THE NEW PORNOGRAPHY

JOHN CLELAND was a luckless little hack who in 1748, destitute and desperate, scribbled Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure for a flat fee of 20 guineas. He went on to become an inept philologist, ducked creditors much of his life, and died aged and unsung. If the poor fellow were only alive today, he could be a Big Writer, for critics on both sides of the Atlantic have acclaimed his ability to describe repetitive fornication with elegance and grace. He could wear hand-sewn Italian loafers, sell his still unwritten books to the paperbacks and the movies for a cool million, and lecture at progressive colleges on "Erotic Realism in the Novel."

But he would have to work hard, very hard, to keep up with the competition. For just about anything is printable in the U.S. today. All the famed and once hard-to-get old volumes are on the paperback racks, from the Kama Sutra to the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, once the last word in unprintable scatology, can often be picked up in remainder bins for 25-c-. Miller has almost acquired a kind of dignity as the Grand Old Dirty Man of the trade, compared with some of the more current writers. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis is out in two new editions, which for the first time render all those horrendous Latin passages in English--and, surrounded by the author's quaint 19th century moralizing, they seem tame alongside Candy or Norman Mailer's An American Dream.

Maurice Girodias, the shy little Parisian who was the world's foremost publisher of English-language pornography until tightening French censorship put his Olympia Press out of business, often talks about setting up shop in the U.S., but it is difficult to see what he could peddle. Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press and in a sense the American Girodias, is way ahead of him. Says Rosset hopefully: "Who knows if the limits have been reached? Just because the scientists split the atom, did they sit back and say, 'Well, that's it'?" The pioneering publisher could always push the limits a little farther by trying the notorious Story of O. or The Debauched Hospodar. But one of these days even Rosset may run out of material.

The avowed professional pornographers face a related dilemma. The fact is that all kinds of respectable hardcover books now contain subject matter and language that would have brought police raids only a few years ago "is really killing us," says a West Coast practitioner. Far from giving up, the cheap paperback pornographers are diversifying by expanding their old preoccupation with lesbianism and sadomasochism, while searching for ever more bizarre combinations and settings. Still, it is tough trying to stay ahead of the avantgarde.

With everyone so afraid of appearing square, the avant-garde is obviously trying to determine just how far things can be pushed before anyone will actually admit to being shocked. New York now exports to various other centers of culture a mimeographed magazine whose title is somewhat stronger than Love You, A Magazine of the Arts; its pages are filled by some certified avant-garde writers, many homosexuals, who mostly write pissoir poetry.

While cheap "nudie" movies are branching out into torture and lesbianism in a desperate attempt to keep a few steps below Hollywood, the far-out new wave in New York and San Francisco is also creating a cinema of sorts; such "underground" films as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Andy Warhol's Couch feature transvestite orgies with masturbation and other frills--although they seem even more concerned with an almost narcotic attack on the concept of time, since most of them are interminable.

After a visit to the U.S., Malcolm Muggeridge, onetime editor of Punch, complained: "I'd have joined a Trappist order rather than take more. All those ghastly novels--sex is an obsession with the Americans." Besides, adds Muggeridge, "if the purpose of pornography is to excite sexual desire, it is unnecessary for the young, inconvenient for the middleaged, and unseemly for the old."

Retreat of Censorship

Unnecessary or unseemly, or just unpleasant, what young and old may now read or see is part of the anti-Puritan revolution in American morals.

The Greek term pornographos, meaning literally "the writing of harlots," has always been relative and subjective. As D. H. Lawrence put it, "What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another." Until the 1930s, U.S. courts generally followed a celebrated 1868 ruling of Britain's Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn, whose test for obscenity--used more or less interchangeably with pornography--was the effect any material might have on a hypothetical schoolgirl, or its tendency to "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences." This ruling, which bedeviled and outraged the literary world for some 65 years, ignored the overall literary or educational merit of a book for the adult reader.

The schoolgirl test began to crumble in 1933 with the famed ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, which held that James Joyce's Ulysses was not obscene --despite its impudent pudendicity and ovablastic genitories --since the "proper test" is a book's "dominant effect." In 1957, in decisions that upheld the conviction of two mail-order pornography dealers, the U.S. Supreme Court finally defined its own views on the matter. First, it flatly denied the smut peddlers' contention that the 1st and 14th Amendments guaranteeing freedom of speech and press gave them a right to sell obscene material. Second, the court held that the Constitution does guarantee freedom for ideas "having even the slightest redeeming social importance--unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion." The court defined obscenity as material "utterly without redeeming social importance," and set up as its test "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest."

This does not establish a uniform permissiveness across the U.S. Each city, county and state can bring actions that publishers or distributors must defend individually, at sometimes prohibitive costs. But in general, what constitutes "redeeming social importance" is endlessly arguable, and even plainly unredeemed "hardcore" pornography is easier than ever to buy, particularly since the Supreme Court ruled that allegedly obscene books or movies cannot be seized by police until they have been so adjudged in the courts.

Matter of Taste

Lately, a distinct reaction against permissiveness has begun. Pressure is increasing from citizens' organizations such as the Roman Catholic National Organization for Decent Literature, the Protestant Churchmen's Committee for Decent Publications, and Citizens for Decent Literature, a nonsectarian organization that now has 300 chapters around the country. These groups are shrill, sincere, and sometimes self-defeating. When a Chicago court ruled three years ago that Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer could be sold locally, the C.D.L. flooded Chicago with excerpts of outrageous passages in the book, undoubtedly giving them wider circulation than they had ever before enjoyed in the city.

Miller, for one, considers such alarms trivial in the light of the Bomb. "We are now passing through a period of what might be called 'cosmic insensitivity,' " he says, "a period when God seems more than ever absent from the world and man is doomed to come face to face with the fate he has created for himself. At such a moment, the question of whether a man be guilty of using obscene language in printed books seems to me inconsequential. It is almost as if, while taking a walk through a green field, I espied a blade of grass with manure on it, and bending down to that obscure little blade of grass I said to it scoldingly, 'Naughty! Naughty!' "

Not everybody can be as cosmically insensitive as that, particularly when, as it sometimes appears, there is so much manure and so little grass. Actually, there is relatively less indignation from the pulpits of any denomination than one might expect. Says Harold Bosley, pastor of Manhattan's Christ Church Methodist: "The new license in the arts is one of the major problems in the church today. But none of us are interested in rigorous public censorship. We must help create an attitude of self-censorship and responsibility, otherwise we're dead ducks." And Baptist Minister Howard Moody of the Judson Memorial Church in New York's Greenwich Village feels that a new Christian definition of obscenity should not concentrate on sex or vulgar language alone, but on anything, particularly violence, whose purpose is "the debasement and depreciation of human beings."

As for psychiatrists, they are great believers in the Jimmy Walker dictum that no girl was ever ruined by a book, asserting, in effect, that no one is harmed by pornography who is not sick to begin with. The young, it is widely conceded, are more vulnerable, but no one has yet devised a practical way of keeping books from the young by law without also keeping them from adults--which would mean a return to the Cockburn rule.

Perhaps beyond questions of law, even beyond concern for morals, the problem is one of taste.

An open mind toward the new, the shocking, even the intolerable in art is an intellectual duty, if only because so many great and shocking artists from Swift to Joyce were so vehemently condemned at first. It hardly follows that any writer who manages to shock is therefore automatically entitled to respect as a worthy rebel. Yet this is how their followers regard the heroes of today's avantgarde, notably Jean Genet (Our Lady of the Flowers) and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch). "The new immoralists" is what they are labeled by Partisan Review Editor William Phillips, who is anything but a literary reactionary. He adds: "To embrace what is assumed to be beyond the pale is taken as a sign of true sophistication. And this is not simply a change in sensibility; it amounts to a sensibility of chaos."

Against Moralists & Hedonists

Genet, Burroughs and other chroniclers of fagotry and fellatio are different from the realists of sex like Zola, the sentimentalists of sex like D. H. Lawrence, the poetic demons of sex like Baudelaire. They are different from the good old-fashioned pornographers like Fanny Hill's Cleland or the masters of bawdry from Ovid to Aretino, Rabelais, Boccaccio and (in an off moment) Mark Twain. However unconventional, these writers found delight in sex; however critical of human folly, they were partisans of mankind. The new immoralists attack not only society but man and sex itself. Their writings add up to homosexual nihilism, and what Fanny Hill would have thought of them is made clear by her "rage and indignation" when she observed a pair of "male-misses, scarce less execrable than ridiculous."

Writing in Commentary, William Phillips nai's the whole genre by devastatingly describing Burroughs' Nova Express as "the feeding almost literally of human flesh and organs on each other in an orgy of annihilation. The whole world is reduced to the fluidity of excrement as everything dissolves into everything else." And Critic John Wain adds: "A pornographic novel is, in however backhanded a way, on the side of something describable as life. Naked Lunch, by contrast, is unreservedly on the side of death."

In their defense it is often said that the new immoralists merely seek to show the world as they see it, in all its horror and lovelessness; but that is simply the old error of confusing art with event, a propagation of the notion that a novel trying to convey dullness must be dull. Sheer nightmare does not redeem a book any more than sheer polly-annaism. The Genet-Burroughs crowd, including such lesser sensationalists as John Rechy (City of Night) and Hubert Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn), are not pornographers, if pornography is defined as arousing sexual excitement. These writers have created a pornography of nausea, which if anything has the opposite effect. They are thus the enemies of the hedonist almost more than the enemies of the moralist.

Sex as Ideology

Apart from making sex hideous and inhuman, the new pornographers also make it hopelessly dull. They should have learned from Sade, who used sex to assert the impossible--the totally unlimited freedom of man--and pushed the concept into insanity. Along the way Sade desperately tried to force his imagination beyond human limits by inventing inhuman horrors, but he only managed to make his compilation shatteringly dreary. Toward the end of his 120 Days of Sodom he was no longer really writing, but simply setting down long lists of neatly numbered and tersely outlined enormities--the effect being ludicrous and totally unreal. Much of the current writing on sex approaches this quality of mechanical repetition and unreality.

For one thing, the constant use of the limited four-letter vocabulary tends to rob the words of what legitimate shock effect they used to have. "Powerful words should be reserved for powerful occasions," says Novelist Philip Toynbee. "Words like money can be devalued by inflation." Stuart B. Flexner, co-author of the authoritative Dictionary of American Slang, believes that this is already happening. "The next step is to find a new crop," he says, "but I don't know yet what these will be."

Secondly, it is becoming ever clearer that, as Novelist Saul Bellow said not long ago, "polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art." The vast majority of writers, publishers and critics rejoice over the decline of censorship. While it permits the emergence of much trash, they feel that this is the necessary price for the occasional great work that might otherwise be taboo--for example, Nabokov's Lolita, a brilliant tour de force. But they concede that the new permissiveness paradoxically imposes a more difficult task on the writer; in a way it is harder to work without than within limits. Says Critic-Author Leslie Fiedler: "We've got our freedom. Now the question is what do we do with it."

Joseph Heller, author of the far from prudish Catch-22, adds: "Now that we have established more dirty talk and more promiscuity in literature, we've established the obvious. What is accomplished by being specific? A reader's imagination is a more potent descriptive power than any author has. When everything is told, what you're left with is pretty crude and commonplace. The love scenes in Anna Karenina are infinitely more intimate than any explicit sex scene I can recall."

Besides, Tolstoy did not suffer from the pathetic phallacy according to which all existence revolves around sex. Many authors today treat sex the way Marxists treat economics; they see it at the root of everything, and daydream about sexual triumph the way revolutionary writers daydream about power. Thus in the tirelessly explicit writing of Norman Mailer, sex is a personal boast, a mystique and an ideology--and, in all three capacities, solemn and unconvincing.

Sex has, of course, infinite variants and imposes many compulsions. There will always be cheap pornography, and in a permissive age it will flourish openly and, perhaps, eventually fade; in a restrictive age, it will live clandestinely and, probably, remain a hardy growth. The purpose of sex in serious literature is to help convey the feeling and meaning of life as it is. Thus literature neither denies the existence of the wildest aberrations nor the use of the most clinical or bawdy language--but does not celebrate them as norms.

In the long run a sense of humor may be far more effective against the new pornography than censorship ever could be. "A return to ribaldry would be a very good thing," says Methodist Minister Tom Driver. "People ought to laugh in bed, and at some of the current writing about bed." There are signs that some are indeed laughing--and laughing at the authors of pornography. For sex is far too important a matter to be left merely to writers.

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