by Loren Glass
The spectacle of handcuffed women being removed from the Grove Press offices by the New York City police permanently damaged the company’s radical reputation and divided its constituency. Julius Lester supported Morgan, writing to Rosset that “for Grove, revolution is a matter of profit, not of lifestyle, behavior or attitude toward others” and that “if the charges against the women aren’t dropped and the demands [not] met, I am left with little choice but to see that no future books of mine are published by Grove Press, that no further articles of mine appear in the Evergreen Review and that my name no longer be listed in Evergreen as a contributing editor.”29 Carl Oglesby publicly resigned in a letter to the editor addressed to Fred Jordan in the July 1970 Evergreen Review. He was followed in the next issue by journalist and activist Jack Newfield. Overnight Grove went from being a platform for the New Left to being a symbol of its disintegration.
Oglesby’s lengthy letter, copied to Robin Morgan at Rat, is also a valedictory, a testimony to what Grove had achieved over the previous fifteen years. Hearkening back to 1955, when he’d “picked up a paperback book called Molloy by a man named Beckett,” Oglesby reminisces that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Grove’s name was almost the same as an author’s. No Grove book would be a waste of time. A Grove book would know what the problem was and would probably move the discussion along to a broader, better understanding of it.”30 However, if “the problem” had been, with Grove’s help, better understood, it had by no means been solved, and Oglesby affirms that “we are still not able to fix the importance of the literary movement that Grove was so crucial to, and the reason for this is that we do not see this movement as having completed itself.”31 For Oglesby, the figure who offers to solve this problem and complete this movement is Robin Morgan:
Robin Morgan really is what you—your magazine, your house—have merely pretended to be. She really is that very real wolf which, at their best moments, the fiction and the social criticism one will have sometimes found in Grove had been all along demanding. No? Was it not explained to you that it was for such self-possessed and revolutionary people that you published this heretic, that outcast, claiming to find the way of redemption in the sin of Genet and the way of responsibility in the crime of Guevara? Isn’t it terrible how it ends now? The New Man you’ve been trying to summon with an incantation jointly authored by some of the best writers of our period at last materializes in the magic circle, right there behind the sixth-floor barricades—and good God, it’s a woman. Nine women, in fact. So what does the sorcerer do, his spells and charms at last having worked? He calls the fucking police, he calls the fucking police, he calls the fucking police, he calls the fucking police.32
Jordan responded by reminding Oglesby that, with the exception of Morgan, none of the occupiers worked at Grove, and he attempted to redirect the terms of the debate, asserting that the core issue was censorship, aligning Morgan with Gerald Ford, the Republican congressman who had recently railed against the Evergreen Review on the floor of the House of Representatives, as “strange bedfellows,” and asserting that “the cops were called in opposition to Robin Morgan’s fascist demand for mindless book burning.”33
As this heated exchange indicates, the struggle over unionization at Grove was at its heart a struggle over what sort of collectivity was most appropriate to the achievement of its revolutionary vision. If Rosset had begun as a “sorcerer” whose powers commanded the allegiance of a small group of loyal followers, he was now a corporate CEO with a massive countercultural constituency increasingly riven by its own internal contradictions. The company contained multitudes; it had become too large to run as an informal group of cultural insurgents. As Fred Jordan related to me, once he didn’t know the names of the people he met in the elevator, he had to concede that the company could no longer function as it had in the past.
In the lead-up to the union vote, the Organizing Committee issued a series of election bulletins foregrounding the support they had received for their efforts to affiliate with the Fur, Leather, and Machine Workers Joint Board of the Amalgamated Meat Cutter and Butcher Workers (FLM) branch of the AFL-CIO (“They didn’t have a legitimate beef,” Graf told me he used to say). These supporters included literary critic Maxwell Geismar, who writes that “if a truly democratic union of people in publishing is to be formed they are lucky to have the furriers as advocates”;34 writer Edgar Snow, who affirms that “a union for all publishing people is required”; and Harry Braverman, who claims that “there is no question in my mind that every group of employees is entitled to self-protection against unilateral decisions, and to be consulted as a body on matters affecting their welfare. I see no reason why publishing should be an exception to this.”35
In response to the unionization effort, a competing Committee for the Survival of Grove was formed, which issued its own collective statement entitled “What It’s Really All About.” Resolutely positioning Grove as an exception to the corporate rule in publishing, and in the American economy more generally, the statement begins by affirming that “Grove is forced to operate as a capitalist company in an essentially hostile capitalist world” and noting that “bankers don’t see much point in giving money to the publisher of Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Régis Debray, etc.” The committee goes on to note the wave of corporate mergers sweeping over the publishing industry and insists that, insofar as they “have been virtually alone in resisting this trend,” they should also be exempted from the unionization efforts that were a response to it. The statement then eloquently describes the ethos at Grove:
The people who worked for Grove identified wholly with the company’s aims; the battle lines were never drawn between Grove management and Grove employees, but between Grove and the enemy outside. While Grove was still small, the spirit of battle pervaded every single department, and staff members could communicate freely with each other to keep informed of the crucial issues besetting the company. There was a genuine communal spirit without artificial class divisions.36
The statement concedes that “as, in the last two years, more and more people have joined us, it became more difficult to maintain the kind of personal communication between members of the staff that had prevailed in earlier days,” but the committee still concludes that “the drive for outside unionization threatens to artificially divide Grove Press people along class lines … The enemy is no longer the hostile environment threatening the survival of Grove, but instead the opposing groups in the battle for outside unionization.”37
As both sides in this battle affirm, Grove had become too large to be run as a small and loosely structured community united by its allegiance to Rosset and his vision. The “outside” environment against which Grove had struggled was itself undergoing transformation, partly as a result of Grove’s success in bringing the margins into the mainstream. The question, then, wasn’t only how Grove should be structured as a company but how it should position itself relative to the changed economic and cultural circumstances it had helped bring into being.
In the end, the employees decided, by a vote of 86 to 34, not to be represented by the FLM. Many Grove employees, not surprisingly, did not feel any strong class affiliation with this particular union. As one organizer remembered, “They didn’t know what snobs we were. We were afraid of dropping down a class and associating with workers.” Indeed, most Grove employees didn’t feel like “workers” in the classic Marxian sense because, as this same organizer notes, “the main problem was that the union did not realize that we weren’t workers in one important respect: we were not alienated from our work.”38
As Claudia Menza, who joined Grove in 1969 and continued to work closely with Rosset in the ensuing decade, told me, “Most of us loved working at Grove, and why would we want to change that?” She continued, “I was making a really good salary at Grove, astoundingly good. We had health benefits. Some of us had bonuses at Christmas. Why do you want to change that? You are being treated well. You’re not being exploite
d. So you had the dedication to this company you loved.” She concluded, “We were sitting there thinking. I don’t know, we’re well paid, we love the work that we do, we love working with these people, and now you want to unionize us with the meatpackers? It doesn’t make any sense.”39
Meanwhile, Rosset’s ongoing battle with Sobel was coming to a head. As Sobel told me in the backyard of his house on East 19th Street, which doubles as the offices of his literary agency,
A couple of months before I got fired, we had a showdown, Barney and I, in front of the entire staff … We’d been having a Monday lunch, which originally generated out of Barney’s office, and his secretary would bring in Chinese food and Fred and myself and Morrie and Dick would have lunch in Barney’s office and bring a guest … As the company got bigger … it became too big for us to have and we had it at a restaurant … It was wonderful, and it was his idea. At these lunches, toward the late sixties, Barney kept coming after me … and expressing his displeasure about the sales of Evergreen magazine and talking to me in a way that he never talked to me personally; and at this particular lunch … Barney sat at one end of the table and I sat at the other … and Barney started in on me about the magazine, and I just got fed up … and so finally … I said, “Barney I don’t come to this lunch every Monday to have you get on my case about the sale of the Evergreen Review at this newsstand on 8th Street and Sixth Avenue; can’t we talk about something else, for Christ’s sake?” And Barney said, “I’m the publisher, and if you don’t like what I want to talk about, you don’t have to sit here.” And then there was deathly silence, deathly silence. Nobody said anything … It was the beginning of the end. That was the last lunch. Barney never had another lunch.40
By this point in our interview there were tears in Sobel’s eyes. He concluded somberly, “When he decided to fire me, he asked Fred to fire me and Fred wouldn’t do it. He asked Dick to fire me and Dick wouldn’t do it. There was nobody else senior to me that he could ask to fire me, so he had do to it himself, which was something he’d never done before.” By the end of the year, Seaver and Goldfischer would be gone as well. Sobel added a coda to his story: “On the other hand, he kept me on the payroll for a year, and that’s how I started my own agency. So when he gave me a great break in hiring me, he gave me an even bigger break in firing me.” He concluded, “My only regret is when I left Grove Press after being fired, I didn’t cut the red phone and take it with me so I would have it on my desk for all eternity, knowing that phone will never ring again.”41 He and Rosset made up a few years later.
The company never recovered from the widely publicized takeover. Already overextended by overinvestment in film and the purchase and renovation of the Mercer Street building, Grove went into a financial tailspin. In 1970, the company lost more than $2 million. In the months following the takeover, Rosset fired seventy employees and vacated the Mercer Street offices, which he was forced to sell for only one hundred thousand dollars above its mortgage debt two years later. He had to end publication of the Evergreen Review in December 1971. In that same month, according to S. E. Gontarski, “Grove Press’s liabilities exceeded its assets by nearly $5 million.”42 In 1972, Standard and Poor’s index refused to issue further reports on the company; the next year the stock was essentially worthless. By 1974, Rosset was working out of a tiny office on 11th Street with a staff of fourteen.
When asked about the unionization drive, Rosset answered,
The FBI was responsible. I knew it was them … They destroyed us … That takeover really was the end of Grove Press. We had like 300 and something employees when it started and we had like 20 when it was finished … The head of the union confessed to me he was an opportunist, and that he felt I was correct, it was an FBI instigated thing, and that he fell for it. The union was having a lot of trouble. The Furriers—it was a dying union. A left wing union that had been red baited almost out of existence during the McCarthy era. It had in its Constitution that you could not be a member of the union if you believed in violence or overthrowing the government. That was in their Constitution and it was forced on them by the McCarthy people … So we counter attacked—Do you want to be a member of a fucking union you can’t even be a Black Panther? We didn’t even say that, we just handed out the Constitution to everybody that worked at Grove.43
Until the Grove takeover, there had been, according to historian John Tebbel, only one strike of editorial employees in the entire history of American publishing. Traditionally a genteel “family” business fostering an image of collegial informality, publishing had been, as Tebbel affirms, “the lowest-paying part of the communications industry.”44 But the meagerness of its remuneration was supposed to be compensated for by the “psychic wages” accrued through working with and for literature, a commitment to which was assumed to be the motivation of anyone willing to enter into such an unprofitable and unorganized industry. And many who entered were young, college-educated women, most of whom were forced to begin their careers as editorial assistants at salaries well below subsistence level for New York City. Under these conditions, Grove’s treatment of its employees, which included health benefits and a profit-sharing plan, was better than that of most of its Midtown brethren. Its hiring of women in positions of authority, it should be noted, also compared favorably with other publishers. Menza assured me that “Barney hired a lot of women, and depended upon a lot of women’s opinions and worked closely with all of us,” and Seaver, in his memoirs, affirms, “Women employees at Grove in key positions of editorial, production, and marketing were legion, and our work hours (thirty-per week), medical benefits, vacations, and holidays were well above industry average.”45 Nevertheless, the executive editors and upper management remained exclusively male.
By 1970, the “genteel” image legitimating, if not justifying, these conditions no longer obtained. Over the course of the prior decade, the American publishing industry had undergone a widely publicized series of mergers and acquisitions, permanently transforming its cultural and economic structure. In 1960, Random House had purchased Knopf; in 1965, RCA purchased Random House. The Times-Mirror Company purchased New American Library in 1963, and CBS purchased Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1967. Companies that were not purchased by larger corporations went public. The consequent demand for economic accountability and fiscal responsibility made it increasingly difficult to run a company as recklessly as Rosset had. As Menza affirmed to me, “If you have a corporation, a large corporation, you have a lot more people to pay, and if you have a lot more people to pay, you can’t afford to make mistakes, and if you can’t afford to make mistakes, you can’t take any chances.”46
Furthermore, such developments increasingly integrated publishing into the larger culture and communications industries, undermining the claim that literature somehow existed outside the rationalized system of commodity exchange and labor relations. Rather, book publishing was now one of the biggest, and one of the few nonunionized, industries in a city that had become the cultural and economic engine of the emergent postmodern world system. The Grove occupation, in fact, was part of a larger effort by employees in the publishing industry to organize in response to these developments. The organizers had been in close communication with members of Harper and Row’s house union, and, according to Publishers Weekly, the organizing meetings in the lead-up to the occupation were attended by “approximately 80 people from 12 publishing firms.”47
Many of the lower-level employees in the publishing industry were women with college educations, literary aspirations, and heightened expectations who, like Robin Morgan, came to work for Grove in hopes that these aspirations and expectations could be met. As the Committee for the Survival of Grove specified in its statement, “We searched for the radical young as part of a deliberate hiring policy,” and the radical young in turn “came to us looking for a place to work compatible with their point of view and their lifestyle.”48
Most of these countercultural youth had first become familiar wi
th Grove in college, where its colophon was by the second half of the 1960s associated with a veritable countercanon of “modern classics.” Menza, for example, knew about Grove as a classics major at Oberlin; as she told me, “I’d heard of Grove because … when I was in school, we had used Grove Press; I mean, everybody had Grove Press books. You were either reading them on your own, or if you studied any drama, of course, you had Grove Press books.” These books were becoming the subject of the scholarly articles and books produced by the burgeoning population of young people pursuing advanced degrees in literature.49
One of these books quickly became a classic in its own right and can be understood as a sort of literary analogue to Morgan’s takeover. In May 1969, a letter from Ellen Krieber at Doubleday informed Grove that “we are planning to publish, early next year, a trade book entitled Sexual Politics by Kate Millett … In our book, we are quoting from several of your books … May we have permission to use these quotes in our book?”50 Grove promptly sent a copy of the letter to Henry Miller, explaining that “enclosed is a letter from Doubleday and the material to which they refer. The author, Kate Millett, is quoting rather extensively from SEXUS and BLACK SPRING. We would normally give such permission for inclusion of quotes in a critical work. However, since this is not ‘exactly’ literary criticism, I would like to know whether or not you agree to quotations.”51 Miller sent the letter back, with his response scrawled across it: “I refuse to give permission to quote from my books.”