by Loren Glass
16. Barney Rosset to Mark Schorer, 24 March 1954, GPR.
17. Barney Rosset to Karl Menninger, 17 May 1954, GPR. Bennett Cerf refused to provide testimony, writing to Rosset on 24 June,
I would like to be helpful, but in all good conscience, I can’t think of any good reason for bringing out an unexpurgated version of lady chatterley’s lover at this late date. In my opinion, the book was always a very silly story, far below Lawrence’s usual standard, and seemingly deliberately pornographic. It’s precisely this kind of book, in fact, that provides ammunition for the people who are hollering for censorship. ulysses was a landmark in literature and we fought and won our battle over it with a good conscience, but I can’t help feeling that anybody fighting to do lady chatterley’s lover in 1954 is placing more than a little of his bet on getting some sensational publicity from the sale of a dirty book. (GPR)
18. Barney Rosset to Laurence Pollinger, 15 June 1954, GPR.
19. Laurence Pollinger to Barney Rosset, 23 June 1954, GPR.
20. Barney Rosset to Alfred Knopf, 30 August 1954, GPR.
21. Barnet Rosset, interview with author, 5 October 2009.
22. “Excerpts from Transcript for the Hearing Held 14 May 1959 at US Post Office Building, New York, New York,” 4, GPR. Extensive testimony from the trial is also available in Rembar, The End of Obscenity.
23. “Excerpts from Transcript,” 210.
24. Ibid., 212–13.
25. Ibid., 37.
26. Ibid., 39.
27. Ibid., 45.
28. Ibid., 122.
29. Quoted in Rembar, The End of Obscenity, 74.
30. Ibid., 94.
31. Departmental decision in the matter of Grove Press, Inc., 11 June 1959, 4, GPR.
32. “A Digest of Press Opinions,” 8, GPR.
33. “Excerpts from Transcripts,” 380.
34. “Signet Gram,” 24 July 1959, GPR.
35. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Grove press release, 29 July 1959, GPR.
36. “The Regrettable Plight of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’” Publishers Weekly, 17 August 1959, 28.
37. Ibid.
38. Rosset interview transcript, pt. 2, 6.
39. Cited in George Wickes, ed., Henry Miller and the Critics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 26.
40. Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 149.
41. Cited in Wickes, Henry Miller and the Critics, 76.
42. Ibid., 82.
43. Ibid., 119.
44. Henry Miller, Black Spring (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
45. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Tropic of Cancer,” 345 Mass. 11 (1962) at 89.
46. Ibid., 88–90.
47. Ibid., 218.
48. Trial transcript, Franklyn S. Haiman v. Robert Morris, No. 61 S 19718 (21 February 1962) at 15.
49. Rosset interview transcript, 16.
50. “Opinion of the Honorable Samuel B. Epstein,” Franklyn S. Haiman v. Robert Morris at 14.
51. “Statement in Support of the Freedom to Read,” Evergreen Review 6, no. 25 (July–August), GPR. Miller had himself used the phrase “freedom to read” in his letter protesting the Norwegian ban on Sexus, “Defence of the Freedom to Read,” published in Evergreen Review 3, no. 9 (Summer 1959): 12–20. While the rights of readers had been a concern for obscenity law from its nineteenth-century beginnings, prominent usage of the phrase “freedom to read” dates from the postwar era, beginning with the official statement “The Freedom to Read,” adopted by the American Library Association and the American Book Publishers Council in May 1953.
52. “Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the District Court of Appeal, Third District, State of Florida,” October 1963, 4, 11, GPC.
53. Jacobellis v. State of Ohio, 84 S. Ct. 1676 (1964) at 195.
54. Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Knopf, 1967), 35. In his acknowledgments, Hassan specifically offers his appreciation to “the farsighted publishers New Directions and Grove Press” (xiii).
55. Ibid., 30, 37.
56. Ibid., 4, 17.
57. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch,” 218 N.E. 2d 571 (1966) at 32.
58. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 199. The deposition was not published in the Olympia edition and appears as an introduction to the first Grove edition.
59. Frank McConnell, “William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction,” Massachusetts Review 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 668.
60. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch” at 52–53.
61. Quoted in Michael Barry Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 235.
62. Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch,” in de Grazia, Censorship Landmarks, 581.
63. “Naked Lunch,” letter to booksellers, n.d., GPR.
64. “Naked Lunch on Trial,” in William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1959), xiii, xv.
65. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch” at 203.
66. “Naked Lunch on Trial,” xxxiv.
67. Rosset interview transcript, 75.
68. “News from Evergreen Review,” GPR.
69. “The Moderns,” display ad, Evergreen Review 8, no. 32 (April–May 1964): 4.
70. In this sense, Grove’s strategy can be understood as a confluence and apogee of the two principal grounds of legal defense whose genealogy Elisabeth Ladenson provides in Dirt for Art’s Sake: the “art for art’s sake” argument that “art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality” and the “realism” argument that “the function of the work of art may legitimately include … the representation of all aspects of life, including the more unpleasant and sordid” (xv).
71. Although I did not borrow it from him, my use of the term “vulgar modernism” is similar to T. J. Clark’s use of it to describe abstract expressionism, which he sees as “the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie’s aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural power. It is the art of that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can speak … the aristocrat’s claim to individuality. Vulgarity is the form of that aspiration” (Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999], 389). The Grove Press canon can be understood as expressing a similar aspiration on the part of a similar class fragment. The term has also been used by film critic J. Hoberman, in a somewhat different sense, to designate experimental innovations in the so-called popular arts of cinema, television, and comics (“Vulgar Modernism,” Artforum 20 [February 1982]: 71–76).
72. In Miracle of the Rose, Genet affirms that he was particularly drawn to “books with heraldic bindings, the Japanese vellum of deluxe editions, the long-grained Moroccan copies” (trans. Bernard Frechtman [New York: Grove Press, 1966], 257).
73. Michael Davidson, Guys like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13. See also Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 52–68.
74. John Rechy to Richard Seaver, 25 January 1963, GPR.
75. Ibid., 7 March 1963, GPR. Marcel Margin, reviewing City of Night for the “homophile” magazine One (August 1962), agreed, claiming, “This book is to a far greater degree the story of degenerate heterosexuals than it is of homosexuals” (25).
76. Peter Buitenhuis, “Nightmares in the Mirror,” New York Times, 30 June 1963, 68.
77. David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 163.
78. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1993), 317.
79. Hubert Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 25.
80
. Ibid., 56.
81. Ibid., 67.
82. Ibid., 122–23, 198–99.
83. United States v. Ginzburg, 338 F. 2d 12 (1964) at 465. Ginzburg had aggressively marketed his magazine Eros through a direct-mail campaign. The justices were particularly irked that he had sought mailing privileges from the postmasters of Intercourse and Blue Ball, Pennsylvania. For his account of his experience, see Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison (New York: AvantGarde Books, 1973); see also Charles Williams, “Eros in America: Freud and the Counter Culture” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2012). Mishkin had, like Girodias, directly solicited authors to write pornographic texts, providing specific guidelines and paying in cash; he had also instructed the printer not to use his name as the publisher. Thus, it was the behavior of the defendants, more than the content of their wares, that led to their convictions being upheld.
84. William Lockhart and Robert McClure, “Censorship of Obscenity: The Developing Constitutional Standards,” Minnesota Law Review 45, no. 5 (1960): 5–121. See also Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 66–88.
85. “Join the Underground,” display ad, New York Times, 13 March 1966, 21.
86. Richard Seaver to Harry Braverman, 14 January 1966, GPR.
87. “‘Evergreen’ Digs into Underground Appeal, Finds ‘Sold Out’ Types Really Dig Its Copy,” Advertising Age, 25 July 1966.
88. “Do You Have What It Takes to Join the Underground?,” display ad, New York Times, 29 January 1967, 273.
89. Ironically, Grove’s editions of these titles have now become collectible.
90. Edmund Wilson, “The Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” New Yorker, 18 October 1952, 176.
91. “Marquis de Sade,” press release, n.d., GPR.
92. Austryn Wainhouse to Richard Seaver, 5 March 1966, GPR.
93. Richard Seaver to Maurice Girodias, 16 September 1966, GPR.
94. Richard Seaver, “An Anniversary Unnoticed,” Evergreen Review 9, no. 36 (June 1965): 54.
95. “Sade Promotional Letter,” n.d., GPR.
96. Jean Paulhan, “The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice,” in The Marquis de Sade: “The Complete Justine,” “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 10.
97. Maurice Blanchot, “Sade,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, 38.
98. Simone de Beauvoir, “Must We Burn Sade?,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, 40.
99. Pierre Klossowski, “Nature as Destructive Principle,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, 66.
100. Austryn Wainhouse, “On Translating Sade,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 42 (August 1966): 51.
101. “Foreword,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, xii.
102. “Publisher’s Preface,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, xxii.
103. Wilson, “Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” 173.
104. Albert Fowler, “The Marquis de Sade in America,” Books Abroad 31, no. 4 (Autumn 1957): 355.
105. John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86.
106. Alex Szogyi, “A Full Measure of Madness,” New York Times Book Review, 25 July 1965, 4, 22.
107. Seaver, “An Anniversary Unnoticed,” 54.
108. Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake, 229.
109. Ibid., 234.
110. “Publisher’s Preface,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, xviii.
111. John Clellon Holmes, “The Last Cause,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 44 (December 1966): 31.
112. Legman, “Introduction,” in My Secret Life, by Anonymous (New York: Grove Press, 1966), xxi.
113. Ibid., xlviii.
114. “Publisher’s Preface,” in My Secret Life, xvi.
115. Ibid., xviii.
116. J. H. Plumb, “In Queen Victoria’s Spacious Days,” New York Times, 1 January 1967, 26.
117. Goldman, “The Old Smut Peddler,” 50.
118. Rosset, nevertheless, took exception to the Life profile and wrote a letter to the editor accusing the author of “innuendo, insinuation, falsehood, libel, and malicious distortion” (Barney Rosset to the editors of Life magazine, 29 August 1969, BRP).
119. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 34.
Chapter 4
1. Edgar Snow, “Author’s Preface to the 1944 Edition,” Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, 1961), vi–vii.
2. “Book Reviews,” Chicago Daily Defender, 11 July 1961, 9.
3. Jahn, Muntu, 19.
4. Donald Franklin Joyce, Gatekeepers of Black Culture: Black-Owned Book Publishing in the United States, 1817–1981 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 78–79.
5. Jahn, Muntu, 25.
6. Jahn, Neo-African Literature, 278, 282.
7. S. E. Anderson, “Neo-African Literature,” Black Scholar (January–February 1970): 76.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 14, 26.
10. “Wretched of the Earth,” press release, n.d., GPR.
11. “Books—Authors,” New York Times, 12 April 1965, 32.
12. “Wretched of the Earth,” display ad, New York Times Book Review, 25 April 1965, 44.
13. Lewis Nichols, “What the Negro Reads,” New York Times Book Review, 16 April 1967, 5.
14. Mel Watkins, “Black Is Marketable,” New York Times Book Review, 16 February 1969, 3.
15. Gail Baker Woods, “Merchandising Malcolm X: Melding Man and Myths for Money,” Western Journal of Black Studies 17, no. 1 (1993): 45.
16. “The Bibliography of Malcolm X,” Los Angeles Public Library, n.d., GPR.
17. “A Discussion Guide for The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” 1968, GPR. The guide lists no author, but it is fair to assume that Geller and Braverman both had a hand in its design.
18. Nat Hentoff, “Uninventing the Negro,” Evergreen Review 9, no. 38 (November 1965): 35.
19. Ibid., 68.
20. Hentoff, “Applying Black Power,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 44 (December 1966): 47.
21. Ibid., 64.
22. Julius Lester, “The Black Writer and the New Censorship,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 77 (April 1970): 19.
23. Ibid., 19, 20.
24. Earl Caldwell, “Black Bookstores Creating New BestSeller List,” New York Times, 20 August 1969, 49.
25. Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 19.
26. Ibid., 92.
27. Ibid., 138.
28. Ibid., 140.
29. Rosset interview transcript, 83.
30. Margaret Randall, “Notes from the Underground,” Evergreen Review 11, no. 49 (October 1967): 20.
31. Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage, 2009), 128.
32. Michel Bosquet, “From The Last Hours of Che Guevara,” trans. Richard Seaver, Evergreen Review 11, no. 51 (February 1968): 33.
33. Fidel Castro, “El Che vive!,” Evergreen Review 11, no. 51 (February 1968): 35.
34. Ernesto Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, trans. Victoria Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review, 1968), 254.
35. Joseph Hansen, “Preface,” in Che Guevara Speaks, ed. George Lavan (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 7.
36. Julius Lester, Revolutionary Notes (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 6.
37. “The Che Guevara Sweepstakes,” Publishers Weekly, 5 August 1968.
38. The details of Liss’s trip to Bolivia are wonderfully recounted in an unpublished report, “Notes for the Bolivian Trip on a Day to Day Basis: A Diary in Search of a Diary,” BRP.
39. “Che Guevara’s Bolivian Campaign Dia
ry,” trans. Helen Lane, Evergreen Review 11, no. 57 (August 1968): 33.
40. Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, “Foreword,” in Revolution in the Revolution?, by Régis Debray (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 9.
41. Ibid., 7, 8.
42. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” in The Ideologies of Theory (New York: Verso, 2008), 508.
43. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 98.
44. Jean Genet, “A Salute to 100,000 Stars,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 61 (December 1968): 51.
45. Ibid., 52, 88.
46. Jerry Rubin, “A Yippie Manifesto,” Evergreen Review 13, no. 66 (May 1969): 42.
47. Ibid., 83.
48. Tuli Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 1.
49. Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, 1971), iii.
50. Carl Oglesby, “The Idea of the New Left,” in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 18.
Chapter 5
1. United States of America v. A Motion Picture Entitled “I Am Curious, Yellow” ended up being the only significant obscenity case that Grove lost, when the appeal made it to the Supreme Court in 1970. Justice William Douglas, who had published an excerpt from his recent book in the Evergreen Review, recused himself, and the vote was split 4 to 4, allowing the district court’s ban to be upheld.
2. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 327.
3. Mark Betz, “Little Books,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 319–52. Very little has been written about Grove’s film division. The best resource I could find is an unpublished undergraduate thesis written at Harvard University by Rachel Whitaker, “Beyond Books: Film Production and Distribution at the Grove Press Publishing House” (2008).
4. “Hiroshima mon amour: A Round-Table Discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean Domarchi, Pierre Kast, and Jacques Rivette,” trans. Liz Heron, Criterion Collection, prod. Issa Clubb (2005), 13 (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma 97 [July 1959]).
5. Ibid., 15.
6. Ibid., 19–20.
7. Marguerite Duras, “Synopsis,” in Hiroshima mon amour, by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 9.