Rebel Publisher
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Then, in June, Grove received a review copy of “Sexual Politics: Miller, Mailer, and Genet,” a version of the book’s introduction, which was to appear as the opening essay in the upcoming New American Review, Theodore Solotaroff’s resuscitation of the New American Library’s groundbreaking journal New World Writing. In his cover letter, Solotaroff notes that “Miss Millett’s essay has been adapted from a Ph.D. dissertation which she is doing at Columbia. This might seem to be an unlikely source for writing that is as candid, partisan, and witty as Miss Millett’s attack on the sexual attitudes of Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, and her defense of Jean Genet’s. Considering, however, the outspokenness emanating from the campuses, Miss Millett’s scholarly but devastating analysis of the cult of masculinity in two of our supposedly liberated writers is perhaps not so unexpected after all.”52
Emily Jane Goodman, at the time Grove’s recently hired house counsel, warned that Miller’s refusal was on shaky legal ground: “Doubleday takes the position that Miss Millett’s book is a critical work and that their excerpts from our authors would be within fair usage. We would have a very difficult time disputing this.”53 Sexual Politics, with extensive quotations from Miller and Genet, was published in 1970, the same year of the feminist takeover of the company. Its very title illustrates the shift from moral to political evaluative frameworks, and its methodological reliance on extensive quotation attests to the degree to which Grove’s determination to make these texts legally available and democratically accessible was a condition of possibility for the political critique that followed.
Although it has been eclipsed by the more theoretically sophisticated feminist theory of the 1980s, Sexual Politics opens with what could arguably be a methodological and political credo for the next generation of cultural critics:
It has been my conviction that the adventure of literary criticism is not restricted to a dutiful round of adulation, but is capable of seizing upon the larger insights which literature affords into the life it describes, or interprets, or even distorts. This essay, composed of equal parts of literary and cultural criticism, is something of an anomaly, a hybrid, possibly a new mutation altogether. I have operated on the premise that there is room for a criticism which takes into account the larger cultural context in which literature is conceived and produced. Criticism which originates from literary history is too limited in scope to do this; criticism which originates in aesthetic considerations, “New Criticism,” never wished to do so.54
What Lionel Trilling famously called the “dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet” had, of course, been a perennial subject for his generation of intellectuals, who had been central to legitimating the study of the figures Millet herself engages, but sexual politics, as opposed to sexuality, had been a blind spot for the predominantly male, and predominantly Freudian, coterie of critics who presided over the canonization of modernism.55 Trilling’s “liberal” imagination was no longer ascendant in the Columbia University English department where Millet was a graduate student. As George Stade, at the time an assistant professor on Millet’s dissertation committee, proclaimed, “Reading the book is like sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker.”56
Like the takeover of Grove Press, Millet’s methodology can be understood at least partially in terms of the penetration of women into the homosocial spaces that were central to the circuits and sacred to the culture of late modernism. Millet affirms that Miller’s “strenuous heterosexuality depends, to a considerable degree, on a homosexual sharing” and that his “sexual humor is the humor of the men’s house, more specifically, the men’s room.”57 Her generous quotation from Miller, which would have been legally impossible without Grove’s efforts to publish him in the first place, inverts the morally redemptive agency of Miller’s earlier male critics. Thus, she opens by overturning Lawrence Durrell and Karl Shapiro’s celebration of Miller as sexually liberating, arguing instead that “Miller is a compendium of American sexual neuroses, and his value lies not in freeing us from such afflictions, but in having had the honesty to express and dramatize them.” And, deprecating Ihab Hassan’s contention that this compendium is actually a (modernist) parody, Millett insists that “the major flaw in his oeuvre—too close an identification with the persona, ‘Henry Miller’—always operates insidiously against the likelihood of persuading us that Miller the man is any wiser than Miller the character.”58
If Henry Miller (both author and character) is the villain in Millet’s study, Jean Genet, with whom she concludes both her introduction and the book itself, is its hero. For Millett, Genet “is the only living writer of first-class literary gifts to have transcended the myths of our era.”59 And Millet analyzes this transcendence in terms that anticipate the antiessentialist orthodoxies of later feminist and gender theory. In her introduction, she argues that Genet’s homosexual characters “have unerringly penetrated to the essence of what heterosexual society imagines to be the character of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ and which it mistakes for the nature of male and female, thereby preserving the traditional relation of the sexes.”60 In her final chapter, she affirms that, in his homosexual parodies of heterosexual hierarchies, “Genet has demonstrated the utterly arbitrary and invidious nature of sex role. Divorced from their usual justification in an assumed biological incongruity, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ stand out as terms of praise and blame, authority and servitude, high and low, master and slave.”61 Millet mobilizes the authority of Sartre’s “brilliant psychoanalytic biography of Genet” to buttress her argument.
However, she also notes that Saint Genet was composed before Genet wrote his last three plays and that it therefore “leaves its subject still a rebel, failing to report his final metamorphosis into revolutionary.”62 Millet offers her own concluding analysis of Genet’s final transformation as a dialectical resolution to Sartre’s uncompleted existentialist argument. According to Millett,
Alone of our contemporary writers, Genet has taken thought of women as an oppressed group and revolutionary force, and chosen to identify with them … Each of his last plays incorporates the sexual into the political situations: in The Balcony it is power and sex, in The Blacks, race and sex, in The Screens, sexual rank and the colonial mentality. Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer identify women as an annoying minority force to be put down and are concerned with a social order in which the female would be perfectly controlled. Genet, however, has integrated her into a vision of drastic social upheaval where her ancient subordination can produce explosive force.63
For Millett, sex is the last essentialist outpost in a discursive struggle that had maintained it as an exception that proved the rule for the solitary male rebel. Once Genet lays siege to this outpost, an authentic revolution becomes possible. In a dramatic dialectical reversal, Mailer’s “White Negro” is replaced by Genet’s Queen, the hipster-rebel by the sex radical.
On August 31, 1970, Time magazine featured Kate Millett on the cover and dubbed her “the Mao Tse-tung of Women’s Liberation.”64 By then, Sexual Politics was in its fourth printing and had already sold more than fifteen thousand copies in hardcover. In September, it was prominently advertised in the Evergreen Review with the tagline, “The biggest power struggle of all has begun. And Kate Millet has written its call to arms.” The same issue also featured Julius Lester’s article “Woman—the Male Fantasy,” in which Lester, still listed as a contributing editor, concedes that “Evergreen Review gratifies the ego of the sexually inadequate male.”65 Also appearing in this issue was Leo Skir’s account of the Gay Liberation march celebrating the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, and it is worth affirming that, unlike many of the other “underground” magazines, Evergreen Review had been consistently supportive of the uprisings, which permanently transformed the cultural geography of Greenwich Village, and that Grove Press published many of the books that provided cultural recognition and political legitimation for the sexual “underworld” whose energies fueled the Ga
y Liberation movement.
Finally, the September 1970 issue of Evergreen Review featured a reprint, translated by Richard Seaver, of an interview with Jean Genet from the Nouvel observateur, recounting his recent visit to the United States in support of the Black Panther Party. While Genet’s books were by this time legally and popularly available, he himself had been denied a visa and had to sneak into the country, with Rosset’s help, through Canada. As Genet recounts, he “went from city to city, university to university, working for the Black Panther Party, speaking on its behalf, and in behalf of Bobby Seale. To popularize the movement and to collect money. I went to MIT, Yale, Columbia, UCLA, etc. In this way, the most important American universities opened their doors to the Black Panther Party.”66 Genet refused to discuss his writing, claiming that it had no relevance for his political radicalism, but this itinerary belies his claim. What Genet was able to contribute to the Panthers was countercultural capital. By 1970, students across the country were familiar with his writing and its galvanizing inspiration for iconic figures such as Ginsberg and Burroughs. And all of that writing had been published by Grove Press.
In its few remaining issues, Evergreen did try both to incorporate and to respond to feminist criticism of the counterculture and the New Left. It published two essays from the foundational 1971 anthology of feminist criticism, Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness: Vivian Gornick’s “Woman as Outsider” and Alix Shulman’s “Organs and Orgasms.” It also featured interviews by Claudia Dreifus with activists Bernadette Devlin and Germaine Greer, as well as an article by Dreifus, “Women in Revolutionary China.”
But Grove had already laid the groundwork for its own demise. By funneling the pornographic margins into the cultural mainstream, it dissolved the aura that had previously shielded the personal, especially the sexual, from being understood as political. Grove’s success also demystified the personal charisma whereby Rosset had commanded the loyalty of the men and women who were dedicated to his company. The campaign against censorship that he had spearheaded, in the end, left him behind. He had gone from avantgarde to arrièregarde, from hero to villain. But the decline in his personal fortunes must be understood in terms of the success of the collective project he was so instrumental in enabling. He had, almost single-handedly, precipitated the end of obscenity, but the result was a battle over the politics of pornography that he was ill-equipped to engage.
…
Rosset did manage to survive the 1970s, but he was never able to revive Grove’s financial solvency or its cultural relevance. Even with the ruthless downsizing that followed the occupation, Grove still had cash-flow problems, and Rosset had to turn to his colleague Jason Epstein, at that point an executive at Random House, to prop up the company. Epstein convinced an aging Bennett Cerf that it would be tragic to let Grove go under, so for much of the 1970s Random House distributed Grove’s titles, in return for which it received a portion of the profits. While not terribly favorable to Grove financially—Rosset had to cede the rights to a number of valuable backlist titles, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X—the deal enabled the company to continue its operations, but on a considerably reduced level of only a handful of titles per year.
Between 1970 and 1985, Grove continued to work the niches it had established for itself in the 1950s and 1960s. The company sustained its position in the vanguard of contemporary drama, publishing new work by Beckett, Pinter, and Stoppard and adding others, such as David Mamet, to its stable of playwrights. Grove also published a number of important anthologies of dramatic work, including the complete plays of Joe Orton, a multivolume Black Cat edition of Pinter’s work, and Paul Carter Harrison’s Kuntu Drama: Plays of the African Continuum. It continued to publish sexually explicit materials, frequently in association with the newly legitimate pornographic film industry, bringing out Emmanuelle and Emmanuelle II and an illustrated anthology of critical responses to Last Tango in Paris. The company also discovered or developed a number of important writers who would enter the postmodern canon, including Robert Coover and John Kennedy Toole, whose Confederacy of Dunces was its last bestseller under Rosset’s leadership. Nevertheless, as Kent Carroll, who worked with Rosset throughout the decade, affirms, “During the ’70s Grove lived on the income generated by its marvelous backlist.”67
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In 1982, Rosset made his last significant acquisition for Grove: Kathy Acker, whose work the company continued to publish after his departure. As a selfconfessed female avatar of Grove authors such as the Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet, Acker represents the ambiguous legacy of Grove’s signal achievement: the mainstreaming of the avantgarde. She exemplifies the radical feminist appropriation of sexual idioms and attitudes previously reserved for male modernist authors, revealing the degree to which this appropriation was a crucial component of the shift from modern to postmodern aesthetic and cultural sensibilities in the 1970s and 1980s. Acker herself is quite literal about this process in the last section of Blood and Guts in High School, when her protagonist Janey meets Jean Genet in Tangier. In the panoply of poetry, prose, and dramatic dialogue that follows, Acker enacts a series of plagiarisms and pastiches of Genet’s work, including direct quotes from Journal de voleur, a stint in an Egyptian prison “for stealing two copies of Funeral Rites,” a “terrible plagiarism of The Screens,” and a concluding scene in an Alexandrian desert where “all Janey and Genet see are mirages or mirrors, pictures of themselves, images of the world which came out of themselves.”68
In her appropriation of Genet, Acker incarnates Millet’s vision of an antiessentialist world in which sex roles are no longer linked to biological sex but are performed as a mode of political critique. But the limits and liabilities of this critique under a new postmodern dispensation must be conceded. Indeed, these limits are part and parcel of the literary legitimacy that Acker enjoys. Though her underground and avantgarde credentials are impeccable, they are also thoroughly integrated into the cultural field as a legitimate market niche and object of academic study. The legitimation of this niche, ballasted by the academic respectability of radical aesthetic and political practices, is the signal legacy of the cultural revolution Grove helped to effect, a revolution that vastly expanded the range of voices that can be heard without radically challenging the larger socioeconomic order in which they are speaking.
There is no editorial file on Kathy Acker in the Grove Press Archives. The only indication of her affiliation with the Rosset era is the manuscript of Blood and Guts in High School that Fred Jordan found on Rosset’s desk upon his return to the company in the early 1980s. But, in a sense, the entire Grove Press backlist is Acker’s archive, her fundamental point of reference and the source of whatever cultural power her work exerts. Indeed, the Grove Press backlist is a renewable resource of dissidence and dissent that continues to energize new generations of radical artists and activists.
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In 1985, Barney Rosset, personally in debt and still struggling to keep the company afloat in the new environment of corporate conglomerates, sold Grove to Ann Getty and George Weidenfeld for $2 million. One year later, Getty fired Rosset as editor-in-chief. Though he continued to pursue a variety of publishing projects, his role as a significant force in the field he had radically transformed was over.
In my first interview with Fred Jordan I asked him what he thought was responsible for the decline of Grove’s fortunes in the 1970s, and he answered without hesitating: “Barney!” We laughed. The next morning he called me in my room at the Chelsea Hotel to clarify: “The times had changed,” he said, and it was no longer possible for Rosset to run the company as he had. When I put the phone down, I realized that both answers were correct. The story of Grove reveals how one man managed to set in motion historical forces that, in the end, passed him by.
Notes
Introduction
1. Barney Rosset, interview with author, 5 October 2009. Though no book has been written about Grove
, S. E. Gontarski’s published lecture, Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy (Chapel Hill, NC: Hanes Foundation, 2000), provides an excellent, if abbreviated, account that gives due credit to Rosset’s background. A somewhat different, if equally informative, version can be found in his introduction to The Grove Press Reader: 1951–2000 (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Gontarski also coedited and wrote the introduction for the fall 1990 edition of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to Grove, which includes interviews with Rosset as well as a selection of editors and authors who worked with him (“Dionysus in Publishing: Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Making of a Countercanon,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 [Fall 1990]: 7–18). A number of articles profiled Rosset and Grove in the 1950s and 1960s, providing useful snapshots of both the company and the times: see “Advance Guard Advance,” Newsweek, 3 March 1953, 94–98; Fred Warshofsky, “Grove Press: Little Giant of Publishing,” Paperback Trade News, March 1962, 10–17; Gerald Jonas, “The Story of Grove,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 January 1968, 28–29, 47–48, 52–53, 59; John Updike, “Grove Is My Press, and Avant My Garde,” New Yorker, 4 November 1967, 223–38; Albert Goldman, “The Old Smut Peddler,” Life, 29 August 1969, 49–53; and Martin Mayer, “How to Publish ‘Dirty Books’ for Fun and Profit,” Saturday Evening Post, 29 January 1969, 33–35, 72–75. John Gruen has an informative section on the company in its early years (The Party’s Over Now: Reminiscences of the Fifties—New York’s Artists, Writers, Musicians, and Their Friends [Wainscot, NY: Pushcart Press, 1989], 40–49); and Al Silverman has a useful chapter on Grove (The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors [New York: St. Martin’s, 2008], 41–68). Also useful is Richard Seaver’s posthumously published memoir, The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). In addition, a film has been made about Grove: Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press (Arthouse Films, 2008). There is one dissertation devoted to Grove’s censorship battles: Brian McCord, An American AvantGarde: Grove Press, 1951–1986 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2002). Also useful is the chapter on Grove in Henry S. Somerville’s doctoral dissertation, Commerce and Culture in the Career of the Permanent Innovative Press: New Directions, Grove Press, and George Braziller Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2009). Finally, Rosset conducted a series of interviews with Jules Geller with the intention of coauthoring a book to be called “Magnificent Maverick.” The transcriptions from these interviews are housed in the Barney Rosset Papers recently acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They will hereafter be referred to as Rosset interview transcript.