Why we curse. What the F***? by Steven Pinker
from THE NEW REPUBLIC
[F] ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after
NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the
mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his
euphoria exclaimed, “This is really, really, fucking brilliant” on the
air. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which is charged with
monitoring the nation’s airwaves for indecency, decided somewhat
surprisingly not to sanction the network for failing to bleep out the
word. Explaining its decision, the FCC noted that its guidelines define
“indecency” as “material that describes or depicts sexual or excretory
organs or activities” and Bono had used fucking as “an adjective or
expletive to emphasize an exclamation. ”

Cultural conservatives were outraged. California Representative Doug Ose
tried to close the loophole in the FCC’s regulations with the filthiest
piece of legislation ever considered by Congress. Had it passed, the
Clean Airwaves Act would have forbade from broadcast
the words “shit”, “piss”, “fuck”, “cunt”, “asshole”, and the phrases
“cock sucker”, “mother fucker”, and “ass hole”, compound use (including
hyphenated compounds) of such words and phrases with each other or with
other words or phrases, and other grammatical forms of such words and
phrases (including verb, adjective, gerund, participle, and infinitive
forms).
The episode highlights one of the many paradoxes that surround swearing.
When it comes to political speech, we are living in a free-speech
utopia. Late-night comedians can say rude things about their nation’s
leaders that, in previous centuries, would have led to their tongues
being cut out or worse. Yet, when it comes to certain words for
copulation and excretion, we still allow the might of the government to
bear down on what people can say in public. Swearing raises many other
puzzles–linguistic , neurobiological, literary, political.

The first is the bone of contention in the Bono brouhaha: the syntactic
classification of curse words. Ose’s grammatically illiterate bill not
only misspelled cocksucker, motherfucker, and asshole, and misidentified
them as “phrases,” it didn’t even close the loophole that it had
targeted. The Clean Airwaves Act assumed that fucking is a participial
adjective. But this is not correct. With a true adjective like lazy, you
can alternate between Drown the lazy cat and Drown the cat which is
lazy. But Drown the fucking cat is certainly not interchangeable with
Drown the cat which is fucking.

If the fucking in fucking brilliant is to be assigned a traditional part
of speech, it would be adverb, because it modifies an adjective and only
adverbs can do that, as in truly bad, very nice, and really big. Yet
“adverb” is the one grammatical category that Ose forgot to include in
his list! As it happens, most expletives aren’t genuine adverbs, either.
One study notes that, while you can say That’s too fucking bad, you
can’t say That’s too very bad. Also, as linguist Geoffrey Nunberg
pointed out, while you can imagine the dialogue How brilliant was it?
Very, you would never hear the dialogue How brilliant was it? Fucking.

The FCC’s decision raises another mystery about swearing: the bizarre
number of different ways in which we swear. There is cathartic swearing,
as when we slice our thumb along with the bagel. There are imprecations,
as when we offer advice to someone who has cut us off in traffic. There
are vulgar terms for everyday things and activities, as when Bess Truman
was asked to get the president to say fertilizer instead of manure and
she replied, “You have no idea how long it took me to get him to say
manure.” There are figures of speech that put obscene words to other
uses, such as the barnyard epithet for insincerity, the army acronym
snafu, and the gynecological- flagellative term for uxorial dominance.
And then there are the adjective-like expletives that salt the speech
and split the words of soldiers, teenagers, and Irish rock-stars.

But perhaps the greatest mystery is why politicians, editors, and much
of the public care so much. Clearly, the fear and loathing are not
triggered by the concepts themselves, because the organs and activities
they name have hundreds of polite synonyms. Nor are they triggered by
the words’ sounds, since many of them have respectable homonyms in names
for animals, actions, and even people. Many people feel that profanity
is self-evidently corrupting, especially to the young. This claim is
made despite the fact that everyone is familiar with the words,
including most children, and that no one has ever spelled out how the
mere hearing of a word could corrupt one’s morals.

Progressive writers have pointed to this gap to argue that linguistic
taboos are absurd. A true moralist, they say, should hold that violence
and inequality are “obscene,” not sex and excretion. And yet, since the
1970s, many progressives have imposed linguistic taboos of their own,
such as the stigma surrounding the N-word and casual allusions to sexual
desire or sexual attractiveness. So even people who revile the usual
bluenoses can become gravely offended by their own conception of bad
language. The question is, why?

[T] he strange emotional power of swearing–as well as the presence of
linguistic taboos in all cultures– suggests that taboo words tap into
deep and ancient parts of the brain. In general, words have not just a
denotation but a connotation: an emotional coloring distinct from what
the word literally refers to, as in principled versus stubborn and
slender versus scrawny. The difference between a taboo word and its
genteel synonyms, such as shit and feces, cunt and vagina, or fucking
and making love, is an extreme example of the distinction. Curses
provoke a different response than their synonyms in part because
connotations and denotations are stored in different parts of the brain.

The mammalian brain contains, among other things, the limbic system, an
ancient network that regulates motivation and emotion, and the
neocortex, the crinkled surface of the brain that ballooned in human
evolution and which is the seat of perception, knowledge, reason, and
planning. The two systems are interconnected and work together, but it
seems likely that words’ denotations are concentrated in the neocortex,
especially in the left hemisphere, whereas their connotations are spread
across connections between the neocortex and the limbic system,
especially in the right hemisphere.

A likely suspect within the limbic system is the amygdala, an
almond-shaped organ buried at the front of the temporal lobe of the
brain (one on each side) that helps invest memories with emotion. A
monkey whose amygdalas have been removed can learn to recognize a new
shape, like a striped triangle, but has trouble learning that the shape
foreshadows an unpleasant event like an electric shock. In humans, the
amygdala “lights up”–it shows greater metabolic activity in brain
scans–when the person sees an angry face or an unpleasant word,
especially a taboo word.

The response is not only emotional but involuntary. It’s not just that
we don’t have earlids to shut out unwanted sounds. Once a word is seen
or heard, we are incapable of treating it as a squiggle or noise; we
reflexively look it up in memory and respond to its meaning, including
its connotation. The classic demonstration is the Stroop effect, found
in every introductory psychology textbook and the topic of more than
four thousand scientific papers. People are asked to look through a list
of letter strings and to say aloud the color of the ink in which each
one is printed. Try it with this list, saying “red,” “blue,” or “green”
for each item in turn from left to right:

red blue green blue green red

Easy. But this is much, much, harder:

red blue green blue green red

The reason is that, among literate adults, reading a word is such an
over-learned skill that it has become mandatory: You can’t will the
process “off,” even when you don’t want to read the words but only pay
attention to the ink. That’s why you’re helped along when the
experimenters arrange the ink into a word that also names its color and
slowed down when they arrange it into a name for a different color. A
similar thing happens with spoken words as well.

Now try naming the color of the ink in each of these words:

cunt shit fuck tits piss asshole

The psychologist Don MacKay has done the experiment and found that
people are indeed slowed down by an involuntary boggle as soon as the
eyes alight on each word. The upshot is that a speaker or writer can use
a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in an audience quite against
their wishes. Thanks to the automatic nature of speech perception, an
expletive kidnaps our attention and forces us to consider its unpleasant
connotations. That makes all of us vulnerable to a mental assault
whenever we are in earshot of other speakers, as if we were strapped to
a chair and could be given a punch or a shock at any time. And this, in
turn, raises the question of what kinds of concepts have the sort of
unpleasant emotional charge that can make words for them taboo.

[T] he historical root of swearing in English and many other languages
is, oddly enough, religion. We see this in the Third Commandment, in the
popularity of hell, damn, God, and Jesus Christ as expletives, and in
many of the terms for taboo language itself: profanity (that which is
not sacred), blasphemy (literally “evil speech” but, in practice,
disrespect toward a deity), and swearing, cursing, and oaths, which
originally were secured by the invocation of a deity or one of his
symbols.

In English-speaking countries today, religious swearing barely raises an
eyebrow. Gone with the wind are the days when people could be titillated
by a character in a movie saying “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a
damn.” If a character today is offended by such language, it’s only to
depict him as an old-fashioned prude. The defanging of religious taboo
words is an obvious consequence of the secularization of Western
culture. As G. K. Chesterton remarked, “Blasphemy itself could not
survive religion; if anyone doubts that, let him try to blaspheme Odin.”
To understand religious vulgarity, then, we have to put ourselves in the
shoes of our linguistic ancestors, to whom God and Hell were a real
presence.

Say you need to make a promise. You may want to borrow money, and so
must promise to return it. Why should the promisee believe you, knowing
that it may be to your advantage to renege? The answer is that you
should submit to a contingency that would impose a penalty on you if you
did renege, ideally one so certain and severe that you would always do
better to keep the promise than to back out. That way, your partner no
longer has to take you at your word; he can rely on your self-interest.
Nowadays, we secure our promises with legal contracts that make us
liable if we back out. We mortgage our house, giving the bank permission
to repossess it if we fail to repay the loan. But, before we could count
on a commercial and legal apparatus to enforce our contracts, we had to
do our own self-handicapping. Children still bind their oaths by saying,
“I hope to die if I tell a lie.” Adults used to do the same by invoking
the wrath of God, as in May God strike me dead if I’m lying and
variations like As God is my witness, Blow me down!, and God blind
me!–the source of the British blimey.

Such oaths, of course, would have been more credible in an era in which
people thought that God listened to their entreaties and had the power
to carry them out. Even today, witnesses in

U.S. court proceedings have
to swear on the Bible, as if an act of perjury undetected by the legal
system would be punished by an eavesdropping and easily offended God.
But, even if these oaths aren’t seen as literally having the power to
bring down divine penalties for noncompliance, they signal a distinction
between everyday assurances on minor favors and solemn pledges on
weightier matters. Today, the emotional power of religious swearing may
have dimmed, but the psychology behind it is still with us. Even a
parent without an inkling of superstition would not say “I swear on the
life of my child” lightly. The mere thought of murdering one’s child for
ulterior gain is not just unpleasant; it should be unthinkable if one is
a true parent, and every neuron of one’s brain should be programmed
against it.

This literal unthinkability is the basis of the psychology of taboo in
general, and it is the mindset that is tapped in swearing on something
sacred, whether it be a religious trapping or a child’s life. And,
thanks to the automatic nature of speech processing, the same sacred
words that consecrate promises–the oath-binding sense of
“swearing”– may be used to attract attention, to shock, or to inflict
psychic pain on a listener–the dirty-word sense of “swearing.”

[A] s secularization has rendered religious swear words less powerful,
creative speakers have replaced them with words that have the same
degree of affective clout according to the sensibilities of the day.
This explains why taboo expressions can have such baffling syntax and
semantics. To take just one example, why do people use the ungrammatical
Fuck you? And why does no one have a clear sense of what, exactly, Fuck
you means? (Some people guess “fuck yourself,” others “get fucked,” and
still others “I will fuck you,” but none of these hunches is
compelling.) The most likely explanation is that these grammatically
baffling curses originated in more intelligible religious curses during
the transition from religious to sexual and scatological swearing in
English-speaking countries:

Who (in) the hell are you? >> Who the fuck are you?

I don’t give a damn >> I don’t give a fuck; I don’t give a shit.

Holy Mary! >> Holy shit! Holy fuck!

For God’s sake >> For fuck’s sake; For shit’s sake.

Damn you! >> Fuck you!

Of course, this transmutation raises the question of why words for these
particular concepts stepped into the breach–why, for example, words for
bodily effluvia and their orifices and acts of excretion became taboo.
Shit, piss, and asshole, to name but a few, are still unspeakable on
network television and unprintable in most newspapers. The New York
Times, for example, identified a best-seller by the philosopher Harry
Frankfurt as On Bull****.

On the whole, the acceptability of taboo words is only loosely tied to
the acceptability of what they refer to, but, in the case of taboo terms
for effluvia, the correlation is fairly good. The linguists Keith Allan
and Kate Burridge have noted that shit is less acceptable than piss,
which in turn is less acceptable than fart, which is less acceptable
than snot, which is less acceptable than spit (which is not taboo at
all). That’s the same order as the acceptability of eliminating these
substances from the body in public. Effluvia have such an emotional
charge that they figure prominently in voodoo, sorcery, and other kinds
of sympathetic magic in many of the world’s cultures. The big deal that
people ordinarily make out of effluvia–both the words and the
substances– has puzzled many observers. After all, we are incarnate
beings, and excretion is an inescapable part of human life.

The biologists Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran identify the reason. It
can’t be a coincidence, they note, that the most disgusting substances
are also the most dangerous vectors for disease. Feces is a route of
transmission for the viruses, bacteria, and protozoans that cause at
least 20 intestinal diseases, as well as ascariasis, hepatitis A and E,
polio, ameobiasis, hookworm, pinworm, whipworm, cholera, and tetanus.
Blood, vomit, mucus, pus, and sexual fluids are also good vehicles for
pathogens to get from one body into another. Although the strongest
component of the disgust reaction is a desire not to eat or touch the
offending substance, it’s also disgusting to think about effluvia,
together with the body parts and activities that excrete them. And,
because of the involuntariness of speech perception, it’s unpleasant to
hear the words for them.

Some people have been puzzled about why cunt should be taboo. It is not
just an unprintable word for the vagina but the most offensive epithet
for a woman in

America. One might have thought that, in the
male-dominated world of swearing, the vagina would be revered, not
reviled. After all, it’s been said that no sooner does a boy come out of
it than he spends the rest of his life trying to get back in. This
becomes less mysterious if one imagines the connotations in an age
before tampons, toilet paper, regular bathing, and antifungal drugs.

[T] he other major source of taboo words is sexuality. Since the 1960s,
many progressive thinkers have found these taboos to be utterly risible.
Sex is a source of mutual pleasure, they reason, and should be cleansed
of stigma and shame. Prudery about sexual language could only be a
superstition, an anachronism, perhaps a product of spite, as in H. L.
Mencken’s definition of puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone,
somewhere, may be happy.”

The comedian Lenny Bruce was puzzled by our most common sexual
imprecation. In a monologue reproduced in the biopic Lenny, he riffs:
What’s the worst thing you can say to anybody? “Fuck you, Mister.” It’s
really weird, because, if I really wanted to hurt you, I should say
“Unfuck you, Mister.” Because “Fuck you” is really nice! “Hello, Ma,
it’s me. Yeah, I just got back. Aw, fuck you, Ma! Sure, I mean it. Is
Pop there? Aw, fuck you, Pop!”
Part of the puzzlement comes from the strange syntax of Fuck you (which,
as we saw, does not in fact mean “Have sex”). But it also comes from a
modern myopia for how incendiary sexuality can be in the full sweep of
human experience.

Consider two consenting adults who have just had sex. Has everyone had
fun? Not necessarily. One partner might see the act as the beginning of
a lifelong relationship, the other as a one-night-stand. One may be
infecting the other with a disease. A baby may have been conceived,
whose welfare was not planned for in the heat of passion. If the couple
is related, the baby may inherit two copies of a deleterious recessive
gene and be susceptible to a genetic defect. There may be romantic
rivals in the wings who would be enraged with jealousy if they found
out, or a cuckolded husband in danger of raising another man’s child, or
a two-timed wife in danger of losing support for her own children.
Parents may have marriage plans for one of the participants, involving
large sums of money or an important alliance with another clan. And, on
other occasions, the participants may not both be adults, or may not
both be consenting.

Sex has high stakes, including exploitation, disease, illegitimacy,
incest, jealousy, spousal abuse, cuckoldry, desertion, feuding, child
abuse, and rape. These hazards have been around for a long time and have
left their mark on our customs and our emotions. Thoughts about sex are
likely to be fraught, and not entertained lightly. Words for sex can be
even more touchy, because they not only evoke the charged thoughts but
implicate a sharing of those thoughts between two people. The thoughts,
moreover, are shared “on the record,” each party knowing that the other
knows that he or she has been thinking about the sex under discussion.
This lack of plausible deniability embroils the dialogue in an extra
layer of intrigue.

Evolutionary psychology has laid out the conflicts of interest that are
inherent to human sexuality, and some of these conflicts play themselves
out in the linguistic arena. Plain speaking about sex conveys an
attitude that sex is a casual matter, like tennis or philately, and so
it may seem to the partners at the time. But the long-term implications
may be more keenly felt by a wider circle of interested parties. Parents
and other senior kin may be concerned with the thwarting of their own
plans for the family lineage, and the community may take an interest in
the illegitimate children appearing in their midst and in the posturing
and competition, sometimes violent, that can accompany sexual freedom.
The ideal of sex as a sacred communion between a monogamous couple may
be old-fashioned and even unrealistic, but it sure is convenient for the
elders of a family and a society. It’s not surprising to find tensions
between individuals and guardians of the community over casual talk
about sex (accompanied by hypocrisy among the guardians when it comes to
their own casual sex).

Another sexual conflict of interest divides men from women. In every act
of reproduction, females are committed to long stretches of pregnancy
and lactation, while males can get away with a few minutes of
copulation. A male can have more progeny if he mates with many females,
whereas a female will not have more progeny if she mates with many
males–though her offspring will do better if she has chosen a mate who
is willing to invest in them or can endow them with good genes. Not
surprisingly, in all cultures men pursue sex more eagerly, are more
willing to have casual sex, and are more likely to seduce, deceive, or
coerce to get sex. All things being equal, casual sex works to the
advantage of men, both genetically and emotionally. We might expect
casual talk about sex to show the same asymmetry, and so it does. Men
swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be
especially demeaning to women– hence the old prohibition of swearing
“in mixed company.”

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a
throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of
the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense
at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against
pornography. As a result, many universities and businesses have
published guidelines on sexual harassment that ban telling sexual jokes,
and, in 1993, veteran Boston Globe journalist David Nyhan was forced to
apologize and donate $1,250 to a women’s organization when a female
staffer overheard him in the newsroom using the word pussy-whipped with
a male colleague who declined his invitation to play basketball after
work. The feminist writer Andrea Dworkin explicitly connected coarse
sexual language to the oppression of women: “Fucking requires that the
male act on one who has less power and this valuation is so deep, so
completely implicit in the act, that the one who is fucked is
stigmatized. ”

Though people are seeing, talking about, and having sex more readily
today than they did in the past, the topic is still not free of taboo.
Most people still don’t copulate in public, swap spouses at the end of a
dinner party, have sex with their siblings and children, or openly trade
favors for sex. Even after the sexual revolution, we have a long way to
go before “exploring our sexuality” to the fullest, and that means that
people still set up barriers in their minds to block certain trains of
thought. The language of sex can tug at those barriers.

[W] hich brings us back to fucking–Bono’ s fucking, that is. Does a
deeper understanding of the history, psychology, and neurobiology of
swearing give us any basis for deciding among the prohibitions in the
Clean Airwaves Act, the hairsplitting of the FCC, and the libertinism of
a Lenny Bruce?

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is the
bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate functions
of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary items or allow
others to use them. On the other hand, private media have the
prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards of taste and
the demands of the market, that excludes words their audience doesn’t
enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer says fucking brilliant,
it’s none of the government’s business; but, if some people would rather
not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be
television channels that don’t force them to.

What about decisions in the private sphere? Are there guidelines that
can inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to
discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity? Here are some
thoughts.

Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful
about where to aim it and when to fire. The common denominator of taboo
words is the act of forcing a disagreeable thought on someone, and it’s
worth considering how often one really wants one’s audience to be
reminded of excrement, urine, and exploitative sex. Even in its mildest
form, intended only to keep the listener’s attention, the lazy use of
profanity can feel like a series of jabs in the ribs. They are annoying
to the listener and a confession by the speaker that he can think of no
other way to make his words worth attending to. It’s all the more
damning for writers, who have the luxury of choosing their words
off-line from the half-million- word phantasmagoria of the English
language.

Also calling for reflection is whether linguistic taboos are always a
bad thing. Why are we offended–why should we be offended–when an
outsider refers to an African American as a nigger, or a woman as a
cunt, or a Jewish person as a fucking Jew? I suspect that the sense of
offense comes from the nature of speech recognition and from what it
means to understand the connotation of a word. If you’re an English
speaker, you can’t hear the words nigger or cunt or fucking without
calling to mind what they mean to an implicit community of speakers,
including the emotions that cling to them. To hear nigger is to try on,
however briefly, the thought that there is something contemptible about
African Americans and thus to be complicit in a community that
standardized that judgment into a word. Just hearing the words feels
morally corrosive. None of this means that the words should be banned,
only that their effects on listeners should be understood and
anticipated.

Also deserving of reflection is why previous generations of speakers
bequeathed us a language that treats certain topics with circumspection
and restraint. The lexical libertines of the 1960s believed that taboos
on sexual language were pointless and even harmful. They argued that
removing the stigma from sexuality would eliminate shame and ignorance
and thereby reduce venereal disease, illegitimate births, and other
hazards of sex. But this turned out to be mistaken. Sexual language has
become far more common since the early ’60s, but so has illegitimacy,
sexually transmitted disease, rape, and the fallout of sexual
competition like anorexia in girls and swagger-culture in boys. Though
no one can pin down cause and effect, the changes are of a piece with
the weakening of the fear and awe that used to surround thoughts about
sex and that charged sexual language with taboo.

Those are some of the reasons to think twice about giving carte blanche
to swearing. But there is another reason. If an overuse of taboo words,
whether by design or laziness, blunts their emotional edge, it will have
deprived us of a linguistic instrument that we sometimes sorely need.
And this brings me to the arguments on the pro-swearing side.

To begin with, it’s a fact of life that people swear. The responsibility
of writers is to give a “just and lively image of human nature,” as poet
John Dryden wrote, and that includes portraying a character’s language
realistically when their art calls for it. When Norman Mailer wrote his
true-to-life novel about World War II, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948,
his compromise with the sensibilities of the day was to have soldiers
use the pseudo-epithet fug. (When Dorothy Parker met him, she said, “So
you’re the man who doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”) Sadly, this
prissiness is not a thing of the past: Some public television stations
today fear broadcasting Ken Burns’ documentary on World War II because
of the salty language in his interviews with veterans. The prohibition
against swearing in broadcast media makes artists and historians into
liars and subverts the responsibility of grown-ups to learn how life is
lived in worlds distant from their own.

Even when their characters are not soldiers, writers must sometimes let
them swear in order to render human passion compellingly. In the film
adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Enemies: A Love Story, a sweet
Polish peasant girl has hidden a Jewish man in a hayloft during the Nazi
occupation and becomes his doting wife when the war is over. When she
confronts him over an affair he has been having, he loses control and
slaps her in the face. Fighting back tears of rage, she looks him in the
eye and says slowly, “I saved your life. I took the last bite of food
out of my mouth and gave it to you in the hayloft. I carried out your
shit!” No other word could convey the depth of her fury at his
ingratitude.

For language lovers, the joys of swearing are not confined to the works
of famous writers. We should pause to applaud the poetic genius who gave
us the soldiers’ term for chipped beef on toast, shit on a shingle, and
the male-to-male advisory for discretion in sexual matters, Keep your
pecker in your pocket. Hats off, too, to the wordsmiths who thought up
the indispensable pissing contest, crock of shit, pussy-whipped, and
horse’s ass. Among those in the historical record, Lyndon Johnson had a
certain way with words when it came to summing up the people he
distrusted, including a Kennedy aide (“He wouldn’t know how to pour piss
out of a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel”), Gerald
Ford (“He can’t fart and chew gum at the same time”), and J. Edgar
Hoover (“I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside
pissing in”).

When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and
uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits
our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of
syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration,
meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both
thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain:
left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no
stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire
human race when he said, “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is,
I know how to curse.” 

Steven Pinker is Johnston Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  His new book, THE STUFF OF THOUGHT: LANGUAGE AS A WINDOW INTO HUMAN NATURE was published by Viking in September.

The gent upstairs

An unpaid dowry, an amorous landlady, a trumpeter and a brothel-keeper … Charles Nicholl pieces together the untold story of a Jacobean court case and asks what it reveals about the ordinary life of ‘a certain Mr Shakespeare’

 On Monday, May 11 1612, William Shakespeare gave evidence in a lawsuit at the Court of Requests in Westminster. His statement, or deposition, was taken down by a clerk of the court, writing in an averagely illegible hand on a sheet of paper measuring about 12 x 16 inches. At the end of the session Shakespeare signed his name at the bottom. It is one of six surviving signatures, and the earliest of them (though it can hardly be called early: he was 48 years old and already in semi-retirement). He signs quickly and rather carelessly. The initial W is firm and clear, with that characteristic looping and dotting of the final upstroke, but the surname becomes a scrawl and is abruptly concluded with an omissive flourish: “Willm Shaks”. These abbreviations were not dictated by space, as they are in a mortgage-deed of 1613 (“Wm Shakspe”) which he had to sign on a thin tag of parchment. They contribute a note of perfunctoriness, or perhaps impatience.

The signature draws the eye. It is, as the graphologists say, a “frozen gesture”: it touches this otherwise unlovely piece of paper with Shakespeare’s physical presence. But what makes this document special is not just – not even primarily – the signature. It is the anonymously scripted text above it, the text which the signature authenticates as Shakespeare’s sworn statement. We know the thousands of lines he wrote in plays and poems, but this is the only occasion when his spoken words are recorded.

The case in which he was testifying is listed in the court registers as Belott v Mountjoy. It was a family dispute: trivial, pecuniary, faintly sordid – standard fare at the court of requests, whose function was broadly equivalent to the small claims courts of today. The defendant, Christopher Mountjoy, is described as a “tiremaker”, which means that he was a maker of the decorative headwear for ladies known generically as “head-tires” or “attires”. The plaintiff, Stephen Belott, had once been Mountjoy’s apprentice and was now his son-in-law. Both men were French by birth but had lived for many years in London.

The Mountjoys’ house was on Silver Street in Cripplegate, close to the north-west corner of the city walls – a respectable residential street of “fair houses” and walled gardens, in which lived doctors and surgeons, goldsmiths and moneylenders, though the more pungent amenities of Pie Corner and Love Lane were only a few minutes’ walk away. This is the setting of the story which unfolds in the court proceedings – a story which involves William Shakespeare.

The dispute concerned a dowry: a sum of £60 which, Belott alleged, had been promised when he married Mountjoy’s daughter in 1604, and which had never been paid. (This is a good but not a huge dowry: according to rough rules-of-thumb, about £12,000 today.) Belott also claimed that Mountjoy had promised to leave the couple a legacy of £200 when he died. Mountjoy denied both claims, and now, eight years after the event, the case was before the court.

Shakespeare was one of three witnesses called on the first day of hearings. What does he say? Not a lot, would be the short answer. The “interrogatories” are put to him, five in number; he answers them briefly – one cannot say curtly, because his answers are shaped to the formulae of court depositions and cannot be reconstructed as to their particular tone, but he does not elaborate much, as some of the other witnesses do, and on some points he remains a little vaguer, a little less helpful than one feels he might have been. His statement, like the signature beneath it, is adequate and no more.

He says he has known both men, the plaintiff and the defendant, “for the space of tenne yeres or thereaboutes” – since about 1602. He remembers the apprentice Belott as a “very good and industrious servant”, one who “did well and honestly behave himselfe”. Yes, he was “a very honest fellowe”, and was accounted so by his employer. As to the particular matter in dispute, Shakespeare is sure Belott had been promised a dowry – a marriage “porcion” – but he cannot remember the sum mentioned. Nor does he remember “what kinde of household stuffe” had been given to the couple when they married.

And he says – and here, amid the general blandness of his statement, there is a hint of something more – he says that he had himself been asked by the girl’s mother, Marie Mountjoy, to “perswade” the apparently reluctant apprentice to go through with the marriage. In the unwieldy language of the law-courts, which contains Shakespeare’s answers amid much extraneous wrapping, “the said deffendantes wyeffe did sollicitt and entreat this deponent to move and perswade the said complainant to effect the said marriadge, and accordingly this deponent did move and perswade the complainant thereunto”. This presents him as a kind of marriage counseller or go-between, a romantic or perhaps merely practical advocate.

But another witness in the case implies that Shakespeare’s role went further than this. He says the couple was “made sure by Mr Shakespeare”, and speaks of them “giving each other’s hand to the hand”. These phrases have a precise significance. They suggest that Shakespeare formally betrothed the young couple, probably there at the house on Silver Street, performing the simple lay ceremony known as a “troth-plighting” or “handfasting”. An intriguing little scene flickers up before us.

Shakespeare does not actually say why he was involved in these family affairs chez Mountjoy, but the answer is not far to seek. It is provided by the Mountjoys’ former maidservant, Joan Johnson, when she refers in her deposition to “one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house”. In Elizabethan and Jacobean usage to “lie” in a house meant to be staying there, and in this context undoubtedly means he was the Mountjoys’ lodger. Shakespeare quibbles on this sense of the word in Othello:

Desdemona: Do you know, Sirrah, where the lieutenant Cassio lies?

Clown: I dare not say he lies anywhere …

Desdemona: Go to, where lodges he?

There is a similar pun in Sir Henry Wotton’s famous definition of an ambassador, “An honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”.

This is one of the primary pieces of information afforded by the Belott-Mountjoy case – it gives us an address for Shakespeare in London. His wife and family were up in Stratford, and he returned there when he could, but by professional necessity, and perhaps for other motives, the “sweet swan of Avon” spent most of his working life in rented accommodation in London. We know of other areas of the city he lived in – Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, Southwark – but this is the only time we have a specific address, an actual house which can be pinpointed on an Elizabethan street-map.

How long he lodged or lay with the Mountjoys on Silver Street cannot be precisely determined. He was certainly there in 1604, when the marriage in question took place. He was then 40 years old, a writer, actor and shareholder in the leading troupe of the day, the King’s Men, a man at the peak of his profession. There is no reason to confine his tenancy to this year, however – a wider date- span of 1603-05 would not be implausible. In these years he wrote, in probable order of composition, Othello, Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well and Timon of Athens (the latter in collaboration with Thomas Middleton), and at least the beginnings of King Lear

“One Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house …”. I think it was the marvellous banality of this phrase that first sparked my interest in the case. For a moment we see him not from the viewpoint of literary greatness, but as he was seen by the maid of the house, a woman of no literary pretensions, indeed unable to sign her name except with a rather quavery little mark. “Mr” is perhaps not quite as banal as it looks, because it was at that time a contraction of “Master” rather than of “Mister” – it is the term of address for a gentleman; a connotation of status. But the effect is the same. We have a fleeting sense of Shakespeare’s “other” life, the daily, ordinary (or ordinary-seeming) life which we know he must have led, but about which we know so little. He is merely the lodger, the gent in the upstairs chamber: a certain Mr Shakespeare.

Shakespeare’s deposition in the Belott-Mountjoy case has been known for nearly a hundred years, but has been oddly neglected as a biographical source. It was found in 1909, along with others in the case, at the public record office in London. Its discoverer was a 44-year-old American, Dr Charles William Wallace, associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska. If you have an image of the archival scholar Wallace is not it. There is a photograph of him, taken around the time of the discovery. He is black-bearded, glossy-haired, elegantly dressed; his wife Hulda stands beside him, primly bonneted. They might be minor characters from an Edith Wharton novel, but instead they are standing in the fusty surrounds of the old record office on Chancery Lane, with a fat bundle of parchments on the table before them.

The Wallaces – they were very much a team – had been sleuthing in the archives for some years, and had already made some Shakespeare-related finds. They had turned up some legal documents relating to the Blackfriars Gatehouse, purchased by Shakespeare in 1613, and some lawsuits involving two of his closest theatrical colleagues, Richard Burbage and John Heminges. Wallace had also experienced the sniffiness of the British academic establishment, which regarded him as a brash American intruder. He has “boomed” his discoveries “in true Transatlantic manner”, wrote one critic. His prose-style, winced a reviewer in the literary journal the Athenaeum, “does not always economise the reader’s attention”. Wallace particularly clashed with CC Stopes, doyenne of Edwardian Shakespeare studies (and mother of the birth- control pioneer Marie Stopes), whom he suspected of cajoling record office employees to show her documents he had ordered up.

Wallace’s earlier discoveries touched on Shakespeare, but none of them had the sheer archival glamour of the deposition. Acting on certain clues, he tracked it down among the then-uncalendared court of requests proceedings – “great bundles of miscellaneous old skins and papers”, some still pristine, some “mouldered” and “grimed”, some still tied up with hempen rope “harsh to handle”. His account breathes the thrill of the chase but the reality was dogged labour. Even today the court of requests collection at the National Archives is something of a jungle, especially for the Jacobean and Caroline periods when the court was at its busiest. In some private notes, Wallace describes his paradoxical feelings when he finally came upon the sheet of paper he was hunting. He felt “glad, but disappointed in measure”. “We were aware of the bigness of what we had” – not only Shakespeare’s signature, but “a personal expression from him” – but it “was so much less than we had wished!” They felt a strange anti- climactic calm: “We exchanged a few words over the document, but no one in the room might have guessed that we had before us anything more important or juicy than a court-docket.”

Perhaps this sang-froid was in part the paranoia of the document-hunter, for whom primacy of discovery is everything. Nothing was given away, no cries of “Eureka!’ – the spies of Mrs Stopes were everywhere. And anyway, there was work to do. “We saw that we had only a part of the documents in the case: we must find the rest.”

Wallace announced his discovery the following year. He had by then recovered a total of 26 documents relating to the Belott-Mountjoy suit, some merely administrative, and some very “juicy” indeed. Twelve contain some kind of reference to Shakespeare. He published a complete transcript in the October 1910 issue of Nebraska University Studies. This choice of periodical does not now make for easy availability, but seems commendable as one in the eye for the Athenaeum.

Shakespeare’s deposition was exhibited for a while in the Record Office Museum, mounted under glass, but is now back where it ought to be, safely and unceremoniously stored in a stout cardboard box at the National Archives’s new headquarters in Kew. There, duly vetted, one may consult it. Ensconced behind two locked doors in the “Safe Room”, I carefully extract from the box this sheet of greyish, coarse-grained paper which Shakespeare once handled, rather less carefully, on a Monday morning nearly four centuries ago. It is hard to say quite what the page has which the photographic reproductions of it do not. The signature is clearer, of course. That dot inside the arcade of the W is very sharp: it stares out like a beady eye. The ill-formed k is perceivable as a sudden blotching of ink – a malfunction of the unfamiliar court-room pen, perhaps. Beyond this one has to resort to vaguer sensations. This bit of paper has presence, or anyway pedigree – an unbroken lineage back to Shakespeare’s writing hand.

After some moments of cargo- cultish reverence, and some futile speculation about fingerprints and DNA traces, I turn to the other papers in the box, also found by Wallace, most of which have never been reproduced. There are four sets of documents. The first set consists of four parchments – or “skins”, as Wallace liked to call them – fastened at the upper left corner with a grubby white cord. These are the initial pleadings of the case – Belott’s bill of complaint, Mountjoy’s answer, etc – lodged by their solicitors in early 1612. The remaining three sets of documents correspond to three separate sessions at the court of requests, at which witnesses testified or “deposed” in answer to a prearranged list of questions.

Shakespeare was one of nine witnesses in the case; he appears among tiremakers and tailors, a mercer, a tavern-keeper and a trumpeter, almost all of them from the Cripple-gate area. This is a local story: its physical boundaries can be paced in half an hour, though Silver Street itself is no longer extant, a victim of the Blitz and of 1960s traffic planning.

In these depositions we make our first acquaintance with some of the protagonists of this story – people personally known to Shakespeare: his landlord and landlady, the apprentice Belott, and others. We get an impression of them, though conscious that a lawsuit can give a distorted, or anyway narrow, view of those involved.

Our first impression of Christopher Mountjoy is that he is a mean and rather crabby sort of man. The meanness is apparent in the whole case, which hinges on his refusal to pay his daughter’s dowry (his refusal is certain: the matter before the court was whether he was breaching a promise to pay). That she was his only child compounds this impression, as does the opinion of witnesses that he was a man of “good estate”, in other words, well-off enough to pay up. We are also told that in the time of Belott’s apprenticeship Mountjoy was “strict unto” him – “strict” meaning tight or stingy – and that Stephen’s mother and stepfather had to find him “sutes of apparel”, and “were fain many times … to pay the barber for cutting the hair of his head”.

Later, as litigation approaches, we hear Mountjoy’s blustering tone. He told his brother Noel that “if he were condemned in this suit undeserved he would lye in prison before he would give the plaintiff anything”. Another heard him say – or perhaps it was the same occasion differently reported – that “he would rather rott in prison than geve them any thinge more than he had geven them before”.

In contrast, one gets a gentler, more amenable note from his wife, Marie Mountjoy. Her encouragement of the hesitant young couple is recalled by the maidservant Joan Johnson – “There was a shewe of goodwill” between them, “which the defendant’s wife did give countenance unto and thinke well of”. And then later, when everyone was falling out over the dowry, she tries to mollify the situation: “Marye, the late wife of Christopher Mountjoy the defendant, did in her lifetime urge him to give something more unto Belott and his wife than he had done.” To which Mountjoy retorted: “He would never promise them anything, because he knew not what he should need himself.”

The depositions of a neighbour, Daniel Nicholas, have an interesting twist, for they supply a secondary recording of Shakespeare’s comments on the matter. It seems Nicholas visited Shakespeare at Belott’s request, presumably within the context of the impending lawsuit. He was sent to Shakespeare, he says, “to understand the truth how much and what the defendant did promise to bestow on his daughter”. In response to this question Shakespeare told him that, “as he remembered”, Mountjoy had promised “the sum of fifty pounds in money”. The oddity about this is that when Shakespeare was asked the same question in court, under oath, he said he could not remember the figure. Does this tell us something? Was his memory – that miraculously agile and sensitive instrument – beginning to fail? The vagueness of his statements in court have been interpreted this way, but it seems that his memory was, in this instance, more selective than defective. It is an anomaly, a little fault-line in Shakespeare’s testimony, perhaps a significant one.

Nicholas also adds to the small store of Shakespearean utterances we have gleaned from his own deposition. Shakespeare told him that Mountjoy had threatened his daughter that if she did not marry Stephen, “she should never coste him the defendant her father a groat.” Given the lapse of time, those last words are more likely to be Shakespeare’s paraphrase than Mountjoy’s exact words in 1604. So here again, among the tiresome exactitudes of legal-speak, nestles an authentic Shakespeare phrasing – “She should never cost him a groat.” As we might say, “She wouldn’t get a penny out of him.”

We might have had another quotation, courtesy of Belott’s app-rentice William Eaton, but all that remains is a curtailed half-sentence: “And Mr Shakespeare tould the plaintiff …”. For whatever reason the court considered this inadmissible. The words were immediately crossed out, and replaced with the formulaic conclusion, “And more he cannot depose.” Whatever it was that Shakespeare had said to Stephen Belott remains off the record.

The documents of the Belott-Mountjoy suit are a way back into the living world of Jacobean Silver Street, and to Shakespeare’s presence within it. For Charles William Wallace, they revealed Shakespeare as “a man among men” (and indeed women). For Samuel Schoenbaum, the Belott-Mountjoy suit is unique because alone among the Shakespeare records, it “shows him living amidst the raw materials for domestic comedy”. These are splendid invitations, and it is curious that no-one has fully responded to them. The broader story that emerges from the case has not been told; this unexpected little window into Shakespeare’s life remains to be opened.

The Mountjoys themselves are a tantalising quarry. Since Wallace, there have been some additions to our knowledge of them – important new material was published by Leslie Hotson in 1941 and by AL Rowse in 1973 – but there is more to come out. The court-case itself has details about them which have been ignored, and others have lain unnoticed in parish registers, subsidy rolls, probate records, and medical case-books. The evidence remains fragmentary, but we begin to know the Mountjoys a little better.

Other interesting characters hover at the periphery of the story. There is Belott’s stepfather, the trumpeter Humphrey Fludd: a professional entertainer, a man on the outer fringes of the court, and sounding in that brief synopsis not unlike Shakespeare himself. There is Henry Wood of Swan Alley, whose business as a cloth-merchant brings him into professional contact with the Mountjoys, but whose relationship with Marie goes a good deal further than that. In the spring of 1598 Wood went to the trouble and expense of consulting the astrologer Simon Forman: what he wished to know, we learn from Forman’s casebook, was whether Marie’s “love will be altered”, and the context certainly suggests he means her love for him.

Another who seems to have been touched by the charms of Marie Mountjoy was a prolific minor poet, Robert Tofte, whose mysterious mistress “EC”, long sought-after by literary scholars, turns out to be a friend of Marie’s called Ellen Carrell. Given this connection it is likely that a handwritten annotation in Tofte’s own copy of Chaucer refers to Marie. Beneath the prologue to Chaucer’s “Testament of Love”, Tofte has written a line in fulsome praise, in Italian, of “la Madama Marie M – donzella bellessa et gentildonna”. “Damsel” and “gentlewoman” are hardly appropriate for her (if taken literally), but I am still tempted to think that the roving eye of Robert Tofte had alighted on Marie Mountjoy. If so – and it is no more than an “if” – we would learn for the first time that Marie was a “beauty”.

Born in 1566 or 1567, Marie was two or three years younger than Shakespeare, and was in her mid-30s when he became her lodger. When referred to in Shakespeare biographies she is usually called “Mrs Mountjoy”, which is correct and convenient, but which tends – especially in conjunction with the faintly comic overtones of “landlady” – to give an older image of her than is right. The more I have looked into her life, the more I have wondered what this sparky and apparently amorous Frenchwoman might have meant to Mr Shakespeare, and he to her.

It seems that her husband was not a paragon of virtue, either. The ledgers of the French Church, which was then on Threadneedle Street and is now in Soho Square, have some fragmentary records of the dowry dispute, which was handed over to them by the Court of Requests. On July 30 1612, four representatives of the church were assigned to argue the matter, two for each of the disputants. But of more interest – to the prying biographer, at least – is a disparaging note at the end of the entry: “Tous 2 pere & gendre debauchez” (“Both the father and the son-in-law are debauched”).

One suspects the Calvinist elders of the French Church had a pretty inclusive idea of “debauchery”, but in the case of Mountjoy more explicit charges are found in later entries. From these we learn that Mountjoy had been “censured” by the elders “for having fathered two bastards by his serving-maid”; had been “often exhorted to piety because of his irregular and outlandish lifestyle”; had been hauled before the magistrate for his “lewd acts and adulteries”; and had been publicly suspended from the church on account of these scandals. We may not be as aghast as the elders were – Mountjoy was by this stage a widower, and cohabiting with his maid does not seem very heinous. Nonetheless, these perceived sexual irregularities – “paillardises & adultères” – are noted as part of the Silver Street ambience.

We find Shakespeare billeted above a busy workshop, in an immigrant household: a milieu of artisan industry, foreign voices, fashion-hungry customers, backstairs intrigues. The family has this rather rackety atmosphere – not only the intrigues but also the fact that the elaborate, tinselly “head-tires” produced in the Mountjoy workshop were favoured, as the pamphlets of the day make clear, by courtesans and prostitutes. We also learn that Mountjoy leased a house in Brentford – today a neat London suburb, but in Shakespeare’s day a notorious “place of resort” for dirty weekends and commercial sex, a convenient boatride upriver from the city.

And then there is the difficult figure of George Wilkins, another of the witnesses in the case. In his deposition he calls himself a “victualler”, which is true up to a point. He would hardly describe himself as a “brothel-keeper”, though this would convey more precisely the nature of his establishment; “pimp” would also be correct. He was frequently in trouble with the law, some of the charges involving acts of violence against prostitutes. But there is a further twist to Wilkins: he was also a writer. Shakespeare knew this dangerous and rather unpleasant character – indeed it is almost certain Wilkins wrote the opening two acts of Pericles. Written in 1607-08, Pericles was notably absent from the great collection of Shakespeare’s plays, the “First Folio” of 1623, probably because of Wilkins’s extensive contribution; it was first included in the Third Folio of 1664.

Shakespeare’s relations with this underworld figure have not been thoroughly studied. Though his literary career was brief and minor, Wilkins is a writer of considerable bite, as best seen in his play, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, loosely based on a real-life murder case, and performed by Shakespeare’s company c.1606. At the time he wrote it, Wilkins was the landlord of Stephen Belott and his wife, who had decamped from Silver Street; it is perhaps through this connection that Shakespeare came to know him, and to collaborate with him on Pericles.

The first law of forensic science, otherwise known as Locard’s exchange principle, is that “every contact leaves traces”. To find out more about the Mountjoys and their world has seemed to me worthwhile in itself, but is primarily a means to find out more about their lodger, the famous but so often obscure Mr Shakespeare, with whom they were in casual daily contact. His deposition is a beginning: a few curt sentences of reminiscence. From there the paperchase leads on, through the dark streets and alleys of Jacobean London, to arrive at a certain house where a light burns dimly in an upstairs window. After 400 years the traces are faint, but he is there.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2194958,00.html
 

Widow plans to publish unedited Carver stories

by Richard Lea/The Guardian

Almost 20 years after his death, the famously lean prose of the
short-story writer Raymond Carver may be about to put on a little
weight.
His widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, is planning to bring out a new
version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the collection
that made his name on its publication in 1981. It’s the latest round in
a tug of war over Carver’s fiction between his second wife and Gordon
Lish, the editor who launched Carver’s career.

Lish, an editor at Esquire magazine and Alfred Knopf as well as a
novelist in his own right, made major changes to many of the stories in
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, cutting about half of
Carver’s original words and changing more than half of the endings.
Gallagher, who was closely involved with Carver’s later work, plans to
reverse many of Lish’s changes. Her plan is publish the results under a
title Carver originally gave to one of the stores, Beginners.
Carver wrote to Lish in 1980, before the collection was published, and
after he had met Gallagher, asking him to do everything in his power to
stop the book from being published.

“If the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form,”
he wrote, “I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God
forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and
mental well-being.”

Lish ignored Carver and the changes he suggested. The book went on to
cement Carver’s reputation as the poet of American suburban despair.

For Gallagher, Lish’s betrayal of Carver’s literary intentions is a
wrong that must be righted.

“I just think it’s so important for Ray’s book, which has been a kind of
secret, to appear,” Gallagher told the New York Times, though she is not
intending for What We Talk About to fall out of print, calling Lish
versions “part of the history”.

She has hired the agent Andrew Wylie, who is currently in negotiations
with publishers around the world.

But with the status of many stories in doubt, some are deeply concerned
about the implications of Gallagher’s project for Carver’s work and
reputation.

Lish himself has cast doubt over the status of the “original documents”,
and his successor at Knopf, Gary Fisketjon, told the New York Times he
was “appalled” at the idea. “I would rather dig my friend Ray Carver out
of the ground,” he said. “I don’t understand what Tess’s interest in
doing this is except to rewrite history.”

Carver himself had begun a process of revising his earlier work,
republishing three of the stories from What We Talk About in revised
form, in a collection he put together with Fisketjon before his death
called Where I’m Calling From. However four other stories from What We
Talk About appear in Where I’m Calling From as Lish left them.

“When we put together Where I’m Calling From,” Fisketjon told the New
York Times, “these were the stories that he handpicked from his work to
live in posterity in the versions that he wanted them to live in. If
that is not the end of the story, I don’t know what that would be.”

Carver’s British publisher, Harvill Secker, is in the process of
reprinting many of his works. Geoff Mulligan, an editor at Harvill
Secker, has yet to see any of the new versions.

“They haven’t been sent to us yet,” he said. He was unwilling to discuss
whether Harvill Secker are interested in publishing the new versions,
either instead of or alongside the old, but he did acknowledge the
importance of the reported changes made by Lish.

“If it is [cutting the words by] half, then I’d characterise that as
fairly heavy editing, though it’s not unprecedented, ” he said.

Editing is usually a “collaborative process,” he added. “It’s just two
individuals trying to make the book better.”

He was also unwilling to speculate on the effect the furore might have
on Carver’s reputation.

“That’s for scholars to decide down the line,” he said.

http://books. guardian. co.uk/news/ articles/ 0,,2193919, 00.html

Anne Enright Wins Booker Prize By JILL LAWLESS LONDON (AP) — Irish writer Anne Enright won the Man Booker fiction prize Tuesday for “The Gathering,” an uncompromising portrait of a troubled family. She is the second Irish writer to win the prize in the past three years, after John Banville’s “The Sea” in 2005. Enright had been considered a long-shot to take Britain’s most prestigious, and contentious, literary trophy. The award, which carries a prize of $100,000, was bestowed during a ceremony at London’s medieval Guildhall. “The Gathering” is a family epic set in England and Ireland, in which a brother’s suicide prompts 39-year-old Veronica Hegarty to probe her family’s troubled, tangled history. The judges praised it as “a very accomplished and dramatic novel of family relationships and personal breakdown.” Enright said people looking for a cheery read should not pick up her book. “It is the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepy,” she said. Howard Davies, the chairman of the judging panel, acknowledged the book was “a little bleak” in places, but praised it as “a very readable novel.” “Anne Enright has written a powerful, uncomfortable and, at times, angry book. ‘The Gathering’ is an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language,” he said. Enright said the book’s focus on family was a classically Irish theme. “I think family is a hugely interesting place, it’s a place where stories happen. … And it’s also a central Irish institution,” said Enright, who acknowledged feeling a bit “trembly” when she heard she had won. Jonathan Ruppin of British bookstore Foyles called the judges’ choice “a welcome boost for serious literature.” “Not everyone will be comfortable with this bleak account of conflict and despair, but the writing is undeniably exquisite,” he said. Dublin-born Enright, 45, has published three previous novels, two short-story collections and the nonfiction book “Making Babies: Stumbling Into Motherhood.” Her victory was another surprise from an award renowned for unpredictable results. Bookmakers had made Enright the rank outsider to win, with bookies William Hill giving her 20-1 odds. Betting on literary prizes — as well as on television reality shows, election results and potential royal weddings — is a long-standing tradition in Britain. “Mister Pip” by New Zealand’s Lloyd Jones and British novelist Ian McEwan’s “On Chesil Beach” had been strongly favored. But the Booker judges have a history of defying the odds when awarding the prize, which usually brings a huge sales boost for the winner. The favorite has not won since 2002, when Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” took the prize. Another popular choice that lost out was Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” the story of a middle-class Pakistani in New York whose relationship with his adopted home changes radically after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The other nominees were English writer Nicola Barker’s “Darkmans,” a sprawling supernatural saga set in the town of Ashford in southern England, hailed by the panel as “an ambitious and energetic contemporary ghost story”; “and “Animal’s People,” a novel about the Bhopal chemical disaster by India’s Indra Sinha. The prize, which is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth of former British colonies, was founded in 1969 and was long known as the Booker Prize. It was renamed when the financial services conglomerate Man Group PLC began sponsoring it five years ago. On the Net: http://www.themanbookerprize.com

By MATT MOORE and KARL RITTER

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – English writer Doris Lessing, who ended her formal schooling at age 13 and went on to write novels that explored relationships between women and society and interracial dynamics, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday.

Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, was born to British parents who were living in what at the time was Persia. The family later moved to what is now Zimbabwe, where she spent her childhood and adolescent years.

She made her debut with “The Grass Is Singing” in 1950. Her other works include the semiautobiographical “Children Of Violence” series, set in Africa and England.

“We are absolutely delighted and it’s very well deserved,” said Lessing’s agent, Jonathan Clowes. He added Lessing was out shopping and may not yet know that she had won the prize.

Her breakthrough was “The Golden Notebook,” in 1962, the Swedish Academy said.

“The burgeoning feminist movement saw it as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship,” the academy said in its citation announcing the prize.

Other important novels of Lessing’s include “The Summer Before Dark” in 1973 and “The Fifth Child” in 1988.

Lessing is the second British writer to win the prize in three years. In 2005, Harold Pinter received the award. Last year, the academy gave the prize to Turkey’s Orhan Pamuk.

A seasoned traveler of the world, Lessing has known many homes from what is today known as Iran, to Zimbabwe to South Africa and London.

“When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,” she told The Associated Press in an interview last year. “What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire — nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?”

Lessing’s family moved to a farm in southern Rhodesia in 1925, an experience she described in the first part of her autobiography “Under My Skin” that was released in 1944.

Because of her criticism of the South African regime and its apartheid system, she was prohibited from entering the country between 1956 and 1995. Lessing, who was a member of the British Communist Party in the 1950s, had been active in campaigning against nuclear weapons.

The literature award was the fourth of this year’s Nobel Prizes to be announced and one of the most hotly anticipated given the sheer amount of guessing it generated in the weeks leading up to award.

On Wednesday, Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding such questions as why the ozone layer is thinning.

Tuesday, France‘s Albert Fert and German Peter Gruenberg won the physics award for discovering a phenomenon that lets computers and digital music players store reams of data on ever-shrinking hard disks.

Americans Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, and Briton Sir Martin J. Evans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for groundbreaking discoveries that led to a powerful technique for manipulating mouse genes.

Prizes for peace and economics will be announced through Oct. 15.

The awards — each worth $1.5 million — will be handed out by Sweden‘s King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Fiction
Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company)
Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nonfiction
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf)
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA)
Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday)

Poetry
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company)

Young People’s Literature
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Company)
Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers)
Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press)
Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Company)