Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist

4. 1928–1934: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and its Bankruptcy

101 1928–1934 Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy Sitting in his Welfare Island cell in 1929 and looking up from the gutter of a shattered reputation, Roth wrote, “I am not at all sure how much I am to blame. . . . But I am ashamed of what I have done.”1 He meant, first, that the public calumny of the moral outcast was insupportable. A second source of shame was that of professional and financial failure. At the same time, his ambition and belief in his abilities as publisher and writer were intact . He continued his prose writing and publishing career, but under a series of pseudonyms: Norman Lockridge, Daniel Quilter, David Zorn, Eric Hammond , Joseph Brownell, Francis Page, Michael Swain, John Henderson, William Hodgson, and perhaps even J. A. Nocross.2 The Secretary John Saxton Sumner, the secretary for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was a “one-hundred-percenter.”3 In this he was similar to other reformers of manners and morals. Like the postal authorities, he conflated Communist ideas, scatological language, disloyal talk, psychoanalytic probing of repressed desires, and explicit discussion of sexuality as dangerous destabilizing forces. In the 1927 annual report of the Vice Society he noted that New York “is the source and supply of so much questionable published matter” that officials have a “special responsibility” to remedy the situation.4 His own efforts to fulfill that responsibility were skillful. Employing a few loyal and clever undercover agents instead of mendacious, fly-by-night petty thieves and con c h a P t e r 4 102 Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist men, as did other cities’ anti-vice societies, Sumner was consistently able to discover underground printers, mail drops and warehouses of distributors, and retailers of banned books. Therefore, federal government investigators and postal investigators often consulted him regarding suspects. No wonder Roth wrote a prospective customer for Fanny Hill that he needed a check or money order in advance, for he “could not keep such an account with safety, for you or for us.”5 Although both Sumner and Roth disliked Joyce, Sumner arrived at his opinion of Roth’s criminality from a radically different perspective than Joyce’s supporters did. Root, Weaver, Beach, Hemingway, and Pound had hyperbolically told the world that Roth was a pirate and a thief, an enemy of creativity insofar as he not only appropriated literature and art but also reproduced it in contexts that demeaned it by stressing its prurient interest, not to mention stealing its readerships and thus making the writers’ careers problematical. As the “Town Censor” (as some journalists called him), Sumner saw the publisher as inflaming a volatile human instinct that had to be not only refined by priestly teachers but also policed by secular authorities. Roth and other merchants of sex had commercialized the instinct, assuming a role authorities had deplored for centuries. The outsider middleman had dared compete, without knowing or caring, with responsible lawgivers, who recognized degeneracy when they saw it. What previously had been the province of sacred regulation was on display in “vulgar,” “cheap” contexts. “A newly created class of addicts” had sprung up, ravenous for “thrills,” Sumner was convinced.6 There was something, on the other hand, that Sumner shared with Joyce and his supporters. The institutions of both modernism and vice suppression saw themselves as upholding, respectively, artistic and moral integrity against barbarism. They had spent a long time training themselves for this struggle. To point out that Joyce was anxious to make money from an American edition of Ulysses, or Sumner to maintain his society’s preeminence in the face of declining contributions, was considered the irreverent mudslinging of philistines . Without moral indignation and resentment, it would be difficult—for either the anti-vice societies or reputable modernist writers and their publishers —to finger a scapegoat. For Roth, Sumner seemed the most dangerous shard in a kaleidoscope of enemies, all the more imposing because he spoke for many, and all New York knew of him. To Sumner, established publishers, other writers including Joyce, and editors who admired European modernism were just as contemptible as Roth. However, this brought no comfort to the publisher. In fact, it isolated Roth further, because the enemies of his enemy could never be his 103 1928–1934 friends. Most modernist literati, like Joyce, were glad to see him go to prison. In Finnegans Wake...