Customer Reviews

"Trouble at Willow Gables" and Other Fiction 1943-1953

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I take it as given that one would not be picking up this volume without a prior interest in Philip Larkin. Anyone unacquainted with his work would do best to start with the poetry, working from The Less Deceived (1955) chronologically forward through The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). His second and final novel, A Girl in Winter (1947), is to my mind a minor masterpiece and very much worth a look. If your appetite then remains unsated, you could circle back to The North Ship (1945) and Jill (1946), his first-published poetry and fiction, respectively, but somewhat inferior to their successors. Having consumed all this, you might then wish to pick up Trouble at Willow Gables (2002). But I emphasize "might."

This attractively-produced volume teases the reader who, like me, loved A Girl in Winter and simply had to accept that there were no more like it. "More Larkin fiction?" one wonders. "Surely too good to be true." And indeed it is. I am not sorry to have spent $5.25 on my remaindered copy of Trouble at Willow Gables, but I do question the wisdom of publishing this volume in the first place (as, I suppose, Messrs. Faber might have done also, given the terms of my purchase). Editor James Booth (who also writes the introduction) has divided it into two sections: the first gathers materials, including the title novella, penned by Larkin under a female pen name, and in the style of "girls' school stories," evidently a minor genre of 20th century English fiction; the second section presents the drafts of two unfinished novels with which Larkin struggled in the late 1940s and early 1950s, after publishing A Girl in Winter.

Were I an English professor trying to work up an article on Larkin, I suppose I should be grateful for this volume, as it would save me a trip to Hull to view the manuscripts (though perhaps naturally, the foundation would bear my expenses). And what material it is, rich with opportunities to use verbs like "transgendering" (p. xxiii) or to say things like "[Larkin] was not simply subverting an innocent feminine genre by exposing it to the heterosexual male gaze" (p. xiv). Not being an English professor, however, I find fragments of unfinished novels and jargon-laden introductions tiresome.

For that reason, I got the most enjoyment out of the title work itself, which is a complete and relatively polished novella. Apparently produced as a pastiche of the girls' school genre for the private consumption of Larkin's Oxford friends (p. xx) (editor Booth does drop in a relevant fact here and there, between the Freudian psychologizing and strained, Eng. Lit.-style poring over every little biographical and textual detail), the novella is a charming little story, whose edgier overtones of lesbianism will have come to seem quite innocuous by contemporary mores. Further, there are glimpses of that Larkin poetry which, for some of us, is the reason Larkin is interesting, regardless of any transgendering he may have done in his day, or of whatever scandalously un-bien pensant attitudes his biographer turned up. When the young Larkin writes, in "Trouble at Willow Gables," that:

"Everyone, even the staff, had retired to their rooms by eleven, and all was
silent. The few portraits stared sightlessly from the walls into the large
hall; notices hung like pale flowers on the notice-board, the stairs ascended
in silent procession, and from an occasional window the moon threw a pattern
onto the floor. The June night was perfectly still." (p. 28)

there is a hint, in the portraits staring sightlessly, or the "notices hung like pale flowers," of poetry in the sense that Larkin so aptly defined it: "I want readers to feel yes, I've never thought of it that way, but that's how it is" (Required Writing, p. 56). For that reason if no other, I would not discourage any Larkin devotee from acquiring Trouble at Willow Gables, but I would send anyone else to the main body of his work. Leave the rest to the English professors.