Babel Tower (94 page)
Authors: A.S. Byatt
“Sickened. Disgusted.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“No. But I am not its expected audience. I watch and pray.”
Superintendent Wren is a large, ferociously groomed wax-skinned man, with a surprisingly light voice. His evidence is dull and cumulative, a list of cases in which it is his understanding that crimes were incited, or suggested, by reading matter. “Those that are content with reading,” he says, “don’t stay content, they start thinking, Why
not,
and then they go on to try it out. Like Ian Brady. They try it out.” One of his examples is a man who, hearing
The Brothers Karamazov
read on the wireless, was suddenly seized with an impulse, snatched up an axe from his coalshed, and murdered his mother-in-law in her bed.
Augustine Weighall, to pre-empt the Defence, asks him, “You are not suggesting that
The Brothers Karamazov
should be banned.”
“No, sir. I am not. I am just explaining, that those vulnerable to suggestion, do act on it. Now this book is not like
The Brothers Karamazov,
a difficult book, that makes you think, a human book, that makes you feel. It is a book in which nothing happens except sex and death, a typical pornographer’s book—”
“Objection. The witness’s opinion as to whether the book is pornographic is inadmissible.”
“Objection sustained.”
The suffragan bishop’s name is Humphrey Swan. He is thin and sad and bespectacled and insubstantial. He says that
Babbletower
is evil, and far from presenting a Christian view of the world, as Canon Holly has argued, is quite possibly open to prosecution for blasphemy in connection with its dubious presentation of Our Lord’s sufferings. He expatiates on this at some length. He says that the book
does
lead the weak into temptation, temptation to great evil.
Asked by Hefferson-Brough if he considers that he himself has been depraved and corrupted by the book, he replies that he has been dragged through dirt and made to see horrors.
Q. I did not ask if you felt disgusted. I asked if you felt you had been depraved and corrupted.
A. If I must answer that question, yes or no, I must answer yes. I am a worse man, a sicker soul, for having read that book. I shall take time, I shall need effort, to recover from the experience. An element of good in my soul has been slaughtered and is festering.
Q. That is strong language, Bishop.
A. So is the disgusting language of that book, sir. Strong and bad. Worse than bad, because it is
truly
tempting in its sensuousness. Evil. Evil.
Rupert Parrott’s face is red with fury when he sees the jaunty figure of Roger Magog in the witness box. He says in a stage whisper to his solicitor, “He thought there was more attention in it for him, this way.” The judge stares reprovingly. Magog states that he is an educator, a writer on matters social, literary and educational. He states that he is a member of the Steerforth Committee of Enquiry. He is wearing a red bow-tie and a kind of navy blazer. He smiles around the court, including Parrott in his benignity.
Weighall.
People may be surprised to see you in this court, Mr. Magog, appearing as a witness for the prosecution. You have,
I believe, a reputation as a liberal thinker, a defender of our liberties?
Magog.
Indeed I have. I am proud of it. I have written essays on freedom of speech. I spoke in favour of
Lady Chatterley.
I wrote articles in support of the Sexual Offences Bill, which is, as we speak, before the House of Commons, and will, I trust, reach the Statute Book this summer.
Weighall.
You wrote an article in the
Guardian,
I believe, when
Babbletower
was first published.
Magog.
I did.
Weighall.
Tell the Court about this article.
Magog.
It was called “Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones.” It argued that the written word could harm no one—no adult—and that there should not be any prohibition of any written text depicting any lawful act, as it is impossible in practice to distinguish pornography from literature, and it is more important that literature not be repressed than that pornography is
suppressed.
Weighall.
Admirable sentiments, you may think. Yet you are prepared, now, to argue before this Court, that the tendency of
Babbletower
IS
to deprave and corrupt those who may read it?
Magog
. (very firmly) I am.
Weighall.
What brought about this change?
Magog.
It was quite simple. I read the book. (Gales of laughter in court.) I knew you would laugh. You may laugh, you may all laugh, you have a right to laugh. I made a fool of myself, but I have learned something. When I wrote the article I genuinely believed
no book
could harm someone like me, someone normal and sensible and well read. It was a matter of principle. Then I read the book. It was a dreadful experience. I know now what it is to feel depraved and corrupted. This book—you may laugh—revealed things to me about myself that horrified me—that if I were a weaker man, if I were some of the unfortunate children I have taught—might have tempted me. In short—I saw the light. I deliberately use the
religious language of a conversion experience. It was a sign. It is better
not
to live in a society which indulges and admires depictions of cruelty. I was made deeply uncomfortable by the
Marat-Sade,
I was disgusted and dirtied, but I believed it was for the good of my soul to see those horrors. I am told there is a writer who has made what he believes is art out of
enacting
the horrors of the Moors Murders for audiences. I am told he claims he is taking “crucial anxiety” and “turning it upside-down in creative play.” I have heard that they are arguing that they should have access to corpses and disembowel them in Harrods’ windows—artists have as much right as anatomists to corpses, they say. I have no doubt Mason would find it easy to justify the horrors of
Babbletower
on the same grounds. But I do not want to live in a society that can find anything—
anything at all
—playful or creative in these horrors. I have come to believe they should be—not swept under the carpet—but incinerated. Burned with flames of fire. I have had enough of the Permissive Society and before long those who advocate more and more of it will come to feel as I do, to weep for their lost cleanliness and innocence. True freedom is not freedom to hurt others.
Samuel Oliphant takes up this phrase in cross-examination.
Q. Mr. Magog. You said, “True freedom is not the freedom to hurt others.”
A. I did. It isn’t a fashionable thought, these days. I stand by it.
Q. But, Mr. Magog, is not that—according to Professor Smith, according to Dr. Gander, according to Mr. Wedderburn—is not that the central message of
Babbletower
itself?
A.
Babbletower
is a text that twists round and round itself like the snake round the tree. What is its true message? We have heard that the Marquis de Sade felt we should be free to murder and rape. The devil can dress his texts with a little morality. The message I get from
Babbletower
is Sade’s message, the modish message of the moment. The author kills off his murderous hero to give his readers another sadistic kick. It is clever and disgusting and infectious.
• • •
Sir Augustine’s last witness comes into the witness box slowly, and when he is there, is hardly visible above its rim. He is tiny, old and frail; he has a sweet, small face, with a parchment-coloured skin traced like an ancient map with fine lines and the brown islands of age; he wears gold-rimmed spectacles on a beaked nose, and a black silk skull cap above a fringe of baby-fine bright white hair. He wears a loose black jacket, under which his spine is humped and twisted; his hands are twigs, claws, knots of bone and vein, which grip the bar in front of him. He says that he is Professor Efraim Ziz, and teaches in Cambridge. He is an expert on Jewish history and rabbinical writings. He is a survivor of the Treblinka death camp, where he lost his wife, his children and his sisters. He is the author of
Babel and Silence,
and of
The Tongues of Men and of Angels,
studies of Jewish mystical histories of language and silence, of a book on Kafka and the German language, and of
A Private Place.
This last, he explains in a small, clear, precise voice, is an account of that sense of “an inner private, silent place” which made possible the survival of some “fortunate or unfortunate inmates of those places.”
He is asked by Sir Augustine if he has read
Babbletower.
A. I have.
Q. Can you give us your opinion of it.
A. It is written by a writer of talent. It is a clever and tormented book. In the last resort, it is pornography, not literature.
Q. Can you justify that opinion? So that the jury may understand how you arrived at it?
A. Pornography is confined to certain aspects of human nature; it is to do with one person’s power over another person’s body. It reduces human beings to bodily functions—certain repetitive, emphasised, selected functions which are made public without any remnants of privacy, or secrecy (the places of imagination, gentleness, the unspoken, kindness and delight). Pornography tears away veils from shames which then fester and destroy. It diminishes humanity.
Q. You have written about these matters, I believe.
A. I have. I should like, if I may, to quote a passage from Maurice Girodias’s
Olympia Reader,
which I criticised in my book.
“Moral censorship was an inheritance from the past, deriving from centuries of domination by the Christian clergy. Now that it is practically over, we may expect literature to be transformed by the advent of freedom. Not freedom in its negative aspects, but as the means of exploring all the positive aspects of the human mind, which are all more or less related to, or generated by, sex.”
This is obviously a foolish statement, an exaggeration. But it is an exaggeration of a position which is taken by respectable people, including those who have eloquently defended
Babbletower.
Nothing should be hidden, nothing should be silent, nothing should be unspoken. And what should be spoken is sex, is the body
as body.
A society with no religious beliefs may reach this position logically. Nietzsche, to whom Mr. Mason is so attached, wrote, “Once Spirit was God, then it became man, now it is becoming mob.” Mob is public man as pure animal, as pure body. I have seen the power of totalitarian states; I have seen the power of those who had total freedom—total
permission
—to do as they pleased with the bodies of others. There are limits to this power. There are
not so many things
you can do to bodies. But those who “enjoy” this freedom—in all senses of the word “enjoy”—resemble each other.
It is not only—perhaps not mostly—what Efraim Ziz says that has its effect on the crowded courtroom, perhaps on the jury. It is his physical presence, his frailty, his age, his survival, his gentleness, his sweet seriousness. Samuel Oliphant rises to ask him, as he has asked Magog, whether he cannot accept that
Babbletower
is on his side, is making his own points, is “opposed to total or totalitarian freedom.”
Ziz replies:
“Mr. Mason has used the myth of the Tower of Babel, which is a myth about language and God, to make a modern point about the human body and its freedom and its sufferings. There is a long tradition of rabbinical commentary on the fact that the inhabitants of the Tower were not all destroyed, as the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah were, or the whole generation before the Flood. And this
was, according to Rabbi Juda ha Nassa, because they loved each other. They worked together. After their presumption they were not destroyed, but were taught eighty languages by the eighty angels around the throne of God. Speech and writing were made
more difficult
for them, but they were saved. Whereas Mr. Mason’s people are not saved, because there is nothing but total freedom and the body in his book. They are not dignified. There is no hope.”
Q. You sound as though you are describing a pessimistic book, but a work of literary merit?
A. I do not say there is no literary merit. I say there is not enough. Not enough to save the book from doing more harm than good to those who read it.
Q. Your view is that of a religious teacher?
A. Yes. And it is that of an expert in pain, who wishes to see less of it in the world.
The barristers make their final speeches. Sir Augustine is clear and on the whole unemotional. He reiterates the point that
Babbletower
is repetitive and constricted in its subject matter; he quotes one or two of the most distressing passages; he quotes also a passage from Sade.
Is murder a crime in the eyes of Nature? Doubtless we will humiliate man’s pride in reducing him to the ranks of other productions of Nature, but nevertheless he is merely an animal like any other, and in the eyes of Nature his death is no more important than that of a fly or an ox.… Destruction is Nature’s method of progress, and she prompts the murderer to destruction, so that his action shall be the same as plague or famine.… In a word, murder is a horror, but a horror often necessary, never criminal, and essential to tolerate in a republic.
Who, he asks, copied out and studied this passage? Who referred to the innocent victims of his sadistic crimes as animals? Ian Brady, the murderer, who shared his reading matter and the nihilism, the desperate vision derived from it, with his dazzled victim and fellow criminal, Myra Hindley. “Do not believe, members of the jury,” says Sir Augustine, “that cruel acts and cruel visions cannot be passed on, from one human being to another. The well-intentioned ‘experts’ who have amused and bemused us with their academic dissertations
on the harmless pleasures of sado-masochism and their determined cheerful
liberal
willingness to say that ‘everything goes,’ refused, almost to a man and woman, to admit that they were sexually or viscerally stirred by the excesses of
Babbletower.
They refused to admit that their flesh tingled or crawled when they read of the torture of little Felicitas or the ingenious death of the Lady Roseace. They are expert witnesses, they are specialist witnesses. Professor Marie-France Smith is a beautiful woman, a cool Frenchwoman, who, for reasons best known to herself, chooses to spend her time studying the sexual dottiness of M. Fourier and the nasty doctrines of the evil Marquis. Canon Holly, a Christian clergyman, is willing to equate the most grotesque fancies of Jude Mason with the sufferings of his Lord. Dr. Gander is harder to follow, but it is clear that his normal responses to depictions of pain, of sexual excitement, of the desire to hurt, are hopelessly entangled in abstract words to which he can give any meaning he chooses—words like ‘liberation,’ words like ‘freedom,’ words like ‘oppression’—words which can only have the odd meanings they have for him because in fact he lives in a decent society where he is free to say what he pleases because his rights are protected by the vigilance of courts like this, and juries composed of sensible people such as yourselves.