An Unhinged History of American Publishing, Episode 7: Grove Atlantic, or: I Can't Go On, I'll Go On

Remember, kids: existential miracles are possible.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

The first paragraph of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Grove Press, 1959) might be my favorite in the whole of Anglophone literature. The rest of the book? Meh, a little inaccurate about the clitoris. But this part is gold.

For me, its genius comes down to a single word: that so in the first sentence. Most people would put a but there: Ours is essentially a tragic age, but we refuse to take it tragically. Or maybe an and, improv-comedy style.

Not D.H. Lawrence, though: he goes for the unexpected so, which removes most if not all free will from the proceedings. It implies a certain inevitability between the clauses, the tragedy and the refusing to live tragically.

What exactly is he calling inevitable, though? Is it the way “we”—presumably all people—refuse to capitulate to tragedy? Is it our species’ general impulse toward perseverance? Or is it something less flattering: our denial, obliviousness, inherent absurdity?

Maybe all that DH Lawrence wants us to understand is that human life is a paradox, much the same way Samuel Beckett described it toward the end of his novel The Unnamable (Grove Press, 1953):

I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

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Speaking of paradoxes: Barnet Lee “Barney” Rosset, 1922-2012, was one of those. The seminal leader of Grove Press was simultaneously the greatest hero and most flamboyant sociopath in the history of American publishing—which, especially for the latter, is saying a lot.