(2 of 3)
When Disraeli was asked to distinguish a misfortune from a calamity, he was inspired: "If Gladstone fell into the Thames, that would be a misfortune, and if anyone pulled him out, that, I suppose, would be a calamity." Some English insults are sharp. Nye Bevan on Anthony Eden: "The juvenile lead." Some are odd. Charles Kingsley called Shelley "a lewd vegetarian." It sounds interesting but is difficult to picture. The top of the line was created by John Wilkes for the Earl of Sandwich:
The Earl: Egad, sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox.
Wilkes: That will depend, my Lord, on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.
Americans, too, were once fairly agile at the art, though they tended to use a club more than a quill. There was William Allen White's little note on Mencken, for example:
"With a pig's eyes that never look up, with a pig's snout that loves muck, with a pig's brain that knows only the sty, and a pig's squeal that cries only when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig's mouth, tusked and ugly, and lets out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habitat."
Complicated, but charming nonetheless. And there have also been flashes of true American wit over the years, with Congressman John Randolph of Virginia comparing an adversary to "rotten mackerel by moonlight; he shines and stinks," or dealing with his public:
Stranger: I have had the pleasure of passing your house recently.
Randolph: I am glad of it. I hope you will always do it, sir.
An equally hapless citizen was once told by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable." Until recently American newspapers were delightfully unrestrained when it came to abuse; a New England journal greeting Jefferson's election, for instance, with particular enthusiasm:
"Murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will be openly taught and practised." One reads such things nowadays—collected at last in Nancy McPhee's Book of Insults—and imagines a whole world packed with high-strung terriers, poised to yip at the slightest noise.
The trouble is that these insulters leave no heirs. The best we have—William F. Buckley Jr., Gore Vidal, Truman Capote —show a flair from time to time, but perhaps because cleverness is so desperately expected of them, often sound as if their hearts are not in it, as if they are merely paying tribute to the old masters. Capote once called Jacqueline Susann "a truck driver in drag." Have we come to this? During Watergate, H.R. Haldeman's lawyer, John J. Wilson, referred to Senator Daniel K. Inouye as "that little Jap." He then defended himself by saying that he "wouldn't mind being called a little American," thus replacing an insult to the Japanese with one to the intelligence.