My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development by A.T. Tolley

Abstract

A brief and ironic final chapter provides a QED to the book. The Waverley novels validated romance, and in so doing recoded the categories and motifs of female reading. “But revalorized categories and motifs are poten­ tially reversible” (248), and this reversal becomes apparent in the reviews of Ivanhoe, and blatant in Carlyle’s landmark essay of 1838, which attacks the novels for “allowing [the reader] to lie down at his ease and be ministered to.” The gender has changed, since Carlyle’s Waverley readers are “languid indolent men,” but the charge is exactly the one that reviewers levelled at female novel-readers a generation earlier. The book will be essential reading for Scott specialists. Ferris makes ex­ cellent use of recent work on the Waverley novels, and particularly of Harry Shaw’s The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Succes­ sors (1983) and Jane Millgate’s Scott’s Last Edition: A Study in Publishing History (1987). Though eschewing close readings, the book does offer pene­ trating discussions of several Waverley novels, including the lesser-known A Legend of Montrose (1819) and The Fair Maid of Perth (1828); furthermore, Ferris offers shrewd critical suggestions throughout — as to why, for instance, protagonists like Edward Waverley do not talk much (129), or why the nov­ els tend to begin with conventional, ritual moments rather than unique ones (221). For the most part, though, Ferris is preaching to the unconverted, to students of the period or of the novel who are not Scott specialists, and her book guarantees that this larger audience will find it much harder in future to dismiss the Waverley novels. b r u c e s t o v e l / University o f Alberta A.T. Tolley, My Proper Ground: A Study of the Work of Philip Larkin and its Development (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991). xii, 227. $19.95 paper. My Proper Ground breaks little new ground in Larkin studies, choosing instead to stay close to the tried and the (almost) true. It employs a good deal of scholarly data to reinforce the standard view of Larkin’s growth to artistic maturity (see especially Chs. 3, 4, 10), and it has the distinction of being the Larkin study most intimate with the poet’s early poems. For readers who know a lot about Larkin but less about jazz, the chapter on Larkin and jazz (Ch. 8) is clear and useful; and My Proper Ground also contains a convincing and concise chapter on the poet’s process of composi­ tion (Ch. 10, “The Making of the Poems” ). I don’t agree with many of the 116 broader claims made about Larkin in My Proper Ground, but this is a seri­ ous work of consolidation that states clearly the customary view of Larkin’s works. Tolley’s thesis is close to the conventional, almost official view of Larkin’s development as a poet, and it is stated as an analysis of a number of inspi­ rations Larkin picked up and altered as he matured — influences, generally speaking, from W.H. Auden, then W.B. Yeats, then Thomas Hardy and John Betjeman, and then the Movement milieu. That is the gist of the first 136 pages of the book, and the last roughly 65 pages of text comprise what look like long footnote or add-on chapters (like the one on jazz and the one on process of composition), chapters that chop up this study’s structure somewhat, giving it a blunt, bits-and-pieces look that is not unrelated to the lack of edge in the book’s controlling thesis. When asked what he himself thought was his proper literary tradition, the “proper ground” (so to speak) of his affinities, Larkin once quipped: I reckon I’m in the agnostic-provincial-satiric bag, the Butlers and Hardys and Bennetts, rather than any High Church polylingual transcendental Alexandrian jetset — but I suppose that’s sufficiently obvious. My ances­ tors are novelists.1 Many critics, now including Tolley, have tended to bark up the wrong genre when dealing with Larkin’s place in literary traditions, and this is possibly why Tolley fails to mention, for example, D.H...