Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America's Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship
232
Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America's Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship
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Overview
Barney explores how Grove's landmark legal victories freed publishers to print what they wanted, and it traces Grove's central role in the countercultural ferment of the sixties and early seventies. Drawing on the Rosset papers at Columbia University and personal interviews with former Grove Press staff members, friends, and wives, it tells the fascinating story of this feisty, abrasive, visionary, and principled cultural revolutionary—a modern "Huckleberry Finn" according to Nobel Prize–winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe—who altered the reading habits of a nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628726527 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arcade |
| Publication date: | 03/07/2017 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Privileged Beginnings
Barney was born in Chicago in 1922, the sole child of a workaholic, successful Russian-Jewish banker and his Irish-Catholic wife. His concern for social justice, his love of the subversive and lifelong need to confront the establishment with its hypocrisies were not passions he inherited from his parents. They harbored no such unsettling impulses. Barnet Lee Rosset Sr. embraced all the conservative values Barney hated. Senior and Junior had little in common besides their shared name. Barney felt trapped between resenting him and being dependent on him for strength and material support. He remembers his father tearing up a biography of Lenin that a teacher had given him at the progressive school to which his parents unaccountably sent him in seventh grade. Except for some shady business associates, like the notorious gangster Meyer Lansky, with whom he jointly owned the Hotel Nacional in Cuba, most of Senior's best friends consisted of Catholic priests, accounting for the peculiar fact that he is buried in a Catholic cemetery. Barney's beautiful mother, Mary Tansey, had no particular interests in priests, her husband's career, or her son's leftist politics. She preferred to drink and go to the horse races, frequently accompanied — in secret — by Barney, as Senior did not approve of Junior going to the track. "My mother was hooked on horses," Barney once observed, "and my father on priests." Although she always denied it, Barney insisted, to her face, that she was anti-Semitic.
While the freckled, stunning redhead represented a great catch for the Russian Jew, their marriage was abysmal. After Barnet Senior recovered from a bleeding ulcer in the 1930s, he joined Mary in turning into an alcoholic. Alfred Adler, a cousin of the famous psychoanalyst of the same name, who was one of Barney's high school teachers and became a kind of mentor to him, reports seeing husband and wife sitting at opposite ends of the large dining room table, in their Lake Shore Drive apartment, a bottle of gin in front of each of them. When, as an adult, Barney had to speak to his father over the phone, he always hoped Senior wouldn't come to the conversation drunk. The roots of Barney's own prodigious drinking are not hard to trace.
But whether drunk or not, Barnet Senior had a vexed relationship with his son, for he was unable to accommodate himself to Barney's contempt for the Rosset wealth. The pleasure Barney took in what Senior's money could buy — a horse, a car, vacation trips, an elegant apartment — never extended to his affirming the unjust social system of which he was a conspicuous beneficiary. Barney would later, only half-jokingly, describe himself as a Communist-Capitalist. A 1943 report on Barney by FBI special agent Nunzio Giabalvo, in addition to pointing out that he was left-handed, notes that "subject's father was very disturbed by subject's radical thoughts and activities and sternly opposed them. Subject's father is a wealthy banker in Chicago and is very much a capitalist. In fact, subject's actions in this regard have nearly broken his father's heart."
The cosseted existence of material pleasures was not without its accompanying demons. Barney remembers a profoundly disturbing dream as a little boy in which "I had an out-of-body experience, seeing myself as an object rocketing into space, zooming through a black void until I was transformed into a 'knob of blackness.' I knew I was experiencing the terror of my own death." For the rest of his life Barney, "hounded by that dream," could not sleep in a totally darkened room. Seventeen years of psychoanalysis still didn't permit him to turn the lights off.
Had Barnet Senior been more self-reflective, he would never have forgiven himself for sending Barney to the two progressive schools that nurtured his radical beliefs: the Gateway School and Francis W. Parker. With tiny classes of ten students or so and a relaxed, permissive ethos, Gateway was bad enough, but Parker, to which Barney went in the middle of the seventh grade when Gateway went bankrupt, was considerably worse. For Barney, there couldn't have been a more life-enhancing choice, even though a left-wing disaster for his father. "I was mad for it. It was my whole life. ... I couldn't wait to get to school in the morning," Barney emphasized in a 1968 interview. He loved his five and one-half years there, claiming that nothing critical about him had changed since his graduation in 1940. Founded in 1901 by Colonel Parker, whom John Dewey called "the father of progressive education," it maintained that learning should be fun, an aid to the full and relaxed flourishing of the individual. Its motto — "everything to help and nothing to hinder" — perfectly suited Barney's needs and temperament. Work was never onerous; grades were not assigned on the basis of objective achievement but were rather tied to an assessment of individual capacity.
If the teachers were not actual card-carrying communists, they were at the very least well to the left of anything that Barnet Senior ever imagined. They supported the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, the American labor movement, and the need to keep America out of any European conflict. Every year the students organized a strike for peace, with appropriately impassioned lectures offered by the faculty. When "Gone with the Wind" opened in Chicago in 1939, Barney picketed to protest its demeaning stereotypes of the blacks.
The classes served up a more or less steady diet of liberal ideas. Sarah Greenebaum, a beloved English teacher, taught Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to Barney's eighth-grade class by handing out her own mimeographed version in which the natives of the island organize to expel Crusoe for being a greedy capitalist intent on extorting money from them. The Parker parents didn't appreciate this recasting of Defoe's novel into a socialist tract, but Greenebaum didn't change the text to please them.
Provoked by Jim Mitchell, a slightly alcoholic English teacher, to do something about their revolutionary ideals besides discussing them, Barney and two of his classmates decided, one evening in their sophomore year in 1938, to take over the school. Climbing to the top of the building, they planted a red flag of revolution (resembling a pirate flag more than anything else), declaring Parker to be a new country. Not all the students shared Barney's political fervor, however, and not all delighted in the takeover. One of Barney's good friends, Stuyvessant Van Buren, whose name clearly suggests closer ties to the DAR than to Moscow, was particularly opposed. The next morning, he ascended to the building's tower, still flying the red flag, with one of his family's handguns. Barney blanched when he saw the revolver, assured him it was all a joke, and promptly proclaimed the end of the revolution. It being the Parker School, nothing happened to the perpetrators.
Parker's laid-back, politically liberal atmosphere allowed Barney to do what he wanted to do, read the authors he wanted to read — John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren, Frank Norris — and stimulated him to continue to question American values. According to the indefatigable Nunzio Giabalvo, Parker caused Barney to entertain "thoughts that there should not be any rich men in the world." Such thoughts undoubtedly led him and his good friend Haskell Wexler, who went on to become a distinguished filmmaker, to join the American Student Union, a left-wing organization intended primarily for college students. Only in the eighth grade at Parker when they became members, they traveled by bus to Vassar for an ASU conference, not in the least troubled that they were years younger than everybody else.
Parker's influence on Barney's adult crusade against all forms of oppression and censorship is evident in a tenth-grade English paper he wrote, lamenting the failure of Americans to live up to the courage of their immigrant ancestors by taking their freedoms for granted. Young Barney's "True American" must "fight for freedom of the press and religious toleration. ... They must vote for the best political candidates, regardless of party or anything else. Their ideas must always be progressive ones. They cannot be whining reactionaries. Today's American carries many responsibilities. He lives in the freest country on earth and he should keep it that way."
Barney rapidly became a star at Parker, in part because of his compulsion to challenge all limits. "Barney always wanted to see how much he could push himself," Wexler pointed out. "How far he could run until he was exhausted; how long he could hold his breath; how much booze he could drink before he passed out." Chosen co-captain of the football team (along with Wexler), Barney also distinguished himself as a track champion, holder of the Chicago private school record in the half-mile. He served as editor of the school paper, was elected senior class president, and remained always an outspoken critic of politics and mores he disliked. When Sarah Greenebaum encouraged students to put out mimeographed newsletters about their interests, he and Haskell coedited in eighth grade the "Sommunist" (a blending of socialism and communism), which contained a variety of left-wing sentiments and observations about the world, as well as some dirty jokes, that Greenebaum shortly terminated. The blatant political nature of the title generated some anxiety among school officials and parents; in response, the two editors decided to change it to the less provocative (but more revealing) "Anti-Everything," making it a kind of puerile precursor to the mature Barney's Grove Press. The experimental French novelist Alain Robbe Grillet, whom Grove published, said in a 1983 interview, that Barney was "fascinated by everything that was against the established order, in whatever sense or direction it took. ... He could get interested in anything ... as long as it was anti-establishment."
Some of the heroic anti-establishment figures of the thirties whom Barney found intriguing were the fabled gangsters of the time — Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, and Bugsy Siegel, to name a few. Of these, Barney liked the bank robber John Dillinger the most, arguing that his initiative and skill were precisely what this country needed to pull itself out of the depression. While still at the Gateway School he wrote a letter to the government, recommending that Dillinger be protected, not prosecuted. He also, when applying to Parker, named Mussolini as the most important person in the modern world. This judgment, a result of having read George Seldes's Sawdust Caesar, a biography of the Italian dictator, later got distorted in official reports on Barney into the rather more incendiary assertion that Mussolini was the living man he most esteemed; it dogged Barney throughout the rest of his life. No subsequent investigation of his character, whether undertaken by the army, the FBI, or the CIA, failed to note his admiration for the fascist leader as proof of Barney's questionable loyalty to American values. And no one seemed interested in the fact that even had he celebrated Mussolini in this way (which he clearly did not), he did so when he was twelve.
In addition to shaping Barney's moral sensibilities and providing him an opportunity for athletic success, Parker introduced him to two women — girls at this point — who occupied his imagination for the rest of his life: Nancy Ashenhurst and Joan Mitchell. Joan, two years behind Barney at school, became his first wife (in 1949), but it was Nancy, a classmate, whom he initially adored. Barney thought her the most beautiful girl in the school. A seductive blonde, she was sought after by all the Parker boys but particularly by Haskell and Barney, who were always vying with each other for her affections, which she doled out with sufficient care to keep both interested. Although not athletic, a quality Barney liked in his women — Joan for example, excelled as a competitive figure skater — and lacking his political concerns, Nancy otherwise possessed all conceivable female virtues for Barney. She loved the theater, both as an actor and sophisticated director beyond her years, and was responsible for all the best undergraduate productions at Parker. Barney claimed his interest in theater — Grove would go on to corner the market on the twentieth-century's outstanding playwrights — Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet — developed out of his attachment to Nancy. Had she been absorbed in mathematics, he later quipped, he might well have become some form of mathematician.
Not everyone admired Nancy — Joan thought her "a pretentious jerk" — but Barney remained smitten. At fifteen, however, his bumbling inexperience made it difficult for him to know how to arrange the consummation of his desires for her. Here Parker's commitment never to hinder, only to help, played a decisive role. Barney had confided his despair to his admiring teacher and friend, Alfred Adler, called by Wexler "the school's unofficial meddler in psychological affairs," who determined that intervention was necessary. He spoke to Nancy's parents about his concern for Barney's well-being, urging them to understand his plight and make Nancy accessible to him. Alarmed at the thought of adolescent unhappiness and buying into the full Parker ethos of helpfulness, the parents shortly went off for the weekend, leaving both door and bed open to Nancy and her imagination. She informed Barney that her parents were gone and the apartment available, at which point, without any further assistance from dedicated faculty, he managed to take care of business on his own.
The triangular relationship between Nancy and her two suitors continued throughout their time at Parker, with Nancy favoring first one, then the other. At one point during their senior year, Haskell graciously renounced his interest in Nancy, ceding her to Barney. According to Barney, Haskell said, "'You know, I don't want Nancy anymore. You can have her.' And I said, 'Do you really mean that Haskell?' He said, 'Yes, I literally do.' I said, 'Thank you very, very much.' I meant it. I went to the phone and called her and said, 'Nancy, you're now mine again.'" Despite Haskell's gifting of Nancy to him, the stops and starts of the relationship between Barney and Nancy continued until March of 1941, when the two agreed to end it permanently. Barney was crushed — the thought that he might not see her again struck him "like a punch in the guts" — but he realized there was nothing to be done about it. He would dream about her for the rest of his life and regret the loss of what he cherished for a time as "the only thing in my life that meant anything." After Haskell called him in 1943 to announce his marriage to Nancy, Barney was both incredulous and despondent. "He married her, I was convinced, because I liked her. And he told other people that too, that I should have married her, not him."
Even with the turmoil surrounding Nancy, Barney always looked tenderly at his Parker years, producing in him a condition that he described as "life-long nostalgia" for the experience. Respected by his peers — his graduation yearbook describes him as "one of those unusual personalities who is outstanding in many fields, as a champion runner and in the classroom, where he has been a great asset by dint of his bountiful factual knowledge and definite ideas on almost every social issue" — he was admired by the faculty as well. Barney remained sensitive throughout his professional life to what he considered the low-grade anti-Semitism of the publishing world, and it must have come as a shock when he discovered that his own beloved Parker was not entirely free from it. Writing his official college recommendation, the school's principal, Herbert W. Smith, endorsed him in the highest terms, noting that "in spite of the depth of his emotions, and the fact that he has Jewish blood, he never obtrudes himself or his own ways on his comrades, and has none of the self-centered preoccupation with his own point of view that marks boys of Jewish extraction."
Smith's exculpatory anti-Semitism aside, there could hardly be a more off-target assessment. Barney's manifold virtues did not include lack of selfabsorption, and Grove Press stands as a stunning testament to the power of one man's point of view. Narcissism, perhaps more than any other trait, constituted Barney's defining characteristic. However misguided Smith's evaluation, his enthusiastic support of Barney guaranteed he would be admitted to the college of his choice. The only nagging question: which one? Barney expressed interest in two, Dartmouth and Swarthmore, and received acceptances from both. He knew very little about either, entertaining thoughts about Dartmouth more to placate his father than anything else, who rejoiced at the notion of a happily conservative school blessedly free from the pinko ideas and teachers that made Parker such a nightmare for him. With his whim of steel already well developed, Barney applied to Swarthmore for two appropriately capricious reasons. First, he liked the recruiter who came to Parker, claiming to have been an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. As a young man, Barney was infatuated with the drama and idealism of the war, lamenting that he had been unable to participate. Discovering a connection to the action he had missed through the person of Swarthmore's representative weighed heavily in the school's favor. Second, and more important, Nancy was going to Vassar and Barney thought — incorrectly — that Swarthmore was nearby.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Introduction,
1 Privileged Beginnings,
2 Joan and Barney,
3 The Young Publisher,
4 A Radical Anomaly,
5 The Stalking Horse,
6 Adventures with the Hooded Cobra,
7 Riding the Gales of the Sixties,
8 A Murder Story; Some Stolen Fingerprints,
9 Decline and Fall,
10 "Who Is the CEO of Grove"?,
Photo Insert,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,