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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
'One of Britain's most stylish and accomplished writers.' -- TelegraphWhen Penguin released a new, unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 they were charged with the crime of publishing obscene material and made to defend the book's literary merit in a court of law. Thus began one of the most famous trials of the 20th century.There to take it all in was Sybille Bedford – who, with her trademark wit and flair, presents us with a play-by-play of the trial: from the prosecution's questioning of the novel's thirteen 'unvarying' sex scenes and its 66 swear words, to the dozens of witnesses who testified – including the Bishop of Woolwich and E. M. Forster.Bedford gives us a timeless and dramatic account that captures one of the most fascinating and absurd moments in both legal and publishing history, when attitudes and morals shifted forever.'Bedford's mind is radiant. Her alarming economy of style burns.' -- V.S. Pitchett'An excellent stylist and a splendid narrator.' -- The New Yorker'When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Sybille Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.' -- Bruce Chatwin
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‘One of Britain’s most stylish and accomplished writers.’ – Telegraph
‘Bedford’s mind is radiant. Her alarming economy of style burns.’ – V.S. Pritchett
‘An excellent stylist and a splendid narrator.’ – The New Yorker
‘When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Sybille Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.’ – Bruce Chatwin
Also by SYBILLE BEDFORD
A Visit to Don Otavio
A Traveller’s Tale from Mexico
A Legacy
A Novel
The Best We Can Do
The Trial of Dr Adams
The Faces of Justice
A Traveller’s Report
A Favourite of the Gods
A Novel
A Compass Error
A Novel
Aldous Huxley
A Biography
Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education
A Biographical Novel
As It Was
Pleasures, Landscapes and Justice
Quicksands
A Memoir
Pleasures and Landscapes
A Traveller’s Tales from Europe
The Trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
REGINA v. PENGUIN BOOKS LTD [1960]
SYBILLE BEDFORD
With an Introduction by THOMAS GRANT
DAUNT BOOKS
Contents
INTRODUCTION
IT IS RARE for a writer to invent a genre. Trial-writing existed in England before Sybille Bedford first set foot in the Old Bailey, but it was writing that was directed towards the preceding crime, or alleged crime, and the unravelling of the truth via the court process. The focus was on the victim, the act and the accused, and the journey towards conviction or acquittal. Sybille Bedford’s great insight was that the trial itself should be the subject. Her gaze was fixed on the space bounded by the four walls of the courtroom, the strange performance that makes up the trial, and the participants in a highly ordered ritual. The witnesses, the judge, the jury, the barristers and the defendant, alone in the dock, are all active and principal players in her dramas, thrown together by haphazard forces for a short period of intense interaction. Bedford’s achievement was to treat the trial not as the resolution of prior events, but as the event.
That Bedford should have developed such an interest in the English trial process is in itself remarkable. Born into the German aristocracy before the First World War, and of mixed Catholic and Jewish heritage, her early life was that of the cosmopolitan itinerant. The rise of Nazism took her to America, where she remained throughout the Second War before settling back in Europe in the late 1940s. She had already written her masterpiece, the novel A Legacy, when she was commissioned to attend the trial for murder of the Eastbourne general practitioner, John Bodkin Adams, at the Old Bailey in 1957. The resulting book, The Best We Can Do, was revolutionary in its approach and focus. It remains the best full-length account of a criminal trial written in English. There followed a series of shorter accounts (published initially in various magazines) of some of the key criminal cases of the 1960s: the prosecutions of Penguin Books for publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; of Stephen Ward for supposedly living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, of Jack Ruby (the assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald), and of the Auschwitz commandants.
The trial of Regina v. Penguin Books Ltd needs little introduction. It is perhaps the most (in)-famous criminal prosecution in England in the twentieth century. The notion of a legal inquiry before an Old Bailey jury as to the obscenity or otherwise of a novel by D. H. Lawrence seems fantastical now but at the time it was treated by the … defence as a case which was by no means a foregone conclusion. And so thirty-six ‘expert’ witnesses were called to speak to the literary, ethical and even spiritual qualities of the book. It was the evidence of these witnesses, a fascinating cross-section of contemporary intellectual life (Roy Jenkins, Rebecca West, E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart …), which provided the meat of the trial, and also, in the hysterical and increasingly ineffectual attempts by the prosecution to cross-examine them, its humour.
