When poets write novels

Philip Larkin is one of my favorite poets, but up until I came across A Girl in Winter on the shelf at my local thrift store/bargain book extravaganza, I hadn't known he was also a novelist. I know that some poets write books and some novelists write poems, but I am apt to look at this cross-writing endeavor kind of skeptically. I've taken enough creative writing classes to know that writing poems and writing fiction are two different things, and being awesome at one does not necessarily mean you will be awesome at the other. And I like things neatly compartmentalized--I was the kind of kid that didn't let her food touch--so this kind of genre-hopping is something I tend to shy away from.

But like I said, I love Larkin. And I tend to think that Larkin's brilliance as a poet comes from the way he manages to jam-pack so much feeling into the pithy, rigid forms of his poems, and so I was interested to see what he would do with a whole book's worth of words. A Girl in Winter, his second novel, was written in 1947, at the beginning of his career, when Larkin hadn't really established himself one way or the other as a novelist or poet. Which I think makes the book extra interesting, in that he could have gone either way. At the point of writing it, he was still standing at the crossroads.

The story is of a young German expat living in England during the Second World War. Katherine Lind works at a glum job in a library. It isn't her first time in England; six years before, she was a guest of the Fennels, the family of her pen-pal, Robin. Robin and Katherine fell out of touch after that visit, and now Katherine is planning to meet him again before he ships out with the army. Will they reconnect? Or will the coldness that sprung up between them over the years have subsumed their old friendship?

It's a quiet little novel. There are no big plot hits. The characters are real and complicated, even if they aren't great personalities that you'll remember. But A Girl in Winter is valuable in that it does provide an interesting window into themes Larkin would explore later in his career as a poet. That strange mix of cynicism and naivete, the way he refuses to be moved by sentimentality and cliche. His post-war poems provide a realistic, untempered look at the failings of modern society, the dying sense of empire and the idea of being British. A Girl in Winter is similar, in that Larkin refuses to buy into the stiff-upper-lippedness that permeates so much fiction about the war years. He focuses on the ugly scar left behind by the ripped-up streetcar tracks with nary a word about how they've found new life as scrap for the war effort. His characters struggle with cold and boredom and fear and deprivation that comes from war. It's a realistic view, often grim, sometimes unpleasant, but it's so much more illuminating because of these things.

After writing A Girl in Winter, Larkin made the jump to writing poetry, and never went back. And that's the most curious part, to me. Because the fact that he never wrote another novel would insinuate that Girl isn't a very good book or that it wasn't very well-received. But actually, I found it beautifully written, and reviews indicate that though it might not have been fully recognized at the time, it has at least earned its fair share of accolades over the years. The New Yorker called it "one of the best embodiments of pre-Second World War manners and turns of speech." The New York Review of Books writes that with this novel, Larkin proves that "his novelistic gifts are as impressive as his abilities as a poet." And while I don't find that exactly true, in my opinion, I did think it was good enough that I find myself wondering why A Girl in Winter was Larkin's last novel. Did he find it too hard, to fill 300+ pages instead of three stanzas? Or could he have found it too easy, the simple act of dumping dialogue and description into pages upon pages. Did he miss the honing and sculpting and the sly little cleverness that poems require? I'd like to know more. I wish I could know more. Because I keep wondering: why?

I want to read his first novel, Jill, now to try and find out. I also want to read more novels by poets. Any recommendations?