#7: "the ideal of a self-supporting avant-garde"
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the seventh one.
Boredom/Glory. At the University of Louisiana, where I went to grad school, there was an excellent, beautifully maintained, comprehensive Ernest Gaines archive. It put Gaines in context: It was full of (mostly racist) contemporaneous reviews of his work from all sorts of publications, correspondences with other writers, and drafts of his novels. I used it to write an article about Gaines featuring a fascinating letter exchange between him and Alice Walker. This archive is an argument for Gaines’s importance. And it’s very difficult to spend any time there without coming to see Gaines—with all his surprising formal experimentation (like in A Gathering of Old Men, or even A Lesson Before Dying), his fraught relationship to African-American literary traditions, his regionalism, his lyricism— as a major American writer.
I didn’t know this was such a great archive at the time, but now I know. Because I have just spent a week at the Black Sparrow Press archives at Penn State. Black Sparrow Press was this cool, hip, prolific, avant-garde tough-guy press that endured for decades—from 1966 to 2002. It put out hundreds of beautifully produced books, most in multiple editions, from some of the most important American experimental writers of the 20th century, like John Ashbery, Larry Eigner, Denise Levertov, Robert Creeley, and Wanda Coleman. Unlike most small presses, it was profitable; John Martin, its founder/publisher/editor, loudly refused to apply for any grants, because the avant-garde should be self-sustaining (or something like that). So if you tell another English professor that you’re working in the Black Sparrow Press archives, they’ll be like, oh yes, yes. My archival research has led me to the conclusion that a more appropriate response would be a conspiratorial eyeroll (about the archive, not the press). There’s all this writing praising Martin for the press’s profitability (Boston Review, 1992: “without Martin, the ideal of a self-supporting avant-garde would have made no stand against the commercialism of mainstream publishing”); but that’s not accurate. As a researcher, I am annoyed by the obfuscating posturing surrounding this issue, and especially by the way Martin actually did sustain the press: by continually selling its archives to various universities as the press was in operation. Because Black Sparrow’s run coincided with a (still ongoing) decades-long cost-cutting trend, particularly in the humanities, at North American universities, no institution wanted to commit to it financially, so the archive is split up across many schools (including Penn State). The University of Alberta, the first school Martin sold materials to, broke off all ties with him in 1971, arguing that it had been tasked with “subsidizing” the press. And it sounds like they had a point. So the archive is fragmented; you can’t follow the work of one writer at the press without going to a bunch of different universities. And you can’t follow the “story” of the press itself. Less than 20 years after the press closed, its aura of coolness and importance lingers—but what about 20 years from now? No institution is set up to argue for it, advocate its importance, the way UL does for Gaines.
*
I went to this archive to research Joyce Carol Oates. I was trying to figure out why she had an association with Black Sparrow throughout the 1970s (the press published 12 Oates books from ’73 to ’79), at the same time she was appearing on the cover of Newsweek, winning the National Book Award, and getting five-book deals with Dutton. This is a two-part question: what does Black Sparrow Press gain from publishing Oates, and what does Oates gain from being published by Black Sparrow?
Oates and Martin each had something they wanted from the other. Martin sought a writer with at least some experimental chops whose sales could help pay for his more experimental, less mainstream, less established writers (and maybe give him a break from the constant archive-selling). Oates sought from Martin something more elusive: avant-garde cache, which had eluded her and continues to elude her, no matter how many experimental stories, novels, plays, and novellas she writes, no matter how many small presses she publishes with, no matter her own work as a small press publisher. Their correspondence, which is frequent through the 1970s and then cools off in the mid ’80s, is generally friendly and enthusiastic. It’s especially interesting to see how Oates manages the fact of her stardom in her letters to Martin. Her tone with him is apologetic, correct, humble, and grateful. For instance, 8/30/74, after a bad (and overly personal and just generally unfair) review of one of her Black Sparrow titles in the New York Times (“Joyce Carol Oates is frankly murderous”), Oates writes to Martin, “I’m so very, very sorry that your press should be involved.” She frequently mentions The Ontario Review, the journal and press that she and her husband are starting (5/16/75: “Our second issue of ONTARIO REVIEW should be reaching you soon”). The presence of her own fledgling small press in her letters functions to tamp down her fame and financial success—she wants to relate to Martin as a fellow small-press publisher.
And then, in October 1987, they have a HUGE falling out. Unfortunately (and mysteriously), Martin’s letter, which set the whole thing in motion, was not in the archive. But Oates’s response (10/6/87) refers to his letter’s “air of reproach and even self-pity. Is this John Martin? I wondered.” The dispute is about Oates’s decision not to publish a new collection of short stories with Black Sparrow Press. “As I explained, I am under contract to Dutton.” Martin, writes Oates, had rejected a poetry collection of hers several years ago, saying he’d rather have short fiction from her. She writes, “At the time of your refusal of the poetry manuscript you were, in effect, abrogating all future contracts between us.” Meaning, I don’t owe you anything! Martin responds immediately (10/12/87). “I had no thought until now when I read your letter that I had either let you down or ‘abrogated’ your friendship.” But Oates had said he abrogated the contract, not the friendship! I hate it when people do that. He takes a business thing and makes it personal. By doing this, he’s underscoring the sense of a homespun, small, "friendship"-based operation, creating an implied contrast between his work and Oates’s that drives the rest of his letter. In his letter, Oates’s assertion over the years of her work at The Ontario Review comes back to bite her. He writes, “imagine yourself trying to continue indefinitely as a publisher on the strength of profits from Ontario Review Editions, and you’ll understand my need to seek every possible opportunity for Black Sparrow.” He goes on, “An occasional Oates book meant a great deal to me in the past and would have continued to mean a great deal to me.” Martin’s implication is that the “great deal” of the “occasional Oates book” is that it makes money for Black Sparrow—he’s not talking about aesthetic fit here. So, finally, he withholds from her that avant-garde cache she sought; he’s suggesting that he took her on because she sold well, the same reason Dutton signed her. After that, Oates writes a short, polite postcard basically acknowledging receipt of his “nice letter,” and as far as I can tell, they don’t correspond again. And Black Sparrow published no other Oates book.
Horror. My project about the Yiddish language poet Celia Dropkin is in the July/August issue of Poetry magazine. It’s an essay/poem/art project that represents several of my tries, across genres, at understanding Dropkin’s work and world. I learned about Dropkin through two excellent books I reviewed for Jewish Book Council: Kathryn Hellerstein’s A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 and The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin. Dropkin, who lived and wrote in Brooklyn before her death in 1956, surprised contemporaneous readers with her stark, open, discussions of female sexuality and sexual fantasy, aging, and motherhood—topics that were largely off the table for male writers of Dropkin’s circle, and beyond taboo for female writers. What I was really interested in was how familiar—like Adrienne Rich! like Jean Valentine!—Dropkin is, but how unreachable. We can work to “recover” a writer like Dropkin, who, for reasons of gender, language, culture, religion, may be excluded from the story of American literature; but in recovering her, we cover her again, too, re-cover her—smothering her with our visions of what she should be or was. It’s just impossible.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987, by Kathryn Hellerstein, The Acrobat: Selected Poems of Celia Dropkin, translated by Faith Jones, Jennifer Kronovet, and Samuel Solomon, A Gathering of Old Men, A Lesson Before Dying, Catherine Carmier, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, by Ernest Gaines
Unrecommended: I forgot to mention that Black Sparrow Press is the reason we know the name Charles Bukowski. While I was at the archive, I read with an open mind every poem I came across by him, and I realized what makes him so bad is that he seems unmoored from any literary tradition of any kind. It’s like he’s not making use of the beautiful tools of poetry, of literary writing. I really don’t get it. His line breaks are atrocious.