Josephine Herbst on Modernism

John was carrying Three Lives with him and had barely laid it down when a man standing next to him, with a soft brown hat jauntily slouched over pale-yellow hair, edged his drink nearer and clearing his throat began, 'I see you are carrying Gertie with you.' A book like three Lives, a blue-bound contraband Ulysses, a copy of transition or This Quarter, was enough for strangers to strike up a conversation that might lead to the drinking of Bruderschaft, a flirtation, or a love affair. Like the speakeasy, a good deal of avant-garde literature was considered unpalatable by the law, and nothing could be more appetizing to the young than the forbidden. That the law was on the side of what the literary left, in its newfound exuberance, called the Philistine made a rallying point for the young for whom freedom to write was synonymous with freedom to love. Nor did it matter that some of the experiments were as obscure as a Chinese ideograph; even the duds generated an atmosphere tingling with the possibility of a chance encounter with the magical phrase. It was with something like pride that the editors of transition had announced in Number 7 that Numbers 3, 4, 5 , and 6 had been confiscated on grounds of obscenity or other pretexts. Ezra Pound had written that his Exile One had been appraised by a Boston customs inspector as 'stuff written by some narcotic fiend. Nobody has thoughts like those except under the influence of drugs.' Brancusi's sculpture was taxed by the Port of NewYork on the ground that it 'wasn't sculpture but metal.' A few weeks later they passed in the Hope diamond free, on the ground that it was a work of art.

 Josephine Herbst, 'A Year of Disgrace,' in The Starched Blue Sky of Spain and Other Memoirs, Harper Collins,1991, p. 66.