(1969) The Seven Minutes (88 page)

Barrett’s voice continued to emerge from’ the tape machine’s speaker. ‘ “Masturbate.” Perhaps the word makes one uneasy. Certainly it is not an act that the defense is advocating - although Mark Twain, tongue in cheek, advocated it in his privately printed treatise Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism. What the defense is saying is that the worst result of reading an erotic book might be masturbation, an act harmful to no one, whereas the reader of a book dealing with criminal homicide would have no such harmless outlet to satisfy his overstimulated hostilities - only possibly a harmful outlet like rushing out to beat someone up or murder him.

‘Which brings me to another point that the defense has sought to develop through its witnesses. There is a certain paradox that was stated succinctly by that student of censorship Gershon Legman, who put it this way: “Murder is a crime. Describing murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is.” This point may be developed in another direction. The well-known British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer has wondered why censors believe that reading a book about sex will deprave and corrupt and lead a person to sexual violence, but that reading a book about murder, a detective story, a mystery, will neither deprave and corrupt nor lead a person to commit homicide. There are psychological answers, and you have heard them propounded in this courtroom.

‘As this trial has unfolded, the defense has presented evidence to support two statements, one made by a psychiatrist and the other by a newspaper columnist. The psychiatrist Dr Robert Lindner once wrote the following: “I am convinced that were all so-called objectionable books and like material to disappear from the face of the earth tomorrow this would in no way affect the statistics of crime, delinquency, amoral and antisocial behavior, or personal illness and distress. The same frustrating and denying society would still exist, and both children and adults would express themselves mutinously against it. These problems will be solved only when we have the courage to face the fundamental social issues and personal perplexities that cause such behavior.”

‘As to the newspaper columnist Sydney J. Harris, he put it this way: “I don’t happen to believe that obscenity, of any sort, is as harmful as some people seem to think. The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference, injustice, and the use of others as means rather than as ends in themselves. If everything deemed indecent or obscene were wiped out overnight, it would not make for a conspicuously better world, or for a more ‘moral’ citizenry.” ’

Zelkin pressed the stop key on the tape machine and then punched the forward key.

Barrett protested the resumption of the tape. ‘I think we’ve heard about enough, Abe.’

‘Just one more passage, Mike. Where you start with Plato.’ He tried to locate it on the machine. As he did so he asked, ‘Hey, how do you know he’ll bring up that Plato quote in his summation?’

‘I heard him use it once in a speech to the STDL,’ said Barrett. ‘He won’t be able to resist using it again. He’ll want to give classical authority to his argument.’

‘Here, I’ve found it,’ said Zelkin. ‘Quiet, everyone. Attention. Our master’s voice.’

Barrett heard his voice spin off the tape once more, and he shut his eyes if not his ears. With the others, he listened to himself.

“The honorable counsel for the State has told you that the philosopher Plato favored censorship of reading. Indeed, he did. In fact, he wanted to censor Homer’s Odyssey for the young. But what

opposition counsel has not told you is that Plato also wanted to censor music - particularly flute players. Now, fhis would not make me too happy if I lived in Plato’s Republic. Because 1 like the flute. But Plato didn’t. Therefore, 1 would not be able to buy a flute or play one privately or even listen to the sweet sounds of the flute in his Utopia, because a censor had told me that the flute would deprivate and corrupt me. In short, who knows what should be banned for everyone? Indeed, who knows what is obscene for anyone else?

‘The counsel for the State is confident that he knows what is obscene. With this confidence, he feels that you must know not only the activities but the motives of two persons - the pornographer and the bookseller. However, learned counsel has omitted one key person with this duo. He has omitted - the censor himself. And I am suggesting that if knowledge of the pornographer has been relevant to this trial, then knowledge of the psyche of the censor, the one who can tell us what is obscene and what is not, is equally relevant and important in judging The Seven Minutes.

‘One common trait seems to distinguish censors from ordinary people. Members of this breed alone are self-assured, positive, even righteous in their belief that they know what is good and what is bad for the rest of us. A book like The Seven Minutes can harm us, the censors say, can even drive us to commit crimes of violence. But why is it “us” who have to be protected, and never “them?” Why is it that the censor, who is exposed to the same dangerous writing that we are, never becomes corrupted by it, is never infected by it, never turns rapist after reading it ? Why does the censor have this immunity, and no one else? Why will others be harmed, but never the censor himself?

‘And this leads to a correlated question. What of the thousands of respectable people throughout history who have read and collected pornographic books, yet have not been destroyed or driven to violence by these books? What of Richard Monckton Milnes, the first Baron Houghton, a cultured man who collected pornography ? What of Coventry Patmore, the Catholic poet who collected pornography? What about J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry E. Huntington, our American success symbols, who collected pornography for their libraries, and Dr Alfred Kinsey, our sex liberator, who collected it for science? What of the librarians at the British Museum in London, who look after twenty thousand so-called obscene books, and the prelates of the Vatican Library in Rome, who oversee twenty-five thousand volumes of erotica ? Where is the evidence that sex books have debased any of these men?

‘Briefly, let us probe further. The two best-known censors in the English-speaking world were Thomas Bowdler, who died in England in 1825, and Anthony Comstock, who died in the United States in 1915. Each of these men lived seventy-one years, devoting

many of those years to censoring literature, and neither one was incited by pornography to commit rape or murder.

‘Thomas Bowdler, a physician, a clergyman, read the plays of Shakespeare and was appalled. There was Twelfth Night, which abounded in salacious lines such as “By my life, this is my lady’s hand! these be her very C’s, her U’s ‘n her T’s, and thus makes she her great P’s.” There was Much Ado about Nothing, in which Hercules’ “cod-piece seems as massie as his club.” There were plays like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, with their coarse jests and words like “bitch” and “whore.” Bowdler knew what must be done to save the young from corruption by Shakespeare, and he did it. In 1818 Bowdler published his expurgated ten-volume set, which he called The Family Shakespeare, and he explained, “Many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased.” To indignant reviewers who were infuriated by the censor’s prudery and excisions Bowdler replied, “If any word or expression is of such a nature that the first impression it excites is an impression of obscenity, that word ought not to be spoken or written or printed; and, if printed, it ought to be erased.” Thus did one man, a censor, move Shakespeare’s bones. And in the year of his death Bowdler published his own version of Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, also censored, purified, made aseptic for the backward public out there who he believed must be told what it could read.

‘In New York, our own Anthony Comstock - a Civil War veteran, a stalwart of the YMCA, with his muttonchap whiskers and red flannel underwear that peeked out from below the cuffs of his black frock coat - set out with his trusted Bible on a lifelong crusade against all that was “lewd and lascivious” in literature and art. In 1913, as a veteran United States Post Office inspector and long-time head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, he boasted that he had sent enough publishers and writers to jail to fill sixty-one railroad coaches, and that he had destroyed one hundred and sixty tons of obscene literature. He had also, he admitted, destroyed sixteen lives, the lives of persons who had in most cases been hounded to suicide and death by his fanatical Puritanism. Along the way, Comstock got Walt Whitman fired from his job with the Department of the Interior for having written Leaves of Grass. He got Margaret Sanger’s books on birth control banned and sent her husband to jail for selling these obscene publications. He attacked George Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs Warren’s Profession and Paul Chabas’ innocuous nude painting “September Morn.” After Comstock’s death, Heywood Broun wrote his epitaph: “Anthony Comstock may have been entirely correct in his assumption that the division of living creatures into male and female was a vulgar mistake, but a conspiracy of silence about the matter will hardly alter the facts.”

Thomas Bowdler and Anthony Comstock live on in our language. In 1836, Perronet Thompson coined the verb “bowdlerize,” meaning “to expurgate.” In 1905 George Bernard Shaw coined the noun “comstockery” as a synonym for meddling, bluenosed censorship. Today the shades of Bowdler and Comstock live on in our lives, yours and mine, whenever an individual, or a group, insists he or it knows what we should read or think about sex. We are here in this courtroom because we have been told that we should not read The Seven Minutes, whether we want to read it or not. We have been told, by a consensus of a few minds, that this book is obscene, dangerous, and beyond redemption. My colleague and I are here to say that what is obscene in the eye of one beholder may be moral and valuable in the eye of another beholder.’

Barrett had had enough of listening to himself on the tape recorder. ‘For Chrissake, Abe, shut the damn thing off!’

Startled, Zelkin hit the stop key, and the machine was stilled.

‘I’m sorry, Abe,’ said Barrett, ‘but hearing myself say just then that what is obscene in the eye of one beholder may be moral and valuable in the eye of another - it made me realize our predicament all over again. I can read the jurors’ minds, as they ask themselves -The Seven Minutes moral and valuable to whom? To that dead girl, Sheri Moore - presuming they’ve heard what happened to her - or to that poor boy, Jerry Griffith ? No good, Abe.’

‘It’s a powerful closing argument, Mike,’ said Zelkin seriously.

‘Not enough,’ said Barrett.

Zelkin had lapsed into silence with the others, and Barrett, to be alone, had turned his eyes inward, rummaging through what lay behind him in the past days of the trial, and then trying to envision the death in the afternoon that lay immediately ahead.

The defense had presented and examined its final witness this morning, and the prosecution would complete its crossexamination of that witness shortly after lunch. With that, the string and time had run out. They had come to the end, Barrett knew, without denting Duncan’s case. The People’s evidence remained as strong and unbreakable as it had been in the first week of the trial: Jadway was a dissolute and commercially minded pornographer who had committed suicide in his remorse for having written The Seven Minutes, and the book had incited violence (and was capable of continuing to corrupt readers), as proved by Jerry Griffith’s crime, which had since led to the death of an innocent victim.

All of this morning, Barrett had seen it in the faces of the twelve jurors. Most of them had avoided his eyes, because of what they already knew they must do to him and to the defendant. The few remaining jurors, whom he caught observing him surreptitiously from time to time, also seemed to regard him as Satan’s counsel for advocating and promoting what was evil. - At this point, Barrett guessed, the twelve jurors were about as

objective and unbiased as would be the mourners tomorrow at Sheri Moore’s graveside.

Sitting there, Barrett closed his smarting eyes and tried to picture those jurors’ reactions, their faces, if they knew as much of the truth as he now knew but could not prove. How astounded they would be, how shocked, how suddenly they would see him and Jadway and The Seven Minutes in a different light.

His mind went to Cassie McGraw, wondering whether she would ever have another good day, and if she did, what she would make of this repudiation of her healthy love and her past and the interred book that might have been her monument and a beacon for all inhibited and fearful women.

His mind jumped to Washington, and from there to some nebulous and unknown place where the aging J J Jadway dwelt with his safe secret. Barrett speculated on Jadway’s mingled misgivings and relief, and then he wondered how much Jadway would enjoy his seat on the highest bench of the land.

Yet the jurors did not know, and would not know, that they had not heard the main actors in the case or witnessed the real performance of truth. Soon they would listen to Duncan’s closing arguments, then to his own, and then they would hear Judge Upshaw’s instructions. They would be led upstairs to their room by the bailiff to pretend to deliberate upon a verdict that was already predetermined. After a respectable lapse of time (this to underline their integrity), they would reappear to render their final judgment. And they would go home again, to their familiar kitchens and dining rooms and bedrooms, positive that they had served justice and democracy and the Constitution and had upheld the cause of truth and freedom.

Barrett’s mind sought and found a passage from Eggleston that he had read when he had been in law school: ‘I do not think I am exaggerating when I say that the evidence contains only kaleidoscopic fragments of the facts. It is as if a checker of light and dark patches were held over all reality. All that gets down in the record is that seen through the light patches.’

Those dutiful and complacent dismissed jurors would never know, as Barrett knew, what reality lay behind the dark patches.