The last days of obscenity

By Ben Yagoda

Philip Larkin once remarked in a poem that, for him, sex "began" in 1963 - "between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban/ and the Beatles' first LP." The ban he referred to ended 50 years ago, after a comic opera of a trial that transfixed Britain.

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover - about the illicit affair between Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her husband's estate - was published in 1928, two year's before the author's death. Printed in Italy, it was banned in Lawrence's native Britain more or less from the moment he set down its last word, which named a body part, though not the one you might think. (It was heart.)

Decades later, in 1959, Parliament passed a significantly revised Obscene Publications Act, under which a publication could not be deemed obscene if it was "justified as being for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning." That same year, a federal judge in New York ruled that Lawrence's novel could be sent through the U.S. mail. Emboldened, Penguin put out a paperback edition, with a planned first printing of 200,000 copies.

The new obscenity law did not prevent the crown's treasury counsel, an Etonian and Oxonian aptly named Mervyn Griffith-Jones, from concluding that an obscenity prosecution was warranted. "Indeed," he wrote in a memo, "if no action is taken in respect to this publication it will make proceedings against any other novel very difficult."

Over the four days of the trial, the defense used the testimony of 35 eminences, including Rebecca West, Raymond Williams, Roy Jenkins, and E.M. Forster, to try to establish that publication of Chatterley was indeed for the public good. (On the day the novelist Kingsley Amis was to testify, he was otherwise engaged in an adulterous tryst.) It was an impressive lineup, but Penguin's files reveal that dozens of other cultural figures declined to testify, including Anthony Powell, Graham Greene, Robert Graves, Alec Guinness, and Evelyn Waugh, who wrote to the defense attorney:

"My memory of [Chatterley] was that it was dull, absurd in places & pretentious. I am sure that some of its readers would be attracted by its eroticism. Whether it can 'corrupt' them, I can't tell, but I am quite certain that no public or private 'good' would be served by its publication."

Meanwhile, the prosecution, led by Griffith-Jones, didn't deign to call a single witness (other than a Scotland Yard detective who testified that he had confiscated 12 copies of the novel). Griffith-Jones set the tone in his opening statement by enumerating occurrences in the novel of a list of forbidden words, as if that proved something. The most notorious Anglo-Saxon four-letter epithet led, with 30 appearances in various forms.

It's generally agreed that Griffith-Jones made a fatal blunder by seeming hopelessly out of touch when he asked the men and women of the jury, including, according to defense memos, a cabinet fitter, a timber salesman, and a butcher: "Is it a book you would wish even your wife or your servants to read?"

In the trial proper, Griffith-Jones adopted a strategy of simply reading explicit bits from the book and sputtering to the critic or scholar in the witness chair something to the effect of: "Do you consider that great literature? Do you consider that in the public interest?"

Nor did the defense acquit itself especially nobly. The scholars who testified understood it was wrong to ban books, but that led many to make exaggerated claims about the flawed Chatterley. At one point, Griffith-Jones read to the university lecturer Richard Hoggart, who had asserted that the novel was "puritanical," a passage in which Connie muses about "the unspeakable beauty to the touch of [Mellors'] warm, living buttocks."

Griffith-Jones: "That again, I assume, you say is puritanical?"

Hoggart: "It is puritanical in its reverence."

After deliberating for two hours and 58 minutes, the cabinet fitter, the timber salesman, the butcher, and the rest of the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty. The newspapers ran banner headlines, as well as photos of workmen with their noses buried in the novel and long lines snaking around bookstores. Over the next six months, Penguin printed two million copies. Philip Larkin kicked his love life up a few notches.

And the English-speaking world was on the path to its current ethos: With certain exceptions (notably, child pornography), banning anything on obscenity grounds is unacceptable.

Since genies are bigger than lamps, it's not especially useful to debate whether it would be good to go back to the way it was. But one can hope, at least, that neither jurisprudence nor literary criticism will ever again have to endure such a Gilbert and Sullivan spectacle as the trial that ended the Chatterley ban.