The Trials of Portnoy

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The Trials of Portnoy Page 27

by Patrick Mullins


  The author of this stuff will always be with us: those who publish on lavatory walls are in essence urged by the same zeal. The pedlar, however, of all this whether he emerges from the lavatory or some gilded lair, must be restrained from using the magnificent services of printing, publication, and distribution to present to all of us (and there is none of us immune from these depravities), the degradation of humans taking their sex as animals.4

  Other states established their own classification bodies, or gave to existing ones more generous powers. The Victorian State Advisory Board, for example, was established with powers to classify printed material in the same manner as films were; in New South Wales, two years after a failed attempt to reform obscenity law in 1973, the government passed the Indecent Articles and Classified Publications Act, establishing the Publications Classification Board, which was tasked with advising the chief secretary on the category of publications.5 A restricted publication could only be sold to people aged eighteen and over; a direct-sale publication could only be sold via mail order or after an unsolicited request from a person aged eighteen and over. It was of a piece with attempts to regulate the display, advertising, and sale of sexual material — not to ban the sale itself.

  Censorship, in effect, was reconfigured as a process of classification, with availability, display, and ratings all used to inform the prospective reader or viewer of the nature of the material. The arguments for the continuation of censorship evolved alongside this shift. In addition to his criticism of the proliferation of pornography, Peter Coleman came to argue that censorship was necessary if a society was to have any way of expressing its disapproval: it was a way of labelling, of alerting the public to disreputable material. As he put it, pithily, to censor material in this way was to censure that material.6

  This shift in the censorship debate left literature behind. Within three years of the unprecedented series of court trials and legal action, books such as Portnoy’s Complaint no longer bothered anyone. For all the heat and passion that it had aroused, Portnoy was essentially different from the ‘cheap, filthy, tabloid-type publications’ that now proliferated, one NSW politician remarked. The difference was in the way that sex and ‘filth’ were depicted. It was the difference ‘between the pictorial and the manuscript’, between the image and the printed word.7

  Efforts to protect the community — through restriction and quarantine — were thereafter directed towards images, and controversy over censorship moved to magazines and films; and then, in time, to videos, video games, and material accessed via the internet. And although there were still occasions when it became a matter of contention, writing and reading in Australia were, for the most part, no longer subject to acts of censorship.

  For writers and readers, the end of book censorship was a profound change. The poet Nancy Keesing, who had testified on behalf of Portnoy’s Complaint in the first trial in New South Wales, later commented that censorship’s disappearance was ‘the greatest and most beneficial change’ to writing in her lifetime.8 Yet memories of it faded quickly, slipped easily into the past. Like the experiments with Prohibition, what remained was disbelief that censorship had ever been real. It seemed absurd, a joke. ‘That ever so many books could have been put on any one list, and people told that they were not to read them,’ Peter Cowan commented later, ‘seems to be like something out of science fiction.’9

  But for the laws of libel and defamation, the ‘literary onanisms’ that Arthur Angell Phillips had lamented in 1969 were now at an end. Reading would come to be regarded as a means of education and self-improvement, not corruption or depravation. Writers had the freedom to explore their ideas in whatever way they wished, to use the words that they saw fitting, to depict the whole spectrum of life, without fear of censure or imprisonment. Publishers could accept and print material without fear of prosecution. Booksellers and librarians could order books and place them all on the shelves, holding nothing under the counter, fearing no visit from the Vice Squad. And readers coming to explore the literary world could wander, browse, and read without limit.

  ***

  The downfall of the censorship regime was a hard-won moment that came after a long campaign of opposition. Over the decades, there had been authors tried, shamed, fined, and — in the case of Robert Close — imprisoned for their work. There had been activists who had openly defied the censorship regime: from Leon Fink and Alex Sheppard, to the crew and organisers of American Hurrah, to Dennis Altman and his copies of Totempole and Myra Breckinridge, to Wendy Bacon and Frank Moorhouse. There had been the editors, writers, and printers of Oz, of Tharunka and its spin-offs. There had been booksellers who had nourished the opposition to censorship by selling illicit volumes from under their counters. There had been publishers and printers who had typeset and published banned works at considerable risk to their livelihoods and liberties. There had been academics and critics who had continued to argue and to agitate, to question and to criticise. Over successive decades, the actions of these protagonists ensured that the grounds for opposition to censorship were always fertile.

  The publication of Portnoy’s Complaint had been made possible by that long opposition. Penguin’s cultural pride in publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the UK, and its burgeoning publishing program of vibrant and culturally engaged Australian works underscored the company’s motivation to publish Portnoy. With improvements for scale, Penguin followed the model that Fink and Sheppard had provided when they published The Trial of Lady Chatterley in 1965. The support that Penguin received from booksellers and activists was of a piece with the ongoing opposition of those booksellers and activists to censorship. The press coverage that Portnoy attracted was predicated, in part, on knowledge of the censorship controversies of the past: their spectacle, their sound, their fury. The public’s uptake of the novel — buying it in numbers large enough to make it a bestseller many times over, in barely a month — stemmed from the notoriety, merit, and ‘buzz’ that surrounded the novel. The willingness of writers, academics, and experts to testify to the excellence and worth of Portnoy emanated from the common-felt duty among the literary community to see censorship gone.

  Where the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint figures most in the history of the end of book censorship is in its scale and scope. It was an unprecedented undertaking. In all the opposition to censorship in Australia, no other act of defiance was as bold. It was the first occasion where one book was used to test every channel of the Australian censorship system. It was an expensive, deliberate, and highly publicised affront to the censorship authorities, conducted within view of the public and — by its sales and its press coverage — with the support of that public, too. In circumventing the Department of Customs, and evading, with mixed success, the various state governments, Portnoy’s Complaint exposed them as near powerless and out of touch, trying to shield an increasingly mature people from the supposedly corrupting story of a man tormented by and obsessed with his mother and his penis.

  Penguin’s decision to invite prosecutions in states across the country magnified the impact of the book’s publication and the importance of the challenge it represented. It became a supreme test case. No other work published to defy the censorship regime was the subject of so many court cases in Australia, nor in so many jurisdictions. As it turned out, those trials exposed crucial flaws in the censorship system and in the rationales put forward by advocates for its continuation. For all the polling that Arthur Rylah and Eric Willis brandished, pointing to support within the community for censorship, the trials revealed a far more nuanced picture. Support for censorship was not monolithic, and though the opposition to it was not perhaps yet a majority of the population, as Geoffrey Dutton had claimed in 1970, there was nonetheless a sufficiently large opposition to make change almost certain.10

  In the aftermath of the Lady Chatterley trial in the UK, much had been made of the suggestion that England in the 1960s was like Disraeli’s two nat
ions: no intercourse or sympathy between them; each ignorant of the other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings; formed by different breeding and ordered by different manners.11 The same might be said of Australia’s community standards during this period. Plainly, the great number of people who purchased Portnoy’s Complaint did not believe it contravened those standards. The varying verdicts in the court trials, meanwhile, suggested that there was no uniformity in those standards, even among those tasked with determining them. Magistrates and judges made markedly different decisions: even when proclaiming their disgust with Portnoy’s Complaint and finding defendants guilty, they accepted that there was more to the work than that disgust alone. The twenty-four men empanelled in the two juries in New South Wales were ostensibly representatives of the community — but they, too, could come to no agreement.

  The trials also exposed the inadequacy of the censorship laws to deal with works that simultaneously triggered bans and the exemptions from those bans. The flowing stream that was supposed to separate high culture and low, that ran between literature and filth, as Kenny put it in the New South Wales trial, was, in Portnoy’s Complaint, muddied. Was it obscene, or a work of literary merit? Was it both? Which was the more important?

  These questions were both a diversion and a paradox. As the historian Barbara Sullivan was to later point out, even if Portnoy’s Complaint could have been neatly placed onto one side or the other, there was no longer any agreement that this was the basis on which it should be censored.12 The argument pursued by Wendy Bacon and her fellow writers in the pages of Tharunka and its variants — arguing not for obscenity redeemed by literary merit, but rather obscenity, in no need of redemption, as a valid and useful language on its own — had exposed the artificiality and class dimensions of that separation. Why should obscenity require some kind of literary merit? What even was that, but a way of treating some books differently from others? The Portnoy trials not only helped to unsettle the ambit of the term literary merit, but also that of obscenity.13

  ‘Portnoy’s Complaint was a very good case [to run],’ Bacon said later. ‘It was respectable and literary, but also very explicit. It wasn’t a run-of-the-mill literary defence. It was unique.’14 In some ways, the novel proved what they had argued: obscenity could be its own, vital subject (as Roth had said, obscenity is ‘very nearly the issue’ in the novel), just as worthy as ‘literature’.15 It won an agreement, widespread if not always wholehearted, that art could explore the obscene. In 1982, when controversy erupted over Juan Davila’s Stupid as a Painter, his tableau of flesh and fluid, New South Wales premier Neville Wran immediately ruled out police action: ‘I do not think art has got anything to do with the Vice Squad.’16 Such a statement would have been unthinkable a decade earlier.

  In another vein, Portnoy’s subject matter insidiously paralleled the arguments for censorship: just as the solitary act of masturbation was supposed to be dangerous for the masturbator, so was reading supposed to be dangerous to the reader. Portnoy’s Complaint showed that argument to be profoundly flawed.

  As the foundations and the ambit of censorship became increasingly untenable, the trials of Portnoy helped to bring to light a crucial point: the state’s efforts to position itself, through government, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary, as the guardian of public morals and virtue. This role was not passive. In guarding morals and virtues, it also shaped them, categorising and delineating what was acceptable and what was not. But where the public had once been willing to accept that guardianship, it was no longer willing to do so in the 1960s and 1970s.

  Censorship could not coexist with the debates that activists and writers were forcing on sexuality, power, education, gender, and discrimination. And notwithstanding that these debates and their results would be an enduring source of controversy, censorship would never be as accepted as it once was. By the 1970s, the long-running campaigns and protests against it had flowered and found recognition in the platform of Whitlam’s Labor Party. And when that party came to power, to give effect to changes that had already been underway for years, the censorship of books was all but over.

  Julie Rigg would not be able to write her book about the Portnoy affair. Life got in the way.17 But the initiative and courage shown by Penguin — in particular, by Michie, Hooker, and Froelich — would not be forgotten. The demise of censorship became an essential part of the realisation of their ambitions for Australian literature and publishing. They understood its significance: Penguin Australia went from strength to strength. It was no longer a clearing house for a British publishing program. It developed a vibrant list of culturally engaged Australian works — more and more of them original titles — that sold well in Australia and abroad. The significance of Portnoy in accelerating this was not to be understated.

  When Portnoy was published, Peter Coleman sensed that it would be significant. Writing in the Bulletin a few days afterwards, he declared that the story of Portnoy’s publication would be ‘an important one in the story of Australian censorship’. Matters had already begun to shift: the agreement for uniform censorship had already been shattered. Don Chipp was raising the stakes, declaring the return of the ‘dark ages’. Coleman was less worried. It was a ‘revival of enlightenment’, he wrote. ‘There should be more of it.’18

  More enlightenment would come. The end of censorship was not far off. And Portnoy would play a significant role in bringing about that end. As Graham C. Greene wrote to Michie only a few months later, after the first Portnoy trial in Victoria: ‘You have certainly won a great moral victory, and I cannot believe that the censorship situation in Australia will ever be quite the same.’19

  Acknowledgements

  This account has drawn on an array of published, unpublished, archival, and interview-based material. The most crucial of the published works are Nicole Moore’s authoritative history of Australian censorship, The Censor’s Library, and Geoffrey Dutton’s A Rare Bird, a history of Penguin Books Australia. I am indebted to these works and their authors.

  I am also in the debt of those who spoke with me about Penguin Books, Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, the trials, and censorship in Australia: Wendy Bacon, Blake Bailey, Reginald Barrett, Sir Max Bingham, Penelope Buckley, Stephen Charles, Hal G.P. Colebatch, Maureen Colman, Dennis Douglas, Sam Everingham, Leon Fink, Peter Froelich, Lucy Frost, Paul Grainger, Jennifer Gribble, Peter Grose, Margaret Harris, Nicholas Hasluck, Harry Heseltine, Tom Hughes, Stuart Kells, Brian Kiernan, Joanne Lee Dow, David Marr, Joan Masterman, Hilary McPhee, Meredith Michie, Nicole Moore, Malcolm Oakes, John Reid, Julie Rigg, Bob Sessions, Jeff Sparrow, Brian Stonier, Jennifer Strauss, Ian Viner, David Walsh, Richard Walsh, Charles Waterstreet, and Charles Wooley. For their help, kindness, patience, and generosity, all are due my considerable thanks.

  I wish to thank those who gave me permission to access and reproduce from public and private archival papers and photographs: the family of Geoffrey Dutton, the family of Graham C. Greene, the family of John Hooker, Hilary McPhee, Freya Michie, Matthew Michie, James Michie, Julie Rigg, the family of Frederick Osborne, the estate of Philip Roth and the Wylie Agency, the family of A.W. Sheppard, the estate of Patrick White, the New South Wales State Archives, the New South Wales District Court Registry Office, the Penguin Random House Archive, and the Penguin Archive. I also wish to thank Catherine Reade, of Fairfax Pictures, and Kevin Davis, of Newspix, for their aid in unearthing some of the photos used in this book.

  I wish to thank the efforts of staff at various libraries, archives, and institutions. In particular, I thank staff at the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia, the Library of the University of Canberra, the New South Wales State Archives, the State Records Office of Western Australia, the State Library of New South Wales, the Penguin Archive at the University of Bristol, and Ceri Lumley of the Special Collections section of the Penguin Random House Archive at the University of Reading.

  This book received inva
luable support, in the form of a grant, from ArtsACT: I thank the team and the government that affords this vital support for writers and artists in the Canberra region.

  This is the second book that I have been honoured to publish with Scribe. I wish to thank Henry Rosenbloom and his team for their fine work, support, and expertise.

  I could not have written this book without the generosity and all-round forebearance of my colleagues, my friends, and my family. For their generosity and advocacy, I am indebted to colleagues at the University of Canberra — including, but not limited to, Shane Strange, Katie Hayne, Tony Eaton, and Jen Webb — and to colleagues and friends further afield, especially Professor Nicole Moore, of UNSW Canberra; Professor Matthew Ricketson, of Deakin University; and Professor John Nethercote, of Australian Catholic University, who read over the manuscript and made valuable suggestions and comments.

  My parents continue to be soundly supportive, loving, and interested, in spite of the ‘slipshod’ language of this book: I thank them. My wife, Kate — who has seen too many weekends and evenings disappear with my head in a book or archive box — has throughout it all been patient, generous, loving, and encouraging: I thank her from the bottom of my heart, and look forward to repaying the enormous debt I owe to her.

  Finally, this book is for my siblings — Sean, Siobhan, and Liam — for their good humour, their longstanding encouragement, and their love.

  Notes

  Chapter 2: In the national interest

  This chapter draws on Nicole Moore’s authoritative history of censorship in Australia (2012) and Deana Heath’s pre-eminent exploration of the role played by racial and imperial ideologies in the formation of the censorship regime in Australia (2010).

 

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