Brunette Coleman - Origins

Origins

In October 1940 Philip Larkin began studying English at St John's College, Oxford. He expected to be called up for wartime military service, but in January 1942 he learned that because of his poor eyesight he had failed his army medical examination and was thus able to remain at Oxford. A prolific writer since childhood, Larkin's primary ambition as an undergraduate was to be a novelist rather than a poet. As well as the articles and poems that he published in Cherwell and Oxford Poetry, he wrote additional material that he kept to himself, or shared only with a few close friends. Among these private unpublished works were fragments of semi-autobiographical stories exploring homosexual relationships among groups of undergraduates. According to Larkin's biographer Andrew Motion these writings, while of no literary value, give an indication of Larkin's confused sexuality at that time, and his growing distaste for what he terms "this buggery business".

From 1942 the character of much of Larkin's "secret" writing changed, as a result of his friendship with a fellow undergraduate from St John's, Kingsley Amis, who arrived at the university that summer. Amis, a much more confident and assertive character than Larkin, disguised his serious concerns behind a facade of jokes and comic ironies. Larkin soon adopted that style as his own, joining with Amis in composing obscene rhymes and parodies of the Romantic poets they were required to study. In time they extended their efforts to soft-porn fantasies in which, typically, "girls roll around together twanging elastic and straps". After Amis's departure for the army in early 1943, Larkin made his first attempt at writing from a specifically feminine perspective in a story called "An Incident in the English Camp", which he subtitled "A Thoroughly Unhealthy Story". Lacking any salacious content despite its subtitle, the work is written in a pastiche of sentimental women's magazine prose. It depicts an undergraduate girl's parting from her soldier lover, and ends: "She walked in exaltation through the black streets, her heart glowing like a coal with deep love".