Stevens' talks to Society

"Morals are the very stuff of art," quote Prof. J. Stevens from Havelock Eilis's book on banned literature at a talk held recently by the Literary Society. Yet for "excellent reasons," society has seen fit to ban certain book as dangerous to the public. Why has this been so? prof. Stevens holds that it is because the artist is generally ahead of his community la his ideas and his way of expressing them. Society, always more conservative in the mass than in the individual, therefore suppresses this literature because it holds it as dangerous to the status quo. Medieval society, through the Church or the Government, suppressed heresy; in the Renaissance, books were banned on political content as "subversive." Today, In fact for the last 200 years, the banning has been on sex and violence, that is to say, in the non-Communist countries, and censorship in the U.S.A. has been particularly suppressive. It has been noticeable that increase of censorship is proportionate with the growth of a reading public.

Pregnant Prose

Prof. Stevens then launched Into a highly entertaining list of banned publications. In 367 B.C., Plato tried to expurgate Homer; Ovid has been banned time and time again throughout the Middle Ages. Luther had his German translation of the Bible burnt in 1634 (even today in Russia, the Bible and Koran are only kept in enormous reference libraries: this of course limits their readers—an effective form of censorship). The Decameron has been burnt, expurgated, and hewed about many times, and is still today in some countries. In New Zealand, before World War II, a bookseller was prosecuted for selling the book, but subsequently acquitted with the warning not to place an Illustrated edition in the window. Other authors banned were Machiavelll, Rabelais, Galileo, Shakespeare, Mollere, Locke, Defoe, James Joyce (Ulysses is still banned in some places), Rousseau, Goethe, Shelley, Byron. Darwin and Marx. The Papal index bans many books to Its adherents. Once critics remarked of George Eliot's Adam, Bede, that "we seem to be threatened with a literature of pregnancy!" Miss Stevens noted that morality is relative to time and place—contemporary literature is dangerous. There is also a tendency, she observed, to remark that other people may be corrupted, never oneself: one must therefore protect a host of innocent readers. One amazing fact is that critics of "immoral literature" indulge In extraordinary fury: a critic of Swinburne once stormed over the "feverish carnality of a schoolboy" which he claimed Swinburne had —it throws an interesting light on Victorian schools … Magazines of course benefit both ways from this sort of review: in reviewing a salacious book they get readers, and In doing so salaciously they are being moral.

Cant Stand Criticism

Artists try to deal with what they feel are radical social problems of their times, and society bans their literature because it cannot stand criticism and realism over the point where strong tension arises, as in sexual and political relationships in the present age. There lies a difference, said Prof. Stevens, in the use of words: certain ones may be used in private, but never in public. This is the concern of taste, not morals, although it is often used as grounds to attack a book.

The concern of literature is with life, character and morality, and the artist must handle them with realism. Concern is for human behaviour, feeling and thought, not for the particular immoral practice under fire. Literature does have a social implication, and so a writer must have both freedom to write and responsibility for what he writes.

Wind Section?

This banning of things also includes music: several respectable middle-aged ladles in Boston walked out in indignation at the "obscene trombone notes" played In a work by Shostakovich.

—J.S.

New Bridge Record

Four students from Durham Colleges broke the world bridge record. Their time of 75 hours 18 minutes was 13 minutes longer than the previous existing record held by New Mexico University. Eight students had started to play but after two days only four were able to carry on. (Courier, Newcastle.)