As others have said, fascinating! There are references online to a Putnam edition in 1929 or 1930, but I'm not sure I believe them. Obviously if there were such an edition it would have been heavily bowdlerized.
It may well have gotten an American edition in 1930! It would just have been the expurgated one. What we would now call the author's preferred, original text had a limited private printing in 1929 under the title The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme & Ancre, 1916. When it was made available to the general public in 1930 as Her Privates We—in which form it was still praised by such lights of war and literature as T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway—it had indeed been cleaned up to the point that even having read a sample in the foreword of the current edition, I can't actually imagine how the bowdlerized version worked because the wall-to-wall profanity seems so much of the atmosphere and the point. This novel has more F-bombs by weight than anything I have read until the 1960's–70's. That home-fires parody is supposed to contain the first attestation in print of "fuck up" as a verb. The regimental sergeant major at one point tells a story about how he and Bourne met one another, which is that they were both in attendance at the same drunken fight between two best mates where one of them bayoneted the other in the ass, and it is extremely funny and wouldn't have anywhere near the same effect without the punctuation of the swear words. Or just at the point where the reader has started to tune out the wall-to-wall profanity, as might a new recruit plunged into this register of relentless language, something happens which makes the violence of the words meaningful and they stop sounding reflexive at all. I don't see any way to achieve those results without the real, uncensored terminology. I didn't expect it and I'm so glad it existed to be rediscovered.
And it reminds me of the story about Dorothy Parker (I think?) meeting Norman Mailer and commenting "Oh, it's the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck'!"
It sounds like Dorothy Parker! Or Tallulah Bankhead. Either way, that is funny.
Have you ever read Patricia Anthony's novel Flanders? It's a multi-faceted WWI/bildungsroman/fantasy (maybe, just a little)/queer (IIRC) novel by a woefully underappreciated writer.
I am not at all familiar with it! Looking it up, however, I can see that anyone who names their WWI protagonist "Stanhope" has done their research.
no subject
It may well have gotten an American edition in 1930! It would just have been the expurgated one. What we would now call the author's preferred, original text had a limited private printing in 1929 under the title The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme & Ancre, 1916. When it was made available to the general public in 1930 as Her Privates We—in which form it was still praised by such lights of war and literature as T. E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway—it had indeed been cleaned up to the point that even having read a sample in the foreword of the current edition, I can't actually imagine how the bowdlerized version worked because the wall-to-wall profanity seems so much of the atmosphere and the point. This novel has more F-bombs by weight than anything I have read until the 1960's–70's. That home-fires parody is supposed to contain the first attestation in print of "fuck up" as a verb. The regimental sergeant major at one point tells a story about how he and Bourne met one another, which is that they were both in attendance at the same drunken fight between two best mates where one of them bayoneted the other in the ass, and it is extremely funny and wouldn't have anywhere near the same effect without the punctuation of the swear words. Or just at the point where the reader has started to tune out the wall-to-wall profanity, as might a new recruit plunged into this register of relentless language, something happens which makes the violence of the words meaningful and they stop sounding reflexive at all. I don't see any way to achieve those results without the real, uncensored terminology. I didn't expect it and I'm so glad it existed to be rediscovered.
And it reminds me of the story about Dorothy Parker (I think?) meeting Norman Mailer and commenting "Oh, it's the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck'!"
It sounds like Dorothy Parker! Or Tallulah Bankhead. Either way, that is funny.
Have you ever read Patricia Anthony's novel Flanders? It's a multi-faceted WWI/bildungsroman/fantasy (maybe, just a little)/queer (IIRC) novel by a woefully underappreciated writer.
I am not at all familiar with it! Looking it up, however, I can see that anyone who names their WWI protagonist "Stanhope" has done their research.