Avant-Garde to Counterculture

Left: Grove Press Catalog Cover. Fall 1958.  Right: Grove Press College Catalog Cover. 1970.

Entering the publishing industry at the height of the paperback revolution, Grove Press established and expanded the circuits through which experimental and radical literature was distributed, particularly to the burgeoning college and university populations that were the seedbed of the counter culture, thereby effectively democratizing the avant-garde.  By the end of the sixties, the avant-garde had in essence become a component of the mainstream, and Grove Press, more than any other single institution, was responsible for this fundamental transformation of the cultural field, the consequences of which are still with us.

Barney Rosset (1922-2012)

Barney Rosset (1922-2012)

Barney Rosset purchased Grove Press for $3,000 in 1951 and brought the entire stock of three titles to his apartment on West Ninth Street.  Born and raised in Chicago, Rosset had recently arrived in New York City from Paris with his first wife, the painter Joan Mitchell.  For the next three decades, Rosset would be the president and owner of Grove Press, and his aesthetic tastes, political convictions, and entrepreneurial spirit would become central to the identity of the company.

New York

Left: Marquis de Sade: Selections from his Writings (1953). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.  Right: Franz Kline, New York, NY (1953). Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.

1951 is also the year of Leo Castelli's famous Ninth Street show.  Featuring paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Rauschenberg, and Joan Mitchell, Serge Guilbaut sees the show as representing New York City's successful displacement of Paris as arbiter of the international art world.  In the same year, Roy Kuhlman came to Rosset's apartment to show him some ideas for book cover design.  Rosset was initially uninterested in his portfolio, but as Kuhlman was leaving he accidentally dropped a 12" by 12" piece of abstract art that he was intending to pitch as a record cover to Ahmet Ertegun.  Rosset immediately saw what he wanted.  Heavily influenced by Franz Kline, Kuhlman was one of the first book designers to incorporate Abstract Expressionism into cover art, and his signature style, making ample use of "negative space," provided a distinct look for Grove throughout the fifties and sixties.

Paris

Left: Henry Miller, Sexus. Traveler's Companion.  Right: Maurice Gerodias (1919-1990).

If New York had become the capital of the art world, Paris still reigned as arbiter of literary reputations.  Over the course of the fifties, Rosset would establish fruitful connections with most of the major publishing houses in Paris, including Éditions de Minuit, Éditions de Seuil, Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Gallimard and, most profitably, Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press, which was already well-known across Europe for publishing English-language pornography in its "Traveler's Companion" series, but which also published avant-garde and experimental literature.

San Francisco

Left: Evergreen Review 1:2 (1957). Cover by Fred Lyon.  Right: Jack Kerouac, The Subterraneans (1958). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

Grove complemented its reputation for publishing the latest in European avant-garde literature by tapping into the artistic scenes that were then emerging in the postwar United States.  Evergreen Review's legendary second issue on The San Francisco Scene featured poetry by Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and, most famously, the first nationally distributed appearance of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."  It was the first time most of these writers had appeared together in a nationally distributed publication; over the course of the sixties, almost all of them would become closely affiliated with Grove and its house journal.  Grove in turn would become known as the "beat" publisher on the literary scene, the go-to resource for the latest products of America's indigenous avant-gardes.

The Quality Paperback Generation

Left: Evergreen Review 1:1 (1957). Cover by Harold Feinstein.  Center: William Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.  Right: Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1958). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In the later fifties, following the lead of Jason Epstein's Doubleday imprint Anchor Books, Grove began publishing original avant-garde texts as inexpensive "quality" paperbacks, which were quickly recognized in the industry as marking a new and significant stage in the paperback revolution.  Epstein had promoted and acquired his new imprint's authors through the Anchor Review, and Rosset adopted the same method.   Thus, in 1957, Grove Press published the inaugural issue of the Evergreen Review, and in 1958 it launched the "Evergreen Originals" imprint.  In 1961, Grove launched a mass market imprint:  Black Cat.  Smaller in format and lower in price than the Evergreen Originals, the Black Cat imprint was nevertheless also promoted as a "quality" line, featuring titles by the same authors and marketed prominently to colleges and universities.

I. — The New World Literature

Left: Jorges Luis Borges, Ficciones (1961). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.  Right: Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1958). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In 1961, Grove published Octavio Paz's Labyrinth of Solitude, which famously announces, "For the first time, we are contemporaries of all mankind" and affirms that "Mexico's situation is no different from that of the majority of countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa."  This perception of simultaneity across continents was crucial to the very possibility of a truly international modernism; insofar as the conceptual coherence of an avant-garde depends upon a linear model of history, an international avant-garde would require that its constituent nations co-exist at the same point on the same timeline.  As an indication of this expansion and the attendant "Latin American Boom," in the same year Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges were co-awarded the newly established International Publisher's Prize.
From its beginnings, Grove worked to provide an American venue for the literature of the new nations that were rapidly emerging from the old empires and of the so-called third world more generally, making available many of the authors who would form the initial core of what would later come to be known as postcolonial literature.  In this sense, Grove can be understood as a central participant in what Pascale Casanova identifies as the third major stage in "the genesis of world literary space," which is marked by the entry of the new nations into international competition for literary recognition.

Europe

Left: Jean Genet, The Maids (1958). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.  Right: Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy (1959). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

Along with Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Alain Robbe-Grillet represent the long twilight of the European male modernist as authoritative genius.  All three men remain best-known for their early work, which presents masculine protagonists in situations of impotence, confusion, and constraint, their only dignity granted through the stylistic virtuosity of their creators.  While these thematic obsessions were frequently honored with celebrations of universality, they were also understood, with equal frequency, as representing the exhaustion not only of the modernist mandate to “make it new” but also of the entire Enlightenment project of epistemological mastery.  The sense that the West had exhausted its ethical authority in the wake of a war that witnessed both the Holocaust and the atomic bomb deeply informed Grove's investment in other cultural traditions.  Grove’s selection of these traditions was in turn informed by America's triumphant emergence from the war and the demands of its rapidly expanding university population for knowledge of the world the war had created.

Asia

Left: Donald Keene, Ed., Modern Japanese Literature (1956). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.  Right: Evergreen Review 2:6 (Autumn 1958). Cover by Susan Nevelson.

Over the course of the fifties and sixties, Grove published and distributed numerous translations and studies of Asian literature and culture, including studies of Zen Buddhism, both by Japanese scholars such as D.T. Suzuki and by American popularizers such as Alan Watts.  Grove also became the American distributor for the London-based Wisdom of the East series and formed the East and West Book Club, offering a choice between The Golden Bowl and The Anthology of Japanese Literature free with a membership.  Grove’s vision of an East-West dialogue was heavily inflected by the international interests and itineraries of the Beats, as illustrated in the sixth number of the Evergreen Review, which features Gary Snyder’s translation of the “Cold Mountain Poems.”

Africa

Left: Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Right: Jahheinz Jahn, Muntu: the new African culture (1961). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In the fifties, Rosset agreed to be Amos Tutuola's literary agent in the United States, and Grove published the three texts for which he remains most well-known—The Palm-Wine Drinkard, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and The Brave African Huntress—while also exerting considerable effort to get his stories into American magazines.  The books met with only modest success.  Then in 1961, Grove published the English translation of Janheinz Jahn's important study, Muntu: the new African culture.  Jahn, co-editor of Black Orpheus and one of the most influential European scholars of African culture in the postwar era, opens his study with the portentous announcement that "Africa is entering world history."  For Jahn, this entry mandates a new approach to the study of African literature. Deprecating earlier efforts to understand African writers in exclusively European terms, Jahn argues, “Within African literature Tutuola is intelligible; within English literature he is an oddity.”

America

Left: Evergreen Review 2:7 (Winter 1959). Cover by Martin Sameth. Right: Donald Allen, Ed., The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In 1959, Rosset and co-editor Donald Allen commissioned Ramon Xirau to guest edit a special issue of the Evergreen Review on "The Eye of Mexico." The volume opens with an excerpt from Labyrinth of Solitude and includes prose by Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes, poetry by Jaime Sabines and Manuel Durán, paintings by José Luis Cuevas and Juan Soriano, and an essay by anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla on "A Náhuatl Concept of Art."  The poetry is translated by Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams.

One year later, Grove released Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry.  This volume was the first to lay out for a popular readership the now canonical—and significantly geographical—designations of the Black Mountain College, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the New York School.  Most of the poets included in the anthology also appeared in the pages of the Evergreen Review, frequently as translators as well as poets.

II. — Publishing Off Broadway

Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double (1958). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

Debates over avant-garde theater tend to adopt Antonin Artaud's opposition between print and performance, an opposition which, in turn, maps onto the tension between playwright and director.  Counterculture Colophon reorients the coordinates of this discussion, focusing instead on the relationship between publisher and reader, a relationship that presents the printed text in a complementary—as opposed to an antagonistic—relation to live performance.  As a publisher, Grove worked to market printed plays as supplements to performance for those who could attend one, and as substitutes for performance to those who couldn't.  Grove’s texts were designed, as much as possible, to invoke the experience of seeing the play live, frequently in direct reference to specific performances.  Its success in this endeavor was crucial to the reception and interpretation of avant-garde drama in the postwar United States.

Samuel Beckett

Left: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1956). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.  Right: Back Cover. Waiting for Godot.

The early performances of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot are landmarks in the history of modern theater.  Roger Blin's succès-de-scandale at the Théatre Babylone in Paris on January 5, 1953; Alan Schneider's debacle at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami on January 3, 1956; Herbert Blau's triumph at San Quentin on April 19, 1957:  all have become legendary events which anchor any study of Beckett's dramatic work.  Much less has been written about an equally significant event in the history of this epoch-defining play:  Grove Press's publication of a $1 Evergreen paperback edition in 1956.  Spurred by the play's Broadway debut and initially sold in the lobby of the John Golden Theater, the edition would eventually sell more than two million copies, becoming an iconic American paperback and one of the bestselling plays of all time.

Beckett, virtually unknown at the time, would be Rosset's most important Parisian acquisition.  The lifelong relationship the two would establish is one of the more underappreciated professional alliances in postwar publishing history.  The unwavering loyalty between the two men hearkened back to an earlier era, before huge advances and high-paid literary agents rendered such allegiances impractical.  Rosset personally handled all of Beckett's literary rights in the United States, was adamant in encouraging the reluctant author to translate his own work, and hosted his only visit to the United States in the summer of 1964 to make Film.

Jean Genet

Left: Jean Genet, The Blacks (1960). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Cover photo by Martha Swope. Right: James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson in The Blacks. Photo by Martha Swope.

More than any other play Grove published, The Blacks was inextricably yoked to a specific American performance, the triumphant three-year run at the St. Mark's Playhouse, photos from which were generously distributed throughout the paperback reissue of the play.  The cover photo features Roscoe Lee Browne in the role of Master of Ceremonies Archibald Absalom Wellington, his hand raised as if conducting a symphony.  In addition to Browne, the original New York cast featured James Earl Jones, Louis Gosset, Cicely Tyson, and Maya Angelou.

Harold Pinter

Left: Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party and The Room (1960). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Cover photo by John Cowan.  Upper Right: Vivian Merchant and Michael Brennan in The Room by Harold Pinter. Royal Court Theatre, London, 1960; photo by John Cowan. Lower Right: Vivian Merchant in The Room by Harold Pinter. Royal Court Theatre, London, 1960; photo by John Cowan.

Grove chose to introduce Harold Pinter's peculiar sensibilities—what would quickly become known as the "Pinteresque"—through a dialogue between typographic and photographic representation.  Since most of Pinter's early plays take place in domestic interiors, they are particularly conducive to the photographic frame, whose rectangular shape conveniently mirrors the geometry of the room.  In The Birthday Party and The Room, a sequence of photos follows the text of each play, replicating in condensed visual stills the action the reader has just followed in print.

The Living Theater

Left: Jack Gelber, The Connection (1960). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Photo by John Wulp. Upper Right: Musicians in The Connection by Jack Gelber, Living Theatre, New York, 1959. Photo by John Wulp. Lower Right: The Connection by Jack Gelber, Living Theatre, New York, 1959. Photo by John Wulp.

Grove's resolutely international list of dramatists was weighted toward the European, but this didn't mean that it neglected contemporary American drama, particularly with the now-legendary Living Theater only a few blocks away.  Grove published one of its first real successes, Jack Gelber's The Connection (1960), a plotless play-within-a-play that centers on a group of addicts in an apartment waiting for the dealer to arrive.  As Kenneth Tynan notes in his introduction, "its theme is akin to that of Waiting for Godot," but with a higher level of explicit self-reflexivity about its status as a performance.  The cast includes a producer, director, and author, as well as two photographers who move in and out of the audience.  The play also features periodic performances by jazz musicians.

Bertolt Brecht

Left: Bertolt Brecht, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1966). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Right: Bertolt Brecht, The Good Woman of Setzuan (1966). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

The key figure in Grove's acquisition and marketing of Brecht was Eric Bentley, who, in collaboration with Fred Jordan, assembled The Grove Press Edition of the Works of Bertolt Brecht. Most of these plays were published as mass market paperbacks under Grove's Black Cat imprint, reflecting an aspiration toward a popular audience appropriate to Brecht's political vision.  These cheap paperback editions of his plays—pocket parables, as it were—proliferated alongside frequent productions by college and university drama departments over the course of the sixties, illustrating the degree to which Grove's domestication of Brecht for an English-speaking public was based in the interplay between reading and spectatorship.

Tom Stoppard

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In 1967, Grove published Tom Stoppard's award-winning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a Black Cat paperback.  Grove's education department issued a free study guide to accompany the play and also sponsored a nation-wide contest for the best undergraduate essay comparing the play to Hamlet. By asking students to compare Stoppard to the author whose work had effectively established the standard format for the play in print, Grove was affirming its remarkable success in marketing avant-garde theater as an explicitly literary genre with authors comparable to the most revered playwright in the canon.

III. — The End of Obscenity

Left: Samuel Roth (1893-1974). Right: William J. Brennan, Jr. (1906-1997).

Roth v. United States (1957) was the first case in which the Supreme Court directly addressed whether obscenity constitutes an exception to First Amendment protection for freedom of speech and the press. It also represented the initial articulation of what Rosset's lawyer Edward de Grazia would later call the "Brennan Doctrine," a developing definition of obscenity formulated by Supreme Court Justice William Brennan that would make it easier for "defense lawyers to demonstrate that the works of literature or art created by their clients were entitled to First Amendment Protection."
Leveraging the Brennan Doctrine throughout the sixties, Rosset planned his battle against censorship with both deliberation and determination; in one unpublished autobiographical fragment, he calls it "a carefully planned campaign, much like a military campaign."  Throughout this campaign Rosset and his lawyers emphasized Grove's reputation as a publisher with literary credentials and made ample use of expert testimony to establish that its publications had "redeeming social value."

The Professors v. The Postmaster

D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1959)

On July 21, 1959, Judge Frederick VanPelt Bryan issued his decision overturning the longstanding Post Office ban on D.H. Lawrence's underground classic, Lady Chatterley's Lover.  In his decision, which was published in full in the Evergreen Review and incorporated into the paperback edition of the text, Bryan affirmed that "Grove Press is a reputable publisher with a good list which includes a number of distinguished writers and serious works.  Before publishing this edition Grove consulted recognized literary critics and authorities on English literature as to the advisability of publication.  All were of the view that the work was of major literary importance and should be made available to the American public.”  Despite the competition from other paperback versions (Grove could establish no copyright on the text), the mass market edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, distributed by Dell, would be Grove's first bestseller, with sales of almost 2 million copies by the end of 1960, and the legal battle provided a firm foundation for the reputation Rosset would continue to build over the course of the sixties for challenging legal restrictions against freedom of expression.

Freedom to Read

Left: Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1961). Right: Evergreen Review 6:25 (July-August 1962). Cover Design by Irving Cowman.

Rosset hadn't really liked Lady Chatterley's Lover, but he felt that its cultural absolution would increase his chances of legally publishing Henry Miller, whose work he had admired since his undergraduate years.  Unlike Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had been fairly easy and inexpensive to defend with the one Post Office case, Tropic of Cancer was suppressed and litigated in numerous venues across the country, while simultaneously enjoying many months on bestseller lists in those same venues.
Of the many trials of Tropic of Cancer, Rosset was most proud of its exoneration in Franklyn Haiman v. Robert Morris. Tropic of Cancer was being illegally suppressed and confiscated across suburban Illinois, and the case pitted Grove against an array of small-town police departments.  Judge Samuel Epstein's ruling, which affirmed that "as a corollary to the freedom of speech and the press, there is also a freedom to read," became the basis of a nationwide campaign.  Rosset printed and circulated thousands of copies of the decision, and published a "Statement in Support of Freedom to Read" on the front cover of the July-August 1962 issue of the Evergreen Review, The statement shifts the terms of defense from elite endorsement to democratic access, affirming that "the issue is not whether Tropic of Cancer is a masterpiece of American literature," but rather "the right of a free people to decide for itself what it may or may not read."

The Last Masterpiece

Left: William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1962). Hardcover Edition. Right: William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1966). Black Cat Edition.

Unlike with Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, it proved challenging to find experts who could establish an authoritative version or interpretation of Naked Lunch.  The prosecuting attorney in the Boston trial understandably doubted that it had a structure coherent enough to merit comparison to Ulysses. After all, the first Grove edition begins with the "Deposition:  Testimony Concerning a Sickness," in which Burroughs claims "I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch."  The judge found the text obscene, claiming that "the author first collected the foulest and vilest phrases describing unnatural sexual experiences and tossed them indiscriminately" into the book.  His ruling was overturned upon appeal, but only because the United States Supreme Court had, in the intervening months, clarified that a text could be suppressed only if it was "utterly without redeeming social value."  The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was forced to concede that "it appears that a substantial and intelligent group in the community believes the book to be of some literary significance."

Vulgar Modernism

Left: Evergreen Review 8:32 (April-May 1964). Cover Photo by Emil Cadoo. Right: Jean Genet, The Miracle of the Rose (1966). Photo by Jerry Bauer. Cover Design by Kuhlman Associates.

In 1964, Rosset decided to change the format of the Evergreen Review from a quarterly quarto to a bi-monthly, and then monthly, folio-size magazine with glossy (and frequently racy) covers.  He recruited a greater diversity of advertisers, emphasizing book, record, tape, and poster clubs, as well as cars, cruises, clothes and alcohol. It was time to move on to newsstands, to take it to the streets.  In his announcement of the change to subscribers, managing editor Fred Jordan writes "to inaugurate the new format, we have put together what is without a doubt the finest, most adventurous collection of modern writing to be found anywhere between the covers of a magazine."

The modern writing Grove promoted can be categorized as "vulgar modernism," both for its vernacular aspirations and for its erotic fixations. It was a modernism dominated by men.  As the trajectory from Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs economically illustrates, Grove's battle against censorship began with a quintessentially high modernist preoccupation with adulterous women and ended up with the highly homosocial and increasingly homosexual preoccupations of late modernist figures such as Burroughs and Jean Genet.

Up from Underground

Left: Join the Underground advertisement. New York Times (March 13, 1966). Right: Join the Underground sticker.

Over the second half of the sixties, the Supreme Court began to shift from an “absolute” to a “variable” definition of obscenity, adopting  a more flexible definition based on the audience to which the materials are directed. This shift led the Court to accept a lower threshold when judging the legality of materials made available to minors. As a direct consequence, a relatively unrestricted “adult” market for sexually explicit materials emerged, a market whose social and cultural legitimacy Grove would help to establish.

Grove almost singlehandedly transformed the term "underground" into a legitimate market niche for adults in the second half of the sixties.  The transformation began with a campaign inviting readers to "Join the Underground" by subscribing to the Evergreen Review and joining the Evergreen Club, which Rosset had started earlier that year as a conduit for distributing Grove's rapidly expanding catalogue of "adult" literature and film.  By specifying its audience as "adult," by continuing to emphasize its literary credentials, and by concentrating its more explicit materials in the institution of a book club, Grove was able to exploit the Court's and the culture's move toward a variable definition of obscenity.

Sade in America

Left and Right: The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (1965). Right: Back Cover. The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (1965).

In the June 1965 issue of the Evergreen Review, Grove editor Richard Seaver laid the groundwork for the imminent publication of the first volume of Grove's massive three-volume translation of Sade's work with an essay entitled "An Anniversary Unnoticed," juxtaposing the much publicized 400-year anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth with the unacknowledged 150-year anniversary of Sade's death.  For Seaver, Sade is as important as Shakespeare, and the essay places him in the company of Baudelaire, Flaubert, Zola, Joyce, Lawrence, and Miller, as great writers whose books have outlived their initial condemnation to become literary classics.  Seaver concludes the essay: “Which is he: devil or saint?  Or perhaps both?  Obviously, it is impossible to know until the doors are at last flung open and his works made available to more than the fortunate few."  By 1967, the Black Cat edition of the first volume had sold over 240,000 copies.

Open Secrets

Left: My Secret Life. Black Cat Edition (1966). Right: The Pearl. Black Cat Edition (1968). Cover Photo by Dennis Martin.

After the work of Sade, the most notorious and voluminous example of underground literature published by Grove was the eleven-volume anonymous autobiography My Secret Life.  The New York Times reviewer confirmed that Grove's publication "helps to adjust our vision of 19^th-century England and Europe," but also warns that it is "only a fragment of evidence."  "We ought,” he continues, “to give to the Victorians the close attention that we give to savage and primitive societies.  The material abounds."  Over the next five years, Grove would make sure that this material became available not only to scholars but to the general public, bringing out an entire catalog of underground "classics" under a series of new imprints such as "Venus Library," "Zebra Books" and "Black Circle."

By the late sixties, the Evergreen Club had abandoned any pretention to literary value, and became a source for anything sexually explicit that Rosset could acquire, including sex manuals, gay porn, stag films, and erotic art catalogs.  At this point, Grove was openly parodying the paratextual apparatus it had deployed in its earlier campaigns, quoting such pseudo-professionals as A.M. LeDeluge and G. Howard Guacamole, MD, who says of one title, "On the whole, I found this book instructive and entertaining.  It is absolutely stuffed with redeeming social value and is a lot of laughs."  The expert testimony Grove had solicited for its earlier battles had been so successful that it was no longer necessary; its form had become so conventional that it was susceptible to parody.

IV. — Reading Revolution

Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (1961). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In 1961, Grove reprinted Edgar Snow's classic text Red Star Over China, originally published to great acclaim by Random House in 1938, as the eighth title in its newly inaugurated Black Cat mass market imprint.  Snow's hagiographic, and ultimately prophetic, history of the struggles of the Chinese communists had been a formative influence on Barney Rosset.  The front matter for the Black Cat edition notes that Red Star Over China was used "as a handbook of guerilla warfare during World War II for anti-Nazi partisan fighters in Europe and anti-Japanese guerillas in Southeast Asia."

Red Star Over China provides a model for the revolutionary handbook, pocket-size paperbacks that combined empirical evidence with practical guidance for the attainment of revolutionary consciousness and the realization of revolutionary programs during a time when world revolution seemed imminent to many in the Movement.

Black and White

Left: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1968). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Right: The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Cover Photo UPI.

Like the Algerian revolution upon which its conclusions are based, The Wretched of the Earth, issued in hardcover in 1965 and then in mass market paperback in 1968, was widely understood as a signal event in the proliferation of anti-colonial wars and independence movements that were transforming the map of the world in the fifties and sixties.  Grove published all of Frantz Fanon's major work, enhancing the company's reputation as a primary resource for revolutionary reading in the United States. Throughout the late sixties and early seventies, Grove strove to exploit the heightened interest in race and revolution, publishing a variety of other titles, which were promoted in full page ads as "The Black Experience in Grove Press Paperbacks."

Grove's most successful and significant title in this category was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was originally to have been published by Doubleday.  The book was already in galleys when Malcolm X was assassinated but the subsequent threats and violence gave Doubleday cold feet.  Rosset was quick to step in, issuing the hardcover in an initial printing of 10,000 copies in the fall of 1965 and the mass market paperback in the fall of 1966.  And Grove put its full promotional efforts behind the book, which was widely reviewed, discussed, advertised and read over the course of the late sixties, despite Malcolm's overwhelmingly negative image in the mainstream white press.  By 1970, Grove had sold over a million copies.

North and South

Left: Evergreen Review 11:51 (February 1969). Cover by Paul Davis. Right: Regis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? (1967). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

The Cuban Revolution and its charismatic leaders inspired radical activists in the United States throughout the sixties, and Grove Press would become a central conduit for the dissemination of their words and images in the turbulent second half of that decade.  After the Revolution itself, the central event in the idealization of the Cuban model would be the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967, which sparked an extensive publishing campaign that would be instrumental both in galvanizing Che's image as a romantic revolutionary and in affirming Grove's position as one of his key promulgators.  Paul Davis' cover of the February 1968 Evergreen Review provided the now famous image of Che with "its first widespread appearance in the United States."  Grove promoted the issue heavily, distributing posters throughout New York City and the rest of the country with the announcement that "the Spirit of Che lives in the new Evergreen."

From Handbook to Reader

Left: Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (1971). Right: Carl Oglesby, The New Left Reader (1969).

In 1971, Grove agreed to distribute Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book, a "handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock nation" that, according to Hoffman, had been rejected by over 30 publishers.  Hoffman wrote the introduction in jail, which he calls a "graduate school of survival." It is something of an irony of history that Grove's canon of texts, including its revolutionary handbooks, would in turn end up on the curriculum of graduate schools across the nation.  In 1969, Grove issued a Black Cat paperback that anticipates this development, The New Left Reader, edited by former SDS President and movement "heavy" Carl Oglesby.  Billed on the back cover as "for anyone who wishes to understand the complex thought behind the actions that are affecting the entire world," the anthology is called a "reader," and not a "handbook"; in offering the "philosophical and political roots" of the New Left, it also anticipates the turn to theory, and the retreat into the university, that would quickly ensue.

V. — Booking Film

Samuel Beckett, Film (1969). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

Barney Rosset had been interested in the cinema since he was a young man, and in 1963, he established Evergreen Theater, Inc. in order to produce film scripts solicited from postwar authors.  In 1964, the Evergreen Theater produced its only film, Samuel Beckett's Film, for which Beckett made his sole visit to the United States, hosted by Rosset and Seaver.  Directed by Alan Schneider and starring an elderly Buster Keaton, Film was never widely released in the United States, though it did garner attention on the festival circuit, winning the Film Critics Prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival.

New Novel/New Wave

Left: Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1961). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Right: Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad (1962). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

Under the general editorship of Robert Hughes, Grove pioneered the genre of the film book, producing a number of lavishly illustrated and annotated paperback screenplays. These books were specifically conceived in response to the rising profile of cinema studies in the American university.  Grove was an early innovator in this underappreciated genre, and its efforts to popularize experimental cinema through the paperback book—both quality and mass market—represent its most important contribution to American film culture.  The series was popular on university campuses, anticipating in a variety of ways the modes of reception and analysis that would establish these films as cornerstones of an emergent academic canon.

The first two films for which Grove published screenplays were landmark collaborations between French writers already noted for their innovations of the New Novel and a director who would become recognized, based on these two films, as a signal avatar of French New Wave cinema.  Hiroshima Mon Amour, written by Marguerite Duras, and Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, were both directed by Alain Resnais, previously known for his documentary shorts.   Together these films foregrounded the relays between the thematic and formal innovations of postwar French cinema and the French New Novel.  Grove's print editions made these relays accessible to examination and analysis in a manner and to a degree not possible when viewing the films, particularly in an era before the videocassette and DVD.

From Seeing to Studying

Left: Jean-Luc Godard, Masculine-Feminine (1969). Cover by Roy Kuhlman. Right: Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (1969). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

Hughes' groundbreaking series not only provided books about films but also revealed the degree to which the academic study of film would be predicated on a terminological preference for "reading" over "viewing."  In the "note" opening every volume in the Black Cat Series of film books, he clarifies how this shift is illuminated by the historically specific need for the hybrid genre he's producing:  "Making books from movies (apart from novelizations) is a relatively recent enterprise.  But until everyone has inexpensive access to prints of his favorite movies and can 'read' them whenever he likes, this is one means toward understanding a particular film."  Not only does Hughes affirm that one cannot fully understand an avant-garde film through a single viewing at a theater, but he further indicates that the form of attention required for such an understanding is analogous to reading a book.

For Adults Only

Left: Evergreen Review 56 (July 1968). Right: Vilgot Sjoman, I Am Curious (Yellow). Cover by Roy Kuhlman.

In the end, Grove made money on a single film: Vilgot Sjoman's I am Curious, (Yellow).  The film was seized by US Customs in January 1968, and Grove had to arrange for critics to view it at the United States Appraisers Stores in New York City.  These same critics were witnesses at the subsequent trial in May.  A Jury found the film to be obscene, and while waiting for the case to be reviewed by the Court of Appeals, Grove issued a Black Cat paperback filmscript with extensive excerpts from the trial testimony.  In February of 1969, by which time the Court of Appeals had overturned the lower court's decision, the Times listed the filmscript as having sold 160,000 copies, indicating that it was an integral component of the campaign that precipitated the phenomenal popularity of the film.  For the rest of the year, I am Curious, (Yellow) was shown to packed houses by reservation only at the Evergreen Theater on East 11th street, and it generated lines around the block for its continuous showing (7 times a day) at the Cinema Rendezvous on 57th street.  The film was widely reviewed and discussed, and Rosset aggressively pursued screenings across the country, retaining De Grazia to supervise the numerous legal challenges, and at one point going so far as to purchase an entire theater in Minneapolis when he couldn't find an exhibitor willing to show it. In November of 1969, it became the first foreign language film to top Variety's list of the top grossing films. It would ultimately bring in more than 14 million dollars.

Saturday Evening Post Jan 25 1969: “How to Publish ‘Dirty Books’ For Fun and Profit”

The Saturday Evening Post (January 26, 1969).

Barney Rosset was now a celebrity.  He was prominently profiled twice in 1969, first for The Saturday Evening Post in an article called "How to Publish 'Dirty Books' for Fun and Profit" and then for Life Magazine in an article called "The Old Smut Peddler."  Both pieces border on the hagiographic and reveal a certain paradox in Rosset's public image: if his reputation for impulsiveness and irrationality was becoming legendary, these profiles prove that he was in fact shaping his public biography with shrewd purposefulness.

VI. — Takeover

Robin Morgan, Ed., Sisterhood is Powerful (1970).

On April 13, 1970, a group of women led by activist Robin Morgan occupied the executive offices of the massive building on the corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets that Rosset had recently purchased and renovated; they demanded union recognition and asserted that Rosset had "earned millions off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading, and dehumanizing women through sado-masochistic literature, pornographic films, and oppressive and exploitative practices against its own female employees."

Morgan's landmark anthology, Sisterhood is Powerful, was already in production with Random House when she staged the Grove takeover.  She was the only ex-Grove employee among the nine women who participated in the occupation.

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.  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.

Though the employees would in the end vote not to unionize, the company would never recover from the widely publicized takeover.  Already overextended by overinvestment in film, Grove went into a financial tailspin.  In 1970, the company lost over 2 million dollars.  In the months following the takeover, Rosset fired 70 employees and vacated the Mercer Street offices.  In December of 1971, he had to end publication of the Evergreen Review.  In 1972, Standard and Poor's index refused to issue further reports on the company; by 1973, the stock was essentially worthless.  By 1974, Rosset was working out of a tiny office on Eleventh Street with a staff of 14.