The 1947 Club: A Girl in Winter / Philip Larkin

It’s 1947 Club time, and my first book is A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin. There are some spoilers in what follows. Jacqui has posted an excellent, spoiler-free write-up of the book here.

I’d been under the impression that Larkin’s two novels, written before he became established as a poet, were a kind of shameful secret, Philippa Martinez-style romances written for the mass market. It turns out I was misled. He wrote this book in his early twenties while working at Wellington Library in Shropshire ‘handing out tripey novels to morons’. You’ve got to do something to preserve your sanity.

The girl of the title is Katherine Lund, an émigrée from an unspecified European country working in an English provincial library during the war. She has a hateful boss, Mr Anstey, and no friends. Several summers earlier, following her participation in a school letter exchange scheme, she spent three weeks staying with her correspondent, Robin Fennel, at his family’s Oxfordshire home. In her present-day loneliness, she has reestablished contact with the Fennels, and the action of the book takes place on the day that she receives a message from Robin to say he is coming to visit her. The book is divided into three parts, the central one consisting of a flashback to Katherine’s visit to the Fennels’ before the war.

Let’s start at the very beginning, which strikes me as a very good place to start, with a description of the snow on that winter morning:

It lay in ditches and in hollows in the fields, where only birds walked. In some lanes the wind had swept it faultlessly to the very tops of the hedges. Villages were cut off until gangs of men could clear a passage on the roads; the labourers could not go out to work, and on the aerodromes near these villages all flying remained cancelled. People who lay ill in bed could see the shine off the ceilings of their rooms, and a puppy confronted with it for the first time howled and crept under the water-butt.

You might have guessed Larkin was going to turn into a good poet from his eye for the small detail. The way you can tell it’s snowed even before you look out of the window, from the changed quality of the light. Small details impressed me throughout. Katherine is delegated to escort an ill colleague home, and finds that her anticipation of hearing from Robin makes her more disposed to do this good deed, a labour of displaced love; when, in the flashback section, she meets Robin for the first time, having exchanged many letters with him, she finds the intimacy of their correspondence counts for nothing in person, and they effectively have to build a relationship from scratch.

Elsewhere Larkin has a nice line in pencil portraits of people, skewering them neatly. The delight present in Robin’s stand-offish sister Jane, for instance, when Katherine upsets a teacup: ‘Her gaiety still seethed quietly within her.’ Or Miss Parbury, whose handbag Katherine restores to her after a mix-up: ‘Rather tall, with a rosy complexion and fair hair, she looked like a large tea-rose gone well to seed.’

Many specific details, though, are shunned. Larkin creates a vivid sense of time and place, but exactly where Katherine is working isn’t at all clear, though we know it’s not London. And just who is she? Where is she from? Her being in England, it is occasionally hinted, is the result of an unpleasant incident, but no further information is given. Is she a Jewish refugee? She admits to Miss Parbury, ‘If there wasn’t a war, I shouldn’t be here.’ Her name, Katherine Lind, makes some readers think her Scandinavian; I think German is more likely, given that we know Robin can speak her language. (In a neat touch that made me smile, the passages where Katherine and Robin talk in her own language are notated not with speech marks as they would be in an English book, but with dashes, the convention on the continent, to differentiate them from the surrounding English dialogue.)

Katherine’s past is a blur, even to her. The middle section, although seen from her perspective, is narrated from its own time. When we return to the present day, we find that Katherine’s own memories of the period, which we have read about very closely, have deteriorated, so that she can’t be sure of the truth. Did she fall in love with Robin, and is that why she’s so worked up about his coming to see her? It’s easy to see why she might have done so. Before she comes to visit, he sends her a photo of himself so that she will be able to identify him when she arrives.

The photograph showed him looking at the camera with his hands on his hips, lit by brilliant sunlight, wearing a cricket shirt. There was a swing in his body that suggested he had been called and had turned momentarily back while the picture was taken. He was dark and slight, with long eyelashes. The expression on his face was evasive in the sense of not being fully captured by the camera. Rather to her surprise, she had shown it to nobody except her parents.

Reading that, I’m a bit in love with him myself. The thing is, though, that love doesn’t seem to be on the cards. The flashback section reminded me very strongly of a book from a few years later, L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between. Katherine, like Leo, is an outsider in a world of unaccustomed privilege where people behave according to a different code. It’s a hot summer, there are games to be played and walks to be taken, everything’s beautifully repressed. A scene where Robin frees a moth from the house is like the scene in The Go-Between where Leo dries Marian’s hair with his bathing suit, a fuss over nothing, with the maintenance of appearances the main consideration. Towards the end of Katherine’s stay, a group photo is taken. In some novels a photograph would serve as a nostalgia-creating device, something to give the episode an idyllic haze, but not here. Katherine’s not happy with the photo, and indeed, unlike Leo, she doesn’t seem to have been bewitched at all by her hosts, who have been polite but often not much more than that. It certainly doesn’t appear that Robin has designs on her. And then, just before she leaves, something happens.

It’s the final section of the book that’s the most interesting, and where the Larkin familiar from the poems is most in evidence. Katherine has a bad day at work, Mr Anstey having been particularly foul to her, and feels disillusioned. Her misanthropy, her disgust at the sordidness and emptiness of human existence, feels like Larkin’s. It was in the passages of despair that I felt closest to her myself. Panicked at the prospect of seeing Robin again, Katherine contrives to miss him, then regrets it, and finally, unexpectedly, finds him waiting for her when she gets home. They talk, she cooks him some food, and they go to bed together.

Larkin’s plot springs a few surprises along the way, so much so that I occasionally thought, is this supposed to be a suspense novel? because if it is there surely ought to be some suspense, not just the revelation. The going to bed is very much a surprise, but (I thought) a happy one.

Afterwards, Katherine and Robin talk. My thoughts turned automatically to Larkin’s poem ‘Talking in Bed’.

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Except that the rest of Larkin’s poem is about how people eventually fail to talk together in bed, whereas Katherine and Robin’s conversation might be the most intimate they’ve had. Sex is a watershed in several Larkin poems, such as ‘Annus Mirabilis’ and ‘High Windows’, though Larkin invariably places himself on the outside. Living is something that other people do. Most pertinent, perhaps, is his marvellous poem ‘I Remember, I Remember’, where he passes through Coventry on a train, ‘where my childhood was unspent’, and proceeds to catalogue the many things he didn’t do in his youth. Katherine’s concerns are Larkin’s, are all of ours, I suspect. She’s missing something. For the moment, Robin will do. Tomorrow, who knows? We carry on. Larkin’s poem ends, ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’ In some circumstances, that thought can be a consolation.

50 films: #2. The Go-Between (Joseph Losey, 1970)

It all begins with what may be the most famous opening line in twentieth-century literature.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

If you want your novel to be remembered, start it with a memorable aphorism. But after nearly sixty years of being quoted, it can’t help coming across as hackneyed, especially when stripped of its context. This is the paragraph that follows:

When I came upon the diary, it was lying at the bottom of a rather battered red cardboard collar-box, in which as a small boy I kept my Eton collars. Someone, probably my mother, had filled it with treasures dating from those days. There were two dry, empty sea-urchins; two rusty magnets, a large one and a small one, which had almost lost their magnetism; some negatives rolled up in a tight coil; some stumps of sealing-wax; a small combination lock with three rows of letters; a twist of very fine whipcord; and one or two ambiguous objects, pieces of things, of which the use was not at once apparent: I could not even tell what they had belonged to. The relics were not exactly dirty nor were they quite clean, they had the patina of age; and as I handled them, for the first time for over fifty years, a recollection of what each had meant to me came back, faint as the magnets’ power to draw, but as perceptible. Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition, the almost mystical thrill of early ownership—feelings of which, at sixty-odd, I felt ashamed.

It seems appropriate to document my own discovery of The Go-Between, which began in a not dissimilar way, with the reawakening of the dead. My uncle William died in May 1998, and I ended up inheriting (i.e. taking) a number of his possessions. Among those books of his I took was a copy of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley (with his name written inside, I think – it was a book he had studied at school, but the edition was a more modern one, a light green Penguin Modern Classic). I also took a couple of boxes of unlabelled tapes, some of them blank, some not, which I scoured for items of interest. One of them, a chrome cassette dating probably from the 1970s and possessing a card insert that looked like one of these, had some extracts from what I identified immediately as the film of The Go-Between recorded on it. Listening to it was a curious experience, like William’s hand reaching out and taking mine. We didn’t have a video recorder until about 1990, and I remember recording the soundtracks of television programmes on my tape recorder when I was very young. How old must he have been when he recorded this? Fourteen, perhaps? That would have been around 1979. Before I was born, anyway.

I was sixteen when I eventually read it. I remember sitting at the front of a German classroom dipping in and out of it while I was supposed to be invigilating GCSE pupils waiting to sit their oral exams. It automatically became a favourite book of mine, partly, I suspect, because of the extra meaning it had already been invested with because of the associations detailed above.

The film of The Go-Between was the third screen collaboration of Harold Pinter and Joseph Losey, following two excellent films made in the years before, The Servant and Accident. Pinter had been asked by Losey to write a screenplay of the novel as soon as The Servant was completed in 1963:

[The novel] had such a tremendous impact on me that I actually broke down. Nothing less than tears. So I couldn’t see how, feeling as I did, I could write a screenplay. Then a month or so later, Joe talked me into it.

But wrangling over rights delayed production for several years, and it was not until 1970 that filming began.

The prologue to the novel shows Leo Colston, a man on the verge of old age, discovering a diary that reawakens memories of the long, hot summer of 1900, which he spent at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, the country home of his schoolfriend Marcus Maudsley. With Marcus incapacitated by measles, the 12-year-old Leo finds himself employed by Marcus’ older sister, Marian, to take letters between her and a local farmer, Ted Burgess. But Marian is engaged to Lord Trimingham. The traumatic end of the affair is something that echoes throughout Leo’s later life, and an epilogue, returning to the present, shows the adult Leo returning to Brandham to lay his ghosts to rest.

The point of chief interest in the film as opposed to the book is its structure. Whereas the novel is told in flashback, bookended by two chapters set in the present, the first setting up Leo’s story and the second resolving it, the film intersperses the past and the present. That famous opening line is spoken as a voiceover by Michael Redgrave, who appears later in the film portraying the adult Leo, over an image of a Norfolk field, followed by the child Leo (Dominic Guard) travelling with Marcus towards Brandham. As the film progresses, the older Leo becomes more prominent. We see him visiting graves at Brandham, taking a room, meeting Marian once more, all of these scenes intercut with the events of that childhood summer. Losey:

… what interested me primarily was the possibility of representing 1900 using shots from the present, not in a chronological, but in an almost subliminal sequence, superimposing voices from the present, so that threads which started off parallel gradually intertwine, and in the end past and present are one and the same. As you know, I am fascinated by the concept of time, and by the power the cinema has suddenly to reveal the meaning of a whole life from the age of 12 to 60, and by the effect that those few weeks lived at the age of 12 are to have on the grown man.

I imagine that this may be the effect that these juxtapositions have on the first-time viewer. Some critics have suggested that the appearance of the adult Leo throughout the film rather than at the end serves to undercut the tension of the narrative. The sight of the man that Leo has become may be too strongly suggestive of how his childhood summer ends. I think it’s just another way of telling the story. Pinter:

You can’t simply transfer a book to the screen. It doesn’t work, for reasons which should be obvious. In a film, you have to go for the essence of the story, to give the film its focus, with the other elements contributing to that focus.

The ending is altered from that of the book, though there is a similar sense of catharsis for Leo. In the book this is achieved by the south-west prospect of Brandham Hall returning to his memory; in the film it is done by the implication that he has defied Marian. I find the generosity of the book’s conclusion more pleasing, but the film’s ending at least does not amount to a desecration of the novel.

I suspect most of these essays will dwell for a while on the music, and Michel Legrand’s memorable score for this film is worthy of discussion. He is in many ways the ideal composer for such a film, a watercolourist rather than an oil painter. His scoring here recalls composers who must have influenced him, most obviously Poulenc (shades of the Aubade and other piano concertante works) – the forces he employs are two pianos and twenty-five accompanying instruments, most of them strings. His melody grows from nothing more than a four-note contour, which he manipulates in various directions while the harmony shifts underneath. (Beethoven did something similar in his fifth symphony.) It is the perfect accompaniment to the rain-spattered window we see while the credits roll, the sound of greyness.

Costume and art direction are exemplary, and contribute greatly at the start to the feeling of Leo as an outsider, a middle-class boy in an upper-class world. I have barely written of the actors yet, but they are in every way as one would wish them. Alan Bates’ portrayal of Ted Burgess entirely fails to dispel the growing feeling that he may be my favourite person in the history of the universe, while Julie Christie is radiant as Marian, and I cannot conceive of a better Leo than Dominic Guard.

Accounts describe the process of making the film as a joyous one. Losey fostered a close-knit family atmosphere, which must have been comforting to Dominic Guard. Guard was a shy boy, somewhat in the shadow, thought Alan Bates, of his older brother Christopher, also an actor; but he struck up close friendships with the other boys in the cast, Richard Gibson (later Herr Flick in ‘Allo ‘Allo) and Simon Hume-Kendall (whose turn as the pompous Denys is one of the film’s great joys; he later became one of the men behind the Sport newspapers). They used to play games and listen to records when not filming. Edith de Rham’s biography of Losey contains a delightful photograph of a cricket match being played by cast members on location at Melton Constable. The very glamorous Margaret Leighton stands at the crease in sunglasses and headscarf while Edward Fox squats bare-chested behind her, keeping wicket.

It is not surprising that such a sensitive and successful adaptation of the novel should have been showered with awards on its release. These included BAFTAs for Pinter, Fox, Leighton and Guard, and the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which left Luchino Visconti miffed at the snub to Death in Venice. Maria Callas wrote to say how much she adored the film. But Pinter and Losey did not work together again. A planned adaptation of Proust did not come to fruition, and remains one of the more tantalising films never to be made. We should be grateful for their legacy.

Those of a sensitive disposition may not wish to sample this kitschy easy-listening version of the Legrand theme, which my fluctuating levels of discernment permit me to enjoy wildly.

Sources
Michael Ciment, Conversations with Losey. London: Methuen, 1985.
Edith de Rham, Joseph Losey. London: André Deutsch, 1991.
James Palmer and Michael Riley, The films of Joseph Losey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

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Memory triggers

While on holiday a month and a bit ago, I came across a mysterious reminder on my phone. It had been set for 15th November and read simply ‘Donovan’. Had I set this reminder myself? I must have done, though I had no memory of it. And what on earth did it mean?

I turned the matter over in my head. I could approach this problem from two different directions: the word, Donovan, and the date, 15th November.

What does Donovan mean to me? Jason Donovan, of course. I was quite a fan of his when I was about six years old. And his father Terence, also in the cast of Neighbours when I used to watch it in the mid-’90s. Also Donovan, the singer-songwriter from the 1960s, of whom I know nothing (and, pace hippies, in whom I have approximately no interest whatsoever) and whom I probably confuse with Lonnie Donegan as often as not. And I have known of people called Donovan in real life, though not known them personally.

What about 15th November? Well, it’s no less attractive a date than many others. It is the birthday of mercurial Uruguayan midfielder Gustavo Poyet, currently manager of Brighton and, among South American players, the Premier League’s all-time joint top goalscorer – until, that is, Carlos Tévez overtakes him, which will surely happen before the month is out, very possibly away at Blackpool on 17th October. Watch the video below to see him put a couple past Man Utd legend Massimo Taibi. But apart from this spectacularly useless knowledge, I can’t claim the date holds any special meaning for me.

Nothing in these paltry associations, then, suggested any connection between the two known facts. I had frankly abandoned hope of deciphering the meaning of the word, but decided as a hopeless last resort to ask friends and relations for suggestions via Facebook. As I began to type the request into the status update box, the answer magically presented itself to me. Donovan is the surname of my piano tuner, and I need to call him in mid-November so I can book a time to have the piano tuned before Christmas.

Needs tuning before the little red tree goes up this year

I can’t work out which is greater: the complacency of my assumption that I would automatically work out what ‘Donovan’ meant if I forgot, or the shame of forgetting my piano tuner’s name. Or the proof this whole story provides of my irredeemable middle-classness. It’s funny, though, regardless of all this baggage, to contemplate how, after seemingly endless and exhausting efforts to remember a piece of information, the slightest mental process brings it suddenly into focus.

This instantaneous unlocking of information has, like everything I write, been better expressed elsewhere. This passage from the start of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley is one of presumably many such expressions. The narrator, now middle-aged, has discovered a diary that is to awaken a trauma that has been suppressed since his boyhood:

I did not want to touch it and told myself that this was because it challenged my memory; I was proud of my memory and disliked having it prompted. So I sat staring at the diary, as at a blank space in a crossword puzzle. Still no light came, and suddenly I took the combination lock and began to finger it, for I remembered how, at school, I could always open it by the sense of touch when someone else had set the combination. It was one of my show-pieces and, when I first mastered it, drew some applause, for I declared that to do it I had to put myself into a trance; and this was not quite a lie, for I did deliberately empty my mind and let my fingers work without direction. To heighten the effect, however, I would close my eyes and sway gently to and fro, until the effort of keeping my consciousness at a low ebb almost exhausted me; and this I found myself instinctively doing now, as to an audience. After a timeless interval I heard the tiny click and felt the sides of the lock relax and draw apart; and at the same moment, as if by some sympathetic loosening in my mind, the secret of the diary flashed upon me.