Censorship by Printers

Published in Censorship, Summer 196510

If it is true that the degree by which any censorship is concealed makes it in that proportion more pernicious, then the one exercised in Britain by printers (which is generally known only to authors and publishers) must be considered amongst the most dangerous.

The most notorious case of this was the first edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners, where objections by the printer led to a delay in publication of ten years. The three passages at which ‘The British Printer raised his Moral Thumb, blew his Moral Nose and lifted his Moral Eyebrows,’ as Gorman puts it in his biography of Joyce, were:

‘. . .a man with two establishments to keep up, of course he couldn’t. . . .’

‘. . .Farrington said he wouldn’t mind having the far one and began to smile at her. . . .’

‘She continued to cast bold glances at him and changed the position of her legs often; and when she was going out she brushed against his chair and said ‘Pardon’, in a cockney accent. . . .’

Joyce’s witty and dignified defence of his work, in which he pointed out amongst other things that far worse was published every day in newspapers, is contained in a correspondence with his publisher, Grant Richards; in another letter he says of the printer:

‘I do not seek to penetrate the mysteries of his being and existence. . .how he came by his conscience and culture, how he is permitted in your country to combine the duties of author with his own honourable calling, how he came to be the representative of the public mind. . .But I cannot permit a printer to write my book for me. In no other civilized country in Europe, I think, is a printer allowed to open his mouth. . .A printer is simply a workman hired by the day or by the job for a certain sum.’

The passages in Dubliners to which the British printer objected appear ludicrously innocuous today, of course, but the production manager of any publishing company will be able to provide evidence (though almost certainly he will not name names) that many printers are still allowed to open their mouths, still try to write books for authors, and still, in fact, operate exactly the same form of censorship today as they did in 1906.

I had experience of this myself over the printing of my first novel, Travelling People, in 1962. The printer considered that certain passages (mainly love-scenes which would really have been obscene if they had been less explicit) in it would lead to a case for obscene libel being brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions against the book. I knew at the time that the 1959 Obscene Publications Act required that any book thus prosecuted should be considered as a whole,¹¹ and therefore for the printer to object only to parts was either to reveal his ignorance of that Act or to show that despite it he was determined to exercise the power of censorship that he had had before it was passed. The same Act also provides that expert (in this case literary) evidence can be submitted in defence of a work: as Travelling People had recently won a literary prize the printer was told that if necessary the judges of the Gregory Award (who were T. S. Eliot, Herbert Read, Henry Moore and Bonamy Dobrée) could be subpoenaed to give presumably favourable testimony as to its literary merit. The publisher resolutely supported my case, being prepared to look for another printer if necessary: at this point the printer capitulated and agreed to set the book as it stood. Had it not been for my stubbornness, however, and (almost fortuitous) knowledge of the 1959 Act, then my book would have been quite unnecessarily emasculated. It was my impression that many first novelists have given in to such pressure out of a natural desire to see their work in print and to cause their publishers no trouble.

The following year the same printer refused outright to set my second novel, Albert Angelo, which contains perhaps a dozen uses of swearwords known to everyone and, I am sure, used in a printing house every time a case of type is dropped on someone’s foot. Fortunately, not every printer felt the same about the book, and another was found who was prepared to accept the work: but the first printer was quite willing to bind the book once the second had printed the sheets, since then his name would not appear on it! Had the decision been mine and not my publisher’s, I would not have given him the chance to make money from this piece of gross hypocrisy.

There was not the slightest indication by anyone at any subsequent time that either of these two novels was liable to be prosecuted for obscene libel, and this points up the most serious aspect of censorship by printers: for a printer must always err on what he considers to be the safe side, must always be governed by what has been permitted in the past, and is therefore always against experiment and always against any extension of limits. Printers are rarely, I would suggest, good enough judges of literature to know whether a defence of expert evidence is likely to be successful, so they must class literary work which they believe to offend together with pornography. A printer may, of course, choose what he will or will not print, and no one is attempting to deny him this freedom: but when in so doing he sets up criteria which are clearly beyond his province, then, as I suggested in my case, he is either ignorant or desires to act as a moral censor.

And of all those engaged in the book trade – authors, publishers, booksellers as well – it is the printer who takes the least risk financially: his only real risk is that a publisher will go bankrupt, and this does not happen so often that it is more than a comparatively remote eventuality. The power he exercises through his censorship is therefore without true responsibility. I can understand that there is nothing for a printer in pornography – the high price this can fetch goes mainly to the author and the publisher, and the printing is no more profitable than it is in the case of a straight book – but unless he will accept the authority of a reputable publisher capable of telling the difference between this and literature, then interference by printers will continue to be bitterly resented.

The 1959 Act did make some attempt to exclude the printer from prosecution, and he is not mentioned by name in it: but the wording had to be such as to include anyone in any way involved in the dissemination of matter considered obscene, and this must obviously include the printer.

The wider issue is, of course, the law itself, which seems based on faulty premises: no one, to my knowledge, has ever produced any definitive evidence that anyone has ever been corrupted or depraved by a book. An equitable law would state that if a Director of Public Prosecutions was to maintain that a book was liable to deprave or corrupt, then he should be made to produce a significant number of persons that it had depraved or corrupted. This would be difficult, defenders of the current state of affairs reply to this eminently reasonable argument: of course it would, but if such defenders agree they have never known persons corrupted, then how can they support the present law? For the law is based on the certainty that people are corrupted and depraved by books, and will continue to be. Obviously, the whole question of obscene publication should receive the attention of those recently appointed to consider law reform in Britain.

The particular concern with the censorship exercised by printers, however, is that another Dubliners may be prevented from reaching its audience for a decade, or that it may be caponized out of its true identity, and that only its author and potential publisher will know anything about it.