The Freedom to Read

...Mencken's Arner/can Mercury, it was surely not in the expectation of great profits, although he no doubt hoped at least to cover his costs...

...George Nash is research fellow at the Charles Warren Center for studies in American history . . . Henry Regnery is Chairman of the Board of the Henry Regnery Publishing Co . . . . Alan Reynolds is an associate to National R e v i e w . . . Peter Rusthoven is studying law at H a r v a r d . . . Benjamin Stein is a free-lance writer residing in Washington, D.C . . . . C. Bascom Slemp is The Alternatives chief Washington correspondent...

...when language deteriorates all else deteriorates with it...

...But 1929 was not all cakes and ale...

...namely, '~Are there crimes for which an individual in our society deserves to die...

...The typical publishing firm of the nineteenth century, as continued to be the case into the 1930s, was a small business, and was often run by its owner, whose personality and point of view it reflected...

...The problem, however, proved too difficult for the nation's court of last appeal...

...238), centered on the question of whether or not the death penalty amounted to "cruel and unusual punishment," and was hence prohibited by the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution...

...But where the "constitutional prohibition" t~sts on the tortured reasoning of a decision like Furman~ it is clear that the Constitution is being used as a shield for something else...

...The book is the chief means by which ideas are communicated and given standing and influence...

...The problems with the "constitutional" approach are fairly apparent...

...It was a year in which Ring ~ e r ' s mastery of the short story was being seriously discussed even among the literati...

...They are also the people who write the editorials and review the books in the New York Times and the Washington Post, give the commencement addresses in the prestige colleges---the last time around, we may be sure, about Watergate--in short, speak for our society, and, as I have said, they read books, at least the books written or recommended by their colleagues and counterparts...

...Chief Justice Burger and Justice Powell seemed to agree with both ideas...

...Who has profited...

...s t year, the United States Supreme Court spent six months pondering the constitutionality of capital punishment...

...itself, is not a part of life, but its object...

...First, as is demonstrated by the nine separate opinions in Furman v. Georg/a, it is hopelessly muddied...

...Justices White and Stewart rounded out the disparate "majority" in opinions that stressed the infrequency of executions (i.e., "unusual" in its most literal sense), and the discretion given to judges and juries in recommending the death s e n t e n c e - - leaving one to wonder whether frequent or mandatory executions would be permiss ible...

...But what, before going any further, constitutes obscenity...

...True, each of these sections involves limitations on the government's right to place the life a citizen in jeopardy...

...The most serious objection, however, is that strained and artful interpretations of the lang~mge of the Constitution tell one nothing about the basic ethical choice involved in the debate over capital punishment...

...Such a decision as Knopf made when he became the publisher of the American Mercury would now be a matter of highlevel corporate policy...

...he resolved his problem (with considerably less reflection than the Court's) by the simple expedient of putting a bullet through the head of police detective John Schroeder...

...Justice Douglas thought capital punishment was "cruel and unusual" because most criminals sentenced to death were poor and/or black raising the question of whether Douglas sees a different constitutional standard for middie-class whites...

...Stephen Spender, in an interview reprinted in Time a year or two ago, remarked that he now questioned his active participation in politics in the thirties, when it was fashionable for young intellectuals to take up left-wing causes with passionate fervor...

...and thus, in standard political fashion, pleased absolutely no one...

...As is obvious from the above, capital punishment is a matter of considerable public controversy...

...it is not an end in itself, but a natural and perfectly normal part of a healthy life...

...Pound answered that he had a shilling or two in his pocket if that would help, to which Matthews replied, and no answer could have been more characteristic of the sort of publisher he was, '~vVell, I wanted to publish it anyway...

...All of which illustrates why, as I have said, obscenity is not primarily a moral problem...

...Has all this permissiveness brought us better books, more inspired writers, a more just, a nobler society...

...The Fifth Amendment, for example, refers to the death penalty in three places: "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury _9 . . nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or l i m b . . , nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law...

...hinted that he might sign a narrower measure...

...It approaches absurdity to argue that in the Eight Amendment these same authors overturned that right in including the prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment...

...After Schroeder's funeral, over 600 policemen marched en masse to the Massachusetts statehouse and demanded that Governor Francis Sargent sign a bill which, in response to Furman, would have reenacted capital punishment for a select group of crimes, including the murder of a policeman...

...Justice Rehnquist's view could be summarized as "Once again, the court is turning the Constitution into a vehicle for its own moral predilections...

...Or we would challenge the Schaeffer Brothers to uphold their defense of Spinoza as the greatest philosopher of all times...

...The intellectuals, for example, speak of Watergate as a great moral crisis...

...When he agreed in the early twenties to publish H.L...

...Here 'WVhitehead," a gentle panhandler would teach us the wisdom of the philosophy of his namesake, as well as the epistemology of Vahinger's As If...

...But, as Max Picard put it, language "was given to man in advance," it is one of those primordial elements ~'which belongs to man's basic structure...

...Luchow's, where the Wurzberger really flowed...

...when Dos Passos was gasping his last revolutionary breath with Airways, Inc., a noisy dramatic interlude on Grove Street which Edmund Wilson treated more kindly than it deserved...

...Last month in Boston, a hold-up man was also confronted with a life-and-death decision...

...And the essence of sin is precisely that it takes means for end, that it does not recognize or that it despises the end purpose...

...Who says life doesn't imitate art...

...Both are erotic, but the eroticism of Renoir is the eroticism of life...

...But that part of my memory must be reserved for another--more reverential--occasion...

...The Republic of Letters was a concept which had meaning not only for writers, but for publishers as well...

...he was a custodian of the word...

...The Association, it might be noted, maintains a group called the Right to Read Committee which acts as a special guardian, so to speak, of the rights of publishers and distributors to handle any sort of book they feel they can sell...

...Mat thews, after reading the manuscript, asker Pound if he had any money to help wit~ its publication...

...To be sure, a direct constitutional prohibition, such as the one concerning laws about religion, does to a degree foreclose ethical debate on certain important issues...

...The flood of pornography and obscenity that followed the Supreme Court decisions which held, substantially, that just about anything was permissible, and made loca prosecution difficult or impossible, has re sulted, not surprisingly, in a strong coun terreaction, one consequence of which i the recent Miller v. California decisioi...

...With a few more years of The Love Machine, Sex and the Single Girl, The Playboy Book of Sex, may we not soon be reaching the point where a gigantic book burning will be welcomed as a much-needed cleansing operation...

...No one mocked the philosophy of Pragmatism with more telling effect than did Samson...

...The four Nixon appointees dissented...

...which goes back to the old test of ~'community standards...

...This refreshment, however, we took most often after a visit to Maurice Schwartz's Yiddish Art Theatre where among its more glorious moments, I once saw the only production in this country of a play by I_~pe de Vega (The Gardner's Dog)--and what a magnificent spectacle it was...

...To which Samson retorted: "Only in a nation of upstarts, where 'proper connections' with the 'higher powers' are daily made between man and man, can its foremost philosopher democratically slap God on the back in the manner of a ward politician...

...Although he was probably the only genius American Marxism has so far produced (he had nothing but contempt for the contemporary collectivisms that went under the names of Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Levestonism, and Trotskyism), he found the prevailing Liberalism in thought even more appalling...

...While this has not yet stemmed the tide, it has aroused the fear on the part of the Publishers and Magazine Distributors Associations, among others, that it will...

...It would be more exact, I should hasten to add, to speak of the malaise of our intellectuals, of those, that is, who presume to speak for us, rather than of society as a whole, but when a substantial part of the writers, professors, critics, journalists, and political pundits are confused, lacking in confidence and direction, unwilling to face the painful fact that two plus two always, inexorably, equals four, it is probably fair to say that society as a whole is at least being infected...

...Baron Von Kannon is publisher of The Alternative and curator of the Modern Art Gallery of Slippery Bear Shoot, Indiana...

...If one compares the serenity, the serenity of having accepted and come to terms with the demands of life and the reality of the human condition, the beauty and completeness of the conception of such a picture as Renoir's "Young Woman Sewing" with the ~xlgarity, cheapness, and destructiveness of the founder of Playboy and what he calls the "Playboy philosophy," the distinction ! am trying to make becomes sharper...

...Sadly, my street--Fourteenth Street---was undergoing a transformation, was a victim to the bitch-goddess Progress...

...It was also the year when F. Scott Fitzgerald his reputation established with Gatsby---tried his hand at drayma with The Vegetable, produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre in a corner of Greenwich Village...

...They, therefore, are setting up special groups to oppose state and local action...

...A recent statement of the Authors League, which is probably representative of all these groups, puts their position in the form of ~rights": the "right" of adults "to acquire the books they choose to read, and see the films and plays they choose to viev/' and of '~librarians, booksellers, theatre owners, authors, publishers and producers . . . . to distribute such works to willing adults...

...but those limitations become rather silly unless one presupposes (as did the authors of the Constitution) that the government d/d have a right in some circumstances to deprive a citizen of his life...

...These, it must be remembered, are all people who have gone to college, many of them, in fact, teach in colleges, read books, but none not recommended by the New York Times or the New York Review of Books, and take themselves and each other with the utmost seriousness...

...Their argxnnent was summarized by Sgt...

...to bring out any sort of garbage the most depraved element of society might wish is also the right to assault, and perhaps to destroy, the standards and taste of society as a whole...

...In the long fight against censorship which culminated in the Supreme Court decisions that virtually eliminated any effective control over what may be printed or distributed, the book publishers, through their association, played a leading part...

...Now his old house is a subsidiary of Random House, which, in turn, is owned by RCA...

...Is there not, therefore, some justification for the assertion that the malaise of the intellect, ml.q is a consequence of the degradation of the book...

...But best of all was I . ~ n Samson who could demolish with an epigram the most precious nostrums then circulating among the intelligentsia...

...A writer was once regarded as a person with a special gift and a member of a noble calling...

...it is that, and much more, what is at stake is its destructiveness of the wholeness of life, of the proper relationship of things and values...

...in international relations in the nation's c a p i t a l . . . Hugh Kenner is professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University and recently has published The PoundEra...

...Having attained complete permissiveness, a state of affairs in which the works of the Marquis de Sade have become as readily available as those of S h a k e - - e , and the Playboy Press feels justified in publishing a book that triumphantly announces the death of the Puritan ethic, perhaps the time has come to ask how much has really been gained...

...From having been, in a sense, a profession with its own standards and values, publishing has largely become dominated by purely business considerThe Alternative February 1974 9 ations...

...Does anyone really have such a right, and doesn't society have the right to protect itself...

...It follows from what has gone before that the degradation of the book is not merely a symptom of the malaise from which our society is obviously suffering, it may well be one of its principal causes...

...Far more serious is our unwillingness to 10 The Alternative February 1974 make the hard decisions the present monetary crisis obviously requires, but it is easier to increase social security payments, raise the minimum wage, pay people for not working, to moralize about Watergate, the military-indnstrial complex, poverty, civil rights, whatever it may be, than to face up to the problems which may well destroy our country, to bring order into our fiscal affairs and restore confidence in our currency...

...The picture in Playboy, on the other hand, represents an eroticism which is an end in David Brudnoy is visiting professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, a commentator with WNAC-TV (CBS) and WBGH-TV (PBS) in Boston, and an associate of The A l t e r n a t i v e . . . John Chamberlain is a nationally syndicated columnist . . . Lindley H. Clark J r . is economic news editor of the Wall Street J o u r n a l . . . James Dornan is a professor in the Department of Politics at the Catholic University of America in W a s h i n g t o n . . . Thonms Etzold is assistant professor of history at Miami University _9 . . Max Geltman, author of The Confrontation, is now at work on a major study of Ezra Pound . . . Neil Howe, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, is managing editor of The Alternative . . . Peter Hughes is an associate of The Alternative who is currently completing a Ph.D...

...Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, he telling them in Latin (out of Aquinas) the meaning of holy charity which usually netted him a saw-buck which (even in those pre-Depression days) was a lot of bucks...

...The true calling of the poet, he went on to say, is not political activism, but the protection of the purity of the language...

...The Governor waffled: he let the bill die without his signature (a pocket veto...

...Justice Blackmun said in effect, "I don't like capital punishment any more than you, but it's a legislative, not a judicial, question...

...where Mencken and Nathan (and other celebrities from the political and literary life of the city) dined on a Sunday evening;, Luchow's an emporium of Gemutlichkeit, where a string quartet sent forth Viennese melodies which, on a cold clear night, could be heard at the Crusader Cafeteria directly across the street where we held forth late into the early hours arguing the problems of the world, most of them still unsolved, dammit...

...He had to operate at a profit, which took skill and business judgment, but a book was still something unique, the work of the mind, written and produced, for the most part, for a small and literate audience...

...when Hemingway was producing his best shorter works (perhaps indebted to l~rdner, although he probably didn't know it...

...When Ezra Pound as a young man in London offered one of his earlier collections of poetry to Elkin Matthews, who was very much a publisher in the old style...

...The Fourteenth Amendment repeats the "due process" clause and applies it directly to the states...

...there was some sorrow mixed with the joy...

...and both will probably occupy some portion of the public spotlight for the foreseeable future...

...an element of life is made the whole thing...

...It told the story of a postal clerk who dreams he is President of the United States, only to find himself beset by makebelieve problems that would haunt the life of a wide-awake president forty years later...

...In their fight for an end to all restrictions on obscenity, isn't it possible that the publishers have succeeded in vulgarizing the book, with the consequent undermining of the respect which the book and their profession have traditionally enjoyed...

...All in all, it was a thorough mess, and it left to the nation's lawyers, judges, legislators, governors, and attorneys general the challenging task of figuring out yet another permutation of the supreme law of the land...

...And when he took after the Behaviorists, he didn't waste time on the pygmies (thus he surely would have regarded Dr...

...In spite of their protestations about freedom, it is probably fair to assume that the publishers' participation in all this was not entirely free of self-interest, but do they, as a whole, stand to profit from it either...

...Skinner), but he took on John B. Watson, the daddy of the movement, whom he polished off with this cutting remark (heard in a Labor Temple lecture in 1929): "Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.' Watson says, ~rhere are white rats, therefore I don't think.'" After allowing a moment for this to sink in, he added with a flourish: "How long will it take the followers of a thoughtless psychology to learn the difference between a man and a ratT' Another time he took on the great William James whom he quoted from The Varieties of Religious Experience as having said: '%Ve and God have a business with each other . . . we are saved from wrongness by making proper connections with the higher powers...

...The next day, an assortment of civil libertarians and others responded to this emotional demonstration by the police, calling the death penalty '13arbaric" and claiming that the evidence was "overwhelming" that capital punishment was not a deterrent to murder...

...b'hitehead" was at his best on a late Sunday afternoon after he got through putting the bite on the princes of the Church as they left St...

...The closing paragraphs of Justice Marshall's opinion provide a good The Alternative February 1974 11...

...There have always, of course, been obscene books, but in the past they were the exception, and were regarded as exceptions, as something done consciously and shamefacedly in defiance of standards and good taste...

...What is forgotten in all this is that ~'no man is an island," as the liberals were fond of telling us when their current enthusiasm was the United Nations: the '~right" of the publishers, producers, writers, et al...

...What is the difference between one of Renoir's ~'Bathers" and the photograph of a naked girl in Playboy magazine...

...the principal consideration in all likelihood was the prospect of association with Mencken and what the publishing of a distinguished magazine would do for the standing of his firm, and it was his decision...

...Reports...

...But we never lost our sense of fun, or our insatiable curiosity for things stored away in books and in other people's minds...

...when the book, therefore, is degraded, by using it as a means to appeal to the lowest, most perverted tastes, by treating it as a commodity and nothing else, society is degraded also...

...But I knew that street only from a reading of populist literature...

...Writing in a different connection, Miguel de Unamuno put the issue with great clarity: "The love of money, said the Apostle, is the root of all evil, and that is because it takes riches for an end, when they are only a means...

...Alfred Knopf was another publisher in the old style...

...The case, Furman v. Georg/a (408 U.S...

...It was the year when (on October 24) Wall Street "laid an egg," as Variety put it...

...And, finally, of what use is the "freedom to read" if we read the wrong things...

...We did not go there to satisfy a '~thirst," that we did on Second Avenue where we imbibed a confection known as an "eggcream," a delicacy that has gone out of the life of the City much as the joy went out of the booze in O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh...

...Where had stood the magnificent Academy of Music there was now looming before us the stone face of the future Con Ed building with its post-medieval clocktower hovering over the a r e a . But Luchow's was (and still is) across the street...

...What followed was a good illustration of the typical capital punishment debate in America...

...Chester Broderick, head of the Boston Patrolman's Association, who said, "No one can tell me or any other policeman that capital punishment is not a deterrent" and "If this bill deters one warped mind from killing a police officer, it will have been a good thing...

...Both questions are fairly interesting and fairly complex...

...For that a post-graduate course was provided by the "lions" of the Public Library on Fifth Avenue (not the stone effigies guarding the entrance) who held forth on almost every subject under the sun with an authority that defied the scholarship of the ivied academies...

...The book has been vulgarized, degraded, and nothing better illustrates the degree of its degradation than the flood of obscenity that has all but engulfed us...

...In the Supreme Court, the question is cast in terms of "constitutionality;," in Massachusetts and the growing number of other states grappling with post-Furman capital punishment bills, the storm rages mainly over the issue of deterrence...

...To break into Democratic headquarters was, admitredly, ill-advised, foolish, and illegal, but to make a great political and constitutional crisis out of anything as essentially petty is indicative of the complete lack of proportion and common sense of our reigning intellectuals...

...We of the twentieth century, of all people, should know how destructive language can be Hitler was a master of language, as were, in their own way, Wilson, Churchill, and Roosevelt...

...what is at stake are the standards and values of civilization...

...in the end, it threw up its hands and produced nine separate opinions which collectively consumed more than 100 pages in the official U.S...

...Examining both the "constitutional" and the "deterrence" debates shows that on this fundamental question both controversies are silent...

...Second, it is strained to the point of being fraudulent, as even a cursory examination of the Constitution reveals...

...When language is misused, therefore, one of the basic elements of man's nature is misused, or, again in the words of Max Picard, '~/-hen language is destroyed, man loses his relationship with the original Word from which his own words and their measure are derived...

...Mass education, mass democracy, mass communications, the commercialization of so much of life have had their effect, needless to say, on book publishing as well as everything else...

...It should be emphasized, however, that it is not primarily a moral issue that is involved...

...Vho benefited from all that," he said, ~'what good did it do...

...Justices Brennan and Marshall (especially the latter) seemed to think that capital punishment in any form was "cruel and unusual...

...After a Labor Temple (or Library) session we would often go down to our favorite Village restaurant (The Black Rabbit) for stimulating conversation fueled by a Prohibition libation called a <tpunchino," a concoction made up of equal parts of black coffee and ether (or so we were told...

...It is unfortunate, then, that neither can shed any light on the ultimate ethical question which underlies, or should underlie, the whole issue of capital punishment in the first place...

...it did not touch my life...

...When Hitler ordered his spectacular book burnings, educated people in all countries reacted with horror, for the reason that the book was regarded almost instinctively as the repository of truth, as the means by which the highest achievements of civilization are recorded and preserved...

...If a dealer in obscene books or magazines in New York or a small town in Ohio was brought into court, the Association of American Publishers, along with the Civil Liberties Union, could be counted on to help in his defense...

...Our intellectuals' utter lack of common sense and their inability to see things in proper proportion are shown by their rapturous enthusiasm for a presidential candidate who could seriously propose to give every man, woman, and child in the country $1,000...