Printableness

About 1926, the year the “Mauve Decade” was published, the printableness of this epithet constituted one of the sharpest battles in a war of taste between old-fashioned American reticence and a truculent frankness advocated, and practised, by the younger generation, then in defiant rebellion against a good many former standards of conventionality.

The Limit of Printableness / (Charleston News & Courier) / “Replying to [Kenneth] McKellar, Senator [Hiram] Bingham [III] said that many of the things the Tennessean had ‘implied and insinuated were unworthy to go into the Congressional Record.” Associated Press dispatch.

[Charles Webster] Leadbeater’s scandalous behavior in the case of his boy pupils; his trial and forced resignation from the Theosophical Society; Mrs. [Annie] Besant’s repudiation of him at first, and her later taking him back to her bosom because she couldn’t get along without his supposed clairvoyant faculties, these are shown up to the very limit of printableness.

But all this, serious thought it is, is hardly more than a film on the surface of “The Tartarus”; immediately below it, the sexuality of the symbolism is so visible and so insistent that one wonders at the printableness of the sketch in Harper’s in the sedate year 1855.