(1969) The Seven Minutes (64 page)

‘Because no clean person uses it.’ Then she added triumphantly, ‘It’s not even in the dictionaries.’

He wanted the jury with him. so Barrett decided to concede the last. ‘You are quite right about the dictionaries, Mrs White. From Dr Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language to The Oxford English Dictionary and The Random House Dictionary the word “fuck” has been held taboo and omitted. Webster’s New International Dictionary also has left the word out, because, as the editors frankly admitted, it might trouble some readers and provoke controversy and harm the reference work commercially. Yet,

as men become more educated, as the pace of life quickens and communications need to become more precise, this words is gaining acceptance in print, as are many other similar words. Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, used it and defined it. Do you know the derivation of the word “fuck,” Mrs White?’

‘I do not.’

“The word has an honorable history. According to Partridge, the word “fuck” derives from a German word meaning to strike, to bang someone, to knock them up, and therefore is used as a slang expression for “to copulate with.” According to Lord Kennet, writing as Wayland Young, the word derives in turn from Greek, Latin, and French words dealing with bearing fruit and with fetus and with felicity. Therefore, “We enjoy one another and bear fruit … we build a fetus in felicity and become fecund.” To do this, we fuck. Indeed, Mrs White, had you been familiar with Shakespeare or Burns, Joyce or D. H. Lawrence, you would have been familiar with that word long before you came upon it in The Seven Minutes. In fact, when D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s’Lover went on trial in England in 1960, the public prosecutor, Mr Griffith-Jones, discovered, and so informed the court, that “the word fuck or fucking occurs no less than thirty times. “Yet the court found this acceptable and the book was acquitted. Moreover, in reporting that trial, The Guardian of London and The Observer of London both candidly and honestly used the word “fuck” in print. Nor did they ever have to report later that any of their readers were corrupted by their having done so.’

“They were trying to sell newspapers, just like Jadway was trying to sell books,’ said Mrs White firmly. ‘I still say it’s wrong and immoral.’

‘Suppose, Mrs White, that we return to The Seven Minutes and some of the other language that has offended you. The next word that troubled you is the word “prick.” You regard that as dirty?’

‘Dirt for dirt’s sake.’

‘Our etymological dictionaries indicate “prick” has had many meanings over the years, and one meaning that goes as far back as 1592, says The Oxford English Dictionary, is that “prick” is slang for “penis.” The word means anything that pricks or pierces, anything sharply pointed like spurs or with a tapering point like a thorn or a goad or, indeed, the male phallus. Now, William Shakespeare used that word exactly as J J Jadway used it. And you still feel it is obscene?’

‘I do.’

‘Another word that appears to have offended you is “cock,” which means a bird, a faucet, or a male penis. The great playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher used this word in their play The Custom of the Country. I would agree with you if you called it a vulgarism, but I doubt if it could be called obscene.’

except for dirty books.’

‘Wouldn’t even know those words? Why, long before the first printed books were circulated, many of those old Anglo-Saxon words were in common usage. No matter. Perhaps we’d best proceed. ‘ Barrett held the book up. ‘Mrs White, besides the time-tested, unconventional English words in these pages, words used by every class of people in America, what else in these two scenes offended you?’

‘What they’re about. What that woman is doing. The author - he doesn’t have to write about that.’

‘Let’s see what Cathleen was doing in this first scene. She’s remembering when she was eighteen, desiring a man and afraid to have one. Yet she needs sexual release. Let’s read it aloud. “Finally she was naked, and now she knew that it had not been the clothes that had made her hot - but her skin, her blazing skin - and, most excruciating of all, the relentless burning between her thighs. It must be stopped or she would die. She rocked back and forth on the edge of the bed, pressing her thighs together to suffocate the burning, then releasing her thighs, then bringing them together tighter, rubbing them together until the pain was unbearable. She went on like this for minutes,eyes shut, shakingher head, moaning, until finally she fell back on the bed, wriggling until she was all on the bed, then lying rigid while her hand found her belly, and massaged it, and moved downward until her trembling fingers touched the silky public hair and finally reached the tiny protruding bud, and now at first gently she caressed and massaged it, and then faster and faster and faster …” ‘ Barrett looked up at the witness. ‘She’s simply masturbating, Mrs White, and the way it’s written -‘

‘It’s obscene! It could serve no purpose except to excite sick people.’

‘But in the context of the whole book, this scene had an important purpose, Mrs White, as defense literary experts will testify. And this second scene. Simple precoital petting, and coitus with the female atop the male. Do you consider that obscene?’

‘Utterly obscene.’

‘You consider those passages as going beyond the contemporary standards of behaviour in your community?’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘As the average woman from Oakwood, Mrs White, can you tell me what the average single girl does to achieve sexual release if she doesn’t have premarital intercourse with a man - and what the average young married woman does in bed with her husband ?’

‘Objection, Your Honor!’ Duncan roared out. ‘Witness has no firsthand knowledge of the behavior of other average single or married women.’

‘The objection is sustained.’

Barrett nodded. ‘All right, Mrs White, then let’s take you. You

are an average young woman, we are told. Perhaps, you would be willing to tell us from your own sexual experience -‘

‘Objection, Your Honor, as being immaterial.’

‘Sustained.’

‘Mrs White, did you know that the average girl” in the United States does masturbate and that the average married woman does frequently assume a coital position astride her mate ? According to Dr Alfred C. Kinsey’s survey on the human female, six out of ten women masturbated sometime during their lives, and forty-five per cent of these reached orgasms in three minutes or less, and in precoital petting, ninety-one per cent of all women manually stimulated the male genitalia and fifty-four per cent of the women permitted men to stimulate their genitalia orally, and fifty-two percent of the females reported coitus while they lay on top of their male partner, and -‘

‘Your Honor,’ Duncan shouted, ‘objection as being argumentative and immaterial!’

‘Objection sustained on the ground of being immaterial.’

Barrett stared at Mrs White, then at Duncan, and then he looked up at the Judge. ‘I’m finished with our average witness, Your Honor.’

After resuming his seat beside Zelkin at the defense table, Barrett knew that while he had satisfied himself in his crossexamination of Mrs White, he had not endeared himself to the jurors. Ignoring what had been drummed into his head way back in law school, that when you are questioning a witness you are really speaking to the jury, he had become emotionally engaged with the witness, instead of concentrating on the impression he was making on the twelve jurors. He had indulged himself, his personal indignation at middle-class self-righteousness and prudery, and probably had offended those jurors who were middle-class themselves. He had spoken of certain subjects that needed airing, forgetting in his passion that this was not a classroom but a courtroom, and now afterward, recalling his obligation to his client, he regretted his outbursts and his badgering and harassment of the witness. His commitment to a cause was beginning to cloud his objectivity. It was that, he told himself, that and this long abrasive day. His nerves were strained and beginning to unravel.

Now, discouraged, emotionally spent, Barrett tried to be attentive to District Attorney Duncan’s smooth, swiftly paced examination of the day’s final witness.

With this witness, Paul Van Fleet, the prosecution had entered upon the traditional last phase of its case -offering ‘expert opinions from persons qualified to so give such opinions’ - opinions from persons who would support the prosecution’s contention that The Seven Minutes was an obscene work without redeeming social importance.

Duncan’s questions, the witness’s answers, established the fact that few American literary critics were better qualified to discuss the merit or lack of merit of a book that Paul Van Fleet. While the sleepy-eyed, nasal young critic might be too devoted to hyperbole and erudition to be fully understood by the jury, Barrett had admit to himself that the witness was proving effective.

The fact that Van Fleet was obviously a homosexual - there was a long-standing rumor that he had once wedded a widow with a second-rate mind so that he might more conveniently possess her beautiful adolescent son - did not seem to be prejudicing the jurors. Nor, Barrett decided, did the jurors understand that Van Fleet would be automatically hostile to a novel that was, if nothing else, an ode to healthy, lusty heterosexuality, with all its sub-heters. Barrett guessed that the jurors would, instead, interpret Van Fleet’s deviate characteristics - as they had probably interpreted the idiosyncrasies of so many well-known homosexuals who had been successful in the arts - as evidence of a special mystique that guaranteed his superior wisdom and aesthetical judgment. Moreover, Van Fleet’s literary credentials were irrefutable: three published collections of learned essays devoted to such subjects as Ellen Glasgow, Lytton Strachey, the death of the Freudian novel, Hart Crane, Ronald Firbank, polemics and the artist; a series of critical articles in Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, Encounter, Commentary, with an occasional popularized, better-paying piece in The New Yorker; a frequent judge for the National Book Awards.

His opinion of The Seven Minutes!

‘It is not uncommon, Mr Duncan, for the arm of literature to be occasionally marred by blemishes - tiny boils or papulae of books that fester briefly, burst, and disappear. The Seven Minutes is such a boil swollen to dangerous proportions by the publicity of this trial. It is my duty, as one of the protectors of literature’s fine arm, to lance this boil at this time, so that the pus of its pruriency be drained, the blemish eradicated, and the good health of literature be restored. In response to your inquiry, it is not only my pleasure but my duty, as a guardian of American taste, to reassure you that the late Mr Jadway’s novel, The Seven Minutes, is utterly devoid of literary or social excellence. It is to literature what a filthy French postcard is to art. It is obscene in the rankest sense of the word.’

Later. Did Mr Van Fleet feel that J J Jadway tried to give the reader some understanding or vision of love?

‘Surely, Mr Duncan, you are twitting me. Love? Mr Jadway knew nothing of love. There exists a telling anecdote about the author’s attitude toward love. Apparently, the story was obtained first hand by the scholar who originally reported it. If I may, I shall quote from the source directly. In an admirable study entitled Outside the Mainstream, the highly respected Columbia University professor Dr Hiram Eberhart writes, “One night, after listening to

a prize fight on the radio, a contest in which Joe Louis wrested the heavyweight championship from one James Braddock, Jadway told friends who had been listening to it with him that love between a man and a woman was most often performed like a prize fight, the dancing, feinting, the blow and counterblow,‘the anger, the savagery, the struggle for ascendancy and physical domination. But rare true love, Jadway went on, had nothing of pugilism in it. When Jadway was asked to give examples of books that depicted the more common hostile love, Jadway cited Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, which he had just read, as a book that reflected perfectly the brutality of love. Yet, curiously, although Jadway appeared to recognize various aspects of love, and the treatments of it in the writing of others, he was blind to any understanding of what he had committed to paper in his only published novel. For in The Seven Minutes, despite a handful of misguided cultists who believed otherwise, the handling of love throughout is an act of hatred against womanhood. With the action, imagery, language he has used in developing a portrait of his heroine, action, imagery, and language that is unremittingly pornographic and coarse, Jadway has unconsciously taken on the role of a pugilist attempting to down and humiliate the opposite sex.” I find myself in total agreement with Dr Eberhart.’

During this testimony, an oddity, an incongruity actually, had caught Barrett’s attention, dominating his thoughts, at once encouraging him to record all of what he had just heard.

Presently, Elmo Duncan’s examination of Paul Van Fleet was concluded, and it was the defense’s turn.

Rising to cross-examine the witness, Barrett was tempted to bring out the strange incongruity, to delve into this unusual evidence of time out of joint. Yet, after his questioning began, when the moment came to bring up what was foremost on his mind, he refrained from mentioning it. For one thing, he was not absolutely certain that he was right about the oddity that he had detected. If he was wrong, the waspish Van Fleet would make a fool of him. If he was right, he might have an ace in the hole, one too important to the defense to reveal to the opposition at this stage.

Barrett filed his question in a far corner of his mind. Tonight he would take it out and try to find the answer to it himself. If he was right, the defense would have a new lead, a fresh possibility, a kindled hope.

By nine o’clock that night, the corned-beef sandwich and coffee beside him still untouched, Mike Barrett suddenly closed the international almanac he had been poring over, dropped it on his office desk, and gleefully shouted through the open door for Abe Zelkin to join him. Zelkin came in hurriedly, holding a half-finished kosher pickle