Backlisted - A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin

Episode Date: September 3, 2018

For the final episode recorded at this year's Port Eliot festival in Cornwall, John and Andy are joined by authors Nina Stibbe and returning guest Simon Garfield to discuss Philip Larkin's second and final novel A Girl In Winter, and Larkin's place in the national psyche. Warning: this episode contains poetry readings, dentistry and a hip-hop remix of This Be The Verse.8'00 - A Girl in Winter by Philip LarkinTimings: (may differ due to variable advert length)* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. When getting my nose in a book cured most things short of school, it was worth ruining my eyes to know I could still keep cool and deal out the old right hook to dirty dogs twice my size. Later, with inch-thick specs, evil was just my lark. Me and my cloak and fangs had ripping times in the dark. The women I clubbed with six. I broke them up like meringues. Don't read much now.

The dude who lets the girl down before the hero arrives, the chap who's yellow and keeps the store, seem far too familiar. Get stewed. Books are a load of crap. Thank you, Philip, our motivational speaker for the day. He was only 12 when he came. So thank you, everybody. Thanks very much for coming. Welcome to Backlisted. Yes.

Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us once again in the storm-lashed boot camp for middle-class self-development that is the Port Elliot Festival. Our bodies may be damp, our tent poles may be sagging, but the spirit and imagination is soaring. I'm John Mitchinson, I'm the publisher of Unbound, the website that crowdfunds the books that readers really want to read, and... I'm Andy Miller, I'm the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. I've been here for 48 hours now here at Port Elliot. I have been bitten by more insects in that time.

So me and the insects, we're working an act up for next year, so come back and see that. A live biting. So I've been enjoying that at the festival. I'll tell you what else. Did anybody go and see Ben Moore's show Wasn't It Great? So Ben Moore, who was our guest yesterday, he did a show which is basically a deconstruction of dismal author talks at rainy literary festivals.

He had the cake and he ate the cake. It was absolutely brilliant. I also saw Peter Asher from Peter and Gordon. Did anyone see that? You know when at the end, when him and his helper did World Without Love by Peter and Gordon, did you all sing along? I was really singing along. I started to cry. And I looked up the row next to me. Please lock me away. I looked up the row next to me. There, literally every pensioner in the row was weeping, tears rolling down their cheeks. It was brilliant. What have you seen? I saw a very good Me Too talk yesterday. Outstanding moment when Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Sylvia, at one point said to everybody, you should all vote, and then looked up to the sky saying, I'm just doing your job,

which I thought was a rather moving moment. It was a very good and very kind of terrifying talk, actually. They asked all the women in the room whether they would prefer to be 16 when they were 16 or 16 now, and almost no women in the room wanted to be 16 now, which says something. Let's keep the mood upbeat. Keeping the mood upbeat,

I had a riotous time listening to James Endicott's DJ set last night, which was unimpeccable. Unimpeccable? So it wasn't very good? This is being recorded. Impeccable, yeah. Unimprovable, I think I was trying to say.

Every track a winner, a banger. I ended up a sweaty mess at the end of it, but that was a joyous end to theable, yeah. Unimprovable, I think I was trying to say. Every track a winner, a banger. I ended up a sweaty mess at the end of it, but that was a joyous end to the day, Andy. Well, let me introduce our unimpeccable guests. On my left, Nina Stibbe. Round of applause, please, for Nina. Nina Stibbe is the author of the memoir Love, Nina and Novels, Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge.

She is a local author. And also, it's taken me... I've wanted to have Nina as a guest on Backlisted for two and a half... No, three years. Three years. And it's taken me three years to persuade her to do it, right? So I'm totally delighted she's here. Yeah.

But you've talked about what you've seen and I want to say a thing I've seen today. There's a thing that tomorrow, and I think it's at 10.45, it's the tarot reading interview. Please go and see this tarot reading

interview with these two secular tarot readers and Lucy Mangan. It will be brilliant. I've just done one this morning and I noticed none of you went to see it. But who saw it? Wasn't it great? It was really, it was really wonderful. So go to that.

That's Fiona Lensfeld. Fiona Lensfeld and Jen something. Yeah. Sorry, Jen. Jen something. Jen who? Townie. Jen Townie.

Townie. Oh, whatever. Townie. And they perform Oh, whatever. Cowley. And they perform as Litwitcher, don't they? Yes. Litwitcher, yes. And they're very good. They really bring the best out of the author.

We'll try that. Please do. And we're also joined by Simon Garfield. Simon Garfield, round of applause for Simon, please. Simon is a returning guest to Backlisted. He came on last year. His previous choice was William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade,

which is a fantastic book and is, I can reveal, one of our most listened to episodes. Congratulations, Simon. Thank you very much. He is the author of 18 books of non-fiction, including the bestseller Just My Type and On The Map. But he's also the author, and I will be neglecting my duty to Backlisted and to Paul

Elliott and to myself, every time I speak to Simon, I am obliged to say he's also the author of one of my favourite books, really is one of my favourite books, my top five books, The Wrestling, which is a book about British wrestling in the early 70s. He's a magnificent book. If you haven't read it, you should read it.

And every time I interview or speak to someone, I try and find a new question to ask them about the wrestling. Here's this year's. Have you watched Glow on Netflix? Yes. Have watched Glow. Have watched Glow. And I began watching it for Mark Maron,

obviously WTF podcast fame, who can act way better than I thought he might do. But the Weirman are great and nominated for all sorts of Emmys, so definitely worth watching that, yeah. How many people here have seen Glow? Make that all of you by the next time I ask. Talking of Glow, can I just say that the... Talking of highlights as well,

last night we went to see Dan Goffey. Did anyone else see him there? Not that many. A few, OK. And it was fine. And Dan, if you don't know, was the drummer in Supergrass and it's a guitar rack here,

a bit like the Clash meets the Ruts or something. And it was full on. Last song, he goes back to the drums, which is his sort of natural home, and Brett Anderson from Suede, who was here yesterday talking, comes on and does a version of pumping on your... Stereo.

Stereo, thank you. And basically it was... You realise the power of a superstar. It was extraordinary. You know, so Dan, admittedly a front man now, but not born to be one. Brett Anderson, extraordinary thing. And you were just, we were there and we were dancing a bit

and we were going open mouth, open mouth like that. Jaw dropping to the floor because he's still got it and amazing stuff. Hey, it can't all be book chat. Smoke Chesterfields. So the book that we're here to talk about today is Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin. His second and final novel, which was published in 1947. I'm just going to take a show of hands. How many people in the tent have read A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin?

A few. I would say that is about 5% of the people gathered in the tent. How many people have read the poetry of Philip Larkin? I would say that's almost everybody in the tent. So this is very much on the marginal end of Larkin's work. It's set during the Second World War. We will talk a little bit about the characters in it as we go along. But the first question I always ask on Backlisting, and this is going to Simon.

Simon chose this book for us to talk about today. Where were you, Simon, when you first encountered this particular novel, A Girl in Winter? Slightly embarrassing. This is my juvenilia. I was at the LSE, and I was working on a newspaper called The Beaver, which, much to the... Thank you.

Much to the hilarity of all Americans at the LSE. But the great thing about... And I wanted to be a journalist and an editor a bit, I suppose. And it's one of those things, unlike going to Oxbridge or most universities, in fact, there was no English department, no history department at the LSE, which means that if you have those kind of journalistic ambitions, you go to the top, because you're not competing with anyone.

So I basically wrote half the newspaper. One of the things I did, God alone knows, I think maybe I was editor, and this is the only way that it could have got into the newspaper. I wrote a sort of lit career, awful thing, I imagine now, about university novels. And so it was David Lodge, you know, novels about university, not necessarily written there.

And David Lodge and Jill, Philip Larkin, was one of those which takes place in Oxford. And then naturally after that I felt I had to read A Girl in Winter. So long, long-winded... But actually, sort's sort of a happy ending because along with lots of other things that I wrote, including a review of Dr Feelgood and all sorts of stuff, which is now extraordinary,

you then enter for Guardian Journalist of the Year competition and my essay on Philip Larkin and others won. Extraordinary stuff. When was the last time you read your essay? Oh, God, no. It's locked away somewhere in a file. I can't possibly... It's got the 30-year rule on it, basically.

But you love the book, and I assume that you may have re-read the novel to do this. Of course, yeah. And what had changed between the you who read it then and you reading it now? It was less romantic now. At the time, I kind of associated myself, oddly enough, with the female protagonist, Catherine,

more than her sort of love interest. Yeah. And now I just, you know, you obviously see it far more with a sort of love interest. Yeah. And now I just, you know, you obviously see it far more with a sort of critical eye. And obviously, oddly, I think, I read the novels in a way, the way his career progressed. So I read the novels before The Pear Heritory, unlike, obviously, everyone else here.

So it was an odd thing. So I knew him as a novelist first. Nina, when did you first... I mean, it's a hard question to ask because Philip Larkin, in a sense, is one of our national poets, has become, for better or worse, one of our national poets. Can you remember when you first heard the name Philip Larkin? Well, Larkin first cropped up in a big way for me in 1987, sort of about February, when we were choosing our dissertations in my degree.

And I'm going to read you it because it actually, Philip Larkin cropping up in my life was in my letters back home when I was writing back from London. So, do you mind this? I love it. Okay, here we go. Divic, all choosing our dissertation, extended essay in brackets, subjects, 5,000 words on subject of choice pretty much. I've decided to do Carson McCullough's Author of Heart is Lonely Hunter, which I absolutely love when I read it a couple of years ago. I'll scroll down a bit. Stella's having trouble deciding between Alticer, I can't remember who it is even,

a Marxist bloke, and Philip Larkin. So there's dialogue. Stella, I can't decide. Me, well, which do you like most? Stella, it's not about liking, So there's dialogue. It's a long time till we have to hand them in, but the important thing is not just to leave them and blah, blah, blah. Stella has done a rough plan. The plan includes interviewing Alan Bennett for extra kudos.

I stupidly mentioned that Alan Bennett had met Philip Larkin and I might have exaggerated it a bit. Annoying. Alan Bennett will show me up by playing down the relationship, which is already quite nothingy. And Stella will show me up by demonstrating she knows fuck all about Larkin, all the true meanings of his poems, which in my opinion are the Mardy ramblings of an oddball.

And she'll say some things like juncture, apropos, or calibre, or her other words. And AB will say to me afterwards, your friend Stella kept saying Calibre. She pronounces it Calibre. So that's my friend Stella choosing to do Larkin for a dissertation. How many years ago was that? Was that 40 years ago? 30.

30 years ago, whatever. 30, all right. Yeah, 30 years ago, whatever. The Marty ramblings of an oddball. Yeah, and I think, yeah, he's awful. So then when finally Andy forced me to do this podcast, I texted my friend Stella, who I'm still friends with, and said, right, OK, I've got to go on this bloody podcast and talk about Larkin.

What shall I say? And she said this. Not a looker. Not a looker, but had two or three women on the go at any one time. But didn't marry because he was a commitment phobe and didn't want to live with anyone, like Kenneth Williams. I don't think, you know, she meant like Kenneth Williams. I think she meant like for the same reasons

that Kenneth Williams wouldn't want to live with anyone because of not using someone's toilet type thing. Best mates were Kingsley Amis, which says a lot. Less popular after Andrew Motion, biog, casual racism and misogyny and grim banter, but normal for the period. He wasn't nice. Shut up, Andy.

He wasn't nice, but preoccupied with death, pointlessness of trying to achieve anything in life, curmudgeon, novels, Jill, thumb down emoji, girl in winter, thumb up emoji. Yes! I would like to give Philip, the disembodied voice of Philip, the right to reply to that, introducing his character in that manner.

There's a poem called Days, which is a very short poem, which offsets all the stuff that we now know about Philip Larkin that we didn't know at the time. I think we should just reset the balance by listening to this 30-second incredible poem. Days. What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us, time and time over. They are to be happy in. they are to be happy in? Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question brings the priest and the doctor in their long coats running over the fields. Oh, it's like a parody of Philip Larkin. Well, if you were mentioning Alan Bennett... I don't know if anybody... Anybody knows Alan Bennett's reading of Winnie the Pooh? Unquestionably, Alan Bennett's Eeyore is Philip Larkin. For me, a present for me.

Jonathan Rabin said about Larkin, he said, Larkin was Eeyore. He said, if you gave him a burst balloon and an empty honeypot, he would know what to do with them. And if you gave him a honeypot that was full of honey, he would find a way of emptying it. The pot was always entirely empty. This is the first mention in his letters of this novel that he's writing.

I'll just read it because it's very Larkin. He writes in his early letters, there are two main correspondees, Jim Sutton, who is a school friend, and the letters, who's an aspiring painter, and Kingsley Amis. The letters to Jim Sutton are wonderful and revealing and human. The ones to Kingsley Amis. The letters to Jim Sutton are wonderful and revealing and human. The ones to Kingsley Amis are just horribly arch and trying to be funny all the time and showing offy. But this is a letter to Jim Sutton. Really, writing is very difficult. The news, which I

don't want to hear, has started just too muffled for me to hear the words. My nether body in general is wrapped in a large rug, which seems to warn me not at all. Truly, this is the dead season. I'm casting Valiabout for a title for my novel, referred to simply at present as Catherine, the name of the chief character. I think it will have something to do with winter. I think of titles and tell them to people, and the people look at me as if I'd let off a fart. So I know the titles aren't very good. The latest is Kingdom of Winter. Would you buy a book called Kingdom of Winter? Or would you pass on to a shelf where the book's called Sons and Lovers?

Kangaroo? Or The Rainbow? Yes, so would I. Do not conclude from this that the novel is anywhere near finished. It is nert. I doubt if I shall finish it this year. Slow but unsure is my motto. We should pray see what the book is about. Do you want me to give you the Philip Larkin's blurb?

Philip Larkin, this book was published in 1947, just four months after his first novel, Jill, was published. And clearly things just after the war were, you know, tight. So they said to Larkin, will you write your own blurb for your own book? And this is his description of his novel, A Girl in Winter. He's had very bad publication history up to this point. A sort of vanity press called the Fortune Press

brought out his first collection of poems called The North Ship, which was written round about the same time as he was writing Girl in Winter. And they also bought Jill, and they sat on Jill and didn't bring it out, which caused him a lot of angst and grief. He was paid nothing, nothing at all, and got no royalties. One of the reasons, he then got a literary agent Peter Watt of AP Watt Who represented him for one book and then after that for some reason he decided not to have an agent and just dealt Completely with the Society of Authors put all his all his work all his contracts through the Society of Authors and when he died he left There were two beneficiaries of his will one was the Society of Authors and the other was the RSPCA,

because he loved animals. Anyway, here he is on the blurb for the book. He says to Alan Pringle, Dear Pringle, thank you for your letter and the news that the book is starting its long voyage towards publication. I've remembered a title I thought of before I started to write it, A Girl in Winter, which, though I believe I discarded it on the grounds of it sounding Mills and Booney,

if you know what I mean. Does it conjure up a more precise image than the present one does? How does it strike you? Otherwise, I keep thinking of things like Frosty Answer, which are foolish but fun. Anyway, here's his suggestion for part of the blurb. A Girl in Winter centres on one day in the life of Catherine Lynde, a day that as it progresses seems increasingly to sum up her present life, connect it with her past

and predict her future. She is brought up against an almost forgotten episode that nevertheless shows how her actions then have influenced others permanently and are still playing her part in her own life. Both past and present force her to take stock of herself and the book's conclusions extend far beyond One Girl and One Winter's Day. He said the plot was feeble. Well, Nina and Simon, do you think the plot of this book is feeble? No, I don't, but I mean,

a remarkable sort of addendum to that, I think, is that he was 22, I think, when he wrote that. So 20 when he wrote Jill, perhaps. And so he got nothing for... He got no advance for Jill. He got £30 advance from Faber for A Girl in Winter. Do I think it's feeble? No, I don't. I think it's really fascinating.

Now, one can't, however, read it without thinking about what came afterwards, what came, you know, with the poetry. Because it is, I think, someone called it diffused poetry, and I think that's what it is. It's a plot itself. I mean, there isn't very much there. It takes place within 12 hours, essentially. There's three parts, and the second part is a big flashback. But the key to it is the fact that it's winter,

part one and three, and then part two is summer. And it's a bit like, although much better than this, you know, the first poem you ever have to write at school is called either summer or winter. And sort of that's what RRT does. I mean, there's a little bit which I can read, just three lines or something, where it basically just sums up the sort of poetic nature of it.

This is a poet writing, not a novelist, despite what he thought, I think, at the time. This is just end of the first page. He goes, but through cuttings and along embankments ran the railway lines, and although they were empty, they led on northwards and southwards till they began to join, passing factories that had worked all night and the backs of houses where light showed round the curtains, reaching the cities where the snow was disregarded and which the frost

could only besiege for a few days, comma, bitterly. Now, that's not poetry. It's which is weddings as well. Yeah. So, Nina, when you, I don't know if you'd read this book before or how did you feel about it coming to it in 2018, given it's like margin, it's marginalia. I hadn't read it before.

And I, people said to me, I said to my mum, I'm reading this novel. She said, oh, it's very short. But actually, because it's so beautiful and it's so crafted, it isn't short because you have to read it quite slowly. I felt intimidated by Catherine because she's so subtle and good and thorough. I love the bit at the beginning in the library. Is that the beginning? Yeah.

It conjures up this awful cold library and they won't even make a cup of tea. And she's just so good. It made me nostalgic for what libraries used to be like. Oh, well, the library was open. No one would tell you to shush. Right, it was open. The library was open and it had all this stuff. And it was open on Saturday.

Yeah. And they looked after the book. I mean, that was incredible. That really shocked me because I remember libraries being like that and that people would go in and spend hours looking at books and there'd be lots of women creeping around. But it was Mr Anstey smoking and... He did something, he'd smoke a pipe and then he puts his bag out

in a bowl of water. I mean, this extraordinary prescient thing, really, because he didn't have any ambitions to be a librarian and a sort of, you know, an Eeyore-ish librarian at all. And he's basically described in Mr Anstey the person he sort of became, or at least his reputation. So is there literally no link between that librarian scene and, I mean, was he not already...

I mean, I haven't really thought about that. No, no. OK, so he sort of... He was, he had a sort of junior job, I mean, I haven't really thought about it yet. No, no. OK, so... He sort of... He was. He had a sort of junior job, I think, in Wellington, so long before moving to Hull. Yeah, he worked in the Wellington College Library in Shropshire, which is where he is when he's writing this book. He left Oxford, went back and moved back in with his parents in Warwick,

and then moved to... So he was living in a sort of a really... A bedsit and freezing cold. One of the unexpected things about the book is that when it was published in 1947, it was the coldest... I think it's still the coldest winter on record. So he writes a rather funny letter to the Faber publicity department

and says, thank you for pulling off such a cosmic publicity stunt to help my novel. So Larkin became quite famous towards the end of his life. He was approached to become poet laureate in 1984. He famously turned down the laureateship for two reasons. The first being that he didn't, in his own words, want to be a spokesman for poetry. And the second, that he was unable to write poetry, that he hadn't really written any verse of any significance for five years.

But in the 70s, he was quite well known. He'd become quite famous. And he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 1976. And I thought I would share a couple of things with you. His luxury was a typewriter and paper with which to torture himself presumably by staring at the blank pages. His book was the collected words of George Bernard Shaw which he described as jolly and he also he's the record that he would have taken to his desert island.

You can imagine Philip Larkin staring at a blank piece of paper, reading George Bernard Shaw to cheer himself up and listening to Bessie Smith's I'm Down In The Dumps. I've just popped outside the tent a moment and somebody spotted, a member of the audience has spotted what they think is the ghost of Philip Larkin, which is handy. I can't see him, but it's handy anyway because it gives me a chance to inform you about our sponsor, the very lovely Spoke.

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You get sharp, personalised design delivered in just two working days. And as a backlisted listener, if you go to www.spoke-london.com and place an order, you'll get £20 off your first order. Just use the code BACKLISTED20. Terms and conditions apply. I shall now return you to the tent. So I sent these guys this when I knew we were talking about Philip Larkin.

I don't know whether you could... Someone, and I wish I knew who it was, but kudos to them, mocked up an album that the Philip Larkin quintet may have written and performed on, and it's called Moaning About Everyone. And the quintet, apart from Larkin, consists of John Wayne, Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym and John Betjeman. And the songs are...

It says, swinging classics from the maestro of mournful, including Toad In My Lawnmower... LAUGHTER ..Complan and Gin... LAUGHTER ..Staff Meeting Rag... LAUGHTER..They Jazz You Up, Your Mum and Dad, Complan and gin. Staff meeting rag. They jazz you up, your mum and dad. Dewey decimal lady.

Love again in brackets, horning at ten past three. And the final track, which I'm sure lasts at least 12 minutes, is Can't Find the Gents. So I read Jill when I was a student, so like 30 years ago, but I hadn't read A Girl in Winter. I've had this copy of A Girl in Winter since 1988, since July 1988,

exactly 30 years ago, and I know that because when I got it down off the shelf, I found the receipt in the back, right? And I bought it from Books Etc. in Victoria Street in London. Books Etc. no longer with us. And I bought another book on the same day, and I thought it was amusing to say what the other book was.

So I bought a copy of Philip Larkin's A Girl Who Wins, which I didn't read, but also a copy of Joan LeMessurier's Lady Don't Fall Backwards, an account of her affair with the comedian Tony Hancock when she was married to John LeMessurier, right? And what I thought, what links those two things is I realised that I love that type of personality in art or music or comedy. I really love that kind of Tony Hancock, Philip Larkin, Eeyore, Anita Bruckner, Stuart Lee, Jean Rees, Morrissey, although that one's been cancelled recently. But nevertheless, and when I did read this book this time, I felt it was like coming home, really.

I thought the sort of, it's so wonderfully gloomy and grim and kind of, I thought, great, I'm going to get to talk at Port Elliot about this miserable bedsit wintry novel. I couldn't be any happier. The other thing that struck me about it, I don't know what you think about this, if I didn't know who this book was by, I would have sworn blind that the author was female.

For a writer who, that's fine, for a writer who is thought of as having a particularly male view of things, the authors it reminded me of were Barbara Pym, of course, but the novelist Elizabeth Taylor or Rosamund Lehmann.

Larkin as a neglected lady novelist, which is a term used for that group of writers, seemed really fascinating to me. No, she's too worthy. Go on. I don't think a woman would write such a... She's just so subtle and good all the time.

She doesn't do anything bad or wrong. Some people might think she's a bit harsh on old Robin. I mean, spoilers are hardly really what you're going to get with this book. Broadly what happens, she falls in love with, she comes over as an exchange student, she falls in love with the frankly rather

dull English boy that she's been billeted with. They don't see each other. She comes and starts working in England, works in a library, and then she gets in touch with the family, he gets in touch with her, he comes, they miss each other. He ends up waiting for her in the flat, and then they spend the night together,

but not in a good way. No, Nina, do you want to...? She could say she was being a bit mean to Robin then. I chose the very end for my bit that Andy wanted, you know, when he wanted us to choose a bit. So... Sorry, this has gone a bit Brechtian, sorry. So shall I read it?

Yeah, please. OK, so this is the very last bit and I'm calling it the end of hope and the death of love. So as John just said, they've met again after years, and actually the novel takes place over one day, but Catherine is longing to see Robin, isn't she? She's longing to see him, and she thinks she might have missed him, and she worries about it.

And then at some point she decides She's longing to see him and she thinks she might have missed him and she worries about it. And then at some point she decides she's not really bothered anymore and I don't know at what point she decided that. It was so subtle I missed it

but we're told that later. Anyway, so this is them after they've had love. They've had love, yes. Do you think they have

actually done it? They've had love. So they've actually had love. They've had love and it's been dismal. So, well, there was the snow and her watch Do you think they have actually done it? They've had love and it's been dismal. So, well, there was the snow and her watch ticking. So many snowflakes, so many seconds.

As time passed, they seemed to mingle in their minds, heaping up into a vast shape that might be a burial mound or the cliff of an iceberg whose summit is out of sight. Into its shadow, dreams crowded, full of conceptions and stirrings of cold as if ice flows were moving down a lightless channel of water. They were going in orderly slow procession, moving from darkness further into darkness, allowing no suggestion that their order should be broken or that one day, however many years distance, the darkness would begin to give place to light. Yet their passage was not saddening. Unsatisfied dreams rose and fell about them, crying out against their implacability, but in the end, glad that such order, such destiny existed. Against this knowledge, the heart, the will,

and all that made for protest could at last sleep. That was after they had... That lady's face there is amazing, right? Lizzie's. Yeah, boom, right? What a big ending. Oh, incredible. But you can be sure she probably never had sex again after that. Yeah.

Because she was so, it was so... Just an interesting point about Larkin, which I only found out about recently. You know, you mentioned, Andy, the idea of, well, you know, odd that Larkin wrote something like this, strong female protagonist. But he did write two earlier novels under the assumed name of,

and this is apparently true, Brunette Coleman, which is fantastic. And only released, or escaped maybe, long after his last poetry collection. And they were, I'm not sure if they were Mills and Booney, but they were... No, they're sort of Mallory Tower's schoolgirl adventures. That's right. So we obviously had this thing of writing as a woman, which is interesting.

I mean, at the time, he very much thought of himself as a novelist. That's what he thought he was going to do. He writes about this book. The Kingdom of Winter is rather unimpressive. This is another letter to Jim Sutton compared with Jill. But when you read it, you will see why. It is a deathly book. We're really selling it well, aren't we?

It is a deathly book and has for theme the relinquishing of live response to life. That's what the bit that Nina just read is. It's not... I feel I have to defend it, but A, it's beautifully written, and B, it's unflinching. It's looking straight at that issue and trying to communicate it as best he can.

He goes on. The central character, Catherine, picks up where John from Jill left off and carries the story on into the frozen wastes, the kingdom of winter, to be exact. Now, I'm thinking of a third book in which the central character will pick up where Catherine left off

and develop logically back to life again. In other words, the North Ship will come back instead of being bogged up there in a glacier. And then I shall have finished this partial branch of soul history, my own, of course. And what will happen after that, I don't know. Well, we sort of do know. He says, this third book will need colossal strength and application. I doubt if I can do it yet. I think I have the elements, but the elements to make a book any more than a sack of molten bushel of hops and the buckets of water and jars of filthy chemicals make beer. But actually, I think what's happening is he's beginning to write. I mean, he's had the North Ship probably he's beginning to publish poetry. And do you know who his favorite, who his model for fiction was,

his favorite novelist? This really surprised and quite shocked me. D.H. fucking Lawrence. No! He goes all his letters to Jim Sutton are about how great Lawrence is and what a deep... I mean, I'm a huge Lawrence fan, as you know, but it's very... it's quite interesting. So all of that sort of pent-up, deep emotion in Larkin

that comes out in the poetry is sort of there in this book. There are two reasons for reading it, I would say. One is it's, as you say, unflinching, beautiful, precise. The story, I think, is actually rather beautifully constructed. It is also, it has in it a scene of such horrific vividness that anybody who's ever had anything done to their teeth will be thankful that we now have a National Health Service and we can get out.

It's a scene of orthodontic horror. Horror. Worthy of Marathon Man. You know, I'm going to excite the tent by reading a bit now. Yes! Yes! by reading a bit now. Yes!

So Catherine has had to take her colleague, Miss Green, for an emergency dental operation, and the only dentist they can find is a seedy backstreet dentist who initially says, I won't give her an injection, I won't pull the tooth out, and then he goes, all right then. And he wheels her on like a gurney through to the... Not an injection? Oh yeah. Oh, sorry. Okay. He suddenly hooked the mask back onto the trolley and reached into the open mouth with forceps. Gripping the tooth horizontally, she felt an upsword of terror, lest the girl should still be half conscious, but unable to move or speak.

The girl should still be half conscious, but unable to move or speak. Her head, someone just went, ah! Her head stirred as he first pulled, and he put his free hand on her forehead, rumpling her hair, before giving another dragging wrench in the other direction. Catherine could almost feel the pain exploding beneath the anaesthetic and nerved herself against a shriek. It seemed impossible for the girl to feel nothing. herself against a shriek. It seemed impossible for the girl to feel nothing. As the dentist levered and wrenched again, the muscles in his wrist moved, and as he withdrew the forceps,

she thought he had failed until she saw the long root in their grip, bright with blood. He dropped it in a silver casket, then tweaked out the wet and blood-stained roll of cotton wool and removed the rubber gag. It's all over, he said. Miss Green's eyes were open, expressionlessly. It's all over, he repeated. It's all right now. Slowly her hands began unclasping. She sat up, slowly, grasping for the arms of the chair. Her mouth seemed to move in a reassuring smile or to speak, and a sudden thin stream of blood ran down her chin. I'm unmoved. I am.

Look, I was a dental nurse for three years, and that was every week. And it's, I mean, you know, what's horrible about that scene for me is that they go to the bleak place, the equipment's so horrible and rusty, and then she requests gas and he won't give it. And then eventually he agrees to do it,

even though he hasn't got enough staff to legally do it, and he takes her into another back room and it's dark. And it's that Catherine has sort of talked him into it. So that's really, it's quite horrible around it, but actually, you know... I think you can feel in that bit, though, I'm sorry, you know, it's quite a grisly bit of reading, but again, by the bit Nina read,

the precision of the language is the precision of a poet, right? There's a clip here, I talked about Desert Island Discs earlier, this is a clip of Larkin talking about what he was trying to achieve in a poem. This is like in the mid-'70s. You try to create something in words that will reproduce in somebody else who's never met you and perhaps isn't even living in the same cultural society as yourself.

That somebody else will read and so get the experience that you had and that forced you to write the poem. It's a kind of preservation by recreation, if I can put it that way. I think that a poem should be understood at first reading, line by line, but I don't think it should be exhausted at first reading. I hope that what I write gives the reader something when they read it first, enough, in fact, to make them read it again. And so on ad infinitum. And I think you can hear that sensibility in the prose of this book. You know, the thing that distinguishes it, in a way,

from other novelists perhaps operating at that time is there is that constant edging towards finding the right phrase, the right words. Larkin writes very little in his life. He has four volumes of poetry published, and they are slim. And he clearly had a morbid fear of publishing anything that was anything less than, as he saw it, perfect. And even when it was out there, he didn't think it was perfect.

Yeah, and I mean, you know, one shouldn't forget, along with all the sort of misery, there was a lot of humour. And the poems I think we like the most are the ones with a bite to them, a spark of humour in a way. I just want to read one

bit where, early on actually in the book, where Catherine is being reprimanded by her boss, Mr Anstey, who is an anagram of, sort of, almost an anagram of nasty. And he, it's the sort of person Larkin became, but I'm going to do it in a sort of snidey,

kind of Pete and Dad voice, I think, because I think this is what I'd least like. He says to her, I don't know what you are intending to do with your life, whether you are intending to follow this profession or not. I don't know. And frankly, I don't want to know. So that is a question that every person has a right to settle and to decide for him or herself. But I am telling you this, that if you decide, yes, I will follow this profession, I will devote my energy to the attainment of this. What I'm doing now, Charles Hawtry or something?

Yeah. Energy to the attainment of this career, you will find, he stressed the three words with his pipe, there's an ounce of good business sense, such as you need to run any factory or business, that'll be worth all your Shakespeare and Dr Samuel Johnson and whatever you call. Of course, he changed his tone to one of indulgent explanation. I'm not saying anything so foolish as that knowledge is not of inestimable value, but what I am trying to explain is that once a year,

a fellow may come in and say, oh, Mr Anstey, look here, I want to know all about Elizabethan drama, or some obscure branch of phonology or morphology, or whatever it is that you happen to be familiar with. Well, there you are then, out trots your education. But nine-tenths of the time, 99 hundredths of the time, you are simply having to fill the position of an ordinary office boss who happens to be dealing with books instead of houses or perambulators

and so on and so forth. And it sort of characterises, I think, really, you know, sort of the archetypal, boring... Library. English provincial. English provincial library. Spot on, really. He was obsessed with wanting to make art out of the stuff that was his life, that was around him. You know, all the famous stuff about rejecting the myth kitty.

There's a brilliant thing where he's writing to Charles Monteith at Faber and he's writing about Barbara Pym, a novelist, who's been turned down, rejected by Cape and turned down by Faber. And very rarely Larkin kind of sounds off sort of people other than his very close friends about what he really thinks about literature, but this is, I think, his kind of credo as far as fiction is concerned.

Personally, too, I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can't find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today. Why should I have to choose between spy rubbish, science fiction rubbish, or dope-taking nervous breakdown rubbish? I like to read about people who've done nothing spectacular, who aren't beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field of activity they command, but who can see in little autumnal moments of vision that the so-called big experiences of life

are going to miss them. And I like to read about such things presented not with self-pity or despair or romanticism, but with realistic firmness and even humour that is in the fact what the critics would call the moral tone of the book. It seems to me that that kind of writing a responsible publisher ought to support. That's you, Charles. And if an introduction by me saying so would help you to review your verdict on the book, then I'd gladly provide it for nothing. In fact, I'd be honoured. Oh, that's great. Yeah, that's that's love. Yeah, come on. So so we're going to hear the hit now because we're near the end. Phil's going to line up for us and what he's going to do

is he's going to read us This Be The Verse, his most famous poem, one of the most loved poems in Britain in the 20th century. So take it away, Philip Larkin. This Be The Verse. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old-style hats and coats,

who half the time were soppy stern and half at one another's throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself. Now, so listen, thanks very much, everyone. Thanks, the disembodied voice of Philip Larkin, for being such a good sport. I absolutely love this book, Girl in Winter. I would really love if people felt inspired to go and read it

or any of Larkin's work. Any last thoughts about Larkin as you return to him? I'm very thrilled to have gone back to him and I'm thrilled to have read this novel and I will now read Jill, which is... Thumbs down, thumbs down. Yes, well, you haven't given it the thumbs down, have you? No, no. It's a book about innocence.

But it's in the wrong order. Isn't Jill the first working-class novel? Isn't it the first fish-out-of-water novel? Well, working-class at Oxford. Yeah, that's what I mean, sort of fish-out-of-water and sort of seeing they've got their posh crockery. And do you think, Simon, do you think that Larkin could have, should have continued as a novelist?

Or does this feel like the end of a novelistic career? No, I think, yeah, it feels that he... I mean, he clearly had a very hard time. He felt that he had I mean, he clearly had a very hard time. He felt that he had a problem with plot, he had no problem at all with language and no problem at all with atmosphere and sentiment and sort of expressing the kind of bittersweet side of life. So I think he chose well.

I think the verse served him well. And he wrote, I mean, multiple drafts of this book. He worked very, very hard on it. There was some wonderful correspondence with him and Pringle at Faber about making changes and he more or less says, look, I think I've got the book right now. It may not be a good book, but it's the book

I wanted. It says the things I wanted to say. Okay, listen. Thank you very much, John. Thank you Nina. Thank you Simon. Thank you very much, John. Thank you, Nina. Thank you, Simon. Thank you, Philip Larkin. And thank you to this lovely audience at Port Elliot. I will be selling copies of the Port Elliot 2018 remix of this bit of verse at the back of the tent when this is over.

Do visit the website. All the clips that you've heard will be on the website, further reading, background stuff, articles about Larkin. Thank you to all our guests and thank you to you. Thank you. APPLAUSE You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon,

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