IN their handling of Philip Roth's celebrated new novel, Portnoy's Complaint, the nation's editors and reviewers faced one of modern journalism's increasingly recurrent challenges to taste and sensibilities. The problem was not how to judge the book (with few exceptions, critics called it a masterly novel of the Jewish genre), but how to convey its sexual content and earthy language without using THOSE WORDS.
The Chicago Sun-Times circled warily, citing Roth's "generous use of the saltier nicknames for our reproductive organs and their congress with one another." In the New Republic, Critic Anatole Broyard tried arch humor, calling the book "a sort of Moby Dick of masturbation." Many newspapers and magazines fell back on tradition, using initials and dashes for familiar obscenities. Considering its usual soberness, the New York Times Book Review surprised its readers by permitting its reviewer to repeat verbatim some of Portnoy's sex-obsessed plaints.
Chickened Out. The decision of whether or not to print words that most readers still consider obscene is one that will not just go away. Four-letter words, and elaborations on them, have become a tool of protest politics and almost de rigueur occurrences on stage, in movies, in books and in the public vocabulary of many celebrities.
One of the stickiest problems arose when the Government-sponsored Walker Report on the violence in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention repeated the obscenities shouted at Chicago police. Ben Bradlee, editor of the Washington Post, decided at first to run the report without deleting the offensive words. "But when the story came up from the composing room and we saw all those words in cold print for the first time, we chickened out," he says. "It's one thing to hear it in conversation, another to see it in the paper. We used dashes."
The Louisville Courier-Journal and Times went ahead and used the words, but later regretted it. "We regarded it as an official report, and it is our policy not to tinker with the text of an official report," says Executive Editor Norman Isaacs. As complaints poured in from church groups and offended readers, Isaacs candidly apologized. "It was an error in news judgment," he adds. "It isn't likely to happen again."
Formed Image. Newsmen increasingly face the dilemma encountered by New York Times Reporter Judy Klemesrud. Interviewing the wife of Black Panther Fugitive Eldridge Cleaver, she was confronted not only by a stream of obscenity directed at white society, but also by Mrs. Cleaver's outspoken contempt for a paper that would not print her language. Judy tried to include one of Mrs. Cleaver's words in the story, but the word was deleted—and so was the story itself after the first edition.
Dashes, asterisks and euphemisms are still the way out chosen by most editors. But "if the image of the word is already formed in the mind of the reader," says John Seigenthaler, editor of the Nashville Tennessean, "you might as well use the word. We have the responsibility of getting over to the reader exactly what was said. We should say what we have to say in this society and say it accurately."