Jefferis took exception to this. Portnoy’s Complaint was not pornographic: the depiction of sex had a deliberate artistic purpose. A serious writer, she argued, begins a book with a theme, with ‘some pressing thing that he feels he has to say’. The writer devises a framework — essentially, a plot — to deliver that theme.
In offering this, Jefferis had opened a door for Kenny. He could use Jefferis — and did — to suggest that Roth had made a deliberate decision to write an obscene work, thinly guised as literature, in order to generate controversy and drive sales. ‘So you think, then,’ he said, drippingly, ‘we may look forward to other novels in which this device will be freely used?’
Kenny continued this sarcasm and scorn when Cyril Pearl came to the stand. A longtime activist and agitator, Pearl had been a founding member of the Book Censorship Abolition League, and had campaigned during World War II against the federal government’s attempts to enforce censorship of the press.7 Now a grand old man of letters, he sprinkled his evidence with literary references and humour. His view of literary merit, he testified, stemmed from James Joyce: ‘The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life has it sprung.’ One could read Joyce or Spillane, and sense Joyce’s ‘greater feeling for life’ and ‘deeper appreciation’. Portnoy’s Complaint had that sense, and bore evidence of extraordinary technical skill, particularly in its form and content. As for its profanities, Pearl was not concerned: ‘A number of great writers have used them, from Chaucer to Shakespeare.’
Kenny’s cross-examination quickly diverged from Portnoy into how Pearl had come to participate in the trial. Who had approached him, Kenny asked. Had he discussed the book beforehand? Kenny was sceptical of Pearl’s calm answers. ‘Suddenly,’ he scoffed, ‘out of the blue last week, you got a letter asking you to give evidence?’
‘Not out of the blue — out of the postbox,’ Pearl replied, to chuckles.
Kenny was indomitable. He submitted to Goran that Pearl was so biased that his testimony was compromised. But Pearl evaded this. To questions on whether he would allow novels to be sold indiscriminately, whether he would allow books containing sex to be available to adolescents, and whether there should be restrictions on the sale of novels with sexual elements, Pearl repeatedly sought more information. Finally, Kenny simply barked, ‘Where do you draw the line?’
‘I do not draw the line,’ said Pearl. ‘That is for Mr Chipp [the Customs minister] to do.’
Kenny had to move on. He demanded to know whether Pearl’s opinion of Portnoy derived from whether or not he liked it. Pearl’s answer — that this was the ultimate position, but that it was buttressed by reasoned criticism — delighted Kenny, but flummoxed Goran. He took over the cross-examination to ask whether, when people reported favourable opinions of Hamlet, they were ultimately saying simply that they liked it.
Yes, said Pearl.
What about students at school and university, Goran asked. Is the ultimate aim of all that education, the expertise of all those tutors and lecturers, just to have students say whether or not they like a play like Hamlet?
‘Unfortunately,’ Pearl replied, ‘they do not like it at school.’
‘Some people come to the conclusion it is great literature,’ Goran huffed, perhaps thinking of his time as a schoolteacher. His final question was plaintive: ‘Is ultimately what they say, “I like it?”’
Pearl shrugged. ‘As you like it, Your Honour.’
Nancy Keesing was next. A poet and longtime reviewer for the Bulletin, Keesing was no stranger to Portnoy’s Complaint. Thanks to her husband, a friend from England, and Allen Allen & Hemsley, she possessed three copies of the novel.8 Much like Barbara Jefferis, Keesing appeared a respectable housewife, a point that Deane emphasised with his first question: ‘Your main occupation these days would probably be described as domestic duties?’
Yes, Keesing said — but went on to argue with force and clarity that Portnoy made the reader see the world in a ‘fresh and new way’, and, on the basis of its characterisation, form, style, content, and language, had considerable literary merit.
Kenny continued his assault on the concept of literary merit. He put to Keesing a hypothetical: we stand in a stream with literature on one bank, and non-literature on the other bank. ‘How do you go about determining what you put on the left-hand bank as literature? What is it you apply? What is the test?’ Could he take it, Kenny went on, that there was no universally accepted test determining on which side of the stream a work should belong?
Keesing admitted that there was not. She was certain that Portnoy’s Complaint was literature and possessed literary merit, but there were works that she would puzzle over when faced with this question.
Then came Paul Grainger, manager of the Angus & Robertson paperback section, and the man who had sold Portnoy’s Complaint to police. He answered questions quickly and clearly. Yes, he had been selling Portnoy on 31 August 1970. No, he did not sell a copy to any schoolgirl. No, he did not sell a copy to any girl in any school uniform. He did not sell it to anyone who he or the staff thought might have been under eighteen years of age. ‘I had explicit instructions from the manager of the store,’ Grainger said, and he had stuck to those instructions. Like Dingley, Grainger testified that he had heard about the supposed existence of this girl a month after the detectives visited.
Kenny used his cross-examination to remind the jury how quickly Angus & Robertson had sold the book, and to suggest the impossibility of its strict control of who had bought a copy. Selling 100 copies in forty-five minutes — ‘Yes,’ said Grainger — was something over two a minute, wasn’t it? And 500 copies in 150 minutes — ‘Yes,’ said Grainger — was something over three per minute, wasn’t it?
Yes, Grainger said.
There was no point changing what had happened, Grainger said later. Portnoy had sold well. Why lie about that? It might not sound good, but that was what had happened. ‘I thought the most fatal thing to do would be to make changes to the story,’ he said later. ‘So I told them what happened.’ But he was not worried. What Grainger had seen of the defence left him confident. They were in control.9
***
Deane, Masterman, and Jamieson had been conscious of the need to call a variety of witnesses. Like the defence in Victoria, they wanted a mix of youthful experts and grey eminences. They especially wanted women. Calling Jefferis and Keesing was but a start. They had convinced Maureen Colman to reappear, and had approached Margaret Harris, a lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, who also agreed. Harris in turn suggested they also approach Maria Szewcow, a tutor in English at Sancta Sophia College at the University of Sydney. The defence team were delighted with this prospect: a witness from the Catholic women’s residential college would be living proof that Portnoy did not corrupt or deprave. ‘In this quest for youth and virtue,’ Harris asked, wryly, ‘what could be more virtuous than a tutor from Sancta Sophia?’10
Szewcow came to court on Tuesday 9 February, and argued that Portnoy was ‘an important document about contemporary literature, perhaps about contemporary experience’. It was morally and psychologically acute — a study of a ‘nervous, insecure, self-conscious, self-aware individual, very critical of himself, tremendously worried, an anxious kind of character’. The novel was part of a contemporary American tradition, she said, similar to works by Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and even Samuel Beckett.
‘In case one or two members of the jury do not know the names of the authors you have mentioned, are all those authors of a high standing?’
‘Yes,’ said Szewcow.
Kenny was rough with Szewcow. Privately, he was to be scornful of her and the other young women witnesses. While there were some with ‘high literary qualifications’, he wrote later, there were also some with nothing more than a degree in Arts. ‘But in these latter cases they were mainly of the female sex,’ he added, ‘and had allied to their degree
s good looks or charm, and an association with young people as teachers or tutors.’11
David Marr, who watched witnesses in between shepherding them into and out of the courtroom, recalled how this dim regard manifested itself. ‘Kenny’s voice — this great Australian nasal artillery — was designed to cut witnesses down to size. It was a blast of scorn that he directed across the court.’ Kenny barraged them with questions, jabbing his index finger at them accusatorily, to impugn their reputability as though they had done all that Portnoy had done. That finger — so vivid and so prominent, at times, that it seemed to Marr to have another joint — was relentless. ‘He would point it at the witnesses as he berated them,’ Marr said. It was a form of indictment, intimidating and unsubtle. ‘It wasn’t subtle at all.’12
In the trial, Kenny railed at Szewcow, seeking to embarrass her and then to find moral fault with her. He read at length a passage that described Portnoy having sex with the Monkey and an Italian prostitute:
Into whose hole, into what sort of hole, I deposited my final load is entirely a matter for conjecture. It could be that in the end I wound up fucking some dank, odoriferous combination of sopping Italian pubic hair, greasy American buttock, and absolutely rank bedsheet.
He demanded: ‘Do you regard that as coarse or not coarse?’
He did not let up when Maureen Colman came to the stand. Kenny seemed ‘very primitive’ and ‘outraged’ by the book, she said later, and he dripped contempt for both it and her. He seemed to want to ‘terrify’ her for testifying.13 To her statement that there must be some evidence of ‘moral concern’ in a work of literary merit, Kenny snorted and asked what the moral concern of Portnoy was. To her answer that it was the relationship between parents and children, he scoffed: ‘That is the matter of serious moral concern? What does it tell us about this situation?’ In response to her explanation, he simplified it: ‘He tells us people brought up in this way have difficulties?’
On and on it went. When Colman suggested that a reader might understand and even forgive Portnoy for his promiscuity, Kenny lampooned her: ‘The understanding which is enlarged then is the understanding about why a man in America somewhere goes on from one woman to another and is not satisfied with the individual relationship?’
The reduction and sarcasm annoyed Colman, and prompted her to push back. She described Portnoy’s relationship with the Monkey, and pointed out that the story of the West Point officers that Kenny was dismissing went to the heart of their relationship. Against her detail and command, Kenny’s scorn became smoke and bluster. When Colman finished, Marr congratulated her: ‘That was terrific!’ he said. ‘You were good!’
‘He was very pleased with me,’ Colman explained later, ‘because I had stood up to that bloke.’14
But Kenny was dogged. After a short appearance from novelist and short-story writer Dal Stivens, Margaret Harris came to the stand and delivered what she later called ‘standard lit-crit’ arguments about Portnoy.15 Aged twenty-nine and an expert on Victorian novels, Harris’s answers were clear and comprehensible, and prompted Goran to ask his own searching questions. It was a mark of Harris’s credibility and the gravity of her evidence that, when it came time to cross-examine, Kenny treated her much as he had Heseltine. He first implied that Harris was too fine a reader to be representative: would the public understand the puns and humour that she described? Then he suggested that she might be grubby for finding the instances of humour funny: ‘Do you think the account of the incident involving the black woman on the table funny?’
He next sought to take a hatchet to literary merit. Wasn’t this merely the way that an author uses words?
Goran, too, pressed for answers on this. What about scenes? What about characters? What about events and conflict? ‘Are those part of what you look for in literary merit?’ To Harris’s cautious yes, with caveats, Goran had to extrapolate: ‘It is a matter of taking the bricks and building certain buildings?’
‘Yes.’
‘It is a matter of the skill with which he uses words for various purposes?’ asked Kenny, seizing the moment.
‘Yes.’
‘Literary merit has nothing to do with anything other than skill with words?’
‘Basically —’
But Kenny cut her off: ‘Yes.’
‘No,’ Harris said, but the prosecutor was moving on.
‘Of course, the ultimate test,’ Kenny said, ‘is it not, is whether the reader appreciates that the work has merit?’ He steadily built his argument that Harris was too scrupulous a reader. Some readers might see the merit and some might not, he said. Those who did would need to have read with ‘close care’. But this was not the only way to read, was it?
Harris’s fine distinctions were repeatedly brushed over, made general, but finally she stopped Kenny dead: ‘This is a sort of process that I referred to earlier in saying that the literary critic, in chipping down the wall and looking at the different bricks and way the mortar is being used, is perhaps doing only in slow motion, with a greater intensity, the kind of thing — and perhaps greater capacity — the kind of thing any reader is doing in making sense of the words on the page before him.’
***
Harris was still being cross-examined when Patrick White arrived at the courthouse the next day, on a ‘deadly steaming’ Sydney morning, to repeat his defence of Portnoy. Thinking that White needed to be entertained, Hugh Jamieson called Marr over: ‘Would you go outside and keep Patrick calm?’
But White needed no nursing. Aware of Marr’s own nervousness, the novelist was sweetness and light. He passed the time in the corridors by telling his future biographer stories about the kids at Centennial Park, where White lived. He had spied them biting the heads of day-old chicks, he said. It was a fiction, as Marr would discover, but it filled in the time.16
White was not enthusiastic about repeating his appearance. He had become tired of Portnoy. ‘I find the whole business rather boring by now,’ he wrote to Geoffrey Dutton, ‘but thought I’d better agree to do it as I’ve been so consistent in refusing A[ngus] and R[obertson] everything they want.’17 However true his reluctance, White again brought immense prestige to the stand. Of all the witnesses to appear at the Sydney trial, his was the most anticipated and the most dramatic. Standing aloof in his heavy Prince of Wales check suit and drawling in his patrician’s voice, White repeated the best of his Victorian performance.
Yes, he was a novelist. Yes, he had written Voss and The Vivisector, and yes, he had written some plays. No, he did not like his poetry to be mentioned in the same breath as his novels: ‘I try to forget about that.’
Asked to describe the criteria that would establish whether a novel had literary merit, White replied that he could define what he looked for in a novel: for his sense of reality to be heightened, for there to be style — anything from ‘limpid simplicity to elaborate ornamentation’ — and for a work to be durable and to withstand multiple readings. Characterisation was another important point.
‘In Portnoy’s Complaint,’ said Deane, ‘the words fuck, cunt, prick and that type of word are frequently used.’
‘Yes.’
Did they detract from the literary merit? Were they relevant to literary merit?
‘Well, they are the kind of words that that man would use.’
Deane brought up the passage describing the sexual fantasy of the Monkey’s ex-husband: her watching as a black woman shits upon a glass table beneath which her husband lies, masturbating. ‘What in your view is the effect of such passages as that on the literary merit?’
‘Well, if you take a passage out like that, it does seem very crude, but I think you have got to take the picture as a whole, not certain passages.’
The thrust of Kenny’s cross-examination, when it came, was potentially mistaken. Marr, observing, thought that Kenny wished for White to blush, to reach for euphemisms, to avoid the four-l
etter words, to maintain a Victorian-like decorum. It was a misreading of White. He responded to the questions forthrightly, succinctly, without artifice — ‘with patrician nonchalance’, Marr recalled. ‘He was just so aloof, so untouched by Kenny’s efforts to make him look grubby for liking the book.’18
Asked whether he would like to forget about certain incidents in the book, such as that of the Monkey and the negress, White shrugged. ‘I had just forgotten about it,’ he said. ‘I had heard of worse in Sydney, actually. It is a part of life which the book reflects.’
Kenny scowled and continued to press him. Was it relevant to the book? How did it show Portnoy’s development and character? ‘You, as I understand it, say that any incident that takes place in real life can be reproduced in detail in a book?’
‘It depends,’ said White.
‘It depends on what?’
‘I think it was quite relevant to introduce it there.’
‘Introduce what?’
‘That incident.’
‘Which one?’
‘Of the negress shitting on the table.’
White took no enjoyment from the trial, but the questioning left him with special scorn for Kenny. Writing to Dutton that night, White was unequivocal: ‘The prosecutor I can only describe as a cunt.’19
***
Alec Chisholm came last. A slight man with an imperious manner that belied a querulous voice, Chisholm was, like so many of those who had preceded him to the stand, a veritable man of letters.20 But his evidence was short. Kenny’s cross-examination was near lethal. He dismantled Chisholm’s reputation: ‘It is a reputation as a naturalist, isn’t it?’ What works of ‘imaginative literature’ have you written, he asked. What novels? What, no novels? And your work as literary editor for The Daily Telegraph — that is the same paper that went out of existence in the 1920s, correct?
The Trials of Portnoy Page 21