SEXIS WRONG

Key to the Fields
Gershon Legman, Folklorist of the Unspeakable
Susan Davis
To take the key to the fields—prendre la clé des champs—
means to take one’s freedom, to walk out and away from the
town or farm. Gershon Legman—folklorist, sexologist, and
social critic—chose this old French saying to name the homestead
he made for himself in the south of France. It carried for
him those senses of radical personal freedom: away from the
city, away from old ties, and especially away from the censorship
of Cold War America.
Born in 1917, Legman made an unprecedented career for himself
as he struggled to write the unspeakable and publish the
unprintable. He constructed an intellectual life off the radar
of official culture, embodying and prefiguring radical ways of
writing about sex. Uncharted lives are often worth knowing
about, and to look closely at the work and life of this energetic
and learned man is to see the price and prizes of intellectual
freedom.
As Legman tells us in his unpublished autobiography, “sex
was always very important” to him. From
an early age, he was absorbed in “a million
dreamlike projects, all invariably and very intimately
connected with sex, sex technique,
sexual folklore, its language, its literature and
its immemorially practical and beautiful art.”
He collected, documented, and analyzed sex
practices, dedicating himself to making anyone within earshot
admit what could not be admitted about sex and culture.
Prophetic, he was unassimilable.
By the early 1950s, it had become impossible for Legman to
publish and distribute his own books and magazines in the
United States. He had been spied on by the FBI, threatened
with arrest by the State of New York, and he lost his mailbased
magazine-publishing business to Post Office censors.
He’d seen publishing friends jailed for distributing erotica,
seen those friends knuckle under. Perhaps worse, his books
had been confiscated, which meant no one could read them.
His work risked invisibility. In 1953, Legman did something
sensible and radical. He left his home in the Bronx and moved
to Paris to work for West 57 th Street publisher and bookseller
Seymour Hacker.
Hacker wanted to bring out books in Paris that could not legally
be printed in the United States. From France they would
trickle out to an English-speaking readership, even make their
way to North America, not incidentally enriching Hacker.
Legman’s widow, Judith, writes that the publisher needed
“somebody who would be willing to be on the spot for a
period of several weeks to read proof for the French printers…someone
who knew something about printing, to watch
over the process and make sure the books were bound up in
the right order.… Hacker may have bought the ticket that took
Gershon to Paris to do this work for him.”
He had been spied on by the FBI,
threatened with arrest by the State
of New York, and he lost his mailbased
magazine-publishing business
to Post Office censors.
In France, Legman could continue writing on sex in a lively expatriate
atmosphere, and it was a lot cheaper than New York,
where there was a housing shortage and a postwar slump.
With his unparalleled bibliographic skills in several languages,
including French and German, Legman probably also scouted
erotica for Hacker and others; he may have conducted a
small book-buying and -selling business of his own. His first
wife, Beverley Keith, a skilled translator, helped out. Here he
walked in the footsteps of the pornographer and poet Pierre
KEY TO THE FIELDS 61