CUTIE
A Warm Mamma
By
BEN HECHT
and MAXWELL BODENHEIM
AUTHORS OF
“The Love Affairs of Lesbia Lefkovitz,
The Studio Siren”
NEW YORK
BOAR’S HEAD BOOKS
1952
[Pg 1]
Copyright, 1952
by
BOAR’S HEAD BOOKS
PREFACE
by
Maxwell Bodenheim
[Pg 7]
PREFACE
In 1924 “Cutie” appeared in different issues of the Chicago LiteraryTimes which Ben Hecht and I edited. We issued this paper in tabloidform, with streamers and scareheads; with poetry, prose and the otherarts treated in a breezy, jovial, unassuming or unpretentiously seriousway. If a creation was in our opinion exceedingly minor, we dismissedit quietly and avoided the poor joke of demolishing a small targetwith a broadside. We were never patronizing, dry, lofty, irascible orpontifical. Again, when creations were, quite frankly, meant to be onlycommercial or surfacely entertaining, we did not scoff at them forfailing to be esthetic. In other words, we violated all of the sacredrules of the United Professional Highbrow Critics Union.
“Cutie”, on which we collaborated and which appeared in theTimes, is a satire on[Pg 8] ultra-prudish hypocritical censors andassailers of sexual candor and incisiveness in literary and pictorialwork—both official and amateur apostles of so-called cleanlinessand righteousness, whose whitewash brushes directed against truthfulexposures bear not the slightest resemblance to soap-laden wash-clothswhich remove actual dirt from skin. After all, a fig leaf isludicrously transparent and directs attention to the object which itis supposed to hide. Again, when you examine the much-debated qualityof obscenity, it is—outside of vicious, abject crudeness—impossibleto establish obscenity, beyond narrow individual preference opposedby relatively tolerant slants. The worn, one-or-two syllable wordsdescribing 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 attemptto jab their branding-irons on art of any kind, they are not cow-boysbranding steers, but suppressive men fashioning would-be ugly effigiesof elusive and sensitively outspoken works of art, and placing meaninterpretations on the false figures. For[Pg 9] example, in the plot toremove my own novel, Replenishing Jessica, in the late twenties,the censor assigned filth and dirty lasciviousness to whimsicallyinoffensive lines such as: “Jessica reclined on the couch with Purrell,intimately but not perilously.”... “He tarried before the abode of hermorals, but he made only a slight impression on the locks guarding thedoorways.”... “As his fingers increased their bold explorations theysuddenly ran into an ic