Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper. Titles like Gershon Legman’s Maxwell Bodenheim’s and most notoriously his anthologized periodical of high-brow smut, Roth—poet, publisher, pornographer—was a creature of mid-century Times Square, a red-hued midnight kingdom of peep shows and “Live Nude Girls,” of Tijuana bibles and X-rated theaters. The glorious and filthy, dingy and beautiful metropolis of brownouts and graffitied subway cars was very much part of the publisher’s legacy.
Galician-born and raised in the Lower East Side world of Yiddish newspapers and theater, this son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants’ initial forays into the literary world was as an ancillary to the Modernist aesthetic holding sway on either side of the Atlantic. Before he was a notorious bookseller, Roth was author of a pair of experimental epic poems, and as well as the promising lyric debut “What will you have taken from me/You have not taken yet?” Roth wrote in a 1922 issue of published before his career took a rather different turn. Regardless of his own (not insubstantial) writing, his greatest poem was one on which he was at best a cowriter— the 1957 Supreme Court case that would begin to redefine “obscenity.
” Any great poem—which is to say a true poem—must ultimately be a failure, and in that regard was triumphant, for with some irony, the defendant lost the case. The 6-3 decision of the Warren court ruled that obscenity was not.
