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WM: Was he out of print at the time?

BR: Not everything of his, but most. We did about eight volumes, and I got Leon Edel, a professor at NYU who was on his way to writing the famous five-volume biography of James, to do introductions to two of the books. I bought The Golden Bowl from Scribner's. Scribner's sent a wonderful, elderly gentleman along with Whitney Darrow, a famous editor, to my apartment on Ninth Street to see if I really existed. He walked up the four flights, and he was satisfied we were real, and we paid his small advance, and then paid the royalties to Scribner's.

WM: So you were responsible for reviving the great traditionalist Henry James.

BR: Yes. We also did other American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, who seemed somewhere to have gotten lost along the way.

WM: Was he out of print as well?

BR: Yes. I thought he was a very important writer. To me, these were the basics of American left-wing idealism, or liberalism: Carl Sandberg, Sherwood Anderson and Lincoln Steffens, whom I didn't publish but I certainly would have if he had been out of print.

WM: You famously published Lady Chatterley's Lover.

BR: Yes. The only book of D. H. Lawrence we did.

WM: All of us who were boys in the fifties owe you a great deal of gratitude for that.

BR: Personally, I didn't like it that much at first. As time went on I got to like it more. I had a lot of feeling about Lawrence—to me he was, no matter what he claimed to be, a rather aristocratic Englishman, and my Irish background made me rebel against him, even though he was doing exactly what he should have been doing—trying to prevail against the industrialization of society and the sterilization of modern life. I thought he was very heavy-handed.

WM: He did not have a light touch.

BR: He didn't have a light touch at all. His descriptions of sex, I think, were ridiculous.

WM: As a publisher, did you have a strategy? I read that you said you published D. H. Lawrence so that someday you could publish someone like Henry Miller.

BR: Somebody like him? No, him, and very specifically Tropic of Cancer. The minute I got into publishing, that became my goal—now I can do it!

I don't know if we would have gotten away with publishing Chatterley or not if it hadn't been for Mark Schorer, a professor of English at Berkeley, who came up with the idea in the first place. Not for Miller, but for Chatterley. To him that was not a means to an end, it was the beginning and the end. He was a wonderful defender of Chatterley and of Lawrence, and I admired that and I liked it, but to me it was really a way to get to Miller. And in my correspondence with Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press I talk about how to get to Burroughs through Miller. To me, the direct line of descent was—you know, like a lineup in baseball—Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs.

WM: Henry James to Lawrence to Miller to Burroughs, how about that?

BR: I would accept that. I would accept it because publishing James created a foundation proving that we were not doing what we were accused of doing by a lot of people, publishing Lady Chatterley as just a sensational trick. I didn't publish James for that reason, I hadn't thought about that ulterior purpose at the time, but it did not hurt. It was a good backdrop to have.

WM: Your relationship with Henry Miller goes back to your freshman year at Swarthmore College.

BR: My relationship with his writing.

WM: Did you discover Tropic of Cancer that year?

BR: I hardly discovered it. Somebody led me to it. Why, I don't know. It would be interesting to ask that person. I've never spoken to him since. I've seen him, he's alive and walking around New York. He became a very well-known curator of art at the Metropolitan and then at MoMA. Still is, as far as I know.

He must have seen something in me that was a little different than the other students at Swarthmore. He told me exactly where to go. To a famous bookstore, the Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street.

WM: Why do you think the book had such an impact on you?

BR: I've been thinking about that a lot. First of all, it's certainly disrespectful to most of what were thought of as bourgeois American values. Two other books of Miller I read at the time were The Air Conditioned Nightmare and The Cosmological Eye, both published by New Directions I think. Tropic of Cancer actually fits right in with them. Tropic of Cancer isn't that different except in its overt sexual terms, which seemed to me at the time very surrealistic. Miller himself struck me as being a very unlikable person. The personality that came through, his arrogance, his foisting himself upon other people. To have to feed him. He would plan a whole week ahead of time, "I'm having dinner at such and such a place this night, and dinner at someone else's the following night," etc. None of these people really wanted him, but they couldn't avoid him. That didn't endear him to me.

What I realize is this. He had an affair with a woman—I think her name was Mona in the book. She was modeled very closely, I think, on a real person. It's a terrible affair, an apparent disaster, but he's very much in love with her, and he loses her, totally. I think now, looking back at that loss, it was so catastrophic it set him free. Something like that happened to me at Swarthmore. I went to Swarthmore very much in love with a girl at Vassar, and I felt very strongly, and, ultimately, correctly, that I had lost her. There was nothing to replace her. It was like Miller, who when he really lost Mona, he's free. A catastrophe that sets him free to go out and be himself, whatever himself is. Very obnoxious, perhaps, but free to do what he wanted to do. I think that that was what I was looking for, a way out of my own dilemna.

When I've written about Tropic of Cancer I've used it as sort of an anti-American-middle-class weapon, but I think deeper down what was important to me was this catastrophic loss that you suffer and then decide to go on living. Very existential, although I didn't know that word then.

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