Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  During the eighth grade I formed a close bond with another student who would become a lifetime friend, Haskell Wexler. In that grade small groups of students each briefly put out their own newspaper. Haskell and I called our paper the Sommunist—for socialist-communist—a name we later changed to the Anti- Everything. I had an uneasy feeling that some of the parents were annoyed by that first title. But we persisted in expressing our radical views. Haskell later recalled in another unpublished interview by Ed de Grazia that I impressed him because of my endless curiosity and store of information: “He would know the odds on horses. He was interested in Buckminster Fuller when nobody ever heard of him.”

  Around the same time, Haskell and I became members of the recently founded American Student Union. I was to be a delegate to its 1937 convention, which was held at Vassar College—and its participants were almost all college students! I rode on a rickety, undersized, chartered bus to Vassar together with another eighth grader from another school on the South Side of Chicago, Quentin Young, and students from the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois. (Quentin later became Medical Director of Cook County Hospital and then Health Commissioner of Chicago.) The head of our delegation was Al Rubio, a charismatic, politically knowledgeable and compelling young man. The lovely coeds in our delegation crowded around him. Al was certainly my role model. (I never saw him again until the Chicago Seven trial in 1969, when his daughter accompanied her husband, who was one of the seven defendants.)

  Parker had a deep impact on my thoughts about politics, society, and economics. Quentin Young, in conversation with Ed de Grazia, recalled that “There were several teachers at Parker who were highly influential in shaping [Barney’s] mind and, I would imagine, stressing the importance of independent thought.” He considered Haskell and me zealots from “a group of students in this kind of private, upper-class progressive school.”

  But many students at Parker certainly did not share my views or those of Haskell and Sarah Greenebaum. One of them was James Bullock Hathaway—very good-looking and a top student. He started the Liberals Club (today it would be called “neo-Liberal”). We would joke about him and other boys in our class who were his best friends and whose names were unbelievable—one was Stuyvesant Van Buren, another was Benjamin Franklin Roselle. All three had definite social and political aspirations. Bullock and Steve enlisted in the Marine Corps in World War II and were killed early in the conflict. Ben survived after suffering a large number of wounds. I liked all three of them but not for their politics. We had a student government, and at one point Bullock and I were the final candidates to be president. And he won by, I think, one vote! Then I was elected president of the senior class. You couldn’t have both positions. So for me, it was a fair tradeoff.

  Haskell and I were actively involved in politically left causes. Inspired by the Oxford Movement in England (led by such writers as W. H. Auden), we organized a one-day strike of the whole school every year in April, not on Armistice Day but on behalf of peace, taking the entire student body and all the teachers out of our building to parade—peacefully—through the neighborhood. One reason almost everyone joined in the strike is that they feared they would have become unpopular had they not participated.

  Bullock, Steve, and Ben were from families connected to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Quite understandably, their parents got upset when there was any hint of radicalism in the air. But they weren’t stupid people, those parents. They probably realized that the Parker “radicals” were not capable of doing much real damage. But that didn’t make them any happier about it.

  The first two kids in our class at Parker who had cars were Haskell and me. It was not exactly your working-class ethic at its best. We were for Republican Spain; we were pacifists; we were Socialist-oriented, and we held the Soviet Union in high regard. We were critical of the capitalist system, but in an abstract way. It did not, however, make us feel guilty about the way we personally lived. In fact, football was just as important to us as politics, if not more so. Haskell and I were co-captains of the football team in our senior year, and Parker almost won the Private School Football League championship.

  As I look back at that period, I think that, despite our wealth, our Parker class was the most radical of all the classes from other years, but we marked the end of the era. The shadows of fascism were deepening, which made life even more difficult for American Communists, whose mentor and Svengali, the USSR, had made an alliance of convenience with the Nazis.

  One of the sad things I discovered was that communists, instead of believing in that much flaunted “free love” in which they supposedly engaged, were Puritans to the core. I didn’t much like the communists, and yet it seemed to me they were at least committed to doing something. They put everything on the line, said they would do anything to accomplish getting rid of racism, monetary inequality, and various other forms of injustice. Whether it was true or not was another matter. They had been doing the same thing for years and years, in the tradition of American radicalism. However, to be frank, I didn’t know anything about the Communist Party other than what I had read.

  Many of the things Roosevelt did back then were considered to be communist—and are considered communist today by many on the right. There was enormous animosity against him in right-wing economic upper circles. He was called “Rosenfeld” or “Jewfelt.” When Jack Ellison, who later became principal at Parker, was interviewed by the Army about me, he said, “Well, if Roosevelt is a communist I guess you could say that Barney is a communist.”7

  The end of the left-wing student movement as a political force came in 1940. It was a dead end. Communist or not, I was a hedonist, no doubt about it. I was lazy and didn’t want to spend all my time with a lot of these Marxists, whom I disliked. And it was hard; I always had trouble being around any large number of these people. They drove me crazy. They were so boring.

  Despite the climate of progressiveness and radicalism at Parker, not a single black student was enrolled. I can’t understand, today, why we didn’t make a fuss about that. I found Richard Wright’s Native Son so compelling. Why I didn’t carry that book’s message to our school, I don’t know. I didn’t speak out about it at Parker or when I went to college. We were reading John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, Meyer Levin’s The Old Bunch, and some older writers, like Frank Norris. But the bitter evidence of racism that we could see all around us that blighted the lives of black Americans did not seem to sink in very deeply yet. That would change.

  A very attractive girl in our class at Parker named Nancy Ashenhurst would soon become a problem, a big one. Haskell and I both zeroed in on her. She was all-around fantastic. She was beautiful and she was everything. She was strong. She wanted her own way. Nancy’s method of getting things done was to make the boys who were the most important to other people do what she wanted them to do—help her.

  Nancy came from a family of very literary people. Her grandfather was Robert Morss Lovett, head of the English Department at the University of Chicago. It was said that he was, at that time, one of the foremost English professors in the United States. He wrote several books and he attracted a great number of unusual students to the University of Chicago and its English Department—a number of writers like Farrell, Nelson Algren, Vincent Sheean, and John Gunther, who were to become famous novelists and journalists.

  Nancy was also a leader, especially in anything to do with the theater. She wanted to be an actress, but she desperately wanted to be a director, which was unusual for a girl back then. She made sure that whenever a play was put on at school she was either the director or at least playing the lead. I acted in plays with Nancy and I did anything she wanted. I was her stage manager, her all-around helper. We staged works such as R. C. Sherriff’s antiwar play Journey’s End in 1940, which Nancy directed. She was not really political but if the only people doing theater were left-wing or liberal, then she was too. And one of the driving forces
behind drama at Parker was the American Student Union. We were mostly interested in mounting plays if they had some sort of political message; Nancy didn’t care if they were political—she just wanted to put on plays. According to Alfred Adler, Nancy “was able to stage a play better than Mr. Merrill, who was one of the drama teachers at Parker … I was quite moved by what this girl was able to do. She was, at the age of sixteen, really an adult.”

  I wasn’t truly devoting my life to political action. Instead, I was infatuated with Nancy and certainly was as interested in sex as politics. More so. Looking back, it doesn’t sound so sinful, or anti-Communist. I was in love.

  3

  Off to College, Off to War

  It was because of Nancy that I went to Swarthmore College in 1940 and it was because of Nancy that I left after only one year. Swarthmore is outside of Philadelphia, but my outrageous sense of geography made me think it is close to Vassar College in upstate New York, which Nancy had chosen.

  During my year at Swarthmore I almost never spoke to a teacher except for an unfriendly but supposedly radical economics professor and an English professor who doubled as the cross-country running team coach and had also edited a selection of American novels put together in a textbook series. This was one of my first adult inadvertent glimpses into publishing. Though the professor whose course I was enrolled in assigned James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer, I disdained actually reading it, having discovered a series of books in the Swarthmore library that contained condensations of most of the books assigned to us. I used these whenever possible and slid through the course that way.

  I had gone to Swarthmore expecting to play football but there was no way I could play without my eyeglasses. In those days facemasks had not yet been invented, and when I was in high school I had made my own mask with a metal clothes hanger shaped as a guard for my supposedly shatterproof eyeglasses. However, at Swarthmore, where they were aware that I was a high school football player of some renown, the coach was overtly hostile and refused to let me have my helmet wired up. I tried playing for a few days, but whenever I would attempt to catch a pass—or, much worse, a punt—I simply could not do it. By the end of the first week I quit and went out for the cross-country track team instead.

  In track I did better and was easily the best freshman. In fact, the English professor/track coach was the only person from Swarthmore, student or otherwise, who wrote to me after my freshman year, my only year there, asking me to return—but for my running ability, not my literary aptitude. As a coach he taught by example and I admired that. Every afternoon, after class, I would go out and run several miles with him leading the pack.

  For me, that daily run was part of a strange routine. First, after classes, I would fall asleep in my dorm room, which I shared with a young Quaker whose surname was Love. It seemed to me that every day I had the same dream. I would be lying in bed and someone would come into the room and attempt to strangle me with his bare hands as I slept. From this recurring nightmare I would awaken and find a release through running. Without knowing it then, I believe that when I ran I was experiencing what was later to be known as “runner’s high.” At some point in the workout, I would find myself moving effortlessly but fast. It was exhilarating and I looked forward to getting that high day after day.

  Our perennial enemy was the University of Pennsylvania, and when I won the Penn-Swarthmore freshman cross-country race that year, a few people actually noticed. My downfall came when we went to another town to race against its high school track team. We had been told that this school had a phenomenal runner, a black kid who was reported to run a mile fast enough to have won at most college meets. They were right. There was no way I could keep up with him. By the time I got to the last quarter mile, he had already finished the race. For the first time, I was not the first-place finisher on our team. I came in last. Having seen a touch of “world class,” I realized I was not about to be in that category, ever, and it made an important impression on me going forward.

  The demise of my running career and the advent of Tropic of Cancer in my life are, curiously, very closely related. I had first read about Cancer in Miller’s own book, The Cosmological Eye, published by New Directions in 1939, a copy of which my parents had mailed to me at my request. What Miller had to say about his father was fascinating. Someone at Swarthmore told me the Gotham Book Mart in New York was a good place to buy Tropic of Cancer. So I took the train, went to Gotham, and asked for the book. The owner of this landmark bookstore, Frances Steloff, asked me why I wanted it. I said I was a student eager to read the novel. So she reached under the counter and took out a paperbound copy of Tropic of Cancer with “Printed in Mexico” on the cover. The price was, I believe, fifteen dollars.

  I never found Miller’s novel especially sexy. But it was exciting (if also depressing) because it was so truly and beautifully anti-conformist. My paper for class was titled “Henry Miller Versus ‘Our Way of Life,’” and it discussed both Tropic of Cancer and The Cosmological Eye. My essay weighed whether the American way of life was worth defending, and concluded, reluctantly, that it was. I wrote, “I do not think that we should take Henry Miller’s advice too seriously and bomb ourselves out of existence but some of his criticisms are quite valid. …” Concerned with freedom of expression in view of the imminent threat of world fascism in 1940, I concluded:

  Perhaps the place of the writer in our civilization is temporarily disappearing. If we become completely Fascistized the writer can give forth nothing creative. Writers must have a liberal society … or they are stifled. … Of course Miller could not help but feel the sadness and emptiness of the life around him, but of this he said, “Everyone has his private tragedy now. It’s in the blood now—misfortune, ennui, grief, suicide. The atmosphere is saturated with disaster, frustration, futility. … However, the effect upon me is exhilarating. Instead of being discouraged, or depressed, I enjoy it. I am crying for more and more disasters, for bigger calamities, for grander failures. I want the whole world to be out of whack, I want everyone to scratch himself to death.”8

  My professor, Robert Spiller, in his quiet Quaker way, commented on my paper, “Perhaps the jaundice is in the cosmological eye itself, not in the world it sees.” He gave me a B minus. Mediocre grade or not, that college essay would later turn out to be instrumental during the most important of all the obscenity trials I instigated through the years, about which more later.

  When Nancy returned to Chicago to study at Northwestern University I followed her back home, where I enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1941. I was that obsessed.

  Every morning I would set off from my house and drive to pick up Nancy, but we never made it to school. Instead, we parked somewhere and necked. This was a foreboding sign. It was as if we had reversed our ambitions and maturity back by three years or so and ignored the future. Looking back, it seems as if Nancy did not wish to start a crippling fight with me by making a clean break, and I was terrified to move aggressively towards her for fear she might thrust me aside. Thus, for months we slowly choked in a sickening miasma.

  I saw classmate Bullock Hathaway only once after our graduation from Parker, and that was in the summer of 1941 at what was to be our only class reunion. One of the girls in the class gave a party at the Belden Stratford Hotel, only a block from Parker. I was told Nancy was going to be there and I was very excited about the chance to see her. We had been quarrelling. I was to meet Steve Van Buren at a nearby bar beforehand. He was late and by the time he arrived I had already had several drinks. I was not drunk but I was definitely not sober. It was a lovely summer evening and I wanted so much to have Nancy with me.

  At the party, Bullock and Nancy were together. Haskell had gone to California. I was madly excited by Nancy from the moment I stepped into the ballroom. Bullock existed only as a person who had momentarily come between us and was not to be taken too seriously. I did not know how to approach her. I wanted to tell her I loved her. I wanted to shout it out
in front of everybody. I told her that she was looking well, that her dress was pretty, that she was a wonderful girl. I also tried to insult her in childish ways. I did not stop drinking and remained suspended in a state of semi-intoxication. I had no basic strategy and as it got later I grew more desperate. I wanted to do something to bring her to me, and at the same time I thought it was impossible. She had not been unfriendly but she remained insulated with her usual calm, and I seemed unable to penetrate it.

  When she and Bullock left the ballroom, I followed. Several of us, including Nancy and Bullock, got into the elevator together to descend to the ground floor. When the door opened I tripped Nancy a little bit as she stepped forward. I may have also said something. She had a large purse in her hand, which she swung around with great force, hitting me solidly on the side of the face. I was stunned. Almost blacking out for an instant, I came to with my fists swinging. A blow caught her squarely on the jaw and she flew back against the wall, but did not fall down.

  Immediately I realized what I had done and I panicked. The only answer seemed more action and I headed toward Bullock, who was doing nothing, standing on the staircase leading to the front door. I got to him and pushed him down several stairs. Before I could leap after him, several elevator boys, doormen, and friends had hold of me. I stopped cold. My anger dissipated, replaced by a terrible sense of shame.

  I had wanted Nancy more than anything in the world, yet I had walloped her in the jaw. Everything was wrong.