© 2016 Estate of Barney Rosset
Published by OR Books, New York and London
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Letters from Joan Mitchell to Barney Rosset © Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Letters from Kenzaburō Ōe © Kenzaburō Ōe. Reprinted courtesy Kenzaburō Ōe.
Letters from Samuel Beckett © the Estate of Samuel Beckett. Reprinted courtesy Cambridge University Press.
All photos © Estate of Barney Rosset except where specifically credited.
Every reasonable effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of archival photographic materials collected in this book. Questions may be directed to [email protected]
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First printing 2016
Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-68219-044-9 paperback
ISBN 978-1-68219-045-6 ebook
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Contents
FOREWORD
1: An Irish Ancestry: From Ould Sod to the New Land
2: Progressive Educations: Experimental Schools and Falling in Love
3: Off to College, off to War
4: China: The Forgotten Theater
5: “The Liberators”: Shanghai and the Return Home
6: Joan Mitchell: The Beginning
7: Partings and Beginnings: Joan, the Hamptons, and Early Grove
8: Samuel Beckett
9: Grove Theater: Harold Pinter and other Playwrights
10: Into the Fray: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
11: A Return to Film: Film, I am Curious (Yellow) and other Celluloid Adventures
12: Profiles in Censorship: Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer
13: Maurice Girodias
14: The Beats and Naked Lunch
15: Revolutionaries: Evergreen, Che Guevara, and the Grove Bombing
16: Attack from Within, Attack from Without
17: My Tom Sawyer: KenzabURō Ōe
18: Eleuthéria
19: A Nightmare in the Stone Forest
END NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
APPENDICES
Barnet Rosset Sr. and Jr., Chicago, c. 1927.
XX is by no means a typical American, even typical of his own class or his own group, but his specialness is not so unusual as to basically differentiate his problems from those of the other American progressives.
XX was born and raised in Chicago, and spends part of the time of the book in Chicago. Thus he is most deeply a Midwestern American by culture, and he in many ways is an extremely typical American—middle-class style. One of the main character traits to play up is his rootlessness in the sense of not having a sharp national background, a religious stability, or even a constant group of old family friends.
His father is Jewish, but without any ties of culture or emotion to the Jews. He would rather have forgotten the accident of his birth, felt that it held him back more than it did anything else. He believed in the power of money above all else, but at the same time felt that he was trying to do good in the world, but his reliance on his own abilities, his own money, is something XX revolts against. The struggle with his father is deep, from infancy in the competition for his mother, and he cannot take up the same values, unless in the sense that he goes toward opposites.
XX was a fierce competitor in school but not for money, only for prestige of scholarship, athletics, and above all else, girls. Thus struggle to get girls has been a deep-rooted problem, and he felt, rather mistakenly, that he could never be successful. This competition for girls was a very subtle thing, taking many forms, and also being a very chauvinistic thing in that the girl was basically a prize to be sought after, not an important human being.
One important idea in the story and a constantly growing one, is the relationship of XX to women, in that he starts as being quite chauvinistic and slowly grows out of it.
ZZ helps him in this, because she is acutely aware of the position of women and this must be one of their main interacting struggles, but of course just as she slowly pulls him out of his chauvinism he must change her from being a lone wolf who is against men, outside of their sex value, into a woman who can see over the ills of her society and integrate herself into society.
—Barney Rosset, “Notes for an Autobiography,” 2006, unpublished
manuscript from the Barney Rosset Papers, Rare Books and
Manuscripts, Butler Library, Columbia University
For Astrid and for my children
Peter, Tansey, Beckett, and Chantal
Foreword
Some people think my chief claim to fame is having published the first book to be sold over the counter in this country with the word fuck printed on its pages in all its naked glory. Perhaps to the mainstream that’s all there was to D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover—just fuck, fuck, fuck. I saw the publication of Lawrence’s masterwork somewhat differently—as a major victory against ignorance and censorship.
There has been much more to my publishing career, of course, than that. I believe, more fairly, that I should be thought of as the publisher who broke the cultural barrier raised like a Berlin Wall between the public and free expression in literature, film, and drama. My determination to publish an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley in 1954 was consistent with my long-held conviction that an author should be free to write whatever he or she pleased, and a publisher free to publish anything. I mean anything.
This relatively uncomplicated idea has gotten me into all kinds of trouble with the authorities. The resultant battles have eaten up great chunks of my time and energy, not to mention money, and enriched a whole generation of attorneys. But we broke the back of censorship. I think this is a good time to tell the story of my life—as a man and as a publisher. I will try to explain what shaped me as a crusader against the anti-obscenity laws, and why very early in my life I believed them to be an outrageous denial of freedom. But it seemed that almost nothing I did was greeted calmly and peaceably. How did I get that way? What made me into such a maverick troublemaker?
1
An Irish Ancestry: From Ould Sod to the New Land
Rebellion runs in my family’s blood. We have never shown a willingness to accept unthinkingly what authorities told us was right or wrong, in good taste or bad. The repression of imposed conformity has always been something we fought against, no matter what the odds.
On July 10, 1884, in Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, Ireland, my great-grandfather, Michael Tansey, was sentenced to death for the murder of one William Mahon.1 The unfortunate Mahon was a British landlord’s man, a gamekeeper on an estate, charged with preventing poachers from unlawfully taking fish and game during a famine year. The Anglo-Irish aristocracy was literally driving Irish tenant farmers off the land, land that the British had seized by conquest and were now leasing back to its original owners at high rates.
Mahon disappeared on the night of October 16, 1879. Because the closed-mouth community offered no help to the authorities, the police were stymied for seven months by what amounted
to an unsolved missing person case. Then a local woman, probably out poaching, saw a human hand protruding from a sack that came bobbing up from the bottom of the River Suck. It belonged to Mahon’s decomposing body. A postmortem showed he had been beaten to death before being dumped into the cold water.
Most under suspicion in the case were the Tanseys, because Roger Tansey, Michael’s teenaged son and my grandfather-to-be, had been accused of poaching by Mahon, and Michael himself had threatened the man.
There were a lot of threats in the air at that time. The Irish Tenant Right League had persuaded Prime Minister Gladstone to back the Land Act of 1870, which recognized that a long-term tenant had certain rights to his holding, including a fair rent. This help didn’t amount to much, though, because as a result of the disastrously poor harvest of 1879, tenants couldn’t afford to pay any rent whatsoever. The League managed to keep people on their farms and have their rent waived during that famine year, but the following year when the crops were better, landlords demanded payment of rent that was in arrears from the year before. If a tenant couldn’t pay he was evicted. And if he refused to leave his house, it was pulled down. In response, violence broke out all over Ireland. Landowners and their hirelings were killed, cattle were poisoned, and property was destroyed, often by dynamite. The British reacted by passing the new Land Act of 1881, which gave more rights to the tenants, but outlawed the Irish Land League and imprisoned its members, including, for a time, Charles Parnell, the greatest Irish leader of his day.
It was in this atmosphere that my great-grandfather was put on trial for the gamekeeper’s murder. The police investigation of his death had not been terribly extensive, but that situation changed when a new crime, involving my great-grandfather’s other son, also named William, was committed. On March 26, 1882, Weston House, the residence of the gamekeeper’s employer, was bombed. Because footsteps at the scene led in the direction of Ballyforan, home both to the Tanseys and a peat bog, the investigation was directed there. Michael Tansey and his sons worked in the bog where, as it happened, dynamite was often used to blast sections of the peat apart. This explosive, used to gain access to peat, a form of low-grade fuel used for heating and cooking, was also a handy tool for terrorism. The authorities persuaded four of the men involved to become state’s witnesses.
At the trial, William Tansey and the four “leaders” of the conspiracy received heavy sentences, William getting fourteen years and a co-conspirator, a fellow named Patrick Rogerson, twelve. When William was sentenced, he yelled out, “God save Ireland!”
Trouble did not end there. Bernard Geraghty, one of those who had turned on the defendants, confessed that he knew something about the 1879 Mahon murder and convinced some others to join him in testifying in court. With this new evidence, on January 27, 1884, the police arrested my great-grandfather and his colleagues, charging them with the murder. Michael Tansey was first to be tried. The case against him was strong, and the jury retired for only forty-five minutes before returning with a guilty verdict. Sentenced to be hanged, he made just one request to the judge: Let me shake hands with my wife before I die. The request was granted, but in the interval before the execution was scheduled, a petition to spare Michael’s life on grounds that the evidence was weak was signed by 50 men in the district, as well as Parnell and other notables, including many members of Parliament. The appeal was successful; Michael’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
His son, William, was released on July 12, 1892, after serving almost ten years of his sentence. In 1895, an ailing 65-year-old Michael Tansey was released from the obligation to labor. He pleaded for the authorities to let him die a free man with his family. Once again a petition was signed by prominent people supporting his plea for clemency. He was hospitalized with a severe case of bronchitis in March 1901, and this seems to have softened the hearts of his keepers.
So my great-grandfather was finally given his freedom. On December 6, 1902, he walked out of the prison gates and returned to his farm in Ballyforan. As time passed, he found it increasingly difficult to report to the police barracks weekly as part of his parole. In October 1907, after making these visits for five years, he wrote a plaintive letter, in which he said he was 77 years of age, weighed down with infirmity and weakness and tottering fast to the grave. He died shortly thereafter.
His family—and therefore mine—had formed part of the clandestine revolutionary movement in Ireland, which eventually ousted their English overlords from much of the country. It is a heritage of which I am very proud.
My grandfather Roger somehow absconded from Ballyforan and, via Boston, found his way to Marquette, Michigan, where he married Maggie Flannery and where his children were born: Barney (nickname for Bernard); Mike; Sarah; my mother, Mary—born July 28, 1891—and a much younger sister, Kate, whom they all called Babe.
Marquette took its name from the French explorer and priest Jacques Marquette. So did the Pere Marquette Railway, which took travelers overnight between Chicago and Marquette. I remember one such run when, in the dead of winter one year before I was ten years old, my mother and I spent more than a few hours snowbound aboard our sleeper car waiting for the tracks to be cleared. In the incredibly cold winters the town’s citizens, including Roger Tansey, went out on the ice of Lake Superior and drilled down to the unfrozen water to fish.
After winning an upright piano in a beauty contest in Marquette, my mother was inspired to make a new life in Chicago. While working as a teller at one of Chicago’s most prestigious banking firms, the Northern Trust Co., she met Barnet L. Rosset, who seemed to her to be an up-and-coming fellow. They were married in 1920, I know not where, and on May 28, 1922, I was born, the only child they would have.
When my father was eighteen, he was already the secretary-treasurer of the Burton Holmes Travelogues Company, a famous and successful firm pioneering a new book format that made great use of photographs and drawings. Looking back, I believe they were a significant factor in my eventually becoming a publisher. We had a set of these ornately bound books, which I own to this day. I later republished part of one of those volumes, about the first modern Olympics, which took place in Athens in 1896.2 The layout and design of the Burton Holmes books made them ahead of their time, and Holmes himself was the author and publisher.
My father, even then, was an independent go-getter. He ultimately left Holmes and went on to start his own certified public accounting firm at the age of twenty-two.
Born in Chicago in 1899 of Russian Jewish parents who had emigrated from Moscow, my father was a capable and smart man. I don’t know if he graduated from high school or not, but he excelled in accounting and was certified almost immediately. His sisters, Beatrice and Paulyne, were also very intelligent. Beatrice knew the most about our family history, but she told a different story every time you asked her. On occasion she would say the name Rosset came from the Rosetta stone; another time she would claim that it was French in origin. She was a very good raconteur, who took great pleasure in concocting her fictions.
My maternal grandparents, Roger Tansey and Maggie Flannery, retained their undying hatred for the English. No explanation of this was ever given to me. But I do vaguely remember hearing something about the Black and Tans from time to time. Although my grandparents spoke in Gaelic when they did not wish me to understand, I got the message quickly and never forgot it. British colonialism had brutalized Ireland and its native people. Indeed, Roger had left Ireland with a price on his head. Nevertheless, he was a very gentle man, tall, handsome, and the patriarch of the immediate neighborhood, which was largely made up of working-class people. Roger worked for the city, building and maintaining sewer lines.
I spent part of a year with my grandparents in Marquette, attending second grade at the public school. My father, who deeply loved Roger Tansey, brought him a radio all the way from Chicago, the first I had seen, and we listened to the broadcast of the fight between our hero, Jack Dempsey, and Gene Tunney, who was also Irish�
��but he was well educated and you could almost think he was English. And on the windup Victrola on our tiny enclosed porch we listened to Caruso, Galli-Curci, and John McCormack. My mother’s upright piano was in the living room, but I never heard her try to play it. My shell-shocked Uncle Barney did, though—from time to time, almost like an interloping stranger, he would walk into the house out of nowhere, sit down at the little piano, and play songs from his army days. “Mademoiselle from Armentières” and its “Hinky, dinky, parley-voo” chorus would often float out. Barney was tough and well-known, almost romantically so, as one of the local hobos, meaning he had no permanent residence or employment. I never did find out where Uncle Barney lived. Much later, when Pinter and Kerouac came along, I recognized them. Shell-shocked as he was, Uncle Barney had prepared me. He was their prototype.
While most of my grandfather’s neighbors were Irish, when he died there was a general day of mourning. The Swedes, Poles, Finns, and French Canadians who lived on our block all came to pay their respects. It was a day I have never forgotten.
In 1929 my father supported Herbert Hoover for president while my mother pulled for Al Smith, and I was strongly on her side because Smith was a liberal with strong welfare policies aimed at helping the poor. Hoover was the standard businessman’s candidate. I don’t doubt that my father regretted it when the Irish Catholic Smith lost the election and the Great Depression ravaged America.
Illinois was one of the states worst hit by bank failures. Illinois did not have branch banking, and in Chicago each bank had to back itself up or it would close. By that time my father was head of one of those self-standing banks and involved with another. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after he was elected, declared a “Bank Holiday” to stop panicked depositors from withdrawing their money and plunging banks into failure. Before that “holiday” I remember my father putting $100 bills in his shoes to bring to his bank to pay the people standing in line outside waiting to take out their deposits. When a bank was out of cash that was the end. Many people never got their money out. As a result, another Roosevelt institution was developed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. For me and many others, FDR was the second coming of Al Smith.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 1
