Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  In order to let us see the interior of the house, as I went on to say, the real estate agent had to break a window. We were charmed and amazed by the originality of the place. We asked the agent how much it would cost to rent for one season. Adding up the main house (the Quonset hut), the studio (also a Quonset hut) and the cinderblock house, it came to eight or nine thousand dollars. We said, “Well, how much would it cost to buy it?” He said, “Twelve thousand.” That included the two acres of land not far from the ocean. It sounded ludicrous even then, early on in the real estate boom. Later that year I brought my father and mother to look at it and they were stunned—“You bought that? You paid twelve thousand dollars for that?” We had, and it became our beloved home, a transformed Quonset hut.

  I have never been to Chareau’s Maison de Verre in Paris, supposedly one of the most important examples of twentieth-century French architecture, but I’ve seen many photographs of it. You could perhaps tell that the East Hampton house was by the same architect because of the way metal and glass were used in its design. The furniture in the house had been designed by another modern architect, Frederick John Kiesler. He was about five feet tall and we called him the Little Genius. I knew Kiesler well and liked him very much. Like Chareau, he was never able to get a major project in this country. The Museum of Modern Art, however, exhibited a full-scale model of Kiesler’s Endless House. He designed furniture that was unique, made from plywood. It looked like Jean Arp paintings. In the Endless House the furniture formed part of the walls. In Motherwell’s house, you could turn the Kiesler pieces upside down, it didn’t matter: a table could become a chair—equally satisfactory. When we moved in, the living room had Kiesler’s work in it but Motherwell took it all back. Sad for us.

  I think Motherwell had wanted to leave the house because he was unhappy personally. His Mexican wife, Maria Emilia Ferreira y Moyers, had left him, and later he married Betty Little who, I was told, was very stiff, very bourgeois, very conservative, the wrong person to live in a house like that. So Motherwell bought a brownstone in New York. (He would later marry a third time, to the painter Helen Frankenthaler.)

  It was very difficult when we first moved out there with our baby, Peter. It had snowed heavily and it was freezing. The first night there was snow down to the ocean, and I almost drove into the water by accident. Then, during the summer, people began showing up and everyone said, “Oh, my God, it’s impossible. It’s as hot as a furnace.” The house was surrounded by burning sand and there were no trees for shelter. The metal roof absorbed the heat. I fixed this by draping soaker hoses over the roof. Then I put in a couple of exhaust fans—simple, inexpensive things that also helped to bring down the temperature. Years later my son Peter and I wood-shingled the metal roof. No self-respecting architect would have ever thought of that, let alone have done it. As the years passed we planted a lawn, and the trees finally grew over the house and joined at the top. It got to be very comfortable and beautiful, albeit strange.

  Motherwell had done things to the original house that had lessened the impact of the original plan—put in a partition toward the end of the room where there was a fireplace, defeating its purpose and spoiling the craziness of the place. As soon as I moved in I ripped that out of the center of the ground floor and relocated it at one end.

  I made several major changes to the studio Motherwell had used, next to the house, greatly improving it. The ceiling had no insulation and there was a concrete floor. It wasn’t really livable. Motherwell painted at night, so light wasn’t important to him. The studio had a southern exposure—not ideal—so we put some corrugated plastic transparent panels in the roof, letting in more light. Robert Rosenberg, a wonderful architect who lived out there and became our best friend, designed an addition to the studio—a little roofed terrace that encircled a tree, and a photo lab (Loly was a photographer), a kitchen and a bathroom, and a linoleum floor in the main area. You could live in it and paint: it was a self- contained unit.

  In the third unit, the cinderblock structure where Chareau had lived, I took the bathroom out of the center of the one rectangular room and made an interior pool, very beautiful, with windows on all four sides. We also put a dome in the ceiling where the toilet had vented out. The cinderblock unit had the same kind of floor as the main house: three-inch circles of wood cut from tree trunks and embedded in concrete. The number and size of the rooms was changeable. Chareau had placed wooden screens on wheels and thus created moveable walls.

  Making any adjustment to the original design was always a difficult decision. We mulled it over for years every time we needed a change, trying to conform to Chareau’s original concept, and I think (with the possible exception of the shingled roof) we held true.

  In the late 1960s we made a film there, released in 1970, that Norman Mailer wrote, directed, and starred in, a chaotic violent film called Maidstone. Norman at the time prided himself on Indian arm wrestling. That was one of the big things in his life then, along with punching people out. But many other, more peaceful, people stayed with us. We threw lots of parties. Everyone loved the house.

  I had a vision of all the Grove people living out there in East Hampton—and they did, or almost. I searched out houses that were abandoned and bought them. We moved them on large dollies to another location I had bought, and rebuilt them. I even bought a tiny church, which we hauled to a new site and transformed into a little theater. We chopped one wall off lengthwise and used it as a stage with a big wooden outdoor plaza surrounded by trees. We called it Evergreen Theater.

  After living in the Chareau house for thirty years, it had become part of me. Then I moved away in 1980 in part because I had gotten divorced again, for the third time, and thought a change was necessary. But it was the stupidest single act of my life. The new owner tore the house down a couple of years later. I have never been able to bring myself to drive past where it once stood.

  Living in East Hampton, Loly and I found ourselves in the midst of a wonderful social scene, very nurturing to artists. I’ve never experienced anything like it before or since. It was not quite the Cedar Tavern in the Village, but it was as if the bar had suddenly added several new layers of personality.

  Soon after we moved there, we were invited to a party for Jackson Pollock at the house of someone we didn’t know, Alfonso Ossorio. There was a big crowd that night at his estate, the Creeks. Ossorio, a formidable and iconoclastic artist who had been born in the Philippines, had an exquisite sensibility and a lot of money, and he helped other people financially, especially Pollock. The artists, for their part, certainly weren’t wallowing in money, but some of their friends were hardly poor. It was a highly unusual group of people, who seemed to cover all the creative ground—Pollock, Pollock’s biographer Jeffrey Potter and his wife, Penny, Bill and Elaine de Kooning, writer Harold Rosenberg, artists Warren Brandt, Paul Brach, and Miriam Schapiro, the architects Robert Rosenberg, Frederick John Kiesler, and Paul Lester Wiener, and Wiener’s wife, Ingeborg ten Haeff, a very good painter herself. Leo Castelli, the gallery owner, lived across the road from our house. Amongst those who later became my close friends were the writers Berton Roueché, who wrote the New Yorker’s annals of medicine, and Joe Liss and his wife, Milly. There was a kind of extended family feeling that I didn’t know could exist.

  To me Pollock was a little bit apart. He wasn’t somebody you could be chummy with, as you could be with de Kooning. Actually, I felt much closer to Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner. We thought of him as a great artist of the period, whether or not anybody knew what he was doing. Certainly Joan thought he was great—he and de Kooning and Kline, and of course I saw painting through Joan’s eyes whether or not I was married to her or even in her proximity.

  I think it took the artists a long time to understand that they were becoming successful. I can only think of this as being related to the Depression in some way. The older artists had never had money, didn’t own things like cars. Franz Kline had never had a car, but when he was l
iving in the “Red House” (so called because it was painted bright red) in Bridgehampton, in the early fifties, he bought a car for $150, a huge Lincoln convertible. It looked to me like a steam locomotive. As I recall, he and Pollock took it out on the road and hit more or less the first car coming toward them, head on. That night, the artist Ludwig Sander, an ex-GI like me, came to my place and told me that Kline had to appear in court for demolishing the other car, which had about six people in it—all uninjured, thank goodness. Franz said that the only thing he owned was his Lincoln, and he was afraid they would take it away from him, so I agreed to buy it for that same $150. In court, the judge let Franz off with a warning. Even the law enforcement people in East Hampton looked kindly upon artists, and Jackson was a recipient of that forgivingness more than once. So I gave Franz back the gorgeous car and he returned my check.

  8

  Samuel Beckett

  One day in the early 1950s, the mailman brought me an unexpected letter from Sylvia Beach, asking for an appointment. For many years she had been the famous proprietor of Shakespeare and Company, the leading and legendary English-language bookstore in Paris. She had been close friends with James Joyce and published his Ulysses in 1922. She had also known Samuel Beckett for many years. During our meeting she spoke about Beckett in the warmest terms as a writer of great importance whose day would surely come.

  Her words sounded a magical note to me.

  When I had read Beckett’s pieces in Transition Workshop, edited by Eugène Jolas in Paris, I was still a student at the New School. Jolas had Beckett listed under the category of “paramyths.” Other writers listed in the same genre included Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein, and Dylan Thomas. And of course there was also Henry Miller.

  After the meeting with Sylvia Beach, I saw an article that told of the opening in Paris on January 5 of that year of a play by Samuel Beckett called Waiting for Godot. I somehow got a copy of Godot—it had only been published in French, the language in which Beckett had written it—and I read it. My immediate response was, “Here is a kind of human insight that I have never before experienced. I want to publish it.” I set about finding Beckett’s New York agent, Marion Saunders, and made one of the earliest Grove Press contracts. The contract itself was with Beckett’s French publisher, Les Éditions de Minuit, the first of many I was to sign with them. It called for an advance of $1,000 against royalties.

  About this time, after I had read Godot, I asked Wallace Fowlie, a specialist in French literature who had been one of my professors as well as my friend at the New School, to give me his opinion of it. I believed him to be a far more conservative reader than I. But he more than confirmed what Sylvia Beach had told me and what I myself had concluded. He told me that Beckett would come to be known as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

  I had the same sort of feeling about two more “French” writers we contracted for in that same year: Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet.

  June 18, 1953

  New York

  Dear Mr. Beckett,

  It is about time that I write a letter to you—now that agents, publishers, friends, etc., have all acted as go-betweens. A copy of our catalogue has already been mailed to you, so you will be able to see what kind of a publisher you have been latched onto. I hope that you won’t be too disappointed.

  We are very happy to have the contract back from Minuit, and believe me, we will do what we can to make your work known in this country.

  The first order of the day would appear to be the translation. I have just sent off a letter to [Merlin editor] Alex Trocchi telling him that the difficulties did not seem as ominous from here as they evidently do from there to him at least.

  If you would accept my first choice as translator the whole thing would be easily settled. That choice of course being you. That already apparently is a satisfactory condition insofar as the play is concerned. …

  I explained to Trocchi at great length, and probably with great density, why I thought it better for Merlin not to publish the first act in advance of book publication. It seems to me that a whole act hardly comes under the heading of an “excerpt” and might really serve to take a little of the edge off of the book publication. I suggested instead that they publish excerpts from the novels whenever pieces are ready, and join me in putting the play out as a book as soon as conveniently possible. I hope that you will join me in this idea. En Attendant Godot should burst upon us as an entity in my opinion.

  As for the translation of the novels, I am waiting first, to hear from you, what you advise, and whether or not you will tackle them yourself. If your decision is no, and I do hope that it won’t be, we can discuss between us the likely people to do it.

  Sylvia Beach is certainly the one you must blame for your future appearance on the Grove Press list. I went to see her with your work on my mind, and after she talked of you … I immediately decided that what the Grove Press needed most in the world was Samuel Beckett. I told her that, and then she suggested that I make a specific offer. I certainly had not thought of that up to the very moment she took out a piece of paper and pencil and prepared to write down the terms.

  A second person was also very important. He is Wallace Fowlie. At my request he read the play and the two novels with great care and came back with the urgent plea for me to take on your work. Fowlie is also on your list. His new translation of Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and a long study of them, is just now coming out. …

  Chatto & Windus have not one single copy of your book on Proust. If you ever come across one I would much appreciate it if you would let me borrow it. Proust is my particular passion and I would so much like to know what you have, or had, to say about him. …

  This would seem to be an already indecently long letter, so I will close. If you would give me your own address we might be able to communicate directly in the future.

  Sincerely,

  Barney Rosset

  June 25, 1953

  6 rue de Favorites

  Paris 15me

  Dear Mr. Rosset

  Thank you for your letter of June 18. Above my private address, confidentially. For serious matters write to me here, for business to Lindon, Ed. de Minuit, please.

  Re translations. I shall send you to-day or to-morrow my first version of Godot. …

  With regard to the novels my position is that I should greatly prefer not to undertake the job myself, while having the right to revise whatever translation is made. But I know from experience how much more difficult it is to revise a bad translation than to do the thing oneself. … I translated myself some years ago two very brief fragments for Georges Duthuit’s Transition. If I can get hold of the number in which they appeared I shall send it to you.

  I understand very well your point of view when you question the propriety of the publication in Merlin of Act I of Godot and I have no doubt that Trocchi will appreciate it too.

  My own copy of my Proust has disappeared and I really do not know where to suggest your looking for one. It is a very youthful work, but perhaps not entirely beside the point. Its premises are less feeble than its conclusions.

  With regard to my work in general I hope you realize what you are letting yourself in for. I do not mean the heart of the matter, which is unlikely to disturb anybody, but certain obscenities of form which may not have struck you in French as they will in English, and which frankly (it is better you should know this before we get going) I am not at all disposed to mitigate. I do not of course realize what is possible in America from this point of view and what is not. Certainly as far as I know such passages, faithfully translated, would not be tolerated in England. I think you might do well to talk to Fowlie about this.

  Sylvia Beach said very nice things about the Grove Press and that you might be over here in the late summer. I hope you will.

  Thank you for your interesting catalogue. I shall certainly ask you for some of your books at a later st
age.

  Thanking you for taking this chance with my work and wishing us a fair wind, I am

  Yours sincerely

  Samuel Beckett

  July 13, 1953

  New York

  Dear Mr. Beckett,

  It was nice to receive your letter of June 25 and then your letter of July 5.

  First, I must tell you that I have not received your translation of Godot. I am most anxious to see it. I would like to plan on publication of the play for 1954, either in the first or second half of the year, depending entirely upon completion date of the translation. I would think the ideal thing would be to coincide publication with performance, but that is ideal only and I would not think it wise to indefinitely postpone publication while waiting for the performance.

  As to the translation of the novels, I am naturally disappointed to hear that you prefer not to undertake translation yourself. I can well see your point, however, and it would seem a little sad to attempt to take off that much time to go back over your own books but I hope that you will change your mind. …

  As to the obscenities within the books, my suggestion is that we do not worry about that until it becomes necessary. Sometimes things like that have a way of solving themselves.

  I do hope you locate a copy of Transition with the fragments translated by yourself.

  I do plan on going to Europe in the fall, and I will certainly look forward to meeting you then.

  Yours sincerely,

  Barney Rosset

  July 18, 1953

  6 rue des Favorites

  Paris 15me