Babel Tower (87 page)

“
Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
ladies and gentlemen, was felt to be an offence to public decency because it described sexual acts explicitly, and because it used four-lettered words which are felt to be part of a vocabulary proscribed by our society as a whole. It was mixed up with feelings about class and the nature of marriage. Many eminent witnesses argued that it was tender—”

Mr. Hefferson-Brough objects. Comparisons as to obscenity between one book and another are not admissible.

The judge says they are admissible if the point in question is one of literary merit, and not simply of comparative obscenity.

Sir Augustine says that in practice this is a very fine tightrope to tread. He says that he wished merely to observe that the kind of problem
raised by
Babbletower
was different from the problems of love, marriage and language raised by
Lady Chatterley,
who was acquitted. It was a problem of cruelty and perversion. He will move on to his next point, which is one concerning the possible or probable readers of the text. The Act speaks of “persons who are likely, in all the circumstances to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it.”

He reminds the Court that the country has just lived through the trial of the Moors Murderers. He asks the jury, when they listen to the arguments that they will undoubtedly hear about literature, about fiction, not inciting readers in general to bad acts, to remember the library of Ian Brady, to remember Myra Hindley’s participation—learned from Brady, who learned it from books, at least in part—in acts derived imaginatively from books, from
The Scourge of the Swastika
and from the Marquis de Sade. Myra Hindley was possibly a normal young woman before this relationship. The works of the Marquis de Sade are certainly in Mr. Jude Mason’s library. His
Babbletower,
his isolated “Tour Bruyarde,” is plagiarised from the terrible Marquis’s Château de Silling in
The 120 Days of Sodom.
“Do not think, ever, ladies and gentlemen, ‘Well, it is only a book.’ Men and women are greatly moved by books, their lives may be enriched, changed, or ruined by books. Dictators seize and burn books, because books are dangerous. That fact too will be advanced, no doubt, as a reason for not condemning
Babbletower.
But they are right, the dictators. Good books are dangerous to bad men, and by the same token, bad books are dangerous to good men.”

Godfrey Hefferson-Brough rises to open the case for the defence of Bowers and Eden. He is a fleshy man, a red man, a hairy man under his false hair. He is not humorous, he is not beguiling, he has a tendency to thunder. He appears throughout the proceedings to be a prosecuting counsel who has strayed into the realm of defence, and is happiest attacking the opposition. Augustine Weighall’s style is sweetly reasonable and understated: Hefferson-Brough would like to make rhetorical flights. It is significant that he, like Martin Fisher, the Bowers and Eden solicitor, is an “Erstwhile Hog,” which is the arcane term for an Old Swineburnian. Rupert Parrott, too, as we have seen, is an Erstwhile Hog.

He speaks a panegyric about Bowers and Eden. They are an old firm, a respectable firm, dating back to the old days of John Murray, John Blackwell, and George Smith. A specialist firm, whose field has
always been religion, theology, social thought, with a lighter section of belles lettres and fiction, fiction appropriate to the
gravitas
of the house, not salacious fiction, not avant-garde fiction, not shockers and penny dreadfuls. A few donnish detective stories, with perhaps an inquisitive vicar, or vicar’s lady, as the sleuth, a few novels lately like Mrs. Phyllis Pratt’s excellent
Daily Bread
about the daily lives of the clergy. Mr. Rupert Parrott, the recently appointed managing director of this small firm, is young, but old for his years, a churchgoing Christian, a happily married husband and father, the dynamic successor to a perhaps dozy, perhaps out-of-touch board of directors. He has tried to expand his list to include burning concerns of the moment, things nowadays hotly debated, new strains of theology, works on the Holocaust and its causes, works on the Samaritans, on new forms of social help for the despairing, works also on psychoanalysis and psychiatry, on sociology and philosophy, on the pros and cons of new things like psychedelics and pop music, serious analyses of these things, up-to-date and responsible.

Babbletower
and its author came to Mr. Parrott’s attention through a literary friend who read for him, and whose judgement he trusted. He saw immediately that it was a controversial book, a book that would arouse strong feelings, a book that was strong meat, yes, very strong meat for readers to digest. But he formed the view—“and it is a view I believe you will share, ladies and gentlemen, when you have read the book”—that it was a powerful and original work, a satirical work about the follies of utopian projectors, and about sexual optimists who believe anything goes and all is permitted. He formed the view that it was—despite its frankness, its full-blooded depiction of the consequences of folly and wrong thinking—he formed the view that it was an
intensely moral
work, a work attacking just those aspects of our society which the 1959 Obscene Publications Act is itself designed to attack, the vacuously pornographic, the licentious, the depraved and the corrupt. For the depraved and the corrupt in
Babbletower,
as you will see, ladies and gentlemen, receive short shrift, they meet a terrible reckoning. This is a book designed to bring home to you the disgusting nature of the world of the depraved and the corrupt in our own society—in all societies—and if you are disgusted, the book has worked its work, for it is not designed to give you a warm and comfortable glow of pleasure. No, it is designed to warn, to alarm, to
avert.
There are episodes, there are tendencies in our society which it is needful for wise men to know about, shun,
and do away with, and it is the knowledge of these tendencies—and a righteous horror—that
Babbletower
promulgates.

Hefferson-Brough, like Sir Augustine, discourses on the meaning of “tend to deprave and corrupt.” The Act, he says, was designed to stop pornography, the filth dirty old men use to masturbate with, the slime oozing from the gutters of brothels, the puerile jokes about torture which we all know, and which the author and publisher of this book abominate as much as you do, ladies and gentlemen. The Act was not designed to stop works of literature—even
daring
works of literature that take a fearless look at a real social problem, the decay of social and sexual controls that leads precisely to a flood of true pornography, trivial, rotten and rotting to the fibres of our community. The Act was designed to make it possible for works of literature to be published in freedom and without fear of prurient attacks. We shall lead evidence to show that there is overwhelming support for the literary, psychological and social importance of
Babbletower.
Bad books do hurt good men, as my learned friend wisely said. But good works hurt nothing but bad books.

“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.”

Frederica wonders if this quotation is not excessive. She looks at the jury to see how many of them react to
Areopagitica
; one man frowns with recognition, one woman gives a beatific smile of assent and nods; most others stare, puzzled and stolid, into space.

Samuel Oliphant, QC, then speaks on behalf of Jude Mason. He says that his client is a young man, an artist, who lives in poverty in order to practise his art. He is not a pornographer, and in his view
Babbletower
is a complex work of art, the subject of which is the relation between erotic freedom and community, between repression and cruelty. His work is, and will be shown to be, in a great European tradition of satirical flouting, of moral outrage working
through
the outrageous. In cases where a work of art is being prosecuted as an obscene publication, it has been held—he cites precedents—that the
intentions
of the author or publisher are irrelevant to the jury’s decision as to whether the book is obscene. In other cases—he cites other precedents—it has been held that in the case of literary merit, intention can and must be discussed. “In the
Lady Chatterley
trial, D. H. Lawrence’s intentions invariably
and inevitably came into the evidence and the debate. It was suggested by many Defence witnesses that Lawrence was a Puritan. He had written a frank book about sex, but his intentions were puritanical. The. same, ladies and gentlemen, could be argued of my client. One of his characters—perhaps the only wholly sympathetic character in the whole tale of excess and punishment—is a figure with the strange name of Samson Origen, who preaches abstemiousness, indeed abstention from all activity, a kind of asceticism. Strange though it may appear, in a book so full of plain-speaking sexual descriptions and even orgiastic behaviour, the ruling atmosphere is one of asceticism and abstemiousness. There is a certain humour, a certain irony, in Mr. Mason’s work, which is on the side of Samson Origen. It would be possible to miss this humour, this irony, particularly when you are reading with an eye to looking for depravation and corruption: I therefore bring it to your attention as perhaps the saving grace of this sorry tale. Mr. Mason’s intentions are to mock folly, and worse than folly, through exposing and depicting it mercilessly. This is an art as old as time, and as honourable as any other.”

During these speeches, Frederica is aware of a strange whirring and clicking coming from behind, or under her seat. As the judge says, “The next question, is it not, is to arrange for the reading of the book?” she turns, and sees the gingery hairy face of Avram Snitkin behind her, bright blue eyes peering between sandy lashes.

Mr. Justice Gordale Balafray asks what arrangements can be made for the jury to read
Babbletower.
How long should be set aside? Where should the reading take place?

Frederica whispers, “Are you recording this on your tape-recorder?”

“Of course.”

“Is it allowed?”

“I’ve got permission from the Court. I didn’t say it was ethno-methodological research. I said it was for the publisher’s records. I’m baffled they don’t use it for the official records but they don’t—there’s their shorthand writer, over there, with a
pen.
But they don’t mind me making a recording; they say that’s fine.”

She hears the snake of tape rustle on its reels, digesting the words.

The barristers and the judge discuss the reading. Samuel Oliphant says that the book could be taken home and read in quiet domestic
surroundings, at a reasonable speed. Hefferson-Brough says that for
Lady Chatterley
a special room was found at the Old Bailey, with armchairs. Juries have been known to retire to hotels. The jury foreman reports that the chairs in the jury room are hard. The judge seems decided by this last complaint; he retorts that they are the chairs in the jury room, where the jurors are doing the work they have been called to do. We have all sat on hard chairs, in our time, says he, in schools, in libraries, and been none the worse for it. Indeed, he himself finds himself more alert, sitting on a good solid hard chair, than sunk on cushions. No, the jury-room chairs must suffice, will suffice.

The jury set off to read the book at two-fifteen. The Court waits. Elvet Gander says to Adelbert Holly and Avram Snitkin that perhaps the judge is a person with sadistic inclinations. That could, of course, go either way, for or against
Babbletower.
Frederica thinks of going to speak to Jude, but he has disappeared, apparently into the belly of the Old Bailey. Rupert Parrott repeats several times that the Counsel for the Prosecution is formidable. Parrott’s face is pink and shining. He is wearing a peacock-blue waistcoat under a fine blue-grey worsted suit.

At four-fifteen the judge sends to enquire of the jury how much longer they will need to read the book. Three or four claim to have finished it already. The foreman—the swimming-pool manager—says that he has been asked to request a dictionary—a
large
dictionary, my lord, and also, if it’s not too much trouble, a
French
dictionary, as well as the English one, that is. Several more jurymen say they will soon be through. Hefferson-Brough asks that the jury be told to read the book carefully and thoroughly, or alternatively be dismissed and replaced. The jury returns to its room and its hard chairs, and its copies of
Babbletower
with the black, pink and cobalt covers. Twelve men and women, twelve readings, or skimmings, or stumblings, or approximate scannings. One woman takes the book home to bed, reaches the death of Roseace, and wakes her husband, gagging. This is later known, because her husband is “in the Print,” a member of a print trade union, and tells a journalist on the
News of the World,
who prints this information when the trial is over.

The Court reassembles the next day. The first witness for the Defence is called. He says he is Alexander Wedderburn. His profession, he says, is that of a playwright. He is a member of the Steerforth Committee Enquiry into the teaching of the English language. He has
worked in cultural radio—the Third Programme—and educational television. He has been a schoolmaster in a boys’ boarding school. His plays are set texts at O Level. He is described in the Press as “a very handsome public figure, wearing a well-cut corduroy suit in a dark green, with a lemon-coloured shirt and a blue tie with green carnations on it. He has a mane of silvering hair, a pleasant tenor voice, and an expression of cautious courtesy and helpfulness which never failed, even under pressure.”

His evidence lasts three hours, and is solid and, on the surface, calm. Hefferson-Brough takes him through the text of
Babbletower,
reading out long passages—mostly not sexual, and none of them cruel—asking him if he feels these passages have literary merit as pieces of English prose, if he thinks the characterisation is subtle, if he thinks the content is serious. Alexander says that
Babbletower
is not part of a genre that requires subtle characterisation. Hefferson-Brough asks him to explain “genre” to those members of the jury “who do not know any technical literary terms.” He reminds his witness “not to be technical if you can help it.” Alexander says that the point about the characters in
Babbletower
is that they are
types,
like the characters in an allegory, or a satire, or a comedy of manners. They don’t need depth. Their actions are what is important. He is asked to explain “allegory,” “satire,” “comedy of manners.” He is asked to say that to say that characters are “types” is not to say that they are vulgar or crude. He replies, “Of course not,” and hears a ripple of laughter, laughter against either him or Hefferson-Brough, with whom he is meant to be agreeing. They
represent qualities,
says Alexander. Good qualities? Not necessarily. Many qualities. As in life.