Print as a Seducer

ON INIQUITY by Pamela Hansford Johnson. 142 pages. Scribner. $3.95.

Perhaps in hopes of duplicating Truman Capote's success with In Cold Blood, the London Sunday Telegraph last year sent Novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson, the wife of C. P. Snow, to cover the most gruesome murder trial in recent British history. The "Moors Case," as it came to be known (TIME, May 13), combined ancient evils with modern technology: murder and perversion were recorded on film and tape so that the killers could relive their crimes. Unlike Capote, Lady Snow flinched in the face of evil. This book is the reflexive--and reflective--result.

Macabre Medley. On trial at Chester last April were Ian Brady, 28, a misanthropic store clerk whose only previous offenses had been housebreaking and burying cats alive, and Brady's blonde mistress, Esther Myra Hindley, 23, a wheyfaced, bouffant stenotypist. They were charged with slowly killing a ten-year-old girl and two boys, twelve and 17, by suffocation and ax blows, among other means. Two of the victims were buried naked in the bleak Manchester moors, where Myra posed smiling over the graves for Brady's camera; the third corpse was found by police in Brady's house. In addition to the bodies, photographs and tape recordings (found in a Manchester locker), police also discovered a lubricious library of sado masochistic pornography, ranging from the Marquis de Sade to a book titled High Heels and Stilettos. Most horrifying item: a 17-minute tape of the screams and pleas of pretty Lesley Ann Downey, ending with a macabre medley of Christmas music, Jolly Old Saint Nicholas and Little Drummer Boy.

Shocked and shattered by the Moors testimony, Lady Snow lays the motivation of the murders not to the dark cur rents of standard Freudian psychopathology but rather to Brady's library. "There are some books that are not fit for all people," she says, "and some people who are not fit for all books." Literature, she believes, is a model demanding emulation; if the model is violence, violence follows. "Their interests," she says of Brady and Hindley, "were sadomasochistic, titillatory and sado-Fascist, and in the bookshops they found practically all the pabulum they needed."

The author's solution to sexual crime is a simple one: lock up all the dirty books, and allow only the "qualified" to read them. Says she: "I am inclined to think that it is less good to make things easy for the prurient than to make him work a little harder for his gratification."

Persuasive though that notion may sound, it is doubtful whether such a system would appreciably alter the number or intensity of sex crimes. Lady Snow ignores a vast body of psychiatric thought that questions the cause-and-effect relationship between pornographic material and sexual aberration; sex-sick minds seem infinitely capable of being triggered into violence without the help of pornography.

Quite apart from psychiatric opinion, which is far from infallible, the author seems to overstate her case by overestimating the power of print as a seducer. The easy availability of pornography is indeed alarming, but its suppression raises more difficult problems. The wisest men have been unable to draw a sure line between what is harmful and what is merely realistic or daring in literature. Moreover, freer access at least allows the reading public to discover just how dull pornography really is, while suppression tends to make it even more titillating. Victorian England, for example, seems to have been as sexually depraved as any era in history--and its pornography flourished underground. Lady Snow is refreshing and courageous in speaking out, unfashionably, against the philosophy of anything-goes; but her indignation does not necessarily lead her to a realistic solution.

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