- In the early 1950s, Barney Rosset bought up a tiny press named Grove Press and developed it into a pioneering publishing house of radical new writers. Rosset's publications included many translations from the French of such writers as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Some of his other, more controversial publications are mentioned in this interview and include Burrough's Naked Lunch, the Diaries of Che Guevara, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and several works of Franz Fanon, LeRoi Jones, and Henry Miller. He also published, from 1957 to 1973, the avant garde literary magazine, Evergreen Review.
- De Grazia cited some passages of this interview with Jean Genet in his recently published Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius, (New York: Vintage, 1993), pp. 369 and 482, a study of legal battles in the U.S. over first amendment rights to freedom of expression as applied to works of art film, photography, literature, and painting. When the interview was conducted, Barney Rosset was still owner and publisher of Grove Press. He has since sold out and no longer has any controlling interest in the publishing enterprise. The new publishers at Grove Press, known as Grove, Weidenfeld, turned down their first publishing rights to Genet's last novel, published in France as Un Captif amoureux in 1986. Barbara Bray's English translation was released in England in 1989 as A Prisoner of Love and only published in the U.S. in 1992 (University Press of New England). Barbara Bray, A Prisoner of Love (New England: University Press, 1992).
- Edmund White cites passages from this interview in Chapter 18 of his recently published Genet (N.Y.: Knopf, 1993) (see page 610 of the British Edition [Chatto & Windus, 1993]).
- Published byR.R. Bowker, New York, 1982.
- George Jackson was killed in the San Quentin prison on August 21, 1971. Genet had frequently spoken out in Jackson's defense and had published, in 1970, an introduction to his letters from Soledad Prison. See Albert Dichy's notes to Genet's texts on Jackson published in L'Ennemi déclaré (Paris: Gallimard, 1991): pp. 347–361.
- Rosica Collins was Genet's English-language agent from about 1965 on.
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X was published by Grove in 1965. The works by LeRoi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka) published by Grove include The System of Dante's Hell, Tales, and The Dead Lecturer.
- Rosset's associate, Dick Seaver, had collaborated with Alexander Trocchi on his very short-lived literary review, Merlin, described in volume 2 (Spring/Summer 1953) as a “clearing hous” for expatriate Anglo-Americans writing in Paris.
- Burroughs was in prison, briefly, in Mexico. The incident is described in Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and The Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992), pp. 483–484. And, although Burroughs did kill his wife, by firing too low at the top of a whiskey glass she had set upon her head, he was not put into a mental hospital on that account. The circumstances and various versions of how Burroughs killed his wife, Joan Vollmer, are described in Girls Lean Back Everywhere, at pp. 481–482.
- The Manet exposition was shown at the Grand Palais in Paris from April 22 until August 8, 1983.
- The California court case against Un Chant d'Amour (Landau v. Fording, 245 Cal. App. 2d 820 1966) is reproduced in Edward de Grazia, Censorship Landmarks (New York: Bowker, 1969), at 592. The decision was upheld on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (Landau v. Fording, 388 U.S. 456 1967), reproduced in Censorship Landmarks at 596 and discussed in Edward de Grazia and Roger Newman, Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment (New York: Bowker, 1982), pp. 287–289.
- The film was seized by police at a screening in Berkeley by Saul Landau and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and at a screening in New York by Jonas Mekas and the Filmmakers' Cooperative. The police action at Berkeley fueled both the “Free Speech Movement” and the “Dirty Speech Movement.” The events are well described in David Lance Goines' recently published The Free Speech Movement (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press,1993).
- The movie is available in the U.S. in film and videotape formats. In November, 1993, Un Chant d' Amour was screened by Steve Seid at the Pacific Film Archives of the University of California at Berkeley as one of a series of screenings of movies “Banned in the U.S.A.” Seid produced a valuable catalogue on movie censorship for this series, called Banned in the U.S.A., America and Film Censorship (Berkeley: Pacific Film Archive, 1993).
Law & Literature
Volume 5, 1993 - Issue 2