Chapter 5

Of American swearing I am not qualified to write, but I understand that in vulgar life the convention there is somewhat different. “Bastard” and “son of a bitch” are friendly terms of reproach. This recalls the experience of an American tourist, Mrs. Beech, who wasstaying in Paris after the War. An elderly Frenchman who was introduced to her greeted her cordially: “Ah, Mrs. Beech, Mrs. Beech, you are one of ze noble muzzers who gave so many sons to ze War.”

Might not a useful addition be made to thisTo-day and To-morrowseries, by some worthier, more energetic, and more scholarly hand than mine? To be calledLars Porsena; orThe Future of Swearing. Lars Porsena, if we may trust Lord Macaulay, was more fortunate than ourselves: he had no less than nine gods to swear by, and every one of them in Tarquin’s time was taken absolutely seriously. How would the argument run? On the lines perhaps of the following synopsis:

The imaginative decline of popular swearing under industrial standardization and since the popular Education Acts of fifty years ago; the possibility that swearing under an anti-democratic rêgime will recover its lost prestige as a fine art; following the failure of the Saints and Prophets, and the breakdown of orthodox Heaven and Hell as supreme swearing-stocks,the rich compensation offered by newer semi-religious institutions, such as the “League of Nations” and “International Socialism”, and by superstitious objects such as pipes, primroses, black-shirts, and blood-stained banners; the chances of the eventual disappearance of the sex-taboo and of the slur on bastardy, but in the near future the intentional use of Freudian symbols as objurgatory material; the effect on swearing of the gradual spread of spiritistic belief, of new popular diseases such as botulism and sleepy-sickness, of new forms of chemical warfare, of the sanction which the Anglican Church is openly giving to contraception, thereby legitimizing the dissociation of the erotic and progenitive principles and of feminism challenging the view that hard swearing is a proof of virility. Research would be suggested on the variations of taboo in different English-speaking lands,[3]on the alliterative emphasis andrhythm of swearing, on the maximum nervous reaction that can be got from a normal subject by combinations and permutations of the oath, the results to be recorded on a highly sensitive kymograph. Finally, this valuable and carefully documented work might treat of the prospects of Pure Swearing; by which is not meant sterilized swearing or “Cliff Clawsonism”, butSwearing without a practical element, with only a musical relation between the images it employs. Swearing of universal application and eternal beauty, following the recent sentimental cult for Pure Poetry.

[3]A man charged recently at Hoxton with using language calculated to make a breach of the peace complained that at Bethnal Green, where he lived, he could have said all that and more with impunity. He suggested a swearing-directory for the London district which should indicate what you might say where.

“But how is this?” the reader asks. “Isn’t what I’m reading calledLars Porsena, orthe Future of Swearing”. I apologize for a little joke, somewhat resembling those advertisements inSnappy Bits, which promise erotic delights to any schoolboy who will send five shillings and a statement that he is not a minor: only to job him off with badly printed photographs of classical paintings and statuary—for to send indecent matter by post is illegal. No doubt the Chic-Art Publishing Company wouldnot object to dealing more faithfully with its clients if it could, and perhaps the delight of expectation is worth the ensuing disappointment of only getting the Venus of Milo and a Rubens or two to gloat over. But though a joke is a joke, this volume goes as far as it decently can in containing at least a few classically draped forecasts and an honest inquiry into the taboos which prevent publication of the realLars Porsena. And, anyhow, this is the nearest to aLars Porsenathat will ever be published. For as soon as there is sufficient weakening of the taboos to permit an accurate and detailed account of swearing and obscenity, then, by that very token, swearing and obscenity can have no future worth prophesying about, but only a past more or less conjectural because undocumented.

Though Samuel Butler’s definition of “Nice People” as “people with dirty minds” can be misunderstood by critics who refuse to differentiate between the humourously obscene and the obscenely obscene, I like it. No nice person is uncritical; and yet we are all hedged roundwith an intricate system of taboos against “obscenity”. To consent uncritically to the taboos, which are often grotesque, is as foolish as to reject them uncritically. The nice person is one who good-humouredly criticizes the absurdities of the taboo in good-humoured conversation with intimates; but does not find it necessary to celebrate any black masses as a proof of his emancipation from it. This book is written for the Nice People. Then, though it is in its first intention a detached treatise on swearing and obscenity, it cannot claim a complete innocence of obscenity, while consenting to the publishers’ limitations of what is printable and what is not. Observe with what delicacy I have avoided and still avoid writing the words x—— and y——, and dance round a great many others of equally wide popular distribution. I have yielded to the society in which I move, which is an obscene society: that is, it acquiesces emotionally in the validity of the taboo, while intellectually objecting to it. I have let a learned counsel go through these pages with a blue pencil and strike throughparagraph after paragraph of perfectly clean writing. My only self-justification is that the original manuscript is to be kept safe for a more enlightened posterity in the strong-room of one of our greater libraries.

Horace is my idea of a characteristically obscene man. An immoderate liking for his poems is, I believe, a sure proof of obscenity in any person. Catullus, on the other hand, was not obscene: he had greater self-respect. Witness his:

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illaIlla Lesbia quam Catullus unamPlus quam se atque suos amavit omnes.Nunc in quadriviis et angiportisGlubit magnanimos Remi nepotes.

Caeli, Lesbia nostra, Lesbia illa

Illa Lesbia quam Catullus unam

Plus quam se atque suos amavit omnes.

Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis

Glubit magnanimos Remi nepotes.

Where “Glubit” by self-disgust and by the bitter irony of the “magnanimos Remi nepotes” leaves obscenity looking foolish. The “Long Man of Cerne” carved out in chalk on the Dorset Downs is not obscene in the real sense that the modern Cinema is obscene with its sudden blackings-out at the crisis of sexual excitement.

When a future historian comes to treat of the social-taboos of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a fourteen-volume life-work, his theories of the existence of an enormous secret-language of bawdry and an immense oral literature of obscene stories and rhymes known, in various degrees of initiation, to every man and woman in the country, yet never consigned to writing or openly admitted as existing, will be treated as a chimerical notion by the enlightened age in which he writes. As Sir James Frazer took, as the text for his inquiries, the Golden Bough legend of Aricia and the primitive ceremonies there surviving until Imperial times, so this new Sir James may takeThe Bottom Legendrecorded by a contemporary historian Roberts as his text. As follows:

‘Shortly before the “Great War for Civilization” (the indecisive conflict, 1914–1918, between rival European confederations to decide which was to have the right of defining Civilization) there was a student at Oxford University famous for his “practical joking”.He is said to have been one of the rare persons of the day to whom a peculiar licence was given for such “practical joking” and for deriding the most sacred taboos of the time. It was he who first defiled a local altar, “The Martyr’s Memorial,” by climbing to the very summit at night-time and planting a chamber-pot—a stringently tabood vessel—on the cross which crowned it. The civic authorities had great difficulty in removing this scandalous object, because climbing the Memorial was no easy feat, and the chamber-pot, being made of enamel ware and not, as was first thought, of porcelain, could not be dislodged by rifle fire. On another occasion, this same student is said to have impersonated an African potentate and, with a suite of disguised companions, to have been officially welcomed with a Royal Salute aboard a battleship of the English Navy, and to have aggravated this quasi-blasphemous performance (for the Fleet was a religious institution of greater dignity and efficiency than the Church itself) by the bestowal of medals on the ship’s officers.

‘But the most interesting breach of taboo with which he is credited was a dinner-party which he gave at a Cathedral town in the Midlands. He spent over a year, and a great deal of money, in scraping acquaintance under an assumed name with every person in the town whose surname contained the syllable “bottom”; Ramsbottom, Longbottom, Sidebottom, Winterbottom, Higginbottom, Whethambottom, Bottomwetham, Bottomwallop, Bottomley, and plain Bottom; he insinuated himself into the friendship of every one of these families, but separately, without allowing them to meet in his presence, until finally he was able to invite them all together to a huge dinner-party at his hotel. When each name in turn had been announced by a particularly loud-voiced hotel-servant, he withdrew, promising to return in a few minutes, and begging them to begin dinner without him. The meal consisted merely of rump-steak, and the host was already in a railway train, riding swiftly towards London, and leaving no address.

‘This story is regarded by Roberts and others as a most amusing one, though the point of the joke will need explaining to readers of this thirtieth century.

‘Apparently “bottom” was the common equivalent, in the secret language which I postulate, of the word “buttocks”. Now, among primitive peoplesno man will utter common words which coincide with or merely resemble in sound tabood names, and, though the twentieth century refused to admit itself primitive, we cannot now understand on what grounds this refusal could have been plausibly justified. The principle I have italicized is a direct quotation from a contemporary treatise on taboo. The author, whose name has been lost with the title-page of the unique copy in the Jerusalem Library, was only able to state this principle in the case of the South African Zulus and other savage tribes; but there is little doubt in my mind that the point of the joke lay in the sensitivity of the Bottom families to the obscene connotations of their name. That the buttocks should have been tabood is asurprising idea, but apparently a morbid prolongation of the lavatory-taboo accounts for it: or so Mannheim holds. The Bottom names either had no original connexion with the buttocks as inBottomwallop, which is a geographical name, or, as inLongbottom, they were inherited from an age when the taboo had not yet hardened. Be that as it may, the unfortunates who were born at this period to a name containing the tabood syllable were in a quandary. If they changed their names by Deed Poll, the expense and embarrassment would be considerable. Yet not to change meant that they would continue to be aware of repressed snickering wherever they went beyond the immediate circle of their friends. Most of them, therefore, changed the spelling merely from “Bottom” to “Botham”, and thus thought to circumvent the taboo. Indeed, as Roberts tells the story, the Bottom guests were all disguised as Bothams or Bottomes. One family, the Sidebottoms or Sidebothams, went so far as to pronounce their name “Siddybotaam” and in Bigland’sLife and Times ofH. Botomley(1954) there is mention of one of these “Siddybotaams” to whom Bottomley (a famous practical joker) is said to have introduced himself as “H. Bumley, Esq.”, “bum” being a common, but strongly tabood, shortening of “bottom”.

‘Now, the secret language, which was generally known as “smut”—possibly the idea of defilement is latent in this word, since another synonym was “The Dirty Talk” or “The Foul Language”—was so rich in its vocabulary, and drew so copiously on the legitimate language for secret obscene usages of common words, that the greatest ingenuity was needed in legitimate speech to avoid the appearance of obscenity. Thus so common a word as “bottom” meaning abase, abed, afundament, acause, owing to its use in smut as an equivalent for “buttocks”, could never be used in the legitimate language in any context where adouble entendremight be understood. The word “parts” becoming a synonym in Smut of the organs of generation had to be used with great care, and these are merely two isolated instancesof a principle so strong that when two persons who had been initiated into the third or fourth degree of the secret language began a conversation, practically not a single phrase could be used by them without thisdouble entendre, causing hysterical laughter.And not merely the names themselves but any words that sound like them are scrupulously avoided, and other words used in their place. A custom of this sort, it is plain, may easily be a potent agent of change in language, for, where it prevails to any considerable extent, many words must constantly become obsolete and new ones spring up.

‘This is a quotation from the same anonymous ethnologist, who is here discussing the taboos in Melanesia and Australia on the mention of the names of certain relatives, whether dead or alive, but it also explains many linguistic changes in the vocabulary of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: for instance, the constant out-of-dating of popular equivalents to the words “whore” and “harlot” which being Biblical alone remainedin constant use as pure descriptive terms; and the disappearance from common use of the phrase “a man of parts”, meaning “a man of great attainments”, and the phrase “he (or she) has no bottom”, meaning that the person referred to has no stability of character. It will be seen that this furtive language must have had a great influence on the legitimate language.

‘For confirmation of my theory of the indecency of the word “bottom” see Boswell’sLife of Doctor Johnsonunder the date of 1781:

Talking of a very respectable author he told us a curious circumstance in his life, which was, that he had married a printer’s devil.Reynolds: “A printer’s devil, sir! Why I thought a printer’s devil was a creature with a black face and in rags.”Johnson: “Yes, sir. But I suppose he had her face washed and put clean clothes on her. (Then looking very serious and veryearnest.) And she did not disgrace him; the woman had a bottom of good sense.” The wordbottomthus introduced was as ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss Hannah More slyly hid her face behind a lady’s back who sat on the same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it; he therefore resolved to assume and exercise despotick power, glanced sternly around and called out in a strong tone, “Where’s the merriment?” Then collecting himself and looking aweful to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced “I say thewomanwasfundamentallysensible” as if he had said “Hear this now and laugh if you dare!” We all sat composed as at a funeral.

Talking of a very respectable author he told us a curious circumstance in his life, which was, that he had married a printer’s devil.

Reynolds: “A printer’s devil, sir! Why I thought a printer’s devil was a creature with a black face and in rags.”

Johnson: “Yes, sir. But I suppose he had her face washed and put clean clothes on her. (Then looking very serious and veryearnest.) And she did not disgrace him; the woman had a bottom of good sense.” The wordbottomthus introduced was as ludicrous when contrasted with his gravity, that most of us could not forbear tittering and laughing; though I recollect that the Bishop of Killaloe kept his countenance with perfect steadiness, while Miss Hannah More slyly hid her face behind a lady’s back who sat on the same settee with her. His pride could not bear that any expression of his should excite ridicule, when he did not intend it; he therefore resolved to assume and exercise despotick power, glanced sternly around and called out in a strong tone, “Where’s the merriment?” Then collecting himself and looking aweful to make us feel how he could impose restraint, and as it were searching his mind for a still more ludicrous word, he slowly pronounced “I say thewomanwasfundamentallysensible” as if he had said “Hear this now and laugh if you dare!” We all sat composed as at a funeral.

‘New words sprang up everywhere, like mushrooms in the night.... The mint of words was in the hands of the old women of the tribe, and whatever term they stamped with their approval and put into circulation, was immediately accepted without a murmur by high and low alike, and spread like wildfire through every camp and settlement of the tribe.

‘This is our ethnologist, again, on the Paraguay Indians: but he does not enlighten us as to who held the word-mint of Smut in his own country. It seems probable that the Stock-Exchange was responsible for a greater part of the new coinages, that from the Stock-Exchange they spread to the big business houses, and were distributed by the commercial travellers to the provinces; but the close connection of the Stock-Exchange with the Turf made the book-makers also useful disseminators of the new coinages. A smutty story or a new word-coinage seems to have been, with whisky-and-soda, the usual ceremonial confirmation of a big business deal or the laying of a bet. Other mints of greater or less importancewere the major Universities, the Inns of Court, and the Military Academies.

‘The composition of smutty rhymes, chiefly in a strict five-line verse-form, known as the “Limerick”, with the conventional beginning “There once was a ...”, was one of the chief occupations of these high-priests of Smut, and two or three at least of the legitimate poets famous at the end of the twentieth century are known to have added largely to the common stock of tradition.

‘Even in our enlightened times, the sex-taboo and lavatory-taboo linger to a certain extent, owing to the natural reserve men and women feel about these functions. The lavatory-taboo still survives with us at meal-times, but we find it difficult to understand the extraordinary customs to which the morbid enlargement of this natural reserve led. For instance, the playwright Hogg records that not only was it considered obscene for a man to show a woman the way to the lavatory, but that even man to man, or woman to woman, an evasive phrase had to be used: “Would you care to washyour hands?” “Have you been shown the geography of the house?” nor would even intimate friends consent to notice each other if one of them was emerging from the lavatory or entering it; and, if this was the first meeting of the day, would greet each other half-a-minute later on un-tabood ground with every pretence of novelty and surprise. If a woman had a slight contusion on the breast, it was considered most obscene to mention it directly, but tender inquiries would be made after “your poor side”, “your injured shoulder”. So our anonymous ethnologist, in a caustic account of the idea of virgin-birth among primitive tribes, is forced to write:

Nana, the mother of Attis, was a virgin, who conceived by putting a ripe almond in her bosom.

‘The curious alternation of prudishness and prurience in the social life of the time makes strange reading. On one hand were to be found sexual extravagances, so fantastic as to be quite unintelligible to-day even to modern physiologists, on the other such delicacy of feeling thatin some classes of Society the word “leg” was actually tabood, and we have it on the authority of the social historian Gilett Burgess that in Boston in the 1880’s it was considered necessary to clothe the naked legs or “limbs” of tables with white cotton pantaloons. Until the decade following the “Great War for Civilization”, the young women of the English moneyed and middle classes lived what was called “very sheltered lives”: which meant that, in the name of modesty, they were left to find out for themselves the simplest facts about the sexual mechanism. These facts, probably owing to a morbidity induced by the lavatory-taboo, they seem to have been frequently unable to grasp. Literature gave them little clue, owing to the custom of writing one part of the body when another was meant; and the use of words like “kiss”, “embrace”, and “hug”, as synonyms for the sexual act confused them so completely that in a majority of cases they were married without having the vaguest idea of what really happens between man and woman, or how babies are born, and the suddenness of the realizationfrequently caused nervous shock and even madness. The young men, on the other hand, by the time they came to marry, usually had had such a fantastic experience of sex-life among the professional “harlots” of a lower social class that it was most rare for a satisfactory sex-adjustment to be made between them and their wives; and it is computed that at least nine marriages out of ten were completely wrecked before the “honeymoon” was over.

‘Between 1919 and 1929 there was a marked relaxing of the sex-taboos among the educated classes: in art-exhibitions though not in public art-galleries, paintings of female nudes in which the pubic hair was represented were for the first time admitted. There were also great changes during this decade in the fashion of women’s dresses. Skirts, which hitherto had hidden the ankles, now revealed the knees; and “evening dresses” were worn, we are told, “without any backs”, though it is conjectured that the buttocks were still covered. “Bathing-dresses”, garments worn by both sexes, even when actually swimming in the water, becameless voluminous, and the use of “bathing-stockings” by women was discontinued. There is record of a novelist James Joyce, whose works, though published in a foreign country, probably France, were smuggled into England, openly read and even regarded as “modern classics” by a literary minority: Joyce appears to have defied all taboos in his writing, and it is a pity that the Universal-Fascismo combination of 1929 succeeded in destroying every copy of his most famous workUlysses, which would have been a mine of information for our present inquiry.

‘For the rest of the century the taboos continued almost as strongly enforced as in the period preceding the War. Indeed, Fascismo did its work so thoroughly that only tantalizing scraps remain of those few records of Smut made in the post-War decade, and the post-Fascismo records are not particularly helpful. By the edict of 1930 the talking of Smut became a capital offence, and when in 1998 the regulation was relaxed, the tradition had become almost extinct. It is now, therefore, impossibleto suggest accurately what were the different degrees of initiation of which Hogg speaks, nor how the different dialects of Smut—Garage Smut, Club Smut, Mess Smut, School Smut—varied. But our knowledge of preceding centuries is no less scanty. We have no critical apparatus for filling in the lacunæ in Marcus Clarke’s account of convict obscenity in his Australian novelFor the Term of his Natural Life, or in Benjamin Disraeli’s account of industrial obscenity in the 1830’s given inSybil; nor can we supplement Alec Waugh’s hints of Public School obscenity in hisLoom of Youth(1917). The poets were as timorous as the novelists. James Stephens records a “Shebeen” curse of the 1920 period:

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over thereNearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:May the Devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hairAnd beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.That parboiled imp with the hardest jaw you will seeOn virtue’s path and a voice that would rasp the dead....... May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and mayThe High King of Glory permit her to get the mange;

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there

Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:

May the Devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair

And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

That parboiled imp with the hardest jaw you will see

On virtue’s path and a voice that would rasp the dead....

... May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and mayThe High King of Glory permit her to get the mange;

... May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten, and may

The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange;

but it is most unlikely that this is a faithful example of the swearing of that day. It is known that swearing in the war[4]was of a very violent character, but not a trace of it, beyond an occasionaldamnorbloody, occurs in Siegfried Sassoon’s otherwise very realistic war-poems. Contemporary newspaper reports of divorce-proceedings are known to have been rigorously cut: such euphemisms were employed as “a certain condition”, “a certain posture”, “a certain organ”, “a certain unnaturalvice”, so that it is difficult to know why such interest in these cases was shown by the readers of the newspapers, unless they were possessed of that primitive intuition which the savages in our own Central African reservations still to some measure display.

[4]Field records that a party of deaf and dumb children were in 1918 taken to a cinema-show called The Somme Film and had to be taken away because of the ‘bad language’ on the screen.

‘Two cases are known of a whole edition (150,000 copies) of a daily newspaper having to be destroyed because of a breach of the taboo which escaped the proof-reader. Both are recorded by Brunel in hisRecent Press History 1928, but he mentions no names and does not explain the matter in great detail:

The whole country edition of one of our leading dailies had on one occasion to be suppressed because of a one-word change made in a leading article by a printer who was under notice of discharge: the alteration was made after the proofs had been passed. The sentence was, if I remember:‘His lordship heartily recommended to all ministers and other public servants who think of retiring from the service of the Crownthat they should devote their energies and leisure to the interesting and enjoyable occupation of farming: he himself had proved....’

‘His lordship heartily recommended to all ministers and other public servants who think of retiring from the service of the Crownthat they should devote their energies and leisure to the interesting and enjoyable occupation of farming: he himself had proved....’

The second occasion was this: an evening paper injudiciously printed a letter on the disorganization of the London traffic without observing the signature: which was R. Supward. The edition had to be destroyed at the cost of several thousand pounds.

‘It is a pity that Brunel has left us in the dark about the obscene connotation ofSupward: perhaps it stands for “Bedward”, supper being the preliminary to bed, andbedbeing a tabood word. But this is only a conjecture. Nor do we know what action would have been taken in the matter by the Censor, an official in whose hands the avenging of all broken taboos lay, had the mistake not been noticed in time; but certainly it must have been a serious one, a heavy fine or a temporary suppression of publication. It seems possible, however, that it was not merely fear of the Censorship which preserved the strength of these taboos: they weresometimes valued on their own account by men and women of otherwise considerable intellectual force. Thus, while our ethnologist writes of the primitive savage “so tightly bound” by taboos of another variety that he “scarcely knows which way to turn”, he is careful to express “the enormous debts which we owe to the savage,” and the context makes it plain that chief among these debts are the ideas of “decency” and “morals” in their most fantastic development. Johnstone, an essayist of this period, has a passage which it would not be out of place to quote here:

“But I cannot describe the awful look of horror which I remember in the eyes of middle-aged women of the pre-War decade when they uttered the worddécolletée(“with a low-necked dress cut almost to the bosom”) or the embarrassment still shown by the young schoolmistress or even the young schoolmaster in the Divinity lesson, should the innocent question be piped: “Please,teacher, what does ‘whoremonger’ mean?””

‘The ethnologist from whom we have been quoting gives us the most authoritative of all surviving late nineteenth-century accounts of the superstitions, taboos, and magic of earlier primitive peoples; but what impresses us most now besides the lucidity of the argument is the elaborate care with which, as we have seen, the author has consented to the sexual and religious taboos of his own society and the great number also of literary and academic superstitions in which his accounts of savage superstitions are dressed. Though clearly a great force in the contemporary movement for the breaking of taboos that had outlasted their use, he never makes a direct attack upon them. It may indeed be said that he clings to the very superstition which he records among primitive tribes, that to dispatch the tribal god by indirect means is not blasphemy in the first degree: that is, he treats facetiously the beliefs and ceremonies of almost every religion but that of contemporary English Protestantism, but points out the commonresemblances and leaves the reader to take the inevitable step. For instance, he derides the claims of priests to divine revelation, the doctrines also of Immaculate Conception, Redemption of Sins, the Real Presence in the Sacrament, the Resurrection of a slain God, the transference of evil spirits to goats and swine, but only derides them in religions earlier than Christianity and, therefore, “superstitious”. Though heretics within Christianity are ridiculed by him for having claimed divinity for themselves, the divinity of Jesus Christ is nowhere directly impugned: who is permitted to have been immaculately conceived, to have cast out devils, taken over the burden of human sin, and risen again. He is allowed a capital F as Founder of Christianity, and the Virgin Mary is written of with traditional tenderness and reverence.

‘As regards literary and academic superstitions, our author’s faithfulness to contemporary literary ritual is such that even pedants who recognized the dangerous tendencies of his theory were forced to applaud the beauty ofhis style with its heavy rhetorical ornaments, its numerous and unnecessary quotations from the duller poets, and its most careful avoidance of repetition even where repetition is necessary for the clarity of the argument. For example, he cannot bring himself to write plainly:

Every province had the tomb and mummy of its dead god. The mummy of Osiris was at Mendes, the mummy of Anhouri at Thinis, the mummy of Toumon at Heliopolis.

He must dress it up as:

The mummy of Osiris was to be seen at Mendes, Thinis boasted of the mummy of Anhouri, and Heliopolis rejoiced in the possession of that of Toumon;

and in chapters where analogous customs of many tribes have to be catalogued and compared, this fear of repeating the same phrase soon fidgets the reader so much that he forgets what he is reading about. Our author also feels the academic necessity for an occasional platitude in the ancient “moral progress” superstition to round off an over-argumentative chapter; it seems to weigh as heavily upon him asthe necessity of sacrificing black wallabies (or were they black cockatoos?) in time of drought weighed on the Australian blackfellow. He writes:

The fallacy of such a belief is plain to us; yet perhaps the self-restraint which these and the like beliefs, vain and false as they are, have imposed on mankind has not been without its utility in bracing and strengthening the breed. For strength of character in the race as in the individual consists mainly in the power of sacrificing the present to the future, of disregarding the immediate temptations of ephemeral pleasure for the more distant and lasting sources of satisfaction. The more the power is exercised, the higher and stronger becomes the character; till the height of heroism is reached in men who renounce the pleasures of life itself for the sake of keeping or winning for others, perhaps in distant ages, the blessing of freedom and truth.

‘Braced and strengthenedwith this belief,vain and falseas it may be, that theblessings of freedom and trutharekept and won, that thecharacter of the race and of the individualbecomeshigher and strongerby suchself-restraint and sacrifice, he is particularly careful of the ephemeral temptation to abuse the sex-taboo.

‘While he speaks with bantering condescension of the poor savage who uses the navel-cord and severed genitals of his relatives for the magic purposes of agriculture, the language he chooses is blamelessly scientific. In other words, he gives himself the privilege of the priests who may treat of the holy mysteries plainly, but in the sacred language and not in the vernacular. Or else, as one of the people, he is exquisitely circumlocutory in his accounts of primitive orgies:

“A striking feature of the worship of Osiris as a god of fertility was the coarse but expressive symbolism by which this aspect of his nature was presented to the eye, notmerely of the initiated, but of the multitude.... At Philae the dead god is portrayed lying on his bier in an attitude which indicates in the plainest way that even in death his generative virtue was not extinct, but only suspended.... One may conjecture that in this paternal aspect....”

And shortly afterwards, he gravely wonders at the savage dread of menstrual blood. Klein, in one of his essays, suggests that the whole book is satiric in intention, and in a private letter has charged me with having no sense of humour because I refuse to read it in this way. But I prefer for once to have no sense of humour.’

To conclude, swearing as an art is at present in low water. National passion seldom runs high, invention is numbed, and there is no appeal of a politico-religious nature which will meet everywhere with the same respect. Theonly taboo strong enough to be worth breaking is the sexual one, and swearing shows every sign of continuing standardized on that basis for some time. It may be that “bastard”, and similar words, may gradually creep into legitimate speech, but only because obscener equivalents have been found.

The only really effective form of swearing that I know is this: Suppose you quarrel violently with a fellow-traveller in a crowded railway-carriage, perhaps about opening windows or the disposition of luggage. You get worsted. “Very well”, you say, with a sigh, “have it your own way.” “By the way”, you add, with a peculiar intensity, “I happen to know that in three weeks’ time you will have a dangerous illness.” If the quarrel has been very violent, you may even sentence your adversary to death.

You have not used obscene or threatening language, or expressed a wish that your adversary should suffer. You have not used God’s name. If you had done any of these things you would not only be putting yourself in danger of prosecution and alienating the sympathyof the other travellers, but you would further be weakening the effect of your curse. “God damn you,” says Jones to Brown. Brown says to himself: “Good; Jones is thoroughly annoyed with me, and afraid to do anything but curse.” And Brown considers himself on good terms with God, and cannot imagine the latter being influenced by any angry petitions of Jones. But “You will have a dangerous illness in three weeks’ time” is a different matter. For all the traveller knows, you may be a specialist, giving a free diagnosis of his condition. Pride will keep him from asking you on what grounds you said what you did. If he does ask, he cannot force a reply from you without assault. Keep silence for the rest of the journey, and watch his nerves gradually go. He is pinned in that corner-seat with you opposite him: he has no refuge from your curse because he does not understand it. The more often he tells himself that he should pay no attention to you, the more irritating will be the superstitious reactions. When eventually you part, he takes the curse home with him—not your curse, buthis own. For this is an individualistic age: the community has little power over the individual, and, if you would curse effectively, it must not be done in the name of the community or the formula of the community. You must put it into your adversary’s mind to curse himself with his own fears. “Injuries only come from the heart” quoth my uncle Toby.

A final word and a most important one. No critic of this essay will be satisfied unless fuller mention is made of James Joyce’sUlyssesthan has here been given. But they must remain unsatisfied. ThoughUlyssescould be studied as a complete manual of contemporary obscenity, such a study will get no encouragement here. It is true thatUlyssesis forbidden publication in England as indecent and that it contains more words classified by law as indecent than any other work published this century; but on the other hand it also contains more obscure poetic and religious references than any other work published this century and the choice of language in the blameless passages is as scholarly as Mr. Saintsbury’s and as Englishas Charles Doughty’s. So far from being a work of merely pornographic intention or even a serious work given the pornographic sugar-coating that Rabelais gave his politico-philosophic pills, it is a deadly serious work in which obscenity is anatomized as it has never been anatomized before. To call Joyce obscene, is like calling the Shakespeare of theSonnetslustful: true, both have had the intimate experiences that their writing implies, but Joyce has brought himself as far beyond obscenity as Shakespeare got beyond the lust of which he makes frank confession. Bloom, gross obscenity incarnate, is presented inUlyssesdirectly without the prejudice of tenderness or harshness. Stephen Daedalus whose early history had been given (semi-autobiographically) in “A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is presented as a type of the over-sophisticated intellectual, a poet who has failed as a poet because he is unable to find any strong enough reality to make foundation for his poetry. In the contemporary religious and literary scene, though a man of strong natural religious feelingsand great literary capacity, he finds only emptiness. Irish nationalist politics are no better. The only life that has any appearance of reality to him is the obscene life as lived by Bloom the middle-aged married commercial traveller and by Mulligan a forceful young medical student who lodges with Daedalus. Daedalus, who makes his living by schoolmastering in an old-fashioned school, is philosophically inclined to the obscene life because Bloom and Mulligan, who live it seriously, are in this respect at least superior to the priests, the schoolmasters and the little Celtic-Twilight poets (Joyce himself began as one) whose lives have no such absorption in a ruling idea. Yet as a sensitive person Daedalus is utterly repelled by the badness and rankness which obscenity exudes; and in the spiritual conflict between an artist’s love of reality and an artist’s hatred of obscenity the plot of the book lies. The only character in the book with whom Daedalus has a strong natural sympathy is his father, the only one man who is able to harmonize religion, politics, and obscenity into something like anartistic reality. Old Daedalus swears admirably. Though most of his oaths are on the censored list there is no disgust stirred by them:

A tall black-bearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner of Elvery’s elephant-house showed them a curved hand on his spine.“In all his pristine beauty,” Mr. Power said. Mr. Daedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:“The devil break the hasp of your back!”

A tall black-bearded figure, bent on a stick, stumping round the corner of Elvery’s elephant-house showed them a curved hand on his spine.

“In all his pristine beauty,” Mr. Power said. Mr. Daedalus looked after the stumping figure and said mildly:

“The devil break the hasp of your back!”

But Stephen has a bitter quarrel with his father since his mother’s death, and anyhow finds no sympathy in him for the intellectual sophistication which is one of the chief causes of unrest. The book rises to a scream of dreadful pain when we come on Stephen drunk in Mabbot Street in company with Bloom, a bawd-mistress and several harlots, two English private soldiers, and a whole fantastic crowd of the imaginary characters of Stephen’s brain: dying away in a monstrously droned account ofthe trivialities of lust and obscenity to which early middle-age has brought Bloom and his wife.

It is quite right thatUlyssesshould be censored since its chief public in England could at the best of times be only an obscene one: and it is not an obscene book, but on the contrary perhaps the least obscene book ever published: that is why it is censored. And there is every reason why Shakespeare’s sonnets should be censored at the same time, and more strictly, because the public even blinds its eyes to the painful history that the sequence gives and makes it ‘extravagant flattery of a patron’ or an ‘academic exercise.’ Joyce is read as obscene instead of successfully past obscenity: Shakespeare instead of being read as past lust is not even read as lusting.

Transcriber’s Notes:Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.

Transcriber’s Notes:

Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.

Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.

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