The Unbanning of the Books

by HARRY LEVIN

WHEN I was a freshman at Harvard, a Cambridge bookseller was jailed for selling a copy of Joyce’s Ulysses to a customer who turned out to be an agent from the Watch and Ward Society of Massachusetts. Such measures, drastic as they may seem, were not enough to preserve the innocence of literate Americans. During a previous summer, like hundreds of others, I had bought my copy from the publisher Sylvia Beach at her little Paris bookshop on the Rue de l’Odéon. To pack it wrapped in laundry and smuggle it past the U.S. customs inspectors, thereby involving ourselves in what was called “booklogging,” gave us an easy thrill of complicity with the embattled author and his courageous champions. Four years afterward in 1933, the time of Repeal, the ban on Ulysses was lifted. The critical decision, which opened the way for an American edition the following year, was handed down by Judge John M. Woolsey of the U.S. District Court for Southern New York.

That incisive opinion acted as a great watershed, since it reversed the trend of earlier opinions and would be frequently cited in later ones. Specifically, books had been condemned on the basis of passages which sounded offensive when taken out of context and without concern for the author’s design. Moreover, the determining question had been, in the reverberating phraseology of the so-called Hicklin Rule, whether the reading of such books would tend to “deprave and corrupt” those into whose hands they were likely to fall, regardless of — or rather, with special regard for — their immaturity. Some of the world’s acknowledged classics could be adjudged obscene, and had been, by such procedures. The freedom to read had been abridged for educated adults because a mooted book might fall into the hands of children. Mr. Podsnap’s cautionary principle of Victorian morality had become a legal criterion: “Would it bring a blush into the cheek of a young person?”

Instead of the jeune fille as final arbiter of the book’s effect, Judge Woolsey proposed “what the French would call l’homme moyen sensuel.” The lawnow seems to recognize this concept of the normal adult reader, “a person with average sex instincts,” as the counterpart to its “reasonable man” in matters of practical judgment. As for the dishing up of salacious tidbits carefully chosen to nauseate the courtroom, it is now general practice to consider a work of literature as a whole. Taking the trouble to master Joyce’s demanding technique, Judge Woolsey found that Ulysses presented modern life in elaborate cross section. Its round of daily activities included the library and the concert hall as well as the bedroom and bathroom. Sexual and other bodily functions occupied no larger place than they might in ordinary lives.

The same extenuation could scarcely be urged for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which is overwhelmingly preoccupied with sex. That may help to explain why it remained unpublishable in the United States until 1959 and in Great Britain until 1961, a generation after Lawrence’s death. Nor could it be argued by his admirers that this intense last novel was his masterpiece, as Ulysses was Joyce’s. Obviously, D. H. Lawrence was less the dispassionate artist than James Joyce. But Lawrence was a passionate moralist, who preached his unorthodox message with evangelical fervor, and therein lay the strength that could be rallied to his support when Lady Chatterley’s Lover went on trial at the Old Bailey. The intervening years had seen drastic changes, if not in sexual habits or morals, then in the frankness and sincerity with which they could be publicly discussed. The voice in the wilderness, while losing none of its militant solemnity, had been amplified into a posthumous cause.

The very name of the case, Regina v. Penguin, suggesting as it does a chapter from Alice in Wonderland, aptly announced the procession of church dignitaries, lady dons, schoolmasters, librarians, editors, critics, and publicists who took the witness stand. Penguin soon was circulating 200,000 paperbacks at three shillings and sixpence apiece. In retrospect it seems particularly significant that, unlike other trials which have led to the unbanning of suppressed books, this one had been decided by a jury. The prosecution, trying to extend the obsolete Hicklin Rule, had asked the jurymen: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” And the defense had taken that point by reminding them that they lived in a democratic society, characterized by equal rights for women, the decline of the servant class, and the production of Penguin Books. The vindication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover spoke, like the novel itself, for the social as well as the sexual revolution.

REGINA v. PENGUIN BOOKS LIMITED was the test case under the new Obscene Publications Act of 1959. Thus it rounded off a cycle, the century of the Hicklin Rule, which in turn had been based on Lord Campbell’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857. By a coincidence which may be worth noting, that year likewise marked the interdiction of Madame Bovary, and it is certainly worth noting that Flaubert was acquitted. The idea of suppressing literature on suspicion of its demoralizing potentialities is at least as old as Plato. Through the course of history, however, censorship has mainly been exerted against religious heresy or political subversion. The censor as guardian of private morality is essentially a midVictorian figure. His period of dominance in AngloAmerican culture was unconscionably prolonged, with such untoward results as can be read in the lives and works of Hardy, George Moore, and Shaw, or of Whitman, Mark Twain, and Dreiser.

The brilliant writers of the early twentieth century grew up in an atmosphere of libertarian protest against what Lawrence called “the censor-morons” — whom we might recognize, under a courtlier phrase, as H. L. Mencken’s “virtuosi of virtue.” Joyce and Lawrence, each in his unique way, could realize their talents only through expatriation. Both Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover could have been first published only in France, where tradition has been especially tolerant to books printed in English and destined for illegal export. The judicial decisions that naturalized these two novels into the body of English literature, all too belatedly, had to square them with prevailing moral standards. Judge Woolsey concluded his decision, with an epigrammatic flourish, by stating that the effect of Ulysses, while somewhat emetic, was not aphrodisiac. Lady Chatterley’s Lover could not be so easily exonerated from the charge of undue eroticism; but, given its preoccupation, it is clearly a tract for reform.

The volume that comes next on our shelf of literary contraband, though it has also been legitimatized by the courts, takes us into more problematic areas of discussion. Tropic of Cancer has not the high dedication of the two books we smuggled in before it. Indeed, its utter laxity is a source of its appeal to a later generation which, perhaps, may feel more kinship with underground man than with the intransigent intellectual. Nor does the stature of Henry Miller begin to compare with that of Joyce or Lawrence; yet his critical reputation has profited from the confusions that have surrounded theirs. When compared with Joyce, as George Orwell pointed out in his farsighted essay “Inside the Whale,” Miller hardly seems an artist at all. As a would-be moralist he stands at the opposite pole from Lawrence, who would have been more outraged than anyone else by the loveless fornications of Tropic of Cancer.

Insofar as there are degrees of vulnerability to attacks from more conventional moralists, this is a harder book to defend than its predecessors. Yet Miller has an undeniable talent, a kind of raffish gusto, as a braggart storyteller in the picaresque mode. While his monologue drifts along the gutters of Paris, it turns up some memorable flotsam. Unfortunately, and increasingly in his other work, this authentic vein of pungent humor is adulterated by messianic rhapsodies — Leaves of Grass gone to seed — which prove more embarrassing. Nevertheless, the seriousness of their intentions cannot be denied. Consequently, in 1961, when the attorney general of Massachusetts sought to ban the recent American edition of Tropic of Cancer, several critics were on hand to testify on its behalf. The case was heard in the superior court, where the judge decreed the book to be “obscene, indecent, and impure.” That decree was subsequently reversed by the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth.

When I reread this decision and see my testimony quoted, I must confess that my feelings are somewhat mixed. I had ventured to say, in effect, that the book’s predominant mood was “one of sexual revulsion,” and that its self-conscious morbidity reflected a sense of cultural decadence. Of course I stand by this view, and feel honored that some of the justices evidently concurred with it. But I cannot help wondering whether the book or I would have had their approval if the suggested line of interpretation had emphasized the joys of the flesh. The puritanical implication is that a writer may concern himself with sex if he treats it as a bad thing, or so long as his treatment of it is emetic rather than aphrodisiac. As a matter of fact, my fellow witnesses found Miller’s outlook healthier than I did. One of them even introduced a fascinating comparison between Tropic of Cancer and Huckleberry Finn.

My colleagues, whom I respect, may conceivably be right. In any case, as professors of literature, we are used to critical disagreements. I trust that the judges allow for this variance, and do not take our personal opinions for absolute verities simply because we are consulted as “experts” offering “evidence as to the literary, cultural, or educational character” of the writings in question. What surprised me in the Tropic of Cancer affair was that no evidence could be admitted from psychiatrists and social workers. Similarly, in Regina v. Penguin, where the court listened so patiently to schoolmistresses and theologians, the defense could get no hearing for doctors and “people who deal with those who are sexually depraved or corrupted” — granted that such expertise is hard to come by, and that the behavioral sciences are far from exact in their application. We are all left in the dark on the crucial point: the actual impact of the alleged means of corruption.

WITH regard to obscenity, the law has modified itself so extensively in recent years that the interested layman is bewildered, and not less so when he finds himself suddenly called upon as an expert by the courts. Bewilderments are bound to arise from questions which lie open at both ends; and though a book is an objective artifact, the intent of its author is subjective, and so is its effect upon the reader. As the Director of Public Prosecutions said in discussing the Obscene Publications Act, “‘Intent’ is a difficult word.” There is even a school of formalistic critics which would rule out “the intentional fallacy.” Judge Woolsey supplied his colleagues on the bench with another epigram, which they have used to test the purity of a writer’s motives, when he spoke of “dirt for dirt’s sake.” The late Justice Frankfurter, characteristically asking for more precision, suggested that the phrase be changed to “dirt for money’s sake.”

But to speak of dirt is to beg a subtle question. And if the practice of writing for money is generally approved, why should it be specially enjoined against when the subject matter happens to be the important matter of sex? Is it because of the possible effect? Then we shift our ground, and the lawyers begin to talk about provoking lustful thoughts or appealing to prurient interest. Ordinarily we praise a writer when, in dealing with any other subject, he manages to convey sensations and stimulate reactions. Advertisers vie with one another, using a directly visual stimulus, to inject an erotic flavor into the most irrelevant situations. We cannot walk through our day without encountering dozens of random excitations which, if we are healthy, ought to arouse our susceptibilities. “A state of mind is not enough,” Mr. Justice Douglas has written; “it is the relationship of that state of mind to overt action that would seem to be critical.”

It is humbling to realize how little is known about the nature of that relationship, and how widely the trains of speculation diverge. Literature is full of stories that demonstrate — and possibly exaggerate — the influence of literature on behavior, such as Dante’s poignant example of Paolo and Francesca, who became lovers after reading a romance together. Specialists in children’s problems earnestly and endlessly debate over comic books: whether they are a major cause of juvenile delinquency or a valid inoculation against it. Classicists and psychoanalysts alike believe in catharsis, the notion that the mind can be purged of its antisocial tendencies by participating in vicarious passions. Tragedy has been exhibiting crimes on the stage for centuries, and its aftereffects are usually regarded as elevating rather than conducive to further crime. Books that dwell on sexual episodes might be just as likely to relieve tensions as to incite lewd and lascivious conduct.

At all events, we must have broader experience, keener observation, and more systematic investigation before we can make confident assumptions regarding how a given piece of reading matter would affect an unforeseen variety of readers. It may be that the Kinsey Institute, which has assembled an impressive library of erotica, will carry its researches into this limbo and bring us back some antiseptic answers. In the meantime, the reading public has been enjoying an unprecedented latitude. The battles for Joyce (inclusion of sex as part of the allround picture), Lawrence (emphasis on sex as a means of salvation), and Miller (obsession with sex as a nihilistic gesture) have opened the floodgates. After Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Tropic of Cancer, what then? Irreversibly the progression moves on, impelled by its own momentum, a sheer need for the next revelation to outstrip the last one. Having exploited the themes of normal sexuality, it seeks new disclosures by turning to perversion and inversion.

Censorship has backed down with less and less struggle, as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita or William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch has bridged the rapid transition from the Parisian bookleggers to a New York imprimatur — and, what is more, to an open market in Boston. Nabokov would be an exception in any grouping, a displaced mandarin from a more elegant age, and his flirtation with vice is merely another whim of his idiosyncracy. Burroughs continues Miller’s sodden bohemianism well into its gangrenous stage. He finds his material by wallowing deeper and deeper, and relies on drugs to give it an imaginative lift. Yet even Naked Lunch pays tribute to moralism in a preface and in an appended article written for the British Journal of Addiction. Therein Burroughs observes the convention of gallows literature, where the condemned man edifies the crowd by warning them against his particular fate. So Nabokov, tongue in cheek as usual, palms off Lolita as a psychiatric case history.

The quest for sensation has been approaching the line between serious literature and pornography, if indeed that border line is still discernible. Joyce and Lawrence both drew it very sharply, since their artistic integrity depended upon it. “Genuine pornography is almost always underworld,” Lawrence could write; “it doesn’t come into the open.” Manifestly, we live in another epoch. The notorious Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which has won greater notoriety as Fanny Hill, earned John Cleland a reprimand from the Privy Council when he brought it out in the year of Tom Jones. Its transatlantic distribution led in 1821 to the first American suppression for obscenity. Notwithstanding, it has gained and held a place in Anglo-American culture, quite properly a surreptitious place among bookdealers’ curiosa. Lately it has been brought out from under the counter and commended to a waiting world by Nabokov’s publisher, the reputable old firm that published Washington Irving and Herman Melville.

IN THE light of these developments, we can appreciate the historic irony of the announcement by Maurice Girodias, head of the Olympia Press and original publisher of the once-prohibited books by Miller, Nabokov, and Burroughs. His remarkable list includes Samuel Beckett, Lawrence Durrell, and other English-writing luminaries of the current international twilight, along with certain titles which might still be classified somewhere as “hard-core pornography.” M. Girodias has declared his intention of moving his operations from Paris to the United States, as soon as he can disentangle them from his present difficulties with the French government. We have come a long way from the days of Sylvia Beach; and so has France, presumably, in the other direction. M. Girodias has reason to envy the Grove Press of New York, which has been so successful in domesticating many of the works that are giving him trouble, notably the English translation of Genet’s Notre Dame des Fleurs.

Jean Genet is a writer of unquestioned power, whose style alone would set his books apart from the pornographic confessions they often resemble, and from those American novels and stories which have recently been putting us into close touch with the homosexual demimonde. Yet it would be uncritical to think that Genet was not obscene, though his verbose apologist, Jean-Paul Sartre, argues the contrary: obscenity is the stance for Genet’s virulent critique of modern society. In this respect, as in others, he is an heir to the Marquis de Sade, that pariah of the eighteenth century who has become a culture hero today, and whose most provocative writings have recently been handsomely republished by the Grove Press. Since Mr. Justice Brennan has ruled in the Roth case of 1957 that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance” are entitled to constitutional protection, the needle’s eye would seem to be large enough for the passage of such camels.

Not much room has been left for any working definition of pornography; its hard core has been softened, at any rate. Its etymological meaning, “writing about prostitution,” should have some bearing on Fanny Hill (banned by the Massachusetts court that unbanned Tropic of Cancer), where every page invites what Judge Woolsey long ago called “the leer of the sensualist.” But a book like Candy works both sides of the street by offering itself as a parody of the pornographic genre (pornography being itself a parody of more serious fiction). Rarities formerly locked in the librarians’ Inferno are available in paperback, sometimes in competing editions where the sanctions of copyright fail to apply. It could be suspected that, whereas the oldfashioned censor-morons confounded art with pornography, we are now being invited to accept pornography as art. However, the old distinctions no longer serve. Those who might once have been stigmatized as purveyors of smut, “dirt for money’s sake,” are hailed as benefactors of civil liberties, virtuosi of virtue at a profit.

Established novelists do their best — and worst — to keep up with the subterranean movement, and to keep on the best-seller lists, by providing their characters with more and more detailed bedroom histories. Norman Mailer asserted in 1959 that sexwas “perhaps the last remaining frontier of the novel which has not been exhausted by the nineteenth and early twentieth century novelists.” One might have assumed that this territory was not altogether virgin before An American Dream, but Mailer is amply justified in his pioneering metaphor. From its first emergence, with the breakthrough of the middle class into literature, the novel has been explicitly committed to the enlargement of human experience. Its great practitioners have all been realists, in the sense that they had to cut through conventions and fight against hypocrisies while striving to capture some segment of reality which has hitherto gone unexpressed. Hence they scandalized the authorities of their day, who retorted with repressive tactics.

Flaubert, Dostoevsky, even the Brontës — no less than Lawrence, Joyce, and their successors — all arrived by succès de scandale. Invariably, contemporaries are shocked by innovation in the arts and commonly accuse the innovators of being sensationmongers, which from time to time they must be. But the shock wears off with habituation, and what is no longer new can thereupon be judged by whether or not it seems true. It was shocking to see the forbidden monosyllables in print while Ulysses was proscribed, though they might not have offended in masculine conversation or in feminine stream of consciousness. Nowadays we have merely to ask ourselves whether or not they fit into the fictional contexts in which they so freely appear. The convention of using asterisks or dashes seems as quaint as Ernest Hemingway’s substitution of the word “obscenity” for the Spanish oaths in For Whom the Bell Tolls. Profanity derives its peculiar force from the violation of a taboo; expletives become meaningless once the taboos lose their hold.

When the Berkeley students shouted dirty words from a public platform, they confirmed the proprieties against which they were protesting. If speech were completely free, no words would bring a blush to a young person’s cheek or raise the eyebrows of an older one. As with the language, so with the contents of books. Descriptions of sexual intimacy, if we get used to reading them, ought to provoke no special titillation. We should be able to take them or leave them, depending on whether they carry honest conviction. When everything has been said, we can focus on how it is said. We may still need safeguards for the immature; but for adults so much is already permitted that not much can consistently be excluded. Our freedom to read, as guaranteed by the law, is virtually complete. Free speech and due process, the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution as reinterpreted by Justice Brennan, reaffirm the humanism of Terence: “I am a human being, and therefore consider nothing human alien to me.”

Accordingly, when writers are allowed to write anything they please and publishers to put it into circulation, then the great responsibility for discrimination rests with the reader. Art in itself may be neither moral nor immoral, as Oscar Wilde insisted; but since we are potentially both, the courts stand ready to correct our overt immorality. Meanwhile, it remains for us to determine the uses of art. If we abandon censorship, we depend all the more imperatively upon criticism. If we agree that books are neither dirty nor clean, we must be sure to remember that they are bad or good, and must not be distracted into ignoring that difference. After all, it has never been too difficult to tell a potboiler from a work of art, and it should be even simpler with potboilers that concentrate upon sex to the point of monotony. To criticize them is to discriminate between artistic imagination and autistic fantasy. One of the wholesome results of our hardwon candor is that it could end by driving the pornographers out of business.