Feature: Valentines - Love and Hate at Unitarian Chapel on February 17th
Published: 10 February, 2011
by PIERS PLOWRIGHT
Whoever gave his name to the blizzard of flowers, cards, chocolates, and soupy endearments that means St Valentine’s Day, he met a sticky end.
The most likely candidate is a 3rd-century priest beheaded (or clubbed to death, or both – accounts differ) on the orders of Emperor Claudius II for conducting secret marriages in defiance of imperial decree. The Emperor needed soldiers, and marriage discouraged enlistment. So no marriages please, we’re Roman.
The saintly priest may or may not have scribbled a note to the jailer’s daughter, whose blindness he may or not have cured, the night before his execution, signed “From your Valentine”.
Anyway, someone must have started it. And look at the flood of poetry and prose, good and bad, that has gathered round February 14 ever since.
Next week the rest of the country be alive with the sound of these verbal missiles being fired from post office and mobile phone into the eyes and ears of the beloveds, and the trouble with most of them will be their banality. For if love is blind it can also be astonishingly deaf.
What a pity, because there’s some wonderful stuff around, from 5th-century BC Chinese love poems to the sharply observed, sometimes painful, and nearly always darkly funny celebrations of more contemporary poets: Wendy Cope, for example, Elizabeth Bishop, James Fenton, Michael Longley and Carol Ann Duffy.
The truth is that the best expressions of human passion mix light with a good deal of darkness. DH Lawrence, for instance, in his exasperated outburst, “The Mess of Love”, writes that...
The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it, / or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes possession of it, /it is not love any more, it’s just a mess…
Not such a bad thing, actually. It’s the messiness of love, as with life, that gives it its interest. And what is it anyway?
Some say that love’s a little boy,
And some say it’s a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round
Some say that’s absurd,
And when I asked the man next-door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn’t do.
The truth about love, as WH Auden suggests, is hard to find. Benjamin Britten set Auden’s words to a Blues. And the Blues is the most brilliantly brutal form of love and hate poetry ever sung or said:
I ain’t gonna mistreat ma
Good gal any more.
I’m just gonna kill her
Next time she makes me sore.
That’s Langston Hughes’ take on his “Evil Woman”, and about as un-PC as you can get.
The truth is, love and hate are inextricable: the way one can turn into the other, the way the two can run alongside each other, the way one can destroy the other. Think of George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, or Mr and Mrs Verloc in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.
And then think of the longings, the betrayals, the renunciations, the estrangements, the impossibilities: Thomas Hardy remembering an illicit “almost-kiss” in the back of a hansom cab; Noel Coward’s reflections on the “bitterness of the last good-bye”, Anne Sexton giving her lover back to his wife; Philip Larkin’s former lovers finding they have less and less to say to each other; Robert Graves’ young bird catcher with his hopeless love for “the squire’s own daughter”.
Painful but exhilarating. And funny too. Ogden Nash, PG Wodehouse and Zsa Zsa Gabor can be hilarious on the subject of love.
So I for one will celebrate next week’s Valentine season with a spicy mix of affection and disenchantment at a special event at Rossyln Hill Unitarian Chapel in Hampstead, helped by some of our best writers and three of our finest performers of poetry and prose – Roger Lloyd Pack, Jehane Markham and Eleanor Bron.
• See box for details
• Piers Plowright is a former BBC producer