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My mum's still a punk and you're still shit
In addition to its pathos and impact as a partly autofictional novel of the First World War, Frederic Manning's Her Privates We (1929) is an invaluable reference work of historical profanity. No joke: it is the sweariest literature I have encountered from its period and not at the bowdlerized remove of effing and blinding required by its first traditional publication in 1930, acclaimed as it was for its blunt realism at the time. Its rank and file in the trenches of the Somme in 1916 exclaim in amazement, "Well, you can fuck me!" and protest even in the shell-crouched crush of waiting to go over the top, "For Christ's sake walk on your own fuckin' feet an' not on mine!" A shy recruit is catcalled in the baths, "Dost turn thysen to t' wall, lad, so's us 'ns sha'n't see tha dick?' while the the battalion's sergeant is extravagantly apostrophized after an extended order drill, "What's the cunt want to come down 'ere buggerin' us about for, 'aven't we done enough bloody work in th' week?" "Bloody" might as well be a filler word in everyone's speech, officers and enlisted men alike, with "bugger" a close second. "Balls-up" is hardly surprising in context of the Western Front, but it was news to me that an unpopular person could even then be dismissed as a "twat." Fans of tmesis will appreciate evidence of the perennial "abso-bloody-lutely," although I personally enjoyed the macaronic "fuck off 'ome jildy, toot sweet." It is inevitable that there should have been front-line filk of a song as popular as "Keep the Home-Fires Burning," but I'd never heard:
'Oh, they've called them up from Weschurch,
And they've called them up from Wen,
And they'll call up all the women,
When they've fucked up all the men.'
When Bourne, the novel's aimless, thoughtful, sardonically misfit gentleman-ranker of a protagonist makes free to speculate on the absurdity of sticking to the forms of war in the chaos of wartime, his philosophy is dashed by his corporal's cold-water realism: "What's the use of talking about it? If Jerry hadn't taken all his stuff down to the Somme, we'd be shelled to shit in half-an-hour." It's incredible, not just because of the immersive, defamiliarizing and—as noted by this edition's insightful foreword—modernizing effect on the reader who gets slung in with these soldiers for whom "hell" and "damn" have become practically minced oaths, but because it's happening in its own time. It's not the hindsight translation of a writer making sure that the blasphemies of the past will register with the same force as the obscenities of the present. It's as near a record as the author himself could reconstruct of a mindset and a mode of expression he had lived in. Any number of other extremely good, stark, modernist or merely effective war novels from this era content themselves with dashes and circumlocution and the more legally printable grades of bad language. Her Privates We couldn't be more than privately circulated with its intended language intact until the 1970's. Take a number, James Joyce. The novel in no way reads as though it were written to offend rather than testify, but there may be a slight tweak of readerly sensibilities nonetheless when Bourne is teased for lapsing himself into the soldier's ubiquitous slang and responds in his customary role of light comedy, "Oh, you all swear like so many Eton boys . . . Have you ever heard an Aussie swear?" Alas, we do not get the chance—or the meta-joke unless we are in on the pseudonymously published secret that the "Private 19022" who had gone to the Somme with the Shropshire Light Infantry was himself Australian—but when the men are suddenly instructed to wear their greatcoats en banderole, we do hear the no longer shockingly worded, indignantly plaintive outcry from one soldier floundering in a sausage of khaki serge, "'o's the bloody shit 'o invented this way o' doin' up a fuckin' overcoat?"
I like this novel beyond its full-metal-mackintosh vocabulary; like all war stories, it should not be embarked upon without bracing for attrition. In its catalogue of period-typicality, I appreciate the presence of Shem, who is one of Bourne's two closest chums and Jewish and possessed of a marvelous look of melting innocence which can get him out of just about any scrape with an officer—likened to the fish-pools of Heshbon, so it may as well be taken as read that he's hot—and just as Bourne's ribbing about his finances was exceeding my tolerance for even unserious antisemitism, the point of the story turned out to be that Shem who presents himself as a cynic of the bottom line actually chucked the safety of a staff job in England for the hazards of the front line in France and since the canard of Jews as slackers persisted through two world wars, I took the refutation as intended. Schoolboyish Martlow having a sailor's mouth even among soldiers may be more archetypal, but the kid makes the point that hasn't stopped being relevant through all the folk songs I grew up on and the wars of my own lifetime: "They don't care a fuck 'ow us'ns live . . . We're just 'umped an' bumped an' buggered about all over fuckin' France, while them as made the war sit at 'ome waggin' their bloody chins, an' sayin' what they'd 'ave done if they was twenty years younger. Wish to Christ they was, an' us'ns might get some leaf an' go 'ome an' see our own folk once in a while." Estimating the chances of that happening will send you on as bad a bender as Bourne, who inherited from his author, along with his age and education and perhaps his existentialism, the PTSD-fueled boozing into which his habitual, ironical detachment begins to dissociate as the novel approaches its climactic setting of the Battle of the Ancre. Like everything else real, it comes down to what people will do for one another, which is different from what they might do for a principle or an order, or at least one has to keep hoping so. But also a heck of a lot of swearing. "If you don't use any bad language when you're awake, you make up for it in your sleep."
'Oh, they've called them up from Weschurch,
And they've called them up from Wen,
And they'll call up all the women,
When they've fucked up all the men.'
When Bourne, the novel's aimless, thoughtful, sardonically misfit gentleman-ranker of a protagonist makes free to speculate on the absurdity of sticking to the forms of war in the chaos of wartime, his philosophy is dashed by his corporal's cold-water realism: "What's the use of talking about it? If Jerry hadn't taken all his stuff down to the Somme, we'd be shelled to shit in half-an-hour." It's incredible, not just because of the immersive, defamiliarizing and—as noted by this edition's insightful foreword—modernizing effect on the reader who gets slung in with these soldiers for whom "hell" and "damn" have become practically minced oaths, but because it's happening in its own time. It's not the hindsight translation of a writer making sure that the blasphemies of the past will register with the same force as the obscenities of the present. It's as near a record as the author himself could reconstruct of a mindset and a mode of expression he had lived in. Any number of other extremely good, stark, modernist or merely effective war novels from this era content themselves with dashes and circumlocution and the more legally printable grades of bad language. Her Privates We couldn't be more than privately circulated with its intended language intact until the 1970's. Take a number, James Joyce. The novel in no way reads as though it were written to offend rather than testify, but there may be a slight tweak of readerly sensibilities nonetheless when Bourne is teased for lapsing himself into the soldier's ubiquitous slang and responds in his customary role of light comedy, "Oh, you all swear like so many Eton boys . . . Have you ever heard an Aussie swear?" Alas, we do not get the chance—or the meta-joke unless we are in on the pseudonymously published secret that the "Private 19022" who had gone to the Somme with the Shropshire Light Infantry was himself Australian—but when the men are suddenly instructed to wear their greatcoats en banderole, we do hear the no longer shockingly worded, indignantly plaintive outcry from one soldier floundering in a sausage of khaki serge, "'o's the bloody shit 'o invented this way o' doin' up a fuckin' overcoat?"
I like this novel beyond its full-metal-mackintosh vocabulary; like all war stories, it should not be embarked upon without bracing for attrition. In its catalogue of period-typicality, I appreciate the presence of Shem, who is one of Bourne's two closest chums and Jewish and possessed of a marvelous look of melting innocence which can get him out of just about any scrape with an officer—likened to the fish-pools of Heshbon, so it may as well be taken as read that he's hot—and just as Bourne's ribbing about his finances was exceeding my tolerance for even unserious antisemitism, the point of the story turned out to be that Shem who presents himself as a cynic of the bottom line actually chucked the safety of a staff job in England for the hazards of the front line in France and since the canard of Jews as slackers persisted through two world wars, I took the refutation as intended. Schoolboyish Martlow having a sailor's mouth even among soldiers may be more archetypal, but the kid makes the point that hasn't stopped being relevant through all the folk songs I grew up on and the wars of my own lifetime: "They don't care a fuck 'ow us'ns live . . . We're just 'umped an' bumped an' buggered about all over fuckin' France, while them as made the war sit at 'ome waggin' their bloody chins, an' sayin' what they'd 'ave done if they was twenty years younger. Wish to Christ they was, an' us'ns might get some leaf an' go 'ome an' see our own folk once in a while." Estimating the chances of that happening will send you on as bad a bender as Bourne, who inherited from his author, along with his age and education and perhaps his existentialism, the PTSD-fueled boozing into which his habitual, ironical detachment begins to dissociate as the novel approaches its climactic setting of the Battle of the Ancre. Like everything else real, it comes down to what people will do for one another, which is different from what they might do for a principle or an order, or at least one has to keep hoping so. But also a heck of a lot of swearing. "If you don't use any bad language when you're awake, you make up for it in your sleep."
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An inspiration to us fucking all!
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It was! I ran across some mention of it at the end of last year and it stuck with me as something to check out and I finally decided to. No [infixed profanity] regrets.
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I really enjoyed it!
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Thank you so much! I really wanted to tell people about it, for the obvious fucking reason.
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It makes me so happy that it's there to be seen. It's on the Internet Archive if that's of use to you!
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Nine
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Also, they can't get out of this car. I'm not at all legal to drive. Apparently a person needs *checks notes* depth...perception.
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I forgot to tell you that at another point in the road-marching, the men sing a version of "Here We Are Again" with the have-a-banana tag, which I had not realized had already percolated into any musical phrase with appropriate scansion. A meme as old as music-hall.
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All right, if you want to walk to Bazentin-Le-Petit . . .
(I thought of you particularly during the scene where Bourne and his makeshift interpreter's skills have to extricate a corporal from the predictable consequences of gallantly and un-bilingually trying to compliment a billet as "cushy avec mademoiselle":
'Wish to God I knew a bit o' French,' said the corporal earnestly.
'I wish to God you wouldn't mix the little you do know with Hindustani,' said Bourne.)
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St. Clair would have been right up to date with the latest argot. (Who didn't want to fuck off home jildy tout suite?)
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I'm so happy to have discovered it!
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Nine
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I had no idea any form of the book existed until the end of last year! And I had read some obscure novels from the First World War. The unexpurgated reprint is a treasure.
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That's great!
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Have you ever read Patricia Anthony's novel Flanders? It's a multi-faceted WWI/bildungsroman/fantasy (maybe, just a little)/queer (IIRC) novel by a woefully underappreciated writer.
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It may well have gotten an American edition in 1930! It would just have been the expurgated one. What we would now call the author's preferred, original text had a limited private printing in 1929 under the title The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme & Ancre, 1916. When it was made available to the general public in 1930 as Her Privates We—in which form it was still praised by such lights of war and literature as T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway—it had indeed been cleaned up to the point that even having read a sample in the foreword of the current edition, I can't actually imagine how the bowdlerized version worked because the wall-to-wall profanity seems so much of the atmosphere and the point. This novel has more F-bombs by weight than anything I have read until the 1960's–70's. That home-fires parody is supposed to contain the first attestation in print of "fuck up" as a verb. The regimental sergeant major at one point tells a story about how he and Bourne met one another, which is that they were both in attendance at the same drunken fight between two best mates where one of them bayoneted the other in the ass, and it is extremely funny and wouldn't have anywhere near the same effect without the punctuation of the swear words. Or just at the point where the reader has started to tune out the wall-to-wall profanity, as might a new recruit plunged into this register of relentless language, something happens which makes the violence of the words meaningful and they stop sounding reflexive at all. I don't see any way to achieve those results without the real, uncensored terminology. I didn't expect it and I'm so glad it existed to be rediscovered.
And it reminds me of the story about Dorothy Parker (I think?) meeting Norman Mailer and commenting "Oh, it's the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck'!"
It sounds like Dorothy Parker! Or Tallulah Bankhead. Either way, that is funny.
Have you ever read Patricia Anthony's novel Flanders? It's a multi-faceted WWI/bildungsroman/fantasy (maybe, just a little)/queer (IIRC) novel by a woefully underappreciated writer.
I am not at all familiar with it! Looking it up, however, I can see that anyone who names their WWI protagonist "Stanhope" has done their research.
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I had to look that up. I assume you're referring to "Journey's End"? I confess complete ignorance, 'til now, of the play and the numerous cinematic adaptations. But that means I got to discover the photo of Colin Clive as Stanhope in the Wikipedia article on the play. And he replaced a very young Olivier who originated the role, and both were under the direction of James Whale! I must off to read a comprehensive biography of Whale.
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Yes! And the 1930 film is readily available on the internet, but only in copies that look as though they also went through the wars, and I have been waiting for it to come around on one of the streaming services I have access to and it keeps not and I am going to have to watch it anyway one of these days. I can recommend the play and picturing Clive in it is not difficult at all.
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You're welcome! I don't know why it isn't better known! I have not read an earlier novel where someone wants to know what the fucking hell all the noise is about!
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I was pretty blown away by it.