Fishcakes!

At one point when I was haunting the second-hand bookshops I sought out volumes by their size. I had got it into my head that there was something particularly attractive about an earlier type of pocketbook, that is, a book you could easily carry around in your pocket. More often than not they were hardback, which marked them out from their modern equivalents, and occasionally, if fortune smiled, they would still have a dust-wrapper. The Thinker’s Library was one series, boasting titles such as Wells’s A Short History of the World and Mill’s On Liberty and fitting – just – into a jacket pocket for reading on the tube or train; and another was To-day and To-morrow, a set of similar pint-sized tomes with the additional appeal of being bound in plum-coloured boards.

It was in the course of pursuing members of the To-day and Tomorrow series that I happened upon the intriguingly titled – and subtitled – and authored – Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing, by Robert Graves.

Lars Porsena of Clusium, By the nine Gods he swore

was the reference (from Macaulay’s Horatius at the Bridge). The future of swearing, what a wonderful subject. I looked forward to learning more: since the book was blessedly short, at 94 pages, 22 lines a page and only 6 words a line, finishing it wouldn’t require many train journeys. And not only to learning but also to an hour or possibly two of literary pleasure. I had read Goodbye to All That, Graves’s great memoir of his service in the First World War, and knew how well he could write. I recalled, too, from that other book a passage on the ordinary soldiers’ wearisome use of a four-letter expletive still so current today. Graves should certainly have interesting things to say on the subject. And the book is still a good read. Graves is sharp, witty, with a mischievous sense of humour. It is fair to say that the second half has stood the test of time less well than the first, probably because at the book’s halfway point it veers off into a discussion of censorship and obscenity. Since the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, discussion of what is or is not obscene and what should or should not be allowed in print seems rather dated. In the first half of Lars Porsena, however, in which he discusses bad language, Graves is at his best. ‘Of recent years in England there has been a noticeable decline of swearing . . .’ he begins, and he declares his intention to use this temporary lull in the use of foul language to inquire into the ‘nature and necessity’ of its employment. His task is fraught with difficulty, since his essay must attempt to steer its course ‘without private offence to the reader as without public offence to the censor’. In those far-off days, the expurgator’s pen was always hovering, his tin of asterisks forever at the ready. So Graves was faced with the teasing prospect of discussing the use of words which were not fit to print. He makes light of the task, chiefly by telling a variety of amusing anecdotes to illustrate his theme. Pride of place must go to the one about General G——r. Dissatisfied with the response of a battery of troops to his order to dismount, the general bellowed out: ‘Now climb back again, you pack of consumptive little Maltese monkeys!’ As proof that even the troops of yesteryear could be a bunch of softies, the battery complained to their HQ. In due course, the general was asked to apologize, which he did by claiming that the slovenliness of the troops’ response to his order had deceived him into believing ‘that I was actually assisting at a performance by atroop of little Maltese monkeys . . . I tender my apologies to all ranks of “Z” Battery for my mistake.’ Such examples of the swearing art aside, the author deplores the dearth of imagination in contemporary swearing, along with the feebleness of the euphemistic exclamations then current, of the genre of ‘Oddsboddikins!’ and ‘Swelp me Bob!’ (He would not, I fear, have approved of ‘Fishcakes!’ the euphemistic expletive favoured by the late and much-lamented cricket commentator Christopher Martin-Jenkins, which, in a world no less at the mercy of the tyrannical four-letter word than the trenches of Flanders, strikes me as rather endearing.) However, even if CMJ’s ingenious avoidance of cruder alternatives would not have been to his taste, Robert Graves shows himself as tired of the F-word as any of us: for the most part, he writes, ‘the dreary repetition of the two sexual mainstays of barrack-room swearing is the despair of the artist’. You might have thought Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had driven a stake through the heart of these two expletives by their mind-numbing repetition in the infamous Derek and Clive sketch, but you would be wrong. Religiously inspired exclamations such as ‘hellfire’ and ‘goddamn’ might be losing their force with waning belief in the afterlife and eternal punishment but not the two standbys of the football crowd. A friend and his son were recently greeted by rival fans at an away game as ‘******* Arsenal **** faces’. Curiously, then, the coarsest sexual oaths have retained their force despite the lifting of the sex taboos at which Graves so chafed. Masturbation may in our enlightened times be thought of as perfectly natural and no longer a threat to one’s eyesight but you still need to think twice about abusing someone as a ****** (or possibly ******* with seven letters as, according to Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang, it is spelt with an h). Although, come to think of it, perhaps we have not moved on very far. I have still covered these printed obscenities with the fig leaf of asterisks, just as Graves was obliged to do eighty years ago. True, he would have fallen foul of the censor, while now I am simply seeking not to offend. The censor who would have expurgated the four-letter words is no more; but swearing lives on and certain swear words continue to be excoriated by ‘polite society’. When and where it is permitted, swearing is I fear no more lively or entertaining now than when Graves wrote Lars Porsena. Would that more of us had the quick wit of the master of a Thames tug Graves quotes – when discussing aspersions on the chastity of sisters and daughters – who

remonstrated with for fouling a pleasure-boat and breaking an oar, leant over the rails and replied hoarsely: ‘Oh, I did, did I, Charley? And talking of oars, ’ow’s your sister?’

While we may have thrown off the shackles of the censor, we have instead wrapped ourselves in the strait-jacket of political correctness. There is only one ray of hope that the noble art of imaginative swearing may be revived, and that is the amendment of section five of the Public Order Act. Since we are again free to use insulting words, swearing may have a future after all. And for this, astonishingly enough, we have to thank our politicians, whom the majority of us regard, at least most of the time, as little more than a pack of venal, pompous, prating, lickspittle jackasses.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Anthony Wells 2015