SOURCE: Willis, J. H. Jr. “The Censored Language of War: Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and Three Other War Novels of 1929.” Twentieth-Century Literature 45, no. 4 (winter 1999): 467-87.

[In the following essay, Willis considers how the political and cultural climate in Britain and America contributed to the censorship of four war novels by Richard Aldington, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, and Frederick Manning.]

When Richard Aldington published his first novel, ironically titled Death of a Hero, in September 1929, he had his English publisher Chatto & Windus include a note on how his manuscript had differed from the printed text. In it he said:

To my astonishment, my publisher informed me that certain words, phrases, sentences, and even passages, are at present taboo in England. I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true. I had not the slightest intention of appealing to any one's salacious instincts. … But I am bound to accept the opinion of those who are better acquainted with popular feelings than I am. At my request the publishers are removing what they believe would be considered objectionable, and are placing asterisks to show where omissions have been made. … In my opinion it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don't believe.

(vii)

Thus self-righteously, Aldington took his stand against censorship and made his points with asterisks. He was having similar but less severe censorship problems with his American publisher, Covici-Friede.

Aldington was not alone in grappling with the suppression of language in 1929, a year that exceeded all other postwar years for published war fiction.¹ On both sides of the Atlantic, three other authors of the most successful and memorable war novels of 1929 had their texts expurgated: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Frederick Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune (better known by the title of the expurgated edition, Her Privates We). The altered texts were just the latest in a growing number of serious works of fiction that tested and protested the limits of acceptable language in the Anglo-American literary communities patrolled by repressive vice societies citing outdated obscenity laws. The noisy clash between iconoclastic early modernist writers and moralistically protectionist censors had been going on noticeably since 1915, when in England, 1,000 copies of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow were seized and destroyed under the provisions of the Obscene Publications Act (1875), known as Lord Campbell's Act, and the same year in America, when Theodore Dreiser's The Genius ran afoul of the postal obscenity law (1873), known as the Comstock Law, and was banned in Boston, New York, and Cincinnati.²

Richard Aldington, an admirer and defender of Lawrence, whom he had known since 1914, could hardly have been astonished in 1929 at the need to repress his own frank language in Death of a Hero. His note, for all its tone of amazed regret, was an ingenuous fabrication. He knew well what had been going on in the war of words.

All the banning, burning, seizing, and censoring in the 1920s, under authority of the obscenity laws, forced authors who wanted to be published either to alter their texts under the guidance of sometimes sympathetic but justifiably nervous publishers or to publish unexpurgated texts outside their country, usually in Paris, where expatriate presses after World War I busily flouted conventions. It proved a financially rewarding but bitter choice for authors to bowdlerize their texts for the potential royalties and readership that only established publishing houses could provide. Some writers, including Lawrence and Aldington, published altered texts at home for profit and unexpurgated versions abroad for pride.

After Lawrence's The Rainbow in England and Dreiser's The Genius in America, both banned in the second year of the war, James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) epitomized the post-war assault on the puritanical and repressive values of the “censor-morons,” as Lawrence called them.³ Neither novel could be published as written, and although both authors had their original manuscripts published abroad—Joyce in Dijon, France, through Sylvia Beach's Paris bookshop, and Lawrence in Florence, Italy, through Pino Orioli's bookshop—shipments of their unexpurgated texts were intercepted, banned, and destroyed in England and America.⁴

To establish copyright protection against piracy and to ensure adequate sales, Lawrence helped censor his own text for Martin Secker in 1928, but the expurgation was insufficient for Secker to publish. Lawrence went ahead anyway with his private publication of the uncut version in 1928, and as predicted, it was soon pirated. Copyright could not be obtained for obscene texts. In 1932, two years after Lawrence's death, Martin Secker in England and Alfred Knopf in America finally published the heavily censored novel. But not until 1959 would the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover be published in America (by Grove Press), and not until 1960 in England (by Penguin). Joyce fared slightly better than Lawrence. He saw an unaltered Ulysses declared safe enough to be read by adult Americans after the famous New York obscenity trial of Bennett Cerf's Random House edition of 1933 in Judge Woolsey's federal district court.

Lawrence suffered further indignities when the registered-mail copy of his poetry manuscript Pansies was intercepted in January 1929 by English customs officials on the lookout for Lady Chatterley, forcing his publisher Martin Secker to issue the edition without 14 of the poems. Lawrence later had the full text privately printed. And six months after that triumph of the customs officials, an exhibit of Lawrence's paintings was seized on July 5 in a police raid at the Maddox Street Gallery in London. In addition to the paintings, copies of the privately printed book of reproductions were seized and destroyed.⁵

But more immediate to Aldington's problems at Chatto & Windus and Covici-Friede over Death of a Hero was the example of Radcliffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, which was published in England by Jonathan Cape in July 1928 and in America by the brash new firm of Covici-Friede in December 1928. Cape pulled the novel from circulation on the advice of Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks (mockingly named “Jix” by journalists), but when consignment copies of a new Paris-printed edition landed at Dover in October, they were seized by the customs officials (St. John-Stevas 98-103). The furor of the resulting trial ignited the literary establishment of England into a fierce but unavailing protest. “Jix” had also jinxed Lawrence's Pansies and paintings, and it is one of the ironies of Lawrence's long battle with the censor that his angry counterblast Pornography and Obscenity was published by Faber and Faber in November 1929 as number 5 in the Criterion Miscellany pamphlet series only to be followed by “Jix's” Do We Need a Censor? as number 6 in the same series.

In America, copies of The Well of Loneliness were seized by police at the instigation of John Sumner, the successor to Comstock in the New York vice society. Donald Friede was arrested and tried in February 1929 for publishing obscene material (Boyer 132-34). Not until April 1929 were Friede and the novel cleared of the charges by a three-judge special-sessions court that reversed a lower-court ruling. At the time, Covici-Friede had begun working on Aldington's manuscript, recommending simultaneous publication in England with Chatto & Windus.

Donald Friede had been twice bitten. Before creating his own publishing house with Pat Covici, he had been an editor for Horace Liveright, publisher in 1925 of Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Sent by Liveright to Boston in April 1927 with a copy of Dreiser's novel for a test case, he was promptly arrested, tried, and fined ＄100, and the novel was banned. Although the Watch and Ward Society enjoyed its moral victory, Friede's appeal case was heard favorably and the original decision overturned in April 1929 (Boyer 185-86; 192-94).

As if Donald Friede's misadventures in the New York and Boston courts in April 1929 were not cautionary enough for Covici-Friede as they planned Aldington's war novel, they had a further example of the power of Boston's moral watchdogs in the case of Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Serialized first in Scribner's Magazine before hardcover publication, the second installment of the novel was banned in Boston in June 1929. Maxwell Perkins, Scribner's famed editor, had persuaded and labored with a rebellious Hemingway to tone down some of his language for the serialization and the book publication in September. Although the love affair between Catherine and Frederick would arouse the censor-moralists in Boston, it was Hemingway's barracks-room vocabulary of four-letter words that caused Perkins heartburn and required a censored text. Balls, shit, fuck, cunt, and cocksucker, among other words, had to be reworded, blanked out, or cut completely. Hemingway struggled to convince Perkins that most of them were to be found in Shakespeare and were in common use by cabdrivers and soldiers. Perkins argued that the cuts were minor; Hemingway countered that castration also was a minor operation, but with major consequences. The changes weakened the integrity and realism of his text. Furthermore, he complained that the English press edition of Erich Maria Remarque's international best-seller, All Quiet on the Western Front (Putnam's, March 1929), had left in the objectionable words shit, fart, and others that he wanted to use. He did not seem to know that the American press edition of the novel (Little, Brown, June 1929) had been censored to meet Book-of-the-Month Club requirements. Hemingway conceded ground grudgingly, agreeing to s—, b—ls and to c—s—rs or c—ks—r, but to no avail. The offending words all appeared as “—” in the text.⁶

The problem facing the young war novelists in the 1920s was how to be faithful to the bitter, life-changing experience of modern warfare in a realistic depiction of both action and dialogue. The war had altered forever the perceptions of soldier-writers, and when the novelists finally found their voices almost 10 years after the armistice, they were determined to depict accurately and unblushingly the sexual behavior of men at war and the four-letter language they used with regularity. The novelists' readiness to use impassioned obscenities also reflected the postwar, antiwar disgust and disillusionment characteristic of the decade. The poets and memoirists had published their experiences during and immediately after the war, confronting the horrors and heroism of trench warfare often euphemistically or metaphorically, but seldom in the graphic language proposed in the late 1920s by Hemingway, Remarque, Manning, and Aldington.⁷ And although sex scenes proved intolerable to the censors, there were few of them in Remarque and Manning, none of them erotic. The scenes were confined, in these predominantly frontline novels, to brief and grim rest-area encounters between soldiers and prostitutes. Hemingway's lyrical way with Catherine and Frederick was objectionable because it elevated nonmarried sexual love to heroic and tragic heights, not because of explicit descriptive language. Aldington in Death of a Hero would use little obscenity, but he would treat sexuality more extensively than the other war novelists and, thereby, would have his text heavily asterisked.

Although to beleaguered writers there may have appeared little to choose from among the Boston, New York, and London vice detectives, by 1915, as de Grazie writes, “the English groups seemed less puritanical, or less fanatical, than the American ones” (117). Dreiser's novels were not attacked in England. In America, John Summer won the day for censorship in spite of H. L. Mencken's furious defense of The Genius. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Mencken waxed angrily eloquent against American moral puritanism and its adherents, whom he labeled “the booboisie.” By 1929, the example of Remarque's altered text of All Quiet on the Western Front, as Hemingway pointed out, gave further proof of greater intolerance in America than in England. Aldington's experience with Death of a Hero, however, would prove the exception.

The differences between the English and American versions of Remarque's novel are instructive. Remarque originally had trouble publishing Im Westen nichts Neues in Berlin. It was rejected by the prominent and conservative Fischer Verlag before being accepted by the liberal house of Ullstein Verlag (Firda 14). It was the grim reality of Paul Baumer's victimization in the war, the disillusioned antiwar sentiments and pacifism of the characters, that proved problematic for German leftists and nationalists alike, not the matter-of-fact language of the soldiers. But A. W. Wheen's translation for Putnam's English edition, retaining such words as shit, fart, piss-a-bed, turd, and masturbate had to be converted for Little, Brown's American edition (Boyer 215-17). Shit became swine, piss-a-bed became wet-a-bed, cow-shit became cow dung, and the comical simile like a fart on a curtain pole became like a wild boar. Masturbate and turd dropped out of the American edition completely.⁸

More devastating to the integrity of Remarque's book, however, was the New York repression of two extended scenes from the English edition: a comically touching one, over three pages long, of soldiers sitting contentedly on portable latrines, reading mail, smoking, and gossiping, free from harassment by superiors; and a four-page scene in a hospital tent where the convalescing soldiers shield the 40-year old Lewandowski and his visiting wife while the couple enjoy a brief moment of sexual intercourse before the couple and soldiers joyfully celebrate with a feast of sausages.⁹

Frederick Manning, unlike Remarque or Hemingway, avoided the problem of public controversy and possible legal action by publishing his original text in 1929 with Peter Davies's private Piazza Press in a two-volume limited edition (520 numbered copies to subscribers) as The Middle Parts of Fortune. Then he bowdlerized his own text for the regular market, changed the title to Her Privates We, and used his army serial number (Private 19022) to disguise his authorship. Peter Davies published this expurgated version in 1930 through his regular publishing house. Putnam's followed the same year with an American edition. Her Privates We, widely praised for its gritty realism, became a competitor to Aldington's novel in the English market although it was published a year after Death of a Hero. Manning's identity as “Private 19022” was not revealed to the public until The Middle Parts of Fortune was reprinted in 1943.

The transformation from the privately published The Middle Parts of Fortune to the public Her Privates We, which could run the gauntlet of “Jix” or John Sumner and associates, illustrates the shaping power of a censor's expected disfavor. The anticipated censorship altered the tone and texture of Manning's and Aldington's novels, and for Aldington, resulted in substantial changes to the text. Manning used the full lexicon of trench obscenities in The Middle Parts of Fortune and thus rendered the salty language of men at war more authentically than any other war novelist had, but the racy colloquialism of natural speech is lost in Her Privates We. Here is an example:

Well, if it's good-bye to the fuckin' Somme, I won't 'arf 'ave a time puttin' the wind up some o' these bloody conscripts. Seen 'em yet? Buggered-up by a joy-ride in the train … so they kept 'em fuckin' about the camp. …

(Middle Parts of Fortune 17; italics mine)

Well, if it's good-bye to the dirty Somme, I won't 'arf 'ave a time puttin' the wind up some o' these bloody conscripts. Seen 'em yet? Beaten to the wide by a joy-ride in the train … so they kept 'em muckin' about the camp. …

(Her Privates We 81; italics mine)

In Her Privates We, Manning quietly cleaned up his text, replacing such apt phrases as buggered-up with the stilted beaten to the wide and strewing the pages with self-conscious muckin's instead of the earthily obscene f-words.

Richard Aldington had enlisted in the British Army in 1916 as a private and been demobilized as a captain in 1919, having, by his own account, narrowly missed being killed or badly wounded at least four times in France, but also having missed the worst part of two of the bloodiest battles of the war. He had separated from his wife, the American poet H.D., after the war, and first with Dorothy Yorke and then with Bridget Patmore as companions, had moved restlessly through Europe, self-exiled like Lawrence. As an imagist poet, then as a busy man of letters, he had earned his living publishing poems, essays, translations, and literary journalism with a wide variety of private presses and established publishers in England, America, and Europe. In 1928, still consumed by bitterness over the causes and losses of the war and deeply influenced by D. H. Lawrence, Aldington at age 27 plunged into writing his first novel, needing an emotional catharsis. He also needed a critical and commercial success and was anxious to avoid trouble with the censors. “Everything or almost everything I have to say about the war of 1914-18,” he wrote in his autobiography Life for Life's Sake, “has been said in Death of a Hero” (178). His “passion and indignation” had inspired the novel, he recalled, but he had “worked them out of [his] system” by writing the book.

Aldington was already under contract to the besieged Covici-Friede for Death of a Hero and prepared to help edit his own text when, at Friede's suggestion, he submitted his half-completed manuscript to Charles Prentice of Chatto & Windus on March 30, 1929. He had written 50,000 words of what he anticipated would be a 100,000-word book, but “as the book now stands,” he wrote to Prentice, “it contains certain words and phrases which will have to be omitted or paraphrased for publication.”¹⁰ He didn't know “how far the prejudices of imbeciles” had to be respected, but he added that he didn't want to be prosecuted, and “so I should be perfectly reasonable about this.” His attitude here is cooperative and pragmatic, in contrast to the “astonishment” he professed in his note in the published book.

In his ensuing letters, Aldington explained the ambitious four-part structure of Death of a Hero (a prologue and three numbered sections) and submitted large portions of his manuscript as he completed them. By May 3 he reported to Prentice that he was well into the third and last part of the novel, which was completely about the war, and that he recognized “how much that goes before is justified only by this third section.” What had gone before the third part, Aldington's savage and belabored satire of Victorian and Edwardian values through the prologue and parts 1 and 2, would be sharply criticized by a number of reviewers on publication in September, but part 3, depicting the experience and death of his antihero George Winterbourne on the battlefield of France, was written with such power and compression that it would bring critical praise. (In fact, several critics eventually thought that part 3 by itself ranked Death of a Hero among the best of the English war novels.) At this early stage of the writing, however, (May 1929) Charles Prentice could only give tentative approval to the manuscript until he had reviewed it with the firm. Aldington mailed in the last chapters of part 3 on May 11. Prentice had read most of it by May 13 and thought it “a glorious book,” but because of the language in several passages, said he would have to consult members of Chatto & Windus before giving approval.

On May 15, Prentice wrote to Aldington accepting an arrangement with Covici-Friede, provided he could make “reasonable alterations” to the text. He agreed to a £100 advance for Aldington against an account of 15 percent royalties on all copies sold. The approximately 140,000-word novel would necessitate a large format, thought Prentice, and probably a selling price of 8s. 6d., one shilling more than the standard cost for a novel. The eventual printing by Chatto & Windus would run to 440 pages. Prentice made no mention of buying printed sheets from Covici-Friede, a common practice between transatlantic firms publishing a book simultaneously, undoubtedly because of Prentice's expressed concerns about the text, which he would edit and typeset independently of the American publisher. He would send Aldington a list of “purple words and passages” under separate cover. He hoped the list wouldn't cause Aldington to “blow up,” but as he explained, no publisher could issue the text as it was.

Death of a Hero, argued Prentice, could be attacked on two grounds: “the stiffness of some of the expressions and the passages in advocacy of free love, etc.” He thought the latter was “perhaps the more important from the point of view of a magistrate and a British jury,” but both aspects needed to be considered together. Thus Prentice set out clearly the twin dangers for British and American war novelists: four-letter vocabulary and sexual explicitness. Without alteration, the combined and cumulative effect of these two elements in Aldington's text, Prentice added, “would lead to prosecution.” Prentice concluded his letter by proclaiming the novel “a splendid piece of writing,” in its vigor and honesty “something quite new.”

In carefully detailing his need to alter Aldington's text and in his respect for his author's sensitivity and integrity, Charles Prentice showed in this letter of May 15 why he was such a respected and beloved publisher, and why his professional association with Aldington grew into a lasting friendship. Aldington, who could be caustically critical of his friends, causing some to break with him permanently, always wrote admiringly of Prentice and celebrated his long friendship with him in Pinorman (1954), a personal tribute to their frequent foursome with Pino Orioli and novelist Norman Douglas. Although Prentice seems never to have mentioned his own war experience in his letters, he had served longer than Aldington and knew firsthand the horrors of the trench warfare that Aldington wrote about in part 3 of Death of a Hero.¹¹ That experience may have made him especially receptive to Aldington's novel and sympathetic to Aldington's sometimes prickly responses to editorial decisions, but it did not change his editor's view of obscenity.

The subsequent correspondence between Aldington and Prentice bristled back and forth across the channel, often in daily exchanges, given the remarkable speed of the post. From May 15 to July 2 they struggled to purify the text to their mutual satisfaction. When Aldington received Prentice's list of “purple passages,” he was at first amused and resigned, then amazed to learn that “advocacy of free love is contrary to British law.” How, then, he asked rhetorically in his letter of May 16, could anyone write a modern love story? He must have known from the example of his friend Lawrence how hard it was. His own novel, in its sexual frankness and advocacy, certainly showed an indebtedness to Lady Chatterley's Lover, published in the previous year. In the same letter, Aldington continued to suggest the use of asterisks for the offending passages and an author's note calling attention to the excisions. “Djuna Barnes did that with her last book,” he wrote, “and while avoiding prosecution, got a good deal of sympathetic publicity.”

Djuna Barnes's Ryder, her boldly experimental, self-illustrated novel of 1928, had been published by Horace Liveright in New York. Donald Friede, who was working for Liveright at the time, probably would have pointed out to Aldington the Barnes-Liveright exercise in asterisks and outrage, since he had helped Barnes expurgate the text. The one-page foreword by Barnes was more polemical than Aldington's note would be, and makes an interesting contrast with his as a prototype. She notes bluntly that censorship “has a vogue in America as indiscriminate as all such enforcements must be,” and therefore her text has been expurgated (xi). The asterisks, damaging the beauty of the text, show clearly what has been destroyed. Prior to her use of asterisks, she writes, readers had read altered literature that was no longer literature without knowing it, so discreetly bound in linens was the murdered text. “In the case of Ryder,” she concludes, “they [the readers] are permitted to see the havoc of this necessity, and what its effects are on the work of imagination.”

There were, in application, only nine passages asterisked in Ryder, far fewer than there would be in Death of a Hero, and not as intrusive or as damaging as Barnes thought. Several of the repressed words obviously were of urination or excretion, comically used in Barnes's suggestively bawdy text, and other passages indicated that the hands of various characters were touching their genitals.¹² Barnes's readers would have had no trouble in decoding the asterisks.

Having cited the example of Barnes's prefatory protest, Aldington continued his May 16 letter to Prentice by listing four advantages of the asterisk plan. Namely, it

(1) enables you [Prentice] to omit exactly what you think fit without further bother of correspondence, (2) serves my “integrity” as a writer, (3) draws attention to the inhibited state of the public mind in England, and (4) gets us the sympathy of those who believe in freedom while leaving its enemies impotent to harm us.

They couldn't be prosecuted for asterisks, Aldington concluded. Although he proposed carte blanche for Prentice as censor, Prentice did not take it. In the actual process, he wisely consulted Aldington on each proposed deletion, and Aldington vigorously protested some of them.

In his next letter (May 17), Aldington sent in a draft of his author's note. On return suggestions from Prentice, he sent in a revision on May 26, changing the original phrase about words and phrases that “are at present illegal in England” to “are at present taboo in England.” Author and publisher were being careful to avoid any legal entanglements over language, even in such a mild caveat.

A week and a half later, Aldington expressed his gratitude to Prentice for his surgery on the longer passages, where the “wicked feelings” in him, more than his dirty words, were ventilated. But he felt cramped in style when he worried about taboos. “I do not want to turn out Lady Chatterleys or Ulysses and certainly not Works in Progress,” he wrote in this June 5 letter, “but on the other hand I don't want to seem dull and proper to the bright young lip-stick wielder of eighteen.” The unlikely idea of Aldington's bitterly satirical war novel appealing to a teenage flapper must have amused Prentice.

By June 9, Aldington had signed and returned the Chatto & Windus contract, reporting that Friede had written from America with the news that Mark Van Doren was reading an advance copy hurriedly set up for consideration by the Literary Guild. “Americans change their minds swiftly,” he wrote four days later to Prentice, “and act with extraordinary energy and rapidity.” Unfortunately, the Literary Guild, rapid or not, would reject the novel in July. Nor would the English Book Club, under its “guiding star” Hugh Walpole, be more accepting. Aldington thought that his past as a reviewer was catching up with him: he had “injudiciously said what [he] believed to be the truth” about several members of the Literary Guild, as well as about Walpole.

In the meantime, Prentice wrote on June 21 that he and the firm were having problems with the extensive asterisks. He suggested substituting censor-proof words or phrases in place of the offending passages. A slightly asterisked text, he thought, would give the book a better chance; too many “secrets” were unsatisfying to a reader, would “invite the full limelight of publicity,” and stir up the busybodies. Some of the asterisked passages looked silly to him, and he recommended pruning some of the damns and bloodys, which he thought lost strength through overuse.

Aldington's return letter of June 28, as forceful as any he wrote to Prentice, began by detailing the relatively minor cuts Friede had made and ended by arguing against Prentice's bowdlerization. Friede had asterisked with economy, Aldington wrote. Balls had been expunged, but the noun bugger was kept (he thought it a term of friendship in the United States, as it was in England); the little proverb “look after your penis” was omitted, as were a few lines about Maisie's knees, but everything else had been spared, especially the erotic scenes with Priscilla and with Fanny. There were no cuts in the war part (part 3), and only about 15 lines in all. Actually the Covici-Friede text as published would have a few more asterisks than Aldington counted, but his point was valid. Covici-Friede spared more of Death of a Hero than would Chatto & Windus, contradicting the accepted wisdom that American publishers were always more censorious than the English ones, and contrary to the history of All Quiet on the Western Front.

Aldington held out for the original asterisk plan even if it made the book look awkward or silly. “I want to invite the full limelight of publicity,” he wrote. If what was left invited prosecution, they could go to court, he added sarcastically, and agree to make whatever cuts “the learned policeman” required. He was convinced that in spite of their vaunted English freedom of the press, they had less of it than France, Germany, Scandinavia, or even the United States.

Charles Prentice grudgingly agreed to the asterisk plan in his letter of July 2. He was glad that Friede had not asterisked very much, and as for Chatto & Windus, he thought there would be only a few more passages to clean up once they saw the proofs of the whole book. “This executioner's job is not at all to our liking,” he added. And with that exchange, the job was largely over. Aldington would protest once more about prepublishing censorship, and Prentice would regret having to cut a passage or two, but their joint task ended amicably, with Prentice praising Aldington for his “unwearied patience.”

The remaining voluminous, almost daily correspondence between Aldington and Prentice traces the book through proofs, arrangements with famed illustrator and war artist Paul Nash for a jacket design (Aldington wanted it to be “hard, abstract, and bitter” but it would be toned down at Prentice's request), reviews, and sales. The first reviews were largely favorable and subscription sales were strong. The book was well launched, but the Chatto & Windus edition was so scarred with asterisks that Aldington hoped eventually for an uncensored version.

He almost had his wish within months of publication. Jack Kahane, founder of the expatriate Obelisk Press in Paris, proposed an unexpurgated edition in early 1930. Aldington was enthusiastic but Prentice was not. Warning of the possible damage to the regular sales of Death of a Hero, Prentice in his January 16 letter to Aldington opposed the publication and recommended, at the very least, a sizable delay and a restriction to a limited edition. He wanted, he wrote, to protect the “real bread winner.” Aldington agreed to the delay and the limitation, and Kahane's two-volume unexpurgated edition of 300 numbered copies was published in September 1930, one year after the Chatto & Windus publication (Kershaw 12-13).

Not until 1965, however, when World Distributors in London published a Consul edition from the original typescript, would Aldington's uncut text of the novel be readily available. Alister Kershaw, Aldington's literary executor and bibliographer, assisted in the production. The Consul edition thus provides the important benchmark text against which to examine the differing degrees of censorship in the English and American editions.

The Chatto & Windus edition has 30 asterisked places in the text, while the Covici-Friede edition has only nine. Sometimes the asterisks indicate the omission of a single word, but more often a phrase, sentence, or even an entire paragraph. In all but those nine places, the Covici-Friede edition supplies the language suppressed in the Chatto & Windus edition. For example, a word like copulate is represented by eight spaced asterisks in the Chatto & Windus edition, but allowed to stand in the Covici-Friede edition. Words like balls or cunt are rendered by the appropriate number of spaced asterisks in both editions but printed in full in the Consul edition. When longer passages are cut in the Chatto & Windus edition, only a single line or two of asterisks indicates the omission, thus disguising the extent of the expurgation. It seems as if Charles Prentice in practice won the argument with Aldington by burying the more severely mutilated passages in only a line or two of asterisks.

The 30-page prologue carries four briefly asterisked passages in the Chatto & Windus edition and none in the Covici-Friede. In the prologue, the unnamed and often omniscient narrator recounts the negligible effect of George Winterbourne's death on his parents—the dim, fumbling father and the girlish, sex-obsessed mother with her 22 lovers. Both parents are “grotesques” (CW 16), explains the narrator. More to the point, the narrator shows the cold indifference to George's death on the part of the two women in his life: his wife Elizabeth and his mistress Fanny. The prologue concludes with the narrator's account of his meeting George at officers' training camp, their growing friendship during service, and his bitterness at George's death in battle. Hinting that George's death by enemy fire might be considered a suicide, the narrator, a thinly disguised Aldington, declares his own “blood-guiltiness” (CW 32), a poison within him as a survivor that needs the atonement of his written account.

The prologue thus effectively establishes the characters and events in the present that will be explained through flashbacks in parts 1 and 2. Only a few words, and these surprisingly mild, are censored in the Chatto & Windus edition but kept intact in the Covici-Friede edition: buggers (CW 7, CF 6), John Blunt (CW 13, CF 12), copulate (CW 13, CF 12), and the punning phrase “he rose … powerfully to the situation” (CW 14, CF 12),¹³ a description of the erection of Mrs. Winterbourne's lover Sam. Untouched by Charles Prentice are Aldington's occasional uses of sodomy (CW 19, 26), which Aldington's narrator argues is fashionable in the conversation of the sexually liberated young. Prentice apparently was convinced, and let the word go.

Part 1 of Death of a Hero savagely depicts in 80 pages the social and sexual hypocrisies of the Victorian and Edwardian world that produced George's parents and led to George's own painful childhood and adolescence. Nine passages are asterisked in the Chatto & Windus edition and four in the Covici-Friede edition. The most heavily censored passages are those relating the lyrical sexual awakening of young George, and even they are largely preserved by Covici-Friede. A few single words are asterisked or cut by Prentice but kept by Friede: pod and pupping (CW 40, CF 37), seemingly inoffensive euphemisms for pregnancy and childbirth; defloweration (CW 48, CF 45); and humbuggered (CW 60, CF 56). Fucking (CW 45, CF 42, WD 48) is cut in both editions. The bawdy little proverb about the penis Aldington had mentioned in his letter of June 28 to Prentice, “look after your cock, and your life will look after itself” (CW 68, CF 64, WD 67) is sadly missing from both editions. The longer censored passages are more interesting and sometimes erotic, and distinguish the Lawrentian character of Aldington's novel from the other three war novels.

The first such passage in part 1 is a 101-word section in which the narrator details the appalling sexual ignorance of George's father on his wedding night. Marked deceptively by only one line of asterisks in Chatto & Windus (46) but by a more fully asterisked passage in Covici-Friede (43), the unexpurgated text in the Consul edition reads like a sex manual (48). Aldington's narrator furiously argues for knowledgeable adult sexuality by indicting father Winterbourne for not knowing about a woman's body, her hymen, orgasms, periods, and possible pain from intercourse, or how to postpone conception. Hardly the stuff of a war novel. An editor might want to cut the passage because of its cumbersome length and inappropriateness to the narrative, but it is interesting that even Donald Friede had to cut a little over half of it to protect against the Watch and Ward.

Another passage of 47 words, indicated in Chatto & Windus by a single line of asterisks (94), has the narrator explaining the chaste passion of adolescent George and Priscilla. Friede had no problem with the passage and left it uncut (87). More erotic, and apparently more objectionable to the English censors, is the section describing the kisses and caresses of George and Priscilla when George fondles her “childish-swelling breasts” (CW 95). The 44-word section is severely altered by Prentice, but kept intact by Friede (88).

The last long passage censored in part 1, fully by Prentice and partially by Friede, describes the “Maisie's knees” episode mentioned in Aldington's June 28 letter. The increasingly passionate foreplay of George and Maisie, a more experienced, older, and sexually aggressive girlfriend than Priscilla, leads to French kissing. Then George lays his leg over hers, and she “opened her knees and gave a sort of little moan.” George naively and comically wonders why she spreads her legs, and why, when she asks him suggestively for “something else” and he knows only to give her more kisses, she gets up in frustration and goes home. Prentice cut 90 words from the passage (105), indicating the omissions by a single line of asterisks, but Friede found it necessary to cut only 28 words (97). The Consul edition shows what is lost (98). Later, on the same page in the Chatto & Windus edition, Prentice cut 50 words in which the flustered George puzzles over what it was that Maisie wanted. Friede retained this passage.

Considering the passages in part 1 that are asterisked heavily by Charles Prentice and uncut or lightly marked by Friede—the one about George's father, two about George and Priscilla, and one about bold Maisie—it is clear how much more repressive the English edition is than the American edition.

The 144-page part 2, the least successful section of the novel according to several reviewers, traces George Winterbourne's development from the puzzled sexuality and muddled aspirations of adolescence to his maturity as an artist, lover, husband, cuckold, and enlisted soldier in the war. The nine asterisked passages in the Chatto & Windus edition contrast with the three passages cut in the Covici-Friede edition.

A few forbidden words are cut in both editions—balls (CW 128, 388; CF 119, 351; WD 118, 332), cold-bollocked, screwing (CW 138, CF 127, WD 126), and cunt (CW 267, CF 243, WD 235) for examples—but most of the cuts in the Chatto & Windus edition are passages that would affect only English sensibilities and were made by Prentice probably to avoid libel. Thus Prentice asterisked Aldington's satirical description of Mr. Upjohn's paintings, Christ in a Bloomsbury Brothel and The Blessed Damozel in Hell (purchased by a man who made a fortune in “intimate rubber goods”), and the official who censored them, one “ever tender for the Purity of Public Morals and the posthumous reputation of our Lord” (CW 121, CF 131). Presumably Aldington's targets here—Augustus John, the painter, and an unidentifiable but no doubt particular “Jix” of 1929—would not have been amused by the passage, but it meant nothing to the American watchdogs and was preserved by Friede. So too Prentice saw the need to avoid prosecution by asterisking George's rumination on time and evolution, which includes the remarkable passage: “Prehistoric beasts, like the ichthyosaurus and Queen Victoria, have laired and copulated and brought forth …” (CW 128, CF 119).

The longest passage cut by Prentice but kept by Friede is Aldington's 280-word diatribe attacking a “virtuous British journalist” who proscribes writing about the erotic life as “morbid and disgusting,” and among other bits of advice, recommends “frequent applications of cold water to the genitals” (CW 172, CF 158). Aldington's anonymous and lecturing narrator, after his journalist-bashing passage, concludes unsmilingly that “without sexual intercourse, frequent and pleasant, adult life is maimed and tedious.” Charles Prentice cut it all, indicating the loss with only two lines of asterisks. There are three other brief passages that Prentice saw fit to asterisk but Friede left whole: an 11-word sentence about the unreliability of prewar “engines” (condoms) (CW 191, CF 175), a five-word phrase in which Fanny and Elizabeth decide to swap “riders” (share the sexual charms of George) (CW 213, CF 195), and an 18-word passage in which George enjoys the exquisite pleasure of Fanny's tongue on his lips (CW 231, CF 211). Certainly in all these examples Prentice is a less tolerant editor than Friede, and it would seem that either Chatto & Windus had reason to fear an actual British journalist or that some members of the firm were more prudish than their American copublishers.

The only passage of any length in part 2 that both Chatto & Windus and Covici-Friede asterisked is part of a 1[frac12]-page rhapsodic digression by George Winterbourne on “sacred Aphrodite” or “the imperious reproductive instinct,” also known as “She, the Cyprian.” Prentice asterisked a 48-word section including a description of the sex goddess's ability to swell “the loins of men with an intolerable burden of seed,” to make ready “the thirsty womb,” and to guide “the slim eager plough-share into the soft open welcoming furrow” (CW 148, CF 136, WD 135). Only the last passage with its trite and blatant metaphor seemed steamy enough for Friede to suppress, but one wonders why the entire 1[frac12] pages of such hard-breathing rhetoric wasn't cropped by both editors as ridiculous rather than obscene. It strains credulity that Elizabeth finds George “delightful” after he has unburdened himself of this wisdom.

Part 3 of Death of a Hero, the frequently admired, 175-page war section, is as good in its way as All Quiet on the Western Front and Her Privates We. Gone in part 3 are the Lawrentian affectations, the bitter digressions, the labored satire. The focus is on the descent into disillusionment, exhaustion, and death of a good man, if not a hero. At the end of the novel, George Winterbourne, driven frantic by the accumulated horrors of war and the sexual betrayals at home, leaps to his feet during a machine-gun barrage and is cut to pieces by the “savage steel whip” of German bullets. Charles Prentice thought the end of the novel “almost unendurable” when he read it in manuscript (May 15, 1929), a response echoed by later readers. A. B. Parsons, for example, reviewing Death of a Hero for the Nation, thought “the book would be more effective if we had only its last part, for that takes its place among the half dozen superb stories of the war …” (556).

Part 3 presented few problems of censorship for Prentice or Friede. As with the other war novels, most of the suppressed language is obscene trench talk.¹⁴ The only sexual passage in part 3 is similar to those in the other war novels. A squad of men lines up to have sex with a single French prostitute. The sergeant barks out orders as in close-order drill, the madame gives each soldier a “short arms inspection” and some antiseptic “Condy's Fluid,” and the prostitute hurries the soldiers about their business, saying “Urry, daypaychez” (CW 340, CF 307). Grotesque and comic the passage is, but it hardly seems censorable. Nevertheless, the 88-word passage was completely cut by Prentice but retained by Friede.

After all his careful editing, Charles Prentice must have felt confident that Death of a Hero was beyond reproach. Published on September 29, the novel did well in reviews and sales. Prentice reported almost daily to a jubilant Aldington the copies sold and the need for additional impressions: 2,727 sold by September 25 (through subscription) and a second impression ordered; 4,000 sold by October 5; 6,006 sold by October 25; 7,157 sold by November 7 and a third impression ordered; 9,000 sold by December 4; and the 10,000 mark exceeded by January 20, with 10,500 copies sold. By then the novel was being translated into Swedish, German, Danish, and French.

Lulled by the success of Death of a Hero and engaged in assembling Aldington's next book, a collection of 13 war stories with another ironic title, Roads to Glory, neither Aldington nor Prentice was expecting the threat of a libel suit when it came.

As Aldington wrote to Prentice on January 23, 1930, he had received a letter dated January 16 from the solicitor Holt Beever on behalf of Dame Gwynne-Vaughan, representing the Old Comrades Association of the WAACs (Women's Army Auxiliary Corps). The Old Comrades, spearheaded by Dame Gwynne-Vaughan, had launched what Aldington called “a barrage of counter-attack” on a passage about pregnant WAACs in Death of a Hero and were threatening to sue for libel. He thought it a mere pretext to discredit the novel, but suggested that Prentice handle the matter or hire a solicitor. “I know I saw pregnant WAACs at the base,” Aldington wrote, but he doubted that it could be proved or disproved by official evidence. The passage objectionable to Dame Gwynne-Vaughan records the thoughts of George Winterbourne:

There were numbers of Waacs at the Base, and he noticed that many of them were pregnant. Apparently there was no attempt at concealment; but then the birth-rate was declining rapidly in England, and babies were urgently needed for the Next War.

(CW 420)

Receiving Holt Beever's letter from Aldington, Prentice employed the solicitor Walker Martineau to represent Chatto & Windus and Aldington. The entire skirmish, amidst the shots and shells of exchanged letters, lasted from January 23 to March 14, when Aldington waved the white flag and issued an apology for any misrepresentations about the WAACs. Aldington stood firm about seeing pregnant WAACs but admitted that they might have been married women. His implication that officials sanctioned sexual relations between unmarried WAACs and soldiers was false. As he wrote to Prentice on February 5, he had “no intention of reflecting on the conduct of Waacs.” He and Prentice agreed to insert an “errata sheet” in the next volumes and to correct the text in any future editions so that Waacs would become generalized as women, many become some, and the birth-rate and babies-needed passage deleted. The Old Comrades were triumphant.

The letters reflect the diplomatic skills of Charles Prentice as he quietly worked behind the scenes with Martineau and Beever to assuage the concerns of Dame Gwynne-Vaughan and to protect the firm from a libel suit while agreeing with an increasingly irate and hot-headed Aldington that he was probably right about what he saw and that the episode was overblown. But he argued that they had better work out a “soft answer” so that the “Old Waacs” wouldn't “get stung into litigation” (February 6). He thought Aldington's letter of apology was admirable, that it would satisfy the WAACs, and that the “dear old Dame” would be busy if she looked up all the war books for references to the WAACs (February 24). Aldington in his letters had become increasingly caustic about “the Lady Champion of the Pregnant” (February 13) and wrote at one point that “I won't apologize to the old bitch. Why should I? I never said she was pregnant. God forbid!” (February 18).

As negotiations dragged on into March, he wrote to Prentice in language that should have been asterisked: “Would you mind telling them from me in more or less Parliamentary language that Dame Shit-Vaughan can go and fuck herself with a cast-iron prick?” (March 4). He hoped Prentice could send something soothing, however, because “you know what an uncontrollable neurotic I am.” Even the patient Prentice wearied of the constant negotiations between solicitors and agreed with Aldington that “it would be pleasant to be shut of these bores” (March 5). Neither Prentice nor Aldington, in their differing degrees of condescension, seemed to have recognized that Dame Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was one of England's most distinguished scientists. Since the war, she had served on a number of important Board of Trade committees and royal commissions.¹⁵ She was not to be trifled with.

So with conciliatory gallantries in public and some censorable language in private, Prentice and Aldington obtained a cease-fire, and the threat of libel was dropped. Death of a Hero, censored before publication, thus became censored after publication as well.

In the prepublication editorial process, Charles Prentice may have been more cautious than he needed to be, or the English guardians of public morality may indeed have been fiercer than their American colleagues, but the result is an English edition that is more heavily censored than the American edition. Donald Friede took more risks than Prentice and preserved more of the original text. His willingness to test the court's authority may have stemmed directly from his triumphant vindication with The Well of Loneliness two months earlier. Whatever the reasons for the marked differences between the two editions, the Chatto & Windus publication is a badly damaged and compromised text. Djuna Barnes was right about textual mutilation. The wonder is that Aldington did not protest more.

Notes

1. Of the war novels listed in Cyril Falls's extensive critical bibliography, I count 22 published in 1929. Between 1919 and 1928, no more than eight or nine are listed by Falls for each year. After the banner year of 1929, the rate of war novels declined. Only 15 are listed for 1930, and the decline continues each year after that.

2. For a discussion of Lord Campbell's act and its extensions, see St. John-Stevas 66-74 and Craig 41-44. For Lawrence's Rainbow, see St. John-Stevas 93-95 and Craig 76. For a discussion of American law and vice societies, see Boyer 1-10. For Dreiser's Genius, see Boyer 37-38 and de Grazie 114-27.

3. See Lawrence's letter to Morris Ernst, November 10, 1928 (Letters 6: 613).

4. For a fuller account of Joyce's Ulysses, see Ellmann 506 ff. For Lawrence's Lady Chatterley, see Meyers 356-62, Roberts 101-02, and Britton 260-72. For accounts of the customs seizures, see Craig 156 and St. John-Stevas 104.

5. For details on Pansies, see St. John-Stevas 105, de Grazie 86-88, and Roberts 120-25.

6. For accounts of this editorial process, see Reynolds 67-75 and Donaldson. For the exchange of letters, see Hemingway and Perkins 91, 101-04.

7. For a glossary of wartime euphemisms, or what he calls “high” diction, see Fussell 21-22.

8. For these transformations from Putnam's edition (P) to Little, Brown's edition (LB), see shit (P 25, LB 17), fart (P 49, LB 39), piss-a-bed (P 55, LB 45), cow shit (P 88, LB 77), turd (P 156, omitted LB 141), fart on a pole (P 196, LB 179), and masturbate (P 212, omitted LB 195).

9. For the latrine scene, see P 13-17, omitted LB 9. For the hospital scene, see P 288-92, omitted LB 267.

10. This and all subsequent correspondence between Aldington and Prentice can be found in the Chatto & Windus archives at the University of Reading. I wish to express my thanks to Michael Bott of the University of Reading's archives, to Chatto & Windus, and to Catherine Aldington for the use of this unpublished correspondence.

11. In the absence of a biography of Charles Prentice, I have gleaned information about his war experience from the correspondence between Percy Spalding, senior partner of Chatto & Windus at the time, and A. R. Prentice, Charles's father, in the publisher's archives at the University of Reading.

12. For the asterisked passages, see Ryder 71, 79, 95-96, 99, 120, 145, 245, and 261.

13. Here and in all subsequent citations, the Chatto & Windus edition is abbreviated as CW, the Covici-Frieda edition as CF, and the unexpurgated World Distributors Consul edition as WD.

14. Prentice cut three buggers (CW 313, 336, 376; CF 283, 304, 340) one cunt (CW 267, CF 243), one balls (CW 388, CF 351); one John Bull (CW 293, retained in CF 266), and the analogy of an awkward, knee-bending recruit to a “bloody great” prostitute who is being “blocked” (CW 274, CF 249).

15. Dame Helen Charlotte Isabella Gwynne-Vaughan is listed in Who's Who (1280) as having received a DSc from the University of London, as being a professor of botany at the University of London, and as having been head of the department of botany at Birkbeck College. She was the author of numerous papers on fungi and a recognized specialist in mycology and cytology. She had been awarded the Linnean Society Medal in 1920 for her work on protoplasm. During the war, she had been Chief Controller, Queen Mary's Army Auxiliary Corps, and then Commandant, Women's Royal Air Force. She was awarded a C.B.E. (Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1918 and a D.B.E. (Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1919.

Works Cited

Aldington, Richard. Death of a Hero. London: Chatto & Windus, 1929.

———. Death of a Hero. New York: Covici-Friede, 1929.

———. Death of a Hero. Consul ed. London: World Distributors, 1965.

———. Death of a Hero. Offset from the Consul 1965 ed. London: Hogarth, 1984.

———. Letters to Charles Prentice. March 30, 1929 to March 14, 1930. Chatto & Windus Archive. University of Reading, England.

———. Life for Life's Sake. New York: Viking, 1941.

———. Pinorman. London: Heinemann, 1954.

Barnes, Djuna. Ryder. New York: Liveright, 1928.

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Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

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Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. A. W. Wheen. Boston: Little, 1929.

———. All Quiet on the Western Front. Trans. A. W. Wheen. London: Putnam's, 1929.

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