Pornography and censorship: The argument rages on, 25 years after ‘Tropic of Cancer’

Pornography seems to be in for it.

The people who make such decisions for the rest of us seem to have decided that photographs and descriptions of sexual debauchery cause rape and violence.

This time the moralists are a coalition of fundamentalist evangelists and radical feminists, abetted by the attorney general’s commission on pornography.

Evidently the commission is about to conclude its inquiries with an opinion that pornography and sexual violence are related, though it has found no scientific evidence to support that conclusion, and neither has anyone else.

As Harvard Law School teacher Alan Dershowitz said the other day in this newspaper, “Rarely has so dangerous a conclusion been based on such flimsy evidence.”

As always in inquiries that lead to censorship, the evidence seems to have been examined by men and women who are curiously immune to the pernicious effects they claim to have discovered in it.

Otherwise, having been exposed to the cause, shouldn’t they naturally begin committing acts of sexual aggression against one another and against the innocents they encounter in general life?

Censors are people who decide that something is unfit for the rest of us to see, but are miraculously unharmed by it themselves.

As Dershowitz says, the trouble with pornography is that no one can define it. The notorious Roth decision held that pornography was any material which, taken as a whole, was utterly without social value.

Who can say whether a book, a movie, a painting or a song has social value? Perhaps a pornographic movie might stir socially beneficial urgings in one person as well as evil in another.

The censorious mind is often the product of some such moral stronghold as religion or education. Some are censorious because of their righteousness; some are merely naive.

Incredibly, it was only 25 years ago that I covered a trial in which a jury found Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” obscene under the Roth ruling, and convicted a young bookseller of selling it. Although it was more bawdy than pornographic, more comic than lubricious, it was banned for many years from this country, along with such works of marked literary value as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and “Ulysses.”

What I remember most about the trial is that a deputy city attorney read the book out loud in court, and the judge often was obliged to lean toward his court reporter as if giving him instructions, meanwhile hiding his face behind a manila folder to conceal his laughter, which made his shoulders shake, and the jurors often went through agonies of facial distortion in futile attempts at concealing their laughter.

And yet, that same jury solemnly returned a verdict of guilty and the judge solemnly sentenced the defendant to jail. Such is the result of censorship: hypocrisy and persecution.

More hilarious to me than Miller’s book was the exposure of two highly placed educators as literary nincompoops, though they testified righteously for the prosecution. Under cross-examination, Donald S. McDonald Ph.D., then president of Cal State Los Angeles, admitted he didn’t have time to read novels.

“Have you ever read ‘The Sun Also Rises,’ by Ernest Hemingway?” he was asked.

“No, I haven’t,” he said.

“Have you ever heard of it?”

“I can’t recall that I have.”

McDonald had also never heard of “From the Terrace” or “Butterfield 8” by John O’Hara, “God’s Little Acre,” the perennial best-seller by Erskine Caldwell, or “By Love Possessed,” a recent Pulitzer Prize novel on love and the law by James G. Cozzens.

“Are you familiar with the painter named Matisse?”

“I may have heard of him,” McDonald answered. “At lectures and so forth. “

“You can’t say positively, yes or no?”

“No, I can’t.”

Here was a man who was not familiar with the most popular literature of his time, and one of the most famous artists of the century, yet he was the educational leader of 16,000 college students and had been enlisted in the cause of censorship.

Also a witness for the prosecution was Ellis A. Jarvis, who had recently retired as superintendent of Los Angeles city schools. Jarvis was also unfamiliar with the works of O’Hara and Hemingway, though he had “skimmed” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (no doubt looking for the censorable passages).

“Have you ever heard of (Hemingway’s) ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ ”? he was asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you know who wrote it?”

“No. I don’t know for sure.”

McDonald showed the censorious quality of his thinking when he was asked: “People should learn about life in the world to the extent that it is not morbid, is that right?”

“And filthy,” he said.

“And if something is morbid and filthy, then they should not learn about it?”

“I’d say yes.”

In the 1950s the sheriff’s vice squad used to show blue movies they’d confiscated in raids on men’s smokers. They were closed showings: just for cops and the press. I sometimes went, but I’d usually sneak out after about half an hour, because at first pornography is funny, but then it becomes boring.

Censors hold that whatever is prurient--that is, whatever excites lust, is pornographic and ought to be banned.

If that is so, then the fundamentalist Muslims are right, and women ought not to be allowed abroad unless shielded from the public eye from head to foot.

Nothing is more prurient than an ordinarily pretty young woman walking down the street on a summer day in a white cotton dress.

Even Jimmy Carter used to lust in his heart.