SEXIS WRONG

to volumes on folklore, and resurrections and rediscoveries of
manuscripts by Robert Burns and Mark Twain.
Legman’s collections of unprintable songs would form the
core of two still-unpublished volumes, The Ballad. In the late
1980s, he pounded out thousands of pages of Peregrine Penis:
An Autobiography of Innocence. Very little of this fascinating
memoir has been published, and the bits in print appear
in obscure journals, erotica magazines, critical essays,
and introductions to other people’s works. Peregrine Penis
gathers memories of his early sexual adventures and experimentation,
paints old lovers in vivid tones, and casts a perspicacious
eye on the early giants of sex research
and New York’s literary fringes.
Even before his big books came out (and almost
all were big), his knowledge and his archive
established Legman as the go-to guy for
American scholars stumbling across the folklore
of sex or sex in folklore. He regularly got letters from the
States that asked, in effect, “What do you make of this?” But
he also struck up correspondences, writing to Roger Abrahams,
a young folk-song collector working in a black neighborhood
in South Philadelphia, to ask, “What can we do for
each other?” Abrahams sent a remarkable manuscript and
Legman replied, encouraging and advising him:
Spread out as far as you can.... [O]f course you’re
not making the mistake of collecting only the
bawdy stuff in spite of its apparent uniqueness:
all the material available should be latched on to....
Remeber [sic] that there are TURNS OF PHRASE
(“went through Pittsburgh like shit through a
goose”), similes, spoonerisms (“they’re off! as the
monkey said when he backed into the lawnmower”),
proverbs (“that woman is cunt all over”) and
purely vocabulary elements (“boy in the boat”: for
clitoris) etc.—there is also a song about this: do
you ever run into it?... There are riddles: there are
chalk items that go on the walls repetitively, on
both fences and toilets; also “catches” (for fools).
YOU HAVE GOT TO GET IT ALL AT ONCE AND
NEVER MISS A CHANCE... THERE IS NEVER ANY
GOING BACK.... [July 7, 1959]
Indeed, Abrahams spread out and wrote Deep Down in the
Jungle, a breakthrough book on African-American folk poetry,
“toasts,” and “the dozens,” antecedents of rap. He was only
one of scores of scholars to consult by mail with Legman
about obscene or sexual folklore. Whether or not they went
back, Legman never did.
It’s possible that somewhere in his unpublished writings Legman
lets us in on the origins of his interest in this unstoppable
flood of material. How, for example, did he come to realize
that he could combine his absorption in sex—a subject few
scholars would approach openly in the 1930s—with his interest
in folklore—a topic condescended to by most scientists
and writers? Most folklorists were prudish or intimidated by
their publishers; most sex researchers feared federal intimidation.
How did Legman free himself for a lifetime of intense
study of the forbidden?
His knowledge and his archive
established Legman as the go-to guy
for American scholars stumbling
across the folklore of sex.
The answers are in his family, in the immigrant Jewish community
in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he grew up, and on
the streets of Manhattan. He writes that his father was a remarkable
storyteller, fluent in biblical and traditional Jewish
lore and vivid in relating the Legman family histories, which
were usually disastrous to the point of tragedy. Emil Legman
was a butcher and a railroad clerk who would’ve liked to have
been a rabbi. He pushed his aspirations onto his son, and
rabbinical study occupied Gershon’s early years. At thirteen,
“tempted by doubt,” Gershon rejected his father’s goals for
him in favor of free thought, and Emil rejected Gershon. But
by then he’d learned the techniques of close reading and
deep research, and he was able to transmute the dream of
being “a perfect rabbi” into the goal of being a total expert
on sex.
Following a short-circuited year at the University of Michigan,
in the mid-1930s he scrounged a living as a ghost writer in
New York. As he writes in Peregrine Penis, he was deep into
a huge project, the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Sexual Speech
and Slang. On his own time he was haunting bookshops and
hanging out in “all the grimier public shit-houses around midtown,
in burlesque theatres and hotels and subway stations,”
any sort of urban place where he could collect the anonymous
folklore of sex. He spent years going through rare volumes
in the New York Public Library, recording slang usage
from every conceivable literary source across four centuries.
The following notes from an unnamed eighteenth-century
book are typical:
yarn, wind up her little ball of ... copulate
yelper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the penis
yoked ...................... married
wrinkle ..................... vagina
wrong door. ................. anus
wearing yellow stockings ....... cuckolded
what’s her name. ............. vagina
whirligigs ................... testicles
KEY TO THE FIELDS 63