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Editing Andy Warhol

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Editing Andy Warhol Advertisement for a published in Inter/VIEW 1, no. 2 (1969). © Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library. 46 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Editing Andy Warhol LUCY MULRONEY Warhol as a Novelist: Andy Should Have Stuck to Soup Cans —Joyce Carol Oates, Detroit Michigan News , December 8, 1968 Forty-six years ago Helen Lane had a job reading manuscripts for a little avant-garde publishing house in New York City called Grove Press. This was still only the beginning for Grove, which would become recognized as one of the most important American pub - lishers of the period, and for Lane, who would go on to translate books by Nobel laureate Octavio Paz and French gastronome Jean- François Revel. But back in 1966, Lane had a tedious job to do. She had to type up a reader’s report for a book that she could only half- heartedly recommend. She wrote, Every era has seen the production of types of realism that were both denied as art and deemed dangerous to the sensibilities of the average man. From Victor Hugo’s vulgar “Quelle heure est-il” in Hernani to Zola and Joyce, critics and readers alike have raised the cry of “utter formlessness” and “destruction of the very fabric of society.” This book is sure to raise the same howls, for it too seems purposeless and contentless by ordinary aesthetic standards, and its characters are so bla - tantly queer as to arouse unconscious hostility in almost any square reader. 1 The “blatantly queer” book Lane describes is Andy Warhol’s novel a, which Grove published in 1968 and about which square readers across the United States did howl “utter formlessness.” But Lane does more than anticipate the aesthetic lamentations to come. Throughout her five-page report, she oscillates between verbose qualifiers about aesthetics and homophobic slanders. Not only does Warhol’s book seem to her “purposeless and contentless by ordi - nary standards,” but she also finds the text of the novel to be “so low-definition as to simply be there .” Of the narrative, she writes, “Nothing happens, or more precisely, everything that happens is contourless, being a totally neutral, literal reproduction of the real.” 2 But this “contentless” and “contourless” book nevertheless produces rancor in Lane. About halfway through her report she admits, “As for the sort of people who engage in this 98% mindless dialogue, let me say that I loathed them all. Andy and Ondine both come across as campy faggots trying to outdo each other in tante -ish praise of [Maria] Callas, the Les Crane Show, Baby Jane Grey Room 46, Winter 2012, pp. 46–71. © 2012 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 47 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Holtzer.” 3 By page four of her report, Lane has elided the tension between the novel’s mindless neutrality and its explicit represen - tation of the private life of a gay drug addict. “There is something unintentionally pathetic,” she writes, “in the furious homosexual justification that fills these pages: I cannot help being sorry for minds so one-trackedly mesmerized by buggery that the mere men - tion of hair cream brings the automatic question: How does it feel up your ass?” 4 From the techniques of realism to the sexual incli - nations of its characters, Lane interprets everything about Warhol’s novel as unintentional, and in this way she articulates the para - doxical tension at the heart of most interpretations of the book. Scholars and critics alike describe Warhol’s novel as formless, neutral, and generated by chance. In reviews published nearly fifty years ago and in later analyses, we read over and over again that Warhol’s novel is about nothing; it is unreadable; it has no real story; its narrative cannot be followed. Yet readers, like Lane, were disgusted by the book’s content. Others were offended by its claim to be a novel. The reviewer from the Green Bay Press-Gazette offered a typical response: “you could bug the local post, grocery store or foundry and get just as valid a piece of ‘art.’” 5 The reviewer from the Detroit Free Press found himself at a loss for words: “This, uh . book? . is the complete transcript of a tape recording of 24 hours in the life of Ondine, who comes under the heading of the French declension, ‘he, she or it.’” 6 More recently scholars have identified in the novel’s formlessness a postmodern or neo- avant-garde compositional strategy. Media historian Paul Benzon suggests, “ a sits at the intersection of two artistic trends of the late twentieth century, namely the discursive, formal, and ontological play of high postmodernist fiction and the reproductive, found-art images of postmodern pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and Warhol himself.” 7 Art historian Liz Kotz argues, “By subjecting language itself to this aesthetics of the index, Warhol relocates reading as an experience of this murmur and babble, the lapses of attention and intelligibility, and the starts and stops of talk and noise and interruption that are the condition of meaning, but also its constant undoing.” 8 Whether praised or denounced, Warhol’s novel is typically evaluated on the terms that it delivers raw language straight to the reader. But Warhol’s novel was no simple exercise in capturing and delivering language. The editorial files in the Grove Press Records reveal that Warhol’s novel strategically embraces and deploys arbi - trariness, chance, and error as both a style and as a rhetorical provocation. These qualities were integrated into the book’s text as it moved through a complicated editorial process, and they were essential to how the novel was publicized by Grove. More than a book with a chance-derived story printed with a plethora of 48 Grey Room 46 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 spelling errors, Warhol’s novel plays with the modes of its produc - tion. Transcribing, editing, typesetting, and publicizing—all of these are the conditions and the content of the novel. The novel fits comfortably within the larger scope of Warhol’s error-embracing visual work and his special talent for exploiting the mechanisms of publicity, but it also operates within the literary landscape of the time, where the genres of fiction and nonfiction became conflated through the emergence of nonfiction novels, tape-recorder litera - ture, and the subjective reportage of New Journalism. Moreover, Warhol’s a was a novel published by one of America’s most avant- garde publishing houses, whose reputation was founded upon the celebrity status of its “sexually deviant” authors and books. While the linguistic turn in art signaled an investigation of the spatial and material contingency of language—in key works by Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, and Robert Barry, for example—Warhol’s novel unleashed such experiments within the mechanisms of publicity and mass production that structure the world of trade book publishing. Unlike projects such as Joseph Kosuth’s Second Investigation , where the artist used the banality of the material conditions of his work’s appearance—the newspaper— as a means to void the importance of that medium in relation to the primacy of the “idea” that lay behind it, Warhol’s novel works in a completely opposite way, incorporating its material and social con - ditions into its meaning. 9 If we attend to the complicated process by which Warhol’s novel was published, circulated, and read, we can see how a mobilizes an aesthetic that sets up readers, titillating them with its blatantly queer characters and scandalous mode of production while playfully anticipating how that interest will quickly shut down in the face of a text that seems “purposeless and contentless” by ordinary aesthetic standards. The Arrival of Andy’s a Grove Press released Warhol’s novel on December 13, 1968, just in time for the Christmas shopping season. The novel would have made a perfect gag gift. Billed by both the publicity materials put out by Grove and by the scathing responses to it in the press as “completely produced on tape,” the premise of the book is that it reproduces, indexically, twenty-four hours in the life of “Ondine,” an interesting protagonist not only because of his feverish style of elocution but also because of his deviant lifestyle as a drug user and homosexual. Ondine had become an underground star after playing “The Pope of Greenwich Village” in Warhol’s widely successful 1966 film Chelsea Girls . In one of that film’s most notorious scenes, Ondine loses control of himself and violently slaps a confessor across the face when she accuses him of being a phony. As the text printed inside the jacket flap of the first edition suggests, getting an Mulroney | Editing Andy Warhol 49 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 insider’s view of Ondine’s life was a selling point for Warhol’s book: “The novel relates one day in Ondine’s life—a day that begins with Ondine popping several amphetamine pills and ends, twenty-four hours later, in an orgy of exhausted confusion.” 10 Warhol’s a suppos - edly underwent no editing or literary molding; it was proclaimed to be a verbatim transcript of audiotapes of actual conversations and events as they unfolded over one day and night with Ondine. Warhol insisted that the errors accrued during the process of transcribing the audiotapes for the manuscript should be retained in the published version.
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