#$%^&*!?: Modernism and Dirty Words

"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...