by Rufus Lodge
He was appearing at the Central Criminal Court at London’s Old Bailey, before Mr Justice Byrne, on 20 October 1960 in the notorious case of Regina vs. Penguin Books Limited. At issue was the legal status of one of the most famous novels of the twentieth century: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. Was it, as Mr Griffith-Jones and his team sought to prove, an Obscene Publication, under the terms of the 1959 Act of that title? Or was it, as argued by the defence, a controversial work which nonetheless merited publication on the grounds of literary merit?
The resulting case became as celebrated as Lawrence’s book, not least for Mr Griffith-Jones’s questions to the jury: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’
Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not the first of Lawrence’s books to have aroused such concern. Copies of The Rainbow (1915) were seized by Scotland Yard a few weeks after publication; more were destroyed after a hearing at Bow Street Police Court. Its sequel, Women in Love (1920), was described by John Bull magazine as ‘A Book the Police Should Ban … Loathsome Study of Sex Depravity’. But neither furore approached the intensity of the firestorm that surrounded the publication – or, more accurately, intended publication – of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Lawrence had completed an initial draft of the book in a remarkable forty-day spurt of creativity in the autumn of 1926; then immediately spent a further three months on a totally revised manuscript. Still unsatisfied, he returned to the sexual exploits of the lady with the emasculated husband, and a potent gamekeeper living conveniently in the grounds, at the end of 1927. By early January 1928, the book was finished, and Lawrence submitted it to his publishers in London and New York – both of whom declared that it was impossible to publish, on account of both its language and its vivid sexual descriptions. Instead, Lawrence allowed a publisher in Florence to print a small run of the uncensored text, most copies of which (and of the subsequent pirated editions) found their way back to Britain. The ever-reliable John Bull was quick to exploit the occasion, pronouncing that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was ‘Shameful – A Landmark in Evil’, and adding, ‘The sewers of French pornography would be dragged in vain to find a parallel in beastliness.’
Lawrence had his own distinctive views on the nature of pornography, French or otherwise. ‘I find Jane Eyre veering towards pornography,’ he wrote. ‘As soon as there is sex excitement with a desire to spite the sexual feeling, to humiliate it and degrade it, the element of pornography enters … The greatest of all lies in the modern world is the lie of purity, and the dirty little secret.’ The crime of Lady Chatterley, and her chronicler, was to expose the existence of sexual feeling, among the aristocracy as well as the lower classes, and to do so without shame.
In his original draft, however, her ladyship seems strangely innocent of the F-word and its power. When her lover, Mellors, describes himself as her ‘fucker’, Lawrence notes: ‘The word, she knew from [her husband], was obscene, and she flushed deeply and then went pale. But since the word itself had so little association to her, it made very little impression on her.’ She is soon employing the term herself, echoing Mellors’s rhetorical question: ‘Why shouldna I fuck thee, when we both on us want it?’
In the final draft, Connie Chatterley first hears the F-word from one of her husband’s drinking buddies, Tommy Dukes: ‘Love’s another of those half-witted performances today. Fellows with swaying wrists fucking little jazz girls with small-boy buttocks, like two collar studs!’ It is left to Mellors to introduce her to another taboo term, whereupon Connie exclaims: ‘“Cunt”! It’s like “fuck”, then.’ ‘Nay, nay,’ Mellors replies. ‘Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see?’ In his fearless use of language, Mellors clearly speaks for his creator: ‘I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warmth, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.’
Before long, everyone in the novel is using the word, including Connie’s husband and her father (‘I never went back on a good bit of fucking myself’). But the king of ‘fucking’ remains Mellors, who in his final missive to Lady C combines earthy expression with Lawrentian poetry: ‘We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth.’ As Lawrence noted in an accompanying essay, ‘The words that shock so much at first don’t shock at all after a while.’
Yet the taint of ‘obscenity’ remained. Lawrence wrote, ‘Nobody quite knows what the word “obscene” itself means, or what it is intended to mean: but gradually all the old words that belong to the body below the navel have come to be judged obscene. Obscene today means that the policeman thinks he has a right to arrest you, nothing else.’
Although Lawrence himself was not arrested for the crime of writing obscenity – his punishment came in the toll that the scandal took upon his health, and in his death in 1930 – his book endured more than thirty years of censorship and repression. It was trimmed of its more controversial words for UK and US publication in 1932. In 1944, the American publisher Dial Press returned some of the taboo terms to the text, albeit as ‘f---’ and ‘c---’, and were immediately convicted of obscenity – a verdict overturned later that year. All three drafts of the manuscript appeared uncut in Italy in 1954. Then, in 1959, Grove Press in New York dared to give the full text of Lawrence’s preferred version its first airing in an English-speaking country. Copies were impounded by the police, but after a series of trials, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was finally freed from its legal shackles.
The next scene took place in London, where in August 1960 Penguin Books planned to issue Lady Chatterley’s Lover as an unexpurgated paperback, priced at three shillings and sixpence (slightly more than the average price of a novel at the time). Anticipating that there might be legal opposition to the book, they effectively consented to the trial at the Old Bailey. A parade of expert witnesses was arranged by the defence, each taking the stand to declare that Lawrence’s stature as a novelist made all talk of obscenity irrelevant. The pioneering sociologist Richard Hoggart tried to dispel the idea that the common people of Britain might be unfamiliar with Lawrence’s language. ‘Fifty yards from this court this morning,’ he testified, ‘I heard a man say “fuck” three times as he passed me. He was speaking to himself and he said, “Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it” as he went past. If you have worked on a building site, like I have, you will find they recur over and over again.’
It was Lawrence’s own use of repetition that appears to upset Mr Griffith-Jones, who was forced to go through the manuscript like a trainspotter. ‘Just glance down,’ he told one witness. ‘“Cunt” appears again. “Fuck” appears. “Fuck” appears. “Cunt” appears. “Fuck” appears. All in the space of about twelve lines. Is this realistic conversation?’ To which the best answer might have been: ‘It is in our house, mate.’
Later, Griffith-Jones read aloud one of the most graphic sex scenes from the novel – presumably, by his own logic, thereby corrupting everyone in the courtroom – and then asked the jury: ‘You would have to go, would you not, some way in the Charing Cross Road, in the back streets of Paris, even Port Said, to find a description of sexual intercourse which is perhaps as lurid as that one?’ Having helpfully been supplied with a list of places where they might easily find pornographic books, the jury retired, and returned with a verdict of ‘Not guilty’.
Penguin were now free to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which they did in November 1960. The entire print run of 200,000 copies was sold out on the first day, thanks in great part to the free publicity provided by Mr Griffith-Jones and his chums. Lawrence was legal; so was the F-word. After that, as Louis the Frenchman would say, it was time for l
e déluge.
Mothers
Mother Comes First
Mothers – like ’em or not, we simply can’t do without them. Not if we want to be born, that is. Fathers? They might rule the universe – one of them might even have created it, if you believe the Bible – but ultimately they’re dispensable. After all, nobody ever wrote a song called ‘Father, the King of My Heart’, ‘Father and Child Reunion’ or even ‘Sylvia’s Father’.
The mother’s unique role in our lives, and our culture, explains why her name is attached to some of the most piercing insults in any language. In the Christian belief system, Mary the mother of Jesus holds a unique place: the spotless, virgin bearer of the Son of God, revered by all sects and strands, worshipped by the world’s billion-plus Catholics, painted across the centuries as the ultimate manifestation of innocence and devotion. The holy respect shown to Mary in Catholic nations is reproduced in the equally fervent way in which they (especially their male inhabitants) openly admire their own mothers. So it’s not surprising that languages such as Spanish and Italian are so rich in invective bent on defacing that eternal love: all the variants on tu madre or tua madre that revolve around the blameless mother suffering the most degrading of fates. When Mexican men spit ‘chinga a tu madre’ at each other, they’re not only inviting their rivals to copulate with their maternal parents, but insulting both the recipient of the verbal assault and the absent matriarch. In English, ‘up your mother’ doesn’t quite hold the same sting.
There’s another, pre-Christian strand of mother-related defilement which has also left its mark. The Greek myth of Oedipus – who, you will recall, succeeded in killing his father and then marrying (and having four children with) his mother – has passed into our global culture both as a psychological diagnosis (the Oedipus complex) but also a mythic tendency that holds an uncanny sway over our relationships with our parents, and male development from child to man. There’s a parallel impulse, in which sons’ love for their mothers is matched by that of daughters for their fathers (both assumed to be inescapable by many parents), but the latter does not require the daughter to kill her mother; only to leave her in the shade.
Sigmund Freud first identified the Oedipus complex at the very end of the nineteenth century; which was also the moment when a variant on that theme, and on the age-old insult from the Catholic lands along the Mediterranean, inspired the birth of a new word in the English language: one that was intended to be uniquely offensive, but which was tamed and even subverted during the second half of the twentieth century. Enter … the Motherfucker.
As recently as 1991, etymological expert Geoffrey Hughes observed that ‘motherfucker’ was first noticed by those who devote their lives to chronicling the changing shape of our language in 1956. But subsequent research has pushed that date further and further back: it might not have taken its place in ‘literature’ until well after the Second World War, but it could have been heard on the streets of major American cities, often from the mouths of young African-American males, well before the First World War. Court reports from the 1890s quote variants on the word cropping up in evidence (‘and then he called me a motherfucking so-and-so, your honour’); which suggests that the term was probably active some time before that. Given that ‘fuck’ had been in use for centuries, and the idea of intercourse with one’s mother was an obvious taboo (illegal, too, in almost all cultures), it is not difficult to imagine how a barrage of insults suggesting that one’s enemy ought to go and ‘fuck your mother’ could provoke the reply: ‘Who are you calling a motherfucker, mister?’
One fact is instantly apparent. There is no tradition, in English or any other major language, of ‘motherfucker’ being rivalled by a male-oriented equivalent: no urban streets resound to the cry of ‘Fatherfucker!’, in other words. That’s not to say that intercourse with a father is looked upon any more lightly than the maternal version: it’s still a taboo, still illegal, still every bit as likely to produce a genetic mutation if the coupling results in a child. But as the ‘father’ in any ‘fatherfucker’ is taken to be impervious to insult, that word would only carry a fraction of the weight delivered by a righteous cry of ‘motherfucker’. The ultimate proof can be found in that infallible (well, maybe not entirely) judge of all modern debates, Google, which turns up 13,700,000 results for ‘motherfucker’, but only 379,000 for ‘fatherfucker’.
The Forgotten Father
Even if ‘fatherfucker’ is largely absent from the English vocabulary as an insult, it has peeked its head shyly into the culture in recent years. Its most notable appearance was as the title of an album by the American singer-songwriter Peaches: a choice that might restrict her chances of radio airplay, you might think, but then the creator of such delicate offerings as ‘Fuck the Pain Away’, ‘Lovertits’, ‘Shake Yer Dix’, and ‘Tent in Your Pants’ had probably already decided to sacrifice such an obvious means of publicity.
Fatherfucker is also the literal translation of a prize-winning 1990s novel by Japanese author and artist Shungiku Uchida, though the book has yet to be rendered into English.
Neither of these works has rivalled the distribution and popularity of the American animated feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. A musical based on the antics of several foul-mouthed schoolboys, one of whom has the unfortunate habit of dying, the movie included several songs that planted themselves immediately into the memory, such as ‘Kyle’s Mom’s A Bitch’ and ‘Blame Canada’. Neither, however, could rival the impact of Terrance and Phillip’s ‘Uncle Fucka’ – an expletive-rich show-tune which not only featured a flatulent duet during the song’s bridge, but also welcomed a fresh insult into the world. As one of the cartoon parents says: ‘Well, what do you expect? They’re Canadian.’
The Superior Mother
The Mother Superior of a convent, otherwise known as the Abbess, should be a stern but dignified figure: the epitome of religious devotion and sinlessness. But, to satirists in the seventeenth-century, Mother Abbess was sometimes used as a euphemism – an obscure one, it’s true – for a common prostitute. A variant was Mother Midnight, the popular term for a midwife, who would presumably watch over the streets while all decent nuns were asleep.
From there, it was a short slip down the ladder of decency for Mother Abbess, in the bawdy sense, to be shortened to ‘Mother’ – therefore giving this loveliest of English nouns a decidedly sexual bent, several hundred years before the first ‘motherfucker’ was ever recorded.
Mother’s Multi-Tasking
Seize the Time was the rip-roaring autobiography of Bobby Seale – co-founder of the Black Panther Party, and one of the figureheads of the late Sixties revolutionary counter-culture that drove US President Richard Nixon to the brink of breakdown. So dangerous was Seale in the establishment’s eyes that when he was placed on trial for conspiracy – that’s conspiracy with a bunch of white radicals whom he had never actually met – he was bound and gagged in the courtroom, to prevent him spouting his righteously radical rhetoric within the delicate earshot of the judge.
Seale’s book perfectly captured the anger, antagonism and sense of injustice that fuelled the Black Power movement. But it also proved its author to be unexpectedly interested in the finer points of African-American language.
The book opens with a vivid account of Seale’s reaction to the assassination of Black Power leader Malcolm X in 1965. His instinctive reaction is violent rebellion, so he collects six loose bricks, ‘and broke the motherfuckers in half’. Each time a police car glides down the street, he picks up a half-brick, and ‘threw it at the motherfuckers’. In summary, then, ‘They’re driving down the street, and I’m throwing bricks for a motherfucker’. This naturally inspired Seale’s imagination to dream of the day when ‘I’ll make my own self into a motherfucking Malcolm X’. And all of this on the first page.
So, to recap: the police are motherfuckers, which is bad; the bricks are motherfuckers, but they’re Seale’s bricks, so they’re good; he’s thro
wing like a motherfucker, which is presumably an expression of power; and he wants to become a motherfucking Malcolm X, which is that power redoubled to the ultimate degree. No wonder that at the conclusion of the book, Seale declares: ‘Motherfucker is a very common expression nowadays.’ And he quotes no less an expert on the subject than his fellow radical (and future born-again Republican), Eldridge Cleaver: ‘I’ve seen and heard brothers use the word four and five times in one sentence and each time the word had a different meaning and expression.’
Yet Seale does more than demonstrate the ‘motherfucker’ in action: he offers an origin for the word that you won’t find in any dictionary. ‘Motherfucker’, he declares, ‘actually comes from the old slave system, and was a reference to the slave master who raped our mothers, which society today doesn’t want to face as a fact.’
None of this means any insult to mothers, Seale insists: ‘This never enters a black brother’s mind.’ Indeed, ‘Raping our mothers was fantastically derogatory.’ But, he concludes, ‘Today, one can use the word to refer to a friend or someone he respects for doing things he never thought could be done by a black man … it’s kind of a real complimentary statement to a brother or even a sister when one vicariously relates to someone who’s black and pulls a fantastic feat. We will joyfully say, “Man, he’s a motherfucker.”’ Which is how a word that was rooted in barbarity came to be turned upside down, and remade into a weapon against the men that it originally described.