A frank conversation on obscenity in literature.
Jay Gertzman, Loren Glass, and Boris Kachka have each recently published biographies on eminent publishers of the past century, looking into the lives and works of literary pioneers the likes of Samuel Roth, Barney Rosset, and Roger Straus and Robert Giroux. Today we're kicking off a serialized Q&A with the authors discussing what prompted them to write these books, what characterized the august personalities they profile and how their work contributed to the landscape of American literature. What follows is a (mercilessly abridged) conversation about sex, obscenity and the American counterculture in publishing.
Q:
What about the postwar period prompted the rise of the Beats, homoeroticism in literature, and the subsequent pushback on obscenity? Why were Roth, Rosset, Straus and Giroux drawn to the works they published?
JAY GERTZMAN: There were several reasons for innovative trends in thought and expression after WWII. Wars liberate people from social restraints, and energize sexual desire, both during and after. To find and read the banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover, for example, was a rite of passage for American servicemen.
We know what Barney Rosset contributed to this liberalization, publishing Beats, existentialists and Vietnam protest literature etc. As for Samuel Roth, he published one of the first gay transvestite novels, A Scarlet Pansy. He secretly distributed the works of Joyce, Lawrence, Schnitzler, and Frank Harris. He sold books, some innocuous, by advertising their s-m, voyeuristic, pedophiliac, and hermaphroditic contents. All this he did between-the-wars. He knew all the trends, and how to popularize them. After the first World War it was “sex o’clock in American literature.” He sold lots of books—until the Post Office mail block.
He filed suit in 1947 against the New York postmaster Albert Goldman, pleading that, as a result of the mail block, he had received no book orders and his business was “at a standstill.” The Post Office defended their practice by citing the danger of disseminating obscenity. Roth’s appeal was a key moment in questioning whether such a vague concept as obscenity was in fact a clear and present danger to the public. As prosecution for obscenity focused on “the man not the book,” Roth was convicted in 1956 and served a federal prison sentence for innocuous materials while Barney Rosset was successfully fighting the post office for the right to distribute Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book Roth had been distributing to anyone who could pay for it since 1929.
LOREN GLASS: Barney Rosset’s legacy could never have been achieved without the landmark case of Roth v. U.S., nor without Barney’s wealth. Samuel Roth, as Jay has expansively illustrated, laid the groundwork, and at much higher personal risk and with no personal fortune to back him up.
Most of the trends Jay mentioned in conjunction with Barney fall under the umbrella term “late modernism,” which, most centrally, indicates the canonization of high modernism in the American university. A prominent aspect of late modernism is its sexual explicitness—many texts (most famously, Joyce’s Ulysses) challenged censorship regimes, but not to the degree that Henry Miller or William Burroughs did. In my book, I refer to this canon, most of which was published by Grove, as “vulgar modernism.” This was the stuff Barney loved.
A prominent aspect of late modernism is sexual explicitness—many texts challenged censorship regimes.
Indeed, he didn’t like Lady Chatterley’s Lover and published it only as a wedge to lay the groundwork for publishing Miller. Then, once he won the case over Naked Lunch, the floodgates were open and he published everything he could get his hands on, including the Marquis de Sade and innumerable “underground” classics from the Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the end of the sixties, he had brought the underground into the mainstream.
BORIS KACHKA: In the constellation of postwar publishing, Farrar, Straus & Co. established itself first and foremost as a gatekeeper—and certainly not as a force in the avant-garde. The tastes of Robert Giroux, the editorial force behind midcentury FSG, were never as outre as the others being discussed among us. He missed out on Jack Kerouac's On the Road, after publishing the Beat's first novel, The Town and the City. Similarly, Roger Straus could have acquired Lolita, but concluded "No publisher will touch it." (He was right for a while.)
FSG did nibble away at obscenity laws, publishing a reprint of Wilson's once-banned Memoirs of Hecate County via a subsidiary in another state. Roger Straus was also a publisher and staunch defender of Wilhelm Reich, the controversial psychologist, who died while imprisoned for contempt of court. (The government had destroyed much of his material, including books.)
Yet it really wasn't until the arrival of another editor-in-chief, Henry Robbins, that FSG really began publishing writers reporting on the counterculture and societal breakdown—Walker Percy, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion—as well as writers like Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme working at the edges of postmodernism.
LOREN GLASS: I should add that Grove was in the forefront of publishing gay male writers, starting with Jean Genet and peaking with John Rechy’s City of Night, which was a huge bestseller. This was before “gay literature” was a mainstream marketing category, and frequently such authors were seen as “underground” rather than homosexual. Genet, of course, was a hero for the Beats and Edmund White argues that he inaugurated the “Queen” as a literary character.
BORIS KACHKA: Though Giroux was gay and to some extent interested in quietly gay writers, he was deeply closeted. (The somewhat more open editor Hal Vursell did publish the important gay writer Marguerite Yourcenar, working most closely on Memoirs of Hadrian, which deal with the Roman emperor's young lover in a refreshingly open way, considering the era).
JAY GERTZMAN: Today, there is no “coherent counterculture community” for banned sexually explicit material. The only publisher of pedophilia or snuff, except for some deep criminal enterprises, would be the government, for its investigators attempting to entrap purchasers. However, there are anarchist writers, whose books are full of dispassionate rejection of the citizens of the 21st century global “developed” world. That world still identifies sex with edenic or spiritual bliss, or more constantly, with shame.
LOREN GLASS: With the “end of obscenity” such material is no longer as controversial as it was then and, more significantly, there is no longer a coherent countercultural constituency to be addressed by such material. I also think that print itself has been absorbed into the larger multi-media digital world, giving it less political power than it once had.
This Wednesday authors Loren Glass, Boris Kachka, and Jay Gertzman are holding an open panel on Personalities in Postwar Publishing at Columbia University. (see flier for details)
See Part II of this conversation »
Jay Gertzman, Professor Emeritus of English at Mansfield University, is author of three books, including Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 and Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist (University Press of Florida).
Loren Glass is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 and Counterculture Colophon (Stanford University Press).
Boris Kachka is a culture journalist, contributing editor to New York magazine, and author of Hothouse (Simon & Schuster). His articles and profiles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, and Elle, among others.
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