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Larkin's Use of a Woolf Innovation

by John Cobley

Tuesday Oct 22nd, 2024

 

 

 

 In two of her later books, The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937), Virginia Woolf began her chapters with a prose poem. These poems were separated from their respective chapters in the text, and they contained no material directly connected to the contents of the two novels. Ten years after The Years was published, Philip Larkin used the same technique for his 1947 novel A Girl in Winter. Since Woolf’s use of prose poems in her two novels was a clear innovation, I will argue that Larkin must have got the idea from Woolf.

 

Woolf

Woolf’s initial use of prose poems in The Waves was just one of the many innovations in that novel. The nine poems, averaging 469 words each, were printed in italics so that they were visually separate from their chapters. They were essentially nature descriptions. This excerpt is typical: In the garden where the trees stood thick over flower-beds, ponds, and greenhouses the birds sang in the hot sunshine, each alone. One sang under the bedroom window; another on the topmost twig of the lilac bush; another on the edge of the wall. Each sang stridently, with passion, with vehemence, as if to let the song burst out of it, no matter if it shattered the song of another bird with harsh discord.

 

Each of Woolf’s nine prose poems starts with the position of the sun, developing from pre-dawn to sunset. The language is still prosaic but the vocabulary is rich. Except for one chapter, where snow is a common theme in both the poem and its chapter, there is no explicit connection between the prose poems and their respective chapters. Rather they act as overtures. 

 

Woolf must have been satisfied with this innovation because she used this technique again in her next novel, The Years, even though she was moving well away from the experiments of The Waves and writing a more conventional narrative novel. The eleven poems describe everyday English life, mainly in London but also in the countryside. An example: In the country it was an ordinary day enough; one of the long reel of days that turned as the years passed from green to orange, from grass to harvest. It was neither hot nor cold, an English spring day, bright enough, but a purple cloud behind the hill might mean rain. The grasses rippled with shadow, and then with sunlight. In London, however, the stricture and pressure of the season were already felt, especially in the West End, where flags flew; canes tapped; dresses flowed; and houses freshly painted had awnings spread and swinging baskets of red geraniums. As befits the setting of novel, the overtures in The Years focus more on London and on urban life—traffic, people, railway stations, clocks. Yet each overture also covers the English countryside. 

 

As well, the overtures in The Years are typeset differently. They are not in italics and are only differentiated from the narrative by a two-line space. (It is worth noting that in the second and third chapters, a two-line space is not used. I suspect this was an editorial error.

 

Larkin

The young Larkin no doubt read Woolf’s novels. He was of course planning to be a novelist in those formative years. And he was, as biographer Andrew Motion asserts, an admirer of The Waves. (Philip Larkin, A Writer’s Life, 43) His first novel, Jill (1946), is a conventional novel, while the second, A Girl in Winter (1947) “deals with less explicit feelings,” which he “tried to represent…by indirect reference and allegoric incident.” (Larkin, Letter to his parents, 11 November 1946). In short A Girl in Winter was a more poetic novel and he had Woolf’s example to follow. 

 

In A Girl in Winter, Larkin uses two prose-poem overtures that are similar to Woolf’s. Both describe snow scenes, the first urban, the second rural. The first starts the book as Chapter 1; the second starts the third of the three “Parts” of the novel, also as Chapter 1. The second  “Part” does not have an overture. Perhaps Larkin felt that a third overture on snow would have been too much. Nevertheless, I believe that Larkin’s two overtures of approximately 400 and 440 words are clearly indebted to Woolf’s “overture” innovation.

 

Larkin’s First Overture

In some 400  words and three paragraphs, Larkin sets the winter scene that will be the background for his narrative. After a short paragraph on the general scene—snow drifts, absence of sun, brown sky, lack of light—Larkin describes winter in more detail that includes people and scenes indoors as well as outdoors: “It lay in ditches and in hollows in the fields, where only birds walked. In some lanes the wind had swept it up 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….” This description is very much like Woolf’s overtures in The Years, but Larkin does not use specific locations like Marble Arch and Kensington and focuses more on human life: “People were unwilling to get up…. Nevertheless, the candles had to be lit, and the ice in jugs smashed, and the milk unfrozen; the men had to be given their breakfasts and got off to work in the yards.”

 

Larkin’s Second Overture

Whereas the first overture is set at a work-day dawn, the second is set on a Saturday afternoon. This was when working people went home after working the morning. Larkin describes the different ways people passed the time—reading the newspaper by a fire, sitting in cinemas, shopping, playing billiards in saloons. He then goes on to describe the winter scene in town and to set the mood for the last part of the narrative: “And meanwhile, the winter remained. It was not romantic or picturesque: the snow, that was graceful in the country, was days old in the town: It had been trodden to a brown powder and shoveled into the gutters. Where it had not been disturbed, on burnt-out buildings, on warehouse roofs and sheds in the railway years, it made the scene more dingy and dispirited.”

 

Conclusion

Larkin’s poetic inclinations thus led him to make use of Woolf’s “overture” innovation. And although his second novel was much more successful than his first, he subsequently focused on poetry. His career as a novelist was over.

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