Beckett and Buster Keaton in New York

Publisher Barney Rosset tells Belinda McKeon in New York, about his long friendship with the writer

It started with a letter, earnest and self-deprecating; the first uncertain foray towards an understanding that would last a lifetime. "It is about time that I write a letter to you," began Barney Rosset, "now that agents, publishers, friends etc, have all acted as go-betweens. A copy of our catalogue has already been mailed to you, so you will be able to see what kind of a publisher you have been latched onto. I hope that you won't be too disappointed."

The catalogue was that of the publishing house which Rosset had bought two years previously; the publishing house was Grove Press, which would go on to gain a stable of brilliant and controversial writers including Miller, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac, and to introduce European writers such as Pinter, Genet and Ionesco to American readers for the first time. Rosset had secured Grove for $3,000; the sum would come, in time, to look like an incredible bargain.

And, apprehensive and hesitant as he might have been as he wrote to Samuel Beckett for the first time in 1953, he was conscious, too, that he had struck another bargain. Having seen a brief notice in the New York Times about a play that was running in Paris, Rosset had gone with his instinct and bought the American rights - for $150.

Now he was writing to Beckett to ask him to translate En Attendant Godot into English, and his tone betrays his anxiety that his request might well be refused. "I hope that you will join me in this idea," he appeals. "En Attendant Godot should burst upon us as an entity in my opinion." Rosset need not have worried - a reply from Paris arrived exactly a week later, with Beckett providing not only his promise of a translation ("I shall send you to-day or to-morrow my first version") but his private address, and a friendly warning on the likelihood of his work drawing unfriendly attention from the censors: "I hope you realise what you are letting yourself in for," he remarked. He hoped Rosset would be in Paris soon and expressed an interest in some of the books from the Grove catalogue. He signed off by thanking Rosset for taking a chance on his work; for "wishing us a fair wind". His response could hardly have been more encouraging.

THE WALLS OF the East Village loft Rosset shares with his companion, Astrid Myers, are lined with binder upon binder of the correspondence that followed with Beckett. Looking today at copies of those two first letters, Rosset, now 83, laughs at the memory of his initial apprehension. "Oh, that was a very clumsy letter," he says. "I don't think I'd ever written a letter like that before."

The first meeting of author and publisher took place three months afterwards, in September 1953. Rosset, on honeymoon with his second wife, sailed from New York to Paris, where Godot, directed by Roger Blin, was playing at the Théâtre Babylone. But before they saw the play, the couple met the playwright - and, to Rosset's renewed anxiety, the first moments of the encounter did not go as smoothly as he had hoped. "He was very cool," remembers Rosset. "He came into the Pont Royal Hotel in his raincoat, and said that he would have to leave soon, that he had another appointment in 45 minutes." At 4am, however, the three were still drinking happily in one another's company, with Beckett buying champagne for the newlyweds.

Waiting for Godot was published by Grove in 1954, with Molloy following a year later, Malone Dies in 1956 and All That Fall, Murphy and Proust in 1957. Altogether, Rosset published 27 of Beckett's works. Early on, he began persuading him to write once again in English as well as in French. Excited by his discovery of his own roots in Ireland - his father, under threat of execution for the crime of firing a shotgun in the late 1800s, had emigrated to the US from Co Galway - Rosset failed at first to understand the strength of the forces that pushed Beckett away from his first language towards another.

This long resistance to writing in English, Rosset believes, was "a very emotional thing" for Beckett and was complicated further, he believes, by Beckett's distressing months back in Ireland in 1954, as his brother Frank died of cancer.

"I think that he felt that in English he was less able to take control of himself than in French, but I kept right on at him," says Rosset. "And I don't know how much influence I had, but he did eventually start writing in English again. And that was with Krapp's Last Tape [ 1958], which, for me, is the most emotional of his pieces, a replay of his personal experiences."

BECKETT AND ROSSET saw each other several times a year, but mostly in Paris, and Rosset always did the travelling. Except, that is, for one occasion - Beckett's sole visit to the US, in the summer of 1964. The trip was officially a working holiday; Rosset had commissioned Beckett to write a film script, and the result, a silent piece called Film, starring Buster Keaton and directed by Alan Schneider (an experienced director of Beckett's works onstage, but here on his first film project), was shot in lower Manhattan.

The omens for a pleasant stay were not good - it was high summer, the heat was sweltering and the shoot went badly in many respects, with one long, central shot having to be scrapped altogether. But Beckett seems to have enjoyed himself immensely. He became fascinated with the technical challenges of making the film, which concerned itself with the tension inherent in the act of perception - between seeing and being seen - and he was involved with every step of the process, from scouting for locations to editing a first rough cut. Though his personal encounter with Keaton was painfully awkward - Keaton sunk in silence, Beckett trying to spark conversation - he enjoyed watching him act. And there were other pleasures, from bar-hopping with Rosset, Schneider and others to meeting Edward Albee; from theatre-going to an afternoon at a baseball game, at which Beckett became an unlikely, but utterly absorbed, fan of the Mets.

IT'S OF BECKETT'S somewhat farcical last day in New York, however, that Rosset has the fondest memories; having planned to drive their guest to the airport, he and his wife overslept on that morning and woke to find Beckett asleep against their bedroom door; his bags packed, his overcoat on, he had been too polite to wake them. His plane was gone, so they spent the day at the World's Fair in Queens - and promptly lost Beckett, only to find him on a bench in the midst of the crowds, once more asleep and once more in the heavy overcoat.

The anecdotes give glimpses of the Beckett that Rosset knew, a different Beckett, certainly, than the evidence of the plays and prose might lead readers to imagine. This was a man as warm as he was wry; serious and intensely private, yes, but also comical, curious, deeply compassionate. Above all, he was generous. Rosset remembers a payment for thousands of dollars arriving for Beckett at the offices of Grove; Beckett insisted immediately that it be sent to the widow of Sean O'Casey in Dublin, of whom he was extremely fond.

When Rosset was sacked by the people to whom he decided to sell Grove, the day before Beckett's 80th birthday, Beckett made him a present of an unpublished play - Eleuthéria, his first complete dramatic work which he had written in French in 1947 - to get him started in his new venture. When the task of translating Eleuthéria into English frustrated him, he completed instead another work, Stirrings Still, to be published by Rosset's new house, Blue Moon Books. "Oh all to end," it concluded, and it was to be an end indeed. Although Beckett wrote a last poem, What is the Word, in his hospital bed, Stirrings Still was his final book.

Rosset was with him close to the end, in the nursing home where he spent his final months. Very soon before his death, Rosset brought him a tape of the famous production of Godot at the high-security prison in San Quentin, California. He didn't know at the time, he says, just how advanced Beckett's emphysema was at the time, just how close to death he was.

Among all the books and papers that Rosset has taken out for our conversation is a photograph he took of Beckett that day, in his bedroom at that nursing home, staring at a tiny television screen. On the table in front of him is a bottle of Tullamore Dew; on his face is a look of absolute concentration. He did not watch his last Godot in silence; Rosset remembers how, as the actors moved on screen, he reached out, silently signalled to them, directed them, as they grappled with the characters he had made. A creator, and a communicator, to the very last.