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 Fowlie, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz, and others, who were very, very important to me. I was doing a great deal of 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 hold of it and read it in the French edition.
It had something to say to me. Oddly enough, it had a sense of desolation,
like Miller, though in its language, its lack of verbiage, it was the opposite
of Miller. Still, the sense of a very contemporary lost soul was compelling.
I got Wallace Fowlie to read it. His specialty was French literature. His
judgment meant a lot to me even though he was so different from me. He was
a convert to Catholicism, he was gay, and incredibly intelligent. He read
the play and told me that he thought - and this before anybody had really
heard about it much - that it would be one of the most important works of
the twentieth century. And Sylvia Beach got involved in it somehow. She
was a friend and admirer of Beckett. 
Waiting
for Godot just hit something in me. I got what Beckett writing 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: In choosing writers over the course of your career, to what extent did you rely on the judgment of people whom you trusted and respected, like Wallace Fowlie or Dick Seaver or whomever, rather than just on your own sense of things?
BR: A lot! A lot. At Grove it would have been mainly three people, Don Allen, Fred Jordan, and Dick Seaver. All of us had different interests, but once you have a feel for the other person's mind, what they are thinking - if Fred, for example, brought up a German writer and said, "This is really good, something we should publish," I would not have been very inclined to say no. I found out after a few years that he had a strong sense about what he was saying and feeling, and his instincts were good. Not necessarily that I always agreed with him, but a certain sensibility echoed strongly.
WM: When you first met him, how did Beckett match the image you'd formed of him from his writings?
BR: I liked him immediately. Far from being like Henry, he was very warm. I know some people thought he wasn't. It made me think, ultimately, of a great psychoanalyst, in the way he treated people. If you were Freud's patient, I would imagine Freud listened to you very carefully and with great intensity, and made you feel while you were with him, that you were the most important thing going. Beckett had that same facility, which some people would misinterpret as meaning he was cold. Because he just listened. He was very sympathetic to whatever you had to say, was very warm, but it could be expressed with very few words. I never discussed it with him but I think he knew a lot about analysis. He was very irascible and unhappy in the younger journals of his that I've read. I introduced him, reintroduced him, to Miller. They had known each other slightly in Paris in the thirties. We three had lunch together, and afterwards both of them said more or less the same thing to me, separately: "My, how he's changed! He's so much nicer than he used to be."
WM: Maybe it was true. In both cases.
BR: I think it's true, my feeling is it was true in both cases.
WM: You said somewhere that Miller was intriguing but not as loveable as Beckett, and that as a person Beckett meant a lot to you. It seems to me that he was the greatest of the writers you published.
BR: Absolutely.
WM: It also sounds like he was also the greatest human being among your writers. Do you think there's any connection there?
WM: Krapp's Last Tape.
BR: Krapp's Last Tape. And in many other things as well. He told me about it a little. He was very, very much in love with a girl. She was English. Her father was a teacher, a professor, and they were living in Germany, on the Baltic. He talks about that in Krapp's Last Tape. You see elements of the Baltic, the North Sea. Before he wrote Krapp's Last Tape, whether it had anything to do with it or not, I don't know. I had asked him, Why don't you write in English? And why wouldn't he type his letters? And the first thing that came out, not too long after that discussion with me, was Krapp's Last Tape, written in English.
WM: Why do you think he wrote almost all his later works in French?
BR: My feeling was that it had partly to do with what had happened to him as a very young man being published in England. Although he wasn't anti-British anywhere near to the degree of, say, O'Casey or some of the other Irish writers, nevertheless he was anti-British. He had a real grudge against his British publisher, Chatto and Windus, who took him on and then abandoned him. The British had proved themselves to him by their treatment of him.
More than
that, I think of French as being a much calmer language than English. I
think English is a very emotional language, and writing in French would
be a way for Beckett to put himself in a straitjacket, to a degree. I really,
really do. I think maybe it got him away from that sadness which he felt.
WM: He made statements to the effect that English was too beautiful, too poetic a language for the things he wanted to say.
BR: Yes, that fits, that's the way he would put it, but... that's putting it very mildly, actually. The first books, More Pricks Than Kicks and Murphy, were written in English. More Pricks Than Kicks foreshadowed many of the later things. Waiting for Godot, though, brought out a lot of things.. More and more, it's obvious to me that a strong element in that play is the reflection of he and Suzanne, his wife-to-be, and their boredom with each other in the Vaucluse during the war, when they were hiding from the Nazis. Just utter boredom. What can we do? What the hell is going to happen? Hoping that something would happen to excite them, but nothing ever did. Pozzo, in Waiting for Godot, to me was Joyce. I never got the feeling that Beckett was enamored of Joyce. I mean, as a writer, yes, but as a person, no. Pozzo doesn't treat Lucky very nicely.
WM: Joyce as sadist..
BR: Yes. Beckett was Lucky, but he was only one of the models, I think. Lucky was put together from a melange of several young Irish devotees like himself whom Joyce used very cruelly.
WM: If it was Beckett's time in Provence that led to Waiting for Godot, his break through work, that period would be the most crucial of his life, those years of boredom down there.
BR: I think they certainly must have been very important ones, in terms of getting him to write. In terms of emotional involvement, I think that was in the Baltic. Krapp's Last Tape is pretty straight-out emotion. It's not like Waiting for Godot, or Endgame. It's not French! It is far and away my personal favorite.
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 towards other cultures, towards French, Italian, 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! 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 it into columns and put them next to each other, supposedly haphazardly, 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 have applauded Joyce. I would disagree with Beckett about that. Maybe when he was much younger he could have been more open to that.
WM: How did he regard his earlier work?
BR: He constantly put it down, all the time. Didn't matter which thing it was. I was reading the other day a letter from him about More Pricks Than Kicks. He hated it! He wrote to me and said, "I don't know how I ever allowed you to ... the idea of publishing it is terrible. It's loathsome. I'm sorry I put you in this trouble and, and send back the contract ..." However, as the years went by, he would change his mind and allowed us to publish the earlier things. And he would give us ideas on how to do them.
