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  As William Preston, Edward Herman, and Herbert Schiller confirm in their history of the vexed relations between UNESCO and the United States, “UNESCO’s origin had been a utopian yet necessary invention in international cooperation, and the attempted elevation of educational and cultural relations to the forefront of world diplomacy was equally adventurous. Both represented the growing intensity of international contacts, as technology, communications, and economic interchange reduced the distance between the world’s diverse populations.”8 Preston, Herman, and Schiller are predominantly concerned with the role of mass media in this globalizing process, but UNESCO was also heavily invested in promoting and enhancing the distribution of books around the world. In 1956, it published R. E. Barker’s study of the international book trade, Books for All; and ten years later, Robert Escarpit’s The Book Revolution, which opens with the claim that, due to innovations in paperback publishing, “over the last decade everything has been transformed—books, readers and literature.”9 In subsidizing and circulating studies such as Barker’s and Escarpit’s, UNESCO hoped to harness the energies and technologies of the paperback revolution in the service of cultural exchange.

  Furthermore, as Christopher Pearson affirms in his fascinating study of UNESCO’s architectural and artistic heritage, “The pan-national idealism that underlay its institutional activities found an immediate parallel in the ideologies of modern art and architecture” that informed its design and many of its cultural policies.10 UNESCO, in other words, emerged at the “confluence of two ideas—international modernism and international cooperation.”11 In this sense, UNESCO’s location in Paris is equally significant. As is clear from the published notes of Luther Evans, UNESCO’s fourth director general, reporting on the meetings of the American delegation to the 1945 constituent conference, a consensus quickly developed that if the United Nations was to be located in the United States, UNESCO would have to be located elsewhere, and Paris, as a “natural cultural center,” quickly rose to the top of the list.12 When the British proposed the French capital as headquarters of the nascent organization, “Senator [James] Murray then went all out for Paris. Others followed in the same vein—Belgium, Mexico, China, Colombia, etc. The French were highly elated.”13 Aesthetically integrated into the cityscape, UNESCO would help Paris maintain its centrality to the circulation and consecration of culture during the period of decolonization.

  Literary authorship in this cultural constellation attained a new stature of diplomatic statesmanship, conferring a mantle of ethical authority on figures of internationally recognized literary achievement. The modernist “exile” of the author, which between the wars had been resolutely apolitical and solitary (if not downright reactionary), attained a diplomatic significance as literary figures, officially or informally, took on the burdens of UNESCO’s mandate to heal the world through cultural exchange. A number of important Grove authors during this period, including Nobel Prize winners Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda, were themselves diplomats who were able to leverage their literary capital into political influence on the international stage.

  To facilitate its vision of world literature, Grove employed a veritable army of translators who played a crucial role in negotiating the tensions between cultural elitism and cultural pluralism that informed its title list. As Casanova affirms, translation is a form of consecration that operates in two directions, depending on the relation between source and target languages. On the one hand, it is a mechanism whereby literary capital from the European center, principally Paris, can be diverted into the periphery; on the other, it enables texts written in peripheral languages to be recognized by literary authorities in the center. Grove worked in both directions, siphoning literary prestige from Paris to New York by translating figures such as Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Genet but also expanding international recognition for work written in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Richard Howard, Bernard Frechtman, Ben Belitt, Lysander Kemp, and a host of other translators, many of whom were poets themselves and most of whom found their professional home in the American university system, not only translated key authors for Grove but also acted as liaisons and consultants in the international literary network that Grove helped build in the postwar era.

  Most of Grove’s translators can be positioned within what Lawrence Venuti, in his contentious history The Translator’s Invisibility, analyzes as the modernist regime in Englishlanguage translation, which “seeks to establish the aesthetic autonomy of the translated text” through assimilating it to the modernist criteria of its target language.14 Venuti’s somewhat selective history mentions none of Grove’s translators, but Paul Blackburn, the Poundian disciple who receives pride of place in The Translator’s Invisibility, was well aware of Grove’s importance when, in a 1962 article for the Nation, he ambivalently proclaims, “Now that colonialism has become an anachronism politically … it is as though we are witnessing the sack of world literature … by the American publishing business.”15 Citing a number of Grove’s authors and translators, as well as the Mexican issue of the Evergreen Review that is discussed in detail later, Blackburn is cautiously optimistic, averring that “the mutual insemination of cultures is an important step toward what our policy makers think of as international understanding.”16

  Grove’s cultivation of an international title list coincided with its innovation of the quality paperback, a conjunction that affected the cultural understandings of both categories. On the one hand, world literature, while maintaining the scholarly imprimatur of its translators and introducers, would be inexpensive and accessible, and Grove’s translators explicitly targeted a broad Englishspeaking American public. On the other hand, Grove’s Evergreen Originals took on the worldly and cosmopolitan cast of the contents they frequently contained. Thus, over the course of the 1950s, Grove established an identity as a source of affordable access to the latest developments in world literature. Kuhlman’s abstract expressionist cover designs provided aesthetic continuity for the various literary products Grove offered. By packaging a wide variety of titles from all over the world under a uniform style of aesthetic innovation already associated with the postwar ascendance of the United States, Grove’s Evergreen Originals, in their very format, accommodated the cultural pluralism of world literature to the cultural elitism of late modernism. And Grove aggressively marketed its international titles to an academic audience, announcing in one flyer circulated to colleges and universities that “Evergreen books have a particular interest for Humanities and World Literature courses. They represent an unusually wide range, from ancient classics of China to the latest novels from France” and boasting “the greatest number of individual titles being used this past year by Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Los Angeles.”17

  Two anecdotes, both set in Paris in the late 1950s, exemplify the network whose general shape I’ve just outlined. The first involves Khuswant Singh, the Sikh author and diplomat who in 1954 became a specialist in Indian affairs for the Department of Mass Communications at UNESCO. In 1955, Rosset, apparently not patient enough to acquire authors and then wait for them to win international prizes, decided to establish his own “Grove Press Contest for Indian Writers” in order “to further cultural relations between the United States and India,” with an award of one thousand dollars to be given to “the best literary work in English to be submitted by a citizen of India.”18 The press received more than 250 submissions, from which a panel of two Indian and two American judges selected Singh’s Mano Majra, a novel focusing on the violence and unrest in a small town on the newly established India-Pakistan border.19

  The ensuing negotiations over the award and the novel’s publication conveniently illustrate the institutional linkages through which Grove built its international reputation. Upon hearing that he had received the award, Singh wrote to Rosset, “I would very much like the presentation to be made by my own Director General, Dr. Luther Evans … It would do my ego a lot of go
od.”20 Rosset promptly wrote to Evans, the former librarian of Congress, who agreed to present the award, writing that “Mr. Singh’s work will contribute to increasing mutual knowledge among peoples of one another’s ways of life, which is one of the fundamental aims of UNESCO.”21 The award was presented to Singh on March 18, 1955, in the Louis XIV room of UNESCO House in Paris.

  In his letter accepting the award, Singh suggested changing the title to Train to Pakistan, calling it a “cheaper title” that will “tempt reviewers to review, buyers to buy and even film companies to look upon it as a possibility. A train is a Freudian symbol which arouses a response at once.”22 Rosset preferred the original title, and the novel was initially published under both titles, though Train to Pakistan is the one that stuck (a movie was eventually made in 1998). Rosset also quickly secured translation deals with Gallimard and Verlag and granted British publication rights to Chatto and Windus. Grove then aggressively publicized the text as a “prize-winning novel” in both India and the United States. The story of Grove’s acquisition and publication of Singh’s novel economically illustrates the alignments between literary prestige, as conferred by the proliferating system of awards, and cultural exchange, as represented by UNESCO, that shaped the network in which Grove’s vision of world literature circulated.

  The second anecdote involves Richard Howard, the prize-winning American poet who translated key authors for Grove, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Fernando Arrabal, and André Breton. In January 1959, Rosset sent Howard on a trip to Paris with an illuminating list of tasks. For the Evergreen Review, Howard was to solicit an article by Roland Barthes on “the current situation of the intellectual in France” and one by René Étiemble on “Red China.” He was to study current productions of Arrabal’s plays, with particular attention to “his use of the contemporary jazz idiom.” He was to contact editors at Éditions de Minuit, Éditions du Seuil, and Gallimard concerning their latest projects. He was to visit Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, partly to check up on the progress of the Lolita Nightclub (Girodias had achieved considerable notoriety for publishing Nabokov’s novel as part of his Traveler’s Companion series in 1955). And he was to look for a cartoonist.23

  Howard’s letters to Rosset provide insight into the formation of the network whereby Grove obtained most of its early access to an emergent international literary canon. He exults that he has “never had so many invitations to dinner, to lunch, to drinks, to talk … in all [his] life.” He reports to Rosset that, based on his visits with Parisian publishers, “we have every reason to feel that the intellectual richesse of France will be showered upon Grove Press.” And he exclaims that, in Paris, “Evergreen Review and Grove Press are perhaps the best known American manifestations of The Higher Culture.” Finally, he notes that “there is a huge Jackson Pollock show [that] Frank O’Hara was here to hang.”24

  But Howard’s most remarkable encounter is with Samuel Beckett, to whom Rosset had written a letter of introduction. Like almost everyone who writes about Beckett personally, Howard was smitten: “I was expecting that fierce, beautiful head that you use on your catalogue, but nothing had prepared me for the gentleness of his voice, the warmth of his welcome, and the fascination of his presence.” The two, not surprisingly, discuss translation, with Beckett affirming that “he does not translate, he creates.” Howard then recounts a remarkable story Beckett told him of a visit in 1940 to Valery Larbaud, the French author and translator of Ulysses under whose “patronage” Casanova places The World Republic of Letters. Larbaud was paralyzed as a result of illness, and Howard sees in this visit the genesis of the narrator of Beckett’s Unnamable: “Surely the vision of that motionless, ignoble trunk babbling incoherent syllables … must have caught somewhere within Beckett’s fierce head, his formidable heart,” Howard provocatively speculates.25

  Europe

  The modernist credentials of Beckett—apprentice to Joyce, critic of Proust, continuously compared to Kafka—were impeccable. Rosset shrewdly anticipated that, like his modernist forebears, Beckett would make a good long-term investment. By 1955, he was already able to announce to Beckett, with whom he had become friends, “I am very happy to see this bubbling up of interest and my strong feeling is that your work is going to be more and more known as time goes by. There definitely is an underground interest here, the kind of interest that slowly generates steam and has a lasting effect.”26 In fact, Beckett was canonized with such unprecedented alacrity that Leo Bersani felt the need to ask, in his review of Martin Esslin’s 1965 anthology of critical essays on the author, “Has Beckett … failed to fail?”27 Bersani’s review reveals how the academic industry that rapidly inserted itself into the interpretive space left open by Beckett’s reticence effectively universalized his idiosyncratic literary response to the devastation and destitution of postwar Europe into an expression of “the nature of human existence itself.”28 Bersani finds it “somewhat disconcerting to read so many admiring, undaunted analyses of a significance for which Beckett implicitly expresses only boredom and disgust,”29 but Esslin has a response to this understandable complaint. He asks in his introduction, “If there are no secure meanings to be established … what justification can there be for any critical analyses of such a writer’s work?” He then lists a number of justifications, including elucidating “the numerous allusions” and uncovering “the structural principles.” But both of these justifications rely for their ultimate utility on the third, which makes it the role of the critic to determine “the manner in which [Beckett’s] work is perceived and experienced by his readers.” For Esslin, “the critics’ experience … serves as an exemplar for the reactions of a wider public; they are the sense organs of the main body of readers.” Implicitly referencing the rocky initial reception of Waiting for Godot in the United States, Esslin explains that the critics’ “modes of perception will be followed by the mass of readers, just as in every theater audience it is the few individuals with a keener than average sense of humor who determine whether the jokes in a play will be laughed at at all, and to what extent, by triggering off the chain-reaction of the mass of the audience.”30

  Esslin’s collection displays a cultural confidence in the gatekeeping function of critics that derives, in somewhat circular fashion, not only from their consensus on Beckett’s importance but also from the shared network of venues in which this consensus circulated. Their spectacular success in inverting Beckett’s failure received the ultimate imprimatur three years later, when Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for, in the peculiar syntax of the Swedish Academy, “his writing which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.” Karl Ragnar Gierow’s speech, given in Beckett’s absence, clarified this powerful logic of reversal. Conceding that “the degradation of humanity is a recurrent theme in Beckett’s writing,” Gierow goes on to ask, “What does one get when a negative is printed? A positive, a clarification, with black proving to be the light of day, the parts in deepest shade those which reflect the light source. Its name is fellow-feeling, charity.”31

  Gierow’s photographic metaphor is revealing, since this humanist universalization of Beckett’s themes tended to be reinforced by analogies to the visual arts. Esslin’s collection exhibits this tendency by opening with Beckett’s “Three Dialogues on Painting,” which includes his famous assertion, offered as an appraisal of the Dutch painter Bram Van Velde but widely understood as an instance of critical self-reflection, that, in the absence of any coherent relation between artist and occasion, “to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail.”32 As the essays that follow reveal, it would be left to the critics to establish this relation, frequently by analogy to abstract painting. Grove’s book design reinforced this analogy, as Kuhlman ensured that the covers for the individual paperbacks of Beckett’s postwar trilogy sported the abstract expressionist designs he favored. Thus, the title Molloy jauntily tilts across the top of the cover, in black type framed by an i
rregular strip of white slanted against a black background. In the center, Beckett’s name appears directly below an abstract design drawn in black lines of irregular thickness against a white background. The abstract, typographical, and thematic elements of the cover are brought together by the central geometric line drawing, which depicts two large black X’s framed by adjacent rectangles (Figure 6). The cover reframes themes of constraint—the abstract design suggests bars or grids—as an image of formal free play. As an aesthetic object in and of itself, it encourages more generally the sublimation of thematic meaning into formal abstraction and stylistic virtuosity.

  For the single-volume hardcover edition, offered as an alternate selection by the Readers’ Subscription in 1959, Grove used the photo Howard mentions from its 1958 catalog cover, which appeared in advertisements and promotional materials throughout the 1960s. It features Beckett from the shoulders up, facing front but with his head slightly turned to the right and his forehead slanted forward, giving his direct gaze into the camera a vaguely menacing aura. He’s wearing a turtleneck sweater and a tweed jacket, and his thick hair is combed straight up off his forehead and cut very short above his ears. His left ear is prominently visible, giving the sense that he is listening skeptically. He looks like a highly intelligent, and intimidating, college professor, buttressing Hugh Kenner’s contention, in his early study of Beckett published by Grove in 1961 and excerpted in Esslin’s anthology, that his work “plays ever bleaker homage to the fact that ours is a classroom civilization, and that schoolmasters are the unacknowledged legislators of the race”33 (Figure 7).