Thy Neighbor's Wife (15 page)

As an adolescent he was sensitive, hyperactive, and rebellious. In private school, he coedited a newspaper entitled
Anti-Everything
, and he once joined a picket line outside a theater showing
Gone With the Wind
because the film seemed demeaning to blacks. Though he was diminutive and wore thick glasses, he became a star halfback on the high school football team, and dated perhaps the prettiest girl in the class. He was also the senior class
president, the first among his group to drive a car, a new beige Packard convertible, and the first to buy an illegal copy of
Tropic of Cancer
.

At Swarthmore College in 1940 he wrote a freshman English paper on Henry Miller, receiving a B minus; and the following year, restless under the school’s Quaker influence, he transferred to the University of Chicago. Three months later, still dissatisfied, he moved to Los Angeles and attended UCLA. Within the year, in October 1942, he had enlisted in the Army, eventually becoming a lieutenant in the Signal Corps assigned to photographic missions in China, where he sometimes had to be restrained by fellow officers from venturing beyond the approved perimeters.

After the war Rosset returned home, earned a bachelor of philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, co-owned a small plane in which he skimmed over the city’s skyscrapers, and had an affair with a blond socialite who wanted to become a painter. At a time when it was considered scandalous to do so, the couple lived together openly without being married, first in New York, later in France; and when they finally did marry, in Provence in 1949, the romance was essentially over.

Upon returning to New York she gradually left Rosset for a struggling Jewish-American abstract expressionist painter, and Rosset soon met and later married a young woman employee of Brentano’s bookshop whose father had been a German intelligence officer in World War II. Rosset was thirty when he remarried in 1953, a year after he had acquired Grove Press and began to publish the work of talented writers who were as yet too uncommercial, unconventional, or shocking for the major American publishers, but who appealed to Rosset’s own eclectic taste and his avidity for risk.

Among the writers that signed contracts with Rosset were Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Simone de Beauvoir, and other Europeans and literary exiles who were living in Paris, which was then still the capital of Western culture. Rosset spent considerable time in that city not only in negotiating with French agents and publishers for the American
rights to novels and plays that he admired but also in acquainting himself with many young Americans who were editing literary magazines in Paris, or writing first novels there, or merely living the café life along the Left Bank and discovering for themselves what Hemingway meant when he called Paris a Moveable Feast. There was a social and artistic freedom in Paris peculiar to that time and place, and largely due to the presence of one man, an audacious publisher named Maurice Girodias, Americans in Paris could buy English-language books that were as yet too outrageous or realistic to be sold legally in the United States.

Maurice Girodias was, like Rosset, the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, and soon after Rosset had met him in Paris there developed between them a kinship and professional admiration. Girodias’ firm, the Olympia Press, founded in 1953, was the first to publish in English Vladimir Nabokov’s
Lolita
, J. P. Donleavy’s
The Ginger Man
, Pauline Réage’s
Story of O
, William Burroughs’
Naked Lunch
, and
Candy
, by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg. Like Rosset, Girodias was impulsive and daring, influenced by what he called “individualistic anarchy,” and was resentful of
l’esprit bourgeois
in all its manifestations. While a portion of what he published in Paris was conventional—Girodias printed books of political essays, Russian classics in French, even a journal devoted to the art of knitting—his name was inextricably linked to libertinage, and among his more carnal contributions to letters were such novels as
With Open Mouth, The Chariot of Flesh
, and
White Thighs
.

The last novel, written under the pseudonym of Frances Lengel, was actually the work of a talented Italo-Scottish writer named Alexander Trocchi, the editor of a Paris-based English literary quarterly called
Merlin
. Girodias also published an adventure thriller entitled
Lust
, by the British poet Christopher Logue, under the Girodias-inspired nom de plume of Count Palmiro Vicarion. Girodias attributed the authorship of
Candy
to “Maxwell Kenton” because its American coauthor, Terry Southern, felt that
if his true name were associated with this tale of an uninhibited young wench from Wisconsin it might reduce his chances of selling to an American publisher a children’s book that he had just submitted for consideration.

Other writers who wished for various reasons to conceal their identity wrote for Girodias under such names as “Marcus Van Heller,” “Miles Underwood,” and “Carmencita de las Lunas.” When Girodias was short of cash, which he frequently was because of his casual management, he would mail out to his vast clientele of readers in France and overseas advertising blurbs that seductively summarized a new sex novel that he urged everyone to buy; and after he had received a sufficient number of replies with money, he would hire a writer to produce a novel that more or less conformed to the plot that he had concocted.

“It was great fun,” he later recalled in a memoir about his rampant career in postwar Paris. “The Anglo-Saxon world was being attacked, invaded, infiltrated, outflanked, and conquered by this erotic armada. The Dickensian schoolmasters of England were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was standing on end beneath their wigs, black market prices in New York and London for our green-backed products were soaring to fantastic heights.”

In directing his “erotic armada” from Paris, Maurice Girodias, though adopting the French surname of his Catholic mother, was following a course charted years before by his father, Jack Kahane, an English Jew who until his death in 1939 had been an expatriate writer and publisher in Paris of English-language books often considered obscene.

Jack Kahane had been born in Manchester, and as a young British soldier in World War I he had suffered lung damage from German gasses in the battle of Ypres. But his contempt for the Germans was matched after the war by his disenchantment with Britain, its stringent conformity and enduring Victorianism, and long before the government had instituted its tirades against D. H. Lawrence, Kahane had abandoned England and returned with his piquant French wife to the Continent, where he eventu
ally established the Obelisk Press in Paris, and befriended Henry Miller, and became the first publisher of
Tropic of Cancer
.

In addition to his own immodest novels, Kahane published works by Cyril Connolly and Anaïs Nin, Frank Harris’
My Life and Loves
, Joyce’s poetry and excerpts from
Finnegans Wake
, and Lawrence Durrell’s first novel,
The Black Book
. But shortly after completing his
Memoirs of a Booklegger
in 1939, Kahane died, leaving to his twenty-year-old son, Maurice, along with several unpaid bar bills, the challenge of continuing the Obelisk Press.

For a time the business survived partly through the presence in Paris of American G.I.s who purchased in abundance the works of Miller and Harris and the “Memoirs” of Fanny Hill. But Maurice Girodias made political enemies in Paris after he had published an exposé written by a French Resistance figure charging collusion between public officials and business leaders; and while Girodias was vindicated of libel by a French court, he felt thereafter more conspicuous and vulnerable as a publisher, and in time he began receiving visits from inspectors inquiring about obscenity.

First he was questioned about the works of Miller, which had gone unchallenged for years, and then Nabokov’s
Lolita
was declared obscene many months after it had been published. Next there were objections to Genet’s
Our Lady of the Flowers
and to the Victorian tale
Under the Hill
, written and illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.

Suddenly it seemed to Girodias that the liberal tradition of France, the legacy of a bloody revolution, was being subverted by reactionary forces within the government, and his feelings were shared by several political observers and correspondents then residing in France; one of them, David Schoenbrun, believed that the nation’s military frustrations in Indo-China and Algeria had convinced many prideful patriots that France lacked discipline, that excessive permissiveness had drained the nation’s resourcefulness, and that what was needed was a restoration of order, obedience, and old-style morality.

As the purge of pornography often signals the rise of a righteous, illiberal regime—one of Hitler’s first acts in the early 1930s was to ban nudist camps and the instructional sex book
Ideal Marriage
—the harassment of Girodias during the latter 1950s presaged the elevation to power of General Charles de Gaulle and his dour and pious wife. Under de Gaulle, the Catholic Church and the military enjoyed increased prestige and influence, and soon Maurice Girodias fell victim to what he called the “priggish virtues” of bourgeois extremism, and about France he would write in his memoir: “All the fun and gaiety have left this nation; the Algerian war chased the last colonies of young artists and loafers away from Paris; in this hygienic-looking city, whitewashed by government decree, the spirit is dead, the secular feast is ended.”

Girodias closed the Paris office of the Olympia Press and spent much time in America, where the new definition of obscenity that Roth had provoked helped to transfer a blithe semblance of the literary Left Bank to New York’s Greenwich Village, to San Francisco’s North Beach, to Los Angeles’ Venice, and to the Near North Side of Chicago. Espresso coffeehouses were flourishing in major cities, beatnik writers and poets were prospering, paperback books by Genet and Beckett were selling well in university bookshops, and
Lolita
, still banned in France, was considered legal in the United States and published by G. P. Putnam’s in 1958, one year before Barney Rosset’s Grove Press would release
Lady Chatterley’s Lover

While the French were following their antiquated hero, Americans were becoming increasingly weary of
their
aging general, were mimicking Eisenhower’s garbled statements to the White House press, and were offended and embarrassed when, after he had set aside Russian charges in 1960 that American spy planes were patrolling over Soviet territory, his deception was exposed by the confession of an American U-2 pilot who had just been shot down and captured by the Russians.

This was one of many incidents that contributed to growing public doubts about the integrity and supremacy of American leadership, and it also served to symbolize a younger generation’s departure from the policies and practices of the past. As the U-2 pilot had violated military tradition in confessing to the enemy—an unthinkable act during Eisenhower’s army days—so were multitudes of younger Americans now disregarding the codes and inhibitions that had influenced their parents, and they thus were contributing to the foundation of a new society that would be less secret, more open, less conformist—a society that would soon be demanding free speech on campuses, denouncing racism, burning draft cards during the Vietnamese war. While most of these and similar acts of defiance would be associated historically with the mid-sixties and later, the initial tremors were felt years before when Eisenhower was still the President; and many early signs of this schismatic trend were sexual.

In 1959 a moviemaker named Russ Meyer, once a cheesecake photographer for men’s magazines, produced a film called
The Immoral Mr. Teas
that displayed the bare breasts and buttocks of attractive Hollywood starlets. Taking advantage of the recently liberalized obscenity law, Meyer was able to exhibit his film in several art theaters around the nation, reaching an audience much larger than the usual crowd of lonely men, and, on a total investment of only $24,000, Meyer’s film earned a million-dollar profit. This quickly inspired dozens of imitating films that featured nudity, and it launched the multimillion-dollar “skin flick” market in America.

Although Lenny Bruce’s nightclub routines continued to be raided by the police, the obscenity charges against him were often overturned on appeal, allowing him to continue (until his death from drugs in 1966) his harangues against American hypocrisy, his defense of pornography as free speech, and his sardonic speculations on the sexuality of censors and clergymen.

While the nude photographs of women had heretofore appeared almost exclusively in men’s magazines,
Harper’s Bazaar
in 1960 printed a picture by Richard Avedon of a bare-breasted
blond socialite, Christina Paolozzi, that prompted her expulsion from the Social Register but established her as a media celebrity and promoted the
Bazaar
as a trend-setter in flaunting fashion.

Throughout the country average middle-class citizens were becoming less squeamish about nudity in films and magazines, and more accepting of brief bikinis on beaches. An influencing factor was no doubt
Playboy
magazine, which, now in its seventh year as an advocate of greater freedom and an irrepressible promoter of the bikini, was selling copies openly and prodigiously not only at urban newsstands but also in small-town drugstores. The magazine also appealed to national advertisers because it had captured a large portion of the affluent youth market—25 percent of all copies were sold on college campuses. Many older Americans who were still repulsed by
Playboy
’s content were nevertheless impressed by the magazine’s commercial success, and juries now seemed less likely than before to convict the purveyors of similar periodicals, even in Mayor Daley’s Chicago.