On Thu, 31 Jul 2008, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> Anyway, it is at least possible and perhaps likely that Proust would
> have survived contact with Learned Hand, who was on the Appellate Court
> by the time Scott-Montcrieff started publishing.
I think you're leaving out the key fact, counsellor: this was homosexual sex, which was still a crime for which people were arrested and put away. We're not talking about depraving vulnerable children. We're talking about what every judge of that era would consider criminally depraved adults.
BTW, IIUC, Ulysses was a stand alone in the annals of obscenity; it set a standard of great art that virtually nothing else met for 30 years. IIUC, it wasn't until Tropic of Cancer in the 1960s that the obscenity laws were changed generally -- when it became one of the key grievances, along with prayer in school, that blended into the right wing apoplexy against the Supreme Court (the dreaded "Warren Court") over a decade before Roe.
BTW, now that we have a thread, I want to apologize for posting this bit self-indulgence in the first place. I just meant to store it with the label "not sent." I misfired.
Michael