by A. S. Byatt
A. I reject all that. I am not interested in anarchy. I am an artist. A lot of nonsense is talked about those words, those words you don’t use—you can’t do anything with those words, it’s like studding your pages with gobs of exudations—those two words, “gobs” and “exudations,” are better words than “shit” and “snot,” they’re words you react to. If I want to upset you I can write in perfectly legitimate words a description of bliss, or hurt, or evacuation, which will leave a trace on your memory as though a knife had slid across your brain; I can leave a trace of these that won’t go. Poor old Lawrence tried to accommodate and tame those words, like old copper coins with the faces rubbed off, bum pennies for bun pennies. It won’t work because they only exist to shock. And no, I don’t write to pose or to shock, Mr. Weighall, I don’t.
Q. You don’t. You write to hurt—to slice our brains and our memories—
A. That is not illegitimate.
Q. Let me finish. You said earlier, and I quote: “I write what I have to, what I see. These are the fantasies people have …” You write the kinds of fantasies that are enacted in brothels and written down badly in dirty books in brown wrappers, Mr. Mason, but you write them in better words and make them more powerful. Do you not agree that they might hurt people just as much as these other pornographic works?
A. Hurt? Hurt? I don’t think those other things hurt, Mr. Weighall. I have been in those places, and I know, I have been amongst the incense and the poppies and the tawdry bits of silk and satin and tulle. I have seen grown men making fools of themselves in nappies with bottles, or loaded with heavy chains. I have seen judges pretending to be housemaids in frilly aprons and black stockings and I’ve seen postmen pretending to be judges and an eminent surgeon pretending to be a fire that could only be put out in a particularly disgusting way. If I wrote you a scientific treatise on these things, you couldn’t touch me—but I am an artist—meretrix, meretricious I may have been as a boy, porno-grapher I am not, I am an artist.
Q. You protest eloquently. You have not answered my question about your readers, Mr. Mason. You have not answered it. I put it to you that when you were a boy, Dr. Grisman Gould hurt your body and depraved your mind with a mixture of literature and cruelty—and that you are intent on passing on that hurt to the world, to your readers, to the possible victims of those of your readers who resemble your own betrayer.
A. You understand nothing. I loved him. He was not a tawdry Svengali. He was—he was—he is dead, it doesn’t matter what he was, he is not on trial, though he appears to be. He is dead, and I loved him, and I have not loved since, and shan’t.
Q. You have not answered my question. Hurt was done, you were depraved and corrupted, and you are passing that hurt on.
Jude, (to judge) Do I have to answer that? It—isn’t—a question. This is all nonsense.
Judge. It is a question of opinion. You need not answer it.
Jude. He need not have asked it.
Judge. The jury will please ignore the question.
Snitkin’s tape-recorder whirs. Augustine Weighall says he has no further questions, thus leaving the deleted question, the struck question, the non-question, indelibly engraved on the jurors’ minds as the climax of his case against Jude Mason.
Frederica leaves the court during the evidence of the next witness, a schoolmaster who confirms the stories of excesses at Swineburn, and asserts that he would have no objection to his charges reading Babbletower. She meets Alexander Wedderburn, wandering along the corridors. Alexander thinks the case is going badly for the Defence. He says that Augustine Weighall is much cleverer than Godfrey Hefferson-Brough. “He must have known something about Jude’s history,” says Alexander. “More than his own people did.”
“Probably met him in some brothel in Piccadilly,” says Frederica tartly. “They all dress up and port about, as my father used to say. Jude is an idiot. Why must he show off?”
“He said. He’s an artist.”
“So are you. You don’t.”
“The dreadful thing is, he’s potentially a better one. And they might put him in prison. He’s got no common sense. That’s his tragedy. I have. Abundantly. That’s mine.”
“Don’t you start talking in cheap epigrams. I hate Oscar Wilde.”
“So does Jude.”
“With the hate that dare not tell its name, I guess. Now I’m doing it.”
“You’re worried.”
“I never thought I’d say it, but I’ve got kind of attached to Jude. I never thought I’d agree with Canon Holly, but he is a kind of holy fool, a real idiot.”
• • •
The Defence’s final witness is the novelist Phyllis Pratt, Bowers and Eden’s only bestseller. Mrs. Pratt is wearing a pink suit over a floral shirt, and an amethyst cross on a silver chain. She addresses both the Counsel for the Defence, and later Sir Augustine, in a sensible, complicit, lemon-and-honey voice, tart and warm. She states that she has much enjoyed Babbletower—“quite a satisfactory experience, like a fairy story, with the punishment of folly and a few thrills to it, but never real enough to alarm anyone.” She says that as a vicar’s wife she has met “many tortured souls who have harmed others, or who would have liked to harm others” and believes that reading Babbletower would “on the whole, merely cheer such people up. That somebody knew, and could make fairytales out of it. Fairy stories and detective stories do much less harm than real reports of what went on in concentration camps, I think you’ll find. They put a kind of pink glow round it all, that takes it out of the sordid real world.”
Would she, Hefferson-Brough asks her, give it to her children to read?
“Any mother knows that some children can take anything and some cry and cry over the death of a seal or a Bambi and never quite recover. I think Mr. Mason made a little mistake calling his work a tale for children. It isn’t. Children don’t like explicit sex. They like dirty noses and dirty bottoms, not genitalia doing what genitalia are made for, or can be contorted to do. No, I’d be careful who I recommended it to. But one must be sensible, that goes for every grown-up book.”
Sir Augustine asks her, as he has asked all the defence witnesses, whether she was sexually moved by the book.
A. Of course I was. He’s a clever writer. I was moved by the bits that appealed to my particular fantasies, as I expect you were, and I laughed at some of the others, and I skipped some of the others, as I expect you would in normal circumstances.
Q. It can’t be normal reading for you, Mrs. Pratt. Your own books are grounded in realism, in village life, in domesticity, in the Church.
A. I heard you grilling Mr. Mason about fantasies. The heroine of my first book stabbed her husband in a real welter of gore when he pushed her too far. That was a fantasy, Sir Augustine, which would perhaps have become a fact, if it hadn’t got out on paper and cheered up a multitude of other vicars’ wives and other women indulging similar fantasies. What Mr. Mason said about fantasies and dreams was very wise. They save us, they save us from action.
Q. Even the warning dreams, the premonitory dreams, of murderers?
A. Come, come, Sir Augustine. You are not going to tell me that anything as accomplished and fastidious and in places downright funny as Babbletower bears any relation to the deranged vision of murderers? Or that poor Mr. Mason wants to kill someone? He is a good writer, and he’s half-dead with anxiety, and I think it’s a pity.
Augustine Weighall has considered other obscenity trials, and believes that previous prosecution witnesses have been ill chosen. He has decided, also, that his witnesses, coming after the long file of defence luminaries, must be succinct and convincing, carry weight. In the event, he calls five: Hermia Cross, who began the public agitation against Babbletower, a chief superintendent from Staffordshire, a suffragan bishop from a difficult part of Birmingham, Roger Magog and Professor Efraim Ziz, a historian of Judaism.
Hermia Cross is disturbingly sensible. She is an MP, has been a local councillor, has worked with recidi
vist adolescents and with the Marriage Guidance Council, is a Methodist lay preacher and a school governor. She is solid and stolid, with dark straight hair and a firm straight mouth, short but full of presence. She says that she agrees that Babbletower is better written than most pornography, but doesn’t believe it is literature. Literature, she says, is complex and varied. Babbletower, like all pornography is simple and repetitive—“like a good wank, if you’ll forgive the expression.” It repeats pain and hurt, and is offensive because it puts ideas into the heads of those who like hurting children. “A good wank is one thing, my lord. Hurting children’s another. We live in the permissive society, I’m told. We see where that leads. It leads to Brady and Hindley hurting children. Killing children. All the rest is trappings. This book is offensive and dangerous.”
Asked whether she agrees with Phyllis Pratt that fantasy might provide a beneficent release, she says she does not. “Not in my experience, it doesn’t. I think that’s her fantasy, if I may say so. Airy-fairy. I think it does more good to watch and pray, if you feel temptations, than to set pen to paper and indulge your imagination. Watch and pray.” Asked by Oliphant if she believes that this goes for stabbing people with bread-knives too, she replies that that is not the issue in question. “But yes, quite probably. Watch and pray. Somebody somewhere may wield a bread-knife in earnest, as a result of reading about one.” The Court stirs: they are Phyllis Pratt fans. Samuel Oliphant pushes his advantage.
“You are not a great reader, Miss Cross? You do not have a passion for literature?”
“No. I don’t. I think a lot of time is wasted by a lot of people, reading rubbish, and talking rubbish about books. But I do know the difference, I think, between a book that is just nasty and a book that is positively hurtful.”
“How do you know?”
“I know quite a lot—pragmatically—about the sort of people who are vulnerable to that sort of book. It’s common sense.”
“And do you consider yourself depraved and corrupted by Babbletower.”
“Sickened. Disgusted.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No. But I am not its expected audience. I watch and pray.”
Superintendent Wren is a large, ferociously groomed wax-skinned man, with a surprisingly light voice. His evidence is dull and cumulative, a list of cases in which it is his understanding that crimes were incited, or suggested, by reading matter. “Those that are content with reading,” he says, “don’t stay content, they start thinking, Why not, and then they go on to try it out. Like Ian Brady. They try it out.” One of his examples is a man who, hearing The Brothers Karamazov read on the wireless, was suddenly seized with an impulse, snatched up an axe from his coalshed, and murdered his mother-in-law in her bed.
Augustine Weighall, to pre-empt the Defence, asks him, “You are not suggesting that The Brothers Karamazov should be banned.”
“No, sir. I am not. I am just explaining, that those vulnerable to suggestion, do act on it. Now this book is not like The Brothers Karamazov, a difficult book, that makes you think, a human book, that makes you feel. It is a book in which nothing happens except sex and death, a typical pornographer’s book—”
“Objection. The witness’s opinion as to whether the book is pornographic is inadmissible.”
“Objection sustained.”
The suffragan bishop’s name is Humphrey Swan. He is thin and sad and bespectacled and insubstantial. He says that Babbletower is evil, and far from presenting a Christian view of the world, as Canon Holly has argued, is quite possibly open to prosecution for blasphemy in connection with its dubious presentation of Our Lord’s sufferings. He expatiates on this at some length. He says that the book does lead the weak into temptation, temptation to great evil.
Asked by Hefferson-Brough if he considers that he himself has been depraved and corrupted by the book, he replies that he has been dragged through dirt and made to see horrors.
Q. I did not ask if you felt disgusted. I asked if you felt you had been depraved and corrupted.
A. If I must answer that question, yes or no, I must answer yes. I am a worse man, a sicker soul, for having read that book. I shall take time, I shall need effort, to recover from the experience. An element of good in my soul has been slaughtered and is festering.
Q. That is strong language, Bishop.
A. So is the disgusting language of that book, sir. Strong and bad. Worse than bad, because it is truly tempting in its sensuousness. Evil. Evil.
Rupert Parrott’s face is red with fury when he sees the jaunty figure of Roger Magog in the witness box. He says in a stage whisper to his solicitor, “He thought there was more attention in it for him, this way.” The judge stares reprovingly. Magog states that he is an educator, a writer on matters social, literary and educational. He states that he is a member of the Steerforth Committee of Enquiry. He is wearing a red bow-tie and a kind of navy blazer. He smiles around the court, including Parrott in his benignity.
Weighall. People may be surprised to see you in this court, Mr. Magog, appearing as a witness for the prosecution. You have, I believe, a reputation as a liberal thinker, a defender of our liberties?
Magog. Indeed I have. I am proud of it. I have written essays on freedom of speech. I spoke in favour of Lady Chatterley. I wrote articles in support of the Sexual Offences Bill, which is, as we speak, before the House of Commons, and will, I trust, reach the Statute Book this summer.
Weighall. You wrote an article in the Guardian, I believe, when Babbletower was first published.
Magog. I did.
Weighall. Tell the Court about this article.
Magog. It was called “Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones.” It argued that the written word could harm no one—no adult—and that there should not be any prohibition of any written text depicting any lawful act, as it is impossible in practice to distinguish pornography from literature, and it is more important that literature not be repressed than that pornography is suppressed.
Weighall. Admirable sentiments, you may think. Yet you are prepared, now, to argue before this Court, that the tendency of Babbletower IS to deprave and corrupt those who may read it?
Magog. (very firmly) I am.
Weighall. What brought about this change?
Magog. It was quite simple. I read the book. (Gales of laughter in court.) I knew you would laugh. You may laugh, you may all laugh, you have a right to laugh. I made a fool of myself, but I have learned something. When I wrote the article I genuinely believed no book could harm someone like me, someone normal and sensible and well read. It was a matter of principle. Then I read the book. It was a dreadful experience. I know now what it is to feel depraved and corrupted. This book—you may laugh—revealed things to me about myself that horrified me—that if I were a weaker man, if I were some of the unfortunate children I have taught—might have tempted me. In short—I saw the light. I deliberately use the religious language of a conversion experience. It was a sign. It is better not to live in a society which indulges and admires depictions of cruelty. I was made deeply uncomfortable by the Marat-Sade, I was disgusted and dirtied, but I believed it was for the good of my soul to see those horrors. I am told there is a writer who has made what he believes is art out of enacting the horrors of the Moors Murders for audiences. I am told he claims he is taking “crucial anxiety” and “turning it upside-down in creative play.” I have heard that they are arguing that they should have access to corpses and disembowel them in Harrods’ windows—artists have as much right as anatomists to corpses, they say. I have no doubt Mason would find it easy to justify the horrors of Babbletower on the same grounds. But I do not want to live in a society that can find anything—anything at all—playful or creative in these horrors. I have come to believe they should be—not swept under the carpet—but incinerated. Burned with flames of fire. I have had enough of the Permissive Society and before long those who advocate more and more of it will come to feel as I do, to weep for their lost c
leanliness and innocence. True freedom is not freedom to hurt others.
Samuel Oliphant takes up this phrase in cross-examination.
Q. Mr. Magog. You said, “True freedom is not the freedom to hurt others.”
A. I did. It isn’t a fashionable thought, these days. I stand by it.
Q. But, Mr. Magog, is not that—according to Professor Smith, according to Dr. Gander, according to Mr. Wedderburn—is not that the central message of Babbletower itself?
A. Babbletower is a text that twists round and round itself like the snake round the tree. What is its true message? We have heard that the Marquis de Sade felt we should be free to murder and rape. The devil can dress his texts with a little morality. The message I get from Babbletower is Sade’s message, the modish message of the moment. The author kills off his murderous hero to give his readers another sadistic kick. It is clever and disgusting and infectious.
• • •
Sir Augustine’s last witness comes into the witness box slowly, and when he is there, is hardly visible above its rim. He is tiny, old and frail; he has a sweet, small face, with a parchment-coloured skin traced like an ancient map with fine lines and the brown islands of age; he wears gold-rimmed spectacles on a beaked nose, and a black silk skull cap above a fringe of baby-fine bright white hair. He wears a loose black jacket, under which his spine is humped and twisted; his hands are twigs, claws, knots of bone and vein, which grip the bar in front of him. He says that he is Professor Efraim Ziz, and teaches in Cambridge. He is an expert on Jewish history and rabbinical writings. He is a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, where he lost his wife, his children and his sisters. He is the author of Babel and Silence, and of The Tongues of Men and of Angels, studies of Jewish mystical histories of language and silence, of a book on Kafka and the German language, and of A Private Place. This last, he explains in a small, clear, precise voice, is an account of that sense of “an inner private, silent place” which made possible the survival of some “fortunate or unfortunate inmates of those places.”
