The tomb without calm of Philip Larkin

Jill no existe. John Kemp, un joven recién llegado a Oxford, la inventa casi sin proponérselo durante una conversación con su compañero de habitación, el tipo de tonto perezoso y arrogante con el que uno suele tropezar en la universidad y que, por lo general, termina sus días dando clases de algo; a Kemp le gustaría tener el dinero de Christopher Warner, su distinción, su trato con los sirvientes, su éxito con las mujeres y su facilidad para apropiarse de lo que no le pertenece, beber a destajo y despreciar la educación que recibe, y Jill es lo primero que se le ocurre para sentirse su igual, una fantasía romántica. Pero Jill sí existe, después de todo; y cuando Kemp conoce a Gillian, la prima de la novia de Warner, se enamora locamente: es la mujer que imaginó mucho antes de saber que existía, pero esto es mejor que Gillian no lo sepa.

"He woke up any public comments" is the laconic summary that Philip Larkin made of Jill's critical reception, the novel about Kemp, Warner and Gillian who published in 1946. He had written it three years before, when, as he remembers in the prologue From 1963 that accompanies its recent edition in Spanish, the impressions of its passage through Oxford were still fresh. Kemp is Larkin and, like him, he is first surrounded by people who do not belong to the working class. "We were (...) in the second year of war," he recalls in the prologue. “Life in College was austere. The routine of the prewar period had broken, in some aspects the changes were permanent. Everyone paid the same rates (in our case, 12 chelines daily) and ate the same. Due to the ordinances of the Ministry of Food, the city did not have much to offer in the field of food and drinks, and the university parties (...) had been suspended indefinitely. Because of the rationing of gasoline, nobody went by car, and it was difficult to dress with style due to the rationing of clothing. There was still coal on the deposits at the door of our rooms, but the rationing of fuel would soon disappear. Knowledge to get a piece of cake or a cigarette after breakfast, after requested the books at the [Library] Bodleiana, became a custom, ”he writes.

The jazz and the friendship of future writers Bruce Montgomery (who adopted the pseudonym of Edmund Crispin) and Kingsley Amis constituted almost the only intellectual stimuli of that period, or at least the most persistent: Larkin was a jazz critic for a decade and arrivedTo say that he could live a week without poetry, but not one day without that music, and with Amis ("the two had the impression that they had finally found someone brighter than themselves," Martin Amis said) whatHe joined a friendship that lasted a lifetime, of which he testifies a delusional and malicious correspondence.

Larkin was born in Coventry in August 1922 and already wrote poems when he entered Oxford; Despite this, at first he tried to carve a reputation as a narrator: after Jill he published a girl in winter (1947) and spent the next five years trying to write a third novel, without getting it; All his reputation is the product of his poetry books, from a minor deception (1955) to the high vents (1974), passing through the weddings of Pentecost (1964): in them he turned his back on Anglo -Saxon modernism to become an involuntary chronicler of The postwar British life, about whose aspects only apparently more banal wrote in a language on a rough. Larkin, writes Félix de Azúa, “disguises himself as an official, cynical, perverse, vulgar and even rude, sarcastic and ordinary citizen. His poems, however, sing again and again the desperate splendor's transience and do so with such a painful intensity that that mask of Casposo and idiot official demands to hide suffering with dignity. In their best curses and blasphemous poems, it is stirred as death wounded because girls and boys become old and stupid, because families become a cartoon of the nucleus originally from the species (also obsessive matter in rimbaud), and when Larkin's heartbreaking cry reaches his blackest cynic mask, of impossible British elegance, we see adolescents wilt as if we attended Hector's destruction. In his negative way, Larkin sings our transience with the great baroque music of [Pierre de] Ronsard. ”

The author of Jill never married or had offspring ('This is the verse' begins with the phrase "well that your parents fuck you" and culminates advising "escapes as before you can / and have no children"), it was not part of The literary scene of his time, had a mediocre career of librarian in province universities, lived all his life in a room without luxuries, his books had no commercial success; Unlike the inexhaustible Kingsley Amis, Larkin finished after two novels, a selection of essays and five poetry books: in fact, when he wanted to do the greatest honor that an English poet can receive, to occupy the position of Laureado poet, he rejected him by admitting that he had not written seven years. He died in 1985, but his last poem had been published in 1977: “Most of the things may never happen: it will happen, / and the accurate compliance makes us enraged / when we are trapped in the oven of fear, / without Company, or a glass in hand. The value is useless: / Said, not for others to be scared. Being brave / does not allow anyone to get rid of the grave. ”

But Larkin's grave has no calm, as proved by the editions of his poetry in Spanish and, now, that of his novels. Kingsley wrote to him once that he had seen a copy of Jill in a Coventry Street store between nudes and without shame and Ivonne, that of the high heels, but his novel has little to offer the reader of erotic novels; It is rather the story of a handful of young people on whose heads the threat of time suspended by tragedy and who, however, did not stop drinking, reading and falling in love with imaginary and also real women. "The affairs of the country marched so badly, and so far was the possibility of a victorious peace, that any effort invested in carving a future after the war was considered little less than an absurd loss of time," Larkin recalls; But the fact is that Jill is written with passion and solvency and she has exceptional passages, magnificently translated by Marcelo Cohen, only weighed in this edition by an amount of errata somewhat bigger than usual.

Larkin sent a copy of the novel to Monica Jones in December 1946, at her request and, as she wrote, "under his responsibility.""Don't say anything if you don't have any particular opinion about her: and if you think Jill is a lot of teenage garbage (...) Do not hesitate to tell me," he asked.We do not know what the answer was, but Monica became her couple after reading it and remained by her side 40 years: if there is something similar to the positive reception of a work, we already know what it is.

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