Contributors

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...Far more serious is our unwillingness to 10 The Alternative February 1974...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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