Rebel Publisher Page 11

  Cohn’s Casebook, which Grove recommended along with Coe’s monograph, Alec Reid’s All I Can Manage, More Than I Could: An Approach to the Plays of Samuel Beckett (1969), and Michael Robinson’s The Long Sonata of the Dead: A Study of Samuel Beckett (1969) for a course entitled “The Vision of Samuel Beckett,” conveniently illustrates the process whereby the initial performance contexts of the play and its controversial reception were assimilated into the readerly practice of academic interpretation. Cohn’s introduction begins by affirming that “Waiting for Godot has been performed in little theaters and large theaters, by amateurs and professionals, on radio and television,” but she quickly shifts to the claim that “Waiting for Godot has sold nearly 50,000 copies in the original French, and nearly 350,000 in Beckett’s own English translation.” She warns that these numbers “help you to know the bestseller, the smash hit, but only the individual can know a classic which is a work that provides continuous growth for the individual,” grounding the value of the play in a resolutely literary and readerly register. She concludes her opening paragraph: “Paradoxically for our time, Waiting for Godot is a classic that sells well,” implicitly recognizing the Evergreen paperback as the embodiment of the play’s success.24 The structure of the anthology then replicates this trajectory, starting with the section “Impact,” which excerpts reviews and accounts of early performances, and concluding with “Interpretation,” which excerpts the type of academic analysis, much of it published by Grove Press, that crucially depends on the printed text. The course itself places Beckett in the company of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Sartre; in addition to Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and the trilogy, it includes Beckett’s early study of Proust, which had already become a common resource for academic interpretation of Beckett’s work. Grove’s course proposal, then, attests to its crucial role in enabling the initial development of the academic industry that quickly emerged around Beckett’s work and to the way this industry reciprocally helped Grove establish Waiting for Godot as required reading across the college curriculum.

  Waiting for Godot and Endgame also appear in Grove’s 1970 college catalog on the syllabus for a more eclectic course proposal called “The Absurd as Reality.” The other playwright included in this course is Eugène Ionesco, and Grove’s marketing of his plays provides additional insight into how Grove translated drama whose performance conventions were inimical to print into bestselling Evergreen Originals. Ionesco’s plays are much busier than Beckett’s, involving elaborate and frequently cluttered sets as well as bizarre costumes and makeup, so Grove couldn’t take the minimalist approach that worked with Beckett. Furthermore, unlike Beckett, Ionesco was generous with his opinions about his work specifically and contemporary drama more generally, so Grove had the opportunity to present the playwright’s views more directly to the American public.

  The strategy of marketing the printed text in conjunction with student performances was replicated with Ionesco, whose plays were also popular on college campuses. During initial negotiations with Gallimard in 1958, Rosset explained the success of this arrangement regarding Godot: “At this time, we have sold 30,000 copies of Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT and a good part of these sales came to us through amateur productions. A special group handles the amateur production rights to this play, and we cooperate with them in a mutually agreeable manner.”25 Some years later, Rosset had to clarify to Gallimard himself the nature of the paperback Evergreen Originals that were sold in this manner: “It is not really equivalent to a ‘livre de poche,’ since it is a full-sized book, selling for approximately $1.95. We have found that the major market for the Ionesco works is in the academic fields, and most of the books are purchased by professors and students.”26

  The first Ionesco Evergreen Original was Four Plays (1958), whose design and format significantly contrast with those of Waiting for Godot. The very inclusion of four plays in one volume—The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, Jack, or The Submission, and The Chairs—both mitigates against the idea of a singular masterpiece and contributes to the sense of clutter between the covers. Instead of a photograph from a production—the conventional design for playscript covers—Grove used one of Kuhlman’s typographic designs, featuring simply a large, black number “4” against an orange background, with a thin strip of white along the left border in which appear the titles of the individual plays in orange. The white background of the border extends into the orange background of the number “4” in horizontal bars of uneven length and dimension, reinforcing the sense of busyness and blurred boundaries (Figure 13). The text itself includes no blank pages and minimal white space. The dialogue wraps around into the speech prefixes, further filling the space of each page. The four plays in this volume complement this sense of clutter, featuring proliferations of prattle and props. Starting with Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano, famously inspired by an Englishlanguage primer, and ending with The Chairs, whose elaborate set becomes increasingly congested, the text of Four Plays feels chaotic and confusing.

  Figure 13. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the first Ionesco Evergreen Original, Four Plays (1958).

  Richard Coe, in his study of the playwright, argues that Ionesco “raised language from the status of a secondary medium to the dignity of an object-initself,”27 and this objectification is immediately evident in The Bald Soprano, which consists entirely of banal clichés without reference to plot, story, or character. This play in particular seemed to call for innovative book design, and in 1965 the French graphic artist Robert Massin, working with photographs of the revival performance directed by Henry Cohen, produced a radically experimental text of the play that Grove reissued in the United States. As the promotional flyer affirms, the book was meant to re-create graphically the experience of the play’s performance: “Like Ionesco’s play itself, it manages to break every rule of conformist book design with a tour de force of explosive image and symbol. All criteria of margin allowance, type combination, spacing and legibility are violated. Yet it brings the action of the play into electrifying life as though each spread were a frame from a flickering silent film arrested momentarily in startling black and white.”28 Grove tried to market this deluxe edition as a gift book in 1966, trumpeting in the press release: “NEW EDITION OF IONESCO’S PLAY THE BALD SOPRANO USES PHOTOS AND TYPE IN A UNIQUE WAY TO CONVEY ON PAPER THE QUALITY OF A LIVE PERFORMANCE,”29 but, as Fred Jordan wrote to Marshall McLuhan in 1967, “For some reason I am not fully able to understand, sales on the book have been disappointing.”30

  An elaborately illustrated oversized hardcover, the Massin edition of The Bald Soprano is a remarkable work of art, but its commercial failure affirms the success of the more modest and affordable design of the Evergreen Original, which had no real equivalent in the Parisian book market. Neither a livre de poche nor an objet d’art, the Evergreen Originals format fused economic affordability and aesthetic quality without being seen as middlebrow. Although the design of these inexpensive paperbacks was meant to give a sense of performance conventions, this correlation could not, as with the Massin edition, compromise their affordability, which was crucial to the democratic ideology of their marketing. Thus, Grove promoted Four Plays in the same way as Beckett’s work, arguing that the printed text provided the opportunity for readers to determine the plays’ significance for themselves. The ad in the Times asked readers, “Are Eugene Ionesco’s plays ‘pretentious fakery’ or ‘amusing and provocative’? Make up your mind—read 4 Plays by Eugene Ionesco.”31 Although he didn’t sell as well as Beckett, Ionesco nevertheless became a reliable author for Grove: Four Plays sold more than ten thousand copies per year throughout the 1960s.

  Grove also used Ionesco’s own pronouncements about the freedom of the artist to bolster its campaign. Ionesco wrote extensively about the theater, and Grove’s publication of his Notes and Counternotes in 1964 played an important role in framing his reception in the United States. In the preface, Ionesco apologizes for the repetitiveness of the collection, explaining,
“I have been fighting chiefly to safeguard my freedom to think, my freedom as a writer.”32 And he extends this freedom to his audience, proclaiming in his ambivalent response to the success of Rhinoceros in the United States: “A playwright poses problems. People should think about them, when they are quiet and alone, and try to resolve them for themselves, without constraint.”33 Ionesco presents a complementarity between the collective and chaotic confusion of seeing the play and the solitary and quiet contemplation afterward, clearly an ideal context in which to read the Evergreen Original.

  Within the literary field of the United States the theater of the absurd generated a mandate not only to read the plays before or after or instead of seeing them but also to read an expanding canon of commentary intended to frame the meanings of these difficult texts. No Grove Press playwright carried a heavier paratextual burden than Jean Genet, whose reception in both France and America was guided, if not determined, by Jean-Paul Sartre’s gargantuan study Saint Genet, ensuring that Genet’s work would initially be understood in terms of the reigning philosophy of existentialism, which formed a kind of interpretive frame around the entire theater of the absurd. Furthermore, Sartre’s opus was written before Genet turned to theater; thus, its focus on his poetry and prose, on his becoming a writer, ballasted his literary credentials and bolstered the common interpretation that he was a poet who had turned to the theater.

  Rosset was introduced to Genet’s work by Bernard Frechtman, who, according to his partner at the time, Annette Michelson, “invented Genet for the Englishspeaking world.”34 Frechtman wanted Grove to begin with The Thief’s Journal, which he called “one of the profoundest books of this century,”35 but Rosset, after seeking legal advice, wrote back that “the Genet book would absolutely be banned and criminal proceedings invoked, and they would probably be successfully invoked to the extent of a jail sentence.”36 In the early 1950s, publishing Genet’s prose unexpurgated would have been foolhardy even for Rosset, so he wisely decided to start with the plays, effectively inverting Genet’s reception in France. After some wrangling, Frechtman accepted this decision.

  The Maids, with an introduction by Sartre and a copyright in Frechtman’s name, was issued as an Evergreen paperback in 1954. Sartre’s introduction, originally an appendix to Saint Genet, reads the play in terms of the thematic concerns of the novels that form the literary focus of the second half of his monumental study, establishing them as crucial for understanding the play and laying the groundwork for their eventual publication by Grove in the 1960s after the legal triumph with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Sartre understands the play in classically existentialist terms, arguing that “the maids are relative to everything and everyone; their being is defined by absolute relativity. They are others. Domestics are pure emanations of their masters and, like criminals, belong to the order of the Other, to the order of Evil.”37 Sartre’s philosophical terminology became crucial not only to framing Genet’s reception in the United States but also to understanding the broader historical and political developments with which his work was increasingly associated.

  As were those of Beckett and Ionesco, Genet’s plays were popular on college campuses, and Grove replicated the practice of encouraging theater departments to sell the paperback in conjunction with their performances. In the late 1950s, both Harvard and Yale put on productions of Deathwatch, and Wellesley did a production of The Maids. Grove prepared a boilerplate letter that opened in this way: “We were wondering if you would be interested in selling copies of our $1.45 edition of THE MAIDS and DEATHWATCH, in the theatre on the evenings of your performance. This has been very successfully done by other groups which have produced the play.”38 Another version elaborates: “Often people are interested in reading a play right after seeing it.”39

  The characters and settings in these first plays—maids, prisoners, and, in The Balcony, a brothel—were at best ancillary to the sensibilities of most Americans who saw or read them. Not until the publication of The Blacks in 1960, followed by its triumphant and controversial three-year run at the St. Mark’s Playhouse starting in 1961, did Genet become thoroughly assimilated into the American cultural and political scene. In his introduction to The Maids, Sartre had noted that mistresses create maids in the same fashion that “Southerners create Negroes”;40 the publication and performance of The Blacks provided the opportunity for Americans, both black and white, to contemplate this claim and, in a larger sense, to gauge the relevance of Sartre’s philosophical premises for their own most immediate social and political concerns.

  The Blacks appeared on the American scene well before civil rights had given way to Black Power, before the term “Negro” had ceded its prominence to “black” in the volatile vocabulary of race relations in the United States. Rosset had originally intended to entitle it “The Negroes,” as he emphasized to Frechtman in late 1959: “We’ve had a great deal of discussion about the title and feel that it absolutely must stay as THE NEGROES. We do not feel that THE BLACKS has as much bite nor is as acceptable.”41 Frechtman was adamant in his refusal: “The title must be THE BLACKS. THE NEGROES is absolutely out of the question … Negroes is a purely neutral and even scientific term. It could be used in the title of an anthropological or sociological work.”42 Eventually Richard Seaver communicated Grove’s concession: “We give in. Reluctantly and contre coeur … THE BLACKS here has a rather ugly connotation rather than the bite you mention.”43 In the end, the publication and performance of The Blacks in the United States arguably contributed to the terminological shift from the purportedly neutral term “Negro” to the more aesthetically and politically loaded “black.”

  More than any other play Grove published, The Blacks was inextricably yoked to a specific American performance, photos from which were generously distributed throughout the paperback reissue of the play, which sold more than eighty thousand copies over the course of the 1960s. The cover photo features Roscoe Lee Browne in the role of Master of Ceremonies Archibald Absalom Wellington, his hand raised as if conducting a symphony. Above him looms the “Court,” five black actors in garish outfits and grotesque white masks. In contrast to the stark black and white of the cover photo, the title across the top features three colors: “The Blacks” in black; “a clown show” in orange; and “by Jean Genet” in purple, as if implying that the aesthetic form of the play is in tension with its philosophical premises (Figure 14). There are no blank pages in the text, nor is there any paratextual material besides Genet’s provocative instruction that the play “is intended for a white audience.” In addition to Browne, the original New York cast featured James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, and Maya Angelou Make; the interspersing of their photos throughout the text creates a fascinating tension between the generic anonymity of the masks that illustrate the play’s purportedly existential philosophy of race relations and the idiosyncratic specificity of the faces that soon became highly recognizable in the American media, partly as a result of the publicity around this play.

  Print and performance are deeply interdependent in The Blacks, both within the plot—which persistently foregrounds its scriptedness—and in the critical controversies around it, in which the disputants seem scripted into roles determined by their race. The play itself, of course, comments on this interconnection between race, writing, and role playing, since its central conceit is a performance by blacks of white fantasies about blackness. Thus, early in the play Archibald admonishes the character of Village (played by James Earl Jones): “You’re to obey me. And the text we’ve prepared.”44 One of the early photos features Village’s ambiguous declaration of hate to Virtue (played by Cicely Tyson), during which Archibald makes the conducting motions depicted on the cover, “as if he were directing Village’s recital,” according to Genet’s footnote.45 The subtle transit between the footnote and the cover photo, between Genet the playwright and Browne the actor as Master of Ceremonies, generates a tension between actors and script that illuminates the terms in which
the play was discussed at the time.

  Figure 14. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for The Blacks (1960).

  This tension was the central subject of Norman Mailer’s review of The Blacks, spread over two issues of the Village Voice in May 1961 and then reprinted in The Presidential Papers in 1964. Revisiting the racial essentialism of “The White Negro,” Mailer asserts that the actors are members of the “Black Bourgeoisie” who “cannot know because they have not seen themselves from outside (as we have seen them), that there is a genius in their race—it is possible that Africa is closer to the root of whatever life is left than any other land.”46 Further elaborating that “the Negro tends to be superior to the White as an entertainer, and inferior as an actor,” Mailer concludes that the cast was too inhibited and selfconscious to fully inhabit Genet’s incendiary dialogue. In the next issue of the paper Lorraine Hansberry offered both Mailer and Genet as examples of “the New Paternalism” and reminded Voice readers that The Blacks must be understood as “a conversation between white men about themselves.”47 Furthermore, she vociferously defended both the actors and the acting, proclaiming that she knew most of them to be “part-time hack drivers, janitors, chorus girls, domestics” and that she found “the acting, almost without exception, brilliant.”48

  In its selfconscious reprise of the dispute between Mailer and Baldwin over “The White Negro,” the disagreement between Mailer and Hansberry feels scripted, as if both were playing roles of which they were becoming weary, preventing either of them from fully engaging the challenges of Genet’s play. It is thus informative to contrast their conventional exchange with Jerry Tallmer’s review of The Blacks, which appeared alongside Mailer’s. Tallmer, cofounder of the Voice and contributing editor to the Evergreen Review, chose to review the play in the form of a dramatic dialogue between Village and Virtue, allowing him to comment more immanently on the complex rhetorical structures of Genet’s text. Significantly, Tallmer opens by appropriating Genet’s prefatory comment, which was not included in the showbill for the play and therefore would be familiar only to those who had read it: “One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what’s his color?”49 Then Tallmer begins: