A modest cause for celebration in my neck of the woods. I’ve finished the first draft of my sixth novel, Girl in Straw Hat. The text is – to borrow Ransome’s usual epithet – bilge. Whether debilgification is feasible only time will tell, but it does mean I must skimp my offering this week.
The other reason is I am working myself up to saying something sensible (I long ago gave up on profound and recently abandoned interesting) on the subject of Teaching Creative Writing in the University. The trouble is my bones tell me it’s bad news: I spent too many years in universities under one sort of lash or another to be at all optimistic. But I’ll give it a go.
So this week I offer you Philip Larkin’s thoughts on relevant issues. Tangential thoughts, I admit, but it’s always best to creep up on your subject. My claim is that we self-publishers can easily recruit Larkin to our cause. You could never accuse him of being frivolously optimistic about the life literary.
You may not know that Larkin was a novelist before he was a poet. Indeed, he always claimed the novel as the greater form. A good novel for Larkin was a long poem. He wrote two in quick succession in his early twenties, Jill and A Girl in Winter, (making him a precocious talent candidate.) He worked on a third, but found he had lost the skill. He thought A Girl in Winter was the better book and stoutly denied it owed anything at all to Elizabeth Bowen (I’m afraid I don’t believe him).
Jill, however, is genuinely original and deserved a better fate. Long after its publication (and descent into obscurity) he received a letter from Kingsley Amis saying he had seen a copy in a dirty bookshop in Coventry Street sandwiched between Naked and Unashamed and High-handed Yvonne.
Larkin wrote, “I can explain that it was probably the imprint that won Jill a place in that Coventry Street shop. Reginald Ashley Caton, mysterious and elusive proprietor of the Fortune Press throughout the Thirties and Forties, divided his publishing activity between poetry and what then passed for pornography, often of a homosexual tinge. My dust jacket advertised titles such as Climbing Boy, Barbarian Boy, Diary of the Teens by A Boy, and so on … I had rather despairingly bunged the novel at him as no one else seemed interested. He must have accepted it unread, since the printer’s objections [there are a few vulgar words in the book] appeared to take him by surprise; our only meeting was in a tea shop near Victoria Station to discuss this, when he assured me that to find yourself in the dock on a charge of obscenity was “no joke”. (That cup of tea was my sole payment for both books.)”
Larkin’s first poems (really just a pamphlet) began life with the same publisher. “You must remember The North Ship was published by an obscure press – The Fortune Press – that didn’t even send out review copies; it was next door to a vanity press. One had none of the rewards of authorship, neither money (no agreement) nor publicity. You felt you’d cooked your goose.”
Larkin as you probably know spent much of his life as the Librarian in Hull University. Asked about regrets in an interview in the 1980s he said, “Everything I’ve written has been done after a day’s work, in the evening: what would it have been like if I’d written it in the morning, after a night’s sleep?”
By the way, the same rather earnest interviewer risked this question: “Is Jorge Louis Borges the only other contemporary poet of note who is also a librarian?” To receive the wonderful answer, “Who’s Jorge Louis Borges?”
Reviewing A T ime to Tell Lies, Rebecca Foster wrote, "so let's hope that the author may have a series, or at least a sequel, in the works." Girl in Straw Hat is the sequel. Meanwhile, if you've not read A Time to Tell Lies, what are you waiting for?