Schoolgirl days

When I was in about Year 9, my friend Roxanne introduced me to the Dimsie schoolgirl books by Dorita Fairlie Bruce. The books in this series had riveting titles such as Dimsie Moves Up and Dimsie Moves Up Again. Dimsie, like many a good schoolgirl heroine, was always “barging in” on things and “getting into scrapes”. And there also was Mabs, who was bound to become a journalist with her ear for gossip, Angela whom could never be trusted on the hockey field with her hot Spanish blood, and so forth.

We read Dimsie with lashings of irony, I hasten to add.

My mother, somehow remembering this schoolgirl craze, gave me a copy of Philip Larkin’s Trouble at Willow Gables for Christmas. Yes, that’s right: Philip Larkin. It seemed he shared our fascination with adolescent schoolgirl literature, including the fortunes of Dimsie.

I’m not sure why I expect you, dear reader/fellow blogger/lurker to share our fascination with both Mr Larkin and the schoolgirl genre, but never mind. As it is, other readers, lurkers, etc, may know more about the foibles of the youthful Mr Larkin. I am, however, dependent on the notes provided by James Booth to the Faber and Faber edition.

Things start out well: Mr Booth writes: “Throughout the 1940s Larkin’s ambition was to be a novelist.” After that, they get a bit murky. It seems that while Larkin was trying to find his voice as a writer at about the age of 21, he was a lot more comfy writing in the third person intimate as Brunette Colman, author of Trouble at Willow Gables, Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, and other odds and sods including poetry and an essay on the schoolgirl genre titled “What are we writing for?”

His other purpose in dabbling with this genre seems to have been to exploit its lesbian potential - as (what was described by Mr Booth) a cross-gendered man. Larkin underwent an interesting sexual evolution: he wrote to Kingsley Amis during his Brunette Colman phase: “homosexuality has completely been replaced by lesbianism in my character at the moment.”

Writing under a feminine persona in a highly feminine genre may have been protective or even nurturing for a man uncomfortable with traditional masculinity during a hyper-masculine wartime era. Booth also suggests Rosemary Auchmuty’s feminist defence of the schoolgirl genre may have been applicable to Larkin.

Auchmuty writes: it “offered me as a young woman a temporary escape and refuge from the profoundly heterosexual society I lived in.” Another possibility here is that Larkin was rather self-consciously drawing on Woolf’s notion of the artist’s androgyny, and there seem to be some covert references to Woolf in Michaelmas Term at Bride’s.

There was, however, not enough lesbianism in the genre for Larkin. Writing to Amis about the completion of Colman’s essay on the genre, he states:

Girls’ stories are not bad, but they are obviously not written by people of erotic sensibility. There is lesbianism in them, but not enough, and it is treated too casually. It’s nice when the girls kiss each other and get into each others’ beds and quarrel and twist each others’ wrists, but in between there is an awful lot of waffle, and the authoresses are very stupid women, without a grain of humour in their tiny little minds …

So speaks the voice of brutish male youth, trying to cover his tracks.

There’s also been some speculation as to whether these early works by Larkin might be classified as pornography (Kingsley Amis dubbed them “obscene and soft porn fairy stories”), but if anything they seemed more “Carry on”, at times, to me. Schoolgirls frequently rip tight-fitting trousers during japes to reveal alabaster botties and so forth.

Larkin himself said that these stories were “unclassifiable”. Booth argues that: “Whatever else it might be, Trouble at Willow Gables is a contribution to the genre, and follows its parameters with some faithfulness.” Whatever the case, I doubt somehow that Larkin would ever have imagined his schoolgirl scribblings being published in a hardback Faber and Faber edition some years later.

I’m going to quote some sections now, hopefully without too much sniggering.

In Trouble at Willow Gables, Hilary, “a semi-intellectual six-former”, develops a crush on Mary, “an athletic fourth form girl”. This is Hilary, musing on her unrequited love for Mary:

What a damned nuisance it was, too, that Mary was so decidedly not the kind of girl to get a crush on anyone; and even if she did, Hilary reflected bitterly, it wouldn’t be for me. There had been girls who had shyly presented Hilary with flowers in the past, or asked if they could clean her bicycle, but they were all so singularly repellent that Hilary had made no response, beyond utilising this cheap labour to the fullest extent - a practice that tended to shorten the crush considerably.

Hilary then attempts to seduce Mary when she falls asleep during French verb tuition. This is passage leading up to Mary’s attempted seduction:

Hilary selected savoir and devoir, which Mary knew, and mettre, which she didn’t. Hilary made her repeat it three times, watching the neat, pronouncing movements of her lips, the little white mordant teeth, the tender ears, and downy skin: while, letting her eyes drift below the neck, she perceived that Mary’s devotion to athletics had produced a figure that a Spartan girl might have envied. The dressing-gown had fallen apart, revealing two firm legs clad in poplin pyjamas: the white ankles were bare above the slippers. Out of this amorous mist Hilary heard Mary asking for a clarification of the rules governing the formation of plurals, and recollecting her thoughts, she gave them.

Part of the climax of Trouble at Willow Gables involves Hilary being expelled for lesbianism, after she attempts to blackmail another girl she catches stealing £5 from the headmistress’s study with sexual favours.

The next book, Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s, is even better, although unfinished. Here the girls from Willow Gables are re-united at Oxford. Mary finds herself mysteriously slated to share a room with the predatory Hilary, who turns out to be rather a good sort in her adult form, if given to rather too much innuendo. Another girl, Marie, starts reading psychoanalysis: “It did not take Marie very long to psycho-analyse herself, despite Mr Barnyard’s professional warnings that this was a dangerous practice only to be undertaken by trained (and paid) psychologists.”

She later becomes concerned over her sister’s collection of 37 belts:

At this point she grabbed Marie. With a flurry of golden hair and black velveteen, the younger girl twisted to escape but Philippa had learnt how to deal with Marie from long experience. In a very short time she was lying face downwards on Philippa’s silken knees, with her velvet skirt folded neatly around her waist. The belt had a curious metal buckle, which Philippa rightly adjudged would add a tearful sting to the lashes. Oblivious of Marie’s piteous tears, cried and struggles, she thrashed her till her forearm ached. Towards the end she even began to enjoy it.

OK, you get the idea. Larkin went on to publish two adult novels, Jill in 1946 and A Girl in Winter in 1947. He gave up on a third and emerged as a poet rather than a novelist. Later he wrote: “novels are about other people and poems are about yourself. I think that was the trouble, really. I didn’t know enough about other people, I didn’t like them enough.”

Thinking back to the amusement that Roxanne and myself derived from the Dimsie series, it’s the almost ludicrous innocence and banality of the genre that stands out. That is, say compared to Puberty Blues, which we would already have read passed round under the desk. Not to mention the novelty of the boarding school world with its “rags on the dorm” and “apple-pie beds” and its suggestions of easier, simpler times.

Larkin, in his critical essay as Brunette Colman on the genre, says that the schoolgirl story cannot be told outside the institution of the school: it is “not a story about schoolgirls, but a story about a school with schoolgirls in it.” He also expresses the notion that the schoolgirl story is bound up with nostalgia for innocent, long-gone (pre-war?) times. The setting must always be England:

We must never forget that we are evoking that old, safe, happy, beautiful world for our contemporaries as well as creating a world of make-believe for our juniors, who are not yet old enough to savour the quintessence of their youth.

He also demands that the genre be taken seriously, that its writers should not talk down to their schoolgirl subjects. It’s novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Picnic at Hanging Rock (or even a TV series such as Brides of Christ) that perhaps take the schoolgirl story seriously in the way that Larkin proposed, exploiting much of the underlying repression and eroticism of the genre.