Just recently I was off down the BBC iPlayer rabbit hole again: this time to catch up with a film by the Oxford literary scholar A.N.Wilson on the renowned English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985).
I thought it was a delightful and insightful addition to other documentary ‘biopics’ made about one of our best known and admired poets.
I have always liked Larkin’s downbeat, often melancholic and decidedly pessimistic poems, and frequently cited his work. He was a strange cove, shunned the London literati, spending most of his later life as the chief librarian of Hull University. He was an enthusiastic cyclist, especially so in the Humberside area.
Despite his life-long atheism he loved visiting churches, exemplified in his 1954 poem ‘Church Going’;
‘Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end…’
I recall his once saying that despite his irreverence, he always thought is appropriate to remove his cycle clips upon entering a church.
Watching Wilson’s programme, and thinking about a recent letter in The Journal abhorring yet another proposal to build on local farmland for dubious reasons, his 1972 poem came to me. The poem was ironically commissioned for a Shell Guide, for car users of course. Larkin disliked cars. Did Shell ever read it?
‘I thought it would last my time –
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down…’
Note the snobbish put-down, which exposes some aspect of the man’s character that came to dominate later opinion of his work and contribution. Larkin was culturally conservative, prone to racist and misogynistic remarks in private and so on. Not always a nice man.
This emerging issue has always bothered me. Can we continue to admire the work of artistic people if we later discover that they are on a range from ‘not very nice to complete monsters’? Should we, do we, ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’?
I have posed this question to people over the years, and it remains an everyday aspect of our moral conduct that still bothers me. Can we overlook, forgive, live with such transgressions while rejecting some characteristics and values of that artist?
Do we become embarrassed about having liked and admired them? What does this say about us, as well as them?
For me, one real difficulty today is living with the very powerful cult of celebrity. All manner of people seem to be capable of degrading themselves, and others, in the head-long pursuit of celebrity, being prepared to live with the consequences, for example appearing in ‘reality TV’ programmes, and dealing with the putdown.
As Alice (in Wonderland) experienced;
‘YOU!’ said the Caterpillar contemptuously. ‘WHO ARE you?’.
Many factors and pressures, self and social, drive people’s thinking and actions,
and these trials and tribulations are often evident when status seeking.
Vance Packard, one of my favourite American Sociologists who wrote a good deal about the emergence of a ‘consumer culture’, commented in his 1959 book ‘The Status Seekers’;
‘Before this era of fabled plenty began, it was widely assumed that prosperity would eliminate, or greatly reduce, class differences. If everybody could enjoy the good things of life – as defined by mass merchandisers – the meanness of class distinctions would disappear.’
And, I am sure some of us can recall John Major’s claim that ‘we are all middle class now.’
I mention these celebrity/status issues because it seems to me that in assessing our feelings about the consequences of the values and motivations that ‘artists’ have is one aspect of that assessment. Another opportunity to consider our moral compass?
I leave this with you.