Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  … I and my wife are very glad to welcome your family in Japan. …

  Kenzaburō Ōe

  My wife Cristina and I traveled to Tokyo for three weeks in March 1966, where we met Yukio Mishima and his wife Yoko, and visited with Ōe and his family. Mishima told us about a short film he wrote and co-directed, The Rite of Love and Death, now known as Patriotism based on his short story of that title, about an army lieutenant who, unable to follow orders to execute fellow soldiers who had attempted a coup, instead commits hara-kiri with his wife. (This would turn out to be the only film he directed.) We featured stills from The Rite of Love and Death in Evergreen, No. 43 (October 1966) along with the story, and in No. 45 (February 1967) we published Ōe’s “The Catch.” I also arranged to publish Mishima’s play Madame de Sade, which was translated by Donald Keene. Mishima sent me a letter on April 24, 1966, to discuss details of these projects, and concluded with this ominous sentence: “My life in Tokyo is deadly busy as always as you might imagine since you visited here. People here are just eating the flesh of each other.” Four years later he would commit suicide.

  We also met translator John Nathan for the first time during this Tokyo trip. An ex-polio victim, he nonetheless looked big, hale, and hearty. He’d met and gotten married to a lovely and talented Japanese woman, the artist Mayumi Oda. Both became good friends of mine.

  A couple of months after my return to New York, Ōe wrote to me on May 3, “After your departure I became very deeply depressed and I found I have been getting little by little the authentic feeling of old Japanese folk who feels every saying good-bye as a transformed death. But thanks to the airplane that safely landed you and Christina [sic] I am now recovering. Your stay in Japan was one of the most wonderful thing for me for those years.”

  By the time Grove published Ōe’s novel A Personal Matter and his story “Ague the Sky Monster” (in Evergreen Review, No. 54), Ōe had already won the Tanizaki Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary distinctions, for the The Silent Cry. He shared the prize, in 1967, with his friend and fellow novelist Kobo Abe.

  June 16, 1968

  Dearest Cristina,

  Yesterday I received your letter about the hepatitis of Barney and another sad news about R. Kennedy. I am very much upsetted and unhappy to hear about Barney’s disease. And I waited until the midnight and made two telephone call to New York to ask Mr. or Mrs. Rosset. But I couldn’t reach both of you. I am thinking two possibility.

  1) Barney is well and at East Hampton

  2) Barney is worse and at Hospital.

  And I hope to know how Barney is as soon as possible. Yesterday I couldn’t sleep and so much drunken, and alone in my room I was watching that beautifully and genuinely human portrait of Barney in New York Times. I, now in Tokyo very often, find out myself who is imitating the way of behavior of Barney … walking … talking … and feeling happy or sad and everything. I feel Barney became one of a very few human being that is truly important for me. Now with your letter I am truly scared.

  Cristina honestly speaking I don’t have so much reason to live on. I am very deeply disappointed about our political situation, and I am from the very pessimistic family. “Pooh” [Ōe’s son] is important. Literature is also important especially when I am working on a new novel. But I have very few friends that are truly important. Then I can’t forget the word Barney said to me in the last night at Black Circle. Then I felt I was going very sentimental, so I said good-bye to Barney and Cristina when John and Mayumi was leaving there.

  I sincerely need Barney who is healthy and who is always fighting … and who is like he is every time.

  With Love and hope Kenzaburō Ōe.

  For you and Tansey and Peter I sincerely pray (to some even leftist God!) Barney’s recovery and for myself I pray (to God anyway, I am not against God) his recovery, not only as a publisher but as a human being. I need him.

  On October 14, 1994, it was announced that Kenzaburō Ōe had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the fourth Grove author to do so. (Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz and, of course, Samuel Beckett, are the earlier winners followed by Harold Pinter in 2005.) Kenzaburō told the New York Times that he was shocked at the news, although I was not.

  By this time, the management at Grove Press had changed, and the present publisher, Morgan Entrekin, who had been very friendly toward me, called upon hearing the news and profusely thanked me for having left Grove a wonderful legacy, namely the three Ōe books I had published which the company, now known as Grove/Atlantic, still had in print. Entrekin made me two enticing offers. The first was an invitation to attend the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm two months hence. The second was a request to have me co-publish with the new Grove any untranslated Ōe novels that I might be able to present to them. In a letter on October 24 of that year, I told Ōe about these invitations, and detailed some of the memories we had shared over the past thirty years:

  This offer made a very strong impression on me—in many ways as I am sure you will understand. It meant in some ways finding things past—Ōe in New York, Ōe in East Hampton, both of us crying over a film depicting the death of Che Guevara, a little Olympus camera for Peter, Pooh and Yukari on the train to Osaka. The lovely inn where I was enchanted by, but afraid of the strange bath filled with hot water. Ōe’s “animal” which stands today on Astrid’s lawn [Astrid Myers, my last wife].

  Ōe replied on October 30, “I thank you deeply for your moving letter. It was the best voice from the other side of the planet. If you publish my novels with John Nathan again, it is the best fruit of the Prize. And I hope to meet in Stockholm soon.”

  So, along with Ōe’s translator John Nathan and two Grove executives, Entrekin and Joan Bingham, my wife Astrid and I traveled to Stockholm for the Nobel festivities, arriving late on the evening of December 6.

  There were lunches and parties all week. At a lunch hosted by Kenzaburō’s Swedish publisher, Karl Otto Bonnier, two days before the ceremony, I finally encountered Kenzaburō. The next day Astrid and I were invited to Kenzaburō’s hotel room, where I was able to spend more time with him. A Japanese film crew was in attendance, and John Nathan and I were also part of the interview. We spent two wonderful hours with Kenzaburō telling stories to an appreciative audience.

  The award ceremony itself was held on December 10 in the Stockholm Concert Hall. I videotaped the festivities. In his Nobel Lecture, Ōe spoke of his work: “Herein I find the grounds for believing in the exquisite healing power of art. … As one with a peripheral, marginal, and off-center existence in the world, I would like to seek how … I can be of some use in a cure and reconciliation of mankind.”105 After the ceremony we were all bused to the impressive City Hall for a banquet, followed by a formal ball complete with a thirty-five piece orchestra. It was an exhilarating four days.

  Grove did follow through with the offer made to me by Morgan Entrekin, and they have published three Ōe novels since the Nobel was announced. I was also approached by a translator from the Netherlands, Luk Van Haute, who wanted to do a translation of Ōe’s highly controversial Seventeen, which told the fictionalized story of the young, right-wing assassin who in 1960 had killed the chairman of the Socialist Party. The novella had appeared in a literary magazine in Japan, Bungakukai, and caused a storm of protest from reactionaries.

  Seventeen had never appeared in book form, and Ōe did not want a full version translated, but he was willing to combine the first half with another novella called J. My new company, Foxrock, published these two works in one volume, with Van Haute’s translations, in 1996. The Los Angeles Times reviewer Richard Eder aptly characterized the plots of both works in the volume as examples of how a “materialistic and decadent society gives rise to an act of grotesque extremity.” He concluded that Ōe’s message is “by no means simplistic” and “is beautifully and darkly related.”106

  My friendship with Ōe is also “by no means simplistic” since it involves so many strands—and so many years—of mutual in
terest, respect, and heartfelt generosity.

  18

  Eleuthéria

  In May 1986, a tribute to Samuel Beckett was held in Paris on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Beckett was not interested in attending any of the festive ceremonies or readings of his work, but he did get together at the bar of the Hotel PLM with a group of old friends, including myself. I am afraid I put something of a damper on the occasion, because I couldn’t help but tell people about my new and unenviable position, having been unceremoniously fired from Grove Press.

  Sam said he felt badly about me and wondered what my next step would be. I told him I would have to consider starting a new publishing company. He believed every author of mine should offer me an unpublished manuscript. In the weeks following, I met with Sam a few more times and we discussed what he might have to give me. One possibility was an early unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. But, considering his idea further, Sam felt that because this book was something of a roman à clef it would not make a very good choice; some of his characters were thinly veiled portraits of people who were still alive. Instead he decided to give me his first play, Eleuthéria, and he immediately set out to translate it. Two days or so later Marguerite Duras followed Sam’s lead and offered me The Man Sitting in the Corridor. I published it in 1991. Sam and Marguerite turned out to be the only authors who offered me work to publish, so that was as far as that project went.

  But the translation of Eleuthéria, written forty years before, proved too much for Sam. In June 1986 he wrote that he didn’t have the energy to translate the play after all. Besides, he told me, he detested it: “I had completely forgotten Eleuthéria. I have now read it again. With loathing. I cannot translate it. Let alone have it published. Another rash promise. … I’ll try to try writing something worth having for you.”

  Eleuthéria always had something of a star-crossed history.107 Back in 1948, Sam wrote his friend Thomas MacGreevy that “Eleuthéria is dithering, dithering, and beginning to be spoken of a little. I think it will see the boards in time even if only for a few nights.” And in March 1949 he mentioned it again: “I’ve finished a second play En Attendant Godot. And I am now typing it up. … I submitted the first play, Eleuthéria, for the Prix Rivarol, which has not yet been awarded as far as I know.”

  Sam’s wife Suzanne took both Eleuthéria and Godot with her when she made the rounds of Paris theaters, trying to interest one of them in a production. In 1950, she gave director Roger Blin both plays to consider. At first Blin was inclined toward putting on Eleuthéria but the cost of production ruled against it. Eleuthéria had seventeen characters, a massive numbers of plots, and called for a complicated, divided stage. Godot, by contrast, had only four characters, two of whom were bums who didn’t require much in the way of costuming. After the enormous success of Godot, Eleuthéria was put away, although—significantly—not destroyed. Indeed, Sam kept the original and the manuscript notebooks that accompanied it, which he later bequeathed to various universities.

  Having years later once more set Eleuthéria aside, Sam let me know he had written another piece, much shorter, to replace it. It was Stirrings Still, which as I have mentioned was dedicated to me, and I published it in 1988.

  Robert Scanlan of the Beckett Society wrote to me from Harvard that one of the last things Sam said to him before he died was, “Be good to Barney. He’s been through a rough time at Grove Press.”

  Having been given the great present of Stirrings Still, I forgot about Eleuthéria until four years after Sam had passed away. Then the literary scholar Stan Gontarksi began prodding me about this play, which both of us thought of as an important addition to the Beckett oeuvre that should see the light of day and eventual theatrical production. Not anticipating too much trouble, I wrote to Sam’s executor, Jérôme Lindon, in 1993.

  I was aware that Lindon had given Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Richard Seaver at Arcade Books for posthumous publication. The people depicted in the novel were, like Sam, deceased by this time, so Lindon deemed it appropriate to go ahead and publish the book. The problem was, for me, that he never offered me the chance even to look at it.

  As I wrote him on March 2, 1993: “I’ve been puzzled … that I had never been informed about … much less offered a chance to publish the book myself.” Making the insult worse, Eoin O’Brien’s foreword to the novel alluded to the fact that at one point Sam “was considering how best to help a friend to whom he wished to give a text for publication,” namely, Dream. The unnamed friend was, of course, me. And offering the novel to someone else could certainly be interpreted as a breach of faith with Sam. I further said in the letter to Lindon, “The conclusion from O’Brien’s foreword seems inescapable; once it was time to publish Dream, it should have been offered to Sam’s American publisher as Sam himself directed in 1986. This was certainly his intent.”

  I then asked Lindon to do the right thing in the case of Eleuthéria. He said I could not publish the work because it would violate the letter of Sam’s wishes. This claim rang very hollow indeed, given Lindon’s blatant disregard for Sam’s wishes with regard to Dream.

  Sam’s heir, his nephew, Edward Beckett, with whom I had a very friendly relationship, wrote me on April 21, 1993, to say, “I feel this is getting out of hand; you must know that there is no question of Eleuthéria being published without the Estate’s consent. … I beg you not to pursue this matter any further; it will do good to no one.”

  I dropped the idea of publishing Eleuthéria. For a while.

  Over the years Eleuthéria occasionally reared its head. Ruby Cohn writes in her book Back to Beckett that Eleuthéria had been accepted by Jean Vilar for the Théâtre Nationale Populaire on the condition that it be cut to one act, which Sam refused to do.

  Stan Gontarski also mentions in The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett that Eleuthéria was announced for publication by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952 and then withdrawn by Sam.

  Grove even had a copy of Eleuthéria in its possession: Sam referred to it in a letter to my assistant Judith Schmidt, dated February 7, 1963, saying, “Please hold both original and copies of Eleuthéria and Mercier and Camier.”

  After his Nobel Prize was announced in 1969, Sam felt pressure to publish old things, such as the story collection More Pricks Than Kicks, originally issued in 1934 in England by Chatto & Windus. He wrote to his English publisher, John Calder:

  Some days ago I had a letter from [Grove editor Richard] Seaver saying “they could wait no longer to publish M. P. T. K.” I answered that this was against my wish. But in the last few days pressure on all sides has grown so strong—and I was so tired, that I capitulated. You may therefore proceed with trade edition of this juvenilium. I also capitulate for “Premier Amour” and Mercier et Camier—but not for Eleuthéria.108

  Sam had a habit of changing his mind about the publication of earlier works. In 1964 we had been in the midst of the publishing process for More Pricks Than Kicks when we received the following letter:

  I have broken down half way through galleys of More Pricks Than Kicks. I simply can’t bear it. It was a ghastly mistake on my part to imagine, not having looked at it for a quarter of a century, that this old shit was revivable. I’m terribly sorry, but I simply have to ask you to stop production. I return herewith advance on royalties and ask you to charge to my account with Grove whatever expenses whatever entailed by this beginning of production. … Please forgive me.109

  He then reversed himself again and allowed us to publish the collection in 1970. Today More Pricks Than Kicks is considered among Beckett’s major works and is tremendously admired, especially the story “Dante and the Lobster.”

  Sam also did this with Mercier and Camier. In a 1960 letter to my assistant, he wrote, “This is just to say that I am opposed to the publication in English of Mercier et Camier, also to the publication of any other extracts.” But fifteen years later, in 1975, he allowed us to publish it.

  The original Eleuthéria m
anuscript, in the Beckett collection at the University of Texas library, contains this note written in Sam’s hand: “Prior to Godot. 1947. Unpublished. Jettisoned.” And in March 1969, Sam wrote on a photocopy of the play: “Never edition of any kind if I can help it.” He and his favorite theater director, Alan Schneider, also discussed the play in a pair of 1975 letters. Schneider told Sam in a letter dated April 27, 1975: “Did you hear about some off-off-Broadway group saying it was going to do ELEUTHÉRIA (in English!) next fall?” Sam replied on May 4, 1975, “We must prevent Eleuthéria at all costs.”

  But he allowed the Revue d’Esthetique to publish excerpts from the play in 1986, and in 1988 he also authorized the publication of dialogue from Eleuthéria in Beckett in the Theatre: The Author as Practical Playwright and Director: From Waiting for Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape by Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld. So the door was not firmly closed, and I have no doubt that Sam would at last have changed his mind and allowed us to publish Eleuthéria, too.

  I waited a year, and tried the subject of Eleuthéria again with Lindon and Edward Beckett. They remained vehemently opposed to the idea, but I felt strongly that Eleuthéria should be brought forward. So I arranged for a staged reading at the New York Theatre Workshop on September 26, 1994. Edward told the New York Times, in a long article by Mel Gussow, that the reading was “not only illicit but morally disgraceful,” that his uncle “always opposed its being published in book form, its being translated into other languages, or its being performed in any way whatsoever. All those who might be a party to this New York event, which deliberately transgresses the will expressed by Samuel Beckett, would of course expose themselves to legal proceedings.”110