Chapter II: Part 2

‘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 importance were 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 wash your 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 that in 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 realization frequently 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, became less 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 work _Ulysses_, 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, impossible to 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 novel _For the Term of his Natural Life_, or in Benjamin Disraeli’s account of industrial obscenity in the 1830’s given in _Sybil_; nor can we supplement Alec Waugh’s hints of Public School obscenity in his _Loom 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 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 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 occasional _damn_ or _bloody_, 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 unnatural vice”, 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 his _Recent 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
Crown that 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 of _Supward_: perhaps it stands for “Bedward”, supper being the preliminary to bed, and _bed_ being 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 were sometimes 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 word _décolletée_ (“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 common resemblances 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 of his 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 as the 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 strengthened_ with this belief, _vain and false_ as it may be, that the _blessings of freedom and truth_ are _kept and won_, that the _character of the race and of the individual_ becomes _higher and stronger_ by such _self-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, not merely 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. The only 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 sympathy of 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, but his 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’s _Ulysses_ than has here been given. But they must remain unsatisfied. Though _Ulysses_ could be studied as a complete manual of contemporary obscenity, such a study will get no encouragement here. It is true that _Ulysses_ is 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 English as 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 the _Sonnets_ lustful: 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 in _Ulysses_ directly 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 feelings and 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 an artistic 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!”

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 of the trivialities of lust and obscenity to which early middle-age has brought Bloom and his wife.

It is quite right that _Ulysses_ should 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:

――Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

――Obvious punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently
corrected.

――Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.

――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.