Rebel Publisher Page 10

  As James Harding affirms in the introduction to his important anthology Contours of the AvantGarde, “The theatrical avantgarde has consistently defined itself vis-à-vis a negation not only of the text and mimesis but also of authorship and authority and of … academic institutions” more generally.6 Artaud, unsurprisingly, is a recurrent and representative figure in Harding’s collection, which emerged as a response to Bonnie Marranca’s critique of the text-centered curriculum in academic theater studies, “Theatre at the University at the End of the Twentieth Century,” published in Performing Arts Journal in 1995. The essays in Harding’s anthology illustrate the degree to which debates over avantgarde theater tend to adopt Artaud’s opposition between print and performance, an opposition that, in turn, maps onto the tension between playwright and director. In this chapter, I focus instead on the relationship between publisher and reader, a relationship that presents the printed text in complementary, rather than antagonistic, relation to live performance. As a publisher, Grove worked to market printed plays as supplements to performance for those who could attend one, and as substitutes for performance for those who couldn’t. Its texts were designed, as much as possible, to invoke the experience of seeing the play live, frequently in direct reference to specific performances. Its success in this endeavor was crucial to the reception and interpretation of avantgarde drama in the postwar United States.

  Grove’s achievement as a publisher of experimental drama complicates Julie Stone Peters’s groundbreaking history of the relations between print and performance in European theater prior to the twentieth century, which concludes with a brief discussion of Krapp’s Last Tape. Peters argues that in the twentieth century, attention shifted from “the difference between the presence of live spectators and the remoteness and privacy of the reader in the study” to “the theatre’s place, on the one hand, in the industry of mass spectatorship and, on the other, in a culture in which one’s most intimate relationship might be, in the end, with a machine.”7 But Grove’s marketing and design of avantgarde scripts reveal that the dialectic between public performance and private reading extended well into the twentieth century. Postwar experimental theater positioned itself in stark opposition to the culture industries and, Beckett’s experiments with radio and tape recording notwithstanding, remained philosophically and politically committed to liveness, especially in the happenings and street theater of the 1960s. Furthermore, the conceptual difficulties of much avantgarde theater were commonly elucidated by American academics in terms of modernist literary technique, mandating that such plays be read as a necessary supplement to seeing them live, and the popularity of experimental theater on college campuses created a large audience for these scripts. As the exclusive publisher of Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Kobo Abe, John Arden, Fernando Arrabal, Brendan Behan, Ugo Betti, Freidrich Durrenmatt, Jean Genet, David Mamet, Slawomir Mrozek, Joe Orton, Sam Shepard, Boris Vian, and many others, Grove cornered this market, in the process acquiring an identity as the “off Broadway of publishing houses.”

  Grove’s connections to off-Broadway theater were enhanced by its downtown location, close to the Cherry Lane, Village Gate, St. Mark’s Playhouse, and Living Theatre. In 1967, Grove also began producing off-Broadway playbills after Showcard, the company that usually designed them, refused to print one for MacBird!, Barbara Garson’s Shakespearean parody of the Johnson and Kennedy administrations. In that same year, Rosset acquired a theater at 53 East 11th Street. Although it eventually became mainly a venue for screening experimental film, the Evergreen Theater made history with the triumphant New York debut of Michael McClure’s The Beard, which had been shut down for obscenity in San Francisco. Finally, starting in 1968, the Evergreen Review began regularly publishing essays and theater reviews by John Lahr, whose father, Bert Lahr, had famously played Estragon in the American debut of Waiting for Godot and who was already an influential new voice in modern theater criticism. Up against the Fourth Wall: Essays on Modern Theater, a collection of the groundbreaking work he wrote for the magazine, was printed as an Evergreen Original in 1970.

  The Evergreen Originals imprint was foundational for Grove’s identity as a publisher of avantgarde drama, and its printed plays had a far more lasting impact than its direct forays into the downtown theater scene. Though it was initially developed as a format for original fiction, Grove quickly adapted it to include original drama as well, as the May 8, 1960, ad in the New York Times Book Review, “Off Broadway’s Most Sensational Hits—in Book Form,” makes abundantly clear. The titles listed include Jack Gelber’s The Connection, Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, Genet’s The Balcony, and Ionesco’s Four Plays. In the ad, Grove calls these “the plays that are making theater history” and encourages readers to “discover their meaning as well as their excitement by reading them for yourself, in EVERGREEN ORIGINAL PAPERBACKS.” Grove adapted this imprint to present avantgarde theater as a specifically literary, and resolutely international, genre that needed to be read in order to be fully understood.

  Grove was assisted in this task by a stable of academic critics who, while maintaining an investment in performance, emphasized the “literary” qualities of contemporary drama. Wallace Fowlie, the Harvard-educated professor of French who taught at Bennington, Chicago, Yale, and the New School before spending most of his career at Duke University, encouraged Rosset to publish Beckett in the early 1950s; in his influential study of postwar French drama, Dionysus in Paris, Fowlie heralded the arrival in France of a “new type of supremely literary playwright.”8 Martin Esslin, the English theater critic whose work as a producer for the BBC in the 1960s was centrally responsible for popularizing experimental drama (and who eventually settled at Stanford University), emphasized in his classic study The Theatre of the Absurd that the plays in this “school,” whose name he coined, are “analogous to a Symbolist or Imagist poem.”9

  Academics such as Fowlie, Esslin, Richard Coe, Ruby Cohn, Eric Bentley, and Roger Shattuck, all of whom worked with Grove over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, helped chart this genealogy from the modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century to the experimental theater of the second half, thereby establishing the literary antecedents of the theater of the absurd for the Englishspeaking world. Coe wrote monographs on Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet, all of which Grove published in the 1960s; Cohn wrote one of the earliest dissertations on Beckett in 1959 and edited Grove’s Casebook on “Waiting for Godot” in 1967. Bentley was responsible for the American reception of Bertolt Brecht and became the general editor of the Grove Press edition of his plays, issued over the course of the 1960s. Shattuck’s The Banquet Years: The Origins of the AvantGarde in France, 1885 to World War I, originally published in 1955, became a standard reference on the origins of the French avantgarde; he was guest editor of an early issue of the Evergreen Review on ’pataphysics in 1960 as well as coeditor of Grove’s Selected Works of Alfred Jarry in 1965.

  In their biographically oriented studies, these critics frequently emphasized poetry as an apprenticeship to drama, positioning the early poems of these dramatists as crucial to an appreciation of their later plays. Furthermore, by establishing an analogy between experimental theater and modernist poetry, they affirmed the necessity of reading both the plays themselves and their own commentary in order to understand fully the significance of these difficult texts.

  …

  Rosset knew that Grove would have to market these plays as literary texts, and from the beginning he thought of Waiting for Godot as a book. He convinced Beckett not to publish the first act in Merlin, arguing that “EN ATTENDANT GODOT should burst upon us as an entity in my opinion.”10 On the same day, Rosset wrote to Alexander Trocchi, affirming that he would like to see “the play first appear in its entirety in a handsome book.”11 A few months later, Rosset described the book he envisioned to Jerome Lindon: “Our edition will include the play GODOT, plus a page or two of biographical material at the back of the book—as well a
s photographs of the production (assuming we can obtain them). The book’s jacket will also tell about Beckett and will also contain his photograph, along with quotations from French reviews of his work.” And he affirmed that “we have decided to go ahead with publication of GODOT regardless of the status of the play’s production here.”12

  Initial sales of the cloth edition were, unsurprisingly, modest; according to Rosset’s recollections Grove printed one thousand copies and sold about four hundred in the first year, one of which ended up in the hands of actor Bert Lahr, delivered by messenger from the offices of producer Michael Myerberg. Lahr was befuddled by the play, asking his son, the future drama critic, “You’re a student—what does it mean?”13 Lahr eventually accepted the role, and the name recognition he brought to the play helped promote the paperback Grove published in 1956, the year of the play’s debut in the United States. After the famous failure in Miami, Rosset wrote to reassure Beckett: “Certainly all is not lost—the printing of the inexpensive edition forges ahead.”14 And Beckett was on board from the beginning, writing to Rosset, “By all means a paper bound edition, I am all for cheaper books.”15

  Meanwhile, in the New York Times, Myerberg made a public appeal for seventy thousand intellectuals to come see the play in order to avoid a repeat of the Miami debacle. Not only did Myerberg agree to sell the cheap paperback in the lobby of the theater but he also arranged for symposiums to be held with the actors during the Broadway run. Later that year, Myerberg wrote to Beckett to report on the success of these discussions:

  Of particular interest were the four symposiums we held during the run. They were extremely well attended and displayed a keen interest in the play. A rather startling development here is that four-fifths of our audience are young—under 24, and even boys and girls 17 and 18 are storming the box office for the cheaper seats. At no time have we had cheap seats available at a performance. The youngsters had a complete and ready acceptance of the play, and quite a lot to say about its meaning, which seemed clear to them and had entered into their lives intellectually and emotionally.16

  Grove tapped into this youthful and impecunious audience over the next two decades, in the process making Waiting for Godot one of its bestselling paperbacks. Grove also helped to domesticate the notion of the “absurd,” which had begun as a pointedly pessimistic response on the part of European artists and intellectuals to the cataclysmic devastation of World War II but, spurred by the ubiquitous existentialism of John-Paul Sartre and the proliferating scholarship of American academics, developed in the 1960s into a more affirmative ethical orientation, with Beckett as its figurehead.

  Rosset realized early on that the collegestudent audience would be central to Godot’s success, and he convinced Dramatists Play Service to reduce the royalty rate for amateur productions: “We are in close contact with the potential audiences for the play and we know that they consist in the main of university students who may well not be able to afford more than a minimum royalty … The whole successful history of this play is the strongest evidence of the necessity for allowing it to be played before very small groups who may also have very limited means.”17 Grove aggressively marketed the paperback edition of the play to these “very small groups,” offering them on consignment to student productions and to every bookstore at any college or university where the play was being performed. And it was performed extensively across the country, as Henry Sommerville affirms: “Between 1956 and 1969, amateur performances of Waiting for Godot were given in every state except Arkansas and Alaska. On average, during each of these years, the play was performed by North American amateurs in thirty-three cities spread across 18 states and one Canadian province.”18

  The design of the Evergreen paperback of Waiting for Godot is clearly intended to match in austerity and simplicity the meager decor of its initial production in Paris, the cast and credits for which are listed following the text of the play. The cover photo, selected by Beckett himself, depicts in black and white the heavily backlit silhouettes of Vladimir and Estragon, their hands barely touching, strolling toward the spindly tree that stands to the right. The title and author’s name, all lowercase, run across the top in simple white type against a black background (Figure 11). Inside the book, ample use is made of white space to further emphasize the sparse environment in which the play’s characters find themselves. The title, now in all caps, is spread over the initial recto and verso pages, unevenly spaced both horizontally and vertically, as if the text itself were aimlessly wandering. On the verso page, all in lowercase italics, unjustified, are four lines—“tragicomedy in 2 acts by samuel beckett grove press new york”—resolutely if modestly linking publisher to author and text (Figure 12). On the next recto page the names of the cast are listed, centered vertically and horizontally. Across the top of the following recto page, unevenly spaced like the title, runs the announcement of “ACT I,” below which, left justified, we see the simple setting: “A country road. A tree. Evening.” In the text of the play that follows, only the verso pages are numbered sequentially in bold black type, as if it is the space across recto and verso, rather than the individual pages, that is being read through. The dialogue is left justified to the immediate right of the speech prefixes, expanding the amount of white space on the page, and foregrounding the alternation of speakers while simultaneously alienating them from their speech, which appears as an autonomous centered column (Beckett insisted on using the speakers’ full names, since “their repetition, even when corresponding speech amounts to no more than a syllable, has its function in the sense that it reinforces the repetitive text”).19 The back cover features an austere photo of Beckett, the left side of his face almost entirely in shadow, accompanied by laudatory reviews of the play and a brief blurb ranking him with Kafka and Joyce.

  While it anticipates the design Grove used for Beckett’s other plays, Waiting for Godot came out before Grove launched the Evergreen Originals imprint; the first Evergreen Original Beckett play was Endgame. The cover photo, from Roger Blin’s production, is an uncompromisingly bleak black-and-white shot of Hamm in his chair against a black background, the handkerchief over his face bleached to bright white with the bloodstains in the center vaguely coalescing into an expressionless skull-like face. The text of Endgame is far more compressed than that of Godot, with the italicized stage directions considerably smaller in point size than the dialogue, which wraps around the speech prefixes. The text, then, gives a sense of the claustrophobic interior in which the action of the play unfolds.

  Figure 11. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen paperback of Waiting for Godot (1954).

  Figure 12. Frontispiece for the Evergreen paperback of Waiting for Godot (1954).

  Grove complemented these efforts to re-create typographically a sense of the play’s setting and mood with a campaign to convince audiences that it was necessary to read it. Initially, Grove capitalized on the befuddlement of critics by claiming that reading the play could clarify its meaning, promoting it as “the play the critics didn’t understand” and encouraging audiences to “read it before you see it,” which became a tagline in the campaign for this and other plays.20

  Grove attributed both the difficulty of the play and the necessity of reading it to the poetic quality of Beckett’s dialogue. The back cover of Endgame features a lengthy blurb by Harold Hobson of the Sunday Times, emphasizing that “Mr. Beckett is a poet: and the business of the poet is not to clarify but to suggest; to employ words with auras of association, with a reaching out toward a vision, a probing down into an emotion, beyond the compass of explicit definition.” When Grove distributed Endgame through the Readers’ Subscription, the scholar Vivian Mercier used this designation of Beckett as poet in an essay included in the catalog, “How to Read Endgame.” The play was sold along with a recording of its performance, and Mercer urged readers to listen to it first, because “I want you to experience the play before you interpret it. Listen to what the play is before you start asking yourse
lf what it means; that is what the practiced reader always does with poetry, and Samuel Beckett remains a poet whatever he is writing.”21

  Many readers wanted help in becoming “practiced” and wrote to Grove in droves asking myriad questions about the larger significance of these plays. Beckett, of course, was notoriously reticent about the meaning of his work, so Grove responded to the queries with a boilerplate letter that suggested resources that would become central to interpreting the play. The letter began in this way: “Mr. Beckett prefers not to discuss his work. If you would like some help in understanding Mr. Beckett’s work, you might refer to any number of critical works that have appeared.”22 The letter also frequently noted that “Grove Press publishes a short book on Beckett, entitled samuel beckett, by Richard Coe, which sells for 95 cents.” Grove published Coe’s book in 1964, Hugh Kenner’s first book on Beckett in 1961, and Ruby Cohn’s Casebook on “Waiting for Godot” in 1967, along with a series of critical studies of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and others over the course of the decade.

  The academic industry that rapidly grew around Beckett’s work amply compensated for his silence, and Grove published many of the key critical texts that helped frame his significance for his American audience. This industry ensured that Beckett would early become a staple in college courses, not only in English but also in religious studies and philosophy departments. Grove marketed aggressively to this academic audience, going so far as to propose courses on Beckett and the theater of the absurd consisting entirely of Evergreen paperbacks. By this time, responsibility for the college catalog was in the hands of exunion organizer and Monthly Review contributor Jules Geller, who explained his plans to Donald Allen in October 1967: “Rather than plan the publishing of ‘textbooks’—an obscene form of book publishing as it’s commonly practiced—I am working on fitting our Evergreen and some Black Cat books in groups for certain courses, and promoting them in these groups as a more modern and more interesting way to teach a given subject. This is working out very well.”23