The administration of the censorship laws entails dividing society into the sensible and the idiotic, the strong and the weaker brethren, and we all know, of course, where we belong. Time and again in obscenity cases Judges and barristers say to Juries, ‘Of course, we’ve all read stuff like this for years and it doesn’t affect us [and you can be sure it doesn’t or there would be permanent orgies in the Judges’ chambers, bondage suits on sale in Chancery Lane and the sound of whips echoing from the Inns of Court], but there are people, members of the Jury, whom you may think would be affected …’ The assumption is that there is always a second-class citizen, who, at the glimpse of a doubtful paragraph or dubious magazine, would go uncontrollably mad. The attitude of censorship depends on the assumption that there is a superior type of person qualified to tell the rest of us what it is good for us to read.
The English law which seeks to control what our citizens read or write is ancient, confused and has not, on the whole, shown the Courts that administer it in a particularly favourable light. I came to believe that this is because such a law is unnecessary and inoperable, and its existence is unfortunate not only because it attacks free speech but because its somewhat ridiculous results bring the law into disrepute. I also thought that such a law is undesirable for this reason. If you commit a murder or a robbery, it is perfectly clear to you that you are doing so. If you take part in an illegal publication, you may have no idea that you have committed a crime at all until months later when a Jury decides whether or not the words you have published are ‘obscene’ or in any way offend against the law. Life is difficult enough for the ordinary citizen without the existence of crimes into which he or she may blunder without any intention of offending or any way of knowing that what has been done is in fact illegal.
The existence of censorship laws, although now admittedly mostly applied to books no one would miss, has been used in the past as a political weapon. The blasphemy laws were used to imprison Chartists who sold the works of Tom Paine. More recently the publisher of a book called The Little Red Schoolbook was successfully prosecuted under the obscenity laws. Among some much-needed advice on contraception, the book asked awkward questions about whether a capitalist society does not deliberately keep the majority of its citizens under-educated in order that they may be obedient and content with menial tasks. The question may have been naive, but the fact that it challenged our brand of democracy may have had something to do with its prosecution.
Slogging round the Criminal Courts in the defence of literary values, I became increasingly aware of the presence of Mrs Mary Whitehouse. At first she appeared as a lonely figure. At a later trial she stood with her adherents outside the Court when the Jury had retired, apparently praying that they might be guided to a conviction. I came to have a great deal of respect for her courage and, indeed, for her cunning as a debater. During the Oz trial we took part in a debate in the Cambridge Union with Richard Neville, who was then on bail. The hall was packed to the rafters with somewhat over-excited students and, when Mrs Whitehouse rose to speak, someone lowered a skull over her head which bore the legend ‘Alas, poor Muggeridge, I knew him well’. She continued her attack upon the powers of profanity and darkness unperturbed.
I had a friend, a journalist, who went up to Mrs Whitehouse outside a court and told her that a film was to be made of her life starring Dame Anna Neagle. She seemed extremely gratified. Later he told her that the casting had been changed and she was to be played by Jessie Matthews who was better at ballroom dancing. He alleged that Mrs Whitehouse had shown some slight disappointment.
Brought up by a father who questioned everything, raised as an only child who was unable to sink himself loyally into a group or take the moral lectures of headmasters seriously, these cases suited me better than struggles between warring spouses. I found it was occasionally possible, during such trials, to make Juries and even Judges laugh, and laughter is as much an enemy to the laws of censorship as it is to the heavy breathing and appalling humourlessness of most pornography.
However, a practice in obscenity cases is held, by many lawyers, to be a few degrees less respectable than dealing with murder or armed robbery. I remember one day, when I was appearing for a ‘gay’ magazine, there was a small posse of homosexuals holding up placards outside the Old Bailey. When I went into the robing-room to put on the legal fancy dress, an old silk greeted me disapprovingly from the shadows by growling, ‘Well, Mortimer. I see you’ve got your friends from Rent-a-Bum outside today.’
Among the anomalies of censorship in the sixties was the strange figure of the Lord Chamberlain, a curious official usually concerned with such weighty matters as keeping the co-respondents in divorce cases off the Queen’s Lawn at Ascot. The Lord Chamberlain had been given the task of licensing plays by an Act of Parliament passed in 1737, and in 1843 was enjoined to prevent the production of any play in the interest of ‘good manners, decorum, or for the public peace’. In the interests of good manners and decorum successive Lord Chamberlains had banned works by Shelley, Ibsen, Wilde, Shaw, Granville-Barker and John Osborne. Marc Connelly’s play Green Pastures was banned because an actor appeared as God. Many of the playwrights of the sixties treasured letters from the Lord Chamberlain insisting on alterations to their dialogue. This authority wrote to Charles Wood, ‘Wherever the word “shit” appears it must be changed to “it” ’, and to M. Jean Genet, author of The Balcony, ‘The huge Spanish Crucifixion must not be visible from the brothel room’. The Lord Chamberlain also forbade Mr Wood to use the expressions ‘I’ll have your cobblers’ and ‘I’ll have your taters’ in his play Meals on Wheels and was seriously perturbed when the actors substituted the mysterious and sinister phrase, ‘I’ll have your ollies’.
There were many suggestions afoot to improve on this office, but it did seem to me that a ridiculous censor was easier to remove than a rational one. With Ken Tynan among many others, I did my best, through the Arts Council, to organize the abolition of the Lords Chamberlain and the passing of the ‘Theatres Act’ which protected plays from private prosecution. As my own works dealt largely with old men and middle-class failures, they did not contain much material likely to offend the Chamberlain; however he had insisted that one line in The Wrong Side of the Park which went, ‘With the single exception of your mother I’ve never had a woman in my life’ be changed to, ‘I’ve never been with a woman in my life’, which seemed to me a typically enigmatic command. In the course of our campaign I called on the then Lord Chamberlain to inquire if he wished to be abolished. Lord Cobbold, a banker who had been Lord Chamberlain of Her Majesty’s Household since 1963, was a charming gentleman who seemed prepared to give up his onerous theatrical duties without too much of a struggle. When I asked him what subject he would be most likely to ban in a play, irrespective of its merits as a work of art, he answered with the single word ‘Regicide’, which seemed to rule out a good deal of Greek drama as well as many of the works of Shakespeare.
In the course of time, prosecutions of serious works gave way to cases solely concerned with what the more pretentious booksellers would call ‘adult reading matter of an exotic nature’. Poorly produced and monotonously written, such books are, on the whole, less sexually stimulating than the omnibus edition of The Archers and could, perhaps, best be prosecuted under the Trades Descriptions Act as failing to fulful their erotic promises. However a new defence was evolved which was roughly to the effect that such works were for the public good in that they relieved complexes, removed inhibitions, and acted as a safe substitute for sex with living people. In that period of the obscenity cases, barristers toured the country with a team of psychiatrists and doctors who were prepared to say, in various provincial centres, that masturbation is good for you. One such doctor had a joke. This concerned a boy who said to his mother, ‘If it really makes you blind can I just do it until I become short-sighted?’ Sometimes this joke went down well with Juries, sometimes it fell like a lead balloon.
Unhappil
y, one of these cases was lost and the unwise bookseller appealed to the House of Lords. No one has felt the full glory of a barrister’s life who has not, in wig and gown, been called to the podium in the committee room of the House of Lords by an official in full evening dress and, on a wet Monday morning, lectured five elderly Law Lords in lounge suits on the virtues of masturbation. Their Lordships had no difficulty in deciding that the Obscene Publications Act did not permit such evidence to be given, and the ‘joke’ was heard no more in the land.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I have boasted, with no particular vanity, of being the best playwright ever to have defended a murderer at the Central Criminal Court. I have said this to the murderers I have defended. I doubt whether they have felt particularly encouraged. For them the Old Bailey is far removed from any sort of place of entertainment. I once congratulated a Jury on having sat through what was undoubtedly the most boring case of the year, and the Judge was perfectly correct in his summing-up when he said, ‘The sole purpose of the criminal law is not to amuse Mr Mortimer.’
And yet the practice of advocacy can only be a matter of deep interest to the writer whose daily obsession is with words. Standing to address a Jury, looking, as some have done, for a friend to support or an enemy to convert, the advocate tests the immediate effect of language. Like the actor he must lower or raise his voice to ensure attention. He must make his listeners feel that he is talking to them alone and yet he must seek for a combined response. In Court the right argument in the correct words may have the most obvious results; years of a man’s or woman’s life may depend on them. And in the theatre words have to prove themselves immediately, by solid laughter which unites an audience, or by that attentive silence when even the most bronchial listeners forget to cough, which is the greatest compliment that can be paid to the writer.
Oratory is no longer, as it was in classical times, or in the eighteenth century, considered an art. Most politicians’ speeches are merely shrill assertions of their opponents’ errors, and addresses in Court have become dull rehearsals of facts. It is as though we have become scared of our emotions and, if there are few calls now to the sense of freedom or natural justice, it may be because it’s thought that such ideals would no longer interest an audience who, it is assumed, only care about wage differentials, law and order and 2p off the income tax. Alexander Herzen, who managed to preserve and develop his political beliefs during the gloomiest days of Czarist tyranny, said, ‘You can waken men only by dreaming their dreams more clearly than they can dream them themselves, not by demonstrating their lives as geometrical theorems are demonstrated.’ That, it seems to me, is a lesson which needs to be learnt, not only by the writer before his blank sheet of paper, but by everyone who gets up to make a speech.
And yet how many cases are won by advocacy? No doubt the answer is far, far fewer than the advocate cares to think. The facts of the matter are dealt to the barrister, like a hand at cards, or a bundle of inherited or acquired characteristics. At first glance he can tell if it is a rotten case or a winner and, although in the course of the argument he may persuade himself that a different result is possible, most cases turn out exactly as you had thought they would in the first half hour after undoing the tape and opening the brief. Clearly cases and hands at bridge can be lost, just as lives can be thrown away, by carelessness, over-confidence, letting in unnecessary evidence, failing to lead out trumps or not noticing when the queen went. And the consequences of defeat can be mitigated. Skill and persuasion, in the vast majority of cases, can go no further: we are stuck with the cards we are dealt and have to act out, as well as we can, the lives which we have been allotted. ‘Everything is in other hands, Lucillius,’ wrote Seneca the Stoic. ‘Time alone is ours.’
I don’t know if the ‘marriage ending’ cards were dealt when we first stood on the beach in Ireland and Penelope was overcome with thoughts of death. Perhaps the course was set as we grew up far apart, in a faithless lawyer’s garden and a sceptical parson’s vicarage. At any rate the time had come to do what I had done for so many other people and plan a divorce. I remember a meeting we had, a lunch in the Rose Garden at Regent’s Park, to discuss the depressing details, the sorting out of money, the allocation of books and pictures, which go with funerals and the formal ending of a marriage.
I had had a minor dental disaster that morning, a part of the façade of a cap had come adrift and I went to have it stuck on again. My dentist at that time was a cheerful Australian who had a surgery complete with nurses in white mini-skirts, Vivaldi tapes and a pattern of coloured lights to keep you entertained while in the chair. Later my dentist disappeared in a mysterious fashion but that, as they say, is another story. I emerged from the ‘Son et Lumière’ with my tooth repaired to keep my open-air luncheon appointment with the wife who had once helped me by typing out my divorce petitions. She came to the Rose Garden Restaurant with her dog and put the lead and her packet of cigarettes and her lighter on the table. We sat in the sunshine and Penelope ordered spare ribs. It was extraordinarily peaceful as we sat surrounded by a silence which was only emphasized by the distant murmur of traffic. We talked, in perfect friendliness, and discussed our plans for the future. I remembered staying with her parents at the vicarage, the huge family meals, the feeling of daring and excitement as I left the scene of my lonely childhood and joined what seemed like a great colony of people whom I had later seen grow up and leave to live their separate lives. I remembered the places we had visited, the houses we had taken, the years we had spent writing and reading each other’s words, waiting, in terrible suspense, for each other’s smallest sign of approval. As we talked Penelope lifted a spare rib and bit into it.
Suddenly, and it was like a frozen frame in a movie, my wife sat, spare rib in hand, immobilized and with a look of horror. Then the film moved on again. She gathered up her dog, her cigarettes and her lighter and, without a word of explanation, she was gone from the Park.
I sat on at the table, half expecting her to return. I had a feeling of being suspended and lost in time. I might sit there, perhaps forever, and that table in that place might be the end of a journey and I would have to go no further. Or I could walk away from Regent’s Park into a new life and leave the Law Courts and the rehearsal rooms forever.
Thinking all these things I lifted the half-eaten spare rib from Penelope’s plate and bit into it. I felt a slight pull on a gum and then I realized that something was missing from my mouth. My exotic dentist had been too distracted by the miniskirts or the subliminal Vivaldi to fix the broken section of the cap on properly.
Before I had time to consider the full implications of the loss, the waitress said there was a telephone call for me. I went, puzzled, into the shadows of the restaurant, lifted the receiver and heard from Penelope who had just reached her house. She said she was sorry she had left so abruptly. I said that I understood perfectly and that it was not an easy thing for anyone to sit at lunch discussing a divorce. It wasn’t that exactly, she explained. What had happened was that, as she bit into her spare rib, a cap came off her tooth and she didn’t want to go on sitting with a mouth full of gap. Again I understood entirely and said we’d meet again soon, wouldn’t we?
I went out into the sunshine where the plates hadn’t yet been cleared away. And there was the spare rib which had captured fragments of dentistry from each of us and which held them tightly and remorselessly together.
Chapter Twenty-Six
At the end of the sixties I became, with waning interest, known for appearing in cases which were alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance. One evening I was in my flat minding my own business when the telephone rang. It was clearly being rung from a call box as there was a bleep, bleep, bleep and then the button was pressed and an unknown, middle-aged, female voice rang out. She asked me my name and I admitted to it.
‘I say, I hope you’re not having food?’
No, I reasurred her, I wasn’t having food.
‘I
’m on my way home to the country. I’m ringing you from Paddington Station.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘And you see, my children are grown up now and Frank, well, to put it mildly, Frank’s not the most lively companion.’
‘Who’s Frank?’
‘Oh, Frank’s my husband, of course. Frightfully respectable.’ She gave what I believe is known as a ‘light laugh’.
I didn’t reply to this and she asked, in a concerned way, ‘I say, are you sure you’re not having food?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘I wouldn’t want to pester you when you’re having food. But what I want to ask you is, do you think I ought to join the permissive society?’
Then she was silenced as her money ran out. I stood looking at the telephone, picturing a woman loaded with Harrods’ bags on her way home to Newbury, and wondered if everything had perhaps gone too far and the fabric of society, as they say in the House of Lords, was really coming apart at the seams. Then the telephone rang again. There was a bleep, bleep, bleep and more money was inserted.
‘I say, are you still there?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Thank goodness for that. I ran out of cash.’
‘So I heard.’
‘Well, what do you think? Shall I go in for the permissive?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘But you’re the expert.’
CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Page 24
