Pelling leaps to Gov Sanford’s defence

Rowan Pelling, former editor of the Erotic Review, yesterday rushed to defend the Republican Governor of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, whose adulterous relationship with Argentine Maria Belen Chapur was made public last week.

On Monday's Today programme, presenters Evan Davies and James Naughtie were reduced to sniggering schoolboys as veteran announcer Peter Donaldson read out extracts from the romantic emails Sanford had sent his lover. Pelling, together with writer and critic Philip Hensher, had been invited into the studio to discuss the merits of the prose.

Davies asked his guests whether they thought it was possible these days, in the age of the 140-character status update, to write a love letter which didn’t make people cringe. More specifically, were love letters something for grown men - or women - to write at all?

"I don't think it's possible to write a letter that can't be read out with a silly voice and make everyone cringe," said Pelling. "We're all so vulnerable to being accused of purple prose. I actually rather liked the extract with the diesel engine humming and the deep Freudian undertones. Women all around the country will be saying to themselves: 'Blimey, I wish someone loved me with that amount of passion'."

Philip Hensher was less generous. "I think is it something peculiarly open to accusations of insincerity. Far from writing only for the eyes of the beloved they write with one eye on the letter being read by colleagues, shown around the office or finding its way into an anthology of the great lovers of literature. The moment I wondered whether Mark Sanford was entirely serious was when we got to the word 'softly'. Adverbs are an insincere part of language. I would worry if I got a love letter that was full of adverbs."

Pelling responded: "You know what the moral of that story is: don't write a love letter to a literary critic like Philip! You're pulling it apart. I thought what was so touching was that he wasn't worried about the authenticity or about cliche. She is his soulmate, feeling anguish over the impossibility of their love. He is going to send her a CD because music makes him think of her and that makes you think of Beethoven's 'Immortal Beloved' letters and the deep connection to your soul."

"It's teenage," said Evan Davies. "It's that kind of first euphoria, not a grown-up mature relationship?"

Hensher: "It certainly hasn't moved on a great deal since Keats wrote those wonderful letters to Fanny Brawne. I think if you want a sincere-sounding letter that's going to interest the beloved, write something specific. The most wonderful love letters are the ones written by Evelyn Waugh to his wife. They're not full of affectionate remarks but full of a sense of respect."

"The love is embedded in the text," said Davies.

"No!" said Pelling. "You're such cynics."

"You just want it to be dirty," added a rather lascivious-sounding Naughtie.

"No, I don't want it to be dirty," said Pelling. "There's something very touching about a grown man or woman being reduced to a teenager. Her English isn't that great but there's something amazing about the way love has this completely reducing effect on people. You look at what Shakespeare wrote of love, right through from there and people behave in the same crazy way."