THE OTHER DAY I was interviewed (Interviewed, were you?) by a large newspaper (Out with it: which one?), the New York Times (That large, was it?), about Humor (Well now), and one thing I said was, I like writing for Soho, here, because I can say shit.
I had never been interviewed by the Times before, and perhaps I got carried away. The next day, I saw Absence of Malice, noting in particular the scene where Sally Field tells the woman whose suicide she will cause, “You’re not talking to me, you’re talking to a newspaper.” And I began to wonder. Should I have said what I said to the Times?
I don’t suppose it will appear in the Times, whose policy continues, I believe, to be as follows:
All the news that’s fit
To print, and that ain’t shit.
The Times has printed Shiite, and Johnny Wadd, and I myself have used—by no means sniggeringly—a penis (Elvis Presley’s) in the Book Review. But in a sports column I wrote a couple of years ago, the Times (after graciously tracking me down at my in-laws’ house to explain that it was, after all, a family newspaper) changed jockstrap to glove.
And Sports Illustrated once turned my crap to baloney, and Esquire my fuck to forget.
Actually the j word, the c word, and the f word were none of them mine, but had been spoken to me by some interviewee or other. Which is what I was the other day, for a few minutes, in the eyes of the Times. What if I am quoted in the Times as saying that I like to write in Soho because I can say feces?
I believe there was already one fuck in that issue of Esquire. So, okay. I doubt that Joe McCarthy, the old Yankee manager, ever said, “Forget a duck,” but it has a certain ring I guess. But baloney? In fact, the crap, which I attributed to a basketball coach in whose mouth butter wouldn’t melt, had been pronounced by him as “shit.” I had done years of clean work for Sports Illustrated, and I thought I had a crap coming. Especially if it was marked down from a shit. But no.
I am reminded of the World War II correspondent who was on a ship attacked by Japanese planes. He saw a sailor run out onto the deck—which was burning and strewn with parts of his buddies—and shake his fist at the strafers and yell, “You fucking Japs!” Aware that no such expression would make it into his paper, the correspondent filed it as “You damn Japs!” The copydesk changed it to “You darn Japs!” Today, of course, it would be “You darn good industrialists!” and properly so.
I am no coprophiliac (or “shithead”); I do not feel the need to say it (note the impersonal pronoun) over and over. But if I am rattling along and a shit crops up and I have to start thinking, “I mean stuff, I mean do-do, I mean, …” then a voice in the back of my head starts chanting, “You can’t say shi-it, you can’t say shi-it, nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah.” These inner embarrassments take their toll.
An interesting sidelight to the interview of me (Back to that again): it was held in the Van Dyck diner, across the street from (Yes, yes) the Times. And a man two booths down objected when I raised my voice in criticism of Ronald Reagan. (Reagan has a terrible sense of humor, but he is so secure in it that no one has been able to get his goat. I proposed taking an expedition all over the country, if necessary, in pursuit of a Goatgate.)
This man two booths down began to shout, “Get out of here with your bullshit! I don’t want to hear your bullshit!” In other words, people can say all kinds of shit all around me, and I—who am being interviewed by the New York Times, and who am expected to be mightier, day in and day out, than the sword—am too often reduced to staff or, just maybe, excreta. It isn’t fair.
In Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer, referring to himself as “he,” observed: “He had once had a correspondence with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. ‘Because they would not let me use the word “shit,”’ he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say ‘shit’ in The New Yorker.”
Since then, there has been a shit or two in The New Yorker, and other publications have eased their dung restrictions. Newsweek recently quoted the Sunday Times of London as saying shat—a more elegant word, especially when imported, than the present tense.
But of course every freedom carries with it certain responsibilities. For one thing, there is the risk of running shit into the ground. So many people cry “Holy shit!” in movies these days that it has come to be like “Zounds!” Perhaps, then, the Times practices a wise conservatism. If anyone ever does say shit in the Times, that person will resound across the ages.
And although the word is a very comforting one to many people, we should not forget that there are cultures—Nice Southern Methodism, for instance, in which I was reared—that take shit even more literally than they do, say, Adam. The best policy to follow is perhaps the one enunciated by my daughter when she was seven, and had to be careful around her grandmother: “I never say fart in front of anyone until I’ve heard them say it first.”
So why didn’t I think of that, before saying shit to the Times?
After this appeared, a reader named Mark Sloane sent me an astonishing clipping from the September 22, 1975, issue of the Times. On that day in history, it would appear, the Times reported that an Englishman named Lord Reith had spoken in his diaries of “‘that bloody shit Churchill.’”
Later, the Times printed the story on humor for which I was interviewed. In it, I was referred to as “an amusing Georgian.”
Shucks.