Gershon Legman - Life and Work

Life and Work

Legman was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania to Emil and Julia Friedman Legman, both of Hungarian/Romanian Jewish descent; his father was a railroad clerk and butcher. According to an obituary by his friend Jay Landesman in The Independent of London, in a childhood incident, classmates "wrote the word 'kosher' in horse-shit juice across his forehead." He regarded the event as formative, and he would insist throughout his life that violence and sadism so prominent in American culture resulted directly from the suppression of sex.

Legman was an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, except during 1964-1965 when he was a writer in residence at the University of California at La Jolla, in the first year of the new campus' undergraduate programs. He pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo materials in folklore. He also was a talented raconteur and could spin out tales non-stop for hours.

As a young man he acquired a number of interests including sexuality, erotic folklore, also origami—for which he was a pivotal figure in founding the modern international movement. In 1940, at age 23, he wrote Oragenitalism, Part I: Cunnilinctus under the pen-name Roger-Maxe de la Glannege (an anagram of his real name). Nearly all copies were seized by the police and destroyed. For a period of time he was a bibliographic researcher with the Kinsey Institute.

In 1949, he published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship, arguing that American culture was permissive of graphic violence in proportion to, and as a consequence of, its repression of the erotic. Legman published and shipped the treatise himself, although he ran afoul of the United States Postal Service authorities, who stopped his deliveries due to the supposed "indecent, vulgar and obscene" content. The book also included a chapter that attacked contemporary comic books as harmful to children; because his critique drew about his view that it was a consequence of the aforementioned cultural permissive views toward violence he wasn't a leading voice during the subsequent debate about the impact of comics that instead was dominated by Fredric Wertham.

Love and Death was an outgrowth of the little magazine Neurotica, edited by Jay Landesman and published in nine issues between 1948 and 1952. Legman was a regular contributor and eventually took over from Landesman as the editor. Other contributors included John Clellon Holmes, Larry Rivers, Carl Solomon, Judith Malina, Allen Ginsberg, Marshall McLuhan, and Kenneth Patchen, which gave it influence disproportionate to its small circulation of a few thousand. The magazine had a few clashes with the authorities, and closed after the censors objected to an article on castration written by Legman.

The full set of Neurotica was reprinted in one volume by Hacker Art Books, New York, in 1963. The Horn Book : Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography was a collection of assorted writings from the 1950s and 1960s. He was a prolific writer of essays, reviews and scholarly introductions, including those for the anonymous Victorian erotic memoir My Secret Life (1966), Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Secret Tales (1966), and Mark Twain's The Mammoth Cod (1976). He supplemented his income at times through the sale of rare erotica.

On account of his trial for violating United States Post Office regulations in his distributing his book Love & Death, Legman found it prudent to depart out of the United States.

In 1953 Legman left his native United States for a farm La Clé des Champs in the village of Valbonne in the South of France, where he was able to pursue his intellectual interests with greater freedom. In 1955 he organized an exhibition of Akira Yoshizawa's work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Legman spent several decades compiling specimens of bawdy humor including limericks. In 1970 his first volume of over 1700 limericks (published in 1953 by Les Hautes Etudes, Paris) was released in the United States as The Limerick. He followed this with a second volume, The New Limerick in 1977, which was reprinted as More Limericks in 1980. His magnum opus was Rationale of the Dirty Joke: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor), a tour de force of erotic folklore, succeeded by No Laughing Matter : Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, 2nd Series for which a subscription had to be paid to support publishing, as no publisher would touch it after Grove did volume one in 1968. Near the end of his life, he edited Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, two volumes of bawdy songs and lore collected by Vance Randolph (both 1992). Other achievements include his edition of Robert Burns' The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1965).