Quotes of the Day

Through the sleepy stupor of a Sunday morning came the elevating lull of National Public Radio. Nat Hentoff, free-speech champion, was paying tribute to Ralph Ginzburg, who had died July 6 at the age of 76. That snapped me awake. Ginzburg had been declared a pornographer, had lost a Supreme Court obscenity decision and gone to jail — all for publishing a magazine I'd subscribed to when I was 17.

It was called Eros, an elegant journal of the lower appetites, and at a Charter Subscription rate of $19.95 for four issues it could bill itself as "the most expensive magazine in the world." Eros proved plenty expensive for Ginzburg: he lost not only Eros, when the Post Office declared it unfit, but his career, when he was sentenced to five years in a federal prison. (He served eight months.) After Eros he put out other magazines, such as Fact, Avant Garde and Moneysworth, but never regained his footing or his brio. In his last years he was a news photographer, mainly for the New York Post.

To freshen my recollection of Ginzburg and his magazine, I looked at the New York Times obit, published the day after his death. He was lionized as "a taboo-busting editor and publisher, who helped set off the sexual revolution in the 1960s with Eros magazine and was imprisoned for sending it through the United States mail in a case decided by the Supreme Court..." The Times described Eros as "a stunningly designed 'magbook' devoted to eroticism... [It] covered a wide swath of sexuality in history, politics, art and literature. Mr. Ginzburg valued good writing, and his contributors included Nat Hentoff, Arthur Herzog and Albert Ellis."

Forty years ago, though, when praise from respected quarters could have done Ginzburg some good, The Times swatted him with its august contempt. In an editorial of March 24, 1966, the day after the Supreme Court upheld Ginzburg's conviction, the paper harrumphed: "Ginzburg was clearly publishing pornography... The Court inescapably concluded that Ginzburg had no scholarly, literary or scientific interests; he was strictly an entrepreneur in a disreputable business who took his chances on the borderline of the law and lost... The pornographic racketeers have cause to worry, and their defeat is society's gain."

Ginzburg a "pornographic racketeer?" The magazine with "no scholarly, literary or scientific interest"? Did the editors even look at Eros, which at its best was the most handsome publication around, and at worst, even by the starchy standards of the day, was mildly racy? If the editors did peruse Eros, and come to their conclusion, they were myopic; if they didn't, they were journalistically irresponsible.

That Eros was banned, and Ginzburg imprisoned, says less about the magazine and more about the times (and the Times). As everyone now agrees, the 60s really began with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Vietnam protests, the ghetto uprisings, and of course sex, drugs and rock 'n roll cracked open, like a raptor from its egg. For the first years of that decade, we were, essentially, still in the 50s, with Doris Day reigning on the big screen and Father Knows Best on the small one.

There were hints of a change in the success of Playboy, which married an upmarket life style to photos of undressed cuties, and in court decisions that allowed the publication of sexually frank novels like D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. But pornography was something most people hid under the mattress. Eros was different. It said that sex wasn't dirty; it was a mark of connoisseurship. Eros was clean, a literary and lithographic work of art. Pristinely produced by art director Herb Lubalin, in an elegantly oversized format on both matte and glossy paper, and with hardback covers, it was meant to be displayed. It was a coffee-table magazine, the American Heritage of sexual literacy.

Like the foreign films of the time, which offered both snob appeal (subtitles and chess games with Death) and sex appeal (the occasional exposed bosom), Eros hoped to be a status symbol for the would-be liberated. Ginzburg, just 31 when he launched his dream book, would be Hefner with a higher IQ and a permanent pass to the New York Public Library's back room of naughty classical literature.

One problem. Hefner, in his robe, pipe and ascot, a blond on each arm and around each leg, really looked like a playboy. Ginzburg, unfortunately, was Central Casting's idea of a pornographer: shady, you might say shifty, with a thin, sallow face and a small mustache. But he, unlike Hefner, wasn't selling himself as the face of his magazine. And Eros was so gorgeous, it made the sex appeal of its editor-publisher irrelevant.

EROS AND ME

How did they get the name and address of a 17-year-old in Philadelphia? Typically, publishers buy subscription lists from other magazines, but I didn't subscribe to any. The truth is, I wasn't that special, since, in the months before Eros started publishing, Ginzburg had sent out 3 million brochures as bait. I was just one of the ones that bit,

I went for Eros not so much because I was a horny kid (though I was) as because I was a pretentious one. My bedroom library was stocked with such scholarly tomes as The Natural History of Love, Eros in the Modern World, the Kinsey Report and Ginzburg's own survey, An Unhurried View of Erotica. Of these books I remember little except odd bits of effluvia. Kinsey informed me that one in seven farm lads had engaged in, shall we say, animal husbandry ("Until," as Tom Lehrer would add, "they caught him at it"). From Ginzburg I learned that Benjamin Franklin had written a mock-scientific essay on the technique of farting, in which he wryly proposed giving the stinky gas a sweet fragrance through the ingestion of, I think, cloves.

None of these books had a priapic impact on me — that I would remember — and neither did Eros. Fact is, whatever the eventual tut-tutting of the courts, the magazine had loads of literary and artistic value. What it lacked for me, frankly, was redeeming prurient interest.

And here's the saddest confession of my late teenage years: I was going to college at a school nearby, and still living at home. So, folks, if Eros had really been pornographic, my good conservative Catholic parents would surely have raised a ruckus.

LOOK BACK AT EROS

Let's. I did. Looking at the magazine for the first time (I swear) in 40-some years, I discovered that my teenage view of it hasn't changed. It's still a good-looking book with more airs than eros.

Spring 1962. Eighty pages, 16 in color, in the oversize, art-book format. The mustard colored cover has an embossed playing card of Bluebeard and one of his maids, the teaser to a five-page feature inside. Ray Bradbury contributed a lovely short fiction, a sort of "Gift of the Magi," in bed. Sixteen pages are devoted to a Guy de Maupassant story, Madame Tellier's Brothel, in "a new uncensored translation" and illustrated with 12 monograph sketches by Degas.

A sample of etymologist Eric Partridge's "vulgar dictionary" contained the commonest four-letter words, but they were masked with asterisks. The fun came in definitions of such obscure but piquant phrases as Back Gammon Player, Brother of the Gusset, Fire Ship, Irish Whist, Nogging House, Pushing School, Scotch Warming Pan and Whiffles. I suppose they might have raised a giggle from the youth of Olde England or 60s Middle America, but kids of the latter era were getting naughtier word play from Ian Fleming. Remember Pussy Galore?

In introducing some lubricious poems by the 17th century Earl of Rochester that had been published by Princeton University Press, the magazine went out of its way to refer to "the forces of censorship" in a complimentary way: "It is to their credit, and to the credit of the Postmaster's General's Office, that they have permitted the book to be freely sold and to travel unhindered through the mails these last 12 years." Attentive ears could detect the sound of sucking up to the Post Office. (Those kind words would fall on deaf ears.)

Summer 1962. The government official Ginzburg should have watched out for was the Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy. But there he was indiscreet. The opening feature in issue #2 was a photo essay of women gazing adoringly at the President of the United States: Bobby's brother Jack Kennedy.

Expanded to 96 pages, 18 in color, the second issue began by thanking subscribers for their support. The photo essays were of Paris prostitutes (clothed) and India's erotic statuary (too time-worn to reveal much detail). The premiere issue had run reprints of quaint old ads from the backs of men's magazines; issue 2 featured an antique patent submission for a male chastity belt.

On the issue's last 16 pages were a few dozen of the 10,000 responses to the magazine's initial mailing. We were solemnly informed that all the responses had been donated to the Kinsey Institute (they're still there). Some of these scrawled missives have the puckish tone of work from the magazine's junior staff after a three-martini-lunch; but, true or fabricated, they're nonetheless instructive. A few examples:

"I've lived 57 years with a prude. She'd never let me have it. Sorry fellas."

"The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul."

"Repent!"

"Sheesh!"

This one, I don't care if it's genuine, for in two sentences it distills the richness of a Sinclair Lewis novel: "The man to who you sent your advertisement died suddenly last Thursday. He was a Sunday school teacher, leader in Boy Scout Council, loved by his sales force and customers — and hated by his wife for his sexual perversions encouraged by magazine's like yours. —Mrs. C.Z."

The most telling of the notes, which the Attorney General should have tacked to his wall, reads: "I read every word of your brochure several times very carefully and I want to tell you that it bored me to tears."

Well, one man's yawn is another's scream of outrage.

Autumn 1962. Eros hit pay dirt with Bert Stern's 18-page photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe, taken six weeks before her death and published six weeks after it. At 36, she looks lined and tired but engaged in her life's work of showing herself to the camera. Her body behind sheer strips of fabric shows the effects of dieting and gravity. Some of the workprints are X'd out —Monroe's nixing of their publication. It was both ghoulish and poignant to see the sex goddess in this post-mortem exposé, while her name was still in the headlines. It's eerie now to recall that whispers were already connecting her sexually with Jack Kennedy, subject of the lead picture story in Eros' previous issue, and with Bobby, who soon would prosecute the magazine.

The issue also included instructions in "Sexercise" by Bonnie Prudden, whose was then fitness guru on the Today show, and "My Search for a French Tickler in Japan" by young Mimi Sheraton, later the Times food critic and a food writer for Time. (I didn't read to the end to see if she found one.) "The Brothel in Art" featured works by Hogarth, Utamaro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso. The book excerpt was from the 18th century novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, or Fanny Hill, which the Supreme Court would absolve from the charge of pornography on the same day it condemned Ginzburg.

An article on the American pornographer Samuel Roth, "Prometheus of the Unprintable," contained a passage that, read today, is creepy in its ignorant prescience: Robert Antrim writes of Roth: "His life would be worth noting if he had done nothing more than get himself prosecuted by the Post Office Department both for publishing obscenity and for not publishing obscenity. (The not-publishing charge, of course, was mail fraud; Roth, as he did more often than not, had published some tame stuff, advertising that it heaved with passion, The P.O. felt that he should have kept his word, even if it was a dirty word.)"

That's just what would happen to Ginzburg for publishing Eros.

Winter 1962. Another 96-pager, with a dozen in color. "Love in the Bible" opened the issue. Allen Ginsberg, who would later protest Ralph Ginzburg's conviction, offered a chatty letter. Frank Harris, author of the social and erotic confession My Life and Loves (which had not yet been legally published in the U.S.), got the biographical treatment. The mood lightened with a couple dozen limericks, familiar to centuries of frat boys. The harlot from Kew, the man from Stamboul and the fellow from Kent all made guest appearances, but not, alas, the hermit named Dave.

Finally, Eros published a piece that was erotic and artful: an eight-page "photographic tone poem" by Ralph Hattersley Jr., called Black and White in Color: African-American guy, European-American gal, both nude. They link hands; they kiss, in silhouette; and in the last shot they press against each other. The mood is chaste and a little solemn; no pubic parts go public. Yet this was the feature that got Eros hauled into court. Several commentators wondered at the time, and I do now, whether the essay would have been deemed so objectionable if the two people had been of the same color — and whether the furor was as much a matter of politics as of propriety, since it was published at the exact time of the Civil Rights demonstrations, and racist violence, in the South.

TRIAL AND EROS

I have no idea how much money the magazine made or lost, before it was shut down, and what its true circulation was. I can guess that Ginzburg wasn't rolling in the dough. With the fourth issue came this flyer: "LAST CHANCE! If you act now, you may still become a Charter Subscriber to Eros." From the screaming capital letters and the shrillness of the italicized "now," even a teenager could tell that Eros wasn't a money-minter like Playboy. It wasn't sexy like Playboy either, and that was probably one reason I let my subscription lapse. Turns out, it didn't matter: issue #4 was the last to be published.

I should say, it didn't matter to me.

In June 1963, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (from whose jurisdiction the magazine had been mailed) heard the government's case that, though the material in Eros may not have been obscene, its promotion tended to "pander to prurient interests." Here are some of the lines from the brochure that the judges viewed as pandering:

"Eros is a child of its times. . . . [It] is the result of recent court decisions that have realistically interpreted America's obscenity laws and that have given to this country a new breadth of freedom of expression. . . . Eros takes full advantage of this new freedom of expression. It is the magazine of sexual candor. ... The publication of this magazine — which is frankly and avowedly concerned with erotica — has been enabled by recent court decisions ruling that a literary piece or painting, though explicitly sexual in content, has a right to be published if it is a genuine work of art. Eros is a genuine work of art."

Puffery, for sure. Pompous, it may be, But prurient?

Perhaps the Justices were aware that Ginzburg had posted the magazine from two tantalizingly named Amish towns, Intercourse and Blue Ball, Pa. But this was merely an example of the magazine's fondness for schoolyard raillery. Surely, even then, "obscene" was a weighter word than "adolescent."

Basically, Ginzburg, like Sam Roth before him, was convicted on a kind of Truth in Advertising sting: he suggested his magazine was dirty when it wasn't. Adding insult to injury, the same day the Supremes upheld Ginzburg's conviction, they overtuned a Massachusetts obscenity ruling on Fanny Hill. Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, stated that to be obscene a work must be "utterly without redeeming social value." That the judges could implicitly place the patently artful Eros in that unredeemed category is an irony they apparetly ignored.

As Ginzburg wrote, years later: "The High Court's Salemesque judgment, authored by the oft-lionized-as-a-liberal William J. Brennan, also upheld my conviction, along with its bloodletting fines and prison sentence of five years." But as the razing of New York's Pennsylvania Station roused the city's citizenry to band together and forestall the destruction of other landmarks, so the Eros conviction belatedly galvanized the intellectual community. Hentoff, Ginsberg, Sloan Wilson, James Jones, I.F. Stone, Grove Press' Barney Rosset and ACLUers far and wide rose to protest the pornographer's incarceration. "These eventually succeeded in having my prison sentence reduced from five years to three," Ginzburg wrote, "and in gaining my parole after I had been locked up for eight months."

This was 1972, 10 years after the brief, beautiful and tragic life of Eros. In that decade, so much had changed. In what was legally permissable as literature or entertainment, everything had changed. Say no more than that 1972 was the year of Deep Throat.

Arthur Miller had put the point smartly in the late 60s: "After all the legal, moral and psychological arguments are done," the playwright wrote, "the fact remains that a man is going to prison for publishing and advertising stuff a few years ago that today would hardly raise an eyebrow in your dentist's office. This is the folly, the menace of all censorship — it lays down rules for all time which are ludicrous a short time later.

"If it is right that Ralph Ginzburg go to jail, then in all justice the same court that sentenced him should proceed at once to close down ninety percent of the movies now playing and the newspapers that carry their advertising. Compared to the usual run of entertainment in this country, Ginzburg's publications and his ads are on a par with the National Geographic."

The sexual tide had rushed in, and Ginzburg had gone to jail for the crime of having once stood on the beach with dry feet and dreams of an ocean spray. Like Lenny Bruce — whom we'll get to in a few weeks, on the 40th anniversary of his death — Ginzburg was a pioneer in, and a victim of, the art of the permissable. He was not a martyr,, exactly; he didn't die for our sins. But he did time so that we could legally enjoy those sins of the flesh. And he helped us realize that they weren't sinful after all..

• Richard Corliss