SOURCE: “What Is Dirt?” in The Bookman, November, 1929, pp. 258-62.

In the following essay, Herrick raises questions about the propriety of certain frank sexual references in A Farewell to Arms, comparing them unfavorably with similarly explicit passages in Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

The censor, whatever he may think of himself, is always a ridiculous figure to the impartial observer. Latterly the censoring spirit has been especially active around Boston, that ancient home of witch hangers, offering comic relief to the gods. That a community which could perpetrate the Sacco-Vanzetti outrage on justice should try to suppress Candide and Strange Interlude is but another instance of the marvellous perversion of our mentality when it becomes tangled in the thickets of public morality. A civilization which laps up jazz, even in Boston, goes delirious over smacking contacts in the “close-ups” of movies, and indulges in...