Rebel Publisher

by Loren Glass

  Girodias hounded Seaver for royalties on Grove’s edition of Sade, prompting Wainhouse to clarify the informality of their arrangements in Paris: “I used to see Girodias almost daily, and never had need to write to him save when I was out of Paris … Never did I sign a contract with him. Nor did I ever sign anything that, in my opinion, would constitute a proper agreement.”92 Six months later, Seaver impatiently wrote to Girodias: “Til now I have refrained from commenting on your several snide and insulting allusions to my collaboration with Austryn on these two American editions of the works of Sade. But, very frankly, my patience with you and your paranoia is running thin. You have no claim to these Sade translations and you know it. If ever you had done business in a correct and ethical manner, you might have had a claim to many things; but it was your choice not to.”93 The contrast between the literary underground, in which work was frequently done for hire and copyright claims were at best clouded, and the publishing mainstream, in which intellectual property claims were codified, is well illustrated by Girodias’s inability to capitalize on his early role in making Sade available to an Englishspeaking public.

  Seaver had initially envisioned a one-volume edition, but Wainhouse convinced him to adopt the more ambitious three-volume plan. In the June 1965 issue of Evergreen Review, Seaver laid the groundwork for the imminent publication of the first volume with an essay entitled “An Anniversary Unnoticed,” juxtaposing the much publicized 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth with the unacknowledged 150-year anniversary of Sade’s death. For Seaver, Sade was as important as Shakespeare, and the essay places him in the company of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, Joyce, Lawrence, and Miller, as great writers whose books have outlived their initial condemnation to become literary classics and further reminds readers that “Swinburne, Baudelaire, Lamartine, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Lautreamont, and Kafka kept one or more of Sade’s major works at hand, to read and contemplate.”94 His ultimate hope was that the work of Sade could be made available to more than these “fortunate few.”

  To realize this hope, Grove sent a promotional letter to selected customers offering the first volume of its collection at a discounted price with a free ten-day examination period and a money-back guarantee. The letter, signed by Alexander Rends but probably written at least partially by Seaver, calls Sade “the most talked-about, controversial, and infamous writer who ever lived” and places his work in the company of Ulysses, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Miller’s Tropics, as “famous classics of world literature” that have “been unavailable in their complete form to readers in this country.”95 Conceding that Sade is “one of the best known” but “also one of the least read authors of all time,” Grove offers to rectify this asymmetry with the publication of its “Huge ‘First American Edition.’” And, echoing Seaver’s article quite closely, the letter proudly announces that it is time “to give American readers the first opportunity to make a fair assessment of this writer—the man who has been simultaneously condemned as a ‘devil’ and as the ‘connoisseur of horror,’ and hailed as ‘the Divine Marquis’ and ‘the freest mind that ever existed.’” Possibly as a sop to Girodias, the letter offers to bundle the volume with The Olympia Reader, which is described as offering “scintillating excerpts from 40 books, most of which have never before been published in the United States … books that have had long subterranean careers and sold only ‘under the counter’ at exorbitant black market prices.”

  As this letter affirms in its detailed description of the volume’s contents, Grove’s edition of Sade is particularly noteworthy for its extensive paratextual apparatus. The first volume (published in hardcover in 1965 and then in massmarket paperback in 1966), which includes Justine and Philosophy in the Bedroom along with other minor works, features two scholarly introductions: one by Jean Paulhan, whose membership in l’Académie française is prominently noted on the front cover and who compares Sade’s work to “the sacred books of the great religions”;96 and one by Maurice Blanchot, the French novelist and literary theorist, who makes a “discreet request, addressed to all Sade’s publishers present and future: when dealing with Sade, at least respect the scandalous aspect.”97 These introductions are followed by a forty-eight-page chronology of Sade’s life. The selections themselves are then followed by an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary work. The back cover quotes authors such as Baudelaire (“it is necessary to keep coming back to Sade, again and again”), Swinburne (“this Great Man to whom I am indebted”), and Apollinaire (“the freest spirit that has ever lived”).

  The second volume (released in hardcover in 1966 and in massmarket paperback in 1967)—most of which is taken up by what Seaver and Wainwright call Sade’s “masterpiece,” the wildly explicit and unfinished comprehensive catalog of sexual atrocities practiced by an incestuously constituted circle of libertine aristocrats upon a carefully selected harem of boys and girls at an isolated chateau, The 120 Days of Sodom—also includes two introductions. One is a revised translation of Beauvoir’s “Must We Burn Sade?,” which proclaims that Sade “deserves to be hailed as a great moralist”;98 and the other is Sade scholar Pierre Klossowski’s “Nature as Destructive Principle,” an excerpt from his seminal study Sade mon prochain, in which he notes that Sade’s work resembles “the analysis of evil for evil’s sake which we find in Saint Augustine’s Confessions.”99 Its back cover quotes prominent American academics praising the publication of the first volume, including Wallace Fowlie (“a courageous publication”), Henri Peyre (“an event of importance in American publishing”), and Harry T. Moore (“it is highly important that we have this authentic and definitive edition”). As it did the first volume, Grove promoted the second aggressively, issuing a lengthy newsletter announcing its publication of what is called “Sade’s Masterpiece—the Cornerstone of His Life Work.” When Irving Kristol at the MidCentury Book Club refused to offer it as a selection, Rosset bought the club and hired its president, Myron Shapiro, boosting the membership of the Evergreen Club to nearly one hundred thousand members. The third volume, published in both hardcover and paperback in 1968, features only the massive novel Juliette. All three specify on the back cover along the bottom border that “the sale of this book is limited to adults,” and the hardcover editions were all offered through the Evergreen Book Club at discounted prices.

  These extensive paratexts describe a migration from European to American protocols and centers of consecration. Sade begins as the dirty secret of Francophone modernism, lauded by such luminaries as Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Bataille, and Blanchot but generally unavailable to the common reader in French or English until after World War II, when Jean-Jacques Pauvert began to publish unexpurgated versions of his most notorious work. Then, with Olympia Press and the Merlin collective as a conduit from France to the United States, Grove in effect domesticated the Sadean aura, first through the herculean efforts of Seaver and Wainhouse and then with the imprimatur of established American academics such as Fowlie and Peyre. Grove’s Sade, in other words, is the inevitable culmination of the canonization of European modernism in the American academy.

  He also represents the apotheosis of a belief in the subversive power of writing that was both activated and vitiated by the unopposed publication of his work. The biographical and critical material incorporated into the Grove Press volumes all emphasize that Sade did not truly begin to write until he was imprisoned and that, not unlike Genet, his obsessive writerly regime during his lengthy incarcerations can be understood as a vengeful and vindictive assault on the system that condemned him. Grove fetishizes this writing with facsimiles of his script on the endpapers of all three volumes (Figure 26). The first volume also includes facsimiles of his letters (from Seaver’s private collection) as well as the order of the minister of the interior forbidding him access to “pencils, pens, ink, or paper.”

  This fetishization of writing correlates with a conviction about the effectivity of reading. In his account of translating Sade, published in the
Evergreen Review in 1966, Wainhouse affirms, “Sometimes it happens that reading becomes something else, something excessive and grave; it sometimes happens that a book reads its reader through.”100 In their translator’s foreword to the first volume, Seaver and Wainhouse somewhat evasively elaborated: “Whether or not it is dangerous to read Sade is a question that easily becomes lost in a multitude of others and has never been settled except by those whose arguments are rooted in the conviction that reading leads to trouble. So it does; so it must, for reading leads to nowhere but to questions.”101

  Figure 26. Facsimile of Sade’s script on the endpapers of The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (1965).

  In the postwar era, these questions tended to involve the metaphysical and historical extensions of the problem of evil. The publisher’s preface, which follows the translator’s foreword, confirms, “Now, twenty years after the end of the world’s worst holocaust, after the burial of that master of applied evil, Adolph Hitler, we believe there is added reason to disinter Sade.”102 Wilson in his New Yorker piece had already noted that “the atrocities [Sade] loves to describe do not today seem as outrageous as they did at first,”103 and Albert Fowler affirms that “it would be difficult to conjure up a holocaust more to the Marquis’s liking than the bombing of Hiroshima or a threat more suited to his imagination than that of the hydrogen bomb.”104 Using the vocabulary elaborated by John Peters in Courting the Abyss, one can understand the postwar Sade as an “abyss-artist” whose entire philosophic and aesthetic program is based in moral negation, and Seaver and Wainhouse as “abyss-redeemers” who “recognize the peril of the fiery deluge but believe that (vicariously) fathoming hell’s lessons justifies the risk of the descent and trust that enlightenment will follow their forays.”105 The constant coupling of liberty and evil in the proliferating metadiscourse about Sade in the 1960s situates Grove’s publication of his work within the larger framework of the postwar crisis of liberalism, whose adherents had been forced by the Holocaust and the atomic bomb to face the nihilism that had always shadowed its individualist ethos and that was currently squandering what remained of its moral capital in the jungles of Vietnam.

  Seaver succeeded in getting Sade’s anniversary noticed in the terms he intended. One month after Seaver’s article was published, Alex Szogyi reviewed the first volume of Grove’s edition in the New York Times and opened with this paragraph: “One hundred and fifty years after his death in 1814, it is perhaps ample time for the Marquis de Sade to be welcomed into the public domain. For a world conscious of its own absurdity and the imminence of its possible destruction, the intransigent imaginings of the Marquis de Sade may perhaps be more salutary than shocking.” Szogyi goes on to praise Grove’s “generous, handsome, critical edition, beautifully printed with two major essays on the Marquis’s work.” He then concludes with the question, “May we not see his work as an immense plea for tolerance in a false and antiquated society?”106 This oddly unselfconscious juxtaposition of an absolute evil analogous to Hitler or the atom bomb and an absolute liberty dedicated to the tolerance of any and all deviance and desire epitomizes the contradictory image of Sade that Grove propagated. Sade was simultaneously a symbol of the evil of which humanity had recently proven itself capable and the freedom toward which it purportedly aspired. Seaver perceived this paradox more acutely than Szogyi and significantly thought it could be resolved only through making the work widely available. As he notes in his Evergreen Review essay, “Which is he: devil or saint? Or perhaps both? Obviously, it is impossible to know until the doors are at last flung open and his works made available to more than the fortunate few.”107 This aspiration was also realized: by 1967, the Black Cat edition of the first volume had sold more than 240,000 copies.

  As Elisabeth Ladenson notes in her wonderful study Dirt for Art’s Sake, “The idea of Sade as the incarnation of liberty was to have a great deal of staying power.”108 Focusing on the popular cinematic renditions of Sade that followed the mainstream publication of his work, Ladenson concludes that Sade “has become a sort of libertine Dalai Lama, dispensing wisdom and preaching personal liberation through the shedding of sexual and social inhibition.”109 But this Sade could only emerge once he had been purged of the aura of evil that legitimated reading him in the first place. Sade entered the American literary marketplace in the 1960s as an avatar of evil, and his evil was frequently framed in explicitly religious terms. However, as Hannah Arendt’s contemporaneous discourse on “the banality of evil” indicates, this religious framework was residual, and the successful integration of Sade’s work into the American literary marketplace in the end diminished the satanic aura associated with it.

  Open Secrets

  After the work of Sade, the most notorious and voluminous example of underground literature published by Grove is the eleven-volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life, which documents the sexual exploits of a Victorian gentleman whose identity has never been established with certainty. Grove had brought out Frank Harris’s gargantuan My Life and Loves without any censorship troubles in 1963. Rosset knew that Stephen Marcus, associate professor of English at Columbia University and associate editor of the Partisan Review, was devoting two full chapters of his groundbreaking study The Other Victorians (1966), based on his research in the Kinsey Institute Archives, to the extremely rare manuscript of My Secret Life. Grove eventually made extensive use of The Other Victorians in its packaging and promotion of My Secret Life—it was offered for free to Evergreen Club members who purchased the massive autobiography in the two-volume hardcover edition—and in legitimating its entire enterprise of unearthing the literary underground of the Victorian era.

  As in its publication of Sade, Grove’s approach to My Secret Life was assiduously scholarly. The publisher’s preface quotes extensively from The Other Victorians, paying special attention to bibliographic description and detail and concluding that “in the interest of preserving the authenticity of a document of great importance, which until now has been available only to a very few scholars, it was deemed best to make as few changes as possible.”110 Grove commissioned former Kinsey Institute archivist Gershon Legman to write the introduction. One-time editor of the short-lived little magazine Neurotica and author of the Freudian anticensorship tract Love and Death (1949), Legman was prominently profiled by John Clellon Holmes in the Evergreen Review in December 1966 as an eccentric bibliophile, independent scholar, and stubborn adherent of the “last cause” of personal sexual liberation.111

  Legman’s introduction, which opens with the interesting claim that “bibliography is the poor man’s book collecting,” is forbiddingly fastidious, laying out at considerable length the little-known history of the surviving bibliographies of erotic literature and putting forth his theory that the author of My Secret Life, known in the text only as “Walter,” was actually the erotic book collector and bibliographer Henry Spencer Ashbee, also known as “Pisanus Fraxi,” whose bequest of his collection to the British Library formed the nucleus of its notorious “Private Case.”112 Grove’s massive box-set, two-volume, hardcover edition runs to well over two thousand pages, supporting Legman’s contention that My Secret Life “is not only the most erotic but also … the largest autobiography ever published.”113

  As with so many of the “underground” classics that Grove published in the 1960s, My Secret Life was in the public domain, and within a month of its initial release in December 1966, advertisements for another version began to appear in prominent periodicals. Rosset quickly requested an injunction against the company, Collector’s Publications, whose version was a hastily assembled photographic reproduction of Grove’s. Since that process spared Collector’s Publications the considerable costs of assembling the text from its initial manuscript form, the court granted Rosset’s injunction based on unfair competition. Grove also issued a press release announcing that it was searching for “Walter’s” heirs in order to pay royalties. As in p
revious cases, the legitimacy of Grove’s labors in producing a definitive edition trumped the tenuousness of its claims to copyright. Collector’s Publications’ plans to issue its own edition never came to fruition. Within three years, Grove’s “abridged but unexpurgated” Black Cat edition, distributed by Dell, had sold nearly 750,000 copies.

  If the publication of Sade was understood as the disinterment of the underground of Enlightenment rationalism, the publication of My Secret Life was understood, with Marcus’s study providing authority, as the exhumation of the underworld of the Victorian novel. As the publisher’s preface favorably recaps, “One of the most interesting aspects of My Secret Life is the way in which it relates, and adds a new dimension, to the Victorian novel.” It then cites Marcus’s contention that “it adds considerably to our understanding of the Victorian novel if we read it against such scenes as those represented in My Secret Life, if we understand that the Victorian novelists were aware of such scenes, and that their great project, taken as a whole, was directed dialectically against what such scenes meant.”114 The preface concludes by citing a review of Marcus’s study affirming that My Secret Life “is the other side of the Victorian novel, what Dickens and Meredith and George Eliot and Thomas Hardy were obliged to leave out. And if only for this reason … it should be published as soon as possible.”115

  My Secret Life was widely reviewed in both popular and scholarly publications from Time and Newsweek to Psychiatric Quarterly and Victorian Studies. The New York Times review was written by Cambridge University professor J. H. Plumb, who confirms that Grove’s publication “helps to adjust our vision of 19th-century England and Europe” but also warns that it is “only a fragment of evidence” and that Marcus “has only scratched the surface.” He concludes that “in the 19th century, industrial society was creating new patterns of living, not only economic or social but also sexual. And we ought to give to the Victorians the close attention that we give to savage and primitive societies. The material abounds.”116 Over the next five years, Grove made sure that this material became available both to scholars and to the general public, bringing out an entire catalog of underground “classics” under a series of new imprints such as Venus Library, Zebra Books, and Black Circle. Between 1966 and 1971, Grove published such titles as The Boudoir: A Victorian Magazine of Scandal, whose back cover claims that “circulating from hand to hand, this daring assortment of exotica was at one time enjoyed only behind closed doors. Now, at last, it can be read by all”; Forbidden Fruit, whose jacket copy informs us that “the recent ‘discovery’ of an entire body of underground Victorian and Edwardian literature … has given us a new perspective on life in that luxuriant era”; Green Girls, which the jacket copy attributes to “the annals of the Victorian underground”; Gynecocracy, by Viscount Ladywood, celebrated as the “first American publication of the long-suppressed Victorian classic”; Harriet Marwood, Governess, which the jacket copy describes as “redolent of the exquisite patchouli in the works of those unknown delineators of the strange and delicious bizarreries of the outwardly upright Victorians”; The Lustful Turk, billed as “a rare collector’s item—a classic example of the Victorian Age’s underground novel”; A Man with a Maid, extolled as “one of the most famous underground novels of Victorian England. An erotic classic suppressed for 75 years sheds new light on life in Victorian times”; The Modern Eveline, which “offers yet another fascinating description of life and love among the not-so-stuffy English aristocracy around the turn of the century”; New Ladies’ Tickler; or, The Adventures of Lady Lovesport and the Audacious Harry, billed as “one of those extraordinary books from Victorian times in which the characters absolutely refuse to be unhappy”; The Pearl, a complete reissue of “the underground magazine of Victorian England” that “flourished on the subterranean market until December, 1880, when it vanished as mysteriously as it appeared”; and Sadopaideia, which “may well rival My Secret Life as an important literary discovery.”