Meanjin had been consistently rejecting most of the new writers.
Où Est le Porno?
Norman Bartlett
(from Meanjin, 1/1971)
London
In these days of mounting inflation the London Underground looks tatty and neglected. Filthy platforms and dirty carriages illustrate Galbraith’s contention that while private enterprise can pass on rising costs the public sector finds it harder and harder to do so. The result is that we have new model cars every season while public transport is slowly wasting away. The advertisements in London’s tubes certainly suggest that private enterprise in contemporary England is entirely ‘with it’ in its effort to sell what most people don’t need or could do without.
Dennis Pryor suggested in Meanjin Quarterly 4/1970 that graffito is the folk literature of a literature. In London, on my observation, graffito is at a pretty low ebb. Certainly it seldom appears in the Underground (or they wash it off pretty quickly, which I refuse to believe) and seems confined to: ‘Smash the Paks’, ‘Nigs – out’, ‘Powell is Right: England for the English’ and a mysterious ‘SHED’ which nobody has yet been able to explain to me.
Maybe, as Dorothy Pickles suggests, the Welfare State for all, plus a dash of affluence for many, have in the words of the Economist ‘bred a dangerous disinclination to take any interest in political affairs, beyond the intermittent recording of a vote’. Yet London demos, whether against blood sports or the Industrial Relations Bill, usually produce plenty of spectators as well as players so I can only assume that just now the semi-literate on the Right content themselves with folk-literature while the activists of the Left do rather than document.
Whatever the explanation, you can better obtain the genuine feel of the Great Wen, as Cobbett called it, by studying the advertisements in the Underground than from wall slogans or, for that matter, from current sociological treatises which, because of the exigencies of research and publications, are often out of date before they are published. These advertisements mostly change from month to month and keep up with (or mould?) changing tastes. Just now they suggest that London is enjoying what the Times decorously describes as ‘a copulation explosion’ and the common man considers ‘a fucking beano’.
A substantial percentage of the advertisements that comprise the icons of modern commerce in the Underground, on the walls beside escalators or in lifts, are ‘sexy’. No one has time to stop and study these advertisements so they confine themselves to the straightforward old-fashioned titillation of breast and buttock, or a discreet display of what used to be called the ‘altogether’. The captions are equally simple. This sort of thing: ‘The no panties panties’, ‘Look naked. Feel fully clothed’, ‘Little Flirt, by Silhouette’.
After the escalators the appeal becomes more and more sophisticated. This morning, for instance, I was faced at the entrance of the station tunnel with a large new poster showing a couple in earnest confrontation, with the caption: ‘To bed or not to bed, that is the twist.’ I hadn’t the slightest idea what the twist is and nobody I saw had time to stop and find out. At the other end of the tunnel foot-high figures gave the telephone number where those in need can obtain ‘Confidential Pregnancy Tests’.
When such advertisements are commonplace, open or snide, pornography is obviously widely acceptable. For instance, the 36pt headlines in the Mirror read: ‘I had to sit on a big bed. The nuns were all around completely naked. Then two nuns jumped on the bed …’ The quote was from a boy actor, aged fourteen, who was telling the story of his part in ‘a naughty frolic’ in a new film, The Devils, an exposure of ‘sex-crazy nuns in 17th-century France’, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed, ‘being filmed behind locked doors by controversial director Ken Russell at Pinewood Studios’. After the above scene the boy actor and another boy were told to leave ‘because they were going to do something we were not allowed to watch’. Meanwhile, according to the Mirror, Actors Equity was investigating complaints by actresses that they were sexually assaulted by male extras during a nude scene in the film.
According to Observer critic George Melly, Ken Russell is ‘a serious artist’ and ‘always a great talent …’ Early in 1970 he produced ‘a controversial’ (blessed word) television film Dance of the Seven Veils, full of sex and sadism, to ‘shock complacent critics and viewers’. The film was a ‘comic strip’ biographical caricature of the composer Richard Strauss (1864–1949). In one scene Russell illustrated Strauss’ Alpine Symphony by showing a group of British soldiers holding the composer while his wife is not only raped but is seen to enjoy the experience. ‘It was disturbingly well-photographed,’ said Melly, ‘but what did it mean?’
Pamela Hansford Johnson asks a similar question in her book On Iniquity, reviewing a play in which the author showed, on stage, a group of men kicking a baby to death. At least this play had some contemporary significance but what artistic or sociological purpose does Russell serve by showing a series of violent and sadistic scenes contingent to Strauss’ music? Unless, of course, he was trying to show that Strauss was ‘a string plucked by the Zeitgeist’. If so, he might do well to remember what the Zeitgeist is in Britain today, and how many artists, as well as advertising men, are allowing themselves to be plucked by it.
Ken Russell may be genuine in his aim to ‘shock people into a realization of their responsibilities’ by the posthumous character assassination of Strauss, or by telling what he thinks went on in 17th-century convents, but few critics claim similar high-minded motives for the men who produce what Variety called ‘groin-grinders’, the wave of ‘sexploitation’ now flooding British cinemas.
‘Films whose main appeal is sex, overt and sometimes pervert, have been bringing the masses back to the cinema,’ says the Economist. Certainly the British public seem quite willing to pay big money for the pleasure of being shocked by Mr Russell and his fellow-producers. ‘The irony behind the film censor’s resignation,’ said the Evening Standard, ‘is that a man whose working rule was “What will the public stand for?” has discovered that the public will stand for anything that the law does not step in and deny them.’
A year ago there were five ‘sexploitation’ movies showing in the West End. There are now about twenty, either homemade or imported from America, Germany or Italy. The manager of a London circuit admitted, ‘If we put on sex films the takings go up 10 or 15 per cent.’ The trade paper Today’s Cinema calls ‘sex films’ a ‘licence to print money’ and directs managers towards pornography as a guarantee of ‘big and ever increasing business’.
The Financial Times, in an article announcing that the secretary of the British Board of Film Censors intended to resign (‘Censor Quits Sex Jungle’ read one headline), reported that during the past year not only did ‘the full range of four-letter words have currency on the screen’ but ‘every aspect of sexual activity has been shown or simulated on the screens of public cinemas in the United Kingdom’, including ‘full frontal male nudity … with increasing frequency’, plus ‘physical homosexual activity’ including ‘general manual-genital contact’. The feature said it was arguable that the re-admission of four-letter words to general currency would enrich the language and that only the prurient could find harm in simple nudity. He was worried, however, about the public representation of full sexual activity for box-office returns.
The tendency to cash in on sex also pervades the legitimate theatre, while serious as well as popular literature is already far along the same way. In London nowadays Soho is full of ‘dirty’ bookshops which, beside the usual ‘girlie’ magazines, provide inner sanctums where the connoisseur of erotic literature can browse for the payment of between five shillings and four pounds an hour, according to the ‘quality’ of the perversion offered. More respectable bookshops offer a wide range of similar wares. Indeed, Claire Tomalin in a recent Observer ironically described the confusion of a young foreigner who asked in a leading London bookshop, ‘Où est le porno?’ He was quite sensibly hoping that it might, a
s in Sweden, have a shelf or corner of its own, like Westerns, SF or Crime.
‘Most novels carry a certain percentage of pornography nowadays,’ Claire Tomalin pointed out, ‘the way Edwardian novels carried descriptions of scenery; but when there’s little else to the book, shouldn’t it be treated as specialist literature?’
With things as they are there seems little doubt that before long England, with pretty general approval, will reach the same degree of permissiveness as Sweden and Denmark. The difference between Sweden and England, apart from intellectual irony, is that where the Swedes are cold and clinical the British tend to vulgarity and warmth. En masse, the Great British Public as yet probably don’t take pornography as seriously as the Swedes. Londoners in particular still tend to take it in the same bawdy spirit that the old musical hall comedians made popular: ‘There’s no ’arm in that, is there Guv’ner?’
Nevertheless even in England corruption has begun to creep in. Intellectuals are beginning to make a cult of the Marquis de Sade, and what the intellectuals approve today the mass media make popular tomorrow. As Gillian Hanson suggests in Original Skin (Stacey, 1970) the changed moral attitudes pioneered by books, films and plays with a claim to art are quickly taken up in a big way by shrewd entrepreneurs out to exploit the paying market that everywhere exists for pornography.
Oscar Wilde, who claimed that art was not concerned with good or evil but only with the creation of things that had some quality of beauty, also saw the way the wind was likely to blow: ‘A great artist invents a type, and life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.’ The point is that democratised art, do-as-you-please art, is commercially exploited art; an art cheap in itself and infinitely cheapening in its effect on people brought into daily contact with it.
Sigmund Freud and D. H. Lawrence are often quoted as exemplars of modern permissiveness. This is nonsense. Both in their own way were puritanical men who would have been horrified at popular interpretation of their ‘message’ of liberation. Both of them understand that the sexual appetite is not an uncontrollable animal urge but something we can adapt readily to widely differing social patterns. The community-induced super-ego is at least as important an element in our behaviour as the primeval id. Custom, convention and morality – in a word, civilization – condition courtship and copulation as well as fashion and manners. Or as Phillip Rieff (Freud, the Mind of the Moralist, 1960) puts it: ‘To prevent the expression of everything: that is the irreducible function of culture.’
The moral of all this is that when the full force of the great ‘sexploitation’ wave reaches Australia, as it surely will, the police and the Customs Department permitting, we should not kid ourselves that it is the advance of civilization. In London Australian expatriates are fond of congratulating themselves on escaping from our ‘cultural deserts’ for ‘the most civilized capital in the world’ where complete tolerance reigns. Many people find London’s current climate of ‘anything goes’ pleasant enough but it is a mistake to confuse a high degree of sophistication with a high state of civilization. Let me again quote Rieff: ‘… if nothing is prohibited, then there will be no transgressions. But in point of psychiatric and historical fact, it is No, rather than Yes, upon which all culture [and civilization] and inner development … depends.’
Once upon a time most Englishmen consciously or unconsciously regulated their conduct by convention and an appeal to common sense. They followed Swift and Burke in their belief that political and social progress was best guaranteed by the funded experience of their forefathers rather than by Rousseauean or similar Enthusiasms. As F. L. Lucas puts it, ‘they measured the stupidity of the individual … against the good sense and decency inherent in the social body …’ Nowadays, instead, they tend to base their thinking on the latest fashion in sophistication, what Northrop Frye calls ‘the clichés and stock responses that pour into the mind from conversation and the mass media’, including the advertising pages and hoardings.
The result is that reputable critics recommend the work of de Sade, Pauline Réage, Gilles de Rais and the Marquise de Brinvilliers as examples of ‘incredible decency’. For instance, back in June, the quality weeklies gave columns to reviews of a reprint of Pauline Réage’s famous piece of pornography The Story of O, with a preface by Jean Paulham of the French Academy, and recommendations from Graham Greene and Harold Pinter. It is, said J. G. Ballard, ‘a deeply moral homily’ about a girl who is chained, whipped and assaulted in a number of perverse ways before being led around on a metal chain from a ring bored through her genitals.
What we are witnessing in England today is a total abrogation of moral judgement and of aesthetic discrimination. On the one hand intellectuals are following the lead of Mme de Beauvoir in praise of de Sade, as ‘a great moralist’ because ‘he chose cruelty rather than indifference’ while on the other hand a growing public is encouraged to enjoy vicariously the wickedness de Sade recommends as purifying: murder, rape, incest, torture, sodomy, cannibalism, arson, coprophagy, necrophilism, and bestiality. Under such circumstances critics who, for fear of ridicule, either take the current fashion for granted or dare not argue against it, are committing the ultimate la trahison des clercs and are betraying their true function in society.
And a Catholic Poet’s View of Change
Les Murray was born in 1938 and raised on a dairy farm at Bunyah, on the lower north coast of New South Wales. Self-educated under the benign cover of several country schools and Sydney University, he worked as a storeman, science translator and public servant before Coming Out as a freelance author in 1971. He has published six books of verse and a collection of prose reviews and essays, and his latest work is a novel in sonnets, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, which explains the inner mystery of Australia.
I think my personal and family life have deepened and grown more satisfying over the last ten years; external events have had little to do with this, though. In politics, I entered the decade with some willed suspension of scepticism. Like most people, I dared to hope against hope a bit, but wasn’t prepared to give up anything I thought essential, so, like those who did, I went out largely unsatisfied. And, as always, I found affection and regard cutting clean across categories and prescriptive generalisations. Evidence like this suggests to me that the world won’t soon be solved. One political preoccupation which deepened and stayed with me was Australian republicanism, although I dreamed of a decentralised republic in which country people, my people, were no longer denigrated and destroyed. I also remain warmly grateful to Gough Whitlam for the Literature Board, a true blessing to primary producers.
Sidere Mens Eadem Mutato
a spiral of sonnets for Robert Ellis
Out of the Fifties, a time of picking your nose
while standing at attention in civilian clothes
we travelled luxury class in our drift to the city
not having a war, we went to university.
We learned to drink wine, to watch Swedish movies, and pass
as members, or members-in-law, of the middle class
but not in those first days when, stodge-fed, repressed,
curfewed and resented, we were the landladies’ harvest.
I had meant to write a stiff poem about that, to be
entitled NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF MRS HARVEY
it might have been unkind, in parts – but then, to be honest
one did evict me for eating my dessert first
and even from the kindliest, we were
estranged, as from parents, in a green Verona
a nail-biting fiefdom of suede boots, concupiscence, tea,
a garden pruned by the Herald angels yearly.
In that supermarket of styles, with many a setback
we tried everything on, from Law School Augustan to rat pack
and though in Chinese my progress was smooth up to K’ung
and in German I mastered the words that follow Achtung
in
my slow-cycling mind an eloquence not yet articulate
was trying to say Youth. This. I will take it straight.
And you were losing your bush millenarian faith – I
remember your dread of the Wrath on first tasting coffee.
We were reading Fisher Library, addressing gargoyles on the stair,
drafting self after self on Spir-O-Bind notepaper
as the tidal freshers poured in, with hard things to learn
in increasing droves they were getting off at Redfern.
Literate Australia was British, or babu at least,
before Vietnam and the American conquest
career had overwhelmed learning most deeply back then:
a major in English made one a minor Englishman
and woe betide those who stepped off the duckboards of that.
Slacking and depth were a single morass. But a spirit
of unresolved life caught more and more in its powerful
field. It slowed their life to bulk wine and pool.
Signals had to be found. The day you gave up fornication
we took your WetChex and, by insufflation,
made fat balloons of them, to glisten aloft in the sun
above the Quad, the Great Hall, the Carillion –
and that was Day One in the decade of chickens-come-home
that day kids began smoking the armpit hairs of wisdom.
It is some while since we roomed at Bondi Beach
and heard the beltman crying each to each.
Good friends we made while snatching culture between
the cogs of the System (they turned slower then)
reemerge, and improve as their outlines grow more clear
(but where’s Lesley now? and Jacqueline, what of her?)
Days of Wine and Rage Page 7
