WM: How did you get to the Beats? The second issue of the Evergreen Review was devoted to them.
BR: I would say that Don Allen was the leader in that. He was very aware of them, and brought to us the writings of Allen Ginsberg, for example. Allen Ginsberg couldn't as a person have been more different from Don Allen. Burroughs might be a little closer to Don, in his ascetic, Puritan exterior. Don wasn't openly enthusiastic about anything. The worst thing you could do would have been to try to get him to be enthusiastic. That would turn him off forever. If you just went by what he turned up however, he was a very great editor. Kerouac, for example, whom he brought to us, was to me right in line with Whitman and Miller and Carl Sandburg, a loosening up of those figures, of that tradition. Things of Kerouac that came much later, I did not like as much. I thought he began to lose it. Don was very involved with Zen Buddhism, but not me. When Kerouac seemed to immerse himself completely in Zen Buddhism he lost it, in my opinion.
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-ups. 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.
WM: What about Ionesco? Did you have a relationship with him?
BR: Yes, much less but real, and very amusing. Ionesco lived in the same absurd way as a character out of The Bald Soprano. Beckett and Ionesco shared a lot. They admired each other, I might add. They didn't really know each other well but they were very aware of each other. They were both expatriate writers. Really unusual, both took French to be their language to write in, one from English, the other from Romanian. To me they were both refugees living in Paris, but the French liked them so much they adopted them. Beckett is now considered a French writer in France. Ionesco is also considered to be a French writer. I don't think they are, but a lot of the French literary community obviously thinks they are.
Ionesco was the bourgeois character carried to its ultimate absurdity. He wanted to be accepted as a bourgeois, and of course at the same time he was making fun of them. Not as engaging as Beckett, or Miller, for me. I was a little more at a distance from him. I felt closer to Jean Genet.
WM: Talk about Genet.
BR: Jean Genet could have come right out of the slums of Chicago, my home city - a tough city. When the Democratic National Convention was held there in 1968, to my eternal discredit I did not go to it. I was afraid. I literally was afraid. I thought, if I go there, I'm going to get killed. Long before the convention I had been anticipating, more or less, what happened. But Genet went, and Dick Seaver went, and Burroughs went, and Allen Ginsberg went, and Norman Mailer. A lot of people went. I felt too close to Chicago. I had reserved a room a year in advance, and I turned it over to CBS. My childhood friend, Haskell Wexler not only went, but also shot there his film Medium Cool, a great creative success.
Genet fit right in there. He made a speech in the park, under the barrages of tear gas, and Dick Seaver translated him for the crowd. Nationality didn't much matter to Genet. I don't think he knew where he came from. He was a wanderer by nature. He was a Henry Miller with more overt emotions.
WM: You've said elsewhere that he was quintessentially a thief, a criminal.
BR: He was! He was sentenced to life in prison for various crimes. To the great credit of the French, a group of famous writers gathered together in a committee and appealed his sentence and won. There was no point in keeping on arresting him. He was going to steal till the day he died. So what?
When we first met Genet, my second wife, Loly, had beautiful earrings on. He took us to the top of a building in Montmartre, and was pointing out the window, saying "Look what's going on down there!" Loly had one hand on her ear, and Genet had his hand out to get the earring. It was beautiful. Nothing happened. He didn't shove her hand away, she didn't take her hand away. She kept her earring. She liked it, but she liked Genet too.
WM: How did you get your connection with Editions de Minuit in Paris and publish not only Beckett but also the French nouvelle vague writers?
BR: It started with Beckett. Then I met Alain Robbe-Grillet, he was an editor at Editons de Minuit. I liked him very much, as a person and as a writer. He was the important one to me there, next to Beckett.

WM: What did you like about him as a writer?
BR: I liked him so much as a writer that I tried to imitate him. It was his method of getting rid of overt emotion to me-not showing emotion directly, but by description-cold, flat, you could almost say medical description that conveyed, to me, an enormous amount of emotion ... by describing objects, the slightest change, the slightest shift of position of a piece of rope, or the way a bicycle wheel was turned, and describing exactly how it was turned - but not telling you anything about a persons emotional reaction to what was going on. But you knew.
WM: Have you read his autobiography, Miroir Qui Revient Le (translated as Ghosts in the Mirror)?
BR: No.
WM: He says in there that the idea he put forth at the time of objective, neutral writing, of purely objective description of the physical world, was a deception, a ruse, and that what he was really writing was his own subjective fantasies. Particularly his sexual fantasies.
BR: Sure! Absolutely! "Ruse"? Call it whatever you want, but that's the way I read it from the beginning-as his sexual fantasies. But by doing it in that way he was able to do convey them very powerfully. He is, I think, one of the most sexually charged writers I've ever read. And his wife too, who is also a writer under the name Jean de Berg
WM: Nabokov, you know, was a big fan of Robbe-Grillet, and I read once that the Nabokov's invited Robbe-Grillet and his wife to dinner in Paris, and she came dressed as Lolita. I guess she is quite a bit younger than her husband.
BR: That's her! She looks like Lolita. Very tiny. Very tiny, but very tough, boy, let me tell you, underneath that Lolita appearance.
WM: What other writers whom you've published have been important to you, as writers and as people?
BR: Kenzaburo Oe became very important to me, as a writer and a human being.
WM: Did you tell me a story once about how you flew to Tokyo to meet Oe and decided, based purely on your meeting with him, to publish him?
BR: No, no. We had already decided to publish him. I got interested in Japanese literature because of the war and because of Donald Allen, who knew a great deal about Japanese culture ... I saw a sensibility, a taste there, and so we put a web up to catch Japanese writers. They were available. Even though Knopf had made quite a specialty of Japanese literature. Very strong. Most interestingly, when Oe came along, he was going to be published by Knopf, and he switched to us -- which said something for him, or for us, against Knopf, I don't know. I wasn't even aware of it at the time that he had made a conscious decision to do that. So we¹d already made our mind up to publish him when I went to Tokyo and I had contracted John Nathan, probably the best translator of Japanese of his generation, to be Oe¹s translator. I hadn't met Oe and I was very curious to know what he was like.
WM: What was he like?
BR: I'll give you an idea of Oe's character. He greatly admired Norman Mailer. Oe was asked to come to Harvard, I think by Henry Kissinger, who was holding international seminars there and inviting people like Oe. Oe went. He sent me a letter saying, "I met the great Norman Mailer yesterday, but he didn't meet me. That's Oe, very self - effacing, very. Mailer whatever else, is pretty filled with himself. Oe said, "Unfortunately for me, he didn't meet me." I believe that was unfortunate for Norman, that he missed something important. Oe came to East Hampton and stayed with us, as had Beckett. I remember watching a film with him about Che Guevara. Oe and I both saw Che as a great hero, the hero who ultimately failed. Oe and I were both taken by Che's heroic persona. This guy from the CIA had chased Che all over the world and finally caught him in Bolivia, and he said, with these little guys-meaning Bolivian soldiers - we caught him, and that was a great triumph because he was a great soldier. His enemy was the one best able to appreciate him. Oe and I were both crying.
WM: What about his writing?
BR: Oe , like Beckett and Miller, also wrote beautifully and hauntingly of a romantic disaster in his life. He handled the situation in a different way. It's treated in his book, A Personal Matter. The protagonist is very, very much in love with a woman and is planning to leave his wife for her. Then the wife gives birth, and the child is born with a faulty head, its brain literally cut diagonally. The child should die, the protagonist thinks. But the child does not die. This was also the case in real life, because I know the child! The protagonist tells the doctors to let the child die, but the baby keeps on living. It doesn't die. He keeps on living, and then, as the days go by, the protagonist changes his mind; he realizes that the child's going to survive, and that he wants it to survive. He decides to go back to his wife. He gives up the big romantic adventure of his life to do that, to return to his wife and help raise the child. To my utter amazement, the real child grew up and became a famous composer! He doesn't speak very well, but he can compose like Bach, and is more famous in Japan than Oe.
Miller and Beckett found themselves by losing someone and going off on their own. Oe found himself by going home and dealing with the situation there, in a very existentialist and beautiful way. He reversed it. He reversed the dynamic.
WM: Barney, the French Ministry of Culture, in designating you a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters, referred to your "conception of publishing as an art." Do you have any final words for us on the practice of that art, on the spinning of your web?
BR: Why do you like one girl better than another? You can make up reasons, you know. You can make them up. But ultimately, you had the answer before you made up the reason.
These things are not done by the numbers. You won't find her, or the great author, or the secrets of a painting, in a mathematical equation or a sociological treatise -- but when it happens, you can say, perhaps only a few times in your lifetime, "Ah, sweet mystery of life at last I've found you." Then go with it. Don't ask the why's and how's of it. Just go with it. Your very own mystery.