SEX NOVELISTS

Manawatu Times, Volume LIII, Issue 6537, 20 February 1928, Page 10

SEX NOVELISTS

DESTROYERS OP YOUTH. In view of tho growing uneasiness at the vogue of modern sex novels, special interest attaches to tho following extracts from a scathing indictment of the authors of these novels by Mr James Douglas, editor of the London Sunday Express. The indictment takes the form of an open letter to the writers. “Youj” writes Mr J. Douglas in tho Sunday Express ef November 29, "are one of the 10 plagues let loose upon us by the war, and I am afraid that no pestologlst will exterminate you before you have completed your corruption of our defenceless youth and your mercenary demoralisation of the English novel. There is a fat market for your wares, because you cater for the beasts appetite of human nature without fearing cither the vengeance of a healthy public opinion oi the lash of the law.

“You have converted holy liberty into unholy license. You have defiled freedom. You have degraded every ideal and debased every noble aim. You hav turned marriage into a mockery. “Sex novels, sex plays, and sex films are a marketable commodity. There is a pseudo-censorship of sex plays and sex films, but your damaged goods are, sold without even the semblance of a censor. f “Fifty years ago parents severely censored the novels read by their children. When I was a boy we were not allowed to poison our imagination with foul and filthy fiction. Our fathers and mothers protected our minds as well as our stomachs against unwholesome food. They nourished our brains as well as our body on the best diet they could find. “I have noted every victory you have won over decency and reticence. After a life devoted to literary criticism, I have come to tho deliberate conclusion that it too late to terrify you by scourging or to frighten you by invective. ’ Your greed for gain makes you proof against satire and impenetrable by irony. Your gilded hides are too thick to feel anything or wince under any whip. You are not ostracised or boycotted, *On the contrary, you are feted and fawned on by the snobbish idolaters of materialism and the worshipers of money. You are tho best sellers because you sell your souls. “A French cynic lids declared that very few people "would fall in love if they had never read about it. .This is a lie, if by love we mean the holy thing that the great poets and the great novelists have set in a shrine of beauty. It is not a lie if we mean the thing you sell in the guise of love.

“If it were not for your loathsome trade youth would be permitted to enter the sanctuary of love With reverence and adoration. Its natural idealism would be allowed to mature. Its roses would bloom without your canker. Its green leafage would not be covered with your slime. There is nothing lovlier than the unspotted and unstained mind of youth. It is generous, unselfish, and chivalrous. But you devour its most spelndid illusions. You ravage its most glorious dreams. You lead it out of the light into the darkness. “Vermin like you are expelled from our schools when they are detected, but you are not thrown out of our drawing-rooms. You crawl everywhere, and there is no insectide with which to spray you. If the critic pours his vitriol over you, he advertises you instead of inhibiting you. You aro the deadliest bacteria in our blood, but we have discovered no antitoxin that prevents' you from multi- ! plying. Some' of you' are endowed with literary artifice that masks your infamy.”

Hr Douglas In his concluding paragraph writes: — “You plead extenuation of your crimes that all knowledge is lawful, and that "to the pure all things are pure. You are liars and you know you lie. If we put you into tho pillory you whine that you do not mean what you say or what you insinuate, and there is a herd rush to the pillory which fills your pockets. “You are making high literature un saleable. Your bad coin is driving good coin out of circulation. Like tho dramatist with a conscience, tho novelist with a conscience is tempted to retire in disgust from a morbid mart which rejects the best in favour of the worst. “You have debased the public palate. Your triumphs have taught your dirty tricks to every greedy vendor of filth who tries to sell didactic tracts and pseudo-scientific treatises by spicing them with indecency. The t dullest monograph or memoir with i salacious flavourings can now com- ' pete with you in your own field of filth. You arc polluting every form of print and nearly every branch of I publishing. I Your motives arc, of course, as I noble as those of any imported pornocrat You are unmasking social ailments. Y r ou arc reformers. But in every degenerate era of history [ parasites like you have appeared. . . History repeats itself in every tidal wave of evil, for it is invariably followed by a tidal wave of righteousness that cxaltcth a nation. I hope we may be able to kill you before you kill us. You deserve hemp or hemlock.”