BARNEY ROSSET:BARNEY ROSSET, the flamboyant, provocative publisher who helped change the course of publishing in the United States, bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to the attention of Americans under his Grove Press imprint, has died aged 89.
Besides publishing Beckett, he brought early exposure in the US to European writers like Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet and gave intellectual ammunition to the New Left by publishing Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Most of all, beginning in high school, when he published a mimeographed journal titled The Anti-Everything, Rosset, slightly built and irascible, savoured a fight.
He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, ultimately winning legal victories that opened the door to sexually provocative language and subject matter in literature in the US. He did the same on movie screens by importing the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow).
Rosset called Grove “a breach in the dam of American puritanism”. Beyond being sued scores of times, he received death threats and Grove’s office in Greenwich Village was bombed.
Rosset was hardly the only publisher to take risks, lasso avant-garde authors or print titillating material. But few so completely relied on seat-of-the-pants judgment. Colleagues said he had “a whim of steel”.
In 1957 he helped usher in a new counterculture when he began the literary journal Evergreen Review, originally a quarterly. It later became a bimonthly and then a glossy monthly. The Review, published until 1973, sparkled with writers like Beckett, who had a story and poem in the first issue, and Allen Ginsberg, whose poem Howl appeared in the second. There were also lascivious comic strips.
Barnet Lee Rosset jnr was born into wealth in Chicago. His father owned banks. “I’m half-Jewish and half-Irish”, he told the Associated Press in 1998, “and my mother and grandfather spoke Gaelic”.
In 1951 he bought a small publishing company on Grove Street in Greenwich Village for $3,000. His goal almost from the beginning was to publish Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, an autobiographical, sexually explicit novel that had been published in Paris in 1934 and long been banned in the States. But he decided first to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had originally appeared in Italy in 1928. He theorised that though it was also banned in the States, it commanded greater respect than Miller’s book.
Arthur E Summerfield, the postmaster general, lived up to Rosset’s expectations and barred the book from the mails – Grove’s means of distribution – in June 1959, calling it “smutty”. But a federal judge in Manhattan lifted the ban, ruling that the book had redeeming merit.
He faced a new round of censorship after buying the rights to Tropic of Cancer for $50,000 in 1961, the agreement having been struck by Miller and Rosset over a game of table tennis. Summerfield again imposed a ban but lifted it before it could be challenged in court. Nevertheless, the book was attacked in more than 60 legal cases seeking to ban it in 21 US states, and Rosset was arrested and taken before a Brooklyn grand jury, which decided against an indictment. Grove won the dispute in 1964 when the United States Supreme Court reversed a Florida ban, bringing all the cases to a halt. Grove sold 100,000 hardcover and one million paperback copies of Cancer in the first year.
There were triumphant moments, like Rosset’s late-night champagne session in Paris with Beckett in 1953 that led to the American publishing rights to Waiting for Godot. It sold more than 2.5 million copies in the US. Beckett was just one winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature published by Grove; others included Harold Pinter and Kenzaburo Oe.
Rosset also made mistakes. He turned down Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and a planned trilogy of films based on short works by Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter was never completed, though it did lead in 1965 to Film, starring Buster Keaton, scripted by Beckett.
Things turned decidedly against Rosset in 1970 when employees tried to unionise several departments, including the editorial staff. He was accused of sexism, and some said his publications were demeaning to women.
Rosset sold Grove in 1985 to Ann Getty, the oil heiress, and George Weidenfeld, a British publisher. Part of the deal was that he would remain in charge. But the new owners fired him a year later.
After leaving Grove, Rosset published Evergreen Review online and books under a new imprint, Foxrock Books. After discovering a trove of suppressed 19th-century erotic books, including My Secret Life, he started Blue Moon Books.
He also took up painting. Grove’s backlist was acquired by Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993. The combined entity today is Grove/Atlantic. After his first marriage ended in divorce, Rosset married four more times.
Barney Rosset: born May 28th, 1922; died February 21st, 2012