Jurgen and the law

by Unknown

JURGEN AND THE LAW

A STATEMENT

A STATEMENT

If Mr. Cabell had not pre-empted the phrase, the words with which he characterized the tale Jurgen might well be used as a title for an account of the tale’s adventures with the law. Those adventures, which the matter of this book commemorates no less effectively than it helped to divert them from a less happy outcome, form indeed a comedy of justice: a comedy which, perhaps, aroused more of indignation than of mirth, and which, in its duration, somewhat exceeded the time-limit that a canny dramatist allots himself, but which ended appropriately on a note of justice, and thus showed Mr. Cabell to be not only the maker of a happily descriptive phrase but also somewhat of a prophet.

Well, the comedy of Jurgen’s suppression is ended. The book is admitted once more to the freedom of the library, and the pawnbroker is again at liberty to wander throughout the universe in search of rationality and fair dealing. And in due course, time and the wisdom of other generations will decide whether the pawnbroker, or the book, or the adventures of either be in any way memorable.

Today, however, the vicissitudes of Jurgen are of indisputable importance, if only because similar misfortunes may overtake yet other publications. At the moment it appears that the position of literature is less precarious than it has been in the recent past. For the courts, of late, with gratifying accord have failed to detect obscenity in a number of volumes at which professional righteousness has taken offense, and there apparently is cause to hope that legal precedent will dispel the obscurity which so long has surrounded decency—within the meaning of the statute. Yet it is still possible for an incorporated organization to waylay and imprison art: to exercise by accusation a censorship which impermanence makes no less dangerous. Until the difference between the liberty permitted to art and the license forbidden to the vulgar be clearly defined, it remains impossible for any artist to foreknow how fully he may describe and thereby interpret life as he sees it, or for the community to enjoy uninterrupted access to much of the best of ancient and modern literature.

In the pages which follow is printed an argument that expressly defines the test whereby that which is legally permissible and that which is prohibited may be determined. It is, explicitly, an argument in behalf of Jurgen, submitted at the trial of the publishers of that book: and it is published in book form, in part because of its intrinsic interest to all readers of Cabell, in part because it is a valuable addition to the literature of censorship. But here there seems need to preface the argument with a brief history of the Jurgen case.

II

It is now a trifle less than three years ago that a Mr. Walter J. Kingsley, a theatrical press agent, sent to the literary editor of a New York newspaper a letter[1] directing attention to James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen as a source of lewd pleasure to the sophisticated and of menace to the moral welfare of Broadway. Hitherto Jurgen had found some favor with a few thousands of discriminating readers; it had been advertised—with, its publishers must now admit, a disregard of the value of all pornographic appeal—as literature. Critics, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, had applauded the book as a distinguished addition to American letters; three editions had been printed and the tale promised to enjoy the success to which its wit, its beauty and the profundity of its theme entitled it. No one, until Mr. Kingsley broke silence, had complained of Jurgen as an obscene production; no letters of condemnation had been received by the publishers; and the press had failed to suggest that decorum, much less decency, had anywhere been violated.

Mr. Kingsley’s letter altered affairs. Immediately a chorus in discussion of Jurgen arose. In the newspapers appeared many letters, some in defense of the book, others crying Amen to Mr. Kingsley. Within a week, the merry game of discovering the “key” to Jurgen was well under way and a pleasant, rather heated controversy had begun. In the upshot some one sent a clipping of the Kingsley letter to Mr. John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, calling upon him to do his duty. Mr. Sumner procured a copy of the book, and, on January 14th, 1920, armed with a warrant, he entered the offices of the publishers, seized the plates and all copies of the book and summoned the publishers to appear in court the following day on a charge of violating section 1141 of the Penal code.[2]