Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist

Preface

xiii One windy night in 1893 or 1894 in a shtetl in eastern Galicia, while a fire destroyed his father’s inn, Samuel Roth was born. According to him, a rival innkeeper had perpetrated this piece of treachery. Possibly it was a cousin, not Sam, who was born that night; possibly his father never owned an inn. “According to him” will be an often-used phrase in this biography, not because Roth had a poor memory (he didn’t), or because he was melodramatic (he was). It’s because of his compulsive self-invention, and the divinely preordained destiny he envisioned for himself. The consequent crazily woven tapestry of his career was fueled by Roth’s seeing events according to needs that were often at odds with reality itself. Sam Roth’s daughter, Adelaide, knew her father was unusual. What does a preteen son or daughter do when a classmate taunts her or him with “Your father ’s in jail”? How many teenagers are told how to respond when an FBI agent or a process server comes to the door? How do a fourteen- and a sixteen-yearold not worry that they have betrayed their father when they are forced to testify that they worked with him, handling packages in his office? Family life revolved around defending him, legally and to people they encountered. Roth spent about one-ninth of his adult life behind bars. His reputation was that of a bold literary “pirate,” issuing unauthorized editions of modernist sensations such as Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He had been vilified by the literary community of two continents in the 1920s for the Joyce and Lawrence publications. But in the absence of an international copyright agreement and because Joyce did not establish a U.S. copyright by having the work printed in PrefaCe Preface xiv this country, what Roth did was not illegal. Rather, it violated the protocols of mutual fair dealing between publishers and authors. Even more infamous was a book he wrote in a fit of spite at booksellers and lawyers after his bankruptcy in 1933. It was titled Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization (1933) and offered the Nazis a serendipity when they most needed it. They advertised it in skywriting and in print media as the testimony of a Jew himself. A generation later, Roth was again held up to widespread public ridicule, by a Senate investigating committee, Walter Winchell, the FBI, the Post Office, and the legendary New York district attorney Frank Hogan, for supposedly inciting juvenile delinquency by targeting teenagers as purchasers of his books and magazines. It’s common for people to be unable to see themselves as others see them, and never more so than when pride, reputation, money, and power are at stake. When individuals are thrown into the spotlight, they struggle either to hold onto what progress they have made or to rewrite history. They often trap themselves in myths of their own making. Sam Roth was an all-time master of self-justification. Being irrepressible, he was judged to be shrill; being belligerent , he was seen as fanatical. When he refused to admit that he made money from taking advantage of customers’ interest in “crude” sex and violence, he was labeled a renegade publisher hiding behind modernist classics, albeit sometimes expurgated for easier distribution. Publicizing himself as a Johnny Appleseed, bringing to ordinary Americans the classic literature, four-letter words and all, of two continents, he expected his fellow citizens to see him as a martyr to the cause of freedom of expression. They didn’t. But in some weird way, he was right. His prison terms were for distributing obscenity. The laws that interdicted the subversive, sexually explicit modernist texts he published, however, were judged unconstitutional while he was serving his second term in federal prison. Roth was also a master of prurient advertising, and no amount of warning deterred him. He insisted on putting himself directly in the line of fire in this regard—right in the spot that municipal, state, and federal law enforcement officials reserved for pariah businessmen in that part of the “forbidden fruit business,” or the underground urban economy, that sold printed work deemed titillating or obscene. His motives included both self-aggrandizement and monetary gain. And once the veils of literary, academic, and class status are considered and lifted, the motives of opponents such as James Joyce, Frieda...