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edition did not satisfy Pope Sixtus V, and the book remained on the Index.
52
THE DECAMERON
Yet it continued to be available in general reading and the authorities
closed their eyes to this particular instance of disobedience, mainly because
popular demand was so strong.
In a report entitled How to Make a Town Library Successful, published
in 1876, Frederick Beecher Perkins, assistant librarian of the Boston Public
Library, recommended censorship of the collection:
It should exclude such books as Rabelais, The Decameron, the heptameron,
the Contes drolatiques (droll stories) of Balzac, . . . all of which are sold in
English translations for money by otherwise respectable American publish-
ers. Few, indeed, are those who will object to this exclusion of ribald and
immoral books from public circulating libraries.
In 1892, The Decameron was involved in the litigation of the Worthington
Book Publishing Company, which was in financial difficulty. The receiver
wanted to sell some of the company stock, including the arabian nights,
the history of tom jones, the art of love, The Heptameron, GARGANTUA
AND PANTAGRUEL, Rousseau s confessions, and The Decameron to pay off
creditors, but Anthony Comstock, secretary of the New York Society for
the Suppression of Vice, stepped in to oppose the sales. He demanded of the
court that the books be officially burned.
One year later, the American Library Association offered for the first
time a 5,000-title book guide for small popular libraries and branches, call-
ing it a collection that one could recommend to any trustee. No works by
Boccaccio were included on the list. When the American Library Association
released its Catalog in 1904, works by Boccaccio were still excluded; Geller
characterizes this situation as censorship by omission. In 1894, the U.S.
Supreme Court applied the Hicklin rule, imported from England, that stan-
dard works of high literary quality were not obscene. The first case involved
editions of The Arabian Nights, The History of Tom Jones, The Decameron, The
Heptameron, and The Art of Love.
In 1903, the Boston Watch and Ward Society began a campaign of
harassment against four area booksellers who were openly advertising and
selling The Decameron and Gargantua and Pantagruel despite the request from
the society that they refrain from doing so. Rather than acquiesce as in the
past, the four met with other Boston booksellers and with publisher Little,
Brown and Company to organize a resistance to this attempt at censorship.
Booksellers, including the Old Corner, N. J. Bartlett, George E. Littlefield,
Charles E. Goodspeed, and six others, joined Little, Brown to raise money
for a legal defense fund. The case went to Boston municipal court, and the
booksellers won judgment against the society.
The Decameron was declared to be an obscene, lewd and lascivious
book of indecent character by a jury in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1906. Edward
Stiefel, president and general manager of the Queen City Book Com-
pany, was indicted by a grand jury for sending a copy of the book through
the mail to Crawfordsville, Indiana. Stiefel gathered a strong defense, calling
53
THE DEER PARK
as witnesses a well-known judge, a member of the Cincinnati Board of Edu-
cation, and a well-respected newspaper editor to testify to the status of the
work as a classic. In addition, Stiefel offered into evidence library catalogs,
catalogs from booksellers all over the world, and catalogs from public auc-
tions of books in New York and Boston, all listing The Decameron. Despite
the evidence, the jury deliberated only an hour and 15 minutes before finding
Stiefel guilty of sending obscene materials through the mail. The judge,
who appeared less punitive, only fined the defendant $5 and court costs.
In 1927, U.S. Treasury Department officials in Washington, D.C., ren-
dered an opinion that reversed a ruling by New York Customs inspectors
and admitted 250 copies of the work, imported by A. & C. Boni, thus ending
forever the banning of this classic in the United States.
FURTHER READING
Boyer, Paul S. Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in Amer-
ica. New York: Scribner, 1968.
Geller, Evelyn. Forbidden Books in American Public Libraries, 1876 1939. Westport,
Conn.: Greenwood, 1984.
Putnam, George Haven. The Censorship of the Church of Rome and Its Influence upon the
Production and Distribution of Literature. Vol. 2. New York: Putnam, 1906.
Tebbel, John. A History of Book Publishing in the United States. Vol. 2. New York:
Bowker, 1975.
THE DEER PARK
Author: Norman Mailer
Original date and place of publication: 1955, United States
Original publisher: G. P. Putnam s Sons
Literary form: Novel
SUMMARY
The Deer Park was originally subtitled A Search for the Obscene, and Mailer
crossed out but did not remove the subtitle when he first submitted the work.
The main title is taken from the Deer Park of Louis XV, where the most
beautiful maidens of France were brought as ladies of pleasure awaiting the
pleasure of the king. The title was appropriate for a novel about the fictional
Hollywood resort Desert D Or, middle aged desperados of corporation land
and the suburb and the venal people in it. It is a setting of decadence, and of
drinking in that atmosphere, I never knew whether it was night or day. . . .
afternoon was always passing into night, and drunken nights into the dawn of
a desert morning.
The novel relates the story of a liberal movie director, Charles Francis
Eitel, who is blacklisted by the studios for refusing to name his Communist
54
THE DEER PARK
friends at a congressional hearing, but who later relents because he needs to
work again. Narrated by Sergius O Shaugnessy, six feet tall, blond haired
and blue eyed, movie-star handsome, and a fake Irishman who decided in
the orphanage to assume that name and ethnic identity, the work concen-
trates on the mores of stars, starlets, producers, sensualists, and panderers.
O Shaugnessy had been a decorated first lieutenant in the United States
Army Air Force in World War II, but he had a nervous breakdown when he
realized how many thousands of faceless people he had killed. Remembering
his victims has left him sexually impotent at the beginning of the novel, but
blond and sensuous sex star Lulu, once married to Eitel, restores his prowess.
After regaining his potency, O Shaugnessy becomes a hard-drinking stud.
The drama shifts from O Shaugnessy to Eitel, whose depression over his
lack of work leads him into an affair with Elena Esposito, an uneducated, sen-
suous woman and sometime actress who has been humiliated by many men.
Their relationship is the main focus of the novel. Eitel considers Elena to be
his intellectual and social inferior, but she does anything that Eitel wants,
including experimenting sexually with other couples. Sex is a vital presence
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