Sex and Revolution, Inc

 
In Counterculture Colophon Loren Glass argues that in the 1950s and 60s Grove Press was singularly important in bringing into the mainstream writing that was once considered sexually, politically, and aesthetically avant-garde. Glass suggests that by targeting a growing college and university population with quality paperback books, and by creating an identifiable countercultural brand to which readers swore allegiance, Grove succeeded in both democratizing and incorporating the avant-garde. Grove was thus a premier instigator of a considerable transformation in US culture, whereby dissonant values such as pacifism, anti-colonialism, and sexual experimentation became available to common sense.
 
It is to Barney Rosset, Grove’s daring founder, that Glass attributes much of Grove’s output, which included—in addition to its main list—the Evergreen Review, founded in 1957; the Black Cat mass-market paperback line, founded in 1961; and a film unit that became more of a focus in the late 1960s. Glass interviewed Rosset for the book, and states that while he sees the press as “a collective endeavor enabled by specific historical conditions,” he must acknowledge that Rosset’s “aesthetic tastes, political convictions, and entrepreneurial spirit were central to the identity of the company” (2). Borrowing a term from Max Weber, Glass treats Grove less as a corporation than as a “‘charismatic community’” made up of people who came together out of loyalty to a particularly dynamic leader (7). His focus is often the titles put out by the press—whose impact is measured through advertising copy and sales figures—rather than the social and cultural milieu they entered and affected.
 
Glass acknowledges that there is little evidence that the average reader is aware of a book’s colophon. Yet Grove’s brand does seem to have been uniquely identifiable, as it tapped into and fostered countercultural niches to develop its loyal following. Cover art was one element in its branding effort. Abstract expressionism had become palatable to many people just as Grove was getting off the ground, and the press worked consistently with Roy Kuhlman, one of the first book designers to use abstract expressionist techniques. But if, as Serge Guilbaut maintains, abstract expressionist painting became a tool for consensus building just after WWII, selling American intellectuals on the idea that they lived in a nation that earned its political dominance through cultural sophistication, Grove’s success prompted and reflected a subsequent moment: the 1960s breach of that consensus by the rise of the New Left and countercultural movements, in which experimental artists rearticulated the aesthetic to the political.
 
Three sources of avant-garde work stand out in Glass’s account as particularly important to Grove’s enterprise. The first was a late modernist literary avant-garde, which primarily originated in Paris but which encompassed US experimental writers and a new world literature as well. Grove built its cultural capital on writers who were first published in Paris, including Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. It then used this capital to consecrate US writers like Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, William Burroughs, and a coterie of non-Western figures who tended to be presented as worthy of interest to the extent that they adhered to and revitalized Western modernist techniques, whether deliberately (Kenzaburo Oe wrote a dissertation on Jean-Paul Sartre) or otherwise (Amos Tutuola was envisioned as an “unconscious modernist” [Glass 53]).
 
Many Grove titles came with critical introductions in which credentialed experts explained why the work was important. The Evergreen Review, which looked like a standard quality paperback, additionally disseminated both avant-garde literature and works of criticism and context supporting it. Ionesco’s “There is No Avant-Garde Theatre,” Robbe-Grillet’s “A Fresh Start for Fiction,” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s interview with L’Express on the Soviet invasion of Hungary (in which the term “New Left” made one of its earliest appearances) all appeared in the journal’s first few issues.
 
Grove developed a special interest in drama, putting out work by Genet, Beckett, Brendan Behan, Joe Orton, and Tom Stoppard among others, turning some of these writers into household names. Waiting for Godot had sold 250,000 copies by 1968. By then, students were so familiar with the “formal and philosophical difficulties of the avant-garde” that they would readily indicate “the ironies of [this] easiness” (Glass 98). Grove marketed printed plays as supplements to or substitutes for live performances; it also produced off-Broadway playbills and eventually acquired a theatre in New York. Advertisements encouraged people to experience works that were already making theatre history. A roster of academic critics stated that the especially poetic quality of the plays made reading them even more worthwhile than seeing them, and also appealed to the image of the modernist auteur in contrast to the collaborative producers of a staged play. These twinned analytical frameworks—the play as poetry to be read and reread with care, and the play as the work of a lone genius—helped suit printed plays to classroom study.
 
Similar techniques were involved in the publication of film scripts. The sole film put out by Grove’s film production unit, Evergreen Theater, Inc., was Beckett’s Film (1964), but it distributed titles by Jean-Luc Godard and others. The unit also produced film texts in a series edited by Robert Hughes, which featured illustrated and annotated screenplays for works that one could not easily catch at the local movie theater. These publications stressed that a film should be read as much as viewed, and, in the case of works like François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, were accompanied by scholarly introductions and numerous screenshot images. Once again, Grove Press translated the prestige of Parisian culture into something mass-produced and academically available.
 
The second of Grove’s major avant-garde publishing interests was sexually explicit literature. Rosset fought court battles against obscenity laws so that he could publish risqué works. Indeed, Glass argues that Rosset “almost single-handedly” precipitated a relaxation of censorship in the 1950s (20). During these trials, the “test of time” standard of literary excellence was displaced by the “patina of professionalism” (Glass 103). Experts were called in and their credentials were exhibited to prove that they were qualified to say what should be considered art and what obscenity. In Glass’s treatment, the idea of the “modern classic” emerged in the courtroom as an aid to the legal defense and commercial promotion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch. He argues that as a result, obscenity was “contained by its aesthetic consecration” (105). It became a marketing feature rather than a liability in the literary field. Court decisions were published in the Evergreen Review and incorporated into new editions.
 
What also arose at this time was the appeal to one’s “freedom to read”—a useful idea when a work, such as one of Henry Miller’s novels, was likely to reach a wide non-professional audience. Courts began to balance the likelihood that an intended audience for a work would deem it obscene against the recognition of an individual’s right to choose her own reading materials. The result was a niche market in which literature intended for adults and sold as “underground” would not be deemed obscene because its likely audience would not be scandalized by it. Grove cashed in, publishing numerous works of what Glass calls “vulgar modernism” because they combined aesthetic experimentation with popular appeal and erotic tendencies (these include Genet’s oeuvre, John Rechy’s City of Night, and de Sade). Over the years Grove became a disseminator of anything explicit, including sex manuals, gay porn, stag films, and erotic art catalogues. The Evergreen Review often featured erotic cover art, and it sold the idea of membership in a semi-scandalous club through campaigns like 1966’s “Join the Underground” (Glass 131).
 
The third and final form of avant-garde writing that Grove supported was politically revolutionary. So to his first two trajectories—the movement from avant-garde to mainstream, and from obscenity to “underground” market niche—Glass adds the movement from radical political possibility to defanged academic appropriation of revolution’s romantic aura. Grove established, through the book design and promotion of works by Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, Régis Debray, Che Guevara, and others, the generic category of the revolutionary handbook, advertising the practical application of particular techniques. Yet one survey of Grove’s readership suggested that it was mostly comprised of white male professionals making good salaries in stable jobs. People were invited to imagine themselves in league with global struggles against colonial domination and its repressive effects on psychology and identity, and of course many did. Grove was an affective instigator of political identification. Che Guevara’s romantic aura makes a great case. The cover of the February 1968 Evergreen Review featured a painting by Paul Davis based on Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che with characteristic black beret and implacable expression. The issue was heavily promoted on posters throughout New York, which widely disseminated this iconic image for the first time, capturing many imaginations to be sure.
 
Glass reads the publication of the New Left Reader in 1969 as a sign of transition. This was a “reader” rather than a handbook, and its placement of academic philosophers alongside political operatives “anticipates the turn to theory and the retreat into the university that quickly ensued” (170). My own tendency would be to see this political foreclosure not as the culmination of a history but as a perennial possibility. As Glass acknowledges, it was always possible to conceive of the revolutionary handbook as a source of insight into new revolutionary thinking and distant political struggles rather than as an actual call to arms. Some of what Grove did at this time was simultaneously opportunistic and avant-garde. Black Power and other movements had prompted publishers to take an interest in attracting black readers. Articles in trade magazines said that “Black is Marketable” and noted that books with “revolutionary themes” were a growth area for the industry (Glass 151). It is telling that while Grove made appeals to black and radical audiences, it was only in 1969 that an African American, Julius Lester, was hired as a contributing editor.
 
As it turns out, Lester soon denounced Rosset as insincere in his commitment to revolutionary politics. Lester was reacting to what had occurred when the company was taken over by women’s liberationists. Valerie Solanas was often seen standing outside the Grove offices with an ice pick, and in 1970 a group led by Robin Morgan occupied Rosset’s castle keep, claiming—not inaccurately—that he earned his money “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” (qtd. in Glass 195). When Rosset had them forcibly handcuffed and removed by police he did serious damage to his reputation. Lester wrote to Rosset that “for Grove, revolution is a matter of profit, not of lifestyle, behavior or attitude toward others” (qtd. in Glass 202).
 
At the same time it was becoming clear that Grove was, however countercultural, nevertheless a corporation. It was publically incorporated in 1967 and its employees soon tried to form a union. Ultimately, however, they voted against membership, with some voters on record stating that they did not feel alienated from their work the way regular employees did, and that they loved working for Grove in a way that offset any desire for union membership. This attitude seems to me particularly illuminating given the incorporation charted by Glass. Grove had helped to foster a personal politics of individual expressiveness and freedom that would define creative labor in the decades to come and, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello suggest, support the capitalism against which it once imagined itself.
 
There is much to be debated here, of course. Some will reject the treatment of the transition from avant-garde to mainstream as a linear process, and will prefer a more dialectical approach in which these currents exist and counter each other: the avant-garde does not die when European modernism and its offshoots become a kind of radical chic; instead, its energy travels as new avant-gardes form and gain recognition. Second, though it is undeniable that Grove helped to popularize some forms of social and political radicalism, some readers will want to stress the social and cultural currents that Grove tapped into, and will wonder if it can really be successfully shown (via sales figures for literary works) that a given press caused or heralded particular ways of thinking. Third, some readers will want to emphasize in more exact terms—perhaps by attempting some study of readership—the limitations and affordances of reading as a mode of revolutionary action and of books as a form of revolutionary affiliation. Glass’s narrative of the avant-garde’s gradual defanging suggests that the radical energies of genuinely disruptive work were domesticated by the movement of a packaged counterculture into academia. This begs the question: how disruptive was this work? Glass says in his final pages that Grove expanded the range of voices but didn’t really change the conversation. His book is, in a way, a cautionary tale about how not to defeat one’s enemies. What did Grove get wrong? Why wasn’t more possible? Glass’s focus on Rosset and the titles he acquired prompts one to wonder how this literature was taken up by buyers and readers. Was it sociologically interesting? Enticingly different? A badge of belonging to a particular group? A substitute for worldly action? Lastly, scholars may consider how Glass’s narrative fits with existing conceptions of the relationship between modernism and postmodernism. Glass briefly treats postmodernism as a reaction to the ruins of the modernist avant-garde. It comes in the wake of Beckett’s ironic success, and of the so-called exhaustion of the narrative of Europe’s aesthetic mastery. But how exhausted is this narrative really, given that we continue to celebrate the authentic challenge presented by avant-garde writers and lament their incorporation into the institutions they despised?