[In the following essay, Herrick raises questions about the propriety of certain frank sexual references in A Farewell to Arms, comparing them unfavorably with similarly explicit passages in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.]

The censor, whatever he may think of himself, is always a ridiculous figure to the impartial observer. Latterly the censoring spirit has been especially active around Boston, that ancient home of witch hangers, offering comic relief to the gods. That a community which could perpetrate the Sacco-Vanzetti outrage on justice should try to suppress Candide and Strange Interlude is but another instance of the marvellous perversion of our mentality when it becomes tangled in the thickets of public morality. A civilization which laps up jazz, even in Boston, goes delirious over smacking contacts in the “close-ups” of movies, and indulges in the semi-nudities of the bathing beach, ought not to be squeamish over a few printed words, no matter how “suggestive” they may be.

What is sexual evil? What “contaminates” the adolescent or even the mature mind? Our generation is still at sea on these points and the efforts of the censor do not make for light. Indeed proscription often advertises and enhances the attraction of a suppressed article. If the authorities really desire to protect the morals and the taste of the public, they go about it in a foolish manner. Frank commercial pornography such as was practised openly in Italy ante Mussolini may have less effect on the morals of the race than wire-tapping, third-degree methods, and universal graft. Unfortunately to the censor there is only one form of evil, sexual license, and only one morality, his own. Therefore open-minded persons like myself who may not care for eroticism in literature are suspicious of every exercise of literary censorship, as likely to be another case of the mote and the beam.

All the same there are instances where the censor's ban seems less grotesque than others where even the most liberal minded observer might accept—for his own reasons, never for the censor's!—the hasty suppression of some expressions of the phallic cult, e.g.., the above-mentioned pornographic pictures still vended in Europe. The coarse, mechanical representation of what should be a beautiful, a significant, at least an intense, human action is deplorable from any point of view. So, too, mere “garbage” (to use Mr. Owen Wister’s apt word about the work of a young American author whom he greatly admires), being repulsive, may well be disposed of as summarily as possible. “Garbage”, to be sure, in cludes other ugly and malodorous human functions—drunkenness accompanied by vomiting (the detailed representation of which Mr. Wister's young protégé seems to have a special fondness for) and the intimate details of physical evacuation. One keeps such offal out of reach of dogs, especially puppies, to prevent them from indulging a depraved taste. The human animal is not supposed to have the animal liking for offal, but if he does I cannot see any sure way of preventing him from indulging in it. There is always the secrecy of the mind where the worst debauchery can be freely indulged in, beyond the reach of any censorship!

It is an old controversy, this—what “decency” finds permissible for expression in the arts. Not only the vendors of garbage, but young radicals and experimenters of all kinds always vociferate loudly in behalf of “naturalism” or “realism” or “truth” or “fact”—whatever term the fashion of the day may use—while the more conventional (and perhaps more sensitive) minded object in terms of “decency”, “good taste”, or “public morals”. The result is a lot of noise and dust from the beating of straw men, and the antics of the censor, who like the circus clown, always presents himself obtusely to the slaps of all parties. Yet there has been progress, if we may call it such, since the time when Hauptmann's Hannele could not be played in New York—from the time when Harper's mangled Jude the Obscure to the time when Scribner's Magazine prints A Farewell to Arms intact! I cannot say that there has been any clarification of the principles underlying the censorship of plays and books, but an ever-increasing tendency towards free exposure of the nude, as in our manners.

The principle that should govern exclusions, if it is worth while to make any, is, however, simple enough: that is the principle that must govern the creative artist who has a larger ambition than to become a successful pornographist or sensation-monger. Ardent naturalists or realists or expressionists (whatever from generation to generation they prefer to call themselves) seem to forget the elementary truth that while all human activities may have eternal significance and therefore an art value, few actually do bear the sacred mark. It is the fundamental duty of the creator to endow the activities he chooses to present with such an enduring quality. If he fails, as he often does, he should not fall back childishly on the plea, “But it's so in life, it's true”. Everything conceivable is so somewhere in life, but what of it? Unless an action or a word reveals something, means something, why burden our distracted attentions with it? Because a man often vomits after over-drinking of what human importance is it—except to the man himself and those who have to care for the swine?

Lately there has been presented in two contemporary novels a fine instance of the elementary thesis I am setting forth: both are war stories, both by young men; one is German, the other American. The American tale is set forth (perhaps symbolically) from the point of view of an ambulance driver—the amateur; the European story, from that of the common soldier, the professional. Boston, with its beautiful lack of discrimination, has condemned them both; that is, the censor forbade the circulation of the magazine containing A Farewell to Arms, and the Boston publisher of the American edition of All Quiet on the Western Front prudently deleted certain passages and expressions from the English translation which he knew would not pass the Watch and Ward Society. Although the two stories present similar material, although both deal “nakedly” with certain common physiological functions, one, I maintain, is literature and the other it would not be too strong to call mere garbage.

Of the two considerable passages of All Quiet on the Western Front suppressed by the American publisher (not too strong for the English taste!) the first deals explicitly with a necessity of the toilette which even animals and savages prefer to perform in private. I take it that the young German novelist had a very definite purpose in not sparing the reader all the details of this daily function (aside from a certain Rabelaisian humor whose indulgence all robust literature has allowed), the desire to reveal to the sensitive reader the most debasing and spiritually disintegrating aspect of our great factory war—its complete lack of privacy for the individual. Nothing, I take it, so stripped its victims of all sense of dignity, of human individuality, as the necessary publicity of even the most intimate and personal activities; nothing so tended to reduce the common soldier to a mere automaton. He was brought by the processes of that gigantic conflict (concerning which his leaders babbled beautiful nonsense) far lower than primitive man in the scale of existence, lower often than domesticated animals, to the place where he had to become a bundle of crude appetites. Remarque, by emphasizing the preoccupation of his common soldiers with food and drink and warmth, did what other truthful writers of war stories from Barbusse on have done, but in this scene (which does not offend me in the least) he has put the final firm touch to his picture of men stripped of every personal protection by the brutal necessities of modern war. The scene over the sanitary buckets tells me far more of war than all the vivid pictures of mangled flesh.

The American novel has no passage exactly paralleling the above although it is never chary of odorous references to similar facts. But what Mr. Hemingway does not hesitate to present is vomiting due to drunkenness, which is not peculiar to soldiers nor significant of their terrible ordeal. Granted that the thing is true and common enough, it has no value in the picture: it is just unpleasant garbage.

The other deleted passage of All Quiet on the Western Front has a close parallel in A Farewell to Arms. The Boston publisher was probably well-advised in not trying to get away with this scene, although any community with a keener sense of humor might well forgive its frankness for its robust amusement. It is a case of a soldier confined to the convalescent ward of a hospital who is visited (for the first time in two years) by his wife with the child born since her husband's last leave. Since everything must be shared in common, the little group of soldiers in that hospital ward know of this event and know what it means to their comrade not to be able to enjoy this brief visit in privacy. They arrange that the forced conditions shall interfere as little as possible with the privacy of the two and with the perfectly natural desires of the reunited couple to enjoy their (legal) relationship. The situation as rendered by Remarque is a delightful mingling of camaraderie and broad humor, without a single vulgar or “suggestive” word. Solely for the fun of it the incident would be worth while, but it contributes richly to the whole picture of what war does to the human being, which the novelist is painting. Also the goodness and good sense of the ordinary man, his homely sound humanity and honest morality, are all finely revealed.

My memory goes back to a situation something like this in Under Fire where a soldier on leave, having travelled many days to reach his home, picks up on the way a stranded comrade and offers him shelter from a storm in the one room he is to share with his wife for the single night left to them of the precious leave. Barbusse, so often accused of brutality, handled the situation with more reserve and less humor than his German rival. … I believe that the Boston publisher has defended the suppression of these two passages, both of which are printed in the translation published in England, on the ground that they are of no significance to the story as a whole. In that I think he errs. The story can stand the lopping off of these two rich episodes because it is so much of a piece, so firmly woven, but the omission of them is a loss to the American reader, who, after all, is accustomed to much worse stuff!

The parallel passage to which I have alluded in A Farewell to Arms is an ordinary boudoir scene, the boudoir being the private ward of an Italian military hospital where the hero is to be operated on for a presumably serious wound. The heroine is an English nurse whom the ambulance driver has flirted with casually at the front:—

I looked toward the door. It was Catherine Barkley. She came into the room and over to the bed. “Hello darling,” she said. She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. … “Hello,” I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. … I pulled her down and kissed her and felt her heart beating. … “You mustn't,” she said. “You're not well enough.” “Yes, I am.” … “No. You're not strong enough.” “Yes, I am. Yes, Please.” … “Feel our hearts beating.” “I don't care about our hearts. I want you. I'm just mad about you.”

(Interlude discretely indicated by space in text)

Catherine sat in a chair by the bed. The door was open into the hall. The wildness was gone, and I felt finer than I had ever felt.

She asked, “Now do you believe I love you?”

This, according to the magazine editor who writes the monthly puff, is “the love conceived in the muck of war which evolves into beauty”! … There follows a nuit d'amour in the hospital interrupted by stealthy reconnoiterings and punctuated by such bits of conversational exchange as this:

“There, darling. Now you're all clean inside and out. Tell me. How many people have you ever loved?” “Nobody.” “Not me even?” “Yes, you.” … “How many have you how do you say it?—stayed with?” “None.” “You're lying to me.” “Yes.” … “You sweet.” “I'm good. Aren't I good? You don't want any other girls, do you?” “No.” “You see? I'm good. I do what you want.”

This, I maintain, is merely another lustful indulgence, like so many that occur between men and women and have since the beginning of time and will persist to its end. It has no significance, no more than what goes on in a brothel, hardly more than the copulations of animals. There are fewer gros mots, perhaps, used by the American writer than by the German, more sentimental wash, but the implications of the situation and of the following passages in the hospital and at a Milan hotel—are plain enough even for the dull-witted Victorian to grasp: the whole episode smells of the boudoir. Remarque's treatment of the theme is literature, whereas the American's “beautiful love” is mere dirt, if anything. …

I must confess that I did not stay with the story beyond the Milan episodes and so am not qualified to say whether such a love “conceived in the muck of war” finally evolved into something which I should call beauty. I had had enough of what Mr. Wister quite properly calls “garbage”, in which Mr. Hemingway so often wraps his pearls. I gather from a review of the book that the hero finally deserted from his post of ambulance driver for the sake of his “great love”, and I am wondering if that action—to quote once more from the publishers' puff—“elucidates the driving purpose of Hemingway's work”?

It is in substance a quite simple matter, this distinction between what is dirt and what isn't in regard to the sexual relation, so obvious one might think as not to require repetition, except for the fact, which every teacher knows, that it is the simplest truth that most needs iteration. All human activities are the rightful property of the creative artist, from the lowest to the highest, on condition that he can endow them with some significance, a meaning—I do not say with beauty. The sun and the rain beat upon the earth, men and women are born and die, love and hate, hunger and lust: there is nothing either new or important in all that. It remains for the imagination to take these commonplaces of sensation and make out of them some thing, if not beautiful, at least arresting—something of a larger import than the facts themselves. Mr. Hemingway's young man and woman are but another couple on the loose in Europe during the War—there were so many of them! Erich Remarque's soldiers on their sanitary buckets or stealing food or in the convalescent ward of the hospital befriending a comrade, are pitiful and tragic figures of the greatest significance to people of this generation. From them even the dullest—even American amateurs—may learn what war really is, what hateful things it does to human souls as well as to their bodies, what an infinite coil of evil the patrioteers unloose in this world. And, incidentally, how pathetically right and lovable the basic instincts of human beings are even in the depths of slime and muck. …

The censor, by intimidating the prudent publishers of the American edition of All Quiet on the Western Front into deleting certain passages and glossing certain coarse terms in others, has done a great harm. Americans more than Europeans need to have their consciousness of the realities of war pricked, and should have received this important story unblemished by prudery, in its full import, literally rendered out of the German. Whereas, to my way of thinking, no great loss to anybody would result if A Farewell to Arms had been suppressed.

Yet I realize that the censor should be the last person to whose intelligence such a decision should be left. The very fact that he was willing to become a censor marks his unfitness for the job. The censoring impulse or habit of mind is both dangerous and puerile. Better to allow free pornography than to leave to any censor or board of censors the choice of what we can read and think! Less harm to public morals would be done with complete license than from the sort of censoring we suffer from at present—haphazard, ignorant, vacillating (also less free advertising for inferior books and plays!). It would seem more intelligent to spend the energy now wasted on ineffectual and wrong-headed censorship, with the attendant controversies in press and pulpit, on an effort to educate the public in what is dirt as distinguished from life and literature. A difficult and perhaps hopeless undertaking, I grant, nevertheless one which from the beginning of human expression every serious creator has endeavored to perform. Let the pornographers and the eroticists ply their trade in the open and purvey dirt for those who like it. Leave the honest imaginative creators free to work in the chaos of human instincts and impulses, knowing that time will inexorably suppress all of their effort but that which has either beauty or significance. The rest will inevitably go to the dust heap of the ages. Dirt would remain, of course—dirty thoughts and habits. But imaginative beings would be free to explore those hidden spiritual significances of sex, which the present age seems to be forgetting.