There was no textbook for the class. Ed would assign us a photocopied packet of cases and notes on a particular topic, and we would come to class and he’d make some prefatory statement to introduce the topic, and then we would all argue for an hour or so. He would throw a flag if arguments became ad hominem attacks, but otherwise, he never interfered, or injected his own view, or even (frankly) gave much guidance, preferring for us to make our own way through the issues. But he was certainly steering the ship and setting the agenda for us, with his neutral pronouncements and his selection and grouping of cases. And the cases were invariably about sex… or obscenity, at any rate, involving the work of James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, among others, and more recently, Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, and Holly Hughes. Our discussions were supposed to focus on the varying legal standards our courts have relied on over the years to determine if a work was “obscene”, though our debate often spiraled off or digressed into other areas.
I didn’t know much about Ed back then. It was only later I learned about the life he had led. Back in the 1950s, he had taken on the US Post Office to free Lysistrata from their censorious grip. He tried to help Lenny Bruce, too, when the state took away his words. Later, in the 1960s, he took Miller’s Tropic Of Cancer all the way to the Supreme Court, obtaining a landmark decision that enlarged the scope of protected speech under the new “Brennan Doctrine.” Burroughs, too, received the benefit of Ed’s passion and talent, when Naked Lunch was banned in Boston. He got Norman Mailer freed from prison after an anti-war protest in D.C., and he got I Am Curious (Yellow) the right to be distributed in the U.S.
He then taught at Cardozo for 30 years, as a founding member of its faculty. Those photocopied cases he passed out in my class ultimately became a book, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. Unbeknownst to us, my classmates and I were his beta testers for what turned out to be a fundamental text on obscenity and the First Amendment. I have a totally unwarranted pride in the book, though I had absolutely nothing to do with a single thing in it. I highly recommend it.
I especially loved the title, “Girls Lean Back Everywhere,” which first appeared as a quote from the original lawsuit in the U.S. regarding Joyce’s Ulysses. Jane Heap, an American feminist, and publisher, published the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses in her magazine, the Little Review. Heap’s attempt to publish the work was attacked in 1920 by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (yes, indeed, that was a real thing). In response to the Society’s charges, Heap wrote of Joyce:
“Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeve- less blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere--seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom (in “Nausicaa”) – and no one is corrupted.”
And so began De Grazia’s powerful dissertation on sex in America and the way its depiction in the arts has been slowly – very slowly, too slowly – decriminalized over the last 200 years… a trend aided and abetted in part by Mr. De Grazia himself.
It has been reported that Ed was also a playwright of avant-garde and largely un-produced plays. I was unaware of that, but it doesn’t surprise me. So as a brother in spirit and a brother in arms, and as a man who spent a lifetime defending our ability to use all our words, not just some of them, I thought Ed deserved a moment’s consideration from us on his passing, particularly in this, the “Sex Issue” (though Ed’s work was about sex the way Moby Dick was about whaling).
So thanks, Ed.
But now there is one less, just when we needed one more.