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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

The Power of Mrs Grundy

The Power of Mrs Grundy

some comments on censorship

Recently the Auckland Students’ Executive, acting on the advice of a lawyer and under strong pressure from the varsity authorities, insisted on the removal of a book review and a poem from the newspaper Craccum. Further, they censured the editor, Mr John Sanders, for conducting an ‘experiment in law’ – whatever that peculiar phrase may mean. Mr Sanders and other Auckland students then resorted to the time-honoured practice of publishing an unauthorised newspaper called Wreccum, in which they criticised the actions and attitudes of the Students’ Executive and the College authorities. The last I heard of the matter, it seemed that these students were at least in grave danger of expulsion. If they were expelled, it would be a horrifying misapplication of disciplinary power; for these particular students have given thought to issues of propriety and censorship, and have begun to examine critically the customs and prejudices of Pig Island society. They have begun to think. The varsity authorities should utter prayers of thanksgiving that a few students at least had grasped what a university is meant to be: a place where people learn to think for themselves.

I would grant readily enough that the majority of men and women who pass through our universities are not concerned with learning to think at all. They want to pass their exams and get good jobs as chemists or librarians with the least possible fuss. The varsity is a tunnel through which they pass from a suburban home to a city office or laboratory. Furthermore, I am sure that our Departmental heads and city fathers are delighted that it should be so. Theypage 669 do not want employees or colleagues who have more ideas than are necessary for the job on hand. An office dealing with immigration, for example, would not want to employ people who questioned the notion that white-skinned British-born immigrants were in some mysterious way better than dark- skinned immigrants born in Madras; and equally no business engaged in the manufacture and sale of soap would want to employ people who could not stomach the degraded use of language in newspaper and radio advertising, or who had doubts about the psychological benefits of the Machine Age. The point is that businessmen and bureaucrats have a vested interest in the status quo. It is their own little speckled cow, as it were; and they draw milk from it daily. And most varsity students hope to do the same some day.

But there is another and older tradition. Since the University of Paris developed in the shade of the Church, there has existed in each generation and in many countries a creative tension between university thought and the habitual attitudes of the wider money-ruled community. In Russia some university students are prepared to criticise the regime; in America some students are preoccupied with racial issues; in England, as in New Zealand, some students join in marches to demonstrate against the use of nuclear weapons. It is precisely this readiness to think, speak, write and act on behalf of causes which lack support from, or may even be opposed to the policy of those who have most power in the community, that distinguishes the thinking students of a university from the pupils of a higher-grade technical college. The existence of such a group will always irritate the bureaucrat and the city father. They will attribute hooliganist and irresponsible motives to its members. They will say – ‘The students should work harder. It isn’t their job to criticise the way the world is built.’ In part the irritation rises from a feeling of personal affront that any point of view different from their own should exist; in part it rises from the chagrin of the fox who has let his tail be chopped off, objecting to the brown, hairy plume of a more fortunate, younger fox. When any clash occurs between students and the authorities of the town or the university – as on this recent occasion in Auckland – the authorities tend to exercise their disciplinary powers with a paranoid severity. It is understandable; for student thought can in the course of a generation change the status quo; and that is what the bought man fears most.

I was unable to read the book review in Craccum since I have not been able to obtain an uncensored issue. The title of the review – ‘The Vaginal Viewpoint of Mary McCarthy’ – is a shrewd one. It sums up in a nutshell the particular bias of that tough American writer. I am sure she would have counted it both amusing and just. The poem which was censored was one I wrote myself – ‘The Sad Tale of Matilda Glubb’, a verse chronicle describing the gradual lapse from sanity of a Pig Island primary-school teacher, whose pattern of gentility does not survive the stresses of the classroom. I had used in this poem, for purposes of satire, the mildest four-letter word – the onepage 670 which has no sexual connotations except for copraphagists – and the climax of the poem, when Miss Glubb dismembers the Director of Education with a butcher’s knife, under the impression that he is the old ogre in the park against whom her mother had warned her, is certainly not the right bedtime reading for invalids. The poem was humorous; it is possible that the majority of Auckland students, their legal adviser, and the varsity authorities were not accustomed to humour in the books they read. But the crux of the matter was undoubtedly the fact that the poem was indecorous.

I can accept a censorship which tries to prevent pornographic writing from being published. A pornographic story or poem is one which is designed or likely to stimulate the reader to sexual daydreams or misdemeanours. In a broad sense a detailed description of torture or atrocities could be termed pornographic, because of its appeal to the sadistic or masochistic proclivities of the reader. But as a literate person I cannot accept a censorship which hinges on another man’s sense of what is proper. It would be a melancholy situation if what one was allowed to write or publish or read depended on the state of the subconscious mind of a Pig Island businessman, a cop or a varsity professor. Standards of decorum vary enormously, among writers, among the general public, and in varsity circles. I cannot see why Craccum should not publish a poem or story or book review which some of its readers might consider indecorous. It means otherwise that a small pressure group can impose their standard of taste, by means of censorship, on other literate people.

Of course the issue goes much deeper. In many respects gentility is the glue which holds the status quo together. A genteel man can be counted on to take the side of the cops, because his mind is fuddled, and what Ernest Hemingway called his built-in dung-detector has been put out of action. (I have not used Hemingway’s exact words in case Salient also should be censored on account of indecorous language.) It is very easy for any demagogue or religious charlatan to put it across a man like that. It was the genteel middle classes in Germany who welcomed Hitler as a bulwark against the indecorous speculations of the Jewish intellectuals who were (they thought) corrupting the youth of the country. And when the smoke blew their way from Belsen they didn’t think about it because it was unpleasant. We have no Belsens here; but I have seen women go crazy in the tidy vacuum of a primary-school classroom between a glass tank and a vase of daffodils; and when I write a poem about the psychological dangers of the teaching profession (a matter of great relevance for student life) my genteel readers notice only that I have used Hemingway’s word for dung three times, and start to call out the cops.

The curse of intellectual barrenness which rests like a black frost on the paddocks of Pig Island may have sprung in a large degree from the neo- Victorian gentility inculcated in our schools. Ordinary working people arepage 671 the ones least affected by it. They generally brush it away like a bad smell, and go on using their minds and their tongues on whatever concerns them most. But the varsity student, like the bureaucrat, is peculiarly vulnerable to it. He can be penalised for saying or writing what any wharfie would not think twice about. It is not the fate of the Auckland students who have come under the censor’s hammer which troubles me most – they will stay alive because they have already begun to think their own thoughts. It is the fate of the ones who prefer to rest in the shade of the city fathers which troubles me. In ten years’ time it may be impossible to distinguish them from vegetable sheep.*

*(Mound of moss found in Central Otago closely resembling sheep.)

1964 (316)