Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

by Barney Rosset

  After the Times publicity, the New York Theatre Workshop asked for a $25,000 bond to hold the reading, so at the last moment we shifted theaters, requesting the audience, actors, and press to walk with us to a new location. I wanted to echo Orson Welles’ twenty-one-block walk with his audience of 600 from the Maxine Elliott Theater to the Venice Theater when his production of Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock had to be moved at the last minute. Our reading was at the Mime Theater, a small space in the building where I lived. Thirteen actors read the play to 100 invited guests. The reading was also covered by the Times, although Gussow wrote that his photographer was not allowed to film the reading. Our fault.

  As a result of my part in the staged reading, on October 13, 1994, Edward Beckett and Jérôme Lindon fired me from my position as US agent of the Beckett Estate, an appointment Sam gave me after my ouster from Grove in 1986 and the source of a major portion of my income.

  But in January 1995 came a reversal. Lindon sent me a two-line fax asking to see a copy of an English translation of Eleuthéria I had commissioned by the playwright, poet, and novelist Michael Brodsky, who made his living as a French-to-English translator at the United Nations.

  The next day there was another fax: “I persist in thinking that Sam would not have wanted Eleuthéria to be published. Yet as I see you are staunchly bent on publishing your translation, I bring myself to grant you that publication right for the United States.”

  So with my partners, John Oakes and Dan Simon of the Four Walls Eight Windows publishing house, we put Eleuthéria into print. Mel Gussow reviewed the book quite favorably in the Times on June 25, 1995: “Those who regard Beckett as a minimalist may be surprised by the ebullience of his first play.” And he called it a “valuable addition to Beckett’s body of work [that] will be of interest to anyone concerned with the author’s art and with exploratory theater. De-jettisoned, Eleuthéria has found its freedom.”111

  In France, Lindon beat us to publication with his own edition of Eleuthéria in the original French. Faber and Faber published an edition in England, commissioning a different translator, Barbara Wright.

  During the summer of 2007 a friend found an Internet reference to a 2004 performance of Eleuthéria that had been staged in Iran. This astounded and excited me, as it seems to be the only instance of this play actually being performed anywhere in the world. I found a contact name and quickly sent off an e-mail. A reply came from the co-director and translator of the project, Vahid Rahbani, who in the meantime had relocated to Montreal, where he was attending the National Theatre School of Canada. He was glad to hear from me: “It is really interesting to receive an e-mail from you. A close friend of Beckett. I am so lucky! I wish you could have been there to see our production of Eleuthéria, which was a great challenge for me and my group. As far as I know our production is the only professional performance of this brilliant play.” He referred me to the website of his theater company, Naqshineh, where stills of his Eleuthéria production could be found. An accomplished film and theater director, Vahid had also put on productions of Waiting for Godot in Iran and Paris, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in Iran, and Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes in Toronto. He told me he was eager to publish his translation of Eleuthéria in Farsi.

  I think he was right. I don’t know about any other full productions of the play. There was an English-language reading in 1998, beautifully done and jointly sponsored by the French and Irish cultural sections of the respective governments in 1998. The reading, which verged on being a full-fledged acted production, was staged by the SCENA Theatre’s Robert McNamara at the elegant French embassy in Washington, DC. Two additional readings were performed, one at the National Arts Club and the other at the Classic Stage Company, both in Manhattan.

  How I would love one day to see a full production of Eleuthéria myself. What a fulfillment that would be. After all, it’s been my life’s work to bring books, films, plays—art!—to the world, no matter the obstacles. As I always said to critics, naysayers, and those who would stand in the way: No pasarán!

  19

  A Nightmare in the Stone Forest

  It is November 5, 1996. I am sitting next to my companion of many years, Astrid Myers, on Thai Airlines flight 103, the 1,200-mile daily jitney from Bangkok to Kunming in southern China. How much more comforting it would be to be back in a Bangkok bar, taking the opiate of female beauty, than approaching Kunming with its too-many memories. This is the 51st anniversary of my war. Kunming was my battleground. They should package this trip for old warriors and call it the Hemlock Tour.

  Months before the trip I had been tending eastward. I had placed three of my own photographs of Thai bar dancers in a single frame, then encrusted the frame with layer upon layer of gold paint—I labored on this fantasy in my Astor Place live/work loft, absorbedly working the pigment with an array of brushes, amid the office noises of my slender structure of book publishing. The central photograph of my gold triptych shows a woman’s midsection twisting upward in the dark like a candle flame. Women in the left and right panels are etherealized by “rare lamps with faint rainbow fans,” like those at the Mabbot Street entrance to James Joyce’s “nighttown.”

  My Nighttown is a superimposition of many cities. Beyond the golden entrance is the full inventory of my fears and loves—seven decades worth. In my Nighttown the Chez Paree—the great Chicago nightclub of the 1930s—adjoins the brothel clubs and restaurants of liberated Shanghai, post-war Paris, Hamburg, New York, and Bangkok. The streets of La Paz and Havana turn sharply into Greenwich Village. Like Joyce’s, my Nighttown contains reproachful ghosts, the ghosts of Chou En-lai, Mao Tse-tung, and Edgar Snow; the names of women pulsate there, wives and near wives, Nancy, Gale, Joan, Loly, Ann, Cristina, Lisa, Kim, Astrid; here are also famous and anonymous comrades in arms, Muddy Rhule and Fred Jordan, Maurice Girodias, Haskell Wexler, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt and Dick Seaver, Wallace Fowlie, Horace Gregory, Henry Miller and Sam Beckett. Nighttown is an evanescent soldier’s camp adjoining an ascendant American publisher’s reserved suite at the Frankfurt Book Fair. It is fraught with the ambushes of wartime and of peacetime—with danger, combat, and yearning.

  As the plane sets down, my first glimpse of Kunming reminds me that I never loved it. I remember a large sign at the hot springs of the Health Spa: BOYS WILL NOT BATHE WITH GIRLS. Kunming was a “Thou Shalt Not” place. We disembark, and I linger on the runway, looking for the “rusted hulks of WWII planes” which my guidebook advertises. I photograph a number of planes—but not the old ones. How empty and glum this airfield looks now.

  After going through cheerless lines at customs, without any help or direction, we take an unmarked taxi. The sullen female driver acknowledges only the name of the hotel—KING WORLD—to which we have told her to take us. The boulevard along the way is drab, the landscape somewhat between a construction project and a slum. There is traffic, but what a contrast to the bustle and life of Bangkok.

  Kunming is still a “Thou Shalt Not” place. The only touch of sensuality is a pair of chic, good-looking young women in our hotel elevator. When we get in, the elevator stalls and re-opens. Framed in the door is a stunning Chinese-gowned woman. She speaks a few harsh words and a policeman appears. He pulls the frightened women next to us out. When we arrive at our floor, an attendant stands at the elevator, hands folded primly before her face, an obsequious house-cop making sure that we go straight to our room.

  My apologies to such heroes of my youth as John Steinbeck, André Malraux, Chou En-lai, and that Depression-era Robin Hood, John Dillinger, but visiting Communist countries can be bruising to one’s youthful ideals. The malaise which quickly invades me here is just what I experienced shortly after the war, when I traveled to Czechoslovakia with my soon-to-be wife Joan Mitchell. I had just made my first and only feature film, Strange Victory, an angry reminder to America that we still faced the enemies of racism and fascism at home. Taking the film to newly Communist Prague, I encountered the same veiled hostility as today in
Kunming, the same sense of being watched. At the Prague airport, customs agents overstepped when they tried to confiscate my cognac. I knew that our supply of cognac and powdered Nescafé would dictate the duration of our visit. “No cognac, no film” was my answer. “I’ll turn and go home.” They gave in. I was in the grips of what might be called the “Ninotchka paradox.” I loved pleasure as much as justice. Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist, was asked why, praising the Russian proletariat as he did, he lived on the French Riviera. “I’m too old to move there,” he answered, seeing no contradiction.

  Our request made to the front desk for a newspaper other than the free handout in the lobby was answered with a curt “Go to the foreign bookstore.” We were directed to a neighborhood where a scrim of old Kunming clung to the riverfront, its bricks, quays, shingles, and foliage completely hemmed in by steel towers. There were no newspapers in the bookstore to which we had been directed, but among an array of books of the “Teach Yourself Business French” variety there were four or five heavily-annotated, paperbound novels, including D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  Now, carrying my new Chinese Lady Chatterley, I walked slowly back to my hotel room. What was it they were saying in the copious notes? Was someone in one of these towers of glass straining over the text, piercing such obscurities as “Pentecost,” “madonna-worship,” “phallus,” “Cannes,” and “hopeless anachronism”?

  I did not expect to be welcomed by rifle salutes, but no one we met seemed remotely aware of Kunming’s past. Amazingly, the travel agents here have no maps. “And Kweiyang?” I ask. I remember Kweiyang as being 500 kilometers or so to the east, eighteen hours away by jeep, but the town appears to have fallen down a deep ravine. The place I considered my war home had apparently been excised from both foreigners’ itineraries and local memories, despite being the birthplace of the current president, Jiang Zemin. The party-line newspaper, China Daily, reports that Zemin visited Kweiyang, where he distributed bedding to impoverished farmers still living in thatched huts. He reached the town via “wriggling mountain roads” just as I had 50 years earlier. So much for my dreams of social progress under the leadership of Mao and Chou En-lai. They had absorbed a nightmarish tinge.

  The following morning Astrid made an excursion without me to the “Stone Forest” limestone peaks outside Kunming, of which my guidebook said, “As twilight comes in, the forest of limestone pillars seems grey and forbidding. The paths become a maze and you suddenly wonder if you can find your way out.” Charming. My war experience made me regard such formations as presenting risks of ambush. But Kunming is a petrified forest in itself, and every hour I spend in this ascending pile of steel and glass grows more suffocating and distasteful.

  When Astrid returns we walk in the city and see a rare sign of independent life, a gang of young men loitering on the sidewalk, hawking large knives that I suspect are both their merchandise and their arsenal. Thugs or no, I like them. When they see my camera they run up and hug us.

  Walking back to our four-star hotel, along Beijing Boulevard about midday, we stop for a red light at a busy intersection. A serious, intelligent-looking man, neatly attired in a student or professional way and holding a child of about three in his arms, cautiously approaches.

  “Would you like something to read?” he asks, very quietly. Then he says, “I have been arrested.”

  He puts down the child, opens a small black leather briefcase and hands me a photocopy of a handwritten document. I take it and, unasked, hand him a 100 yuan note, worth about twelve US dollars. He accepts it, whereupon I thank him and wish him good luck. A bit surprised, he gently lifts up the child and moves silently away as we continue across the street. The whole incident seems to last no more than a minute.

  The document proves to be a complaint against brutal political corruption, where the victim who reports a crime to the local police is caught in a Kafkaesque maze. I think that Boeing, GE, and the Chinese Communist Party are building an unholy alliance here. Sentences leap out—quotes from a student leader, Li Peng: “Today’s government is crueler than Guo Ming Dang’s [ Kuomintang] government, seventy years ago. … that government only used high pressure water to disperse students. But in Tian An Men [Tiananmen Square], the police used guns. … In this society, money talks. If you want to do something, enough money is very important.”

  This chimes with my memories. I wrote a letter to my parents in 1946 that is applicable today, omitting only one name: “Where we are dead wrong is our policy in China. The Central government in China are the biggest bunch of grafters and crooks I have ever seen. Chiang Kai-shek is nothing but a fascist in my estimation. … Important Chinese civilians and military men lived like kings, with new cars, the best of homes, the best of everything.”

  Back at the King World Hotel I feel even more disgust for the huge, expensive, and deserted lounge area, the joyless luxury designed for business junkets. My fear mounts as I stare from the hotel window, which overlooks the corner where we received the document. The busy thoroughfare holds a lone, slow truck. Two dim streetlamps fend off a sea of darkness. Even under the Japanese bomb threats of 50 years ago, we had not extinguished the city to this degree, having enough cheer and bravado to light fires in the street and keep the wine flowing.

  As I fall asleep I sense an unmistakable panic, which progresses into a dream.

  It is a nice summer evening in East Hampton in the 1950s. Norman Mailer is here, looking young, healthy, and calm. Bill de Kooning is around, and so is Franz Kline. I agree with Mailer that we need not search for the best party of the evening, that old constant preoccupation. It does not seem so pressing now. We are beyond that. Grown up.

  And now I hear that we were lucky to miss the “right party,” or “the orgy” as someone has mysteriously referred to it. The party had gone wrong. Two hundred fifty four people have died I am told. I rush to my hotel room’s TV, turn on the news to get the details. But there is no CNN, no news.

  And now I am being told a brash populist is opportunistically restaging the disaster, for profit, right now at Madison Square Garden, which has been transported to the center of Kunming. Crowds are lined up outside the hotel, waiting to enter, but fires have broken out. People are burning to death. I chase the hired cameraman, trying to help him. He bursts into flames! Can I help him or is he already dead? I am paralyzed. I must try.

  The nightmare peaks. The fear has become intolerable. I am half-awake, shame and horror following close upon the dream. I am tortured by my dereliction, my indecision in going to the aid of the cameraman. I hoped his swift destruction would relieve me of responsibility. But he has survived the first bonfire. The dream resumes.

  I run toward him across the Kunming slum. This Lower East Side vacant lot, this Kunming/Manhattan plot of cursed real estate. There are murderous drug dealers and there are outdoor fires, and there is the hapless cameraman. A structure is collapsing on him. Now he must be suffocating, dying. But is he? I have to check, move toward him, free him from the collapsing timbers and debris. But will I escape this killer mob?

  My fear is all-enveloping. I wake up.

  I look at the desolation called Kunming, desperate to leave. Another day here and I would be out looking for that hapless guy who gave me the manuscript. Soon we would both be in trouble, real trouble.

  It took me thirty-five years to even partially decipher the story which had transported me to Kunming, to Shanghai, and back. At the time I naively believed that this was the magical circuitry of art and life, Red Star Over China and Man’s Fate, two milestones of my emotional life. It was not until I obtained my intelligence files under the Freedom of Information Act that I would learn anything of the dense fog in which my destiny had unfolded. That I was probably sent to China to get me out of the way. That I was under constant, absurd suspicion, first of “treason” and then of “disaffection.” That I had been inducted into and then expelled from the OSS without being informed of either event. That my �
�premature anti-fascism” was held against me. The gulf between my ardor to contribute and the government’s misgivings about me was unbridgeable. The OSS Washington personnel chief was aghast that his counterpart in China had taken me on. What a blunder! The Army had sent me to Kanchapara, the end of the line. I had only gotten into action by replacing a suicide. And now I was in the OSS? Why didn’t the officer in China check his files before making rash personnel decisions? That would have taught him what he was dealing with.

  I had enlisted in the Army in the summer of 1942. Certainly by the late spring of 1943, but probably much sooner, Army Intelligence had singled me out for investigation. A report charged that I was in “mail communication with persons who are under suspicion as possible espionage agents for Japan.” Another further identified those persons as being “two Japanese girls in New York City” and then gave their names and addresses.112 It also said: “H.D.C. & Fourth Army, Presidio of San Francisco, Ca., discloses information indicating possible Communist sympathies of subject.” In another report, requested by the Assistant Chief of Staff of G-2, Military Intelligence, War Department, Washington, DC, dated May 28, 1943, my twenty-first birthday to be exact, a background check was requested: “Character of Investigation: Espionage.” The profile of me read:

  Characteristics: Over-emotional; highest consideration of others, highest integrity; independent; great self-confidence; sarcastic; ruthless behavior in high school; courageous; aggressive; lacks spirit of compromise; lacks judgment.

  Miscellaneous: Subject is left-handed.

  When our plane takes off from Kunming Airport the following day, for the return to Bangkok, there are no Zeros stalking us. I am heading back to Nighttown. Perhaps I will see the shades of Valerie and Ferral113 at the weekend market, laughing as they buy a new birdcage and a fighting cock to put in it. And of course I will have a drink with Tony at the bar of the Shangri La or the Oriental. Perhaps at the Asia Bookstore on Silam Boulevard I will bump into the aristocratic and handsome Chou En-lai. I have bad news for him.