Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Betsy: You got to be kidding. This is a dirty movie.  
Travis: No, no this is a movie that a lot of couples come to. All types of couples.  
Betsy: You sure about that?  
Travis: Yeah, I see them all the time.

Taxi Driver is full of memorable and iconic scenes but I really get a kick out of the clip where Travis takes Betsy to a Times Square porno theater on their first date. Not because it shows how out of touch and socially inept Travis was but because it shows how in the know he was — even if unknowingly. Hear me out.

Believe it or not there was a time when your Mom and Dad went to a porno movie on a date. Take Deep Throat. Barbara Walters saw it. Spiro Agnew saw it. Hell, 2020 Democratic nominee John Hickenlooper took his mother to see it. In the era of porn chic or the Golden Age of Porn from 1969 to 1984, adult movies received positive reviews from movie critics and large in-theater viewership from the general public. Not the trenchcoat and newspaper over the lap crowd, but instead the more forward-thinking contingent of upper-middle class America. Porn movies were viewed as a crucial and vanguard element of the counterculture, part and parcel of the war on censorship and the freeing of artistic and personal expression. Pornos and their directors and actors were champions of sexual liberation, not Exhibit A for exploitation and discrimination. Travis Bickle was actually a very hip guy. Poor Betsy was the square.

At the forefront of the mainstreaming of pornography was Barney Rosset of Grove Press. And our friend William Burroughs. Nowhere is this phenomenon presented more clearly and repeatedly than in the newsletters of the Evergreen Club News. You have all heard of Evergreen Review, the primary periodical outlet of Grove Press, which brought the literature and art of the margins into Middle America, but you may not know that in conjunction with Grove’s extremely popular literary magazine, they also had a successful book and film club. A club that reached hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A club that distributed Victorian erotica, transgressive novels, portfolios of erotic drawing, sexual treatises, legal tomes on censorship and obscenity, foreign art films, New American cinema, silent movie classics, stag films, and gay porns.  

The Evergreen Club began in 1966 and as an introductory offer potential subscribers could receive a free copy of three titles: Eros Denied by Wayland Young, Games People Play by Eric Berne, and Naked Lunch. Burroughs’ novel was big news at the time as it had just beaten an obscenity rap in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. The book was also a big seller reaching number one on the New York Post bestseller list in November of that year with the hardcover selling more than 50,000 copies. Selections from Burroughs novels, like The Ticket That Exploded, appeared in the early Evergreen Club News brochures but the book club increasingly became a film club especially once Rosset hit pay dirt with the distribution of I Am Curious (Yellow), the Swedish art-porn film that had obscenity issues of its own, which Grove covered in the pages of Evergreen Review. That movie would eventually make Grove $14 million dollars, which encouraged Rosset to dive head-first into the porn pool. Rosset eventually got all wet, losing money hand over fist, in an attempt to replicate the success of I Am Curious (Yellow). No other film distributed by Grove made a profit. By embracing hardcore pornos, Rosset also alienated some of his supporters, particularly female employees and supporters of women’s rights, who revolted against profiting on the exploitation and degradation of women as well as the pervasive sexism and misogyny at Grove. Female radicals, led by Grove employee Robin Morgan, occupied Rosset’s office and attempted to take over the press. As Loren Glass argues in Counter-Culture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review and the Incorporation of the Avant Garde, porn films ultimately played a decisive role in the downfall of Grove and Rosset.

But for a brief moment, Rosset was the Porn King, if not on top of the media mountain, at least at the vanguard of the future of technology. Albert Goldman’s Life feature, “The Old Smut Peddler,” on Rosset from August 1969 (which featured Norman Mailer on the cover and coverage of Woodstock and the murder of Sharon Tate), opens with Rosset’s vision of video cassettes and porn on demand in the bedrooms of America. By the 1980s this world came to be, which happened to destroy the Golden Age of Porn that Rosset helped usher into existence. For in the heady days of the late 1960s, Rosset aggressively acquired libraries, film archives, bookstores, and movie theaters and partnered with Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, noted collectors of erotica, all in the quest for porn content to feed his empire. Goldman’s article is provided here in full to provide a portrait of Rosset on top just before the collapse in a mere two years. Sidenote: The Old Smut Peddler was only 46 years old at the time of the article. I am older than that now. I guess that makes me an Old Smut Collector.

The Evergreen Club News documents the early days of the Golden Age before Deep Throat changed the game in 1972, by taking porn films into the spotlight and the mainstream. The success of Deep Throat made Rosset’s porn empire of vintage stag films, art-house erotica, New America Cinema, and other 8mm odds and ends obsolete and even worse quaint by comparison. Evergreen Club News is not well-documented. There is no checklist or bibliography and the brochures have no publication dates on them, which results in confusion. For example one prominent seller of Evergreen Club News dates them at 1960, which is clearly wrong. From what I can tell there were seven volumes of the News as well as several out-of-series pamphlets centered around a particular movie or topic, like The Aviator, a stag film from the 1920s, or The New Venus Library of Erotica, a collection of porn exploitation novels. Volume One of the News was published in 1966, when the Evergreen Book Club was initiated. That would place the rest of the volumes as follows:

• Volume Two – 1967
• Volume Three – 1968
• Volume Four – 1969
• Volume Five – 1970
• Volume Six – 1971
• Volume Seven – 1972

By 1972 Rosset’s reckless investment in film as well as internal struggles stemming from the decision to take Grove public basically bankrupted the company and stopped the flood of Grove titles to a mere trickle. As mentioned above, it is also telling that 1972 was the year porn broke, leaving Rosset behind like a starlet’s no longer needed boyfriend.

In the Counter-Culture Colophon, Glass makes good use of the News, particularly in his chapters on obscenity and feminism. Ephemera relating to old porn is crucial to documenting the history of media, advertising, and sexuality as well as gender studies and I suspect will be increasingly collected by institutions and private collectors as such. They are also of course interesting on a visual and design level. I have acquired about 50 Evergreen Club News brochures and I hope this archive will be of interest to academic and general readers alike. As promotional materials they are somewhat repetitive so I have scanned all the cover pages and just a small sample of complete pamphlets to provide a sense of the contents. That said, if anyone has an interest in seeing the complete contents of a particular number I will be happy to scan it and get it posted in the archive. Also if anyone has any News that I am missing please send in scans and we will add them as well. Enjoy!

“The Old Smut Peddler”
Life Magazine
29 August, 1969

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Evergreen Club News
Vol 3, No 4

Evergreen Club News
Vol 4, No 4

Evergreen Club News
Vol 4, No 7

Evergreen Club News
Vol 4, No 8

Evergreen Club News
Vol 4, No 9

Evergreen Club News
Vol 4, No 13

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 1

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 2

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 3

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 4

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 5

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 6

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 7

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 8

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 9

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 10

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Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 11

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 12

Evergreen Club News
Vol 5, No 13

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 1

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 2

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 3

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 4

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 5

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 6

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 7

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 9

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 10

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 11

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 12

Evergreen Club News
Vol 6, No 13

Evergreen Club News
Vol 7, No 1

Evergreen Club News
Anatomy of a Delivery Boy

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Evergreen Club News
The Aviator

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Evergreen Club News
Bare Sexpertise

Evergreen Club News
Getting His Goat

Evergreen Club News
Girl on a Swing

Evergreen Club News
Great Erotic Reading

Evergreen Club News
Her Daughter’s Boyfriend

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Evergreen Club News
Love and the Art of Sexual Fulfillment

Evergreen Club News
Lust Girls and Hot Desires

Evergreen Club News
New Venus Library

Evergreen Club News
Of Studs and Swapping

Evergreen Club News
Sex and Seduction Now and Then

Evergreen Club News
The Erotic Drawings of Mihaly Zichy

Evergreen Club News
The Friendly Couple

Evergreen Club News
The Picture Book of Sexual Love

Evergreen Club News
The Venus Quartet

Evergreen Club News
The Venus Treasury

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have to be honest it is tough for me to get excited about the Evergreen Review. Sure, Evergreen Review 2, the San Francisco Scene issue, is one of the most important little mags of the post-WWII era, but does it really pack the same charge as any issue of C, My Own Mag, Fuck You, or Floating Bear? I just cannot shake the feeling that the Evergreen Review is, in the issues up to Number 32, the Reader’s Digest of the Mimeo Revolution and then from Issue 32 onward the Playboy of little mags. As in Reader’s Digest and Playboy, print runs were large, exceeding 100,000, and there were over 40,000 subscribers at some point in the 1960s. The broad reach of the Review cannot be denied. This is where Middle America first came into contact with not just New American poets and fictioneers but new international writing as well. Yet as in Reader’s Digest there is a strong element of sanitizing, condensing, and processing involved. And like Playboy, everything is soft focus, soft-core (on the other hand, check out Hubert Selby, Jr.’s “Prowl Car” for the nasty, misogynist side of Evergreen Review that was widely discussed at the time), sensationalized, and eroticized.

Nowhere is the Reader’s Digest mentality clearer than in the publication of Burroughs’ “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” in the January / February 1960 issue (#11). When Ginsberg read this piece in manuscript he questioned Burroughs’ sincerity. Is this for real? Burroughs stated that it was and was written on his own volition, but surely the Deposition was written on request to help Grove Press defend Naked Lunch in legal courts and in the court of public opinion. In the Deposition, Burroughs shows his hand (or plays a con as I like to think) presenting Naked Lunch to a larger audience. This type of mass marketing of the underground was the role played by Evergreen Review throughout its first 96 issues from 1957-1973.

Also of interest is Issue 32, the Playboy mentality, which also featured Burroughs. Evergreen 32 is a scarce issue that was seized by police in Hicksville, Long Island (as Burroughs wrote, “Boy, are we ever in Hicksville”) for obscenity. The problem was not Burroughs (“They Just Fade Away”) but an article by Wayland Young (a history of the word fuck) and a portfolio of nudes by Emil J. Cadoo. The issue was banned from distribution to England so copies are rare there. They are tough to find stateside as well. Not a single copy is currently available online. Hence the $110 price tag from BeatBooks in Catalog 48. My copy has a revised price sticker that raised the cost of the issue to $1.50. This testifies to the issue’s rarity and desirability in 1964 to say nothing of the present. 

Issue 32 is important because Evergreen changed its format and content with that issue. The small octavo journal format was replaced with a quarto glossy magazine format. The nude pictorial was introduced in Issue 32 as well. The photographs testify not to just the popularity of men’s mags, but also the literary nature of them. From Playboy to Swank, men’s magazines provided readers with selections from the outlaw writers of the day. Like Evergreen, men’s magazines introduced a wide audience to the writing and lifestyle of the underground. Issue 32 makes clear that Evergreen competed with mainstream glossies, not mimeos, for an audience. The decision to print nude photos represents a shift in focus to the more sensationalistic aspects of the underground, sex and revolutionary politics, (usually Black Panther or radical feminist), as voyeuristically covered by the mass media, rather than literary experimentation.

Yet Evergreen Review changed course long before Issue 32. It is taken for granted by many that Evergreen experienced a decline and shift in focus once Donald Allen stepped down as editor after the sixth issue. Allen edited the San Francisco Scene issue, and it is readily apparent that that issue planted the seeds that grew into the New American Poetry anthology. Richard Seaver stepped in as editor with Issue 9. See my discussion on Burroughs and Seaver for more on Seaver’s editorial style.  

In 1957, the San Francisco Scene issue was simultaneously straight from the mass media headlines and from the frontlines of poetic experimentation (this could be debated). With poems like Howl, the form and content of poetry was being challenged. As time wore on, Evergreen Review would push the envelope with content in a sexual or racial direction that seems less about showing Middle America what was new territory in art and literature than about rubbing Mr. and Mrs. Jones’ noses in all that they feared and despised. The result seemed on the surface to be cutting edge, but was instead merely just another version of the mass media’s sensationalized interpretation of the Underground and avant-garde, which played up sex, drugs, and rock and roll rather than any exploring any new creative ground. A study of the advertising in Evergreen Review would make this even clearer. The ads are all about sex and fashion and on some levels so is Evergreen Review.

Throughout Evergreen‘s first 96 issues, Burroughs was a regular contributor, and the list of Burroughs’ appearances provides a snapshot of Burroughs’ writing in the 1960s. But that picture is photoshopped and airbrushed in a way, and, therefore, indicative of Evergreen‘s interests. The more extreme of Burroughs’ cut-up experiments were not published in Evergreen Review. Instead his radical visual / textual work appeared in mimeos and other fringe little mags. Comparing Burroughs’ work in My Own Mag to Evergreen is instructive as it proves my point that Evergreen was in some ways a mainstream publication. The experimental work in My Own Mag and other mimeos held little, if any, appeal to an audience of general readers flirting with the writings of the underground. Burroughs cut-ups like Time or APO-33 appealed to working poets and artists. To be honest, this material has yet to find an audience outside of this small circle. Yet Burroughs was a pop culture figure in the 1960s and many were curious about his work. As a result, Evergreen published the more accessible Burroughs, such as Burroughs’ essays (Deposition, “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs,” and “Comments on a Night Before Thinking”), interviews with and other commentary on Burroughs, and his more narrative based writing (Exterminator! and Wild Boys material). In addition much of the other cut-up material Evergreen did publish was from Nova Express, in a way the most mainstream of the cut-up novels. The book as published by Grove in 1964 made a bid for a larger audience with a 10,000 copy print run. To this day, Nova Express is many people’s introduction to the cut-up technique. Printing excerpts from Nova Express was part of Grove’s publicity campaign for the novel. I have stated elsewhere how the form and format of the novel, as represented by Nova Express, stunts the experimental nature of the cut-up in several ways, such as enforcing a left to right, up to down, forward to backwards reading experience (not to say that Burroughs himself was not conflicted about making the cut-up more accessible and less illegible to the everyday reader). Here is a cut and paste bibliography of Burroughs’ Evergreen appearances for reference.

Evergreen started as a quarterly, grew to a bi-monthly and eventually became a monthly. The final issue of the initial run came out in 1973. In 1984, Grove Press put out an Issue 98 (which features Beckett prominently as did Issue #1), and in 1998 Evergreen Review became an online magazine with Issue 100. What about Issue 97 or 99? I can find no mention of them online or at Abebooks. They are not mentioned in Ken Jordan’s brief history that introduced the Evergreen Reader in 1993. The Magazine Data Index lists 98 issues from 1957-1984. Apparently there is an Index to Evergreen Review by David A. Power and Carol Strempak published by Scarecrow Press in 1972. Obviously this book does not help me regarding Issue 97. I am not sure if numbers were skipped or if there were de facto publications by Grove or Evergreen that serve as those numbers. Any help on this would be appreciated.

In my research on Evergreen Review, I came across a YouTube video featuring Evergreen Review #12. Somebody flipped through each page of the book and filmed it. Although maybe unintended, it struck me as an interesting commentary on reading in the electronic age. There must be more video and conceptual art that address this issue. I am particularly interested in artists’ books which examine book production and consumption, but I am unaware of video/computer art that does the same thing. I am dimly aware of hypertext experiments in this area (like internet based novels), but know very little. If anybody has any suggestions for me to check out please post them.  

• Bibliography of Burroughs Texts in Evergreen Review
• Issues 1 – 31 (octavo journal format)
• Issues 32 – 99 (quarto glossy magazine format)