Kicking Out the Jams

In 1951, Barney Rosset bought a small, failing reprint publisher that took its name from the Greenwich Village street on which it was housed. He paid $3,000 for Grove Press. Rosset was 29, a World War II veteran, recently separated from his first wife, painter Joan Mitchell, who had been his high school sweetheart. Two years earlier, he had made a documentary film, “Strange Victory,” more didactic than dramatic, the message of which was that the freedoms we had lately fought for in Europe and the Pacific were not fully realized at home, especially for blacks.

Rosset had grown up in Chicago, the only child of a wealthy Jewish banker and an Irish Catholic mother. (It was Rosset’s trust fund and then his inheritance that would underwrite the early years of Grove Press.) He claimed the transforming experience of his life was the years he spent in the Francis Parker School, a progressive private school that served the children of Chicago’s upper middle class and whose graduates were automatically accepted by a dozen of America’s best universities.

Between 1951 and 1959, there was little to distinguish Grove Press from a number of other small independent publishers. It reissued some minor Herman Melville and Henry James and, in 1953, selections from the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Rosset also started Evergreen Review in 1957, which paid attention to civil rights issues, new American poets such as Allen Ginsberg and to the growing popularity and influence of jazz. It was not until the end of the decade, with the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” soon to be followed by Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and Willam Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch,” that Rosset launched Grove on the path that led straight to the heart of the political and cultural maelstrom that we now think of as “the ‘60s.” This courageous and audacious journey would initially be remarkably influential and finally prove to be destructive.

In the 1960s, Grove became the leading American publisher of much that was new to Americans, provocative and politically subversive. Rosset, along with editors such as Don Allen and Richard Seaver, tapped into a body of literature written, performed and published in Europe over the previous two decades, that had not yet been translated or introduced on our side of the Atlantic Ocean: Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett and, just as important for Rosset personally and the culture in general, “My Secret Life,” Frank Harris’ “My Life and Loves” and the “Story of O.” There were also some American originals: Hubert Selby’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” John Rechy’s “City of Night” and “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”

Rosset was presiding over a successful New York trade publisher that operated more like a small press, albeit one whose presiding authority was deeply attracted to freedom of expression and the romance of tarnished left-wing ideals. The Spanish Civil War might have been 30 years gone, but it continued to inspire Rosset, who directed the operation not only with his sympathy for the oppressed, an instinct for anything that challenged societal taboos, but also, as one wag commented, with “a whim of steel.”

In 1968, Rosset went to Bolivia to secure the diaries of Che Guevara, who had been killed several months earlier. Che had become the Grove poster boy. An image of him used to promote Evergreen Review and urging one and all to “Join the Underground” had the dual effect of merchandising political revolution and turning Guevara into a cultural icon. Publication of excerpts from the diaries, first in Evergreen and then in a Grove hardback and subsequent paperback edition, did not go unnoticed by those who felt they had suffered at the bloody hands of Castro and his lieutenant. Early one morning in July 1968, a small bomb was launched through a window and exploded in Grove’s editorial office on University Place.

Promoting uncensored sexual expression and supporting revolutionary politics, while profiting from both, was a combustible mixture. It was sometimes difficult to tell the avant-garde from the loony bin, the disenfranchised from the disaffected. One of the latter was Valerie Solanis, who submitted her manifesto for “Cutting Up Men” to Evergreen. When it was not accepted, she prowled the sidewalk outside the Grove office, ice pick at the ready, waiting to catch Rosset alone. When he proved too elusive, she walked a few blocks north to Andy Warhol’s “Factory” and shot the artist.

These same conditions were to give rise in the spring of 1970 to a conflict that marked the end of Grove’s decade of remarkable success. A dissident group of employees sought to unionize the company, and a disciplined cell of feminists demanded veto power over Grove’s editorial policy. The machinists’ union quickly signed up half a dozen editorial workers, all of whom Rosset promptly fired. The women had other goals, including 24-hour free child care, for all profits from books written by black authors to be “returned” to the black “community” and for all profits from erotic books to be used to establish a defense fund for prostitutes. In keeping with the spirit of the times, the feminists occupied the executive offices at Grove and mounted a press campaign that made network television news. Rosset refused to acquiesce in what he saw as censorship and had them forcibly removed by the police. He had sat on his own sword.

The union lost the vote among the employees, but the demands of the radicals remained morally divisive. How could a man who had been a Communist in his youth, one who held in contempt any social policy that interfered with the freedom of the artist or the individual, not accede to the values of the women’s movement? The writers and film-makers who saw in Grove a haven for expression and experimentation became disaffected. Readers, 200,000 of whom bought Evergreen Review every month and who sought out new books from Grove simply because they were published by Grove, began to desert the company.

These events, coupled with declining revenues from the film division and the excessive cost of renovating a new office building, combined to jeopardize Grove’s financial future. But, more important, by the early 1970s, Grove’s captive audience had been fractured. Books and magazine articles that only Grove would have published a scant five years earlier were now seen as safe commercial ventures by larger, more conventional houses, and Grove, at a moment of capital scarcity, was forced to compete with publishers who had far more money available to invest.

When I joined Grove in 1969, the company employed 140 people and had just moved into a lavishly restored office building at the corner of Bleecker and Mercer streets. Four years later, there were 14 of us working out of Rosset’s home on West Houston Street, after an interim stopover on East 11th Street in a small building that housed a miniature movie theater and the Black Cat bar, which Rosset operated on the financially dubious policy of never charging friends or employees for their drinks.

During the 1970s, Grove lived on the income generated by its marvelous backlist. There was the occasional new book of note, even the rare momentary best-seller. But the halcyon days were gone, along with the money. Rosset’s instinct had been to make Grove into what we would now call a multimedia company. And instinct it was, as his view of the future was always a bit light on planning or details and, later, on resources. He wanted a company that could publish a magazine to support its books and discover new writers, to run a book club that offered publications and short films (most of them in aggressive violation of just about everybody’s “community standards”) via the mail, so as to circumvent the regular, stodgy channels of distribution. He entered the feature film business to distribute movies such as Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” and the seminal, if banal, “I Am Curious (Yellow).” These and other films were, Rosset understood, a natural extension of the publishing operation (a number of them were made by Grove authors such as Marguerite Duras).

His idea of what America’s future could aspire to--racial tolerance, free sexual expression--was based on morality and an acute sense of history. That some of his ideas were not much more than mental curlicues and that some of his behavior was awfully self-centered does not detract from his ethical impulse.

America has traveled some distance since the mid-1950s. Today it looks a lot more like what Rosset wanted it to be than it resembles the social order championed by those who would have delighted in attending his auto-da-fe. For his view of the future was not a “vision”; it was concrete, something one could stake reputation and private fortune on, which is what he did.

An inveterate child of the 1930s, he was a man whose true thoughts and emotions were closer to those of a precocious 16-year-old than to those of the charming sophisticate one first met. Rosset needed money but disdained what he believed it represented, as when, after his father’s death, he sued the state of Illinois to return a prized charter to operate a private bank.

By the early 1970s, the book club had gone the way of the Mercer Street building; Evergreen Review was moribund; the film division was manned by two people who rented its library to film societies and college classrooms. There was the occasional new book from stalwarts such as John Rechy (“The Sexual Outlaw”), important new pieces from Samuel Beckett that enhanced his august reputation but did little for Grove’s balance sheet and some unlikely pieces such as the illustrated script tie-in to the movie “American Graffiti,” which sold 300,000 copies, and Judith Exner’s “My Story,” bought for $1 after every reputable New York publisher had rejected her poorly told but important tale of concurrent affairs with President Kennedy and the Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

Grove could no longer afford to sell its own books and so entered into a distribution arrangement with Random House, whereby Random would pay Grove a monthly fee that was barely enough to cover Grove’s overheads and not nearly sufficient to acquire new titles. Rosset believed that Random House made this deal, secured by the contracts on Grove’s backlist, in the expectation that Grove would go under and Random would inherit a body of titles then as now the envy of the New York publishing community. But, considering Grove’s declining, even perilous, circumstances, the deal from Random’s side was smart business: reasonable and, some thought, generous. Rosset, however, chafed under these conditions, expressed his frustration and anger in ways that were often hard on the patient Random House sales staff, who admired Grove but found meetings with Rosset bewildering. As one told me: “He wants to release three new editions of ‘Story of O,’ each with its own cover and all with different prices.” Random House executives were known to go home and lie down after these meetings.

As the decade neared its end, Grove’s circumstances did not improve. Rosset had lost none of his ability to see the world in a creative, if somewhat bent, way that was at once prescient and confusing; he had well understood the meaning of sexual politics a decade before the term was coined, and it was no error that he bought one of the first portable videotape recorders imported into the United States. His plan was to produce a video version of Evergreen Review, which we did. But this was before quarter-inch tape and cassettes, and by then the money and key people were gone, and much of the energy was misplaced.

There were other adventures during that decade: the overnight Air France flight when Rosset and I and “Mrs Baldwin’s bug-eyed boy,” as James Baldwin insisted on calling himself, were the only passengers in a 747 first-class section; the brawl with Joan Mitchell and her hangers-on, because rats had nibbled one of her paintings that Rosset was meant to be keeping safe; the sex farm in the hills above Topanga Canyon; the nights in Paris when Steve McQueen (whom Rosset kept confusing with James Garner) tried to buy the movie rights to “Waiting for Godot” and Beckett said no to half a million dollars (“If I wanted it to be a movie I would have written it as a movie”), 10% of which would have gone to Grove as his agent.

By 1980, Grove’s very existence appeared to be threatened. The acquisition of the world English paperback rights to the much rejected comic masterpiece “A Confederacy of Dunces” provided a temporary respite. The fact that I bought those rights for a mere $2,000, my spending cap, suggests the limitations imposed on our publishing program by the absence of ready cash. Soon after, Rosset began to seek investors who might inject enough money to revitalize Grove. When that alternative proved fruitless, he was forced to consider selling the company. In 1985, he sold Grove to Anne Getty, the socialite wife of oil heir Gordon Getty, who was partnered with the British publisher George Weidenfeld. The price was $2 million. Rosset signed a five-year employment contract and extracted a promise to restart Evergreen Review, which had been moribund for more than 10 years.

Rosset’s unaccustomed role as an employee did not last long. He was soon dismissed, and the renewal of the magazine was shelved. Over the next eight years, Grove limped along under the guidance of a series of editors and the largely absentee ownership of the Getty family. There was more money to sign new books, but the list declined from 70 titles a year to 35, and few of the new books were able to earn back their advances.

In February 1993, Grove merged with Atlantic Monthly Press. Grove’s exceptional backlist was complementary to Atlantic’s developing front list. Since then, the new company has managed to keep alive a semblance of the spirit of Grove, repackaging and reselling classic titles from the Grove backlist. The merged company has also been careful to avoid the excesses and expensive controversies that had brought Grove down. That Grove Atlantic appears to flourish today is a credit to Morgan Entrekin, its publisher. While the old Grove Press was more than just a product of its times, because it helped to forge those times, the new Grove seems to have mastered the means to compete and succeed as an independent publisher in a time of consolidation. If a company with $15 million in revenue can continue to publish worthy books in an environment dominated by conglomerates many times its size, then the purpose that Barney Rosset began to define 50 years ago continues and, in a different form, triumphs.