Two days later I had lunch with Courtenay.
Courtenay was an excellent publisher. The discouraging thing about him was that there was a startling physical resemblance between him and me – discouraging to me because, though we looked startlingly alike, I was an artist and he was a businessman.
Let me give you an example. The first time we met, Courtenay asked me to have lunch with him at his club. Being young in those days and unused to clubs, I was pleased and impressed. We sat down at a table and ordered what we were going to eat.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Courtenay asked. ‘A glass of beer or something?’
‘Thank you,’ I said shyly, ‘I should like a glass of beer.’
Courtenay called the wine-waiter and ordered a glass of beer for me and a bottle of wine for himself.
You see what I mean about being a businessman? And yet he was not insensitive, far from it. Later in the meal, when I was finishing my glass of beer and he his glass of wine, a rueful look came into his eyes, large, light-coloured eyes that Robert, with a more romantic vision than mine, used to refer to as sad and lemur-like. Courtenay put down his glass not quite empty and said to me consolingly:
‘It was only cat-piss, really.’
We looked, I can tell you, surprisingly alike. He was the same size and shape as me; he had the same large rounded forehead as me and the same sort of curly hair, now turning grey like mine. He looked very lively and, worse still, he looked – painful though it is to say it, artistic integrity compels me – dapper … I looked at him and I thought of myself. I was an artist and he was a businessman. I wore a bow tie; he wore a bow tie and a carnation. One day, when we were washing our hands in a club lavatory, he suddenly looked intently into the mirror above his wash-basin, and said in a rueful tone:
‘Joe, why do I look such a cad?’
Far was it from me to give him an answer.
He was an excellent publisher. To be an excellent publisher you have to be a businessman. I had no intention of leaving Courtenay.
On the other hand, the morning I met Courtenay for lunch I was not what my Civil Service colleagues might have called happy in my relationship with him. I felt amazed and injured. My small masterpiece improper? (Or, more accurately, perhaps too improper to be published.) It seemed to me incredible. It was no more improper – if you want to be able to judge for yourself – than this book you are now reading! (To be accurate, just about the same.) I went to Courtenay’s club looking pale, I have no doubt, but feeling proud.
I was early and had to wait in the foyer. I meant to reproach Courtenay as soon as he came in, not to wait until after lunch. Businessmen, I had learnt, went in for lunch first, business afterwards, a form of etiquette that I, as an artist, found intolerably digestion-destroying. In the past I had put up with going through the whole lunch, with wine, waiting for Courtenay to say what he thought of my new manuscript. Nowadays I used to ask him before he got his overcoat off. Lunch first, business afterwards – O.K. But Art before either!
Through the glass doors I saw Courtenay coming vigorously up the steps. He was not wearing an overcoat. A carnation glowed in his smartly cut lapel. He shook my hand.
‘It’s a very good book, Joe,’ he said, warmly. ‘Very good.’
I stared at him.
‘But I can’t risk publishing it.’
Before I could say anything he got me moving up the staircase to the bar.
Courtenay got some drinks and we settled down in a corner by ourselves.
‘So you think it’s improper?’ I said.
Courtenay gave me a shrewd glance. ‘Who said I said that?’ Though his eyes might normally, according to Robert, look sad and lemur-like, they could give a shrewd glance that was positively levantine.
I told him my agent said he said that.
Courtenay then did look sad. ‘How you both misunderstand me,’ he said. He looked at me straight. ‘Do you think I’m a prude, Joe? Do you honestly think I’m a prude?’
I said I did not think so.
‘You, Joe, can write anything you like,’ he said, ‘and I should like it.’ He began to smile. ‘In fact, in this book you have …’ He went on smiling. Then suddenly he stopped smiling. ‘But if I print it, I shall have the Home Office down on me like a ton of bricks. It won’t do, Joe … Publishing’s a business, you know. Something you artists sometimes don’t fully understand. The firm’s got to make money, not lose it. If I brought this book out I’d risk losing a hell of a lot of money.’ Then he added. ‘And it’s not my money … It’s the firm’s money.’
I cannot say my heart was wrung as much as his by that thought. I said: ‘But surely it’s not as improper as all that? I’ve read books much more improper.’
‘So you may have. So have I. They’ve been published and nothing has happened to them because the Home Office hasn’t been interested in them.’ He drank some of his gin-and-tonic and then gave me his levantinely shrewd look. ‘But we’ve just heard that the Home Office is going to start getting interested.’ He glanced round as if he might be making sure that nobody was eavesdropping. ‘Apparently they’re just about to open a new drive …’ He paused. ‘In case you should be thinking that some other publisher might be ready to publish your book, I’m afraid that won’t be so. The word’s going round …’ He drank some more gin-and-tonic and said modestly: ‘I just happened to be the first one to hear.’
This left me for some time with nothing to say.
‘I suppose,’ I said at last, ‘I shall have to alter the book?’
‘I sincerely hope you will,’ he replied.
I remarked. ‘You sound doubtful …’
‘I am, Joe, I am. I don’t know how much you’d have to alter it to make it pass.’
‘There must be some standard of reference,’ said I.
Courtenay shook his head. ‘The Home Office, or the Director of Public Prosecutions, can set the standard more or less where they like. Since the war everybody’s noticed that it’s been going down. Now they’re going to put it up. We shan’t know how high they’re going to put it’ – he made a gesture with his hand – ‘till they put it.’ He rested his hand on my arm. ‘It’s got us publishers worried, Joe. Definitely worried.’
‘No more worried than it’s got one of us writers,’ I observed.
‘For instance,’ said Courtenay, ‘they could take The Decameron out of circulation tomorrow if they felt like it.’
‘But you don’t publish The Decameron.’
‘No.’
‘And I,’ said I, ‘am nothing like as improper as Boccaccio.’
‘I know.’ He patted my arm. ‘Have another drink, Joe. I wish I could help you, old boy.’
With a lively step he went to the bar. When he came back with two more drinks, he said:
‘Of course I’m not entirely without any suggestions for you, Joe. Don’t think that! I want to publish that book, Joe. I believe in it.’ He looked at me. ‘My suggestion is that you should talk to our solicitor about it. I rely on him. Will you do that, Joe? He’ll explain the law to you, and then even make some suggestions about how to … tone the thing down so as to get by with it. You just twist the book a bit’ – he grinned – ‘and we’ll twist the Home Office.’
I said all right, I would see the firm’s solicitor.
We drank the rest of our drinks without making any further headway. And I must say I did not feel very much like eating any lunch afterwards.
In his businesslike way, Courtenay arranged for me to see the solicitor on the next afternoon.
The solicitor had his chambers in an old rabbit-warrenish sort of building. However, the room in which he himself worked when I finally got to it reminded me agreeably of a tutor’s room in a college. It was a square room with a tall sash-window that looked out on to a green stretch of grass. The walls were panelled and painted white – as in college rooms, they looked fairly dirty – and they were ornamented with old county maps in Hogarth frames. An electric fire was glowing in the fireplace.
When I entered the room the solicitor got up from his desk – I saw my manuscript on it – and smiled at me in a pleasantly composed way. He was tall, slender, nicely filled-out. I judged him to be about fifty. His neck was long and cylindrical, and he had a smooth oval face. His hair appeared to have gone white prematurely. Altogether he was a nice-looking man. Beautiful teeth, I noticed, when he smiled. Nice grey eyes.
‘Ah,’ he said, shaking my hand and speaking in a warm unaffected voice. ‘I want to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed and admired your book.’
I must have looked startled.
‘You see,’ he said, giving me his pleasantly composed smile again, ‘I want you to see right from the start, that I’m not pi.’
π? For a moment I was startled again. Then the language I had never spoken at a prep. school came back to me. ‘Oh, pi,’ I said, nodding my head. ‘Yes, not pi …’
‘H’m – h’m.’ He sat down again.
Actually I would not have thought at first sight that he was pi – or not pi, for that matter.
I sat down in a big leather armchair beside his desk.
He clasped his hands beneath his chin and began.
‘The first think I have to explain to you, Mr Lunn, is that the law relating to Obscene Libel is –’
‘Obscene Libel!’ I cried.
He smiled. ‘Libel, in this case, does not mean what you think it means. The word derives from libellus, meaning “little book”.’
Little book! That was just what I had written. A charming, attractive little book, a masterly little book!
‘But obscene!’ I still cried. ‘That means repulsive, repellent. There’s nothing repulsive or repellent about what I’ve written.’
‘Not to you, clearly. Not to many people, I dare say.’ He spoke slowly and evenly all the time. ‘But that is not relevant, I’m sorry to say. One of the questions we have to ask ourselves in the first instance is: Might it seem repulsive, repellent, to the Director of Public Prosecutions?’
‘How am I to know? I’ve never met him. Anyway, there’s always somebody to whom something is repellent.’
‘I was referring to the D.P.P. in his official role.’ He smiled a little.
‘What’s that?’
‘That of advising the police whether or not to take action over a particular book.’ He paused. ‘Though I must tell you the police are not bound to take his advice.’
‘I see,’ said I.
‘Not,’ he went on, ‘that it need necessarily be the police who set the Act in motion in the first place. Any person, any private person, can set the Act in motion.’ He paused again. ‘But we are straying away from the point. I have to explain to you that in connexion with the Act there is no definition of what is obscene.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘Nor is the punishment for “publishing an obscene libel” anywhere defined or limited.’
‘Oh,’ I said again.
‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘there are, as it were, some signposts.’ He smiled at me.
‘M’m?’ I said.
‘In the absence of a definition of obscenity, we have a test for obscenity. You probably know it? That of Chief Justice Cockburn in 1868.’
I shook my head. He nodded his.
‘In any case, I should have felt bound to remind you of it,’ he said. ‘It goes thus: “The test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall” … Let me anticipate’ – he held up his hand in a pleasantly composed way – ‘a claim that I’m sure you must be going to make, that you, as the author, had no intention to deprave and corrupt any of your readers.’ He smiled at me, shaking his head. ‘In the court, this is ignored. The intention is judged entirely from the book itself … I can go further. In the court the author has no locus standi, as we call it. He may neither give nor call evidence.’
It dawned on me that he must be the most composed person I had ever met.
‘And lastly,’ he went on, ‘two final points, before we get down to work on your book, in which, I’m afraid, we shall have to make radical alterations if we are to meet the Home Office in its new mood – in what we have reason to believe will be its new mood – two final points. With reference to Chief Justice Cockburn’s test. There is no certainty in theory as to the meaning of the words “deprave and corrupt” nor to which class of persons they apply.’ He paused. ‘Nor is there any certainty in practice either.’
There was a short silence.
‘Well, thank you,’ I said. ‘It sounds to me as if you’ve covered the lot.’
‘Thank you for saying so.’ He turned slowly to look out of the window. The light glimmered on his beautiful teeth. The contrast between his white hair and smooth uniformly brownish complexion was striking. He turned back to me.
‘In our work we shall have two signposts on which we can rely,’ he said. ‘The one, my knowledge of previous indictments. The other’ – his voice became more resonant – ‘our own good feelings.’ He nodded his head. ‘It is the latter which in the long run will make the more important signpost. Incomparably the more important. I’m confident that if we rely on our own good feelings, all will be well.’
Something made me feel inclined to reserve my judgement.
‘Now,’ he said, beginning to turn over the pages of my typescript. ‘To begin with I think we’d better look for isolated passages that might cause us trouble.’ He glanced up and smiled. ‘I can reassure you. They are fewer than might be expected. If I may say so, that is a tribute to your talent.’
As he appeared to mean it, I smiled back.
‘Here is the first point. I see here a word consisting of the letter “f” and three asterisks.’
‘Good gracious,’ I said. ‘That word’s printed in full about ten times a page, in—’ I named an American war-novel that everybody had read.
‘In that work,’ he said, ‘you will recall that the word was mis-spelt … I’m afraid your device leaves it open to the correct spelling, when no doubt might be left in the mind of the Home Office.’ He held up his hand. ‘Now, please don’t think I’m being pi! I’m not suggesting you should remove it. Indeed, I’m not. We all know the word is sometimes used, even if we do not use it ourselves. What I’m suggesting is that you may keep the letter “f” and add four, or perhaps five asterisks.’
‘That might certainly leave some doubt in the mind of the Home office,’ I said.
‘With five asterisks we might have no trouble at all. And our good feelings would be spared.’
I said: ‘I think I’ll cut the whole remark out.’
‘That would be meeting the Home Office more than half-way. I’m glad, Mr Lunn.’
He went on turning over pages. ‘And now,’ he said, looking down, ‘I have to notice that here you’ve mentioned a member …’
‘Member?’ I said, startled. ‘Member of what?’
His head remained down. ‘I was hoping you’d take my meaning without further explanation. I was using the word “member” in the sense of … “organ”.’
‘Oh dear,’ I said. I felt as if I were going to blush. Then I said: ‘Where have I mentioned it?’ I went and looked over his shoulder at the manuscript. ‘But I haven’t mentioned it,’ I said. ‘Show me where!’
‘Ah, that is merely a tribute to your literary skill. It is not mentioned by word, but I have no doubt that the Home Office would feel it was there.’
‘If two people are making love,’ I said, ‘it’s bound to be there! Home Office or no Home Office.’
‘H’m, h’m,’ he said thoughtfully. Then: ‘Making love …’ He looked up from the manuscript. ‘I wonder if your good feelings tell you that kissing might serve your purpose just as well?’
‘I can tell you,’ I said, tapping the manuscript, ‘it wouldn’t serve theirs!’
There was a long pause.
I said: ‘I suppose that scene will have to go out.’
‘That’s excellent, Mr Lunn. I’m very glad indeed to hear you say that. I can see that ours is going to be a very fruitful partnership.’
There was a pause. He quietly turned back the pages of my manuscript, so that the book was closed.
‘I see that I can now safely leave isolated passages to you, Mr Lunn.’ He smiled. ‘I wish that were the end of our troubles. If the law were concerned only with isolated passages, I can assure you it would be. However, the law is so framed that there is no certainty as to whether the test of obscenity is an isolated passage or the book’s dominant effect. We now have to consider the book’s dominant effect.’
‘The dominant effect,’ I said with authority, ‘is that of a work of art.’
He said: ‘In declaring a book “obscene” according to the law, it is very doubtful if a judge or jury may take that into consideration.’
‘Oh,’ said I.
He smiled. ‘I hope I’m not tiring you with so many explanations. I think I can make quite shortly the statements in the light of which we have to consider your book for the purpose of judging its dominant effect. Obscenity, as you know, has always been confined to matters related to sex or’ – he completed the sentence hurriedly – ‘the excremental functions. Furthermore, we say something is obscene, we know it to be obscene, if it arouses in us a feeling of shock, of outrage.’
I was really irritated.
‘In your book there is a good deal about matter related to sex,’ he went on. He smiled friendlily. ‘Now didn’t your good feelings tell you that the dominant effect of the way you had presented them might arouse a feeling of shock, of outrage, in some persons who might read it?’
‘Not till there was some question of the book not being published.’
He shook his head in a way that signified composed disappointment in me. ‘I’m afraid it may arouse that feeling. It well may. The characters in your book make love to each other. There appears to be no likelihood of their generating children thereby – in fact you go to no lengths to conceal from the reader that they are not married. What is the dominant effect of the passages in which these actions are recounted?’ He answered the question himself, after first posing another one. ‘Do we see them in a light of immodesty, of shame? … Undeniably we don’t.’ He paused. ‘The dominant effect of these scenes is of pleasure.’ His lips formed the word as if it were spelt with a capital P. ‘Of undivided Pleasure! Of complete Enjoyment!’
‘That was what I had in mind,’ I conceded honestly.
He said: ‘Suppose, then, a jury were directed to imagine a typical young person – tempted to sexual activity, and asking desperately, “How do I stand?” and “Where do I go from here?” – searching for an answer to his problem in your book.’ He paused. ‘What answer do you think he’d find in your book?’
I did not say anything. He was making me feel shy again.
‘The answer he’d find would be Yes, a thousand times Yes, wouldn’t it?’
I said: ‘I think a thousand’s a bit much.’
‘You may be right … But twice would be enough.’ There was almost a tremor in his composure. ‘Or even once, more’s the pity!’
I looked out through the tall sash-window. The grass looked very green, the daylight very limpid. Not like his imagination, I thought.
‘You now see what I mean by the dominant effect, Mr Lunn.’
‘Indeed I do,’ I replied.
He smiled very composedly, very friendlily now. ‘I’m glad you’ve been so understanding,’ he said. ‘Obscenity is a very difficult thing to make clear to authors. And the task of making it clear is specially difficult for anyone like myself, who, as you now see, is not in the least pi.’
I nodded my head.
He picked up my book to give it back to me. ‘This is an excellent book, Mr Lunn. When you are rewriting it, just let good feelings be your guide. Then the Home Office will let it go by. In affairs relating to sex, remember modesty, concern for the conventions, awareness of sin; above all don’t give us a dominant effect of undivided pleasure, complete enjoyment, as you have done!’ He smiled. ‘Think of that typical young person whom the jury might be directed to imagine! … Keep him clean!’
He stood up, and I stood up. As he shook my hand he said:
‘When I look into your face, Mr Lunn, I can see that you can!’