Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius.

• Author: Gilson, Anne E.

This poor old gentleman, in the seventieth year of his life, could not find a lawyer to defend him. If he had poisoned half a dozen nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, he could have had the best advice of the bar to prove him an innocent man. Because his crime was that he published [Emile] Zola's novels, he could find nobody.(1)

Publishers like the elderly Henry Vizetelly have a passionate and extremely knowledgeable defender in Edward de Grazia with the publication of Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. De Grazia(2) has constructed an impressive and unique history of obscenity prosecutions, skillfully blending arguments against censorship with voluminous factual details about the censored works and their creators. A product of eight years of research,(3) this overflowing work is consistently readable and provocative.

De Grazia tells the story of obscenity law through the words of artists, publishers, censors, judges, and politicians, quoting from those most directly involved in the cases. Interspersed among the quotations appear excerpts, often graphic, from the challenged works, ranging in time and tenor from Ulysses (pp. 24-26) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (pp. 91-93) to the lyrics of 2 Live Crew's rap song "Me So Homy" (pp. 656-57). De Grazia adds his own commentary throughout, but the book is primarily a remarkable collage of other people's words.

Its compelling title comes from the words of a publisher convicted in 1921 for printing a section from James Joyce's Ulysses in her magazine, The Little Review. In that except, Leopold Bloom becomes aroused at the sight of Gertie McDowell leaning back to watch a fireworks display, playfully exposing her legs. The publisher, Jane Heap, defended Joyce elegantly:

Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere - seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom - and no one is corrupted. [p. 10]

Heap paid a hundred-dollar fine, and The Little Review published no more of Ulysses.

The book documents American and British courts' struggle with obscenity law, leading us through what de Grazia sees as its highlights.(4) De Grazia's history begins with an early English case(5) that lays out the following test: "whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall."(6) The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly rejected this test as "unconstitutionally restrictive of the freedoms of speech and press."(7)

Though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1957 that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment,(8) it has since wavered on its definition of obscenity. Justice Brennan, in a 1964 opinion, set out the standard de Grazia champions throughout Girls Lean Back Everywhere: "a work cannot be proscribed unless it is |utterly' without social importance."(9) In the Court's 1967 per curiam decision in Redrup v. New York,(10) the Justices could not agree on a rationale but held that, under any standard, certain books and magazines were protected by the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court later summarily reversed...