by Jean Devanny
‘Probably,’ she went on, ‘the book was banned because of its brutality, but that cannot be helped, for it is a true story of New Zealand country life. I know it is true. I have lived in the country and have seen for myself.
‘Naturally I was very disappointed at my book being banned here, but it is possible the reason is that it would have been a bad advertisement for New Zealand. It would, too. But I repeat, it is all true. Then, again, a good deal of the opposition to the book might be political. I cannot disassociate my writings from my Socialistic views, and the book was written with a purpose.
‘However, the censors here have given the book the best advertisement it could have. My publishers advise me they are delighted with the sales in England. There were a couple of chapters at the end cut out and I am sorry for that. It may be said that the book is brutal, but intellectual people who have read it agree that for me to draw a logical conclusion I could not have ended it in any other way. What I have written is history down through the ages, and my theme was the subjugation of woman in all time. The title is chosen because the woman is butchered. It is a materialistic conception of history. Only a scientific Socialist will fully comprehend my object.’15
‘I am not surprised that my book has been banned,’ said Mrs Devanny.
‘I know it is horrible, brutal, revolting. But life is brutal—brutal to women, working women.’
‘Why did you choose that title, “The Butcher Shop,” ’ I asked.
‘Because the woman is butchered in life.’
‘I wrote that book with a purpose. Always I have known the brutality of life, not in my own home, but I have been actively engaged in the Labour cause, and as a social worker I have learnt a great deal. As a married woman with two children, I am not inexperienced. I know the problem underlying home life. Other writers have attacked this subject, but usually they chose a woman who is childless. That problem is simple. It is where there are children that the real problem arises. In writing this story with all its vivid brutality, I have taken every scene from life. I have endeavoured to show the subjugation of woman from ancient times. It is the man who chooses his mate—not the woman.’
‘Does she not sometimes, by subtle, less direct methods, have a hand in the choice?’
She swept the suggestion aside.
‘It is a man’s prerogative to make the choice. The wife has been merely a chattel. I am not advocating polyandry, which means more husbands than one, but showing life as it is, stressing phases. Unfortunately, my publishers have cut out a couple of chapters at the end which included my philosophy and were really the key to the story. In this I had fully explained my theme which, as I have told you, is based on the materialistic conception of history. As the story stands, the average person thinks it is a sex story. It is not. Only a scientific socialist will fully comprehend my true objective.’16
‘When I tell you why I am against the present system of society you may say that I am an embittered woman, a depressing woman (some say that my books are depressing). I am a revolutionary, if you like. But I do not feel particularly soured of soul. I don’t try to depress my readers. What have I against this system then? Well, we came to Australia from New Zealand about 15 months ago because we intended to go to England, where the field of writing is less parochial and conservative, and partly because I thought it would benefit my son Karl’s health. My husband went into business, and because of the economic factors against him he failed immediately. He is a good workman, and there is no work for him to do. My daughter has trained as a musician and a typist, and there is no job for her either. My son’s delicate health debars him from being anything but an art student. We had to live.
‘Until a few weeks ago I was working in a cafe in Her Majesty’s Arcade, Sydney. Perhaps you did not know this. I still get a little money from my books. Since it was published in 1926 I have had about £400, proceeds from the ‘Butcher Shop.’ About 15,000 copies have been sold in England, and it has run into four editions. ‘The Butcher Shop’ was banned in New Zealand because the authorities were afraid that its revelations of life on a sheep station would affect migration to the Dominion. It was banned in Australia on the ground of obscenity….’17
Mrs Devanny does not appear to have been aware of her right, or perhaps did not think it worth it, to appeal against the Board’s decision—a right asserted by the Minister in a debate on censorship in Parliament in 1926. But the right was not otherwise made public. There were two Parliamentary debates on censorship in the General Assembly. In the first, in which John A. Lee (Labour member for Auckland East) and the Leader of the Labour Party H. E. Holland took part, the Labour members, who were more interested in political censorship than indecency, complained of secrecy and of official ignorance as to which books were banned. The Minister of Customs, William Downie Stewart, promised to supply a list of restricted books.18 But though such lists were prepared, and from time to time amended or replaced, it is not clear who, apart from Customs officials, saw them. Three years later, on 1 October 1929, both Peter Fraser and Harry Holland were complaining that no list was available, and W. B. Taverner, the Minister of Customs of the year-old United Party government, agreed to make available the complete list, which, he said, contained 400 titles.19 Yet it was not till September 1935 (in the last days of the Coalition Government of 1931-5) that E. D. Good, the recently-appointed Comptroller of Customs, supplied such a list to Wellington City Library, as a result of a verbal request from the Librarian. The Librarian had this, and subsequent lists and amendments issued during the 1930s and 1940s, bound and kept. The last of these in which The Butcher Shop appears was a complete list published on 19 April 1938.20
In that year, in spite of there being a Labour Government in office, the Customs Department enforced its decision for the last time, when the bookseller Thomas Avery of New Plymouth imported two copies. In recommending that delivery be not granted the Comptroller of Customs not only cited the opinion of the original Board, he ventured a literary opinion of his own. According to Pat Lawlor, the Censorship Appeal Board, though it was revived for a while in 1935 with two new members, had ceased to operate.21 The Comptroller-General’s opinion was at least as competent as that of the original Board:
Such a plot is, of course, fairly common in these days, but in this case the matter is dealt with in a most sordid manner: while perhaps if the book was first referred for consideration at the present time we might not prohibit it as actually indecent I do not think that any good purpose would be served by removing it from the list of publications which have been prohibited from importation. To my mind the book has no real literary merit.22
The Comptroller pointed out that the publisher had not appealed against the 1926 decision. Mark Fagan, Member of the Executive Council (presumably acting on behalf of the Minister of Customs, Walter Nash) approved the Comptroller’s recommendation. There was no further complete list of restricted publications till 1958, and though The Butcher Shop had not been included in any of the interim lists of deletions, it was not present in the 1958 list.23 By that time Jean Devanny’s name and her novel had been largely forgotten in New Zealand.
But not entirely. There was a clear month between the arrival of the first copies of the book in New Zealand and the decision of the censors, and according to Nelle Scanlan the early shipments had sold out before the book was banned. Several New Zealand libraries hold—or held—copies of the first edition accessioned in 1926. In Auckland Public and Invercargill Public they were presumably kept in cupboards during the ban. The Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and the McNab Collection at the Dunedin Public Library, being closed access collections, did not need to restrict their copies. New Plymouth Public Library acquired a 1926 edition by donation somewhere in the late twenties or early thirties, during the ban. Even the General Assembly Library, when G. H. Scholefield was Librarian, acquired a 1928 edition in that year, during the ban, presumably for the reading of Members of Parliament. (This copy was found to be missing
in 1960.)
In late 1946 the Library of the Auckland Museum and Institute was the first of a number of libraries to acquire a copy of The Butcher Shop from a dealer. A pencilled entry on the inside back cover: ‘New Zealand novel formerly censored’, made presumably by the dealer, indicates that though the ban had not been lifted, it was confidently considered in the book trade to be a thing of the past. Gradually through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, most of the major libraries in New Zealand acquired copies by donation or from private collections or dealers.
Very shortly after she moved to Sydney Jean Devanny gave a lecture at the Aeolian Hall on ‘Literature and Morality’ in which she repudiated any form of censorship. ‘She contended’, it was reported, ‘that censorship by the State was a far greater evil in itself than any it proposed to cure.’ The report continues to summarize her argument: ‘Censorship had never yet succeeded in doing more than draw attention to the forbidden thing. It always defeated its own object.’24
It is ironic that it was this very appearance in public that led to the censorship of The Butcher Shop in Australia. Jean Devanny cut a striking figure in her Eton crop and long gown with draperies of chiffon over her arms; and her witty point that the ones who needed protection from sexual candour in literature were not the young but the old, attracted a sensational report in The Daily Guardian, which was clipped and filed with the Customs and Excise Office at New South Wales.25 One item in the report, to which officers of the Department of Trade and Customs were to refer repeatedly, was the fact that The Butcher Shop had already been banned in New Zealand. Within three weeks six copies ordered by Dymock’s Book Arcade came to the attention of the Invoice Examining Officer, who read the book in the light of a pragmatic directive issued as recently as 29 August 1929 by the Comptroller-General of Customs.
Indecency in literature is hard to define, but a book that is restricted should be of such a nature that if taken into Court the probability would be that the book would be condemned.
The Invoice Examining Officer reported:
I have perused it and found it is a ‘sex’ novel. There are no passages that could be described as indecent although the sexual relations of the several characters are plainly stated.
The officer submitted that no action be taken. The Inspector of the Investigation Section, however, wanted a further opinion and referred it to a clerk of his section, C. J. Brossois, who produced eight sheets of plot-summary liberally illustrated with quotations from the novel. Mr Brossois concluded:
The philosophy expounded by the author is pernicious. It assails the fundamentals of present-day society and in advocating loose morals for married people constitutes a definite danger to impressionable youth. It will be noted that the volume has already been banned in New Zealand vide the attached clipping from the ‘Daily Guardian’.
He submitted that the book was indecent in terms of Section 52(c) of the Customs Act 1901-25, of which Section 52 dealt with prohibited imports and subsection (c) with ‘blasphemous, indecent or obscene articles’.
The prohibition was imposed on 2 October 1929 by the Department of Trade and Customs and the Customs and Excise Office at New South Wales, and it lasted till 1958.
Jean Devanny was not to learn of the ban until the following February after Duckworth had received the six copies returned from Dymocks. She called personally at the Customs Office and finding it was indeed true that her book was banned in Australia, she noted that the ban had been imposed only three weeks before the accession of a new Government, the Labour administration of J. H. Scullin. She addressed a long persuasive letter to the Acting Minister of Customs, F. M. Forde, seeking a reversal. She pointed out that the book had been freely circulating for nearly four years in Australia, Great Britain, and America. She cited favourable extracts from reviews in nine British journals. She claimed that in New Zealand Herbert Baillie had told her that the criticism of the ban had been so strong that he had informed Downie Stewart ‘he would never ban another book’. She was aggrieved that a serious work like her own should be banned while commercially motivated pornography was freely sold. But more pointedly she appealed to the Minister as one Labour supporter to another by suggesting that she had been the victim of party-political animosity of ‘the Tories … in possession of the Benches’ in New Zealand in 1926, and that the Labour Party in the House had fought the ban. She implied a political as well as literary manifesto in her distinction between ‘frank and open discussion of the social and sexual problems we spend our lives trying to readjust’ as practised by ‘we writers of the younger and Labor school’ and ‘lurid descriptions of the sexual depravity of the moneyed classes’. An example of deliberate pornography currently circulating in Australia was George S. Viereck and Paul Eldridge’s My First Two Thousand Years: the Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (New York, Macaulay, and London, Duckworth, 1928). She insisted that she approved of laws against obscenity.
F. M. Forde was sufficiently impressed by her letter to call for a further report on the book which was duly supplied by Ernest Hall, the Comptroller-General, whose opinion was that The Butcher Shop was indecent and should continue to be prohibited. Forde examined the book himself before regretting that he was unable to vary the earlier decision.
It is in this context that one should read the interview Jean Devanny gave to Zora Cross (‘Bernice May’) in the Australian Woman’s Mirror in July. By this time she sees, or claims to see, The Butcher Shop as only the first novel of a writer in mid-career.26 In the interview reported in the Otago Witness from Sydney, in December 1930, it is clear that she had adopted Australia as a home more receptive to her ideas than New Zealand had been.
The last official notice of The Butcher Shop in the documents accessible in Australian Archives is in 1932. Jean Devanny’s departure in 1931 for the Soviet Union and for the 8th World Congress of the Workers’ International Relief in Berlin in October 1931 had attracted official attention, and in anticipation of her return a confidential memorandum (which I have not seen) was sent to the Collector of Customs at Sydney by the Commonwealth Investigation Branch as early as 7 August. (Another, from the Department of Home Affairs, went to Fremantle in September.) On her arrival at Sydney on the S.S. Neckar on 29 January 1932 her baggage was thoroughly searched. Three political pamphlets by Maxim Gorky and the roneo’d documents relating to the Congress were examined in the light of a Proclamation of 19 December 1929 prohibiting literature advocating the violent overthrow of the Government, and were cleared. But Jean Devanny brought with her a copy of the German translation of The Butcher Shop and this was seized. It was in vain that she called at the Customs office to assert that this was her personal author’s copy. Hal Devanny called at the office to pick up the Gorky pamphlets, and Die Herrin was duly (to quote the official minute) ‘put away’, and (in the company of James Hanley’s Boy) was listed among Hollywood Nights, Paris Frolics, and The Virgin’s Progress.
But before the prohibition was imposed in Australia a good many Australian readers must have had access to The Butcher Shop.
In Australia The Butcher Shop was in fact only one of many victims of a restrictive censorship policy that began in April 1929 with the banning of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Although it was initiated by a Minister for Trade and Customs (Henry S. Gullett) in the last months of the Nationalist-Country Party coalition government, it was continued by the succeeding Labour and United Australia Party governments. The Department’s test as explained by the New South Wales Collector of Customs, W. H. Barkley, in May 1930 was ‘whether an average householder would accept the book in question as reading for his family’.27 By 1936 the prohibited list, which included political pamphlets and pulp fiction as well as a number of outstanding works of literature, contained about 5,000 titles—including Jean Devanny’s The Virtuous Courtesan, which had been added shortly after publication. In 1937 the Minister, T. W. White, initiated a more liberal policy by setting up a Literature Censorship Board to whose advice he would pay attention. There
was machinery for appeal. The first Board consisted of two teachers of languages and literature at Canberra University College, J. F. M. Haydon and Dr L. H. Allen, and the National Librarian, Kenneth Binns. Although the Board released a hundred or so books within two years, including such classics as Moll Flanders, Ulysses, Farewell to Arms, Brave New World, and John Dos Passos’s 1919, the prohibited list was still extensive and included Jean Devanny’s two novels. (And in 1941 the restriction on Ulysses was reimposed.)
In 1957 the Minister for Customs and Excise, Senator Denham Henty, responded to a public outcry against the banning of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye to further liberalize his Department’s censorship policy. He announced that books of literary pretension were to be referred to the Literature Censorship Board, which now consisted of Dr Allen, Kenneth Binns, E. R. Bryan, Professor of English at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, and D. P. Scales, Professor of French at Canberra University College. He also asked the Board to examine the existing list of prohibited books with a view to releasing them. It was thus that The Butcher Shop (in the company of such fellow-prisoners of roughly a quarter of a century as Norman Lindsay’s Redheap, Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre and John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra) was released from the prohibited list in Australia in 1958.
Jean Devanny’s comment was concerned for her fellow-writers. In a letter to the Sydney Morning Herald she welcomed the new policy but pointed out that it affected only imported books, and that books published in Australia were subject to various State censorship laws, which often caused Australian publishers ‘to reject sincere work by Australian writers portraying aspects of social life essential to a clear picture of the whole’.28 It is a comment that throws light on her conception of the function of those writers whose aims she sympathised with and reveals the consistency, from the beginning to the end of her writing career, of her conviction that censorship was inimical to those aims.
