Postscript
Word over all
P. J. Kavanagh In a news bulletin about a collapsed hotel in Singapore it was announced that the tunnelling experts helping in the rescue were English and Irish, 'Tommy Gallacher from Donegal and Mr Bryan Powers from Lancashire'. It is a small distinction, and If I were an Irish citizen I might smile. It was doubtless unconscious on the part of the news-compiler, unconsciously uncorrected by the newsreader, but it could be thought to imply a world of difference — !vit. Powers the expert, and Tommy trundling the barrow. Paddy's place is behind the mixer,' said the dying Sir Robert Mac- Alpine. Years ago the Irish poet Pearce Hutchinson made friends with a neigh- bour's pony that was making friends with a cat. When he learned that the pony's NO e was Leprechaun he silently renamed It, because for him 'Leprechaun' is an Irish" belittling word, like 'Shillelagh', and 3 pony-belittling name also. I was present at this incident and did not know how deeply he felt until I read a poem about it in hls latest collection, Climbing the Light. His reaction may seem over-sensitive to some English readers, but we do well to remem- ber the power of words, their capacity to affect the way we think. I was also present when Seamus Heaney; in answer to some question from ca; audience, in a village hall near Bristol, began to talk about 'The Word'. Not about the power of words, but about The Word _ itself. This was startling, with its obviou. ., Biblical reference, and interesting: I conT not imagine Larkin, or any English Po t, talking about The Word. It was not entire ly clear what Heaney meant — any more than St John is clear, in an ordinary sense — but he opened the discussion wide. The Word, its astonishing power to build or destroy, is to be seen clearly in opera- tion if we crank the whole business down as far as it will go, to the use of words in Popular journalism, and then crank it up again, quite high, to their sports pages, where the better writing is usually found. What, for example, brought down the exquisite footballer George Best, but The Word? Not cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women, but the way he was himself pursued as he pursued these things. It is as though the accumulated words poured over him, built themselves into a single destructive edifice and overwhelmed him. We are not talking about film stars and Politicians — those who seek publicity may Perish by it — we are talking about genius withered, blasted, by The Word. The same sort of thing is happening to Ian Botham. It is no good saying that People should not read their own bad Publicity. It is not possible now to live like Wordsworth, protected by his wife and sister from unfavourable reviews. Botham has, it seems almost literally, gone mad. There was something insane about the gesture he directed at the press box when he was out for a low score in the Trinidad Test Match. It was too violent. Genius is being destroyed, by itself, and by The Word.
These may seem small matters, sports- men merely. It is possible to think of more Widely serious examples, but they are in the same category: The Word and its Power. Two words, for example, drive the press mad. One is 'vicar' and the other is `rape'. When they come together in a story, as they have recently, the madness is Palpable. Could, therefore, a plea be made for the abandonment altogether of the word `rape'? What the woman has en- dured, after all, is Assault. A Women's Group has stated that it believes rape (a Word used only in whispers a few years ago, but now on every newscast) has nothing to do with sex but with power and the desire to humiliate. Nevertheless we are daily infected with the involuntary Pictures the word `rape' occasions and, worse, very much worse, the victim knows we have these pictures in our minds, Whether we want them or not, and that must be the worst part, or the most enduring, of her suffering. This could be avoided if the crime were a form of assault. It would be a movement towards sexual equality. Why the word 'vicar' is a trigger word, a comic word, is perhaps best resolved by vicars themselves. Last night there were comic vicars in two television advertise- ments, one for lavatory cleaner and the other for Today newspaper. Both were in the act of praying and one levitated by the lavatory-pan. The reasons for censorship ate many, the arguments against them Irrefutable: you cannot legislate on matters Of f taste. But we could abandon the word rape'.
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