He gave a lecture at the University of Malta titled “Obscenity and the Arts”, in which he argued that the suppression of literature on ideological or religious grounds was intolerable in a modern liberal society.
When the Sunday Times sent a copy of Doris Lessing’s Children of Violence for review, this was also confiscated by the censors, presumably because of its inflammatory communist and feminist content.Įnraged by the climate of censorship in Malta, Burgess decided to open up the subject for debate. The list of confiscated items included books by D.H Lawrence, Angela Carter and Kingsley Amis. Shortly after arriving on the island, he discovered that a large chunk of his personal library had been impounded by the Office of State Censorship. Having established his anti-censorship credentials, Burgess moved to Malta with his wife and son in 1968. He maintained that the deception had been worthwhile. Reflecting on the Selby case in the 1990s, Burgess admitted that he had exaggerated the literary qualities of Last Exit to Brooklyn in order to thwart the guardians of public morals who had wanted to see it banned. When the novel was eventually acquitted in 1968, Burgess wrote an introduction to the first post-trial edition, in which he defended Selby’s writing on the grounds of literary merit. In 1966 Burgess gave evidence on behalf of Hubert Selby, whose novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, was the subject of an obscenity trial. Among the novel’s detractors was Dame Edith Sitwell, who wrote to the TLS, saying: “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories.” When, in the early 1960s, his friend William Burroughs was having trouble finding a British publisher for his scandalous novel The Naked Lunch, Burgess wrote a letter to the Times Literary Supplement (published 2 January 1964) promoting Burroughs and his work, and another article published in the Manchester Guardian.
This was the context in which Burgess became a champion of free expression.
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