The people who published modernist writers were either magnanimous cultural gatekeepers with eccentric tastes or gamblers willing to pursue younger authors and risqué manuscripts. Horace Liveright was a gambler. Though Ulysses was too risky for him, Liveright published several daring books, including Aphrodite, George Moore’s A Story-Teller’s Holiday and D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. He exemplified the publishing industry’s changes after the war. He was a high school dropout with a drinking problem, but he was brilliant and adventurous and he spotted talent early. Liveright began publishing Ezra Pound in 1920, and he brought out the first books of Hemingway, Faulkner and Dorothy Parker. Unlike everyone else, he advertised heavily, and his ads had testimonials from Hollywood stars and fonts that blared like billboards.
In the 1920s, publishing was close to the center of the nation’s emerging celebrity culture, and Liveright had a hand in putting it there. He invented the book-launch party. Well-known authors could expect to draw crowds, and Boni & Liveright authors—like grumpy Theodore Dreiser and wild man Eugene O’Neill—blended seamlessly in an office that buzzed with actresses, showmen and bootleggers. The office’s cocktail parties started in the early afternoon. Tommy Smith, the editor-in-chief, knew everyone in town—actors, philanthropists and brothel madams. He would mix Pernod with eye-watering bootleg liquor so strong that the rim of sugar on the glass would barely help you choke it down. Arthur Pell, the accountant, gave Horace Liveright false account statements and hoped that dire numbers would curb his lavish expenditures. Boni & Liveright was a company without brakes.
The vice president was twenty-four years old. Bennett Cerf was a wide-eyed newcomer, and the excitement of Boni & Liveright was exactly what he had hoped to find in the publishing world. After graduating from Columbia in 1919, he became a stockbroker on Wall Street, but he always wanted to be in publishing, and when a college friend, Richard Simon, left Boni & Liveright to start his own publishing house with Max Schuster, Simon claimed he could get Cerf’s foot in the door.
Liveright didn’t want Bennett Cerf for his business experience. He wanted him for his money. Cerf’s mother, an heir to a tobacco fortune, died when he was sixteen and left him $125,000. On top of that, Cerf had made a small fortune speculating in the stock market, and Liveright needed more capital. The company wasn’t keeping up with its royalty payments, and Liveright was financing a Broadway play he was producing (one of his bad gambles). When he met Cerf in 1923, he told the young man there was room for rapid advancement. “If you’d like to start with style, you could put a little money into the business.” For a $25,000 loan, Bennett Cerf began his publishing career as the stylish vice president of Boni & Liveright.
To Cerf, Boni & Liveright meant the Modern Library, the imprint he associated with books like Moby-Dick and The Scarlet Letter that he had discovered in college. The Modern Library was Albert Boni’s idea. He and Liveright wanted to put together an inexpensive series by cutting the costs of publication rights, and Boni’s solution was to merge copyright-free classics with second-run editions of quality books whose sales had flagged and whose rights could be acquired for a bargain. Among the first twelve Modern Library books in 1917 (which included works by Rudyard Kipling, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson), only four of the writers were living, and most of the titles had no American copyright. They looked for titles with the potential to sell in small, steady numbers for years. As it turned out, there were plenty. After the war, their retail prices soared from sixty to ninety-five cents per copy, and yet the Modern Library remained one of readers’ most economical options. By the mid-1920s, the series was the backbone of Boni & Liveright’s profits.
When Cerf started his new job, Liveright was ignoring the Modern Library to focus on potential best sellers written by headline-producing authors. Zane Grey, Peter Kyne and Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson—you couldn’t beat authors like that. The series became less interesting over time. When Liveright halfheartedly tried to acquire Joyce’s Portrait after refusing to publish Ulysses, John Quinn balked. A Portrait was too modern. Being on the Modern Library’s list, Quinn said, was a sign of a writer’s decay, “a declension into the sunset preceding the dark night of literary extinction.” Liveright was insulted. He reminded Quinn that the Modern Library included some outstanding contemporary authors: Max Beerbohm, Gustav Frenssen, Andreas Latzko and Arthur Schnitzler. That list made John Quinn’s point exactly.
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BENNETT CERF BECAME the imprint’s de facto editor, and it wasn’t long before he began thinking about owning it. He had his chance sooner than he expected. In May 1925, Cerf booked a trip to London and Paris for his twenty-sixth birthday. It was, as he wrote in his diary, “a trip I’ve dreamed of for years.” Before he left, Horace Liveright met Cerf at a midtown speakeasy. Liveright had a few drinks beforehand, and he was nervously clenching his scotch. As Cerf recalled it, Liveright’s father-in-law was breathing down his neck because he owed him portion of the seed money for the publishing house. Liveright had a few mistresses he liked to pamper, and he was apparently worried about what a disgruntled father-in-law might use as blackmail. “Oh, how I’d like to pay him off and get rid of him.”
“One very easy way to pay him off,” Cerf said, “is to sell me the Modern Library.” Cerf expected Liveright to laugh and continue griping, but instead he asked, “What will you give me for it?” When the other executives found out that Liveright had made a deal to sell their primary source of steady income while half drunk at a speakeasy, they were livid. Liveright insisted that he was selling the list at its peak (it sold 275,000 copies in 1925), and Cerf had to fight an entire committee to keep his deal alive and sign the contract before his ship disembarked at one in the morning. In the end, Liveright prevailed, and the Modern Library belonged to Bennett Cerf.
They agreed on two hundred thousand dollars, the highest price ever paid for a reprint series. The only problem was that Cerf didn’t have the money, and the contract required him to have it in three weeks, as soon as he returned from his trip. With time running out before his departure, Cerf called up a Columbia friend, Donald Klopfer, who hated working at his father’s diamond-cutting business. Cerf offered to put up the remainder of his inheritance if Donald could find the other half of Liveright’s price.
“Where the hell am I going to get a hundred thousand dollars?”
“That’s your problem,” Cerf said, “but it’s got to be in cash.”
—
BENNETT CERF AND DONALD KLOPFER set up an office of six people in a loft building on Forty-fifth Street. Their desks faced each other, and they shared a secretary, as they would for years to come. Where Cerf was a charismatic deal maker, Klopfer was fastidious and patient—Cerf thought of him as “one of the nicest men that ever lived.” They worked on the Modern Library nonstop for two years, personally visiting booksellers along the eastern seaboard, finding new buyers, redesigning the covers, the bindings, the colophon, everything. They added a new title to their catalog every month, including works by Ibsen and Joyce in 1926. While the catalog was more adventurous, the Modern Library as a whole became substantially older. The list doubled in ten years because it was growing in both directions.
But Cerf and Klopfer wanted more than backlist titles. They wanted a publishing house that would acquire new manuscripts just like Boni & Liveright. They were kicking around a modest version of their idea in front of Rockwell Kent, a celebrated commercial artist, when Cerf suddenly said he had a name for it. “We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random. Let’s call it Random House.”
Kent loved the name, and he drew the humble house colophon that would eventually adorn millions of books all over the world. In its first years, Random House tapped into the burgeoning market for expensive limited editions by reprinting deluxe versions of Modern Library books. Melville’s Moby-Dick and Voltaire’s Candide could be illustrated, printed on high-quality paper, expensively bound, numbered in lots of a thousand and signed by the translator or a well-known illustrator like Kent. The luxury editions would sell to book collectors at a dramatic markup—Sylvia Beach’s strategy for the first edition of Ulysses became a new business model. What began as a way for dirty books to elude the police was, during the boom years of Wall Street, a mainstay of the publishing industry.
By 1929, Random House had issued dozens of deluxe limited editions. Their 1929 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sold out immediately at one hundred dollars per copy. Yet even then, Cerf and Klopfer were unaware of how advantageous their position was. When the stock market crashed, the Modern Library catalog of ninety-five-cent classics not only carried Random House through the Depression, it helped them increase their market share. They sold a million books in 1930 (four times their first year’s sales) and turned a profit every year. The company that Cerf and Klopfer bought for two hundred thousand dollars was sold in 1965 for forty million.
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THE MODERN LIBRARY dominated the market before the paperback revolution in the 1950s because it thrived on making prestige accessible. Cerf advertised it as “a collection of the most significant, interesting and thought-provoking books in modern literature.” The pitch was tailored to the country’s changing readership. College enrollment in the United States doubled every decade from 1890 to 1930, and students typically bought the inexpensive but durable Modern Library editions for their classes. But it wasn’t just the number of college students. It was the way they read. When Cerf was at Columbia, the Great Books movement was incubating in the university’s English department. Professors like John Erskine envisioned a two-year survey of the Western canon that, when it was instituted in 1920, the university described as a “Reading of Masterpieces of literature in poetry, history, philosophy and science.” The reading list included works from Homer, Plato, Dante and Shakespeare. This sounds like typical fare, but having biology students read masterpieces outside of literature’s disciplinary constraints (and there were plenty) was not something universities generally did before 1920.
Erskine’s idea was to “treat the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other masterpieces as though they were recent publications”—they transcended centuries and bore directly upon contemporary lives. Masterpieces showed readers that the chaos of modern life was a part of the larger pattern of human civilization. The Great Books movement was, in other words, a syllabized version of Ulysses. Both within and beyond universities, people began thinking that certain books illuminated eternal features of the human condition. They didn’t demand expertise—one didn’t need to speak classical Greek or read all of Plato to benefit from The Republic—all they demanded was, as Erskine put it, “a comfortable chair and a good light.” Bennett Cerf absorbed the ethos of reading great books as contemporary texts during his college years, and he was inspired by a freshman course on contemporary British authors (Rudyard Kipling, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells), which extended the great literary continuum to the present. The Modern Library catalog was, to some extent, an homage to Cerf’s undergraduate education.
And so much the better. For the Modern Library provided a ready-made curriculum for a generation of upwardly mobile people who were either nostalgic for their college years or who wanted the cultivation that college offered—people like Bennett Cerf and Horace Liveright themselves. The Modern Library offered commodified prestige with the illusion of self-reliance. Readers could have the benefits of institutional culture without the institutions. They could rise above the masses by purchasing a dozen inexpensive books. Cerf changed the Modern Library’s colophon from a cowled monk working at his desk to a lithe body leaping in the air with a torch held high. Reading classics wasn’t about scholarship. It was about freedom and the promise that the individual’s light could illuminate the world.
The prestige of reading great books appealed to a postwar population that was anxious about the future of Western civilization and liable to think of itself as the bearer of that civilization. American readers wanted to imagine contemporary American writers entering the Western canon just as the country was emerging onto the world stage. The Modern Library was where William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker and Sherwood Anderson rubbed shoulders with Aeschylus, Milton and Cervantes. The catalog managed to make literature both cosmopolitan and patriotic.
None of this was planned. The Modern Library had begun as a gimmick. In 1915, Albert Boni sent a tiny copy of Romeo and Juliet bound in imitation leather to Whitman’s Chocolates and suggested they include the tragic love story in each of their boxes. Whitman’s placed an order for fifteen thousand copies. Tiny books were a novelty item, and when Boni realized he could sell the books without the chocolate he began retailing his Little Leather Library at Woolworth’s for twenty-five cents (a set of thirty cost $2.98). He went into business with Liveright in 1917, and together they expanded the series, augmented the format, raised the price and began calling it the Modern Library. By 1930, the series was selling over a million books a year.
Bennett Cerf saw Boni’s innovation through the prism of a Great Books program. What united the list wasn’t the low cost of acquiring publishing rights. It was the books’ shared modern spirit. “Most of the books have been written in the past thirty years,” Cerf’s catalog claimed, and the older ones “are so essentially modern, that the publishers feel they are properly embraced in the scope and aim of the series.” Old or new, their books were “modern classics.”
The concept was brilliant. Bennett Cerf used the word modern to evoke a way of thinking, a continuity with a global tradition. A reader could buy a modern classic decades after it was originally published, and it would still be up-to-date—it was always a good time to buy. Modernism’s dicta—that writers respond to one another across nations and centuries, that artists renew ancient forms, that classics are being written as we speak—were folded into the modern classics brand. Bennett Cerf turned modernism into a marketing strategy. Pound, Joyce and Eliot didn’t want to acquiesce to the mass market, but Bennett Cerf found ways to make the market acquiesce to them.
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WHAT WAS SO STRANGE about publishing at the time was that the passage between prestige and prison was so narrow. Alfred Knopf faced criminal charges in court before he became more careful. Liveright and Huebsch were explicitly trying to avoid the disturbing prospect of prison when they refused to publish Ulysses. In New York, the penitentiary was on Welfare Island (formerly Blackwell’s Island) with the Smallpox Hospital and a psychiatric institution. The corridors were designed to make prisoners feel powerless. Iron bars enclosing the catwalks along the cellblock tiers drew the prisoner’s eye upward to a ceiling as distant as the nave of a cathedral. The cell doors had crosshatched metal slats and locks the size of mailboxes. In 1928 a man named Samuel Roth sat in one of those cells and plotted ways to continue building his publishing empire.
Roth shoveled coal in the South Prison House Gang, and in his unpublished memoirs he recalled how the other men laughed when they heard he was a publisher.
“You came here in a wagon, didn’t you?”
“Is there any other way to get here?”
“You really don’t know! You should’ve seen the way Mae West came here last year. You must be a very small publisher.”
By anyone’s estimate, Samuel Roth was the biggest literary pirate of the 1920s. He produced and distributed unauthorized editions of illegal and semilegal books, which, at the time, was a highly competitive business. He trafficked mostly in racy titles from Europe—School Life in Paris, Only a Boy, The Russian Princess. He printed them on cheap paper with cheaper bindings and sold them at inflated black market prices. When times were good (and the 1920s were very good) his system of pseudonyms and underground presses made him more than seven hundred dollars a week in Chicago alone. And it wasn’t just smut. Samuel Roth ripped off everyone—George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley and André Gide, to name a few. Roth was a pirate with excellent taste. He found his niche in the publishing world by combining his love for cutting-edge modernist literature and salacious pulp. When he stole a fragment of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes he chose it at least partly for the appeal of Eliot’s working title, Wanna Go Home, Baby?
Roth’s biggest successes were counterfeit versions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, and he read Joyce eagerly in the pages of The Little Review. He thought of Dubliners as an earnest character study and A Portrait as bizarre and unfinished with flashes of brilliance. But in Ulysses he saw, as he put it later, “a portrait of the metamorphoses of all men in one, of all nations in one, of all cities in one, and of all days in one Dublin day.” He admired Joyce’s novel so much he decided to steal it.
The best part about literary piracy was that in many cases it wasn’t illegal. An English-language book didn’t have American copyright protection unless it was printed on plates manufactured in the United States. All Roth needed to do was reprint British and European titles that hadn’t yet found American publishers. Roth preferred to work in legal gray areas. Sometimes he obtained the author’s permission to reprint their work, and on a few occasions he paid them nominal sums. But authorization didn’t make the dirty books any less dirty, and he served time in at least five different prisons over twenty-five years.
Roth sold his first pornographic book in 1919. He opened up a small bookshop on Eighth Street called the New York Poetry Book Shop, which was a large room in an apartment building’s basement with a window peeking out just above street level. Roth stayed open until midnight, and he never advertised. His bookshop was unremarkable for Greenwich Village, but with a few dozen reliable patrons, he figured he could eke out a living doing what he loved. He scoured Manhattan for hidden gems and secondhand books to build his inventory, and he eventually discovered a shop in a Park Avenue basement run by a lanky old man who was a connoisseur of contemporary poetry and pornography. Roth visited the old man’s shop regularly until he found it padlocked. The old bookseller was serving ninety days on Welfare Island for selling a copy of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill to an undercover agent, so Roth sent him two dollars a week for the duration of his sentence.
When the old man was released, he left the country and repaid Roth’s generosity with a package from Paris containing several illicit books bound in paper with false titles on the covers. Roth got scared and stuffed them in a bookcase behind expensive first editions that no one ever ventured to purchase. He remained anxious about the stash until an editor on Christopher Street offered him five dollars for each one. When the editor said he’d pay the same price for similar books, Roth began asking the old man for more. After a few transactions, he made $130. This was how selling books could make a man rich.
When peddling armloads of banned books wasn’t enough, Samuel Roth began printing them himself. He wanted to be a major presence in the publishing world, and he saw an opening in the risqué material that American publishers wouldn’t touch—an entire market wasn’t being served. But because he didn’t have enough capital to break into the book industry, he began casting about for alternatives. Two business models were doing well at the time: deluxe limited editions of books that couldn’t circulate openly and glossy magazines like Vogue, Smart Set and Vanity Fair. Roth decided to combine them. In the mid-1920s, he started a magazine called Two Worlds Quarterly, which spawned Two Worlds Monthly and Casanova Jr’s Tales.
They were limited-edition magazines sent to subscribers via railroad express instead of the Post Office. Works by Lewis Carroll, Boccaccio and Chekhov appeared alongside tepid erotica. Evelyn Waugh woodcuts shared space with cartoonish drawings of buxom nudes beset by goblins or draped over the giant craniums of warlocks. Issues of some of Roth’s magazines cost three to five dollars—more than the typical newsstand price of twenty-five or fifty cents but less than the ten to twelve dollars that Knopf and Liveright charged for private editions of Painted Veils or A Story-Teller’s Holiday. Roth found a new price point. To bolster his empire, he launched his own glossy magazine complete with photographs and a fashionable Art Deco cover. He called it Beau, and it was the nation’s first men’s magazine.
Roth thought Beau would be his entrée into the legitimate publishing world, but it was expensive to produce, and he needed money to give it time to consolidate its position on the newsstands. He ran full-page ads in Two Worlds to find investors: “Mr. Roth Is Building the Most Powerful Magazine Group in America.” When investors were not persuaded, Roth decided to peddle a reprint edition of Cheikh Nefzaoui’s The Perfumed Garden, which described 237 positions of “the sweet recreation,” as the translator phrased it. Roth knew he could find a thousand readers willing to pay thirty dollars a copy, and that would finance Beau for a year.
In 1927 two Post Office inspectors arrested Roth just days after he mailed his advertisements for The Perfumed Garden. Because it was his first offense, the judge fined him five hundred dollars and gave him two years’ probation, but Roth’s biggest problem was that he was now an entry in John Sumner’s records. Anthony Comstock had taught Sumner about the economy of vice hunting: finding a smut peddler was a costly investment, but once found, he would yield multiple arrests. Four months after Roth’s trial, Sumner walked into his bookshop with three detectives and a search warrant. The officers found a packet of obscene drawings they had been looking for and had no trouble uncovering indecent books when they searched the premises.
In court, Roth testified that the drawings had been planted by one of Sumner’s men. The assistant DA needed to ask just one question: hadn’t the defendant already pleaded guilty for advertising The Perfumed Garden? When Samuel Roth admitted he had, he was treated as a repeat offender violating federal probation. And that’s when he was sentenced to three months in the prison workhouse on Welfare Island. By the end of 1928 what had seemed like a nascent publishing empire had evaporated. For by the time he was hauled off to Welfare Island, Samuel Roth was also the object of an unprecedented international protest.
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ROTH HAD BEEN THINKING about Ulysses since the Little Review trial in 1921, and in 1922 he wrote a letter to Joyce about his plans for Two Worlds. “Among other things, we shall try to publish a novel complete in every issue,” Roth wrote. He wanted to begin Two Worlds with one of Joyce’s novels (hopefully Ulysses, though he didn’t say it) and promised Joyce one hundred dollars and 15 percent of the titanic issue’s sales.
Roth designed extravagant letterhead stationery with a descriptive header of his magazine’s goal: to “serve established writers as the organ of their opinion and as a refuge from their persecutor.” The complete description spilled down the sides of the page and managed to inflate Roth’s already grand ambitions: “Every issue will contain a complete novel, a play, a short story, verse, and reviews of the books and plays of the period.” Miss Weaver politely declined the offer on Joyce’s behalf. She joked to Sylvia Beach that he must have been planning to use a font “the size of a needle’s head.”
But Roth wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wrote to Ezra Pound in June 1922 both to acquire the rights to Ulysses (as Joyce’s Little Review editor) and to secure Pound himself as a contributor. While Joyce virtually ignored Roth, Pound burst forth with a list of advice for the Two Worlds editor. He had some suitable poems, translations and an article for the magazine, and he suggested not only a potential art editor but also the artists Two Worlds should feature in the first five issues.
Little did Pound know, he was entering Roth’s twilight world in which suggestions became verbal contracts. Writers offering advice found themselves listed as “contributing editors” of a magazine they had never seen. When Pound told Roth that he approved of any scheme that could circumvent the Comstock Act, Roth took this as permission to publish Joyce’s work in full. To make his claim marginally more legitimate, Roth gave a check and four promissory notes totaling one thousand dollars to a lawyer and instructed him to hold them until Joyce officially gave Two Worlds permission to publish Ulysses. The eight hundred dollars in notes could be redeemed, cashed, Roth said, just as soon as he had enough money in his account. In 1925, four years after his first flash of inspiration, Roth published the first issue of Two Worlds. Ezra Pound threatened to sue when he saw his name on the cover, at which point Roth offered to pay him fifty dollars per issue. He would publish his poems or one of his characteristic screeds. “Make it as long as you like. Every word shall be held precious.”
In July 1926, Roth started printing episodes of Ulysses—and he began cutting the offensive passages. He omitted references to urination, masturbation and gonorrhea. He changed “the grey sunken cunt of the world” to “the grey sunken crater.” When a newspaper man shouts out, “He can kiss my royal Irish arse,” Two Worlds politely substituted, “my royal Irish aunt.” Roth did his best to appease the vice societies. Like so many other publishers before him, he tried to persuade John Sumner about his earnest intentions. He wanted to use the illicit aura of Ulysses to sell magazines, but he didn’t want to go to jail.
His legal problems began to mount, however, when Hemingway told Sylvia Beach the details of Roth’s piracy. One night in 1926, Roth met with Hemingway at a New York café while he was in town trying to sell a few short stories. Hemingway’s rare silence (he showed up with a swollen jaw) gave Roth the chance to brag. Two Worlds had eight thousand subscribers, he said, and the backbone of the publication was James Joyce. Roth figured Joyce’s name could lower Hemingway’s price, but they never reached an agreement (Roth printed his short stories anyway).
At some point, the rumored number of Two Worlds subscribers went as high as fifty thousand, which suggested tens of thousands of dollars in lost profits, and yet Shakespeare and Company couldn’t sue Roth for copyright violations, which came as a surprise. John Quinn told everyone that, as disastrous as The Little Review was, it had secured the American copyright over the portions of Ulysses printed in New York. Quinn was wrong in at least two different ways. Judges might simply refuse to enforce the copyright of obscene works, and even if a judge enforced copyright for The Little Review, that protection wouldn’t extend to the serialized Ulysses episodes because individual portions of a magazine as a whole did. Beyond this, Ulysses had no copyright protection in 1926 because U.S. law required any English-language book to be printed on American-manufactured plates within (at most) six months of the initial publication. Since there was no American edition, Ulysses had fallen into the public domain while its reviews were still hitting the newstands. Samuel Roth could reprint, bowdlerize, alter and mutilate all he wished. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, nobody owned Ulysses.
Quinn was wrong about copyright, but he was right about literary pirates: legal action against them was futile. Pound told Joyce that he could either denounce Roth in print or “organize a gang of gunmen to scare Roth out of his pants. I don’t imagine anything but physical terror works in a case of this sort (with a strong pull of avarice, bidding him to be BOLD).” Because Sylvia Beach couldn’t sue for copyright violations (and because gunmen were not exactly her style), she had to be creative. After threatening a $500,000 lawsuit, she had the New York Supreme Court issue an injunction preventing Roth from using the name James Joyce in any of his ads or publications.
But that wasn’t enough. Beach asked two of her friends (a novelist and a lawyer) to write up a formal protest against Roth’s unauthorized version of Ulysses. If she couldn’t stop the piracy through legal channels, she would ostracize Samuel Roth from the world of letters. Beach thought a public protest would ensure that no author gave him material, that no editor provided him advertising space and that no ethical book buyer patronized publishers who stole from the writers they loved. The protest declared that Samuel Roth was stealing James Joyce’s property in the United States while publishing a bowdlerized and corrupted version of the text. He was both a thief and a butcher.
Shame was the protest’s only weapon, and Beach wanted it to be as powerful as possible. She tracked down the addresses of writers all over Europe and mailed each of them a personal letter asking them to support the protest with their signature. The response was overwhelming. Many of the writers were victims of piracy themselves, and no one had launched a concerted international protest against the outright theft of writers’ work. Beach gathered 167 signatures, a compendium of Europe’s prominent writers. Yeats, Woolf and Hemingway. Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, Luigi Pirandello, Mina Loy, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Jules Romains, W. Somerset Maugham. Even George Bernard Shaw agreed to sign. Joyce was especially pleased to see the signature of Albert Einstein. Beach sent the signed protest to nine hundred publications in the United States alone.
When the protest hit the papers in February 1927 (Beach made sure the first notices were published on Joyce’s birthday), letters of support poured into Shakespeare and Company. Many of them were seething with anger. “The thought of such an outrageous business makes me ill,” one fan wrote. “I cannot express my detestation of these people. . . . What the world needs today is a new poison, something to destroy the virus that has made these weaklings strong but oh how malignant!” Two Worlds subscribers were caught off guard. “If you are what I consider morally guilty of pirating Ulysses,” one subscriber wrote, “so far as I should care you might suffer hanging in a noose.” Roth tried to fight back in the press, but it was too late. Post Office inspectors, acting in what Roth called “a forceful advisory capacity,” made sure that the express companies wouldn’t touch his publications. The sales of Two Worlds, Beau and Casanova Jr’s Tales plummeted, and booksellers removed them from the stands.
One gets the sense that with a bit more compunction and a bit less savvy, Samuel Roth could have spent the late 1920s developing his idiosyncratic mix of high modernism and sexploitation (a sort of arched middlebrow) instead of languishing in a prison cell ten bricks wide and fourteen and a half bricks long. His toilet was a white bucket sitting on a page of The New York Times. Roth had to explain his absence to his nine- and ten-year-old children. “My lovely and valiant babies,” he wrote. “I am compelled, by mysterious reasons of state, to stay away from home a little longer.” He wrote to his son that faithfulness to the best books was the only thing he would need in life: “learn to love them, read them to yourself over and over again, so that not only the stories but the paragraphs, sentences and even words become familiar to you.”
The money could not have made piracy worth what he lost. Though there were moments of prosperity, the business was risky and erratic. Roth wanted an empire for reasons that went deeper than money. In 1913, when he was nineteen years old, Roth had spent his days reading in the New York Public Library and his nights sleeping in parks or tenement alleyways. At Columbia, he edited a poetry magazine called The Lyric and met a girl named Anna during the war. She lived with her family in Brooklyn, and Roth would go to her house at night, climb up to her room on the second floor and sit down beside her as she lay in bed. He read her Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. Sometimes he read his own poetry. Eventually, Anna told him that she had reservations about his four-dollar-a-week life. Roth remembered how she said that things could have been different if he had made forty dollars a week. She ended up marrying a dentist who made eighty dollars a week.
Roth ensconced himself in poetry’s higher calling and saved what little money he had to publish the thin book of poems that Anna had rejected for dentistry. He called it First Offering. Since poetry would never pay the bills, selling books became the only thing that made him happy. Prominent writers and publishers visited Roth’s bookshop, and he could claim to be acquainted with Max Eastman, Ben Huebsch, Thomas Seltzer and Mina Loy. Roth wasn’t famous in New York’s literary circles, but he had a presence. John Quinn heard of him as a “nut poet” and figured he was “either a fool or a wild man.” Roth sent poetry and nonfiction manuscripts to Harcourt, Dutton and other reputable publishers, all of whom sent rejection letters. In 1921, Leonard Woolf wrote to inform Mr. Roth, regretfully, that Hogarth Press’s publication list was already too full to accept additional contributions.
If only he knew that the Woolfs had also rejected Ulysses. Around the time he was trying to get published—and two days before the Little Review trial began—Roth wrote Joyce a fan letter. “Of all the writers in Europe today you have made the most intimate appeal to me.” Before sending the letter off, he jotted down a belated question: “Why is not ULYSSES in book form yet?”
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A READER COULD HAVE been proud to own a copy of Ulysses in 1929. The book’s front matter indicated that it was the 1927 Shakespeare and Company printing. This was the ninth printing of Joyce’s book, and it was still hard to come by. Most of the people who had a copy had gone to Paris to get it, but this one was behind the counter or hidden deep in the back room of a trusted bookstore like the Gotham Bookmart. It cost about ten dollars, more expensive than any other item on the average reader’s shelf, but a bargain nonetheless. It had the famous solid blue cover, and it said DIJON.—DARANTIERE at the bottom of the last page, just where it should be.
But if you knew what to look for, you could tell something was wrong. The blue cover was just a shade darker than it should have been. The font seemed right, but the italicized words were noticeably different from Sylvia Beach’s copies. The paper was smoother and slightly heavier. The margins were wider. It was about as thick as a Paris copy, but just a bit too narrow and long. The cover had no fold-overs for the bookbinder to insert the hardcover boards, and the binding looked like it would fall apart after one complete reading. The page listing James Joyce’s other works was missing, and the page that noted his other publishers had the first of many typos: “Jonthan Cape.” And then there was the spine: the author and title were printed clearly on the Shakespeare and Company edition, but this spine was blank.
Samuel Roth was no longer bothering with magazines. When he emerged from his first stint in prison in 1929, he entered the business of pirating books, and his counterfeit version of the 1927 printing of Ulysses wasn’t bad. Roth oversaw the details and paid the Loewinger Brothers on Seventeenth Street to reset the type, which meant that if anyone’s edition of Ulysses was going to have copyright in the United States, it would be his—it was the perfect revenge against “Sylvia Bitch,” as he began calling her.
Prison and literary ostracism darkened Roth’s perspective. Publishers seemed to be nothing but a syndicate of unscrupulous capitalists who didn’t give a shit about literature. He, on the other hand, was brave. Where profiteers like Knopf and Liveright folded under the pressure of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Roth saw himself as an unstoppable outlaw for artistic expression. No one else had the nerve to present books like Ulysses to the American public.
In the wake of his Welfare Island sentence and Sylvia Beach’s protest, Roth took his business off the street, out of the press and far from any U.S. Post Office. He separated his business office from the warehouse holding his illegal inventory. His “publishing house” changed names and printers frequently, and he moved his family at a moment’s notice. Selling pirated books in bulk meant that the bookshops assumed most of the risk, sweating each individual sale long after he disappeared—if he ever appeared at all. Enterprising bookleggers hired salesmen to walk door to door with briefcases or drive around to bookstores in a plain truck. The driver would walk into a shop, ask how many copies of Aphrodite or Married Love they wanted, rummage through the back of the truck and hand them over for half the retail price (cash only). The next time the truck came around, the driver would be different.
Samuel Roth had become especially elusive after he was released from prison, so when the NYSSV wanted to nab him again, they got to him through his brother. In October 1929, Max Roth was going door to door on lower Broadway with a briefcase packed with samples of obscene books, and he had the misfortune of trying to sell his wares to one of Sumner’s vice society allies. When Max returned to the man’s office at an appointed time the following afternoon, John Sumner, a police officer and a Post Office inspector were pretending to work in the adjacent office, and they casually ambled over in the middle of Max’s sales pitch. Larry, the officer, purchased Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Fanny Hill for sixty dollars, and as soon as money changed hands Max was promptly arrested. When they discovered that he was Samuel Roth’s brother, the trail led to the Golden Hind Press on Fifth Avenue, where the vice hunters caught Samuel and one of his salesmen with three hundred dirty books.
But that wasn’t all. Max happened to be carrying a large set of keys, and after Sumner found a lease in his name, they went to the Fifth Avenue address listed on the document and unlocked the door. It was a warehouse stocked with advertising materials, facilities for packaging and shipping inventory across the country and thousands of books—mostly Lady Chatterley’s Lover and pirated copies of Ulysses. Because they didn’t have a search warrant, a police officer stood guard at the warehouse overnight to secure the evidence.
Max Roth was sentenced to a prison term of six months to three years for his involvement in the nationwide Joyce piracy, and Samuel was back in jail less than a year after he left. When he was released six months later, a detective was waiting at the prison gate with another warrant for his arrest. Roth was extradited to Pennsylvania, where he was convicted for selling Ulysses yet again. After serving six months for Joyce’s book in New York, he served three more in Philadelphia. And even then he didn’t stop.
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SAMUEL ROTH WAS modernism’s doppelgänger. Like Margaret Anderson, he wanted a daring magazine devoted to art’s supremacy. He insisted it was the artist’s “right to have his creations printed and judged by the standards of literature alone and by none other.” Like Ezra Pound, he wanted to bring far-flung writers together—the Two Worlds title referred to the connectedness of the Old World and the New.
And Roth was more than a bit like Bennett Cerf. Both were Columbia classmates in 1916, and neither was a traditional student. Roth had a one-year scholarship and never graduated. Cerf never received a high school degree but edged his way into the College from the School of Journalism, which didn’t require the foreign language credits he didn’t have. Both men left Columbia with an insider’s respect for institutional culture and an outsider’s desire to transform it, and they both claimed to be democratizing literature. Roth duplicated Cerf’s Modern Library pitch when he insisted his magazines were “the only vehicle for the expression of the many artists who would otherwise reach only a very limited public.”
And yet while the pirate was devoted to his wife and children, the esteemed publisher had slightly less regard for matrimony. For years, Bennett Cerf scheduled trysts in his little black books as “Deals”—“Deal at Midnight” (April 22), “Deal Maria” (December 8), “deal with Marian” (May 13). He had deals on April 29 and 30, May 5, 6, 13, 14, 28 and June 4. These were all weekends. He sent telegrams to various women—Rosamond (“you heavenly creature”), Francine (“Overwhelmed by your pulchritude Please rush rear view”), Marie (“Adoring and sex starved residents demand date of your return”). There were several telegrams to a woman named Marian. “Missing you darling” and “Cant wait” and “Thinking of you and missing you Love Bennett.” Marian was Marian Klopfer, Donald Klopfer’s wife.
Roth was not as sordid as that. He was candid with his desires. He wanted to be a staunch individualist, a literary crusader, and he wanted, like Joyce, to be loved. Roth wanted the prestige of James Joyce and Ezra Pound. He wanted their names listed beneath his own as the editor of Two Worlds. In a way, he did it for the letterhead. Unlike others craving prestige, however, Roth was willing to steal for it. Margaret Anderson drew inspiration from the dozens of contributors she published. Pound and Eliot recycled old poetry to make it new. Joyce accepted patronage, asked for favors and money and incorporated the work of scores of other writers to create his novels. And yet they all had a keen understanding of the debts they owed to others, both living and dead. Roth, on the other hand, thought individualism meant that everything permanent and universal belonged to him and that a cultural rebellion was an opportunity to build an empire. As much as he admired Joyce, he was a poor student of Ulysses.