'It's Great Sport to Write Tushery'

One of the consolations of writing letters to intimates was the opportunity to indulge in silliness, offensiveness or just plain nonsense. We count on friends to get our jokes, share at least some of our prejudices, forgive our emotional lapses and respect the First Amendment. The private is not public, or at least that’s how it used to be understood. Philip Larkin was pilloried and his reputation briefly damaged for the roughhouse language he used in letters to old pals like Amis and Conquest. I was reminded of the wartime letters my maternal grandmother received from her sons – whole paragraphs inked out or scissored to ribbons by military censors. 

I’ve learned of a new side – new to me -- to Robert Louis Stevenson while reading his letters. His sense of humor was stronger than I realized and he had a taste for sheer puerile fooling around. In a May 1883 letter to W.E. Henley he includes a poem titled “A Lytle Jape of Tusherie,” including these lines:

 

“The filthy gutter slushes,

The clouds are full of rain,

But doomed is he who tushes

To tush and tush again.”

 

In another letter written that same month to Henley, Stevenson outdoes himself:

 

“The influenza has busted me a good deal; I have no spring, and am headachy. So, as my good Red Lion Counter begged me for another Butcher's Boy -- I turned me to -- what thinkest ’ou? - to Tushery, by the mass! Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free, that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush.”

 

Clearly, Stevenson had a thing for tush. The OED, with a straight face, defines it as “an exclamation of impatient contempt or disparagement,” and cites Stevenson three times. (Hamlet: “Tush, tush, twill not appear.”) Under tushery, the Dictionary gives “n. used by R. L. Stevenson for a conventional style of romance characterized by excessive use of affected archaisms such as ‘tush!’; gen., sentimental or romanticizing writing." As Stevenson writes in an 1899 letter to Sidney Colvin: “It's great sport to write tushery.”