THE TRIAL OF LENNY BRUCE
BY ALBERT GOLDMAN
From `The New Republic' September 12, 1964
Manhattan's Criminal Courts Building, a grim grey skyscraper dominating the
columns and porticos of the city's legal and administrative Acropolis, was
the scene in recent weeks of an eerie summer arts festival. In it's cool,
religiously silent courtrooms, films were screened, and tapes played of
night-club shows, and a parade of critics, columnists, editors, professors
and clergymen pronounced on the merits of the works in question - becoming
players themselves in a strange Genet-like theater with a raised bench of
black-robed judges behind the actors, and row after row of absorbed
spectators in front.
Billed in the press as trials of this or that artist for violations of
Section 1140-a of the Criminal Code (Immoral Shows and Exhibitions), these
legal dramas are the inevitable outcome of collision between America's
first permanently established avant garde and the old guard who are the
official protectors of public decency and morality. As an ultimate stage,
the Criminal Court is better suited to the principal defendants - Village
film-maker and critic Jonas Mekas, and comedian Lenny Bruce, cultural
kamikazes eager to impale themselves on the spears of authority - than any
downtown movie house or cafe.
Both the movie-man and the comic invited arrest in order to determine
the size of the area in which society will let them operate. Jonas Mekas,
founder of FilmMakers' Cooperative and bellwether of the Village Voice,
has already been convicted for showing Jack Smith's "Flaming Creatures"
which displayed genitalia and other portions of the male and female anatomy,
and he is now awaiting trial for sponsoring Jean Genet's "Un Chant d'Amour",
a story involving homosexual love.
The most notorious case in what is being called the "harassment of the
arts" in New York is that of Lenny Bruce. His present trial for obscenity
climaxes a six-month lockout of Lower East Side art activities by the New
York City Department of Licenses, the New York State Division of Motion
Pictures, and the city's vice squad, fire and municipal building
authorities. Theaters have been padlocked, coffee shops driven out of
business, summonses served, arrests made. The storm center is the Bruce
trial, which began June 16 and swelled during the summer to Dickensian
proportions. It concluded recently but no verdict is expected until late
this month.
For this unprecedented crackdown, accusing fingers have been leveled at
Robert Moses, who is suspected of wanting to "clean up" the city for the
World's Fair; at Cardinal Spellman, who is leading a crusade against
pornography; and at the real estate interests, which wish to clear the
Village of beatniks. But the provocations have more than kept pace with
the persecutions.
In less than a decade, the avant garde has transformed itself from a
secret brotherhood of hipsters living dangerously in the deep shadows of
hatred and fear of authority, to a band of beat "saints" welcoming a
showdown in the courts - where they expect to triumph either legally or
morally through martyrdom.
Lenny Bruce, who turned up in court looking like a bearded rabbi in the
garb of the concentration camp, was once an impeccably groomed, stylishly
accoutred Broadway entertainer who projected his satyric images of American
society with typical professional aplomb. But when he found that his
audiences were kissing the rod with which he flailed them, he insisted on
drawing blood instead of pocketing his $5,000 a week and going on with the
show. He demanded, "How many niggers we got here tonight?" or threatened
to urinate on the audience. Eventually, he punched through the mask of the
funny man and the satirist and emerged as a furious and sometimes
frightening shaman, struggling with the aid of lights, drums, chants and
surreal fantasy, to exorcise the demons of the national conscience.
Obscene language was as necessary to his act as dynamite to a miner.
In the last year, however, he has suffered a loss of inspiration - partly
attributable to ill health and emotional distress - and his use of obscenity
has begun to resemble the twitching of a damaged muscle.
A magnet for cops and cranks, Lenny Bruce has been arrested for obscenity
and possession of narcotics nine times in the past two years. The mere
appearance of his name on a theater marquee last November provoked an
arsonist to mine the stage with bundles of gasoline-soaked rags. In April
the announcement of a regular run in a Greenwich Village cafe was the signal
for Assistant District Attorney Richard M. Kuh to send in his plainclothesmen
with recording machines under their coats and microphones in their tie pins.
Bruce's New York arrest was no crude "bust." A grand jury of 30-odd leading
citizens handed up an indictment and a three-judge panel was selected to try
the defendant, with Kuh (who has obtained 100 pornography convictions) as
procecutor.
The forces for the defense were equally impressive. They included Ephraim
London, who is the elder statesman of obscenity actions and a one-time
attorney for Alger Hiss, and London's junior partner, Marvin Garbus. Poet
Allen Ginsberg, who has proved in this crisis to be the most resourceful
leader of the avant garde, circulated a pre-trial petition containing 100
signatures, including those of Reinhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling, James
Baldwin and Mr. and Mrs. Richard Burton. A dozen expert witnesses from
journalism, publishing, the universities and the clergy testified on Bruce's
behalf, and five rebuttal witnesses with comparable credentials testified
against the comedian. As the trial progressed, the Criminal Courts
Building, that had started out as a stage for Lenny Bruce, became a cultural
Palladium where highly articulate, intellectual witnesses took turns trying
to "put away" the impassive judges. Bruce sat quietly by, writing reviews
of all his critics.
The three judges - John M. Murtagh, a Roman Catholic; Kenneth M. Phipps,
a negro; and J. Randall Creel, a WASP - made it clear that they regarded
Bruce's work with profound personal distaste, but were willing to hear or
read anything that could be said in the comedian's defense. To a man,
defense witnesses asserted that Bruce is a brilliant social satirist, and
then struggled to prove it from the crude and unfunny "bits" mercilessly
laid out in the transcript. The inflation of values was bizarre: Bruce was
compared to Rabelais, Swift, Twain, Joyce, Henry Miller and Hosea. All the
witnesses found the "dirty words" acceptable by "contemporary community
standards" (one clergyman remarked that the only bar to the use of Bruce's
language in the pulpit was custom).
"A Brilliant Moral Man"
Inevitably, the trial had its humorous aspect. The tapes elicited strangled
laughter from the spectators, court officers, and even one of the judges -
until he was shushed. Another judge wanted to know if "goy" was a dirty
word. Lawyer London once referred absentmindedly to his client as "Mr.
Crotch." Dorothy Kilgallen, who called Bruce "a brilliant moral man," on
cross-examination was confronted with a routine about a man who has been
caught by his wife having intercourse with a chicken. Stopped for a moment,
she hesitated, then demurely asserted: "Well..he got into some other animals
too!"
Though the trial was good theater, it was not an honest search for truth.
The defense witnesses evaded a direct confrontation with the facts. Instead
of conceding Bruce's power to shock and infuriate by a public display of the
ugly, the twisted, the perverse, and justifying his use of such powers by
the remarkable cathartic effect he sometimes achieved, these liberal,
intellectual witnesses turned the case into the conventional issue of the
blameless artist versus the uncomprehending world.
The perversion of the issues apparent in the Bruce trial illuminates
powerfully a cultural dilemma that is likely to become more serious in the
future. Of the two obvious ways of dealing with a militant and
revolutionary avant garde, the one - repression - succeeds only in driving
it underground and thereby increasing its intensity. The steady relaxation
of restraint exemplified by the Supreme Court liberalization of the
definition of "obscenity" has an equally frustrating effect on those whose
social contribution is relentless challenge to established values. To meet
protest with ever-expanding permissiveness is to refuse to feel its bite,
to translate it into "art" or "satire" or other expressions that seem
comfortable, thus forcing the dissident into ever more extravagant gestures
of defiance.
It is unlikely, however, that current trials in New York will establish
a new code for dissent. The probable outcome is that Lenny Bruce will be
acquitted of "hard-core vulgarity" - as the judge put it - by a court
convinced that "it's a crime that he's getting away with it." If this
happens - and any other verdict would be out of line with the rulings of
the Supreme Court - the judges will not be the only ones to compromise
themselves. They will be joining hands with the liberal intellectual
witnesses - and even with the defendant. For the one really saddening
thing in this trial was the spectacle of Lenny Bruce, the cause of all this
commotion and the recipient of much praise and assistance, offering himself
as a victim of the society he had once attacked so ruthlessly and so
daringly. There in the tape recordings were the signs of unavailing
compromise: in the mumbled obscenities, the elaborate but incoherent self-
justifications, the obsessional narratives of persecution, and above all,
in the total absence of the nihilistic rage and savagery that had once left
his audiences shaken but grateful for a magical release - all gone - and
his primitive but priestly function forsaken.
Perhaps the trials of Jonas Mekas and Lenny Bruce will convince the avant
garde that no genuine confrontation with society is possible in the
courtroom. Substituting the judicial setting for the stage gives the artist
a momentary sense of engagement, and brings him a kind of attention he would
not otherwise receive; but ultimately it tempts him to abandon his role of
rebel for that of litigant, crusader or martyr. The worst is that even
after the price has been paid, the legal encounter may nearly obscure an
already dark and difficult problem, leaving the real tension unexposed
and unresolved.