Air passengers faced travel chaos today after a software problem at Britain’s air traffic system triggered mass delays and cancellations. By page 498, on balance, one knows just why.The reviewer is writing a life of Ronald Firbank. Though Booth acknowledges the “support and encouragement” of Motion and Anthony Thwaite, Larkin’s literary executors, their effective absence from this project may indicate a certain ambivalence. As Motion noted, the material is “disappointingly thin”, offering “a picture of sexual indifference, disgust, and/or violence towards women” and an “insoluble fear of marriage” that Larkin was “unable to transmute into art”.Proust and Joyce’s ur-texts may or may not illuminate the masterpieces that followed This, however, unmistakably describes a creative dead end Larkin’s genius only really found its outlet in verse. Though Andrew Motion’s biography considered “neither novel more than a fascinating curiosity”, the Coleman fiction entertains, with suggestive links to Larkin’s poetry.Regarding his attempts at a third novel, however, there can be no excuse for publication.
Less obviously, the strong concession to the woman’s perspective in A Girl in Winter may be indebted to Larkin’s experiments in an all-female world.One of the few accusations not levelled against Larkin since his death has been that of lesbian propagandist. But it is the long-forgotten world of Joy Francis, Dorita Fairlie Bruce and Nancy Breary that inform these writings and allow Larkin his sly Sapphic spin.In the period 1943-1948, Larkin saw successfully published his two extant novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter. Presented under the pseudonym “Brunette Coleman”, these constituted part of a putative epistolary pact with Kingsley Amis to penetrate the world of girls-school fiction.Two novels resulted, Trouble at Willow Gables and the unfinished Michaelmas Term at St Bride’s. Also included are Sugar and Spice, a handful of passionate woman-to-woman verse spoofs, and What Are We Writing For?, an oddly thoughtful essay on girls’ fiction. The film M?hen in Uniform and Gautier’s cross-dressing novel Mademoiselle de Maupin may feature in “Coleman’s” storyline.
On his deathbed, Philip Larkin, England’s greatest post-war poet, urged only that his diaries be burnt. Monica Jones, his lifelong confidante, obeyed his wishes.
The material in Trouble at Willow Gables and Other Fictions survives in the Brynmor Jones Library, Hull, where Larkin worked and where James Booth teaches. It comprises, first, works written to distract the young Larkin from his Finals revision. James Joyce famously sought to consign the manuscript Stephen Hero to flames once he found the means of transposing the material into Portrait of the Artist. But it blows its chances on both levels.On the one hand, an over-clarifying flashback destroys, for the audience, the ambiv-alence of Catherine’s assertions. And, unlike Stoppard’s Arcadia or Frayn’s Copenhagen, mathematical obsession features here as a melodramatic backdrop to lurid conundrums – has the daughter inherited her father’s madness as well as his brilliance?– rather than as a profound preoccupation fully integrated into the emotional fabric of the drama.Though Paltrow makes an arresting impression, the play patronises the audience by running a mile from any real discussion of the eponymous discovery. It may be quite a bit better than execrable A Beautiful Mind, but Proof is nonetheless just hokum-on-stilts.
Less than the sum of its derivative parts, it is Broadway’s mistaken idea of a truly penetrating play.. The title refers both to a ground-breaking “proof” in number theory found among the posthumous papers and to the difficulty of proving its authorship after Catherine claims that it is her independent work.The play wants to contrast the inductive, tightly logical proofs possible in mathematics with the indeterminacy of attempts to prove things in the real world where leaps of faith may be necessary. “Kids, there are only three things you need to know in life,” she drawls “One and one make two Two and two make four. And four and four make ten – if you know how to work it right.”I was suddenly reminded of this scene at the London opening last night of David Auburn’s Broadway hit Proof, another event that piquantly brackets together a blonde Hollywood icon and mathematical wizardry.
Considerably less curvaceous than Miss West, Gwyneth Paltrow has a distinct edge on her on the maths front in John Madden’s skilfully inflected production of this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama. But woven into the low-key, American post-modern iconoclasm is a wry wit and clever shreds of commedia dell’arte posturings.Meanwhile, over at the Bastille, where the monument is still daubed in anti-Le Pen graffiti, the POB also performs Nureyev’s Don Quichotte, more recent than the staging now in the Royal Ballet repertoire. Elena Rivkina and Alexander Beliaev have produced a redesign, using Goyaesque colours and authentic 19th-century scenic methods Elisabeth Maurin’s Kitri has irresistible warmth.
