She was arrested September 11, 1971, on a charge of aggravated harassment after sending letters and placing telephone calls in which she threatened my family. Having been released on her own recognizance and after missing the court date for her hearing, she showed up outside the Grove offices with a bench warrant out for her arrest and an ice pick in her pocket. She was taken into custody later that day. As my lawyer, Shad Polier, wrote Dr. Naomi
Goldstein who was assigned to evaluate Solanas’s psychiatric condition, “While there is every reason to believe that she intended to assault Mr. Rosset with the ice pick, the District Attorney concluded that there was not sufficient evidence of specific intent to provide the basis for an arrest on the charge of possession of a dangerous weapon. Apparently there will not be sufficient evidence for such a charge until such a time as Miss Solanas attempts to make an actual assault.”
One night Paul Morrissey, film director and Warhol associate, and I followed her. Our theory was that if we followed her, she couldn’t kill us. We had a lookout. A guy saw her coming down the street and we could not get the two police detectives who were assigned to shadowing her. They were caught in traffic. She had announced prior to this that she was going to kill me. There she came, so we ran around the block, onto University Place and found a cop who, discovering the ice pick she was carrying, disarmed her.
On January 5, 1972, Solanas was certified as mentally ill. She escaped from prison nearly a year later and Maurice and I were immediately alerted. The following day we hired Pinkerton guards to work at the Grove offices. Solanas called Grove on February 23 to ask if the police had been notified and to request that we send a letter to her doctor stating that a job awaited her at Grove. She sent many letters, one dated March 5, 1973, where she said, “By the way, when I was in front of Grove with the ice pick I wasn’t going to hurt anyone,” and “You’re also trying to get me to think you, Rosset, are afraid of me. Surely you must know, if I really wanted to get you, I wouldn’t warn you or subject myself to trouble over the letters before I had a chance to get you.”
By March she was back in the House of Detention in East Elmhurst, New York. She continued to write to us: “How can I be prosecuted for a letter I wrote while a mental patient?” She sent “demands” on April 17 that included this requirement: “The correct edition of the SCUM Manifesto printed on the front pages of the ten largest Sunday papers in the English-speaking world. … My royalties from past editions of the Manifesto I estimate the work has sold several million copies (exactly how many millions I haven’t decided yet) and I want 10% of the gross” as well as “a public confession, written jointly by me and one of you.”
From there she ended up in obscurity, in and out of asylums. She died in 1988 in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.
There are and there always will be contradictions about Girodias’s life because he was a very contradictory, enigmatic person. I think Maurice was extraordinary, a serious publisher of great importance. He had a unique sensibility that was hard to pin down. He was also a dandy. I would say his tastes were arcane. If he had been on the road with Kerouac, he would have kept his tie on. He had a streak of mysticism, just like Henry Miller, who was a sort of mentor to him. At least once he traveled to India, to the French enclave of Pondicherry by way of the southern tip of India, two days by taxi from the last train tracks, where there was a guru, a Frenchwoman known as The Mother.78
And Maurice and I shared another odd bit of fate: we were both of Jewish and Catholic ancestry and neither of us ever heard the other say a good word about any established religion. Beyond that, we had both cherished and loved Jacqueline without allowing any feelings of jealousy to interfere.
In 1959 André Malraux, who had written the book I treasured the most of any, Man’s Fate, condemned Maurice for publishing books that were forbidden in their countries of origin, although not in France, a strange crime indeed and a charge especially peculiar in terms of who made it. At that moment he was the minister of culture for France, serving under Charles de Gaulle. How could this great writer, this great activist who worked his heart out helping the Spanish Loyalist Air Force during the Civil War in Spain, how could he, this man who had been imprisoned for robbing a temple in Indochina, a non-crime as far as he and Maurice were considered, put Maurice in jail for publishing some great books in France, including those of Henry Miller, because they had been illegal in the United States?
I wrote Malraux a letter, asking him to let Maurice out of jail. He actually answered me, very cursorily, I thought. However, shortly thereafter Maurice was released. I would like to think I had at least a little bit of influence in the matter.
14
The Beats and Naked Lunch
Grove Press published the Beat Generation writers, ultimately including William Burroughs, almost from the beginning. For me personally it all started with Henry Miller in 1940 and went into high gear when Donald Allen joined Grove in the early 1950s.
As I have described, Don and I first met as slightly aging, post–GI Bill classmates in a Columbia University publishing course. I admired Don very much, and respected his judgment and his knowledge. After we started Evergreen Review, Don immersed himself in this special group of writers who had formed a loose alliance with each other and were mostly living in San Francisco. Our descriptive phrase for the Beat phenomenon was the “San Francisco Scene,” and their work formed the basis of Evergreen Review, No. 2, in 1957, which played an important role in attracting poets and writers whom Grove subsequently published.
Why San Francisco? Well, as Kenneth Rexroth wrote in the issue, taking a potshot at the East Coast establishment, “It is easy to understand why all this has centered in San Francisco. It is a long way from Astor Place …” (At the time, Grove’s office happened to be only three and a half blocks away, at 59 West Ninth Street.) The issue, which Don and I edited, included such writers as Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, Josephine Miles, Jack Spicer, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, along with Allen Ginsberg and his epochal Howl. And finally, we included Henry Miller, to me the pioneer Beat spirit and readily accepted as such by his younger colleagues. Our “San Francisco Scene” became a landmark of its own and was the only Evergreen issue we ever reprinted—and more than once.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti rightly described the issue as “mainly Donald Allen’s baby” but, he continued, Don “went heavily by what Allen Ginsberg told him to publish. Allen suggested who should be in there.”
So these San Francisco writers, along with Ferlinghetti’s oh-so-bright City Lights, were illuminated permanently by Evergreen. We went on to publish many of them in book form—Kerouac, McClure, and others, and later, of course, Don Allen placed them very prominently in his landmark Grove anthology, The New American Poetry.
There were strong political overtones in all of this. I think a truly important, catalytic moment was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. That “happening”—tumultuous protests in the streets—took on the aspects of a battlefield. One photograph, which we published in Evergreen Review, was literally taken in the war zone. William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Dick Seaver, and Allen Ginsberg marched together, a likely crew indeed. To me, the Beat Generation writers, even if they didn’t always see it that way, were also of necessity a courageous political movement and a proud icon for freedom of expression. It was what it was, and it was also a part of me.
I think now of Allen Ginsberg as the organizer of the Beat Generation, the conceptual person who guided the others. Wherever there was a moral battlefield somewhere or other on this planet, say Czechoslovakia or India or Cuba, more often than not Allen Ginsberg showed up, ready to shed light into the darkness, chant Om, bring a sense of beatitude and peace to the scene. William Burroughs was the brain of the Beat Generation; Jack Kerouac, the Beats’ shining star, was its heart, and Allen was its soul. This in no way dims the luster of Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Michael McClure or Gregory
Corso or Gary Snyder or many others. But Allen and Jack have always held a special place for me. My relationship with Allen lasted some forty years. The two of us felt we shared in the battle to liberate literature, and with it American consciousness. At the time of his death in 1997, I wrote a letter to a newspaper affirming his importance, “Ten years or so after World War II, Allen Ginsberg took strength and inspiration from the same place which had so buoyed up Walt Whitman. There were cries of madness and suicide from Brooklyn and other areas, but those same cries once again brought compassion and love.” My final words applied simply to the great Beat poet. “His generation was the ‘beat generation.’”
One thing Grove shared in common with the Beats was a passion for standing against censorship. Ferlinghetti had fought for Howl and McClure went through all sorts of indignities and troubles with his play The Beard in Los Angeles. They did their own part nobly and well. Our Grove tribe was closely allied to the Beats, and fighting censorship came with membership in Grove.
Much as I respected the Beats, things did not always go smoothly. I must confess to making a mistake in allowing Don Allen to edit Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, which infuriated Jack. Don, who later became a close friend of Kerouac’s, “straightened out” Jack’s very different kind of language and sentence structure. Kerouac responded, “What the hell, what do you think you’re doing? I did it that way on purpose.” Don put it all back together the way it had been. The Subterraneans was the most successful Kerouac book Grove ever published, but we did many more, including Doctor Sax and Mexico City Blues (both 1959), and Satori in Paris (1966).
Kerouac wrote me a letter on May 15, 1958:
Dear Barney:—
Sorry I haven’t seen you except a minute since New Year’s Eve. Glad Subterraneans doing well.
I’m very happy to hear you’re ready to do Doctor Sax next. It’s a work of great prestige. It’s an autobiographical Gothic myth set in New England. Rexroth + Ginsberg both agree it’s great. The subject matter will take us off the “hipster” trail awhile.
Let me know what you think, + I can then get busy + type up a nice clean new ms. of Doctor Sax for the printer on my new typewriter.
Drop a line anyhow.
Your friend,
Jack
In 1961 I went to Milan to testify in a trial in support of the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who was being sued for publishing Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, which the public prosecutor claimed was a work of pornography. I was the sole witness for the defense.
I met Feltrinelli in New York in 1959 when I was asked to interview him for a radio program we were producing at Grove. Already expressing his admiration for the Beats, he said they were “a new generation of hard authors and writers who tell the facts of life as they see it, in a harsh way, telling them in a crude way.” He believed such writing was salutary. “In every country there are problems and there is good and bad, and the only way to deal with that is to write about it or speak about it in direct terms.”79
Feltrinelli was to have his own hands full with censorship battles for translations of other Grove books, including Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and Henry Miller’s Tropics, but Kerouac’s Subterraneans really hit a nerve. One aspect of the book that set the judges off may have been its interracial romance between a white man and a black woman.
Ann Charters, in Beat Down to Your Soul, perceptively noted the attraction many of the Beats felt for black people, saying that “[John Clellon] Holmes and Kerouac romanticized the lives of drifters and [black] jazz musicians.” She goes on, “James Baldwin understood that these contemporary white writers were appropriating what they imagined as the specially soulful quality of black experience to empower themselves,” and then quotes Baldwin himself, “I had tried to convey something [to the Beats] of what it felt like to be a Negro and no one had been able to listen: They wanted their romance.”80
“The words of Beat slang are always violent, incisive, compact, and chosen from monosyllabic words,” Subterraneans translator Fernanda Pivano wrote in the preface to the Italian edition. In Kerouac’s case, Pivano stated, such language is put into patterns borrowed from the methods of jazz improvisation “with its diversions and return to a central theme.” Kerouac was particularly inspired by bop, she continued: “Bop was characterized by its detachment
from conventional melody, which proceeds according to pre- established syntactic rules, to follow a form of improvisation which was an end in itself, so as to absorb existing melodies.”81
Another sympathetic portrayal of Kerouac’s artistic intentions in The Subterraneans came from none other than Henry Miller. In his preface, he wrote,
We say that the poet, or genius, is always ahead of his time. True, but only because he’s so thoroughly of his time. “Keep moving!” he urges. … But the stick-in-the-muds don’t follow this kind of talk. … So what do they do? They pull him down off his perch, they starve him, they kick his teeth down his throat.82
It was almost as if Miller foresaw what would happen to the book in Italy, where the “stick-in-the-muds” attempted to stop the book’s distribution. The courts put Feltrinelli’s company on trial, citing The Subterraneans as pornographic. In June 1961, the Milan prosecutor’s office seized all copies of the book and sued the publisher.
Kerouac wrote a letter to the Italian judge presiding over the case, which we published in Evergreen Review, No. 31. He presented a surprising and highly literate analogy between his writing style and his Catholic upbringing, describing his form as “strictly confessional in accordance with the confessional form of … Notes from the Underground. The idea is to tell all about a recently concluded event in all its complexity, at least tell all that can be told without attempting to offend certain basic sensibilities in polite society.” Responding to the question of how he arrived at creating a novel with such a purpose in mind, Kerouac answered, “The practice of my narrative art, frankly, Gentlemen, has its roots in my experience inside the confessionals of a Catholic childhood. It was my belief then that to withhold any reasonably and decently explainable detail from the Father was a sin.”83 Thus, Kerouac disarmingly presented a Catholic side to his art that was sure to please the tribunal, which was bound to be influenced by the church. I myself, alone in the court with the judge, had tried my best to underscore the religious origins of Kerouac’s art.
At a hearing in October, the court acquitted the publisher and rescinded the seizure. It was reported to me that the conclusion of the judges was as follows: “The Subterraneans isn’t pornography because the book as a whole is not simply a vehicle for sexual description, the fragments of the book in question are not merely titillating unless they are removed from the context of the rest of the book. The book is therefore not obscene under Article 528 of the law.”
As I recounted in my winter 1997 Paris Review interview with Ken Jordan,84 one of my less stellar moments with the Beats happened with Allen Ginsberg present during an adventure I had with Timothy Leary in late 1960. I had never met Leary before, or really even heard of him, when Allen and Peter Orlovsky brought him to my place on Eleventh Street. Leary gave my girlfriend Ann Holt and me a big handful of pills—LSD—which we had never heard of. I suppose we didn’t have to take the pills, but Leary was from Harvard and seemed kind of respectable. The drug had an effect, I’ll tell you. My apartment was on two floors, and the three of them went upstairs and turned on African music and danced while Ann and I stayed downstairs and became paranoid. We backed into the corner of the room we were in. Joan Mitchell’s paintings kept coming out of the wall and I’d go and push them back in! Then Allen came down and taught me something I have never forgotten: how to throw up. It was fantastic. I had an absolute phobia about throwing up until that point but never since. Allen taught me to relax, that throwing up is not a bad thing. He coaxed and coaxed me to get rid of some of the LSD. And it worked.
The next day I went to the office but when I returned to the apartment Ann was lying unc
onscious in a big pool of blood in the living room. She had tried to commit suicide, slitting her wrist with a razor. Thank god she was still breathing. Fred Praeger, a publisher and friend, as well as an acknowledged CIA agent, was my tenant living on the other two floors of the building. He gave me a handkerchief and I made a tourniquet. St. Vincent’s Hospital was one block away. It took them three hours to save Ann, but, bless them, they did.
Afterward, Leary said the whole thing was my fault because I hadn’t guarded Ann for 72 hours. Then he took her to Massachusetts and tried to get her to marry him. I received a letter from him with all these questions about the LSD: “After you took the LSD did you feel a) 10 percent better or b) 20 percent better” and so on. I was so infuriated I gave it to somebody I knew from Francis Parker who was at Harvard Medical School, a psychiatrist. He said, “After reading this I am ashamed to be associated with Harvard.” Shortly after that, Harvard threw Leary out.
On January 5, 1961, Leary wrote me:
I do feel that you were somewhat deprived. The dosage you took was too moderate to produce a real visionary state. I expect that Ann’s experience was deeper because she took an estimated equivalent of 20 mushrooms—i.e., three times your dosage.
… I am very interested, naturally, in your reactions—during and after. As well as those of Ann. I’m going to be in New York January 13–16. Can we get together for lunch to exchange notes?
I wrote back on January 24:
Many thanks for sending me the curandero questionnaire. I find it very interesting, although I confess I am not able to answer it. For example, I never have been able to decide whether or not I find it easy to get intoxicated or whether there is some difficulty involved. However, good luck with it.
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 23
