Foreign Law: Blocked Exit

Even when British police refuse to act, an aggrieved citizen has a legal remedy. He can ask a local magistrate to issue a summons against the defendant, hire a barrister and conduct his own "private" prosecution. If he loses, he must pay the defendant's costs. For the first time in British legal memory, a private citizen has just used this approach against an allegedly obscene book—and his victory may be Britain's biggest pornography precedent since a jury cleared Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960.

The book in question is U.S. Novelist Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, a stomach-turning homosexual excursion, which the British government refused to act against on the theory that the book probably had literary merit. Balderdash, retorted Sir Cyril Black, a Conservative M.P., friend of Evangelist Billy Graham and watchdog of British public morals.

Black appealed to London Magistrate Leo Gradwell, whose Marlborough Street court has jurisdiction over the Soho restaurant district and the offices of Exit's British publishers, Calder & Boyars. Black charged the publishers with violating the 1959 Obscene Publications Act by having "obscene articles in their possession for publication for gain." For his part, the magistrate cooperated by issuing a search warrant. The police seized three copies from the publishers and the prosecution was on —with no jury trial.

Incriminating Tendency. As usual, assorted defense experts denied obscenity; indeed, Novelist Anthony Burgess declared that Exit "might make sexual activity of any kind repugnant." Publisher Marion Boyars called Exit "a sad book, a true book" and "too American" to sell. As for gain, she said, her firm had sold 11,247 copies and netted only $3,315.20. Appearing for the prosecution, Dr. Ernest Caxton, an authority on homosexuality, called the book an "extremely dangerous" guide to homosexual experimentation. Book Publisher (Pergamon Press) Robert Maxwell, a Labor M.P., blasted it as "sociological material with filth and muck just added for profit."

Firmly ruling that Exit "has a tendency to deprave and corrupt," Magistrate Gradwell ordered his three copies destroyed and in effect banned all future sales—a decision that actually applies only to his own Soho district. Despite that limitation, said one alarmed British publisher, Gradwell's precedent invites "any crank to start proceedings against a book he does not like. All you need is a friendly magistrate." As a result, the publishers are now practically begging the government to prosecute—with a jury. Their hope is obviously to give the book nationwide legal approval. Watchdog Black is all for it. As he sees it, this time a jury could not help ruling in his favor.