"At last, an unprintable book that is fit to read."
So wrote American poet and critic Ezra Pound of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.
First published in France in 1934, it was banned in the United States that year on the grounds of obscenity, but was regarded as a serious contribution to literature by none other than George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Aldous Huxley.
It wasn't the first time an author had gone offshore in order to be published.
D.H. Lawrence knew Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) would offend British readers so, to avoid the censors, he had it first published in Italy.
Indeed, even Lawrence's typist refused to work with the text. It was banned in the United States, Great Britain, Ireland and Poland, but pirated editions flourished.
Grove Press printed the first unexpurgated edition in 1959.
In 1960, when Penguin Books (UK) went to trial over its paperback version, jurors were asked: "Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?"
One peer replied: "I would not object to my wife reading it, but I don't know about my gamekeeper." After three days of deliberation, Penguin Books was cleared.
(In 1965, Lady Chatterley's fate was decided in New Zealand. After much discussion, clouded by the availability of a cheap paperback version over a more expensive hardback copy, it was classified as "not indecent".)
In 1961, Grove Press followed up its
Lady Chatterley victory by announcing open publication (trade paperback) of Tropic of Cancer. Copies appeared in New York bookstores before publication date (June 24, 1961) and the book was banned from the US Post Office. The ban was lifted without the issue being bought to trial. This made the book more readily available to readers, especially in the United States.
Of course, Miller was just one in a long line of "criminals", including (in no particular order) Petronius, Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Sir Richard Burton, Flaubert, Radcylffe Hall, James Hanley, James Joyce, New Zealand's Potocki de Montalk, Swinburne, Rabelais, Casanova, Zola, Mark Twain, Frank Harris and Walt Whitman.
As a result of the bannings (he followed Tropic of Cancer with Black Spring and Tropic of Capricorn in 1938 and 1939, respectively), Miller wrote much about the notion of pornography and obscenity.
One major piece was "Obscenity and the Law of Reflection" in his Remember to Remember (1947), which began with the sentence: "To discuss the nature and meaning of obscenity is almost as difficult as to talk about God."
Miller also remarked on what is a truism, perhaps even today: those books that have steady sales fall into two categories - the pornographic or obscene, and the occult.
For the former, witness NZ Penguin's publication of Christine Leov Lealand's erotic fantasies, Quintessence (1999), Avocado (2000) and Astride (2001), published by Penguin NZ in the belief they would sell well. The move paid off. Quintessence has sold more than 35,000 copies, mainly to the Australian market.
For more
For notes on the University of Otago's 2009 special collections exhibition, "Heresy, sedition, obsenity: the book challenged", visit: www.library.otago.ac.nz/exhibitions/bannedbooks/index"