‘Yes. Can he tell us where Esmond is at the moment?’
Boris’s sightless face turned to me.
‘He is Esmond.’
Note to The God of the Labyrinth
Some time in 1968, the Daily Telegraph published a leading article deploring the increasing amount of pornography that is being printed, and citing myself and Miss Brigid Brophy as two ‘serious’ writers who aim at larger sales by spicing their books with episodes that would have led to prosecution in less liberal times. I took no exception to this article, for it is true that I have written about sex in some of my books in a way that would not have been legally permissible fifty years ago. I do not think of myself as a writer of pornography; but if someone else wishes to do so, it is surely a matter of the point of view? A few weeks later, the Telegraph article was syndicated in a New Zealand newspaper, and a reader wrote a letter indignantly defending me; he pointed out that more than half my books are about such subjects as philosophy, art, music and literature, and that of my seven novels, four have little or no sex. When I read this letter I was convinced; I was not a pornographer. It is true that a New England bookseller had to appear in court for displaying The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme, but nothing came of this. The judge’s opinion was that although I was totally devoid of literary talent, the book was not technically obscene.
A few weeks after the Telegraph article, I was asked by a firm of solicitors if I would appear in court to give evidence in favour of a Bradford bookseller who was being prosecuted for selling My Secret Life, the sexual autobiography of an anonymous Victorian. I replied that I was too busy to travel to Yorkshire—a two-day journey from Cornwall—but that they were welcome to quote my opinion that the book was not pornography, and ought to be published openly in England. I offered to write a letter to this effect. And when I began thinking it out, I saw the difficulty of the task facing the defence. My Secret Life has no literary merit. When Grove Press published it in America, they argued that it was a valuable social document of the Victorian era; but this is not true either. A sociologist could learn more from ten pages of Charles Booth or Henry Mayhew than from the three thousand pages of My Secret Life. Its author was the male version of a nymphomaniac. Sex was a vocation. He tried every possible kind of sexual experience over forty years or so, and then decided that it had all been so fascinating that he ought to write about it. Who can deny that he was right? It is true that not everybody would want to read it; but then, not everybody wants to read autobiographies of soldiers, politicians and travellers; that is no argument against them.
One cannot even say that My Secret Life was written ‘without obscene intent’, or whatever the phrase is. He had enjoyed the sex, and he enjoyed writing about it. The man is a dirty-minded bore; to write at such length about sex argues complete empty-headedness. All the same, the book is real; it is a man’s life; it is ‘fact’, just as the massive volumes of White Papers the Webbs studied for their history of trade unionism were ‘fact’. Now I agree that there is a case against the publication of certain kinds of unpleasant fact—for example, the details of sexual assault that emerge at murder trials; these could lead to imitative crimes. But anyone who imitates the author of My Secret Life will do no particular harm, or come to any; so this does not apply. I can think of no valid ground for suppressing the book—and certainly not for sentencing people who sell it to two years in gaol—as happened to the Bradford bookseller.
But the ‘fact’ argument can hardly be applied to de Sade and Fanny Hill (whose publication I would also defend), particularly if they are kept fairly expensive, so that the cost acts as a ‘filter’ where minors are concerned. I do not like de Sade; I do not think him ‘significant’ in the way that Jean Paulhan and Mlle de Beauvoir apparently do. The basic spirit of his books is one of schoolboy revolt—like writing dirty words on walls. But I would not be in favour of suppressing his books. As to Fanny Hill, Cleland admits he wrote it for money; it is a prime example of what Sainte-Beuve called ‘books that one reads with one hand’. It is amusing, well written, and there is nothing in it that every adult reader does not already know.
It must be borne in mind that to suppress a book—to declare that it is unfit for public consumption—is the literary equivalent of executing a criminal, or burning a witch, or having a political opponent thrown in gaol. It is difficult to defend it impartially—with detachment. Like the Index of the Catholic Church or the Nazi burning of the books, it can only be defended on sectarian grounds: from the basis of accepted dogmas. We can argue against the open sale of drugs, or of intoxicating liquor to minors, on pragmatic grounds: it can cause physical damage. We know about the limits of the body; we know nothing about those of the mind. This kind of argument cannot be transferred to books.
I agree that all this sounds like special pleading—like a cunning lawyer who knows he has an indefensible case, and decides to try to blur the lines and confuse the issues. I get this feeling reading a great many liberal opponents of censorship. But when I look inside myself, I find I have a very definite intuition of what constitutes pornography and what doesn’t. Let me try to explain the nature of this intuition.
I might take as a starting point a paragraph from my autobiography, Voyage to a Beginning:
The hero [of Ritual in the Dark] is obsessed by the feeling that there is meaning in human existence, and that it is accessible to the mind—if only the mind knew the right way to go about finding it. One of the commonest ‘meaning experiences’ comes through sex, and therefore sex makes a valuable starting point for the search for meaning. (I italicize ‘starting point’ because it seems to me that nothing can be more futile than sex carried on as a kind of vocation—as by Casanova or Frank Harris.)
Sex can be the starting point of the ‘search for meaning’, the denial of Sartre’s assertion that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’. This argument obviously applies to D. H. Lawrence, as well as to those books of mine that the Telegraph had in mind. De Sade is defensible because he also saw sex as somehow containing the meaning of human existence. It is true that there are basic errors in his thinking—the failure to reckon with the ‘law of diminishing returns’—that invalidate his work in the last analysis; it is a curious monument of error, like the geocentric theory of the universe or the phlogiston theory of combustion, and it remains a useful symbol of an interesting fallacy. It also makes an excellent starting point for existential philosophy. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov argues that if there is no God, then man is god, and must prove it, and he carries this logic to the point of suicide. De Sade carries it into an ultimate defence of amorality. In either case, one can begin to argue fruitfully.
I get a feeling of real pornography when I read certain books that no one has ever thought of suppressing—books like No Orchids for Miss Blandish, or The Carpetbaggers, or even some of the James Bond novels. Forster accused Joyce of trying to cover the universe with mud; he was mistaken; the dirt and violence of Ulysses is intended to act in reverse, as an emetic. Joyce himself recognised his kinship with Swift. James Hadley Chase and Harold Robbins are out to please—and to make money by pleasing. The sex and violence—particularly the violence—are intended to make the meal more palatable. They are like brothel-keepers in that they are willing to cater for anyone who is willing to pay. And if one drags their premises into the light of day, one finds another version of the de Sade argument: that what gives pleasure is, by definition, good. But de Sade, like Voltaire or some modern logical positivist, was arguing against ‘metaphysical’ notions of goodness. He says, in effect: ‘People say that virtue, self-denial, self-sacrifice, public spirit, honour and bravery are good. I say this is just confused thinking. To the level-headed realist, only pleasure is good.’ What he then proceeds to do is to refute himself by trying to demonstrate his thesis at exhaustive length. The only thing that surprises us is that he himself was not bored sick long before the end of Juliette. B
ut at least he was clearly aware of the values he was trying to erode.
Now no one criticises Conan Doyle or Rider Haggard for not being as intelligent as Thomas Mann or Aldous Huxley. They set up as entertainers, and the ‘values’ they advocate—honour, bravery and so on—are in no way controversial. Since their time, the popular entertainer has become more realistic, more sophisticated. Unfortunately, not more intelligent. He rejects the older values—but not in the name of a questing intellect; only in the name of entertainment, of ‘giving people what they want’. But the rejection of values—if it is to be a useful activity—must be fully conscious of its own nature. When we come across people who hold opinions they are not willing to think about, we rightly call them fools or bigots. And the objection to this kind of stupidity or bigotry is that it is somehow life-denying. I have a digestive and an excretory system to deal with the food I need to keep me alive. I have a mental digestive and excretory system to deal with my experience, and my growth as a human being depends upon this as my bodily growth depends on the physical system. If either system gets blocked, I shall be slowly poisoned. Ian Fleming and Harold Robbins do not possess a digestive and excretory system to deal with the values they reject. The result is a smell of decay, of a system blocked with its own waste products. If one reads them for too long, the result is that feeling of headache, of dyspepsia, of futility, that is the outcome of severe constipation.
This law also applies, of course, to much greater works of literature. One gets the same feeling of futility if one reads too much of Rolland’s Jean-Christophe, or Powys’s Wolf Solent, or even War and Peace. These books possess a digestive system, but it is not big enough to deal with so much ‘experience’. It is worth observing that a digestive system is not simply a capacity for abstract thought. Huxley or Mann are intelligent enough; yet their books are curiously static. What is important is a writer’s capacity to attack his experience; not simply to ‘suffer’ it, but to get beyond it. Dostoevsky is never boring, in spite of his clumsy style and meandering length, because of this feeling of smouldering fires trying to consume his material, as a furnace smelts ore.
This defines my intuition of the nature of pornography. It is bound up with the question of the digestive system. We do not give rice to ducks, or suet pudding to small babies, because we know their digestive systems cannot cope; if I did so, knowing the result, I would be guilty of criminal negligence. The same applies to a writer who produces a sticky, undercooked mixture of sex and violence, aimed at the ‘lowest common denominator’ of reader.
This also explains why I would not consider My Secret Life, Fanny Hill or de Sade truly pornographic. The test is whether it contains this element of poison, of life-denial. My Secret Life becomes very dull and repetitious after the first few hundred pages, but it is no more ‘poisonous’ than Hansard or the Congressional Record. The narrator is coarse and stupid, but he is not cruel or mean. One might object to his basic values: to his feeling that sex is the most important human experience. But one can take it or leave it. There is nothing to prevent the reader putting a Beethoven quartet on the gramophone after reading a dozen pages or so. The same is true of Fanny Hill. As to de Sade, reading him provokes a reaction that would actually enhance the Beethoven quartet. The trouble with Hadley Chase or Harold Robbins is that after reading a few pages, one would no longer be capable of enjoying Beethoven. He would seem to be irrelevant to this vicious, dangerous, violent world in which we live, a ‘beautiful ineffectual angel’ living in his absurd musical dreamworld.
In short, pornography involves a sense of the debasement of values. If art is a battle between man’s mind and the material world, then the pornographer is on the side of the world. It is interesting to note that Fleming, Harold Robbins and Hadley Chase all exploit crime as well as sex, and often seem to equate the two as a kind of destructive activity. Shaw pointed out that we judge the artist by his highest moments, the criminal by his lowest. This means that art may be seen as an advocate of man’s highest moments as against his lowest. The writer who exploits crime and violence purely to titillate the reader has become an advocate of the lowest. But if he goes on to treat sex in such a way as to bracket it with crime as one of man’s lowest moments, the offence is compounded.
But now to the next stage of the argument. It will be noted that Thomas Mann and Aldous Huxley are also concerned about the battle between the material world and the mind, and that both of them tend to be defeatists. I personally find Huxley almost as depressing as Graham Greene because the material world always seems to win by a short head. He talks about life-affirmation, but somehow, none of it ever seems to get through in his books. His ‘affirmative’ people are always unpleasant and stupid; his sensitive people are always weak. The same is true of Thomas Mann, but his ‘objectivity’ makes it less oppressive.
Life-denial, then, while it is an essential element of pornography, is not restricted to pornography. This raises the question of how far the converse is true. Is pornography possible if the spirit of life-denial is not present?
This is a more important question than it sounds. This question of morality and immorality, health and decadence, has been concerning us for nearly a century, ever since the great Zola and Ibsen controversies of the 1880s. The arguments on both sides have always been roughly the same. As early as 1782, Thomas Jefferson wrote: ‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God. . . . Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.’ These simple, primitive societies are like a healthy body; the rejection of ‘corruption’ is an automatic function of the health. When the ‘dubious’, the unhealthy, the corrupt, begin to find a foothold, it means, ipso facto, that decadence has set in. If my physical body became more susceptible to germs, I would take steps to cure it, to reject the germs; I would certainly not accept them as an interesting variation of the boring routine of being healthy. This is the line Max Nordau pursued in his Degeneration (1893); decadence should be recognised for what it is, not tolerated and encouraged. Shaw’s counterblast, The Sanity of Art, was sub-titled: ‘An exposure of the current nonsense about artists being degenerate’, and its argument could be summarised in the words: ‘Not degeneration, but development.’ Thomas Mann, who was writing his first stories at this time, took a less positive position (which he maintained all his life): that as art becomes more sensitive and subtle, it develops and degenerates; evolution means degeneration, beyond a certain point. Spengler said the same thing in The Decline of the West.
Shaw disagreed fundamentally. He would have said: ‘Of course, evolution can mean degeneration, if sensitivity outruns vitality. But it does not necessarily follow.’ And this is obviously another form of the question we have already raised. Mann and Huxley were writers in whom sensitivity outran vitality. One might have thought that if sensitivity outruns vitality, it ought—in theory—to be possible to increase the vitality to match it. Neither of them believed this possible. But is this true? Let us suppose I have a crude and oversimplified view of something. The result is a head-on collision with reality which leaves me wiser—more sensitive—but, for the moment, less confident and assertive. Must I remain like this for the rest of my life? Obviously not. I make a mental effort, I digest the experience, contemplate it until I have absorbed all its implications: that is, until I have mastered it. Then the confidence returns; the vital springs flow again. That is to say, it depends upon the same ‘digestive’ act that I have already discussed in connection with pornography.
This view presents an alternative to the Jeffersonian position: that simplicity and health and stability all go together. If you upset the stability, you will upset the simplicity and health; but with a certain effort and a certain optimism, they can be reestablished on a higher level, and the result will be a genuine evolution. The alternatives are not a stick-in-the-mud conservatism or galloping decadence.
All of wh
ich, then, would seem to argue not only that pornography cannot exist unless life-denial is present, but that what would be pornographic in the presence of life-denial would cease to be so in the presence of life-affirmation.
The conclusion may sound abstract; but for me, it was of immediate practical interest. When I started writing my first novel, in my late teens, I was obsessed by the problem that led Joyce to choose the Odyssey to provide the structure for his own chaotic novel of modern Dublin. The problem was expressed by Yeats in the three lines:
Shakespearian fish swam the sea, far away from land;
Romantic fish swam in nets coming to the hand;
But what are all those fish that lie gasping on the strand?
That is to say, Shakespearian art held a mirror up to Nature: or perhaps one should say, a magnifying glass. Its basic unit was the event, the story. Character is important, but only within the story; after all, it would not really matter if it was Hamlet who got jealous and murdered his wife, or Lear who became Thane of Cawdor. In romantic art, character became the story. Goethe’s Werther, Senancour’s Obermann, Hölderlin’s Hyperion, are not interchangeable because they are the story. The magnifying glass moved closer, so that the basic unit ceased to be the event, and became the character.
A story will tell itself if you let it. But a character has to be lived by the author. Goethe had to become Werther and Wilhelm Meister in a way that Shakespeare never had to identify with Hamlet or Lear. But still, if the novelist got ‘into’ the character, the events then developed naturally; Wilhelm becomes the manager of a theatrical troupe, and Faust becomes a public benefactor.