Critics & Censors, Then & Now

 An echat with Gene Palumbo reminded me that I still own a rare book, so I decided to re-read it. The book is titled Criticism and Censorship,  by Walter Kerr, the distinguished drama critic for the New York Herald Tribune and, later, The Times.
 It's only 86 pages, and the reason it is rare is that it was originally the 1954 Gabriel Richard Lecture at Trinity College in Washington, D.C. Bruce Publishing Co., a conservative Catholic house no longer in business, gave it the kind of press run you would normally give an academic paper.  Then Time magazine gave the book a money review. Orders came pouring in. But by then Bruce had melted the printing plates to re-use the lead. But I had my copy.
 Re-reading it reminded me of the art vs. censors climate of the 1950s, and I was struck by how much the very different climate 65 years later resembles it.


 Kerr set up the discussion by stating the obvious -- that censors and what he calls critics (as stand-ins for the arts in general, especially film and theater and, to some extent books) have been at war for centuries. The critics want to view art within art's own values and rules; the censors want to apply an outside standard. Both sides seek total victory over the other. As of then (1954), the critics were having things pretty much their own way. Formal censorship was being strangled in the courts.
 The censors had shifted to a strategy of making everyone a censor, alerting them to the dangers coming from the "art-for-art's-sake crowd" on all sides. The strategy was typified by the Catholic Legion of Decency, which stood everyone up at Mass and got them to be on the lookout for sex (mostly) and other inducements to sin in the movies. Kerr, who was Catholic, conceded that the Church was the custodian of the Index of Forbidden Books, so when artists saw announced Catholics they saw potential censors.
 Not that the artists were totally misled. A reader of the New York diocesan press a few years earlier, looking for entertainment in the Big City, would have learned that the only thing suitable for his Catholic eyes was Howdy Mr. Ice of 1950.
 (Kerr didn't go into detail, but I looked it up. Among shows unsuitable for Catholics were Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Names Desire, Shakespeare's King Lear [reference to cheeks?] and Peter Pan. Also, Guys and Dolls -- in which the original bet was that Guy could bed Sarah, but when it was explained to Abe Burrows that Catholics would boycott that, the plot was changed to  bet he could get her to take a trip to Cuba with him. Obviously, euphemism didn't save it from the Catholic press.)
 Kerr makes the case that approaching a work of art with a Legion of Decency mind precludes understanding the art. If you are watching for, and expecting, the bad, you will never see the good, much less understand it.
 At the same time, he gives some censorship its due. He cites cases in which the very people who are opposed to censorship anytime, anywhere or in any form make an exception for something that they think really would be bad. The sudden disappearance of a British film of Oliver Twist in which Alec Guinness was maybe rather too good as Fagin is one example. And the early days of television brought out some unexpected critics, mostly psychologists, Kerr dryly noted.
 And, Kerr notes, the State Department employees charged with deciding what to send overseas were guided by the principle of what contained material that could be used for propaganda against us. Which was censorship again without reference to art. State blew away Porgy and Bess,
 Kerr ends by appealing to the social sciences to find out how art really works on people's minds, a subject about which we know as little as Aristotle did when he wrote his Poetics.
 Well, that hasn't happened.
 The "critics" have pretty much had their way with sex and violence. If The Passion of the Christ can be shown in theaters and churches, there isn't much violence that's unacceptable.  We still don't know what effect Mel Gibson's devout adherence to more than the Bible tells us might have had on young or unformed or disoriented or even adult minds. But there's no stopping it.
 However, the "censors" have been very successful in applying DIY censorship to politics. We can all  live in our own little bubble of truth and sniff at the other guy's "fake news."
 I wonder what effect that has on young, unformed, disoriented and even adult minds.