SEXIS WRONG

Louÿs and made friends with Maurice Girodias, founder of
the Olympia Press and specialist in the most adventurous
literary and trashy erotica. (Girodias was the son of Jack Kahane,
original publisher of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller.) Legman
hung out with many other artists and intellectuals, European
and expatriate Americans, making particular friends with
Richard Wright.
It was all more or less one work, a series of examinations of
sexual folklore, based on his enormous collections of erotica,
oral traditions, and popular culture. When he left New York in
1953, he somehow stored and later transported an astonishing
volume of self-generated paper, and this archive would
continue to grow as people around the world sent manuscripts
and queries.
But, eventually, the lure of Paris faded. Using a train ticket
given in lieu of a paycheck, he and Beverley traveled south
to Cagnes-sur-Mer and found they liked the Riviera. For several
years they lived in the little towns of the Nice-Cannes
back country, always shifting when the landlady needed her
rooms for summer tourists. Finally, in 1960, they were able
to use Beverley’s small inheritance—she was the daughter
of a wealthy Canadian family—to buy the remnants of a farm,
a few acres of olive trees and an old goat barn. La Clé des
Champs stands on the road between the sixteenth-century
walled town of Valbonne and Opio, a tiny village perched
above the highway to Grasse.
The place was remote and rustic; no running water, electricity,
or indoor plumbing at first, not for years. They had no
car and seemed to live on literally nothing except barter and
the occasional stingy royalty check. When Beverley was diagnosed
with lung cancer, Legman sold parts of his rare-book
collection to pay for radiation treatments. After she died in
1965, he married a young Californian, Judith Evans, a librarian
who would share his work for three decades, and with
whom he would have three children. The goat barn expanded
to accommodate them, spreading slowly into two structures,
a studio and a modest but elegant house designed by Legman
and built of native stone by local craftsmen.
This house in the woods offered Gershon a near-perfect life of
quiet and isolation, a marked contrast to his years of scuffling
in war-time Manhattan. He customarily rose at 4:30 a m and
worked with ferocious and disciplined energy until 1:00 p m, a
full eight-hour day. “Always give the hind part of the day to the
boss, and keep the best for yourself,” was his maxim or, less
Legman’s collections of unprintable
songs would form the core of two
still-unpublished volumes,
The Ballad.
politely, “Sweets to the sweet, and piss on the boss’s shit.”
After lunch, Judith recalls, Legman would declaim to her what
he’d written, answer correspondence, read, or work on pet
projects. Nothing except illness or the occasional journey interrupted
his schedule. Even honored visitors had to wait until
after noon. He never took a vacation or a weekend off, laboring
for nearly 30 years, almost 11,000 eight-hour days.
By a circuitous route his crates followed him to Valbonne.
Eventually he brought over, in addition to his extensive library,
a collection of thousands of American dirty jokes gathered
between roughly 1927 and 1950. He stored up bawdy drinking
songs, parodies, and ballads expurgated from scores of
more polite collections. From his research on censorship
and sexual attitudes—outlined in Love & Death: A Study in
Censorship, the book that got him in trouble with the United
States Post Office in 1950—he kept file folders of magazine
illustrations, book covers, and greeting cards. An unending
drift of materials we now call popular culture—advertising,
comic books, pinups, graffiti, pornography, and amateur or
homemade erotic art—he studied as expressions of overt or
covert sexual attitudes. Framed portraits of his mother and
Sigmund Freud guarded his desk.
He had boxes of notes on children’s folklore, games, songs,
and rhymes. Naughty postcards—French, American, and
English—augmented albums of his private erotica. He collected
thousands of obscene limericks. Bales of correspondence
from his earliest years as a writer tell the story of his
life until leaving the United States, and to these he added
over the years literally tens of thousands of letters to and
from hundreds of international correspondents. Most of this
material is still archived at La Clé des Champs. Even today,
Judith Legman says she is unpacking boxes that were never
opened after his 1960 move.
With the exception of a volume of 1,700 limericks published
in Paris in 1953, all of Legman’s big books were written or edited
at Valbonne. His joke collection was worked into the classic
Rationale of the Dirty Joke: Series I and Rationale of the
Dirty Joke: Series II, No Laughing Matter. His
detective works on the history of nineteenthcentury
pornography and his brief for the uncensored
study of folklore appear in The Horn
Book. There is a second volume of limericks
called, naturally, The New Limerick.
He would bring to press Ozark folklorist Vance Randolph’s
volume of bawdy folk songs, Roll Me in Your Arms, and Blow
the Candle Out, a collection of formerly unprintable Ozark
speech, riddles, folk beliefs, and games. He would annotate
Randolph’s celebrated joke collection, Pissing in the Snow.
There would be many other books, important introductions
62 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG