Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs: The Uncensored Life of Gershon Legman by Susan G. Davis (review)

The name "G. Legman" may ring a bell with collectors of arcane erotica, historians of the dirty joke, and experts in origami, but to most people beyond the world of folklore scholars, the name will, no doubt, mean little. Yet this is the man who single-handedly invented the vibrating dildo, brought origami to the West, came up with the slogan "Make Love Not War," collected penis measurements for the Kinsey Report, and fathered 21 children.

Or so he claimed. Legman's aptitude for hyperbole, according to those who knew him, was just one of his many exasperating qualities. Besides, exaggeration was unnecessary. Gershon Legman, folklorist, bibliographer, historian, taxonomist, social critic, and connoisseur of oral erotica, left an imposing legacy, including Love and Death: A Study in Censorship (1949), The Limerick (1953), The Horn Book: Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (1964), The Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1968), and its sequel No Laughing Matter (1975). Why, then, does this magisterial figure remain so obscure? The reasons, as Susan Davis' deeply researched biography suggests, are many.

Born into a Polish immigrant family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Gershon Legman (1917–1999) was sent to rabbinical school in New York by his overbearing father, "that rare thing, a Jewish prude" (p. 29). Young Legman had an aptitude for textual exegesis but despised religion and, by the mid-1930s, had left the temple to explore the gutter. Fascinated by street life, he moved in with an uncle who was a vaudeville actor, which brought him into contact with strippers, blue comedians, and burlesque dancers. But his main interest was always the text, and eventually he found work as an errand boy and "literary factotum" for Jacob Brussel, a "veteran antiquarian bookseller and reprint publisher" for whom Legman did everything from fetching sandwiches, typesetting, proofreading and editing, to "miserable hack jobs," mainly erotica (p. 41).

Over the next 10 years, like a New York version of Zelig, Legman was everywhere, although always on the periphery. He knew everyone. He hung out in the East Village with hipsters like John Clellon Holmes and Jay Landesman. He had Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac over for dinner. He edited Neurotica, the short-lived journal of the Beats. He helped Henry Miller find a US publisher. He researched erotica for Alfred Kinsey, working as his book scout in New York. He knew—or at least corresponded with—H. L. Mencken, William Carlos Williams, Havelock Ellis, Jane Jacobs, Marshall McLuhan, Larry McMurtry, Alex Comfort, Alan Lomax, Leslie Fiedler, Anatole Broyard, Leonard Bernstein, Karl Menninger, and Zora Neale Hurston. He made love to Anaïs Nin.

Legman's writing brought little recompense; royalty payments, even for his major works, were few and far between. He never had a salaried job; he received no stipends, no grants, no advances. Books meant more to him than food. He was poor his whole life, often desperately so, sometimes living on offal, sometimes on rice and tomatoes. After falling foul of the U.S. Post Office censors, he and his first wife, Beverly Keith, purchased a small stone edifice outside Opio, a small village in southern France. This is where Legman spent the rest of his life, first with Beverly, then—after her death from lung cancer—with his second wife, Judith, and their three children. His home had no electricity until 1971 and no indoor plumbing until 1976. The nearest photocopier was in Cannes, a half-hour bus ride away. Nevertheless, it was here, on an old typewriter in an outbuilding, that Legman produced his authoritative and meticulous works of scholarship.

Davis, Professor Emerita of Communication and Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is keenly and sympathetically attuned to Legman's love of archives, collections, annals, and taxonomies. Dirty Jokes and Bawdy Songs is the product of extensive research...