Reading from Solace at Baruch College, March 26, 4pm

In Conversation with British poet Glyn Maxwell following his reading at NYU Lillian Vernon House, March 29, 7pm

Reading from Solace at the University of Connecticut, April 3, 12.30pm

In Conversation with poet & memoirist Meghan O’Rourke at the Irish Arts Center, April 3, 7.30pm

Talking on Maria Edgeworth and Solace at Yale University Library, April 5, 2pm

There was the rumble above us of the elevated trains. I complained at the lack of true lustre in my stories. Silvija sighed and stopped up on the pavement and she took hold of my elbow. She gave me one of her statements or manifestos, then, one of her great orations on the Nature of Art:

‘When you are worried, that is when you are working. When you are doing nothing, that is when the work is happening. It does not happen in the front section of the brain, Patrick. It happens in back section. Here is the subconscious level. This is the place the story come from. You just have to let it happen. Liberate yourself! If it is going to come, it will come. You just make yourself available and open to it. If it comes good, some day, it comes good. Champagne! But you have no power over it. It is all involving luck. When it feels like nothing is happening, that is when it is all happening. And remember that when you are worried, you are working.’

Still I search for a more succinct explanation of how it all occurs, but I know I will not find one.

From Berlin Arkonaplatz – My Lesbian Summer by Kevin Barry

(That said, I know Kevin Barry. And he’s never doing nothing.)

More here (Sam Thompson), here (Greg Baxter) and here (the late Jan Karski). And more anon.

*not a different husband, either.

“I loved how neat it was, the way she told it, then and now stitched up tight.” To her young narrator, the daughter of English settlers in 19th-century Australia, Kate Grenville has given a novelist’s fascination with the past and how it pushes its way into the present. Sarah Thornhill was the last child born to William and Sal Thornhill, the couple whose struggle for a new beginning was memorably imagined in Grenville’s 2005 bestseller The Secret River. This is that novel’s sequel. Grenville has drawn once again on her ancestors’ stories, working from the detail of a banished granddaughter in her own family history to link back to, and build upon, The Secret River‘s landscape of resilience and atrocity.

Sal is long dead now, and Sarah and her siblings have a stepmother, Meg, a brisk and unsentimental woman who keeps busy with the work of social climbing; her task, as she sees it, is to mask her husband’s “taint” – his past as a convict deported from England – by mixing with the right kind of people and raising his daughters as ladies. But Sarah is wilful and adventurous, happiest outdoors on her horse or in the cave she uses as a hideaway, and has no interest in being a lady. When she falls in love, it is with the wildly inappropriate Jack Langland, a neighbour who is “half darkie”, product of a union between his father and an Aborigine woman in the first years of colonisation. Jack works with Sarah’s brother Will, gone for long periods on sealing expeditions to New Zealand, returning with what sound like fantastical stories of a wild and exotic place. Jack returns Sarah’s feelings, and the two make plans for a life in a simple cabin up the river.

Unsurprisingly, these notions are knocked off course by Sarah’s parents, but not through any power on their part to forbid Sarah’s involvement with Jack; rather, they reveal to Jack a shameful secret which has been hinted at throughout the narrative, and which will be known to readers of The Secret River, but to which Sarah is somehow oblivious. The difficult journeys on which Sarah then finds herself for the remainder of the novel are propelled by the fact of that secret, by the damage it has done and, eventually, by her need to discover it and to attempt a kind of atonement. Even for readers who have not witnessed William Thornhill’s past deeds, the nature of this buried truth will not be difficult to guess – this is Australia in the early 19th century, after all, and even as a child Sarah is conscious of her father’s deep unease about the Aborigines living lives of poverty in the bush nearby. One of them is an old man, tall and crooked, with a head wound “where something bad had happened and never mended”.

Grenville’s challenge is to create sufficient space for Sarah’s own experience of this family history, and to create for her story a narrative pressure that does not lean too overtly on the promise of a revelation that seems self-evident: we know that a furnace of displacement and violence has risen to boiling point, and that this is a reality from which Sarah has been too well protected, despite the considerable losses that life has thrown her way.

It is with often marvellous vividness and clarity that Grenville evokes Sarah’s world, from childhood on the Hawkesbury, through an adolescence of idealistic love, to a marriage towards which she goes with a resigned heart but of which she ultimately makes a fine hand. Sarah is well inhabited by her creator, and through the eyes of this young woman, the physical and cultural strangenesses of a nation still clambering into existence spring richly to life. But the much-signposted secrets ride roughshod over this character rather than drawing her compellingly on; they take too much of the narrative’s oxygen for Sarah ever to be able to negotiate towards them a convincing relationship. Their elements and repercussions come to seem stockpiled rather than layered. The attention given to their many constituent parts can seem hasty or rushed: there is a lost brother about whom the reader can barely care, and a secret child who is introduced and abandoned too quickly. Most problematically, there is a journey far afield that would seem almost epic in its importance to Sarah, and in its demands as a plot point, and yet which is over within a matter of pages, dispatched before it has even begun. Sarah Thornhill, a character of great spirit and determination, surely deserves more.

**

Sarah Thornhill by Kate Grenville is published by Canongate, £12.99

IN THIS, HIS SECOND NOVEL, the US writer Adam Johnson enacts a feat of sorcery that is audacious and utterly unsettling: he imagines a country that has long seemed almost beyond imagination. The North Korea of recent history, into which Johnson plunges his young hero, Jun Do, is everything we have suspected it of being. It is cruel, dysfunctional and bizarre. Yet so vividly does The Orphan Master’s Son evoke this place and its strangenesses, and with such intensity does Johnson portray its landscapes, its moods and its dynamics, that North Korea, for the reader, comes to life much more fully, and even more unsettlingly, than this grim frame of references could allow. Johnson’s daring vision delivers a North Korea that is all those things and more.

Jun Do, raised in a work camp for orphans and trained to kill in absolute darkness, has a control and a precision that are useful to the state. First he is “recruited” as a professional kidnapper for the court of Kim Jong-il. Proficient in English, he is next assigned to monitor radio transmissions aboard Junma, an ancient fishing vessel, on the East Sea, and afterwards to translate on a government mission to Texas. After this, the system takes him. While it has him, he does something to change the shape of its grip and the course of his life.

And so The Orphan Master’s Son is an odyssey through dark waters, although it is also a thriller, a picaresque, a satire and a love story. Johnson has a remarkable eye for detail. There are moments, things glimpsed, that take the breath away, whether with their quiet grace or with their unthinkable evil. He writes of the weight of blood bags as the life of people is snatched away; of the sight of thousands of American sports shoes adrift far out to sea; of the voice of a night rower, a young American woman attempting to traverse the world, as it is picked up on a ship radio; of the way some trees planted after the Korean famine grew strangely because they sprouted from seeds in famished stomachs. He writes of torture, of hard labour and of pain in ways that are difficult to forget.

His gift for atmosphere, and for the deeply complex interactions that take place between cornered and petrified people, seems to arise out of instinct, so purely does it strike home on the page. When he is writing at this level, his evocations of a troubled place and of troubled human consciousness merge to create a portrait of suffering and of endurance that is uniquely compelling.

All of this gives us a Jun Do whose changing inner life is revealed subtly, through the ways in which he moves through a difficult world. This does not always happen during quiet moments: Johnson is adept at handling the back and forth between what is grave and what is bizarre in Jun Do’s experience. This is nowhere more true than in Part Two, which brings a startling change of horses, as Jun Do assumes the identity of the much-feared Commander Ga, Kim Jong-il’s greatest rival. Crazy though this sounds, it works; in a place this surreal, surprisingly many things do. Our hero also acquires Ga’s wife, Sun Moon, a favourite of Kim Jong-il and the only North Korean woman permitted to be an actress.

The “Dear Leader” himself is a frequent presence in the novel’s second part. There is a satisfying voyeurism to the glimpses of this maniac, living in his underground bunker, composing his artistic works and obsessing over the women he has stolen and the Americans who have insulted him. Strangely, though, in a novel that has elsewhere exhibited such a steady, unflinching gaze, there is no more real traction on the character of the tyrant than this. The bizarre must be present, of course, given that this is Kim Jong-il, but must it be quite so dominant?

A part of Johnson’s narrative from this point on is comprised entirely of a very effective satire – the voice of the daily broadcast – that would seem to do all the work necessary on that score. Another perspective shows us Jun Do’s progress as Ga, and the third is the voice of the unnamed interrogator, who brings us up close to the most horrific practices of the regime and throws light on the suffering of ordinary citizens – his elderly parents – who live in fear of the camps.

There is much, then, to savour as the story moves towards its climax: an unlikely love story, a blistering satire and a forceful tension arising from the pressure of three perspectives. But there is a sense, too, of the canvas being stretched, of elements being forced into play. For the plot to develop as Johnson wishes, certain traps must be laid, certain switches must be tripped, and there are moments when these props – chief among them the film Casablanca and a sort of magic camera connecting Jun Do to the CIA – stand out too incongruously amid a narrative otherwise so rich in confidence and subtlety. Indeed, the role and position of the United States seem not quite worked out: at times, Johnson bluntly swings his satire in its direction while, at other points, there is a jarring sense that the US exists in the narrative not just as an ideal to be dreamed of by the suffering North Koreans but as an ideal that the novel also believes in without asking many questions. There are moments when Jun Do’s journey of self-discovery seems too overtly signposted, to him and to us; illuminations are pushed out like mantras rather than being made manifest by Johnson’s nuanced prose.

Still, the novel is a wonder in spite of these strainings towards resolution; perhaps partly because of them. At its starkest, Johnson’s imagining of this place and of this hero recognises that there can be no easy wrapping up, no matter how central to the narrative the act of storytelling might be. This is a place, after all, in which stories are valuable only in so far as they are useful. But what Jun Do ultimately recognises is that his story can be useful to him as well as to those who demand or steal it; he can tell himself, at the end of all, how he would have felt if things (by which he means everything: North Korea, Kim Jong-il, everything) had been different.

To evoke at once what it feels like to be in such a place, and how it might have felt had things been very different there, are vast feats that Adam Johnson accomplishes with ingenuity and with towering empathy.

**

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson is published in the UK by Doubleday, £18.99, and in the US by Random House, $26.

How did you first hear about Waiting for Godot?

I had seen a notice about it in the New York Times, a small thing, and I’d read a couple of small things by Beckett in Transitions magazine; this was a compilation, Paris in the 1930s. So I knew a little bit and I finally got a copy of the play here in New York and I read it.

Then you wrote to Beckett, and the letter makes clear how impressed you were by the play. Were you apprehensive about writing to him?

(Laughs) Oh, this is sort of a very clumsy letter.

You say in the letter, “It’s about time that I write a letter to you,” which makes it sound as though you were putting the task off. There’s a lot of quite nervous language in there, actually.

Yeah. (Laughs) I don’t think I’d ever written a letter like that before.

And did you have much hope that you’d get a positive reply?

Well, I did, because we had a contract with him already…for a hundred dollars we had bought the rights. It was a bargain, and I thought so…But I think the contract was more important than the amount.

Did he write you a short letter by way of reply?

What’s very important is that he wrote back immediately to say that there was a problem with censorship.

(At this point, Astrid Myers helps Rosset to find the Beckett letter in his papers. You wrote first, she says to Rosset. Then, June 25^th, he wrote back.)

He gave me his address, his home address. But on the second page there he started telling me how it was with the censors; I hope you’re realizing what you’re letting yourself in for, he said. But that was the last thing that I was [concerned about]…because I was intent on publishing DH Lawrence and Henry Miller and so on, I wasn’t really very frightened by it. But I thought about it a while. I didn’t answer him directly, I just said, well let’s let something happen. Which it never did. And then…we went over to see him. That was in September of the same year.

Did you go especially to see the production of Godot?

It was [still running] but you know, the production opened in London, so it moved back to Paris, it was in French, by the time that we got there and we went to see it. And that was very dramatic because…here’s the story, the most delicate…because we went to see the production. First we had met Beckett and he had been very cool. But then he got very friendly during the evening; we stayed out with him until four in the morning. And then we went to see the play. My wife, Loly, was German, and she had, luckily, through her father’s influence, been sent to Paris during the war instead of being at home in the war. Her father was an ex-officer in the German army before World War II. And when the war was over, the Americans had sent him to a POW camp. And then released him because he had saved the life of a man who ran a bank with him in Essen and who was Jewish, and he protected this guy during the whole war and hid him, and so forth, so he was…you could say that he was anti-Nazi. So anyway, Loly had been in, and she had actually met, some of the people who were in that group that had put on Godot.

So when we went to the play to see it, afterwards, there were very warm, effusive greetings between people in the cast and Loly. She’d been very young at that time; she’d worked for a German newspaper which had taken over the Communist paper. They’d taken over the Humanite building in Paris. And she had told me about how, at night, they would get up on the roof of the building, the people who worked in the newspaper, and scream obscenities about Hitler. And I believed her, but I was always…I mean, I wanted to believe her. And after that trip to Paris, I believed. And so did Beckett. And he was very taken by the greeting. And so it immediately…brought us much closer to him. So that was a big thing.

And after that, Beckett started writing to us. The first letters were to Loly; she was handling the production of the book. And we went through many things about that. He wanted it the way he wanted it. And we…not really considered that we thought it was a very beautiful design, so Sam didn’t like it. And he said, very sweetly, I didn’t want to be a Nyet man all the time. So obviously we compromised and did what we wanted [about the design]. I didn’t particularly like it; it was done by a very avant-garde printer in New York. And it wasn’t too easy to read, I thought. Very stark. Also the cover photograph that he liked the most had been done in Germany in the very town that Loly was born in. We wrote to the photographer and that photograph is on the first cover. The French cast. On the stage.

So it got…friendlier…and friendlier.

When do you think it went from being a professional exchange to being a friendship?

The night we met him.Yes.

But you say he was a little cool with you that first time?

He had to leave. He came in in his raincoat in the Pont Royal Hotel, which was a famous place for the underground during the war, for Sartre, Camus and so on…we must have known something, because why else did we stay there? Anyway…there we were. And I think he said he had another appointment in forty-five minutes, at seven o clock or something. And yet, at four in the morning he was still with us. So from then on…it was very very friendly. And eventually he came here. For just the one time. In 1964.

So this was 1953. did you write to each other a lot?

Very.

What did you write about? Always to do with publishing?

No. my father died in 1955. and Beckett’s brother died then too, within a week of each other. And his brother was very important to him. He went back to Ireland, for a couple of weeks, I think. And he wrote and said, I’m never coming back here [to Ireland] again. And it gradually struck me that Beckett, something I didn’t know, that’s sort of a division it seemed to me in I between Protestant and Catholic. My mother was very much from the Irish Catholic background…from Mayo and Ballyforan in Galway. Astrid and I finally went there…and I tried to get Beckett interested in that. But he really wasn’t interested. (Laughs.) And I just didn’t let that sink in on me. For a long time. That there’s a real difference. But that’s it. And so he…that was not his great interest.

Ireland was somewhere he wanted to get out of.

I mean, he just wanted to be in France. And I started arguing with him very early on as to why he didn’t write in English again. I thought that it was a very emotional thing for him. That he had been put down by the English publishers and not recognized and that that had caused him to stop writing in English. I think that he felt that in English he was more emotional than in French. And that he wanted to take control of himself. But I kept right on [at him]. And whether or not, how much influence I had, I don’t know, but he did start writing in English. Krapp’s Last Tape, that piece is the most emotional, to me, I mean, personally…I identified with it. The story where he had a girlfriend in the North Sea in Germany and she left him and went off with somebody else. And that really happened and Krapp’s Last Tape was a replay of that experience. I’d had a very similar experience in this country. I think it created a bond that was there. And kept right on going.

Another of the aspects of Beckett;s not writing in English so much was that he’d get caught up in the translation. Was it that everything was too emotional when he got into the work of translation?

That’s right. I’d never heard of Eleuthéria until Beckett brought it up. And then he brought me the ms…Or, actually, it was not the ms. Maybe the cover was. It was a copy of the original, even though he said it was the original. Ok.

It was a gesture…and then he started to translate it. He did a few lines and he said, I can’t do this, it’s terrible, it’s disgusting. And he wrote to me, if you will forgive your unforgivable Sam, I’ll write something for you. (Pause.) So what am I gonna say? (Laughs.) So I said yes, sure, and he did, he wrote Stirrings Still. Which I had a slight feeling that at least part of it had been written before, but I never said that. Never discussed it. And then…I’d been thrown out of Grove. And only he and one other writer really came forward to say, hey, we’ve got to do something. That was Marguerite Duras. And I don’t think Sam liked her. I think he disliked her. I again sort of ignored that, and she gave me a short piece also; we published both of them separately. But then I said to Sam, I don’t want to put both pieces into one and combine them, but I thought it might be nice if we did two books and put them in a box together. All he said to me was, does she still write? That gave me the message. (Laughs.)

Someone else about whom Beckett was a little uncertain was William S. Burroughs.

That’s what he said. He said, that’s not writing, that’s plumbing. And Burroughs really respected and admired Beckett. I thought at the time it was interesting…the American writers like Allen Ginsberg and Burroughs and Jack Kerouac – all of whom we were publishing – tremendously admired Beckett. And Beckett, I thought, acted more like the French, in the sense of saying, who are they; he wasn’t terribly interested. And I thought, for once, the Americans really are ahead in their sensitivity. They can understand Camus and Sartre and so on. But it’s not getting, there’s no back…[no return].

Was it that he didn’t know their writing?

Well, he had a good chance to know them, because they were in Paris.

But did he know their work?

Well if it was Burroughs, I’d have to say he didn’t like it. He hadn’t read anything of Kerouac, I don’t know [if he had]. But he did read Catcher in the Rye and loved it, wrote to me and said, this is the best thing I’ve read in a long time. Totally out of nowhere. And that was…I thought very interesting, that maybe he was more au courant with our writing than I thought. So it’s a mixture but I think that was true, that the French were not really looking much outside of themselves. And we were. Kerouac was French-Canadian. His mother spoke French, sort of. And they had great admiration, and I think that was true of Americans in general. We were sort of admiring the French, but they were sort of looking down on us. Because we were trying to be outgoing to them. Whereas the British were nasty. Didn’t bother to learn how to pronounce anything. And that made a thing out of bad pronunciation. And the French were therefore sort of in fear of the English. I mean they were superior. So I thought that was something that was missed.

During these years before Beckett came to New York, did you see much of him? Did you go to Paris often?

Yes. Very. I did. Several times a year.

I was wondering whether it felt like he was isolated…but you saw each other regularly?

I did. And I wrote to him. And he complained about it. But as somebody here said, if a couple are married and they know each other very well and they talk to each other all the time, why the hell do they have to write to each other.

But he liked getting letters? He was a good correspondent?

Yes. So my assistant Judith Schmidt, and Dick Seaver who had lived in Paris but whom I had not met, and I didn’t hear of him until I went to Paris, after we had taken on Beckett, Dick lived in Paris…my first wife, Joan Mitchell, is a painter. And she went to France and eventually ended up living her life out in France. So I’d gone there, we lived there for a while, and we lived in Southern France. But the only people we knew were painters. Painters are much more gregarious than writers. Writers go and hide. (Laughs.) There were some English writers who lived right near us in this fishing town. And in one year they never said hello. (Laughs.) So I understood that feeling of going to France and staying away. But we never heard of…we didn’t know about Beckett or anybody, any other writers, really. We knew about the Communist party, that intrigued us very much. Even people like Maurice Chevalier who’d pretended to become very left-wing, and Picasso, Joan…we finally she wanted to go very much to Spain, to see the Spanish painting of the century and so forth. And I refused to go, I said, unless we went to Guernica. And we did, we drove from Southern France. And it was scary. There were machine gun squads on the roads…Franco, and so on. But the most hostile people were students in the Basque coast who thought we must be pro-Franco and they were attacking us. This was in the mid-1940s; 1946 or 1947. And then, later, we had a tour with an association of writers, Gallimard in France, and so on, and we represented the US. Which was amazing, because all the other companies were large and very prestigious. But the European group had asked Pantheon Press to be the American reps. And that was run by a German in exile. And he said, I’m not American. Go to Gallimard and get them, they’ll be better reps for the US. So they did, and the first year we got a big prize and we split it between Beckett and Borges. That already developed a split within that organization.

Sam wouldn’t go to Majorca [where they met every year]. I don’t know [why not], maybe it was too social. Henry Miller came but immediately got sick and stayed in a room until he heard it was over. Then he was well.

You published all of Beckett’s work.

Twenty-seven books.

Godot was first…

I don’t know if Godot was first, it was the first one signed. But the two novels that had already come out…L’Innomable and Molloy. We may have done those beforehand. I put off publishing Godot because I had one superstition. I put off publishing it in paperback until we got in my Evergreen paperbacks to number thirty-three. My one superstition or belief is in that number…so I waited till 33 came up. That was my number…

Why? I had a good time when I was captain of my high school football team and I was number 33.

And Beckett was very interested in sports. I went with him to a tennis game in Roland Garros stadium in Paris. And it was a great American player, a professional. This was before they let the professionals play with the amateurs. So they had to play alone. And the American player was playing an Australian. And the referee knew Becket when he came into the stadium. Thousands and thousands of people there, and he came to Beckett, then he went to the stand, to judge the game. And the American player, whose name I’m missing now, got angry at the calls of the referee he was losing, and he stopped the game, and said, I won’t go on playing unless you throw the referee out. Never heard such a thing, ever…anyway…they threw the referee out. And he came by us on his way out of the stadium. Didn’t seem upset at all. And said, good afternoon, goodbye…it was a weird experience.

The trip that Beckett took to New York in 1964 sounds like a wonderful couple of days.

He was here for ten days. He stayed with Christine and I in our house on Houston St. Playing pool…forcing the ball into the pocket…

It was a working holiday?

Well, I’d commissioned him to write a film script, and he did it, Film, and then we had to pick the location. I also picked my favourite people in filming to work on it. Alan Schneider…the first Godot was put on in Florida, and he was fired, because it was so unpopular and producer thought it wasn’t good…neither Sam nor I saw it, but we both separately got the impression that he’d done a good job, despite being fired. So I got him as the director, and Beckett came here. And they became very good friends. But he had never done a film before. He had done some television. I remember disaster with one shot which included strobing. I wish we’d kept the outtakes.

You were also involved in the 1961 Made-for-TV production of Waiting for Godot, also directed by Schneider, and starring Burgess Meredith and Zero Mostel.

Yeah, and I did the introduction to that. It was a very good production. That was one of the inconsistencies with Sam: he said, I don’t want this made into a film, but this is for TV, so that’s ok…

Steve Martin and another comedian did Godot at the Lincoln Center. In a production that I thought was incredible. But it was put down by a lot of Beckett experts, especially in school. And I thought they played it in a totally different way…which was an equality between the two…it was definitely a couple, let’s say a man and wife. And it was played…with jealousy, written, sadness and so forth. Interpreted that way, that made it a different play. Not a word of it was changed. And I took that to Sam, a film of it, the Lincoln Center Godot, before he died. I took to him…I don’t know if I took that or the one in San Quentin – I went to San Quention and shot that production, and it was amazingly good. And amazingly sad. In the sense of how it was done. I mean, they had guns aimed at us while we were watching it. Literally. And warning us if anything happened, we’d be treated just like any of the other prisoners…if there was shooting, well, bad luck.

It was very, very moving, done by a Swedish director who really poured his life into that. And he had done it in Sweden and it was so good that they were going to put it on in Stockholm and the prisoners didn’t show up [i.e. they escaped]. Just one guy showed up and they put him back in jail. But the others were gone. But there was no chance for that in San Quentin. and the prison…it was an amazing thing that the superintendent of the prisons allowed that…he had gone to Sweden, I mean he was obviously a person of a whole different background than the rest of the people there. Because there was great hostility on the part of the other guards. But it meant a great deal to those prisoners. They were all in for life, every one of them.

And I got a letter the other day from one of them. Still in prison, oh yes, and not only that, they moved him to another brand new absolute security prison, they didn’t like the fact that they were getting so friendly with each other, the people who were in it. And of course, in terms of how you were seeing it and what you knew about the people…you knew that…I mean, it changed the play again. Gave it a whole different context and atmosphere. And the last photographs I think that were ever taken of Beckett, I took. I brought a TV set, and carried it, from here, and a heavy, heavy thing for the electric change in Paris, and a couple of other things, just to make it possible to show it. And I took it to where Sam was, in this medical rest-home. And I photographed him looking at it. And he was…gesturing at it, I mean, sort of directing [makes movement like composing]. And when I was going to leave, he said, Barney, you can’t carry all that stuff, it’s very heavy, and then he gets up – he’s dying – he goes over and picks it up and says, Aw, you can. [Laughs.] You can, you can.

From your descriptions, it sounds as though Beckett was a very generous, funny person.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes [nodding.]

This picture, it’s with my son, Beckett…he’s now thirty-five, but the day that was taken was in Paris, near where Beckett was living. The Pullman Hotel, it was an obscenity of a hotel, but it was the only place Beckett would go. The only, only place. It was the closest to where he lived. But still a distance. A miserable place. It had a huge lobby which had two escalators running through the whole lobby, going up and down. It mainly appealed to young Japanese high school students coming on trips to the city. And German, Scotch, so forth, football players. And I remember seeing Sam in that lobby waiting for me, and all these Japanese schoolgirls running around, and on the loudspeakers they’re saying, will the Scottish rugby team report to the fourth floor, and these guys in kilts running around…so the Japanese students and the kilted men and there’s Sam in a black overcoat [laughing helplessly now], sitting in the middle of it. Unbelievable. And a very miserable kind of a little café…and it was the only place in my life I’ve ever been where if you wanted to get breakfast you would go up to the cashier with a picture card, and on it were photographs; an egg, a photograph of two eggs, a photograph of bacon, etc etc.

This was the only place he would go the last year or so of his life. I finally took a room there. So I didn’t have to… It was not near the centre of Paris, or the left bank. It was outside, and so I finally left my stuff there and got a room each time I went. (Laughs.) I don’t think he noticed. And I’d say Sam, why don’t you go home. He lived only a few blocks away. He said, I need things that I have in my apt and I’d say let’s go and get them. No, I can’t do that. But he took a walk every day. And he told me, oh, I walked further today, than if I’d gone home. His wife was home. May have been important.

So I’d say, oh, you walked further? Well, let’s take another walk. We’ll walk home. I don’t want to carry anything, he’d say. So I’d say, well I’ll get a car. [Shakes his head.] He never went home. She died, I think, a week before he did.

Had Beckett seen his wife before she died?

I don’t know if they ever…how long they’d seen each other before he died. It…I was there when he died….I mean, I was in Paris. [Voice faltering.]

When was the last time you saw him?

That time I took the photograph was the last time.

It must have been very difficult, knowing he was close to the end.

I couldn’t believe he was. It didn’t seem…he looked, I thought, looked well. It was a nice kind of a place to be, I’ll say that. No…of living, and dying…if he was going to die, the medical place…I think they took him to hospital at the very end. Which probably shouldn’t have been done. Because it didn’t help any. Difficult.

He was still talking, still himself?

Yes. Absolutely. I think that film I showed him was…of the cast of the prison. I told him about the other one. And I told him at great length because the fact that these were two Hollywood people and so on. But it was wrong… I made a terrible mistake with Beckett once…I was asked by a Hollywood agent whom I didn’t even know was a very famous one. And he was calling on behalf of a client, a famous actor who wanted to put on Waiting for Godot. And this guy was dying also. I didn’t know that. And they were willing to pay anything to get the right to do it and have Beckett there. And let him do anything he wanted in the shooting, and have any actors, and they named Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles and Marlon Brando…Steve McQueen…he was the producer. It was all his. Steve McQueen. He was putting up the money, etc, and he was dying and I didn’t know anything about that. And I didn’t know what Steve McQueen looked like. So I called a friend of mine, just called here just now, Joe Strick, who’s a filmmaker. And said, what can you ask for such a thing? The most he’d ever heard for buying the rights to a play was a million dollars. So this agent called me in Paris and I said, half a million. And he said, ok, I’ll think about it and called back shortly, said, we’ll make it $350,000, and that’s in writing. Ok. So next, I’m going to see Beckett, and he says, what do they look like? And I said, Marlon Brando, well he’s very big – he was very fat at that time, heavy set, was getting very big and heavy at that time, and Beckett said, what about Steve McQueen. And I didn’t know who he was, I thought of James Garner. And I said, he’s also heavy, big. Sturdy. And Beckett said, no. My characters are ghosts. The answer is no. So we turned down $350,000. (Laughs.) And Steve McQueen then went and made the film with a Norwegian writer…a famous one and he made the film…about syphillis or something…it was a medical thing of a famous doctor [This was the 1978 production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.] He made that, and then he died, right then.

You weren’t to know.

And then we wanted to redo or do again, Alan Schneider went to Paris to try and talk Sam into letting us do a similar production to the one that was on TV. But Alan’s heart really wasn’t in it, and he gave it up. But the important thing is that Sam could change his mind. I mean, Susan Sontag was putting on Godot in Sarajevo, and there was a war going on. They were literally shooting right around the goddamn theatre. And I thought she was being extremely courageous. And she was changing cast all the time. And again, people here got very upset about her changing things, etc. I wrote to Beckett and told him that he shouldn’t listen to any of that, that they sometimes had to change Lucky from one actor to the next. As far as I know, he was ok about it. But I thought it was really bad that she was being hounded by the very people who should appreciate her. I didn’t even know her. I met her afterwards. When we had something in common.

Is this your Irish passport?

Yes. It took a while to get this. But finally I got it and finally went to Ireland for the 1^st time. And used my American passport. I don’t know how my grandfather got here. Because his father was being executed at the time. And then it was commuted to life imprisonment. Parnell got involved.

My mother spoke Gaelic, which was astounding. They both did. My grandmother and grandfather spoke it all the time. So that way, I wouldn’t know what the hell they were saying. And I don’t think they came here together. My grandmother was from Mayo. And my grandfather from Galway. So probably came here around 1900. My father’s grandparents came some other time…I think to Boston.

My grandfather came after this murder had taken place; it all started on account of him. He had shot this bird, a grouse. Very similar to the quail. But the Irish weren’t allowed to shoot birds. So he shot this bird and got arrested by a representative of the British. And he was supposed to go to court to report, but he didn’t go. My Great-Grandfather went. My great-grandfather said about my grandfather, he has absconded. And after that he was sort of out of it. But then it kept on going, and they were dynamiters. Terrorists. Professional. They lived in a barn in Ballyforan. We went to right where they still lived. The barn is still standing. As the houses fall down they build new ones themselves. And all these sheep running around with collars…it was an incredible strange experience. And my cousin who’s living there…we asked her about it. She didn’t say much. But she wrote a letter, to me about our backgrounds.

[We look at some letters and the conversation turns to the play Eleuthéria.

I thought that Eleuthéria would be just like everything else, you’d go through all the years with Beckett and he'd say no; he always said no to anything. He was not going to allow about five different things to be published. And then, three years later, he’d say go ahead. And so I was just waiting on Eleuthéria [for Beckett to change his mind on that]. And then, three years later Beckett was dead. And that’s when I was convinced by the example of the…The Trial, the Kafka…Kafka did the same thing, he told the man in charge of all of his work to burn it to destroy it. But if he had, we would never have had the various books of Kafka which Beckett liked very much. This was in that hotel, the Pullman.

You went to a lot of trouble.

Carrying it through that place.

When we published this book of Roger Casement, The Black Diaries here in New York, I went to the leading Irish politician here, Paul O’Dwyer, a very liberal good person. I said, you’ve got to attack us when we publish this book, to get attention to it. So he did. Irate press conferences and so on, O’Dwyer saying, no, that book is…that Casement was a great man but he was not homosexual. That that was all put in, faked, by the British. And that got some attention for the book. That was the only time I ever did that [courted publicity]. But it was the only time I could do it, to get attention for Casement.

[Here talk turns to the Richard Avedon photoshoot, in which Beckett was photographed with Rosset. Rosset has the photograph on his wall.]

I had known Avedon a little before Grove press. But then I read that the only people he really wanted to photograph were Beckett and Greta Garbo. And I wrote to him and said that maybe I could arrange for him to photograph Beckett. Avedon was in Tokyo and I was in New York. We met in Paris, and I didn’t mention it to Beckett until I was there…I said, there’s this photographer who really wants to photograph you, and finally he agreed. And so we went out one day. It took hours, and Avedon was very nervous. And strange. And Sam was very quiet. Which was normal.

But finally, after several hours, Avedon said to Sam and to my son Beckett to follow him. And they went over the street. There was an overpass, so I couldn’t see to the other side. And they went, and a long time passed, and they came back. And I asked my son, did he take photographs? And my son said, I think he did, he put a thing over his head. So then Avedon left and weeks and weeks went by, and then finally, that photograph arrived, here in New York, in my place, but nothing of Beckett alone. And then Beckett asked me, the only time he ever asked about a photograph, he said, what happened to the photograph the day I was with young Beckett? So I wrote to Avedon and said, maybe he had sent it to the wrong address. And Avedon wrote back and said, he didn’t take a photograph, he didn’t take it, because he felt that Beckett was unhappy. I learned later that A pulled the same thing with Marilyn Monroe. Took photographs of her with her husband, Joe DiMaggio, and then said he hadn’t taken anything, and then years later, it’s the most famous photograph he ever took. He suddenly said he found it. Well, about two years after that, somebody whom I didn’t know, wrote to somebody who told me that they had seen photographs of Beckett in a museum or something, in England. So. Then there was a big show here. At the Met, of portraits by Avedon. And there was Beckett. Beckett alone. They were all shot individually.

So he had taken them on that day. This one of Beckett and your son?

He had taken them two or three years before he showed them. Why he did that I don’t know. I saw Avedon two or three times after that, and I walked out of the room. I was really annoyed. It was a strange way to behave; I didn’t see who benefitted. He didn’t. And it was the only time that Beckett asked about a photo, because Avedon had gone on talking and talking about how his father and Beckett were similar. And that was how he had developed the idea of shooting photographs with a sheet. That was from Beckett. The lack of scenery. That was the whole theory he developed as a photographer. That didn’t impress me too much, or didn’t impress Beckett either. I kept telling it to him, and he said, OK, he wouldn’t talk about it. And Avedon, I think personally thought it was stupid that he did all his photography only with a sheet. Monotonous.

And Beckett died before seeing the photographs. I don’t think I ever told him.

You recall his 80^th birthday, in Paris?

Yes. I was there for a Beckett program arranged by a person who was here in NY. Well it is important (the name) because he had organized a whole thing for Beckett at the Pompidou Museum in Paris. And I was one of the speakers at it; I had written something. And also I’d been thrown out of Grove Press. I knew the day before. I told Beckett, and I guess he thought about it, because then we went to La Coupole, and there was a group of people at the entrance.

Who was there?

Tom Bishop was the guy who arranged the whole thing…the others…I think the Irish photographer, John Minihan, I think he was there. And I think Stan Gontarski. There were a lot of French writers. It was a big gathering and it was very unusual. It was the only time I ever saw Beckett go out like that, you know, where…naturally, he came very late [laughs], but everybody was still there.

Suzanne?

No, no, I didn’t see her for many years.

It was the biggest group I ever saw Beckett with. I was already there when he arrived. I was amazed that he came.

Was nobody expecting him?

Well, yes and no. They were hoping. And then it all sort of fades in my mind after that. He seemed very happy and he made two statements…[Rosset then talks about how Beckett didn't wish to be friendly to the person who'd replaced him – Rosset – at Grove Press.] I had to sort of push Beckett into being friendly. He didn’t want to be. Maybe he was right. He had said to one person, you can’t get blood out of a stone. And then he said to the young Getty [Gettys had bought Grove], who’s responsible for this? I was only about 20 feet away from him, didn’t really hear.

You must have been very disappointed.

Yes. I don’t think it had really sunk in.

What’s the most precious memory you have of B’s time here in New York?

I really have to think about that. Well, I’ll tell you. When he was gonna go back, we had to leave very early in the morning to go to the airport. My wife and I overslept and we were supposed to go to the airport, let’s say 8.30 or…and we woke up at 9.30. We get up and go to the door of the bedroom, and I can’t open it, there’s something on the other side. And I finally discovered…it’s summer, it’s hot…Beckett is asleep. He sat down outside the bedroom door, he didn’t knock. Didn’t want to bother us. And he fell asleep with his overcoat on, and his muffler, and was sleeping. And that was one thing…so we woke him up and now he’d missed the plane. So what are we going to do? Ok. The World’s Fair was on. Here. So we (laughs) went to the World’s Fair. It was on the way to the airport. And there, Sam bought two purses, one for Suzanne and one for Christine. Greek things. And we’re going around the fair…and then we lose him, don’t see him anymore. Well, we panicked. We went running around the World’s Fair. And we found him sound asleep on a bench, in a sort of park. So we woke him up, and we went to the airport which was then called Idlewild still, I think. We went to the bar there to have a drink. And they wouldn’t serve my wife, because she didn’t have ID; they thought she was under 21. Yeah, not true but it was a compliment. And I remember Beckett was bewildered by all of this madness. I could just see he thought, this is a strange country. I don’t think I want to come back here again. And it turned out that he never did.

But he had a good time while he was here? Oh, I think so. He went to a game with Dick Seaver. I think I was at that game too but I left. I wasn’t going to sit through two games. But Beckett did not want to leave. I think he had a good time here.

We played tennis as well. And then, and there we realized that he had cataracts, which were removed later, after that. And he was so disgusted with himself, because he kept missing the ball. And at that time when he walked on the street, people thought he was drunk. Because he was staggering around..he couldn’t see anything. And you know, Joyce had the same thing. When Joyce left Paris during the war or something, Sam seemed very unhappy about that. And I got the feeling he felt that Joyce had copped out, that he didn’t want to face what was happening. Because Beckett lived there…went to Southern France and stayed there.

I loved Sean O’Casey’s autobiography. And there was another thing. I got the feeling he personally disliked O’Casey, but loved his wife very much. And once, when we got a big payment for Beckett, five or ten thousand dollars, he wanted it immediately, all of it, brought to her. O’Casey’s widow at this stage. And her daughter Shivaun I got to know pretty well because of all this. I went to Paris with her to see Beckett. He liked them so much but he didn’t want to even talk about Sean. We delivered that money to Sean’s widow.

I never could really understand the importance of the original handwriting. Boston has a lot of that and so does Texas. I gave all of the Grove files to Syracuse in 1960, so that’s a huge collection. All of this here [pointing to folders of papers in the apartment] is Beckett. We did a lot of this ourselves. And Gontarski spent a lot of time on the correspondence, a lot of it right here. He really was the one who incited me into doing Eleutheria. He said to me several years later, what did you do with that play? Gontarski translated it. And we turned down his translation. I don’t think he’s gotten over it yet. And then we had a second one done, and we turned that one down. And then Faber went ahead and did it finally. And still another one. So that’s four. And two of them were published. One of them was Michael Brodsky’s. God knows how good the translations are or aren’t. Because, you know, it’s a very difficult play. I love it though. And I know it so well.

[Rosset looks through the archive, singling out items and talking briefly about them]

There’s this new cassette thing, the three novels that [the Irish actor] Barry [McGovern] recorded. He read at the Irish Historical Society: Stirrings Still. We saw him when we were in Dublin, we went to the Gate. These photos, I took them in Paris, at a production of Endgame. That’s Suzanne. I think that’s the only photograph. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen of her. Short hair, sort of a quiff, thin, waistcoat…high white shirt. I think she got mad at me that time. I had just got off a plane. And went to the theatre. Sat down and fell asleep. Looking at the play. I don’t know how I was awake…this was Endgame. But she did not excuse that. It was my feeling. I may be totally wrong. And that was the…I think end of our friendship or relationship right there. Because, before that I had spent a fair amount of time with her. And she was going to go a little bit to the Berlin school to study English. But I don’t think she kept going. She did not want to learn English I have to say.

Now one of the things that…it really embarrasses me….Dick Seaver, in an article said I didn’t know how to get in touch with Beckett and I asked him for Beckett’s address. But he gave it to me. I graduated from the New School in 1952. I know I graduated because they sent me a certificate. And I don’t think they noticed. But there were some teachers that were very important to me…Wallace Fowlie was one, and Stanley Kunitz, and Alfred Kazin was another, he was very well known, a sort of New Yorker writer, but also a professor and I took a lot of courses with him…and several other people at the New School. As I say, I took everything that was offered. And Fowlie particularly, Fowlie was somebody who couldn’t have been more different to me. He was a convert to Catholicism. And I, if anything, would have been the other way. He was gay. He was very scholarly. And he wrote some very good books on Mallarmé and Rimbaud. So when I was making up my mind about publishing Beckett, I went to him. He was somebody who didn’t speak in superlatives. And I remember I gave him Godot and something else. I had lunch with him, and he said that Godot was going to be one of the most important plays of the 20^th century, before anyone else had even heard of it. And I said this to Beckett, that he had said that. Now, I don’t remember meeting Sylvia Beach. I’m sure I did though, in New York.

One funny thing was meeting Beckett and Henry Miller together. They both didn’t want to have the meeting because they both had a feeling of really hating each other. For some reason. And I think it was very true. They were both very…in Paris in the 30s, they weren’t doing very well…irascible. Miller, I loved his writing but I got to hate him through reading his personality. But they actually got along very well. And both of them came to me separately afterwards and said, you know, he’s a lot better than I thought. He’s mellowed, he’s gotten better…it was very…actually very satisfying.