Where Have All the Insults Gone?

Trentino: I did not come here to be insulted. Firefly: That's what you think. --Duck Soup

In an age when the uptight are continually exhorted to let it all hang out and be in touch with their feelings, it is curious that no one calls anyone else a Byzantine logothete any more. That is what Teddy Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson; and, while a Byzantine logothete is not the worst thing you can say about someone--it means a glorified accountant--it does suggest a certain largesse of contempt that is missing from modern life. A government official is fired from a high post and he cites "personal differences" with his superior. An actress is savaged in a gossip column, and she "resents" it. Mighty civilized behavior. To be sure, these people do not mean a tepid word they say. Deep in their smoking hearts what they yearn to shout is that the former boss and the gossip columnist are the putrescence of the earth, that they have the grace of herring, the brains of rock stars, that their faces would sink a fleet. They do not say so, of course. Instead, their minds flee their true feelings like panicked belles, skittering over perfectly decent invectives, settling finally on the gray ruins of politeness.

It is not that insults have disappeared entirely from modern discourse, but they have been reduced to the most elementary forms of abuse, and to the least poetic occasions. Once in a while one feels the sweet spray of curses in a traffic jam or at a ball game, for example, and is momentarily uplifted, but it is mere rudeness, and rudimentary. Fortunately, we still have the old movies to turn to:

Peter Lorre: You despise me, don't you? Humphrey Bogart: Well, if I gave you any thought, I probably would.

Otherwise all is indirection--the professor who refers to his "learned colleague" (meaning "fool") or the Congressman who defers to "the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey" (meaning "crooked fool"). There simply are no great insults any more; what was an art has become a shambles.

The odd thing is that it was not so long ago that the art of the insult was in its heyday. Winston Churchill was a virtuoso at it, calling Clement Attlee "a sheep in sheep's clothing" when he was not calling him "a modest little man with much to be modest about." Then there was this famous exchange:

Lady Astor: Winston, if you were my husband I should flavor your coffee with poison. Churchill: Madam, if I were your husband I should drink it.

That was a good deal kinder than the night Bessie Braddock M.P. berated Churchill for being drunk. Churchill replied that in the morning he would be sober, but she would still be ugly.

The English have always been especially adept at this sort of verbal violence, perhaps because they are an island people and have learned to hold familiarity in contempt. Disraeli on Gladstone, for example: "He has not a single redeeming defect." Gladstone, in fact, brought out the best in his antagonist.

When Disraeli was asked to distinguish a misfortune from a calamity, he was inspired: "If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anyone pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity." Some English insults are sharp. Nye Bevan on Anthony Eden: "The juvenile lead." Some are odd. Charles Kingsley called Shelley "a lewd vegetarian." It sounds interesting but is difficult to picture. The top of the line was created by John Wilkes for the Earl of Sandwich:

The Earl: Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox.

Wilkes: That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.

Americans, too, were once fairly agile at the art, though they tended to use a club more than a quill. There was William Allen White's little note on Mencken, for example:

"With a pig's eyes that never look up, with a pig's snout that loves muck, with a pig's brain that knows only the sty, and a pig's squeal that cries only when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig's mouth, tusked and ugly, and lets out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habitat."

Complicated, but charming nonetheless. And there have also been flashes of true American wit over the years, with Congressman John Randolph of Virginia comparing an adversary to "rotten mackerel by moonlight; he shines and stinks," or dealing with his public:

Stranger: I have had the pleasure of passing your house recently.

Randolph: I am glad of it. I hope you will always do it, sir.

An equally hapless citizen was once told by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable." Until recently American newspapers were delightfully unrestrained when it came to abuse; a New England journal greeting Jefferson's election, for instance, with particular enthusiasm:

"Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practised." One reads such things nowadays--collected at last in Nancy McPhee's Book of Insults--and imagines a whole world packed with high-strung terriers, poised to yip at the slightest noise.

The trouble is that these insulters leave no heirs. The best we have--William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal, Truman Capote --show a flair from time to time, but perhaps because cleverness is so desperately expected of them, often sound as if their hearts are not in it, as if they are merely paying tribute to the old masters. Capote once called Jacqueline Susann "a truck driver in drag." Have we come to this? During Watergate, H.R. Haldeman's lawyer, John J. Wilson, referred to Senator Daniel K. Inouye as "that little Jap." He then defended himself by saying that he "wouldn't mind being called a little American," thus replacing an insult to the Japanese with one to the intelligence.

Why has this slackening occurred? For several reasons, all of which pertain to the general corruption of life as well as to that of the insult. There is psychiatry, for one thing. Mothers can no longer be joked about; victims agree with the worst that is said about them. There is provincialism, for another. Oscar Wilde explained: "Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up." You could not get away with that today, even if you thought of it, because nations are as touchy as individuals. Then, too, no one wields real criticism any more. In 1905 Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession was hailed by the New York Sun as "a dramatized stench"; now it would be "fun for the entire family."

There is not much inventiveness of language these days either, no Menckenish words like "pecksniffian," no Rabelais around to rail against "slubberdegullion druggies, ninny lobcocks, or scurvy sneaksbies." Our social conscience interferes as well--the feeling that life offers enough abuse without adding insults to injuries. In short, we are simply too reverent, too reverent about the wrong things. In the past no one was safe. Macaulay said of Socrates: "The more I read him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him."

Of course, the main reason for the death of the insult is the death of confrontation in general. Time was when enemies would wholeheartedly enjoy squaring off, ram to ram. Not today, not in the world of cold war conversation, where it is judged safer and saner to say nothing and assume the worst than to say the worst and get on with it. Now the insult retreats behind a tinny smile and emerges lame from the mouths of wimps at cocktail parties, grasping soda water in both hands and leveling a whine: "I really don't think much of his work." No confrontations there. Face to face with their adversaries they assault them with flattery. Perhaps it's best. Maybe we could no longer endure a life made up of chaotic barkings and overwhelming wit.

Yet there is so much to be said for letting the fur fly, for openly acknowledging your enemy and allowing him to have at you with the full force of his puny, flaccid mind. It is even more pleasurable to give than receive, to hone one's words until they gleam, and watch them fly in lovely arcs toward one's fellow creatures. How happy Sir Edward Coke must have been when he told Sir Walter Raleigh: "There never lived a viler viper upon the face of the earth than thou." How empty Whistler must have felt at the end of his life when he lamented that he had "hardly a warm personal enemy left." Naturally, such violence is not for everyone. It takes a person of extremely bad temper, a truly unredeemable sourpuss, to feel comfortable with insults, to take deep pleasure in things like Mark Twain's observation that Wagner's music is better than it sounds, for example, or in Ben Franklin's letter to a new-found adversary:

You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy, and I am

Yours, Roger Rosenblatt

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