Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist

8. 1949–1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Céline, and Nietzsche

219 1949–1952 Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Céline, and Nietzsche In the 1950s, one of the features of Times Square was the “record-andbook -shops that offer titillation first and culture second” that film critic Judith Crist described.1 “Tourist bookstores” was the epithet newspapers often used. The first of these, Louis Finkelstein’s Times Square Book Bazaar, was founded in 1940, at about the same time Sam Roth had begun his mail-order operations .2 Finkelstein was the advance guard. After the war began, servicemen headed for Forty-second Street as they did earlier to the girlie shows, hookers, gambling venues, and porno distributors at the honky-tonk circus sideshows back home. Roth’s Model: The“Tourist Bookstores”on the“Main Stem” Roth was not part of the network of backdate magazine, remainder, and erotica dealers of the tourist bookstore kind, which were found in the massentertainment areas of major cities. But there were congruencies in materials, personnel, and prospective customers. Harry Roskolenko, Clement Wood, and David George Plotkin wrote tourist bookstore erotica. Roth used a chief jobber for tourist stores, G.I. Distributors, for Good Times.3 More important than those facts, however, is the similarity in subject matter and literary tastes between Roth’s readers and those of Times Square’s bookstore and newsstand browsers. Roth’s customers were people from small towns or rural areas across the eastern United States, as the postal inspectors well knew. Their “test letters ” to obtain circulars and books as evidence for the 1956 federal indictment c h a P t e r 8 220 Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist were mailed from Parma, Canfield, and Alliance, Ohio; Dearborn, Michigan; Cordell, Georgia; Old Greenwich, Connecticut; Aiken, South Carolina; and Rochester, New York.4 If people could browse the shelves of tourist bookstores for images and texts (and novelties such as photo sets, sex toys, and erotic playing cards), Roth’s mail-order catalogues allowed his customers to do the same. Rubber blow-up dolls—a “honey for your bedside”—anyone? Tourist stores carried materials about homosexuality, sadomasochism, flagellation, and other sexual alternatives. Irving Klaw, on Fourteenth Street near Third Avenue, learned about niche audiences in the earlier 1940s, and his photo booklets on bondage, flagellation, wrestling girls, high heels, and other fetish clothing were also available in tourist bookstores as well as in his mail-order catalogues. Robert Harrison enhanced the interest of his girlie magazines in the later 1940s with fetish images. When mass-market paperback publishers commissioned general-interest genre fiction not originally printed in hardback form in the late 1940s, their “paperback originals” with lesbianism and lesbian protagonists found an enthusiastic audience.5 Sex pulp hardbacks also published such fiction. Samuel Roth knew that men living far from downtown mass-entertainment districts had curiosities just as strong as those of urbanites. Roth as Purveyor of Alternative Sexualities Roth knew that innovative magazines of general appeal, such as Confidential and Playboy in the early and mid-1950s, spawned many imitators, including Roth’s own short-lived The Earth (modeled on Harrison’s Confidential and Lyle Stuart’s Exposé) and Good Times: sexy cartoons, bare-breasted pinups including a centerfold, issues devoted to high life in various cities (as well as in outer space), short stories, and celebrity reportage.6 He was also aware that a smart publisher always had another title in reserve if one was banned by a municipality or by the Post Office.7 The first magazine, or paperback book, purchase was impulse-motivated; when the subject was prurient curiosity regarding sex, private lives of celebrity, or violence, this was especially true. Subsequent purchases occurred because the customer wanted similar material . The niche market for gay, flagellation, and fetish materials was more responsive to this strategy than a more diffuse one.8 Roth had sensed the buying potential of gays and transvestites when he published A Scarlet Pansy, which he republished in shortened form after his 1940 return from Lewisburg. His ads in the girlie magazines allowed him to add some elements of the market for sexually alternative works to his mailing lists. 221 1949–1952 To establish his own niche market readership for borderline erotic materials in the early 1950s, Roth published his mail-order catalogues listing the novels Finistere (“homosexuality rampant”) and Strange Brother, Gide’s The Secret Drama of My Life, and Proust’s Cities of the Plain (“frank study...