(1969) The Seven Minutes (28 page)

He realized that she had suddenly glanced over her shoulder and caught him staring, and now she quickly looked away and straight ahead.

Embarrassed, he guiltily diverted his gaze to Faye, who had just twisted around to beckon him. ‘Mike, I thought you were in a hurry?’

Striding forward, he caught up with Faye and took her arm, and together they entered the Grand Ballroom behind Maggie Russell. The vast hall had been darkened, he was pleased to see, and it was filled with an audience that probably added up to one thousand persons. There were a number of vacant folding chairs at the rear, and as he and Faye trailed after Maggie Russell he wondered whether they would sit together. But, reaching a makeshift aisle, Maggie found one empty chair at the end of a filled row. Disappointed, Barrett led Faye across the aisle to where a number of unoccupied chairs were clustered, and firmly he directed her to the second seat in from the aisle, while he took the outside place for himself.

Faye leaned toward him, cupping her mouth to his ear. ‘I apologize,’ she whispered. T shouldn’t have introduced you to her, but I wasn’t thinking. It didn’t embarrass you, did it?’

‘Why should it embarrass me?’ he said.

‘She is Frank Griffith’s niece and very close to the boy.’

‘So much the better,’ he whispered. ‘It might beuseful to know someone close to the boy.’

Faye removed her gloves. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky she didn’t spit in your eye.’

With that, Faye settled back and concentrated on the stage, and for the first time Barrett became aware that all eyes were fixed on the speaker.

The speaker was the evening’s main attraction, District Attorney Elmo Duncan, straight and imposing on the platform as his hands held the sides of the lectern and he bent toward the microphone to emphasize a point. Barrett sat fully upright in his chair and listened.

‘So let us make no mistake about the word “pornography” itself,’ Elmo Duncan was saying. ‘Let us not forget the derivation of the word. It came from the Greek word pornographos, which meant “the writing of harlots.” It meant any writing or description of the sexual lives of harlots or prostitutes, a special kind of writing that was meant to be aphrodisiac in content. Or, as a modern-day commentator put it, the original pornography was “the writing of and about whores with the intention of arousing a man’s lust so that he would go to a whore.” Centuries have passed, but the word “pornography” has not changed its meaning. This I affirm although our higher courts have asked those of us devoted to enforcing the law to believe that all pornographic books are not equally criminal. We have been told that a pornographic book that

possesses some nonerotic narrative, some passages with so-called social value, must be treated with more tolerance and favor than another book in which the erotic content is unrelieved by any moral digressions. From my personal point of view, this isiegal nonsense, this is nit-picking, and this is precisely what has slowed down enforcement of obscenity laws. The diluting of the definition of pornography is what has had law enforcers, to quote Justice Black, hopelessly struggling in a quagmire.

‘But, my friends and neighbors, I assure you that I am trapped in no quagmire. To me, a filthy book, even though it pretends to express a social idea or a message, is no less disgusting than a book of total hard-core obscenity. In fact, many jurists contend that literary quality in a written work makes an obscene book all the more destructive. To me, dirt is dirt, no matter how you try to camouflage it. Yes, the Greeks had a word for it, the right word for it, the word that meant writings that excited lascivious thoughts and lustful actions. As a special deputy district attorney and expert in the field of obscenity once stated it, “The sole purpose of pornographic books is to stimulate erotic response. Pornography encourages people to luxuriate in morbid, sexual-sadist fantasies…’ And we possess evidence, real evidence, that pornographic books stimulate more than fantasies. We know now that they stimulate crimes of violence.

“The men who are closest to the problem know the truth. Let me quote to you from Dr Fredric Wertham, formerly senior psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in New York and psychiatric consultant to a Senate subcommittee for the study of organized crime. According to Dr Wertham, “Children’s attitudes and consequent actions are definitely affected by the reading of literature suggestive of a combination of sex and violence. I am convinced that this combination is creating in the minds of children the ego ideal of the brute who by physical strength takes the law into his own hands, makes his own rules, and solves all his problems by force.” To support this statement, we have the statistics of our Federal Bureau of Investigation covering a recent ten-year period in our history, a period of the greatest production of pornographic books, a period during which forcible rape increased thirty-seven per cent in the United States, and the age bracket of rapists that increased the most was that of late-teen-agers.

‘Yet there is more to fear. From the time of that great English jurist of the eighteenth century, Sir William Blackstone, to the present day, we have been on notice that our society may suffer a death of the soul if pornographers are given unlimited license. Blackstone told us that to punish dangerous or offensive writings “is necessary for the preservation of peace and good order, of government and religion, the only solid foundations of civil liberty.” Now, after two hundred years, we continue to be reminded of our duty. The anthropologist Margaret Mead has told

us that every human society on earth exercises some kind of explicit censorship over behavior, especially over sexual behavior. From England, Sir Patrick Devlin has admonished us that we dare not tolerate complete openness about sexual freedom. “No society,” he said, “can do without intolerance, indignation, and disgust; they are the forces behind the moral law.” Our own Judge Thurman Arnold has concurred. He has gone so far as to state, “The fact that laws against obscenity do not have a rational or scientific basis, but rather symbolize a moral taboo, does not make them any the less necessary. They are important because men feel that without them the state would be lacking in moral standards.” In short, whether there is a scientific basis for our obscenity laws or not - and I happen to believe there is such a basis - the laws must be observed and enforced if our society is to survive the eroding effects of immorality.

‘My friends, let us not be afraid of being branded censors, and let us not be afraid of justified censorship. The truth is that censorship, which is as old as history itself, has long been known to be a necessity for the common good and civilized man’s survival. Far back before Christ’s birth, the philosopher Plato asked the question, “Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?” And to this Plato gave civilization’s answer, “Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.”

‘My friends, the time has come when each and every one of us must face the fact that pornography, no matter what disguise it wears, still remains outright obscenity and a threat to our families, to our future, and to the health of this great nation. We must say to ourselves, to each other, to the entire country, that the time has come to resist and stop the black plague of pornography. The time has come, the time is now, and, as a fellow citizen as well as your district attorney, I pledge every energy and resource at my command to lead this crusade!’

Elmo Duncan had paused, awaiting the expected response, and it came in a thunderclap of applause. As the applause continued, Barrett looked at Faye beside him. Her eyes were bright, fixed upon the figure on the stage, and she was clapping her hands. Troubled, Barrett turned his head and looked across the aisle. Maggie Russell, her face pensive and pale, sat unmoving. Her hands lay still in her lap. Curious, Barrett thought, but then the speaker’s deep voice intruded, and Barrett returned his attention to the stage.

‘Since the year 1821,’ Duncan was saying, ‘when the United States had its first obscenity trial, a year when one Peter Holmes

was found guilty of publishing Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure -none other than Fanny Hill - various publishers, in recent years a legion of them, have taken advantage of our liberties and freedoms, and made a mockery of our Constitution and instruments of justice. As a result, today the publishing of smut has become a two-billion-dollar-a-year business.

‘I blame these publishers for supporting, sometimes encouraging, the production of filth, and I blame them for promoting its sale throughout the land in the name of literature when their only fidelity is to their profit ledgers. I blame the booksellers equally, for lacking the moral fiber to reject this trash, for thinking of private gain rather than public welfare. And I blame the writers of this filth, too. Let no one escape, least of all the creators, those debasers of freedom of expression who hide behind the skirt of the very Muse whom they would soil and defile.’

On the platform, Elmo Duncan had paused, shaking his head. “Writers - writers,’ he said sadly, ‘who betray not only themselves but one another for Mammon, their true god. Let me quote you the words of a celebrated writer. “But even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously,” he wrote. “Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable.” Unpardonable indeed. And who spoke those glorious words ? Let me tell you. D. H. Lawrence, the author of that paean to purity, Lady Chatterley’s Lover!’

There was laughter and applause, and Elmo Duncan acknowledged it with a smile and held up his hand.

‘I’m not through,’ he said. ‘Listen to this. When James Joyce published Ulysses in Paris, who was among the first to call it obscene and demand that it be suppressed ? You guessed it. D. H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterlefs Lover and would-be protector of public morals - protecting them from other people’s pornography, that is!’

A raucous burst of laughter greeted the District Attorney’s sally.

Duncan was serious again. ‘I have mentioned Joyce’s Ulysses, which brings to mind something I’ve long wanted to say. For years we have had dinned in our ears the bravery of Judge John M. Woolsey for admitting that pornographic work into our land, and for years we have had dinned in our ears the courage of Circuit Judges Augustus and Learned Hand, who sustained Woolsey’s lower-court verdict in their appeal court against one dissenting judge. But, friends, and forgive me for this, no Woolseys have been pulled over my eyes, no Hands have ever covered my ears, to prevent my recognizing and listening to the one person who deserved to be heard before all others - for the real bravery and courage in the Ulysses case was that of the one arbiter who dissented with the Hands’ verdict in that appeal case. I refer to the long-forgotten Circuit Judge Martin Manton, and to his dissent which each of us should carry writ on our banners in this crusade against the cor-rupters of freedom. “Congress passed this statute against obscenity for the great mass of our people,” wrote Judge Manton, adding that it is only the unusual person who thinks he can protect himself. Then Judge Manton went on, “The people do not exist for the sake of literature, to give the author fame, the publisher wealth, and the book a market. On the contrary, literature exists for the sake of the people, to refresh the weary, to console the sad, to hearten the dull and downcast, to increase man’s interest in the world, his joy of living, and his sympathy in all sorts and conditions of men. Art for art’s sake is heartless and soon grows artless; art for the public market is not art at all, but commerce; art for the people’s service is a noble, vital and permanent element of human life … Masterpieces have never been produced by men given to obscenity or lustful thoughts - men who have no Master … Good work in literature has its permanent mark; it is like all good work, noble and lasting. It requires a human aim - to cheer, console, purify, or ennoble the life of people. With this aim, literature has never sent an arrow close to the mark. It is by good work only that men of letters can justify their right to a place in the world.” These are the words I pray the STDL will continue to support, and the community will begin to heed -‘

These words by Circuit Judge Manton. Hearing them, Barrett’s gray cells had begun groping, and at last they snared Judge Manton in memory and impaled him. The moral Judge Manton, short years after airing his noble words, had been arrested for his part in a conspiracy to block justice and had wound up in a federal prison for nineteen months. Barrett wondered whether he should offer this postscript to the enthralled Faye. He decided against it. She was too engrossed in the District Attorney’s forensics. Barrett settled back to listen further.

‘ - yes, give heed to these sentiments by Judge Manton,’ the District Attorney was saying, ‘for had they been the standard by which a book publisher and seller had made their judgment in recent weeks, I assure you that our city would have known less violence and our neighbors would have suffered less grief.’

Elmo Duncan halted, and the swelling of applause was instantaneous in response to his first oblique reference to The Seven Minutes and the Jerry Griffith rape case.

Once more Barrett could see that Faye was fervently clapping her hands, and once more he turned to observe Maggie Russell. As before, and like himself, she had not joined in the applause. Instead, picking up the empty glass and her purse, she abruptly rose, met his eyes, then started up the aisle and toward the exit.

Her sudden departure bewildered Barrett. Obviously she had come to this rally because her sympathies were for the STDL and Elmo Duncan, who were trying to punish the book that had, in their view, driven Jerry Griffith to crime. And Jerry was Maggie Russell’s close relative. Then why had she, abruptly and with