Samuel Roth - Career As A Man of Letters and Publisher

Career As A Man of Letters and Publisher

A poet in his youth, Roth's work was praised by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Maurice Samuel, and Ezra Pound, among others. After World War I he founded a bookshop, and traveled to London in 1921 to interview European writers, hoping to sell his essays to magazines. Roth's poetry appeared in several respected magazines, such as The Maccabean and The Hebrew Standard, and in anthologies. His sequence of 18 sonnets, "Nustscha" (composed c. 1915-18) is an elegy to his home town in Galicia. His “Sonnets on Sinai,” in The Menorah Journal are also notable. The speaker in the poems plans to visit Sinai in order to return the Ten Commandments to God, since so many peoples of the world have relegated them to the walls of their public buildings in order to lie to themselves about their own moral rot.

During this time, he wrote two well-reviewed books on the state of the “two worlds” of Europe and America, and the situation of the Jews on both continents. Europe: A Book for America (Boni and Liveright, 1919) is a long prophetic poem predicting the decay of Europe and the promise of America. Now and Forever (McBride, 1925) is an imaginary “conversation” between Roth and the great British writer Israel Zangwill on the merits of Diaspora and Zionism for the Jewish people. Zangwill praised Roth for his “poetry and pugnacity.”

In the mid-1920s, with money earned by establishing a school for teaching immigrants English, Roth founded four literary magazines, including Beau, a forerunner of Esquire and perhaps the first American “men’s magazine.” The most important products in his short-lived magazine empire were the quarterly Two Worlds and Two Worlds Monthly. He chose to publish, in at least some cases without permission, some of the sexually explicit contemporary authors, including (in Two Worlds Monthly), segments of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce won an injunction to stop Roth from printing these expurgated installments. Joyce's publisher Sylvia Beach, at the writer's urging, engineered an international protest in 1927 against Roth, although the nature of copyright law at the time made the charge of piracy debatable. The results were Roth, due to the well-organized protest of 167 authors against him, becoming an international literary pariah, and Random House’s winning its case to "de-censor" Ulysses in 1934. Roth soon after published pirated editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, most probably the first American to do so. After a raid on his Fifth Avenue warehouse by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1929, Roth spent over a year in prison on Welfare Island, and in Philadelphia, for distributing pornography.

Roth had an unerring sense of literary merit, but since he had no money or status, and because of the international protest, he was ignored by established writers, and outbid by wealthier, better connected Jewish publishers (Alfred A. Knopf, Thomas Seltzer, Bennett Cerf, Horace Liveright). He did not ask permission of some of the best writers he published not only in his underground publications but in his trade imprint, William Faro, Inc. The reputation of "that pirate Roth" spread to all corners of the literary establishment.

Roth’s instinct for discovering political corruption was first rate. Due to the nature of his popular audience, he appealed to sensationalism. He understood the energy that made Broadway, Washington, and Hollywood glamour irresistible, but his readership demanded romantic clichés and prurient gossip. So Roth sensationalized his exposes and his advertising copy. He did well with his Faro imprint in the early 1930s. His expurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a big seller, as were reprints of classic erotica (especially Mirbeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid), from which books explicit sex was excised. Another interesting William Faro novel was A Scarlet Pansy (Robert Scully, 1932), an early, sympathetic account of a flamboyant homosexual. In 1931, Roth published an expose of Herbert Hoover (The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags) which sold extremely well.

The Wall Street Crash forced Roth into bankruptcy. What followed was the most complex episode in Roth’s life, the one that brought him the most rejection, and the one wherein his degraded status as a pirate and pornographer most unhinged him. This was his infamous anti-Semitic tract, Jews Must Live (subtitled “The Persecution of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilization”). It was self-published in 1934. Written under the pressures of bankruptcy, and the advantage taken of that by colleagues in the underground economy of erotica publishing, this example of ethnic honesty is a terrified response to insecurity and a substitute for self-examination. An embarrassment to the family and to the writer himself, Jews Must Live is, ironically, evidence of an imperiousness and irascibility that served Roth well in his iconoclastic efforts against the established legal and moral absolutes he challenged. He later renounced the work, and started to write an (unpublished) revision.