Flaubert v. Bundling

Novembre is the autobiography of Novelist Gustave Flaubert's adolescence, with special attention to his love affairs. Translated into English three years ago, it was passed by the Federal Censor but set upon by many a guardian of local morals. Last week a New York City court ruled that Novembre is not "objectionable literature," refused to ban it. Said Magistrate Jonah Goldstein: "The criterion of decency is fixed by time, place, geography and all the elements that make for a constantly changing world. . . . The practice of bundling, approved in Puritan days, would be frowned upon today. . . . In 1906 the play Sappho was suppressed because the leading lady was carried up a flight of stairs in the arms of a man. In 1907 Mary Garden was prevented from appearing in an opera, Salome. . . . When I was a boy--I'll change that to a young man--I went to Miner's Bowery burlesque theatre and saw young women dancing in tights. There was more whistling than during a fan dance or a bubble dance of today."

By way of illustrating the lack of any continuing criterion of decency, which is fast killing censorship in most U. S. cities, the New York Junior League last month opened an exhibition of banned books from the time of Confucius to the present. Among them: Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's Richard the Second, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. The governor of a Chinese province once banned Alice in Wonderland because in it animals talked, thus putting themselves on a par with humans. Tsarist Russia, fearful lest moppets get fantastic ideas, banned Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales. Last week New York Junior Leaguers, delighted by the interest the exhibition had aroused, extended it an extra week, talked of taking it on tour.

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