On pornography and censorship

TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN

Princeton, NJ—Reading, as I seldom do, the entertainment pages of the local prints, I have discovered that a 'B' movie is being prepared called The Scandalous Daughter of .Fanny Hill, and that in the hospitable climate of Italy, an 'A,' that is expensive, movie is being made of Candy, Mr Terry Southern's scandalous parody of Candide. This has induced some reflections on how far 'permissiveness' can go, since Fanny Hill is a classic, perhaps the classic, of Anglo- Saxon pornography or erotica. It is an elegant literary production (a parody, a learned kins- man tells me, of Fielding), but it is undoubtedly devoted to the pursuit of happiness via the bed. Its few ethical phrases are not obtruded and the love affair isn't plausible. This is sex-for-sex's sake. It is still banned, in its un- expurgated form, in Britain, but is freely on sale in the drug stores and airports of this quite recently prudish land. What does this mean?

I suspect it means very little. I can't see how, even in these permissive days, any movie can give the full flavour of Cleland's prose or how Candy on the screen can reproduce the parodistic effect of Mr Southern's erotic guy- ing of both Candide and The Pilgrim's Pro- gress. But leaving the movies out of it, is America going to the demnition bow-wows because Candy and Fanny Hill are both freely on sale? Here a personal note may be intruded. I first saw the name Fanny Hill in an Italian translation on sale in the Corso in Rome, in Mussolini's anno primo, 'primavera di bellezza.' Below the book was a card: 'Seized by the police in Milan last week. Buy while there is yet time.' So it was with a shock of pleasur- able recognition that I read last year that the

Milan police were still pursuing poor Fanny Hill. But I suspect, as well as hope, that she will escape the Christian-Democratic net as she did the stern moralists of fascism.

I have some dissident views on the censor- ship of books, because I find the humbug of both sides equally irritating and equally mis- leading. Each side pulls its punches. Thus gallant attempts were made to show in the English trial of Miss Hill's narrative that it was a useful piece of social history. I haven't read The Memoirs of a Lady of Pleasure for quite a long time, but, as I remember it, it is peculiarly lacking in social history. There is none of the information about prices, for example, that you get in Balzac, Conan Doyle. or Dickens. I can think of nothing that isn't better done in a sober book like Dr Dorothy George's London Life in the Eighteenth Celt- troy. Fanny, or John Cleland, had a one- track mind. Should that mind be hidden from us?

Here we come to another type of humbug, the humbug of the censors. For they usually argue that pornographic or erotic books are harmful because they 'put ideas into people's heads.' Maybe they do. But the ideas of Funny Hill are there in the adolescent male mind anyway. The story varies in detail, but many of us know of the question put by the curate, schoolmaster, scoutmaster: 'Are you much troubled by impure thoughts?' and of the schoolboy's candid answer: 'Troubled? I simply love 'em.' Whether Fanny Hill increases the amount or concreteness of impure thoughts in the young male, I don't know.

But for many boys (and girls), the first 'dirty book' they read was the Bible. Indeed, I have

known a Scottish-matron who banned the Bible as dangerous reading for the young. But the

Christian view of impure thoughts is that it is lust that is the sin. To lust after a woman in your heart is to commit adultery. Therefore . it is not necessary for Lord Soper or Sir Cyril

Black or the embattled censors of the Irish Republic to show that reading the Bible or . Fanny Hill or Ulysses leads to any specific act of unchastity. But once you begin censoring

on this C'hristian ground, it is very hard to glop.

Miss Pamela Hansford Johnson has argued, in a book that I have not read, tht behind the horrible crimes of Brady lay the reading

of the Marquis de Sade. As one who has never been able to read even one of The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom without a com-

bination of boredom and disgust, I suspect that the disciples of the 'Divine Marquis' have ten- dencies that he excites but does not create.

(Yes, I have read Mario Praz's The Romantic Agony.) But does erotic literature not lead to

erotic activity? An eminent American states- man and poet, the late Mayor of New York, Jimmy Walker, once announced in the New York Assembly 'that no girl has ever been ruined by a book.' But an even more famous municipal politician and poet, D. Alighieri, had a different view. It was reading an early Ver-

sion of Camelot that led Francesca da Rimini to sin immortally, and the idea of all well

lost for love has led girls into trouble often enough. Can we abolish romantic love? Should we?

Then the effectiveness of a book as an aphro- disiac depends on whether its attractive picture

of illicit love provokes mere day-dreaming or active imitation. The Blue Lagoon, judging by how difficult it was to borrow it from Ruther-

glen Public Library, was very popular. But

the idea of warm water, warm sands, no problems of clothing or feeding was too remote from the west of Scotland to incite to imitation. In the same way an imitation of the Histoire d'O. set in the West End of Glasgow

and on the banks of Loch Lomond, made far

better reading than the preposterous and odious original; but Tantour sur l'herbe' on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond suggests rheumatism, pneumonia and arthritis rather than a successful 'voyage a Cythere.'

But I shouldn't (or wouldn't) like it to be thought that I have done nothing to keep the public mind as clean as a Boy Scout's. During

the Second World War, I dropped in on Joe Jackson, the literary editor of the San Fran- cisco Chronicle and the literary dictator of

'the Coast.' He pushed across to me a massive typescript. 'Have a look at that. A very good- looking girl brought it in last week and asked how she could get it published. I looked it over and said, "Miss Winsor, your novel will either be a great failure or a great success. I fear

it will be a great success."' I looked it over and thought it might be a great success, but to make it really pay in cash in compensation for the loss of credit, the firm of Hamish Hamilton would have had to stop publishing me, such was then the British paper shortage. An older firm found a way round the paper control and had the profits of letting the British reader savour Forever Anther, which Bernard de Voto rightly described as 'Fanny Hill for Harper's Bazaar.'

Poor Miss Winsor tried a comeback a year or two ago, but though she was as 'powerful' as ever, the difference in power standards was like that between an ordinary atomic bomb and one of those new hydrogen bombs our American friends leave around like absent-minded professors. Nowa- days, it would not surprise me to read the original Fanny Hill in Harper's Bazaar. Mere shock value now is hard to provide. Dirt value can be provided, as is done regularly by Mr Harold Robbins of The Carpetbaggers, which, I was glad to learn, has been banned in Bir- mingham. As a moral gesture it should certainly be banned somewhere and the citizens of the Second City can always travel to Wolver- hampton.

I am aware that there is a great deal more to be said on the subject of literary censorship than I have even hinted at. Dr George Steiner has published a powerful attack on the deliber- ate substitution of an external—and debased —imagination for the genuine imagination, including the erotic imagination, of the victims of literary fashion and of the doctrine of un- limited permissiveness. It is not, indeed, a doctrine of permissiveness but a demand for approval, since it claims that all truths, despite the French proverb, must be expressed. We are not allowed the liberty of repulsion or disgust. I have some kinds of prudery which I think I am entitled to express, although I don't want to impose my prudery on more liberated souls.

A learned friend of mine had an experience in an American university which he was visiting that is to the point. There was a knock on his door around midnight and when he opened, he was faced with one of his better students who hurriedly addressed him. `Do you know what's wrong with this college? Too much thwarted chastity. There are a lot of people here who don't want to go in for indiscriminate sex at this time but public opinion won't let us follow our own judgment.' I suspect there is more aesthetic, religious, romantic chastity about than it is fashionable to admit!

There is also probably a great deal less innocence, which is not, I think, a bad thing. The late Anita Loos reported that many readers of her classic Gentlemen Prefer Blondes believed that kind Mr Ginsberg (later Mount Gins) was really spending his money in educating Lorelei Lee. After all, Henry James has told us of a Boston performance of The Lady of the Camellias in which the lady was described on the programme as Armand's 'fiancée.'

I suppose the liberating generation was just after the First World War (long before Miss Mary McCarthy went to Vassar). It was at that time that it was noticed that 'the young can talk about anything'—a liberal slogan to which a sour American retorted, 'The trouble is that they can't talk about anything else.' Even in those enlightened days, there were communi- cation blocks, as when a fresh young thing, hearing a four-letter word used, said in astonish- ment, 'I didn't know anybody said those words. I thought they only appeared in books.' In 1955, the late C. S. Lewis argued in this journal that verbal descriptions of the sexual act were aesthetically wrong because there was no suitable vocabulary. The scientific terms were deadening and the traditional words (not the slang words) were so debased by vulgar use that a false impression was given that was not given by the plastic arts or by music. It was, I believe, one of D. H. Lawrence's aims in that absurd book, Lady Chatterley's Lover, to rescue the fine Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs, out of public use since Chaucer's time. He didn't do it, but the ingenious Yankees were turning the problem by inventing semi-obscene nouns and verbs which had not been debased and withdrawn from speech. These were restored to print with increasing freedom. As Cole Porter put it, 'anything goes.'

Yet there were mishaps. I can remember dining at New College high table with a noisy, learned don, long since dead. There were American guests and, as the presiding fellow, he wanted to make them feel at home so he told them how much he had been amused by a joke of Miss Dorothy Parker's: 'If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end to end it wouldn't surprise me a great deal.' The reverential Americans were shocked and I broke the news that Miss Parker's joke was more concrete than the eminent scholar had thought. No reader of SPECTATOR would need to be warned today. I think this is a gain since, for certain jokes, an erotic vocabulary is needed.

I fear that to Lorenzo and his disciples, the assertion that a vocabulary is needed in order to make jokes about sex is blasphemy. It is too sacred to be joked about. I can only say— rubbish. Most cultures of which I know any- thing have a rich store of sex jokes. True, there are none in the Old Testament but there are no jokes of any kind in the Old Testament. But Vulcan is only one of the oldest examples of that great comic hero, the cuckold. Other men always laugh at the wearer of the horns and some crafts and worldly situations traditionally invite cuckoldry. In France, even a fairly modern official, the station master, is tradition- ally a cuckold. But I know of one instance in which the tables were turned. A troop train entering Nancy station was greeted (so a friend told me) by a large banner : 'cc chef de gare n'est pas made.'

But this is a long way from the case for and against censorship. In the United States where I now am, sex books are sold with a freedom and with a cheapness unknown in the Place des Vosges before the arrival of Madame de Gaulle stopped business. There are so many of them that I begin to suspect that where there is so much smoke there may be next to no fire. For the purposes of research, I bought a promising paperback; The Bedroom Game (95 cents). I was swindled, for what I got was an interesting novel about the difficulties of setting up a small investment trust in Los Angeles, the dangers of intervention by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the risk of being robbed by loving friends. It was fascinating and there was very little sex, although I did enjoy the account of how the hero profited by the gener- osity, financial and amorous, of a mature film star called Marie Corelli.

But the deception reminded me of an admir- able example of justice given by the American Post Office. A citizen who had sent good money to get a packet of what it was very strongly indicated were leeltify postcards' protested that what he had got was the Venus de Milo, La Source, etc. The Post Office prosecuted the vendor for two offences. It is a federal felony to offer to send obscene matter through the mails; it is another federal offence not to deliver goods promised. So the vendor got two years on each count, to be served consecutively.