50 Years Ago 30 DECEMBER 1955
A Threat to our Culture
KINGSLEY AMIS
Few people except those concerned in the comicbook trade can have been very sorry when the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act came into force last June. If there were any doubts about the wisdom of extending criminal ‘tendency to corrupt’ to include the portrayal of crime, violence and horror, and thus reinforcing the armoury of litigious Puritanism, these doubts would have been laid to rest by the limitations of the terms of the Act to publications consisting ‘wholly or mainly of stories told in pictures’. Fielding, Dickens and M.R. James were safe; Eerie Tales from the Crypt and Unusual Comics reeled at the blow. I myself remain unpersuaded that any actual corrupting gets done by such means, and tend to feel that absorption in horror comics is a symptom rather than a cause of delinquency — or proneness to delinquency. At the same time, I must admit the existence of much contrary opinion, some of it apparently well-informed. And whatever my views might be about the wrongness of featherbedding children by hiding nasty things from them, I should certainly snatch out of my own children’s grasp things like The Vault of Horror (featuring The Vault-Keeper, The Old Witch and The CryptKeeper, a most alluring trio). Whether the stuff corrupts people or not, there can be little doubt of its capacity to frighten. Why, it even frightens me! All the more reassuring, therefore, to think that it can no longer get as far as the bookstall counter.
Is the battle over, then? No, by no means. There are those who would like to make the victory over horror comics a mere curtain-raiser to the task of generally cleaning up our culture. Crime stories and strips are bad because they portray crime, often sympathetically. Westerns are bad because the characters are apt to use violence as a means of solving their disputes. Most of the Sunday papers are bad because they feature sex and crime, some weeklies are bad because they carry photographs of scantily clad young ladies, and both lots are particularly bad because they may fall into the hands of children. Even if we keep ear-stoppers handy to clap into our children’s lugs when something bad comes over the wireless, and however vigilant we are to hood them at the right moment in front of the television set or cinema screen, who knows how corrupted they — or we may get by accidentally catching sight of a bad film poster? The risk is too great; let’s get up a Committee to Censor everything, to be composed of a clergyman, a probation officer, a children’s officer, a police superintendent, an educational psychologist, a holder of a diploma in social science, the Postmaster-General and a Justice of the Peace. That’ll fix us.
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