The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [48]
In both Ulysses and Lady Chatterley the index of the literary was determinative. Judge and jurors attempted to decide whether the works had literary quality and were written with literary intent. Probably the most cited piece of literature to come out of the trials was Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis,” with its well-known opening stanza:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Similar issues had been raised in connection with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which was banned in the United Kingdom and in France before its eventual publication. In an interview with the London Times, the novelist Graham Greene had called Lolita one of the best novels of 1955. The editor of the Sunday Express immediately denounced it as “sheer unrestrained pornography” and “the filthiest book I have ever read.” Were these books literature, or were they “filth”? This was the question bandied in the court of public opinion and argued in the courts of law. From a present-day perspective, it would be possible to regard the contretemps as quaint, signs of a very different time. (Morris Ernst indeed compared the lifting of the ban on Ulysses to the end of Prohibition.)25
For these novels, literary was a qualitative honorific, borne out by subsequent critical judgment, and the binary alternative set up by the law as the opposite of obscene. Judge Woolsey’s decision, as we saw, was itself an extended and effective piece of literary criticism. All three books are now regularly taught, and highly praised, in college courses. But what about works with a less certain or less acclaimed literary status?
Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) inspired support from writers and scholars despite doubts about its lasting merit as a work of literature. When The Well was condemned by the editor of the Sunday Express as “A Book That Should Be Suppressed” (“I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”26), Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster drafted a letter of protest and lined up other signatories, including T. S. Eliot, G. B. Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Vera Brittain, and Ethel Smyth. But as Virginia Woolf reported, Radclyffe Hall insisted that the letter should praise the book’s “artistic merit—even genius,”27 and the letter was never sent. Woolf herself, who privately regarded The Well as a “meritorious dull book,”28 signed a briefer letter with Forster and appeared as a witness in court, where she was relieved, she wrote, that “we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art.” The chief magistrate, Sir Charles Biron, ruled that the question of obscenity was one that he alone would determine, and he refused to permit testimony about literary merit. His decision—that the book was obscene and prejudicial to the morals of the community—was upheld on appeal, and the book was not legally available in the U.K. until twenty years later.29
In the United States, Morris Ernst headed the defense when The Well was accused of obscenity. A number of prominent authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, submitted statements in support of the book, and although a magistrate refused to consider the question of literary merit, the New