ANOTHER VOICE

Time to send for the Earl of Airlie

CHARLES MOORE

According to the Daily Mirror last Sat- urday, 'Edwina Currie's fiery daughter has left a top boarding school under a cloud after hurling four-letter abuse at a teacher.' 'Debbie Currie, 17' called Mr Nigel Green, who was supervising her German A-Level exam, 'you twat'. She also, the Mirror reports, said 'monkey, monkey' to Mr Green, for reasons which are obscure. As a result, she was, it seems, rusticated from Denstone College ('Denstone is set in extensive grounds and has its own golf course') in Staffordshire.

Miss Currie's fate caught my eye because I was brooding about an article by Nigel Spivey (`Meditations on an f-theme') which appeared in The Spectator two weeks ago. Mr Spivey was arguing that four-letter words are becoming more and more com- mon in newspapers, and should be stopped because the use of such words is 'an essen- tially juvenile speech act'. He rejected the argument that because the words were used in real life they therefore had to be report- ed, and cited the poetry of the first world war: '... every other word in the trenches of the great war was an f-word. The most pow- erful records of trench experience are poems: poems without f-words... a certain propriety is upheld that never weakens the essential audacity of the writing.'

That seemed well put; but then I remem- bered David Jones' preface to his own In Parenthesis, one of the most audacious nov- els to come out of the Great War:

I have been hampered by the convention of not using impious and impolite words, because the whole shape of our discourse was conditioned by the use of such words. The very repetition of them made them seem liturgical, certainly deprived them of malice, and occasionally, when skilfully disposed, and used according to established but flexible tra- dition, gave a kind of significance, and even at moments a dignity, to our speech. Some- times their juxtaposition in a sentence, and when expressed under poignant circum- stances, reached real poetry... I say more: the 'Bugger! Bugger!' of a man detailed, had often about it the 'Fiat! Fiat!' of the Saints.

We shall never know how David Jones would have managed this 'liturgical' obscenity. I suspect that he could have car- ried it off. But what we do know is that he wrote a very good novel under the con- straint of which he was complaining (it was published in 1937), and what we can observe is that no one writing in the age of free expression in these matters does use obscenity with anything like the precision and, if that is not too paradoxical, the deli- cacy which Jones describes.

Most modern writers use obscenity casu- ally, in the name of realism, or lazily, to achieve instant immediacy, or posturingly, to prove their street cred. (I like to think that, in 50 years, such writing will seem as dated as all the 'By Joves' and 'Great Scotts' of the 1930s.) What they need is the equivalent of a good newspaper sub-editor, someone who reads the copy carefully and asks annoying questions like, 'Why is this here?' and 'You said the same thing four paras earlier' and `How does this advance the story?'. They have no such person. Publishers who, 30 years ago, tried to take obscenity out, now try to put it in. I know a recent case of a very distinguished publisher telling a very distinguished former Booker Prize winner to go away and write some more naughty bits into his novel. The same seems to be true of playwrights. If you write for the sub- sidised theatre, you do not write with your audience in mind, but with an eye to the approval of those who work in the sub- sidised theatre, and they are trapped in a culture which would not dare to condemn obscenity.

Which brings me back to Miss Currie. Miss Currie, if the Mirror is right, used a rude word (I didn't realise how rude it was, actually, until I asked our learned news edi- tor after reading the story, but Miss Currie did: she told the Mirror, 'Yes, I do know what it means') so she was sent home. That seems about right. Her academic career is not in ruins, but she was punished. Shouldn't the equivalent happen to writ- ers?

No, comes the outraged response writers aren't schoolchildren: they are the guardians of truth. But couldn't they be both? Couldn't they be, simultaneously, the most remarkable and the most silly people? Isn't there something about the artist's rel- ationship with society which requires an authority against which he can rebel? Artists are like teenagers — assertive of their independence precisely because they are in fact so dependent. The quality of their work drops when their temperaments are indulged. It rises when they face the challenge of getting round authority.

But who is the authority to be? The important thing is that it should not be a person or body with any claims to artistic expertise. As soon as the authority starts trying to fudge aesthetic merit and artistic intention you get the nightmarish self-con- gratulation of the witnesses for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial, and lose all pos- sibility of stopping rubbish. Nor should it be an employee of the• government, let alone a government department. That way lies the manipulation of all artistic expres- sion. My suggestion is that it should be the Earl of Airlie.

Judging by his entry in Who's Who, the Earl is admirably free from any taint of the creative (although his wife is a trustee of the Tate and National Galleries), but that, though a good starting point, does not dis- tinguish him from many of his fellow noble- men. His special qualification is that he is the Lord Chamberlain, and it was the Lord Chamberlain, until the 1960s, who vetted plays before they could be put on in Lon- don.

How benign that system seems now. There was no rigid rule, no power to imprison, no pushing of an ideological line — just the power of a decent man who was head of the Queen's Household to say from time to time that a play went a bit too far and could do with some toning down.

As a boy when the system was abolished, I remember Kenneth Tynan leering into the television camera and explaining that now a play called, I think, The Beard, could 'use words never before heard on stage'. Naturally, I longed to go to The Beard, but even at the time it did not seem much more of a blow for freedom than the skinhead's right to scream abuse at old women in the street.

If Lord Airlie had all today's manuscripts put before him, the playwrights would quickly adapt without detriment to their serious artistic intention. At the same time, fringe theatres would enjoy a revival because they would be mildly samizdat and people would like going along to them in the spirit of the children in the song by Flanders and Swann who shout 'Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers' when their parents are out.

Could the same arrangements be extend- ed to novels? Clearly Lord Airlie would not have the time. Perhaps the duties could be spread around the court — the Lord Stew- ard, the Master of the Horse, even the Sil- ver Stick-in-Waiting, Brig. Andrew Parker- Bowles.