A threnody for the declining art of rudeness
PAUL JOHNSON
The man who has been labelled 'the rudest man in Britain' is to be paid £75,000 an hour to entertain television viewers with the story of the monarchy. I came across Dr David Starkey on Radio Four's Moral Maze programme. He was rude; and I was rude back, I'm sorry to say. But his rudeness was not the quality product: no touch of the FE. Smiths, none of the finely phrased, piercing insolence that caused Dr Johnson to tell a Thames waterman, Sir, your wife, under pretence of keeping a bawdy house, is a receiver in stolen goods.' O'Connell would have been disgusted at such gaucherie; Disraeli would not have half-raised an eyebrow. If this man is the best Britain can do, then the ungentle art of insolence is in perilous decline and mere hoydenism rules.
By the art I do not mean what judges, when presiding over a libel action, dismiss as 'vulgar abuse; the kind of thing that Dennis Skinner used to come up with in the House of Commons (what has become of him, by the way?). Or the incondicity of RSM professionalism ('you 'orrible little man'). Or fighting words developing into fisticuffs, so characteristic of Brendan Behan and Norman Mailer in their prime. I mean, rather, creative rudeness, malicious persiflage, which can be polished into a historic anecdote, like Churchill's exchange with Lady Astor, or preserved and updated for re-use. Or classic outbursts, habitually associated with a particular person, eagerly or fearfully awaited, heard (if you are not the victim) with relish and recounted endlessly.
It seems to me that there is less calculated effrontery and sophisticated insult these days. The Australian movie actor Russell Crowe, who 'pinned against a wall' an errant BBC producer, wasted the opportunity and used mere Six O'Clock Swill obscenities, thereby letting down the antipodean tradition of witty impudence. I met a mine manager up the coast from Perth, who had taught his parrot to be craftily rude. In the splenetic stakes I once rated highly such products of the Sydney Push as Germaine Greer and Clive James, and also Edna Everage in his tinny days, to say nothing of the intemperate art-expert Douglas Cooper, rated 'the rudest man of the 20th century'. A good example of this hard-edged stuff is what one lady says to her neighbour at a women's lunch (said to have been coined by Ms Greer): 'What do you do, dear? Or are you just a handbag?' (The correct response to this is to turn to your other neighbour and say, 'Well, there's Sydney manners for your) I miss the days when television exchanges were delicately barbed as well as rumbustious, I am thinking of that old battle-axe Lady Violet Bonham-Carter, who would occasionally, as she put it, 'condescend to be rude', especially when exchanging thrusts with a first-rate claymore such as Bob Boothby. I recall making up a trio with this illustrious pair in the famous Studio Nine at the bottom of Kingsway, a notorious arena for insults. That part of London was a minefield of rage in mid-century. A stone's throw away dwelt Professor J.B.S. Haldane, a heroically rude man whose cataclysmic storms of uncontrolled fury were directed alike at Cabinet ministers, field marshals, dons, servants, anyone within reach. With one of his thermo-nuclear strikes he could reduce a strong man to tears. I have seen it — and his assaults were all the more fearful in that his wife, far from restraining him, often threw in a kiloton or two of her own.
Then there was Gilbert Harding, forgotten now, perhaps, but a broadcasting titan whose formidable put-downs make Starkey seem pygmaean. He was a 1930s schoolmaster, and looked it; and his crushing sarcasms, hitherto expended on hapless boys — it was usual in those days but would be unlawful now —were transmuted into television gold. What I liked about Gilbert, a man of infinite insults, was that he practised rudeness as an art form. By way of training, he would sit just inside the door of the bar at the Savile Club and subject each member, as he entered, to a well-aimed broadside. The Savile bar was a place sacred to bold insolence, for it was there that the great John Davenport, the Hercules of the art, had hoisted the tiny Lord Chancellor, Maugham, on to the mantelpiece and bade him, 'Sit there like a clock, you short-arsed little tick.' So in this hallowed shrine Gilbert reigned and members trembled or, if they were safely over the threshold, roared with craven laughter.
It is the essence, indeed, of vintage rudeness that it should generate glee as well as horror and rage. By this rule Tom Driberg did not qualify, for his vituperative scorn was directed exclusively at the servile, especially in restaurants. (He once got the entire editorial staff of the now-defunct Reynolds News banned from the only passable restaurant in the district where it was produced.) On the other hand, Randolph Churchill, though intolerable in liquor, when his skill deteriorat ed, was universally rude but especially to the powerful. He made a particular point of roaring at potential or actual employers, in the shape of Max Beaverbrook and Esmond Rothermere, who quailed at his approach. I never heard him bawl out a waiter (though chambermaids were another matter, I heard). Nor, when writing of those brazen, blazing days should I forget Bernard Levin's encaustic contributions to this journal, which collectively constituted an Old Testament of quotable ruderies, all directed at the high and mighty in their seats of power. In those days he was not merely a rude man of genius but a prophet inspired.
I wonder whether the decline in highoctane abuse is not due, in part, to changing fashions in naughty words. Legitimising the four-letter expletive has made insults monotonous and uncerebral. in the Crowe manner. On the other hand, an infinite range of comparative terms is now judged in bad taste, if not actually against the law. Dubliners cannot now bring Kerrymen into the tirade, nor New Yorkers the Bowery, nor Australians the wretched New Zealanders and Tasmanians. `Bare-arsed Scotchmen. and 'thieving Welsh' are now protected species. Blacks and 'Chinamen', `Fuzzy-Wuzzies' and spearthrowers are out, as Prince Philip, one of the last exponents of the art, has recently been reminded. Insults involving the deaf, the blind, the halt, the midget, the old or the senile, or indeed anyone egregious and eccentric, are forbidden. This process of censorship can be, and is being, extended indefinitely.
Yet classical rudeness, in which nothing is barred, is not heartless. Whether practised by Shaw or Beiloc, Nye Bevan or Winston Churchill himself, it often reflects the ebullience of a great spirit. A rude man can be magnanimous, and tender. Thus the great Gilbert Harding broke down in tears during his famous television encounter with John Freeman. Evelyn Waugh and Randolph Churchill were in the same mould. When Waugh heard that his sparring partner had undergone a successful operation for lung cancer, he spat out, 'Isn't modern medicine wonderful? They examined all Randolph's body and removed the one bit of it that was not malignant.' But shortly afterwards, glimpsing Churchill's pale and shrunken features in White's Club, he embraced him tearfully and thus healed a breach of many years. Inside every rude man, a compassionate man is struggling to get out.
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