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Early Larkin
ii
Early Larkin

James Underwood
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks

of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2021

Copyright © James Underwood, 2021

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Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. viii–ix constitute an extension

of this copyright page.

Cover design: Namkwan Cho

Cover image © The Society of Authors as the Literary
Representative of the Estate of Philip Larkin

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recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
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For my parents Allison and Steve,
and for Emily
vi
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii
List of abbreviations x

Introduction 1
1 A portrait of the artist as a young man: The Larkin-Sutton letters 13
2 Larkin’s short fictions 33
3 Brunette Coleman: Experiments in genre 51
4 Brunette Coleman: Experiments in gender 71
5 The outward turn: Larkin’s novels 93
6 The Coleman effect: Sugar and Spice and Larkin’s early poems 119
7 Larkin’s first great poems 141
8 The Less Deceived 159
Conclusion 187

Notes 189
Bibliography 203
Index 209
 Acknowledgements

This book began as a PhD undertaken at the University of Hull between

2012 and 2015. I am immensely grateful to my supervisor, John Osborne, for
his brilliant and inspiring guidance, and for the many large coffees in the old
Arts Café. It is no overstatement to say that John’s work has revolutionized
Larkin Studies, and, in so many ways, this project would not have been possible
without him. My thanks also go to Daniel Weston and Sam Perry for their
supervision. My examiners, Seamus Perry and Jane Thomas, were generous in
their encouragement and feedback; Jane’s support during my whole time at Hull
and since has meant a lot. I’m grateful to other Hull colleagues, especially Sarah
McKeon and Richard Meek. I’m also grateful to the university for awarding me a
doctoral scholarship, without which I could not have undertaken a PhD.
The book has been significantly developed during my time at the University of
Huddersfield, where I have been extremely fortunate to work with outstanding
colleagues in English Literature and Creative Writing. I am indebted to several
in particular for their support, direct and indirect, and their friendship: Merrick
Burrow, Heather Clark, Steve Ely, Jessica Malay, Jodie Matthews and David
Rudrum. I could not hope for better colleagues.
The Philip Larkin Society, and its journal About Larkin, have been excellent
sources of information and exchange, and I have benefited greatly from
conversations and collaborations with many individuals, especially James
Booth, Rebecca Devine, Kyra Piperides and Philip Pullen. Archival research
for this project was undertaken in the Larkin collections at the Hull History
Centre, an incredible and invaluable resource; my thanks to all the staff there,
and particularly to the former university archivist, Simon Wilson. Thanks also
to my editor at Bloomsbury, Ben Doyle.
Over the years I have worked on this project, I have enjoyed the support,
interest and encouragement of many friends – too many to mention here, but
every one of them hugely appreciated. This book is dedicated to my parents
Allison and Steve, and my partner Emily.
James Underwood
Huddersfield, August 2021
 Acknowledgements ix

The third-party copyrighted material displayed in the pages of this book is

done so on the basis of ‘fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review’ or
‘fair use for the purposes of teaching, criticism, scholarship or research’ only in
accordance with international copyright laws, and is not intended to infringe
upon the ownership rights of the original owners.
 Abbreviations

References to these works by Philip Larkin are cited in-text using the following
abbreviations:

AGW A Girl in Winter

FR Further Requirements

J Jill

LH Letters Home

LM Letters to Monica

OBTCEV The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse

RW Required Writing

SL Selected Letters

TCP The Complete Poems

TWG Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions

Archival sources in the Philip Larkin collections, University of Hull Archives,

Hull History Centre:

U DPL Papers of Philip Arthur Larkin

U DP/174 Letters from Philip Arthur Larkin to James Ballard Sutton

All other references are given as endnotes, in full on their first appearance, and
in short thereafter. Insertions in square brackets are mine unless otherwise
indicated. All URLs last accessed March 2021.
 Introduction

This book tells the story of Philip Larkin’s early literary development. It is not
a biography, but the first book-length critical study of Larkin’s early work: his
poetry, novels, short fictions, essays and letters. It begins in the late 1930s, with
the remarkable correspondence with Jim Sutton and Larkin’s earliest literary
efforts, and ends in the 1950s, with the publication of The Less Deceived, his
first truly mature collection. Although Larkin’s biographers have looked at this
period of his career, no one has yet undertaken a comprehensive and systematic
critical study of it.
This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. The first is a problematic
narrative at the heart of Larkin Studies, which John Osborne calls the ‘theory
of the rupture’.1 Osborne summarizes this as being ‘between the prose works of
the 1940s (bad) and the poems of the 1950s (good)’, a distinction he sees as ‘self-
evidently reductive and implausible’. In fact, the problem is worse than Osborne
suggests: the ‘rupture’ which critics identify runs much deeper, isolating almost
all of Larkin’s work of the 1940s, and fencing it off as a curiously bad false start.
In a review for the Times Literary Supplement, Adam Kirsch described the
publication of Larkin’s Early Poems and Juvenilia as ‘strictly unnecessary, and
potentially damaging to his reputation’.2 Richard Palmer is equally dismissive
about Larkin’s early work:

until the late 1940s Larkin’s poetry and prose fiction are almost entirely without
distinction. . . . [W]hat is extremely unusual – possibly unique – about Larkin’s
early work is not just its mediocrity but the fact that it does not remotely telegraph
the poetry that would ensue, either in quality or in the specifics of style, tone,
choices of form, governing preoccupations and subject matter. I can think of no
other writer of the first rank of whom something analogous could be said.3

Palmer is too impatient and too sweeping to detect any important continuities
between the early and mature work. That said, there is little doubt that a
massive transformation of Larkin’s art did take place somewhere between the
composition of the poems which comprise The North Ship and the publication of
The Less Deceived a decade later. This introduces the second problem prevalent
2 Early Larkin

in Larkin Studies, namely the ways in which that transformation is explained.

By and large, critics have followed Larkin’s lead in proposing that the change is
best understood as a trading of influences, swapping Yeats for Hardy. Having
rediscovered Hardy’s poetry in 1946, the story goes, Larkin realized the potential
of writing about his own life, and disavowed Yeats, whose addictively bardic
work had dominated his verse for several years. Central to this book’s counter-
narrative is an insistence on the significance of Brunette Coleman, the heteronym
Larkin invented in 1943. Three years before his reassessment of Hardy, Larkin
wrote a series of works in prose and poetry which led him not only away from
Yeats and other unhelpful influences but also away from himself. This argument
is controversial because whereas the Yeats-to-Hardy narrative emphasizes the
autobiographical qualities of Larkin’s mature verse, my account proposes that
Larkin’s breakthrough was a result of his burgeoning ‘interest in everything
outside himself ’, a phrase taken from an early short story, ‘The Eagles Are Gone’,
and one which reverberates throughout this book.4

‘The Dixon problem’

Establishing Brunette Coleman as a key influence on Larkin’s development is

also controversial because of the critical consensus which either diminishes or
outright dismisses her importance. Once again, Palmer epitomizes this best
when he writes that ‘in all conscience, the Coleman stuff is feeble’.5 He considers
her work ‘prolix arch nonsense’, and argues that ‘nobody would read such
ephemera were it not for the “laundry-list syndrome”, i.e. the compulsion to
devour every last thing composed by a man who went on to become one of the
twentieth century’s greatest writers’.6 But Coleman was essential to becoming
that writer. Not only did she distract Larkin from his imitative and immature
self-investigations in prose and poetry, but an unprejudiced consideration of
her work reveals that many of the key ingredients for Larkin’s mature work
are present there – especially in her poems, where a recognizably Larkinesque
aesthetic can be glimpsed for the first time.
Given the fundamentally unserious way in which the Brunette Coleman
project has been framed – in short, as titillation for Larkin and undergraduate
friends like Kingsley Amis – this argument may be too much of a stretch for
some readers. Indeed, one reader of the manuscript of this book commented
the following: ‘Kingsley Amis might have thought, had he lived to see this,
that it was another manifestation of the kind of article Jim Dixon struggles to
 Introduction 3

write to keep his job’ (‘But it is much better than that’, they hurriedly added).
In fact, Jim Dixon, protagonist of Amis’s Lucky Jim, occupies much safer
ground, academically speaking, with his work on ‘The Economic Influence of the
Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485’.7 But it is a good point:
few critics agree that Coleman’s work deserves the same kind of serious scholarly
treatment. Of course, part of the charm of the Coleman writings is their fun
– which means that an entirely po-faced analysis of them is bound to appear
absurd and suffer from what that reader described as ‘the Dixon problem’. But
dismissing Coleman’s significance raises more questions than it purportedly
answers, such as why, in private, Larkin took them so seriously. These questions
are explored in subsequent chapters, which adopt a broader, more open-minded
approach to the oeuvre. Almost two decades after their posthumous publication,
the time is right for a fresh look at Brunette Coleman’s writings.
Indeed, the time is right for a fuller reconsideration of early Larkin.
Scholarship on this poet has undergone a significant shift in the twenty-first
century, and in doing so exposed the limitations of much of the scholarship of
the late twentieth century. When Larkin died in 1985, his stock could not have
been higher. Peter Levi, then the Oxford Professor of Poetry, wrote this in his
obituary tribute for the Sunday Telegraph:

Philip Larkin, until his death on 2nd December 1985, was the funniest and most
intelligent English writer of his day, and the greatest living poet in our language.
It is possible to feel about him, as people felt about Eliot, that he was the last
great poet. . . . No new poet in English will be so well remembered for a long
time to come.8

Thirty years later, however, Geoffrey Hill used his valedictory lecture as Oxford
Professor of Poetry to disparage Larkin:

Let me become a little aggressive towards you . . . by the easy expedient of

introducing the name of Larkin. . . . The Complete Poems . . . contains fine
poems, fine poems, and poems that are average, and poems that are even below
average. His work is rated so highly across the literary board, because a large
consensus has been persuaded by critical opinion that certain mediocre poems
are outstanding.9

On the subject of Larkin’s popularity, Hill was facetious:

I would wish to say that if you find it very, very gratifying indeed when quite
ordinary people – i.e. not reviewers – tell you ‘that’s just what I felt’, I think you
would be far better employed, you would be bringing far more delight to a far
4 Early Larkin

wider variety of audiences, you would obtain far greater job satisfaction, if you
were to sign up to appear as a regular expert on the Antiques Roadshow.

The attitudes of these two Oxford Professors of Poetry neatly bookend Larkin’s
fall, perhaps the most dramatic in twentieth-century British literature. Elsewhere,
Hill has argued that ‘During his lifetime Larkin was granted endless credit by the
bank of Opinion’.10 This is not true – there were always detractors – but the 1990s
saw a very rapid withdrawal of credit. What caused opinion to shift from Levi’s
warmth in 1985 to Hill’s severity in 2015, and where is Larkin Studies now?

Twentieth-century Larkin

Jake Balokowsky, the fictive biographer in Larkin’s poem ‘Posterity’, describes

his subject as ‘One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys’; but Martin Amis
argues that such biographical details are unimportant (TCP, 86). Introducing
his selection of Larkin’s verse, Amis writes with straightforward conviction:
although ‘what rivets us [is] the mystery story of Larkin’s soul’, there is a ‘simple
truth that writers’ private lives don’t matter; only the work matters’.11 Still, as he
admits, ‘Every serious devotee’ will have read not just the Collected Poems but
also the Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography. The reaction to the
last two publications was, he writes, ‘prodigiously ugly and violent’, a ‘bovine’
ideological stampede led by Tom Paulin.12 Yet Amis seems confident that
Larkin’s reputation has been restored. There was an ‘historical explanation’ for
the downturn, namely the 1990s zeitgeist, ‘the high noon, the manly pomp, of
the social ideology we call PC’. But with that chapter of Western history having
been closed, Larkin is ‘back to being what he was Before: Britain’s best-loved
poet since World War II’.13
Amis writes as though this is a case closed, but still his thinking appears more
wishful than truthful. One critic reviewing the 2012 Complete Poems thought
that ‘The only thing we’re reminded of is what a shit Larkin was in real life’, and
Blake Morrison, in his review of the most recent Larkin biography, argued that
‘there’s no doubt that a corrective is needed before the myth of Larkin as monster
(misogynist, racist, porn addict, gin-swilling Thatcherite bigot) hardens into
fact’.14 Writing in The Guardian, Sean O’Brien criticized Amis’s easy distinction
between the life and the work:

This kind of thing may not ‘matter’ to some presumed eternity of true judgment,
but it propagates itself. Amis’s own distinction between what we attend to (the
 Introduction 5

work) and should set aside (the private life) is not one that he himself is able
to observe: see the absorbing and chilling biographical sketch with which he
concludes his introduction.15

O’Brien is right: Amis introduces that sketch as ‘a personal assessment of Larkin’s

character, and one that reflects a preoccupation that can fairly be described as
lifelong’.16 In this fleeting dispute between Amis and O’Brien, we find the essence
of a debate which now divides scholarship on Larkin.
Biography – or more specifically, biographical reading practices – is the
issue. Osborne estimated in 2008 that ‘Of the twenty to thirty critical books
and sixty or so worthwhile essays on Larkin, well over ninety per cent employ
the biographical approach’.17 This mainstream interpretive framework has
enabled critics to falsify Larkin’s work, and then brand it ‘rancid’, ‘insidious’ and
‘minor’, to quote Peter Ackroyd’s assessment.18 Amis’s identification of three key
publications between 1988 and 1993 helps explain much of this. When Anthony
Thwaite’s edition of the Collected Poems appeared three years after Larkin’s
death, bad feeling could already be detected. For some critics, the eighty-three
previously unpublished poems were simply underwhelming. Ian Hamilton, for
instance, disagreed with the idea that ‘adding means increase’, commenting that
‘Kilograms aside, the plumpened Larkin oeuvre does not carry a great deal of
extra weight’.19 A deeper problem, however, was Thwaite’s decision to arrange
the poems in chronological order of composition. Larkin took ‘great care’ in
arranging collections, telling John Haffenden that ‘I treat them like a music-hall
bill: you know, contrast, difference in length, the comic, the Irish tenor, bring on
the girls. . . . The last one is chosen for its uplift quality, to leave the impression
that you’re more serious than the reader had thought’ (FR, 55). In breaking
this, Thwaite’s intention may have been to chart the poet’s development, but an
unforeseen consequence was to make the poems readable in relation to the life.
This facilitated major problems when, in 1992, Thwaite published a selection
of Larkin’s letters. Littered with obscenities, many of them misogynist and racist
in nature, the volume shocked a hitherto adoring public. Readers now eagerly
awaited Motion’s biography, released the following year, and consolidating the
revelations of the Selected Letters, with added cause for concern. No longer
merely interested in ‘That vase’, readers were fascinated by that wind-up,
saluting model of Hitler which Larkin’s father had displayed on the mantelpiece
(TCP, 54–5). They were also absorbed by Larkin’s pornographic habits, heavy
drinking, sexual infidelities, and his slurs against women, ethnic minorities and
the working class. When Larkin died in 1985, his popularity largely rested on
the achievement of three slim volumes of verse. Just eight years later, readers
6 Early Larkin

could access a fat wad of private correspondence, an equally hefty biography,

and an expanded poetic corpus arranged in chronological order of composition,
allowing the Letters and the Life to be tacked onto it. Cultural commentators
instantly seized upon these sordid details, in what Clive James has called ‘a
rush of dunces’.20 Tom Paulin described the Selected Letters as ‘a distressing and
in many ways revolting compilation which imperfectly reveals and conceals
the sewer under the national monument Larkin became’, whilst Lisa Jardine,
lambasting Larkin’s ‘Little Englandism’, announced that ‘we don’t tend to teach
Larkin much now in my Department of English’.21 In his afterlife, Larkin had
become the literary scandal of the decade.

Larkin and personae

That scandal was political in nature, but it also entailed a literary-critical debate
about authors and personae. For obvious reasons, it was an attractive strategy for
Larkin’s defenders to simply cordon off the poetry from the biography, as Martin
Amis insists should be the case. Insofar as clear differences between the man and
his poems exist, this is an important and necessary strategy. But what Larkin’s
private, biographical writings and his public, literary ones have in common is
their use of personae. Sometimes these are easy to pick out in the poems, such as
when Larkin writes from the perspective of a bride, a disenchanted biographer
or a jet-setting academic. In other, more seemingly autobiographical poems, the
personae are subtler. Even more complex, however, was Larkin’s use of personae
across his different correspondences, and generally in his relations with people.
As evidence of this, witness the personal pronouns which feature in the titles of
relevant memoirs: Philip Larkin, The Marvell Press and Me and The Philip Larkin
I Knew. In the former, Larkin is Jean Hartley’s cynical but hilarious and kind
acquaintance; in the latter, Maeve Brennan’s deeply romantic, borderline religious
companion. Since the appearance of the Selected Letters and Motion’s biography
in the early 1990s, new archives and publications have added substantively to
the roll of Larkins. Letters to Monica (2010) suggested his lack of interest in
party politics, his preoccupation with the domestic and, most interestingly, a
feminine, almost spinsterish identity.22 More recently, the publication of Letters
Home (2018) presented Larkin the dutiful son. Other archives, such as Bruce
Montgomery’s in the Bodleian, will almost certainly add new Larkins to the
record when they become available in the future.
 Introduction 7

What relation, then, does the highly sensitive aesthete of the Sutton
correspondence have to the grumpy and stringent university librarian
encountered by many students? What relation does the feminine and queer
Larkin of the Monica Jones letters have to the laddish misogynist of the Kingsley
Amis correspondence? What relation does the bigot of the Colin Gunner letters
have to the gentle lover of Maeve Brennan? It is tempting to conclude none, except
that the diverse personae Larkin developed in his different correspondences and
relationships all helped with the business of being a writer. These were identities
which, in collaboration with others, he constructed and explored, rather than
simply expressed; and whether Larkin the private individual, Larkin the poet, or
Larkin the public figure, they were constructed assiduously and self-consciously:
‘Quite a Larkin afternoon’, he told Jones after exploring a Victorian cemetery
(LM, 437). Some acquaintances, including Brennan and Amis, were surprised
and upset to discover, after his death, the existence of other Larkins: ‘I sometimes
wonder if I ever really knew him’, Martin Amis recalls his father saying; others,
like Gunner, always suspected they were getting a particular performance.
This emphasis on the multiplicity and relativity of Larkin’s personae can be
frustrating for readers, who understandably want to get at ‘the real Larkin’; and
various friends, critics and readers have indeed claimed to ‘know’ that Larkin. It
can also look like a theoretical sleight of hand, conveniently allowing Larkin off
the hook for his more troubling statements. But if we embrace the uncertainty,
or negative capability, about what might constitute the real Larkin, then we can
properly appreciate what makes him a great writer: his complexity, range and the
attention he pays to the inner lives of other people. As will be seen throughout
this study, Larkin’s construction of personae was fundamental not only to how
he presented himself, but also to his art.

Twenty-first-century Larkin

If conversations about Larkin in the late twentieth century were dominated

by biographical revelations, in the twenty-first century the critical landscape
is altering. Outrage at aspects of Larkin’s life is being met with a staunch
determination to return to his work. Two publications in particular have thrown
the field wide open for new kinds of investigation: John Osborne’s polemical
monograph, Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence: A Case of Wrongful Conviction
(2008), and an authoritative edition of Larkin’s Complete Poems (2012) by
8 Early Larkin

Archie Burnett of Boston University’s Editorial Institute. Osborne’s study has

revolutionized the field with its wholehearted rejection of biographicalism, a
methodology which replaces ‘the hermeneutical quest for textual meaning [with]
a biographical quest for the moment of origination’ (original emphasis).23 By
substituting a text-centred approach for the author-centred one, Osborne makes
close reading key to the process of interpreting Larkin’s work: ‘Once the meaning
of an artefact is no longer regarded as having been nailed to the floor of the
author’s intentions, a limited plurality of interpretations is generated relative to
different reading perspectives.’24 His study identifies countless misreadings of
Larkin’s work in which narrators are ‘sexed’, ‘raced’ and so on, in order to make
their identities fit with the poet’s:

The stark truth is that the overwhelming majority of the poems tell one nothing
about the gender, race, class or nationality of either their narrators or their
addressees, but that both the poet’s champions and detractors fill in the missing
information by jumping to the conclusion that the protagonist is always and
only a white, male, middle-class Englishman named Philip Larkin.25

Osborne wipes clean this slate of presuppositions, approaching each poem

afresh with the intention of reading out of it rather than into it. The Larkin
who emerges is a stranger and more subversive writer, and one who has plenty
in common with the younger author discussed in the present study. One
particularly sharp example of Osborne’s approach is his reading of ‘MCMXIV’,
a poem often cited as an example of misty-eyed pre-war nostalgia: simply by
shifting the emphasis of the poem’s final line onto the word ‘Never’, Osborne
turns it into an anti-nostalgic myth-buster: ‘Never such innocence again, please
God!’, as he puts it.26 In other words, a single verbal shift by the reader can
transform the poem’s politics entirely. More generally, Osborne revamps Larkin’s
relationship to modernism, and argues that the poet anticipated deconstruction
by decades; he concludes by demonstrating Larkin’s influence on a generation
of younger British postmodernists. He has since followed this up with Radical
Larkin (2014), a study of seven radical techniques used by the poet, including
ellipsis, deterritorialization and de-essentialism. His fierce countering of the
critical violence done to Larkin’s work has cleared the way for new and more
open-minded studies of this writer, the present one included.
The publication of The Complete Poems was another landmark moment for
Larkin Studies. Burnett’s edition expands the corpus by including all accessible
poems, with newly interrogated print and manuscript sources, Burnett
having found more than 100 errors in A. T. Tolley’s edition of the Early Poems
 Introduction 9

and Juvenilia alone. Most impressively, Burnett provides a comprehensive

commentary on the poems, including Larkin’s extensive intertextuality. The
consequences of his editorial scholarship are substantial and manifold. Larkin’s
corpus is not just larger but more accurate. Perhaps more significantly, Burnett
has strengthened the case for a more textual approach. Although there is
far more biographical information than in any previous edition, Burnett’s
commentary also presents summaries of divergent critical interpretations, non-
biographical contexts and Larkin’s many citations and allusions. In other words,
his commentary encourages readers to look within the poems in order to better
understand them. As the dustjacket states, ‘Larkin played down his literariness,
but his poetry enrichingly alludes to and echoes the writings of many others;
Archie Burnett’s commentary establishes him as a more complex and more
literary poet than many readers have suspected.’

Prospectus

It is with this complexity and literariness in mind, as well as the possibilities

demonstrated by Osborne’s text-centred ethos, that I have approached Larkin’s
early work afresh. It seems to me that another way to prove the multifaceted
brilliance and subversiveness of Larkin’s mature work is to show the early
development and influences required to write it. The cradle-to-grave biographies
have naturally explored the years before Larkin became a major poet. They have
also explored a range of his writings from that period, though with varying
degrees of coverage, patience and critical acumen. This study takes a more
systematic approach; because it is not a biography, it also takes a distinctly
different methodological one. Biographies necessarily weave a writer’s work
into the bigger life story being told, whereas this study only calls upon the life
where it helps to clarify a particular point in some way. Biographies tend to
have a narrative arc; this study does too, but it is one focused on texts rather
than life events: what is being traced is Larkin’s literary development, rather
than psychological, sexual, professional and so on. The main methodological
approach is that of close reading and literary analysis, even when what is being
read seems to be biographical in nature, such as Larkin’s letters. Though no
theoretical or methodological approach can claim to be somehow ‘pure’, close
reading at least has the virtue of not going looking for something particular in
a text, instead allowing the text to speak on its own terms – a method Larkin’s
work has come to require. By working through Larkin’s early writings with an
10 Early Larkin

openness to the ways in which meaning is textually constructed, this study

presents an original and often surprising account of his literary development.
Chapter 1 of Early Larkin explores Larkin’s vivid correspondence with his
friend, Jim Sutton. In doing so, the chapter establishes a meta-narrative for the
entire study, namely Larkin’s sustained and self-conscious search for a writerly
identity. This is a highly aesthetic and citational correspondence, which shows
Larkin’s early influences. Throughout the 1940s, Larkin used it to dialogically
construct an artistic identity for himself and for Sutton. Searching for common
artistic ground, he found it in the form of D. H. Lawrence. However, Lawrence’s
model of an artistic life, whereby the life and the art are one, was not something
Larkin could replicate; this chapter shows how he adopted and then adapted the
Lawrentian model.
Chapter 2 looks at Larkin’s earliest prose, written between the late 1930s
and the invention of the Brunette Coleman heteronym in 1943. Much of this
represents an exercise in genre, contributing to Larkin’s writer’s education.
The chapter offers a flavour of these early writings, and thinks through their
implications for his development. It shows how Larkin’s short fictions gradually
moved away from narrowly autobiographical fantasies of male homosociality
and authorship, towards an interest in other people that would come to define
his mature work. The chapter draws particular attention to a 1943 short story, ‘An
Incident in the English Camp’, which for the first time shows Larkin parodying,
rather than imitating, genre fiction, exploring a female centre of consciousness
and experimenting with a surrogate model of authorship.
Having tried his hand at this surrogate mode of authorship, Larkin expanded
the practice by inventing Brunette Coleman, the lesbian heteronym whose work
is the subject of Chapters 3 and 4. Coleman’s work in and on the schoolgirl story
genre has baffled, and in some cases irritated, critics; for the few sufficiently
interested in them, Larkin’s sexual psychology has offered the most obvious
explanation. These chapters decline to take such an approach, instead reading
them as a coherent oeuvre, and on their own terms, thereby allowing their
preoccupation with genre and gender to emerge. Chapter 3 looks at Coleman’s
subversive approach to genre, reading her essay on the schoolgirl story as a
remarkably expert analysis with some important ideas about the interaction
between genre and gender. These are then related to her schoolgirl novella,
Trouble at Willow Gables. Chapter 4 extends the discussion, looking at Coleman’s
narratological treatment of gender across her prose works and revealing a
radical approach to sex and sexuality. Though Larkin eventually abandoned the
heteronym, Coleman took his writing into new territory and enabled him to
 Introduction 11

produce his most original and intriguing work to date. Her example showed him
the possibilities of breaking rules and conventions, and of sensitively exploring
the lives of others, rather than his own autobiography.
After Coleman, Larkin went on to produce more ‘serious’ fiction.
Chapter 5 shows Coleman’s influence on the two published novels, Jill and A Girl
in Winter. Jill is the most obvious successor to the Coleman works: its protagonist,
John Kemp, invents a fantasy sister, even acting as the surrogate-author of her
letters and diaries. Though critics have read the novel biographically, this chapter
shows how Larkin continued his sensitive exploration of difference, something
he amplified in A Girl in Winter, with its female protagonist exiled to wartime
Britain. It is in this novel that Larkin most successfully applies the lessons learned
from his Coleman phase, writing a subtle and empathetic account of a foreign
woman’s experience.
Having traced Larkin’s development in prose, this book then turns to the
poetry. The standard narrative of Larkin’s poetic development views The North
Ship as a false start that would be corrected by his conversion in 1946 from a
Yeatsian to a Hardyesque poetic. Chapter 6 challenges this narrative with its focus
on the Sugar and Spice poems written by Coleman three years earlier. Against
a backdrop of critical dismissal, the chapter argues that these poems represent
some of the best of Larkin’s writings that decade, and that they both resemble
and influence his later poetic achievements. The chapter teases out from the
Sugar and Spice poems a number of textual echoes of later, major poems, and
also locates moments in The North Ship when Coleman’s presence can be felt.
Reading ‘Femmes Damnées’, one of Coleman’s 1943 poems, the chapter asks how
Larkin could publish this under his own name thirty-five years later, without it
seeming out of place in his oeuvre.
In 1950, Larkin wrote ‘Round the Point’, a dramatic piece in which two
characters debate the reasons for his stalling career as a novelist. Its prescient
analysis returns us to the meta-narrative established in Chapter 1, showing that
Larkin was now on the cusp of realizing his writerly identity. Chapter 7 looks
at this and the significant changes occurring in his poetry workbooks. Having
abandoned the novels he had worked on since A Girl in Winter, Larkin used the
first weeks of the new decade to write his first two great poems: ‘At Grass’ and
‘Deceptions’. Both are acts of poetic calibration, testing and respecting distance
and difference, and therefore finally realizing Coleman’s influence, and the
achievement of A Girl in Winter, in his verse. The chapter presents close readings
of these first two major poems, showing the distance Larkin had travelled during
the preceding decade.
12 Early Larkin

Chapter 8 completes the study by turning to The Less Deceived, Larkin’s first
truly mature collection. Reading a representative selection of poems from the
volume, it shows how Larkin finally achieved maturity as a poet by continuing
to practise ideas developed in earlier writings, especially those of Brunette
Coleman. In The Less Deceived, Larkin continues to demonstrate his sensitive
preoccupation with gender, and the lives of others more generally; he also follows
Coleman in using personae to drive poems which upset genre, orthodoxy and
cliché. These are poems expressed in a voice and manner definitively Larkin’s
own, finally enabling him to make his mark on literary history.
The poems Larkin wrote during the first weeks of the 1950s show that he had
at last achieved poetic maturity. But it was during the 1940s that Larkin grew as
a writer, discovering his ‘interest in everything outside himself ’, and establishing
a poetic that would make him famous. Larkin’s major poetry – the poetry that
is widely read and studied today – is the result of a decade’s experimentation
with ideas, influences, forms, genres, subjects, voices and personae. In his
correspondence with Sutton, Larkin set out to attain literary greatness, but the
journey he went on to achieve it was not the one he imagined. As he would later
remark in ‘Round the Point’, ‘A writer’s development is a slow approximation
to his fated position. . . . [D]iscovering what one writes about best is a slow
business’ (TWG, 481). If we are to truly appreciate Larkin’s art, and continue to
push back against reductive readings of it, we need to better understand the slow
journey he undertook in order to produce it. This book tells that story.
 1

A portrait of the artist as a young man

The Larkin-Sutton letters

This book is about the journey Larkin undertook to become a mature and
original writer and one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Larkin’s
correspondence with James (Jim) Ballard Sutton is an important place to begin,
because it was there that Larkin constructed and negotiated his artistic identity
– an identity that was forced to adapt to the changing circumstances of his life
and his growing acceptance of his own character and art. It is there that we can
first begin to see the shape his literary development would take and the various
roads not taken, a narrative pursued across subsequent chapters.
The friendship between Philip Larkin and Jim Sutton began at Coventry’s
King Henry VIII School. Their extant correspondence starts in 1938 with a letter
Larkin wrote from a family holiday in Sidmouth, and trickles to a halt in the
early 1950s.1 It therefore spans the entire decade of the 1940s, and, as a running
commentary on these formative years, is one of the most important available
to Larkin scholars. This correspondence also contains some of the best writing
Larkin produced that decade. These are vivid and lively letters, often deeply
amusing, and electrified by playful language and obscenities. Such qualities are
absent from much of the literary work Larkin produced during the 1940s, but
would, during the course of the decade, gradually find their way into his writing
and form part of what we now recognize as ‘Larkinesque’. Critics were quick
to point out the value of these letters: Andrew Motion has described them as
‘extraordinary . . . intimate, spontaneous, vital’, whilst Anthony Thwaite argues
that ‘They are very much a portrait of the artist as a young man’ (SL, xii).2 These
are common means of characterizing the correspondence. The intimacy which
Motion describes makes this correspondence stand out, particularly from
more perfunctory or excessively performative correspondences, like those with
Kingsley Amis and Colin Gunner, which were in many ways conducted from a
14 Early Larkin

sense of social obligation or guilt. The letters to Sutton are full of longing and
exhilaration:

Your word revived me like a warm fire, solid, sincere, deepest I wished more
than anything else that rather you were here or I was in Coventry. (1 April 1941)3
Permit me to observe that during the last eight days I have received 6 (six) letters
from you . . . . In other words, I resemble a man who has consumed 6 bots [sic]
of beer in swift succession. (12 April 1943)

The language of warmth and intoxication is perhaps more redolent of love letters,
and at times, the sense of yearning arguably borders on the sexual: ‘Ah, if only
we could get together again and you stuff my poems in your cavernous pipe, and
I put my feet through your canvases two at a time as of old’ (5 August 1942). ‘I
long for you to come back’, he wrote the year after; ‘I feel you are a particularly
good book or record I have voluntarily locked away and some time in the future
shall take out and read or play again – if you see what I mean. Of course you are
much better than a book or record. But it’s almost the sense of something saved
up. I hope you come back, soon’ (12 August 1943).

Epistolarity

Letters occupy an unsound theoretical relationship to literary studies. As

Hermione Lee writes, they are ‘dangerous, seductive, and invaluable for
biographers’.4 That much may be obvious, but critics producing ostensibly less
biographical scholarship are not immune to their seductions. Though some work
has been done to theorize epistolarity, and literary correspondence is beginning
to receive the more sophisticated attention it demands, a much older and more
naïve notion of letter-writing continues to exercise a pull on the imagination
of literary scholars and lay readers. As the historian Rebecca Earle points out,
‘Personal letters . . . have often been read as windows into the soul of the author.
The ancient trope that views the letter as merely a conversation in writing lent
particular force to this idea, whereby the letter becomes as unmediated as a
casual conversation.’5 Larkin has been a notable victim of this approach, since it
was his letters – and a sometimes wilfully simplistic way of reading them – that
were responsible for the backlash of the 1990s. As Amanda Gilroy and W. M.
Verhoeven argue, however, this view of letter-writing as a casual, unmediated
form of expression involves two acts of erasure, namely the ‘dialogic construction
of identity’ and the independent ‘textuality’ of letters.6 These aspects must surely
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 15

be even more acute in the case of a writer’s letters. For Hugh Haughton, a poet’s
letter ‘is not only a source of information but a form of information, a literary
performance with a bearing on poetry’.7
In this chapter, however, I am less interested in the possibility that Larkin’s
letters represent early rehearsals for poems than in the idea that they represent
early rehearsals of a writerly identity. Larkin used this correspondence as a
space in which to construct and negotiate his identity as a writer – the ‘form of
information’ Haughton describes. In this sense, I concur with its characterization
as a ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’, but complicate the implications of that
phrase: declining to treat the correspondence as biographical plunder, a source
of information about the young artist, I instead interpret it as the place where
he first became a young artist. From the displays of power in early modern royal
portraiture, to the carefully composed twenty-first-century ‘selfie’, the history of
the portrait and self-portrait teaches us that this genre is fundamentally about
the construction and projection of identity, not the naïve recording of it. If the
Larkin-Sutton correspondence is a portrait of the artist as a young man, then it is
only because the correspondence itself is the process by which the young Larkin
constructs and projects himself as artist.

War and letter-writing

This correspondence was at its most intense during the Second World War. In
1940, Larkin and Sutton both went to Oxford, Larkin to study English Language
and Literature at the university, and Sutton to study art at the Slade, recently
relocated from London in order to avoid German bombing. Sutton, however,
would only enjoy two terms, being called up into the Royal Army Service
Corps in the spring of 1941. Larkin, whose exemption from military service
due to poor eyesight had been confirmed earlier that year, was able to continue
his studies. This distanced, wartime context is crucial to understanding the
correspondence.
A casual reference in December 1940 – ‘My bloody Uncle is convinced that the
invasion will start tomorrow’ – reminds us just how much the threat of disaster
and defeat loomed over the country during these years (20 December 1940).
However, references like this to the war are relatively scarce: it seems Larkin
was largely uninterested in the subject, seeing it more as an interruption to the
relationship and their artistic destinies (explored later in the chapter). His letters
show almost no interest in nationalist sabre-rattling, the implications of the war,
16 Early Larkin

or its specific battles and developments. Even on 8 May 1945 – the day after
Germany signed an act of military surrender – Larkin’s mind was elsewhere: ‘I
hope the end of the European War means that we shall meet again soon, and
be able to get going on affairs of mutual and eternal interest. By this I mean the
appreciation and creation of temporal and timeless ART.’ As the nation erupted
in euphoric relief, Larkin wrote this:

I listened to Churchill blathering out of him this afternoon, and the King this
evening. But all day I have had a headache and felt despondent. The second draft
of the novel has reached p.22. I have had some bad meat for supper which gives
me a thoughtful expression. And the weather has turned enervatingly warm. (8
May 1945)

Here, the great war leader Churchill is ‘blathering’, the king is no better and the
Allies’ victory is narrated as casually as Larkin’s headache, the drafting of his
novel, his evening meal and the weather. For Larkin, there are concerns more
personally significant than the fate of Europe.
One such concern is to keep Sutton’s ‘mutual and eternal interest’ in art
alive throughout the war. Jenny Hartley has argued that ‘During a war letters
assume a heightened significance, and the Second World War can be seen as
the last golden age of letter-writing’.8 She goes on to discuss the important
role women, and particularly mothers, played as letter-writers during this
conflict:

In their letters, mothers reproduced the kind of dailiness we find in women’s

fiction. The creation of the everyday, the ‘study of provincial life’, to borrow
Middlemarch’s subtitle, is a project which the letter-writing mother shares
with the writer of domestic fiction. . . . If mothers were the domestic realists
of the war, they also had to practise the novelist’s arts of editing and selecting.
Letters might offer space for creativity and enable the writing self to gain in
confidence, but they had to be carefully angled and controlled with the reader in
mind. Mothers could not forget for long the function of their letters as surrogate
maternal comfort.9

Larkin, though neither a woman nor a mother, was in the privileged position of
remaining at home and at Oxford, thanks to his exemption. In this context he
seems to have assumed a similarly ‘surrogate’ role. This partly manifests itself
as chatter about jazz, books, mutual friends and so on, but often also as scene-
setting – presenting Sutton with vignettes of the ‘provincial life’ from which he
has been torn. There is both an Englishness and a strong verbal-visual quality
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 17

to these efforts. In one fascinating letter, penned in rich present tense from the
gardens of St John’s College, Larkin writes:

Round the base of a treetrunk there is a wooden circular seat. The tree (unknown
tree) lets its branches fall around on all sides so that anyone sitting on the seat
is mainly obscured. A thin veil of green and sungreen leaves flick and mottle in
the wind: this page is shadowed by endless changing. Farther, bells debate the
exact moment of 2 o’clock. Due to the wind and the curious tree there is always
a rustling, like constantly blowing leaves in Autumn streets, or, on a scorched
headland, the distant sound of the sea. (21 May 1941)

This is impressive prose, and edited to achieve maximum impact. The passage
shows genuine poetic promise: ‘flick and mottle . . . shadowed by endless changing’
is redolent of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and ‘bells debate the exact moment’ is a
strong metaphor, which would find its way into a later poem, ‘Livings III’: ‘The
bells discuss the hour’s gradations’ (TCP, 78–9). The letter seems designed to
put Sutton back in touch with home – with the city and the country he has had
to leave behind. Having been sent away to fight a war, a letter such as this one
carries him, for the moment, out of his present reality and into another. But
Larkin’s letter-writing goes beyond the mere provision of ‘comfort’; convinced,
as Larkin was, that Sutton was the art world’s Next Big Thing, passages like this
also seem to have been written to appeal to his friend’s visual imagination, lest
it wither away in an unconducive military environment. Often, then, Larkin’s
letters self-consciously participate in a version of ekphrasis:

I saw a horse last night, standing at the edge of a field, being patted on the nose
by some people, and lifting its long proud head away, again & again, proudly;
but gently the shape of its skull surprised me. It was a black one. And then the
fields, in slopes and little hills, sunlit and hedged. And the clouds, small, pearly
blue-grey sea-shells, drifting along the blue horizon, like Paul Nash. And the
feeling of people out in their Sunday things on a summer evening. (6 July 1942)

Such passages represent a kind of ekphrasis because of the way they render
visual experience into words, passing on those words for Sutton to re-produce
as something visual again, whether in his imagination, or with pen and paper
(this particular passage was prompted by a sketch of a horse which Sutton
had sent). Larkin himself compares the scene to a Nash painting, so that life
imitates art and becomes art again. What purpose could this serve, other than
to keep Sutton’s painterly imagination kindled? This is much more than keeping
his friend’s spirits high during testing times: letters like these represent a more
18 Early Larkin

significant project – the most important of this correspondence – which is the

mutual construction of the pair’s artistic identities.

A shared artistic identity

When Larkin and Sutton arrived in Oxford in 1940, each man knew where he
wanted his life to go: Larkin was determined to be a great novelist, and Sutton
to be a great painter; and each one had confidence in the other’s abilities.
Sometimes Larkin jokingly addresses Sutton as ‘Wotto Giotto’ or ‘Ello Angelo,
Michael’ (respectively, 16 September 1941 and 5 October 1941), but is deadly
serious about their mutual greatness:

Yes, I look forward to our meeting again, I do really. . . . I need someone who
consciously accepts mystery at the bottom of things, a person who devotes
themself to listening for this mystery – an artist – the kind of artist who is
perpetually kneeling in his heart – who gives no fuck for anything except this
mystery, and for that gives every fuck there is. Is this you? I believe it is. (16
August 1945)

This is perhaps the most explicit instance of Larkin constructing a narrative of

shared artistic promise: in his directness – ‘Is this you? I believe it is’ – Larkin
leaves no room for doubt that he and Sutton are both ‘artists’ in the deepest
sense. He is also serious about Sutton’s talent:

By the way, the drawings you sent impressed me. There has always been
something about your style of drawing that I only vaguely identify as ‘lower
class’. By this I mean primarily the people you draw are l-cl, but there is also
something about your ‘line’ (‘in two yahs from now, Sutton, you’ll draw as well as
you evah will!’) which is rough, crude and fundamental, vivid and earthy. There
is great hope for your painting. (23 June 1941)

In another intriguing letter, Larkin gives Sutton a tantalizing glimpse of the kind
of work he might go on to produce:

I think you might make a name as ‘the painter of the brickyards’ – blue sky,
red bricks, yellow sun. Scaffolds, shadows, comic labourers, brown tea, and the
rarified ice-wind blowing through the grass. Or just one enormous . . . picture
entitled ‘The Builders’ with about 50 builders running & jumping and falling
and shouting and building and climbing and conveying with the wind against
them. It would be richly beautiful and also richly humourous [sic]. (12 April
1943)
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 19

Larkin’s vision for Sutton’s aesthetic seems to be a blend of Ford Madox Brown’s
Work (1852–63) and Stanley Spencer’s Cookham paintings. This is not simply
a case of friendly encouragement. The visual stimuli, the provocations and
inspirations, the reminders of home and of normality – all this must have
been life-affirming for an aspiring painter stuck in a martial environment
that, when it was not horrific, was downright banal. This is borne out by one
of Larkin’s sketches, discussed by Julie Maylon, which shows him sending a
literal ‘lifeline’ from England all the way to the Middle East, where Sutton was
based.10
Again and again, Larkin presents himself and Sutton as the next generation’s
Great Artists, working in the novel form and painting respectively:

[T]here has been a change in English psyche. The wind is blowing ‘in a new
direction of time’, and I feel that you & I, who will be if anyone the new artists,
are onto it. I am not confident about this, nor am I prepared to argue about it,
but it seems likely to me. (6 July 1942)

This shared artistic destiny becomes something of an obsession for Larkin:

‘Together, we shall be no more successful materially – if I am ever famous it
will not be for ages, probably till I am dead because I will not push myself –
but we shall do better work. We shall become more faithful artists’, he wrote
on 16 August 1945. With an almost outrageous sense of arrogance, Larkin told
Sutton that ‘I was not meant to study, but to be studied’ (12 April 1943). This was,
admittedly, during the midst of his dreaded Finals; but one gets the impression
that he was only half-joking. His letters are full of epigrammatic, often pretentious
statements about art; given his confident and powerful sense of his own future,
it is easy to feel these have been put down for the benefit of posterity, secure in
the faith that scholars would pore over these letters for signs of early genius.
They have, of course – indeed, this chapter is dedicated to them – but so many
of the ideas Larkin sets down in this correspondence bear little resemblance to
his more mature literary practice, or his more mature temperament. This shows
the extent to which Larkin used the correspondence in order to test out ideas,
theories, voices and identities. It is highly unlikely, for example, that he would
have much sympathy with any of the following principles even a decade after he
wrote them down:

As for the vision itself, it’s got something to do with sex. I don’t know what, & I
don’t particularly want to know. . . . I should think poetry & sex are very closely
connected. (20 December 1940)
What a poet has to do is to create a new language, for himself. (11 April 1942)
20 Early Larkin

I was thinking that every man should at some point in his life voluntarily
abandon himself to the spirit of journeying. (22 July 1944)

The point is not to criticize Larkin’s aesthetic inconsistency but to demonstrate

the function of this correspondence as a kind of holding place for potential
voices and identities to be worked out.

Writerly anxieties

That said, for all the gusto and self-promotion, there is much more anxiety about
Larkin’s ability to live up to his own expectations. Even as a teenager, Larkin
possessed enough self-reflexivity to describe one of his poems as ‘Full of gloom
and adolescent self-conceit and windbag sentimentality and pseudo-Keatsian
mush’ (6 September 1939). He is aware of the self-absorbed moaning that takes
place in his letters, often apologizing to Sutton for the ‘mental pyrotechnics’
and ‘gabblings of a demented megalomaniac’ (respectively, 21 May 1941 and
6 September 1939). He is also acutely conscious that such ‘demented babblings’
are ‘badly written’. In other words, Larkin’s concern is with the aesthetic quality
of his emotions rather than the emotions themselves. If writing is at the very core
of his identity, then an inability to write, or to write well, represents a serious
existential crisis. This results in countless letters of agonizing self-analysis and
reproach. One device Larkin sometimes employs is a dialogue between different
parts of himself: the ‘Self ’ and the ‘Better Self ’, or the ‘Mind’ and the ‘Bowels’:

God, I can’t possibly write letters.

Mind. Don’t ‘write letters’. Write!
Bowels. Aw fuckin’ ‘ell, I can’t.
Mind. Tee-hee! I know you can’t! That [sic] just the point, isn’t it? Look at that
book on the table! Know what it is? Shall I read the title to you?
B. Aw, fuck off!
Mind. ‘The Letters of DH Lawrence’. He he! That shits you up a little, eh? One
thing a pseudo Lawrence can’t do, eh? Achilles’ heel, eh?
B. ‘Aw, fuck, Achilles’ tits!’
Mind. Vulgar abuse gains no advantage to you. Why not admit that you are a
complete sham? Why not realise that your natural laziness and incompetence,
coupled with an absurdly inverted inferiority complex, has led you to assume a
role for which you are peculiarly fitted but for the reality of which you are quite
unsuited? (16 June 1941)
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 21

The mind/bowels dichotomy is amusing, but reveals a particularly interesting

concern of Larkin’s, which is his ability (or not) to write letters. This anxiety
shows Larkin’s perception of letter-writing as an art in itself, rather than a
straightforward transmission of information and gossip. He yearns to be a
writer, but does not think he can write letters; ergo he is not a writer. Ironically,
passages like this represent a far more idiosyncratic and entertaining style than
the one he was carefully curating in his poetry and prose in 1941. This is a lesson
he would have to learn; but in 1941 Larkin was too preoccupied with emulating
his personal pantheon of literary influences. He could, at least, recognize this
problem, but for various reasons spent much of the 1940s repeating it. A highly
representative example of the misery this caused him can be seen in the following
letter:

I am continually examining myself for signs of literary ability. This in itself is a

bad thing. And there is a point of view that is always present in my mind and to
which in moments of extremer gloom like this I tend to adhere. This is:

1. I want ‘to be a writer’, not ‘to write’.

2. The kind of writing (scrabbles, scratchy nonsense) I have perpetrated up to
now has been entirely derivative and imitative.
3. There has been in it no ‘unknown quantity’, such as abounds in Lawrence
and all writers worth admiring.
4. It is merely a symptom of youthful onanistic egoism, of which there are far
too many examples.
5. Look at Isherwood! By the time he’d finished his 2nd university year he’d
written Lions, Shadows – a 100,000 words novel. Length, boy, length!
6. Look at Auden, and his superb early poems! . . .
7. Look at Dylan Thomas! (Just look at him).

. . . There are times when I absolutely pray for the power. (1 April 1942)

Larkin’s self-examination generates a remarkably prescient assessment of his

weaknesses, all of which would need to be resolved: his desire to act out the
identity of a ‘writer’ being stronger than his desire to earn the identity by actually
writing; the derivative nature of his attempts at writing so far; the consequent
lack of originality, or ‘unknown quantity’ as he puts it; a juvenile obsession with
himself (‘onanistic egoism’), and with especially dominant models and influences
– Lawrence, Isherwood, Auden, Thomas – which stifle his attempts to produce
anything original. That Larkin was able to recognize these problems allowed
him to eventually address them; they are explored in greater depth throughout
22 Early Larkin

the course of this study. For the moment, however, it is worth interrogating the
function of some of these influences in this correspondence and in Larkin’s
identity formation.

Influence

Larkin’s writing under the influence of particular artists is a major theme of this
study. If, as I have argued, this correspondence constructs Larkin’s identity as an
artist, then it partly does so by using other artists as building blocks. In other
words, Larkin’s identity is performed through a series of repeated references
to specific artists. In one letter, Larkin tells Sutton he is ‘content not to be able
to “appreciate” Shakespeare & Beethoven, preferring Isherwood & Armstrong.
People of 19 who say they can appreciate the former are liars and cunts. No one
of 19 – unless they are genii of course – can be expected to’ (24 September 1941).
His preference for Isherwood and Armstrong over Shakespeare and Beethoven
is symptomatic of a very contemporary taste. As well as a number of jazz artists,
the most frequently cited figures in the correspondence include Lawrence,
Isherwood, Auden, Joyce, Mansfield and Woolf: all modern, if not modernist,
artists; many of them radically experimental; many of them controversial,
who suffered censorship; and much of their work either explicitly or implicitly
feminist.
These things are important to note. During his lifetime and after his death,
Larkin was criticized for a number of political and aesthetic reasons: for
enjoying a narrow, unambitious, mostly white and male set of influences (Hardy,
Betjeman, etc.); for his professed dislike of modernism; for the conservative
and reactionary nature of his 1973 Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English
Verse; and for the racist, misogynist and class-conscious attitudes revealed in
his Selected Letters. Each one of these is at least unsettled by the radical, diverse,
subversive and contemporary influences present in this correspondence, which
Larkin used as the basis of his writerly identity. This was not just performance;
later chapters show the positive impact writers like Woolf had on his work and
on his development. Whilst simply imitating those writers was unwise, it is true
that many of their concerns were also the concerns of the early Larkin, and of
the mature one.
As will be seen in Chapter 2, Isherwood and Auden were particularly
significant – and particularly hindering – influences for Larkin. In 1942, Larkin
sent Sutton five typed-out poems from Auden’s Look, Stranger! (1936) without
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 23

comment – the sheer brilliance of the poems apparently speaking for itself.
Larkin repeatedly points to the presence of Auden in his verse, sometimes
boastfully, sometimes in acknowledgement that it is holding him back, and
sometimes both simultaneously: ‘My poetry – my thin trickle of cindery shit
– has changed too. I write about big things nowadays – quite in Audenish, I’m
afraid’ (5 April 1943). Given Larkin’s ambition at the time was to be a novelist,
Isherwood is perhaps the more significant influence. We have already seen him
express envious admiration for Lions and Shadows (1938) – not only for the
book itself but also because Isherwood wrote it at an impressively young age.
Elsewhere, in another letter seemingly written for the benefit of posterity, Larkin
writes: ‘I know I am a mirror – a curious concave mirror that makes everything
small and distinct – a mirror that must be polished by ceaseless artistic creation’
(22 March 1944). Larkin’s ‘I am a mirror’ echoes the famous line on the opening
page of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939): ‘I am a camera with its shutter
open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’11 His identity as a novelist is, then,
self-consciously modelled on Isherwood. But the comparison is problematic:
‘I’m feeling a bit Isherwoodish myself ’, he told Sutton on 16 December 1940, ‘but
being far too conceited on the (arse) hole for self hatred am dissolved in maudlin
self-pity’. As a description of ‘the education of a novelist’, much of Lions and
Shadows is taken up by expressions of the author’s literary frustrations; but what
Larkin seems to imply here is that Isherwood’s ‘self hatred’ proved a far more
superior means of overcoming these than Larkin’s ‘self-pity’, which achieves very
little.12
In April 1941, he informs Sutton that he has

been employing my time by making a selection of my poems into another book.

‘Chosen Poems’. 35 in all – from ‘38 to ‘41. Typing them out depressed and
impressed me. Depressed me because they were just like any other shit by Day
Lewis or anyone else: impressed me because the words seem to come so easily
(‘My fatal gift for pastiche’ – Ch. Ish) – odd phrases just like Auden.
pastiche means copying, youse iggerant cunts. (16 April 1941)

Once again, Larkin is discerning in recognizing his own strengths and weaknesses:
he is sufficiently precocious and technically adept to write in the manner of
the Thirties Poets he so admires, but not writing with enough originality to
distinguish himself from them. There is an irony in the fact that Larkin chooses
to diagnose his ‘fatal’ attraction to pastiche by echoing Isherwood’s own self-
diagnosis in Lions and Shadows. Even in writing this letter, Larkin performs an act
of Isherwoodesque authorship: by telling his artist-friend about the poems he has
24 Early Larkin

been working into a book, Larkin mirrors the passage in Lions and Shadows where
Isherwood shows Chalmers (a version of Edward Upward) the manuscript of his
book, describing how he ‘envied my fatal facility for pastiche’.13 In case ‘pastiche’
seems too sophisticated in Larkin’s case, however, he lands a final and honest
blow on himself by deflating the term: ‘pastiche means copying’. Isherwood may
indeed have enjoyed such a ‘fatal facility’, but the novel in which he acknowledges
this is itself evidence of an original talent. Larkin understood that, and he also
understood that he would have to offer the literary world more than just imitation
if he was to break into it. Chapter 2 further explores the ways in which Larkin
performed an Isherwoodian identity, a behaviour he would have to abandon in
order to make progress in his prose. There is, however, an even more significant
and even more disabling influence in this correspondence than Isherwood. The
single most important lodestar in these letters – and the figure with whom Larkin
would have to wrestle most fiercely – is that of D. H. Lawrence.

Lawrence

For much of the 1940s, Larkin worshipped Lawrence. Though his letters to
Sutton are full of farts and belches, sundry obscenities and irreverent comments
on writers and other public figures – all part of what gives this correspondence
its vitality – such vulgarity is notably absent from the many passages concerning
Lawrence. For Lawrence, Larkin reserves his most emotional, reverential,
religious language. Quoting Hesketh Pearson on Shakespeare’s plays, Larkin
writes:

He says ‘they . . . contain all the humour, all the beauty, and the feeling, and
all the wisdom that ever mattered on this earth’. Now, I do not screw up my
mouth & make a farting noise. But I do say that I say the same thing of ‘Lady
Chatterley’ (the real one), ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘Kangaroo’, ‘Aaron’s Rod’, ‘Pansies’,
and ‘Collected Letters’. (6 July 1942)

In an extraordinary passage, he declares Lawrence ‘England’s greatest writer’ on

the basis of just one or two of his works:

I have been reading ‘Sons and Lovers’ and feel ready to die. If Lawrence had
been killed after writing that book he’d still be England’s greatest novelist. If one
knocks out all his books except ‘S&L’ and ‘Lady Ch.’ he is still England’s greatest
writer. Cock me! Nearly every page of it is absolutely perfect. . . . Lord, I pray
power of thee! (20 March 1942)
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 25

Year after year, month after month, Larkin and Sutton return to Lawrence: ‘You
say “Lawrence is the only man I can wholeheartedly admire.” I agree’; ‘I fully
agree about the importance of Lawrence. To me, Lawrence is what Shakespeare
was to Keats and all the other buggers’; ‘I am reading a lot of DHL – praise
the Lord! – and feel like renouncing all other modern writers’ (respectively,
16 September 1941, 6 July 1942 and 7 January 1943). It is Lawrence, then, who
provides the ultimate yardstick against which Larkin measures his own literary
ability: ‘Having read Lawrence, I know what shit is, and won’t write it: on the
other hand, I can’t write anything else’ (19 June 1942). If Lawrence is Larkin’s
chief influence, he is also the chief obstacle to his success as a writer. Even more
so than Isherwood or Auden, the mismatch between their personalities, their
temperaments and their worldviews was massive. However much Larkin might
worship Lawrence’s work, with hindsight we know that he was never going to
lead the kind of life that allowed Lawrence to write it. The main reason for this is
the very different approach to art and life which Larkin would come to represent.

Art and life

For Lawrence, art and life were one: his vocation as an artist was powerful, and
he could let nothing get in the way of it; everything he did, he did as an artist.
According to F. R. Leavis, ‘the man created out of the intensity of his living’,
whilst John Middleton Murry went further, arguing that Lawrence ‘gave up,
deliberately, the pretence of being an artist. The novel became for him simply
a means by which he could make explicit his own “thought-adventures”’.14 As a
young man, Larkin could not predict precisely what shape his life would take,
but he could use this correspondence to work out his relation to art. His vivid
definition of a true artist – cited earlier as someone ‘perpetually kneeling in his
heart – who gives no fuck for anything except this mystery, and for that gives
every fuck there is’ – establishes the centrality of art as a consensus.
The entire correspondence can be read as an extended and collaborative essay
on what it means to be an artist. Early on, he is keen to paint himself as a Dandy:
in one very early letter, he tells Sutton about the sartorial purchases he has made
on holiday in Jersey, including two bow ties – ‘one a brilliant, eye-teasing orange,
the other a sort of crafty maroon. . . . Also a beret. If I had a cigarette holder I
should look quite French. Wait till I get back to Coventry!’ (12 August 1939).
The following year, he sent Sutton his poem ‘Ghosts’: ‘I wanted to send it you to
show you my real talent – not the truly strong man but the fin de siècle romantic,
26 Early Larkin

not the clinically austere but the Peg’s Paper sonneteer, not Auden but Rupert
Brooke’ (20 December 1940). ‘One thing I object to is having to earn a living’, he
wrote in 1942 (7 December). These are the cultivated poses of an Aesthete, and
Edna Longley has used this correspondence to characterize Larkin as a fin-de-
siècle romantic.15 But as the correspondence progresses, such a pose becomes less
tenable. This is a necessary consequence of entering adulthood: though easy for
Larkin to play the Dandy at university, the closer he got to graduation, the more
he was forced to grapple with the question of how his art would fit into his life;
and once out of university, life’s many impositions would render the question
much more urgent. It became an economic and social question more than an
aesthetic one. Though middle class, Larkin’s family was not wealthy enough
to indefinitely support him as a writer; nor did he have the financial stability
to experiment with a series of part-time positions, as Isherwood does in Lions
and Shadows. The world of work and social commitments – a world he would
write about so memorably in his later poetry – was calling. In such a context, his
relationship with Lawrence begins to alter. In the summer of 1943 – the summer
he graduated – Larkin admitted to finding himself ‘a bit tired of Lawrence’ (9
July 1943). A few weeks earlier, he had told Sutton: ‘Oh, and another thing about
Lawrence. Lawrence has been the world to me. Now the world is beginning to
enforce itself through experience, and Lawrence will have to go, or at least be
modified by experience. S’obvious. Yersh’ (23 May 1943).
It is surely no coincidence that Larkin put these thoughts down on paper just
a few weeks after reporting to Sutton that he had made

a new friend – ‘Percival’, in ‘Lions & Shadows’. Or so he says, and I see no reason
to doubt his word. He was certainly at Repton & Cambridge with Isherwood
& Upward. His name is Vernon Watkins & he is a poet. He is nearly 40 & has
just published a book of poems which I don’t like an awful lot, but I like him
enormously. (16 March 1943)

Vernon Watkins’s impact on the early Larkin is considerable but also complex.
Their first encounter came shortly before this letter, when Watkins addressed
the English Club at Oxford. The subject of his talk was Yeats, whom he had
known; Larkin recalled the talk as ‘impassioned and imperative’, and cites it
as the moment he first became interested in the Irish poet (RW, 29). Watkins
was also friends with Dylan Thomas, and, as Larkin tells Sutton, had been at
Repton and Cambridge at the same time as Isherwood, appearing very briefly in
Lions and Shadows as the character ‘Percival’. He had, therefore, all the glamour
of association with a number of Larkin’s literary heroes, and his passion for
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 27

Yeats would infect Larkin for a number of years to come (discussed further in
Chapter 6). In this way, Watkins represents another significant but also unhelpful
influence.
However, something else about Watkins also affected Larkin. In getting to
know him, Larkin was drawn to a particular version of the art/life relationship,
which he remembered years later in his obituary for Watkins:

Having spent all his adult life in a bank, he was now a flight sergeant, no doubt
for the duration; after the war he would go back to being a bank clerk again. This
in no way hindered his devotion to poetry, which in turn was quite unaffected
by ambition . . . . Plainly he had not the slightest intention of ‘living by writing’;
he was not interested in journalism or reviewing . . ., and found banking much
more acceptable than pot-boiling. At that time he was not married. The picture
this built up was of a genuinely modest, genuinely dedicated person, who had
chosen, in Yeats’s phraseology, perfection of the work rather than of the life.
To anyone who, like myself, was on the edge of the world of employment his
example was significant. Indeed, it was almost encouraging. (RW, 42)

In a minor but revealing detail, Larkin also mentions how Watkins would ‘listen
patiently to my enthusiasm for D. H. Lawrence’ (RW, 41). Until his acquaintance
with Watkins, Larkin’s correspondence with Sutton never seems to register the
possibility of such a separation of the life and the art. And yet, with hindsight,
we know this is exactly the approach Larkin would take, establishing himself not
in banking but in the similarly nine-to-five world of librarianship. Larkin would
also compartmentalize his life and art in other ways: unlike Watkins, he would
never marry, keeping even his longest and closest romantic companion, Monica
Jones, at arm’s length. In other words, rather than combining his life and his art,
Larkin kept them separate, so that the latter might have some space in which to
grow.
But what might it mean to perfect the work and not the life? James Longenbach
has challenged the neat binary of Yeats’s ‘The Choice’:

There is something wrong, something too ingeniously self-forgiving, about

Yeats’s distinction between perfection of the life and perfection of the work.
Yeats was a formidable guy; he lived in a medieval tower, he talked with dead
people, he wrote some of the most beautiful lyric poems in the language. But
nobody has a perfect life. Every life is enriched by disappointment, driven by
compromise, and to suggest that one might have been a good person if only one
had not been a great artist is to diminish the integrity of art. It is to suggest that
art is not fueled by human experience – from the aesthetic to the political to the
apocalyptic – but somehow transpires beside or beyond it.16
28 Early Larkin

One might make a similar comment about Larkin’s life: he reached the top of
his profession as an academic librarian; he experienced passionate and loving
relationships with women; he got immense aesthetic enjoyment out of jazz
music; and so on. His life was not perfect, but it was not exactly empty or
completely wretched either. But to debate whether or not Larkin’s life was well-
lived is a distraction and a decision best left for the man himself. The important
point is his decision to separate out the life and the work, in order to achieve
the latter’s perfection. Again, as Longenbach points out, there can be no clean
division between the two: art inevitably arises from the life of the individual who
creates it.
But that statement in itself does not really tell us all that much. Think of
Eliot, the bank clerk and then publisher, and author of The Waste Land and Four
Quartets; then think of Byron, joining the Greek War of Independence, and
writing Don Juan; to say that their art and their life related hardly accounts for
the very different relation which each of these poets represents. For Larkin, one
of the great poets of the everyday, that he chose to order his life as ‘ordinarily’ as
possible is surely no coincidence. But – paradoxically – he was only able to write
that poetry once he had made the decision not to make his life the centre of his
art. On this, the comparison with Yeats once again becomes illuminating. Denis
Donoghue has written:

What surrounds Yeats’s name is not the aura of an achieved poetry, a body of
work separable from its origins, but an impression of genius fulfilled chiefly in
the multiplicity of its life. . . . I am not certain that it is entirely a question of
choice. It is sometimes assumed that Yeats sought perfection of his work and did
so at some cost to his life. In fact, he made the other choice. Perfection of the
life is compatible, as a personal and profoundly accepted choice, with occasional
perfections in the work. . . . My impression remains that Yeats made the choice
in favor of his life rather than his art, and that he thought of perfection chiefly
as a matter of diversity, multiplicity of interests and relations. We respond to the
choice when we think of Yeats as a presence, a figure in the landscape, a force
of attraction drawing to itself preoccupations mainly historical, biographical,
political, aesthetic, theatrical, and psychological.17

It would be difficult to argue that Larkin too fulfilled his genius through a
wilful attraction to ‘diversity [and a] multiplicity of interests and relations’.
Again, this is not to say that his life was somehow dull or misspent, or that
he had no interests. But Larkin had no desire to mythologize his life or his
world; he had no interest in politics; he did not experiment with theatre, with
spiritualism or with automatic writing. Poems came into existence as acts of
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 29

the imagination, conducted at his desk with pencil and paper. We know from
his letters that an average day for the librarian involved getting up, going to
work, coming home, cooking a modest meal, catching up on correspondence
and then, maybe, sitting down to work on a poem. We might even register this
transformation in artistic propensities by registering Larkin’s change in attire:
gone are the flamboyant, Yeatsian garments, and particularly the bow ties, of his
undergraduate days, in favour of the suit and tie. One represents the Decadent,
visionary artist, the other the ‘nine to five man who had seen poetry’, in Seamus
Heaney’s memorable words.18 James Booth quotes one of Larkin’s letters to
Sutton in which he announces that ‘I intend to devote myself to writing and
doing my boring job without enthusiasm or slackness. I only took it on account
of being able to write in the intervals’.19 Elsewhere, he cites Larkin’s reflection in
a 1982 interview that ‘I’ve never been didactic, never tried to make poetry do
things, never gone out to look for it. I waited for it to come to me, in whatever
shape it chose’ (RW, 74). As Booth comments, ‘Being a librarian enabled him to
“wait for it to come”.’20
In short, then, it was a separation of the life and the work which allowed
Larkin to achieve perfection of the latter. And so many of Larkin’s mature poems
are perfect. Although the posthumously compiled Complete Poems is a tome,
it should be remembered that the poetry Larkin published during his lifetime
amounts to just four slim volumes. This might be taken as one indication of his
opting for perfection of the work. Such a settlement would, however, be hard-
won, or slowly realized. After 1943 – the year he met Watkins – Larkin’s letters
to Sutton begin to think more consistently about the art/life quandary. Sending
Sutton a copy of his poem ‘The North Ship’, Larkin explained:

It took a great hold on my imagination, and I planned some more poems to

make it into a loosely-linked long poem. But I have tried hard at them without
success, and I know why it is. Every now and then I am impelled to try to declare
a faith in complete severance from life: and I can never quite do it. Perhaps it is
as well, because who knows the consequences? and I always say that no one can
write well if he does not believe what he is writing. (17 October 1944)

Though Larkin would go on writing in such a mode for months to come, and
the poem in question would be published as the centrepiece of a collection
with the same name, we can see here the beginning of his loss of faith in a
falsely Romantic conception of the writer and the writing life. Though it is not
completely clear what Larkin means by having to ‘declare a faith in complete
severance from life’, he seems to realize that his approach to poetry is false and
30 Early Larkin

that however seductive, however much it appeals to his ‘imagination’, he ‘does

not believe what he is writing’.
Two years later, Larkin was mired in a problematic and unhappy relationship
with Ruth Bowman – his first substantial relationship with a woman, and
one example of the many ways in which life asserts itself. In a particularly
extraordinary letter, he told Sutton:

What mainly worries me, if you’ll excuse my speaking on my own affairs for the
moment, is a strengthening suspicion that in my character there is an antipathy
between ‘art’ and ‘life’. I find that once I ‘give in’ to another person, as I have
given in not altogether involuntarily, but almost completely, to Ruth, there is a
slackening and dulling of the peculiar artistic fibres that makes it impossible to
achieve that mental ‘clenching’ that crystallises a pattern and keeps it still while
you draw it. . . . Time & time again I feel that before I write anything else at all
I must drag myself out of the water, shake myself dry and sit down on a lonely
rock to contemplate glittering loneliness. (7 April 1946)

It is striking that Larkin chooses to frame his relationship problems in terms

of the art/life debate. Though we might object to his conception of a romantic
relationship as ‘giving in’ to someone, he is clearly concerned about the ways
in which life can suffocate the artistic impulse. Like Cyril Connolly (another
influence, discussed in Chapter 3), who wrote ‘There is no more sombre enemy
of good art than the pram in the hall’, Larkin shows concern that in his case art
and life may be incompatible.21
In other words, as Larkin made his way through life – or as ‘the world [began]
to enforce itself ’ – he continued to use the correspondence with Sutton in order
to negotiate his fundamental relationship to art. Lawrence continued to be his
point of reference, but his relationship with Lawrence itself had to evolve and
eventually be abandoned. Larkin never lost his enthusiasm for Lawrence’s work,
but his ambition to emulate it had to be ditched. In the 1980s, Larkin would wear
a t-shirt bearing an image of Lawrence whilst mowing the lawn: a wry gesture,
referencing this most undomesticated of writers whilst undertaking a mundane
domestic chore. Indeed, one sign of how far Larkin travelled during this decade
can be found in the form of an unpublished essay he wrote in July 1950, titled
‘A note on the freedom of D. H. Lawrence’.22 Considering the reverence with
which he discusses Lawrence in countless of his letters to Sutton, the essay is
startling for its sarcasm and irritation; as he told his friend, ‘The other night,
like a curate in the depths of misery blaspheming against the Almighty, I wrote
a short hostile article about D.H.L.’s “freedom”’ (SL, 166). In it, Larkin accuses
Lawrence of disingenuousness. He begins by quoting him: ‘Thank God I am
 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 31

not free, any more than a rooted tree is free.’23 ‘But is it true?’, Larkin asks,
before discussing the ways in which ‘a man’s freedom is commonly curtailed’.
He classifies ‘necessity’ into three types: ‘economic’ (‘a man must eat, he must
earn money by work’), ‘social’ (‘he must come to some kind of terms with the
society he lives in’) and ‘emotional’ (‘yielding to certain common human desires,
principally the sexual’). Larkin then relates each of these to Lawrence’s life:

It is hardly necessary to point out how singularly free Lawrence was from the
first of these necessities. After the age of twenty-six he never held a salaried
position but lived entirely by his writing. This is much more remarkable than
it sounds. . . . As a writer who could live modestly by his writing – and let it be
noted that modestly was how he preferred to live – Lawrence could afford to
dispense with society. It would be interesting to compile an itinerary of his life
to discover what was the longest time he lived in any one place . . . . There is no
need to pile up quotations to prove that, as a social animal, Lawrence did not
exist. . . . It has to be admitted that Lawrence could not escape the third necessity,
emotional necessity, as completely as he did the other two. In fact he could not
escape it at all.

Larkin’s conclusion, therefore, is this: ‘In the face of the foregoing one can only
think that Lawrence would have been honester if he had said “Thank God I am
free, as free as a man can well be. I know my freedom is not complete, but I wish
it were”.’ The sense of frustration is palpable: by 1950, Larkin was established in
his career, struggling to protect his writing time from a range of social pressures,
and had broken off his engagement to Ruth Bowman, but was now in another,
not always easy, relationship with Monica Jones. He knows he cannot evade any
of the three necessities he sets out in the essay; and Lawrence, who managed two
out of three, is galling for his disingenuousness – ‘the absurdity of it all struck
me like a fist in the knackers’, as he put it to Sutton (SL, 166). As will be seen in
the final chapters, however, Larkin was by this point just beginning to write the
kind of poetry which would mark him out as an exciting and original new voice
in English poetry. He may feel frustrated by these facts of life, but his literary
development had come a long way during the preceding decade. Part of the
recipe for his success was an evolving understanding of how his life might relate
to his art. Eventually abandoning the example of Lawrence, for whom there was
no essential difference between the two, Larkin arranged his life in such a way
that would keep his art separate but alive.
If there is no corresponding moment of realization about this in the letters
to Sutton, this is possibly because the correspondence begins to thin at this
time. This is no coincidence: by the early 1950s, Larkin was a published novelist
32 Early Larkin

and poet, and beginning to write the poems that would make his name; on the
other hand, Sutton, for whom Larkin had held such high hopes as a future great
painter, had gone nowhere in the art world and instead become a pharmacist
and landlord. In other words, Larkin had rehearsed the discourse of the artist,
and eventually fulfilled it; Sutton, who collaborated in that discourse, ended up
far from it. This explains why their correspondence does not last beyond the
early 1950s: the flame of the artist’s discourse, with nothing to feed on, simply
expires.
As far as Larkin is concerned, however, what this important correspondence
shows is the way in which he constructed and negotiated his writerly identity
during the 1940s, responding to a number of influences and events, before finally
abandoning the model he had admired for so long in the form of Lawrence. By
the end of the 1940s, Larkin had settled on a way forward in terms of the art/life
problem; he had achieved his ambition to become a published author, with two
novels and a collection of poems; and he was beginning to write his first major
poems. His writerly identity was, after a protracted negotiation, in place; but
what remains to be seen is how his actual writing developed – how he found his
voice – a question the following chapters seek to answer.
 2

Larkin’s short fictions

This chapter looks at the short fictions Larkin wrote before inventing the
Brunette Coleman heteronym in 1943. His earliest efforts represent exercises
in genre, as he works through the mechanics of writing. Other stories explore
characterization, with varying degrees of success. The stories Larkin wrote at
Oxford act out a fantasy of male homosociality and Isherwoodian authorship,
a model he would have to abandon in order to make progress. Eventually, in
the 1943 short story ‘An Incident in the English Camp’, Larkin tries his hand
at an alternative mode of authorship, a development that paves the way for the
Coleman works explored in subsequent chapters.

Very early Larkin

In ‘the winter of 1939–40’, Larkin co-opted a manuscript book with a specific

purpose in mind: having decided that his many writings produced so far, which
he had kept ‘religiously’, were taking up ‘an amount of space they do not justify in
worth’, Larkin chose to ‘burn a great deal’.1 But to prevent the loss of ‘all memory
of the kinds of thing I did’, he decided to ‘select and retain a few extracts from
the best of the manuscripts and so on, and give a brief inventory of them’. This
manuscript book, then, gives us a sense of Larkin’s literary tastes and phases
during the 1930s, and the earliest stages of his apprenticeship.
In many ways, Larkin’s literary efforts are typical of a precocious and bookish
child’s ambitions, pretensions and humour. A controversialist schoolboy pose
of anti-authoritarianism is represented by ‘several diatribes against various
things, such as Education and Christianity’, but in turn soon replaced by a
controversialist schoolboy pose of authoritarianism: in one story, he recalls,
‘wireless propaganda was sent out in a manner reminiscent of the Nazi regime
in Germany, which at the time (I was about fifteen) attracted me intensely’. That
34 Early Larkin

Larkin, just two years later, describes these pieces with embarrassment shows
how short-lived such poses were. Other themes, however, seem to be longer-
lasting: Larkin preserves an extract from ‘The Life of a Cog’, a play in which a
character called ‘Larkin, the Successful Author’ says: ‘You were tied down by
the school certificate you had. You wanted a safe job – you got it. And now the
jobs [sic] got you, and won’t let you go.’ Sometime after curating this manuscript
book, Larkin added a pencil annotation: ‘Pretty good’. It seems he could hear the
croak of toads as early as the 1930s.
Larkin’s prose and dramatic writings imitated whatever he happened to be
enjoying at the time. A ‘wave of gangsters and America . . . found its way into
my little world’; shortly after, he wrote ‘nearly a full-length novel’ called ‘Death
in Swingtime’ about ‘a great jazz saxophonist who is poisoned’. Then Larkin
‘began to read seriously’ (he later pencilled inverted commas around ‘seriously’
to signal contempt for the younger self who thought he understood ‘Aldous
Huxley . . . and the rest of the moderns, Lawrence, Aldington, and Maugham’).
Here we learn only the briefest of details about the novels inspired by his new
diet: ‘Shapes of Clay’, for example, whose ‘general scheme was Huxleyan, but the
writing was more individual, except when it approached Aldington’ (Larkin’s
pencil strikes again: ‘approached’ is underlined, and he adds ‘a long way off, old
friend’). ‘Present Laughter’ was ‘written in the style of Evelyn Waugh’; another
story, ‘Trio’, was conceived with the Hogarth Press in mind. None survived the
bonfire.
Nor did an erotic play with the title ‘Teddy Bear’s Picnic’ (perhaps just as
well), or a masque called ‘One O’Clock Jump’. By the end of the decade, Larkin
was also writing poems and short stories about ‘brief emotions and interesting
characters’. Thus, in 1940, at the age of ‘17½’, and just a few months before he
went up to Oxford, Larkin was in a position to review and curate a variety of
writings in prose, poetry and drama. Many of these he destroyed, and the brief
selections saved and pasted into the manuscript book were subjected to his
sarcastic annotations. But the Larkin who would very soon be engaged in an
intense correspondence with Sutton about his artistic destiny had at least made
a start.
As well as giving us a sense of Larkin’s writings during the 1930s, the
manuscript book tells us two other things. Clearly it represents an exercise in
stock-taking: approaching the age of eighteen and entry to university, Larkin
used this transitional moment in his life to collate the work done so far as a
means of bringing into focus his options for the work to be done in the future.
With annotations in both pencil and ink, it seems he returned to this book more
 Larkin’s Short Fictions 35

than once. The other aspect it reveals is Larkin’s engagement with the nuts and
bolts of writing: genre, plot, structure, characterization, mood. Most of the prose
pieces which Larkin excerpts or describes are deliberate exercises in genre:
schoolboy stories, detective fiction, gangster thrillers, political allegories and so
on. This, of course, was a perfectly natural activity for a bookish child, trying his
hand at the kind of stories he loved to read. Similarly, for an aspiring novelist,
it was logical to serve an apprenticeship by systematically working through
different genres. As this chapter and subsequent ones show, however, this close
engagement with genre is particularly significant when seen within the wider
context of Larkin’s career: these exercises in genre during the 1930s led him to
experiment with genre during the 1940s, paving the way for the mature poetry
of the 1950s and onwards.
Larkin’s exploration of the mechanics of writing can be perceived more clearly
if a wider array of extant pieces is surveyed. He tore out and kept, for example, a
page from his school exercise book containing an evocation of a pub atmosphere
(his teacher wrote ‘v good’ in red pencil).2 ‘Vampire Island’ is a handwritten
story, thirty-five pages in length, about a young boy who discovers a treasure
map, falls asleep and dreams he is a pirate in search of gold and silver. It has all
the hallmarks of a boy who has read and loved Treasure Island, and the most
recognizably adolescent of endings: ‘He realised that it was all a dream!’3 Other
stories, however, already begin the trend of modifying generic conventions.
‘Incidents from Phippy’s Schooldays’ is a farcical send-up of Thomas Hughes’s
Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), another novel enjoyed by the young Larkin,
but the story is inspired by his own grammar school experience rather than the
hallowed Rugby School, setting of the source text.4 ‘Last Man In (or “How Allan
Saved His Side”)’ takes place on the school cricket pitch, but its protagonist,
Allan Grayham, is contemptuous about the sport and the boys who play it, and
sneers at them as his mind tours Plato, Socrates and Bernard Shaw.5
Other pieces try to be more ‘literary’ and reflect Larkin’s more serious
reading, either by wearing their stylistic influences on their sleeves or by
eschewing plot in favour of purer evocations of character and mood. A one-
page fragment, presented as an extract from a bigger work called ‘Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Frog’, tries to justify the literary credentials of its title with
a number of Joycean overtones: the narrator is desperate to get away from his
stultifying home; he experiences sudden memories triggered by the flux of his
surroundings; and there are some nice Joycean phrases, such as ‘shitspattered
streets’.6 In 1940, whilst engaged in war work at Warwick Fuel Office, Larkin
wrote a ‘Letter to Myself ’ on headed paper, using a novelist’s eye to detail the
36 Early Larkin

events and characters of a single day: from waking up and eating ‘Cornflakes,
bacon and scrambled egg (from dried eggs)’, to a conversation with colleagues
about the impending Allied invasion of France; one colleague, the ‘morose’ Mrs
Glencross, has recently given birth whilst her husband is in enemy captivity.7
Alongside fragments like these are longer pieces, such as an unfinished and
untitled short story with an extended description of a rough crossing from
Ostend to Dover, evoking the ship’s putrid smells of beef, oil and vomit.8 After
what seems like ages, we are introduced to the protagonist, Charles Hemingway,
whose name is as unconvincing as the story. Already, however, Larkin’s eye for
the details of contemporary urban life is active: arriving at the train station,
Hemingway notices a number of advertisements, including one imploring him
to ‘Come to Sunny Jersey’ (a similar image resurfaces in the 1963 poem ‘Sunny
Prestatyn’).
Another untitled story (‘It had snowed in the night’), this time finished and in
typescript, is described in the manuscript book as being ‘in the style of Virginia
Woolf ’. Opening in the early hours of Christmas Day, Larkin’s prose imitates
Woolfian rhythms with its acutely sensitive description of a snowy night during
which the protagonist’s mother has passed away: ‘Very carefully he slipped out
of his bed and dressed, very carefully, for he must recapture what he had felt,
obscurely, he must be careful not to lose the single thread he held to connect him
with last night, because he knew last night had been very important.’9 In fact, it
is another modernist writer, Joyce, who casts a bigger shadow upon the piece:

All over England the steeples were rocking, the notes rising to the pale clouds,
sunlit overhead in the rarefied air. All over England, snow would tumble in a
little as doors swung back, would lodged [sic] against windows when the curtains
were drawn.

Syntactically, and in its use of a wintery landscape as objective correlative for

death, the passage is an imitation of ‘The Dead’ (1914). Although not without
faults, this story is one of the loveliest pieces written by Larkin in the 1930s, and
an early stylistic rehearsal for A Girl in Winter, discussed in Chapter 5.

‘Maurice’ and ‘The Eagles Are Gone’

Whilst early pieces like ‘Vampire Island’ may have fed Larkin’s 1939–40 bonfire
without causing literary historians too much sorrow, some of the stories he
wrote just before and during his time at Oxford would have been a greater loss,
 Larkin’s Short Fictions 37

given that they tell us much about his literary development. As the untitled ‘It
had snowed in the night’ shows, not everything Larkin wrote before Oxford
was merely generic. The remainder of this chapter discusses five short stories
written between the late 1930s and 1943: ‘Maurice’, ‘The Eagles Are Gone’, ‘Story
I’, ‘Peter’ and ‘An Incident in the English Camp’. These stories are not offered up
as contenders for the ‘neglected masterpiece’ category of literary criticism, but
they are discussed as important transitional works, interesting as examples of
what Larkin had to either ditch or amplify in his writing.
Larkin mentions ‘Maurice’ in his manuscript book as having been written in
1939. It is a strange story, in which two Sixth Formers, Dorning (the narrator)
and Stephen Simmons, recognize a fellow drinker in the pub as Maurice,
an alumnus of their school. He joins them for a drink. Maurice’s build and
demeanour are confidently masculine; despite his education, he has chosen to
work in an armaments factory, and it is not long before Simmons tries to impress
him: ‘“I want some skirt,” remarked Stephen suddenly. . . . [W]hy he made the
statement I have not the faintest idea, unless, of course, he was speaking the
truth, which I considered unlikely’, the narrator ponders.10 Maurice relays his
vast sexual experience, but in doing so reveals a nasty misogyny:

There’s a bloody lot of trash talked about women – about their beauty, for
instance. Well, I’ve been to Paris, Ostend, Brussels, Hamburg, and Naples – and
I’ve never seen a completely beautiful woman yet. Never. All ugly sods in one
way or another. . . . A lot of them stink. Others have terrible voices, or stumpy
fingers; some have bad breath or bite their fingernails. There’s something wrong
with every one of them, yet when one thinks how everyone talks about them.

The female body disgusts Maurice, but there is a faint sense of his physical
admiration of the men who toil in the factory: ‘The fellows are simply impregnated
with filth. They’ve been brought up to think and act plain dirt, and they do’. This
is delicately suggestive of a repressed homosexuality; indeed, Larkin’s reflective
account of this story in the manuscript book describes it as being ‘rather like
Isherwood’. As will be seen, this represents the beginning of a recurring trope in
Larkin’s short fiction.
In terms of characterization, ‘Maurice’ is an enigma. The narrator, Dorning,
is the weakest presence in the story, and he focuses mainly on Maurice’s speech
and appearance, with the odd comment on Simmons’s reactions. Consequently,
it is difficult to pin down either the narrator’s or the implied author’s attitude
to Maurice: Is he a captivating connoisseur of male animal roughness, or just
a misogynistic bore? The ambiguity may be Larkin’s artistic choice, but it
38 Early Larkin

seems more like an artistic failing. In this sense, ‘Maurice’ makes an interesting
companion piece to ‘The Eagles Are Gone’, although the latter is difficult to date,
and therefore to establish whether any connection was intended.11 ‘The Eagles
Are Gone’ reads more explicitly as an allegory of characterization. Its narrator,
who is called ‘Philip Larkin’, visits the family home of an Oxford friend during
the long summer vacation. Isherwood’s influence emerges again, this time at the
level of dialogue: Philip and his friend, Peter, engage in self-consciously effete
banter (‘I’m getting a bit tired of being a brilliant young man. It’s so unoriginal.’).12
Although the Larkin character is visiting a friend’s family, the descriptions of
family life are remarkably similar to the actual Larkin’s descriptions of his own:
‘I never left the house without a sense of walking into a cooler, clearer, saner
and pleasanter atmosphere’, he wrote in an autobiographical fragment.13 This is
particularly true of the subtle warfare waged daily at the dinner table: ‘For all
their unending battle, Peter and his mother were not unlike at certain moments.’
It appears that Larkin was exploiting narrative distance in order to explore his
own home life.
In the end, however, the story does more than that. During his stay with
Peter’s family, Philip catches glimpses of the different characters’ inner lives.
Peter’s father, Mr Canning, is a stoic and taciturn builder who spends as many
evenings as possible in the pub. In this sense, he is a two-dimensional stock
character. But when Philip learns more about Mr Canning’s history, particularly
his experience serving in the First World War, he begins to piece together a more
vivid psychology:

Peter had been born in 1916, Robert in 1920. Slowly, after the War, the household
got under way. But Mr. Canning could never wholly resign himself to living in
the present with his wife: the War was always lurking at the back of his mind,
drawing his [sic] away into the past. Mrs. Canning resented this, and showed. it.
[sic]. As a result, he retreated even further among his friends who understood
him better, perhaps who’d been in the War themselves. Mrs. Canning was left
more and more alone, left to a life that was increasingly unsatisfactory and dull.

Similarly, in describing Mrs Canning, there is a telling simile: ‘As I held the door
for her and the tray, the smell of cooking from the kitchen struck like a wave of
unutterable boredom.’ In passages like these, it is possible to see the two Larkins
(the writer-character and the actual writer) becoming increasingly interested
in the lives of others. Importantly, this is also otherness for its own sake. The
characters are not mere ciphers for Larkin’s own family; Mr Canning’s life, for
instance, has been shaped by war, whereas Sydney Larkin never experienced
combat.
 Larkin’s Short Fictions 39

The most interesting character in the story, however, is Peter’s younger

brother, Robert. In some ways, the dynamic between Peter, Robert and their
parents mirrors that of Larkin, his sister Kitty and their parents: Peter is
transparently the favourite child; Robert is well-treated but not lavished with
the attention given to Peter, and in consequence does not achieve the same
success.14 Robert seems set to be written off as a minor character until a series
of earnest conversations, contrasting sharply with Peter’s pose of insincerity,
triggers Philip’s interest:

[R]ather unexpectedly, he began to talk to me . . . He told me of a fivevalve set

he’d made . . . . After a time I began to enjoy it: previously I’d vaguely realised his
frankness and so on was perfectly genuine, born not of a neurotic desire to put
you at an immediate disadvantage, but from a perfect extravertist [sic] interest
in everything outside himself.

Robert, and his ‘perfect extravertist interest in everything outside himself ’, is a

foil to the narcissistic Peter, whom Larkin cannot draw into conversation about
the brother he considers ‘an exceptional damned nuisance’. Later in the story,
Philip encounters Robert and a girlfriend at the local fair. Robert has won several
coconuts, and gives one to Philip, who ‘guiltily’ lodges it behind a washstand in
the Cannings’ home, not knowing ‘what to do with it’. When Peter accompanies
Philip to the train station for his journey home, the coconut reappears:

The whistle blew at last and Peter got up, feeling in his mac pocket and grinning.

‘You forgot something, you know,’ he said, shutting the door.

‘What’s that?’
‘Here you are . . . you might as well keep it as a symbolic souvenir.’
And he handed me the coconut . . . .

When I got home, I thought of tying the coconut up with a label and some
pink ribbon and sending it back to him. But on the whole, I decided not to.
However, when I see him again (probably at Oxford next term) I shall certainly
ask him what he meant by it.
And, meanwhile, the coconut rests on my bookcase, looking rather out of
place.

This is how the story ends: like an object in a Katherine Mansfield story (another of
Larkin’s major influences at this time), the coconut is imbued with psychological
symbolism. Philip’s bemusement at the coconut mirrors the bemusement he felt
when gently confronted by its gifter, Robert, whose intriguing character he had
too easily overlooked in favour of the more obvious candidate for his attention.
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 After I had a little passed over this great and sudden affliction, I
prepared myself to go for London; and having set all things in order,
on Thursday morning, the 27th of September, 1638, I took leave of
my family at Chatham and rode to Gravesend, thence took boat to
Woolwich where I stayed one night, and next day, accompanied with
my son Peter, we went by water to Kingston, where we took up our
lodging in a private house, the inns being full. The next day, being
Sunday, we went by water to Hampton Court, where we presented
ourselves to his Majesty, who was pleased to use us very graciously,
where we spent that whole day, at night returning by water to our
lodging at Kingston.
Next morning, my son and myself rode to Sion,[606] to wait upon
the Lord Admiral, and was presently commanded by him to hasten
to Chatham to prepare barges and boats to be sent to Dover for the
receiving on shore the Queen Mother,[607] expected to arrive and land
there

(Here the manuscript ends.)

FOOTNOTES:
[178] MS. 'Phinees' (the form also adopted in his signature), the
Greek form of the Hebrew name Mouth of Brass, given as
'Phinehas' by the translators of the Bible.
[179] MS. 'Deepforde Stronde.' The etymology of this well-known
name does not appear to have been satisfactorily determined.
Antiquaries have been content to explain it as the 'Strand' or
shore of the deep ford over the Ravensbourne River, which enters
the Thames at Deptford Creek. As a matter of fact, Deptford
Strond lay on the shore of the Thames some distance to the west
of the Ravensbourne. It seems more probable that Deptford
Town, at the head of the creek near the bridge by which the
Dover Road crosses, was the original settlement, and took its
name from the deep creek (fiord), which was navigable for ships
of 500 tons up to that bridge, and that Deptford Stronde was
settled later from the 'Town' and took the addition 'Stronde' in
contradistinction. The dockyard was on the site now occupied by
the Foreign Cattle Market.
[180] Probably Thomas Howell, Rector of Paglesham.
[181] Throughout the MS. the name of the Deity is spelt without
a capital letter: the use of capitals in this connection appears to
be comparatively modern.
[182] 'Num' in MS., in which it occurs twice.
[183] I.e. apprentice.
[184] Benjamin Gonson, junior, and Buck were appointed jointly
Clerk of the Ships, with reversion to the longer liver, by letters
patent of 10 July 1596. Gonson died in 1600 and Buck succeeded
him. Buck was knighted in 1604 and died in 1625.
[185] A private man-of-war, called later in the 17th century a
'privateer.'
[186] Or Glemham. This was the second voyage. Neither appears
to have been a financial success. An account of this voyage under
the title, News from the Levane Seas ... was published in 1594.
[187] Prize.
[188] MS. 'Divelinge,' apparently a phonetic attempt at the old
name of Dublin, 'Duibhlinn,' pronounced Divlin. Pepys in his
marginal note writes 'travelled to Dublin.'
[189] This was destined to be the last voyage of Drake and
Hawkyns. The Defiance was Drake's ship.
[190] Or Due (Dieu) Repulse.
[191] Built in 1561, this was a rebuilding.
[192] Advance.
[193] Howard of Effingham.
[194] On the north side of Deptford Green, overlooking the
Thames, afterwards the Gun Tavern. See Dew's History of
Deptford, p. 185.
[195] I.e. the Cadiz Expedition of 1596, under the joint command
of Howard and Essex.
[196] William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
[197] Pronounced 'Tibalds,' whence the form 'Tiballs' in which it
appears in the MS. Theobalds Park (near Waltham Cross) was
afterwards exchanged between Burghley's son, the first Earl of
Salisbury, and James I for Hatfield.
[198] MS. 'Pakellsum.'
[199] MS. 'estate.'
[200] MS. 'Hye Woodehill'; near Mill Hill.
[201] St. James's Day, 25th July.
[202] St. Bartholomew's Day, 24th August.
[203] Hugh Lydiard, senior, Clerk of the Check.
[204] The navigator, brother of Stephen Borough.
[205] Possibly the entrance to the dock.
[206] The 'income' was the fee or fine paid on entering upon the
lease.
[207] Thomas Wiggs, a subordinate of Lord Buckhurst,
Commissioner of State Trials. He is mentioned in a letter of
Buckhurst to Cecil of 7th December 1600. Salisbury MSS. (Hist.
MSS.), x. p. 411, and in Pepys' Miscell., x. p. 349.
[208] Southwold.
[209] Or 'Vugle.'
[210] I.e. districts.
[211] See Introduction.
[212] Afterwards Lord Brooke.
[213] Like, favour.
[214] See Introduction.
[215] An allusion to the game of bowls.
[216] Stepfather.
[217] MS. 'syses.'
[218] S.P. Dom. 28th May 1599; the name is given as 'Nun.'
[219] Probably John Hone, Advocate of Doctors' Commons, 1589;
Master in Chancery 1596-1602.
[220] The ecclesiastical 'Court of Arches' held at St. Mary-le-Bow.
[221] A Newcastle carvel-built ship.
[222] MS. 'Bulley'; the high ground south of Rochester Castle.
[223] 'All Hallows, Barking,' founded by the nuns of Barking
Abbey, whence the name.
[224] MS. 'raynam.'
[225] Thievish Dunkirker.
[226] Swatchway; the channel south of the Nore Sand.
[227] Christmas.
[228] Originally half a mark, or 6s. 8d., afterwards 10s.
[229] 1602, according to the Old Style, as it is before the 25th
March.
[230] Or Avale, see p. 86; for many years the pilot for the river
and Downs. The Commission of 1618 proposed to pension him as
'aged and blind.'
[231] MS. 'Dagnam.'
[232] MS. 'Grenehyve.'
[233] See Introduction.
[234] Band.
[235] Round shot. At that period salutes were fired with shotted
guns, not with blank charges.
[236] Immediately.
[237] South of St. Paul's, and on the east side of Baynard's
Castle.
[238] I.e. Prince Henry.
[239] I.e. the Lord High Admiral.
[240] M.S. 'Ihon,' mis-transcribed in the Harl. MS. here and
elsewhere as 'Thomas.'
[241] M.S. 'Winebancke.'
[242] The words in italics are wanting in the original MS.
[243] The words in italics are wanting in the original MS.
[244] Coruña.
[245] San Lucar, at the mouth of the Guadalquivir.
[246] MS. 'Bonance': opposite San Lucar.
[247] MS. 'Civill.'
[248] C. de Sta. Maria.
[249] Bore away.
[250] Cadiz.
[251] Santander.
[252] In Hampshire, north of Havant.
[253] See Introduction.
[254] This is a mistake. He has already given the date of birth of
John as 23rd March 1601-2 and of Henry as 18th March 1602-3;
see pp. 17 and 18.
[255] Suites.
[256] Of Hinchinbrook, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, uncle
of the Protector.
[257] In 1608, see Introduction.
[258] MS. 'Alceholte' (Aisholt = Ashwood), near the Surrey border
S.W. of Farnham.
[259] At the northern approach to old London Bridge.
[260] The poet, then gentleman of the bedchamber to Prince
Henry.
[261] I.e. for this special purpose.
[262] A legend concerning the relics of St. Vincent, who suffered
martyrdom at Valencia in A.D. 304. His body on being exposed to
wild beasts was said to have been protected by a raven. During
the Moorish invasion of Spain these remains were removed from
Valencia to Cape St. Vincent, and in the twelfth century were
brought by water from that Cape to the cathedral of Lisbon and
placed in the Chapel of St. Vincent. Two (not three) ravens, who
watched over his tomb, accompanied the ship on its voyage,
remaining on watch when the relics were deposited in the
cathedral. The ship and the two birds appear in the arms of
Lisbon.
[263] I.e. of ample powers.
[264] See the list and notes at pp. 54-5.
[265] Ante, p. 20.
[266] Rotherhithe; MS. 'Redreife.'
[267] MS. 'Bluther.'
[268] MS. 'Peter.'
[269] A small piece of ordnance without carriage, used for firing
salutes. This was not the 'chamber' used with the early breech-
loading ordnance.
[270] The Prince Royal.
[271] MS. 'flower.' 'Floor—are those timbers lying transverse to
the keel, being bolted through it ... and strictly taken, is so much
only of her bottom as she rests upon when lying aground.'—
Blanckley, Naval Expositor.
[272] Troublesome, painful.
[273] Lie.
[274] Careless.
[275] The Tuck is 'that part of the ship where the ends of the
bottom planks are collected together immediately under the stem
... a square tuck' (as in this case) 'is terminated above by the
wing transom and below and on each side by the fashion-pieces'
(Falconer, Marine Dictionary). According to Sutherland
(Shipbuilder's Assistant), the 'height of the tuck' was taken from
the point where the heels of the fashion-pieces were 'let in upon
the posts,' i.e. upon the stern post and false stern post.
[276] Bully, swashbuckler.
[277] A coach or chariot of a stately or luxurious kind.—N.E.D.
[278] Sir Robert Cecil had been created Earl of Salisbury in 1605.
[279] Considering.
[280] Previously.
[281] MS. 'brew.'
[282] MS. 'Wrong heads.' The upper ends of the floor timbers.
[283] The inside planking from the kelson to the orlop clamps.
[284] Canopy.
[285] Of the East India Company, merchant and sea-captain.
[286] One of the six Masters Attendant of the Navy.
[287] Probably John Watts, who was captain of Denbigh's flagship
in the Cadiz Expedition of 1625 and was knighted; together with
Michael Geere and others, at Plymouth on the return. He was
captain of Buckingham's flagship in the Ile de Rhé expedition of
1627.
[288] Captain Thomas Norris (or Norreys) referred to at p. 119 as
being one of the Commissioners of 1618 and at p. 120 as one of
Pett's 'greatest enemies.' From p. 33 it would appear that at one
time he had been a purser.
[289] Perhaps the Captain James Chester referred to in Naval
Tracts of Sir William Monson, I. xxxiv. and III. 60.
[290] See Introduction.
[291] Captain Christopher Newport, recommended by Mansell
and Trevor in 1606 for the reversion of one of the principal
masters' places. In 1612 he was captain of the East Indiaman
Expedition. He was removed from among the six masters by the
Commission of 1618, on account of his employment by the East
India Company.
[292] Of Limehouse; master of a merchantman, and a
shipbuilder.
[293] Probably the 'Thomas Redwood, mariner, precinct of the
Tower of London,' whose will was proved in 1613 (Wills. P.C.C.)
[294] Possibly the William Geere granted 'the office of an
Assistant of the Admiralty' in 1604; or Michael Geere granted 'the
place of Assistant to the King's chief officers of the Admiralty' in
March 1608, subsequently knighted and a Master of Trinity
House.
[295] In 1618 'Captains Geer and Moore' were engaged 'in
receiving and inventorying the Destiny and her furniture, the
goods of Sir Walter Raleigh.'—Cal. S. P. Dom., November 2, 1618.
[296] A servant of the East India Company.
[297] Of Limehouse, mariner.
[298] See Introduction.
[299] MS. 'Cleye.' Referred to at p. 33 as 'Nicholas Clay of Redriff,
shipwright and yardkeeper.' Nominated in the Charter of 1605 as
one of the 'Assistants' of the Shipwrights' Company. The name is
there spelt 'Cley,' but he signed as 'Nycholas Clay.'
[300] Referred to at p. 33 as 'Thomas Graves of Limehouse,
shipwright and yardkeeper'; the indictment is, however, signed by
'John Greaves' (see Introduction), and it may be noted that 'John
Graves' was nominated an 'Assistant' by the Charter of 1612.
Probably Pett has made a mistake in the forename.
[301] Probably Robert Tranckmore, who with Jonas Day was
employed in 1627 in making a dry dock, etc., at Portsmouth.
These two with Pett were also ordered to report on the faults in
the ships built by Burrell.
[302] Clerk of the Check at Woolwich.
[303] Brother of Sir Peter Buck, Clerk of the King's Ships. It
appears from p. 33 that he was an under clerk to Sir Peter. In
October 1607 Thomas Buck and William Holliday were granted
'protection' for a year, and this was renewed in September 1609.
On 31st July 1609 Thomas Buck and John Clifton were granted
the moiety of all forfeitures, etc., incurred by officers of the navy
for frauds against the Crown.
[304] John Clifton (see preceding note); he had been purser in
the Answer in the Spanish voyage of 1605.
[305] In October 1604 he was granted with others a reward of
5s. a ton for building five new ships. He was a friend of William
Adams, the navigator, who refers to him in his letter from Japan
of October 23, 1611, to the East India Company. It would appear
that he and Diggens (and possibly Woodcott) would more
properly have been included under 'shipwrights.'
[306] Probably the William Bigatt who was master of the Lion
under William Borough in 1587. See 'The Mutiny of the Golden
Lion' in Oppenheim, Administration of the Royal Navy, p. 382 et
seq.
[307] Of Stepney.
[308] Became in 1610 one of the six principal masters. Newport's
reversion (see note 7, p. 54) was granted 'after the placing of
John King.'
[309] Possibly Arthur Pett, the navigator of 1580. He was one of
the members incorporated by the second charter of the Virginia
Company in 1609.
[310] Possibly referred to in Court Minutes of the East India
Company (Cal. S.P. East Indies, 407) of April 1608: 'Gratifications
to Diggins, Burrell, Kitchen and Woodcott.'
[311] This may be the 'old Thomas Fuller' who died in the East
India Company's ship Thomas in 1612.
[312] MS. 'Write.' In 1604 the Lord Mayor was directed to appoint
Richard and Robert Wright joint packers of woollen cloths, &c.,
and porters of strangers' goods in and out of the port of London.
It is not, however, clear that this is the same man.
[313] Of Ratcliff. Mentioned in the grant to the North-West
Passage Company. Cal. S.P. Colonial, July 26, 1612.
[314] Granted in August 1604 the usual allowance for building
five new ships. William Adams, who died in Japan in 1620, had
been for twelve years apprenticed to Diggens, and refers to him
affectionately in his letters to the East India Company. (See
Letters received by the East India Company, vol. i.)
[315] Probably the 'Edward Jordan, mariner,' mentioned in the
Pipe Office Dec. Acct. for 1613 (No. 2251).
[316] Principal master workman of the East India Company; see
Introduction.
[317] Brother-in-law of Phineas. A shipbuilder at Ratcliff;
nominated as a warden in the shipwrights' charter of 1605.
[318] Nominated as an 'Assistant' in the shipwrights' charter of
1612.
[319] Thomas Cole of Woodbridge and Thomas Pryme of
Yarmouth were nominated 'Assistants' in the shipwrights' charter
of 1605.
[320] MS. 'Androes.'
[321] Shipbuilder at Gillingham, see p. 24. He was also a
shipwright in Chatham Yard.
[322] Referred to at p. 93 as 'friends in the navy.'
[323] See Introduction.
[324] MS. 'directed.'
[325] See Introduction.
[326] The transverse section of the ship at the greatest breadth.
[327] Henry Briggs (1561-1630), mathematician. First Professor
of Geometry at Gresham College.
[328] The futtocks or foothooks are the timbers between the floor
timbers and the top timbers. The floor timbers, lower and upper
futtocks, and top timbers, when put together, form a complete
frame-bend.
[329] Redness being a sign that the wood was past its prime and
beginning to decay.
[330] Entirely.
[331] To be dressed or smoothed with an adze.
[332] The timbers, popularly called 'ribs,' forming the frame.
[333] Carefully.
[334] Marvel at, Lat. admirari.
[335] Result.
[336] Thomas Button. Knighted 1616; died 1634.
[337] MS. 'and.'
[338] John Legatt, or Legate, Clerk of the Check at Chatham,
granted in 1604 the reversion of the Clerkship of the Navy after
Peter Buck, sen. (Pat. Roll, 1655). He appears, however, to have
died before Buck, probably in 1615.
[339] An allusion to the well-known line of Horace (De Arte
Poetica, 139): 'Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus'
(Mountains are in labour, a silly little mouse will be born).
[340] MS. 'veryest bable and drowne divell.' This has the
appearance of a seaman's saying, but I have not met it
elsewhere. 'Bable' (bauble) is used contemptuously for 'a mere
toy, applied to a machine, etc., considered too small or weak for
actual work' (N.E.D.), as in the following passages:
 ' ... the sea being smooth,
How many shallow bauble boats dare sail
Upon her patient breast ...
But let the ruffian Boreas once enrage
The gentle Thetis ...
... where's then the saucy boat
Whose weak untimbered sides but even now
Co-rivall'd greatness?'
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, I, iii.

' ... his shipping

Poor ignorant baubles—on our terrible seas
Like egg-shells mov'd upon their surges, crack'd
As easily 'gainst our rocks.'
Shakespeare, Cymbeline, III, i.
The word 'bawble' is also used by Anson in speaking of the Tryal
sloop, which the Spaniards at Juan Fernandez could not credit
with having rounded Cape Horn.
'Devil' seemingly refers to the 'poor devils' forming the crew: it
does not appear to refer to the seam in the ship's bottom to
which that name is sometimes given.
[341] Referring to his voyage in 1602. See Introduction.
[342] Granted October 27, 1607.
[343] Apparently John Pory, who, from his letter to Dudley
Carleton of January 3, 1610 (S.P. Dom., James I, lii, 1), appears
to have been connected with the Lord Treasurer. This would be
the traveller and geographer of that name, then M.P. for
Bridgwater, but settled in London.
[344] Probably John Keymer, the author of Observations upon the
Dutch Fishing.
[345] Reproof.
[346] By William Burrell.
[347] Of 1100 tons; wrecked on her first voyage in 1613 and
burnt by the Javanese.
[348] Of 250 tons.
[349] MS. 'strokes.' The ship is struck (lowered) upon the
launching ways when the blocks and wedges on which the keel is
supported are driven out and the weight of the ship taken upon
the cradle, the bottom of which rests upon, and slides along, the
launching ways.
[350] According to the account of the captain of the Peppercorn
(Egerton MS. 2100) this was on 30th December. The Peppercorn
was launched on 1st January, 'and the great ship the Trade's
Increase ... a little removed, but not launched. The 2nd day
Tuesday the Trade's Increase was half her length removed but
not launched for the dockhead was too narrow for her passage.
The 3rd day ... she was launched.'
[351] An account of this tournament is given in Birch, Life of
Henry, Prince of Wales, p. 182 et seq.
[352] Satisfaction, content.
[353] Completed with her ornamental work.
[354] The 6th August 1610 was a Monday.
[355] Near Cheam. This Palace was commenced by Henry VIII
and pulled down by the Duchess of Cleveland.
[356] 'The Orlopp is no other but the Deck (as we say) the lower
Deck, the second Deck, so you may as well say the lower Orlopp,
or the second Orlopp: and indeed it is commonly held the proper
speech to call them the first Orlopp and the second Orlopp: for
this word Orlopp seems to be appropriated only to these two
Decks,'—Manwayring, The Seaman's Dictionary.
[357] MS. 'Lyeadger.' The Sieur de la Boderie, then engaged in
settling the 'League' or Treaty between the two kingdoms.
[358] A silk stuff.
[359] MS. 'withe.'
[360] A small capstan, placed on the ground.
[361] MS. 'scruses.' Placed at the bow to start the ship.
[362] The 'scavel' was a small spade used for digging clay, etc.,
as in forming drains. The scavelmen were dockyard labourers
whose duty it was to clean and pump out the docks. The name,
which disappeared after 1844, probably on the introduction of
steam pumping machinery, was no doubt a survival from the time
when the 'dock' was formed of piling, wattles, and clay, which
was placed round the ship when she had been brought to the
shore, or across the mouth of the creek into which she had been
hauled, and which had to be dug away in 'opening the dock.'
[363] For an account of this ceremony see Fraser, The Londons of
the British Fleet, p. 68.
[364] To inaugurate the use of. (N.E.D.)
[365] Presumably of Deptford Yard, but he may mean Blackwall.
She had been undocked at Ratcliff.
[366] The Gore Channel, running between the Kent coast and
Margate Hook Sand, west of Birchington.
[367] Thomas; one of the pilots for the river and Downs. The
name appears elsewhere as 'Poynett,' 'Punnett,' and 'Poinet.' He
signed with a mark 'T.'
[368] On the Essex shore, half-way between London and
Gravesend.
[369] Now covered by the extension of Chatham Dockyard
northwards.
[370] A Captain of the Navy, commended by Nottingham to
Salisbury in 1609 for having taken Harris, the pirate, on the Irish
coast and done good service off the West Islands of Scotland
(Cal. S.P.D., July 3, 1609).
[371] For the time being.
[372] MS. 'taken.'
[373] It was customary at that period to fire salutes with shotted
guns, and accidents from the shot were not infrequent.
[374] A light ship's boat or gig.
[375] Arabella Stuart. Placed in custody after her marriage to
William Seymour. She escaped dressed as a man, but was
captured in the Straits of Dover and committed to the Tower.
[376] MS. 'Lee.'
[377] Younger brother of Sir Henry Middleton. This was the return
from his voyage in the Expedition.
[378] The grant of this post to Bingley was dated 7th May. He
was knighted on 10th November.
[379] August: the month is noted in the margin.
[380] Nephew.
[381] W. of Canvey Island.
[382] This word is not in the N.E.D.; it is probably derived from
'heart' or 'hearten,' to acquire more energy. See also note on p.
106.
[383] MS. 'Shepeway.'
[384] This word is not in the N.E.D., but it evidently means 'to
become more dull or calm.' It is used as a transitive verb by
Mainwaring in the Seaman's Dictionary, s.v. 'Blowe':—'the heat of
the land, which should duller the wind.'
[385] Sheirenasse.
[386] Merhonour.
[387] For an inclusive sum.
[388] Plans, draughts.
[389] I.e. the curves of the timbers which were to form the
frame. Each complete 'mould' would give a transverse section of
the ship.
[390] Button sailed as 'Admiral' of this expedition in the
Resolution, which was lost in the voyage. He was accompanied by
the Discovery in which Waymouth and Hudson had made earlier
voyages to the same parts.
[391] This use of 'together' in the sense of mutually, from each
other, is not illustrated in the N.E.D., but it is evidently cognate to
its use in the expressions 'love together,' 'see together' (= meet)
of which examples are given.
[392] The burden in 'tons' represents the net wine-carrying
capacity of the ship in Bordeaux casks. The 'tonnage' was an
additional allowance equal to one-third of this; the 'ton and
tonnage' representing the gross burden (see Oppenheim,
Administration, pp. 30, 132, 266).
[393] The pirate; subsequently a naval officer; author of the
Discourse of the Beginnings, Practices, and Suppression of
Pirates, and of The Seaman's Dictionary; knighted 1618. MS.
'Manwaring'; other spellings of the name are Maynwaring,
Manwayring, Maynnaring, Mannering.
[394] Gibbons, who was Button's cousin, went in the Resolution
as a volunteer. In 1614 he went out again in the Discovery in
command, but this voyage proved a complete failure. Button had
a very high opinion of him, and so, apparently, had Pett. For an
account of the voyages, see Rundall, Narratives of Early Voyages
(Hakluyt Soc.), and Christy, Voyages of Foxe and James to the
North-west (Hakluyt Soc.).
[395] Presence-chamber.
[396] See Introduction.
[397] Perhaps Nicholas Pey
[398] Thomas; ship-painter.
[399] Picture, image.
[400] Daughter of the King, married to Frederick, Elector Palatine,
subsequently King of Bohemia. Prince Rupert was her third son.
[401] By contract.
[402] Shipbuilders.
[403] St. Stephen's Alley occupied a site near the position of the
present Parliament Street, where Charles Street runs into it.
[404] The wharf of that name at Southwark. It lay north-west of
the present cathedral (St. Saviour's) which had been the church
of the Priory of St. Mary Overy.
[405] I.e. the Prince Royal to be flagship of the fleet.
[406] The Elector Palatine.
[407] 'A strake is the term for a seam betwixt two planks (as the
... ship heels a strake, that is one seam),' Mainwaring (1623).
According to Blanckley (1750) the term was applied to 'the
uniform ranges of planks on the bottom, decks and sides of the
ships.' The ship was not to be heeled over further than would
bring the sixth seam, or edge of the sixth plank, above water.
[408] MS. 'Alsbrey.' Mathematician; appointed one of the
Commissioners of Inquiry in 1626; Master of the Mint and created
baronet in 1627; appointed Surveyor of the Navy in 1628.
[409] At Upnor.
[410] Nimble, quick, ready.
[411] MS. 'pike.' The anchor is a-peak when the cable is heaved
in so far as to bring the hawse of the ship right over the anchor,
the cable being then perpendicular.
[412] On p. 94 the wind is spoken of as having 'harted.'
[413] Going round; turning head from wind.
[414] Complete.
[415] I.e. the ship.
[416] The 'furrow' or depression in the ground made by the ship's
bottom.
[417] MS. 'to.'
[418] This word, which Pepys transcribes as 'pritly,' is not in the
N.E.D., but since it appears to have the same meaning as 'predy'
(or 'priddy') which was in use at sea in the seventeenth century
for 'make ready' or 'set ... in order,' it is not impossible that it may
be a variation of that word.
[419] The ends of the Buxey and Gunfleet sands, where the
Spitway leads between them from the East Swin to the Wallet.
[420] Eight and a half miles north of Margate.
[421] The entrance to the Thames, opposite the Queen's
Channel; not the English Channel.
[422] Drew ahead or became 'scant.' The use of 'shorten in this
sense is rare and unknown to the dictionaries.
[423] MS. 'Blakenborough.' On the Belgian coast.
[424] MS. 'Scone.' A small fort or earthwork.
[425] MS. 'Sluce.'
[426] MS. 'yoathes.' This must be one of the earliest instances of
the introduction of the Dutch 'Iacht' into English. The word 'yacht'
does not seem to have come into use until after 1660.
[427] Count: Dutch 'Graaf.'
[428] Fort Rammekens, east of Flushing, at the entrance of the
channel between Walcheren and South Beveland. Rammekens,
Flushing, and Brill were then occupied by English garrisons as
'cautionary towns,' in security for the money lent to the Dutch by
Elizabeth.
[429] Campvere, now called Vere, on the north-east side of
Walcheren Island, at that time the staple port for Scottish
merchants.
[430] On the (then) I. of Cadzand.
[431] Off the Essex coast.
[432] The prison situated near St. Saviour's, Southwark.
[433] Mansell was accused of taking exception to the Commission
for Inquiring into the Abuses of the Navy, in a contemptuous and
disloyal manner.
[434] 1615.
[435] MS. 'Rawly.'
[436] Mentioned by Ralegh in his testamentary memorandum.
[437] See note on p. 151.
[438] Politician; degraded 1621. Smiles, Men of Invention and
Industry, p. 43, says he was the original of 'Sir Giles Overreach' in
Massinger's play, 'A New Way to Pay Old Debts.'
[439] Sic.
[440] 1618; see Introduction.
[441] A protégé of Northampton and Buckingham. Master of
Wardrobe and Court of Wards. Treasurer 1621. Earl of Middlesex
1622. Impeached 1624.
[442] First Governor of the East India Company, member of the
Muscovy Company, and Treasurer of the Virginia Company.
[443] Chancellor of the Exchequer 1621. Created Earl of Portland
1633.
[444] Knighted in company with Sutton, Pitt, and Osborne in
February 1619.
[445] MS. 'Robert.'
[446] MS. 'Cooke.' Deputy Treasurer of Navy 1591; knighted
1624.
[447] William Pitt; one of the Tellers of Receipt.
[448] MS. 'Worsenam.' Of the East India and Virginia Companies;
knighted 1617.
[449] This rank was instituted in 1611 by James I. to raise money
for the Crown, the sum to be paid being 1095l. At first certain
restrictions as to numbers and conditions were made. The
restrictions were gradually withdrawn, and under Charles I. blank
patents were put up for sale. The price seems to have fallen as
low as 300l. by the end of Charles I.'s reign.
[450] MS. 'Ratcliff'; ancestor of the Earls of Derwentwater.
[451] A Roman Catholic who refused to attend his parish church.
[452] A gentleman pensioner, knighted in 1617.
[453] I.e. the King named them. The names allude to
Buckingham's entrance into the Lord High Admiralship and his
'reformation' of the Navy affairs.
[454] Or Cleive (Clive), MS. 'Cleave.' Knighted in 1605.
[455] MS. 'surplage.'
[456] Captain of the Marygold merchantman.
[457] Probably what is now the West Oaze Buoy, about five miles
east of the Nore Light.
[458] South-east of the Oaze, on the opposite side of the Oaze
Deep.
[459] Cape St. Vincent.
[460] MS. 'Jubellatare.'
[461] See Introduction.
[462] Stevens was now a master shipwright, associated with Pett
at Chatham; see Introduction.
[463] John Greaves; see note, p. 55.
[464] John Dearslye.
[465] Robert Bourne, nominated an 'Assistant' in the charter of
1612.
[466] Edward. MS. 'Chandelor.'
[467] The estimate was 994l. 11s. 8d. Coke MSS. (Hist. MSS.),
vol. i. p. 130.
[468] Intimation, hint.
[469] See Introduction.—Steward was in command of the rear
squadron in the Cadiz expedition of 1625.
[470] Knighted 1625.
[471] Sir Fulke Greville, created Baron Brooke in 1621.
[472] Whitaker Spit, between the Swin and the entrance to the
river Crouch.
[473] Obliged to veer, or go large.
[474] MS. 'Fayrelye.' East of Hastings.
[475] MS. 'Beawlye.'
[476] James, second Marquis of Hamilton, a commissioner for the
marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta.
[477] William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke.
[478] Sir John Ramsay, created Earl of Holderness in 1621.
[479] Thomas Erskine, created Earl of Kellie in 1619.
[480] James Hay, created Earl of Carlisle in 1622.
[481] Philip Herbert, created Earl of Montgomery 1605.
[482] Francis Manners, sixth Earl of Rutland.
[483] Drawing ahead suddenly and becoming foul; cf. 'shorten,'
p. 109.
[484] This expression is unknown to the dictionaries, and it is
difficult to conjecture its meaning: it may be a synonym for 'bank'
or 'shore,' or for 'seaweed,' which would be found in the
shallower water near the shore.
[485] N.W. Spain. MS. 'Ortingall.'
[486] Apparently 'bent' was in use at this period in speaking of
the tide when it had turned and begun to ebb or flow with full
force. Cf. Luke Ward's narrative (1582) in Hakluyt (vol. xi. p.
174): 'Being at anchor, I manned our boat and would have gone
aboard the Admiral, but could not, the flood was bent so strong.'
[487] I.e. make way against.
[488] Brother of Sir John Trevor, and a naval officer of distinction;
knighted in 1604.
[489] The captain, or commanding officer. 'Commander' as a
substantive rank dates only from 1793.
[490] MS 'Gundamar.' Diego Sarmiento d'Acuna, Count of
Gondomar. He played an important part in the foreign policy of
Great Britain from 1613, when he was sent to England as
ambassador to bring James into accord with Spanish policy. It
was Gondomar who secured the execution of Ralegh.
[491] MS. 'Sylla.' He means the principal island, St. Mary.
[492] I.e. the ship first beat to windward, tacking two or three
times, and then laid her course for the anchorage with the wind
on her quarter.
[493] Castle Hugh, near Hugh Town, the capital.
[494] The shoal at the entrance to Spithead, north of St. Helen's.
[495] Gentleman of the Chamber.
[496] The sands along the Kent coast off Sandwich.
[497] The narrow part of the ship's bottom near the stern post.
[498] MS. 'over.'
[499] Duke Christian of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. He arrived in
England on December 20 with letters of recommendation from
Elizabeth of Bohemia, whose cause he was championing, and was
the guest of the Prince of Wales.
[500] The official residence of the Navy Officers on Chatham Hill.
[501] Bore large, bringing the wind on the beam or quarter.
[502] MS. 'Bullen.'
[503] Dragged their anchors.
[504] Predicament.
[505] John Pyham, Vicar of Chatham.
[506] Designs.
[507] This has been added at the bottom of the page, where it
has no connection with the context. In the margin Pett has
written, 'Son Joseph died in Ireland this year 1625.'
[508] 12 Dec. 1626. Pett was named last in the list.
[509] I.e. the Great Seal.
[510] Built by the Dutch, but intended for the French Navy. It was
captured in the Texel and added to the English Fleet.
[511] One of the four Masters Attendant.
[512] MS. '1637.' 1628 new style.
[513] Treasurer of the Navy.
[514] Knighted in 1634.
[515] Shipbuilders.
[516] The ten Lion's Whelps.
[517] Payments in advance.
[518] MS. 'Redcliff.'
[519] More usually spelt 'Compter': one of the debtors' prisons
attached to the Sheriff's Court; the last was abolished in 1854.
[520] The prison on the east side of Farringdon Street, taking its
name from the Fleet River; burnt down in 1666 and in 1780; it
was abolished in 1842.
[521] Treasurer of the Army, with whom Buckingham was
lodging.
[522] Apparently used in the sense of 'unemployed.'
[523] Colonel Sir Thomas Fryer. The circumstances are related in
detail by Dr. S. R. Gardiner in his History of England from the
Accession of James I., vol. vi. chap. lxv.
[524] I.e. the prison of that name.
[525] Chaussée de Sein, south of Ushant.
[526] Richard, successor to Paul Isackson.
[527] Robert Bertie, created Earl of Lindsey 1626; admiral of the
second fleet sent to Rochelle in 1628.
[528] Robert Treswell.
[529] Foliejon on the modern ordnance map. 'Folly' appears to be
a local name for a clump of trees on a hill.
[530] Henry Goddard.
[531] Francis Brooke.
[532] John Brooke.
[533] MS. 'Farum.'
[534] The report, signed by Phineas Pett, Jo. Dearslye, Peter Pett,
Andrewes Burrell, John Greaves and John Taylor, is preserved
(S.P. Dom. Chas. I. clxxvi. 8). Mr. Oppenheim (Administration, p.
297) points out that 'five years later some of the same men
turned round with "we positively conclude that there is a worm in
that harbour."'
[535] Richard Weston, created Baron Weston in 1628, and Earl of
Portland in 1633.
[536] The Lord High Chamberlain was Robert Bertie, Earl of
Lindsey; the Lord Chamberlain was Philip Herbert, Earl of
Pembroke, who had succeeded his brother, William.
[537] Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland, beheaded 1649.
[538] A prize of 1625 taken into the Navy.
[539] MS. 'Strowde.'
[540] A very late example of this form of the past tense of 'row.'
[541] MS. 'given.'
[542] Deliberately.
[543] Son of Edward Stephens, late Master Shipwright.
Imprisoned in 1626 for disrespect to Pett and Trevor.
[544] The passage in italics is wanting in the original MS.
[545] Below.
[546] MS. Ockum. In the Medway.
[547] Kenrick Edisbury, alias Wilkinson, who in 1626 was
Paymaster of the Navy, succeeded Sir Thos. Aylesbury as
Surveyor of the Navy in December 1632 and died in 1638. Mr.
Oppenheim pronounces him 'perhaps the most observant and
energetic of the chief officers.'
[548] John Goodwin, Master Attendant at Portsmouth.
[549] Nathaniel Apslyn. In 1626, when Carpenter of the Red Lion,
he was recommended by Pett for the post of Assistant Master
Shipwright, and was appointed in that capacity at Chatham.
[550] Hawkridge is said to have accompanied Button in the
voyage of 1612. In 1619 he was in command of an expedition in
search of the North-West Passage which proved a failure.
Subsequently he was captured with his ship and cargo, valued at
£2000, by the pirates of Algiers and held to ransom. See Christy,
Voyages of Foxe and James (Hakluyt Soc.).
[551] Near Wye, on the main road from Ashford to Canterbury.
[552] MS. 'Shorum.'
[553] Nephew.
[554] Master Carpenter of the St. Denis in 1632.
[555] MS. 'Langer.' At the entrance to Harwich harbour.
[556] Old cordage, used for manufacture into brown paper.
[557] Francis Sheldon, Clerk of the Check at Woolwich.
[558] The wife of Thomas Cole, who was one of the witnesses at
the Inquiry of 1610 (supra, p. 57). Thomas Cole owned the
Manor of Woodbridge, which by 1649 came into Peter's
possession. See Copinger, Manors of Suffolk, vol. iv. p. 328.
[559] Bailiffs.
[560] See Introduction.
[561] Edward Boate, Master Shipwright.
[562] Comptroller of the Navy since 1632; son of the Comptroller
of the Navy of the same name who died in 1611.
[563] Denis Fleming, Clerk of the Acts.
[564] Edward Sackville, 4th Earl, one of the Commissioners of the
Admiralty appointed after the death of Buckingham.
[565] The elder (1589-1655), then Comptroller of the Household
and Privy Councillor.
[566] Sir Francis Windebank (1582-1646), joint-Secretary of State
with Sir John Coke, 1632.
[567] MS. 'president.'
[568] MS. 'whelles.'
[569] MS. 'Waynstead.' A royal manor.
[570] On the edge of the Maplin, six miles east of Shoeburyness.
[571] MS. 'Burlington.'
[572] MS. 'Whytebye.'
[573] Luke Foxe, the Arctic navigator. He died at Whitby in July.
[574] M.S. 'Stockdone.'
[575] Stockton had fallen into decay during the sixteenth century.
[576] Sic.
[577] MS. 'Chopple.' On the Derwent, six miles south-west of
Newcastle.
[578] MS. 'Bramespeth.' On the Wear, four miles south-west of
Durham.
[579] MS. 'Duresme.'
[580] Pett's clerk.
[581] Comptroller of Customs for Port of London; one time
Secretary of the Council of the North.
[582] MS. 'Tuckesford.'
[583] MS. 'Grantum.'
[584] Charles Lewis, the second son of Frederick and Elizabeth,
born in 1617. Frederick had died in 1632.
[585] Prince Rupert.
[586] It was the 9th.
[587] I.e. not moored, having only one anchor down.
[588] Swinging round with the tide.
[589] Obsolete form of 'travailed'; laboured.
[590] Charles Lewis, whom, on p. 162, he called the Palsgrave.
The title of Elector was, however, not formally accorded to him
until the Peace of Westphalia, in 1648, when the Lower Palatinate
was restored.
[591] Apprentice. In 1633 he was recommended by Pett for the
post of Master Carpenter of the Charles on the ground that he
had wrought upon the same throughout her being built, and was
also 'a pretty mariner.' S. P. Dom. Chas. I., ccxxxi. 45.
[592] Became too shallow.
[593] Spring tide.
[594] MS. 'Austyne'; Thomas Austen.
[595] Burning reeds.
[596] MS. 'Grenhyve.'
[597] MS. 'Shevarees.' Marie de Rohan; exiled from France in
1626.
[598] James Stuart, 4th Duke; created Duke of Richmond, 1641.
[599] Married on 7th January. On p. 171 his wife's father's name
is given as 'Etherington'; her Christian name was Mildred. The use
of two forenames was practically unknown at this period;
evidently she had been married before.
[600] Wife of Christopher Pett.
[601] The south end of the Goodwin Sands.
[602] This word is lost, the margin being torn away; these six
words are not in the Harleian copy.
[603] Chatham.
[604] Perhaps intended for 'own.'
[605] At Chatham.
[606] Sion House at Brentford, the seat of the Duke of
Northumberland, who had been appointed on 13th April to act for
the young Duke of York, declared Lord High Admiral for life at the
Council on 18th March.
[607] I.e. of France. Marie de Medicis, widow of Henri IV. and
mother of Queen Henrietta Maria; she landed at Harwich on 18th
October.
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