John Martin Believed in Writers Not Profits

When John Martin died on June 23, the world lost a visionary who gave a chance — over and over throughout his career — to writers whom traditional publishers would have walked past with their nose high in the air.

Beginning with the launch of Black Sparrow Press in 1966, Martin and his wife Barbara worked intensively on building its list until the 2002 sale of titles on that list to Ecco, a division of HarperCollins, and to Godine, respectively. Barbara developed techniques for the distinctive design of the press’s rugged, stylish yet unpretentious books. For his part, Martin viewed literary experimenters much the same way that Charles Bukowski, who attained a wide readership through Martin’s patronage, regarded certain of the pre-revolutionary Russian authors.

In a preface to an edition of Ask the Dust by John Fante – who also became part of the Black Sparrow canon – Bukowski stated that Fante stood out in a literary landscape so dumbed down that you usually had to go back to the novelists and dramatists of pre-1917 Russia to find “any gamble, any passion.” Most of what passes for literature in our time is so tame, so unoriginal, or so politically correct that finding the exception can feel like searching for a planet whose very existence is the stuff of controversy, or trying to access a time in the remote past.

Well, Martin devoted his career as a publisher to seeking out gamble and passion, and he found them in spades in Bukowski and Fante, not to mention Paul Bowles, Wyndham Lewis, Robert Creeley, Fielding Dawson, Kenneth Koch, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Clark, Andrei Codrescu, and many others.

Martin’s reasons for valuing some types of prose and verse over others were, ultimately, known only to the man himself. Yet a reader of Bukowski can see how often their tastes and criteria overlapped, how much they both sympathized, in their respective ways, with the underdog and the outcast. Bukowski’s subjects are, famously, drunks, deadbeats, hobos, has-beens, people fired from jobs after one shift and about to be evicted, and others on the margins of society. But he had a special place in his wine-soaked heart for the desperate writer, because when he undertook a character study of such a figure he was, obviously, taking a hard look in the mirror.

Bukowski, who recounted his long shifts at an L.A. post office, in factories, and at many other thankless jobs, was aware of the gulf between the romanticized and real writer’s life. His empathy for authors and thinkers who would be prone to alienation and despair, if they happened to live in our times, comes out in poems such as “One for the Road,” which appears in the Black Sparrow collection The Night Torn Mad With Footsteps. Here he imagines none other than Socrates as just another drunk sitting at a bar one Saturday, “far more interesting than most / of course / but just as helpless.” You do have to wonder whether Socrates today could land a deal for a TED Talk or Netflix miniseries based on his work. It seems likelier they would run the poor guy out of town for whispering the wrong ideas on gender and the family.

Bukowski knew all too well how easy it is for the most ambitious writers to fall into soul-deadening routines without the intervention of that rare publisher possessing both the discernment to find merit in their work and the iconoclasm to sign deals for works that most of the book-buying public – such as it is – might reject.

In the poem “Rogue’s Gallery,” Bukowski relates how seeing photos of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, D.H. Lawrence, and Ernest Hemingway, respectively, remind him of various losers and outcasts he has known in and around L.A. over the years. Eliot, for example, reminds Bukowski of a young guy at the post office who boasted all night about his amorous exploits. Sometimes, nothing is sadder than the braggadocio of someone who obviously has not ended up where he hoped in life. But that is the fate of writers who have not known a patron with the vision and integrity of John Martin.

Brutal as it may be, in a post-literate CGI-fixated age that rewards short attention spans (admittedly, Bukowski, who died in 1994, did not see quite all these things come to hideous bloom), the writer’s life is the only one that he could have contemplated with any seriousness, for reasons that are evident in poems such as “A Definition,” where he tells us, “love is Dostoyevsky at the / roulette wheel.” Dostoyevsky sought the same gamble and passion that Bukowski would find in his engagement with the morbid Russian master, and indeed came to embody those things for Bukowski in much the same way that so many authors would do for the publisher of Black Sparrow who took them under his aegis, profits and critics be damned.

None of this is to imply that the publisher had a fixation on grunge, or outcast, lit to the exclusion of other genres and styles. To take a radically different example from Bukowski, consider the work of Paul Bowles, a New Yorker with a fascination for Morocco, who turned out stories and novels about the tensions of a society with a class of tourists and toffs imperfectly layered on traditions and cultures that the Westerners scarcely understand. Bowles was an avant garde visionary whose style rose to something close to formal perfection, in contrast to the deliberate and often hilarious gaucherie in which Bukowski reveled. He was in good company among William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, and other Americans who heard the siren song of a mesmerizing society and culture.

Though John Martin has left us, Black Sparrow stands as one of a handful of publishers, also including Dalkey Archive, New Directions, and Talisman House, that reject a commercial order whose idea of literature, as Ezra Pound put it in the immortal “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” amounts to “a mould in plaster,” “made with no loss of time.”