The Censor Read online

  The Censor

  The Secret Life of an Anti-Pornography Campaigner

  John Gardner

  © John Gardner 1969

  John Gardner has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 2001, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1969 by New English Library.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To Alec King with thanks

  “Nobody can define what pornography is. It’s all in the eyes of the beholder, and what seems to be pornographic to one person may appear as benign as December snow to someone else. I’m sure that there are people who consider the Song of Songs in the Bible pornographic.”

  Truman Capote: Playboy Interview

  Table of Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  Extract from The Liquidator by John Gardner

  I

  IT WAS NOT natural. David Askelon stretched out in the half-light and squinted at the small luminous dial — tested in six atmospheres. Covered by our guarantee in 156 countries world wide. Five-forty-five in the suspended fog of morning and Askelon was awake. Not simply awake but aware. Conscious of all his senses. The mustiness of the bedroom and its familiar shapes beginning to emerge. The horizons and landmarks of furniture. His own being and that which was inside him. His short, compact body, fingertips light on his naked thigh. Stale sweet fish in his nostrils and the indeterminate scent of the girl close to him: her natural sour cream smell freed from the social cocoon of deodorants and smudges of bottled fragrance.

  His heartbeat. The pump inside his thick chest tolling the rhythm of life. His metronome, steady, yet at dawn declaring itself.

  The patient walked and joked with nurses two days after the operation. There were no signs of rejection.

  You want a transplant nurse?

  An implant maybe.

  High-pitched freakish female laughter around the sterile walls. Give me a couple more days ...

  And maybe another operation?

  I don’t need me another operation for that. Why they’ll be wanting me for a donor when they get round to those kind of transplants.

  Now don’t you boast Mr — ... Christ. Oxygen. Quick with that mask. If this bastard dies.

  The blood tracking down freeways of arteries, highways of veins. His breathing. The rise and fall. Expansion and contraction.

  The flashing pictures of his unconscious mental stream. Sharp, clear, without coherent pattern. The unwanted recollection of a scrap from some TV documentary. Helicopters and a body heavy, sagging in a ground sheet, being hustled over scrubby grass.

  The child had gone out to gather wood. The helicopter passed overhead. Then it returned and opened fire.

  Why the hell had he got hung up on transplants? Spare part surgery? Shirts ordered last week. A dry martini. The current manuscript. One hundred and thirty pages getting nowhere. Ronald, Buddy, Greta, Marsh and Tony. Cardboard characters. Flat with no division, each one the same as the other, no motivation. No breath or truth of life. He had ceased to observe with any true accuracy. When he had written The Golden Spin every tiny tic of life had registered on his mental lens, contained within him, then flashed onto the page at exactly the right moment. The new book lay untouched for ten days. Ten days ago. Time magazine and the diagram of Bobby Kennedy’s head showing the bullet fragments. Mid-brain. Large remaining fragment. Cerebellum (Balance & coordination). Spinal cord. The endless flicker from the screen pumping out violence. Re-killing and re-burying the Senator.

  He loved life completely and lived it intensely.

  Andy Williams chanting The Battle Hymn of the Republic. America the Beautiful.

  The olive in the martini. The sweating clean glass. The sweating bodies. The girl’s underclothes dropped to form a small huddle of multicoloured nylon. Vote Nixon. Vote Humphrey. Vote McCarthy. Rockefeller beating a drum in Cleveland. The sick button. Where is Lee Harvey Oswald now we really need him? One in minute, almost undecipherable script — I don’t think I like you.

  His genitals ached. He cupped them in his hand and felt them leap to its narcissistic touch.

  Askelon’s mind and body usually reacted slowly to the demands of a new day, each sense taking time to programme itself to consciousness. Though his thoughts were scattered, this new early morning alertness triggered off a nip of anxiety. Why? A reaction of the nervous system? Was that why he was awake? A state of preparation? A sprig of prophecy slotted into the subconscious in order to make him more equal with some new mandate about to be imposed by life?

  Gently he groped among the litter of the bedside table, found the pack of cigarettes and lit one, exhaling into the semi-darkness.

  The girl did not stir. He began to question himself about her. Why her? He was not a promiscuous man, in the sense that his sexual adventures were usually planned, or at least predictable. So why, suddenly, little Celia? Blonde, with a complexion too open-pored to be smooth, pink or even attractive. She was a short girl, neat except that her breasts were out of proportion. Large, but firm. Certainly no sag. Yet out of proportion, as though some permanent male paid too much attention to one of them. The eyes were wide. The nose long. Not a girl that he would normally wish to absorb.

  A white mini-dress with a lot of sequins. A lot of talk as well. Fluttering butterfly conversation to kill time and waste the few hours of Ruby Silverstein’s party in that impossible apartment in the mid nine-hundreds of Fifth Avenue. Gold silk on the walls. Sixty people flushed and bubbling in the living area built for two and a pair of dwarfs. The silly great ornate mirror covering one wall, swirled around with a dark wood that could have been plastic, reflecting the same tired faces it always reflected at Ruby Silverstein’s parties. A couple of useful movie people. A voluble twittering circle of in folk. In with each other because they had the same incomes, saw the same plays and movies, read the same books, shared each other.

  A clutch of failed writers, each engaged on the great American novel.

  Christ, this time last year he had been a failed writer, and could be again this time next year if he did not drag himself out of the slough. Success brings its own brand of lethargy.

  Ruby had been telling a story. Loudly, with the big jade earrings jingling below her curls, made brittle with amber dye, her mouth vast with the thick crimson lips curling. A massive sapphire ringed with diamonds weighted a stubby hand raised in ineloquent gesture as she gabbled. ‘There was this monk who hit his thumb with a hammer and yelled. “Jesus! Oh shit I said Jesus. Oh Jesus I said shit. Oh balls I didn’t want to be a monk anyhow.”’

  A wild burst of laughter.

  Then the girl appeared in front of him and said. ‘Hello. I’m Celia Aston. You’re David Askelon aren’t you?’

  He nodded. There was a tiny subliminal recognition of the name. Now you see it. Now you don’t.

  ‘I just read your book.’

  ‘Which one?’ It was Askelon’s standard parry. Nobody except Joe Tireling, his agent, and Dean & Ruttenham, the publishers, had ever heard of Permutations or Dream Now, Rest Later. It had to be The Golden Spin.

  ‘Is there more than one? I didn’t know.’ Bland innocence. ‘I read The Golden Spin.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘It’s a load of crap.’ There was no viciousness. She meant what she said. With provocation.

  ‘Others have told me.’ Askelon tried to relax but he seemed to be smiling through a Novocaine injection.
He shrugged. ‘But they wrapped the crap in money.’

  She laughed.

  His attempt at candour was phoney. Whatever the motive, her honesty hurt. He did not need the snide grudging praise of the reviewers to tell him The Golden Spin was good. Good of its type. He knew it was good. And not just good of its type. God help them, the trouble with reviewers was they spent so much time steeped in mediocrity that they sometimes recognised good prose as genius and exceptional work as good prose.

  ‘Mind you I enjoyed it. The sex was great erotica.’ She tried to qualify.

  This bitch I’ll have, he thought. That was the moment, frozen there between the cackles of Ruby’s clique and the mirror, the martini glasses sweating in their hands. He was conscious of his penis, snug sleeping tight. He poured himself onto pages of paper yet the subtle thrust of conversation always escaped him. Talking, he was happier with men. Now he wanted to hurt her. Because of her honesty, her obvious sense of being self-contained. And the only hurt he could provide was the hurt of pleasure. The vaginal rending.

  They talked and drank martinis. Talked of the assassination, the curse of the Kennedy family, Humphrey’s chances now, of violence. Gore Vidal’s grotesque hilarious Myra Breckinridge, Belle De Jour which they had both just got round to seeing. As the alcohol trickled into his bloodstream Askelon opened up, about himself, publishing, his motives behind The Golden Spin: the commercial motives, the hidden thoughts which few authors even reveal to themselves. It was Askelon out of character, tongue loosened.

  Before they left the party she said, ‘Some of these nuts don’t see why a book like yours should be top of the Time and Newsweek lists for three months when you don’t need it.’

  It was the first time anyone had put it into words. He suspected that crowd spoke and thought in those terms. The dialogue of the haves and have nots. Rich kid makes good was not their translation of the American dream. He should know his place and stick to oil like his father. He did not need the money.

  Like hell. You always need the money even if your old man leaves you four million five tied up in oil stock. You always need it. Anyhow it was not just the money. They talked about art, literature, their ‘work’, as if the big fat sexy book was not work. Too right it was work. His work, and he worked under compulsion with the words filling his head and breaking like a fountain onto the paper. A fountain in sunlight with the colours dazzling and, through the spray, the glimpse of another world.

  She had her face turned away from him. Nestled in the sheets. So it was his anger that had brought him to invite her back. She knew why she had come, but there was a gulf between their separate reasons.

  They undressed independently and he took her quickly for the first time. On top of the bed as violently as he could muster. She cried out as he entered her, and again at her climax as she bit at his shoulder, goading his buttocks with her short nails.

  ‘There was that scene in The Golden Spin ...’

  ‘What scene?’

  She put her cheek against his to whisper in his ear. The film of perspiration made the tight skin of her breast glint, reflecting the lamp. ‘With the ice. Can you do that? With the ice?’

  She was suggesting her own torture. Askelon could do that thing with the ice. He had first read about it in a magazine. It was supposed to be practised in the Orient.

  He slipped into a robe and went through to the kitchen. She was sitting up in bed when he returned with the small silver ice bucket. He had filled the bucket, taking the three shallow trays from the freezer, running them one at a time under the hot tap, easing back the levers allowing the hard little cubes to fall into the bowl. Like a cache of large uncommon gems. Bright white moving to opaque, blue at the centre where the light struck through them.

  Beside her, in the bed, he took the cigarette from her fingers and crushed it into the ashtray.

  ‘How many do you think you can go then?’

  She pouted. ‘I’ve never counted.’

  ‘Five? Six? Seven?’

  ‘Five I guess.’ Kneading her belly into his.

  ‘Let’s try for six.’

  He had managed six with the Mexican girl in San Diego and she was a good deal more experienced than Celia. The Mexican girl had been finished after six. The following morning he sat on the balcony writing the whole scene. Hardly a word, except for their names, the place and incidentals, was changed in the final draft.

  Celia was clawing him onto her. He slipped inside and began to give her the gentle long strokes, making the pace and gradually increasing the power until he could feel himself pushing her deep into the mattress. She writhed, wild, like a bucking horse. Undulating and thrusting. Bouncing back at him.

  His timing was bad the first time and she did not come. A good minute before she was ready he felt his own orgasm rising. Think of something else. Trees in Summer. Cool water. The mill wheel. The splash and envelopment. Too late. It was rising. He heaved back, disengaging, flipping round on the bed and grabbing the ice bucket, jamming his penis down among the cubes, raping the frozen jewels. The burn of cold shrieked through him as he wilted. The girl almost screaming with desire as he turned back to her, manipulating. Oh god, David. Hard. Put it in me hard. His hand soaking.

  Then he revived, erect again and into her before she gave the strangled choke, lifting her arching body overcome by the muscular spasms of orgasm.

  They exchanged no words. Askelon’s rasping breath left no room for speech. He did not stop. Ploughing on as she clung to his shoulders before beginning to move with him once more.

  The blue sheets. Movement in the brass rails of the bed head. A caress of light sliding unchecked on the gold. Sensitive areas. The ease and tenaciousness of her vagina. Twice more she responded into climax before he again resorted to the ice, cooling his own organ and arresting his coming.

  The lamp and unread books beside the bed. Far away an unidentifiable fragment of music. The syrup and ooze of copulation soaking each other. Another climax for Celia. And another. The ice again. She lay exhausted, unable to reply to Askelon’s movement as he entered her, heading for the fifth time. Sweat swelling between them. It was enough and he allowed his retarded orgasm to grow, rising, welling from his loins. Thundering through him as he crushed down on her. Hands bunching and nipping flesh. The girl’s fingers clawing at the edging of the pillow. Ferocious. Tingling.

  Finally it came in throbbing gusts, as though he was ejaculating his being into her. An explosion between their thighs, so great that he felt himself being thrust from her.

  Tired as she was, Celia’s body replied with a small delighted contraction.

  He fell from her. Limp. Pulling away there was a vacuum at their navels. A sucking with gobbets of sweat.

  She dropped her hand to her thigh, holding herself to soothe the ache.

  ‘Satisfied?’

  She opened her eyes. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever fuck again. You’ve burned me raw you bastard. Raw.’

  Light began to open up the room. She moved and moaned quietly in her sleep. Askelon began to measure last night against his memory of the Mexican girl and the description that was delighting millions between the artistically packaged covers of The Golden Spin.

  The motel room at Point Loma. Crushed ice in a wax container. Mascara smearing the pillow like a long dark cloud against an unblemished sky. Teeth strong in his shoulder.

  The idea for The Golden Spin had come about a week before the Mexican girl, crushed ice. Point Loma, San Diego.

  Peter Goldsberg, Askelon’s editor at Dean & Ruttenham’s had told him to get out of New York.

  ‘Go back to Tulsa if you have to.’

  ‘I like New York.’

  ‘And you hate Tulsa?’

  ‘I prefer to keep as many miles as possible between me and the family business. Tulsa means oil.’ Askelon was sitting perched on the corner of Peter Goldsberg’s desk. He slid off and walked to the window, looking down on the evening build-up of traffic in Madison Avenue. ‘I like New York
. Even now with the summer just underneath the sidewalk I like New York.’

  It had been towards the end of last spring. Almost a year ago. For a week, in a series of meetings, a couple of lunches and a dinner, the writer and the editor had bounced around the subject for Askelon’s next book. Dream Now, Rest Later, was a critical and commercial failure.

  ‘And that’s just why you should get out of the city. You’re ground into a rut, David. The same people, parties, clubs. You have the craving to create. You have the talent. And the trouble is, you have the money.’

  Fourteen storeys below, a Yellow Cab disgorged a pair of women. The echoing bark of baulked motor horns drifted upwards.

  ‘Get away. Look. Search. Observe.’ Goldsberg slapped the desk. ‘Get your mind onto something alive. Real. If I’m any judge, the fire will light itself.’

  Four days later, Askelon gave a ride to a boy hitching from St Louis to San Francisco. The boy carried a pack and a guitar. He wore Levis and a checked shirt and his hair fell untidily to his shoulders. He had a dream. A desire. To get where the action was in Haight-Ashbury, lean on the euphoria a while and maybe get integrated with a group.

  Askelon dropped the boy off outside Topeka and lanced into the Bible Belt. Dust and the burgeoning wheatscapes. Small towns with dirt roads and the paint peeling on a hotel sign. The first flicker of an idea. The concrete unset. The fire not yet taking hold.

  II

  THE BOY WAS called Paul Potter. Askelon never heard of, or from, him again. He might as well have died after leaving the car. Yet, months later, in an untypical and sentimental moment, Askelon gave him a form of immortality by dedicating The Golden Spin —To Paul Potter with thanks for our conversation.

  After Topeka he took it easy, driving from motel to motel in the cool of the day. Resting up in the heat, lying by the small oblong motel pools, blue and green, their waters too tepid to refresh.

  It was during a pause like this, outside Flagstaff, Arizona, all dude cowboy suits and moulting Navajo Indians, that the tiny marker of light in his brain began to explode into the sheet lightning which eventually became The Golden Spin.