Fuck Read online

  In a ‘Song’ penned when he was about 24, Rochester laid his cards and his balls on the table. He portrayed a young girl, ‘Fair Chloris’, who lies in a pigsty and dreams of being ravished. When she awakes, she is so randy that she has only one option: she ‘frigs’. One can still hear the guffaws of Rochester’s audience more than three hundred years later.

  His licentious creativity now knew no bounds. A year or so afterwards, he penned and circulated a riotous romp entitled ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, in which the narrator, driven to distraction by a woman’s lusty appearance (‘her very look’s a cunt’), spills his sexual beans before he is able to manoeuvre himself into the docking procedure. The aftermath is melancholy indeed: ‘I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive … And rage at last confirms me impotent.’

  The poem climaxes with an oration of disgust at the offending organ:

  Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most,

  Through all the town a common fucking post,

  On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt

  As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt.

  ‘A Rumble in St James’s Park’ might sound like an Ealing Studios remake of a biker movie from the Sixties, but it actually describes impolite posh society from the vantage point of 1673, suggesting that very little changes from one century to the next: ‘Much wine had passed, with grave discourse/Of who fucks who and who does worse.’ His copy of Ye Olde Saucee Words was clearly well thumbed at this point, as the poem also manages to squeeze the words ‘frig’, ‘fucked’, ‘swive’, ‘whores’, ‘buggery’, ‘bitch’, ‘prick’, and ‘cunt’ into its 165 lines. And, to prove that sexism was just as rife in late-1600s social networking as it is today, Rochester coined some delightfully vivid images to describe the secret parts of a woman’s form: ‘lewd cunt … vast meal of nasty slime … devouring cunt’. Not the ideal young man to take home to your gran, perhaps.

  Another untitled ‘Song’ of the 1670s imagined a dialogue between a whore and the Duchess of Cleveland – who was none other than one of Charles II’s many ‘discreet’ lovers. The Duchess delivers one superb couplet, which would (with the politicians’ names changed) carry just as much force today: ‘I’d rather be fucked by porters and car-men/Than thus be abused by Churchill and Jermyn.’

  The existence of this poem suggested that Rochester was not altogether careful about the way in which he treated his mentor, the King of England. Indeed, he was soon composing ‘A Satyr on Charles II’, of whom he wrote that ‘he loves fucking much’, ‘rolls about from whore to whore/A merry monarch, scandalous and poor’ and carried within his royal garb ‘the sauciest prick that e’er did swive’. That might (just) have been acceptable to a broad-minded monarch, but Rochester’s closing couplet left no doubt about his true opinions: ‘All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on/From the hector of France to the cully [a pal, usually uttered in derogatory terms] of Britain.’

  Charles II had already been forced to turn an extremely blind eye to the young nobleman’s adventures. At the age of eighteen, Rochester had taken a firm fancy to a young heiress four years his junior, but whose father (with admirable common sense) considered him to be an unsuitable match for her. So he commanded a coach-and-four and stole 14-year-old Elizabeth away from her father’s house. He was tracked down and arrested; the girl was restored to her family, and Rochester sent to the Tower of London in deep disgrace and high dudgeon. The King let him stew in a fetid cell for several weeks, before setting him loose again on London’s high society. So taken was young Elizabeth by his romantic gesture, incidentally, that she agreed to be his wife little more than a year later. She bore him four children, and generously provided a home for the illegitimate offspring of Rochester’s liaison with a mistress.

  Around 1675, several years after these escapades, King Charles II summoned Rochester to bring him a manuscript of a poem about his likely heir, the Duke of York (who took the throne as James II). ‘Signior Dildo’ was a singular celebration of the Duke’s second marriage, which illustrated the extent to which society women, including the bride-to-be, enjoyed the company of an Italian gentleman with an unusual name, preferring his attentions to those of their husbands. Charles was prepared to be royally entertained by this verse, which was already popular among his courtiers. But instead, in a slip that Freud might have recognised, Rochester handed over a copy of his scurrilous ‘Satyr’ against the King.

  Once he realised his mistake, the Earl assumed that his goose was cooked and his entrails would soon follow, in advance of a jolly good public quartering. So he fled the country. But within a few months he was back, having apparently been forgiven. The King even tolerated his company after Rochester had destroyed the royal sundial, although only after the nobleman had been forced to skulk in disguise for a year or two – time he devoted not to composing poetry but to masquerading as a quack doctor named Alexander Bendo. Charles’s temper was presumably assuaged by the flow of risqué verse that continued from Rochester’s quill, such as ‘The Disabled Debauchee’, in which the narrator invites a young man to join him and his female lover in bed, and then kisses them both, so he can decide ‘whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy’.

  There was, inevitably, another scandal on the horizon – a double-header, this time, in which Rochester and the Ballers were first said to have been discovered frolicking naked in Woodstock Park, and then took part in a mass brawl which had unfortunate consequences for a working boy who happened to stray into their path. Suddenly, as if he had reached the point of satiation, Rochester appeared to change character. His poetry retained its vividness, but lost its profanity; he talked no longer of orgies and whores but only of God and Jesus; and he declined into illness, eventually dying at the meagre age of 33. His work was still passed from hand to hand, but as tastes changed and standards of decency with them, it was first viewed as too indecent to read, and then ignored entirely. Only in more recent decades has it been considered seemly to revisit the poetry of the man who undoubtedly put the F (and several other letters) into Free Verse.

  Not with a Bang …

  Nobody embodied the pained, myopic image of the scholar more perfectly than Thomas Stearns Eliot: arguably the most influential English-language poet of the twentieth century. Thin and painfully ascetic, he suggested a man for whom the pleasures of the flesh might, on a particularly relaxed afternoon, extend to a cup of tea (no sugar) and a rich tea biscuit. The man was, after all, a banker in the days before the word became all-too-accurate rhyming slang; then a publisher, when only gentlemen published. And still he found time to divert the course of English poetry with such peaks of modernism as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘The Waste Land’.

  At Harvard, T.S. Eliot studied philosophy for three years; then taught it for a further five. Unbeknown to his students, however, he was also scribbling verse into a notebook: some of it deathless; some of it rather less renowned, and destined only for the eyes of his closest (male) friends. With a very beady eye on the value of his success, he allowed his handwritten manuscripts to be bought by a collector in 1922, the year he published ‘The Waste Land’; but first he removed several pages that might tarnish his reputation were they ever to be glimpsed by the public. Unwilling to leave them among his papers, where they might be uncovered if he should ever slip beneath the wheels of a black cab, but loth to destroy even the most insignificant of his works, he sent the offending items to someone who he knew would treasure them securely: his poetic mentor, Ezra Pound.

  It was only after Pound’s death fifty years later that these previously undocumented verses by the master of modernism were retrieved by archivists, and in due course offered to a grateful world as part of the definitive assemblage of Eliot’s poetry. At last, his millions of admirers around the world could read ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’, a roaring satire on the polite literary audience, which hinged around the repeated refrain: ‘For Christ’s sake stick it up your ass’. On the very next page, Eliot
had penned the ribald tale of ‘Columbo and Bolo’, which widened the great man’s literary vocabulary to include ‘prick’, ‘shat’, ‘whore’, ‘pisspot’, ‘cowshit’, ‘balls’, and, for good measure, ‘cock’. The fun didn’t end there: Eliot introduced a character named Orlandino the cabin boy, whose ‘chief remark’ was ‘fuck spiders!’ – an exclamation rather than an instruction or complaint, and a genuine TSE extension of the English language. The poem climaxed when Columbo and the Queen ‘terminated the affair by fucking on the sofa’. It was not exactly ‘The Journey of the Magi’.

  Eliot’s career as a poetic pornographer sadly ended there, although researchers did uncover a series of ‘Fragments’ in which he had carefully employed the words ‘fuck’, ‘fucked’, and ‘cunt’, while also describing a tinker whose ‘cock’ mysteriously grew from two feet long to four. If Cats could evolve out of Eliot’s feline poetry, there might also be room for some of Eliot’s less familiar verses to make an XXX-rated journey onto stage and screen – ‘Columbo and Bolo’ the musical, perhaps. Where’s Andrew Lloyd-Webber when you need him?

  Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus

  Fame, we often hear from the famous, is a curse rather than a blessing. But there are compensations. For instance, a famous person can treat someone else – even someone as famous as they are – in ways that would land the rest of us in trouble. Or in jail.

  Few celebrities ever tested that freedom with more devilish intent than Serge Gainsbourg – songwriter, singer, bon viveur, doyen of self-destruction, a Gallic blend of Leonard Cohen, Wyndham Lewis, and Charlie Sheen. His work was devoted to pushing boundaries, perverting clichés and épater-ing the bourgeoisie at every possible moment. So persistent was his desire to shock and outrage, in fact, that it was easy to overlook the genuinely courageous daredevilry of his performances and compositions.

  Gainsbourg was also box-office catnip: guaranteed to provoke trouble and entertain a crowd (apart from those who were simply too shocked to be entertained). He was, therefore, one of the last people you would invite to participate in a live TV discussion, if you were trying to create something as bland as The One Show. Fortunately, French TV producers had a little of Gainsbourg’s adventurous spirit in their own souls, which allowed the mercurial genius ample opportunities to exhibit his command of the F-word, in a variety of tongues and moods.

  Exhibit numéro un: a 1984 appearance on a talk show, in the company of another polymath entertainer, Catherine Ringer. Before achieving musical fame with Les Rita Mitsouko, Ms Ringer earned a living as the star of adult movies with such titles as Love Inferno and Body Love. When she and Gainsbourg were forced to share a TV couch, Gainsbourg – wreathed in cigarette smoke, as ever, unshaven, joylessly disreputable – affected to find himself disgusted by Ringer’s past exploits. Clearly intoxicated and (so Ringer declared) smelling like a slightly over-ripe cheese, Gainsbourg refused to look at his fellow guest, and announced his indifference to what she was saying by alternately picking his nose and mumbling vaguely incomprehensible insults: ‘You’re a whore … a prostitute … you get fucked by a camera’. Ms Ringer kept her cool: she had obviously met bigger pricks than Gainsbourg earlier in her career.

  Two years later, another young woman was more flustered by his antics. When Whitney Houston joined him on the set of Champs Elysées in April 1986, she was just 22 years old, and for all the multi-platinum sales of her debut album, she looked as if she was auditioning for the role of ‘Most Innocent Cheerleader’ in a slasher movie. Gainsbourg was in evening dress, albeit with the air of a man who had recently been pulled from the gutter outside a particularly squalid Left Bank bar. Their subsequent conversation, moderated ineptly by the show’s host, Michel Drucker, was conducted in a mixture of barrack-room French and slurred English.

  Houston, entering stage left with the naïveté of an ingénue at her first junior prom, was willing to be charmed when Gainsbourg kissed her hand, and then mumbled that she was ‘superbe’ (in French) and ‘a genius’ (in English). Then he mumbled something that didn’t sound like either language. ‘He says you are great,’ Drucker said quickly. ‘No,’ Gainsbourg interrupted. ‘I said, “I want to fuck her”.’

  Houston’s reaction could be used in an acting class: this, boys and girls, is how you act surprised. She knew she had to keep smiling – this was showbiz, after all – but she couldn’t hold back a frantic gasp of shock. Then, as Gainsbourg’s face crumpled into self-satisfied laughter, Houston’s mouth slowly formed a perfect ‘O’. Way too late, Drucker intervened: ‘No, he says you are great.’ But Houston wasn’t listening. ‘Whaaaat?’ she cried, before she started to laugh in disbelief. ‘WHAT did you say?’ So Gainsbourg repeated himself – in French, this time, to the startled delight of the audience – and then reached over to stroke her hair.

  This is the point at which anyone less famous than Gainsbourg would have been carted away in un Maria noir. With no sign of les flics on the horizons, Houston was left to defend herself, flinching away from his caress. ‘Sometimes he’s a bit drunk, you know,’ Drucker interposed, prompting Gainsbourg to violent disagreement, while Houston nervously anticipated his next advance. ‘Are you sure?’ she said contemptuously. ‘Are you sure you’re not drunk?’ ‘No, that’s just normal,’ Drucker assured her. Then the lecher resumed his assault, stretching out to stroke her chin. Houston pushed him away; then, after Gainsbourg mumbled the apologies that are the perennial defence mechanism of the habitual groper, she allowed him to kiss her hand. Gainsbourg closed the deal by fumbling with a cigarette and nearly taking her eye out, before the scene faded to black, and Houston marched off to sack the publicist who had booked her on the show in the first place.

  I think we can safely assume that Gainsbourg’s campaign to ‘baiser’ young Whitney was destined to end in failure. But maybe something about this encounter with the ultimate bad boy of French entertainment proved to be enticing, as her schoolgirl sweetness was soon banished from her public image. Within three years, she had hooked up with drug abuser Bobby Brown, and stepped onto the grim downward elevator that led to her sordid death in a Hollywood hotel room, drowning in the bath while five different drugs competed for control of her bloodstream. She might have been safer spending the night with Serge Gainsbourg after all.

  Natural Gas in Space

  It takes courage to be an astronaut: to sit atop a mountain of rocket fuel, and be blasted into the unknown at the whim of scientists, knowing that if something goes wrong, no parachute is going to bring you safely back to earth. So it is safe to assume that, when the ignition sequence starts, the rocket begins to roar, and the unfeasible fragile missile slowly edges off the launch pad, every astronaut with human blood in their veins is likely to be muttering a profanity or two.

  The first American in space was Alan Shepard, the pilot of the Freedom 7 mission in 1961. He was a cool customer, with humour to match: asked what went through his mind as he waited for the launch, he quipped: ‘The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.’ In his autobiography, however, he recalled that he placed the biggest responsibility on himself. ‘Don’t fuck up, Shepard,’ he whispered to himself in the loneliness of the capsule.

  In public, NASA’s astronauts were legendarily more circumspect. So calm and self-effacing was the leader of the first moon mission, Neil Armstrong, and so determined was he to erase any hint of heroism from his person, that in any other circumstance he would have been dismissed as terminally boring. Other astronauts who were more prone to let rip with the F-word on the ground received psychological coaching to ensure that they would be more restrained when the world was listening to their communications from space.

  It is pleasing to report that, among the valiant but often personality-free men who undertook mankind’s most hazardous missions, there was one hardy soul who let his humanity speak from a quarter of a million miles away. Commander John Young is a space veteran, who flew with both the Gemini and Apollo missions, and then headed up two fligh
ts by the Space Shuttle. In April 1972, he led the Apollo 16 crew, and drove the Lunar Roaming Vehicle on the surface of the moon. Yet his chief concern while he and his co-pilot, Charles Duke, rested in the Lunar Module was the state of his stomach.

  To ensure that all aspects of the astronauts’ digestive systems were functioning normally in the unnatural confines of the capsule, the Apollo 16 team were encouraged to feast on oranges and orange derivatives. ‘I’m gonna turn into a citrus product, is what I’m gonna do!’ Commander Young complained to Mission Control. The crew completed their status report, audible to everyone who was following the live TV transmissions, and then settled into what they believed was private conversation. John Young returned to the subject closest to his vitals: ‘I got the farts again. I got ’em again, Charlie. I don’t know what the hell gives them to me. I think it’s acid stomach, I really do. I haven’t eaten this much citrus fruit in twenty years! And I tell you one thing, in another twelve fucking days, I ain’t never eating any more!’ He was distracted for a minute, before another convulsion in his nether regions seized his attention. ‘I like an occasional orange. I really do,’ he said. ‘But I’ll be durned if I’m going to be buried in oranges.’

  It was only when Young let slip another expletive – a muttered ‘Oh, shit’, though this time not provoked by oranges or their consequences – that Mission Control entered the conversation. ‘Yes sir!’ Young replied, as if snapping to attention. ‘OK, John,’ said the voice of Houston calmly, ‘we have a hot mike.’ At which point Young gathered that his musings upon the flatulent effects of the orange diet, plus the first F-word broadcast to Earth from a man on the moon, had been heard around the world. One small slip for a man, one giant linguistic leap for mankind.