Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  Residing there at that time were such people as the documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty and the composer Virgil Thomson, who had encouraged

  Strange Victory by suggesting composers and instrumentalists. A bit later the independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke ensconced herself in a group of former maids’ rooms out on the roof, accessible from a fire escape. She filmed The Connection, Jack Gelber’s play, which was produced by Judith Malina and which we much later published at Grove. And Maurice Girodias, the French publisher who was to play a big part in my life, was later a longtime tenant.

  Joan and I finally moved into our first Greenwich Village living space,

  267½ West Eleventh Street in late 1949. If you walked from our place to Hudson Street and crossed you ran more or less smack into the White Horse Tavern. That site gained much fame, a bit later, because of the nightly presence of Dylan Thomas, the greatly talented Welsh poet who died “from a massive insult of alcohol to the brain” at St. Vincent’s Hospital, only a few blocks away. It took him far too short a time to achieve the necessary saturation to kill himself. The Irishman Brendan Behan, whom I got to know, publish, and regard with real affection, followed Thomas step for step, succumbing to the same trap as his fellow artist.

  Our apartment was a strange little one-room house, with a basement, which had been planted down in the middle of a garden behind a brownstone. Maybe it had been meant for a maid or for a children’s playroom, but it was our living space—and Joan’s studio. Some friends from Chicago who were handy helped us insulate the basement, and there we were.

  Going out from our narrow entrance lane and turning left on Eleventh Street, you came in less than a block to Seventh Avenue and the Village Vanguard. We got to know Max Gordon, the proprietor, and his wife, Lorraine, very well. We spent hours at the Vanguard with the likes of Pete Seeger and his folk group. One night the great South African singer Miriam Makeba came on stage, fresh from the shebeens of Soweto and Johannesburg. It was at the Vanguard we saw the tragicomic Lenny Bruce warning us there was a cop in a raincoat in the audience; and then Miles Davis playing his horn facing the wall one night because the audience annoyed him; Jack Kerouac spinning a bizarre, more than slightly drunk monologue; and Huddie Ledbetter, Lead Belly himself, just out of a Southern prison, escorted by Alan Lomax, singing his new song “Goodnight, Irene.”

  In April 1950 I worked as a volunteer at the American Association for the United Nations, while trying (unsuccessfully) to get a job at the UN. At that time I was also doing volunteer work—a version of an internship, you might say—for the new Socialist magazine, The Monthly Review. Grove Press might never have existed but for an act of carelessness on my part that resulted in my losing that job: I got a parking ticket on my car while I was distributing freshly printed copies of the magazine to some workers at a building near Union Square. I paid the parking ticket myself. But the editor, Leo Huberman, good leftist that he was, decided that a bourgeois like me, who got parking tickets while delivering the goods, was not the person to help people on the left side of the spectrum, and I was fired.

  During the summer of 1950 Joan and I traveled to Haiti and Cuba, then on to Yucatan and Mexico City. After we returned home we concluded that

  267½ was a bit too small for a painter whose canvases were growing larger by the week, so we decided to move. Just before we were supposed to move, Joan had an acute attack of appendicitis at 4:00 one morning and Dr. David Barsky, who had helped create the first mobile hospital units during the Spanish Civil War, the war that never ended, rushed her over to Beth Israel Hospital and operated immediately. He looked in on her a few hours later, and then went to jail to begin his sentence for refusing to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

  Then we packed up our stuff and moved into two floors of a nice brownstone at 57 West Ninth Street, setting up the living room on the top floor as a studio. Reached through an inner staircase, it was a large room with a vaulted ceiling, large fireplace, windows and glass doors, terraces at each end. And no heat.

  Back in Chicago, I was used to moving from one apartment to another, but I had never really lived in a house until I found Greenwich Village, where, as I write this, I have lived for sixty years. The Village had a unique ambience. It had elements of my childhood in Chicago—the importance of the Irish and the Jews—but also a strong Italian community and culture. And of course there were the writers, the artists, the theater people. Hey, Eugene O’Neill’s plays were staged here. And real communists gathered in Union Square (see the film Reds). Disparate souls were joined together in this place. I had found my home.

  In 1951, thanks to the GI Bill, I enrolled at the New School for Social Research, only three blocks from our apartment. I worked hard and enjoyed myself there. Among my professors were Wallace Fowlie, Stanley Kunitz, Meyer Schapiro, and Alfred Kazin. It was their inspiration and the Village atmosphere that propelled me on to graduate with a BA, something that at Swarthmore, the University of Chicago, and UCLA I had failed to do.

  Meanwhile I was doing work for the Council of Living Theater and the film producer Lester Cowan. I wrote reports on the Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner schools for acting. In December 1951, in Wallace Fowlie’s course at the New School, I submitted a partial film script based on the novel Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer) by Henri Alain-Fournier. I was crawling my way toward a career that I thought might still be in film, though soon it would take a different turn. My old friend Haskell Wexler had moved to Hollywood, undergoing his own transformation into a great mainstream filmmaker—but like me, never abandoning his political orientation, or at least its spirit.

  Joan’s work flourished. In October of 1950 she had her first solo exhibition in St. Paul, Minnesota, with thirteen paintings created in Le Lavandou and New York. But we were slowly growing apart. She rented another studio in a marvelous clone of a Paris studio building on West Twelfth Street, and it occupied her attention more and more. She began meeting and making friends with other artists, like Willem de Kooning, socializing with them, sometimes at the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place, where all the artists drank and argued endlessly.

  I remember Joan and de Kooning having long discussions about different kinds of oil paints. Joan and Bill were very traditional in their likes and dislikes. Quality was what mattered most. They thought it incredible, but amusing, that Jackson Pollock was using a commercial paint, Duco. For Pollock, anything was possible, but it was not for them.

  I thought Jackson Pollock was a great artist. To me, he was almost frightening in the sense that he seemed extraordinarily quiet and tense. Though he was gentle, I felt an incipient violence in him. The only violence I actually ever saw was leveled against himself or an inanimate object, except for one night when he got into an argument at the Cedar bar. With whom? Franz Kline and Bill de Kooning. I was sitting at a table with the three of them, listening to their talk, then suddenly they were arguing. Pollock stormed off to the men’s room and I heard a loud crash. The owner told him to leave—not forever, just a month, maybe, like a fine for a basketball player who had crossed a forbidden line. When we saw Pollock peering inside the bar window, we went out to console him and soon were all happily saying good night to one another. Even in this instance Pollock didn’t hurt anybody, just the bathroom door.

  Joan and I were sinking, much as I desired to stay with her. She became confrontational and combative, and, though we were sometimes extremely close, it was impossible to maintain an intimate relationship. By the spring of 1951 she had slipped away from me, moving out of the apartment into a studio building at 51 West Tenth Street. She exhibited that year in the Ninth Street Show, organized by Leo Castelli and held in a vacant storefront at 60 East Ninth Street, and was represented in the Whitney Museum’s 1951 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Art.

  I wrote in my journal on Thursday, May 8, 1952:

  My stomach feels uneasy and weary. Last night was with Joan. The last night that we may well sp
end together while we are still married. It is supposed to be all over tomorrow. First we talked with Bob, Howard, and Alfred about doing a book motivated by Bob’s film THE LIFE OF CHRIST made from Durer’s woodcuts. I felt that Joan was un-cooperative and hostile but perhaps it was all me. The whole idea had seemed so good a few days ago, but it suddenly collapsed last night and I ended up agreeing with Joan. We all went to the Bocce to eat, and then Joan and I talked for hours at a bar, arguing, recriminating, crying, and so on. Finally we came home, Joan remarking at the door that she was being a high class whore, but in she did come, and we had a wild, brutal time in bed, ending in almost tenderness as I switched off my hostility near the end.

  That was 3AM. Now it is noon. Joan is still asleep. I have been up since eight, and I am sitting in the downstairs room, waiting for her to wake up. I have been on the verge of panic all morning. After bitter conversation with my father about becoming thirty on May 28. He made all the money he says. It is his. I am in it only as a tax deduction. And then the conversation shifts, as before. It will go my way he says, and then we stop. He is drinking, as usual, though it is still morning in Chicago.

  Joan goes to Dr. Fried this afternoon, and I go to Sager. Between us we will pay forty dollars to speak a combined hour and a half or so. It has been going on for so long. When was the beginning, somewheres [sic] back there so many months ago, when will be the end and is there an end.

  We divorced in 1952, not with a moan or a whimper, but with a sense of relief. Now we were free to be friends, and we remained friends. I bought her a poodle in Paris when our divorce was finalized and had the dog shipped to the US. I named the dog Georges du Soleil—and I took her to the airport to meet this “young man.” Georges was impossible and Joan loved him desperately. That same year, she had her first solo show in New York at the New Gallery. I spent many hours getting her catalog written by the surrealist writer Nicolas Calas, and printed. She was a part of me—no matter what.

  Our relationship slowly dissolved, but in a rather beautiful final act, Joan, with the help of her Art Institute friend Francine Felsenthal, encouraged me to enter publishing. Together they helped me take the very first step.

  Francine lived on the Lower East Side in a sixth-floor walkup, one room after we knocked out the wall. There was a girl next door in the only other apartment on the same floor, Susan Nevelson, whose ex-mother-in-law was the sculptor Louise Nevelson and perhaps Susan’s best friend. Beautiful Susan made a living by sketching fashion models for retail store ads. Later she became, for a brief moment, a lover, and afterward was still my close friend. A photo she took of her daughter is on the cover of Evergreen Review, No. 6.

  One fateful day in late 1951 Francine brought me copies of the three titles published by a moribund little company, Grove Press: The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville, a new collection of the religious love poetry of Richard Crashaw, and a book of the writings of Aphra Behn, who was said to be the first feminist author. Francine told me that her friend, John Balcomb had, with a partner, Robert Phelps, formed a company and published those three books. The company’s name was Grove Press after the West Village street where Balcomb lived. Having publishing the three titles in 1949–50, they had run out of money and stopped. Balcomb’s wife Cynthia had put up the initial money but would not put up any more. She and John were getting divorced.

  I looked at the books and all three intrigued me. In the Aphra Behn book the following statement was printed: “The function of the GROVE PRESS, as we understand it, is to publish the kind of books that other publishers publish books about—those ‘unexpected’ masterpieces of the past and present that have been more read about than read simply because they have been hitherto inaccessible to the general reader.” And the back of the title page stated: “Grove Press editions are edited by John Balcomb and Robert Phelps and are published by the Grove Press, Inc., at 18 Grove Street, New York City.”

  The first book the Grove Press partners had done was the closest to being a simple reprint, meaning, it contained no new editorial material. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was a lithographed copy of the Dix, Edwards & Co. edition of 1857. It had been out of print for 60 years before they revived it.

  The jacket flap of The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw stated that Richard Crashaw “has left what is probably the most exultant body of religious verse in the English language. … Crashaw opened every stop, and celebrated his belief with all the emblazonry of the Baroque instinct at its fullest.”

  In true Balcomb/Phelps style the jacket went on to say, “In most cases Crashaw left at least two very different published versions of each poem, and it would be an extremely dubious undertaking to establish a single ‘definitive’ text. The present edition therefore has brought together the complete texts of the first and last versions of all the poems published during and immediately after Crashaw’s lifetime.”

  The third, Selected Writings of the Ingenious Mrs. Aphra Behn, had an introduction by Robert Phelps, who quoted the author as saying, “If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom [to be a writer], I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me, no, not so much as to make comparisons, because I will be kinder to my brothers of the pen than they have been to a defenseless woman, for I am not content to write for a third day only. I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero; and if you rob me of that I can retire from the ungrateful world and scorn its fickle favors.”12

  Phelps wrote of Behn, “She is chiefly regarded as a novelist, or at least as a writer of narratives, and due recognition is given her method of creating reality by the immediacy of her own avowed, witnessing person. … She had a genuine, natural gift, that of a tale-teller.”

  Was I interested in meeting Phelps and Balcomb? Yes, I was. I reached out to embrace Joan’s idea of my becoming a publisher. My documentary filmmaking days were no longer appealing. The film business hadn’t worked for me. That world was too big, too expensive, with “strictly business” interests too deeply embedded. I was ready to segue naturally from studying Proust, Rimbaud, and the like to publishing them and authors like them. Since the Village was now my home it would become the home of my Grove Press as well.

  Like his mentor Ezra Pound, Balcomb was a highly literate, eccentric person. His apartment was crammed with stacks of newspapers and magazines. We met there and made plans to continue Grove Press as partners. I then had to go see Robert Phelps, who lived in Woodstock, to ask whether he would sell his share to me, or whether he would join us. It turned out to be easy to make an agreement to buy Phelps’s interest in Grove Press for $1,500. So, with my father’s help, I became John Balcomb’s partner, and there we were, in business. The negotiations took place during September through December 1951.

  Beyond those first three books, Balcomb and Phelps had set in motion work on a fourth book, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s gothic novel, The Monk. They had already set the type—no small task in those days before computers—but had been forced to abandon it for lack of funds. Now the project was alive again. But it wasn’t long before I began to see that Balcomb and I could not coexist. He had a headstrong personality, set in his version of Ezra Poundian ways. I respected Pound as an astute critic and poet and felt almost personally aggrieved when Pound (who had made pro- Mussolini radio broadcasts during the war) was arrested by the American army in Italy, impounded, so to speak, in a cage as if he were a dangerous, perhaps rabid, animal. I could abide Pound, but I simply couldn’t abide Mr. Balcomb. He was at my mercy in a sense, because he was without money to continue publishing on his own. So, again with my father’s help, I bought him out, too, for about the same amount paid to Phelps. I don’t remember my father ever saying what I should do. I think he knew it was hopeless to try to tell me. So he provided the $3,000 required to buy the company and the inventory.

  Now I was free to go on alone.

  I had taken a real liking to Lewis’s The Monk, this strange, sadistic, weird story of a girl who enters a monastery dressed as a monk an
d seduces the head of the monastery, who himself, in a lustful passion, murders another girl, and so on. And I was interested in the history of Lewis himself, who was an eccentric eighteenth-century Englishman from a family of considerable wealth. I decided to go ahead with its publication.

  Balcomb had hired a professor to do a kind of variorum edition of the book, with all sorts of scholarly notes about the different editions published and changes made across the years, a pedantic exercise that repulsed me. I eventually did publish the original edition and the variorum changes in a very small hardcover edition, but was able to get an introduction from John Berryman, an excellent poet and littérateur (also rather psychotic, as Lewis had been) to write another introduction. Berryman admired The Monk on its own creative merit and he was able communicate that feeling.

  Berryman wrote that The Monk was “one of the authentic prodigies of English fiction, a book in spite of various crudenesses so good that even after a century and a half it is possible to consider it unhistorically; and yet it has never quite become a standard novel. Several reasons for this must be its intermittent unavailability, its reputation for eroticism, its not being reinforced by excellence in Lewis’s other imaginative work, so that it has had to stand alone.”13 Berryman went on to explain that Lewis’s father had secured him the post of attaché in the British embassy at The Hague when Lewis was not quite nineteen. Out of boredom with Dutch society, he began composing the novel and finished it in an astonishingly short period of time.

  The book created a sensation instantly. … It was attacked, defended, parodied, plundered, dramatized, opera’d, adapted, translated, imitated. … On coming of age in July 1796 [Lewis] was returned to Parliament … (taking the seat, oddly, of the author [Thomas Beckford] of Vathek) and when a second edition was called for in October he not merely put his name on the title-page but added “M.P.” This was oil to fire.