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  VILLAGE: If we are not what they think us, neither shall we avoid being invented, being evacuated, by their thoughts. What then are we?

  VIRTUE: Blacks, Clowns, Phantasms, of Jean Genet.

  VILLAGE: What exactly is Jean Genet? First of all, what’s his color?

  VIRTUE: White.

  VILLAGE: What color is that?

  VIRTUE: Pink, orange, yellow, black. Black as the ace. Black as sin. Black as diamonds. Black as the black semen of hatred. Black as genius. Black as the black chambers of masterpiece.50

  Tallmer’s review begins by inverting Genet’s comment, routing the opening question back through the playwright and seemingly anticipating the color dynamic of the Evergreen paperback that incorporated photos from the New York production. Tallmer uses the same formal mimicry to comment on the identity of the actors:

  VILLAGE: Do you speak as a white?

  VIRTUE: As a Negro and a performer. Is not each of us—are not you—a Negro and a performer?

  VILLAGE: I am Deodatus Village, rapist of the unraped, murderer of the unslain. I am a performer. Deodatus James Earl Jones Village.

  VIRTUE: A Negro?

  VILLAGE: A young American Negro. My name is Jones.51

  Tallmer’s dialogic response to The Blacks comments more cogently than Mailer’s or Hansberry’s on the complex racial and rhetorical dynamics of the cast’s position in the New York production. And Tallmer concludes by claiming that such dialogue is only the beginning of a new rhetoric of revolution: “In the new swamps, the new colonialism. Slaves, criminals, Negroes, put on your masks; clowns, take your places. What does not yet exist must now be invented. It begins; it is only the beginning.”52 While Mailer and Hansberry’s exchange looks back to the context of the 1950s and the beginnings of the civil rights movement, Tallmer’s appropriation of Genet looks forward to the alliance in the later 1960s between the New African Nations and the Black Power movement, an alliance in which both Genet and Grove Press played a role.

  The early and sustained prominence of Beckett, Ionesco, and Genet in Grove’s list of contemporary dramatists attests both to the persistent power of Paris as a cultural capital in the immediate postwar era and to the quality of the literary connections Rosset and company had there. After Paris, the most significant European capital of dramatic innovation was undoubtedly London, and Grove also established an impressive list of playwrights from the United Kingdom, including Brendan Behan, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn, Joe Orton, and Tom Stoppard. The most successful and influential of this list was certainly Harold Pinter, whose collected works Grove began issuing under their massmarket Black Cat imprint in the 1970s. As the introduction to the first volume of the Complete Works of Harold Pinter, Grove chose “Writing for the Theatre,” the transcript of a speech Pinter gave at the National Student Drama Festival in Bristol in 1962, which was reprinted in the Evergreen Review in 1964. Commenting on the contrasting critical responses to his first two major plays, Pinter dryly and dismissively opens: “In The Birthday Party I employed a certain amount of dashes in the text, between phrases. In The Caretaker I cut out the dashes and used dots instead … So it’s possible to deduce from this that dots are more popular than dashes and that’s why The Caretaker had a longer run than The Birthday Party.”53 Pinter’s comment is intended as a dig at his critics, who “can tell a dot from a dash a mile off, even if they can hear neither,”54 but his wry dismissal of the relation between punctuation and performance can’t help having a rhetorical boomerang effect in retrospect, given the importance of pauses in his plays. As Worthen affirms, “In the first decade of Pinter’s real celebrity, the material idiosyncrasies of Pinter’s printed text drove the understanding of Pinter’s dramatic writing,” and no idiosyncrasy was more prominent than Pinter’s famous pauses that, as Worthen further elaborates, tend to assimilate the plays into a temporality associated with “certain kinds of reading.”55

  For Worthen, Pinter’s pauses function within a larger literary temporality that is explicitly poetic since, as Martin Esslin affirms, Pinter “is a poet and his theatre is essentially a poetic theatre.”56 For both Worthen and Esslin, Pinter’s poetics are those of the modernist lyric, precise and pregnant with hidden meanings that can become legible through close critical attention to their arrangement on the page, and usually with the help of a critic who can explain, as Esslin notes in the preface to his book-length study of the dramatist, “much that is puzzling, obscure, and evokes a desire for elucidation.”57 This correlation between Pinter’s plays and modernist poetics receives further affirmation from his self-fashioning as an author. As he continues in his speech, “The theatre is a large, energetic, public activity. Writing is, for me, a completely private activity, a poem or a play, no difference … What I write has no obligation to anything other than to itself.”58 Given such dedication to the autonomy of the writer, it is not surprising that Varun Begley has recently suggested that Pinter supplant Beckett as “the last modernist.”59

  The antinomy between private writing and public performance is folded into the setting and substance of most of Pinter’s early plays, almost all of which take place in the sorts of constrained domestic spaces where reading and writing frequently occur. Indeed, as Begley affirms in his interpretation of the significance of the newspaper in Pinter’s work, everyday reading, as opposed to “poetic” reading, is frequently thematized as a component of the action in his plays. Both The Birthday Party and The Room, published together as an Evergreen Original in 1961, open with a principal male character reading, only partially attending to the dialogue of the principal female character. Significantly, then, the opening pauses in these plays indicate a man reading while his wife speaks. The Birthday Party begins with the following lines between Meg and her husband, Petey, who is sitting at the kitchen table reading a newspaper:

  MEG: Is that you, Petey?

  Pause.

  Petey, is that you?

  Pause.

  Petey?60

  The Room opens with an almost identical scene between the couple Rose and Bert, in which Rose addresses a long monologue to Bert as he sits silently reading a magazine. In this scene, instead of simply indicating pauses, Pinter inserts extensive stage directions detailing Rose’s actions as she prepares Bert’s meal. This scene was chosen as the cover photo for the Evergreen Original. It is a low-angle, black-and-white close-up of Bert sitting at the table with Rose, her face partly in shadow, leaning over him; between the two of them is propped the magazine with the title The Last of the Mohicans, presumably serialized, just showing over the edge of the table that juts into the foreground of the shot. Above their heads the background is entirely black (Figure 15).

  As the design of this edition indicates, Grove chose to introduce Pinter’s peculiar sensibilities—what quickly became known as the “Pinteresque”—through a dialogue between typographic and photographic representation. Since most of Pinter’s early plays take place in domestic interiors, they are particularly conducive to the photographic frame, whose rectangular shape conveniently mirrors the geometry of the room. In The Birthday Party & The Room a sequence of photos follows the text of each play, replicating in condensed visual stills the action the reader has just followed in print. Frequently these photographs represent silences in the text; the first photo from The Room is a frontal shot of Bert sitting at the table, the magazine propped in front of him, as Rose pours him a cup of tea (Figure 16). The third photo depicts a subtle alteration of the action described in the printed text. It shows Rose, alone, in the process of concealing the magazine in her shawl (Figure 17). Based on its order in the sequence, one can deduce that this photo represents her solitary actions between Bert’s departure and the arrival of Mr. and Mrs. Sands, which Pinter describes at some length:

  He fixes his muffler, goes to the door and exits. She stands, watching the door, then turns slowly to the table, picks up the magazine, and puts it down. She stands and listens, goes to the fire and warms her hands. She stands and looks ab
out the room. She looks at the window and listens, goes quickly to the window, stops and straightens the curtain. She comes to the centre of the room, and looks towards the door. She goes to the bed, puts on a shawl, goes to the sink, takes a bin from under the sink, goes to the door and opens it.61

  If The Room, in its pure reduction to a single interior space, epitomizes Pinter’s settings, the surreptitious transit of a serialized American novel across the photographic reproductions of this space reveals how Grove worked to replicate its complexities in textual form. Pinter’s printed dialogue tends to hover over or penetrate into silences that indicate modes of everyday reading that significantly contrast with the type of attention solicited by the dialogue. The selection of photographs for this text foregrounds this dynamic, ensuring that Pinter’s pauses will be pregnant with the practice of reading in mind, a practice that, increasingly, was inculcated in the college classroom.

  Figure 15. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen Original edition of

  The Birthday Party & The Room (1961).

  Figure 16. Vivian Merchant and Michael Brennan in Harold Pinter’s The Room (1960). (Royal Court Theatre, London; photograph by John Cowan)

  Figure 17. Vivian Merchant in Harold Pinter’s The Room (1960). (Royal Court Theatre, London; photograph by John Cowan)

  …

  Grove’s resolutely international list of dramatists was weighted toward the European, but it did not neglect contemporary American drama, particularly with the now-legendary Living Theatre only a few blocks away. Grove published one of its first real successes, Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1960), a plotless play-within-a-play that centers on a group of addicts in an apartment as they wait for the dealer to arrive. As Kenneth Tynan notes in his introduction, “Its theme is akin to that of Waiting for Godot” but with a higher level of explicit self-reflexivity about its status as a performance.62 The cast includes a producer, director, and author, as well as two photographers who move in and out of the audience. It also includes periodic performances by jazz musicians.

  Grove made ample use of photographs in its print edition. Kuhlman’s controversial cover features a close-up of the character Leach leaning over a table shooting up, with smoke curling in the background (Figure 18). Photos are generously distributed throughout the text, some across both recto and verso pages, many including the photographers and musicians (Figures 19 and 20). The photos function analogously to the musical interludes in the performance (recordings of which were available through Blue Note records), encouraging the reader to experience pauses in the lackadaisical action. Most of the photos are dark and grainy; many of them prominently feature the stage lighting. Thus, they create a paradoxical combination of verisimilitude and self-reflexivity. On the one hand, the front cover is startlingly realistic, and the murkiness of the photos in the text reinforces the underground atmosphere of the action. On the other hand, the presence of photographers reminds the reader that this is a performance about a performance, the kind of metalevel theatrical experience that became a signature of the Living Theatre.

  Figure 18. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for The Connection (1960).

  Figure 19. Musicians in Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959). (Living Theatre, New York; photograph courtesy of John Wulp)

  Figure 20. Photographers in Jack Gelber’s The Connection (1959). (Living Theatre, New York; photograph courtesy of John Wulp)

  In the ensuing years, the Living Theatre performed The Connection across Europe, generating a cultural countercurrent to the stream of European avantgarde drama appearing in the United States in the postwar era. The Living Theatre itself was deeply influenced by the European avantgarde. Both Julian Beck and Judith Malina had been inspired by the theories of Antonin Artaud, and in the 1950s the struggling repertory company had staged work by absurdist forebears Alfred Jarry, August Strindberg, and Luigi Pirandello. They also staged a number of productions by another of Grove’s more important dramatic acquisitions, Bertolt Brecht, whose mentor, Erwin Piscator, had also been a strong influence on Malina.

  Unlike Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, Gelber, and the many other young and relatively unknown playwrights Grove published and whose careers it was therefore able to nurture from the beginning, Brecht was dead by the time Grove established itself as a publisher of contemporary drama, and he already had a towering reputation reaching back into the modernist era. Furthermore, the condition of his literary estate was a crazy quilt of textual variants and conflicting copyright claims. The key figure in Grove’s acquisition and marketing of Brecht was Eric Bentley, Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University and drama critic for the New Republic. As a translator, editor, and critic, Bentley, who had also been a personal friend of Brecht, introduced his work to the Englishspeaking world after the playwright’s death. Bentley first approached Rosset and Donald Allen in the mid-1950s, suggesting that they devote an issue of the Evergreen Review to Brecht. Allen thought that such an issue would have too narrow an appeal and instead suggested “a one volume selected Brecht, his own theory and some of the plays … the kind of one vol. that students would have to have, etc. Bentley would be a good editor.”63 Grove published the hefty Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht in 1961, and Bentley, in close coordination with Fred Jordan, continued on as the general editor of the never-completed Grove Press edition of the Works of Bertolt Brecht.

  The year 1961 was a turning point for Brecht’s career in English. In addition to the Grove publication of Seven Plays, the Tulane Drama Review devoted an entire issue to his work, including the first English translation of his essay “On the Experimental Theater.” Also in 1961, Anchor Books released a massmarket version of Martin Esslin’s Brecht: The Man and His Work. Grove issued its own Evergreen Pilot study of Brecht by Ronald Gray. Together, these publishing events laid the groundwork for the popular availability of English translations of Brecht’s work that Bentley envisioned for the Grove Press edition.

  Grove emphasized the scale and scope of Seven Plays in its ads, calling it “one giant volume of the lyrical, cynical, grim, comic plays of Bertolt Brecht.”64 Crucial to the design of this near six hundred–page tome was a selection of Brecht’s early work, before his conversion to Marxism. The inclusion of these plays allowed Bentley to frame Brecht as an absurdist forebear, in essence reverse-engineering his appeal. As the flyleaf affirms, the volume features “the great early plays in which critics have found the beginnings of that Theater of the Absurd which we associate with the names of Beckett and Ionesco.” This design also enabled Bentley to argue in the introduction that, despite Brecht’s political transformations and the collaborative nature of most of his work, his oeuvre has the unity and coherence necessary to place him in the ranks of his modernist contemporaries.

  Brecht’s plays, according to Bentley, are essentially poetic since, as he argues in his introduction, Brecht “remained the Poet as Playwright.”65 Esslin agreed that “Brecht was a poet, first and foremost.”66 For both Bentley and Esslin, Brecht’s poetic sensibility unites a corpus that would otherwise lack coherence, since Brecht resisted authoritative written versions of his plays and collaborated so extensively on their composition and production as to solicit sustained charges of plagiarism and exploitation. Nevertheless, Bentley insists, “In the Brecht theatre, though others made contributions, he himself laid the foundation in every department: he was the stage designer, the composer, and the director. The production as a whole, not just the words, was the poem. It was in essence, and often in detail, his poem.”67 Drama is collaborative; poetry is solitary. In order to establish Brecht as a modernist auteur, Bentley projects the latter onto the former. As we have already seen, this logic pervaded the positioning of Grove’s list of major playwrights; it allowed the dramatist to claim the autonomy of the poet and provided a reason to read the plays.

  Seven Plays—as well as the entire Grove Press edition of Brecht’s works—was itself a highly collaborative and complicated endeavor. In addition to Bentley
’s translations of In the Swamp, A Man’s a Man, Mother Courage, The Good Woman of Setzuan, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (with Maja Apelman), it includes Frank Jones’s translation of Saint Joan of the Stockyards and Charles Laughton’s version of Galileo. Each play has its own title page, detailing its copyright and permission status (only Galileo has a copyright in Brecht’s name). Bentley’s introduction, subtitled “Homage to B. B. by Eric Bentley,” based on his Christian Gauss seminar on Brecht from the previous spring, is characteristically scattered and feisty, in essence a series of polemical observations and interventions intended to jump-start “a real discussion of Brecht.”68 Bentley’s commentary on Brecht’s collaborative methods is as revealing about him as they are about his subject. Bentley notes: “It has not escaped attention that, following the title page of a Brecht play, there is a page headed: Mitarbeiter—Collaborators. It has only escaped attention that these names are in small type and do not appear on the title page of the book or, presumably, on the publisher’s royalty statements.”69 It is impossible not to notice that the title page of Seven Plays prominently features Bentley’s name but doesn’t mention the many translators and editors who assisted him in his task. These names appear in the acknowledgments, which conclude with the following lines: “Finally, I wish to thank Mr. Barney Rosset. There’s a lot of prattle in America about enterprise. Barney Rosset, so far as my personal acquaintance goes, is one of the few enterprising Americans.”70