Five Dials

Number 6 The Obscenity Issue

Paul Maliszewski 4 Obama and Child ali smith 9 on Muriel Spark john sutherland 12 Freedom of Speech ( Just Watch What You Say) john mortimer, jello Biafra, art spiegelman 13 Obscenity: A Look Back ann mallalieu & jerry heller Arundhati Roy 27 Obscenity Now Bobby Gillespie 35 Lux Interior, R.I.P.

Plus four new Danish cartoons ...and indeed more CONTRIBUTORS

Becky Barnicoat’s illustrations can be found at everyoneisherealready.blogspot.com Marilyn Chin’s poetry has won numerous awards, including four Pushcart Prizes. Her novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, will be published in March, 2010. Alain de Botton is the author, most recently, of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Bobby Gillespie is the lead singer of the band Primal Scream. His remembrance of Lux Interior is reproduced by permission of our friends at Caught By The River, the world’s only rock ’n’ roll ’n’ fishing website. Lynsey Hanley is the author of Estates: an Intimate History, and has written a new introduction to the forthcoming Penguin Modern Classics edition of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. Paul Maliszewski’s first collection of essays,Fakers, was published by the New Press in 2009. Prayer and Parable, a collection of his stories, is forthcoming from Fence Books. stephen marshall is a freelance illustrator in Manchester with a website at stephenmarshall.blogspot.com Matthew McKinnon is a freelance arts journalist and editor. Patrick Neate is the author of seven books. Jerusalem, a novel, will be published in July, 2009. Sophia Augusta Pankenier co-founded the artist collective PLATS in 2005. Their website is seeplats.com Emily Robertson is a graduate from the Glasgow School of Art and a co-founder of PLATS. Arundhati Roy is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she was awarded the Booker Prize in 1997. Her new book, Listening to Grasshoppers, is published this July. Ali Smith is the author, most recently, of The First Person and Other Stories. Her essay in this issue first appeared as an introduction to the beautiful Virago Modern Classics reissue of A Far Cry From Kensington. John Sutherland is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London. Steve Toltz was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 for his novel A Fraction of the Whole. His contribution to this issue is his first published piece since then. Jakob von Baeyer is a freelance writer and editor based in London. Stuart White’s illustration work can be found at stuartwhite.eu Colin Whyte is the owner of The Redcard Writing Group in Portland, Oregon. He has contributed to ESPN.com, Teensizzle.com, The Institute of Practical Philosophy, and Future Snowboarding, where he was Editor-in-Chief.

Thanks: Simon Prosser, Juliette Mitchell, Anna Kelly, Debbie Hatfield, Ellie Smith, Nick Lowndes, Oliver Hutton, Jamie Searle, Sarah Batten, emma brown, tony lacey, john elek.

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Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations by becky barnicoat A Letter From The Editor smiled, asked to hear it again, nodded, and said, ‘That sounds about right’ then put another quarter of Polo mint in his mouth. On John Mortimer and Obscenity Over the course of assembling this issue we’ve heard stories of scenes that have no place in today’s world, including the sight of the filmDeep Throat broadcast on every nstead of a glass of late-morning Somehow it would wriggle free. possible wall of the Old Bailey while Ichampagne there was a single Polo mint I travelled to John’s home near Henley- young lawyers watched and jotted notes. broken into quarters within reach of his on-Thames early in the morning. I was At the Five Dials offices we’ve taken partic- fingers. Instead of a stream of conversation given a walk through the garden and ular pleasure in the famous line uttered by there were pauses when John Mortimer even had time to rub the snouts of John’s Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a prosecutor at the sat in his wheelchair, smiling a little, while pigs – all descendents from his original trio, Lady Chatterley trial, who asked the jury: the fax machine on the other side of his Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner – before I was ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your office birthed another spam advertisement ushered in to talk to him about the subject wife or your servants to read?’ I’m sure that curled up into the air before flutter- of this issue of Five Dials. He didn’t hear each Five Dials reader can recall an instance ing to the floor. Instead of the immense me the first time I announced the word, so of clunky censorship. I remember the lenses of his old glasses he wore small, I repeated ‘obscenity’ in a louder voice and disingenuous voice that leapt into actors’ dapper frames. But on the day last autumn John then smiled and nodded and said: ‘Ah mouths when the swear words of the day I visited Mortimer’s house there were also yes, obscenity.’ If anyone in this country needed to be smothered on network tele- reassuring signs of continuity. The latest, could recognize the subject when it entered vision. (Crook 1: ‘Get the frick out of here, and what would turn out to be his final, a room it was John Mortimer. motherjumper.’ Crook 2: ‘Fudge you.’ Crook attempt at a Rumpole novel was spread To the very end, as is evident in the 3: ‘You’d better tell your freaking goons to before him in a black binder, printed in a interview that starts our review of various flip off.’) Even today, as John Sutherland font so large only a single paragraph fitted censorship struggles, Mortimer stressed points out in his essay, the words that are on each page – a sign he would surely keep that if life is a writer’s subject then no now permissible on BBC1 can be very dif- writing even if the pages could only hold area should be forbidden, nothing should ferent from what may be uttered in a BBC single letters, for there was no reason a be stifled under an obscenity act or cen- green room. petty nuisance like near-blindness should sorship law. He was aware of the power What Mortimer understood immediate- stop a decent story. ‘There is,’ Mortimer of the material at the hands of writers. ly was the silliness of censorship. The jury reminded me, ‘still a lot to fight against. I ‘Words are seen as unexploded mines, lying was his if he could get them laughing at tend to use Rumpole for those fights,’ he on deserted beaches,’ he wrote in a fore- the prosecution, so the obscenity trials of said, as if introducing his favourite knife. word to Books in the Dock by C.H. Rolph, the 1960s and 1970s became trials of demar- Throughout the morning the fax ‘which may be gingerly approached in cation, laying the line between epochs. As machine intermittently bucked to life. the course of morning walks, cautiously Mortimer argued, if you weren’t moving When I asked him what he was thinking examined, perhaps prodded with a stick; forward you were on the side of repres- about these days, Mortimer didn’t wait for but ever likely to blow up in the faces of sion. Each precedent looks very silly now me to repeat the question. In a more force- passers-by, destroying private property and yet examples continue one after the ful tone than the one he’d used to describe and changing the face of the landscape for next, including the reaction of Al Gore’s his vegetable garden he said, ‘English law’, generations to come.’ These odd creatures wife, Tipper, to a lyric on her daughter’s and listed a few initiatives he wanted to called writers, who sit alone scratching Prince CD which led her to assemble the fight against, including the threat of forty- black marks on white paper, had, accord- Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) in two-day detention, which was still very ing to him, no idea how much power the 1985, an American organization that stirred much alive at the time. A few days ago, resulting words could hold. The struggle up almost as much fuss over the lyrics to when I listened to the recording of his goes on. As Mortimer points out in the Sheena Easton’s ‘Sugarwalls’ as Gore’s hus- voice again, the phrase sounded out of the same introduction, ‘liberals who defend band was able to garner years later for glo- headphones with a dose of octogenarian pornography would still like to ban books bal warming. It seems laughable now, but bounce. John died on 16 January 2009, but with fascist or racist arguments.’ Those as punk rocker Jello Biafra recounts, the the recorded words capture his fight. I like Americans who smile at the archaic strug- concerned groups may have stopped notic- the way John says ‘English law’; it wasn’t gles of the British back in the 1960s might ing the devil in every piece of cover art but the first time he’d pondered its worth. ‘I’m have been the ones who were made nerv- they are still ready to legislate. Some who not as fit as I could be,’ Mortimer pointed ous by the new ways a quartet of young laugh at Gore’s crusade against obscenity out with a smile on that day. His own black hip hop musicians from California might find themselves rethinking censor- systems were frail but there was still some- found to express their fears of police bru- ship laws as they apply to the images that thing solid woven into the fabric of his tality in the late eighties. ‘We all say that flash across darker reaches of the Web. life, something that might carry on long we are never frightened of words,’ wrote What were we so scared of then and past him, though the Labour Party, he said, Mortimer, ‘provided we agree with them.’ what are we frightened of now? Was it was trying to gut his beloved English law. When I read that phrase back to him he necessary to stand up for the rights of

3 every petty pornographer, or have these social networking site sat next to Samuel ‘ “Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, fights led to a moral laxness that is putting Beckett in his profile picture). ‘The one Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.” It sounds like our children in danger and leading millions who fights the battle is not the one to a snack, doesn’t it?’ Well, it does now, so of people towards addiction? And, perhaps ask about what the victory achieved,’ he which word or phrase or image has taken most importantly, is obscenity the last and wrote in an email to me in late March. ‘It its place to be loaded with the fears and best way to sell hundreds of thousands of is for those who enjoy the aftermath and cultural baggage of the day? It’s a question books? occupy the newly won territory who John Mortimer would have wanted us to Our survey is by no means definitive should tell us how the victory has influ- keep asking. but now was the time to ask some of the enced their lives.’ And so we’ve turned I did end up drinking a glass of cham- key figures of the past half-century just to the present, and asked if there are pagne before I left Mortimer’s study. It what their fights achieved. We’ve worked words or phrases that are obscene now was a hard offer to turn down. ‘I have a up through the decades, from John Mor- and whether it’s worth getting worked long afternoon ahead of me,’ he said, and timer, John Calder and Ann Mallalieu’s up over every ‘motherjumper’ when, as although there were hints he was in pain experiences in the sixties; cartoonist Art Arundhati Roy demonstrates in her con- he masked it with more amiable talk about Spiegelman on the images of the seven- tribution, there may be more pressing his next book – always a next book – and a ties; Jello Biafra on his battles with the obscenities in the world. We’ve also gone few more stories he could dredge up about PMRC, and Jerry Heller, the manager ahead and printed more Danish cartoons old judges, old campaigners like Mary of N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude), on – four more, to be exact, which can be Whitehouse and others who had formed the phrases Americans feared in the late found at the back of the magazine. the choir of the shocked and outraged. eighties and early nineties. A notable The issue, as you might imagine, con- ‘Did they think the world would crum- absence is the former owner of Grove tains plenty of strong language. But if any ble?’ I asked. Press, Barney Rosset, who published words catch your eye, please ask yourself ‘Yes.’ Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer what makes them strong and how long ‘Has it?’ and The Story of O in the United States. these particular black marks on a page ‘No, it hasn’t,’ John replied. ‘So I think Rosset is still active, keeping busy writ- will maintain their power. ‘It sounds like we do live in a more tolerant time.’ He ing his memoirs and, with the help of a nickname,’ George Carlin once said of tapped his finger on the work that lay in his wife Astrid, updating his Facebook the forbidden term ‘tits’, one of his ‘Seven front of him. ‘Whether it produces better page. (He’s probably the only person on a Words You Can’t Say On Television’. writing, I don’t know.’ ◊

Currentish Events three in the morning to claim a spot. Because gloom begets gloom (at least for me, multiplying like evil-looking rab- Obama and Child bits), I nearly convinced myself that the whole day – the praying and the pretend- Paul Maliszewski introduces his baby to the President playing of Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman, the oath-taking and the orating – was less y the time freshly inaugurated US I thought a car could manage without a national celebration than a ceremony BPresident Barack Obama was secured being considered parked. This is a machine, designed to seal the new president inside inside the presidential limousine and inch- a distinctly American machine, whose the White House, which, from my vantage, ing down Constitution Avenue, I was at doors, I noticed, are so heavy with armour seemed like one of the world’s most impres- home, sitting on the sofa, watching the and bulletproof glass that even a fit man sive mausoleums. I was, as I say, in a bit of proceedings on television. Outside, the must use both hands and put his weight a mood. The day had not turned out as we streets were full of sirens, non-stop and into closing them. Those doors impressed expected. overlapping sirens, and the air was thick me. I rewound the coverage, heading back It was, in retrospect, not a good idea to with helicopters. I was, I think it’s safe to some seconds into recent history, so Had- try to bring Elliot, our baby, almost nine say, in a less than generous frame of mind. ley could catch just how thick they were. months old, to the inauguration. And it was that disposition, I’m sure, which Police officers, hailing from probably We had planned elaborately though. We led me to look at the Secret Service agents every state and dressed in the rich variety discussed what we would do and what who were walking alongside the limo, two of uniform khaki, blue and black, lined might happen. We talked about what at the front and two behind, and think, the route, standing shoulder to shoulder could go wrong and what we would do ‘Those guys look like ushers carrying a and facing two lines of metal barricades, then. We looked up maps online and stud- casket.’ I said to my wife, ‘Is it just me, or chest-high at least. Behind the barricades, ied street closings and determined, as best does it feel like we’re watching a funeral?’ on the other side, were the crowds, the we could, where we should walk. But the ‘It’s weird,’ Hadley said. ‘It’s definitely milling people. Some friends of ours had information was changing, always in flux, weird.’ said they were going to try to get to the and one bit of information could conflict The limo was moving more slowly than parade route. One left his apartment at with another. Maps were altered overnight.

4 We bought the urchin, aka Urch or Munch bathroom, I went. I mean, why ever delay? may make speeches but who can’t vote on (as in -kin), little fur-lined boots. They And yet I never, in all those years, thought a thing, not even to rename a post office were his first pair of shoes. We purchased of myself as intrinsically selfish. This is or declare Johnny Cash a great American. air-activated hand- and foot-warmers not like the selfishness of the uncharitable When we moved to D.C. a friend told me from the local hardware store, where miser or the greed of the money-grubber. he thought of voting here as a kind of per- employees were selling them as fast as they This is a kind of invisible, existential self- formance art, a largely symbolic act that could tear open the boxes. We stocked up ishness. I wrestle with this still, from time might make you feel good inside, at least on granola bars. to time, and so I have no real wisdom to for a little while. Like soldiers sharing burdens, we figured offer, except to say that there are many Still more signs directed us to cross Penn- out who would carry what. Would they varieties of love, and one that I’m learning sylvania, walk behind the Madison building, let us bring bottled water? We checked is this: love is when you feed yourself not the stark, stone addition to the Library of with the Joint Congressional Committee when you feel hunger, but after everyone Congress complex built, undoubtedly, in on Inaugural Activities. Could we take else has eaten. the 1970s, and then head around the back the baby’s stroller? We could not. Since of the House office buildings. I don’t know my wife works on the Hill, in one of the On the morning of the inauguration, why we bothered with all the maps. There House office buildings located across the we walked toward the Capitol, about were no choices. There were no alternate street from the Capitol, we decided to use a dozen blocks from our house. I wore routes, really. There was only one way. her office as a kind of forward-operating Elliot strapped to my chest and facing the We followed the general flow of the base. We could store extra supplies there, world. We’d walked this way countless crowd and looked for the entrance – or baby gear we might need but didn’t nec- times, by the Library of Congress and the line to get to the entrance – of the essarily want to tote around. Her office the Folger Library, the Supreme Court orange section, the location of our seats, would, if necessary, be our refuge from the and the Capitol. However intrinsic these which Hadley had won in her office’s pool. cold and the crowds. buildings are to America’s shared civic life, T-shirt vendors were hawking their com- Not all of this feverish preparation, this however large they loom in the national memorative wares and a woman was sell- elaborate exercise in catastrophic thinking, imagination and mythology, however ing ‘Handmade Obama earrings’, price $10. was particular to the inauguration. We many high-school classes visit them on Our line, when we found it, coiled around do it all the time, albeit on a less intense forced-march field trips, they are also just the perimeter of a park. People were kind, scale. It’s just that generally we don’t have part of our neighbourhood, fixtures on friendly, patient and even, I thought, a lit- to worry about manoeuvering around the landscape, a set of handy reference tle hushed. They were all one could want barricades. Becoming a parent is like being points. We see them all the time. We run from people stuck together in the same promoted to command a platoon, a tiny, our errands here, do our dry-cleaning, line. The couple behind us had come from largely helpless and sometimes trying, but, our shoe repair, our grocery shopping. Raleigh, in North Carolina, a good five yes, still lovable platoon. Everything – a We circle around the Capitol, pushing hours by car. My wife was born in North simple dash to the mall or meeting some- Elliot in his box, as we’ve taken to calling Carolina – most of her family still lives one for lunch – poses a logistical challenge: his stroller, and then we figure out what there – and she and I met there, in Dur- possible to overcome, sure, but needing to we’re going to do about dinner. ham. I could imagine people everywhere, be addressed with uncommon efficiency. In the weeks before, signs had gone in our line and all the other lines forming And every logistical challenge comes at a up designating certain streets and blocks throughout the city, finding little things cost, too. Want to make that lunch date? ‘buses only’. Would chartered tour buses in common, thin threads with which to tie Then give up on the idea of getting any- be parked here, end to end, where the tiny knots. Unlike the folks who came for thing done in the morning, of reading cars usually were, or would only buses the second Bush inauguration (which we or writing or dish-washing or whatever, be allowed to use the roads? It was never also attended, mostly out of base curiosity, because that time must be given over to clear. Other signs called for the District to two inveterate gawkers wanting to wit- preparing the platoon to leave, to being be, at long last, made a state. ‘Yes We Can!’ ness the spectacle of whatever happened ready – for anything. they said. ‘DC Statehood NOW!’ It’s a sore while secretly hoping for full-scale riots), What’s more, being organized only gets spot and a perennial issue that District this crowd did not sport anywhere near one so far. Harder still is working against residents, most of whom are African- the outstanding volume of jewellery and one’s own nature. I’ve come to realize that Americans, don’t have a vote in Con- ankle-length fur. It was more of a jeans I’ve lived almost my entire life doing what gress. While most states feature chipper, and hiking boots crowd. Outdoor wear, I wanted to do pretty much when I want- tourism-friendly mottoes on their licence sports-team jackets, shiny tracksuits. ed to do it. Yes, I went to school, I held plates – Sunshine State, Grand Canyon The weather was, of course, quite cold, jobs and I followed most of the rules, but State, Big Sky Country, Sportsman’s Para- and by the time we completed the entire when I was on my own, at leisure, I was, dise and Maine’s ridiculous Vacationland circuit of the park it was starting to wear as former President Bush famously said, – ours raise the full-throated cry of revolu- on Elliot, who was fussing and crying the decider. If I wanted to go out, to take tion: ‘Taxation without Representation’. and kicking me in the crotch. We headed a walk, well, that’s what I decided to do: I We do have a so-called shadow senator back down the steps, trailing after the end grabbed my coat and I left, right then. If I and a representative, elected officials who of our line, only to see that many people felt hungry, I ate. If I needed to go to the may sit in on committee meetings and were simply streaming right past the park,

5 skipping the ordeal of the line and heading funnel for the crowd. Maybe he had just right now,’ Hadley said. ‘For us.’ directly for the entrance and what was the had enough of being strapped to my chest. ‘I know,’ I said. A couple of million first of I can only guess how many layers Hadley stood in front of me, talking to people had their own ideas about what of security. Elliot. ‘Do you want out?’ she said. ‘Have was important, historic, whatever, but she New lines were forming in front of a you had enough?’ There’s always a new was right. series of walk-through metal detectors puzzle to solve and too little information Hadley walked back to one of the cops installed under a white tent in the middle to glean. On the other hand, maybe he manning the metal detectors and asked of the road. Police there warned everyone couldn’t eat well in that upright position. how we could go about getting out. to empty their pockets. Everything out, He still always takes milk on his back, rest- ‘Out?’ he said. It seemed like the one electronics, keys, coins. Even a foil wrap- ing atop a pillow that not so long ago was question he hadn’t answered a thousand per on a granola bar or a pack of gum larger than he but now is so small his legs times before. would set off the alarm. I pulled a bottle dangle off the end, sometimes crossed at ‘We need to get out of the cold,’ she said. of milk out of my pocket and Hadley the ankles, as if he were a kid lounging on ‘My baby has had it.’ stood in front of me, feeding it to Elliot. an inflatable raft, afloat in a pool. The cop motioned us back through. We shuffled forward as a unit. A cop work- Elliot’s cheeks appeared blue. Or at least ‘Come on,’ he said. ing the other side, with a handheld metal one of them did. I pointed to a spot where ‘Do you know where the closest detector wand, called out general instruc- I thought I saw a slight bluish tinge. ‘They entrance is to the House buildings?’ she tions. ‘What you do at the airport,’ he said, don’t always look like that, do they?’ I said. asked. ‘I’m staff.’ ‘you do here.’ Someone asked if that meant Maybe it was just the light or a shadow ‘Capitol staff?’ the cop asked. She nod- he had to take off his shoes. ‘Except for reflected from his coat. It didn’t matter ded and he pointed back to an entrance shoes,’ the cop said. Then he added, ‘But though. All that mattered was that he was we had passed, where people were already if you want to take off your shoes, you can upset and cold. We all were cold. It was too lining up. Everywhere a crowd. ‘Just go go right ahead.’ much, too much to try to do. We had tried to the front of the line,’ the cop said, ‘and We had been outside, in line, for about to do things before and needed to turn back. show them your ID.’ an hour and a half. As Hadley went Once, when Elliot was just a few weeks Hadley went ahead, faster than me and through the metal detector, Elliot started old, we walked to the National Gallery of Elliot, and worked her way toward the to howl. I held the milk in front of him Art to see Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures of door. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’m staff.’ A and looked down, trying to see. The the National Museum, Kabul. The exhibition guy beside her, standing right in front of hood of his coat poked up over his head, a was crowded though, too crowded for me the door, produced his own ID. ‘So am I,’ light blue puffy cone that reached to just to manoeuver the stroller and Elliot was he said. We would have to wait. underneath my chin. I couldn’t see his loud, too loud to walk through a museum. face. I could hear him feeding though, that He could take in only half of the hidden I wasn’t always keen to attend the rhythm of gulp and swallow. Then he let treasures before we retreated for home. inauguration. In the months after the go of the nipple in order to cry again. Sometimes, still, it was too much to try to election, in fact, my interest peaked I stepped through the metal detector take him out to eat. Timing was everything. and ebbed. One low point came when I next and tripped the alarm. Shoe-cop Timing and chance. was at a local photo place, dropping off came at me with his wand. ‘One of you set Hadley said she’d take Elliot inside and some picture files of the baby for print- it off,’ he said. warm up. ‘You should go on to the inaug­ ing. A sign in the window advertised ‘Well, he can’t walk through on his own,’ uration,’ she said. ‘Take the tickets.’ that they were now framing copies of I said. ‘He’s a baby.’ Elliot went on crying. I looked at the crowd, still hardly moving, the Washington Post, preserving instant I have no idea what my face looked like just everyone staring toward the Capitol, Obama memorabilia like the front page just then, or what my expression revealed, willing themselves forward. ‘I don’t want to the day after he won the election. I sat but I imagine I must have appeared des- go by myself,’ I said. at the store’s computer, uploading my perate, pleading more than making some ‘But you were looking forward to this,’ files, and while the hard drive churned feeble challenge, too weary to be even a she said. ‘You wanted to go.’ away, I rocked Elliot back and forth in his little annoyed. ‘I can’t just leave you here, with him like box. A woman came in and asked about Shoe-cop looked me over and said, ‘You this.’ the framing. She seemed excited, maybe can go on, sir.’ Elliot was in my arms, looking up at us, even breathless. This was in November, Everyone who passed through security miserable, upset, his face crumbling. What not long after the election. The woman bunched together on the other side. There had we done, and why had we done it, and wanted to know, were they selling the was no pushing or shoving, but there was what were we thinking? It was too cold. newspapers too? No, the owner said, just no line either and no recognizable order. Elliot was too small. We tried to reassure the frames. The woman, less excited now, Everyone was just oriented toward the him and then we just tried to make him asked how much the frames were. Fifty Capitol, looking up 1st Street NW, past laugh, giving everything we had. Sound dollars, he said. He stepped toward the the Rayburn building. By now Elliot effects, funny faces, anything. Sometimes back of the store and picked up one of was in full meltdown mode. Hadley and if you get him laughing you can almost the frames from a thick pile that leaned I stepped to the side, behind a couple of trick him out of crying. Make him forget. against the wall. It was just a plain, black concrete barriers that were acting as a ‘It’s just not the most important thing frame, one you would use for a poster. If

6 it cost more than half that, regularly, I’d stars and miniature bunting, encouraged coats, our scarves, our hats and gloves. be shocked. What a cheerless enterprise, I customers to ‘Celebrate Change with Hadley went to see about some food – a thought, and yet I had no trouble imagin- Moët & Chandon Champagne.’ Another juice for me, a coffee for her, something ing the owner, a tall man with a shaved liquor store recommended that Ketel One baked to tide us over. I took Elliot’s jacket head and squirrel cheeks, wondering how vodka was the smart purchase for those off and tried to warm his hands by cup- he could get a piece of the Obama action, looking to ‘celebrate change’. A dry- ping my fingers around his. He had on a and then it occurred to him: I will frame cleaner had formalwear – ‘Rent Inaugural pair of striped pyjamas and, over it, some their newspapers. Tuxedos Now!’ – with ‘designer styles kind of fuzzy Christmas-themed get-up As the inauguration neared, every busi- available for purchase’, and a vintage shop that’s warm but looks like it was sewn ness got into the spirit somewhat. At Art advertised a sale on ballgowns. CVS, the together from faded chunks of moss. A & Soul, a craft gallery, they were selling national pharmacy chain, draped its build- flat-screen TV was bolted to a nearby wall the limited edition Barack Obama Tote ing in bunting, while Pawticulars, a chi- and several people had already gathered Bag, an all-plastic number with Obama’s chi pet store, had three cardboard cut-out around it, pulling up chairs, creating a face superimposed over a collage of head- dogs and two cats on display, all wearing front row and then occupying it. The lines. Only 2,008 bags, each handmade in Uncle Sam hats. So adorable. walls were cinderblock, painted white. Vermont, were for sale nationwide. A steal, National advertising campaigns didn’t Photographs of the Capitol under con- I’m sure, for $90. For the more practical disappoint either. Pepsi morphed its red struction and in various stages of comple- shopper, there was Obama bottled water. and blue logo so that it appeared to be kin tion hung on the walls at irregular inter- Water N’ Faith featured the president-elect to Obama’s campaign symbol and then vals. Exposed pipes and vents and banks as shill, a bottle of the good stuff crudely released a series of ads that baldly appro- of fluorescent lights were suspended from Photoshopped so that it appeared clutched priated ‘Hope’ and ‘Optimism’ as the com- the ceiling. The carpet must have been in his upraised hand. The 7–11 conven- pany’s latest pitch words. ‘Yes You Can’ some textile designer’s take on either cel- ience store had a competing brand of inau- one Pepsi ad promised, which is but one lular mitosis or the fertilization of the egg guration water. ‘Collect all Four Bottles,’ word apart but substantially different from by eight artful spermatozoa, I couldn’t the sign on the front door said, with a the original, more inspiring slogan, ‘Yes decide which. measly 37-cent discount offered on quan- We Can.’ Yes, they did reduce collective I’d been here before, to have lunch with tity purchases. A nearby deli, meanwhile, action to individual encouragement and Hadley. It was packed then, just teeming was selling chocolate bars with Obama’s empty flattery. An online clothing retailer with staffers, young people mostly, in suits, face in bas-relief. T-shirt vendors on the had the same idea, sending out an email on sitting at tables, their heads bowed over their street were a phenomenon unto them- the day of the inauguration (subject line: BlackBerrys and their thumbs manic, hardly selves. Personal favourites included one ‘Change Never Looked So Good!’). ‘Yes anyone uttering a personal word. In Wash- with Obama styled as Clark Kent, ripping you can!’ it read, then gave shoppers the ington, it’s not at all uncommon to overhear his shirt open to reveal, on his chest, the chance to ‘celebrate change with an extra a young man announce, with supreme presidential seal. Another featured Obama 15% offEVERYTHING .’ The day before, confidence, to a tableful of his young associ- as a slam-dunking basketball star. ‘Now is an outfit selling reproduction antiques ates, ‘Well, I have several qualms about the our time,’ it said. I couldn’t pass up buy- emailed customers about ‘Great items for current tax code. Firstly . . .’ Such is Wash- ing a shirt that cast Obama as Muhammad 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,’ with ‘44 great ington – or at least, political Washington – a Ali, the undisputed champ, standing over items in honor of America’s 44 Presidents.’ place that could be fairly encapsulated into Sonny Liston and yelling at him to get up Was this simply advertising at its crass a single image: a young woman in a skirt after his first-round knockout in 1965. On worst, spotting whatever seems the least suit and pumps laughing too loudly at some the shirt, (which I wore, along with three bit genuine in the culture, colonizing it, old white guy’s dumb joke. By the time additional layers, to the inauguration) and then, before we’re all sick of it, turn- we leave this city (and I sometimes hope Senator John McCain is laid out on the ing it into a new way to sell us the same it’s soon), I aim to learn the quintessentially mat, bony-chested and flabby-armed. shit? Or was Obama perhaps all too easily perfect dumb joke to complete that image. The bookstore was selling ‘Inaugural appropriated because, well, he was himself On the TV, some of the dignitaries Edition President Obama’ trading cards a brilliantly advertised product, with a and boldfaced names started to arrive and as well as a poster-sized enlargement of sharp logo, a catchy slogan and a few easy take their places on the platform. We were Obama on the cover of Ebony magazine, to remember messages? Maybe, in a way, supposed to be there, I thought. We were the issue that named him among ‘the 25 it was all advertising: the president just a supposed to watch this in person. What’s coolest brothers of all time’, citing his new beverage – or, worse, the same bever- more, I wanted to be there. Sure, I had swagger, confidence, effortless style and age we’d been drinking for years poured reservations about the parade of Clinton black cool. Down the street, at a newish into a newly redesigned bottle – and sold, regulars, all ready to assume positions of hamburger place, the chef, a guy who whatever the case, by expert pitchmen to a power in the new administration. And yes, graduated from a reality show, had cre- nation that needed its thirst quenched. I felt, at most, a bottomless ambivalence ated the Obama burger, with Applewood for the frenzied market in tenuous inaug­ bacon, red-onion marmalade, horseradish In the basement of the Longworth ural tie-ins. And I was, frankly, exhausted mayo and crumbled blue cheese. A liquor building, just outside the cafeteria, we by the news coverage, maybe the longest store, its window festooned with tinfoil found a table and chairs and dropped our pre-game show in the history of broad-

7 casting. In spite of all that, however, I without irony, about the deterioration of Three days later, I happened to be at still thought we all should be there, Elliot the social fabric, as I term it, I was touched CVS when the inaugural decorations came perhaps most of all. Years from now, he to see people make conscientious attempts down. We were standing in line, wait- would, I imagined, want to tell people, not to block other’s view of the television. ing to buy something or other – I can’t friends, his own family, I was there. My Such a small consideration, really, and yet remember what now – when a guy came mom and dad took me to Obama’s inaugur­ation. it said everything: I know you want to see this, in and introduced himself to the manager. Instead we were stuck in this cafeteria and I don’t want to keep you from seeing. We all ‘We’re here to take your bunting,’ he annex. It was like waiting out some dis- did what we could, as best as we could. We said. The manager didn’t really respond. aster in a shelter set up by the Red Cross. watched the prayer and saw Aretha Fran- ‘Those flags on the outside,’ the guy added. Who were these people anyway? I thought. klin sing. Some women really liked Fran- ‘I just thought you’d want to know.’ And how had everyone come to be here, klin’s hat, ooh-ing their approval. When Outside, a guy on a ladder unhooked underground? We were all so close to the Obama came on the TV, everyone cheered. the bunting and, within minutes, CVS was Capitol and yet not there at all. Had they, But when he spoke, it was hard to hear. I just a pharmacy again, the same as before. like us, been overcome by the cold? There could make out just phrases, a word or two. I had started to wonder what would come were children with parents, the older Nobody could turn up the television. Peo- next, for the country, the new president, kids running around, playing, some rest- ple tried, but nobody could get the buttons for us. And it occurred to me that I endure ing their heads on the tables, using their to work, and nobody knew where the Republican administrations, weather them, balled-up coats for pillows. Or was every- remote control was. People would go ssssh- knowing full well what to expect. But one here turned back, unable to get in? hhh, but then their shushing was just as with Democrats, I brace for eventual dis- Hadley returned with food and I sug- loud as anything else. This was our inaugu- appointment. On balance, I decided it was gested we should give our tickets away. It ration, such as it was. People took pictures much worse to be disappointed, crushed, could transform our bad time into some- of the TV, close-ups, so that you couldn’t than to ride out even a long dismal period. one else’s lucky windfall. ‘Someone could tell, at first, that it wasn’t live. A woman I had by then seen President Obama’s still use the seats,’ I said. rested her head on her partner’s shoulder. inaugural speech replayed on television, ‘So we should just say, “Does anyone Another woman browsed back through the and I’d read the text several times. Some- want these?”’ images on her camera. She had some good thing he said stuck with me: ‘I guess,’ I said. ‘Look for people who shots, I thought. Other people stood at the are just a couple.’ front of the room and took pictures of us, What is required of us now is a new era ‘So you want me to ask?’ just standing there, looking back at them of responsibility – a recognition, on the I nodded. I often have bright ideas and watching the TV. part of every American, that we have that involve Hadley following through We applauded and we cheered and then duties to ourselves, our nation and the on them, particularly when they involve everyone went their separate ways. A man world, duties that we do not grudgingly going up and, you know, talking to people. came up and asked us where we got our accept but rather seize gladly, firm in I bounced Elliot up and down on snacks, but the cafeteria had closed so the knowledge that there is nothing so my leg and made motor sounds, pretty Hadley told him another place that might satisfying to the spirit, so defining of much my default setting. Hadley walked still be open. As we left, I was carrying our character than giving our all to a to the front of the room. ‘Does anyone Elliot in my arms. It would be easier that difficult task. need tickets?’ she said. ‘We have two. We way. If I strapped him back on my chest, couldn’t use them.’ he would fuss again. He wouldn’t have it. It was a curious speech, I thought, unusual ‘It’s too late to get in,’ a man said. And When we emerged from the basement for how little it tried to make everyone then he asked to look at the tickets anyway. and started to walk for home, it might as feel good. Instead, it was like being hand- Hadley handed them over. ‘Can I keep well have been a new day. It was sunny, ed a homework assignment, a schedule of them,’ he said, ‘as a souvenir?’ clear and bright. And it was warmer. Had- heavy reading and, at the end of the class, She said he could have one and then ley said, ‘Why couldn’t it have been like a tough exam. ‘This is,’ the president said, brought the other back. I shrugged elabor­ this in the morning?’ ‘the price and the promise of citizenship.’ ately. We tried. I tossed Elliot into the air, and he gig- It was hard not to wonder if we – if I – People came until the room was full, and gled and laughed and drooled. We all were up to that task. then still more people came. One hundred laughed, his joy infectious. Behind us, we I thought of the speech again one night people, maybe more. We heard that The heard a helicopter take to the air, trailing while Hadley and I were watching the Dai- Mall, designated as the overfill area, the that deep woof-woof sound. It was Bush’s ly Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart was play- place to head if you couldn’t get where you ride, leaving the Capitol. It rose above the ing a clip of the president talking to CBS were supposed to go, was closed, already at roofline of the houses and then banked to news anchor Katie Couric about one of the its capacity. In the cafe­teria, people started the north. more modest items in his economic stimu- to pack themselves in pretty tight. They Some people ahead of us turned to lus package, a plan that Republicans and, took every chair. They sat on top of tables. watch the helicopter too and they cheered in slavish turn, Couric were questioning They leaned against the wall or stood in to see the former president go. ‘Go home,’ as just so much useless pork-barrel spend- the middle of the room. As someone who one guy said. ing. ‘We’re going to weatherize homes,’ is a bit too given to ranting and swearing, ‘See ya,’ his friend said. the president told Couric. ‘That immedi-

8 ately puts people back to work. And we’re tions of Americans,’ Obama said, ‘have hope has to become something else: an going to train people who are out of work, responded with a simple creed that sums expectation, say, not to be entertained or including young people, to do the weath- up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can. Yes, amused or feel swept away, as in a romance, erization.’ Further, the programme – and we can.’ Stewart read off a few more jokes, but an expectation to think and work, and it really was, all told, a few raindrops in the about how the president was being so very a desire to stay engaged by the minutiae of stimulus ocean – would help lower energy boring, the worst offence, really, in the making the country run, even if just some costs for homeowners. The clip ended and world of popular culture, and how he was government-sponsored weatherization returned to Stewart, who was sitting at his sounding so much more like John Kerry programme. Obama called it responsibility. desk, cheering, his fist pumping in the air, than John Kennedy. Perhaps though it is just another defini- as he yelled out, ‘Yes! We!’ And then he Is that a joke, really? And is it a joke we tion of love. It won’t be easy, I’m sure, or fell asleep and began snoring. ‘Weatheriz- should find funny? Obama hadn’t become simple, to love the government as much as ing?’ he asked, his incredulity speaking for dull, he’d become president. He was elect- I say, abstractly and without thinking, that itself. ‘Where did this guy go?’ he added, ed to govern, which, as boring as it may I love this country. Nor will it be easy to playing a second clip, this time of then- sound, means being concerned with the work my mind, to think about things I’d Senator Obama, speaking after the New details of how the country works and how just rather leave to someone else, to think Hampshire primary, in January 2008, when people can best be helped. High hopes and for me, on my behalf. But what is love, he was still a long-shot candidate. ‘Genera- lofty expectations got us this far, but now finally, if not work? ◊

A SINGLE BOOK acter is a shining piece of sardonic creation by Spark. Emma Loy has a lot of sway in the book world – and this particular A Far Cry from Kensington London is full of people surreally chasing jobs in the publishing industry; part of the Ali Smith on the double edge of Muriel Spark novel’s high entertainment is its satire of the book business. ‘Jobs in publishing, Mrs ‘Can you decide to think? – Yes, you announces its own preoccupied insomnia. Hawkins, are very hard to come by. You can. You can put your mind to anything But its insomnia is unexpectedly pleasant, might bear that in mind. I could put in a most of the time. You can sit peacefully a ‘beloved insomnia in the sweet waking word for you in many quarters. Only you in front of a blank television set, just hours of the night’ – as if the usual dark must, simply must, retract.’ The power watching nothing; and sooner or later night of the soul has been replaced by struggle is swift. Pretty soon Mrs Hawkins you can make your own programme something much, much lighter. We begin is out of a job. much better than the mass product. It’s in the future, intimate with its narrator Over at the rooming-house, ‘from fun, you should try it. You can put awake in her bed listening, in the silence, Wanda’s room came a long, loud, high- anyone you like on the screen, alone or to the noise of thirty years ago, the pitched cry which diminished into a in company, saying and doing what you noise of the mid-1950s, a time when Mrs sustained, distant and still audible ulu­ want them to do, with yourself in the Hawkins, publishing assistant, literally lation.’ Wanda, the Polish dressmaker, has middle if you prefer it that way.’ larger than life, large enough in a post-war started receiving anonymous threats. ‘We, time of rationing and utilitarian discom- the Organisers, have our eyes on you.’ hat do we do with our lives? fort to suggest a comforting abundance to Everyone at the rooming-house suspects WHow do we employ ourselves? everyone who simply looks at her, lives in everyone else; everything polarizes down How do we view our pasts, and more, a shabby, decent rooming-house in down- to the single question – are you a friend how do we survive them to really inhabit at-heel Kensington – how things change or an enemy? But Mrs Hawkins, eyes like our futures? And what do we do if those over time! – run by Milly, an Irish land- the hawk in her name, notices how cheap pasts keep us awake at night? A Far Cry lady of great kindness and frankness. the threatening letters look, how fake, like from Kensington is one of Muriel Spark’s Mrs Hawkins has a lot on her plate, as ‘a deliberate literary performance of poor most liberating, liberated and meditative it were, which is something she learns quality; an attempt at parody, if a lame novels. Spark is a writer who can take the practically and literally to deal with in the one.’ Is Wanda ‘guilty’? Of what? Why meditative and make it mercurially funny, course of the novel. She has simply spoken has she, like many others in this slim, far- playful and mischievous; alongside the the truth, out loud; she has told a rather reaching novel, fallen so completely for grim ‘cry’ at the core of this novel there’s bad writer called Hector Bartlett, to his the hype about a mesmerizing, modern yet a force of fun, and a force of calm light- face, exactly what she thinks – that he’s medieval-sounding contraption called the heartedness in its analysis of the creative a bad writer, a ‘pisseur de copie’. (‘It means Box, which, its proponents claim, has the process in the light of free will, imagina- that he pisses hack journalism, it means power to cure all ills? And what exactly is tion, truth, history. that he urinates frightful prose.’) Bartlett the Box, with its ‘radionic’ power in the First published in 1988, it is a conscious happens to be having an affair with a new radioactive age, its special resonance exercise in looking back – a novel that famous novelist, Emma Loy, whose char- for the radio and TV generations reading

9 this book in the 1980s? time when, in her own life, she was living girl . . . in the office at 50 Old Brompton When these three different farcical in London and first writing her own fic- Road, with one light bulb, bare boards stories come together, Mrs Hawkins finds tion; her first novel,The Comforters, was on the floor, a long table which was the herself at the centre of a cheap detective completed in the mid-fifties and published packing department,’ as she writes in Cur- mystery on the one hand, and on the other in 1957. This particular time in her life is riculum Vitae. Much of her Poetry Society a set of metaphysical tests concerning very entertainingly dealt with in her only experience slipped into her marvellous power and truth. ‘No life can be carried volume of autobiography, Curriculum Vitae novel Loitering With Intent, written seven on satisfactorily unless people are honest.’ (1992), a book she published four years years earlier, which dealt with the years Meanwhile, post-war London comes back after this novel and whose voice, wry and just prior to those depicted in A Far Cry. to life – ‘strange grasses and wild herbs calm, witty and sharp, is very close to that With its lambasting of literary vicious cir- had sprung up where the war-demolished of A Far Cry’s narrator. cles and all their bombast and fakery, and houses had been’ – and because in many Spark had spent the latter war years by dint of its sheer post-war joyousness, ways this is a novel distinctly about revival, working in intelligence for the Foreign Loitering With Intent can be seen as a sister- particularly about the aftermath of the Office. When the war ended she made volume, the bright noon to this ‘wide- war, how such trauma can be healed by its a career move which must have seemed eyed midnight’ of a novel. walking wounded, A Far Cry from Kensing- very farcical indeed after such work; she But in Spark’s work the lightness of ton is, in the end, a beautiful – and still suit- took a post at the Poetry Society, editing things is always a serious business, and a ably utilitarianly ‘sober’ – celebration of its periodical, Poetry Review, and by all literary vicious circle is likely to be one of a whole new blossoming. This wonderful accounts enduring a series of mini-wars, the worst forms of viciousness, since she blossoming is the real mystery, in a novel battling with every mad faction imagina- is an artist profoundly drawn to a moral- which doesn’t just sort the frauds from the ble in the London literary world; after this ity in the art process, and especially to the true but also the good frauds from the bad she took a position three days a week with function of fiction in the real world. For frauds, and which becomes a conscious act Peter Owen, ‘a young publisher who was Spark, who converted to Roman Catholi- of revitalization, not just of a city, but of interested in books by Cocteau, Hermann cism at about the same time as she wrote its people and also their potential literature. Hesse, Cesare Pavese. It was a joy to proof- her first fiction (and consequently at about A Far Cry was Spark’s eighteenth novel read the translations of such writers. I was the same time as A Far Cry is set), the and, incidentally, takes place around the secretary, proof-reader, editor, publicity religious process, the writing process and

10 the processes of art are inextricably inter- twined. Her belief system gifted her a ‘bal- anced regard for matter and spirit,’ as she called it, and a vision of all our realities, all our ‘real’ histories, as a kind of paral- lel fictional work; this gives the recurring notions in her work of the relationships between fiction, truth and lies, between real and fake, between author, authority and free will, a particular slant. Here the trivial, intimate history of the novel apes the reality whose setting it is, in a plot which resembles a mini-Cold War, a mini-descent into 1950s post-war paranoia. Where the novel’s surface is scattered with the authentic references that make the obvious links between fic- tion and real time (‘Billy Graham, Senator McCarthy, Colonel Nasser . . . Lucky Jim’); where its general theme might be said to be a people getting back into shape in the post-war years; its subtext is Spark’s end- less preoccupation, the ‘supernatural proc- ess going on under the surface and within the substance of all things’. The novel’s own preoccupation is moral – the makings quite fatalism, but watching until you see European of English novelists is a Scottish of good and bad – in this case, what makes the whole picture emerge.’ novelist, gifted in a particular otherness of a good or a bad writer, in a novel where Above all, the novel is a fiction about authority, brought up between the wars in gratuitous viciousness and powermonger- what happens when you speak the plain Edinburgh, where she ‘imbibed, through ing, and ‘bad’ and ‘untrue’ writing, come truth out loud, how to survive the con- no particular mentor, but just by breathing together as the same thing. It’s a book that sequences, and the damage that happens the informed air of the place, its haughty knows it’s a book – it is always announcing to those taken in by, convinced by, the and remote anarchism. I can never now its status to its reader. ‘I offer this advice,’ opposite of truth. It asks us not just to suffer from a shattered faith in politics and our narrator says, ‘without fee; it is sense that we’re being watched (in both politicians, because I never had any.’ included in the price of the book,’ a book the cheap 1950s paranoia plot as well as in ‘Can you decide to think?’ This per- very much about the act of narrative skill, a much larger metaphysical context), but missive education in the art of thinking, about the uses of foreground, background, more, to watch ourselves and, like Mrs this laughing history of post-war liter- foresight, hindsight, or the basics of nar- Hawkins, to be ready to change, to change ary London, this pensive and merry lay- rative structure. Mrs Hawkins, the ‘scru- our own bad habits, to put ourselves ing of old ghosts, is a book that knows pulous’ proof-reader and editor, almost blithely to rights. This blitheness is the key its mere place as a book, and argues back suggests this novel is a casebook for those to survival in a novel in which the bruised, about the importance of truth and art, who would wish to write well. haunting dark of the past is ever-present, and truth in art, with every fictive bone Its subject is the thoughtful self, mak- but dealt with, as it were, with a combin­ in its body. Masquerading as a chatty, ing sense, from an objective distance, of ation of unsentimental affection and satis- realist piece of fiction, it is another the meanings of both silence and voice. Its fying, score-settling wit – a perfect model revelation, as each of her novels is, of first refrain is the pained cry of the lost, of what critic Ruth Whittaker calls Spark’s Spark’s art of merciful litheness, and the wounded woman at the centre of its plot, ‘aesthetic of detachment’ and, in the form far-reaching after-effects of language and to some extent also Mrs Hawkins’ of this novel, a prelude to every kind of well used. ‘That cry, that cry,’ the far own silent cry, which readers learn of revitalization. cry at its core is both idiomatic and actu- when they come upon the story of her war Spark often takes south London – and al, painful then distanced, examined and marriage. Its other, more pervasive refrain not the north of the city, which is the understood, by means of the Sparkian is much sweeter, and arises from emo- usual literary stamping-ground of novel- balance of artifice and truth. It all adds tional distance, from the meditative future ists – as her subject in her books about the up to something huge – a sprightly phil- which will, it is promised, simply put the city. She likes to reveal alternatives; she osophical rejection of twentieth-century past into its proper context. ‘I came to comes, after all, to this most English of angst, with all the carefree carefulness, realise the answer later,’ as Mrs Hawkins narratives, shot through with its references all the far-reaching economy, all the repeatedly says. ‘I’m a great believer in to the Brontës, Dickens and Forster, from merciless, sharp mercy, that characterize providence,’ Spark herself wrote. ‘It’s not a quite alternative position; for this most the art of Spark. ◊

11 The Obscenity Issue but just the opposite. They aimed to undermine the foundations on which the ancien régime rested, hence the stress on Lightning in a Summer Storm libidinous priests, satyromaniac and nym- phomaniac aristocrats and royalists. John Sutherland on the power of a bad word It was the same with the licentious satirists in Britain in the Regency period n 1982 I published a monograph language needs these weapons of lexical – William Hone (tried three times for Ientitled Offensive Literature: Decensorship destruction, like the nuclear bombs which obscenity in 1817) and George Cruikshank, in Britain, 1960–1982. were never used in the 1960s, but which Sr. Their squibs weren’t corrupting: they The book took the form of a calendar, preserved the status quo. were seditious. Their cartoons threatened the first date of which was November 1960 When he wrote Lady Chatterley, Law- not the morals of the individual, but the and the dam-breaking decision that ‘acquit- rence proclaimed his noble intention to current holders of power in Britain, by ted Lady Chat’. There followed a series of ‘hygienize’ our Anglo-Saxon lexical herit- rendering them ridiculous. At various vigorous but eventually ineffect­ive resist- age: to make ‘fuck’ as usable, in any and periods in history pornography can be the ances in the twenty years following – spear- all social contexts, as ‘copulate’; ‘cunt’ as cultural equivalent of dynamite: ‘libertine’ headed by Mrs Whitehouse and the Festival ‘vagina’; ‘shit’ as ‘excrement’; ‘cock’ as and ‘liberty’ coalesce. of Light – which, effectively, collapsed ‘penis’; ‘piss’ as ‘urine’. Did Lawrence suc- We are now at a fascinating juncture. with the ineffective prosecution ofThe ceed in his mission? No. Could he ever For five hundred years it has been rela- Romans in Britain, in 1982. Hot stuff, then. have done? No. tively easy to control public expression. In Tepid stuff, now and long under the bridge. Debates about censorship tend to be the UK, the legal requirement (going back The pages of my author’s copy of Offen- as sterile and inconclusive as those of the to the eighteenth century) is that every sive Literature are sadly faded (as, alas, is fallen angels in Pandemonium, in Para- piece of print must carry an indentifiable their author) but the issues raised in the dise Lost. The same terms recur so often printer’s mark – creating a trail of owner- book remain fresh. They may be sum- as to become mere sound. Those terms ship and responsibility. Copyright registra- marized thus: Has the ‘Great Liberation’ include: ‘a tendency to deprave and cor- tion, administered via the British Library, represented by these two transformative rupt’ (the Victorians’ favourite); ‘liberty operates a similar kind of mass control. decades and what followed: of thought and expression’ (Orwell and The Performing Rights Society keeps tabs 1. enriched British culture? other subscribers to Voltaire, Areopagitica on music. Film distributors voluntarily 2. put British culture on a glide-path to and Index on Censorship); ‘public decency’ submit their wares to the BBFC. News- terminal and irreversible decadence? (the favourite French legal instrument of papers, wary about libel, routinely have 3. had little or no effect on British oppression); and ‘obscenity’, a term whose their chancier items ‘legalled’ by lawyers. culture? meaning is as slippery as its etymological The Official Secrets Act muzzles the Civil origins are obscure. Service. The oaths of loyalty do the same Unlike his father, Kingsley (who had to Looking back, all that furore about with politicians. Expression in the UK is reserve it for his scabrous letters to Larkin), sex and obscenity in the 1960s – what effectively as caged as it ever was. Martin Amis can eff-and-blind in print to it was ‘permissible’ to depict, and what Except, of course, for one place: the his heart’s content, and does just that. Are was not permissible – now seems to me internet. Attempts to control cyber- the son’s novels better for the licence? Has to have been a huge distraction. The real expression are chronically, at times comic­ the abolition of the Lord Chamberlain – issue was, and still is, power and control. ally, flat-footed. One example will serve. preposterous office though his was – had Where the power chooses to discharge In February 2009 the Dutch politician that much impact on the quality of what is itself culturally seems as historically ran- Geert Wilders is banned from entering offered on the West End stage since 1960? dom as the lightning strikes in a summer the UK to attend a private showing of his The arguments of the cultural conserva- storm. You can say ‘fuck’ now on prime- seditious film,Fitna . Thanks to the pub- tives are worn threadbare, but still have time television on the BBC (Kenneth licity, hundreds of thousands of Britons some superficial validity. Shakespeare, Tynan broke that barrier in 1964). But Google and goggle at it on the web. No Jane Austen and Tolstoy wrote under you can’t say ‘golliwog’ in the Broadcast- one is prosecuted. By comparison the conditions of strict censorship. Is their art ing House green room (in 1964, of course, old ‘published in Paris’ convention (under the worse for it? Is the unbuttoned Lady the Black and White Minstrel Show was which Lady Chatterley lived for thirty Chatterley’s Lover that much better than the riding high). years) was brutally effective. four-letter-wordless Women in Love? One of the more enduring contribu- Web-control is impossible. The only Kingsley Amis – who placed himself, tions to the Great Debate begun forty weapon left in the government’s arsenal perversely, side by side with Longford years ago is Robert Darnton’s book on is exemplary punishment. There will, (‘Lord Porn’), Whitehouse and the FoL – the ‘forbidden’ bestsellers (i.e. pornog- depend on it, be more high-profile Gary argued for the continuation of censorship raphy) of the pre-Revolutionary era in Glitter prosecutions, more Gary McKin- because it preserved a kind of radioactive France. These ‘under the cloak’ works non extraditions (he was the geek guilty energy in the forbidden vocabulary. Pro- were not intended to excite, or stimulate. of looking where he shouldn’t on the web, hibited words were strong words; and Erection was not what they had in mind, namely the Pentagon’s archive), more huge

12 fines for the odd student file-sharer guilty has their stash of porn.’ He did not, evi- does. What is worrying is that, in the of receiving bootleg music or a ripped dently, feel threatened. future, given the current uncontrollable movie. When the odious Craig Meehan To return to the big question. Culture nature of expression on the web, the state (partner of Karen Matthews, mother of has neither been coarsened nor stimulated will necessarily be driven to ever more ‘missing’ schoolgirl Shannon) was pros- into new heights of creativity by the long intrusive inspection and intrusion: more ecuted for having downloaded child porn, period of decensorship of certain areas of cameras, more email monitoring, more one of his young, male neighbours was expression through which we have lived. data-capturing and quarrying. Paradoxically, reported as saying: ‘Everyone round here It has merely adapted, as culture always the more freedom, the more control. ◊

The Obscenity Issue what more there is. I don’t know if there’s any censorship to fight, really. The way we did it was to laugh at it because things ‘I think we are staying tolerant’ they censored were so funny. They were ludicrous. John Mortimer 5D: Why was laughter such an important Although he was known in the early 1960s for his JM: It’s ridiculous. It says the definition of tool in the battle? work in divorce courts, John Mortimer was drawn obscenity is something that would be like- into the ongoing battles against the Obscene Pub- ly to deprave or corrupt likely readers. It’s JM: Censorship is ridiculous, really. Laugh- lications Act when asked to defend Hubert Selby’s been difficult to find anyone who’s been ter is an important tool in anything, abso- Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1968. Other high- depraved or corrupted by reading a book. lutely anything you’re defending. It’s very profile cases followed, including trials where he It also has lots of exceptions. It’s all right good for people to be caused offence, by defended the publications Oz (1971) and the Gay if the book’s beautifully written or artistic, the way. They should be caused offence News (1976). A fervent believer in free speech, or it’s of historical worth, or whatever. So three times a week and three times on Sat- Mortimer said the Oz case, which became the you could be depraved and corrupted on urdays. It keeps them alive. longest obscenity trial in British history, ‘stands one side and educated on the other. The at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of act doesn’t really make much sense. 5D: What should they be caused offence our freedom to think and write and draw what we by? please’. Mortimer went on to defend the makers of 5D: Why did you want to fight this act? Deep Throat and the Sex Pistols for their use of JM: Censorship. You must laugh at every- the word ‘bollocks’ on an album cover. He believed JM: Because I was a barrister and that was thing else. You must remember some of no one – not even the near-illiterate pornographers the work that came my way. these cases were richly comic. I’ve been in of the world – should be stifled. ‘I think it’s highly front of some very stupid judges. inequitable that the talented should be permitted 5D: Were there personal reasons? access to erotic fields denied to the clumsy, talentless 5D: How did you deal with stupid judges? majoritiy,’ he once wrote. ‘We should not only be JM: I don’t believe in censorship of any able to defend to the death other people’s right to sort. I don’t think there should be anybody JM: Argue. That’s what we did. You say things with which we disagree; we must also telling us what to read and what to write. would have Mrs Whitehouse kneeling in allow them to do it in abominable prose.’ I was a barrister who wrote, so these cases the corridor praying for a guilty verdict. I visited Mortimer at his house near Henley- came my way. Most barristers refused to One judge wrote that God was dictating on-Thames in the first week of October 2008. do them. his summing up to him. But the moods He died on 16 January 2009. change, don’t they? At the end of the Vic- 5D: Is there any way an idea can be torian age they changed too. I think these FIVE DIALS: Do you believe that literature banned? waves come, perhaps unconsciously. was improved by the battles against the obscenity act? JM: Some ideas are banned all the time. 5D: How did you know how to handle If you have the idea of robbing a shop, these judges? JOHN MORTIMER: I think we learned to breaking and entering a house, murder- be more tolerant of each other and not ing someone – of course those ideas are JM: My best moment was Inside Linda to be surprised at other people’s tastes. I banned. But otherwise, no. Lovelace. The doctor was giving evidence hope we learned tolerance. The Obscene and said what a terrible effect it would Publications Act was an act of censorship 5D: Are we now in danger of losing what have on a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl if really. Getting round the OPA might have you fought for? she read this account of sex with Linda improved literature. Have you read it? Lovelace – I looked at the judge and he JM: I don’t think so. Pretty much every- was hiding his nose under his notebook 5D: I have. thing is out in the open now. I don’t know and giggling. I said, ‘Would you mind

13 telling the jury whether it would have that make the English law so unique are 5D: What effect did seeing all that obscene a different effect on a fourteen-year-old being dropped by the Labour Party. That’s material have on you over the years? schoolgirl than it is clearly having on a obscene. seventy-three-year-old judge?’ He wasn’t JM: I was mildly amused. Mildly. (Pause.) very pleased. I think the English are likely 5D: Why do you think today’s writers Have you had a drink yet? to be more moralistic about sex for some aren’t writing about those issues? reason. I don’t know why that should be. 5D: I haven’t. And violence? Every kind of violence is JM: I am writing about them. I don’t think already in Shakespeare. It’s full of violence other writers are quite conscious of what’s JM: You must. Is anyone in the kitchen? and sex. I once went to see the official going on. He’s had nothing to drink, this poor man. censor, the Lord Chamberlain, and I said, Glass of champagne? ‘Is there any subject you would censor 5D: How are you tackling these issues? irrespective of how it was done?’ He said, 5D: Yes. ‘Regicide.’ I looked at him and said, ‘What JM: I’m writing a Rumpole book, natural- about Hamlet?’ ly. You have to set out on the assumption JM: And did you see the garden? that there’s nothing you can’t write about. 5D: What would the world be like today if If anyone tells you anything different you 5D: I was shown the garden when I came. you hadn’t won? fight them. You fight them and keep fight- ing them. JM: The garden’s rather good. There are JM: Someone would have so many apples. The pigs eat won. Someone. some of them.

5D: How does a society stay 5D: I went to see the pigs. tolerant? They seemed to be very happy. JM: I think we are staying tolerant. JM: They get out, they get lost. It’s chaos. Wonderful 5D: But aren’t you worried chaos. we’re becoming a bit more conservative these days? 5D: You’ve changed your glasses. You don’t have the JM: Are we? When I think big glasses any longer. of a Conservative gov- ernment I think that is a JM: No, what do you think? bit worrying. Except the Labour Party has become so 5D: They’re a good choice. conservative. You must be vigilant. You’ve got some- JM: I used to have big round thing very precious here, ones. I have different ones precious freedoms. Don’t now. My eye doctor was tak- let them get thrown away in ing out my cataract or what- little bits. I suppose some of ever it was. I said, ‘I can’t chat the greatest literature in the to you but I’ll say Othello’s world has been produced final speech.’ So I said to in censorious periods – you him, ‘I pray you, in your let- can’t stop literature, really ters / When you shall these – but we don’t need censori- unlucky deeds relate, / Speak ous periods for great books. of me as I am; nothing exten- uate, / Nor set down aught 5D: What issues are you interested in now? 5D: What effect do you hope this new in malice: then must you speak / Of one book will have? that loved not wisely but too well.’ And JM: The issues I think of these days are the he then gave me a speech out of Richard II. Labour Party’s assault on the law. The fact JM: I don’t know. I don’t set out to convert We went through this entire operation not you can be imprisoned for however many people. I don’t really hope for anything, quoting Shakespeare but giving chunks of days without being put on trial. Witnesses except that they might enjoy the book. If Shakespeare to each other. My eyes have can be stood behind screens so no one the ideas get absorbed, then that’s fine. changed, you see. Mind you, everything knows who they are. All these little things has changed. ◊

14 The Obscenity Issue the phrase came out the jury laughed again. The poor prosecutor’s case was completely finished after that. ‘I don’t know how to put the genie back in’ John made pretty much the same speech about liberty on every occasion. It Baroness Ann Mallalieu implied the prosecution weren’t civilized and couldn’t see this was really not of any Ann Mallalieu was the first female president of an excuse that he had to be somewhere great significance. We used to call a team the Cambridge Union Society and worked as a else. The jury was told if you’re going of experts, a strange crew, who would trainee presenter for Yorkshire Television before to be sick just run out of that door and turn up at every case and give expert opin- being called to the bar in 1970. She worked with you’ll find the loo. The men on the juries ion on why the work wasn’t contrary to John Mortimer on numerous occasions. In 1991 were normally the most squeamish. It was Christianity and why it didn’t do anybody she became a life peer as Baroness Mallalieu and the men who sat with their eyes covered, any harm. Looking back now, it seems went on to defend in cases dealing with consent looking down, unable to watch, whereas utterly crazy because none of those sorts and personal choice, including R v Brown, the the women who were used to changing of films would be prosecuted at all today. House of Lords case on the extent to which a per- nappies didn’t seem the slightest bit per- son can consent to injury. She spoke to Five Dials turbed. I think they had a much higher 5D: Was it necessary to defend everything on her mobile phone from the Chilterns, within a threshold for that sort of stuff. you defended? couple of miles from John Mortimer’s home. Deep Throat was one of many films we had to defend in the Old Bailey. All the AM: I have a mixed view looking back over ANN MALLaLiEU: In the 1970s we had a barristers defending had to see the material. the years because I don’t think you can frame great spate of cases. I did some on my own, There were so many barristers we had pro- the law – as somebody said in a case, and I’m but John Mortimer was my leader on oth- jectors all around the courtroom and the paraphrasing – according to the sensitivities ers. I suspect I was instructed to defend film being shown simultaneously on every of a delicately brought up fourteen-year-old because he thought the mixed jury were wall in the court. Wherever you looked, schoolgirl. On the whole I think people more likely to accept the arguments if still more strange activity. should be allowed to choose what they see. I there was a woman barrister telling them don’t think any adult of sound mind should it was perfectly all right. Such was the 5D: Did John give you any advice when be prevented from seeing and reading what- amount of money available that the top you were working with him? ever they want. But they shouldn’t have it silks in the profession were involved in this put in places where it’s going to hit them in sort of work. Publishers could go for who AM: John was a very undemanding leader. the eye if they don’t want it to. they took to be the best, so they went for I don’t remember him ever asking me to I am troubled by the enormous growth John Mortimer. do anything. I learned by watching him. of internet pornography. We could never If John was leading me in a case involv- He had superb timing – he was an actor have anticipated how it would lead to such ing film, and he had to actually be there, manqué – so he’d have the jury eating out levels of addiction. I’ve come across cases he’d take his glasses off or he’d send me of his hand. Quite often at the end of the in recent years where this is plainly so – in to sit through the whole thing. He case, when it was all over, jurors would people are spending hours and hours view- took the view that they’d say, ‘If that nice come up and ask for his autograph. I was ing and paying for pornographic material young girl can sit there and watch these so keen and enthusiastic, I’d prepare pages which is now available in our homes. The films they must be all right.’ I’d come of notes about the law and pages of sug- people who were the recipients of the out blinking into the daylight, think- gestions for the final speech for which he’d stuff we were looking at had to go out ing, ‘What are all these people doing with thank me very courteously. Then he’d of their way to visit clubs or find places clothes on?’ proceed to make exactly the speech he where they could buy magazines. intended to make. Also, I’m not sure we’ve advanced very FIVE DIALS: How did you feel being put John’s great forte was making people far from those days in our general sexua­ in that role? laugh. If the jury were laughing you knew lization of women. That’s what all those you were home and dry. It was important magazines are about. Although people say, AM: To some extent I shared John’s views to get the jury looking down on the pros- ‘Oh, that’s pretty harmless, the stuff you see that none of this stuff should have been ecution as being rather out of date and out in the newsagents,’ I think we should have prosecuted. A certain camaraderie devel- of touch with life. Once there was a maga- moved on from that stage to actually look- oped around these cases, and we all got zine John and I were defending, a sort of ing at what people are, rather than what they pretty insensitive to the whole matter. It flagellation magazine calledSpank . The appear to be. It’s led to a very considerable was sometimes quite difficult to anticipate prosecution said, ‘This is not upright sex’ degree of unhappiness. how a jury, coming fresh to the material, and from that moment on John latched would take it. on to the phrase and the poor prosecutor 5D: Would your attitude have changed if There were some extremely unpleasant was branded as the champion of ‘upright the prosecution had argued that what you films. At one stage we had to watch some sex’. The words meant something entirely were defending would lead to an addiction that were very scatological and John made different when John said them. Every time to internet porn?

15 AM: I would have wanted to be convinced control and, in a sense, exploiting men. tion is on the visual image, and I would very of it, and at that time I wouldn’t have been. A lot of the works were frankly just good much doubt that any book published by a Now I am. You get people saying you fun and you wouldn’t be offended, or at reputable publisher would be prosecuted must close down these sites involving chil- least I don’t think you would. There was a now. I can’t quite imagine what it would be, dren. That is only the tip of the iceberg. wonderful Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs unless it was some glorification of one of There’s a real problem for adults, and I cartoon film we had to defend where all those things that are regarded as complete think that will come to be recognized. the dwarves had enormous erections. It was taboos like sex with children. I think the What I don’t want is complete censor- just funny. I remember one we had a great authorities have steered right away from ship of everything. I don’t want to cen- trial with. It was a medieval costume drama anything that could be said to have any lit- sor, providing the choice is voluntary set on a castle’s walls, and everyone was erary merit. I suppose it would be possible and not put into the faces of people who wearing suits of armour or the ladies were to be shocked by a book if you’ve got some don’t want to see it or vulnerable people, wearing those long hats with plumes and imagination, but, a book is more difficult, by which I really mean children. But I things, then they took them all off and the on the whole, to be shocked by. A book do think there is a real problem with the usual activities took place. The credits went involves an interaction with your mind. internet and the lack of control. People up and it was called Cumalot. When the jury Visual images just have to hit you in the face. concentrate on paedophilia, but I think saw that they all laughed and we knew we there are a great many vulnerable people were on our way to an acquittal. 5D: What were we scared of back then? who are a lot older who are having their Later on – and it wasn’t with John, but lives badly affected. later on when I was in silk – I defended AM: As the prosecution put it there were in a sadomasochist case. Some of that was two things. Firstly, there seemed to be a 5D: It touches on that idea of control and pretty horrible stuff, but it was all consen- belief that you only had to watch a couple how much control should be allowed. sual. I’ve never come across a snuff movie of these films and you would start trying or anything along those lines, but I have to imitate the behaviour there would be a AM: It does. It certainly does. I suspect you defended cases where people were actually breakdown of traditional morality. Second- oughtn’t be able to access stuff unless you harming one another but it was consensual. ly, they also thought they were trying to make considerable effort and probably pay My view was that it wasn’t exploitation; it protect young people, particularly. We do money to do so. I don’t know how you was just that these were rather sad people make mistakes in those sorts of areas, I think put the genie back in the bottle. People are who were unfortunate enough to only noticeably on drugs. It’s no good trying to not aware how addictive some of this stuff find gratification by watching and doing warn young people about the evils of drugs is. Back then you’d have to go and find the these bizarre things. because they know more about drugs than shops and seek out the magazines and the the adults. The more you tell people not to contacts. 5D: John was of the firm belief censorship do things, the more they actually do them. is gone. Is it gone or has it just changed to Those were the fears we had and I think 5D: Is passivity the dangerous ingredient? suit our time? all that’s changed to some extent. We have abandoned the idea that you only have AM: No matter how something affronts AM: We haven’t worked out how we deal to get sight of an image or read a passage you the first time you see it, when you with offences concerning children at all. from Lady Chatterley, or the equivalent, to see it day in, day out you do tend to find We go in with a sledgehammer and what have a breakdown of the social order. yourself somewhat changing your attitude. we do then is break up families. We don’t know how to deal with it properly. 5D: Have you thought about how the law 5D: Did you feel any backlash from femi- I think John was wrong. I think censor- succeeds in protecting the vulnerable but nists? Did anyone at the time say you were ship does still take place. Censorship is still respects free speech? helping to put forward material that was certainly there almost to the point of para- denigrating to women? noia. You’ve only got to suggest there’s AM: I’m not there yet but I certainly think a child involved in anything and the full that I will, at some stage, when somebody AM: Certainly not at the bar. I wasn’t force of the law comes down on you. I’m gets round to trying to face up to it, be in aware of that at all. I don’t think I felt that not sure to what extent violence is being favour of a greater restriction in so far as myself, in fact I’m sure I didn’t. I’m not prosecuted now. There was a time when it’s possible to impose the law upon what sure why, perhaps I was looking at it in things had moved from sex on to violence. goes out on the internet. too simplistic a way. It hasn’t gone. It’s just changed its empha- Some of it was extremely exploitative, sis and moved away from sex to offences 5D: Do you think there would be people but equally some of it was almost Sex and involving children and, to a lesser extent, who would fight against you at that time the City with bells on. The Linda Lovelace now violence. in favour of freedom of imagery, in much films, for example – Linda Lovelace, or the same way you fought for freedom of the characters she played, appeared to be 5D: What about words? speech? in total control in the films. It was not somebody being forced to do things they AM: Our relationship to words has changed AM: At the moment there would, but I’m didn’t want to do. It was somebody taking very much since those trials. The concentra- not sure that when, as I believe increasing-

16 ly, people see that there is enormous dam- and trying to shut down those sites. It’s 5D: Wouldn’t that sort of block set the age done [by internet addictions] that that probably impossible to do at the moment, stage for another John Mortimer to come will necessarily be so. I think it is a real, but I’m sure there will be a technology in through and make his case again? serious, growing problem. At the moment due course which will enable it to be done. we talk about addictions as drink and We do face such restrictions in our lives, AM: I wonder. I think John, in a way, was drugs, but I think there are addictions to many of which I disagree with, but that a one-off. John didn’t believe in any rules the internet which are every bit as damag- I’m sure is at some stage something the of any sort but that’s anarchy, and attrac- ing and which are, on the whole, concealed state will feel it ought to do. tive though it is in a straightforward and because you don’t see the immediate physi- China blocks all sorts of things. And so clear argument, I wonder . . . John was of cal effects. But the effect of breakdown on we’ll find the free world blocks all sorts of his time, I think, which was a time when lives and families, I think, is a growing one, stuff. There’ll always be people trying to things were opening up. I think they’re and when that is recognized people will find ways around it and no doubt succeed- beginning to close down now. They go in feel we’ve got to take some steps here – in ing. At the moment we don’t even begin cycles. Maybe there will be another John. I a way they have with child pornography to try. expect not. ◊

The Obscenity Issue line of people were collecting outside of Foyles [the independent bookshop on Charing Cross Road] to get hold of ‘We’re moving into restrictive times’ the book before it was banned. And the queue got to be over a mile long. I didn’t John Calder tell anyone about the letter from the DPP, of course, because I wanted to keep the John Calder was the British publisher of Henry thought very likely, didn’t happen either. excitement going. We sold 160,000 copies Miller, Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs Tropic of Cancer came along two years in hardcover. and others. He was at the vanguard of changing after the Chatterley trial in 1960. I had attitudes to what was acceptable in print in the invited Henry Miller to Edinburgh and he 5D: The issue here was the depiction of sex? 1960s, championing freedom of expression, and a got such a standing ovation I was persuaded free press, during several high-profile court cases. the time had come to publish him in Brit- JC: He was just very frank about his sexual In 1966 Calder convinced John Mortimer, then a ain. He was loved all over the world, and in life. You’ve got to remember that until divorce lawyer, to take his first obscenity trial in America. I wrote to a considerable number the Obscene Publications Act, which was defense of the graphic depictions of sex and drugs of people – Graham Greene, Bertrand Rus- in 1959, the word ‘fuck’ in a book would in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit To Brooklyn. sell, Evelyn Waugh – to ask would they be enough for it to be prosecuted. You’d Now 82, Calder has relinquished his publish- be willing to appear as witnesses, then I expect the jury to automatically condemn ing house. By day he occupies a cluttered desk sent a list of sixty or seventy names to the it for one word like that. in the basement of his South London bookshop Director of Public Prosecutions saying I not far from his flat. When we met he had was going to publish this book, saying it 5D: What other words or phrases were just returned from Ireland, touring Beckett’s was out in America, it was out in Germany, forbidden? Endgame, and was preparing a short lecture France and so on, saying it was nonsense on Dylan Thomas for an upcoming event at the that such a major novel could not be pub- JC: Simple Anglo-Saxon words which shop. – Jakob von Baeyer lished in Britain because of our outdated you heard around you all the time. But in censorship laws. I said if they wanted to print – oh, horrors. And you could not FIVE DIALS: What causes you offence? take action I would withhold publication bring a witness in to court to go into the until after a trial because I didn’t want to literary merits of the work. The Obscene JOHN CALDER: Things to do with cruelty. get booksellers into trouble. But that there Publications Act of 1959 allowed, for the I’ve always been more interested in the was this long list of witnesses willing to first time, the defence to bring witnesses political side of things than the moral ones. appear in court for them to see. into court. I’ve never really looked to be attacked, A month went by and not one word, so you know. I went ahead. I could only find one printer 5D: But there was a real trial in 1964 for willing to print the book and all he could Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book? 5D: Was Tropic of Cancer the first time one print was 10,000 copies. Ten days before of your books was on trial? publication, I finally got a letter from the JC: Cain’s Book had extremely good Director of Public Prosecutions saying reviews but it was not a national case. It JC: No, that was the one I got away with. they were not going to prosecute. I kept was a bookseller in Sheffield, a sort of The trials I prepared for were the trials this letter to myself. backstreet bookseller, who had a large that didn’t happen. Tropic of Cancer didn’t On publication day, on the evening stock of borderline books seized. But they happen and William S. Burroughs, which I news on the BBC, I heard that a long did seize Cain’s Book as well. The book had

17 had good reviews and had been selling for timer, who was a friend, and had tea at his Most hardcover novels were about twelve a while, but the sales had declined at this house. I said, ‘Look, the lawyers I’ve got to fifteen shillings. Twenty-five shillings point and were due a new boost, so I decid- just don’t understand the issues here, but was a pretty hefty price, but we did it ed to defend it. A few of us went up to you do. You’re a writer. Would you lead deliberately, because it wasn’t money that Sheffield. Unfortunately Trocchi insisted an appeal for us?’ And with some reluc- anybody young would have to spend on a on coming. Trocchi just made every kind tance he agreed. He said, ‘Well, I’ve main- book. But then Henry Miller’s agent came of trouble. I said, ‘Books don’t corrupt ly been a divorce lawyer up until now.’ I over and wanted me to sell the paperback people, they just inform them.’ And Troc- said, ‘Yes, but you are an intellectual and a rights straight away. I said it’s not advis- chi went into the witness box after me and writer, and you understand the issues.’ He able; only adults are buying and if it’s in said, ‘I totally disagree with my publisher. was brilliant. The appeal judges found for paperback everyone will be able to get If I didn’t think that books affected people us, so we won in the end. But that took hold of it. But he put great pressure on me, I wouldn’t bother to write them.’ He went over two years. so in the end I had to sell the paperback out of his way to be as provocative as pos- rights, reluctantly, because the hardcover sible. The magistrate found against it. They 5D: What was the substance of the argu- was selling so well. probably would have anyway. That was ment of the appeal? the kind of people they were. 5D: How did this affect you as a publisher JC: The main thing was that the judge had of ‘obscene’ books? 5D: The obscenity here was the depiction not explained literary merit sufficiently of drug use? well to the jury. There were three appeal JC: In the sixties I had a series of bestsell- points, but that was the main one. There ers. They were not particularly typical JC: Yes. There wasn’t much sex but there were no witnesses in appeal court. It was of what we were publishing. We were were detailed descriptions of shooting purely legal argument between the two publishing a rather intellectual, literary up heroin into your arm and all that, and barristers. After that, of course, Mortimer list with a lot of translations – people like what a man feels when he is doing it. It was the first name everyone thought of. Samuel Beckett, the French nouveau roman, was autobiographical. Trocchi was Brit- and so on, which sold, but not particularly ain’s best-known drug addict at the time, 5D: What have we gained from the trials well. but in those days, you see, it was legal. of this time? You got a prescription daily if you were a 5D: Did the marketing appeal of ‘obscene’ registered addict. There were only two or JC: The sixties was an age of reform. You books drive sales? three hundred people in the country who had one bill after another. Law reform were registered. came in, capital punishment was brought JC: No doubt about it – anything that The court found against the book. We to an end, censorship in the theatre was had been forbidden. People liked reading appealed in the High Court in London and brought to an end. There were all these about sex, I suppose. It got them excited the appeal went against us, whereupon it Liberal reforms, one after another, with or interested. But then that gradually died became illegal to describe a description the Wilson government. It was also the down and now it’s rather taken for granted. of drug taking, meaning that it could first time young people had money in their Interestingly, at a certain period there was be prosecuted from there on. We went pockets – you didn’t have to work so hard a lot of behaviour that was perfectly legal on selling the book. Not in Sheffield, of and life was easier. In the years before, and nobody could touch you whatever course, but quietly, and it just went on there obviously was sex around but it you were doing. But writing about it was selling because of its general reputation. It was kept very, very quiet. People didn’t illegal. went on selling quite well for years. talk about their private lives much. Then But then came the Last Exit To Brooklyn everything just exploded. And, of course, 5D: What would it take today to have a case. That was purely the result of a Billy the older generation reacted against it book taken to trial for obscenity? Graham campaign. He came over and did eventually, and that was Thatcher. Now [the television show] Big Breakfast; he used things are changing again. I think we’re JC: The times we’re moving into are going to take the Albert Hall and have these big ultimately going to go back to the fifties to be restrictive in a lot of ways. Civil Christian rallies there. Everybody would again, to the sort of era like in 1947 when liberties are being eroded here right now. come forward to be saved. It was all very things were rationed and short. We all know that. That means some books fundamentalist. He said a book was com- – political books – are going to come under ing out that he would like to see pros- 5D: Thinking as a publisher, are there attack. Whether or not they go back to ecuted. He picked on Selby just because he words or phrases that may offend? worrying about obscenity again, I would had recently been published, but Last Exit guess more restrictive attitudes may follow. wasn’t any stronger than most other books. JC: No, not me personally. What people I read The Satanic Verses long before the There were, however, descriptions of inci- are more worried about today is what goes fuss started. I didn’t see anything in it. I dents of homosexuality. on on the internet. I certainly kept things found it a rather amusing book in a lot of They won. I said we must appeal and away from children. I published Tropic ways. And then he [Salman Rushdie] was was told there’s no sense appealing against of Cancer for twenty-five shillings, which threatened with death and some of his a jury trial. So I went to see John Mor- was quite a lot of money in those days. publishers and translators were murdered.

18 I can remember going into a bookshop in JC: Well I’m well over eighty now. I’ve him. I said, you never know. I’m always Manchester one day and finding the whole stopped publishing myself. I can only rec- willing to listen to every point of view. place totally smashed up because they’d ommend. I never really looked for trouble, [Laughter.] been selling the book. I think we’re going it sort of came. But when it comes you I remember one debate, somewhere like to see a lot more of that now. have to defend yourself. Leeds, out in the open air. John Trevelyan, Actually, I was very often asked to the film censor, who was also a friend of 5D: The new line is not sex or drugs, but debate with Mary Whitehouse about mine, was with Mary Whitehouse arguing religion? censorship. I got to know her very well. against me. And I remember her saying In the end she was pretty unshockable, ‘And doesn’t Mr Calder realize that sex JC: Fundamentalism is coming back every­ anyhow. Once we debated in a town hall and violence are exactly the same thing?’ where and it’s going to be trouble. Vio- in Birmingham against each other. She There was a man in the front row who had lence has started again in Northern Ireland. packed the place with her supporters fallen asleep who suddenly woke up and I was up there a little while ago in Enniskil- who were all waving Bibles at me. It was yelled: ‘Nonsense, woman!’ and every- lin, a nice town, and the people I spoke to a dreadful night. It was pouring with body laughed. said things were over with. They’ve ended. rain, and winter, and I was wondering All the university debating societies They haven’t. They’re coming back. There how I was going to get to the station and invited me, and it was very often Mary are always a few fanatics, people who like back to London. Suddenly Mr White- Whitehouse debating against me, or a trouble. I think from now on it’s going house, her husband, asked, ‘Are you right-wing journalist. I always argued the to be political and ideological conflicts looking for a taxi? Would you like a lift case as I saw it, and I always used to win. between different racial or faith groups. to the station?’ I said, Mr Whitehouse I But then I began losing because she would really would. On the way he said, ‘You pack the place with her supporters. Opin- 5D: Are you tempted to get involved and know, tonight you were quite reasonable. ion was changing anyhow. Thatcherite to publish things which challenge where Perhaps you’ll begin to see things our days were beginning. I was asked to talk a that line is? way.’ Well I wasn’t going to argue with lot in those days. ◊

The Obscenity Issue with my portfolio, feeling that it was bet- ter than anything they published, and told them I wanted to do comics. ‘There aren’t any rules any more’ I was already beginning to do surreal comics with no punch lines, but with- Art Spiegelman out the context of underground comics around me. I was groping for something. I Art Spiegelman is often credited as the father of example, the FCC [Federal Communica- went up to see the editor and he said, ‘You the graphic novel. Famously, his two-volume tions Commission] has determined that got anything with some sex and drugs Holocaust comic Maus, in which Jews are drawn certain words cannot be said on the radio. in it?’ I was a seventeen-year-old kid. I as mice and Nazis as cats, won the Pulitzer Certain things couldn’t be in bookshops just didn’t know that much about sex and Prize in 1992. Spiegelman’s early interest in the for a long time. The reason I thought my drugs. potential of comics, like the lurid and exciting book Breakdowns could not even be re- So I went to college to avoid the draft panels he discovered in Tales from the Crypt, published is because I was working with and look into sex and drugs some more was scuppered by a restrictive Comic’s Code obscene drawings. so I could come back with appropriate in fifties America. He later became part of the material. By the time I came back the taboo-breaking underground comics community 5D: Have you ever set out to create a delib- underground comics thing had really which thrived in San Francisco in the sixties and erately obscene image? started with Robert Crumb as its avatar, seventies. and with [comic artist] S. Clay Wilson Spiegelman was in London to promote a re- AS: Yes, I did. In 1965 I was a high school egging Crumb on to greater depredations issue of Breakdowns, one of his experimental kid, inspired by MAD magazine, who like Captain Pissgums and his Pervert strips from the seventies. I met him in his Soho wanted to be a cartoonist of some kind. I Pirates, Ruby and the Dykes, and these hotel room on a rainy night. His only demand just didn’t know what kind of comics I intense George Grosz-inspired, totally was that he could chain smoke throughout our wanted to make. By the end of high school congested pictures of every obscenity that interview. – JvB I was offered a newspaper strip, but that could be drawn in defiance of the Comics was the kind of cartoonist I didn’t want Code that censored comics in the fifties FIVE DIALS: How have the boundaries of to be. I thought it would be like being in America. It was in that context I began obscenity been defined in comics? invited into a tomb every day for the rest doing underground comics. These guys of my life. I saw the first issue of theEast were slightly older, and more sophisticated ART SPIEGELMAN: In America there are Village Other – an underground newspaper and advanced than me, so I tried to draw specific rules about what’s obscene. For with rotten drawings in it – so I went over the most obscene comics I could make. I

19 succeeded in totally terrifying R. Crumb’s images was the buzzer that would set cops between what can be seen and what can- wife. She wouldn’t let me in the house. on your trail. not be seen are changing. Let’s say it was before I found my voice. I My book Breakdowns didn’t have a very Clearly, what’s obscene are dead bod- didn’t yet know where atrocity lay in my wide public when it came out. There was ies in Iraq. That’s harder to see. At least in own life, so it got projected elsewhere. a lot more interest in it after Maus. My America, and without really great Goo- There was an issue of Zap comic that publisher heard about Breakdowns and gling skills, those images aren’t entered was pretty much purged from all the my editor at Pantheon said, ‘What’s this into the bloodstream. For me that is actual bookshops and led to some crippling Breakdowns thing?’ I showed it to him and obscenity – atrocity photos, or something lawsuits for the booksellers. One sweet he said, ‘Oh, we could publish that.’ I that can either exist as evidence or can Robert Crumb drawing called ‘The Fam- said, ‘You can? But what about this?’ and I exist as horrifying titillation for people. ily That Lays Together Stays Together’ showed him the panels that to me still rep- That would be genuinely obscene. showed parents, grandchildren and ani- resented the forbidden. He looked at me mals all fucking in a tableau in typical and said, ‘What, the naughty bits?’ I felt 5D: How do you think we arrived at this Crumb style. That was definitely the one really old. I felt like a hick. And as I said point? that blew the whistle. There was a very at the time, and wrote in my afterword, I specific line that one couldn’t cross at the know we live somewhere between Janet AS: I don’t think there are any rules any time, which was photographically repre- Jackson’s tit and Paris Hilton’s clit, but I more, or any rules that are understandable. sentational images of organs that depicted don’t know exactly where. Usually the rules would have to do with penetration. That was the marginal line These colliding agendas exist now. On means of distribution. Other than that that has long since been crossed. But at one hand there are absurd fences being whatever you could manage to get a hold that moment it was a clear definition. You built but on the other hand one can see of and keep private was yours to deal with didn’t get to explain context. It’s the same anything, anything – a suicide, as I just as you may. But in mainstream media, in thing that maybe James Joyce had to deal saw listed on one of the news sites, that television and radio, there are limits, usu- with when his book [Ulysses] was com- someone put on Facebook. You can see ally arbitrary, and there’s usually someone ing out and had the word ‘fuck’ in it. The people fucking any creature that has an trying to push at them, to figure out what visualization of highly representational aperture large enough. The divisions can and can’t be said or shown. One of the places where this limit sits is at exactly those images by Robert Crumb that we were talking about, when a representation of an adult is fucking with a representa- tion of a kid. That, in and of itself, is enough to land somebody in jail. Which is strange because it’s a representation. My moral indignation at certain things is trumped by my moral indignation at when things are stopped being said. I can’t think of too much that’s as obscene as the government that I lived under for the last eight years in terms of its disregard for life, its greed, its stupidity. It’s been an obscene eight years. On the other hand, that’s because it exists in the world of actions. If there’s some kind of fevered, dreaming, mad, sadistic inner life of Karl Rove, if he had turned into some sort of Genet-like novelist, I could have lived with it. It’s just when it began to create real blood and gore and bodies and dispossession, disenfranchisement. That’s what gets me mad. I come from this Lenny Bruce-like, First Amendment, absolutist place where it can all be said. When it becomes more than said it has to be looked at again. But if it can’t be said, maybe it has too much power? Because that which can’t be said still gets whispered, and at that point it roils and infects. ◊

20 The Obscenity Issue like to grow up poor in the richest country on earth . . . we can’t have that!

‘The culture wars are coming back’ 5D: You did a lot of the work of exposing what was going on in courtrooms and sen- Jello Biafra ate chambers and presented it in a way that was entertaining, meaning young people Jello Biafra knows more about the long arm of with censorship? would tune in and learn what was going censorship than most: In 1986 the former Dead on. Did you see your role that way at the Kennedys singer was charged by the LA deputy JB: It added fuel to the fire. When the time, as a kind of translator or jester? city attorney with ‘Distribution of Harmful LAPD charges came down I realized I was Matter to Minors’, placing him squarely in the Tipper Gore’s pigeon. I became an inter- JB: Um, I don’t think jester is quite the first group of people in America ever to face crimi- view machine. I was practically losing my right word. nal charges over a record. In the heyday of Tipper mind because of the pressure of going Gore’s organization, the Parents’ Music Resource through a trial in court and thinking the 5D: In the sense of poking fun at the king? Center (PMRC), and their burgeoning ‘Tipper whole future of the music industry might sticker’ album-rating system, Biafra set himself be on my back – whether they were help- JB: I used to be a little self-conscious apart as a louder voice in the fray, fighting censor- ing me or not – so I could not fuck up. when so many people got down on my ship (and the religious right) via his increasingly In the end two good things happened: I lyrics in Dead Kennedys, saying, You public trial, his music and a discography of spoken got to meet and spend time with Frank shouldn’t be such a preacher, you’re going over word albums that now span two decades. Zappa and suddenly, instead of spoken the line, but it didn’t really make me back Biafra’s underlying philosophy might be word readings in little coffee houses, I was down. But then, when the so-called ‘cul- summarized as this: Question Authority. His brought into universities as a supposed ture wars’ began in earnest, it coincided spoken word rants are instantly recognizable for ‘censorship expert’ to, quote–unquote, with all kinds of buyouts and hostile their volatile content, complete with call-outs ‘lecture’ to the students. But I’ve always takeovers of mass media outlets when the of elected officials. His delivery style is a mix of hated the concept of lectures, so they got merger and takeover laws were dereg­ vocal twang and vaudevillian energy and though the spoken word show instead. ulated by the Reagan regime. his dark, curly hair is a little thinner up top now and he’s thicker in the middle, his face and voice 5D: It’s a great platform. 5D: What was the result of mergers? carry the same animation and vitriol as of old: during his days in the Dead Kennedys he wore JB: It also meant that there are sections JB: Corporate-owned mass media became spray-painted t-shirts; during his 50th birthday on one of my spoken word albums that deliberately dumbed down in order to use party show he dived shirtless into the crowd. explain the sordid, ugly details of who the news to sell more products and keep From the hugely influential Dead Kennedys was funding the Parents’ Music Resource people in the dark. And as Chuck D put it to his new venture, JB and His Axis of Merry Center. The co-founder of the PMRC was when people were grilling him on the lyrics Evildoers; from a run for mayor in San Francisco also on the board of Focus on the Family of Public Enemy: We are the new CNN. I in ’79 to being tapped as a presidential candidate at the time and Focus remains the leading took that very seriously and thought it’s by the New York state Greens in 2000, Biafra Christian Right hate group in this country. not just hip hop where you need to tell has kept the politics in punk and the punk in One of the things the PMRC wanted red- people what’s going on. All artists need to politics. – Colin Whyte flagged when it came to music ratings was tell people what’s going on because if we homosexual content. don’t, who will? So then, by the time the JELLO BIAFRA: If you’re recording we Gulf War broke out, mainstream corporate have to make sure it’s working. 5D: That and the occult and the classic media in this country was way more openly seven words you can’t say on television. biased than I had ever seen them before. I, FIVE DIALS: I checked already by phoning of course, went ballistic at a time when a some people before you, so I think we’re JB: Then when Public Enemy and Ice-T lot of people were afraid to say anything all right. and N.W.A. got popular, Tipper and crew and I realized that the ‘Talk on Censorship’ had a field day because then they could at the spoken word shows didn’t need to JB: Check it again . . . I don’t want it to be play the race card, just like the people who be confined to Tipper Gore and religious like SPIN Magazine who interviewed me got rock ’n’ roll thrown off the radio in Right hate groups anymore. I could talk and Ice-T together about the Rodney the late 1950s. Oh my God, your children! about anything I wanted and, in all like­ King riots and then brought the tape to Your nice, precious, suburban children! The lihood, it was things that were not getting New York and it was blank . . . that’s what devil! The guy with the horns only scares reported in mainstream news. I want to avoid. so many suburban white parents, but you start bringing in the horror that their chil- 5D: What aspects of the censorship debate 5D: I hear you. Was your move from music dren might be listening to political music in the USA do you think we should con- into spoken word and more straight-up made by – gasp! – black people who are talk- sider ‘settled’ at this point? politics catalysed by your own experience ing in very graphic ways about what it’s

21 JB: Is it ever settled? duced in Congress called the Media, Mar- Toby Keith or Arnold Schwarzenegger or keting & Accountability Act which would Mel Gibson – then it’s OK . . . 5D: Well it seems, at least, like the religious introduce a federally mandated sticker to Right is a less obvious boogeyman now. rate sexual content, level of violence, how 5D: What do you think, right now, is the patriotically incorrect art is or whatever main mechanism by which moral stand- JB: Whoa, well they’ve been more suc- and it would be a one-size-fits-all system ards are enforced in the USA? cessful at penetrating the mainstream. And for music, movies, DVDs and games. And as much as people recoiled in horror and anybody who did not ‘voluntarily’ adopt JB: I’m not sure there is a main mecha- laughed at Sarah Palin, when I saw her the rating system and slap it on their prod- nism. It comes in layers. I mean, nowadays speech at the Republican Convention I ucts – their products would automatically what’s creeping me out is how people – gasped in horror: A star is born! become illegal. If you tried to sell some- not just young people but mainly young So are any parts of this argument dead? thing without the mark the Federal Trade people – feel like their lives are not valid No. I think the dramatic dumbing down Commission could then fine you $11,000 except based on how they advertise them- of the news media in the United States per unit sold per day. Luckily that bill has selves on Facebook or MySpace. You have is the worst form of censorship going on never even made it out of committee to advertise yourself or you don’t exist. today. Corporations deliberately omit- every time it’s popped up, but the last time ting key parts of the story or forgetting to it was introduced another sponsor was 5D: Who do you view as the custodians of report the story altogether – that got us added: Hillary Clinton. taste these days? into Iraq and now we can’t get out. And Part of the reason the PMRC faded away that’s far more dangerous than Tipper was that who needed the PMRC when you JB: Same as it’s been for generations: Gore or Focus on the Family. I mean, real had the Bush Administration and a corpo- Hollywood. And that goes for corporate people are getting killed because of this rate media willing to do anything the Bush McNews, as well. It’s getting harder and every day. Administration wanted, including bullying harder to tell the difference between the The so-called Culture Wars were quiet- anybody who opposed the war on terror news and Entertainment Tonight. er when Bush was in office, in part because or any part of the invasion of Iraq. You’ll [Since Five Dials is a publication pro- there were way nastier things that were notice how they vilified the Dixie Chicks duced in the UK], readers in Britain need scaring the shit out of people. But they’re and even attacked Sheryl Crow for hav- to realize that part of the reason Americans going to come back. And one of the ing a peace sign on her guitar strap at the are so ignorant and so dumb and so insen- people that I fear is going to bring them Grammy Awards – my God, you’d think sitive about some things, such as the way back is Barack Obama. He said during his she wanted to blow up a building or some- Israel treats Palestine, is because our cor- campaign that if people who make video thing! I could almost forgive her for all her porate media is so dumbed down . . . Let games don’t crack down on the content of horrible music. And the message was: ‘Pop me put it this way: About five days after 11 those games then ‘my administration will.’ culture figures should not express political September 2001, I flew over to Europe for I mean, all three of the major candidates opinions because they’re abusing their vis- a spoken word tour and I was just stunned had an agenda against freedom of speech if ibility and popularity in the marketplace.’ at the difference in quality between the you go back far enough. You know – ‘Artists must not be political.’ European media’s coverage [of 9/11] and Several times there’s been a bill intro- Unless, of course, they’re [country singer] the American media’s coverage. There was so much more depth in Europe . . . so many more sides to the argument were allowed to be heard; and then I came back home and started talking to people about some of these things I’d found out and people hadn’t heard about them at all. I’ll say it again. The worst kind of censorship going on today is McPapers regurgitating what advertisers and the government tell them to print. How do you fight back? ‘Don’t hate the media, become the media.’ And that includes going one-on-one with people you know at home, work, school, family . . . They start spouting Rush Limbaugh/Sarah Palin bullshit or they’re too blindly obe- dient to Obama without really checking to see what he’s actually doing – don’t just dismiss them as stupid or rednecks or unreachable – sit down and talk to them. If you don’t, who will?

22 5D: Fox News? relatives and friends who live out in these the right to free expression you can’t fight other areas. global warming, you can’t fight for animal JB: It may turn your stomach. You may rights or anything unless you have the right get put down and ridiculed. But at least 5D: You’ve got the war itself and this to express yourself. you planted some seeds. That’s how we ‘greater depression’ looming, so how turned a majority of Americans against the important is the fight against censorship 5D: To question authority . . . war. It wasn’t CBS, it wasn’t MTV, it wasn’t in the grand scheme of things? Are there Lollapalooza – it was us. On top of that I other things we should be fighting against JB: Without fear of being taken away to tell people that there’s large sections of the first, say torture? some torture chamber or prison. country now that have been so monopo- lized by the Clear Channels and the JB: I think you have to fight them all at 5D: Is it hard for you to tell who the bad Disneys of the world that all people are once under the umbrella of human rights. guys are? exposed to are, you know, twenty crappy I mean, you can’t stop torture unless you pop music tunes and, for political content, have the right to agitate against torture and JB: Oh, for me it’s actually quite easy . . . it’s ‘all assholes all the time’. Right-wing express yourself. But you have to use one [Laughs.] Anybody with a wind-up key debating ultra Right-wing, and that’s all to fight the other; you have to fight both sticking out of their back saying, ‘Cor- they get. So in places like that . . . people at the same time. You use your freedom porations: please screw me so I can screw who are in bigger cities or hipper college of speech to fight other assaults on human somebody else.’ I think it’s pretty obvious towns or whatever should encourage their rights, because without human rights and who they are. ◊

The Obscenity Issue it.’ I said, ‘OK, I’m going to be at Macola [Records, a Hollywood vinyl pressing plant] on Tuesday. Have the guy show up ‘Censorship has now moved into the and I’ll talk to him. Whatever.’ On 3 March 1987, a beautiful spring hands of the people’ afternoon in Los Angeles, this tricked-out Suzuki Samurai pulled up. This little guy, Jerry Heller to AIDS. Dr. Dre has become one of the most Eric Wright, got out the driver’s side. MC successful producers in hip hop history. Ice Cube Ren was in the passenger seat. Eric was Jerry Heller broke into the music industry in (who painted Heller as the white devil of hip hop clean – pressed Levis, a cap with Jheri 1966, representing artists for a mobbed-up book- for skimming N.W.A.’s profits, although he has curls sticking out. Alonzo introduced us. ing agency in Los Angeles. Heller went on to never pursued the allegation in a court of law) is Eric reached down in his sock, pulled out act for stars like Marvin Gaye and Van Mor- now a Hollywood leading man. He continues to a roll of money and paid Alonzo $750. I rison; he booked Elton John and Pink Floyd’s record gangsta rap, as does MC Ren. DJ Yella said to him, ‘You got anything for me to first American tours. In 1987, he met Eric is the CEO of an adult film company based in hear?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ He didn’t say, ‘Oh ‘Eazy-E’ Wright, a twenty-one-year-old drug Compton. Heller spoke to me about his experiences man, I got this girl, and I got this guy, and I got dealer who wanted to rule the hip hop game. with the band on the phone from his home, north- this song, and this is my boy, and this is my this, The unlikely duo became friends and business west of Los Angeles. – Matthew McKinnon and this is my that’ – the typical bullshit LA partners. They co-founded a gangsta rap label, record business patter. He was willing to Ruthless Records, and Heller agreed to manage JERRY HELLER: Alonzo Williams, who was let his music do the talking. Wright’s band, Niggaz With Attitude. the patron of the World Class Wreckin’ We went inside and he put on ‘Boyz-N- In Heller’s estimation, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, Ice Cru, and one of the most influential of the the-Hood’. I was flabbergasted. It blew my Cube, MC Ren and DJ Yella were no less than early West Coast rap impresarios and artists, mind. When I asked Eric what the name ‘the black Beatles’. The band became US law was a close friend of mine. He kept saying of the band was, he said, ‘N.W.A.’ I said, enforcement’s public enemy no. 1 upon the release to me, ‘There’s this guy who comes in my ‘What’s it stand for, No Whites Allowed?’ of their 1988 album Straight Outta Compton. club, and I’d like you to meet him.’ At the He laughed and said, ‘Actually, that’s The song ‘Fuck tha Police’ had violent, anti- time, I was managing Egyptian Lover, the pretty close.’ I didn’t know what it meant authoritarian lyrics; Heller says it provoked fre- Wreckin’ Cru, LA Dream Team, J.J. Fad until I heard ‘Straight Outta Compton’ quent run-ins with the LAPD and, in a letter of and Bobby Jimmy and the Critters, so I – ‘Crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube, from complaint from the FBI, N.W.A. was cited for was reasonably busy. Alonzo kept on me the gang called Niggaz Wit’ Attitude.’ I’m obscenity after performing the song in Cincinnati, for a couple months, until I said, ‘What’s not sure the profanity was anything more and nearly arrested for doing the same thing in the story? Is this guy your brother-in-law than a vehicle to draw attention to the Detroit. Their manager champ­ioned their right or your cousin?’ He said, ‘No, he’s a guy message, which was the anguished cry of to freedom of speech at every turn. who comes in the club and spends money. what’s happening in America’s inner cities. N.W.A.’s last album was released in 1991. He offered me $750 to set up a meeting, I remember Gil Scott-Heron, I remember Eazy-E died in 1995 from complications related and to be honest with you, I could use the Rolling Stones, I remember the Black

23 Panther Party. I thought to myself, this is you’ve got to stop getting high. This is JH: It was the furthest thing from my a combination of those forces that’s going too crazy. Nobody will ever listen to this, mind, that the world’s number one law to shock the world. I was willing to give no radio station will ever play it, and cer- enforcement agency would take ‘Fuck up everything I was doing to go into busi- tainly no one will ever buy it.’ I said, ‘Joe, tha Police’ seriously. Even though I had ness with Eric Wright. I remember when radio stations wouldn’t been around Huey P. and Rap Brown and play “Let’s Spend the Night Together” by Bobby Seale and the Panthers – I actually FIVE DIALS: Right now I’m looking at the Stones – now Mick Jagger is Frank represented Emmett Grogan and the Dig- a Polaroid of you standing in front of a Sinatra. Things change, Joe. This is one of gers – it was never something that crossed house with your arm around Eazy. There’s those times, one of those seminal albums my mind. a sold sign on the lawn, and someone has that is going to forge a change in Ameri- What crossed my mind was, how am printed ‘The Wrong Hous [sic]’ beneath can culture.’ I going to get white people to buy this the photo. Do you know why? record? How am I going to get the people 5D: Did you expect ‘Fuck tha Police’ in Kansas and Nebraska and Minneapolis JH: That’s the first house that Eazy bought, would be labelled obscene? and places like that, which is probably in Norwalk [south-east Los Angeles ninety per cent of the record-buying County]. I had never been there before. JH: I’m a child of the sixties. I grew up public in America, and was probably There were two or three new houses in a with a president who was a crook, who eighty per cent of the record-buying row, and we wound up taking the picture put us into the most unpopular war in public in the world in those days? What in front of the wrong one. It was a modest history, who had no communication with I came upon was this: the Huntington house, but it was especially meaningful to people under thirty. I had seen the Sym- Beach surfers and skateboarders, who him, I think because it was the first time bionese Liberation Army and the Panthers are always on the cutting edge of the anyone in his family had really owned a and the Diggers, I understood what they arts in this country, liked Suicidal Ten- home. It exemplified our relationship, that were about. I didn’t think the authorities dencies, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses. we were able to do that together early in would perceive ‘Fuck tha Police’ as the I approached those groups, who then his career. kind of threat that they did with the Pan- became giant fans of N.W.A. If you look thers, because the Panthers really scared at the interviews and videos Guns did 5D: You look paternal. them. But I thought they would find it during that period, ’88, ’89, ’90, you’ll see distasteful, and I certainly never thought them wearing Compton t-shirts and hats. JH: That was our relationship. It was very that radio would play it. Their fans said, ‘If Guns thinks they’re much father–son. cool, if Metallica thinks they’re cool, if 5D: Milt Ahlerich was an assistant director Suicidal Tendencies thinks they’re cool 5D: In your book Ruthless: A Memoir, you of the FBI when he wrote, ‘Law enforce- – they’re cool.’ We’re talking about 26 mil- wrote about representing Marvin Gaye in ment officers dedicate their lives to the lion people who had bought Appetite for the 1960s. Were you still his agent when protection of our citizens, and records Destruction at that point. he released Let’s Get It On, which became such as the one from N.W.A. are both notorious for its sexual content, in 1973? discouraging and degrading to these brave, 5D: What happened when N.W.A. per- dedicated officers’ and, ‘I wanted you formed ‘Fuck tha Police’ in Detroit? JH: No. But we had a close relationship; to be aware of the FBI’s position relative we were very good friends. There was to [‘Fuck tha Police’] and its message. I JH: We had been warned by the mayor that some discussion about Let’s Get It On believe my views reflect the opinion of the if the band played ‘Fuck tha Police’ there when it came out, but nothing serious, entire law enforcement community.’ Was would be serious repercussions and the because it wasn’t so overt that it came to his letter alarming to read? city would close the show. I said to the the attention of radio programmers. They guys, ‘The date is sold out, and if they shut seemed to be more lax toward black artists JH: First of all, Priority Records, which you down, it will cost us a couple hundred than they were to artists like the Rolling was our distributor, was terrified. Number thousand dollars. Can we do one show Stones. Marvin didn’t throw sex in your two, the band loved it. They thought it without that song?’ They said no prob- face like Mick and Keith did with ‘Let’s was one of the greatest compliments of lem. They got on stage and started with a Spend the Night Together’, which is the their lives. I took it very seriously until couple other songs. Then they looked at first record I can remember that radio sta- Donald Edwards, who was a Democratic each other, started laughing, and went into tions wouldn’t play. congressman from San Jose, came out and ‘Fuck tha Police’. Mysteriously, some ​cherry defended our right to free speech. Once bombs went off in the audience. The cops 5D: There was nothing radio-friendly he did that, I said, ‘Fuck these FBI guys. interpreted that as gunfire and rushed the about N.W.A. Whatever happens, it’s not going to go stage. We had two tour buses at that time, unnoticed.’ but the police had confiscated our bus JH: I went to see Joe Smith when he was drivers’ licences so they couldn’t drive. My chairman of the board at Capitol and 5D: Still, getting scolded by the Bureau cousin Gary Ballen was N.W.A.’s produc- played him Straight Outta Compton. He must have been a surprise. tion manager; my old friend Atron Gre- looked at me and said, ‘You know, Jerry, gory was the tour manager. To get the band

24 offstage, they took the guys through LL 5D: Is censorship gone since the time of 5D: Body Count, a metal band fronted by Cool J’s dressing room, out the back door ‘Fuck tha Police,’ or has it just changed? Ice-T, released ‘Cop Killer’ in 1993. The and on to the hotel. When the cops got to song was thematically similar to ‘Fuck tha LL’s room, I guess all blacks look the same JH: Censorship has moved into the hands Police’, and was equally loathed by US to them, so his guys took the beating that of the people rather than into the hands authorities. What did you and Eazy think was meant for N.W.A. Elvis had already of the legislators. One thing that N.W.A. when you heard it? left the building. did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reli- JH: ‘Cop Killer’ was more of a rock ’n’ roll 5D: But the police found them anyway, ance upon the good sense of the people record than it was a rap record. Ice-T was right? to determine what’s right and what isn’t, the original gangsta rapper in Los Angeles. what’s obscene and what isn’t, and what’s He was a lot older than the guys in N.W.A. JH: When our guys got to the hotel, I told immoral and what isn’t. It’s an individual He was a friend, but Eazy didn’t feel he them not to leave their rooms because choice now, which is what it should be. was making the same magnitude of politi- the police couldn’t come inside without a cal statement that Straight Outta Compton search warrant. Of course, they weren’t in 5D: What do you think that society was made. We thought about it more from an the rooms fifteen minutes before they were afraid of back then? economic point of view than we did from down in the lobby looking for women. a ground-breaking, sociological-political The cops showed up; it turned out to be a JH: N.W.A. were the audio-documenta- point of view. fiasco. I negotiated a settlement with the rians of their time. They were trying to chief of police, which was that N.W.A. shock people with the violence of their 5D: What about Public Enemy? ‘Fight the would leave the state immediately. Their language and the subjects they were talk- Power’ came out a year after ‘Fuck tha next date was in Nashville or somewhere. ing about. The fact that they dressed in Police’, and became as much an anthem The cops gave the bus drivers their licenses guerilla outfits like the Black Panthers for hip hop on the east coast as ‘Fuck tha back and the band left Detroit. made them shocking by their appearance Police’ was for the west. as well. People my age were terrified of 5D: I want to read you something from the Panthers in the sixties and seventies. JH: To me, there are no two more impor- Ruthless: ‘In Cincinnati, N.W.A. was They were terrified that the Panthers were tant acts in the history of American hip busted for violating the city’s obscenity going to poison water supplies and com- hop than Public Enemy and N.W.A. They statutes, taking [their] place in a long line mit overt acts of terrorism. Remember went hand in hand, with Public Enemy of artists, from actress Mae West to photo­ that one Sunday afternoon in 1971, the on the east coast emulating the Panthers grapher Robert Mapplethorpe, victimized Panthers walked into a San Francisco and N.W.A. on the west coast emulat- by the censorship capital of America.’ Was police station and killed a police officer. ing the life of inner city youths in places that episode a repeat of Detroit? We’re talking about people the system like Compton. When those bands broke couldn’t control. ‘Fuck tha Police’ reawak- up, that was the end of gangsta rap as far JH: Those two cities, along with St Louis ened that fear in the hearts and psyches of as I’m concerned. Everyone else were just and Milwaukee, amazed me, because I middle America. imitators. The difference between ‘Fight always thought they were in the north. the Power’ and ‘Fuck tha Police’ was But those places were unbelievably big- 5D: Does that fear persist? What if ‘Fuck that Public Enemy was making a politi- oted against the band. It was obvious tha Police’ came out tomorrow instead of cal statement and N.W.A. was making a what their motives were. In Cincinnati, twenty-one years ago? sociological statement. The songs were the guys did ‘Fuck tha Police’ and the interlocking in a certain respect. Together, police came on stage and cited them for JH: For one thing, the record stands up. they covered the whole spectrum of prob- obscenity. The people from the River- Certainly, it enlarged our level of toler- lems that Bobby Kennedy had been trying front Auditorium, where the show hap- ance and understanding of the problems to remedy before he and Dr. King were pened, told us they would finance a law- that young people face in our inner cities, assassinated. suit against the statute up to the Supreme to the point that everybody can under- Court if we were willing to take it that stand their situation. ‘Fuck tha Police’ isn’t 5D: I don’t remember Public Enemy get- far. Towards the end of that lawsuit, the about killing police, like Milt Alherich ting knocked for obscenity. N.W.A.’s officials from Cincinnati called us and said said. It’s about the interactions of inner offence seems to have been violating com- they would let us off if we paid tickets of city youths when confronted by different munity standards – although there’s no $117, and they would only cite two guys configurations of police: a black officer such thing as a homogeneous American in the band. We refused. The Riverfront with a black officer, a white officer with community. people won that suit. Around the same a white officer, a black officer with a time, the city lost another obscenity suit white officer. That’s what it was trying to JH: N.W.A. had something in common [over an exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s enlighten young America about – what with the Rolling Stones and MC5 and photographs at the Contemporary Arts it was like to live in that environment. It groups like that: the voice of rebellion. It’s Center]. It was a great victory for civil certainly wasn’t a call to arms against the rebellion against your parents, it’s rebellion liberties. police. against the system, it’s rebellion against

25 society. The band just had to strike that JH: That wasn’t open for consideration. I I’ve never been prouder than the period note of discord, to make the public feel thought Straight Outta Compton was the from 3 March 1987 to 26 March 1995, that what they were saying was not that most important piece of work I had heard when I was associated with Eazy-E. different than what the Rolling Stones since the mid-sixties, probably since Sgt. were saying in 1965. Pepper. I was totally uncompromising, the 5D: Finally, should we be legislating band was totally uncompromising, the against some forms of obscenity these 5D: Was it necessary to defend against backbone of the band, Eazy-E, was totally days? everything? Or, turning that question on uncompromising. MTV banned the video its head, what if N.W.A. had not defended for ‘Straight Outta Compton’ and we JH: We have to worry about nuclear capa- ‘Fuck tha Police’ – if they had chosen to refused to change anything about it. We bilities in Iran and global warming and the apologize for the song and pull the album were going to rise or fall with what you economy now. There’s far more serious from stores? see is what you get. Of all the things I’ve problems for us to face than whether some- done in my career, which have been many, one says ‘motherfucker’ or ‘cocksucker’. ◊

The Obscenity Issue The Parental Advisory Sticker Patrick Neate

was a guest last year at a conference at applicable in western society – after all, call smut! / Girl, let’s get butt naked and I the University of Tübingen in southern alienated as we are, isn’t ‘in’ but not ‘of ’ a fuck!’) Really, I did. Germany. Titled ‘Multi-Ethnic Britain’, it state familiar to us all? Looking back, is it just me that finds the was organized by the English department In the end, though, I just suggested she acronym quaintly coy and even the vul- and attended by academics from across get hold of a copy of Ice-T’s seminal 1988 garity of the lyric somehow innocent? the nation and beyond. Privately educated, album, Power, and take a gander at the I think it was the sticker that mattered white, middle-class and suburban, I was cover. to me most; more than the sex and vio- clearly the ideal candidate to address the I’m looking at it now: there’s the man lence, let alone the music. Just like my nuances of British multiculture; so that’s himself, front and centre, concealing a gun kicks had to be Nike, so my listening had what I did. behind his back. On his right stands Dar- to be Parental Advisory. At my school, I didn’t complain. In fact, I rather lene Ortiz, his then girlfriend, wearing the where kids customized their jackets with enjoyed it. Increasingly, I suspect this is skimpiest swimsuit the other side of 1990, spray paint, the most popular stencil the lot of the contemporary British novel- and wielding an Uzi. And, on the other read ‘Parental Advisory: Explicit Con- ist – the illumination of otherness for the side, affixed to the bottom right hand cor- tent’. In fact, I spent much of this period reading classes. It’s the price we pay for ner, is that notorious sticker with the bold choking on terrible, throat-scorching telling stories more interesting than our black and white lettering: ‘Parental Advi- hash on the grounds that it was dope and own. sory: Explicit Content’. it was illegal. And I likewise listened to At lunch one day, I was approached by I explained to my solemn interroga- inane, expletive-driven hip hop on the an earnest, murine woman. She challenged tor that this image represents an adequate grounds that it was rap music and it was me to explain why white, middle-class, summary of hip hop’s appeal to adolescent Parental Advisory. To me, it made sense. suburban boys – not just in Britain, she boys: sex, violence and vexing the ’rentals. I may not have known much about sex, shockingly revealed, but all over the con- Simple. still less about violence. But pissing tinent – should find relevance in the music I confess I said this with some convic- off the parents? I knew how to do that, of black America; specifically hip hop. tion since that very album cover once had didn’t I? I pondered a moment. The woman pride of place on my teenage bedroom Apparently not. wore spectacles perched on a nose that wall. In fact, back in 1988, I actually When my mum saw the Power album might have been ergonomically designed bought Power unheard, solely on the basis cover pinned to my bedroom wall, she for the purpose. of that swimsuit, gun and sticker. And I didn’t bat an eyelid. She knew I was trying I considered telling her about the pri- was in no way disappointed by its contents. to tell a story more interesting than my macy of ‘authenticity’ (however nebulous I used to cruise Putney High Street in own. It seems nothing changes. And as its meaning) as a contemporary cultural my dad’s Mazda estate, windows down meaningful as the Parental Advisory label signifier; perhaps even postulating that and stereo cranked, playing ‘Drama’, ‘I’m was to me, so it was meaningless to her. W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of ‘double- Your Pusher’ and, most frequently, ‘Girls My mum certainly needed no advice from consciousness’ might now be universally LGBNAF’ (‘Do that stuff that your mama a sticker. ◊

26 The Obscenity Issue after cutting him to pieces, they put him on the wood they’d piled and set him on An Incomplete Guide To Obscenity fire. Burned him alive.’ OBSCENITY FOUR: In which democracy Arundhati Roy’s Field Notes from India triumphs again. The overwhelming public reaction to This is in the nature of an Open F.I.R. (First term as Chief Minister, the Indian news- the Tehelka sting was not outrage, but Information Report), a technique borrowed from magazine Tehelka did a sting operation in suspicion about its timing. Many believed the Indian Police. (It’s true what the agony which several of the killers were captured that the exposé (like the genocide itself ) uncles say, there’s some good in everyone.) An on camera boasting about their crimes would help Modi to rally the Hindu vote. Open F.I.R. is a Work in Progress, which and detailing the ways in which they Some even believed, quite outlandishly, allows the police to keep adding new suspects were supported by Modi and his admin- that Modi had engineered the sting. (under the sub-heading ‘& Others’) to old case- istration. The sting was broadcast on a Whatever the reasons, he did win the files. In that spirit, this document is offered as a national news channel. elections again and is now Chief Minister preliminary dispatch. This is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major for a third term. lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, rec­ THE GENOCIDE IN GUJARAT orded on camera: OBSCENITY FIVE: In which the police ‘We didn’t spare a single Muslim shop, lend a hand. OBSCENITY ONE: In which the Govern- we set everything on fire. . .hacked, burned, While the carnage raged, the Gujarat ment sponsors genocide. set on fire. . . we believe in setting them on police stood by and watched. Several In the state of Gujarat, there was geno- fire because these bastards don’t want to victims testified that the police actu- cide against the Muslim community in be cremated, they’re afraid of it . . . I have ally helped the killers. The Ahmedabad 2002. I use the word genocide advisedly, just one last wish . . . let me be sentenced to Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey and in keeping with its definition con- death . . . I don’t care if I’m hanged . . . just for example, was kind enough to visit tained in Article 2 of the United Nations give me two days before my hanging and Gulbarg Society while the lynch mob Convention on the Prevention and Pun- I will go and have a field day in Juhapura massed before the attack. He did nothing. ishment of the Crime of Genocide. The where seven or eight lakhs [seven or After Modi was re-elected, Pandey was genocide began as collective punishment eight hundred thousand] of these people promoted and made Gujarat’s Director for an unsolved crime – the burning stay . . . I will finish them off . . . let a few General of Police. of a railway coach in which fifty-three more of them die . . . at least twenty-five The police also found other ways to Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. thousand to fifty thousand should die.’ help. When survivors went to the police In a carefully planned orgy of supposed Babu Bajrangi continues to have the to file reports, the police would record retaliation, more than one thousand Mus- blessings of Chief Minister lims were slaughtered in broad daylight Narendra Modi, the protec- by squads of armed killers, organized tion of the police, and the by fascist militias, and backed by the love of his people. He con- rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tinues to work and prosper Gujarat government led by the Gujarat as a free man in Gujarat. Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Muslim In another gruesome women were gang-raped and burned alive. incident, Ehsan Jaffri, the Muslim shops, Muslim businesses, and Congress politician and poet Muslim shrines and mosques were sys- who had made the mistake tematically destroyed. One hundred and of campaigning against fifty thousand people were driven from Modi in the Rajkot elections, their homes. All this was widely reported was publicly butchered in in the national media. Gulbarg Society, a housing society in Ahmedabad. More OBSCENITY TWO: In which democracy than forty others were killed triumphs. with him. Several women Soon after the genocide, there was a were gang-raped before they State election. Narendra Modi who pre- were killed. In the words of sided over the genocide was voted back to Mangilal Jain: power for a second term. ‘Five people held him, then someone struck him OBSCENITY THREE: In which the killers with a sword . . . chopped have their say. off his hand, then his legs . . . Towards the end of Modi’s second then everything else . . . [and]

27 their statements inaccurately or refuse to In Hindustan, land of the Hindus, lives universe, systemic horrors are converted record the names of the perpetrators. In and should live the Hindu Nation. . . . into temporary lapses, attributable to several cases, when survivors had seen All others are traitors and enemies to flawed individuals, and a more ‘balanced’, members of their families being killed the National Cause, or, to take a chari- happier world is presented in place of the (and burned alive so their bodies could table view, idiots. . . . The foreign races more disturbed one. Those at the top not be found), the police would refuse to in Hindustan . . . may stay in the coun- of the food chain, those who have no register cases of murder. try, wholly subordinated to the Hindu reason to want to alter the status quo, are Nation, claiming nothing, deserving most likely to be the manufacturers of OBSCENITY SIX: In which procedure is no privileges, far less any preferential the ‘counterfeit universe’. Their job is to everything. treatment–not even citizen’s rights. patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegiti- In a democracy, for impunity after mize anger, and negotiate a ceasefire. genocide, Procedure is everything. In And again: This is Shahrukh Khan’s (Bollywood the case of several massacres, the public superstar, heartthrob of millions) response prosecutors the Gujarat government To keep up the purity of its race and to a question about Narendra Modi. ‘I appointed had actually already appeared culture, Germany shocked the world don’t know him personally . . . I have no as counsel for the accused. Several of by her purging the country of the Se- opinion,’ he says. ‘Personally they have them belonged to the Rashtriya Swayam- mitic races–the Jews. Race pride at its never been unkind to me.’ sevak Sangh (RSS) which is the ideological highest has been manifested here . . . a Ramachandra Guha, liberal historian heart, the holding company of the BJP good lesson for us in Hindustan to and founding member of the New India and its militias. Or to the Vishwa Hindu learn and profit by. Foundation, advises us in his new book, Parishad (VHP) and were openly hostile to India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s those they were meant to represent. By the year 2000, the RSS had more than Largest Democracy, that to describe the BJP forty-five thousand shakhas (branches) and regime – in power both in Gujarat and at OBSCENITY SEVEN: In which we see that an army of seven million swayamsevaks the centre during the 2002 genocide – as Hindu fascism’s roots are wide and deep. (volunteers) preaching its doctrine across fascist would be to ‘overestimate its pow- The RSS was founded in 1925. By the India. They include India’s former Prime ers and to underestimate the democratic 1930s, its founder, Dr K.B. Hedgewar, a Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former traditions of the Indian people’. To sub- fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun to home minister and current leader of the stantiate his point, Guha reminds us that model it overtly along the lines of Italian opposition L.K. Advani, and, of course, in the 2004 general elections, the bjp alli- fascism. Hitler, too, was and is an inspi- the three times Gujarat chief minister ance at the centre was voted out of office. rational figure. Here are some excerpts Narendra Modi. It also includes senior peo- ‘When was the last time a “fascist” regime from the RSS bible, We, or, Our Nationhood ple in the media, the police, the army, the permitted such an orderly transfer of Defined by M.S. Golwalker, who suc- intelligence agencies, the judiciary and the power?’ he asks. He omits to mention that ceeded Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS administrative services who are informal in the Gujarat state elections held soon in 1940: devotees of Hindutva – the RSS ideology. after the genocide (which Guha calls ‘the Gujarat riots’) Narendra Modi was voted Ever since that evil day, when Moslems OBSCENITY EIGHT: Some industrialists, a to power for a second term and then, five first landed in Hindustan, right up to newspaper editor, a little Bollywood and years later, for a third term. So far, in the present moment, the Hindu Nation some Schollywood. Gujarat, there has been no transfer of has been gallantly fighting on to take It’s not surprising that very little of all power, ‘orderly’ or otherwise. on these despoilers. The Race Spirit this makes it into the version of the New has been awakening. India currently on the market. That’s Editors and commentators in because what is on sale is what Robert Jay the ‘secular’ national press, having got Then: Lifton calls a ‘counterfeit universe’. In this over their outrage at the Gujarat geno- cide, now assess Modi’s administrative skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. Vir Sanghvi then editor of the Hindustan Times said, ‘Modi may be a mass murderer, but he’s our mass murder- er,’ and went on to air his dilemmas about how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a ‘good chief minister’. At the Vibrant Gujarat meeting in January 2009, the CEOs of India’s leading corporations including Ratan Tata, and Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Industries), publicly backed Modi as India’s future prime minister. ◊

28 Poem Horns: A Coda Marilyn Chin

uring the tenth month of the Dfirst year of the reign of Emperor Jing, a little girl from the southernmost province of Guangdong grew horns. The horns were hideously sharp with little tufts of greenish hair sprouting in the ridges. When the new emperor heard about this monster, he ordered his five most valiant soldiers to execute her. But, when the soldiers arrived, the girl’s grandmother had already sent her into the hills. The old woman, then, with proper demeanour, served the men last year’s infe- rior crop of high mountain tea and quoted The Book of Changes: When an evil minister of state usurps power, the indigenes will grow horns. The head soldier replied with a quick cou- plet from ‘The Treatise of the Five Mon- archs’: Little girls, no matter how mistreated or angry, must not grow horns. Feudal citizens, no matter how unhappy, must not revolt against the Lord. Whereupon, he took out his sword and slayed the grandmother and mounted her head on a pole, as a warning to other renegade villagers. Centuries of chaos and pogroms fol- lowed. Finally, rebellions were quashed, marauders were executed and there were no more incidents of little girls grow- ing horns. By now, most of the world’s citizens have smooth, unfurrowed hair- lines. Albeit, there was a sighting of a pair of razor-sharp growths erupting on the forehead of a little brown girl. She was last seen in the autumn of 2008, smooch- ing with her surfer-dude boyfriend and strolling on a sun-flooded promenade in San Diego.

29 Help Pages and he recommended ruin-gazing as ‘the most intense pleasure that memory can pro- cure’. He even proposed that the Coliseum The Agony Uncle was far more attractive in ruins than it could ever have been in its heyday. Alain de Botton will make life easier For a ruin-complex to work its power, it should feature a once impressive set of I am one of those people who has never quite symbols of civilizations in ruined form, as buildings, preferably banks or temples or fulfilled his potential. I did well at school and a warning to, and revenge on, the pompous palaces, now lying in an artful arrange- in my university studies, but I have not made guardians of the age in which they were ment of stones overrun with weeds and any great success of my career. Sometimes, I feel painted. So fond was he of painting the flowers – and even better if in the rooms envious of friends of mine who have made a lot great buildings of modern France in ruins where kings once made their subjects of money. One friend of mine started a chain of that the French eighteenth-century painter tremble, a goat is nibbling at some grass or pizza restaurants and is now extremely wealthy Hubert Robert earnt himself the nickname a donkey is defecating. (with all the usual toys: a Mercedes, a twenty- ‘Robert des Ruines’. His ‘Imaginary view ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of four-year-old girlfriend – we are both fifty-six, of the Grande Galleries of the Louvre in Kings / Look on my works, ye Mighty etc.). I hate feeling envious, but I can’t deny that Ruins’ (1796) is a fine example of his work. and despair!’ reads an inscription on the I feel bad. What can I do to worry less about the In England, his contemporary Joseph pedestal of a statue of Ramses II of Egypt achievements of others? – Mark, London Gandy made his name by painting the in Percy Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. But Bank of England with the ceiling caved there is no need for the mighty, or even here may be no better cure for in and some seventy years later, Gustave the humble, to despair. Ramses II lies in Tenvy than the thought of death. Doré illustrated London as he imagined pieces on the ground, and Shelley ends the The thought might seem a melancholy it would look in the twenty-first century; poem with the lines: ‘Round the decay / one, but arguably far more so for those resembling a latter-day version of Ancient Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare currently anchoring their lives around Rome, complete with a New Zealander, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’ the pleasures of a high-status position an inhabitant of the country that in Doré’s In ruined cities, we can enter without than for those ignored by the world and day was thought to represent the future, knocking into the bedrooms of people therefore already well-acquainted with sketching the ruins of the then brand-new who would once have been guarded by the oblivion that their counterparts will Cannon Street station – much as English- legions. We can yawn in the reception eventually be accorded. It is the rich, the men had once gone to Rome to sketch the rooms of kings; we can step into the tomb beautiful, the famous and the powerful Parthenon or Coliseum. of a man who would never have let us to whom death has the cruellest lessons While artists have anticipated the ruins approach him and indifferently chew our to teach. However troubling the notion of the future, many travellers have set out way through a sandwich, bits of ham fall- of our own mortality might be, there on journeys to contemplate the ruins of ing onto the dusty floor in which there is comfort to be found in the idea that the past. Already by the eighteenth century, may still be infinitesimal fragments of among those who will suffer our fate are ruin-tourism was an established feature of emperors’ bones. What was once a throne the very people whose achievements are the experience of travel; parties routinely may be a good place to apply suncream. now apt to leave us feeling inadequate stopped to behold the ruins of Troy, Cor- Ruins speak of the folly of giving up our and envious. Their celebrated names, inth, Paestum, Rome, Thebes, Mycenae, peace of mind for the sake of the unstable their wealth, their parties, their arrogance, Knossos, Palmyra, Baalbec, Petra and rewards of earthly power. In contemplating their cruelty – all these will be washed Pompeii. No longer were ancient statues them we may feel our anxieties about our away by time. We may be forgotten and to be used as latrines and temple columns achievements slacken. What will it matter ignored in our own day, but we can rest as lintels for stable doors. The Germans, if we have not been a success in the eyes assured that everyone else will ultimately masters at according compound words to of others, if there are no monuments or join us in oblivion. Time equalizes pain- fugitive and rare states of the soul which processions in our honour; such things will ful earthly differences; the ashes of the other languages require paragraphs to evoke in any case disappear into dust and New Chief Executive and the peasant will end (Weltschmertz, Schadenfreude, Wanderlust) Zealanders will in time be sketching on the up mixed together in the earth. No won- quickly coined terms to describe the new ruins of our boulevards and department der that certain people have, throughout feeling for old stones: Ruinenempfindsamkeit, stores. Judged against eternity, how little of history, found a bitter-sweet pleasure in Ruinensehnsucht, Ruinenlust. In March 1787, what agitates us can matter. Ruins bid us to going to look at graveyards and the ruins Goethe made two visits to the ruins of Pom- surrender our strivings and our images of of past civilizations. peii: ‘Many a calamity has happened in the perfection and fulfilment, to stop defying For those roughly treated by society, world,’ he reported from Naples, ‘but never time and accept that we are the playthings there is a pre-emptive revenge to be had in one that has caused so much entertainment of forces of destruction which we can at anticipating individuals’ and society’s even- to posterity as this one.’ ‘What wonderful best keep at bay, but never vanquish. A tual demise – a pleasure that painters have mornings I have spent in the Coliseum, lost playfulness and lightness may descend upon often expressed. The history of art con- in some corner of those vast ruins!’ remem- us as we contemplate ourselves from a per- tains a number of canvases showing the key bered Stendhal in his Promenades dans Rome, spective of a thousand years hence. ◊

30 The HH Archive ship which is not founded in a much closer personal respect is a vicious thing. This spirit seems to me to pervade Lady Chat- How To Be A Witness terley throughout, and in this it seems that it is highly moral and not degrading of sex.’ Richard Hoggart is examined during the Chatterley Trial ‘As far as the young people under your care are concerned, would you think that Richard Hoggart was the ideal candidate to have written in Britain in the last thirty this was a proper book for them to read?’ defend Lady Chatterley’s Lover because years’, said Mr Hoggart. – ‘Viewed purely in the abstract, I would he embodied, as much in his writing as in his ‘It has been said that the two main think it proper, if they came to me to ask outlook on life, Ruskin’s belief that ‘the great- characters in the book are little more than me if they could read it, to tell them to est thing a human soul ever does in this world is bodies which continuously have sexual ask their parents, and probably I should to see something and tell what it saw in a plain intercourse together. What would you say give them a note to their parents asking way’. At the time he had not long published to that as a fair summary of this novel in them if they could read it, but I would The Uses of Literacy, a book dedicated to such relation to its main characters?’ – ‘I should not take that responsibility upon myself.’ an ideal and to upholding the values instilled think it was a grossly unfair summary. I ‘You would think that a wise course?’ – in him by his grandmother, who herself read should think it was based on a misreading ‘Yes.’ Lawrence’s descriptions of sex and remarked that of the book.’ ‘Have you children of your own?’ – ‘Yes.’ ‘’E makes a lot of fuss and lah-de-dah about ‘The book has also been described as ‘By the time you have reached the end it.’ Language mattered to Hoggart because he little more than vicious indulgence in sex of the book, have those two persons, in knew that most boys of his background – urban, and sensuality. In your view is that a valid your view of the reading of it, found some orphaned, working class – were almost wholly description of this novel?’ – ‘I think it is true and real contact, as opposed to all the dispossessed of its true range. He’d heard the invalid on all three counts. It is not in any contacts at the beginning of the book?’ – word ‘fuck’ three times on his way to court only sense vicious; it is highly virtuous and if ‘Yes, I think the ending of the book has a because it had come to mean something filthy anything, puritanical.’ result which one can hardly find in litera- and vitiated. What is filthy about fucking?, he ‘Did you say “virtuous and puritanical”?’ ture now. He is able to say things in the reasoned. It was the false division between those interrupted Mr Justice Byrne. And Mr letter he writes at the end, the very last deemed morally superior due to their high status, Hoggart, who was a self-composed, deter- page, “Now is the time to be chaste, it is and those not trusted to have morals of any kind, mined and unshakeable witness, said that so good to be chaste, like a river of cool which had given rise to the word’s misuse in the he did. He added that ‘indulgence’ was not water in my soul.” This is the writing of first place. His commitment to looking at things the word for the love passages in the story. a pure man. “I love the chastity now that honestly and speaking to others truthfully was ‘The sexual encounters, the parts in which it flows between us. It is like fresh water invaluable in the book’s defence: he was damned we have descriptions of sexual life, are all and rain. How can men want wearisomely if he was going to allow ignorance and secrecy to carefully woven into the psychological to philander,” that is, to be promiscuous. prevail, as it always had done. In standing up relationship, the context of the two people, This seems to me a resolution which estab- for it, he stood up for himself and all those who and the natural flow from this as part of an lishes that the book has moved through had helped him to climb ‘hand over hand’, in attempt at explaining their outlet, either the whole cycle.’ his words, out of a situation in which one was physical or spiritual. The third word in the ‘It is quite obvious, of course, that this expected to remain for life. And if his grand- statement is?’ and Mr Hutchinson repeated: relationship is between two people who in mother could handle it, so could the rest of us. ‘Vicious indulgence in sex and sensual- fact are married. Would you say this book – Lynsey Hanley ity.’ – ‘The book obviously includes sen- advocates – it obviously describes – but sual passages because they are part of the would you say it advocates adultery?’ – ‘I Then came Mr Richard Hoggart, author relationship, but certainly not indulgent think the book advocates marriage, not of The Uses of Literacy, Senior Lecturer in and certainly not vicious. I thought, taken adultery. It takes a difficult and distressing English Literature at Leicester University. as a whole, it was a moral book.’ human situation which we know exists. A He was introduced to the Jury as a man ‘We know one of the complaints is that marriage which has gone wrong, which who went from elementary school and it uses four-letter words. What exactly do had never started right. It doesn’t burke grammar school to university and took an you mean by saying that, taken as a whole, the issue by saying they went on some- English degree. He said that he lectured you think the book is a moral book?’ – ‘I how, and this is very much to the point. on D.H. Lawrence to ‘the young people mean that the overwhelming impression He could have made this analysis of the under his care’. He was a member of the which comes out to me as a careful reader realization of the solution through sex by Albemarle committee on the Youth Serv- of it is of the enormous reverence which a wife who did not love her husband. He ices and of the Pilkington Committee on must be paid by one human being to stacked the cards against himself. He was broadcasting. Mr Hutchinson asked him another with whom he is in love and, in talking about the nature of a true marriage what he thought about the literary merit particular, the reverence towards one’s relationship between people. We know of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. ‘I think it is a physical relationships. Physical relation- there are bound to be occasions in human book of quite exceptional literary merit, ships are not matters in which we use one beings, sometimes for very bad reasons and probably one of the best twenty novels we another like animals. A physical relation- sometimes for reasons that are unavoidable,

31 when there is friction between our formal sex.” But one realizes from this last letter it, fuck it” as he went past. If you have state of marriage and the relationship we that, between Mellors and Lady Chatter- worked on a building site, as I have, you meet with, the genuine relationship he is ley, there will be periods of extraordinary will find they recur over and over again. talking about. He did not say, if you want chasteness; there will be moments of The man I heard this morning and the to enjoy yourself in sex you should leave coming together in love which will be all men on building sites use the words as your wife or husband, but the thing to do the better because they are not using one words of contempt, and one of the things in a marriage was to work hard at every another like creatures for enjoyment. It is Lawrence found most worrying was that level. When you get up in the morning a kind of sacrament for him.’ the word for this important relationship and cook breakfast, don’t lose your temper ‘I want to pass now to the four-letter had become a word of vile abuse. So one with the children. Having gone through all words. You told the Jury yesterday you would say “fuck you” to a man, although this they will get married. He tells us so; were educated at an elementary school. the thing has totally lost its meaning; it they are waiting for it.’ Where was it?’ – ‘Leeds.’ has become simply derision, and in this ‘In your view is there anything more ‘How did you start your life?’ – ‘I was sense he wanted to re-establish the mean- in this book than, at the end, two people born into the working class and I was ing of it, the proper use of it.’ finding a state of satisfactory sexual rela- orphaned at the age of eight and brought ‘What do you say about the use of these tionship?’ – ‘There is not only more in it up by my grandmother.’ words as they have been used in this book?’ than that, but one could say – although ‘What is your view as to the genuine- – ‘The first effect, when I first read it, was it sounds paradoxical – one could say the ness and necessity in this book of the use some shock, because they don’t go into physical sexual side is subordinate. I am of these four-letter words in the mouth polite literature normally. Then as one read sure it was for Lawrence. He said more of Mellors?’ – ‘They seem to me totally further on one found the words lost that than once that really he is not interested, characteristic of many people, and I would shock. They were being progressively puri- not unduly interested in sexual acts. He is like to say not only working-class people, fied as they were used. We have no words interested in a relationship between peo- because that would be wrong. They are in English for this act which is not either a ple which is in the deepest sense spiritual. used, or seem to me to be used, very freely long abstraction or an evasive euphemism, This includes a due and proper regard for indeed, far more feely than many of us and we are constantly running away from our sexual and physical side. I believe in know. Fifty yards from this Court this it, or dissolving into dots, at a passage like this book what he said is, “I must face morning I heard a man say “fuck” three that. He wanted us to say “This is what one this problem head on, even at the risk times as he passed me. He was speak- does. In a simple, ordinary way, one fucks”, of having people think I am obsessed by ing to himself and he said “fuck it, fuck with no sniggering or dirt.’ ◊

Fiction half-step back. A long silence. HUGO motions to the phone.)

Scene Two HUGO I’m getting my DNA tested. An Excerpt From A Play By Steve Toltz (Pause.) (Back to the phone) Sorry. Sorry. Of course, SCENE TWO: Hugo’s office please. . . The genetic codes are the tarot cards of the twenty-first century, they reveal every- (HUGO is at his desk, on the phone.) (There is a knock on the door. Before HUGO thing about you – from how many hours has a chance to respond, CLAUDE enters. She is of sleep you need a night to how high you HUGO his student – a goth with black clothes and black wear your pants. This is Professor Hugo Fox. I sent down a eye makeup and black fingernails.) couple of DNA samples. I was wondering (CLAUDE takes a step towards HUGO. HUGO if the results were back. When will that be? HUGO takes another step back.) OK . . . whenever you can, that would be (HUGO looks out the window.) great. Thanks. HUGO The future is etched into your body. HUGO (HUGO hangs up the phone.) Genes are the new fate. These atomic-sized Hey. (He leans out the window.) LUCINDA! interwoven strands of destiny will tell me LUCINDA! LUCINDA! CLAUDE all my prospects and limitations, and will You wanted to see me? illuminate the exact size and shape of the (To himself) She’s not turning around. boundaries within which I am allowed to (CLAUDE walks towards HUGO and stops only improvize my life. (To Lucinda) I know you can hear me! a couple of inches from his face. HUGO takes a

32 (Pause.) HUGO the unexpected happened. I’m not interested in getting into a debate DNA will even tell me if I have blue eyes about sexual politics, Claude.(Pause.) (Pause.) My mother suddenly got better. or not. Besides, I told you – anything is excusable if you do it just one time and never repeat (Pause.) She was released from hospital CLAUDE it. Infidelity. Murder. Even genocide’s one Saturday afternoon and by Sunday You do have blue eyes. OK if you have only one sloppy crack at morning she was found murdered in her it. What are you staring at? bed. Shot, stabbed, suffocated and set on HUGO fire. But that is not yet confirmed. CLAUDE Your hair. It’s really receding, isn’t it? (Pause.) That’s when I knew I couldn’t CLAUDE trust people. And if I couldn’t trust I’m looking right into them. They’re blue. HUGO people, then I didn’t want to be trusted Like the shoreline before a tsunami. myself. Why should I be the only trust- HUGO worthy person on the planet! Well. That’s what DNA will tell us. CLAUDE I think it’s sexy. (Pause.) That’s why I moved to this city, (The two stand in silence.) because I wanted a change, only as soon HUGO as I got here, I realized how pointless it HUGO I think what we have here is a failure to is to go from one place to another, how Claude, do you know why I wanted to communicate. everyone travels to escape themselves and see you? no one ever succeeds, not even in death, CLAUDE not even in heaven, or hell, because the CLAUDE Did I tell you about my mother’s death? soul you believe is eternal is the exact Yes. same soul that disgusts you now, the HUGO same one that makes you sick. I’ve never HUGO Yes. During sex. understood how people can believe that You plagiarized your essay. the most sublime idea imaginable is to CLAUDE be stuck with your own tedious essence CLAUDE She was lying on her death-bed. It was throughout eternity. I know. one of those electronically-controlled death-beds, you know, in the hospital. HUGO HUGO The whole family came, brothers and My God, you’re depressing. But you plagiarized me. sisters and uncles and aunts and second cousins, a big family, these were not a CLAUDE CLAUDE physically beautiful group of people, by Thank you. As are you. What did you say Word for word. the way, in truth not ten teeth between in class today? ‘Your enemies may hurt them. They came in one by one to be you, but you can always count on your HUGO with her, to give her comfort, that was friends to ignore your cries of pain.’ It’s This essay is just an exact repeat of what I the ostensible reason for their compassion, so true. That’s exactly how people are, said in class. but they couldn’t miss the opportunity, and that’s why the best thing we can ever someone dying like that, lying alone in say about someone is that he didn’t kick CLAUDE a bed, unable to move, a perfect recep- me when I was down. I couldn’t have said it better. tacle in which to pour out the sewerage of their hearts and minds, so they slid HUGO HUGO up beside her, and confessed the deepest, You know, it really is rare to hear some- But didn’t you think I’d notice? darkest secrets that they were harbour- one your age articulate the essence of life ing in their foul souls. Dark, dirty secrets with such sophistication. CLAUDE about themselves. My brother told my I hoped you would. mother he’d slept with his brother’s wife. CLAUDE My brother’s wife confessed she’d slept Boys my age – they don’t understand the HUGO with my father. My father confessed he’d darkness. I mean, they feel the darkness, Do you think that is proper? slept with the priest. The priest confessed but they don’t understand it. You feel and he’d slept with my cousin’s son. It went understand the darkness. CLAUDE on and on. Everyone filed in one by Last week we made love on your desk. one and emptied out their worst secrets HUGO Was that proper too? into my dying mother’s ears, the worst My wife tells me not to be so negative all ex­cesses of their small, filthy lives. Then the time.

33 CLAUDE CLAUDE HUGO But you have to be! Life is horrible! How naïve. But you – you understand. How is it you understand? How is it someone so young HUGO HUGO and fresh and – if you don’t mind me She doesn’t see the darkness. One big happy family. saying – nubile, how is it you have such a deep and abiding grasp of the horrors CLAUDE CLAUDE of existence? Was it just your unhappy How can she not? Ripe for slaughter! childhood? Or was there more? Were you beaten? Were you sex-traded for a hand- HUGO HUGO ful of magic beans? Wait – don’t answer She’s always looking on the bright side. Of course, in a family like that, misfor- that. I’ve had an idea. Well, actually a tune and tragedy shocks them something feeling. Take your clothes off. CLAUDE silly. If one of them gets cancer, they act What bright side? all surprised about it, as if fifty million CLAUDE people don’t get cancer every year. Are you sure? HUGO She thinks there’s a bright side. CLAUDE HUGO Fools! Undress. CLAUDE That’s just moronic! HUGO (She starts to undress.) As if they’ve never even heard of cancer! HUGO CLAUDE It’s not her fault. It’s her upbringing. CLAUDE Are you going to undress too? Where do they get off? (Beat.) They were happy. HUGO Eventually.

34 A Remembrance The genius of The Cramps is that they knew that the true essence of rock & roll is to be found in records like ‘Hanky Long live the Garbage Man Panky’ by Tommy James & The Shondells or ‘Love Me’ by The Phantom. Records Bobby Gillespie on Lux Interior discarded, derided, as sweet-sick bubble­ gum for hormone-ravaged teens or retardo Erick Lee Purkhiser, known as Lux Interior, void, unrelenting, eternal. There was the trash for backwoods hillbilly psychot- died on 4 February, 2009, aged 62. Interior was impossibly beautiful Poison Ivy Rorschach ics. The Cramps saw the beauty in the the lead singer of The Cramps, the world’s fore- firing out wave after wave of demented unwanted, the losers, the outcasts, the most garage punk, trash rock, psychobilly band. wipe-out rockabilly/surf fuzz-tone guitar misfits, the freaks – the true visionaries death. Ivy was scary & sexy, not mov- deemed ridiculous & beneath contempt by ’m sitting in a hotel room in Sydney, ing, just cool as ice, always. She’s still one the mainstream, uptight, straight, bour- IAustralia writing this. I’ve heard the of my favourite guitar players, alongside geois ‘culture’ creeps who run the media news that Lux Interior has died and I Johnny Thunders & Link Wray. Ivy is a show in the USA & the rest of the world. feel weird & sad & numb & I don’t know goddess. Then there was Lux, a truly wild Being a Cramps fan meant you could what to say ’cept that when I told my & free rock & roll madman jumping off learn about Charlie Feathers, The Legen- band members, one by one, the reaction the fifteen-foot high stage into the front dary Stardust Cowboy, Count Five, The was the same . . . no one can believe it & stalls to terrorize the New Wave Glasgow 13th Floor Elevators, Hasil Adkins, The all are sad. Lux was loved by rock & roll- teens who had come to hear ‘Roxanne’. Seeds, The Sonics . . . the list goes on & ers all the world over, ’cos him & his band I went straight out & bought the Gravest on. They gave you an education in arcane The Cramps meant so much to us all. Lux Hits EP with ‘Human Fly’, ‘Way I Walk’, Americana. For this alone I am forever was living testament to the power of rock ‘Domino’, ‘Surfin’ Bird’ & ‘Lonesome grateful. My friends & I have been turned & roll music – it flamed through him, his Town’ . . . that was it, I was infected by The on to so much fantastic music just by whole life was taken up by playing it, liv- Cramps & their rockabilly voodoo music. being fans of Lux & Ivy & The Cramps. ing it, turning other people on to it. He I caught the virus & I’m still sick. The sad thing is, when guys like Lux & was a preacher in the best sense of the They released their debut album Songs Ron Ashton of The Stooges go, there’s a word. The Lord Taught Us, produced by Big Star/ little less rock & roll in the world. It really Lux was one of the great rock & roll Box Tops genius Alex Chilton at Sam is a dying art. showmen/shamen, right up there with Phillip’s legendary Sun Studios in Mem- When you went to a Cramps concert Iggy Pop, Jerry Lee Lewis & Jim Morrison. phis, Tennessee, where Elvis, Jerry Lee you knew you were seeing the real thing. Like them, he seemed to want to burst Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash & Roy They meant every single note they played. free from his body & explode outta this Orbison had created the rock & roll mon- People used terms like ‘trash aesthetic’ & world, transport himself to other planes, ster that was to change the world forever. ‘horror B-movie cartoon’ to describe The taking his audience with him. Songs The Lord. . . sure lived up to that Cramps – well there’s nothing trashy about The Cramps, alongside The Birthday incredible legacy & more – it’s outer-limits them. Lux Interior & The Cramps were Party, Gun Club & The Jesus & Mary rock & roll that shakes, aches, astounds possessed by the wild, free, spirit of rock Chain, kept the beautiful, feral, ecstatic, & mystifies to this day, with songs like & roll music & that is a truly beautiful & raging, diseased spirit of rock & roll alive ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf ’, ‘Garbage wonderful thing. It’s not something that at the end of the seventies and thru into Man’, ‘What’s Behind the Mask’, ‘Strych- can be bought or acquired or learned in the early eighties – a time of nothingness, nine’, ‘Sunglasses After Dark’ & the truly college. It’s something that some people when punk had prostituted itself & turned demented ‘Drug Train’, where Lux prom- are born with & feel & need to do for all into New Wave, which then begat Duran ises us ‘you’ll see Elvis with your mother’ of their life. Lux Interior was one of those Duran, Dire Straits & the legions of Rea- if we all just step aboard. Songs The Lord. . . people & the world is a sadder place with- gan/Thatcher-pleasing cocksuckers who was an instant classic. The Cramps had out him. shared the stage at Live Aid. made an album as deranged & wild & sexy Thanks for the music Lux. We’re gonna I first saw The Cramps live as support & beautiful as any of their heroes. miss you. ◊ for The Police at the Glasgow Apollo in the summer of 1979 & it was truly insane. There was Bryan Gregory, with a white Flying V guitar covered in black polka dots, wearing a frogman’s rubber diving suit, lying on his back for the whole show and shuddering spasmodically like some weird insect. The high-quiffed drum- mer, Nick Knox, dressed head-to-toe in jet black, was pounding out the holy backbeat, just endlessly staring into the

35 the obscenity issue Four Danish Cartoons

A Danish Man Opening a Birthday Card

36 A Danish Mother and Child

37 A Danish Drink

38 A Danish Man Writing

39