Smuggled Culture

By BRIAN INGLIS

Dublin.

WE Irish are a touchy people when it comes to reading about ourselves in newspapers and periodicals from abroad. We have not yet reached the stage when the sight of our dirty linen exposed to a neighbour's view causes us only a mild amusement, or even gratification at an ability to enjoy our own discomfiture. But there are two insti- tutions which are exempt from the protective howl that goes up when their doings are noised abroad. One is the present Abbey Theatre, whose protective lease, it is felt, has run long enough. The other is the Censorship of Publications Board.

Every month the Censorship Board issues a list of books that have been banned for indecency or obscenity. For the month of October, 1952, it excelled itself. Eighty-eight books were prohibited, including—it sounds better if they are read aloud— Three Pair of Heels, by Neil Bell.

The Sun Dances at Easter, by Austin Clarke. Doting, by Henry Green. The Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek. , The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, by Andre Malraux.

Honey, Not Now, by Steve Markham.

Hellbox, by John O'Hara.

Glamour of Desire, by Alan Roscoe.

Phoenix Rising, by Marguerite Steen.

Young Man on a Dolphin, by Anthony Thorne.

Hemlock and After, by Angus Wilson. - Bedtime Blonde, by John Wilstach.

—altogether a nice, all-round selection, with perhaps a little less emphasis than usual on the "No orchids" school, which is usually represented by more lurid titles. (" Hotsy, You'll be Chilled" was a recent one.) The culprit who immediately catches the eye is that hardened old sinner Schweik, who has been lurking here undetected in English translations for over twenty years. The Censor- ship Board appears to have no statute of limitations; longevity is no protection from disgrace. Years after it appeared as a "Penguin," Miss Arnott Robertson's Four Frightened People came under the ban, and Nigel Balchin's Small Back Room suffered almost as belatedly. In the case of the Balchin it has since transpired that the Board was sent an American pocket-edition with a suggestive picture on the cover; that was sufficient.

The way in which the Censorship Board works was dis- closed, not for the first time, in 1949, when one of its mem- bers, resigning, sent a statement of his reasons to the Press. He had apparently been anxious to obey the clause in the Censorship Act which enjoins the Board to have regaid " to the literary, artistic, scientific, or historic merit, or importance, and the general tenor of the book." But so many books came before the Board that he found this was impossible. Books were sometimes handed round for the first time at the meeting which banned them, and his colleagues appeared satisfied on occasion to ban a book on the strength of a passage marked by the reader who had sent it in.

As it happened, the resigning member's statement was a less effective exposure of the Board's methods than the Board's letter in reply. Not only did it defend the practice of judging books from marked passages, bunk went further and boasted that on one occasion a book was banned before the Censors had had a chance to study it, on the strength of a denunciation which had appeared in an English Sunday newspaper. The Board's inability to supply a ruling under which it claimed to be acting—a ruling not found in the Censorship Act—was excused on the grounds of the imminence of the holiday season. The letter went on to explain that, if a Censor had not time to read a particular book, he would always have" the opinion of his colleagues to guide him, in addition to a quick examina- tion during the meeting." Finally, a statement made by a Minister for Justice was quoted in defence of the Board's policy. "There are books which are blatantly indecent and known to be indecent," the Minister had said. "Should the members of the Board, for instance, be compelled to read every line of Ulysses, a book which has been universally con- demned ? "

The position is less bad than it sounds, because some years ago the censorship situation became so farcical that the Government had to intervene, to set up an Appeal Board. This consisted of a more enlightened group of citizens, who have since busied themselves unbanning books ranging from Brave New World and Shaw's Black Girl to For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Cruel Sea. But the Appeal Board' works under diffi- culties. It has to receive formal notice of appeal, with.several copies of the book from the publishers; and the Irish market is not so profitable that many publishers consider the money well spent—especially as the reader who can afford to buy books is often in a positipn to get a copy from England smuggled in.

Alternatively, an appeal can be made by five members of the Irish Parliament—a procedure which, it is to be hoped, will be adopted in the case of old Schweik. The unbanning of books, incidentally, is not well received by the _Censorship Board. On one occasion recently it instructed its secretary to reaffirm its original conviction about a book which the Appeal Board had taken off the banned list—in a letter to the Press. It was as if a circuit court judge were to tell the judges 'of the Court of Appeal that they were all wrong to acquit a citizen whom he had convicted.

It has now become apparent that the Censorship Board, irri- tated by the establishment of the higher court, is interpreting its duties more rigidly than when it Was alone in the field. Some of its decisions have been astonishing. It banned Dr. Halli- day Sutherland's The Laws of Life in spite of the fact that it had received the Permissu Superiorum of the Catholic Arch- bishop of Westminster. Of two books by Irish authors banned recently, one became the Catholic book-of-the-month in America and the other the Catholic book-of-the-month in Holland. On the day that Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter was published, the Irish Times carried an advertisement quoting from a review in which Evelyn Waugh had called it a book which only a Catholic could write, and only a Catholic could understand. On another page of the Irish Times was the announcement that The Heart of the Matter had been banned as indecent or obscene. More recently an English author wrote sorrowfully to the same newspaper to ask how it could come about that his book had been banned, when such was its pro- priety that it had been chosen by the B.B.C. for the series A Book at Bedtime. Nobody could enlighten him.

Significantly, strictures on the Board have even appeared in a leading article in the Irish Press. The Press is the organ of Mr. de Valera's party, and is not much given to criticism of that party's handiwork. Nevertheless, it felt obliged to tell the censors that they were making public asses of themselves by banning the British White Paper on population. Such an action, the Press thought, could only bring ridicule on the country. And there lies the only hope of a change in the present system. No real demand exists for the abolition of censorship in Ireland—and, if an English visitor is inclined to scoff at our apathy on the subject, he is quickly reminded that there is no official censorship of the theatre in Ireland, which is more than can be said for the theatre of a certain neighbour. But Irish Governments, and the Irish people, are sensitive to ridicule. They do not like the way in which the censors' absurdities are pounced upon for use by the Northern Irish politicians, as justification for the continuance of the Border.

They do not like having their legs pulled at Strasbourg, or other international gatherings, about the fact that much of the best work of the outstanding Irish writers of the present day, O'Connor and O'Faolain and the rest, cannot be obtained in Ireland. A few more lists like this last October effort, and who knows but that the Government may once again be jogged into action, unable to tolerate such nonsense any longer ?