Gershon Legman
Encyclopedia
Gershon Legman was an American
cultural critic
and folklorist
.
to Emil and Julia Friedman Legman, both of Hungarian/Romanian Jewish
descent; his father was a railroad clerk and butcher. According to an obituary by his friend Jay Landesman
in The Independent
of London, in a childhood incident, classmates "wrote the word 'kosher' in horse-shit juice across his forehead." He regarded the event as formative, and he would insist throughout his life that violence and sadism so prominent in American culture resulted directly from the suppression of sex.
Legman was an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, except during 1964-1965 when he was a writer in residence at the University of California
at La Jolla, in the first year of the new campus' undergraduate programs. He pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo
materials in folklore
. He also was a talented raconteur and could spin out tales non-stop for hours.
As a young man he acquired a number of interests including sexuality, erotic folklore, also origami
--for which he was a pivotal figure in founding the modern international movement. In 1940, at age 23, he wrote Oragenitalism, Part I: Cunnilinctus under the pen-name Roger-Maxe de la Glannege (an anagram of his real name). Nearly all copies were seized by the police and destroyed. For a period of time he was a bibliographic researcher with the Kinsey Institute
.
In 1949, he published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship, arguing that American culture was permissive of graphic violence in proportion to, and as a consequence of, its repression of the erotic. Legman published and shipped the treatise himself, although he ran afoul of the United States Postal Service
authorities, who stopped his deliveries due to the supposed "indecent, vulgar and obscene" content. The book also included a chapter that attacked contemporary comic books as harmful to children; because his critique drew about his view that it was a consequence of the aforementioned cultural permissive views toward violence he wasn't a leading voice during the subsequent debate about the impact of comics that instead was dominated by Fredric Wertham
.
Love and Death was an outgrowth of the little magazine Neurotica, edited by Jay Landesman and published in nine issues between 1948 and 1952. Legman was a regular contributor and eventually took over from Landesman as the editor. Other contributors included John Clellon Holmes
, Larry Rivers
, Carl Solomon
, Judith Malina
, Allen Ginsberg
, Marshall McLuhan
, and Kenneth Patchen
, which gave it influence disproportionate to its small circulation of a few thousand. The magazine had a few clashes with the authorities, and closed after the censors objected to an article on castration written by Legman.
The full set of Neurotica was reprinted in one volume by Hacker Art Books, New York, in 1963. The Horn Book : Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography was a collection of assorted writings from the 1950s and 1960s. He was a prolific writer of essays, reviews and scholarly introductions, including those for the anonymous Victorian erotic memoir My Secret Life
(1966), Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Secret Tales (1966), and Mark Twain
's The Mammoth Cod (1976). He supplemented his income at times through the sale of rare erotica.
On account of his trial for violating United States Post Office regulations in his distributing his book Love & Death, Legman found it prudent to depart out of the United States.
In 1953 Legman left his native United States for a farm La Clé des Champs in the village of Valbonne
in the South of France
, where he was able to pursue his intellectual interests with greater freedom. In 1955 he organized an exhibition of Akira Yoshizawa
's work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Legman spent several decades compiling specimens of bawdy humor including limericks
. In 1970 his first volume of over 1700 limericks (published in 1953 by Les Hautes Etudes, Paris) was released in the United States as The Limerick. He followed this with a second volume, The New Limerick in 1977, which was reprinted as More Limericks in 1980. His magnum opus was Rationale of the Dirty Joke
: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor), a tour de force of erotic folklore, succeeded by No Laughing Matter : Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, 2nd Series for which a subscription had to be paid to support publishing, as no publisher would touch it after Grove did volume one in 1968. Near the end of his life, he edited Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, two volumes of bawdy songs and lore collected by Vance Randolph
(both 1992). Other achievements include his edition of Robert Burns' The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1965).
.
, for example, in The Fake Revolt (1967), and leaving countless irascible obiter dicta on such topics as women's liberation, rock and roll
and the psychedelic
movement's use of mind-altering substances. However, he claimed to have been the inventor of the famous phrase "Make love, not war," in a lecture given at the University of Ohio in 1963. He remained essentially an individualist and an idealist: "I consider sexual love the central mystery and central reality of life," he wrote. And "I believe in a personal and intense style, and in making value judgements [sic]. This is unfashionable now, but is the only responsible position" Mikita Brottman
offers the consensus view of Legman as, in many ways, his own worst enemy, exacerbating his rejection by the academic community with vitriolic attacks upon it.
In Bruce Jackson's view "Legman is the person, more than any other, who made research into erotic folklore and erotic verbal behavior academically respectable" and who made accessible to other scholars material that scholarly journals had long been afraid to publish.
Gershon Legman died February 23, 1999 in his adopted home country, France, after several years of debility, and a week after suffering a massive stroke.
's book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, Legman was a homosexual and is credited with having invented the vibrating dildo
when he was only twenty. However, Mikita Brottman
holds that he was exclusively heterosexual, accounting for both the abandonment of his proposed volume on fellatio as well as, possibly and in some measure, for his contempt for Alfred Kinsey
. He was married for many years to Beverley Keith (died of lung cancer, 1966), married briefly to Christine Conrad, a possibly bigamous relationship, ended either by annulment or divorce, then to Judith Evans. Autobiographical asides in his works note multiple heterosexual relationships, including at least two engagements. In Rationale of the Dirty Joke, he consistently speaks of homosexuality as a "perversion," and Frank Rector claims that homosexuality was in Legman's mind connected not with a democratic gay liberation movement, but with the Nazi Ernst Rohm
. His obituary in the London Independent lists three marriages, two sons and two daughters. Brottman lists a daughter, Ariëla Legman (b. 1957), by an unidentified Dutch woman, as well as Legman's children by Judith: David Guy Legman (1968), Rafael (1971) and Sara Felicity (1973), and identifies Louise "Beka" Doherty as the great love of Legman's life.
Beginning at the age of 65, Gershon Legman would sometimes "faint at orgasm." He experienced a heart attack after "excessive sexual effort".
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cultural critic
Cultural critic
A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole and typically on a radical basis. There is significant overlap with social and cultural theory.-Terminology:...
and folklorist
Folkloristics
Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore. The term derives from a nineteenth century German designation of folkloristik to distinguish between folklore as the content and folkloristics as its study, much as language is distinguished from linguistics...
.
Life and work
Legman was born in Scranton, PennsylvaniaScranton, Pennsylvania
Scranton is a city in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, United States. It is the county seat of Lackawanna County and the largest principal city in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area. Scranton had a population of 76,089 in 2010, according to the U.S...
to Emil and Julia Friedman Legman, both of Hungarian/Romanian Jewish
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
descent; his father was a railroad clerk and butcher. According to an obituary by his friend Jay Landesman
Jay Landesman
Irving Ned Landesman was an American publisher, nightclub proprietor and writer long resident in London.-With the Beats:...
in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
of London, in a childhood incident, classmates "wrote the word 'kosher' in horse-shit juice across his forehead." He regarded the event as formative, and he would insist throughout his life that violence and sadism so prominent in American culture resulted directly from the suppression of sex.
Legman was an independent scholar without institutional affiliation, except during 1964-1965 when he was a writer in residence at the University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
at La Jolla, in the first year of the new campus' undergraduate programs. He pioneered the serious academic study of erotic and taboo
Taboo
A taboo is a strong social prohibition relating to any area of human activity or social custom that is sacred and or forbidden based on moral judgment, religious beliefs and or scientific consensus. Breaking the taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent by society...
materials in folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
. He also was a talented raconteur and could spin out tales non-stop for hours.
As a young man he acquired a number of interests including sexuality, erotic folklore, also origami
Origami
is the traditional Japanese art of paper folding, which started in the 17th century AD at the latest and was popularized outside Japan in the mid-1900s. It has since then evolved into a modern art form...
--for which he was a pivotal figure in founding the modern international movement. In 1940, at age 23, he wrote Oragenitalism, Part I: Cunnilinctus under the pen-name Roger-Maxe de la Glannege (an anagram of his real name). Nearly all copies were seized by the police and destroyed. For a period of time he was a bibliographic researcher with the Kinsey Institute
Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction
The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction is a nonprofit research institute at Indiana University. It was established in Bloomington, Indiana in 1947...
.
In 1949, he published Love and Death, an attack on sexual censorship, arguing that American culture was permissive of graphic violence in proportion to, and as a consequence of, its repression of the erotic. Legman published and shipped the treatise himself, although he ran afoul of the United States Postal Service
United States Postal Service
The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...
authorities, who stopped his deliveries due to the supposed "indecent, vulgar and obscene" content. The book also included a chapter that attacked contemporary comic books as harmful to children; because his critique drew about his view that it was a consequence of the aforementioned cultural permissive views toward violence he wasn't a leading voice during the subsequent debate about the impact of comics that instead was dominated by Fredric Wertham
Fredric Wertham
Fredric Wertham was a Jewish German-American psychiatrist and crusading author who protested the purportedly harmful effects of violent imagery in mass media and comic books on the development of children. His best-known book was Seduction of the Innocent , which purported that comic books are...
.
Love and Death was an outgrowth of the little magazine Neurotica, edited by Jay Landesman and published in nine issues between 1948 and 1952. Legman was a regular contributor and eventually took over from Landesman as the editor. Other contributors included John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes , born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, was an author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Considered the first "Beat" novel, Go depicted events in his life with his friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat"...
, Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...
, Carl Solomon
Carl Solomon
Carl Solomon was an American writer.-Biography:Solomon was born in the Bronx of New York City. His father's death in 1939 had a profoundly negative effect on his early life...
, Judith Malina
Judith Malina
Judith Malina is an American theater and film actress, writer, and director, who was one of the founders of The Living Theatre.-Early life:...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist...
, and Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. Though he denied any direct connection, Patchen's work and ideas regarding the role of artists paralleled those of the Dadaists, the Beats, and Surrealists...
, which gave it influence disproportionate to its small circulation of a few thousand. The magazine had a few clashes with the authorities, and closed after the censors objected to an article on castration written by Legman.
The full set of Neurotica was reprinted in one volume by Hacker Art Books, New York, in 1963. The Horn Book : Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography was a collection of assorted writings from the 1950s and 1960s. He was a prolific writer of essays, reviews and scholarly introductions, including those for the anonymous Victorian erotic memoir My Secret Life
My Secret Life (erotica)
My Secret Life, by "Walter", is the memoir of a Victorian gentleman's sexual development and experiences. It was first published in a private edition of eleven volumes, which appeared over seven years beginning around 1888....
(1966), Aleksandr Afanasyev's Russian Secret Tales (1966), and Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
's The Mammoth Cod (1976). He supplemented his income at times through the sale of rare erotica.
On account of his trial for violating United States Post Office regulations in his distributing his book Love & Death, Legman found it prudent to depart out of the United States.
In 1953 Legman left his native United States for a farm La Clé des Champs in the village of Valbonne
Valbonne
Valbonne Sophia Antipolis is a commune near Nice in the Alpes-Maritimes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in south-eastern France...
in the South of France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, where he was able to pursue his intellectual interests with greater freedom. In 1955 he organized an exhibition of Akira Yoshizawa
Akira Yoshizawa
Akira Yoshizawa was considered to be the grandmaster of origami. He is credited with raising origami from a craft to a living art...
's work at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Legman spent several decades compiling specimens of bawdy humor including limericks
Limerick (poetry)
A limerick is a kind of a witty, humorous, or nonsense poem, especially one in five-line or meter with a strict rhyme scheme , which is sometimes obscene with humorous intent. The form can be found in England as of the early years of the 18th century...
. In 1970 his first volume of over 1700 limericks (published in 1953 by Les Hautes Etudes, Paris) was released in the United States as The Limerick. He followed this with a second volume, The New Limerick in 1977, which was reprinted as More Limericks in 1980. His magnum opus was Rationale of the Dirty Joke
Rationale of the Dirty Joke
Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor is a book by American social critic and folklorist Gershon Legman. The book analyzes more than 2000 jokes and folk tales in terms of social, psychological, and historical significance...
: (An Analysis of Sexual Humor), a tour de force of erotic folklore, succeeded by No Laughing Matter : Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, 2nd Series for which a subscription had to be paid to support publishing, as no publisher would touch it after Grove did volume one in 1968. Near the end of his life, he edited Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out, two volumes of bawdy songs and lore collected by Vance Randolph
Vance Randolph
Vance Randolph was a famous folklorist who studied the folklore of the Ozarks in particular. He wrote a number of books on topics including the Ozarks, Little Blue Books, and juvenile fiction....
(both 1992). Other achievements include his edition of Robert Burns' The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1965).
Autobiography
The title Peregrine Penis of Gershon Legman's as-of-yet-unpublished autobiography was a sobriquet bestowed on him by his girlfriend Louise "Beka" Doherty, on account of the fact that he "used to travel to meet her in strange places." The writing of Peregrine Penis, over "six hundred pages" in length, was continually subsidized by Larry McMurtryLarry McMurtry
Larry Jeff McMurtry is an American novelist, essayist, bookseller and screenwriter whose work is predominantly set in either the old West or in contemporary Texas...
.
Evaluation
Legman was in many senses a radical, but never identified with the movements of his time, decrying the sexual revolutionSexual revolution
The sexual revolution was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the Western world from the 1960s into the 1980s...
, for example, in The Fake Revolt (1967), and leaving countless irascible obiter dicta on such topics as women's liberation, rock and roll
Rock and roll
Rock and roll is a genre of popular music that originated and evolved in the United States during the late 1940s and early 1950s, primarily from a combination of African American blues, country, jazz, and gospel music...
and the psychedelic
Psychedelic
The term psychedelic is derived from the Greek words ψυχή and δηλοῦν , translating to "soul-manifesting". A psychedelic experience is characterized by the striking perception of aspects of one's mind previously unknown, or by the creative exuberance of the mind liberated from its ostensibly...
movement's use of mind-altering substances. However, he claimed to have been the inventor of the famous phrase "Make love, not war," in a lecture given at the University of Ohio in 1963. He remained essentially an individualist and an idealist: "I consider sexual love the central mystery and central reality of life," he wrote. And "I believe in a personal and intense style, and in making value judgements [sic]. This is unfashionable now, but is the only responsible position" Mikita Brottman
Mikita Brottman
Mikita Brottman is a British scholar, psychoanalyst, author and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture...
offers the consensus view of Legman as, in many ways, his own worst enemy, exacerbating his rejection by the academic community with vitriolic attacks upon it.
In Bruce Jackson's view "Legman is the person, more than any other, who made research into erotic folklore and erotic verbal behavior academically respectable" and who made accessible to other scholars material that scholarly journals had long been afraid to publish.
Gershon Legman died February 23, 1999 in his adopted home country, France, after several years of debility, and a week after suffering a massive stroke.
Legman's Sexuality
According to George ChaunceyGeorge Chauncey
George Chauncey is a professor of history at Yale University. He is best known as the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 .-Life and works:...
's book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, Legman was a homosexual and is credited with having invented the vibrating dildo
Vibrator (sex toy)
Vibrators are devices for the body and skin, to stimulate the nerves for a relaxing and pleasurable feeling. Some vibrators are designed to ergonomically stimulate erogenous zones for erotic stimulation.-History:...
when he was only twenty. However, Mikita Brottman
Mikita Brottman
Mikita Brottman is a British scholar, psychoanalyst, author and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture...
holds that he was exclusively heterosexual, accounting for both the abandonment of his proposed volume on fellatio as well as, possibly and in some measure, for his contempt for Alfred Kinsey
Alfred Kinsey
Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology, who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, as well as producing the Kinsey Reports and the Kinsey...
. He was married for many years to Beverley Keith (died of lung cancer, 1966), married briefly to Christine Conrad, a possibly bigamous relationship, ended either by annulment or divorce, then to Judith Evans. Autobiographical asides in his works note multiple heterosexual relationships, including at least two engagements. In Rationale of the Dirty Joke, he consistently speaks of homosexuality as a "perversion," and Frank Rector claims that homosexuality was in Legman's mind connected not with a democratic gay liberation movement, but with the Nazi Ernst Rohm
Ernst Röhm
Ernst Julius Röhm, was a German officer in the Bavarian Army and later an early Nazi leader. He was a co-founder of the Sturmabteilung , the Nazi Party militia, and later was its commander...
. His obituary in the London Independent lists three marriages, two sons and two daughters. Brottman lists a daughter, Ariëla Legman (b. 1957), by an unidentified Dutch woman, as well as Legman's children by Judith: David Guy Legman (1968), Rafael (1971) and Sara Felicity (1973), and identifies Louise "Beka" Doherty as the great love of Legman's life.
Beginning at the age of 65, Gershon Legman would sometimes "faint at orgasm." He experienced a heart attack after "excessive sexual effort".
Books
- The Language of Homosexuality: An American Glossary, in: George W. Henry, Sex Variants (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1941)
- Love and Death: A Study in Censorship, (1949)
- Bibliography of Paper-folding (1952)
- Neurotica: No. 9 The Castration Complex (ed., with Alvin LustigAlvin LustigAlvin Lustig was an American graphic designer and typeface designer. He studied at Los Angeles City College, Art Center, and independently with Frank Lloyd Wright and Jean Charlot. He began designing for books in 1937. In 1944 he became Director of Visual Research for Look Magazine. He also...
) (1952) - The Compleat Neurotica: St. Louis - New York 1948 - 51 (ed., with Jay Irving) Landesman (1963)
- The Horn Book, Studies in Erotic Folklore and Bibliography (New York, 1964; repr. London, 1970: ISBN 0-224-61866-0)
- Guilt of the Templars (1966)
- OragenitalismOragenitalismOragenitalism is the title of a book authored by American folklorist Gershon Legman, and published by the Julian Press in 1969. The book describes various types of oral sex....
; an Encyclopaedic Outline of Oral Technique in Genital Excitation. Part I: Cunnilinctus. (NY: J.R. Brussel, 1940. 63 pp.). Nearly all copies seized by police and destroyed. - OragenitalismOragenitalismOragenitalism is the title of a book authored by American folklorist Gershon Legman, and published by the Julian Press in 1969. The book describes various types of oral sex....
(Julian Press, 1969. 319 pp.) reissued as The Intimate Kiss (Paperback Library, 1971) - Rationale of the Dirty JokeRationale of the Dirty JokeRationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor is a book by American social critic and folklorist Gershon Legman. The book analyzes more than 2000 jokes and folk tales in terms of social, psychological, and historical significance...
: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (New York: Grove Press, 1968); reprinted in hardcover by Indiana University Press (December 1982) ISBN 0-253-34777-7; ISBN 978-0-253-34777-0 - The New Limerick: 2750 Unpublished Examples, American and British (New York, 1977, ISBN 0-517-53091-0)
- Introduction to: The Private Case - An Annotated Bibliography of the Private CasePrivate CaseThe Private Case of the British Library is a collection of pornographic books and other items, not normally available to general readers. It was established in 1857 and the core of the collection is the bequest of the Victorian collector Henry Spencer Ashbee in 1900. Other significant...
Erotica Collection in the British (Museum) Library (Compiled by Patrick J. Kearney) (1981) ISBN 0-905150-24-4 - No Laughing Matter: An Analysis of Sexual Humor (1982)