Grove's Evergreen Review

January 27, 2008
A few weeks ago one of the legendary editors of book publishing, Richard Seaver, died. Though his career would be considered a success if only confined to his last thirty years (he edited Robert Coover, Octavio Paz, and started the small indie press Arcade), it is his association with the trailblazing Grove Press during the 1960s that stands as his finest achievement.

So when a neighbor dropped off this weekend a few pristine copies of the Evergreen Review, stretching between 1958 and 1963, we were overjoyed by the prospect of discussing them here.
For it was in the Evergreen Review that Seaver, along with his boss Barney Rosset (still kicking and in his mid-80s) and colleague Fred Jordan, blazed many of the literary trails of the decade.

There are many excellent recaps of just what Grove accomplished in little over ten years, not the least of which is Louisa Thomas's excellent profile of Rosset in a recent Newsweek. But chief among them was the defeat of censorship laws by fighting on behalf of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence's unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Rosset was a combination of literary avant gardist and old fashioned smut peddler (see above for a clip from the recent documentary Obscene) whose taste ranged from Victorian porn to Eugene Ionesco. It's hard to love Rosset unconditionally. He was (and is) a businessman with an admirable stubborn streak. But his personal philosophy could grate and alienate others on the left and right. Anti-Castro factions bombed his offices. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Warhol, was rumored to have him next on the list.

When Seaver arrived at Grove in 1959 from Paris he was already a champion and acolyte of Samuel Beckett, soon a fixture in the house's new magazine, Evergreen Review. With contributions from the Beats (Kerouac, Corso, Burroughs, and Ginsberg), the New York School (Koch, O'Hara), European existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Artaud, Beckett), and of course the boundary pushers (Genet, Rechy), the Review served as a test balloon for Rosset's and Seaver's underground causes.

The copies we received chronicle the ongoing fight to sell Tropic of Cancer from coast to coast, most blatantly with the cover of the July-August 1962 issue in response to a ruling of a superior court judge in Illinois:

Judge Epstein's ruling against book banning has reaffirmed the right of a free people to decide for itself what it may or may not read. Beyond that, it sounds a clear warning to all of us to guard the principles upon which our country was built.

It is clear from browsing these issues that very early on--despite the challenges Grove faced in the courtroom and in the bookstore--the Review was a success. Pages of ads fill the front and back of each issue (including such staid institutions like Yale and Oxford university presses). At a later date will may examine the literary merit of the collection, but for now it's more fun to provide a snapshot of who was reaching out to the readers of the Review
--Peter Miller

From Volume 4, Number 13 (May-June 1960)

--The Russian Tea Room: "hearty, authentic Russian food to the discriminating gourmet from all over the world."

--Gotham Book Mart (notably, this is where Rosset several years prior bought the smuggled copy of Tropic of Cancer that led to his obsession with Henry Miller)

--Oscar Brand's Bawdy Songs and Backroom Ballads: "Over forty rollicking, rowdy, superbly sophisticated ballads...Here are all you favorites from college, Army and bachelor days, arranged for piano, guitar and lusty voice."


From Volume 6, Number 25 (July-August 1962):

--A new work by Alan Watts titled The Joyous Cosmology just being published by Pantheon: "America's most adventurous philosopher describes his own experiences, ranging from the diabolic to the divine, with the 'mystic drugs'--LSD-25, mescalin, and the mushroom derivatives."

--Esteemed Houghton Mifflin's novel Man Walking on Eggshells by Herbert Simmons: "Here is the story of a man who is a Negro, a musician, a young American."

--Folkways's latest release: "AMERICAN FAVORITE BALLADS, vol. 5, sung by Pete Seeger, with 5-string banjo & 12-string guitar...$5.95"

From Volume 6, Number 22 (January-February 1962)

--Paul Krassner's comic counter culture publication The Realist: "Look Ma--No Taboos!...ARTICLES: Henry Morgan writes on socialized medicine; Lenny Bruce indulges in a stream of consciousness...SATIRE: Psychita (wherein Psycho meets Lolita)...UNCLASSIFIABLE: Medical reports on fracture of the penis and the calorie count of semen; the story behind the rent-a-beatnik ads."

--A book of reviews of erotic literature: "This volume is a 'must' for the connoisseur's library, rare book collectors, psychiatrists, psychologists, socialogists [sic], mature sex folklorists, serious students, Jurists, Church, PTA, and police officials!"

Volume 4, Number 11 (January-February 1960)

--a catalog of Hanover Records: Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen "Poetry for the Beat Generation"; Del Close "The 'Do It Yourself' Psychoanalysis Kit"; "San Francisco Poets: Readings by Rexroth, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Whalen"; "What Is Subud?: A Discussion By John Bennett and Steve Allen"

--Landscape: A Magazine of Human Geography with articles on "Religion, Landscape and Space," "College and the Experience of Nature," "Small Towns, Puget Sound Region," "The Growth of Paris," and "The American Creed of Nature As Virtue."

--Charles Tuttle publishers: The Wild Geese by Ogai Mori, Japanese Prints by James A. Michener, and The Art of Korean Cooking by Harriett Morris