Rebel Publisher Page 4
Seaver and Rosset first met in the fall of 1953, when Rosset returned to Paris with his new wife, Loly, to meet Beckett, with whom he had just concluded a contract through Jerome Lindon of Éditions de Minuit. In Paris Seaver and Rosset began a relationship that became central to Grove’s operations once Seaver returned to the States. Rosset told me, “If I’d ever had a brother, I wish it would have been him,” and he spent years trying to convince Seaver to work for Grove. The two men, though they became very close, were also quite different. Seaver was from a WASP family in Watertown, Connecticut, clean-cut, athletic, and highly intelligent. He completed his dissertation, with honors, at the Sorbonne. Rosset, more of an outsider, lacked Seaver’s discipline and focus; he attended four undergraduate institutions before receiving his BA from the New School in 1952. But the two men shared literary enthusiasms, and, according to Seaver’s widow, Jeanette, Seaver recommended Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet to Rosset. Genet, whom Rosset also met that year in Paris through his translator Bernard Frechtman, became crucial to Grove’s radical image, first with his politically explosive theater and then with his homosexually explicit prose.41
In his article, Seaver calls Beckett “a prime example of that literary phenomenon which began some time during the last century and continues today, the writer in exile,”42 and it was in selfconscious emulation of the Lost Generation that the “Merlin Juveniles,” as Beckett called them, attempted to realize their literary aspirations in Paris. In addition to Trocchi and Seaver, the group at one time or another included the English poet Christopher Logue, the South African writer Patrick Bowles, and the American translator Austryn Wainhouse. All of them worshipped Joyce, whose Ulysses is praised in Trocchi’s editorial statement opening the second issue as “a great work of genius” and a model for the type of writing the journal seeks to publish.43 In this sense, Merlin was modeled on the now-legendary little magazines such as transition and the Transatlantic Review, which had launched the careers of so many modernists between the wars.
But, as Seaver notes in his introduction to the reissue of Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, which Grove had originally published and promoted in 1960 as a Joycean masterpiece, “Paris may have been our mistress, but the political realities of the time were our master.”44 And the master of political realities in Paris in the 1950s was, without question, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose pronouncements set the terms of engagement for literary and political dispute not only in Paris but around the world, and whose journal Les temps modernes provided the Merlin collective with their talking points. Seaver and Trocchi arranged to reprint articles from Sartre’s magazine, and Seaver’s next article for Merlin, “Revolt and Revolution,” was his account of the famous break between Camus and Sartre over Francis Jeanson’s review of L’homme revolté in Les temps modernes. Though Seaver opens with the challenge of commitment, averring that in a world of “categoric division, the position of the politically unaffianced is certainly ambiguous, perhaps even untenable,” he himself scrupulously avoids affiliation in his scholarly summary of both the book and the ensuing break, concluding that “undoubtedly both men are sincere. There are certain elements of truth in both their arguments.”45 Seaver was a young and unknown American in Paris, and his objective was less to take sides in a dispute between two intellectual titans than to communicate accurately the philosophical underpinnings and historical contexts of the debate for an Englishspeaking audience. When Seaver joined Grove Press as an editor and translator in 1959, this was the role he played. He provided the press with scholarly gravitas and intellectual expertise; his connections to and knowledge of the French intellectual world were crucial to Grove’s literary reputation.
Merlin may have helped launch Seaver’s career, but it was not a money-making proposition. Like most little magazines, it was supported by private funds, in this case from Trocchi’s American girlfriend, Alice Jane Lougee, who had a modest allowance from her family in Maine. A temporary solution to the collective’s cash-flow problems arrived in the person of Maurice Girodias, who first commissioned the more fluent of the Merlin collective as translators and then, ultimately, as pseudonymous writers for hire of Englishlanguage pornographic titles conceived specifically for his Traveler’s Companion series. Girodias, whom Trocchi introduced to Rosset, is a key figure in the early history of Grove Press, a pariah capitalist on the margins of modernism whose courage in publishing literature no one else would touch was matched by his unreliability in remunerating its authors.46 Jeanette Seaver told me he was a “thief” and a “scoundrel” but also conceded that he was “a charming man.” When I asked Rosset about Girodias, he told me they had “a deep relationship, and a very important one.” Seaver, by contrast, called it “a fragile friendship.”47
The parallels between the two men are noteworthy. They were born only three years apart, to wealthy Jewish fathers and Catholic mothers, and both were brought up without adherence to either religion. Indeed, Girodias took on his mother’s last name to avoid being identified as a Jew during World War II. His father, Jack Kahane, was the founder and owner of Obelisk Press, original publisher of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, for which the young Maurice designed the cover. Thus, both Rosset and Girodias forged an early link to Miller, who was crucial to their careers after the war, when each established a publishing house specifically designed to challenge the residual regimes of literary censorship. In this they were entering into a tradition of eccentric (and frequently Jewish) entrepreneurs of erotica on the avantgarde of the battle against censorship that, once won, rendered them superfluous. The Olympia/Merlin nexus represents the last incarnation of that symptomatic convergence of modernism and obscenity that centrally shaped the cultural field of the first half of the twentieth century.48 Olympia’s combination of highbrow obscurantism and pulp pornography provided the groundwork for Grove’s title list, as the relaxation of censorship in the United States that Rosset almost single-handedly precipitated in turn enabled him to cannibalize most of Girodias’s catalog from the 1950s.
In Paris, Rosset and Seaver tapped into two august traditions of the European avantgarde: experimental theater, with its origins in the Ubu plays of Alfred Jarry and the influential theories of Antonin Artaud, and obscenity, which had constituted the moral challenge of modernist masterpieces since the 1857 trials of Madame Bovary and Fleurs du mal. Grove virtually cornered the market on European experimental theater, publishing not only Beckett but also Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Artaud, Jarry, Arrabal, Brecht, Tom Stoppard, Joe Orton, Genet, and Slawomir Mrozek. And Grove famously led the charge against the censorship of obscenity, precipitating landmark trials for its publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch and then unearthing the entire field of clandestine pornography that had previously been available only through pariah publishers like Maurice Girodias and Samuel Roth.
In addition to Éditions de Minuit and Olympia, Grove benefited from its relationship with Gallimard, the most prestigious and well-established publisher in France. When Rosset was in Paris, Gallimard was already beginning to release its complete collection of the novels of Jean Genet, who, in the wake of his famous pardon by the French president in 1949, was in the process of his initial canonization. And Sartre, who along with Jean Cocteau had personally written to the president endorsing Genet’s pardon, was just finishing his monumental psychobiography, Saint Genet: Comedienne et martyr, which had developed out of his introduction to the Gallimard edition and served to complete the consecration inaugurated by the pardon. The publication of the English translation of Saint Genet in 1961 enabled Grove to begin publishing Genet’s homosexually explicit novels in the United States.
Also at Gallimard, though unknown to anyone at the time, a young female editor and veteran of the Resistance named Anne Desclos, who wrote under the pseudonym Dominique Aury, was completing a selfconsciously Sadean fantasy of female submission that she had been secretly writing for her boss and sometime lover, Jean Paulhan, influential editor of Gallimard�
�s house organ, the Nouvelle revue française. In 1954, her novel was published anonymously by Jean-Jacques Pauvert as Histoire d’O, generating feverish speculations in Paris as to its authorship. In the following year it was both charged with obscenity and awarded the prestigious Prix des deux magots. Ten years later, Grove caused a sensation when it published the novel in the United States, translated by Richard Seaver under the pseudonym Sabine d’Estrée.
The inaugural issue of the Evergreen Review in 1957 amply illustrates the success of Rosset’s efforts to export Parisian cultural capital to New York. It features a cover photo and a portfolio by Harold Feinstein, the Brooklyn-born photographer already known for his scenes of New York City; the opening article is a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous interview with L’express on the Soviet invasion of Hungary. This interview both provides the fledgling journal with the imprimatur of France’s preeminent intellectual and situates the Evergreen Review at a moment of emergence for the post-Stalinist left. Indeed, Sartre’s article is one of the first to introduce the term “New Left,” only then coalescing as an identifiable political slogan in France and England, to readers in the United States. Grove Press and the Evergreen Review forged a crucial component of their political identity through their alliances with the New Left. This issue also features the first American publication of two works by Samuel Beckett, the short story “Dante and the Lobster” and the poetry selection “Echo’s Bones.” All of Beckett’s major work over the next decade was introduced and advertised in the Evergreen Review. Finally, this issue of the review features University of California (UC), Berkeley English professor Mark Schorer’s essay “On Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which became his introduction to the landmark Grove Press edition of the suppressed erotic classic.
San Francisco
Grove complemented its reputation for publishing the latest in European avantgarde literature by tapping into the artistic scenes then emerging in the postwar United States. Rosset’s key partner in this endeavor was Donald Allen, whom he had met in a publishing class at Columbia taught by the legendary Random House editor Saxe Commins. Allen coedited the first two volumes of the Evergreen Review, as well as The New American Poetry, brought out by Grove in 1960 and widely heralded, both then and now, as a key event for postwar American literature. Allen was a consummate editor, translator, and networker. Like Rosset, he was in the Pacific during the war. Upon returning, he attended graduate school at UC Berkeley, where he became involved with the Berkeley Renaissance. A taciturn midwesterner, gay, and something of a loner, Allen rarely showed up at the Grove offices. According to Rosset, “He couldn’t stand anybody getting near him, emotionally,” and “he wouldn’t say hello to anybody” when he came to the office. Seaver’s initial impression was that Allen was “scholarly, aloof, diffident.”49 Herman Graf, by contrast, called Allen, “brilliant, enigmatic, mysterious … and playful.” He was crucial to the operations of the press and the initial design of the Evergreen Review, which he saw as “a kind of quarterly sized magazine that would have a longer shelf-life than the ordinary magazine.”50 In those groundbreaking first two volumes, Rosset and Allen reinforced Grove’s reputation for obtaining the latest in European avantgarde literature, publishing Beckett’s early poetry and prose, Ionesco’s “There Is No AvantGarde Theater,” Robbe-Grillet’s “A Fresh Start for Fiction,” and Artaud’s “No More Masterpieces”; alongside these pioneers of the Parisian avantgarde were American poets such as Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Creeley, and Denise Levertov, as well as early prose by Jack Kerouac. The Evergreen Review was also a prominent venue for abstract expressionism, including one issue with a photograph of Jackson Pollock on the cover and a reminiscence by Clement Greenberg, and another featuring Frank O’Hara’s interview with Franz Kline.
Allen was also instrumental in Grove’s acquisition of novelists Jack Kerouac and John Rechy. He had been interested in Kerouac since editing “Jazz of the Beat Generation,” Kerouac’s contribution to New American Library’s New World Writing. In July 1956, Allen wrote to Rosset that he was “feeling more and more strongly that Kerouac should be published” and therefore had “asked Sterling Lord to let me look at the MSS and present them to you—for I think there is a real chance that his novels would do well enough in Evergreen editions to justify taking him on.”51 Grove ultimately published The Subterraneans, Dr. Sax, Satori in Paris, Lonesome Traveler, Pic, and Mexico City Blues, which, piggybacking on the monumental popularity of On the Road, cemented its association with the Beats. Allen was even more important for Rechy, who had considerable difficulty completing City of Night, his semiautobiographical rendering of the life of a young hustler that became Grove’s fastest-selling novel ever, affirming its commitment to the emergent genre of gay literature. Allen encouraged and assisted Rechy throughout the three-year process, publishing excerpts in the Evergreen Review and nominating him for the Formentor Prize.
In the late 1950s, Allen relocated to San Francisco, where he operated as Grove’s West Coast representative throughout the 1960s. His West Coast connections would be crucial to the Evergreen Review’s legendary second issue on the San Francisco scene, the only issue Grove ever reprinted. Kenneth Rexroth introduced this issue, which featured poetry by Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and, most famously, the first nationally distributed appearance of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (a mildly expurgated version, since Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poets edition was still on trial for obscenity in San Francisco). Allen sent a copy to Grove, which Jordan read aloud to Rosset over lunch at the Cedar Tavern. After he finished, he looked up and said, “This is the most radical thing I’ve read in America since I’ve come here.” In his introduction, Rexroth calls the poem “a confession of faith of a generation that is going to be running the world in 1965 and 1975” and offers a “modest prophecy” that “Ginsberg will be the first genuinely popular, genuine poet in over a generation.”52 The first time most of these writers had appeared together in a nationally distributed publication was in this issue, which also features Jack Kerouac’s “October in the Railroad Earth”; over the course of the 1960s almost all of them became closely affiliated with Grove and its house journal. Grove in turn became known as the “Beat” publisher on the literary scene, the go-to resource for the latest products of America’s indigenous avantgardes.
The second issue of the review was a big hit in the Bay Area. As Allen wrote back to Rosset, “Evergreen Review No. 2 went on sale here last Thursday. It is stacked up all over town, even in the cigar stores on the change counter! Ferlinghetti decided (against the advice of his lawyer) to stock it too: he’s put it in the window and told me he sold 40 copies in the first two hours.”53 Jordan, who in his many sales trips across the country had helped build Grove’s reputation on the West Coast, convinced Rosset that they should capitalize on the popularity of this issue by organizing an “Evergreen Book Week” in the spring of 1958 in coordination with the legendary Bay Area bookseller Fred Cody in Berkeley. The series of events scheduled over a three-week period was kicked off by a full-page ad in the Daily Californian headed “Cody’s Salutes Evergreen Books” and announcing that “evergreen books are a vital force on campus today.”54 The events of the first week—which included performances of Ionesco’s Victims of Duty and The Lesson; a preview performance of Beckett’s Endgame; two radio shows; numerous panel discussions with critics, editors, and English professors on both the UC Berkeley and Stanford campuses; and readings by Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Robert Duncan—amply illustrate how Grove worked not only to associate its imprint with the latest in experimental literature but also to establish itself as a cultural force in the communities that both produced and consumed this literature in the United States, communities that would soon become epicenters of student revolt and countercultural revolution. As Rosset told me, the Bay Area “just adopted us, right from
the beginning.”55
In their news release for the second issue of the Evergreen Review, Grove announced that the writers included in the volume are “fast turning the Bay Area into the nation’s cultural capital.”56 The events of the Evergreen Book Week explicitly interrogated the idea of a “San Francisco scene,” with lectures and panel discussions on such topics as “The Art of Writing in the San Francisco Bay Area,” “Prose Writing in the San Francisco Bay Area,” and “The San Francisco Renaissance: Fact or Fraud?” All the readings were by authors who had been published in the special issue. By combining these readings and discussions with performances of works by Ionesco and Beckett, Grove helped highlight the affinities between the European and American avantgardes. Furthermore, the inclusion of editors, publishers, and professors along with authors on the scheduled panel discussions encouraged participants, mostly faculty and students, to understand the avantgarde as a cultural network, not just a list of titles.