The Censor's Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia's Banned Books
432
The Censor's Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia's Banned Books
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| ISBN-13: | 9780702247729 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 432 |
| File size: | 27 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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The Censor's Library
By Nicole Moore
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2012 Nicole MooreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-4772-9
CHAPTER 1
A sight worth looking at
'No literary merit, and I consider it indecent. I would ban.' In one line, Sir Robert Garran, chairman of the Australian Commonwealth Book Censorship Board in the 1930s, dismissed George Orwell's third novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The other two members of the Board concurred, if reluctantly.
'A very dull piece of work,' declared J. F. Meurisse Haydon, Professor of French at the Canberra University College. He agreed that it was 'frequently indecent' but did not think initially that it possessed 'interest sufficient to make it a harmful book'. Dr L. H. Allen, poet and English and classics lecturer at the same institution, was stronger in his defence, allowing the novel 'considerable merit' with 'crass, but not vicious, passages', but excepting two, 'the frustrated seduction scene, and the hotel debauch scene, which are not necessary to the development of the story and which may occasion palpable[?] offence.'
Keep the Aspidistra Flying is remembered as Orwell's indictment of both mid-level English poverty and the kind of leftist politics that casts the sufferance of poverty as noble. It is an early work in the career of one of the world's best-known literary novelists, a writer often held up as the voice of left-leaning liberalism, who developed critiques of economic inequality, moral and political conservatism and fascism in the 1930s that were extended by attacks on Soviet-style totalitarianism in the 1940s. Following the Board's recommendation, Customs placed Keep the Aspidistra Flying on the list of publications banned from importation into Australia in the early months of 1937.
Censorship was one of Orwell's targets in his essays and novels, and Keep the Aspidistra Flying is no exception. Its central character's job in a bookshop and lending library allows Orwell to portray the circulation of risqué books among typical British readers, and to discuss the book trade in general. Gordon Compstock's contempt for the giggling teenagers and old men who seek out titles like Secrets of Paris and The Man She Trusted among the 'hundreds of sex books' kept at the back of the shop is part of the character's rejection of working-class British life. Such scenes interrupt Gordon's deliberations about whether to marry his pregnant girlfriend and take back his old job in an advertising firm, a job he had given up to become a poet. Gordon ironically shares a surname with the historical figure Anthony Compstock, founder of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice and initiator of the Compstock Act, which strictly defined obscenity in US publications from 1879.
These ironies were lost on Garran. Nor was the treatment of Keep the Aspidistra Flying an exceptional response to Orwell from Australian Customs. In April 1933, before the establishment of the Book Censorship Board, Orwell's first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, a frank memoir of time spent among the desperately poor of France and England, was banned by the Minister for Trade and Customs under the powers of the Customs Act. 2 Section 52(c) of the Act prohibited the importation of 'blasphemous, indecent or obscene works or articles'. Under Section 269 of the Act, the Minister had the power to settle 'in his opinion' any dispute arising and his opinion on the obscenity of Orwell was final.
Such instances have given Australian censorship its reputation for severity. In 1930, a few years before the Orwell bans, the Bulletin literary editor Cecil Mann vividly conjured an image of a censorious nation that has resonated through the century:
All that is suggested is that if there must be a censorship it be a competent one. Until it has been secured, or at least until the existing farce is ended, Australia will remain what it is today – a provincial, simple-minded, sport-loving, tin-god worshipping country, culturally indifferent, henpecked by ignorant officials, a sight worth looking at.
Mann titled this denunciation in terms that are still familiar: 'Australia Remains a Joke'. His contempt was well sourced – the piece reported on a delegation of writers, journalists and booksellers to Francis Forde, Minister for Customs, in June 1930, protesting at the current censorship 'farce'. Customs had added to the list of banned publications Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, James Joyce's Ulysses, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover as well as other lesser-known titles. On 7 November 1929, New Zealand/Australian writer Jean Devanny's novel The Butcher Shop became the first book by an Australian writer to be banned as a prohibited import. On 18 June 1930, the prominent Australian writer and artist Norman Lindsay's Redheap joined The Butcher Shop on the banned list, prompting the deputation and Mann's column. Despite such protests, Forde roundly declared the system would continue.
Has Australia really been so much worse than elsewhere? Many commentators agree that Australia has a history of prohibiting material freely available in most of the rest of the world and have speculated on why this might be. Australia has been declared one of the worst censors in the English-speaking world, or even the Western world, trumped in its severity only by Catholic Ireland and Apartheid South Africa. Like Mann, journalists, writers, lecturers, politicians, film-makers, theatre directors, publishers and booksellers have vociferously criticised censorship in Australia, skewering governments of different political persuasions and lambasting the country as narrow-minded and puritan, isolationist and philistine, ruthless and oppressive, even totalitarian.
But Joyce and Lawrence were banned in many countries and Hemingway's language was toned down even in US editions of A Farewell to Arms. Radclyffe Hall's call for recognition of lesbian love was tried and banned as obscene in the UK and released in the US only on appeal. Redheap was welcomed there but Lindsay was only ever a minor writer for Americans. Devanny's book circulated in the UK but was banned in her birth country of New Zealand. Orwell's two novels were finally released in Australia – Down and Out in Paris and London in 1953 and Keep the Aspidistra Flying in 1954 – after the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1952 reported the removal of Down and Out in Paris and London from the shelves of the parliamentary library. Its ban was still in place, but the newspaper declared that the book 'had been freely circulating for 20 years'.
Has Australia really been so much worse than elsewhere? How do we know?
It is almost too conventional to lament Australia's long history of censorship, casting the country as a bastion of prudes and wowsers. Today, we understand that prohibition itself can create interest in banned material. The history of sexuality in particular has been reconfigured around the insights of Michel Foucault, who critiqued what he called 'the repressive hypothesis' to suggest that since the sixteenth century Western European culture has engaged in perpetual discussion of sex, stimulated rather than stifled by taboos. More empirical work such as Lesley Hall and Roy Porter's history of the 'creation of sexual knowledge in Britain', however, suggests that the suppression of publications about sex was effective, particularly away from the English working classes in the nineteenth century. 'It may be simplistic to write off the Victorian era as one of sexual repression,' writes book historian Jonathan Rose, 'but the circulation of sexual information in print was certainly restricted.'6 The practices of censorship in former settler colonies like Australia, looked at in new detail, offer similar if not more substantial evidence of real restriction.
In a rarely published 1945 preface to Animal Farm, Orwell complained that 'the sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary', suggesting on the basis of his treatment by his publishers that a culture of reticence had perhaps been inherited from the Victorians. '[Things are] kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that "it wouldn't do" to mention that particular fact'. Down and Out in Paris and London, as his first book, was also one of the first titles published by the adventurous British publisher Victor Gollancz. While an enthusiast for his new author, Gollancz required the glossing over of swearing and some small rewriting for fear of obscenity charges. Last minute changes to Keep the Aspidistra Flying were also required, including to Orwell's parodic names for people and companies in fear of libel, which he resented greatly. Swear words were removed and some 'alleged obscenities' rewritten, including phrases from Gordon and Rosemary's abortive love-making. Angered, Orwell distanced himself from this early novel in later life. The banning of these two Orwell titles in Australia, despite the in-house censorship already exercised upon them for the British market, is a little-known but revealing instance in which Australia's definitions of obscenity exceeded those of most other English-speaking countries.
The severity of Australian regimes is illuminated in the treatment of books as varied as Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel Moll Flanders, banned in 1930, and Jackie Collins' The World is Full of Married Men, banned in 1968, and also of the great mass of titles deemed to have little or no merit and to be devoid of public interest. The sheer scale and reach of what was an exceptionally successful system is instructive; across the century, Australia's censorship regimes are a powerful realisation of modern bureaucratic control matched by few.
Australia had a national border easily policed through parcel post and ship and air traffic, and a book market dominated by British imports. It had powerful federal Customs laws for the seizure of property, and established vague and multiple definitions of censorable offence, arbitrated by a minister against whose opinion appeal in the courts was expensive and likely to fail. These, combined with other complex, overlapping pieces of state and federal legislation, compounded the risk of offence rather than reduced it. Religious and civil organisations supported stricter censorship in different decades and were prepared to lobby politicians and defy opposition in the press.
There grew an administrative regime whose systemisation, secrecy and rigour attempted a complete model of rational, postcolonial modernity – protecting the new Australian nation state – but which was also attended by apparently necessary arbitrariness and unpredictability. Whose suitcase would be searched? Whose decision about a book should count? Which bit of which book was offensive? By the time publications made it to Australia, many had already been passed or accepted by other countries, but a censorship system that did not ban anything was not doing its job. It is tempting to conclude that Australia was one of the worst censors in the western world simply because it could be.
A new history
The history of Australian literary censorship is one of courtroom dramas and internecine bureaucracy, stolen libraries and police raids, authorial scandals and moral panics, famous court cases and secret lobbying, obscenity, sedition, blasphemy, libel and defamation, suitcase searches and prison terms, hoaxes and conspiracy. Writers are lauded as heroes and censors damned as philistines, or publishers damned as perverts and readers cast as moral ciphers. Censorship practice has a layered and highly complex history of secretive institutional decision-making, multiple overlapping and sometimes indeterminate regulative regimes, sometimes conflicted common law and statutory legal decisions, covert and unrecorded resistance and covert and unrecorded censorship. Estimates of the numbers of books banned through the early decades of the century have run as high as 5000.
There has been no comprehensive account of literary censorship in Australia since Peter Coleman charted its 'rise and fall' in his 1962 book Obscenity, Blasphemy and Sedition. In a postscript to a 2000 edition, Coleman chose to repudiate his book and its liberal anti-censorship argument from the apparent wisdom of old age, declaring, '[t]his is a young man's book written some forty years ago on the cusp of the 1960s. In those distant days I was convinced that any restriction on any publication of any kind was an intolerable infringement of our freedom. I later lost this certainty'.
New generations after Coleman need a different kind of certainty – or at least access to more of the history – if they are to understand how censorship impacts on what Coleman calls freedom. We need to know how, why, when and what things were banned, and we need to go back and understand in contemporary terms what was at stake for those censors, for whom obscenity, blasphemy and sedition were such threats to the maintenance of national order, and for whom books as different as Petronius's Satyricon and Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly should be kept from Australian readers for their own sakes. What is at stake is not merely the ability to read such books, but to know of their proscription: the capacity to know of what we don't or couldn't know, and to assess the motivations and effects of power over such knowledge.
In general, Australia's rigorous and successful censorship regimes have been traced superficially or via the famous, publicly fought instances. This is because many of the censors' documents held in institutional archives, including the files of the Customs department, either remained uncatalogued or have been dispersed among the mountains of records generated by the everyday activities of federal government over a century. Police and post-office involvement was extensive but not systematically traceable, and the extent and nature of public debate and media coverage is difficult to reconstruct. The role of libraries in censorship practice has yet to be researched, especially in controlling access to publications to which the censors gave only restricted access, such as the work of sexologist Havelock Ellis.
For his 1962 history, Coleman was given access to Customs' records on federal censorship by the Minister himself (then the Hon. Denham Henty), who, he says, 'allowed me to examine without restriction the relevant ... archives'. In so far as they survive from 1962, those records and others, like most official documentation of activity, are partial and incomplete, even though they are voluminous, and generate sometimes conflicting and unclear versions of what we might read as the past, and sometimes silence or contradict what we thought we knew.
New work on Australian censorship by historian Deana Heath emphasises its role in the 'purifying' global networks of Empire, in detailed comparison with more liberal regimes in India and Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, while Richard Nile and others have demonstrated the importance of monopoly British interests in the book trade when thinking about the impact of Customs' control of Australian imports. This book benefits also from expanding international interest in the cultural history and sociology of print, including in censorship regimes as such, the political, social and legal frameworks of offence, and histories of the book as object and commodity. Other arguments emphasise the partiality and hyperbole of some previous accounts of Australian literary censorship. It can no longer be construed as a simple story of brutal censors and valiant writers, but has to account for wide public and political support for censorship, and motivations which, while easily trivialised by posterity, cannot be seen as historically aberrant or extreme.
Obscenity, blasphemy and sedition
Despite its predominance, obscenity censorship – dismissed or justified as uncontroversial 'moral' censorship by some historians of political censorship – is yet the most unexamined, particularly the unread, offensive and excluded content of obscenity. While the moral danger has been taken for granted, obscenity's political threat – of endangering the governing moral consensus of a nation state – has not wholly been understood. Other offences were also often imbricated with obscenity in practice because it was easier to ban. But from J. M. Harcourt's 1934 novel Upsurge, influenced by political involvement with organisations like the Industrial Workers of the World and banned in part for rude insults to the judiciary, to Robert Close's Love Me Sailor – its author sent to prison in 1948 for the use of the word 'rutting' as a (clearly unsuccessful) substitute for fucking – the obscenity itself has not, retrospectively, been regarded as the substance of the threat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Censor's Library by Nicole Moore. Copyright © 2012 Nicole Moore. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Abbreviations,The censor's library,
1. A sight worth looking at,
2. Shipping, air and parcel post,
3. No business of god or man,
4. Sedition's fiction,
5. Brave new moderns,
6. Homosexualists and pornographs,
7. Bastards from the bush,
8. Literature in handcuffs,
9. Everything you could expect for a quarter,
10. The censor poets,
11. Because they were white, baby, and they ruled the world,
12. Porno-politics,
13. The 'last' banned books,
14. Out from underground,
15. Decline and rise,
16. National reading,
Acknowledgements,
Bibliography,
Notes,
Index,