Many thanks to the rather wonderful research team at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas for kindly sending me a facsmile of the handwritten article by Graham Greene from 1969 which was published in the UK The Spectator magazine on 8th November 1969.
It is a typically brilliant piece of waspish journalism by Greene who, at that time, was usually working on two books every day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and writing journalism in the evening.
The piece is called “Regina vs Sir James Barrie” and takes the form of an imagined judicial summary by the prosecution in a fictional case of obscenity, resting on Barrie’s now little-known 1902 novel, The Little White Bird. This novel was the first occasion for the appearance of the character Peter Pan, and the Peter of this novel is a markedly different and considerably more complex character to the one we were later shown on the stage.
Greene’s case for obscenity rests largely on the fairly stomach-churning scenes laid out in one chapter entitled “The Interloper”, in which the male narrator describes a night spent in the company of a little boy whom he has befriended in the Kensington Gardens.
Greene has much fun with comparisons with the 1960 obscenity case against Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which it was stated that “The book is deemed to be obscene if its effect…if taken as a whole…is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt.”
Greene claims that the fictional defence in his Barrie trial — led, amusingly, by the Bishop of Porchester — uses this as a means of forgiving The Little White Bird, since the depravity is only situated in the one chapter. He states: “I hope I have shown you in this case that the mind which perpetrated this loathsome chapter is the same mind which composed the book as a whole, even though elsewhere the obscenity is a little modified.”
Greene wants us to ask ourselves: how could readers of the early 1900s have allowed these passages in The Little White Bird to pass unnoticed? The novel was widely praised at the time with not a single person expressing any discomfort about this nighttime scene.
Greene’s article — which you can still read at the Spectator archive here https://lnkd.in/eXxqPX3u — is a wonderful example of how to combine wit, erudition and style to make a serious point in a journalistic context.