George F. Mathew 8 Freshwater Court, Crawford Street. London WI
Sir: Mr Cumming (Letters, 8 December) attacks Mr Burgess for trotting out the old stale arguments against banning pornography. There were surely two particularly relevant points implicit in Anthony Burgess's article of I December: that it is impossible to impose a point at which pornography becomes unacceptable: and that if this is to be done through the courts, and if it must be done, then it should be done by people sympathetic to and knowledgeable about literature. Mr Calder has pointed out that the Last Exit w Brooklyn jury took, with one exception, only an hour to read the book. Without disrespect to the jury, this reading time is impossible in a medium-length book, written in a by no means easy style, and packed with slang terms of which a great proportion must have been quite new and incomprehensible to those twelve men.
That is the second impossibility. The third im- possibility, though it would be wiser to say unlike-
lihood, is that the jury is now depraved and corrupted. If they are not, then they totally failed to grasp the meaning of the law. if they are, then they should be watched very carefully for a long period by the police. That really is the serious im- plication of their verdict. It is difficult, otherwise, to see in what way they have been corrupted. If their minds have been depraved and corrupted and they arc not willing to put their new-found ten- dencies into practice, then their state is no worse than others who have long realised and considered that the shocking and terrible events in Lust Exit are realities. No one can be free of 'foul' thoughts or perverted notions at some time. Are we all so feeble and easily influenced that we must be pro- tected against reality? Is the small boy more likely to be raped by a paederast when he knows the danger, or when he is innocent?
This is not a plea for gratuitous sadism in books, thotigh the detractors of pornographic licence must bring better evidence than the literature of the Moors murderers, or prove that the condition of the large American cities depends on the avail- ability of cheap sadistic books and not on other causes. Nor does it support the tastelessness of 'No coddling' as a caption to the beating-up of prisoners in Vietnam. But would Mr Cumming have been so outraged had the caption read 'This is a foul war'? He sees the picture as porno- graphic. yet it is the quite unpornographic caption which shocked him. This is surely the point. 'Pornography' is not concerned with subject-matter but with presentation. There is. one knows, a glut of cheap and nasty books which, whether they are destroyed or not, no one except their authors and their publishers could care less about. They are worthless, but they probably do no harm. There are also serious books whose subjects shock, repel, disgust, etc right through Roget's Thesaurus. In their humanity, in allowing us a glimpse of a world which social mollycoddling denies us, in their assault on our smugness, and in recognition of the serious intentions of fine writers, they should be allowed a free sale in this country on their own merits. If their publication is endangered by a confusion with cheap trash or by the misunder- standings of otherwise admirable juries, then the trash must also be allowed and the prosecution of books ended.
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