“Growing up, I belonged to nothing because in a city like Chicago there were two groups that I think really had great prejudice against them, and that was the Jews and the Irish—and I was both of them! And they didn’t like each other. I felt that by not identifying with anything, I would not censor, but they censored each other too [laughs].” – Barney Rosset

We give you Barney Rosset’s own commentary on what it’s like to be Everywhere and know Everyone.

Barney Rosset's fierce battles against US government censorship gave us the freedom to read, and Barney a lifetime of surveillance
Barney Rosset’s fierce battles against US government censorship gave us the freedom to read, and Barney a lifetime of surveillance

In September of 2008, “Barney’s Wall” co-producer Williams Cole interviewed Barney Rosset for “The Brooklyn Rail” in the East Village loft where Rosset lived with his wife Astrid Myers.   (Visuals are by “Barney’s Wall” co-producer Sandy Gotham Meehan)

Cole (Brooklyn Rail): So you ran into censorship, or what you perceived as censorship early on in your life and you just had a natural anger towards it? I

This almost destroyed JFK's presidential run
This almost destroyed JFK’s presidential run

Rosset: Yes, I ran into it early in my life. There were some things I didn’t notice but which must have had an effect. One of my dearest friends from childhood, Haskell Wexler was interviewed at one point and he said a person he had great sympathy for was my mother because in the building where we lived, a little world unto itself, he said none of the other women, all of whom were Jewish, would speak to my mother, who was Irish. I wasn’t conscious of that but it must have done something. I guess I saw people locking other people out and I didn’t like it.

(Life-long Barney friend Haskell Wexler’s classic film “Medium Cool,” described by “The New York Times” as “a kind of cinematic Guernica, a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence.” Sound familiar?)

Rosset: I didn’t go through lawsuits to open up culture; I wanted to publish Henry Miller. That certainly involved fighting censorship. But the first thing I thought of was Miller. So, in other words, my thinking never went along the lines of, “We are doing all of this for a very set purpose.

Barney Rosset made Henry Miller a college curriculum regular, Miller's greatest fear
Barney Rosset made Henry Miller a college curriculum regular, Miller’s greatest fear

Rosset: I thought Beckett was a great writer, I guess, no matter what he wrote. To me, it was good. I certainly was against censorship, in any way I ran into it. But I didn’t go out looking for new places.

Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, whose diaries inflamed readers, and Henry
Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, whose diaries inflamed readers, and Henry

Rosset: I would say the greatest moment for me was when Tropic of Cancer was banned in Chicago. I was one of the accused. Miller would never go to a trial of his work. The District Attorney had accused me of having published the book to make money—nothing else. And I had brought the paper I wrote about Miller in college with me. So I just took it out of my pocket and started reading it until he stopped me. The judge had been a good friend of my father and we won! And the judge gave a marvelous decision which we used on the cover of Evergreen titled “freedom to read.” That was the high moment of the whole thing—it all came together: me, Chicago, the court, the book, the author. That’s one time I was very conscious of what we were doing.”

Barney Rosset made Henry Miller famous
Barney Rosset made Henry Miller famous

Rail: What about Miller and the case involving Tropic of Cancer in NYC? Miller was from Brooklyn, actually right near the street where I live in Williamsburg.

Rosset: We had a case in New York and, of course, he wouldn’t go to the court. I had lunch with him at a restaurant on sixth Avenue right near here called Alfred’s with our lawyer and three or four other people, and then we had to go to court. But he wouldn’t go.

Rosset: He’d been summonsed so he was breaking the law by not going. So we went into court, and the District Attorney questioned me and said, “You see that we have a jury here of men and women with children who go to school right near where that book is on sale, near the subway stop. What’d you think they feel to have their children reading this book?”

The nanny from heaven
The nanny from heaven

Rosset: So I took out the book and started reading and the jury started laughing and they thought it was wonderful. I said to them, “If your children got this book and read the whole book you ought to congratulate them.” And they loved it, and they refused to convict me of anything. That was a great pleasure. Miller couldn’t leave this country until the decision was in, verified and so forth. For at least a year or two years, he couldn’t go.

It was so funny because they accused me of soliciting him to write the book—write Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn—in Brooklyn, and at that point I was only 8 years old! Miller was a little older than me. It was a specific charge against me that was absurd. I was a pimp supposedly. They didn’t even bother to see how ridiculous their charge would look.

Rosset goes to court, Henry Miller goes to Paris
Rosset goes to court, Henry Miller goes to Paris

Rail: You worked with poets and prose writers.

Rosset: Poetry used to be more differentiated from prose. Ginsberg’s Howl, I don’t know if that would have been considered poetry in 1920.

Rosset: Kerouac is a good example too. He thought of what he was doing, much of it, as poetry. We published a book of his, The Subterraneans, and the very person who brought the manuscript to me, as much as he liked it, thought that it had to all be edited, changed, and so that’s what he did. When Kerouac saw it he was enraged. He said, “I wrote it that way because that’s the way I wanted it.” And he put every word back exactly as he had given it to us in the first place. That’s a good example of the certain confusion, the idea of an editor saying, “This person really has some talent but he has no education.”

Jack Kerouac: dazed and confused after too much time on the road
Jack Kerouac: dazed and confused after too much time on the road

Rosset: Kerouac really disabused us of that.

Rail: What was it like hanging out with those guys?

Rosset: I mainly knew painters because of Joan Mitchell, whom I finally got married to.

Rosset: So being with her, almost all of my social life was with painters. Larry Rivers would be a cross between the two and Joan liked him very much personally but was a lousy painter, she thought. So whatever she thought, I thought [laughs] in terms of painting. My social life was mainly with painters.

Barney Rosset's artist rat pack
Barney Rosset’s artist rat pack

Rail: But you would talk literature with them and reading and— —

Rosset: Talking about anything to the most famous of those painters, Pollock, was not easy [laughs]. He didn’t do much talking. He was a very quiet guy and very ominous. He came in the room and everyone went “Whoa!” He had a high temperature, but was actually quite harmless except to himself. And de Kooning’s language wasn’t English.

Barney Rosset: "de Kooning's language wasn't English."
Barney Rosset: “de Kooning’s language wasn’t English.”

Rosset: So, in other words, it wasn’t a very high literary group but they were very intelligent, of course.

Rail: Was Beckett fun to hang out with?

Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset bromance
Samuel Beckett and Barney Rosset bromance

Rosset: Sometimes, usually. But Beckett acted as your psychoanalyst. He concentrated on one person so intensely, you could get the idea he was angry at the rest. Then next time, it would be somebody else. One thing that was funny about Beckett is that he really didn’t like Ireland. “I haven’t any desire to go back,” he said. I recently read a magazine piece about Pinter. It was a long story about him but it never mentioned Beckett even though every word that Pinter wrote he would give to Beckett! I remember going to a bar in Paris drinking alone once, and I didn’t notice but the guy who was sitting next to me was Pinter, with a manuscript he was bringing to Beckett.

Frenemies Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett
Frenemies Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett

Rail: He really would show everything that he wrote to Beckett?

Rosset: Everything. Pinter lived like a Pinter. He was a Pinter play. So strange, the same pauses. I think that Beckett taught them silence, Pinter and Mamet. He taught them that art is in silence.

Pinter's Art of the Pause
Pinter’s Art of the Pause

Rosset: Once I asked Pinter to write an introduction for a Beckett play I was publishing and he just wrote back in big lettering, “I can’t.” I never saw Pinter again. The Pinter magazine piece was mostly about his play The Homecoming—about its great success. But I was there on the opening night, and it was a riot—a bad riot. I was with his agent, and I said to his agent, “What the hell’s wrong with you?” I mean this big theater, and you gave these people tickets, why couldn’t you find anybody who liked Pinter? I mean this woman stood up in the first row of the audience and said, “Let’s get out of here, this is terrible.” So I wouldn’t call that a great success, but I guess it ran for a long time, so it was successful, but not from the opening.

Rail: You were spied on and harassed by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. throughout your career. Do you think that’s happening now to publishers and the like?

Rosset: I would think they would. I can’t imagine that they would stop. Wiretapping seems to be common.

Barney Rosset avoiding CIA and FBI tail
Barney Rosset avoiding CIA and FBI tail

Rail: Were you surprised personally when you found out the C.I.A. was spying on you?

Rosset: Yeah, I was. I shouldn’t have been. I was very unpleasantly surprised. I thought it was not in the spirit of what this country is supposed to be. And that obviously is still going on. And now with better means of communication, it’s a lot easier to ensnare people. That’s a real problem. You have to be vigilant.

Get the William S. Burroughs Paranoid t-shirt NOW
Get the William S. Burroughs Paranoid t-shirt NOW

Rail: Were you frightened?

Rosset: If you start using your time up being frightened, you’re in big trouble.

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“Without Rosset, contemporary literature as we know it would simply not exist.” – L.A. Times

Our thank you to our Kickstarter backers
Our thank you to our Kickstarter backers

BARNEY ROSSET ON BECKETT, PINTER, MAMET, THE CIA…AND CENSORSHIP

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