📚 'Rather Dated' January: Philip Larkin's 'Jill'📚

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Welcome to the 'Rather Dated' Bookclub!
Our latest book was Philip Larkin's 'Jill'.

Philip Larkin, perhaps better known for his poetry, wrote two novels, 'A Girl in Winter' and 'Jill'. This is his second novel, written over the course of a year and published after Larkin's first year at Oxford in 1946.

The protagonist in the story is John Kemp, a boy from a modest background from a northern town who has been awarded a scholarship at Oxford University. The story is told through John's eyes as he navigates his way around the campus and finds his feet as an undergraduate student. He tries to fit in with his room-mate and his friends who are wealthy and privileged and also boorish and unruly. John is too naive to recognise that he is being used by them.
Under their influence, his studious habits fall by the wayside and he spends his days being merry or drunk.

He has a crush on Elizabeth, a cousin of one of them. When this isn't realised, he makes up a sister, Jill, to impress Christopher and friends. Much to his surprise, he sees the incarnation of Jill cycling around Oxford one day and he becomes fixated on meeting her and getting to know her which lands him in real trouble.

This is a quiet, understated book that leaves a lingering impression of sadness, loneliness and wasted opportunities on the reader. It is very descriptive and strongly evokes a sense of Oxford during World War Two and also the northern town of Huddersfield when John goes back to check in with his family following an air raid. There is an excruciating moment at the start of the book when John discovers that his room mate is using the tea set that his mother bought for him without his permission. We know from this moment on that John isn't going to cope well, that he is out of his depth.

I particularly liked the beginning and end of the book. I thought the writing was really very good. I was less impressed by the middle section where John writes diary entries and a short story in the voice of Jill. I thought this was odd and rather dull, but it's a clever device when you think of it, to illustrate John's interior thought processes. When I was reading it, however, I felt it threw off the pace of the story.

While I felt sympathy for John, I didn't feel he was a likeable character. I certainly felt sorry for him in his situation but also quite annoyed that he refused to see Christopher for who he was. I wished he could have cultivated the friendship of the other student who was like himself and not part of the privileged set. I also thought that was a spectacularly mean trick he played on that guy at the end. I was annoyed that he wasted the opportunity provided to him to study and get on at university by working hard and not coasting along like Christopher and the gang. It illustrated the difference in social class between him and them, although Larkin said that this wasn't the main thrust of the book. It really stood out for me.

Overall, I liked 'Jill'. It was worth reading. I especially liked the setting of the book. The description of life at Oxford during war-time was its best feature. It seemed that John lived in a bubble for most of it, but the reader still had a keen sense of what life was like then for people.

I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on it.

Excellent review, Fuzzy!

I'm dashing out so maybe back with more later (and I don’t just now have my copy of A Motion's Larkin biography to hand), but I agree about the clunky interpolation of 'Jill's' diary and stories. These are derived from the (vaguely Sapphic) school stories Larkin wrote under the pseudonym 'Brunette Coleman', mainly one called 'Trouble at Willow Gables' - which iirc he was writing at roughly the same time as Jill. All very interesting to pick apart in retrospect but I don’t think it helps make the actual novel better, as you say…!

Thank you Terpsichore!
Thanks for the background information!
It was an odd interlude like a strange kind of alternate reality

Just marking my place, will post my review later. I didn’t know that, about “Brunette Coleman”, how interesting.

Thanks Fuzzy for an excellent synopsis and review.

I agree with everyone that the section written by Jill was a bit of a flop. It ruined the continuity of the main narrative for me - which was interesting enough on its own and didn't need this device - and I'm afraid I didn't find Larkin was very convincing writing in the voice of a teenage girl. It all felt slightly hammy to me.

I really enjoyed the rest of it though. As a story about class, aspiration, and coming of age I thought it was almost painfully astute at times. I found some of it quite excruciating to read, especially the scene where John is making all the elaborate preparations for Gillian to come to tea, and of course you know that she certainly won't show up.

I agree that John isn't a wholly likeable character, though I did sympathise with him in many respects - his loneliness and his desperate attempts to insinuate himself into Christopher's circle made me feel sorry for him.

One thing I really disliked about John Kemp as a character was his abominable treatment of poor Whitbread. In the last part, at the start of his night of mad drunkenness, when he puts butter in Whitbread's slippers and jam in his books I felt quite shocked by his meanness. I know it was an expression of his desire to get away from everything that a person like Whitbread represented (someone with whom he had a lot in common, and from whom he was therefore desperate to draw his distance), but I still felt a bit appalled.

Overall though this has inspired me to read more Larkin.

Thank you MotherofPearl! I agree with you on all your points. I thoroughly agree with 'hammy' to describe the middle section of the book. I was also appalled by John's treatment of Whitbread who had always been kind to him, perhaps the only one who had shown him kindness. I think Elizabeth was quite nice to him eventually, although he made it awkward for her with regard to her young cousin.

If you read Larkin's other novel, let us know what you thought of it!

I read A Girl in Winter several years ago when someone in our book club chose it. I can see now that in fact it has quite a lot in common with Jill: it’s about a character who’s alienated from pretty much everything. I dug out my review from then:

Larkin had thoughts of being a novelist at this early stage - 1947 - but the writing is so poetic that his future destiny is clear. Katherine Lind, a 'foreigner' (exact nationality deliberately never specified, but my money's on German) lives in England and works in a provincial library, as the country shivers in the grip of a frozen winter. She is alone, without family or friends, but has contacted the Fennels, with whom she spent a summer several years earlier when the son, Robin - her pen-pal - invited her to stay. She fell in love with him as a 16-year-old and the middle section of this 3-part novel is a flashback to that heightened time. In the final part comes a tense and bleak encounter between Katherine and Robin, both now older and changed by life and events.
This is a curious book, beautifully written but affectless - intentionally, I suppose, as Larkin wanted it to be a study in loneliness and isolation. He wasn't very happy with it, and in later life virtually disowned it.

Thank you for including this review, Terpsichore!
I can definitely see the similarity to Jill.
There is a kind of abstraction going on with his character portraits I think, a sort of distance between them and the reader.
It's interesting how Larkin grew to dislike his first novel immensely.

I also liked the beginning and ending of the book but blimey the Jill section went on for ages. The other sections though I did enjoy the background and how that one teacher decided to focus on John and meeting his dad etc. Then the general worrying about money once at university and trying to fit in but not really succeeding.

A very mixed bag

Such an interesting choice. Larkin’s poetry is exquisite. In fact, at its best it’s some of the most beautiful poetry I have ever read - up there with Shelley, Wordsworth and T S Eliot. I’d always been curious about his novels.

Interesting little fact: when Larkin was at Oxford, he became friends with Kingsley Amis. Amis wanted to be a poet, and Larkin wanted to be a novelist. Yet Amis became a famous novelist (Lucky Jim is great), and Larkin became the greatest British poet of the late 20th-century (with the possible exceptions of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Douglas Dunn). Strange huh?

There was an introduction to my edition.
I thought it was really interesting!

Brava Fuzzy, brilliant OP* *🙌

I’d studied Larkin's poetry at school (like most of my gen in England I think) but had never read either novel, so was glad of the push to read Jill. Overall I thought the writing excellent but the book as a whole flawed, often in puzzling ways, but intriguing too - I’ve begun the Andrew Motion Larkin biography in consequence, and will definitely go on to AGiW (esp after @Terpsichore review).

Anyway, if I’d ever known any details about this book beforehand, I’d forgotten everything except that it was an Oxford novel written shortly after Larkin had graduated, so went in expecting a gloomy undergrad version of Lucky Jim: Unlucky Jill? And was properly caught out by the twist of Jill being the name of a fictional character in the book itself; then both excited (I love girls’ school stories! I love meta portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man stuff!) and skittish (the sleaze potential, especially from this particular man!); then increasingly bored, and baffled by how boring it was and how much space it was taking up in such a short book.

The Brunette Coleman background helped a bit - it seems Larkin’s insistence on the ‘innocence’ of the fantasy seemed to entail cutting out any spark in the original stories along with the Sapphic smut… But while reading I just found it difficult to believe even John could become so obsessed with writing such bland pap. Motion’s biography also includes the detail that the moment when John “crossed to the sofa and drank the cold dregs from Jill’s cup, putting his mouth where hers had been” comes from another of Larkin’s homoerotic undergrad short stories (sharing characters named Christopher Warner, Elizabeth, Patrick and David) but there the cup ‘kiss’ is between two male students. Casts another fascinating light on the final book’s repressive, evasive approach to sex/desire.

Otherwise, the sublimation of sex/desire as food and drink/appetite did work well. OK it was a bit heavy-handed and repetitive (that level of patterning better suited to poetry, so interesting in that respect) but since granular details of daily life are a major part of the appeal of ‘RD’ books for me, those also made this a great choice for this group (thanks @StellaOlivetti !) And led to two standout scenes, which others have highlighted already: the theft of the tea-service and John's jam vandalism of Whitbread’s room.

In addition, I found the trip home (after news of the bombing) brilliant, and the brief scene after John’s return to Oxford, where all Warner's dickhead friends facetiously reveal their various experiences of the Blitz so effective in bringing the characters and the war context into focus for a brief moment. According to Motion, one working title for Jill was Figures Under Glass, which I prefer - it conveys the mutedness of the book, the mundane abnormality of wartime distorting everything from offstage. I wish he'd gone with that and then cut most of the schoolgirl nonsense

Fully aware of irony in my complaints about things being too longwinded and boring😅Full rations of and to anyone who made it this far. (And even if you stand me up I won't put jam in your books.)

Thank you Inaptonym 😊
'Figures Under Glass' would have been a much better title for the book. Completely agree.

I enjoyed your thoughts on this do I get extra cake? The strange middle section of 'Jill' reminded me of what a schoolboy might have done (or still do!) when writing an essay. Starts off, gets a bit bored and hands it over to a mate to write a chunk, gets it back and finishes it. I've blotted the odd bit out to remember the parts at Oxford and his trip to Huddersfield.

@inaptonym granular details of daily life are a major part of the appeal of ‘RD’ books for me me too x 1000!

I had forgotten just how sad this book was! I first read it before I went to university, decades ago, and I think I may have just been too young and green to really comprehend the awful social disadvantage John was under, and I rather think I missed the thing that struck me most forcefully on this reread: the mundane, oppressive, constant background of the war. I mostly remembered the pushy teacher and his fussy note taking, with the red underlining and the brass head pins. I do so agree about the granular details! It’s like a Time Machine in miniature.
You’re absolutely right, @inaptonym , about the conflation of food/ desire, again something I hadn’t consciously considered.
Most of what I think about this book has already been said more eloquently than I’d be able to, so I’ll just add my twopennyworth: Larkin is a great writer, clearly a poet, but Jill, for me, comes across as juvenalia (very very polished juvenalia but still). I guess it’s the Wednesday play type trope of the grammar school boy going to Oxford and being completely out of place that makes it seem so to me. It’s brilliantly written but it’s kind of obvious,iyswim? The cruelty of his behaviour towards Whitbread was shocking, but I understood it as John wanting to punish Whitbread as a way of distancing himself from him (their similar backgrounds meant really they should have stuck together). Finally, the invention of the fictitious Jill reminded me very strongly of a short story I read ages ago where a character who worked in a cotton mill invented a sister to impress a colleague … I think it was a Bill McNaughton story so I guess was written after Jill. I’m going to go and look it up.

Bill Naughton! Not McNaughton. Can’t find the short story though. I think it was in a collection called Late Night on Watling Street.

I'm really enjoying reading everyone's reviews - lots of insights to consider.

I'd not thought about the food and repressed desire connection @inaptonym but of course now you've mentioned it I can see just what you mean. It's particularly evident in the tea room scene with Christopher's mother, and of course in the lavish preparations John makes for the doomed tea with Gillian.

Totally @MotherofPearl and chucking his sandwiches out of the train window right at the beginning!

Fascinating to get the POV of a rereader @StellaOlivetti The detail about the note-taking is exactly the kind of thing that would stick in my head too!
I wonder how I would have responded to the book if I'd been closer to John's/Larkin's age. Some of the social awkwardness might have hit harder, but I probably would have been less sympathetic to John's passivity. Didn't he end up going earlier than planned, at only seventeen? Whereas some of Christopher's group might have been early 20s - quite a gap at that age.

[Another Motion-inspired sidebar: It seems Larkin was in many ways more like Christopher than John, arriving at Oxford with a social group already in place (many from school), being the drunk 'cool kids' constantly in trouble with Proctors, sneering at working class studious boys etc. which also muddies the sympathies. I did find it curious how consistently un-romanticised C&co. were and often outright disgusting with all the puking and belching ('boorish' as Fuzzy put it!) - it seemed as rooted in self-disgust as John's portrayal.]

Anyway, as someone who now teaches at a university, I did notice some similarities between this wartime generation's attitude to the future (and working towards it) and my Covid and post-Covid undergraduate cohorts. Not quite nihilism and that weirdly anhedonic hedonism. Concerning. And that it was meeting up with his teacher again, with his well-meaning but totally misguided advice, that set off John's final breakdown...