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

Abstract

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.