Anyone have a good explanation for Hemingway censoring the profanity in For Whom The Bell Tolls?
Wikipedia has a section about language in the book but it doesn’t really explain it too well.
Perhaps it was purely done to ensure the book got published to the wider market? James Bond novels are conspicuously devoid of swearing, in that it’s censored out rather than just absent; you’ll see things like “Why don’t you go and get ----?” “Now, Mr. Bond, there’s no need for that kind of language! Perhaps Snips will have to remove one of your fingers to teach you some manners. Or perhaps another, more valued extremity, hmm?”
These were books published in the 1950s and 1960s, FTR.
And in 1948 (8 years after “For Whom the Bell Tolls”), Norman Mailer’s first book, “The Naked and the Dead”, used the word “fug” throughout. Supposedly, shortly after the book’s publication, Mailer was introduced to a socialite who said, “Oh yes, you’re the young man who doesn’t know how to spell ‘fuck’”.
I could do some looking, but IIRC, Hemingway was also criticized for the paragraph at the beginning of chapter 36 or so (??) where a sex scene is described. It’s the literary equivalent of the shower scene in Psycho - you don’t *really *see anything, but you can swear you did and either way, it certainly has the emotional impact as if you did see it (i.e., the sex scene is very well written and erotic)…
Anyway, the Pulitzer committee, in one of the few times they have done so, elected NOT to award a prize that year - the general “understanding” was the For Whom actually won, but they wouldn’t award the prize to such scandalous book…
I didn’t read the Wiki entry - okay, just scanned it and see that there is a reference to the Pulitzer issue…