In one sense this relationship was completely natural: the writers of the avant-garde, as deliberate flouters of convention, would have taken great delight in scandalizing the more staid middle class. They thrived on notoriety, and pornography was one sure way for them to gain notoriety.
For the publishers of such material, scandal was a twin-edged sword, as I have pointed out above. If it was taken too far, then the full weight of the law would be brought to bear, and the publisher could soon be put out of business. Yet if played just right, the publisher of pornography could obtain great benefits from such scandal: there is no surer way to increase sales than to have people talking about the product one is selling. The efficiency of this marketing technique was noticed very early in the history of the printed word. Henri-Jean Martin (Febvre & Martin 1976) describes how
Printers and booksellers, as friends, confidantes and protectors of literary men, were often led, if only for business reasons, to publish daring books that would sell better because scandalous, and they frequently sheltered writers suspected of heresyThere are many examples of this association between the avant-garde and obscenity before the Beat writers. One has only to look at the landmark obscenity trials: Lady Chatterly's Lover; James Joyce's Ulysses; the works of Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anaïs Nin. Indeed, since in its broadest sense the avant-garde consists of that which is against convention, almost by definition anything which offended the middle class could be included in with the avant-garde. The offense against convention need not be deliberate, however, nor simply a casual attempt to provoke outrage. Writers such as Joyce considered themselves seriously hampered by the Victorian constraints placed upon them by society, and were forced to seek publication outside of the mainstream publishing industry; in Joyce's case this meant having Ulysses published in Paris. In handing down his decision in the 1934 obscenity trial of Ulysses, Judge Hand ruled that "art certainly cannot advance under compulsion to traditional forms, and nothing in such a field is more stifling to progress than limitation of the right to experiment with a new technique" (Lewis 1976).
As mentioned above, the books in Olympia Press's Traveller's Companion series were essentially just cheap pornography, "db's" (for "dirty books") as they came to be known, and were written "to order" by writers who needed money. Since the Bohemian lifestyle was one close to, if not beyond, the poverty line, a number of the Beats were in this category. Diane di Prima describes her dealings with Maurice Girodias as she worked on her Memoirs of a Beatnik for Olympia Press (di Prima 1988):
I had met Maurice Girodias in New York, and had written the sex scenes for a couple of dull and innocuous novels he had purchased as skeleton plots to which the prurient interest had to be added, like oregano to tomato sauce. Before I had left town he had asked me to write one myself, and when it became obvious that money was scarce, to put it mildly (everything you could possibly want in San Francisco of 1968 - four hundred pounds of free fish, $85 kilos of grass, great cheap wine, beach and sky - everything except cash. Wherever the "prosperity" was, it wasn't where we were) - when, as I was saying, it became obvious that money was scarce, and would continue to be so, I got to work, and quickly whipped out enough pages for an advance. It was the first and only time I'd written a "potboiler," and it was clearly the course to take [...] Gobs of words would go off to New York whenever the rent was due, and come back with "MORE SEX" scrawled across the top page in Maurice's inimitable hand.