Politics is how we collectively decide who gets how much of a nation's collective wealth. Control a nation's sexual behavior and money distribution and you rule. On the big cotton and rice plantations of the Antebellum South, Ol' massa decided which male and female slaves would mate, and legally owned their offspring. By definition, slaves are not paid. My novels do have this sex-and-money theme running through them, no doubt about it. In One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, the 14-year-old prostitute Kitten wants to be paid $100 for spending the weekend with the well-born college sophomore (wise fool) J. C. Holland. He convinces himself that she has invited him to her place because she loves him. Each finds the other exotic and, on a certain level, they are in love with each other—briefly.
That age disparity was not so scandalous back in the sixties as it would soon become. In contemporary America, sex between consenting partners of different age groups has become downright criminal—women teaches are now imprisoned for having sex with teenage boys. We are awash in X-rated videos portraying inter-age sex, yet police have simultaneously acquired the extra-legal right to arrest anyone for possession of “kiddie porn.” I'm not talking about rape. Of course rape is a crime, and it certainly should be, for it harms victims horribly—although tragically enough, rape victims are too often further harmed by the legal system that's supposed to protect them. Of course, someone from society's lower depths raping someone from the heights of wealth is “a very serious matter.”
But Korda's “political pornography” is another's idea of personal freedom. A week or so after my first novel appeared in the USA, the prominent civil rights activist, Rev. William Sloan Coffin, then Yale University Chaplin, recommended that it be required reading in the Yale School of Divinity. I clearly remember Barney Rosset telling me this news with his jaw hanging and his eyes wide with amazement. By the late sixties, it was required reading in quite a few universities. Then, mysteriously, it became hard to get. Since students couldn't buy copies, it gradually ceased to be required reading. The moral is this story: the ruling class feels threatened by a mix of eroticism and redistribution of wealth. Racial prejudice is based on the existing politics of wealth distribution. Korda's motive for zapping my career was based on his perception of my novels as a threat to the economic assumptions we all live by in Western Culture. That's my surmise.
During the sixties, rumors circulated that Grove Press had been infiltrated by provocateurs and/or government undercover agents, and, eventually, sabotaged from within. Grove had become famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) for publishing “pornographers” and “radicals”, from William Burroughs to Bertolt Brecht. In 1975, the Rockefeller Commission confirmed that the CIA had indeed been spying illegally on Americans and singled out Grove Press as an extreme example. In 1979, Grove mounted a law suit against CIA bigwigs George Bush, William E. Colby, James Schlesinger, Richard Helms, John A. McCone and others. (See The Grove Press Reader 1951 to 2001, by S. E. Gontarski, published by Grove Press, 2001.)
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