Late News from the Provinces: The Trial of Cain’s Book

Abstract

The trial of Penguin Books in 1960 for the publication of Lady Chatterley 's Lover and its 'not guilty' verdict did not establish a uniform climate of liberalisation across the UK. In particular, the defence of literary merit as an expression of the 'public good' did not become an absolute criterion in judging the obscenity of any particular title. The freedom from legal censorship of publishing and bookselling rolled out slowly from the centre after 1960 and was to receive a setback in the 1964 trial, and subsequent appeal, of Alexander Trocchi's Cain's Book.Keywords: 1960s, Scotland, Trocchi, Calder, Lady Chatterley's Lover, obscene publications, obscenity trials, public good.This chapter examines the significance of the 1964 trial for obscenity of Alexander Trocchi's novel Cain 's Book published by John Calder. That significance can be seen not only within the narrow focus of a subset of book history that considers the shifting relationships between authors, publishers and the state but also within the broader context of the cultural history of the 1960s in Scotland and the UK. Indeed, the trial of Cain 's Book represents an interesting intersection of book history and cultural history where the pedantic attention to detail that often characterises the former can be used beneficially to qualify the sweeping generalisations typical of the latter. The 1960s as a decade possesses a set of strong, simplified associations that are reinforced through popular expressions and popularising histories. Not least of these associations is that of the 1960s as a period of sexual liberation and revolution. Few commentators on the decade fail to quote Philip Larkin's verse from Annus Mirabilis:Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(which was rather late for me)Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.Even fewer fail to appropriate the 1960 trial in London of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover from book history; they do so in order to provide an illustration that will define a rather homogeneous portrait of the decade. The fortuitous date of the novel's transition to legal legitimacy provides a starting point for accounts of the liberalisation of British society. For the cultural historian, the lifting of the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover marks a boundary between the repressive 1950s and the liberated 1960s, an instance of the 'immense freeing or unbinding of social energies' that Fredric Jameson argued to be characteristic of the latter decade.2 The 'end of the Chatterley ban', in this reading, represents a new Zeitgeist in the UK - with swinging London at its centre.Randall Stevenson, for example, notes that 'Penguin's victory had many implications during - and beyond - the decade that followed' and uses it as one of the key starting points of his masterly review of British cultural history of the last half of the twentieth century.3 This interpretation echoes a long line of synoptic histories through which the 1960s as a decade is 'remembered'.4 They reflect and privilege a metropolitan experience and perspective in which this Old Bailey trial with a London-based jury was perceived to be the end of the war against censorship rather than a one-off victory. In particular, the trial verdict seemed to have allowed an absolute right of publication to those works where literary merit or the public good were attested to or validated by expert witnesses. The subsequent appearance of innovative texts, primarily films and novels, challenging orthodox beliefs and social norms, represented an artistic will to exploit this seeming new immunity. Many of these commentators on the decade are passing judgement, thumbs up or thumbs down, on the social and cultural 'revolution' of the 1960s but, whatever their stance, all accept that a revolution, with its implications of sudden, radical change, did take place. What this chapter disputes is not the effect of the revolution but whether there was really a revolution at all as opposed to gradual change seeping out from the centre. …