In this Freudian age, Americans were opening up, acknowledging their needs, and, because of automation and the shorter workweek, they had more time in which to ponder and seek their pleasure. The newly developed birth-control pill was being anticipated by women. The bikini bathing suit, imported from France, was beginning to appear on American beaches. And there were newspaper stories about the existence of mate-swapping clubs in several suburban communities. Jukeboxes across the nation were throbbing with the music of the pelvic-thrusting Elvis Presley, and audiences gathered in nightclubs to hear a shocking new comedian named Lenny Bruce.
Bruce’s uniqueness was in mentioning the unmentionable, de
scribing certain private acts and attitudes that people blushingly recognized as their own. While Bruce and Hefner both in their own way, and through their own initiative, extended the limits of sexual expression, neither man would have been able to reach such large audiences had not the law itself become more liberal during the late 1950s. But the individual who was most responsible for this change, and whose rebellious life was a precursor to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, was relatively unknown in America, except to the authorities who now held him in jail as the nation’s most incorrigible literary outlaw.
His name was Samuel Roth.
S
AMUEL ROTH
was born in an Austrian mountain village to Orthodox Jewish peasants who had an instinctive reverence for the printed word. On sabbath afternoons his mother would read to him about the miracles of the rabbis, hoping that it would inspire him to a religious life; but the likelihood of this was diminished by an incident that occurred while he traveled in the steerage section of a New York-bound ship with his family and two hundred other immigrants in the spring of 1904.
Samuel Roth, then nine years old, was in a bunk reading a Yiddish pamphlet that had been given him by a stranger along the loading dock at Hamburg, a pamphlet describing a Jewish prophet who was more brilliant than all the rabbis and who, though later crucified, rose from his death to resume his spiritual mission. This was a tract from the New Testament, and young Roth became so enthralled as he read it that he began reading aloud to the passengers near him, causing religious discussions and debates that could be heard on the deck above.
Suddenly, a tall red-bearded rabbi appeared at the top of the stairs, and in an ill-tempered voice he demanded to know who had been reciting from “heathen scrolls.” The boy was pointed out, and as the rabbi descended into the dark and fumy dungeon there was total silence, except for one man who, recognizing the interrogator, whispered in awe, “the great Rav from Pinsk.”
The rabbi approached the boy, quickly grabbed the pamphlet, and damned it as a sinful work forbidden to Jews. He tore it into several pieces and threw it out a porthole into the sea. Roth watched, shaken and humiliated, wincing as he again saw the rabbi’s condemning eyes and heard further warnings on the evils of false knowledge. Finally, after the rabbi had returned to his quarters above, Roth felt hatred for the holy man and his destructive act; and he would that night, and many nights in the years that followed, remember the damnation and never again abide by any literary judgment but his own.
Roth was a precocious student in the public schools of the Lower East Side. His teachers, however, were rarely impressed with him and his argumentative nature, and were intolerant of his habit of bringing to class books that were not part of the curriculum. Often reprimanded, he was finally suspended, which incensed his humble father, a pants maker in a sweatshop, who had little sympathy for a son who challenged authority.
Roth recognized himself as a rebel, if not an anarchist, when he became a follower of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, whose radical lectures he regularly attended at a lyceum on East Broadway. He read the anarchist magazine
Mother Earth
, and he befriended many dissident young men from the tenements who would one day gain power through the unions and fame during strikes. But Roth was also too individualistic to remain harmonious for long with any group, including his own family, which was why at fifteen he was banished from home by his father, and why he failed to complete any school that he ever attended. “I was,” he later observed in his journal, “too much in love with books to make a good student.”
During his many scholastic interruptions, he held a variety of jobs for brief periods of time. He sold newspapers along the East River to commuters using the Brooklyn ferry, worked as a waiter in a small restaurant, and, as a drugstore clerk, he filled bottles, typed labels, and occasionally sold condoms to red-faced rabbis.
At night, if lacking access to a sofa in a friend’s apartment, he slept in the sheltered halls of buildings, using newspapers as pillows, and he bathed in the public washrooms of parks or terminals. He felt at home only in a library, particularly the one on East Broadway and the Bowery, where he read and reread the works of Keats, Shelley and Swinburne, Spencer and Darwin, and also wrote poetry and articles that he always sent, and sometimes sold, to Anglo-Jewish weeklies.
After a friend had shown examples of Roth’s published work to an influential professor of English at Columbia University, Roth received in 1916 a faculty scholarship; but, as in the past, he was an unsuccessful student, being less committed to the classroom than to editing the campus poetry magazine and joining the student protest movement against American involvement in World War I.
Roth’s defective eyesight made him ineligible for the draft, but he was too restless to remain in college longer than a year. In 1918, after he had married a young woman he had known from the Lower East Side, he opened at 49 West Eighth Street a small bookshop made quickly popular by the illegal distillery that he kept in the back room. Along the walls of the shop he permitted Greenwich Village painters to display their canvases, and he also functioned as a kind of pawnbroker to local writers and artists. In exchange for small loans, which were rarely repaid, he accepted unsold manuscripts and portraits, unsalable trinkets and heirlooms, old books that were not rare, and rare books that nobody seemed to want.
Pleased to be in the book business, but selling few books, Roth closed his shop after Christmas in 1920 to accept, at the suggestion of an editor he knew on the New York
Herald
, the assignment of interviewing literary celebrities in London. But this opportunity dwindled to another of his misadventures when the articles that he sent back proved to be more candid than the
Herald
had bargained for. Describing the Georgian poets as “nibbling on the dry bones of Keats,” and writing that Arthur Symons “is a torch blazing in the vacuum,” and suggesting that George
Moore was impotent, was not what the
Herald
had in mind when it made Roth its literary correspondent; and so at the age of twenty-six, just as he was cultivating a British accent and becoming accustomed to the daily use of a walking stick and a furcollared coat that lent distinction to his lean six-foot frame, he was ignominiously recalled to New York, where during the next few years his skill with words was limited to the Jewish immigrants to whom he taught basic English at a special school on the Lower East Side.
Fortunately for his finances, his wife was now prospering as a milliner, a trade to which she had been apprenticed as a teenager, and she would undoubtedly have enjoyed ever greater success had she not, in 1925, agreed to join her voluble husband in a venture he considered more intellectually rewarding, that of founding a literary magazine and a mail-order book business that specialized in the lightly libidinous nineteenth-century fiction of such writers as Zola and Balzac, De Maupassant and Flaubert.
The Roths’ magazine was called
Two Worlds Monthly
, and its early editions featured excerpts from the condemned
Ulysses
, offending not only the American censors who had banned the book but also its author in Paris, James Joyce, who, though offered by Roth the double rate of $50 per installment in deference to his “seniority in genius,” claimed that Roth had not received permission to serialize the book.
Roth argued that permission had been granted him by Ezra Pound, who had represented himself as Joyce’s agent, and this led to additional controversy in Europe between Pound and Joyce. Roth meanwhile continued to excerpt the book in
Two Worlds Monthly
, deleting some of Joyce’s explicit sexual language; but after several issues, Roth was ordered by the court to discontinue the serialization, which by this time had bored most of its readers into abandonment, leaving Roth and his wife nearly bankrupt.
Throughout his life Roth took pride in being the first American publisher to challenge the censors on
Ulysses
, and he accepted as a croix de guerre his sixty-day imprisonment for later distributing
unexpurgated editions of the entire book in 1930—three years before it would be elevated from obscenity to art in the celebrated ruling of Federal Judge John M. Woolsey. While Random House would accept full credit for the legal triumph, and would profit grandly from the American distribution rights it acquired directly from Joyce, Roth believed that it was his intransigence that had goaded Random House into its noble, belated defense of a classic. In his journal, Roth noted: “The rich publisher lets the poor one set precedents in moral standards.”
Having perhaps had enough of moral standards and poverty for a while, and wishing to redeem himself after the loss of his wife’s savings, Roth ventured more boldly into the literary underworld by including among his enterprises—under a fictitious name and a temporary address—a mail-order subsidiary that he hoped would thrive by selling such books as a fourteenth-century Arabian ritualistic love volume called
The Perfumed Garden
, which contained illustrations depicting 237 possible positions for men and women “in congress.” Roth had gained access to this book when he was approached one day by another underground publisher who, having just been arrested for circulating
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
, was now anxious to dispose of three hundred copies of
The Perfumed Garden
that he had hidden in a warehouse on Fourth Street. The book, printed in Paris, was priced at $35 a copy, but the desperate seller said that Roth could have the copies for only $3 each, meaning that Roth could possibly earn $10,000 from the transaction.
Long before Roth had earned anything close to that amount, however, his mail-order operation had been infiltrated by spies from the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which had been watching him closely ever since the serialization of
Ulysses
. The Society not only obtained incriminating copies of
The Perfumed Garden
through the use of decoy letters but also raided a store on East Twelfth Street that Roth and his wife had rented for an art auction and book sale, and there the investi
gators discovered a book by Boccaccio and a series of figure drawings that the Society’s leader, John Sumner—Anthony Comstock’s successor—considered obscene. For these transgressions, Roth was sentenced to three months of hard labor at Welfare Island in New York.
After his release, unrehabilitated and certainly unrepentant, Samuel Roth resumed immediately his career in precarious publishing. Because of his arrests and the arrogance with which he defended his principles, he was now endowed with a certain cachet along the side streets of the book business, and he was often propositioned by smugglers from Europe wishing to sell him pornographic novels and erotic classics, and by collectors eager to purchase from him almost any risqué rarity. Photographers made available to him their private prints of nudes, and writers presented him with manuscripts that, for a variety of reasons, no other publisher would print.
One of the manuscripts that Roth arranged to have printed and bound had been written by an Englishman named John Hamill, and it was a pernicious biography of President Herbert Hoover that newspapers later refused either to review or advertise; and yet Roth sold close to 200,000 copies, and it became a best seller in Washington, Boston, and St. Louis. Another of Roth’s books, by Clement Wood, was entitled
The Woman Who Was Pope
, in which it was alleged that from the years 853 to 855, between the reigns of Leo IV and Benedict III, the Vatican had been ruled by a female vicar; and while this book did not become a best seller, it did add to Roth’s infamy within the New York archdiocese and the local police department.
Roth also reprinted and sold several underground editions of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, as well as an ancient Hindu sex manual known as the
Kama Sutra
, and a book entitled
Self-amusement
—“a handbook on the harms and benefits of the universal custom sometimes called self-abuse.” In addition Roth published books written by himself, including a favorable biography on the controversial writer Frank Harris, best known for his lickerish autobiographical volumes entitled
My Life and Loves
, a smuggler’s
gem that titillated or shocked nearly everyone who read it except Mrs. Frank Harris, who believed that her husband had greatly exaggerated his sexual adventures, and she was quoted as saying after his death in 1931: “If Frank did the things he says he did, he did them on the running board of our car as we drove across France together.”
While many civil libertarians in the early 1930s believed that censorship was subsiding in America, particularly after Judge Woolsey had lifted the ban on
Ulysses
, Roth was not inclined to such optimism, being influenced by the fact that his office on East Forty-sixth Street was being watched from a hotel window across the street by men standing behind a telescope. Roth also learned confidentially from a postal employee that the mail to and from his office each day was being intercepted by federal inspectors who, after steaming it open and perusing it, visited his customers and sought to convince them to testify against him. Roth wrote a letter of complaint to the Postmaster General, James A. Farley, which went unanswered, but shortly thereafter Roth did receive an indictment charging him with defiling the mail with obscenity. Among the books listed in evidence were
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and
The Perfumed Garden
.
After a trial, Roth was convicted; and in 1936 he began serving a three-year term at the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. That his plight caused no great protest or lamentation within the literary community did not surprise him, for he dismissed most other publishers as cautious men not drawn to unpopular causes. In the autobiographical writing that he did in jail, Roth recalled in particular how Alfred A. Knopf had reacted after being warned by the Society for the Suppression of Vice not to publish Radclyffe Hall’s
The Well of Loneliness:
“Knopf did what he always does under these circumstances,” Roth wrote. “He yielded his fealty to letters to fear of the censor. He destroyed the type of the book and relinquished his contract for it.”
Roth’s opinion of literary lawyers, especially after his latest conviction, also was not flattering. “Substituting one lawyer for another is not like changing doctors or jewelers,” he wrote.
“Every lawyer you talk to finds additional difficulties (however imaginary in your case), bills you for them, and, since they all work in unison, like the witches in
Macbeth
, manages to raise the price of the services of the one you finally chose to defend you.”