Brooke Moves to Ban "Fanny Hill"

Fanny Hill has run into trouble in Massachusetts again.

Massachusetts Attorney General Edward W. Brooke this week began legal proceedings to ban John Cleland's eighteenth-century novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) in the state. A petition presented before Judge Eugene A. Hudson of Suffolk County Superior Court asks that he declare the book "obscene, indecent, and impure," and therefore illegal under Commonwealth statutes.

First published in England in about 1749, the book figured in the earliest recorded suppression of a literary work on grounds of obscenity. In 1821 in Commonwealth vs. Holmes, the Massachusetts court indicted two men for publishing this "lewd and obscene" work. There have been innumerable bans ever since.

Judge Hudson said yesterday that he is reading the book and will issue a preliminary order on Monday, which may "temporarily restrain" sales of the book until a trial and any appeals have been completed. According to Lee H. Kozol, Assistant Attorney General, prosecution of the book was recommended by the state's Obscene Literature Control Commission, and "it is at least an arguable issue," that the book should be banned.

Action to prevent censorship of the novel is planned by the Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Reuben Goodman, chairman of the group's censorship committee, said yesterday. The group will intervene at least by the time the case reaches the state Supreme Court, "which I'm sure it will," he added.

Goodman said that any defense of the book would be based on the last censorship case in Massachusetts, which involved Tropic of Cancer. In that case the state Supreme Court declared that "anything with literary attributes" could not be banned and that it is "not the function of judges to serve as arbiters of taste."

"While the book is clearly pornographic in intent and was meant to sell because of its sensational nature. I am against censoring it except for people under 21," John M. Bullitt, professor of English, said last night. Bullitt, whose course, English 141, studies the period in which Fanny Hill was published, explained that the novel is historically important as an extreme example of the "anti-Pamela" tradition in English literature. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is an eighteenth-century defense of chastity.

Fanny Hill's popularity has extended to Harvard Square. Local bookstores reported yesterday that sales of the book were breaking records. The Coop said it had been selling "like mad," and another store stated that "it is impossible to keep it in stock." One store suggested that sales had increased yesterday after news of the Attorney General's action.

One store manager admitted that she's "chicken" and will take both Fanny Hill and its newly published "sequel," Memoirs of a Coxcomb, off the shelves if Monday's court order is against the book.