The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (41 page)

Quinn was wrong about copyright, but he was right about literary pirates: legal action against them was futile. Pound told Joyce that he could either denounce Roth in print or “organize a gang of gunmen to scare Roth out of his pants. I don’t imagine anything but physical terror works in a case of this sort (with a strong pull of avarice, bidding him to be BOLD).” Because Sylvia Beach couldn’t sue for copyright violations (and because gunmen were not exactly her style), she had to be creative. After threatening a $500,000 lawsuit, she had the New York Supreme Court issue an injunction preventing Roth from using the name James Joyce in any of his ads or publications.

But that wasn’t enough. Beach asked two of her friends (a novelist and a lawyer) to write up a formal protest against Roth’s unauthorized version of
Ulysses
. If she couldn’t stop the piracy through legal channels, she would ostracize Samuel Roth from the world of letters. Beach thought a public protest would ensure that no author gave him material, that no editor provided him advertising space and that no ethical book buyer patronized publishers who stole from the writers they loved. The protest declared that Samuel Roth was stealing James Joyce’s property in the United States while publishing a bowdlerized and corrupted version of the text. He was both a thief and a butcher.

Shame was the protest’s only weapon, and Beach wanted it to be as powerful as possible. She tracked down the addresses of writers all over Europe and mailed each of them a personal letter asking them to support the protest with their signature. The response was overwhelming. Many of the writers were victims of piracy themselves, and no one had launched a concerted international protest against the outright theft of writers’ work. Beach gathered 167 signatures, a compendium of Europe’s prominent writers. Yeats, Woolf and Hemingway. Thomas Mann, E. M. Forster, Luigi Pirandello, Mina Loy, H. G. Wells, Rebecca West, Jules Romains, W. Somerset Maugham. Even George Bernard Shaw agreed to sign. Joyce was especially pleased to see the signature of Albert Einstein. Beach sent the signed protest to nine hundred publications in the United States alone.

When the protest hit the papers in February 1927 (Beach made sure the first notices were published on Joyce’s birthday), letters of support poured into Shakespeare and Company. Many of them were seething with anger. “The thought of such an outrageous business makes me ill,” one fan wrote. “I cannot express my detestation of these people. . . . What the world needs today is a new
poison
, something to destroy the virus that has made these weaklings strong but oh how malignant!”
Two Worlds
subscribers were caught off guard. “If you are what I consider morally guilty of pirating
Ulysses
,” one subscriber wrote, “so far as I should care you might suffer hanging in a noose.” Roth tried to fight back in the press, but it was too late. Post Office inspectors, acting in what Roth called “a forceful advisory capacity,” made sure that the express companies wouldn’t touch his publications. The sales of
Two Worlds
,
Beau
and
Casanova Jr’s Tales
plummeted, and booksellers removed them from the stands.

One gets the sense that with a bit more compunction and a bit less savvy, Samuel Roth could have spent the late 1920s developing his idiosyncratic mix of high modernism and sexploitation (a sort of arched middlebrow) instead of languishing in a prison cell ten bricks wide and fourteen and a half bricks long. His toilet was a white bucket sitting on a page of
The New York Times
. Roth had to explain his absence to his nine- and ten-year-old children. “My lovely and valiant babies,” he wrote. “I am compelled, by mysterious reasons of state, to stay away from home a little longer.” He wrote to his son that faithfulness to the best books was the only thing he would need in life: “learn to love them, read them to yourself over and over again, so that not only the stories but the paragraphs, sentences and even words become familiar to you.”

The money could not have made piracy worth what he lost. Though there were moments of prosperity, the business was risky and erratic. Roth wanted an empire for reasons that went deeper than money. In 1913, when he was nineteen years old, Roth had spent his days reading in the New York Public Library and his nights sleeping in parks or tenement alleyways. At Columbia, he edited a poetry magazine called
The Lyric
and met a girl named Anna during the war. She lived with her family in Brooklyn, and Roth would go to her house at night, climb up to her room on the second floor and sit down beside her as she lay in bed. He read her Keats, Shelley and Swinburne. Sometimes he read his own poetry. Eventually, Anna told him that she had reservations about his four-dollar-a-week life. Roth remembered how she said that things could have been different if he had made forty dollars a week. She ended up marrying a dentist who made eighty dollars a week.

Roth ensconced himself in poetry’s higher calling and saved what little money he had to publish the thin book of poems that Anna had rejected for dentistry. He called it
First Offering
. Since poetry would never pay the bills, selling books became the only thing that made him happy. Prominent writers and publishers visited Roth’s bookshop, and he could claim to be acquainted with Max Eastman, Ben Huebsch, Thomas Seltzer and Mina Loy. Roth wasn’t famous in New York’s literary circles, but he had a presence. John Quinn heard of him as a “nut poet” and figured he was “either a fool or a wild man.” Roth sent poetry and nonfiction manuscripts to Harcourt, Dutton and other reputable publishers, all of whom sent rejection letters. In 1921, Leonard Woolf wrote to inform Mr. Roth, regretfully, that Hogarth Press’s publication list was already too full to accept additional contributions.

If only he knew that the Woolfs had also rejected
Ulysses
. Around the time he was trying to get published—and two days before the
Little Review
trial began—Roth wrote Joyce a fan letter. “Of all the writers in Europe today you have made the most intimate appeal to me.” Before sending the letter off, he jotted down a belated question: “Why is not ULYSSES in book form yet?”

—

A READER COULD HAVE been proud to own a copy of
Ulysses
in 1929. The book’s front matter indicated that it was the 1927 Shakespeare and Company printing. This was the ninth printing of Joyce’s book, and it was still hard to come by. Most of the people who had a copy had gone to Paris to get it, but this one was behind the counter or hidden deep in the back room of a trusted bookstore like the Gotham Bookmart. It cost about ten dollars, more expensive than any other item on the average reader’s shelf, but a bargain nonetheless. It had the famous solid blue cover, and it said DIJON.—DARANTIERE at the bottom of the last page, just where it should be.

But if you knew what to look for, you could tell something was wrong. The blue cover was just a shade darker than it should have been. The font seemed right, but the italicized words were noticeably different from Sylvia Beach’s copies. The paper was smoother and slightly heavier. The margins were wider. It was about as thick as a Paris copy, but just a bit too narrow and long. The cover had no fold-overs for the bookbinder to insert the hardcover boards, and the binding looked like it would fall apart after one complete reading. The page listing James Joyce’s other works was missing, and the page that noted his other publishers had the first of many typos: “Jonthan Cape.” And then there was the spine: the author and title were printed clearly on the Shakespeare and Company edition, but this spine was blank.

Samuel Roth was no longer bothering with magazines. When he emerged from his first stint in prison in 1929, he entered the business of pirating books, and his counterfeit version of the 1927 printing of
Ulysses
wasn’t bad. Roth oversaw the details and paid the Loewinger Brothers on Seventeenth Street to reset the type, which meant that if anyone’s edition of
Ulysses
was going to have copyright in the United States, it would be his—it was the perfect revenge against “Sylvia Bitch,” as he began calling her.

Prison and literary ostracism darkened Roth’s perspective. Publishers seemed to be nothing but a syndicate of unscrupulous capitalists who didn’t give a shit about literature. He, on the other hand, was brave. Where profiteers like Knopf and Liveright folded under the pressure of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Roth saw himself as an unstoppable outlaw for artistic expression. No one else had the nerve to present books like
Ulysses
to the American public.

In the wake of his Welfare Island sentence and Sylvia Beach’s protest, Roth took his business off the street, out of the press and far from any U.S. Post Office. He separated his business office from the warehouse holding his illegal inventory. His “publishing house” changed names and printers frequently, and he moved his family at a moment’s notice. Selling pirated books in bulk meant that the bookshops assumed most of the risk, sweating each individual sale long after he disappeared—if he ever appeared at all. Enterprising bookleggers hired salesmen to walk door to door with briefcases or drive around to bookstores in a plain truck. The driver would walk into a shop, ask how many copies of
Aphrodite
or
Married Love
they wanted, rummage through the back of the truck and hand them over for half the retail price (cash only). The next time the truck came around, the driver would be different.

Samuel Roth had become especially elusive after he was released from prison, so when the NYSSV wanted to nab him again, they got to him through his brother. In October 1929, Max Roth was going door to door on lower Broadway with a briefcase packed with samples of obscene books, and he had the misfortune of trying to sell his wares to one of Sumner’s vice society allies. When Max returned to the man’s office at an appointed time the following afternoon, John Sumner, a police officer and a Post Office inspector were pretending to work in the adjacent office, and they casually ambled over in the middle of Max’s sales pitch. Larry, the officer, purchased
Ulysses
,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and
Fanny Hill
for sixty dollars, and as soon as money changed hands Max was promptly arrested. When they discovered that he was Samuel Roth’s brother, the trail led to the Golden Hind Press on Fifth Avenue, where the vice hunters caught Samuel and one of his salesmen with three hundred dirty books.

But that wasn’t all. Max happened to be carrying a large set of keys, and after Sumner found a lease in his name, they went to the Fifth Avenue address listed on the document and unlocked the door. It was a warehouse stocked with advertising materials, facilities for packaging and shipping inventory across the country and thousands of books—mostly
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
and pirated copies of
Ulysses
. Because they didn’t have a search warrant, a police officer stood guard at the warehouse overnight to secure the evidence.

Max Roth was sentenced to a prison term of six months to three years for his involvement in the nationwide Joyce piracy, and Samuel was back in jail less than a year after he left. When he was released six months later, a detective was waiting at the prison gate with another warrant for his arrest. Roth was extradited to Pennsylvania, where he was convicted for selling
Ulysses
yet again. After serving six months for Joyce’s book in New York, he served three more in Philadelphia. And even then he didn’t stop.

—

SAMUEL ROTH WAS modernism’s doppelgänger. Like Margaret Anderson, he wanted a daring magazine devoted to art’s supremacy. He insisted it was the artist’s “right to have his creations printed and judged by the standards of literature alone and by none other.” Like Ezra Pound, he wanted to bring far-flung writers together—the
Two Worlds
title referred to the connectedness of the Old World and the New.

And Roth was more than a bit like Bennett Cerf. Both were Columbia classmates in 1916, and neither was a traditional student. Roth had a one-year scholarship and never graduated. Cerf never received a high school degree but edged his way into the College from the School of Journalism, which didn’t require the foreign language credits he didn’t have. Both men left Columbia with an insider’s respect for institutional culture and an outsider’s desire to transform it, and they both claimed to be democratizing literature. Roth duplicated Cerf’s Modern Library pitch when he insisted his magazines were “the only vehicle for the expression of the many artists who would otherwise reach only a very limited public.”

And yet while the pirate was devoted to his wife and children, the esteemed publisher had slightly less regard for matrimony. For years, Bennett Cerf scheduled trysts in his little black books as “Deals”—“Deal at Midnight” (April 22), “Deal Maria” (December 8), “deal with Marian” (May 13). He had deals on April 29 and 30, May 5, 6, 13, 14, 28 and June 4. These were all weekends. He sent telegrams to various women—Rosamond (“you heavenly creature”), Francine (“Overwhelmed by your pulchritude Please rush rear view”), Marie (“Adoring and sex starved residents demand date of your return”). There were several telegrams to a woman named Marian. “Missing you darling” and “Cant wait” and “Thinking of you and missing you Love Bennett.” Marian was Marian Klopfer, Donald Klopfer’s wife.

Roth was not as sordid as that. He was candid with his desires. He wanted to be a staunch individualist, a literary crusader, and he wanted, like Joyce, to be loved. Roth wanted the prestige of James Joyce and Ezra Pound. He wanted their names listed beneath his own as the editor of
Two Worlds
. In a way, he did it for the letterhead. Unlike others craving prestige, however, Roth was willing to steal for it. Margaret Anderson drew inspiration from the dozens of contributors she published. Pound and Eliot recycled old poetry to make it new. Joyce accepted patronage, asked for favors and money and incorporated the work of scores of other writers to create his novels. And yet they all had a keen understanding of the debts they owed to others, both living and dead. Roth, on the other hand, thought individualism meant that everything permanent and universal belonged to him and that a cultural rebellion was an opportunity to build an empire. As much as he admired Joyce, he was a poor student of
Ulysses
.