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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
For a country that lacks any written constitution enshrining freedom of speech for its people, we British seem rather less concerned than our friends across the pond about what we have a right to hear and read. Most of us look askance at those who seek to protect their children's sensibilities from such seminal works by Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Maya Angelou. Does this mean, then, that is in fact us who are the closest to being a genuinely libertarian society - in spite of our archaic laws? The Anglophile Voltaire certainly thought this to be the case. In seeking to free his own country from the bondage of absolutist rule he looked to England as the prime example of a libertarian state, in which each of us 'is free to go to heaven by whichever route he chooses'.
Such soundbytes may well have suited Voltaire's rather mordant satire, but even he could not have been ignorant to the laws that banned Roman Catholics from any position in Parliament. Nor to the fact that the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the work of his great inspiration, John Locke, was banned not only in France but also forbidden to be taught at the University of Oxford. And in later years, with no Voltaire to extol the virtues of the English nation, and the animosities between America and the British at their height, Thomas Paine was indicted for treason for The Rights of Man, in which he defended the French Revolution. His publishers had incidentally already been prosecuted for printing The Age of Reason, in which Paine argued in favour of Deism, much like Voltaire fifty years earlier. That was 1792. Meanwhile Locke has become required reading in all English universities, just as Paine, no doubt, is in American. The effects of the fifty years that embodied the first half of this century are a constant reminder of the necessity of religious and political freedom, if we needed to be reminded at all. Yet many works are banned in America for political reasons, not least those works deemed to be racist or pernicious to the state. This testament to the power of America's lobbyists may in fact confirm the premise that it is in the interest of the most powerful states to silence anything subversive. But before congratulating ourselves on our open-mindedness (or indeed bewailing the permissive nature of British society) one might recall that there is one subject that lies far closer to the hearts of suburbia and which, in our attempts to maintain a distance from it, we tend also to label subversive. In 1928 two books were written by English authors that were immediately banned and were to cause controversy for the next thirty years. Their linking theme: sex - The Well of Loneliness for sexual subversion and Lady Chatterley's Lover for the fact that it was happening at all. Both books have a rather different history of acceptance. Following its ban in Britain, The Well of Loneliness, arguably the first 'lesbian' novel, was published by Pegasus Press in France and copies smuggled into Britain, only to be seized by customs. Leading intellectuals, including E.M. Forster (author of the posthumously published Maurice) and Virginia Woolf (author of the sexually ambiguous work Orlando) immediately leapt to the book's defence, citing its literary merits. However, the magistrate disallowed their evidence, calling it 'obscene libel'. Contemporary Home Office Papers, first published in 1997, labelled it as 'gravely detrimental to the public interest' in its support of 'a depraved practice'. Subsequent responses, marked by the age of sexual liberation, have, alas, been less favourable to the ideas extolled by Radclyffe Hall in the work.
Few extolled the literary merits of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Indeed, the fact that it was circulated in secret only added to its being branded as pornography. Worse still, its author, D. H. Lawrence was accused of being a self-appointed spokesmen of trafficking in filth and obscenity, which turned him into an icon for those 'like-minded' people, who in fact shared none of his actual sentiments. The famous court case of 1960 finally brought it to the public and, eventually, to an enlightened younger generation who are able objectively to see the literary merits of a brilliant author without being offended by the supposedly explicit nature of the work. One might well have thought the D.H. Lawrence case in 1960 and the contemporaneous period of sexual liberation to have put an end once and for all to any concerns that material of an explicit nature should be kept from the eyes of the public. Fair enough, most material is now available to the public in some form, and the Government has set up an Obscene Publications Act to control the distribution of material deemed to be questionable. Yet, as with any law, the application of it can prove to be a tricky business. The Act has famously been the cause of trials to ban such works as Inside Linda Lovelace and Last Exit to Brooklyn and resulted in Professors of English in court attempting to find literary merits in the works, where in fact there is very little. Rather this, perhaps, than the hegemony of pressure groups, but the Act has also been used as a pretext for raiding publishers of 'curiosa' material, including Savoy Press, whose authors have been jailed for possessing the same obscenity that is legally on sale throughout the country.
And where the Obscenity Act proves unsuccessful, we can always rely on somebody to find one of those archaic British laws to ensure that we are spared the worry of reading a work that might offend our sensibilities. Such was the case in 1977 when Mary Whitehouse, President of her own National Viewers and Listeners Association, brought a private prosecution against James Kirkup, author of The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name. The poem portrays several homoerotic images of Christ with other Biblical figures and was banned under a blasphemy law that has only ever been cited once before in the past century. The British public is still forbidden to read it. The irony here is that the very act of bringing a work to trial in fact puts it in the forefront of the public eye. This is also the case with those private institutions who, in appealing to public sentiment by banning a book from their shelves, actually publicise the book's presence. Thus W H Smith ensured the notoriety of A. M. Homes' The End of Alice, a dark novel dealing with the sexual abuse of children, by publicly banning it from its shelves, as thousands of interested readers rushed to alternative bookstores to purchase a copy.
Most of us will, however, go to the grave without ever having read The End of Alice. But many would still shudder at the thought of our nation's children ever reading and being in some way affected by the work. After two hundred years of a seemingly ever more open society, it appears that we do not want to know (or at least hear about) everything after all. Indeed W H Smith received huge support from the NSPCC and several tabloid newspapers for their decision. The supreme irony is that it is in fact the Government that is currently responsible for ensuring the availability of information most of us would rather not have. For Section 28, banning the promotion of homosexuality in local authorities, and responsible for preventing plays, art exhibitions, funding grants and innumerable other sources of help to teenagers, is to be removed from the statute books despite majority views to the contrary. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Daniel Mann is a graduate from Oxford in Modern Languages and a free-lance writer, currently living in Berlin. |
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