Under Attack : GIRLS LEAN BACK EVERYWHERE: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius <i> By Edward de Grazia (Random House: $30; 688 pp.) </i>

The Supreme Court of the United States has become so weighted to the right that one can imagine a brief, set before the justices, sliding down to the far end of the collective bench, where Clarence Thomas sits.

As the nation grows, so does the din of its voices. There are more of us, there are more of us seeking to speak--to make art and to protest and to plead our claims. We seem to grow impatient with one another while our government grows impatient with the difficulties of regulating our traditionally irregular conduct. More and more, the Supreme Court seems to seek simplicities in this terribly complex time. More and more, the Bill of Rights appears endangered. So, therefore, does our liberty.

“Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius” is written by a lawyer who has defended the literary arts against traditional American fretfulness about--to finally name the name--sex. Edward de Grazia has studied censorship in two other books, and he pours into this one his expertise and his concern for our right to make and to experience art. Justice William J. Brennan Jr., whose absence from the court feels more like a wound to the body politic every day, is the hero of the story that De Grazia seeks to tell. It is to him that the book is dedicated, for Justice Brennan guided the Warren Court--against the inclinations of Justice Earl Warren’s prudishness--to establishing the precedent that books having literary, artistic or other social importance ought to be protected by the Constitution against charges of being obscene.

“Girls Lean Back Everywhere” studies attempts to suppress writing, to intimidate and bankrupt publishers, to jail nightclub performers and to shut down magazines. It offers fascinating accounts of the jailing of Zola’s English publisher, of the machinations of the Watch and Ward Society, the National Vigilance Assn. and the Cincinnati Citizens for Community Values. It reminds us that when we protect the genius of Theodore Dreiser and Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce, we also protect such second-rate fiction as Desmund Wilson’s “Memoirs of Hecate County,” or the likes of 2 Live Crew’s “As Nasty as They Wanna Be.” It shows the courage of such non-Establishmentarians as Al Boni and Horace Liveright (publishers of Dreiser), Pascal Covici and Donald Friede (publishers of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness”) and Random House’s Bennett Cerf (publisher of “Ulysses”), and the timidity of most of the publishing houses that were old- line when these brave people were up and coming. And it demonstrates amply the damage--financial, emotional, artistic--done to artists and their supporters by the arts vigilantes who would determine what is fit to disseminate to the rest of us.

The “girls” of the title come from Jane Heap, who, along with her friend and partner Margaret Anderson, sought to print part of Joyce’s “Ulysses” in “The Little Review” for July/August, 1920. John Sumner, one of the anti-vice agents of whom American history is too chock-full (think of Anthony Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; think of Jesse Helms and his assault on the National Endowment for the Arts), arrested the women and charged them with publishing obscenity. Jane Heap’s wonderful response is well-employed by De Grazia: “Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere--seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom (in the “Nausicaa” episode)--and no one is corrupted.”

It is wonderfully ironic that the book’s title derives from the remark of a woman who sought to publish some of “Ulysses” after another brave and dedicated woman, Sylvia Beach, published it in France. For the argument against artistically used language has been, in England and the United States and on the Continent, that girls would be endangered, either through direct exposure to the corrupting language itself or to the crazed actions of immature young men who might fall prey to it. Again and again, over so many years, De Grazia shows, the prosecutors--usually male, WASP--bemoan the endangered girls.

But now that the novel about lesbian love, “The Well of Loneliness,” can be published, now that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” can be published, now that “Lolita” can be published, now that “Howl” can be published, and now that Eddie Murphy can shout scatologies that Lenny Bruce was hounded for stating, the “girls” about whom the censors cried have grown up to be powerful women to whom one must listen. And they are demanding censorship for what they call “pornography,” a definition of which is offered by Catharine MacKinnon: “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects. . . .”

Consider the proposed McConnell Bill, the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and now in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It will enable those who see themselves as victimized by obscenity and child pornography to bring suit against the publishers or distributors of the allegedly offensive material. Might we soon see another suit against, say, “Lolita,” this time claiming that it is child pornography under the influence of which a lust-crazed man, etc.?

If new threats to the First Amendment loom, the same old threats also drift above us. In a letter of March 6, 1990, Sen. Jesse Helms, writing to the comptroller general of the United States, offers this preface: “(B)ecause of the nature of the enclosed material, I urge that great care be taken to assure that your women associates not be exposed to the material. . . .”

A lawyer and law professor as well as an aficionado of the arts, De Grazia fashions his book in the form of a court transcript. The effect is to put the arts vigilantes on trial. It’s an inspired idea, but in practice it usually bloats the book with facts irrelevant to censorship. His long chapter on the trials of Nabokov and “Lolita,” for example, tells us nothing new about the artist, the book or the genius that censorship is seeking to cabin and confine. Instead, it rambles with disembodied quotes such as this “testimony” from a New York Times reporter:

ALDEN WHITMAN: “Sheer laziness” was one of the reasons he gave for remaining (in Switzerland); he also wanted to be near his only son, Dmitri, who was an opera singer in Italy, and a sister in Geneva.

One might ask why, in the chapter on Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” we find the complexities of the poem summarized somewhat hastily while De Grazia lingers over Ginsberg’s sexual proclivities: “Years later, in San Francisco, Allen declared his homosexuality to his then-girlfriend Sheila; this put a strain on the relationship.” Where was De Grazia’s editor? And to whom, one wonders, reading “Ferlinghetti was (and still is) also a poet,” is his book addressed?

Asking such questions, a reader grows impatient. But there are also rich rewards, glimpses into what pass for minds in the persecutors of art, like this statement by the prosecutor of “Howl”: “I don’t know anything about literature, but I would like to find out what this is all about. It’s like this modern painting nowadays, surrealism or whatever they call it, where they have a monkey come in and do finger painting.”

One need only read statements made on the floor of Congress, or during the trial of the curator of the Cincinnati Mapplethorpe exhibition, to take seriously De Grazia’s warning that advances for artistic freedom made under the Brennan doctrine, “eroded by the Berger court and further weakened by the Rehnquist court,” are going to be under attack “for the foreseeable future.” This flawed, fascinating survey of art in danger--and, therefore, of freedom besieged, is frightening, and necessary to read.