The Chroniclers of Postwar Publishing: A Q&A
This evening Jay Gertzman, Loren Glass, and Boris Kachka convene at Columbia University for a powwow on personalities in postwar publishing, honing in on the audacious and censorship-averse Samuel Roth, the equally bold Barney Rosset of Grove Press, and the kingpin behind the ubiquitous three-fish colophon of FSG, Roger Straus.
What follows is a wrap-up of our Q&A series with the authors. Today they share what drew them to write their books along with their favorite parts of the writing and research process.
Boris Kachka: I’d covered publishing in fits and starts as a reporter at New York magazine, but wrote a sort of omnibus state-of-publishing piece in 2008. FSG seemed to stand for so much: independence, the “golden days,” but also the pitfalls of nostalgia and rigidity in any industry. It both resisted and succumbed to the encroachment of shareholder-driven thinking on every aspect of our life and work. It was big enough and cash-strapped enough that it had to be truly self-sustaining for most of its existence, and thus it was a real-world test case of whether a truly literary house could survive on its own. It also just felt like a great story, brimming with wild personalities, beginning Roger Straus but also including the devoted, circumspect Giroux, imperious Susan Sontag and Edmund Wilson, and all those bipolar poets. It was the potential for storytelling that really made me want to write the book.
Jay Gertzman: I was asked by two of Samuel Roth’s grandchildren to write the biography. They liked what I had written about Roth in Bookleggers and Smuthounds. Also, their mother Adelaide Kugel had given me a lot of information about her father for that book, and my bibliography of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. They wanted an account that was fair to their grandfather, and that showed his literary skills and commitment to freedom of expression.
Loren Glass: I was originally planning to write a book on obscenity and modernism, and one of the first archives I went to visit was the Grove Press Papers at Syracuse University’s Special Collections library, in order to examine their records of the trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch. But there was so much more. After perusing the finding aid and rummaging through the archives for a few days I realized that there was a fascinating story here and, astonishingly, no one had written it. Both of my parents were politically active in the sixties, and their separation coincided with my Mom’s involvement in the Women’s movement, so I felt as though I were writing a cultural history of their generation.
BK: It’s hard to pick favorites. The FSG archives in the New York Public Library are a gold mine for scholars on every author whose correspondence is listed there. In many ways it was the mundane stuff that intrigued me most: telegrams that not only clicked timelines into place but revealed Roger Straus to be as punctilious and regimented as any owner, no matter how flamboyant and superficial he seemed to be.
Among the interviews, I’m going to be boring and say that the two most important people I talked to were the obvious ones, and those with whom I spent the most time. Peggy Miller, Roger Straus’s secretary, guards many secrets and was certainly not candid, but she channeled Roger (who died four years before I started working on the book) in a way no one else could. Roger Straus III, Straus’s son, was as candid as could be. More importantly, he had an excellent read on his own mixed feelings for his father. He also had a surprisingly homespun and straightforward eloquence, in contrast to his effusive, obfuscating father.
LG: I enjoyed almost every facet of writing this book, but the interviews were definitely special. When I started doing my research I had never conducted a formal interview and had become accustomed to working on dead people. The interviews with Barney were, of course, especially useful and stimulating, and have become more poignant in retrospect as he died before I finished the book. After that, my most useful resource was Fred Jordan, who had worked closely with Barney throughout the period I cover. To date, the most rewarding response I’ve gotten to the book has been from Fred, sent me in which he wrote:
“I was so fortunate to have been part of these events that changed the fabric of our society so radically, and that allowed me to know these extraordinary people — Barney Rosset foremost among them — who brought it about. For me, reading these pages was a wonderful return to the memory of an unforgettable time that gave such rich meaning to my life. I can’t thank you enough for that.”
I can’t imagine a more gratifying affirmation of the book.
JG: I was just grateful to be allowed access to the work and life of such an interesting figure in a field I love.
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See Parts One and Two of the Q&A
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Jay Gertzman, professor emeritus of English at Mansfield University, is author of three books, including Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 and Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist (University Press of Florida).
Loren Glass is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Authors Inc.: Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880–1980 and Counterculture Colophon (Stanford University Press).
Boris Kachka, is a culture journalist, contributing editor to New York magazine, and author of Hothouse (Simon & Schuster). His articles and profiles have appeared in The New York Times, GQ, and Elle, among others.
