Norval Morris (1923–2004)

Norval Morris (1923-2004), was Dean of Law and Julius Kreeger Professor of Law at Chicago Law School, among many other distinctions. He played a significant role in criminal law and penal reform in Australia and the United States and he was one of the most inspiring law teachers of his generation. He was gregarious in his friendships and ruthless in his pursuit of rectifiable injustice. I remember with undiminished gratitude the classes I took with him in Chicago the late sixties. ‘The Brothel Boy and other Parables of the Law’ is a late work, published in 1992. It is unlike any of his earlier books on criminal law and punishment in its revelatory personal dimension, ‘The Brothel Boy’ is a novel half realised and in disguise. The personal element may explain the elaborate persona that Morris constructs in order to present his parables. In each of them his protagonist is the young Eric Blair, fresh from Eton and Cambridge and now serving as a member of the British Imperial Police force in Burma in the first half of the 20th century. As District Officer in the town of Moulamein he exercises the authority of a ‘policeman, prosecutor and judge rolled into one’. Eric Blair was, of course, the birthname of George Orwell, whose first novel ‘Burmese Days’ (1934) drew on his experiences as a British police officer in Burma in 1922-6
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Each of the eight parables is a dilemma in which Blair will face unresolved issues of moral and legal responsibility. Most involve the criminal law and its enforcement, though the second, 'The Best Interests of the Child' requires Blair, in his role as magistrate, to determine a question of custody where his choice lies between 'a privileged upper-middle class setting and privileged Burmese village setting for an unusually bright and gifted Eurasian child'. Each of the parables concludes with reflections and comments when Morris drops his mask as Eric Blair and engages more directly with the reader. He thought 'The Best Interests of the Child' was the most ambitious and difficult of his parables and declined to express an opinion on the question whether his alter ego Blair was right to give custody to the English couple. Though the setting is exotic, the underlying problems in cases of disputed custody are painfully familiar. That is equally true of the criminal law parables which involve the crimes of rape, murder, manslaughter and drug trafficking under the Indian Penal Code. In the first parable the ‘brothel boy’ of the title is the simple-minded son of a prostitute, about 20 years of age, brought up in the brothel where his mother works and employed in the brothel as a menial servant. He rapes a young woman, is convicted and hanged for his crime. None of the people in this story, except perhaps the brothel boy’s unidentifiable father, is European. For Blair, and for Morris, the question is whether the brothel boy had sufficient understanding of what he had done to be held responsible for a crime punishable by death. The only response the brothel boy could make to the charge of rape was his pathetic insistence that he had the money to pay the woman and always intended to pay her for intercourse. That response seems to have reflected the extent of his understanding of what was involved in sexual relationships. Some of the parables involve crimes within the European enclave. In ‘The Tropical Bedroom’ a battered wife kills her violent and sexually abusive husband while he sleeps. Others cross the ethnic, class and social divide between the Europeans and the indigenous population: ‘The Planter’s Dream’ is a case of somnambulistic homicide, in which a European planter kills his Burmese mistress. In ‘Ake Dah’ both the offender and victim are indigenous: a village headman suffers a psychosis of temporary duration and attempts to kill his beloved son.

With the exception of the parable of the Brothel Boy, in which the law takes its brutal course, all of the parables involve subterfuge and manipulation or evasion of the law as Eric Blair searches for a just and humane solution for the tragedies involved in the crimes that have been committed. In his reflections on ‘The Tropical Bedroom’ in which the battered wife kills her sleeping tormenter, Norval Morris remarks in his epilogue that Blair faces, in each of these stories, ‘the problem of ensuring that official legal action under the aegis of the criminal law does more good than harm’.

Why ‘Eric Blair’ and his alter ego George Orwell? And why Burma? In the preface to ‘The Brothel Boy’ Morris makes the disarming admission that Blair ‘is a superb embodiment of the moral and ethical values to which I aspire….and in imagining these stories I tried to live up to his values.’ Why Burma? Morris hoped that the transposition of some familiar dilemmas of the criminal law to a different time and place, in the period of British colonialism, would displace the cultural blinkers that often obscure the complexity of the human tragedies involved when crimes are committed within our own familiar cultural milieu.

There is another and deeper impersonation involved in ‘The Brothel Boy’, an impersonation which takes the book into territory well beyond a collection of legal parables by a gifted and imaginative teacher. The second half of the book begins to take the form of an unrealized novel, struggling to emerge from its chrysalis. Norval’s creature Eric Blair starts a sexual relationship with Rosemary Brett, who is considerably older, sophisticated, beautiful, intelligent, wealthy in her own right and married to George, a military officer of impeccable breeding, excellent prospects and implacable rectitude. The beginning of the affair with Rosemary is pure delight for Blair, who is infatuated with Rosemary. Infatuation cools, though delight persists, when Rosemary makes it apparent to him that she will manage their relationship so as not to endanger the privileged life she expects to lead with her husband. Fate intervenes when George is killed in a frontier skirmish. Rosemary returns to England where she is diagnosed with cancer. Blair and Rosemary arrange to meet again in Ceylon, where it soon becomes apparent that she is disfigured, drinking too much and too often and suffering a florid mental breakdown. Rosemary first attempts suicide with pills and subsequently kills herself by gunshot when Blair leaves her bedroom after a final episode of sexual humiliation. The coroner’s inquest that follows absolves him from legal responsibility for the death. As a matter of law, a duty of rescue might be owed to a wife in these circumstances, but not to a mistress. It is the end, however, of any hope that Blair might have for advancement in the British Colonial Service. This sad tale of the scarifying intimacies of the relationship between Blair and Rosemary is presented in fragments over several earlier parables and reaches its culmination the last of them, ‘The Curve of Pearls’.

The Brothel Boy is inspiring as a humane reflection on the criminal law, its limits and potential for the infliction of undeserved suffering. It is haunting for the unexpected way in which ‘Eric Blair’, who begins as a convenient alter ego for Norval Morris, takes on a strange and troubled life of his own in his love affair with Rosemary, well beyond the presentation of familiar legal dilemmas in a set of illustrative parables… (mais)