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...