Rebel Publisher

by Loren Glass

  Most of these titles were offered at a discount in hardcover through the Evergreen Club, many were prominently reviewed, and a number of them became paperback bestsellers: for example, on June 29, 1968, Man with a Maid and The Pearl were numbers 2 and 3, respectively, on the New York Post’s bestseller list. This popularity conveniently contrasted with their prior limited availability, and indeed collectibility, which Grove frequently emphasized on its jacket copy and in its promos for the book club. The Memoirs of Count Alexis is billed as an “extraordinary volume—limited to only 700 copies in its privately printed original edition”; The Abduction of Edith Martin is a “relentlessly faithful reproduction of a privately published erotic classic, limited in the early 1930’s to an edition of only 250 copies”; and “Frank” and I, one of the many flagellation novels Grove reissued, is billed as “originally published in 1902 in an edition of 350 copies for private subscribers.” My Secret Life, of which only three known copies of the author’s original printing of six were extant when Grove brought out its popular edition, epitomized this shift from private to public circuits of distribution, which transformed the publishing industry by eliminating the literary underground. Kuhlman, now successfully incorporated as Kuhlman Associates, designed the covers for most of these texts, frequently deploying illustrations from the eras of their initial publication (Figure 27).

  By the late 1960s, the Evergreen Club had abandoned any pretention to literary value and became a source for anything sexually explicit that Rosset could acquire, including sex manuals, gay porn, stag films, and erotic art catalogs. Many titles were bundled, including the Olympia Five, originally penned by the Merlin collective as part of the Traveler’s Companion series, as well as such imaginatively titled series as Wild Nymph Flesh (ten titles including The Missionary’s Daughter, Flesh on Fire, and The She-Slaves of Cinta Vincente) and Strange Passionate Hungers (ten titles including Lustmaster, Sorority of Submissive Girls, and A Hunger in Her Flesh).

  Figure 27. Kuhlman Associates’ cover for Two Novels from the Victorian Underground (1969).

  At this point, Grove was openly parodying the paratextual apparatus it had deployed in its earlier campaigns, quoting such pseudo-professionals as A. M. LeDeluge and G. Howard Guacamole, MD, who says of one title, “On the whole, I found this book instructive and entertaining. It is absolutely stuffed with redeeming social value and is a lot of laughs.” The expert testimony Grove had solicited for its earlier battles had been so successful that it was no longer necessary; its form had become so conventional that it was susceptible to parody.

  And Barney Rosset was now a celebrity. He was prominently profiled twice in 1969, first for the Saturday Evening Post in “How to Publish ‘Dirty Books’ for Fun and Profit” and then for Life magazine in “The Old Smut Peddler.” Both pieces border on the hagiographic and reveal a certain paradox in Rosset’s public image. If his reputation for impulsiveness and irrationality was becoming legendary, these profiles prove that he was in fact shaping his public biography—from the Francis Parker School to the Army Signal Corps to the trial of Lady Chatterley—with shrewd purposefulness. As Albert Goldman notes in the Life article, “Rosset wants to be famous and he knocks himself out to cooperate with the press,” elaborating that “Rosset treats the intimate recesses of his private life as if they were public record.”117 In fact, both articles are remarkably reticent and respectful about Rosset’s private life, representing him as settled and satisfied with his third wife, Christina, pictures of whom are prominently featured by both magazines.118

  Rosset’s private life meshed with his public image as a pornographer more directly than either of these profiles imply. He had a reputation as a womanizer, by all accounts he cheated on his wives, and his nighttime escapades at sales conferences and book fairs were legendary. Nat Sobel confided in me that when Christina was pregnant, Rosset got another woman pregnant at the same time, and “the two women met with their big bellies on the street and Christina knew that the child was Barney’s.” Herman Graf assumed that the two were swingers, stating with a big grin, “He had a great sex life” and adding that “hookers appealed to him.” According to Sobel, “All the juicy stuff about Barney will never appear in print.”

  …

  In his profoundly influential study The History of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault famously attacked the “repressive hypothesis,” as exemplified for him by Freudian critics like Marcus, forcing scholars in the United States to rethink entirely the philosophical and political assumptions behind the struggle against censorship detailed in this chapter. Foucault almost single-handedly inverted our understanding of censorship, proclaiming that the Victorian era that we had previously seen as “repressed” in fact witnessed “a regulated and polymorphous incitement to discourse” about sex that his short study proceeds to document.119 Yet Foucault’s historical examples of this incitement are notoriously scanty and selective. Indeed, only two of them were available in English at the time his study was published: The 120 Days of Sodom and My Secret Life. Before Grove published them, it is fair to say that only a handful of readers would have had any access to these texts in any language. For Foucault, these two examples of “scandalous literature” are representative of the historical incitement to discourse, despite the fact that, as he himself admits, almost no one read them at the time they were written. The 120 Days of Sodom existed only in manuscript form until Maurice Heine brought out a three-volume limited edition in the 1930s, which was the basis for Grove’s American translation. A mere six copies of My Secret Life had been privately printed by its author during his lifetime, only three of which were extant when Grove brought out its edition. These authors may have been motivated by an incitement to discourse, but their discourse had a profoundly restricted audience until after World War II. If we adjust our historical lens to understand these texts in terms of readership and access, instead of authorship and production, a somewhat different story emerges, a story less of liberation than of legitimacy. Grove moved the pornographic from the margins to the mainstream by making it legally accessible to “adult” consumers as well as professionally legitimate as an object of scholarly scrutiny. Ironically, Foucault’s study was made possible by this very transformation, which, arguably, constitutes the “repressed” element of his revisionary history.

  Reading Revolution

  In 1961, Grove reprinted Edgar Snow’s classic text Red Star over China, originally published to great acclaim by Random House in 1938, as the eighth title in its newly inaugurated Black Cat massmarket imprint. Snow’s hagiographic, and ultimately prophetic, history of the struggles of the Chinese Communists had been a formative influence on Barney Rosset. When he was stationed with the Army Signal Corps in China during the war, Rosset had Snow’s text with him and, based on his reading of it, felt himself to be the only American who knew that the Communists would prevail. The front matter for the Black Cat edition classifies Red Star over China as “one of the basic source books of modern Chinese history, as a satisfying and enlightening tale for the general reader, and even as a handbook of guerilla warfare during World War II for anti-Nazi partisan fighters in Europe and anti-Japanese guerillas in Southeast Asia.” In his preface to the 1944 edition, Snow had commented on the global audience for his book, which offered Englishspeaking readers “an entirely new conception of Chinese character” while providing practical political guidance for resistance movements in India, Burma, and Russia. He further noted that the Chinese translation was widely pirated, with “many editions produced entirely in guerilla territory,” a testimony to Mao’s shrewdness in allowing Snow exclusive access to himself and the northwestern region of China held by the Communists after the legendary Long March.1 Red Star over China is a rare example of a book that intervened in the historical process it chronicled, and in that sense it can be seen as a model for the “revolutionary handbooks” Grove published in the 1960s.

  As civil rights gave way to Black Power, the Vietnam War radicalized the New L
eft, and independence movements and student uprisings swept the globe, Grove issued a variety of titles billed as “handbooks” for revolutionaries, including Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth; Régis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution?; Che Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War; Robert Lindner’s The Revolutionist’s Handbook; David Suttler’s IV-F: A Guide to Draft Exemption; Tuli Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow’s 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) radicals Kathy Boudin, Brian Glick, Eleanor Raskin, and Gustin Reichbach’s The Bust Book: What to Do until the Lawyer Comes; Julius Lester’s Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!; and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as well as collections of speeches by Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. Like Red Star over China, these pocket-size paperbacks combined empirical evidence of with practical guidance for the attainment of revolutionary consciousness and the realization of revolutionary programs during a time when world revolution seemed imminent to many in the Movement.

  Furthermore, in the second half of the 1960s, Grove expanded and enhanced both the investigative reporting and the radical rhetoric of the Evergreen Review, publishing double agent Kim Philby’s revelations about British and American intelligence; Ho Chi Minh’s prison poems; extensive reports on urban riots and ghetto activism; eyewitness accounts of the events of May 1968, the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and the trial of the “Chicago 8”; interviews with My Lai veterans and other exposés on the Vietnam War; and numerous articles by and about the New Left, Weather Underground, Black Panthers, and other revolutionary movements throughout the world. In these efforts, Grove sought to merge literary and political understandings of the term “avantgarde” in the belief that reading radical literature could instill both the practical knowledge and psychological transformation necessary to precipitate a revolution.

  Black and White

  Also in 1961, Richard Moore, chairman of the Committee to Present the Truth about the Name “Negro,” issued a statement calling upon “intellectuals, writers, journalists, and leaders of important cultural and civic organizations of people of African descent to take decisive action on this question with full rather than ‘deliberate speed.’”2 Moore’s call was precipitated by Grove’s publication of the English translation of Janheinz Jahn’s groundbreaking study Muntu: The New African Culture, which opens with the affirmation, “We speak in this book … not about ‘savages,’ ‘primitives,’ ‘heathens,’ or ‘Negroes’ but about Africans and Afro-Americans, who are neither angels nor devils but people.”3 Muntu had become a bestseller at Moore’s Frederick Douglass Book Center in Chicago, and he hoped to speed this terminological reformation by capitalizing on its popularity among the burgeoning population of African American readers. As Donald Franklin Joyce affirms in his study of black-owned publishing houses in the United States, the era between 1960 and 1974 witnessed rapidly rising literacy rates and educational levels among African Americans, as well as increased government funding for public education and libraries in African American communities, expanding the economic viability and cultural autonomy of the black reading public.4 Grove endeavored to provide “revolutionary” reading for these radicalizing readers alongside the principally white counterculture that made up its primary audience throughout the 1960s.

  As discussed earlier, Jahn had leaned heavily on the authority of Frantz Fanon in his introduction to Muntu, going so far as to offer a quotation from Black Skin, White Masks (unavailable in English at the time) as “a motto at the head of this book.” The quotation, appearing only a handful of pages after the excerpt cited by Moore, reads, “For us the man who worships the Negroes is just as ‘sick’ as the man who despises them. And conversely the black man who would like to bleach his skin is just as unhappy as the one who preaches hatred of the white man.”5 Although the English translation retains the term “Negro” for the French nègre, Jahn refers to Fanon himself as an “Afro-American” and offers Black Skin, White Masks as advocating the same cultural relativism that grounds his own analytical method. By the time Jahn finished Neo-African Literature: A History of Black Writing in 1966 (followed by Grove’s English translation in 1968), Fanon had posthumously become an international icon of African revolution and Jahn felt the need to engage his work more critically. In the final pages of this highly ambitious scholarly study, Jahn, this time discussing The Wretched of the Earth, argues that “Fanon’s analysis leaves no room for a free literature of independent writers.” Sticking to his cosmopolitan guns, Jahn warns his readers that “all purely psychological, political, or sociological interpretations … must always remain inadequate, for they neglect the aspect which makes literature what it is.”6

  In 1970, S. E. Anderson reviewed Grove’s edition of Jahn’s study for the recently established journal Black Scholar. His opening paragraph illustrates the political and rhetorical transformations that marked the emergence of black studies in the United States: “Practically every brother and sister into a ‘black thing’ has read Jahn’s first book: Muntu. Many of us without question take Muntu as the gospel truth on black culture. Many of us even think that Janheinz Jahn is a brother!” Affirming that Jahn is indeed white, Anderson, a founding member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Arts movement and director of one of the first black studies programs in the nation, cautions that his scholarship, while constituting a useful resource, perpetuates “a dangerous dependency upon a white analysis of our existence.”7 Directly inverting Jahn’s statement in defense of his method, Anderson affirms that “it is in the realm of social and political analysis, not the interpretation of Neo-African styles and patterns, where Jahn fails.” Thus, he argues that “the conflict between Fanon and Jahn—and between the contemporary white critic and the revolutionary black writer—is that of understanding and dealing with the political and psychological components of black literature.”8 Anderson leaves no doubt where his allegiances lie, and while he concedes that Jahn’s work should be read by African Americans, he makes it clear that Fanon should guide their political practice, as well as their evaluation and understanding of the newly renamed “black writing.”

  Grove published all of Fanon’s major work, enhancing the company’s reputation as a primary resource for revolutionary reading in the United States, and as with most of its international literature, Grove’s acquisition of Fanon was routed through Paris. The English translation of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon’s second book but in 1965 the first to be published in the United States, was originally commissioned in 1963 by Présence Africaine, the enormously influential Pan-African journal and publishing house founded in the late 1940s by Alioune Diop, for distribution in Anglophone Africa. Like the Algerian revolution on which the book’s conclusions are based, its publication was widely understood as a signal event in the proliferation of anticolonial wars and independence movements that were transforming the map of the world in the 1950s and 1960s.

  The Wretched of the Earth features a preface from the ubiquitous Jean-Paul Sartre, whose imprimatur provided both cultural ballast and interpretive guidance for readers unfamiliar with Fanon’s work. Sartre’s famous preface, addressed specifically to “European” readers, affirms that the book is not addressed to white people and therefore must be read differently by them. In particular, Sartre exhorts his audience: “Have the courage to read this book, for in the first place it will make you ashamed, and shame, as Marx said, is a revolutionary sentiment.” For Sartre, all Europeans, including those descendants who occupy that “super-European monstrosity, North America,” are implicated in the colonial system that disqualifies them from membership in the intended audience of Fanon’s book.9 In its 1965 press release announcing the hardcover publication of The Wretched of the Earth in the United States, Grove emphasizes Sartre’s advice with an affirmation from LeRoi Jones that “Fanon’s book should be read by every black person in the world … Sartre’s introduction should be read by every white person.”10