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  The design and composition of both paperback editions deploy a series of paratextual conventions intended not only to legitimate the literary authenticity of the text but also to distinguish it from their more salacious rivals in the field, eschewing illustration entirely for descriptive and promotional blurbs (in an unpublished interview, Rosset called the cover “very carefully uninteresting”).38 Like the hardcover, Grove’s paperback edition included Schorer’s introduction and MacLeish’s preface (framed as a letter to Rosset), now further supplemented by Bryan’s decision. On the front cover, in red caps, is trumpeted “THIS IS THE GROVE PRESS EDITION, THE FIRST UNEXPURGATED VERSION EVER PUBLISHED IN AMERICA”; on the back cover it reiterates, again in red caps, “THIS AND ONLY THIS IS THE COMPLETE REPRINT OF THE FAMOUS GROVE PRESS $6.00 BEST SELLER.” As if any question could remain, the front cover also includes, in yellow print against a red circular background, “This and only this is the uncensored edition making today’s headlines!” (Figure 21).

  The Signet edition also announces tautologically that it is the “complete unexpurgated authentic authorized edition” and includes a statement on the back cover from Pollinger testifying, “This Signet Edition is the only complete unexpurgated version of LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER authorized by the estate of Frieda Lawrence for U.S. publication” (Figure 22). The Signet edition also included an afterword by Harry Moore, whose endorsement had originally appeared on Grove’s hardcover edition. Despite the competition from this and other paperback versions, the massmarket edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, distributed by Dell, became Grove’s first bestseller, with sales of almost 2 million copies by the end of 1960, and the legal battle provided a firm foundation for the reputation Grove continued to build over the course of the decade for challenging legal restrictions against freedom of expression.

  Figure 21. Front and back cover of Grove Press edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959).

  Figure 22. Front and back cover of Signet paperback edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959).

  Freedom to Read

  Rosset had not really liked Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but he thought that its exoneration would increase his chances of legally publishing Henry Miller, whose work he had admired since his undergraduate years. New Directions had published Miller’s less explicit writing, but Jay Laughlin was unwilling to publish the Tropics, which remained banned in the United States and Britain. Rosset was determined to bring them out, but Miller initially turned down his generous advance. As Rosset recounted to me, “I had tried to get Miller and totally failed. I’d gone to California, to Big Sur … and he said no … he said he couldn’t stand the idea. If I published it, it would be read by college students.” But Rosset persisted, and with the help of Girodias, whose father had originally published both Tropics, and Miller’s German publisher, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, he finally managed to get Miller to agree to publication in the United States in 1961, with a substantial advance of fifty thousand dollars. Unlike the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been fairly easy and inexpensive to defend with the one Post Office case, Tropic of Cancer was suppressed and litigated in numerous venues across the country, while simultaneously enjoying many months on bestseller lists in those same venues. Henry Miller became both a cause célèbre and a succès de scandale, and the strategies of both his accusers and defenders illustrate how the elite aesthetics of modernism collapsed into a popular politics of sexuality in the 1960s.

  Miller’s work had never been easy to categorize or evaluate. His biography, particularly his expatriation in the 1930s, tended to align him, albeit somewhat belatedly, with the modernist Lost Generation, but his unseemly and unwavering focus on this biography tended to violate the evaluative protocols critics used to canonize the work of that generation. Edmund Wilson, reviewing the then unavailable Tropic of Cancer for the New Republic in 1938, called it “an epitaph for the whole generation of American artists and writers that migrated to Paris after the war” and “the lowest book of any literary merit that I ever remember to have read.”39 In both his bohemian lifestyle and his literary experimentation Miller seemed to fit, if somewhat awkwardly, into the Lost Generation category. As one biographer describes, his aspiration was to be “a working-class Proust, a Brooklyn Proust.”40

  However, as Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv affirmed, “With few exceptions the highbrow critics, bred almost to a man in Eliot’s school of strict impersonal aesthetics, are bent on snubbing him.”41 According to Rahv, Miller is incapable of this strict impersonality: “So riled is his ego by external reality, so confused and helpless, that he can no longer afford the continual sacrifice of personality that the act of creation requires, he can no longer bear to express himself implicitly by means of the work of art as a whole but must simultaneously permeate and absorb each of its separate parts and details.”42 In other words, Miller can’t afford, both literally and figuratively, to practice Eliot’s “impersonal” act of creation, even though his own aesthetic is clearly a dialectical response to that act, with whose Proustian protocols Miller was deeply familiar. Miller’s gargantuan personality, his maddening mix of garrulous charm and aggravating arrogance, emerges in ambivalent resistance to the figure of the modernist genius he can’t quite be.

  Miller was not only too personal to be considered high modernist; he was also too popular, despite the difficulty in obtaining his work. As Kenneth Rexroth, writing on the eve of Miller’s American apotheosis, proclaimed, “Henry Miller is really a popular writer, a writer of and for real people, who, in other countries, is read, not just by highbrows, or just by the wider public which reads novels, but by common people, by the people who, in the United States, read comic books.”43 Much of Miller’s initial popularity was enabled not by the scattering of critical accolades but by the widespread smuggling of his banned books into the United States by GIs returning from World War II. In sum, Miller posed a problem for midcentury arbiters of literary taste.

  Nevertheless, Rosset armed himself with an enormous battery of critical endorsements, since he knew from his experience with Lady Chatterley’s Lover that they could prove that a text had redeeming social value. He solicited written comments from an impressive roster of critics, writers, and publishers, including Jacques Barzun, Marianne Moore, Lawrence Durrell, Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Vladimir Nabokov, Alfred Kazin, and Malcolm Cowley. Rosset was wise to prepare, as he was almost immediately engulfed in a firestorm of controversy involving more than thirty court cases and more than fifty instances of extrajudicial suppression across the country. Since he had agreed to indemnify booksellers against any fines or court costs and to handle all legal cases arising from the sale of Miller’s book, Rosset found himself battling for the financial survival of Grove Press.

  Grove’s challenge is neatly summed up in the epigraph to Miller’s Black Spring, the lesser-known second volume in the trilogy that begins with Tropic of Cancer and ends with Tropic of Capricorn: “What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.”44 This dig at the very modernism with which Miller simultaneously endeavored to associate himself received an inverse ironic commentary in the trials of Tropic of Cancer, as experts in literature attempted to prove they had the street credentials to evaluate the book. The first trial, somewhat inevitably, was in Boston, for which Rosset rehired Ephraim London, who assembled an illustrious cast of experienced expert witnesses, including Mark Schorer, Harry Moore, and Harry Levin. However, the judge was not impressed by the credentials of these scholars, interrupting Schorer’s testimony with the quip that “all that was necessary in this case was to offer the book in evidence and then leave it to me, who knows everything about how the ordinary man feels and what his reaction would be.”45

  Assistant Attorney General Leo Sontag agreed and attempted to establish that Schorer and the other witnesses for the defense were not in touch with the American public and therefore could not be expected to represent the book�
�s effects on an ordinary reader. Sontag proclaimed, “It’s said that a rarified atmosphere exists on the campus at the University of California at Berkeley.” The judge then required clarification: “Do you feel he is in an ‘Ivory Tower’ and therefore has no contact with ordinary human beings?” Sontag affirmed, “That is correct, your honor. The Professor is on a shelf by himself with others.” Schorer then quipped, “I’d like to tell you sometime the non-‘Ivory Tower’ aspects of my life.” London attempted to come to the rescue by reminding the court that “the judge’s life is, if anything, more of an ‘Ivory Tower’ existence than that of a college professor.” And the judge crankily responded, “We are on the street just the same as and as much as any ordinary being.”46

  Who’s in the Ivory Tower and who’s on the street, and from which position is it most legitimate to judge a book like Tropic of Cancer? The courtroom would have to wait for Harry Levin’s testimony for an ironic resolution, although this was not fully recognized in the trial itself. London introduced him with the claim that “Professor Levin’s qualifications are so many that I would like to save a great deal of time by merely reading a few of them in the record and having the professor acknowledge that these are his accomplishments.”47 The judge was unimpressed until London concluded that Levin was the Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. The judge and Levin then discovered that they both studied under Babbitt as undergraduates at Harvard. Although Judge Goldberg in the end disregarded the expert testimony and found the book obscene, this incidental exchange affirms the degree to which Rosset’s eventual triumph depended on the professional-class solidarity of the judges, academics, and publishers who participated in these trials, a solidarity that, somewhat ironically, could not fully include the author over whom they were struggling.

  The Boston trial was handled in rem, meaning that the case was against the book itself. In the Chicago trial, handled by Elmer Gertz, the demographic alignments of the adversaries were far clearer. Tropic of Cancer was being illegally suppressed and confiscated across suburban Illinois, and the case pitted Grove against an array of small-town police departments, including Arlington Heights, Skokie, Glencoe, Lincolnwood, Morton Grove, Niles, Des Plaines, Mount Prospect, Winnetka, and Evanston. Rosset grew up in Chicago, where his father had been president of the Metropolitan Trust Company. Gertz surely must have felt reassured when Judge Samuel Epstein opened the proceedings with the claim, “I doubt if any lawyer, who is old enough, hasn’t had some sort of business relationship with Barney Rosset.”48 During the course of this widely publicized trial, Gertz also established an ongoing epistolary relationship with Miller himself, who was finally becoming wealthy as Tropic of Cancer rocketed up the bestseller lists. As Gertz advised Miller on various tax-evasion schemes, Miller sent him rare and signed editions of his books. A number of socioeconomic allegiances and alliances, then, contributed to Grove’s success in this landmark case, which Rosset saw as a “peak moment” in his career.49

  Judge Epstein’s ruling, which affirmed that “as a corollary to the freedom of speech and the press, there is also a freedom to read,” became the basis of a nationwide campaign.50 Rosset printed and circulated thousands of copies of the decision and published a “Statement in Support of the Freedom to Read” on the front cover of the July–August 1962 issue of the Evergreen Review, which also included Chicago Sun-Times book reviewer Hoke Norris’s account of the Chicago trial. The statement, which runs over from the front cover onto the flyleaf (Figure 23), is followed by a long alphabetical list of signatories, including James Baldwin, Ian Ballantine, Saul Bellow, Louise Bogan, Richard Ellmann, Arnold Gingrich, Hugh Hefner, Jack Kerouac, Carson McCullers, Marianne Moore, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. The statement shifts the terms of defense from elite endorsement to democratic access, affirming that “the issue is not whether Tropic of Cancer is a masterpiece of American literature” but rather “the right of a free people to decide for itself what it may or may not read.”51

  Figure 23. Irving Cowman’s cover for Evergreen Review issued after Grove successfully defended its right to publish Tropic of Cancer (1962).

  Grove was unable to appeal either Attorney General v. Tropic of Cancer or Franklyn Haiman v. Robert Morris et al. to the Supreme Court; thus, while Miller’s book remained a bestseller across the country in 1963, it was also unavailable in many locations, and Grove’s coffers continued to be drained by litigation. Yet another of Grove’s lawyers, Edward de Grazia, decided to appeal the Florida case of Grove Press v. Gerstein, which had been decided against Tropic, using the argument that the court had not yet determined “whether the Constitutional guarantees of free expression are not violated by the application of local, rather than national, ‘contemporary community standards’ to the question of whether a literary work may be suppressed as ‘obscene.’” Further on in his petition, De Grazia clarified that the issue of national standards concerns both “free artistic expression and freedom to read,” revealing his desire to incorporate Epstein’s formulation into the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment.52

  On June 22, 1964, the Supreme Court overturned the Gerstein decision and, in the attached case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, affirmed that “the constitutional status of an allegedly obscene work must be determined on the basis of a national standard. It is, after all, a national Constitution we are expounding.”53 It had been three years almost to the day since Grove had first issued Tropic of Cancer, and over that brief period Rosset had not only revolutionized the publishing industry but had also mobilized a cadre of publishers, academics, and artists in a successful effort to transform the cultural field itself by incorporating the literary underground into the mainstream.

  Although the copyright to Tropic of Cancer was, as Rosset testified in the Chicago trial, “clouded,” and Grove had rushed out a Black Cat paperback version in late 1961 to compete with anticipated pirated editions, the version that rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists in the early 1960s, with a copyright granted to Grove Press, has remained remarkably stable across time, and Miller’s books, enormously popular and critically acclaimed throughout the 1960s, remain reliable titles on Grove’s backlist. Featuring a gushing introduction by Karl Shapiro celebrating Miller as “the greatest living author,” a laudatory preface by Anaïs Nin (rumored to have been penned by Miller himself) promising that his book “might restore our appetite for the fundamental realities,” and issued originally with a tastefully unadorned cover, Grove’s version of Tropic of Cancer made it into the margins of the modernist canon and onto reading lists at colleges and universities across the country, as Miller had dismissively told Rosset it would. Although Grove chose not to incorporate any trial transcripts or legal decisions into the text itself, it was able to further capitalize on the controversy a few years later when it published E. R. Hutchison’s study, Tropic of Cancer on Trial: A Case History of Censorship, which had started out as a dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

  The 1960s were Miller’s decade, as Grove was finally able to publish both the Tropics and his Proustian magnum opus, The Rosy Crucifixion. And they sold well; in June 1965, Miller occupied the top four positions on the New York Post’s bestseller list, and he remained on bestseller lists across the country for the remainder of the decade. Tropic of Cancer alone eventually sold more than 2.5 million copies in Grove’s massmarket edition. Furthermore, something of an academic industry emerged around his work, as professors and critics strove to legitimate and account for his popularity. One of the more influential of these, Ihab Hassan of Wesleyan University, in his 1967 study The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, proudly proclaims, “Henry Miller, who has survived both Faulkner and Hemingway, is finally honored in his country.”54 Hassan celebrates Miller as “the first author of anti-literature,” and he explains Miller’s use of obscenity in illuminating terms: “In his work, the physical body of men and women is anatomized only to be finally transcen
ded; obscenity is a voice of celebration. Obscenity is also a mode of purification, a way of cleansing human sensibilities from the sludge of dogma, the dross of hypocrisy.”55 Hassan’s section on Miller, “Prophecy and Obscenity,” renders Miller’s work in an apocalyptic frame, illustrating that, in the 1960s, the aesthetic transgressions of the avantgarde were increasingly understood in political terms. Indeed, Hassan opens his study, which significantly twins Miller and Beckett as “the two masters of the avantgarde today,” with the proclamation that “criticism may have to become apocalyptic before it can compel our sense of relevance.”56 As a member of the cultural wing of the newly expanded and diversified professional managerial classes, Hassan can be seen as a spokesman for the cadre of critics and writers that canonized the cultural coordinates of the New Left’s political agenda.

  The Last Master Piece

  As the litigation over Tropic of Cancer was proceeding across the country, thousands of copies of Naked Lunch were languishing in the Grove Press warehouse on Hudson Street. Though the perennially impecunious Girodias was pressuring him to distribute it, Rosset wanted to wait until the litigation over Miller died down. Anticipation over Naked Lunch in countercultural circles had been growing since the publication of portions in the Chicago Review in 1958 had earned the censure of the University of Chicago administration, prompting editor Irving Rosenthal to found the journal Big Table expressly to publish the offending excerpts. The Post Office impounded the first issue of Big Table, prompting a trial whose eventual success inspired Girodias to publish the novel in Paris. Rosset published excerpts in the Evergreen Review in 1961, and then, buoyed by Burroughs’s critical coronation at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference organized by John Calder in August 1962, Grove brought out its hardcover edition. In early 1963, a Boston bookseller was arrested for selling the book, and Rosset retained the services of Edward de Grazia to defend him. As with the earlier cases, they closely followed the precedents from Ulysses, soliciting an impressive panel of experts, including John Ciardi, Norman Mailer, and Allen Ginsberg, to substantiate that Burroughs’s book was a “modern classic.” Although the case was originally in personam against the bookseller, De Grazia had it changed to in rem against the book, ensuring that the expert testimony would focus on the text itself.