Barney Rosset in his Manhattan loft.
You Can’t Print That! (but he did, he does)
By Jerry Tallmer
… as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book … hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe … ”
— John Milton,
Areopagitica, 1644
Barney Rosset has a great title for his autobiography if he ever finishes it, and even if he doesn’t. He estimates he’s halfway through the damn thing, which should please Algonquin Press. “Let’s put it this way,” he said not long ago. “They’ve paid me, and I’m two years late. It will go very far into all areas of my life. My problem is I’m never able to sign off in any one area.”
Rosset’s title: The Subject Is Left-handed. “That’s taken from my FBI file, which I got to see when I sued for it in 1971.”
Left-handed and left-minded, if left means being off the beaten track. Being daring and inquisitive and ornery enough to fight for, through the courts, and to publish, one way or another, over the years, through Grove Press or Evergreen Review or Four Walls Eight Windows or the Foxrock label, such censor-inflaming pattern-smashers as D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Joe Orton, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Vaclav Havel, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Malcolm X., Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Norman Mailer. Hubert Selby, Jr., Seymour Krim, Julian Beck, Edward Albee …
And, oh yes, Samuel Beckett.
The autobiography will not be chronological. At the moment Barney’s been concentrating on his year and a half in China in the last half of World War II. “I was a Second Lieutenant and then a First Lieutenant in charge of a photographic unit under Stillwell” – Gen. Joseph W. (“Vinegar Joe”) Stillwell, a tough old rebel in his own right. “He was thrown out just as I got there. He wanted to win the war. The Japanese had taken over almost all of China by then. I was stationed in Kunming and ended up in Shanghai.”
A city the present writer (and sometime contributor to Evergreen Review) had bombed from the air as a crew member on a B-24 toward the end of the war. Maybe I bombed you, Barney.
Rosset seemed to find that interesting.
“Before the war,” he said, “I’d read Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China” — an influential classic of sorts that’s a wide-ranging, sympathetic reportage on the Mao Tse-tung who led the Long March against the armies of Chiang Kai-shek and would lead China into communism. “Grove later actually republished it as it first was, and then I met Snow and got him to add to it for a newer edition.
“The OSS [Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA] was the only [American] outfit doing anything in China during the war. Do I remember it? I was in it and didn’t know it. I got thrown out,” said Rosset with the Rosset laugh that’s somewhere between a chuckle, a cackle, and a bark. “Anyway, that’s 50 or 60 pages of what are hundreds of pages. But I mean, it’s the result of working on this thing since 1949.”
It was at age 12 that Barney Rosset was first put on the FBI’s watch list – for going up by bus from New York City, along with young James A. Wechsler and young Joseph Lash, to an American Student Union conference at Vassar. Jimmy Wechsler (New York Post editor/columnist) and Joe Lash (Eleanor Roosevelt biographer) are gone now, but silken white-haired Barney Rossett, a little hunched, a little hard of hearing, is still with us, at 82, and still residing three long, hard flights up to an old book-lined floor-through just north of Cooper Union, carrying on the good fight there along with Astrid Myers, who has been his lady and helpmeet for more than 15 years now.
He was born May 28, 1922, in Chicago, the city of broad shoulders, stockyards, John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell – “all of whom, along with Hemingway, were taught at the University of Chicago by Robert Morse Lovett, who was accused of being a Communist, which he was not, but he refused to be a red-baiter, and suffered for it. Chicago? I’ll put it to you in one sentence: The Jews and Irish run it, but the Protestants own it.
“Robert Morse Lovett was also the uncle of a girlfriend of mine, Nancy Ashenhurst, one of the two most beautiful and most intelligent girls in the Frances Parker School in Chicago, which I went to when a previous school went bankrupt overnight.”
Barney was president of his class and, for all his hardly overpowering size, tailback on and co-captain of the football team. His best friend was an end on the team, co-captain Haskell Wexler, himself a lifelong radical who would grow up to be the cinematographer on America, America, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, Mulholland Falls, Silver City, and four dozen other well-known films. Haskell Wexler would also marry the Nancy Ashenhurst who had been best-friend Barney Rosset’s girl.
“A small thing between us, Haskell and me,” Rosset said now. “We’re very great friends, but … ”
(A more recent filmmaker named James Fotopoulos has just put the life and times of Barney Rosset into 90 minutes of abstract footage.)
The Frances Parker School was what in those days was getting to be called a progressive school. “We were able to go to any college, without marks, without an exam. The guiding light of our class was a great teacher, Sarah Greenbaum. I owe my whole education to her. She brought investigation down onto the school. It was at the instigation of the Walgren’s family. She’d rewritten Robinson Crusoe as a story of colonial exploration in which the people rose up against Crusoe and deported him! She was also against our having any sex in the school newspaper, and when I was in her class I had to hide my copies of Studs Lonigan and Of Mice and Men.
“It was a great school, but I did not like the principal. He wrote a recommendation for me to the University of Chicago, and put it in a sealed envelope. When I got home, I took it out and read it. It said: ‘Mr. Rosset has none of the characteristics of his race … ”
The principal was actually half-right about Barney’s “race.” Rosset’s mother, Mary Elisabeth Tansey of Marquette, Michigan, was the daughter of Roger Tansey, an Irish Catholic sewer digger who rose to middle-class respectability as a construction worker. He in turn was the son of a Michael Tansey who, back in Ireland, had been arrested and convicted of murder for killing the flunky of some lord on whose grounds Tansey had shot a bird. “This man who worked for the lord tried to have my great-grandfather arrested … and failed. In those days the whole family worked in peat bogs and dealt with dynamite. They had dynamited the lord’s manor eight years earlier.”
On purpose?
“On purpose. My great-grandfather” – he who had killed the flunky – “was to be hanged. They had built the gallows. Three days before the hanging, his sentence was commuted, thanks somehow to Parnell [Irish political leader Charles Stewart Parnell]. Then the family made it to America. I’ve decided that the Irish are a lot like the Sicilians [in taking the law into their own hands]. Two years ago I went to Ballyforan, where the Tanseys came from.”
He looks fondly back on the summers he spent in boyhood in his mother’s birthplace. “Marquette was a very unusual town. Biggest docks in the world, as big in tonnage as the Suez and Panama Canals combined. It still looks that way in photographs. But with all that, it was also a town with an opera house.”
Mary Elisabeth Tansey, who spoke fluent Gaelic, won a beauty contest in Marquette that took her to Chicago. She married a young Jewish man on the rise, a banker – “not Chase, very small” – named Barnet Rosset.
“So I’m a [Barnet] Junior, and that’s not Jewish [being named after a living member of the family]. My father and Haskell Wexler’s father were capitalists pushing forward. My parents never tried to get me to be Jewish or Catholic. I always thought my mother was anti-Semitic because she wouldn’t deal with all the other mothers around – the Jewish mothers, in a large Chicago apartment house. Haskell Wexler lived in that apartment building, too. He always felt sorry for my non-Jewish mother whom the other people didn’t talk to. I felt the opposite – that she didn’t talk to them.
“Haskell took me to Hebrew school, but didn’t tell me what it was. I never knew. And my father – very unusual – was buried in a Catholic cemetery. Bishop Bernard Friel was a good friend of my father’s. My mother pretended to go to church, but didn’t go. She told me: ‘You go!’ And I told her I did, but I didn’t.
“Ann Getty, the woman who bought Grove Press [when Barney, bankrupted by a libel case that was not of his doing, was in 1986 squeezed out of the brilliant publishing company he himself had built], always reminded me of my mother.”
So you were given no religion, first to last?
“None. So I became a Communist. As a religion. And you better believe it.”
He went to Swarthmore because he thought it was near Vassar, where a girl he was in love with was going. He went to UCLA “because I thought they made movies there.”
A schoolmate from Chicago – a girl whom he was also in love with, and whose parents snubbed him as a Jew – had gone to Paris to become a painter (and a good one). Barney followed her there. Her name was Joan Mitchell. They got married, lived in Paris and on the Cote d’Azur, and came back to New York in 1949. (Joan Mitchell, now dead, was followed by three more wives and fatherhood of Peter, Tasnsey, Beckett, and Chantal Rosset).
“Joan and I took an apartment in Brooklyn, and after that a tiny dollhouse near the White Horse on West 11th Street in the Village, and then” – with the help of his family – “a brownstone on 9th Street between Fifth and Sixth, where there was a studio on the top floor for Joan that became the first home of Grove Press after Joan left me and moved a block away.”
That was in 1951, when the 29-year-old Rosset, a graduate student in English taking classes from Alfred Kazin and Wallace Fowlie at the New School, learned of two people, Robert Phelps and John Balcomb, who along with the then Mrs. Balcomb had started a small, quality-minded publishing company called Grove Press, named for the Grove Street where they lived.
“Ezra Pound was their inspiration. They had done three quite good reprints” – of Melville’s The Confidence Man, the verse of Richard Crashaw, and the writings of Mrs. Aphra Behn, a very early feminist. Barney, telling this, points to a street sign over the door of his present domicile. Sure enough: grove street.
“I went over and bought half of it for $1,500 and then went back and bought the other half for another $1,500.” He carried the entire inventory of three paperbacks in three suitcases back to the top-floor studio space on 9th Street.
That was the beginning, and with three highly intelligent, highly dedicated associate editors, Don Allen, Fred Jordan, and Dick Seaver, Grove Press (along with its offspring, the monthly Evergreen Review) was ready to break from the barriers – no, to burst barriers – in accordance with, as Grove/Atlantic chronicler S,E, Gontarski, a professor at Florida State University, puts it:
“… Rosset’s current passion – whatever it happened to be … Much of what appeared to be whim [stemmed from] calculated enthusiasm nurtured deep in Rosset’s soul, lifelong political values shaped as early as the seventh grade. That ‘whim of steel’ led Rosset to revitalize American publishing in the 1950s and 1960s and to profoundly alter America’s reading habits.”
The whim of steel that in 1959 would crash through all barriers with an unexpurgated commercial edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and fight for it up through the courts to a total First Amendment victory.
Some four or five years earlier than that, Rosset had come across a tiny one-paragraph story in the New York Times about a play in Paris called Waiting for Godot.
“It intrigued me. I had lived in Paris for a year. Things do intrigue me,” said Rosset, with a typical hop, skip, and jump of thought. “Do you know that, allowing for inflation, it takes the same proportion of capital now to make a DVD as it used to take to publish a book? Well, I’m now putting together a DVD on Beckett including the film he wrote which is called Film [shot in New York in 1965, directed by Alan Schneider, starring Buster Keaton (!), Neil Harrison, and James Karen – an actor who in those years also had an antiques shop on Greenwich Avenue].
“To shoot the film I got Boris Kaufman, the great cinematographer of Zero de Conduite, L’Atalante, On the Waterfront, and many, many other movies. I was then living across the street – Houston Street – from where Film Forum is now. Actually I had two houses, one on each side of the street. One of those is where Beckett stayed when he came here for the making of the picture. He was here for around two weeks, the only time he ever came to this country. I guess he thought: Enough is enough.”
Rosset had taken that clipping from the Times about some crazy play in Paris and, here in New York, he hunted up Beckett’s American agent, Marian Saunders. She lent him a copy, in French, of Godot. He read it, took it around to Wallace Fowlie, his professor at the New School. Fowlie read it and confirmed its greatness. “I went back to Marian Saunders and bought the rights. Then I went to Paris to meet the author.”
The 1954 Grove Press edition, in English, of Waiting for Godot sold 400 copies the first year. It would go on to sell more than 2 million copies around the world. “We didn’t have a translator. We messed around, and finally Beckett said: ‘I’ll do it myself.’ All the other Beckett plays we published were translated by Bernard Frechtman.”
The 1956 arrival of Godot on Broadway broke everything open, including the sales of the Grove text and the irascibility of Norman Mailer, who in the pages of the Village Voice attacked, at length, Waiting for Godot and all its supporters, even while acknowledging that he’d not yet seen or read it.
Rosset, 49 years later: “He called it gay and all that. Nobody believes any of that now.” In fact, when Norman and his then wife, Adele Morales, got around to seeing the Broadway play, as they left the theater she said to him: “You fucked up, baby,” and Mailer forthwith took a full-page ad in tiny type (so as to get it all in), paying for it himself, in the new weekly he himself partly owned, revising his snap prejudgment to a certain begrudging extent.
As for Rosset, he and Beckett developed a close working and personal friendship.
“I became his agent in this country, was made that by Beckett, in his handwriting – was by agreement to stay his agent until such time as Beckett or I said no. Had a good income from it until Beckett died” – in 1989, at age 83, 20 years after Samuel Beckett had won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
One play that Beckett did not want Rosset to publish was an early, excessive, unformed work called Eleutheria. “So it wasn’t done, wasn’t published, although he gave it to me. He didn’t want it to see the light of day. I have his note. Here, let me read it to you: ‘If you can forgive an unforgivable Sam, I will write a new piece for you’ – instead of Eleutheria, that is. The new piece was Stirrings Still.”
After Beckett died, S.E. Gontarski convinced Rosset that Eleutheria ought to be published. “The precedent had been Kafka, who told his friend Max Brod: ‘When I die, burn everything I wrote.’ But Brod thought the world deserved to read it, so he disobeyed. And Beckett was very affected by Kafka.”
Rosset not only published Eleutheria but held a private reading of it, a sort of bootleg reading in his own building, for a small invited audience. The mother Barney thinks was anti-Semitic might never have heard the word chutzpah, but if her son hadn’t had a healthy dose of it from the cradle, we wouldn’t be talking about him today.
Rosset, awesomely grappling with the technology of three generations younger than his own, is these days involved in a number of projects:
• Keeping alive an Evergreen Review of then and now “on whatever you call it, a Website,” with the help of Astrid Myers and Choko Ichihara;
• Bringing out works by Beckett, Kenzaburo Oe, Marguerite Duras, and others, via video, CD, DVD, and Internet, under a Foxrock label (Foxrock is the suburb of Dublin where Beckett was born);
• Striving to bring forth, in print, a collection of the correspondence over the years between Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset. “I told Edward Beckett, Sam’s nephew, I can cut it down painlessly. I’ve got it down to 150 pages, but don’t know where to go with it.”
Samuel Beckett’s handwriting, by the way, arriving mostly by postcard, was a tiny cramped unreadable scrawl. “I complained to him, over and over again; told him to stop that. He finally went to typing.”
As someone was just saying: If there were a Literature-facilitative Nobel Prize in Creative Chutzpah …
