Rebel Publisher
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Grove’s preference for hiring radical youth contributed to a highly undisciplined atmosphere, particularly at the book club, where Myron Shapiro’s burgeoning staff was frequently stoned and rarely showed up to work on time. According to Seaver, “Book club employees worked for sums ranging from seventy-five to eight-five dollars a week in jam-packed cubicles, breeding resentment and discontent.”4 Some of Grove’s more politically engaged workers perceived Rosset’s decision to go public in terms of the wider incorporation of the publishing industry and felt that Grove’s employees should respond by unionizing. Finally, some Grove employees, both female and male, were beginning to question the sexual politics of the press, both in what Rosset chose to publish and in how he dealt with his staff.
“The times were insane,” Fred Jordan told me, and indeed all the political energies of the radical downtown scene were coming to a head. The Stonewall riots of 1969 had inaugurated the Gay Rights movement, and radical feminist groups such as WITCH and New York Radical Women were beginning to challenge the male-dominated ethos of the New Left. Valerie Solanis could frequently be seen standing outside the Grove offices with an ice pick. “She actually really tried to kill Dad,” Ken Jordan told me. “Yeah, she was after me,” his father answered. “She was outside with an ice pick … She wanted to kill Barney.”
It all came to a head on April 13, 1970, when a group of women led by activist Robin Morgan occupied the executive offices of the Mercer Street building, demanding union recognition and asserting that Rosset had “earned millions off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing women through sado-masochistic literature, pornographic films, and oppressive and exploitative practices against its own female employees.”5 Morgan had been instrumental in the seizure of Rat, one of New York City’s signature “underground” newspapers, four months earlier, in which she had published “Goodbye to All That,” her radical valedictory to the sexual politics of the New Left; her landmark anthology, Sisterhood Is Powerful, was already in production with Random House when she staged the Grove takeover. As the premier publisher of “underground” literature in New York City, Grove was a logical follow-up to the Rat action, particularly after Morgan was fired along with eight other employees for what an arbitrator later affirmed to be unionization activities.6
Grove undeniably had a blind spot in regard to gender politics. Though it had published a handful of significant titles by women, including a selection of novels and plays by Marguerite Duras, the company’s catalog was heavily tilted toward male authors, and most of the handful of books by women that it did publish were erotic confessions, diaries, and autobiographies—frequently anonymous or pseudonymous—such as Sandrine Forge’s Lily: The Diary of a French Girl in New York, Edith Cadivec’s Eros: The Meaning of My Life, and Katmoubah Pasha’s Memoirs of a Russian Princess. Furthermore, Evergreen in the later 1960s had gained a reputation as being the Playboy of the counterculture, featuring racy covers, nude photo spreads, and “adult” comics such as Barbarella and Phoebe Zeitgeist. Finally, even though Grove employed many women, some of whom had been with the company since its beginnings, its upper management and senior editorial staff were all male, and Rosset’s reputation as a womanizer and swinger aggravated the company’s image as a bastion of male chauvinism and a purveyor of pulp pornography.
Nevertheless, Grove’s popularization of pornography was a necessary antecedent to its political critique. As Richard Ellis affirms, invoking Walter Benjamin’s foundational theory of the “aura,” “Decensorship transfers the erotic/ pornographic from the realm of ritual to the realm of politics.”7 By democratizing access to previously forbidden texts, Grove “debracketed” the aura that had been generated around obscenity in the modern era, making the category more directly accessible to political, rather than moral or aesthetic, critique. The “end of obscenity,” in other words, precipitated the politics of pornography, casting a crucial historical sidelight on Catharine MacKinnon’s polemical claim that “obscenity law is concerned with morality, specifically morals from the male point of view … The feminist critique of pornography is a politics, specifically politics from women’s point of view … Morality here means good and evil; politics means power and powerlessness.”8 The story of Grove’s rise and fall reveals how the moral discourse of good and evil that proliferated around pornography in the 1960s generated the conditions of possibility for a political discourse of power and powerlessness in the 1970s.
The Story of O, the first selection for the Evergreen Book Club after the initial “Join the Underground” promotion, conveniently crystallizes, both in its content and in its publishing history, the volatile passage from erotic ritual to pornographic politics that culminated in Grove’s downfall. The pseudonymously authored third-person narrative of a woman subjected to sadistic sexual slavery by her lover and his aristocratic associate, Histoire d’O had originally been published in Paris in 1954 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the brash postwar upstart already notorious for issuing unexpurgated editions of the Marquis de Sade. Pauvert had encouraged Grove to publish a translation early on, writing to Seaver in 1960, “Now that you have succeeded in modifying American law a bit with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, why don’t you do a translation of Pauline Réage’s lovely book The Story of ‘O’, to which I have the exclusive rights?”9 Seaver and Rosset were interested, but they proceeded with caution. In 1964, after three copies of the French edition had been held up at Customs, Seaver wrote to Pauvert: “This book shouldn’t be published in America, at least in our opinion, until the terrain has been carefully prepared by the publication of many books such as Miller’s Tropics, books by John Rechy and Burroughs and, more recently, Genet and Frank Harris.”10 Later that year, William Kristol declined to offer it through Readers’ Subscription, writing that “the people who have read it believe that our members—most of them good family men and women—would be outraged at receiving it as an automatic selection.”11 Kristol’s refusal was yet another spur to Rosset’s decision to start a book club of his own in the following year.
Speculation about the author’s true identity had been rampant upon the book’s original publication in France and was reignited when Grove brought out its translation in the United States; many thought that it must have been written by a man. Not until 1994 was it publicly revealed that the author was Dominique Aury, a pseudonym for Anne Desclos, editorial assistant to and sometime lover of literary lion and influential editor of the Nouvelle revue française Jean Paulhan (who had himself been suspected of being the author), for whom it had originally been written, partly to woo him back to her and partly to prove to him that a woman could write like Sade, whom he greatly admired.12 Desclos, a member of the French Resistance, an avid reader of English, American, and French literature, and a formidable critic and translator in her own right, was the only woman in Gallimard’s inner circle of editors and authors in the immediate postwar era, and her authorship of the Story of O should be understood in terms of this anomalous position within the homosocial literary milieu of the time, in which Sade was a particularly potent model of literary creation. In terms of the sexual politics of modernist publishing, The Story of O can be understood as something of a feminist Trojan horse; while its content seems to confirm all the worst stereotypes of feminine masochism and submission, it also marked the beginning of a series of demographic and discursive transformations that precipitated the rapid disintegration of the male-dominated world it so coolly anatomizes.
When Grove brought out The Story of O, speculation about the real identity of the translator, Sabine d’Estrée, was less common, though this, too, was assumed to be a pseudonym. Payment records in the Grove Press archives establish that Richard Seaver translated the book, a fact confirmed by his widow upon his death in 2009.13 Seaver’s pseudonymous identity ironically illuminates the claim in the translator’s preface, originally published in the Evergreen Review in 1963, that “Story of O, written by a woman, demands a woman translator, one who will humble he
rself before the work and be satisfied simply to render it, as faithfully as possible, without interpretation as such.”14 Seen in the light of Seaver’s authorship, this claim takes on considerable, and complex, significance. In the figure of Sabine d’Estrée, we see the translator as transvestite, as a male reader taking the opportunity to “assume” the role of the female masochist as opposed to the male sadists of the narrative. The many embedded secret identities behind the production of this text indicate that these positions map onto the more “literary” roles of writer and reader, author and translator, and, most literally, editor and editorial assistant. Indeed, shortly after the landmark publication of The Story of O Robin Morgan Pitchford, at the time an aspiring poet and Movement activist, joined Grove’s editorial staff under Seaver, a position from which she was fired some years later for attempting to organize a union.
The story of The Story of O, then, is very much a story about literature. In “A Girl in Love,” Réage’s introduction to the sequel, Return to the Chateau, published by Grove in 1971, the author describes the genesis of the text in the experience of two secret lovers for whom books held
the most important place. Books were their only complete freedom, their common country, their true travels. Together they dwelt in the books they loved as others in their family home; in books they had their compatriots and their brothers; poets had written for them, the letters of lovers of time past came down to them through the obscurity of ancient languages, of modes and mores long since come and gone—all of which was read in a toneless voice in an unknown room, the sordid and miraculous dungeon against which the crowd outside, for a few short hours, beat in vain.15
The “girl” has already told her lover that she could write the kinds of stories he enjoys reading, and The Story of O then emerges when she, “instead of taking a book to read … began to write the story she had promised.” The story she writes is selfconsciously Sadean, a narrative of serial enslavement and torture meant to prove, again according to Réage, that “prison itself can open the gates to freedom.”
Like the slave narratives that are in some sense its generic antecedent, The Story of O relies on extensive paratextual legitimation. Preceding the text itself are three introductions: Seaver/d’Estrée’s “Translator’s Note,” André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s “A Note on Story of O,” and Paulhan’s “Happiness in Slavery.”16 For Paulhan, the desire for slavery is inherently feminine, but he sees Réage’s ability to write the fantasy with such purity as betraying a masculine nature. Thus, he writes, “Woman you may be, but descended from a knight, or a crusader. As though yours were a dual personality, or the person for whom your letter was intended was so constantly present that you borrowed his taste, and his voice.”17 That Paulhan was himself the person for whom the letter was intended compounds the ironies here.
Not surprisingly, Grove made much of the novel’s Parisian antecedents in marketing it to an American readership. Seaver’s translator’s preface, which also fronts the Evergreen Club newsletter promoting Story of O, opens anecdotally, announcing that “in July of 1954, one of the most curious—and most mysterious—novels of recent times appeared under the imprint of a young French publisher, Jean-Jacques Pauvert: Histoire d’O [Story of O]. Its author was Pauline Réage, a name completely unknown in French literary circles, where everyone knows everyone. The work was greeted with considerable respect by the critics, who none the less clearly did not know what to make of this latter-day, female Sade.”18 The fact that Seaver is the author of these lines stitches the Story of O more tightly into the larger story of Grove’s transatlantic network, as the preface places the novel in the postwar Parisian milieu in which he and Rosset first established their literary connections and from which they would acquire so much of the literature that made Grove famous. The Story of O’s reception in the United States must be understood in terms of this shift from an exclusive European modernist milieu in which the text could be interpreted as a species of sexual ritual to a mainstream American milieu in which the emergence of New Social Movements was precipitating a postmodern politics of sexuality that would condemn the text as a premier example of patriarchal sexism.
The Story of O was reviewed twice in the New York Times, and both reviews are reproduced in full in the Evergreen Club News. Claiming that “what it resembles most is a legend—the spiritual history of a saint and martyr,” Albert Goldman warns that “Pauline Réage is a more dangerous writer than the Marquis de Sade.”19 This danger, for Goldman, consists in the threat of identification on the part of the male reader, as the book makes “real to the reader those dark and repulsive practices and emotions that his better self rejects as improbable or evil.” Goldman concludes that, for the book’s male readership, which includes himself, “our situation is rather embarrassing: for men pick up pornographic books, as they do prostitutes, intending to take their pleasure and then repudiate the instruments that have provided it. But this moral stratagem will not work with Réage.”20
Eliot Fremont-Smith also sees the text as groundbreaking, arguing that its publication “marks the end of any coherent restrictive application of the concept of pornography to books.”21 He concludes that this challenge to the very category of pornography also threatens the “distinctions pornography helps to maintain—between men and women (or ladies), between generations, and so on—all of them somewhat false, all of them partial devices for not seeing ourselves in candid relation to each other.”22 Both of these reviews acknowledge that The Story of O presents a particular challenge to the reader’s sexuality and gender identity, a challenge specific to the time and place of its publication.
Both reviewers are also acutely aware of the contrast between the novel’s American apotheosis and its original appearance a decade earlier in France, which places it in a Francophone lineage extending back to “that old workhorse of libertinage, the Marquis de Sade.”23 Ultimately, this gradual democratization and demystification of Sade and his heirs helped expose the raw politics of power that tended to be obscured by the various moral and religious frameworks within which his work had conventionally been framed. It is crucial to note, in this regard, that sexual positions do not necessarily map onto sexual identities in the Sadean universe. Women can be, and frequently are, as sadistic as men, a fact that tends to reduce everyone to positions of power and powerlessness ultimately determined by status more than sex. It is the aristocratic “fortunate few” who exploit everyone below them, whether male or female. The unfettered publication of what we might call the Sadean canon, including The Story of O, the massmarket edition of which had sold more than 450,000 copies by the end of 1969, buttressed the feminist contention that pornography is, ultimately, about power.24
…
In her most recent autobiography, Robin Morgan, who in fact helped Seaver with his magisterial Sade project, claims, “As a woman I need no country. As a New Yorker, my city is the world.”25 Morgan’s pithy synecdoche conveniently illustrates the geopolitical specificity of the Grove takeover. It was both a resolutely local intervention in the cultural politics of Greenwich Village and a symbolic action whose significance resonated into the national and international networks of which New York City had become the nexus. As a crucial node in this nexus, Grove was a strategic target.
Morgan was the only ex-Grove employee among the nine women who participated in the occupation, though she was advised by Grove’s former house counsel, Emily Jane Goodman, whom Rosset, ironically, had recently hired in order to increase the number of women in powerful positions at Grove (in a clear sign of the deterioration of Rosset’s relations with his employees, Goodman called him “a one-man dictatorial operation who lives off the money people pay for dirty books”).26 The manifesto issued by the women echoes both the rhetoric and the politics of “Goodbye to All That,” identifying Rosset not only with the sexism of the New Left but also with the capitalism of the culture industries. With “no more” replacing “goodbye” as the anaphoric invocation of a series of ne
gative proclamations, the manifesto chants, “No more using of women’s bodies to rip off enormous profits for a few wealthy capitalist dirty old straight white men, such as Barney Rosset!”; “no more mansions on Long Island for boss-man Rosset and his executive yes-men flunkies, segregated mansions built with extortionist profits from selling The Autobiography of Malcolm X”; and “no more Latin American executive junkets for the rich men who sell the books of Che, Bosch, Debray to get rich while the Latin cities they visit are choked with hungry babies!”27
Rosset and Jordan were in Copenhagen, which had recently legalized pornography and become a key source of erotic films for Grove, when the occupation occurred; they were taken completely by surprise. According to Rosset,
I called Grove from Denmark, and I got my secretary and I said, “Hi, how’s everything?” And she says, “Fine.” “Everything going ok?” I ask. “Well there is something special today; I’m on the 6th floor.” Our office was on the 7th floor. “Well why?” said I. “Well,” she says, “some other people are in your office.” “WHAT?” In my office I had all my personal letters and records. And they had barricaded themselves into my office. I said, “Get ’em out!” And she said, “No, they won’t come out.” I said, “Go in and throw them out.” “No, nobody wants to do that.” … So I said, “Let me speak to somebody else.” So I spoke to Dick Seaver and a guy named Myron Shapiro. And nobody really wanted to get them out. I mean I’m going crazy. What are they doing while they’re in there? They did smash up the furniture but they didn’t steal the documents, which is utterly amazing! But they sure smashed the place up, and hung flags out the window like they’d taken over Grove Press. And here I am sitting in Denmark—rather cleverly planned, wouldn’t you say? Well, I said, “If none of you have enough guts to get them out, call the police.” So they called the police. But the girls inside the office, the ones barricaded inside, said, No, they only wanted to be arrested by women cops. So they went out and looked for women cops, but they couldn’t find any. So finally the men cops had to go in and carry them out.28