Robert Spoo

I bought a used copy of this book a couple of years ago when the 1920s author kept popping up in book related discussion. H.D. was an American author, mainly of poetry, who is often spoken of with Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Dorthoy Richardson. H.D. also wrote a couple novels, [Asphodel] being one of them. It is a stream of consciousness work that I was a bit apprehensive of reading because I thought it might be hard to read and comprehend. Actually, though, I really loved this book and I'm glad I made time for it.

In [Asphodel], H.D. writes a flowing, colorful, autobiographical novel about her experience before, during, and just after WWI. Her love life is central to the book and frames the action. Pre-WWI, her love is her female friend Fayne Rabb; during the war it's Jerrol Darrington, who she has a stillborn baby with; and then Cyril Vane, who is less a love and more a diversion, but who she does have a child with.

The book doesn't necessarily have much forward motion, it sort of swirls around the plot, but I liked that. I was happy to dwell in the descriptions of the main character's experiences, feelings, and observations. You can tell that H.D. wrote a lot of poetry when you read this novel. She has a beautiful way of using color in her writing.

I highly recommend this for readers interested in the 1920s era of British and American writing. I think this book deserves to be more widely read!

A note also that the edition I could get my hands on, edited by Robert Spoo, has an incredibly helpful appendix that gives background info on the real people that the fictional characters are based on. It really helped me understand what was going on.… (mere)

A history of modernism’s various encounters with law: the prohibition of homosexuality and obscenity, defamation law, privacy/right of publicity law, blackmail law, and copyright law. Spoo reads the danger of Dorian Grey as residing in his unauthorized replication of his own portrait, figuring the dangers of mechanical reproduction on morals writ large. As he says, both copyright and obscenity law developed “in response to printing technologies and fears of an ungovernable mass of readers.” Both laws are designed to produce artificial scarcity, though in different ways (but as he points out, obscenity law in Britain particularly always accepted the idea that some circulation was okay; the question was whether the material was circulating too widely, among those not fit to receive it like servants or wives). At the same time, the bodies of law could be at loggerheads—Byron and Shelley, as well as others, found themselves unable to suppress pirate editions because immoral works couldn’t have valid copyrights, and in the US likewise the inability to find a domestic publisher (required for protection under then-current US law) because of fears of obscenity prosecutions left works like Joyce’s Ulysses unprotected by copyright. Spoo also discusses how libel law was supposed to supplant private violence in an honor culture, and how a number of well-known authors nonetheless fought duels, or got very close, sometimes over (accurate) imputations of homosexuality, even through the early 20th century. Also, modernist authors sometimes deployed publicity rights to substitute for unavailable copyright in America, as when Wilde toured to promote the authorized version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s opera and Joyce sued for misappropriation of his name when he couldn’t sue for copyright infringement. And in discussing Pound’s fascism/treason in the context of his use of copyright law, Spoo draws connections to Wilde’s earlier quixotic attempts to use libel law—both artists thought that art had inherent superiority to law, and both were ultimately forced to comply with the state’s monopoly on violence.… (mere)

Reading this book felt like walking through a dream. The style is stream-of-consciousness, which honestly usually annoys me to no end. Here, though... it's compelling and beautiful and readable and it drew me in. Flowers and Greek mythology abound in this book. And the colors- so many colors!

This is an autobiographical story by HD of her time living in Europe before, during and after WWI. She was contemporaries with artists and writers of the time and some of them feature in her story. I was very conscious of reading a true story, because, despite the dream-like feeling of the writing, it feels very real. The substance of the story may fade with time, but feeling of it will stick with me.… (mere)

I came across this book by accident. When I picked it up in a local library after being drawn in by the title I expected something that would seem relevant to me as a writer grappling with the changing environment for commercially and self-published writers. The challenges facing writers opposed to Google’s digital copying program are nearly overwhelming, and I was stumped to understand why courts found it so easy to rule against writers and in favor of Google and others. I still don’t understand completely, but I have a better understanding of how we got where we are and why Google has been successful so far.

Robert Spoo, well recognized in his chosen field of copyright law and literature, is interested in how copyright laws, or the lack of them as we understand them today, interacted with modernism in literature. He takes for his example the writer James Joyce, and his attempts to have an unexpurgated Ulysses published in the United States.

Spoo’s history of copyright in this country is an eye-opener. Writers often talk about books in the public domain as though they had drifted into this ocean as a result of neglect or the passage of time or creation by the US or state government. But the public domain was in fact created by Congress through earlier copyright laws to ensure that those involved in the book business in this country had work here and didn’t face competition from outside the country. The only books that received copyright in this country were those that were printed and bound here, manufactured here; all others, no matter where they were published or by whom, were in the public domain. Once in the public domain, which occurred within a very short time after publication elsewhere, the book was fair game for anyone who wanted to publish it here. Writers who published abroad could gain a copyright here if they met stringent requirements, but otherwise the copyright failed in the US. This was the case well into the twentieth century.

Publishers who wanted to publish work by someone who had already published it abroad faced the Wild West of publishing for decades. In response to this chaotic world they developed something called the “courtesy of the trade,” or “trade courtesy.” This phrase referred to a gentlemanly agreement among the larger, more established publishing houses to let the first to claim the work to have it. If Publisher X announced through a magazine ad or in some other way that he was going to publish the work of a popular British poet, his colleagues left him to it. The trade courtesy was an understanding among publishers to not poach on others’ writers from their publishers, and to not try to undercut other publishers with cheap reprints. None of this was legally binding, and no one could stop another publisher who ignored the unspoken rules.

A publisher who ignored the rules was called a pirate. The term is not accurate because the publisher operating outside the rules of trade courtesy wasn’t breaking any law, but some felt so strongly against what he (it seems mostly a he) was doing that the term was used freely. Publishers who wanted to get ahead published anything that wasn’t protected by copyright, which meant almost everything published overseas. One of the more famous of these publishers was Samuel Roth, who hoped to publish James Joyce’s work, especially Ulysses.

A publisher who published with no regard to the gentlemanly agreements of others faced no legal repercussions but plenty of social costs. He was shunned and subjected to unrelenting negative gossip and boycotting, others published cheap work to undercut his prices, and writers might sue to get any monies they could extract. Public opprobrium could drive a publisher out of business.

Into this topsy turvy world came Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Joyce bitterly resented anyone taking his book and publishing an altered version, one cleaned up for the censors. Pound believed in disseminating literature, and in the end chose that over Joyce’s right to control his publishing in its entirety. When we think of Joyce’s lawsuit to get Ulysses into the US, we think he was challenging the prudish laws of the US. But in fact, Joyce first sued Roth for using his name for advertising without his permission. Joyce sued for damages he felt he must have suffered by not having control of his work, but in the end Joyce and Roth settled by agreeing to a consent decree (dated December 27, 1928). But even this had a very limited effect. This decree, according to the author, and despite Joyce’s grandiose claims, “has not been cited by a single court in a reported case” (p. 224). Joyce thought this decision would give authors their natural moral rights in the ownership of their labor, echoing Locke and European attitudes, but US courts and legislation have never gone this far (p. 225).

The second step in getting Ulysses safely into the US, where Joyce’s preferred publisher, Bennett Cert, could publish it, was to have it seized by Customs. Once this happened, the book was subject to the Tariff Act of 1930, and the Cutting amendment. This amendment made the object confiscated the defendant in a case, and forced the government itself to defend its actions. The sender and the receiver of the item in question, in this case Ulysses, were not part of the case. During Prohibition, according to Spoo, lawsuits were often filed against the truck carrying bootlegged liquor and the like.

Ulysses was confiscated, the case went to trial, and Judge Woolsey decided in favor of the book, in 1933. The book was free to enter the US, but it was still without copyright. Joyce’s great work was now subject to the trade courtesy practices that he and others abhorred, but he had no choice.

This is a story of stunning twists and turns and surprises in getting Ulysses published in the US, not the least of which was Joyce’s attitude towards his lawyers’ bills (he refused to pay them).

Equally surprising to me as a writer is that copyright as I have come to understand it only became law in 1976. Legislators have continued to tinker with copyright law so that even now the public domain is occasionally given a great book and deprived of another for a few years. It is a patently crazy system. The US didn’t sign the Berne Convention until 1989, when the US finally agreed to recognize foreign copyrights and afford works so protected overseas the same protection in the US. There is more, but by now you should have the idea that the history of copyrights in the US is anything but tidy and linear.

The text is dense, but the writing is free of academic jargon, in some cases delightful. The author makes every effort to explain the legal niceties in simple, clear language. I learned more about Ezra Pound and James Joyce in this book than I ever did in college English literature classes. Highly recommended.… (mere)