Brunette Coleman - Critical Reception

Critical Reception

Shortly before his death in 1985 Larkin instructed his companion Monica Jones to burn his diaries. His instructions did not cover other writings, therefore the Coleman material remained in the archives of the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where Larkin had worked as chief librarian since 1955. The existence of these papers was first made public in 1992, when Larkin's Selected Letters was published. In the following year extensive extracts from the Coleman works appeared in Motion's biography of Larkin, and became the subject of literary analysis by M. W. Rowe, in his 1999 essay "Unreal Girls: Lesbian Fantasy in Early Larkin". Rowe saw Larkin's adoption of a female persona as an outlet, compensating for his sexual awkwardness and lack of success with Oxford women. The punishment scenes, in which women punish women, were a means of subduing Larkin's feelings of anger and frustration with his personal sexual failures. More significantly, according to Rowe, Larkin's invention of Coleman was the catalyst which broke the writing block that had afflicted him for most of his Oxford years. The few months of her creative life in 1943 were, Larkin later acknowledged, the prelude to "the intensest time of my life"; in the three subsequent years his poetry collection The North Ship and his novels Jill and The Girl in Winter were published.

The complete Coleman material, in a collection edited by James Booth, was finally published in 2002. Booth thought that the material would probably cause "a huge amount of confusion and smoke because the politically correct brigade will jump on it". Anticipating the publication, Emma Hartley and Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer doubted the literary value of the works, citing to Motion the view that the stories were "little more than mild pornography" which the mature poet would never have wished to see published. On publication, Booth's collection provoked a particularly hostile reaction from The Guardian's critic Jenny Diski, whose review dismissed the Coleman writings as "drivel" and "sad ramblings", unworthy of publication or critical attention, and not even valid pornography: "Not a breast, not a clitoris is seen or mentioned." Unlike serious pornographers, "Larkin sketches a mere outline and then walks away with a snigger". Diski mocks Booth's reverential descriptions of the typescripts "as though they were slivers of the True Cross", and concludes: "Let this be a lesson, at least, to anyone who hasn't got around to chucking out the crap they wrote in their teens and early twenties."

Other critics were more positive. The New Statesman's Robert Potts found the stories "entertaining and intriguing for readers familiar with their background and with the genre", and for the most part charmingly innocent, "especially when compared with the reality of boarding-school life". The evocation of adolescent homoeroticism was deliberate and playful rather than pornographic. In a similar vein, Richard Canning in The Independent found the Willow Gables fiction vibrant, well-constructed and entertaining, and praised Larkin's "sly Sapphic spin". In a more recent analysis Terry Castle, writing in the journal Daedalus, disagrees profoundly with the notion expressed by Adam Kirsch in The Times Literary Supplement, that the publication of the Coleman works was damaging to Larkin's reputation. On the contrary, argues Castle, "the Brunette phase speaks volumes about the paradoxical process by which Philip Larkin became 'Larkinesque'—modern English poetry's reigning bard of erotic frustration and depressive (if verse-enabling) self-deprecation".