The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1929. BOOKS AND POLITICS

Southland Times, Issue 20773, 14 May 1929, Page 4

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. TUESDAY, MAY 14, 1929. BOOKS AND POLITICS

Britain has not yet recovered from the blows delivered by Sir Joynson Hicks when he seized copies of a very ordinary novel called “Sleeveless Errand” by Miss Norah James on the ground that it was obscene literature. The Home Secretary of the Baldwin Government complacently declared that all he did was to refer the case to the courts, which put the onus of deciding the principal point into the proper hands. But the courts operate under the dictum of Mr Justice Cockburn: I think the test of obscenity is this: whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscene is to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influence, and into whose hands a publication of this sort must fall. The dictum of the learned judge is one which many people will applaud, but when it is put to practical test it develops a maw so capacious that the majority of the great works of literature and the Bible would not escape. Fancy a Red-eyed Government wishing to fight Christianity interpreting that opinion! Shakespeare could not escape, and hardly a scientific work dealing with sex could be printed with safety. Coarse language and sex realism may be repellant, but whether it tends “to deprave or corrupt” depends on how

it is presented and on the characters of those “into whose hands” the books charged “may fall.” As a matter of fact the sentence which caused all the trouble for "Sleeveless Errand” was a remark by one of the characters: “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.” This remark heard in public would be objectionable to many, it would give offence, but would anyone seriously argue that it could be called obscene? Yet it is clear from the London newspapers that it was this phrase which incurred the anger of the Home Secretary and caused the courts to enter a conviction against the publisher, who happened to be a New Zealander. One critic, by no means averse to censorship, says that coarse and profane (not blasphemous) language prevails in sickening prodigality, but he urges that the best tendency of the book cannot be termed corruptive. The heroine, disillusioned and made aware of the rottenness of the life she has been leading, commits suicide in despair. Evidently it is a frank, but morbid work, portraying an unattractive and socially harmful patch of city life, though, according to the critics who have read it, there is nothing obscene in it. The Home Office steps in to suppress a novel picturing vividly, and with obvious condemnation, an objectional social group, but it says nothing about those lively, clever comedies which use vice for sport and dress it up in attractive garments, despite the greater influence for evil in these works. As Mr J. A. Hobson has said: “A strict enforcement of the law against obscenity would certainly rule out one or more of the works of each of our halfdozen foremost novelists or playwrights on the strength of particular passages or, in some instances, whole books.” Tolstoi's “Resurrection” could not survive a prosecution for obscenity, and Shakespeare would be banned without any hope of appeal. The unfortunate fact is that the application of the censorship seems to be directed by minds utterly incapable of assessing values. The trouble, of course, is that censorship is usually manipulated by an official who has no real taste in literature, and whose judgments are founded on isolated passages, but it is common knowledge that the naughty comedies, in books or in plays, go blithely on their way without interference while serious works are made the subject of prosecutions. The Baldwin Government has suffered not a little from the activities of the Home Office in this and in the other case which caused public outcry at the same time. This was the use of a Geneva Convention to seize in the mails the manuscript of poems by D. H. Lawrence. That convention seeks to prevent immoral literature being circulated through the mails, but it was never intended for use against works in manuscript, which had not been published. We are quite prepared to believe (hat Lawrence’s poems could be brought well within the corners of Mr Justice Cockburn's dictum, but where a Government invades the mails to seize a manuscript it destroys the sanctity of all letters, and renders all mails unsafe from official prying. Would any person in this country like to think that his or her letters might be opened and perused by officials who could offer as an excuse that they were searching for immoral writings? This may be necessary in war time to check enemy espionage, but it will not be tolerated in peace. No one can defend obscenities in literature—no one wishes to defend them—and certainly much of the rubbish posing as literature could be safely destroyed without loss, but who is there willing to leave the determination of what is noncorruptive to Government officials or to magistrates, restricted by a dictum which practically gives them no option. In the election campaign now proceeding quite a large number of artists, writers and musicians have taken the field and their operations will be directed largely at the censorship operated by the Home Secretary, who seems to have a flair for blundering. It is quite clear that public opinion in the Old Country has been seriously stirred by these cases and undoubtedly votes will be swung by their arguments because they have one of those eases which will always arise when officialdom attempts to interfere with literature. We have instances of it in this country, and know of some novels, morbid, repulsive, untrue and of no literary merit, which have been banned by some official as harmful to the people, when lewd comedies are permitted to pass the Customs unimpeded to do far more harm in corrupting "those in whose hands” they “may fall.”