Getting Obscene with Barney Rosset
IFQ Magazine recently caught up with legendary book publisher Barney Rosset to discuss his storied career and ventures into film and political opinions ; the occasion was marked by the DVD release of Obscene, a documentary on Rosset by filmmakers Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, made available courtesy of Virgil Films and Entertainment alongside Arthouse Films. With both Grove Press and his literary magazine The Evergreen Review, Rosset introduced American society to a who’s who of iconic writers including Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, among many, many more. His progressive politics and belief in freedom of speech led him to champion such banned books as Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, and Naked Lunch, all of which were subjected to obscenity trials that Rosset subsequently won, thus opening up free speech to a then-unparalleled degree. Below are some brief words from our conversation.
IFQ: Looking back on the work you did with Grove Press and the Evergreen Review (both in its heyday and current online form), what do you feel you were able to accomplish culturally in bringing any sort of definitive change to our society, if any at all?
Barney Rosset: Well I certainly have no clear concept or never expected that we would but I would hope that, along with many other people, we ended up with a kind of thing that would hopefully would result in somebody like Obama winning an election. I’ve lived most of the time through very dull and reactionary people, like the last eight years, and how much that we have contributed in either direction is not clear to me. I certainly knew the way I hoped we’d be going, whether we were apart of accomplishing something, whether we did whether we will, I don’t know. I just say you have to look at the thing itself. You have to go look at the books and form your own opinion. That’s what I did at the time; I didn’t have any strong preconceived ideas other than perhaps some dear friend of mine would very strongly advise me to look at something or that I would recognize something that I would like in a film. I had one sort of thing that was like, you might think of a person, whether seeking a book or a film, as a spider putting a web down where it thought it was a pretty good place for something interesting to stumble around and fall in.
IFQ: During your tenure at Grove Press, you introduced American society to now-legendary authors like Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, to name only a couple. Given the list of people whose work you introduced us to, what guided your decision making? What criterion did you abide by when looking for new authors and works to publish?
BR: It’s usually a case by case basis, however let’s say Beckett and Pinter for example. I heard about Beckett in New York, it must have been the early 50’s and it sounded interesting the whole concept of these two people out alone in this wilderness, whatever you want to call it, and I did hear opinions about it from various people. Finally, I somehow got a hold of the play. I read it and thought it was quite marvelous, so did my wife and so did my teachers at the New School and when I got the book I wrote to Beckett’s agent and then to Beckett himself. For $200 we bought Waiting For Godot, and went to Paris to meet the author where I was tremendously impressed by him as a human being. But it was easier then to go onto Pinter because Pinter reminded me of Beckett (laughs). He really, really did and I think Pinter felt the same way.
And to me it started to be like a baseball team with Beckett playing first base, then Pinter, and then after him David Mamet for example, who went to my same school in Chicago several years after me but we shared the same drama teacher. I don’t know, I would think that when you read Beckett for example, it either means something to you or it doesn’t. To me it meant a lot and we had things in common that wouldn’t be so simple on the surface like incidents that happened to us. For example, he went to either France or Germany to the North Sea and met a girl. She left him and went with somebody else which was a big, real tragedy for him from which came a lot of his plays. And I had the same sort of thing and emotions happen to me so on that level there was an emotional connection that I couldn’t have made with just anybody it had to be, thinking back on it, somebody who’d shared the same kind of misery and the same notes.
IFQ: I’m curious to know what your reaction has been to authors like again Beckett and then much later Pinter winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, reaching the very top rung of the ladder as it were?
BR: I was extremely pleased (laughs) as I was when we had I think five more including Octavio Paz, Kenzaburo Oe, etc. I felt like “hey, I participated in this”. Beckett wouldn’t even go to pick up the prize (laughs) because his excuse was “well, Sartre didn’t go”. Well maybe Sartre had a good reason but I don’t think Sam did (laughs). I thought that he should go and then of course a very great tragedy happened to Beckett and also to me in that his first long play, Eleutheria, was never published in France, never was put on, the only place I now know where it has been (put on) is in Iran. The man who put it on is now in Canada on some sort of scholarship. I keep hoping that I’m going to meet him before we get in a war I hope. To me one of the main things about Obama winning was my god maybe we won’t go to war with Iran. he’s put on Pinter in places like
IFQ: That leads to ask that given the politics that governed Grove Press during its heyday and your own personal beliefs, what are your thoughts on how this country has been run during the past eight years given the sorts of constitutional threats we lived under and the possibilities inherent in the new administration? Any particular hopes or misgivings about it?
BR: The first thing going for him is he’s connected to Chicago (laughs) where I was born and raised. So I have an immediate tie-in, although he’s from a part of Chicago I didn’t know very well. I think the last eight years have been a horror show, it’s been terrible. I’m beginning to feel a little sympathy for Bush now that he’s not there but it’s a tragedy not only for him, but I think for all of us and the world. I have a wild, strong hope that something good can happen with Obama and that everyone can benefit whether white, black, rich, poor, whatever but there’s a human being there now. He reminds me most in my lifetime of Roosevelt, although they’re very different people from different backgrounds and so forth. But there is a kind of spiritual going forward and going out that they share, which was also shared by Carter and Kennedy, but there’s much more planning it seems to me in the Obama approach like Roosevelt.
IFQ: Obscene touches on how, in addition to publishing, you were also involved in film production and distribution both before and during your tenure at Grove Press. Could you briefly touch on why film held your interest at that time and moreover, your opinion or tastes in cinema in general both then and now?
BR: Visual things have always been very haunting and strong to me; my first wife was Joan Mitchell who became, I think it’s safe to say, a world-famous painter in Chicago at the same school as (famous cinematographer) Haskell (Wexler) and I. When I was a child I went to Europe with my family and a 16mm camera, which I still have and I even have the goddamn projector. Without that projector you wouldn’t be able to show it. Haskell and I both got very interested (in film) and in the eighth grade we made a magazine. Later after eighth grade we wanted to make a film, a training film for ourselves, which was to be a film of a ship being loaded in the Chicago docks. After we decided to make it, we discovered that we had to fly over that thing and in order to do that you had to be a pilot; so we both became pilots. And then you got to have an airplane, so we bought an airplane, an air coupe, which cost about $3000 then, made the film and then threw away the airplane. I got out of it and walked away but Haskell sneaked in after me and took it and sold it.
Haskell then went straight onto a film career, I did not. I came to New York and then in the 1950s a friend of Joan’s, who’d went to the Art Institute of Chicago with her, came over to see me one day and she was carrying three paperback books. The two people who had put these books out did it through their company Grove Press. The wife of one said “I’ve had enough of you” and left him so he had no money which became the end of the company. I took it over from them, not really knowing what to do with it, and then Joan came back and said well how about The Golden Bowl by Henry James, which was not in print at the time. So I sort of drifted into it. So to me between film and books what else was there? It didn’t much matter whether it was books or film, so it became a combination of the two. I tried to make a film magazine, I actually made one issue but it was so far ahead of its time that making it on film, 16mm film, the print got lost before it made it past the University of Michigan. But it was a constant thing that I was interested between both films and books.
IFQ: I know that you had planned on producing a number of films written by Grove writers and actually got one made called Film, written by Samuel Beckett. How was the experience of producing that particular film? What were Beckett’s feelings towards film?
BR: Beckett had just as much ambition as I did, and certainly more talent, in the film direction. And the only time he ever came to the United States was to participate in the shooting of Film. He got to know the cameraman Boris Kaufman, all of us at Grove, stayed for the film, went to go see a baseball game and then he went to the airport bar with me and my wife. They wouldn’t serve my wife a drink because they didn’t think she was old enough even though she was. She didn’t have her ID and Beckett says “this is a very strange country, I’ll be seeing you”, got on a plane and went back. But he was very involved, wanted to be in films and was very important in the making of the film. We ran into all sorts of stupid problems like a condition where the film jiggles, you shoot something and there’s too much space so the film itself jumps up and down. We could not reshoot because one of the people involved was stupid as to put us up to a regular Hollywood union status in New York. So we couldn’t reshoot it, it would cost as much to do that one shot as the rest of the whole film. So Beckett did not get discouraged, he rearranged everything so we could eliminate that third of the film. We made it and he went back but afterwards neither he nor I had another chance to make another film. I commissioned several more and have the scripts, Marguerite Duras wrote one along with two or three other French writers and Harold Pinter too. His film was made but it was made in England and I never saw it. I was never able to even find out the name but I know the script well and am sure it was a very typical Pinter thing.
IFQ: Wasn’t one of the writers Alain Robbe-Grillet?
BR: Yes, he wrote a manuscript and was going to do it with Haskell. Haskell had just made America, America with a famous American director, I forget the name at this moment and Alain Robbe-Grillet had just made a film in Turkey I think. And they met, it had nothing to do with me. Haskell told me what a great guy he was and I said great we’ll get a script for you and Robbe-Grillet and we did. Robbe-Grillet wrote it and it was to take place in South America, they’d both been somewhere off the coast of Brazil totally by accident. Haskell had left his equipment there for one reason or another and Robbe-Grillet had left something there for some reason or another. And it was outdoors which would make for cheaper conditions, so they were going to do this together and then one day Haskell said to me “I think he’s too strong for me, he’ll push me around” or something ridiculous like that and it didn’t get made. It was tragic because we had a whole group of films to be made but the only one we made was Film, we spent all the money we could gather on it. Jason Epstein at Random House was very helpful in getting a French film company to put up all the money for Film. So I’ve always been split between the desire to make films and publish books.
IFQ: What about your experience in distributing I Am Curious (Yellow)?
BR: I found out about I Am Curious through a Swedish publisher, they suggested to me at the Frankfurt Book Fair that there a film, I Am Curious (Yellow), that was the sort of thing that I’d like and maybe I should go and see it. I was so flattered that they’d ask me to begin with but they then went ahead and told the producers, which was a non-profit foundation in Sweden. I did go see it and liked it and bought the film. But along the way I also bought a Susan Sontag film which now I’m looking for. We bought it, paid $25,000 for it and now can’t find it (laughs). It was called Duet for Cannibals and it was one of the last things she did. I didn’t know her well but I liked her spirit very much. We paid $100,000 for I Am Curious (Yellow) and we used some astounding ideas for distribution here in the United States where people said we’d be wiped out by it. But it didn’t happen that way, our attorney was a genius in that he said we’ll take the film to theaters that will run it and tell them they’ll get ten percent of the box office. And that happened all over the country; we’d sometimes buy a theater, show the film, and then sell the theater back. So we’d try something new in everyplace and it really worked.
For more information on Obscene itself, go to www.arthousefilmsonline.com and www.aaadvdstore.com.
To read IFQ’s review of Obscene, click here
To check out the current online edition of the Evergreen Review and other Rosset-associated materials, go to www.evergreenreview.com
*Photos Courtesy of Barney Rosset and Arthouse Films