The World Broke in Two

by Bill Goldstein

  Between the publication of the Little Review in summer 1920 and its trial the following winter had come Seltzer’s edition of Women in Love with its title page pointedly without a publisher. At the same time that Sumner seized it and two other Seltzer books, Casanova’s Homecoming, by Arthur Schnitzler, and the anonymous A Young Girl’s Diary, another case was decided. It set a new precedent of which Seltzer might take advantage.

  * * *

  The limited edition of Women in Love had been among the first books published by the new company created by Thomas Seltzer after the dissolution of a brief partnership, Scott & Seltzer, which he had formed with an editor named Temple Scott. Seltzer had published his first Lawrence book, Touch and Go: A Play in Three Acts, in June 1920. Women in Love followed in November, and by the spring of 1921 there would be three more, The Lost Girl; The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, a play; and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, an essay. This would have been a glut of the marketplace—Lawrence’s essay sold only seven hundred copies—even if 1921 had not been a disastrous year for publishing. Seltzer had started his firm at a time of “business panic,” as his wife, Adele, explained to her family about her husband’s new venture. “The salesman in the West says if things keep on the same way, he’ll starve, and he represents some of the largest houses besides Thomas Seltzer, Inc.”

  The Lost Girl had, however, sold four thousand copies within a few months of publication in 1921, persuading Seltzer to postpone Aaron’s Rod, the novel Lawrence had completed that June, until the spring of 1922 so that he could continue to promote The Lost Girl. “Business is extremely dull, practically dead,” Seltzer wrote to Lawrence’s agent, Robert Mountsier. Despite the business doldrums, they were nevertheless in the midst of what Seltzer rather grandly—and self-aggrandizingly—called a “Lawrence boom,” which really meant that The Lost Girl was selling. Sales of the several other Lawrence books he’d published were weak, but there was “hardly a literary page we pick up that has not some mention or other” about one of them. Seltzer assured Mountsier he was still “spending money freely on publicity for Lawrence.” (Perhaps this was why Seltzer and his wife, however much they were “benefactors of writers,” were also “never very far from insolvency.”) Seltzer had faith in Lawrence’s nonfiction and thought that even Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious might sell, given a chance. He also hoped Sea and Sardinia, excerpts of which Mabel Dodge would see in the Dial, would be a lucrative spring 1922 title. Aaron’s Rod should come after that, Seltzer proposed.

  Lawrence had initially been wary of tying himself up with Seltzer’s new firm at all and had specifically not wanted a “semi-private publication” of Women in Love. But he agreed to go ahead, prophesying that the book would be either a succès d’estime or a succès de scandale. He had not thought, it seems, that it might be one at first and the other later.

  Women in Love sold steadily enough, “considering the times,” that after six months Seltzer thought a second subscriber edition, including signed copies, would soon be necessary. A sold-out edition would be lucrative, but the key to the publisher’s hope for Lawrence’s future, he wrote to Mountsier in June 1921, was whether Aaron’s Rod is “really unobjectionable,” as Lawrence had told him it was. Lawrence had only just finished writing the book, and Seltzer had not yet read it. But he was confident that to follow the popular Lost Girl with another novel “against which there is no definite objection … would give Lawrence a very strong position here. After that we need fear no antagonism.” Seltzer predicted (wrongly, as it turned out) that by January 1922 the limited edition of Women in Love would be exhausted. But he also believed that following large sales of an unobjectionable Aaron’s Rod, even Women in Love could at last be published for general circulation later in the year.

  But Seltzer was too sanguine. The success of The Lost Girl did not change Lawrence’s reputation. Secker had found this out, too: his English edition of Women in Love in the summer of 1921 ran into the familiar trouble with John Bull. The critic for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle might praise Aaron’s Rod, but he also knew its author was still “the sex-obsessed Mr Lawrence.” However much Seltzer claimed to worry about Lawrence’s reputation or his own, he continued to capitalize on it. His June 1922 advertisement for Aaron’s Rod in the New-York Tribune echoed his circular for the 1920 Women in Love and his spring promotional pamphlet “D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work,” and declared, “The work of a great genius and a bestseller. Love and Marriage in our day as Lawrence sees it.” The same month Lawrence’s name could be invoked as comic shorthand for the risqué at the “offish little” Neighborhood Playhouse in lower Manhattan, where a revue, The Grand Street Follies, was drawing crowds. The show, riding the coattails of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1922, was a “delightfully carefree” hit, the Tribune reported, a “low-brow show for high-grade morons,” using quotation marks that suggest this may have been the production’s own tag line.

  In one skit, a young man was trying to get the attention of his sweetheart, who was content to read a book instead. “Don’t interrupt me,” she told him. “I am in the midst of one of the most passionate passages of D. H. Lawrence.”

  Seltzer included the anecdote in one of his long business letters to Mountsier, who was out of town in rural Pennsylvania for the summer. “This, they say, always brings the house down.” That Lawrence had entered into common parlance brought credit to him as his publisher, and reporting it might serve as yet another defense against Mountsier’s complaints about Lawrence’s generally weak sales and Seltzer’s unfavorable contractual terms that the agent suggested other publishers would be willing to better.

  But here was a joke about the very thing that most worried John Sumner and the Society for the Suppression of Vice: the poisoning of a young girl’s mind by reading a book.

  Knowing nothing of the Follies, Lawrence wrote Seltzer from Australia on June 9 to report on his progress on Kangaroo, and the fact that there was “no love interest at all so far—don’t intend any—no sex either.” And he made his own joke. “Amy Lowell says you are getting a reputation as an erotic publisher: she warns me. I shall have thought my reputation as an erotic writer (poor dears) was secure. So now I’ll go back on it.”

  The erotic writer soon enough got stuck again. But that was not to be Lawrence’s—or his erotic publisher’s—only problem that summer. The Follies joke, and his own, soon shared a different punch line.

  * * *

  Late in the afternoon of Friday, July 7, Sumner raided the Seltzer offices, at 5 West Fiftieth Street. Nearly eight hundred copies of the three books, Lawrence’s, Schnitzler’s, and the anonymous Diary, notable for its foreword by Sigmund Freud, were “pinched by the PO-lice.”

  Seltzer was charged with violating Section 1141 of the New York State Penal Code, the statute dealing with “the publication and sale of obscene literature,” as the Times decorously put it. The sweep of Seltzer’s office was so complete that copies of books from other publishers were “taken by Mr. Sumner’s command,” after they were discovered in Seltzer’s locked desk, which he agreed to open “under threat of having it forced.”

  Sumner’s target was A Young Girl’s Diary, about which he had received a complaint in June from an informer. Sumner immediately deputized a colleague who “called on Thomas Seltzer,” as Sumner collegially reported to his board, and purchased a copy of the book from him. Sumner read A Young Girl’s Diary, believed it to be actionable, and, beginning official action, “marked [it] for presentation” to the Seventh District Court. The complaint was filed, and on July 7, Sumner was given a summons and search warrant. He went to the Seltzer offices with a warrant officer of the West Side Police Court, who with Sumner oversaw the packing up of the hundreds of books. Seltzer was given a receipt for the copies; they had left it up to him whether he would hire—at his own expense—a trucker to take the books away, or whether Sumner would send a police patrol wagon for them. Seltzer decided to pay for it himself, a way of symbolically affirming at the outset
his refusal, all along, to concede any criminality in the publication or distribution of the books. The receipt was in the name of the district attorney, a reminder that Sumner was a private citizen still working under a city license granted nearly fifty years ago to Comstock. Copies of A Young Girl’s Diary were also seized from Brentano’s, on Fifth Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street. It was the only one of the three Seltzer books available there, the Times reported. (The society ignored Aaron’s Rod during its visit to Brentano’s, despite the novel’s popularity at the moment. It was listed that week in the Tribune as Brentano’s best-selling novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned was number five.) Mary Marks, a clerk at Womrath’s, a circulating library, was also arrested, and charged with lending A Young Girl’s Diary to “divers persons.”

  There had been no mention of Women in Love in Sumner’s monthly board reports before the seizure, and it seems he read the book only after it was taken, blandly noting among his activities for the month of July, “Also read books: ‘Women in Love.’” Sumner had received complaints about Casanova’s Homecoming in 1921 but, unusually, had taken no action.

  The title of Women in Love was obviously suggestive enough, even without any knowledge of its contents or its author’s reputation. It might almost be a sequel to A Young Girl’s Diary, chronicling that anonymous author’s continuing sexual development. The title of the third book, Casanova’s Homecoming, was as damning as Schnitzler’s foreign name. And though the “young girl” who had written the diary was anonymous, the penumbra of the alien (and sexual) hung over it, too. Freud’s name and endorsement of the book’s importance were featured on the cover.

  That Sumner and the society seized books from so many Jewish publishers—Liveright, Knopf, and Ben Huebsch were perennial targets—was not a coincidence. He was ecumenical enough that he prosecuted publishers with names like Harper, Scribner, and Lippincott whenever possible, too, but Sumner did not think of them in league with one another against good taste and American purity as he did of the Jewish publishers whose offerings he deplored. Sumner’s crusade against obscene plays was even more aggressive than his attacks on publishers in 1921 to 1923, and he fulminated against the Jewish producers who were responsible for polluting the city’s stages, urging Americans “to rescue its theatre from ‘foreigners.’”

  Seltzer, born in Russia in 1875, had immigrated to the United States with his family in 1887. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, a scholarship student, in 1897, and did postgraduate work in modern languages, so that in addition to English, Russian, and Yiddish, the languages of his childhood, he was conversant in Polish, German, French, and Italian. He translated Maxim Gorky, and before starting his imprint he was a journalist and a founding editor of Masses, one of the intellectual “giants of the Village.” (Seltzer had more “spark” than Martin Secker, Lawrence’s English publisher, Frieda once wrote.) Seltzer was also the uncle of Liveright’s partners Albert and Charles Boni, with whom he had formed the imprint Boni & Liveright in 1917.

  The seizure was a catastrophe for Seltzer’s firm and for him personally. His wife, Adele, had only just left for a summer vacation in Ontario, where he was to join her at the end of the month. He waited a week to write her, holding off until he thought news of the “dramatic occurrence” could not be withheld from her any longer. The invasion of his office, the seizure of the books, the publicity, his outrage: “Of course the burden upon me was terrific.… At first I thought I’d break under it—all alone and with so much other work,” he told Adele, an even greater champion of Lawrence than her husband. Lawrence “enslaves me,” Adele wrote a friend in the summer of 1922. “But he is lots more to me than that. Lawrence is the throbbing vital life of today with the genius of a sort of a combination of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.”

  Seltzer had also waited until he could tell Adele what he had decided to do. On the twelfth, Seltzer’s lawyer, Jonah Goldstein, announced that he would not seek to have the charges dismissed. Seltzer had been buoyed by supportive letters praising him for having published the books, he told Adele, and convinced, as she was, that Lawrence was the greatest writer of his time, he wanted to protect his investment but also his principles. Goldstein told the Times that he had read the books carefully and was confident that they were “in my judgment, classics of the day.” The three books that had been seized had just the opposite effect than Sumner charged, Goldstein claimed, and in fact they tended “to elevate the tone and the morals of the community.”

  The case “is being conducted properly, I think, and it looks hopeful,” Seltzer assured his wife. “We are up against a gang of toughs, but Goldstein seems to know how to fight them.… The papers are all with us and we are putting up a big fight.”

  * * *

  Nothing about the seizure of Women in Love could have surprised “the sex-obsessed” Mr. Lawrence, except perhaps the society’s long delay in discovering the novel, particularly after the John Bull attacks on Secker’s edition the previous year in England. But he did not hear about it from either Seltzer or Robert Mountsier in the five weeks between Sumner’s visit to Seltzer’s office and his departure from Sydney, on August 11.

  Why neither Seltzer nor Mountsier felt news of “the big fight” was urgent enough to cable to Lawrence is unclear. Seltzer wrote a letter that did not reach Lawrence before he left Australia. Lawrence read it only after he arrived in the United States, by which time it was no longer news. Lawrence’s June 21 letter, reporting that he’d finished more than half of Kangaroo, would have likely reached Seltzer not long after the publisher’s first appearance in court.

  The prospects for Lawrence’s next novel, even one without any love at all in it, were likely to be an afterthought, given Seltzer’s preoccupation with his defense against Sumner. But it turned out that the hiatus in productivity Lawrence feared had been only days, not years, as it had been for his two previous “stuck” novels. It had been a fortuitous pause. He had found his way forward.

  Kangaroo is set entirely in Australia—except for the one chapter Lawrence wrote after he resumed work. But in order to account for why Richard Lovat Somers—or David Herbert Lawrence—was there, he began to write about the one episode in his life that he had not yet touched on in his fiction: his and Frieda’s experiences during the war. Frieda had told Mrs. Jenkins that Lawrence had written “his head off” until chapter eleven. The twelfth chapter is set in England during the first years of the war. The fear Lawrence had felt at the vastness of the Australian bush during his short stay in Perth was a fear he carried within him, and which he gave to his protagonist. Lawrence broke off writing after an unnerving conversation between Somers and Kangaroo. Will Somers stay loyal to him? Is his future with the movement Kangaroo leads? Somers doesn’t know. And apparently neither did Lawrence. Somers is walking through Sydney on a Saturday night. The shops are closed, and the streets were, Lawrence wrote, “dark and dreary, though thronging with people. Dark streets, dark, streaming people. And fear. One could feel such fear, in Australia.” The chapter ended. The inspiration that had carried him two-thirds of the way through the novel had unexpectedly failed. It was if Lawrence had written at full tilt until he could simply not see where Somers might go next.

  In the next chapter, Lawrence explored where the fear had set in. Forster had told the Memoir Club in his recent contribution that he had looked into the “lumber-room of my past” and had found things that “were mine and useful.” Lawrence, at the same moment, did it, too. He wrote as if his protagonist (and he himself) had taken to a psychoanalyst’s couch, with Somers “lying perfectly still and tense” as he thought out “detail for detail … his experience with the authorities, during the war.… Till now, he had always kept the memory at bay, afraid of it. Now it all came back, in a rush. It was like a volcanic eruption in his consciousness.”

  In a novel of eighteen chapters, all of them roughly ten to twenty pages, the twelfth chapter, which Lawrence called “The Nightmare,” is the longes
t and, at almost fifty pages, more than twice as long as any of the others.

  Lawrence went through all that had happened to Frieda and him between the start of the war and their departure from England in 1917. “It was in 1915 the old world ended.… The integrity of London collapsed, the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors … the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.” He described the shock of the “very strict watch” on Frieda and himself, and the humiliation of being “called up”—the judgment of his “thin nakedness,” the “ignominious” rejection as “unfit” that was a relief to him. “Let them label me unfit.… I know my own body is fragile, in its way, but also it is very strong, and it’s the only body that would carry my particular self.”

  The exhortation of the doctor who decided he was unfit was to “find some way for himself of serving his country.” Somers, as Lawrence did, “thought about that many times. But always … he knew that he simply could not commit himself to any service whatsoever. In no shape or form could he serve the war, neither indirectly or directly.” He would be “forced into nothing” not of his own volition. He would “act from his soul alone.”

  Finally the military authorities order the couple to leave the county of Cornwall “within the space of three days.” Then, wherever it was they would go in England, they must “report themselves at the police station of the place,” and give their address, within twenty-four hours. As they left Cornwall Somers experienced “one of his serious deaths in belief.” And so began the “long adventure” that led Richard and Harriet Somers out of England and to “this free Australia,” where they came to feel the “same terror and pressure” of being “suspect again, two strangers.”