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Home , Billy Name, Brigid Berlin, Chuck Wein, Fred Jordan (publisher), Grove Press, Joe Campbell (actor)

Advertisement for a published in Inter/VIEW 1, no. 2 (1969). © Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Editing Andy

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 City called . 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 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 ’s novel a, which Grove published in 1968 and about which square readers across the 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 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 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, , 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

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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 . 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

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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. Thus the book contains a multitude of spelling errors, garbled lines, and a variety of formatting styles that seem to change arbitrarily throughout the text. Several years later, Warhol admitted the book was not exactly what it claimed to be: I did my first tape recording in 1964. . . . I think it all started because I was trying to do a book. . . . So I bought that tape recorder and I taped the most interesting person I knew at the time, Ondine, for a whole day. . . . I was determined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine, the most talkative and energetic of them all. But somewhere along the line I got tired, so I had to finish taping the rest of the twenty-four hours on a couple of other days. So actually, A, my novel, was a fraud, since it was billed as a consecutive twenty-four-hour tape- recorded “novel,” but it was actually taped on a few separate occasions. I used twenty tapes for it because I was using the small cassettes. And right at that point some kids came by the studio and asked if they could do some work, so I asked them to transcribe and type my novel, and it took them a year and a half to type up one day! 11 Although Warhol admits his book is a “fraud” because it does not stick to its consecutive twenty-four-hour premise, he tells us it was indeed produced entirely on tape and that the novel’s execution and final form depended on the chance arrival of “some kids” at and their individual lack of adeptness at typing. The scenario is hardly believable: “right at that point” when Warhol stopped taping Ondine “some kids” wandered into the Factory ask - ing for work. Yet the novel conveys this chance-derived status through its unusual and error-ridden form. Its text includes words with transposed letters and sentences with messy punctuation. The book employs multiple layout styles, including double columns of dialogue and full-measure pages of run-on speech—without any indication of why the formatting abruptly changes. Its “chapters” conform to the durational structure of the audiotapes: tape 1 /side 1; tape 1 /side 2; and so forth. Originally published with minimal explanation of its unconventional format, the only clue for the reader is printed on the jacket flap: “It is [Warhol’s] first basically literary

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 work, but, in the use made of a tape recorder, stems directly from his work in film.” 12 Given the lack of explanatory information, pub - lished reviews became the primary vehicle for explaining the novel. Grove’s publicity department sent a press release to reviewers at newspapers across the United States, explaining that Warhol’s book was “completely recorded on tape” and that “the typographical format of a changes with the mood and action of the novel.” 13 Whereas the novel itself leaves readers guessing at what causes the text’s stylistic shifts, various reviewers picked up Grove’s pitch, using it to explain and criticize the novel. For example, reviewing the book for Newsweek in December 1968, Robert Scholes wrote, As near as I can make out, the 451 pages in this volume were printed without correction from inaccurate transcriptions made by various typists from poorly recorded tapes. . . . [This] book is not a ‘novel,’ and it is not by Andy Warhol. He has neither edited nor written it; he has merely marketed it. 14 As a publisher known for pushing the limits of acceptable liter - ature—Grove Press was notorious for publishing “obscene” works, including D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959), ’s (1961), and William Burroughs’s (1962), as well as for publishing political and experimental authors from to —Grove’s avant-garde roster could easily accommodate Warhol’s unusual novel. In many ways Warhol’s a follows the pattern set by Grove’s 1965 edition of Pauline Réage’s Story of O , a novel that is as much about its myste - rious mode of production and its author’s identity as it is about the sexual deviancy of its characters. 15 A handwritten memo by Seymour Krim, consulting editor for Grove’s , suggests that Warhol’s book may have been too similar to what other Grove authors were writing at the time, although in terms not of depravity but of technique. In reference to the excerpt of Warhol’s novel that was scheduled to be published in the Evergreen Review in September 1968, Krim wrote to managing editor , “I’m concerned about the number of tape-recorded pieces and themes (Negro piece, Burroughs, the hippy piece) for this issue. A Warhol excerpt would make four, which is too much.” 16 While Grove’s publicity pitch for Warhol’s novel emphasized his reputa - tion and ingenuity in the realm of visual art and film, Grove’s publishing program and internal correspondence reveal how seam - lessly Warhol fit within the publisher’s provocative public image and with what their other authors were writing. 17 Despite the novel’s apparent accord with the literary zeitgeist, the critics found Warhol’s literary experimentation more annoying than rewarding. They called it, among other things, a “put-on,” “abominable,” as well as a “tedious facsimile,” and something to “display as part of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 your psychedelic collection.” 18 Rather than refute such critiques, Grove appropriated the attacks to promote Warhol’s book. In accord with common practice, a list of quotes from critics was selected to be printed on the first page of the paperback edition of the book. In the mock-up for the paperback edition, predictably overwrought praise such as “Andy Warhol’s tape novel . . . is a work of genius” is reprinted alongside condemnations: “without a doubt the most mumbling, incoherent, formless, unwritten, unedited 451 pages ever printed.” 19 Why would a publisher plan to reprint scathing reviews? Would such attacks not diminish the book’s marketability? The opposite proved true. Warhol’s book was pitched precisely on the grounds that it was scandalously “unwritten” and “unedited.” In this way the public - ity for a aligned the book with Warhol’s interventions in the realm of visual art—echoing both his detached and technologically medi - ated approach to painting and the seemingly arbitrary, unedited eye of his movie camera. Grove’s publicity campaign articulated what was already becoming the standard narrative of Warhol’s artistic coming-of-age: the moment that Warhol moved away from expres - sion and toward indifferent and indexical replication was precisely the moment that he started to become an important artist. 20 But Grove not only reinforced the story of Warhol’s intervention in modern art, it implicated readers in the scandal around that art. In 1969, in the film journal Inter/VIEW , which Warhol began pub - lishing the year after his novel was released, Grove ran an adver - tisement for a. The ad shows a photograph of Warhol with a smirk across his face and a copy of a in his hand. Below his picture the copy reads, They laughed when he stepped up to the easel . . . and when he picked up a camera . . . and now that he’s written a novel? Nobody’s laughing; they’re all screaming! “Vile, disgusting, dull, filthy”—the voices cry. called “a,” among other things, “the all-time low in .” Will Andy Warhol again have the last laugh? See for yourself, pick up a copy of . . . 21 The mobilization of scandal through print culture—as an adver - tisement for a Warhol product within another of Warhol’s publish - ing ventures—returns us to the artist’s paintings of tabloid newspapers in the early 1960s and his later silkscreens of distress - ing and gruesome reportage photographs. In light of the publicity program for his novel—“Vile, disgusting, dull, filthy”—the subject of his paintings Daily News , 129 Die in Jet! , Tunafish Disaster , Three Jackies , or Orange Car Crash Ten Times seems less about the specific disasters being depicted than the ways in which scan - dalous events presented through mass media such as newspapers

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 or television solicit readers’ or viewers’ emotional response. 22 What Warhol appropriates in these works is not so much images of dreadful events as the entwined mechanisms of publicity and mass media that transform events into public scandals—scandals for which you can “see for yourself.” Warhol shows us the promise that we can satisfy our curiosity and simultaneously claim our disgust. All we need to do is “pick up a copy.”

Ready-Made Language The most frequently cited description of Warhol’s novel is the explanatory “Glossary” written by historian Victor Bockris, which was added to the 1998 paperback edition of the book. In its supple - mentary position within the covers of the novel, Bockris’s account materializes how the scandal—regardless of its accuracy—around Warhol’s novel became part of the work. In his “Glossary” Bockris echoes Warhol’s earlier concession that the twenty-four-hour premise of the book was a ruse. We also find out that the tran - scribers were not just “some kids” who wandered into the studio. Bockris tells us they were Maureen Tucker, the drummer for ; Susan Pile, a regular at the Factory; and two high school girls “hired for the express purpose of transcrip - tion.” 22 While Bockris offers more details, the story of the tran - Andy Warhol. Daily News , 1962. scribers remains dubious. This is because early on in the novel © 2011 The Andy Warhol a couple of girls (identified in the text as “Cappy” and “Rosilie”) Foundation for the Visual Arts, arrive at the Factory looking for , and Ondine tries Inc ./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy 24 to hire them as receptionists for the Factory. A few hours later, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Ondine, Dorothy Dean (here “DD”), and (here “SPF”) Frankfurt am Main, formerly discuss these same girls who have now been put to work transcrib - collection of Karl Ströher, Darmstadt. Photograph by Axel ing the novel. Schneider, Frankfurt am Main.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 SPF—I was talking to the girls that typed that thing. O—Yeah, Risilee and uhhhh SPF—Rosilie and the other one. O—Cappy. SPF—And Cappy said uh h, I said, “What are you doing?” O—In a rather, her faulty voice ( he raises his voice ) she said “It’s worse than Henry Miller.” SPF—She said you hired her. O—Yes. SPF—And she said, there’ve been three of us working on this O—Billy, may I please have a match again? Do you know what the thir one’s name is? Brooki. SPF—We only have three hours done; there’s nine more to go. B—Are you looking for a match again? O—I need a light. I have to, I have this in front of me. SPF—And she said something about Drella paying us. O—She never said that, trouble maker. SPF—She said— O—I admire those girls because they were ( pause ) complete slaves. 25 In tape eighteen, Ondine directly addresses “the girls” who are transcribing the book. He speaks into the microphone: “Rosilie— Capry—and Gookie, mark—that Voice (I’m speaking to the girls). That Voice is the Voice of your Mayor, girls . . . . . (that’s right girls— d-e-a-t-h).” 26 The audiotapes for the novel, which are archived at in , reveal that none of these girls was named Maureen or Susan. 27 Regardless of who did the transcribing, Bockris assures us the final text for a was the product of chance. He explains that the girls produced the manuscript through a process of error and speed rather than something akin to literary craft. According to the “Glossary,” each transcriber followed the rules of grammar or spelling according to her own preferences and abilities, and her errors were kept intact in the published book. Moreover, the novel’s form was the result not only of the duration of the audiotapes but also of the rush of transcribing them quickly, which generated even more errors. Bockris tells us that Warhol did make alterations but that these changes were supposedly “random” and intended only to confuse and obscure the text, not to clarify it. Bockris explains, All four [transcribers] shared a disinclination to spell correctly or apply the rules of grammar. . . . Furthermore, speed was of the essence, and it was presumed that after the first rough draft, corrections would be made. However, on first reading the entire original manuscript of the book, Warhol was delighted by the mistakes and decided to let them stand. Added to that

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 was the necessity, he felt, to change the names of almost all the characters in the book and further confuse the issue by obscuring the text even more by randomly changing com - ments he liked or disliked. 28 Forty-four years after its publication, a continues to be understood this way: as arbitrary, unedited, and embracing the chance defects produced by the people and technologies used in its construction. In Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art , Liz Kotz exam - ines Warhol’s a within the context of a larger interrogation of how language was used as a creative medium by various artists in during the 1960s. Kotz draws a line from John Cage’s scores for 4’33” to Warhol’s tape-novel, placing Warhol at the culmination of a decade of artists’ investigations of the material, temporal, and spatial conditions of language. Although Kotz grants a highly experimental aesthetic to Warhol’s novel, she takes at face value the chance-derived nature of its form. She writes, “While Warhol was no doubt sufficiently informed about modernist and avant-garde poetics to recognize their resonances in the jumbled manuscript delivered to him, these devices nevertheless occur accidentally, unintended, through the unforeseen distortions and deviations introduced in the text’s production.” 29 According to Kotz, these unintended distortions signal a’s participation in the “principle of the readymade” and that principle’s extension into the realm of language. 30 Warhol’s novel was produced using recording technology, its form and content were partially determined by the capacities of that technology, and it did subvert a conventional notion of authorship, but these characteristics do not necessarily qualify its status as a readymade. The readymade, its origins in the work of Marcel Duchamp, is a mass-produced utilitarian object—a urinal, a bottle rack, a snow shovel—that has been chosen by the artist and named “art.” While Kotz makes room for a less literal understanding of the readymade in her examination of how artists in the 1960s used text as a medium for making art—to the extent that language itself became a kind of anonymous material that could be found, appro - priated, and compiled—the essential point of the readymade, its “principle,” is that the artist does not make it; he or she simply selects it and calls it art. 31 Through this act of selecting and naming, the artist critiques traditional notions of the autonomy of art and of the artist’s role as author and creator. This is not what Warhol did. Warhol made a book that claimed to be a novel, was marketed as a novel, and was circulated as a novel. He did not produce it alone, but that fact does not make it ready-made. To claim that Warhol’s book operates within the principle of the readymade is to overlook the fact that novels are produced under conditions that are dramat - ically different from those of the manufactured and anonymous

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 objects that Duchamp appropriated as ready-made works of art. 32 Novels are authored, publicized, and shared as texts. Kotz’s empha - sis on the roles of chance, distortion, and the durational structure of the audiotapes misses how Warhol’s book takes up the idea of the novel as a commodity, drawing attention to and incorporating the mechanisms of trade book publishing that are usually kept separate from the content of literary works. The text of Warhol’s a was not simply “selected” and called art; it was produced through a com - plicated process of transforming “a day in the life of Ondine” into a published book “authored” by Warhol. The novel retains the imprint of each stage of this process: the falsified twenty-four-hour structure, the distortion of the tapes, the errors registered by the inattentive ears and fingers of the transcribers, the mechanisms of standardization implemented by the editor, the typographic capacities of the typesetter, the legal concerns of the publisher, and, most important, the publicity pitch that it all happened as if by chance. The traces of this process are visible on the surface of the novel’s pages.

Skim Reading The novel opens with a list of sounds: “Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle.” They evoke the noise of emptying pockets and medicine bottles, the gurgle of mouthwash, the clink of metal on porcelain, and the tin - kle of taking a piss. Are we overhearing someone in the bathroom? We cannot be sure. The novel opens by showing us nothing. We enter the scene through sound alone. The second line sounds less like a person: we hear a machine: “Click, pause, click, ring.” As in the opening line, four verbs express a vague action in an unarticu - lated space. The third line sounds off: “Dial, dial.” The ringing of the second line now becomes recognizable. A dialing telephone introduces our hero. Ondine speaks. But he is not actually talking on the phone. He is talking to someone else while trying to make a phone call. His speech is continually interrupted by the mechan - ical noise produced in the process. On the first page of the pub - lished book, the first few lines appear as follows: 1 / 1 Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle. Click, pause, click, ring. Dial, dial. ONDINE —You said ( dial ) that, that, if, if you pick, pick UP the Mayor’s voice on the other end ( dial, pause, dial-dial-dial ), the Mayor’s sister would know us, be ( busy-busy-busy). Despite the lack of contextual information in these lines, they are revealing. If we look at them again and read them visually, super - ficially, certain typographical issues present themselves. 33 The first

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 three lines—those poetic fragments of sound—are three short and distinct articulations. They do not run directly from one to the next. They stack on top of one another. And they are marked, italicized. When Ondine appears in the text, his name is printed in small cap - ital letters and followed by an em dash. His speech, unlike the sonic noise, is attributed. He stutters poetically. His text is not italicized, yet it is not unmarked. A single word is capitalized mid - sentence, creating a dramatic effect within his staccato line: “that, that, if, if you pick, pick UP the Mayor’s voice.” Meanwhile, the sounds of the phone and the other diegetic noises and moments of pause that continually cut into Ondine’s speech are italicized: ( dial, pause, dial-dial-dial ). Reading the text in this manner, its construc - tion is revealed as anything but arbitrary; it is systematically styl - ized. The surface of Warhol’s novel oscillates between bold and italics, capitals and empty tabs of space. Despite claims that the novel prohibits linear reading, its text was stylized in such a way as to allow readers to follow along in a linear fashion. Sliding into Photocopy of first page of manu - script for a. Grove Press Records, the novel, or into Grove’s publicity pitch, readers miss the stylized Special Collections Research texture that guides them along, line by line. Center, Syracuse University The editorial files of the Grove Press Records contain two different Library. Materials from the Grove Press Archive 1953 –1985 used by copies of the first page of a. The first is a copy of the original man - permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 uscript typed by one of the transcribers employed by Warhol. This copy includes strings of Xs typed over unwanted text and also in- text editorial notations by at least two different pens: one set made before the manuscript was copied and one made after. The second copy of the first page of the manuscript has been retyped and par - tially standardized with the names of the speakers identified; it integrates the edits from the first copy and also includes additional handwritten edits in the text—again by two different pens. The dif - ferences between these two versions of the first page and the final published text suggest a process of editing vastly more complex than Warhol “randomly changing comments he liked or disliked.” 32 Several kinds of edits were made to the text of Warhol’s novel before publication. The first page of the novel serves as a good example of the types of changes made, although it does not serve as an exhaustive catalog. A key difference between the first copy and the second is the addition of the speakers’ names. In the first copy Retyped first page of manuscript who is speaking is not clear, and the line breaks seem erratic. In the for a. Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research second copy, the names of the speakers have been added. Yet Center, Syracuse University another level of editing occurred before the book was finally pub - Library. Materials from the Grove lished. On the first page of the published book the names of Ondine Press Archive 1953 –1985 used by permission of Grove/Atlantic Inc. and Warhol are listed only the first time they speak. Although their

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 initials were added to the second copy of the manuscript each time they spoke, these initials were deleted before final publication. 35 Such a change highlights the fact that Warhol’s novel navigates between, on the one hand, an interest in appearing completely unedited and, on the other hand, a simultaneous interest in ever so gently helping readers move through the narrative. A desire for clarity is also apparent in the move between the two copies of the first page of the manuscript. Standardized line breaks have been inserted between speakers. 36 Crossed-out or typed-over text from the first copy has been deleted. Some words have been added to flesh out the dialogue, and some words have been deleted for aesthetic reasons. From the first version to the second we see a standardization of punctuation, as well as a poeticization of lan - guage. For example, line fifteen in the first version reads, Answering service . . . . . Are you honking and horns blasting In the second version this line reads: D--Answering service . . . Are you ( cars honking , blasting ). The shift from “cars honking and horns blasting” to “( cars honking , blasting )” makes the line clear and concise. We see a speaker des - ignation followed by an em dash, the standardization of the ellipses, and the marking of the external noise within parenthesis and in italics. These edits standardize the text. Yet the language is still fragmented and difficult to decipher. The novel still reads like an incomplete transcript. Memos in the Grove Press Records written by Arnold Leo, the editor in charge of Warhol’s novel, show that the novel’s ability to seem “purposeless and contentless by ordinary aesthetic stan - dards” was strategic. In one memo Leo dictates how he would like the novel to be typeset by the printer. Leo writes, “We’d like the printer to set the attached copy exactly as it is—complete with all the typing errors, garbled lines, mistakes in spelling, etc. Our object is to get a verbatim text. However, the text is to be set in three dif - ferent formats.” 37 These three formats (identified elsewhere in the editorial files as A, B, and C) are used throughout the manuscript and structure the novel’s text. Leo recalls telling Warhol and at an editorial meeting, “I’m sure this will be worthwhile to publish, but there are so many problems in this transcript of spelling and trying to identify who is speaking, and where the locale is.” 38 But Warhol and Billy Name did not want to spend the time correcting the mistakes. Leo remem - bers, “Billy Name and Andy were saying: ‘Why do we want to correct all this stuff? Isn’t that what makes it real, that all these mis - takes are here? . . . the manuscript should be reproduced the way it

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 is. And that will save us all a lot of time.’” Leo, a meticulous editor, needed some time to come around to Warhol’s idea. But suddenly, a light went on. I began to see what Andy was about. And it was like the characters he would bring into his movies, he didn’t care how imperfect they were or how much they really just wanted attention and were willing to do any - thing to get it. That was the reality. . . . It was reality that fascinated him. Leo arranged a meeting to discuss how to typeset the book. The manuscript was very long, and Leo realized it might be easier for readers to follow if it were formatted other than as a full page of running text. Leo designed three different styles that could be used to format the book. Style A takes the form of “Two columns, with one-em dash hanging indention for the over-run of speeches.” Style B takes the form of “a solid, full-measure page” with only a two-em space inserted between speakers. Style C also takes the form of a full- measure page, but with “a new line for each speech.” 39 Leo recalls that when Warhol was presented with these styles as possible options for formatting the book, he said, “Oh, well they are all nice, let’s use all of them.” 40 Thus the three styles are used alternately throughout the novel, cutting and repeating across the tape-based durational structure of the chapters. The plethora of variations on the three styles that appears throughout the novel complicates any reading of standardization put in place by Leo. Not only has the novel’s format been misread in support of the stories about the book’s unorthodox mode of production, but the claim that Warhol simply decided to change the names of all the characters in the book has also been misunderstood. “There was a bit of fear that lawsuits could arise, or that some of the people who appear in the text would want to be paid,” Leo recalls. “So it was decided that we would use initials and different names.” 41 While perhaps the result of legal concerns rather than aesthetic whim, these pseudonyms are not neutral. Some seem silly: “Do Do” is Dorothy Dean, and “Ian Coop” is John Cage. Others are obvious: “The Duchess” is , and “The Cattleman” is Leo Castelli. Others appear to comment upon the person they ficti - tiously veil. For example, Robert Rauschenberg, who was known to dislike Warhol’s publically swish persona, is sometimes ousted from the pseudonym game with his real name appearing in the text; at other points he is named “Bedroom Billy,” a jab, perhaps, at Rauschenberg’s closeted homosexuality. Despite its use of pseudonyms, Warhol’s novel is not a roman à clef. At certain points in the novel, the assigned pseudonyms were intentionally misattributed during a second round of edits.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 For example, in the twelfth chapter Warhol, Moxanne, and Ondine leave the Factory and get into a cab. During the cab ride they enter into a funny conversation with the cabbie about eating “cooked bulls’ balls.” The conversation is particularly amusing because of its sexual connotations. The whole chapter can be understood by tracing the progression of resonance and interference between “mountain,” “Mounties,” and “mounted.” Combined with the misheard “oysters,” discarded “orchids,” and nonce “orchens” that punctuate the giddy conversation taking place during a downtown cab ride, these terms all at once triangulate the testicles: the cooked criadillas or Canadian “mountain oysters.” 42 But this triangulation of testicle talk takes on a different meaning if one learns that Ondine is not the one spurring on the conversation. The audiotapes reveal that Ondine was left at the Factory and that was in the cab with Moxanne and Warhol. Ondine is not the one encouraging the cabbie to yell out the window and ask the male pedestrians if they have ever heard of eating “Mounted mountains.” It’s Chuck Wein. The copies of the transcript from this scene in the Grove Press Records correctly attribute the speech in this section to Wein. The copies also contain handwritten edits that intentionally misattribute Wein’s dialogue to Ondine. These edits cover over the fact that the narrative is not following Ondine. In so doing, the edits also reveal that at least some level of narrative continuity—and not simply chance and error—is key to Warhol’s book. Other edits work to support the myths generated about the novel. For example, the mother of one of the transcribers is said to have overheard the tape her daughter was transcribing and become so offended that she confiscated the tape and threw it into the trash. 43 Throughout the novel, strings of “xxxxx” and “censored” appear where nothing on the audiotape has been censored. In these instances is merely a stylistic effect, one that fits nicely with Grove’s special relationship to censorship. The publishing house had been embroiled in a sequence of nationally publicized trials beginning with the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1959. Each obscenity trial, while extremely expensive, served as an effective publicity vehicle for Grove and spurred the sale of its books. As filmmaker remarks, “Censorship was part of Grove Press’s press kit.” 44 In his “Glossary,” Bockris identifies tape fifteen as the one thrown out by the transcriber’s mother. The corresponding chapter is only two pages long, and the second half is missing. Tape fifteen is held in the archives of the Warhol Museum, and the conversation it records does not correspond to the text in the published chapter.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Instead, tape fifteen is a continuation of the conversation from side two of tape fourteen. The source for the text in chapter fifteen is unknown. The key point is not whether the story about the girl’s mother is true—although it is an interesting example of how the scandal around the novel and its material form are fused—but how the discrepancy between the tapes and the text reveals that the duration of the audiotapes as the governing structure for the book was, in fact, thoroughly manipulated. With the exception of tape fifteen, the first eighteen chapters of the novel conform to the structure provided by the tapes: each chapter begins and ends with the corresponding side of a tape. 45 But starting with chapter nineteen, the chapters include no side two. This break corresponds with the five tapes that are “missing” from the Warhol Museum. Side one of tapes nineteen through twenty-three is signaled in the novel; only the second side of each has been dropped. Because of the disjunctive narrative and the oscillation between formatting styles, which divide and cross the chapters, the missing half of chapters nineteen to twenty-three is hardly noticeable. The return to the original structural pattern for the final hour of the novel (24/1, 24/2) makes the omission even less noticeable. The five tapes are unlikely to be missing from the Warhol Museum. Rather, after the break in the first attempt to record a day in the life of Ondine, which ends at tape eighteen, Warhol likely recorded and had transcribed a couple of audiotapes made on separate occasions. In his recollection of the project, Warhol states that he used only twenty tapes, which were recorded on a few sep - arate occasions, but he also explains that the premise of the book was that it would be a full day in the life of Ondine: “I was deter - mined to stay up all day and all night and tape Ondine, the most talkative and energetic of them all.” But Warhol got tired and went home rather than finishing the twenty-four-hour recording session. Yet the premise of the book remained through the subsequent recordings and editorial process. According to Leo, “We all knew that it was not [twenty-four hours], that is was like twenty hours, maybe not even twenty full hours if I recall, but everybody was say - ing it was the life of Ondine, twenty-four hours of Ondine. The orig - inal title was Twenty-four Hours .” 46 Upon finding that Warhol’s novel is, in fact, heavily edited, one should not dismiss its relationship to chance and error. Leo’s memo to the printers reveals that including the errors of transcription— that the novel be a “verbatim text”—was as important to the novel as its also being stylized. Paradoxically, the changes made during the editing of Warhol’s a are precisely what testify to its unmade and therefore “readymade” status. A similar paradox has been pointed out by Thomas Crow, who contends that the conventional

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 readings of Warhol’s silkscreen paintings fail to recognize that the insistence that Warhol’s approach is passive and detached was authorized by Warhol himself. Crow writes, “It was Warhol who told us that he had no real point to make, that he intended no larger meaning in the choice of this or that subject, and that his assistants did most of the physical work of producing his art.” 47 Through his denial of authorship Warhol still authorized and controlled the reception of his work. Warhol and Grove insisted that the novel was produced completely on tape, the critics used this description to dismiss it, and Grove appropriated these dismissals to further promote the book. Subsequently, scholars have taken up these descriptions and dismissals to qualify the novel’s avant-garde sta - tus. 48 But in all this discussion of form, nobody notices what the book is about.

Our Hero, Ondine Three months before the release of Warhol’s a, Evergreen Review published an excerpt from the novel illustrated with photographs of Ondine taken by Billy Name at the Factory. In the opening spread of the excerpt we see a full-page photograph of Ondine. He stands on a ladder in the center of the image, his arms raised above his head. He is young and slender with thick, dark hair. The sleeves of his shirt are pushed up around his forearms, and his baggy pants Billy Name. Photograph of Ondine. From Andy Warhol, lead our eyes down to his dirty boots. The industrial space echoes “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen his unkempt look with bare walls, exposed hardware, and painting Review , 1968. © Billy Name. stretchers stacked along the floor. A small towel hangs around Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Ondine’s neck. He looks like he might be working out, doing pull- Syracuse University Library. ups. He gazes into the space beyond the cam - era that captures him. The whole scene feels candid, as if the viewer were on a movie set, watching, waiting for something to happen. On the facing page the excerpt from the novel begins with an explanatory subtitle: “An episode from the first novel by the famous artist of the Velvet Underground—a tape-recorded kaleidoscope relating one day in the life of its hero, a passionate, perverse seeker of the meaningful.” 49 For each of the next two pages of text another full-page photograph of Ondine runs alongside, emphasizing the centrality of Ondine as the novel’s passionate and perverse hero. While the narrative, with its lack of biographical or contextual information, gives readers little material with which to construct Ondine’s character, these photographs deliver him to us.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Somehow, in all the interpretations of Warhol’s novel, Ondine has been lost. And yet, through Ondine we can see what is at stake in understanding Warhol’s novel as more than an exercise in chance. The novel is a portrait of Ondine—an insider’s view into “one day in Ondine’s life.” 50 Those members of the public who consid - ered themselves part of the underground—the readership of Grove Press—would have been interested in getting this view of Ondine because of his notorious role in Chelsea Girls and his place among the Factory crowd. But the wider general public would have also been curious because of what Ondine represented: He was a social problem. Ondine was a homosexual drug addict living in pre- Stonewall New York City. 51 As Lane points out in her reader’s report, Ondine and his friends were “so blatantly queer” that the novel was sure to raise the cry of “destruction of the fabric of society.” But the reactions to Ondine have been strangely ambivalent, then and today. This ambivalence is especially strange given the social climate in which the novel was produced and circulated. Only two years before Warhol began taping Ondine for his book, the New York Times ran a story with the following headline: “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” 52 Pretending to report an issue raised by authorities, the article reads, “The city’s most sensitive open secret—the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and the increasing openness of its manifestations—has become the subject of growing concern by psychiatrists and religious leaders as well as of law enforcement officers.” 53 Throughout the article, homosexuality is framed as a social problem, one that is “increasing rapidly” and that must be addressed through public discussion. Most trouble - some, the article makes clear, are those homosexuals who do not conceal their deviant lifestyle: “The overt homosexual—and those who are identifiable probably represent no more than half of the total—has become such an obtrusive part of the New York scene that the phenomenon needs public discussion, in the opinion of a number of legal and medical experts.” 54 The cause for worry seems to be less that homosexuals were living in New York City than that these people were not hiding their desires and behaviors. They were becoming increasingly visible. Precisely this dilemma of visibility is at play in Warhol’s novel. The book’s self-proclaimed “unedited” text is elided with the offer to provide an “uncensored” view into Ondine’s life and the infamous social crowd among whom he circulated. Grove’s press release reads, While Andy Warhol himself, under his “private” name Drella, is one of the major characters in this kaleidoscopic novel, its hero is Ondine—a passionate seeker of the meaningful in a world peopled by such characters as Rotten Rita, The Sugar Plum Fairy, The Duchess, Billy Name, Irving du Ball, Paul Paul,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Taxine, Moxanne, Ingrid Superstar, and other personalities, new and old, in and around the Velvet Underground. The only common denominator in this splendiferous cast is their diverse perversity. 55 As documentarian of this private and perverse social world, Warhol’s insistence on passivity and detachment, which undermines his novel when it is considered in relation to a craft-based notion of aesthetic value, here shifts the book to a new register. Warhol’s refusal to edit suggests that his novel is more “real” and “truthful”; it guarantees an unmediated, voyeuristic view of Ondine and his world. This voyeuristic impulse had already manifested itself in Warhol’s work and social reputation. We see it in his 1950s projects for a “Cock Book” and a “Foot Book” and also in the stories about his social life. According to Ondine, the first time he met Warhol was at an orgy: “I was at an orgy, and he was, ah, this great presence in the back of the room.” 56 But Warhol was only watching, so Ondine had him thrown out of the party. The most dramatic artic - ulation of Warhol’s voyeuristic gaze is perhaps found in his 1963 film Sleep . In this film, which runs for five hours and twenty-one minutes, we watch Warhol’s love interest sleep. In many ways Sleep prefigures a. Not only do both of these works operate within the register of voyeurism—one scopic, the other aural—but they have both been repeatedly misread as works in which “nothing happens.” Both Sleep and a are often thought of as faithful records of uninterrupted spans of time reproduced without editing. Whereas the novel purports to be a verbatim transcription of twenty-four hours of audiotape, the film is supposed to be a five- hour-and-twenty-one-minute excerpt of an eight-hour recording of a man sleeping. But just as a is a constructed representation of a day in the life of Ondine, so Sleep is a thoroughly constructed repre - sentation of John Giorno sleeping. The film is not five hours and twenty-one minutes of Giorno sleeping but five hours and twenty- one minutes of repeating loops of twenty-two different close-ups of Giorno’s body that have been edited and spliced together into a representation of him sleeping. The constructedness of both works often goes unnoticed by viewers or readers. But their structures dramatically impact how their subjects—Giorno, Ondine—are perceived and accessed by their audiences. Branden Joseph argues that the repetitive structure of Sleep mimics the compulsive behavior that defines commercial culture while simultaneously disallowing the pleasure that com - modities usually bring. 57 He suggests that Sleep may present Giorno as a homoerotic object of desire, but it also estranges him from us through its repetitive structure, lack of narrative action, and long duration. This may sound strikingly similar to how Warhol’s novel

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 portrays Ondine, but a key difference separates the two works. We are undoubtedly voyeurs when reading Warhol’s novel. But the person we are spying on knows we are there. Ondine is not asleep. He plays with us. He performs for “his” book. He eats and sings, he gossips and flirts, and he begins to lose his voice from fatigue. Throughout the book Ondine oscillates between directly addressing his imagined audience, worrying aloud about what his readers must think, talking as if they do not exist, and playing with the microphone and its capacity to capture his voice as he kisses, screeches, burps, offers inverted sighs, and chews on the micro - phone. The novel is thoroughly reflexive about its incapacity to represent what its characters do and say: D—Fantastic! Come back Ondine, you’ve got a hundred more pages to go. Come on Ondine. O—Why am I so gay? ( Laughs. ) So gay. D—Oh. O—May I have that that other piece, honey? The one on your shoulder? D—Oh. O—May I? M—No but, this is a book. D—Something like sixty pages, uh, not thirty, I mean M—If um, three minutes D—Sixty. RR—Minimum. M—Twenty. D—Oh that’s not very much at all. M—That’s 480 pages. D—Oh. O—( he blows into the microphone ) That was me. 58 “That was me.” How do we understand such an utterance within the text of this novel? We can begin to understand it only in relation to the gap to which it refers, which it utters not only in this one line but throughout the book in its totality, its publicity, its premise. The book promises its readers a privileged view into the life of a gay drug addict living in New York City, but in all the reviews and analyses of Warhol’s novel, Ondine has become nearly invisible. His invisibility is not only the result of the novel’s structure—its error-ridden text, multiple formats, pseudonyms, and durational structure. Ondine’s invisibility is caught up in a much larger system of representation. No matter how aggressively Grove pitched this book and its “splendiferous cast” of perverts, these people simply became another tabloid story and nothing more. “The book is all waste. It’s not profound. It’s not trivial. It’s just there. Readable. Unreadable. A mute graceless presence like a trash heap.” 59 Although

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Warhol’s novel promises to make Ondine and his friends visible, to lend its readers the voyeur’s peephole, what it really shows is the mechanisms of publicity that perpetually “provoke concern” and then allow the public to “see for yourself,” all the while never really showing us anything. “That was me” refers to Ondine, to the sound of his breath hitting the microphone, to the abrasive noise it made. That noise, though, fails to be represented within the text. We do not even get a string of letters standing for the sound Ondine pro - duced. Instead we read, “( he blows into the microphone ).” We are barred from experiencing, from hearing, Ondine. If that was him, we missed the rendezvous.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes I would like to thank Douglas Crimp and Rachel Haidu for their incredible encour - agement and enthusiasm, and also for their insightful feedback. My conversations with Arnold Leo, whose memory and generosity were extraordinary, gave me unexpected insights into Warhol’s novel and the workings of Grove Press. Conversations with Billy Name and Susan Pile were not only informative, but also very fun. Many thanks to Matt Wrbican at the Warhol Museum for letting me spend a week in his office to listen to the audiotapes for a. Joan Shelley Rubin and Thomas DiPiero read earlier versions of this paper and offered helpful advice and encouragement. A grant from the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies generously funded my trips to the Warhol Museum. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Symposium on the History of Art at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University and at the Contemporary Artists’ Book Conference at MoMA PS1 thanks to Stephen Bury. And, lastly, I would like to thank the wonderful people in the Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Library for sharing their time, resources, and expertise.

1. Helen R. Lane, Reader’s Report, March 1966, n.p., Grove Press Records, Special Collections Research Center (SCRC), Syracuse University Library. 2. Lane, Reader’s Report. 3. Lane, Reader’s Report. 4. Lane, Reader’s Report. 5. B.W., “Nuts to You, Warhol,” Green Bay Wisconsin Press-Gazette , 18 April 1969. This newspaper article and all subsequent newspaper and magazine reviews of a come from the press clippings for Warhol’s novel in the publicity files of Grove Press Records, SCRC. 6. Unattributed, “A Freaked Out Life Style, And Andy Warhol’s Thing: ‘a,’” Detroit Free Press , 15 December 1968. 7. Paul Benzon, “Lost in Transcription: Postwar Typewriting Culture, Andy Warhol’s Bad Book, and the Standardization of Error,” PMLA 125, no. 1 (2010): 98. 8. Liz Kotz, Words to Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 266. 9. On Kosuth’s Second Investigation , in which the artist purchased advertising space in a variety of publications and ran texts from Roget’s Thesaurus , see Alexander Alberro, “Art as Idea,” in Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 26–54. 10. Andy Warhol, a (New York: Grove, 1968), book jacket. 11. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 95. 12. Warhol, a, book jacket. This description is also repeated in the press release for the book. 13. Press release for a (and record of newspapers to which the release was sent), n.d., pp. 2, 3, Grove Press Records, SCRC. 14. Unattributed, Book Review Digest , March 1968. Book Review Digest reprinted an untitled excerpt from Robert Scholes’s review of a in Newsweek , 2 December 1968. 15. Grove published the first American edition of the Story of O in 1965. The novel is about a female sex slave; it became notorious not only because of its plot but because it was written under a female pseudonym. Public speculation about the author of the book was intense. Patrick Smith also makes a connection between a and Story of O . Smith writes, “Throughout a, Ondine is referred to as

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 being ‘O,’ and in a sense, a is a homoerotic Story of O .” Patrick Smith, Warhol’s Art and Films (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 177. 16. Seymour Krim to Fred Jordan, memorandum, 13 June 1967, Grove Press Records, SCRC. 17. Reva Wolf claims Warhol’s work was in dialogue with the poets and writers of his time, including , , William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsburg. Wolf suggests Jack Kerouac’s novel Visions of Cody is a primary model for a: “ Visions of Cody has so much in common with a: a novel , ranging from its premise and structure to details of content, that it appears to have been the key literary model for Warhol’s book.” Reva Wolf, Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 141. Film theorist Peter Wollen also connects Warhol’s use of the tape recorder and the literary avant-garde of the 1960s. Wollen describes Warhol’s relationship to the tape recorder as “com - pletely the opposite to that of William Burroughs.” Whereas Burroughs and Jack Kerouac used tape-recording to obtain source material to be edited for their novels, Warhol’s approach, according to Wollen, was a “‘reverse paranoid’ desire to be taken over” by the material his various machines could record. Peter Wollen, “Raiding the Icebox,” in Andy Warhol: Film Factory , ed. Michael O’Pray (London: BFI, 1989), 22. 18. Hugh Clark, “The Put-On,” Courier-Post (Camden, NJ), 18 December 1968; Unattributed, “Worst Bet: A is for Abominable,” New York Magazine, 25 November 1968; and John A. Weigel, “‘a’ day in the life of Andy Warhol,” The Cincinnati Enquirer , 2 January 1969. 19. Mock-up for Evergreen Cat Book edition of Warhol’s novel, Grove Press Records, SCRC. Warhol’s novel was indeed published in paperback form as an Evergreen Cat Book, and printed on the back cover of this edition is the text from the mock-up: “(see page 1 inside for some reviewers’ conflicting comments).” But for some unknown reason the critics’ quotes were not reprinted on the first page of the book as planned. 20. This story is recounted in Emile de Antonio’s 1972 film Painters Painting and in Andy Warhol, (New York: Harcourt, 1980), among many other places . 21. Advertisement for a, Inter/VIEW 1, no. 2 (1969): 21. This ad also seems to be a parody of the 1925 ad campaign by Ruthrauff and Ryan for the U.S. School of Music: “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play!” 22. Rachel Haidu suggests this reading of Warhol’s tabloid paintings in “Reading Art,” in The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010), 82. 23. Victor Bockris, “ a: A Glossary,” in Andy Warhol, a (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 453. 24. Warhol, a, 46. 25. Warhol, a, 314. 26. Warhol, a, 373. 27. The copies of the manuscript in the Grove Press Records reveal that Cappy’s name is actually Cathy Naso, that Rosilie is Iris Weinstein, and that Gooki is Brooky (her last name is unclear). Xerox copies of manuscript for a, pp. 42–43, Grove Press Records, SCRC. The audiotapes at the Andy Warhol Museum confirm this. This is not to suggest that Susan Pile or Maureen Tucker did not help tran - scribe the novel (I believe they did) but rather to suggest that the transcription process was more complicated than what Bockris and Warhol describe. Susan Pile confirmed to me that she transcribed sections of the novel. Susan Pile, phone interview, 30 March 2011.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 28. Bockris, “ a: A Glossary,” 453. 29. Kotz, 263–265. 30. Kotz writes, “However perverse, the 451-page novel incorporates and extends the postwar practices we have read as extension of the readymade principle (1) the use of the recording mechanism, without apparent criteria of selection or impor - tance, to sample from a potentially uninterrupted flow of existing material—in this case, twenty-four-hours of conversation; (2) the use of durational structures based on externally or arbitrarily determined time brackets, and the use of existing technologies of transcription and transmission without correction for distortions and imperfections; and (3) the use of predetermined or chance-based processes, executed in a quasi-mechanistic manner, to produce unanticipated and largely uncontrolled results, in a manner that largely cedes conventional functions of authorship, creation, and expression to a simple device.” Kotz, 265. 31. Kotz, 6 –7. 32. My understanding of the issues books pose for the concept of the ready - made is indebted to the insights of Rachel Haidu through our conversations and through her book The Absence of Work . 33. My interest in skimming the “surface” of this text in order to elicit a new reading of Warhol’s novel was inspired in part by Douglas Crimp’s essay “Spacious,” in which he analyzes the play of surface and depth in Warhol’s films. See Douglas Crimp, “Spacious,” October 132 (Spring 2010): 5–24. 34. The typesetting copy of the entire manuscript for a is held in a series of folders in Grove Press Records, SCRC. In these folders some sections of the manuscript have been retyped, and other sections have not. 35. This deletion of names or initials also happens elsewhere in the text. 36. Like the addition of the speaker’s names to each utterance in the second copy of the manuscript, these line breaks were removed before the final printing. The breaks were deleted to bring the text in line with the book’s three formatting styles. 37. Arnold Leo to J.A., memorandum, “Re: Test sample pages for Andy Warhol’s TWENTY*FOUR HOURS,” n.d., Grove Press Records, SCRC. 38. Arnold Leo, phone interview, 27 January 2011. All subsequent quotes from Leo in this paragraph are from this interview. 39. Leo to J.A. 40. Leo, interview. 41. Leo, interview. During the interview, Leo noted that a similar financial/legal issue arose in regard to the printing of song lyrics. On the audiotapes, popular music and Maria Callas singing opera can be heard constantly in the background. The transcribers of the tapes often typed out the lyrics from these songs, and the lyrics are present in the manuscript in Grove Press Records, SCRC. But upon real - izing that printing these lyrics would be costly, Leo had them deleted. Thus, throughout the text we find spans of blank space between parentheses, where the lyrics had previously been typed. Leo’s memos in reference to the song lyrics can be found in Grove Press Records, SCRC. 42. Craig Dworkin, “Whereof One Cannot Speak,” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 52. 43. Bockris, “ a: A Glossary,” 455. 44. John Waters makes this comment in the film Obscene: A Portrait of and Grove Press , directed by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, 2009. 45. The Warhol Museum has eighteen tapes identified as those used for Warhol’s novel. The other five tapes that would make up the twenty-four hours are either missing or remain unidentified among the thousands of audiotapes held by

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00060 by guest on 27 September 2021 the museum. 46. Leo, interview. 47. Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Andy Warhol , ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 50. 48. See, for example, Kotz; Benzon, “Lost in Transcription”; and Lynne Tillman, “The Last Words Are Andy Warhol,” Grey Room 21 (Fall 2005): 38–45. 49. Andy Warhol, “Ondine’s Mare,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 58 (September 1968): 26–31, 77. 50. Warhol, a, book jacket. 51. Georg Lukács suggests the hero’s life is not so much his own as it is the sym - bol of the conflict that he encounters in his journey toward self-recognition. Lukács writes that the hero “becomes a mere instrument, and his central position in the work means only that he is particularly well suited to reveal a certain prob - lematic of life.” Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 81–83. 52. Martin Duberman, About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York: Meridian, 1986), 238. Duberman reprints the article, which was published December 17, 1963. 53. Duberman, 238. 54. Duberman, 239. 55. Press release for a. 56. Patrick Smith, “Ondine,” in Warhol: Conversations about the Artist (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 259. 57. Branden Joseph, “The Play of Repetition: Andy Warhol’s Sleep ,” Grey Room 19 (Spring 2005): 46. 58. Warhol, a, 253. 59. Steve Katz, “Books,” Village Voice , 20 February 1969.

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