Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 26 May 2024
A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin
It is well over forty years since I read Philip Larkin’s only two novels Jill and A Girl in Winter, published in 1945 and 1947 respectively and reissued in elegant paperbacks by Faber in 1975.
My extremely vague recollection of A Girl in Winter was that it could only really be considered a flawed early work by a writer who went on to become one of the nation’s most loved poets – sadly, a rather pedestrian novel about adolescent love. I decided to give it a second chance because I found a copy in a charity shop and immediately found myself remembering the excitement and anticipation which surrounded the reissue of these novels in the mid-70s. In addition, I have always loved the clean, modern mid-70s design the jackets were given and so had to buy it.
I found this rereading extremely instructive. First, one must remember that both of his novels were the work of a writer still in his early-20s: he would have been just twenty-three when the first was published, and twenty-five when the second was. But even making this allowance, I felt my expectations were still significantly confounded by the novel. It is far, far more accomplished than I remembered it being. I was surprised how much Larkin there was in it – how evident the voice and sound and concerns of his later poetry are, how well-written it is, how sensitively observed. Larkin is on record as saying that he wrote and rewrote the novels as one would poetry, working the prose until every word mattered.
Clive James, the critic and memoirist, a close friend of Larkin’s, says that if the novels have a fault it is that the young Larkin’s ‘aesthetic effect was rich’ but his ‘stock of events was thin’. I think this is James’s kind way of saying that what Larkin lacked was experience of life – and I think this is evident if one considers the narrow confines of the novel and the events which drive it. It is set during the early stages of the Second World War. A young woman, Katherine Lind, twenty-two years old, has been living in London but has moved to an unnamed northern town to take up a job in an insignificant branch library. Katherine may be German or French; she may possibly be Jewish – this is never made clear, but that she is alone in England and living as a refugee is certain. Her reasons for choosing England are that she is to some degree already proficient in the language, but mainly because six years earlier she had spent several weeks here, staying with the family of Robin Fennel, a boy with whom she has been corresponding as a pen-friend.
The story essentially is that of Katherine Lind – her loneliness, her naive and muddled and largely mistaken view that she is in love with Robin and he with her. The novel is in three parts. In the first we are immersed deeply in a bitter, icy English war-time winter (possibly that of 1941-42, the coldest European winter on record). Katherine is lonely and home-sick, her work is stultifyingly dull and her boss, Mr Anstey, is an embittered and bullying martinet, a stereotype of authoritarianism and pedantry. Events are few. There is a mix-up about a reserved library book that should have been returned to the local university and Katherine is to blame; a young woman she works with has appalling toothache and Anstey unwillingly agrees that Katherine should escort her home; two handbags get mixed up and are returned to their rightful owners. The second and longest section of the book recounts the three weeks she spent with Robin’s family in their river-side home in rural Oxfordshire. The last part concerns an unexpected insight into Mr Anstey’s private life – which almost but not quite humanises him in Katherine’s eyes – and finally, a brief and bleak reunion with Robin.
You can see from this bald account just how thin Larkin’s stock of events really was – indeed, the plot sounds risibly threadbare. But what surprised me most about the novel is that this isn’t the case: within the confines in which Larkin is operating I found it completely convincing and never less than of the utmost seriousness in its intent and its human observation. It is saved from its flaws by the sheer quality of Larkin’s writing and because with the passage of time it has become a perfect time-capsule of the pre-war and war years, saturated in minute period detail.
But it is true that the book does have some curious aspects. For example, while the war is never not present it isn’t really in the foreground until the very end, when Katherine finally meets Robin again. Stranger, perhaps, is the account of Katherine’s stay with the Fennels. This struck me as being extremely anachronistic, for while the time-frame of the novel would put the visit some time in the late-1930s, its period detail – including a maid who can be summoned by a buzzer under the breakfast room carpet – would seem to place it significantly earlier in the century. Perhaps Larkin had indeed met such families through university friends at Oxford.
I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this novel and how much it gave me to think about. Yes, there is a certain gaucheness and naiveté, I suppose, but in the context of the novel it doesn’t seem out of place. Unexpectedly, it reminded me powerfully of Barbara Pym – a not dissimilar, prematurely aged outlook, an eye for melancholy detail fastidiously recalled (the small, quotidian comforts we seek when at our unhappiest, for instance), a distinctive voice and sensibility, and an acutely telling sense of period. It is by no means the insignificant juvenilia I had come to regard it as and I may have to find a copy of Jill and give that a second chance as well.
Alun Severn
May 2024
Related posts elsewhere on Letterpress:
Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me by Jean Hartley
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym