# Great bit of writing



## Steerpike (Dec 4, 2013)

in the form (of all things) of a dissent in a legal opinion. The issue was whether Henry Miller's book _Tropic of Cancer_ was obscene and could be banned. The Court said no. Justice Musmanno thought it was obscene and dissented, riffing on Tropic of Cancer. The result is hilarious.

Quoting:

‘Cancer’ is not a book. It is a cesspool, an open sewer, a pit of putrefaction, a slimy gathering of all that is rotten in the debris of human depravity. And in the center of all this waste and stench, besmearing himself with its foulest defilement, splashes, leaps, cavorts and wallows a bifurcated specimen that responds to the name of Henry Miller. One wonders how the human species could have produced so lecherous, blasphemous, disgusting and amoral a human being as Henry Miller. One wonders why he is received in polite society.

I would prefer to have as a visitor in my home the most impecunious tramp that ever walked railroad ties, a tramp whose raggedy clothes are held together by faith and a safety pin, a tramp who, throughout his entire life, always moved at a lazy pace, running only to avoid work, a tramp who rides the rods of freight cars with the aplomb of a railroad president in his private train, a tramp who knows as much about Emily Post's etiquette as a chattering chimpanzee, and who couldn't care less; I would prefer to invite that lazy, bewhiskered cavalier of the road to my residence for a short visit, than even to see on the highway that hobo of the mind, that licentious nomad called Henry Miller, whose literary clothes are plastered with filth, whose language is dirtier than any broken sewer that pollutes and contaminates a whole community;-Henry Miller who shuns a bath of clean words, as the devil avoids holy water, who reduces human beings to animals, home standards to the pigsty, and dwells in a land of his own fit only for lice, bedbugs, cockroaches and tapeworms.

*...
*
The Majority has missed a great opportunity to ring the Liberty Bell again for high moral standards. This was a case where the Court did not have to balance between literary excellence and moral turpitude in a book. It did not have to consider what the public might lose in being deprived of a work with some social value as against obscenity, because ‘Cancer’ has no social worth whatever, it has no literary merit, and no information value. It is a scabious toad croaking obscene phrases in a pestiferous swamp of filth and degradation.

... 

I regret that the action of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the oldest Supreme Court in the nation, should result, not in Cancer's being consigned to the garbage can malodorously yawning to receive it, but, instead, in Cancer's being authorized unquestioned entry into the Public Library in Philadelphia within ringing distance of Independence Hall where the Liberty Bell rang out joyously the proclamation of the freedom, independence and Dignity of man.

I would recoil in dismay if I attempted to visualize the reaction of the founding fathers if they could see this, one of the foulest books that ever disgraced printer's type, now taking a place on the library shelves with the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare's Works, Plutarch's Lives, Homer's Iliad, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, Cervante's Don Quixote, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and the other immortal books that inspired the brilliant architects, the brave leaders, the kneeling prayers, and the heroic soldiers who fashioned the United States of America.

From Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, from Dan to Beersheba, and from the ramparts of the Bible to Samuel Eliot Morison's Oxford History of the American People, I dissent!


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## T.Allen.Smith (Dec 4, 2013)

Never read it but I guess it's true that no publicity is bad publicity.

The judge's comments make me want to see what all the fuss is about.


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## Ireth (Dec 4, 2013)

I'm curious... what was it about the book that sparked such a reaction?


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## Steerpike (Dec 4, 2013)

There is a lot of very candid depiction of sex, and vulgar language in the book. And remember, this was the 1960s.


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## Steerpike (Dec 4, 2013)

T.Allen.Smith said:


> Never read it but I guess it's true that no publicity is bad publicity.
> 
> The judge's comments make me want to see what all the fuss is about.



I think the judge was a frustrated novelist.

Interestingly, he was a Judge Advocate General in the Navy and one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials.


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## T.Allen.Smith (Dec 4, 2013)

Steerpike said:


> ...he was a Judge Advocate General in the Navy and one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials.



Well that presents an interesting angle....book burnings of the 3rd reich and all.


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## CupofJoe (Dec 5, 2013)

T.Allen.Smith said:


> Well that presents an interesting angle....book burnings of the 3rd reich and all.





> ...where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people...


Heinrich Heine


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## Feo Takahari (Dec 5, 2013)

Looked up the book on Wikipedia. Found this passage:



Spoiler: My eyes! The goggles do nothing!



O Tania, where now is that warm cunt of yours, those fat, heavy garters, those soft, bulging thighs? There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed. I will send you home to your Sylvester with an ache in your belly and your womb turned inside out. Your Sylvester! Yes, he knows how to build a fire, but I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.



That is quite possibly the least erotic attempt at eroticism I have ever read in my entire life, and I have read the works of John K. Peta. (Though apparently it turned on at least one woman--Anais Nin, who was, er, involved with Miller for a while, quoted that passage in a letter to him.)

On the more general topic of censorship, there has been one time, and one time only, when I read one of these "foul" and "polluted" books and concluded that it was actually foul and polluted. Ghosts is a horrible story about horrible people, and I didn't care one whit about the things they did to each other. Every other time, it turned out that the book was "foul" because it vaguely hinted that some characters were gay, or because it had a female character who actually had a brain, or, at worst, because the author was a dumbass who couldn't shut up about sex but never said anything particularly unusual or significant about it. (My guess is _Tropic of Cancer_ is a book of the last sort.)


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