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Authors: Hubert Selby Jr.

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On 3rd April 1967 the publishers returned to the Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court where they pleaded ‘Not Guilty’ and were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey. The case began on 13th November and lasted nine days. Senior counsel for the defence was Mr Patrick Neill QC, and he was assisted by Lord Lloyd of Hampstead and Mr Cyril Salmon. The prosecution counsel were Mr John Mathew QC assisted by Mr Corkery. Mr Montgomerie, a partner in the firm of Goodman, Derrick and Co., prepared the case for the defence.

The Old Bailey trial was conducted in courteous terms; everybody, with the exception of one of the witnesses for the prosecution, seemed concerned to keep the temperature low. There was some initial argument between opposing counsel about the order in which the witnesses should appear, and the admissibility of evidence as to obscenity. Judge Rogers ruled that the defence must produce their witnesses first, and that evidence of the book’s obscenity was inadmissible, it being a matter for the jury alone to decide. He also ruled that there should be no women on the jury, and twelve male jurors were sworn in. Mr Mathew explained the law to them: a book was obscene if it had a tendency to deprave and corrupt those into whose hands it was likely to fall. He defined ‘to deprave’ as ‘to make people do wrong acts’, and he explained that under Section 4 of the Act, even if the book was found to be obscene, it must nevertheless be allowed if publication could be proved to be ‘in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or other objects of general concern’. Mr Mathew’s opening was very fair, leaving it for the jury to decide for themselves after hearing the evidence, although it was perhaps unfortunate that he several times referred to the case as not being a very ‘serious’ one, which might have given some of the jurors the impression that they were wasting their time. Mr Neill,
on the other hand, stressed the seriousness of the case, and went on to explain that the jury might find the book shocking, and even perhaps disgusting, but that that was a very different matter from finding it ‘liable to deprave and corrupt’. The jury was sent out at 2.15 on the first afternoon to read the book. At 4.15 they were asked by the judge how long they would need to finish it, and to the consternation of the defence some members of the jury claimed to have already done so. One man said, ‘You’d need an interpreter to read this’ and others said they would need another hour or so to finish it.

The following morning Mr Neill asked for the jury to be dismissed on the grounds that they were obviously not reading the book properly. This was refused, but it was emphasized to the jury that they must read the book as a whole, and except for one man who insisted he had read it and was excused for the day they spent the Tuesday reading. One man took it home with him to finish that night.

The first defence witness, Professor Frank Kermode, Lord North-cliffe Professor of English Literature at the University of London, spent the greater part of the next day in the witness box, expounding the book chapter by chapter. He was followed by Eric Mottram and A. Alvarez, who concentrated on the literary merits of the book, placing it in the tradition of American naturalistic literature which, as Professor Kermode had already pointed out, had developed from writers like Zola and Dickens. Many other literary experts were called, as well as experts to support the defence’s contention that, in addition to its literary merits, the book’s sociological and ethical merits also gave grounds for a verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ under Section 4 of the Act.

The thirty witnesses for the defence were, in order of appearance: Professor Frank Kermode (professor of English literature), Eric Mottram (lecturer in American literature), A. Alvarez (poet and critic), Professor Barbara Hardy (professor of English literature), John Calder, Professor Dan Miller (professor of sociology), Dr Michael Schofield (sociologist), Professor Ronald Atkinson (professor of philosophy), Quentin Crewe (journalist and critic), Marion Boyars, Jocelyn Baines (publisher), Jeffrey Simmonds (publisher), Kenneth Allsop (writer and television commentator), Anthony Storey (psychologist and writer), Martin Goff (writer and bookseller), Edward Lucie-Smith (poet and
critic), Eric Blau (writer), Philip French (critic), Lyman Andrews (lecturer in American literature and poet), Professor Bernard Williams (professor of philosophy), Olwen Wymark (playwright), Dr David Downes (sociologist), Judith Piepé (social worker), Alan Burns (writer), John Arden (playwright), Dr David Galloway (lecturer in American literature), Professor Gorham Davis (professor of English literature), Stuart Hood (writer, TV producer, former comptroller of BBC TV), Robert Baldick (lecturer in French literature) and the Rev. Kenneth Leach (curate of St Anne’s, Soho).

The first prosecution witness was Professor Catlin, an elderly sociologist, who was admitted exceptionally between two defence witnesses as he had to return to America. Catlin insisted on talking through Mr Neill, proclaiming among other things that ‘if this book is not obscene then no book is obscene’. While admitting that what happened in the book happened in life, he announced that he did not object to it in life but he did object to it in literature. The other prosecution witnesses were David Holloway (critic), Sir Basil Blackwell (bookseller and publisher), H. Montgomery Hyde (writer), Dr Dennis Leigh (psychiatrist) and the Rev. David Sheppard (priest and social worker). Sir Basil claimed that the book had depraved him, but it transpired that he had only read it because he had been asked to appear as a witness for the prosecution. The most telling of the prosecution witnesses was the last, the Rev. David Sheppard, who emerged as a naïve and well-meaning man, sympathetic to the jury. He said he felt the book pandered to all that was worst in him, and had left him ‘not unscathed’. He was not cross-examined as to what he meant by this, but the assumption is that he found the book erotically stimulating.

Mr Mathew stressed in his cross-examinations and in his final speech the great difference between the way an intellectual would read this book and the way it would be read by what he called ‘the normal average reader’. He suggested to the jury, for example, that an unhappily married man reading ‘Strike’ might be tempted to conclude that his way to happiness lay in homosexuality. His closing speech was full of insinuating time-bombs designed to go off later in the jury room. Mr Neill stressed again that to shock was not to deprave, and that the jury must not think of the book’s possible effect on some extremely disturbed
or abnormal person but on the average reader. The defence, he repeated, claimed that the book was not obscene, but even if the jury found it so, that obscenity was over-weighed by the book’s merits, to which thirty highly qualified witnesses had testified. The judge reviewed the evidence briefly and fairly and gave the impression that he was sympathetic to the defence. However, there were certain vital omissions in his summing-up which were later to change the whole case.

The jury was out for five and a half hours in all. At one point, when they had already been deliberating for some considerable time, they returned to ask the judge whether they had to decide the question of obscenity before going on to consider the book’s merits. The judge’s answer was ‘an emphatic yes’. At 4.15 on 23rd November they returned a verdict of ‘Guilty’.

Calder & Boyars were fined £100 and ordered to pay £500 prosecution costs. Their own legal bill for the trial was £8,600, with a further expenditure of about £2,000 on defending the private prosecution brought by Sir Cyril Black the year before. And this does not include the myriad other costs incurred in connection with the two cases, such as witnesses’ fares and accommodation, transcripts, and special expenses, not to mention the time put in by the publishers and their staff and the very serious damage done to their business, which was already trying to cope with the difficulties of steering a small firm through the credit squeeze and the commercial disadvantages of publishing an intellectual list in a country traditionally middle-brow in its reading tastes. Without resources of their own they nevertheless decided to appeal to the public and to go on. At the time of the verdict they had already raised nearly £3,000 from other publishers, sympathizers in the Arts, and from the general public. They now helped to found
The Defence of Literature and the Arts Society
, which became active in fighting the case, and which now intends to continue to defend literature and the other Arts – probably including the Theatre too, now that the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship is removed – from repressive litigation. After lengthy and serious deliberation by the publishers and their legal advisers, the case went on to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

The hearing of the appeal began on 22nd July 1968 before Lord Justice Salmon, Mr Justice Geoffrey Lane and Mr Justice Fisher. This
time Mr John Mortimer QC, himself an eminent playwright, led for the defence, assisted by Mr Salmon. The appeal was made on eleven points, two of which the judges found to be sufficient to overturn the verdict. The first was that the judge had not put to the jury in his summing-up the defence case against the alleged obscenity of the book, and the second was that the judge had not given the jury any guidance as to how they were to balance the defence case under Section 4, which deals with the book’s merits, against the obscenity, if proved. The meaning of the word ‘obscenity’ in law is very different from its meaning in everyday usage, and it is perhaps the definition that Mr Mortimer gave in the Appeal Court that will now become standard: that ‘to deprave and corrupt’ means to make a person behave worse than he or she otherwise would behave, or to blur a person’s sense of discrimination between right and wrong.

The success of this Appeal was an event of the utmost importance, not simply for one publisher, one author and one book, but for the future interpretation of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, the intentions of which had manifestly been frustrated by the verdict given at the Old Bailey. The very carefully worded judgement delivered by Lord Justice Salmon clarifies many issues and will, it is hoped, prevent the prosecution of books of recognized value and make it easier for publishers to defend works of merit. Whether or not the Act needs further reform, or whether we should do away with legal censorship altogether, are matters which must and will continue to be debated.

The publishers wish to express their deep gratitude to all those who have supported them, morally and financially, through these last two difficult years; to the witnesses who appeared for them and to those who were prepared to appear, to their solicitors and barristers, whose brilliant preparation of the case was finally rewarded by the success of the Appeal, and to those members of the public who donated money towards the costs and who it is hoped will continue to support
The Defence of Literature and the Arts Society
so that this fight may not have been won in vain.

The Publishers
September 1968

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published 1966
Published in Penguin Classics 2011

Copyright © the Estate of Hubert Selby Jr., 1957, 1960, 1961, 1964, 1968

Introduction copyright © Irvine Welsh, 2011

Cover photograph © Michael Ackerman/Agence Vu.

All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

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ISBN: 978-0-141-96621-2

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