The Use and Abuse of Literature (15 page)

Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel
The Well of Loneliness
(1928) inspired support from writers and scholars despite doubts about its lasting merit as a work of literature. When
The Well
was condemned by the editor of the
Sunday Express
as “A Book That Should Be Suppressed” (“I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”
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), Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster drafted a letter of protest and lined up other signatories, including T. S. Eliot, G. B. Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Vera Brittain, and Ethel Smyth. But as Virginia Woolf reported, Radclyffe Hall insisted that the letter should praise the book’s “artistic merit—even genius,”
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and the letter was never sent. Woolf herself, who privately regarded
The Well
as a “meritorious dull book,”
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signed a briefer letter with Forster and appeared as a witness in court, where she was relieved, she wrote, that “we could not be called as experts in obscenity, only in art.” The chief magistrate, Sir Charles Biron, ruled that the question of obscenity was one that he alone would determine, and he refused to permit testimony about literary merit. His
decision—that the book was obscene and prejudicial to the morals of the community—was upheld on appeal, and the book was not legally available in the U.K. until twenty years later.
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In the United States, Morris Ernst headed the defense when
The Well
was accused of obscenity. A number of prominent authors, including Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, John Dos Passos, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, submitted statements in support of the book, and although a magistrate refused to consider the question of literary merit, the New York Court of Special Sessions decided that the book addressed a “delicate social problem” and was not written in a way that could be described as obscene.
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But if
The Well of Loneliness
was not obscene, did that make it literature? It has been much reprinted and has sold well; it is often taught in courses on sexuality, lesbian and gay theory, and feminism. Few critics have spoken up in admiration of its style, which is often regarded as overwrought and sentimental. The use of obscene works had been roundly decried: such works, it was said, provoked lustful thoughts, and lustful actions, and were “intended” by the authors to produce such thoughts and actions. What should we say about the use a work like
The Well
, which inspired identification, solidarity, strong and varied emotional responses, and political and social debate? The publicity that the trials brought to the book increased its visibility and its sales, to the pleasure of some and the dismay of others. Its celebrity, and its subsequent place in a historical canon of lesbian and gay writing, came about as a result of a kind of publicity we might want to call extra-literary, or nonliterary. But the publicity was inextricably tied to a debate about whether it was a literary treatment or some other kind of writing.

Moreover, the view that
The Well
addressed a “delicate social problem” comes close to the notion of “redeeming social value,” which was laid down in the 1957 case of
Roth v. United States
(354 U.S., 476) as the limit standard for obscenity: “[a] book cannot be proscribed unless it is found to be utterly without redeeming social value.” The conditions attached were two: the book had to be considered in its entirety rather than by particular parts; and it had to be judged according to contemporary community standards, the anticipated response of the average
person. In a later case,
Jacobellis v. Ohio
(378 U.S. 184, 191, 194), Justice Brennan altered the phrase to “utterly without redeeming social importance.” Whether there is a significant difference between “value” and “importance,” legally speaking, is not unambiguously clear.
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But what is clear is that when jurists and literary scholars go head to head in a courtroom—even, or especially, a Supreme Court room—a great deal depends upon the literary standards of the judge.

Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark, dissenting in the decision on John Cleland’s eighteenth-century
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
(usually known as
Fanny Hill
), found literary scholars’ testimony about “the book’s alleged social value” unconvincing, to say the least. He offered, with “regret,” a summary of the book’s plot, beginning, “
Memoirs
is nothing more than a series of minutely and vividly described sexual episodes.” To the first expert witness’s testimony that the book “is a work of art” and “asks for and receives a literary response,” he countered with a flat statement of denial: “If a book of art is one that asks for and receives a literary response,
Memoirs
is no work of art. The sole response evoked by the book is sensual.” Whether reviews spoke in favor of the novelist’s writing style (“literary grace”), the history of the novel as a form, or the heroine’s “enthusiasm for an activity that is, after all, only human,” Clark dismissed their arguments as worthless: “The short answer to such ‘expertise’ is that none of these so-called attributes have any value to society. On the contrary, they accentuate the prurient appeal.”
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Despite the facts that Clark’s opinion was a dissent and that
Fanny Hill
went on to have a successful commercial career (including films and a spinoff novel by Erica Jong), his views underscore the problem of calibrating “value to society” in terms of “literary merit”—especially when “literary experts” are rejected as lacking any substantive grounds for their expertise.

This was precisely the issue addressed by Justices Harlan and Douglas in their opinions in Memoirs v.
Massachusetts
, the case that addressed the status of Cleland’s novel. Justice Harlan wrote, “To establish social value in the present case, a number of acknowledged experts in the field of literature testified that
Fanny Hill
held a respectable place in serious writing, and unless such largely uncontradicted testimony is accepted as
decisive it is very hard to see that the ‘utterly without redeeming social value’ test has any meaning at all.” Justice Douglas wrote, “If there is to be censorship, the wisdom of experts on such matters as literary merit and historical significance must be evaluated.”
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The idea that a work of literature should have an identifiable “social value” to “redeem” it from the charge of obscenity ran counter to much thought about what art was and was not. Such an idea spoke, and speaks, to the continually problematic question of use. If use in this case was synonymous with “having social value,” what kept the claim from being merely tautologous, or a matter of taste, whether lay or expert? The defense against the charge of obscenity was, to a certain extent, a defense against the idea that the author’s intent had been to create a bad object, something that could be used (or misused, or abused) to generate lustful thoughts and even lustful actions. What was the proper, nonabusive, nonmisusing use of a novel? Was reading a sufficient use? Was it a social value? None of these novels has been at the forefront of social change or social improvement, except if we include—as maybe we should—a change in cultural taste or cultural norms. But this idea, that risky (and risqué) writing should push the envelope of community standards, was not the social value that the Justices had in mind. The notion of redemption, with its religious ring, further complicates the matter: is the sinner in this picture the work, or the author, or the reader?

As is often the case with sin, these putative acts of bad behavior on the part of works of literature seem to have required, or inspired, their foes to wallow in them in order to make their sinful nature clear. Thus, for example, in 1930 U.S. Senator Reed Smoot of Utah undertook a public reading of blue passages from “foreign literature” that brought crowds of spectators to the Senate galleries. Smoot had piled up a stack of works by non-American authors, works he thought should not be permitted to pass through customs. They included Frank Harris’s
My Life and Loves
, Balzac’s
Droll Tales
, the poems of Robert Burns, the memoirs of Casanova—and perhaps inevitably,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. Smoot decried the books as “lower than the beasts” and averred that he would rather have a child of his “use opium than read these books.” He was succeeded at the podium by Senator Bronson Murray Cutting, who represented
New Mexico but had been born in New York and educated at Harvard. Cutting suggested that such liberties were often taken by works of literature: “the first page of
King Lear
is grossly indecent; the love-making of Hamlet and Ophelia is coarse and obscene; in
Romeo and Juliet
the remarks of Mercutio and the Nurse are extremely improper,” and so on. “There may,” he said, “be people whose downfall and degeneration in life have been due to reading Boccaccio, but I do not know who they are.” Moreover, Cutting accused Smoot of having drawn attention to
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
by his attacks, suggesting that Smoot had thereby made the book a “classic.” This thrust brought Smoot back to his feet. “I resent the statement the Senator has just made that
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is my favorite book!” he said. “I have not read it. It was so disgusting, so dirty and vile, that the reading of one page was enough for me … I’ve not taken ten minutes on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!” In support of Smoot’s position on censorship, Senator Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina rose to say that his priority was “the womanhood of America” and that “the virtue of one little 16-year-old girl is worth more to America than every book that ever came into it from any other country.”
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This culture clash would seem completely trivial and forgettable, except that its upshot was to take the question of literary censorship away from the customs agents and leave the decisions, instead, to the U.S. District Courts. Senator Smoot was the co-sponsor of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, to which the decision about the importation of foreign books was an amendment, so the obscenity trial of Joyce’s
Ulysses
three years later came under the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court and thus, as we’ve seen, to the sophisticated and humane assessment by Judge John M. Woolsey, who had (unlike Senator Smoot) read the book in question “in its entirety” from cover to cover.

It’s easy to think of these blocking figures who rail against the danger of reading as quaint survivors of an earlier, less enlightened age. On the one hand, that age is very much with us in the persistent attempts, for example, to ban
The Catcher in the Rye
(offensive language),
The Bluest
Eye
(sexually explicit content), or the Harry Potter books (witchcraft) from classrooms and libraries;
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on the other hand, they are in some ways right: reading
is
dangerous, which is why it is important. If literary works (as well as scientific treatises—ask Galileo) did not shake up the world we think we live in, they would indeed be trivial, inconsequential, “entertaining.” It is precisely because a book can enrich the mind, challenge, disturb, and change one’s thinking, that it may after all—whatever its specific content—possess that curiously elusive quality called “redeeming social value.”

Some forms that, as forms, remain typically outside of literature nonetheless generate examples that have become recognized literary works. Take the example of the diary. Certainly the published diaries of writers like Virginia Woolf have enjoyed and merited publication and study, but what I have in mind is something more like Samuel Pepys’s
Diary
, a daily record kept for almost ten years by an English naval administrator, member of Parliament, and fellow of the Royal Society that chronicled his activities, personal, professional, political, and sexual, from 1660 to 1669. In the course of this period, Pepys recorded such epochal events as the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1665, and the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67, while also meticulously transcribing descriptions of plays, concerts, meals, and sexual encounters with women other than his wife, often in the same day’s account. The diary was written in a shorthand code. After his death, it was decoded with great labor by a scholar who was unaware that the key to the shorthand had been filed quite nearby, in Pepys’s library. Other transcriptions and editions followed, and the
Diary
(by turns perceptive, scurrilous, indiscreet, and wise) became a canonical work.

Robert Louis Stevenson called it “a work of art” and observed with admiration that “his is the true prose of poetry—prose because the spirit of the man was narrow and earthly, but poetry because he was delightedly alive … you would no more change it than you would change a
sublimity of Shakespeare’s [or] a homily of Bunyan’s.” Stevenson’s praise was affectionate, not hyperbolic: “There never was a man nearer being an artist, who yet was not one,” he wrote, saying that Pepys was comparable to the poet Shelley in “quality” but not in “degree”—“in his sphere, Pepys felt as keenly.”
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Virginia Woolf, who knew the
Diary
well enough to mention it regularly in her essays, considered Pepys to have a rare gift: “in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau perhaps.”
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For Woolf, there was no question but that Pepys’s
Diary
was literature. Is it still literature today? Certainly it has been read over the years with literary attention.

At the other end of this spectrum, consider the vicissitudes of the work we have come to know as
The Diary of Anne Frank
. Pepys was a grown man of the world who went many places and saw many things. Frank was a young girl confined to a hiding place on the upper floors of an Amsterdam house because of the Nazi persecution of Jews. Pepys discontinued his diary after almost ten years when it became physically uncomfortable to write and politically uncomfortable to record. Frank’s diary, begun on her thirteenth birthday, came to an abrupt end a little more than two years later, when her family was betrayed, discovered, captured, and sent to a concentration camp.