I'd love to take credit for making the book filthier, but in
this case we didn't. We simply reversed some of the
bowdlerization Gold Medal imposed on it. You see, before the
book was published by Gold Medal under Prather's real name it
was published by Lion -- a house willing to take a few more
chances in terms of skirting the edges of what the TV
industry calls 'standards and practices' -- under the fake
name "Douglas Ring."
We went back to the original text, as published by Lion,
rather than the (very slightly) cleaned-up version Gold Medal
published several years later.
As often as possible we do go back to original manuscripts
or, where an author is still living, give the author the
opportunity to revise his work. Sometimes (as, for instance,
in the case of David Dodge), the author isn't alive but we
have the advice of someone who knew the author very well (in
that case, Dodge's daughter Kendal, who went with him on all
those trips up the Amazon in rickety steamships and so
forth). In each case, we try to bring the book into
conformity with what we know or have good reason to think the
author would have wanted.
As a general rule, though, this amounts to a change of at
most a dozen words in the course of a book, and often not
even that much. And the most common changes are just
correcting obvious typos.
There are some real dilemmas, though, such as what I think of
as the Case of Axelrod's Fuck. George Axelrod was, by all
accounts, a fellow with a bawdy sense of humor and a healthy
appreciation of sex; this certainly comes through in his
work. He's the man who put Marilyn Monroe over that subway
grating in "The Seven Year Itch," after all, and he was on
the record as being pissed off that Hollywood wouldn't allow
him to have the male lead bed Marilyn's character in the film
the way he did in the original Broadway play. But in his
novel BLACKMAILER (which, incidentally, is a sequel of sorts
to "The Seven Year Itch" -- it stars the same male lead) he
uses an almost Victorian gimmick to avoid writing the word
"fuck" -- he spells it out in a line of dialogue as
"f___."
So, what to do? We could certainly replace "f___" with "fuck"
today -
- and I have zero doubt that Axelrod would be offended by the
change if he were alive -- but we tried it that way and it
stood out as the most glaring sort of anachronism, like
digitally inserting Angelina Jolie into the background of a
scene in "Casablanca." We could have switched to "fug" or
"frig," but those options were presumably available to
Axelrod when he was writing and he chose not to use them --
and anyway, why replace one uncomfortably old-fashioned bit
of uptightness with another? So, in the end, we stuck with
"f___." It's the way he wrote it, and speculating that if
he'd had the opportunity he would have written something else
is pointless. Fun --
but pointless.
So, to answer your general question: We observe a publisher's
version of the Hippocratic Oath -- first, do no harm -- and
only when we're confident we're not damaging a work do we
make changes, and then only in accordance with the author's
wishes, as best we can determine them.
--Charles
--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, DJ-Anonyme@... wrote:
>
> A while ago, Duane mentioned that he wuld have
thought some of this
book
> too explicit for the '50s. Well, turns out it
was.
>
> A few of the images in this book struck me as
surprising for their
time,
> too. One was the use of the euphemism "frig." Sure,
Norman Mailer
had
> famously (infamously?) used "fug" just a few years
earlier, but
that was
> "serious literature," whereas Prather was published
by Gold Medal, a
> popular imprint, near the height of the debate over
the evils of
mass
> culture. I found it surprising that the publishers
would tempt
> reformers with a word so clearly meant to be "fuck."
Though I'd
never
> read it, I've long had a copy of the Gold Medal
printing of The
Peddler,
> so I pulled it out and checked.
>
> Hard Case version:
>
> The hell with it, it was that dumb talk with Angelo,
and the screwy
way
> Alterie had acted. Well, frig Alterie--and Angelo.
Frig them all.
>
> Gold Medal:
>
> The hell with it, it was that dumb talk with Angelo,
and the screwy
way
> Alterie had acted. Well, to hell with Alterie--and
Angelo. To hell
with
> them all.
>
> A later "frig" was also changed to "to hell
with."
>
> So I flipped back to an earlier phrase that had
struck me as filthy
(not
> that that's a bad thing, this is a great
image):
>
> In his mind grew an obscene image of a great fleshy
whore lying on a
> bed, her legs parted and a constant stream of
dollars spurting from
her:
> dollar bills, ten-dollar bills, hundred- and
thousand-dollar bills,
> filling the room, smothering her, flowing out of the
doors and
windows,
> a cascade, a flood, of money rushing day and night
from the woman's
> thighs.
>
> It's the "her legs parted and" that makes it so
filthy for me,
makes it
> very clear exactly where the money is spurting from
(the word spurt
has
> always gotten to me, too, as in Richard Hell's song,
"Love Comes in
> Spurts"). Those four words were not in the 1952
edition.
>
> I checked a few other passages, but those hadn't
been changed.
>
> Raises a question, though: Charles, are you going
back to the
original
> manuscripts of the classics you're reprinting, not
the previously
> published versions? Cool if you are. Are you finding
much was
changed
> in the original printings?
>
> Mark
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 14 Feb 2007 EST