Were it not for the discernment of Barney Rosset, we might still be waiting for Godot (Wikipedia)
I interrupt my ongoing meditations on the evolution of the female orgasm to share some bad news: Having just returned from a week in the deep, dark Costa Rican rain forest —home of myriad brightly colored birds, reptiles and insects—I learned a more somber reality: Barney Rosset has died. In a world in which the phrase “one of a kind” is readily bandied about, Barney really was one of a kind. And a remarkable kind at that!
He almost single-handedly defined “maverick publisher,” from the great old days when publishers and editors were free to follow their instinct and imagination, untethered from today’s buttoned-down corporate marketing experts and accountant-driven mentality.
The list of Barney’s authors at Grove Press (many of whom had been shunned by mainstream publishers) is extraordinary, including Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. He also gave voice, in translation, to the likes of Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Barney was unabashedly a provocateur, and a brilliant one; he also made no secret of his politics. Nonetheless, if there was anything that Barney detested more than right-wing sentiment, it was censorship, no matter from whence it came.
I met Barney in the early 1980s, when he agreed to publish Stop Nuclear War! A Handbook, an antinuclear activist’s manifesto that I co-authored with my wife, Judith Eve Lipton, which appeared in 1982 to howls of protest from the militaristic, nuclear-besotted right wing, and which was nominated for a National Book Award that year. Actually, Grove Press had been going through a rough financial patch at the time, such that Barney’s financial adviser urged him to decline Stop Nuclear War!, whereupon Barney replied that he “didn’t give a good god-damn” whether he could afford it, but this book was “too f&^$ing important not to be published” … and that was that.
It’s a cliché to refer to “an end of an era,” but I fear that Barney’s passing constitutes just that. You may or may not have agreed with his politics (quite distinctly left), or his taste in literature (quite distinctly erotic), but I think any objective assessment of his impact will conclude that Barney Rosset was one of the publishing greats, and that the world of letters, not to mention everyone else, is the poorer for having lost him. More to the point: We are all the richer, and intellectually freer, because he lived.
