The Trials of Portnoy

by Patrick Mullins

  A number of leading Melbourne booksellers who are particularly sympathetically inclined, have stated that they just would not stock the book, and our other line of contact has been newspaper editors anxious to start an anti-censorship move. The chief editor of the Age [Graham Perkin] is in this class, but has stated that the Board would not support any move to print excerpts from Portnoy’s and they are certainly the most likely to support the cause.43

  There was not yet the support that could make it work, he finished. It was just too early.

  ***

  It all came back to the system. Customs had examined Portnoy; the National Literature Board of Review had scrutinised it; the minister had appraised it; there had been a verdict; there had been appeals that had been disallowed; and there had been reports and reviews. The ban had been reaffirmed at every step, and there was no reason to overturn it. And though some copies of the novel were available for import by particular individuals — psychologists, in the main, working at universities — the restriction remained. Portnoy’s Complaint could not be imported into Australia. The government would not allow it to be published in Australia.

  Chipp kept the door shut and barricaded. He would not rescind the ban. There were plenty of opportunities for him to do so, but he refused them all. At every moment, he reaffirmed it. It was perplexing. He was making no secret of his unease with censorship, was expressing the same arguments against censorship as his correspondents, and seemed intent on showing people how flawed the system was.

  In April 1970, he screened a selection of pornographic and violent film clips for 150 selected MPs, journalists, religious figures, and academics, stating that his aim was to show the necessity of censorship and the absurdities of judging depictions of sex and violence without considering their context. It was not wholly persuasive, as no one was arguing about those aims. The issue in contention was critically acclaimed works that more than adequately justified their inclusion of depictions of sex or violence. Should those works be censored? Chipp would not say. ‘There is a case of for censorship for the protection of the young,’ wrote one reporter, after the April screening. ‘There is a case for saying … that today’s permissive standards in art and entertainment are injurious to the quality of art itself. There may even be a case for censorship in its present form, but Mr Chipp’s exhibition — interesting though it was — did nothing to prove it.’44

  Chipp’s intransigence on Portnoy stemmed from his desire to maintain a balance: to reassure those who believed in censorship, and to encourage those who wanted it gone. By standing firm on the high-profile, controversial Portnoy, he placated the former, and in so doing had room to push for change within the censorship system that could satisfy the latter. In 1970, this did appear to bear fruit. In a ministerial statement on censorship in June — the first such statement since the 1930s — Chipp announced that the government had abandoned, as a test of what should be censored, the tendency of a work to encourage depravity. That test remained in legislation and regulation, but at a practical level Chipp said that it was no longer the determining question. ‘Community standards’ — which he defined as the level of sexual behaviour, bodily exposure, or violence that the community was prepared to tolerate — would now guide decisions.

  The second of Chipp’s changes was the introduction of R and X rating certificates for film. If implemented correctly, and with the cooperation of the state governments, these certificates would prevent children and young people from accessing inappropriate films while preserving the rights of adults to do so. These changes, Chipp hoped, would satisfy censorship’s supporters and its opponents.

  But consternation over the ban on Portnoy continued. In March 1970, student editors at Macquarie University printed a ‘lifted, stolen, appropriated’ extract of the novel in the campus newspaper Arena. ‘You should be able to see what has been banned,’ they wrote. ‘… If you find this subject distasteful or depraved, don’t read it, but see a psychiatrist instead. For those other free souls, read on and laugh.’45 One Liberal Party MLA in New South Wales complained about their ‘flagrant contempt for the law of the land and the moral standards of the people’, but the editors were unapologetic.46 In the next issue, they called the extracts ‘shock therapy’, and printed more.47

  As 1970 wore on, the controversy became a weeping sore for the federal government. Letters continued to stream in, protesting the ban. ‘I do not see why anyone living in this country should be denied access to a book judged important in a civilised country,’ wrote one woman.48 A mature-age student studying literature was bewildered when copies of Portnoy and Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam? were seized: ‘At my age — 60! — am I likely to be corrupted?’49 A South Yarra man made a similar point when his copy was seized: ‘I would point out that at my age, 66 years, I would stand little chance of being corrupted by reading it.’50

  By July, Chipp had heard it all. He had put up with it for months. There was nothing new to be heard, said, or done. Then, on 19 July, he received a telegram:

  WE HOLD AUSTRALIAN RIGHTS PHILLIP ROTH NOVEL PORTMOYS COMPLAINTS [SIC]. PROPOSE PUBLISHING THIS WORK IN AUSTRALIA IN THE NEAR FUTURE. IN VIEW OF YOUR OFFER OF PRIOR CONSULTATIONS ON MATTERS OF CENSORSHIP HAVE BEEN ANXIOUS TO DISCUSS THIS MATTER WITH YOU BEFORE PROCEEDING.51

  Chipp could have been forgiven for feeling blindsided. Nonetheless, his reply was remarkable for its equanimity. ‘I am agreeable to a meeting as suggested,’ he cabled back. ‘Please contact my secretary in Melbourne … with a view to arranging a suitable time.’52

  CHAPTER 7

  Straws in the wind

  The telegram had come from John Michie, managing director of Penguin Books Australia. A laconic and somewhat austere man, Michie had been raised on the sparsely populated King Island, in Bass Strait, and educated in the bosom of the establishment: Melbourne Grammar and the University of Melbourne. He knew money and its manners, and was interested in the arts. He loved Melville and Moby-Dick; read Waugh, Conrad, Dostoevsky, and the English naturalist poets; listened to Bach, Mahler, Stockhausen, and Sibelius; and possessed an enduring love of the sea and sailing, to the point that once, after sailing single-handed to New Zealand, he remarked that it had been ‘Sibelius all the way’. Thirty-four years old, he was tall, lean, stern, and handsome — a striking man with dark hair and keen blue eyes. Charming when he wanted, ruthless when it suited, Michie was intelligent, by instinct independent, and immensely canny.1

  He had displayed all of these qualities in his work as managing director. In the previous decade, the modest, post-war beginnings of the Australian branch of Penguin — as a distribution centre for the paperback books that its British parent was famous for — had been left behind. Thriving in a prosperous period of Australian publishing, Penguin had cornered the market for inexpensive, quality books from the UK. It was building a small Australian list by taking over titles available only in hardcover and republishing them in paperback. It had paid attention, with lucrative results, to the needs of the education sector. And it had lately won grudging acquiescence from its parent company to begin building a program of original Australian titles that were culturally engaged and critically astute. Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964) was one of the most famous examples; another was Robert Hughes’s The Art of Australia (1966).

  Michie had joined Penguin right at the cusp of some of its greatest success. Hired in 1965 as a sales manager, he was given an early opportunity to demonstrate his talents when Brian Stonier, Geoffrey Dutton, and Max Harris — who had started the domestic publishing program — left to found Sun Books. Within six months, Michie had been promoted to manage promotions and distribution; by 1968, his abilities were in such evident abundance that the managing director was shown the door and Michie was appointed in his place.

  Michie came to the job with especially noteworthy ambitions. In his view, the days where Australians read what publishers in England wanted should end.2 T
he domestic publishing program that Stonier, Dutton, and Harris had begun was instrumental in presenting to Australian readers their own voices and perspectives. Michie wanted to build on it, to increase it, to make it sustainable; in doing so, Penguin could shape Australian culture and life, present new ideas, expose old canards, question orthodoxies, and pose alternatives. There was an idealistic, even outsized, dimension to this — the belief that Penguin could even play a role in shaping the region around Australia, too. A nationalism that by its vehemence could be heard as Anglophobic ran through this mission: to make Penguin Australia an international publishing house, publishing Australian and international books, for Australia and the region.3

  But this could only happen if Penguin continued to be commercially successful. Aware that the ‘takeovers’ that constituted Penguin’s easy source of profit was soon to dry up, Michie sought to hone Penguin’s competitive advantages. The main way he sought to do this was by overhauling the company’s distribution system. ‘When I took over Penguin,’ he said later, ‘it had a small but flourishing local publishing program instituted by Brian Stonier, but the actual machinery of the operation — the distribution and so on — was in some disarray.’4

  To repair this, Michie drew on the talents of Peter Froelich, a fellow commerce graduate of the University of Melbourne and an accountant who had joined Penguin in 1964 at the age of twenty-eight. A keen sportsman who wore pinstripe suits to work and was thought a Menzies man by his colleagues, Froelich too believed in the cultural mission of publishing.5 But, like Michie, he also believed that that cultural mission needed to be accompanied by constant improvements in the company’s bottom line.6

  One of the most pressing improvements needed to be in tracking sales and processing. The tabulating machine in use, which required an operator to punch holes in a series of forty- or eighty-column cards that would be fed into a primitive computer that would spit out a list of sales, was too slow for the voluminous business Penguin was now engaged in. Froelich persuaded the board to lease, and then to buy, a GE-115 computer, which replaced the tab-card system with large, plate-sized discs, each of which could hold the content of 25,000 cards.7 The improved processing and tracking it afforded allowed Penguin to order timely and better-sized print runs. The constant problem of any publisher — of ensuring the minimum of stock necessary to maintain sales, without an oversupply of stock that would have to be written down — became easier and easier to manage. Money lost because of exhausted stock was reduced to between two and three per cent of Penguin’s yearly earnings. The computer, recalled Hilary McPhee, who joined Penguin as an editor in 1968, aged twenty-six, ‘revolutionised Penguin’s efficiency. Everything was efficient in a way that no other publisher was.’8

  Getting books to booksellers quickly was another area that needed changing. The system for packing orders was inefficient: taking orders via a phone in the warehouse, packers would fill them individually, doubling back and forth through the warehouse and shelves, slowing down distribution. The computer improved this process significantly. ‘Because we could now update the stock dynamically,’ Froelich said, ‘we could, when the orders came in, have the data-processing staff process the order. They could prepare the invoice, and a copy of the invoice could go to the warehouse, and it would be set out in the same order as the warehouse was laid out. It would be quicker. Then we installed a conveyor belt to help streamline that, too. It helped make it quick and more efficient.’

  Michie and Froelich also sought to gain more control of how books were ordered and shipped. In the past, booksellers had been able to order titles in paltry numbers, and Penguin would ship them at a loss. Froelich changed that by putting a floor on the number of books that a seller could order. When booksellers objected, he pointed out that it was unsustainable for Penguin to persist with the current system, and that without change Penguin would need to start passing on the costs, thereby increasing prices for everyone. The discontent continued, but Froelich and Michie managed to bring opponents around by explaining the benefits that this efficiency would bring. ‘In effect,’ Froelich said, ‘we were saying that booksellers needed to smarten up their logistics, too.’

  Such improvements would always be in-progress, never finished, but they spoke to Penguin’s determination to innovate. ‘I managed to crank up that distribution system,’ Froelich said later. ‘That was my baby.’ It would not have been possible to do this without the goodwill and opportunity that Michie and other Penguin staff offered, he added. ‘Michie saw that he needed someone with skills other than what he had. That was the catalyst for it. He used to trust me and give me free rein. It was also an environment where people were objective about stuff. They were open to it.’ Bob Sessions, who joined Penguin in September 1970, was in no doubt about the effect and the credit of these changes: ‘As a team, he [Michie] and Peter Froelich built on the good things that been done before them, and made sure that the company became computerised and the warehouse worked and the accounts system was brought up to date.’9

  All this markedly improved Penguin Australia’s financial position in the immediate years before 1970. The company became cash rich, to the point that it could meet the demands for regular infusions of money from its British parent company, which began to suffer a series of cashflow crises late in the 1960s. These demands would have been impossible to meet had Penguin Australia’s position not been strengthened by its changes to operations.

  The economic growth was accompanied by an increasingly vibrant non-fiction list that was invigorated by John Hooker, a New Zealand–born editor who joined Penguin in September 1969.10 Literate and creative, a self-proclaimed ‘ideas man’ who lived by his ‘publishing wits’, Hooker brimmed with projects that he would pitch to promising writers.11 He was interested in politics and social issues, and was unfazed about taking on the risky or unlikely. He offered Anne Summers, then a PhD student, a contract for the book that would become Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975); he published Humphrey McQueen’s seminal New Left history, A New Britannia (1970); and he commissioned Aboriginal writer and artist Kevin Gilbert to write Living Black (1977), which would win the National Book Council Award in 1978.

  Lean and tousle-haired, with a finely boned face and penchant for cigarettes and long lunches, the thirty-seven-year-old Hooker was a novelist in his spare time and a sharp-tongued rebel.12 This could have made for a hard fit with Michie: at a philosophical level, Hooker acknowledged later, they were ‘poles apart’.13 But the distance between those poles did not prevent the two from striking up a rapport. In Hooker, Michie found someone with a similar grandness of vision for Australian publishing, who wanted to produce books that were culturally engaged, new, and exciting.

  This was a notable point. Penguin’s engagement with Australian culture, through its domestic and original publishing list, was opportune. The war in Vietnam, the advent of the women’s movement, the increasing knowledge of Indigenous discrimination, and uncertainty about Australia’s place in the world meant that there was a literate population yearning for works that addressed these issues. ‘These were exciting and heady times,’ Hooker said later. ‘… It was a publisher’s paradise.’14 McPhee echoed this. The politics and cultural shifts, the burgeoning arts and theatre scenes, and the emergence of new and interesting writers, she recalled, were sustenance for a publisher looking to engage: ‘It was a heady time.’15

  It was also a happy, successful period. Tensions with the British Penguin offices were assuaged by transfusions of cash. The independent directors who sat on the board were kept docile by the company’s ever-stronger financial position. The staff at Penguin Australia were idealistic and young. They were passionate about the cultural mission of their work. McPhee recalled being ‘starry-eyed’: ‘There was always a real energy in the place,’ she said later.16 Conversation was about expansion, about reshaping the publishing world, about illuminating Australian life, showing that Penguin Australia’s books were not f
or Australia alone but for the world as well: thus McPhee’s successful argument that they should remove from the colophon the boomerangs that marked their books as Australian Penguins only. Penguin published serious works, some of them original, some of them takeovers, all of them intended for the whole world — not just Australia.

  And at the top of the company were the three men, Michie, Hooker, and Froelich: working at the frontier, willing to challenge outdated assumptions and ideas, to push for more, and to pursue the big picture they saw.

  ***

  There were frequent conversations. Over lunches that lasted late into the day and dinners that drifted late into the night, whether at the office or at Jimmy Watson’s in Carlton, the staff at Penguin often talked about the problems afflicting publishing and literature in Australia. Sessions recalled the passion that Michie and Hooker, in particular, brought to these conversations. ‘We used to sit around the common room after work, and chew the fat and have a drink,’ he said. ‘Out of the conversations we had there developed a certain rebelliousness. “Why are they doing this? Why are they doing that? Why can’t we do this?” They were all questions we were asking.’17 Amid Michie’s ambitions and Penguin’s engagement with culture and politics, it was not surprising that censorship was a regular topic. ‘We’d had issues with it before, in minor ways,’ Froelich recalled, ‘and when we’d have drinks we’d say, “It’s wrong! How can we fix it? What can we do? How do we bring it to people’s attention, so that it can be changed?”’

  There were constant spurs for the sentiments expressed over meals and drink to become action. The trials of Wendy Bacon and the travails of Arthur Rylah and Don Chipp were always in the news. But the most instrumental was the publication of Dutton and Harris’s Australia’s Censorship Crisis — for among the extracts from banned works it included was one from Portnoy’s Complaint.