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Since Beckett couldn’t come up with a single title for the trilogy, Grove simply presents it on the jacket cover in yellow as Three Novels by Samuel Beckett to the lower left with the individual titles, also in yellow, to the lower right. The Black Cat paperback, which sold more than sixty thousand copies in its first five years, features simply Three Novels by Samuel Beckett in black, followed by Molloy in blue, Malone Dies in green, and The Unnamable in blue. Over the course of these serial iterations, Grove used all three of Kuhlman’s styles—abstract, photographic, and typographic—to package Beckett’s trilogy. And Beckett in turn ballasted Grove’s reputation, grounding and legitimating the modernist standards that dictated its choices of international authors. His austere gaze appears authoritatively in many of its ads, and his name, conveniently early in the alphabet, always fronts any list of its titles. The combination is epitomized by the covers for the collected works that Grove issued in the wake of Beckett’s Nobel Prize, all of which sport the now-classic photo in different colors.
Figure 6. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for Molloy (1955).
Figure 7. Grove Press catalog cover (Fall 1958). (GPC)
Beckett also provided a model for the practice of translation that was so central, philosophically and economically, to Grove’s international enterprise. Indeed, early correspondence confirms that Rosset should be given some credit for convincing Beckett to enter into the business of selftranslation. In his first, and frequently cited, letter to Beckett, Rosset states emphatically, “If you would accept my first choice as translator the whole thing would be easily settled. That choice of course being you.”34 Beckett responded that he was willing to tackle Godot but that, concerning the novels, he would “greatly prefer not to undertake the job.”35 In his recently published memoirs, Seaver affirms Rosset’s role in encouraging Beckett to take up the task, quoting him as saying, “I always felt Beckett had to be his own translator … but he resisted for a long time.”36
As Paul Auster admiringly asserts in his “Editor’s Note” to the Grove Centenary Edition of Beckett’s complete works, “Beckett’s renderings of his own work are never literal, word-by-word transcriptions. They are free, highly inventive adaptations of the original text—or, perhaps more accurately, ‘repatriations’ from one language to the other, from one culture to the other. In effect, he wrote every work twice, and each version bears his own indelible mark, a style so distinctive it resists all attempts at imitation.”37 Auster’s shift from “adaptation” to “repatriation,” from “language” to “culture,” can be understood to indicate a certain “cultural turn” in the conventional understandings of translation, but he also invests the implied pluralism of this terminology with a model of modernist mastery indicated by the “indelible mark” of Beckett’s authorship. Grove’s translators were similarly split between an emergent cultural understanding of linguistic difference and a residual modernist understanding of literary value.
The difficult work of Alain Robbe-Grillet also solicited critical elucidation; unlike Beckett, Robbe-Grillet was eager to supply some of this elucidation himself. Robbe-Grillet claimed that he wrote the essays collected in For a New Novel because “I was not satisfied to be recognized, enjoyed, studied by the specialists who had encouraged me from the start; I was eager to write for a ‘reading public,’ I resented being considered a ‘difficult’ author,” which situates him within the mandate for popularizing modernism that also motivated his American publisher.38 His agent Georges Borchardt wrote to Grove about what became Robbe-Grillet’s most popular book in the United States: “la jalousie has not yet been seen by any American publisher. I think Grove is just right for it, and it is just right for Grove.”39 And Grove indeed worked hard to promote both Robbe-Grillet’s novels and his explanations of their technique, publishing a number of the essays in the Evergreen Review that were later collected in For a New Novel. The first, “A Future for the Novel,” specifies the degree to which the “New Novel” implies a “New World”: “Not only do we no longer consider the world as our own, our private property, designed according to our needs and readily domesticated, but we no longer even believe in its ‘depth.’”40 Robbe-Grillet’s abandonment of “depth” allied his literary program with the visual arts, in particular film, to which he increasingly turned in the 1960s after the success of Last Year at Marienbad. Two issues later the Evergreen Review featured Roland Barthes’s seminal essay on Robbe-Grillet, in which he affirmed that the author “requires only one mode of perception: the sense of sight.”41
Barthes’s essay formed one of the multiple paratexts inserted into the combined volume of Jealousy and In the Labyrinth that Grove published as a Black Cat paperback in 1965. According to Rosset, Robbe-Grillet, who had himself worked as an editor at Éditions de Minuit, had encouraged this repackaging of his most acclaimed novel during his US lecture tour, which the author claimed consisted of “forty universities and forty-three cocktail parties.”42 After the visit, Rosset wrote to Borchardt, “When Robbe-Grillet was here, we decided to do our own small format Evergreen containing jealousy and in the labyrinth, plus a section of critical material by and about Robbe-Grillet, specifically aimed at the college market. This is what Robbe-Grillet wants, and so do we. We hope for an enlargement of the audience for Robbe-Grillet in this manner.”43 This academically pitched Black Cat massmarket version, appearing in the same year as For a New Novel, in fact features three critical introductions: Barthes’s essay, a piece by the French critic Anne Minor, and one by University of Chicago professor Bruce Morrissette. These essays are followed by a map of the colonial villa in which the novel’s action takes place, accompanied by a detailed legend, orienting and emphasizing the spatial logic of the narrative to follow. The texts of the two novels are then supplemented, as stated on the back cover, by “a bibliography of writings by and about the author.” The back cover also prominently quotes an American reviewer’s prediction that “Robbe-Grillet will take his place in world literature as a successor of Balzac and Proust.” This paratextually packed “college” version of Robbe-Grillet’s most famous novel, which sold more than forty-five thousand copies over the course of the 1960s, affirms the degree to which his work found a home in the American academy. It is not surprising, then, that Howard, Robbe-Grillet’s American translator, also translated seminal work by Barthes and Michel Foucault, situating Robbe-Grillet in the advance guard for the army of French theorists who invaded the American university in the coming decades. Robbe-Grillet himself became a professor at New York University in 1971.
The final figure in Grove’s triumvirate of Parisian late modernist literary innovators is Jean Genet, who modeled the passage from aesthetic to political revolution that informs the larger story of Grove Press in the 1960s. On the one hand, Genet was widely perceived, in the frequently excerpted words of Alex Szogyi’s review of Our Lady of the Flowers for the New York Times Book Review, as “the foremost prince in the lineage of French poètes maudits.”44 Celebrated as heir to Baudelaire and Proust, Genet entered the Englishspeaking world with impeccable literary credentials, and his novels, once published, were widely celebrated as modernist masterpieces. On the other hand, the itinerant delinquency of Genet’s youth, coupled with the impassioned political militancy of his later career, turned him into something of a stateless diplomat, as he leveraged his literary celebrity into a tireless advocacy for the oppressed. As a figure of sexual dissidence who persistently associated himself with the causes of ethnic and racial minorities, especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Genet anticipated the politics of difference that emerged from the social upheavals of the 1960s. More than any other single Grove author, his career exemplifies the complex convergence of the aesthetic, sexual, and political meanings of “revolution” that linked Grove’s early investment in European modernism with its later commitment to liberation movements around the world.
The philosophical framework within which this convergence was understood was resolut
ely existentialist, as Genet emerged onto the world stage in the enormous shadow of what Gerard Genette has called “the most imposing, or most inhibiting, example of philosophical support for a literary work,” Sartre’s monumental Saint Genet: Comedienne et martyr. Sartre’s work began as a preface to Gallimard’s edition of Genet’s collected works but turned into a six-hundred-plus-page tome issued by George Braziller in the United States in 1961 as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, the same year Grove brought out its hardcover edition of Our Lady of the Flowers.45 Saint Genet, from which Grove excerpted its prefaces to The Maids, Our Lady of the Flowers, and The Thief’s Journal, ensured that Genet’s development from thief to prisoner to poet to playwright to political radical, as well as the homosexual identity that subtends this development, would be understood dialectically, as willed appropriations of and identifications with an entire series of “others” against which the Western bourgeoisie defined itself.
Genet’s entry into the Englishspeaking world was also enabled by a less celebrated figure, Bernard Frechtman, the American expatriate who translated all his major work, as well as much of Sartre’s enormous corpus, including Saint Genet. Frechtman, a brilliant but emotionally unstable man with unrealized literary aspirations of his own, not only translated Genet’s difficult work into English but also operated as his literary agent until their break in the mid-1960s, after which he descended into a deep depression that ended in suicide in 1967. Prior to their break, Frechtman had been a tireless advocate of Genet’s genius, writing to Rosset in the early 1950s that “Genet—I haven’t the slightest doubt about this—is the greatest living writer.”46 Frechtman also specified that translating Genet presented particular challenges: “You do realize that translating Genet is not like translating an ordinary book. I’m generally a very fast worker and have a certain routine for handling translations. But works by Genet, as you well know, are another matter. I cannot stand outside them, as I can when translating ‘just another book.’ I must, after a fashion, become the book.”47 Frechtman inserts himself as yet another double in the narcissistic hall of mirrors that constitutes Genet’s Sartrian universe.
Significantly, Frechtman’s break with Genet was precipitated by a dispute over their respective share in the revenues from the paperback deal that Grove made with Bantam Books in the mid-1960s. Rosset had delayed publishing Genet’s sexually explicit novels until after his success in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Thus, the plays, written after the novels, were both published and performed in the United States before the novels became available. Even after his triumph with Lady Chatterley, Rosset was cautious with the explicit homosexuality of Genet’s prose, first excerpting Our Lady of the Flowers in the Evergreen Review in 1961 and then issuing it as a hardcover, and a Readers’ Subscription choice, in 1963. After this hardcover edition received the unanimous acclaim of American critics such as Susan Sontag, Richard Wright, and Wallace Fowlie, Grove sold the paperback rights in 1964 to Bantam, which reissued it as a Bantam Modern Classic in 1968, by which time it had gone through five print runs. This delayed publication meant that Genet’s novels, while written in the 1940s, did not fully enter into the American cultural field until the 1960s, when they were rapidly canonized and widely circulated.
Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Genet represent the long twilight of the European male modernist as authoritative genius. All three men remain best known for their early work, which presents masculine protagonists in situations of impotence, confusion, and constraint, whose only dignity is granted through the stylistic virtuosity of their creators. While these thematic obsessions were frequently honored with celebrations of universality, they were also understood, with equal frequency, as representing the exhaustion not only of the modernist mandate to make it new but also of the entire Enlightenment project of epistemological mastery. The sense that the West had exhausted its ethical authority in the wake of a war that witnessed both the Holocaust and the atom bomb deeply informed Grove’s investment in other cultural traditions. Its selection of these traditions was in turn informed by America’s triumphant emergence from the war and the demands of its rapidly expanding university population for knowledge of the world the war had created.
Asia
In early 1953, Donald Allen began negotiations with Donald Keene, whom he had met and befriended in the Pacific during the war, over the publication of an anthology of Japanese literature. Allen described his vision to Keene as “a fairly large book, as complete as possible within such limits, and we’d like to present fairly long selections from the best Japanese writing together with informative prefatory notes that would somehow sketch in the history of Japanese literature. We aim to put together a book that will have some value as a textbook, we hope, but that will also appeal to the general reader.”48 Allen and Rosset also hoped that Keene could recruit Arthur Waley, by then the éminence grise of Oriental studies in the Anglophone world and translator of numerous works of classical Japanese and Chinese literature. But Waley, a “rather crotchety gentleman,” according to Keene,49 declined, telling Keene, “I don’t feel inclined to come in on the anthology business.”50
Keene, however, was enthusiastic about the anthology business. Like Rosset and Allen, he had become interested in East Asian culture from his experiences in World War II. Keene was a Columbia undergraduate studying with Mark Van Doren when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Since he could not imagine himself “charging with a bayonet or dropping bombs from an airplane,” he decided to train as a translator and interpreter at the US Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado, after which he honed his language skills as an intelligence officer in the Pacific.51 After the war, he returned to Columbia to pursue graduate study in Japanese literature. He received his PhD in 1949 and taught Japanese literature at Columbia for the next fifty years, founding the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture and retiring only recently as the Columbia University Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature. Over the course of his long and illustrious career, he became one of the world’s most respected scholars and translators of Japanese literature, and one of only three who were not Japanese to receive the title of Bunka Koro-sha (Person of Cultural Merit).
In 1955, Rosset and Keene decided to split the anthology in two: the first volume covered “the earliest era to the mid-nineteenth century,” and the second was devoted to modern Japanese literature of the last century. In the preface to the second volume Keene felt compelled to account for the fact that both anthologies—one covering more than one thousand years; the other, less than eighty—were the same length. According to Keene, the “disproportion is largely to be explained in terms of the amount of literature which has poured from the printing presses in recent times.”52 In the introduction, Keene correlates this groundswell of literary production to the opening of Japan to Western influence, when “Japanese literature moved from idle quips directed at the oddities of the West to Symbolist poetry, from the thousandth-told tale of the gay young blade and the harlots to the complexities of the psychological novel.”53 Keene concludes with the prediction that, “as European traditions are finally absorbed, not only by the novels but by the drama and poetry as well, we can expect that the amazing renaissance of literature in Japan during the past half-century or so will continue to be one of the wonders of the modern literary world.”54 Keene’s correlation of Japanese literary modernity with the absorption of “European traditions” indicates the degree to which the standards of Western modernism informed the developing canon of world literature in the postwar era. As he affirms in his introduction, Japan, like the rest of the world, had learned that “the industrial plant, democracy, economics, Symbolist poetry, and abstract painting all go together.”55 To visually affirm this series of equivalences, Grove used one of Kuhlman’s abstract cover designs for the anthology (Figure 8).
The timing of Grove’s publication of Keene’s anthology was felicitous, as the newly formed Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations of the Modern Language
Association had been lamenting the absence of affordable translations of Asian literature. In his review of the anthology for the conference’s journal, Literature East and West, Glen Baxter of Harvard called it “the most satisfying anthology of the literature of any Asian country” and noted, in particular, that “thanks to UNESCO support Professor Keene has been in a position to decide what should be translated and then seek especially qualified persons to undertake it.”56 Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Grove published and distributed numerous translations and studies of Asian literature and culture, frequently in collaboration with UNESCO. In addition to translations by Keene and Waley, Grove published studies of Zen Buddhism, both by Japanese scholars such as Daisetz T. Suzuki and by American popularizers such as Alan Watts. Grove also became the American distributor for the Londonbased Wisdom of the East series, which had been founded in 1904 but received a renewed mandate in the postwar era. As its general editor, J. L. Cranmer-Byng, proclaimed, “Two great wars have done much to alter the map of the world and as a result, Asia is now assuming an important place in international affairs.” Hewing close to the UNESCO mandate, Cranmer-Byng argues that this new situation requires that Westerners develop a familiarity with Asian culture, since “it is only through a sympathetic appreciation of Asia’s cultural inheritance that foreigners will be able to … realize how great an extent their religion, philosophy, and poetry and art still mould the outlook of the peoples of Asia today.”57 In the late 1950s Grove also formed the East and West Book Club, offering a choice between The Golden Bowl and The Anthology of Japanese Literature free with a membership.