Damp-Lipped Hilary

Jenny Diski

Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions by Philip Larkin, edited by James Booth
Faber, 498 pp, £20.00, May 2002, ISBN 0 571 20234 9

Life is too short to read Philip Larkin’s juvenilia. Reading ‘Trouble at Willow Gables’ and ‘Michaelmas Term at St Brides’ is up there with stuffing mushrooms: there is a part of me which, as I read – or stuff – has precognition of the moment of my death and the very last conscious thought, which is the blinding awareness of the precious hours wasted on Larkin’s schoolgirl stories or mushrooms when I might have done something more positive with them such as sleeping or filing my nails. Actually, I’ve never stuffed a mushroom in my life. That much sense I’ve got. I have no idea whether James Booth has ever gone in for fancy cooking. No time probably. He has his hands full of Larkin. He is a Reader in English at Hull University, and after a false start in 1981 (Writers and Politics in Nigeria), he has devoted himself to the cause of Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin: Writer in 1992 was followed by a collection of essays, New Larkins for Old (2000); he is secretary of the Philip Larkin Society and edits its newsletter, About Larkin (it’s a joke, d’you see?). Now he has edited and introduced these mostly unfinished and unpublished fictions that have been lying around in the archive. It’s what some literary academics do for a living, I know, hanging on the every word of their chosen one, but when it comes down to scratching about at the bottom of the barrel of the 21-year-old Larkin’s doodlings during the summer after leaving university, it’s time to head for the kitchen and get the mushroom scraper out.

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Vol. 24 No. 10 · 23 May 2002 » Jenny Diski » Damp-Lipped Hilary (print version)
Pages 22-23 | 2586 words

Letters

From Mike Taylor

However enjoyable it might be to see Jenny Diski at work with her witty scalpel, killing off two writers with a couple of dextrous slashes, it occurs to me that devoting two whole pages of the LRB's 23 May issue to the early fiction of Philip Larkin, which doesn't apparently deserve to see the light of publication, in an edition by James Booth, which has even less reason – or so it seems from Diski's review – to be read (let alone pondered), replicates the very sin of unnecessary publication that she so trenchantly castigates.

Mike Taylor
Ottawa

From John Bayley

Jenny Diski's review of Philip Larkin's juvenilia is the worst I have ever read in the LRB, which is saying a lot. A parade of undercover PC, it made no attempt to look closely at, or to come close to, its subject, his words, his ways of writing. In his elegy on Yeats, Auden opined that Time, indifferent to politics and ideology,

Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives.

'With this strange excuse' Time has 'pardoned' Kipling, Claudel, Yeats himself, and no doubt Auden and Larkin as well. Time is also looking over the critic's shoulder when he or she denigrates the language of such writers.

John Bayley
Oxford

From James Booth

On 23 May you published Jenny Diski's review of my edition of Philip Larkin's 'Trouble at Willow Gables' and Other Fictions. On 27 June you followed this with a letter by Mike Taylor, which accused Diski of wasting her readers' time as much as I had wasted hers. Larkin can fend for himself, but I hope that I may be allowed to respond to the casual brutality to which I have been exposed in your pages. Diski asserts that: 'after a false start in 1981 (Writers and Politics in Nigeria), he has devoted himself to the cause of Philip Larkin.' This is not wit; it is a sneer. As a result of this 'false start' two of my recent PhD students have just published books on African writers. Nor do I possess the religious ardour which the words 'devotion' and 'cause' imply – not for the writing of Larkin, nor for anything else. She continues:

There is indeed a strong sense that Booth hasn't got enough to keep his mind occupied. Otherwise why would he bother with footnotes informing his readers that Hugh Walpole was a 'popular novelist', Benny Goodman an 'American clarinettist and bandleader (1909-86)' … Does he imagine that Larkin's avid readers are too young to have heard of Benny Goodman? Or is he merely trying to justify the time and fill out the pages of the little he has to work with?

Does Diski imagine that all the readers of my edition will be as old as, or older than she is? Working in a university I know that many of Larkin's most avid readers are students (or schoolchildren). Some are also Italian or Japanese. These readers know little of Benny Goodman, and they certainly haven't a clue who Hugh Walpole was.

James Booth
University of Hull