MINDS BEHIND THE MEDIA: BECKETT ROSSET

On legacy rebellion, surviving NYC's underworld, and building a family out of strangers

Those who know literature know Beckett Rosset is a hell of a name.

On first, Beckett stands in the shadow of legendary Irish playwright, novelist, and poet Samuel Beckett, best known for his existential doozy Waiting for Godot.

Beckett’s surname, however, looms even larger.

Barney Rosset, Beckett’s late father, is known as the The Evergreen Review founder and publishing pioneer of Grove Press, hailed for fighting American obscenity laws and general conservatism in favor of the literary avant-garde.

In many ways, Beckett was doomed to be a writer. And, as illustrated by many of his Grove Press forebears, a writer’s life is rarely a pretty one.

When I meet Beckett at Barrow’s Pub, a cash-only dive in NYC’s West Village, he’s shooting pool with a handful of regulars. As always, he approaches me with the good-natured slope of a man hardened by life and softened by humor. His glacial blue eyes alternately flash and warm as he recalls a past marked by lovers, crack pipes, homelessness, and the man who formally introduced countercultural literature to just about everyone except his only son.

“I always wanted to be that, some version of my father,” he tells me, clutching a can of Estrella Jalisco. “Unfortunately, he didn’t like that…”

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t up to dear old dad. In spite of his burdensome lineage, Beckett has successfully made a name for himself in recent years.

In 2022, following the social strictures of pandemia, Beckett reanimated a collective sense of community and culture with a series of sexy, smoky literary salons at his West Village spot, known simply to many as “Beckett’s.” After losing this location, Beckett adapted to a nomadic model and formally named the series Tense, hosting dancers, filmmakers, and notables like Nico Walker and Penny Arcade.

These days, seemingly against all odds, Beckett is plotting his next Tense event and formal debut as a writer. In passionate snatches between games of pool, smoke breaks, and meandering visits from local friends, Beckett shares his favorite writers, junkie tales from an NYC gone-past, and why he was damned to be “counterculture personified.”

Beckett Rosset at Barrow’s Pub. Photo by Nick Dove.

Why are we here?

Beckett Rosset: Well, it’s a block from where I lived for 22 years. It’s in the neighborhood that I grew up in. It’s empty, which is very important to me. Even if it’s loud, it’s not packed with a bunch of bros. It has a pool table. And beers are cheap.

Amen. Do you mind if we get biographical?

BR: No, I’ve got nothing to hide.

I was researching your father’s background, and I didn’t realize just how much he was targeted by the FBI and CIA. What was it like growing up in a household that was under that level of scrutiny?

BR: That seriously influenced my life. I don’t think my dad realized it, but it made me kind of paranoid from the get-go. Even when I was a kid, supposedly our phones were tapped and our mail was opened. The first 10 years of my life, I lived at 196 West Houston, which is on the block that the Film Forum is on. My dad bought this factory building in the early sixties for practically nothing and he converted it into a private residence. So I grew up in a building twice the size of this one with these gigantic and now very expensive Joan Mitchell paintings everywhere, because that was my dad’s first wife.

As I got a little older, I understood what my dad did. [I discovered] The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the diaries of Che Guevara, Naked Lunch, Lady’s Chatterly’s Lover. So, yeah, I definitely was a rebel from the beginning and distrusted the government and hated authority of any kind. It definitely shaped me, even though my father never really talked to me about it. It was just [a matter of] what I learned and deduced and figured out from the books he published that I read. And that carries over to today. I am that person, without a doubt.

What do you mean by that?

BR: I am counterculture personified, in a way. I’m the outsider that is always going to question the authority and the powers that be, whoever they may be. Obviously, we live in a world right now where we’re being governed by a bunch of psychopaths.

Well, you grew up steeped in counterculture, obviously. You were exposed to arguably some of the greatest countercultural voices very early on in life.

BR: But that was also a burden to me, without anybody putting expectations on me. I put them on myself. I’m named after Samuel Beckett. He won the Nobel Prize the year I was born, and my dad named me after him because they were very close. I have a telegram from Sam congratulating my parents the night I was born. I met the guy. He sent me a post card once that began: “Dear Homonym…” The entire lineup of Grove Press was very revolutionary for me as it was for an entire generation except that was the generation before mine. Maybe I was born too late.

I decided very early on that I wanted to be a writer, even though I haven’t quite followed through on it. I always wanted to be that, some version of my father. Unfortunately, he didn’t like that because he was a fucking narcissist. Out of all of his four children, I’m the one that is the most like him. I look like him, I kind of think like him, and I’m interested in most of the things he was. I’m almost him, for better or worse.

And that disturbed him.

BR: He hated me. He actually told me I was competition.

How old were you when he said that to you?

BR: That was, like, in the last ten years of his life. So, fifteen or twenty years ago.

He felt threatened by you at some point.

BR: Always. When my writing got better, he got nasty.

Was he a writer himself?

BR: No. He tried to be, but he was not. He died before he finished his autobiography. He probably spent a hundred grand writing the autobiography which was more than he got as an advance. He took the advance and put a lot of his own money into it, but he wasn’t a writer. It eventually came out, but it was ghostwritten. It’s horrible.

That’s kind of devastating.

BR: Yeah. There’s also a movie about him called Obscene. If he hadn’t meddled with it, it would have been good. But again, he didn’t want me or my sisters to be in it. He was a very selfish, narcissistic person. He did a lot of amazing things, but he was a horrible father. Very abusive.

So you clearly felt the weight of your namesake.

BR: Oh, immensely. I got flown to Paris to be photographed because [Samuel] Beckett asked for it. So I meet him on his 80th birthday, and Richard Avedon takes these pictures.

Was there any point in time where you felt close to your father at all?

BR: No, neither one of my parents. I felt like I was an orphan despite knowing who my parents were and even living with them. I was raised by my dog, which is probably why I love animals so much. I had an Akita named Teru for ten years of my life and I spent all my time with her. She was a very smart dog.

Were there people in your life who encouraged you to read the writers your father published?

BR: I had no encouragement to do anything in my fucking life. I was literally put down, told I was a worthless piece of shit, or ignored. I had no grandparents. My grandfathers both died before I was born. Both grandmothers were gone by the time I was like eight or nine. One aunt, no uncles. No family, period. My mother was basically a child when she married my dad. She was his babysitter for his kid from the previous marriage. He was in his mid-forties and she was eighteen. She had my sister, and then, two years later, she had me. She wasn’t even twenty-three by then. She did not know how to be a mother. She grew up in the West Village and went to an Italian Catholic school. I was basically just ignored my entire childhood.

And your sister?

BR: Not my favorite person. She wants me to be in a mental institution. I don’t speak to her. And I didn’t talk to [my mother] for like 30 years. When I got sober and stopped shooting heroin, I had to dead the entire family. They had no sympathy or understanding.

The more successful I got and the longer I was sober, the nastier my father got. It was really bizarre. There was no happiness that I was clean. When I did a year in jail and got out, nobody offered to let me sleep anywhere. I literally got out of jail after a year at like twenty-four years old and was homeless. Like, boom. It was bizarre.

Beckett Rosset at Barrow’s Pub. Photo by Nick Dove.

Okay, take me back. So you get kicked out of boarding school at thirteen…

BR: Then I got kicked out of another one. And then I ended up in New York. I went to some private school for a hot minute, and then I got a GED.

What was your plan at the time?

BR: I didn’t have a plan. Nobody talked to me about plans. I ended up going to Hollywood with my friend because his family basically wanted their son to have a friend. Then they moved to France, so I went to France with them. I spent a year in France. I was probably more responsible and productive at the age of nineteen than I am now. I had a job, an apartment. I cut flowers for sixteen hours a day for a German guy. Hard work, but he paid me well. And when I wasn’t doing that, I was in a bar getting drunk and chasing French girls.

And you were still entertaining this ambient idea of being a writer?

BR: Always. I think I thought more about being a writer than I actually wrote.

I think a lot of people who live in New York do.

BR: For me, it was a deep source of shame and embarrassment. Everybody assumed, because of who my father was and because of my name, that I was incredibly well-read. Yeah, I read everything Beckett wrote by the time I was sixteen, but I wasn’t well-read at all. And, in general, I don’t think my dad published a lot of incredible literary giants. I don’t think Jack Kerouac... I could read that when I was fourteen, but I wouldn’t want to read that now. I mean, yeah, Burroughs. Whatever. I think he’s overrated. I think Beckett was by far the best author my dad [published]. Kenzaburō Ōe was okay, but I found him sort of repetitive and boring. That’s not to put down Grove [Press]. But I always, for some weird reason, felt ashamed. Like, I should know more, I should have read more. I should have done this, I should have done that. So then I sort of become a chameleon, you know? I sort of change what I am to suit everyone around me. I kind of had to because I have found myself in a very diverse range of environments, from Rikers Island to Fifth Ave penthouses.

You curated a reading list for the Language Arts newsletter [in 2024]. I noticed a lot of the books you selected are portraits of people who are down and out, to one degree or another.

BR: [Hubert Selby Jr.’s] Last Exit to Brooklyn is one of my favorite books of all time because I can identify with it on some levels. Just the brutality of it. Just that. It’s not the characters themselves, it’s just being in a version of that world and witnessing it. It was insane, surviving it. I never thought I’d end up in jail. I grew up with a country house in East Hampton.

But it’s clear that you weren’t entirely comfortable in that [East Hampton] environment, right?

BR: No. I remember going through the streets when I was a teenager looking for a place to be. I remember telling myself, “I belong here.” I found some burned out vacant lot that some people had built a little shanty village in. It was like on 8th, between B and C or something. It’s long gone, but I just walked in and was like, “Hi!” And they were like, “Hi!” Next thing I know I’m hanging out and living there. And I’m 15.

Because you felt comfortable there.

BR: Nobody judged me or put me down. Nothing like that exists anymore in New York. New York was so different and so incredible. I mean, it was full of misery and poverty and hardships. But in a beautiful way, if that’s possible. It was way more sincere and honest and just human.

When did you see it start shifting?

BR: In the 90s.

What were the early signs?

BR: [Rudy] Giuliani, for one. I just vaguely remember. In 2001, I got my first cell phone. I was very confused by it. It cost a lot of money. But, I don’t know. I was in so many drug programs and jail that I really wasn’t present for half of it. And what little I know about computers, I had to teach myself when I was in a drug program. Back then it was like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

Did you get into drugs around the same time you started hanging out in the shanty village?

BR: No. I had a predisposition, not knowing that both of my father’s parents died of alcoholism. My mother says her father died of a heart attack. I don’t know anything about him. I know nothing about any of my grandparents. But it’s clear that my gambling predilection and drinking [problem] that my Irish grandmother [had]...clearly I took after her. The first time I drank a bunch of beer I was 12. I got hammered on a six pack. And my dad always had large quantities of alcohol in the house. So I just started drinking by myself because it felt good. Then I got kicked out of boarding school because some kid handed me a joint. And it just took off from there. By the time I was sixteen, crack was around and I stumbled onto that. That’s what really destroyed me as a teenager.

Crack in the 1980s, like 1985. You can’t imagine. The East Village that you know now, it was just literally bodies lying everywhere. You’d walk down the street and crunch, crunch, crunch. There were thousands of crack vials all over the streets. It was the Wild West. People have no idea what shit was like just 30, 40 years ago. It was insane.

Where were you living at this point?

BR: I don’t know where I lived. I lived wherever, slept on my friend’s roof. Sometimes I could sleep in his apartment. My parents finally were like, “You can’t come back here.” I had friends on the Upper East Side and I stayed with them, but they were like selling drugs, heroin or cocaine. Crack was really, in some ways, way more destructive than even shooting heroin and cocaine. But that’s what came after crack.

[That’s what came after] for you, and for the city.

BR: Yeah. By the nineties, when I was twenty-one or something, I was doing heroin. I’m living with guys who were dealing it. I ended up with some girlfriend who was a dancer, and she’s like, “We should shoot up.” And next thing you know, I’m sticking a needle in my arm. I never had any plans to do that. Although, when I read [William S. Burroughs’] Junky at sixteen, me and my friend both decided we were going to become heroin addicts when we grew up. That’s how dumb we were. And we succeeded. Except he’s dead. It’s crazy. And somehow, I’m still alive. I have no idea why I’m still alive.

Yeah, you’re a resilient motherfucker.

BR: It’s just so weird to hang out with anybody under the age of 35. Not that I would wish my life on anybody, but people think they have a drug problem and I just look at them. I mean, it’s all relative. I’m like, “You have no fucking clue.” All I did was get high all of my twenties.

At the time, where was your head at?

BR: I was like: I’m a worthless piece of shit. I don’t fit in anywhere. My family hates me. I have nowhere to go. And I can’t deal with this, so I’m gonna self-medicate. Shooting heroin was the most effective tool to do that. I’m not happy about it, but that’s what I did. And that’s why I ended up in jail and homeless or living in Bowery flophouses.

The only thing that I got out of it that’s good is the incredible random acts of kindness I encountered, whether it was in jail or on the street. No matter where you go, there you are. And when you think it’s your darkest hour, you might stumble on some incredible person. That happened to me over and over. So many people have helped me. [Otherwise] I would not be here. I can’t count how many people have helped me. People I don’t even know who they are. I’d wake up with money, food, or clothing by my head. It’s crazy.

So how do you feel that time informed your perspective?

BR: I feel like we don’t live in a very kind world right now. And that’s all I have at this point, my ability to have empathy and to be kind. I don’t think enough people do this anymore. And it’s partly because of these things, these phones.

[We’re briefly interrupted by a visiting friend. Later, the topic of conversation turns to writing.]

You don’t think writing is getting better.

BR: No. That’s why I read Tea [Hacic-Vlahovic]’s novel. Instead of just turning up my nose at everything—contempt without investigation—I need to put my money where my mouth is and read this shit.

So what’s the conclusion?

BR: Well, I didn’t know how to say it to [this writer]. I texted her when I was drunk, so she probably thinks I’m insane. I babbled. I wanted to say ‘your novel is imperfect but has potential,’ but I can’t say that. It just felt like it was incomplete, like there was something seriously missing. It was almost like there was no truth in that novel.

If I ever publish a novel, I hope you’ll feel comfortable being that candid with me.

BR: I would have to. If I’m your friend, I would want people to be like that with me. And it’s not like she doesn’t know how to fucking write. That’s what upsets me. She said she had no editor. If nobody’s editing the books they publish, how good can they be? That doesn’t mean they gotta rewrite their novels, but they gotta do something.

My friend wrote a book for Grove Press called The Lotus Crew, which was about heroin on the Lower East Side in the 70s and 80s. Best heroin book I ever read. What he gave my father was so bad that the editor had to basically rewrite the entire fucking book. He even admits it at this point. It turned out to be pretty damn good. It’s very niche, but I gave it to Nico [Walker]. He loved it. It’s real. It’s fictionalized, but it’s such a good read. Blows William Burroughs away. I love Junky, but that isn’t Junky. I do seem to gravitate towards Junky, The Lotus Crew, Last Exit to Brooklyn. I just like the brutal honesty.

You’ve mentioned that [Samuel Beckett’s] Murphy was another pivotal book for you.

BR: Murphy was Beckett’s first book he ever wrote. It was the only book he wrote in English, which is weird because he’s Irish. He spoke English, but he wrote everything else in French. I think he had one book translated, and he hated it so much that he then translated all of his books into English. He was a finicky cat.

What was it about Murphy that you liked?

BR: It was so fucking funny. It was a young Samuel Beckett who was kind of fucking around with words. There’s a scene where this guy works in a mental institution, and he’s playing [chess with] a patient, and the patient just keeps trying to commit suicide with his queen. . So the whole game, he’s trying to kill himself, and the guy won’t kill him. It defeats the purpose of playing chess. The way he writes it is like laugh out loud. None of his other shit is like it. They don’t consider it his best work, but I do.

Molloy and Malone Dies. Those are great. It’s a lot to digest. It’s very terse, but it fucks with your head. It’s bleakness combined with humor, which, to me, is my life.

That’s also true for [Mikhail Bulgakov’s] The Master and Margarita, which I know is another one of your favorites.

BR: One of my favorite books. Life is futility, so if you can’t laugh about it, what else are you gonna fuckin’ do? You can’t cry all the time. You can’t scream at people all the time. I’ve tried, trust me. It doesn’t work.

[Photographer, journalist, and Tense regular Nick Dove arrives and reflects on the early days at Beckett’s.]

Nick Dove: There was always this old-school sexiness to Tense events.

BR: That’s what I love. Like, people have come up to me and said, “I met my girlfriend at your event,” or, “I got married to a chick I met at your event.” That tells me I’m doing something right, which I hope I am. Bringing people together.

ND: You had the horniest events in New York. Beckett’s in 2022 or 2023 at the 42 Hudson space was the singularly most horny room I’ve ever been in. Every time I walked in there, there was some insanely charged interaction. I did wind up seeing someone for a little bit who I met there.

BR: That was the intent, though. That’s the idea. Why else do you fucking go out when you’re in your 20s, man? Everybody’s looking to get laid, right?

I love a raw space. I learned a lot doing production and fashion events for ten years. I can buy lighting for a huge space on Amazon for $300. For $150, I get a motorized disco ball, and then I get a PA system for $200. That’s all I need. I can take that anywhere.

ND: [My first night at Beckett’s] was one of my favorite nights in New York. All of my friends are people who originated at Beckett’s.

BR: Your energy was infectious. For me, as a venue guy, I look for key people. I want to have four to six key people who bring the energy. It’s all about energy. What did you think when you entered the space?

ND: Oh, it was magical. The furniture, the chairs on the ceiling, the old books. It felt like a different time. It felt special. The city was just coming out of COVID and everyone had all this energy. Everyone was starved for contact.

BR: I asked about the space because for me it was such a labor of love. When I first moved there, I lived down there [in the living room]. When Mary bought the place, it was a bar. The concrete floor, the back part, was a dirt floor. She put my bed where the urinals used to be. One day she was like, “Yeah, you’re sleeping where the urinals used to be! Haha.” I’m like, “Gee, thanks.”

The space looked so different. I had access to so many weird things. And it was so fun to decorate it. That’s part of what I really miss, creating the environment. Because that sets the mood. You know, you go to a bar like KGB, it’s always going to be the same.

Beckett’s West Village location, the origin of Tense. Photo courtesy Beckett Rosset.

Why do you think your event series popped off like it did?

BR: I honestly don’t know. It was totally organic. I was kind of broken, and I knew it was only a matter of time until I was thrown out [of the space]. I was lonely. And all of a sudden, I started meeting all these people. I started meeting people who worked for The New Yorker, or The New York Times. And I was like, “Oh my god, I think I’ve found my people.” Because I didn’t know any literary people, really. That got me really excited.

Where do you see it headed now?

BR: Well, unless I find a permanent spot, it really depends on the next event I do. It’s kind of sink or swim.

What would your vision be if money wasn’t a concern?

BR: My dream was to turn [that space] into a cafe bookstore during the day, and then a bar venue [by night]. We had a Steinway Baby Grand. We did films, dance, live music. We did so many different mediums. I loved that. There are so many young, talented people in New York who need a platform, and I could give it to them. And nobody ever knew what was going to come up. I just put their name on the flyer; I didn’t say what they did. One night I had a pole dancer with an upright bass player. I didn’t even know how it was going to play out. And I like that. I really get off on spontaneity. I like not knowing what’s going to happen, creating the conditions.

And what about this lifelong dream of being a writer?

BR: Honestly, that would be the most satisfying thing I could ever do before I die. To write a book, whether it’s a bunch of short stories like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, or essays, or if it’s somehow an actual novel. I don’t care if it sells. As long as I’m okay with it, I’m proud of it. If I could do that, that would be the end-all deal.

Well, it sounds like you have something in the works now.

BR: I do, but it’s still a little too incoherent. I have a lot of material, but I need an editor. I can do it for other people, but I can’t do it for myself.

Is it autobiography? Autofiction?

BR: I hate the word autofiction. But at this point, whatever they want to fucking call it, I would like to fictionalize myself.

At 33, I got out of jail and I went to Bronx Community College because my outpatient program was there. While I was there, I was in an English classroom where nobody spoke English but me. I didn’t want to do the assignments because they were stupid, so I wrote a story about jail, and my teacher went batshit crazy. She made me make copies of it and read it to the class. She’s like, “You can write!” Then one day we had a recruiting thing, and they recruited me to go to The New School. I took three creative writing classes, and my teachers went batshit crazy again. “You can get a book deal!” I had never really written that seriously, and I was a little overwhelmed. Then my friend published me in some things and set me up with an agent. I met the agent at the MUD Cafe on 9th Street in the East Village, and the first thing he says is, “You can get a book deal, but you gotta write about your father.” Immediately, I just shut down. I stopped writing and never saw the guy again. Then I had surgery and relapsed.

But now you’re willing to entertain the idea.

BR: Yeah, my dad’s not alive. I’m not gonna write a bunch of dirt about him, but I gotta write honestly. I’m not good at making shit up, but, a lot of shit I don’t need to make up. I don’t need to make up that when I was in Rikers, they stripped us naked and x-rayed our buttholes with German Shepherds held by female correction officers. We’re all lined up at four in the morning and sitting on the same thing, one ass after another, to make sure there’s no weapons in our assholes. You can’t make that shit up. Truth is always stranger than fiction in my book. So, how I turn that into a story…

The material is there.

BR: It’s totally there, and it’s very close. It’s more my brain that’s my biggest enemy. I’m not saying it’s gonna be some huge success, but it’s real.

The one identity I’ve managed to kind of hold onto my entire life is being a New Yorker, and knowing that that was kind of special in some way. And whether I was rich, whether I was poor, whether I was on Rikers Island, or I was homeless, or I was living in a beautiful apartment, I was a New Yorker. Every time I’ve left, I always end up coming back. I’ve seen so much over the course of my life, and I’ve become this piece of New York.

To me, the most impactful thing anybody ever said to me at my events was, “You’re so real.” And it’s not like I’m trying to be real. I don’t even know what that means. To me, I’m a New Yorker. That’s how I am. Because of the environment that I grew up in, you know? When I travel abroad, and people ask where I’m from, I tell them I’m from New York. I’m not from America. Instinctively, I say that, you know? And it makes a difference.

When I lived in L.A. and Hollywood, I was a New Yorker. When I lived in Minneapolis, I was a New Yorker. When I lived in the South of France, I was a New Yorker. Wherever I go, I’m a piece of New York.

You’ve also got the New York hustle in you. You make shit happen.

BR: Yes. When you didn’t have the hustle, we called it “cancer of the hustle.” It’s a great expression.

In many ways you’ve had no choice but to be real.

BR: Yeah, it was actually a defense mechanism, especially in jail.

But somewhere along the line, because I’ve never really had a real family, and I’ve really spent most of my life completely alone, I have this very strong desire to bring people together. I’m drawn to people who have strong families or strong relationships with their significant other or whatever, because I want that. I get a lot of pleasure out of making people happy by bringing people together. That’s not people-pleasing, that’s just creating an environment that is conducive to people getting to know each other. There’s no pretension. There’s no bullshit. There’s no snobbishness.

That’s an honest human drive. I think the success of Beckett’s owes a lot to that as well.

BR: I don’t need 4,000 people to validate my existence…I don’t need fame, fortune, and glory. I just need to feel like I’ve really done something, and I would like it to be something that made the world a better place because I really care about that.