Things that get into print and make us shudder
Hard to remember an occasion when an author has aroused such unanimous distaste as Cherie Blair’s revelation that the birth of her son Leo was due to her unwillingness to take her contraceptive kit to Balmoral, where the royal butler would unpack her suitcase and see it. ‘Ugh!’ or ‘Oh dear!’ were the universal responses; and ‘Poor Tony! How embarrassed/ashamed he must feel!’ To the dismay of her friends, and the delight of her enemies, Mrs Blair has been made to realise the sheer adamantine power of cold print. A tale which might be tolerable, even amusing — or touching — when told, mouth to ear, in gossip, becomes offensively leaden when spelt out on the page and read by countless firesides. All professional writers learn by bitter experience, or helpful censorship by their elders, that there is a rubicon which divides private speech from public print: cross it at your peril. Some would argue that Cherie, having made this woeful faux pas, should brazen it out. Should not truth come first, even in the marital quarters? Freddie Ayer used to say — or was it his witty wife, Dee Wells? — ‘If the Dutch cap fits, wear it.’ But I don’t think so. The clumsy author’s best bet is that it will all soon be forgotten. But not by poor Leo, I fear.
It is some consolation that most, perhaps all, authors, even the greatest, have committed comparable blunders, have put into irrevocable and perpetual texts phrases, whole sentences or even entire paragraphs which return to haunt them on sleepless nights, or blot records for good taste, fine judgment and literary decorum. Jane Austen is the perfect example, for no writer took more trouble to judge the exact power of words to bring a blush or pump up a heartbeat or plant a dangerous thought in delicate minds — and used words accordingly. I have no doubt that Jane, talking to her sister Cassandra, let her witty, sharp, even salacious and scandal-relishing tongue range freely, knowing she was safely on the discretionary side of the river, and all would be guarded in her sister’s sensible heart. And, when she put her naughty thoughts into epistolary words, Cassandra could be relied on to destroy the letters or cut it. But once or twice her vigilance slept. Thus cruel Jane has gone into print with her remark about the lady who had a miscarriage because she happened to glance inadvertently at her husband. Jane’s critics have pounced on this lapse as evidence of her malignity, though it is, rather, of the taste of Elizabeth Bennet, who says ‘Follies and non sense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’ In her canonical novels Jane only once plunges across, or rather into, the rubicon. She is close to the brink once or twice, notably when she has the sophisticated, town-bred Mary Crawford, speaking of junior admirals she knows, say that of ‘rears and vices’ there are plenty. This is a deliberate double entendre, the only one in the entire corpus, and must have caused Jane to hesitate long before she penned it. But I would not have it cut for words. The one real disaster occurs in Persuasion, a novel of her experienced maturity and therefore all the more surprising. She writes: ‘The Musgroves had had the ill fortune of a very troublesome, hopeless son; and the good fortune to lose him before his twentieth year.’ This is a shocking, detestable sentence — no argument about it — and she follows it up by adding: ‘he had been very little cared for at any time by his family, though quite as much as he deserved’. All Austen’s admirers shudder when they think of this horrible lapse.
Then there is the case of Evelyn Waugh, a writer who used words, and the images they convey, with immense care and precision, and often got up in the middle of the night and padded downstairs to alter a term or a phrase in his exquisitely handwritten copy. But he, too, once or twice, made hair-raising mistakes. Thus in Brideshead Revisited, where he used words like jewels as a rule, and produced unrivalled metaphors in profusion, he fell off his horse when he came to describe the tender moment, on the transatlantic liner, when the hero and heroine first make love: ‘It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.’ Hard to think which is worse — that awkward phrase ‘narrow loins’, which becomes more embarrassing the more you think of it, or pronounce it (worse), or the gross idea of Charles Ryder as a sexual property developer. The book was an instant success, so it was some consolation to Waugh’s rivals and friends that they could snigger and gloat over this dreadful lapse. Bowra roared. Cyril Connolly read it aloud with relish. Nancy Mitford took to referring to her ‘narrow loins’ whenever she went to her dressmaker, or joked that Louise de Vilmorin was carting her narrow loins from one lover to another. The error was all the more unfortunate in that the original owner (do they come in pairs, one wondered), Julia Flyte, never quite comes to life anyway. Harold Acton, having resorted to the OED and come up with the definition, read aloud to visitors to La Pietra, that Julia’s valuable property was ‘situated on both sides of the vertebral column, between the false rib and the hip bone’.
Kingsley Amis was another writer who took immense trouble over words and used them admirably. Like Waugh, he delighted to discover a new word or its pristine meaning. Where Waugh rebuked people for misusing the word ‘effete’, which should never be applied to a man, Kingsley once ticked me off for confusing ‘unqualified’ with ‘unequivocal’ (in his anxiety to score a cheap point he sometimes talked like a red-brick don, which of course he had been). But he stumbled heavily, too, crossing the line between loose saloon-bar ridicule and unalterable print in his best novel, Lucky Jim. When Dixon hears the hated Professor Welch singing in the bathroom, the authorial voice comments: ‘The piece was recognisable to Dixon as some skein of untiring facetiousness by filthy Mozart.’ When the book came out, to general delight, this sentence was seized on by instant enemies as proof of Amis’s unfathomable philistinism, lower-middle-class cloth ear and provincial barbarism. Some people never let him forget it: ‘Heard any filthy Mozart lately?’ they would sneer.
Finally, as yet more pitiful balm to the much-battered Cherie, there is the case of Shakespeare. Considering how much he wrote, and how quickly, and the vertiginous risks he took with words, often inventing them, he fell into the river remarkably seldom. But there was a big splash in Macbeth, his best-written play, albeit the text we have is corrupt. He has Lady Macbeth saying:
I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me, I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn As you have done to this.
Such stuff is unbelievable, and unpleasant, and makes you worry horribly about the author. It caused great trouble to A.C. Bradley in his famous or notorious Shakespearean Tragedy, with its realist approach to the texts, and led Bradley’s critics, such as L.C. Knights, to weigh in with laboured satire, as in his essay, ‘How Many Children had Lady Macbeth?’ Perhaps none. I can’t see Lady M worrying about the butler unpacking when she went to stay with King Duncan. Though she’d be careful to hide her customary pair of daggers.
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