by Loren Glass
In a sense, Grove Press in the late 1960s was both experienced and perceived by members of the counterculture as something of a “foco,” a small group of leftists committed to both modeling and fomenting a revolution. Not only did Grove have a revolutionary reputation that increasingly drew radical writers and readers into its orbit but its offices were a social nexus for Movement intellectuals, and every year idealistic young people migrated to New York City in the hopes of being able to work for Grove.
From Handbook to Reader
The author who most effectively modeled the radical possibilities of Grove’s volatile nexus of aesthetic and political avantgarde sensibilities in the 1960s was Jean Genet, who became increasingly involved in revolutionary politics in the second half of the decade. Genet had, for all intents and purposes, stopped writing in 1961, and after the controversial 1966 Parisian production of his last play, The Screens, based on the Algerian War, he fell into a deep depression that lasted until the galvanizing events of 1968. After witnessing the suppression of the Paris uprising in May, Genet, partly funded by Grove, sneaked into the United States through Canada to attend the Democratic Convention in Chicago and report on it for Esquire, along with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Terry Southern. Genet had agreed to write the article on the condition that Esquire also accept a second one condemning the Vietnam War. In the end, Esquire took the report on the convention but rejected the article on Vietnam, which was translated by Richard Seaver (who had accompanied Genet to Chicago) and published as “A Salute to 100,000 Stars” in the December 1968 issue of Evergreen Review.
Genet’s “Salute” is structured as a poetic/erotic wake-up call to Americans mourning the soldiers killed in Vietnam. Opening with the question, “Americans, are you asleep?,” Genet proceeds to evoke such a soldier’s death—“brain exploded, members scattered, penis stupidly ripped off, butts in the sun”—contrasted with the family that “will hang a small star in the window of its house” in memoriam.44 Contending that “your dead child is a pretense to decorate your house,” Genet goes on to affirm that the causes of America’s intervention in Vietnam are simultaneously political and aesthetic. Thus, he includes such parenthetical notes as “I think you are losing the war because you are ignorant of elegant syntax” and “You are losing this war because you do not listen to the singing of the hippies,” and he concludes by encouraging Americans to remember “this line of Rilke: ‘You must create chaos within yourselves so that new stars will be born.’”45 Genet’s “Salute” illustrates the persistence of modernist aesthetics in the political rhetoric of the counterculture. Even though both Sartre and Genet had condemned and abandoned “literature” as irredeemably bourgeois in the late 1960s, their political authority was still based in the cultural capital accruing to their literary reputations. Genet illustrates this persistence in his very person, as a “star” whose dissident charisma, based in the books and plays that were now popularly available throughout the country and the world, could enhance the visibility of groups participating in revolutionary struggle.
A few months later, Evergreen published an article that can be understood as a response to Genet’s call for chaos: Jerry Rubin’s “A Yippie Manifesto.” Featuring a full-page photo of its author dressed as a Viet Cong soldier for his appearance at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearing to which he had been summoned, Rubin’s famous manifesto affirms that “revolution only comes through personal transformation.”46 Invoking the spirit if not the letter of Debray’s theory of the “foco,” Rubin announces that “within our community we have the seeds of a new society. We have our own communications network, the underground press. We have the beginnings of a new family structure in communes. We have our own stimulants.”47 The Yippies’ unique combination of absurdist humor and activist brio fused the political and aesthetic meanings of the avantgarde, and Grove was a central node in the communications network that distributed their irreverent calls to transformative action. In addition to featuring Rubin’s manifesto in Evergreen, Grove published Ed Sanders’s Yippie novel Shards of God (1970), distributed Abbie Hoffman’s celebrated Steal This Book (1971), and issued a set of satirical handbooks on avoiding work, making love, and beating the draft by Tuli Kupferberg.
Originally published as a stapled pamphlet by Oliver Layton Press in 1966 and then as a Black Cat paperback in 1967, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, assembled by Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow, is a list of satirical suggestions for draft evasion (number 1 is “Grope J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of congress”; number 2 is “Get thee to a nunnery”).48 The list is interspersed with newspaper clippings, photos, cartoons, and other printed matter, both contemporary and historical, meant to communicate the absurdity and brutality of war in general, and of the Vietnam War in particular. The front cover features a World War I–era illustration of a soldier with his head being blown off by his own rifle; the back cover features a reproduction of an induction order addressed to Lyndon Johnson and signed by Nguyen Cao Ky (Figures 34 and 35). As a countercultural collage, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft, along with its companion volumes 1001 Ways to Make Love (1969) and 1001 Ways to Live without Working (1967), uses a combination of aesthetic and political tactics in an attempt to revolutionize the very structure and purpose of the paperback book.
In 1971, Grove agreed to distribute Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, a “handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock nation” that, according to Hoffman, had been rejected by more than thirty publishers, including Random House, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Harper and Row, and Ballantine. Organized into three sections—“Survive!,” “Fight!,” and “Liberate!”—Steal This Book is a surprisingly practical guide to revolutionary action, providing precise instructions for obtaining free food, clothing, and housing; setting up guerrilla broadcasting networks and organizing demonstrations; and getting first aid and legal advice, among other things. Extensively illustrated with photos of activists, panels from underground comics, and images culled from old newspapers and magazines, Steal This Book enacts the do-ityourself aesthetic that it encourages its readers to replicate across the country. In its explicit address to a revolutionary subculture, it embodies the logic of the “foco” that had provided the political justification for Grove’s investment in this Sixties genre.
Figure 34. Front cover of the Black Cat edition of
1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (1967).
Figure 35. Back cover of the Black Cat edition of
1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (1967).
Figure 36. Cover for Black Cat edition of The New Left Reader (1969).
Hoffman wrote the introduction to Steal This Book in jail, which he calls a “graduate school of survival.”49 It is something of an irony of history that Grove’s canon of texts, including its revolutionary handbooks, ended up on the curriculum of graduate schools across the nation. In 1969, Grove issued a Black Cat paperback that anticipates this development. The New Left Reader, edited by former SDS president and Movement “heavy” Carl Oglesby, features a marquee list of radical intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Fidel Castro, and Leslie Kolakowski, almost all of whom had been published by Grove in one form or another over the past decade. With the title in white, selected contributors’ names in orange, and editor’s name in red, against a black background within a red frame, the design of The New Left Reader uneasily integrates the various typographical tropes illustrated by Grove’s revolutionary handbooks (Figure 36). Yet it is highly significant that this book, billed on the back cover as “for anyone who wishes to understand the complex thought behind the actions that are affecting the entire world,” is called a “reader” and not a “handbook,” and that, in offering the “philosophical and political roots” of the New Left, it also anticipates the turn to theory and the retreat into the university that quickly ensued.
Oglesby’s organization of the anthology reflects its transitional position. Part 1, “Understanding Leviatha
n,” includes pieces by C. Wright Mills, Herbert Marcuse, and Louis Althusser, along with excerpts from Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson’s May Day Manifesto of 1967. Part 2, “The Revolutionary Frontier,” features work by Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. Part 3, “A New Revolution?,” features essays by student leaders Rudi Dutschke, Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Tom Fawthrop, Tom Nairn, David Treisman, and Mark Rudd, all commenting on the events of 1968, in whose immediate aftermath this anthology was assembled.
The year 1968 is, of course, a watershed in all histories of the 1960s, and it is notable that most of the figures from parts 1 and 2 of Oglesby’s reader have since become canonical, but the new student leaders who contributed the materials for part 3 have, for the most part, vanished into history, providing a negative answer to the question asked by Ogleby’s section title. But if Oglesby’s desire to situate these student activists in the political vanguard remained unrealized, his knowledge that they represent a “new class,” a class for whom figures like Althusser and Fanon are foundational, has come to fruition.50 What The New Left Reader reveals in retrospect is the cultural significance of Grove’s catalog for this new class. Once the possibilities of political action promised by its revolutionary handbooks were foreclosed, the political theories that informed them became required reading.
Booking Film
Barney Rosset had been interested in the cinema since he was a young man. After dropping out of Swarthmore College and returning to Chicago, he transferred to UCLA with the intention of studying film, only to find out that it did not yet have a film program. When his studies were interrupted by the US entry into World War II, his father managed to get him into the Army Signal Corps in China, where he became a photographic unit commander and motion picture cameraman. Upon his return, again with the help of his father, Rosset started a film production company, Target Films, through which he produced a single feature-length documentary, Strange Victory, on racial discrimination in the United States after World War II. Released in 1949, the film was well received critically and was shown at the Marienbad film festival in 1950, but Rosset had struggled with director Leo Hurwitz for creative control, and the film failed to recoup the $150,000 Rosset had invested in it.
In the 1950s, Rosset focused on establishing and expanding Grove’s identity as a book publisher, but he remained interested in film. Starting with Amos Vogel’s detailed report on the International Experimental Film Festival held in conjunction with the World’s Fair in Brussels in the spring of 1958, he and Jordan ensured that developments in avantgarde cinema were closely followed in the pages of the Evergreen Review. In addition to regular contributions from Vogel, the review included frequent articles by Parker Tyler, whose classic study Underground Film: A Critical History Grove published in 1969. Evergreen Review also featured frequent interviews with prominent filmmakers ranging from Jean-Luc Godard to Roman Polanski to John Cassavetes. And Grove published a number of important monographs on experimental and international film, including V. I. Pudovkin’s Film Technique and Film Acting (1960), Marie Seton’s biographical study of Sergei Eisenstein (1960), Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie’s study The Japanese Film (1960, with an introduction by Akira Kurosawa), as well as two anthologies of film criticism edited by Robert Hughes, a professor of film studies at Hunter College and one-time president of the American Federation of Film Societies. Throughout the 1960s, Grove maintained close ties with the international cinematic avantgarde, from the Cahiers du cinéma in France to the indigenous underground scene in New York City, reflecting Rosset’s sustained interest in the medium.
In 1963, Rosset established Evergreen Theater, Inc., to produce film scripts solicited from postwar authors. In the end, the company produced a single film, Samuel Beckett’s Film (1964). Directed by Alan Schneider and starring an elderly Buster Keaton, Film was never widely released in the United States, though it did garner attention on the festival circuit. Then, in November 1966, Rosset purchased Vogel’s legendary Cinema 16 library for forty-nine thousand dollars and in the next year established a separate film division for distribution, bought a theater on East 11th Street for exhibition, and hired Kent Carroll from Variety to oversee Grove’s growing cinematic interests (Vogel also worked briefly for Rosset as film editor for the Evergreen Review). Also in 1967, Rosset acquired the only film on which Grove made a profit, Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious, Yellow, which became both a succès de scandale and a cause célèbre when it was confiscated by US Customs for obscenity in a case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court.1 Energized by the film’s success and flush with the cash flow it precipitated, Rosset began investing heavily in avantgarde, experimental, and documentary film from around the world, attempting to distribute titles as rentals for home viewing through the Evergreen Club and to exhibit them through film festivals in New York City and on college campuses across the country. While a number of the titles Grove distributed, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Man Who Lies, Nico Papatakis’s Thanos and Despina, and Nagisa Oshima’s Boy, have since been canonized as classics of avantgarde and international cinema, Grove’s film division became an economic drag on the company, as Rosset was unable to replicate the success of I Am Curious, Yellow. His indiscriminate investment in various cinematic ventures in the late 1960s was one of the multiple converging causes for Grove’s financial collapse in the early 1970s.
Grove’s film division was established in the interregnum between Old and New Hollywood, between the decline of the Production Code and the establishment of the ratings system, between the waning of the art-house scene and the innovation of the videocassette; its eclectic catalog, as well as the controversy over I Am Curious, Yellow, can be understood in terms of the instability of the American film industry during this transitional period. Generic and audience categorizations were in flux, as were the economic and technological mechanisms of exhibition and distribution. Grove’s film division anticipated both the stabilization of the “adult” film market and the capitalization of home movie viewing before the distribution networks and technologies were fully in place for exploitation of either.
With the help of Robert Hughes, Grove also innovated the genre of the film book, producing a number of lavishly illustrated and annotated paperback screenplays for such landmark films as Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Féminin, and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, as well as Beckett’s Film and Sjoman’s I Am Curious, Yellow. As Richard Seaver affirms, these books were specifically conceived in response to the rising profile of cinema studies in the American university, and Grove sent them “to every film department in the country.”2 Cinema scholar Mark Betz confirms that Grove was a pioneer in this underappreciated genre, and Grove’s efforts to popularize experimental cinema through the paperback book—both quality and mass market—represent its most important contribution to American film culture. The series was popular on university campuses, anticipating in a variety of ways the modes of reception and analysis that would establish these films as cornerstones of an emergent academic canon.3
New Novel / New Wave
The first two films for which Grove published screenplays were landmark collaborations between French writers already noted for their innovations of the New Novel and a director who became recognized, based on these two films, as a signal avatar of French New Wave cinema. Hiroshima mon amour, written by Marguerite Duras, and Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, were both directed by Alain Resnais, previously known for his documentary shorts. Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais’s first feature-length film, won the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Palmes d’or at Cannes. Duras received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Last Year at Marienbad also won the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics award, as well as the Golden L
ion at the Venice Film Festival. Robbe-Grillet was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay. Together these films foregrounded the relationship between the thematic and formal innovations of postwar French cinema and the French New Novel. Grove’s print editions made these relationships accessible to examination and analysis in a manner and to a degree not possible when viewing the films, particularly in an era before the videocassette and DVD. Both titles sold more than twenty-five thousand copies over the course of the 1960s.
In the round-table discussion of Hiroshima mon amour that appeared in Cahiers du cinéma in 1959, conveniently translated and excerpted in the Criterion Collection booklet, these relationships were of central concern. In response to Eric Rohmer’s opening gambit that “Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything,” Jean-Luc Godard responded, “Let’s start by saying that it’s literature,” to which Rohmer added, “And a kind of literature that is a little dubious.”4 However, over the course of the discussion this “dubiousness” of the literary was qualified and, ultimately, disclaimed. Pierre Kast averred, “It’s indisputable that Hiroshima is a literary film. Now, the epithet ‘literary’ is the supreme insult in the everyday vocabulary of the cinema. What is so shattering about Hiroshima is its negation of this connotation of the word.”5 And Godard agreed, conceding, “I think Resnais has filmed the novel that the young French novelists are all trying to write, people like Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Bastide, and of course Marguerite Duras.” Ultimately, Rohmer concluded, “To sum up, it is no longer a reproach to say that this film is literary, since it happens that Hiroshima moves not in the wake of literature but well in advance of it,” effectively placing cinematic technique in the avantgarde of literary innovation.6