Rebel Publisher Page 3

  Guilbaut concludes his study in 1951, the year of Leo Castelli’s famous Ninth Street show, featuring paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joan Mitchell. Guilbaut sees the landmark show as “the symbol of both the triumph and the decadence of the avantgarde.”28 Rosset also bought Grove Press in 1951 and carried its entire stock of three titles to his apartment, also on West 9th Street, out of which he ran the company for the next two years. And 1951 is the year that Roy Kuhlman, a painter on whom Mitchell had been an influence, came to Rosset’s apartment to show him some ideas for book cover design. Rosset was initially uninterested in his portfolio, but as Kuhlman was leaving, he accidentally dropped a twelve-by twelve-inch piece of abstract art he intended to pitch as a record cover to Ahmet Ertegun. Rosset immediately saw what he wanted. Kuhlman, whose aesthetic sensibilities had been formed by the abstract expressionist pioneers, owed a particular debt to the minimalist work of Franz Kline, as can be seen by a comparison between one of his early covers and a contemporaneous piece by Kline (Figures 1 and 2). Kuhlman was one of the first book designers to incorporate abstract expressionism into cover art, and his signature style, which made ample use of “negative space,” provided a distinct look for Grove throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

  If the success of abstract expressionism signaled the ascendance of New York in the international art market, literary consecration remained based in Paris, and Grove’s story amply illustrates that city’s persistence as an arbiter of cultural value in the postwar era. Grove effectively siphoned cultural capital from Paris to New York in the 1950s and 1960s, reprinting and translating authors it had acquired from Éditions de Minuit, Éditions Gallimard, Éditions du Seuil, and the Olympia Press, thereby establishing a reputation as the premier American disseminator of European avantgarde literature, especially drama. However, Grove championed the idea of an indigenous avantgarde as well, providing an early publication venue for the Beats, the New York school, and the Black Mountain school, publishing multiple scholarly studies of American jazz, adopting abstract expressionist designs for its book covers, and affirming the San Francisco Bay Area as itself a “cultural capital” in a burgeoning national scene.

  For Guilbaut, the development of an indigenous avantgarde depended upon what he somewhat awkwardly calls the “De-Marxization” of the American intelligentsia and the purported political “neutrality” of the abstract expressionist aesthetic. In this way, abstract expressionist painting was part of the larger process of liberal consensus building during the Cold War that reconciled American intellectuals to the ideology of the American century. As Guilbaut affirms, “The depoliticization of the avantgarde was necessary before it could be put to political use.”29 By the 1960s, this consensus had begun to unravel, challenged by the rise of the New Left and the counterculture. A crucial component of this process, and in the emergence of the counterculture itself, was what one might call the “repoliticization” of the avantgarde and the increasing engagement of experimental artists with radical politics over the course of the 1960s. Grove Press was central to this effort to rearticulate the political to the aesthetic meanings of the avantgarde.

  Figure 1. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for Marquis de Sade: Selections

  from His Writings (1953).

  Figure 2. Franz Kline, New York, NY (1953).

  (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Art Resources, NY)

  This effort did not rely on any coherent theory or philosophy of the avantgarde ; rather, it inhered in a fundamental commitment to expanding the distribution of and access to what were understood to be avantgarde texts in the United States, which was the central, and successful, mission of Grove Press.30 Grove entered the publishing industry at the height of the paperback revolution. Its most significant achievement was to establish and expand the circuits through which experimental and radical literature was distributed, particularly to the burgeoning college and university populations that were the seedbed of the counterculture, thereby effectively democratizing the avantgarde. This democratization involved both geographic dispersal—making avantgarde texts available in more places across the country and the world—and temporal absorption—closing the conventional lag between initial publication and critical consecration. By the end of the 1960s, the avantgarde had in essence become a component of the mainstream, and Grove Press, more than any other single institution, was responsible for this fundamental transformation of the cultural field, the consequences of which are still with us. This process determines the underlying structure of the narrative that follows.

  New York

  At one point in our second interview, Rosset made a sweeping gesture with his hand and said, “All of Grove Press’s life was within about four blocks of here.”31 Indeed, Grove Press was a landmark in the downtown scene. In 1953, by which time the stock was straining the floors of his third-story walk-up, Rosset moved the company to a small suite of offices at 795 Broadway. In 1959, he relocated to 64 University Place; in 1964, to 80 University Place; and in 1969, he purchased an entire building on the corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets. For the entirety of the long 1960s, Grove was located in the center of Greenwich Village, within walking distance of the Cedar Tavern, San Remo Café, Stonewall Inn, White Horse Tavern, Living Theater, Caffe Cino, Fillmore East, Cherry Lane Theater, Bitter End, Village Vanguard, Café Wha?, Strand, Eighth Street Bookshop, and the offices of the Village Voice. Grove’s national function as a countercultural publisher was enabled by its central location in the institutional network of New York City’s burgeoning downtown scene. Like these other famous institutions, Grove was not only a business; it was also a social nexus for the counterculture. Though Rosset himself moved to the Hamptons in the late 1950s, he frequently spent the night in the Village. Fueled by amphetamines and lubricated with alcohol, he often stayed up all night barhopping, flirting, and networking within blocks of the Grove offices. In the 1960s, he was a key player in a social scene that was also a cauldron of cultural dissidence, sexual experimentation, and political upheaval.

  Though Grove was based downtown, its network extended the full length of Manhattan Island. Uptown was Columbia University, which was enjoying a surge of cultural influence as the academic wing of the New York Intellectuals. Columbia was the institutional home to many professors with close connections to Grove, including Donald Keene, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature, who assisted in establishing Grove’s extensive connections to Far Eastern literatures; and Eric Bentley, Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature, who edited the popular Grove Press edition of the work of Bertolt Brecht. Columbia was also the site of one of the most famous student occupations of 1968, closely followed in the pages of the Evergreen Review. The occupation was sparked partly by Columbia’s vexed relationship with the adjacent neighborhood of Harlem, whose radical art and activism Grove helped publicize in the 1960s. Malcolm X founded the Nation of Islam’s Temple Number Seven in Harlem in 1952. Harlem was also home to the legendary National Memorial African Bookstore, where Malcolm frequently spent time and where his autobiography and speeches, both published by Grove, sold in great numbers after his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom. In the later 1960s, Harlem became home base to the Black Arts movement, whose founder, Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka, published a number of significant early works with Grove and who was a regular contributor to the Evergreen Review. And Harlem was the location of the Hotel Theresa, where Che Guevara and Fidel Castro stayed during their visit to the United Nations in 1960. Grove had connections in the Cuban mission, published popular paperback collections of both men’s speeches in the 1960s, and dedicated an entire issue of the Evergreen Review to Che after his death in Bolivia in 1967.

  In Midtown, three recently established institutions immeasurably enhanced New York City’s global stature in the postwar era: the United Nations, a massive complex dominating the East side, which injected Manhattan directly into the volatile g
eopolitics of the postcolonial era; Birdland, the legendary jazz club on West 44th Street where musicians such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis launched their careers; and the Museum of Modern Art on West 53rd, which, through its savvy promotion of abstract expressionism, had just achieved the triumphant theft chronicled by Guilbaut. Grove had connections to, and was crucially influenced by, all three of these institutions in the 1950s and 1960s.

  New York City was also home to a Jewish community that was on the eve of an unprecedented cultural apotheosis. The genteel anti-Semitism that had restricted Jewish access to higher education had lost its authority in the wake of the Holocaust, while at the same time numerous Jewish intellectuals fleeing Nazism had settled in New York, which had long been a destination for European Jewish immigrants. By the 1960s, Jewish writers and academics occupied the center of New York intellectual and cultural life, bringing European schools of thought into the American mainstream while also producing and defining what came to be understood as American literature and culture. When I asked Rosset if he identified as Jewish, he responded with disdain, saying he didn’t see himself as Jewish or Catholic. “I didn’t know which I disliked more,” he quipped. “It made me a communist.” Nevertheless, Rosset was perceived by many as Jewish, and most of the key players at Grove were New York Jews.

  Fred Jordan, Rosset’s right-hand man throughout the 1960s, was a Holocaust survivor. Jordan was born in Vienna on November 9, 1925, and his bar mitzvah was on Kristallnacht; it marked the end of his formal education. Soon after, he fled to England, where he became the cultural programmer for a small cell of fellow traveling Austrian Jews. Later in the war, he joined the British army as a member of the Glasgow Highlanders. He briefly returned to Vienna after the war, where he worked for the US Armed Forces newspaper. He arrived in the United States in 1949 with the intention of becoming a journalist. In 1956, Rosset hired him to handle the business end of things. Jordan shared Rosset’s left-wing political sympathies and became deeply dedicated to realizing his vision for the press. And the two worked well together: Rosset was impulsive and intuitive, whereas Jordan was analytical and deliberate; the pairing of their personalities was crucial to the operations of the company.

  As the company expanded, Rosset hired more New York Jews, including Morrie Goldfischer; Nat Sobel; Herman Graf; Myron Shapiro, who ran the book club; Jules Geller, who ran the educational division; and Harry Braverman, who was a prominent editor and jack-of-all-trades at the company on and off throughout the 1960s. All of these men came from traditions of left-wing Jewish activism and cultural entrepreneurship, with many having close ties to labor groups such as the Socialist Workers Party. Braverman and Geller’s ties to the Monthly Review Press were particularly significant in developing Grove’s list of radical political titles.

  The industry into which these men were entering was also centered in New York City. All of the major American publishing houses—for example, Random House, New American Library, Dell, Doubleday, Knopf, and Scribner’s—had been based in Midtown since the beginning of the twentieth century. In the early 1950s, the New York publishing world was on the verge of what John Tebbel has called “The Great Change,” the era of conglomeration and consolidation during which book publishing, which had remained relatively insulated from the broader culture industry, was gradually absorbed by it.32 Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, most of the major Midtown publishing houses were bought by large publicly owned corporations that both capitalized and rationalized an industry that had remained a genteel backwater during the first half of the twentieth century. The New York publishing world had been an insular community of (mostly) men, all of whom knew each other and most of whom shared a commitment to literary culture that, they felt, distinguished their industry and their product from others. Many of these publishers, in particular the so-called new breed of second-generation Jewish immigrants such as Horace Liveright, Alfred Knopf, and Bennett Cerf, shared a sense of mission that led them to take risks with unknown authors and then to remain loyal to those authors once they had established themselves. Tebbel calls this earlier era the “Golden Age between the Wars,” and under Rosset, Grove would in many ways be a holdover from it, an independent publisher committed to modernist standards of aesthetic evaluation without regard for the bottom line.33 Like the new breed that preceded him, and consciously modeling his enterprise on James Laughlin’s groundbreaking New Directions Press, Rosset was committed to bringing the latest in European experimental literature to the attention of an American reading public—a sense of mission that trumped any simple profit motive. Grove’s location downtown emphasized the philosophical and political differences between Grove and the larger mainstream publishers that were ushering the industry into the era of late capitalism.

  However, in one crucial respect, Grove depended on and grew out of the incorporation of the mainstream publishers, insofar as that process was driven by the paperback revolution of the postwar era, which, according to Kenneth Davis, “democratized reading in America.”34 Piggybacking on the distribution networks of massmarket magazines, and frequently featuring salacious and sensational cover art, most paperback books in the 1940s and 1950s were reprints either of bestselling hardcovers or of classics that were out of copyright. Initially, Rosset pursued this inexpensive route, developing his title list by reprinting classic texts such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. But in the later 1950s, following the lead of Jason Epstein’s groundbreaking Doubleday imprint Anchor Books, Grove began publishing original avantgarde texts as inexpensive “quality” paperbacks, which were quickly recognized in the industry as marking a new and significant stage in the paperback revolution.35 As one writer for the New York Times remarked, the sudden success of the quality paperback evinced a “surprisingly large, if somewhat self-hidden, intelligentsia” in the United States.36 In order to access this intelligentsia, Epstein had promoted and acquired his new imprint’s authors through the Anchor Review, and Rosset adopted the same method. Thus, in 1957 Grove Press published the inaugural issue of the Evergreen Review, and in 1958 it launched the Evergreen Originals imprint. Through these two vehicles Rosset hoped to establish an identity for his fledgling enterprise. To achieve this goal, he needed to acquire contemporary authors, and to acquire such authors, he needed connections. And he made them, in Paris and across Europe. Grove became a conduit through which the cultural capital of European late modernism flowed into the United States, ballasting the emergence of an indigenous American avantgarde and generating a veritable canon of countercultural reading for the paperback generation.

  Paris

  Over the course of the 1950s Rosset established fruitful connections with most of the major publishing houses in Paris, including Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, which was already well known across Europe for publishing Englishlanguage pornography in its Traveler’s Companion series, but which also published avantgarde and experimental literature. Grove also established ties with UNESCO, which afforded it a fruitful conduit to world literature, both classical and contemporary. From these sources Grove acquired the work of many of the authors with whom it would become closely identified in the ensuing decades, including Fernando Arrabal, Antonin Artaud, Régis Debray, Frantz Fanon, Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade, J. P. Donleavy, and Samuel Beckett.

  Beckett, virtually unknown at the time, became Rosset’s most important Parisian acquisition. The lifelong relationship the two established is one of the more underappreciated professional alliances in postwar publishing history. The unwavering loyalty between them hearkened back to Tebbel’s “Golden Age,” before huge advances and high-paid literary agents rendered such allegiances impractical. Rosset personally handled all of Beckett’s literary rights in the United States, was adamant in encouraging the reluctant author to translate his own work, and hosted his only visit to the United States in the summer of 1964 to make Film, from a sc
reenplay Rosset himself had commissioned. By 1957, Beckett’s trust in Rosset to handle his affairs was implicit and complete, as he wrote: “I am incapable of understanding contracts. My ‘method’ consists, when they are drawn up by those in whom I have confidence, in signing them without reading them. Any contract drawn up by you, involving me alone, I shall sign in this fashion.”37 And Grove’s role as Beckett’s exclusive publisher in the United States provided it with high cultural cachet throughout the postwar era. It published all of his work and much of the early criticism that established the foundation of what became an academic industry, whose rapid growth ensured his place in the lucrative college curriculum of the booming postwar American university.

  In reminiscences published in Conjunctions in 2009, Rosset credits two people with encouraging him to publish the Irish author: Sylvia Beach (a close friend of Joan Mitchell’s mother, Marion Strobel Mitchell, who edited Poetry magazine) and his New School professor Wallace Fowlie, author of Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater. According to Rosset, he gave Fowlie a copy of Waiting for Godot, and Fowlie, after reading it, guaranteed him that “Beckett will become known as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.”38 Rosset promptly informed Beckett that “what the Grove Press needed most in the world was Samuel Beckett.”39

  Rosset makes no mention in his reminiscences of Richard Seaver, who was equally instrumental, if not in Grove’s initial acquisition of Beckett, then in managing the professional relations between them. Before Rosset became aware of Beckett, Seaver, a young University of North Carolina graduate working on a dissertation on James Joyce at the Sorbonne, had stumbled upon Molloy and Malone meurt in the display window of Éditions de Minuit. Knowing of Beckett’s work on Finnegans Wake, he bought both books and, after reading through Molloy in one sitting, received “a shock of discovery” that marked the beginning of an extensive personal and professional relationship with the author and his work. Seaver mentioned Beckett’s name to the Scottish exile Alexander Trocchi, who had just started a journal called Merlin, and Trocchi encouraged Seaver to write on Beckett for the fledgling journal.40 One of the first critical appraisals of the postwar work on which Beckett’s reputation would soon rest, “Samuel Beckett: An Introduction,” appeared in the second issue.