Low life
Plain-
Jeffrey Bernard
There's not enough love in the world and that's a fact. There's a woman, a rather nasty piece of work to my eyes and way of thinking, who has a vendetta against me and who is trying to get me barred from a club. She objects to my language and last week when she overheard me call a friend of mine a wanker in one of our weekly 30-second rows, she complained to the management and she is hell bent on doling out some sort of punishment. I don't quite know whether she is vindictive or simply unhappy. But I don't consider the word wanker to be a swear word. If I had wanted to call him a masturbator I would have done. What I did want to do was to let him know that what he was saying was in my opinion a load of rubbish. Whether or not he is a masturbator is neither here nor there nor any of my business, but should he be I take my hat off to him in view of the fact that he is 71.
Curiosity made me look up `wanker' in Partridge's Dictionary of Slang this morn- ing and I am quite right. A wanker is also somebody thought little of, and, as every- body knows, a bloater: Felstead School, 1892, the Felstedian. But the whole silly business upset me since I don't like gener- ating a sort of blind hate in people I don't even know. (A Sporting Life reader once sent me a turd in the post because of something I had written about the Govern- ment in my column.) Anyway, I spoke to my brother Oliver about it on the tele- phone and this morning I received a letter from him on the subject, which I hope he won't mind me quoting from.
I know there is a lot of pathology in swearing. That is, possible symptoms of early trauma connected with guilt and angst about sex. Some poor chaps and women can't help associating sex with aggression, randiness with rape, etc. I know too that there is verbal aggression, and I hope I can use words skilfully enough to make them substitute for caresses or for blows in the face. And as for us paranoids, it's necessary to verbally fuck the Government or the Trustees of the Tate Gallery now and again. We were brought up not to use that sort of language, and we have to have our revenge on our upbringing. We were brought up oppressively, you might say
unjustly . . We were not allowed to know that adults even pissed, let alone mastur- bated or had genital sex. We were made to cower under the toadstools of tiny-tottery and chastised for peering up at ladies' knickers under their modest modes and fashions . . . . I see of course, we all see of course, that the texture of a discourse half full of fucking and fucking well and fuck is not so pleasant or smooth or elegant as it might be, but after all discourse is a way of expressing our feelings to our own satisfac- tion (not altruistic), and probably we need to do this. Fucking is not descriptive, but off-duty writers have done their descriptions already in the morning, and are now fucking well going to fucking relax among their friends and whatever other pricks may be about in the enormously fucking expensive haunts they repair to in order to avoid the worst fucking pricks and awful clubs they might otherwise have to be flicking endur- ing . . . No club exists which does not have
`All my life I'd wanted a sex-change operation.'
the purpose of excluding non-members but no club excludes enough people, obviously.
Quite so, but what else can I call my friend other than a wanker when he tells me that D. H. Lawrence was the greatest writer of the 20th century? Another thing I wonder about is how do men or women so squeamish about swearing cope with con- temporary theatre, cinema and fiction? The flushes must be hot enough to be able to fry an egg on their cheeks. Of course a lot of women, particularly in the East End, and their minders, object so violently to swearing because they think it makes them look like ladies. They then, of course, go home and have shouting matches swearing at the loved ones like the proverbial fish wife. I nearly forgot. Another thing that makes my mate a wanker is that he will persist in following beaten favourites last time out. But, as Oliver suggested, perhaps the rebuke to the lady in the club might be from Corinthians: 'Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'
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