SEX NOVELS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 359, 21 May 1928, Page 11

SEX NOVELS

English Editor Hits Out at Literary Flood AN OPEN LETTER (Incensed over the flood of vile sex novels that, he believes, threaten to inundate the moral foundation of the English-speaking world, Mr. James Douglas, himself a writer of vitriolic tongue, and the editor of the “London Sunday Express,” hi: .:t at the modern sex novelist in an open letter that has caused an earthquke in staid London’s literary atmosphere. Below is given the full text of his "open letter” to “celebrities:”) Mimes, Cads, Bounders, Sniggerers, Innuendoists, Pornocrats, Garbage Mongers, Purveyors of Pruriency, Vendors of Vice, Sewer Rats, Blow Flies, Carrion Crows, Maggots of Decadence, Hookworms of Salacity, Literary Lepers, and Yahoos. You are one of the 10 plagues let loose upon us by the war, and X am afraid that no pestologist will exterminate you before you have completed your corruption of our defenceless youth and your mercenary demoralisation of the English novel. There is a fat market for your wares, because you cater for the basest appetites of human nature without fearing either the vengeance of a healthy public opinion or the lash of the law. You have converted holy liberty into unholy licence. You have defiled freedom. You have degraded every lofty ideal and debased every noble aim. You have turned marriage into a mockery. You have glorified lust and lechery. You have made the world safe for pornocracy. It is your crowning shame that you have transformed sex into a synonym for sensuality, so that this once honest word is now a lewd leer reeking of lubricity. Sex novels, sex plays and sex films are a marketable commodity. There is a pseudo-censorship of sex plays and sex films, but your damaged goods are sold without even the semblance of a censor. Fifty years ago parents severely censored the novels read by their children. When I was a boy we were not allowed to poison our imagination with foul .and filthy fiction. Our fathers and mothers protected our minds as well as our stomachs against unwholesome foods. They nourished our brains as well as our body on the best diet they could find. Good Old Fare They gave us Dickens and Scott, and we relished the good fare. No sex novelist in those days could afford to defy the parental censorship. Dirt was kept out of the home. The bookshelf was not a domestic midden. Children were given a chance to grow up without being soiled and contaminated by the scum of scribblers. They were taught to swim in the clean sea of literature. They were not flung into the cesspools of fiction. You have exploited the abdication of parental authority. You have battened on the pathetic curiosity of adolescence. You have played the pimp and the pander to a helpless generation, which is no longer guarded by its own natural guardians or defended by its own proper defenders. It is the fashion to deride the Victorians, but at least they had the courage of their austere beliefs and stern virtues. They did not capitulate to the hawkers of vice and the pedlers of depravity. They closed their doors when ghouls like you prowled on their threshholds with deadly poisons for sale. It is well for you that you were not born in the great Victorian age, for most of you would have been in either gaol or the poorhouse. But you have reaped the golden harvest of Armageddon. You are the yilest of all war profiteers. We can forgive the creatures who made fortunes out of our sore necessity. We cannot forgive you who wax fat on the moral deprivation of our surviving youth. The process of lowering the standard of fiction has been stealthy and furtive, for you have exercised infinite caution and cunning in your permeation of our social conscience. You have walked warily, with one eye on the police and the other on the sleeping watchdogs of religion. You took care to keep in step with the decline and decay of parental and religious vigilance. But as your victims gradually fell into your clutches, you increased endosage of your dirt, You competed with each other in the arrogance and insolence of your venality. I have noted every victory that was won over decency and reticence. After a life devoted to literary criticism, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that it is too late to terrify you by scourging or to frighten you by invective. Your greed for gain makes you proof against satire and impenetrable by irony. Your gilded hides are too thick to feel any thong or to wince under any whip. You are not ostracised or boycotted. On the contrary, you are feted and fawned on by the snobbish idolators of materialism and the worshippers of money. You are the best sellers because you sell your souls. Loathsome Trade A French cynic has declared that very few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. This is a lie, if by love we mean the holy thing that the great poets and the great novelists have set in a shrine of beauty. It is not a lie if we mean the thing that you sell in the guise of love. If it were not for your loathsome trade, youth would he permitted to enter the sanctuary of love with reverence and adoration. Its natural idealism would be allowed to mature. Its roses would bloom without your canker. Its green leafage would not be covered with your slime. There is nothing lovelier than the unspotted and unstained mind of youth. It is generous, unselfish and chivalrous. But you devour its most splendid illusions. You ravage its | most glorious dreams. You les.d it | out of the light into darkness, j Vermin like you are expelled from our schools when they are detected, but you are not thrown out of our drawing-rooms. You crawl everywhere, and there is no insecticide with which to spray you. If the critic ; pours his vitriol over you, he adver- ! tises you instead of inhibiting you. jYou are the deadliest bacteria in our blood; but we have discovered no

anti-toxin that prevents you from multiplying. Some of you are endowed with_ literary artifice that masks your infamy. You sparkle and scintillate in your prutrescence. There are, however, signs that you have nearly exhausted the resources of evil. You are being driven by your commercial rivalries to dig deeper into the darker mysteries of iniquity and the blacker enigmas of abnormality. Not long ago I retched over a novel by a female procuress which explored abyssmal horrors that hitherto have been the monopoly of psychoanalysis. Sweet girl graduates read jit and discussed its esoteric abomin- | ations and fetid mysteries. This is the pass to which we have j come. Knowledge, which in a cleaner | age never crept into the mind of ; healthy manhood and womanhood, is j now purveyed openly by you and all iyour fellow-desecrators. You can ! sell your capsules of corruption to innocent children whose questions paralyse us with horror. You plead in extenuation of your crimes that all knowledge is lawful, and that to the pure all things are pure. You are liars and you know you lie. If we put you into the pillory you whine that you do not mean what you say or what you insinuate, and there is a herd-rush to the pillory which fills your pockets. ! You are making high literature unsaleable. Your bad coin is driving | the good coin out of circulation.