Inside the hallowed halls of State Library Victoria, a very special and scrappy little book is currently on display: Portnoy’s Complaint, the only book ever written by one “Phillip Roth”.
This battered, stained edition of the infamously filthy novel, with Roth’s first name misspelled with two Ls on the cover, is enormously significant: one of three known surviving copies of an illegal edition printed in Australia when the book was banned across the country.
Portnoy’s story in Australia is well told: the novel was published in 1969 to great fanfare overseas, but it was deemed obscene and imports were banned at the border by John Gorton’s government. The publisher, Penguin, attempted to circumvent the ban by printing 75,000 copies locally in 1970, before facing down legal battles across the country.
After more than a year of prosecutions of defiant booksellers and publishers, and two trials in New South Wales that both ended with hung juries, the censorship of Portnoy’s Complaint was finally lifted in June 1971, marking the end of book bans in Australia.
“The case really did challenge Australia’s censorship laws because this wasn’t some pulp book; this was a novel by a well-known American literary author who won awards,” says Des Cowley, principal librarian at SLV and co-curator of the World of the Book 2022 exhibition, in which the bootleg Roth is now displayed. “Readers would have felt affronted that they could not read his book in Australia.”
But in early 1970, during the ban, a few hundred copies of a samizdat edition of Portnoy’s Complaint were secretly printed in Melbourne. Cowley had heard rumours of it, but had never seen a copy until 2018 when a regular donor, Andrew Richards, revealed to Cowley that he had one. His copy is the one now on display.
“As soon as I saw it, I knew this was clearly the book I had long heard about. And it lived up to my expectations, in that it was so clearly handmade,” Cowley says. “We’re not talking printers and binders, we’re literally talking about people secretly working to print hundreds of copies of a banned book, which would have been completely illegal.”
Richards’ copy had come to him via an old friend: Mietta O’Donnell, the late, well-known Melbourne restaurateur. In 1970, when she was 20, O’Donnell handed her copy to Richards; she didn’t want to be caught with it as she was working as a staffer for a federal MP at the time.
“I remember Mietta rocking up with this book and being worried that she shouldn’t have it, as it was illegal. It was being handed around by various people – of course I read it! I enjoyed Roth, but especially because it was banned, you know? So she gave it to me and I put it on the shelf and didn’t think much of it,” says Richards, a former solicitor. “I found it while doing a spring clean.”
Then in 2020, another copy turned up: this time handed over to the SLV by a donor who was involved in its production. He told Cowley the books had been photocopied and stapled together in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) headquarters in Carlton.
“His memories are a little hazy, but he believes around 300 copies were made in this way, completely by hand,” Cowley says. “Then clearly read and read to death, because so few have survived.”
“It is fantastic artifact,” says Anna Welch, senior librarian at the SLV. “You can see how many hands that’s been in, it must have been passed around a million sharehouses. It’s extraordinary that we found a second – sometimes it never rains but it pours.”
Only three copies are known to have survived; two are at SLV and one is in the National Library of Australia. (Listed in the catalogue as being by “Phillip [sic] Roth”.)
Cowley is unsure how many more might be out there: “When the book was officially made available, I guess many people would have then discarded something like this. So the story would have been lost.
“There’s been a lot written about the whole saga with Penguin and the legal case, but a little part of that story is that a small group of people got together and defended the right of literature to exist. It is such a beautiful case because, in a way, it ushers in the change Australia saw between the 1960s and 70s, with the progressive Whitlam government, and going from a literary backwater to a world stage.”
Other rarities in the SLV’s World of the Book exhibition include a Cuneiform tablet carved in southern Mesopotamia in 2050BCE; a selection of medieval marginalia – the art of decorating and illustrating the margins; a pristine copy of John James Audobon’s Birds of America, one of the most expensive books in the world; and a pirated US edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, another famously banned book that celebrates its 100th birthday this year.
Among all those beautifully preserved manuscripts and first editions in the exhibition, Cowley describes the Roth as being “the little, cheap goblet hidden among all the glittering cups when looking for the holy grail”.
“We’ve done no conservation or anything to it because it’s purely an artefact,” he says. “With all its tears and marks and thumbs of readership, we would not touch or tamper with that in any way; that would detract from its story. And it is a terrific Australian story – one that has never been fully told, as far as I’m aware.”
The World of the Book 2022 exhibition is on display in State Library Victoria until 19 February 2023. Entry is free.
