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  Figure 25. Kuhlman Associates’ cover of The Miracle of the Rose (1966).

  (Photograph by Jerry Bauer)

  City of Night was a landmark in publishing, laying the groundwork for the emergence of gay literature as a lucrative market niche in the 1970s. Don Allen linked Rechy up with Grove in 1960 and provided crucial editorial assistance and emotional support to the young author in completing his first book. It became Grove’s fastest-selling novel ever, enjoying six months on the New York Times’s bestseller list in 1963 and at one point selling more than one thousand copies per day. Grove aggressively pursued an international market, selling translation rights to publishers in France, Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Japan, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Israel, and Poland.

  Despite the novel’s homosexual focus, Rechy rejected Kuhlman’s suggestion that the cover feature a picture of a drag queen without title or author. As Rechy wrote to Seaver, “I want, very much, for this book of mine to be presented as a very serious work, shunning as far as possible any strong emphasis on it as a sensational exposé.”74 He further affirmed that he didn’t want the jacket copy to categorize it as a “homosexual novel,” writing later to Seaver, “My objection to the word ‘homosexual’ on the jacket is merely a reaction to it as much too clinical; and, really, much too explicit and restrictive regarding the book itself … Would ‘sexual underworld’ or ‘sexual underground’ or ‘the world of subterranean sex’ do just as well?”75 Rechy’s reservations situate his novel in the pre-Stonewall era, before the uprising that, among other things, made gay literature a mainstream marketing category, but they also illustrate the appeal of the underground as a cultural region in which such distinctions are less important, at least between men. Grove exploited these connotations of the term “underground” quite successfully in the later 1960s.

  Rechy may not have wanted his novel to be promoted as “homosexual,” but he couldn’t prevent reviewers from perceiving it in those terms, nor is it surprising, given the book’s focus, that they did. Peter Buitenhuis, in his review for the New York Times, opens by announcing, “This novel would surely not have been published as little as five years ago. Its issue by a reputable house marks how far the black hand of censorship has been lifted.” But Buitenhuis sees no literary value in Rechy’s narrative, calling him “an inept writer with a number of mannerisms that should have been suppressed by an editor.” Rather, echoing Hollander’s testimony in the trial of Naked Lunch, Buitenhuis recognizes the novel’s sociological value, claiming it has “the unmistakable ring of candor and truth,” and dubbing Rechy “the Kinsey of the homosexuals.”76 Rechy struggled against this pigeonholing, but Grove marketed him in the 1960s as a chronicler of the homosexual world. The cultural visibility of his books, and others published by Grove, provided an opening cultural wedge for the Stonewall riots of 1969, in which, as historian David Carter argues, “the most marginal groups of the gay community fought the hardest.”77

  A more aesthetically representative example of the vulgar modernism Grove helped establish in the 1960s was Hubert Selby, whose sensationally explicit Last Exit to Brooklyn Grove published in hardcover in 1964. Born and raised in Brooklyn and a close childhood friend of Gilbert Sorrentino (soon to become an assistant editor at Grove), Selby had little formal education but nevertheless developed a distinctive stream-of-consciousness style whose modernist antecedents were clear. Indeed, if Miller was the Brooklyn Proust, than Selby was its Joyce, and Last Exit, which vividly and clinically depicts the most marginal and desperate denizens of Manhattan’s notorious neighbor, something of a latter-day Dubliners.

  Explicit as it was, Last Exit to Brooklyn escaped censorship in the United States (though there was a landmark trial in Britain later in the decade); its unimpeded entry into the literary marketplace testifies to the remarkable transformation Grove had precipitated with the series of trials that preceded its publication. Furthermore, insofar as it positions the criminal underworld of Brooklyn against the sexual underground of Manhattan, it can be understood as an indigenous psycho-geographic map of Grove’s vulgar modernist sensibilities. The reigning character in this landscape was the Queen, the central subject of Selby’s second chapter, “The Queen Is Dead,” which was also the lead story in Evergreen Review 33 in 1964. Edmund White credits Jean Genet with “the literary creation of the Queen, a creature who had existed only in folklore before Genet wrote his portrait of Divine” in Our Lady of the Flowers.78 And Genet is specifically named by Selby’s title character, Georgette, who “took a pride in being a homosexual by feeling intellectually and esthetically superior to those (especially women) who werent gay.”79 When Genet is mentioned, Georgette’s love object, a Brooklyn ex-con named Vinnie, asks, “Whose this junay?” to which Georgette replies, “A French writer Vinnie. I am certain you would not know of such things.”80 “Such things” are precisely what made up the literary repertoire of the homosocial networks in which vulgar modernism circulated and that were in turn both chronicled and aestheticized by its principal avatars. The party that concludes “The Queen Is Dead” provides a set piece for this milieu, when Georgette recites Poe’s “The Raven” to the accompaniment of a Charlie Parker record, at which point everyone at the party “knew she was THE QUEEN.”81

  The Queen’s literary ascendance in the social circuits of vulgar modernism is further affirmed in the long story that forms the centerpiece of Last Exit to Brooklyn, “Strike,” which chronicles the experiences of a Brooklyn lathe operator and shop steward named Harry during a strike at his factory. The story is less concerned with the strike itself than with the idleness the strike enables, allowing Harry to take up with a transvestite named Alberta. The contrast between the opening sex scene with his wife, with “Harry physically numb, feeling neither pain nor pleasure, but moving with the force and automation of a machine; unable now to even formulate a vague thought, the attempt at thought being jumbled by his anger and hatred,” and the later sex scene with Alberta, where he experiences “the sudden overpowering sensation of pleasure, a pleasure he had never known, a pleasure that he, with its excitement and tenderness, had never experienced,” reveals the utopian extensions of vulgar modernism’s homosocial preoccupations.82 These scenes, one in which a drag queen recites a poet canonized by Baudelaire to the tune of a bop saxophonist canonized by the Beats and the other in which a Brooklyn shop steward has his first experience of sexual fulfillment with a Manhattan transvestite, provide some of the contradictory cultural coordinates within which vulgar modernism briefly flourished.

  And its time was brief. The principal authors Grove brought to the forefront in its battle against censorship—Lawrence, Miller, Burroughs, Genet, Rechy, Selby—received both critical and popular acclaim during the 1960s, but, with the notable exception of Burroughs, they are rarely taught or written about today. Rather, vulgar modernism emerged in the brief interregnum between high modernism and postmodernism, between the end of obscenity and the rise of pornography, as a transitional formation specific to the 1960s.

  Up from Underground

  In 1966, the US Supreme Court took up the case of Putnam’s publication of John Cleland’s eighteenth-century pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which had been appealed along with Mishkin v. State of New York and Ginzburg v. United States. On March 21, Cleland’s famous book was exonerated, but Ginzburg’s and Mishkin’s guilty verdicts were affirmed. The reasons for this split are informative. While Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was being rescued from illicit underground circulation by a reputable publisher, Ralph Ginzburg and Edward Mishkin were pariah capitalists in the tradition of Samuel Roth, who had also been found guilty in the landmark case that bears his name. In affirming their guilty verdicts, the high court determined, in an argument similar to Earl Warren’s reasoning in his Roth concurrence, that it “may include consideration of the setting in which the publications were presented as an aid to determining the question of obscenity.”83
The court decided, in other words, that a text’s location in the cultural marketplace was relevant to determining whether or not it could be deemed obscene; if the publisher marketed it as obscene, the court would be more likely to agree. Although this “pandering” logic was maligned at the time, it was in essence an acknowledgment that the literary underground in which pirated masterpieces had circulated alongside pornographic pulp was coming to an end. Grove Press had successfully legitimated even the most explicit and graphic texts; men like Roth, Ginzburg, and Mishkin were no longer necessary.

  The 1966 decision was an important step in the court’s shift from an “absolute” to a “variable” definition of obscenity over the course of the 1960s, a shift that was particularly significant in the court’s acceptance of a lower threshold when judging the legality of materials made available to minors. Following the logic elaborated by William Lockhart and Robert McClure in their influential article for the Minnesota Law Review, the court, realizing the difficulty of establishing a fixed definition of obscenity, was beginning to formulate a more flexible definition based on the audience to which the materials were directed. The most important consequence of this shift was the emergence of a relatively unrestricted “adult” market for sexually explicit materials, a market whose social and cultural legitimacy Grove helped establish.84

  Thus, the split decision in 1966 put Mishkin and Ginzburg in jail, but it provided Rosset, whose reputation was at its peak, with the opportunity to move in on their turf, legally and profitably exhuming the entire literary underground of the modern era. Grove almost single-handedly transformed the term “under ground” into a legitimate market niche for adults in the second half of the 1960s, starting with a campaign inviting readers to “Join the Underground” by subscribing to the Evergreen Review and by joining the Evergreen Club, which Rosset had started earlier that year as a conduit for distributing Grove’s rapidly expanding catalog of “adult” literature and film. By specifying its audience as “adult,” by continuing to emphasize its literary credentials, and by concentrating its more explicit materials in the institution of a book club, Grove was able to turn the court’s pandering logic to its advantage. Rosset dealt in the same wares as Ginzburg and Mishkin, but the combination of Grove’s literary reputation and the restricted audience enabled by the club prevented him from suffering their fate.

  In the opening months of 1966, “Join the Underground” appeared in full-page ads in Esquire, Ramparts, New Republic, Playboy, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the Village Voice and on posters throughout the New York City subway system. Grove also distributed tens of thousands of free stickers to subscribers that began to appear on public benches and in public bathrooms across the country. The ad in the Times opens by provocatively specifying its target demographic: “If you’re over 21; if you’ve grown up with the underground writers of the fifties and sixties who’ve reshaped the literary landscape; if you want to share in the new freedoms that book and magazine publishers are winning in the courts, then keep reading. You’re one of us.”85 The ad chronicles how Grove spearheaded this transformation, from the court battles over Lawrence and Miller to its promotion and publication of the theater of the absurd and the French New Novel. In order to entice the audience expanded by its efforts to join the club and subscribe to the magazine, Grove offered a free copy of one of three titles: Eros Denied by Wayland Young, “which examines the awful mess the Western World has made of sex”; Games People Play by Eric Berne, the surprise bestseller that promises to “give people astonishing insights into parts of their lives they usually keep hidden”; and Naked Lunch, described as “an authentic literary masterpiece of the 20th century that has created more discussion, generated more controversy, and excited more censors than any other novel of recent times.” The campaign was a big success, as Seaver reported to Harry Braverman: “The response by the Evergreen subscribers to the book club mailing has been overwhelming, and the full page advertisement in the New York Times last Sunday is going to produce at least 1500 members—an unheard of response.”86

  Buoyed by the success of the campaign—circulation for the Evergreen Review had nearly doubled from fifty-four thousand to ninety thousand in the first half of 1966—Jordan commissioned Marketing Data, Inc., that summer to distribute a survey to Evergreen Review subscribers. The survey established that, according to an article in Advertising Age, “the average member of the ‘underground’ is a 39-year-old male, married, two children, a college graduate who holds a managerial position in business or industry, and has a median family income of $12,875.”87 Jordan promptly mounted a follow-up campaign, boldly asking readers, “Do you have what it takes to join the Underground?” The ad prominently displays the survey results and then answers, “You have what it takes if you need what we’ve got: a collection of readers who are better educated than Time’s; better off than Esquire’s; and holding down better jobs than Newsweek’s.” It concludes, “All in all, the Underground magazine looks like it’s going through the roof. Take a look at the charts above taken from our recently completed reader survey.”88 Although the promotional copy doesn’t mention it, the first survey statistic reveals that Evergreen’s subscriber base was 90 percent male, affirming that the homosociality of Grove’s literary and cultural network extended into its readership.

  To these well-paid, well-educated, and predominantly male readers, adjacent to and interested in the countercultural communities that remained Evergreen’s core constituency, Grove channeled much of its catalog in the later 1960s, a catalog that was increasingly ballasted by pornography and erotica exhumed from the Edwardian and Victorian undergrounds. Rosset’s sources for this material were many. He continued to plunder the Olympia backlist, including reissuing the Traveler’s Companion series and an Olympia Reader, edited by Girodias, who had declared bankruptcy and moved to New York City in order, he hoped, to exploit the new freedom enabled by Grove. Rosset also acquired many titles from a private collector named J. B. Rund, whose interest in erotica and pornography began when he worked in Grove’s mailroom.

  Rosset also purchased many titles from Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, sex therapists and erotica collectors with whom he worked closely in the late 1960s (and who were affectionately known in the Grove offices as “Syphilis and Everhard”). The Kronhausens, who were prominently profiled by Sara Davidson in Evergreen Review 15, no. 91, published a variety of books with Grove, including The Sexually Responsive Woman (1964), Walter, the English Casanova (1967), and Erotic Fantasies (1969). They used their royalties from these and other books to collect erotic art from around the world, mounting a triumphant international exhibition at museums in Denmark, Sweden, and Germany in the summer of 1968. Grove published two lavishly illustrated volumes based on the exhibition.

  In the late 1960s, Grove reissued in popular editions virtually every title whose publication had previously been forbidden by Comstock-era laws, thereby transforming the structure of the cultural field. In effect, Grove brought Francophone and Anglophone materials whose value had been based in their rarity into mainstream American print circulation, briefly achieving a considerable cash infusion for the company that would, in the end, only hasten its decline.89

  Sade in America

  Lauded by legendary literary luminaries Charles Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire, the wildly explicit writings of Donatien-Alphonse-François de Sade had been understood as the secret subterranean source of the amorality of modernism since its inception. But Sade’s work had been unavailable legally in both the Francophone and Anglophone literary marketplaces until the postwar era. Before then, Sade’s unavailability buttressed his mystique: simply having read him could indicate membership in an exclusive club. As part of its effort to popularize modernism, it was inevitable that Grove would publish Sade.

  Indeed, Rosset’s interest in Sade went back to the beginnings of Grove, when he published a carefully sanitized selection of his writings, chosen and translated by Paul Dinnage as
an “anthology-guidebook,” prefaced by Simone de Beauvoir’s now-classic essay from Les temps modernes, “Must We Burn Sade?” Published in hardcover in May 1953, Grove’s selections followed Edmund Wilson’s lengthy New Yorker article of 1952, “The Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” which deprecated the hagiographic bias of foundational Sade scholars Maurice Heine and M. Gilbert Lely (whose biography of Sade Grove later published) but praised Beauvoir’s essay as “perhaps the very best thing that has yet been written on the subject.”90 Wilson declined to write an introduction for the volume but agreed to let Grove use his article in its promotional efforts. Although the more explicit sections were left in the original French, Grove nevertheless promoted the volume in its press release as “one of the first attempts to make available in English large selections of what the Marquis actually wrote.”91 Sporting an untranslated epigraph from Baudelaire’s Journaux intimes exhorting the reader, “Il faut toujours revenir a de Sade, c’est-à-dire a l’homme naturel, pour éxpliquer le mal” (We must always go back to Sade, that is, to the natural man, to understand evil), and concluding with a chronology and bibliography compiled by Dinnage, this small volume anticipates the scholarly seriousness with which Grove published Sade in the 1960s.

  In the same year that Grove issued this sanitized collection, Austryn Wainhouse, using the baroque pseudonym Pieralessanddro Casavini, published his unexpurgated translation of Justine with the Olympia Press. Over the next decade Wainhouse, a Harvard graduate on what became permanent leave from his doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, translated a large selection of Sade for Girodias under this pseudonym. These translations became the foundation for the massive three-volume, two thousand-plus-page edition of Sade’s work that Wainhouse and Seaver, who had originally met as members of the Merlin collective, assembled for Grove in the mid-to late 1960s, after the risk of censorship had been eliminated by the successes with Lawrence, Miller, and Burroughs.