Rebel Publisher Read online

  As was not the case for Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, it proved challenging to find experts who could establish an authoritative version or interpretation of Naked Lunch. The prosecuting attorney, William Cowin, understandably doubted that it had a structure as coherent and intentional as that of Ulysses. Thus, he asked the first expert witness, John Ciardi, “When he put these notes or writings, however you would refer to the book, together, do you feel that he knew what he was doing; that he was conscious that he was actually writing this book called NAKED LUNCH?”57 After all, the first Grove edition begins with “Deposition: Testimony concerning a Sickness,” in which Burroughs claims, “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch.”58 As one early critic affirmed, the challenge of the defense in this trial was to “prove to the court’s satisfaction that Naked Lunch is a book.”59

  As in the cases of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer, Grove solicited a revealing combination of literary and sociological experts for the trial of Naked Lunch. In addition to Ciardi, Mailer, and Ginsberg, De Grazia retained Paul Hollander, a newly hired assistant professor of sociology at Harvard specializing in deviance and delinquency. Hollander claimed to be the first professor to offer a sociology of literature course at Harvard. Thus, his defense of Naked Lunch was based on sociological rather than aesthetic value: “From the point of view of the sociology of literature specifically, I think the book has merit because it presents a social type or a segment of society or subculture … So, in so far as the sociology of literature seeks to understand society via or through novels, this book is informative.” He then goes on to clarify: “The world he presents is an underworld, a subculture alienated from and contemptuous of the norms, values and standards of society at large. People who belong to this underworld consciously or unconsciously, deliberately and spontaneously, are engaged in flaunting these standards and norms.”60 Hollander’s contention that literature that accurately reflects subcultural and countercultural experience has a sociological value independent of its literary merit became central to Grove’s legitimation of many of its books in the later 1960s.

  In the end, neither the aesthetic nor the sociological argument convinced the judge in the Boston trial, who found the text obscene, claiming that “the author first collected the foulest and vilest phrases describing unnatural sexual experiences and tossed them indiscriminately” into the book.61 His ruling was overturned upon appeal, but only because the US Supreme Court had, in the intervening months, clarified that a text could be suppressed only if it was “utterly without redeeming social value.” The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was forced to concede that “it appears that a substantial and intelligent group in the community believes the book to be of some literary significance,” and therefore it could not be deemed obscene.62

  Rosset used these expert opinions, as well as the ultimate decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, to leverage sales of Naked Lunch, as he had done with Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer. In a 1962 letter to booksellers he compares Naked Lunch to “other famous modern classics of American and English literature—including James Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Henry Miller’s Tropics”—and then quotes a series of critics and authors justifying the comparison.63 Grove also published excerpts from the trial transcript in the June 1965 issue of Evergreen Review and included them, along with the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, as front matter in the Black Cat massmarket edition issued in 1966, by which time the hardcover had sold more than fifty thousand copies. By November 1966, the massmarket edition had reached number 1 on the New York Post’s bestseller list.

  The excerpts incorporated into this volume do not include the exchanges with the academic experts who testified at the trial. They focus instead on the testimony of Norman Mailer, who along with Mary McCarthy had been championing Burroughs ever since the Edinburgh Festival, and Allen Ginsberg, without whose editorial and promotional efforts Burroughs would probably never have been published. Mailer affirmed that Naked Lunch was “a deep work, a calculated work, a planned work” that drew him in “the way Ulysses did when I read that in college, as if there are mysteries to be uncovered when I read it.”64 And Grove recycled Mailer’s laudatory claim that Burroughs is “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius,” originally quoted on the back of the hardcover edition, for the front of the paperback.

  But Ginsberg’s testimony indicated the transformation that had been wrought in American literary culture in the few years since the case of Lady Chatterley. By now the author of “Howl,” which had been the first work of literature to be exonerated of charges of obscenity based upon the legal reasoning in Roth, was an international celebrity with credentials of his own, which he simply affirmed by noting, “I am a poet and have published.”65 The judge clearly thought that Ginsberg, in sandals and a three-piece suit, was the only person in the courtroom who might conceivably understand what Naked Lunch was about, and he plied him with questions about the political and sexual themes of the text, particularly as they are laid out in the section on the parties of Interzone. Ginsberg’s expertise as a poet, not a scholar, was ratified when De Grazia asked him, “Didn’t you once write a poem about Naked Lunch?” Ginsberg answered, “Yes, a long time ago.” De Grazia asked Ginsberg if he had the poem with him, and Ginsberg answered that he did and that it appears in “a book of my own that is called Reality Sandwiches.” The judge then asked where he might find the book, and Ginsberg answered, “Probably in Cambridge.” Ginsberg concluded his testimony by reading aloud “On Burroughs’ Work,” a poem he had composed well before much of Naked Lunch had even been written, affirming that both his testimony and his poetry had achieved enough cultural legitimacy for De Grazia to solicit it and for Grove to republish it as part of the proliferation of paratexts that continued to grow around this novel.66

  Mailer’s and Ginsberg’s presence as expert witnesses in the trial of Naked Lunch indicates the ascendancy of the generation that had been educated by the literary experts who had canonized modernism in the postwar American university. Mailer had studied with Robert Gorham Davis at Harvard; Ginsberg, with Lionel Trilling at Columbia. Both writers had modeled their iconoclasm on modernist innovators while simultaneously decrying their domestication by academic critics such as Davis and Trilling. Both men, in other words, wanted to translate the subversive energies of literary modernism into the political and sexual realm. The publication of Naked Lunch, a text that radically combined aesthetic innovation with sexual explicitness and political allegory, seemed to indicate the triumph of this vision.

  Toward a Vulgar Modernism

  Lawrence, Miller, and Burroughs all ended up on bestseller lists, and Grove’s net sales for 1964 came to more than $1.8 million; but due to the extensive costs of litigation, the company was still operating at a loss. Nevertheless, Rosset decided to expand and moved to larger quarters at 80 University Place. Rosset and Jordan also decided to change the format of the Evergreen Review from a quarterly quarto to a bimonthly, and then monthly, folio-size magazine with glossy (and frequently racy) covers and a wider diversity of advertisers, emphasizing book, record, tape, and poster clubs, as well as cars, cruises, clothes, and alcohol. According to Rosset, he and Jordan initiated the format change because they “felt that there ought to be a larger audience for what we were doing. We’d reached a plateau in circulation in the small size, about twenty thousand an issue, and nothing we did managed to break through that ceiling.” The quarto format was helpful initially because “we were able to confuse the bookstores as to what we were. We were treated both as a book and a magazine—we got the best of both worlds. But it kept us within a certain circle. You didn’t get into the world of big, real magazines.”67 By 1964, the colophon was well established in bookstores and college classrooms; it was time to move on to newsstands, to take it to the streets.

/>   In his announcement of the change to subscribers, Jordan notes that the magazine has been redesigned by Roy Kuhlman, “one of America’s best-known graphic artists,” and will feature “drawings, collages, and many beautiful photographs (in color as well) to add to its new visual excitement.” Indeed, Evergreen Review 32 featured a portfolio of erotic photographs by Emil Cadoo that solicited the censorious wrath of the Nassau County district attorney, garnering additional publicity for the launch of the new format (Figure 24). Jordan continues, “To inaugurate the new format, we have put together what is without a doubt the finest, most adventurous collection of modern writing to be found anywhere between the covers of a magazine.”68 This issue did contain an impressive roster of writers, most of whom were already closely associated with the magazine, including Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Michael McClure, Robert Musil, Jack Gelber, and Eugène Ionesco. It also featured a full-page ad for a new anthology edited by LeRoi Jones, The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America. Although not published by Grove, the collection features a significant number of its authors, including Jones, Kerouac, Burroughs, John Rechy (whose City of Night had rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists in the preceding year), and Hubert Selby (whose Last Exit to Brooklyn Grove had just released in hardcover). The ad copy announces that “the significance of the literary upheaval that has been taking place in the United States over the last decade is just beginning to be realized. A new young group of writers has been at work creating an American fiction that is completely separate from the fashionable literary world.”69 The magazine also features full-page ads for Yale University Press’s edition of Cleanth Brooks’s study of William Faulkner, for Grove’s own publication of Beckett’s How It Is, for Riverside Records’ LP of Bentley on Brecht, for Paul Goodman’s novel Making Do, and for the New York Review of Books, the Paris Review, and the Tulane Drama Review, featuring a special supplement on the Living Theatre. As this ad copy indicates, by 1964 Grove had become central to the simultaneous popularization and institutionalization of modernism in the United States.

  Figure 24. Cover of Evergreen Review after change in format (1964). (Photograph by Emil Cadoo)

  The modernism Grove promoted, as is so abundantly illustrated in the testimony at the obscenity trials of Lawrence, Miller, and Burroughs, solicited both elite and populist modes of legitimation. On the one hand, Grove relied heavily on the testimony of academic experts, depending on modernism’s reputation for difficulty and complexity. On the other hand, Grove promoted the more populist proclamations of authors such as Miller and Burroughs, who were disdainful of academic expertise. The shift from freedom of expression to freedom to read, and the oscillation between literary and sociological testimony in these trials, reveals this tension, which was so central to the transitional location of modernism in the 1960s.70 The cultural torque of this tension derived from the unprecedented sexual explicitness of these texts, which increasingly came to characterize avantgarde writing in this period. For this reason, I choose to call this developing canon of late modernism “vulgar modernism,” both for its vernacular aspirations and for its erotic preoccupations. More than any other postwar publisher, Grove was responsible for putting vulgar modernism on the literary map.71

  It was a modernism dominated by men. As the trajectory from Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs economically illustrates, Grove’s battle against censorship began with a quintessentially high modernist preoccupation with adulterous women—inaugurated by Madame Bovary and Ulysses—and ended up with the highly homosocial and increasingly homosexual preoccupations of late modernist figures such as Burroughs and Jean Genet. When Grove began to publish Genet’s homosexually explicit autobiographical novels, he had long been a hero to the Beats, and the popularity of his prose in the 1960s buttressed Grove’s centrality to the realignment of postwar American masculinity. All of Genet’s novels take place within homosocial institutions and networks—reform schools, prisons, the criminal underworld—and his overwrought stylization and spiritualization of these milieus helped provide a cultural consecration for the boy gang as dissident literary community in the United States.

  Rosset had been interested in Genet since the early 1950s, but he cautiously began with the plays, waiting for a more permissive climate to bring out the far more homosexually explicit prose. Samuel Roth’s publication of a pirated version of Our Lady of the Flowers forced Rosset’s hand, and he had to proceed with publication earlier than he might have liked, beginning with an excerpt in the Evergreen Review in the spring of 1961. In the meantime, Bernard Frechtman had finished translating Sartre’s massive study, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, for George Braziller, and Grove arranged to bring out at the same time, in hardcover, Frechtman’s translation of Our Lady of the Flowers, with an ample excerpt from Sartre’s study as an introduction. Rosset negotiated with Braziller for cooperative advertising and joint reviews, ensuring that Genet’s novels would enter the United States in the existential embrace of postwar Europe’s most respected and influential intellectual.

  In essence, Saint Genet provided the “expert testimony” establishing that Genet’s work had redeeming social value. And American reviewers were happy to have Sartre’s philosophical help and cultural imprimatur in understanding these sexually explicit and formally difficult texts, which both celebrate and equate homosexuality and criminality as modes of aesthetic stylization and spiritual apotheosis. Saint Genet provided the philosophical vocabulary within which reviewers could situate its subject’s literary output, framing both (male) homosexuals and criminals as “others” to mainstream middle-class culture. Genet’s canonization in France, enabled by the patronage of Sartre and Cocteau, also helped reviewers situate him within a lineage of French poètes maudites, from Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Villon to Céline, providing further cultural cover for his sexually dissident identity. Grove continued to issue Genet’s novels, initially in hardcover, over the course of the 1960s: The Thief’s Journal, with a brief foreword by Sartre, in 1964, and then Miracle of the Rose in 1966. The book jacket for Miracle of the Rose features Genet’s face framed by an iron grillwork that simultaneously suggests horns, a heart, and a headdress, an overdetermined image that distills the moral and political complexity of his canonization in the United States, where he was embraced by the counterculture and the political left (Figure 25).

  Genet’s novels considerably exaggerate his criminality, and it is worth remembering that the crime for which he almost spent his life in prison and for which he was pardoned by the French president in 1948, was stealing books from the quays along the Seine.72 Many, if not most, of Genet’s convictions were for book theft, which complements and complicates the circuits through which his own writing passed. Our Lady of the Flowers was, as Grove’s flyleaf reminds us, originally written on the paper prisoners were given to make bags, and its characterizations were partly inspired by the pulp fiction Genet read as a boy. Until Gallimard published it in 1951, it was available only in limited, or pirated, editions and translations, its value inversely elevated by the criminal depths from which it emerged. In 1963, Grove’s hardcover hit number 3 on the New York Post’s bestseller list; by 1967, it was in its fourth printing as a Bantam massmarket paperback; and by 1968, Bantam reissued it as a Bantam Modern Classic, marking Genet’s successful, and indeed symptomatic, migration from the margins to the mainstream.

  Grove’s championing of authors such as Miller, Burroughs, Genet, Rechy, and Selby indicates the homosocial contexts in which most of the postwar struggles against censorship were initially negotiated. As Michael Davidson affirms, the literary communities that formed around the New York school, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Beats exacted a “compulsory homosociality” that tended to exclude women but resolutely permitted, indeed required, acceptance of male homosexuality, rendering the traditionally rigid boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual orientation more fluid.73 Davidson focuses on postwar poets, but the male-dominated author list and insti
tutional organization of Grove Press reveal that this fraternal ordering of social relations characterized the countercultural publishing world as well. Grove embraced gay male writers and readers, publishing Spicer, O’Hara, Ginsberg, and many other openly gay authors in the Evergreen Review, and heavily promoted the work of John Rechy, whose semiautobiographical novels City of Night and Numbers chronicle the life of a male hustler with unprecedented explicitness. Grove’s publication of these authors, and its active address to their audience during a time when homosexuality was still illegal across the United States, was a crucial component of its battle against literary censorship. Two novels, Rechy’s City of Night and Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, illustrate Grove’s centrality to this realignment of US masculinity.