Rebel Publisher

by Loren Glass

  2. Check of Records: Francis W. Parker High School, February 1944, BRP. In a startling sign of the casual anti-Semitism of the day, Smith also added, “In spite of the depth of his emotions and the fact that he has Jewish blood, he never obtrudes himself or his ways on his comrades and has none of the self-centered preoccupation with his own viewpoints that sometimes marks boys of Jewish extraction, who, like himself, have no physical characteristics to distinguish them.”

  3. Barney Rosset, “Henry Miller vs. ‘Our Way of Life,’” Nexus: International Henry Miller Journal 2, no. 1 (2005): 1.

  4. Ibid., 2, 4.

  5. Ibid., 6.

  6. Loren Glass, “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 341–61.

  7. Steven Brower and John Gall, “Grove Press at the Vanguard,” Print, March/April 1994, 61.

  8. Barney Rosset Jr. to Barney Rosset Sr., 9 April 1951, BRP.

  9. Rosset interview transcript, 44, BRP.

  10. Ibid., 7.

  11. Herbert Gold, “A Friend to Writers, Whatever the Cost,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 April 2012, F1.

  12. “Military Intelligence?,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 60.

  13. In truth, US Army Intelligence had considerable difficulty characterizing Rosset. In one document he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, his characteristics are listed as “boyish, unusual resources, keen and habitual analyst, impetuous, courageous, popular, melancholy, intelligent, well poised, well mannered, loyal, mild and quiet, retiring, sober, levelheaded, liberal, idealist.” FOIA request, file no. LA-5880: IX-o/2-17756, BRP.

  14. Fred Jordan, interview with author, 23 October 2010.

  15. Jeanette Seaver, interview with author, 21 October 2010.

  16. Herman Graf, interview with author, 25 October 2010.

  17. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Max Weber: Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1113.

  18. Warshofsky, “Grove Press,” 1.

  19. Gontarski, “Modernism, Censorship,” 29.

  20. James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13.

  21. John Sutherland, in his contribution to an issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to the sociology of literature, asserts that the history of publishing is a “hole at the centre of literary sociology” and cites Robert Darnton, along with McGann and D. F. McKenzie, as scholars endeavoring to fill that hole (“Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 3 [Spring 1988]: 574). Sutherland deprecates case studies as inherently unrepresentative and gloomily prophesies that “most future publishing history will be drudging, unexciting labour” (579), but I argue that he overstates his claims. In the case of the United States, John Tebbel’s magisterial four-volume History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: Bowker, 1972–81) has established itself as an authoritative reference work, providing the more quantitative and statistical overviews within which case histories like my own can comfortably position themselves without having to claim representativeness. Indeed, as this study reveals, Grove was in many ways the exception to most rules of the publishing business, which is part of what makes it so interesting.

  22. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11.

  23. “The Cult of the Colophon,” Publishers Weekly, 6 August 1927, 384. Most modernist theories of the brand focus on industries whose products are uniform. Thus, W. F. Haug, in his landmark Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), offers Chiquita bananas and Melitta coffee filters as examples of how “the trans-regional brand-names of large companies impose themselves on the public’s experience and virtually assume the status of natural phenomena” (25). Naomi Klein, whose highly influential study, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000), famously argues that, in our contemporary corporate world, “the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand” (21), still illustrates much of her argument with companies that mass-produce uniform commodities such as shoes and coffee. While Grove’s acquisition of a countercultural constituency anticipates the “lifestyle marketing” increasingly characteristic of contemporary culture’s brand-saturated public culture, it is also worth emphasizing that its effort to establish a colophonic identity recognizable by a discrete group of readers also hearkens back to the modernist publishing industry. For a sample of recent scholarship on branding and promotional culture, see Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers, eds., Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).

  24. “Cult of the Colophon,” 384.

  25. Ibid., 389.

  26. Jason Epstein, “A Criticism of Commercial Publishing,” Daedalus 92, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 64.

  27. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 87. Important engagements with Casanova’s book include Christopher Prendergrast, “Negotiating World Literature,” New Left Review 8 (March–April 2001): 100–121; Alexander Beecroft, “World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems,” New Left Review 54 (November–December 2008): 87–100; Jerome McGann, “Pseudodoxia Academica,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 645–56; Frances Ferguson, “Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 657–84; and Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 458–93.

  28. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5.

  29. Ibid., 143.

  30. The two most significant studies of the avantgarde are Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the AvantGarde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Peter Burger, Theory of the AvantGarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Poggioli’s theory is the more general one, asserting that “the avantgarde is a law of nature for contemporary and modern art” (225), while Burger’s Marxist approach is far more precise, seeing avantgarde movements as historically specific efforts “to negate those determinations that are essential in autonomous art” (53). Poggioli’s more catholic definition is far closer to that endorsed by the editors at Grove; indeed, he concludes by offering Grove authors Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco as contemporary avatars of the avantgarde.

  31. Barney Rosset, interview with author, 23 October 2010.

  32. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980, 105–282. See also Charles Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 403–557; André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2000); and John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 100–187.

  33. See Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, vol. 3, The Golden Age between Two Wars, 1920–1940. See also Jay Satterfield, “The World’s Best Books”: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

  34. Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), xii. See also Thomas L. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture: New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution (New York: Meridian, 1989); Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, 4:347–412; and Madison, Book Publishing in America, 547–57.

  35. For Epstein’s account of his career and his relationship with Rosset, see Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2001).

  36. David Dempsey, “Quality (Culture) Plus Quantity (Readers) Pays Off,” New York Times, 3 June 1956, 18.

  37. Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 6 April 1957, BRP. Extract from Samuel Beckett’s letter to Barney Rosset of 6 April 1957 reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s relationships with his publishers, and with the literary marketplace more generally, have been the subject of two recent books: Stephen John Dilks, Samuel Beckett and the Literary Marketplace (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); and Mark Nixon, ed., Publishing Samuel Beckett (London: British Library, 2011).

  38. Barney Rosset, “Remembering Samuel Beckett,” Conjunctions 53 (Fall 2009): 10.

  39. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 18 June 1953, quoted in Rosset, “Remembering Samuel Beckett,” 10.

  40. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 25.

  41. For Seaver’s account of his initial meeting with Rosset, see ibid., 200–207.

  42. Richard Seaver, “Samuel Beckett: An Introduction,” Merlin 2 (Autumn 1952): 73.

  43. Alexander Trocchi, “Editorial,” Merlin 2 (Autumn 1952): 55.

  44. Richard Seaver, “Introduction,” in Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book (New York: Grove Press, 1992), xii.

  45. Richard Seaver, “Revolt and Revolution,” Merlin 3 (Winter 1952–53): 172, 184.

  46. For a history of the Olympia Press, see John de St. Jorre, Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers (New York: Random House, 1994); and James Campbell, Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 36–80, 122–80. See also Maurice Girodias’s rambling autobiography, The Frog Prince (New York: Crown, 1980); and Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 179–94.

  47. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 286.

  48. On the complex relations between modernism and obscenity, see Adam Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Florence Dore, The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). The prominent role of Jews in this history is frequently noted but rarely analyzed. Two exceptions to this significant oversight are Jay Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Literature (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).

  49. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 249.

  50. S. E. Gontarski, “Don Allen: Grove’s First Editor,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 133.

  51. Donald Allen to Barney Rosset, 10 July 1956, GPR.

  52. Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” Evergreen Review 1, no. 2 (1957): 11–12.

  53. Donald Allen to Barney Rosset, 14 July 1957, GPR.

  54. “Cody’s Salutes Evergreen Books,” Daily Californian, 14 April 1958, 9.

  55. Barney Rosset, interview with author, 5 October 2009.

  56. Evergreen Review news release, n.d., 1, GPR.

  57. On the rise of paperback bookstores in the postwar United States, see Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 42–44.

  58. Grove Press spring 1958 catalog, 1, GPR.

  59. “An Experiment in Book Publishing That Worked!,” display ad, New York Times Book Review, 19 October 1958, 29.

  60. Raymond Walters Jr., “Market Report: Trends of a Year,” New York Times, 14 January 1962, 22.

  61. Barney Rosset, “Paperbacks: Does Good Taste Cost More?,” speech presented at “The Popular Arts in American Culture,” University of California, Berkeley extension, Summer 1962, 2–3, GPR.

  62. Rosset interview transcript, 6.

  63. Gontarski, “Don Allen,” 133.

  64. Jacques Barzun, “Three Men and a Book,” foreword to A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers’ Subscription and MidCentury Book Clubs, ed. Arthur Krystal (New York: Free Press, 2001), x.

  65. Marshall Best, “In Books, They Call It Revolution,” Daedalus (Winter 1963): 36. Tebbel affirms that “book clubs by 1960 were an important part of the publishing scene,” adding that, in 1958, “90 percent of adult books distributed in America had gone through book clubs or paperback outlets” (History of Book Publishing, 4:363–64).

  66. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 64.

  67. Ibid., 66.

  68. Ibid., 73.

  69. Digest of Education Statistics, “Earned Degrees in English Language and Literature,” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t281.asp.

  70. Digest of Education Statistics, “Earned Degrees in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures,” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t282.asp.

  71. Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1–28.

  72. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 2–3.

  73. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 164, 209.

  74. Ibid., 210.

  75. Philip Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the ’60s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 7. My main reservation about Beidler’s fascinating study is that he doesn’t include enough Grove Press titles.

  76. “Your Black Cat ‘Kit,’” GPR.

  77. Warshofsky, “Grove Press,” 13.

  Chapter 1

  1. Thornton Wilder, “Goethe and World Literature,” Perspectives USA (1952): 134.

  2. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5.

  3. Ibid., 4.

  4. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 47.

  5. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 56.

  6. UNESCO, Basic Texts (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), 7.

  7. Luther Evans, The United States and UNESCO (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1971), 1.

  8. William Preston, Edward Herman, and Herbert Schiller, Hope and Folly: The United States and UNESCO, 1945–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 70.

  9. Robert Escarpit, The Book Revolution (London: Harrap, 1966), 9.

  10. Christopher E. M. Pearson, Designing UNESCO: Art, Architecture and International Politics at MidCentury (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), xv.

  11. Ibid., xiv.

  12. Evans, United States and UNESCO, 39.

  13. Ibid., 115.

  14. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 177.

  15. Paul Blackburn, “The International Word,” Nation, 21 April 1962, 357. Grove, of course, was not alone in this postwar “sack of world literature,” arguably inaugurated by New American Library’s important series New World Writing, first issued in 1952. Nevertheless, it rapidly established a reputation for providing the most avantgarde examples of international writing.

  16. Ibid., 358.

  17. “Evergreen Books for World Literature and Humanities,” n.d., GPR.

  18. News release, “Khushwant Singh Wins Grove Press India Contest Award,” 15 March 1955, GPR.

  19. The judges were Wallace Fowlie, Alfred Kazin, Mulk Raj Anand, and V. K. Krishna Menon. Rosset later discovered, from documents obtained through the FOIA, that the political sympathies of the Indian judges brought the prize to the attention of the Department of State.

  20. Khushwant Singh to Barney Rosset, 3 February 1955, GPR.

  21. Barney Rosset to Luther Evans,
8 February 1955, GPR.

  22. Singh to Rosset.

  23. Barney Rosset to Richard Howard, 8 January 1959, GPR.

  24. Richard Howard to Barney Rosset, 29 January 1959, GPR.

  25. Ibid., n.d., GPR.

  26. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 31 August 1955, GPR.

  27. Leo Bersani, “No Exit for Beckett,” Partisan Review 33 (1966): 262.

  28. Martin Esslin, “Introduction,” in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 4.

  29. Bersani, “No Exit for Beckett,” 262.

  30. Esslin, “Introduction,” 10–12.

  31. Karl Ragnar Gierow, presentation speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1969, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1969/press.html.

  32. Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues on Painting,” in Esslin, Samuel Beckett, 21. Grove published the dialogues in 1958 with lavish illustrations, including twelve color plates, under the title Bram Van Velde in its short-lived Evergreen Gallery series.

  33. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 205.