Feydeau created thirty-nine plays, apparently out of extreme indolence. When he was a child his father found him writing and told the governess that he need do no lessons as he’d written a play that morning. From then on Feydeau wrote to avoid sums. He was so lazy that when a friend said to him, ‘Turn round. The prettiest woman I’ve ever seen has just come into the room,’ he answered, without moving, ‘Describe her to me.’ He sat in a café in the Rue Vivienne and made wild and ill-calculated investments on the stock exchange. So he had the great traditional stimulant to the industry of an artist, laziness and debt. A friend described him as elegant, gentle and charming, a poet who knew the ‘wealth of fantasy and disenchantment that hovers in the smoke rings of a cigar’. It’s hard not to see in Feydeau one of his own characters, sensible and detached, choosing a quiet life; but unceremoniously booted into a world of frenetic creation which became, at the drop of a coincidence, gloriously out of control.
All this was taught to me and much else about the theatre and the nature of comedy by Jacques Charon. He was a tall, fat man with slicked-back black hair and a rubbery face lit up with a grin of great amiability. He could be mercilessly honest to himself, and to his actors when he was directing. He said that the most important requirement for a performer was physical fitness, a sound chest and the ability to run at least a mile in the course of an evening. In spite of his comfortable figure he was, as he often boasted, extremely ‘sportif’ and he could not only dance with extraordinary lightness, as many fat people can, but I have seen him perform with great dexterity on water-skis. He lived in a flat behind the Comédie Française, that Mecca to which he had set his face when, as a small, fat, bourgeois child, he had been taken to the plays of Molière and Racine. When he was in Paris he seemed able to direct a play or a film during the day, as well as act at night and then stay up until dawn with friends in a restaurant. When he arrived at the National he knew hardly any English but demonstrated all the parts, and particularly the women’s roles, with such energy and comic flair that the actors learnt a lesson in the truthfulness of comedy that they have never forgotten. And I will always remember what he told me about the solid basis of comic writing.
The construction of a Feydeau play is so wonderful that another playwright can only look at it with the awe with which a junior maths master might approach the work of Einstein. There is a dullish ten minutes in all his plays, and this always occurs at the beginning when he is laying the foundations for the ornate edifice he will build during the course of the evening. Feydeau’s concern was with events and he didn’t write many verbal jokes, so in translating him I supplied a number of my own. I always noticed that they never got as many laughs as such workmanlike Feydeau lines as ‘What?’, ‘Who?’ or ‘I can’t believe it!’ said at precisely the right moment. They were very happy days when we sat in the prefabs behind the National and Laurence Olivier lunched off an apple and a bottle of champagne and we read and reread the play until I hope it didn’t sound like a translation at all, but made the listeners feel that they could understand French. The language of French farce of that period came easily to me, being not far removed from Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome and the sort of chat which still lingered in certain areas of the Inns of Court and which I could further explore and develop when I came to write Rumpole.
Puce à l’Oreille, which became, inaccurately, A Flea in Her Ear, lasted a long time at the National and was remarkable for Geraldine McEwan’s acting suspicion like a beautiful Groucho Marx, for Albert Finney’s falls and for the Astonishing Revolving Bed. When it went to Canada, Laurence Olivier played the smallest part, that of the butler, and made it memorable. I worked on another Feydeau play with Jacques Charon and some films. We did a film of A Flea in Her Ear which was shot in Paris for 20th Century Fox, but as Jacques was acting in the evenings and film was not his medium, he had no real enthusiasm for the day’s work with ‘Le Fox’. The film was disastrous, but the days spent making it were filled with pleasure, with lunch at the Boulogne studios and staying at the Plaza Athénée and evenings at the ‘Elle et Lui’ where the boyish waiters in dinner jackets often turned out to be girls. All those, and many other delights, came to me from the work of translation. The hard fact of the language barrier became clear to me one evening in the presence of an English actress who left her husband for one night when Terence Rattigan was visiting Paris. She was learning French eagerly but slowly by listening to Berlitz records in her hotel bedroom and used to try out her newly acquired skill whenever possible. After her night of absence, which caused her non-French-speaking husband great anxiety, she reappeared and, although she would give him no adequate explanation, he forgave her and they were reunited.
That evening I went with them to a celebratory dinner at ‘Marius et Janette’. Halfway through the evening the errant wife leant across the table and spoke to me, in ringing tones and with a strong English accent, words which must have taken her a considerable time to prepare. ‘Cher John,’ she said, ‘Hier soir j’ai fucké le chauffeur de Terence Rattigan dans le Bois de Boulogne.’ Her husband had the good manners, or good sense, to treat this as a remark couched in such idiomatic French that he was quite unable to understand it. He decided to order the Sole Meunière and the dinner proceeded to a peaceful conclusion.
So I shall always feel grateful to Ken Tynan and to Jacques Charon for the opportunity they gave me to learn about the serious side of farce, a form of drama which seems to me often more true to the facts of life as we know them than many great tragedies.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The publisher John Calder, who with his then partner Marion Boyars was to be immortalized for lawyers in ‘R v. Calder and Boyars’, a notable battle in the long, hard-fought, often serious, sometimes important, frequently farcical, and occasionally trivial, war between the freedom of the written word and our legal system, had been one of the organizers of the playwrights’ conference in Edinburgh. He published Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Junior, a novel concerned with drug abuse and homosexual prostitution in the slums of New York. It was a powerfully written work, if conspicuously short on the jokes.
At that time I was busy doing murders and less significant crimes and still involved in the occasional divorce. As a ‘leading Counsel’ I was experiencing the strain of cases in which you are employed because you are expected to work miracles. In the old days at the bar I had been used to rushing from Court to Court, always conscious of the fact that I was about to be called on somewhere else, saying a breathless ‘goodbye’ to clients before diving down the Underground for a fresh bout of cruelty, adultery or wilful neglect to maintain. Now I was doing selected cases on which I was able to concentrate, and the responsibility seemed far greater and any adverse result far more disastrous. The divorce laws changed and the matrimonial offence was abolished. Having treated women with monstrous unfairness for centuries the law swung heavily in their favour. Wives could expect to strip their husbands of their assets however they had treated them. One insurance executive returned to his home in Wimbledon to find his wife in bed with two members of a pop group, the drummer and the lead guitarist. When he divorced her he was quite puzzled to find that this single act of abandon had earned her a third of his income, a third of his capital and a third of the value of their house which would have to be sold. Confused by the morality of these matters I devoted myself more and more to a life of crime.
John Calder and Marion Boyars, as the publishers of Last Exit, were duly prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act at the Central Criminal Court. The wording of the charge consisted of that immortal phrase coined by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in the year 1868. His Lordship was faced then with an evangelical Wolverhampton metal broker who had published a disgraceful pamphlet about the alleged methods used by Catholic priests to extract erotic confessions from lady penitents. An article is criminally obscene, Lord Cockburn decided in his great contribution to the law of literature, if it ‘tends to deprave and corrupt’. This reson
ant phrase has been ransacked, in the following century, in the hope that it might yield some sort of intelligible meaning.
Lord Cockburn, of course, didn’t consider the question of literary merit and even if the metal broker had written a work to rank with Abelard and Eloise, or the love sonnets of John Donne, that fact wouldn’t have saved him from the Nick. In 1928 The Well of Loneliness, Mrs Radcliffe Hall’s novel of lesbian love, was condemned by the Bow Street Magistrate and thirty-nine eminent writers, who had come to testify as to its being as ‘sincere, courageous, high-minded and often beautifully expressed’, as The Times Literary Supplement had said it was, were sent away unheard. (Times change and The Well of Loneliness was read out, a few years ago, as the ‘Book at Bedtime’ on the wireless.) Concerned at this slight to the world of letters, such well-intentioned MPs as Sir Alan Herbert and Mr Roy Jenkins promoted the Obscene Publications Act, 1959. This measure repeated Lord Cockburn’s words as the test. A literary work is obscene, says the Statute, if it ‘tends to deprave and corrupt those likely to read it’. However, if it is obscene, those who publish it are not to be convicted if its publication can be shown to be for the public good because it has artistic or other merit. The literary conception here enshrined in the tablets of our law is an interesting one. A book is first found to be depraving and corrupting, causing its readers to slaver at the mouth, walk with their knuckles brushing the ground and show a general tendency to breathe heavily down the telephone and rape the lady traffic wardens. However, the same book may then be found to be so exquisitely well written that its effect is ennobling after all. This is the sort of philosophic and aesthetic conception which is, of course, readily understood by your average Brixton Jury. It may not have been totally understood by the masterminds who promoted the Bill itself, men of the undoubted stature and literary repute of Sir Alan Herbert and Mr Roy Jenkins.
On the defence of literary merit expert evidence was made available by the 1959 Act and, in the prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, literary figures entered the witness box to do battle for the honour of D. H. Lawrence. Natural revulsion at the idea of a book by so highly regarded a writer being attacked in a Criminal Court may have tempted those who gave evidence to exaggerate the value of a somewhat absurd work, but the victory was significant. Lady Chatterley and her gamekeeper were acquitted, much to the irritation of the Judge and the outrage of the Judge’s wife. The gentlemanly prosecutor, who suggested that it was not a book which the Jury might wish their wives or their servants to read, was consigned to everlasting ridicule, and Lord Gardiner, who defended Penguin Books, proceeded in a stately fashion to the Woolsack. The tide of progress was flowing and who ever would be able to hold it back? Soon, who doubted it? the law would have to abandon its ill-judged attempts to censor the written word.
The trial of Last Exit took place eight years after the acquittal of Lady Chatterley. It was the only obscenity case in which witnesses were produced who said that they had been depraved and corrupted, or in which we were given an opportunity of seeing what a depraved and corrupted person looked like. Sir Basil Blackwell, the Oxford bookseller, said that he had certainly been depraved by the book, but as he was in his eighties at the time the matter didn’t seem to be of great practical significance. The Reverend David Sheppard, who had been Captain of the English Cricket Team, also gave evidence to the effect that he had not, metaphorically speaking, held his bat so straight after reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, but as he went on to become Bishop of Liverpool the damage, whatever it was, doesn’t seem to have been serious. In spite of the industry of a number of literary and clerical witnesses, the book was found to be obscene in its trial at the Old Bailey and the publishers were fined £100. So it came about that John Calder asked me to argue the Last Exit case in the Court of Appeal.
We were lucky in our Court. It was presided over by Cyril Salmon, whose casual way with a gold watch and leisurely stroll up to a cross-examination had led me to envious imitation when I was starting at the bar. I found myself standing up at a point where the two great concerns of my life, writing and the law, met and almost failed to recognize each other. Indeed I was trying to explain to three courteous and distinguished Judges the fundamental difference between writers and lawyers, which produces the basic fallacy of all censorship laws. The writer is bound to explore all areas of human experience. The whole of life must be open to his voyage of discovery, he must sail as far as he can and his only duty is to come back with the truth as he sees it. There can’t be ‘no go’ areas in the world of art, and the writer who cuts short a line of work for fear of shocking some people or ‘giving offence’ is untrue to his calling. But lawyers are trained on ‘no go’ areas. They are accustomed to find truth concealed behind barriers marked ‘inadmissible evidence’. They cannot accept that it’s a writer’s duty to reveal all truths however unpalatable. I tried my best to explain this to the Court of Appeal in the Last Exit case and the Judges listened with great care and attention. The proposition which must be elementary to all students of literature came to their Lordships as an apparent surprise. They looked like three poets who had just been told that you may not call expert evidence on the point the Jury has to decide.
An easier argument in the case was that the descriptions of homosexual prostitution and drug-taking in the book were so revolting that, far from turning anyone on to such practices, they would cause a sharp upswing in the marriage rate and the consumption of unadulterated ‘Old Holborn’ tobacco. The Judges were impressed by this argument which became known as the ‘Aversion Theory’ and withstood the test of a good many obscenity cases. The Court also ruled out the more usual meanings of the word ‘obscene’ which the trial Judge had given them. Publishing a book that was merely disgusting, or immoral, or erotic, or rude was clearly not a crime: it had to be blessed with the mysterious ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’. In the end the Court allowed John Calder’s and Marion Boyars’ appeal and set aside the conviction. Last Exit became a best-seller for a short while and I was led into a new department of law which I, in my more elevated moments, called arguments about free speech, but most of the friendly hacks in the robing-room call ‘dirty-book cases’.
I became more and more aware of the gulf that is fixed between the law and any sort of literature. One of the most difficult things to explain to Courts is that writers don’t necessarily approve of their characters’ behaviour. Because Shakespeare wrote Othello and Macbeth it doesn’t mean that he approved of wife murder and the stabbing of house guests. The putting-out of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear is a deeply disturbing, shocking and horrific scene; but it tells a terrible truth about man’s inhumanity to man. The purpose of a play, Shakespeare said, is to hold a mirror up to nature: censorship laws would ensure that the mirror is a rose-coloured distortion.
Courts are very unclear about the effect of books on readers. Reading is done in a world of the imagination which has, it would appear, little direct result on the reader’s behaviour. I suppose the worst crime is murder and murder is nowhere written about more freely than in the works of Agatha Christie. If books had the effect claimed for them by the censors, every English country house would have a bloodstained butler in the library, dead with a knife between his shoulder blades. James Bond, licensed to kill, is read about and enjoyed by millions of inoffensive people who catch the train to the office every day and have never killed anyone with a karate chop or slept with a Chinese air hostess. It has been said that it is a strange anomaly of the censoring attitude that murder is against the law, but it is no crime to write about it. Sex is not against the law, but to write about it has often been held a criminal offence.
Doing these cases I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the
disbelief suspended. The attempts of the law to control the written word seemed to me dangerous and likely to put our Courts of Justice in a somewhat ridiculous light. I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
One of the difficulties of laws which tried to control books and habits of reading was that they assumed that our society was as one, as it no doubt was in 1868 when Lord Cockburn made his resonant pronouncement, and not a loose federation of groups with their own languages, customs, taboos, freedoms, courting habits and senses of morality. In England the moral values of a group of retired army officers and their wives frequenting a golf course in Worthing are not the same as those of a crowd of art students in a Kings Cross squat. What appears permissible in the Surrey commuter belt, among bright young advertising men and their wives, would be looked on with horror by the Puritan Pakistanis of Bradford. Of course all these groups must be subject to a basic strongly enforced criminal law; they must not be allowed to assault or pillage or rape or rob one another. But in such a society, tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law, it has always seemed to me, is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it.
And it is significant that the attempted use of force is all one way. I did not wish to compel any member of the Festival of Light to sit through Oh, Calcutta! or read Gay News, although they do appear, no doubt from the highest motives and in the spirit of martyrdom, quite prepared to submit themselves to such works in the call of duty. No one, in the whole chequered history of censorship, has ever questioned anyone’s right not to read a book, to stay away from a play or not to visit a cinema. No one has ever suggested the compulsory sale of television sets without the button necessary to switch them off if you don’t like the picture.
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