Dispatches from Hate Archipelago: Simon Heffer and Sarah Vine on Larkin and Love Island
Larkin has not been cancelled and Love Island is no more morally bankrupt than every version of the Mail...
As Philip Larkin died in 1985, it’s hard to know what he would have made of Love Island. Channel 4 was launched in 1982, so the poet spent all but the last three years of his life in a three-channel world, mostly watching rugby or cricket1.
The notion that ITV would ever have four channels to itself and dedicate one to the ersatz romances of boneheads would not have occurred to Larkin but since he hated most things, I think it’s likely he would have found watching even a single episode of Love Island absolute torture. It’s a shame really that we were not able to inflict that on him.
My brain crash-landed Larkin into the middle of Love Island after reading the latest emissions from The Mail on Sunday’s Sarah Vine and The Daily Telegraph’s perpetually beetroot-faced evil Beaker Simon Heffer. While the topics of their respective columns could not be more different, no matter how much I picture a glum Larkin being compelled by producers to discuss “coupling up”, they are united by their hypocrisy and ahistorical worldview.
Heffer writes his second column on Larkin and “cancellation”2 in a year in today’s Sunday Telegraph. Under the headline Larkin is being cancelled for his private letters – can't we separate the art from the artist? the Huffer complains, after quoting several verses from the poet’s letters that include the n-word, that:
The idea that Larkin actually actively despised black people simply because they were black sits ill with his love of jazz, and of numerous black musicians who distinguished themselves in that genre. If one reads the offending material, contained in his letters and occasionally manifesting as offensive little poems he shared with his cronies, one quickly realises that racial minorities were simply another group of people unlike him whom he could childishly deride; he was, if you like, an equal opportunity bigot.
Heffer offers a combination of the two hoariest old excuses made of racists: Oh, look he made some exceptions for ‘good’ black people who played music he liked! And anyway he hated everyone as “an equal opportunity bigot” so that makes it better somehow. We might call it the Eric Clapton fallacy3.
After a whistlestop tour through some other grim and cruel things Larkin said about other groups he didn’t like (“his social inferiors, Leftists, and various other groups… most women…”) Heffer writes:
Next year is Larkin’s centenary, and when the time comes we should celebrate the genius of his poetry wholeheartedly. But for now, a public that perhaps needs Larkin’s penetrating realism and lack of cant and hypocrisy more than ever also needs to be protected from his critics: critics who attack him not for the quality of his verse, because they would make fools of themselves doing that, but because of his frankly objectionable character. There are those who make the case for not listening to Wagner because he was a blatant anti-Semite, or to Britten because of his unhealthy interest in young boys; or for not admiring Eric Gill because of his unhealthy interest in young girls; or who won’t read Dickens because he was a wife-beater. Larkin was a racist, than which there is currently no worse transgression in our culture.
The quartet of men chosen by Heffer as part of his defence of Larkin against imagined commissars is interesting. And as is common in his writing, Heffer cheats the history, offering much milder assessments of Wagner, Britten, Gill and Dickens than their own words and deeds suggest is warranted, while pretending that each of these figures has been erased from the canon.
New recordings of Wagner’s works are issued regularly and his compositions feature frequently in concert. Wagner’s essay Judaism in Music — which he published first under a pseudonym (K. Freigedank) in 1850 then reprinted in 1869 under his own name is a damning piece of work. In it he writes:
The Jew — who as everyone knows, has a God all to himself — in ordinary life strikes us primarily by his outward appearance, which, no matter to what European nationality we belong, has something disagreeably foreign to that nationality: instinctively we wish to have nothin in common with a man who looks like that.
He also claimed “the Jewish race” was “the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it” and made numerous other vile statements about Jews in public. Wagner’s antisemitism has been discussed often for decades and he has not been ‘cancelled’.
To call Britten’s behaviour “an unhealthy interest in young boys” is excusing a paedophile because you appreciate their music. The composer had many ‘close friendships’ with boys aged 13/14 — with whom he often shared a bed — as an adult. In John Bridcut’s book Britten’s Children, an accusation from one of them — Harry Morris, who was then 13 — that he was subjected to “a sexual approach from Britten in his bedroom” is detailed. The boy’s mother didn’t believe him and nothing more was done.
Reviews of Bridcut’s book in The Daily Telegraph…
In treating Britten's fondness for the young of his own sex as something more than lipsmacking paedophilia, this book does him a service both as a man and an artist…
… and The Times…
Many paedophiles were abused as children, and their dangerous desires are motivated by hatred. Britten's were motivated by love, which may have been to a large extent narcissistic and, as John Bridcut's book reveals, often ended with an abrupt withdrawal of attention when the boy grew up, but which was fundamentally benign.”
… made the same excuses for Britten as the author did and Heffer does now. An even more appalling level of explanations and deflections is present in a column on Britten by Norman Lebrecht from 2006, in which he writes with the arrogance of the pre-Saville silence:
Yes, he was interested in boys, but they were no more than reflections of the boy in himself, an inner voice that was, as he sometimes hinted, the source of his inspiration, an ideal of beauty and goodness. I received a letter recently from someone who was approached after a school show in 1945 by two men, scouting on behalf of Benjamin Britten.
My correspondent failed to get the part of apprentice in Peter Grimes (it went to Leonard Thompson) but it is impossible to imagine that the respected librettist Eric Crozier or the chorusmaster Arthur Oldham would have gone around procuring for Britten if there were any suspicion that the boys might be misused. Crozier later fell out with Britten and accused him of ‘corrupting’ boys, but he specifically excluded physical abuse.
Heffer’s diminishment of Eric Gill’s crimes is even more disgusting. To sweep aside Gill’s abuse of his daughters and even the family dog as “an unhealthy interest in young girls” is a reprehensible simplification.
The extent of Gill’s abuse first came to real public attention after the publication of Fiona MacCarthy’s charitably-titled biography Eric Gill: A Lover’s Quest for Art and God in 19894. In the 32 years since its publication, Gill’s typefaces have remained in wide use and his statues (including one at BBC Broadcasting House) have not been pulled down, though there have been discussions about their removal and more broadly about celebrating his work in general.
Finally, Dickens is Dickens and his treatment of his wife is viewed by most people as little more than a biographical footnote. Again Heffer dismisses the behaviour with a gross simplification (“… he was a wife-beater…”). Dickens did not just physically abuse his wife — although that would obviously be enough to conclude that he was an irredeemable creature — but, in the words of his friend and fellow journalist, William Moy Thomas, tried to have her committed:
He discovered at last that he had outgrown his liking. She had borne 10 children and lost many of her good looks, was growing old, in fact. He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing! But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.
Heffer concludes his column by making two more excuses for Larkin. The first is that Britain was more racist then so what did you expect Larkin to do?
Young people may not believe this, but one could have walked into any saloon bar in England in the late 1970s and heard such sentiments as Larkin’s openly expressed, albeit less carefully crafted. Britain was a tired, fractious, badly governed and increasingly impoverished country run by the trades unions, and in that sense, though in no other, Larkin was its poet laureate. None of those three pieces of racist doggerel was meant for publication; they were to show off to his friends in writing in default of their meeting in the pub.
Ah, well, if it was just private racism…
The last of Heffer’s excuses for Larkin is that he, Heffer, doesn’t believe that the old shit actually meant it:
Did Larkin actually believe what he wrote, or was he just ranting in a way designed to amuse his equally choleric pals? The latter, I feel sure.
Well, if Simon Heffer late of The Daily Mail and firmly ensconced at The Telegraph, Britain’s premiere fanzine for tweedy racists, thinks Larkin was only larkin’ about when he spewed the n-word over and over again, it must be true.
Having written in high dudgeon back in March about Hull thinking about whether it wants a statue of Larkin and now fretting about Coventry, Larkin’s birthplace, “barely noticing him” (whatever that means), Heffer concludes:
He is being cancelled already. But this is insane. Whatever his private opinions, he was the greatest poet in English since Eliot. And that is where we should begin our evaluation of him on his centenary.
Larkin remains on GCSE and A-Level syllabuses as well as the reading lists of universities across the world. It’s the kind of ‘cancellation’ that a minor irritant like Simon Heffer can only dream of…
And so we come to Sarah Vine, Daily Mail columnist and the type of parent about whom Larkin’s This Be The Verse was penned (“They fuck you up your columnist mum and cabinet minister dad…”). Writing in The Mail on Sunday, which is no less addicted to the assessment of female flesh than its daily counterpart or its online cesspit MailOnline, Vine writes of “how amoral Love Island is taking us back to the Dark Ages.”
Once again exploiting her son and daughter for content — her other stalwart, Michael Gove, is now less easy fodder what with the divorce and the [redacted] — Vine recounts her family’s discussions about the ITV show:
There are few topics that divide opinion more keenly in my house than Love Island. My daughter watches it with her boyfriend; they seem to love and hate it in equal measure, taking sides furiously while at the same time disparaging the show’s obvious flaws…
Afterwards, my daughter asked me if I thought she should get a boob-job.
She is 18. I said ‘no’, obviously.
My SON, meanwhile, takes a more straightforward, and some might say, male view. ‘I get that you hate it, Mum,’ he said, shovelling down breakfast eggs and beans yesterday morning, ‘but I don’t see what’s not to like about being sent to Majorca and being paid to have as much sex as you can with a load of fit women. Then come home to five million followers on Instagram and a bunch of brands desperate to sign you up and never having to work again.’
Having set the scene and provided us with her children’s reviews, Vine gets to her assessment:
It’s also why I hate it so much. Hate it with a passion. Hate the vacuous messages it sends and the cynical way it manipulates the contestants. Hate the soapy sentiment and the overblown emotions. Hate the cookie-cutter version of physical desirability it promotes.
I could take that critique and apply it word for word to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and Mail Online. The Mail titles constantly note house prices — even in stories about violent deaths — and assure their readers that happiness is just another purchase away. Mail headlines are cynical, manipulative, soapy and predicated on overblown emotions (usually anger).
And as for promoting a “cookie-cutter version of physical desirability” a quick flick through the pages of any edition of the Mail or scroll down MailOnline’s Sidebar of Shame quickly reveals multiple stories about celebrities “flaunting their curves” or “showing off their incredible post-baby bod”.
At the time of writing this newsletter edition, there were 20 Love Island stories on the MailOnline homepage, each one illustrated by a young man or woman in the least possible amount of clothes, a "cookie-cutter version of physical desirability” deployed to ensure the Mail gets the eyeballs it needs.
Then we get to Vine accusing ITV — not incorrectly — of hypocrisy:
Hate the fleshy vulgarity of it and, perhaps most of all, hate the rank hypocrisy and sheer brass neck of ITV for screening it alongside adverts for mental health charities and other empty-minded sentiment designed to gloss over the fact that four people associated with the show, including former presenter Caroline Flack, have taken their own lives. Nor am I the only one.
But the problem is that a Daily Mail columnist and particularly this Daily Mail columnist criticising anyone else for hypocrisy is like Harold Shipman being asked to head up the Care Quality Commission.
At the time of Caroline Flack’s death Sarah Vine tweeted:
I always had a really bad feeling about the Caroline Flack story. Trial by social media. What a terrible tragedy.
In the hours after Flack’s death was announced MailOnline published 16 stories about her. The number rocketed as the days went on. In the months between her arrest and her death, it published over 25 stories about her. But it was social media that put her under pressure, right?
But Vine isn’t done there. Her tin-eared, blinkers-on criticism continues:
[Love Island] takes us back to the Dark Ages. It’s barbaric and gladiatorial in the way it presents suffering as entertainment, encouraging us to salivate and pore over glistening young bodies as we follow the fortunes – and misfortunes – of this surgically enhanced, fame-hungry group of desperados. There’s something of the Colosseum about the way these muscle-bound young people are forced to demonstrate their physical and sexual prowess for the pleasure of the spectator.
Nobody show her the pages that surround her column in print or the MailOnline stories that it nestles beside online. “Suffering as entertainment” could be the Daily Mail’s slogan — for its health coverage, for its celebrity news, and for its ongoing use of Liz Jones5 as a complicit living piñata.
Vine throws her hands up in the air about Love Island contestants being “carted off once a week to have their nails and lash extensions topped up” just a few months after she was the subject of a big makeover in the Mail, a paper which closely examines celebrities’ bodies for cellulite on a frequent basis.
Her conclusion on Love Island…
It’s cruel, crass and exploitative. And it demeans us all.
… is how I feel about the Mail titles output in general and Sarah Vine’s column in particular. Vine hopes Love Island will be cancelled, but I don’t think that’s likely. Like Larkin and Vine herself, Love Island is going to be with us for a long time.
I’ve based my summation of Larkin’s TV viewing habits on the claims of his friend and fellow poet Andrew Motion in a 2017 New Yorker piece (Philip Larkin and Me: A Friendship with Holes in It).
There’s also a derisory reference to television in Larkin’s poem Afternoons where “the albums, lettered Our Wedding” are “lying near the television…”
The last one, The cancel mob can attack Larkin the man, but they should leave his poetry alone, appeared in March.
Clapton, who made his name mining the blues, famously sparked the Rock Against Racism movement after onstage comments at a concert in Birmingham in 1976, when he told any foreigners present in the audience “I don’t want you here, in the room or in my country” and continued, “Listen to me, man! I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back.”
Such was MacCarthy’s sympathy for Gill that she described his abuse of his dog as an “experimental connection”. It’s not a defence I can imagine working at any crown court in the land.
Jones mentions Love Island in more friendly terms in her column today.