(1969) The Seven Minutes (21 page)

Barrett’s car had arrived then, and as Sanford’s bags were placed in the trunk, Barrett had wondered how truthful were the reasons Sanford had given for wanting a speedy trial. It occurred to him that Sanford, as much as Elmo Duncan, wanted to take advantage of the publicity that the book and the case were receiving.

Then, as he had settled into the driver’s seat, Barrett had realized that part of the fault was his own. He had been paying lip service to Zelkin’s wish for a postponement. He had not been more persuasive about a delay because of private and selfish reasons. Faye had indeed succeeded in cajoling her father to hold the vice-presidency Open for him another month. Barrett had one more option on a successful future. He dared not let it expire.

Yet, as he drove toward the freeway, he had found himself troubled by his conscience. He had committed himself to defending a book in which he believed. At the same time, he was as responsible as his client, Phil Sanford, for not giving his side the days and weeks necessary to build an impregnable and well-armed defense. Their position was not merely risky, but downright perilous.

It was as if Phil Sanford had read his mind. Sanford had been silently brooding, and when they were on the San Diego Freeway he had given voice to his concern. ‘Mike, you made me a little nervous back there with your talk. You almost sounded defeatist.’

‘I’m anything but defeatist,’ Barrett had replied. ‘I’m determined to win this one. We all are. It just worries me going into battle with a rifle when, if there’d been time, I might have had a rocket launcher.’

‘Whenever I called you or Abe, you sounded busy enough, like you were getting some big guns on our side.’

‘We are, we are, but I just want to be sure they’re big enough and the very best. In fact, before we sit down to lunch, I’d better bring you up to date.’

As they careened over the freeway, Barrett had recited the names of the defense witnesses that had already been lined up. They had Sir Esmond Ingram, the elderly, cranky, and celebrated onetime Oxford don, who had years ago hailed The Seven Minutes as being ‘one of the most honest, sensitive, and distinguished works of art created in modern Western literature’ a blurb which Sanford House had used extensively in promoting the novel.

In his retirement Sir Esmond had devoted himself to three marriages and divorces, to English girls half his age. He had given his energies to foundations supporting a world calendar, a universal language, and a crusade for vegetarianism. He had been twice jailed, briefly, for lying down before No. 10 Downing Street in

protest against nuclear armament. Because of Sir Esmond’s growing reputation for eccentricity, Barrett had worried that the value of Sir Esmond’s championship of the Jadway book might be weakened. But Zelkin had pointed out that elderly Englishmen were understood by Americans to be consistently eccentric, and that an English accent from the witness stand always carried authority and was effective and tended to intimidate a jury, and, besides, who in the hell else was there of such a reputation who had ever praised the book?

Sir Esmond had been reached by transatlantic telephone in his Sussex cottage, and his enthusiasm for the book (although Barrett had a vague suspicion that the English don thought they were talking about Lady Chatterley’s Lover) had been as great as ever. Yes, he would be delighted to cooperate against ‘the book burners,‘provided his sponsors could convince the United States immigration people that he was not an anarchist. Zelkin had been able to so convince immigration, and Sir Esmond Ingram would be one of their chief witnesses.

And, Barrett had reassured Sanford, there were others being assembled for different purposes. Guy Collins, the popular exponent of the naturalistic novel who had often written about how much he had been favorably influenced by Jadway’s book, had agreed to be a defense witness. Efforts were being made to obtain the support of two or three other literary experts who admired The Seven Minutes. Then, anticipating the District Attorney’s effort to prove, through Jerry Griffith and additional witnesses, that the book’s prurient appeal endangered the youth of America and general community security, both Barrett and Zelkin had sought witnesses to counteract such a contention. For the defense, they had acquired the services of Dr Yale Finegood, a psychiatric authority on juvenile violence and delinquency, and of Dr Rolf Lagergren, a Swedish specialist in sex surveys whose findings had earned him international renown and a visiting professorship at Reardon College in Wisconsin. Both Finegood and Lagergren attributed juvenile crime to causes other than obscene literature and motion pictures, and their enlistment on the side of the defense had been a reason for some optimism.

‘But make one mistake about one thing,’ Barrett had said, guiding the car into the Sunset Boulevard off ramp. ‘The real defendant in this trial will not be Ben Fremont, but J J Jadway. In every major case of this kind, a central issue has always been the author’s motivation and purpose in writing the book, because this would help to establish that his work had some social importance. Now, this is thin ice, and we have to determine whether we dare face crossing it or should detour. We have a choice. So has the District Attorney. Each side has to determine how it intends to proceed before the fireworks begin.’

‘Exactly what do you mean, Mike?’

‘If we don’t have sufficient proof that Jadway’s intent was beyond reproach in his writing The Seven Minutes, we’d be better off asserting that an author’s intent has nothing to do with obscenity, which has been done successfully before. We have Justiee Douglas’ dissent in the Ginzburg case to hide behind. Douglas argued, “A book should stand on its own, irrespective of the reasons why it was written or the wiles used in selling it.” Even if we hold to this, we still might be pushed out on that thin ice by the prosecution. If that happened, we could always fall back on the argument Charles Rembar used in one Fanny Hill appeal. You see, when Rembar defended Lady Chatterley earlier, he had had no trouble proving that Lawrence’s intentions in writing the book were of the best. But in defending Fanny Hill there was rough sledding, because the only evidence about the author’s motives showed that he had written the book cynically, for crassly commercial reasons. Remember? John Cleland was in debtor’s prison. He needed money to get out. A publisher approached him and offered him twenty guineas, enough to get him out of jail, if he wrote a salacious novel to order, one that might sell. So, presumably, Cleland wrote Fanny Hill for that reason, for the money to be freed, and he was released, and the publisher made ten thousand pounds in profit on subsequent sales.’

‘That’s right,’ said Sanford. ‘How did the defense lawyer explain that?’

‘Rembar explained it sensibly. Cleland’s motives, he insisted, were a question of literary history, not of law. As Rembar put it, “The courts simply could not decide, two and a quarter centuries later, what had gone on inside Cleland’s head.” What mattered was the end result, the book, its ideas, its view of life, not the personal reasons that had made an author write his book. Besides, argued Rembar, “It would be both futile and unbecoming… for courts to inquire into the diverse springs of artistic endeavor. The miserable record made by artists as critics of their own work - the ludicrous verbalizations that we sometimes hear from talented people in the nonverbal arts - shows that their stated plans are of little consequence; what they create is of the greatest consequence.” ’

‘What was the final verdict of the judges ?’

‘They said nay. Impressive, but not impressive enough,’ said Barrett sourly. ‘The judges voted three to two for suppression, because they didn’t accept Rembar’s arguments generally.’

‘But you indicated that we have another choice?’

‘We do. The other choice is to face up to what is ahead of us. The preponderance of legal opinion holds that an author’s motivation and intent is one of the important issues in holding a book to be obscene or not. Take Judge Woolsey in the Ulysses trial. He observed, “In any case where a book is claimed to be obscene it must first be determined whether the intent with which it was written was what is called, according to the usual phrase, pornographic,-

that is, written for the purpose of exploiting obscenity.” Later, Judge van Pelt Bryan, is one of the Lady Chatterleycases, added, “The sincerity and honesty of purpose of an author as expressed in a manner in which a book is written and in which his theme and ideas are developed has a great deal to do with whether it is of literary and intellectual merit. Here, as in the Ulysses case, there is no question about Lawrence’s honesty and sincerity of purposes, artistic integrity and lack of intention to appeal to prurient interest.”’

Barrett had paused and glanced at Sanford’s troubled profile. “That’s our issue, Phil. Did Jadway write his book honestly, sincerely, with artistic integrity? That’s the question we have to answer affirmatively and without reservation. It is a question that will be in every juror’s mind. Either we pussyfoot and back away or we set out to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Jadway did not write this book for commercial reasons but wrote it for artistic and moral reasons, so that it has that necessary social importance. Anyway, Abe and I have made our choice. We’ve decided to attempt to prove Jadway’s good intentions.’

Sanford had groaned. ‘How are you ever going to prove that? Jadway’s been dead a million years. He was young, he was nobody, he was practically unknown when he died. Nothing remains to prove his good intentions. You know how hard I’ve dug on my end. I couldn’t turn up a thing. He left nothing, and he can tell us nothing. Dead men tell no tales, to coin an expression.’

‘But ghosts can be very impressive,’ Barrett had said calmly. He had pointed off to his right. ‘By the way, there’s the UCLA campus. Jerry Griffith’s school. I think we may be doing a little research there.’

Sanford had showed no interest in the Los Angeles campus of the University of California. ‘What do you mean about Jadway’s ghost?’

‘Few people die without leaving some heritage behind. Maybe it’s only something of themselves they revealed or bequeathed to friends or acquaintances. We’ve been making use of the budget you gave us for European investigators. We have several scurrying around Paris, and now other points as well. We’re trying to invoke the ghost of Jadway. We’ve learned there was an Italian artist, da Vecchi by name, who used to frequent the cafes in Paris where Jadway hung out in the thirties. We’ve learned that da Vecchi is alive, and that he once painted a portrait of Jadway. If so, that’ll be the first pictorial representation of him to come to light. Anyway, we’re trying to locate the painter. Then we’re on the trail of a Contessa Daphne Orsoni. She’s a Dallas woman who married a rich Italian count. Shortly after Jadway published his book, he was vacationing in Venice, and the Contessa had heard of Jadway’s “naughty” novel and she invited him to a masked ball at he? palazzo. We’ve traced her to Spain. Apparently she has a place on”

the Costa Brava. But to invoke the good ghost, our main hope is still centered on the Frenchman who published the underground version of The Seven Minutes -‘

‘Christian Leroux,’ interrupted Sanford. ‘Have you heard anything more?’

‘Just the same news I gave you a few days ago. Etoile Press has expired, but Leroux is very much among the living. As long as Leroux is alive, we can resurrect Jadway’s shade. If we can get our hands on the French publisher, we’ll have our own star witness, the one we need to offset the Griffith boy’s testimony. After all, Leroux did bring out The Seven Minutes. He must have believed in it, and he must have known a good deal about the book’s author. He’s our man. We’re on his trail and getting warm. Kimura hoped to have some word on this today.’

‘We’ve absolutely got to get Leroux,’ said Sanford.

Barrett snorted. ‘You’re telling me?’

A few minutes later he had dropped Phil Sanford off at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Sanford had reserved a bungalow, and then Barrett had gone on to the office on Wilshire Boulevard. He had spent two hours conferring with Zelkin, making telephone calls, and dictating to Donna Novik, the secretary he shared with Zelkin. He enjoyed working with Donna. She was an eyesore, henna hair, narrow eyes, overly powdered bloated face, frumpy clothes on a shapeless body, but she was a delight because she was as trustworthy as a madonna, fiercely devoted and loyal, and had such astonishing, skills at the stenotyper, the electric typewriter, and the calculator that Barrett sometimes thought she was plugged into an electrical outlet herself.

After Kimura had telephoned that he would be late, Barrett had buzzed Zelkin, and together they had gone to meet Philip Sanford for lunch.

And here they were now. Barrett realized that his forehead was ablaze from the sun and that the glass in his hand was empty and that Zelkin was introducing Sanford to Leo Kimura. Pulling his chair in under the umbrella, Barrett gave Kimura a mock bow, and Kimura bowed back seriously, then settled down in the place left for him. Balancing his bulging briefcase on his knees, he was already unlocking it.

‘You want a drink or are you famished?’ asked Barrett.

‘Famished,’ said Kimura. ‘I feel like the whole Donner Party in one.’ But then he was at once apologetic, like a servant who had considered his own comfort before his employer’s. ‘I can wait, if you prefer to talk first.’

Barrett had great affection for the Nisei attorney. Kimura had a crew cut, a saffron-completed face with features that seemed impassive, and the steely, springy appearance of the kind of person they shoot out of cannons.

‘We prefer to eat and talk,’ said Barrett.

Zelkin was already signaling for menus, and after the menus came they ordered sparingly.

The moment that the captain had gone, they all concentrated on Kimura. ‘Well,’ Zelkin inquired, ‘what’s the latest, Leo?’

Kimura had finished extracting papers from his briefcase. Closing the briefcase, propping it against his chair, he laid his papers on the table before him and looked up. ‘Some progress, I believe. I will save the best for the last. First, Norman C. Quandt.’ He addressed himself to their new client. ‘Mr Sanford, I have here the information you dictated on how you purchased the rights to The Seven Minutes from Mr Quandt. Now that you are here in person before me, I would like the opportunity to learn whether anything was omitted. Could you review the facts of the acquisition once more?’