Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper. Titles like Gershon Legman’s The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women, Maxwell Bodenheim’s My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village, and most notoriously his anthologized periodical of high-brow smut, American Aphrodite: A Quarterly for the Fancy Free. Roth—poet, publisher, pornographer—was a creature of mid-century Times Square, a red-hued midnight kingdom of peep shows and “Live Nude Girls,” of Tijuana bibles and X-rated theaters. The glorious and filthy, dingy and beautiful metropolis of brownouts and graffitied subway cars was very much part of the publisher’s legacy.
Galician-born and raised in the Lower East Side world of Yiddish newspapers and theater, this son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants’ initial forays into the literary world was as an ancillary to the Modernist aesthetic holding sway on either side of the Atlantic. Before he was a notorious bookseller, Roth was author of a pair of experimental epic poems, Europe: A Book for America and Now and Forever, as well as the promising lyric debut First Offering: A Book of Sonnets and Lyrics. “What will you have taken from me/You have not taken yet?” Roth wrote in a 1922 issue of Poetry Magazine, published before his career took a rather different turn.
Regardless of his own (not insubstantial) writing, his greatest poem was one on which he was at best a cowriter—Roth v. United States, the 1957 Supreme Court case that would begin to redefine “obscenity.” Any great poem—which is to say a true poem—must ultimately be a failure, and in that regard Roth v. the United States was triumphant, for with some irony, the defendant lost the case. The 6-3 decision of the Warren court ruled that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment and that American Aphrodite (which included the avant-garde memoirist Anais Nin) was most definitely obscene.
Still, the opinion by Justice William J. Brennan Jr. greatly circumscribed obscenity’s definition, so that now material could only be banned if entirely scatological or pornographic. The case was instrumental in the history of American free speech, where even if it hardly abolished censorship, it was first in a line of decisions that would. Conservative pundits blamed those later cases, particularly Miller v. California sixteen years later, for Deep Throat, The Devil in Ms. Jones, and Debbie Does Dallas, but these were also the rulings that made it possible to read unexpurgated editions of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. The cost of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a book where Molly Bloom’s beautiful soliloquy (“yes I said yes I will Yes”) earned Roth six months in detention in 1929, is Hustler and Penthouse, YouPorn and OnlyFans—not that this can be reduced in such a way, nor need we denigrate the later things in service of the former.