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...what mean. But anything more convoluted than plain old homosexual or heterosexual can be hard to grasp. (Bisexual doesn't help much: many sensible people remain unconvinced that this elusive state of being even exists.) For a while I've kept a list in my head of famous people whose sexual proclivities I myself find inexpressible--so odd and incoherent I can't begin to plumb their inner lives. Greta Garbo, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, the Duke of Windsor, Marlon Brando, Simone de Beauvoir, Michael Jackson, and Andy Warhol have been on the list for some time; Condoleeza Rice may join them soon. Futile my attempts to pigeonhole such individuals: they seem to transcend--if not nullify--conventional taxonomies.
Pious readers will already be spluttering: how presumptuous to 'label' someone else's sexual inclinations! The truth is, however, Everybody Does It, and when it comes to understanding the very greatest writers and artists, some empathetic conjecture regarding the psychosexual factors involved in creativity seems to be necessary. Would life be better if Wilde had not raised the issue of Shakespeare's sexuality in "In Praise of Mr. W. H."? If Freud had not explored the homoerotic themes he found in the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci?
And it is hard to approach the work of Philip Larkin (1922-1985)--considered by many the greatest English poet of the second half of the twentieth century--without acknowledging his particular brand of sexual eccentricity. The quintessential Establishment poet--he was offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984--Larkin is usually thought of as a straight, if not blokish, man of letters. He portrays himself as such in numerous poems, though not in any vainglorious way. On the contrary, the rhetorical pose usually cultivated--indeed now regarded as typically Larkinesque--is that of shy (if sardonic) English bachelor: reclusive, timid, physically unattractive to women, envious of other men's romantic successes. At its most poignant, to be Larkinesque is to feel excluded from the family life and ordinary sexual happiness granted to others. ("For Dockery a son, for me nothing.") For those who love Larkin, this rueful evocation of sexual loneliness, tempered always with subtle intransigence and a wildly uncensored wit, is just what they love him for:
Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me)-- Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles' first LP.
Despite tiresome overquotation the rhymes never go stale, nor do they lose their odd power to console. Yet, however bleak the (real or imagined) erotic life, Larkin's 'normality' would seem to be a given. As the poet has his frustrated stand-in say in "Round Another Point"--an unpublished debat between two young men on the subject of women, sex, and marriage--"I want to screw decent girls of my own sort without being made to feel a criminal about it."
Since the poet's death, however, some unexpected kinks in the Larkin persona have come to light. Pixillating indeed was the revelation, in Andrew Motion's 1993 biography, that the bespectacled author of The Whitsun Weddings was an avid, even compulsive, consumer of lesbian porn, especially the kind involving frolicking English schoolgirls in gym slips and hockey pads.
But downright electrifying was the news that, after finishing his final term at St. John's College, Oxford, in 1943, the young poet, then twenty-one, had spent several months writing such stories himself, under the pseudonym 'Brunette Coleman.' Brunette was in fact a full-blown comic persona: the imaginary sister of Blanche Coleman, the platinum-blonde leader of a 1940s 'all-girl' swing band in whom the jazz-loving Larkin took both a musical and prurient interest. Unlike her real-world sister, the fictional Brunette was supposedly tweedy, bookish, and sentimental--a prolific author of Angela Brazil--style schoolgirl novels and one of those mawkish middle-aged English lesbians whose imperfectly suppressed homosexuality is plain to everyone but themselves. Her works, it seemed, were an odd mixture of the lecherous and the dotty. Amazingly enough, the Brunette manuscripts had survived, Motion disclosed, and were to be found along with other unpublished works in the Larkin archive at the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull University, where Larkin had served with great distinction as Head Librarian for almost thirty years.
Sensing curiosity--or at least titillation--among Larkin readers, Faber, Larkin's long-time publisher, made the complete Brunette oeuvre available in a 2002 volume called Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fiction, edited by James Booth. 'Brunette's' literary corpus consisted of five works: Trouble at Willow Gables and Michaelmas Term at St. Bride's (two fully elaborated parody-school stories, full of games mistresses, mash notes, and lubricious hijinks after lights out); Sugar and Spice (a set of fey sapphic poems modeled--with suitable languor--on the "Femmes damnees" poems in Baudelaire's Les fleurs du mal); Ante Meri-dien (a fragment of autobiography in which Brunette reminisces about her Cornish childhood in the blowsy shemale manner of Daphne du Maurier); and "What Are We Writing For?" (an artistic manifesto, supposedly composed at the instigation of her live-in protegee, Jacinth, wherein Brunette defends the genre of popular girls' school fiction against "penny-a-liners" who flout the time-honored rules of the form). In printed form, they run to nearly three hundred densely packed pages and, along with his jazz writings, could be said to represent, however risibly, the otherwise costive Larkin's most fluent and sustained literary endeavor.
It's hard, of course, to keep the usual scholarly po-face. Why--at the very outset of Larkin's estimable career--this protracted muddy detour across the playing fields of Lesbos? A postadolescent liking for scabrous fun is one thing, but what inspires an ambitious young poet, already sizing up his chances in the great literary game, to impersonate at such length--and with such conspicuous dedication--a leering, half-mad, sapphistically inclined author of books for girls? The editor of the Girls' Own Paper, last heard from in 1956, has yet to address the question.
Conservative poetry lovers have been displeased by the whole business. In "Green Self-Conscious Spurts," a stunningly humorless piece about Larkin's early work recently in the TLS, Adam Kirsch dismisses the posthumous publication of Trouble at Willow Gables as "strictly unnecessary, and potentially damaging to [Larkin's] reputation." As punishment for prissiness--not to mention the frigid little blast of homophobia--Kirsch should no doubt be required to sit on it and rotate.
But one also wants to disagree with him profoundly. 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. Homosexual women have long been associated with sexual failure and fiasco: Sappho grieves for her faithless girls; Olivia loses Viola; Sister George is cuckolded and killed off. In The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian potboiler from 1928--a book I'm convinced Larkin knew well--the luckless heroine, a supposedly famous writer, ends up suicidal and alone. Brunette Coleman,...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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More articles from Daedalus
Song for Pushkin.(Chandra Pushkin), March 22, 2007
A trip to Hibbing High School., March 22, 2007
On Benjamin's '-abilities'.(Walter Benjamin), March 22, 2007
On the state of American television., March 22, 2007
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