Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Ted Morgan

Author:Ted Morgan [Morgan, Ted]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary
ISBN: 9780393343243
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2012-07-30T12:00:00+00:00

1. The dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest in sex.

2. The material is patently offensive because it affronts contemporary community standards relating to the description or representation of sexual matters.

3. The material is utterly without redeeming social value.

All three elements had to be present for a work to be declared obscene.

With these firm guidelines, knowing where the High Court stood, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled on July 7, 1966, that Naked Lunch was not obscene, in the first application of the new tests to a contemporary work of literature. By a vote of five to two, the Massachusetts court ruled that although the book met the first two tests it could not be said to be “utterly without redeeming social value,” and was thus not obscene. Dissenting Justice Paul C. Reardon said that he had found the book to be “a revolting miasma of unrelieved perversion and disease, graphically described. . . . It is, in truth, literary sewage.” But his was the minority view.

The ruling on Naked Lunch in effect marked the end of literary censorship in the United States. Americans were finally allowed to read what they wanted to read.

It was fitting that the final battle between First Amendment rights and America’s puritan heritage should have been fought in the city which made “banned in Boston” part of the national culture. No book like Naked Lunch had been cleared before—a book that made Tropic of Cancer seem sedate. Since nothing that would come after it would come close in bad language and objectionable scenes, it would set the standard for what was not obscene. Thus, Naked Lunch was the last work of literature to be censored by the post office, the Customs Service, and by a state government. And, as we all know, today’s dirty book becomes tomorrow’s college textbook. The Naked Lunch decision also left the door ajar for hard-core pornography, which squeezed into the opening, and this raises the question of whether the right to be sexually aroused is guaranteed by the First Amendment . . . but that’s another matter.

All during the period of the book’s publication and the trial in Boston, Burroughs had a more immediate problem, which was that he was finding it impossible to collect his share of the American royalties from Maurice Girodias. The arrangement was that Grove sent the royalties to Girodias’s agent in Switzerland, Odette Hummel. In October 1963, for example, Barney Rosset cabled $9,500 to Odette Hummel, representing the royalties on 9,405 copies of Naked Lunch sold between January and June 1963. At that time, Burroughs, who was supposed to be getting his share of the American royalties, was in Tangier, so broke he could not pay his rent or repair his typewriter. He was in fact truly destitute, for he had told his parents he no longer needed the $200-a-month allowance they had been sending him since his graduation from Harvard, now that he had his royalties. For the

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