The Censored Language of War: Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero and Three Other War Novels of 1929

Abstract

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limits of acceptable language in the Anglo-American literary communities patrolled by repressive vice societies citing outdated obscenity laws.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 Gomstock 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 postwar 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. …