Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  Hauled into court, Lewis was forced to expurgate the text. Berryman quotes the author as saying, “I have to accuse myself of high imprudence. Let me, however, observe that twenty is not the age at which prudence is most to be expected.”

  So there were at least some semi-rational reasons for buying Grove Press. Here was a small but existing enterprise with a flair that lifted it above a mundane commercial effort. It fit my way of thinking. When Balcomb left, I was on my own and my first “dirty book,” The Monk, would soon emerge from the printing press.

  The additional copies of the first three books which I had printed, and later, the English imports that followed, were stored in my apartment at 57 West Ninth Street. Along with other titles I was beginning to publish, they took up so much space and were so heavy that the floors were on the verge of collapse after a year or two. The original books I had bought from Balcomb and Phelps were all contained in a few small trunks and suitcases, probably a few hundred copies of each title, but more and more were being added all the time. The originals

  I took to a bindery and had them rebound into hard covers. Later, unsatisfied with the way they looked, I stripped off the unsold hardcover’s bindings and put the books back into paperback format—and also changed the design of the covers. I was very influenced by James Laughlin’s publishing house, New Directions. The original Balcomb/Phelps Grove covers were unattractive and without coherence. The new covers were plain yellow wrappers imprinted with black type—sort of a cross between the publication style of books in France and that of New Directions here.

  Another important influence on me in the early days of Grove was Anchor Books, a trade paperback line at Doubleday, created by Jason Epstein. We became friends and shared ideas about publishing. When Jason left Doubleday because the firm would not let him publish Nabokov’s Lolita, we decided to undertake a partnership and buy the American franchise on a trade paperback line published by a British publisher, Penguin, and its US subsidiary, then based in Baltimore. Before the Frankfurt Book Fair, Jason and I went to England and made an offer to the owner, who turned us down.

  Shortly after this, Jason joined Random House where he created another trade paperback line, Vintage, that became and remains enormously successful.

  The first book I published after The Monk was an edition of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, and I got Richard Blackmur, a famed Jamesian critic, to write the introduction. Publishing The Golden Bowl was Joan’s idea. It was her favorite of all of James’s books. She had found a copy in France and discovered that it had not been in print since 1925. We approached Scribner’s, who still owned the copyright. They sent an elderly and distinguished editor, Whitney Darrow, down to my office to see if we really existed. The copy of The Golden Bowl that Joan gave me was the actual copy we used to print from by photo-offset, and Francine did the illustration for the cover. I went on to publish seven or eight more of James’s novels, all out of print when I picked them up.

  So Joan actually had a lot to do with Grove in the beginning. But I also knew Horace Gregory at that time, and he was a big influence on me, too. Horace was a Jamesian scholar as well as quite a good poet.

  Early on, I became aware that English publishers were publishing many good books that weren’t being done in America. Having read and catalogued various books and authors that interested me, I traveled to England and approached publishers such as Faber and Faber, Chatto & Windus, and a few others, and ended up taking on a number of British writers. Little did I know then how unusual were my friendly, helpful overtures to the English publishers.

  In 1952 I took a course in publishing at Columbia. Saxe Commins, onetime senior editor at Random House, was the professor. I learned a great deal, but mainly I met book people—each session had a great visiting lecturer, each a leader in his or her area of publishing: advertising, editing, and so forth—people such as Ian Ballantine of Ballantine Books. But I also met students, among them Donald Allen, the first of the editors who would work with me at Grove. Donald had been an English teacher at Berkeley, and during World War II he had served as a specialist in Japanese for Naval Intelligence.

  At first Don appeared to me to be the prototype of the effete intellectual snob, albeit the brightest one ever. But when I got to know him better, I came to admire his daring and uncanny good judgment. I brought him to Grove early on and considered him a very important addition. For a while we comprised a publishing company with an editorial staff of two.

  In 1953 Don moved next door to me, into a basement apartment at 59 West Ninth Street, a brownstone with a garden behind it. I soon rented the floor above his apartment for an office. It was the new Grove’s first home away from home. One door away, to be exact. An easy commute.

  As Grove grew, our editorial and administrative staff expanded. When Richard Seaver returned from his years abroad in 1957 where he’d been a student and one of the editors of Merlin, he worked first for the publisher George Braziller. I was finally able to persuade him to join Grove in 1959. Dick’s knowledge of European literature helped him make invaluable contributions to Grove during the twelve years he was with us, working on manuscripts of French writers like Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugène Ionesco, and the Marquis de Sade. He translated many books from French. I once said at a speech (when I was receiving the PEN American Award for career achievement) that if I ever had a brother, I would have wanted him to be Dick Seaver. Eventually Dick would become the managing editor of our journal Evergreen Review.

  About this time Fred Jordan, who had come to work at Grove in 1956, took on more editorial responsibilities in our book publishing division. Like Dick, Fred was essential to Grove’s development. He read German (English was his second language), which was crucial in dealing with work by authors like Rolf Hochhuth, whose play The Deputy was about the role of Pope Pius XII with respect to the Jews in Europe during World War II. I acquired a copy from our German publisher friend, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, and also the rights. Fred had managed to escape from Vienna when the Nazis took over and made his way to England. During the war he served in the British Army. We were introduced by a freelance Grove salesman, Felix Morrow, who knew Fred and mentioned him to me. Fred got in touch with me and soon joined Grove, working in sales and then editorial—and stayed with the company for more than thirty years, before he left to run another publishing house, Pantheon.

  Other long-term employees at Grove included Judith Schmidt, who was my assistant for many years. She could write letters in my voice—and she made good friends with many Grove authors, which, among other things, made them feel at home when they came to our office.

  Harry Braverman, another Grove editor, was involved in a major book published by Grove in 1965, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I remember being in my car when it was announced on the radio that Malcolm X had been shot. The next day I seized an opportunity because I heard that Doubleday had his autobiography under contract but did not want to proceed with publishing it. Doubleday himself was quoted as saying he was afraid that the company’s employees might be endangered. I went to the agent for the book, signed it up, and then got Alex Haley (who later wrote Roots) to put the final touches on the manuscript quickly so it could come out as soon as possible. (Haley had compiled the text from lengthy interviews with Malcolm X.) The book turned out to have enormous political and social impact.

  After it was published, I went to my son Peter’s school to give a talk on how a book got published (I think Fred Jordan and Dick Seaver came along with me), and when I was finished with my talk, I asked if there were any questions. One of the students, a big, rather imposing young black kid, put his hand up and said, “It’s the most important book you ever published, isn’t it?”

  I wasn’t prepared to say yes, so I simply said to him, “You’re asking me to choose between my children. I can’t.”

  In fact, as time would tell, many people would feel that a number of my “children” were the most important books I had ever published, including,
I might add, our erotica. Richard Gallen, our lawyer for Grove, once said, “Barney’s business was always on a precipice. There was no one editorially doing what he was doing at that skill. In terms of drama, European literature, avant-garde literature, sexually provocative literature—there was no one doing it in America. No one.”14

  Perhaps his statement was too sweeping, but there were people like Laughlin, who in publishing Henry Miller left out Tropic of Cancer, or Alfred Knopf, who took on D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover but suppressed a crucial chapter. Those things were not being published in this country because of threatened and actual arrests, just as The Autobiography of Malcolm X was almost kept from publication because of Doubleday’s fears. I never let any of that stop me.

  I had always been drawn to books that were considered risky. When I was at Swarthmore in 1940–1941, I asked my parents to send me 50 books, all of which were published by New Directions or the Modern Library. And before that, when I was in Chicago attending high school, I went to Marshall Field & Co. to get books by John Steinbeck, James Farrell, and other writers considered too daring for young students to read, writers such as I. F. Stone, Nelson Algren, Pearl Buck, Edgar Snow, and André Malraux. So when I later found myself making “risky” decisions as a publisher, I was just being who I had always been.

  While Harry Braverman was working on the Malcolm X book, he brought in a young editor named Gilbert Sorrentino to help him—essentially, Harry used this occasion to train and work with Gil as an editor. Gil was also an innovative poet and fiction writer. Grove eventually published his remarkable comic novel, Mulligan Stew, in 1979, after it had been rejected by numerous other houses.

  Jules Geller was another important editor for us. He had been a Trotskyite in World War II and a conscientious objector. He would also eventually act as a leader in the fight against a group of protestors that tried to unionize Grove, about which more later. Skilled at tactics, Jules drove the union people crazy.

  Morrie Goldfisher handled our publicity for quite a few years. He was very good at his job and very much part of the inner circle. We also had one book designer, Roy Kuhlman, who did our covers and jackets for many years. He helped make Grove books stand out because of the distinctiveness and effectiveness of those designs. Joan’s approval of his work greatly strengthened my belief in Roy’s talent. I am proud that he was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

  In 1967 we made Grove a public company, something that was done by a number of other book publishers at about the same time. Grove had come a long way by the end of the decade. When we started out, there was just Don Allen, my second wife Loly (Hannelore Eckert), Howard Turner, John Gruen, and me. Grove soon needed more space and more editorial help, particularly after Evergreen Review was launched. The staff grew to about thirty-five people in the editorial, sales, and administrative side of Grove, and many of them worked with us for a long time.

  Evergreen Review originally came out in 1957 as a quarterly. It went bimonthly in late 1959, became a monthly in April 1964, and was mostly distributed in bookstores, although there were subscriptions. Later, when we started the Evergreen Book Club, we linked it to a subscription for the Review.

  The first issue featured eight pieces along with a portfolio of photographs by Harold Feinstein, printed on coated paper. Some of our contributors were regular Grove authors—Samuel Beckett’s short story “Dante and the Lobster” and his poem “Echo’s Bones” were included—and certain pieces had some connection to my past, for instance, Baby Dodds’ reminiscences of his career as a jazz drummer. (Dodds is the drummer I saw performing as 1945 turned into 1946 at my favorite Chicago bar, Tin Pan Alley, when I returned from the war.) We also published Mark Schorer’s “On Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” of course, which would become the introduction to the unexpurgated edition of the novel that Grove was to publish. I wanted to tie Evergreen Review to Grove Press as much as possible, and it would turn out that the two entities strengthened each other in immeasurable ways.

  Don Allen’s relationships with people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books (founded in 1953 and the first publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl in 1956) and a wide variety of poets, particularly on the West Coast, led directly to the second issue of Evergreen Review, “The San Francisco Scene,” and indirectly to one of our landmark books The New American Poetry 1945–1960, which Don edited. The anthology included many of those poets who had been featured in Evergreen, No. 2, among them Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Whalen. Poets from the Beat generation included Ginsberg, and the “New York School” poets were widely represented—John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara.

  The New American Poetry was one of the many books we published that opened up a wider market in the educational sector because they were used widely in college courses. We even began to put out a separate catalog just for that market. Dedicated sales promotion by Nat Sobel and Morrie Goldfisher did a tremendous job in making political poetry and erotica work their way into the halls of academe.

  Our book club operation grew steadily. The acquisition of Mid-Century Book Club in 1966 strengthened the Evergreen Book Club; at one point we had over 50,000 members. Grove’s best year was 1969, when our net revenues were more than $14 million. This was a huge leap from 1959, when our revenues were less than $1 million.

  In addition to the continuing sales of books by authors like Samuel Beckett, whose centrality to Grove grew and grew over time, from Waiting for Godot forward, as well as certain others, Grove’s revenues continued to rise. Not everything sold well initially, Godot among them. For example, Grove had published a book by a psychiatrist named Eric Berne that had sold perhaps two thousand copies. In 1964 we published his new book, Games People Play, which for quite a time sold very poorly, so I was inclined to drop it. I told this to one of my fellow participants in group therapy, where we mingled with young psychoanalysts in training and he said, “Don’t do it! Keep it going!” So I decided to start doing direct mail ads in the New York Times and elsewhere, and that slowly got the book going. It finally broke through and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 109 weeks. Ultimately more than five million copies were sold.

  At its largest Grove had its own warehouse, which was located on the far West Side. And our book club operation was in a separate building. The warehouse was unionized by a comparatively left-wing union, one we got along with quite well. In fact, they made an extraordinary concession—Grove would be allowed to move its warehouse location if need be. (Unions did not want a company to be able to move out of the state, or the country, simply to get out from under the union.) So when it came time for us to shift our warehousing, shipping, sales, and distribution to Random House in 1971, there was no problem.

  During my years at Grove its location never went beyond more than ten blocks from where it started—we remained in Greenwich Village. Over the years we moved a number of times, first from our space on West Ninth Street to 795 Broadway between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Grove’s offices there were over a clothing and hot dog stand. There were other publishers in the building, including Sheed and Ward and Fred Praeger, whose firm I believe had CIA connections. The two of us used to talk about it and laugh. In 1959 Grove moved to 64 University Place (over a grocery store) and then to 80 University Place (between Tenth and Eleventh Streets). In 1967 we relocated to 53 East Eleventh Street (where we established both the Black Circle Bar and Evergreen Theater, not your usual amenities for a publishing house), and then to 214 Mercer Street after renovations were completed in 1970 at a cost of $2 million. After that building was sold in June 1972, Grove moved back to East Eleventh Street and ultimately to 196 West Houston Street, the southern boundary of the Village. This was the site of both my home and Grove’s offices.

  After our lack of capital and debt load forced me to sell the company in 1985, I had my final real estate experience at Grove. I had found us an excellent space in the P
uck Building, a magnificent Romanesque Revival building constructed in 1885, located at 295 Lafayette Street (at the corner of Broadway) in the SoHo section of lower Manhattan. It once housed the printing facilities of the long defunct Puck magazine. The new owners had other ideas. They wanted to move Grove’s offices uptown. But Grove (which subsequently merged with Atlantic Monthly Press to form Grove/Atlantic) ended up right back in the Village, at 841 Broadway, only a few blocks from Ninth Street—where everything began.

  Apart from the Village, there was another place that became an integral part of my life and, in the years to come, a delightful working refuge for members of the Grove Press family.

  I first went out to East Hampton in 1950 with Joan. I thought it quite beautiful, especially the ocean beaches, and I wanted to go back, even though Joan was slowly fading out of my life. Three Mile Harbor in the Springs community of East Hampton was a center for the New York artists who were to become the leaders of their generation, not only in the United States but in the world. Motherwell, Pollock, Krasner, Kline, de Kooning, and Rothko painted out there, along with many other important artists.

  A couple of years before I married Loly at New York’s City Hall in August of 1953, I bought Robert Motherwell’s house in the Georgica area. It had been designed for Motherwell by the French architect Pierre Chareau. I knew nothing about Chareau at the time but Loly and I had read about the house, actually a Quonset hut from World War II, in Harper’s. It had been built in 1946. Now Motherwell was planning on moving, so Loly and I went to have a look at it. We drove around until we found the house, as I related in an interview published by Pataphysics in their 2001 Pirate Issue, “this strange-looking thing stuck in a pile of sand. When they had first built it, they had not bothered to cover the construction pit, and only a few young saplings had been planted. It looked hopeless. We loved it immediately.”15