The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (40 page)

Bennett Cerf saw Boni’s innovation through the prism of a Great Books program. What united the list wasn’t the low cost of acquiring publishing rights. It was the books’ shared modern spirit. “Most of the books have been written in the past thirty years,” Cerf’s catalog claimed, and the older ones “are so essentially modern, that the publishers feel they are properly embraced in the scope and aim of the series.” Old or new, their books were “modern classics.”

The concept was brilliant. Bennett Cerf used the word
modern
to evoke a way of thinking, a continuity with a global tradition. A reader could buy a modern classic decades after it was originally published, and it would still be up-to-date—it was always a good time to buy. Modernism’s dicta—that writers respond to one another across nations and centuries, that artists renew ancient forms, that classics are being written as we speak—were folded into the modern classics brand. Bennett Cerf turned modernism into a marketing strategy. Pound, Joyce and Eliot didn’t want to acquiesce to the mass market, but Bennett Cerf found ways to make the market acquiesce to them.

—

WHAT WAS SO STRANGE about publishing at the time was that the passage between prestige and prison was so narrow. Alfred Knopf faced criminal charges in court before he became more careful. Liveright and Huebsch were explicitly trying to avoid the disturbing prospect of prison when they refused to publish
Ulysses
. In New York, the penitentiary was on Welfare Island (formerly Blackwell’s Island) with the Smallpox Hospital and a psychiatric institution. The corridors were designed to make prisoners feel powerless. Iron bars enclosing the catwalks along the cellblock tiers drew the prisoner’s eye upward to a ceiling as distant as the nave of a cathedral. The cell doors had crosshatched metal slats and locks the size of mailboxes. In 1928 a man named Samuel Roth sat in one of those cells and plotted ways to continue building his publishing empire.

Roth shoveled coal in the South Prison House Gang, and in his unpublished memoirs he recalled how the other men laughed when they heard he was a publisher.

“You came here in a wagon, didn’t you?”

“Is there any other way to get here?”

“You really don’t know! You should’ve seen the way Mae West came here last year. You must be a very small publisher.”

By anyone’s estimate, Samuel Roth was the biggest literary pirate of the 1920s. He produced and distributed unauthorized editions of illegal and semilegal books, which, at the time, was a highly competitive business. He trafficked mostly in racy titles from Europe—
School Life in Paris
,
Only a Boy
,
The Russian Princess
. He printed them on cheap paper with cheaper bindings and sold them at inflated black market prices. When times were good (and the 1920s were very good) his system of pseudonyms and underground presses made him more than seven hundred dollars a week in Chicago alone. And it wasn’t just smut. Samuel Roth ripped off everyone—George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley and André Gide, to name a few. Roth was a pirate with excellent taste. He found his niche in the publishing world by combining his love for cutting-edge modernist literature and salacious pulp. When he stole a fragment of T. S. Eliot’s
Sweeney Agonistes
he chose it at least partly for the appeal of Eliot’s working title,
Wanna Go Home, Baby
?

Roth’s biggest successes were counterfeit versions of
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and
Ulysses
, and he read Joyce eagerly in the pages of
The
Little Review
. He thought of
Dubliners
as an earnest character study and
A Portrait
as bizarre and unfinished with flashes of brilliance. But in
Ulysses
he saw, as he put it later, “a portrait of the metamorphoses of all men in one, of all nations in one, of all cities in one, and of all days in one Dublin day.” He admired Joyce’s novel so much he decided to steal it.

The best part about literary piracy was that in many cases it wasn’t illegal. An English-language book didn’t have American copyright protection unless it was printed on plates manufactured in the United States. All Roth needed to do was reprint British and European titles that hadn’t yet found American publishers. Roth preferred to work in legal gray areas. Sometimes he obtained the author’s permission to reprint their work, and on a few occasions he paid them nominal sums. But authorization didn’t make the dirty books any less dirty, and he served time in at least five different prisons over twenty-five years.

Roth sold his first pornographic book in 1919. He opened up a small bookshop on Eighth Street called the New York Poetry Book Shop, which was a large room in an apartment building’s basement with a window peeking out just above street level. Roth stayed open until midnight, and he never advertised. His bookshop was unremarkable for Greenwich Village, but with a few dozen reliable patrons, he figured he could eke out a living doing what he loved. He scoured Manhattan for hidden gems and secondhand books to build his inventory, and he eventually discovered a shop in a Park Avenue basement run by a lanky old man who was a connoisseur of contemporary poetry and pornography. Roth visited the old man’s shop regularly until he found it padlocked. The old bookseller was serving ninety days on Welfare Island for selling a copy of John Cleland’s
Fanny Hill
to an undercover agent, so Roth sent him two dollars a week for the duration of his sentence.

When the old man was released, he left the country and repaid Roth’s generosity with a package from Paris containing several illicit books bound in paper with false titles on the covers. Roth got scared and stuffed them in a bookcase behind expensive first editions that no one ever ventured to purchase. He remained anxious about the stash until an editor on Christopher Street offered him five dollars for each one. When the editor said he’d pay the same price for similar books, Roth began asking the old man for more. After a few transactions, he made $130. This was how selling books could make a man rich.

When peddling armloads of banned books wasn’t enough, Samuel Roth began printing them himself. He wanted to be a major presence in the publishing world, and he saw an opening in the risqué material that American publishers wouldn’t touch—an entire market wasn’t being served. But because he didn’t have enough capital to break into the book industry, he began casting about for alternatives. Two business models were doing well at the time: deluxe limited editions of books that couldn’t circulate openly and glossy magazines like
Vogue,
Smart Set
and
Vanity Fair.
Roth decided to combine them. In the mid-1920s, he started a magazine called
Two Worlds Quarterly
, which spawned
Two Worlds Monthly
and
Casanova Jr’s Tales
.

They were limited-edition magazines sent to subscribers via railroad express instead of the Post Office. Works by Lewis Carroll, Boccaccio and Chekhov appeared alongside tepid erotica. Evelyn Waugh woodcuts shared space with cartoonish drawings of buxom nudes beset by goblins or draped over the giant craniums of warlocks. Issues of some of Roth’s magazines cost three to five dollars—more than the typical newsstand price of twenty-five or fifty cents but less than the ten to twelve dollars that Knopf and Liveright charged for private editions of
Painted Veils
or
A Story-Teller’s Holiday
. Roth found a new price point. To bolster his empire, he launched his own glossy magazine complete with photographs and a fashionable Art Deco cover. He called it
Beau
, and it was the nation’s first men’s magazine.

Roth thought
Beau
would be his entrée into the legitimate publishing world, but it was expensive to produce, and he needed money to give it time to consolidate its position on the newsstands. He ran full-page ads in
Two Worlds
to find investors: “Mr. Roth Is Building the Most Powerful Magazine Group in America.” When investors were not persuaded, Roth decided to peddle a reprint edition of Cheikh Nefzaoui’s
The Perfumed Garden
, which described 237 positions of “the sweet recreation,” as the translator phrased it. Roth knew he could find a thousand readers willing to pay thirty dollars a copy, and that would finance
Beau
for a year.

In 1927 two Post Office inspectors arrested Roth just days after he mailed his advertisements for
The Perfumed Garden
. Because it was his first offense, the judge fined him five hundred dollars and gave him two years’ probation, but Roth’s biggest problem was that he was now an entry in John Sumner’s records. Anthony Comstock had taught Sumner about the economy of vice hunting: finding a smut peddler was a costly investment, but once found, he would yield multiple arrests. Four months after Roth’s trial, Sumner walked into his bookshop with three detectives and a search warrant. The officers found a packet of obscene drawings they had been looking for and had no trouble uncovering indecent books when they searched the premises.

In court, Roth testified that the drawings had been planted by one of Sumner’s men. The assistant DA needed to ask just one question: hadn’t the defendant already pleaded guilty for advertising
The Perfumed Garden
? When Samuel Roth admitted he had, he was treated as a repeat offender violating federal probation. And that’s when he was sentenced to three months in the prison workhouse on Welfare Island. By the end of 1928 what had seemed like a nascent publishing empire had evaporated. For by the time he was hauled off to Welfare Island, Samuel Roth was also the object of an unprecedented international protest.

—

ROTH HAD BEEN THINKING about
Ulysses
since the
Little Review
trial in 1921, and in 1922 he wrote a letter to Joyce about his plans for
Two Worlds
. “Among other things, we shall try to publish a novel complete in every issue,” Roth wrote. He wanted to begin
Two Worlds
with one of Joyce’s novels (hopefully
Ulysses
, though he didn’t say it) and promised Joyce one hundred dollars and 15 percent of the titanic issue’s sales.

Roth designed extravagant letterhead stationery with a descriptive header of his magazine’s goal: to “serve established writers as the organ of their opinion and as a refuge from their persecutor.” The complete description spilled down the sides of the page and managed to inflate Roth’s already grand ambitions: “Every issue will contain a complete novel, a play, a short story, verse, and reviews of the books and plays of the period.” Miss Weaver politely declined the offer on Joyce’s behalf. She joked to Sylvia Beach that he must have been planning to use a font “the size of a needle’s head.”

But Roth wouldn’t take no for an answer. He wrote to Ezra Pound in June 1922 both to acquire the rights to
Ulysses
(as Joyce’s
Little Review
editor) and to secure Pound himself as a contributor. While Joyce virtually ignored Roth, Pound burst forth with a list of advice for the
Two Worlds
editor. He had some suitable poems, translations and an article for the magazine, and he suggested not only a potential art editor but also the artists
Two Worlds
should feature in the first five issues.

Little did Pound know, he was entering Roth’s twilight world in which suggestions became verbal contracts. Writers offering advice found themselves listed as “contributing editors” of a magazine they had never seen. When Pound told Roth that he approved of any scheme that could circumvent the Comstock Act, Roth took this as permission to publish Joyce’s work in full. To make his claim marginally more legitimate, Roth gave a check and four promissory notes totaling one thousand dollars to a lawyer and instructed him to hold them until Joyce officially gave
Two Worlds
permission to publish
Ulysses.
The eight hundred dollars in notes could be redeemed, cashed, Roth said, just as soon as he had enough money in his account. In 1925, four years after his first flash of inspiration, Roth published the first issue of
Two Worlds
. Ezra Pound threatened to sue when he saw his name on the cover, at which point Roth offered to pay him fifty dollars per issue. He would publish his poems or one of his characteristic screeds. “Make it as long as you like. Every word shall be held precious.”

In July 1926, Roth started printing episodes of
Ulysses
—and he began cutting the offensive passages. He omitted references to urination, masturbation and gonorrhea. He changed “the grey sunken cunt of the world” to “the grey sunken crater.” When a newspaper man shouts out, “He can kiss my royal Irish arse,”
Two Worlds
politely substituted, “my royal Irish aunt.” Roth did his best to appease the vice societies. Like so many other publishers before him, he tried to persuade John Sumner about his earnest intentions. He wanted to use the illicit aura of
Ulysses
to sell magazines, but he didn’t want to go to jail.

His legal problems began to mount, however, when Hemingway told Sylvia Beach the details of Roth’s piracy. One night in 1926, Roth met with Hemingway at a New York café while he was in town trying to sell a few short stories. Hemingway’s rare silence (he showed up with a swollen jaw) gave Roth the chance to brag.
Two Worlds
had eight thousand subscribers, he said, and the backbone of the publication was James Joyce. Roth figured Joyce’s name could lower Hemingway’s price, but they never reached an agreement (Roth printed his short stories anyway).

At some point, the rumored number of
Two Worlds
subscribers went as high as fifty thousand, which suggested tens of thousands of dollars in lost profits, and yet Shakespeare and Company couldn’t sue Roth for copyright violations, which came as a surprise. John Quinn told everyone that, as disastrous as
The
Little Review
was, it had secured the American copyright over the portions of
Ulysses
printed in New York. Quinn was wrong in at least two different ways. Judges might simply refuse to enforce the copyright of obscene works, and even if a judge enforced copyright for
The Little Review
, that protection wouldn’t extend to the serialized
Ulysses
episodes because individual portions of a magazine as a whole did. Beyond this,
Ulysses
had no copyright protection in 1926 because U.S. law required any English-language book to be printed on American-manufactured plates within (at most) six months of the initial publication. Since there was no American edition,
Ulysses
had fallen into the public domain while its reviews were still hitting the newstands. Samuel Roth could reprint, bowdlerize, alter and mutilate all he wished. As far as the U.S. government was concerned, nobody owned
Ulysses
.