‘Barney Rosset turned down a chance to publish “The Hobbit.” That, he would recall, was an act of “stupendous stupidity.”
‘But “The Hobbit” would surely have seemed out of place on the long list of significant books Rosset published in his several decades running Grove Press, the imprint that challenged America’s ingrained prudery. Grove’s specialty wasn’t fantasy but realism, in all its ungainly beauty.
‘Under Rosset’s plucky leadership, Grove introduced U.S. readers to Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Amid the volatile culture of the mid-20th century, Grove legitimized “degenerate” authors such as Jean Genet and Hubert Selby Jr., and it backed the search for Che Guevara’s diaries and the publication of Malcolm X’s “Autobiography.”
‘Some prominent names dot the modern history of alternative book publishing — James Laughlin at New Directions, Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights, John Martin at Black Sparrow. But Rosset, who died in 2012 after 60 years in the business, was in a category of one.
‘Inspired, as he writes in this gruff and amusing memoir, by his family’s history of rebellion in Ireland and his own youthful admiration for the Robin Hood-style bank robber John Dillinger, he set out to topple government authority over the publishing business. And he succeeded.
‘First, Grove published the unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” in 1959. Then it brought out Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.” In each case, the company fought legal battles to defend the social value of its authors’ work and the imprint’s freedom to publish them.
‘The old obscenity laws were a cultural barrier “raised like a Berlin Wall between the public and free expression in literature, film and drama,” he writes. Near the end of his life, he’s clearly pleased to make it plain: “We broke the back of censorship.”
‘In its heyday, Grove was not just a publisher of novels. Rosset’s little empire helped establish a mass market for the publication of dramatic works, with titles by Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco, Joe Orton, David Mamet and many more.
‘Grove published the Evergreen Review, which hosted a sizable chunk of the literary and political discussion of the ’60s. The company also elbowed into the film business; Rosset’s recollections of Norman Mailer’s ridiculous escapades while directing his film “Maidstone,” involving real violence and a drunken Hervé Villechaize, are a hoot.
‘Boldface names make cameos throughout. Rosset, who was married five times, kept up a long friendship with his first wife, the painter Joan Mitchell, and he writes of being stalked by Valerie Solanas, the militant feminist who shot Andy Warhol. (She once showed up at the Grove offices with an ice pick in her pocket.) In another episode, he negotiates with Francis Ford Coppola, who briefly entertained the idea of buying Grove Press.
‘Rosset reportedly began writing his autobiography a decade or so before his death, and its publication now could have something to do with the timing of an upcoming biography by Michael Rosenthal called “Barney.” By the second half of the book, Rosset’s habit of excerpting his correspondence with some of his closest confidants becomes a bit of an irritant. To his credit, he also gives voice to some of his detractors, including fellow publisher Maurice Girodias, who calls his colleague “unbearable.”
‘For bibliophiles and those with a renewed investment in guarding the First Amendment, Rosset’s long-overdue account of his career in publishing is a welcome addition to all those musty old Grove paperbacks. Recalling the implications of his first big censorship battle, for “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” he writes, “It would be a savage kick in the face to Death and a lovely kiss to Life.” That could have been the company slogan.’ — James Sullivan
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Further
Barney Rosset @ Wikipedia
Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing
Defender of the “Obscene”
The Publishing Gamble That Changed America
Barney Rosset, A Remembrance
Barney Rosset 1922-2012
On Barney Rosset
Barney Rosset’s Vision
Barney Rosset’s brave and wild life
Barney Rosset and the Unending Struggle to Read Freely
Tropic of Barney
IN MEMORIAM: On Barney Rosset
1957 Greenwich Village: Barney Rosset, Evergreen Press and The Cedar Tavern
BARNEY ROSSET ON BECKETT, PINTER, MAMET, THE CIA…AND CENSORSHIP
A Life in Underground Letters
Barney Rosset on Beckett’s Film
Renegade Rosset
Obscene: Barney Rosset Vs Our Way of Life
Buy ‘Rebel Publisher’
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Extras
Obscene – A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press
BARNEY’S WALL: Portrait of a Game Changer (Official Trailer)
Dale Peck, A.M. Homes, Lev Grossman, and Emily Gould in celebration of Barney Rosset
Loren Glass: Avant-Garde Literature
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Interview
from Tin House
Win McCormack: Barney, what Tin House would like to discuss is your uncanny ability to spot the great writers of your era.
Let me read you something you once said: “You might not know what’s going to fly into your web, but you put it where you think there might be flies. If you leave your web out long enough, you might have the option to pick only those flies that please you, and eventually you can discern a pattern or similarity in the flies that you choose, and finally you accidently learn to choose wisely.”
What was the web that you put out, and where did you put it? And who were the first to fly into it?
Barney Rosset: I don’t think you can go at it quite that way. I had done a lot of reading prior to Grove Press, in high school, in college, in the army, and I had developed my own taste, for good or for bad. For example, Henry Miller’s work had entered my life in 1940, in full force. There were also people like Hemingway and Malraux, and others, whom I had read and admired.
If you have a small publishing company, or a large one for that matter, many people whom you admire are published by somebody else—for example, Hemingway, or Faulkner, or Malraux. So already you’re circumscribed to a degree. Your web can’t catch them, they’re caught. So if you, let’s say, find that somebody like Miller, whom you liked, is available, you start doing something about it.
WM: When you started Grove Press, Henry James was one of the first authors you published.
BR: He certainly was, the very first.
WM: How did that happen?
BR: That happened through my first wife, Joan Mitchell, later a very famous artist. Joan’s mother was the editor or Poetry magazine. She was the editor of it for many, many years and a poet herself. Joan was a very astute person, with a very good taste for writing, just as good as for painting. She was the one who really directed me into Grove. John Balcomb and Robert Phelps had started Grove Press and Grove Street. They published three books, and quit. They really had quit. They had wanted to do The Monk. That was the first book we physically published. It had been published several times with changes, so we did a variorum edition, and I went to Princeton and got John Berryman, a very well-known poet at that time, to do an introduction.
The Golden Bowl was a novel by Henry James that Joan particularly liked, and she asked me to do that. I went to Princeton again and got R. P. Blackmur, who was at that time the leading writer on James, to do an introduction. It wasn’t accidental that we did James, it was a direct result by being pushed by Joan. Then I went right on, did six or seven more of him.
WM: Was he out of print at the time?
BR: Not everything of his, but most. We did about eight volumes, and I got Leon Edel, a professor at NYU who was on his way to writing the famous five-volume biography of James, to do introductions to two of the books. I bought The Golden Bowl from Scribner’s. Scribner’s sent a wonderful, elderly gentleman along with Whitney Darrow, a famous editor, to my apartment on Ninth Street to see if I really existed. He walked up the four flights, and he was satisfied we were real, and we paid his small advance, and then paid the royalties to Scribner’s.
WM: You famously published Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
BR: Yes. The only book of D. H. Lawrence we did.
WM: All of us who were boys in the fifties owe you a great deal of gratitude for that.
BR: Personally, I didn’t like it that much at first. As time went on I got to like it more. I had a lot of feeling about Lawrence—to me he was, no matter what he claimed to be, a rather aristocratic Englishman, and my Irish background made me rebel against him, even though he was doing exactly what he should have been doing—trying to prevail against the industrialization of society and the sterilization of modern life. I thought he was very heavy-handed.
WM: He did not have a light touch.
BR: He didn’t have a light touch at all. His descriptions of sex, I think, were ridiculous.
WM: You had a great deal of trouble getting Henry Miller to let you publish Tropic of Cancer in America.
BR: I did for a long time have trouble. I went to Big Sur to try to convince him. I was terrified by the place. He had a couch on the edge of a cliff. I got vertigo when I looked over the side. He was living like somebody in the Albanian mountains. It was very hard to get to him. A dirt road up a steep hill, with somebody at the bottom of the hill checking you in. His wife Eve, who was very charming, said, “When Henry arrives I’m going to pretend I don’t want you to do the book, because anything I say he disagrees with.” She tried playing that role, but it didn’t work. It didn’t work at that time, but at least he’d met me, so he knew I was interested, and that I was for real. Later his publishers in Europe convinced him to let me do it.
WM: What was his reluctance?
BR: I don’t know. I can only surmise. I have the feeling he was enjoying his lifestyle. He was quite famous in certain quite large circles, among people who might read New Directions books or books from the Olympia Press in Paris. He said if this book were published in the United States, the next thing you know, it would be read in colleges as a textbook.
WM: He didn’t want to be mainstream.
BR: He did not. I loved that idea, and proceeded to try to fulfill it, I might add, and did to a degree. He did not seem to understand. He liked being an outlaw, is my strong feeling. We were trying to take away his right to be an outlaw. And we did: Tropic of Cancer became accepted.
WM: How did Beckett fly into your web?
BR: I had actually read a little bit of Beckett in Transition magazine and a couple of other places. I was going to the New School. My New School life and the beginnings of Grove crossed over. At the New School I had professors like Wallace Fowley, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz, and others, who were very, very important to me. I was reading and writing papers for them, and one day I read in the New York Times about a play called Waiting For Godot that was going on in Paris. It was a small clip, but it made me very interested. I got a hold of it and read it. It had something to say to me. Oddly enough, it had a kind of desolation of scene, like Miller, though in its language, its lack of verbiage, it was the opposite of Miller. Still, the sense of of a very contemporary lost soul—very interesting. I got Wallace Fowley to read it. His specialty was French Literature. His judgment meant a lot to me because he was so different from me. He was a convert to Catholicism, he was gay, and incredibly intelligent. He had read the play and told me he thought—and this was before anybody else had really heard about it much–that ot would be one of the most important works of the twentieth century. And Sylvia Beach got involved somehow, she was a fan of Beckett.
Waiting for Godot just hit something in me. I got what Beckett was available and published it. He flew into the web and got trapped. he had been turned down by Simon and Schuster. I found out, much earlier, on an earlier novel.
WM: Did your publishing Beckett lead the Beats to your door?
BR: No, not to my door, to Beckett’s door. I thought American Beat writers were very, very good in one sense: they were much more outgoing toward other cultures, towards French, Italian, and German literature. Whereas the Europeans were not very outgoing toward Americans at that particular time. People like Ginsberg and Burroughs recognized Beckett early on. They really did, and they wanted him to accept them.
WM: But Beckett was not a Beat.
BR: He was not a Beat. He was not a Beat! I think he was particularly disturbed by Burroughs’ cut-up theory. He did not like to do things by accident. If there was going to be an accident, it was going to be one that he planned. To take a text and cut things out and put them next to each other, that was not his idea of how to write.
WM: There’s a story I’ve read about how Beckett, when he was acting as Joyce’s secretary, was taking dictation for Finnegans Wake and somebody came to the door and said something and Joyce immediately incorporated it into the book, and Beckett was absolutely appalled at the randomness of that.
BR: Yes, that would be similar to Burroughs. I would personally would applaud it. I would disagree with Beckett about that. Maybe when he was much younger he could have been more open to that.
WM: Did you bring any of the Beats together with Beckett?
BR: I did once. I had a dinner at Maurice Girodias’s restaurant in Paris with Beckett and Burroughs. I’ve told the story so many times I’m beginning to wonder if it was real or if I made it up or somebody else did, but my memory is that Burroughs tried to get Beckett interested in cut-up. And Beckett, who was extremely polite, really polite, said, “That’s not writing; that’s plumbing.” That’s my memory. Whether he ever said it or not, that’s the way he felt.
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Book
Barney Rosset Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship
OR Books
‘Genet, Beckett, Burroughs, Miller, Ionesco, Oe, Duras. Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Hubert Selby Jr. and John Rechy. The legendary film I Am Curious (Yellow). The books that assaulted the fort of propriety that was the United States in the 1950s and ’60s, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Tropic of Cancer. The Evergreen Review. Victorian erotica.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A bombing, a sit-in, and a near-fistfight with Norman Mailer. The common thread between these disparate elements, a number of which reshaped modern culture, was Barney Rosset.
‘Rosset was the antidote to the trope of the gentleman publisher” personified by other pioneering figures of the industry such as Alfred A. Knopf, Bennett Cerf and James Laughlin. If Barney saw a crowd heading one wayhe looked the other. If he knew something was forbidden, he regarded it as a plus. Unsurprisingly, financial ruin, along with the highs and lows of critical reception, marked his career. But his unswerving dedication to publishing what he wanted made him one of the most influential publishers ever.
‘Rosset began work on his autobiography a decade before his death in 2012, and several publishers and a number of editors worked with him on the project. Now, at last, in his own words, we have a portrait of the man who reshaped how we think about language, literatureand sex. Here are the stories behind the filming of Norman Mailer’s Maidstone and Samuel Beckett’s Film; the battles with the US government over Tropic of Cancer and much else; the search for Che’s diaries; his romance with the expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, and more.
‘At times appalling, more often inspiring, never boring or conventional: this is Barney Rosset, uncensored.’ — OR Books
Excerpts
William S. Burroughs, as I also mentioned in The Paris Review, was so special by himself, very special in a literary sense. One day Ginsberg brought Burroughs’s manuscript, Naked Lunch, to the Grove office. I believed it was a work of genius, especially the Dr. Benway character. Now when you read the book it sounds almost coherent, but back then, it was like looking at an abstract painting. We had never seen anything like it before. Burroughs turned language and concepts all around, and he used a good figure, a doctor, to send up the whole society. And of course he had strong concepts about all kinds of drugs, whether they were good or bad and how to break your habit.
Ginsberg had taken it upon himself to market the Naked Lunch manuscript and had met rejection for two years, even from such venerable champions of free expression as Olympia Press and City Lights. Maurice Girodias’s first response to Naked Lunch, which had been brought to him by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, was negative, a “no go.” Allen next showed the manuscript to City Lights, but Ferlinghetti wasn’t interested in the mixture of sexuality, violence, and psychopathology.
The next stop was the office of Chicago Review, the literary magazine of the University of Chicago. Ginsberg sent Naked Lunch to what he thought—correctly, as it turned out—would be sympathetic student editors. Both Paul Carroll and Irving Rosenthal were drawn to Burroughs’ iconoclastic satire. The first excerpt from the book was published in the Spring 1958 issue of Chicago Review. Although a faculty member, Richard Stern, groused about the journal becoming “a magazine of San Francisco rejects,” since it had also published such California writers as Robert Duncan and Michael McClure, the storm had not yet broken. The lack of outcry emboldened Rosenthal and Carroll to publish an even larger chunk from the novel in the Winter 1958 issue, which included Kerouac, Burroughs, and Edward Dahlberg.
Then, of course, the press caught wind of what had been going on at the magazine. A front-page column by Jack Mabley appeared in the Chicago Daily News in which the “vulgarity and courseness” being purveyed by the Chicago Review was excoriated. No actual authors were cited in Mabley’s piece. When the University of Chicago chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, was alerted to this controversy, he banned Burroughs and other Beats from appearing in the Review. Hutchins had previously made a name as being a liberal leader, but now he radically changed his position by clamping down on free literary expression. Rosenthal, Carroll, and others resigned in protest and decided to start their own independent magazine, Big Table. It was financed with private donations and ads, but now faced a new hurdle when an issue with another excerpt from Naked Lunch was seized by the Post Office as obscene.
The poet John Ciardi wrote a June 27, 1959 editorial in the Saturday Review castigating the Chicago Post Office, pointing out “it is not interested in the law, but only its own kind of harassment.” He also offered a reading of Naked Lunch: “Only after the first shock does one realize that what Burroughs is writing about is not only the destruction of depraved men by their drug lust, but the destruction of all men by their consuming addictions.”85
The work was put on trial in Chicago in front of Judge Julius Hoffman, who would later try the Yippies for their alleged disruption of the Chicago convention and, in a less historically significant moment, presided over my divorce from Joan Mitchell. His verdict was “not guilty.” In his judicial opinion he wrote, “Naked Lunch, while not exactly a wild prose picnic in the style of Kerouac, is, taken as a whole, similarly unappealing to the prurient interest. The exacerbated, morbid and perverted sex related by the author could not arouse a corresponding interest in the average reader.”
Meanwhile, the hullabaloo and national press coverage—along with the steady sales of Big Table—convinced the publishers that had earlier ignored Burroughs’ novel to rethink their positions. While still involved with Carroll and the Chicago people, Rosenthal, who had meticulously edited the excerpts from Naked Lunch that had appeared, moved to New York. We gave him a job at Grove Press. He began editing the manuscript with Burroughs but found himself cut off at the pass when Girodias, who had earlier disdained Naked Lunch, now offered Burroughs $800 for the book. Olympia quickly rushed out an edition, done with minimal editing. Now Burroughs came to value the more chaotic, collage-like style that had been edited out of the Chicago Review excerpts and insisted that the Grove edition conform to the Olympia version. This cut down on Rosenthal’s ability to shape the text and later led to acrimony between Burroughs, Rosenthal, and Grove.
On July 29, 1960, Allen Ginsberg stepped in, to no avail, urging Burroughs to listen to Rosenthal’s advice: “Irving put a lot of work into the detail, and your last letter tends to sweep all further detail under carpet. But it won’t be much work for you just to check what he did. I think book’ll be better, easier to read.” (Allen also did work on the text, and I recently found a copy of an invoice he submitted for eight hours of copyediting at $2.50 per hour—$20.00 due in total.) Although Burroughs acceded to some of the suggestions, he had his own ideas regarding his book’s integrity. When he wrote to Ginsberg agreeing to some of Rosenthal’s editorial suggestions, such as adding chapter heads, Burroughs added, “Please send more mescaline. I will send along more money very soon.”
Meanwhile, I cabled Girodias on August 12, 1959, “DON’T FORGET I WANT NAKED LUNCH FOR STATES STOP DO YOU HAVE CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS STOP AND DON’T DRINK YOURSELF TO DEATH UNTIL I GET THERE.”
At the outset of Rosenthal doing the editorial work, Burroughs wrote him:
First a general statement of policy with regard to Naked Lunch. The Olympia edition aside from actual typographical errors is the way the book was conceived and took form. That form can not be altered without loss of life. … [I]t definitely is my intention that the book should flow from beginning to end without spatial interruption or chapter headings. I think the marginal headings are definitely indicated. THIS IS NOT A NOVEL. And should not appear looking like one.
Burroughs now adhered to the cut-up method of composition, which he said he had adopted unconsciously in relation to Naked Lunch. He explained in his essay “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin” in A Casebook on the Beat that this technique had been introduced by Dadaist writer Tristan Tzara, who “at a surrealist rally in the 1920s proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theatre.”88 In other words, as Tzara suggested, an artwork would be composed by utilizing chance operations to one degree or another. Burroughs’s version of this, he said, was that he sent the different parts of Naked Lunch to the printer in random order, so that while each section had continuity in itself, the ultimate arrangement of the pieces of the book arose by accident.
Burroughs also wanted to include an introductory note in the Grove edition explaining the background of the book, coming as it did from years of a drug addiction he had now cleaned up from, as something of a reply to critics. He put his justification like this: “I get tired of people telling me they lost their lunch reading my Lunch.”
Aside from difficulties editing the book, there was the problem of getting copies from Olympia (which would be easier to work from rather than the original manuscript) because the government kept seizing the ones that were sent to us. As my assistant, Judith Schmidt, observed, “By this time the Customs Department must have so many Naked Lunches on hand that they could easily open a bookstore to compete with us when our edition is published.”
Indeed, I received a letter from the Bureau of Customs, which managed to misspell the author’s name. The letter, dated August 29, 1960, read in part, “You are advised that a mail package addressed to you from _________ found to contain the following listed merchandise, has been seized as in violation of the provisions of Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930:—1 book “The Naked Lunch” by W. Burrough.”
We had bought the rights to Naked Lunch from Girodias in November 1959 and even printed copies, but I hesitated to distribute the book when I was already embroiled in the Tropic of Cancer censorship trials. The Miller situation was still up in the air and adding more fuel to the fire by bringing out another controversial book seemed like a poor move.
As I wrote Girodias,
At this point we have legal battles over TROPIC ranging up and down the length of the country. We have employed legal firms in perhaps ten cities, leaving others to wait, and the book has been taken off sale in a major part of the United States. … [C]opies have been confiscated and in many places the wholesalers have kept the books but have not distributed them. Most of the trouble comes from police who intimidate the wholesalers and the actual retailers. Unless there is some sort of censorship by police intimidation and it is [a] very difficult thing to fight because in many places you cannot even prove that intimidation has taken place.
It would be absolutely suicidal to publish Naked Lunch at this moment—Burroughs seemed perfectly aware of that fact.
Girodias, in fact, sent Miller a copy of the Burroughs work, hoping to get a positive blurb. Miller replied in December 1960,
I’ve tried now for the third time to read it through, but I can’t stick it. The truth is, it bores me … However, there’s no question in my mind as to Burroughs’ abilities. There is a ferocity in his writing which is equaled in my opinion, only by Céline. No writer I know of made more daring use of the language. Thinking about the law, it seems to me that the effect of Burroughs’ book on the average reader—if publication were ever permitted—would be the very opposite of what the censors feared. One would have to have a diseased mind to ask for more. To read that book is to take the cure.89
Even with the Chicago Review controversy, William S. Burroughs was still not a recognized name and could not expect the attention and (relative) courtesy afforded Miller. Girodias, who was anxious for my American edition to succeed because he would receive a percentage, sent a piece by Burroughs for publication in Evergreen Review, writing, “It is quite essential that we rapidly establish Burroughs’ reputation as a serious writer in this country.” We published it as quickly as possible but this didn’t stop Maurice’s complaints.
He also lamented the financial consequences of the delayed publication, writing on February 21, 1961, “You certainly have valid reasons for adopting this policy [of delaying the distribution of the book] but it is quite disastrous from Burroughs’ point of view and mine. I have been anxiously looking forward to the publication of Naked Lunch in the U.S. as one of the only imaginable means of restoring my shaky finances.”
On July 21, Girodias again wrote to me frantically, “Concerning Naked Lunch, I must also once more ask you to let me know what you have decided. I would not like the idea of having waited one year and a half for you to publish a book, and learn at the last minute that you finally decided not to do it.”
I cabled back, “PLANS PROCEEDING PUBLISH LUNCH THIS FALL.”
Nonetheless, the complaints from Girodias, now happy that the book was on the verge of publication, did not stop. Burroughs had offered me excerpts from The Soft Machine, his follow-up book to Naked Lunch, and, Maurice, who was doing the novel in Paris, became incensed and complained that I was stealing his thunder, since he had already contracted to do the book and run an excerpt in his own magazine. I responded on November 13, 1961,
Usually publishers are delighted by the chance to have a section of one of their books appear in a magazine, even if the circulation of the magazine is not too large. Usually, you have to pay for advertising, and the chance to get some free exploitation is not easily come by. Obviously in this case it is your magazine that you are protecting, and you are not concerned with the welfare of the book. Again, I think you are very silly because although I would like to think that the EVERGREEN REVIEW blankets the globe, I’m afraid that it does not. Also I think perhaps you are having some delusions of grandeur concerning your own magazine, if you believe that the section from THE SOFT MACHINE will jet propel the whole affair into the stratosphere of SUCCESS and glory. … If you will really think this matter over a little bit, I think you will come to Burroughs’ and my point of view. You cannot consider him a slave who can only be published in your magazine.
To appease Girodias, I cancelled the inclusion of the excerpts. And although this was obviously not a result I would have wished for, I held up publication a little longer, as the Tropic trials dragged on. Girodias became angry and talked of buying back the copies I had already printed and offering them to Dial Press. In a letter dated December 7, 1961, I explained Grove’s difficulties in relation to our censorship trials:
When the book [Tropic of Cancer] is sold to the thousands of booksellers, of all description, in this country, an indemnification goes with it under which we guarantee to take up the defense for any wholesaler or retailer who might be arrested. It seems difficult for you to understand, but the arrests are CRIMINAL ones, and if someone is convicted he can go to jail—and even if he does not go to jail he suffers various penalties for the rest of his life because of the conviction. Legal fees are expensive and these dealers cannot pay them. If we did not indemnify them, there would be absolutely no sale. Therefore the investment in lawsuits is a matter of necessity, not frivolity, providing one finds it important to publish the book. This same problem will also hold true for NAKED LUNCH.
More than fifty people are now awaiting criminal trial.
Burroughs was much harder to defend than Miller at that time. You could make a good case that Henry Miller was an established twentieth-century writer. But, as I say, nobody had heard of Burroughs. Lawrence had set the stage for Miller, and Miller set the stage for Burroughs. At the time we signed the contract for Naked Lunch, we hadn’t won anything. We were right in the middle of it. Had we just gone ahead and published Burroughs it would have been a mess, because we already had all these lawsuits to contend with. That book would have proven that we were pornographers not satisfied with doing one dirty book—look, now we’ve got another one!
Even this did not stop Maurice’s complaints and threats to go to another publisher, so I wrote back angrily on December 13, 1961, “Once again, NAKED LUNCH will be published by us. Do everybody a favor by ceasing your attempts to sell it to anybody else and stop telling us how and when to publish it here. You take care of your problems in France, we will deal with the problems here as best we can. Is this precise enough.”
I put it more delicately in a follow-up letter in January:
The censorship problem has not improved—it may well get worse before it gets better. Today two local booksellers are being hauled before a grand jury right here in New York. We have our fingers crossed. …
A trial in Chicago has been going on for three weeks and one in Los Angles for almost as long. Only a suicidal maniac would plunge in with Naked Lunch at this moment—at least that is the opinion of everyone I have talked to, including Burroughs. We are not sitting on 10,000 books to spite you, believe me.
Indeed, Burroughs himself wrote me, “In any case if he [Girodias] makes any move to put Naked Lunch in the hands of another American publisher you can be sure it is done without my approval.”
One thing that finally precipitated quicker publication was the positive reception Burroughs was receiving from the literary elite. Prompted by British publisher John Calder, who was doing yeoman work to get Burroughs known and accepted, William had been invited, along with Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Mary McCarthy, to appear at the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference in August 1962. Not only was Burroughs well received but both Mailer and McCarthy heaped praise on his head as being a writer of genius. This, along with my lawyer Edward de Grazia’s assurance that any prosecution of Naked Lunch could be beaten, convinced me to publish the book.
So we announced publication on October 30, 1962.
The moment the book was out, we were hit by both negative reviews and a new round of censorship trials. As to the reviews, one of the most scandalous, because it libeled the author, appeared in Time magazine.90 We consulted a lawyer, John V. Long, about the case, and he wrote that w
e should seek legal recourse, since the review was wrong, “1) in falsely stating that he [Burroughs] is an ex-convict, and 2) in falsely attributing his discharge from war-time military service to self-maiming for the purpose of evasion of such service.” Long also bridled at the way the review casts doubts on the writer’s love of country, making a perhaps disingenuous argument:
Nor would his [Burroughs’s] non-conformist biography have any relevance to the amount of damages to which he would be entitled by virtue of false statements impugning his patriotism in war time. It simply does not follow that since one is or was a drug addict, he is probably unpatriotic anymore than that an unpatriotic person is likely to be a drug addict.
As for the censorship trials, we assembled expert literary witnesses, including Norman Mailer and John Ciardi. For the Boston trial, held in January 1965, we asked Burroughs himself to testify. Our lawyer Edward de Grazia prepped him with these words:
Allen [Ginsberg] thinks you might describe how this book developed from your recordings in depth what passed through your mind, your recollections, following the apromorphine treatment and how elements of “isolation” and “alienation” got involved and how even a process of adjustment to outer world was involved, etc. I would think the material can be described as originally unconscious, made conscious through your act of creating this book, etc. and others (our psychiatric witnesses) can testify that the “horror” or “obscenity” of that unconscious material is kin to that of most people. You can perhaps relate this personal creative process to your personal drug “problem.” Others may speak, as you have suggested, of “drugs” [as] the perfect American commodity. Mailer, like Ciardi, wants to talk about hell and I hope you won’t feel bad if no one talks about heaven.
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When we signed up Pinter, I remember very well that we had not yet seen one of his plays performed, but his scripts clearly showed his writing was brilliant. The way he used silence was reminiscent, to me, of Beckett—but different. There was an all-pervading sense of menace. The Dumb Waiter was a good example. Pure menace, terrifying, brilliant theater charged with a silent danger.
Pinter’s agent was Jimmy Wax. He and Harold were close friends. In New York they premiered The Homecoming on Broadway, but opening night was less than triumphant with many in the audience hating it. I remember asking Jimmy, “Who the hell did you invite to this opening?” I mean, at an opening when an author is already very well known, you can pick and choose whom you’re inviting—and you’re giving away many tickets. At least you ought to get people who might like the play. But on that first night one woman in the audience stood up and shouted in the middle of the first act: “Let’s get out of here, this is terrible!”
Pinter always talked and even acted as if he were a character in one of his plays. During the New York blackout of 1965, Cristina and I were in a Greenwich Village restaurant with Harold and my wife’s sister. Initially, when the lights went out, we thought that the blackout was confined to the restaurant and its immediate vicinity. I got my car from our nearby house, parked it facing the restaurant, and turned on the headlights so we could see to eat. The restaurant staff did not object. We slowly realized there was a total blackout extending as far as we could see uptown. Harold sat there silently for a long time, then suddenly said, “Does this happen very often here?” I waited for about three minutes before answering, as if we were in one of his plays, and then said, “Not often. Every twenty years or so.” Finally, Harold asked us to go back with him to his room at the luxurious, blacked-out Carlyle Hotel. We did and a city police officer carrying a flashlight escorted us up a back stairway. Back in his room, Harold read to us by candlelight a poem he had recently written. It was a memorable evening.
Pinter asked Beckett to critique everything he wrote, and Beckett liked Pinter both as a friend and as a writer, and paid him and his work close attention. The reverse was equally true.
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Earlier I mentioned Norman Mailer’s film Maidstone, which we did in the Hamptons. It had a very promising premise. Supposedly there are two teams of CIA people, one of which thinks it’s a good idea to assassinate the character Mailer plays, a would-be presidential aspirant, and another that wants him to get elected and not killed. The actors were each given a chip indicating which team they were on, information they could not share with anyone else. At some point the good ones were supposed to save Norman and the bad ones were supposed to try and kill him.
One of the actors was Hervé Villechaize, who became quite famous later when he appeared on the TV show Fantasy Island. One night, after the film crew had left my house, my mother-in-law stepped outside and came back screaming, “There’s a midget in the pool!” And there was Hervé floating on his back, unconscious. My wife Cristina and I fished him out, placed him on the side, and raced to Bridgehampton, where Norman was, and said “Go get your midget!” And he did, and took Hervé to get his stomach pumped.
The next night Hervé, who was also a pianist, gave a concert during a party sequence that was part of the film. The actor who was supposed to play the lead in this scene was drunk, and Norman ordered him out of the huge room. I found myself next to him, outside on a stone terrace with his girlfriend; I was sitting next to them and overheard the actor say, “I’m going to kill Norman when he comes out.” When Norman appeared, the actor jumped on him from behind. Norman turned around, slugged him, knocked him into the bushes, and then ignored him. The guy slowly got up, tackled Norman, and started to hit his head against the stone terrace. At that point José Torres, a former world champion light-heavyweight boxer and a close friend of Norman’s, walked by, and Cristina said, “José, you’ve gotta save Norman!” José said he couldn’t do it because he’d get arrested, being a prizefighter. So I jumped on top of the actor and put my hands around his throat. I pulled him off Norman, and Cristina and I were still holding him, although by now he was standing, when some guys came over, Black Panthers, I think, one with a bottle of whiskey with which to hit the actor over the head. Cristina slipped around behind and took it from the guy’s hand. The actor ran off, fell off some large stones and wound up in the hospital. That was one night! I’d gotten all these people in East Hampton to lend Norman their houses as settings for the film. After that evening, I was persona non grata to them all.
The next day actor Rip Torn, who was supposed to have been the assistant director of the film but, with reason, felt thwarted, said to Michael McClure, “Come with me. We’re gonna kill Norman today out on Gardiners Island.” Michael decided he didn’t feel like going, and Cristina and I didn’t feel like going either. Rip took a little hammer to the island. In the film we saw him hit Norman with it but the wound looked a lot worse than it was. Nobody came to help. Norman’s wife started screaming, “He’s killing Norman!” Then Norman bit Torn so badly on the ear that Torn ended up in the hospital and Norman went home. This whole five minutes or so of film looks staged when viewed. However, it was real.
Norman must have edited the film himself because he’s all that’s left in most of it. All those mad acts — throwing the midget into the pool and the attempted killing of the actor — aren’t in it.
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p.s. Hey. On the commenting/verification issue, it’s not something I have been able to fix on my own, being pretty much a tech klutz. WordPress are looking into it. I hope they can resolve it. In the meantime, jay suggests that you try accessing the blog from a different browser or VPN. I’m so sorry for the problem and the hassle. ** jay, Thank you for the suggestion. Miko: agree, me too, no surprise there. I’m okay with Von Trier before ‘Dancer in the Dark’. I may have to go to the American/British food store here to find those Linda McCartney products, but I will. Awesome that ‘TMS’ sat well with you guys. I hope your train trip today is super easy. Are you looking forward to the college restart or anything in particular about it? ** Joe, Hi! The blog certainly likes gremlins, that’s for sure. Very interesting about the Cassavetes research. Very. Huh. Personally, I like early Cassavetes the best by far: ‘Faces’, “Shadows’, ‘Husbands’. The later films are really good, of course, but I preferred his work before he let narrative become the guiding force. The frenetic, inspired editing and off-the-cuff-seeming situations in the early ones kind of spoiled me, I think. Lovely to see you, pal. ** kier, Thanks, k! Yeah, I’m often super envious of the slaves’ writing abilities. I like ‘Ginger Snaps’, yes, for sure. Glad your ear is righted. My still isn’t, and I fear I may end up having to see a doctor after all. It’s not debilitating or anything, but it’s annoying. I’m going to a concert tonight, and we’ll see if that fixes it or murders it. Right, your solo show, man, I sure hope you get the grant. How could they not award you? You sound generally really good, sadness aside. Exciting plans. Zac and I are doing LA Halloween in October, so I’m obviously jonesing for that. I’m okay. Life has been kind of consumed by really big problems around our film that we need to solve. Money and other things. But we have a scary, important meeting this morning with one of our producers to try to sort it out, and that’ll either improve things or create another huge mess depending on how he reacts to our plans and demands. Otherwise just working on stuff (next film, mostly) and looking forward to Paris coming back to life after its summer nap. So wonderful to get to talk with you. I really hope we can align our schedules and see each other very soon. Big love, me. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I can still feel the pain in my fingers when I remember that day. I try to mostly chew gum, but once in a while my nails are just too charismatic. If you like Dead boys killed by women, love is happy to communicate with you, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, I’ve seen photos of the Crowley/Page cottage, but only from the outside. It’s so petite. Obviously and enthusiastic yay re: … Everyone, May I have your attention? ‘The new episode of (_Black_Acrylic’s) show Play Therapy v2.0 is online here via Tak Tent Radio! With Ben ‘Jack Your Body’ Robinson it’s as if you’re being shot out over millions, billions of years. Time simply obliterates.’ As always, you are mostly strongly encouraged let your ears luxuriate thereby. ** Lucas, Hi. Yeah, I mean you have to rise above. There’s no other choice, unfortunately. Warmest hugs across the vast physical distance. But, yeah, you’ll be back in the big P before you know it. My weekend: I did my biweekly Zoom book/film club with my American writer friends. I worked on stuff. I strolled. I mostly tried to psych myself up for this kind of potentially intense meeting about our film this morning where things will either get much better or much worse. Urgh. But the week ahead looks okay otherwise. ** Oscar 🌀, Dag! Amsterdam! Ah, you took the 7 tram. Interesting. My ear’s all clogged and fucked up, as you may know, and when I put my finger tip in it and move it around, it makes this squishy sound that I only just realised has an alphabet, and the first thing I”m going to teach it to say is ‘hi Oscar’, not that you’ll ever know, I guess. I think there’s a pretty high percentage of stolen photographs in those slave profiles, oh, yes. Just this morning when I was looking for escorts there were at least four Timothee Chalamets. I miss the Eye Filmmuseum. And taking the ferry over to it. Sweet. My weekend was no great shakes, but it passed the time. What else are you guys doing there? Wait, it’s your birthday! Happiest one! Are you going to smoke your brains out? How did you mark the auspicious occasion. Have massive fun! ** HaRpEr in Blogland, Right, ‘Voyage in the Dark’ is really good. Jean Rhys kicks Bukowski’s ass all the way down any motherfucking street no matter how long it is. Cool, cool, I’m glad you’re on the preparatory phase of the YouTube project. Jacques Brel is great. Marc Almond did a very good cover of ‘Jackie’. For every Gaddis there’s a Kathy Acker. Whatever works and excites. Enjoy the continued figuring out. ** Okay. Barney Rosset is a big hero of mine due to his founding and manning of the, at one point, unimpeachably great Grove Press, home of the vast majority of my picks for the greatest ever writers. Plus, I fulfilled a childhood dream of becoming a Grove Press author myself, albeit in the post-Barney years. Anyway, I thought I’d spotlight his autobiography, and that’s your day. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 