A Pound of Waltzing Mice

There was no getting around it: Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County was what the nonliterary citizen would call a raw book and decidedly not for the high-school youngsters. One of its six short stories had 20 more or less detailed descriptions of sexual intercourse. But Memoirs was no flippant bedroom farce. Fat, fiftyish Author Wilson, book critic for the New Yorker, had written it as a critique of modern manners and morals. Most reviewers agreed that it was an honest and intelligent work; many a reviewer and reader found it labored, obscure, pedantic and depressing. By all the form charts it should have been forgotten except perhaps in the more waspish literary circles of Manhattan.

But last July, four months after appearing in bookstores, it was rescued from imminent obscurity. Grey-haired, bespectacled 70-year-old John S. Sumner; executive secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, decided it endangered public morals. He got a court order against Doubleday & Co., Inc., its publishers, set Manhattan cops to raiding bookstores and Manhattan citizens to hunting copies as zealously as they hunted steaks.

Then the Hearst newspapers struck an attitude of righteous indignation, began castigating Hecate as "printed filth." The book sold more than 50,000 copies, became the subject of excited argument from coast to coast.

Collectors' Items. Last week the process by which copies of Hecate were being converted into collectors' items reached a climax. A Special Sessions Court in Manhattan ruled, 2 to 1, that the book was obscene. The court fined Doubleday & Co., Inc. $1,000 and forbade it to publish and sell the book. The decision made thousands of citizens more impatient than ever to get their morals ruined. It also proved again that finding a yardstick for proving a serious book indecent is as difficult as weighing a pound of waltzing mice.

Dissenting Justice Nathan D. Perlman was almost completely at odds with his colleagues. Said he: "Giving due weight and consideration to the artistic impact of [the story] and judging [it] as a whole ... I find that the story is not obscene....

"The writer is ... honestly concerned with the complex influences of sex and of class consciousness on a man's search for happiness. That problem is also of deep concern to the public. That public is entitled to the benefit of the writer's insight. ... To suppress what may appear bad in a book is also to suppress what is good therein."

The Hecate case was far from closed. A second action against a Manhattan bookseller was soon to come before three other Special Sessions justices who might well reverse their colleagues. Doubleday & Co. planned to appeal to higher courts. Before it was all over Memoirs of Hecate County might well be one of the best-known books of the decade.

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