Gino’s little bit of trouble, as it happens, had nothing to do with the books he stocked, even if they were in languages suspected of loitering with intent to commit a felony. Where he made his mistake was in consorting with Renoir. Innocent Gino had taken it into his head to enliven Leonardo’s window with a reproduction of a Renoir nude, breasts and all. Our bureaucratic nannies had never been able to take breasts, so to speak, in their stride. They once clamped down on a book of Norman Lindsay’s because the jacket depicted a lady with one bare breast. The Renoir reproduction, with two, had them deary-meing and goodness-graciousing and whatnexting as if they’d been brought face to face with the Kama Sutra. Prompt and energetic action was called for. And taken. Gino had scarcely placed the Renoir in his window when, with a cop watching his every move, he was taking it out again.
I would have given a lot to see Gino’s face on learning that Renoir was a misdemeanour. And I would have liked to be around, too, when he was prevented in the nick of time from turning us all into rapists by importing some Modigliani reproductions. I wonder if he ever realised how lucky he was as a second offender, almost an habitual criminal, not to be manacled and carted off to clink.
That was what happened to Robert Close when he published his novel, Love Me, Sailor. The nannies were in a terrible state. They’d been so sure, the dear old things, that no-one could be dirtier than Renoir, except perhaps Modigliani, and here was Close, worse than either. Whether the nannies had ever considered trying to extradite Renoir and Modigliani to face trial I couldn’t say although it wouldn’t surprise me if they had, but putting Close in the dock presented no such problem. He was right to hand, waiting to be nabbed. And nabbed he was, hauled before the court on a charge of obscenity, found guilty (what else?) and refused bail. The judge wanted to spend a leisurely weekend deciding just how tough a sentence he could pronounce. Meantime, Close was handcuffed (presumably to make sure that he didn’t start writing another book) and borne off to prison in the Black Maria. ‘A man who is responsible for this work,’ observed the judge in a giant eructation of forensic reasoning, ‘cannot quibble if he is sent to gaol.’ Gino would have admired the happy choice of the word ‘quibble’.
Judges have to endure their little disappointments like the rest of us and it must have caused quite a pang to His Lordship when he realised that the maximum penalty he could impose was a lousy three months. And I don’t doubt that his golf game went all to hell when a higher court reduced the penalty to a mere fine. One can only hope that he was slightly consoled when Close announced that he had had enough of Australia’s prissy view of life (not to mention its ready use of handcuffs) and would henceforward live abroad. So there was that much gained. One writer less.
I didn’t know Close well but we’d met occasionally in Melbourne and I recall being struck by a mildness of manner which was, to say the least, unexpected in a man who’d sailed before the mast for some years and whose life had been a hard one even after he left the sea. That was before the hullabaloo over Love Me, Sailor. Later we had a drink together when he came to France (where his book was published without any significant increase in sex crimes) and he had changed very considerably. He was an angry man. There was nothing remotely mild about his remarks on his own experience and on the Australian attitude towards artists in general. God knows what would have happened to him if the judge and the Crown Prosecutor had overheard his conversation. They would have clapped the darbies on his wrists in a flash.
If Ionesco thought he’d invented the theatre of the absurd he was much mistaken. Australia’s courts were miles ahead of him. Especially in the obscenity trials (and there were plenty of them going on at that time), judges and learned counsel and witnesses for the prosecution regularly made themselves into stupendous figures of fun. Close’s trial was different. The clowns had turned nasty. There wasn’t a laugh in the whole performance.
When Max Harris had his run-in with the law it was good clean family entertainment from start to finish. To begin with, Max always had a romantic and rather touching love of publicity. During his trial, he did a good deal of magniloquent snorting about freedom of speech and artistic integrity and the insanity of censorship (and of course he was absolutely right). But nobody is ever going to persuade me that he didn’t enjoy himself one hundred per cent. Besides, there was never any danger of his being shoved into a cell and, finally, the chief witness for the prosecution revealed himself to be one of the most hilarious slapstick artists of the day.
The poems responsible for Max’s ordeal (although, as I say, I’m willing to bet that it was no ordeal to Max) were the work of the ersatz poet Ern Malley. They were about as sexually arousing as Hymns Ancient and Modern but when Max published them in his Angry Penguins magazine they gave a terrible jolt to at least one reader. Detective Vogelsang could see depravity that was hidden from everyone else. You couldn’t, as he himself would probably have put it, pull the wool over his eyes.
A detective who appeared in another obscenity case readily acknowledged, when asked if he was familiar with Shelley, that he had indeed come across someone of that name, a bloke who lived in Woolloomooloo. In the matter of Lord Byron he wasn’t so sure. On the spur of the moment, he confessed with a manly frankness which well became him, he couldn’t recollect whether Lord Byron had been on Admiral Mountbatten’s staff during the war or not.
These two crime-busters may have been one and the same, but if they weren’t, it ought to be recorded that Detective Vogelsang hadn’t got a thing to learn from his colleague when it came to knockabout comedy. One of Ern’s poems, for instance, was set in a park, a park at night, and the detective was on to the significance of that like a shot. ‘I have found,’ he said, ‘that people who go into parks at night go there for an immoral purpose.’ Fair-minded though, he conceded that possibly ‘my experience as a police officer might tinge my appreciation of poetry’. Who would have thought that judges and cops had such a delicate feeling for words? ‘Tinge’, ‘quibble’—I’m not sure that Flaubert could have done any better. And how about the sort of verbal sixth sense which enabled the detective to affirm that while he didn’t know what ‘incestuous’ actually meant, it had an unmistakable whiff of indecency about it?
I hate to think of Detective Vogelsang and his peers being forgotten. They gave so much pleasure to so many people. When will some sedulous anthologist come along and produce a monumental sottisier to preserve their solemn inanities? It mightn’t be a bad idea at the same time, I must admit, to envisage a second volume of excerpts from the literature some of us were turning out at that time. In our own way, we avant-garde sophisticates could, and now and again did, show ourselves right up there in the same class as Detective Vogelsang when it came to inanity.