Literary Fly Catcher No.2

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 at one time the editor of Poetry magazine and a poet herself. Joan was a very astute person, with a very good taste for writing, just as good as it was for painting. She was the one who really directly got me into Grove. John Balcomb and Robert Phelps had started Grove Press on Grove Street. They published three books and quit. They really had quit. They had wanted to do The Monk, a gothic novel by Matthew G. Lewis. They had it almost ready. I loved The Monk. That was the first book we actually printed. It had been published several times before with many changes, so we did a variorum edition as Balcomb and Phelps had wanted, and I went to Princeton and got John Berryman, a very well-known poet at that time, to do a new introduction.
The Golden Bowl was a novel by Henry James that Joan particularly liked, and she asked me to consider it. 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 of being pushed by Joan. Then I went right on, did six or seven more of his books.
WM: Was he out of print at the time?
BR: No, but many of his books were. 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. They sent a wonderful, elderly gentleman, Whitney Darrow, a famous editor, to my brownstone 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 a small advance, and then the further royalties to Scribner's.


	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 at one time the editor of Poetry magazine and a poet herself. Joan was a very astute person, with a very good taste for writing, just as good as it was for painting. She was the one who really directly got me into Grove. John Balcomb and Robert Phelps had started Grove Press on Grove Street. They published three books and quit. They really had quit. They had wanted to do The Monk, a gothic novel by Matthew G. Lewis. They had it almost ready. I loved The Monk. That was the first book we actually printed. It had been published several times before with many changes, so we did a variorum edition as Balcomb and Phelps had wanted, and I went to Princeton and got John Berryman, a very well-known poet at that time, to do a new introduction. The Golden Bowl was a novel by Henry James that Joan particularly liked, and she asked me to consider it. 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 of being pushed by Joan. Then I went right on, did six or seven more of his books. WM: Was he out of print at the time? BR: No, but many of his books were. 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. They sent a wonderful, elderly gentleman, Whitney Darrow, a famous editor, to my brownstone 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 a small advance, and then the further royalties to Scribner's.
WM: So you were responsible for reviving the great traditionalist Henry James. BR: Partially. We also did other American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, who seemed somehow to have gotten lost along the way. WM: Was he out of print as well? BR: Yes, many of his books were. I thought he was a very important writer. To me, these authors were the basis of American left-wing idealism, or liberalism: Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and Lincoln Steffens, whom I didn't publish but I certainly would have if he had been out of print and various others of course. 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: As a publisher, did you have a strategy? I read that you said you published D.H. Lawrence so that someday you could publish someone like Henry Miller. BR: Somebody like him? No, him, and very specifically Tropic of Cancer. The minute I got into publishing, that became my goal -- now I can do it! I don't know if we would have gotten away with publishing Chatterley or not if it hadn't been for Mark Schorer, a professor of English at Berkeley, who came up with the idea in the first place. Not for Miller, but for Chatterley. To him that was not a means to an end, it was the beginning and the end. He was a wonderful defender of Chatterley and of Lawrence, and I admired that and I liked it, but to me it was really a way to get to Miller. And in my correspondence with Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press I talk about how to get to Burroughs through Miller. To me, the direct line of descent was - you know, like a lineup in baseball - Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs. WM: Henry James to Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs, how about that? BR: I would accept that. I would accept it because publishing James created a foundation proving that we were not doing what we were accused of doing by a lot of people, publishing Lady Chatterley as just a sensational trick. I didn't publish James for that reason, I hadn't thought about that ulterior purpose at the time, but it did not hurt. It was a good backdrop to have. WM: Your relationship with Henry Miller goes back to your freshman year at Swarthmore College. BR: My relationship with his writing. WM: Did you discover Tropic of Cancer that year? BR: I hardly discovered it. Somebody led me to it. Why, I don't know. It would be interesting to ask that person. I've never spoken to him since. I've seen him, alive and walking around New York. He became a very well-known curator of art at the Metropolitan and then at MOMA. Still is, as far as I know. He must have seen something in me that was a little different from the other students at Swarthmore. He told me exactly where to go - a famous bookstore, the Gotham Book Mart on Forty - seventh Street. WM: Why do you think the book had such an impact on you? BR: I've been thinking about that a lot. First of all, it's certainly disrespectful to most of what were thought of as bourgeois American values. Two other books of Miller I read at the time were The Air Conditioned Nightmare and The Cosmological Eye, both published by New Directions I think. Tropic of Cancer actually fits right in with them. Tropic of Cancer isn't that different except in its overt sexual terms, which seemed to me at the time very surrealistic. Miller himself struck me as being a very unlikable person. The personality that came through, his arrogance, his foisting himself upon other people. To have to feed him. He would plan a whole week ahead of time, "I'm having dinner at such and such a place this night, and dinner at someone else's the following night," etc. None of these people really wanted him, but they couldn't avoid him. That didn't endear him to me. What I realize is this. He had an affair with a woman - I think her name was Mona in the book. She was modeled very closely, I think, on a real person. It's a terrible affair, an apparent disaster, but he's very much in love with her, and he loses her, totally. I think now, looking back at that loss, it was so catastrophic it set him free. Something like that happened to me at Swarthmore. I went to Swarthmore very much in love with a Chicago girl who had gone to Vassar, and I felt very strongly, and, ultimately, correctly, that I had lost her. There was nothing to replace her. It was like Miller, when he really lost Mona, he's free. A catastrophe that sets him free to go out and be himself, whatever himself is. Very obnoxious, perhaps, but free to do what he wanted to do. I think that that was what I was looking for, a way out of my own dilemma. When I've written about Tropic of Cancer I've used it as sort of an anti-American middle-class weapon, but I think deep down what was important to me was about a catastrophic loss which you suffer and then decide to go on living. Very existential although I didn't know that word then. WM: When you met the real Miller, how did he match the image you'd formed of him from reading his works? BR: He matched up pretty well, not friendly, very involved in his own affairs, I got to like him more each time I saw him. In the beginning he was very suspicious of me, I immediately coined a name for him, "The Hooded Cobra," because he had very narrow, Asian-like eyes, rather Japanese. He looked out from the very narrow space between his eyelids, and I thought he was always being very appraising of the situation, and not really open. At one point I had Norman Mailer write a book about him. Henry could not understand why Mailer was doing that. He kept figuring there was something there that wasn't there. Mailer was simply a great admirer of his writing and his life. I don't think Henry could accept that. He thought Mailer was after something that he couldn't put his finger on. WM: You had a great deal of trouble getting 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 and those 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 but I loved that idea, and I proceeded to try to fulfill it, I might add, and I did to a degree. I think that Henry liked being an outlaw. It was my strong feeling. We were trying to take away his right to be an outlaw. And we did succeed, Tropic of Cancer became accepted.