"The first words were obscenities"
-William Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads
Most Hemingway scholars are familiar with the anecdote regarding Maxwell Perkins's squeamishness when it came to discussing editorial changes in A Farewell to Arms. According to his biographer A. Scott Berg, Perkins had informed Charles Scribner that there were three words that couldn't possibly be printed in Hemingway's latest book, which both men knew could cement their new author's reputation after the success of The Sun Also Rises. However, when Scribner asked what the words were, Perkins was apparently incapable of uttering them aloud, and instead had to write them down. A more apocryphal version has it that Perkins had written the words-"fucking," "cocksucker," and "shit"-on his calendar under the heading "Things To Do Today."1
It is informative to read this relatively obscure anecdote alongside the most famous passage in A Farewell to Arms, indeed one of the most well-known passages in modern American literature: Frederic Henry's thoughts on the relation between language and war. These lines were almost instantly recognized not only as a credo for the austere clarity of Hemingway's literary style, but also as an eloquent expression of the disenchantment of the "lost generation" he had come to represent.
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had not glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.2
There is a certain irony in Hemingway's choice of the word "obscene" to describe such "abstract" words, since it would be for the implied use of highly "concrete" words that A Farewell to Arms would be briefly banned for obscenity in Boston, and over which Hemingway would struggle painstakingly with Perkins before the publication of the book that would establish his status as a major American novelist. Most of these words, interestingly enough, appear-or rather fail to appear-in the harrowing description of the Caporetto retreat that follows the above passage. It is from these pages that Hemingway was persuaded by Perkins to remove "fucking," "cocksucker" and "shit," replacing them with cryptic blanks.
In the following discussion, I will rehearse these frequently amusing struggles between editor and author, which involved almost every book Hemingway published with Scribner's under Perkins's guidance. Then I will turn to D.H. Lawrence's refusal, in the very year of A Farewell to Arms' publication, to remove a similar group of words from Lady Chatterley's Lover which, as a result, circulated as an underground pornographic classic for the next thirty years, precisely the period during which Anglo-American modernism was canonized in the academy. I will conclude with a discussion of the trials of Lady Chatterley in England and America, after which dirty words could be published freely, alongside Grove Press's publicity campaign for the unexpurgated edition, which made much of this freedom. Grove Press publisher Barney Rossett's eagerness to print dirty words contrasts serviceably with Perkins's reluctance; the two struggles-one to omit the words and one to include them-can therefore be understood as periodizing markers of the inception and dissolution of modernism in the Anglophone cultural field. Indeed, it is felicitous that the term "four-letter word" first appears in the OED in 1934, and that all the words to which this term refers first appeared in the Penguin English Dictionary in 1965.
I intend to establish the centrality of so-called dirty words, then, not only for any understanding of Hemingway and Lawrence's considerably different literary styles but also of Anglo-American modernism more generally. Indeed, many mostly male Anglophone writers of the mid-twentieth century, from James Joyce to William Burroughs, were deeply invested in the significance of a mere handful of words that they insisted were integral to their literary projects. In the many trials and controversies that resulted from this insistence, these words in turn came to play a central role in public debates over the nature and significance of literary modernism in the Anglo- American world.
Before examining the Hemingway/Perkins correspondence, I would like quickly to jump forward in time to the American trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover, at which literary critic and lost generation chronicler Malcolm Cowley testified to the shifting cultural significance of this handful of highly charged words:
there are a certain number of short Anglo-Saxon words for bodily functions that were regarded until World War I as being wholly part of a secret language of men, comparable to the secret language of men that the anthropologists have found in the South Pacific tribes. These words were used in the smoking room, in the bar room, in the barbershop, but no woman was supposed to know them unless she was an utterly degraded woman. After World War I, women increasingly demanded admission to what had been the sacred places of men, the smoking room, the barroom, the barbershop even, and demanded knowledge of the secret language of men. So that there came one word after another in one novel after another. Some literary historian should follow the fate of these four-letter words, when they first appeared, which of the first words appeared in Hemingway's Farewell to Arms in 1929, which of the words first appeared here in Ulysses, when it was introduced in 1931; which of the words appeared in, let us say, The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity and, more lately, By Love Possessed.3
It's been almost half a century since this landmark testimony, and still no literary historian has responded to Cowley's call. I intend, somewhat belatedly and partially, to do so here. First, however, I would like to comment on the specific euphemistic terminology that Cowley uses, since these words were almost invariably described as Anglo-Saxon, even though few of them are of certain Anglo-Saxon derivation (indeed, the etymology of dirty words is notoriously hard to trace). Furthermore, it was likewise emphasized that these words constituted a language of men, usually lower-class men at war.
The Australian linguist Ruth Wajnryb has recently affirmed that "wars do great things for the spread of swear words," and certainly the initial controversies over the publication of these words occurred in the context of accurately representing the speech of soldiers in World War I, especially in A Farewell to Arms and the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.4 Not only does this periodization affirm the congruence of these controversies with the inception of literary modernism, it also places them in the larger world-historical context of the transition from the British Empire to the American Century. The emphasis on the "Anglo-Saxon" derivation of these terms, I would argue, must be understood as part of an attempt both to fetishize the language of soldiers as representative of national vernaculars and, coordinately, to affirm a certain Anglophone cultural hegemony in the context of literary modernism's internationalist pretensions in the wake of the Great War. As Paul Fussell notes, the use of obscenity amongst soldiers in WWI was frequently figured in literary terms: "the intensifier of all work was fucking, pronounced fuckin', and one exhibited one's quasi-poetic talents by treating it with the greatest possible originality."5 A 1931 anthology of Songs and Slang of the British Soldier affirms the imperial extensions of this vernacular poetics, insofar as fuck "is known all over the world as the English curse par excellence. Street urchins will spit it at you in Cairo, Bombay, Cape Town, Shanghai and probably in Labrador and Paraguay as well."6
This effort to forge folk poetry out of military obscenity was ballasted by a coordinate affirmation of the lower-class provenance of these terms, in contrast to the more bourgeois connotations of the euphemisms used to refer to them, which were invariably of Latin derivation. Thus Morris Ernst, Bennet Cerf's lawyer for the landmark American trial of Ulysses, opens his 1928 study To the Pure with what he calls "the six deadly adjectives-obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, and disgusting-which are the basis of censorship."7 These words-vague, abstract, polysyllabic-contrast notably with the short, concrete terms-George Carlin's seven dirty words-which they describe; thus Ernst affirms that his book will have "an Anglo-Saxon cast."8 It was not uncommon to trace this linguistic peculiarity to the Norman Conquest, and the consequent development of an English national vernacular in opposition to aristocratic French. Thus the linguist Allen Walker Read opens his 1934 essay meditating on the word "fuck" as what he calls "An Obscenity Symbol": "The obscene 'four letter words' of the English language are not cant or slang or dialect, but belong to the oldest and best established element of the English vocabulary."9 And Lawrence Durrell, in his 1968 preface to Lady Chatterley's Lover, speculates: "it has always struck me as curious that most, if not all, the banned words seem to be of Saxon provenance, while the euphemisms constructed to convey the same meanings are of Latin-French. Does this argue some great split in the British conscience-a split occurring very far back in history when the Normans were the rulers?"10 The emphasis on Anglo-Saxon derivation, then, affirms the linguistic power and pedigree of an Anglophone vernacular in the face of political and artistic developments that were vitiating the integrity of nation-states.
This "power" is invariably figured as masculine. Thus Otto Jespersen, in his foundational study Growth and Structure of the English Language, opens with the claim that English "seems to me positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grownup man and has very little childish or feminine about it."11 And Geoffrey Hughes, one of the few literary scholars to write on swearing, claims that, "Anglo-Saxon poetry is largely 'androcentric' . . . just as most romance is 'gynocentric'."12 Soldiers in WWI, of course, were men, and Cowley's assumption that dirty words are the language of men was shared by those who participated in the controversies over these texts. C.H. Rolph, editor of The Trial of Lady Chatterley, notes "obscenity trial jurors were invariably male, thanks to a patriarchal provision in the law . . . allowing judges to exclude women from trials which featured evidence of a sexual nature."13 The United States had no such provision, which resulted in some symptomatic, and amusing, contre-temps. For instance, in the 1920 New York obscenity trial over the publication of excerpts from Ulysses in the Little Review, one of the judges indicated that the book should not be read aloud in front of the woman in the room. When notified that Margaret Anderson, the woman in question, was the publisher of the text, he claimed "I am sure she didn't know the significance of what she was publishing."14 Similarly, Sam Coleman, the attorney representing the government in the case of The United States v. one book called "Ulysses" (1933) is said to have whispered to defense attorney Morris Ernst that he couldn't properly prosecute the case, because he couldn't read "four-letter words" aloud with "a lady in the courtroom." Ernst, realizing that the woman in question was his wife, assured Coleman that "she's seen all these words on toilet walls," but Coleman was adamant, and refused to read aloud from the text.15
As these anecdotes indicate, and as Cowley's quote above affirms, the controversies over dirty words in literary texts occurred in the context of changing protocols in the heretofore gendered divisions of language use in the Anglophone world. In particular, the bohemian circles out of which much modernism emerged, from Bloomsbury to Paris to Greenwich Village, were engaged in challenging these protocols. As historian Christine Stansell affirms, "a willingness to tolerate looseness in what women said and how they presented themselves in saying it" was one of the defining features of turn-ofthe- century bohemian society.16 Stansell argues that these "conversational communities" set the standards for modern middle class sociability. According to Bernard de Voto, writing for Harper's Magazine in 1948, she's correct: "toleration of the monosyllables and occasional and even habitual use of some of them has come to signify frankness, sophistication, liberalism, companionability, and even smartness among a very great many educated and well-to-do metropolitan women."17 The use of dirty words in mixed company, then, gradually came to signify modernity itself.
However, the authors of the texts that chronicled and represented these developments were almost invariably male, such that the controversies over dirty words in literature can partly be understood as an ambivalent attempt on the part of these men to reappropriate and reinscribe the purportedly masculine force of the Anglophone vernacular. As Nina Miller, in her important study Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women, affirms, "the most visible experience of the situation we are calling modern was one of male crisis, and the most quintessentially modern response was a clearly marked style of masculinity."18 Cowley handily illustrates this response when he concludes the above portion of his testimony with, "I don't like this new fashion of using those four-letter words all over the place. I would rather keep them for the secret language of men. I am very much against the abolition of the smoking room and the bar room."19
Dirty words in mid-century, then, were associated with a very specific ethnographic group: lower-class English-speaking men, the "folk" of the modern Anglophone world. Thus Cowley's invocation of anthropological discourse to specify the nature of these words is noteworthy. His analogy between barber shop banter and sacred tribal language may or may not be accurate, but it does indicate a persistent belief in modern anthropology that there is something both primitive and primal about dirty words. Indeed, most of the surprisingly few studies of cursing and swearing have been written by anthropologists. Thus Ashley Montagu, in his 1967 study The Anatomy of Swearing affirms that such a project is "long overdue."20 And he begins by noting that "many philologists have held that speech originated in utterances closely akin to swearing" (5). He then speculates as to the corporeal logic of this origination:
This need was fundamentally a physiological one and was only secondarily psychological. Such expletive sounds were not invented by man but were physiologically determined for him by the shape of his chest and the form of his nasal cavities, throat, and larynx. (6)
According to Montagu, language began out of our frustration with the intransigence of the material world, since, as he amusingly comments, "there is an inherent malice in inanimate objects, which some speak of as Resistentialism, the conspiracy among inanimate objects to resist the incursions and manipulations of the animate world" (74). Swearing, then, is the physiological response of the animate body to the resistance of the inanimate world. From these material origins emerges a magical understanding of language as performative, an understanding in which words function as things. Thus Montague argues, citing Malinowski, that "The study of the language of nonliterate peoples has revealed the fact that words play the part essentially of implements. Words are regarded as capable of doing things" (8). In this view, words begin as a physiological response to the environment and then develop into a functional practice of acting on that environment.
This understanding of words as things was central to modern anthropology's theorization of the sacred languages of "primitive" peoples.21 In James Gordon Frazier's magisterial and encyclopedic The Golden Bough, whose influence on literary modernism was immense, the author provides an analysis of "Tabooed Words" that quite clearly relies on the same logic as Montagu's later study:
Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and idea association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person.22
Montagu's speculations as to the origins of language and Frazier's understanding of primitive taboos, then, presume that "savages" confuse words both with the things to which they refer and the bodies from which they emerge. Five years after the release of Frazier's study, his contemporary Robert Graves would satirize his analysis in Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language, affirming that, in refusing to apply these conclusions to his own national religion and language, Frazier "clings to the very superstition which he records among primitive tribes."23 According to Graves, in other words, the very "superstitions" that apparently dictate the savage use of language also characterize the "civilized" discourses of the modern anthropologist.
It is, I would like to claim, in this constitutive ambiguity of the anthropological distinction between primitive and modern understandings of language that the ultimate significance of dirty words for literary modernism can be located. Indeed, it is felicitous for my purposes that Hemingway's first dispute with Perkins occurred over a considerably complex combination of libel and obscenity. Perkins was concerned about the discussion between Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton in The Sun Also Rises, where the two men refer to Henry James's alleged impotence. In one of his earliest editorial letters to Hemingway, he writes:
I swear I do not see how it can be printed. It could not by any conception be printed while he was alive, if only for the fear of a lawsuit; and in a way it seems almost worse to print it after he is dead. I am not raising this you must believe because we are his publishers. The matter referred to is a peculiarly personal one.24
The fear of libeling James here can figure as a modern equivalent to Frazier's savage superstitions about naming, but the specific reference, which is of course more about Jake Barnes then Henry James, links these anxieties about libel both to the problem of obscenity and to the autobiographical extensions of Hemingway's narrative. These concerns would become more explicit when Perkins elaborated on the changes that would be required before Scribner's could safely publish Hemingway's first novel: "There are two points to consider that bear on this publication: the danger of trouble from referring to real people in a way to reflect upon them, and the danger of suppression." 25 The first included references to Roger Prescott, Hillaire Belloc, James Hergesheimer, and Henry James. As to the second, Perkins elaborates:
The book is of course a healthy book with marked satirical implications upon novels which are not.-Sentimentalized, subjective novels, marked by sloppy, hazy thought. That is one of the first things it is. But as I said, people are afraid of words. We don't want to divert attention from its intrinsic qualities to details of purely extrinsic importance. It would be a pretty thing if the very significance of so original a book should be disregarded because of the howls of a lot of cheap, prurient, moronic yappers. You probably don't appreciate this disgusting possibility because you've been too long abroad, and out of that atmosphere. Those who breathe its stagnant vapors now attack a book, not only on grounds of eroticism which could not hold here, but upon that of 'decency,' which means words. In view of this, I suggest that a particular adjunct of the Bulls, referred to a number of times by Mike, be not spelled out, but covered by a blank.26
Hemingway responded by suggesting that "balls" be replaced by "horns." He then sums up the entire editorial process: "We've eliminated Belloc, changed Hergesheimer's name, made Henry James Henry, made Roger Prescott into Roger Prentiss and unfitted the bulls for a reproductive function."27 The peculiar conflation of libel and obscenity could not be more economically expressed. And this castration of the bulls would quickly become, for Hemingway, a sort of metonym of the entire censorial process to which Perkins subjected all his books. Thus when Perkins sent him the illustration of the author that was to accompany advertisements for this book, Hemingway responded, "It looks very much like a writer who had been saddened by the loss or atrophy of certain non replaceable parts."28
This figuring of censorship as emasculation would become far more explicit in Hemingway's struggles with Perkins over A Farewell to Arms. Here Hemingway candidly admits his anxieties to Perkins:
My point is that the operation of emasculation is a tiny one-It is very simple and easy to perform on men-animals and books-It is not a Major operation but its effects are very great-It is never performed intentionally on books-What we must both watch is that it should not be performed unintentionally.29
Perkins's response to these concerns is highly significant. He tries to convince Hemingway that they're not really emasculating the book, since at this point the discussion was only over the serialization of the narrative in Scribner's magazine:
Now this serialization is not the real thing, as the book is. If we considered 'A Farewell to Arms' only in respect to its intrinsic quality, and refused to regard the question from any practical point of view, we would all be dead against serialization. It is an incidental and outside thing, and the best reason for it, to my mind, was on account of the practical aspects of it in widening your public, and in making you understandable to a great many more people, and generally in helping you to gain complete recognition. It is in view of all this that I think-as I judge you do by your letter today-that cuts can be philosophically made, for if we can keep people from being diverted from the qualities of the material itself, by words and passages which have on account of conventions, an astonishingly exaggerated importance to them, a great thing will have been done. Your mind is so completely free of these conventions-and it is fortunate it is-that you do not realize the strength with which they are held. If you knew a few of the genteel!30
Although Hemingway was not convinced, Perkins's distinction here is crucial for a more general understanding of how and why dirty words were so significant for Anglo-American modernism. Hemingway's concerns operate by way of a metonymically ballasted analogy between author and book. Like the authorial body from which it emerges, the book is an integrated whole. To remove words that refer to bodily parts or functions, then, is tantamount to removing these parts, or eliminating these functions, from the body of the author himself.
However, as Michael Szalay has recently affirmed, the analogy between texts and bodies in Hemingway in the end supports a crucial difference between them: "Insofar as they are about male bodies, Hemingway's texts are meant to replace those bodies, not as new vessels for human identity but as exemplars of an invulnerable identity entirely unavailable to persons." As Szalay compellingly reasons, male bodies can by mutilated and still be bodies, but, "because the identity of such a text is embedded in each and every word, the loss of any one of its words makes it not a lesser version of the original but something categorically different."31 This something categorically different, though Szalay doesn't pursue it in this direction, is a commodity. Thus, when Hemingway finally concedes to leave cocksucker, fucking, and shit not only out of the serialized version of the novel, that was briefly banned in Boston, but out of the book as well, he writes to Perkins:
You know we have no fights about money. The only fundamental disagreement was about the words-I knew certain ones could be published because I saw them in proof and they were all right-They shocked no one-I had to have them-It meant everything to the integrity of the book . . . it was cut so it would be able to sell-I've had no interest in it as a book since. It's something to sell.32
Hemingway's literary credo, and by extension one of the fundamental tenets of literary modernism, could not be more emphatically expressed. The "book" has an integrity that, by both analogy and contrast to the authorial body, cannot be modified. But such modification becomes inevitable as a concession to the market, at which point the book becomes simply a commodity for sale. And this process of commodification is simultaneously a process of emasculation insofar as it specifically concerns those few words which not only refer to masculine sexual performance but which, by the residually "savage" nature of their linguistic function, are understood as equivalent to it.
In the very same year that Hemingway was struggling with Perkins over A Farewell to Arms, D.H. Lawrence, dying of tuberculosis in Italy, was writing an essay simultaneously attacking pirated editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and justifying his refusal to expurgate it. In "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," Lawrence proclaimed, using logic strikingly similar to Hemingway's, that "I might as well try to clip my own nose into shape with scissors. The book bleeds."33 In a letter to his Italian publisher, he reaffirmed that he would not make a "castrato public edition."34 However, in refusing, unlike Hemingway, to adapt to the marketplace, Lawrence significantly shifted the legal terms that would frame his text's alleged obscenity. With Hemingway, the authenticity of the text conflated obscenity with libel; with Lawrence, the illegitimacy of the text conflated copyright and obscenity since, at that time, it was impossible to copyright a book that had been deemed legally obscene.
I would like to parallel this shift from libel to copyright with a significant contrast between the role of dirty words in Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Farewell to Arms. On the one hand, their role in the wake of the Great War seems very similar, as Lawrence proclaims that "All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great, dynamic words were half dead now."35 And this cancellation, not surprisingly, becomes associated with Clifford Chatterley, the literary entrepreneur crippled by the war who irritates Connie when he reads her the opening line of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." "How she hated words," Connie contemplates, "always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of living things" (97). "Ravished!" Lawrence then comments, "How ravished one could be without ever being touched. Ravished by dead words become obscene" (98). Lawrence, then, identifies the same post-war collapse of abstract meaning as Hemingway but, crucially, it is in terms of the sensibilities of a female protagonist. The "obscene" words, correlatively, have less to do with martial than with domestic ideals.
It is Oliver Mellors, of course, the working-class (if ambiguously gentlemanly) gamekeeper, who will bring language back to life through his vernacular speech. Thus although the enlightened Tommy Dukes quips to Connie, "I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit' in front of a lady" (40), it is Mellors who will introduce her to the more mystical term "cunt" which, in an earlier version of the text, Lawrence designates as "one of the indefinable words of the dialect."36 The indefinability of "cunt" is part and parcel of its performative, and putatively therapeutic, power in the text as an illustration of what Lawrence wanted to affirm as "a proper reverence for sex, and a proper awe of the body's strange experience." 37 This quasi-mystical effort to "cleanse" or "redeem" the language used for corporeal reference, to convince the reader that dirty words are "a natural part of the mind's consciousness and body," was central to the defense of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover.38
However, it is important to note that, unlike with Hemingway, the consciousness and body in question here is not so closely linked to the masculine author. Although Lawrence used the same language of castration and emasculation when discussing possible expurgations of his text, Lady Chatterley's Lover, by its very name and subject matter, was more closely analogized to the female body of its protagonist than the male body of its author. Indeed, Lawrence himself had exulted in a letter to his publisher upon receiving his first copy, "Lady Chatterley came this morning, to our great excitement, and everybody thinks she looks most beautiful . . . Now let us hope she will find her way safely and quickly to all her destinations."39 The "Lady" did travel quickly, if not quite safely, far and wide, but without the approval or profit of Lawrence or, after his death in 1929, his widow; the text achieved a certain autonomy, both literary and legal, from its male author, frequently signified by a figurative collapse of the gender of the protagonist into the book itself. Thus, when Lady Chatterley's Lover finally went on trial in the United States and Britain, in 1959 and 1960, respectively, it seemed as much a woman as a book that was in the docket. Rolph affirms: "just how much it was she, and not D.H. Lawrence or Penguin books, who was on trial, will appear from the following pages."40 In fact, Lady Chatterley's Lover, quite concretely, was more autonomous from its author than A Farewell to Arms. Since Lawrence refused to expurgate it, he was also unable to copyright it, and thus pirated editions circulated around the world, from which neither Lawrence nor his heirs would profit.
When Barney Rossett decided to publish an unexpurgated edition, then, his concerns were as much about copyright as obscenity, and he initiated a long and arduous series of attempts to obtain legal permission from Lawrence's heirs (first Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and then, after her death in 1956, her estate as represented by the British Lawyer Laurence Pollinger) which might aid him in suppressing competing editions if he won his case. Thus Charles Rembar would open the American trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover with the statement that "our client has important property rights at stake here."41 Judge Frederick VanPelt Bryan issued his famous decision on July 21, 1959 and literally within days Rosset's worst fears were realized when New American Library announced that it was issuing "the unexpurgated and complete edition of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' under their exclusive license for paperbound reprints of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' granted by contract authorized by the author's estate more than 10 years ago, still in full force and effect and just re-confirmed by the Lawrence estate and its literary executors."42
There ensued a legal battle between New American Library and Grove Press whose commercial terms quite conveniently both mirror and invert those of Perkins's argument with Hemingway over the difference between magazine and book publication. The "paperback revolution" had intervened between the two battles, permanently transforming the entire landscape of book publication.43 Now the very words that Perkins had to keep from being published in Scribner's Magazine became precisely the selling point for the flood of "unexpurgated" paperbacks that followed on the heels of Bryan's decision. Rossett brought suit against New American Library, not for copyright infringement, since it had been established that the book was in the public domain, but for "seeking to mislead and deceive the public" with its avowals, in both its promotional materials and on its book covers, that its edition was "complete" and "authorized."44 As Publishers' Weekly affirmed, this was less a legal issue than a matter of "the ethics of the publishing industry."45 Not only did most industry insiders feel that Rossett's assumption of the original risks of publishing the unexpurgated edition gave him the exclusive right to profit from it, at least initially, but they also acknowledged that "Grove's performance in publishing its $6 hardbound edition of the book and in advertising and promoting it was in keeping with the book's high literary standing," and had indeed been responsible for its legal exoneration.46 If Perkins had insisted that publication in a genteel magazine prior to issuing the hardcover would help establish Hemingway's literary stature, Rossett conversely was afraid that competition between a hardbound and paperbound edition would not only cut into his profits but also damage Grove's (and Lawrence's) literary reputation, upon which he had been able to free the book of obscenity charges in the first place. Now the modernist integrity of the "book" is threatened not by the genteel magazine, but by the salacious paperback reprint.
On October 2, 1959, Grove and NAL issued a joint statement announcing a settlement of their legal battle, and mutually acknowledging that "The unexpurgated version of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' published by Grove as well as the unexpurgated version published by New American Library are equally complete, unexpurgated and valid presentations of the author's work."47 Nevertheless, Rossett still had to struggle against a flood of reprints issued by less scrupulous rivals, so he circulated a series of ads that quite economically condenses these literary and legal issues. With the heading "DANGER! Pirates at Work," the ad lists a series of warnings against purchasing incomplete or inaccurate editions. These include: "CAUTION! The Lady may be cut"; "INSIST on a complete Lady"; "AVOID the expurgated Lady"; "BEWARE the 'mutilated' Lady"; "Some of the Lady may be MISSING"; and finally "DEMAND all of the Lady!"48 With the legal publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, then, we've shifted from a logic whereby the expurgated text is understood as a potentially libelous metonym for the castrated authorial body to a logic whereby the unexpurgated text is understood as a metaphor for the complete, if clearly vulnerable, body of the fictional female protagonist who, from Madame Bovary to Connie Chatterley, would float freely in the public domain of modernist preoccupation.
These complex relays between text and body illuminate the equally complex relations between theories of modernism and definitions of obscenity in the twentieth century. As Walter Benn Michaels affirms, most accounts of literary modernism "acknowledge its interest in the ontology of the sign-which is to say, in the materiality of the signi- fier." Michaels affirms that one of the central fantasies of modernism involves a wish that the sign "might function, in effect, onomatopoetically, without reliance upon a system of syntactic and semantic conventions."49 I would like to conclude by offering the modernist deployment of dirty words as a central, and heretofore unacknowledged, version of this fantasy and by arguing, furthermore, that this fantasy powerfully informed both the rhetoric of the free speech movement and the practices of radical performance art.
One of the more eloquent and influential theories of modern literature is elaborated by Roland Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, in which he affirms that style is rooted in the authorial body:
A language is therefore on the hither side of Literature. Style is almost beyond it: imagery, delivery, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art. Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has its roots only in the depths of the author's personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of words and things takes place, where once and for all the great verbal themes come to be installed. Whatever its sophistication, style has always something crude about it: it is a form with no clear destination, the product of a thrust, not an intention.50
Barthes concludes: "It is the Authority of style, that is, the entirely free relationship between language and its fleshly double, which places the writer above History as the freshness of innocence."51 Barthes's emphasis on the idiosyncrasies of style here cannot belie his reliance on the anthropological theories of language that informed modern understandings of dirty words which, in their primal origins, represent a "coition of words and things," and therefore figure as a sort of generic symptom of literary modernism's idealization of style as the "fleshly double" of language.
Barthes's theory is fundamentally focused on the relations between language and the authorial body, and this is indeed as it should be since the ultimate implications of modernist style when theorized in this manner are private and undecipherable, writing degree zero. However, once these texts circulate in the public, they are subjected to an entirely different interpretive paradigm based on the effects such language may have on readers. Thus the famous Hicklin definition of obscenity, which was essentially the law of the land in English speaking countries until the landmark case of The United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses," deemed that "the test for obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."52 Judge John Woolsey, in his famous ruling freeing Ulysses in 1933, did not change this essential emphasis on effects, defining obscenity as "tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts."53 The shift to the female body of the protagonist in Lady Chatterley's Lover can be understood in terms of this readerly valence of obscenity. As Frances Ferguson has recently affirmed, "the elision of the immorality of the book with the immorality of the character" makes sense, since "Constance Chatterley herself embodies the very notion of susceptibility that pornography and obscenity statutes were designed to provide armor against."54 Legal theories of obscenity, then, were also based on the apparently "savage" understanding of language as performative, as literally acting on the bodies of persons; it's just that they focused on (feminine) readers while the proponents of modernism tended to focus on (masculine) writers.
On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway, struggling with depression and writer's block, shot himself with his favorite shotgun. He had not produced a major text since The Old Man and the Sea (1953). His literary stock had dropped precipitously, and he would have to wait until the eighties, with the posthumous publication of The Garden of Eden, for his critical resuscitation. The revival of Lawrence, on the other hand, was in full force. Propelled and promoted by an entire stable of literary critics who dedicated their careers to establishing him as an academic industry and disseminating his work throughout the college curriculum in the crucial post-war years of the GI Bill, D.H. Lawrence was one of the most read and written about authors of the sixties. 55
And his passionate if problematic endorsement of dirty words in Lady Chatterley's Lover would help render visible the crucial links between the free speech movement and the sexual revolution. One example will have to suffice. In March 1965, John Thomson was arrested by the UC Berkeley campus police for holding up a sign on which he had written the word "fuck." The next day, four students set up a table and protested his arrest by reading aloud from Lady Chatterley's Lover.56 The so-called "filthy speech movement" affirmed that the aesthetic significance of dirty words had modulated into an explicitly political register which no longer recognized the sacred integrity of literary texts. In this highly economical conflation of aesthetic subversion and political revolt, the stage was set for Karen Finley and Annie Sprinkle, as the frontiers of the avant-garde shifted from a literary canon dominated by male-authored texts to performance-based events in which the (frequently female) body (and voice) of the artist is also the artwork. But that's the subject for another paper.
[Footnote]
Notes
1. A. Scott Berg, Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (New York: Pocket Books, 1978) 178.
2. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner's, 1929) 184-85. The composition of this text has been the subject of extensive analysis. See, for example, Michael Reynolds, Hemingway's First War: The Making of A Farewell to Arms (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), Bernard Oldsey, Hemingway's Hidden Craft: The Writing of A Farewell to Arms (University Park: Penn State UP, 1979), and Robert Lewis, A Farewell to Arms: The War of the Words (New York: Twayne, 1992). On the censorship controversy, see Scott Donaldson, "Censorship and A Farewell to Arms" Studies in American Fiction 19:1 (Spring 1991) 85-93.
3. Quoted in Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity (New York: Bantam, 1968) 80.
4. Ruth Wajnryb, Expletive Deleted: A Good Look at Bad Language (New York: Free Press, 2005) 244.
5. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford UP, 1975) 179. Fussell argues that the British and American experience of the Great War can be contrasted in terms of the relative lack of "a consciousness of a national literary canon" in the United States (158). The transatlantic currency of the word "fuck," however, affirms the degree to which obscenity would become crucial to forging a post-war Anglophone canon that would vitiate this contrast.
6. Quoted in Allen Walker Read, "An Obscenity Symbol," American Speech (December 1934) 275.
7. Morris Ernst and William Seagle, To The Pure . . . A Study of Obscenity and the Censor (New York: Viking, 1928) vii.
8. Ibid., x. The actual number of dirty words has varied surprisingly little. Carlin's famous list is shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. The Pacifica Foundation's radio broadcast of Carlin's monologue generated a Supreme Court Case, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), which continues to determine FCC rules regarding the regulation of indecency, as opposed to obscenity, on the airwaves. Since the landmark obscenity cases of the fifties and sixties, the focus on censorship has shifted from literary texts to performance art and broadcast media.
9. Read, 264. Read didn't, or possibly couldn't, actually print the word "fuck" in this significant article, instead somewhat provocatively calling it "our word" throughout.
10. Lawrence Durrell, Preface to Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: Bantam Books, 1968) ix. Durrell, citing his "deep repression," prints the words backwards as "kcuf" and "tnuc."
11. Otto Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960) 2.
12. Geoffrey Hughes, Swearing: A Social History of Oaths and Profanity in English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) 217.
13. C.H. Rolph, ed. The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited (London: Penguin, 1961) ix.
14. Quoted in Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (New York: NYU Press, 1998) 50.
15. Quoted in Vanderham, 109-10.
16. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000) 80.
17. Bernard De Voto, "The Easy Chair," Harper's Magazine (December 1948) 100.
18. Nina Miller, Making Love Modern: The Intimate Public Worlds of New York's Literary Women (New York: Oxford UP, 1999) 98.
19. Quoted in Rembar, 89.
20. Ashley Montagu, The Anatomy of Swearing (New York: Collier, 1967) 1. All further citations are from this text.
21. Obscene words were equally central to psychoanalytic theories of language development and psychogenesis. Thus Freud, in his classic study of Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious, affirms that children are "accustomed to treat the word as an object" (A.A. Brill, ed., The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud [New York: Modern Library, 1938] 713. See also Sandor Ferenczi, "On Obscene Words," in Sex in Psychoanalysis. Ernest Jones, Trans. (Boston: Gorham Press, 1916); Ernest Begler, "Obscene Words," Psychoanalytic Quarterly 5 (1936) 226-248); and Leo Stone, "On the Principal Obscene Word of the English Language," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 35 (1954) 30-56.
22. James Gordon Frazier, The Golden Bough (New York: Collier, 1922) 284.
23. Robert Graves, Lars Porsena, or the Future of Swearing the Improper Language (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927) 79. Graves goes on to perform an interesting thought experiment, projecting himself into the future, looking back at the inception of literary modernism: "There is a record of a novelist James Joyce, whose works, though published in a foreign country, probably France, were smuggled into England, openly read and even regarded as 'modern classics' by a literary minority: Joyce appears to have defied all taboos in his writing, and it is a pity that the Universal- Fascismo combination of 1929 succeeded in destroying every copy of his most famous work Ulysses, which would have been a mine of information for our present inquiry" (71-72).
24. Maxwell Perkins to Ernest Hemingway, 18 May 1926. In Matthew Bruccoli, ed., The Only Thing That Counts: The Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (New York: Scribner, 1996) 38.
25. Perkins to Hemingway, 20 July 1926. In Bruccoli, 41.
26. Ibid., 42.
27. Hemingway to Perkins, 26 August 1926. In Bruccoli, 45.
28. Hemingway to Perkins, 16 November 1926. In Bruccoli, 48.
29. Hemingway to Perkins, 16 February 1929. In Bruccoli, 91.
30. Perkins to Hemingway, 19 February 1929. In Bruccoli, 92-3.
31. Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State (Durham: Duke UP, 2000) 100.
32. Hemingway to Perkins, 20 November 1929. In Bruccoli, 128.
33. D.H. Lawrence, "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," reprinted in Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: Bantam, 1968) 331.
34. Quoted in Ronald Friedland, Introduction to Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: Bantam, 1968) xxiii.
35. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (New York: Bantam, 1968) 63. All further citations are from this edition.
36. D.H. Lawrence, John Thomas and Lady Jane (New York: Viking, 1972) 170.
37. D.H. Lawrence, "A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover," 333.
38. Ibid., 333.
39. D.H. Lawrence to Giuseppe Orioli, 28 June 1928. In James T. Boulton, Ed., The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979) 398.
40. Rolph, 8.
41. Trial Transcript, Grove Press, Inc., v. Robert K. Christenberry, 13. Grove Press Archives. Syracuse University Special Collections.
42. Signet Gram. July 24, 1959. Grove Press Archives.
43. On the "paperback revolution," see Freeman Lewis, Paper-Bound Books in America (New York: Bowker, 1952) and Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).
44. Grove Press Release. July 29, 1959. Grove Press Archives.
45. "The Regrettable Plight of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'." Publishers' Weekly (August 17, 1959) 28.
46. Ibid., 28.
47. "A Joint Statement from New American Library of World Literatures, Inc., and Grove Press, Inc.," October 2, 1959. Grove Press Archives.
48. Proof of Grove Press Advertisement. 7-31-59. Grove Press Archives.
49. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, Pluralism (Durham: Duke UP, 1995) 2.
50. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Trans., (New York: Noonday, 1967) 10-11.
51. Ibid., 12-13.
52. Queen v. Hicklin (1868). In Edward de Grazia, Ed., Censorship Landmarks (New York: Bowker, 1969) 9.
53. United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses." (1933). In de Grazia, 96.
54. Frances Ferguson, Pornography, The Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004) 133.
55. The inaugural text of the Lawrence revival is F.R. Leavis's D.H. Lawrence: Novelist (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955). Leavis has little to say about Lady Chatterley, and he refused to appear as a witness at the British trial, but his boldly stated desire "to win clear recognition for the nature of Lawrence's greatness" (15), made it acceptable, and indeed fashionable, to champion Lawrence's literary credentials over and against his dismissal by T.S. Eliot and other cultural arbiters of high modernism. After Leavis, then, came the deluge. For a representative cross section, see Harry Moore, The Intelligent Heart (New York: Penguin, 1954) (reprinted as The Priest of Love in 1974), D.H. Lawrence and His World (New York: Viking, 1966); Mark Schorer, D.H. Lawrence (New York: Dell, 1968); Graham Hough, The Dark Sun (New York: Capricorn, 1956); Keith Sagar, The Art of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966); and Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D.H. Lawrence (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1963). Many of these figures also appeared as expert witnesses at the trials of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Furthermore, and possibly most significant in the end, with the help of Barney Rossett, Sir Allen Lane, and other entrepreneurial post-war publishers, they edited and introduced a battery of anthologies and reprints of Lawrence's massive oeuvre in the sixties.
56. See David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000) 48.
[Author Affiliation]
Loren Glass is associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. His book, Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880-1980, was published by New York University Press in 2004. He is currently developing a project on modernism and obscenity.