The Village

by John Strausbaugh

  John Waters says that his becoming an underground filmmaker “was all because of Jonas Mekas and the Village Voice. The Village Voice was incredibly important to me as a beatnik paper and then a hippie paper.” Growing up in a very mainstream suburb of Baltimore, a city that had “one bohemian” that he could recall, he might never have heard of Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, or anything of the avant-garde movie scene had he not read about them in Mekas’s column.

  IN 1951 BARNEY ROSSET PAID THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS TO BUY A tiny Village press that reprinted obscure vintage literature. He would turn Grove Press into the most influential publishing house of its time, certainly the most controversial. He helped change how Americans read, and what they are allowed to read. Like the Village Voice, Grove Press grew into a national presence, a pivotal force in the avant-garde, the counterculture, and the sexual and radical politics of the 1960s.

  Rosset was born in Chicago in 1922, a combustible combination of half Jewish and half Irish, the only son of a prosperous banker. His parents sent him to a left-wing experimental school, where Dillinger was one of his heroes and the future cinematographer Haskell Wexler was his pal. In the eight grade they started putting out their own newspaper, which they called the Communist, then the Socialist, then the Somunist, and finally the Anti-Everything. At seventeen he protested Gone With the Wind for its racist content. He read a smuggled copy of Henry Miller’s banned Tropic of Cancer and wrote a paper on it as a freshman at Swarthmore. During the war he learned photography and film in the army signal corps. After the war he came to New York, where he produced a documentary film, Strange Victory, about the persistence of American racism and anti-Semitism despite having just trounced the fascists abroad. He later explained it was about how he and other vets “came home from the war and took Hitler home with us.” One theater, the Ambassador on Forty-ninth Street, showed it.

  In 1949 he pursued the feisty painter Joan Mitchell, whom he’d known in Chicago, to France, where they married on impulse. Back in New York they took a small place near the White Horse and she plunged them both into the Ab Ex scene. “Very inarticulate people,” he later said of the painters. “They didn’t talk much.” Nevertheless, Barney and Joan did a lot of drinking with them at the Cedar. Barney and Joan were big drinkers like everyone else, only more so. Rosset would remain a dedicated drinking man long after his contemporaries died from it or quit. Friends, employees, and the press marveled at the small man’s ability to put it away. Into his sixties, seventies, and eighties his ever present rum and Coke, magically replenished from morn till night by silently gliding assistants or wives, was his raffish signature, his set piece, like Hugh Hefner’s pipes and bunnies. He also developed a taste for amphetamines that powered him through all the drinking.

  Barney and Joan considered themselves free to pursue side affairs; given their combative temperaments and consumption habits, they inevitably became one of the most explosive couples on the downtown scene. They could be counted on for a screaming match at any party, with Joan throwing whatever she could put her hands on at Barney’s head. Friends like John Gruen worried for the slight, wiry Rosset’s safety when two-fisted Joan really got worked up. The marriage gradually unraveled and died in 1952. She moved to Paris and he would make and break a few more marriages. Kindred spirits, he and Joan remained friends and admirers until she died.

  Before she left she told Rosset about a little Village publishing house that was failing after putting out just three volumes of public-domain literature, two from the seventeenth century (The Verse in English of Richard Cranshaw and Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn) and Melville’s The Confidence-Man. Rosset was at loose ends, his filmmaking career a bust, taking courses at the New School. He borrowed some cash from his banker father and bought Grove Press, thinking that publishing might be his best avenue for shaking things up. The staff for the first few years was never more than five people (including Gruen for a time), and Rosset never let running his business get in the way of his drinking and partying all night. His half-Irish, half-Jewish, half-drunk, and half-speeding management style would go a long way to explain his erratically brilliant, periodically disastrous, and generally impulsive publishing career. In 1953 he read an essay about Waiting for Godot, which had just opened in Paris. He flew there, met Samuel Beckett, and paid him a two-hundred-dollar advance to publish an English translation of the play in the United States. It sold fewer than five hundred copies in its first year. Americans wouldn’t get Beckett until later in the 1950s, and when they did it was through Rosset’s publishing his books and through productions of his plays in Greenwich Village theaters. When New York’s WNTA-TV televised a production of Godot starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel in 1961, Rosset gave the Rod Serling–esque stand-up introduction. Godot went on to sell more than two million copies by the 1970s. Beckett and Rosset were good friends until Beckett’s death in 1989.

  In 1957 Rosset started Evergreen Review, which began as both a literary magazine and a clever marketing tool, a way of hipping readers, through samples and excerpts, to the kinds of writers whose books he published. He also used it as a political platform. When U.S. Customs seized City Lights’s shipment of Howl and Other Poems and Ferlinghetti went to trial, Rosset published “Howl” in the second issue of the Review. Since Ginsberg’s book had been impounded, a lot of readers first saw the poem in Rosset’s magazine. The magazine spun off a radio program where people could hear writers read their work. Through the books, the magazine, and radio Rosset introduced or helped introduce American readers to a very long list of avant-garde writers, cutting-edge intellectuals, and political radicals, who besides Ginsberg included Kerouac, Burroughs, Frank O’Hara, Nabokov, Borges, Havel, Susan Sontag, Julius Lester, Charles Bukowski, Robert Coover, Malcolm X, Jean Genet, Che Guevara, Ed Sanders, John Rechy, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Tom Stoppard, Michael O’Donoghue, and Hubert Selby. In the 1960s the Review would be as much a political as a literary magazine and, along with the Voice and Rolling Stone, a counterculture must-read.

  When the judge in San Francisco found Howl not obscene, Rosset saw an opening. He’d itched to challenge censorship since reading that banned copy of Tropic of Cancer. He published an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959; since 1928 it had been available in the United States only in a bowdlerized edition with the sex cut out. Rosset didn’t particularly like the book—the characters struck him as cold British snobs—but thought D. H. Lawrence made a better stalking horse than Henry Miller. The U.S. Post Office seized it, Rosset fought, and he won in the Court of Appeals. When he published Cancer in 1961 the Brooklyn district attorney instantly impaneled a grand jury, hoping for indictments against both Rosset and Miller (then living in Big Sur) on charges of conspiracy to peddle smut. The grand jury declined, but hundreds of jurisdictions all over the country brought their own charges. Rosset spent a fortune over the next few years helping to defend bookstore owners who’d been arrested for selling the book. Richard Seaver, who came on as an editor in 1959, later said that 90 percent of Grove Press’s energies and cash went into court fights during his first couple of years on the job. (Earlier in the 1950s Seaver had published the literary magazine Merlin in Paris and wrote the essay on Beckett that had sparked Rosset’s interest.) Grove let copies of Naked Lunch, its next test case, sit in the warehouse while fighting the Miller battles one by one. In 1964 the Supreme Court found Cancer not obscene.

  At the same time, Grove was publishing highly controversial political writing. When Rosset read that Doubleday had decided not to publish The Autobiography of Malcolm X he had to have it. White liberals turned on him for that. Then, after Che Guevara was killed in 1967, he bought a chapter of Che’s much-sought-after diaries. One night in July 1968 a bomb went off in Grove’s offices, which were then at University Place and East Eleventh Street. A right-wing Cuban exile group claimed responsibility but Rosset would always maintain it was CIA. He published the Che excerpt in the August Revi
ew anyway.

  In 1969 Rosset brought the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) to the United States and went into another round of fighting obscenity cases one jurisdiction at a time, up to the Supreme Court again, where this time he lost. Meanwhile, however, all the press covering the court cases made the rather dreary and not very sexy film a box-office smash. Block-long lines of curious-yellow Americans formed outside movie theaters, bringing millions into Grove while paving the way for “porn chic” and the massive success of Deep Throat in 1972. Rosset also bought and began reprinting a large library of public-domain vintage erotica including My Secret Life, The Pearl, and A Man with a Maid, which became another profit center.

  Cash rolling in and his staff up to almost a hundred and fifty employees, Rosset bought the six-story brick building on the southwest corner of Mercer and Bleecker Streets, renovated it at great cost, and moved the company there in 1970. It was a very short-lived heyday. New York real estate went into freefall just as Rosset moved into the new building, which was suddenly worth less than the cost of the renovations. Meanwhile he was hit by an attempt to organize the editorial staff by the Fur, Leather and Machinists Union. He rashly fired some pro-union staffers, including a militant young feminist who turned it into a women’s liberation issue. She organized a takeover of Rosset’s office while a larger group picketed down on the street, wearing “I Am Furious (Yellow)” buttons, protesting the misogynist erotica Grove distributed. As one of them told a television reporter, “What we want from Grove Press, in addition to the disclosure of the financial records, is fifty-one percent control of the editorship, so that we can determine what books and magazine articles are published.”

  Rosset, hurt and confused by this two-pronged attack from the left, managed to stave off both the union and the feminists but bankruptcy loomed. He sold the building, slashed staff, suspended publication of Evergreen Review, and began selling off pieces of the business to other publishers. By 1973 Grove was back down to about a dozen employees, operating out of Rosset’s new home, a bunker-like blockhouse of a building at 196 West Houston Street. To some extent he fell victim to his own successes. As the 1970s rolled on, America was awash in erotica and porn, and the big commercial publishers were outbidding him for new, edgy books. Rosset’s film distribution wing lost a bundle and he was forced to sell the rights to some of his bread-and-butter backlist titles. There’s an old business joke that you can tell who the pioneers were because they’re the ones with the arrows in their backs. Like other Village pioneers, Rosset lost the struggle to survive in the new world he’d helped to create. In 1985, desperate and deep in debt, he sold Grove to the West Coast socialite Ann Getty. The following year she fired him. He made some unsuccessful bids to buy Grove back in the following years, and he started a new line of erotica called Blue Moon Books. In 1993 Grove was merged with Atlantic Monthly Press.

  Rosset was working on a long-promised memoir when he died in 2012 at age eighty-nine. David Amram played “Amazing Grace,” a favorite of Rosset’s, at a memorial service at Cooper Union.

  23

  Standing Up to Moses and the Machine

  ONE OF THE FIRST NEIGHBORHOOD ISSUES ON WHICH THE NEW Voice took a stand was the grassroots effort to prevent the powerful highway-building city planner Robert Moses from destroying the Village. The battle would help spark the modern historic preservation movement and make a star of one of its participants, Jane Jacobs. Born Jane Butzner in Scranton in 1916, she’d opted not to go on to college after high school and moved, with a sister, to Brooklyn in 1935. Jane soon discovered Greenwich Village and they took an apartment on Morton Street. She pursued a career in journalism, married Robert Jacobs Jr., and then bought a three-story town house at 555 Hudson Street in 1947. It had no heat, an abandoned candy store on the ground floor, and a laundry and a tailor shop as next-door neighbors.

  In 1952, despite lacking a degree, Jacobs was hired by Architectural Forum, where she received crash courses in city planning, urban renewal, and public housing. The prevailing wisdom among urban planners and architects in the postwar years was that older cities from the East Coast through the Rust Belt were decrepit, dangerous, and dying. They were mixed up, a hodgepodge, disorderly, and dysfunctional. White flight was sweeping the middle class out to the Leave It to Beaver suburbs, abandoning urban centers to the poor. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s geometric Radiant City, planners dreamed of knocking down all that mess and erecting a brand-new type of urban center, vertical and orderly, with neatly spaced towers lining multilevel highways, rationally segregated in discrete living, business, and recreation zones. They would be less like traditional cities than hives or nodes strung along bustling arterial roadways, operating with machine-like precision and order. They would impose order on their human inhabitants and if it looked like the mindless order of an ant farm, well, look at how efficient ants were.

  Touring East Harlem, Jacobs saw some of that vision put into action. Block after block of old tenements and storefronts had been demolished to clear the way for more than a dozen towering public housing projects, grim brick monoliths standing back from the streets on plazas of sterile lawn where no one was allowed to walk or play or picnic. The people who inhabited these cheerless giants were no longer a community, no longer even neighbors, just hive dwellers. She began to form opinions distinctly counter to her employers. Jacobs thought cities were pretty much all right just as they were. To her a city was “an immense laboratory of trial and error,” thriving on density and diversity, on mixes of people and businesses, even on chaos and mess. Attempts by planners and developers to impose neat order on urban life from above would always kill what makes it vital and successful, she argued. “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder,” she would write, “and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

  Few urban planners had such opportunity to impress their vision on their cities as Moses, the city’s extraordinarily powerful public works caudillo. Since his start under La Guardia in the 1930s he’d met little opposition to his grand-scale planning that he couldn’t overcome. In the 1950s Moses drove the Cross Bronx Expressway straight through the South Bronx, displacing perhaps a hundred thousand working-class residents. In Brooklyn Heights, however, residents had the political and social clout to fight his plan to ram the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway straight through the old heart of their neighborhood. They forced an ingenious compromise, a two-tiered roadway along the neighborhood’s Manhattan-facing bluff, with a pedestrian esplanade above. Moses still leveled a large section of the neighborhood—including the building where Whitman had helped set the type for the first edition of Leaves of Grass—to create Cadman Plaza, a soulless park lined with cheerless high-rises.

  Greenwich Village, with demographics similar to those in Brooklyn Heights—a sizable proportion of white, well-educated, and well-connected professionals—fought him off as well, but it was a long battle and mixed victory. Moses had not only the city but the federal government behind him, in the form of Title I of the Federal Housing Act of 1949. It provided cities with massive amounts of federal funding to acquire and clear designated slum areas so that private developers could build on them. The law was generally interpreted as an aid to improving the living conditions of low- and middle-income city residents, and Title I money was in fact used to prepare the way for grim public housing blocks like the ones Jacobs visited in East Harlem. But Moses proved adept at interpreting the program more widely to fund other goals. He believed—and many political and business leaders agreed—that New York City’s survival depended on halting the white flight to the suburbs by making the city’s core borough, Manhattan, a more attractive and prestigious place. It meant creating a combination of new “luxury” housing, new amenities, and new prestige institutions in the borough. Two new prestige institutions he spearheaded were the United Nations complex on the East Side waterfront and the
Lincoln Center arts complex near Columbus Circle, razing large areas of older housing and industrial stock to make way for them.

  Closer to home for Jacobs, he also set his sights on Washington Square and the area of old housing and light manufacturing buildings below it. Over local protest Moses moved out a thousand small businesses and more than a hundred families and flattened the old buildings. He offered some of the cleared ground to NYU for new facilities and the rest to private developers, Tishman & Wolfe, for luxury housing towers to be called Washington Square Village. To sweeten the pot for the developers he promised them Washington Square Village would have a prestigious Fifth Avenue address. To do that, he planned to drive a Fifth Avenue extension straight through Washington Square, obliterating the fountain and cutting the park into two isolated strips.

  Moses was stunned when Village residents—many of them “housewives” and mothers—got organized to oppose this proposal. It wasn’t as if the Square didn’t already have traffic in it. Horse-drawn vehicles in the nineteenth century and buses and cars in the twentieth, reaching the end of Fifth Avenue, had always driven through or past the arch and into the Square. But those who contested the idea of plowing Fifth Avenue straight through the park set up card tables around the Square with petitions, eventually garnering thirty thousand signatures, half the population of the Village. When the Voice appeared in the fall of 1955 it took on the controversy. Over the next three years, as opposition mounted, the city considered a variety of alternative plans: to divide the road, bury it under the Square, or lift it over the Square on stilts. Villagers countered with an idea that seemed radical at the time: close the Square to all traffic and turn it into a proper park. Moses scoffed that this was “an absurdity” and “completely unworkable.” Where would the buses turn around? Villagers didn’t care. Eleanor Roosevelt personally led a delegation to City Hall to support closing the Square. Carmine DeSapio, the neighborhood’s Democratic power player, and the up-and-coming John Lindsay joined the fray. So did Jane Jacobs, who gradually emerged as the movement’s figurehead. In its March 12, 1958, issue, the Voice printed the opinion of the eminent architecture critic Lewis Mumford that “the attack on Washington Square by the Park Department is a piece of unqualified vandalism,” “an almost classic example of bad city planning” that would “deface and degrade” the Square. He supported the idea of closing it to traffic. In 1959 Moses’s plan was finally abandoned and Washington Square Park was closed to all traffic.