Moral Combat

by R. Marie Griffith

  But to Lawrence, the most dangerous critics were the censors, and he refused to concede any ground. His work was in no way smut, he argued, for it focused not on the dirtiness but the very holiness of sex. “Let us hesitate no longer to announce that the sensual passions and mysteries are equally sacred with the spiritual mysteries and passions,” Lawrence urged in the foreword to Women in Love. “Who would deny it any more? The only thing unbearable is the degradation, the prostitution of the living mysteries in us.” Lawrence was here writing directly against the American censors who were complaining of his “Eroticism,” a charge that greatly puzzled him. “Which Eros? Eros of the jaunty ‘amours,’ or Eros of the sacred mysteries? And if the latter, why accuse, why not respect, even venerate?” But the trouble seemed to be not that Lawrence wrote of the spiritualization of sex, but that he wrote of sex at all. That subject landed his works in the lap of the law, over and over again.10

  In 1925, living in Italy, Lawrence wrote his last significant novel and the one that would become the most infamous of all, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He also painted a number of oils and watercolors featuring naked bodies (many of them depictions of himself and several of Frieda), phallic imagery, and love and eroticism as sacred themes. Both on the page and on canvas, he conveyed very similar messages about sex, love, and life that centered on liberation from social norms and full surrender to the wise god of experience. His erotically charged painting Contadini (1928), a sensuous depiction of a naked Italian peasant man, was representative of both his work and its reception: Lawrence was photographed painting it, he mentioned it in several letters to friends, and a later biography pointed out that the figure’s “dark head and nude torso link him to Mellors,” Lady Chatterley’s fictional lover.11 When a London art gallery exhibited a good number of these paintings in 1929, reportedly attracting some twelve thousand spectators, critics complained of lasciviousness and indecency, until Scotland Yard detectives seized thirteen of the “filthy productions” for obscenity. Lawrence could only take what a free speech activist called “a poet’s revenge,” publishing a derisive rhythmic poem depicting the “lily-white” officers fainting “in virgin outrage” upon beholding one of Lawrence’s nudes. The “hypocrisy and poltroonery” of these “craven, cowardly” officials, he wrote to the gallery owner, were contemptible.12

  Struggling with tuberculosis and profoundly frustrated with the relentless censorship of his writings and his paintings, Lawrence entered a sanatorium in Vence, France, in early 1930—even as, across the Atlantic Ocean, John DeLacey awaited his final fate in the Dunster House Bookshop case. On March 2, the very day after his medical discharge, Lawrence died. Photographs accompanying the obituaries showed a worn-looking man who appeared far older than his forty-four years. His admirers would argue that Lawrence died brokenhearted though unwavering, a man who never tried to hide his loathing and contempt for those “grey Puritans” and prudish Victorians who pursued his work with salacious abandon in order to ban it for the ostensible sake of purity. The Dunster House Bookshop case was noteworthy enough to be mentioned in an appreciative New York Times obituary appearing two days after Lawrence died.13

  GRASPING THE FORCES ARRAYED AGAINST Lawrence requires understanding the history of literary censorship in Europe and America. Legal restrictions on obscene literature long embodied a Christian consensus regarding sexuality and sexual morality, reflecting the belief that to read about sexual sin was profoundly dangerous. Leaders of the Catholic Church kept a list of publications they deemed objectionable for sexual or heretical content, called the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. An early list of prohibited works appeared in the ninth century, and the first modern edition appeared in 1559. Later editions grew longer and longer, as more books appeared that church leaders found offensive, either for potentially inciting lust or for challenging church doctrine.

  In France and England, anti-vice laws in the nineteenth century had generated obscenity statutes that were both more specific and more expansive than their antecedents. Between 1821 and 1892, government officials in France prosecuted twenty-six literary works, from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal to Marguerite Eymery’s Monsieur Vénus and erotic poetry by Paul Verlaine and Guy de Maupassant. In England, authors and artists fought battles of their own with officials and citizens seeking propriety and the preservation of national character. The Obscene Publications Act of 1857 gave courts the power to seize and destroy materials deemed obscene; sale of such corrupting materials was a criminal offense, and offenders were regularly punished for over a century. British officials famously condemned Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, one judge at trial noting, “These unnatural offences between women which are the subject of this book involve acts which between men would be a criminal offence, and involve acts of the most horrible, unnatural and disgusting obscenity.”14

  In America literary censorship arrived on the Mayflower, with Plymouth’s governor, William Bradford, inflicting punishment in 1628 on a rebellious colonist found to have “composed sundry rhymes and verses, some tending to lasciviousness.”15 The first literary censorship trial in the United States took place in Massachusetts in 1821, over the printing of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure—more popularly known as Fanny Hill—a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Officials fought against writers such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville because of the ideas expressed in their writings, and sometimes because of their behavior as well. And we have already seen the ways in which American censors such as Comstock and the array of vice societies that burgeoned and flourished during the Progressive Era pursued not only novelists but also freethinking activists like Margaret Sanger, whom they saw as jeopardizing virtue and the status quo.

  The religious underpinnings of literary censorship were personified in Comstock, for years the king of the nation’s Christian censors. He argued that lewd writing would breed lust, which “defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul.” Obscene literature had enormous power, overwhelming and overtaking even the best of people. Ordinary readers of such material, he warned, inexorably became “rakes and libertines,” polluting their families, abandoning their children, and desecrating their homes. But Comstock reserved his greatest ire for those “so-called ‘liberals’ of this land” who fought the censors and turned “monsters” and “devil-men” into martyrs for free speech. This “mawkish sympathy for criminals” left no room for the true victims: “the youth cursed for life, the wife widowed, the child orphaned, the family disgraced, pauperized, and destroyed.” To Comstock and those who shared his way of thinking, obscenity ruthlessly ensnared all who touch it, wreaked familial disorder, and devastated the broader social world; the vile sin had to be eliminated at its very source.16

  During this period, tensions were growing between modernist literature and traditions of literary censorship. James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen endured charges of being an “obscene” book upon its 1919 publication, as John S. Sumner, the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice since Anthony Comstock’s 1915 death, attacked its sexual content and prosecuted its publisher and editor. In 1920, editors of a well-known American avant-garde periodical, The Little Review, were hit with obscenity charges for printing work by James Joyce—excerpts from what would eventually become Ulysses. Likewise, Theodore Dreiser’s novels Sister Carrie (1900), The Genius (1915), and An American Tragedy (1925) also enraged the censors for their supposedly immoral content. In a letter to a university student writing his master’s thesis on literary censorship, Dreiser wrote starkly, “Any writer, artist, painter or sculptor, or thinker of any breadth of mind who wants to present reality is now being ignored or misrepresented by a kept Press.” In that environment, it took “real courage” to write truthfully of sex.17

  Those who supported censorship v
iewed the enforcement of purity and decency as a crucial way of maintaining order, or of restoring it during a time of change. Awash in societal changes brought about by immigration, urbanization, modernization, and feminism, as well as the economic uncertainties wrought by the stock market crash of 1929, Americans might well seek stability in traditional social norms and reassurance that younger generations would uphold them. The minds of youth, still in formation, needed protection from corrupt literature intended to arouse sensation and encourage debauchery, lest they be overtaken by lust and cease to be functioning citizens contributing to a well-ordered society. The flesh could overtake the spirit, a warning that ran deep in the Christian tradition starting with the apostle Paul’s own inner warfare; stringent disciplinary regimens had long been advocated as barriers to temptation. Perhaps this was a low view of human nature, rendering persons helplessly impressionable and even imprisonable by the power of print, but literature could also uplift, and the wholesome variety might well abet virtue. Even as many early-twentieth-century writers and readers were chafing against longstanding rules of propriety in literature, then, others held to them as pillars of moral constancy and social control. Little wonder, in such a milieu, that the literary censorship of sex became a battleground.18

  The controversy over Joyce’s writing that began in 1920 did not end quickly. Joyce’s work was the subject of trials in the United States that stretched to 1934, when a federal appeals court upheld lower court judge John M. Woolsey’s earlier decision allowing for publication. It was a euphoric moment already, as Prohibition—the one against alcohol sales—had just been rescinded in December 1933; that, along with the pro-Ulysses decision, could seem to augur a more lenient age. In his foreword to the first legally published edition of Ulysses, the civil liberties lawyer Morris Ernst wrote jubilantly about the victory over the “prudery-ridden” censors who “have fought to emasculate literature…, have sought to reduce the reading matter of adults to the level of adolescents and subnormal persons, and have nurtured evasions and sanctimonies.” The outcome for Ulysses, Ernst continued, was “a turning point” and “a body-blow for the censors.” Writers could eschew euphemisms and “describe basic human functions without fear of the law.”19 But regardless of the Ulysses decision, literary censorship continued, with books like Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath attacked for supposed indecency countless times over many decades, and the government’s ban on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in effect until 1959.

  MOST AMERICANS, OF COURSE, DID not have access to Lawrence’s infamous love story in its early days, and the vast majority in the 1930s likely accepted the notion that it was a dirty, immoral book. Debates over popular entertainment hit more people directly, and attempts to censor various products marketed for popular amusement garnered significant disagreement. Motion pictures, long a target of Christian censors like New York’s Canon William Chase and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), came in for years of more highly regulated scrutiny, for instance. Hollywood already had a reputation for debauchery, partly because of the publicity given to the romances and sexual escapades of its movie stars, and a series of scandals that shocked audiences and attracted reproach to the film industry drove industry representatives in 1921 to hire a moral overseer who would ensure decency in motion pictures. They selected Will Hays, a Presbyterian elder and postmaster general of the United States, and made him president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which they established in 1922. Industry leaders were trying to avoid censorship and increase mass audiences, and they hoped that the MPPDA would stem the rising protests against sensationalism and ostensibly lewd content in films.

  One of Hays’s first actions was to invite two thousand representatives of influential religious, educational, and civic organizations to a conference in New York, offering them a voice in evaluating film content and advising industry representatives. He forged a Committee on Public Relations to serve as a liaison between the MPPDA and the public, informing the Hays office of its objections to any films and promoting approved films to the public so that filmmakers would be incentivized to make more. Religious groups were part of that committee from the outset, including the National Catholic Welfare Conference and several other Catholic organizations, the Central Conference of American Rabbis along with other Jewish groups, and the FCC as well as other Protestant associations. Hays’s office worked steadily with Hollywood producers, eventually producing a list known as the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls”—situations and topics that films should avoid altogether or treat with special care, most having to do with sex.

  Hollywood moguls Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Fred Niblo, with Catholic clerics, 1929. JOHN KOBAL FOUNDATION/GETTY IMAGES.

  Some Christian censors were not immediately mollified by the work of Hays and the MPPDA. For instance, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which had focused attention on the dangers of motion pictures as early as 1906, shortly after the five-cent theaters opened, continued to target movies into the 1930s, on the grounds that their power over children and youth was formidable and that viewers could become “addicted” to film no less than to alcohol. Seeing Hays’s office as ineffectual, a group of churchmen, women’s groups, and business leaders calling itself the Federal Motion Picture Council sought government regulation of the movie industry. In 1930, the WCTU responded to a new wave of so-called sex pictures by leading a host of Christian organizations—churches, missionary societies, women’s clubs, and more—in pressuring Congress to enact a strong censorship law and save the nation from the movies’ dangers.20 Such legislation was exactly what the MPPDA had repeatedly attempted to forestall.

  The Catholic publisher of the film industry’s leading trade paper, the Motion Picture Herald, was thinking deeply during this time about how to promote movies that offered virtuous entertainment to families and that reflected, or at least did not undermine, the values of the Catholic Church. Like Hays, Michael Quigley disliked the idea of movies being subject to federal oversight, but he believed a suitable instrument could be created from a code of decency whose rules were clearly articulated and would be compulsory for all filmmakers—a more formalized tool than the “Don’ts and Be Carefuls.” He worked on devising such a code with a couple of Catholic priests, including one who was also a playwright and dramatist, and he consulted with Hays along with members of the industry. The document was decidedly Christian in orientation, its details leaving “no room to doubt,” as one observer put it, “that the agenda was primarily concerned with sins of the flesh.”21 Adopted in 1930 as the Motion Picture Production Code, this system of self-regulation was intended to preempt federal censorship by producing salubrious movies for mass entertainment. Implemented correctly, the code itself would regulate the content and distribution of all Hollywood films concerning issues such as profanity, crime, and sexuality. The Hays office did not emphasize the Catholic origins of the code; it was better, in that climate, to describe it merely as reflective of broadly American moral values.

  The code’s section on sex was considerably longer than those treating murder, religion, and other topics, and it began by insisting, “The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing.” Specific instructions covered such subjects as adultery (“sometimes necessary plot material, must not be explicitly treated or justified, or presented attractively”), passionate love scenes (“should not be introduced except where they are definitely essential to the plot… passion should be treated in such manner as not to stimulate the lower and baser emotions”), rape (“never the proper subject for comedy”), and interracial sex (“sex relationship between the white and black races is forbidden”).22 Other sections regulated the showing of bedrooms, dances, vulgarity, and more. By accepting the code, motion picture producers hoped to persuade critics that they could successfully regulate themsel
ves on sexual and other moral content.

  But apprehension about the sincerity of studios’ dedication to clean entertainment continued to grow, particularly as the Depression depressed movie ticket sales and racked up enormous losses that Hollywood filmmakers determined could only be reversed by more exciting, racy movies. Between 1930 and 1934, films were more sexually explicit than they had ever been, and the Hays Code was largely ignored. Henry James Forman’s best-selling book, Our Movie Made Children, published in 1933, alarmed American audiences by describing the moral damage wreaked on children by these decadent films, a message taken up and spread by Christian writers in numerous periodicals and other vehicles that blamed Hollywood for the sexual promiscuity of American youth. That same year, the president of the National Council of Catholic Women warned that Hollywood was creating films that were “a menace to the physical, mental and moral welfare of the nation.”23 In this climate, many felt that external pressure on the studios would be needed to hold the line on wholesome film.

  Protestants were apprehensive too: even those who were gradually liberalizing, though uncomfortable with the tactics of anti-vice societies, wanted wholesome amusements and knew some regulation was necessary. In late 1931, for instance, the Christian Century pontificated against an editorial in the Nation that excoriated censorship of literature and film alike. Against the Nation’s advocacy of “permitting grown-ups to decide for themselves what books they shall buy, what plays they shall see, and even what pictures of undressed females they shall look upon,” Century editors contemptuously scorned “the glib rationalizing of liberals of this kind—found in large numbers in the Manhattan sector.” While agreeing that citizens should be “freed from capricious and tyrannical state control,” it was obvious to the writers that there was a need for “some community control over the commercial activities of the individual,” lest the United States become a nation of “smut.” The occasional overreach by censoring authorities was simply “the price that the community must occasionally pay” for decency.24