A Rare Book's Roll-Call of Dishonest, Immoral, and Unusual People

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1813, James Caulfield published a new, expanded, three-volume edition of his  Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, From the Reign of Edward the Third, to the Revolution, containing 109 engraved plates and 292 pages of accompanying text,  finishing the work originally issued in two volumes 1794-1795 with sixty plates and 214 pages of biographical material.

Caulfield's purpose was to embellish with prints the "twelfth class" section found in James Granger's Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, consisting of Characters dispersed in different Classes (2 vols., 1769), the "twelfth class" being those ‘such as lived to a great age, deformed persons, convicts, &c.’

It is, in short, an illustrated rogue's gallery of the odd, the dubious, the notorious, the eccentric, and the disreputable including:

Mother Damnable, the epitome of ugliness and the cursing, scolding, fuming, fire-flinging shrew not to confused with Mother Louse;

 

Blash De Manfre, the human Trevi Fountain commonly called the Water Spouter, who earned fame for drinking water in large quantities and regurgitating it as various sorts of wine, simple waters, beer, oil, and milk;

Elynour Rummin, the famous Ale-Wife of England, with "nose some deal hooked, and curiously crooked, never stopping but ever dropping; her skin loose and slacke, grain'd like a sacke, with a crooked back," but whose ale was renowned as A-1;

Margaret Vergh Gryifith, who had a six-inch horn protruding from her forehead;

Mrs. Mary Davis, who one-upped Margaret Vergh Gryifith with two horns growing on her head that would shed and grow again;

Francis Battaglia, alas not known as "Frankie Batts," who would devour half a peck of stones within 24-hours and six days later excrete them as sand through a colon with true grit;

John Clavell, the gentleman highwayman who wrote elegant poetry that begged mercy from judges, nobles,  and King, and was the author of A Recantation of an ill-led Life: Or, a discovery of the Highway Law (1627);

Archibald "Archie" Armstrong, the sharp-tongued master of buffoonery while jester to James I and Charles I, who earned renown and fortune as a Jacobean wise-acre, retired and became a loan-shark, and wrote A Banquet of Jeasts. Or Change of cheare: Being a collection of moderne jests. Witty ieeres. Pleasant taunts. Merry tales (1630);

Ann Turner, "a gentlewoman that from her youth had been given over to a loose kind of life, of low stature, fair visage, for outward behavior comely, but in prodigality and excess riotous," and was executed for murder;  

 Innocent Nat Witt, a poor, harmless idiot;

Moll Cut-Purse, "a woman of a masculine spirit and make [who] practised or was instrumental to almost every crime and frolick;"

Roger Crab, the sack-cloth wearing vegan hermit;

Mary Aubrey, who murdered her abusive husband then chopped him to pieces and cast him thither and yon;

Robert Fielding, gambler, bigamist, suspected murderer, and the vainest of all fops; 

Augustine Barbara Venbek, aka Barbara Urselin, whose "whole body and even her face was covered with curled hair of yellow color and very soft like wool";

Mary Carleton, who used more aliases than any knave in the Kingdom, was married three times, robbed and cheated several people, was often taken to be a German princess or at least a woman of quality, and was tried for bigamy and acquitted;

Mull'd-Sack, b. John Cottington, the genius pickpocket and miscreant who, one night while drunk, accidentally married an hermaphrodite named Aniseed-Water Robin (credited with twice impregnating himself and giving birth to a boy and a girl) in Fleet prison, "the common place for joining all rogues and whores together"; and many more.

James Caulfield (1764–1826) was an author and printseller. "Many old English portrait prints were too rare and valuable to supply the extraordinarily large demand for them. To this end, many old plates were republished and many old prints were copied. Caulfield came to specialize in prints illustrating Granger's twelfth class of people—‘such as lived to a great age, deformed persons, convicts, &c.’—whose portraits were very often the hardest to come by. In 1788 he began his work Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters of Remarkable Persons, a series of reproductions of old portrait paintings and copies of rare old or popular prints accompanied by letterpress biographies" (Oxford DNB).

(In a bibliographical aside, Granger's book made fashionable the practice of extra-illustrating historical or topological books, i.e. pasting in illustrations from other sources, which became known as "grangerizing" existing texts).

In 1819 Caulfield further extended his book to include Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, from the Revolution in 1688 to the end of the Reign of George II.

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CAULFIELD, James. Portraits, Memoirs, and Characters, of Remarkable Persons, From the Reign of Edward the Third, to the Revolution. Collected From the Most Authentic Accounts Extant. A New Edition, Completing the Twelfth Class of Granger's Biographical History of England; With Many Additional Rare Portraits. London: Printed for R.S. Kirby, 1813.

New edition, expanded and completing the original two volumes 1794-95. Three tall octavo volumes (10 x 5 7/8 in; 254 x 149 mm). viii, 104; [2], [105]-198; [2], [201]-292 pp. 109 engraved plates (one folding), including engravings based upon the drawings of Marcellus Laroon (1653-1702). Publisher's original blue paper covered boards with white printed spine labels

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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A Rosary of Teardrops: The Life of Henry Darger

by Alastair Johnston 

HENRY DARGER: THROWAWAY BOY The Tragic Life of an Outsider Artist by Jim Elledge (Overlook Duckworth, 2013, 396 pp., illus., $29.95)

Long after his death in 1973 Henry Darger emerged, first as another curious figure in Outsider Art in America, then gradually, as the extent of his work became known, as a remarkable self-taught artist whose obsessions resulted in awkward, childish, brilliantly colored surreal paintings and the longest work of fiction ever written, In the Realms of the Unreal.

John M. MacGregor, a psychologist interested in the mental state of Outsider Artists, wrote the first study of his work (which appeared as Dans les Royaumes de l’Irréel: le Monde de Henry Darger, from Art Brut in Lausanne, 1995, before appearing in English), stating emphatically that Darger had "the mind of a serial killer" and was possibly a "murderer and pedophile." During his decline into senility, Darger’s landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, hired a neighbor to clear out the packrat’s Chicago apartment and only then discovered it contained art and writing: the distillation of his years of longing and scavenging in quest of something unobtainable. The landlords’ (who benefited to the tune of millions from Darger’s art) only acquaintance with the recluse had been occasional remarks about the weather when they ran into him. They had no idea this soul was someone who had been brought to tears by snowfall as a child.

In fact his whole miserable life was one of complete obscurity. Based on the startling artworks (some 300 paintings found in his apartment), a disturbing portrait emerged among critics of Darger as a sexually frustrated lunatic with a vague grasp of children’s anatomy and an insatiable blood-lust. Now we have a full scale biography, meticulously researched and imaginatively reconstructed by Jim Elledge to put Darger's art in a whole new light. Fortunately Elledge is a writer with a grasp of history, particularly the little-known history of gays in the late nineteenth century, and his discourse is free of terms like "discourse" -- not to mention "reification" or "structuralism."

In “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), Charles Baudelaire posited that “genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered at will.” Many artists use memory and reflection, remembrances of things past, as the inspiration for their work. But the innocence and curiosity of childhood are lost as we grow up. Like Balthus, Darger got stuck in adolescence, and the key to Darger is his childhood. So Elledge takes us back to the sordid corner of West Madison Street, Chicago, where Henry Darger Junior was created. His parents were German immigrants scrabbling to raise themselves up to a better life in the new world. Darger’s father was a tailor but, unlike his hard-working brothers who rose out of poverty, Darger’s father was a drunkard, and after the death of his wife in childbirth he became more dissolute and lived with the boy in a run-down shack. Young Henry was raised on the streets. He lied, stole and fought and showed a taste for pyromania.

Various Catholic do-gooders attempted to give him some education but he resisted, slashing one teacher with a knife, and ended up running with gangs of boys who would entice and then roll homosexuals. In school he acted out so much (speaking in voices) the other kids nicknamed him “Crazy.” Older boys and men would protect young Henry, who was small for his age, in return for sexual favors. It was the only route he knew to money and food. We know he was sexually promiscuous because among other things he was locked up at age 12 for excessive and sometimes public masturbation.

Fifty years from now Americans will marvel at the ludicrousness and expense we incurred to imprison people for possessing marijuana. Pot smoking is not a social evil, incarceration is. A century ago the insane asylums were full of people who had syphilis or were habitual masturbators. Spilling your vital seed, your “precious bodily fluids,” as fans of Dr Strangelove know, is a fatal weakness. But recognized authorities like Dr Kellogg (father of the flakes) expounded about the effeminacy that resulted from excessive wanking. In those days a man or boy who jerked off was considered to be temporarily transformed into a girl while his body regenerated his manly essence. Homosexuals were only of one type: men who dressed as women, wore makeup and had floral names, like Daisy or Violet. Machos who liked punking other men or boys were considered normal heteros with a taste for variety. Society thought the evils of masturbation and homosexuality were so great that the only sure cure was castration.

At Jennie Richee, n.d. (detail)

In Elledge's view, the little girls with penises, familiar from Darger’s massive paintings, are not hermaphrodites or freaks — or the product of his ignorance of female anatomy — they are emasculated boys.

Henry failed at schoolwork. If he received any money from his aunt he would be punished as a thief. If he told on the others they would extract sadistic revenge. He did have an interest in history, particularly the American Civil War which had ended three decades earlier. When a teacher mentioned that so many thousand men had died at some battle, Henry said that he had read three different figures in three different books therefore could not agree with the teacher’s estimate. Punished for being a wise guy, he soon shut up. Tales of life in the dark corridors of the Mission of Our Lady of Mercy reminded me of Papillon on Devil’s Island, without the tattoos and shrunken heads, but still pretty vicious. But the “vice, degeneracy and abnormal behavior” exhibited by Henry meant the Catholics couldn’t control him and asked his father to remove him.

At this point the father, turning down an incredibly generous offer from one of the matrons to adopt the lad, handed him over to the State Insane Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, 150 miles away on the prairie where he could forget about him. He was enrolled, unartfully, as Henry Dodger (later amended to Dagett). Henry thought the food was good and plenty, and he wolfed down heapings of breakfast oatmeal. Interestingly the asylum fodder was considered wormy oatmeal, wormy prunes and rotten meat, which suggests that the food in the Catholic home had been worse!

Untitled, pencil & watercolor, n.d., (detail)

The children were beaten with boards, raped and punished in many sadistic ways. One of the guards’ tricks was strangulation with a towel, which didn’t leave marks, until the child’s tongue lolled and they passed out. Deaths from castrations gone wrong led to an inquiry and the newspapers reported the sordid details: a 1907 investigative committee was shocked at the seeming callousness of the hospital staff. The committee reported that there were many problems that needed attention, in particular, although it was called The Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children, there were many children of normal intelligence there as well as many adults (transferred from overcrowded prisons) who were left unsupervised after 10 p.m. in the dormitories with the children.

The girls fared as badly as the boys, one was gnawed by rats and lost a finger as well as much of her skin, another died after being put in a scalding hot bath. Her piercing screams were ignored. After Darger’s father’s death he wrote “I was very dangerous if not left alone.” As he entered his teens Henry could no longer face the future in this institution which now consigned him to full days of farm labor. He tried to escape, was captured and roped and led back tied to a horse like a beast. His second attempt was also a failure, but by the time he was 16 he managed to hop a freight and ride back to Chicago. But once there he had no idea what to do but surrender to police who sent him back to the city nuthouse where he had been locked up as a 6 year old. After a month he was returned to the Asylum but fled again, this time going South where he worked for a farmer for a few days and then set off to walk the 160 miles back to Chicago. After a five year absence, he showed up on his aunt’s doorstep and told her he had been cured of his insanity and discharged.

At Norma Catherine. Are captured again by Glandelinian Cavalry

His relatives didn’t know what to do with him, but all he wanted from them was to know what had happened to the baby sister who had been given up for adoption. This was the central puzzle of his life. He couldn’t believe her lot had been as bad as his. His godmother didn’t exactly welcome him with open arms, but called on an old acquaintance, a nun who worked at St Joseph’s Hospital, and managed to get Henry hired as a janitor. However, the nurses and nuns all knew he had been in the asylum and gave him a wide berth and any time they thought he needed a reality check they threatened to send him back. He worked long hours in return for a room and board. 

But then in 1911 his life changed. Darger met an older man, "Whillie" Schloeder, and the two had a friendship that lasted until Schloeder’s death in 1959. They were photographed together thrice and all indications are that they were a couple. With some stability now in his life Henry began writing and illustrating his novel in the style of a children's book, In the Realms of the Unreal. Endless and unreadable, it occupied him for the rest of his life.

Michael Bonesteel published excerpts in his book on Darger and now Elledge has gone further to identify sources and point out the parallels to Darger’s own life in the story of the seven Vivian girls and the war between good and evil. The Vivian girls are fairies in both senses of the word: girls in spirit trapped in boys' bodies, as well as beings from an unearthly realm. There are numerous clues to Henry as Marie, one of the characters, and also the fact that he notes that the real author is Annie Aronburg, another alter-ego. He copied out important personal documents into his notebooks but always changed his own name to Annie Aronburg. Later he used pseudonyms, including Dargarius, claiming he was born in Brazil, and as proof would sing a children's marching song in Portuguese.

It was the abduction, rape and strangulation of a 5-year-old child named Elsie Paroubek that set Henry off. As a janitor he would find all the day's papers discarded in the hospital waiting rooms and could follow the drama which unfolded for a month before the child's corpse was found in a canal. There had been a monumental hunt for the girl, including pursuit of an Italian organ grinder and the belief that she had been kidnapped by gypsies and forced to beg. Another little girl, Lillian Wulff, who had escaped from gypsies showed remarkable strength of character and advised the police. But in the end the murderer was never apprehended.

Henry empathized with the tiny victim because it was the kind of abuse he had put up with all through his childhood. Although Henry had escaped with his life, he "understood her fear, her wanting to be back with her family, and what it meant to be raped and strangled. She became an emblem to him of his own abuse." He was moved to begin writing In the Realms of the Unreal. The illustrations were based on popular sources, Saturday Evening Post, the Sunday funnies etc, but were subsumed by Darger into his own fantasy and took on the sinister qualities of torture and disembowelment found in Japanese guro manga today.

A second novel, Further Adventures in Chicago: Crazy House, is even more autobiographical, as Elledge points out, interweaving stories from Darger's life with fiction based on his library as well as his established cast of characters (Penrod -- a readymade boy hero from Booth Tarkington -- and the Vivian girls), but this time set in Chicago, rather than a fantasyland. The hero, Webber George, is badly behaved and mad at God for not making him a girl. (The surname George is common among the Romany or gypsy families but Elledge doesn't pursue this.) Many of Webber's escapades are drawn directly from Darger's autobiography and he himself enters the narrative to say, "the writer knows quite a number of boys who would give anything to have been born a girl."

Creative activity quelled his pent-up rage and inner torment, since "God had made his life a rosary of miseries and tragedy." A third work, promisingly titled The History of My Life, written in his seventies, derails into an apocalyptic revenge tale of a tornado (appropriated from Oz, though Darger had witnessed the devastation of a tornado personally) named Sweetie Pie that wreaks havoc on the Midwest, destroying all those places where Darger had suffered.

We now have several coffee-table books reproducing the remarkable art of Henry Darger and this biography fills in the sad details behind the work: his life of pain and despair, religious anguish and daily misery. (As an aside, all of the works of Darger are marked © Kiyoko Lerner, but this would never stand up in court. Apart from the fact he has living relatives, most of the work is not registered with the copyright office and she could not prove legal entitlement [See U.S. Copyright Law, Involuntary Transfer of Ownership, Section §201 (e)].)

What remains? We know he had a cupboard full of books including all of L. Frank Baum, some Dickens, books about the Great Fire of Chicago, and a mass of ephemera, pictures clipped from magazines to be traced and collaged into his art, which he pasted into old phone books. He also had a collection of 78 rpm records that he played into the night while he worked: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Chopin. Darger would be astounded at this interest in his life. (Even the little victim "Elsie Paroubek" brings up 65,000 Google search results.)

Acres of manuscript remain for the doctoral thesis machine to pick over before we wring all the sentimentality out of one of the saddest lives ever saved from the rubbish dump and held up for our contemplation.
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A Glutton Of Literature Hungry For Learning But Starved Of Wisdom

by Stephen J. Gertz

Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848).

 The following is excerpted from Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature, originally published in 1791 and expanded to multiple volumes in 1793, 1807, 1817, and 1823 (Second Series). A compilation of literary anecdotes and lore, this piece appears as Article 121, a cautionary tale about the dangers of reading too much, thinking about it too little, and thus becoming "a living Cyclopædia, though a dark lantern."

"Anthony Magliabechi, who died at the age of eighty, was celebrated for his great knowledge of books. He has been called the Helluo, or the Glutton of Literature, as Peter Comestor received his nickname from his amazing voracity for food he could never digest; which appeared when having fallen sick of so much false learning, he threw it all up in his “Sea of Histories,” which proved to be the history of all things, and a bad history of everything. Magliabechi’s character is singular; for though his life was wholly passed in libraries, being librarian to the Duke of Tuscany, he never wrote himself. There is a medal which represents him sitting, with a book in one hand, and with a great number of books scattered on the ground. The candid inscription signifies, that “it is not sufficient to become learned to have read much, if we read without reflection.” This is the only remains we have of his own composition that can be of service to posterity. A simple truth, which may however be inscribed in the study of every man of letters.

"His habits of life were uniform. Ever among his books, he troubled himself with no other concern whatever, and the only interest he appeared to take for any living thing was his spiders; for whom, while sitting among his literary piles, he affected great sympathy; and perhaps in contempt of those whose curiosity appeared impertinent, he frequently cried out, “to take care not to hurt his spiders!” Although he lost no time in writing himself, he gave considerable assistance to authors who consulted him. He was himself an universal index to all authors. He had one book, among many others, dedicated to him, and this dedication consisted of a collection of titles of works which he had had at different times dedicated to him, with all the eulogiums addressed to him in prose and verse. When he died, he left his large collection of books for the public use; they now compose the public library of Florence.

"Heyman, a celebrated Dutch professor, visited this erudite librarian, who was considered as the ornament of Florence. He found him amongst his books, of which the number was prodigious. Two or three rooms in the first story were crowded with them, not only along their sides, but piled in heaps on the floor, so that it was difficult to sit, and more so to walk. A narrow space was contrived, indeed, so that by walking sideways you might extricate yourself from one room to another. This was not all; the passage below stairs was full of books, and the staircase from the top to the bottom was lined with them. When you reached the second story, you saw with astonishment three rooms, similar to those below, equally full, so crowded, that two good beds in these chambers were also crammed with books.

1848, all in one volume edition.

"This apparent confusion did not, however, hinder Magliabechi from immediately finding the books he wanted. He knew them all so well, that even to the least of them it was sufficient to see its outside, to say what it was; and indeed he read them day and night, and never lost sight of any. He ate on his books, he slept on his books, and quitted them as rarely as possible. During his whole life he only went twice from Florence; once to see Fiesoli, which is not above two leagues distant, and once ten miles farther by order of the Grand Duke. Nothing could be more simple than his mode of life; a few eggs, a little bread, and some water, were his ordinary food. A drawer of his desk being open, Mr. Heyman saw there several eggs, and some money which Magliabechi had placed there for his daily use. But as this drawer was generally open, it frequently happened that the servants of his friends, or strangers who came to see him, pilfered some of these things; the money or the eggs.

"His dress was as cynical as his repasts. A black doublet, which descended to his knees; large and long breeches; an old patched black cloak; an amorphous hat, very much worn, and the edges ragged; a large neckcloth of coarse cloth, begrimed with snuff; a dirty shirt, which he always wore as long as it lasted, and which the broken elbows of his doublet did not conceal; and, to finish this inventory, a pair of ruffles which did not belong to the shirt. Such was the brilliant dress of our learned Florentine; and in such did he appear in the public streets, as well as in his own house. Let me not forget another circumstance; to warm his hands, he generally had a stove with fire fastened to his arms, so that his clothes were generally singed and burnt, and his hands scorched. He had nothing otherwise remarkable about him. To literary men he was extremely affable, and a cynic only to the eye; anecdotes almost incredible are related of his memory. It is somewhat uncommon that as he was so fond of literary food, he did not occasionally dress some dishes of his own invention, or at least some sandwiches to his own relish. He indeed should have written CURIOSITIES OF LITERATURE. He was a living Cyclopædia, though a dark lantern.

"Of such reading men, Hobbes entertained a very contemptible, if not a rash opinion. His own reading was inconsiderable, and he used to say, that if he had spent as much time in reading as other men of learning, he should have been as ignorant as they. He put little value on a large library, for he considered all books to be merely extracts and copies, for that most authors were like sheep, never deviating from the beaten path. History he treated lightly, and thought there were more lies than truths in it. But let us recollect after all this, that Hobbes was a mere metaphysician, idolising his own vain and empty hypotheses. It is true enough that weak heads carrying in them too much reading may be staggered. Le Clerc observes of two learned men, De Marcily and Barthius, that they would have composed more useful works had they read less numerous authors, and digested the better writers."

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I am indebted to J.J. Philips for drawing my attention to this piece from Curiosities of Literature, a book with which I am familiar but have not, admittedly, read in its entirety.

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The whole book may be read online at Spamula or Project Gutenberg.

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The Most Notorious Publisher In American History

by Stephen J. Gertz

He stood at the crossroads of Modernism and censorship, twentieth century literature, copyright law, and cultural history. He introduced America to James Joyce's Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, Alfred Jarry's The Garden of Priapus, etc. He also published Loose Shoulder Straps by "Alain Dubois" aka poet, litterateur, and author of The Rhyming Dictionary, Clement Wood; Padlocks and Girdles of Chastity by Alcide Bonneau (1928); Sacred Prostitution and Marriage By Capture (1932); Lady Chatterley's Husbands (1931, written by Antony Gudaitis, aka Tony Gud);  and the famed homoerotic novel, A Scarlet Pansy (1932 deluxe issue, by "Robert Scully," almost surely poet Robert McAlmon, with a 1933 trade edition). He edited and published Two Worlds, a hardbound literary quarterly whose contributing editors were Arthur Symons, Ezra Pound, and Ford Maddox Ford. He was a master of mail-order book sales. The list of imprints he established is as long as a leg. He was Jean Valjean to New York Society For the Supression of Vice leader John S. Sumner's Javert. He spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. He gave his name to a  key Supreme Court 1st Amendment decision. Samuel Roth's personal and professional activities - they were one and the same - ultimately allowed Americans to read whatever they wanted to; his sacrifice at the Court in 1957 made it safe for U.S. citizens to buy legal American copies of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in 1958 and William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch in 1959 without Mrs. Grundy at their door with SWAT team and incinerator.

Roth, at right, in his Poetry Book Shop, Greenwich Village 1920.

"Samuel Roth…was a man of considerable culture. Some of the material he sold was trash; some of it was unquestionably literature" (Charles Rembar). He believed that "reading is itself is a great good, any kind of reading is better than no reading and some people will read only rather low material, which I am willing to supply" (Samuel Roth, as paraphrased by his attorney, Charles Rembar, in his The End of Obscenity).

Sam Roth (1893-1974), if he is remembered at all, is infamous for his literary piracies. After he serially published twelve excerpts from Joyce's Ulysses without authorization in Two Worlds, Sylvia Beach, who had published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris, at Joyce's behest organized an international protest in 1927 against Roth with 167 internationally respected intellectuals and artists signing the document, including Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Albert Einstein. He was immediately vilified. This incident has deeply scarred Roth's legacy. Jay A. Gertzman, with evidence not available to earlier scholars, makes a strong case for reappraising Samuel Roth's guilt, both legal and ethical, in a new and definitive biography.

Issue 1, No. 1, December, 1925.

Gertzman, who in his Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940 (1999), exposed the edgy world of the clandestine, East Coast-U.S. publication of sexually-themed literature, has now, after at least fifteen years of research, published this long-awaited biography of Roth, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist, the first deeply researched, full-length investigation of the man and his milieu.

Samuel Roth.

Grade C-Z moviemakers were once consigned to Gower Gulch, a low-rent, run-down section of Hollywood near the major studios but a light year distant from their  superior quality; it was also known as Poverty Row. Brazen upstarts, outsiders, and finaglers with ambition but little money and desperate to distribute their product through a system dominated by the big studios vied for the eyeballs of movie-goers. New York publishers short on cash but long on brash found themselves in similar circumstances. Being proudly Jewish and thus not well-connected to or well-perceived by book publishing's elitist, gentile power-centers didn't help. Having a constitutional attraction to literature, modern and classical, fiction  and non-fiction that defied contemporary moral standards was certainly a disadvantage. A strong anti-authoritarian streak and determination to publish and accept the consequences (but not without a fight) in concert with a fundamental aversion to censorship in a free society only made matters worse. Being a blatant huckster came with the territory; publishing was a Darwinian business. Easily victimized, you did what you had to do to survive. Roth, a downtown publisher with uptown aspirations, was all of these things, and a writer, too, a brilliant Columbia graduate with artistic pretensions and a voice for self-pity. Born in Galacia, he was raised on New York's Lower East Side, where chutzpah was sliced thick and Roth's portion super-sized.

Roth's mug shot, 1930, upon beginning his two-month prison
sentence for selling copies of Joyce's Ulysses in Philadelphia.

An outsider to begin with, the Ulysses controversy made him an outcast, a  pariah for his sin as "desecrater of literary expression." Gertzman carefully mounts a strong case that Roth was not the philistine he has been made out to be. 

• Roth did not "pirate" Ulysses. Because of a clause in contemporary U.S. copyright law written to protect the domestic printing trade, books that were not printed on an American-based press were not granted copyright protection. Ulysses was, within the U.S., in the public domain. Blame Congress.

• There is evidence that Joyce and Roth's mutual friend, Ezra Pound, acting as Joyce's literary agent, gave Roth the go-ahead, and that arrangements for payment had been made.

• Joyce's outrage was disingenuous. While sincerely trying to protect his image as avant-garde genius he was also a shrewd businessman not without keen commercial instincts. The furor of his friends and supporters was exaggerated. Edited excerpts of Ulysses had been previously published and no one complained about it. A managed protest could only increase awareness and build demand for the book's ultimate legal publication in full in the United States (Random House, 1934). Genius aesthete versus greedy capitalist barbarian always makes a good story.

• Joyce's concern that sales of the Beach edition of the book would be hurt by Roth's excerpts to a broad audience (Roth wanted his publications bought by the average man on the street; his overriding goal was to popularize literature of all kinds and get it to the hinterlands) was groundless and something of a canard. With its limited press run and price the Beach edition was never meant or expected to attract a broad readership beyond wealthy collectors.

Gertzman goes on in depth and what we take away is that there is plenty of blame to spread amongst the actors in this bit of literary theater. Roth was not a boogey-man. He was, to a large degree, the perfect scapegoat.

Sketch, undoubtedly by Mahlon Blaine, for an advertisement.

Are you aware that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a memoir concerning his incestuous relationship with his sister, Elisabeth? In 1951 Roth published My Sister and I (NY: Boar's Head) based upon a manuscript in Nietzsche's hand that fell into Roth's possession in 1924. Its first edition went through fourteen printings. He initially advertised its publication in 1924 but ran out of money (Roth never got rich publishing anything, much less Ulysses, and was always in a financial bind of some sort). After a raid on Roth's offices by John S. Sumner in 1929 the manuscript was thought lost. It resurfaced during a 1940s inventory. Real or apocryphal Nietzsche? Gertzman presents the critical arguments, strong on both sides. The jury remains out.

Roth was a big cat who, when wounded, roared and attacked, a Lion of Judah. He was a "steadfast Jew and Zionist...who became so distressed by what he felt was lack of support from his co-religionists that he, after claiming to be instructed by Jesus in a vision, wrote Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All Frontiers of Civilization, a vicious 325-page anti-Semitic tract that was used by Nazis for propaganda and is kept in print by right-wing white-supremacist groups today" (Michael Bronski).

NY: Golden Hind Press, 1934.

• • •

Thrill of the Trade Department:  around ten years ago I had Roth's personal copy of another publisher's piracy of A Scarlet Pansy (NY: Nesor [Rosen, backwards], 1937) pass through my hands. Within, Roth made penciled revisions, cuts, and expurgations for his planned reissue (NY: Royal, 1940). The book also possessed subsequent annotations by sexual folklorist and bibliographer Gershon Legman, who worked for Roth during the 1930s, recording what Roth was up to with this book, from Legman's library, acquired directly from his widow, Judith. I felt as if I was sitting next to Roth as he worked on the book. Thanks, GL.

• • •

Roth lost his 1957 appeal to the Supreme Court to vacate his 1956 conviction for obscenity; he went to jail. But he won the war. The Court's Constitutional test in Roth v. United States - that for a work to be judged obscene its "dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest" of the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" without any redeeming social value whatsoever opened the door to soft-porn. Soon, "redeeming social value" could be found in anything no matter how hard-core, particularly if publishers hired medical professionals or literary critics (real or otherwise) to write prefaces explaining why Doing It With Dad and Brother Dan While Mom Sings Hawaiian War Chant presents an intimate family interpersonal dynamic with deep psychological insight into the human condition and a penetrating sociological view of the exotic byways of love in an All-American metropolis, thus saving it from  Vice Squad condemnation.

Scholars and citizens with an interest in modern literature and the struggle for frank expression and publication of  candid material in a free society will be captivated by Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist. I believe every library should own a copy; it's a must-acquire. For those fascinated by the shadow world of clandestine publishing and modern lit. in the U.S. it's a must-read.

But it's not a free read; you have to pay for it and that's how it should be. Yet at $74.95 it may be a bit too un-free. Issued by University Press of Florida it's a case study of what has gone so wrong with university press and books-on-books publishing. While the volume is very attractive its production quality is not what you'd expect from a book costing $75. And the $75 cost is likely connected to its print run, which, given the current state of the market (dismal), cannot have been more than 500 copies.

I can't help but think that if Roth were alive and the publisher, the book would have been issued as a fine trade paperback for $25 in an initial print-run of 2,000 copies and distributed via mail order and through every newsstand location in the country with accompanying hard-sell suggestive and sensational hoopla and ballyhoo using every free marketing tool available to spread the word that this is a sizzler, a book the major publishers found too hot to handle, an important book on American literary and publishing history about the man who died so that Ulysses, Casanova Jr.'s Tales, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Pageant of Lust, and The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags (Roth's best-selling exposé of President Herbert Hoover, 1931) could live, and made it possible for the huddled masses to not only breathe but read free.

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GERTZMAN, Jay A. Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist.  Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. xxviii, 387, [1] pp. Illustrations throughout. Illustrated boards. $74.95. Release: 4/23/2013.

UPDATE: 
A PRE-PUBLICATION DISCOUNT ($30 total) HAS BEEN EXTENDED THROUGH JUNE: Order online at http://www.upf.com/ book.asp?id=GERTZ001
This link will appear as: University Press of Florida: Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist
Click on “add cloth to cart”
Click on “apply code” (just above the “check out” button) and enter code: PP113
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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface

Chapter One: 1893-1916: From a Galician Shtetl to Columbia University.

Chapter Two: 1917-1925: Prelude to an International Protest: A Rising, Pugnacious Man of Letters.

Chapter Three: 1925-27: “Damn his impertinence. Bloody Crook”: Roth Publishes Joyce.

Chapter Four: 1928-34: Roth Must Live: A Successful Business and Its Bankruptcy.

Chapter Five : 1934: Jews Must Live. “We Meet Our Destiny on the Road We Take To Avoid It”

Chapter Six 1934-39: A Stretch in the Federal Penitentiary.

Chapter Seven: 1940-1949: Roth Breaks Parole, Uncovers a Nazi Plot, Gives “Dame Post Office” Fits, and Tells His Own Story in Mail Order Advertising Copy.

Chapter Eight: 1949-1952: Times Square, Peggy Roth, Southern Gothic, Celine, and Nietzsche.

Chapter Nine: 1952-57: The Windsors, Winchell, Kefauver: Back to Lewisburg.

Chapter Ten: 1958-74: “It Had Been a Long Time since Someone Like You Had Appeared In the World”: Roth Fulfills his Mission.

Appendix: Samuel Roth’s Imprints and Business Names.

Bibliography.

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Other books by Jay A. Gertzman:

A Descriptive Bibliography of Lady Chatterley's Lover. With Essays Toward a Publishing History of the Novel.

Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920-1940. 
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Full Disclosure: Mr. Gertzman and I are friends, and he kindly acknowledges me in the book as a source, however modest my contribution - and it was, indeed, very modest.

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Image of My Sister and I advertisement courtesy of Mr. Gertzman's website, with our thanks.
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Travels with Kapuscinski, Travel Writer Extraordinaire

by Alastair M. Johnston

Ryszard Kapuscinski: a Life, by Artur Domoslawski, Verso, 2012, 456 pp., cloth in d.j.

You know who makes my blood boil? Rick Steves, the twerp with a travel show on American public television. A TV crew follows him around Europe while he stumbles into local museums and fancy hotels with a yokelish manner that yells, Look out natives, it's those culturally deprived Yankees again! He thinks if someone doesn't understand him all he has to do is raise his voice. After all if they don't understand English they should. Well, I suppose there's an audience for his banal brand of travel.

I am more of the adventure travel type: I've been lost in the Nubian desert, pursued by armed bandits in Southern Sudan, attended a Candomblé ceremony in the slums of Brazil (with fireworks to get the Gods' attention), and got so disoriented at a Voodoo ritual in Port-au-Prince that I wandered lost in the backstreets of the Haitian capital half the night until I found the sanctuary of the Oloffson hotel. In my teens I was held at the Bulgarian border, suspected of being an Anarchist because I had long hair. I was freed after a humiliating haircut done with tiny surgical scissors that left long wisps and bald spots, giving me even more of the air of an escaped lunatic. A Sikh man wept as they cut off his beard.

So my kind of travel journalist is always coming across armed roadblocks in the Third World and thinking he is about to get blown away.

"I was waiting for them to set me on fire... I felt an animal fear, a fear that struck me with paralysis ... My life was going to end in inhuman torment." (The Soccer War, pp. 133-4)

Ryszard Kapuscinski is my kind of writer, coming from a tradition that connects Orwell and Marquez. He travels to unusual locales with a purpose: to report on a revolution or insurrection, and while I wouldn't intentionally go into a war zone, it's thrilling to read about it. Like him, I contracted malaria in Africa, and, like him, felt it was the price to pay for the incredible experiences I had there. For years I would scour Granta magazine looking for pieces by Kapuskinski while waiting for an addition to his slim shelf of books (there are but seven of his cultural travelogues). I got the news he had died from the dustjacket of Travels with Herodotus (2004), and it was a sad blow.

Ryszard Kapuscinski was born in 1932 in Pinsk, which was in Eastern Poland then. After the Nazis invaded and killed the Jewish population, the Red army took possession and it became part of Belarus. Kapuscinski had a mother who idolized him and a father who didn't understand him. When his father saw him sitting up late, reading and underlining a book, he told his son: Go to bed, son, by morning I will have underlined the entire thing for you.

But that is later: during the War the father was about to be deported to Siberia so fled to German-occupied Poland and joined the Resistance. Maria, his wife, and children followed — out of the frying pan into the fire. Young Ryszard, 7 years old, experienced terror, poverty and hunger. The War was horrific but he survived by blending in, not trying to be a hero. He was a good Catholic, then a good Communist. So, the author asks, is this how he survived in all his fantastic adventures as an adult? Is the real Ryszard just a writer creating the mythic Ryszard in books about wars & revolutions in Angola, Congo, Iran, Ethiopia and Latin America?

The central question at the core of any biography is, Who was this person? Kapuscinski was a reporter and therefore a good listener and observer. Even those who seemingly were his closest friends only remember him listening. The book is a series of "snapshots," but they are as enigmatic as the close-up of that Polish face with a cigarette and querying eyes, scrutinizing the reader from the front cover.

RK grew up in a Totalitarian system. The way to survive is to keep secrets, to lie constantly, to reinvent oneself. We must not judge people who lived through the War and Stalinism: they did what was necessary. RK was a party member, a keen one; but calling him a "collaborator" is pointless. He was a youth activist, a reporter and a poet. His literary activities were in line with party orthodoxy. Revolutionary propaganda was second nature to him, so it is interesting that we know him as a reporter seemingly outside all the revolutions he witnessed and wrote about in his magisterial works. However one reason the state machines of Iran, Latin America and Ethiopia were so familiar was that he could have been writing about home.

1956 was the year of a great thaw in Poland, a turning point in its history: A youth festival attended by hundreds of thousands of young people saw an influx of Western Europeans who brought jazz, cool colorful clothes and an eagerness to get it on. People were becoming more critical of the regime and changes began to occur. There was still censorship but the truth began to seep out. RK began his career as a foreign correspondent and consequently would miss most of the changes that occurred in his homeland, but he preferred life on the road to being behind a desk.

His first foreign assignment was India (he writes about it in his last book Travels with Herodotus): throwing off the yoke of colonialism meant a lot of countries were turning to the Soviet bloc for ideas, for support and materials; so he also went to China, but cut short a side-trip to Japan when he had to resign from his paper in solidarity with the other reporters who had walked out. His passion for the Third World was stoked and his anti-colonial outlook meant he would become more than a journalist covering politics abroad: he would become an interpreter of cultures.

But while many of us go in search of the exotic, this is not RK's aim:

"The so-called exotic has never fascinated me, even though I came to spend more than a dozen years in a world that is exotic by definition. I did not write about hunting crocodiles or head-hunters although I admit they are interesting subjects. I discovered instead a different reality, one that attracted me more than expeditions to the villages of witch doctors or wild animal reserves. A new Africa was being born — and this was not a figure of speech nor a platitude from an editorial. The hour of its birth was sometimes dramatic and painful, sometimes enjoyable and jubilant; it was always different (from our point of view) from anything we had known, and it was exactly this difference that struck me as new, as the previously undescribed, as the exotic." (The Soccer War, p. 21)

Kapuskinski identified with Africans' struggle under colonialism, but Africans found it hard to believe that whites had colonized other whites, just as they found it hard to understand him when he talked about tramcars or snow. Snow recurs in his work, especially in a wonderful passage about frozen corridors in the mist found in Imperium which can be reread like parts of Dickens, proving ultimately that Kapuskinski is a sensual rather than an intellectual writer. 

He interviews 10-year-old Tanya in Yakutsk:

"One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in the mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child — a small corridor… Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school…
   "If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.
   "Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means — Tanya lowers her voice — that some drunk was walking, tripped, and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street."

But Kapuscinski was known for embroidering his tales and although his friends took his stories with a pinch of salt, he invented a gonzo persona for himself: the death-defying journalist who faced firing squads without flinching and was lucky when someone bought off the commandant with liquor, etc etc. The problem is, according to his biographer, Ryszard began to believe these myths too.

After witnessing the tragic collapse of the revolution in Congo in 1960, RK wrote cynically about the prospects for the nascent state in which the "most backward country in Africa came under the control of the most worthless, insignificant people in Europe" (Belgium) and was carved up by imperialist Western powers, notably the USA. His reports in the press raised nearly 3 million zloty for the Lumumba Fund in Poland. In 1962 RK became the only foreign correspondent of the Polish Press Agency and the whole world became his beat. It really sounds like a classic Polish joke: How many Polish reporters does it take to cover the foreign beat? One.

But that one is astonishing. He witnessed 27 revolutions, civil wars or coups d'etat. He thought it was good to know two or three languages but carried on learning until he knew seven or more. This helped him in Angola and even Gdansk. His African reports are published as "Special bulletins" by the Polish Press Agency, which means high-ranking party officials can read them but their candid analysis of affairs cannot receive wide circulation in the daily press. This puts him in a privileged position: he can speak his mind, but then knows his work is not reaching the widest audience. But these were not all political or economic reports, RK took a delight in meeting everyday people and writing about them. His boss loved his style so didn't chide him when he vanished for weeks on end or turned in short pieces. He used his skill brilliantly. When he was sent to Russia to cover the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, "he writes from the viewpoint of a man who is surprised. This permits him to tell us things about the Soviet system that he couldn't say in any other way. It's a masterpiece — to write so much truth without necessarily being critical. The wolf is fed, and the sheep is still in one piece."

Off to Chile he hears rumors of a coup and sends them home in a not-for-publication special bulletin, but the header gets lost and his article appears on the front page of a daily paper. Salvador Allende looks out for him so instead of arrest he is only deported to Brazil.

Book jackets always refer to him meeting Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba but that is not true: however he never corrected those statements. He didn't have to lie — he was RK, but obviously, Domoslawski thinks, he lacked self-confidence.

What we learn from RK's work is that there is no such thing as objective reporting. He tries to give both viewpoints but you can always see where his sympathies lie. In Angola he gets the story of a lifetime. The Cubans have sent military advisers to the MPLA. This is a bombshell, but how does he know? Well, the Cubans are operating via Russian intermediaries and the only person who speaks Spanish, Portuguese and Russian is Kapuskinski, so he is drafted into the meetings to interpret! He is sitting there as a civil war is being hatched, but he cannot do anything about it. If he fires off a telegram to Warsaw as a "Special Bulletin" it might get intercepted; if the news leaks out then the Western powers may send in their troops. Clearly his sympathies were with the Marxists and that was more important than getting the scoop.

Africans are sometimes critical of his writing on Africa as simplistic, and borderline racist, but he has a passion that ignites his prose, and reminds us of the passion Germans in the 19th century had for the American Indian. Far from being objective he even takes up arms when he is with the MPLA at the front and caught in a firefight.

Back in Poland Socialism has evolved into consumerism, with money borrowed from the West, but the government is crumbling. RK writes his great book, The Emperor, ostensibly about the fall of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, but as it appears weekly people start to read it as an allegory about the corrupt "court" of Gierek, Poland's lax ruler. One reviewer says it's as if Kafka had written The Castle from inside the keep. The censors are afraid to touch it because that will show they really feel there is something to the fabled parallels between their own collapsing bureaucracy and Selassie's.

Poland changes; the Solidarity movement breaks out in the shipyards and Kapuskinski is sent to cover it, and of course writes the best reports, not covering Walesa's speeches so much as talking to the ordinary striking workers, many of whom are passing the time by reading his books! But Walesa inspires him and he sides against the government, losing his job. However his books have been translated and he is able to leave Poland and travel to Europe and the United States as a speaker. But all reports are that he is not very good on the podium: even as a teacher of journalism, his students expect him to regale them with anecdotes about Che Guevara, instead he discusses the finer points of Latin American Marxist theory. (As a former Catholic he was drawn to "liberation theology.")

And there are the famous missing pages (15 of them) from the American edition of Shah of Shahs, which discuss the CIA's role in the Iranian revolution and the overthrow of Mosaddegh in 1953. Domoslawski can find no evidence of any American editor asking for the cuts: only RK himself could have censored his own writing: perhaps he knew that although he was always a fierce critic of Yankee Imperialism he would be looking to America for prizes, awards and lectureships and so better retract his fangs a bit. Or perhaps he was afraid the CIA had files on him and could expose his role in providing information on Americans to his own secret service.

But one searing truth is, Kapuskinski couldn't handle criticism and was always taken aback by fact-checkers who critiqued his works on Iran and Ethiopia. He was creating a new kind of literature: a fictionalized reportage that has all the elements of truth but which are configured in a way to suit the author rather than reality. You might say it's magic realism applied to journalism as seen, for example, in the works of Bruce Chatwin. Rather than magic realism, Domoslawski calls it "tropical baroque."

At the end of his life, RK wrote out a quote from Mircea Eliade's diary: "My best books will be written by someone else." He had abandoned the third in his "power" trilogy — a biography of Idi Amin — to rush through Russia after perestroika and write Imperium, his masterful account of the collapse of the Soviet Union. He wanted to write a summing up of all his thoughts on Latin America in a book called Fiesta, but set that aside when he decided to retrace Bernard Malinowski's steps to the Trobriand Islands and write about that instead, one of the last "uncivilized" places on earth, but he became too ill.

He left behind a globe on his desk and on each continent were posted notes:

North America: community
South America: trust
Eurasia: Inquiring nature, openness, joy, friendship, sympathy, hope
Australia: no comments
Africa: LOVE

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Getting Nowhere with John Cage: A Zen Biography

by Alastair Johnston

Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson. The Penguin Press, New York, 2012. 496 pp., $30.

As a teenager I was interested in all kinds of music, so I took the opportunity to attend a concert for prepared piano by the America composer John Cage at the Royal College of Music (behind the Albert Hall) in London in 1968. I got there early to secure a good spot. I had no idea what to expect but the audience seemed unusual, more curious bohemian than the Baroque crowd. When a man with a wooden leg came in, it occurred to me he was part of the performance as he tapped his way to a vacant chair.

Cage was already controversial. In 1960 he performed "Water Walk" on the TV show "I've Got a Secret." It was a delightful and zany event which used water, ice and steam to create music.

When asked about the audience's laughter, he said he considered laughter preferable to tears. With this he gave permission to other musical experimenters, such as Frank Zappa playing on a bicycle on the "Steve Allen Show" three years later.

Cage was the enfant terrible of American music for half of the twentieth century. Few other composers adopted his chance methods and rejection of the then cutting-edge 12-tone scale. What's wrong with Schoenberg, who was Cage's early teacher? "The twelve-tone row is a method; a method is a control of each single note. There is too much there there. There is not enough of nothing in it."

It's the opposite of Gertrude Stein's famous characterization of Oakland, and something that would resonate through Cage's work. He was on a quest for silence, the discovery of nothing there. For instance, in his piece "Imaginary Landscape no. 4" for 12 radios -- or "Golden Throats," as he called them -- by the time of the performance (late one night at Columbia University in 1951) the radio stations had mostly gone off the air so there was static and a lot of silence. Others deemed it a failure, Cage was delighted.

It is appropriate that the author of this new biography is not a music critic or biographer. In fact this is Kay Larson's first book, though she has made her name as an art critic in the Village Voice and The New York Times. Furthermore it's as much about Zen as about the subject, which is a pleasant surprise. I didn't expect to read a book on John Cage and learn so much about D. T. Suzuki and spiritual practice.

After a bumpy start about Ginsberg, Snyder and the Beats, delivered almost as paper darts that don't fly, Larson settles down to be entertaining. Larson has a lively, journalistic style; she is a practicing Buddhist so starts with a major appropriation to her side: Marcel Duchamp. While we think of Duchamp as the Dada Supreme, she recasts his readymade "Fountain" as a perfect shining Buddha of the Bathroom: "In Stieglitz's photo the bulbous porcelain body looks exactly like the Buddha in outline... The white porcelain arc of the urinal serves as the Buddha's robe. Where the Buddha's head would be is a bright white spot that could represent the 'third eye,' one of the classic attributes of enlightenment" (pp. 47-8).

"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp, 1917. Photographed by Alfred Stieglitz.

I was really taken with the little chunks of Zen wisdom she drops in as much as the net she casts to catch Cage hanging out with Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, or leading a class in mycology while warning that no two mushrooms are alike.

His chance operations foreshadow a later musical innovator, Brian Eno, who created Oblique Strategies to help him work, in the same way Cage had used the I Ching, to bring indeterminacy into his music. Other pioneering feats include being the first "turn-tablist" -- in 1938 Cage had discovered two variable speed turntables at Cornish College radio lab in Seattle, and set out to play records that were just one tone per side, but to change the pitch periodically (by chance) and create an ever-evolving soundscape. Scratching and ambient music, both at once!

It was at Cornish that Cage met dancer Merce Cunningham and began a partnership that would last over 40 years.

Merce Cunningham by Halsman (Magnum) 1948

None of his contemporaries got it, so Cage turned his back on the musical avant garde and chose to hang out with artists instead. He had moved to New York by 1948 and was part of "the Club," an informal group of painters, including Motherwell and De Kooning, that got together to drink coffee and talk. There is a lot of discussion of Cage's creative process. The famous four and a half minutes of silence (4'33") is profounder than you would imagine, and Cage worked on it for ages. Seriously. First of all he learned that Muzac Corporation commissioned pieces that were that length, so it was conceived as a subversive joke. But then he started to explore silence, even going into an anechoic chamber at Harvard. This room excluded all outside sound. He rushed out to ask the engineer what the noises were he could still hear. The high whine is the neurons of your nervous system firing and the dull roar is the systolic rush of your blood. A flash of insight: There is no such thing as silence. There is no "something" and "nothing." There is only being.

This leads to a story about a Zen monastery in Japan. The monks get up at 4.30 to chant. After two hours or so one of them slides open the doors to the world and in come the noises of the morning: birds, traffic and wind.

The first performance of 4'33" by David Tudor in Woodstock caused a riot. There's a version by him on YouTube with voice-over and a stopwatch that is distracting, and an orchestral version that really gets into the spirit of the piece (though I prefer it as a solo work). 

Duchamp's long years of silence may of course be another source of inspiration. Cage had met him at the Arensbergs' home in the Hollywood Hills and in New York showed up to play chess with him, troubled that he couldn't ask him anything about music, but was calmed simply by his presence. Cage was obviously influenced by Duchamp's intention to make works which are not works of art, his "skillful poetics of ordinary things." Cage wrote: "At a Dada exhibition in Düsseldorf, I was impressed that though Schwitters and Picabia and the others had all become artists with the passing of time, Duchamp's works remained unacceptable as art. And in fact, as you look from Duchamp to the light fixture the first thought you have is 'Well, that's a Duchamp.'"

The art of the everyday -- in Cage's world "sounds" as opposed to "music" -- and the quest for stillness and silence reminds us of all the authors who chose not to write. There's an excellent recounting of them in Bartleby & Co by Enrique Vila-Matas (Random House, 2004). This book is a series of footnotes to a non-existent text and a delightful survey of non-writing "for those in the No," inspired by Bartleby the Scrivener's perennial retort, "I would prefer not to."

In New York in 1950 Cage attended talks by Sukuzi. Cage had been studying Vedanta. Through Alan Watts he met Joseph Campbell and his wife, and the widow of Ananda Coomaraswamy. Listening to Suzuki he realized he needed to get his ego out of his work. One of Cage's students was Christian Wolff, son of Kurt who had published Kafka, Rilke, and Benjamin before he fled Germany and started Pantheon Press in New York. Christian gave Cage the newly published two-volume I Ching. He could use the book to answer questions and thus avoid bringing his own taste into the work.

And Cage acknowledged Bob Rauschenberg's white paintings as efforts to make a neutral artistic statement, though when they met in 1951 at Black Mountain College, Cage was the teacher and Rauschenberg the student. In 1953 they collaborated on an artwork: Rauschenberg glued twenty sheets of paper together and put black ink on a tire of Cage's Model A Ford.

Larson writes, "Automobile Tire Print makes an inescapable allusion to Chinese scroll painting. Here though the scroll is just a single very long black line. The white spaces in the tire tread make the line visually vibrate. The black line is a 'gesture' that doesn't 'express' anything -- a witty put-down of Abstract Expressionist painting and a re-affirmation of Cage's views on an art of action and process."

Automobile Tire Print, SF Museum of Modern Art

The work has since been attributed solely to Rauschenberg, but Cage recalled, "I know he put the paint on the tires. And he unrolled the paper on the city street. But which of us drove the car?"

At Black Mountain, Cage and Cunningham staged the first "Happening." Later his students would start the Fluxus movement (and one of them, Dick Higgins, founded Something Else Press); he is also a godfather of the pop movement through his influence on Jasper Johns. Again Larson makes a Buddhistic connection. The readymades -- Ballantyne cans or flags -- show an aesthetic detachment. Larson quotes Leo Steinberg who was uneasy: he was angry at the artist for letting him down, mad at his friends for pretending to like it, mad at himself "for being so dull, and at the whole situation for showing me up." How often can art provoke that response?

Larson's use of asynchronous time is good, so halfway through 1950 we flash forward to Naropa Institute in Boulder to see a Cage performance being demolished by an audience of hippies in 1974. Naropa was supposed to be a catalyst for cutting through spiritual (as well as consumerist) materialism and "alleviate the terrible karma of addictions to power and achievement at the expense of others." What the author doesn't say is that Naropa was run by wild egos and an out-of-control little scuzzbucket, Chogyam Trungpa, who thought he was a rockstar and ruled the place with a panoply of power. (The Tibetans are the Catholics of the Buddhist world, while the Zen sect are more like the Unitarians, hence the Tibetans are into pomp and circumstance in contrast to the more spartan Zen Buddhists.) Cage chose to perform "Empty Words," based on the writings of Thoreau, where he dropped out words and phrases by chance operations (it sounds like a microphone with a faulty connection to me) until there was mostly silence. He imagined it like clouds drifting into the blue sky. The 1,500 Boulder hippies reacted in a violent uproar, shrieking, whistling, screaming, playing guitars, dancing, throwing things on stage. Cage was appalled, Trungpa on the other hand was "delighted at the ego noise" and asked him to join the faculty. When he repeated "Empty Words" three years later in Milan it led to another riot.

Cage faced a true Zen dilemma: how to keep creating when he would rather not let his ego be front and center. He is "going nowhere yet endlessly evolving." (p. 356) Back in New York, Suzuki had been appointed visiting lecturer at Columbia and Cornelius Crane, the businessman who subsidized the gig, insisted Suzuki's classes be open to auditors, making it possible for Cage and others to attend.

Suzuki talked about Zen: Before studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains. While studying Zen there is confusion between the two. After studying Zen men are men and mountains are mountains once again. And a student asks, What's the difference between before and after? Suzuki replies: No difference, only your feet are a little higher off the ground.

Another talisman for Cage was Erik Satie who explored unusual avenues in music outside the mainstream. Cage was instrumental (pun intended) in getting together a group of 10 people to play "Vexations," the piece that repeats 840 times, and lasts over 18 hours. Written in 1893 it had been laughed off until Cage gave it a premier at the Pocket Theater in New York in 1963. Among the performers was John Cale who appeared on TV ("I've Got a Secret" again!) to talk about it. Andy Warhol was in the audience and it inspired his film "Sleep."

It wasn't until 1962, when he was fifty, that audiences began to get Cage. In fact his biggest success was his first tour of Japan, arranged by his student Yoko Ono & her then-husband Toshi Ichiyanagi. He visited D. T. Suzuki and Zen monasteries, and gave concerts with David Tudor. And he wrote another piece. An aesthetic of indifference had become key to Cage. This doesn't mean he doesn't care, just that he doesn't care to choose. The student of Suzuki had learned well. Finally, Cage gave up arranging things in exchange for process. The sequel to 4'33" is 0'00" which consists of an instruction: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action." Cage himself performed it by putting a contact mike on a desk and sitting down to type answers to his voluminous correspondence, thus combining his duty as a celebrity with clamoring fans wanting a piece of him and his need to be a creative artist.

We get more paper planes thrown out at the end: notes about Minimalism and later artists who were influenced by Cage, but we return to Duchamp and how he denied any influence from Oriental philosophy though he lived life like a Zen master. It was Cage who pointed this out. Al Held said, "Duchamp was just a French Symbolist until Cage showed us how to understand him."

For many people, myself included, Cage is more interesting as a philosopher than a composer. But his influence persists, and one of his compositions is still being performed. Inspired by Satie's "Vexations," Cage wrote "Organ 2/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible)." It is being performed in the church of St Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany. The first movement began with a rest of 17 months duration on September 5, 2001 (Cage's 89th birthday). "The first chord roared from the organ on February 5, 2003. The first tone change drew a cheerful crowd on July 5, 2004. The first movement is scheduled to end in 2072." The piece will end in 2639.

I do have to lament how the mighty Penguin Press has let its typographic standards slide. There are some serious design flaws: hard hyphens in quotes that weren't caught, sections beginning at the bottom of the page, no ligatures, figure 1 for cap I, and other glitches that show the book was typed but not redacted by a real typographer.
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