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DWIGHT MACDONALD
is
fully and completely described?" He showed himself a master of
the British Reflexive Question, as: "Now we don't want any trouble,
do we?" It takes a bit of doing to answer the wrong way. But the
jury did it.
The novel provisions of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act
were that expert testimony might be introduced and that the book
must be taken as a whole in relation to "the public good." They
were intended to
be
liberalizing but Justice Byrne converted them
into restrictions, sneering at experts ("There is not a subject you
could think of where there is not to be found an expert who will
deal, or says he will
be
able to deal, with the situation.") and turn–
ing the second provision inside out.
"If
you think it is an obscene
book," he instructed the jury, having violently nudged them in that
direction, "then you must consider whether the defendants have
established the probability that the merits of the novel are so great
that they outbalance the obscenity." As Kenneth Tynan noted
in
The Observer:
"For a few mad moments, it seemed as if the only
point at issue were whether it would be 'for the public good' to pub–
lish books that tended to 'deprave and corrupt.''' The proposition
to which the judge asked the jury to devote its mind was one that
might stump a Sartre, namely, The Social Utility of Filth.
The spirit of the whole drama was caught by Penelope Gilliat
in a skit in
The Spectator
entitled "The Case of the Three-Letter
Word." Arnold Wesker is on the stand:
PROSECUTOR: Are you the author of a play called
The
Kitchen?
Is that an example of dramatic merit, dragging the words
"the kitchen" into the name of a play?
WESKER: I think it is, sir.
PROSECUTOR: And did you not write another play called
[spitting] Chicken SO'up with Barley?
More of this socalled expert,
artistic writing? Another title in the public good, I suppose?
WESKER: Yes.
PROSECUTOR: Mr. Wesker, I do not wish to
be
offensive
but it is clear, is it not, that you are seeking to put food on a pedes–
tal? In every one of your plays, there are bouts of eating of the
most blatant kind. The expression "eat" occurs no less than 167
times, the expression "tea" 93 times, "gin" and "nip" 50 times
apiece....
WESKER: Sir, in my plays it has always been my intention
to
