It's not just Chandler either. In Dashell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, someone says "Fuck you" but the narration puts it as The boy spoke two words, the first a short guttural verb, the second 'you.'
Profanity also seems almost nonexistent in works by Robert E Howard, Ross Macdonald, and other pulp writers. Are these examples outliers? If not, what is the deal with the lack of profanity in older, pulp works? If they're meant for adults and were considered slop by mainstream critics anyway, why hold back?
by insane677
8 Comments
This was pretty much the convention. There were still social regulations about what could and could not be published. The word ‘pregnant’ was a no-no for a long time too. We have a broad variety of euphemisms as a result.
But even beyond that, my guess is that quite a few people would take offence … Kinda like we have now, when readers – or non-readers – are demanding so many books are banned. Why pour fuel on the fire?
Obscenity laws were far more strict back then. Shipping obscene materials is still a federal offense, although we are far more lax on what constitutes obscene materials, but a publisher of pulp fiction back then wasn’t raking in the cash to begin with, so they aren’t going to risk federal charges by shipping copies of a book that says “Fuck you” to newsstands and drug stores.
I think they got censored or might not have been allowed to publish at all. You see it in Agatha Christie too.
The magazines these things were originally written for would reject stories with explicit profanity because the Post Office would not deliver the magazines to their subscribers with those words spelled out.
Different times. See e.g. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_Boston](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_in_Boston)
Printers wouldn’t print it. Publishers wouldn’t even try. When Norman Mailer published *The Naked and Dead,* his publisher replaced “fuck” with “fug.” There is an apocryphal anecdote that Tallulah Bankhead met him at a party and said, “so you’re the young man who can’t spell ‘fuck.’” Mailer said that he never met Bankhead and that her publicist probably invented the story.
Because they weren’t *that* lesser and lurid.
I think it’s because sometimes fiction was read by children too, not just adults. Rex Stout for example, has Archie mention that one grandmother wrote in that her grandkids love his stories. And so, when relaying a conversation with a murder suspect whose every second word was a cuss, he censored it, each time using a more ridiculous word!
Back then, also, a lot of adults didn’t cuss, it was thought of as vulgar, and harsh. Some people condemned it as a lack of creativity. Again, looking at Stout, “He said something that was physically impossible, and I told him so.”