Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry 9781474440820

Citation preview

Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry

Edited by Lise Jaillant

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Lise Jaillant, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4080 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4082 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4083 7 (epub)

The right of Lise Jaillant to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

v vi vii

Introduction Lise Jaillant

1

Part I: Pioneers 1. Modernism, Reform and the Traditional Business of Books: The B. W. Huebsch Imprint Catherine Turner 2. Young Americans: Transatlantic Connections in the Early Years at Knopf Amy Root Clements 3. ‘Glad to be in the Fold’: Boni & Liveright’s Multifold Marketing of Modernism Jennifer Sorensen 4. The Hogarth Press Claire Battershill 5. Bringing the Modern to Market: The Case of Faber & Faber John Xiros Cooper

15

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51 70 88

Part II: Fine Books 6. Shakespeare and Company: Publisher 109 Joshua Kotin 7. Publishing the Avant-Garde: Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press 135 Mercedes Aguirre 8. ‘Flowers for the Living’: Crosby Gaige and Modernist Limited Editions 154 Lise Jaillant

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Contents

Part III: Publishing Modernism after the Second World War 9. New Directions Books Greg Barnhisel 10. Grove Press and Samuel Beckett: A Necessary Alliance Loren Glass 11. Calder and Boyars Adam Guy 12. Cape Goliard Matthew Sperling Notes on Contributors Bibliography Index

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175 193 214 232

250 253 268

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List of Figures

3.1 3.2 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 8.1 8.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7

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Front Cover, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) Dust Jacket, Tropic Death (1926) Gertrude Stein’s Lending Library Card Ulysses Prospectus Ulysses Printings, 1922–1930 Lending Library Flyer Advertisement for Two Worlds Monthly with Beach’s Annotations Letter of Protest against Samuel Roth Cover, Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929) Crosby Gaige in the 1940s Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Crosby Gaige Edition (1928) Front Cover, Waiting for Godot, Evergreen Edition Title Page, Waiting for Godot, Evergreen Edition Front Cover, Endgame, Evergreen Edition Front Cover, Molloy, Evergreen Edition Front Cover, Malone Dies, Evergreen Edition Front Cover, The Unnamable, Evergreen Edition Front Cover, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press Hardback Edition

61 66 112 117 123 125 126 127 130 157 164 200 201 202 207 208 208 209

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Acknowledgements

It has been a privilege to lead this project to completion – thanks to a group of enthusiastic contributors. I am very grateful to them! Over the years, I have met several of them at conferences and during research trips. I look forward to further conversations on modernist publishers. My own chapter on Crosby Gaige was funded by a Grolier Club fellowship and a Modernist Studies Association Research Grant. I am grateful to these institutions for the opportunity to carry out essential archival work in the United States. Lise Jaillant The editor and contributors wish to thank W. W. Norton & Company for permission to reproduce Figures 3.1 and 3.2; Princeton University Library for permission to reproduce Figures 6.1 to 6.7; and the Kuhlman Archive for permission to reproduce Figures 10.1 to 10.7 (covers designed by Roy Kuhlman).

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List of Abbreviations

CORC

GPC HBL HPA HRC JC NTP PUL RH

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Charles Olson Research Collection, Archives and Special Collections (Thomas J. Dodd Research Center), University of Connecticut Grove Press Collection, Special Collections Library, Syracuse University Egleston, Charles (ed.), The House of Boni & Liveright, 1917–1933: A Documentary Volume Archives of the Hogarth Press, Special Collections, University of Reading Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin Archives of Jonathan Cape Ltd, Special Collections, University of Reading Nathaniel Tarn Papers, Special Collections (Green Library), Stanford University Princeton University Library Random House Records, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

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Introduction Lise Jaillant

Few scholars and students of literature pay attention to book publishers. Our job, after all, is to look at texts and their creators. Studying publishers has long seemed a distraction from the real business of literary studies. In 1995, John Sutherland wrote that for many people, the ‘novel is something that appears quite magically on the library shelf, or in the “Literary Classics” section of the bookshop’.1 I remember reading that some time ago and thinking it would be interesting to do some research on series of classics. My first book was on the Modern Library, a cheap series of reprints created in New York in 1917. The Modern Library reprinted all kinds of books – modernist texts by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, but also detective fiction and novels that we now see as ‘middlebrow’. The series is a good starting point to explore the evolution of the literary canon. When I teach F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, I explain that the Modern Library reprinted the novel in 1934 and the book was a complete flop: it sold less than its first printing of 5,000 copies and had to be dropped from the list. I show pictures of the dust jacket with the red stamp ‘discontinued’ (this edition is worth a lot today). This example helps students think about the literary canon, and about the fluctuating reputation of twentieth-century writers. The paratext is almost as important as the text itself. When you read a book, you read not only the text but also the introduction and the blurb on the back cover – you look at the picture on the cover, you look at the binding (is it a hardcover or a paperback?) and this may well influence your reading of the text. In other words, publishing houses have an impact on the literary text but also on the reading experience. When the field of book history emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, scholars recognised the need to look at the entire communications circuit from authors to publishers to readers.2 Specialists of Victorian literature have driven the scholarly locomotive, and

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we now know a lot about nineteenth-century print culture thanks to the work of distinguished book historians such as Leslie Howsam, Jonathan Rose and Simon Eliot. It is time for modernist scholars to pay more attention to the book publishers that ‘made it new’ in the first part of the twentieth century. Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry is the first edited collection on book publishers that sold modernist texts to a wide range of readers across the Atlantic and elsewhere. By ‘modernism’, I mean works that addressed the huge social, economic and technological changes of the early twentieth century. Although ‘modernism’ has become a broad category, it continues to be centred on canonical texts by James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others. In the past twenty years, the field of modernist studies has been profoundly transformed by an increasing emphasis on the material format in which modernism first appeared. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker’s three-volume The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines has been instrumental in the rise of modernist print culture. The expansion of this sub-field has led to the study of a wider range of periodicals: little magazines, but also magazines for a large audience (including Vogue and Vanity Fair).3 However, this focus on periodicals has come at a price: the neglect of book publishers associated with modernism. There is no history of Random House, no history of Harcourt Brace, and no history of Faber & Faber. This is all the more surprising given that T. S. Eliot worked as an editor for Faber from 1925 to his death in 1965 – as John Xiros Cooper reminds us in Chapter 5. More than thirty years ago, Joyce Wexler wrote in a pioneering article ‘Modernist Writers and Publishers’: ‘Books of literary value were published by commercial firms, and the few novels that raised legal obstacles eventually overcame the censors, thanks to the willingness of commercial firms to defend them in court.’4 Yet, publishers are nearly invisible in New Modernist Studies. There are at least three reasons for the neglect of publishers, and especially commercial publishers, in modernist studies. First, scholars tend to focus on modernism’s original context of production. And since many modernist texts were first serialised before appearing in book form, periodicals are favoured over book publishers. This leads to an overproduction of scholarship on a few little magazines such as The Egoist or The Little Review. Once this avenue of enquiry has been exhausted, scholars sometimes turn to book publishers, studying first editions rather than later editions. We know much more about Shakespeare and Company and the publication of

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James Joyce’s Ulysses in Paris in 1922, than we do about Random House. And yet, it was Random House that pushed for the lift of the ban on Ulysses in the United States, publishing the first legal edition of the book in 1934. The second reason for the invisibility of book publishers is that publishing enterprises issued a wide range of texts. Canonical modernist texts did not appear in isolation, safely preserved from the contamination of mainstream culture. In my second book on European series of reprints, I show that Chatto & Windus’s Phoenix Library reprinted Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, but also popular novels and even a cookery book.5 Small presses also had diverse lists. As Catherine Turner notes in Chapter 1, Ben Huebsch published James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Sherwood Anderson – but also self-help books and political pamphlets. Despite the expansion of ‘modernism’, scholars continue to favour difficult modernist texts, neglecting institutions that mixed the high and the low. The third reason for the neglect of publishers is that Ezra Pound and others were often very critical of the publishing industry. In May 1933, Pound wrote an article for the English Journal, the publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. He told the story of Joyce’s struggles against various enemies. The story ends well, with Joyce’s entry into the literary canon. But for Pound, this recognition had attracted the wrong kind of publishers. Pound was especially critical of reprint publishers such as Tauchnitz and Albatross, which he called ‘parasitic publishers’.6 No wonder that the first modernist scholars looked at little magazines rather than large-scale publishers. ‘The commercial publishers – the large publishing houses and the big “quality” magazines – are the rear guard’, wrote Frederick J. Hoffman and his colleagues in their influential study The Little Magazine (1947).7 But the problem is that Pound was not telling the entire truth. Along with Joyce, he had eagerly courted publishers of cheap editions. It is only when these commercial publishers became interested in modernism that Pound dismissed them as parasites eager to make a profit. The critical attitude of modernist writers towards commercial publishers has had a major influence on scholarship – even though this attitude was disingenuous. Unlike Victorianists, modernist scholars seldom go to book history conferences. We seldom try to share our research with members of SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) and other organisations. There are a few exceptions. Representatives of MAPP, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, have successfully bridged the gap between modernism and

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book history/digital humanities. At the time when book history is moving away from a Western, Eurocentric perspective, modernist scholars would benefit from collaborations on transnational projects. The publishing market was already global at the beginning of the twentieth century, an aspect that has not been sufficiently explored. As a sub-field, ‘Modernist Print Culture’ needs to become more interdisciplinary and to broaden its scope towards a wider range of printed forms. This collection of essays is a step in that direction. Its main focus is on Anglo-American book publishers, including expatriate publishers in Continental Europe. Some of these firms reached a truly global market: for example, Bennett Cerf (the owner of the Modern Library series and Random House) sold modernist books in Asia, South America and Australia. This is an important avenue of enquiry, recently explored in a special issue of Modernist Cultures on Global Modernism.8 For lack of space, however, Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry looks mainly at transatlantic partnerships. For example, Alfred Knopf opened an office in London, as Amy Root Clements shows in Chapter 2. British publishers such as Calder and Boyars were also influenced by their American counterparts, as Adam Guy points out in Chapter 11. Patrick Collier has recently denounced our ‘continued infatuation with experimental or avantgarde production along with a continuous, if diminished, emphasis on canonical modernist figures’.9 Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry tends to favour book publishers associated with difficult modernist writers. Shakespeare and Company is in, while Victor Gollancz (George Orwell’s publisher) is out. However, the overall emphasis is on the diversity of publishing lists – again, Joyce and Woolf were not published in isolation from mainstream culture. The volume is organised chronologically, starting with the firms that pioneered the publication of difficult modernist texts in the United States and Britain. Part 1 on ‘Pioneers’ is followed by a section on ‘Fine Books’, which sheds light on the physical formats in which modernist texts appeared – including luxurious editions published by Shakespeare and Company or Crosby Gaige. The third and final part moves the focus towards the period after the Second World War, when modernism became institutionalised in university departments. This entry into the literary canon was facilitated by publishers which issued paperbacks and other cheap editions of modernist texts, and marketed them to an audience of students and teachers. Publishing firms also fought the last legal battles to obtain the right to issue controversial texts such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Finally,

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new firms such as Calder and Boyars and Cape Goliard looked for texts inspired by modernism, thus ensuring the legacy of this influential literary movement. The collection brings together, for the first time, an international team of scholars who have pioneered the study of modernist book publishers. Catherine Turner, the author of Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars (2003), reminds us of the importance of Ben Huebsch – a publisher who has been studied mainly in relationship to James Joyce. Throughout his long career, Huebsch took the modernist dictum to ‘make it new’ seriously both in his choice of works and in his experimentation with format. While his firm began in the early 1900s publishing a few, now obscure, authors, by the 1910s Huebsch had expanded his list to focus on some of the most radical literary works of the time, introducing Joyce and D. H. Lawrence to American audiences and creating a home for Sherwood Anderson. He also began experimenting with publishing politically radical works in inexpensive paper form. While this early effort to ‘make the world anew in paper covers’ had a smaller audience than he had hoped, it reflected his commitment to publishing as a way to reshaping the world. He brought this same commitment to creating a school for booksellers, where he hoped to renew the trade through professionalising book clerks and managers. Thus, when Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer bought out his firm and hired him as one of their company’s vice presidents, he continued to edit radical literature and, after the Second World War, he found new, less expensive ways to issue these texts. His work on the Viking Portable Library shaped the material form in which readers encountered modernism and influenced the canon of modernist texts for the higher education classroom. Amy Root Clements then turns to the extraordinary career of Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Founded in New York City in 1915, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., played a paradoxical role in the rise of literary modernism. Clements’s chapter explores the process by which the company’s young founders, Blanche and Alfred Knopf, formed a corporate identity designed to appeal to middlebrow audiences while attracting the attention of highbrow authors and critics. For their initial lists, the Knopfs relied heavily on European literature – including texts by Thomas Mann, Dorothy Richardson, Somerset Maugham, André Gide and D. H. Lawrence. Yet, owing particularly to Alfred’s old-world sensibilities, an equal measure of the firm’s imported works bore no traces of an avant-garde voice, and the fiscally conservative Knopfs accepted the constraints of censorship laws instead of challenging them.

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Clements examines the ways in which these conflicting identities were communicated in design choices and promotional messages, in the context of disruptions taking place in New York’s publishing community in the 1920s. The chapter highlights the Knopfs’ experimentation with Pocket Books, an affordably priced hardcover line; and the Blue Jade Library series, which was the brainchild of Carl Van Vechten. The Knopfs’ positioning of the American authors Willa Cather and Langston Hughes is also explored, with consideration of the branding distinctions made between ‘foreign’ and ‘domestic’ works in a publishing climate that fostered interest in exoticism. The chapter concludes with a reflection on a transatlantic element that was unusual for its time: the Knopfs’ attempt (albeit a failed one) to sell in the British market through a London branch headed by British novelist and journalist Storm Jameson. The Knopfs were competing against other ‘new’ publishers, including Boni & Liveright – the topic of the next chapter by Jennifer Sorensen. Boni & Liveright published modernist writers such as Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Hart Crane, Anita Loos and Eugene O’Neill. Sorensen analyses an array of underutilised archival materials – focusing particularly on dust jackets and advertising copy – to show how Boni & Liveright transformed the publishing of modernism as they pioneered innovative marketing practices. In addition to the bestselling Modern Library series, the Boni & Liveright list included a wide range of critically and commercially successful texts. Through an analysis of dust jackets and advertisements for Boni & Liveright publications, Sorensen explores complex issues of race and gender. These rich material artefacts are essential traces to study the publishing history of modernism. While the first three chapters focus on American presses, we then turn to UK publishing enterprises, beginning with Claire Battershill’s chapter on the Hogarth Press. The basic story of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press is by now well known in modernist studies. In 1917, the Woolfs bought a printing press, set it up in their home in Richmond, and began to print stories and poems written by their friends, including T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield. The early Hogarth Press books were hand-printed in small runs and contained illustrations by post-Impressionist artists including Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington and Roger Fry. However, as early as 1920, the Press had grown to such an extent that it could no longer be considered a hobby: the Woolfs were having to employ commercial printers to assist them with the kind of work they wanted to produce. By the

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1930s, the Press was producing books in all genres (from medical and psycho-analytic texts to political pamphlets) with print runs in the tens of thousands. They were selling international and film rights, negotiating with literary agents, and working with the Book Society on Book-of-the-Month selections. In short, they had become a commercial as well as a literary operation. Battershill’s chapter draws on material from the Hogarth Press archives at the University of Reading and on recent scholarship to give an account of the day-to-day operations at the publishing house at important moments in its development: when the first publications had been printed and were being reviewed and circulated among modernists; when the Woolfs began consistently working with commercial printers; when John Lehmann became managing director of the Press and started to shape its editorial practices; and when the firm became an imprint of Chatto & Windus. Battershill gives us a vivid sense of what it was like to be a modernist publisher in a changing book world. Like the Hogarth Press, Faber & Faber published all kinds of texts – including many bestsellers. In his chapter, John Xiros Cooper points out that T. S. Eliot worked as editor for Faber for nearly forty years, and yet we know very little about this publishing house. Cooper shows the cultural importance of a firm which both helped to define the idea of the modern in the twentieth century and managed to endow its imprint with the highest symbolic or cultural value in the market for cultural goods. To understand how this has been accomplished, the chapter recovers the marketing strategy of the firm in the critical years when it was establishing itself as a major trade publisher of modern literature and culture. Moreover, it reconstructs, along lines suggested by Pierre Bourdieu, the specifically British social fields for the movement of symbolic goods, fields in which Faber established its cultural pedigree. The ambition to publish tasteful products was central to the fine books trade – a trade that had deep roots in France, a country with a more relaxed approach to censorship (at least when Anglophone texts were concerned). Part 2 on ‘Fine Books’ starts with Joshua Kotin’s chapter on Shakespeare and Company. Set up by Sylvia Beach in Paris, the imprint published only three books over its decades-long existence. Yet one of those books changed the course of literary history. Kotin’s chapter provides a history of Shakespeare and Company, giving special attention to the 1922 publication (and near-constant reprinting) of Ulysses. The chapter begins in 1919 with the opening of Beach’s bookshop and lending library on the

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Left Bank of Paris, and ends in 1941, when Beach was forced to close her business during the German occupation of France. Drawing on the Beach Papers at Princeton University, the chapter illuminates the finances of Shakespeare and Company, as well as the sales and circulation of three key publications (Joyce’s Ulysses and Pomes Penyeach [1927], and the collection of essays about Joyce, Our Exagmination [1929]). While Shakespeare and Company has been extensively studied, little attention has been paid to the Hours Press. Mercedes Aguirre’s chapter shows that the British poet and activist Nancy Cunard founded the Hours Press from her house in Réanville, Normandy in 1928. The following year she moved the press to a small shop in the Rue Guénégaud in Paris, where the windows displayed her books alongside works by twentieth-century avantgarde artists. During its four-year run, the Hours Press published works by key modernist writers, including Ezra Pound, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, Roy Campbell and Samuel Beckett, whose first poetry book, Whoroscope, was published by the press after he won a competition set up by Cunard in 1930. Carefully produced and hand-printed, many of the Hours Press books were illustrated by artists connected to the surrealist circle, including Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and John Banting. Aguirre looks at the Hours Press alongside other fine presses set up by British and American expatriates in France in the interwar years, including Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions and Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press. She explores the importance of expatriate presses as agents for transatlantic literary exchange in the modernist period, analysing the role of the Hours Press in the dissemination of surrealist art and ideas in Britain years before the landmark International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. The chapter examines the Hours Press books created collaboratively with surrealist artists, but also the role of the press in publishing works central to the theoretical framework of surrealism, including Louis Aragon’s French translation of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (La chasse au snark [1929]), by which he established the English literary nonsense tradition as a precursor of surrealist experimentation. Drawing on archival work at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, the chapter positions the publications of the Hours Press in the broader context of Cunard’s decades-long career as a publisher and editor. Whereas the Hours Press enthusiastically embraced contemporary writing, American fine presses were generally more cautious – with

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the exception of Crosby Gaige’s imprint. Established in New York in 1927, it published the first American edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, as well as James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle and Joseph Conrad’s The Sisters. Gaige has attracted very little attention from scholars of modernism and print culture, partly because he considered publishing a hobby rather than a profession. Having started his career as a highly-successful Broadway producer, he then used his fortune to publish fine books. He also wrote about food and wine and saw Epicure as the model of a good life. In Chapter 8, I show that Gaige’s short-lived imprint marked a key moment in the US trade in rare books and limited editions. Previously, American publishers of fine books often favoured older classics in physical formats heavily influenced by William Morris. In contrast, Gaige was convinced that even the most difficult contemporary texts could appeal to American bibliophiles. While the trade in modernist limited editions so far had been largely associated with Europe, the Gaige imprint highlights a key moment in the history of modernism: the moment when American readers finally had access to the new literature in a wide range of editions. Texts such as Orlando were available in limited editions but also in cheap editions for a much broader market. In short, modernism continued to benefit from the prestige of luxurious editions, while also expanding its market thanks to cheap books. Like Woolf and Joyce, Gaige died in the 1940s – but modernism survived well after the Second World War, as the next three chapters demonstrate. In Chapter 9, Greg Barnhisel, the author of James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005), shows that New Directions Books occupies a unique space in twentieth-century American literary publishing. The house, founded and for over fifty years run by Pittsburgh steel scion James Laughlin, initially served as a kind of coterie publisher for the major American modernist writers who had been abandoned by trade publishers – F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and, especially, Ezra Pound. After the Second World War, New Directions did much to mainstream avant-garde modernist literature for American readers through its easily identifiable black-and-white paperbacks aimed at students. In so doing, New Directions helped to shape the college market. The house, which remains independent from the large corporate conglomerates that have dominated American publishing since the 1960s, has always balanced between a small business and patronage model. Specialising in contemporary experimental literature, since the 1950s New Directions has done much

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to bring foreign writers in translation to American audiences, from Herman Hesse in the 1960s to Yukio Mishima in the 1970s, and by bringing them under the recognisable New Directions brand has subtly argued that these foreign writers are all part of the international modernist tradition. Like New Directions, Grove Press was a key player in the quality paperback revolution of the late 1950s. In Chapter 10, Loren Glass shows that Grove skilfully exploited the niche genre of avant-garde drama, epitomised by its triumphant acquisition of Samuel Beckett and its landmark publication of Waiting for Godot. While Grove is best known for its successful challenge to obscenity laws in the Anglophone literary marketplace, this achievement must be understood in terms of its championing of late modernism in the post-war era, as Glass explains at length in his book-length history, Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (2013). Focusing mainly on Beckett, this chapter highlights Grove’s strategy to market avant-garde texts in the expanding American university system before leveraging their popularity into a countercultural brand. In the last two chapters, we return to the UK context, with the establishment of new presses deeply influenced by the modernist movement. Adam Guy’s chapter focuses on the activities in the long 1960s of Calder and Boyars, a London-based publisher formally established in 1957. As the publisher of novels by Samuel Beckett and Wyndham Lewis, Calder and Boyars was one of principal sponsors of late modernism in the British literary field. The firm also published newly emerging vanguards: British experimentalists like Alan Burns, Ann Quin and Eva Tucker; the French nouveau roman; and major international writers like Jorge Luis Borges and William Burroughs. Yet modernism continued to dominate the firm’s account of aesthetic novelty. Calder and Boyars framed its new writing with reference to the authors, texts and theories of interwar modernism. In the 1960s, the firm’s attentions turned increasingly towards campaigns against censorship. But its established template was a text from the heroic period of high modernism, as it published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for the first time in Britain, and in the face of the threat of seizure by the police. The chapter reframes Calder and Boyars as inseparable from modernism – not as a legacy, but as an on-going concern in the post-war British literary field. Modernism continued to be a major influence on fiction but also poetry, as Matthew Sperling shows in Chapter 12 through the example of Cape Goliard Press. The lustrum 1965–70 was a golden

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age for the publishing of avant-garde poetry in Britain. Key texts by senior figures such as Basil Bunting, Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky, along with the early work of younger writers influenced by them, such as Edward Dorn, Roy Fisher, J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth, were issued in sumptuous editions, skilfully designed and printed, often with contributions by leading visual artists (such as R. B. Kitaj, Richard Hamilton, Tom Phillips or Jim Dine), and backed up by considerable sales and distribution capabilities. Cape Goliard Press represented a unique experiment, whereby Jonathan Cape Ltd incorporated the Goliard Press into a new subsidiary imprint that represented ‘a little press within a large publishing house’, in the words of poet-anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn, whose idea it was. Cape Goliard attempted to radicalise mainstream literary culture and challenge the poetical dominance of Faber & Faber by producing elegant hardbacks in large print runs which would give the impression of coming from an established publishing house, while carrying texts of considerable innovation, including Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968), The Maximus Poems (second edition, 1970) and Archaeologist of Morning (1970). The history of the press, Sperling argues, is a crucial marker in the history of modernism in England – a moment propelled by a dialectic of the utopian hope for a radical transformation of English culture and the elegiac sense that such an attempt, as a replaying of earlier modernist ventures and a try-hard emulation of dominant American models, was already haunted by knowledge of its own belatedness and likely failure. The closing of Cape Goliard in acrimonious circumstances in 1971, just as the era of conglomeration was beginning, represents the end both of the cultural optimism of the long 1960s, and of the hope that trade publishing could be the site of programmatic avant-garde ambitions.

Notes 1. Sutherland, Victorian Fiction, p. 159. 2. See Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’. The best introduction to the field of book history is Howsam, Old Books and New Histories. See also Howsam (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book. 3. See Hammill and Hussey, Modernism’s Print Cultures; Ardis, ‘Modernist Print Culture’ and ‘Introduction – Mediamorphosis: Print Culture and Transatlantic/Transnational Public Sphere(S)’; Latham and Scholes, ‘The Rise of Periodical Studies’. Studies of little magazines and other

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

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Lise Jaillant periodicals associated with modernism include: Churchill and McKible (eds), Little Magazines & Modernism; Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism; White, Transatlantic Avant-Gardes. Wexler, ‘Modernist Writers and Publishers’, p. 293. Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, pp. 71–93. Pound, ‘Past History’, p. 351. See Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, pp. 94–5. Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich, The Little Magazine, p. 3. Special issue ‘Global Modernism’, Modernist Cultures, 13.1 (2018). ‘Against Modernist Studies’, Modernist Studies Association conference, Pasadena, 18 November 2016.

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Part I

Pioneers

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Chapter 1

Modernism, Reform and the Traditional Business of Books: The B. W. Huebsch Imprint Catherine Turner

As a publisher, Benjamin W. Huebsch focused on authors who, as he saw it, ‘wanted to make the world over’.1 This commitment made his firm an excellent fit for modernist authors, including James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and D. H. Lawrence, as Huebsch took their desire to ‘make it new’ seriously, both in his politics and in his literary tastes. While he began publishing modernist authors in the early years of the twentieth century, he continued to champion texts that questioned the status quo during the 1950s and 1960s. Nonetheless, there were limits to Huebsch’s ‘reformer’s ambition’ that made him a useful publisher for those moderns he chose to publish as well. Huebsch celebrated the thought that some of the works he published were ‘stirring public opposition’, because he felt the possibility his books held for changing minds and norms was the reward for ‘the cloisterly rigors of a one-man publishing business’.2 Huebsch always represented his interest in publishing as only incidentally commercial; instead he saw there was a direct link between his monkish devotion to the sacred value of literature and literature’s ability to make change. According to his obituary in Publishers’ Weekly, Huebsch told friends ‘I’d rather publish good books than anything else and I expect to as long as I am able.’3 Indeed, when he passed away in London at the age of eighty-nine, he was still searching for good books. Even as he published works which redefined what was acceptable in literature, his definition of ‘good’ remained structured by many of the traditional assumptions of cultural life in the United States. First, as Huebsch’s comment on the ‘cloisterly rigors’ of publishing shows, he felt that literature held a sacred role within culture, one that was only incidentally commercial. Second, he believed that

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good literature had a role to play by engendering reflection and thoughtful discussion about self and national improvement. In his oral history, he commented: One really doesn’t need any amusement for one’s leisure besides reading. One could, in a long lifetime do nothing but reading, I think. Oh, once in a while a walk in the park, maybe, or a little music, or a few other things. But with reading and friends – reading and conversation.4

Beyond that he noted, ‘I have always been receptive to voices from all quarters, demanding only that they stimulate my interest.’5 That image of a genteel world focused on interesting reading and conversation with friends sums up Huebsch’s sense of why publishing was a worthwhile profession: books provided meaningful leisure that connected an individual to a larger set of conversations. Because of his commitment to this set of assumptions about ‘good’ literature, Huebsch came to represent an honest, legitimate publisher to his colleagues. Upon his retirement from Viking in 1956, Publishers’ Weekly praised him: No one among New York publishers is held in warmer regard for his publishing acumen than Ben Huebsch, and no one could more completely represent American publishing in the European centers. His gift of friendship is inborn and irresistible. His love of all the arts molds his conversation and his decisions. His has been good publishing.6

Huebsch did publish works that pushed the boundaries of acceptable literary taste and political legitimacy, works that appeared at the time radical in that they called for significant social change or mounted a substantial critique of the status quo. However, the focus at the end of his life on his value to the publishing community, both as a tastemaker and a conversationalist, indicates the extent to which he remained committed to the values of the traditional publishing world. He was ahead of his time, particularly in seeing the worth of early works by Joyce, Anderson and Lawrence and in publishing leftist political texts, but his radicalism was tempered by a desire to make those radical critiques accessible to readers and part of a larger community. Scholars often present Huebsch alongside a set of ‘new publishers’ who were, like the modernists themselves, turning away from Victorian values and giving birth to a new era in publishing and literary

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production.7 In his history of Huebsch’s firm, James Gilreath claimed that Huebsch represented ‘a different kind of publisher from what the nineteenth century could offer’.8 Huebsch may have opened the door to modernism, as I have shown elsewhere,9 but he opened the door only to a certain kind of modernism, a modernism that focused on social problems and that used experimentation to reveal the depth of those problems. Thus, he was ‘carried away’10 by Sherwood Anderson’s experimental collection of short stories Winesburg, Ohio but he could not appreciate Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. He also found Faulkner unreadable, admitting that it was probably his own ‘weakness’ but ‘what I have read, I’ve read with some difficulty. I don’t fall naturally side by side with Faulkner.’11 Both in what he published and what he didn’t, Huebsch shows that he had little taste for modernism that lacked his own sense of literature’s social purpose. Huebsch’s attitude towards the modern classics he published indicates the flexibility of the modernist movement in the early twentieth century. Scholars have long struggled to provide a coherent definition of modernism and increasingly have come to define it as a set of questions or tendencies. These efforts to consider a far wider range of modernisms have allowed scholars like Paul Saint-Amour to describe what he calls a ‘weak theory’ of modernism, a definition of this artistic movement that allows modernism to be ‘pluralized, adjectivalized, decoupled from high culture, and rethought as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon’.12 In fact, Lawrence Rainey and Joyce Wexler have both shown the ways that experimental, difficult and challenging modernist texts had a value in the cultural market despite their apparent lack of interest in (or even apparent dislike of) ordinary consumers.13 At the other end of the modernism spectrum, Sarah Churchwell and others have shown how novels which critics might have dismissed as not fully modern because of their commercial appeal, such as Anita Loos’s novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, shared stylistic and thematic qualities with canonical, elite modern works such as those of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.14 Jay Satterfield and Lise Jaillant have pointed out that cheap series such as the Modern Library took the term ‘modern’ from high culture to publicise a wide range of reprinted texts. Jaillant has gone on to show how other reprint series also put scandalous, subversive and often obscene elements at the centre of modernism’s brand in the market.15 Huebsch’s list focused on texts that resisted Victorian propriety, but he placed those texts into a set of firmly Victorian assumptions

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about literature and reading. James Secord’s description of reading’s power to reshape self and society in Victorian Sensation fits into Huebsch’s own sense of why reading and publishing mattered. Secord describes the power of print to convert Victorian readers to a new way of defining the self, a self whose political power rested in group action.16 This sense that readers used books both to define self and create a community is echoed by Joan Shelley Rubin’s description of the equally religious power that cultural elites in the United States throughout the nineteenth century assigned to reading the best literature. Reading well could spread ‘moral and aesthetic ideals’ about self-reliance and self-control which could lead to a revitalised individual and national culture.17 Huebsch, as his reliance on the importance of reading to conversation and open-mindedness indicates, subscribed to a similar sense of what made reading important. Thus, the type of modernism he favoured, and was willing to publish, challenged readers but was not so challenging that readers could not act on their social critique to remake themselves and their community. Just as Huebsch connected older literary values with new politics and literary styles, he also adopted the business values of older publishing firms for a significantly different set of texts. US firms founded in the nineteenth century regularly claimed that they treated books differently from ordinary commercial objects. Sociologist Laura Miller explains that in the late nineteenth century, publishers became more ‘self-conscious’, concerned about shoring up their place as members of the ‘cultural elite’, a role in which they would create products focused on eternal, priceless value. At the same time, these publishers recognised their place within obviously commercial enterprises that needed to increase sales and profitability to survive.18 Alongside these contradictory claims sat the concept of trade courtesy. As Jeffrey Groves has described it, trade courtesy was a ‘set of extralegal trade conventions’ that were ‘never overtly and systematically articulated’ that initially served to control competition around foreign reprints in the nineteenth century. These conventions evolved to cover a firm’s relationships with any author, so that once a firm published an author, no other firm should offer to publish the author until the first firm severed the pre-existing relationship. An author’s relationship with their publisher was sacred and familial rather than financial. While the growth of agents and reprint rights in the twentieth century eroded these standards (and nineteenth-century firms never fully followed them), these industry-imposed guidelines came to define the difference between honourable publishers and those the trade called

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‘pirates’.19 Huebsch treated the ‘noncommercial’ and ‘noncompetitive’ values of genteel publishing as law. Doing so allowed him to provide an important bridge between non-traditional literary and political texts and the value of reputable publishing to signal those texts which can enable individual and social advancement.

Up from lithography Huebsch came to publishing differently to many of the ‘upstart’ publishers who followed him. Born in 1876, he grew up in an educated and liberal household speaking English, German and French. His father Adolph Huebsch participated in the Hungarian Revolution, completed his PhD and became a rabbi in, first, Prague and, later, in New York City where he helped found the Central Synagogue at Lexington and 55th in 1872.20 Doctors told Huebsch’s parents that Benjamin was a ‘twitchy’ kid and suggested more fresh air; so Benjamin left school when he was nine and, as he put it, went to school in Central Park.21 As he got older, he studied a little at Packard Business College. In the evenings, he took violin classes with Sam Franko and ornamental drawing at Cooper Union Night School.22 Eventually he was apprenticed to a commercial lithographer, Joseph Frank & Sons. Work there was ‘drudgery’ and deliberately so: the apprentices had to make their own ink and their own blotting paper, spending hours creating things that could have been bought easily and inexpensively. The work of engraving too involved precision and, while Huebsch admitted he learned something about perfectionism and precision, the lesson ‘wasn’t worth the price’.23 His brother Daniel, in the meantime, attended City College and afterwards with their uncle Samuel Huebsch set up a commercial printing house.24 Benjamin joined the business in 1893 and, when Daniel left around the turn of the century, he took control of the company and renamed it B. W. Huebsch. He turned the company away from the commercial printing business towards publishing original works, beginning with self-help lecturer Edward Howard Griggs.25 The way Huebsch remembered it, he stumbled into publishing ‘without the slightest knowledge of what publishing implied’.26 For the first five years of his business, Huebsch’s list focused on Griggs’s work, such as Moral Education (1903) and Human Equipment: Its Use and Abuse (1909), as well as Lectures on Dante (1905) and The Poetry and Philosophy of Browning (1905). Huebsch also published other works which focused on readers’ desires for mental

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and spiritual self-improvement, such as Emily Bishop’s Seventy Years Young (1907) and George Price’s Gaining Health in the West (1907). While he may have lacked a traditional liberal education, Huebsch’s experiences allowed him to run a small business effectively. As he remembered it: I did every part of the business myself at one time, when I only had a few assistants. I knew how to wrap a bundle. I knew how to keep books. I read my own proof. I did my own designing of the books, designed labels, jackets. I set copy, read the proofs of the books, read manuscripts, dealt with authors, borrowed money, and so on. I did every part of it myself.27

Beyond simply the work of keeping the office running, he also did his own sales: ‘I knew people went out to sell [books], or sent salesmen out, but I didn’t have any salesmen’ and so he went himself. ‘It was a completely new world to me.’28 His knowledge of every aspect of publishing shaped his attitude towards his list. Lise Jaillant has noted that Huebsch lacked both financial and cultural capital and that his odds of ‘succeeding in a highly competitive publishing business were low’.29 She assigns his success to the niche in radicalism that Huebsch carved out for himself. His other advantage, however, was the experience of running the business alone. He saw the long odds. Thus, while he published authors who might not have seemed to offer much profitability, he did so in ways that ensured his company’s financial continuity.

Putting politics and modernists into the marketplace By 1906, Huebsch’s list began to shift, reflecting his own interests in the arts (he had been a music reviewer for The New York Sun in 1899) and his increasingly left-of-centre politics. Huebsch added books such as M. S. Levussove’s study of the illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien (1906) and the liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman’s In Peril of Change (1905). Huebsch’s advertising for Masterman’s book, promising that it ‘must make his readers think’,30 indicates how he wanted readers to encounter books. By getting consumers to think (or at least encouraging them to make purchases that might enable thinking), Huebsch hoped to change mainstream politics. His firm’s reputation became an important element in reassuring readers that the risks they took with these challenging books would be worth the effort. Huebsch

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went on to publish several books from British, Continental and American socialists, including Eduard Bernstein’s Evolutionary Socialism (1911), John Spargo’s Applied Socialism (1912) and André Tridon’s The New Unionism (1913). Huebsch admitted that a new publisher often had to take authors rejected by other publishers. But his desire for substantial reform meant that he was glad to give these writers a voice and to provide readers with the possibility of thoughtful selfdevelopment and national improvement. Huebsch was not simply a publisher of progressive works; he was also a lifelong joiner of politically progressive organisations and a creator of new ones. He had a long history as a pacifist. He sailed with the Ford Peace Ship in 1915, where he ran the shipboard newspaper, and The New York Times noted in his obituary that he continued to write against war in the 1940s and 1950s.31 He became involved in PEN and helped establish the club in America in 1922, later serving on a number of its committees.32 He was a signatory member of The Committee of 48, an organisation which attempted to launch a third political party in the United States in 1919. He also helped found organisations such as the India Home Rule League of America in 1917. In addition, he served as treasurer of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1926 until his death in 1964.33 Finally, from 1921 to 1924, he was the manager and the publisher of The Freeman, a journal that Albert Nock and Francis Neilson co-edited. While initially the journal intended to be the voice of the single-tax movement in the United States, it became an important journal of social criticism, with writing by Thorstein Veblen, Charles Beard and Suzanne Lafollette, as well as artistic criticism under the editorship of Van Wyck Brooks. Huebsch’s political interests and organising helped him make a wide range of important contacts but also meant that his own publications sometimes came under government scrutiny. He admitted that he ‘had more trouble than most’ with censors during the First World War because of his association with pacifist, anti-Imperialist, and Irish political causes and that both the US and British governments monitored his activities.34 His political commitments also caused trouble for his business. His travels with the Peace ship interrupted his attempts to distribute Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and his work for The Freeman meant he was inattentive to the fact that Winesburg, Ohio, published in October 1919 and selling steadily since then, had sold out during the Christmas season.35 At The Freeman, Huebsch participated in a venture at once reformist (in its political and literary ambitions) and conservative (if for no other reason than its insistence on British spelling conventions).

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According to the historian Susan Turner, Nock intended to model the magazine after the London Spectator, creating an effect of ‘substance, of traditional nineteenth-century elegance’ and a ‘solid, well-bred appearance’.36 Huebsch wrote the messages to subscribers on the back cover and there he continued to focus on the very things he wanted to be part of his publishing list. He promised that the journal will not make ‘grandiose promises’ but instead enter into only ‘sober covenants with the public that it proposes to serve’. The Freeman and its editors believe ‘the greatest public service that can be performed . . . is the promotion of free popular discussion’. Huebsch continues in this vein in the next issue, after noting with delight that The New York Times had called The Freeman ‘radical’ because the Times ‘does not approve of us’. The Times’s disapproval was the result of The Freeman’s willingness to give ‘fair hearing to all schools of thought, all shades of opinions and all sects in the arts, religion and science, whenever their utterances are interesting and readable’.37 Huebsch’s messages to subscribers and potential subscribers of The Freeman focused on the journal as an open place for discussions, connecting its social and political radicalism with virtues long associated with reading. Huebsch’s conservatism towards the book industry is evidenced by what might seem to be a ‘radical’ experiment in publishing – a series of inexpensive pamphlets that he began creating in 1911 and publicised more widely in 1920. Huebsch had a small success with Will Irwin’s forty-seven-page book, The City that Was (1906), just after the San Francisco earthquake, which he sold in hardcover format for 50 cents (when most books cost a dollar). Inspired by the success of that book, and responding to consumer concerns about the rising costs of books during and after the war, he started using paper covers to publish what he called pamphlets, particularly for political reprints, including John Spargo’s works, Arthur Henderson’s The Aims of Labor, E. D. Morel’s Red Rubber and William Z. Foster’s The Great Steel Strike. In a 1920 interview with The Christian Science Monitor, he admitted that he took his cue for this experiment from European socialists who ‘have known for a long time that the only way to reach a great number of people is to print cheap editions of what they wanted a great number of people to understand’. He told his interviewer that he intended this experiment to ‘remake the world in paper covers’.38 He may have wanted to remake the world, but he did not aim to remake US publishing practices. US publishers had good reason to feel anxious about experiments in price. In 1913, the Supreme Court upheld Macy’s challenge to the American Publishers Association’s

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efforts to control American book prices with a net pricing system like that of Great Britain. Lower-priced books (‘cheap’ in the eyes of the trade) appeared to undermine trade publishers’ efforts to convince consumers that good books were worth their full price.39 However, in 1920, Publishers’ Weekly covered Huebsch’s pamphlet experiment positively, noting that in this form ‘material that should be important in molding the trend of public affairs’ can reach its full usefulness.40 Such positive trade press indicated that Huebsch price and format were not a challenge to higher prices for newly published books. It helped that Huebsch’s reprints competed only with his own hardback books, advertising Foster’s The Great Steel Strike in hardback for US$2 and in paperback for US$1. Additionally, his seemingly lower reprint prices were largely in line with the prices for many books. For example, he advertised Morel’s Red Rubber with 225 pages and fold-out maps in paper covers for US$1.25. Sermons for Children (a 165-page hardcover book published by George Doran) also cost US$1.25.41 By contrast, the same year, Publishers’ Weekly reported on an effort by the Reynolds Publishing Company to issue small-sized (6 1/2 by 4 3/8ths), books of ninety-six pages with illustrated soft covers each containing a short story such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ for 10 cents each. These texts were to be sold through drugstores (Woolworths ordered them by the 100,000s) and the company only printed up each book once it secured an advance order of over a million copies. Huebsch did not intend to distribute his books on this mass scale and his experiment, and Reynolds’s far more radical one, did not last.42 Huebsch’s publicity emphasised the traditions behind the format and this format’s connection to traditional faith in reading. In his advertisements for these texts (which ran in both The Nation and The Liberator) he followed the headline, ‘Why Not Pamphlets?’ with an appeal to European traditions. ‘In Europe, substantial books have long been issued in paper covers’ and now that hardcover binding has become more expensive ‘the only way to meet the high cost of reading is to bring out paper-covered books in large editions’.43 In the same Christian Science Monitor interview, he connected his experiment to the supposed sophistication of European consumers. ‘Everyone has bought Tauchnitz novels in the foreign railroad stations and a good many people have bought the Reclam edition of the classics there too.’ He pointed out that Europeans bought paperback books not just because of price but also to be free to bind the books that really mattered to them ‘in a fashion that will suit their particular taste’. He also indicated the pamphlets’ value

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to the nation. After the war, he claimed, Americans ‘faced strange problems’ which only ‘the presentation of fact, the discussion of controversial questions, in the form of cheap literature easily accessible to the general public’ could help answer. Interestingly, Huebsch also made the argument that mass-marketing techniques and lowering prices would not actually sell books: Cheapness never sold a bad book any more than the high cost of a volume de luxe was a deterrent from the purchase of a good one . . . the prices allow more people to read them. But if they weren’t interesting, no matter how cheap they were, no one would buy them.44

Huebsch’s publicity for his pamphlet project emphasised its connection to national good and individual fine taste rather than to mass marketing or price.

The value and limits of ‘gloom’ in fiction Huebsch’s interest in publishing modernism was part of this larger commitment to social change, but that change, like the change coming from The Freeman, could only come through texts that were readable and could spark conversation. While Huebsch published some important modernists, there were others, like Gertrude Stein, who he did not. In 1912 Louise Collier Willcox, a reader for Macmillan and the book review editor for the North American Review, sent Huebsch the manuscript of Stein’s The Making of Americans (over 2,400 pages) and told Huebsch: ‘I knew no other publisher in America would have patience to try to fathom the puzzle so I turned to you.’45 Huebsch may have seemed ready to publish anything but instead he sent a polite rejection to Stein. He also requested she send him US$1.32 which he had had to pay in additional shipping charges because of the size of the manuscript. He returned the manuscript to Willcox who then explained Huebsch’s refusal to Stein. To begin with, Willcox told Stein, the book was simply too big to be profitable. However, Huebsch’s concerns went beyond profitability. Willcox wrote: ‘you have something to say’ but you have not said it ‘in any form that anyone else can grasp’.46 Stein sent the manuscript to Huebsch again in the 1920s and he rejected it again. Huebsch’s attitude towards Stein’s work shows that his interest in modernism focused on social critique but not experiment for its own sake. His hope for the modernists that he published was similar to the hopes he had for the political radicals

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he published: a desire to reshape conversation by providing accessible, interesting reading. Huebsch’s relationship with Sherwood Anderson, on the other hand, indicates how Huebsch’s conservative attitudes allowed him to, as he saw it, develop the right audience and reputation for modernist texts. With Anderson, as with Lawrence and Joyce, Huebsch wanted to make sure that the text itself, rather than scandals or gossip about the author, became the most important reason consumers bought books. This story also shows Huebsch’s adherence to a conservative attitude towards the commercial value of literature as well as his gentlemanly relations with other publishing firms. At John Lane, Anderson’s earlier works had received a good bit of critical attention but not much sales success. When Lane’s reader, Frederic Chapman, judged the collection of short stories that would become Winesburg, Ohio ‘too gloomy’, Anderson started searching for a new publisher. Huebsch, who had read Anderson’s works and was already interested, liked the collection because he ‘leaned to gloom in fiction’ and recognised that ‘there wasn’t too much of it in American stories in 1919’.47 While he was eager to become Anderson’s new publisher, he did not even draft a contract until Lane’s manager confirmed that they had severed ties. In 1919, Huebsch helped Anderson find the right title and published the collection to slow but steady sales. In 1925, Horace Liveright actively recruited Anderson without communicating with Huebsch. The contract offered by Liveright promised US$100 a week in return for a book every year as well as much more aggressive sales efforts. After signing the contract, Anderson took weeks to tell Huebsch he was leaving.48 While Huebsch did not record his response (and was always quite gracious about it afterwards), negotiating with an author who already had a publisher would have been unthinkable to him. Huebsch hoped that, by providing an audience of educated, thoughtful readers for modern works like Anderson’s, he would give those seemingly radical authors reputations as legitimate artists whose works had cultural value. When Anderson wrote to Huebsch asking if he might consider issuing his novel Many Marriages (1923) in a more expensive, limited-edition format to avoid censorship, Huebsch refused. Such a mode of publication will ‘stamp [the book] as pornography’ and clerks will sell it with ‘a wink and a leer’ to ‘the furtive-eyed erotomaniac’. Instead, Huebsch told Anderson to ‘walk the straight path with your head high’. As Huebsch saw it, Anderson could write the book he wanted without ‘compromising with the vice societies’, simply by taking care with the words he used. In keeping

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with his conservative sensibility even in publishing scandalous works, Huebsch explained ‘in most instances a work of literary art can be presented without employing a style or vocabulary offensive to the great many people who have not yet abandoned the Victorian tradition’.49 Huebsch would have been aware that a firm could be bankrupted by court proceedings.50 But beyond the financial strain, Huebsch’s business focused on creating a reputation and legitimacy for works that were outside the mainstream and, as a result, Huebsch hoped to protect these works from accusations that they were not serious. He feared that being ‘pinched’ by the censors or issued in a limited edition would signal that Anderson’s work had value only to a limited set of consumers. Connecting Anderson back to Victorian reading virtues and legitimate publishing values allowed Huebsch to argue that Anderson’s desire to question Victorian sexual mores had long-term value for readers and for culture. This attitude towards the literary value of modernism shaped Huebsch’s attitude towards sales and advertising as much as his limited staff and finances. In keeping with his faith that book clerks sold books, the largest advertisement Huebsch placed for Winesburg was in Publishers’ Weekly. He took out a full page with the headline ‘These books have just been published’ over a list that placed Winesburg, Ohio alongside Lajpat Rai’s Young India and Thorstein Veblen’s The Vested Interests.51 Another advertisement for Winesburg appeared in The New York Times Book Review but it did not identify the publisher nor even the price of the book. On 10 August 1919, in the bottom corner of the book review, beneath an advertisement for a Dutton book by Leonard Merrick, there is a statement that looks different from the rest of the text on the page: ‘An odd title for fiction – Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson – but what excellent fiction it is!’52 The blurb, if you can call it that, sounds like Huebsch but does not even suggest that the book is for sale. In fact, Huebsch believed that conversation about books and contact with educated, thoughtful sales clerks encouraged meaningful book sales, particularly for works like Anderson’s which Huebsch believed had a limited but important audience.53 Despite largely favourable reviews, the sales of Anderson’s books were strong but not spectacular. It took a year to sell 2,154 copies of Winesburg, Ohio.54 Initially, Anderson was grateful to Huebsch for his non-commercial attitude, thankful to have a publisher who was unwilling to compromise with the market.55 He wrote to a friend that Huebsch ‘doesn’t know . . . how to sell books’ but at least he wasn’t going to ‘tell you what to do to make your book sell’.56 Later, for books like Poor

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White (1920) and A Story Teller’s Story (1924), Huebsch spent more on advertising but not as much as other publishers – most notably Horace Liveright who was selling Winesburg, Ohio very successfully through his reprint series, the Modern Library.57 In 1924 under financial pressures of various kinds, Anderson’s attitude towards Huebsch soured. Otto Liveright, Anderson’s agent and Horace’s brother, told Anderson that Huebsch’s attitude towards publishing was ridiculous. Anderson wrote to friends complaining that Huebsch was ‘incompetent’ and lacked ‘artistic sense’. Worse still, Anderson complained that Huebsch’s friends were all ‘single taxers’.58 Huebsch could neither afford his competitors’ large advertising budgets nor did he care to use advertising to force what he saw as artificial sales of books. Anderson’s comments about Huebsch’s friends and his taste imply Anderson’s desire to be part of a publishing list more committed to art and less about socially progressive works. Anderson’s departure, one of many around that time, indicated the extent to which Anderson felt that his books had a larger market and that a more innovative publisher, one that was more interested in art than politics, might find that market.

Continued political commitments at Viking Anderson’s complaints focused on Huebsch’s attitude towards art as well as the small size of his business. Huebsch was dissatisfied too. After incorporating in 1920, he had a slightly larger staff than he had when he published Winesburg. But he was nearly fifty. The Freeman had never made money and finally ceased publication in 1924. Huebsch wanted to focus on the editorial side of publishing and spend more time in Europe. After Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer incorporated the Viking Press in March 1925, they began talking with Huebsch about merging. Before Viking had even issued a book, Huebsch bought Viking stock and the Viking partners bought Huebsch’s stock. As Huebsch remembered the experience, his new partners ‘just moved into my business, a going concern, and started out’. So, ‘Viking is really a continuation of my firm rather than a new one’.59 Coverage of the merger complicates Huebsch’s memory. The creation of Viking a few months before merited just a small mention by Publishers’ Weekly.60 However, the end of B. W. Huebsch as a publishing imprint earned much wider coverage. In the Saturday Review of Literature, Christopher Morley celebrated Huebsch’s ‘genius of sympathy and shrewdness’. The

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editorial staff at The Nation commented that ‘the name of Huebsch was in every way a good one’. Both listed the many authors that Huebsch introduced to America and particularly mentioned Anderson (without saying that he was on his way to Liveright). Both also commented particularly on Huebsch’s non-commercial attitude towards books. Morley joked at the end of his piece that Huebsch’s ‘taste was so broad that I don’t think he would even have objected to a book that was likely to sell in large quantities, if he liked it’. The Nation commented more simply that B. W. Huebsch ‘came to stand for methods and ideals which were anything but commercial, to perpetuate a type of publishing all too rare in any age’.61 Coverage described Huebsch’s firm in the past tense but celebrated his reputation, which he carried with him to Viking. Leaving his office with Guinzburg and Oppenheimer, Huebsch travelled to Europe for a year. Once he returned to New York as vice president at Viking, he continued to work much as he had before, creating strong personal ties with his authors and continuing to publish important political texts. For example, one of the early books he brought to Viking was The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti (1928), a text that seems to align perfectly with the kind of books that Huebsch published on his own. Putting together this text required Huebsch to negotiate both the reluctance of Sacco and Vanzetti’s anarchist correspondents to have their letters used by any capitalist enterprise as well as the charges of fabrication and editorial bias that resulted from the editorial selections. To manage all these relationships, Huebsch relied on his own reputation but also the way his reputation adhered to Viking. He wrote to Garner Jackson (who along with Marion Frankfurter had worked for the Sacco and Vanzetti Defence Fund and were together editing the letters) that Marion’s husband Felix ‘will give me a good character’ and ‘as to our firm I will add that it is at least as good as I am’. While Jackson and Frankfurter edited out some of the more militant passages in the letters, Huebsch encouraged the editors to leave them. After two major editorials appeared questioning the authenticity of the collection, Huebsch mounted an aggressive defence of the work. Here the backing of the staff and financial stability of Viking played a critical part in Huebsch’s ability to address these criticisms and to advocate for the authors he believed in.62 The publication of the Sacco and Vanzetti letters shows the extent to which Viking was committed to Huebsch’s politics, but Viking’s advantage over Huebsch’s firm was their commitment to a wider array of political voices and types of literature. The ALA Bulletin

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in 1955 summarised the firm’s list as reflecting ‘a concern for civil rights and progressive liberalism in ideas, and an openness both to genuine tradition and to new departures in the arts’. ALA celebrated one of Viking’s early successes: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a book that Huebsch brought to the firm. However, Viking also took advantage of what the ALA called ‘off-beat enterprises’ that helped generate money: the Ask Me Another series of trivia books (the first promised over 4,100 facts) as well as a set of joke books called The Pocket Book of Boners, begun in 1931 and illustrated by Theodor Geisel before he began writing as Dr Seuss.63 At Viking, Huebsch’s seriousness of purpose and gloomy tastes in social commentary were intermixed with a willingness to provide less-lasting books across a range of markets. Still, the move to Viking allowed Huebsch to focus on literature which had what he felt would be lasting importance and which would remake the world, at least in a small measure. Viking continued to publish authors, even those Huebsch did not individually work with like John Steinbeck, whose writings expressed strong social criticism. Huebsch did bring major Continental authors to Viking throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He created particularly strong relationships with émigré German writers: Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Arnold Zweig and Stefan Zweig. Huebsch’s relationship with all these authors indicated the extent to which he felt a publisher ought to watch over his authors and also his concern for their reputations.64 So, for example, as Werfel’s Song of Bernadette (1941) became a massive bestseller, he offered Werfel assistance with his taxes, helped him place short stories (although Werfel had an agent), and even notified Werfel of the creation of a Song of Bernadette soap sculpture in Alabama. Throughout their correspondence, Huebsch focused on the reputation and dignity of Werfel’s work. That dignity became a particular issue as Werfel considered publishing future works in the United Kingdom. Hamish Hamilton had published Song of Bernadette there and as the book’s sales rose, Werfel received other, potentially more lucrative offers for his next books. Hearing about these offers, Huebsch wrote to Werfel that legitimate publishers resented the idea of ‘acquiring authors like merchandise at an auction sale’.65 He warned Werfel against signing with Nicholson & Watson, a firm started by ‘sons of the Sardine king or something like that’ which ‘threw money around like a drunken sailor’.66 Later he also warned Werfel against Hutchinson and Jarrolds, since neither firm was particularly distinguished and

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his place on their list would be simply about money. ‘You alone’, he told Werfel, ‘can determine whether to allow yourself to be too greatly influenced by that’.67 Huebsch, not surprisingly, defended the values of the trade as he mediated between Hamilton and Werfel and this shows the extent to which his conservative attitude towards books and publishing continued at Viking. This commitment paid off in Huebsch’s ongoing legacy at Viking and in a very concrete way in Viking’s relationship with James Joyce. Huebsch published Joyce’s works, Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Exiles (1918), in the teens. However, Joyce left Huebsch’s firm in 1921 when the publisher refused to issue Ulysses (1922) without alterations after the Society for the Suppression of Vice halted serial publication in The Little Review. Sherwood Anderson implied that Huebsch’s treatment of Joyce and his unwillingness to publish Ulysses in 1921 showed that Huebsch lacked real literary taste.68 But, Huebsch did take risks with Anderson’s works and that may instead indicate that Ulysses, like Stein’s and Faulkner’s works, was not the type of modernism Huebsch wanted to publish. In the end, Joyce saw Huebsch’s value. He offered Viking ‘Work in Progress’ (as Finnegans Wake [1939] was then called) and his contract explicitly called attention to his relationship with Huebsch. It provided a clause that allowed Joyce to publish with Huebsch should Huebsch leave Viking for any reason. Stuart Gilbert claimed that Joyce felt Huebsch’s refusal to publish Ulysses ‘not only showed a wise discretion but, in the long run, served its author’s interests’.69 Huebsch never commented on the literary merits of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake but such a contract was testimony to the value that he had generated for modernists throughout his publishing career. In 1953, Harold Guinzburg spoke on ‘Free Press, Free Enterprise, and Diversity’. He discussed the changes facing publishers in the United States as paperback books became an accepted part of the book market after the Second World War. Guinzburg’s speech focused on how far the publishing industry had fallen from its non-commercial values and instead had bought into a ‘“jackpot-or-nothing” attitude’ which meant publishing firms focused only on books with clear ‘probabilities of subsidiary sales, and therefore profits’.70 Such an attitude meant that works with only a small market, often those containing literary experiments and non-mainstream politics, could hardly find a publisher. Guinzburg mourned the passing of the days when a ‘young idealist could rent desk room in an office from which to issue a few good titles’, and ‘gradually grow into an important publishing house’.71

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Guinzburg’s story surely referenced Huebsch and indicates the way that Huebsch’s legend shaped assumptions during the Cold War about publishers as guardians of free expression and defenders of cultural value in the market. Huebsch may have begun as a lone publisher in an office and published a limited set of modernists more because of his commitment to their social commentary rather than their stylistic experiments. In the end, however, it was also Huebsch’s dedication to a conservative vision of publishing and commerce that allowed him to legitimise modernist works by connecting them to older values and, thus, while he may not have remade the world, he was able to provide a meaningful place for works outside the mainstream to thrive.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

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Huebsch, ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’, p. 406. Huebsch, ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’, p. 407. ‘Obituary Notes’, Publishers’ Weekly, 17 August 1964, p. 27. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, 1955 (Oral History Research Office, Columbia University), p. 489. Huebsch, ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’, p. 406. Quoted in Madison, Book Publishing in America, p. 467. As another measure of Huebsch’s influence in the publishing world, Madison’s book, a classic, is dedicated to Huebsch alongside Fredric Melcher, long-time editor of Publishers’ Weekly. For example, see Jaillant, ‘New Publishers’, p. 397 and Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 3, p. 128. Gilreath, ‘The Benjamin Huebsch Imprint’, p. 225. Turner, Marketing Modernism, p. 45. Huebsch, ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’, p. 415. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 113. Saint-Amour, Tense Future, p. 41. Lawrence Rainey’s chapter on Eliot and The Waste Land is particularly instructive in Institutions of Modernism, pp. 77–106. Wexler outlines the contradictory message about art and commerce that highbrow modernists faced in her introduction to Who Paid for Modernism, pp. xi–xxv. Churchwell, ‘“Lost Among the Ads”’. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, pp. 38–64; Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon, pp. 3–7; Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, pp. 48–66. Secord, Victorian Sensation, p. 334. Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, p. 17. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, pp. 26–8.

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19. Groves, ‘Courtesy of the Trade’, p. 140. 20. For more about Adolph Huebsch, see Markens, The Hebrews in America, pp. 282–3. 21. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 7. 22. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 15. 23. Huebsch, ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’, p. 412. 24. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 27. 25. Turner, Marketing Modernism, p. 48. 26. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 415. 27. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, pp. 27–8. 28. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 37. 29. Jaillant, ‘New Publishers’, p. 401. 30. Advertisement for C. F. G Masterman’s In Peril of Change, Publishers’ Weekly, 20 January 1906, p. 88. 31. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 138; ‘B. W. Huebsch, Publisher, Dead’, The New York Times, 8 August 1964, p. 19. 32. Tebbel, Between Covers, p. 254; Berlin, Daviau and Johns, ‘Unpublished Letters’, pp. 127–8. 33. Raucher, ‘American Anti-Imperialists and the Pro-India Movement’, pp. 94–5. 34. Huebsch describes his experience with censors in Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch. Of particular interest is his description of his efforts to comply with their censorship of A German War Deserter’s Experience (1917), pp. 426–9. In ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’ (p. 409), he describes being recorded during a meeting with Lajpat Rai. 35. Gilreath, ‘The Benjamin Huebsch Imprint’, pp. 233, 238. 36. Turner, A History of The Freeman, p. 32. 37. ‘On Human Satisfaction’, The Freeman, 17 March 1920, p. 24; ‘On Encouragement’, The Freeman, 25 March 1920, p. 48. 38. ‘The Pamphleteer and the Public’, The Christian Science Monitor, 25 June 1920, p. 3. 39. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists, pp. 144–5; West, ‘Price Control and the Publisher’, pp. 273–4. 40. ‘Selling Pamphlets’, Publishers’ Weekly, 5 June 1920, p. 1826. 41. See Huebsch’s advertisement ‘Why Not Pamphlets’, The Nation, 15 May 1920, p. ii, and Publishers’ Weekly, 29 May 1920, pp. 1781–2. 42. ‘Books at Ten Cents Each’, Publishers’ Weekly, 29 May 1920, p. 1777. 43. ‘Why Not Pamphlets’, The Nation, 15 May 1920, p. ii. 44. ‘The Pamphleteer and the Public’, The Christian Science Monitor, 25 June 1920, p. 3. 45. Huebsch, ‘From a Publisher’s Commonplace Book’, p. 118. 46. Gallup, ‘The Making of The Making of Americans’, p. 56. 47. Huebsch, ‘Footnotes to a Publisher’s Life’, p. 415. 48. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, p. 562.

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49. Huebsch to Sherwood Anderson, 11 February 1922 (BWH collection LoC). 50. The case of Thomas Seltzer’s firm, which in 1922 and 1923 was defending its right to publish Lawrence, would have been of particular interest to Huebsch both because of his connection to the American Civil Liberties Union and because Seltzer had become the publisher of Lawrence’s works that Huebsch felt he ought to have published. Seltzer’s firm closed in 1925. See Tanselle, ‘The Thomas Seltzer Imprint’, p. 396. 51. ‘These Books Have Just Been Published’, Publishers’ Weekly, 7 June 1919, p. 1577. 52. Advertisement, The New York Times, 10 August 1919, p. BR3. 53. Turner, Marketing Modernism, pp. 72–4. 54. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, p. 321. 55. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, p. 301. 56. Rideout, Sherwood Anderson, vol. 1, p. 436. 57. Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon, pp. 41–62. 58. Anderson, Letters to Bab, 1925, pp. 219–20. 59. Reminiscences of B. W. Huebsch, p. 74. 60. ‘A New Publishing House’, Publishers’ Weekly, 28 March 1925, p. 1190. 61. Morley, ‘The Sad Horn Blower’; and ‘Editorial Paragraphs’, The Nation, 2 September 1925, p. 247. 62. Richard Polenberg covers the story of Huebsch’s work before and after publication of the Sacco and Vanzetti letters in his ‘Introduction’ to The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti. 63. ‘The Viking Ship’, ALA Bulletin, September 1956, p. 494. 64. Jeffrey B. Berlin has published a great deal on these relationships, see Bibliography for more information. 65. Huebsch to Franz Werfel, February 1944, in Berlin, Daviau and Johns, ‘Unpublished Letters’, p. 172. 66. Huebsch to Werfel, 9 July 1943, in Berlin, Daviau and Johns, ‘Unpublished Letters’, p. 160. 67. Huebsch to Werfel, 28 April 1944, in Berlin, Daviau and Johns, ‘Unpublished Letters’, p. 184. 68. Anderson, Letters to Bab, 1925, p. 220. 69. Gilbert, ‘Introduction’, p. 38. 70. Guinzburg, ‘Free Press, Free Enterprise, and Diversity’, p. 15. 71. Guinzburg, ‘Free Press, Free Enterprise, and Diversity’, p. 17.

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Chapter 2

Young Americans: Transatlantic Connections in the Early Years at Knopf Amy Root Clements

Founded in New York City in 1915, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., was geographically and chronologically well situated to publish modernist writers, yet the firm played contradictory roles in the rise of literary modernism and is sometimes miscast as having been built on a foundation of difficult texts and a penchant for the avant-garde. In fact, Blanche and Alfred Knopf made it their mission to craft a corporate identity which would appeal to profitable mainstream audiences while simultaneously positioning the company’s young founders as having superior taste in literature – in an America that had not yet established norms for determining which of its authors should be deemed meritorious. Nonetheless, an aura of elitism was central to the formation of the Knopfs’ reputation among booksellers, other publishers and literary critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Relying heavily on European imports for their initial lists, the Knopfs created an early roster that included such British modernist authors as Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence and Dorothy Richardson, but a majority of the firm’s initial releases were devoid of experimentation, and the fiscally conservative Knopfs were not among the daring American publishers who fearlessly tested censorship laws. Signified by a colophon featuring an exuberant yet elegant borzoi (a Russian wolfhound, associated with czars and therefore scorned by Bolsheviks), the formative business strategies of Blanche and Alfred Knopf captured in this chapter offer a paradoxical case study for scholars of modernism in the early twentieth century.

At the edge of the vortex Reflecting the many disruptions taking place in America’s publishing industry at the time, the house of Knopf was launched by outsiders

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with Jewish ancestry who had no family ties to a publishing empire and who were eager to implement modern marketing tools, especially print advertising, to make a name for themselves as much as for their authors. A distinctive couple whose personal history and personalities were interwoven with their company from the beginning, Blanche and Alfred shared a vision for creating a singular brand; their firm emerged from a quest for independence that jibes with the cultural revolutions propelling modernism. However, their independent spirit was tempered by a decidedly old-fashioned approach to business management. After they befriended each other on Long Island in the summer of 1911, the teenage bibliophiles gradually formed a partnership that would endure for the rest of their lives.1 The partnership was at first a romantic one, leading to marriage in April 1916, but the lasting element was a devotion to a financially prudent publishing plan that would provide them each with the ability to rule their own literary kingdoms, albeit under the unified banner of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. By marrying Alfred, Blanche Wolf placed her future in the hands of a garrulous, highly confident entrepreneur who respected her intellect and throughout their courtship welcomed her opinion about a variety of decisions related to their new business venture; it was she who invented the firm’s Borzoi Books trademark.2 Soon after the birth of their only child in 1918, Alfred named Blanche vice president and director of ‘his’ firm. This occurred in the same year when women were granted the right to vote in New York’s general elections even though the Nineteenth Amendment would not be ratified until 1920.3 The publishing industry moved even more slowly to adopt gender equality; by the time Blanche and Alfred sold their company to Random House in 1960, she was still barred from the men’s-only Publishers Lunch Club. Within those cultural confines, Blanche nonetheless rose rapidly from being Alfred’s protégé to commanding respect as a publisher in her own right, and eventually she became his rival, as recalled by staff members who were pitted against each other by the Knopfs.4 In the company’s early years, her emerging power as a vibrant literary gatekeeper was unmistakable. A business-savvy negotiator with chic, bobbed hair and a wardrobe of haute couture, she had no interest in spending her days managing the Tudor-style suburban home she and her husband had built in Westchester County. She preferred to stay within walking distance of their Manhattan office, in an apartment that she decorated in sleek white, echoing her name.5 Blanche Knopf’s presence was itself perhaps the most modern trait of the Borzoi brand. The independence Alfred sought was similarly rooted in a desire to create a singular publishing identity for himself. Having begun his

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career selling ad space for The New York Times before joining the accounting department of Doubleday’s forty-acre industrial-printing complex in Garden City, New York, Alfred dreamed of creating a publishing house that would eschew cheap, mass-market reprints. He also decried the bureaucracy and mediocrity of the immense establishment houses that had ruled America’s publishing scene for generations. Yet he had an equally low opinion of the small houses run by aesthetes who had no business sense. In the months leading up to the launch of his own firm, Alfred left Doubleday, Page to work for literary publisher Mitchell Kennerley, who had learned the trade in England as an apprentice for John Lane, director of the Bodley Head. While Kennerley’s circle included innovative typographer Frederic Goudy and boundary-pushing authors such as Upton Sinclair, he was plagued by threats of lawsuits for failing to pay royalties. Though Alfred’s salary doubled when he accepted a position with Kennerley, he soon discovered that high wages did not necessarily indicate solvency.6 In addition to their businesslike sensibilities, Blanche and Alfred shared an initial preference for European literature, informed partly by Alfred’s professors at Columbia University and Blanche’s education at the Gardner School. While literary agents were not de rigueur for American writers seeking American publishers, agents frequently served as the pathway for American publishers who wished to acquire imported works, and the origins of Knopf’s foundational lists can be traced to agreements negotiated through such intermediaries as Albert Curtis Brown (who secured Knopf’s reprint rights for multiple novels by E. M. Forster), and other pioneers in the agent profession, including Edward Garnett, J. B. Pinker and Jean Wyck, who advertised her services in The Dial. Blanche and Alfred also purchased reprint rights and imported printed sheets directly from overseas publishers, giving the impression that they met frequently with overseas publishing communities. In fact, for the company’s first six years, such negotiations were conducted remotely, as their debut trip abroad as publishers did not occur until 1921. In the first fifteen years, the fruit of these efforts was some 700 Borzoi titles by authors born outside the United States. The majority of those works, such as the detective novels of J. S. Fletcher, were not associated with literary modernism. However, through the American agent John Quinn, the Knopfs published a novel that is now a particularly distinctive artefact of modernism, complete with the use of equal signs as a form of emphatic punctuation.7 The book was Tarr by Wyndham Lewis, a painter and critic who co-founded the Vorticist movement and edited BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex,

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an anti-establishment quarterly distributed by publisher John Lane. Taking its title from the last name of the book’s bohemian protagonist, Tarr was written before the First World War and published serially in The Egoist, a London literary journal that billed itself as ‘an individualist review’. In this loosely autobiographical pre-war novel set in Paris, Englishman Frederick Tarr and his fellow expat artist Otto Kreisler debate interwoven aspects of the nature of creativity, social pretence, the sex drive and human impulse in general. By 1918, when Knopf published the work as a complete novel, Lewis had served in the First World War, both in the British Royal Artillery in France and as the official war artist to the Canadian Corps.8 One of the least accessible works on the Borzoi roster, Tarr was panned by The New York Times, though the British edition, published by the Egoist Press, was lauded by critics in the United Kingdom. Decrying elitism, The New York Times critic complained that: The most unfortunate part of it all is the fact that it is the faults of the book – its turgid style, its gargoyle characters, its incoherencies, and perpetual suggestion of a something struggling through, deterred from manifesting itself by the writer’s lack of skill – which will in all likelihood obtain for its author the vociferous applause of the wouldbe literary, the pretentious and the half-baked, all those who believe that whatever is obscure must necessarily be profound.9

A year later, Alfred advertised the book in The Nation, alongside Pavannes and Divisions by Ezra Pound (who had assisted Lewis in assembling the Tarr manuscript) under the headline ‘For the Intelligenzia [sic]’ with the frank observation that ‘now that the War is over you will be able to enjoy properly Kreisler, the perfidious German’.10 Tarr was still in print at Knopf nearly a decade later when, in 1926, it was advertised in The New York Times under the conversational headline ‘What Are They Really Like?’ followed by copy that promises to vicariously transport the reader to the Latin Quarter, where artists ‘spend their days painting in dark studios, and their nights talking outside the cafés of Montparnasse . . . and occasionally one of them sets the Seine on fire with a masterpiece’. The ad shares space with the latest whodunit from J. S. Fletcher, ‘England’s Most Popular Mystery Writer’.11 The timing of the ad coincides with the pending publication of Lewis’s The Art of Being, which was notably not published by Knopf but was instead advertised by Harper as ‘an audacious criticism of modern society . . . by the brilliant and iconoclastic author of Tarr’.12 Two years later, as thoroughly charted

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by Lise Jaillant in Cheap Modernism, Tarr would be issued in Great Britain in an affordable Phoenix Library edition, after being revised by Lewis to make the novel easier to understand.13 Further examples of the Knopfs not retaining key members of modernist circles include their experience with T. S. Eliot. Despite having published Eliot’s Poems in 1920, before the poet went to work for Faber & Gwyer,14 the Knopfs withdrew their three-book contract after the American publisher Horace Liveright offered Eliot an advance of US$150 for ‘a poem of about 450 lines’, which would ultimately be issued as The Waste Land. Advances were not commonplace at that time, but in later years Alfred freely acknowledged that his financial short-sightedness had caused him to lose out.15 A similar scenario had begun to play out in 1917, when Knopf published two works by Ezra Pound: Lustra, with Earlier Poems and ‘NOH’ or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan, followed by Pavannes and Divisions in 1918. However, in 1921 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the book-length poem that marked the tipping point in Pound’s career, was published by Horace Liveright in a collection after being released as a stand-alone work by the short-lived Ovid Press in London, ending Knopf’s relationship with Pound while further bolstering Boni & Liveright’s pantheon of modernist luminaries (see Chapter 3). Economic performance was likely the reason Knopf was the publisher of only three of Edith Sitwell’s early poetry collections (The Sleeping Beauty, Troy Park and Rustic Elegies) and only one of Osbert Sitwell’s (Argonaut and Juggernaut), products of a shortlived professional relationship sparked by Blanche, who queried prospective authors and their foreign publishers from her office in New York.16 Disappointing sales were certainly the reason Alfred became disenchanted with Bloomsbury feminist Dorothy Richardson. After publishing the first five volumes in her Pilgrimage series (Blanche having been persuaded by Carl Van Vechten and Curtis Brown to buy the American rights), Alfred complained in 1923 that Richardson’s preceding books had cost his firm a ‘great deal’, and if she wanted to look for another publisher in the United States ‘there will be no bones broken’. The Knopfs generally only paid for setting and printing imported works if they predicted sales of 1,500 or more. In the case of Richardson’s novel Revolving Lights, Knopf predicted sales of only 700 copies and refused to do more than purchase a small batch of sheets from Duckworth, unmoved by her assertion that she was receiving considerable American fan mail, ranging from admirers in Buffalo, New York, to San Antonio, Texas.17 In spite of

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critical acclaim emblazoned on the jackets, Alfred did not predict Richardson’s later canonicity. Novelists such as Willa Cather, Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie Hurst, whose accessible storylines are encased in deftly crafted but familiar imagery, are more representative of Knopf’s top-selling American writers during the company’s formative period. The colourful, unconventional novels of Carl Van Vechten, along with his introduction of the poet Langston Hughes to the Borzoi roster as part of the company’s limited participation in the Harlem Renaissance, reflect Blanche’s zeal for a progressive milieu, but when examined in the context of the complete list of Knopf publications during the Jazz Age, they are the exceptions, not the standard-bearers of the brand. As much as the Knopfs wished to be perceived as tastemakers, their publishing decisions tend to indicate that they were followers of safe bets, not champions of daring new cultural directions.

Cowed by censors The censorship movements which tested the mettle and the pocket books of modernist publishers further illuminate the middle path Knopf so frequently took. Much to Blanche’s delight, the Knopf poet and playwright Witter Bynner persuaded D. H. Lawrence to leave the upstart house of Thomas Seltzer, Inc., which was near bankruptcy after the response of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to Lawrence’s Women in Love. Having been represented at various times by Edward Garnett, J. B. Pinker and Curtis Brown, Lawrence eventually became a Knopf author through less formal means at a time when Blanche and Alfred’s network of authors began to serve as literary scouts for the firm. Knopf author Storm Jameson, the English novelist, also participated in signing up Lawrence by counselling Blanche on the timing of the offer.18 Between 1925 and 1928, Blanche oversaw the acquisition and production of six works by Lawrence: St. Mawr, David: A Play, The Plumed Serpent (Quetzalcoatl), Mornings in Mexico, The Woman Who Rode Away and Pansies, all of which were also released in Britain by Martin Secker, a contemporary of the Knopfs whose publishing house had served as a model and an inspiration for Alfred. In April 1918, Blanche wrote an enthusiastic letter to Lawrence after she had just finished reading the manuscript for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. She proposed leaving the decisions about expurgations to Secker and asked to see Secker’s proofs, wanting the two editions

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to be identical on both sides of the Atlantic. Blanche was also careful to point out that she herself was not at all offended by the novel and in fact considered it to be a beautiful work about which she cared very much.19 Yet Lady Chatterley’s Lover never went to press as a Knopf book, as it was soon banned in Britain. Expurgated editions in English were published before and after Lawrence’s death in 1930, but the unexpurgated text was not published for another thirty years, after Penguin Books triumphed in the British courts. Prudently, the Knopfs did not follow in the footsteps of Thomas Seltzer, avoiding risking their time and treasure to test the American courts. In the summer of 1928, Blanche offered a contract for Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a novel which portrays a lesbian relationship. Biographer Laura Claridge describes Blanche as having ‘moved fast’ to land the book through agent Carl Brandt and hypothesises that ‘it was likely [Blanche’s] reading about psycho-analysis and sexuality, during an era when both were intellectually serious subjects – as well as the language of the speakeasies – that motivated her to publish Hall’s novel’. Blanche and Hall’s correspondence covered the final details of correcting typographical errors that had appeared in the British proofs and selecting photographs to use for publicity. Yet the book’s British publisher, Jonathan Cape, soon withdrew The Well of Loneliness after censors deemed it to be immoral. Once again, risk-averse Blanche abruptly cancelled the contract in September on the eve of publication. Hall’s American release was only briefly stalled, as the champions of modernism at Covici-Friede were willing to purchase Knopf’s sheets and take on John Sumner’s New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Not only did Pascal Covici and Donald Friede prevail in the courts, but they also prevailed at the cash register; within two years they had sold 100,000 copies.20 Perhaps surprisingly, between 1919 and 1925 the Knopfs published the socialist American Floyd Dell’s Greenwich Village plays, novels and a polemic titled Were You Ever a Child? promoting progressive education and the celebration of young students’ individuality. As the editor of The Masses, Dell had recently been acquitted of espionage when in 1920 Knopf released his autobiographical novel Moon-Calf (an idiom for a simpleton), which depicts a sensitive young man’s attempts to maintain a sense of childlike wonder despite the harsh realities of life. In this case, though the author was a radical, his first books were tame enough to keep the Knopfs out of court. In 1922, Dell wrote to Knopf’s publicity manager, Franklin Spier, to discern whether the Plimpton Press, located in Norwood,

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Massachusetts, and a producer of many Knopf titles (though not Dell’s, which were printed at Vail-Ballou in Binghamton), employed union labour. In 1919, New York’s pressmen and compositors had undertaken a well-publicised strike that made a significant impact on the publishing industry, leading to additional strikes in Boston and Philadelphia. By the time of Dell’s enquiry to Knopf, the strike had ended, and Plimpton had reached an agreement that gave unions first rights to staff the 500 positions at the Press. Yet the response Dell received from Spier’s office was that Knopf had no interest in getting involved with other firms’ labour disputes and would not ‘interfere’ with their vendors’ policies.21 This response exemplifies the Knopfs’ hands-off approach to a publishing landscape that was populated by champions of anti-establishment causes. Advertising campaigns and jacket copy for Moon-Calf similarly kept mum about any controversial aspects of the author’s passionate political stances: ‘Floyd Dell’s novel isn’t exotic, and it isn’t propagandist, which will disappoint a lot of people who don’t like him’, Alfred assured retailers in a 1920 Publishers’ Weekly ad.22 In consumer-facing copy published on the front of the book jacket, Alfred simply emphasised his own stature: ‘Moon-Calf is by far the most distinguished and most significant first novel by an American that has ever been offered me for publication. It will, I believe, command wide attention and universal respect.’ The key word is ‘distinguished’. Alfred Knopf was obviously not a radical, but he pursued status through readership by those whom he perceived as New York’s intelligentsia. His aim was for daring writers such as Dell to elevate the reputation of the young publisher as a tastemaker who deserved wide attention and universal respect – but who at the same time wanted to court mainstream audiences. When Knopf hired ‘street teams’ to dress in artists’ smocks and tam o’ shanters to promote Moon-Calf in Times Square and Wall Street (they wore wooden boards to which sample copies of the books were affixed), his walking bohemian billboards only underscored the fact that he was performing an act. He viewed his authors as a means to develop his own ‘distinguished’ reputation. Affiliations with European writers provided an even more effective method for achieving this goal, as long as their books were profitable. Though Moon-Calf was reprinted numerous times, Dell’s other works were less popular, and by the late 1920s he was being published by multiple houses other than Knopf. Dell’s departure from Knopf’s roster occurred after another example of the risk-averse Knopfs avoiding censorship; Dell’s 1923 novel Janet March, which depicts sexual longing and mentions abortion, stoked the ire of the Watch and Ward

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Society of Massachusetts, which enlisted John Sumner to suppress the novel.23 Alfred met with New York’s district attorney and agreed to withdraw the book from sale in New York and Massachusetts. Dell subsequently rewrote the novel and reissued it in 1924 through competing publisher George Doran.

Tastemaking through translation Aside from the Russian authors whose works Alfred imported in English through British publishers – a segment that comprised most of Knopf’s inaugural season – books in translation were frequently Blanche’s domain, and they provided the firm’s most enduring ties to modern fiction. Within the frame of early modernism, Blanche’s most notable acquisitions were the works of Thomas Mann and André Gide, which would later lead to her achievements as the American publisher of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. While Alfred Knopf was a boisterous talker who dressed in loud colours, Blanche was refined, easily becoming part of the fabric of Parisian expatriate literary culture. The William A. Bradley Literary Agency was at the centre of that culture, launched just two years after Blanche’s first acquisitions trip abroad. Bradley was a Connecticut native who had worked as a writer and art director until serving in the First World War, when he met Jenny Serruys, a Belgian scholar of literature who became his wife and business partner. Blanche was an astute networker, and she was far more proficient in French than her husband was. Her affection for French culture had been deepened when, as a young woman, she attended Impressionist concerts in New York, absorbing the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.24 On her first trip to France as a young publisher, she opted to meet personally with André Gide’s editor, Alfred Vallette, at the publishing house Mercure de France, rather than simply executing the contract through the Bradleys. Pleased with the performance of Strait Is the Gate under Blanche’s care, Gide continued his relationship with Knopf, publishing nonfiction as well as additional novels in translation, including The Immoralist, which he considered to be a contrasting partner to Strait Is the Gait, as both novels address questions of impulse, desire and the concept of sin. Thomas Mann’s path to Knopf was a more circuitous one. In the company’s early years, Blanche and Alfred very much hoped to sell translation rights for their American authors, but as newcomers to the business of publishing they met resistance in that endeavour.

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The criteria for a publisher to be selected to purchase translation rights sometimes exceeded objective factors such as royalties, a high advance or a reputation for honouring contracts. For works that had sold well in their original language, subjective factors came into play, including a publisher’s ability to attract favourable review attention (preferably from critics who would today be termed ‘influencers’, and who were often book authors themselves) as well as the publisher’s standing in the bookselling community, particularly in a sales environment that was likely to involve personal hand-selling. In these two areas, Blanche and Alfred needed time to establish a distinguished reputation, and they were not always offered the most promising titles. One of the first books Alfred published in imported sheets was Mann’s obscure novel Royal Highness: A Novel of German Court Life, a satirical depiction of European mores written in 1909. Because Knopf was importing through an English publisher, no translation was necessary, and although Knopf would not be able to secure a copyright, the price offered him by Sidgwick & Jackson suited his lean start-up budget. (A provision in the US Copyright Act of 1909 required that a work be both printed and bound in the United States in order to receive copyright protection.) In 1921, Blanche and Alfred enriched their inaugural grand tour of Europe by directly calling on Thomas Mann’s German publisher, S. Fischer Verlag. Despite having letters of introduction provided by an editor at William Heinemann, Ltd, the young American publishers were not granted an appointment. Yet their friend and author Henry [H. L.] Mencken, The Baltimore Sun satirist and journalist, made it possible for them to meet with Mann. Although Alfred was moderately proficient in speaking and reading German, Blanche required an interpreter. Nonetheless, it was she who cultivated the friendship with Mann, easily conforming to the requisite formality of the author’s old-world manners. Blanche recognised that Mann’s semi-autobiographical 1901 novel Buddenbrooks, a family saga that examines the crossroads of fate and fortune, possessed an accessible storyline and the assurance of clear writing to match. The two-volume edition published by Knopf three years later proved to be profitable, and a transatlantic partnership was begun that would benefit publisher and author alike. For Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia, the benefits became personal when Blanche helped them flee Europe in 1939 and build an expatriate life through a teaching position for Mann at Princeton University.25 As their reputation for distinguished publishing grew, so did their immersion in the process of translation. Two particular commissions

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reflect important cultural intersections between modernist literary circles and translated editions. In negotiating the rights to publish Gide’s Strait Is the Gate in America, Blanche was working with a text that had been translated by Dorothy (Strachey) Bussy, a sister of the English biographer and critic Lytton Strachey. In addition to forming close ties to the Bloomsbury Group, Bussy was married to the minor French painter Simon Bussy. In 1918, she befriended André Gide and became not only his translator but his English teacher. Though they were both married and in their fifties at the time, Dorothy developed an unrequited passion for Gide, even while he was embarking on a new relationship with teenager and future film director Marc Allégret.26 When Blanche became Gide’s American publisher, she therefore also became associated with Bussy and the modern, liberated sensibilities of Bussy’s world, and she became the American counterpart to Jarrolds in London, which issued Strait Is the Gait in its Jay Library, with modern jacket art commissioned from Laura Knight, a popular English painter. In acquiring Thomas Mann’s works, however, Blanche and Alfred appear to have had faith in books they themselves had not read deeply. Despite their limited ability to read German, the Knopfs signed the contract for Buddenbrooks and then sought a translation referral from Heinemann in London. The firm led them to Helen Lowe-Porter, a Pennsylvania native who had graduated from Wells College in rural New York. At the time of the Mann project, Lowe-Porter was living in Oxford, England. Knopf published Lowe-Porter’s translation of Buddenbrooks in 1924, and in just the next year the firm issued the first Englishlanguage translation of Mann’s Death in Venice and Other Stories, created not by Lowe-Porter but by the avant-garde critic Kenneth Burke. Knopf had seen Burke’s rendition of a portion of the manuscript in The Dial in 1924 and moved forward with publishing Burke’s complete translation the following year. Burke’s circle of friends included Man Ray and E. E. Cummings, and he was active in the publication of little magazines. Contemporary critics have considered Burke’s translation to be true to Mann not only in terms of linguistics but also in terms of explicitness, yet the Knopfs reverted to Lowe-Porter for all subsequent Mann translations and in the 1930s commissioned her to produce an entirely new translation of Death in Venice to replace Burke’s version, ending their affiliation with a translator who could have expanded their connections into radical literary communities. However, the choice of a female translator, Lowe-Porter, was progressive; a 1927 review

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of The Magic Mountain in the British newspaper The Guardian repeatedly and unwittingly referred to her as a man.27 Regardless of their choice of translators, by buying English-language rights, not just printed English-language sheets, the Knopfs achieved a new status as power-brokers who could negotiate with British publishers such as Martin Secker for the rights to sell a translation that had been commissioned by Knopf. With the Mann translations in particular – which reflected a modern literary approach that itself required ‘translation’ or interpretation even when readers accessed it in their native language – Alfred publicly positioned himself as a true tastemaker, not merely a reissuer of classics, who could discover highbrow texts for middlebrow consumers. The reality of Blanche’s intellect, social graces and sheer hard work, which brought those literary discoveries into print for Englishspeaking audiences, was redacted from Borzoi promotional messages, silencing her potentially modern marketing voice while raising the volume of Alfred’s persona as a hyperbolic, old-world hawker. As Catherine Turner explores in Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars, the few difficult books the Knopfs published were sold using a tone that was designed to bring the authors into the mainstream while elevating the Borzoi Books trademark into the realm of ‘distinguished’ publishing.28 Predicting the inviting, step-by-step double-page advertising that Random House would run in 1934 to teach readers ‘how to enjoy James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses’, Knopf produced a twenty-page illustrated primer for understanding The Magic Mountain, available free of charge to help booksellers explain the novel to their customers. However, his consumer-facing advertising messages repeat the theme that Alfred continually replayed in his company’s early years: he positions himself as a distinguished tastemaker while providing little evidence of his having actually read or even understood the book. In an advertisement in The New York Times Book Review published on 1 May 1927, a year before the Nobel Prize would be awarded to Thomas Mann, Knopf wrote that The Magic Mountain: is already taking its inevitable rank as a world masterpiece. It is a panorama of the intellectual and spiritual life of modern men . . . “The Magic Mountain” has every great quality that I can conceive of as possible to fiction, including a mighty undertow of sheer narrative power. My own reading of it was an experience that I can never forget. Nothing I have published is more of a justification for thanksgiving on the reader’s part, or for pride on my own.

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Novel approaches to bookselling While Blanche and Alfred’s networks with overseas agents and houses were built using conventional practices, one transatlantic element that was unusual for its time was the Knopfs’ attempt (albeit a failed one) to sell in the British market through their own London-based publishing company headed by the British novelist, journalist and translator Storm Jameson. Launched in 1926 and operating for merely five years, Alfred A. Knopf Ltd was headquartered in the Bloomsbury area. While the location placed him in the company of such progressive publishers as Jonathan Cape, the offerings of Knopf Ltd reflect the broad-based approach seen in Knopf’s American lists, ranging from P. T. Barnum’s autobiography to guides such as A Book of Other Wines Than French, textbooks (Grammar of the English Sentence among them) and the detective novels of Dashiell Hammett. The acquisitions approach was clearly based on what might sell to a broad audience, not what would place the Knopfs in a modern literary circle. The second criterion, of course, was that the acquisitions fit the Knopfs’ budget, and despite their lavishly furnished office on Bedford Square, they were continually outbid for the UK rights to works by wellknown authors, including many of the authors who were published by Knopf in the United States. Willa Cather, for example, was loyal to Blanche and Alfred’s New York branch, but her agent sold her UK rights to houses other than Knopf Ltd. That said, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, whom Van Vechten mentored – arguably two of Knopf’s most progressive American voices – were published under the Borzoi colophon on both sides of the Atlantic, and books by both authors received high praise from London’s Times Literary Supplement (TLS). In fact, Knopf Ltd books were regularly reviewed in the TLS, often favourably. The firm’s advertising in the TLS was carefully devoid of the bombastic style that permeated Borzoi advertising in America, but the wolfhound colophon made for a clearly distinguishing feature in marketing messages and on jackets. After mounting financial losses at Knopf Ltd, Alfred theorised that the British marketplace rejected him because he was perceived as an American interloper, but the most likely reason for the failure of Knopf Ltd was simply the economic climate of Britain in the wake of the First World War.29 Alfred launched his overseas publishing house at a time when unemployment was rising and retail sales were falling in the United Kingdom. To finance the war, the government borrowed millions of pounds, a debt that was not fully paid off until 2015.30

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In contrast, when Knopf Ltd debuted, America was experiencing unprecedented levels of consumerism and credit plans, in addition to a cultural transformation as rural populations shrank while metropolitan centres grew. The home library was a sign of having joined the cultivated echelons of an enlightened new century, and America’s rising middle class could afford this intellectual accessory to modern living. A bookcase displaying purchased volumes was a status symbol, expressing individual tastes in a way that books temporarily on loan from a public library could not. Cheap editions might have offered a modicum of relief from the financial challenges faced by Blanche and Alfred in their London office, in the spirit of Jonathan Cape’s Travellers’ Library or J. M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library, but the Knopfs’ production standards prevented them from achieving cheap manufacturing costs when they ventured into the terrain of ‘affordable’ publishing in 1923 at the suggestion William Addison Dwiggins, the master typographer whom they commissioned as a designer for dozens of volumes throughout the first thirty years of their firm. Available in Britain and America, Borzoi Pocket Books were respectively priced at 3s/6d (compared to an approximate average of 7s/6d for standard Knopf editions in Britain) and US$1.25 (compared to the approximate average of US$2.50 for standard Knopf editions in America).31 The series was also distributed in Canada through Macmillan Company, of Canada, Ltd. While the Borzoi Pocket Books retail prices were on par with those of competing ‘cheap’ editions, the Knopf brand had been built on a promise to sell books that were designed and manufactured with beauty and durability in mind, and these smaller-format books were no exception. Alfred called them ‘popular priced’ in the inaugural advertisement for the series in The New York Times on 25 February 1923 and assured readers of an ‘attractive format’. Unlike the rudimentary design of The Pocket Books published by George Doran a decade earlier, Knopf’s small editions looked lavish. In the American version, jackets featured colour illustrations, and the blue full-cloth binding was debossed and stamped in black to form an ornate leaf pattern, in addition to green stamping for the colophon and lettering. Endpapers printed in two colours featured either a modern motif designed by architect and set designer Claude Bragdon or a repeating pattern of wolfhounds. The paper struck a balance between the heavier stock used for standard editions and the grainy sheets that defined the pulp trade. One element added elegance without raising the production cost: the typography was well designed to make it highly readable (as touted in advertising and jacket copy), and the

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title pages were framed with unique ornaments specially created by master printer Elmer Adler. In Britain, Borzoi Pocket Books jackets were considerably more understated, with an inset illustration, delicate typography and two-colour printing, while the blue full-cloth bindings were devoid of flourishes but nonetheless featured gold-ink stamping. The demise of Knopf Ltd is evidence that Borzoi Pocket Books failed to solve the fiscal problems of the London branch, and by 1927 Dwiggins was encouraging the Knopfs to produce an even more cheaply manufactured series, recommending that the firm ‘give up the game of faking a standard of book-making that we can’t even approximate under present cost conditions’.32 Notably, the series was not created in order to put the spotlight on modernist writers; these pocket-sized books were simply intended to reach an even wider audience for Knopf’s top-selling backlist, ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist, translated by H. L. Mencken, to short fiction by Guy de Maupassant and Maxim Gorky. The Knopf series that would have been most appropriate for showcasing modernism, Blue Jade Library, was indeed positioned as a purveyor of ‘colorful rarities’, as Time magazine described it after the 1925 launch. Enduring for a decade and led by Carl Van Vechten, the Blue Jade reprint series emphasised exoticism, but it was decidedly not a platform for daring, modernistic works. The fact that all of the selections were reprints is an indication of risk reduction; every Blue Jade title had previously debuted at another house, meaning that the Knopfs intended for the series to become a dependable profit centre, not a literary laboratory. The most enduring Blue Jade title has proven to be James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a solemn, consciousness-raising novel in which a biracial narrator describes a lifetime of passing for white in segregated America. Previously published by Sherman, French and Company, and still in print under Knopf’s Vintage trade paperback line, Johnson’s now-canonical work was released alongside a Blue Jade ‘negro comedy of manners’ (as it was called by a New York Times reviewer) titled The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer by English military veteran Haldane Macfall.33 Previously published in London by Grant Richards in 1898 and again in 1913 by Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Company, the novel is set in Barbados and Jamaica and delivers demeaning transliterations of patois, along with caricatures such as ‘kerchief-turbaned marketwomen’ who ‘chattered with plaintive whining negro speech’.34 The bulk of the Blue Jade titles echo Macfall’s world-view and emphasise the mystique of the Other through the eyes of European colonisers.

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One such novel in the series, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, was originally published in the early nineteenth century by John Murray. Its author, James Justinian Morier, had served as a British diplomat in Persia. Nonfiction titles in the series similarly paid homage to white voyagers, such as a biography of Sir Walter Raleigh by the English historian Martin A. D. Hume. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a commonly cited example of the Blue Jade Library’s modern offerings, but it is not a representative artefact, just as the name ‘Blue Jade’ belies the fact that the Knopfs never incorporated hues of jade into the series’ design elements, although some of the cloth bindings are dark blue. The carefully managed personae that Blanche and Alfred created for themselves were tightly interwoven with the reputation of their publishing enterprise. In an era when youthful rebellion was shattering artistic, political and social conventions, the twenty-something Knopfs chose to project an image of gravitas and parental wisdom. Although Alfred’s taste was steeped in old-world sensibilities while Blanche was attracted to novelty, the couple acted in agreement about risk aversion, championing modern writers only to the extent that it seemed financially prudent to do so. Though the Knopfs were unsuccessful in establishing an enduring European publishing house of their own, their New York office delivered an American audience to European writers who represented both new and traditional literary styles (primarily the latter). Perhaps because of these complementary strategies, the house of Knopf remains distinctive, selective and relevant – and a profitable crown jewel for parent company Penguin Random House.

Notes 1. Alfred Knopf’s unpublished memoir, p. 65, Box 610, Folder 2, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. collection, HRC. 2. Hellman, ‘Publisher: A Very Dignified Pavane’, p. 52. 3. Knopf memoir, p. 128. 4. Lemay, Inside, Looking Out, pp. 230–49. 5. Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi, pp. 140–1. 6. Clements, The Art of Prestige, pp. 34–40. 7. Knopf memoir, p. 137. 8. Lewis’s New York Times obituary asserts that he was born ‘at sea off Nova Scotia in 1884 of British parents’, though the Dictionary of Literary Biography reports that his father served in the American Civil War. Lewis spent most of his life in England, with periods in France, the United States and Canada.

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9. ‘Tarr’, The New York Times, 21 July 1918, p. 45. 10. Advertisement for Pound and Lewis, The Nation, 23 August 1919, reprinted in Turner, Marketing Modernism, p. 96. 11. Advertisement for Lewis, The New York Times Book Review, 18 July 1926, p. 20. 12. Advertisement for Lewis, The New York Times Book Review, 26 September 1926, p. 22. 13. Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, pp. 71–93. 14. See Chapter 5. 15. Knopf memoir, p. 137. 16. Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi, p. 71. 17. Multiple letters between Dorothy Richardson and Alfred Knopf, 1923, Box 665, Folder 1, Knopf collection, HRC. 18. Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi, p. 102. 19. Blanche Knopf to D. H. Lawrence, 3 April 1928, Box 693, Folder 1, Knopf collection, HRC. 20. Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi, pp. 138-40. 21. Franklin Spier to Floyd Dell, 12 May 1922, Box 653, Folder 4, Knopf collection, HRC. 22. Advertisement for Dell, Publishers’ Weekly, 20 November 1920, reprinted in Turner, Marketing Modernism, p. 97. 23. Hart, Floyd Dell, p. 93. 24. Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi, p. 11. 25. Clements, The Art of Prestige, p. 70; and Claridge, The Lady with the Borzoi, p. 197. 26. Selected Letters of André Gide and Dorothy Bussy, p. 105. 27. ‘Teutonic Heights’, The Guardian, 1 July 1927, [accessed 1 December 2017]. 28. Turner, Marketing Modernism, pp. 81–110. 29. Clements, The Art of Prestige, pp. 74–9. 30. ‘Government to pay off WW1debt’, BBC News, 3 December 2014, [accessed 1 December 2017]. 31. Note that Borzoi Pocket Books prices dropped to one dollar during the Great Depression. 32. Quoted in Knopf, ‘Dwig and the Borzoi’, p. 110. 33. ‘In the West Indies’, The New York Times Book Review, 6 December 1925, p. 10. 34. Macfall, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer, p. 4.

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Chapter 3

‘Glad to be in the Fold’: Boni & Liveright’s Multifold Marketing of Modernism Jennifer Sorensen

In a letter to the publisher Horace Liveright, first-time book author Jean Toomer expressed his admiration for the roster of writers published by Boni & Liveright and his joy at being included in this illustrious ‘fold’: ‘I am glad to be in the fold. There is no other like it . . . it simply cant [sic] be beaten.’1 In this chapter, I take up Toomer’s material metaphor of the ‘fold’ to work with the impressive assemblage of modernist authors published by the press and also the material folds of Boni & Liveright’s packaging of their texts in visually arresting dust jackets and often with shocking text printed on the inner flaps. The press published and often introduced key modernist figures including Toomer, Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill and Ezra Pound. The cultural influence of the publishing house extends beyond modernism, which made up only a fraction of its eclectic list: experimental texts that have since become staples of the modernist canon appeared in catalogues alongside bestsellers such as Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen, Maxwell Bodenheim’s Replenishing Jessica and Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.2 With an emphasis on archival dust jackets, this chapter will show how Boni & Liveright altered the publishing of modernism as they pioneered innovative practices to market and advertise their books. Building on the scholarship focused on the Modern Library series, developed in the early decades of Boni & Liveright, this chapter will range beyond that series to consider the design and marketing of other Boni & Liveright productions.3 In addition, I will explore the complex negotiations of race and gender constructed in and through the material artefacts of the dust jackets and ads for Boni & Liveright publications.

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A brief history of Boni & Liveright Picture this: a young man named Horace Liveright came into the advertising office he was working at one day with ‘an armload of manufacturing possibilities, in this case various kinds of household gadgets’ and immediately fell upon Boni, the other occupant of the office and a total stranger to him, and asked his opinion of the relative merits of each device. Boni, who was surprised but game, matched Liveright’s enthusiasm by carefully considering each one and finally choosing a self-sealing jar lid as the best sales prospect.4

Thus, one of the most influential publishing partnerships of the modernist era developed from a chance collaboration between young innovators. After this fortuitous brainstorming session about possible products, the pair settled on books and Boni & Liveright began as a joint venture between Horace Liveright (who provided most of the financing) and Albert Boni (who provided his idea for the Modern Library series).5 Liveright was searching for new ideas and products after his recent failure to sell toilet paper, which he had called Pick-Quick Paper as an ill-fated homage to Dickens.6 Boni had recently sold his Washington Square Bookshop and his recent success with the Little Leather Library – pocket-sized books of reprinted classics which had begun with a 25-cent copy of Romeo & Juliet that was distributed in boxes of Whitman’s chocolates – had encouraged him to attempt the Modern Library series. The Boni & Liveright Publishing firm was officially established in 1917 and began by producing twelve titles in the Modern Library series – reprints of mostly European classics – selling them for 60 cents each.7 The dust jacket from Nietszche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra proclaims ‘People Are Judged By The Books They Read’.8 The back-cover blurb reads: ‘It is the purpose of the publishers to issue in the “Modern Library” books that have already won for themselves a position as classics . . . The “Modern Library” appeals to people who consider good books a necessity, not a luxury.’9 These statements assure the purchaser that they are investing in crucial cultural capital and the Modern Library series was an almost overnight success with profits from the series enabling the house of Boni & Liveright to begin publishing new work outside of the series even in its first year of operation. Thus, just after its founding, Boni & Liveright emerged as a firm committed to printing ‘good books’ and willing and able to take risks on

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young unknown authors – their risky business being initially in large part funded by the successful Modern Library series. Indeed, while Boni & Liveright insistently marketed itself as an arbiter of cultural value and taste, it also continually embraced newness and experimentation. There has been excellent recent critical work focused on the Modern Library series and I will only briefly sketch out this important aspect of Boni & Liveright’s business, from the firm’s founding in 1917 to the sale of the series by Liveright in 1925, by citing two recent monographs devoted to the series by Jay Satterfield and Lise Jaillant. Both Jaillant and Satterfield document how the Modern Library series promised the intellectual glamour of modernism at a low cost. Satterfield has argued that the series successfully hawked highbrow modernism to a large audience and cites Life’s J. B. Kerfoot’s 1917 usage of a delectable metaphor to describe the unique zest offered by the Modern Library: ‘a full mental meal for sixty cents’.10 Jaillant shows that the Modern Library strove to create an image of elegant modernity for their brand . . . combin[ing] an aura of New York glamour and intellectual sophistication with a very affordable price. The colophon designed by Lucian Bernhard showed a leaping torchbearer, which symbolized the modern spirit of the series.11

Satterfield documents that while cheap reprints experienced an initial boom during the publishing expansion following the technological advances and lower-cost materials available after the US Civil War, these cheap books – ‘priced between ten and fifty cents’ – had been very low-quality print products.12 Satterfield shows how the Modern Library brand emerged as part of a larger modern print culture movement to ‘rehabilitate (and rejuvenate) inexpensive books’.13 While Boni & Liveright had the best intentions to improve the quality of cheap books, initially it had an unfortunate slip-up that caused the volumes to ‘smell’: When the warmer days of summer arrived, the books began to give off an unmistakably fishy odor, which was traced to the fish oil used in the bindings – probably cod liver oil. The situation was eventually corrected, but the irony of binding great works of the imagination between covers reeking of fish oil haunted the firm for a few years.14

In their advertising campaigns, distribution strategies and material uniformity, Modern Library books developed a distinct aura as a series: Satterfield demonstrates how Boni & Liveright was designed to

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be more than just an inexpensive reprint, ‘the publishers encouraged the public to see the series as a coherent whole: uniform leatherette bindings with identical gold-stamped spines made the books similar in appearance . . . and advertising featured the entire list (rather than individual titles)’.15 Jaillant emphasises the tremendous appeal of the high/low cultural balancing act of the Modern Library series, which promised a sense of belonging to the cultural elite, ‘even if they could spend no more than 95 cents on a book’.16 In its best-known series, Boni & Liveright developed a corner of the market that combined modernity with highbrow intellectual ambition and fused low prices with a sense of curated cultural capital. Despite their initial successes, the partners quickly disagreed on the direction of the firm – Liveright wanted to focus more on American authors and to foster unknown talents while Boni favoured the novels and socio-political works of Continental writers.17 Walker Gilmer has reported that the future of the firm hung on a coin toss won by Liveright and ‘in July 1918 he became the majority owner of the firm’.18 After Boni’s departure, Liveright hired Edward Bernays in 1919 to develop the marketing side of the press and Bernays spearheaded the firm’s innovation with its advertising methods. Boni & Liveright and Bernays pioneered practices that were then quickly copied by other publishers including sending out press releases for their books that newspapers could just copy and print either selectively or in full as though they were reviews.19 These methods ensured that even a book with a small print run like Djuna Barnes’s A Book was still reviewed widely.20 Indeed, most of the canonical modernist authors in the Boni & Liveright fold sold relatively poorly, but they lent the press an aura of prestige and intellectual daring that helped attract new authors like Jean Toomer who wanted to be part of the impressive group. Perhaps the most famous contribution of Boni & Liveright to modernist literature was the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, which was the first edition to include Eliot’s notes. Gilmer documents how the poem had disappointing sales – only about 2,600 copies over eight years – despite widespread critical attention. With the relatively low price of US$1.50, the book only made ‘a little over $100 in excess of its costs’ in large part due to Liveright’s aggressive promotion campaign: he had gone all out and spent 25 cents per copy for advertising instead of holding with a more realistic budget of 12 to 15 cents a book. This was foolhardy extravagance in the case of a relatively unknown poet like Eliot.21

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Yet Boni & Liveright was able to offset extravagances on unproven poets with big sellers such as Gertrude Atherton’s Black Oxen (1922) and Maxwell Bodenheim’s Replenishing Jessica (1925). Indeed, Bodenheim’s novel was the subject one of several censorship trials concerning Boni & Liveright books; during the Replenishing Jessica trial, they read the whole book aloud in court before the novel was cleared and then ‘it sold nearly thirty-three thousand copies in the next two years’22 with the publicity of the censorship case boosting the book’s sales. While continuing to issue commercially unsuccessful texts that have since become classics of modernist literature – including Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925) – Boni & Liveright also managed to have many bestsellers on its roster. At its peak in 1927 and 1928, Gilmer documents that it had ten books accounting for nearly a million volumes in sales. In July 1928, Boni & Liveright had six of the bestselling books in the US, a first in the history of publishing.23 During its peak in the mid-1920s, the firm had enough bestselling texts on the roster to balance out its often-unremunerated expensive marketing campaigns for almost all of the texts on its lists. The publicity department – led by Bernays – developed a flashy and eyecatching style to its advertisements: often featuring very bold type, heavy black borders framing the texts and featuring the firm’s iconic cowled monk at a writing table. Former employee Louis Kronenberger describes this mascot as ‘this most misleading of office symbols, for never in publishing, and seldom anywhere else, has there been an atmosphere so unmonastic, so unstudious, so unsolitary as at Liveright’s’.24 Flipping through issues of the Publishers’ Weekly and The New York Times Book Review from the 1920s, one cannot miss the bold, eye-catching and heavily bordered advertisements touting Boni & Liveright’s ‘Good Books’. While several authors – like Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker – complained to Liveright of poor promotion, he aggressively marketed almost all of his publications. Indeed, as he explained in his defensive letter responding to Hemingway’s criticisms of the packaging and marketing of In Our Time, Liveright contended that the publicity was ‘unusually intelligent and aggressive’ and assured the author that he believed the book would garner long-term sales: ‘we published In Our Time because we, more than any other publishers in New York, play for the long future’.25 In his defence, Liveright underscores the complexities of marketing highbrow modernist texts like In Our Time by a relatively unknown author to a reading public

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who will most likely reject them. His wisdom about ‘the long future’ explains his willingness to risk publicity costs on avant-garde texts that would not recoup the costs immediately. Parker was so irked by ads for her first Boni & Liveright book Enough Rope (1926) – which announced: ‘America’s A. A. Milne is a lady / She is Dorothy Parker’ – that she penned a poem called ‘When We Were Very Sore (Lines on Discovering That you Have Been Advertised as America’s A. A. Milne)’, featuring the image of her rage condensed in a ‘Great Big / Snifter of / Cyanide’.26 Despite Parker’s rage at being jibed at as ‘Dotty-the-Pooh’ by friends, the book sold 42,000 copies.27 Liveright’s rebuttals of authors’ critiques that poor sales resulted from insufficient promotion are supported by Gilmer. Indeed, ‘Liveright believed that books should be advertised like cars and just as extravagantly’ and he spent over a million dollars promoting his publications during the 1920s.28 Tom Dardis has declared Horace a ‘Firebrand’ because of his unorthodox techniques and his breaking from the conservative publishing practices of older established firms: ‘US book publishing was never the same after Horace Liveright’s arrival . . . with his gaudy showmanship and genius for publicity, Liveright created new and hitherto unknown audiences for books’.29 Sherwood Anderson describes the publisher as having ‘none of the dignity, the formality of the older publishing houses . . . the place was a sort of mad house’ led by Horace’s gambling spirit and trust in his authors that allowed Anderson to bring him Hemingway and Faulkner with their first books depending on ‘his never failing generosity and his real belief in men of talent’.30 Boni & Liveright emerged as one of the major new publishers of the 1920s – part of a network of new firms in New York, most of them run by Jewish publishers – and Horace Liveright left a legacy through his willingness to challenge older business models, to innovate in advertising, to take risks on unproven talent, and to fight against the censorship of literature.31 After his death, former employee Edith Stern described Liveright’s unique genius and impact: He had flairs – hunches – instincts – call them what you will, for they transcended judgment – which he applied both to choosing employees, and titles for his lists . . . he had the heroic quality, rare in both publishers and employers, of encouraging you to be yourself. The long-time result was the galaxy of office alumni; the contemporary, a remarkable list.32

The risky business that Liveright developed eventually succumbed to market forces outside of his control and by 1933 Liveright was

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unable to maintain the balance between price and prestige that had maintained the upstart firm for over a decade. I will now move from the firm’s folding into a series of ‘folds’ by analysing several intriguing jackets produced by Boni & Liveright. I have chosen to focus on several books by modernist women writers whose packaging constructs gender in provocative ways and on two works by writers of the Harlem Renaissance that aggressively market their authors’ racial authenticity.

Folding Djuna Barnes in ‘the charm of unnecessary evil’ I have previously analysed Boni & Liveright’s complexly embodied marketing and packaging strategies for Djuna Barnes’s strange 1923 text, A Book, and here I will only touch upon her intriguing packaging to set up similar moves in the marketing of Loos and Newman.33 The internal flaps of the Boni & Liveright dust jacket for A Book underscore the connection between Barnes’s authorship and embodiment. Her name and photographic portrait appear at the top of the front flap and the jacket markets Barnes’s text through tantalising phrases that seem to offer access to the woman via the book: Here are things written down and drawn by a woman who acknowledges the charm of unnecessary evil, but cheers existence not because it is beautiful or ugly but because of the sublime folly of its persistency. Her people are not marked with a bustling bankruptcy; she deals with America as if it were – like Europe – dignified by time, and of course she is personal. In these plays, stories, poems and drawings, we sense a desire to make the world dangerous for democracy. It is evident that she has been shot once too often. But what a gallant wound! What a devastating convalescence.34

Here, the jacket suggests that A Book functions as the material evidence of its author’s ‘shot’ ‘wound[s]’ and also of her ‘devastating convalescence’. Framed by the image of Barnes’s photographed profile, the jacket links Barnes’s writerly body with her material book – a strategy that Boni & Liveright seem to frequently use to market its female authors. I offer this brief example of Barnes’s

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early jacket because it crystallises Boni & Liveright’s pattern of conflating female author and text through the surprising, concluding image of A Book inviting us to witness and even marvel over Barnes’s injured and convalescent body.

Folding Anita Loos in pigtails and a sailor suit The front cover of the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos proclaims that it is ‘The Intimate Diary of a Professional Lady’ that is ‘Intimately Illustrated by Ralph Barton’.35 The front of the jacket doubles down on its claims to offer ‘intimate’ access and blurs the lines between author and character/diarist. The front inner flap launches into a paragraph of exclamations about an ambiguous ‘she’: ‘What a beautiful, clever dumb-bell she is! What an intriguing gold-digger! What a smooth worker!’ Here, Boni & Liveright’s marketing within the folds of the dust jacket uses this unspecified ‘she’ pronoun to blur the lines between author and diarist and to increase the sense of alluring ‘intimacy’ proclaimed by the cover. As with their jacket blurbs for Djuna Barnes’s A Book, Boni & Liveright here seems to offer up its female author for readerly consumption as it conflates the female author and her text. The Loos front inner flap continues to market the heroine as a contradictory and candid delight: Here we have her in all her glory, in a side-splitting, astonishingly frank diary that takes her from New York to London, Paris, Vienna and Munich in quest of an education in the foreign colleges known as the Ritz Hotels. Diplomats, princes, society, big business and men – she plays them all, especially men, men, men. Tiaras, state secrets, titles and Poiret models all fall into her pretty little net.

The ‘she’ described here seems to be a paradoxical ‘clever dumb-bell’ who has a lot of power even if that power is somewhat diminished by the description of ‘her pretty little net’. The back flap of the jacket explicitly shifts to advertising the author and features a small headshot of Loos with a boyish tousled pixie cut and text that searches for a source for her precocious power: Perhaps it is heredity. Her father was a humourist, – and a theatrical producer. At five she was on the stage. At thirteen she was an authoress, and at the same time was writing scenarios for David Griffith. When Griffith, two years later, saw the child in pigtails and sailor suit who was writing his roughest comedies for him, he nearly collapsed.

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Here the jacket emphasises the surprising contrast between Loos’s girlish embodiment and ‘rough’ skills. Much as the front flap presented our heroine as a compelling mix of opposites, the back flap presents Loos as a shocking and even slightly threatening mix of traditionally masculine and feminine traits ‘in pigtails and sailor suit’. The text figures Loos as both the powerful figure behind the scenes and words of many films and as somehow tainted by her extraordinary and perhaps ‘[un]wise’ knowledge of these figures: ‘Since then she has outlined the moods and motions for many an eminent screen star; and she has come to know far more about “professionals” than it is wise perhaps for anyone to know.’ She is described as a productive genius able to conjure up a chapter as a means of fighting against the boredom of train travel, and as somehow beholden to Harper’s and to the ‘book’ which takes on its own agency through the allusion in the flap’s final sentence: On her last trip to California, to while away the dull passages of a four-day train journey, she wrote the first chapter of this book. Harper’s Bazaar which took the first called for more. And so the book ‘growed up’, a Topsy of literature which is certain to make a definite mark in American literature.

This reference to Stowe’s ‘Topsy’ implicitly removes any agency from Loos as the OED defines the word as ‘used allusively as the type of something that seems to have grown of itself without anyone’s intention or direction’.36 The jacket strangely blurs ‘authoress’ and ‘heroine’ – both paradoxical figures at once dominant and diminished. The back cover of the jacket returns to the ‘she’ of the heroine – featuring one of Barton’s drawings of her hard at work writing at her desk – and continues the jacket’s descriptions of her as both savvy and humorously ignorant: ‘It would be strange if I turned out to be an authoress’ – wrote the heroine. Fortunately for a cheerless world she did. She may not have known what a ‘salon’ was. Joseph Conrad to her was a man who wrote ‘books on Ocean travel’. She read a deep philosophical work called ‘SMILE, SMILE, SMILE’. She heard of a king who was famous in England called King Edward. In only a few Paris blocks she recognised all the historical names like Coty and Cartier. And so on, into a vortex of amusement in which very simple and quite bare, shines the soul of that ancient flower, new grown in rich America, the gold digger.

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Here, the heroine’s mental vacancy is tied to her ignorance of the modernist genius of Conrad and her preference for the ‘depth’ of a work whose incantatory title stresses the importance of her own polished surfaces. She is both timeless and novel – ‘ancient flower, new grown’ – and the book went on to be a bestseller for Boni & Liveright to offset its smaller print runs of less marketable fare by Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer and Hart Crane.

Folding The Hard-Boiled Virgin ‘within the limits of its chosen field’ Plastered on the front cover of Frances Newman’s The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) partially obscuring the central illustration of a haughty armoured warrior, James Cabell proclaims that: This appears to me the most civilized, and – always within the limits of its chosen field – the most profound book yet written by any American woman. You have here – for, to be sure, the discerning and the tolerably tolerant reader alone – a small masterpiece.37

In the same ochre-coloured text box, H. L. Mencken’s slightly warmer praise appears below: ‘I go with Cabell all the way, and even beyond. You have done an original and first-rate job, and I kiss your hand.’ Thus, strangely the front cover immediately genders the author and even addresses her in Mencken’s ‘I kiss your hand’. Newman’s femininity is invoked through the text on the cover and perhaps even policed as she is firmly ensconced ‘within the limits’ of work by ‘any American woman’ and only appealing to a ‘tolerably tolerant reader’ or on offer for her hand to be kissed. Yet the accompanying image is tantalisingly hybrid: depicting a central figure in vermillion warrior garb and draped in what seems to be a male toga exposing a very masculine looking pectoral nippleless breast, and also featuring long dark hair emerging from the silver helmet and traces of reddish orange tinting on the pouting mouth and fingernails curled around the inside of the shield (Figure 3.1). The figure is strong and carrying a spear and shield, while also delicate with thin arms and softly curved lines around the upturned chin. The spear is pointed at an unthreatening angle towards the ground, while the chin and nose tilt upwards to the sky and the eyes slant downwards suggesting a haughty state of ennui at odds with the armoured and seemingly mobile stance of the figure.

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Figure 3.1 Front Cover, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926)

The front flap continues to trade on Cabell’s praise of Newman – this time ‘as the most opulently gifted young woman now publishing in America’ – before concluding with the provocative description: ‘Sophisticated, dripping with knowledge casually displayed, full of understanding and rich in humor, it is a delightful and witty book.’ While jam-packed with descriptive words, this sentence leaves the book’s contents very vague and strangely doesn’t tell the reader anything concrete about the story or the style. The effusive obscurity continues on the inner back flap of the jacket, which reads: With the advent of The Hard-Boiled Virgin a new style in contemporary fiction will have been born – a style as startling and as brilliant as the contents are amazing and revealing. For Miss Newman has created a form of her own which fits perfectly the matter it conveys. The Hard-Boiled Virgin is the story of Katherine Faraday, a girl of the very flower of Southern aristocracy, but unlike the usual Southern-girl heroine, Katherine Faraday possesses two important gifts – erudition and humor. In a frank and fascinating manner Miss Newman leads us through a world in which Katharine Faraday and other women exist and in doing so presents one of the most astounding

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Jennifer Sorensen documents of modern literature. There is no conversation, since Katherine Faraday’s ideas and actions are refracted in their transition through Miss Newman’s mind into a wise and sophisticated prose.

While this back flap does mention the novel’s heroine – it repeats her full name five times – it manages to convey almost nothing about her other than that she’s Southern, aristocratic, ‘erudite’ and humorous. As the superlatives pile up – ‘new’, ‘startling’, ‘brilliant’, ‘amazing’, ‘revealing’, ‘perfectly’, ‘frank’, ‘fascinating’, ‘astounding’, ‘wise’ and ‘sophisticated’ – there are very few actual details about the plot of the book, and a reader might be genuinely puzzled about the seemingly oxymoronic title and the incongruous warrior/ess image on the front. Similar to the blurring of author and character found on Loos’s jacket and author and book on Barnes’s, the final sentence moves from character to author with the strange sense that somehow Katherine Faraday is a real person or vision that could be ‘refracted’ through ‘Miss Newman’s mind’ as through a prism. This final sentence is structured as though it has a clear logic with the ‘since’ explanation – but seems only to mystify this creative process that causes the book to have ‘no conversation’. The back cover of the jacket spends several paragraphs lauding Newman’s reputation as a critic before concluding with the bombastically withholding text-heavy description of the novel in the final two paragraphs: It is no wonder that readers interested in literature await with keen expectation her first, full length fiction. THE HARD-BOILED VIRGIN may surprise, but will not disappoint them. Expecting, perhaps, a historical novel in which her store of knowledge and colorful writing could have full play, they will probably be surprised to find in THE HARD-BOILED VIRGIN a contemporary tale. It is the story of a woman, unconventional in an unconventional manner, a woman intimate with the mysteries of the past, exotic, and yet thrillingly human. And they will find the disclosure of this extraordinary character performed by a sheer innovation in style and technique that astonishes both by its daring, and by its magnificent success.

This concluding endorsement adds to the accretion of superlatives, while seeming to relish its own obscurity. This enigmatic example of Boni & Liveright’s marketing of a relatively unknown author illustrates how it used its showmanship to promote even unfamiliar products through a combination of the endorsements of established writers, tantalising invitations to gendered intimacy, and alluringly mysterious jacket copy.

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Folding Jessie Redmon Fauset in ‘her race’ and folding Eric Walrond in the jungle Boni & Liveright published three key works of the Harlem Renaissance – Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Jessie Redmon Fauset’s There is Confusion (1924), and Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926). As I have argued previously, the firm’s jacketing and marketing of Cane complexly ‘Feature[d] Negro’ while also touting the book’s interest in abstract formal structures.38 The publication histories of the press’s other two contributions to African American literature are less well known and I want to focus on the firm’s marketing of Fauset’s first novel in contrast to their strategies for packaging Walrond’s collection of stories. The cover for There is Confusion is unusual for Boni & Liveright productions, which usually featured compelling images rather than only textual descriptions, and stands out especially against the lush tropical foliage featured on the ornately designed jackets for Cane and Tropic Death. Despite lacking visual references to overtly exoticised and racialised landscapes, Fauset’s cover does explicitly invoke her race inside the large justified text block enclosed within a series of shaded bands: THERE IS CONFUSION is a novel about the educated Negro of the North. The world of this absorbing story is the new society that is growing up among the Northern Negroes; the society that is fulfilling the belief of sociologists that the solution of our coloured problem lies in the development of a milieu which, self-contained, parallels the life of the white Americans. In the place of sentimentality and dark humor, THERE IS CONFUSION, through its intensely dramatic story of a highly spirited young colored woman and her circle, gives us the realities of this life, utterly unknown to the great mass of educated, posted readers.39

The text here promises presumably white readers a glimpse of this ‘utterly unknown’ and ‘self-contained’ life of ‘Northern Negroes’ and even makes an argument for segregation and uplift while promising a new access to this separate ‘parallel’ life. The front inner flap of the jacket unsurprisingly features a formal portrait of Fauset in a cameo-esque circle and, as with most other Boni & Liveright texts by women and in the other two works by African American authors, the author’s authentic experience is emphasised in the description: JESSIE REDMON FAUSET is one of the eager, intelligent personalities who are evolving an independent, forceful culture in Negro life,

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Yet, while Fauset’s individual biography is mentioned, it is sandwiched between sentences that suggest that she is ‘one’ of many representatives of ‘her race’: THERE IS CONFUSION is not only her first novel, but it is also the first strikingly realistic, creative expression from her race, and by all odds the first book from any source to make concrete the newly organizing facets of Negro life in this country.

Her book is given agency in this description as a force that is ‘strikingly’ able to make life concrete, yet while her own credentials are touted, she disappears slightly from the final sentence as the book seems to emanate ‘from her race’ even more so than from herself. The back inner flap underscores this treatment of Fauset as ‘one’ of many Negro authors as it features two review blurbs to advertise Toomer’s Cane under the heading: ‘A remarkable book about Negro Life in the South’. The back cover features the endorsement of an established white author Zona Gale who had recently won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1921. The whole back of the jacket is given over to Gale’s praise – including an unusual typo suggesting that maybe the lack of design for the front cover was part of a lack of care with and confidence in the book as a whole: NOTHING in American letters is more dramatic than this decade’s emerging of the American Negro into literary expression. That these mililons [sic] of long-silent folk should speak in art forms is inevitable – but the moment when they do so is highly spectacular and it is so that the future will regard it. Jessie Redmon Fauset was certain to write a good book sometime . . . Why should she not write about her own people, the American Negroes, as going about their lives without central reference to any ‘problem’ attaching to them? Though for them so much of life is spent in trying to find a normal means of living, still after all the white race and its vagaries toward them present only one set of factors in that living. Otherwise there are to them, for example, birth and death, love and youth, sacrifice, ambition, hatred, courage, business and recreation. Of action and reaction to some of these impacts and ambitions Miss Fauset’s novel is made, even as yours and mine.

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Gale’s language here frequently assumes an entirely white readership and uses ‘them’ to mark Fauset as speaking of ‘her own people’ as opposed to Gale and the implied reader explicitly differentiated from Fauset as white with the phrase ‘even as yours or mine’. Gale’s assertion that Fauset is one of a mass of ‘long-silent folk’ who are finally able to ‘speak in art’ is echoed in a bookstore advertisement for Fauset’s novel (alongside Waldo Frank’s Holiday and Toomer’s Cane) that cites a New York Post review claiming that ‘in it the educated Negro becomes articulate’.40 While only featuring the image of Fauset’s portrait, the jacket of There is Confusion broadcasts her race and repeatedly casts her work as both ‘self-contained’ and consumable, as othered and representative, and as ‘utterly unknown’ to the intended white readership. Two years later Boni & Liveright took a more graphic approach to the folds of Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (Figure 3.2). The front and back of the jacket feature a chaotic jungle-scape with several human figures emerging from the tropical wilderness of oversized blooms. This riot of exotic flora and fauna is repeated in the bright yellow endpapers, thus the reader is greeted by many iterations of this image before and after reading the text. The interior flaps of Walrond’s jacket repeatedly promise unprecedented access and authenticity as the ten stories ‘represent a crosssection of tropical Negro experience’, and the text promises that ‘Culled from a varied and authentic experience, Eric Walrond’s work is stark, brilliant, true. There is poetry, folk essence in it.’ Many of the other descriptions build upon the cover design’s evocative portrayal of an exotic othered landscape whose human inhabits are intermixed with the animals: ‘Only the exotic intermingling of races below the Gulf Stream could yield such a bountiful harvest’ and ‘Peopled by sharks and snakes, vampires and West Indian peasants.’ At times the description veers into explicit dehumanisation: ‘The people who come within the range of the author’s vision are as colorful as pheasants.’ The penultimate paragraph promises something new and separate from the press’s previous publications of the race-focused texts of Toomer and Fauset: ‘Hitherto, stories by American negroes have busied themselves largely with problems of race either in the South or in our larger northern cities. Here, for the first time, are purely objective stories, devoid of prejudice, propaganda or excessive race consciousness.’ Yet despite this claim for ‘objectiv[ity]’, the final paragraph returns to the voyeuristic exoticised language of the bulk of the jacket: ‘With this book the least sentimental of Negro prose writers arrives, and a region hitherto steeped in utter mist looms broodingly on the literary horizon.’

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Figure 3.2 Dust Jacket, Tropic Death (1926)

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Clearly the folds of the Boni & Liveright jackets of these texts are problematic in their commodification of racial otherness, authenticity and voyeurism, and in their exoticising and distancing of these stories from their implied white consumers. The firm published three relatively unknown African American authors who might not have found their way into print through the more established and conservative firms. Boni & Liveright was willing to take a financial risk in publishing these unknown authors even as they explicitly ‘Featur[ed] Negro’ in troubling ways. Boni & Liveright was a pioneering, unconventional firm that started through a lucky coincidence and had a lasting impact on high modernist literature by publishing experimental avant-garde texts alongside bestselling authors. While at times the jackets can confine authors within their races or genders, at other moments the Boni & Liveright packaging of works on their jackets stresses hybridity and complexity. The firm successfully balanced prestige and profit during the height of modernism and its new methods of publicity upended previous conservative publishing practices; Boni & Liveright was so unmonastic and unconventional that the brownstone ‘housed not only a flourishing publishing firm, but an opulently furnished informal club and, briefly, a homemade still’.41 Perhaps Edith Stern put it best: The Boni & Liveright office was the Jazz Age in microcosm, with all its extremes of hysteria and of cynicism, of Carpe Diem, of decadent thriftlessness, and of creative vitality. To recapture its atmosphere one would not, like Proust, dip a madeleine into a cup of tea, but a canapé into bathtub gin.42

Notes 1. Box 1, Folder 16, JWJ MSS 1, Jean Toomer Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, pp. 27–8. 3. For a more thorough account of the cultural influence of the Modern Library series in particular, see Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon. 4. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, pp. 4–5. Here I have given a brief version of the longer history that I recount in my book, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture – a history which has been enabled by the work of the previous scholars and biographers cited liberally here. For a collection of many archival materials, a detailed timeline, and many snippets from memoirs of the staff and authors, see Egleston (ed.), The House of Boni & Liveright.

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5. Walker Gilmer recounts this story and stresses the spontaneity and excitement of the partnership. Horace Liveright, pp. 4–5. 6. Dardis, Firebrand, p. 43. 7. Gilmer describes the first Modern Library books from 1917: ‘Priced at sixty cents each, bound in limp lambskin, and duodecimo in size, most of these books could not be found elsewhere in such a convenient and attractive form; some, moreover, were out of print and others unavailable in this country. The demand for the first volumes . . . was so great that Boni & Liveright decided to issue six more titles immediately.’ Horace Liveright, p. 11. 8. Dardis, Firebrand, p. 55. This phrase was also used in advertisements as noted in Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon, p. 9. 9. Dardis, Firebrand, p. 55. 10. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, p. 22. 11. Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon, p. 2. 12. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, p. 23. Satterfield documents how the Modern Library signalled a shift in American attitudes towards reprints from late nineteenth-century ‘cheap books’, which Satterfield contends ‘represented some of the worst examples of bookmaking in the history of printing. Most were ungainly quartos printed on lowgrade, woodpulp paper in densely packed columns of type (much like a newspaper) with only flimsy paper covers’ (p. 23). 13. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, p. 25. 14. Dardis, Firebrand, p. 54. 15. Satterfield, The World’s Best Books, p. 27. 16. Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon, p. 15. 17. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 19. 18. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 19. 19. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 26. This practice, while claimed as new by Liveright’s biographers, is part of a longer history of marketing books that extends back into the nineteenth-century and Boni & Liveright leveraged this established method to promote its texts as widely and aggressively as it could afford. June Howard’s discussion of Harper’s strategies for marketing The Whole Family (published serially at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century) helps to situate Boni & Liveright within a longer history. For a more comprehensive treatment of Boni & Liveright’s marketing strategies, see Satterfield, The World’s Best Books. 20. Djuna Barnes’s A Book sold only 295 copies. Dardis, Firebrand, p. 235. 21. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 38. 22. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 157. 23. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 187. 24. Louis Kronenberger, ‘Gambler in Publishing: Horace Liveright’, Atlantic, January 1965, p. 97. Cited in HBL, p. 81. 25. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, pp. 124–5.

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26. The offending advertisement from The New York Times Book Review and the poem are both reproduced in HBL, p. 87. 27. HBL, p. 86. 28. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 90. 29. Dardis, Firebrand, p. xvi. 30. Sherwood Anderson’s Memoirs: A Critical Edition, pp. 517–18. Cited in HBL, p. 70. 31. Liveright was one of the major voices speaking out against the Clean Books Bill and published ‘The Absurdity of Censorship’ in The Independent in March 1923 to fight against censorship as ‘stupid, ignorant, and impudent’ (pp. 192–3); full article reproduced in HBL, pp. 57–8. 32. Stern, ‘The Man Who Was Unafraid’. 33. In ‘Female Embodiment in the Marketing of Modernism’, I place the Boni & Liveright packaging of Barnes’s A Book within a larger context of the embodied marketing strategies used for female modernists. For my argument about how the Boni & Liveright marketing helps us to read Barnes’s A Book, see Sorensen, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture. 34. Here I have quoted the complete text from the internal back flap of the jacket. 35. This first edition jacket was consulted at the HRC. 36. ‘Topsy, n.’, OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017 [accessed 6 January 2018]. 37. This first edition jacket was consulted at the HRC. 38. I have argued that Toomer’s investment in the materiality of the book format should be central to our understanding of Cane; Toomer’s shifting responses to the publication of Cane and the multidimensional packaging strategies of his publishers make Cane a rich site of intersection between form and materiality, between aesthetics and audience, between design and dismemberment. For the full argument see Sorensen, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture. 39. I consulted the jackets of There is Confusion and Tropic Death held at the Beinecke Library. 40. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. ‘There is confusion. Holiday. Cane’, March 1925, The New York Public Library Digital Collections, [accessed 3 June 2018]. 41. Gilmer, Horace Liveright, p. 81. 42. Stern, ‘The Man Who Was Unafraid’.

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Chapter 4

The Hogarth Press Claire Battershill

Prelude Virginia Woolf’s thirty-third birthday on 25 January 1915, was ‘a fine frosty day, everything brisk and cheerful’. Leonard Woolf brought Virginia to London, where they enjoyed what the city had to offer – the cinema, the bustling streets – and made schemes for the future. Over tea at Buszards Tea Rooms in Oxford Street, they decided that they would buy a printing press.1 They would learn how to use it. At the same time, they decided that they would buy a bulldog and name it John. They didn’t buy the dog,2 but the press remained on their minds. In the months that followed, they window shopped and contemplated the purchase carefully. As Leonard Woolf later put it in his autobiography, ‘we stared through the window at [the equipment] rather like two hungry children gazing at buns and cakes in a baker shop window’.3 Two years later, in the spring of 1917, they finally bought the printing press.4 They wondered if it might give them an opportunity to publish, on a small, modest scale, their own works and the works of their friends without the meddling interventions of editors and without the pressures of commercial expectations. Like many publishing operations, the Hogarth Press began with an idealistic and optimistic vision for literary production: starting a publishing house, the Woolfs thought, would be fun. The Woolfs, unlike most people working in publishing, were writers first. When they pulled the first prints of ‘Two Stories’, on their new press, they had been married for five years. Leonard had returned from his time in Ceylon, where he worked as a colonial administrator (and where he developed some of the anti-colonial views that would shape his own writing and, later, as Anna Snaith has pointed out, some of the publications selected by the Hogarth Press). The Bloomsbury Group was already holding soirées in sitting rooms

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and sharing autobiographical stories on Wednesday nights through their ‘memoir club’,5 and Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell’s Omega Workshops were in the business of self-publishing art books on their own hand press at 33 Fitzroy Square.6 Also by 1918 the Woolfs had established reputations among the wider literary circles in Britain: they both published work in literary intellectual weeklies like The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman, and each had written and published a novel. Leonard’s The Village in the Jungle (1913) was issued by Edward Arnold (who also published E. M. Forster’s novels),7 and Virginia’s The Voyage Out (1915) was published by her cousin, Gerald Duckworth.8 Despite the Woolfs’ existing connections to the wider publishing world, the Hogarth Press had small beginnings in a shared life of bohemian Bloomsbury cosiness, and its associated privilege. Given these origins, it is impossible, of course, to separate the story of the Press from Virginia Woolf’s story and from her legacy. Since both Leonard and Virginia Woolf ran the Press according to their own values and tastes, it’s important to understand the connections between the Woolfs’ roles as authors, as readers and as publishers. Something like the account above of the Hogarth Press’s beginning will be familiar to many scholars of Woolf and of modernism. Indeed, unlike many of the other publishing houses addressed in this volume, the Hogarth Press has been the subject of a great deal of rich and fascinating critical work. It is really the only modernist publishing house to have received a thorough ‘material modernisms’ treatment by a variety of scholars. I would like to begin, therefore, by addressing here the range of critical resources which are already available on various aspects of the Press and its history. Indeed, as Mark Hussey and Faye Hammill point out, though there is a lack of critical work on modernist book publishing broadly writ, the Hogarth Press is a ‘rare exception’, having occasioned nuanced and fascinating criticism in a variety of areas. J. H. Willis’s fulllength history, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers (1992) and J. Howard Woolmer’s A Checklist of the Hogarth Press (1986) have tended to be the standard works on the subject, and each provides tremendously useful preliminary historical and bibliographical work. Helen Southworth’s edited volume, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (2010) invigorated the field with a collection of thoughtful and detailed essays on individual authors’ experiences at the Press. Southworth has continued to work on the Press since her collection was published and has recently produced a full-length biography of

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Hogarth Press author Francesca Allinson, Fresca: A Life in the Making (2017). Similarly, Emily Kopley’s work on the Hogarth Press poets; Laura Marcus’s and Claire Davison’s on the Russian translations published by the Press in the 1920s; Diane Gillespie’s on detective fiction, religion and, most recently, Viola Tree; Alice Staveley’s theoretical work on the feminist aspects of Woolf’s role at the Press and on female labour; Nicola Wilson on Hugh Walpole and the Press’s relationship with the Book Society; Anna Snaith on the Press’s complicatedly anticolonial publications; Lise Jaillant’s work on the Uniform Edition of Woolf’s works; and Elizabeth Willson Gordon on the Press’s cultural significance and branding have nuanced and complicated the idea of the Press as a small, exclusively domestic operation. The Press also received renewed critical and public attention in 2017 in celebration of the centenary of its founding. The International Virginia Woolf Conference at the University of Reading saw the launch of a digital critical archive of Hogarth Press materials, the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) was launched, offered thousands of newlydigitised archival documents complemented by scholarly essays and metadata, encouraging new work on the rich archival materials that still remain to be analysed and discussed.9 The recent critical re-evaluation of the Press has helped us to reconsider the Woolfs as not just literary figures but specifically as business people: increasingly savvy in their commercial field and constantly negotiating their own relationship with the book market. The origins of the Press in the Woolfs’ home and its situation in their seemingly cliquish social networks can tend to obscure the complexities of the Hogarth Press’s operations through its nearly thirty years as an independent publishing house. The Press very quickly (in the early 1920s) became a much more commercial operation than the Woolfs first imagined it would be on that day of birthday scheming. Recent scholarly narratives have highlighted its rapid transformation from a hobby into a profitable and prolific publishing house. Between 1917 and 1946, the Press published over 500 titles in a wide variety of genres written by a range of authors.10 After its sale to Chatto & Windus in 1946, the Hogarth Press imprint remained active and was used in part to promote the legacy of Bloomsbury writings. This later imprint published, among other things, Leonard Woolf’s own autobiography which contains his reminiscences about his time as a publisher.11 In light of all this detailed scholarly work it’s worth asking: why has the Hogarth Press received so much attention when other modernist publishers (Caresse and Henry Crosby’s Black Sun Press, for

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example, or Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press) have languished in relative critical obscurity? Part of the reason the story of the Hogarth Press has been told a few times over is that it’s a good one: it has associations with a well-known author and a few human details (the bulldog, the birthday) to make it even more compelling. It’s an essentially feminist story and an essentially modernist one: a press of one’s own to free Woolf herself from the patriarchal constraints of (male) editors and a platform to allow both Woolfs the chance to put work out into the world that they thought was meritorious and that they thought was new.12 It’s also the story of a particular kind of romance: a wife and husband sharing in a creative pursuit and each bringing their own strengths and abilities to the business. Another and perhaps even more important reason the Hogarth Press has received scholarly attention, however, is archival. The Hogarth Press Business Archive, housed at the University of Reading, is, like much hyper-documented Bloomsburyana, plentiful, rich and unusually interesting and dynamic for a publisher’s archive.13 The Woolfs not only wrote incisive criticism, inventive novels and astute book reviews. They also told good stories every day. They told them in their letters arranging publishers’ lunches, they told them on dust jackets of new books and they told them in hand-drawn scribbles to one another. Their epistolary styles are distinct, of course: Virginia’s often oscillates between wry humour and effusive praise of Hogarth authors, and Leonard’s is direct, blunt and clear. Neither of them ever seems to hold back an opinion or write out of pure convention or duty. Reading through the Hogarth Press archives offers a similar pleasure to reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries or letters: it gives one a window into the day-to-day lives of these two modernist thinkers and writers. It also gives one a view of a very specific and idiosyncratic approach to publishing, one that followed some of the basic publishing industry standards of the time but also deviated when it needed to.14 The Press also makes an ideal case study because it is just small enough to allow for a bird’s-eye view of its entire list (especially with the help of digital humanities methods and collaborative scholarly practices), yet it still occupies a central enough position in the cultural field of its moment to have had an important influence on the way literary modernism is now characterised and studied. Having told the basic story of the Press and outlined its scholarly reception, I will spend the rest of this chapter detailing the Press’s operations and practices in each of the different aspects of book publishing. I begin with ‘Selecting’ and address the Press’s practice of receiving and soliciting manuscripts from both established authors

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and newcomers. I then move to ‘Editing’ and address the Woolfs’ editorial practices and policies once they received work from their authors. The next section, ‘Making’, addresses material book production, including the Press’s own printing practices and its relationships with commercial printers, binders, shippers and other elements of the material trade. ‘Publishing’ explains the tactics employed by the Press when it came to making the books public: this includes marketing and branding strategies such as advertisements, catalogues and the employment structures that allowed the Press to carry out its business. Finally, ‘Reading’ addresses the ways in which the Press distributed books and responded to readers and reviewers. The shape of this process – moving from the selection of a book for publication through to its reception in the world – follows the conventional shape of the publishing process, formalised in Robert Darnton’s ‘communications circuit’ and the many responses to his diagrammatic representation.15 In each section, I give an overview of the Press’s usual practices in these areas and reflect on how these changed as the Press became more commercial over time. While the narrative I provide here gives a sense of the Press’s habitual ways of doing things, it’s also important to note that the Woolfs made individual, title-specific decisions about how to engage with the existing conventions and structures of publishing. This, too, is partly why the Hogarth Press’s materials have been so rich for scholars of various aspects of modernist thinking and writing: each work published by the Press went through its own distinctive process, and the Woolfs were always open to trying new approaches to everything from material production to advertising. Through the Press, they brought their broad-ranging, fluid version of modernism to a variety of publics.

Selecting Manuscripts tended to come to the Woolfs on an informal basis, especially at first. Sometimes, they would acquire work through conversation with a friend, Katherine Mansfield, for example. Mansfield had a story ready to be published, and the Woolfs would take it on if they thought it was good enough and if they had the equipment and resources to make it happen.16 Publishing what suited their personal preferences was their primary way of selecting works.17 If they liked it, they published it, and if they didn’t, they didn’t. They were very forthright and transparent about this policy of taste-driven

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selection and never pretended to be applying scientific procedures to their choices.18 They would accept work in any genre (including, as Elizabeth Willson Gordon and Diane Gillespie have pointed out, some surprising picks, from detective stories, to etiquette manuals, to health books). There were no explicit aesthetic criteria by which they made their selections, though an early review in The Observer of Logan Pearsall Smith’s Stories from the Old Testament provides a typical perspective on the Press’s wide-ranging and somewhat indefinable approach. Describing Pearsall Smith’s work as ‘sui generis’, the reviewer notes that ‘the modernity of the treatment is unquestionable, but beyond that certain readers will perhaps have difficulty making up their minds’.19 Modernity, broadly understood, was the main characteristic of Hogarth Press works in all genres. Given their rather loose approach to selection, when the Woolfs began to receive queries and submissions from a wide range of authors by the early 1920s they tried various methods to ascertain a work’s suitability to their imprint. If they weren’t sure about a new or untested author, they would sometimes assign an article for the Nation & Athenaeum – of which Leonard was the literary editor between 1923 and 1929 – so that they could see how the author made out in short form before encouraging the submission of a full book manuscript.20 Since both Woolfs had been prolific journalists before becoming publishers, they had in their own ways undergone this kind of apprenticeship in their early careers. Of course, the Woolfs didn’t accept everything they were sent. Sometimes the subject of a book didn’t interest them (they turned down a biography of Francis of Assisi, for instance, on the grounds that he wasn’t a biographical subject that seemed right for their imprint),21 and sometimes they worried about the quality of a book, as in the case of Vita Sackville-West and Nancy Cunard, both of whose later works Leonard rejected in the 1940s despite long-standing friendships, publishing relationships and mutual admiration.22 They famously also rejected Ulysses, for a variety of reasons both aesthetic and political. They worried that the printers wouldn’t print it for fear of obscenity charges, and they didn’t much like the obscenity anyway.23 The rejections of the Hogarth Press are in many ways harder to trace archivally than the acceptances: as Nicola Wilson has written, the Hogarth Press archive is ‘author-based’ and organised by ‘Work’, which means that works never published don’t have a folder in the archive.24 Whereas some commercial firms such as Chatto & Windus kept meticulous ledgers of incoming manuscripts, the Hogarth Press appeared to have no such systematic process for

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tracking rejections, so the cases we do know about are often documented in letters to authors who did have other works published by the Press, or in the Woolfs’ diaries and autobiographies. In addition to considering the individual works they were sent, at first by friends and then by strangers too, the Woolfs also went looking for works, as publishers do. One reason for soliciting writing from friends and contemporaries was to complete and add to the various publishers’ series that the Press produced. These series comprised nearly a third of their total list and were often concerned with somewhat ephemeral debates and reflections on elements of contemporary life. The series included the Hogarth Essays, belle lettristic booklength pamphlets on a variety of topics (later collected and published as an anthology); the curious and fascinating Hogarth Letters series, in which prominent writers create an epistolary address to a recipient of their choosing; and two biography series.25 The significant place of political texts at the Press is also made clear in the various series concerned with international relations and political affairs, including the Day-To-Day Pamphlets and the Merttens Lectures on War and Peace. In the 1920s, the Press also took over the publication of the International Psycho-Analytical Library, making it the first English publishers of Freud. Often the Woolfs would have an idea of a volume to be added to a series (for example, a biography on a particular subject or a treatise on a particular element of social or political life) and would seek out an expert or well-regarded author to treat the subject for the series.26 As Lise Jaillant’s work on the Modern Library series has shown, examining series publications can offer a way of seeing a coherent body of works that are designed to stand together. The Hogarth Press’s own forays into series publication represented some of their larger-scale interventions into the literary, social and political worlds in which they also participated.

Editing Evidence of editing in the Hogarth Press Archives is rather sparse, likely for two reasons. The first one, as in the case of rejection letters, is a practical matter of historical documentation and preservation. Most Hogarth Press files on a given work do not contain markedup manuscript drafts (which tend to be disbursed, if they do exist, to the collections and papers of individual authors). When evidence of editing does remain in these files it is often in the form of editorial correspondence, with broad suggestions from one or both of the Woolfs to the author.27

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The second reason for the lack of editorial evidence is that the Woolfs in general had a relatively hands-off approach when it came to minute or detailed editing. Part of Woolf’s reason for starting the Press in the first place was to take herself out of the pressures of the commercial literary marketplace in which others found themselves. Once the Press was relatively established and was a reliable way of disseminating her work, Woolf wrote in her diary: ‘I am the only woman in England free to write what I like. The others must think of series and editors.’28 Though this remark has often been taken as a sign of Woolf’s confidence in the freedom the Press afforded her, which of course it is, it is also worth noting that Woolf is here emphasising the emancipation that she experiences as a self-publishing author that even other women publishing with the Hogarth Press did not possess, subject as they were to the preferences of the Woolfs in their own roles as publishers. However, the Press also extended some of the same editorial freedom that Woolf herself experienced to its other authors: the taste-based decision making that the Woolfs enacted at the solicitation phase meant that they were more likely to reject a book outright than to accept something that required extensive editorial intervention. It is also worth noting that the informal manuscript circulation and drafting and revision that occurred before the beginning of the publication process likely plays a role in the lack of formal editorial intervention by the publishers. Leonard Woolf read and gave feedback on much of Woolf’s writing, and she did the same for him. These ‘first reader’ experiences are often documented in their diaries and letters (as, for example, in the case of Virginia Woolf’s Roger Fry, which Leonard famously disliked). The Woolfs also read the works of their friends (sometimes out loud, at the ‘Memoir Club’ gatherings, and sometimes on paper). This kind of informal circulation among authors meant that the lack of editorial documentation in the Press archive hardly suggests that authors were composing works in solitude without the feedback of their peers.29 Rather, this editorial experience seemed, in the context of Bloomsbury, often to come before the publication process had begun in earnest. The Woolfs were relatively informal and non-interventionist when it came to substantive editorial matters, but what about proofing and copy-editing? Specimen pages and printer’s proofs, as I shall discuss further in the section below on production, are often preserved in the publisher’s archive. About the material books the Woolfs were quite particular, as I shall discuss in detail in the next section, and perhaps even more so because of the wide variety of kinds of physical books that they produced. Copy-editing, I think it is fair to say

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(though this judgement is based solely on a detailed examination of the books themselves, rather than on any supporting correspondence or statements), was not a high priority for the Press. Or, whatever the reason, typos and other minor errors are frequent in Hogarth Press books. There is no evidence in the archive for the existence of a dedicated copy-editor employed by the Press at any time.

Making The materiality of Hogarth Press books is one of its most interesting, dynamic and unusual elements. As I’ve mentioned, the Woolfs printed some of their early works by hand, learning as they went with the help of the manual they’d purchased from Excelsior Supply Company. They also received technical advice from a local printer in Richmond, Mr McDermott, who helped them learn the craft, gave them feedback on their earliest prints and sometimes loaned them equipment.30 They attempted to enrol in a professional printing course at St Bride’s but were refused entry because of their status in the literary profession (the course was designed for those who would work in the trade and join the printer’s union). Instead they taught themselves their craft from the sixteen-page pamphlet that came with the equipment they had purchased.31 The typeface they used for the earliest hand-printing was Caslon Old Face (the type that came with their press and other equipment), though they experimented with a variety of faces in subsequent years. As early as 1918, the Woolfs thought about outsourcing at least some of the printing labour, first seeking estimates from McDermott for printing a small run of John Middleton Murry’s poem ‘The Critic in Judgment’.32 From 1920 onwards they regularly worked with a variety of commercial printers, most often Garden City Press in Letchworth, Lowe & Brydone in Northwest London, and R & R Clark in Edinburgh. Frequently, if a text was commercially printed its binding would be done to the Hogarth Press’s specifications by the same firm. These commercial bookcloth bindings were then covered with illustrated dust jackets. Design-wise, the Press had a distinctly modernist aesthetic for its jackets (a style Leonard Woolf jokingly called ‘reproachfully postimpressionist’).33 Vanessa Bell’s designs for Woolf’s own works have become iconic and their artistic partnership, materialised in these Hogarth Press books, has been discussed in detail by Diane Gillespie and others.34 Beyond Bell, the Press commissioned woodcuts for their

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early works from a variety of illustrators and artists broadly associated with the British post-Impressionist movement and with Bloomsbury, including Dora Carrington and Roger Fry. These artists produced both illustrations and cover designs, and, in the cases of Carrington and Fry, collections of just their own woodcuts. Later illustrated jacket designs were done such well-known figures in British art and book design as Enid Marx, E. McKnight Kauffer, John Banting, and even, on one occasion, the typographer Eric Gill.35 The Hogarth Press logo, which appeared on the title pages of the works, was always an image of a wolf’s head. The first iteration was designed by Vanessa Bell and the second by E. McKnight Kauffer.36 Virginia Woolf’s own interest in the art of the material book began long before she took up printing in her thirties. As a teenager, she learned bookbinding and re-covered many of the books in her father’s library with colourful, hand-printed papers.37 Woolf’s re-bound set of the Complete Shakespeare, for example, remains on display today at Monk’s House covered in bright orange, blue and abstract splashes of paint, the titles written in black on paper labels in Woolf’s spiky cursive. In a letter to her cousin, Emma Vaughn, in 1902, Woolf wrote about her excitement at learning new techniques and styles of binding: ‘There seem to be ever so many ways of making covers – of leather – linen – silk – parchment – vellum – Japanese paper etc. etc. which the ordinary lidders never think of.’38 Woolf’s suggestion that there could be more inventive and colourful ways of practising the craft of binding prefigures the Press’s notion, too, that it would publish works that the ‘ordinary’ publishers weren’t considering. The Hogarth Press books would have bindings as distinctive as their texts. The earliest Hogarth books, therefore, were bound by Woolf in carefully selected Japanese papers – the Woolfs selected what Leonard described as ‘beautiful, uncommon, and sometimes cheerful papers’ that pleased them for their earliest books.39 These, unlike sturdy industrial bookcloth, were often fragile and even ephemeral, designed to be pleasing objects of their moment rather than monuments to last.40 Over time, as their printing practices also changed with their increasing commercialisation, the Hogarth Press employed a variety of different kinds of bindings. The handmade books all have relatively simple binding constructions in which the decorated paper is the star. They produced nothing in the line of fancy Coptic stitching, but made quite a lot of single-signature pamphlets tied with a single Hercules knot, sometimes in colourful linen thread. Bigger books, including Woolf’s own novels, were bound by commercial binding firms, sometimes, as I mentioned above, done together with

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the printing by multi-purpose firms like Garden City in standard cloth (often Winterbottom’s Extra Quality in jade green).41 For more complicated designs, the Woolfs worked with specialty binders, most commonly the ‘Ship’ Binding Works in London. In many cases, especially for smaller books produced in short runs, such as poetry or short story volumes, the Woolfs also employed a hybrid production practice involving a hand-painted cover or hand-printed text done by themselves, which they would supply to a commercial firm that would undertake the binding.42 Because of the range of production methods used by the Press, they produced a variety of sizes of print runs. The smallest print run, for a privately-circulated pamphlet by Harold Nicolson, was fifty copies, and the largest, for the bestselling author Vita SackvilleWest and for Woolf herself, were well into the tens of thousands. The commercial elements of production are part of what distinguish the Hogarth Press in style and scale from other modernist ‘small’ presses like Cuala, Black Sun and Hours: while these firms relied on their own in-house printing operations and produced only works that conformed to those set-ups, the Hogarth Press outsourced production while maintaining a distinctive material aesthetic, which allowed them to expand their business beyond the 200-copy runs of the truly small presses.

Publishing Once the copies of the material books had arrived at the Press, they were distributed to libraries and bookshops across England and around the world. At first, this distribution occurred entirely by subscription. The Press maintained two lists, a ‘A’ list, whose customers would receive a copy of every book to be published by the Press, and a ‘B’ list, whose customers would receive a list of publications each season and choose their desired titles.43 As the Press’s reputation grew through reviews and other means in the 1920s, the subscription model became unsustainable, and the Press moved to a more aggressively commercial mode of distribution. To encourage purchasers, the Press advertised their wares in intellectual weeklies, in feminist periodicals, and on rare occasions even in daily papers and cinemas. They produced seasonal catalogues decorated in their characteristically modernist style and advertised their lists in the back matter of their new publications.

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Like most publishers, the Woolfs released books twice annually in the two regular book seasons: spring and fall. The book orders were packed in house (in later years this occurred in the reputedly cluttered, somewhat chaotic basement of Tavistock Square). For the domestic market, the Press did what most publishers of the time did and employed book travellers to drive from town to town offering Hogarth Press stock to booksellers outside of London. One of the travellers during the Second World War, Elizabeth Hepworth, describes the frenzy of packing and preparing books for the spring and fall publishing seasons: ‘At publishing time it was all hands on deck. Virginia Woolf herself would come down to help with the packing.’44 Like others before her, including the novelist Alice Ritchie who also published work with the Hogarth Press (and was reportedly the first female book traveller in England), Hepworth’s job was as a traveller bringing books around to bookshops all over the country and, when she wasn’t out driving from town to town on country roads, supplying the booksellers’ ‘bag men’ who would arrive at the Press to collect orders throughout the day. The work of publishing is, of course, always a collaborative endeavour involving the contributions and the labour of many individuals beyond the famous ones whose names remain etched in history. Hepworth was, therefore, one of a handful of paid Hogarth Press staff to work at the publishing house over the years. The operation began with just the Woolfs running the whole business. Leonard was always in charge of finances, and together the Woolfs took care of design, editorial, marketing and distribution. As the business grew, however, the Woolfs began to need help, and over the years a series of employees, unpaid and informal helpers, and assistants spent time working at the Press. Bloomsbury Group member Ralph Partridge (now most known for his romantic relationships with Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington) became the first assistant to the Press in 1920. From 1923 onwards, the Woolfs employed a series of Press managers who handled day-to-day correspondence including negotiations with printers, booksellers and customers. These included Norah Nicholls, whose fascinating history Alice Staveley has uncovered and recounted, Aline Burch, Marjorie Joad, Margaret West, Dadie Rylands and Bernadette Murphy. Assistants to the Press tended to carry out day-to-day jobs like packing and sorting and tidying the shop. Richard Kennedy wrote and illustrated a charming memoir of his experience as an assistant, A Boy at the Hogarth Press (1972), and in it he gives a

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lively pen-and-ink rendition of the Woolfs at work and of the layout of the Press’s headquarters in Tavistock Square. More recently, Leonard Woolf’s nephew Cecil Woolf has written of his own experiences helping his uncle and aunt with their business in The Other Boy at the Hogarth Press (2017). Perhaps the most important role at the Hogarth Press beyond those of the Woolfs themselves was John Lehmann’s. Lehmann had worked briefly at the Press in 1936 before moving to Vienna to write. In 1938, he returned to England and joined the Press as managing director, taking over Virginia Woolf’s financial share and many of her editorial responsibilities. Lehmann brought a new generation of poets, activists and writers to the Press, primarily through his magazine, New Writing, an anti-fascist miscellany that published works by all sorts of new international writers of that generation including W. H. Auden, Federico García Lorca, Jean-Paul Sartre, Christopher Isherwood, Ahmed Ali, and many others. Lehmann and Woolf ran the Press together until 1946, when disagreements between them about managerial practices caused them to sell the operation to Chatto & Windus.45

Reading One of the most exciting archival finds to come to light in recent years is the Hogarth Press Order Books, which document the customers purchasing books from the Press. The Order Books show that Hogarth books were sold in many ways: to individual customers who ordered books directly from the Press, to London and regional branches of booksellers such as W. H. Smith, to department stores like Harrods, and to circulating libraries like Boots. Crucially, these books also show the international range of the Press’s distribution network, containing orders from bookstores all over the world.46 The Press also served an international market by producing Colonial Cloth editions of some of its more popular titles, as Nicola Wilson has discussed, and selling extra unsold sheets and foreign and translation rights to international markets.47 Amidst this global distribution, the Woolfs still gifted books to their friends, and familiar names appear in the Order Books throughout the Press’s time as an independent business. Vita Sackville-West, for example, was a supportive repeat customer of the Press as well as one of its most successful authors. Attribution copies of Hogarth Press books are now highly valuable items: Virginia Woolf had a

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policy of only inscribing books for her intimate friends and under special circumstances (in the early days of the Press, for example, the A list subscribers would sometimes receive signed copies). These rare inscribed copies now sell at auctions for extremely high prices.48 Although the distribution and sale of books can be traced through the Order Books, it is important to acknowledge that buyers are not always readers: while we know that a W. H. Smith’s bookshop in Bolton purchased ten copies of The Edwardians, it is much more difficult to find out who in turn purchased those copies, and even rarer to know whether or not book buyers actually read the books they purchased and, if they did, what they made of them. Tracing real readers is always a serendipitous pursuit, as dependent on the luck of archival preservation as much as anything. Of course, some readers, particularly literary professionals like authors and reviewers, record their thoughts and reflections about books and sometimes even publish them, and in these cases we have some individual snapshots of readers’ experiences.49 Other forms of reading evidence in the publisher’s archive include marginalia in Hogarth Press books50 and letters back to the publishers. I’ve written elsewhere about both Woolfs’ standard practice of responding, whenever possible, to their readers.51 Whether these readers were children from Canada writing back to the Press about a text they had been assigned in school, or historically-interested hobbyists setting out to correct Woolf’s sartorial accuracy in her novels, the Woolfs consistently replied to their correspondence. Both Woolfs were themselves amazingly prolific readers and therefore placed reading alongside writing as a crucial act in the formation of literary culture. Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘The Patron and the Crocus’ articulates the centrality of the publisher and the public in defining and determining literary production. Woolf describes the history of literary patronage from the courtly system of the Renaissance onwards, and notes the uncertainty that modern writers face as they seek those mediators that bridge authorial practice with reader experiences. In the essay, Woolf posits the centrality of readers to the art writing itself: ‘a book is always written for somebody to read’, she suggests, and, even more vehemently, ‘to know whom to write for is to know how to write’.52 Woolf advocated for the reader’s prominence in an understanding of the literary world. She also saw reading and publishing as crucially mutually dependent: both extra-authorial elements of textual production that together form the literary ‘atmosphere’ (to use her word) in which literature operates. In order to find the appropriate

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audience for a given book, and in order to reach it in the ways most suitable both to the art and to the public, choosing the right ‘patron’ was, she argued, of the utmost importance: The patron’s prime quality is something different, only to be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so much – atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him . . . that he is now ready to efface himself or assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of literature depends upon their happy alliance . . .53

The Hogarth Press acted as a modern ‘patron’ of the kind that Woolf suggests. Twinned with the aesthetic goals of its writers, the Press emphasised creative freedom, especially for the Woolfs, but also for a wide range of authors who would not perhaps otherwise find such suitable guardians for their own ‘crocuses’. The Press created an ‘atmosphere’ best captured for us now in the remaining archival glimpses and historical accounts of the long and ‘happy alliance’ that the Woolfs created between literary art and publishing.

Notes 1. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 28. 2. Although this particular pet never joined the Woolf family, they were the proud owners at various times of a marmoset named Mitz (who reportedly sat perched on Leonard’s shoulder during Hogarth Press editorial meetings) and a King Charles Spaniel (who likely posed as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog in the photographs for Woolf’s Flush, see Sorensen, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture, p. 140). 3. L. Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 234. 4. The delay in the purchase of the printing press was caused in part by a period of several months during which she was under constant psychiatric care and unable to engage in her regular activities. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 39. 5. For more on the Memoir Club, see Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club.

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6. See Collins’s The Omega Workshops for a history of the enterprise. The Omega Workshops also often supplied the Hogarth Press with paper for covers (see Rhein’s The Handprinted Books on the materiality of the hand-printed books). 7. For more on Leonard Woolf’s early writings on his experiences in colonial administration, see Boehmer’s Leonard Woolf ’s The Village in the Jungle. 8. Woolf writes of her experience of sexual abuse at the hands of her halfsiblings, the Duckworth brothers, in her autobiographical fragments, posthumously collected and published as Moments of Being. 9. I am a co-director of this digital project, available at . Please also see MAPP for images of Hogarth Press archival files, dust jackets and other materials mentioned throughout this chapter. 10. I have written at length elsewhere about the range and scope of the Press’s output. See Modernist Lives, particularly pp. 26–8. 11. The volume that contains the most significant passages on the early days of the publishing house is Beginning Again. 12. The Woolfs’ stated mandate was to publish ‘writing of merit which the ordinary publisher refuses’. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, p. 242. 13. As with most publishers’ archives, the Hogarth Press Business Archive is housed at the University of Reading, but is owned by a current business, Penguin Random House, and therefore researchers must request permission before entering the archive and accessing the materials. 14. An early example of this deviation is the publication of Harold Nicolson’s Jeanne de Hénaut which was privately printed in a run of fifty-five copies to be distributed to friends and family as Christmas gifts and was therefore essentially done as a favour rather than a commercial endeavour. Woolmer, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, p. 28. 15. The ‘communications circuit’ has been variously republished and refined by subsequent critics but made its original appearance in Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’, p. 68. 16. Mansfield’s Prelude was published by the Press in 1918. For a detailed discussion of this rather complex episode, see Sorensen, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture, pp. 206–14. 17. I have written at more length on the Woolfs’ taste-based decision making, in Modernist Lives, pp. 5–10. 18. Leonard Woolf also used his investment in the importance of personal taste to justify sometimes seemingly contradictory selections: ‘where taste is concerned’, he wrote in his autobiography, ‘there is no law of contradiction’. Beginning Again, p. 26. 19. ‘The Easy Chair’, The Observer, 9 May 1920, p. 5. 20. See L. Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 130. 21. This letter can be found in Folder MS2750_27, HPA.

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22. Vita Sackville-West’s long history with the Press is extensively documented in Folders MS2750_410 through MS2750_424, HPA, and I have written about it at more length elsewhere (see Battershill and Southworth, ‘Woolf, the Hogarth Press, and Global Print Culture’, pp. 388–91). 23. Harriet Weaver, then the editor of The Egoist, delivered the manuscript to the Woolfs in 1918. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 136. 24. See Wilson, ‘Archive Fever’, p. 83. As Lise Jaillant points out, the absence or obscurity of rejection letters and other similar evidence in the archives leads to a more general neglect of would-be authors in the study of book history: ‘there are surprisingly few studies of aspiring writers who never broke into print’, she notes (‘“I’m Afraid I’ve Got Involved with a Nut”’, p. 100). 25. I have written at length on the biography series in Modernist Lives, and Eleanor McNees has recently also considered the World-Makers and World-Shakers series as examples of modernist radical pedagogy. 26. It is interesting to note that this tactic of giving well-known authors a creative brief for a series is what the current incarnation of the Hogarth Press, under the umbrella of Penguin Random House, does today with its Hogarth Shakespeare series, in which contemporary authors including Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Howard Jacobson and Anne Tyler, among others, offer new renditions of Shakespeare’s mostloved plays. 27. Both Woolfs, for example, edited the manuscript for Viola Tree’s Can You Help Me? (1937). 28. Woolf, Diary [22 September 1925], vol. 3, p. 43. 29. For a recent collection on the broader literary phenomenon of authors giving one another informal feedback, see Guignery (ed.), Crossed Correspondences. 30. McDermott was the owner of The Prompt Press in Richmond. In November 1917, he sold them a new press and other printing equipment. In her diaries, Virginia Woolf consistently refers to McDermott as ‘the little printer’. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 77. 31. L. Woolf, Beginning Again, p. 234. 32. Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p. 229. 33. L. Woolf, Downhill All the Way, p. 76. 34. See Gillespie, The Sisters’ Arts. 35. Gill collaborated with the Woolfs and with Count Harry Kessler on a beautiful limited edition of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien. Elegies from the Castle of Duino (1931) (trans. Vita and Edward Sackville-West), which was printed by the Cranach Press. 36. For much more discussion of McKnight Kauffer’s role in the Press’s design history, see Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing. 37. Many of these re-bound books remain in the Library of Leonard and Virginia Woolf collection, now housed at Washington State University, Pullman. 38. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 56.

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39. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group, p. 150. 40. Angelica Garnett links this idea of design for the moment with her mother, Vanessa Bell’s spontaneous, in-the-moment aesthetic. Garnett, ‘Foreword’, p. 7. 41. This and other material information can be found in the various production files for Hogarth Press books. The Winterbottom Quality green was ordered, for example, for Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (HPA MS2750_106). 42. An example is the 1927 edition of Kew Gardens decorated with Vanessa Bell’s illustrations (HPA MS2750_560). 43. These subscriber lists remain and are housed in the Leonard Woolf Papers at the University of Sussex (IQ1a). 44. Elizabeth Barbara Hepworth appears in the Hogarth Press correspondence as Barbara Hepworth, not to be confused with the modernist sculptor of the same name. 45. These disagreements were partly about their differing tastes in poetry, and partly about Leonard Woolf’s absence in day-to-day affairs of the Press in his later years and his continued authority over editorial selections. The letters between them can be found at the Harry Ransom Center in the John Lehmann Papers (Correspondence Folder: Lehmann, Recip, 1930–1960). 46. The Modernist Archives Publishing Project team is currently working on a large-scale transcription and data analysis project based on the newly digitised order books funded by the Roberta Bowman Denning Fund for Humanities and Technologies, Stanford University. This will provide a detailed picture of the Hogarth Press’s global distribution networks and identify its key customers. 47. See Wilson, ‘British Publishers and Colonial Editions’. 48. An example is a copy of Jacob’s Room inscribed in a paper label to An ‘A’ Press Subscriber which is on sale at the time of writing by Peter Harrington books for GBP 25,000 (‘Signed and Inscribed Books’). This copy does not have a dust jacket. ‘Peter Harrington Books Catalogue: Signed and Inscribed Books’, [accessed 8 March 2018]. 49. The Reading Experience Database (RED) is an excellent repository of published accounts of reading experiences (). 50. The Modernist Archives Publishing Project is in the process of documenting and digitising existing marginalia in individual copies of Hogarth Press books (). 51. See Battershill, Modernist Lives, p. 96. 52. Woolf, ‘The Patron and the Crocus’, p. 206. 53. Woolf, ‘The Patron and the Crocus’, p. 209.

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Chapter 5

Bringing the Modern to Market: The Case of Faber & Faber John Xiros Cooper

In its first three decades, modernism was limited to the margins of society, but over time its influence spread across the whole of society and by the mid-twentieth century modernism in all its variations had become the dominant style of modernity, not only in the arts, but in everyday life as well. The word ‘margin’ here is a social not a geographical or spatial term. In fact, the physical spaces of modernism were rather more centrally located than the word marginal might suggest. In central London, for example, Soho and Bloomsbury mapped out an avant-garde quarter with Tottenham Court Road as its high street. Indeed, Tottenham Court Road separated two parallel modernist communities. To the west, in Soho and Fitzrovia, the unruly, bristling, robust, hard-edged, aggressive, masculinist, sarcastic and violently experimental Imagists, Vorticists, and assorted Futurists in Soho and Fitzrovia; to the east, the Bloomsbury Group, more reserved, understated, artsy-craftsy, a little on the pale side, slim, delicate, slyly ironic, certainly sensitive, and gender vague, but still seriously experimental. New York, Paris, Florence, Berlin and many other urban centres accommodated similar bohemian enclaves during the early days of the modernist revolution. Although born and raised in these gated communities of the mind, modernism soon left home and discovered its adult self in the wider world. The arrival of T. S. Eliot as a participant in Geoffrey Faber’s new publishing venture in 1925, Faber & Gwyer, marks an important transitional event in modernism’s steady migration from margins to the mainstream of cultural life in Britain. The particular event that brought Eliot to Faber’s attention was not the aesthetics of modernism as such nor some other doctrinal attraction but the practical problem of finding a place for Eliot’s periodical, The Criterion,

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that his first patron, Lady Rothermere, no longer wished to support financially. It was Faber’s promise to take on The Criterion in the new venture that brought Eliot on board.1 The company programme to promote modernism more generally, which this chapter examines, developed over the next five years, coming more fully into view when the firm was reorganised as Faber & Faber in 1929–1930. First, though, a little background might help to better understand how the Faber company found its way into the new aesthetics. My interest in modernism at the present time lies in the moment of transition, when it leaves behind its avant-garde phase and moves decisively into the mainstream.2 How this was effected has led to scholarly work on what Lawrence Rainey calls the ‘institutions of modernism’, by which he means the small literary periodicals, literary presses, coteries and the like in the early years of the movement. But the problem here is the rather narrow meaning Rainey attaches to the word ‘institution’. The small literary magazine and the patronage system that supported it may be very important in the earliest phases of modernism, but there are other ‘institutions’ that carried the message forward: the establishment of new public institutions, art galleries and museums of modern art, such as the Phillips Collection of modern art in Washington DC in 1921, the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, both of those in the late 1920s.3 Or, the activities of anthologists who began the work not only of canonising particular modernist texts and tendencies but who prepared the ground for its robust colonisation of the curricula of mid-century university English departments. Or, the adoption of new verbal, typographical and design practices in the advertising business that began to absorb modernist styles in the 1920s and 1930s. Or, the movement of authors from the small literary press to the larger trade publishers, publishers who were willing to take risks on the evolving taste for the modern among the middle classes first, and later among the masses. And let’s not forget that the word ‘institution’ also includes the experiments in living, i.e. new forms of life, what we now call ‘lifestyles’, among avant-garde artist communities that spread out to the general population after the Second World War.4 The scholarly work on the small literary presses and periodicals has yielded a rich research base for studies in the material culture of early modernism. The focus on the small press and magazine has tended, however, to limit the study of modernism to its earliest artisanal phase, when investment capital was slight, distribution to customers rudimentary or non-existent, marketing primarily face

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to face and achieved by uncomplicated economic practices, namely, barter, consignment and subscription. In following the discussions of how one might define modernism one can come away with the impression that its marginalised cultural position in the early twentieth century is one of its primary defining characteristics. But this is clearly not true. Joyce’s Ulysses was published first in a very limited, subscription edition by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier in Paris at the then-obscure Shakespeare and Company bookshop (see Chapter 6). The much-anticipated publication of the novel was the avant-garde sensation of 1922 (even more so than the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land in the same year). However, Joyce’s Ulysses is not any less modernist after Random House publishes it in 1934. It may no longer function as an avant-garde icon (although its avant-gardist aura as a useful marketing tool clung to it well into the 1960s), but its position as a modernist work is not compromised by the change in its material means of production and distribution. Modernism may go through an avant-garde period, but its avantgardist position is not intrinsic to it. Of course, the suppression of the novel for general consumption changed its commodity status and, as a result, enhanced its reputation and affected its value.5 The period of early modernism ended in the mid-1920s and early 1930s.6 From that historical moment, it begins its long expansion into the mainstream. Bloomsbury’s involvement with Vogue and Vanity Fair magazines is one indication of a change in the socio-economic positioning of modernism.7 Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square is another, establishing the material bridge between a studio-based system of private patronage and the lifestyle mass-marketing strategies of, say, the Heals home furnishings store on Tottenham Court Road. Omega represents not only an experiment in artistic expression but one of the first sallies into marketing to the niche, pioneering an economic hybrid between one-off private commissions and mass consumption, between luxury or high-end commodities for the wealthy and commodities for the middle and working classes.8 It’s the consumer in a middle group between high and low ends of the market that early modernism begins to attract in large numbers. When these consumers grow sufficiently prosperous and, more importantly, increasingly confident that the acquisition of modernist ‘stuff’ speaks well of their cultural smarts, modernism begins to migrate from bohemia to the mainstream.9 The moment in time when modernism moves beyond its early phase occurs between 1925, when T. S. Eliot joins Geoffrey Faber at Faber & Gwyer, and the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses by

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Random House in the United States in 1934. In April 1934 as well, Gertrude Stein’s prose style, as found in Tender Buttons and Four Saints in Three Acts, was sufficiently out there to be put into service as a copy style for department store ads in the New York Herald Tribune and The New York Times.10 By the time of the Paris World Exposition and New York World’s Fair in 1937 and 1939 respectively, modernist visual styles and architecture, and its verbal styles, are fully in the ascendant. If we think of the function of the international exposition or world’s fair as the fantasy narrative of the life to come, modernism by the late 1930s has already colonised the future. But let me be very clear, I’m not saying that modernism is co-opted by market capitalism or commerce. Modernism is not a target of opportunity for nasty-capitalist-leecheslooking-for-any-victim-to-suck-dry. Modernism is not capitalism’s useful idiot. I’d rather argue, as I have elsewhere, that modernism and a fully deployed market society emerge from the same gene pool and are in fact one and the same.11 Like modernism, market society, finally freed from regimes of custom and precedence, generates a post-traditional economic and cultural order. In the arts of modernism, market society sees for the first time its own face. The new communal and personal relationships among the modernists also provide the paradigm for the subsequent social development of societies organised around the market-form. Scott McCracken’s pioneering work on the social institutions of modernist life patterns, such as teahouses and coffee shops, is another very good example of the new types of communities that come into being in market society.12 But those are large issues. Let’s get back to that moment of transition between 1929 and 1934. And let me say a word or two about the arrival of Ulysses as a trade publication in 1934 and to the marketing of the idea of the modern. This is something I have discussed at length in my book on modernism and market society in a section on Joyce.13 With the publication of the novel in 1934, Ulysses could finally, like any other commodity, seek an audience of its own, probably never on the scale of a popular novel, but certainly within the confines of a specialised cultural sub-market. The William Morris firm and the Omega Workshops in Britain had already shown the commercial potential of highbrow culture carefully targeted to specific consumers. The innovations of Omega in particular came in the form of creating products that were no doubt useful objects, but perhaps more importantly they marked the cultural status, in terms of refinement and daring, of the purchaser. Acquisition as a marker of specifically

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social status did not figure as large in the consuming practices of Omega’s customers. As a result, the products were marketed across class and income lines. Wrapping the product in an aura of high art or high-concept design, not entirely successfully carried off by Roger Fry, was eventually refined into highly profitable, mass consumption businesses later in the century by Terence Conran’s Habitat in Britain, the Ikea company or, more specifically, in the 1990s craze for Bloomsbury-style products, marketed by the Pottery Barn company in the United States. The trade in cultural goods, whether they are in the lifestyle arts, or in experimental fiction, enjoys essentially the same structural differentiations as the trade in any other high-end commodity. Pierre Bourdieu, in the chapter in The Rules of Art called ‘The Market for Symbolic Goods’, describes two models for the production and circulation of symbolic goods such as novels, books of poems, etc.14 He speaks, first, of enterprises with a ‘short production cycle’.15 These enterprises aim to minimise business risks by an advance adjustment to whatever predictable demand is out there. Commercial networks, intense marketing efforts, such as advertising, author tours, book signings, and promotions, are designed to ensure accelerated return of profit from a rapid circulation of products, products that are destined to disappear from the market quickly. Bestselling novels are the example he gives. High initial print runs, intensive publicity campaigns, author interviews in the mass media, perhaps the selling of film rights, and then, within a month or two, or perhaps even a little longer, the virtual disappearance of the product from view. In contrast to this, Bourdieu describes enterprises with a ‘long production cycle’, founded on the acceptance of the risk inherent in cultural investments and above all on submission to the peculiar logic of the art trade.16 Having a small or even no market in the present, this production (entirely turned towards the future) slowly builds a customer base, not by the more familiar business practices of advertising and promotion in the commercial sector but by a slower process that often works through the education system or through alternative organs of niche communication, such as the academic journal or the literary review, or by word of mouth. Eliot’s Collected Poems, first published commercially in 1925, and Joyce’s Ulysses, in 1934, continue to make steady profits for their publishers while the bestsellers of their time, Vickie Baum’s Grand Hotel (1930) or Faber’s first big bestseller, Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1927), have more or less disappeared from view. Meanwhile

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Eliot’s poems and Joyce’s novels have been returning a profit for a very long time for their publishers far in excess of their initial costs of production and the early years of lean returns. In this way, they give the company revenue streams with only minimal costs. No costs for advertising or promotion are required, for example, because it is the teachers, university lecturers and professors who primarily keep the products in circulation. Symbolic and economic success in long cycle production depends (at least in the beginning) on the moves of a few ‘talent-spotters’, that is authors, critics and editors who make the firm’s reputation by endowing it with the proper sort of consecration, what Bourdieu calls, ‘the accumulation of symbolic capital’.17 Success also depends, and this has not been studied sufficiently well, on the educational system, which is capable of offering, in time, a converted public, an appropriately primed and a continuously renewed consumer base. The opposition is stark between ‘bestsellers with no tomorrow’ and the steady sales of certain items ‘which owe to the education system their consecration’ as art, hence their extended and durable marketability.18 Education, and especially higher education, can make all the difference between the continued veneration of a poem like Eliot’s Four Quartets and the continued profits Faber & Faber still derive from it and the virtual disappearance from view of an equally beautiful and significant long poem, Basil Bunting’s Briggflats (1966). A popular bestseller such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), on the other hand, does not depend on the educational level of the consumer, indeed in this instance too much education may be precisely what impedes consumption of the product. The principal issue in the case of the bestseller is the publishing firm’s ability to saturate the market with the right kind of advertising and promotion, to break through the noise created for other products by stratagems of penetration and maximum visibility. One of Eliot’s letters to his mother on 3 February 1929 reveals how well Eliot understood the dynamics, avant la lettre, of Bourdieu’s dichotomy.19 ‘Pure’ works of art are not usually accessible except to consumers endowed with the disposition and competence seen to be necessary for their appreciation. Here critics, scholars, teachers play, in slow motion, what a publicist or promoter effects more quickly. Devoted to their function as discoverers, avant-garde critics or university teachers must enter into exchanges of attestation and charisma that often make them the spokespeople of artists and their art. The symbiotic relationship between the critic Clement Greenberg and Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism is a case in point. The higher education system which

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monopolises the consecration of works of the past and on the production and consecration (by diploma and degree) of conforming consumers, does not grant, except post mortem, and after a long process, the infallible sign of consecration that is constituted by the canonisation of works as classics, worthy of remembrance, by inscribing them in curricula. This is not a process directed by Harold Bloom or any of the other celebrity academics, but by the unromantic democracy of the thousands of routine course reading lists circulating in colleges and universities, the handy teaching anthology, the course materials put online, and that final guarantor of a work’s longevity, tedious repetition of its virtues. But, of course, this is not how the story of the great works of art is normally told. In modernity, the narrative of heroic struggle to stay alive in a philistine world defined the cultural and spiritual value of a work like Ulysses and to some extent may still do so. Even though Faber & Faber by the 1960s was a successful and prosperous business enterprise, traces of its bohemian/modernist aura still clung to the brand. And like the Apple Corporation’s cheeky deployment in the 1990s of its image as part of contemporary ‘alternative’ culture, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, hard as it may be to believe, still carried a trace of the same ‘alternative’ cachet for the Faber brand in 1968 as the book had, in spades, in 1925. In Britain, Faber & Faber, more than any other publishing firm, understood the implications of marketing high-end symbolic goods. It began as a firm in 1929, but its roots go back further to a company called The Scientific Press, founded in the nineteenth century. The firm was owned in the early twentieth century by Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer and derived much of its income from a weekly magazine called The Nursing Mirror. Financial problems and their desire to expand into trade publishing led them to Geoffrey Faber, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a man with an inherited fortune derived from brewing. Faber & Gwyer was launched in 1925. The union was not a happy one right from the start. The testimony of former employees and the few company records made available to researchers show that the Gwyers were probably only interested in Faber’s money, not Faber’s ideas, nor the ideas of the new people Faber insisted on bringing into the company, T. S. Eliot among them. As we would say today, Faber wanted to change the culture of the firm. He wanted to experiment with design, presentation and marketing. He also wanted to expand the firm’s acquisitions brief. The Gwyers were not comfortable and said so with increasing irritation. Design issues were a particularly knotty problem. The publisher’s

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device on the title page of the new company, an oval form framing a snake wound round a flaming torch and the letters F and G on either side, was adapted from the Scientific Press. Its conservatism offended the modernist instincts of the new men. The Gwyers were also typographical traditionalists and were wedded to the symmetrical organisation of title pages and other design features. The new men wanted a more modern look. After four years, Geoffrey Faber and the Gwyers agreed to go their separate ways but not without a certain amount of turmoil.20 The Nursing Mirror was sold and the science side of the publishing programme declined, although Faber was canny enough to hold on to a number of titles in the fields of health and medicine because they were a sure source of revenue for the company. Searching for a name with a ring of respectability, Geoffrey settled on the name Faber & Faber, although there was only ever one of him. James Joyce was amused by this and when the company hemmed and hawed about bringing out a trade edition of Ulysses in England, he renamed the firm ‘Feebler and Fumbler’.21 The doubling of the name helped make one of the more recognisable brands in publishing. Like Allen Lane’s later creation of Penguin Books and the distinctive visual branding of the product, Faber pioneered the use of a house style as the brand itself rather than the simple publisher’s device, such as Penguin’s little penguin or Knopf’s sleek borzoi hound (see Chapter 2). All publishers had and have a house style, but until Faber, and then Penguin and Gollancz, came along, this did not necessarily extend to layout, typography, dust jacket design, use of colour and so on. It was T. Fisher Unwin in the mid 1890s who had realised that a dust jacket could be the ‘canvas’ for a new kind of art, but it was Faber & Faber that made it a high art for the mass market.22 Wren Howard, Faber’s first book designer ‘laid down a house style which was clear, handsome and simple’,23 a great advance in British typography that, in terms of a house committed to the highest standards, still leads the trade in Britain.24 This was all new in the 1920s. There had been uniform editions – the New York edition of Henry James’s novels is a good example – and there had been series, but in the new dispensation all books, no matter what their content, were brought within the orbit of the style. The Faber house style was not so rigidly defined that it gave the designers no opportunity for variation. The house style emphasised a particular look to the books, but within the general appearance there was plenty of give in the design. In addition to Howard, the first generation of book designers at Faber included Richard de la Mare, the son of the

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poet Walter de la Mare. He eventually became a director of the firm. But it was Berthold Wolpe who, from 1941 to his retirement in 1975, took the company to new heights in terms of adapting modernist art styles to the design of books.25 The other modernist twist to the new Faber company was provided by that unsung genius of cultural marketing, T. S. Eliot, who had been suggested to Faber by a colleague, Charles Whibley, at All Souls.26 Faber’s connection with Eliot was aided by the convergence of religious interests. Faber, the author of a book on the Oxford Movement, and Eliot, the potential convert to the Church of England, met on the terrain of high church Anglo-Catholicism, itself something of a ‘bohemian’ outlier within the Broad Anglican church in those days. In 1925, Eliot finally left Lloyd’s Bank in London to join Faber & Gwyer as literary adviser. In the first season, after Faber’s money had opened up new commercial possibilities, the firm issued Eliot’s first collection of poems, Poems 1909–1925. With this publication, Faber launched the process by which modernism, let’s be a little more accurate, a certain kind of early twentieth-century British modernism entered the mainstream. The commitment to the modern movement in literature was announced as a company objective in the spring 1930 catalogue after considerable discussion.27 The beginnings of this direction are already discernible in Eliot’s long letter to Geoffrey Faber in March 1925 when outlining his editorial plans for The Criterion.28 But these commitments, in the cultural climate of a still highly traditional Britain, were never going to be an easy task. It would need a new vision of the commercial possibilities for the modern and new marketing tactics. The aim was to expand the customer base, and the directors and editorial staff were very much aware of the necessity of educating the broader British public to consume the new aesthetics. A principal impediment to the wider dissemination of modernist works was their reputation as difficult, obscure, highbrow productions that the ordinary person could not possibly understand. The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot had a wide reputation (although very few people had actually read it in the 1920s) but it was already the iconic modernist work that was obscure, difficult, impenetrable, and possibly even a hoax. It was this marketing hurdle that the company had to overcome. How the Faber team managed the breakthrough is a story about the marketing of cultural goods that is not only interesting in itself but has offered a kind of paradigm for the dissemination of cultural goods ever since. Success in the mainstream is predicated on knowing your customers very well and Eliot, along with another American in the firm,

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Frank Morley, was able to understand how the process of interpellating a modern readership for modern literature worked. Eliot and Morley saw how to make a virtue, or at least a selling point, for what was perceived by everyone else as a negative, i.e., modernist literature’s difficulty.29 William Empson, for example, whose book of poems The Gathering Storm appeared in 1941, was described in the autumn notice that year as ‘the most brilliantly obscure of modern poets’.30 Eliot was never afraid to use the so-called difficulty and daring of modernist writing as a selling point rather than something that needed to be concealed. Customers do not come back for more if they feel they have been hoodwinked on the initial sale. But if the initial sale includes a repositioning of a possibly negative feature as a positive aspect of the product, and especially if it is presented in such a way as to flatter the taste or acumen of the customer, chances are they will be intrigued and come back for more. How do we know that Eliot was aware of this fundamental law of advertising? The many jacket blurbs and book descriptions he wrote for Faber quarterly notices often included warnings to readers about what they would face if they purchased the offered product. In the same way that wilderness outfitters know how to flatter urban customers who will very rarely venture into a real wilderness, by the simple stratagem of making them feel that they are capable of climbing Mount Everest, Eliot would often and very pointedly warn off readers from purchasing a particular book. He knew full well that certain kinds of readers could not resist the challenge, nor resist what possession of such an object might say about their cultural standing. The uncertainties of modern life and the loosening of traditional bonds and social boundaries made the marketing task that much easier. In modernity, costumers often need to be told who they are before they are able to recognise themselves in the mirror of the commodity. The insertion of the product into the fluid identity dynamics of modernity can be seen at work in the blurb that Eliot wrote for Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood. ‘[The novel]’, he wrote for the spring quarterly notice, ‘is concerned with le miserable au centre de sa misère, and has nothing to offer readers whose temperament attaches them to either an easy or a frightened optimism’.31 It hardly needs saying that readers who want to see themselves as possessing the proper sort of cultured ‘temperament’ will find Eliot’s warning tempting. In an unpublished letter to Geoffrey Faber, Eliot discusses some of the issues surrounding the publication of the novel. Eliot is also aware that Nightwood’s exploration of unconventional sexualities

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may put the company in legal jeopardy but insists that the book goes much deeper than ‘sex’, plumbing, he writes, ‘la misère de la condition humaine’. The anxieties, fluidity and uncertainty of modern life helped undermine the old stable identities of the past and to make the unmoored reader more vulnerable to this kind of approach. This Eliot understood better than most. For Christmas 1932, the firm pioneered yet another marketing feature, a staple of marketing regimes to this day – the guide for buying presents for different kinds of people. The company circulated lists of such books, including a list for ‘People who take literature seriously’. And which serious reader among us wouldn’t want to be included on this list? This kind of advertising is now very familiar. But in the early 1930s naming the niche the company was targeting was very new. Unlike the step taken by Random House in the publication of a single work – Joyce’s Ulysses – that already had a considerable reputation in bohemia, Eliot set about recruiting promising young authors most of whom were being shaped by the new modernist sensibility. The search for the hot new talent was not limited to poetry or literature. All genres and the new prose hybrids were also encompassed by the publishing strategy of the new firm. Indeed, Eliot went out and poached authors from the small literary presses. Herbert Read, for example, was enticed away from the Hogarth Press much to the annoyance of its proprietors, Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Eliot’s relationship with the Woolfs worsened still when Eliot included The Waste Land in Poems 1909–1925 for Faber. They had published the poem in 1922 and expected to reprint it. Eliot didn’t even bother to tell them that he had made other arrangements. The Faber programme, founded on Eliot’s growing reputation as a modernist, was aimed not only at presenting modernism as a movement in literature, but as a phenomenon of a more general relevance. What I mean by this is that in addition to the publishing of wellknown and now familiar figures of modernist literary culture, Eliot himself, Pound, Joyce, David Jones, the Auden generation including George Barker, Djuna Barnes, and many others, figures who now constitute one of the major canonic currents of modernism, Eliot and Faber expanded the list horizontally to include books that illustrate the extensive penetration of modernist culture in society at large. It was not simply a matter of assessing a book’s merit as the sole criterion for publication, but also where it fit into the programme and how it might be marketed to sceptical middle-class (and perhaps even middlebrow) readers. One of the first areas of attack was in the promoting of modernist visual culture.

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Faber & Faber’s publications on the visual arts became one of the high points of the Faber programme. In fact, it’s quite a remarkable list that the company accumulated in the first decade of its existence. It included those strange masterpieces by Adrian Stokes, The Quattro Cento (1932) and The Stones of Rimini (1934), that so beautifully and obliquely illuminate Ezra Pound’s Italian Cantos. Stokes went on to write several more books on the visual arts, Colour and Form (1937), Inside Out (1947), Art and Science (1949), Smooth and Rough (1951), and other individual artist studies. R. H. Wilenski’s The Modern Movement in Art was designed to appeal to a more popular audience. Originally published in 1927, it went into many reprints and cheaper reissues right up to the 1960s. Although the ‘Preface to the First Edition’, challenges ‘the enemies of the modern movement’,32 Wilenski avoids the combative, ranting tone of, say, Ezra Pound, in his defence of modern art, or the rude incivilities of a Wyndham Lewis. The preface sets the art he is about to describe in the context of the history of art more generally and only emphasises the break with the ‘Romantic art’33 of the nineteenth century that had animated modernism’s earliest polemics (the manifestos of the Futurists, for example, or Mina Loy’s Feminist Manifesto, or Wyndham Lewis’s Blast). By connecting modernism with the ‘classical art’ of the past, Wilenski not only advanced Eliot’s own critical ideas but gave modernism a satisfactory pedigree. The new, more serene rhetorical atmosphere was carefully cultivated all through the late 1920s and 1930s. P. Morton Shand’s translation of Walter Gropius’s The New Architecture and the Bauhaus perfectly illustrates this new rhetorical direction in the promotion of modernism. It was a major addition to the autumn 1935 list. The quarterly notice refers to Walter Gropius as ‘the greatest pioneer of the new movement in architecture’.34 As the founder of the Bauhaus in Weimer, Germany, Gropius is described as asserting that ‘what the past did for wood and brick and stone, the present shall do for steel and concrete and glass’. The notice also includes the remarks of the young John Betjeman, extracted from his review in The New Statesman.35 It is rather a coup to have got the words of the already militant, and very old school, wood-brickand-stone man in the promotional material for an apostle of steel, concrete and glass. The company did not ignore the other arts as well. Adrian Stokes, again, on modern dance (The Russian Ballets [1935]), Eric Gill on Work and Leisure (1935), Rudolf Arnheim on Radio (1936), and the distinguished list of books on the arts of the moving image, from Arnheim’s own Film as Art (1938), to Paul Rotha’s classic Documentary

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Film (1935, with a preface by John Grierson) and Raymond Spottiswoode’s A Grammar of the Film (1935). They reveal the Faber strategy for defining and marketing the modern in the 1930s. Modernism, the programme silently declared, is everywhere; it extends across the whole of culture. This even included the revolution in all those aspects of daily life that everyone typically takes for granted, such as the design and decoration of domestic spaces. The interior designer Raymond McGrath’s Twentieth-Century Houses (1934) is a case in point. The book, Eliot’s blurb tells us, . . . describes the progress made in the planning, construction, equipment and decoration of the house. It describes the causes and character of the revolution in design, a revolution more profound than any which has occurred in the other arts. The scientific, the economic, the sociological and the geographical influences at work are examined in relation to the house and those who live in it.36

The book examines everything from McGrath’s own architectural commissions to a wide-ranging, international survey of innovative and modernist house designs, interiors and furniture, and, perhaps above all, to noticing that new forms of life need to be accommodated in the modern age (which he summarises as ‘the freer conditions of the private person’ in modernity). By way of illustrating these new, relaxed ‘freer conditions’, he writes, amusingly, that ‘the story of the common man might well be seen in the slow sloping back of the chair’.37 The book also illustrates the way the Faber company was beginning to experiment with asymmetric typographical and design ideas. McGrath also acknowledges Richard de la Mare’s encouragement in exploring modernist design ideas in the making of the book.38 As mentioned above, T. S. Eliot poached Herbert Read from the Hogarth Press to contribute a series of books on the visual arts, books that spanned the high and low ends of the visual art and design scenes of modernity. Art Now (1933), The Meaning of Art (1936), Education through Art (1943) and the classic Art and Industry (1934) not only reveal the Faber agenda, but illustrate the deliberateness of the strategy. From the blurb, which Eliot wrote (Eliot had known Read as a peer in the London publishing world since 1917 and as a steady contributor to The Criterion), the linking of what we persist in calling high modernism with the world of the masses and popular culture is made quite explicitly. Indeed, this is precisely the point of Art and Industry. Let me refer to the 1935 spring list that promoted the

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book. Eliot writes there that a previous Faber publication by Read, Art Now (1933, and already into a second edition by 1935), was what we would call today a ‘prequel’ to Art and Industry. In the notice, Eliot acknowledges that the ‘ordinary man’ has been ‘bewildered’ in recent years by modernist innovations in the visual arts. Read did, it seems, a masterful job in elucidating these developments in the earlier book. In the new book, however, Read, Eliot tells us, takes the argument in a new direction.39 The ‘artistic spirit’ which animated modernist visual culture at the high end of the artistic spectrum has sunk more deeply into society and affected the lower depths as well, namely in ‘the designs of objects which are in everyday use’. This, we are told, is a difficult task because art at work has to satisfy several masters – the abstract principles of design, the requirements of use and comfort, and the conditions of machine production. The move away from the artisanal modes of production in early modernist design in, say, the Omega Workshops, is here made explicit. However, Read’s task is easier in the new book because ‘everybody has begun to be familiar with the look of modern houses, furniture, decorations and so forth’.40 Eliot claims that Read’s book is the first in English to tackle systematically the ‘questions’ raised by modernism as they relate to the education of artists and designers. He concludes the notice by inviting visitors to the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of industrial art (January–March 1935) to read Art and Industry as preparation in order to ‘enormously’ increase their understanding of the exhibits. ‘The book’ itself, Eliot writes, ‘is . . . a model of the very best modern machine production’.41 The marketing of the book is brilliantly carried off, from the initial engagement of the attention of Read’s earlier readers to the sense of the unavoidable presence of modernist culture everywhere in modern life, and from the remarks about the materially germane exhibition at the Royal Academy to the closing comment about the book itself as apt illustration of its own theses. I think that even this glance at the way the Faber company construed modernity reveals the general goal of the programme. The pervasiveness and inescapableness of the modernist revolution in everyday life, the popular arts, mass culture and, of course, at the tonier end of the scale, in the dissemination of cultural artefacts for the highest of brows suggests modernism’s general relevance to society. In this way, the artefacts of high modernist culture, the poetry of an Eliot, or a Pound, the fiction of Barnes, the experimentalism of Jones and Joyce, are seen as the tip of the iceberg of modernism. A great deal of modernism, it seems, is submerged in everyday life

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and has, no doubt, become so pervasive and familiar, or so the programme wants the consumer to believe, that social life is no longer conceivable without it. And this was no doubt true. But marketing books as modernist was not the only factor in the company’s designs on its readers. There was plenty of discussion among the editorial staff and the director group at their Wednesday meetings and in correspondence on the question of the readership’s conservatism and its possible resistance to modernist innovation.42 There was also an appreciation for the particulars of specifically English or British resistance to the modern. It was necessary not only to give the impression that modernism was everywhere and could not be resisted, but that the readership needed training and education in the proper sort of understanding and appreciation. In this, Herbert Read was a key figure – namely the village explainer who was recruited to the task of explaining to suspicious, sceptical middle-class Britons the importance of the new movements. He was seen as much more successful than another well-known ‘village’ explainer, Ezra Pound, whose belligerence put off more people than he convinced. Wisely, T. S. Eliot also disqualified himself as explainer-in-chief to hoi polloi. He kept himself in reserve for the higher-end readership, what I called in a previous study the British mandarinate of university dons, clergymen, upper-level civil servants, sixth-form teachers, and members of the quality media. These elite readers, opinion-makers and leaders needed to be handled with greater delicacy and Eliot was the man for that job.

Notes 1. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, pp. 598–602 and 608–11. 2. To avoid confusion, it is important to distinguish between modernism and the avant-garde. The terms are not synonymous. This useful distinction was first explicated by Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde. 3. See Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice. 4. Nicholson, Among the Bohemians; Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity. 5. Censorship of the novel in the 1920s and the early 1930s had given the book as an object a value that skewed the logic of the market. The novel under conditions of censorship could not find its proper customer base. Censorship was and still is in many places a throwback to traditional social orders that fully developed market societies eventually destroy. The judgement that permitted the publication of the novel in 1934 severed one more tentacle from a traditional past. Modernist literature enters the mainstream the moment the law is modernised by

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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allowing the text into the market as a commodity. The justification for the publication, however, is not put in those terms. Freedom of speech and increasing the liberty of the individual are the liberal values invoked to break the grip of a censorious past in the heroic version of these events (but see The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, pp. 8–12 and 15–18 regarding the publication of Ulysses in Britain). Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, p. 58. Luckhurst, Bloomsbury in Vogue; Mellown, ‘An Annotated Checklist’; and see The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, p. 496n. Sheehan, ‘Dressmaking at the Omega Workshops’. There are class issues here that need a finer analysis than I can go into at this time. For one thing, this middle group of consumers is not necessarily co-extensive with the middle class. Obviously, there are the occasional upper-class customers of modernism as well, but there are surprisingly few of them. The working class and rather large remnants of the less adventurous middle class do not enter modernism until the 1950s and 1960s and then only because by then there are very few other mass cultural choices available. Box 169, Folder 4332, YCAL MSS 76, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society, p. 23. McCracken, ‘Voyages by Teashop’. Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market Society, pp. 163–93. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. 141–73. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 142. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 142. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, pp. 147, 142. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 147. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, p. 412. See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 4, pp. 435–6 and 461–2. ‘The History of Faber: 1930s’, Faber, 2016 [accessed 17 July 2016]. Certainly, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press had done much, with the help of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, to make the book wrapper a significant art object, but their productions were still aimed at a much smaller and more exclusive market. Flower, Fellows in Foolscap, pp. 76–7. See Connolly, Eighty Years of Book Cover Design. Connolly, Eighty Years of Book Cover Design, pp. ix–xviii. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, pp. 619–24. As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, the complete collection of Faber quarterly notices is only available in the company archive. It was through the good graces of the then company archivist, Mrs Constance Cruikshank, that I was allowed to examine these and other items some years ago. After Mrs Cruikshank retired, access – never entirely

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28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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John Xiros Cooper encouraged by the firm – became even more restricted. Eventually, all access ended when the company moved the archive to a location, I believe, in Essex. The archive as I saw it was never very well organised which led to a great deal of wasted effort and frustration. Perhaps the most important set of records for research purposes are the bright yellow forms and minutes of Book Committee meetings where publication decisions were discussed and made. These have either not survived from the firm’s early period or they are off limits to scholars. It seems a pity that the firm which was, and still is, one of Britain’s most important cultural institutions should guard so closely its institutional memory. But this did not seem to concern the company when I was seeking access; as one director put it to me in the late 1990s, ‘we are not a library, we’re a private business’. This was amplified some years later when I was told that the company records were being ‘capitalised’ which was why another one of my requests for access was denied. I was under the impression at the time that the company was ascertaining the commercial value of its records for eventual sale to a major university library. This I took to be a hopeful sign for research purposes. But it has come to nothing so far and access is, as in the past, difficult excepting those working on the various authorised editions of Eliot’s letters, prose and poetry. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, pp. 608–11. See The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 2, pp. 662–3. Autumn notice 1941, p. 36. Spring notice 1936, p. 28. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art, p. xii. Wilenski, The Modern Movement in Art, p. ix. Autumn list 1935, p. 83. Betjeman, ‘The Ten Storey Town’. Spring list 1935, p. 54. Spring list 1935, p. 53. Let me note also that McGrath wrote the book in BASIC (British, American, Scientific, International, Commercial) English. BASIC’s deviser, the British linguist C. K. Ogden, has provided an essay at the back of Twentieth-Century Houses, explaining the need and uses of this streamlined version of the English language. ‘The language’, Ogden writes, ‘has only 850 words, in addition to about 50 international words and the names of the numbers (which are needed for talking purposes only). These words are clearly printed on the list facing p. 232 – that is to say, on a space not much bigger than a bit of business note-paper – and they may be said over in 15 minutes on a small folding phonograph record’ (McGrath, Twentieth-Century Houses, p. 222). The intention was to make BASIC an international language for the purpose of eliminating as much as possible the confusion, ambiguity and misunderstandings that often attend communication between peoples of different languages

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and cultures. It corresponds, and Ogden makes this explicit claim in his essay, with McGrath’s promotion of an international design style for modern domestic interiors and architecture. See also Kinross, ‘Herbert Read’s Art and Industry’, p. 35. Spring list 1935, p. 54. Spring list 1935, p. 54. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. 7, pp. 812–14.

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Part II

Fine Books

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Chapter 6

Shakespeare and Company: Publisher Joshua Kotin

In 1922, Shakespeare and Company published its first book: James Joyce’s Ulysses. In 1927, it published its second: Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, a slim volume of thirteen poems. In 1929, it published its last: Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays about Joyce’s then-unpublished and untitled Finnegans Wake (1939). Three books in seven years – all connected to Joyce: this is the complete catalogue of Shakespeare and Company, publisher. But Shakespeare and Company was not only a publisher. It was a bookshop and lending library, which operated on the Left Bank in Paris from 1919 to 1941. It was also a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, a refuge for expatriates and students, and a crucible of avant-garde and modernist writing in both French and English. Finally, it was whatever Joyce needed it to be: bank, post office, reference desk, literary agency, advertising agency, delivery service, law office, hideout. To understand Shakespeare and Company the publisher, one must understand its focus on Joyce in combination with its myriad other activities. Many of the central questions of this edited collection are inapplicable. How did modernist publishers discover new talent? How did they balance the competing demands of their authors? How did they establish a niche in a crowded marketplace? But other questions take their place. How did a small bookshop and lending library transform itself into a publisher? How did it manage to publish (and keep in print) the most important – or controversial or overrated or whatever – novel of the twentieth century?

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Sylvia Beach Despite its name, Shakespeare and Company was actually one person: Sylvia Beach. She ran the bookshop and lending library; supported a wide range of writers, musicians and artists in interwar Paris; coordinated the publication, distribution and marketing of all three Joyce books; and tended to Joyce’s needs, from managing his appointments to paying for his eye operations. In Joyce scholarship, she is often portrayed as a martyr. ‘All she ever did was to make me a present of the ten best years of her life’, Joyce himself told Maria Jolas in the late 1930s.1 Beach’s life is well documented. The best sources are her autobiography, Shakespeare and Company (1959); Noel Riley Fitch’s Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (1983), which details Beach’s publishing activities and quotes passages from earlier versions of her autobiography; and Keri Walsh’s The Letters of Sylvia Beach (2010). Beach was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1887 to Sylvester and Eleanor Beach, and raised in Bridgeton, New Jersey. Her father was a Presbyterian minister and, in 1902, moved with his family to Paris to become associate pastor of the city’s American Church. (Beach was the second of three daughters.) In 1905, he moved with his family back to New Jersey to become pastor of Princeton’s First Presbyterian Church. There, he developed a close friendship with Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of Princeton University. After Wilson was elected president of the United States in 1912, Sylvester Beach became known as the ‘president’s pastor’.2 Between 1907 and 1916, Beach made two extended trips to Europe. She also made the short trip from Princeton to New York to meet Ben W. Huebsch. (Huebsch would publish Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in 1916 – see Chapter 1). Beach describes the meeting in her autobiography: He was extremely kind, and encouraged me in what, as I recall, was a vague plan for a bookshop. I don’t doubt that already there was a mysterious bond between Mr Huebsch and a future follower of his in the Joycean field.3

In August 1916, Beach moved to Paris, joining her younger sister, Cyprian, an actor in the French film series, Judex. (Beach’s older sister, Holly, worked for the Red Cross throughout France, and then in Italy.) In 1917, Beach volunteered in Touraine as a farmhand – ‘all

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the male farmers were at the front’– and worked as a journalist.4 That year, she also made her first visit to La Maison des Amis des Livres, a bookshop and lending library on the Left Bank, and met its owner, Adrienne Monnier. Monnier would become Beach’s life partner – they lived together from 1920 to 1936 – and La Maison des Amis des Livres would become the inspiration for Shakespeare and Company. In 1919, after a year serving with Holly in the Balkan Commission of the Red Cross in Belgrade, Beach began to make plans to open a bookshop and lending library. She considered opening a French bookshop in London and visited Harold Monro at his Poetry Bookshop to ask for advice. He ‘walked right down his winding stair in his velvet jacket to advise me strongly against’, she recalled.5 Then with the help of Monnier, Beach decided to open an English bookshop and lending library in Paris. In a speech for French radio in 1927, she recalls: It was a French woman, Mlle Adrienne Monnier, founder of the first literary bookshop in Paris, who gave me the idea of opening a library where French readers might become acquainted with modern literature of England, and particularly of America.6

Monnier found a location at 8 rue Dupuytren, a two-minute walk to La Maison des Amis des Livres, which was located at 7 rue de l’Odéon. Beach accepted a US$3,000 gift from her mother – ‘all her savings’ – and signed a lease.7 Beach also began to purchase books, scouring bookshops in Paris and travelling to London, where she bought ‘two trunks full of English books, mostly poetry’.8 Cyprian, now living in New York, ‘sent her the most recent American books’.9 Shakespeare and Company opened for business on 17 November 1919. Beach offered a twenty per cent discount to members of La Maison des Amis des Livres, and to students and professors. (The Sorbonne was a six-minute walk away.) Fitch lists the first customers: Louis Aragon, Léon-Paul Fargue, Valery Larbaud, André Gide, Georges Duhamel, Jacques Benoist-Méchin. Many would play important roles in the history of Shakespeare and Company. Larbaud, for instance, would coordinate the translation of Ulysses, which Monnier would publish under the La Maison des Amis des Livres imprint in 1929. In March 1920, Gertrude Stein visited and purchased a year-long membership (Figure 6.1). By June 1920, Shakespeare and Company had 106 active members.

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Figure 6.1 Gertrude Stein’s Lending Library Card

During the following year, the bookshop and lending library changed radically. On 8 July 1920, Joyce arrived in Paris from Trieste and moved with his family to an apartment at 9 rue de l’Université on the Left Bank. (Ezra Pound, also newly arrived in the city and living nearby, found the apartment for Joyce.) Nine months later, on 1 April 1921, Beach wrote her mother with startling news: Mother dear [Shakespeare and Company is] more of a success every day and soon you may hear of us as a reglar [sic] Publishers and of the most important book of the age . . . shhhhhh . . . it’s a secret, all to be revealed to you in my next letter and it’s going to make us famous rah rah!10

Beach could not wait to reveal the secret. In a postscript to the letter, she adds: ‘P.S. It’s decided. I’m going to publish “Ulysses” of James Joyce in October . . . !!! Subscriptions to be sent to Shakespeare and Company at once . . . Ulysses means thousands of dollars of publicity for me.’11

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In the midst of collecting subscriptions (pre-orders) for Ulysses, Shakespeare and Company moved to a larger space at 12 rue de l’Odéon, where it would operate for the next twenty years, across the street from La Maison des Amis des Livres. Monnier dubbed the neighbourhood, ‘Odéonia’, a ‘country of books and lovers of the word’.12

Publishing Ulysses How exactly did Shakespeare and Company come to publish Ulysses? The question has been answered many times – and in many different ways. In Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios (1928), the British journalist Sisley Huddleston provides a concise, one-sentence answer: Sylvia Beach, a young American girl, fell into the literary haunts of Paris as from the clouds, became the close friend of Adrienne Monnier, emulated her by opening a bookshop – in the same rue de l’Odéon – and, sharing the admiration of Valéry-Larbaud for Joyce’s work, boldly resolved to publish Ulysses.13

Joyce provides an answer of his own in a letter to Bennett Cerf, co-founder of Random House, dated 2 April 1932: My friend Mr Ezra Pound and good luck brought me into contact with a very clever and energetic person Miss Sylvia Beach who had been running for some years previously a small English bookshop and lending library in Paris under the name of Shakespeare and Co. This brave woman risked what professional publishers did not wish to, she took the manuscript and handed it to the printers . . .14

Joyce’s answer minimises the role of Shakespeare and Company: Beach is a courier, not a publisher. But he has a specific motivation: to create a space for Random House to take over the publication of the novel. The letter would appear in the prefatory material for the first authorised American edition, published by Random House in 1934. There are other valid answers as well. In The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses (2014), Kevin Birmingham connects a series of seemingly disparate events, including the Irish Rebellion of 1798; the passing of the so-called Comstock Act in the United States in 1873, which outlawed the distribution of obscene material; Joyce’s meeting with Nora Barnacle, his future wife, in Merrion Square in Dublin on 16 June 1904; the ‘plummeting franc’ after the First World War; and Joyce’s meeting with Beach at a dinner

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party at André Spire’s apartment on 11 July 1920.15 Pascale Casanova would surely emphasise the importance of Paris itself. She describes how ‘the most subordinated writers’ – the Irish Joyce would count – ‘manoeuvre with extraordinary sophistication to give themselves the best chance of being perceived’.16 Paris in the 1920s gave Joyce that chance. My answer, in this chapter, focuses on three events following Spire’s party. On 12 July 1920, Joyce visited Shakespeare and Company for the first time. Beach, already an admirer of his work, recalls: He was twirling a cane, and, when he saw me looking at it, he told me that it was an ashplant from Ireland, the gift of an Irish officer on a British man-of-war that had stopped at the Port of Trieste. (‘Stephen Dedalus’, I thought, ‘still has his ashplant’.) . . . He told me again that Pound had persuaded him to come to Paris. Now he had three problems: finding a roof to put over the heads of four people; feeding and clothing them; and finishing Ulysses.17

Joyce also told Beach about his eye troubles, and joined the lending library, borrowing J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904).18 As Fitch reports, ‘he was to return many times during the coming weeks and months to borrow more books, to cash checks, and to keep her informed of the progress of Ulysses’.19 The two other events concern the novel’s suppression in England and the United States. On 25 August 1920, Harriet Shaw Weaver, Joyce’s patron and publisher, and editor of The Egoist, abandoned plans to publish Ulysses in England.20 British law made publishers and printers responsible for the distribution of obscene material. Accordingly, a single ‘brave woman’ could not guarantee publication. She needed a printer-accomplice. (Weaver had tried to find one, approaching Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Hogarth Press, among many others.) Six months later, on 21 February 1921, Ulysses was banned in the United States. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the editors of The Little Review, which had begun to serialise the novel, were found guilty of distributing obscene material, fined US$50 each, and ordered to stop publishing excerpts of the book. The New York Times announced the verdict: ‘Improper Novel Costs Women $100’.21 The article states that ‘the chief objections had to do with a too frank expression concerning a woman’s dress when the woman was in the clothes described’.22 Joyce learned about the verdict in March and accepted that publication in England and the United States was now impossible.

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No one knows whether Joyce or Beach first suggested that Shakespeare and Company publish the novel. Joyce and Beach themselves seem uncertain. In a letter to Weaver, dated 10 April 1921, Joyce writes: ‘I arranged for a Paris publication to replace the American one – or rather I accepted a proposal made to me by Shakespeare and Co, a bookseller’s here, at the instance of Mr Larbaud.23 The switch from ‘arranged’ to ‘accepted’ marks Joyce’s uncertainty. Beach, in her autobiography, offers a melodramatic account of the agreement: All hope of publication in the English-speaking countries, at least for a long time to come, was gone. And here in my little bookshop sat James Joyce, sighing deeply. It occurred to me that something might be done, and I asked: ‘Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses?’ He accepted my offer immediately and joyfully. I thought it rash of him to entrust his great Ulysses to such a funny little publisher. But he seemed delighted, and so was I. We parted, both of us, I think very much moved.24

The narrative, here, seems clear. But in an earlier draft of her autobiography, Beach tells a different story: ‘I accepted with enthusiasm Joyce’s suggestion that I publish his book. I felt that my little bookshop was immensely honored.’25 Regardless of who actually made the initial proposal that spring, Shakespeare and Company was now a publisher. With guidance from Monnier, Beach and Joyce quickly settled on a plan for publishing the novel. In the same letter to Weaver, from 10 April 1921, Joyce explains: The proposal is to publish here in October an edition (complete) of the book so made up: 100 copies on Holland handmade paper at 350 frs (signed) 150 copies on vergé d’arches at 250 frs 750 copies on linen at 150 frs that is, 1000 copies with 20 copies extra for libraries and press. A prospectus will be sent out next week inviting subscriptions. There are many already in advance with shops here, I am told. They offer me 66% of the net profit. Today I delivered the first sheets to the printer and am to receive trial proofs on Saturday together with his estimate. The actual printing will begin as soon as the number of orders covers approximately the cost of printing . . .26

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That printer was Maurice Darantiere, who had already printed ephemera for Shakespeare and Company (flyers, business cards, labels) and books for La Maison des Amis des Livres. Darantiere began by printing a prospectus for Ulysses, which Beach and her friends mailed around the world, and distributed by hand in cafés and bars around Paris (Figure 6.2). In an unpublished essay, Beach recalls Weaver’s generosity: Miss Harriet Weaver had given me a complete list of her ‘Egoist’ readers, Joycists from way back . . . These people were of course the first to receive our ‘invitation to subscribe’ to Ulysses, and many of them subscribed by return of post.27

The price of Ulysses was high – even for the least expensive edition. In 1921, 150 francs were worth about thirteen dollars.28 For comparison, Marcel Proust’s three-volume Sodome et Gomorrhe (1923), the fourth instalment of À la recherche du temps perdu, cost just over twenty francs when it was published, and Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923) cost US$2.29 (The books were published by major publishers, Éditions de la NRF and Knopf, respectively.) Morrill Cody claims that ‘one could manage to live in Paris for less than twenty-five dollars a month’ in the early 1920s – that is, for the cost of two copies of Ulysses.30 After receiving the prospectus, George Bernard Shaw wrote to Beach that ‘if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen’.31 Yet all English-language books in Paris were expensive – hence the urgent need for a lending library. Writing in 1928, Huddleston recalls that: French books have, in my time, mounted from 3fr.50 to 12 francs – occasionally 15 francs – rarely more. But the cheapest English or American book works out in French money to 60 or 70 francs, and often it is well over 100 francs.32

It is doubtful that Shakespeare and Company could have published a more affordable edition of the book in 1922. (In 1924, it published an edition on low-quality paper that sold for sixty francs.) Beach had little capital. She did not accept pre-payment with the pre-orders, and was far from certain that she could sell all 1,000 copies. (When Weaver published the English edition of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1917, she ordered no more ‘than 750 sets of sheets’ from Huebsch.)33 Beach could not reliably – or even legally – distribute the book in its two largest markets. On 22 September 1921, she wrote to Holly about finances: ‘My business

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Figure 6.2 Ulysses Prospectus

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is going well and I could tackle the carpenter bill if I didn’t have to put every single centime aside to pay the printer of Ulysses five thousand francs on the 1st of December.’34 The publishing proposal was extravagant, but it was also practical. Despite the book’s price, orders began to arrive at Shakespeare and Company. Fitch reports that by ‘November [1921] there were 400 subscribers’.35 The list is a modernist who’s who: Gide, Yeats, Wells, Barnes, Firbank, Dos Passos, Hartley, Anderson. (First names are not required.) Lawrence Rainey, however, emphasises that ‘dealers . . . bought the overwhelming majority of copies’, and lists ‘eighteen shops, dealers, and agents who placed orders that totalled more than 1,000 francs’.36 ‘Taken together’, he concludes, ‘these dealers alone accounted for 55,280 francs, nearly 40 percent of the 142,000 francs in gross sales that Beach took in for Ulysses’.37 These dealers sold Ulysses at a profit. Fitch notes that in the United States, ‘the $13 edition sold for $20; the $23 edition for $30 (at Brentano’s for $35)’.38 Rainey seems scandalised by these numbers. He shouldn’t be. The prospectus circulated among a pre-selected elite. Customers outside this elite would have had difficulty ordering the book directly from Shakespeare and Company. Regardless, some customers may have simply preferred to pay a premium to a local dealer to avoid having to send payment to Paris and wait for Ulysses – then contraband – to arrive (possibly) by mail. As Shakespeare and Company was promoting the book and accepting subscriptions, Joyce was confronting a daunting set of tasks. Most significant: he had to complete Ulysses. As Luca Crispi writes in ‘Manuscript Timeline 1905–1922’ (2004): In the spring of 1921, neither the printer nor the publisher could have known that Joyce had still to finish writing the last two episodes of the book: ‘Ithaca’ (17) and ‘Penelope’ (18). Joyce himself could not have known how difficult writing those 113 pages (a full one sixth of the book as published) would prove to be.39

At the same time, Joyce had to help Beach manage a series of amateur typists who were preparing typescripts for Darantiere. (‘Circe’, the novel’s longest episode, required thirteen typists!)40 In addition, Joyce had to check the proofs that began arriving on 10 June 1921. He took the opportunity to radically expand the novel. On 26 August 1921, he collapsed from overwork. ‘The attack lasted about an hour’, he wrote Robert McAlmon the next day; ‘I could scarcely breathe and was very pale and weak – and nerves!’41 Three days later, Joyce wrote Weaver: ‘I have been obliged to reduce my working hours from about sixteen hours daily to six.’42

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Darantiere’s proofs are the key to understanding Shakespeare and Company’s impact on Ulysses. Imprimerie Darantiere set type by hand – despite the widespread use of linotype machines – and employed no English speakers. Errors were inevitable and frequent. Hugh Kenner gives one memorable example: [T]he Ulysses typesetters, of whom there were at least 26, lived in Dijon and knew no English whatsoever, which means they held strings of meaningless letters in their heads while swivelling back and forth between typescript and typecase . . . Thus one day in the summer of 1921 a compositor named Marchal made mental note of the W on ‘Weight’, reverted instead to the W on ‘Wonder’, and so dropped nine consecutive words out of Joyce’s text. That was one such incident of hundreds.43

These errors – which Beach estimated to average ‘one to half-a-dozen per page’ in the first edition – led to a manic proofreading process (involving Beach, Pound, McAlmon, Weaver and others) that complemented Joyce’s manic rewriting process.44 (‘Joyce wasn’t proofreading’, Birmingham remarks. ‘He was still writing.’)45 Ultimately, the errors led to a series of errata lists and ‘corrected’ editions from Shakespeare and Company over the next eight years. Indeed, there is a direct link between the challenges Shakespeare and Company encountered publishing Ulysses with Darantiere in France and the so-called Joyce Wars of the 1980s.46 Joyce’s near-constant revisions to the proofs expanded the length of the novel by almost a third. (In the prospectus, Beach announced that Ulysses would be a ‘volume . . . of 600 pages’. The first edition was 732 pages.) Joyce needed as many as eleven sets of proofs for some episodes: first galley proofs (or placards), then page proofs. Fitch quotes a draft of Beach’s autobiography: I let him have as many proofs as he wanted and [he] crowded them with as many additions as he could get onto the page. The final proofs contained more handwriting than print . . . After the ‘bon à tirer’ had been returned with Joyce’s and my signature, and the printing had begun on our beautiful handmade paper, the printers would receive a telegram with several extra lines to insert – but they were so obliging . . . as for me I was mad over Ulysses and would never have dreamed of controlling its great author . . .47

Joyce continued to send revisions to Darantiere until 31 January 1922. The cost was enormous. ‘One addition’, Birmingham observes, ‘could cause an avalanche of changes’.48 Darantiere warned Beach.

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Beach feared bankruptcy. But on 2 February 1922 – Joyce’s fortieth birthday – Ulysses was published. Early that morning, a Tuesday, Darantiere sent two copies to Beach by express train. She gave one to Joyce as a birthday present and placed the other in the window of Shakespeare and Company. Beach’s willingness to allow Joyce to expand Ulysses – no matter the cost – is the most important legacy of Shakespeare and Company, publisher. Few publishers would have been as indulgent or idealistic or visionary. Without Shakespeare and Company, the book would have been published eventually, but it would not have been the book we know today. Janet Flanner gets it right in her tribute to Beach, ‘The Great Amateur Publisher’ (1963): That Ulysses became the sort of book it is largely due to her, for it was she in this, her one publishing venture, who decided to allow Joyce an indefinite right to correct his proofs. It was in the exercise of this right that the peculiarities of Joyce’s prose reached their novel flowering.49

Beach made Ulysses by giving Joyce the freedom to make and remake it.

A one-author publisher By July 1922 the regular edition of Ulysses sold out.50 Over the next ten years, Beach would keep the novel in print, publishing, in total, 27,500 copies across eleven editions – or, more properly, printings. She would also support Joyce financially, supplementing his royalties with her personal income. If Weaver was his patron, Shakespeare and Company was his bank, dispensing cash as needed. Fitch quotes from an early draft of Beach’s autobiography: I don’t know what happened to the income from Miss Weaver which I suppose he received regularly but it didn’t seem to solve his problems, and I had to come continually to the rescue with my Ulysses Bank and even with the bookshop cash box. Except for the sums always set aside for the printers bills, everything coming in from Ulysses went Joyceward: how could so much money be advanced to the author without drawing on the publisher’s royalties? Owing to this system, I never had to wonder how to invest all this fortune I was supposed to be making with Ulysses. After all, I had my bookshop: and if I had wanted to make money I wouldn’t have chosen to make it out of

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anything that belonged to Joyce. My multiple services to Joyce were free, and I felt more than repaid by the fun I got out of knowing him and collaborating as you might say with him.51

Fitch’s gloss of the passage is, at once, clear-sighted and sympathetic: ‘[Beach’s] pay was the increase in business that came to the bookshop and the glamour that accrued from her association with a great author – she warmed herself at the fire she helped light for him’.52 Financial gain was never Beach’s goal. ‘I did not hold back any copies for speculation’, she wrote to Weaver on 26 June 1922; ‘Adrienne Monnier . . . took over a number and is beginning to sell them at Fr 500 (edition at Fr 150) and will give the proceeds to Mr Joyce.’53 Keeler Faus, a customer and employee at the American Embassy in Paris, describes Beach’s reluctance to sell books: When a new customer walked into the shop, she did not jump up to serve. With an attitude which verged on the indifferent, she waited until a customer had a question. Only then would she take a personal interest in the customer. Often she asked a question to see the extent of the customer’s knowledge and seemed to part reluctantly with each book.54

Shakespeare and Company was, first and foremost, a way to live a literary life. In 1938, Beach chastised her assistant, Eleanor Oldenberger, for asking Ernest Hemingway to settle his account. ‘Never do that again’, Beach declared, ‘Friends can have anything that they want. If they do not want to pay for what they take, they do not have to pay.’55 A team of forensic accountants: this is what it would take to reconstruct the finances of Shakespeare and Company. Beach did not separate her bookshop, lending library and publishing businesses. She promised Joyce sixty-six per cent of the profits from Ulysses, but seems to have given him all the profits. Her papers at Princeton University – 78.3 linear feet, 180 boxes – include hundreds of notebooks that detail her daily life: lending library memberships, Ulysses sales, publisher receipts, loans to struggling artists, grocery bills. Yet there is no clear breakdown of Shakespeare and Company’s income and expenses from year to year. Occasionally, she provides a relevant number in her letters – for example, on 27 January 1928 she writes to her father that Shakespeare and Company made only a 3,600-franc profit the previous year.56 But such numbers do not provide a clear portrait of the economics of publishing Ulysses. The profits from the

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book may have gone to Joyce or they may have subsidised the bookshop and lending library. Primary and secondary sources do, however, provide a clear portrait of how Shakespeare and Company kept Ulysses in print, and how Ulysses changed from edition to edition (Figure 6.3). Sam Slote’s Ulysses in the Plural (2004) is a resource. In June 1922, Beach agreed to help Weaver publish a second edition. (‘At this point’, Slote writes, ‘Beach had no intention to continue publishing Ulysses beyond the first edition’.)57 The second edition, printed by Darantiere using the plates from the first, was supervised by Weaver’s agent in Paris, the writer and publisher, John Rodker. The edition appeared on 22 October 1922 under the Egoist Press imprint, and sold for two pounds, two shillings – just over nine dollars. It was limited to 2,000 numbered copies, and included an eight-page list of errata, tipped in. Distribution was immediately a problem. By the end of 1922, the General Post Office in New York had burned between 400 and 500 copies, and the British Home Office had banned the novel. In January 1923, Rodker supervised the printing of a third edition, limited to 500 copies, to ‘replace those destroyed in transit to the USA’.58 These copies were almost all burned upon their arrival in England. In January 1924, Shakespeare and Company published a fourth edition under its own imprint. A fifth edition followed in September 1924. These editions were printed on inexpensive, brittle paper and sold for 60 francs each. A sixth edition appeared in August 1925 with better paper. All three editions reversed the colour scheme of the novel’s original cover – from white lettering on a blue background to blue lettering on a white background. (Joyce had required that Darantiere match the blue of the original cover to the blue of the Greek flag.) The next edition, the seventh, was published in December 1925 with the original cover design. For the eighth edition, Beach had Ulysses reset, and the new plates served as the basis for the final three editions. With each new edition, Darantiere corrected errors – directly or in errata lists – and occasionally introduced new errors. When he was preparing the second edition, for example, he wrote to Beach that ‘since the type he used was moveable, a few new errors might creep in’.59 New editions required new strategies to get Ulysses to customers. Shakespeare and Company became a smuggling operation, mailing copies to Canada to be taken across the border illegally and wrapping copies in innocuous dust jackets to trick customs agents. (Shakespeare’s complete works was a favourite.)60 Nevertheless, copies were routinely seized and destroyed. During this time, Shakespeare and Company

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Figure 6.3 Ulysses Printings, 1922–1930 Printing Date 1

2 February 1922

Imprint Shakespeare and Company

Print run Limitation

Cover

Price

1000

1–100

Blue

350f

–

–

–

–

101–250

Blue

250f

–

–

–

–

251–1000 Blue

150f

2

22 October 1922

Egoist Press

2000

1–2000

Blue

£2 2s

3

January 1923

Egoist Press

500

1–500

Blue

£2 2s

4

January 1924

Shakespeare and Company

2000

–

White

60f

5

September 1924

Shakespeare and Company

2000

–

White

60f

6

August 1925

Shakespeare and Company

2000

–

White

60f

7

December 1925

Shakespeare and Company

2000

–

Blue

75f

8

May 1926

Shakespeare and Company

4000

–

Blue

100f

9

May 1927

Shakespeare and Company

4000

–

Blue

125f

10

November 1928

Shakespeare and Company

4000

–

Blue

125f

11

May 1930

Shakespeare and Company

4000

–

Blue

125f

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continued to operate as a bookshop and lending library, six days a week. Customers could almost always secure a copy of Ulysses in person. For as little as eight francs a month – or sixty francs a year – lending library members could borrow an unlimited number of books, one at a time (Figure 6.4). Books had to be returned or renewed within two weeks, and members could pay extra to borrow two books at a time. According to extant records, Ulysses was the most frequently borrowed novel over the life of the bookshop and lending library. Due to the challenge of distributing Ulysses, piracy was always a risk. Copyright in the United States was still impossible to secure, and supply of the novel rarely kept up with demand. Beach spent much of the 1920s battling pirates. The most famous case involved the American publisher Samuel Roth. In 1925 and 1926, Roth published (without permission) excerpts of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (then titled ‘Work in Progress’) in his journal Two Worlds Monthly (Figure 6.5). In 1926, Beach organised a letter of protest, collecting signatures from Albert Einstein, Ivan Bunin, Benedetto Croce, José Ortega y Gasset, Robert Bridges, H.D., Knut Hamsun and Havelock Ellis, among many others (Figure 6.6). (‘The list of signatures is amazing in its literary dignity and length’, Flanner declared in The New Yorker in 1927.)61 Beach also threatened legal action – even though her legal position was tenuous. But Roth could not be stopped. In 1929, he published a complete edition of Ulysses. Robert Spoo tells the full story in Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (2016). When Random House published Ulysses, they used Roth’s pirated edition as their source text, replicating ‘most of its typographical errors’.62 The Roth debacle resulted in media attention – and significant legal fees. To protect himself from liability, Joyce decided to formalise his publishing agreement with Shakespeare and Company. The contract, dated 9 December 1930, gave Beach the ‘exclusive right of printing and selling throughout the world, the work entitled ULYSSES’, and confirmed that she would ‘print and publish at her own risk and expense the said Work’. In exchange, Beach would ‘pay the Author on all copies sold a royalty on the published price of twenty-five per cent’.63 (Notice that Joyce was willing to exchange sixty-six per cent of the profits for twenty-five per cent of the cover price – a sign that he did not trust Beach’s accounting of the ‘profits’.) When she signed the contract, Beach was still selling the eleventh edition of the novel, which would not sell out until the end of 1932.

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Figure 6.4 Lending Library Flyer

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Figure 6.5 Advertisement for Two Worlds Monthly with Beach’s Annotations

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Figure 6.6 Letter of Protest against Samuel Roth

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As Shakespeare and Company gained prominence, it began to receive unsolicited submissions. Beach describes one especially difficult rejection in her autobiography – Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928): It was sad refusing Lawrence’s Lady, particularly because he was so ill the last time I saw him that he had got out of bed to come to the bookshop and had a flushed, feverish look. It was distressing trying to explain my reasons for not undertaking other publications than Ulysses: lack of capital – but you couldn’t persuade anyone that Shakespeare and Company hadn’t made a fortune – and that we lacked space, personnel, and time. It was difficult to tell him that I didn’t want to get a name as a publisher of erotica, and impossible to say that I wanted to be a one-book publisher – what could anybody offer after Ulysses?64

Beach’s papers include a whole box of unsolicited submissions. My favourite is Alan Campbell’s Closing Doors, submitted on 19 January 1930. ‘The setting is San Francisco’, Campbell explains; ‘it is a study of homosexual adolescence – the high school years’.65 The book remains unpublished. But Beach was not exactly a ‘one-book publisher’. As Hugh Ford writes in Published in Paris (1975): A more accurate description would be a one-author publisher, for in 1927 she had agreed to bring out Joyce’s slender volume of poetry Pomes Penyeach, and in 1929 had overseen the production of the first apologia of Finnegans Wake, which appeared under the inflated title of Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress.66

In addition to these two books, Beach was also intimately involved in the publication of the first French translation of Ulysses in 1929. (La Maison des Amis des Livres published 1,200 copies in February.) Except for the French Ulysses, these books did not make a significant impact on literary history. Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress – which Beach called Our Exag and Joyce called O – is most famous for including Samuel Beckett’s first publication – his essay, ‘Dante . . . Bruno. Vico . . . Joyce’.67 Even Beach’s account of Pomes Penyeach is dismissive. In her autobiography, she writes: Every once in a while, Joyce wrote a poem, and usually, I believe, ‘threw it out’. Some he put aside, and in 1927 he brought me thirteen of these and asked me if I would care to print them: a baker’s dozen

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to be sold for one shilling, like the wares of the old apple women on the bridge over the Liffey. He called them Pomes Penyeach. That’s all they were worth, in his opinion . . .68

Beach commissioned Herbert Clarke, an English printer in Paris, to print 5,000 copies of the book, which was priced, initially, at one shilling or six francs and fifty centimes.69 (Beach would raise her prices as her books began to sell out.) Pomes sold slowly, but steadily: on 6 November 1932, she wrote to Paul Léon, then Joyce’s main adviser, that fifty copies were left. According to Fitch, the reviews disappointed Joyce, who had ‘hoped the poetry would moderate criticism of his new work’, which he had begun to publish in transition and elsewhere, and which would appear as Finnegans Wake in 1939.70 Pomes Penyeach was also pirated. On 15 April 1931, Beach received a letter from Alexander H. Buchman, then a student at the Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio explaining that he planned to print 100 copies of the book. In response, Beach rushed to secure copyright in the United States, which required that she print the book in the country. By 4 May 1931, she had arranged for Princeton University Press to print fifty copies, including two for the Washington, DC copyright bureau. The pirated edition appeared nevertheless – in an edition of just over 100 copies. ‘After the book was printed’, Buchman recalls, ‘we were told emphatically by Miss Beach . . . that we would be beheaded, or such, if we dared to print “Pomes”. Since “Pomes” had already been printed, we had little choice but to destroy the books or give them away. We chose the latter.’71 The third and final book published by Shakespeare and Company appeared in 1929. Our Exag includes twelve essays defending sections of what would become Finnegans Wake and two ‘Letters of Protest’. As Richard Ellmann observes, ‘the book had twelve writers, like . . . the twelve apostles of Christ’.72 Beach commissioned Imprimerie Durand in Chartres to print 3,000 regular copies and ninety-six numbered copies on vergé d’arches paper (Durand printed the French Ulysses). The regular edition sold for twenty-four francs and did not sell well.73 Beach designed the cover, which Joyce worried might ‘incline reviewers to regard [the book] as a joke’.74 The cover certainly did encourage the impression that Joyce was a cult leader – even a god. The names of the twelve apostles radiate from an absent centre – Joyce’s name does not appear – as if apophasis was the only way to understand the author’s greatness (Figure 6.7).

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Figure 6.7 Cover, Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929)75

After Joyce On 4 February 1932, ten years and two days after Ulysses was published, Beach wrote to Léon to confirm that she had given up her rights to publish Ulysses: I made a present to Mr Joyce last December of my rights to ULYSSES, as far as an edition in America was concerned. Some time later, on the 25th of January, Mr Colum told me that Mr Joyce was not satisfied with the contract between us for ULYSSES ‘because neither party was free to act without the consent of the other’. I replied that I supposed it resembled other contracts in that way, but, as I had already assured Mr Joyce in December, he might consider himself free from all obligation to me, and to dispose of ULYSSES to whomsoever and in whatever manner he pleased, without any question of an indemnity to me. Of course I understand that Mr Joyce is anxious to have this assurance from me on paper, so I hereby agree to cancel the contract between us for ULYSSES, and to give up my claims to this work for future editions.76

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As the letter indicates, Beach’s relationship with Joyce had deteriorated. Beach felt exploited after years of serving as Joyce’s everything. Joyce needed money and suspected that Beach was preventing him from securing a more lucrative publishing deal. The break-up, however, was not as neat as Beach’s letter suggests. Joyce was already negotiating with American publishers, and Beach would continue to make plans for a twelfth edition. (On 5 April 1932, she received a letter from Darantiere with quotes for 2,000, 3,000, and 4,000 copies.)77 On 24 October 1932, however, she wrote to Joyce directly, informing him that she ‘would no longer be able to serve [him] personally’: My time and energy are entirely absorbed in the problem of keeping my shop going in these bad times. Since most of the English and Americans have gone away, the library terms have to be revised for the French who, I hope, will take their place.78

In December 1932, an entirely new edition of Ulysses (authorised by Joyce) was published in Hamburg by the Odyssey Press, an imprint of Albatross Books. Beach sold copies – thirty-six francs for a twovolume edition, sixty francs for a one-volume edition – at Shakespeare and Company once her copies of the eleventh edition sold out. She received royalties on the Odyssey Press edition and continued to correspond with Léon about a range of matters. On 6 December 1933, Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that Joyce’s novel could be distributed in the United States. Less than two months later, on 25 January 1934, Random House published Ulysses in an edition of 10,300 copies. (They initially printed an edition of 100 to secure copyright.) The price: three dollars and fifty cents. Within three months, 35,000 copies had been sold –‘more than all the copies of the Shakespeare and Company editions combined’.79 Beach did indeed refocus her attention on the bookshop and lending library. But she also became a resource for information about Joyce, corresponding with scholars and a growing number of Joyce collectors. In 1935, she printed a catalogue of rare material to raise money for Shakespeare and Company – Joyce manuscripts and editions, two Blake drawings, Whitman manuscripts. (In 1926, she had printed a twelve-page catalogue for a Whitman exhibit she curated and hosted at Shakespeare and Company.) In 1936, she organised Les Amis de Shakespeare and Company to support the bookshop and lending library. Members paid an annual fee to attend readings. (Joyce was often in attendance.) In 1941, during the German

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occupation of France, she closed Shakespeare and Company after a German officer threatened to confiscate its contents. Beach would publish one additional book – but not under the Shakespeare and Company imprint. In 1959, her autobiography appeared from Harcourt, Brace. (A chapter, titled ‘Ulysses in Paris’, appeared as a gift book in 1956.) The reviews were positive. One ran with the headline ‘Bookshop was Mecca of Writers’, and another, ‘Left Bank Bookshop That Made Literary History’.80 My favourite, in The Bethlehem Globe-Times, ran with the headline, ‘Ulysses’ Sponsor Had Own Odyssey’.81 Together, the headlines capture Beach’s legacy – as Joyce’s publisher, and as the architect of a literary world.

Acknowledgement I thank Lise Jaillant, Eric Bulson, Ronan Crowley and Rachel Applebaum for feedback on earlier drafts of this chapter; Luca Crispi for research advice; and Stephen Ferguson, Gabriel Swift and the staff of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, for research assistance.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Jolas, ‘The Joyce I Knew and the Woman Around Him’, p. 86. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 26. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 8. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 14. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 39. Beach, Letters of Sylvia Beach, p. 321. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 17. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 18. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 39. Beach to Eleanor O. Beach, 1 April 1921, Box 5, Folder 3, Sylvia Beach Papers, PUL. Beach to Eleanor O. Beach, 1 April 1921, Box 5, Folder 3, Sylvia Beach Papers, PUL. Fitch, Walks in Hemingway’s Paris, p. 48. Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios, p. 208. Joyce, Ulysses, p. xvi. Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book, p. 148. Casanova, ‘Literature as a World’, p. 89. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, pp. 37, 38.

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18. Joyce’s earliest extant lending library cards, now in the James Joyce Collection at the University at Buffalo Libraries, indicate that the first book he borrowed was Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder (1893) on 16 November 1920. Cards recording earlier transactions have been lost – or never existed. 19. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 67. 20. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 491. 21. ‘Improper Novel Costs Women $100’, The New York Times, 22 February 1921, p. 12. 22. ‘Improper Novel Costs Women $100’, The New York Times, 22 February 1921, p. 12. 23. Joyce to Weaver, 10 April 1921, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, p. 162. 24. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 47. 25. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 78; also quoted in Ford, Published in Paris, p. 6. For additional accounts of the agreement to publish Ulysses, see Bishop, ‘The “Garbled History”’, pp. 7–12. 26. Joyce to Weaver, 10 April 1921, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, p. 162. 27. Beach, ‘The Ulysses Subscribers’, Box 47, Folder 4, Sylvia Beach Papers, PUL. 28. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 126. 29. According to the Bibliographie de la France (1923), each volume of Sodome et Gomorrhe cost six francs, seventy-five centimes. 30. Cody, The Women of Montparnasse, p. 8; also quoted in Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, p. 63. 31. Shaw to Beach, 11 June 1921. Quoted in Deming (ed.), James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, vol. 1, p. 190. 32. Huddleston, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios, p. 208. 33. Quoted in Slocum and Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, p. 19. 34. Beach to Holly Beach, 22 September 1921, Letters of Sylvia Beach, p. 88. 35. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 107. 36. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, pp. 44, 60. 37. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, p. 61. 38. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 126. 39. Crispi, ‘Manuscript Timeline 1905–1922’. 40. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 513. Ronan Crowley notes (in an email to me) that this number is an exaggeration – three or four amateur typists worked on the episode. 41. Joyce to McAlmon, 27 August 1921, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, p. 170. 42. Joyce to Weaver, 30 August 1921, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, p. 171. 43. Kenner, ‘An Insane Assault on Chaos’. 44. Ford, Published in Paris, p. 19. 45. Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book, p. 216. 46. ‘The Joyce Wars’ refers to the controversies surrounding Hans Walter Gabler’s editions of Ulysses, especially his Ulysses: The Corrected Text (1986). For an account of the Joyce Wars, search for ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Gabler’ in the online archives of The New York Review of Books.

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134 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

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Joshua Kotin Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 106. Birmingham, The Most Dangerous Book, p. 216. Flanner, ‘The Great Amateur Publisher’, p. 47. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 120. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, pp. 129–30. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 130. Beach to Weaver, 26 June 1922, Letters of Sylvia Beach, p. 97. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 359. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 389. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 268. Slote, Ulysses in the Plural, p. 13. Slocum and Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, p. 27. Slote, Ulysses in the Plural, p. 14. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 119. Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday, p. 17. Slocum and Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, p. 31. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 308. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 93. Alan Campbell to Sylvia Beach, 19 January 1930, Box 55, Folder 2, Sylvia Beach Papers, PUL. Ford, Published in Paris, p. 32. Colette Colligan argues that the distribution of books – especially banned books – was also kind of publication: the ‘virtual imprint’ of Shakespeare and Company, she writes, ‘is on the other banned books that [Beach] supplied to dealers from her bookshop’. See Colligan, A Publisher’s Paradise, pp. 173–4. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 283. Beach, Shakespeare and Company, p. 174. Sylvia Beach, ‘Diary of a Publication, 1927–1931’, Box 53, Folder 13, Sylvia Beach Papers, PUL. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 263. Quoted in Slocum and Cahoon, A Bibliography of James Joyce, p. 38. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 613. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 613. Joyce to Larbaud, 30 July 1929, Letters of James Joyce, vol. 1, p. 283. Beckett et al., Our Exagmination. Beach to Léon, 4 February 1932, Letters of Sylvia Beach, p. 139. Maurice Darantiere to Sylvia Beach, 5 April 1932, Box 49, Folder 5, Sylvia Beach Papers, PUL. Beach to Joyce, 24 October 1932, Letters of Sylvia Beach, p. 145. Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, p. 342. Ellmann, ‘Bookshop Was Mecca of Writers’; Gannett, ‘Left Bank Bookshop That Made Literary History’. Hutchison, ‘Ulysses’ Sponsor Had Own Odyssey’.

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Chapter 7

Publishing the Avant-Garde: Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press Mercedes Aguirre

Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press was one of the most successful expatriate small presses operating in France during the interwar period. Cunard founded the Hours Press in 1928 at her house in Réanville, Normandy, later moving to Paris in 1929. In its four-year run, it published twenty-four works by some of the most notable names associated with modernism, including Ezra Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos and Samuel Beckett’s first published book, Whoroscope, in addition to works by Laura Riding, Robert Graves, Louis Aragon, George Moore, Richard Aldington, Bob Brown and Brian Howard, among others. The books published by the Hours Press were also innovative in their design, and Cunard commissioned artists associated with surrealism and other avant-garde movements, including Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, John Banting and Len Lye, to create illustrations for the covers. This chapter looks at the history of the Hours Press and its publications in the context of the group of small presses founded by expatriate writers in France during the interwar period. Cunard’s biographers Anne Chisholm and Lois Gordon have explored her role as a publisher,1 and a description of the activities of the Hours Press – partly based on Cunard’s own memoir – appears in Hugh Ford’s influential study of expatriate presses, Published in Paris.2 Accounts of the Hours Press have often emphasised the personal relationships between Cunard and her authors, among whom were several old friends and acquaintances, downplaying her choices as a publisher and the distinctive identity of its publications. However, the Hours Press was never conceived of as a private press for a coterie of writers. An examination of its titles shows a marked influence of avant-garde, and especially surrealist, themes and preoccupations. This chapter

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situates the productions of the Hours Press as part of an early wave of English-speaking publications that fostered the dissemination and exchange of surrealist and surrealist-inspired ideas between French avant-garde circles and the Anglophone world years before the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition, which is widely considered as the fundamental event for the diffusion of the movement in Britain. Reconstructing the history of the Hours Press is complicated by the general lack of archival records of its editorial and publishing activity. Most of the documents Cunard kept regarding her role as publisher, including business letters about the Hours Press, manuscript drafts and letters from authors, were destroyed during the Second World War when German soldiers plundered her house in Normandy. After the defeat of the Nazis, local villagers, resentful of foreign presence, ransacked the house. When Cunard returned to France in the summer of 1945, she was faced with a horrible scenario: her papers and books had been ruined, as had many of the works of art by her surrealist friends. While Cunard rejected requests to write her autobiography during the 1950s and 1960s, reluctant to contribute to mythical retellings of the ‘roaring 20s’, she agreed to write a memoir of her experience as a publisher. These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, which she began to write in the late 1950s and which was published posthumously in 1969, provides valuable insights into her experience as a printer, and evidence that she considered the creation of the Hours Press to have been one of the principal achievements of her diverse career. Glimpses of the activity of the Hours Press also appear in the memoirs and letters of its authors and collaborators, including Samuel Beckett, Henry Crowder and Richard Aldington. But the best evidence of the importance of the Hours Press is its list of publications, twenty-four books in a variety of formats containing works by major modernist writers and bearing witness to the role of the press as a bridge between French-based avant-garde circles and Anglophone writers and audiences.

Literary beginnings and the expatriate presses in Paris Born in 1896 in Nevill Holt in Leicestershire, Nancy Cunard had a long and varied career as a poet, editor and journalist, as well as the author of biographies of George Moore (GM, 1956) and Norman Douglas (Grand Man, 1954). From the late 1920s until the end of her life, she was a committed activist for civil rights and against racial

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discrimination. She is today perhaps best known as the editor of Negro: An Anthology (1934), a pioneering interdisciplinary anthology of articles, poems, artworks and musical scores exploring the literature and culture of the African diaspora. Her mother, Lady Maud Cunard, was a society hostess and patron of the arts, and regular guests at her house included Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and the writer George Moore, who became Nancy Cunard’s literary mentor.3 In 1916, Nancy Cunard’s poems appeared in the first issue of the anthology series Wheels, which she probably co-edited with Edith Sitwell. Cunard’s poem provided the title for the series. Her first book of poems, Outlaws, appeared in 1921. In 1923, she published Sublunary, in which she drew inspiration from her travels around Europe. The following year, her poem ‘The White Cat’ was collected in The Best Poems of 1924, an issue of a yearly anthology of American and British poetry edited by Leonard Strong, alongside works by Sitwell, Siegfried Sassoon and Amy Lowell. In 1925, Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press published her long poem Parallax, which Woolf hand-set herself.4 Like many other British and American writers, Cunard moved to Paris, encouraged by the city’s intellectual and artistic atmosphere and the sense of creative freedom it inspired. In Paris, she became part of several international artistic and literary groups, and became particularly close to the surrealist circle, participating in several projects by its members. Cunard’s main contribution to surrealism, however, was her work for the Hours Press as a publisher and a printer. Her ability to foster creative collaborations among writers and artists – and, importantly, her tireless work and determination to see the projects to completion – became crucial for her work as a publisher and for later editorial projects connected to her activism, including the anthology Negro. Her charismatic personality was captured in novels of the time. Cunard appears as Myra Viveash in Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay and as Lucy Tantamout in his Point Counter Point, as well as in Louis Aragon’s Le Con d’Irène and as Baby Bucktrout in Wyndham Lewis’s The Roaring Queen.5 From the 1920s onwards, Cunard developed an interest in African culture and art and began to wear her signature stacked African ivory bracelets, with which Man Ray and Cecil Beaton photographed her. Her reputation as a rebellious heiress, her public fights with her mother, and especially her romantic relationship with Henry Crowder, an African American musician, turned her into gossip fodder, and her life was followed with interest by British and American tabloids throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

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Cunard had been living in France for eight years when she founded the Hours Press in 1928. Like other exiled British and American writers in Europe, she decided to set up a press, joining the list of expatriate small presses that included William Bird’s Three Mountains Press, Henry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s Plain Edition, Edward Titus’s Black Manikin, Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press, Bob Brown’s Roving Eye Press, and Robert Graves and Laura Riding’s Seizin Press. Despite their reduced print runs, small presses played a crucial role in shaping the modernist canon by encouraging innovative writing and fostering creative partnerships, and the Hours Press was no exception, publishing work by Beckett, Pound, Riding and Graves, among others. Many of these presses were initially funded by the writers’ private wealth. Cunard used an inheritance from her father to buy her house in Normandy6 as well as the printing press and materials, and she hired a professional printer to teach her to set type and help with the production of the books. Her case was not exceptional: Robert McAlmon founded Contact Editions with money from his in-laws, and the Three Mountains Press was self-funded by the American journalist William Bird.7 This does not mean, however, that Cunard saw the Hours Press as a hobby. Although she had no experience in printing or bookkeeping – like many of her contemporaries who taught themselves how to hand-print – Cunard conceived the Hours Press as both a creative and a professional venture. Without ever reaching the success or print runs of the Hogarth Press, which transitioned from a small press to a more commercial enterprise during the 1930s,8 Cunard’s aim was for her books to be distributed widely. Several Hours Press books sold out soon after publication, including Peronnik the Fool by George Moore (1928), Poems by Roy Campbell (1930) and Ten Poems More by Robert Graves (1930). The books were sold in several international bookshops including the Warren Gallery in London, the Holliday Bookshop in New York, José Corti and Edward Titus’s bookshops in Paris, through Pino Orioli, who was Norman Douglas’s publisher in Florence, and from 1929 in her own shop in Paris.9 The prices ranged from £5 5s for a signed copy of Pound’s Cantos, bound in Cuir Vermeil with gilt lettering, to one shilling for an unsigned copy of Beckett’s poetry pamphlet Whoroscope, bound in scarlet paper.10 The editions were usually between 100–200 copies, and occasionally the Hours produced two or three editions of the same work with different qualities of paper, binding and lettering. Despite the small editions, reviews of Hours Press books appeared in British and American periodicals

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including The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation and Saturday Review of Literature. In 1930, Janet Flanner wrote about the Hours Press in her ‘Paris Letter’ for The New Yorker, praising Cunard’s success in the competitive French market of limited editions.11 The extent to which the group of expatriate small presses identified as a collective movement, or whether they can be described as a network or community, is unclear. The presses were idiosyncratic institutions and their publications reflected the taste of their founders. Cunard stated in a letter written in 1959 that she never had any contact with Henry and Caresse Crosby of the Black Sun Press or Robert McAlmon of Contact Editions, and she claimed that her relationship with Laura Riding and Robert Graves focused exclusively on her role as publisher of their poetry collections.12 However, despite Cunard’s reluctance to place the Hours within a community of expatriate presses, these were connected by the authors they published. Ezra Pound, for instance, had published A Draft of XVI Cantos with the Three Mountains Press in 1925, and A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 with John Rodker in London in 1928, before the Hours Press printed A Draft of XXX Cantos – the first printing of the collected Cantos. The Black Sun Press published Bob Brown’s 1450–1950 in August 1929. Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press published The Well of Loneliness with a commentary by Havelock Ellis before Cunard published Ellis’s The Revaluation of Obscenity, and Obelisk would later publish works by Hours Press authors Richard Aldington and Norman Douglas in the mid-1930s. In addition, some of the Hours books were written by fellow poet-publishers, including Rodker, founder of the Ovid Press, Robert Graves and Laura Riding, who ran their Seizin Press from Mallorca, and Bob Brown, who founded the Roving Eye Press in the late 1920s. These connections also extended to the printing presses themselves. Cunard acquired a Belgian Mathieu hand press from William Bird, who in 1922 founded the Three Mountains Press in Paris, which would later form the basis of Robert McAlmon’s Contact Editions. Like Cunard, Bird decided to learn how to print by hand, publishing works by Pound and William Carlos Williams, among others, until ceasing publishing activity in 1925. Cunard recalled paying £300 for the press, as well as ‘a good deal of Caslon Old-Face type, wooden furnishing, and an appreciable amount of paper – a handsome Vergé de Rives’.13 After she closed the Hours, Cunard sold her Minerva press to Guy Lévis Mano, founder of Éditions GLM, who published key works by surrealist authors and artists during the 1930s.

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Beginnings of the Hours Press: printing in Réanville Cunard had bought a house, Le Puits Carré, in Réanville, Normandy, where she set up the press. Her friend Richard Aldington, who visited her in Réanville in early December 1928, described how the house had two separate buildings in the garden, one of which held the press and the other a library.14 At the time Cunard was in a romantic relationship with the surrealist writer Louis Aragon, who helped her with the plans to refurbish her house. In her memoir, she explains how William Bird himself supervised the move and assembly of the press to her house and provided a professional printer, Monsieur Lévy, who moved to Réanville and taught Cunard and Aragon to set type. Reflecting upon her reasons for starting the Hours Press, Cunard stated that what attracted her most about the idea of printing was ‘the sense of independent creativeness it might give one’,15 a comment that echoes Woolf’s famous assertion about the creative freedom the Hogarth Press granted her as woman writer: ‘I am the only woman in England free to write what I like’ (see Chapter 4).16 Unlike other small presses initially established to publish works by their founders and their circle, however, the Hours Press was never conceived as a vehicle for Cunard’s own poetry. The only pieces by her ever published by the press were two poems in Henry Music by Henry Crowder, a book of Crowder’s piano compositions. This differentiates the Hours from most of the small publishers set up by authors, including Seizin, Contact Editions and the Hogarth Press in England. Compare this too with the account of the founding of the Black Sun Press that Caresse Crosby gives in her autobiography: ‘In 1927 the Black Sun Press was born, the foal of Necessity, out of Desire . . . it did not occur to us to submit them to a publishing house – the simplest way to get a poem into a book was to print the book!’17 Cunard saw herself primarily as a publisher and printer from the start of the press’s activity, with a focus on contemporary literature and innovation in design. These Were the Hours is a celebration of the work of the printer as a crucial component of the creative process. Cunard’s enjoyment of the craft of printing is evident in the memoir, in which passages about the Hours Press’s authors are intercalated with descriptions of the printing process that oscillate between the technical and the lyrical, describing aspects of typesetting, guttering, composition and pagination. Perhaps as a response to characterisations that portrayed her as a wealthy dilettante, her narration emphasises manual labour and presents it as creative work. Cunard recalls the scepticism of

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her friends when she announced her intention to become a printer: ‘John Rodker . . . [was] positively bewildered. Leonard and Virginia Woolf . . . wrote “Your hands will always be covered with ink.”’18 The printing process was also an object of interest for avantgarde artists, who favoured the letterpress over modern presses as it allowed experimentation with typography. For the surrealists, the act of printing appears to have had a special mystique, which extended to the printing press itself. Cunard kept a scrapbook of photographs relating to the Hours that included pictures of herself at work in the press. These are not candid images but posed photographs that show Cunard in full make-up and smartly dressed, and they convey an interpretation of printing as both craft and performance. Man Ray developed his take on the printing press as a subject in a series of photographs with the surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim. The images, which depict Oppenheim posing naked with a press, her hand covered in ink, appeared in the surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933. A comparison of the images throws light on the way Cunard aimed to present herself and her work for the Hours. Whereas Cunard’s stylised photographs engage with printing as a form of artistic creation, she is depicted while working, in contrast to Oppenheim’s artistic engagement with the press as an eroticised object dissociated from its primary function. When Cunard describes Richard Aldington’s The Eaten Heart, published in 1929, the act of printing becomes a medium through which to gain a deeper artistic appreciation of the text: I knew it almost by heart at the end of setting it myself, in the first days of that hard-come spring, with its sharp, cold sunsets that marked not the end of my day in the printery . . . An intimate communion with a long, intense poem is already there, if one reads it as often as one does, say, The Waste Land. How much more so when, letter by letter and line by line, it rises from your fingers around the type.19

She also found printing more agreeable than the mountains of administrative and logistical work associated with starting a publishing imprint, the quantity of which surprised her. Looking back, she recalled how printing activities ‘clerking included, turned into a fourteen or fifteen-hour day’.20 Richard Aldington also commented that she appeared surprised at the amount of work needed to run the press, and he believed that she was going to ask him to take over the publishing side of the business: ‘And I don’t want to, because it would take all my time, chain me down & keep me from my own work.’

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Aldington had visited her in Réanville when she was working on George Moore’s Peronnik the Fool, the first book to come out with the Hours Press imprint, and was surprised by the laborious process of typesetting: ‘the hand-press is a bore. I set up a couple of lines of type, & helped pull off a few sheets of G.M. – & it takes ages.’21 After ending her romance with Aragon, Cunard began a relationship with the American jazz musician Henry Crowder in the second half of 1928. When Crowder moved to Réanville with Cunard, he took up some of the clerking work associated with the press, including packing and sending book orders, as he described in his memoir As Wonderful as All That?22 The list of Hours Press authors combined upcoming writers with well-established names such as Norman Douglas and Arthur Symons. The press also published works by some of the most prominent modernist writers, including Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930), with initials designed by his wife Dorothy Shakespear. Samuel Beckett’s first published poem, Whoroscope, was published by the Hours Press after he won a poetry competition set up by Cunard and Richard Aldington in 1930. Beckett was then twenty-three years old and a lecteur or teaching assistant at the École Normale Supérieure. Cunard and Aldington placed their call for submissions in the July 1930 issue of Poetry, with these brief guidelines: Miss Nancy Cunard of the Hours Press, 15 rue Guénégaud, Paris, in association with Richard Aldington, has offered a prize of ten pounds for the best poem up to 100 lines, in english or american [sic] on time (for or against).23

Though Cunard would later state in her memoir that Beckett’s name ‘meant nothing to either Aldington or myself’,24 Beckett had met Aldington two years before through his friend and fellow lecteur Thomas McGreevy.25 Cunard found Whoroscope striking though hermetic, and Beckett agreed to provide some explanatory notes that were printed with the poem. Beckett later became a collaborator on several of Cunard’s projects, and he was the author of most of the translations from the French for Negro: An Anthology.

Surrealism and the Hours Press As was typical of small presses, the authors Cunard published initially came to her through fellow writer friends, several of whom were connected with avant-garde circles. Various books published by the

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Hours Press dealt with central concerns of the surrealists, including homages to literary forefathers of the movement Guillaume Apollinaire and Paul Verlaine, an essay on sexuality by Havelock Ellis, and iconoclastic satire such as Aldington’s Christmas poem Hark the Herald. Particularly from the 1930s, the book became an important instrument for communicating surrealist ideas. The format of the book allowed artists to experiment with text and images, resulting in what Virginia Zabriskie has called the ‘marvellous union of artist, writer, and publisher’.26 Surrealism, as Mary Ann Caws and Peter Stockwell have explored, first began as a literary movement.27 Its aims, as defined by Breton in the Surrealist manifesto, were to ‘express – verbally . . . – the actual functioning of thought . . . in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’.28 The movement rejected bourgeois values and social conventions, aiming to use art to disrupt traditional beliefs. The printed text was a fundamental medium for surrealism and other avant-garde movements, from the publication of manifestos to the creation of magazines that helped to establish group consciousness. The crucial moment for the dissemination of surrealism in Britain was the spectacular and massively attended International Surrealist Exhibition, which took place at the New Burlington Galleries in London in 1936. The movement had a comparatively late start in Britain, with poet David Gascoyne its main exponent. As Peter Nicholls points out, Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism appeared in 1935, eleven years after Breton presented the first surrealist manifesto in 1924.29 Michel Remy argues in his comprehensive study Surrealism in Britain that surrealism was first introduced from France to Britain through periodicals30 – in the first instance via Ford Madox Ford’s Paris-based bilingual magazine Transatlantic Review in 1924, then by the avant-garde Paris-based literary journal transition, founded in 1927 by Eugène Jolas and Maria McDonald. The Hours Press, based in Paris but publishing mostly Anglophone writers, was part of this ‘cultural bridge’ between France and the English-speaking world during the interwar period, encouraging the transmission and exchange of surrealist ideas and art through its publications. Cunard was conversant with the principles of the surrealist movement, its influences and its evolution, and had written about surrealism for the British press before starting the Hours. In a long 1927 article for the book supplement of The Outlook focusing on ‘literature since the war’, she analysed current intellectual and literary trends in France. Her article singled out surrealism as the leading artistic and

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literary movement in France, examining its literary predecessors, its relationship to Dada, and the role of the periodicals Littérature and La Révolution surréaliste. She also noted the connection of its members with the French Communist Party.31 The extent to which Cunard can be considered a surrealist, however, is unclear. Despite her involvement in many of their projects throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Cunard does not include herself when discussing the surrealists in her memoir. She was not one of the signatories to the manifesto and did not participate in the surrealist periodicals. She was indeed resistant to labels, advocating Communism in many of her publications during the 1930s but never becoming a card-carrying member. Recent scholarship has reclaimed Cunard as a surrealist in different ways. Penelope Rosemont included Cunard as an early surrealist in her influential 1998 anthology Surrealist Women, which reproduced an extract from the article in The Outlook. Tory Young has read Cunard’s pamphlet Black Man and White Ladyship, in which she denounced racism in British society, as a transgressive, surrealist-inspired ‘act of iconoclasm’.32 In his comprehensive study of surrealist stylistics, Peter Stockwell analyses Cunard’s long poem Parallax as a surrealist text, examining its ‘hybrid’ poetic voice, the ‘depersonification’ of the central character, which ‘lack[s] agency and wilfulness’, and the use of surrealist imagery to portray landscapes.33 Cunard’s connections with Dada and the surrealist group began in the 1920s when she met Tristan Tzara, founder of Dada, in France. They developed a close friendship and began a literary collaboration. In a letter sent to Transatlantic Review in 1924, Tzara announced that he was working collaboratively with Cunard on a French adaptation of Marlowe’s Faust,34 the drafts of which are still in her archive. Tzara dedicated his 1924 play Mouchoir de nuages (Handkerchief of Clouds) to Cunard, who had come up with the title of the play. Through Tzara, Cunard met several members of the surrealist group, including surrealist founders André Breton and Louis Aragon – with whom she maintained a lifelong friendship after the end of their relationship – and the artists Man Ray and Constantin Brancusi. Cunard worked collaboratively with leading figures in both Dada and surrealism such as Tzara and Aragon, and with artists and writers on the periphery of those movements. These collaborations took multiple forms. Eugene MacCown (sometimes McCown), the American painter, musician and translator who was close to the surrealists and became René Crevel’s lover, designed the cover of Cunard’s book of poetry for the Hogarth Press in 1925. He had

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also painted a portrait of Cunard in 1923, and in turn she reflected on the experience of posing for him in a poem, the sonnet ‘In the Studio’. In 1930, the Hours later published a catalogue of McCown’s paintings and drawings, a present to the artist by Cunard. The Hours Press was therefore associated with the surrealist circle from its origins in Réanville, and such connections continued when at the end of 1929 the press moved to a small shop on rue Guénégaud in the sixth arrondissement, close to the Galerie surréaliste. The shop displayed works by Dalí, Man Ray and Miró, as well as Cunard’s own collection of African, American and Oceanic art. Georges Sadoul, writer and contributor to La Révolution surréaliste, became a printing assistant. His appointment was not without challenges, as his knowledge of the English language was very limited. Around the same time, Cunard acquired a new and more modern hand press, a Minerva or ‘Cropper’ press, which enabled them to print faster. After the move to Paris, Cunard commissioned several artists to create designs and illustrations for the covers. The list included Man Ray (who created photomontages for the covers of Henry Music by Henry Crowder), John Banting (God Save the King by Brian Howard), Len Lye (Robert Graves’s Ten Poems More, Laura Riding’s Twenty Poems Less and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, and John Rodker’s Collected Poems) and Yves Tanguy (Walter Lowenfels’s Apollinaire: An Elegy). Lye, Tanguy, Banting and Ray all exhibited works at the International Surrealist Exhibition. The Hours publications crystallised many of the recurrent themes, artistic interests and critical influences at the core of the surrealist movement. Several of the Hours Press’s publications paid homage to the forefathers of surrealism. In 1930, the press published Apollinaire: An Elegy, a long poem by the American poet Walter Lowenfels, with covers designed by Yves Tanguy. Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the term surrealism in the preface of his work Les Mamelles de Tirésias, had died eleven years before, becoming an icon for the movement. Despite their philosophy of innovation and desire to break with convention, the surrealists claimed several nineteenth-century writers as predecessors, including Baudelaire and the Symbolist poets Mallarmé and Verlaine. The Hours Press published Mes Souvenirs, a collection of three essays including one on Verlaine by Arthur Symons, who had also previously translated the letters of Baudelaire into English. Louis Aragon’s French translation of Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark (La chasse au snark), which the Hours Press published

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in 1929, is one of its most emblematic publications. It was the only book the Hours Press published in a language other than English, and the only exception to Cunard’s policy of publishing contemporary writing. Aragon’s translation, the first rendering of Carroll’s work into French, received good reviews in the English press. The Times Literary Supplement called the translation ‘a masterpiece in its way’ and emphasised its modern quality: ‘What is charming is that if you omit Lewis Carroll’s mythology . . . the “Snark” in M. Aragon’s French reads as a metaphysical poem of the modern school.’35 Aragon’s choice of Carroll’s poem implicitly situated the English tradition of nonsense poetry as a precursor to surrealist art and aesthetics, which Aragon continued to explore in an article, ‘Lewis Carroll en 1931’, published in the December 1931 issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The Hunting of the Snark remained an important text for the surrealist tradition and was translated again in 1950 by Henri Parisot with drawings by Max Ernst. Other publications engaged with subjects of interest to the movement. In 1931, the Hours published Havelock Ellis’s essay The Revaluation of Obscenity. Ellis had written the prologue to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928, and his work, engaging with sexuality and the unconscious, resonated with the preoccupations of the surrealists. The artist Claude Cahun had also been inspired by Ellis and translated into French a section of his 1912 work The Task of Social Hygiene in 1929. Written after The Well of Loneliness was banned as obscene in England in 1928, The Revaluation of Obscenity was a success – the entire edition sold out.36

Primitivism and African and Oceanic art The Hours Press bookshop in Paris displayed a collection of avantgarde paintings and a selection of African and Oceanic sculptures and objects, linking its publishing activity with modern art. A booklet listing Hours Press publications that was published in 1930 stressed these connections, stating that the press was ‘interested in Ethnography – African Art, Oceania, and the two Americas and generally has on show a few specimens, as well as certain modern french [sic] pictures, a few English and American books, and the Surrealist series’.37 African art, interpreted through the Eurocentric lens of cultural primitivism, had been a fundamental influence on modern visual art since the beginning of the century. The surrealists saw ‘primitive’ art or art sauvage as unconstrained by bourgeois

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social rules. As Louise Tythacott argues, the primitive was seen as the ‘authentic antecedent – and antithesis – of European civilised society’.38 In France, the fascination with l’art nègre extended to mass culture in the form of jazz and music hall performances. Crucially, the Hours Press used African and Oceanic art to establish its status as an avant-garde institution, becoming such an important component of its identity that its letterhead read: ‘Hours Press: Éditions-Imprimerie-Librairie-Objets Sauvages’.39 The Hours Press pioneered the use of photomontage and photocollage on the covers of its books, anticipating what Renée Riese Hubert identifies as the consolidation of the surrealist book as a ‘fully integrated work of art’ after the Second World War.40 In 1930, the Hours Press published three poetry collections by Robert Graves (Ten Poems More) and Laura Riding (Twenty Poems Less and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine). Riding and Graves had founded their own small imprint, the Seizin Press, in 1927 in London. In 1930, the press moved to Deya, Mallorca, where its activity continued until 1937, when the couple left the island, forced out by the Spanish Civil War. The New Zealand artist and filmmaker Len Lye became the house artist for Seizin, designing a motif based on Maori art for the title page of Gertrude Stein’s An Acquaintance with Description (1929), as well as the covers for Riding’s Laura and Francisca (1930). Seizin also published a book of Lye’s ‘letters’, titled No Trouble. Cunard commissioned him to create the covers for Riding’s and Graves’s books. Lye’s biographer Roger Horrocks gives an account of how Lye created a collage sculpture for the covers while visiting Riding and Graves in Mallorca, making use of local natural materials such as stones, twigs and pieces of bark, which was then photographed by a local photographer. Horrocks emphasises that Lye’s work with the landscape was influenced by Australian Indigenous sacred sites.41 One of the most visually striking books published by the press was Henry Music by Henry Crowder (1930). It combined jazz music for piano written by Crowder with a selection of poems by Cunard, Richard Aldington, Harold Acton, Walter Lowenfels and Samuel Beckett, and covers by Man Ray. Mentions of the conception and production of Henry Music are notably absent in Crowder’s memoir, but Cunard describes how Crowder chose which poems to set to music. She contributed two poems to the book, ‘Memory Blues’, inspired by the cabaret Le Boeuf-sur-le-Toit, and ‘Equatorial Way’, written from the perspective of a black man leaving America for Congo to escape racial violence, which was reprinted in the February

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1931 issue of The Crisis, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) monthly magazine. Primitivist views of African art, admiration for the cultures of the African diaspora and a desire to end racial inequality coexist uneasily in Cunard’s editorial projects. Such problems are patent in the covers that Man Ray designed for Henry Music, a photomontage depicting Cunard’s collection of African ivory bracelets, showing Crowder in the top-left corner with Cunard’s bracelet-covered arms surrounding his neck and shoulders. To the present-day observer, the effect of this awkward grasp in combination with Crowder’s half-smile is undeniably disquieting. The inclusion of Crowder’s image among Cunard’s collection of African ivories and wooden statues appears to turn him into another fetishised object for consumption, or as Carole Sweeney has described in her study of the photograph, ‘a metonymic fragment of an imaginary African aesthetic’.42 The image also exemplifies how modernist taste for black culture conflated African American music and culture with African art, regardless of origin. Cunard’s relationship with Crowder was transformative. It was through him that she learned about the civil rights struggle of black Americans and began reading many of the authors that would later contribute essays and poems to her Negro: An Anthology, which is dedicated to Crowder. He was also the main motivation behind the publication of Black Man and White Ladyship (1931), an incendiary essay that denounced the racism of British society in general and her mother in particular, which Cunard printed privately and distributed among her British friends and acquaintances. As she became progressively more occupied with her activism, she left Wyn Henderson in charge of the press during its last year of activity. Henderson, a typographer who had founded the short-lived Aquila Press in 1929, had also published Cunard’s Poems (Two) in 1930. By the time the Hours Press published its last book, Havelock Ellis’s The Revaluation of Obscenity, in the spring of 1931, Cunard was already absorbed in the preparation of her anthology Negro, which was eventually published in 1934.

Political printing in the 1930s Although Cunard did not publish any more books under the imprint of the Hours Press after 1931, Georges Sadoul recounts that she had started to think about using the press to publish political documents, and that she was ‘ready to be at the disposal of clandestine associations’.43

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In December 1930, she was involved in the distribution of Dalí and Buñuel’s scandalous film L’Âge d’or. The film depicted a newly-married couple trying to consummate their relationship, and implicitly criticised the Catholic Church. It was shown in Studio 28, along with an exhibition of paintings by Dalí, Miró, Tanguy and Man Ray, and copies of the Surrealist manifesto. The film attracted such a strong reaction from French conservative and anti-Semitic groups that, after a violent attack on the projection room where it was being shown, the French authorities, who had previously given their approval, censored it.44 Temporarily, Cunard was given the only existing copy, which was in the custody of the owners of the Parisian bookshop Librairie Espagnole, and she arranged a screening in London on 2 January 1931. Yvonne Cloud (later Knapp) was commissioned by Cunard to write a four-page pamphlet explaining the controversy in France, which was distributed at the screening.45 This episode, the first of many political acts in Cunard’s career, marked a shift in her literary and publishing work, which from then on was inseparable from her political activism. In 1935, Guy Lévis Mano, founder of Éditions GLM, bought Cunard’s Minerva printing press.46 Éditions GLM continued Cunard’s collaboration with surrealist artists, publishing artists’ books by Yves Tanguy and Man Ray,47 and becoming one of the leading publishers of surrealist books in the 1930s. The old Belgian hand press was returned to Cunard’s house in Réanville, where it served other purposes in the late 1930s, including the production of a series of poetry pamphlets or plaquettes that Cunard and Pablo Neruda produced to raise funds during the Spanish Civil War, Les Poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol. Cunard continued involving her former collaborators in this project. Tristan Tzara was one of the contributors, and an Hours Press author, Brian Howard, wrote a poem for the publication. Other numbers included works by Federico García Lorca and Langston Hughes, and W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Spain’. It was a fitting ending for Cunard’s successful career as a printer, a project that united her literary sensibilities with her search for social justice.

‘Not those beastly twenties’: writing a memoir of the Hours Press Nancy Cunard began writing her memoir These Were the Hours at the end of the 1950s, thirty years after she had founded the press. The decade had seen renewed interest in the community of expatriate

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writers and artists that populated Paris during the interwar period, culminating in the exhibition ‘American Expatriate Writers and Their Friends’ at the Centre Culturel Américain in Paris in 1959. Curated by Sylvia Beach, the exhibition displayed portraits and works of authors connected to Shakespeare and Company, literary magazines, and a sample of books by small presses including the Hours Press.48 Cunard, who had worked with some of the most prominent artists and writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and who had been a passionate political activist, received several requests to write an autobiography. However, the only memoir she ever agreed to write was her account of her work with the Hours Press. These Were the Hours is narrated chronologically, structured tightly around the books published by the press. It provides precise descriptions of their production together with brief sketches of its authors. Cunard’s choice to focus on the Hours publications, with few concessions to more atmospheric descriptions, made her book a tough sell for publishers. In the autumn of 1959 she sent a manuscript titled ‘Such Were the Hours’ to Rupert Hart-Davis, who had published her biography of George Moore in 1956. Hart-Davis rejected the memoir, deeming it too ‘repetitive’ and noting ‘it doesn’t seem to me to add up to more than an interesting bibliographical footnote plus an interesting biographical one’.49 Through Hours Press author Walter Lowenfels, Cunard got in touch with the American scholar Hugh Ford, who offered to assist her with refining the draft for publication. In the correspondence that followed, Ford suggested ways of expanding the focus of the book to include her reminiscences about the lives of famous writers and artists of the Parisian Left Bank. Cunard’s response to his suggestion evidenced her fear that her book would contribute to fictional retellings of the ‘fabulous 20s’. As she wrote to Ford: I could never let it be ‘a gossip book’ with all that. Why in God’s name must every reader have to know ‘who-was-who’ in those beastly twenties?! . . . I cannot, and would not ‘gossip’ about people or things, ‘the atmosphere’ and so on; I am incapable of it.50

Cunard had focused on life writing for much of the 1950s, writing two well-received biographies about her close friends Norman Douglas (Grand Man [1954]) and George Moore (GM [1956]). Both projects would have prompted her to reflect on how her own achievements might be narrated and memorialised. Cunard, whose life and activism had sometimes been ridiculed in British and American tabloids,51 was

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reluctant to turn her book into the tell-all memoir of a wealthy dilettante, a characterisation she had fought against for most of her life. At the same time, she was eager to document the history of the Hours and its role among the expatriate small presses of the period. Two contemporary publishers had written memoirs of interwar Paris – Caresse Crosby’s The Passionate Years in 1955 and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in 1959 – and in 1962 Robert E. Knoll assembled the biography McAlmon and the Lost Generation, a composite work made out of McAlmon’s writings. As memoirs of the 1920s were published, so were apocryphal versions of Cunard’s life. Knoll’s book on McAlmon, for instance, wrongly stated that Cunard had married ‘General March’s coloured chauffeur’ during the First World War, a fact taken from another popular memoir of the decade, William Carlos Williams’s Autobiography (1951). By limiting These Were the Hours to a factual account of the activity of the press, Cunard was electing to emphasise her contribution to the development of modern literature as a printer and publisher, rather than as a literary personality. It is perhaps for similar reasons that she chose to open her memoir with the purchase of her country home in Normandy, where she first established her press, away from the literary salons of Paris. Cunard did not live to see her book in print, although she published a bibliographical essay and a list of the press’s publications in The Book Collector in 1964.52 The extraordinary list of Hours Press collaborators bears witness to Cunard’s role in fostering modern literature and creative exchanges. Within the group of expatriate small presses in interwar Paris, the Hours Press played an important part in the early dissemination of surrealist ideas and aesthetics to an Anglophone audience, its books forming a bridge between French and English-speaking avant-garde movements.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

See Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, and Gordon, Nancy Cunard. Ford, Published in Paris, pp. 253–89. Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, pp. 31–2. Woolf, Diary [6 January 1925], vol. 3, p. 4. Gordon, Nancy Cunard, p. 126. Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, p. 108. Knoll, Robert McAlmon, pp. 32–3. Wilson, ‘Virginia Woolf’, p. 238; see also Chapter 4.

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9. Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 15, and advertisement for Librairie José Corti, La Révolution surréaliste, 15 December 1929, p. 90. 10. Cunard, Hours Press Booklet. 11. Flanner, ‘Paris Letter’, pp. 34–47. 12. Nancy Cunard to Hugh Ford, 31 March 1963, Box 10, Folder 2, Papers of Nancy Cunard, HRC. 13. Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 6. 14. Aldington to Brigit Patmore, 6 December 1928, in Richard Aldington, pp. 90–1. 15. Cunard, These Were the Hours, pp. 6–7. 16. Woolf, Diary [22 September 1925], vol. 3, p. 43. 17. Crosby, The Passionate Years, p. 156. 18. Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 8. 19. Cunard, These Were the Hours, pp. 51–2. 20. Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 16. 21. Aldington to Brigit Patmore, 6 December 1928, in Richard Aldington, p. 91. 22. Crowder, As Wonderful as All That?, p. 85. 23. ‘News Notes’, Poetry, July 1930, pp. 230–3. 24. Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 111. 25. ‘Chronology’, in Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 1, p. 5. 26. Zabriskie, Paris in the 1930s, p. 3. 27. Caws, ‘Surrealism’, p. 189; Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, p. 5. 28. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 26. 29. Nicholls, ‘Surrealism in England’, p. 396. 30. Remy, Surrealism in Britain, pp. 29–31. 31. Cunard, ‘France’, pp. 525–6. 32. Young, ‘Nancy Cunard’s Black Man and White Ladyship as Surrealist Tract’, p. 157. 33. Stockwell, The Language of Surrealism, p. 165. 34. Tzara, ‘Letter to the Editor’. 35. ‘New Foreign Books’ (Review of La chasse au snark), Times Literary Supplement, 13 June 1929, p. 475. 36. Cunard, These Were the Hours, p. 192. 37. Cunard, Hours Press Booklet. 38. Tythacott, Surrealism and the Exotic, p. 50. 39. Nancy Cunard to George Moore, 24 January 1931, Box 10, Folder 4, Papers of Nancy Cunard, HRC. 40. Hubert, Surrealism and the Book, p. 287. 41. Horrocks, Len Lye, pp. 116–17. 42. Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject, p. 77. 43. Sadoul, ‘The Fighting Lady’, p. 146. 44. Hammond, L’Âge d’or, p. 60. 45. Cloud, A Note on the Affair, and Time Will Tell, p. 148. 46. Coron, Les Éditions GLM, 1923–1974, p. ix.

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47. See for instance Facile by Paul Éluard and Man Ray (1935), and Benjamin Péret’s Trois cerises et une sardine avec un dessin de Yves Tanguy (1936). 48. Centre Culturel Américain, Les années vingt, n.p. 49. Rupert Hart-Davis to Nancy Cunard, 27 October 1959, Box 15, Folder 9, Papers of Nancy Cunard, HRC. 50. Cunard to Hugh Ford, 8 March 1963, Box 10, Folder 2, Papers of Nancy Cunard, HRC. 51. Gordon, Nancy Cunard, p. 168. 52. Cunard, ‘Hours Press: Retrospect’.

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Chapter 8

‘Flowers for the Living’: Crosby Gaige and Modernist Limited Editions Lise Jaillant

Crosby Gaige (1882–1949) started his own publishing house in New York in 1927. Unlike most of his competitors in the field of fine books and limited editions, he actively sought out texts by contemporary authors. Editions of ‘well-known contemporaries’, he recalled, seemed to me to be a much more interesting and useful form of limited-edition publishing than the practice of eternally issuing reprints of the classics in new dress. I have always thought flowers for the living, and in this case the living author, more grateful and fragrant than garlands for the dead.1

Gaige often travelled to Europe to meet modernist writers and convince them to publish limited editions in the United States. In May 1928, he met Virginia Woolf for tea, and later that year he issued the first American edition of Orlando (a few days before the UK trade edition). Other titles which appeared under the Gaige imprint include Anna Livia Plurabelle by James Joyce with a preface by Padraic Colum, and The Sisters by Joseph Conrad with an introduction by Ford Madox Ford. Despite his importance in the American publishing landscape, Gaige has attracted very little attention from scholars of modernism and print culture. This is partly due to Gaige’s dilettantism: a wealthy Broadway producer, he dabbled in fine books but also gourmet cuisine and expensive wine. The Gaige imprint lasted less than three years. In 1929, he sold his publishing enterprise to James Wells, who continued to publish limited editions under a new

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imprint (Fountain Press). Despite its ephemerality, Gaige’s enterprise marked a key moment in the US trade in rare books and limited editions. In the early twentieth century, American publishers of fine books generally preferred to issue older texts in editions reminiscent of the pre-industrialised era. Influenced by William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, ‘American bibliophilia of the 1920s consciously nurtured much that was antithetical to the modernism emanating from central Europe.’2 In contrast, Gaige embraced contemporary literature and showed that unconventional, difficult texts could be sold to American bibliophiles. The trade in modernist limited editions was not a new thing, but it had so far been largely associated with Europe (think of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses published by Shakespeare and Company in Paris). The Gaige imprint sheds light on a turning point in the history of modernism, when American readers finally had access to the new literature in a wide range of editions. Drawing on extensive archival work at Columbia University, the Grolier Club and Yale’s Beinecke Library, this chapter shows that the association of modernist writers with small presses did not end when commercial publishers and cheap reprint series became interested in the new literature. Texts such as Orlando were available in limited editions but also in inexpensive editions for a much broader market. In other words, modernism continued to be imbued with the prestige of luxurious editions, while also expanding its market thanks to cheap books. The chapter starts with an overview of the networks that Gaige used to manage his business. His fine books were typically designed by Frederic Warde or Bruce Rogers, produced by the William Edwin Rudge printing plant, and distributed by Random House to local book dealers. In a second section, I turn to several case studies of books issued by Gaige – including Orlando and Anna Livia Plurabelle. The conclusion examines the legacy of the Gaige imprint and the Watch Hill Press, a micro-press that Gaige operated at his home in Peekskill, NY.

Crosby Gaige’s networks: connecting bibliophilia and modernism From an early age, Crosby Gaige showed an entrepreneurial spirit. The son of a postmaster and a housewife, he attended Cazenovia Seminary, NY, and then sold a life of Christ from door to door until

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he had US$250.3 One of his instructors, Father Doody, encouraged him to go to university in New York City. ‘You were born in the country and you’ve had it all your life’, Doody told him. ‘What you need is the city and the things a great city can bring to you.’4 Gaige entered Columbia University in 1899. Determined to make his way up by doing newspaper writing, Gaige edited the university magazine, Spectator, and served as the campus correspondent for The New York Times. But theatre proved a more enticing and lucrative option. He went to work for Elisabeth Marbury, a noted play agent, and then Alice Kauser, who had set up a rival office in the Empire Theatre building on 42nd street. Gaige then worked with Archibald and Edgar Selwyn, becoming their right-hand man in 1912 when they produced the melodrama Within the Law. Starring Jane Cowl, the play made over US$1 million. The Selwyn-Gaige partnership led to several hit shows, and Gaige was vice president and financial adviser of the firm until 1923. He then became an independent producer and was involved in famous plays such as Broadway (1926) and Coquette (1927) starring Helen Hayes.5 Gaige had skipped the final examinations at Columbia and he never graduated, but he kept close links with his alma mater. As a young agent representative, he lived on Morningside Heights near the university. His bachelor apartment had a comfortable living room with a fireplace and shelf room for his books. In recognition of his knowledge of books, he was admitted to the prestigious Grolier Club, one of the youngest members ever to be entered.6 Gaige also kept touch with Columbia alumni – including Donald Brace and Alfred Harcourt. After graduation, Brace and Harcourt both worked for the publishing house of Henry Holt. Brace specialised in book planning and manufacturing, while Harcourt was based in the editorial and trade sales departments.7 In 1919, the two men launched their own firm, which became ‘Harcourt, Brace and Company’ shortly after. In his autobiography, Gaige claimed some credit for this successful ‘publishing marriage’, for which he ‘acted as Cupid’.8 He was a director in the new company and was delighted to see it prosper with a series of bestsellers by Sinclair Lewis, Lytton Strachey and others. In the late 1920s, Gaige decided to follow Brace and Harcourt’s example and to launch his own imprint. Unlike his friends, however, he had little interest in trade books. As a collector of fine contemporary editions, he wanted to publish limited editions for readers like him – successful and educated businessmen with plenty of money to spend on their hobby. His publishing enterprise became an extension

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of his own collection, housed in a large pine-panelled room in his apartment on Upper Fifth Avenue. There was a large fireplace, and ‘long shelves of richly colored bindings gave the room great dignity and beauty’.9 This interior conveyed wealth and aristocratic taste and showed that Gaige had come a long way from his modest social origins. It was also reminiscent of fine printers’ workplaces, which often featured fireplaces, luxurious furniture and fresh flowers.10 Economic and cultural capital were combined to signify the distinction and high social status of all actors in the fine book trade – from printers to collectors (Figure 8.1). Gaige wanted to publish beautiful limited editions of contemporary texts, rather than reprints of older works. His own collection of books – which started with Thomas Hardy and ended with Virginia Woolf – served as a guide for the new imprint. Describing the modern classics he collected, Gaige said that he was interested in authors of his generation who ‘might stand the years’.11 When he started his imprint, Gaige had more than two decades of experience collecting contemporary books, and he showed remarkable flair at selecting writers such as Woolf and Joyce who did, indeed, join the literary

Figure 8.1 Crosby Gaige in the 1940s

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canon. Gaige’s passion for contemporary editions also enabled him to expand his network of contacts in the publishing industry. In 1908 or 1909, he read The Old Wives’ Tale by the English writer Arnold Bennett. Deeply impressed by the book, Gaige contacted Bennett’s American publisher, George Doran, who became a close friend and put him in touch with many people in Britain (including Bennett). Thanks to his extensive network of contacts, Gaige was able to approach writers and convince them to sign deals for limited editions in advance of regular publications. ‘This procedure was welcomed by the authors’, he wrote, ‘because it brought them additional compensation, and it also gave them the advantage of design and typography they might otherwise not have enjoyed’.12 When he was in London in 1926, Gaige started negotiating with authors he would later publish – including Siegfried Sassoon, whose collection of poems, The Heart’s Journey, was published by Gaige the following year. To package contemporary texts, Gaige looked for book designers who were both innovative and sufficiently distinguished to attract collectors. A former assistant of Bruce Rogers at the printing firm of William E. Rudge, Frederic Warde became Gaige’s favourite typographer and designer. Born in 1894, Warde had worked as Director of Printing at Princeton University Press before spending nearly three years in Europe in the mid-1920s.13 Warde was ‘a paragon of training’, wrote George Macy, the founder of the Limited Editions Club. ‘He trained himself, not only in the art of book design, but also in its history, its traditions and background.’14 Warde and his wife Beatrice spent months studying European typography and printing in libraries in Paris and London, and travelled throughout the Continent to meet distinguished printers. In a 1926 letter, Warde described the Officina Bodoni directed by Hans ‘Giovanni’ Mardersteig as ‘the finest hand-press establishment in Europe – I think in the world’.15 Mardersteig looked towards the past and the future. He told Warde that his greatest wish was to get away from the machines and to reconnect with the artistic side of a printer’s work.16 But he was also associated with modernism (for example, he later designed the covers of the Albatross Modern Continental Library).17 It is this modern outlook that had a significant impact on Warde. In the United States, he had been trained into traditional methods largely inspired by William Morris. Warde rejected this training, claiming that Morris ‘was dead before he was born’ and that US typography was ‘old fashioned in its preciousness and

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over-conservatism’.18 American printers were deeply influenced by what they saw as European – including woodcut illustrations modelled on fifteenth-century books and broad margins around dense blocks of texts. During his travels, Warde discovered that reallife European printers had a different approach. He particularly admired printing in Germany, which skilfully combined industry and art. Like Gaige, Warde thought that American bibliophiles were too timid, preferring older classics packaged in a form often inspired by the pre-industrial era. The Gaige-Warde collaboration led to the publication of important modern texts – including Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle and Woolf’s Orlando. Although the new imprint targeted only a small audience, Gaige’s notoriety as a theatre producer led to several articles in the mainstream New York press. ‘Crosby Gaige announces small editions of new books by Joyce, AE [George William Russell], Yeats and others’, titled The New York Times. The article stressed the originality of a fine press that specialised in current authors: ‘the first press in this country to be devoted exclusively to the publication of new or unpublished books of famous contemporary writers in fine limited editions, to be designed by leading craftsmen’. While the Gaige imprint focused mostly on British and Irish authors, its Americanness was central to its positioning. By employing American book designers and printers, the press showed that the country could compete against the finest English enterprises such as the Nonesuch Press. ‘There will be no separate English edition of any book on the list’, wrote The New York Times, ‘but the English market will be supplied from the American printings’.19 Fine books produced in America had reached the same level of perfection as English presses, wrote the Dublin-born critic Ernest Boyd for the New York Independent: Save for the Nonesuch Press, I know of no other recent enterprise of this kind which so successfully combines the publication of books that are beautiful with books that are at the same time wanted. The Nonesuch, of course, has chiefly specialized in the English classics, giving us works of which no other adequate edition is available, whereas Mr Gaige is resolutely contemporary.20

Here, the Gaige imprint appeared as an American response to the Nonesuch Press: a press that combined the finest craftsmanship with a fresh and innovative approach to literature. It is not a coincidence that Gaige contracted with Bennett Cerf of Random House, the distributor of the Nonesuch Press in America.

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Like Gaige, Cerf had an entrepreneurial attitude and a fierce determination to develop his publishing business. As the publisher of the Modern Library series, he was associated with cheap series of reprints. To distribute the Nonesuch Press, he and his partner Donald Klopfer created a new imprint: Random House. Cerf did not expect the new enterprise to be profitable. ‘As far as I can see’, Cerf wrote in October 1926, ‘there will be little or no profit accruing to us from the sale of these books; what we have to look forward to is the prestige that we may gain through handling the line and the hope that one day we may be able to publish something in conjunction with them’.21 Cerf wanted to move to a position in the publishing field where economic gains were less important than the accumulation of symbolic capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms. But this apparent disavowal of profit led to new opportunities that made the Random House imprint a profitable enterprise. Following the Nonesuch deal, Random House became a reference in the fine book trade, rather than an unknown imprint directed by two young men associated with inexpensive reprints. Like Cerf, Gaige chased prestige rather than economic gains. For example, he sometimes used advance payments as a form of patronage for struggling authors. A former Imagist poet, Richard Aldington was doing freelance writing to make ends meet. In 1927, Aldington told Gaige that he was making £400 a year with book reviewing, but he wanted to go back to poetry and serious writing.22 Gaige paid him a US$1,000-dollar advance royalty for an unpublished book, and left him entirely free to choose the topic.23 Aldington offered to write a piece of scholarly work on Romance languages, which would have been difficult to place with another publisher. Fifty Romance Lyric Poems was published in 1928 with a ‘preface-letter’ to Crosby Gaige. The book design by Bruce Rogers attracted many collectors, and Ernest Boyd praised the ‘handsome, sober blue binding with gold lines’.24 Aldington used his advance to finance the writing of his First World War novel, Death of a Hero, which became a bestseller. In 1933, he wrote to Gaige: Years ago you did me a great service, which I have never forgotten. The money you gave me for Fifty Romance Poems [sic] enabled me to get free from the slavery of highbrow journalism by giving me the leisure to write Death of a Hero. I feel sure you will be pleased to know that my latest novel, All Men Are Enemies, has started off well in America with a subscription sale of 10,000, while the movie rights have been sold to Fox Films for $12,500.25

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Not everyone was pleased with the publication of Fifty Romance Lyric Poems. Its physical format disappointed Bennett Cerf. ‘We have sold a considerable number of this book at a $15.00 price on the basis of it being a Bruce Rogers item’, Cerf wrote. ‘The finished product, however, looks a great deal more, to me, like a $1.50 text book than an expensive limited edition’.26 While Aldington was then a little-known English poet, Rogers was a distinguished book designer whose name could be used to attract book collectors with the promise of quality and taste. However, Cerf felt that this promise had not been delivered, and he resented being associated with a poorly-produced book that threatened his own reputation as publisher and distributor of fine books. He also resented the commercial failure of several Gaige books – including Woof’s Orlando.

Publishing modernism On 4 May 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that she had received the visit of several Americans – including Crosby Gaige. ‘The “fame” is becoming vulgar & a nuisance’, she wrote, ‘it means nothing; & yet takes one’s time’.27 Two days before, she had been awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for To the Lighthouse.28 The novel had made her an ‘established figure’ on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was through her American publisher Donald Brace that Gaige got an introduction.29 While Woolf did not enjoy meeting Gaige, the American businessman described a totally different experience. In his autobiography, he remembered going to the Woolfs’ ‘charming flat at Tavistock Square’. For Gaige, Woolf was ‘a person of exceptional literary insight and delicacy of feeling’. And he added: ‘she and her husband seemed most happy and companionable’.30 It is not difficult to understand why Gaige kept such an enchanted memory of his tea with Virginia Woolf. As a collector and publisher, he preferred British and Irish literature, which constituted four-fifths of the books he published. Gaige also loved to socialise in elite environments, with distinguished guests, beautiful surroundings and exquisite food. The English upper-class held a particular appeal to him – hence the references to Woolf’s father Sir Leslie Stephen and to Siegfried Sassoon’s wealthy family.31 Publishing limited editions was a way for Gaige to transform his economic capital into social and cultural capital, and to gain access to circles that remained closed to him as Broadway producer.

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The Woolfs took a few days to consider Gaige’s offer to publish a limited edition of Orlando. On 9 May, Leonard Woolf sent a note to the Savoy Hotel in London, where Gaige was staying: We have thought the matter over, and my wife would be very glad for you to do her new book in the limited edition for America without an English edition under an English imprint. I do not know of course whether you would agree to this or whether you consider it essential to have an English edition. But we are averse to having a limited edition brought out here under an imprint not our own, and at the same time we are not anxious to handle it ourselves.32

For the Woolfs, it was essential to keep control over the publication of Virginia’s work in England. By the late 1920s, the Hogarth Press had become a commercially successful enterprise, and it would have made no sense to let other British publishers benefit from Virginia’s fame and commercial appeal. This is why the Woolfs rejected Jonathan Cape’s offer to issue The Common Reader in a cheap edition and decided to include the title in the Uniform Edition published by their own press.33 Letting Gaige publish an English edition was therefore out of question. A compromise was reached when Gaige promised that no UK imprint would issue the limited edition of Orlando; however, 200 copies of his American edition would be distributed in England by Dulau and Company.34 After accepting Gaige’s offer, Virginia Woolf resented the effort she had to devote to the limited edition of Orlando. By the time the page proofs had been revised for the American edition, she had corrected eighty typographical errors and had made more than 600 substantial changes in the text.35 In June, she wrote to Edward Sackville-West: I have been blind and dead: nothing but proofs do I see; and the entire worthlessness of my own words. I have been correcting for 6 hours daily, and must now write my name 800 times over. Pen and ink and my own words disgust me.

The signature of the famous writer increased the aura (and the monetary value) of the limited edition. But for Woolf, having to sign her name in 800 copies of the book seemed a senseless task. She concluded her letter on a more optimistic note, moving away from the frustrations of finishing a book towards the pleasures of starting a new project. ‘Why does one write these books after all? The drudgery, the

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misery, the grind, are forgotten every time; and one launches another, and it seems sheer joy and buoyancy.’36 The signed copies of Orlando were also numbered, to distinguish the book from mass-produced editions. As Megan Benton puts it, ‘assigning each copy a unique number underscored the limited size of the edition, ostensibly clarifying its rarity and consequent value to collectors’.37 In addition to the 800 copies signed and numbered, there were sixty-one copies not for sale, out of a total print run of 861. This was slightly more than the average print run of Gaige books (circa 700 copies). In August, Bennett Cerf expressed doubts about the market for Orlando, and he refused to guarantee more than 350 copies for distribution.38 Cerf was well aware of modernist trends: Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared in the Modern Library in early 1928, followed a few months later by Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. While Cerf was ready to include Woolf in a reprint series priced at 95 cents, he doubted that American bibliophiles would be interested in a US$15 fine edition of Orlando. In mid-October, he wrote an angry letter to Gaige. Their distribution arrangement had been ‘a dismal failure’, he claimed before adding: ‘it is out of the question for us to continue on the present basis’. Although limited editions were often over-subscribed before publication, he still had 200 copies of Orlando in his stock room. Since Random House paid US$7.25 for each book (around half of the price charged to customers), the stock amounted to US$1,450.39 One year after the publication of Orlando, only 328 copies had been sold – a dismal 41 per cent of the total number for sale, and the worst performance among Gaige books.40 While limited editions by Joyce and Conrad were nearly sold out, Woolf’s book was a flop. This is all the more surprising given that Orlando sold very well in the trade edition published by Harcourt, Brace later in October. The first printing of 6,350 copies was followed by five re-impressions totalling 14,950 copies between November 1928 and February 1933.41 The Gaige edition was five times more expensive than the trade edition, and its failure shows that the American market was not ready to consider Woolf a collectable writer. Among American bibliophiles, few collected contemporary authors – let alone female contemporary authors. In April 2018, shortly before Gaige went to Europe, Cerf told him to acquire texts by Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling, Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, James Stephens and Norman Douglas.42 Overall, Gaige agreed that this (exclusively male) list was what the market was prepared to buy. He later published Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex

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and Stephens’s Julia Elizabeth. But unlike Cerf, Gaige included Woolf among the most notable writers in England, and she became the only female author to appear on his list. Designed by Frederic Warde, the Gaige edition of Orlando was beautifully presented (Figure 8.2). The upper cover featured the publisher’s device of a ram on a green base. Golden patterns decorated the spine and cover. The seven illustrations, and the pure rag paper, also gave the book a luxurious feel. Fifteen copies were printed on green paper, making this special issue even more exclusive as it was reserved for Gaige himself and his close friends and associates. Other Gaige books also appeared in very limited editions of coloured paper. Since these special issues were not for general sale, book collectors resented a practice that made the regular edition less rare, and therefore less valuable. After receiving several protests, Cerf told Gaige he thought this was a harmful thing and should be discontinued.43 However, the Random House directors also eagerly collected green paper editions, and Cerf asked Gaige to send copies for himself and Klopfer.44 The special edition may have been harmful for the trade, but the Random House owners hoped to benefit from their close association with Gaige to add valuable books to their own libraries.

Figure 8.2 Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Crosby Gaige Edition (1928)

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A copy was sent to Woolf, who was not impressed. ‘One miserable specimen, on pale green paper like a widows hymn book, has arrived’, she told Edward Sackville-West, who had requested a copy for his library. ‘I don’t think you can wish for this’, Woolf continued, ‘so I’ll wait for the white paper ones, and send you what I trust may be less cadaverous. The Americans have surpassed themselves, in pretention, fuss, and incompetence.’45 Woolf looked down on Gaige’s attempts to compete against the finest presses in England. For her, he remained a tasteless American businessman, who had no right to the prestige associated with fine books. Yet, Woolf also wanted to widen her audience in the United States. In September 1928, shortly before the publication of Orlando, she published an article on Laurence Sterne in the New York Herald Tribune (which later appeared as a preface to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Sentimental Journey). Later that year, the Modern Library edition of Mrs Dalloway included a new introduction by the author. In these two introductions, Woolf placed readers at the centre of her analysis: like Sterne, she saw the literary text as a two-way conversation with readers, rather than a monologue addressed to a passive audience.46 As new editions of her books appeared in both cheap and expensive format, Woolf was excited about her growing American readership. In late October, she thanked Gaige for ‘the most attractive edition of Orlando’. Putting herself in the shoes of her readers, Woolf wrote: ‘It is easy to read, and delightful to look at.’ The edition seemed to her to ‘fulfil all the needs of a reader’, and she hoped that Gaige would ‘find the American public appreciative’.47 Although the Gaige edition targeted only a small audience, it served Woolf’s ambition to engage with a new public across the Atlantic. In 1929, after Gaige sold his list to James Wells, Orlando appeared in the catalogue of the newly-founded Fountain Press. By that time, Cerf and his partner Donald Klopfer were desperate to sell their stock of Gaige books. This commercial failure was not only costly, it also threatened their reputation. Indeed, Random House advertisements explicitly presented modern editions as a good investment that would yield healthy profits. In November 1928, shortly after the publication of Orlando and other Gaige books, an announcement in Publishers’ Weekly claimed: ‘These are the recognized first editions for both England and America and will almost certainly command substantial premiums in short time. Enterprising booksellers should take advantage of the public’s growing interest in modern first editions.’48 Since Orlando had already been advertised as a desirable book that would soon sell out, the Random House owners designed

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a new strategy. They listed the Woolf book and another slow-seller, Carl Sandburg’s Good Morning America, as out of print ‘with the deliberate intent of stimulating a certain amount of interest in these books, and of making them scarce’.49 This misleading strategy was not uncommon among fine book publishers. As Benton points out, announcements of sales figures, and especially news that an edition was sold out, served as marketing tools to make books more desirable and hasten sales.50 After the Orlando fiasco, Cerf refused to take a risk on another Woolf book in an expensive edition. When Wells announced his intention to publish A Room of One’s Own, Cerf told him that he could not raise the quantity above 350 copies at US$10. ‘We sold only 350 copies of Mrs Woolf’s widely acclaimed Orlando’, Cerf said. ‘Surely we can expect to do no better with the very much less important A Room of One’s Own.’51 Once again, Cerf thought that American bibliophiles were not ready for Woolf’s work. A feminist text had little chance to attract an audience of book collectors, at a time when most collectors were men. In July 1928, Publishers’ Weekly gave three reasons why so few women collected fine books. First, ‘the hobby is an antisocial one, the book collector working best alone’. Women preferred social activities such as literary clubs, talks and lectures. Second, ‘the acquiring of the knowledge necessary to the book collector is unattractive to women’. Without this knowledge, books could not be displayed as decorative objects. In other words, book collecting was incompatible with home decoration – a favourite pastime for women. And third, ‘the handling of old books in bookshops has an unaesthetic phase that does not appeal to femininity’.52 This article highlights the prejudices of the book trade of the time. Few women challenged these prejudices to show that they were equally able to pursue knowledge on their own, and to manipulate dusty old books. And in turn, publishers responded to a male-dominated market by mostly selecting books by men. This choice reinforced the conviction that male writers were more gifted and valuable. Whereas less than half of Orlando had been sold one year after publication, this number reached 99 per cent for Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, an extract of Work in Progress.53 The two books had been designed by Frederic Warde, published with a similar print run (800 copies for general sale) and sold for the same price (US$15). In both cases, Gaige found the texts difficult to understand. He described Orlando as a ‘baffling and elusive story’. And he admitted that he did not think much of Joyce as a writer. ‘Anyone who wants

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to know more about Anna Livia has my permission to buy the book’, he added.54 The literary text was not Gaige’s main concern. Instead, he was interested in the value of an author’s name in the market for fine books, a market based on prestige as a precondition for real monetary gains. In the late 1920s, James Joyce was sufficiently well known to attract American collectors. The scandal of Ulysses – which was still banned in the United States – underlined his reputation. He was, in Gaige’s words, ‘already a prime collector’s item’.55 For Gaige, publishing Anna Livia Plurabelle was a coup that positioned his press as a major player in the field of fine books. ‘You are becoming quite an “éditeur de luxe”, and I hope you make some money’, Theodore Rousseau told him. ‘Unless the “Society for the prevention of Pornography” gets hold of you, I imagine you will do well!’56 As a Paris-based agent of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York, Rousseau was familiar with censorship on both sides of the Atlantic: he knew that publishing Joyce was riskier in the United States, a country with tough obscenity laws and antipornography activists. Acting on behalf of Gaige, Rousseau gave Joyce US$675 for the corrected copy of transition no. 8, which served as the basis for the Gaige edition.57 ‘Joyce is a very interesting man – almost blind, and quite charming’, Rousseau claimed. Publishing Joyce allowed Gaige to meet the author in person, a disappointing meeting that differed from his charming afternoon tea with the Woolfs. The millionaire was shocked by Joyce’s ‘stuffy flat that might have been imported from the Bronx’. ‘Its squalid, unhandsome confusion was not unlike Joyce’s literary work’, wrote Gaige, ‘and the man’s conversation was nearly as muddled as his prose’.58 Here, Gaige presented Joyce as a lower-class writer who lacked the taste of Virginia Woolf and her ability to pleasantly interact with guests. In contrast with this unflattering description of Joyce, announcements for Anna Livia Plurabelle used the vocabulary of literary distinction. ‘A new prose work by the author of Ulysses – conceived and executed with brilliancy and dexterity – a complete episode from a work in progress which the author believes to be his finest work’, declared the blurb written by James Wells.59 The text was not long, and the challenge was to make it look like a book rather than an isolated fragment. Gaige could have added illustrations but, instead, he commissioned a preface by the Irish writer Padraic Colum. Two years earlier, Colum had written the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Joyce’s Dubliners. With the Gaige edition, Colum addressed a wealthier audience, but he kept the same objective: explaining this difficult text to readers with no

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or little experience of modernism. Adopting a scholarly tone, Colum gave an overview of the publication history of Joyce’s text, which had first appeared in Le Navire d’Argent in September 1925, before being expanded and published in transition in November 1927. ‘Again expanded, it is here published in its definite form and with a title given it: Anna Livia Plurabelle’, Colum wrote.60 The promise that the text would no longer be revised or changed reassured bibliophiles of the long-term value of the book. Even with the preface, the edition designed by Frederic Warde had only sixty-four pages. The brown cover was a reference to the River Liffey flowing through Dublin. Sylvia Beach said that it had to be published in a tea-coloured cover because the Liffey was the colour of tea.61 The cover featured an inverted triangle of three rules, with the inner rule dentelle. This represented Anna Livia’s symbol, the river delta. As in the case of Orlando, 800 copies signed and numbered were for general sale. A special issue of fifty copies on green paper completed the regular edition. Once again, Cerf was not impressed by the physical format of Gaige publications. He described Anna Livia Plurabelle as ‘a sorry-looking affair for $15.00’.62 Ten days later, he told Gaige: ‘It becomes increasingly evident that you are not very much concerned with making your imprint stand for something in the publishing world, and that we will have to take more stringent steps to protect ourselves in the matter.’ Cerf’s criticism can be seen as a negotiation strategy to extract better conditions from Gaige and to lower the risks Random House was taking. In the same letter, Cerf asked to be shown the proofs and specimen covers before giving his approval to distribute the books. ‘Frankly, we will refuse to accept any more books that look like the Joyce or the de la Mare’, he concluded.63 After Gaige moved away from the publishing business, the Fountain Press continued to publish Joyce in limited editions. In November 1930, the Press announced the publication of Haveth Childers Everywhere, another fragment of Work in Progress. The US$20 edition included 500 copies printed on handmade paper. A deluxe edition at US$40 had a smaller print run of 100 copies, printed on Japan Vellum and signed by Joyce, in a green and gold box, of which only fifty were allotted to America.64 Despite the economic crisis of the 1930s, investing in Joyce books remained a popular strategy among wealthy collectors. Other Gaige authors fared less well in a changing market. James Branch Cabell was one of those who saw his reputation collapse during the Depression. Two of his books available in the Modern

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Library – Beyond Life and Cream of the Jest – were discontinued in the 1930s. But back in 1928, when Gaige published Ballades from the Hidden Way, Cabell was at the height of his popularity. Despite the high price (US$20), 85 per cent of the print run of 831 copies sold within one year of publication.65 The book was based on a 1916 collection of poems, rearranged by Cabell ‘to make up a volume of the exact size desired by my present publishers’.66 The new introduction by the author aimed to create interest in a mere reprint, but many collectors were disappointed. The original edition was still available for US$2, ten times less than the Gaige edition. ‘We have had over 100 copies returned to us so far on the entirely justifiable grounds that this book was originally represented as a new item, and is, in fact, merely a reprint’, Cerf wrote.67 Collectors who returned their purchase feared that the Cabell book was a bad investment. They were right: today, first editions of Ballades from the Hidden Way can be found for around US$30 – whereas Gaige editions of Orlando and Anna Livia Plurabelle sell for US$2,000 to US$3,000.

Conclusion In his autobiography, Gaige presented himself not as a traditional publisher but as a book collector frustrated by the lack of fine editions by contemporary writers. Rather than wait for publishers to discover this untapped market, Gaige used his immense energy and entrepreneurial drive to issue books himself. Like other book-collectors-turnedpublishers, Gaige issued many fragments, adding paratextual elements to make them look like fully-developed works. For Joseph Conrad’s unfinished novel, The Sisters, Gaige enlisted Bruce Rogers to stretch the text to a respectable number of pages. The book designer added extra space between the lines and a series of typographic ornaments. Gaige also approached Ford Madox Ford, asking him to finish the novel. Conrad’s friend and collaborator refused, but he did write an introduction to the Gaige edition. For the following four decades, this edition of The Sisters remained the only one available. It was not until 1968 that Ugo Mursia, a Conrad enthusiast and Italian publisher, issued a reprint of the uncompleted novel. Although he refused to identify as a professional publisher, Gaige left a significant legacy in publishing and literary history. Not only did he publish famous names such as James Joyce, he also took risks on writers who were not yet well-established in America. At the time when American bibliophiles largely dismissed women collectors and

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writers, Gaige openly endorsed Virginia Woolf as a collectable author. He became a patron for Richard Aldington, who was able to complete his First World War novel Death of a Hero after receiving a generous payment. In turn, Gaige benefited from his association with writers across the Atlantic. As a Broadway producer, he probably would not have been admitted into exclusive literary circles in England. But as a publisher of fine editions, he could socialise with Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf. He almost forgot his background as a successful businessman. Commenting on the closure of his imprint, he said: ‘by early 1929 the production of limited editions for the delectation of the book collector had become more of a business than a pastime as more commercially minded men than I took it up’.68 By the time Gaige sold his press, he had fully transitioned to what Bourdieu calls the field of restricted production. Adopting a ‘loser wins’ attitude, he dismissed the logic of business and the pursuit of profit.69 His next venture was a private press, the Watch Hill Press, which he managed at his home in Peekskill, NY, with the help of Frederic Warde. The press was mainly used to communicate with Gaige’s friends, often at Christmas time. Print runs rarely exceeded 100 copies. For example, Rupert Brooke’s Letter to the Editor of the Poetry Review had a print run of fifty copies. Whereas his friends Donald Brace and Alfred Harcourt published modernism for a large audience in the 1930s, Crosby Gaige turned away from difficult modernist works, preferring to publish easily-readable texts for a very small audience.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

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Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 201. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 41. ‘Crosby Gaige Dies’, New York Times, 9 March 1949, p. 25. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 33. Cunningham, ‘Gaige, Crosby’. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 54. Dzwonkoski, ‘Harcourt Brace’. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 40. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 200. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 53. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 200. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 201. See Loxley, ‘Frederic Warde, Crosby Gaige, and the Watch Hill Press’, and Printer’s Devil.

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14. George Macy, ‘A Note on Fred Warde’, nd, Box 2, Paul Bennett: Papers relating to Frederic Warde, Grolier Club Library Manuscript and Archival Collections (hereafter referred to as Bennett/Grolier). 15. Warde to Thomas Nast Fairbanks, 4 January 1926, Box 1, Frederic Warde Papers (hereafter referred to as Warde/Grolier). 16. Mardersteig to Warde, 17 August 1931, Box 1, Warde/Grolier. 17. Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, p. 106. 18. Warde to William Kittredge, 25 November 1926, Box 1, Bennett/Grolier; Warde to Henry Kent, 22 September 1925, Box 1, Warde/Grolier. 19. ‘Forms Limited Press for Current Authors’, The New York Times, 30 March 1928, p. 14. 20. Boyd, ‘Readers and Writers’. 21. Bennett Cerf to Manuel Komroff, 28 October 1926, Catalogued Correspondence, RH. 22. Aldington to Gaige, 19 May 1927, Box 1, Richard Aldington Collection, Yale University Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter referred to as Aldington/Yale) 23. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 203. 24. Boyd, ‘Readers and Writers’. 25. Aldington to Gaige, August 1933, Box 1, Aldington/Yale. 26. Cerf to Gaige, 12 July 1928, Box 173, RH. 27. Woolf, Diary [4 May 1928], vol. 3, p. 183. 28. The prize was presented to Woolf at the Institut Français in South Kensington, London on 2 May 1928. 29. Woolf, Diary [6 June 1927], vol. 3, p. 137; Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 203. 30. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 204. 31. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, pp. 204, 202. 32. L. Woolf to Gaige, 9 May 1928, Leonard Woolf Papers (SxMs-13), University of Sussex Library. 33. See Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, pp. 123–4. 34. Gaige to Virginia Woolf, 11 June 1928, Leonard Woolf Papers (SxMs-13), University of Sussex Library. 35. Online Exhibition, ‘Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of her Own’, Smith College Libraries, [accessed 11 April 2018] (hereafter referred to as ‘Woolf in the World’). 36. Woolf to Edward Sackville-West, 24 June 1928, Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, p. 510. 37. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 77. 38. Cerf to Gaige, 10 August 1928, Box 173, RH. 39. Cerf to Gaige, 15 October 1928, Box 173, RH. 40. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 206. 41. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, p. 63. 42. Cerf to Gaige, 19 April 1928, Box 173, RH.

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43. Cerf to Gaige, 6 August 1928, Box 173, RH. 44. Cerf to Gaige, 18 October 1928, Box 173, RH. 45. Woolf to Edward Sackville-West, 22 October 1928, Sothebys, [accessed 10 April 2018]. 46. See Jaillant, Cheap Modernism, pp. 37–42. 47. Woolf to Gaige, 29 October 1928, ‘Woolf in the World’. 48. Advertisement for Random House, Publishers’ Weekly, 17 November 1928, p. 2101. Quoted in Thompson, ‘Birth of the First’, p. 184. 49. Donald Klopfer to James Wells, 5 April 1929, Box 173, RH. 50. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 205. 51. Cerf to Wells, 28 June 1929, Box 173, RH. 52. ‘Women and Book Collecting’, Publishers’ Weekly, 21 July 1928, p. 239. 53. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 206. 54. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, pp. 204–5. 55. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 204. 56. Theodore Rousseau to Gaige, 1 February 1928, Box 5, James Joyce Collection, Yale Beinecke. 57. Wynne and Reynolds, ‘James Joyce’, p. 74. 58. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, pp. 204–5. 59. Wells to Cerf, 17 February 1928, Box 173, RH. 60. Colum, ‘Preface’, p. viii. 61. Quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 603. 62. Cerf to Gaige, 17 September 1928, Box 173, RH. 63. Cerf to Gaige, 27 September 1928, Box 173, RH. 64. ‘First Editions for Sale: The Fountain Press Imprint’, 24 November 1930, Box 173, RH. 65. Benton, Beauty and the Book, p. 206. 66. Cabell, ‘Preface’, Ballades from the Hidden Way, n.p. 67. Cerf to Gaige, 17 September 1928, Box 173, RH. 68. Gaige, Footlights and Highlights, p. 211. 69. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, p. 39.

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Part III

Publishing Modernism after the Second World War

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Chapter 9

New Directions Books Greg Barnhisel

Mid-1930s Harvard College didn’t seem like the kind of place that would save modernist literature in America. While the working-class city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was not as stuffy as its neighbour Boston, its famous university was the epitome of Yankee reticence and upper-crust superciliousness. Flamboyant European bohemianism seemed very far away. But in 1932, to the dismay of his Old Princetonian father, the Pittsburgh steel heir James Laughlin IV arrived at his rooms in Weld Hall fresh from the Choate School, where modernistfriendly teachers Carey Briggs and Dudley Fitts had mentored him. Four years later, Laughlin created New Directions Books, the publishing house that would ensure the survival of modernist literature in the United States, transform the public’s understanding of modernism, and establish its own school of modernist-inspired writing from authors both American and international. New Directions Books and its wide-ranging legacy cannot be separated from James Laughlin, its founder and guiding spirit. And while this is certainly true of the Woolfs and the Hogarth Press, or Ben Huebsch and his house, or the Knopfs and theirs, or Barney Rosset and Grove Press, even among these publishers New Directions’ combination of longevity and scope is singular. Laughlin remained its publisher and editor-in-chief for over fifty years, a half-century during which the house regularly put out dozens of titles a year (disqualifying it from small-press status) while always remaining focused exclusively on one type of book – unlike Huebsch or Knopf, which had diverse lists. New Directions leveraged the traditional tools of the publisher: building a list; identifying an audience; advertising its titles; establishing relationships with booksellers; cultivating friendly reviewers; devising marketing campaigns. In this, the house distinguished itself from the small presses that had published modernist literature from the early 1900s, and that were too small

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or too averse to commercialism to act like real businesses. But as Laughlin learned the trade, he began to take advantage of and even pioneer new opportunities: establishing a brand identity through design; using public-domain texts to underwrite a front list; creating book series with distinctive looks; capitalising on the new trade paperback format; aggressively targeting the growing college market. By the 1960s, New Directions’ austere black-and-white paperbacks had become almost synonymous with modernist literature for American college students and young people, its list steering their understanding of modernism itself. This was part of the plan, even if – when he started New Directions – Laughlin couldn’t possibly have foreseen how it would ultimately play out. A conviction that experimental literature would renew a corrupted world drove Laughlin into publishing. From the beginning, he infused New Directions’ list not just with his personal taste, but with this philosophy of literature – a philosophy that evolved over the years, and that often clashed with his approach to running his business. In the 1940s and 1950s, that philosophy (as well as Laughlin’s own life) merged with larger developments in culture: most notably, the literary and academic establishment fully accepting modernist literature, and the United States claiming the role of home and protector of ‘cultural freedom’ as the Cold War opened.

Birth of a publisher Even into old age, Laughlin cut a striking figure. Almost six-anda-half feet tall, he was handsome and patrician-looking while still seeming charged by youthful enthusiasm. A sub-Olympian skier in his youth, he moved like the former athlete he was, dexterous and fluid but touched by long-ago injuries. He carried his upbringing with him in other ways, as well. Laughlin came from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the rough-hewn city at the centre of the American steel industry. Laughlin’s family had owned one of the nation’s largest steel companies (Jones & Laughlin) since before the Civil War, and Laughlin grew up in wealth and comfort: a house in the city, a country estate, prep schools in Switzerland and Connecticut, Harvard. But he never forgot Pittsburgh, or its dismissive attitude towards art and literature. ‘There was no one to talk to in Pittsburgh’, he said about his hometown. ‘It was a stifling town.’1 Unsurprisingly then, his upbringing didn’t give him his love of literature. He reminisced that his family ‘didn’t read a great deal’

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except for his mother’s passion for ‘very bad novels by Lloyd Douglas’ (author of The Robe and other wildly popular Christianthemed novels).2 The household library was stocked with ‘nothing but sets and the Bible, and the sets were never read’.3 But at Choate, he encountered Briggs and particularly Fitts, who would ‘start Laughlin on the road to Rapallo and Ezra Pound’, in the words of Laughlin’s biographer Ian MacNiven.4 Fitts, who was both a poet and a translator, introduced Laughlin to modernist poetry, and his influence shaped what would become the New Directions school of modernism. (New Directions would publish several books by Fitts in its early years.) Laughlin started writing modernist-influenced poetry, publishing a few in the Choate literary magazine.5 At Harvard, Laughlin’s family wealth did nothing for him socially. ‘I didn’t rate with the boys who had been to [old-money prep schools] Groton or Milton’ and who came from established New England and New York families, he remembered.6 And Harvard’s writing classes, run by the arch-conservative poet Robert Hillyer, did nothing to nurture Laughlin’s literary endeavours. Laughlin remembered Hillyer as the epitome of what made Harvard ‘dull . . . a mediocre poet’ who’d send you out of the classroom if you mentioned Pound or Eliot.7 Instead, Laughlin found his community among writers, both at Harvard and in Boston itself. On campus, he joined the Harvard Advocate literary magazine and befriended forward-thinking professors like Ted Spencer and F. O. Matthiessen. With Fitts’s help, he networked with important writers and artists in the area including John Wheelwright (a friend of E. E. Cummings), Lincoln Kirstein, Sherry Mangan, R. P. Blackmur, and even a young John Cheever, the last four of whom were members of Laughlin’s Thursday evening supper group. Membership in this impressive crowd wasn’t enough for an increasingly dissatisfied Laughlin, though, and so in June 1933 he set sail for Europe, determined to immerse himself in the world of art and literature so lacking at Harvard. With an introduction from Fitts to open the door for him, Laughlin brashly wrote to Ezra Pound and asked if he might visit the poet in Rapallo, Italy. His positions on the Advocate and Yale’s Harkness Hoot would help him ‘preach’ the Cantos, he explained, and so he wanted Pound’s help with their ‘elucidation’.8 Pound agreed. Laughlin’s future, and independent literary publishing in the United States, would never be the same. Upon Laughlin’s return to Harvard, he and Pound commenced an intense correspondence. Pound was in the height of his Social Credit economic obsession, and worshipful Laughlin adopted many of Pound’s ideas – and idiosyncratic pseudo-cracker-barrel language.

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(‘The olde Eliotic serpent has done a damned good job in selecting the Perlite’, Laughlin complimented Pound on his Faber & Faber collection Polite Essays. ‘I didn’t suspect it until yesserday when the prooves come.’9) This second year in Cambridge went no better than the first, though, and Laughlin told his parents that he intended to take a year off – to ‘rest his eyes’, he explained.10 He toyed with the idea of going to work for Frances Steloff at New York’s Gotham Book Mart (the leading avant-garde bookstore in the nation), wheedled money out of his Aunt Leila to buy a small hand press, and used his position on the Hoot to get some of Pound’s work in print. This still wasn’t enough, though. In June 1934, he set sail for Europe again, where he settled first in southern France with Gertrude Stein (writing press releases for her upcoming American tour) and then, after a Parisian sojourn, he returned to Rapallo and Ezra Pound. Pound’s ‘Ezuversity’, as he called it, was the most important experience of Laughlin’s life. For six months, Laughlin spent his days with the poet, swimming and playing tennis and watching bad Italian movies but mostly in endless tutelage. Pound talked at Laughlin about everything – poetry, politics, economics, language, music – and Laughlin drank it in. ‘Ezra completely changed . . . my forma mentis, my way of looking at the world’, Laughlin told an interviewer. ‘I went to him with fairly conventional views about almost everything, and I left him with either very eccentric or radical views about everything – views which have persisted with me.’11 While this was mostly true, Laughlin – who must have told this story a thousand times – wasn’t being entirely honest. When he went to stay with Pound, Laughlin’s main goal was to join the modernist movement, to secure Pound’s imprimatur for his own poetry. But Pound wasn’t impressed by Laughlin’s writing – he dismissed it as ‘too much Harvard’ – and advised Laughlin instead to ‘do something useful . . . be a publisher’. (In truth, his first suggestion was that Laughlin assassinate the stodgy Saturday Review of Literature editor Henry Seidel Canby, but the logistics didn’t work out.)12 Laughlin took this advice to heart upon returning to the United States and to Harvard in the late summer of 1935, and over the next year he prepared himself to become a publisher (although he never gave up writing poetry). He wrote a column for Gorham Munson’s magazine New Democracy and, using Pound’s introductions, met many of the leading writers in American modernism, including Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and even T. S. Eliot sent Laughlin poems for consideration for inclusion in his New Democracy column. And, most significantly,

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upon his twenty-first birthday his father gave him US$100,000 in stocks, earmarked for his Harvard expenses. As the annual dividends themselves amounted to three times what his education cost, Laughlin now had thousands of dollars of ready cash to finance a publishing house (leaving a significant chunk of capital in reserve).13 New Directions was born.

Fighting the ‘enemy’ Even if he hadn’t realised it, Laughlin had been preparing for a career as a publisher for years. His time preparing promotional releases for Stein trained him to write ad copy. The hand press he’d obtained helped him learn about book design, about typesetting and craft printing. With Steloff, he’d gained experience dealing with booksellers and distributors. Placing Pound’s articles in various magazines was an apprenticeship in managing rights and representing an author’s interests. And Pound’s and Fitts’s introductions taught him how to approach writers in order to build a list. But even though he’d inadvertently cobbled together a relatively conventional series of publishing internships, his press would be anything but ordinary. New Directions Books published its first two volumes in 1936. The first, ‘Montagu O’Reilly’s’ Pianos of Sympathy, was a sixteen-page hand-printed pamphlet by Laughlin’s Harvard friend and fellow avant-gardiste Wayne Andrews (who would later introduce Laughlin to Paul Éluard, André Breton and Raymond Queneau). But it was New Directions in Prose and Poetry, the first instalment of what became an annual anthology, which truly announced the arrival of an important new voice in modernist publishing. Under the influence of his mentor, Laughlin had modelled the anthology – and his process of assembling a list of contributors – on Pound’s own example as editor of 1914’s Des Imagistes, as Poetry and The Egoist and Blast editor and talent scout during the 1910s, and as editor of more recent collections like Active Anthology (1933). For Pound and Laughlin, modernism was a movement with a unifying philosophy of literature that expressed itself in particular poetic practices. An editor presented to the public a broad spectrum of these practices – ideally from writers both familiar and unknown – in order to illustrate and propagate the underlying philosophy. But Laughlin didn’t just pay tribute to Pound as he birthed his new publishing house. ND 1 was dedicated to transition, the Paris-based

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review headed by Eugène Jolas, who also contributed several pieces. transition’s first issue, from 1929, had announced its mission with a manifesto very much like Laughlin’s, and although the young publisher didn’t like Jolas personally – ‘a FAKE, and I say to hell with him’, he sniped to Pound – he wanted to position ND in the long lineage of modernist little magazines, of which transition was the best-known current exemplar.14 New Directions was created with a mission: using experimental literature to transform and revitalise society. Laughlin first worked out these ideas in his New Democracy column, where he often wrote about the connection between Social Credit economics and the production of art. (Not coincidentally, Pound’s conviction that a healthy economic system will foster a vibrant and humane culture permeates The Cantos.) But he laid out his ideas in true modernist-manifesto form in ND 1: He’d had it wrong in New Democracy, he asserted. In those pieces, he’d argued that ‘leadership’ needed to come from ‘the economist rather than the poet’. But ‘nearly a year in the hard propagation of Social Credit has led me to feel that the emphasis should be reversed: it is the poet – the “word-worker” – who must lead . . . The world is in crisis, and language is at once the cause and the cure. New social concepts could stop the waste and destruction. But they can only be introduced into minds ready to receive them, minds able to think along new lines, minds capable of imagination.’ As Pound had long preached, exactitude in language was of paramount importance. ‘The clarity of our thought (and consequently our actions) depends on the clarity of our language’, Laughlin said, because ‘language controls thought . . . [A]s soon as a culture has advanced to a fairly general literacy, the process of ossification sets in and language, becoming, in its state of sclerosis, a force in itself, impeding by its sclerosis the free flow of ideas, having an obstinate life of its own, begins to condition and then to control the modes of thought.’15

Writers can stop this. ‘Always, in every age the best writers have understood and resisted ossification. The fertile periods of literature are those of philological innovation.’ Laughlin pointed to Cummings, Williams and Stein as writers whose works resisted ‘ossification’, but in keeping with what would become a New Directions hallmark – assembling a canon of older modernist writing and identifying a group of younger writers as the inheritors of the modernist tradition – he also cites Lorine Niedecker, whose poems ‘The President of the Holding Company’ and ‘Fancy Another Day Gone’ he includes in ND 1. (These

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were among her first publications and Laughlin likely learned about her from Louis Zukofsky, another literary eminence that Laughlin met through Pound.)16

Building a list and establishing an identity The first New Directions annual set the pattern for the publishing house itself, at least for its first era. Like the annual, the firm’s list was heavy on older modernist writers – Stein and Cummings and Williams, but also Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound and Jean Cocteau. These are impressive ‘gets’ for a twenty-four-year-old publisher, even if much of this work was reprinted from Laughlin’s New Democracy column. Supplementing the high modernist generation are the inheritors, younger writers who drew heavily on the modernist tradition but also transformed it: Louis Zukofsky, Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Boyle, Niedecker. Then there are Laughlin and his friends, such as Fitts and ‘Montagu O’Reilly’ and John Wheelwright. But the overwhelming presence is of the past. As more than one critic sniped, these were hardly ‘new directions’ in literature, but rather the ‘epigonism’ of a young man’s worship of his heroes.17 True, they may not have been cutting edge, but they were available. In the first few years of the firm, Laughlin built his list and his firm’s credibility on two cornerstone authors: Pound and Williams. During the 1930s, both had been publishing their works in the United States, but Pound’s current primary American publisher (the established New York trade firm of Farrar & Rinehart) wasn’t happy with Pound’s low sales, obscure poetry and increasingly controversial public persona. Earlier in his career, Pound had also put out work with the other new literary publishers of the 1910s and 1920s – B. W. Huebsch, Alfred A. Knopf and Horace Liveright – but had established an enduring relationship with none of them. For his part, Williams had been putting out his work with small, unreliable publishers like the Objectivist Press and the Alcestis Press. Farrar declined to publish Pound’s more strident nonpoetic work such as Guide to Kulchur or Jefferson and/or Mussolini, and Williams was always interested in reaching a greater audience, so both took a chance with this young publisher/admirer. For Laughlin as well, this was an incredible opportunity. Although high modernism (with the exception, of course, of Eliot) had largely run out of steam by the mid-1930s, Laughlin was devoted to it and convinced of the lasting importance of the writers who had formed his

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own literary taste. A strategy presented itself: republishing older modernist works that had gone out of print, leasing or buying the copyrights from their previous publisher, while also publishing the newest works by these writers and finding younger writers who were carrying on in the same vein. This strategy, which continued through the 1960s, helped New Directions ensure that high modernism remained at the centre of twentieth-century literary history. Seen in retrospect, these are remarkable lists for a one-man publishing firm run out of a college boy’s aunt’s barn while the proprietor finished up his degree.18 An anthology edited by Yvor Winters (Twelve Poets of the Pacific [1937]). Williams’s first novel (White Mule, also 1937). Kay Boyle’s A Glad Day, Pound’s Culture, Williams’s Life Along the Passaic River and Delmore Schwartz’s first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (all 1938). The years 1939 and 1940 brought first American publications of Henry Miller’s The Cosmological Eye, Kenneth Patchen’s First Will and Testament, Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Kafka’s Amerika, Williams’s In the Money, Pound’s Cantos LII-LXXI, and Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding, as well as a number of reprints that established a lineage for the hybrid Poundian-Williamsian modernism that was increasingly the firm’s identity: Sophocles’s Elektra in William Scott’s translation, Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue in Laughlin’s own translation, Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell translated by Delmore Schwartz, Williams’s In the American Grain, and the first American edition of Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work In Progress, the 1929 anthology of essays about Joyce’s Work in Progress. ‘I was grasping for a tradition’ in the early years of the firm, Laughlin explained.19 Even though the firm was starting to assemble a master-narrative about the American modernist tradition, Laughlin retained the fervour of the activist. In a ‘Postscript’ to Williams’s White Mule, he pronounced that: Reader, you have read a pure book . . . White Mule has nothing in common with the books, the new books, which the critics and their masters the publishers will tell you are good books . . . It is time I think to damn the book publishers as hard as you can damn them. They are traitors and enemies of the people. They have made literature a business . . . They have made the writing of books the production of cheap-goods. They have made a book a thing no more valuable than an automobile tire. They have forgotten their social responsibility. They have forgotten that the word is holy. They have made writing, which was an art, a business.20

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The New Directions annual of that same year also captured Laughlin’s fury at the publishing business: Nothing short of a decent economic order will clean out the editorial pigsties of Fourth and Madison Avenues . . . whatever it finally proves to be, there is no doubt that it is coming – and in the meantime New Directions will do what it can to clean up the mess and keep the ideal of serious artistic writing alive.21

(‘I felt like I was saving the world from Bennett Cerf’, he reminisced in 1992 about what he called his ‘sense of mission’ as a publisher.22) Laughlin’s fiery protestations against the perfidy of commercial publishers, though, were starting to run up against the cold reality that he was, in fact, a capitalist.23 He learned his first lesson quickly, soon after the 1937 publication of Williams’s White Mule. Laughlin had left the country to go skiing just as the book had started to receive good reviews, and when the small first printing sold out Laughlin could not be reached to order a second printing and the buzz about the book faded quickly. Williams was hurt and angry at losing his first chance to publish a widely-read and -reviewed book, and told Laughlin that unless the young publisher started to engage in the customary (if sullied) publisher’s work of hustling reviews and concocting marketing campaigns and advertising, he would take his books to another house. Laughlin agreed, and to win his cornerstone author back humbly and apologetically presented him with a comprehensive publication and marketing plan.24 But, inevitably, it was Pound who confronted him with his first major dilemma. Laughlin’s career as a publisher, from his earliest days to the New Democracy column to the launch of the house itself, had always centred on Ezra Pound. If New Directions Books wasn’t explicitly a project to promote the work of the increasingly isolated and ostracised poet, that was its implicit thrust. Not only Pound’s work, but Pound’s very view of literary history was immanent in New Directions’ list and Laughlin’s philosophy of publishing. And when Laughlin obtained from Farrar & Rinehart the contract to publish the instalments of The Cantos that Pound was regularly producing, Laughlin felt that he had finally accomplished his goal: because he was in charge of how Pound’s work appeared in the United States, he could ensure that readers had a full and fair picture of Pound’s accomplishments and his idiosyncratic views on history and literature. In 1939, Pound was prepared to deliver Cantos LII–LXXI to Laughlin for publication; this would be the first set of Cantos to

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appear exclusively under the New Directions imprint. But as Pound was becoming steadily more vocal in his support for Mussolini’s fascist government in Italy, and increasingly strident in his antiSemitic language, Laughlin had begun to drift away from his mentor. He felt that he had to take a stand. ‘In regard to the Cantos’, he wrote Pound, I will not print anything that can be fairly construed as an outright attack on the Jews and I want that in the contract in the libel clause. You can take all the potshots at them you want, but no outright attack on the Jews as jews.

And confronting the contradiction between serving the interests of his writers and building New Directions, Laughlin makes his choice: ‘I agree with what you said about commercialization and the ruin of art. I am not trying to commercialize. I am simply working like hell to make my business an efficient mechanism.’25 Cantos LII–LXXI didn’t just confront Laughlin with a painful choice between art and ‘commercialism’. It also forced him to rough out a plan not just for publishing individual books or authors, but for how the house would present its version of modernism. In a separate negotiation, the poet and the publisher clashed over whether Pound’s intimidating, erudite, heavily allusive poems needed to be explained to readers. Pound, of course, dismissed this. If readers needed their hands held, they shouldn’t be reading his work. Laughlin, though, knew that the middle Cantos were increasingly obscure, but also that the combination of the forbidding poetry and Pound’s strident support for Mussolini could kill the book in the market. People just weren’t going to buy difficult poems by a man who was advocating for a hostile power in what was about to be a time of war. Laughlin proposed using paratextual materials to gently reframe the collection for sceptical readers. He suggested to Pound that the book include some prefatory material – explanation of Pound’s poetic method, perhaps a short biographical essay detailing his central role in the evolution of modernism, some glosses on the people and historical events that figure in the poems. Unsurprisingly, Pound refused. ‘Cantos can NOT have a preface IN the book . . . the new set is NOT incomprehensible’, he shot back. Slyly, Laughlin finessed the issue and proposed not an introduction but an adjunct: a short brochure to accompany the book. This was acceptable to Pound, but only so long as Laughlin himself wrote it and okayed the copy with him in advance. Pound’s provisional approval was dated 9 June 1939. On 1 September, German tanks rolled into Poland, the Second World War

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began, and most communication between Italy and the United States ceased. Pound never had the chance to approve this sixteen-page pamphlet pasted into the endpapers of the first 500 copies (of 1,000) of Cantos LII–LXXI. In two short essays, Laughlin and Delmore Schwartz attempt to contextualise and explain the ideas and the formal qualities of these twenty cantos, but the pamphlet’s significance goes far beyond this one volume of poems, for it provides a sneak preview of the arguments that not just Laughlin and Schwartz but many of the most important cultural and literary critics of postwar America would make about how readers should understand these works by a man who ended up giving aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war. Schwartz – who had earlier that year written Pound to ‘resign as one of your most studious and faithful admirers’ because of the older poet’s virulent anti-Semitism –concludes that the poems’ formal brilliance, particularly in their use of the poetic line, outweighed the repugnance of their content. For his part, Laughlin tries to spin Pound’s fascist sympathies as the result of his egalitarian and democratic nature, as expressed in his economic ideas. He is not a fascist; he is a statist.26 Taken in total, these actions prefigure how New Directions would become not only the pre-eminent publisher of modernist literature in the United States, but one of the most important forces defining modernism for the broad public in the Cold War period. While still driven to use literature to renew civilisation, Laughlin started to make his peace with some of the tactics of commercial publishing. In building his list, he proposed a lineage for a particular strain of American modernism, starting with Greek and Roman classics, moving through the French Symbolists to Pound and Williams, and concluding with a younger generation who first appeared in his annuals and in anthologies like Five Young American Poets (three collections appearing from 1940–4 that included, among others, Mary Barnard, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell and Karl Shapiro). Most importantly, he began to bleach the political radicalism out of modernism, and particularly out of Pound, by framing the poetry’s accomplishments primarily in formal terms.

The war provides new opportunities for New Directions If the war presented many larger publishers with a crisis – fewer readers, less disposable income, paper rationing – the period offered a scrappy small publisher like New Directions the opportunity to experiment with innovative new projects. (Although of draft age, Laughlin received a medical deferment.) With a subvention from the

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Office of Inter-American Affairs, in 1942 New Directions put out an Anthology of Contemporary Latin-American Poetry edited by Fitts – a book intended to support the OIAA’s drive to improve cultural relations with Latin America and undercut Nazi efforts to do the same, and that prefigured Laughlin’s much more extensive culturaldiplomatic involvement in the mid-1950s. As the war began, Laughlin moved aggressively into series publication, inspired by the Modern Library. ‘The New Classics’, debuting in 1941, republished at a cheap price – initially US$1.50 – out-of-print texts that Laughlin judged to be important predecessors or exemplars of modernism. It’s striking to think that any of these thirty-six titles had fallen into obscurity, but that Laughlin cheaply leased the copyright for classics like James’s The Aspern Papers, Sartre’s Nausea, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell, Stein’s Three Lives, Joyce’s Exiles, or especially Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby is astounding. Starting in 1944, Laughlin began to collaborate with the designer Alvin Lustig, who specialised in glorious abstract designs for commercial products such as advertisements, album covers and of course book jackets. In fact, Lustig probably did as much as Laughlin to establish the New Directions ‘brand’, for he gave the books a consistent, sleek, modern look that reinforced the modernity and urbanity of the literature. Laughlin said that when Lustig began to design the covers for a series, that series’ sales would triple. (Lustig designed many of the New Directions jackets until he died in 1955, at which point the company started using a stark black-and-white design for most of its books.) While ‘The New Classics’ provided the texts, the ‘Makers of Modern Literature’ provided the commentary. Like the ‘New Classics’, ‘Makers’ was a small-format, low-priced hardcover series with jacket designs by Lustig, but these were book-length critical studies of modernist writers and their near predecessors: Harry Levin on Joyce, Lionel Trilling on Forster, David Daiches on Woolf, and eventually Vivienne Koch on Williams and Hugh Kenner on Wyndham Lewis. In 1946, ‘Direction’ – an even smaller-format hardcover series of contemporary experimental writing – joined these offerings. These three series are a microcosm of Laughlin’s overall approach to publishing modernist literature: provide primary texts by the ancestors, the paragons and the contemporary inheritors, as well as the critical apparatus to explain their achievements.27 Even though during the war he moved aggressively to publish affordable books accessible to a broad audience, Laughlin also sought to revive the modernist practices of fine printing and subscription publishing. A few of his earliest books were printed by small craft printers,

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but in 1941 Laughlin rolled out the ‘Poet of the Month’ pamphlets (with Williams, of course, the first poet featured). The series was a genuine miscellany, mixing established names such as Fitts and Malcolm Cowley with new poets – Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, John Berryman, Howard Baker – and some classic authors like Donne, Rochester and Melville. Almost every volume was produced by a different small printer; in fact, Laughlin explained that the spur for this series was as much his desire ‘to give patronage and encouragement to hand printers’ as his love of poetry.28 For US$5, subscribers would get one thirty-two-page pamphlet a month. Unfortunately, subscriptions and bookstore sales never fully covered the costs of printing, and Laughlin abandoned the project after about four years. Although a great deal of the house’s output during the war years consisted of reprints of various kinds, Laughlin continued to cultivate promising new authors who, he hoped, would continue to publish with New Directions in the long term. He primarily did this through the ‘Poet of the Month’ series and the annual, but at times the authors solicited him. At a 1942 cocktail party at Lincoln Kirstein’s apartment, for example, Laughlin was approached by a ‘small man with a sharp nose and curly dark hair’ who had come specifically to meet him. Tennessee Williams, at the time an unsuccessful playwright and sometime poet, desperately wanted New Directions to publish his work. ‘I could not be printed under better auspices’, he told Laughlin.29 The two men quickly became friends and Laughlin included Williams’s poetry in the 1944 Five Young American Poets, followed by several other books – most notably, in 1947, the first trade edition of A Streetcar Named Desire (with a Lustig jacket design). After the war ended, Laughlin quickly ramped up his firm. Whereas New Directions had been publishing around twenty titles a year during the war, starting in 1946 that increased to thirty or more, and more than ever were new titles, as opposed to reprints. Williams and Pound produced a spate of books for New Directions in these years, both new titles and anthologies of previously published works. Laughlin found new American writers to add to the list: Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Thomas Merton. With transatlantic communication re-established, Laughlin looked to Europe for new writers, and soon the list featured Céline, Gide, Camus, Sartre, Queneau, Italo Svevo, Giuseppe Berto, Elio Vittorini, and others. (New Directions was so important in making French writers available in the United States that the French government named him a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1953). This combination obliquely revived the early days of modernism, where Americans

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and French and Italians and English and Romanians mingled and published together in London and Paris. But it wasn’t so easy to leave the war behind. In 1948, Ezra Pound won the inaugural Bollingen Prize in Poetry, awarded by the Library of Congress, for his 1947 collection The Pisan Cantos, and ignited a cultural firestorm. At the time, of course, Pound was involuntarily committed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC, with a treason indictment hanging over his head. He had started composing The Pisan Cantos on rolls of toilet paper while held in the custody of the US Army in a ‘gorilla cage’ at the Detention Training Center outside of Pisa, Italy, in 1945. (Later he was given the use of the camp commandant’s typewriter.) Readers, journalists, cultural figures and even some of the Bollingen judges, including New Directions author Karl Shapiro, were infuriated that such an honour, endorsed by an office of the United States government, could go to someone who had given aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war. The controversy was fierce, and in a sense it culminated the first period of Laughlin’s career as a publisher. The loudest voice demanding that the prize be annulled was that of Robert Hillyer, the adamant anti-modernist who had run Harvard’s writing programme during Laughlin’s undergraduate years. Hillyer issued his salvos in the middlebrow Saturday Review of Literature, the object of Pound’s ongoing ire. Defending the prize, although not necessarily Pound, was a curious alliance of left-wing, largely Jewish New York intellectuals and conservative Southern ‘New Critics’, both of whom insisted that an artwork had to be judged purely on its own merits, not on the personal qualities or political beliefs of the artist who created it. (Laughlin had already published work by members of both groups, and in fact New Directions published John Crowe Ransom’s manifesto The New Criticism in 1940.) And Laughlin, partly because it had become his belief and partly because it was the only way to save Pound’s reputation as a poet, for several years embraced this doctrine of ‘aesthetic autonomy’ in everything having to do with Pound, even to the extent of omitting photographs or images of Pound from advertisements or dust jackets.30 The activist who went into the business to promote Poundian social change through literature was now trying to bleach all of the social and political meaning out of his marquee author’s works and public image. Laughlin’s own politics were changing, as well. The war and the ensuing Cold War had convinced him of the imperative for free societies to work together to promote artistic experimentation, and his own experience as a businessman quenched much of his early

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anti-commercial fire. It was not only possible but crucial, he increasingly felt, for governments and businesses and foundations to work together to help artists create the ‘new social concepts’ and the ‘free flow of ideas’ that he still valued above all. In 1952, he took a leave from New Directions to head a Ford Foundation-funded journal, Perspectives USA, intended to republish the best of contemporary American literature and art and critical writing for readers in Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy. The journal, which lasted for four years, was neither ground-breaking nor influential, but in editing it Laughlin spent extended periods of time in India, Burma and Japan, and, as a result, when he returned to his old job New Directions became a leading publisher of contemporary Asian literature in translation. These Asian writers such as Yukio Mishima, in turn, combined with the modernists already on the New Directions list (most notably Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder) to suggest a kind of trans-Pacific modernism.31 College publishing became a crucial revenue stream for New Directions in the 1950s, a development that helped modernism, particularly as manifested in New Directions’ list, secure its central place in American literary history. Laughlin didn’t exactly stumble into publishing for the growing college market – after founding New Directions he spent term breaks hustling around Northeastern and Midwestern college bookstores with a trunk full of books – but that his early titles, particularly in the ‘New Classics’ series, gained traction in America’s rapidly expanding post-GI Bill universities was an unexpected benefit of his approach. ‘Professors hadn’t been able to assign’ books such as Gatsby or The Aspern Papers or Exiles, he remembered, ‘because they were out of print. And now they were delighted to be able to assign them in inexpensive editions, and at that price they were good impulse buys even if they weren’t assigned.’32 And given that in the 1940s most university literature departments didn’t include modernist authors in their curricula, the combination of the ‘New Classics’ and the ‘Makers of Modern Literature’ was a brilliant, if inadvertent, way to tempt professors to start teaching modern writing. After New Directions started publishing in the trade paperback format in the mid-1950s, their books – Pound, Williams, Thomas Merton, Tennessee Williams, later Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, and above all Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, probably the firm’s all-time bestselling title – became ubiquitous in dorm-room shelves and off-campus houses, easily identifiable by their black-and-white spines and stark sans serif lettering.

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‘The New Directions list from 1940 to 1955 reads like the canon of modernism’, journalist Cynthia Zarin observed in her 1992 New Yorker profile of Laughlin. That’s certainly true; but that’s because to a very great extent the New Directions list from 1940 to 1955 created the canon of modernism, at least for American readers and students, and then embodied that modernism through its pervasiveness on class syllabi and in college libraries and bookstores. It’s a particular kind of modernism, both deeply international (that’s the Pound) and proudly American (there’s Williams), rooted in Pound’s and H.D.’s and Dudley Fitts’s angular take on the Greek and Roman legacy, comfortable with difficulty (there’s Pound again, but also later writers like Susan Howe), often steeped in the natural world (Rexroth and Snyder and Merton). ‘I get awfully bored with poets who just spin poetry out of poetry’, Laughlin explained, possibly in an oblique jab at the Wallace Stevens strain of modernism conspicuously absent from the New Directions list. ‘I love poems like the Cantos which have all sorts of stuff in them, lots of history and ideas and people and recollections and places.’33 And although Laughlin withdrew from the day-to-day work of the publishing house in the late 1980s, and died in 1997, the house still very much bears the imprint not just of his taste, but of his way of doing business: independent, resolutely international, run by a small staff who often spent most of their careers there, always in search of the New.

Notes 1. Zarin, ‘Jaz’, p. 44; Ziegfeld, ‘The Art of Publishing’. 2. Ziegfeld, ‘The Art of Publishing’. 3. ‘Sets’ refers to late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century sets of classic writers like Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and the like. Laughlin, Interview with Robert Dana, p. 5. 4. MacNiven, ‘Literchoor is My Beat’, p. 28. 5. See Barnhisel, ‘James Laughlin’s Early Poetry’. 6. Ziegfeld, ‘The Art of Publishing’. 7. Laughlin, Interview with Robert Dana, p. 2; Ziegfeld, ‘The Art of Publishing’. 8. Laughlin to Pound, 21 August 1933. Quoted in Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, p. 50. 9. Laughlin to Pound, 8 October 1936, Box 1371, New Directions Publishing Company Archive, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 10. MacNiven, ‘Literchoor is My Beat’, p. 58. 11. Ziegfeld, ‘The Art of Publishing’.

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New Directions Books 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

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Laughlin, Interview with Robert Dana, p. 10. MacNiven, ‘Literchoor is My Beat’, p. 92. MacNiven, ‘Literchoor is My Beat’, p. 97. Laughlin, ‘Preface’, New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1. Peters, Lorine Niedecker, p. 57. Macdonald, ‘A Theory of “Popular Culture”’, p. 21. New Directions’ ‘offices’ were in Norfolk, CT, in the barn on Laughlin’s Aunt Leila’s Meadow House estate. Zarin, ‘Jaz’, p. 57. Williams, White Mule, pp. 292–3. Laughlin, ‘Preface’, New Directions in Prose and Poetry 2. New Directions was initially headquartered in Cambridge, MA, then for some years in Norfolk, CT, but by 1942 the house had largely transplanted its operations to New York: first in lower midtown at 67 W. 44th Street and then 500 Fifth Avenue, then in the late 1940s the firm moved, appropriately, to Greenwich Village, initially at 333 Sixth Avenue (at Bleecker) and then to 80 Eighth Ave (at 14th St.), where it remains today. Its downtown location, far from the larger firms in midtown, underscored its distance from the practices of mainstream trade publishing and its connection with bohemian artists. Zarin, ‘Jaz’, p. 62. Laughlin, Interview with Robert Dana, p. 15. Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, pp. 65-7; Morris, The Writings of William Carlos Williams, pp. 116-17. Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, pp. 81–2. Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, pp. 84–7. When Pound finally saw the pamphlet – in 1945, after he had been returned to the United States for trial – he griped a bit about Laughlin’s essay (‘ignorant as a sow’s cunt of American history’) but was much more incensed by Laughlin’s careless error on the jacket confusing John Quincy Adams for John Adams. The useful website ‘A Series of Series’ (https://seriesofseries.owu.edu) provides a capsule history and full list of titles for these three New Directions series, as well as dozens of other twentieth-century publishers’ series. Laughlin, Interview with Robert Dana, p. 19. MacNiven, ‘Literchoor is My Beat’, p. 193. Barnhisel, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, pp. 92–126. Also see Pound, The Pisan Cantos; Leick, ‘Ezra Pound v. The Saturday Review of Literature’. The Bollingen affair, moreover, wasn’t the first backlash against Pound’s anti-Semitism, wartime broadcasts and treason indictment. Bennett Cerf, the publisher of Random House (and a long-time target of Pound’s scorn),

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had refused to allow Conrad Aiken and William Rose Benét to include any of Pound’s poems in their 1945 Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, which was published as a Modern Library Giant. Receiving over 100 letters objecting to this ‘censorship’, and attacks from Laughlin himself, Cerf relented in future editions of the anthology. (See Jaillant, Modernism, Middlebrow, and the Literary Canon, pp. 145–7). 31. Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists, pp. 179–216. 32. Zarin, ‘Jaz’, p. 58. 33. Laughlin, Interview with Robert Dana, p. 30.

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Chapter 10

Grove Press and Samuel Beckett: A Necessary Alliance Loren Glass

The lifelong relationship between Samuel Beckett and Grove Press owner Barney Rosset is one of the more under-appreciated professional alliances in post-war publishing history. The unwavering loyalty between them hearkened back to the era of high modernism, before huge advances and high-paid literary agents rendered such allegiances impractical. Rosset personally handled all of Beckett’s literary rights in the United States and hosted his only visit when the author came to New York in the summer of 1964 to make Film. And Grove not only published all of Beckett’s work in the United States but also much of the early criticism that would establish the foundation of what quickly became a massive academic industry, the rapid growth of which in turn ensured his place in the lucrative college curriculum of the GI Bill generation and bolstered the reputation that would win him the Nobel Prize in 1969. In order to achieve the personal and aesthetic autonomy towards which he aspired, Beckett needed someone to issue his work responsibly and reliably, to represent his literary and economic interests, to project an image of him appropriate to the reputation of his work, and to protect him from the distractions attendant upon his celebrity. In the United States, where much of the Beckett industry would find its academic home, Rosset reliably performed these tasks for the entirety of Beckett’s career. The relationship between the two men can be more fully and effectively documented now that the bulk of Beckett’s correspondence has been published in a four-volume scholarly edition for which he originally selected Rosset as the general editor. Indeed, the very logic of editorial selection was based on their relationship, as Beckett wrote to editor Martha Fehsenfeld shortly before his death, ‘I do have confidence in you & know I can rely on

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you to edit my correspondence in the sense agreed on with Barney, i.e. its reduction to those passages only having bearing on my work.’1 In addition, Rosset’s widow Astrid Myers Rosset has recently curated a collection entitled Dear Mr Beckett: Letters from the Publisher, which includes most of the letters Rosset wrote to Beckett. Together these collections provide detailed documentation of one of the most important author-publisher relationships in modern literary history. In his first letter to Beckett, Rosset credits Sylvia Beach and Wallace Fowlie with advising him to pursue the little-known reclusive writer. ‘Sylvia Beach is certainly the one you must blame for your future appearance on the Grove Press list’, Rosset writes, adding that ‘after she talked of you in beautiful words I immediately decided that what the Grove Press needed most in the world was Samuel Beckett’. He then adds that he consulted with his New School Professor Wallace Fowlie, who gave him an ‘urgent plea to take on your work’. In this initial letter, Rosset also encourages Beckett to self-translate, avowing, ‘If you would accept my first choice as translator the whole thing would be easily settled. That choice of course being you.’2 Rosset would repeat this recommendation throughout their early correspondence, justifying that he would get some credit for Beckett’s decision to take on the task for which he would become iconic. Rosset’s early and auspicious enthusiasm for Beckett was shared by Richard Seaver, a University of North Carolina graduate in Paris working on a dissertation on James Joyce at the Sorbonne, who had stumbled upon copies of Molloy and Malone Meurt in the display window of the offices of Éditions de Minuit. Knowing of Beckett’s early work on Finnegans Wake, Seaver bought both books, and after reading through Molloy in one sitting received ‘a shock of discovery’ which marked the beginning of an extensive relationship with the author and his work, particularly during his ten-year stint as a senior editor and translator at Grove Press.3 Seaver mentioned Beckett to the Scots exile Alexander Trocchi, who was starting up an expatriate little magazine called Merlin, and Trocchi encouraged Seaver to write an article on Beckett for the fledgling journal. Seaver’s essay appeared in the second issue; for the third, which features an excerpt from Watt, Seaver was listed as advisory editor and director, and he would be a member of the editorial board for the remaining issues, all of which featured work by Beckett. He would also be instrumental in publishing both Watt and Molloy as part of the ‘Collection Merlin’, an imprint of Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press, whose catalogue Grove would profitably cannibalise over the course of the sixties.

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‘Samuel Beckett: An Introduction’ opens by identifying its subject as ‘a prime example of that literary phenomenon which began some time during the last century and continues today, the writer in exile’.4 Indeed, the ‘Merlin Juveniles’, as Beckett called them, would also attempt to launch their literary aspirations in the culture capital that had been the adopted home of so many of the authors they admired. In addition to Trocchi and Seaver, the group would at one time or another include the English poet Christopher Logue, the South African writer Patrick Bowles, and the American translator Austryn Wainhouse. All of them worshipped James Joyce, whose Ulysses is praised as ‘a great work of genius’ and model for the type of writing the journal seeks to publish in Trocchi’s editorial statement opening the second issue.5 In this sense, the journal was modelled on the now-legendary little magazines such as transition and the Transatlantic Review, which had launched the careers of so many modernists between the wars. Like those earlier journals, Merlin had a very small circulation, but Barney Rosset nevertheless managed to get his hands on one in New York City, and it confirmed his sense that Beckett was just what he needed to establish the reputation of the tiny publishing house he had just purchased for US$3,000. Rosset went to Paris and met with Seaver, who directed him to Jerome Lindon of Éditions de Minuit, from whom he was able to acquire the American rights to Beckett’s work. Rosset shrewdly anticipated that, like his modernist forebears, Beckett would make a good long-term investment. Indeed, by 1955 Rosset was able to announce to Beckett, with whom he was already on a first name basis: I am very happy to see this bubbling up of interest and my strong feeling is that your work is going to be more and more known as time goes by. There definitely is an underground interest here, the kind of interest that slowly generates steam and has a lasting effect.6

Beckett, in turn, would come to trust Rosset implicitly, conceding in 1957: I am incapable of understanding contracts. My ‘method’ consists, when they are drawn up by those in whom I have confidence, in signing them without reading them. Any contracts drawn up by you, and involving me alone, I shall sign in this fashion.7

Beckett was canonised with unprecedented alacrity, providing Grove with a panoply of critical sound bites that would be recycled over

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the course of the 1950s and 1960s, and that can be usefully tracked across the publication of his famous trilogy, the titles of which were initially issued separately as ‘quality’ paperbacks under Grove’s ground-breaking Evergreen Originals imprint. In the later 1950s, following the lead of his friend and colleague Jason Epstein’s Doubleday imprint Anchor Books, Rosset began publishing original avant-garde texts as inexpensive ‘quality’ paperbacks, which were quickly recognised in the industry as marking a new and significant stage in the paperback revolution.8 Grove launched Evergreen Originals as an experiment analogous to the avant-garde literature in its rapidly expanding catalogue. In a 1958 circular to booksellers, boldly headed ‘An experiment’, Grove notes the industry’s concern ‘over the shrinking market for new, original fiction’ and attributes this shrinkage to ‘the wide gap between the prices of original hardbound fiction and paperback reprints’. The circular proposes that Grove’s new imprint will ‘bridge that gap’, and urges booksellers to ‘display these books, talk about them, and report them to your local bestseller lists’.9 Six months later, Grove ran an ad in The New York Times Book Review trumpeting the imprint as ‘an experiment in book publishing that worked!’, and offering The Unnamable as the latest addition to the line. All of Beckett’s work was marketed by Grove to this audience and in this format, which fused economic affordability and aesthetic quality without being dismissed as middlebrow. The biographical blurbs on Grove’s editions of the trilogy establish the iconicity of Beckett’s exilic itinerary from Dublin to Paris. The back-cover copy on Molloy (1955) and Malone Dies (1956) reads, ‘Samuel Beckett is an Irishman, born in Dublin, graduated from Trinity College, who now lives in Paris and writes in French.’ Significantly, the back cover of The Unnamable (1958) has no biographical information, instead simply announcing that, with its publication, ‘the famous post-war trilogy by the Irish-born writer has now been completed’. By 1958, Beckett’s biography required only a thumbnail phrase to affirm and explain his authorship of what the copy calls ‘the narrative of a man without a name who is searching for his self’. This dialectic between the iconicity of the authorial name and the anonymity of the text’s narrator is economically displayed on the cover, which simply reads ‘The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett’. The Unnamable also includes the clearest bibliographic evidence yet of Beckett’s literary stature, listing on one of the opening pages the range of editions Grove published, including not only 100 ‘specially bound limited’ editions, but also ‘A specially bound and signed edition of 26 copies numbered A through Z’ and

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‘A specially bound and signed edition of 4 copies, hors commerce, numbered 1 through 4’. Beckett’s considerable celebrity and high cultural cachet by 1958 had less to do with the trilogy than with the worldwide success of Waiting for Godot, which was crucial to the marketing of Beckett’s novels. The jacket of Molloy notes that the play ‘was met with tremendous acclaim and has since successfully played in many countries in Europe’. By the time of Malone Dies, ‘Europe’ has been dropped from the sentence. Correlatively, the copy for Molloy specifies that the trilogy ‘has established an important place for Beckett in the French literary world’, while by the time of the paperback publication of The Unnamable the publishers are able to assert, with proprietary confidence, that the trilogy ‘established an important place for Beckett in our literary world, paralleling the fame he achieved as a playwright with his WAITING FOR GODOT’. Finally, when Grove issued the entire trilogy as a single Black Cat mass-market paperback in 1965, it is deemed ‘a major contribution to the modern novel [which] has caused Beckett to be ranked by critics along with Kafka and Joyce’ while ‘his world-famous play, Waiting for Godot, has been translated, published, and performed in nearly a dozen languages’. Yoked to the worldwide success of Godot, the trilogy analogously migrates from being a European to a global phenomenon. The early performances of Waiting for Godot are landmarks in the history of modern theatre. Roger Blin’s succès de scandale at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953; Alan Schneider’s debacle at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami on 3 January 1956; Herbert Blau’s triumph at San Quentin on 19 April 1957: all have become legendary events which anchor any study of Beckett’s dramatic work.10 Less has been written about Grove’s publication of a US$1 Evergreen paperback edition in 1956. Spurred by the play’s Broadway debut, when nearly 3,000 copies were sold in the lobby of the John Golden Theatre, it would eventually sell more than two million copies, becoming an iconic American paperback and one of the bestselling plays of all time, providing Beckett with a reliable royalty stream for the rest of his life.11 W. B. Worthen affirms that ‘Beckett’s plays are an essential part of the modern drama’s seizure of the page’, particularly because Beckett’s authority over permissions to perform them – disputes over which were mediated by Barney Rosset in the United States – was exercised with such high modernist imperiousness and exactitude.12 The printed play in Beckett’s case embodies and anchors the autonomy of the auteur as source and adjudicator of the conditions and

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conventions under which the play can be performed. As a profoundly literary figure, Beckett has been a crucial model for the authority of the modern playwright as writer, as producer of the printed text which determines the parameters of performance. Although Grove initially handled the performance rights to Beckett’s plays, the number of requests and the legal and bureaucratic burdens of dealing with them eventually led the company to farm out the responsibilities to Samuel French for stock rights and Dramatists Play Service for amateur rights. Over the course of the next two decades, Waiting for Godot became one of the most frequently performed plays across the United States, particularly on college and university campuses. Since its share of the performance rights was small, Grove’s challenge was to convince these audiences that it was necessary not only to see the play but also to read it. In order to achieve this objective, Grove relied on the assistance of a stable of academic critics who emphasised the ‘literary’ qualities of post-war European experimental drama. Thus Wallace Fowlie, the Harvard-educated Francophile who had encouraged Rosset to publish Beckett, in his influential study Dionysus in Paris heralded the arrival in France of a ‘new type of supremely literary playwright’.13 And Martin Esslin, the English theatre critic whose work as a producer for the BBC in the 1960s would be centrally responsible for popularising the theatrical avant-garde, emphasised in his classic study, The Theatre of the Absurd, that the plays in this ‘school’, whose name he coined, are ‘analogous to a Symbolist or Imagist poem’.14 Academics such as Fowlie, Esslin, Hugh Kenner, Richard Coe, Ruby Cohn, Eric Bentley and Roger Shattuck, all of whom worked with Grove over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, helped to establish this genealogy from the modernist literature of the first half of the twentieth century to the experimental theatre of the second half, thereby establishing the literary antecedents of Beckett’s drama. In proposing an analogy between experimental theatre and modernist poetry, they affirmed the necessity of reading not only the plays themselves but also their own critical commentary in order to understand fully the significance of these difficult texts. From the beginning, Rosset thought of Waiting for Godot as a book. He convinced Beckett not to publish the first act in Merlin, arguing that ‘EN ATTENDANT GODOT should burst upon us as an entity in my opinion’.15 A few months later, Rosset described this book to Lindon: Our edition will include the play GODOT, plus a page or two of biographical material at the back of the book – as well as photographs

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of the production (assuming we can obtain them). The book’s jacket will also tell about Beckett and will also contain his photograph, along with quotations from French reviews of his work.

And he affirmed that ‘we have decided to go ahead with publication of GODOT regardless of the status of the play’s production here’.16 Initial sales of the cloth edition were, unsurprisingly, modest. The entity that ended up bursting upon the American public was the US$1 quality paperback Grove brought out in 1956, the year of the play’s debut in the United States. After the famous failure in Miami, when befuddled tourists expecting a comedy walked out in droves, Rosset wrote to reassure Beckett: ‘Certainly all is not lost – the printing of the inexpensive edition forges ahead.’17 Meanwhile, in New York, producer Michael Myerberg made a public appeal for 70,000 intellectuals to come see the play in order to avoid a repeat of the Miami debacle. Not only did Myerberg sell the cheap paperback in the lobby of the theatre, he also arranged for symposia to be held with the actors during the Broadway run. Later that year, Myerberg wrote to Beckett to report on their success: Of particular interest were the four symposiums we held during the run. They were extremely well attended and displayed a keen interest in the play. A rather startling development here is that four-fifths of our audience are young – under 24, and even boys and girls 17 and 18 are storming the box office for the cheaper seats. At no time have we had cheap seats available at a performance. The youngsters had a complete and ready acceptance of the play, and quite a lot to say about its meaning, which seemed clear to them and had entered into their lives intellectually and emotionally.18

Rosset realised early on that this college-age audience would be central to Godot’s success, and he convinced Dramatists Play Service to reduce the royalty rate for amateur productions, writing: We are in close contact with the potential audiences for the play and we know that they consist in the main of university students who may well not be able to afford more than a minimum royalty . . . The whole successful history of this play is the strongest evidence of the necessity for allowing it to be played before very small groups who may also have very limited means.19

Grove aggressively marketed the paperback edition of the play to these ‘very small groups’, offering it on consignment to student productions and to every bookstore in any college town where the play was being performed.

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The Evergreen paperback Waiting for Godot is clearly designed to match in austerity and simplicity the meagre décor of its initial production in Paris, the cast and credits for which are listed following the text of the play itself. The cover photo, which Beckett thought ‘marvellous’, depicts in black and white the heavily backlit silhouettes of Vladimir and Estragon, their hands barely touching, strolling towards the spindly tree that stands to the right. The title and author’s name, all lower case, run across the top in simple white type against a black background (Figure 10.1). Inside much use is made of white space to further emphasise the sparse environment in which the play’s characters find themselves. The title, now in all capitals, is spread over the initial verso and recto pages, unevenly spaced both horizontally and vertically, as if the text itself were aimlessly wandering through the book. On the recto page, all in lower-case italics, unjustified, are four lines – ‘tragicomedy in 2 acts/by samuel beckett/ grove press/new york’ – resolutely if modestly linking publisher to author and text (Figure 10.2). On the next recto page, the names of the cast are listed, centred vertically and horizontally. Across the top of the following recto page, unevenly spaced like the title, runs

Figure 10.1 Front Cover, Waiting for Godot, Evergreen Edition

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Figure 10.2 Title Page, Waiting for Godot, Evergreen Edition

the announcement of ‘ACT I’, below which, left justified, we see the simple setting: ‘A country road. A tree./Evening’. In the text of the play that follows, only the verso pages are numbered sequentially in bold type, as if it is the space across verso and recto, rather than the individual pages, that is being read through. The dialogue is left justified to the immediate right of the speech prefixes, expanding the amount of white space on the page, and foregrounding the alternation of speakers while alienating them from their speech, which appears as an autonomous centred column. The back cover features an austere photo of Beckett, the left side of his face almost entirely in shadow, accompanied by laudatory reviews of the play and a brief blurb ranking him with Kafka and Joyce. While it anticipates the design which Grove used for Beckett’s other plays, Waiting for Godot came out before they launched their Evergreen Original imprint; the first Evergreen Original Beckett play was Endgame. The cover photo, from Blin’s Parisian production, is an uncompromisingly bleak black-and-white shot of Hamm in his chair against a black background, the handkerchief over his face bleached to bright white with the bloodstains in the centre vaguely coalescing into an expressionless skull-like face. The title,

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with the initial ‘E’ capitalised and the lower-case ‘g’ superscripted, runs across the top in white; on the next line is ‘a play’ in lower-case orange type, and then ‘by Samuel Beckett’, with the author’s name in white (Figure 10.3). The text of Endgame is far more compressed than Godot, with the italicised stage directions considerably smaller in point size than the dialogue, which is in turn wrapped around the speech prefixes. The text, then, gives a sense of the claustrophobic interior in which the action of the play unfolds. Grove complemented these efforts to recreate typographically a sense of the play’s setting and mood with a campaign to convince audiences that it was necessary to read it. Grove capitalised on the befuddlement of critics by claiming that reading the play could clarify its meaning. Endgame was advertised as ‘the play the critics didn’t understand’, and audiences were encouraged to ‘read it before you see it’. ‘Read it before you see it!’ then became a tagline in the campaign for this and other plays, and Grove would encourage readers to believe that they could discover the meaning of Beckett’s work in their ‘own heart’ through reading the play as a supplement to seeing it.20

Figure 10.3 Front Cover, Endgame, Evergreen Edition

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In addition to encouraging audiences to read the play, Grove provided paratextual instructions for how to read it. Thus, the back cover of Endgame features a long blurb by Harold Hobson emphasising that, Mr Beckett is a poet: and the business of the poet is not to clarify but to suggest; to employ words with auras of association, with a reaching out toward a vision, a probing down into an emotion, beyond the compass of explicit definition.

When Grove distributed Endgame through The Readers’ Subscription book club, this designation of Beckett as poet was leveraged by the scholar Vivian Mercier to instruct readers ‘How to Read Endgame’. The play was sold along with a recording of its performance, and Mercier urged readers to listen to it first, because: I want you to experience the play before you interpret it. Listen to what the play is before you start asking yourself what it means; that is what the practiced reader always does with poetry, and Samuel Beckett remains a poet whatever he is writing.21

Many readers wanted help in becoming ‘practiced’, and they wrote to Grove asking about the larger significance of these plays. Beckett, of course, was notoriously reticent about the meaning of his work, so Grove responded to these queries by suggesting resources which would become central to the framing of his work in the 1960s. Judith Schmidt, who handled the voluminous correspondence to Beckett for Grove, composed a boilerplate letter which opened: ‘Mr Beckett prefers not to discuss his work. If you would like some help in understanding Mr Beckett’s work, you might refer to any number of critical works that have appeared.’22 She also frequently noted that ‘Grove Press publishes a short book on Beckett, entitled SAMUEL BECKETT, by Richard Coe, which sells for 95 cents.’ Grove not only published the work of Coe, but also Hugh Kenner’s first book on Beckett, as well as Ruby Cohn’s Casebook on Waiting for Godot. The academic industry which rapidly grew around Beckett’s work amply compensated for his silence and Grove published many of the critical texts that helped to frame Beckett’s significance for his American (and broader Anglophone) audience. This industry in turn ensured that Beckett would become a staple in college courses, and Grove marketed aggressively to this academic audience,

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going so far as to propose a course on Beckett consisting entirely of Evergreen Paperbacks.23 Cohn’s Casebook, which Grove recommended for this course, conveniently illustrates the process whereby the initial performance contexts of the play and its controversial reception were assimilated into the readerly protocols of academic interpretation. Cohn’s introduction begins by affirming that ‘Waiting for Godot has sold nearly 50,000 copies in the original French, and nearly 350,000 in Beckett’s own English translation.’ She then warns that these numbers ‘help you to know the best-seller, the smash hit, but only the individual can know a classic which is a work that provides continuous growth’, grounding the value of the play in a resolutely readerly register. She concludes her opening paragraph with, ‘Paradoxically for our time, Waiting for Godot is a classic that sells well’, implicitly recognising the Evergreen paperback as the embodiment of the play’s success.24 The structure of the anthology then replicates this trajectory, starting with a section on ‘Impact’, which excerpts reviews and accounts of early performances, and concluding with a section on ‘Interpretation’, which excerpts the type of academic analysis, much of it published by Grove, that crucially depends upon the printed text. The course description places Beckett in the company of Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Sartre; in addition to Waiting for Godot, Endgame and the trilogy, it includes Beckett’s early study of Proust, also published by Grove, that had already become a common resource for academic interpretation of Beckett’s work. Grove’s course proposal, then, attests to the company’s crucial role in enabling the initial development of the academic industry that quickly emerged around Beckett’s work, and to how this industry reciprocally helped Grove establish Beckett as required reading across the college curriculum in the United States. Grove was also instrumental in enhancing Beckett’s international profile. In 1961, the company nominated him for the newly established Formentor Prize, named after the hotel in Mallorca where the jury met to deliberate. The Formentor was founded by six publishers, Weidenfeld & Nicholson of England, Gallimard of France, Einaudi of Italy, Seix Barral of Spain, Rowohlt of Germany, with Grove representing the United States. The publishers chose submissions from their catalogues and then collectively selected the winners, who were rewarded with translations into their native languages. To win the Formentor, then, was to be immediately catapulted into the realm of World Literature. As Borges, who shared the prize with Beckett in that inaugural year, famously commented: ‘As a consequence of

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that prize, my books mushroomed overnight throughout the western world.’25 As Pascale Casanova affirms in her ground-breaking study, The World Republic of Letters, both Borges’s and Beckett’s reputations were initially established in Paris, and the inaugural Formentor award ratified its judgement; but by the 1960s, as she also concedes, Parisian centrality was being challenged on a number of fronts, and the story of Beckett’s global consecration is incomplete without a consideration of these other agencies.26 For one thing, in the post-war era American institutions of higher education were becoming increasingly central to ratifying and brokering international reputations. In Beckett’s case, this process precipitated a symptomatic paradox insofar as his work seemed to deny the utility or significance of critical exegesis. Thus, in a review of Martin Esslin’s edited volume, Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, Leo Bersani wryly asks: ‘Has Beckett . . . failed to fail?’27 Bersani finds it ‘somewhat disconcerting to read so many admiring, undaunted analyses of a significance for which Beckett implicitly expresses only boredom and disgust’,28 but Esslin in his introduction anticipates this understandable complaint. He asks, ‘if there are no secure meanings to be established . . . what justification can there be for any critical analysis and interpretation of such a writer’s work?’29 He then answers that it is the role of the critic to determine ‘the manner in which [Beckett’s] work is perceived and experienced by his readers’.30 Implicitly referencing the rocky initial reception of Godot in the United States, Esslin explains that the critics’ modes of perception will be followed by the mass of readers, just as in every theater audience it is the few individuals with a keener than average sense of humor who determine whether the jokes in a play will be laughed at all, and to what extent, by triggering off the chainreaction of the mass of the audience.31

Esslin’s collection displays a cultural confidence in the gatekeeping function of critics that derives not only from their consensus on Beckett’s importance but also from the shared network of venues in which this consensus circulated. By positioning this critical consensus on the avant-garde of literary reception, Esslin clarifies the complex and contradictory role of ‘failure’ in Beckett’s oeuvre. The standard interpretation relies on Beckett’s revelatory decision that, in opposition to Joyce’s unsurpassable achievement of mastery, his ‘own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge, and in taking away, in subtracting

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rather than adding’.32 But the rhetoric of failure can also be seen as an elegant mechanism for aligning the disparate timescales of the autonomous and commercial poles of the cultural field. Significantly using Éditions de Minuit’s publication of En Attendant Godot as an example, Pierre Bourdieu notes that the autonomous pole is based on long-term investment in the work of initially unknown authors while the commercial pole requires short-term promotion of bestsellers and big names. In the modern era, these temporalities could function with minimal interference, especially in France, but in the post-war era they begin to interpenetrate, precipitating figures like Beckett, for whom elite renown and mainstream celebrity precariously coincide. ‘Failure’ becomes a powerful rhetorical tool for simultaneously enabling and disavowing the conversion between cultural capital accruing from the former and economic capital accruing from the latter. The key primary source of Beckett’s rhetoric of failure is his early commentary on the Dutch painter Bram van Velde, published by Grove with illustrations in 1960, and included as the first essay in Esslin’s collection. In these dialogues with Georges Duthuit and Jacques Putnam, Beckett makes his famous assertion, offered as an appraisal of Van Velde but widely understood as an instance of critical self-reflection, that, in the absence of any coherent relation between artist and occasion, ‘to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail’.33 It would be left to the critics to establish this relation, frequently by analogy to abstract painting. Grove’s innovative book design ballasted this analogy early in Beckett’s career, as graphic artist Roy Kuhlman ensured that the covers for the individual paperbacks in the trilogy featured the abstract expressionist designs he and Rosset favoured. Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger claim Kuhlman has been ‘vastly underappreciated’ as a book designer, noting that he ‘produced one of the most consistently distinctive bodies of work in the history of book cover design’.34 Steven Brower and John Gall agree, calling Rosset and Kuhlman’s collaboration ‘a marriage of imagery and the written word that had not been seen before, or, perhaps, since’.35 Kuhlman’s iconic covers for Beckett’s work combine typographic and formal innovations in ways that encourage the critical analogy between Beckett’s writing and abstract painting. The title of Molloy jauntily tilts across the top of the cover, in black type framed by an irregular strip of white slanted against a black background. In the centre, Beckett’s name appears directly below an abstract design drawn in black lines of irregular thickness against a white background. A subtle but distinctive relation among the abstract, the typographical and the thematic

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elements of the cover is achieved by the central geometric trope of the line drawing, which depicts two large black ‘X’s framed by adjacent rectangles. These interrelations are reinforced by two adjacent rectangular sections to the lower right, one black with straight edges containing the words ‘a novel’ running vertically in white, and one orange with rough edges containing, in small black type, the designation ‘An Evergreen Book $1.45 Published by Grove Press’, with the publisher’s name set in bold (Figure 10.4). The cover of Malone Dies features a similar combination of irregular typography, cryptic geometric form and asymmetric spatial composition and colour distribution (Figure 10.5). By the time of The Unnamable, title and author appear more prominently across the top while the design that takes up most of the space features more colour: a central orange circle surrounded by concentric turquoise lines of uneven thickness against a black background (Figure 10.6). These covers reframe themes of constraint – the abstract designs suggest bars or grids – as images of formal free play. Semi-autonomous aesthetic objects in and of themselves, they encourage more generally the sublimation of thematic meaning into formal abstraction and stylistic virtuosity.36

Figure 10.4 Front Cover, Molloy, Evergreen Edition

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Figure 10.5 Front Cover, Malone Dies, Evergreen Edition

Figure 10.6 Front Cover, The Unnamable, Evergreen Edition

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For the trilogy as a single volume in hardcover, Rosset chose a photo of Beckett that Grove had used for the cover of the 1958 catalogue and would recycle in advertisements and promotional materials throughout the sixties. It features him from the shoulders up, facing front but with his head slightly turned to the right and his forehead slanted forward, giving his direct gaze into the camera a vaguely menacing aura. He is wearing a turtleneck sweater and a blazer, and his thick hair is combed straight up off his forehead and cut very short above his ears. His left ear is prominently visible, giving the sense that he is listening sceptically. He looks like a highly intelligent, and intimidating, college professor, buttressing Hugh Kenner’s contention, in his critical study of Beckett published by Grove in 1961 and excerpted in Esslin’s anthology, that his work ‘plays ever bleaker homage to the fact that ours is a classroom civilization, and that schoolmasters are the unacknowledged legislators of the race’37 (Figure 10.7). Since Beckett could not come up with a single title for the trilogy, Grove simply presents it on the jacket cover in yellow as ‘Three Novels by Samuel Beckett’ to the lower left with the individual titles, also in yellow, to the lower right. For the Black Cat paperback, the cover simply specifies ‘Three Novels by Samuel Beckett’ in

Figure 10.7 Front Cover, Three Novels by Samuel Beckett, Grove Press Hardback Edition

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black, followed by ‘Molloy’ in blue, ‘Malone Dies’ in green and ‘The Unnamable’ in blue. Over the course of these serial iterations, Grove used all three of Kuhlman’s styles – abstract, photographic and typographic – to package Beckett’s trilogy. And Beckett in turn ballasted Grove’s reputation, grounding and legitimating the modernist standards that dictated its choices of international authors. His austere gaze appears authoritatively in many of their ads, and his name, conveniently early in the alphabet, always fronts any list of their titles. The combination is amply epitomised by the covers for the collected works which Grove issued in the wake of Beckett’s Nobel Prize, all of which sport the now-classic photo in different colours. The Nobel Prize would be the ultimate recognition of Beckett’s failure to fail, of the successful consecration of his work in terms that were in many ways opposed to its philosophical implications. Thus, in a syntactically incoherent sound bite that would be replicated in Grove’s promotion of the collected works, the Swedish academy praised ‘his writing which – in new forms for the novel and drama – in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation’. Swedish Academy Member Karl Ragnar Gierow’s speech clarified this powerful logic of reversal. Conceding that ‘the degradation of humanity is a recurrent theme in Beckett’s writing’, Gierow goes on to ask, ‘What does one get when a negative is printed? A positive, a clarification, with black proving to be the light of day, the parts in deepest shade those which reflect the light source. Its name is fellow-feeling, charity.’38 Extending the metaphor for a moment we can understand Grove Press as the developer who printed the negative, inverting Beckett’s necessary failure in the residual modernist temporality of posthumous fame into the spectacular success of contemporaneous celebrity. Indeed, according to his biographer James Knowlson, Beckett chose to accept the prize partly because ‘he wanted the publishers who had shown faith in his work, especially in the early days, to be rewarded with an increase in sales of his books’.39 This increase in sales notwithstanding, Grove’s fortunes declined over the course of the seventies, but the company maintained its dedication to Beckett throughout. Rosset would continue to represent his interests in the United States, including during the notorious controversy over the American Repertory Theater’s production of Endgame, in which Beckett took exception to director JoAnne Akalaitis’s restaging the play in a subway tunnel. In 1976, Grove issued I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, edited by Seaver (who had since

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left the company), in which he recounts his discovery of the author and prophesies that, if the present rate of exegesis continues . . . it has been calculated that by the end of the century Beckett’s oeuvre will have been the subject of more scholarly probes than that of any other writer in the history of the English language with the exception of Shakespeare.40

In 1986, the company issued On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, edited by Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski, who affirms that, by 1976, there were ‘sixty odd books and five thousand articles on Beckett’ in print.41 Gontarski would work with Grove on a number of other projects as well, including The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, co-edited with C. J. Ackerley and published in 2004 (long after Rosset’s untimely and controversial departure from the company). Finally, in 2006, Grove issued its elegant four-volume Centenary Edition of Beckett’s work, edited by American author Paul Auster. The front cover of the fourth volume of the centenary edition features a silhouette, based on a photograph by David H. Davison, of an old man and a child holding hands, walking away from the viewer. It is an image from Worstward Ho, the late prose work to which Pascale Casanova dedicates the first chapter of her monograph on Beckett, and which represents for her his ultimate achievement of an autonomous literary language which contains ‘no more referents, no more attempts to imitate reality or provide an equivalent to it, no more direct links of transposition or description of the world’.42 And yet the image, both in the writing and on the book cover, is referential (indeed one of its referents is Ireland, as the original appears in a book entitled The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett’s Ireland) and, echoing the original cover of Waiting for Godot that Beckett so admired, it refers to the dependence of one person on another. While it would be a stretch to take this image as an allegory of the writer’s dependence on the publisher, it nevertheless can be taken as a concession to the inevitability of both linguistic reference and human interdependence which make autonomy a myth. Casanova calls Worstward Ho ‘the magisterial conclusion to [Beckett’s] whole oeuvre’,43 but in Grove’s centenary edition it is in fact the penultimate prose piece, followed by ‘Stirrings Still’, which is dedicated to Barney Rosset. Shocked upon hearing that Rosset had been fired by Ann Getty after he sold the company to her, Beckett revised and expanded a text he had been working on, adding the

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phrase ‘For Barney Rosset’ to the title. Rosset published a signed, limited edition of the piece for his new company, Blue Moon Press, in 1989, the year of Beckett’s death. Unlike Worstward Ho, this short text features pronouns, and the dedication makes it impossible not to link the seated figure, ‘head on hands’, to its dedicatee, who had done so much to enable the career whose valedictory this piece can claim to represent.44

Notes 1. Samuel Beckett to Martha Fehsenfeld, 18 March 1985, Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 4, p. 654. 2. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 18 June 1953, in Dear Mr Beckett, pp. 62–3. 3. Seaver, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, p. xi. 4. Seaver, ‘Samuel Beckett’, p. 73. 5. Trocchi, ‘Editorial’, p. 55. For an account of the Merlin collective and its relations with Olympia Press, see de St. Jorre, Venus Bound, and Campbell, Exiled in Paris, pp. 36–80, 122–80. 6. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 31 August 1955, in Dear Mr Beckett, p. 89. 7. Beckett to Rosset, 6 April 1957, Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 3, p. 38. 8. See, for example, Dempsey, ‘Quality (Culture) Plus Quantity (Readers) Pays Off’. For Epstein’s account of his career, and his relationship with Rosset, see his Book Business. 9. ‘An Experiment’, GPC. 10. For an excellent performance history of this play, see Bradby, Beckett: Waiting for Godot. 11. James Knowlson affirms that Beckett’s earnings from the Broadway success of the play and the concomitant sale of the cheap paperback ‘guaranteed that the days of financial hardship were at last over’. Damned to Fame, p. 381. 12. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, p. 15. 13. Fowlie, Dionysus in Paris, p. 18. 14. Esslin, The Theater of the Absurd, p. 403. 15. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 18 June 1953, in Dear Mr Beckett, p. 62. 16. Rosset to Jerome Lindon, 11 November 1953, GPC. 17. Rosset to Beckett, 6 January 1956, in Dear Mr Beckett, p. 107. 18. Michael Myerberg to Beckett, 8 June 1956, GPC. 19. Barney Rosset, Letter to Dramatists Play Service, 1 November 1956, GPC. 20. Display Advertisement, The New York Times Book Review, 4 February 1958, p. 27.

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21. Vivian Mercier, ‘How to Read Endgame’, Readers’ Subscription Catalogue, GPC. 22. Judith Schmidt, Boilerplate Letter, GPC. 23. Grove Press College Catalog (1970), pp. 2–3, GPC. 24. Cohn, Casebook on Waiting for Godot, p. 7. 25. Quoted in Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges, p. 136. 26. While Casanova routes the Latin American Boom through consecration in Paris, it also marked a hemispheric shift in the negotiation of literary reputations that helped to elevate New York as a rival to Paris. Mark McGurl affirms that ‘By the 1950s . . . New York had begun to rate as an arbiter of global cultural value’ (The Program Era, p. 327). As I argue in my recently reprinted history of Grove, Rebel Publisher, its promotion of an indigenous avant-garde was central to this postwar challenge to Parisian pre-eminence. 27. Bersani, ‘No Exit for Beckett’, p. 262. 28. Bersani, ‘No Exit for Beckett’, p. 262. 29. Esslin, Samuel Beckett, p. 10. 30. Esslin, Samuel Beckett, p. 12. 31. Esslin, Samuel Beckett, p. 12. 32. Quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 319. 33. Esslin, Samuel Beckett, p. 21. 34. Drew and Sternberger, By Its Cover, pp. 65, 67. 35. Brower and Gall, ‘Grove Press at the Vanguard’, p. 60. 36. It is worth affirming the degree to which these covers contrast with the conservative ‘blue line’ design of Éditions de Minuit, which simply feature author, title, publisher and colophon within a blue rectangular frame. 37. Kenner, Samuel Beckett, p. 205. 38. Gierow, Presentation Speech for The Nobel Prize in Literature 1969, [accessed 26 June 2018]. It is, of course, of considerable significance that Beckett selected Jerome Lindon to accept the prize in his stead. 39. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 507. 40. Seaver, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, p. xliii. 41. Gontarski, On Beckett, p. 3. 42. Casanova, Samuel Beckett, p. 21. 43. Casanova, Samuel Beckett, p. 16. 44. Beckett, ‘Stirrings Still’, p. 487.

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Chapter 11

Calder and Boyars Adam Guy

The list of the London-based publisher Calder and Boyars images a cross-section of the post-war period, representing a significant proportion of the major authors and publishing categories that emerged after 1945. Reflecting the political upheavals of the time, the firm published significant works of feminism (Simone de Beauvoir), black nationalism (Amiri Baraka, Alphaeus Hunton) and anti-imperialism (Henri Alleg). The social changes embodied in the so-called ‘permissive society’ were channelled through works by William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi. The firm was thoroughgoing, too, in its support of recent aesthetic revolutions. International movements in the theatre (Eugène Ionesco), the novel (Heinrich Böll, Alain Robbe-Grillet), music (John Cage) and the cinema (Ingmar Bergman, Alejandro Jodorowsky) all found a prominent place on Calder and Boyars’s list. Closer to home, the firm was invested (in many senses of the word) in an emerging avant-garde in the British novel, publishing new works by writers like Alan Burns, Ann Quin and Eva Tucker. None of the names listed above would necessarily evoke modernism in the first instance. Calder and Boyars’s publication of novels by Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett maintained a link to the later developments of modernism in the 1930s, but otherwise the firm’s list points to trends and tendencies of the middle of the twentieth century that exceed or escape modernism’s traditional aesthetic and sociological descriptions. However, through both the authors and texts it published, and the manner in which it presented these authors and texts, Calder and Boyars captured a transitional moment in modernism’s history. This chapter contributes to the still ongoing work of what Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz call the temporal ‘expansion’ of the New Modernist Studies.1 The chapter considers modernism’s status in the 1950s–1960s not just as a legacy and an archive with which readers and publishers were coming to terms, but also as an

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ongoing concern that survived beyond the personnel, the times and the places that characterised its signature articulations. Ultimately, in the context of a dominant culture that seemed to have rejected modernism, Calder and Boyars embodied modernism’s transformations and persistence in the British literary field after the Second World War.

The modern movement John Calder started a publishing company under his own name in 1949. In later years, he described this enterprise as a ‘hobby’ that coincided with the fact that ‘at that point I was a poet’.2 Such informality of purpose defined the early years of Calder’s publishing activity: Calder published books sporadically, and in a range of genres. Alongside translated works of the nineteenth century by Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff and Gottfried Keller, Calder published historical surveys like Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais’s A History of the American Labour Movement (1956), and reference works like Harry Felix Swartz’s The Layman’s Medical Dictionary (1955), Jane Koster and Margaret Murray’s New Crochet and Hairpin Work (1955) and David Ewen’s Encyclopedia of the Opera (1956). Publications of more recent literary material ranged from a 1955 dual-language collection of poems by the Italian writer Antonia Pozzi, to novels by Martha Dodd (The Searching Light [1956]) and Albert Maltz (A Long Day in a Short Life [1957]). By publishing both literary texts in translation and literary texts that represented broader struggles for freedom of speech and political belief (Dodd and Maltz were both McCarthyite targets in the United States), Calder had established in embryo two of the major concerns of his later publishing company. Calder began working full time as a publisher in 1957.3 Marion Boyars (then Lobbenberg) joined the firm in 1958; two years later she purchased fifty per cent of the business.4 By the early 1960s, the firm’s identity and commitments had been refined, and both John Calder and Marion Boyars used their substantial cultural and financial capital to publish and promote the work of innovative and transgressive writers. In this sense, as a publisher, Calder and Boyars represented to some extent a formalised and institutionalised version of the networks of patronage that were central to the development of interwar modernism. Educated in England and Zürich, Calder was the scion of a Scottish/Canadian family of brewers and timber

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merchants. In his first eight years as a publisher, he had supplemented his activities by working as a director at the timber company owned by his great uncle, Sir James Calder.5 The archives of Calder and Boyars, held at Indiana University Bloomington, show a number of instances where, in its early years, the publisher was supported – materially and otherwise – by Calder’s ‘uncle Jim’. Marion Boyars was born in Germany and educated in Switzerland. Her father, Johannes Asmus, was also a successful publisher. As her mother was Jewish, Boyars was sent to New York with her sister in 1938 to escape persecution. She studied at New York University, and subsequently attended Keele University when living in the UK with her first husband, the clothing manufacturer George Lobbenberg. Calder has claimed that it was the alimony from Boyars’s divorce from Lobbenberg that enabled her to buy a stake in the publishing company.6 It is clear from their various interviews and mission statements that John Calder and Marion Boyars had a shared set of principles that undergirded their practice as publishers. These principles marked – in all but name – a complex relation to modernism. Both publishers put the emblematic names of high modernism into the service of their own self-justifications. Writing a letter to The Times in 1961, for example, Calder insisted that the ‘James Joyces and Virginia Woolfs of the future are hardly likely to be encouraged by the large publishing corporations’.7 In Calder’s view, in a time of rapid expansion in the publishing industry, it was the role of small publishers like Calder and Boyars to continue to sponsor innovative writing. In an interview of 1967, Marion Boyars explained in similar terms her rationale for publishing the lengthy novel Milkbottle H (1967) by the American writer Gil Orlovitz: It’s Joycean, a very difficult book. We don’t expect it to be a financial success, but it’s an impossible book, and I wanted to do it. The involvement I get out of publishing is that all these writers are doing something that is important, really important.8

In conferring importance onto a novel because of both its aesthetic difficulty and its lack of commercial success, Boyars accords with Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of the ‘anti-“economic” economy of pure art’. For Bourdieu, this economy can ‘acknowledge no other demand than one it can generate itself’ and is ‘oriented to the accumulation of symbolic capital’, a ‘veritable credit, and capable of assuring, under certain conditions and in the long term, “economic” profits’.9 As in

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Calder’s letter, in her assessment of Orlovitz’s novel, Boyars shows that high modernism provided the measure of the value of this symbolic capital. Calder and Boyars’s publicity materials make the same judgement, with contemporary writers legitimated by way of reference to a roll-call of prominent high modernists: the back cover of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Snapshots and Towards a New Novel states that ‘[i]f one accepts Kafka, Proust and Joyce as the greatest innovators of the first part of the century, then Robbe-Grillet is the man who has done as much as anyone to extend our awareness of the meaning of contemporary reality after them’.10 Calder and Boyars’s relationship to modernism is exemplified in ‘The Crisis of Communication’, an article Calder wrote for the Scottish periodical, New Saltire, in 1964. At the centre of the article is a long explanation of the history of what Calder names ‘the modern movement’. Calder’s example is that of painting, as painters ‘tend to be rather ahead of writers and musicians and it is perhaps painting that first manages to communicate itself to the public’. Calder’s account centres on Impressionism, which he sees as dominating artistic sensibilities in Britain from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. Calder then argues that parallel developments in music and literature never took hold of the public mind in the way those in the visual arts did: ‘Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps the first really great novel written in English in this century, is virtually unknown except to specialists.’ Further, though Impressionism ‘opened doors to later movements’ in the visual arts, it did so to little avail in terms of public perception: regarding new frontiers in abstraction, for example, Calder states that ‘even the public that tries to be up to date and admires the work of Mondrian, Klee, Arp and more recent abstract artists, often does so for the wrong reasons’. Ultimately, for Calder, the public sees contemporary art as no more than ‘decoration, as patterns in which there is perhaps no meaning at all, or else a very obscure and unintelligible one’.11 In particular, two elements of Calder’s definition of ‘the modern movement’ illuminate Calder and Boyars’s relationship to modernism. Firstly, in ‘The Crisis of Communication’, Calder presents a familiar, broad-stroked genealogy of European modernism in the visual arts, but his surrounding theorisation offers a more profound and nuanced attempt to define modernism as a whole: The modern movement consists essentially of disbelief in the reality that the eye sees and a desire to examine the components that make up apparent reality. The findings of science support this attitude of

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suspiciousness. The modern arts consist of a research to re-examine apparent reality and the painter therefore assumes that the landscape in front of him consists of much more than appears evident at first glance.12

Boyars expresses a similar idea in a 1970 article, where she portrays the contemporary British writers Alan Burns, B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Eva Figes and J. G. Ballard as ‘creating an avant-garde’ who by virtue of their innovations in the form of the novel ‘will ultimately reflect in literature the changing world we live in’.13 A Calder and Boyars advertisement in The New Statesman makes the same point more succinctly about a new generation of British novelists ‘who have something definite to say about contemporary life in a contemporary way’.14 For Calder and Boyars, writers who seemed solely committed to aesthetic innovation in fact married aesthetic form to historical content; by contrast, many conservative writers continued to reflect ‘apparent reality’ uncritically, blindly inhabiting the exhausted forms of the past. Such ideas are also restatements of the defence of modernism first developed in German aesthetics in the 1930s, as in Ernst Bloch’s provocative series of questions about György Lukács’s critique of Expressionism: ‘what if Lukács’s reality – a coherent, infinitely mediated totality – is not so objective after all? What if his conception of reality has failed to liberate itself completely from Classical systems? What if authentic reality is also discontinuity?’15 But the same notions were also being articulated anew inside the pages of Calder and Boyars’s own publications. Calder’s approval of an ‘attitude of suspiciousness’ marshalled against ‘apparent reality’ is perhaps an echo of Nathalie Sarraute’s The Age of Suspicion, a book published by Calder and Boyars the year before ‘The Crisis of Communication’. For Sarraute, the true ‘realist’ writer ‘works unceasingly to rid what he sees of the matrix of preconceived ideas and ready-made images’ that ‘encase’ a given perception of reality; the result is to attain something in writing ‘that is thus far unknown, which it seems to him he is the first to have seen’.16 The same analysis was central to the theory of the novel expressed by Michel Butor and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute’s fellow exponents of the nouveau roman, and also features of the Calder and Boyars list. Like these writers, as Calder and Boyars sought to express the novelty of its commitments and its commitments to novelty, it was indebted to the debates and discourses that emerged out of modernism.

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The second notable feature of Calder’s definition of ‘the modern movement’ concerns his attention to modernism’s publics. Alongside the account in ‘The Crisis of Communication’ of those who appreciate but misunderstand the work of ‘Mondrian, Klee, Arp and more recent abstract artists’, Calder also provides a more general literary example: ‘people who are able to deal with problems and technicalities of great complexity during working hours will not go to the bother of using similar concentration on a book or a play during their leisure’.17 Here, as with Boyars’s judgement on Orlovitz, aesthetic complexity is a modernist sine qua non. But Calder’s article goes further. By subsequently offering the example of Samuel Beckett, Calder concludes optimistically, and with a clear sense of mission: Relatively unsophisticated people have found a personal message and excitement in [Beckett’s] writings which has become one of the greatest things in their lives. Because no really supreme artist is ever that difficult to grapple once the mental blocks are removed.18

As with Boyars’s view of Orlovitz, Calder sees Beckett’s value as irreproachable. In fact, for Calder, this value constitutes a transcendent quality that can surmount the limits of any conventional understanding. The logical extension of this notion is clear to see in ‘The Crisis of Communication’ and across Calder and Boyars’s publishing activity: complex and innovative writing was not a minority concern, but instead something for which a mass public was, under the right conditions, a future possibility and a desirable aim. Modernist difficulty posed not so much an aesthetic problem for Calder and Boyars as it did a problem of reception: as Calder suggests in ‘The Crisis of Communication’, ‘the arts today are like an exploding universe: . . . [the] number of new forms is growing, and the rate of development is growing too. Only the public lags behind.’19 Calder’s recommended solution to this problem, of course, centres on the work of those who mediate modern art to its publics; accordingly, Calder and Boyars’s central aim was to make up the lag that separated new and experimental writing from its potential audience. Peter D. McDonald captures Calder’s character in this respect: [a] modernist with an Arnoldian sense of public vocation, a liberal committed to state patronage, an anti-moralist who defended the avant-garde on moral grounds, a democrat who believed passionately in the guardianship of the elite, Calder was driven by a range of contradictory energies.20

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All of these contradictory energies are present in ‘The Crisis of Communication’, especially as Calder describes his engagement ‘in promoting contemporary literature’ – something that involves trying to ‘bring the concept of aesthetics into the lives of more people, admittedly in self-interest, but also in the public good’. In order to achieve such aims, Calder admits, ‘one must promote a willingness to concentrate in the receiver’ while also acknowledging ‘a willingness to explain on the other side of the fence’. In broader view, though, for Calder, the disconnect between the writing he published and a potential mass audience derived from macroeconomic issues: ‘it depends ultimately on the willingness of a few men at the top to put the quality of living on the same level as the quantity, and to rank education alongside housing and economic welfare when it comes to priority’.21

Wyndham Lewis Though never quite delivered in the way he wanted, Calder’s wish for greater state patronage of the arts was granted. As McDonald notes, from the late 1960s through to the middle of the 1980s, Calder’s various publishing enterprises were beneficiaries of increasing and generous funding from the British Arts Council.22 But in its earlier years, Calder and Boyars directed significant efforts on its own accord to mediating its ‘modern movement’ to a wider public. As a consequence, the firm brought to the fore the tensions that inhered within modernism’s historical status at this point in time – particularly regarding whether in the post-war period modernism was a living tradition or a discrete, past phenomenon that the public had yet to catch up with. The latter tension was particularly in evidence in Calder and Boyars’s presentation of two of its most prominent writers, Wyndham Lewis and Samuel Beckett. Between 1965 and 1968, Calder and Boyars issued new editions of five books by Wyndham Lewis. In 1965–6, the firm published the trilogy of novels The Human Age in separate volumes – namely, The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta. In 1967, it published the memoir Blasting and Bombardiering (1937), and, in 1968, Lewis’s seminal modernist novel Tarr (1918), serialised originally in the The Egoist, although reprinted by Calder and Boyars in Lewis’s preferred, less formally radical 1928 version. These publications index the fact that Lewis’s legacy and reputation were still being negotiated in the decades following his death in 1957. In the 1960s

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alone, alongside Calder and Boyars, Methuen, Penguin and Thames and Hudson were also reissuing Lewis’s work. One way Calder and Boyars sought to distinguish its publications by Lewis was to consecrate his writing through completist and quasi-scholarly presentation. The Calder and Boyars Blasting and Bombardiering, for example, includes a new preface from Lewis’s widow, Anne, as well as three previously unpublished chapters. The firm’s Malign Fiesta, meanwhile, included an appendix containing Lewis’s draft opening to The Trial of Man, the projected final volume of The Human Age, plus an explanatory essay by Hugh Kenner. When sourcing and producing Malign Fiesta’s new appendix, Calder and Boyars engaged with the emerging representation of Lewis in the scholarly and curatorial worlds. The firm consulted with Kenner, C. J. Fox and Walter Michel – three of Lewis’s main post-war supporters and mediators.23 Fox and Michel were Lewis specialists: collectors and scholars of Lewis’s work, they edited Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956 (1969), as well as producing a number of other edited volumes and monographs separately; both were also involved with the Wyndham Lewis Society and its newsletter.24 Kenner had published a monograph on Lewis in 1954 with Methuen, Lewis’s main publisher; he first met Lewis two years later in London as part of the early stages of the research that would lead to his 1971 masterwork, The Pound Era.25 In its panoptic view of high modernist literary culture, as well as its part-successful attempt at rehabilitating contentious figures like Lewis and Ezra Pound, The Pound Era represented a major event in the historicisation of modernism. But even when Calder and Boyars published Kenner’s essay as part of its edition of Malign Fiesta, Kenner had already published extensively on Pound, Joyce and T. S. Eliot, establishing himself at the forefront of a new generation of academic writers keen to define modernism’s relevance and importance. In this sense, Calder and Boyars’s version of Lewis participates actively and pointedly in a wider scholarly conversation about modernism. Other publications by the firm show a similar impetus, from Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain’s Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (1956) and Rayner Heppenstall’s Raymond Roussel: A Critical Guide (1966), to essays on figures like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens in its short-lived International Literary Annual of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Calder and Boyars’s scholarly presentation of modernism was not narrowly literary either: the firm displayed particular interests in music, publishing translated monographs on modernism’s two totemic composers, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, as well as works on

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Anton Webern and Edgard Varèse, two composers who expanded the modernist musical idiom in different directions. While rightly rejecting the charge that modernism was solely a phenomenon retrospectively formulated in the post-war period, Andrzej Gąsiorek nevertheless notes that ‘in any discussion of modernism, we need to acknowledge that the various writings which get labelled “modernist” depend for this attribution on critical acts that have complex institutional and theoretical histories’.26 Calder and Boyars’s publication and presentation of Lewis constitute just such a critical act, drawing on and contributing towards modernism’s unfolding institutional and theoretical constitution in the 1960s. But while a collective cultural understanding of modernism was still in the process of formation in the post-war period, Lewis exemplifies the fact that, for many at this time, the object of such knowledge had ceased to exist. Even in Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis had claimed, as Gąsiorek puts it, that modernism was ‘finished as a significant movement’.27 In this respect, Calder and Boyars’s publication of Lewis looks much like Kenner’s demarcation of a ‘Pound era’, and can be read accordingly as an attempt to secure a link to a heroic modernist past, a means for the firm of incorporating into its list an emblematic figure from the age of The Egoist and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. But to do so in Britain in the twenty-five years following the Second World War was to appear to be part of a rearguard action. For the dominant position in the British literary field after 1945 was, as Rubin Rabinovitz had it, a ‘reaction against experiment’.28 Though not representing the totality of opinion of the time, famous critiques of modernism from 1950s–1960s Britain – such as Kingsley’s Amis’s summation of the formal innovations of Joyce and Virginia Woolf as mere ‘obtruded oddity’, or Philip Larkin’s dismissal of the Eliotian/ Yeatsian ‘common myth-kitty’ – stand as a set of performative utterances that will into being modernism’s obsolescence.29 Lewis was invoked in one of the more incendiary – if not untypical – claims about modernism made in Britain after 1945. In ‘The Two Cultures’, his famous Rede Lecture of 1959, C. P. Snow reports the question of a colleague: ‘Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, nine out of ten of those who have dominated literary sensibility in our time – weren’t they not only politically silly, but politically wicked? Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?’30 Accordingly, in publishing Lewis, Calder and Boyars was careful to explain and nuance Lewis’s political positions. Though Anne Wyndham Lewis remained resistant to general charges against her husband’s character and world-view, in preparing the Calder and Boyars edition of Blasting and Bombardiering, she at least conceded

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the very real political wickedness of Wyndham Lewis’s phraseology and deleted certain elements accordingly.31 In one representative instance, Lewis’s comment in the book’s introduction about Hitler having ‘popped up in Germany, and sent all the Jews flying’ loses its final clause in the 1967 edition.32 More publicly, Calder and Boyars framed its publications of Lewis’s work with careful explanations. The blurb of the Calder and Boyars Childermass, for example, suggests that ‘it is possible because his political sympathies remained to the right of fashion during the leftish thirties and forties that his contemporary reputation is not higher’.33 Though the blurb of The Childermass further hints at Lewis’s politics by venturing a comparison ‘perhaps to Céline as a writer’, otherwise any unwelcome associations are offset with reference to Lewis’s aesthetic singularity. In this respect, Calder and Boyars’s approach to the regrettable politics of a modernist writer was not unique: for example, Greg Barnhisel has shown how, as Ezra Pound’s fascism came to dominate his public image, James Laughlin’s New Directions Press ‘remade’ Pound’s writing by presenting it on purely aesthetic terms (see Chapter 9). Calder and Boyars’s particular remaking of Lewis portrays an author who is ‘one of the most unusual literary figures of this or any century’: although his ‘literary reputation has suffered in recent years from his fame as a painter’ he is ‘undoubtedly one of the most important English writers of this century’. The blurb to The Childermass concludes that the ‘force of Wyndham’s Lewis’s imagination in his descriptions of the personalities and places that lie beyond death makes this one of the most extraordinary fantastic novels of the century’.34 Calder and Boyars supported its superlatives about Lewis’s literary powers with various high modernist reference points. It is worth noting the irony here of Lewis’s new publisher using high modernist aesthetics as a means of downplaying his politics: as Tyrus Miller notes, Lewis’s own negative relation to high modernism derived from an analysis of how high modernist writing’s ‘emphasis on form and style was implicitly political in nature and that its aesthetic way of viewing and practicing politics had become increasingly unviable’.35 Referring to Lewis as ‘one of the most powerful and polemical propagandists of the modern movement in all the arts’, the blurb to The Childermass ignores such dimensions of Lewis’s writing, focusing instead on his modernist credentials: In 1914, he founded the famous magazine BLAST to which all the principal painters, poets and musicians of the Great War contributed. Many of the most brilliant of them were killed, Wyndham Lewis

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remaining the central figure among the survivors, many of whom became the best-known artists of the twenties and thirties, although the movement that he founded, Vorticism, never achieved the popularity of its French counterpart, Cubism, as established by Braque and Picasso.36

At best, then, in its portrayal of Lewis, Calder and Boyars demonstrates its own – rather than Lewis’s – multifarious commitments to modernism. With its references to the ‘best-known artists of the twenties and thirties’, to Cubism and Braque and Picasso, the blurb to The Childermass is consistent with Boyars’s description of a new novel by a little-known contemporary author as ‘Joycean’. Both Lewis and Orlovitz were, for Calder and Boyars, legitimated with reference to a more recognisable modernist canon. At root, the act of assuming the value of this canon in a British literary field that sought to denigrate it constituted a clear position-taking on the part of the firm; but equally, by sponsoring Lewis, Calder and Boyars sought to expand this canon in the process.

Samuel Beckett Prior to publishing Lewis, Calder and Boyars’s profile had risen considerably with its publication of the work of another significant high modernist writer. In early 1963, the firm made it known that it intended to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1934), which had previously been banned in the United Kingdom on the grounds of obscenity. Following the Chatterley trial and the recent publication in the United States of Miller’s novel by Grove Press – with whom Calder and Boyars shared numerous authors – John Calder claimed in an interview that ‘the climate of public opinion’ was now in favour of publishing a book that contained ‘some frank talk, frank sex scenes, but not perversion’.37 Forewarned about Calder and Boyars’s intention, and despite a complaint from a Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party, in April 1963 the British Attorney General instructed the Director of Public Prosecutions not to pursue the firm.38 The publication was a significant success for Calder and Boyars, completely selling out its weekly print runs of 10,000 copies in the first few months following publication, reaching The Sunday Times bestseller list, and helping to keep the firm solvent for many years to come.39 After Tropic of Cancer, Calder and Boyars issued further tests to the prevailing culture of British censorship, publishing William

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Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch (1959) in 1964, Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book (1960) in 1963 and Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) in 1966. The last two were both taken to trial and judged to be obscene, although Calder and Boyars had the judgment on Last Exit overturned on appeal. Like Grove (see Chapter 10), Calder and Boyars defined itself in terms of a particular notion of freedom of expression: in evangelising for literature which pushed both the bounds of aesthetic and moral acceptability, the firm sought to express a link between the two. At the same time, the way Calder and Boyars presented its publications suggests that it imagined that individual literary works were only able to inhabit one of these poles. A comparison between the firm’s framing of Wyndham Lewis and Henry Miller brings this into relief. As the example of Lewis shows, in many ways, modernism set the template for Calder and Boyars’s notion of aesthetic innovation. But despite Tropic of Cancer’s restless play with novelistic form and its setting in the modernist milieu of 1920s–1930s Paris, in promoting Miller’s novel Calder and Boyars focused on its more transgressive content. An advertisement at the time of Calder and Boyars’s publication of Tropic of Cancer celebrates the fact that the novel is ‘[p]ast the censors at last after 29 years of waiting’, and that it is ‘the fastest selling book since Lady Chatterley’. Here, everything in the novel is reduced to a cipher for Calder and Boyars’s victories against state censorship and superannuated Victorian morality: ‘Shocking but salutary, it sweeps hypocrisy aside in a racy, gripping narrative of the bohemian Paris of thirty years ago, a paean of praise to the city of freedom.’40 Alongside eradefining texts like Joyce’s Ulysses and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Henry Miller’s writing exemplifies the entanglement with censorship that characterised the emergence of modernism.41 But Calder and Boyars’s account of modernism elided this fact. It was on surprisingly similar terms to those of Miller that Calder and Boyars began publishing the single author who cemented its reputation. Following the theatrical success of Waiting for Godot (1953), Faber had attained British rights for Samuel Beckett’s drama. But as John Calder later related, Faber declined to take up Beckett’s prose writings for fear that they would provoke censure on the grounds of obscenity.42 Consequently, Calder and Boyars acquired the British option on Beckett’s prose in the late 1950s on the same grounds that it did the works of writers like Miller, Burroughs, Trocchi and Selby Jr. However, the firm’s presentation of Beckett mostly ignored this fact. Prima Facie, the UK premiere of Beckett’s Come and Go (1967) – a text dedicated to John Calder – seems to be an exception. The performance was put on in support of Calder’s newly-founded

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Defence of Literature and the Arts Society (DLAS), a campaigning organisation brought into being following the success of Calder and Boyars’s appeal against the prosecution of Last Exit to Brooklyn. But if, as Stephen John Dilks notes, Come and Go ‘gave Calder a showpiece’ that assisted in ‘elevating the status’ of the DLAS, it did so by trading in Beckett’s prestige as an exemplary proponent of contemporary artistic innovation – something Calder and Boyars had helped to establish outside the domain of debates around censorship and obscenity.43 In all, by sidelining the politics involved in publishing Beckett, Calder and Boyars represents part of what Pascale Casanova calls the ‘route by which [Beckett] achieved formal and stylistic freedom’, a route that must be ‘retrace[d]’ in order to ‘understand the very “purity” of Beckett’s work, his progressive detachment from all external definition, his almost absolute autonomy’.44 The notion of artistic autonomy, of course, is itself associated in the work of theorists as diverse as Casanova, Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno with the development of modernism, and as a key part of its dialectical articulation. But paradoxically, Calder and Boyars often formulated Beckett’s artistic autonomy by way of his detachment from a high modernist tradition. For example, throughout the three paragraphs of small-type text on its back cover, the 1966 Calder and Boyars edition of Molloy (1950) oscillates between different terms for conveying Beckett’s novelty: though Molloy is ‘the most important novel since Ulysses’, the blurb concludes more stridently that Beckett’s text is ultimately ‘one of the most aware-making works of creative fiction of the twentieth century’ and that ‘nothing written since the war can claim to have a more immediate impact on the senses or more relevence to the age which produced it’ – Beckett is an ‘innovator of the first importance in both the modern theatre and the modern novel . . . considered by many to be the outstanding writer of the present day’.45 A similar dual literary-historical temporality is in evidence in a large Times Literary Supplement advertisement titled ‘Censorship and the Avant-Garde’. Here, again, Beckett’s originary force is inscribed simultaneously alongside his place in a modernist lineage: he is on the one hand ‘the father of both the modern theatre and the modern novel’, while on the other his own novels ‘undoubtedly constitute the most important literary achievement since Joyce’.46 Elsewhere Calder and Boyars’s promotion of Beckett stresses his aesthetic autonomy more absolutely. Advertising the publication of Beckett’s Imagination Dead Imagine (1965), the firm praises ‘a frightening explosion which shatters the frontiers of literature’, a ‘highly

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condensed masterpiece’ and ‘the shortest complete work of fiction ever published’ representing ‘a number of years’ work from one of today’s most serious and original writers’.47 But Calder and Boyars’s reissue of Beckett’s early critical study Proust (1931) best demonstrates the rhetorical effort involved in inscribing Beckett’s singularity. In both its subject matter and its publication date, Proust’s primary associations are with modernism of the 1910s–1920s. Yet, republished in 1965, it is described in a Calder and Boyars advertisement as ‘one of the most astringent pieces of critical writing of our time’ (emphasis added). Calder and Boyars also included Beckett’s later ‘Three Dialogues’ with Georges Duthuit (1949) in its edition of Proust. In the same advertisement, this work serves to compound a sense of the contemporary relevance of Beckett’s critical work: ‘Beckett vehemently states his own violently personal and controversial position to all art, provoking a new approach to aesthetics.’48 More so than with Lewis, Calder and Boyars’s presentation of Beckett often better captured the fine grain of his relation to modernism. For Tyrus Miller, it is through ‘demonstrating how Beckett came to call high modernist poetics in question and to evolve a late modernist approach to fiction’ that the work can be done of ‘fleshing out’ the claim that ‘the concept of late modernism helps us to situate and understand the majority of Beckett’s works’.49 This view of Beckett resonates with the one pursued by Calder and Boyars. In the process of portraying Beckett’s urgent contemporaneity in terms of his aesthetic autonomy, Calder and Boyars inscribed his distance from high modernism while simultaneously determining it as a context for his innovations. Elsewhere on Calder and Boyars’s list, the same process was in operation: the firm put significant energy into creating a critical context around its publication of Beckett’s work, in 1967 publishing both Beckett at 60: A Festschrift and A Samuel Beckett Reader. Prior to these publications in 1962, Calder and Boyars published Hugh Kenner’s Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, which was first published in the United States by Grove the year before. Calder and Boyars’s support for Kenner’s work on both Lewis and Beckett embodies the twofold version of modernism – as either a past or a present phenomenon – that is in evidence in the firm’s activities in the 1950s–1960s. Alongside Beckett, who was born in 1906 and died in 1989, Calder and Boyars published the work of a number of other writers who began publishing in the late 1920s and the 1930s, but whose reputations were mainly established after 1945. Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Jorge Luis Borges

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(1899–1986), Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69), Raymond Queneau (1903–76) and Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99), like Beckett, were transitional figures who were born too late to have participated in modernism’s first flourishing, but who wrote in dialogue with it and shared its aesthetic commitments. The fact that Calder and Boyars was central to – and in many cases instigated – the Anglophone reception of such writers offers one explanation for the tensions manifested in its presentation of Beckett. By the 1950s–1960s, even modernism’s immediate legatees were becoming historical, and were at the stage, in some quarters, of providing a model for emerging writers either to draw upon or write against. Calder and Boyars’s list provides a snapshot of such an unfolding literary history.

Modernism plural Both of the blurbs quoted above – from Lewis’s The Childermass and Beckett’s Molloy – come from books published in Calder and Boyars’s ‘Jupiter’ series. Launched in 1963, this series embodied the dual aims that John Calder expressed in ‘The Crisis of Communication’, reprinting the works of Calder and Boyars’s ‘modern movement’ in a format that the firm saw as accessible to a larger public than its regular list. Jupiter books sold at a relatively low price – in the 1960s, usually below 10 shillings – while still maintaining the element of distinction that distinguished their selection in the first place: The Jupiter series intends to become the outstanding popularly priced paperback series for the important literature of the twentieth century and all books are produced with better printing and paper than is common to paperbacks on the assumption that readers will want to keep them permanently and return to them in the future.50

Prior to the advent of Jupiter, Calder and Boyars had launched its ‘Calderbooks’ series – large-format trade paperback reissues of books the firm had previously published in hardback. Calder latterly noted that Calderbooks resembled the slightly earlier innovation of Barney Rosset at Grove, who had sought to ‘introduce new authors and bridge the gap between general and academic publishing with his Evergreen “egghead” paperbacks’.51 The subsequent introduction of the Jupiter series further extended Calder and Boyars’s attempts to build bridges to a ‘general’ audience by entering the mass-market paperback end of the market.

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In one sense, the writers that Calder and Boyars published as part of the Jupiter series convey the fluidity and openness of its ‘modern movement’, ranging from high modernists like Wyndham Lewis, through to transitional late modernists like Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, to writers representative of contemporary literary tendencies and groupings such as Heinrich Böll, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alexander Trocchi. Like many other aspects of Calder and Boyars’s promotional work, the Jupiter series imagined an emerging twentieth-century canon of innovative and transgressive literature that was contiguous with modernism in a historical sense, and described on modernism’s theoretical terms. It is worth considering Calder and Boyars within the ambit of modernism’s publishing history for this reason. But to end on a qualifier, it should also be noted that though the version of modernism expressed by Calder and Boyars was expansive in a temporal sense, in a geographical sense it was less so. Borges’s presence on the firm’s list – as well as that of the pre-eminent work of Persian-language modernism, Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1936) – is ultimately an exception for a publisher that presented modernism mainly as an Anglophone and Francophone phenomenon, and one expressed from within those languages’ metropolitan centres (even the reputations of Borges and Hedayat depend to a great extent on Paris’s importance as what Casanova calls ‘the capital of the literary world’).52 As Susan Stanford Friedman says, ‘Multiple modernities create multiple modernisms. Multiple modernisms require respatializing and thus reperiodizing modernism.’53 If Western modernist studies is still opening itself up to such requirements, then it does so to redress a historical process of institutionalisation – in which publishers like Calder and Boyars played a part – that conceived of modernism on more narrowly exclusive terms.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’, p. 737. Firchow, ‘John Mackenzie Calder’, p. 63; Famler, ‘Life’, p. 25. See Famler, ‘Life’, p. 26. See Calder, ‘Boyars [née Asmus]’, and Bateman, ‘The Book’s the Thing’, p. 28. Up until 1964, the firm’s name was ‘John Calder (Publishers) Ltd.’ – Marion Boyars’s name did not begin appearing in the firm’s publications until after she had taken the name of her second husband, the poet Arthur Boyars. However, anachronistically, I refer to the publisher

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Adam Guy throughout its lifespan as ‘Calder and Boyars’, both to acknowledge Boyars’s central role, and so as to make for a clear distinction between John Calder the individual and the publishing company that for some time bore his name. See Famler, ‘Life’, pp. 23–6. See Calder, ‘Boyars [née Asmus]’. Calder, ‘A Personal Interest’, p. 9. Bateman, ‘The Book’s the Thing’, p. 29. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, p. 142. Robbe-Grillet, Snapshots and Towards a New Novel, back cover. Calder, ‘The Crisis of Communication’, pp. 6–7. Calder, ‘The Crisis of Communication’, pp. 6–7. Boyars, ‘The Disintegrating Novel (5)’, p. 50. ‘Calder Modern Authors’ [advertisement], The New Statesman, 21 May 1965, p. 810. Bloch, ‘Discussing Expressionism’, p. 16. Sarraute, Tropisms and The Age of Suspicion, p. 128. Calder, ‘The Crisis of Communication’, p. 6. Calder, ‘The Crisis of Communication’, p. 8. Calder, ‘The Crisis of Communication’, p. 8. McDonald, ‘Calder’s Beckett’, p. 160. Calder, ‘The Crisis of Communication’, pp. 7–8. See McDonald, ‘Calder’s Beckett’, pp. 160, 167. See Anne Wyndham Lewis correspondence, Box 56, Files 33–4, II. Author/Translator Files, Calder and Boyars mss., Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington. See ‘The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies’ (information page), The Wyndham Lewis Society, [accessed 18 December 2017]. See also Kenner, ‘A Last Sight of Lewis’. Gąsiorek, A History of Modernist Literature, p. 6. Gąsiorek, A History of Modernist Literature, p. 554. See Rabinovitz, The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel. Amis, ‘Fresh Winds from the West’, p. 565; Larkin, ‘Statement’, p. 79. Snow, The Two Cultures, p. 7. Anne Wyndham Lewis to Marion Boyars, 4 January 1967, Box 56, File 33, Anne Wyndham Lewis correspondence. Compare Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering [1937], p. 18, and Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering [1967], p. 16. Lewis, The Childermass, back cover. Lewis, The Childermass, back cover. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 169. Lewis, The Childermass, back cover. ‘Tropic of Cancer’, The Guardian, 31 January 1963, p. 7. See ‘“Tropic of Cancer”: No Proceedings’, The Guardian, 13 April 1963, p. 4.

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Calder and Boyars 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

231

See Calder, Pursuit, pp. 222, 282. ‘Three of the Best!’ [advertisement], The Observer, 5 May 1963, p. 26. See Potter, Obscene Modernism. See Calder, Pursuit, p. 96. Dilks, Samuel Beckett in the Literary Marketplace, p. 291. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, pp. 318–19. Beckett, Molloy, back cover. ‘Censorship and the Avant-Garde’ [advertisement], Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1964, p. 690. ‘News from Calder and Boyars’ [advertisement], Times Literary Supplement, 2 December 1965, p. 1100. ‘Samuel Beckett’ [advertisement], Times Literary Supplement, 4 November 1965, p. 982. Miller, Late Modernism, p. 170. ‘Samuel Beckett’ [advertisement]. Calder, The Garden of Eros, p. 3. Calder’s statement here is typical of his own tendency towards revisionism. Both Grove’s Evergreen Books and Calder and Boyars’s Calderbooks drew on the earlier innovations of hardcover reprint series such as the Travellers’ Library and the Phoenix Library, which sold modernism to a large audience. See Jaillant, Cheap Modernism. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, p. 127. Friedman, ‘Periodizing Modernism’, p. 427.

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Chapter 12

Cape Goliard Matthew Sperling

1. On 31 July 1968, the poet, anthropologist and editor Nathaniel Tarn addressed a meeting of publishing executives from Jonathan Cape in words that must make for the most extraordinary opening to a business meeting ever: I hope you will bear with me if I put these objects on the table. Primitive peoples encourage themselves when talking with the presence of familiar, perhaps magical objects. If this is magic, it is not aimed at you, but is here merely to reinforce my own spirit.1

The identity of the objects is not recorded. Tarn was speaking, in his role as Cape’s editorial consultant, to a group of the most senior people at the company, and distinguished himself from them by performing the role of participant-observer in his own anthropological ritual. This was perhaps not regular behaviour in the clubbable world of 1960s London publishing. His aim was to defend, and to argue for the continuing importance of, two recently founded imprints that were incurring financial losses: Cape Editions, which published anthropological, structuralist and other nonfiction texts, and Cape Goliard, which published late modernist experimental poetry. In the fifteen months before this meeting, Cape Goliard had published works in elegant hardbacks with wide distribution by writers including Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth. It published only around fifty books, pamphlets, prints and miscellaneous items between 1967 and 1971. Yet its publishing programme made enough impact for the American Language poet Ron Silliman

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to claim in 1996 that the press’s efforts ‘were major and still reverberated in the American literary scene’.2 Although short-lived, Cape Goliard occupies a significant place in the history of poetry publishing in several ways. In Tarn’s words, the press was created for ‘publishing Objectivists, Black Mountaineers, and their kin when these were in the wilderness’, so that ‘the fate of American poetry was for these years virtually in the hands of British publishers’.3 This is a slight overstatement, but it is credible to say that the fate of those strands of late modernist poetry that followed in the steps of Pound and William Carlos Williams was in British hands. Charles Olson did not have a reliable American publisher at the time, but through Cape Goliard’s co-publication agreement with Grossman of New York, he was being read in America in editions conceived and printed in London. The publishing arena created by the press, along with the simultaneous work of Fulcrum Press, the London-based imprint founded by Stuart Montgomery that published important works by Basil Bunting, Edward Dorn, Roy Fisher, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan and others, brought late modernist poetry in the United Kingdom and the United States closer together than they have been at any other point. Tarn’s defence of his work with Cape began with an account of the history of his relations with the firm since 1964, when he started writing reader’s reports on submitted manuscripts. His poetry programme took centre stage, and he compared his achievement with Cape Goliard to the founding of premier modernist poetry publisher in Britain, Faber & Faber: I created here a poetry scene which is now being talked about in the same breath as, let us say, Fabers. Only a shallow epoch could talk that way: Fabers is thirty years or more deep, ours is only four or five. But the fact that this talk can go on is a sign of . . . an achievement which continues to require careful nursing.

Although Tarn did not mention who exactly was talking about Cape Goliard ‘in the same breath’ as Faber, he stressed that these were the people he cared about – ‘This is the world I am in, this is what I see, I am proud of it and it is unique’ – and that their values were at odds with those of the publishing professionals he was addressing: ‘But there is another world in which you live. In the world of sales, the series have failed. You tell me so and I accept the evidence.’

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To accept the evidence for the sales failure of Cape Goliard and Cape Editions, however, was not to accept that the ventures were a failure. Tarn went on to make several different arguments for the unjustness of writing them off after only a year, even while ruefully admitting that the work he had done for Cape ‘may be a luxury in this extraordinary country’. Four years earlier, when Tarn had proposed his schemes to Cape’s Director, Tom Maschler, his optimism was of a different order. The prospectus Tarn drew up argued that ‘the publication of poetry is important in its own right and requires no justification whatsoever’, and that the only acceptable attitude for a publisher is to accept its intrinsic value and do ‘everything in his power to start, keep and expand a poetry List’. It ended with a bold suggestion: ‘Above all, the defeatist attitude that “poetry is a luxury because it does not sell” should be banned on principle for ten years from a Publisher’s conversation.’4 Having asked in 1964 for a moratorium of ten years on the idea that poetry is a luxury, in 1968, barely a year into the programme, Tarn discovered that he himself was the luxury.

2. The story of Cape Goliard’s creation illustrates the extent to which both trade publishing and literary avant-gardes are formed along lines of social acquaintance. By the 1960s the networks of acquaintance in which the activities of late modernist poetry were constituted usually had relatively little overlap with the networks that structured trade publishing as an industry. In the case of Cape Goliard, however, Nathaniel Tarn was unusual in being able to move between both worlds, making him the ideal instigator of an avant-garde poetry project embedded in a trade publishing house. His understanding of English-language poetry’s recent history was defined by his self-declared ‘opposition to “little-englandism”’.5 In his own writing, he wanted to move beyond the idioms available in the work of poets associated with the Group, the circle of writers whose meetings he briefly attended, or its better known equivalent, the Movement, and to contribute to the ongoing modernist movement, as described in broad-brush terms in his 1968 essay, ‘World Wide Open: The Work Laid Before Us in this Disunited Kingdom’: The modern revolution in English language poetry is American: Eliot/ Pound. Local post-Georgian poetry of validity is not English but Celtic: Yeats, Joyce, MacDiarmid, Dylan Thomas. A first English reaction

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fades out after a praiseworthy but inconsequential brush with politics: Auden et al. Thomas, in whom Surrealism has its British day, provokes a new wave of little-englandism: ‘Movement’ and ‘Kitchen Sink’ . . . The rest is beer and marital squabbles: politics at the level of the Profumo case. THEN the English language is discovered to have survived and to be thriving in America: Pound, W. Carlos Williams, Zukofsky, Lowenfels; Olson, Duncan, Creeley . . .6

In the view of literary history laid out here, modernism was an ongoing revolutionary movement in need of renewal in the 1960s: after the initial impact made by Pound, Eliot and their Celtic contemporaries, the dominant voices in English poetry had slipped back into traditional modes, in the absence of ‘a new Poetics’, and needed to be reconnected with the Americans who came in Pound and Eliot’s wake. Tarn’s sense of the modernist project in the 1960s is therefore in line with the emphasis on an expanded temporal understanding that has emerged in the ‘new modernist studies’ since the 1990s.7 In the younger British poets he would publish at Cape Goliard – writers such as J. H. Prynne and Tom Raworth – Tarn found writers as keen as he was to take up the challenge of renewing the ‘modern revolution’ in Anglophone poetry for the 1960s. Already somewhat unusual among British poets of the time for the cosmopolitanism of his background (he was born in Paris and raised in Belgium) and the range of his intellectual interests, Tarn was also distinguished by the directness of his ambitions in relation to the poetry world. In 1964, he got the break he wanted when he met Tom Maschler. Born in 1933, Maschler was five years younger than Tarn, but had enjoyed great success at a young age, moving rapidly through jobs within the publishing world to become a director of Cape in 1960, aged just twenty-seven. Every recollection of Maschler mentions his ambition, energy, pushiness and confidence; he was a man who could make things happen. He was also, among publishers, someone with unusually high ideals to go with his finely tuned editorial instincts: Michael S. Howard’s 1971 history of the firm quotes Maschler on his ambition to have Cape rival Suhrkamp and Einaudi in the ‘purity’ of their standards, and to cross-subsidise valuable but economically unprofitable books with the profits from bestsellers: ‘We must strive always to remain in a position where we can afford to publish authors who have something of value to contribute to our culture, irrespective of their commercial potential.’8 When Maschler met Nathaniel Tarn in early November 1963, introduced by John Fowles, the two men had much in common; a

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friendship developed, and quickly Tarn entered into an informal arrangement to recommend new poets and write reader’s reports for Cape. Tarn, however, had bigger plans than this. From January 1964 he had began to urge on Maschler two related schemes. The first scheme, for a series of short theoretical texts by Continental authors to be published in affordable paperbacks with the aim of introducing the latest thinking in structuralist criticism and anthropology, would become Cape Editions, of which Tarn was the general editor. Its first books were Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael and works by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, and it would go on to publish writings by Fidel Castro, André Breton, Vaclav Havel and others. The second scheme was for a new poetry programme for Cape. Tarn’s work in preparation was extensive: the prospectus he sent to Maschler introducing ‘the concept of the Little Press within a Publishing House’ stretched to more than fifty pages.9 After making his argument for the urgency of establishing a poetry list and providing extensive lists of poets to whose work the rights might be acquired, Tarn lamented the haphazardness of poetry publishing from the poet’s point of view: the terrible delays, the gap between the world of little magazines and London publishing offices, and the paralysing effect of the risk and investment required in issuing new hardbacks in slim volumes. The solution, ‘to promote greater fluidity and freer experimentation in publishing’, was the concept of a ‘LITTLE PRESS WITHIN A MAJOR PUBLISHING HOUSE’, which would combine the prestige and the distributional resources of a publishing house, as the era of mass conglomeration approached, with the freedom of a small press in the modernist tradition. Tarn stressed that little-press publishing did not mean ‘anything in any way inferior to hardbacks’, but instead ‘conditions of greater fluidity and greater experimentation with less expense and less risk’. Eventually, Maschler was persuaded by both proposals, and from 1967 Tarn resigned from his lecturer post at SOAS to be appointed as a full-time editorial consultant to Cape, serving as the general editor of the Cape Editions imprint, and as an editorial representative on the proposed ‘LITTLE PRESS WITHIN A MAJOR PUBLISHING HOUSE’. The next task was to find a little press for Cape to buy up.

3. Goliard Press had been run since late 1964 by artist and engraver Barry Hall and poet and printer Tom Raworth. It was Raworth’s third significant small-press venture: between 1961 and 1964 he produced the

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magazine Outburst and several poetry booklets under the imprint of Matrix Press, as a means of fostering his connections with the American writers with whom he had been in correspondence since the late 1950s, including Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka). At the time when he met Hall, Raworth was growing weary with his solo work as a smallpress printer: ‘tired of working, printing, writing – generally rushing around’.10 The idea of starting a press to do larger books in collaboration with Hall re-fired his enthusiasm. According to Raworth, Hall’s interests in poetry and art ‘matched and/or complemented mine’,11 and the two men soon found that they ‘could work together without much problem’:12 We found a run-down stable in Fairhazel Garden, behind Finchley Road tube station, and through some contact at his work Barry tracked down another (but larger than mine) second-hand treadle press, with a variety of cases of type, a guillotine, and various other print-shop necessities.13

So Goliard Press was born, unpromisingly, in a stable. (Raworth: ‘There were cobbles on the floor and the loft was actually still full of shit.’)14 Nowhere has the name been accounted for, but the historical goliards were a ‘class of educated jesters, buffoons, and authors of loose or satirical Latin verse’ in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the word likely derived from Latin gula, ‘gluttony’.15 An appropriate flag under which to make a noisy and disrespectful impact on the polite world of English letters. Perhaps the allusion to medieval poetic culture also makes Goliard (like its contemporary small presses ‘Fulcrum’ and ‘Trigram’) a recognisably Poundian name, since Ezra Pound in his London years had done so much to make a place for troubadours and jongleurs in the modernist imagination. Goliard Press published only a small number of books but could fairly claim to be at the centre of new avant-garde writing in England. Its first publication was a poem by the English Beat poet Michael Horovitz, Nude Lines for Larking in Present-Night Soho (Raworth: ‘I think it should have been Rude Lines for Barking – Michael’s terrible handwriting’),16 and this was followed by work from other English writers who were in touch with various international avant-garde scenes, including Elaine Feinstein, Christopher Logue and Raworth himself. In 1966, Goliard published Charles Olson’s ‘West’. Olson had been dissatisfied with the production of his previous books, notably the first volume of The Maximus Poems published by Jonathan

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Williams at Jargon Press; Olson wanted the printed page to replicate as closely as possible the spacing effects he was able to achieve with his typewriter, despite the very great difficulties of doing so with letterpress type. Goliard had the advantage that ‘West’ was not a work of much extent or typographic complexity, with a sparse number of words on each page. It also had the advantage of being run by an artist and a poet with a gifted eye for satisfying and original layouts. As Raworth recalls: We were fairly arrogant . . . Olson bombarded us with letters about West: move this here, move that there, do this, do that – until we stopped opening the mail, did the book the way we thought, and on publication received an ecstatic telegram of thanks.17

The letters from Olson about ‘West’ do not survive in the archive, but the setting typescript prepared by Raworth and annotated by Olson, does – it has been scrawled over by Olson in three different coloured inks, handwriting flying off the page at various angles, with wild arrows linking one thought to the next.18 This book particularly caught the attention of Tom Maschler, when Nathaniel Tarn showed him a spread of various small-press publications, with a view to approaching one of them for a merger. Maschler had been on the trail of Olson for Cape since Tarn had suggested his name in 1964. It’s not really clear what interest Maschler had in Olson’s work, but what he did have was an astute businessman’s sense for the coming thing, and a strong desire to get a piece of the action for Cape. But as Maschler later recalled, ‘Charles was, when it came to business matters, about the most reluctant correspondent I have ever encountered’:19 letters would go unanswered, or if they were answered the replies would be baffling and oblique; Olson appeared unable to supply copies of most of his own texts, or to clarify which works had been licensed to which publishers, and Maschler found himself having to deal with intermediaries such as Jeremy Prynne just to be able to read the works that he wished to publish. This was not the treatment that one of the most powerful men in London publishing was used to; but it did not dissuade him, and part of the attraction of the Goliard Press was that acquiring the press looked like it would mean getting Olson. In some ways the arrangement also suited Goliard. A letter of September 1966 from Raworth to Olson, responding to his request for Goliard to publish Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, gave a clear picture of the practical limitations of the press’s capacities as an independent

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venture – ‘Barry (my partner) and I work full time at other jobs . . . we get to the press in our spare time, at most 2 days a week’.20 The incorporation of Goliard Press into Cape Goliard, a subsidiary company of Jonathan Cape, early in 1967, enabled the press to become a full-time concern, paid for the renovation of the stables off the Finchley Road where the press was located, and allowed it to commit to productions on a much larger scale than it had previously been capable of.

4. The first Cape Goliard publication was A Sight by Robert Creeley and R. B. Kitaj: not a book, but a portfolio of three large screenprints, featuring a reproduction of Creeley’s handwritten poem, ‘A Sight’, with artwork by Kitaj.21 In its production it was an exemplary work of collaboration, with the holograph of the poem donated by Creeley in response to a fundraising request, and the printing done by Asa Benveniste at Trigram Press, since he was better resourced for large-scale silk-screen work.22 Kitaj would later comment that his contributions were ‘hopelessly obscure and awful’,23 in line with his general tendency to downplay his graphic work (he excluded all print work from his 1994 Tate Gallery retrospective), but nonetheless A Sight marks a distinguished beginning for Cape Goliard and a fitting one in regard to Nathaniel Tarn’s conception of how a ‘little press within a major publishing house’ could bring the energy of transatlantic innovation to British literary culture on an ambitious scale. The same is true of perhaps the most impressive and important books Cape Goliard would go on to publish: the three volumes of Charles Olson’s major poetry – Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (1968); the second edition of The Maximus Poems (1970); and Archaeologist of Morning (1970), effectively Olson’s collected non-Maximus poems. The last two of these were published after the author’s death, and Cape Goliard also published two other Olson books: Letters for Origin 1950–1956 (1969) and a second edition of ‘West’ in 1969, while the prose books Call Me Ishmael and Mayan Letters (both 1968), which had previously been published in the United States, were reissued in the Cape Editions series. Olson, then, was at the heart of the Cape poetry list in these years. When Olson sent through the manuscript of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, Tom Maschler expressed his excitement dryly – ‘It will be a Christmas called Maximus for us all’24 – while Barry Hall was more unreserved, predicting that ‘There will be

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no better book printed’,25 and declaring afterwards that everyone at Cape Goliard was ‘damned proud of the book . . . To our minds, it is our arrival.’26 The major technical challenge the firm faced was in setting the text. When he sent the manuscript, Olson raised this with Tom Maschler as a matter of the first importance (insertions in square brackets are his own): The problem mainly anyway is to have a type-face which gives anyway very delicate spacing [between lines in particular: my style anyway so closely shades prose anyway, that the desirable is not at all a poetic type-face at the same time that (1) the placement on the page; & (2) the breathing of all spacements are as close as imaginable to the way my “Royal” machine [whatever that face is] does this].27

The difficulty was that Olson wanted to be highly exacting and precise in his relation to the production of his books, yet was far from a level of competence which would enable him to work helpfully with typesetters and printers; he wanted a typeface which gave ‘very delicate spacing’ but was ‘not at all a poetic type-face’, which is to say that he didn’t know what he wanted, and didn’t understand how letterpress printing was actually carried out. When Barry Hall returned the proofs of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI six months later, he tried tactfully to explain the matter to Olson’s intermediary: There should be few problems with the proofs as long as Charles realizes that there exists a natural, and sometimes rather sizeable, difference between the length of a type-written line and the same line when type-set, and that some of his vertical alignments are simply impossible to achieve in print.28

In the event, Hall achieved some remarkable layouts for the pages in the Maximus books in which Olson’s technique of ‘open field composition’, as he named it in the essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), stretches typographic convention to the limit.29 The other aspect of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI that required careful planning was the cover. Olson wanted the cover to feature an image of the continents at a mid-point of splitting away from the original supercontinent, based on a drawing by the Canadian geographer John Tuzo Wilson that Olson had seen in the Scientific American in 1963. He asked his publisher to track down and adapt this image:

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Will you kindly have someone take this step – & start thinking how to make a map AND WITH COLOUR! which will look practically as though it was a present day Ordinance map in its professionalism? Even though of course there can be no such details, solely these mad great masses of the Male Continents all surrounded by Two Seas, the Biggest & the lovely Female gulf?30

Barry Hall eventually managed to ‘re-draw it (in the same projection) and do it in three colours – brown landmass and blue sea, overlaid with black continent outlines, longitude and latitude lines and continent names – the same tints standardly used for ordnance maps’31 – with results that make for one of the most striking poetry dust jackets of the decade. In featuring a map on the cover, the book followed the 1960 Jargon Press edition of The Maximus Poems, which had a map of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and it became the sibling of two other books also published in 1968: The North Atlantic Turbine by Edward Dorn, published by Fulcrum Press, which featured a map of the Atlantic in between the North American and European land masses, and Kitchen Poems by J. H. Prynne, published by Cape Goliard. When read in conjunction with the unpublished correspondence between the poets, the work of Olson, Dorn and Prynne in these years comes to seem like a continuous effort, a shared transnational context of late modernist writing fostered by ardent exchanges of intelligence and inspiration, and the books’ covers bear quiet witness to this. The map on the cover of Prynne’s Kitchen Poems is bisected by a coastline, with the land area to the left almost featureless except for a few dotted coastal towns and inland refineries, and the sea on the right divided into hundreds of small numbered squares. Prynne gave his own account of the image’s significance in 1971, describing his first encounter with the horrific vision of the Shell/Esso/BP claim map of the North Sea gas area, in which England appears as a blank white space, and the sea is portioned off into tiny little packets over which about 300,000 lawyers were litigating furiously, like knitting in the middle of the North Sea.32

The Continental Shelf Act, which licensed seismic exploration of the area, came into force in 1964, making Prynne’s cover image one of intense topical relevance, even if few people at the time would have predicted how crucial North Sea Oil would be to the next few decades of economic life.

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The title of the book extends its concern with economic life. The kitchen, Prynne said, is ‘a very good place to start getting clear about certain kinds of commodity link-up in the world around, which basically work down to what you eat’.33 The combined implication of title and cover image, then, is that his poems aim to extend enquiry beyond English poetry’s traditional range of discourses: into the smallest, most daily business of food production and sustenance; into an understanding of place which takes in the enormous scale of continental shelves; and into the forms of economic activity which structure our experience of all these things. All of which seems dauntingly ambitious, for a slim booklet of five poems, the text of which covers only fourteen pages. The publication of Prynne’s elegant hardback with a total firstedition print run of almost 4,000 copies on both sides of the Atlantic seems like it should mark the decisive entry of English late modernist poetry into the publishing mainstream. But the folder held in the Cape archive shows why that decisive moment misfired. Already in August 1967 Prynne was concerned about any delay in his date of publication, since, as he said, ‘this small collection is a work of some polemic & topical relevance, and that I am anxious it should appear in some form or other without delay’.34 When Cape Goliard’s production rate turned out to be slower than they had hoped, and Prynne was told by Barry Hall that his book was being pushed back to May 1968, his letter to Graham C. Greene seethed with anger and indignation beneath the surface formality and courtesy: You may remember that I have from the first stressed my anxiety that there should be no delay in the appearance of these poems, which are explicitly topical & which are already beginning to lose the particular force which I intended them to have . . . I have just received the enclosed reply, which has made me very angry indeed. I am afraid that I remain entirely unconvinced over the need for a five month production delay in the printing of what is a mere pamphlet and which could be run off by a hardworking printer in seven days flat.35

For Prynne, this experience was the moment for a decisive break with the world of trade publishing. Subsequently all of Prynne’s new works were issued by small presses run by acquaintances, handproduced quickly and usually in cheap formats, distributed outside of the economics of scarcity and exchange. The move to exclusive small-press distribution coincided with Prynne’s abandonment of the Olsonian project, and the turn in his work to an increasingly hermetic style.

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The Creeley-Kitaj screenprints, the Olson Maximus volumes and Prynne’s Kitchen Poems show how the most impressive Cape Goliard books marry texts of considerable innovation to design characterised by the ‘greater fluidity and greater experimentation’ that Tarn had foreseen, while maintaining the production standard associated with a major publishing house. The aesthetic excitement of Cape Goliard is well caught by Iain Sinclair, in his nostalgic account of Tom Raworth’s ‘emergence in the 1960s with a succession of crafted and customised books, objects so desirable (so distant now) that, in memory, they seem edible’: The smell of quality glue. Sour-cream paper with a tidemark like an invisible tattoo: the sacred papyrus of the state-sponsored leisured classes, students, ex-students, dole bandits and freeloaders with the habit of literacy . . . You owed it to the poet to make a decent fist of reading the thing.36

5. For Tom Raworth, however, Goliard’s incorporation into Cape represented too compromising an engagement with trade publishing, and though he continued with the firm as an author, he withdrew from the scheme as a printer-publisher early in 1967, before it had even begun. Raworth gave his own account of the matter in a 1972 interview: ‘No hard feelings anywhere. I just had the feeling that if Cape wanted to do books of poetry they would slide those in as well. And I didn’t want to print anyone I didn’t want to print.’37 If Raworth had remained in the scheme he would have had to compromise on editorial decisions, with the opinions of Tarn, Maschler and Graham C. Greene all carrying weight. But it seems that as much as Cape ‘sliding in’ the books they wanted to the Cape Goliard list, as Raworth feared, the interference went in the other direction, whereby authors whom Tarn and Hall wanted for Cape Goliard were poached for Cape’s main list; Robert Duncan is the foremost example. Although Raworth declared in 1972 that there were ‘No hard feelings anywhere’, letters of the time suggest the true strength of his feelings on how he was treated. In July 1967 he wrote to Olson narrating his last encounter with Tom Maschler: Maschler is such a thick cunt that he passes being amusing and is dangerous . . . That motherfucker really thought I was some sort of fey ‘writer’ from the hills . . . when I finally got in touch with him and

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said what about some money for like my half of the press, my name of the press, the stock of books I’d printed, the goodwill etc. he was really astounded. Oh really, he said, I can’t really talk about that, you see, I have someone waiting downstairs for me in the car. You better talk about it was my snappy rejoinder . . . But it’s ‘allen ginsberg’ waiting for me he said . . . my parentheses indicating hushed breath, awe, etc. Then I dropped the magic word ‘solicitor’ and I think he told Allen to hold on. Not that that did much good . . . he’d got Barry to sign so many things that it ended up Barry had made himself responsible for ‘compensating’ me (i.e. that cunt obviously KNEW all the time they should pay something, but just thought I didn’t. And assumed my good nature/friendly relations with Barry would stop me taking Cape to court . . . as then anything I could have done . . . like getting an injunction, would have directly affected Barry. So that basic, and naive, sense of ‘business’ that Maschler has, works.38

Already we see a suggestion that the ways and imperatives of a little press might not sit as easily within a large publishing house as Nathaniel Tarn had hoped. Tom Maschler’s ‘basic, and naive, sense of “business”’, in leaving Raworth unable to sue for better terms without harming Barry Hall, shows a different understanding of art and commerce than the model of co-operative harmony under which Goliard Press had begun. In Raworth’s letter, several different kinds of authority which operate in farcically discontinuous spheres come into collision. Raworth has, in his own terms, taken Maschler’s measure, and yet his moral and artistic authority are impotent in the world of ‘business’, where deals get done. He invokes a potential trump card with his ‘magic word “solicitor”’, but it turns out Maschler had seen this coming way back down the road, when he set up the deal to make Hall responsible for compensating Raworth. Raworth begins by seeing through Maschler’s attempts to patronise him as a ‘fey “writer” from the hills’, and with his star-struck name-dropping about Allen Ginsberg, but ends by actually being the naive figure, played and owned by a practised business-world operator; the sweary letter to Olson is the self-consolation of the defeated. Maschler’s authority was always going to be the winner on his home turf.

6. The publishing files held in the Jonathan Cape archive are full of instances of how the ways of working that suited a small press didn’t suit the lead times and the commercial imperatives of the

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trade publisher. Barry Hall disliked needing to provide cover images months in advance of a book’s publication for publicity and sales purposes; the reviews the books received were small in number, and sometimes hostile in tone, especially in the London literary press, where poetry reviewing was dominated by critics sceptical of modernist experiment, such as Ian Hamilton and Anthony Thwaite; the sales figures were poorer than expected; and the loss of spontaneity caused by extended lead times and larger print runs was a source of frustration. Tarn was in the same position as Prynne in finding that publication of one of his books was delayed as the press worked out its production rate. But his position was complicated by the fact that Tarn was a director of Cape Goliard as well as an author. When the publication date of Where Babylon Ends was pushed back for the second time, Tarn wrote to Maschler to remonstrate, making a general point in the process: On a publishing point, I am rather amazed to find that all the reasons for setting up a little press in the first place are being sacrificed to the considerations which govern big-publishing. All this nonsense has blown up on scores of salesmanship. Next it will be because the reviewers will not be ready.39

Five months later, Tarn had gone from being ‘amazed’ to find that trade publishing considerations were outpowering small-press ones, to feeling resigned about the matter: ‘I am not comforted by the way in which Cape-Goliard is being rendered indistinguishable from Cape itself: poetry takes longer now than it used to. I fear Raworth may have been right: lamb and tiger do not mix.’40 From this moment onwards, relations deteriorated rapidly. Maschler wrote to Tarn to tell him that his conduct at a recent meeting had been ‘intolerable’,41 only for Tarn to reply, ‘I have moods like other people have epileptic fits’, and to refuse to apologise, since ‘one does not apologize for having the measles or a common cold’.42 By the end of June, the idea that Tarn’s ‘association’ with Cape might be ‘re-examined’ was growing bones, and on 23 June 1968 a meeting of Cape Goliard directors ended with an ominous suggestion, as recorded in Tarn’s typed notes on the occasion: ‘The remark I liked least was that if my salary were cut out, things would return more or less to normal: yours is the biggest overhead.’43 One difficulty for Tarn was that he had no contract with Cape; the ‘arrangement’ by which the firm paid him £4,000 a year to be

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an Editorial Consultant had been sealed in a letter from Maschler. Having suggested that a cut to Tarn’s salary would help in reducing overheads, it was only a short step to what Maschler told Tarn over the telephone: that ‘the overhead they are bearing in my salary is crippling and must be curtailed or terminated’.44 Tarn wanted to carry on being paid to do the work he had started, preferably on the current terms, but if need be, on reduced terms. Finally, on 30 July 1968, after Tarn ‘had calculated staying at 2,500’, a figure in the range of £1,000 to £1,500 was suggested as the limit of what Cape could afford. The fateful meeting with the top executives of the firm, with which I began this chapter, was scheduled for the next day. On the morning of the meeting, Tarn met with the playwright Arnold Wesker, who was close friends with both him and Maschler. Tarn rehearsed his speech for the meeting, and Wesker brought to the situation a dramatist’s eye for conflicting characters: ‘What had begun as the discovery of an intellectual on whom he could lean had turned, for TM, into a battle of personalities. Old stuff.’45 This has the ring of truth in describing relations between Tarn and Maschler, both European émigrés of much energy, ambition and self-regard, the one an artist and polymath intellectual, the other a self-made man of the world who never went to university. Having placed his magical objects on the table and recounted the history of his dealings with Cape, the first argument Tarn made was that the losses being sustained by his projects were small in the overall context of the company and were outweighed by their value in bringing prestige to the firm. Next, he appealed to his colleagues’ sense of justice towards him personally, in curtailing his Cape projects after only one year when he had ‘made a very great change in my life, leaving a good position in a university for this job’. Finally, he suggested what else might be done, before giving up on Cape Editions and Cape Goliard as unaffordable luxuries: We could discuss market research into what everyone agrees to be the mystery of no sales in the series . . . We could see if patience is not a virtue for Cape Editions as it is for so many other projects, including Cape-Goliard.46

But Tarn’s argument did not sway the executives. His full-time arrangement was to be cancelled at the end of 1968, with the offer of six further months from January 1969 at a rate of £2,500 a year while he found other work.47 Soon he had found a visiting appointment at Buffalo University for summer 1969, arranged a visiting

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professorship at Princeton for the start of 1970, and in September 1968 he was in Guatamala, writing to Barry Hall to describe the stripped-down life he was now leading: ‘Absolute solitude; writing a lot; somewhat pauperized; but loving it. Daily diet of avocado and rice, for the most part. Have not seen a newspaper for weeks and do not miss them. Far, far away.’48 Having conceived of the Cape poetry programme in terms of national importance – ‘The Work Laid Before Us in this Disunited Kingdom’ – Tarn saw the curtailment of his ambitions for it as the end of England, the last nail in the coffin of a dead culture which, out of key with his time, he had tried to resuscitate. He has never lived in England since. Barry Hall continued to produce Cape Goliard books, many of them commissioned by Tarn, for almost two years after his departure. With the overhead of Tarn’s salary off the books, the financial pressure on the press was reduced, so that the Cape directors’ view for the time being, as Hall communicated to Tarn, was that ‘this was a small, unknown outfit and that things would improve; back titles would sell etc.’.49 But without Tarn to act as a buffer between Hall and the Cape executives, his frustration grew. In Tom Raworth’s account, Hall ‘just got bored of it all’: Barry got bored, . . . and as I remember it left the rollers inked just across the type as being printed, locked the door, and went to Africa. Asa Benveniste told me he went by some months afterwards and looked through the window and things were still there. Cape hadn’t even bothered to go in and clean up or anything. The machines were still there.50

A sad end for one of the most important poetry publishers of the 1960s. In Tom Maschler’s memoir, Publisher (2005), Cape Goliard is dealt with in 100 words as an aside in the chapter on his acquaintance with Allen Ginsberg and receives no mention in the separate chapter on ‘Poets’.51 The story of Cape Goliard marks a crucial staging post in the history of relations between poetry and the publishing industry and between modernism and the market in general; it also acts out in miniature the history of 1960s cultural optimism and its dissipation. The petering-out of Cape Goliard coincided with the acrimonious winding-up of Fulcrum Press following a lengthy legal dispute with the Scottish concrete poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. The situation that remained after these two events, with second- and third-generation

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American modernist poets like Olson, Zukofsky, Dorn, Snyder and Duncan barely in print in the United Kingdom during the 1970s, and the works of British experimental poets such as Prynne and Raworth largely circulated in cheaply duplicated forms among small networks of acquaintances, while the poetry lists of trade publishers were dominated by writers of more traditional and continuous lyric values, structured the shape of the poetic field for the decades leading up to the end of the twentieth century.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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Box 38, Folder 11, NTP. Zamir, ‘Bringing the World to Little England’, p. 270. Tarn, Views from the Weaving Mountain, p. 51. Box 38, Folder 7, NTP. Tarn, Views from the Weaving Mountain, p. 59. Tarn, ‘World Wide Open’. Mao and Walkowitz, ‘The New Modernist Studies’. Howard, Jonathan Cape, Publisher, pp. 319, 321. Box 38, Folder 11, NTP. Zamir, ‘Bringing the World to Little England’, p. 283. Zamir, ‘Bringing the World to Little England’, p. 283. Schlesinger and Chambers, ‘Tom Raworth: An Interview’, p. 9. Zamir, ‘Bringing the World to Little England’, p. 283. Schlesinger and Chambers, ‘Tom Raworth: An Interview’, p. 12. Simpson (ed.), Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘goliard, n.’. Zamir, ‘Bringing the World to Little England’, p. 283. Zamir, ‘Bringing the World to Little England’, p. 285. Box 18, Folder 747, CORC. Tom Maschler to Charles Boer, 19 February 1970, Box 138, Folder 5, JC. Tom Raworth to Charles Olson, 22 September 1966, Box 207, CORC. Creeley and Kitaj, A Sight. Schlesinger and Chambers, ‘Tom Raworth: An Interview’, p. 8. Eckett, ‘The Poet Lover’, p. 47. Tom Maschler to Charles Olson, 14 December 1967, Box 99, Folder 8, JC. Barry Hall to Olson, 10 December 1967, Box 159, CORC. Hall to Olson, 15 October 1968, Box 159, CORC. Olson to Tom Maschler, 28 December 1967, Box 99, Folder 8, JC. Barry Hall to Robert L. Hogg, 13 June 1968, Box 159, CORC. ‘Projective Verse’, in Charles Olson, Collected Prose, pp. 239–49. Olson to Tom Maschler, n.d., Box 99, Folder 8, JC. Barry Hall to Olson, 4 March 1968, Box 159, CORC.

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32. J. H. Prynne, poetry reading given in Vancouver, 30 July 1971, Archive of the Now, [accessed 30 January 2018]. 33. J. H. Prynne, poetry reading given in Vancouver, 30 July 1971, Archive of the Now, [accessed 30 January 2018]. 34. Prynne to Valerie Kettley, 19 August 1967, Box 101, Folder 4, JC. 35. Prynne to Graham Greene, 23 January 1968, Box 101, Folder 4, JC. 36. Sinclair, ‘The poet steamed’, p. 28. 37. Alpert, ‘Tom Raworth: An Interview’, p. 32. 38. Tom Raworth to Charles Olson, 19 September 1967, Box 207, CORC. 39. Nathaniel Tarn to Tom Maschler, 3 November 1967, Box 38, Folder 11, NTP. 40. Tarn to Maschler, ‘Tuesday’ [2 April 1968], Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 41. Maschler to Tarn, 2 April 1968, Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 42. Tarn to Maschler, ‘Saturday’ [6 April 1968], Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 43. Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 44. Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 45. Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 46. Box 38, Folder 11, NTP. 47. Tom Maschler to Nathaniel Tarn, 2 August 1968, Box 39, Folder 4, NTP. 48. Tarn to Barry Hall and Chris Bryer, 12 September 1969, Box 39, Folder 4, NTP. 49. Box 39, Folder 5, NTP. 50. Schlesinger and Chambers, ‘Tom Raworth: An Interview’, p. 11. 51. Maschler, Publisher, p. 280.

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Notes on Contributors

Lise Jaillant is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Loughborough University. She is the author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955 (Routledge, 2014) and Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the Avant-Garde (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). *

*

*

Mercedes Aguirre is Lead Curator, Americas at the British Library. She has a PhD in English literature from University College London. She presented her work on Cunard at the symposium on ‘Modernist and Twentieth-Century Publishing Houses’ (University of Reading, June 2015). Greg Barnhisel is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. He is the author of Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy, 1946–1959 (Columbia University Press, 2015) and James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). Claire Battershill is a Government of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at Simon Fraser University. She is a co-founder of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP) and has published several chapters and articles on modernism and book history. Her first book was a collection of short stories, Circus (McClelland & Stewart, 2014). She is also the co-author of two collaboratively written academic books, Scholarly Adventures in the Digital Humanities (Palgrave New Directions in Book History, 2017) and Using Digital Humanities in the Classroom (Bloomsbury, 2017). Her monograph, Modernist Lives: Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press was published with Bloomsbury (2018).

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Amy Root Clements is Associate Professor at St. Edward’s University, Texas. She has also worked for a variety of book publishers as an advertising manager and freelance copy-editor. She is the author of The Art of Prestige: The Formative Years at Knopf, 1915–1929 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). John Xiros Cooper is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of several influential monographs, including Modernism and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Cooper was one of the last scholars to access the privately-held Faber archive before it closed to the public. Loren Glass is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde (Stanford University Press, 2013) and Authors Inc. : Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 (New York University Press, 2004). Adam Guy is the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC-funded Dorothy Richardson Scholarly Editions project. He is currently completing a monograph on the impact of the nouveau roman in Britain, with Calder and Boyars as a central protagonist. Joshua Kotin is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Princeton University. His articles and reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Wallace Stevens Journal, nonsite.org and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His first book, Utopias of One, was published by Princeton University Press in 2018. Kotin directs a digital humanities project, ‘Mapping Expatriate Paris: The Shakespeare and Company Lending Library Project’. Jennifer Sorensen is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&MCorpus Christi. Her book, Modernist Experiments in Genre, Media, and Transatlantic Print Culture, was published in January 2017 by Routledge. The central dynamic animating her work is how genres – both textual and paratextual genres – are mixed and juxtaposed to create new aesthetics and new material forms. Matthew Sperling is Lecturer in Literature in English from 1900 to the Present Day at University College London. His first monograph,

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Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014, and he is at work on a second, entitled Poetry and the Book: Publishing Late Modernism in the Long 1960s. Catherine Turner is Senior Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Marketing Modernism Between the Two Wars (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003) and co-editor with Greg Barnhisel of Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda and the Cold War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).

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Index

abstract art, 217, 219, 224 abstract expressionism, 206 Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski (ed.), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Grove Press), 211 Active Anthology (ed. Pound) (Faber & Faber), 179 Acton, Harold (contrib.), Henry Music by Henry Crowder (Hours Press), 147 Adler, Elmer, 48 Adorno, Theodor, 226 advertising Boni & Liveright, 6, 51, 54, 55–6, 65 Calder and Boyars, 218, 225, 226, 227 department stores, 91 Faber & Faber, 98 Grove Press, 196, 209, 210 Harper, 37 Hogarth Press, 80 Huebsch, 23, 26 industry, 89 Knopf, 37, 41, 45, 46 literary agents, 36 Random House, 45, 165–6 see also blurbs African American literature, 64–5, 67; see also Harlem Renaissance African arts, 146–7, 148 Âge d’or, L’ (film), 148–9 Aguirre, Mercedes, 8 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 210 Albatross Books, 3, 131, 158 Alcestis Press, 181 Aldington, Richard and Gaige, 160–1, 170 and Hours Press, 135, 136, 140, 141–2 and Obelisk Press, 139 All Men Are Enemies (Chatto & Windus), 160 Death of a Hero (Chatto & Windus), 160, 170 The Eaten Heart (Hours Press), 141 Fifty Romance Lyric Poems (Crosby Gaige), 160, 161 Hark the Herald (Hours Press), 143 Henry Music by Henry Crowder (contrib.) (Hours Press), 147 Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. see Knopf, Blanche and Alfred Alleg, Henri, 214 Allinson, Francesca, 72 American Civil Liberties Union, 21, 33n ‘American Expatriate Writers and Their Friends’ exhibition (1959), 150 American Library Association, Bulletin, 28–9 American Publishers’ Association, 22–3 American Repertory Theater, 210 Amis de Shakespeare and Company, Les, 131 Amis, Kingsley, 222 Anchor Books (Doubleday), 196 Anderson, Margaret, 114 Anderson, Sherwood and Boni & Liveright, 6, 25, 27, 28, 51, 56 and Huebsch, 3, 5, 8, 17, 21, 25–7, 28, 29–30

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Many Marriages (Huebsch), 25–6 Poor White (Huebsch), 26–7 A Story Teller’s Story (Huebsch), 27 and Ulysses, 118 Winesburg, Ohio (Huebsch, Modern Library), 17, 21, 25, 26, 27 Andrews, Wayne (‘Montagu O’Reilly’), 179 anthologists, 89 anti-colonialism, 70, 72, 214 anti-fascism, 82 anti-Semitism, 149, 184, 185, 191n, 223 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 143, 145 Aquila Press, 148 Aragon, Louis and Hours Press, 135, 140, 142 and Shakespeare and Company, 111 and surrealism, 144 La chasse au snark (Hours Press), 8, 145–6 Le Con d’Irène (Grove Press published translation), 137 ‘Lewis Carroll en 1931’, 146 Arnheim, Rudolf, 99 Arnold, Edward, 71 art galleries, 89 art sauvage see primitive art Artaud, Antonin, 227 artistic autonomy, 25, 188, 193, 197, 206, 207, 226–7 Atherton, Gertrude, Black Oxen (Boni & Liveright), 51, 55 Auden, W. H., 82, 98, 235 Auster, Paul (ed.), Beckett Centenary Edition (Grove Press), 211 authors, 57–9, 62 advances, 38, 43, 160, 193 marketing role, 92 relationship with publishers, 18, 29–30, 55–6, 183–5, 191n, 242; see also Grove Press (Beckett); Shakespeare and Company (Joyce) signed copies, 83, 87n, 162–3, 168, 196 avant-garde, the Boni & Liveright, 56, 67 booksellers, 177 Calder and Boyars, 217–18, 226 Cape Goliard Press, 11, 12 critics and, 93–4 Grove Press, 10, 196 Hours Press, 8 infatuation with, 4 Knopf, 5, 34, 44 in London, 88 New Directions, 9 not synonymous with modernism, 89, 90, 102n see also surrealism B. W. Huebsch see Huebsch, Benjamin W. Baker, Howard, 187 Ballard, J. G., 218

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Index banned books Shakespeare and Company, 134n Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 40, 224 Tropic of Cancer (Miller), 224 Ulysses (Joyce), 3, 114, 118, 122, 167 Banting, John, 8, 79, 135, 145 Baraka, Amiri (formerly LeRoi Jones), 214, 237 Barnard, Mary, 185 Barnes Collection, Philadelphia, 89 Barnes, Djuna and Boni & Liveright, 6, 51 and Faber & Faber, 101 and Ulysses, 118 A Book (Boni & Liveright), 54, 56–8, 69n Nightwood (Faber & Faber), 97–8 Barnhisel, Greg, James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, 9, 223 Barnum, P. T., 46 Barthes, Roland, 236 Barton, Ralph, 59 Bataille, Georges, 227 Battershill, Claire, 6 Baudelaire, Charles, 145 Baum, Vickie, Grand Hotel (Faber & Faber), 92 Beach, Sylvia, 110–11, 132, 150, 151, 168, 194; see also Shakespeare and Company Beard, Charles, 21 Beauvoir, Simone de, 42, 214 Beckett at 60: A Festschrift (Calder and Boyars), 227 Beckett, Samuel, 209 artistic autonomy, 193, 197, 207, 226–7 and Calder and Boyars, 10, 214, 219, 220, 225–7, 228, 229 correspondence published, 193–4 critical studies, 203–4, 205–6, 209, 211, 227 and Cunard, 142 ‘failure’, 205–6, 210 and Finnegans Wake, 194 Formentor Prize, 204–5 and Grove Press, 10, 195–7, 203–4, 210–11; see also individual titles and Hours Press, 136 literary stature, 196–7, 197–8, 226–7 Nobel Prize, 210 plays as books, 197–8, 198–204, 205 and Rosset, 193–4, 195, 197, 198–9, 211–12 and Shakespeare and Company, 128 Bram van Velde (with Duthuit and Putnam) (Grove Press), 206 Come and Go (Calder and Boyars), 225–6 En Attendant Godot (Éditions de Minuit), 206; see also Waiting for Godot Endgame (Grove Press), 201–2, 202, 204, 210 Film (film), 193 Henry Music by Henry Crowder (contrib.) (Hours Press), 147 I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On (Grove Press), 210–11 Imagination Dead Imagine (Calder and Boyars), 226 Malone Dies (Grove Press), 196, 197, 207, 208 Malone Meurt (Éditions de Minuit), 194 Molloy (Éditions de Minuit, Grove Press, Calder and Boyars), 194, 196, 197, 206–7, 207, 226 Proust (Grove Press), 204 Proust with Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (Calder and Boyars), 227 ‘Stirrings Still’ (Grove Press, Blue Moon Press), 211 trilogy, 209, 209; see also Malone Dies; Molloy; The Unnamable The Unnamable (Grove Press), 196, 197, 207, 208 Waiting for Godot (Grove Press, Faber& Faber), 10, 197, 198–200, 200, 201, 204, 205, 212n, 225–7; see also En Attendant Godot Watt, 194 Whoroscope (Hours Press), 8, 135, 138, 142 Worstward Ho (Grove Press), 211, 212

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269

Beinecke Library, Yale, 155 Bell, Vanessa, 6, 71, 78, 87n, 103n Bentley, Eric, 198 Benton, Megan, 163, 166 Benveniste, Asa, 239 Bergman, Ingmar, 214 Bernays, Edward, 54, 55 Bernstein, Eduard, Evolutionary Socialism (Huebsch), 21 Berryman, John, 185, 187 Bersani, Leo, 205 Berto, Giuseppe, 187 bestsellers, 55, 60, 92, 93, 204, 206 Bethlehem Globe-Times, The, 132 Betjeman, John, 99 bindings Hogarth Press, 78, 79–80, 85n Hours Press, 138 Knopf, 47, 48, 49 Modern Library, 53, 54 as paratext, 1 see also cheap hardbacks; dust jackets; pamphlets; paperbacks Bird, William, 138, 140 Birmingham, Kevin, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, 113–14, 119 Bishop, Elizabeth, 178, 181 Bishop, Emily, Seventy Years Young (Huebsch), 20 Black Cat (Grove Press), 197 Black Manikin, 138 Black Mountain poets, 233; see also Creeley, Robert; Duncan, Robert; Olson, Charles black nationalism, 214 Black Sun Press, 8, 72, 80, 138, 139, 140 Blackmur, R. P., 177 BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex (founded Wyndham Lewis), 36–7 Blau, Herbert, 197 Blin, Roger, 197, 201 Bloch, Ernst, 218 Bloom, Harold, 94 Bloomsbury Group, 44, 70–1, 77, 81, 88, 90; see also Bell, Vanessa; Fry, Roger; Grant, Duncan; Richardson, Dorothy; Woolf, Leonard; Woolf, Virginia Blue Jade Library (Knopf), 6, 48 Blue Moon Press (Rosset), 212 blurbs Boni & Liveright, 52, 58–62, 63–4, 65 Calder and Boyars, 223–4, 226–7 Crosby Gaige, 167 Faber & Faber, 97, 100–1 Grove Press, 196, 197, 203 Huebsch, 26 as paratext, 1 Bodenheim, Maxwell, Replenishing Jessica (Boni & Liveright), 51 Bodley Head, The, 36 bohemianism, 41, 71, 88, 94, 175 Böll, Heinrich, 214, 229 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, 188, 191n Boni & Liveright Publishing advertising, 6, 51, 54, 55–6, 68n bestsellers, 55 blurbs, 52, 58–62, 63–4, 65 business values, 56–7 and censorship, 55, 69n dust jackets, 6, 51, 57–62, 63–7 ethos, 52–3 founding, 52 and Harlem Renaissance, 63–7 relationship with authors, 55–6 Boni, Albert see Boni & Liveright book collecting, 131, 166, 168 Gaige, 156–7, 158, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 169 Book Collector, The, 151 book history, 1–2, 3–4

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Book-of-the-Month Club, 7, 29 Book Society, 7, 72 booksellers, 5, 26, 45, 81, 82, 196 Borges, Jorge Luis, 10, 204–5, 227–8, 229 Borzoi Books (Knopf), 34, 35, 36, 39, 45, 46 Borzoi Pocket Books, 47, 48 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7, 160, 170, 206, 216, 226 The Rules of Art, 92, 93 Bowles, Patrick, 195 Boyars, Marion, 215, 216, 218; see also Calder and Boyars Boyd, Ernest, 159, 160 Boyer, Richard O. and Herbert M. Morais, A History of the American Labour Movement (John Calder), 215 Boyle, Kay, 181, 182 Brace, Donald, 156, 161 Bradley, William (William A. Bradley Literary Agency), 42 Bragdon, Claude, 47 Brancusi, Constantin, 144 Brandt, Carl, 40 Breton, André, 143, 144, 179, 236 Briggs, Carey, 175, 177 British Arts Council, 220 Brooke, Rupert, Letter to the Editor of the Poetry Review (Watch Hill Press), 170 Brooker, Peter, 2 Brooks, Van Wyck, 21 Brower, Steven, 206 Brown, Bob, 135, 138, 139 Buchman, Alexander H., 129 Bunting, Basil, 11, 93, 233 Buñuel, Luis, 148–9 Burch, Aline, 81 Burke, Kenneth, 44 Burns, Alan, 10, 214, 218 Burroughs, William, 10, 214, 225 Bussy, Dorothy (Strachey), 44 Butor, Michel, 218 Bynner, Witter, 39 Cabell, James Branch, 60, 61, 168–9 Cage, John, 214 Cahun, Claude, 146 Calder and Boyars American influence, 4 and Beckett, 225–7, 228 and censorship, 224, 225, 226 company name, 229–30n founding, 215–16 The Garden of Eros (Calder and Boyars), 231n International Literary Annual, 221 Jupiter series, 228–9 and long 1960s, 10 and Miller, 224, 225 and modernist legacy, 5 and music, 221–2 principles, 216–20 subject range, 214 and Wyndham Lewis, 220–1, 222–4 Calder, John, 215–16, 217–18, 219, 220, 228 Calderbooks (Calder and Boyars), 228, 231n Campbell, Alan, Closing Doors (unpublished), 128 Campbell, Roy, 8, 138 Camus, Albert, 42, 187 Canby, Henry Seidel, 178 Cape Editions (Jonathan Cape), 232, 234, 236, 239, 246 Cape Goliard Press (Jonathan Cape) avant-garde poetry, 10–11 book design, 240–1, 242, 243 compared to Faber & Faber, 233 founding, 234, 239 inception, 236; see also Goliard Press and modernist legacy, 5

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output, 232–3 petering-out, 247–8 relationship with parent, 243–5, 246 sales failure, 233–4 significance, 233 Carrington, Dora, 6, 79, 81 Carroll, Lewis, The Hunting of the Snark, 8, 145–6 Casanova, Pascale, 114, 205, 211, 213n, 226, 229 Castro, Fidel, 236 catalogues, marketing, 51, 74, 80, 96, 131, 165, 209; see also Faber & Faber: quarterly notices Cather, Willa, 6, 39, 46 Caws, Mary Ann, 143 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 187, 223 censorship and Boni & Liveright, 55, 69n and Calder and Boyars, 10, 224, 225, 226 France, 7 and Huebsch, 25–6, 32n and Knopf, 5, 40, 41–2 and Pound, 192n L’Âge d’or (film), 149 Janet March (Dell), 41–2 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Lawrence), 4, 40 Replenishing Jessica (Bodenheim), 55 Ulysses (Joyce), 30, 102–3n, 114, 122 The Well of Loneliness (Hall), 40 Women in Love (Lawrence), 39 see also banned books; obscenity laws Cerf, Bennett and Gaige, 159, 161, 163–4, 165–6, 168, 169 and Joyce, 113 Laughlin on, 183 Modern Library and Random House, 4, 159–60, 163 and Pound, 191–2n and Wells, 166 Chapman, Frederic, 25 Chatto & Windus, 7, 72, 75, 82; see also Phoenix Library cheap hardbacks, 6, 22, 186; see also Modern Library Cheever, John, 177 Chekhov, Anton, 215 Chisholm, Anne, 135 Christian Science Monitor, The, 22, 23 Churchwell, Sarah, 17 Claridge, Laura, 40 Clarke, Herbert, 129 class, 90, 103n Clements, Amy Root, 4, 5 Cloud, Yvonne (later Knapp), 149 Coconut Grove Playhouse, Miami, 197, 199 Cocteau, Jean, 181 Cody, Morrill, 116 Coe, Richard, 198, 203 Cohn, Ruby, 198, 203, 204 Cold War, 31, 185, 188 Collection Merlin (Olympia Press), 194 college publishing see education, influence on sales Collier, Patrick, 4 Colligan, Colette, 134n Colum, Padraic, 154, 167–8 Columbia University, 155, 156 commercialism, 2–3, 18–19, 31n Boni & Liveright, 17 Hogarth Press, 6–7, 71–2, 79–80, 138 Huebsch, 15, 26, 28, 29–30 communications circuit, 1, 74, 77, 85n Communism, 144 Conrad, Joseph, 9, 59, 60, 154, 169 Conran, Terence, 92 Contact Editions, 8, 139, 140 Cooper, John Xiros, 2, 7 copyright, 43, 124, 129, 182, 186 Corti, José, 138 Covici-Friede, 40 Covici, Pascal, 40

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Index Cowley, Malcolm, 187 Cranach Press, 86n Crane, Hart, 6, 51, 55 Creeley, Robert, 232, 235, 237, 239, 243 Crispi, Luca, ‘Manuscript Timeline 1905–1922’, 118 Criterion, The (ed. Eliot), 88–9, 96, 100 Crosby Gaige see Gaige, Crosby Crosby, Henry and Caresse, 8, 73, 138, 139, 140, 151 Crowder, Henry and Cunard, 137, 142, 148 and Hours Press, 136, 140, 142, 145, 147 Crowley, Ronan, 133n Cruikshank, Constance, 103n Cuala Press, 80 cultural goods, 7, 91–2, 96 Cummings, E. E., 6, 44, 51, 177, 180 Cunard, Nancy, 136, 150 and Aragon, 140, 142, 144 art collection, 145 career, 136–7 as character, 137 and Crowder, 137, 142, 148 and Hogarth Press, 75 Paris, 137 politics, 148–9 and surrealism, 143–5, 148–9 Black Man and White Ladyship, 144, 148 ‘Equatorial Way’, 147 Grand Man (Secker), 136, 150 Henry Music by Henry Crowder (contrib.) (Hours Press), 140, 145, 147 ‘In the Studio’, 145 ‘Memory Blues’, 147 Negro: An Anthology (ed.) (Continuum), 137, 142, 148 Outlaws (Elkin Mathews), 137 Parallax (Hogarth Press), 137, 144 Poems (Two) (Aquila Press), 148 Sublunary (Hodder & Stoughton), 137 These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, 136, 140–1, 149–51 see also Hours Press Curtis Brown, Albert, 36, 38, 39 Dada, 144 Daiches, David, 186 Dalí, Salvador, 145, 148–9 Darantiere, Maurice, 116, 118, 119, 122, 131 Dardis, Tom, 54 Darnton, Robert, 74, 85n Davison, Claire, 72 Davison, David H., 211 Day-To-Day Pamphlets (Hogarth), 76 de la Mare, Richard, 95–6, 100 Defence of Literature and the Arts Society (DLAS), 226 Dell, Floyd, 40–2 detective fiction, 1, 36, 37, 46, 75 Dial, The, 36, 44 Dilks, Stephen John, 226 Dine, Jim, 11 Direction (New Directions), 186 Dodd, Martha, The Searching Light (John Calder), 215 Donne, John, 187 Doran, George, 23, 42, 47, 158 Dorn, Edward, 11, 233, 237, 241, 248 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 215 Doubleday, Page & Co., 36, 196 Douglas, Norman, 136, 138, 139, 142, 150, 163 Dramatists Play Service, 198, 199 Drew, Ned, 206 Duckworth, Gerald, 38, 71, 85n Duncan, Robert, 233, 235, 243, 248 Duras, Marguerite, 229 dust jackets Boni & Liveright, 6, 51, 57–62, 61, 63–7, 66 as camouflage, 122

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271

Faber & Faber, 95, 97 Hogarth Press, 73, 78–9, 103n Jarrolds, 44 Knopf, 47 Modern Library, 52 Duthuit, Georges, 206 Dwiggins, William Addison, 47, 48 Éditions de Minuit, 194, 195, 206, 213n Éditions GLM, 139, 149 education, influence on sales, 93–4 Grove Press, 193, 199, 203–4, 205, 209 New Directions, 9, 189 Egoist Press, 37, 116, 122 Egoist, The (ed. Pound), 2, 37, 86n, 114, 179, 220, 222 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 215 Einaudi, 204, 235 Eliot, Simon, 2 Eliot, T. S. Americanness, 234 and Boni & Liveright, 6, 38, 51, 54 and Calder and Boyars, 221 at Faber & Faber, 2, 7, 38, 88–9, 90, 94, 96–8, 100–1, 102 and Hogarth Press, 6 and Kenner, 221 and Laughlin, 178 reputation, 222 Collected Poems (Faber & Faber), 92–3, 94 Four Quartets (Faber & Faber), 93 Poems 1909–1925 (Faber & Faber), 96, 98 Poems (Knopf), 38 The Waste Land (Boni & Liveright, Hogarth Press, Faber & Faber), 38, 54, 90, 96, 98 Ellis, Havelock, 124, 139, 143, 146, 148 Ellmann, Richard, 129 Empson, William, The Gathering Storm (Faber & Faber), 97 Epstein, Jason, 196 Esslin, Martin, 198, 205–6, 209 Evergreen Originals (Grove Press), 196, 200–2, 204, 207, 231n Everyman’s Library (Dent), 47 Ewen, David, Encyclopedia of the Opera (John Calder), 215 expatriate small presses, 138, 139, 151; see also Shakespeare and Company Expressionism, 218 Faber & Faber archives, 103–4n branding, 95 Cape Goliard Press compared to, 233 commitment to modernism, 96 cultural importance of, 7 development from Faber & Gwyer, 89 gift guides, 98 history, 94–5 house style design, 95–6 no book about, 2 poetical dominance challenged, 11 quarterly notices, 97, 99, 100–1, 103n readership, 97, 102 reputation, 94 talent-scouting, 98 visual arts, 99–101 Faber & Gwyer, 38, 88, 90, 94, 96 Faber, Geoffrey, 88, 94, 95, 96 failure, rhetoric of, 205–6, 210 Farrar & Rinehart, 181, 183 fascism, 184, 185, 222–3; see also anti-fascism Faulkner, William, 6, 17, 51, 56 Faus, Keeler, 121 Fauset, Jessie Redmon, 51, 63–5 Fehsenfeld, Martha, 193 Feinstein, Elaine, 237

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272

Index

feminism, 38, 72, 73, 80, 99, 214 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 189 Feuchtwanger, Lion, 29 Figes, Eva, 218 film, 58–9, 99–100, 148–9, 160, 193 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 247 First World War, 21, 22, 37, 46 Fisher, Roy, 11, 233 Fitch, Noel Riley, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 110, 111, 118, 120–1, 129 Fitts, Dudley, 175, 177, 181, 186, 187, 190 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1, 9, 17, 186, 189 Flanner, Janet, 120, 124, 139 Fletcher, J. S., 36, 37 Ford, Ford Madox, 143, 169 Ford Foundation, 189 Ford, Hugh, 128, 135, 150 Formentor Prize, 204–5 Forster, E. M., 36, 71, 186 Foster, William Z., The Great Steel Strike (Huebsch), 22, 23 Fountain Press, 155, 165, 168 Fowlie, Wallace, 194, 198 Fox, C. J., 221 France, 42; see also Hours Press; Shakespeare and Company Frankfurter, Marion and Felix, 28 Freeman, The (pub. Huebsch), 21–2, 24, 27 Freud, Sigmund, 76, 87n Friede, Donald, 40 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 229 Fry, Roger, 6, 71, 79, 90, 92 Fulcrum Press, 233, 237, 241, 247 Futurism, 88, 99 Gabler, Hans Walter, Ulysses: The Corrected Text (Random House), 133n Gaige, Crosby, 157 advances, 160 background, 155–6 book design, 155, 158, 160, 164, 164, 168, 169 and Columbia University, 156 contemporary literature, 154, 155, 156–8, 159 distribution, 155 fine books, 4, 9, 154 limited editions, 154, 155, 158, 162–5, 167–8, 170 network, 156, 158 preference for British and Irish authors, 159, 161 and Random House, 155, 159 and theatre, 156, 159, 161, 170 Watch Hill Press, 155, 170 Gale, Zona, 64–5 Galerie surréaliste, 145 Gall, John, 206 Gallimard, 204 García Lorca, Federico, 82, 149, 182 Garden City Press, 78, 80 Garnett, Angelica, 87n Garnett, Edward, 36, 39 Gascoyne, David, A Short Survey of Surrealism, 143 Gasiorek, Andrzej, 222 Geisel, Theodor (Dr. Seuss), 29 Gerald Duckworth and Company see Duckworth, Gerald Getty, Ann, 211 Gide, André, 5, 42, 44, 111, 118, 187 Gierow, Karl Ragnar, 210 Gilbert, Stuart, 30 Gill, Eric, 79, 86n, 99 Gillespie, Diane, 72, 75 Gilmer, Walker, 54, 56, 68n Gilreath, James, 17 Ginsberg, Allen, 232, 237, 244, 247 Girodias, Maurice, 194 Glass, Loren, 10, 213n globalism, 4

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Goliard Press, 236, 237, 238–9; see also Cape Goliard Press Gollancz, Victor, 4, 95 Gombrowicz, Witold, 228 Gontarski, S. E., 211 Gotham Book Mart, New York, 178, 179 Grant, Duncan, 71, 103n Grant Richards, 48 Graves, Robert, 8, 135, 138, 139, 145, 147 Great Depression, 50n, 168 Greene, Graham C., 243 Griggs, Edward Howard, 19 Grolier Club, 155 Gropius, Walter (trans. Shand), The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Faber & Faber), 99 Grossman Publishers, 233 Group, the, 234 Grove Press advertising, 196 and Beckett, 10, 195–7, 203–4, 210–11 book design, 200–2, 200, 201, 202, 206–10, 207, 208, 209, 211 challenging obscenity laws, 10 distribution, 203 and Formentor Prize, 204 freedom of expression, 225 limited editions, 196–7 see also Black Cat; Evergreen Originals; Rosset, Barney; Seaver, Richard Groves, Jeffrey, 18 Guardian, The, 45 Guinzburg and, 30 Guinzburg, Harold, 5, 27, 28, 30 Guy, Adam, 4, 10 Gwyer, Sir Maurice and Lady, 94, 95 H.D. (Hilda Doolitle), 124, 190 Hall, Barry, 236, 237, 239–40, 241, 245, 247 Hall, Radclyffe, The Well of Loneliness (Cape, Obelisk Press, Covici-Friede), 40, 139, 146, 225 Hamilton, Ian, 245 Hamilton, Richard, 11 Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 29–30 Hammill, Faye, 71 hand printing Éditions GLM, 149 expatriate small presses, 139 Hours Press, 138, 140, 141–2, 145 Laughlin, 177–8, 179, 186, 187 Matrix Press, 237 Officina Bodoni, 158 Omega Workshops, 71 Prynne and, 242 Woolfs, 70, 78, 80, 137 see also Darantiere, Maurice Harcourt, Alfred, 156 Harcourt, Brace & Company, 2, 132, 156, 161 Harlem Renaissance, 39, 46, 57, 63–7 Harper and Brothers, 37 Harper’s Bazaar, 59, 68n Harry Ransom Center, 8 Hart-Davis, Rupert, 150 Harvard College, 175, 177, 188 Havel, Vaclav, 236 Heap, Jane, 114 Hedayat, Sadegh, The Blind Owl (Calder and Boyars), 229 Heinemann, 43 Hemingway, Ernest, 6, 17, 51, 55–6, 121 Henderson, Arthur, The Aims of Labor (Huebsch), 22 Henderson, Wyn, 148 Henry Music by Henry Crowder (Hours Press), 140, 145, 147, 148 Heppenstall, Rayner, Raymond Roussel: A Critical Guide (Calder and Boyars), 221 Hepworth, Elizabeth, 81, 87n

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Index Hergesheimer, Joseph, 39 Hesse, Herman, 10, 189 high modernism, 182, 221, 223, 226, 227 Hillyer, Robert, 177, 188 Hobson, Harold, 203 Hoffman, Frederick J., 3 Hogarth Press advertising, 80 anti-colonialism, 71, 72 bindings, 79–80 book production, 78 Business Archive, 73, 85n Chatto & Windus and, 7, 72, 82 Colonial Cloth editions, 82 critical studies, 71–2, 72–3, 74 distribution, 80–1, 82–3, 87n dust jackets, 78–9, 103n eclecticism, 75 editing, lack of, 76–8 and feminism, 38, 72, 73 growing commercialism, 6–7, 72, 79–80, 138 inception, 70, 71, 140 informal circulation, 77 logo, 79 lost authors, 98 mandate, 85n and Penguin Random House, 85n, 86n poetry, 72, 87n print runs, 80 printers, 78 and readers, 83–4 rejects, 75–6, 86n reputation, 80 resistance to competition in England, 162 Russian translations, 72 selection of manuscripts, 74–5 series, 76, 86n soliciting writing, 76, 77 staff, 81–2 and taste, 71, 74–5, 77, 85n and Ulysses, 75, 86n, 114 Uniform Edition, 162 Holliday Bookshop, New York, 138 Holt, Henry, 156 Horovitz, Michael, Nude Lines for Larking in Present-Night Soho (Goliard Press), 237 Horrocks, Roger, 147 Hours Press, 8, 73, 80 ‘American Expatriate Writers and Their Friends’ exhibition (1959), 150 cessation, 148 cover art, 147 distribution, 138 and ethnographic art, 146–7, 148 founding, 137, 140–1 move to Paris, 145 ouput, 136 reviews, 138–9 and surrealism, 135–6, 137, 143, 145–6, 147 wartime destruction, 136 Wyn Henderson, 148 Howard, Brian, 135, 145, 149 Howard, June, 68n Howard, Michael S., 235 Howard, Wren, 95 Howe, Susan, 190 Howsam, Leslie, 2 Hubert, Renée Riese, 147 Huddleston, Sisley, Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios, 113, 116 Huebsch, Benjamin W. B. W. Huebsch, 19–20 background, 19 and Beach, 110 business values, 18–19, 25–7, 29–30, 31 eclecticism, 3 The Freeman, 21–2, 24, 27

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and Joyce, 116 literature and culture, 15–16 pamphlets, 22–4 politics, 15, 17, 20–1, 27, 28–9, 33n and Pound, 181 and reading, 17–18, 24–5 reputation, 16–17, 19, 20, 27–8, 31 Viking Press, 5, 16, 27–30 Hughes, Langston, 6, 39, 46, 149 Hunton, Alphaeus, 214 Hurst, Fannie, 39 Hussey, Mark, 71 Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 29–30 Huxley, Aldous, 137, 163 illustration, 11, 159 Boni & Liveright, 58 cover, 23, 135, 145, 147, 240–2 Crosby Gaige, 164 dust-jacket, 47, 48, 59, 60, 61, 65, 66, 78–9 Grove Press, 206 Hogarth Press, 6, 81 Hours Press, 8 Knopf, 23 Viking Press, 29 Imagism, 88, 160 Imagistes, Des (ed. Pound), 179 Impressionism, 42, 217 Imprimerie Durand, 129 Independent, The (New York), 159 Indiana University Bloomington, 216 International Psycho-Analytical Library (Hogarth), 76 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936), 8, 136, 143, 145 International Virginia Woolf Conference, 72 Ionesco, Eugène, 214 Irwin, Will, The City that Was, 22 J. M. Dent, 47 Jackson, Garner, 28 Jaillant, Lise, 17, 20, 53, 54, 72, 76 Cheap Modernism, 38 ‘ “I’m Afraid I’ve Got Involved with a Nut” ’, 86n James, Henry, 95, 186, 189 Jameson, (Margaret) Storm, 6, 39, 46 Jargon Press, 238, 241 Jarrell, Randall, 185 Jarrolds, 29, 29–30 Jay Library (Jarrolds), 44 Jewish publishers, 56; see also Knopf, Blanche and Alfred Joad, Marjorie, 81 Jodorowsky, Alejandro, 214 John Calder (Publishers) Ltd see Calder and Boyars; Calder, John John Golden Theatre, New York, 197, 199 John Murray, 48 Johnson, B. S., 218 Johnson, James Weldon, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Blue Jade), 48, 49 Jolas, Eugène, 143, 180 Jonathan Cape Ltd, 40, 46, 47, 162; see also Cape Editions; Cape Goliard Press Jones, David, 98, 101 Jones, LeRoi (later Amiri Baraka), 237 Joseph Frank & Sons, 19 Joyce, James and Calder and Boyars, 221 as canonical figure, 2 as Celt, 234 collectability, 167 comparisons with, 216, 217, 226 critical studies, 186 and Faber & Faber, 98 and Gaige, 157, 167; see also Anna Livia Plurabelle (below)

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274

Index

Joyce, James (cont.) and Huebsch, 3, 5, 8, 30 Joyce Wars, 119, 133n and Kenner, 221 and mainstream culture, 4 and Modern Library, 1 piracy of, 129; see also Ulysses: piracy and Pound, 112, 113, 114, 119 reputation, 197, 204, 222, 224 Shakespeare and Company and, 90, 109, 120–1, 133n Anna Livia Plurabelle (Crosby Gaige), 9, 154, 155, 159, 166–7, 167–8, 169 Dubliners (Huebsch, Modern Library), 30, 167 Exiles (New Classics), 186 Finnegans Wake (Viking and Faber & Faber), 30, 109, 124, 129, 194; see also Work in Progress (below) Haveth Childers Everywhere (Fountain Press), 168 Pomes Penyeach (Shakespeare and Company), 8, 109, 128–9 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Huebsch, Modern Library), 30, 163 Work in Progress, 166, 168; see also Finnegans Wake (above); Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress see also Ulysses (Joyce) Jupiter (Calder and Boyars), 228–9 Kaf ka, Franz, 182, 197, 204, 217 Kahane, Jack, 138, 139 Kauffer, E. McKnight, 79 Kauser, Alice, 156 Keller, Gottfried, 215 Kelmscott Press, 155 Kennedy, Richard, A Boy at the Hogarth Press, 81–2 Kenner, Hugh, 119, 186, 198, 203, 209 The Pound Era (University of California Press), 221, 222 Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (Grove Press, Calder and Boyars), 227 Kennerley, Mitchell, 36 Kerfoot, J. B., 53 Kirstein, Lincoln, 177, 187 Kitaj, R. B., 11, 239, 243 Klopfer, Donald, 160, 164, 165 Knight, Laura, 44 Knoll, Robert E., McAlmon and the Lost Generation, 151 Knopf, Alfred, 4 Knopf, Blanche and Alfred attitude to business, 34, 35, 36, 39 Blue Jade Library, 48–9 book design, 47–8 branding, 95 and censorship, 40, 41–2 early days, 35–6 early lists, 34 European reprints, 36, 43 and Lawrence, 39–40 and literary agents, 36 London company, 4, 6, 46, 47, 48 lost authors, 38 outsider status, 34–5 place in market, 5–6 Pound and, 181 pricing, 47, 50n pursuit of distinction, 41, 43, 45, 49 reputation, 34, 41, 43, 49 and translations, 42–5, 48 and Wallace Stevens, 116 Knowlson, James, 210, 212n Koch, Vivienne, 186 Kopley, Emily, 72 Koster, Jane and Margaret Murray, New Crochet and Hairpin Work (John Calder), 215

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Kotin, Joshua, 7–8 Kronenberger, Louis, 55 Kuhlman, Roy, 206, 209 Lafollette, Suzanne, 21 Lane, Allen, 95 Lane, John, 25, 36–7 Larbaud, Valery, 111, 115 Larkin, Philip, 222 Laughlin, James background, 175, 176–7 changing politics, 188–9 Chevalier of Légion d’honneur, 187 damns publishers, 182–3 draft deferred, 185 and Pound, 177–8, 179–80, 183, 188, 191n publishing ‘apprenticeship’, 176, 178–9 retirement, 190 and Stein, 178, 179 and Tennessee Williams, 187 and William Carlos Williams, 183 see also New Directions Books Lawrence, D. H. and Huebsch, 3, 5, 15, 21, 33n and Knopf, 5, 34, 39–40 and Seltzer, 33n, 39 David: A Play (Martin Secker, Knopf), 39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Martin Secker, Penguin Books), 4, 39–40, 128, 224, 225 Mornings in Mexico (Martin Secker, Knopf), 39 Pansies (Martin Secker, Knopf), 39 The Plumed Serpent (Martin Secker, Knopf), 39 The Rainbow (Huebsch), 21 St. Mawr (Martin Secker, Knopf), 39 The Woman Who Rode Away (Martin Secker, Knopf), 39 Women in Love (Thomas Seltzer Inc.), 39 Lehmann, John, 7, 82, 87n Léon, Paul, 129, 130, 131 Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti, The (Viking), 28 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 236 Levin, Harry, 186 Levussove, M. S., 20 Lewis, Anne Wyndham, 221, 222–3 Lewis, Sinclair, 156 Lewis, Wyndham biography, 49n and Calder and Boyars, 10, 214, 220–1, 222–4, 229 critical studies, 186 and Cunards, 137 Harper and, 37 and Knopf, 34, 36–7 politics, 222–3 reputation, 222 The Art of Being (Harper), 37 Blast (ed.), 99 Blasting and Bombardiering (Calder and Boyars), 220, 221, 222, 222–3 The Childermass (The Human Age) (Calder and Boyars), 220, 223–4 The Human Age (Calder and Boyars), 220 Malign Fiesta (The Human Age) (Calder and Boyars), 220, 221 Monstre Gai (The Human Age) (Calder and Boyars), 220 The Roaring Queen (Secker & Warburg), 137 Tarr (Knopf, Calder and Boyars), 3, 36–8, 220 The Trial of Man (fragment, with Malign Fiesta) (Calder and Boyars), 221 Wyndham Lewis on Art: Collected Writings, 1913–1956, ed. Fox and Michel (Funk & Wagnalls), 221 Liberator, The, 23 Library of Congress, 188 Lilien, Ephraim Moses, 20

02/02/19 1:34 PM

Index limited editions, 25, 26, 86n, 90, 122, 138–9; see also Gaige, Crosby: limited editions Limited Editions Club of New York, 158 Lindon, Jerome, 195, 213n literary agents, 36, 39, 40, 42, 193 lithography, 19 Littérature, 144 Little Leather Library (Boni & Liveright), 52 Little Magazine, The, 3 little magazines, 2, 3, 44, 89–90, 236; see also Criterion, The; Freeman, The; Merlin; New Writing; Outburst; Transatlantic Review; transition Little Review, The, 2, 30, 114 Liveright, Horace and Anderson, 25, 27, 28 and Eliot, 38 ‘firebrand’ personality, 56 and Pound, 181 pre-publishing career, 52 takeover of Boni & Liveright Publishing, 54 see also Boni & Liveright Publishing Liveright, Otto, 27 Logue, Christopher, 195, 237 London Huebsch’s death, 15 International Surrealist Exhibition (1936), 8, 136, 143, 145 Knopf in, 4, 6, 46, 47, 48 modernist, 88 Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of industrial art (1935), 101 see also Calder and Boyars; Cape Editions (Jonathan Cape); Cape Goliard Press (Jonathan Cape); Faber & Faber; Hogarth Press; Jarrolds Loos, Anita, 6, 17, 51, 58–60 Lowe & Brydone Printers Ltd, 78 Lowe-Porter, Helen, 44–5 Lowell, Amy, 137 Lowenfels, Walter, 145, 147, 150, 235 Loy, Mina, Feminist Manifesto, 99 Lukács, György, 218 Lustig, Alvin, 186, 187 Lye, Len, 135, 145, 147 McAlmon, Robert, 8, 118, 119, 138, 139, 151 McCown, Eugene, 144–5 McCracken, Scott, 91 McDermott, F. T., 78, 86n MacDiarmid, Hugh (Christopher Murray Grieve), 234 McDonald, Maria, 143 McDonald, Peter D., 219, 220 Macfall, Haldane, The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer (Blue Jade), 48 McGrath, Raymond, Twentieth-Century Houses (Faber & Faber), 100, 104n McGurl, Mark, 213n Macmillan Company, of Canada, Ltd, 47 Macmillan Publishing, 24 MacNiven, Ian, 177 Macy, George, 158 Macy’s (R. H. Macy & Co.), 22–3 Magalaner, Marvin and Richard M. Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (Calder and Boyars), 221 magazines, 2, 59, 68n, 90; see also little magazines Maison des Amis des Livres, La, 111, 113, 116, 128 Makers of Modern Literature (New Directions), 186, 189 Maltz, Albert, A Long Day in a Short Life (John Calder), 215 Mangan, Sherry, 177 Mann, Thomas, 5, 42–3, 44–6 Mano, Guy Lévis, 139, 149 Mansfield, Katherine, 6, 74, 85n Mao, Douglas, 214

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275

Marbury, Elisabeth, 156 Marcus, Laura, 72 Mardersteig, Hans ‘Giovanni’, 158 market society, 91 marketing of bestsellers, 92, 93 Boni & Liveright, 6, 51, 53, 55–6 Calder and Boyars, 217 Cape Goliard Press, 245 culture-influencers and, 93–4 Faber & Faber, 7, 96–8, 102 Grove Press, 10 Hogarth Press, 80–1 mass-, 24 New Directions, 9 Omega Workshops, 90, 91–2 Random House, 166 to students, 4 see also advertising; blurbs; catalogues, marketing Marx, Enid, 79 Maschler, Tom, 234, 235–6, 238, 243–4, 245–6, 247 Masses, The, 40 Masterman, C. F. G., In Peril of Change, 20 Matrix Press, 237 Maugham, W. Somerset, 5 Maupassant, Guy de, 48 Melville, Herman, 187 Mencken, H. L., 43, 48, 60 Mercier, Vivian, 203 Mercure de France, 42 Merlin (ed. Trocchi), 194–5, 198 Merton, Thomas, 187, 190 Merttens Lectures on War and Peace (Hogarth), 76 Methuen Publishing Ltd, 221 Michel, Walter, 221 Miller, Henry, 10, 182, 224, 225 Miller, Laura, 18 Miller, Tyrus, 223, 227 Minotaure, 141 Miró, Joan, 145, 149 Mishima, Yukio, 10, 189 Modern Continental Library (Albatross), 158 Modern Library (Boni & Liveright, Random House) and Anderson, 27 Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry, 192n and Cerf, 4, 160, 163, 191–2n founding, 51, 52 ownership, 6 and Pound, 191–2n reprints, 1, 17 significance, 68n success of, 53–4 modernism, definition, 2, 17, 88, 90–1, 100–2, 102n, 190 Calder and Boyars, 214–15, 217–19, 221–2, 229 see also high modernism Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), 3–4, 72, 85n, 87n Modernist Print Culture, 4 Monnier, Adrienne, 90, 111, 113, 115, 121 Monro, Harold, 111 Montgomery, Stuart, 233 Moore, George, 135, 136, 137, 138, 142, 150 Moore, Marianne, 178 Morel, E. D., Red Rubber (Huebsch), 22, 23 Morier, James Justinian, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (Blue Jade), 49 Morley, Christopher, 27 Morley, Frank, 97 Morris, William, 9, 91, 155, 158 Movement, the, 234, 235 Murphy, Bernadette, 81 Murry, John Middleton, ‘The Critic in Judgment’ (Hogarth Press), 78 Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 89

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276

Index

Mussolini, Benito, 181, 184 Myerberg, Michael, 199 Nation, The, 23, 28, 75, 139 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The Crisis, 147 National Council of Teachers of English (US), English Journal, 3 Navire d’Argent, Le, 168 Neilson, Francis, 21 Neruda, Pablo, 149, 232 networks, social and trade, 92, 205, 241, 248 Calder and Boyars, 215 expatriate small presses, 139 Gaige, 155–6, 158 Hogarth Press, 72, 82, 87n Knopf, 39, 42, 46 Laughlin, 177 Tarn, 234 New Classics, The (New Directions), 186, 189 New Critics (US), 188 New Democracy (Laughlin column), 178, 180, 181, 183 New Directions Books book design, 176, 186, 189 college publishing, 189 development, 185, 189 early days, 181–2 embodiment of modernism, 190 Five Young American Poets, 185, 187 founding, 179 headquarters, 191n influence of Pound, 183 and Joyce, 182 mission, 180 New Directions in Prose and Poetry annuals, 179–80, 183, 187 ‘Poet of the Month’ series, 187 postwar expansion, 187–8 reprints, 182 republication strategy, 182 scope, 175–6 in Second World War, 185–6 significance, 9–10 New Modernist Studies, 214 New Republic, The, 139 New Saltire, 217 New Statesman, The, 71, 99, 218 New Writing (founded Lehmann), 82 New York City bohemianism, 88 General Post Office, 122 intellectuals, 188 New Directions’ move to, 191n publishing disruptions, 6 rivalling Paris, 213n see also Boni & Liveright; Farrar & Rinehart; Gaige, Crosby; Grove Press; Huebsch, Benjamin W.; Knopf, Blanche and Alfred New York Herald Tribune, 91, 165 New York Post, 65 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 30, 39, 40 New York Times Book Review, The, 26, 45, 55, 196 New York Times, The department store advertising, 91 and Gaige, 156, 159 and Huebsch, 21, 22 and Knopf, 36, 37, 47, 48 and Lewis, 49n and Ulysses, 114 New York World’s Fair (1939), 91 New Yorker, The, 124, 139, 190 Newman, Frances, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (Boni & Liveright), 60–2, 61 Nicholls, Norah, 81 Nicholls, Peter, 143

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Nicholson & Watson, 29 Nicolson, Harold, 80, 85n Niedecker, Lorine, 180 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 48, 52 Nobel Prize, 45, 210 Nock, Albert, 21, 22 Nonesuch Press, 159, 160 North American Review, 24 nouveau roman, 10, 218 Nursing Mirror, The (Faber & Gwyer), 94, 95 Obelisk Press, 138, 139 Objectivism, 233 Objectivist Press, 181 obscenity laws, 10, 75, 113, 114, 167, 225 Observer, The, 75, 139 Odyssey Press (Albatross Books), 131 Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA), 186 Officina Bodoni, 158 Ogden, C. K., 104–5n Oldenberger, Eleanor, 121 Olson, Charles after Cape Goliard Press, 248 Americanness, 235 and Cape Goliard Press, 11, 232, 233, 243 and Maschler, 238, 239, 240 and Raworth, 237 Archaeologist of Morning (Cape Goliard Press), 11, 239 Call Me Ishmael (Cape Editions), 236, 239 Letters for Origen 1950–1956 (Cape Goliard Press), 239 Maximus Poems IV, V, VI (Cape Goliard Press), 11, 238–9, 239–41 The Maximus Poems (Jargon Press, Cape Goliard Press), 11, 237–8, 239 Mayan Letters (Cape Editions), 239 ‘Projective Verse’ (Totem Press), 240 ‘West’ (Goliard Press, Cape Goliard Press), 237, 238, 239 Olympia Press, 194 Omega Workshops, 71, 85n, 90, 91, 101 O’Neill, Eugene, 6, 51 Oppenheim, Meret, 141 Oppenheimer, George, 5, 27, 28 O’Reilly, Montagu (Wayne Andrews), Pianos of Sympathy (New Directions), 179 Orioli, Pino, 138 Orlovitz, Gil, 216, 219 Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (Shakespeare and Company, New Directions)), 8, 109, 128, 129, 130, 182 out-of-print announcements, 166 Outburst, 237 Outlook, The, 143, 144 Ovid Press, 38, 139 Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, The, 2 pamphlets Cunard, 144, 149 Hogarth Press, 7, 76, 79, 80 Hours Press, 138 Huebsch, 3, 22–4 New Directions, 179, 185, 187 paper Cape Goliard Press, 243 Crosby Gaige, 164–5, 168 Fountain Press, 168 Hours Press, 138 Knopf, 47 reprints, 68n Shakespeare and Company, 115, 116, 119, 122, 129 see also bindings

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Index paperbacks, 4 Calder and Boyars, 228 Grove Press, 199, 206, 212n, 228; see also Black Cat; Evergreen Originals Guinzburg, 30 Huebsch, 5, 23–4 Jonathan Cape Ltd, 236 Knopf, 48 New Directions, 9, 176, 189 paratext, 1, 203 Paris Beckett and, 194, 195 Blanche Knopf and, 42 bohemianism, 88 centrality challenged, 205, 206, 213n Cunard and, 137 international authors and, 229 World Exposition (1937), 91 see also Hours Press; Shakespeare and Company Parker, Dorothy, Enough Rope (Boni & Liveright), 56 Partridge, Ralph, 81 Patchen, Kenneth, 182, 187 patronage, 9, 83–4, 89, 90, 120, 215–16 state, for the arts, 220 see also authors: advances PEN America, 21 Penguin Books, 40, 95, 221 Penguin Random House, 49, 85n, 86n; see also Random House Perspectives USA, 189 Phillips Collection, Washington DC, 89 Phillips, Tom, 11 Phoenix Library (Chatto & Windus), 3, 38, 231n Pinker, J. B., 36, 39 piracy, 124, 126, 127, 129 Pocket Books (Knopf), 6 Poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol, Les (Cunard), 149 Poetry, 139, 179 post-Impressionism, British, 78, 79 Pound, Ezra Americanness, 234, 235 beligerence, 3, 99, 102 Bollingen Prize controversy, 188, 191–2n and Boni & Liveright, 6, 38, 51 and Cunards, 137 detention, 188 and Faber & Faber, 98 fascism, 184, 185, 191–2n, 223 and Hours Press, 8 and Joyce, 112, 113, 114, 119 and Kenner, 221 and Knopf, 37, 38 and Laughlin, 177–8, 179–80, 183, 188, 191n London years, 237 and New Directions, 9, 187, 190 successors, 233 and Three Mountains Press, 139 The Cantos, 99, 180 Cantos LII–LXXI (New Directions), 182, 183–5 Culture (New Directions), 182 A Draft of the Cantos 17–27 (John Rodker), 139 A Draft of XVI Cantos (Three Mountains Press), 139 A Draft of XXX Cantos (Hours Press), 135, 138, 139, 142 Guide to Kulchur (New Directions), 181 Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Ovid Press, Boni & Liveright), 38 Jefferson and/or Mussolini (New Directions), 181 Lustra, with Earlier Poems (Knopf), 38 ‘NOH’ or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan (Knopf), 38 Pavannes and Divisions (Knopf), 37, 38 The Pisan Cantos (New Directions), 188 Pozzi, Antonia, 215 Price, George, 20

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277

pricing Boni & Liveright, 68n Calder and Boyars, 228 Crosby Gaige, 166, 168, 169 Fountain Press, 168 Grove Press, 207 Huebsch, 22–3, 24 Knopf, 47, 50n New Directions, 186, 187 Shakespeare and Company, 116 primitive art, 146–7 Princeton University Press, 129, 158 printing, hand see hand printing printing, in America and Europe, 158–9 printing presses see hand printing production cycles, 92–3, 245 Prompt Press, The, 78, 86n Proust, Marcel, 116, 133n, 204, 217 Prynne, J. H. (Jeremy), 11, 232, 235, 238, 241–2, 248 public libraries, 47 publicity see marketing Publishers Lunch Club (NYC), 35 Publishers’ Weekly and Boni & Liveright, 55 and Huebsch, 15, 16, 23, 26, 27 and Knopf, 41 and Random House, 165 and women authors, 166 Putnam, Jacques, 206 Queneau, Raymond, 179, 187, 228 Quin, Ann, 10, 214, 218 Quinn, John, 36 R & R Clark Ltd, 78 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 222 race, 136–7, 144, 147–8; see also Harlem Renaissance Rai, Lajpat, Young India, 26 Rainey, Lawrence, 17, 89, 118 Random House buys Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 35 as distributor, 155, 159, 163, 165–6, 168 and Gaige, 164 international sales, 4 no book about, 2 Ulysses, 3, 45, 90–1, 92–3, 98, 102n, 113, 124, 131 see also Cerf, Bennett; Penguin Random House Ransom, John Crowe, The New Criticism (New Directions), 188 rare books, 9, 83, 155, 164 Raworth, Tom after Cape Goliard, 248 and Cape Goliard Press, 11, 232, 235 and Goliard Press, 236–7, 238–9 and Hall, 247 and Maschler, 243–4, 245 Ray, Man and Burke, 44 and Cunard, 137, 144, 149 and Hours Press, 8, 135, 145, 147, 148 and Oppenheim, 141 Read, Herbert, 98, 100–1, 102 Readers’ Subscription Club, The (Grove Press), 203 reading experience, 1, 18, 83, 87n, 165, 220 Reading, University of, 7, 72, 73, 85n religion, 96, 149; see also anti-Semitism Remy, Michel, Surrealism in Britain, 143 reprints Calder and Boyars, 220, 228, 231n Faber & Faber, 98 Gaige, 169 Huebsch, 22, 23 Knopf, 36 and standards of courtesy, 18

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278

Index

reprints (cont.) see also Albatross; Blue Jade Library; Little Leather Library; Modern Library; New Classics, The; Phoenix Library; Tauchnitz Editions reputation critics’, 62 Faber & Faber’s, 94 Hogarth Press’s, 80 Huebsch’s, 16–17, 19, 20, 27–8, 31 Knopfs’, 34, 41, 43, 49 publishers’, 93 Ulysses’, 90 Woolfs’, 71 writers’, 1 reviews of Anderson, 26 attracting, 43 as blurbs, 60, 64 Cape Goliard Press books, 245 Hogarth Press books, 75 Hours Press books, 138–9, 146 Knopf London books, 46 of Mann, 44–5 Révolution surréaliste, La, 144, 145 Rexroth, Kenneth, 187, 189, 190 Reynolds Publishing Company, 23 Richardson, Dorothy, 5, 34, 38–9 Riding, Laura, 8, 135, 138, 139, 145, 147 Rimbaud, Arthur, trans. Schwartz, A Season in Hell (New Directions), 182, 186 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 214, 217, 218 Rochester, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of, 187 Rodker, John, 122, 139, 141, 145 Roethke, Theodore, 187 Rogers, Bruce, 155, 158, 160, 161, 169 Rose, Jonathan, 2 Rosemont, Penelope (ed.), Surrealist Women: An International Anthology, 144 Rosset, Astrid Myers, Dear Mr Beckett: Letters from the Publisher, 194 Rosset, Barney, 175 and Beckett, 193–4, 195, 197, 198–9, 211–12 see also Grove Press Roth, Samuel, 124, 127 Rotha, Paul, Documentary Film (Faber & Faber), 99–100 Rothermere, Lilian, Viscountess, 89 Rousseau, Theodore, 167 Roving Eye Press, 138, 139 Rowohlt Verlag, 204 Royal Academy Winter Exhibition of industrial art (1935), 101 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 18 Rudge, William Edwin, 155, 158 Rylands, Dadie, 81 S. Fischer Verlag, 43 Sacco and Vanzetti Defence Fund, 28 Sacco, Nicola, 28 Sackville-West, Edward, 162, 165 Sackville-West, Vita, 75, 80, 82, 83 Sadoul, Georges, 145 Saint-Amour, Paul, 17 Samuel Beckett Reader, A (Calder and Boyars), 227 Samuel French, 198 San Quentin Prison, 197 Sandburg, Carl, Good Morning America (Random House), 166 Sarraute, Nathalie, 218, 228 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 82, 186, 204 Sassoon, Siegfried, 92, 137, 158, 161 Satterfield, Jay, 17, 53, 68n Saturday Review of Literature, 27, 139, 178, 188 Schmidt, Judith, 203 Schneider, Alan, 197 Schoenberg, Arnold, 221

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Schwartz, Delmore, 182, 185, 187 Scientific Press, The, 94, 95 screenprinting, 239 seasonal release, 42, 80, 81, 96 Seaver, Richard, 194, 195, 210–11 Secker, Martin, 39–40, 45 Second World War, 5, 9, 89, 185 Secord, James, Victorian Sensation . . ., 18 segregation, 63 Seix Barral, 204 Seizin Press, 138, 139, 140, 147 Selby, Hubert, Jr, Last Exit to Brooklyn (Calder and Boyars), 225, 226 self-help books, 19–20 Seltzer, Thomas, 33n, 39, 40 Selwyn, Archibald and Edgar, 156 serialisation, 2, 30, 37, 68n series, 95 Calder and Boyars, 228 Chatto & Windus, 3 Hogarth Press, 76, 86n Huebsch, 22, 29 Knopf, 38, 47–8; see also Blue Jade Library New Directions Books, 176, 186–7 Virginia Woolf’s freedom from, 77 see also Modern Library Serruys, Jenny, 42 sets, 190n Shakespear, Dorothy, 142 Shakespeare and Company ‘American Expatriate Writers and Their Friends’ exhibition (1959), 150 and banned books, 134n development, 112 and ‘difficult’ modernism, 4 as emblem, 222 end of, 131–2 finances, 120–2 founding, 111 and Joyce, 90, 109, 120–1, 128–9, 130–1; see also Ulysses lending library, 109, 111, 112, 114, 116, 121–2, 124, 125, 131, 133n records, 2–3 rejects, 128 and Whitman, 131 Shand, P. Morton, 99 Shapiro, Karl, 185, 188 Shattuck, Roger, 198 Shaw, George Bernard, 116, 163 Sherman, French and Company, 48 Sidgwick & Jackson, 43 Silliman, Ron, 232–3 Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Company, 48 Sinclair, Iain, 243 Sitwell, Edith, 38, 137 Sitwell, Osbert, 38 Slote, Sam, Ulysses in the Plural: The Variable Editions of Joyce’s Novel, 122 Smith, Logan Pearsall, Stories from the Old Testament (Hogarth), 75 Snaith, Anna, 72 Snow, C. P., ‘The Two Cultures’, 222 Snyder, Gary, 189, 190, 233, 248 Social Credit, 177, 180 Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), 3 Sophocles trans. William Scott, Electra (New Directions), 182 Sorensen, Jennifer, 6 Southworth, Helen, 71, 72 Souvenirs, Mes (Hours Press), 145 Spanish Civil War, 149 Spargo, John, 21, 22 Spectator, The, 22 Sperling, Matthew, 10, 11

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Index Spier, Franklin, 40, 41 Spire, André, 114 Spoo, Robert, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, 124 Spottiswoode, Raymond, A Grammar of the Film (Faber & Faber), 100 Staveley, Alice, 72, 81 Stein, Gertrude influence on advertising style, 91 and Laughlin, 177, 179 and Modern Library, 1 Plain Edition, 138 rejection by Huebsch, 17, 24 and Shakespeare and Company, 111, 112 An Acquaintance with Description (Seizin Press), 147 Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto), 91 The Making of Americans (Contact Press, Harcourt Brace), 17, 24 Tender Buttons (Claire Marie Editions [Donald Evans]), 91 Three Lives (New Classics), 186 Steinbeck, John, 29 Steloff, Frances, 178, 179 Stephens, James, Julia Elizabeth (Crosby Gaige), 163–4 Stern, Edith, 56, 67 Sternberger, Paul, 206 Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 165 Stevens, Wallace, 116, 190, 221 Stockwell, Peter, 143, 144 Stokes, Adrian, 99 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 59 Strachey, Lytton, 44, 81, 156, 163–4 Stravinsky, Igor, 221 Strong, Leonard (ed.), The Best Poems of 1924, 137 student market see education, influence on sales subscription, 80, 87n Suhrkamp Verlag, 235 Sumner, John, 40, 42 Sunday Times, The, 224 Supreme Court (US), 22–3 surrealism British, 235 Cunard and, 143–5, 148–9 Éditions GLM and, 139 Hours Press and, 8, 135–6, 137, 143, 145–6, 147 and primitive art, 146–7 and printing, 141 Surréalisme au service de la révolution, Le, 146 Sussex, University of, 87n Sutherland, John, 1 Svevo, Italo, 187 Swartz, Harry Felix, The Layman’s Medical Dictionary (John Calder), 215 Sweeney, Carole, 148 symbolic capital, 93, 160, 216–17 Symbolism, 145 Symons, Arthur, 142, 145 Tanguy, Yves, 8, 135, 145, 149 Tarn, Nathaniel conception of Cape Goliard and Cape Editions, 11, 232, 236, 243 defence of Cape Goliard and Cape Editions, 233–4 life after Cape, 247 and Maschler, 235–6, 238, 245, 246 relationship with Cape, 245–6 sense of modernism, 235 Where Babylon Ends, 245 ‘World Wide Open: The Work Laid Before Us in this Disunited Kingdom’, 234–5, 247 Tauchnitz Editions, 3, 23 Tavistock Square, 81, 82, 161 Thacker, Andrew, 2 Thames and Hudson, 221

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279

Théâtre de Babylone, Paris, 197 Thomas, Dylan, 182, 234, 235 Thomas Seltzer, Inc. see Seltzer, Thomas Three Mountains Press, 138, 139 Thwaite, Anthony, 245 Time, 48 Times Literary Supplement, The (TLS), 46, 71, 139, 146, 226 Titus, Edward, 138 Toklas, Alice B., 138 Toomer, Jean, 6, 51, 54 Cane (Boni & Liveright), 55, 63, 64, 65, 69n Transatlantic Review, 143, 144, 195 transition, 143, 168, 179–80, 195 translations Beckett, of himself, 194, 197, 204 Calder and Boyars, 221 Faber & Faber, 99 Formentor Prize, 204–5 Hogarth Press, 72, 82 Hours Press, 8, 142, 145–6 John Calder, 215 Knopf, 42–5, 48 Modern Library, 52 New Directions, 10, 182, 189 of Ulysses, 111, 128 Travellers’ Library (Cape), 47, 231n travelling salespeople, 81 Tree, Viola, 72, 86n Tridon, André, The New Unionism (Huebsch), 21 Trigram Press, 237, 239 Trilling, Lionel, 186 Trocchi, Alexander, 194, 195, 214, 225, 229 Tucker, Eva, 10, 214 Turner, Catherine, Marketing Modernism Between the Two World Wars, 5, 45 Turner, Susan, 22 Two Worlds Monthly, 124, 126 type Boni & Liveright, 55 Cape Goliard Press, 240 Hogarth Press, 78 Hours Press, 139 reprints, 68n typography, 89, 95, 100 hand printing, 141, 158 Tythacott, Louise, 146–7 Tzara, Tristan, 144, 149 Ulysses (Joyce) admiration for, 195 censorship, 30, 102–3n, 114, 122 changes between editions, 122 cover design, 122 cultural value, 94 distribution, 122, 124, 131 and Faber & Faber, 95 French translation, 128 history, 3 and Hogarth Press, 75, 86n, 114 and Huebsch, 30 income from, 120–1 lending of, 124 The Little Review and, 114 Odyssey Press and, 131 piracy, 124, 126, 127 pricing, 116 printings, 123fig. proofs and revisions, 119 Random House, 3, 45, 90–1, 92–3, 98, 102n, 113, 124, 131 reputation, 90 sales, 118 Shakespeare and Company, 7, 8, 109, 112–14, 115–22, 117, 122–4, 130–1 US ban, 167

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280

Index

uniform editions, 53–4, 72, 95, 162 unions, 41, 78 Unwin, T. Fisher, 95 Vallette, Alfred, 42 Van Vechten, Carl, 6, 38, 39, 46, 48 Vanity Fair, 2, 90 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 28 Varèse, Edgard, 222 Veblen, Thorstein, 21, 26 Velde, Bram van, 206 Verlaine, Paul, 143, 145 Victor Gollancz, 4, 95 Viking Press, 5, 16, 27–30 Vintage Books (Knopf), 48 Virgil trans. Laughlin, Fourth Eclogue (New Directions), 182 Vittorini, Elio, 187 Vogue, 2, 90 Vorticism, 36–7, 88, 224 Wainhouse, Austryn, 195 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 214 Walpole, Hugh, 72 Walrond, Eric, Tropic Death (Boni & Liveright), 63, 65–7, 66 Walsh, Keri, The Letters of Sylvia Beach, 110 Warde, Frederic, 155, 158–9, 164, 166, 168, 170 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, Lolly Willowes (Viking Press), 29 Warren Gallery, London, 138 Watch and Ward Society of Massachusetts, 41–2 Watch Hill Press, 155, 170 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 86n, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122 Webern, Anton, 222 Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 204 Wells, James, 118, 154–5, 165, 166, 167 Werfel, Franz, The Song of Bernardette (Viking Press), 29–30 Wesker, Arnold, 246 West, Margaret, 81 Wexler, Joyce, 2, 17 Wheels (ed. Cunard and Edith Sitwell), 137 Wheelwright, John, 177, 181 Whibley, Charles, 96 Whitman, Walt, 131 Wilenski, R. H., The Modern Movement in Art (Faber & Gwyer), 99 Willcox, Louise Collier, 24 William A. Bradley Literary Agency, 42 William Heinemann Ltd, 43 Williams, Jonathan, 237–8 Williams, Tennessee, A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions), 187 Williams, William Carlos Americanness, 235 critical studies, 186 and Laughlin, 178, 180 and New Directions, 9, 187, 190 successors, 233 and Three Mountains Press, 139

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In the American Grain (New Directions), 182 Autobiography (W. W. Norton & Co.), 151 Life Along the Passaic River (New Directions), 182 In the Money (New Directions), 182 White Mule (New Directions), 182, 183 Willis, J. H., Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers, 71 Willson Gordon, Elizabeth, 72, 75 Wilson, John Tuzo, 240–1 Wilson, Nicola, 72, 75, 82 Winters, Yvor (ed.), Twelve Poets of the Pacific (New Directions), 182 Wolpe, Berthold, 96 Woolf, Cecil, The Other Boy at the Hogarth Press, 82 Woolf, Leonard, 71, 85n, 87n, 141, 162; see also Hogarth Press Woolf, Virginia bookbinding, 79 as canonical figure, 2 critical studies, 186 and Cunard, 137, 141 freedom afforded by self-publishing, 77 and Gaige, 157, 161, 167, 170; see also Orlando (below) and mainstream culture, 4 mental illness, 84n and Modern Library, 1 and New York Herald Tribune, 165 pets, 84n and readers, 165 reputation, 71, 222 sexual abuse, 85n The Common Reader (Hogarth Press), 162 Jacob’s Room (Hogarth Press), 87n To the Lighthouse (Hogarth, Harcourt Brace), 161 Mrs Dalloway (Hogarth, Modern Library), 163, 165 Orlando (Crosby Gaige, Harcourt Brace), 9, 154, 155, 159, 162–3, 164–6, 164, 169 Roger Fry (Hogarth Press), 77 A Room of One’s Own (Hogarth, Harcourt Brace), 166 ‘The Patron and the Crocus’ (in The Common Reader), 83 The Voyage Out (Duckworth), 71 see also Hogarth Press Woolmer, J. Howard, A Checklist of the Hogarth Press, 1917–1946, 71 Woolsey, Judge John M., 131 World-Makers and World-Shakers Series (Hogarth), 86n Worthen, W. B., 197 Wyck, Jean, 36 Wyndham Lewis Society, 221 Yeats, W. B., 118, 222, 234 Young, Tory, 144 Zabriskie, Virginia, 143 Zarin, Cynthia, 190 Zukofsky, Louis, 11, 181, 235, 248

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