FROM THE ARCHIVES:The unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Loverin 1960 is sometimes seen as marking the beginning of the Swinging Sixties, helped by Philip Larkin's famous lines that sexual intercourse began "Between the end of the 'Chatterley' ban/And the Beatles' first LP". Broadcaster Maurice Gorham wasn't so sure that Penguin's publication of the unexpurgated text was a good idea. – JOE JOYCE
Personally I have always regarded “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” as a dirty book rather than as a literary masterpiece, and that was certainly the light in which it was first presented to me. When it was still new, much talked about but banned from public sale, a B.B.C. colleague of my young days burst into my office and planked it down on my desk. “I haven’t got it for long,” he said, “but you must see it. Don’t waste time at the beginning – start at page so-and-so. The real stuff begins there.”
This colleague was not a mere philistine; he was widely read, a writer himself, and quite capable of appreciating D. H. Lawrence’s better books, but he had no doubt as to what category this one came into. Nor, by the way, was he a repressed type who found his only outlet in books. He was as uninhibited a character as I ever knew. It was this sort of book that made me realise that even good writers can write dirty books. I had grown up with the belief that good writing could not be dirty, and a secondary assumption that classics were not really dirty, however strange they might seem to our modern ideas. It dawned on me slowly that though Petronius and Apuleius may have been good writers, the “Satyricon” and “The Golden Ass” were meant to be dirty books when they were written in the first two centuries AD, and that Rabelais would probably have been surprised to find G. K. Chesterton joining with the cynics in praising him, despite his schoolboyish habit of stringing together a variety of dirty words and relating with gusto a number of dirty tricks.
Here in Ireland we go to the other extreme. Reading through the lists of banned books that appeared from time to time you find, it is true, a string of titles that condemned themselves: titles worthy only of the bookstands around Shaftesbury avenue in London which teem with pornography on almost every known form. But you come across serious books of literary merit in the banned lists, alongside the trash. At one time it was almost automatic for new novels by Irish authors to be banned.
I remember once in London taking part in some sort of panel programme for the B.B.C. on which the last question from the audience was “What does the panel think about censorship?” My three English colleagues all agreed that censorship was bad in principle but in practice you had to have it in some form. My own answer was that censorship is right in principle but in practice it nearly always works out in a way to excite ridicule and contempt. I still think I was right.
Our own book censorship does not work too badly nowadays, bearing in mind that there is always the possibility of an appeal. It works a good deal better than the English censorship of plays. And even if an official censorship sometimes makes itself ridiculous, it is better than an unofficial one.
The real tyranny is that of the busybodies, the wielders of backstairs influence, the people who bring pressure to bear on managements, publishers, librarians, customs officers or police. Sometimes their motives are obscure, as they were when they kept Joyce’s “Dubliners” from being published for nine years: at others they are obvious and one is inclined to agree with them. But it is the wrong way of doing things. Better the Aunt Sally of the censorship board.
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