Mary WHITEHOUSE
Half a century ago, the writer Anthony Burgess – most famous for the “ultra-violent” dystopian satire A
Clockwork Orange – relocated to Malta with his second wife. On arrival, he discovered that 47 of his books (including works by DH Lawrence and Angela Carter) had been seized by the country’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Agriculture on the grounds that they were indecent, and incinerated.
A furious Burgess responded by giving a lecture at the local university, entitled “Obscenity and the Arts”, which proved to be inflammatory. In it he argued, provocatively, that obscenity and pornography should be judged according to their literary value. He went on to say that filth is all around us, in our homes and in our schools, citing Shakespeare’s Titus
Andronicus and the Old Testament’s “Song of Songs” as examples, before quoting Milton who said that “he who destroys a good book kills reason itself ”. The Catholic authorities reacted by seizing Burgess’s newly acquired 18th-century palazzo.
Prophetically, Burgess had realised that when you start banning books, you are not far from banning culture itself – something which chimes strongly in the current climate, proving that cancellation is nothing new. Yet this episode also serves to remind us of how cancellation has changed over the past 50 years. Back then, obscenity was the enemy and it was our morals, not our choice of words, which were considered in grave danger.
In Britain, the permissiveness which was born of the Sixties counterculture had prompted opprobrium in several quarters. Art galleries in London, Birmingham and Manchester were regularly policed by plain-clothes detectives who had the licence to destroy any works that they thought were potentially obscene. In 1966, an exhibition at the Leeds College of Art by the Cyprus-born Stass Paraskos was raided and closed down because one painting depicted masturbation.
The nation’s theatres were watched over by the Lord Chamberlain whose list of banned works included the hippy musical Hair (which involved a hilariously chaste nude scene) and Edward Bond’s Early Morning, a surrealist farce which portrayed Queen Victoria as a predatory lesbian.
The democratising force of TV caused much hand-wringing, too. Mary Whitehouse’s Clean-up TV campaign vowed to preserve the nation’s morals and objected to everything the gogglebox had to offer – profanities, violence and, of course, nudity (even though, as far as I can tell, nudity on Sixties TV was mainly confined to Renaissance paintings and nature documentaries).
But we shouldn’t laugh at people like Whitehouse. Their moral crusades may seem cranky now, but there was a strong sense of purpose to their guardianship. They may have proved a threat to artistic freedom of expression, but they also offered a kind of alternative way of living which today’s finger-pointers could learn from – the deeply religious Whitehouse wanted us to live better lives. It needs to be pointed out that Whitehouse wasn’t an Establishment figure; she was, in a sense, an outsider; a housewife from Essex who was sneered at by a liberal elite (particularly when the BBC was under the stewardship of director-general Hugh Carleton Greene, with whom she had countless battles). The Corporation assumed a sort of intellectual high ground (sound familiar?); Whitehouse, to her credit, saw it as her duty to constantly challenge that.
There is also an argument that the moral guardian role of the mid-to-late 20th century actually helped to create better art.
This is certainly the case with theatre where, up until the Theatres Act of 1968 (which eroded the Lord Chamberlain’s powers), censorship seemed to inspire a genuine sense of mission in practitioners, and theatres such as the Royal Court produced great work in so-called “theatre clubs” in order to circumnavigate the law. The aforementioned Bond was never better than when he had something to rail against and has never produced works of such cultural importance as the banned Early Morning and Saved (which famously depicted a baby being stoned to death by a group of disaffected teenagers). Once he had been given full artistic licence, Bond’s voice somehow became blunted.
There is no doubt that great work should sometimes be morally ambiguous and yes, sometimes obscene. Our lives would be culturally poorer had we not been granted the gift of Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment or Ulysses by James Joyce or even The Exorcist. Yet sometimes the arbiters of decency should be listened to – particularly if a work is going to have a corrosive effect on impressionable minds.
What is strange is that in the current climate of cancel culture, where history is vulnerable to castigation and judged with anachronistic vehemence, morals have become almost meaningless.
In their Twitter tirades and tunnelvoiced agendas, the identity politickers show precious little compassion or heart. And while they have a strong sense of “good” and “bad” speak, they don’t relate it to any action, which is, of course, what morality is all about.
So, if identity politics is taking a stranglehold, and certainly at the moment there does seem to be a very strange alignment between this new discourse and arts institutions who are propagating a new form of censorship from within, where does that leave the individual artist whose plight Burgess was fighting for all those years ago?
I would argue, very tentatively, that they might have scope to reacquire some outsiderly originality, which could ultimately be quite radical, if they refuse to toe the new line.
Alternatively, those currently hellbent on cancelling culture could offer some sort of positive alternative to their onslaught of negativity. At the moment, though, that seems unlikely.
Her moral crusade may seem cranky now, but there was a strong sense of purpose