I enjoyed reading what Desmond Morris said to Stanley Borg in the February issue of M magazine about his life in Malta. Dr Morris has always made it clear that he greatly enjoyed living in Malta and is always generous with his time when approached by Maltese authors as, for instance, I did (via e-mail) when preparing my article about him for the volume Encounters with Malta edited by Petra Bianchi and Peter Serracino Inglott and published in 2000.
I feel, however, I have to correct what Dr Morris said about Anthony Burgess and censorship in Malta in the early 1970s.
He is quite correct, of course, when he reports Burgess's complaints about the Maltese postal censor's withholding of books sent to Mr Burgess from abroad - including, I believe, a copy of Mr Burgess's own work (his most famous one) A Clockwork Orange - but what seems to be implied by Dr Morris, that this was ecclesiastical censorship, is incorrect. The censorship was solely governmental, and in the second volume of his autobiography, You've Had Your Time" (1990) Mr Burgess himself makes this quite clear, though he voices his indignation at the postal censors' throwing at him the Church's (now long defunct) Index of Prohibited Books by which they were certainly guided... Ironically, in fact, when Mr Burgess was invited by the Malta Library Association to give a public lecture about obscenity and censorship, in the Science Lecture Theatre at the University of Malta campus, Tal-Qroqq, the honorary secretary of the association was a Jesuit priest, the late Anthony Sapienza, as liberal a Catholic priest as you could come across. As a member of the MLA committee I was present at the lecture, which I much enjoyed, and remember clearly that there was a large audience which listened to Burgess with great interest.
Dr Morris is absolutely wrong in saying that "His condemnation of censorship is met with a mass exit".
In fact, all Mr Burgess writes in his autobiography after giving an account of his lecture, is "Any questions? There were no questions, but a fat Franciscan made a throat-cutting gesture."
Perhaps a few people did leave at some time - I do not really remember any, but it is possible - I can assure both Dr Morris and readers that Mr Burgess's lecture was heard by the vast majority to the end and was applauded. In fact, Mr Burgess was in good humour, and afterwards joined members of the MLA committee for drinks in a Sliema hotel.
His lecture had been recorded on tape by us, with his full consent, and when we asked him if we could publish the text, he agreed on condition that he revised the text before publication, and eventually he did so. The MLA's publication of Anthony Burgess's Obscenity And The Arts (1973) has become one of the rarer collector's literary items written by Mr Burgess.