N 1924 “Cutie” appeared in different issues of the Chicago Literary Times which Ben Hecht and I edited. We issued this paper in tabloid form, with streamers and scareheads; with poetry, prose and the other arts treated in a breezy, jovial, unassuming or unpretentiously serious way. If a creation was in our opinion exceedingly minor, we dismissed it quietly and avoided the poor joke of demolishing a small target with a broadside. We were never patronizing, dry, lofty, irascible or pontifical. Again, when creations were, quite frankly, meant to be only commercial or surfacely entertaining, we did not scoff at them for failing to be esthetic. In other words, we violated all of the sacred rules of the United Professional Highbrow Critics Union.
“Cutie”, on which we collaborated and which appeared in the Times, is a satire on ultra-prudish hypocritical censors and assailers of sexual candor and incisiveness in literary and pictorial work—both official and amateur apostles of so-called cleanliness and righteousness, whose whitewash brushes directed against truthful exposures bear not the slightest resemblance to soap-laden wash-cloths which remove actual dirt from skin. After all, a fig leaf is ludicrously transparent and directs attention to the object which it is supposed to hide. Again, when you examine the much-debated quality of obscenity, it is—outside of vicious, abject crudeness—impossible to establish obscenity, beyond narrow individual preference opposed by relatively tolerant slants. The worn, one-or-two syllable words describing sexual organs and practices can be tagged as obscene, though “gruesomely stale and unnecessary” would be a more exact appellation. But otherwise obscenity is a moot question, and when censors attempt to jab their branding-irons on art of any kind, they are not cow-boys branding steers, but suppressive men fashioning would-be ugly effigies of elusive and sensitively outspoken works of art, and placing mean interpretations on the false figures. For example, in the plot to remove my own novel, Replenishing Jessica, in the late twenties, the censor assigned filth and dirty lasciviousness to whimsically inoffensive lines such as: “Jessica reclined on the couch with Purrell, intimately but not perilously.”... “He tarried before the abode of her morals, but he made only a slight impression on the locks guarding the doorways.”... “As his fingers increased their bold explorations they suddenly ran into an ice floe and hastily withdrew.”
When playful, or sprightly, or oblique moues in words are pounced on by censors and labeled horribly lewd, then these censors must secretly be so afraid of the effect of sexual descriptions on their own glandular secretions that even the most moderate chuckle or eye-wink in print makes them shiver childishly.
“Cutie” is a barbed satire on this infinitesimal venom spurted at sexual verities. Herman Pupick, a prude with one glass eye and splintered pieces of glass in what passed for his heart, is forced to stagger in hilarious pursuits of Cutie herself, who represents an intelligent, involved, nicely belligerent pagan and hoyden, with a face so exquisitely symmetrical, so magically, enticingly, softly, elasticly gleaming, that a paralyzed octogenarian would have jumped out of his wheel-chair in a miracle restoring him to youth. In the uproarious contretemps between Cutie and Pupick, she is seduced to an adultery of which his sourly blotched, equally self-holy wife is unaware. To Pupick, every tiny dalliance and eye-wink represents a dire sin, magnified by a blithe lack of repentance on the part of the minute transgressors.
This book appeared in the Early Twenties. At present the best way to indicate the piercing impudence of a Cutie toward the perennial Fraud of Pupick would be as follows: “Look, Pupick, a person isn’t taking up for adultery just because he admits that it exists and describes the motivations and reasons which make it happen in some cases. That is an accusation as silly as calling some one a lush-hound because he sat in a party of drunks and sympathized with some of the things which they said and did, even though he was sipping ... er, ginger ale. You’re sour cream, Pupick, and your mug would make a rotten cantaloupe apologize to the grocer trying to palm it off on a customer for nine cents and a bus transfer. And as far as sexual details are concerned, rusty nuts and screws always have a yen against nuts and screws oily, polished and in perfect working order. You see, Pupick, a wolf who’s lost most of his claws and teeth ties on a pair of papier mache wings and claps a cardboard halo on his head and slowly and contentedly dies of starvation, but you, Pupick—you’re worse than the wolf. You insist that everybody should have all his teeth pulled out, because you’re a sanctimonious, buttery, pimply long-face. So take your frustrations to the nearest gin-mill (like you did when I pushed you into one on the North Side of Chicago) and pretend that you can chew just as well with your store bicuspids and molars as you did when you were still able to chew rawhide on a bet. Only wipe that cheesy smile off your puss when you try to pull the same camembert line in the next liquid-poison emporium.”
So long, folks, and be sure to read our strip tease of a censor-faker starting on the next page.