I wish I could be of more help on censorship in those days. I
only have a memory of a documentary about film and the Hays
Act, and how alcohol stood in for the taboo topic of
sex.
A couple of things from fiction generally, though not
necessarily the pulps. You probably know that in Hemingway's
"For Whom the Bell Tolls," he resorted to using locutions
like "I obscenity in the milk of your obscenity." And Norman
Mailer, some years later, used "fug" in
"The Naked and the Dead." I was also re-reading Faulkner's
"Dry September," a great short story about a lynching. The
characters are dropping the N-bomb all over the place, of
course, but when it came to using "black son of a bitch," it
was shortened to "black son." Whether it was because of
publishing standards or self-censorship, I don't know.
But that's all more about language than actually leaving sex
out and dry martinis in. Henry Miller had trouble getting
published, as I recall, and much of his work appeared first
in France. But that's not the kind of writer Rara Avis
usually talks about. Maybe someone out there knows the rules
for publishing, and whether the pulp novels were able to duck
them in some way.
Lawrence
---------Included Message----------
>Date: 1-Oct-2007 14:51:00 -0400
>From: "jacquesdebierue" <
jacquesdebierue@yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: <
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com>
>To: <
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com>
>Subject: RARA-AVIS: Re: James M. Cain
>
>--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Lawrence Coates"
<coatesl@...> wrote:
>>
>> I've heard that all the drinking, at least in
the movie versions of
>The Thin Man, was a
>> substitute for the sex that would have been
censored out.
>>
>
>Lawrence, what do you know about censorship
(self-imposed, implicit or
>overtly enforced) in the pulps of the twenties and
thirties? That's
>something I've often wondered about. As some here
know, I have a sweet
>tooth for the cruder forms of the pulps (not just
crime pulps) and
>sometimes I wonder how those writers (Bellem, for
example, and not
>only in the spicy pulps) got away with publishing
certain things that
>more respectable American novelists couldn't say and
that American
>film-makers absolutely could not show or sometimes
even suggest.
>
>Best,
>
>mrt
>
>
>
---------End of Included Message----------
Lawrence Coates Associate Professor of Creative Writing
Bowling Green State University
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