However, this Boston trial did not follow the normal pattern in which state authorities simply seized a book that they considered obscene. They were also prosecuting a bookseller, Theodore Mavrikos, for stocking and offering the volume for sale. De Grazia petitioned the court, protesting reasonably enough that it was unfair to prosecute Mavrikos for selling a book that was openly carried in other stores and even in the public library. Eventually, the charges against Mavrikos were dropped even though the state of Massachusetts charged that the book was obscene.
When the Boston trial finally got underway on January 12, 1965, Grove brought forth a parade of literary celebrities to testify for the defense. Ciardi testified very pertinently to complaints that Burroughs didn’t really need to use such strong language, by saying that when Dante dipped the sins in excrement, he did not call it “excrement.” When you are dealing with depraved subject matter, he said, you must coarsen the language.
Other writers also found religious parallels to the novel. Literary critic Norman Holland stated, “Naked Lunch is a religious novel about original sin. … If St. Augustine were writing today, he might very well write something like Naked Lunch.” Norman Mailer played the same key, saying, “William Burroughs is in my opinion—whatever his conscious intention may be—a religious writer. … [The book] is a vision of how mankind would act if man was totally divorced from eternity.”
Despite the lack of witnesses on the prosecution side, the judge found the book obscene. The judge stated the book was “hardcore pornography” and said the author was “mentally sick.”
We appealed this ruling to the Massachusetts Supreme Court a year and a half after the Boston trial, on July 7, 1966. This court sat tight for the time being because it was waiting to see how the Supreme Court ruled on pending cases. An earlier Massachusetts obscenity case, in which Fanny Hill had been ruled obscene by the State Supreme Court, was now on the federal Supreme Court docket. The federal court overturned the obscenity ruling for this matter. With this and other new rulings in view, the Massachusetts court now found in favor of Naked Lunch, declaring it not obscene.
Still, this was not the end of Naked Lunch’s legal troubles. As I learned during the Tropic of Cancer cases, in our legal system the determination of what qualifies as obscene is left up to the individual states. While we got off in Boston, we were also prosecuted in other jurisdictions, such as Los Angeles. Here, again, booksellers were put on trial and, in this case, they were prosecuted for two books, Naked Lunch and Monte Steele’s The Sex Scholar, lumping Burroughs’ artistic achievement with some rather mundane sexual material in order, I suppose, to condemn the Beat writer by association. The judge in the case, however, could discriminate, and while allowing the case against The Sex Scholar to continue, threw out the case against Naked Lunch, saying that as a whole, Burroughs’ novel could not be said to be without “redeeming social value.”
While these trials were ongoing, I found that Burroughs, who had waited so long for his book to finally come out, was (it seemed) being stiffed by Girodias on some of his royalties. Richard Seaver—he and Fred Jordan were still my top two editors—wrote Burroughs on March 6, 1964, “I hear rumors that you have had some difficulties collecting royalties from our edition of Naked Lunch that we have paid to Girodias. Is this true?” Seaver went on, “Frankly, I cannot imagine how your royalties should become involved with any of Girodias’ French business, since we pay royalties not directly to him, but to an agent in Switzerland.” The rumors that reached Seaver had come from Paul Bowles who talked to Burroughs in Tangier.
Burroughs replied that there were indeed funds owed him, but that Girodias’s financial situation was so dire, it was unlikely he would yield a cent. “[I]t is a question,” he wrote, “of find a lawyer and get in line and the line is long and the till is empty. The plain fact is he spent the money to cover what he evidently considered more pressing debts and I was barely able to squeeze out of him enough to get myself back to Tangier.”
Still, Burroughs remained magnanimous:
Despite my understandable annoyance with Maurice I still sympathize with his position, which could hardly be worse. More and more trouble with the French authorities, suspended sentences piling up, a twenty year publishing ban, inevitable debacle of that unfortunate restaurant venture [Girodias had opened a bistro], owing money to his staff, social security to the government, fines, lawsuits, the lot.
Once the Naked Lunch trials finished in our favor, we went on to publish many other books by Burroughs. Now, often as not, the headaches came not from prosecutions but from conflicts with other publishers over rights and Burroughs’s over-scrupulousness. For instance, I remember a problem over The Soft Machine in late 1965. At the last moment Burroughs wanted a vast amount of changes to his text, after the novel had already been typeset. We acceded to his request but under protest. As Seaver wrote him on December 20, with a touch of humor:
Bill, I don’t want to sound like an old St. Louis preacher, but there comes a point at which you have to write finis to the writing of a book. Before you left America, you did re-write this novel extensively and went over all our questions prior to its being sent for setting. Then, when you received galleys, your changes were so extensive (especially in your decision to lower case literally hundreds of words that had been upper case in your manuscript) that we had to junk the entire first typesetting and reset the book completely a second time.
Burroughs, though, would consider last-minute changes crucial with later books as well. When we sent him the galleys for The Ticket That Exploded in 1966, he asked us to put a hold on the book because of revisions he was working on:
It really would be extremely disadvantageous to publish the book as is. The changes I am making could well make the difference between a real setback and a book that will make money. … I think you will agree that the original Olympia edition of The Soft Machine would have sold very badly indeed and that the corrections and changes made all the difference.
Once these changes had been finished and set, in April 1967, Burroughs had one final request about Ticket: “Everything O.K. except the photo which I have never liked … I am having some photos made with a studio here and will send them along toward the end of the week.” The new photo arrived ten days later. Burroughs wrote that it made him look like a 1910 financier but asked that it be used on all further reprints.
In the end, Burroughs was another author who stood by me when I lost control of Grove Press. When I was forced out of the company in 1986, Burroughs, writing through his secretary, James Grauerholz, stated, “[W]e are appalled and infuriated at the treatment you have received.” Grauerholz added that “In the thirteen years I have worked with William, no publisher has made more regular accountings, nor more honest, nor has paid more fairly, than Grove Press. And Grove is further distinguished from William’s earliest publishers in that, unlike Olympia, there has never been any financial chicanery to blot the record.”
15
Revolutionaries: Evergreen, Che Guevara, and the Grove Bombing
We often launched new Grove authors, such as John Rechy and Hubert Selby, in Evergreen. And we were now able to mingle in Evergreen some non-exclusively Grove authors: Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Chester Himes, Edward Gorey, Charles Bukowski, and Woody Allen, for instance. Don Allen even managed to get an Albert Camus article for us about capital punishment that had been published in Nouvelle Revue Française. Camus won the Nobel Prize not long after I bought the article.
Evergreen was a wonderful platform for Grove, and it worked very well for a long time. Some issues were themed, such as No. 2, “San Francisco Scene,” which as I have described became very well known and brought the contributors to the attention of a nationwide readership. No. 7, “The Eye of Mexico” (Winter 1959) was the only issue of Evergreen reviewed as a book, and quite favorably so by the New York Times Book Review.
This Evergreen came quite naturally to me, having
first traveled from Chicago to Mexico in 1940 when I drove to Mexico City with a friend in an attempt to meet Diego Rivera. Trotsky was there, along with Frida Kahlo, but Rivera was away in New York.
The famous “What is ’Pataphysics?” issue was No. 13 (May–June 1960). The term was coined by Alfred Jarry for a science of imaginary solutions, or, as the New York Times called it, “the science of meaningful nonsense, or nonsensical meaningfulness.”91 This included pieces by Eugène Ionesco, Raymond Queneau, Michel Leiris, Boris Vian, and of course Jarry himself. “’Pataphysics relates each thing and each event not to any generality (a mere plastering over of exceptions) but to the singularity that makes it an exception. Thus the science of ’Pataphysics attempts no cures, envisages no progress, distrusts all claims of ‘improvement’ in the state of things, and remains innocent of any message.” The scholar Roger Shattuck, who specialized in French literature, was our guest editor for the issue.
There were other important Evergreen issues in the early 1960s. No. 21 was “The German Scene,” with contributions by Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Günter Grass, and Heinrich Böll. Grove’s Fred Jordan was its chief editor. No. 23 (March–April 1962) was “Henry Miller on Trial,” explaining the legal issues we had faced with the publication of Tropic of Cancer and a resultant trial in Chicago. We continued this coverage in No. 25, with Chicago journalist Hoke Norris’s report, “‘Cancer’ in Chicago.”
The first issue published in a larger format, No. 32, got us in trouble—21,000 unbound copies of the magazine were seized by Nassau County Vice Squad detectives on April 24, 1964, at our printing plant on Hicksville Road in Bethpage, New York. A woman employed at Pegasus Press, the bindery for the magazine, tipped off a detective in the district attorney’s squad, leading to the arrest of the bindery president, George Haralampoudis, on a charge of possessing and distributing obscene literature. There were some supposedly nude color photographs by Emil Cadoo in that issue, although if you looked at them you would be hard pressed to say whether anybody was nude or not. But they were beautiful and creative photographs. The whole issue was deemed lewd by the district attorney, William Cahn, because it contained “provocative and sexually bizarre poses” and “a dirty story.” And the New York Times reported: “Warrants have been issued for the arrest of Barney Rosset, president and editor of the Review, and Richard Seaver, secretary and associate editor.”92
We sued in Brooklyn Federal Court, arguing that the suppression of the magazine was unconstitutional, and on June 12, 1964, three federal judges ordered the return of the confiscated copies on grounds that the police seizure was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. They did not rule on the obscenity of the material. Without the magazines in their possession, the Nassau County DA claimed they would no longer be able to build a case against us, and all charges were dropped a month later. Hicksville played its name to the hilt.
In No. 77 (April 1970), we printed an excerpt, “Redress and Revolution,” from William O. Douglas’s book Points of Rebellion. This not only resulted in Justice Douglas disqualifying himself from the Supreme Court rulings on I Am Curious (Yellow) to avoid what could be seen as a conflict of interest, but it gave then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford ammunition to try to impeach the liberal Supreme Court justice on April 16, 1970. A group of over a hundred Democrat and Republican congressmen called for Justice Douglas’s impeachment on charges of, among other offenses, “fomenting rebellion through his books and articles, writing for a pornographic magazine, [and] associating with gamblers and underworld figures.”93
The Washington Post’s obituary of President Ford in 2006 explained some of the political motivations behind the failed attempt to remove Justice Douglas: “Ostensibly, it was Ford’s idea to impeach Douglas because of the appearance of excerpts of a book by the jurist in the Evergreen Review alongside material that Ford said was pornographic. However, after he became president, Ford admitted he had been helped by John N. Mitchell, the attorney general in the first Nixon administration, who was angry about Senate rejection of two of Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees.”94
We published our last Evergreen issue in 1984, No. 98. It included contributions from Ferlinghetti, Beckett, Duras, McClure, and Kathy Acker. We had paid tribute to some of our most treasured contributors.
But Evergreen Review was reborn on the Internet in 1998, where it continues to this day.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara was killed in Bolivia on October 9, 1967, and the February 1968 issue of Evergreen Review, No. 51, contained a special section to commemorate his life.
The lead piece we included was a translation of a speech given by Fidel Castro at the Plaza de la Revolución on October 18, 1967, “El Che Vive!” in which Castro stated, “Che fell defending the interests, defending the cause of the exploited and the oppressed people of this continent—Che fell defending the cause of the poor and disenfranchised of this earth.” While his death was a tragic loss to the anti-authoritarian movement, Castro said, the imperialists who killed him were shortsighted. “[T]hey think that by eliminating a man physically they have eliminated his thinking; that by eliminating him physically they have eliminated his ideas, eliminated his virtues, eliminated his example.” On the contrary, he concluded, “[H]is death will, in the long run, be like a seed which will give rise to many men determined to imitate him, men determined to follow his example.”
Che himself told the story of his part in the overthrow of the corrupt Fulgencio Batista regime in Cuba in his book Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, which we excerpted in Evergreen. It was in 1955, in Mexico, that Che met Castro and joined the guerrilla force he was recruiting to enter Cuba. On November 25, 1956, Castro’s group of eighty-two men embarked on the leaky vessel, the Granma, for a slow voyage to the island. They landed—starved and worn out from seasickness—on December 2 at the swampy Las Colorados beach. The bedraggled army was eventually victorious, ousting the corrupt dictator and putting the revolutionaries in power.
Once Castro’s leftist government was stabilized, Che hungered for greener pastures and set off for Bolivia to join the guerrillas there. In a letter dated April 1, 1965, also included in Evergreen, Che wrote to Castro bidding him farewell. “I feel,” he said, “that I have fulfilled the part of my duty that tied me to the Cuban revolution in its territory, and I say good-bye to you, the comrades, your people, who are already mine.”
The next piece in our Che tribute was an account of what went on among the guerrillas Che led in Bolivia, reported by fledgling photographer George Andrew Roth. After a futile week accompanying the military as they hunted guerrillas, Roth hooked up with some peasants who led him to the guerrilla camp. Che wrote his own interview, both questions and answers, into Roth’s notebook. He then sent his friend Tania—of whom more in a moment—to lead Roth and two journalists who had found their way to the camp, one being Régis Debray, back out of the mountains.
Debray, Roth, and the other journalist were arrested as revolutionaries by the Bolivian military and thrown in jail, and the two journalists remained behind bars. Although sentenced to thirty years, Debray was released in 1970 after Pope Paul VI and other prominent figures put pressure on the Bolivian government. While things were going badly for Debray in prison, they were also deteriorating for Che who, after two years in Bolivia, was wounded on October 9, 1967, and taken captive. Later, while under guard, he was shot through the heart. The military had planned well.
Che was a very important figure to me. Grove Press published a number of books about him, including The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia by Luis J. González and Gustavo A. Sánchez Salazar, which detailed the perils and tension of Che’s attempt to create an insurgency in Bolivia. The story of how we signed this book is part of the story of our attempt to secure a copy of Che’s diary from the Bolivian authorities.
In March 1968 I asked a close friend, Joe Liss, who had been a top-notch correspondent for CBS News, to travel to La Paz to meet a contact we had established to obtain Che’s diary
from the Bolivian authorities. Liss later wrote in an unpublished report he prepared for me, titled Notes for the Bolivian Trip on a Day to Day Basis, that when he arrived at my office to get the plane tickets, “To my astonishment Barney handed me cash amounting to $8,500 in denominations of $50’s and $100’s, and told me that with this money I was expected to spend about $6,000 to get what I could of the Che Guevara diaries.”
Since the Bolivian government seemed to be actively against giving any further publicity to the murdered guerrilla, this mission was undercover. Liss was to pretend he was visiting the country because he was working on a screenplay about Che. He was even to receive a phone call from a movie producer he knew, who would ask how the writing was going. As a further precaution, all communication between Liss and myself would go through his wife.
Once Liss made phone contact with a mysterious, high-ranking general named Juan Torres, he found that the general didn’t speak English. So he hired a translator and set up an appointment to see him. “I explained to him that I was a film writer from New York and London and was anxious to see the Che Guevara diaries for research on a film,” Liss reported.
Torres did have access to the diaries but told Liss that another American publishing company, McGraw-Hill, had also made an offer for them. Indeed, he intimated that he had already closed the deal with them.
I told Liss that I had been given the name of another contact, Gustavo A. Sánchez Salazar of the newspaper El Diario, who might have some information about Che’s diary. Liss flew to the provincial city of Cochabamba to meet Sánchez. Although Sánchez didn’t have the diary, it turned out that he and Luis J. González, yet another journalist, were writing a book about Che. Once we got a glimpse at the interesting and thorough research the two had done into Che’s life and demise in Bolivia, we asked them to let Grove publish their book when it was completed, and they agreed.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 25
