Rebel Publisher
Rebel Publisher
Grove Press and the Revolution
of the Word
Loren Glass
Seven Stories Press New York • Oakland • London
Copyright © 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
Introduction © 2018 by Loren Glass
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Seven Stories Press
140 Watts Street
New York, NY 10013
www.sevenstories.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Glass, Loren author.
Title: Rebel publisher : Grove Press and the revolution of the word / Loren
Glass.
Description: Seven Stories Press first edition. | New York : Seven Stories
Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018006112 | ISBN 9781609808228 (pbk.); ISBN 9781609809225 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: Grove Press—History—20th century. | Rosset, Barney. |
Publishers and publishing—United States—History—20th century. |
Literature, Experimental—United States—History and criticism. |
Counterculture—United States—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC Z473.G74 G58 2018 | DDC 070.50973/0904—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006112
Printed in the United States of America
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Barney Rosset (1922–2012)
And for my parents
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction to the Paperback Edition
Introduction: From AvantGarde to Counterculture
1 The New World Literature
2 Publishing Off Broadway
3 The End of Obscenity
4 Reading Revolution
5 Booking Film
6 Takeover
Notes
Index
Figures
1 Marquis de Sade: Selections from his Writings
2 Franz Kline, New York, NY
3 Cody’s Books display
4 Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans
5 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable
6 Samuel Beckett, Molloy
7 Grove Press catalog cover
8 Donald Keene, Modern Japanese Literature
9 Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
10 Martin Williams, The Art of Jazz
11 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
12 Frontispiece, Waiting for Godot
13 Eugène Ionesco, Four Plays
14 Jean Genet, The Blacks
15 Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party & The Room
16 Vivian Merchant and Michael Brennan in The Room
17 Vivian Merchant in The Room
18 Jack Gelber, The Connection
19 Musicians in The Connection
20 Photographers in The Connection
21 D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Grove Press paperback)
22 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Signet paperback)
23 Evergreen Review (July–August 1962)
24 Evergreen Review after change in format (April–May 1964)
25 Jean Genet, The Miracle of the Rose
26 Pastedown endpaper, The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
27 Two Novels from the Victorian Underground
28 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
29 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
30 The Autobiography of Malcolm X
31 Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!
32 Turner Brown Jr., Black Is
33 Che Guevara on cover of Evergreen Review
34 Tuli Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft
35 Back cover, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft
36 Carl Oglesby, The New Left Reader
37 Text and image layout, Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour
38 Images of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad
39 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet
40 Text and image layout, Last Year at Marienbad
41 Samuel Beckett, Film
42 Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett in the room set in Film
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to thank the students, faculty, staff, and administration of the University of Iowa. The generosity of the university administration began with a Dean’s Scholarship in 2007 that, among other things, allowed me to purchase a full run of the Evergreen Review from 1957 to 1964, and peaked with a Faculty Scholarship that, among other amenities, provided me with three semesters off to conduct archival research and interviews. I offer my gratitude to the committee members who graciously decided to provide me with this support. My colleagues in the English Department and the Center for the Book also provided me with numerous opportunities to present my ongoing research. In particular, Kevin Kopelson, Matt Brown, and Naomi Greyser merit acknowledgment for facilitating these presentations, and Melanie Reichwald and Sonia Johnson deserve thanks for inviting me to deliver the keynote address at the Craft Critique Culture Graduate Student Conference in 2010. Two of my senior colleagues, John Raeburn and Ruedi Kuenzli, read an early version of the entire manuscript; I want to thank them for their insight and advice at that crucial juncture. As this project inevitably ranged across topics in which I lacked expertise, I needed the help of a number of scholars in reading over specific chapters. In particular, I would like to thank Heidi Bean and Jennifer Buckley for reading drafts of Chapter 2, Louis Siegel for reading an early draft of Chapter 4, and J. D. Connor for reading an early draft of Chapter 5. I also benefited from fruitful and frequent discussion with Kembrew McLeod, Harry Stecopoulos, Corey Creekmur, Charlie Williams, Sarah Fay McCarthy, Matthew Lavin, Michael Chasar, and Sonia Johnson.
I visited many archives in conducting the research for this book. My work began in the Grove Press Records housed at the Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center. I want to thank Sean Quimby, Nicolette Dobrowolski, Kathleen Manwaring, Nicole Dittrich, and Susan Kline for their patience and assistance. Susan was especially helpful in researching sales and print-run information at a time when I couldn’t get to the archives in person. My work finished in the Barney Rosset Papers, acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 2010. Carrie Hintz very kindly allowed me to examine this collection before it had been fully processed. I also had the privilege to visit the archives at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, the Calder and Boyers Collection at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, the Donald Allen Papers at University of California San Diego’s Mandeville Special Collections Library, the Henry Foner Papers at New York University’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, and the Papers of William J. Brennan Jr. at the US Library of Congress. The librarians at all of these collections were invariably helpful and courteous, and I am grateful for the permission to use their archival materials. I also want to thank Astrid Rosset on behalf of the Estate of Barney Rosset for permission to quote from unpublished interviews and correspondence.
When I started this book, I had never conducted a formal interview, and I am forever indebted to the patience and enthusiasm of the many individuals who allowed me to learn on the job, as it were. Foremos
t among these is Barney Rosset, an experienced interviewee if there ever was one. Barney and his wife, Astrid, were gracious and cooperative during my two visits, and our discussions were invaluable not just for the information they provided about the history of Grove Press but also for the insights they enabled into the interpersonal dynamics of the remarkable community of people who worked there. These insights were widened and deepened by my conversations with Fred Jordan, Morrie Goldfischer, Nat Sobel, Jeanette Seaver, Herman Graf, Judith Schmidt, and Claudia Menza. I additionally want to thank Fred’s son, Ken Jordan, for his support and enthusiasm. I also had an informative interview with Morgan Entrekin, current owner of Grove Press, and would like to thank him for taking time off his busy schedule to meet with me.
When I was in the midst of this project, I was fortunate enough to be invited to join the Post•45 Collective for their annual meeting in 2009 at the University of Missouri and then in 2010 at Brown University. Both meetings were invaluable in providing probing criticism of my project and an inspiring vision of the directions the study of postwar American literature and culture is taking. I want to thank the organizers of and participants in these meetings, including Andrew Hoberek, Deak Nabers, Abigail Cheever, J. D. Connor, Amy Hungerford, Oren Izenberg, Michael Clune, Catherine Jurca, Debbie Nelson, Fred Whiting, Tom Cerasulo, Daniel Grausam, Florence Dore, and Michael Szalay. Michael and Florence also deserve thanks for convincing me to submit the manuscript to their Post•45 series with Stanford University. Their encouragement enabled me to bring the project to fruition.
At Stanford University Press, I would like to thank Emily-Jane Cohen and Emma Harper, whose patience and expertise were crucial in shepherding this project into its final stages. I also want to thank Stan Gontarski and Stanford’s anonymous reader for their expert engagement with the manuscript and their useful suggestions for final revision.
And I would like to thank my family. In a sense, this book is about my parents, Ruth Minka and Marty Glass, who, like all participants in the Sixties counterculture, remember reading books published by Grove Press. My father read the entire manuscript as I was writing it, and his enthusiasm and support kept me excited about and invested in the project from its early stages. Finally, I want to acknowledge, with love and tenderness, my wife, Tara, and my two daughters, Nora and Becca.
Portions of this book have been published previously, and I am grateful for permission to reprint those materials here. Small sections from Chapter 3 appeared in Naked Lunch at 50 (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), edited by Oliver Harris, and in Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006); and a shorter version of Chapter 2 appeared in Modern Drama 54, no. 4 (Winter 2011). Finally, select portions of the Introduction and Chapter 3, along with small excerpts from Chapters 2, 4, and 5, appeared as a two-part series in the newly launched Los Angeles Review of Books, and I want to thank editors Tom Lutz and Evan Kindley for providing me with indispensable insights and suggestions at a crucial stage in the development of this project. In a book affirming the importance of editors in literary history, it is fitting that they should be recognized here as model practitioners of the profession without which nothing would get published.
Grove Press/Evergreen Review covers used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Introduction to the
Paperback Edition
When I first went to visit the Grove Press archives at Syracuse University over a decade ago I didn’t intend to write a history of the company. Rather, I was researching a book on literature and obscenity. At the time, very little had been written about the mid-size independent publishing house that had revolutionized the literary landscape of the postwar era. A few articles and book chapters on censorship, a handful of interviews, mostly with maverick owner Barney Rosset, and a pamphlet by S. E. Gontarski entitled Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy were all that I could find. The more time I spent in the archives the more I realized how much of the story remained to be told. Thus began a lengthy literary adventure that took me to archives across the country, as well as into the living rooms of surviving veterans of Rosset’s volatile time at the helm of the company. When the book was published in 2013 by Stanford University Press under the title Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the AvantGarde, I felt confident that I had produced the definitive history of one of the most important American publishers of the postwar era.
Since then, two books have come out that also tell this story: Barney Rosset’s long-awaited autobiography—Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship (OR Books, 2017)—and Michael Rosenthal’s biography of Rosset—Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle Against Censorship (Arcade, 2017). As their titles clearly indicate, both books center on Barney as the moving force behind the company and the battle against censorship as his signal achievement. Barney Rosset was a fascinating man and both of these books provide interesting and informative versions of his highly eventful life. And there can be little doubt that his passionate embrace of the First Amendment was behind Grove’s successful campaign against censorship in the sixties. But publishing is a team sport and if Barney was captain and quarterback, he benefited from the skills and instincts of a number of colleagues to execute his plays and, not infrequently, balance out his errors in judgment. Furthermore, publishing books that offended some people and defied the prevailing obscenity standards of the day wasn’t the only thing that Grove did exceedingly well. The company pushed the envelope in a variety of other avantgarde and radical directions, which are the organizational focus of my book. Rebel Publisher tells this larger story of how a publishing house was able to survive and flourish under a political regime and economic system that it opposed.
IntroductionFrom AvantGarde to Counterculture
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 avantgarde 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 everythin
g 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