Publish and be Damned

The law is an ass, an idiot, so said Charles Dickens’ Mister Bumble the Beadle in Oliver Twist.  I think we can maybe refine that just a little: it’s not the law that is an ass and an idiot but Lord Justice Leveson, who last week produced his report recommending, as anticipated, statutory regulation of the press. 

His conclusion has been welcomed by other asses, not least of whom is Nick Clegg, the Limp Dumb Deputy Prime Minister, a man who could play Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream with no need for the ears. 

David Cameron, now twisting on the horns of yet another dilemma, only has himself to blame for his discomfort.  There was no need, as I have said, for this expensive farce in the first place. Breaches of the law by journalists in News International should have been dealt with as breaches of the law, nothing more.  Instead we have this stupid lawyer and his equally stupid acolytes mounting a challenge to press freedom, a freedom upon which all others might be said to hang. 

What irony there is here.  Our democracy is dying anyway, hurried along to extinction by the European politburo in Brussels.  Now if Leveson has his way we can forget about Milton and Wilkes and Orwell; we can forget about all those who defended a free press as an essential adjutant to free speech.  State regulation is the beginning of the end. 

It’s gratifying to see that not all in the present government are as terminally stupid as the insufferable Corporal Clegg.  William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, warned Cameron that statutory press regulation would be warmly welcomed by Vladimir Putin and other petty tyrants around the globe.  According to one insider, Hague said that “…Britain demonstrating that we have a free press is part of our ability to say that we believe in democracy…if we announced statutory regulation this would be used by the Russians to justify all sorts of behaviour.  It is a fundamental part of British foreign policy to have a free press.”

It’s a point of view echoed by Jethro Goko of the Daily News, Zimbabwe’s biggest independent newspaper.  He said that the rest of the world looked to Britain as a model of press freedom and that the phone hacking scandal should not be used as an excuse for government interference.  If Leveson has his way it will be “manna from heaven” for the likes of Robert Mugabe and his kind.  Goko should know.  His own paper was shut down for seven years and only publishes now under state licence.

Here the Spectator, my favourite political weekly, has openly announced in the latest issue that it will not cooperate with any regulatory structure mandated by the state.  Fraser Nelson, the editor, writes that the publication will not attend meetings, pay fines or heed menaces. 

“To do so would be to betray everything The Spectator has stood for since 1828.”  So far as he is concerned Leveson is a no-brainer.  “…our archives [show] how we have been implacably opposed to the principle of state regulation of the press – not because it protects the press, but because it protects the public.” He added that the magazine has a long history of standing up to politicians who want to restrict freedom of speech.

When I think of Leveson I think of one of those antediluvian fossils, the old judges who sit on the bench regularly having to seek enlightenment as lawyers present their cases because there is some aspect of modern life that they do not understand, from Wi-Fi to iPhones.  Leveson does not understand the internet.  A mere twelve of his almost two thousand page tome is devoted to its place in modern life. 

His is a scheme that is effectively twenty years or so out of date, completely ignoring the fact that more and more people get their news from the net, not from newspapers.  The Sun pointed out the absurdity here, saying that it and other papers could be stopped from publishing stories and pictures already seen by millions online. 

A gagged press is a dead press.  With circulation already in sharp decline I’m guessing that in twenty years or so we will no longer have published newspapers, the so-called ‘qualities’ like the Guardian being the first dinosaurs into Jurassic extinction.  Let its ridiculous editor reflect on that as defends Leveson’s attempt to “ensure decent standards.” 

Publish and be damned.  Be damned to state control of the press; be damned to Lord Leveson

Finding Anastasia

The female most associated with France is Marianne, the symbol of liberty, of freedom, of the republic and of revolution. But what I did not know, what I found out only recently, is that Marianne has a sister, altogether more censorious and far less interested in freedom. Her name is –can you guess? – Anastasia!

Anastasia, or rather Madame Anastasie, was brought to my attention here by Dominic, who came across a reference to her in the pages of Proust as a figure representing official censorship in France during the First World War. She appears specifically in Finding Time Again, the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past, where the line appears “I do hope the most-high and all-powerful Anastasia doesn't blue-pencil us!"

Dominic started the ball rolling; I decided to kick it further. The whole thing is quite intriguing – it intrigues me – because I can only take the story so far. It looks as if the original figure of Anastasia, armed with a large pair of sheers or scissors, was created sometime in the 1870s by the caricaturist André Gill specifically to represent the official censor, who counted political caricature high among his targets. The thing is none of the sources make it clear if Anastasia, the tight-lipped old maid, was already in existence in some form or other before Gill gave her a definite shape.

The obvious question is why Anastasia, why was the censor given that name? The short answer is that it’s impossible to say with any precision. The suggestions that do exist, self-referential and unanchored in any original source, are not wholly convincing. More than that, they are contradictory and fairly obscure.

It could refer to a Saint Anastasia who was martyred during the third century persecution of the Christians by the Emperor Decius. Amongst other things she is alleged to have had her tongue cut out. An article in Time Magazine published in December 1939 repeats the tongue story, but says that this was because she resisted the advances of the Emperor Valerian, who, interestingly enough, had been chosen as censor by the Senate after Decius revived the office.

The other possibility, the one favoured by the French sources, seems even more obscure. Anastasia is said to be based on Pope Anastasius I who, in condemning the work of Origen, the Alexandrian scholar and theologian, began a tradition of Christian censorship. It seems more obscure to me because it’s difficult to believe that this kind of rarefied debate would have impacted at all on the popular imagination, unlike virgins and tongues!

Though the Press Law of 1881, guaranteeing free expression, sent the old girl into a partial hibernation, she and her sheers got back to work after the outbreak of the First World War. That is to say that official censorship was once again given her unprepossessing shape by Le Canard enchaîné,- The Chained Duck -, a satirical magazine established in 1915, which attempted to escape the fatal cuts by using word games and other diversions, probably beyond the old lady’s comprehension! Interestingly she seems never to have been unduly concerned by adverse depictions of herself, which survived intact.

L’Ouevre, which also appeared in 1915 as a daily newspaper, was another publication that came under the gaze of Anastasia. Whole swathes of material were disallowed, to which the editor responded by publishing a single white space to the right of the masthead with the word Chut! (Shush!)

The Second World War brought the sheers back, but the censorship was considered so onerous that protests were even raised in the Chamber of Deputies. According to a Time report of March 1940, Leon Blum, leader of the Socialist Party and Prime Minister at the time of the pre-war Popular Front, said that Anastasia’s conduct showed “absolute incompetence” and “ridiculous ignorance.” The French, he continued, were even more starved of hard news than the Germans.

So, this is it, this is the story of the French Anastasia. She is now back in hibernation; she has been for years, perhaps for good. But when it comes to legends, and archetypes, and Anastasias one should never say never. :-)

A load of balls

Is it possible to believe that the publication of a single book, a novel, would begin a major shift in sexual and cultural attitudes; that it would stand as marker on the road to free expression? Well, it did. The book in question is Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H Lawrence, a sexually explicit novel whose publication was only officially allowed in England in November 1960, thirty years after the author’s death, following the failure of a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis opens with his own wryly humorous comment on the significance of this;

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

In retrospect it’s difficult to believe just how backward, how antediluvian attitudes were, particularly among the political and legal establishment, towards sexual and artistic freedom in England prior to the lifting of the Chatterley ban, well out of step with far more progressive attitudes to such matters on Continental Europe. Even the mildest sexual references could provoke a reaction.

In 1928, for example, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a novel which touched ever so gently on lesbian themes, was destroyed on the orders of a magistrate, horrified that a single line (“and that night they were not divided”) meant that the female protagonists had gone to bed together! The prosecution had even trundled in Rudyard Kipling, by then well past his best by date, just in case a literary expert was required, ready to persuade the court of the need “to keep the Empire pure.”

Publishers continued to be prosecuted for breaching uncodified rules on censorship for years after. Even as late as the 1950s books by James Joyce, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Cyril Connolly, amongst others, were only available to those who were able to bring them back from Paris, concealed, of course, from customs officials.

Then came the trial fifty years ago of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which turned out to be a kind of contest between the old and the new. It actually began as a provocation, a test of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, introduced with high-minded intentions, namely to draw a clear line separating literature from pornography. It was the decision of Penguin Books to publish an unexpurgated paperback edition that set the law in motion.

But what a challenge Lady Chatterley was for the morally self-righteous establishment: not only did it use the word fuck a lot, in the midst of a lot of fucking, but a titled lady was being fucked by the family gamekeeper. The horror! The horror! At one point Mervin Griffith-Jones, leading the prosecution, so antique that he would have been out of place in the nineteenth century, actually asked the jury, all male, of course, if they “would allow your wife or even your servants to read this book?” His was a world where wives were property and servants knew their place. Perhaps the worst thing of all from the perspective of Griffith-Jones and the winged-collared brigade is that the Penguin paperback was available for a few shillings (about twenty pence), well within the means of the randiest game keeper with an eye on aristocratic and frustrated wives!

Just as Kipling was ready to testify for the prosecution in 1928, a whole range of impressive literary figures had been contacted, this time, though, on behalf of the defence. The Obscene Publications Act allowed for expert testimony on a book’s literary merits, a provision not lost on the Penguin defence team. They managed to assemble a panel of the great and the greater of contemporary English letters: people like E. M Foster, Iris Murdoch, T. S Elliot, Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley and Aldous Huxley, to mention but a few, people who were prepared to testify directly or to write testimonials on the novel’s behalf.

There was one exception. Evelyn Waugh demurred, describing Lady Chatterley’s Lover as “dull, absurd in places and pretentious.” Of course none of this was relevant under the law. If it was a great many novels would fail the test, and save us all some excruciating hours! I think the prosecution was wrong, I think censorship in literature is wrong, and I’m glad that Penguin Books won the case…but I’m still in full agreement with Waugh: Lady Chatterley’s Lover is “dull, absurd in places and pretentious.”

The thing is I think Lawrence is a grossly overrated writer. I’ve read his main novels, beginning with Sons and Lovers, and I’ve hated them all; hated his overripe metaphysics, his bogus and insincere spirituality, his inflated and unlikable characters and his florid use of language.

There is nothing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that could possibly ‘deprave and corrupt’, the test under the 1959 Act; it’s just an overblown mess, a bad book by a second rate writer. All the naughty words, all the ‘arse’, ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’, ‘shit’ and ‘balls’ will never make up for the fact that Lady Chatterley, like the rest of this unpleasant man’s canon, is, well, a load of balls. :-)