When Evergreen Review editor Barney Rosset started publishing writers like William Burroughs and Henry Miller back in the 1950s, a clerk at a bookstore could still get hauled off to jail for selling a copy of a poem by Allen Ginsberg.
Many of the authors who Rosset championed in the magazine, and at his publishing company Grove Press, are now considered the most powerful voices of the 20th century -- writers such as Samuel Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, and Carlos Fuentes. It's a testament to his vision of an insurgent, restlessly experimental world literature.
Still spunky at age 76, Rosset is porting that vision to the Net.
In a fourth-floor loft in downtown Manhattan, Rosset and his younger colleague Jason Meagher are building the Evergreen Review Web site, a multimedia forum that will house the magazine's priceless archives and new works created specifically for the Web.
"Saving the underground of the past for the future" is the site's slogan. And when all the magazine's editions have been scanned and uploaded, its table of contents will read like a cross section of the modern literary imagination.
American readers first discovered Beckett's Waiting for Godot in the pages of Rosset's review, alongside contributions by Malcolm X, Woody Allen, Terry Southern, Che Guevera, Timothy Leary, Boris Pasternak, and Diane DiPrima. The print version of Evergreen Review ceased publication in 1973.
Rosset has asked Michael Joyce, whose "afternoon, a story" was the landmark pioneering work of hypertext fiction, to create something for the new site's Shockwave-driven hypermedia zone. Bert Jackson, a comics artist, will design an interactive strip.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City Lights Books in San Francisco helped catapult Beats into the public imagination, says, "What seems significant about the republication of the Evergreen Review in 1999 is the surprising number of international writers there. It shows the spread of the Beat mystique and message -- the American message of freedom of the press -- around the world." In fact, many of the writers Rosset published over the years were not inspired by the Beats, but were part of a post-war surge of creative risk-taking that prepared the ground for the Beats. The court battles fought over Rosset-published texts such as Lady Chatterly's Lover paved the way for Beat works like Howl and Naked Lunch to thwart obscenity raps.
"Rosset is an old warrior," says Raymond Foye. The publication of writers like Cookie Mueller, David Trinidad, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell in Foye's own influential Hanuman Books series helped advance the lineage of Rosset and Ferlinghetti into the contemporary era.
"He managed to bring marginality into the mainstream," Foye adds. "Rosset is the kind of publisher that almost doesn't exist anymore, motivated by a real love of literature."
Unfortunately, the love of literature won't be able to rescue Rosset from the latest battle he's facing: one tougher to win than the courtroom battles with censorious district attorneys.
In 1997, a Las Vegas casino operator named Steve Wynn won a US$3.1 million lawsuit against Lyle Stuart's Barricade Books for a single sentence in the Barricade catalog that linked Wynn with the Genovese crime family. Rosset had nothing to do with the catalog or the book in question, but Barricade was the distributor of one of Rosset's imprints, Blue Moon.
When Stuart -- who had no libel insurance -- was forced into bankruptcy, so was Rosset.
"I have nothing," Rosset told a reporter. "I don't have a bank account."
In March, Publisher's Group West acquired Blue Moon, and appointed Rosset the editor of a new imprint, called Foxrock. The wolf still isn't permanently banished from his door, however, and Rossett is hoping that the new Web site will attract advertisers or a grant to help finance its construction and contribute to his living expenses. Rosset, who has never shied away from publishing erotica, says he would consider accepting advertisements from adult-content providers -- except for one reason.
"Sex is fine. But those banners are so goddamned ugly."
Rosset acknowledges a parallel between the explosion of small presses and zines in the post-war era and the renaissance of self-publishing on the Web.
"It's better today for would-be publishers and writers than at any time in the history of the world," he says. "For once, the technology is in the hands of the relatively impoverished -- Microsoft aside -- and there's a chance for the people to speak."
That the people are using the power of speech on the Net to kibitz about presidential semen stains doesn't faze him.
"Clinton is slime and sleaze, but he's ours," he observes. Punning on the names of the independent prosecutor and a certain televangelist, Rosset quips, "Let the Starr fall well into the abyss."
He attributes the enduring appeal to young audiences of Evergreen Review to "a direct line running from Walt Whitman to Henry Miller to Jack Kerouac: the desire for open expression and freedom."
You might think it was the 25-year-old Meagher who hipped Rosset to the brave new World Wide Web, but it was Rosset who put his colleague on the Net.
"I made films before I published books, and I was married to an abstract expressionist painter [Joan Mitchell]. If you put those two things together, you get the Web," jokes Rosset.
Ever the cultural provocateur, Rosset is itching to publish another controversial text: the Lolita-inspired Lo's Diary, published in Italy, but blocked here by a lawsuit from one of Nabokov's heirs.
"I think of myself as an amoeba with a brain," Rosset says. "Where it finds a crack in the rock, it goes."
