Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  Two weeks later, on my thirty-seventh birthday, May 28, 1959, Ablard came to his so-called decision—which was that there was no decision. Apparently sympathetic to our case, he had passed the ball to Postmaster General Summerfield, stating that overturning the ban on Lady Chatterley would “cast a doubt on the rulings of a coordinate executive department.”40 We again asked that the ban be lifted but received no reply. On June 10, 1959 I sued the Postmaster of New York City, Robert K. Christenberry, who was in possession of the books. but Postmaster General Summerfield’s decision came the following day.

  Based on standing law, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was found to be obscene despite Grove’s testimony:

  The book is replete with descriptions in minute detail of sexual acts engaged in or discussed by the book’s principal characters. These descriptions utilize filthy, offensive and degrading words and terms. Any literary merit the book may have is far outweighed by the pornographic and smutty passages and words, so that the book, taken as a whole, is an obscene and filthy work.41

  Oddly, I had already formed a great deal of sympathy for Charles Ablard. We had no choice but to go to the press and inform them that the Post Office, despite professional literary opinion and the guarantees of the First Amendment, had made this outrageous decision. The ensuing editorials and stories provided further evidence for Rembar to use in court to rebut the argument that the book offended “community standards of prurience.”

  Our day in court came on June 30, 1959, before Frederick van Pelt Bryan. The court read the record of the prior hearing, there were no additional witnesses. S. Hazard Gillespie, Jr., US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, represented the Post Office. Grove Press argued that the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was guaranteed by the US Constitution; that the book was not obscene, and even if it were found to be so within the limits of the statute, it was nonetheless protected under a larger constitutional umbrella. It was a new tactic, and one that would be advanced in later trials. Rembar recalled, “I would ask the court to pay little attention to what had been said to be obscene or not obscene under the various statutes. No matter what Congress or the state legislature had meant to do, the First Amendment necessarily confined their enactment in narrow straits.”42

  The Post Office, outside its own territory this time, reminded the court of its power to ban mailed books and postulated that they knew obscenity when they saw it, even if a publisher did not. They conceded that Lawrence’s writing was good, with the caveat that “the excellence of Lawrence’s descriptions make it all the more necessary to ban the book.” It was a stunning statement. The better the writing, the worse the crime? Gillespie read one of the novel’s sexual interludes aloud, and turned to the court: “I say to you where you find passages of that type spread throughout a book which literally describes the decline of a woman of this nature, your Honor is faced with a very serious problem.”43

  He further attempted to bind the court to the earlier Summerfield ruling with the judicial powers of the Post Office, claiming that “the determination by the Postmaster General is conclusive upon the court unless it is found to be unsupported by substantial evidence and is clearly wrong.” Fortunately, Judge Bryan rejected this argument, ruling on July 21 that “The Postmaster General has no special competence or technical knowledge on this subject which qualifies him to render an informed judgment entitled to special weight in the courts.” The Post Office had operated outside its jurisdiction, and “discretion” in obscenity cases was beyond its powers. Bryan dismissed Summerfield’s ruling and would decide “whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover is obscene within the meaning of the statute and thus excludable from constitutional protection.”

  He found in our favor based upon the merits of the book itself and the concept of community standards:

  It is not the effect upon the irresponsible, the immature, or the sensually minded which is controlling. The material must be judged in terms of its effect on those it is likely to reach who are conceived of as the average man of normal sensual impulses. …

  The material must also exceed the limits of tolerance imposed by current standards of the community with respect to freedom of expression on matters concerning sex and sex relations.

  Bryan concluded that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not an obscene work and was therefore protected by the First Amendment. The Post Office had to deliver the books without further interference. Its powers had been fundamentally redefined. Our victory was overwhelming. The right of “serious publishers to issue books without threats of confiscation and prosecution” had been upheld.

  The Post Office appealed on December 2, 1959, and lost again on March 25, 1960. The Bryan decision would stand as a landmark precedent in deciding all future obscenity cases. We had succeeded in removing the legal risk for the bookstores, and press coverage of the obscenity proceedings, combined with our advertising campaign, had resulted in massive public interest in buying the book. But of course we had no copyright on Lady Chatterley. Pollinger refused to deal with us, so I said therefore we had no further obligations to the estate.

  Grove had sold 110,000 copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by the time Bryan’s decision was announced on July 21, 1959. The book was second on the New York Times bestseller list on September 6, and then sales declined steadily. There was still great interest in the book but our market exclusive had disappeared. Pirate paperbacks were killing the sales of our hardcover edition.

  New American Library (NAL) had been licensed in 1946 by Knopf to publish an expurgated paperbound edition in 1946. It was revealed that, during the trial, NAL had made a separate agreement with Pollinger to publish a censored paperback edition, which was ready for sale when Bryan’s decision was made public. Based on the contracts with Pollinger and Knopf, NAL proclaimed their edition to be the legitimate one in an advertising campaign. Knopf issued a statement clarifying that he had licensed only the expurgated edition to NAL. He had not been party to the Pollinger contract with NAL and, to his credit, withdrew his support from both.

  Pocket Books also emerged as a competitor. I had negotiated paperback reprint rights with them in May of 1959. A contract was drawn up that we had agreed upon, but when Pocket returned their copy for my signature, they had made changes that were unacceptable and the deal was dead. I then signed with Dell Publishing for them to distribute a paperback reprint. Pocket Books had been developing their own edition and simply went ahead without an agreement with Grove.

  By September 10, 1959 there were five paperbound editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the market. Grove had a distribution agreement with only one, Dell, and 1,750,000 copies of the Grove paperback were by then in print. We also had a contract with Random House for a Modern Library edition. We were forced to run a special on the hardcover to get rid of them: one free with ten. Publishers Weekly noted that “the public image of the whole book trade has been cheapened by the ‘Chatterley’ sweepstakes.” At the end of the day, we may have saved Lady Chatterley from the censors, but we still had to fight the pirates just like D. H. Lawrence.

  Mugshots of Michael Tansey, Barney Rosset’s maternal great-grandfather, 1884 and 1902.

  Barney Lee Rosset, Jr., 1923.

  Barney Rosset, Chicago, c. 1928, Lake Michigan in background.

  Mary Tansey Rosset and Barnet Rosset, Sr., aboard S. S. Lurline, trip to Hawaii, 1935.

  Parker School, senior class yearbook, 1940.

  In his senior year at Parker School, Rosset appeared in a production of R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End. Rosset standing on left, Haskell Wexler extreme right.

  Mary Tansey Rosset and son Barney, Chicago-New York trip, April 1941.

  Nancy Ashenhurst and Haskell Wexler, at home shortly after their marriage, c. 1943.

  Barney Rosset at a Camp Kanchapara, India, awaiting assignment, Fall 1944.

  Barney Rosset with his Rolleiflex camera.

  A duck is presented for approval to Barney Rosset and other US soldiers, China, 1944. />
  Barney Rosset and his “Foto Moto” weapons carrier, Chinese/Japanese front, January 1945.

  Chinese refugee in liberated Liuchow, the day after the departure of the Japanese, July 1945. Photo by Barney Rosset.

  Barney Rosset and Meredith “Muddy” Rhule on pillbox, May 1945.

  Joan Mitchell, Fulton Street apartment, Brooklyn, 1947. Photo by Barney Rosset.

  Joan Mitchell and Barney Rosset in front of their apartment, 1 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY, 1947.

  Barney Rosset, c. 1948.

  Joan Mitchell and Barney Rosset in the one-room Paris apartment they shared at 73, rue Galande, 1948.

  Barney Rosset plays chess, 267 ½ West Eleventh Street, Greenwich Village, New York City, 1948. Photo by Haskell Wexler.

  Barney’s cat Minoulouche during chess, 267 ½ West Eleventh St., 1948. Photo by Haskell Wexler.

  Barney Rosset and Cuban dancer Nora Penalver with proprietors of La Cabane Cubaine, 42, rue Fontaine, Paris, early 1950s.

  Barney and second wife Hannelore “Loly” Eckert Rosset, honeymoon aboard SS Flandre, September 1953.

  Grove Press front window with view of Grace Church, 795 Broadway, New York City, Summer 1954.

  Barney Rosset, Grove Press office, 795 Broadway, New York City, Summer 1954.

  The Evergreen Books/Grove Press first English edition of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, 1953.

  Robert Motherwell’s East Hampton Quonset hut, designed by Pierre Chareau, was sold to Rosset in 1954. Beckett stayed here when he came to the U.S. in 1964.

  Barney and son Peter, 1955.

  Barney Rosset and Grove Press’ First Amendment attorney Charles Rembar.

  First Grove Press paperback edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1959).

  Richard Seaver and Barney Rosset, Living Theater event, 1960. Photo © Estate of Fred W. McDarrah.

  Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Barney Rosset, Washington Square Park, New York City, 1957. Photo by Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos.

  Barney Rosset and Maurice Girodias, East Hampton, NY, 1960.

  Book party, Robert Gover’s One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, 1962. Photo © Estate of Fred W. McDarrah.

  Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, 1958.

  Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, 1961.

  Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, 1964.

  The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965.

  Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset on the set of Film, 1964.

  Drawing by Gregory Corso for Barney Rosset, c. 1965.

  Rosset together with Norman Mailer, late 1960s, at a Grove party. Photo courtesy Astrid Myers Rosset.

  Barney Rosset and Fred Jordan, Grove Press offices, c. 1970. Photo by Bob Adelman.

  Fred Jordan, Lord George Weidenfeld, and Barney Rosset, American Booksellers Association convention, New Orleans, May 1985. Photo by Arne Svenson.

  Petition on behalf of Barney Rosset, signed by Samuel Beckett, 1986.

  Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset, Paris, 1986. Photo by Bob Adelman.

  Samuel Beckett watches a production of Waiting for Godot staged by inmates at San Quentin State Prison on a television brought to him by Barney Rosset. Paris nursing home room, 1988. Photo by Barney Rosset.

  Portrait of Barney Rosset by Allen Ginsberg. Inscribed by Ginsberg: Publisher-hero Barney Rossett [sic] whose Grove Press legal battles liberated U.S. literature & film—at Tower Books, N.Y. symposium on new 90’s Censorship Politics, June 20, 1991. © 2010 The Allen Ginsberg LLC.

  Astrid Myers Rosset and Barney Rosset at Kenzaburō Ōe’s Nobel Prize award ceremony, Stockholm, Sweden, 1994. Photo by Vilgot Sjoman.

  Kenzaburō Ōe is made a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City, May 21, 1997. Photo by Astrid Myers Rosset.

  Return to China, Kunming Airport, 1996. Photo by Astrid Myers Rosset.

  11

  A Return to Film: Film, I Am Curious (Yellow) and Other Celluloid Adventures44

  In 1963 I decided to make another try at film production. Evergreen Theater, Inc., was to exist as a separate unit, and it would originate and produce motion pictures. The Evergreen Theater team was to consist of Grove editors Richard Seaver, Fred Jordan, myself, and theater director Alan Schneider, who had directed both stage and television versions of Waiting for Godot and had a Broadway hit with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

  I described the goals of the Evergreen Theater as “a logical extension of our activity as publisher of many of the leading contemporary playwrights and novelists.” In the wake of Hollywood’s postwar decline, there was a growing audience for films of a higher intellectual quality, more in line with the literature Grove was publishing.

  Foreign films led the way. By the early 1960s, foreign releases outnumbered domestic productions by nearly four to one. And more than a few recent imports were from directors who had formerly worked as writers, playwrights, and journalists, including Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Grove author Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Shoot the Piano Player. The link between literary and cinematic art was underscored by the newly popularized notion of the auteur, which came into fashion in this country along with the French New Wave directors who fostered it.

  This was the context in which we created Evergreen Theater. Greatly helped by Random House’s Jason Epstein, we entered into an agreement with Four Star Television to produce original scripts provided by Grove and Evergreen Review authors.

  In the fall of 1963, as I have mentioned, we asked for and secured film scripts from five writers: Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, Robbe-Grillet, and Duras. Requests were also made to others, including Jean Genet, who declined. He was then and later a Grove author, but that did not keep him from angrily, though with a wonderfully comic affect, dismissing the proposal from Fred Jordan and me. Using the London hotel room’s TV set as a prop, Genet explained to us—or at least to himself—that the little people on the screen were not really there. He proved this by walking to the back of the set. Where were they? He wanted “real actors.” Later, though, we would distribute the only film Genet ever directed, Un Chant d’Amour, a black-and-white twenty-six-minute film he had made in 1950. It was beautiful, incredibly emotional.

  A September 1963 article in the New York Times gave hints about the nature of some of these commissioned scripts. Pinter described his piece as one that “might be described as a triangle set in an English basement.” He went on to portray Ionesco’s work, like his Rhinoceros, as satirizing “conformity by combining spy-thriller and comedy effects into one adventure.” Under a misspelled attribution as “Barney Grosset,” I characterized Duras’s love story as being “set in a rural French town that uses the stream-of-consciousness effects of Hiroshima, Mon Amour” while Robbe-Grillet’s Frank’s Return was “an unusual adventure set in a Caribbean locale.” Actually, Robbe-Grillet’s was meant to be done in collaboration with my friend Haskell Wexler as cinematographer and co-director and set in Portuguese-speaking Brazil.45

  We planned to combine short films by Beckett, Ionesco, and Pinter into one feature-length production, with someone different directing each segment. Beckett’s Film, as I mentioned earlier, was the first—and ultimately the only one of the five—to be made by Evergreen Theater. It premiered at the 1965 Venice Film Festival, and made its US debut at the New York Film Festival that fall. It then toured numerous international festivals, and won awards at films festivals in Venice, Oberhausen, and a number of others. But it did not succeed at the box office.

  Duras, Robbe-Grillet, Pinter, and Ionesco also completed their screenplays. The BBC eventually produced Pinter’s, and Ionesco’s The Hard-Boiled Egg was finally made by James Fotopolous and shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 2006. Duras’ script, which we could not finance, evolved into her novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein, published by Grove in 1966.

  In 1967 we announced the acquisiti
on of the Cinema 16 Film Library, Amos Vogel’s film society, which had ceased regular programming in 1963 but continued as a nontheatrical distributor, mainly to universities. Purchased for around $50,000, the library consisted of 200 shorts and experimental works, including films by Georges Franju, Stan Brakhage, Carmen D’Avino, Peter Weiss, Agnès Varda, Kenneth Anger, and Michelangelo Antonioni. We now had the distinction of distributing many of the finest works from the cinematic avant-garde to complement our growing list of books.

  That same year we took out a ten-year lease on an empty theater on East Eleventh Street, as mentioned before. We rebuilt this space, installed good film facilities, and reopened it as the Evergreen Theater, a venue for plays and films. We also opened a 1930s-style bar in the front, which we called the Black Circle, and moved our growing offices into the floor above the theater.

  Around this time we also began buying features to run in other commercial theaters. The first slate included a handful of literary-related titles (Alain Robbe-Grillet’s L’Immortelle, Norman Mailer’s Beyond the Law, Mary Ellen Bute’s Passages from Finnegans Wake), documentaries (Allen King’s Warrendale, Frank Simon’s The Queen, and Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies), and international cinema (Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend).