The Trials of Portnoy
Page 2
The following year saw the appointment of T.W. ‘Tommy’ White as minister for trade and customs. Son-in-law of Alfred Deakin and a decorated veteran of the Great War, White was a fervent anti-communist, a determined advocate for the military, and a pugnacious, even combative, politician. As minister for customs, he became closely identified with a resurgence of censorship. In 1935, he accused the Scullin government of allowing into Australia ‘scores of publications previously banned as seditious’, and he increased the number of bans on seditious works, targeting leftist publications about communism.19
But a crucial factor in the growth and consolidation of censorship in Australia was changing.20 Banning pamphlets by small socialist organisations was one thing: they would rarely attract widespread and sustained attention. Banning works of fiction that were famous and acclaimed was different. And famous and acclaimed works of modernism — which sought a deliberate break from the empirical, the civilised, and the hierarchical, and prized instead the relentlessly new, the subjective, the chaotic, and the taboo — presented an impossible challenge for the censors. Bans placed on James Joyce’s Ulysses, in 1929, Norman Lindsay’s Redheap, in 1930, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in 1933, were extensively reported and aroused considerable public criticism. The ban on Redheap caused Lindsay to scoff that censorship was as effective as banning air. ‘Do they really think they can keep this country as an ignominious little mental slum, isolated from the world of serious intellectual values?’ he asked. ‘Do they think that an ostrich policy of sticking their own silly heads in the sand is going to save them from exposure elsewhere?’21 For their part, booksellers were stunned by the volte-face that had rendered their stock a liability. ‘The ban is utterly stupid,’ said an employee of Melbourne bookseller Robertson & Mullens, of the ban on Brave New World. ‘It will make us appear ridiculous to the English people … It is about time that the people knew who makes these decisions.’22
Calls for public attention and scrutiny cut through. Newspapers took up the cause. ‘Whatever one believes,’ the Adelaide-based News editorialised, ‘he [or she] will hardly agree that the present system of censorship, under which a Minister of the Federal Government is the final arbiter of what Australians shall read, is anywhere near ideal.’23
The glare of public scrutiny was anathema to censorship: it required secrecy and shadows. This attention from newspapers and the public was crucial to forcing change in censorship practices. For White, it was galling. A month after Brave New World was banned, he said that ‘the irritating critics’ should fight the ban or be quiet. They should order a copy from London; tell Customs so that it could be seized; and then sue for its return. The courts could decide. ‘I will meet the critics on their own ground,’ he promised.24
But the government wished to shut the debate down. In May 1933, it created the Book Censorship Board, an honorary body composed of three qualified and interested persons who would recommend whether a work should be banned.25 Designed to defuse criticisms of the lack of expert judgement and to defer responsibility for decisions from the minister, the committee’s lack of remit and the secrecy surrounding its work demonstrated that its establishment was largely for show. The committee did not consider seditious works; White could override its recommendations; and the mechanism by which it considered works meant that it only ever followed in the department’s footsteps.
White made clear his expectation that little would change. ‘Fine writing by prominent writers will not save them if their work is tinged with obscenity,’ he said. ‘My idea is that authors like [Richard] Aldington and Huxley should not escape the provisions of the law.’26 Moreover, the lists of banned publications — works deemed obscene, blasphemous, seditious, or likely to deprave by an undue emphasis on sex or crime — only ever continued to grow during White’s tenure. Records indicate that in December 1933 there were sixty-six publications that had been deemed seditious and remained banned; eighteen months later, that list had grown to 157 publications.27
The founding of the Book Censorship Abolition League in 1934 was the inevitable consequence of these continued controversies. Driven by University of Melbourne academic William Macmahon Ball and bookseller Roy Rawson, the league initially sought abolition of all censorship by means of public campaigns and legal challenges.28 It was clear from the beginning that the league’s ideological poles would affect how it pursued this: Ball, a liberal political philosopher interested in education, was spurred to action after Customs seized six books on communism and the Soviet government that he had ordered for a course he was teaching. Rawson, meanwhile, was a socialist and radical who papered the back wall of his store with Customs confiscation notices.29
Barely three months passed between the league’s founding, in November 1934, and the first outbreak of dissent, with questions over whether abolition of all censorship was practical or even politically feasible. Ball himself wrote to The Age in February 1935 to call complete abolition ‘an extreme view’. ‘It is not the policy of the League,’ he went on, ‘and not a policy which would win any public support.’30
That month, the league presented a petition signed by 20,000 people calling for return to Scullin government–era censorship policy and release of all books that freely circulated in England. White was unmoved: ‘The Cabinet is not taking the slightest interest.’ There were political grounds to explain White’s scorn: despite its popularity, the league had struggled to extend its influence beyond Victoria, and the presence of socialist and communist elements suggested that the league was a less liberal body than Ball’s advocacy suggested. Moreover, White was aware that censorship enjoyed considerable support around the country. Letters from church groups and community organisations poured into his office and fortified White’s resolve. ‘I am quite sure that the majority of people appreciate what is being done in carrying out the laws of the country regarding the exclusion of indecent or seditious literature,’ he wrote to one supporter.31 Criticism levelled at him in the press, which he regarded as overtly personal, did much to reinforce White’s view that he was in the right.32
Increasingly of the view that compromise with White was impossible, the league sought to circumvent him. Its opportunity came in December 1935, when the minister for industry and the attorney-general, Robert Menzies, returned to Australia. Then aged forty-one, Menzies was a former barrister who had served as deputy premier of Victoria until his election in 1934 to the federal seat of Kooyong. A man of spritely intelligence, with a fine speaking manner and a talent for debate, Menzies’ skills were too many to be left unused on the backbench. Joseph Lyons, the prime minister, therefore elevated him immediately to the ministry and, almost as quickly, took him to London to participate in trade talks and celebrations for the silver jubilee of King George V.
Menzies’ absence from Australia had allowed White to expand his control of censorship policy. The attorney-general’s department was supposed to determine whether a seditious work should be banned or released — not Customs. But, late in 1933, when it started to approve for release works of communist and socialist literature, White countermanded convention by allowing his department to ban books without referring them to the attorney-general’s department.
Menzies’ return, therefore, was important. His mind was stricter on questions of the law than was White’s, and his rapport with Ball — whom he had known since late in the 1920s — was considerably warmer than with his colleague. Moreover, usually unnoticed but important was Menzies’ streak of quiet bohemianism: a willingness to be entertained by bawdy comedy, literary drama, and artistic whimsy. In response to representations from Ball, Menzies saw to it that responsibility for determining whether a publication was seditious was returned to the attorney-general’s department, and he responded favourably to lobbying about specific books. ‘Neither of us has time to waste,’ Menzies replied, to one instance of Ball’s lobbying. ‘The banned books to which you refer will be unbanned in the morning.’33
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That small victory set in motion the demise of the Book Censorship Abolition League, but the public opposition to censorship it had fomented continued to percolate. Prime Minister Joseph Lyons seemed to respond to this in 1936 when he answered a question on notice, in Hansard, stating that interpretation of censorship policy would be ‘in a spirit consonant with the established British principle of the freedom of the press’.34
That hint of a change found form the following year, when the Book Censorship Board was reconfigured as the Literature Censorship Board, with formalised, regulatory duties, and an avenue for appealing board recommendations.35 But, again, belying the extent of actual change — bans on A Farewell to Arms, Brave New World, and Ulysses were rescinded, and censorship of works of communist and socialist thought was relaxed, for example — the overarching powers of the government to reassert its control of censorship remained undiminished. It would delegate powers to mollify criticism and then retrieve them as it wished. This was particularly evident in the aftermath of the recission of the ban on Ulysses.
In September 1941 — six months after James Joyce’s death, two years after the onset of World War II, and four years after the ban on Ulysses had been removed — the president of the Catholic Evidence Guild complained to Eric Harrison, minister for trade and customs in the perilously poised Fadden government, that Joyce’s maze of a novel was ‘blasphemous, indecent, and obscene, almost from cover to cover’. Harrison flicked the matter to his department. A senior clerk obtained a copy of the book, and, citing passages on fifteen pages, reported that its supposed literary merit could not justify its unrestricted circulation in Australia. He claimed, inaccurately, that Ulysses was banned in the United Kingdom and Canada.36
That clerk’s superiors backed him up. ‘In my opinion,’ wrote A.H. Wilson, acting assistant comptroller-general, ‘the book reeks with indecency, obscenity, and blasphemy and should be prohibited.’ And yet there was a note of hesitancy. Reasserting a ban could be logistically difficult and would certainly be embarrassing.37 Harrison — a man who saw black and white, and nothing in between — had no such hesitation.38 On 16 September, he ordered the department to reclassify Ulysses as fit only for ‘restricted circulation’.39
The decision brought immediate controversy. Criticism of inconsistency and the sidelining of the board filled the newspapers, which carried additional reports of bookshops being rushed for copies. Amid the hoopla were some who simply wanted to know what the fuss was about. Former prime minister Billy Hughes went to the Parliamentary Library to borrow a copy of Ulysses, but found that too many others had been there before him: there were none left to borrow. So he tried Finnegans Wake. ‘This man is an Irishman,’ said a boggled Hughes — a Welshman — afterwards. ‘If Irishmen talk like him I don’t wonder that Ireland has her troubles. I couldn’t read that sort of stuff.’40
Harrison refused to back down. ‘This [book],’ he said, ‘is crude and vulgar in every possible way, and can only pander to pornographic minds.’ Ulysses was simply indecent: ‘Why, there is hardly a page that is fit to read!’ The book had made his hair stand on end, he said, and he had banned it in order to preserve ‘clean and decent literature’. Ulysses scorned ‘the highest principles on which civilisation was founded. It held up to ridicule the Creator, the Church, and the whole of moral standards of civilisation, citizenship, and decency.’ Harrison made clear that he thought the matter at an end: ‘My decision is final. There can be no appeal, and I hope no attempts in this direction are made.’41
Harrison would strain to ensure this remained true. Two weeks later, the Fadden government lost a vital budgetary vote in the House of Representatives, and Fadden was forced to return his commission to the governor-general. Four days after that, on 7 October, the Labor Party’s John Curtin was sworn in as prime minister. From the opposition benches, Harrison lobbied his successor as minister for trade and customs, Senator Richard Keane, to maintain the ban. ‘I have no doubt that the press will be approaching you with regard to the lifting of the ban on Ulysses,’ he wrote to Keane on 13 October. ‘Therefore I feel you would be fortified in any decision you may make by having before you copies of communication that I have received.’ Those communications were almost entirely from church groups — who had written, Harrison neglected to say, in response to extracts of Ulysses that Harrison himself had sent them. ‘I can assure you,’ Harrison finished, ‘my fan mail in this regard is of some dimension.’42
Amazed that the press could be fixated on a novel when a war was underway, and regarding the ban as a matter of neither ‘great national interest’ nor urgency, Keane was content to leave well alone. Ulysses remained banned.
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At almost every turn the censorship system had a backstop. But for the High Court’s ruling against efforts to enforce censorship of the press during World War II, the government, bureaucracy, and judiciary were in lockstep. The state governments were zealous prosecutors of a swathe of writers, publishers, and booksellers in the immediate post-war years. Max Harris, the precocious, young South Australian poet and editor of the modernist art journal Angry Penguins, was prosecuted and found guilty of publishing obscene and indecent works in 1944, after rushing to print the poems of the fictional Ern Malley. Bookseller Angus & Robertson was prosecuted in New South Wales for selling Lawson Glassop’s war novel about Tobruk, We Were the Rats. Agreement from the prosecutor and trial judge that it was a novel ‘true to life’ did not save it: Angus & Robertson was found guilty.
Perhaps the most controversial prosecution was that of Melbourne writer Robert Close, in 1945, for using rutting as a substitute for fucking in his novel Love Me Sailor. Close was sentenced to three months’ jail. An appeal to the Victorian Supreme Court saw the sentence quashed, but the conviction was affirmed and the justification of literary merit seemingly scotched. Justice Wilfred Fullagar admitted to a belief that there was a ‘general instinctive sense’ in the community of what was decent and indecent — a forerunner of the justification of community standards — but declared nonetheless that objectionable passages in literary works were not redeemed by the skill that had been used to write them. Likening such works to a drunk yelling in the street, Fullagar wrote that ‘the general sense of a civilised community condemns both, and the instinct which condemns them is thoroughly sound and far more realistic than any sophistic doctrine which would find something praiseworthy in either’.43
As exemptions were made for works that were of clear literary merit, as the New South Wales government did in 1946, laws for censorship continued to proliferate. Moral panics sparked by the popularity of film, pulp magazines, lowbrow genre fiction, and comics intended for children and adolescents spurred a burst of legislation between 1953 and 1955, creating extra offences and more efficient machinery for suppressing obscene and indecent material.44 The governments of Victoria and New South Wales introduced licensing and registration schemes for publishers in 1954 and 1955 as way to regulate and control their output; in 1951, the New South Wales government added ‘any matter which emphasised unduly matters of sex, crimes of violence, gross cruelty or horror’ to its definition of obscenity. In Victoria, the defence of literary merit would not be admitted; in 1954, the Queensland government introduced its own censorship board, the Queensland Literature Board of Review, with the power to ban domestically produced and imported publications that it deemed obscene, irrespective of whether they had been refused or allowed into the country and other states. Tasmania mimicked the move that year by establishing its Publications Board of Review, but raised its status by removing any provision for appeal of the board’s decisions.
This consolidation continued to be driven by a fear of contaminating international influences. In May 1945, Customs requested that the Literature Censorship Board review American writer Kathleen Winsor’s novel Forever Amber. The department was concerned that a film adaptation and British edition of the book might excite Au
stralian interests, hence the ‘urgency’ of its request.45 The board set to examining the 900-page bestseller, which would be acclaimed for inaugurating the modern romance genre. But, with the scathing dismissal that ‘popularity is no sure guarantee of worth’, chairman Leslie Allen declared that its ‘crude and obvious appeal to the sexual instinct’ made its popularity fatal: the book posed a danger to Australian readers. Two other board members, neither of whom had read the whole book, agreed. Customs minister Senator Richard Keane, who had also not read the book, announced a ban on Forever Amber on 6 June with an invocation of providence and moral purpose: ‘The Almighty did not give people eyes to read that kind of rubbish.’46
Censorship went on almost irrespective of who was in power. The Labor government of Ben Chifley did not see fit to alter it materially; nor did the Liberal–Country Party coalition government of Robert Menzies, which won office in 1949. The Department of Trade and Customs continued its work in much the same way as it had for the previous forty years: with citations of its righteous mission and intimations of ruin if it were stopped. ‘The Department has a definite duty to protect the morals of the community by exercising censorship,’ wrote comptroller-general J.J. Kennedy in 1946, ‘… and after 40 years’ experience in the Department I would say that the need is as great today as ever.’47 Ministers were happy to let this be. Recalling the impossible flood of ‘paperback junk’ into Australia during his short tenure as customs minister in 1955–56, Fred Osborne said later that ‘one had to rely on the good sense of Customs officers in applying the taste of the time’.48
For its advocates, censorship was necessary for protecting the standards and morals of the community; for its opponents, censorship was stultifying and a much-abused inhibition on freedom. A notorious case in the 1950s concerned a series of popular romance comics banned by the Queensland Literature Board of Review on grounds that they would be ‘injurious to [the] morality’ of the ‘unstable adolescents’ who would read them — namely, girls and young women. At a Supreme Court hearing over the ban, a matron from a Salvation Army girls home was summoned to condemn the comics for the effect they would have on the girls in her charge: ‘The love scenes would excite them and retard their rehabilitation and the pictures of “pick-ups” would do particular harm.’ Was this really true? Could it really be accepted as fact? The Supreme Court was of a mind to accept it, but the High Court would not. Setting aside the ban in 1956, it ruled that its disapproval of the American-influenced passionate love portrayed in these comics was outweighed by the sound morality of their stories: ‘The theme of them all nearly is love, courtship, and marriage. Virtue never falters and right triumphs. Matrimony is the proper end.’49