In 1951,
Barney Rosset took charge of Grove Press, and via its flagship literary
magazine Evergreen Review he spent the next few decades publishing some of the most
important writers of the 20th century—Samuel Beckett, Jack
Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Edward Albee, and more—along with some of
the most spurious. According to Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor's
documentary Obscene, Rosset didn't just help shape his times; he was a product of them.
Born in 1922 and raised in Chicago, Rosset fought his boyhood inclination to
sympathize with anti-social types like John Dillinger, and instead tried to be
an upstanding citizen, with a wife and a college degree and distinguished
military service. But once Rosset was exposed to the freethinking European art
community and the New York jazz scene, it occurred to him that both he and the
American culture at large could handle a lot more free expression than they'd
been allowed over the country's first 175 years.
Obscene recounts the tale of Rosset's
involvement with Grove Press from the tentative first steps to a bizarre
downfall fueled by union trouble, feminist trouble, and alleged CIA-backed
terrorism. In the interim, Rosset blatantly tested the U.S obscenity laws,
first by publishing D.H. Lawrence's previously banned Lady Chatterly's Lover, then Henry Miller's Tropic Of
Cancer, then
William S Burroughs' Naked Lunch. He also distributed the film I Am Curious (Yellow), and brought the writings of
Malcolm X and Che Guevara to a wider audience. Throughout, Rosset and Grove
made piles of money, which they plowed into court cases and ever-riskier
artistic ventures.
Ortenberg
and O'Connor don't dwell enough on the ironies and contradictions in the Rosset
story: how he couldn't always tell the difference between art and smut, and how
he angered various liberation movements because of business practices and
published material they viewed as exploitative. Those problems are acknowledged
in the film, but dismissed with a wink and a smile from Rosset, still going
strong in his 80s. But though Obscene tells the story without fully exploring its nuances, that
story is both fascinating and more than a little inspiring. What a world Rosset
created, where the disenfranchised and the depraved alike could put what they
were thinking down on paper, and find an audience that numbered in the
millions.