Brunette Coleman

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A young woman wearing a hat, scarf and long coat stands in a wintry scene, with snow on the ground and bare trees behind her.
Idealised illustration of an early 20th-century English schoolgirl

Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet and writer Philip Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of his time as an undergraduate at St John's College, Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and critical commentary under that name, including homoerotic stories that parody the style of popular writers of contemporary girls' school fiction. The Coleman oeuvre consists of a completed novella, Trouble at Willow Gables, set in a girls' boarding school; an incomplete sequel, Michaelmas Term at St Brides, set in a women's college at Oxford; seven short poems with a girls' school ambience; a fragment of pseudo-autobiography; and a critical essay purporting to be Coleman's literary apologia. The manuscripts were stored in the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, where Larkin was chief librarian between 1955 and 1985. Their existence was revealed to the public when Larkin's Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's biography were published in 1992 and 1993 respectively. The Coleman works themselves were finally published, with other Larkin drafts and oddments, in 2002. At Oxford Larkin underwent a period of confused sexuality and limited literary output. The adoption of a female persona appeared to release his creativity, as in the three years following the Coleman phase he published under his own name two novels and his first poetry collection. Thereafter, although he gradually established his reputation as a poet, his career as a prose writer declined, and despite several attempts he completed no further fiction. Critical reaction to the publication of the Coleman material was divided between those who saw no value in these juvenilia, and those who considered that they cast useful light on the study of the mature Larkin.

Origins

Facade of an ancient building, facing an expanse of grass. At ground floor level the building presents a long colonnade of arches, above which are rows of windows up to a crenellated roof line.
The quadrangle, St John's College, Oxford

From 1942 the character of much of Larkin's private 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.[1] 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.[2] In time they extended their efforts to soft-porn fantasies in which, typically, "girls roll[ed] around together twanging elastic and straps".[3] 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".[4]

Writing

Larkin's letter to Iles does not mention a female pseudonym, although the idea of using one had been in his mind for months. The previous March he had begun writing the imagined autobiography of a supposed lady novelist, "Brunette Coleman", adapting the name of a well-known contemporary female jazz musician, Blanche Coleman.[5] Larkin tentatively titled the autobiography "Ante Meridian"; he soon abandoned it, but held on to the Coleman name. According to James Booth, who prepared the Coleman texts for publication in 2002, the adoption of a female persona was in line with the pose of "girlish narcissism" that Larkin was affecting in the summer of 1943: "I am dressed in red trousers, shirt and white pullover, and look very beautiful".[6] In his letters to Amis, Larkin maintained a straight-faced pretence that Coleman was a real person. Thus in one letter he wrote "Brunette is very thrilled" with a poem written in her name, and in another, "Brunette can stand healthy criticism".[7] As he waited for offers of employment through the summer and autumn of 1943, Larkin added more works to the Coleman oeuvre. He began a sequel to Trouble at Willow Gables, set in a women's college at Oxford and entitled Michaelmas Term at St Bride's, but did not finish it: "All literary inspiration has deserted me", he informed Amis on 13 August.[8] Nevertheless, a week later he told Amis that Brunette was helping him to write a novel, provisionally entitled Jill, about "a young man who invents an imaginary sister, and falls in love with her". With this letter Larkin sent a Coleman poem, "Bliss", the first of seven written in the girls' school idiom.[9] As late as 19 October he reported to Amis that "Brunette is working on a little monograph about girls' school stories".[10] This is a reference to the putative literary manifesto "What Are We Writing For", which became the final Coleman work. Thereafter, Motion records, she disappeared, "to be mentioned only fleetingly in later accounts of his university life ... She ended up as an occasional comic reminder of lost youth".[11]

Works

The works which Larkin attributed to Brunette Coleman comprise a short piece of supposed autobiography, a complete short novel, an incomplete second novel, a collection of poems and a literary essay.

"Ante Meridian"

This fragment of spoof autobiography is distinct from the rest of the Coleman oeuvre in having no relation to girls' school fiction. It records Brunette's early life as the daughter of an eccentric priest, brought up in a tumbledown Cornish cliff-top house.[3] Apart from descriptions of the house and its contents (some of which may be drawn from Larkin's own childhood home in Coventry),[12] much of the narrative is taken up with a comical description of an attempt to launch the local lifeboat. Larkin's biographer Richard Bradford is struck by the distinctive tone in the fragment, different from anything else written under Coleman's name.[12] The text breaks off suddenly; Motion surmises that Larkin abandoned it because he was eager to begin work on the first Coleman novel.[3] Booth describes the prose as "a mix of Daphne du Maurier nostalgia and surreal farce".[4]

Novel: Trouble at Willow Gables

Synopsis

Two young women face each other, one (right) seated in a chair, the other sitting on the floor. They are lookng intently at each other; the one on the right has placed her right arm on the other's left shoulder.
Emotional friendships between girls are characteristic of Brunette Coleman's school fiction.

Marie Moore, a junior pupil at Willow Gables, receives a birthday present of £5 from an aunt. After the banknote is retained for safekeeping by the headmistress, Miss Holden, Marie slyly recovers it but is quickly found out, and is coerced by Miss Holden into giving the money to the school's gymnasium fund. When later the banknote goes missing from the fund's collection box, Marie is suspected, but protests her innocence despite a savage beating from Miss Holden with assistance from two burly school prefects. Only her friend Myfanwy believes her. Confined in the school's punishment room, Marie manages to escape with the help of a domestic servant, and runs away. Hilary is sent with a search party to find the missing girl. Meanwhile, Margaret makes a daring escape via the window, and rides off on the school horse. She finds Marie, who is miserable and frightened and wants to return to the school whatever the consequences. Margaret confesses that she borrowed the £5 to bet on a horse, and has won £100. She means to leave Willow Gables for good, and apologises to Marie for the trouble she has caused her. This conversation is overheard by Hilary's search party, and after a scuffle the truants are captured. On the way back to school they hear cries from the river; it is Myfanwy, who has got into difficulties while swimming. Margaret frees herself from her captors' clutches, dives in and saves her drowning friend. Back at the school, Miss Holden overlooks the theft in view of Margaret's heroism, although she confiscates the £100 winnings and donates the money to a new swimming pool fund. Marie is exonerated, and her £5 is returned. Mary Beech comes forward to corroborate Margaret's accusations against Hilary, who is summarily expelled. Marie and Myfanwy enjoy an emotional reunion in the school sickroom, as life at the school returns to normal, with friendship and forgiveness all round.

Commentary

The typescript begins with a dedication page "To Jacinth" (Brunette Coleman's imagined secretary). There follows an untitled poem which later appears, slightly altered, as "The School in August" in Sugar and Spice, the Coleman poetry collection. In the story the surnames of the headmistress and principal girls have been altered in ink throughout the typescript; some of the original names belonged to Larkin's real-life acquaintances at Oxford. The presence of a publisher's inkstamp on the wallet containing the typescript indicates that the story may have been submitted by Larkin for publication.[13]

Novel: Michaelmas Term at St Bride's

Synopsis

A large brick building is shown, left, with long upper windows above which is classical pediment which includes a round window. In front of the building is an area of grass and trees.
Somerville College, Oxford, the recognisable model for St Bride's

Of Myfanwy's doings we learn relatively little. Margaret, still fascinated with horse-racing, sets up her own bookmaking business. Marie discovers psychoanalysis and tries to cure her sister Philippa's leather belt fetish. After various efforts prove unsuccessful, the sisters seek solace in alcohol. The later stages of the story introduce Larkin's real-life friend, Diana Gollancz, and recount her preparations for a fashionable party. In the final scenes the narrative becomes surreal, as on their alcoholic quest Marie and Philippa are confronted by the knowledge that they are characters in a story, while "real life" is going on in the next room. Marie takes a peep at real life, and decides she would rather stay in the story, which breaks off at this point with a few pencil notes indicating possible ways in which it might have continued.

Sugar and Spice: A Sheaf of Poems

The typescript of Sugar and Spice consists of six poems, which in sequence are:

  1. "The False Friend"
  2. "Bliss"
  3. "Femmes Damnées"
  4. "Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis"
  5. "Holidays"
  6. "The School in August"

A seventh poem in pencil, "Fourth Form Loquitur", has been loosely inserted into the typescript.[14] "Femmes Damnées", which was printed by John Fuller at the Sycamore Press, Oxford, in 1978, is the only Coleman work published in Larkin's lifetime.[15] This poem, and "The School in August", were included in Larkin's Collected Poems published in 1988;[16] "The School in August" was omitted from the 2003 revised edition of the collection although, according to Amis, it is the poem that best gives the flavour of the Coleman pastiche.[17] "Bliss" was included in Larkin's Selected Letters (1992), as part of a letter to Amis.[18] Motion describes the Coleman poems as "a world of comfortless jealousies, breathless bike-rides and deathless crushes", mixing elements from writers and poets such as Angela Brazil, Richmal Crompton, John Betjeman and W.H. Auden. Larkin's own attitude to these poems appears equivocal. He expresses pleasure that his friend Bruce Montgomery liked them, especially "The School in August".[19] However, to Amis he writes: "I think all wrong-thinking people ought to like them. I used to write them whenever I'd seen any particularly ripe schoolgirl ... Writing about grown women is less perverse and therefore less satisfying".[20] Booth finds the poems the most impressive of all the Coleman works, in their evidence of Larkin's early ability to create striking and moving images from conventional school story clichés. They are an early demonstration of Larkin's talent for finding depths in ordinariness, an ability that characterised many of his later poems. Booth draws specific attention to the elegiac quality of the final lines of "The School in August": "And even swimming groups can fade / Games mistresses turn grey". In Booth's view the Coleman poems are among the best Larkin wrote in the 1940s, well beyond anything in his first published selection The North Ship (1945).[21]

"What Are We Writing For"

The typescript of the essay is headed by an epigraph, attributed to The Upbringing of Daughters by Catherine Durning Whethem. It reads: "The chief justification of reading books of any sort is the enlargement of experience that should accrue therefrom".[22] The text which follows is, in Motion's words, "a homily on how and how not to write for children".[23] It argues for the need for well-drawn heroines, and for unrepentant villainesses: "To be tenacious in evil is the duty of every villain ... Let her hate the heroine wholeheartedly, and refuse, yes, even on the last page, to take her hand in forgiveness". The story should not be about schoolgirls, but about a school with girls in it. The school must be English; foreign settings or trips abroad are disparaged. Larkin, in Coleman's voice, pleads for "the Classic Unities": Unity of Place, which is the school and its inhabitants; Unity of Time, normally the term in which the action occurs; and Unity of Action, whereby every recorded incident contributes in some way to the telling of the story. The essay is laden with quotations from many writers of the genre, among them Joy Francis, Dorita Fairlie Bruce, Elsie J. Oxenham, Elinor Brent-Dyer and Nancy Breary.[24] Motion argues that aside from the sometimes facetious tone, the opinions expressed by Larkin in his Coleman persona, particularly the mild xenophobia that enters the essay, foreshadow his own mature prejudices.[11] Bradford believes that the essay reads as a serious, well-researched paper on the genre of early twentieth century boarding school literature, worthy of inclusion in F. W. Bateson's Essays and Criticism had that journal existed in 1943.[12]

Critical reception

A tall man wearing a suit and holding a sheaf of papers stands, slightly stooping, in front of a microphone. A seated woman, and the crossed legs of another, are visible behind him.
Andrew Motion, Larkin's biographer, who made public the existence of the "Brunette Coleman" works

Influences

Reviewing the published Coleman material, The Independent's Richard Canning suggests that the influence of these early works is often discernible in Larkin's poetry.[25] 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.[26] 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).[27] 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).[28] 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).[29]

Notes and references

Notes

References

  1. ↑ Motion, pp. 53–54
  2. ↑ Motion, p. 58
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Motion, pp. 86–87
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Booth, pp. viii–ix
  5. ↑ Soester, Jeffrey (2 May 2008). "Obituary: Blanche Coleman". The Guardian.
  6. ↑ Booth, p. xii
  7. ↑ Thwaite, pp. 66 and 69
  8. ↑ Thwaite, p. 62
  9. ↑ Thwaite, p. 63
  10. ↑ Thwaite, p. 80
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Motion, p. 101
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 Bradford, pp. 52–55
  13. ↑ Booth, pp. 3–5
  14. ↑ Booth, pp. 241–52
  15. ↑ Motion, p.98
  16. ↑ Motion, p. 97
  17. ↑ Amis, p. 55
  18. ↑ Thwaite, p. 64
  19. ↑ Thwaite, p. 69
  20. ↑ Thwaite, p. 70
  21. ↑ Booth, p. xvii
  22. ↑ Booth, p. 253
  23. ↑ Motion, pp. 101–02
  24. ↑ Booth, pp. 255–73
  25. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named indy
  26. ↑ Cooper, p. 6
  27. ↑ Cooper, p. 10
  28. ↑ Cooper, p. 14
  29. ↑ Cooper, p. 23

Sources

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