28 July

Last Exit to Brooklyn, the censor’s last throw

1966 Segments of Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn had been printed in the US as early as 1957. One extract – recounting the gang rape of the whore Tralala – had been prosecuted, and cleared, around the period of the first Lady Chatterley trials, in 1959. The whole work was published in America in 1964. Selby’s novel was palpably rawer than Lawrence’s, and there was a nervous interval in the UK before the firm of Calder and Boyars (who specialised in avant-garde literature) took the risk of publishing Last Exit, on 24 January 1966. The British publishers took the precaution of sending a pre-publication copy to the director of public prosecutions (DPP), who said he could not instruct them on the legal situation, and to various professors, who were all for going ahead. The publishers took the further precaution of pricing the novel sky-high, at 30 shillings, a ruse that often mollified the censorious. Nonetheless, the book proved a bestseller, selling 11,000 copies in its first few weeks.

There were, from the first, stirrings of anger among establishment figures. A Conservative MP, Sir Charles Taylor, on 28 June, brought this ‘filthy and disgusting book’ to the notice of the attorney general, who declined to take action. Another Tory MP, Sir Cyril Black, using a provision in the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, moved at Bow Street on 28 July to have Last Exit banned. The magistrate issued a search warrant of Calder and Boyars’ premises and seized three sample copies. The publishers vowed to continue publishing. By this stage, however, booksellers were distinctly anxious about handling it.

The case was heard at a magistrates’ court in mid-November. Unlike the Lady Chatterley case (a fiasco, moral conservatives thought), the prosecution mustered persuasive witnesses – including the then respectable mogul Robert Maxwell (who declared the novel ‘muck’). The magistrate, Leo Gradwell, found the book obscene and ordered the three seized copies destroyed.

Calder and Boyars appealed. On 6 February 1967 the DPP indicated that he would, after all, prosecute. A second trial was heard at the Old Bailey, 13–22 November 1967. The jury was, by direction of the judge, all male, to spare ladies possible embarrassment. Among the array of prosecution and defence expert witnesses, particular impact was made by David Sheppard, former opening batsman for England, who had given up his sporting career to work among the poor and take religious orders (he would later be appointed Bishop of Liverpool). Sheppard had been, he testified, ‘not unscathed’ by reading the raping-to-death of Tralala, and the violation of her corpse with a broomstick. Despite a barrage of expert defence from leading academics, cultural commentators, writers and clergymen, the jury found the book to be obscene. The publishers, somewhat bad-temperedly, accused the jury of being ignorant and suggested that in such trials in the future at least an A-level in literature should be a necessary qualification. It did not go down well.

On July 1968, an appeal was heard. Acting for Calder and Boyars was John Mortimer. The appeal judges, while not actually clearing Last Exit to Brooklyn, could see no reason, under the terms of the existing law, for suppressing its sale and circulation.

Effectively the exoneration of Selby’s book completed the process begun with the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. Henceforth censorship on grounds of sexual obscenity was a dead letter.