Wednesday's Writerly Happenings

Rosset, at Ease in the Underground

Lately it seems anniversaries have people talking. There’s the moon landing, of course, and Woodstock. This July also marks the thirtieth anniversary of Disco Demolition Night at Cominsky Park, as well as the year Saddam Husein became the President of Iraq. 200 hundred years ago Napoleon made mince meat of the Teutonic Knights, and not so long ago, in 1999, Microsoft sent its first public message via MSN. All well and good. These events duly deserve our reflection. But the one we really want to talk about took place in 1959, the year in which the United States Post Office deemed Lady Chatterly’s Lover a pornographic offense, and spurred a trial that would ultimately shape the future of American publishing. The publisher was Barny Rosset of Grove Press, the author, D.H. Lawrence; the issue at hand: the First Amendment.

The trial attracted attention. Many lines were drawn. In the end, Justice William J. Brennan found that Lady Chatterly’s Lover did in fact posses cultural significance and was publishable. An article in the NY Times discussed the story yesterday. It’s worth reading. Here’s a snippet:

On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority — which, until then, it held absolutely — to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.

Who the Hell Just Said Censorship? Who!?!

Grove Press is the publisher of the Evergreen Review, which in the 60′s and 70′s made a name for itself by featuring bold, contemporary literature, as well the era’s biggest names. Writers and readers flocked to its pages. Currently the Evergreen Review is available online. Here’s a snippet from one of their recently published stories. It’s called Parking, and is written by Carmen Firanon.

I sat on the nearest sofa, eager to avoid more scrutiny, having already committed the sin of arriving late. It was then that I realized that the blonde woman next to me was barefoot. I looked around. They were all barefoot. All their shoes were aligned in a neat row along the wall. Do I really have to? I gave Lisa a quick, apprehensive glance, and she, as if reading my mind, nodded a benevolent “yes; no problem, you can keep your shoes on.”

Interesting to think about publishing issues. Especially with regard to current standards. Such thoughts fill us with pluck. We wanted to take a look at some of history’s more controversial books. Books that induced ire. Books that said fuck. Books that channeled a different set of societal standards. Of course, almost nothing is shocking now. But imagine if you will the time period, the stakes, the authors, editors and publishers; imagine the prosecutors and judges, each of whom carried with him a unique set of morals and jurisprudence. And then imagine readers like us, dirty buggers that we are, and what we would have had to pay to ship those worthless, filthy books all the way from Europe had Brennan voted against Grove Press.

– “Even before the music begins there is that bored look on people’s faces, a polite form of self-imposed torture, the concert. For a moment, when the conductor raps with his little wand, there is a tense spasm of concentration followed almost immediately by a general slump, a quiet vegetable sort of repose induced by the steady, uninterrupted drizzle for m the orchestra.” — Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer

– “Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland’s hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?” — James Joyce in Ulysses

– who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational
therapy pingpong & amnesia — Allen Ginsburg in Howl

Packing Heat Since 1959

– `Well,’ he said,`I don’t know. What’s the use of my generalizing? I only know my own case. I like women, but I don’t desire them. I like talking to them; but talking to them, though it makes me intimate in one direction, sets me poles apart from them as far as kissing is concerned. So there you are! But don’t take me as a general example, probably I’m just a special case: one of the men who like women, but don’t love women, and even hate them if they force me into a pretense of love, or an entangled appearance. — D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterly’s Lover

We found a couple of other noteworthy articles concerning this subject. In the Times Book Case, Tymon Smith reviews The Naked Lunch. Turns out he’s smitten. A snippet:

The book is The Naked Lunch and the author is everyone’s favourite suit wearing, homosexual, gun toting, heroin shooting Beat writer – William S Burroughs. Of all the Beat movement’s seminal texts The Naked Lunch is, as one Guardian blogger recently pointed out, the one that “reads like it could have been written yesterday,” and while it’s not an example of the cut-up style that made Burroughs famous in later years, it’s a rollicking, dark take on the lowlifes and back alleys of New York, Mexico and Tangiers in the company of William Lee, Dr Benway and the giant dildo Steely Dan.

George Will draws the discussion further into the realm of main stream culture with his essay in the Houston Chronicle. George, the floor:

Until into the 1940s, it had been a crime in Massachusetts to sell Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, in which Roberta loses her innocence to a factory foreman. In 1948, the Supreme Court affirmed a New York court’s judgment against Doubleday for publishing Edmund Wilson’s novel Memoirs of Hecate County, which depicted an extramarital affair. In 1957, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a bookseller for mailing obscene materials, saying that constitutional protection of free speech did not extend to obscenity, as determined by the Department of the Post Office, which had its own judiciary.

And finally, a coincidence. In the 1959 trial, Rosset was represented by an attorney named Charles Rembar. Before this, Rembar worked with Norman Mailer. He advised Mailer in his novel The Naked and the Dead to change “fuck” to “fug.” This helped Mailer’s book get published quicker. Anyway, in the late sixties, when Mailer was experimenting with politics and film, he and Barney Rosset had the chance to work together. Rosset was an actor on a film shoot in East Hampton, where Mailer was directing and starring in the now notorious Maidstone. This might sound like a stretch as well as a coincidence. After all, it is not very often that the publisher of progressive books shoots a film with an author of progressive books, and that the movie, which was equally hailed and lambasted, dissolves into a drug-fueled, hippie version of Fight Club. Talk about obscene. Not to mention that the lawyer who suggested fug over fuck for Mailer was the same lawyer who got Lady Chatterly’s Lover approved for publication. The only question remaining, where was Charles Rembar during the Maidstone fiasco? — Kevin Murphy

Video: Norman Mailer and Rip Torn in Maidstone