The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing

Finally, in 1985, Rosset was forced to sell to the oil heiress Ann Getty and the British publisher George Weidenfeld. Rosset believed he would remain in charge. But a year later, on a snowy evening, he walked into the Bar Americain in Paris, where a group had gathered to celebrate Beckett's 80th birthday, and announced he'd been pushed out. Beckett asked what Rosset was going to do. "Start over, I guess," said Rosset. So Beckett gave Rosset one of his early unpublished plays, "Eleuthéria," to help him begin publishing again. But when the playwright set about to translate it from French, Beckett decided that the play wasn't good enough to publish, and sent Rosset a note. "I feel unforgivable. So please forgive me," he wrote. Beckett dedicated his last book, a prose piece, "Stirrings Still," to him.

Under his own imprint, Rosset published "Stirrings Still." But after Beckett died in 1989, he returned to "Eleuthéria." When he tried to hold a reading of the play, Beckett's estate threatened to sue, forcing Rosset to move it from a public venue to his apartment. And when he tried to publish it, the estate resisted— for a while. Rosset wouldn't give up. He also published a few more books, including the Victorian erotica that Grove's new owners had jettisoned, and a book by Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize in 1994. There have been other moments of fight, but it's been a few years since Rosset sued anyone. Now he's working on his autobiography, and producing, with Myers, the Evergreen Review, which was revived online in 1998. He has a blog.

When talking about the major obscenity trials of the mid-19th century, Norman Mailer once said, "There's a wonderful moment when you go from oppression to freedom, there in the middle, when one's still oppressed but one's achieved the first freedoms. By the time you get over to complete freedom you begin to look back almost nostalgically on the days of oppression, because in those days you were ready to become a martyr, you had a sense of importance, you could take yourself seriously, and you were fighting the good fight."

There seemed to be some justice to this comment, and so I asked Rosset what he thought of it. He waved the question away. "That was Mailer! He would have been crazy in any time," he said. And then he launched into another story, about the time Mailer filmed a movie, "Maidenhead," in the Hamptons. Rosset picked up a small wooden block onto which a photograph of his East Hampton Quonset hut had been laminated, and told me about how Mailer had bit off a chunk of an actor's ear while filming at a nearby estate after the actor had gashed Mailer's head with a hammer. "What was his name? Tony?" he asked Myers. (Rip Torn was the answer.) Myers went over to a cabinet of old VHS tapes, took out "Maidenhead," and pulled off the cover. "What a terrible movie," she said, and smiled.

© 2008