Loren Glass is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (2004).

Counterculture Colophon

Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde

By Loren Glass

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-8416-0

Contents

List of Figures……………………………………………………xiAcknowledgments……………………………………………………xiiiIntroduction: From Avant-Garde to Counterculture………………………11 The New World Literature………………………………………….332 Publishing Off Broadway…………………………………………..653 The End of Obscenity……………………………………………..1014 Reading Revolution……………………………………………….1455 Booking Film…………………………………………………….1736 Takeover………………………………………………………..193Notes…………………………………………………………….217Index…………………………………………………………….243

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The New World Literature

In the summer of 1949, at the Goethe Convocation in Aspen, Colorado, organizedby University of Chicago chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, novelistand playwright Thornton Wilder proclaimed that Goethe, in predicting in1827 that an epoch of world literature was at hand, had “spoke[n] too soon.”Wilder announced that “it is now during the second quarter of the twentiethcentury that we are aware of the appearance of a literature which assumes thatthe world is an indivisible unit.” Wilder’s examples of this world literature—T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound—are predictably modernist, and the locationand occasion of his speech, a conference in the United States organized byan influential theorist of higher education and proponent of the “Great Books”program, indicate the degree to which high modernism had by 1949 been embracedby the American university, effectively institutionalizing Wilder’s versionof Goethe’s vision. Over the next two decades, as the university populationexpanded exponentially, this revised vision of world literature would come toinform the reading habits and cultural sensibilities of a considerable fractionof the American public.

Wilder’s modernist elaboration of Goethe’s romantic vision clearly impliesa canon of texts based both in a certain idea of aesthetic value and in acertain consciousness of cultural diversity, but David Damrosch has recentlyreminded us that “world literature is not an infinite, ungraspable canonof works but rather a mode of circulation and of reading” According toDamrosch, the category of world literature simply designates “literary worksthat circulate beyond their culture of origin” Wilder’s modernist definition,as illustrated by the Grove Press catalog, is the object of my analysis in thischapter, but I rely on Damrosch’s more pragmatic definition for my methodof analysis, which helpfully recognizes the importance of publishers, editors,and translators as crucial nodes in the network that enables this category toexist in the first place. Through close alliances with academics and translatorsacross the country, Grove helped popularize a concept of world literature inthe late 1950s that centrally informed the political investments of the counterculturein the 1960s.

Barney Rosset and his team at Grove were, like Wilder, steeped in Europeanmodernism, and many of the major writers they made available in theUnited States—Samuel Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet—representedthe final stages of the high modernism that had reigned between the wars andwhose cultural capital had been Paris. But the political and cultural status ofEurope had been transformed by the cataclysms of World War II. Grove’s visionof world literature was also inflected by the decolonization of the Europeanempires and the inception of the American century. From its beginnings, Groveworked to provide an American venue for the literature of the “new nations”rapidly emerging from the old empires, and of the so-called Third World moregenerally, making available many of the authors who formed the initial core ofwhat later came to be known as postcolonial literature. In this sense, Grove canbe understood as a central participant in what Casanova identifies as the thirdmajor stage in “the genesis of world literary space,” which is marked by theentry of the new nations into international competition for literary recognition.The resulting canon can be formulated as a version of what Mark McGurlcalls “high cultural pluralism,” literature that combines modernist formal experimentationwith “a rhetorical performance of group membership” McGurlsees high cultural pluralism as a mechanism whereby postwar American fictionaccommodated and canonized US minority writers.

Grove’s embrace of an expanded canon of world literature was enabled bythe postwar mandate for cultural exchange elaborated by UNESCO, whose imprimaturappears on many of the texts discussed here. UNESCO’s constitution,adopted in 1945, claims that “the wide diffusion of culture, and the educationof humanity for justice and liberty and peace are indispensable to the dignity ofman” It affirms that “a peace based exclusively upon the political and economicarrangements of governments would not be a peace which could secure theunanimous, lasting and sincere support of the peoples of the world, and thatthe peace must therefore be founded, if it is not to fail, upon the intellectual andmoral solidarity of mankind.” The perceived urgency of this mandate at theinception of the atomic age is well illustrated by Archibald MacLeish’s openingstatement at the meeting of the American delegation to the organization’sconstituent conference in 1945, which emphasizes “the crucial importance of itssuccess if the civilization of our time is to be saved from annihilation.”

As William Preston, Edward Herman, and Herbert Schiller confirm intheir history of the vexed relations between UNESCO and the United States,”UNESCO’s origin had been a utopian yet necessary invention in internationalcooperation, and the attempted elevation of educational and cultural relationsto the forefront of world diplomacy was equally adventurous. Both representedthe growing intensity of international contacts, as technology, communications,and economic interchange reduced the distance between the world’s diversepopulations.” Preston, Herman, and Schiller are predominantly concernedwith the role of mass media in this globalizing process, but UNESCO was alsoheavily invested in promoting and enhancing the distribution of books aroundthe world. In 1956, it published R. E. Barker’s study of the international booktrade, Books for All; and ten years later, Robert Escarpit’s The Book Revolution,which opens with the claim that, due to innovations in paperback publishing,”over the last decade everything has been transformed—books, readers and literature.”In subsidizing and circulating studies such as Barker’s and Escarpit’s,UNESCO hoped to harness the energies and technologies of the paperbackrevolution in the service of cultural exchange.

Furthermore, as Christopher Pearson affirms in his fascinating study ofUNESCO’s architectural and artistic heritage, “The pan-national idealism thatunderlay its institutional activities found an immediate parallel in the ideologiesof modern art and architecture” that informed its design and many of itscultural policies. UNESCO, in other words, emerged at the “confluence of twoideas—international modernism and international cooperation.” In this sense,UNESCO’s location in Paris is equally significant. As is clear from the publishednotes of Luther Evans, UNESCO’s fourth director general, reporting on the meetingsof the American delegation to the 1945 constituent conference, a consensusquickly developed that if the United Nations was to be located in the UnitedStates, UNESCO would have to be located elsewhere, and Paris, as a “naturalcultural center,” quickly rose to the top of the list. When the British proposedthe French capital as headquarters of the nascent organization, “Senator [James]Murray then went all out for Paris. Others followed in the same vein—Belgium,Mexico, China, Colombia, etc. The French were highly elated” Aesthetically integratedinto the cityscape, UNESCO would help Paris maintain its centrality tothe circulation and consecration of culture during the period of decolonization.

Literary authorship in this cultural constellation attained a new stature ofdiplomatic statesmanship, conferring a mantle of ethical authority on figuresof internationally recognized literary achievement. The modernist “exile” of theauthor, which between the wars had been resolutely apolitical and solitary (ifnot downright reactionary), attained a diplomatic significance as literary figures,officially or informally, took on the burdens of UNESCO’s mandate toheal the world through cultural exchange. A number of important Grove authorsduring this period, including Nobel Prize winners Octavio Paz and PabloNeruda, were themselves diplomats who were able to leverage their literarycapital into political influence on the international stage.

To facilitate its vision of world literature, Grove employed a veritable armyof translators who played a crucial role in negotiating the tensions betweencultural elitism and cultural pluralism that informed its title list. As Casanovaaffirms, translation is a form of consecration that operates in two directions,depending on the relation between source and target languages. On the onehand, it is a mechanism whereby literary capital from the European center,principally Paris, can be diverted into the periphery; on the other, it enablestexts written in peripheral languages to be recognized by literary authorities inthe center. Grove worked in both directions, siphoning literary prestige fromParis to New York by translating figures such as Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, andGenet but also expanding international recognition for work written in Asia,Latin America, and Africa. Richard Howard, Bernard Frechtman, Ben Belitt,Lysander Kemp, and a host of other translators, many of whom were poetsthemselves and most of whom found their professional home in the Americanuniversity system, not only translated key authors for Grove but also acted asliaisons and consultants in the international literary network that Grove helpedbuild in the postwar era.

Most of Grove’s translators can be positioned within what Lawrence Venuti,in his contentious history The Translator’s Invisibility, analyzes as the modernistregime in English-language translation, which “seeks to establish the aestheticautonomy of the translated text” through assimilating it to the modernist criteriaof its target language. Venuti’s somewhat selective history mentions noneof Grove’s translators, but Paul Blackburn, the Poundian disciple who receivespride of place in The Translator’s Invisibility, was well aware of Grove’s importancewhen, in a 1962 article for the Nation, he ambivalently proclaims, “Nowthat colonialism has become an anachronism politically … it is as though weare witnessing the sack of world literature … by the American publishing business.”Citing a number of Grove’s authors and translators, as well as the Mexicanissue of the Evergreen Review that is discussed in detail later, Blackburnis cautiously optimistic, averring that “the mutual insemination of cultures isan important step toward what our policy makers think of as internationalunderstanding.”

Grove’s cultivation of an international title list coincided with its innovationof the quality paperback, a conjunction that affected the cultural understandingsof both categories. On the one hand, world literature, while maintainingthe scholarly imprimatur of its translators and introducers, would be inexpensiveand accessible, and Grove’s translators explicitly targeted a broad English-speakingAmerican public. On the other hand, Grove’s Evergreen Originalstook on the worldly and cosmopolitan cast of the contents they frequentlycontained. Thus, over the course of the 1950s, Grove established an identityas a source of affordable access to the latest developments in world literature.Kuhlman’s abstract expressionist cover designs provided aesthetic continuityfor the various literary products Grove offered. By packaging a wide varietyof titles from all over the world under a uniform style of aesthetic innovationalready associated with the postwar ascendance of the United States, Grove’sEvergreen Originals, in their very format, accommodated the cultural pluralismof world literature to the cultural elitism of late modernism. And Grove aggressivelymarketed its international titles to an academic audience, announcingin one flyer circulated to colleges and universities that “Evergreen books havea particular interest for Humanities and World Literature courses. They representan unusually wide range, from ancient classics of China to the latest novelsfrom France” and boasting “the greatest number of individual titles being usedthis past year by Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the Universityof California at Los Angeles.”

Two anecdotes, both set in Paris in the late 1950s, exemplify the networkwhose general shape I’ve just outlined. The first involves Khuswant Singh, theSikh author and diplomat who in 1954 became a specialist in Indian affairs forthe Department of Mass Communications at UNESCO. In 1955, Rosset, apparentlynot patient enough to acquire authors and then wait for them to win internationalprizes, decided to establish his own “Grove Press Contest for IndianWriters” in order “to further cultural relations between the United States andIndia,” with an award of one thousand dollars to be given to “the best literarywork in English to be submitted by a citizen of India” The press receivedmore than 250 submissions, from which a panel of two Indian and two Americanjudges selected Singh’s Mano Majra, a novel focusing on the violence andunrest in a small town on the newly established India-Pakistan border.

The ensuing negotiations over the award and the novel’s publication convenientlyillustrate the institutional linkages through which Grove built its internationalreputation. Upon hearing that he had received the award, Singhwrote to Rosset, “I would very much like the presentation to be made by myown Director General, Dr. Luther Evans … It would do my ego a lot of good”Rosset promptly wrote to Evans, the former librarian of Congress, who agreedto present the award, writing that “Mr. Singh’s work will contribute to increasingmutual knowledge among peoples of one another’s ways of life, which isone of the fundamental aims of UNESCO.” The award was presented to Singhon March 18, 1955, in the Louis XIV room of UNESCO House in Paris.

In his letter accepting the award, Singh suggested changing the title to Trainto Pakistan, calling it a “cheaper title” that will “tempt reviewers to review, buyersto buy and even film companies to look upon it as a possibility. A train is aFreudian symbol which arouses a response at once.” Rosset preferred the originaltitle, and the novel was initially published under both titles, though Trainto Pakistan is the one that stuck (a movie was eventually made in 1998). Rossetalso quickly secured translation deals with Gallimard and Verlag and grantedBritish publication rights to Chatto and Windus. Grove then aggressively publicizedthe text as a “prize-winning novel” in both India and the United States.The story of Grove’s acquisition and publication of Singh’s novel economicallyillustrates the alignments between literary prestige, as conferred by the proliferatingsystem of awards, and cultural exchange, as represented by UNESCO,that shaped the network in which Grove’s vision of world literature circulated.

The second anecdote involves Richard Howard, the prize-winning Americanpoet who translated key authors for Grove, including Alain Robbe-Grillet,Fernando Arrabal, and André Breton. In January 1959, Rosset sent Howard ona trip to Paris with an illuminating list of tasks. For the Evergreen Review, Howardwas to solicit an article by Roland Barthes on “the current situation of theintellectual in France” and one by René Étiemble on “Red China.” He was tostudy current productions of Arrabal’s plays, with particular attention to “hisuse of the contemporary jazz idiom.” He was to contact editors at Éditions deMinuit, Éditions du Seuil, and Gallimard concerning their latest projects. Hewas to visit Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, partly to check up on the progressof the Lolita Nightclub (Girodias had achieved considerable notoriety forpublishing Nabokov’s novel as part of his Traveler’s Companion series in 1955).And he was to look for a cartoonist.

Howard’s letters to Rosset provide insight into the formation of the networkwhereby Grove obtained most of its early access to an emergent internationalliterary canon. He exults that he has “never had so many invitations todinner, to lunch, to drinks, to talk … in all [his] life.” He reports to Rosset that,based on his visits with Parisian publishers, “we have every reason to feel thatthe intellectual richesse of France will be showered upon Grove Press.” And heexclaims that, in Paris, “Evergreen Review and Grove Press are perhaps the bestknown American manifestations of The Higher Culture.” Finally, he notes that”there is a huge Jackson Pollock show [that] Frank O’Hara was here to hang.”

But Howard’s most remarkable encounter is with Samuel Beckett, to whomRosset had written a letter of introduction. Like almost everyone who writesabout Beckett personally, Howard was smitten: “I was expecting that fierce,beautiful head that you use on your catalogue, but nothing had prepared me forthe gentleness of his voice, the warmth of his welcome, and the fascination ofhis presence” The two, not surprisingly, discuss translation, with Beckett affirmingthat “he does not translate, he creates.” Howard then recounts a remarkablestory Beckett told him of a visit in 1940 to Valery Larbaud, the French authorand translator of Ulysses under whose “patronage” Casanova places The WorldRepublic of Letters. Larbaud was paralyzed as a result of illness, and Howard seesin this visit the genesis of the narrator of Beckett’s Unnamable: “Surely the visionof that motionless, ignoble trunk babbling incoherent syllables … must havecaught somewhere within Beckett’s fierce head, his formidable heart,” Howardprovocatively speculates.

(Continues…)
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