Abstract
Actor
Pearson, most famous for his roles as the sexist TV boss in the Bridget Jones’ films and his role as gambler Dave Charnley in cult TV newsroom drama Drop the Dead Donkey, now combines his theatre and screen work with running a rare books business.
His enthusiasm and belief in the power of books explodes from almost every sentence.
Actor Neil Pearson
“I’ve been a reader since I could read,” he said. “I’ve been a collector [since] before I even knew I was doing it.” He read books avidly as a child, and early pleasures were found in the pages of Enid Blyton, the Canadian/American adventure writer Willard Price and Arthur Ransome, of Swallows and Amazons fame. It soon becomes clear that adventure stories held great appeal for the young Pearson.
“It wasn’t a retreat from anything, it felt like I was running towards something. Running towards adventures, and people and worlds I didn’t know,” he said.
Pearson’s strongly held beliefs in the power of reading extends to his support and involvement with the charity Book Aid International, which sends books to 25 countries around the world – especially those in Africa – as well as helping to train librarians. In 2017 it sent 938,333 new books around Africa to libraries, schools, refugee camps and hospitals, and helped train 158 librarians.
“It’s an issue that is quite close to my heart because books have been close to my heart ever since I knew what books were,” he said, adding: “The impulse is explained by wanting people to have the same thrill and the same happiness that reading has given me.”
As a bookseller, Pearson stocks a collection of works published in Paris between the two world wars and this, it turns out, is a very particular passion.
Not only does he wax lyrical about their importance but he has also written a book about one particular Manchester-born publisher, Jack Kahane, who worked in Paris and published some of the most controversial novels of the era, many of which were banned in other countries.
In fact, Kahane was only able to publish them in France because of a loophole in the French censorship laws that meant they did not cover books published in English.
“That’s why the writing expat community was out there during the wars, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, because you could write freely but, more importantly, you could publish freely. Without being published you couldn’t speak freely.”
This legal loophole, believes Pearson, who clearly has spent many hours studying the history of this period, was there because of an intellectual French guilt about the impact of the trials of two writers in the 19th century.
“There had been two prosecutions in the 19th century of French writers, one was against Charles Baudelaire, for Les Fleurs du Mal, the other was against [Gustave] Flaubert for Madame Bovary.”
A revival of the 1980s’ play Rita, Sue and Bob Too at the Royal Court theatre in London which nearly got cancelled-in 2017 for being too controversial
CREDIT: Alastair Muir/Shutterstock
He says the trials caused some anger in the French press. “They were outraged that their artists were not being allowed to think outside the then societal norms,” he said.
“Artists are supposed to imagine worlds beyond the worlds that they actually inhabit and it was a source of shame. They were disappointed in themselves for not defending these leaders of men, and they became less inclined to... use those obscenity laws.”
Pearson was inspired to research and write a book about the Obelisk Press, an English language imprint based in Paris in the 1930s and run by Kahane, because he considered him an influential character whose story was not well enough known. “He published his books in English at a time when they could be published nowhere else but France,” he said.
“He followed on from Sylvia Beach when she published Ulysses in 1922. He published Lawrence Durrell; Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness when it was banned in the UK; [and] he published an early edition, not the first, of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”
Kahane was a “very important figure in the fight to break down, once and for all, the laws governing what you could and couldn’t publish”. He added that those laws were finally “knocked off their hinges with the amazing Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial and, as a coda, the Last Exit to Brooklyn trial”.
“Those both happened in the early 1960s, but the fight to get to that point started with Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press,” he went on. Many controversial books, including James Hanley’s Boy, Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book and titles by Henry James, were published by Obelisk. “This was uncharted territory, so I was drawn to it.”
He exudes admiration for what Kahane achieved, and why it was symbolically important. “The fight always goes on, but it is a question of where the pendulum is. [In] that era you didn’t have the ability to publish. That right was won. Now we have a different battle we have to protect that right, we have to protect it from those who would take it from us.
“As the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo would tell you, were they still alive today, there are people who will kill you for publishing what they don’t like, and while that still remains true the fight remains unwon.”
As Pearson acknowledges, governments have seen books as threats throughout history. “That’s why they ban them.”
Novelist Dame Rebecca West in London after appearing at the Old Bailey to defend the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover on 27 October 1960
CREDIT: Eddie Worth/AP/Shutterstock
When the conversation weaves back to the work of Book Aid International and what it does, Pearson says the charity delivers books to places where they are not available for geographic and economic reasons, rather than because of censorship. “We are talking about getting books to people that can teach them a skill, that can help them to live. I can’t think of a more important thing to do,” he said.
But books are not the only thing on his mind. He is concerned about freedom of thought more generally.
Much of Pearson’s career has been as a stage actor, as well as appearing in TV dramas such as Between the Lines, for which he was Bafta-nominated, and more recently the BBC’s Waterloo Road. He appeared in Joe Orton’s Loot in the 1980s, a play which had been subject to cuts insisted on by the Lord Chamberlain when it was first performed.
What does he think about censorship within the theatre today? “I think we are in a phase where people are self-censoring as well. Theatres are self-censoring. What you present to the public can be thought-provoking, and even controversial, but there is an acceptable controversial and an unacceptable controversial.
“I think the Royal Court dodged the bullet slightly when there was a revival of Rita, Sue and Bob Too,” he said.
In 2017 London’s Royal Court theatre announced that although it had planned to stage a revival of Andrea Dunbar’s working-class play set in Bradford, it decided it was no longer right to do so. Accusations of censorship flipped around the mediasphere before the Royal Court, which has had a reputation for staging controversial plays throughout its history, rethought its position and decided it would go ahead with the production.
“But that is where you can get yourself into hot water,” said Pearson. “You have to be able to encourage looking at something and creating the ability to discern, to factor in when it was written, what the prevailing climate was, how people thought, how people interacted with each other and distill from that their own experience. Please don’t tell me, Royal Court, or anyone else, what I may or may not see. Put it on and let me think.”
And he added: “If you are genuinely against censorship, you have to be evenhanded against censorship. If your idea of freedom of speech is only allowing people to say what you already agree with, then Goebbels would have no problem with that definition of speech.
“But we have to be able to continue to think.”