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
Copyright, 1952 by BOAR’S HEAD BOOKS
PREFACE
by
Maxwell Bodenheim
In 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.”