She refused Peter Ackroyd permission to quote from the poet's work but could not prevent him from publishing an award-winning biography. "The role of a literary wife is not a happy one," said Beatrice. The job of guarding the great man's work and observing the provisions in his will may be equally arduous. Valerie Eliot, widow of T S Eliot, has tried to compel would-be biographers to respect her late husband's expressed wish never to be the subject of a Life, but with limited success.
It may be his collected letters and reviews, along with a Life (Kathleen for Kenneth). It may be the complete collected works, plus four volumes of letters (Sonia for George Orwell). It may be the complete collec ted letters (Valerie for T S Eliot). Or it may be an account of their life together (Caitlin on Dylan Thomas or Beatrice Behan on My Life with Brendan). BEAUTIFUL, fragile, iridescent Kathleen Tynan died this week aged 57, a few months after completing the self-imposed labour of her widowhood.
She is the latest in a procession of literary widows who have taken upon themselves the task of editing and publishing their late husbands' work. Mr Coates's words above, if they ap p eared in the Sun or the Mirror, would be rendered with dashes or asterisks Politicians should have a care.. It remains remarkably prudish about language however coarse its stories. Politicians, like newspapers, need toreflect the society they serve.But they might also remember the paradox of Britain's tabloid press, which knows a thing or two about popularity. It is said that one of the proudest moments in the life of Robert Gottlieb, former editor of the New Yorker, was the day in the late Eighties when he first got the f*** word into that austere magazine. I cannot tell you my contempt for those shits."We get Mr Coates's drift. One of the unquestionable features of life in Britain, and much of the English-speaking world, over the past few decades, has been the coarsening of public language - on television, in pubs, in the street and on the printed page.
Hence they must be tough, like Samson or Andrew Neil before or after theirrespective haircuts. It won't work, this linguistic equivalent of the arms race Somebody always builds a bigger gun. How can Mr Blair compete, for example, with the Labour MEP for Nottingham, Ken Coates? In an interview last week, the disaffected Mr Coates said: "Bugger th e next election ... there's no relief coming because those bastards [the modernisers] are just going to walk past them [the unemployed]. Copious advice to both, however, from newspapers and spin-doctors, has stressed that niceness does not win elections. The new departure is that they are spoken for public consumption, by two men whose nervy readiness to smile suggests that they want to be liked. Mr Blair accuses his party's MEPs of "infantile incompetence".
These words are mild compared with what politicians and the rest of us say when we think we are in private (Mr Major's bastards, or Richard Nixon's expletive deleted). SUDDENLY, political leaders are anxious not to seem nice They wish to be blunt, to be robust, to tell it like it is. Mr Major says Labour's plans for devolution are "teenage madness". The more certain way for that to happen, however, is for Mr Major and his Cabinet to go on pretending that they know better than Britons north of the border..