The Playboy Panel: Sex and Censorship in Literature and The Arts

Panelists

Judge Thurman Arnold heads the Washington law firm of Arnold, Fortas and Porter. He has had a long career in government, including the posts of Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. and Associate Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals. He has authored five books, taught at three universities (including Yale) and – wrote the celebrated opinion against the forces of government censorship in the famous Esquire case.

Dr. Albert Ellis is a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, authority on sex and marriage, author of The Folklore of Sex and other books, and co-author of the just-published two-volume Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior.

Ralph Ginzburg is an author – journalist whose best – known work is the book An Unhurried View of Erotica. His article Cult of the Aged Leader (Playboy, August 1959) previsioned the present youthful national administration.

Maurice Girodias is editor – publisher of Olympia Press, in Paris, has pioneered in the publication of works by Henry Miller, among many other controversial writers, was the first publisher of Lolita, is known to Playboy readers as author of a candid autobiographical memoir, Pornologist on Olympus (April 1961).

Norman Mailer, since publication of his famous 1948 best seller, The Naked and the Dead, has remained among the forefront of individualistic, iconoclastically outspoken American authors. He has just completed dramatization of his third book, Deer Park. His most recent volume is Advertisements for Myself.

Otto Preminger, producer-director whose latest film is Exodus, broke the self-imposed censorship of The Production Code Administration by releasing, without the seal of approval, The Moon Is Blue (1953), The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

Barney Rosset(On the Scene, Playboy, April 1960) is the youthful head of Grove Press, which made publishing history when it successfully contested a Post Office ban on D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover; he is also founder of Evergreen Review and has published the works of such contemporary luminaries as Ionesco, Behan, Robbe-Grillet. As this issue of Playboy goes to press, Rosset is contemplating American publication of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Playboy: Last month, in these pages, the distinguished critic, Leslie Fiedler, discussed the problems of the writer dealing with sex, vis-a-vis his craft – in an article called The Literati of the Four-Letter Word. Our discussion now is far less intramural; our aim will be to try to shed some light on the writer – and those in allied arts – confronted with the conflict between his work, as it relates to sex, and the forces of censorship.

Today, as perhaps never before, there exist two opposing concepts in this area. First is the indubitable wave of public liberality and growing maturity of outlook which, in conscious or unconscious rebellion against vestigial puritanism, has been responsive to a greater degree of candor and freedom in the public arts. Opposing (often with the best of motives) is a countercurrent of censorship. Neither side is organized: the creative artist and his audience constitute a group in which individuality runs high; in the camp of the censors there is chaos, with standards and procedures varying from place to place and day to day, and with enclaves of zealots banding together into pressure groups of self constituted censors with no official status or fiat from the majority of citizens.

Whether as a result of latent puritanism, of censorship, of societal customs and pressures, or of deep-seated anxieties and guilts – or, more probably, a combination of these and still other factors – there exists a tendency in many people and their legal representatives to associate sex with vice, crime and sin. Post hoc thinking continues to regard candor concerning sex as a causative factor in crime – and then goes on to argue that censorship (in suppressing sex in the arts) is thereby fighting crime.

Let us begin our discussion with a brief quote from G. Legman's classic study of censorship, Love and Death. He says: "Murder is a crime. Describing murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing sex is. Why?"

Girodias: That is an excellent formulation of the whole problem of censorship. Nobody has ever offered a coherent explanation of censorship, and yet one is supposed to submit to it as if it were part of a God-given code of conduct. Why? Censorship is obviously inspired by individual feelings of modesty, of decency. We have a good word for the notion in French: la Pudeur, which may also be translated as decorousness. But these feelings are rooted in what I would call a sexual inferiority complex: a fear of sexual inadequacy, of failure; or the realization of a physical disgrace, or of a lack of experience. People suffering from such a complex want to bring down everybody to their own level. The very image of a healthy couple making love is intolerable to them. To an inadequate husband, the idea that his wife may come across the knowledge that there exist plenty of adequate males in the world is sheer torture. Such people seem to have been in the majority in the Nineteenth Century; perhaps they still are. Very often the sexual inferiority complex is acquired through education. Well, this complex has held sway over us for decades; it has taken the social form of censorship – moral and mental censorship. In short, describing sex is a crime in the eyes of those who are ashamed of their own sex, and who wish to burden others with their sense of sin.

Arnold: From time immemorial, laws making obscenity a crime have been a psychological requirement of a society that wants to be considered moral and virtuous. The fact that laws against obscenity do not have a rational or scientific basis, but rather symbolize a moral taboo, does not make them any the less necessary. They are important because men feel that without them the state would be lacking in moral standards.

Ginzburg: But why should the portrayal of murder be less reprehensible than the portrayal of love? It's the quintessence of this whole matter – why is it more reprehensible to portray fornication than murder? Which is more immoral? Murder or making love? I think it boils down to that very simple question.

Ellis: Let me quote from a book published in 1945 by George Ryley Scott, who was a fairly well-known English writer on special subjects, called Into Whose Hands, subtitled An Examination of Obscene Libel in Its Legal, Sociological and Literary Aspects: "It is futile to deny that dangerous books are written and published, but these books are not necessarily sexual. They need not be pornographic. In fact, pornography itself is never dangerous. The most dangerous book I ever read was one that the moralists would never dream of interfering with. Moreover, it was a book which could not be suppressed by any existent law. It did not present the faintest loophole to the prosecution as an obscene, a blasphemous, or a politically dangerous publication. The chief character was a cunning murderer whose remarkable success was due to the fact that each crime was committed in such a way as to rank as an accident. The man was never in danger of detection for the simple reason that he was never suspected. In each instance the technique employed was described in detail, and I cannot imagine a more potentially dangerous book to put into the hands of anyone who for any conceivable reason was interested in the sudden demise of another person." He's right to the point. There are lots of books that could be dangerous – books on how to steal, how to bilk the public, or something like that. And most of the time, especially if you put it in fiction form, these would never be banned at all, while if you describe a sex act, even in fiction form, then people would censor it. And, incidentally, if you describe how an individual gets disturbed about other people not liking him, and you really encourage the reader to get equally disturbed – which we do in ninety-eight percent of the self-help books that say, "If you are not popular, you are no damn good, and if you commit a faux pas then you are a villain" – nobody bans this kind of immensely harmful work. But when you beautifully describe an act of sex, as in Fanny Hill, the censors often get up in arms.

Mailer: I think there's a certain logic to censorship – I don't agree with the logic – but I think that people who assume that all censors are stupid, that they have no reason, no implicit philosophy behind their efforts, are making a grave error. To begin to understand censorship, you have to try to understand what's going on in the censors' minds, what their purpose is, what their desire is, and so you have to assume that there may be a logic behind it; because, on the surface, it seems absolutely true, as Legman said in his book, that murder is a crime but you can write about it, and that sex isn't a crime but you can't write about it.

Preminger: No, that is not true. Describing sex is not a crime, but if you do something that is obscene, it is against the law. There is a great difference between describing sex in very good terms in literature and – I don't have the power of language to define obscenity, but I can tell you that almost anybody who is honest will know the difference between an obscene drawing or an obscene photograph or an obscene motion picture and one that is just straight forward and honest. It is the intention that plays a great part in it and the taste with which you do it.

Arnold: The Supreme Court, in U.S. vs. Roth, said that something is obscene "if, considered as a whole, its predominant appeal is to prurient interest . . ."

Rosset: I don't think there should be any such distinction. Maybe for day-today practical purposes you could say, well, one of Maurice Girodias' books – (continued on page 72)Playboy Panel(continued from page 28) which he mentioned himself in his playboy article – White Thighs, is written with the sole intent of selling because of its erotic titillation, whereas a book like William Burroughs' Naked Lunch was certainly not written with that being the only intent. But what is wrong with trying to titillate the reader? The erotic sculpture found in various temples in India was meant to titillate the onlooker; why shouldn't an author do the same thing? Is there anything wrong with titillating the reader with a desire to make love? Titillating him with the desire to murder somebody seems to be quite aboveboard and accepted in all of our various forms of communication – which, by the way, I would not suggest censoring.

Mailer: I don't know that I have the answer offhand, but I think one of the possibilities is this: that reading about murder very often voids the desire, whereas reading about sex very often increases the desire. Now it's obvious that censors are not interested in increasing the amount of sexual desire in a country. The reasons are very complex, but there seems to be some possibility that countries with the most sexuality have the lowest productive level. In so-called backward countries like India, where the poor people – not the intellectuals – are absorbed in sex very profoundly, productivity has stayed at a very low level for centuries. The same was true in China, and in a lesser sense, perhaps, in Russia before the revolution. At any rate, there does seem to be some relation between sexual repression and the increase of productivity. The Victorian age in England was famous for two things: its sexual repression and its enormous industrial expansion. Another example that occurs to me is that when De Gaulle came in he began censoring the pornographic books on the bookstalls in Paris. I think he probably saw that France's tolerance toward pornography had something to do with the weakness of the state. So that the problem is a great one because I think censors very often feel that they are quite right, that they are guarding the health of the nation by repressing sexuality. I don't agree with them, but I think it's an attitude that has to be understood before you can get into the problems of the subject. I've never known a censor personally, but I imagine they're rather conventional sorts, and they just see themselves doing their duty, and might not even worry too much about it. That is, I don't think they see that very often they might be quite hypocritical, that there may be a distance between their personal lives and the particular acts of suppression they try to enforce.

Playboy: This would seem to raise the question of who censors whom. Gentlemen, would you go along with this statement by Dr. Benjamin Karpman, chief psychotherapist at St. Elizabeth's Federal Hospital in Washington, D.C.: "Crusading against obscenity has an unconscious interest at its base"?

Mailer: I haven't dealt with censors that closely. I'll tell you one thing that may apply to this. When I was at Bellevue, I was talking to one of the men there – I forget what he was in for – and at one point he said, "A judge will forgive you for any crime he's incapable of committing himself."

Arnold: Apparently, to be a good censor, one should be possessed of a real prurient interest. There is genuine comedy in the contradictions that roam throughout the area of pornography. At the same time that men insist on suppressing obscene literature and punishing those who write it, they enthusiastically go on collecting it and preserving it in libraries of priceless value.

Ellis: There are people, like the famous John Summer and Anthony Comstock who, in all probability, do have an unconscious or semiconscious prurient interest in pornography, and they sublimate this by making their life's work the legal suppression and, as Thurman Arnold just pointed out, the collection – also legally – of this pornography. But there's no reason to believe that every single individual – every clergyman, for example – who's against pornography and violently campaigns against it, has any great sexual interest in it. Many censors have a nonsexual interest in curtailing other people's liberty. And I'd say that most of them are very hostile and disturbed individuals, but not necessarily sexually disturbed.

Rosset: I'm not a social scientist, but it's been my feeling, my intuition, that every time I run into situations where people are decrying a piece of writing because of its sexual content, they show some sort of abnormal interest in the matter, and they seem to use their censorship function as a sort of self-inhibiting mechanism to protect themselves – protection the rest of us don't need.

Girodia: This movement toward universal castration – inspired, as I said before, by people suffering from a sexual inferiority complex – has been fully exploited by most religious groups and by modern governments as well. The confessor has acquired a power over the confessed by controlling his sex life minutely, and by submitting it to a strict code of conduct. Succeeding the religious eras, our democratic regimes have adopted the same methods of moral domination – only confession has become collective, and the authority of the confessor is exerted through censorship.

Ginzburg: I interviewed a Post Office inspector recently, and he was telling me about a certain convicted so-called hardcore pornography publisher whom we'll call Mr. X. Well, this Post Office inspector and another postal inspector were trailing Mr. X, and they followed him along Broadway, and they saw him pick up a girl, and they followed him and the girl into a hotel, and they rented a room that gave them a view of Mr. X's room. So Mr. X got involved with this girl, and he apparently neglected to pull down the window shade, according to this Post Office inspector's story, so he and his cohort viewed all the proceedings in Mr. X's room. He went through all kinds of detailed descriptions to me of what went on in this other room, and then when he was all finished, he – the postal inspector – had the nerve to say it was his observation that Mr. X was a sexual pervert. The point is that sometimes the biggest pervert is the obscenity suppressor himself, projecting his own guilt feelings onto others. In effect, he is allowed to meddle in other people's sex lives not only with complete impunity, but also with the praise of the public.

Playboy: That anecdote is reminiscent of another story, which appeared in one of its many variations as a Party Joke in our magazine years ago. It concerns a prissy lady who phoned the police to complain about goings on across a court-yard, which she could observe through her window. The desk sergeant suggested she pull down her shade, to which she replied, "I did, but by standing on the bureau on tiptoe I can still see over the top of the shade's roller."

But let's get back to censorship and the arts. Justice Douglas of the Supreme Court has observed that "The standard of what offends 'the common conscience of the community' conflicts, in my judgement, with the command of the First Amendment that 'Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.' Certainly that standard would not be an acceptable one if religion, economics, politics or philosophy were involved. How does it become a Constitutional standard when literature treating with sex is concerned?

"Any test that turns on what is offensive to the community's standards is too loose, too capricious, too destructive of freedom of expression to be squared with the First Amendment. Under that test, juries can censor, suppress, and punish what they don't like, provided the matter relates to 'sexual impurity' or has a tendency to 'excite lustful thoughts.' This is community censorship in one of its worst forms. It creates a regime where in the battle between the literati and the (continued on page 74)Playboy Panel(continued from page 72) Philistines, the Philistines are certain to win." But it is not only the courts and law officers and extra-legal zealots who censor or attempt to do so. It used to be said, in the book publishing business – and only partly in jest – that the banning of a book in Boston was a better sales stimulant than a dozen full-page ads. Yet there does exist a kind of tacit censorship, by an author who wants to stay out of trouble, and by his publisher, who may have the same motives, or who may hope for a book that it will be "pure" enough to be acceptable to a major book club, thus earning more money for himself and his author. Norman Mailer, as a writer, do you find this kind of voluntary or tacit censorship among book publishers?

Mailer: All the time. Publishing is a particularly complicated industry. I think what happens very often with a lot of these people is that it's not so much a matter of censorship as embarrassment. Often they consider certain sexual writing in bad taste. They may often try, with the best intentions, to censor a book because they feel they have the author's interest in mind. They may know very well that certain important reviewers are going to be repelled by certain chapters or passages, and it's going to hurt the reviews they give the book.

As a practical matter, it's even true that there are many reviewers, especially for the smaller newspapers, who don't dare give a certain book a good review if the sexual material is too intense, too direct, too explicit, because, if they do, they're going to get into trouble with their newspapers. There will be readers writing in to the editor. Or it may not even be as direct as that. There'll just be a general air of displeasure that this reviewer chose to approve of this "salacious" book. The result is that there's the sort of censorship that I call motherly censorship. The people who do the censoring very often consider it distasteful, but they're doing it for the child's – in this case, the author's – own good. For that reason, it's the most insidious kind of censorship, because the people who are censoring you very often are your friends; they like you, they feel they're doing it for your good, and so it's much harder to fight back. You're not able to say to yourself, "Well, this censor is my enemy and I resist him and I take my stand here." Instead, you have to argue with a close friend, whom you've worked with for years, who may even have a certain practical wisdom in what he's saying. And so it weaknes the writer, vis-à-vis the publisher, because many of the more compromised, more reflective, more sensitive, more timorous parts of his nature are brought into being, and it's harder for him to fight back. Of course, my feeling is that a short gain is taken for a long loss. It's no good for a writer to retract anything he's written that's good.

Playboy: Otto Preminger, would you care to comment on the problem of prior censorship – which is a special problem for the film industry?

Preminger: Yes, the censorship that people are always threatening the movies with when they ask to see a movie first, and then decide whether you can show it or what you have to cut out of the movie in order to show it. This is censorship which, if allowed, must eventually lead to the destruction of free expression not only on the screen, but also in books, in newspapers, in magazines. That was always the beginning of totalitarian government. When it started in Germany, Hitler came in. When it started in Russia – well, in Russia you can't say it started because there was a totalitarian government with the Czar – but there is prior censorship today. In a free society, something should become a violation of the law only if you do it, not if you intend to do it.

Playboy: Not long ago, the Supreme Court struck down the criterion of suitability for children as a basis for censoring a book. Many hailed this as a major step toward a greater freedom of the press. The State of Michigan had ruled it an offense to make available to the public a book that a trial judge had deemed potentially harmful to youth. Justice Frankfurter spoke for the unanimous Court, saying, in part, "The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig. . . . We have before us legislation not reasonably restricted to the evil with which it is said to deal . . ."

Yet a subsequent Supreme Court decision, in the case of a movie called Don Juan, seems to have reversed the trend toward greater liberality. This decision, by the way, with Chief Justice Warren dissenting, would seem to have opened the door to local censorship by upholding Chicago's right to forbid the showing of the film. Otto Preminger, how do you think this will affect the film industry – in terms of the prior censorship you describe?

Preminger: The Supreme Court decision didn't say anything about censorship. It simply said that a city or a state has the right to license pictures. They have the right to a law for the licensing of pictures, which means that a picture is to be submitted and they can charge a certain amount of money for giving this license, but it doesn't say that they can refuse the license for any reason, for instance, not liking the contents of the picture. You know, it was a five-to-four decision – four of the justices were very much against even permitting them to license pictures because it gives the appearance of censorship; but even the other justices never said that the City of Chicago has the right to cut out certain parts of a picture or to refuse a license.

When I had a picture, The Anatomy of a Murder, opening in Chicago, the censors – an advisory board consisting of one man who used to be the driver for the mayor and six women who are widows of policemen – wanted to cut out one word, "contraceptive," and I went to court. The Federal judge immediately instructed the city to order a license for this picture and told them they have no right to ask for any changes or for any alterations of the picture before they issue the license.

I think people in the industry now are more than ever aware of their duty to fight censorship. Films have always been a very good scapegoat – and also a very nice way for everyone involved to get publicity.

Playboy: Norman Mailer mentioned earlier the censoring of books by De Gaulle in Paris. Maurice Girodias, how have you tried to counter this suppression?

Girodias: It would take hours to tell you the complete history of our fight against the censorship authorities of the De Gaulle regime. It is a very fluid situation, of course. I now have forty-one books banned and, so far, repeated attempts to have the bans declared illegal have failed. But this does not deprive me of the right to sue the government for damages, as I am now doing. However, it is a criminal offense to sell or make publicity for banned books. Newspaper publishers who would accept ads for banned books would risk heavy fines and prison sentences. Well, one year ago somebody from police headquarters came to see the manager of my nightclub, La Grande Séverine, asking for an ad to figure in the gala program for the policemen's ball. We decided to take a full-page ad. How the publicity for La Grande Séverine disappeared just before the program went to press, and how a full-page ad listing banned books published by Olympia Press appeared instead (not far from a full-face portrait of General de Gaulle) might make a good scenario. Of course, the police were unable to send themselves to jail. This is only one little episode among others. All I can say is that I haven't abandoned the good fight.

Playboy: You were quoted in the Sunday (continued on page 76)Playboy Panel(continued from page 74) New York Times Book Review as saying that "The publication of pornography is a defensible, even a socially useful undertaking." What did you mean by that?

Girodias: What I meant was that pornography has a formidable shock value which can be used effectively against the old moral order – I am tempted to say "against the old mental order." I hope it is not too presumptuous to quote my own words from a letter recently published in the London Times Literary Supplement: "What is known as pornography is a simple and elementary reaction against an age-old habit of mental suppression, of deliberately conditioned ignorance of 'the facts of life.' True, pornography is a very crude and excessive form of protest – but the very intensity of the protest proves that it is not gratuitous, and that there is a deep and general need for free expression which is still far from being gratified. In other words, contrary to current belief, pornography is simply a consequence of censorship. Suppress censorship and pornography will disappear."

Rosset: I object to the word "pornography." I think the word implies something bad. No matter what the dictionary definition might be, it has come to imply something illegal which is erotically tremendously arousing.

Playboy: Yet one of your own authors, D. H. Lawrence, said in an essay, Pornography and Obscenity, that even he "would censor genuine pornography rigorously."

Rosset:I think there was a very strong puritanical streak in Lawrence.

Ellis:I would not agree at all with Lawrence's position, because genuine hard-core pornography – meaning material which is deliberately used to excite sex desires – can easily be ignored by those who dislike it. They have the privilege of not reading it. Nobody is forcing anyone to read pornography any more than anyone is being forced to listen to a speech in favor of Communism or Nazism. I would not ban political tracts or speeches with which I thoroughly disagree, as long as the individual has the right not to read or listen to them.

Arnold: But obscenity laws rest on a different Constitutional basis than any other Constitutional restriction on free speech. Other Constitutional restrictions must rest on the tendency of the forbidden literature to result in harmful conduct, and the probability of such harmful conduct must be great indeed. But an obscenity statute rests on a different basis. It is in its essence a moral declaration on the part of the legislature, a recognition of a taboo that is as old as history. Such laws are passed because most men are stimulated by erotica and at the same time they are ashamed of it. Society requires a public denunciation of this almost universal sin whether or not it leads to positive harmful conduct.

Ginzburg: And yet, Dr. Karpman, whom we mentioned before, has stated that "Contrary to popular misconception, people who read salacious literature are less likely to become sexual offenders than those who do not, for the reason that such reading often neutralizes what aberrant sexual interests they may have."

Ellis: The chances are that some individuals who did not have access to pornography might well, in a bottled-up and highly anti sexual society such as our own, do something more antisocial than reading so-called obscene literature. They might possibly rape, or exhibit themselves, or commit some other sex offense. If they have the outlet of pornography, it is quite possible that the most they will do is masturbate. So it is possible that there are some people who, in this repressive society, do get some relief of sexual tensions through reading pornography, and that with these people there is less likelihood that they will do an antisocial act than might otherwise be true.

Preminger: I cannot quite agree, because when the purpose of pornography is to provide an outlet for people, it becomes, in a way, dirty. If it replaces making love or having sex – then, in my opinion, it becomes obscene. If you can show me a certain photograph, I can tell you whether it is obscene or not. But there is a very thin borderline. I think, for instance, that some of the pictures that I have seen in Playboy are not pornography, but others, because of the very positions that your models take, become possibly an outlet for immature people.

Arnold: I would say that there is no court in the United States that would condemn Playboy. I remember that in the case of Sunshine Book Company us. Summerfield – involving a nudist magazine – in the District Court, Judge Kirkland examined each nude in the magazine and tried to analyze which would cause prurient thoughts. He condemned some and passed others. The spectacle of a judge poring over the picture of some nude, trying to ascertain the extent to which she arouses prurient interests – and then attempting to write an opinion that explains the differences between that nude and some other nude – has elements of low comedy.

Playboy: If recollection serves, Judge Arnold, you once said the only way to avoid argument over what is obscene and what is art is to hold that "no nudes is good nudes," which you were most unwilling to do.

Ellis: You get into all kinds of difficulties with the Supreme Court's definition of obscenity. If you just ban the prurient items, you run into trouble because some men look at Marilyn Monroe, fully clothed, and they get a terrific sexual itch, and other men look at a scrawny hag who is completely nude, and she doesn't appeal to them at all. How can you ban desire? Some people go out on the street and look at a clothesline with drawers hanging on it and get aroused. Should we therefore censor clotheslines?

Rosset: I think a wonderful example of this is to take an author of ours, RobbeGrillet, a French author who said some wonderful things in one book about a piece of string which the protagonist sees as he draws into a harbor on a ship. He sees this piece of string throughout the book and he concocts extremely erotic fantasies around it. He uses it in various ways; it might be a clothesline in one instance, and the next instance he is imagining tying a girl up with this piece of string. It gets down to almost anything being used as subject matter for an erotic fantasy.

Ellis: About ten years ago, Maude Hutchins wrote a novel which aroused a furor, not because it had anything obscene in the usual sense of the word, but because she had highly sensuous descriptions of flowers which read almost as if the flowers were having orgasms. I don't think that the word "obscene" can ever be properly, conclusively defined.

Arnold: Another evil of the commonly applied "lustful thoughts" test in judging obscenity is its tendency to create attitudes toward sex which are akin to fetishism.

In 1911, a book was widely sold, named Three Weeks, in which the obscene passages consisted only of pages of asterisks at appropriate places. The book was passed from hand to hand in every college. Certainly it is unhealthy to be stimulated by asterisks. Human beings can be trained like Pavlov's dog so that they are stimulated by sights and sounds completely unrelated to the things they desire. A strict standard of obscenity contributes to such unhealthy training. Taking the pin-up girls away from American soldiers would not make their minds more pure. It would only mean that they would be aroused by some less healthy or attractive substitute. At the turn of the century the old Police Gazette had a nationwide pornographic appeal. A dance called the cancan in which the chorus girls kicked up legs covered with black stockings was wicked and highly stimulating. Today a person with an appetite for pornography would not pay ten cents to see either the magazine or the dance. This is how censorship makes material sexually stimulating which would not (continued on page 88)Playboy Panel(continued from page 76) have any stimulation at all if that censorship did not exist. And that is why anything but the most tolerant standards creates an unhealthy psychology.

Mailer: I think that the answer is honestly that there should not be any kind of formal censorship. Perhaps the answer is that there should be independent groups in this country in the literary world who would exercise some function roughly similar to the American Civil Liberties Union; these groups should really be created and kept in being by the best critics in the country. No one is finally qualified to judge what good sexual writing is, but certainly some people are more qualified to judge than others. Certainly I would trust my fortunes with a good literary critic, even if he didn't particularly like my work, rather than with a public censor who is at the mercy of various religious organizations and government bodies and police sheriffs of God knows what country.

Ginzburg: I get the National Organization for Decent Literature lists of objectionable books every month – which police departments use as a guide – and it seems as if they include almost every worth-while book that gets published – authors like Faulkner, Hemingway and other Nobel Prize winners.

Arnold: I think that people don't want disagreeable and shocking things around – but I don't think that censorship accomplishes that – it's usually concentrated on better works. Such is the zeal of reformers that the banning of works of real merit is an inevitable consequence unless the definition of obscenity is strictly limited. Over the ages it has been proved that it is impossible for moral reformers to let good books alone. It is the responsibility of the courts to prevent zealots from curbing art in trying to cut down on the number of impure thoughts per capita among the general public.

Mailer: If I could be as honorable an editor as I'd want to be, I would try to fight to the limit of my ability for any writer's sexual writing that was good writing, but I would also try literally to destroy bad sexual writing. What I mean by bad sexual writing is sentimental sexual writing. You see. I think sexual writing has got to be more honest than any other kind of writing. Otherwise, it's not doing any good, just more harm. I think one of the crises of this country is that a great many people are terribly obsessed by sex and yet in a funny way they know very little about it. They keep going to books to find out more about it, but they don't find out more about it; all they get is the same sort of lies that they can get in a barroom or talking to their closest friends who will lie to them also. So there's a general air of confusionand distress about sex which is very bad for the health of the nation.

I would argue with the censor on his own ground that there's no use trying to resist a wave of real interest and even perhaps of biological intensity by trying to suppress it. If there's going to be any censorship – and I'm not certain there should be – it's got to recognize that an intimate and serious evocation of sex is part of the very marrow of a nation's culture, and when the marrow is drained through brutal censorship or stupid censorship, through the abuses of bad sexual writing, then the country begins to sicken. I won't say it causes, but it certainly accelerates, the sickness of the country.

Playboy: Which leaves unresolved the basic question just raised: whether or not there should be censorship.

Ginzburg: Never. Who would decide what's to be censored? I'll tell you a standard device of the police vice squad. They'll go before one magistrate in a city like New York, for example, and ask him to ban the sale of a particular magazine or book. If he refuses, they will take that same magazine or book to another magistrate in the same city and they will succeed in having the material banned, without troubling to inform the second magistrate that the first one did not regard it as obscene.

Ellis: I don't think that the word "obscene" can ever be properly, conclusively defined. And I'm against statutes labeling anything obscene, because they're all vague and indefinite. In my article on Art and Sex in the Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior, I include a definition of hard-core pornography, and point out that not only must it arouse desire, but it also must be clearly against the mores of its community – which, incidentally, vary considerably from one place to another and from time to time.

Preminger: I really think it never helps to suppress these things. Many times in history, when church or government in many countries suppressed pornography, it went underground and people charged more for it, just like with Prohibition. It is probably true that if alcohol could be completely eliminated from our society, many crimes would not be committed, but, on the other hand, when this was tried, many more crimes were committed in the United States. So it doesn't work, because it is probably human nature that people don't want to have the things they like forbidden to them.

Arnold: The moral problem of obscenity is as full of inconsistencies and contradictions as was the enforcement of Prohibition – where good citizens wanted liquor and Prohibition at the same time. One way by which legislatures have tried to reconcile some of these contradictions has been to follow the theory, as we've observed, that erotic material is harmful to children.

Ellis: Assuming that were true, should nymphets the age of Lost have their sexual or other reading material curtailed? Seriously, I can't see that any harm would come to a child from lurid things that he didn't understand.

Playboy: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover has stated: "We know that in an overwhelmingly large number of cases, sex crime is associated with pornography. We know that sex criminals read it, are clearly influenced by it. I believe pornography is a major cause of sex violence. I believe that if we can eliminate the distribution of such items among impressionable children, we shall greatly reduce our frightening crime rate."

Ellis: He posits a cause-and-effect relationship between sex crime and pornography when actually there only seems to be a meaningless correlation. I'm sure that if you surveyed juvenile delinquents, you would find that a great number of them were poor in reading, writing and arithmetic. But this doesn't prove that their being poor in reading, writing and arithmetic causes their juvenile delinquency. It is associated with it, but it does not cause it. Hoover's allegation is meaningless for the simple reason that it would be difficult to find many non-delinquents or non-sex criminals in our society who did not have a considerable acquaintance with pornography. If this is true, then pornography is associated with the higher arts, with religion, with government, with practically everything. If, for example, we could show that nine out of ten great artists or composers had some considerable acquaintance with pornography, then we could conclude by this "logic" that their acquaintance with pornography caused them to write great books or compose great music. And we probably could actually prove that about ninety percent of creators do have some degree of acquaintance with pornography.

Ginzburg: There was a study by a team of psychologists at Brown University a few years ago which reported that there was absolutely no connection between pornography and sex crime. Moreover, Dr. Karpman, again, went on record in a statement before the American Medical Association that, if anything, pornography has a positive effect on the minds of children in that it serves as a valuable instrument of sex education in view of the general absence of sex education in the schools.

Girodias: What is pornography, in Mr. Hoover's mind? Have any children become wild sadists after absorbing De Sade's works? All those impressionable children who read pornography will no (continued on page 92)Playboy Panel(continued from page 88) doubt become sensible voters.

Rosset: I have never thought of J. Edgar Hoover as somebody I would look to for scientific information. I was very pleased and mildly astonished to read the communiqué of, I believe, the Episcopalian Bishops recently, wherein they made a statement condemning capital punishment and directly blaming Mr. Hoover for being at least partially responsible for its continuance in America – and I think his beliefs on capital punishment are just about of equal value to those on literature.

Ginzburg: Let's take this very dirty, filthy, pornographic book called Lady Chatterley's Lover. Since it was published here, it has sold millions of copies and is available at most newsstands, but I can't recall seeing in any newspaper the case of a kid running out of a school-yard after having read this book, and grabbing the first dame who walked down the street and molesting her.

Rosset: Even if it could be shown that highly prurient reading matter were a contributing factor to sex crimes, this in my mind would have nothing to do with the problem of censorship, but would lead us into other sociological studies to find out why it did this, not to stop it. We know that automobiles kill a great number of people. I haven't heard anybody suggesting that they be banned.

Ginzburg: Unfortunately, most people view pornography as cause, rather than effect. They ascribe magical powers to it that it does not possess. Wiping out pornography will not eliminate the vestiges of puritanism in our society, which is the real cause and creator of pornography.

Mailer: The way it is now, on the one side there's puritanism and on the other there's a subterranean impetus toward pornography so powerful that half the business world is juiced by all sorts of sexual attachments, from conventioneering businessmen with girls on call, to the sort of half-sex that one finds in advertisements. You get enormously attractive girls selling cigarettes, which is a perversion of sex because an enormously attractive girl should be presented for what she is, and not as a handmaiden to a little box containing some paper, tobacco and cellophane.

I think this bad "art," that one gets in the mass media, on television, in the movies, does the nation far more harm than if one were to remove all controls from pornography and obscenity. There's a practical limit to how much pornography anyone can read at any given moment – it's vitiated. Take a fifteen-year-old who reads it. The very worst that's going to happen to him is that it's going to intensify his onanistic temptations greatly, and I don't believe that's good.

Ellis: I disagree. There is no evidence that pornography, either at its best or worst, will intensify a young boy's masturbatory urges. As Kinsey and other investigators have shown, these urges are fairly stable and are probably as much motivated by internal drives as by external influences. Even, however, if pornography did encourage a greater degree of masturbation on the part of a young male, there is every reason to believe that such autoerotism would be entirely harmless and might in many respects be beneficial.

Mailer: But the censor would then argue there's a difference between a tendency and an act. And the censor's not interested in encouraging the act. The censor is interested in discouraging the tendency. But it's equally bad to live in a half-state in relation to pornography. I mean, everyone knows the drama of a fifteen-year-old boy who can spend an entire day wandering around the streets of a city getting mildly aroused by a half-view of a beautiful bosom and a box of cigars, or he looks at a billboard and goes to a movie because the billboard promises him that he's going to get a pleasure that he doesn't get once he's in the movie. This state of being half-excited and half-frustrated, I would say, leads to violence. A half-censorship is odious because whenever one is aroused sexually and one doesn't find a consummation, the sex in one's veins turns literally to violence. It's no accident that most frigid people are sadistic.

Ellis: Half-censorship certainly tends to result in sex arousal without consummation, and therefore is harmful. But sex frustration only leads to violence when one neurotically rants and raves against the frustration, instead of philosophically either accepting it as being temporarily inevitable or calmly and concertedly working to do away with it. Frustration does not lead to aggression, as many psychologists erroneously contend; one's childish attitudes toward frustration do the real damage.

Mailer: What I'm getting at is, I refuse to take pornography seriously as a danger to the country until the things that are really dangerous to the country – like the mass media – are first subjected to a little scrutiny. When they're ready to clean their house, I'll say we writers will be ready to clean our house. Of course there are books that don't have a drop of pornography in them that are also evil. I think an overly sentimental serial in The Saturday Evening Post is evil. I think a reasonably good play on television that is truthful for the first two acts and becomes completely false in the third act, is evil, because it arouses certain expectations in people, makes them start considering their lives, and just at the point when they're most open they're turned away with a lie. It's exactly like coitus interruptus. Coitus interruptus is evil.

Playboy: Another aspect of what Norman Mailer is talking about, perhaps, was explored in an article called The Pious Pornographers (playboy, October 1957) by Ivor Williams. It made the point that some magazines, notably the women's mass magazines, purvey what has been termed "pornography," or "obscenity," in the guise of clinical or scientific advice and case histories which, the author avered, were stimulating morbidly sexual curiosity. A completely different sort of sexual writing, presented in the habiliments of scientific inquiry, may be found in the unbanned paperback book called Pornography and the Law. This sober-sided study quotes so copiously in establishing just what "hard-core pornography" is, that it will spare the reader of prurient bent a great deal of boredom while searching for the gamier passages to be found in so-designated "obscene" books. This one inexpensive volume enjoys unrestricted distribution because it is, presumably, a scholarly work.

The degree of emotional "charge" that affects people's (and the law's) judgment may be discerned in the ready acceptance of such clinical postures – which arouse no feelings of guilt – and the condemnation of the frankly erotic. One of the evils of pornography, according to James Jackson Kilpatrick, in his book The Smut Peddlers, is that "When a youth accepts the idea of sex without love he is stained inside."

Arnold: Sounds like gobbledygook to me. I don't know what he's talking about. The Supreme Court held that "the judgment is not to be made with regard to the likely effect on the young or immature, nor to the sophisticated or worldly wise."

Preminger: It is an old-fashioned point of view, in my opinion. We know very well that sex without love exists – only hypocritical people can say that nobody has sex without love or that nobody should have sex without love.

Ginzburg: Is Mr. Kilpatrick trying to suppress sex without love? Is that what he is trying to do indirectly by getting at pornography? Well, I think he's got a great big job ahead of him, even after he gets rid of all the pornography.

Rosset: I've never seen any of those "stains." I would put it this way: Something that I find to be disturbing is murder without passion. This may be roughly analogous. I think we live in a society where violence without passion is encountered in multiple forms.

Girodias: Protecting children against moral corruption has always been the last-resort argument of the champion of censorship. It is the weakest and most idiotic justification invoked to suppress books written for adult readers. Mr. Kilpatrick's remark is too elliptical not to be misleading. Sex exists with or without love. Sex is the primary agent of love between males and females. Should we hide the fact from young people? Should we teach them that sex is corrupting in some cases, and not in others? Then I leave to Mr. Kilpatrick the task of explaining to our young friends what is sex and what is love, when sex is just sex and when sex is sex with love. Such guidance will probably make the whole continent frigid, but that shouldn't bother Mr. Kilpatrick.

Seriously, if we want to restore mental sanity to our world, we must first of all save the young from the lies and hypocrisy inherited from generations of puritans. Modern man must find his path in a world which has become infinitely dangerous and dense. Our society will only survive if it starts producing individuals endowed with full freedom of judgment; we do not need an elite of specialized thinkers, but positive and personal thinking at every level. Those children Mr. Kilpatrick is so concerned about are not corrupted by bad books. I don't think they are interested in books, or pornography, which is a game for adults. If they feel that they were born in a dry, cold and hopeless world, this cannot be corrected by more censorship.

Mailer: The trouble is very few people in the country really find love, and because they don't find it, the only way they can begin to get back on the track of finding it is to find some kind of excitation. I think what happens over the years is that most people in America sooner or later sink into a profound depression about sex because they've failed at it so many times in so many ways. So pornography at least charges their batteries, and they go out again, and they search for it again, and again they fail. The argument, I think, comes down to this: that the half-state of acceptance that America has for pornography is probably intolerable. The tragedy of so many people is that the reason they don't find love is not because their bodies are inadequate to love, but their minds are inadequate to it. Love is an enormously complex matter, and we have absolutely no preparation for it in this country, we have no tradition for it, we don't have our Heloise and Abelard, our Romeo and Juliet, we don't even have our Tristan and Isolde. We've got Eddie Fisher and Liz Taylor – and Liz Taylor is always in dire medical peril – and that's our great love story. Or we have Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, or Joe DiMaggio Revisited. As a matter of fact, the only love story we have is Jack and Jackie.

Playboy: Supreme Court Justice Brennan has written, in an obscenity-case decision, that "Implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance." Must a work have social importance in order to be protected by law?

Rosset: I can't accept a statement that says something ought to be banned if it is of no socially redeeming importance, because I would say that no such thing exists. It becomes a semantic game.

Playboy: Thurman Arnold has pointed out that William James made a most telling – and amusing – comment on that very matter. Judge Arnold was pointing out the desperate futility of "playing the game of definitions," apropos determining just what "hard-core pornography" is. He quoted James as saying, "Such discussions are tedious – not as hard subjects like physics or mathematics are tedious, but as throwing feathers endlessly hour after hour is tedious."

Ellis: I think that trashy books should be protected by the law, but not by the critics. If we start banning trashy books, then we'd have to ban Elsie Dinsmore as trash, and all the theological tracts that are utter trash, and so on. For who's to say whether something is trash?

Mailer: I think that one of the difficulties has been that practically all the defenses of pornography have been predicated on the assertion that the work is not pornographic. The legal mind has been so presumptuous as to assume that pornography cannot be of any social value. Someday I hope there will come that happy day when someone will go into court and plead a defense on the basis that the work is (a) pornographic, (b) serious and (c) valuable for the health and life of the republic. That's the ideal.

Girodias: Obviously, Justice Brennan does not even consider the possibility of an association between art and obscenity. Is it necessary to recite the old list – from the Bible to Rabelais to Joyce – to show that he has been daydreaming?

Mailer: The authority in this country is like one vast, frozen, nervous, petrified mother who's trying to keep her favorite son – this utterly mad hoodlum – under control, and she's getting more and more frantic as the years go on because she doesn't understand her son. The essence of such mothers is that they always try to keep things from happening. They don't understand that the more you try to keep something from happening, the more the pressure increases. In a funny way, there's too much respect for civilization in this country – too much terror of things getting out of control.

Arnold: We might get out of an awful lot of trouble if we had no ban on pornography, although I don't think that's going to happen. But I would agree with Justice Douglas, who dissented on the ground that the Federal Constitution prohibited making the distribution of any literature criminal however obscene it was. He said: "To allow the State to step in and punish mere speech or publication that the judge or the jury thinks has an undesirable impact on thoughts, but that is not shown to be a part of unlawful action, is drastically to curtail the First Amendment . . ."

Rosset: I don't believe that there is any practical way of administering a censorship program for the benefit of one group of society – children, say – without ending up by forcing all the rest of the society to conform to the same standards. Therefore, we have to take the calculated risk that comic books or television programs or whatever it is, may hurt people.

Ellis: If there should be censorship at all, obviously the people who should do the censoring should be professionally trained individuals who understand the psychological make-up of those at whom censorship is directed. Or, a safer way to do it would be to have no censorship, but – as in the case of some movies – to censor the sale of this noncensored product to certain individuals – but leave the product alone. Often you see movies for people over twenty-one; the movie itself is not censored, but the audience is restricted.

Preminger: I always try to do this in my own movies. If I feel that I am doing a story which certain parents would not like their children to see, I want to warn them about the movie, tell them what the theme is about, because certain themes to certain parents are objectionable for their children. These parents should then have the right to keep their children away from these movies, but I would object to the police doing it. The producer should honestly, out of his own responsibility, advertise it this way – and I would like to add that my movies lose revenue this way. But the parents should have no excuse to say, "I didn't know, I wouldn't have let my daughter go, I didn't know what it was about." They should know what it is about. Then they should stop the children from going. Because the kind of parents who say, "How can I stop my children? The theatre should not let them in" – that's nonsense. If parents cannot stop their children from going to the movies, they won't be able to stop them from a lot of other things. But I do think that you can do and say almost everything in a movie if you keep it within the limits of good taste and if your purpose is to tell a story honestly. Of course, a nude bosom of a woman – which can be very beautiful in my opinion – might in America be less acceptable than in France. And the American moviemakers who make two versions of a movie take this into account. I have never made a movie with two versions.

Playboy: We're all familiar with the two-version movie, or the one billed as "for adults only." Whatever the motivation of the maker or the distributor, these do constitute a limitation on which kinds of audiences are exposed to a product, rather than, a censorship of the entire product itself. A somewhat similar situation exists in certain libraries, where books deemed suitable only for adults, or judged by the librarian – or the PTA, or Loretta Young – to be controversial, are put on a separate, labeled shelf, or even in a special room. One library, in Clifton, New Jersey, has a special shelf for such "controversial" books as Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Is this an acceptable, or a desirable, or a more benign facet of censorship, or is it, rather, a well-intentioned service to the public?

Rosset: I think it's unwise. I think it reacts exactly against what it is that they are presumably trying to do. And again, just as with the word "pornography," it has bad connotations. Immediately, the books on this shelf have something wrong with them. This doesn't mean that, especially when it comes to children, they should be deliberately exposed – and here I am not speaking of erotic material any more than I am speaking about detective stories or whatever. I have a child. I don't tell him, "Go in and turn on the television set and look at it for the next six hours if you feel like it." I think that as a parent I would like to play some part in the formation of his opinions concerning what things he thinks are good and bad. I think the school is doing the same thing, and everything around him. We can try to single out those elements that we think are good. But that's quite different from censoring.

Playboy: What would be your reaction – as a parent, not a publisher – were your child to pick up a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover – possibly stimulated to do so in part because a librarian put it on the "controversial" shelf?

Rosset: At the moment, I wouldn't worry too much about it – he can't read. But later I would be all for it.

Playboy: How about Henry Miller?

Rosset: If it interested him or her I would be all for that, too.

Playboy: How about a stag movie?

Rosset: Let me put it this way. I think that every child is different. You can judge your own, and one should be able to judge the personality and what stage of development a child has gotten to. Some kids at the age of ten are much more mature and understanding than others at fourteen. It depends on the situation. I've often been invited to see a stag movie, but I'd be rather surprised if my child were. But a stag movie is not any different from the situation I mentioned earlier, in regard to the book White Thighs. The author of White Thighs consciously was trying to do something that he could sell specifically for the purpose of erotic stimulation and probably, but not necessarily, didn't have much other purpose in mind; whereas, let's say, a film like Hiroshima Mon Amour – it certainly has some erotic elements in it, but they are a product or a part of the film. They are meant to be erotic; they are meant to be stimulating. They are also part of something which transcends that element.

Girodias: I think Antonioni's La Notte is very relevant to our subject – and a most instructive and illuminating study of sex and love.

Rosset: Whether or not my child at a certain age should be exposed to them – that would be a decision I would have to make when confronted with the problem. As far as any adult is concerned, the danger I see in such things is that, rather than creating an overwhelming desire to commit rape or adultery or whatever it is that apparently some legal authorities fear, they cause repulsion and disgust and boredom with a very wonderful thing. But I wouldn't censor them. Everybody in life is a censor for himself, because we are all selective. And if my child says to me he wants to look at a television program, I look in the paper and pick out one that I think would be the most interesting for him. And that is selectivity, that's not censorship. If my child associated with people, let's say, who were constantly speaking in racially discriminatory terms, I would be very upset about it. I would very strongly disagree with these people. And I would point this out to him, and I would try to put him in an environment where such would not be the case. I wouldn't call that censorship. I would call it guidance.

Ginzburg: A child's notions regarding sex are implanted in his mind long before he goes to see his first pornographic picture. There is no such thing as obscenity – any more than there is witchery. They are both superstitions. That is, you cannot measure witchery or obscenity by any scientific measuring device. This is something subjective – strictly in the beholder's mind. Former Postmaster Summerfield and Barney Rosset here both read the same book, Lady Chatterley's Lover. One thought it was obscene, the other didn't. Why? Obviously, this book does something to Summerfield that it does not do to Barney Rosset.

Arnold: Summerfield is a very excitable man.

Mailer: I read Lady Chatterley's Lover in college. The unabridged edition. It changed my life. I think if I hadn't read it I would have a different attitude toward sex. It was the first thing I'd ever read that gave me the idea that sex could be beautiful. Lawrence was the first writer I knew to write with a certain relaxation about sex and love. I'm sure I got a sense from Lawrence that the way to write about sex was just simply to write about it, that it was not to strike poses, it was just to be true to the logic of each moment, because there's an enormously subtle logic to love. I think one of the reasons why people are absorbed in love is because it's one of the few ways in which they find a logic to their lives. Looking back on it now, I think Lady Chatterley's Lover is probably not a very good book. It's probably one of the greatest of the bad books – because it's much too simple – it has everything about sex and nothing about the violence which is part of sex. So that in a sense it's a terribly sentimental book – because one doesn't arrive at love like that – like just getting into bed with a woman and getting better and better at it, and exploring more and more deeply. That, is, a man and woman can't just explore more and more deeply into one another. Any number of things keep happening – the world keeps impinging on sex. The lovers keep testing one another; lovers not only create but they also destroy one another; lovers change one another; lovers resist the change that each gives to the other. So Lawrence, by avoiding all these problems, really wrote a book that was more mythical than novelistic. It's also a book I would defend to the death. It's exactly the sort of book that, if it had entered the general literature at the time it was written, our entire sexual literature today would be far better, far more subtle, sensitive, incisive, profound. It was exactly because Lady Chatterley's Lover was kept in that state of suppression for so many years that it took on a power it didn't really possess.

Playboy: In The Time of Her Time – that section of your novel-in-progress included in Advertisements for Myself – might not those sexual scenes, in effect, be an answer to Lady Chatterley's Lover?

Mailer: Maybe. I didn't think of it when I was writing it. I suppose now that we've talked about it, I can hardly be unself-conscious about it; from now on I'll have to be writing an answer to Lawrence. You've changed the consciousness of my time – my personal time.

Playboy: Dr. Ellis, in an interview with The Realist, you said that "Although Henry Miller is often an unusually fine writer, he sometimes goes to ridiculous, and to my mind often downright pornographic lengths – such as having a character copulate with his girlfriend in a crowded movie theatre." What makes this pornographic to you?

Ellis: I consider this a good example of pornography, because pornography is normally literature that is deliberately written with the main purpose of inciting sexual desires, and that describes sex acts in a totally unrealistic, wish-fulfilling way.

Mailer: I think Dr. Ellis is wrong. I remember when I lived in Brooklyn, when I was a kid, I had friends who swore they'd made girls in the top balcony of the Brooklyn Paramount. Probably by now it's all policed and standardized and homogenized but at least during the Depression there used to be an awful lot of sex in balconies.

Ellis: I will say that Henry Miller normally does not write pornography. He writes fine literature that depicts very honestly and openly the sex lives of his characters, including himself. But in some of his latest works, I do not think he portrays Henry Miller or anyone else. I think he deliberately made up some of his material, not for its literary value, but for its excitation value. Now, I'm not for censoring this kind of stuff, but I think it's trash. But then I think most pornography is utter trash.

Girodias: This brings us back to the definition of pornography, doesn't it? A pornographer is expected to make easy money by playing upon the reader's libido. I know Henry Miller well enough to say that he is not only an unusually fine writer, but a sincere and honest one as well. The obscenity he has introduced in his books has not helped his material interests; on the contrary – he has been deprived of a normal career in his own country because he wanted to be free to write completely. A man who has preferred the status of a semi-tramp to success and money in order to preserve his freedom of creation cannot easily be accused of base motives. I believe that what Dr. Ellis calls pornographic in Miller's work has been written deliberately to shock the reader, to shake up his false values. I believe that Miller has refused to be incorporated in the old order, and that he has built his life work against the taboos of a society which he rejects. Hence the provocations, the wild attacks against conventions, proprieties and ready-made ethics.

Playboy: How do you feel about the impending publication in the United States of Henry Miller's unexpurgated Tropics?

Girodias: I am quite optimistic about this. For years I have been trying to persuade Miller to let his books be published in the United States, while he objected that the times were not ripe or that he wanted to avoid the publicity which would inevitably follow the appearance of the Tropics in America. Some months ago I visited him in Germany in a little village inn where he was staying near Hamburg. It took six bottles of mosel wine and a five-hour session before Miller announced: "I have made up my mind." I felt that something really important had been achieved. It will have taken nearly thirty years for this truly great writer to be recognized in his own country. Following publication of Lolita and Lady Chatterley's Lover, the appearance of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn in the U.S. will be the next big step toward the total elimination of literary censorship in the English-speaking countries.

Mailer: I read Tropic of Cancer years ago, but as I remember it, what was marvelous about it was that it was the exact opposite of Lawrence, which was that it had the beauty of sex in it the way people who care a great deal about prize-fighting can go to see a club fight and will enjoy all of it: they'll enjoy all the ugliness of a club fight; they'll enjoy the way the blood rolls down the guy's mouth, onto his shoulder, they'll enjoy the cigar smoke, they'll enjoy the spit on the floor, they'll enjoy the body odor of the people there, they'll enjoy it because it's all true, it's all part of something going on that's real, whose end is unforeseen. Lawrence wrote about sex as if it were a spirit; Miller writes about sex as if it's something that is growing in a most specific environment. In Lady Chatterley's Lover, as I remember, there was not even a description of Mellors' cottage – you don't know what the bed's like – but when you read about sex in Miller, you know exactly how the sheets scratch. For anyone who's interested in getting sexual pleasure from reading a book, Tropic of Cancer is a much more exciting book than Lady Chatterley's Lover, and the reason is that most people find their own sex in some rough garden or barnyard where people cough at the penultimate moment, where men and women make little squeaky mouselike sounds at the ultimate moment, where cockroaches crawl along the edge of the wall, and because of that, one can relax. When one reads Lawrence there's a tension – a certain wistfulness one feels, for most people don't find sex that pure, that deep, that organic. They find it something sort of partial and hot and ugly and fascinating and filled with all sorts of bric-a-brac, with day-to-day details. What I'd like to achieve is something between Miller and Lawrence, though naturally, I'm not interested in trying to imitate one or the other. What I'm interested in is finding a new consciousness about sex; a consciousness that will have perhaps a little more – a happier sense – of what it's all about.

Playboy: In upholding the appeal on the acquittal of Forever Amber in Massachusetts, Judge Frank J. Donahue said that the book was "a soporific rather than an aphrodisiac . . . that while the novel was conducive to sleep, it was not conducive to a desire to sleep with a member of the opposite sex." Does this imply that the basis of censorship legislation is overtly antisexual in nature?

Ginzburg: That's the basis of the whole thing. What that judge was saying about the book he was really saying about himself.

Rosset: Although I find it a very amusing decision and one of keen insight, I would say it was totally beside the point and would lead to the ridiculous assumption that if the book had had good qualities instead of bad ones, of necessity it would have been banned. It goes along with the passage that Maurice Girodias quoted in his Playboy article, in which a British judge found Ulysses acceptable because it was unintelligible to him.

Ellis: Let me quote from Into Whose Hands: "The sexually stimulative effect of erotic literature is enormously exaggerated. Literature occupies a very inferior position in the list of aphrodisiacs. There are many far more potent influences on sexual libido. Dancing exerts a powerful aphrodisiacal effect; so does alcohol; so does women's dress; so does perfume. Yet no one suggests the prohibition or suppression of any of these aphrodisiacs on the grounds of its 'corrupting influence' or its power of inciting sexual passion. Indeed, the most powerful sexual stimulant of all is in the contact of the sexes. It is impossible to guard against in any extended or complete sense."

Ginzburg: When you admit that pornography is harmful in any respect, you have to accept the whole concept and claim that portrayal of sex in any form is harmful. Actually, there is no question but that puritanism is fading, though. Arnold Gingrich, the publisher of Esquire, has stated that the world is about to embark on a great new voyage of morality, by which he apparently means puritanism. He feels that freedom in literature and the arts is going to produce a counteraction, that people are going to get fed up with honesty regarding sex and throw it out in favor of a sort of mid-Victorian hypocrisy – though he doesn't say it in those words. But if Gingrich thinks the public is becoming bored by sex, or upset about its prevalence, I think he is projecting onto the public something which may be the result of his own increasing age.

Ellis: I feel that there are ups and downs in these areas, but that generally over the last five hundred or a thousand years the tendency has been toward more liberal acceptance of sex. When we liberally accept sex for a while, counterreformation often sets in, and squelches free expression. But never completely. I would predict, rather, that hundreds of years from now, sex won't be much of an issue, just as gluttony and smoking are insignificant moral issues today. Tomorrow the big issues are still likely to be atomic bombs and political affairs, or maybe space travel.

Mailer: I think it's possible that this counterwave that Gingrich talks about could come into being. I hope it doesn't. As we become Victorian, we will also become more totalitarian. I couldn't really give you careful and clear reasons for it. It's just that when I think of all the people I've known in my life, the ones who are Victorian are quite totalitarian. I don't want to make a blanket statement out of this: I've also known any number of people who are sexually promiscuous who are also quite totalitarian. It's not at all simple. My hip, if you will, tells me that Victorianism is just going to make us more like the Soviet Union.

Preminger: The pendulum always swings to the left and then to the right – it is possible that we might go through a phase where at least one part of the people in this country and other countries becomes again more prudish about outspoken expressions of sex and love or any outspoken descriptions of human relations, in favor of what you call mid-Victorian hypocrisy. But I don't think it will last, because I believe in the progress of human nature, of human behavior. I believe that eventually, more and more, we will not only enjoy freedom, but we will also profit by this freedom. And when I say freedom, I don't mean licentiousness.

Mailer: The question really is whether we should move toward more freedom. My feeling is that we should, because, while there'll be any number of abuses of that freedom, there would be a natural reaction against pornography, and a natural reaction against pornography would be fine. With unlimited access to pornography, a point of satiety is reached sooner or later; when one does not have unlimited access, that point of satiety is never quite reached; it's kept in a state of half-tension.

Arnold: In 1900, when women were required to bathe fully clothed and bare legs were a mark of indecency, youths were stimulated by the sight of an ankle or a calf. I don't think we will ever get rid of a certain amount of censorship on sex – but I don't think any effort to reduce the number of impure thoughts percapita is ever going to succeed, either.

Rosset: I feel about the future trend of censorship as I feel about the future trend of the world. If the atom bomb doesn't fall, things will get better. There will be a constantly greater freedom, a greater ability for creative effort in the arts, unless some complete catastrophe takes place. And that I don't foresee.

Girodias: There is no doubt that censorship is winning a victory in most countries. This is not surprising, as moral censorship is used by most governments as a means of control and domination. The authoritarian methods in use nearly everywhere nowadays explain this counterattack of the puritanical forces. But it's only one phase in a general evolution that is leading toward individual as well as collective freedom – even if that goal is still very far away. So let us sit tight and wait for the next wave.

Playboy: Gentlemen, apparently we have achieved a consensus which might be summarized this way: Censorship in literature and the arts is very much with us: the official censorship of laws and government, the unofficial censorship of pressure groups, and the tacit censorship of writers and artists, and those who (like publishers and editors, film makers and distributors) expose their work to the public. We seem agreed that censorship is on the wane, though oscillations in its strength are apparent. We have seen, even in our own discussion, the tortuous treadmill of attempted definitions of such words as "obscene" and "pornographic," with their immense subjective load. We have noted progress toward fuller freedom; not long ago, Thurman Arnold observed that "Courts are no longer required to undertake the undignified, introspective task of putting themselves in the role of the general public and then deciding whether in that role the material [they are studying] has unduly aroused their sexual interest."

There has been agreement among us that the concept of legal censorship is alive with danger to creative art as well as free speech, and that it puts courts in the role of literary critics "for which task they have no fitness" – to quote Judge Arnold yet again. We have considered censorship as a form of thought control – in which connection a pronouncement by Justice Harlan seems most pointed: "The Federal Government has no business, whether under the postal or commerce power, to bar the sale of books because they might lead to any kind of 'thoughts.' "

Concerning postal censorship in particular, but all government censorship by implication, let us close our discussion with the final words of Judge Arnold's landmark decision against the Post Office's attempt to deny second-class mailing privilages to Esquire magazine.

"We intend no criticism of counsel for the Post Office. They were faced with an impossible task [to prove obscenity]. They undertook it with sincerity. But their very sincerity makes the record useful as a memorial to commemorate the utter confusion and lack of intelligible standards which can never be escaped when that task is attempted. We believe that the Post Office officials should experience a feeling of relief if they are limited to the more prosaic function of seeing to it that 'neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.'"