Jill doesn't exist. John Kemp, a young man recently arrived at Oxford, invents it almost unintentionally during a conversation with his roommate, the kind of lazy and arrogant fool you often bump into in college and who usually ends your days. teaching something; Kemp would like to have Christopher Warner's money, his distinction, his dealings with servants, his success with women, and his knack for appropriating what does not belong to him, drinking heavily and despising the education he receives, and Jill is the first thing that occurs to him to feel like his equal, a romantic fantasy. But Jill does exist, after all; and when Kemp meets Gillian, the cousin of Warner's girlfriend, he falls madly in love: she is the woman he imagined long before he knew she existed, but this is better Gillian not knowing.
"It aroused no public comment" is Philip Larkin's laconic summary of the critical reception of
Jill
, the novel about Kemp, Warner and Gillian that he published in 1946. He had written it three years earlier, when, as he recalls in the prologue of 1963 that accompanies his recent edition in Spanish, the impressions of his time at Oxford were still fresh. Kemp is Larkin and, like him, he is surrounded for the first time by people who do not belong to the working class. “We were (…) in the second year of the war,” he recalls in the prologue. "Life in
college
it was austere. The routine of the prewar period had been broken, in some respects the changes were permanent. Everyone paid the same rates (in our case 12 shillings a day) and ate the same thing. Due to the ordinances of the Ministry of Food, the city did not have much to offer in terms of expensive food and beverages, and university parties (…) had been suspended indefinitely. Because of the gasoline rationing, no one drove, and it was difficult to dress in style because of the clothing rationing. There was still coal in the warehouses outside our rooms, but fuel rationing would soon make it go away. Queuing for a piece of cake or a cigarette after breakfast, after ordering the books at the Bodleian [Library], became a habit ”,write.
He was a jazz critic for a decade and went so far as to say that he could live a week without poetry, but not a day without that music.
Jazz and the friendship of future writers Bruce Montgomery (who took the pseudonym Edmund Crispin) and Kingsley Amis were almost the only intellectual stimuli of that period, or at least the most persistent: Larkin was a jazz critic for a decade and eventually to say that he could live a week without poetry, but not a day without that music, and with Amis ("they both had the impression that they had finally found someone more brilliant than themselves," Martin Amis once said) He joined a friendship that lasted a lifetime, to which a delusional and malicious correspondence testifies.
Kingsley Amis, a great friend of Philip Larkin, portrayed in 1987 with 'The Old Demons', the novel that won him the Booker Prize.
Larkin was born in Coventry in August 1922 and was already writing poems when he entered Oxford;
Despite this, at first he tried to build a reputation as a storyteller: after
Jill he
published
A Girl in Winter
(1947) and spent the next five years trying to write a third novel, unsuccessfully;
His entire reputation is the product of his books of poetry, from
A Minor Deception
(1955) to
Tall Windows
(1974), through
The Wedding of Pentecost
(1964): in them he turned his back on Anglo-Saxon modernism to become an involuntary chronicler of postwar British life, about whose only seemingly more banal aspects he wrote in sometimes harsh language. Larkin, writes Félix de Azúa, “disguises himself as a civil servant, as a cynic, as a perverse, as a vulgar and even rude citizen, as a sarcastic and ordinary. His poems, however, sing over and over again the exasperating transience of splendor and they do so with such painful intensity that the mask of a stupid and stupid civil servant demands to hide suffering with dignity. In his best poems he curses and blasphemes, revolts like mortally wounded because girls and boys grow old and stupid,because families become a caricature of the original nucleus of the species (a subject also obsessive in Rimbaud), and when Larkin's piercing cry reaches its blackest mask of cynicism, of imposing British elegance, we see the adolescents wither as if we were attending to the destruction of Hector. In his negative way, Larkin sings our fleetingness to the great baroque music of [Pierre de] Ronsard ”.
“Larkin”, writes Félix de Azúa, “disguises himself as a civil servant, as a cynic, as a perverse, as a common citizen.
His poems, however, sing over and over again the exasperating transience of splendor "
Jill's
author
He never married or had children ('Let this be the verse' begins with the phrase "Well your parents screw you" and ends by advising "Escape as soon as you can / and do not have children"), was not part of the literary scene of His time, he had a mediocre career as a librarian in provincial universities, he lived all his life in a room without luxuries, his books were not commercially successful; Unlike the inexhaustible Kingsley Amis, Larkin came to an end after two novels, a selection of essays, and five books of poetry: indeed, when he was wanted to be honored with the greatest honor an English poet can receive, that of occupying the position of Poet laureate, he rejected it, admitting that he had not written in seven years. He died in 1985, but his last poem had been published in 1977: “Most things may never happen: this will happen,/ and the certainty of its fulfillment makes us enraged / when we are trapped in the furnace of fear, / without company, or a drink in hand. The value is useless: / that is, not for others to be scared. Being brave / does not allow anyone to get rid of the grave ”.
He was not part of the literary scene of his time, he had a mediocre career as a librarian in provincial universities, he lived all his life in a room without luxuries, his books were not commercially successful.
But Larkin's grave has no peace, as the editions of his poetry in Spanish and, now, that of his novels prove.
Kingsley once wrote to him that he had seen a copy of
Jill
in a Coventry Street shop between
Naked and Shameless
and
Ivonne in the high heels.
But his novel has little to offer the erotic novel reader; Rather, it is the story of a handful of young people over whose heads hung the threat of time suspended by the tragedy and who, nevertheless, did not stop drinking, reading and falling in love with imaginary and also real women. "The affairs of the country were going so badly, and the possibility of a victorious peace was so remote, that any effort invested in carving out a future after the war was considered little less than an absurd waste of time," recalls Larkin; but the fact is that
Jill
is written with passion and solvency and has exceptional passages, superbly translated by Marcelo Cohen, only weighed down in this edition by a somewhat larger amount of misprints than usual.
Larkin sent a copy of the novel to Monica Jones in December 1946, at her request and, as she wrote, "at her own risk."
"Don't say anything if you don't have any particular opinion about her: and if you think
Jill
is a bunch of teenage crap (…) don't hesitate to tell me," he asked.
We don't know what the answer was, but Monica became his partner after reading it and stayed by his side for 40 years: if there is something like the positive reception of a work, we already know what it is.
READINGS
Jill
Philip Larkin
Translation by Marcelo Cohen
Impedimenta, 2021
312 pages
22.50 euros
Letters to Monica
Philip Larkin
Translation by Verónica Peña Olmedo and Jorge Osorio González
La Umbría y la Solana, 2020
642 pages
30 euros
Poetry collected
Philip Larkin
Translation by Damián Alou and Marcelo Cohen
Lumen, 2014
256 page
22.90 euros
A girl in winter
Philip Larkin
Translation by Marcelo Cohen
Impedimenta, 2015.
304 pages
22.95 euros
All What Jazz.
Writings on jazz, 1961-1971
Philip Larkin
Translation by Ferran Esteve
Paidós, 2004
384 pages
26 euros
You can follow BABELIA on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
.
