Even before the advent of Comstock and his emulators, nay, before ever the rude forefathers of this Republic grappled with Sin, the sages had discovered that man is a wicked and perverse creature, and that unrighteousness is largely the salt of his life. Wine, Woman and Song have been the lure which has drawn mankind along in that pretty business of civilization, whose culmination is the Ford and the Prophylactic toothbrush within the reach of Main Street. Methodist muezzins may cry out from their towers of virtue against the old Adam in us, but the very scriptural ancestry of our backward-looking instincts serves, in some sort, to reconcile us to the inevitable. We know that vice, as defined by the moralists, is largely synonymous with the joy of life, not only as we understand it, but as the human race has understood it from the beginning of time.
It was doubtless the same Devil who whispered to such good effect in Eve’s ear, who enabled man to stumble upon the vine. Satan can hardly have restricted his suggestions to one fruit amongst so many, tho it is significant that the apple still persists, in a most un-Christianlike spirit, in fermenting in defiance of the Eighteenth Amendment. Thus, should a generation arise, after aeons of alcoholic innocence, this country will still be in danger lest history repeat itself by witnessing the rediscovery of the soothing properties of fermented juices. Indeed, the provision that alcoholic beverages may be manufactured and sold for medicinal purposes is an indication of reluctant wisdom in the arid mind of the prohibitionist. It is a confession that humanity is not so dry as it is painted. It is an expression of the belief that what is natural cannot be extirpated, but it can be controlled. The doctrine is capable of extension to other parts of that triune Satanity. Wine, Woman and Song, in which are embodied the fundamental yearnings of the common—and the uncommon—man.
Already in many parts of the unregenerate, but more candid, world beyond the confines of Anglo-Saxondom, the half-world has been made safe for democracy. But nowhere, so far as my researches go, has there been any analogous effort to control the consumption of pornography. Unlike Booze, whose existence is legally admitted, pornography is either ignored or suppressed. The result is unsatisfactory, even to the moralists, but they have failed to understand why. Indecency is as essential a part of our human frailty as the attraction of sex and the desire for intoxicants. It is so deep a need of humanity that countries whose civilization is dry have left us classics of erotica, more venerable than the Pompeian inscriptions, and as eloquent as the Greek and Latin classics in their testimony to man’s delight in the indecent. Our more hypocritical age pretends that only small boys, confronted with a blank wall suitable for inscriptions, now indulge in the practices of their remote ancestors. This is to ignore, of course, the erotic work which almost every great artist has produced, and to shut one’s eyes to the obvious intention of many of the finest writers in all literature. Everybody knows that a smoking-room story is inevitably better than its drawing-room counterpart, and that the success of La Vie Parisienne thruout the English-speaking countries is one of the definite achievements of the war. Countless Anglo-Saxons discovered in its graceful and amusing gauloiserie relief for instinct which had been starved, or imperfectly fed.
Nowadays the talented pornographer is usually driven into the trade of the gutter. In Europe his efforts are peddled by furtive Armenians, who have preferred rather to assume the appearance of selling shawls and carpets in the cafes of Paris than to follow the national pastime of supplying statistics of Turkish massacres. Those with a genius for the indecent are compelled to conceal it under a cloak of chemical purity, which is also invoked in behalf of their unhampered predecessors, whose frank impropriety is Bowdlerized by the professors, or explained away in the name of art. This procedure can convince nobody except the professionals of virtue, who accept the theory that Balzac’s Contes drôlatiques and Boccaccio’s Decameron fulfil some uplifting function. In revenge, however, they are all the more intent upon refusing even the slightest benefit of the doubt to living writers. They are intimidated by the dead classics, but are restrained by no aesthetic sense, so that the moderns are defenceless against them. Thus the art of pornography languishes; the tales and inventions which have preserved the fame of Aretino, Boccaccio, Bandello; which make the Kama Sutra an enchanting monument to Oriental civilization: which have diverted the leisure of geniuses as different as Aristophanes and Alfred de Musset, Shakespeare and Mirabeau, Verlaine and Richard Burton—all this has been relegated to the smokeroom. Erotica which are the work of many of the most distinguished poets and novelists of the last two centuries are unknown except to specialists.
Since pornographic art and literature are a manifestation of one of our deepest natural instincts, why should they not be recognized as such? A little candor is all that is needed to face this question, which mightily disturbs both the reformers and the intelligentsia. The former are for ever preoccupied by what they regard as the danger of immoral art and literature. The latter protest against interference with the liberty of the artist. If both would rid themselves of their respective preconceptions, the problem could be solved. The prosecutors of indecency must face the fact that most of us like it. The champions of the artist’s freedom should take all mankind for their ken, and assert our right to be naughty, not for art’s sake, but from no ulterior motive. The roll-call of pure pornographers is as imposing and as authoritative as that of the names which are usually invoked when some contemporary is delivered by an incidental frankness into the hands of the censors. The plain people, whose souls do not respond to appeals for art, cannot fail to rally when they understand that what is at stake is the right to do supremely well what all of them have essayed as amateurs, when called upon for a good story.
Lest this appeal be misunderstood, let me hasten to reassure the guardians of our present virtue. They need not fear that my proposal is to displace from the newsstands the chaste publications which now adorn them, in order to make room for cheap reprints of the Marquis de Sade. They need not fear that unexpurgated translations of Martial and Petronius are to be substituted for the Police Gazette. I have a proposal which will at once stir the crusading spirit of the moral experts: another prohibition! Why not a constitutional amendment controlling the manufacture and sale of pornography? Like alcohol, this other evil exists. We must not trifle with it. A provision allowing one-half of one per cent. lasciviousness would permit the unhampered consumption of the pseudoerotic, the furtively suggestive, which is considered now to be suitable for the American public. Genuine erotica, unalloyed Rabelaisianism, would then be easily procurable from duly authorized venders, on production of a doctor’s prescription. It is hardly necessary to point out that a pornographic work may be required for medicinal purposes. A properly qualified medical man would prescribe the requisite dose, and after diagnosing cases calling for such treatment, he might be assisted by a doctor of letters, who would administer the pornography, just as an anaestheticist co-operates with a surgeon.
Indecent literature is just like alcohol. Its potency and effect will vary from person to person. The prolonged period of repression thru which this country has lived must have produced an alarming number of morbid cases, that should not be exposed to the risk of making beasts of themselves. Only after the most careful diagnosis would it be possible to ascertain the tiny doses of wholesome indecency which the constitution of a congenital pathological puritan could stand. Obviously, strict control, and expert advice are required in such cases. Children and susceptible young people, whose innocence is so constant a concern of censors under the present regime, would be simply and adequately protected by a literary Volstead act. Their needs, none the less real than those of their elders, would be properly filled by the appropriate prescription, for the dose suitable for a man of fifty would not be the same as that required by an adolescent girl.
In this fashion the whole question of censors and censorship might be peacefully solved to the satisfaction of all concerned, and the American people would be relieved of a problem which is assuming an increasingly alarming aspect. The harassing thought as to whether a certain work would or would not be suppressed could no longer arise, for nothing would be suppressed. Art and literature would simply enjoy, in a more organized manner, the privilege now accorded to medical works and books on psychoanalysis. When these exceed the limits regarded as fit for the general public, they are supposed to be sold only to certain qualified purchasers. Similarly, the system at present adopted in the distribution of erotica would merely become more elaborate, for the method of publishing books for private subscribers, now so widely practised, is nothing more than an embryonic effort at control. It is tacitly or avowedly accepted in the English-speaking world by the moral enthusiasts as a guarantee that the sale will be restricted to persons whose virtue can withstand the assault. But this arrangement is somewhat haphazard, and has, moreover, led to sad disappointment when volumes have been privately issued which did not contain one-thousandth of one per cent. of lascivious matter. This deception is the moral equivalent of the tragedy of that home-brew which one eagerly accepts, only to find that its alcoholic content has been omitted by the well-meaning practitioner of this now revived domestic art.
Our literary Volstead, of course, will be confronted by the pornographer who “makes his own,” and the task of dealing with such an offender will be perhaps even more elusive than it is at present. Each of us has a natural fund of Rabelaisian or Gallic humor upon which to draw, whether the prohibitionists like it or not. That, in fact, is the postulate upon which this plea for control is based. Except in abnormal cases, it is unlikely that the manufacturer of home-made pornography will go very far in this direction. The real pornographic home-brewer, the offender under this new act, will he the person who gets illicit pleasure out of things not contemplated by the proposed amendment. The people who saw indecency in September Morn, for example, are aesthetically on a par with those who make cocktails to-day of wood alcohol. Just as there is no hootch too vile for the drunkard in a dry country, there will he no book clean enough to deprive the pathological puritan of his prurient thrill, provided it be a work of the imagination with any beauty and human passion. The minds of the vice experts will get their pornographic “kick” at any cost to sanity, wholesomeness and probability. As these people will have no occupation, since there will be nothing to suppress, they will be thrown back upon themselves, and their excesses will eliminate them in the course of time.
Here, I fear, is the defect of this modest proposal on behalf of our human-all-too-human indecency. Its victims would be precisely such people as are responsible for the thousand and one prohibitions and censorships of our time. Even if they could be induced to look frankly at the fundamental fact of human nature which has expressed itself in pornography, they will never acquiesce in a prohibition amendment whose aim is the destruction of prohibition.
