Burgess and the ‘Smut-hounds’
by Josh Mcloughlin
PARIAH PRESS, 130pp, ISBN 9780993037863, £10.99
Fifty years ago today, Anthony Burgess gave a lecture on ‘Obscenity & The Arts’ to a packed crowd assembled at the University of Malta. He had been invited by the Malta Library Association but, more importantly, provoked by the Maltese General Post Office. The island’s authorities had confiscated and incinerated 43 volumes from Burgess’s library upon its arrival in November 1968, shortly after Burgess himself had relocated his family from Britain to an 18th-century palazzo in the Maltese interior.
Originally printed as an edition of 50 poorly printed pamphlets by the Malta Library Association in 1973, the lecture faded into obscurity and has been virtually unknown ever since. Its resurrection began in 2015, with an impromptu offer from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation to young upstart Manchester publisher PARIAH PRESS. Editor Jonny Walsh describes how they approached publication:
‘A simple grammatical edit, and a neatening and reprinting of the original pamphlet would have been a literary cop-out. The Burgess Foundation houses a vast repository of Burgess’s life and work [. . .] and the subterranean archive is pretty special too. So, why not bring some lustrous materials to the surface? A conceptual framework quickly manifested on the creation of a type of ziggurat of literature, a majestic intercorrelation of words and images – around the remit of “Anthony Burgess in Malta 1968-1974” – upon which to sacrificially display, and thereby give further meaning to, the genius of Burgess’s lecture.’
The result is Obscenity & The Arts (2018), a significant document in the history of literary censorship and a monument to an important, if overlooked, period in the career of one of the great English writers of the 20th century. Central to the attempt to create a ‘type of ziggurat’ is the book’s extensive and illuminating interdisciplinary apparatus. The wealth of material published alongside Burgess’s speech is the real triumph of Obscenity & The Arts. Two original essays by Andrew Biswell and Germaine Greer anchor Burgess’s speech in its social, political, and literary contexts and survey 20th-century debates around obscenity. Greer supplies a stinging rejoinder to Burgess, comparing his complaint over the loss of his books in Malta to the violent suppression faced by the countercultural writers and artists of 1960s London. Archive photography taken during Burgess’s time on the island is coupled with ‘Transmogrifies’, a series of photographic studies by PARIAH designer Adam Griffiths that seek to re-contextualise images disinterred from the Burgess archive and provide a visual response to the lecture and the anti-censorship debates it engages. A transcript of an interview Burgess gave in the aftermath of the speech, a solo piece for piano composed by Burgess in 1968, and a satirical essay Burgess wrote for Punch in June 1970 entitled ‘Gladly My (Maltese) Cross I’d Bear’, ensure that Burgess’s own contributions are not confined to the speech alone.
The introductory essay by Andrew Biswell not only situates Burgess’s struggle against the Maltese authorities within the context of his career as an author, but shows how this skirmish was emblematic of an anti-censorial impulse that went all the way back to Burgess’s schoolboy days in 1920s and 1930s Manchester. As vividly described in Flame Into Being (1985), the young Burgess sought to lay his hands on DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), not just because they were outlawed but because the popular and reactionary press criticised them so violently.
Joyce’s novel, smuggled into Britain by Burgess’s history teacher at Xaverian College in Rusholme, had a profound and lasting effect on Burgess, who claimed he never recovered from the shock of its first reading. In the context of Obscenity & the Arts, however, the fact that the book was censored in the UK is crucial. The text bequeathed to Burgess not only a keen ear for innovation and a penchant for the shock of the literary new, but an unshakeable belief that the state had no right to decide which books its citizens were allowed to read.
Burgess’s concerns might seem antiquated now. To appreciate his intervention we need to peel back our contemporary amnesia and remind ourselves of the long history of censorship from 14th to the late 20th century. Until 1968, all stage plays were vetted by The Lord Chamberlain’s Office to expunge anything deemed offensive, a practice that had remained, give or take or few historical permutations, the same as that of the Master of Revels, an office dating back to 1347. Likewise, galleries in major English cities were visited frequently by plain-clothed policemen scouring the land for ‘obscene’ paintings. The Home Office’s ‘Blue Book’ — the existence of which was denied until 2001 — listed 4,000 dangerous books subject to destruction orders, including Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856).
The 1959 Obscene Publications Act promised a push back against this moral policing by allowing for literary and artistic merit to be used to defend books against suppression. Yet, despite the early gains made in 1960 at the trial of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover, a censorial morality pervaded British public discourse, especially in the popular and tabloid press. Burgess defended William S. Burroughs in a letter published in the Times Literary Supplement in January 1964 and berated ‘the protectors of public morals’ in a review of The Naked Lunch for The Guardian in November of the same year. Lurking behind the review was the Obscene Publications Act, which compelled critics to be forthright about the merits of works they reviewed, should any allegation of obscenity arise and critics be called upon to give evidence in court.
Burgess was among the most prominent of these expert literary witnesses, called upon to assess Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) at trial in 1966 and at a successful appeal to overturn an obscenity prosecution against its publisher in 1967. In a post-trial report published in the Spectator, Burgess began to formalise the thinking on obscenity that would later culminate in his speech on Malta. In the report, Burgess points out that the obscenity lobby was among the least qualified to assess the books they would suppress. He suggested that, far from reducing violent crime, censorship risked more murder by removing ‘the reasonable catharsis of art’. Despite the brusque confidence of Burgess’s witty dismissal of his opponents — whom he dubbed ‘the poronography-hounds, the prurient sniggerers’ and later the ‘smut-hounds’ — he registered the fear of all who wrote ‘honest works of literature’: that the next trial might see them in the dock.
Eighteen months after arriving in Malta, Burgess resumed hostilities, seeking to destroy not the whole edifice of censorship, but censorship that ‘has no clear rationale’. His aim in the speech is not to defend obscenity in and of itself, and he makes clear he is not ‘on the side of the wholesale dissemination of obscenity for its own sake’. Rather his apologia is for literary and artistic uses of obscenity, that is, obscenity with a purpose. For Burgess, that means obscenity as an affective purgative in the Aristotelian cathartic mould. Literature, for Burgess, utilises obscenity in the service of a ‘moral purpose’, unlike gratuitous works designed ‘solely to disgust’ or ‘titillate’.
He begins by summarising the grisly plot of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, quoting a smutty line from Dante’s Divine Comedy and invoking Rabelais, ‘that great doctor and luminary of the early Renaissance’ who also happened to be a master of grotesque fiction. Burgess points out that these writers’ works are available on Malta, leading to his opening question: ‘What precisely is the standard prevailing on this island which decides that one book is dirty and another is not?’
He then proceeds to examine the ‘subjective term ‘“obscenity” — and its ugly sister “pornography”’, arguing that each ‘ultimately [. . .] seems to have some connection with a particular mode of disgust’ elicited by ‘the purgative functions of the human body’. Giving the example of leaving a bag of shit on a doorstep, Burgess says that we abhor such an ‘obscene act’ because it reminds us of the ‘lower forms of purgation’, whereas ‘we like to think of ourselves progressing upwards and we want to forget our lower animal origins’. But this ‘exhibition[ist]’ brand of obscenity ‘may be used for a purpose which is not at all disgusting’, such as when Swift and the other 18th-century scatophiliacs used obscenity to ‘remind men’ who had quite ‘forgotten their lowly origins’ that they remained the paragon only of animals, despite their godlike aspiration.
This is the first statement of Burgess’s overall position on censorship: obscenity, provided it ‘is there for a [moral] purpose’, is permissible. This nuance, he says, is lost on those who ‘regard the presence of obscenity at all, for whatever purpose, as automatically condemning a book to the flames’. He exonerates Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) because it ‘aim[s] [. . .] to arouse compassion through the depiction of obscenity in people’s lives’ and exposes ‘diseases of the body politic which must in fact be cured’ rather than hidden away.
By contrast, Burgess takes aim at certain ‘magazines’ he at first refuses to name: ‘it would be an obscene act, in fact, to do so’, he says. In the next breath, however, he translates the title of one such publication as ‘Equine Ordure’, i.e. Horseshit: An Offensive Review, the anti-military magazine that published four issues between 1965–1968. The example Burgess picks up on is a drawing by Robert Dunker of a baby impaled on a bayonet. Burgess engages in a disingenuous rhetorical sleight of hand when he says that this and other images in Horseshit ‘are merely meant to disgust’. As Greer points out in her essay, the publication’s ‘obvious purpose [. . .] was to intensify revulsion about the Vietnam War’.
From there Burgess turns from purgative to ‘pornographic obscenity’, displaying a characteristically mid-century heterosexist male mindset. ‘Pornography in the simplest order’, he says, ‘is the representation of a female sexual partner’. Predictably, he says that the underwear advertisements in the Times of Malta and in London Underground stations ‘are intended merely to excite minimally a kind of sexual emotion on the part of the male’, but are ultimately harmless. ‘Hard-core’ pornography goes further, and ‘has not solely the aim of sexual excitation, but the aim of a kind of solitary sexual fruition’, which Burgess dubbed its ‘cathartic purpose’, a therapeutic act’ that ‘do[es] the state no harm’.
He declares ‘it is conceivable that if sexual energy is discharged in this artificial way, it will not then flower into the various bizarre forms of violence which flourish in the cities of the West’. Because this catharsis plays out at the level of the individual, says Burgess, the state ‘should do little about it if pornography has no social significance’. With his heterosexual blinkers strapped firmly on and turned all the way up to ‘Male Gaze Overdrive’, Burgess argues: ‘if the free sale of pornography merely promotes solitary acts of auto-eroticism, then pornography is doing no harm’. He takes aim at Pamela Johnson, whose 1967 study On Iniquity examined Ian Brady’s love of the Marquis de Sade and asked ‘whether there are things which may encourage us in wickedness, or else break down those proper inhibitions which have hitherto kept the tendency to it under restraint’. If Johnson lamented the slide towards an ‘affectless’ and unfeeling society, for Burgess the reverse is true: an excess feeling, that is, of ‘lustful desire’, poses a great risk to civil order. If not adequately purged in literary and artistic catharsis, say Burgess, undischarged desire threatens to overwhelm us. In the end, Burgess’s rejoinder to Johnson is that if we ban de Sade, we have to ban the Bible because:
‘We can find nothing which, with somebody deranged, somebody potentially deranged or actually so, will not possibly drive them around the corner into the enactment of what previously is merely imagined.’
In the next breath, Burgess says deadpan: ‘Hamlet may persuade a young man to murder his uncle [. . .]. If we are going to proscribe the presentation of sensationalism in literature, we are getting rid of a great deal of what we think is valuable literature.’
Burgess instead proposes a ‘region of values’, a schema by which works can be judged and ‘condemnation of pornography can properly be made’. He proposes a ‘scale’, with properly ‘aesthetic’ literature falling somewhere between the ‘didactic’ and the ‘pornographic’. All three stir up emotion, but whereas the latter two leave that emotion undischarged, in literature ‘the discharge of the emotion aroused is effected during the aesthetic rhythm of the work itself’.
A didactic text on, say, ethics, requires the reader to discharge the energies and emotions it arouses in the world, by acting ethically. Pornographic writing ‘inflames’ desire, but ‘when the book is closed, the inflammation still exists’ and ‘may well be discharged in some totally non-sexual medium, such as public violence’. Literature, says Burgess, occupies ‘the middle’ ground, ‘works which arouse emotions only for their discharge within the rhythm of the work itself’. He warns writers: ‘One must try to avoid, as far as one can, the raising of the reader’s emotions, with no intention of discharging those emotions’.
He closes by citing the example of his own novel Tremor of Intent (1966), which ‘was held up at the Post Office [...] because it came out in French, and French is ipso facto a suspicious language’ yet ‘when the book came out in Danish called Martyrernes Blod, which means ‘Martyr’s Blood’, it was almost whizzed through with an archiepiscopal blessing. You could smell the incense on it’. He relates that a sex scene in the novel was designed to be ‘totally unerotic [...] totally symbolic’, but one reader informed him that it had saved his marriage. ‘It is evident one cannot always win’, concludes Burgess. As Biswell notes, Burgess’s:
‘argument about writing being either ‘static’ (meaning ‘aesthetic’) or kinetic (meaning didactic or ‘pornographical’) is taken almost word for word from chapter 5 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).’
In other words, Burgess purloins his theory of aesthetics straight from the Stephen Dedalus playbook, and thus ultimately from his beloved Joyce. The Irishman was not simply Burgess's favourite writer but was profoundly important in shaping Burgess’s attitudes towards censorship. As Graham Foster points out, ‘Reading Ulysses by James Joyce was perhaps the first time that Anthony Burgess had experienced forbidden literature’. Not only Burgess’s formative literary experiences but his development as a writer throughout his career — he continued to measure all of his fiction against the yardstick of Ulysses — was bound up in Joyce's brush with the censors in 1922. The novel’s suppression in the UK holds the key to the ironic peripeteia that concludes Burgess’s speech in Malta. The author’s ultimate failure to control the reading of his text mirrors the inability of the authorities to suppress obscenity which, like literature, always has a habit of exceeding whatever boundaries are erected to circumscribe it.
Burgess’s campaign against the ‘smut-hounds’ did not end in Malta. He fictionalised his experience on the island in Earthly Powers (1980) and three years before his death in 1989 he finished a poem entitled ‘An Essay on Censorship’. The poem’s satirical bent clearly responds to the controversy The Satanic Verses (1988), whose author Salman Rushdie was the subject of a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini a year after its publication:
Authors, who eat and drink what they create,
See the prescriptions of a foreign state
As a mere aspect of a threat diffused
Wherever the free-winging word is used.
A book’s unpublished lest it may offend;
Published, its tenuous life is at an end
While libel seems to mutter. Books are burned
By activists whose muftis have not learned
The truth of Heine’s aphorism: ‘Who
Burns books will soon burn human beings too’.
In the half century since Burgess’s speech, his native England has relaxed its moralistic laws but censorship and obscenity still play a crucial role in global contemporary literary history. Books continue to be banned around the world. Jay Asher’s 13 Reasons Why (2007) was banned in Canada, Ma Jian’s novels are predictably proscribed in China, and two ultra-conservative New Jersey Republicans recently attempted to have Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1885) struck from the curriculum. Burgess’s loathed ‘smut-hounds’ are still at large. In shining a light on a brief episode in Burgess’s career, Obscenity & the Arts not only forms a vital contribution to our understanding of Burgess and his work, but acts as an antidote to liberal complacencies and a timely reminder that the ‘free-winging word’ is still in dire need of liberation 50 years on.