The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [342]
Shooting Niagara
For more than 30 years unexpurgated versions of these books written in the 1920s remained firmly out of public view. Officially banned on both sides of the Atlantic, like the earlier novels by Cleland and de Sade, they were available only in illicit editions from semi-undergound publishers like the Olympia and Grove Presses, based in Paris and New York. Not only did the law prohibit the publication of such material. Society in general still continued publicly to accept the moral values on which these laws were based. In nothing were those standards more clearly reflected, for instance, than in the Hayes Code, the system of self-censorship voluntarily adopted by the cinema industry in Hollywood, which laid down precise rules as to what could or could not be shown on a movie screen, right down to the maximum number of seconds an actor and actress could be seen making physical contact in a kiss.
Then, in the 1950s, all those strict taboos against the too overt display of sexual imagery, which to a greater or lesser extent had survived through thousands of years, quite suddenly began to crumble. Fuelled by the onset of a material prosperity like nothing known before in history, based on a wave of new technological advances, an immense shift was beginning to take place in the collective psyche of the Western world. This found expression in the emergence around 1955-1958 of the obsessively fashion-conscious new `youth culture', with its new forms of popular music based on the beat of rock 'n roll, its acceptance of drugs and greater sexual promiscuity, and a rejection of anything identified with the despised `square' world of their elders. It was heavily reinforced by the presence of powerful new forms of imagery, above all through the suddenly ubiquitous television screen. All this helped create in people's heads a sense that they were entering an entirely new age, in which conventions of thinking and behaviour associated with the past could now be thrown aside as constricting and irrelevant. And nowhere did this heady sense of freedom find more obvious expression than in all those areas of life governed by the rules of what came to be known as `traditional morality'.
In Britain in 1959, in keeping with the spirit of the times, a Labour politician, Roy Jenkins, passed through Parliament a new law, the Obscene Publications Act. Its intention was to liberalise censorship on books which could be seen as serious `literature, while continuing to allow that of publications which could be regarded as mere `pornography. It was of course impossible to draft any legal definition to distinguish precisely between what was `art' and what was `filth. And it was this Act which in Britain was to prove the watershed, when in 1960 Penguin Books chose to try out the new law by publishing the first general unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
Lady Chatterley seemed the ideal candidate for such a test case (indeed a full version had already been published in America, for similar reasons, the previous year), because Lawrence so clearly intended his book to be considered not as pornography, which he despised, but as a serious work of art. What followed was a battle between two fundamentally opposed mindsets which was to be repeated many times over the years ahead. On one side were the `progressives; claiming that Lawrence's novel