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Why Are There No Alternatives? by Paul Goodman

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Non Fiction, Reprints

Reprinted from Evergreen Review Vol. 5, No.16, January-February 1961

In every day’s newspaper there are stories about the two subjects that I have brought together in Growing Up Absurd, the disgrace of the Organized System of semimonopolies, government, advertisers, etc., and the disaffection of the growing generation. Both are newsworthily scandalous, and for several years now, both kinds of stories have come thicker and faster. It is strange that the obvious connections between them are not played up in the newspapers; nor, in the rush of books on the follies, venality, and stilling conformity of the Organization, has there been a book on Youth Problems in the Organized System.

 

Those of the disaffected youth who are articulate, however–for instance, the Beat or Angry young men–are quite clear about the connection: their main topic is the “system” with which they refuse to co-operate. They will explain that the “good” jobs are frauds and sells, that it is intolerable to have one’s style of life dictated by Personnel, that a man is a fool to work to pay installments on a useless refrigerator for his wife, that the movies, TV, and Book-of-the-Month Club are beneath contempt, but the Luce publications make you sick to the stomach; and they will describe with accuracy the cynicism and one-upping of the “typical” junior executive. They consider it the part of reason and honor to wash their hands of all of it.

 

Naturally, grown up citizens are unconcerned about the beatniks and delinquents. The school system has been subjected to criticism. And there is a lot of official talk about the need to conserve our human resources lest Russia get ahead of us. The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same connections as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has become increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don’t more people speak up and say so, and initiate a change? The  question is an important one and  the answer is, I think, a terrible one: that people are so bemused  by  the  way  business and politics  are  carried on  at present, with all their intricate relationships, that they have ceased to be able to imagine alternatives. We seem to have lost our genius for inventing changes to satisfy crying needs.

 

But this stupor is inevitably the baleful influence of the very kind of organizational network that we have: the system pre-empts the available means and capital; it buys up as much of the intelligence as it can and muffles the voices of dissent; and then it irrefutably proclaims that itself is the only possibility of society for nothing else is thinkable.  Let me give a couple of examples of how this works. Suppose  (as is the case)  that  a group of radio and TV broadcasters, competing in the Pickwickian fashion of semimonopolies, control all the stations and channels in an area, amassing the capital and variously bribing Communications Commissioners  in  order  to  get them; and the  broadcasters tailor their programs to meet the requirements of their advertisers, of the censorship, of their own slick and clique tastes, and of a broad common denominator of the audience, none of whom may be offended: they will then claim not only that the  public wants the drivel that they  give them, but indeed that nothing else is being created. Of course it is not! Not for these media; why should a serious artist bother? Or suppose again (as is not quite the case) that in a group of universities only faculties are chosen that are “safe” to the businessmen trustees or the politically appointed regents,  and  these  faculties  give out all the degrees and licenses and union cards to the new generation of students, and only such universities can get Foundation or government money for research, and re­ search is incestuously staffed by the same sponsors and according to the same policy, and they allow no one but  those  they  choose,  to  have access to either the classroom or expensive apparatus: it will then be claimed that there is no other learning or professional competence; that an inspired  teacher  is not “solid”; that the official projects are the direction  of science;  that progressive education is a failure; and finally, indeed-as in Dr. James Conant’s report on the high schools -that only 15 percent of the youth are “academically talented” enough to be taught  hard subjects. This pre-empting of the means and the brains by the organization, and the shutting  out of those who do not conform, can go so far as to cause delusions,  as  when  recently  the president  of Merck and Company had the effrontery to warn the Congress that its investigation of profiteering in drugs might hinder the quest of scientific knowledge! as if  the spirit of Vesalius and Pasteur depended on the financial arrangements of Merck and Company.

 

But it is in these circumstances that people put up with a system because “there are no alternatives.” And when one cannot think of anything to do, soon one ceases to think at all.

To my mind the worst feature of our present organized system of doing things is its indirectness, its blurring of the object. The idea of directly addressing crying objective public needs, like shelter or education, and using our immense and indeed surplus resources to satisfy them is anathema. For in the great interlocking system of corporations people live not by attending to the job, but by status, role playing, and tenure, and they work to maximize profits, prestige, or votes regardless of utility or even public disutility­ e.g., the plethora of cars has now become  a  public  disutility,  but automobile  companies continue to manufacture  them  and  persuade people  to  buy  them.  The indispensible premise of city planning, according to a vice president of Webb and Knapp, is to make a “modest, long-term profit on the promoter’s investment.” (His exact sentence, to a meeting of young planners, was, “What we’re going to have built will be built only if some developer is going to make a profit from it.”!)  Obviously he is not directly interested in housing people or in city convenience and beauty; he is directly interested in being a good vice president of Webb and Knapp. That is his privilege, but it is not a useful goal, and an idealistic young fellow would not want to be such a man. Another example:  Some earnest liberal Congressmen are baffled “how to give Federal aid to education and not interfere in the curriculum and teaching.”  But when the teaching function is respected and assayed by the teacher’s peers-in-skill, no one can interfere; no one would dare (just as Harvard tossed out McCarthy). The  sole function  of  administration  is  to smooth the way, but in this country we have the topsy-turvy  situation that a teacher must devote himself to satisfying the administrator and financier rather  than to doing his job, and a universally  admired teacher  is fired for disobeying  an administrative order that would hinder teaching. Let me give another example, because I want to make this point very clear: These same Congressmen are concerned with “how to discourage low-level programming in private TV stations without censorship.” Their question presupposes that in communication the prior thing is the existence of networks and channels, rather than something to communicate that needs diffusing. But the prior thing is the program, and the only grounds for the license to the station is its ability to transmit it. Nothing could be more stupid than for the communications commission to give to people who handle the means of broadcasting the inventing of what to broadcast, and then, disturbed at the poor quality, to worry about censorship. We live increasingly, then, in a system in which little direct attention is paid to the object, the function, the  program, the task, the need; but immense attention to the role, procedure, prestige, and profit. We don’t get the shelter and education because not enough mind is paid to those things. Naturally the system is inefficient; the overhead is high; the task is rarely done with love, style, and excitement, for such beauties emerge only from absorption in real objects; sometimes the task is not done at all; and those who could do it best become either cynical or resigned.

 

 

In the light of this criticism, the recent scandalous exposures of the advertisers, the government, and the corporations are heartening rather than dismaying (I am writing in the winter of 1959-60 and we have been hearing about TV, the FCC, Title I, and the Drug Industry; by the time this is published there will be a new series). The conditions exposed are not new, but now the public skepticism and disgust are mounting; to my ear there is even a new ring; and the investigations are being pushed further, even further than intended by the investigators. The effect of this must be to destroy for many people the image of inviolability and indispensability of the kind of system I have been discussing, to show its phony workings and inevitable dangers. It is the collapse of “public relations.”

When the existing state of things is  suddenly measured by  people against far  higher standards than they  have  been  used  to, it is no longer  the case that  there  are no alternatives. People are forced by their better judgment to ask very basic questions: Is it possible, how is it possible, to have more meaning and honor in work? To put wealth to some real use? To have a high standard of living of whose quality we are not ashamed? To get social justice for those who have been shamefully left out? To have a use of leisure that is not a dismaying waste of a hundred million adults? The large group of independent people who have been out of the swim, with their old-fashioned virtues, suddenly have something admirable about them; one is surprised that they still exist, and their existence is relevant. And from the members of the Organized System itself come acute books criticizing the shortcomings of the Organized System.

 

It is my belief that we are going to have a change. And  once  the Americans can  recover from  their mesmerized condition and its astounding political apathy, our country  will  be  in  a  most  fortunate situation. For the kinds of radical changes we need are those that are appropriate to a fairly general prosperity. They are practicable. They can be summed up as simply restoring, in J. K. Galbraith’s phrase, the “social balance” that we have allowed to become lopsided and runaway in the present abuse of the country’s wealth. For instance, since we have a vast surplus productivity, we can turn to finding jobs that will bring out a youth’s capacity, and so really conserve human resources. We can find ways to restore to the worker a say in his production, and so really do something for manly independence. Since we have a problem of what to do  with leisure, we can  begin to think  of  necessary community enterprises that  want  doing, and that  people  can  enthusiastically and  spontaneously  throw  themselves  into,  and be proud of the results (e.g., beautifying our hideous small towns). And perhaps thereby create us a culture again. Since we have the technology, the capital, and the labor, why should we not have livable cities? Should it be hard to bring back into society the 30 percent who are still ill-fed and ill-housed, and more outcast than ever? What is necessary is directly addressing definite objective needs and using available resources to satisfy them; doing things that are worthwhile just because they are worthwhile, since we can. Politically, what we need is government in which a man offers himself as a candidate because he has a new program that he wants to effectuate, and we choose him because we want that good, and judge that he is the best man to effectuate it. Is that outlandish?

 

The present widespread concern about education is only superficially a part of the Cold War, the need to match the Russian scientists. For in  the  discussions, pretty soon  it becomes clear that  people are uneasy about, ashamed of, the world that  they  have given  the children to grow  up in. That world is not manly enough, it is not earnest enough; a grownup may be cynical (or resigned) about his own convenient adjustments, but he is by no means willing to see his children robbed of a worth-while society. With regard to the next generation, everybody always has a higher standard than the one he is used to. The standard is ceasing to be one of money and status and is becoming a standard of the worth of life. But worth, like happiness, comes from bona-fide activity and achievement.

 

My stratagem is a simple one. I assume that the young really need a more worthwhile world in order to grow up at all, and I confront this real need with the world that they have been getting. This is the source of their problems. Our problem is to remedy the disproportion. We can. Our inheritance, our immense productivity, has been preempted and parceled out in a kind of domainal system; but this grandiose and seemingly impregnable feudalism is vulnerable to an earnest attack. One has the persistent thought that if ten thousand people in all walks of life will stand up on their two feet and talk out and insist, we shall get back our country.

 

 

Paul Goodman (September 9, 1911 – August 2, 1972) was a novelist, playwright, poet and psychotherapist, although now best known as a social critic, anarchist philosopher, and public intellectual. Though often thought of as a sociologist, he vehemently denied being one in a presentation in the Experimental College at San Francisco State in 1964, and in fact said he could not read sociology because it was too often lifeless. The author of dozens of books including Growing Up Absurd and The Community of Scholars, Goodman was an activist on the pacifist Left in the 1960s and a frequently cited inspiration to the student movement of that decade.

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Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde by Loren Glass

Posted In: Barney’s Picks, Jim Feast, Reviews

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013

Reviewed by Jim Feast

Perhaps there’s a new academic field – I’m not up on these things – which concentrates on the esthetics of book design: layout of the page, colors on the cover, illustrations chosen, and so on. I mention this because Loren Glass in his new Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, The Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde spends a lot of time meticulously analyzing Grove book covers. Even so, the heart of and the real magnificence of this book is Glass’s combination of a detailed history of the press and, the more difficult task, a thoughtful evaluation of this publisher’s impact on American culture.

The most well known of these impacts is how Barney Rosset, with able lieutenants Fred Jordan and Richard Seaver, broke down the censorship rules, which had muzzled publishers. The story has often been told of how Grove in its spirited legal defense of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and other works more or less demolished all the legal barriers that had Puritanically controlled publishing and told adults what they could read. Not mentioned in this story is the fact, which Glass shows is of key explanatory value, that the battering rams Grove used were not books such as Ulysses, an earthy but decidedly high-brow work, but books Glass calls example of “vulgar modernism.” These were novels that honored the stylistic and topical concerns of high modernism, for instance, in Burroughs use of a fragmented, cut-up style of composition or in Henry Miller’s focus on the travails of being a writer, but that, due to their humor, absurdity and high quotient of x-rated scenes, were favorite reads of the general public. Glass puts it like this: “The principal authors Grove brought to the forefront in its battle against censorship – Lawrence, Miller, Burroughs, Genet, Rechy, Selby – received both critical and popular acclaim during the 1960s.” And something Glass doesn’t mention, but which a glance at book sales indicate, is that these authors, not taught in academia to the degree they used to be, still sell widely to the general public.

While Grove brought the avant-garde to a much wider readership – this is one of the major themes of Glass’s study – it did not do this solely through battening on writers who favored salacious material. Grove’s championing of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and other not erotically inclined but equally audacious writers is proof of this. Here a confluence of other factors, along with Grove’s canny marketing, brought this group to the fore in sales and attention. For one, there was a new audience of being-educated, young people. “Subsidized by the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Americans entered college in unprecedented numbers in the postwar years. … undergraduate enrollment increased by almost 500 percent between 1945 and 1975. ” This new audience represents what may have been print’s last stand. Glass quotes Phillip Beidler to the effect that the 1960s, “was truly the last great moment of reading and writing in the West by an identifiable mass-cultural constituency  … [being] spiritually, the last great moment of America’s own faith in the Word as its basic article of political and educational reliance.”

Moreover, it was not accidental that all these writers, who each bested the next in terms of nihilism and a pessimistic view of the human future, were Europeans. Glass suggests that there was a latent element of American boosterism in the interest in these books. “Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Genet represent the long twilight of the European male modernist. … [There was] The sense that the [particularly European] West had exhausted its ethical authority … [in contrast to] America’s triumphant emergence from the war.”

So, it stands to reason if the establishment, represented by the European modernist tradition, is defunct, a new generation needs to come forward to take the reins, just as Grove’s young Turks had come forward to rewrite the rules of publishing. However, due not only to historical circumstances but (I think)  also to Rosset’s time in China, most of the sources for this new order were looked for either outside the U.S., in Mao’s People’s Republic or Che’s Cuba, or in non-white America, as in the writings of  Malcolm X. In a second evolution, following the creation of a mass readership for vulgar modernism, Grove now argued that revolution had to be by the book. Glass explains both how works such as Malcolm X Speaks “promised to provide readers with both empirical evidence of and practical guidelines for the development of revolutionary consciousness,” and how the new political booklist from the publisher combined seamlessly with the earlier cultural one. “Grove sought to merge literary and political understandings of the term ‘avant-garde’ in the belief that reading radical literature could instill both the practical knowledge and psychological transformation necessary to precipitate a revolution.”

Being first on the market with books on topics such as black power, Cuba, China, gay liberation, and Irish nationalism, it seemed there was only one area of revolutionary ferment which Grove overlooked, feminism. We’ll come back to that.

First, let’s return to the opening point about the esthetics of book design. Another interesting feature of Grove is how, at the time when film studies was originally becoming an academic field and when, moreover, there were no DVDs or video players so cinema had to be viewed in the movie theater or not at all, Grove invented a new form: the print film. These were books that contained the script, stills and director’s comments from individual significant films in an artifact that, Glass says, made up a “hybrid and transitional genre that provides a unique insight into the process whereby films were presented texts that needed to be read both closely and repeatedly and whose difficulty requires reading other supplemental material to be fully understood.”Analogously, Glass’s Colophon can be seen as the skillful creation of another hybrid, one that concurrently studies history, literary texts and book design. So, just as Grove invented a new breed of film books so Glass’s work, which is chock full of illustrations of Grove covers, which he penetratingly scrutinizes, invents a new form of cultural study.

But, as noted, Glass ends the book examining how the all-male upper crew of Grove management tended to overlook feminism, a neglect that came to a head when a group of dissident women, led by Robin Morgan, occupied Grove’s offices till they were expelled by the police that Grove staff called. Although there seemed little else the Grove executives could have done but call the cops if they wanted to continue operating, this event tarnished the press’s countercultural credentials and led to further complaints about its male chauvinism. Partially reacting to these events, Grove did begin publishing feminist authors, including Kathy Acker, who, Glass points out, “exemplifies the radical feminist appropriation of sexual idioms and attitudes previously reserved for male modernist authors.” He notes further that she represents an “ambiguous legacy,” in that “though her underground and avant-garde credentials are impeccable, they are also thoroughly integrated into the cultural field as a legitimate market.” In other words, once the censorship battles had been won repeatedly by Grove, and barriers against such books as those about, say, male hustlers or third world revolution had been downed, everything could be said, but, therefore, nothing was challenging. “Grove helped to affect a revolution that vastly expanded the range of voices that can be heard without radically challenging the larger socioeconomic order.”

Here, though, I can register a reservation about this tremendous book.  If Glass had gone further in history  — though this would have gone beyond the parameters of his examination — and looked at the small publishing company Rosset founded after he sold Grove, it would seem Rosset was still publishing books that came from unacceptable-to-the-mainstream, outlaw traditions that even now resists academic incorporation.

One type of renegade book would be those like Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary, which attack a famed author, here Nabokov, from a feminist position. This rewriting of Lolita rated a savage, undeserved attack in the New York Times, in which the reviewer gave no evidence that he had read beyond the first chapter. (Believe it or not, the gist of the attack was the contention that nobody wanted to read about a main character that tortured guinea pigs!)

A second type of renegade book is a work like Alan Kaufman’s Jew Boy. Again, this is a book Rosset published that violates a principle that still governs academic and mainstream inclusion.  Recall Glass’s comments that academics and reviewers were always embarrassed by Henry Miller’s tendency to wear his heart on his sleeve as if good writing could never have too much feeling. But Kaufman combines this type of emotional openness with a penchant for discussing taboo subjects. One such subject is the Holocaust, whose horrors can be revealed in the standard treatment but whose wounds have to be shown slowly healing. Kaufman’s book, in violation of this principle, centers on a Holocaust survivor who did not make peace with her past, and who even passes on neuroses to her children. The wounds in this book never heal. This text, too, was neglected by the mainstream, as is to be expected for such a product of rebel intelligence.

The great contribution Glass makes is to show the heroic, humorous and vigorous fight Grove and Evergreen Review made to break down barriers and create new forms that introduced vulgar modernism, sex and politics into the relatively staid world of bookselling. We can say they won a major skirmish but the fight is not over. The establishment is different now. It doesn’t censor but rather ignores significant outsider voices. It no longer fears things like x-rated sex, but rather studiously avoids books, like Jew Boy, that are in your face for (what it considers) all the wrong reasons.

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Mourning the Loss of Barney Rosset by Kenzabur? ?e

Posted In: Uncategorized

Barney Rosset to me represents the literary world of the latter half of the 20th century.  Two hefty books—the oldest of autographed books in my library—attest to this fact. The books are The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings and The Olympia Reader: Selections from the Traveler’s Companion Series, both published by Grove Press, Inc. The autographs are Barney Rosset’s dated 1965.

I was then a writer aged 30, a complete unknown outside of Japan, visiting the New York publishing houses to receive a publication contract for my novel A Personal Matter. The owner of the company, knowing that I had started writing as a student majoring in French literature, asked me who, in contemporary literature, I found interesting.  A soft smile spread across his face at the mention of each of my favorite French, English, and American writers and poets.  He then kindly gave me the two books saying that although the work by Marquis de Sade required no comment from him, the “Olympia Reader” contained works—obtainable only in Paris—by writers whom I admired.  The clear-thinking, soft-spoken man, from whose countenance exuded a youthful vigor, said: “Among the writers in this selection, the most talented is Samuel Beckett, and this book carries a brief story of how Watt came to be published.  I will most likely publish all of his works.”

Astrid’s letter informing me of Barney’s demise evoked immeasurable sorrow in me, and pride as well, for she wrote: “He spoke of you often as one of the two authors/friends he most cherished—the other being Samuel Beckett.”

There are now my compatriots making an indefatigable effort to recover from the great earthquake, tsunami and explosions at the nuclear power plant, and I too am doing what little I can do to help in this land of devastation, with Barney’s most encouraging words carved in my soul. No amount of words will be adequate to express my gratitude to Barney Rosset.

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Tribute by Wynn Chamberlain

Posted In: Uncategorized

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, Author D.H. Lawrence. Case # 276F. 2d 433 – Grove Press and Readers Subscriptions v. Robert Christenberry individually and as Postmaster of New York City – The case was argued on December 2, 1959, and decided March 29, 1960 at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Lower Manhattan. The hero of this story is Barney Rosset. He had published “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and the U.S. Postmaster had decided on his own that the book was ‘unmailable’ and held to be obscene pursuant to U.S. Code # 18 – 1461 based on laws passed by Congress in 1873, 1876 and continued in 1958.

And so the 1960s began – ‘A breach in the dam of American Puritanism had been opened,’ and in the next four years came the cases of Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer”, the writings of Samuel Beckett, and “Naked Lunch” by William Burroughs versus the U.S. Government. The Victorian burial wrappings of the English language were torn away and its body resurrected in all its splendor. Speech and the Constitutional freedom it enjoys under American law was reasserted and broadened to include journalism and literary works; works of art, including journalism, painting, drawing and photography; drama, opera, dance, and finally motion pictures.

All this was brought about by the energy and enthusiasm of one man, Barney Rosset, who defied the odds against him and fought the fight to renew the ideals of Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams based firmly on The First Amendment of the American Constitution.

A whole new world of creativity opened up, including the translation into English of ancient and foreign languages, which had been smothered with euphemisms since the 17th Century.

But there were and still are many in America who would happily snuff out freedom of speech. Upon his inauguration as President, in January 1969, Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, suddenly the most important man in America, said, “We’re gonna take this country so far to the right that nobody will recognize it.”

Unfortunately, the threat to freedom of speech and expression never goes away and has increased over the past 40 years. G. W. Bush has been recorded as saying, “We aren’t interested in history. We make it.”

Besides being a great freedom fighter, and one of the most important publishers since Alfred Knopf, Barney was also a major collector, mover and shaker in the creation of the New York School of Painting, which included Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Bill De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers and many others who made New York in the 1960s and 1970’s a world center for the avant garde in all branches of artistic expression.
If any new statue should stand permanently in Union Square at Park Avenue and 14th Street it should be a larger than life bronze of Barney, dedicated to this man’s heroic efforts to keep freedom alive in the country he loved so much, and to remind people that they will have to continue to speak up bravely if they wish to preserve these freedoms which are always under attack by those who have the power to instill fear among the public and suppress free speech by any means. With the digital revolution, the danger is greater today than it has ever been. Let us remember these things when we think of Barney Rosset, who did so much for all of us.

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