Rebel Publisher by Loren Glass

Author:Loren Glass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: censorship, publishing history, Barney Rosset, Grove Press, Samuel Beckett, obscenity, Henry Miller, 1960s, 1970s, Marquis de Sade, Bertolt Brecht
ISBN: 9781609809225
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-03-26T18:00:00+00:00

Up from Underground

In 1966, the US Supreme Court took up the case of Putnam’s publication of John Cleland’s eighteenth-century pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, which had been appealed along with Mishkin v. State of New York and Ginzburg v. United States. On March 21, Cleland’s famous book was exonerated, but Ginzburg’s and Mishkin’s guilty verdicts were affirmed. The reasons for this split are informative. While Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was being rescued from illicit underground circulation by a reputable publisher, Ralph Ginzburg and Edward Mishkin were pariah capitalists in the tradition of Samuel Roth, who had also been found guilty in the landmark case that bears his name. In affirming their guilty verdicts, the high court determined, in an argument similar to Earl Warren’s reasoning in his Roth concurrence, that it “may include consideration of the setting in which the publications were presented as an aid to determining the question of obscenity.”83 The court decided, in other words, that a text’s location in the cultural marketplace was relevant to determining whether or not it could be deemed obscene; if the publisher marketed it as obscene, the court would be more likely to agree. Although this “pandering” logic was maligned at the time, it was in essence an acknowledgment that the literary underground in which pirated masterpieces had circulated alongside pornographic pulp was coming to an end. Grove Press had successfully legitimated even the most explicit and graphic texts; men like Roth, Ginzburg, and Mishkin were no longer necessary.

The 1966 decision was an important step in the court’s shift from an “absolute” to a “variable” definition of obscenity over the course of the 1960s, a shift that was particularly significant in the court’s acceptance of a lower threshold when judging the legality of materials made available to minors. Following the logic elaborated by William Lockhart and Robert McClure in their influential article for the Minnesota Law Review, the court, realizing the difficulty of establishing a fixed definition of obscenity, was beginning to formulate a more flexible definition based on the audience to which the materials were directed. The most important consequence of this shift was the emergence of a relatively unrestricted “adult” market for sexually explicit materials, a market whose social and cultural legitimacy Grove helped establish.84

Thus, the split decision in 1966 put Mishkin and Ginzburg in jail, but it provided Rosset, whose reputation was at its peak, with the opportunity to move in on their turf, legally and profitably exhuming the entire literary underground of the modern era. Grove almost single-handedly transformed the term “under ground” into a legitimate market niche for adults in the second half of the 1960s, starting with a campaign inviting readers to “Join the Underground” by subscribing to the Evergreen Review and by joining the Evergreen Club, which Rosset had started earlier that year as a conduit for distributing Grove’s rapidly expanding catalog of “adult” literature and film. By specifying its audience as “adult,”

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