MY EVIL LITERATURE

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No need to travel all the way to London like in the old days to get your hands on a few dirty books. All you have to do now is winkle them out of the collection held by the Dublin City Library and Archive. That is, if this latest exhibition in Pearse St. is to be believed.

Believe you me, I know whatof I speak. I have got my share of dirty books from Pagan England. I even had one of them confiscated on my re-entry at Dún Laoghaire port.

When the Irish Free State was set up and all those licentious British soldiers sent home, we embarked on the age of Celtic purity and virtue. There was a fly in the ointment though. The virtual flood of evil literature emanating from across the water was polluting the dream and it had to be stopped. So enter the censorship regime to nip this boil in the bud.

The menace was graphically illustrated on more than one occasion by Gordon Brewster in his Evening Herald cartoons, one of which is reproduced at the very beginning of the exhibition (above).

A larger artists reproduction of the same evil octopus bookends this particular panel.

Needless to say, when it comes to stamping out evil, the Church is never far behind. This video in the exhibition brings us the soothing velvet tones of Father Kelly explaining that censorship is a necessary instrument to protect the an ignorant and vulnerable lower classs while they are being slowly elevated to the level of virtue and discernment of the good Father himself.

So, what then are the dirty books on offer?

Borstal Boy? Where's the dirt in that. I must read it sometime out of curiosity. I do have an import certificate for it from the Department of Justice of the day but I never actually bothered to get a copy at the time. My application was more by way of testing the system than actually acquiring official filth.

Then, there's The Ginger Man, which I did read in the repressive 1960s when the site of a slip showing could send your pulse racing madly. I laughed my way through it. A marvelously refreshing book to keep you sane, though it equally made you sad at what you were apparently missing out on in this valley of tears.

And then, The Dark. I think John Charles's obsessive interest in masturbation by young boys was the problem here. Not only was the book banned, and I have the cert to prove it, but John McGahern lost his teaching job in Belgrove BNS as a result. This is the school that subsequently produced Gerry Ryan and Neil Jordan and where I kicked my first teacher.

Of Lee Dunne I know absolutely nothing, but if you were to judge a book by its cover ... ...

Finally, Fr. Kelly does not hog the whole video. Here is my friend and Dublin historian, Donal Fallon, curator of the exhibition, explaining to this Millennial chappie how he had the bad fortune to completely miss the frisson that was the 1950s and 1960s - gone forever.

It now takes a ration of hard-core porn to produce the same effect.

Ah well, that's progress for ya.

The exhibition runs until the end off May 2019.