On October 4, 2009, I flew from Iowa City to New York to conduct interviews for this book. Everyone I contacted had agreed to meet with me except Barney Rosset. In a series of e-mails, his fifth wife, Astrid Myers, had firmly but politely resisted fixing a date, telling me that it all depended on how Barney was feeling. I had made all my travel arrangements, set to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the publication of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, without knowing whether I’d be able to interview the legendary owner of Grove Press, which had published Burroughs’s masterpiece along with an entire canon of postwar avant-garde literature, and editor of the Evergreen Review, the premier underground magazine of the Sixties counterculture. I was eager to meet the man who bought the fledgling reprint house for three thousand dollars in 1951, built it up into one of the most influential publishers of the postwar era, and then was summarily fired after selling it to Anne Getty for $2 million in 1986. I checked into my room at the Chelsea Hotel, called Astrid, and succeeded in scheduling an interview for the following day.
I knew that Rosset liked martinis, so I bought a bottle of Bombay Sapphire gin at a liquor store around the corner from the East Village walk-up he shared with Astrid. Rosset was spry and loquacious; though his body was bent over with age, his motions were animated and he spoke with assurance. He emerged from behind the glass-brick partition separating the kitchen and living quarters from the long, narrow front room lined with bookshelves, and when he saw the blue bottle of gin, it immediately evoked the past. Without preamble or introduction, he launched into a lengthy memory of shipping out from New York through the Panama Canal and around Australia to Bombay. His ultimate destination was China, where he’d received a commission, through his father’s government connections, as a photographic unit commander for the Army Signal Corps. At the opening of the voyage he’d been given a blue plastic canteen, which he filled with gin instead of water. By the time he arrived in Bombay, the plastic had melted into the gin, turning it blue. He drank it anyway.
It took more than ten minutes for Rosset to mention Grove Press, and when he did, it was in order to dismiss everything that had been written about it: “Something you have to understand about how Grove Press came about—nothing like what seems to be written down . . . It’s really a big problem. People write about Grove . . . they think I came out of an egg or something.”1 I was later to discover that this has been an ongoing complaint. For Rosset, the roots of Grove Press penetrate deep into the soil of his childhood, and he dismisses any account that would attribute its success to others who worked with him or to larger historical and cultural forces. Rosset’s reservations notwithstanding, this book will do both of those things: it will analyze Grove as a collective endeavor enabled by specific historical conditions. But Rosset was the president and owner, and his aesthetic tastes, political convictions, and entrepreneurial spirit were central to the identity of the company. It is thus appropriate that any history of Grove Press start with the story of Barnet Rosset Jr.
He did not come out of an egg. He was born and raised in Chicago, the only child of a Russian Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother, and he attended the progressive (and private) Francis Parker School, which he credits with instilling in him the passionate left-wing convictions he maintained throughout his life. At Parker he made his first foray into radical publishing (along with his childhood friend Haskell Wexler) with a mimeographed newsletter called the Sommunist (a mash-up of communist and socialist), soon renamed Anti-Everything. His favorite writers were Nelson Algren and James Farrell. Chou En-lai was his hero. Rosset stood out at Parker—he was class president and captain of the football team—and its principal, Herbert W. Smith, recognized his promise. In a document obtained by US Army Intelligence (and then retrieved by Rosset himself through the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA]), Smith declares that Rosset is “one of the very best: a strong leader, a keen and habitual analyst; decided in his opinions without being intolerant of people who do not hold them; impetuous, courageous, and popular.” The letter concludes: “Potentially, since he is an extremist, he is an outstanding fascist or a fair, sensitive democratic leader.”2
In fact, Rosset saw himself as an enemy of fascism, and his greatest regret was that he was too young to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After graduation, he went to Swarthmore College, partly because its recruiter had been an ambulance driver for the Spanish Republicans and partly because he thought it was close to Vassar, the college his high school girlfriend attended. She broke up with him, and he found solace in reading Tropic of Cancer, purchased under the counter from the legendary Gotham Book Mart in New York City. “I didn’t even notice the obscenity,” Rosset told me; “I noticed two things: one, he’d had a terrible breakup with a girlfriend. And that struck home to me . . . And also Henry’s anti-American stance: all Americans looked alike, talked alike . . . etc.” As evidence, he gave me a copy of a paper he wrote at Swarthmore, “Henry Miller vs. ‘Our Way of Life.’” Written on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, when “drums are rolling” and “men are marching,” the paper openly wonders what in “our way of life” is worth fighting for.3 Noting that Miller, as an expatriate, might have a singular insight into this question, Rosset focuses on the author’s comparison between Paris, where Miller found “greater independence” and became “a completely self-sufficient being,” and New York, “a land of the dead” where he saw “only automatons.”4 Rosset approves of the critique but takes exception to Miller’s individualism, arguing that “we must participate in action with our neighbors if we ever wish to achieve any of the freedom which Miller so covets.” He concludes that “perhaps our salvation lies in all of us becoming artists.”5
Rosset gave me a copy of this paper, which he had once used as evidence in court that his interest in Miller was not pecuniary, in order to refute yet another argument: mine. In an article for Critical Inquiry, “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism,” I had argued that “the end of obscenity was also a triumph for modernist formulations of the literary, insofar as texts previously valued by an elite intelligentsia were finally being granted mainstream cachet.”6 Much of the article focused on Grove’s battles against censorship in the 1960s, which I argued had brought late modernism into the mainstream; I intended this argument to be central to my book. Rosset would have none of it: “This is based much more on aesthetics,” he argued, shaking his copy of my article in the air disdainfully, “to me it’s like quibbling between Catholicism and Protestantism . . . None of them really interest me . . . I looked at Tropic of Cancer from a political, and social, point of view.” But, as his conclusion affirms, Rosset wanted to make the freedoms Miller found in art available to everyone. With Paris as Rosset’s primary resource, New York as his home base, and the booming American university population as his audience, his signal achievement with Grove Press and the Evergreen Review would be to take the avant-garde into the mainstream, helping to usher in a cultural revolution whose consequences are with us still.
Rosset got a B- on his Henry Miller paper and lasted less than a year at Swarthmore. He decided to run off to Mexico but made it only as far as Florida. He wandered back north and enrolled at the University of Chicago, before leaving again to attend UCLA, intending to study film, only to discover that the university did not yet have a film department. In the fall of 1942 he enlisted in the US Army. With a copy of Red Star over China close at hand, Rosset ran the only American film crew in the region. After the war, he returned to Chicago, joined the Communist Party (he left two years later, in 1948, after a visit to Czechoslovakia), and hooked up with a Parker schoolmate, the painter Joan Mitchell, a key figure in Grove’s early history. Rosset followed Mitchell first to New York, where she introduced him to her circle of friends, the abstract expressionist painters who were in the process of revolutionizing the art world, and then to France, where the two were married. According to Rosset, witnessing Mitchell’s development as a painter transformed his understanding of the visual arts: “If I have any taste today, or any emotion about art, and if the Grove book covers show any consistency, it’s all thanks to Joan.”7 When they returned to New York in 1951, they began to drift apart but remained friendly; when Mitchell heard about Grove, she encouraged Rosset to purchase it.
At the time, Rosset was attending the New School on the GI Bill (taking classes from Wallace Fowlie, Alfred Kazin, and Meyer Shapiro, among others) and living off a stipend of eight hundred dollars from his father, who refused to give him access to the trust funds from which the stipend was taken. At twenty-nine, Rosset objected to being treated like a child, and he wrote to his father: “I am still in the position of a . . . minor, who receives a monthly stipend, who has no power in the [determining?] of its size, and who has no clear idea of where the money is coming from, how much of it there is, and who does not know if this river of gold will continue to flow.”8 Barney Rosset Sr., a highly successful investment banker, had never been in good health and died only three years later at the age of fifty-five, leaving his son as president of the Metropolitan Trust Company of Chicago. Rosset’s father had specialized in government bonds, and, according to Rosset, “I suddenly had $50 million worth of these bonds and I knew almost nothing about them.”9 He noticed that the bonds were losing money, so he sold them all at a huge loss. In Grove’s annual report for the year 1955, the Metropolitan Trust Company is valued at $1.5 million, which means, if Rosset’s figures are correct, that he lost more than $48 million in a single year. The annual reports from the 1950s also affirm that Rosset essentially incorporated the bank into the publishing company, allowing him to operate at a loss without going under into the mid-1960s, when Grove began to make money. Rumors of Rosset’s great wealth, which helped the company get credit in its early years, were founded in truth.
Rosset also began to acquire real estate on Long Island, starting in 1951 with a Quonset hut designed by Pierre Chareau, which he bought from Robert Motherwell for twelve thousand dollars; with his inheritance he expanded his holdings into more than a mile of oceanfront property in Southampton, purchased at forty dollars per foot. Rosset’s Hamptons estate became a weekend social center for Grove employees and the writers and artists with whom they associated, and he provided vacation houses on the property for his closest associates. As Rosset remembers, “I moved a lot of people out there. I got a vision of all the Grove people living out there—and we did, or almost! I went and got houses that were abandoned, and we moved them on wheels and rebuilt them.”10 In the 1960s, when the press was mired in litigation across the country, he sold much of this land to keep the company afloat. If he had kept even a small piece of it, he would have remained a very wealthy man. But Rosset squandered his entire fortune on Grove Press; when I visited him, he was living in very modest circumstances. According to at least one obituary, he was almost broke when he died in March 2012 at the age of eighty-nine.11
By all accounts, then, Rosset was a reckless and impulsive man motivated by strongly held political convictions. He was also closely watched, and government surveillance of him dates to his years in the army. In 1943, US Military Intelligence, suspecting him of “disaffection,” interviewed an informant who had been a classmate at the Francis Parker School.12 The informant characterizes Rosset as “a headstrong individual, completely lacking in the spirit of compromise, refusing at all lengths to give up on his version of a particular issue.” The informant continues that Rosset “was very radical in his views; that his views were definitely ‘leftist’ in character,” and that he “was dissatisfied with the present organization of society and felt that the social organization that gives to people all the luxuries and comforts that he himself had and enjoyed is a corrupt one and should not exist.” The informant comments extensively on Rosset’s impulsiveness, noting that he “totally lacks sound judgment; he is incapable of appraising people, all of his impressions and judgments are based upon emotional reactions.”13
Everyone I interviewed agreed with this appraisal. Fred Jordan, Rosset’s longtime colleague and managing editor of the Evergreen Review throughout the 1960s, called Rosset “extraordinarily impulsive,” adding that the company was “driven by Barney’s moment-by-moment impulses.”14 Jeanette Seaver, widow of Grove’s executive editor Richard Seaver, agreed that Rosset was “irrational,” adding that he was also “very generous.”15 According to Herman Graf, who joined Grove as a salesman in the mid-1960s, Rosset “made most of his major decisions in seconds and spent the rest of his life regretting them.”16 Purchasing Grove Press was not one of those decisions.
Indeed, though Rosset developed a reputation for having an “iron whim,” he in fact pursued his career in publishing with shrewd determination, and his instincts tended to be sound. He intuited that the obscure experimental dramatists whose work he acquired in the 1950s would become steady sellers once their reputations were established, and he realized early that the market for their printed work would be in the expanding American university system. He sensed that the regime of censorship established under the Comstock Act was collapsing and that challenging it could therefore become profitable. He saw the hypocrisies and contradictions of America’s Cold War consensus in the 1950s and was therefore able to exploit the rise of student activism when that consensus began to unravel in the 1960s. And, possibly most important, he had exceptionally good instincts for finding other people who shared his vision and whose talent and expertise could help him realize it.
These people did not conceive of Grove as a business. As Fred Jordan told me, “If you take a publishing company to be a commercial enterprise, Grove never was.” “It wasn’t a business,” his son Ken interjected. “It was a project driven out of passion, which Barney completely self-identified with.” If Grove wasn’t a business, what was it? “We just called it Grove. Because it was just its own thing,” Ken replied. Jeanette Seaver had likened it to a family; Morrie Goldfischer, who had been in charge of promotion and publicity, repeatedly used the term “team” to describe Grove’s core group. Nat Sobel, Grove’s sales manager, told me that Rosset compared the company to a football team, adding, “I’m the quarterback, and I’m calling the signals.” What about a rock band? “It’s more like a band than anything else,” Ken agreed. And then he added, “The relationship was not so much from one person to another. It was one person to Barney, and then Barney to everybody else.” And Sobel confirmed, “If we had any personal relationship, it wasn’t with each other; it was with Barney.”
My interviews with Rosset’s coworkers, all of whom remembered him with a combination of affection and aggravation, led me to conclude that Grove, before Rosset decided to take the company public in 1967, was what the sociologist Max Weber calls a “charismatic community,” a small group of people who come together out of loyalty to a figure whose authority is based in his charismatic appeal. From 1960 to 1970, Grove Press was run not by Rosset alone but by a cadre of men and women who were unwaveringly loyal to him even as he made decisions that put the press economically at risk. Weber claims that “charisma rejects as undignified all methodical rational acquisition, in fact, all rational economic conduct,” and Rosset’s impulsive decision-making style and reckless disregard for money perfectly illustrates this quality of the charismatic leader, whose very irrationality is central to his appeal.17
Not surprisingly, most people who have written about Grove understand it as an expression of Rosset’s personality. One of the first articles published about the company, “Grove Press: Little Giant of Publishing,” characterizes it as “a dynamic expression of [Rosset’s] own personal likes and tastes in literature . . . Grove’s editors are little more than extra-sensory . . . extensions of the master’s personal literary tastes.”18 And S. E. Gontarski, one of the few academics to write about Grove, affirms that Rosset “had personalized publishing, made it an extension of his own will and psyche.”19 Understanding Rosset as a charismatic leader, and Grove as a charismatic community, allows me to reframe this reductive (and seductive) interpretation and to understand Grove not as an expression of his personality but as a community enabled by it.
This community—which was to play a crucial role in the creation of the counterculture—has been neglected by literary and cultural histories of the 1960s. As James English attests, most cultural criticism and cultural history neglect the “middle space between acts of inspired artistic creation on the one hand and acts of discerning consumption on the other.”20 English focuses on the increasingly significant role of prizes in the circulation of literary prestige, but his claim applies equally to publishers and editors, whose role in generating literary value and meaning is equally important, if not always equally neglected. Like those who administer and fund prizes and awards, publishers function as gatekeepers, mediating the text’s passage from author to reader and populating the expanding zone between them.21
Publishers, however, are only part of the story. As book studies pioneer Robert Darnton affirms, all books must pass through “a communications circuit that runs from the author to the publisher . . . the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the reader.”22 Although I will not be dwelling at all the stops on this circuit—the printer and shipper do not play significant roles in the pages that follow—I will be emphasizing the multiple agents involved in establishing Grove’s unique niche in the postwar field of cultural production. Rather than see this process in terms of a circuit, however, I choose to understand it as a network extending out from Rosset and his crew and linking authors, academics, editors, readers, and activists around the world. The Grove colophon became a kind of quilting point enabling this network to coalesce around a distinct set of aesthetic sensibilities and political affiliations.
The publisher’s colophon is in fact one of the more undertheorized symbols in our cultural landscape. It started out as a “finishing touch” on the last page of a book, where the printer provided a description of the volume and the place and date of its manufacture. Gradually this material migrated to the title page, and in the twentieth century the term came to designate the publisher’s emblem and to play a role analogous to that of the trademark or brand name in other industries. However, the unique nature of the book distinguishes the publishing industry from others and inhibits consumers from recognizing a colophon to the same degree they would a brand name like Coca-Cola or a trademark like the Nike Swoosh. As affirmed in “The Cult of the Colophon,” an article that appeared in Publishers Weekly in 1927, establishing brand recognition is more difficult for publishers because they “have to promote one title after another, most of which can have but a few months’ attention, while the producer of other merchandise markets the same product with the same appearance, year in and year out.”23 Thus, the article concedes that “while there is a small bookish public which really knows imprints, by far the larger number of book buyers do not carry along with them any remembrance of the publishers’ name.”24
“The Cult of the Colophon” discusses how modern publishers were attempting to enhance the visibility of their colophons through creative graphic design, and it concludes by noting that “modern art has not failed to influence the colophon,” listing Norman Moore’s work for Modern Library and Rockwell Kent’s design for Random House as preeminent examples.25 This emphasis on the aesthetics of the colophon accompanied an increased attention to jacket design, which also frequently borrowed principles and elements from modern art. Through a complex synergy of title selection, graphic design, and promotional rhetoric, modern publishers were attempting to garner the public recognition and customer loyalty that was already standard practice in other industries.
They were only modestly successful. As influential editor and cofounder of the New York Review of Books Jason Epstein noted twenty-five years later, “Publishers’ imprints tend not to mean much to the people who buy books.”26 Despite the sustained efforts of copywriters and graphic designers, the identity of individual publishers remained, for the most part, of little concern to the book-buying public. Grove became the crucial exception to this rule. By focusing on a series of niches increasingly associated with the emergent counterculture, Grove developed a loyal following of writers and readers who bought books simply because they prominently displayed the Grove or Evergreen (and later Black Cat) colophon on the spine. The company was the central node in what could be called a colophonic network. If you owned books by Grove Press, if you read the Evergreen Review, you were hooked into this network.
In order to map this network, I’ve turned to Pascale Casanova, whose groundbreaking study The World Republic of Letters has generated considerable conversation and controversy, particularly since its translation into English in 2004. Casanova has little to say about publishers, but her ambitious thesis—that Paris has been the “Greenwich Meridian of Literature” for the past four hundred years—not only implicates them in the international game of literary competition that her book anatomizes but also foregrounds the networks through which Grove established its literary reputation in the United States.27 A substantial proportion of the authors upon which Grove built its “avant-garde” reputation—most notably Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugène Ionesco, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet—were originally published in Paris, and Grove relied heavily on its French connections, and the prestige they afforded, in the first decade of its existence.
In this regard, Counterculture Colophon extends and elaborates the provocative thesis propounded by Serge Guilbaut in his important study How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Focusing on the emergence, and astonishing success, of abstract expressionism in the years immediately following World War II, Guilbaut convincingly shows how New York City was able to appropriate the status of culture capital previously held exclusively by Paris. Abstract expressionism, Guilbaut affirms, became America’s first internationally recognized avant-garde, permanently shifting the center of gravity of the art world.
Guilbaut concludes his study in 1951, the year of Leo Castelli’s famous Ninth Street show, featuring paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joan Mitchell. Guilbaut sees the landmark show as “the symbol of both the triumph and the decadence of the avant-garde.”28 Rosset also bought Grove Press in 1951 and carried its entire stock of three titles to his apartment, also on West 9th Street, out of which he ran the company for the next two years. And 1951 is the year that Roy Kuhlman, a painter on whom Mitchell had been an influence, came to Rosset’s apartment to show him some ideas for book cover design. Rosset was initially uninterested in his portfolio, but as Kuhlman was leaving, he accidentally dropped a twelve- by twelve-inch piece of abstract art he intended to pitch as a record cover to Ahmet Ertegun. Rosset immediately saw what he wanted. Kuhlman, whose aesthetic sensibilities had been formed by the abstract expressionist pioneers, owed a particular debt to the minimalist work of Franz Kline, as can be seen by a comparison between one of his early covers and a contemporaneous piece by Kline (Figures 1 and 2). Kuhlman was one of the first book designers to incorporate abstract expressionism into cover art, and his signature style, which made ample use of “negative space,” provided a distinct look for Grove throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
If the success of abstract expressionism signaled the ascendance of New York in the international art market, literary consecration remained based in Paris, and Grove’s story amply illustrates that city’s persistence as an arbiter of cultural value in the postwar era. Grove effectively siphoned cultural capital from Paris to New York in the 1950s and 1960s, reprinting and translating authors it had acquired from Éditions de Minuit, Éditions Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, and the Olympia Press, thereby establishing a reputation as the premier American disseminator of European avant-garde literature, especially drama. However, Grove championed the idea of an indigenous avant-garde as well, providing an early publication venue for the Beats, the New York school, and the Black Mountain school, publishing multiple scholarly studies of American jazz, adopting abstract expressionist designs for its book covers, and affirming the San Francisco Bay Area as itself a “cultural capital” in a burgeoning national scene.
For Guilbaut, the development of an indigenous avant-garde depended upon what he somewhat awkwardly calls the “De-Marxization” of the American intelligentsia and the purported political “neutrality” of the abstract expressionist aesthetic. In this way, abstract expressionist painting was part of the larger process of liberal consensus building during the Cold War that reconciled American intellectuals to the ideology of the American century. As Guilbaut affirms, “The depoliticization of the avant-garde was necessary before it could be put to political use.”29 By the 1960s, this consensus had begun to unravel, challenged by the rise of the New Left and the counterculture. A crucial component of this process, and in the emergence of the counterculture itself, was what one might call the “repoliticization” of the avant-garde and the increasing engagement of experimental artists with radical politics over the course of the 1960s. Grove Press was central to this effort to rearticulate the political to the aesthetic meanings of the avant-garde.
Figure 1. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for Marquis de Sade: Selections
from His Writings (1953).
Figure 2. Franz Kline, New York, NY (1953).
(Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Resources, NY)
This effort did not rely on any coherent theory or philosophy of the avant-garde ; rather, it inhered in a fundamental commitment to expanding the distribution of and access to what were understood to be avant-garde texts in the United States, which was the central, and successful, mission of Grove Press.30 Grove entered the publishing industry at the height of the paperback revolution. Its most significant achievement was to establish and expand the circuits through which experimental and radical literature was distributed, particularly to the burgeoning college and university populations that were the seedbed of the counterculture, thereby effectively democratizing the avant-garde. This democratization involved both geographic dispersal—making avant-garde texts available in more places across the country and the world—and temporal absorption—closing the conventional lag between initial publication and critical consecration. By the end of the 1960s, the avant-garde had in essence become a component of the mainstream, and Grove Press, more than any other single institution, was responsible for this fundamental transformation of the cultural field, the consequences of which are still with us. This process determines the underlying structure of the narrative that follows.
New York
At one point in our second interview, Rosset made a sweeping gesture with his hand and said, “All of Grove Press’s life was within about four blocks of here.”31 Indeed, Grove Press was a landmark in the downtown scene. In 1953, by which time the stock was straining the floors of his third-story walk-up, Rosset moved the company to a small suite of offices at 795 Broadway. In 1959, he relocated to 64 University Place; in 1964, to 80 University Place; and in 1969, he purchased an entire building on the corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets. For the entirety of the long 1960s, Grove was located in the center of Greenwich Village, within walking distance of the Cedar Tavern, San Remo Café, Stonewall Inn, White Horse Tavern, Living Theater, Caffe Cino, Fillmore East, Cherry Lane Theater, Bitter End, Village Vanguard, Café Wha?, Strand, Eighth Street Bookshop, and the offices of the Village Voice. Grove’s national function as a countercultural publisher was enabled by its central location in the institutional network of New York City’s burgeoning downtown scene. Like these other famous institutions, Grove was not only a business; it was also a social nexus for the counterculture. Though Rosset himself moved to the Hamptons in the late 1950s, he frequently spent the night in the Village. Fueled by amphetamines and lubricated with alcohol, he often stayed up all night barhopping, flirting, and networking within blocks of the Grove offices. In the 1960s, he was a key player in a social scene that was also a cauldron of cultural dissidence, sexual experimentation, and political upheaval.
Though Grove was based downtown, its network extended the full length of Manhattan Island. Uptown was Columbia University, which was enjoying a surge of cultural influence as the academic wing of the New York Intellectuals. Columbia was the institutional home to many professors with close connections to Grove, including Donald Keene, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature, who assisted in establishing Grove’s extensive connections to Far Eastern literatures; and Eric Bentley, Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, who edited the popular Grove Press edition of the work of Bertolt Brecht. Columbia was also the site of one of the most famous student occupations of 1968, closely followed in the pages of the Evergreen Review. The occupation was sparked partly by Columbia’s vexed relationship with the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem, whose radical art and activism Grove helped publicize in the 1960s. Malcolm X founded the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number Seven in Harlem in 1952. Harlem was also home to the legendary National Memorial African Bookstore, where Malcolm frequently spent time and where his autobiography and speeches, both published by Grove, sold in great numbers after his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom. In the later 1960s, Harlem became home base to the Black Arts movement, whose founder, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, published a number of significant early works with Grove and who was a regular contributor to the Evergreen Review. And Harlem was the location of the Hotel Theresa, where Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stayed during their visit to the United Nations in 1960. Grove had connections in the Cuban mission, published popular paperback collections of both men’s speeches in the 1960s, and dedicated an entire issue of the Evergreen Review to Che after his death in Bolivia in 1967.
In Midtown, three recently established institutions immeasurably enhanced New York City’s global stature in the postwar era: the United Nations, a massive complex dominating the East side, which injected Manhattan directly into the volatile geopolitics of the postcolonial era; Birdland, the legendary jazz club on West 44th Street where musicians such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis launched their careers; and the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd, which, through its savvy promotion of abstract expressionism, had just achieved the triumphant theft chronicled by Guilbaut. Grove had connections to, and was crucially influenced by, all three of these institutions in the 1950s and 1960s.
New York City was also home to a Jewish community that was on the eve of an unprecedented cultural apotheosis. The genteel anti-Semitism that had restricted Jewish access to higher education had lost its authority in the wake of the Holocaust, while at the same time numerous Jewish intellectuals fleeing Nazism had settled in New York, which had long been a destination for European Jewish immigrants. By the 1960s, Jewish writers and academics occupied the center of New York intellectual and cultural life, bringing European schools of thought into the American mainstream while also producing and defining what came to be understood as American literature and culture. When I asked Rosset if he identified as Jewish, he responded with disdain, saying he didn’t see himself as Jewish or Catholic. “I didn’t know which I disliked more,” he quipped. “It made me a communist.” Nevertheless, Rosset was perceived by many as Jewish, and most of the key players at Grove were New York Jews.
Fred Jordan, Rosset’s right-hand man throughout the 1960s, was a Holocaust survivor. Jordan was born in Vienna on November 9, 1925, and his bar mitzvah was on Kristallnacht; it marked the end of his formal education. Soon after, he fled to England, where he became the cultural programmer for a small cell of fellow traveling Austrian Jews. Later in the war, he joined the British army as a member of the Glasgow Highlanders. He briefly returned to Vienna after the war, where he worked for the US Armed Forces newspaper. He arrived in the United States in 1949 with the intention of becoming a journalist. In 1956, Rosset hired him to handle the business end of things. Jordan shared Rosset’s left-wing political sympathies and became deeply dedicated to realizing his vision for the press. And the two worked well together: Rosset was impulsive and intuitive, whereas Jordan was analytical and deliberate; the pairing of their personalities was crucial to the operations of the company.
As the company expanded, Rosset hired more New York Jews, including Morrie Goldfischer; Nat Sobel; Herman Graf; Myron Shapiro, who ran the book club; Jules Geller, who ran the educational division; and Harry Braverman, who was a prominent editor and jack-of-all-trades at the company on and off throughout the 1960s. All of these men came from traditions of left-wing Jewish activism and cultural entrepreneurship, with many having close ties to labor groups such as the Socialist Workers Party. Braverman and Geller’s ties to the Monthly Review Press were particularly significant in developing Grove’s list of radical political titles.
The industry into which these men were entering was also centered in New York City. All of the major American publishing houses—for example, Random House, New American Library, Dell, Doubleday, Knopf, and Scribner’s—had been based in Midtown since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the early 1950s, the New York publishing world was on the verge of what John Tebbel has called “The Great Change,” the era of conglomeration and consolidation during which book publishing, which had remained relatively insulated from the broader culture industry, was gradually absorbed by it.32 Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, most of the major Midtown publishing houses were bought by large publicly owned corporations that both capitalized and rationalized an industry that had remained a genteel backwater during the first half of the twentieth century. The New York publishing world had been an insular community of (mostly) men, all of whom knew each other and most of whom shared a commitment to literary culture that, they felt, distinguished their industry and their product from others. Many of these publishers, in particular the so-called new breed of second-generation Jewish immigrants such as Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, and Bennett Cerf, shared a sense of mission that led them to take risks with unknown authors and then to remain loyal to those authors once they had established themselves. Tebbel calls this earlier era the “Golden Age between the Wars,” and under Rosset, Grove would in many ways be a holdover from it, an independent publisher committed to modernist standards of aesthetic evaluation without regard for the bottom line.33 Like the new breed that preceded him, and consciously modeling his enterprise on James Laughlin’s groundbreaking New Directions Press, Rosset was committed to bringing the latest in European experimental literature to the attention of an American reading public—a sense of mission that trumped any simple profit motive. Grove’s location downtown emphasized the philosophical and political differences between Grove and the larger mainstream publishers that were ushering the industry into the era of late capitalism.
However, in one crucial respect, Grove depended on and grew out of the incorporation of the mainstream publishers, insofar as that process was driven by the paperback revolution of the postwar era, which, according to Kenneth Davis, “democratized reading in America.”34 Piggybacking on the distribution networks of mass-market magazines, and frequently featuring salacious and sensational cover art, most paperback books in the 1940s and 1950s were reprints either of bestselling hardcovers or of classics that were out of copyright. Initially, Rosset pursued this inexpensive route, developing his title list by reprinting classic texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. But in the later 1950s, following the lead of Jason Epstein’s groundbreaking Doubleday imprint Anchor Books, Grove began publishing original avant-garde texts as inexpensive “quality” paperbacks, which were quickly recognized in the industry as marking a new and significant stage in the paperback revolution.35 As one writer for the New York Times remarked, the sudden success of the quality paperback evinced a “surprisingly large, if somewhat self-hidden, intelligentsia” in the United States.36 In order to access this intelligentsia, Epstein had promoted and acquired his new imprint’s authors through the Anchor Review, and Rosset adopted the same method. Thus, in 1957 Grove Press published the inaugural issue of the Evergreen Review, and in 1958 it launched the Evergreen Originals imprint. Through these two vehicles Rosset hoped to establish an identity for his fledgling enterprise. To achieve this goal, he needed to acquire contemporary authors, and to acquire such authors, he needed connections. And he made them, in Paris and across Europe. Grove became a conduit through which the cultural capital of European late modernism flowed into the United States, ballasting the emergence of an indigenous American avant-garde and generating a veritable canon of countercultural reading for the paperback generation.
Paris
Over the course of the 1950s Rosset established fruitful connections with most of the major publishing houses in Paris, including Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, which was already well known across Europe for publishing English-language pornography in its Traveler’s Companion series, but which also published avant-garde and experimental literature. Grove also established ties with UNESCO, which afforded it a fruitful conduit to world literature, both classical and contemporary. From these sources Grove acquired the work of many of the authors with whom it would become closely identified in the ensuing decades, including Fernando Arrabal, Antonin Artaud, Régis Debray, Frantz Fanon, Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade, J. P. Donleavy, and Samuel Beckett.
Beckett, virtually unknown at the time, became Rosset’s most important Parisian acquisition. The lifelong relationship the two established is one of the more underappreciated professional alliances in postwar publishing history. The unwavering loyalty between them hearkened back to Tebbel’s “Golden Age,” before huge advances and high-paid literary agents rendered such allegiances impractical. Rosset personally handled all of Beckett’s literary rights in the United States, was adamant in encouraging the reluctant author to translate his own work, and hosted his only visit to the United States in the summer of 1964 to make Film, from a screenplay Rosset himself had commissioned. By 1957, Beckett’s trust in Rosset to handle his affairs was implicit and complete, as he wrote: “I am incapable of understanding contracts. My ‘method’ consists, when they are drawn up by those in whom I have confidence, in signing them without reading them. Any contract drawn up by you, involving me alone, I shall sign in this fashion.”37 And Grove’s role as Beckett’s exclusive publisher in the United States provided it with high cultural cachet throughout the postwar era. It published all of his work and much of the early criticism that established the foundation of what became an academic industry, whose rapid growth ensured his place in the lucrative college curriculum of the booming postwar American university.
In reminiscences published in Conjunctions in 2009, Rosset credits two people with encouraging him to publish the Irish author: Sylvia Beach (a close friend of Joan Mitchell’s mother, Marion Strobel Mitchell, who edited Poetry magazine) and his New School professor Wallace Fowlie, author of Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater. According to Rosset, he gave Fowlie a copy of Waiting for Godot, and Fowlie, after reading it, guaranteed him that “Beckett will become known as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”38 Rosset promptly informed Beckett that “what the Grove Press needed most in the world was Samuel Beckett.”39
Rosset makes no mention in his reminiscences of Richard Seaver, who was equally instrumental, if not in Grove’s initial acquisition of Beckett, then in managing the professional relations between them. Before Rosset became aware of Beckett, Seaver, a young University of North Carolina graduate working on a dissertation on James Joyce at the Sorbonne, had stumbled upon Molloy and Malone meurt in the display window of Éditions de Minuit. Knowing of Beckett’s work on Finnegans Wake, he bought both books and, after reading through Molloy in one sitting, received “a shock of discovery” that marked the beginning of an extensive personal and professional relationship with the author and his work. Seaver mentioned Beckett’s name to the Scottish exile Alexander Trocchi, who had just started a journal called Merlin, and Trocchi encouraged Seaver to write on Beckett for the fledgling journal.40 One of the first critical appraisals of the postwar work on which Beckett’s reputation would soon rest, “Samuel Beckett: An Introduction,” appeared in the second issue.
Seaver and Rosset first met in the fall of 1953, when Rosset returned to Paris with his new wife, Loly, to meet Beckett, with whom he had just concluded a contract through Jerome Lindon of Éditions de Minuit. In Paris Seaver and Rosset began a relationship that became central to Grove’s operations once Seaver returned to the States. Rosset told me, “If I’d ever had a brother, I wish it would have been him,” and he spent years trying to convince Seaver to work for Grove. The two men, though they became very close, were also quite different. Seaver was from a WASP family in Watertown, Connecticut, clean-cut, athletic, and highly intelligent. He completed his dissertation, with honors, at the Sorbonne. Rosset, more of an outsider, lacked Seaver’s discipline and focus; he attended four undergraduate institutions before receiving his BA from the New School in 1952. But the two men shared literary enthusiasms, and, according to Seaver’s widow, Jeanette, Seaver recommended Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet to Rosset. Genet, whom Rosset also met that year in Paris through his translator Bernard Frechtman, became crucial to Grove’s radical image, first with his politically explosive theater and then with his homosexually explicit prose.41
In his article, Seaver calls Beckett “a prime example of that literary phenomenon which began some time during the last century and continues today, the writer in exile,”42 and it was in self-conscious emulation of the Lost Generation that the “Merlin Juveniles,” as Beckett called them, attempted to realize their literary aspirations in Paris. In addition to Trocchi and Seaver, the group at one time or another included the English poet Christopher Logue, the South African writer Patrick Bowles, and the American translator Austryn Wainhouse. All of them worshipped Joyce, whose Ulysses is praised in Trocchi’s editorial statement opening the second issue as “a great work of genius” and a model for the type of writing the journal seeks to publish.43 In this sense, Merlin was modeled on the now-legendary little magazines such as transition and the Transatlantic Review, which had launched the careers of so many modernists between the wars.
But, as Seaver notes in his introduction to the reissue of Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, which Grove had originally published and promoted in 1960 as a Joycean masterpiece, “Paris may have been our mistress, but the political realities of the time were our master.”44 And the master of political realities in Paris in the 1950s was, without question, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose pronouncements set the terms of engagement for literary and political dispute not only in Paris but around the world, and whose journal Les temps modernes provided the Merlin collective with their talking points. Seaver and Trocchi arranged to reprint articles from Sartre’s magazine, and Seaver’s next article for Merlin, “Revolt and Revolution,” was his account of the famous break between Camus and Sartre over Francis Jeanson’s review of L’homme revolté in Les temps modernes. Though Seaver opens with the challenge of commitment, averring that in a world of “categoric division, the position of the politically unaffianced is certainly ambiguous, perhaps even untenable,” he himself scrupulously avoids affiliation in his scholarly summary of both the book and the ensuing break, concluding that “undoubtedly both men are sincere. There are certain elements of truth in both their arguments.”45 Seaver was a young and unknown American in Paris, and his objective was less to take sides in a dispute between two intellectual titans than to communicate accurately the philosophical underpinnings and historical contexts of the debate for an English-speaking audience. When Seaver joined Grove Press as an editor and translator in 1959, this was the role he played. He provided the press with scholarly gravitas and intellectual expertise; his connections to and knowledge of the French intellectual world were crucial to Grove’s literary reputation.
Merlin may have helped launch Seaver’s career, but it was not a money-making proposition. Like most little magazines, it was supported by private funds, in this case from Trocchi’s American girlfriend, Alice Jane Lougee, who had a modest allowance from her family in Maine. A temporary solution to the collective’s cash-flow problems arrived in the person of Maurice Girodias, who first commissioned the more fluent of the Merlin collective as translators and then, ultimately, as pseudonymous writers for hire of English-language pornographic titles conceived specifically for his Traveler’s Companion series. Girodias, whom Trocchi introduced to Rosset, is a key figure in the early history of Grove Press, a pariah capitalist on the margins of modernism whose courage in publishing literature no one else would touch was matched by his unreliability in remunerating its authors.46 Jeanette Seaver told me he was a “thief” and a “scoundrel” but also conceded that he was “a charming man.” When I asked Rosset about Girodias, he told me they had “a deep relationship, and a very important one.” Seaver, by contrast, called it “a fragile friendship.”47
The parallels between the two men are noteworthy. They were born only three years apart, to wealthy Jewish fathers and Catholic mothers, and both were brought up without adherence to either religion. Indeed, Girodias took on his mother’s last name to avoid being identified as a Jew during World War II. His father, Jack Kahane, was the founder and owner of Obelisk Press, original publisher of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for which the young Maurice designed the cover. Thus, both Rosset and Girodias forged an early link to Miller, who was crucial to their careers after the war, when each established a publishing house specifically designed to challenge the residual regimes of literary censorship. In this they were entering into a tradition of eccentric (and frequently Jewish) entrepreneurs of erotica on the avant-garde of the battle against censorship that, once won, rendered them superfluous. The Olympia/Merlin nexus represents the last incarnation of that symptomatic convergence of modernism and obscenity that centrally shaped the cultural field of the first half of the twentieth century.48 Olympia’s combination of highbrow obscurantism and pulp pornography provided the groundwork for Grove’s title list, as the relaxation of censorship in the United States that Rosset almost single-handedly precipitated in turn enabled him to cannibalize most of Girodias’s catalog from the 1950s.
In Paris, Rosset and Seaver tapped into two august traditions of the European avant-garde: experimental theater, with its origins in the Ubu plays of Alfred Jarry and the influential theories of Antonin Artaud, and obscenity, which had constituted the moral challenge of modernist masterpieces since the 1857 trials of Madame Bovary and Fleurs du mal. Grove virtually cornered the market on European experimental theater, publishing not only Beckett but also Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Artaud, Jarry, Arrabal, Brecht, Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton, Genet, and Slawomir Mrozek. And Grove famously led the charge against the censorship of obscenity, precipitating landmark trials for its publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch and then unearthing the entire field of clandestine pornography that had previously been available only through pariah publishers like Maurice Girodias and Samuel Roth.
In addition to Éditions de Minuit and Olympia, Grove benefited from its relationship with Gallimard, the most prestigious and well-established publisher in France. When Rosset was in Paris, Gallimard was already beginning to release its complete collection of the novels of Jean Genet, who, in the wake of his famous pardon by the French president in 1949, was in the process of his initial canonization. And Sartre, who along with Jean Cocteau had personally written to the president endorsing Genet’s pardon, was just finishing his monumental psychobiography, Saint Genet: Comedienne et martyr, which had developed out of his introduction to the Gallimard edition and served to complete the consecration inaugurated by the pardon. The publication of the English translation of Saint Genet in 1961 enabled Grove to begin publishing Genet’s homosexually explicit novels in the United States.
Also at Gallimard, though unknown to anyone at the time, a young female editor and veteran of the Resistance named Anne Desclos, who wrote under the pseudonym Dominique Aury, was completing a self-consciously Sadean fantasy of female submission that she had been secretly writing for her boss and sometime lover, Jean Paulhan, influential editor of Gallimard’s house organ, the Nouvelle revue française. In 1954, her novel was published anonymously by Jean-Jacques Pauvert as Histoire d’O, generating feverish speculations in Paris as to its authorship. In the following year it was both charged with obscenity and awarded the prestigious Prix des deux magots. Ten years later, Grove caused a sensation when it published the novel in the United States, translated by Richard Seaver under the pseudonym Sabine d’Estrée.
The inaugural issue of the Evergreen Review in 1957 amply illustrates the success of Rosset’s efforts to export Parisian cultural capital to New York. It features a cover photo and a portfolio by Harold Feinstein, the Brooklyn-born photographer already known for his scenes of New York City; the opening article is a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous interview with L’express on the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This interview both provides the fledgling journal with the imprimatur of France’s preeminent intellectual and situates the Evergreen Review at a moment of emergence for the post-Stalinist left. Indeed, Sartre’s article is one of the first to introduce the term “New Left,” only then coalescing as an identifiable political slogan in France and England, to readers in the United States. Grove Press and the Evergreen Review forged a crucial component of their political identity through their alliances with the New Left. This issue also features the first American publication of two works by Samuel Beckett, the short story “Dante and the Lobster” and the poetry selection “Echo’s Bones.” All of Beckett’s major work over the next decade was introduced and advertised in the Evergreen Review. Finally, this issue of the review features University of California (UC), Berkeley English professor Mark Schorer’s essay “On Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which became his introduction to the landmark Grove Press edition of the suppressed erotic classic.
San Francisco
Grove complemented its reputation for publishing the latest in European avant-garde literature by tapping into the artistic scenes then emerging in the postwar United States. Rosset’s key partner in this endeavor was Donald Allen, whom he had met in a publishing class at Columbia taught by the legendary Random House editor Saxe Commins. Allen coedited the first two volumes of the Evergreen Review, as well as The New American Poetry, brought out by Grove in 1960 and widely heralded, both then and now, as a key event for postwar American literature. Allen was a consummate editor, translator, and networker. Like Rosset, he was in the Pacific during the war. Upon returning, he attended graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he became involved with the Berkeley Renaissance. A taciturn midwesterner, gay, and something of a loner, Allen rarely showed up at the Grove offices. According to Rosset, “He couldn’t stand anybody getting near him, emotionally,” and “he wouldn’t say hello to anybody” when he came to the office. Seaver’s initial impression was that Allen was “scholarly, aloof, diffident.”49 Herman Graf, by contrast, called Allen, “brilliant, enigmatic, mysterious . . . and playful.” He was crucial to the operations of the press and the initial design of the Evergreen Review, which he saw as “a kind of quarterly sized magazine that would have a longer shelf-life than the ordinary magazine.”50 In those groundbreaking first two volumes, Rosset and Allen reinforced Grove’s reputation for obtaining the latest in European avant-garde literature, publishing Beckett’s early poetry and prose, Ionesco’s “There Is No Avant-Garde Theater,” Robbe-Grillet’s “A Fresh Start for Fiction,” and Artaud’s “No More Masterpieces”; alongside these pioneers of the Parisian avant-garde were American poets such as Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov, as well as early prose by Jack Kerouac. The Evergreen Review was also a prominent venue for abstract expressionism, including one issue with a photograph of Jackson Pollock on the cover and a reminiscence by Clement Greenberg, and another featuring Frank O’Hara’s interview with Franz Kline.
Allen was also instrumental in Grove’s acquisition of novelists Jack Kerouac and John Rechy. He had been interested in Kerouac since editing “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” Kerouac’s contribution to New American Library’s New World Writing. In July 1956, Allen wrote to Rosset that he was “feeling more and more strongly that Kerouac should be published” and therefore had “asked Sterling Lord to let me look at the MSS and present them to you—for I think there is a real chance that his novels would do well enough in Evergreen editions to justify taking him on.”51 Grove ultimately published The Subterraneans, Dr. Sax, Satori in Paris, Lonesome Traveler, Pic, and Mexico City Blues, which, piggybacking on the monumental popularity of On the Road, cemented its association with the Beats. Allen was even more important for Rechy, who had considerable difficulty completing City of Night, his semiautobiographical rendering of the life of a young hustler that became Grove’s fastest-selling novel ever, affirming its commitment to the emergent genre of gay literature. Allen encouraged and assisted Rechy throughout the three-year process, publishing excerpts in the Evergreen Review and nominating him for the Formentor Prize.
In the late 1950s, Allen relocated to San Francisco, where he operated as Grove’s West Coast representative throughout the 1960s. His West Coast connections would be crucial to the Evergreen Review’s legendary second issue on the San Francisco scene, the only issue Grove ever reprinted. Kenneth Rexroth introduced this issue, which featured poetry by Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and, most famously, the first nationally distributed appearance of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (a mildly expurgated version, since Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets edition was still on trial for obscenity in San Francisco). Allen sent a copy to Grove, which Jordan read aloud to Rosset over lunch at the Cedar Tavern. After he finished, he looked up and said, “This is the most radical thing I’ve read in America since I’ve come here.” In his introduction, Rexroth calls the poem “a confession of faith of a generation that is going to be running the world in 1965 and 1975” and offers a “modest prophecy” that “Ginsberg will be the first genuinely popular, genuine poet in over a generation.”52 The first time most of these writers had appeared together in a nationally distributed publication was in this issue, which also features Jack Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth”; over the course of the 1960s almost all of them became closely affiliated with Grove and its house journal. Grove in turn became known as the “Beat” publisher on the literary scene, the go-to resource for the latest products of America’s indigenous avant-gardes.
The second issue of the review was a big hit in the Bay Area. As Allen wrote back to Rosset, “Evergreen Review No. 2 went on sale here last Thursday. It is stacked up all over town, even in the cigar stores on the change counter! Ferlinghetti decided (against the advice of his lawyer) to stock it too: he’s put it in the window and told me he sold 40 copies in the first two hours.”53 Jordan, who in his many sales trips across the country had helped build Grove’s reputation on the West Coast, convinced Rosset that they should capitalize on the popularity of this issue by organizing an “Evergreen Book Week” in the spring of 1958 in coordination with the legendary Bay Area bookseller Fred Cody in Berkeley. The series of events scheduled over a three-week period was kicked off by a full-page ad in the Daily Californian headed “Cody’s Salutes Evergreen Books” and announcing that “evergreen books are a vital force on campus today.”54 The events of the first week—which included performances of Ionesco’s Victims of Duty and The Lesson; a preview performance of Beckett’s Endgame; two radio shows; numerous panel discussions with critics, editors, and English professors on both the UC Berkeley and Stanford campuses; and readings by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Robert Duncan—amply illustrate how Grove worked not only to associate its imprint with the latest in experimental literature but also to establish itself as a cultural force in the communities that both produced and consumed this literature in the United States, communities that would soon become epicenters of student revolt and countercultural revolution. As Rosset told me, the Bay Area “just adopted us, right from the beginning.”55
In their news release for the second issue of the Evergreen Review, Grove announced that the writers included in the volume are “fast turning the Bay Area into the nation’s cultural capital.”56 The events of the Evergreen Book Week explicitly interrogated the idea of a “San Francisco scene,” with lectures and panel discussions on such topics as “The Art of Writing in the San Francisco Bay Area,” “Prose Writing in the San Francisco Bay Area,” and “The San Francisco Renaissance: Fact or Fraud?” All the readings were by authors who had been published in the special issue. By combining these readings and discussions with performances of works by Ionesco and Beckett, Grove helped highlight the affinities between the European and American avant-gardes. Furthermore, the inclusion of editors, publishers, and professors along with authors on the scheduled panel discussions encouraged participants, mostly faculty and students, to understand the avant-garde as a cultural network, not just a list of titles.
In Berkeley, Cody’s Books was establishing itself as a crucial institutional node in this network. Like City Lights in San Francisco, it specialized in paperback books, and its customer base was the faculty and students at UC Berkeley. In an account of his “Evergreen Salute” printed in Publishers Weekly on May 19, 1958, Cody claims he had “felt for some time that Evergreen Books make a special appeal to the University public served by the bookstore.” For three weeks, Cody devoted his entire front-window display to promoting Evergreen Books, which Grove had provided him on consignment. And he emphasizes that his discussions with his customers not only about Evergreen and Grove but also about the book industry more generally were a crucial component of the campaign. Thus, he notes that “talk of what Grove was doing in the Evergreen Series led customers to discussion of other paperback lines and to a discussion of the ‘revolution’ in publishing brought about by paperbacks.” He also notes that “new respect was gained for the store which had made the effort to organize a special promotion.” Local paperback booksellers such as Cody’s, which were cropping up in college towns across the country, became key nodes in Grove’s countercultural network.57
Cody’s display features the Evergreen colophon as a sort of visual pun, emphasizing its similarity to an arrow pointing downward, thereby directing the eye to the titles on whose covers and bindings it prominently appears (Figure 3). But the colophon itself is only one component of the visual language Grove deployed to generate brand identity and loyalty. As the prominent photos of Kerouac and Beckett affirm, Grove put its identifiably experimental stable of authors in the service of its brand recognition. Photos of both Beckett and Kerouac are featured prominently in many of Grove’s advertisements over the course of the 1960s, as are images of Burroughs, Ionesco, Genet, and others. Unlike larger publishers, who worked to make their catalogs comprehensive, Grove acquired its authors almost exclusively from the avant-garde and the underground, providing a distinctive identity for its colophon that increasingly aligned it with the radical stirrings of the incipient student movement.
Figure 3. Cody’s Books display in Berkeley (1958). (Photographer unknown; GPC)
Kuhlman frequently incorporated the Evergreen colophon into his designs for this line. Thus, the cover for The Subterraneans, prominently displayed in the Cody’s salute, plays on the Bay Area location of the narrative with a recognizable silhouette of the Golden Gate Bridge but then renders that silhouette as an abstract formal experiment in shape and color, distorting its symmetry and altering its hue. The off-balance green shades that bisect the bridge against the black background contrast with and foreground the blue lettering for the word by and the colophon that takes the place of the artist’s signature in the bottom right corner, obliquely reminding us of the mediating role of the publisher in the production of the text (Figure 4). The colophon is similarly situated in Kuhlman’s cover for Beckett’s The Unnamable, which reflects the isolation of the novel’s narrator with a central orange circle surrounded by concentric turquoise lines of uneven thickness against a black background (Figure 5). By the early 1960s, Kuhlman’s style had become so recognizable that readers could identify a Grove Press book by its cover.
Figure 4. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen edition of
The Subterraneans (1958).
Figure 5. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen edition of
The Unnamable (1958).
The Quality Paperback Generation
Grove organized its spring 1958 catalog around its new line of Evergreen Originals, announcing that
though Grove Press has done some original publishing in paperback format before—most of Samuel Beckett’s works first came to the attention of the American public in original evergreen paperback editions—the launching of the new Spring list of original evergreens represents a new emphasis on original books in “quality” paperbacks . . . Up to now the emphasis in the “quality” paperback field has been on reprints of old works. We at Grove Press feel the time has come for a major effort to make new works of a high level available to a larger audience through the lower prices afforded by paper covers.58
Grove launched the imprint as an experiment analogous to the avant-garde literature in its rapidly expanding catalog. In a 1958 circular to booksellers, boldly headed “An Experiment,” Grove notes the industry’s concern “over the shrinking market for new, original fiction” and attributes this shrinkage to “the wide gap between the prices of original hardbound fiction and paperback reprints.” The circular proposes that the imprint will “bridge that gap” and requests that booksellers “display these books, talk about them, and report them to your local bestseller lists.” The first of four titles listed in the circular is Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, which in the wake of the publication of On the Road had become a bestseller. A mere six months later, Grove ran an ad in the New York Times Book Review trumpeting its Evergreen Originals imprint as “an experiment in book publishing that worked!,” listing The Subterraneans’ “best sellerdom” as proof of success and offering new titles by Samuel Beckett and Alain Robbe-Grillet as the latest additions to the line.59
By 1962, the New York Times, in a special section of the Book Review dedicated to paperbacks, confirmed that the “quality” paperback revolution had, indeed, been a success: “Created only eight years ago to meet the curricular and extracurricular needs of academic communities, its popularity is now so widespread that it is being sold in virtually all the nation’s 1,700 bookshops.”60 In that same year, Rosset returned to the Bay Area to speak in a lecture series, “The Popular Arts in American Culture,” through the UC Berkeley extension. In his speech, he celebrates the paperback book for making reading “more popular, more voluntary, less dutiful” and specifies that the quality paperback has “done much to revitalize” bookstores, further noting that “many stores have opened just for them and new people trained in the craft of book selling. Certainly San Francisco and Berkeley are proof positive of these facts.”61
The Evergreen Review in these early years was something of a “quality paperback” itself. It was identical in size and format, featured the same colophon, and was listed in Grove’s catalogs along with its books. According to Rosset, “We just melted that right into our paperback line . . . We just slipped the magazine in as a book. To get distribution.”62 In a rare interview, Allen affirms that “we really thought of Evergreen Review in terms of a paperback . . . a quality paperback.”63 Initially, it featured no advertisements, though it did list the titles in the Evergreen imprint on both flyleaves, which by the second number exceeded one hundred, including plays by Beckett, Ionesco, Brecht, and Genet; Beckett’s trilogy; Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double; Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur; and Olson’s Call Me Ishmael. With the sixth issue, it began to include advertisements, focusing most prominently on other journals, such as the Chicago Review and the Partisan Review; other publishers, including many university presses; and numerous book clubs, including Marboro and the Readers’ Subscription.
The Readers’ Subscription, founded by Lionel Trilling, W. H. Auden, and Jacques Barzun in 1951 “to create an audience for books that the other clubs considered to be too far above the public taste,” became a particularly important early outlet for Grove.64 Reaching a mostly university-based membership of around forty thousand, the club was plagued by financial troubles and was sold off in 1963. Nevertheless, its influence exceeded its modest numbers; Marshall Best, writing for Daedalus in 1963, attested to the success of such book clubs, “which have not only increased the reading of better-than-average books among the existing audience, but also have brought to light a whole new public of sizable dimensions.”65 Grove made sure that this new public had access to the latest in contemporary avant-garde literature and drama, providing its members with an opportunity to join the underground.
This new public was mostly young and mostly in college. Subsidized by the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), Americans entered college in unprecedented numbers in the postwar years. According to Louis Menand, undergraduate enrollment increased by almost 500 percent between 1945 and 1975, and graduate enrollment increased by an astonishing 900 percent. 66 Although the GI Bill has tended to receive more emphasis in the many accounts of this expansion, it was actually, as Menand affirms, the NDEA that “put the Federal Government, for the first time, in the business of subsidizing higher education directly.”67 Furthermore, as Menand crucially reminds us, “the strategic rationale for the postwar expansion of American higher education was technological and geopolitical . . . but the social policy rationale was meritocratic.”68 The NDEA was intended to broaden the talent pool in American colleges and universities, creating a student population that was not only larger but also more diverse than that of preceding generations.
In The Marketplace of Ideas, the title of Menand’s chapter on this expansion (and the following contraction) is “The Humanities Revolution”; indeed, the humanities grew both in size and in cultural and social significance in the postwar era. The number of bachelor’s degrees conferred in English increased by more than threefold between 1950 and 1972, while the number of advanced degrees (MAs and PhDs) more than quadrupled.69 Modern languages, which the NDEA specifically targeted, saw comparable increases.70 If the actual number of degrees granted in the humanities remained tiny relative to the size of the general population, the canon of texts and the habits of reading promoted by their recipients disseminated much more widely as the humanistic disciplines took on the mandate of “general education” that was part and parcel of the NDEA program. Furthermore, as Stephen Schryer has recently shown, students and scholars of literature and the humanities in the postwar era increasingly saw themselves as the cultural educators and ideological arbiters of the expanding “new class” of professional elites being educated in American universities.71
This generation is usually referred to as the baby boomers, but I prefer to follow Kenneth Davis in labeling Grove’s readership the “paperback generation.” As Davis affirms, the “‘boomers’ were the first generation to have paperbacks in the classroom. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they read their classics in soft covers, having been assigned reading lists filled with inexpensive paperbacks that they could own, not borrow.”72 Many of these paperbacks were so-called modern classics, illustrating and effecting the canonization of modernism in postwar American universities. For Fredric Jameson, this canonization was explicitly ideological, representing a cultural containment and domestication of high modernism’s subversive energies into an ideal of aesthetic autonomy. However, as Jameson concedes, “The affirmation of the autonomy of the aesthetic is a contradictory one,” and he offers Samuel Beckett as illustrating the late modernist exposure of “the failure of autonomy to go all the way and fulfill its aesthetic programme.”73 For Jameson, this is a “fortunate failure,” generating a more accessible form of “middlebrow late modernist literature and culture” whose public “can be identified as the class fraction of college students (and their academic trainers), whose bookshelves, after graduation into ‘real life,’ preserve the souvenirs of this historically distinctive consumption which the surviving high modernist aesthetes and intellectuals have baptized as the canon.”74
If such souvenirs survive as reminders of 1960s syllabi, these paperbacks were, during the 1960s themselves, something more. On the one hand, individual ownership was only one component of this generation’s relationship to print, and in some ways a misleading one, since paperbacks were frequently shared as a form of collective property. On the other hand, assigned reading lists were only one delivery system whereby these books got into the hands of college students, whose loyalty to Grove Press extended into their “real life” outside the classroom. Indeed, the paperback generation was the last generation to identify itself by what it read; Grove Press nurtured a whole common culture of revolutionary reading in the 1960s. Here I follow Philip Beidler, who, in Scriptures for a Generation, affirms that the 1960s “was truly the last great moment of reading and writing in the West by an identifiable mass-cultural constituency, a moment of print-apocalypse, so to speak: materially, a true culmination of print production and distribution intersected with unprecedented consumer affluence and appetite; and spiritually, the last great moment of America’s own faith in the Word as its basic article of political and educational reliance.”75 If Beidler’s tone is a bit breathless here, he nevertheless indicates the degree to which private reading and public life were powerfully stitched together in the 1960s; to be in the Movement meant, at least partly, to be reading certain books, and many, if not most, of those books were published by Grove Press.
In 1961, Grove launched a new imprint, Black Cat (named after a nightclub in Frankfurt), calling it “the new mass-market line with the liveliest look in the field.”76 Smaller in format and lower in price than the Evergreen Originals, the Black Cat imprint was nevertheless also promoted as a “quality” line, featuring titles by the same authors and marketed prominently to colleges and universities. With these two imprints, Grove was able to establish itself, according to a 1962 article in Paperback Trade News, as “the largest publisher of original paperbacks in the nation.”77 But Grove, as we have seen, was already much more than this. It had by 1962 become the communications center for the emergent counterculture. Any writers or readers who felt marginalized by the mainstream came to feel that Grove Press represented their aesthetic tastes, social sensibilities, and political convictions. In the 1960s, the Grove colophon meant more than just avant-garde quality paperbacks; it was a signifier of countercultural sympathies, increasingly drawing radical authors, readers, translators, professors, lawyers, and activists into its expanding network.
Grove achieved this significance through focusing on a series of cultural and generic niches. Counterculture Colophon is therefore organized according to the categories in the company’s catalog. Thus, each of the following chapters covers similar chronological ground, with the exception of the last chapter, which focuses on the feminist occupation of the press in 1970 and its consequent decline in the following decade. Structurally speaking, this book is recursive, with each chapter spiraling back through the 1960s along the lines mapped out by the niches in which Grove developed a name for itself. Together, they document the creation of a countercultural canon and the achievement of a cultural revolution.