Our Q&A series with Loren Glass, Jay Gertzman and Boris Kachka continues today, as they delve more deeply into who Barney Rosset, Samuel Roth and Roger Straus were, and how each steered their respective ships (see the first in the series, Sex and Counterculture in Postwar Publishing). Check in again tomorrow for the last installment of their conversation and if you're in the New York area, don't miss their panel at Columbia University tomorrow at 6 pm.
Jay Gertzman: Roth would say he never published anything but good books of educational and literary value. This is bushwa. He thrived on scandal, faux-erotica, and gossip books. But he also was a go-to publisher for those who could not find a mainstream publisher whose choices for publication were constrained by conventions. Therefore he published a satire of the most powerful anti-vice kingpin of the day, one of the first transvestite novels, a critic of President Hoover that helped in a small way to defeat the sitting president, two very good Southern Gothic satirical adventure novels, the first post-war study of Celine, Gershon Legman’s critique of the Kinsey Report, and his translation of Ubu Roi.
Boris Kachka: So what did Straus and Giroux actually like and publish? Where FSG excelled was in promoting work by the group Irving Howe called “semi-outsiders”; Jewish intellectuals, Catholics (both born and converted), and Southern agrarian writers—people with privileges and a voice in the culture, albeit removed from the dominant Protestant center that still held sway in the middle of the century. For Straus, the Guggenheim heir mocked in prep school for being Jewish, and Giroux, the working-class Catholic and the first in his family to go to college, these books were a natural fit.
Loren Glass: Most people who have written about Grove understand it as an expression of Rosset’s personality. One of the first articles published about the company, “Grove Press: Little Giant of Publishing,” characterizes it as “a dynamic expression of [Rosset’s] own personal likes and tastes,” and continues that “Grove’s editors are little more than extra-sensory . . . extensions of the master’s personal tastes.”
“Sex and Politics” was something of a mantra for him, and he repeated the phrase to me a number of times in our interview to explain his publishing philosophy. On the one hand, this was simply his version of the Freudian left sensibilities popular amongst movement intellectuals of the era, that sexual repression enabled political repression and that, conversely, sexual liberations would enable political liberation. On the other hand, it was a logical consequence of his first amendment fundamentalism, his unwavering conviction that anything and everything should be published. Undoubtedly he would see the so-called “end of obscenity” as his legacy, and he has a right to claim it, in my opinion, though many others were involved in those campaigns (Samuel Roth chief among them).
JG: I wanted to ask Loren about the feminist sit-ins and protests in 1970. The radical sex and gender alternatives emerging in the 60s could explain the ambience in which feminist opposition grew to Barney’s erotic paperbacks and images in the Evergreen Review. I had the impression that Barney was bitter about that sit-in.
LG: No doubt Barney was bitter! He was sure the FBI was involved, and both he and Fred felt that the feminists were using sexual politics as an excuse for attacking free speech. The feminist takeover was a significant and enormously symbolic act to which he attributed the eclipse of the company in the seventies. Grove Press, in essence, enabled the very phenomenon that eclipsed it.
But Grove was in economic trouble before the feminist takeover, mostly due to Barney’s indiscriminate investments in film. He also spread himself thin with his real estate holdings in the Village, buying a theater space, a bar, and a seven-story, forty thousand square foot building with an arched entranceway in the shape of a “G” and a private elevator. A subsequent collapse in the real estate market destroyed its investment value.
BK: I’ll bounce of Loren’s point about fiscal responsibility. Say what you will about Roger Straus, who could be profligate in his own life, he was conservative when it came to money. Over and over, he pointed to money-hemorrhaging books as cautionary tales, a stark contrast to the write-offs gleefully taken on book advances in later decades. Nary a pencil was thrown away; the office subsisted on soap purloined from hotels by sales reps; and expansion was almost always nipped in the bud. FSG’s survival is a testament to the tightness of a Guggenheim scion who fancied himself a WASP manqué.
It was only in being able to convince authors that they belonged to an exclusive club, an elite as unassailable as the invisible masthead of The New Yorker, that FSG was able to underbid and underpay for so long and still be able to retain otherwise sensible, financially minded authors (like Tim Wolfe, Philip Roth and Susan Sontag). Editors came and went rather quickly too, not only because he never paid competitive wages. He simply couldn’t cede authority in matters beyond the purely editorial. (As his secretary of four decades told me, “There was no politics at FSG. There was only one king.”)
The tightness was one aspect of Roger’s personality that enabled the survival of an independent Farrar, Straus. Another, equally key, was his faith in instinct, a natural extension of his own preternatural confidence. He hired editors who knew what they were doing and had a point of view, and he let their taste lead the house.
JG: Gershon Legman once said that Roth worked before publishing became corporate. He was a “character,” at a time when individual idiosyncrasy meshed with creativity and plain “guts.” Other examples are Lyle Stuart, Nat Wartels, Ralph Ginzburg, Al Goldstein, and of course, Barney Rosset.
Roth published under some 25 imprints and over 60 business names from 1919 to 1966 (of course, he also published banned pornography “‘privately” without identification of any sort). After the International Protest regarding his unauthorized publication of Ulysses, he was considered a pariah by the institutions of publishing in America and Europe. The epithet of “thief” hurled at him by Joyce and his supporters, calculated to get Joyce known as a victim not of censors but of a pirate (which Roth was not), was a license for the police and anti-vice societies to attack. The large number of imprints is due to various factors, including the ebb and flow of his financial situation, his desire to publish various kinds of books for various audiences, the need to counter the interception of certain titles by the Post Office, and the reluctance of newspapers and magazines to accept advertisements.
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See the final installment of this conversation here.
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Jay Gertzman, professor emeritus of English at Mansfield University, is author of three books, including Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 and Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist (University Press of Florida).
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 and Counterculture Colophon (Stanford University Press).
Boris Kachka, is a culture journalist, contributing editor to New York magazine, and author of Hothouse (Simon & Schuster). His articles and profiles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, and Elle, among others.
