The Real to Reel doc Obscene has a brand new web site that includes a fascinating career history written by its subject publisher Barney Rosset:
While still taking courses at the New School in New York (1951), I took over
three abandoned reprints from a stillborn press called Grove and slowly embarked
on a legal and literary trench war - from the campaigns for Lady Chatterley's
Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch all the way to putting the iconographic
portrait of Che Guevara on the cover of the Evergreen Review. Was Grove controversial?
The word is too pale for the tempests at Grove. Say rather that Grove was a
valve for pressurized cultural energies, a breach in the dam of American Puritanism
- a whip-lashing live cable of zeitgeist. One has to reach back to early Elizabethan
Theatre to find a parallel in terms of enraptured audience, outraged authority,
political daring, exploding passion, and the perennial threat of censorship.
The writers: Beckett, Selby, Genet, Brecht, Robbe-Grillet, de Sade, Casement,
Behan, Borges, Pinter, Ionesco, Fanon, Neruda, Kerouac, Baraka, Paz, Tutola,
Oe, Malcolm X, Mamet, Stoppard, Burroughs…Miller! Not to mention my comrades-in-arms
at Grove, with Dick Seaver, Fred Jordan, and Don Allen in the front row.”
Somewhat rashly, I also made and lost fortunes in film distribution, waging
cultural war on behalf of I Am Curious (Yellow) the landmark Swedish
film, and Titcut Follies (Frederick Wiseman's masterpiece which takes
place in a prison for the criminally insane in Massachusetts). I endured hilarious
but costly fiascos with Godard and Norman Mailer (Beyond the Law).
I rode the gales of the '60s. My private life sometimes mirrored the fiction
I published. “Kitten” in Robert Gover's best-selling novel The One Hundred
Dollar Misunderstanding for instance, resembled my girlfriend at the time
- the woman whose photograph we used on the cover of the book. This meshing
of life and art is one that I could never escape.
Continued here...
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