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Profiles in Censorship: Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer
It is January 1962. A battle is being waged on multiple fronts. Twenty-one lawyers around the country are fighting in nearly 60 separate legal actions. In New Jersey alone, one attorney is concurrently juggling twenty-six criminal cases as well as a federal action. In Illinois, a single lawyer will eventually bring sixteen separate actions together to the state supreme court. The highest courts in four more states—Massachusetts, New York, California, and Wisconsin—will weigh in before the final showdown on the floor of the United States Supreme Court.51 As the head of Grove Press, which published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, the book at the heart of these lawsuits, I will wind up testifying in only two of these actions, but key to my testimony is a paper I wrote about Miller’s Cancer more than twenty years earlier in which I asserted, “writers must have a liberal society—or they are stifled.”
My whole life has brought me to this point: my Irish family’s outrage at British brutality; my years at Francis Parker, the progressive school I attended in Chicago; my fervent support for the loyalists during the Spanish Civil War—all of this history is being played out right here at home in the censorship wars. But the enemy has advanced as far as they can. They will not get through.
The first time I met Henry Miller was in 1959, when I flew to California to visit him in Big Sur, an unlikely, strange, but beautiful place clinging to the sides of rugged mountains poised on precipitous descents to the Pacific Ocean below. I brought a new friend with me, Valerie Desmore, whom I had met not long before in London, where one night I’d visited a wax museum with Samuel Beckett’s British publisher, John Calder, who was in many ways my English counterpart. His press shared an avant-garde aesthetic with Grove, and we had many authors in common. John brought Valerie with him that evening. She was a young painter who had been studying with Oskar Kokoschka in Italy. When I saw her, I was struck by her beauty and radiant energy. She reminded me of Merle Oberon in Wuthering Heights, and like Oberon, Valerie had some sort of Asian, Indian, South African background. What was more, I gathered that she was quite familiar with Henry Miller’s writing.
After our trip to the wax museum, in the cab on the way to drop Valerie off, she sat on my lap. Having gotten her phone number from John, I called her a couple of days later from New York and invited her to go with me to California. She happily agreed. I met her at Idlewild Airport, fetched her luggage, and the two of us raced to catch our plane to San Francisco. We really were still total strangers, essentially sharing one thing only: a deep admiration for Henry Miller.
In San Francisco I rented a car and we headed straight for Big Sur, although one could hardly call the road straight, as it wound toward Henry’s strange half–Okie hut, half-citadel perched on the edge of a mountain, all of which gave me vertigo. To get to it you first came to a rather primitive shack, sort of a combined guard station and souvenir shop, replete with items celebrating the author’s career. Our arrival was telephoned ahead from the shack at the bottom of the hill, and we entered Henry Miller land.
As it happened, Henry himself was off seeing a daughter from a previous marriage, who was in a mental institution. His recent and very lovely wife, Eve McClure, was alone at home, and was warm and receptive in greeting us. I explained to her that we had come all this distance because I was interested in publishing an unexpurgated edition of Henry’s controversial novel,
Tropic of Cancer, in the United States. Eve warned me, “When he gets here, he’s not going to be very happy about this. I think you should publish it, but I will pretend I’m against it, because anything I say, he disagrees with.”
When Henry finally arrived, he was cool and noncommittal. It was pretty clear to me that he had little interest in dealing with the problems that would inevitably arise if I brought out this challenging, uncompromising novel, originally published in Paris in 1934. I did my best to persuade him to consider my offer, but it was hard to break through his almost hostile reserve. Eve spoke up as she had promised, but even her strategy didn’t work as she had hoped. Henry was much more interested in discussing a book he was working on at that time, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, with the American painter Abraham Rattner, who coincidentally resided in East Hampton, where I was living at the time. It was certainly not a very successful meeting. Valerie and I left, subdued.
At the bottom of the hill, we had to find a night’s lodgings. Big Sur was decidedly not a place of bright lights. I located what seemed to be a cross between an abandoned motel, or perhaps one which had never opened, and a semi- abandoned truck stop. Picture Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s Petrified Forest, but without the bar. Our room of bare-board walls, with a single swinging yellow light bulb, was unfriendly, even sinister.
There was nothing for us to do but go to bed. That night, a storm of historic proportions hit the cliffs of Big Sur. Little did I know it was a sign of things to come. Valerie and I, who before had retreated to opposite sides of the double bed, now madly held onto each other, our arms and legs entwined. At dawn, we drove down the precarious highway along the coast, en route to Los Angeles, from which we would head our separate directions. I was defeated, but only temporarily.
From the first time I encountered his work I believed that Henry Miller was a great American writer who said, in his own unique way, exactly what he felt. He expressed himself in an original American idiom and became famous in part because he was considered to be a forbidden author. But to me, he was the contemporary embodiment of Walt Whitman—the open voice, deeply loving of the society in which he lived, yet fiercely critical of it. His free, wildly provocative, and poetic attitude would later be absorbed by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among others. They were the first to say so, though Henry never quite believed them. These strange new writers sharing their creative powers were truly fresh blood in the vein of American literature that coursed from Whitman to Miller and flooded the heads and hands and hearts of those who became known as the Beat Generation.
As mentioned earlier, I had originally read Tropic of Cancer while at Swarthmore in 1940, having obtained a contraband copy at the Gotham Book Mart after reading about it in Miller’s own book, The Cosmological Eye, published by James Laughlin’s New Directions in 1939. One reason I enjoyed Cancer so much, aside from its ripping-open kind of honesty, was the uncanny way in which it combined the comic cleverness of French surrealism with the crude originality of our own psyches. In his novel, Miller discussed Proust and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and he liked them for the same reasons I did. Lawrence’s text was very elemental, and in a way ugly and stupid in its early chapters, but then there arose from it an almost mystical feeling, a sense of the numinous, which grew stronger as the story went along. Henry was doing something similar. Both Miller and Lawrence developed and communicated an intense, freeing belief that we should live the kind of life we desire—and they inspired each of us to believe and do the same.
As for censorship, Henry himself was sort of proud that Tropic of Cancer was a banned book. He claimed he didn’t want too many readers, once writing me,
Frankly, I am beginning to doubt that I ever want to see an American edition of these banned books. The notoriety, the unpleasantness involved, seem hardly worth the price. I have always felt deep down that no great change can be expected in America—either on the part of our legislators or our judges. As for the public—it is indifferent, it seems to me. The vast majority, I mean. I am in no hurry to make myself a scapegoat for what seems like a lost cause.
To me this seemed terribly defeatist. But by the time I was trying to convince him to allow Grove Press to publish his novel, Grove had already overcome many censorship laws with our publication of Lady Chatterley. We had shown that with determination, real change could be accomplished. I knew Grove Press was the natural choice for Miller and Tropic of Cancer, and simply didn’t want to take no for an answer, so I wrote back to h
im, coaxing, “I must say that I very much disagree with your idea that there would be notoriety and unpleasantness involved …”
In the summer of 1960, Henry responded as follows:
Part of my reluctance to wage open combat with our American authorities arises from the fact that I see no evidence of genuine revolt in the people themselves. We have no real radicals, no body of men and women who have the desire, the courage, or the power to initiate a fundamental change in our outlook or in our way of life. … It is not enough … to win the privilege of reading anything one pleases—usually more trash—but to obtain the right to read books which are distasteful, obnoxious, insidious and dangerous not only to public taste but to those in power. How can the people wrest such rights and privileges from their appointed representatives when they do not even suspect that they are living in a state of subjugation? When they imagine themselves to be a “free people”? To win a legal battle here or there, even if sensationally, means nothing. One does not acquire real liberty through these operatic victories. … What I mean to say is that to be hailed and accepted by an unthinking public as the Petronius of our time would afford me no satisfaction. … I would triumph as the King of Smut. I would be given the liberty to thrill, to amuse, to shock, but not to edify or instruct, not to inspire revolt.
A strong statement. Yet at the same time, he confessed he was terrified that his books would morph into college textbooks, tolerated and dismissed by blasé students, much as he felt The Communist Manifesto had.
I assured him, “Don’t worry, it’ll never happen.” What I did not tell him was that I had long ago determined to publish Tropic of Cancer and had taken step after strategic step toward that goal. I could not let even Henry himself deter me.
After that trip to Big Sur nothing very positive happened until I got a telegram from Maurice Girodias and Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt in Hamburg in early 1961. Maurice wired me, “Come, Henry Miller is here!”
Girodias was the publisher of the Olympia Press in Paris, a house whose list, like John Calder’s, was very much in the same spirit as Grove. Girodias was the son of Jack Kahane, whose Obelisk Press had first published Tropic of Cancer with Anaïs Nin’s help. Maurice, as a child, had drawn the now-classic cover illustration for the original Obelisk edition. Rowohlt was Miller’s German publisher; he published both Tropic books. They had spoken to Miller on my behalf and were instrumental in getting his approval to meet with me again.
Immediately, I boarded a plane, but just as it had that night in Big Sur, bad weather once again intervened, causing our flight to be diverted to Scotland. I had to take a train from Glasgow to London, and it wound up taking me about three days to get to Hamburg—but there Henry was.
He was in a very different mood. A much better mood. We played ping-pong, talked about life, became very friendly. Henry really liked Rowohlt, and Rowohlt had great influence on him. So did Girodias, and with encouragement from the two of them after a few Hamburg days and nights, he finally signed a contract with Grove. We paid him an advance of $50,000, which was a lot of money at that time. Michael Hoffman, his agent, was also there. He was not overly amicable, but at least he carried out his function, and our deal was struck.
Now I could get to work. Publication would be the easy part. Grove’s larger and immediate task was to challenge the censors back home. We needed a strategy to take on both the US Customs Service, which banned the book from being imported, and the US Post Office, which banned its distribution through the mail.
Henry, it soon became apparent, for all the fearlessness of his writing, was fearful of the courts, and was not such a great crusader. By the time we were ready to publish, he was spending time in Switzerland, nervous as hell, even from a distance.
The booksellers were equally nervous. In order to encourage them to stock Cancer, I insisted that Grove guarantee to indemnify them for any legal costs arising from prosecutions over selling the book. All this was going to cost us heavily but the stores needed that reassurance while the ban was still in force.
The first assault came from the Post Office, which seized hardcover copies of Cancer from us on June 12, 1961, launching the initial legal challenge to the book. The date for a hearing was set, but the assistant general counsel of the Post Office’s Fraud and Mailability Division didn’t wait, and quickly charged the novel with being “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent and filthy in content.” We fought right back, releasing the following statement:
We assume that the Post Office, having once made a serious error which the courts corrected, will not make the same mistake again. The assumption seems particularly justifiable in view of the fact that the Post Office decision in the Lady Chatterley case was the work of one man—the former Postmaster General. We trust that the present Postmaster General is fully aware of the fact that serious and respected works of literature cannot constitutionally be excluded from the mails.52
The legal machinations that soon developed seemed to overwhelm Henry, so it was better all round that he stayed away. However, he was called to testify at a Post Office hearing in New York scheduled for June 26, 1961. I cabled him in Paris, adding that the government “GUARANTEES NO PROSECUTION AGAINST YOU STOP EXPECT YOU WILL SAY NO BUT WOULD LOVE TO HAVE YOU.”53
Before he could decide whether or not to take my advice, the Post Office abruptly backed down, canceling the hearing on legal advice from the Justice Department. Later the Washington Post revealed that Postal Department lawyers felt that “many people found Miller’s writings … disgusting and shocking but not sexually exciting. For this and other reasons, there was remarkable agreement that the Government could not win if it charged that Miller’s work is obscene.”54 And the New York Times wrote,
Officials termed this a tactical step. They explained that suits testing whether the novel was obscene by legal definition were pending, and that it would be wise to await their outcome. However, it was learned that the Justice Department had advised the Post Office to drop the case for another reason—that it was likely to lose in the courts.55
It appeared that half the battle had been won with hardly a shot fired, but we were still left with one adversary, US Customs. A complete lack of coordination between Customs and the Post Office created a laughable anomaly. As Earl Hutchison put it, in Tropic of Cancer on Trial, “From June 13 until August 10, 1961 … a person could have had his copy of Cancer seized at the port of entry, then walked into the terminal and picked up an American edition at the bookstore there.”56
By August 10, following legal advice, the government announced it was lifting the Customs ban on Tropic of Cancer. At that stage we had 130,000 copies in print and we were ready to roll.
On the face of things, we were in the clear. However, our lawyer,
Cy Rembar, treated the victory with deep caution. Though the Post Office had backed down, Cy felt that since the case had never been decided by the federal courts, the issue of censorship would be litigated in the lower courts throughout the country.
Meanwhile, Dell Distributing, Inc., which had previously distributed a number of Grove paperbacks, including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was terribly important to us, got the jitters. William F. Callahan Jr., Dell’s executive vice president, notified me on May 17, 1961, that “We are exercising our prerogative of refusing to handle any title of Grove Press we deem inadvisable. Accordingly, we hereby disclaim any responsibility for the sale or distribution of the Grove Press edition of Cancer.”
That came as a blow. What disappointed and mystified me was that Dell pulled out long before both cases were due to be heard. Macfadden Publishing took over from Dell, and although both companies would later distribute Cancer, Dell’s nervousness was a sign of things to come. Local pressure began to build everywhere, like those storm clouds over Big Sur—with two major battles behind us, the worst lay ahead.
Tropic of Cancer sold more than 68,000 hardcover copies in the first week of publication. By the third week it was on bestseller lists all over the co
untry, including those of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. And by the end of 1961, Publishers Weekly listed Cancer sixth in Bookstore Bestsellers (non-paperback) with 100,000 in sales, right behind The Carpetbaggers by Harold Robbins.
Despite such healthy sales, more trouble was brewing. One month before our June 24, 1961 publication date, the executive vice president of Brentano’s, a major bookstore chain in New York City, had warned Aaron Sussman, the gifted head of our advertising agency, a man who was fiercely loyal to us, “Our counsel has very strong feelings about the inherent danger in the sale of this book and continues to advise us against it. … I am very unhappy about this situation and want you to know it.”57
Soon enough, Doubleday, Scribner’s, and Macy’s refused to carry Tropic of Cancer, and in August the Chicago Tribune announced it would no longer list “filthy” books—namely Cancer—on its bestseller list.
These lists were influential but inherently flawed in the way they were generated. Writing in July to Belle Rosenbaum of the New York Herald Tribune book review staff, I pointed out,
I am most happy that you are interested in our rather unique problem. I can’t recall such a situation in the history of publishing. We have contacted many of the stores on your list of 43 best-sellers reporting for your bestsellers’ list, “What People Are Reading” of last week (July 9) and found some astounding and, I might add, disheartening facts: at least 11 of these 43 are not even selling Tropic of Cancer. Another six are selling it under the counter. I’m sure you can see what this does to the accuracy of the best-seller lists. …
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 19
