Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist by Jay A. Gertzman (review)

Samuel Roth, who died in 1974, is remembered widely for his extensive career in publishing magazines and books that teetered on the fence between literature (including modernist names such as D. H. Lawrence, André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Louis Zukovsky) and erotica, some leaning more one way than the other. His career culminated in the now famous legal challenge to obscenity, Roth v. United States (1957), a case that Roth lost in appeal to the U. S. Supreme Court (which sent him to jail), but whose minority opinion redefined the legal meaning of obscenity in this country. Many of the JJQ’s readers will equate “Roth” with “pirate” for his unauthorized serial publication of Ulysses in Two Worlds Monthly and Joyce’s ballistic response to cease the publication and to cast shame on its perpetrator.¹

Despite this wide notoriety, little has been written about Roth. Leo Hamalian published a scathing but colorful retrospective just months before his passing, and Roth’s daughter wrote a short justification for his Ulysses in 1992.² Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist is the first comprehensive biography of the man. Jay A. Gertzman brings to the task plentiful relevant experience: his Bookleggers and Smuthounds examined the pornography trade between the wars, and his bibliography of Lady Chatterley’s Lover documented the convoluted publishing history of this key modernist text.³ His coverage of Ulysses complements Robert Spoo’s recent survey of modernist copyright issues; the biography stands on its own with its portrayal of Roth as an author and as a full-fledged actor on the margins of modernist publishing.⁴

Born in either 1893 or 1894 in a shtetl in Galicia (now an area straddling Poland and Ukraine), Roth spent his early years in a rural, religiously conservative, and culturally isolated world whose overtones, Gertzman suggests, defined his attitudes toward sexuality, personal responsibility, and artistic endeavor. His family emigrated to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1903 where Roth was introduced to the streets, the movies, books, and cultural diversity; he remained a lifelong New Yorker. Some classes at Columbia University led to his first venture as a publisher with the short-lived magazine The Lyric.⁵ Roth began writing poetry as a young man and achieved a measure of success with work appearing in The Nation, Poetry, Contemporary Verse, and other prominent publications.⁶ From 1919 into 1920, his Poetry Bookshop in the West Village offered a wide variety of American and English publications.

In the mid-1920s, Roth began his publishing career in earnest with Two Worlds, in his words “an experiment in magazine publishing,” reprinting “gallantiana” from the past—Giovanni Boccaccio, François Rabelais, Oscar Wilde—and soliciting contributions from prominent and sexually frank contemporaries including James Branch Cabell, Ford Madox Ford, Aldous Huxley, and, of course, James Joyce. Five installments from “Work in Progress” appeared in the magazine; Roth paid Joyce $200 for these.⁷ Knowing that Ulysses had failed to be properly registered for copyright in the United States, Roth was free—in a sense—to publish installments of that title without Joyce’s permission in the mass-market Two Worlds Monthly.

Gertzman’s contribution to this well-worn but not well-understood tale is a close and balanced examination of Roth’s motives that draws from the published evidence as well as unpublished material such as Roth’s autobiography, “Count Me among the Missing.” He points out that Two Worlds Monthly’s bowdlerization of the book was much milder than what the Little Review subjected it to several years earlier. He examines Roth’s correspondence with Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, Harriet Weaver, and others, as Roth first seeks permission to publish Ulysses, then justifies the unsanctioned deed. Roth recognized that Ulysses could appeal to precisely the market to which he sold his literary erotica. Joyce’s outrage that resulted in the “International Protest” (79) signed by 167 writers and artists is well documented (JJII 585-87...