Brunette Coleman - Influences

Influences

The effects of Larkin's Coleman phase are clearly evident in his first novel, Jill, in which he makes copious use of Willow Gables material. The novelist's protagonist, a shy Oxford undergraduate called John Kemp, invents a schoolgirl sister called Jill, initially to impress his arrogant and dismissive room-mate, Christopher Warner. Although Warner displays little interest, the non-existent "Jill" comes to obsess Kemp. He imagines her at Willow Gables School, and writes long letters to her there. In the form of a short story he details her life at the school—now located in Derbyshire rather than Wiltshire as it had been in the Coleman works. The girls' names are different, but their speech and attitudes closely reflect those of the earlier stories. A lesbian element is introduced through Jill's fascination with the cool, detached senior girl Minerva Strachey. Kemp's fantasy is disturbed when he meets a real-life Jill, or Gillian; his attempts to match his flight of fancy to reality end in embarrassment and humiliation.

In his review of the Coleman material in Booth's book, The Independent's Richard Canning suggests that the influence of these early works is often discernible in Larkin's poetry. Likewise Stephen Cooper, in his 2004 book Philip Larkin: Subversive Writer, argues that the stylistic and thematic influences of Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St Brides anticipate the poetry's recurrent concern with rebellion and conformity. Among examples, Cooper cites Marie's refusal in Willow Gables to compromise with an unjust authority as reflecting the sentiments expressed in Larkin's poem "Places, Loved Ones" (1954). The reader, says Cooper, "is invited to identify with Marie's plight in a manner that foreshadows the empathy felt for the rape victim in 'Deception'" (1950). When Marie, having escaped from the school, discovers that her freedom is an illusion, she longs to return to the familiar paths. These sentiments are present in poems such as "Poetry of Departures" (1954), "Here" (1961), and "High Windows" (1967).

The spirit though not the name of Brunette was briefly revived during 1945–46, when Larkin renewed his friendship with Amis. Among the stillborn projects planned by the pair was a story about two beautiful jazz-loving lesbian undergraduates. According to Booth, the "feeble plot merely the excuse for lesbian scenes ... far indeed from the originality of Larkin's Brunette works of 1943". Jill, completed in 1944, was finally published in October 1946 by The Fortune Press, whose eccentric proprietor Reginald Caton reportedly accepted the book without reading it. Larkin was disappointed by the book's critical reception, but by this time his second novel, A Girl in Winter, had been accepted by Faber and Faber, and was duly published in February 1947. It received better reviews than Jill, and achieved moderately good sales; Booth calls it Larkin's "most original and adventurous experiment in fiction". It is written from the viewpoint of its main female character, Katherine, but otherwise is unrelated to the Coleman phase. Over the following years Larkin began several more novels, in the last of which, A New World Symphony, he returned once again to the device of a female protagonist-narrator. The novel was never completed, and was finally abandoned around 1954.