Steve Braunias: On indecent proposals

Melanie Griffith, Jeremy Irons and Domenique Swain in Lolita.

They don't make filth like they used to. I was at a loose end in my favourite part of town the other day – the English part, by the High Court of Auckland, opposite the stately grounds of Old Government House where the Queen once lay her young head, the streets an index of colonialism (Parliament, Waterloo, Princes) – and decided to hoof down to the Davis Law Library in the Auckland Law School, where I inspected two bound volumes of the Indecent Publications Tribunal Decisions.

They used to make filth that exercised some of the finest minds in New Zealand. The tribunal gathered in rooms and bent their heads to the task of adjudicating whether the public needed to be shielded from such publications as Modern Sunbathing Quarterly and The Alphabet of Copulation.

It existed from 1964 to 1993, and its decisions ranged from ruling whether a publication was either indecent, not indecent, or indecent in the hands of minors under the age of 18. It read filthy magazines. It read filthy comics. It read filthy novels. It had a filthy mind.

They used to make filth that had a vague resemblance to literature. Much of the tribunal's work was occupied with trash. It read an erotic novel which really was titled Some Like It Black.

It notes with terrific disdain that another erotic novel, The Nude Who Never (never what?), "is written by one Ted Mack". So many awful novels, with hectic and improbable narratives, but so what? They provided wild excitement. The tribunal's ruling that The World is Full of Married Men by Jackie Collins was indecent can be taken as a recommendation.

They used to make filth that were works of art. The tribunal had a mean, puritan streak – it banned all magazines aimed at gays and lesbians - but it was also receptive, understanding, intelligent.

It read a lot of novels by William Burroughs, and declared all of them not indecent. It acted likewise with novels by Gore Vidal, Philip Roth, Henry Miller, and other serious authors whose work crossed their desk. Its rulings were sophisticated and liberal musings on artistic merit. Its biggest challenge was contained in the three tormented, conflicted, fluent pages devoted to Lolita.

"The theme is a repulsive one." Yeah. Nabokov's masterpiece will always repel, and confound; Martin Amis, an admirer, calls it "unforgiveable". And yet the tribunal ruled it not indecent. "The book is saved from its utter damnation by its humour and its pathos, and by good writing."

The decision was made in 1965. I wonder if we were more enlightened then.

They used to make filth that was complained about, at length, for years, censoriously, constantly, conscientiously, by New Zealand's greatest campaigner for the protection of moral standards: Patricia Bartlett. There she is, in 1971, complaining about something called Affairs by someone called John London, "a novel about a man who never marries and his passionate love for five women".

Five! God almighty! What a beast; and there is Bartlett, peering for signs of filth: "She draws the tribunal's attention to specific pages which she considers as indecent." Did she dog-ear the pages? Underline the passages? But she meant well. She tried to hold back the tide of porn.

They used to make filth that jumped off the page into real life. The saddest decision concerned Key magazine, a kind of dating site for married people wanting affairs, hooking up horndogs all over Auckland.

"The magazine appears to have had its genesis in the fact the New Zealand Herald refused to accept an advertisement from Mr Alan Douglas seeking a companion to 'cuddle on a cold winter's night'." The Herald objected to the word "cuddle".

Undaunted, Douglas created Key in 1978. He told the tribunal, "Most of the advertisers are desperately lonely. Several lasting relationships have been formed as a result."

He produced a witness, Dr Alma Colgan from something called the Human Relations Centre, who produced an interesting statistic – a nationwide survey found that 17% of men and 10% of women had engaged in "group sex experiments" – and claimed that promiscuity can "serve to keep marriages together".

The tribunal listened with massive disinterest. Tolerant towards Lolita, it condemned Key, and ruled it indecent. There was something noble about the tribunal, also something hopeless. Desire is beyond legislation.