Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won by Charles McGrath

According to the New York Times...

In its heyday during the 1960s, Grove Press was famous for publishing books nobody else would touch. The Grove list included writers like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara and Malcolm X, and the books, with their distinctive black-and-white covers, were reliably ahead of their time and often fascinated by sex.

The same was, and is, true of Grove’s maverick publisher, Barney Rosset, who loved highbrow literature but also brought out a very profitable line of Victorian spanking porn.

On Nov. 19 Mr. Rosset will receive a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his many contributions to American publishing, especially his groundbreaking legal battles to print uncensored versions of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer.” He is also the subject of “Obscene,” a documentary by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, which opens on Friday at Cinema Village.

Mr. Ortenberg and Mr. O’Connor are themselves refugees from book publishing, and this is their first film. “Barney was basically my idol, my mentor and my role model for most of my publishing career,” said Mr. Ortenberg, who used to run Thunder’s Mouth Press, publisher of, among other books, “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature.” “I just thought, here was a great story about a major cultural impresario most people don’t know about. It was just dumb beginner’s luck, I guess. I had had a lot of experience with intellectual content, and I knew something about editing, and the movie was small enough that whatever mistakes we made, they didn’t wind up costing huge amounts. We learned as we went along.”

The documentary has a literary rock score — songs by Bob Dylan, the Doors, Warren Zevon and Patti Smith — and includes, in addition to the usual talking heads, some surprising archival footage. There’s an excerpt from Al Goldstein’s old cable television show, “Midnight Blue,” in which Mr. Goldstein quizzes Mr. Rosset about his four marriages and in general interviews him not as a major cultural figure but as a fellow smut peddler. There are clips of Europe that Mr. Rosset filmed as a teenager (his father, unfortunately, instructed him to keep the camera moving constantly), some footage he took during World War II and some poignant home movies of Mr. Rosset cavorting with his family on his Hamptons estate. Mr. Rosset, who made and squandered several fortunes, eventually had to unload the place to cover his losses.

“I had a very good publishing career, but not money-wise,” he once said. “We got rid of the money.”

The documentary makes the point that Mr. Rosset originally wanted to be a filmmaker himself. He grew up in Chicago, the son of a banker, and went to the Francis W. Parker School, a place so progressive that according to Mr. Rosset, the teachers arranged for the students to sleep with one another.

His best friend there was Haskell Wexler, the great cinematographer. Mr. Rosset was an Army photographer during the war and afterward made a documentary, called “Strange Victory,” about how America, though victorious on the world stage, was still losing the war against racism at home.

In 1951 Mr. Rosset got into publishing by accident when, at the suggestion of his ex-wife, he took over a stillborn company called Grove Press, whose entire list consisted of three reprints: Melville’s novel “The Confidence Man,” some writings by Aphra Behn and a volume of poems by Richard Crashaw. He quickly turned the company into what he later called “a breach in the dam of American Puritanism — a whiplashing live cable of zeitgeist.”

And yet, as the documentary suggests, he never completely lost his infatuation with film, and in the end it helped bring the company down. In the late ’60s Mr. Rosset made a killing distributing the sexually explicit Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow),” and he thought he could repeat the trick with other European imports, none of which found much of an audience. He also made some bad real estate decisions and in 1985 was forced to sell Grove, though he hung on to his magazine, Evergreen Review, which he continues to publish online at evergreenreview.com.

Now 86 and a little shrunken, Mr. Rosset, who has just finished writing an autobiography, lives with Astrid Myers in a fourth-floor walkup near Union Square. There is a pool table in the living room, and the walls are lined with loose-leaf binders containing Grove-related photos and correspondence. Over a rum and Coke the other evening, Mr. Rosset recalled that in the famous 1959 obscenity case he had used “Lady Chatterley” as a kind of stalking horse for Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” a book he had discovered in college but whose raunchiness he thought would have a much tougher time in the courts.

“I loved that book,” he said. “When I was a young man, it never occurred to me that it was about sex. What interested me was that Miller didn’t like Americans very much.”

He went to California to meet Miller, Mr. Rosset recalled, and Miller refused to sell him the rights. “He had all sorts of silly reasons,” Mr. Rosset said. “Too many people would have it. It might become a college textbook.” Mr. Rosset eventually secured the book through the intervention of Maurice Girodias, the publisher of the Olympia Press in Paris, and Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, Miller’s German publisher.

In 1961 he set about the very expensive business of fighting for the book in the courts. “The greatest joy that came out of my life in publishing was when ‘Tropic of Cancer’ went on trial in Chicago,” Mr. Rosset said. “The judge was a friend of my father’s, and at one point when the prosecutor accused me of just trying to make money, I took out my Henry Miller term paper from Swarthmore College and read from it. I remember leaving the courtroom and somehow getting lost going home. It was snowing. But I was so happy that I thought, ‘If I fall down and die right here, it will be fine.’ ”

Mr. Rosset went on: “All my life I followed the things that I liked — people, things, books — and when things were offered to me, I published them. I never did anything I really didn’t like. I had no set plan, but on the other hand we sometimes found ourselves on a trail. For example, out of Beckett came Pinter, and Pinter was responsible for Mamet. It was like a baseball team — Mamet to Pinter to Beckett.”

Mr. Rosset sipped from his drink and smiled. “Should we have had more of a business plan?” he added. “Probably. But then the publishers that did have business plans didn’t do any better.”

Unfortunately the film isn't available from Netflix. If I can find it I will post where / how to view the film.