Compton Mackenzie

FOR a brief moment when I opened my Times on September 18th to read the headline `Stable in Form' I hoped that Mr. Justice Stable was giving another lesson in common sense to a jury, but all too soon came the headline ' Recorder on " Test of Obscenity," ' and I was back in the Eighties of the last century when Sir Gerald Dodson and myself were children.

Listen to Mr. Justice Stable summing up :

During the closing speech of the Prosecution it seemed to me that there was ... a certain confusion of thought. It was suggested that you are, by what you decide today, to determine whether books like this will or will not be published in the future. May I venture to say that your task is absolutely nothing of the kind ? We arc not sitting here as judges of taste . . . we are not here to say whether we think it would be a good thing, if books like that [The Philanderer] were never written.

Listen to Mr. Griffith-Jones for the prosecution a few weeks later :

If you decide this hook, September in Quinze, is not obscene you are in effect giving licence to those responsible for maintaining the standard of our novel.

Listen to Mr. Justice Stable :

It is not out' fault that, but for the love of men and women and the act of sex, the human race would have ceased to exist thousands and thousands of years ago.

Listen to Sir Gerald Dodson, the Recorder:

Sex has been referred to as one (sic) of the vital things in life.

I cannot believe that Sir Gerald Dodson is a devotee of artificial insemination for human beings, but he should clarify his point of view.

Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall, QC, for the defence, in an attempt to instil into the minds of the jury he was addressing some of the common sense which Mr. Justice Stable had in- stilled in the case of The Philanderer, quoted at length from what will be a classic summing-up. It was a waste of breath. Sir Gerald Dodson gave the jury, which according to The Times included ' a number of women,' a day off to read September in Quince, warning them not to discuss it with members of their family. The members read the book, and, duly shocked, gave the Recorder their verdict. In his summing up Sir Gerald observed that 'a book which might not affect the mind of an archbishop might well affect the mind of a callow youth or a girl just budding into womanhood.'

Yet Mr. Justice Stable had recently asked in the same court: Are we to take our literary standards as being the level of some- thing that is suitable for the decently brought up young female aged fourteen ? Or do we even go further back than that and are we to be reduced to the sort of books that one reads as a child in the nursery 7 A mass of literature, great literature, from many angles is wholly unsuitable for reading by the adolescent, but that, of course, does not mean that the publisher is guilty of a criminal offence for making these works available to the general public. These words of wjsdom do not appear to have impressed Sir Gerald Dodson. 'I wonder what he feels about putting the Old Testament, however innocuous it may be for an archbishop, into the hands of a callow youth or a budding girl. He must know that the mind of callow youth has learnt far more about sex from a few chapters in the Old Testament than from all the novels ever written. If to learn about sex is to be corrupted and depraved then the Old Testament is a book which makes for corruption and depravity, and the publishers and printers of it should be fined £1,500 and admonished by Sir Gerald Dodson.

In the course of a jobation to Mrs. Webb, a director of Hutchinsons, he derived comfort from the thought that juries from time to time took a very solid stand against this sort of thing. He might have added, without offending against modesty, when high-minded Recorders like himself were able to impress upon jurors a sense of their own importance as guardians of morality. These juries,' Sir Gerald Dodson continued, ' realise how important it is that the youth of this country should be protected and that the fountain of our national blood should not be polluted at its source.' And he concluded with this lyrical outburst :

All credit to jurors who resist all the blandishments which can surround productions of this sort, and all the arguments 'which can be levelled, based upon literature of the past.

What seems a grave matter for authors is that a man of Sir Gerald Dodson's age and experience ventures to say, Maybe competition in this line of business [authorship] today is as fierce as it is in others, and maybe it is a great temptation to an author, even one of reputation, to allow himself to sink into the mire of literature debased and calculated to deprave others.' If Sir Gerald Dodson will have the courage to repeat that remark when he is not protected by the Bench it can be answered with suitable vigour.

There is not much space left to deal with the comic attempt by the Swindon police to have The Decameron destroyed as obscene. The translation and the illustrations are over fifty years old and have been on sale all that time.

The Chairman of the Appeal Committee of the Wiltshire Quarter Sessions asked Mr. Molony, who appeared for the prosecution, if it would be proper to find a copy of The Decameron in the Swindon Public Library. Mr. Molony was good enough to admit that students of social history should have access to it, but insisted that to sell it in Commercial Road, Swindon, for three guineas could only be an attempt to attract people looking for obscene literature.

I am glad that possession of The Decameron will not involve the Swindon Public Library in a prosecution because I had the privilege of formally opening it and should have felt uncom- fortable if a book I had on my shelves as an undergraduate had cast a slur on a particularly efficient Public Library.

Fortunately the obvious fact that Mr. Stephenson for the defence had read the book with more intelligence than his learned friend for the prosecution proved a blandishment that the magistrates were unable to resist and Swindon was saved from becoming ridiculous. We do not want that old joke about Wiltshire Moonrakers to be given a new life, and it was no more absurd for those Wiltshire worthies once upon a time to mistake the reflection of the moon in a pond for a cheese than it would be for Wiltshire worthies of today to mistake The Deccuneron for Flossie the Venus of Fifteen.

And now is it not time that the Home Office ceased to try to emulate the ineptitude of the Colonial Office over Cyprus? It never can be quite so inept and it really is not Worth the competitive effort.