October 2005

--e*I*22- (Vol. 4 No. 5) October 2005, is published and © 2005 by Earl Kemp. All rights reserved.
It is produced and distributed bi-monthly through http://efanzines.com by Bill Burns in an e-edition only.

Contents -- Me and Maurice -- eI22 -- October 2005

Me and Maurice, by Earl Kemp

Who Are You Really…?, by Earl Kemp

Maurice Girodias, Fandom, and Me, by Patrick J. Kearney

Our Lady of the Flowers, by Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset

Repentance, Desire, and Natalie Wood, by Barry Malzberg

Dialogue, by Earl Kemp and Barry Malzberg

“Maurice…the gangster of love….,” by Earl Kemp

Pirates of Pornography, by Peter Collier

Me and Maurice, by Jim Haynes

Me and Maurice, by Gil Lamont

Me and Maurice, by Larry Townsend

A Virgin Anew, by Victor J. Banis

Darlings of Death, by Thomas P. Ramirez

Acknowledgments, by Earl Kemp

The terrifying acceleration of history brought us by technology can be overcome by a revolution of the mind, a poetic revolution. Politics are the enemy; they reduce everything to a false two-dimensional image of our needs and our fate. We need much more than that.

It is on the level of the paramyth, of the philosophical dream, that we will find all the answers that we need. The blinding utopia! And I have no doubt that very soon the first examples of the new literature, of the new esoteric fiction, will appear and that it will immediately change the face of the world, by magic as it were.

             --Maurice Girodias

Me and Maurice A homage to Maurice Girodias   Edited by Earl Kemp   This is an eBook   Edited and published by Earl Kemp P.O. Box 6642 Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 earlkemp@citlink.net Produced and distributed by Bill Burns FTL Design/eFanzines.com billb@efanzines.com

Introduction:
Me and Maurice
Artwork recycled William Rotsler

By Earl Kemp

A long time ago I realized that I’d eventually have to do the Me and Maurice thing.

Eventually finally arrived and this is it, my Me and Maurice thing.

Elsewhere in this book, in “Maurice…the gangster of love…,” I go into as much detail as I dare about that obsession. This is about the book that my obsession finally became, this book, my Me and Maurice thing.

When I first started making plans for this venture, I had no idea what form it would take, nor who might be participating in it along with me. Now I know, and so do all the rest of the people out there remotely interested in the topic. I do know that I wanted to involve as many people as I possibly could who had direct contact with Maurice Girodias in some fashion. Just locating those people, in some cases, proved to be completely impossible.

Still, I did my best, and every one that I could locate who knew Girodias, I tried to persuade to join me in the effort with their own memories of the man we all hate to love, the one and only Prince of Pornography, Maurice Girodias, the frog prince himself.

Muffie Wainhouse, who worked for Girodias at Olympia Press Paris, should know all about it. She was in on Traveller’s Companion books from before they were born. Writing of that, she said, “One evening Maurice packed Alex Trocchi, Jane Lougee, Dick Seaver, Pat Bowles, Christopher Logue, Austryn and me into his big Citroen and drove us to a restaurant. Here we all had our first escargots, then trout with Sancerre, boeuf bourguignon with Nuits St.Georges, cheese, poires belles Helene and finally cognac. (At that time we were eating for about $1.50 a day; Christopher Logue for less.) Slightly avuncular, Maurice was a wonderful host and storyteller. A convivial group; a merry evening. We also saw the possibilities of earning money. And Maurice must have seen the possibility of launching the Traveller’s Companion Series.”

After the series of green-covered paperbacks began appearing, the roster of writers grew considerably, finally containing a few of the best writers of the century. Not quite up to that level was a real charmer named Iris Owens, who began writing for Girodias under the pseudonym of Harriet Daimler, and became an instant overnight sensation porn star.

Writing of her in his superb book The Candy Men, Nile Southern said, “Iris Owens, whom Terry called ‘Gid’s great love,’ was one of the most prolific Olympia women authors, penning, under the name Harriet Daimler, The Woman Thing, Innocence, Darling,The Organization, and, with Meeske, The Pleasure Thieves. As Terry wrote of Owens, ‘Aside from her Junoesque beauty, she had rapier wit and devastating logic. She was a pre-Sontag Sontag, and [Girodias] was determined to get the best of her.’

“’We were natural DB writers,’ she told John de St. Jorre. ‘Sexual revolutionaries with a need to shock. There was a streak of anarchism in all of us.’”

In The Candy Men, his great tribute to his father—Terry Southern—and Terry’s collaborator Mason Hoffenberg, Nile wrote of the end of Olympia Press Paris. He said, “This was the end of the Olympia Press and its incestuous inspiration, father Jack Kahane’s Obelisk. For Girodias, it was a sad defeat and truly the end of an era in publishing. No doubt the French Ministry of Culture (and the Paris courts) breathed a collective sigh of relief, having endured two generations of continual browbeating, innovation, and challenge.”

And it seemed, to Maurice Girodias, to be that way elsewhere as well, particularly here in the USA where he grew increasingly more unwelcome day by day.

#

Our edition of Candy was GC101, the first book published in the Greenleaf Classics series, in 1965. It was a proud and exciting time when William Hamling and I launched our grand new adventure in San Diego and in the open seas of the public domain. A grand schooner voyage it was, too, for all of us aboard the Jolly Roger.

And then there’s Patrick Kearney, a man who knew Girodias well for a number of years under a number of different circumstances…from the top to the bottom as it turned out. He refuses to give Girodias enough bad marks and winds up saying things like this: “There are too many stories about Maurice’s unorthodox business practices for it not have been at least partly true. Having said that, as a publisher, he was probably one of the most adventurous and perceptive of the twentieth century. His record of spotting great books is testament to that.”

And while I’m touching upon the subject of Patrick Kearney <http://www.sonic.net/~patk/>, I must pause long enough to give him an enormous salute. He was initially a bit reluctant to come aboard this project but when he finally relented and said yes, he did so with a furious intensity. He has maintained that pace for months now continuously offering advice and suggestions, addresses and opening lines…scanning dozens of covers from his fantastic erotica collection, etc. He overwhelmed me with his help and generosity.

Barry Malzberg also gets a standing ovation for help beyond the call of duty with his own Me and Maurice.

There are two artists whose line artwork appears in this book. One of them is the incomparable Harry Bell and the other is the eternal William Rotsler, whose recycled artwork appears throughout this volume as needed.

#

Much has been written about Girodias’ misadventures in his native Paris with The Traveller’s Companion books and the gendarmes. For that reason I have attempted to focus this venture more toward Girodias’ tenure in the United States with Olympia Press New York.

#

All the regular features of eI have been delayed one issue in order to keep this book restricted to one subject only, Me and Maurice. The regular features will all reappear in the next issue complete with all your wonderful letters of comment about Me and Maurice.

That’s earlkemp@citlink.net for the Internet and P.O. Box 6642, Kingman, AZ 86402-6642 for the snail mail inclined. Please don’t be reluctant to tell us how you think we’re doing out here in cyberspace.

The books I published in the fifties, in particular Henry Miller’s, have opened the world to sexual freedom. The consequences of that revolution are immense, endless and continuously developing through more and more advanced stages, reaching more and more deeply into our knowledge of ourselves. The sexual liberation was necessary to restore a true vision of the human person, of the boundless riches of nature, and to permit the exploration of internal reality we hold in ourselves. The sexual liberation has brought back truth and authenticity, freedom and brotherhood. Without it the ecological revolution would not have been possible.

            --Maurice Girodias

Who Are You Really…?
The Fabled Olympia Press Writers

By Earl Kemp

The list of writers who made up the bulk of the publications of Olympia Press in both Paris and New York contains names that rank among the literary masters of the world. It was a unique time and the circumstances surrounding the appearance of Traveller’s Companion books insured that the very best of the best would surface just then and Maurice Girodias was lucky enough to capture a great many of them.

Girodias just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Certainly he fostered some of those writers, and ignored others, and ripped off many of them, nevertheless he, they, and Olympia Press are responsible for their literary existence in the first place.

No attempt has been made to catalogue the writers who wrote under they own bylines, and they are the all-time cream of the very crop of erotica. They include such well-known scribes as Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, J.P. Donlevy, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet, Chester Himes, Nikos Kazantzakis, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, and many others.

However, this section is concerned only with the bylines used by the other writers who worked for Olympia Press, the pseudonymous writers. It was one of Maurice Girodias’ trademarks to create complex, unusual, and memorable pseudonyms for his writers of lesser reputation. The attempt has been to list here as many of those wild pseudonyms as we felt we could at least try to authenticate.

#

Traveller’s Companion/Olympia Press (Paris) Pseudonyms
This list does not include writers using their real names
See also Traveller’s Companion/Olympia Press (New York) Pseudonyms

Pierre Angelique—pseudonym of George Bataille
Richard Ashby—pseudonym of Sybah Darrich
Willie Baron—pseudonym of Baird Bryant
Diane Bataille—“XXX”
George Bataille—“Pierre Angelique”
Sinclair Beiles—“Wu Wu Ming”
Baird Bryant—“Willie Baron”
Denny Bryant [Mrs. Baird Bryant]—“Winifred Drake”
John Coleman—“Henry Jones”
Henry Cranach—pseudonym of Marilyn Meeske
Harriet Daimler—pseudonym of Iris Owens
Sybah Darrich—“Richard Ashby”
Akbar del Piombo—pseudonym of Norman Rubington
Anne Desclos—“Pauline Reage”
Hamilton Drake—pseudonym of Mason Hoffenberg
Winifred Drake—pseudonym of Denny [Mrs. Baird] Bryant
John Glassco—“Miles Underwood”
Mason Hoffenberg—“Faustino Perez,” “Hamilton Drake,” “Maxwell Kenton” with Terry Southern
Henry Jones—pseudonym of John Coleman
Maxwell Kenton—pseudonym of Mason Hoffenberg and Terry Southern
Christopher Logue—“Count Palmiro Vicarion”
Marilyn Meeske—“Henry Cranach”
Wu Wu Ming—pseudonym of Sinclair Beiles
Muffie—pseudonym of Mrs. (Mary) Austryn Wainhouse
Iris Owens—“Harriet Daimler”
Faustino Perez—pseudonym of Mason Hoffenberg
Pauline Reage—pseudonym of Anne Desclos
Norman Rubington—“Akbar del Piombo”
Terry Southern—“Maxwell Kenton” with Mason Hoffenberg
John Stevenson—“Marcus Van Heller”
Miles Underwood—pseudonym of John Glassco
Marcus Van Heller—pseudonym of John Stevenson
Count Palmiro Vicarion—pseudonym of Christopher Logue
Austryn Wainhouse, Mrs.—“Muffie” (Mary)
XXX--pseudonym of Diane Bataille

#

Traveller’s Companion/Olympia Press (New York) Pseudonyms
This list does not include writers using their real names
See also Traveller’s Companion/Olympia Press (Paris) Pseudonyms

Barbara Abrams—“Odette Newman”
Sam Abrams—“Frank Newman”
Leslie Adirondack—pseudonym of Jerry Weil
Roger Agile—pseudonym of Richard White
William Amidon —“Jesse Taylor”
Richard Amory—pseudonym of Richard Love
Anonymous—pseudonym of Michael Bernet
Angelo d’Arcangelo—pseudonym of Joseph Bush
Scott Arlen—pseudonym of Carl Stone
Richard Ashby—“Sybah Darrich”
Isidore Atlantis—pseudonym of Dexter Kelly
Renee Auden—pseudonym of Uta West
Adam Aymes—pseudonym of Julia K. Harris
Richard Balle—pseudonym of John Cicone
Victor J. Banis —“Victor Jay”
Phillip Barrows—pseudonym of Daniel R. Tuite
Diane Bataille —“Selena Warfield”
Shane V. Baxter—pseudonym of Victor Norwood
Tina Bellini—“Salambo Forest,” ” Max Hopper”
Albright Benson—pseudonym of Spencer Moore
Arnold Benson —“Keith Kerner”
Michael Bernet--”Anonymous,” “ Sheila Foster,” “J.J. Jadway”
D. Bruce Berry—“Morgan Drake”
William David Boynton —“Mullin Garr”
W.H. Bradley —“Douglas Macayket,” “Andrew Laird”
Edwin Scott Brown —“Scott Suneib”
Joseph Bush—“Angelo d’Arcangelo,” with Phoebe Wray—“Justine and Juliette Lemercier”
Chris Castberg —“C.S. Vanek”
John Cicone—“Richard Balle”
John Cleve—pseudonym of Andrew Offutt
James Colton—pseudonym of Joseph Hansen
Joseph Como—pseudonym of Joseph Cummings
John Coriolan—pseudonym of William Corington
William Corington—“John Conolan”
Joseph Cummings—“Joseph Como”
Frank Cutter—pseudonym of Donald Volkman
Harriet Daimler—pseudonym of Iris Owens
Sybah Darrich—pseudonym of Richard Ashby
Frederick C. Davis —“Curtis Steele”
Art Derfall—pseudonym of William Kalinich
Francine Dinatali—pseudonym of Barry Malzberg
Morgan Drake—pseudonym of D. Bruce Berry
Orson Durand—pseudonym of Charles Gorham
Bruno Fischer —“Jason F. Storm”
Terence Fitzbancroft—pseudonym of Joseph Renard
Carol Flinders—pseudonym of Milton Saul
Karl Flinders—pseudonym of Milton Saul
Salambo Forest—pseudonym of Tina Bellini
Sheila Foster—pseudonym of Michael Bernet
Melissa Franklin—pseudonym of Mary McChesney
Walter Franklin—“Prince”
Richard Fullmer—“Dirk Vanden”
Michel Gall—“Homer & Associates,” “Humphrey Richardson”
Mullin Garr—pseudonym of William David Boynton
Jack Gilbert and Jean McLean—“Tor Kung”
John Glassco —“Miles Underwood”
Charles Gorham —“Orson Durand”
Neils Grant, Jr.—“Gene North”
Benjamin Grimm—pseudonym of Spencer Lambert
Franz T. Hansell —“Joanne Stonebridge,” “Joe Stonebridge”
Joseph Hansen—“James Colton”
Julia K. Harris —“Adam Aymes”
Homer & Associates—pseudonym of Michel Gall
Max Hopper—pseudonym of Tina Bellini
Harvey Hornwood—“James Kerstetter,” “Carl Ross”
Fred Huber—“Jed Thorne,” “Joy Thorne”
J.J. Jadway—pseudonym of Michael Bernet
Victor Jay—pseudonym of Victor J. Banis
Paul Johnston—“Justin Paris”
J. Joth—pseudonym of Jerry Roth
James Jurgens—“Jett Sage”
Ray Kainen—pseudonym of Ray Kainulainen
Ray Kainulainen —“Ray Kainen”
William Kalinich —“Art Derfall”
Pablo Kane—pseudonym of Hugh Zachary
Peter Kanto—pseudonym of Hugh Zachary
Michael Karnow —“Michael Tarr”
Dexter Kelly —“Isidore Atlantis”
Keith Kerner—pseudonym of Arnold Benson
James Kerstetter—pesudonym of Harvey Hornwood
K.K. Klein—pesudonym of Robert Turner
Tor Kung—pseudonym of Jean McLean and Jack Gilbert
Andrew Laird—pseudonym of W.H. Bradley
Spencer Lambert—“Benjamin Grimm”
Colonel Spiro von Lambre, retired—pseudonym of Russell Martin
Justine and Juliette Lemercier—pseudonym of Phoebe Wray and Josef Bush
Frances Lengel—pseudonym of Alexander Trocchi
Richard Love —“Richard Amory”
Marshall Macao—pseudonym of Leonard F. Mears
Douglas Macayket—pseudonym of W.H. Bradley
Barry Malzberg —“Francine Dinatali,” “Gerrold Watkins”
Russell Martin—“Colonel Spiro von Lambre retired,” “Robert Moore”
Webb Matthews—pseudonym of David Stannard
Mary McChesney—“Melissa Franklin”
Jean McLean and Jack Gilbert—“Tor Kung”
Leonard F. Mears—“Marshall Macao”
Arthur Moore—“Marcus Van Heller”
and others: David Stannard, John Stevenson, Robert Yerger, Hugh Zachary
Robert Moore—pseudonym of Russell Martin
Spencer Moore—“Albright Benson”
Frank Newman—pseudonym of Sam Abrams
Odette Newman—pseudonym of Barbara Abrams
Gene North—pseudonym of Neils Grant, Jr.
Victor Norwood —“Shane V. Baxter”
Andrew Offutt —“John Cleve”
Iris Owens —“Harriet Daimler”
Philip Oxman—“Thomas Peachum”
Justine Paris—pseudonym of Paul Johnston
Thomas Peachum—pseudonym of Philip Oxman
Akbar del Piombo—pseudonym of Norman Rubington
Prince—pseudonym of Walter Franklin
Eliot Randall—pseudonym of Leah Wallach
Alexander Reck—pseudonym of Alex Silberman
Richard Rein—pseudonym of Richard Rein Smith
Joseph Renard —“Terence Fitzbancroft”
Humphrey Richardson—pseudonym of Michel Gall
Carl Ross—pseudonym of Harvey Hornwood
Norman Rubington—“Akbar del Piombo”
Sharon Rudahl—“Mary Sativa”
Jerry Roth—“J. Joth”
Jett Sage—pseudonym of James Jurgens
Mary Sativa—pseudonym of Sharon Rudahl
Milton Saul —“Carol Flinders,” “Karl Flinders”
J.J. Savage—pseudonym of James Keenan
Alex Silberman—“Alexander Reck”
Richard Rein Smith—“Richard Rein,” “Ann Taylor”
David Stannard —“Webb Matthews”
Carl Stone —“Scott Arlen”
Scott Suneib—pseudonym of Edwin Scott Brown
Bob Stanley—pseudonym of Robert Yerger
David Stannard—“Marcus Van Heller”
and others: Arthur Moore, John Stevenson, Robert Yerger, Hugh Zachary
Curtis Steele—pseudonym of Frederick C. Davis
Clarence A. Stevens—“Gus Stevens”
Gus Stevens—pseudonym of Clarence A. Stevens
John Stevenson—“Marcus Van Heller”
and others: Arthur Moore, David Stannard, Robert Yerger, Hugh Zachary
Joanne Stonebridge—pseudonym of Franz T. Hansell
Joe Stonebridge—pseudonym of Franz T. Hansell
Jason F. Storm—pseudonym of Bruno Fischer
Michael Tarr—pseudonym of Michael Karnow
Ann Taylor—pseudonym of Richard Rein Smith
Jesse Taylor—pseudonym of William Amidon
Jed Thorne—pseudonym of Fred Huber
Joy Thorne—pseudonym of Fred Huber
Larry Townsend—“J. Watson”
Alexander Trocchi —“Frances Lengel”
Daniel R. Tuite —“Phillip Barrows”
F.H. Turner—pseudonym of Florence Turner
Florence Turner—“F.H. Turner”
Robert Turner—“K.K. Klein”
Miles Underwood—pseudonym of John Glassco
Dirk Vanden—pseudonym of Richard Fullmer
C.S. Vanek—pseudonym of Chris Castberg
Marcus Van Heller—pseudonym of various: John Stevenson, Arthur Moore, David Stannard,
Robert Yerger, Hugh Zachary
Fred Vassi—“Marco Vassi”
Marco Vassi—pseudonym of Fred Vassi
Donald Volkman —“Frank Cutter”
Leah Wallach—“Eliot Randall”
Selena Warfield—pseudonym of Diane Bataille
Gerrold Watkins—pseudonym of Barry Malzberg
J. Watson—pseudonym of Larry Townsend
Jerry Weil—“Leslie Adirondack”
Uta West—“Renee Auden”
Richard White—“Roger Agile”
Phoebe Wray and Josef Bush—“Justine and Juliette Lemercier”
Robert Yerger—“Bob Stanley” “Marcus Van Heller,”
Hugh Zachary—“Pablo Kane,” “Peter Kanto,” “Marcus Van Heller”

- - -

Special thanks to Patrick Kearney for much help in formulating these lists.

Do you know where I can get some hashish? It’s for her. She wants some for us to smoke back in the hotel room.

            --Maurice Girodias

Maurice Girodias, Fandom, and Me
Artwork by Harry Bell

By Patrick J. Kearney

Ephraim and Rosa Doner and me in the garden of their Carmel home, about 1980. Ephraim was a close friend of Henry Miller, and Miller included an essay about him in My Bike & Other Friends (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1978).  Meeting somebody whom Miller had described at length was an extraordinary experience, and showed how great a writer he really was; Ephraim felt like an old friend of mine as well. –Patrick Kearney

Having been persuaded by the smooth-talking Earl Kemp to write something about “Maurice Girodias and Me,” I decided to expand the topic slightly so that it might more accurately be called “Maurice Girodias, Fandom, and Me” for the very good reason that banned books and my experiences in the science fiction fandom of London in the early 1960s seem, at least in my mind, inextricably linked. But before proceeding, a caveat; to the best of my knowledge and recollection, the anecdotes that follow are, in themselves, accurately remembered, but in relation to each other I can’t be so sure. Time has a way of compressing events, like the view through a telephoto lens, and so the sequencing may be out of synch.

As must be obvious, I first encountered the Olympia Press before I was interested in, or even aware of, its founder Maurice Girodias, and I believe the first Olympia title I actually saw was a “popular” edition of J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, the one with the garish, mosaic cover design.

I was in Paris of course, and it was about 1960 or ’61, but it wasn’t my first visit. I’d been several times before thanks to my father who worked for Skyways Coach/Air, a small airline that provided cheap flights between small French and English coastal airports on ageing DC3s, with bus transport to the respective capitals. There was also the manager of the Bel-Air, a clean but reasonable hotel near the place du Republique, round the corner from the bus terminal, who was a friend of my father’s.

On this occasion, however, I wasn’t staying at the Bel-Air. For reasons I cannot now remember, I was at a particularly unpleasant rat-trap of a place on the Boulevard Voltaire called the Hotel des Etranger, and staying there in the company of Don Geldart, an sf fan with a literary turn of mind who, at the time I think, was still in the Army, but on leave for medical reasons. I’d known Don for a while. I first made his acquaintance from a distance, so to speak, at Ella Parker’s original penitentiary where, at one of the regular Friday night fan get togethers, a tape was played that had been mailed to Ella by fellow fan George Locke from Aden or Kuwait or some other God-forsaken place. George and Don were both there doing their National Service in the army and had recorded the tape in a tent in the middle of a sandstorm, with results that were not too far removed from The Goon Show, a popular and anarchic English radio show with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe. Some off-colour remarks concerning camels and the alleged weakness of Arabs for young boys were not met with universal enthusiasm, however.

Don wasn’t really too much of a science fiction fan I don’t think. He didn’t publish a fanzine, and so far as I can recall never wrote for any of them either. I think of him as part of the fringe, along with Ken Potter and Ivor Mayne amongst others, who although enjoying science fiction were a little different from the mainstream of fandom, but enjoyed its social life. Because of its leanings toward radical politics and subversive literature it was a circle I felt, as a rebellious 18 year old, strongly drawn to and very comfortable in, and it must have been this rebelliousness that led me to an interest in erotic literature. And very tedious I became. Jim Linwood, wearying of my constant harping on the subject, twitted me rather well once at a convention by presenting me with what he described gravely as a banned book by H.G. Wells – a pre-WWI Tauchnitz edition, with “Not for sale in the United Kingdom or its Colonies” or something of the sort printed on the wrapper. Some time later, in 1963, Jim borrowed my copy of The Naked Lunch and left it on the London-Salisbury bus. Not anticipating at the time how collectible it was to become, my main concern was that it might end up in the hands of somebody who wouldn’t appreciate it. Fortunately, I was able to obtain another copy.

But sometimes my interest in erotica came in useful as when I needed the use of a typewriter to cut some stencils for a fanzine. Bruce Burn had the typewriter and I had a copy of Tropic of Capricorn, as yet unpublished in England or the United States, which he was anxious to read. Neither of us was anxious to loan out our treasures, so a compromise was reached. I went over to his rented room and spent a Saturday typing stencils while he lay on the bed reading Henry Miller.

But to return to Paris and The Ginger Man, I believe that Don purchased his copy from a bouquiniste, one of the booksellers who operate out of those dark green metal stalls along the banks of the Seine in Paris. I’d never heard of the book, and on my asking about it Don told me that it was a very good novel by J. P. Donleavy, a new writer who’d been unable to have it published in England or America because of its obscenity. The Olympia Press had first published it in June 1955 as volume 7 of their Traveller’s Companion Series. It had originally been called S.D. – the initials of Sebastian Dangerfield, the central character – and tradition has it that the manuscript, despite its many excellent qualities, was marred by the untidiness and lack of discipline of a first novel and required extensive editorial work by the late Muffie Wainhouse, the wife of Austryn Wainhouse, Olympia’s pre-eminent translator of Sade, Bataille, and others. Dissatisfied with his agreement with Girodias, the author decided to break his contract and enter into a new agreement with Neville Spearman, a London publisher, for an expurgated edition of his work, which was published the following year. It was a course of action that about eleven legally complicated years later would lead to Girodias losing control of his company to Donleavy.

I knew none of this when eyeing Don’s copy of the cheap Olympia edition. It had doubtless been put out in an effort to salvage something from the Spearman debacle, but it was his mention of the word “obscenity” that piqued my curiosity. He allowed me a look, but after much effort I was totally unable to find anything remotely stimulating and wondered what all the fuss was about.

The problem with the books offered for sale by the bouquinistes was that the more interesting ones were usually wrapped in a clear, crackly plastic of some sort, with the price written in black crayon along the top edge. Dipping in was not encouraged. So having been disappointed by Mr. Donleavy’s performance, I was obliged to look elsewhere for smut, and found it rather surprisingly at Brentano’s, the American bookshop on the avenue de l'Opéra. I knew the place well from previous visits when I had discovered, in their basement, a treasure trove of both used and new American paperbacks that I would ransack for science fiction titles that were difficult to find in London. I made the trek to Brentano’s on this occasion for the double purpose of checking out the basement as usual and also to pick up a map of Paris. The maps and plans were all displayed on a high, freestanding rack to the right of the door as one entered. Not finding anything to my liking, I looked round the rear of the rack expecting a further selection, but was faced instead with a substantial display of regular books. I noticed at once the same edition of The Ginger Man that Don was reading; it was garish and caught the eye. But I quickly saw that most of the other books there had extremely suggestive titles, and best of all one could leaf through them.

I rapidly discovered that the Olympia Press published all the books. Most of them had the dark green wrappers of the Traveller’s Companion Series, a few, like The Fetish Crowd, with pictorial dust wrappers. But there were other series as well that on closer inspection seemed less literary and distinctly more masturbatory. Having earlier in the day been icily ignored by a couple of young beauties in a bar who preferred their pinball machine and the dulcet tones of Johnny Halliday on the jukebox to an English poseur trying to look sophisticated with his glass of Ricard and horrible French cigarettes, I felt the need of something to cheer me up, so I picked out a copy of The Gilded Lily, an Ophelia Press title. It was the first dirty book I ever read.

It was doubly ironic that it wasn’t an Olympia Press book that got me interested in the company and its founder, but Henry Miller’s Black Spring that had been published by the Obelisk Press, founded in the 1930’s by Jack Kahane, Girodias’s father, who died in 1939. Girodias, who adopted his mother’s maiden name to avoid the scrutiny of the occupying fascists, took over the company but during the War, for obvious reasons, put it to bed for the duration, publishing instead art books and similar “safe” projects in French under a different imprint, Les Éditions du Chêne; but he revived the Obelisk Press in time to greet the American and British troops visiting Paris after the Liberation with new editions of books his father had published, by Henry Miller, Frank Harris, and others.

The second part of the irony was the fact that the Obelisk edition of Black Spring I read was published in 1958 well after Girodias, in one of his periodic reversals of fortune, had lost control of both Les Éditions du Chêne and the Obelisk Press to Hachette, a major French bookseller and distributor.

Like Jim Linwood, Ken Potter found my interest in smutty books tiresome, and tended to speak his mind when he’d had a few. I have a fond memory of exiting a pub one evening at closing time with Ken and Ivor Mayne. Ken was on a roll, and for no apparent reason started singing “The Recruiting Sargeant,” an I.R.A. song from around WWI, at the top of his voice, and getting belligerent with a policeman who wanted him to stop. Fortunately, Ivor and I were able to defuse the situation.

One day, his pipe gripped fiercely between his teeth and being more than usually irritated by my musings on erotica, Ken rapped me smartly on the head with the copy of Miller’s book, and then thrust it into my hand. “Here’s a real dirty book,” he growled, “ – well written and printed in France.” I looked at it blankly. Back Spring wasn’t a promising title. Less prepossessing even than The Ginger Man, which was at least colourful, it had plain white wrappers, printed in black and with the added embellishment of crayoned squiggles by Ken’s first-born. I flipped though the pages, detected a few “fucks” and decided it might after all be interesting. My trip home that night was a voyage of discovery. I couldn’t put the damned book down and sailed past my subway stop without realizing it. Henry Miller became an obsession, and I determined to read every word he’d ever published. That didn’t mean the Olympia Press exclusively, but it did have me looking at their books with a new respect. If they published Sexus, Plexus, Quiet Days in Clichy, and The World of Sex, their other publications might be just as interesting.

So my trips to Paris became more frequent. For a while I made some extra money smuggling Olympia Press books into England, selling them to Alan Bale, an sf fan who ran Premier Book Centres in Chiswick. Alan’s shop was modeled on the Popular Book Centres, a chain that specialized in giving you half your money back in credit for the second-hand books and magazines you bought there and returned. There always seemed to be something a bit sleazy about these places. One, near the British Museum, had a rack of books outside that invariably featured the Paul Elek paperback reprints of Emile Zola’s novels. Already rendered garishly vulgar by having irrelevant cover illustrations of nudes by old masters, they would be further debased with wide paper bands wrapped around them on which would be hand-written in Magic Marker™ inducements like “Adults Only,” “Hot Stuff!!”, “Extra Spicy.” One can only wonder at the cruel disappointment met by those who picked up a copy of Germinal.

Alan’s shop – he had only one, despite being called Premier Book Centres – was similar, but seemed more respectable. For one thing, he stocked a lot of science fiction and fantasy, much of it imported from America. American sf paperbacks always looked more interesting somehow. Better cover artwork helped, and I rather liked the yellow edges, although I’m not sure what purpose they served. I think he was a little uneasy about fans visiting his shop too frequently, or maybe it was just me. I once found a copy of Poul Anderson’s Broken Sword there, and at first he refused to sell it to me, as he knew I wouldn’t return it, even for the credit on another purchase. He eventually relented.

But it wasn’t only science fiction Alan sold. Out of sight under the counter was tucked a couple of battered suitcases containing what the punters called “readers” – dirty books. Mostly these were “Soho Bibles,” short, mimeographed novels reproduced from typewriting and illustrated with blurry black and white photos having no connection whatsoever with the story. I gather these were quite a profitable line for Alan – he’d rent them out at, I think, a couple of quid or more a time. Despite my fascination with the subject, these things never greatly interested me and I suppose some sort of agreement was arrived at whereby I’d smuggle real books in from Paris for him. I can no longer recall the circumstances of exactly how this came about, but it didn’t last long once the available pornography published by Girodias under the Ophelia Press imprint had been exhausted. Many of the books with the famous green wrappers of the Traveller’s Companion series were a bit too literary for “the lads in Chiswick,” and I believe it was something by Jean Genet – or was it Jean Cocteau? – which eventually put the tin hat on the venture. I could have continued on by importing novels by Girodias’ competitors, but I found little to recommend them and was unwilling to risk my neck smuggling them through customs.

I still ran Olympia Press books from Paris through to London, but now it was for my own collecting habits. I’d grown to love them, and to admire the man who’d created the company. There was something about the way they looked – especially the Traveller’s Companion series – an elegance and simplicity of design, texts that were invariably interesting, and at times even great. Smuggling became a way of life for a time. Sometimes I would take my acquisitions to the Globe, a pub in Hatton Garden, where London sf fans would gather on the first Thursday of the month, and show them off. A few of the fans were actually interested. Walking home from the underground one evening after such a visit to the Globe, I became aware of a bell ringing annoyingly somewhere. It was very foggy and the sound was muffled, and I couldn’t quite place from which direction the sound was coming. Abruptly, a brace of Gerald Road’s finest emerged from the shadows and asked me to hand over my attaché case. Afterward I reasoned that the bell had been a burglar alarm, and the interest expressed by the cops in my case probably had something to do with a robbery. At the time, though, I grew panicky and must have acted suspiciously for they grew increasingly insistent and demanding. Eventually I opened the case and they peered inside, moving the books around as if trying to find something hidden amongst them. They pulled out the compendium volume of three Samuel Beckett novels, flipped the pages and tossed it back. Satisfied, one of the cops told me to “bugger off home.” I didn’t need to be told twice.

On one of my smuggling trips I even enlisted the assistance of my long-suffering parents. They’d gone to Spain for a couple of weeks, and as they planned to return to London via Paris I thought I’d take one of my periodic book-buying sprees and meet them there. My purchases were a little more extensive than usual, and after stuffing my own pockets with books I found that I still had all seven volumes of Sade’s Juliette left over with nowhere to put them. Much to my surprise, my father volunteered to put them in his attaché case, a gesture that did not find favour with my mother.

Waiting in line in the customs shed at Lympne airport on the English coast, I watched in curious fascination as a man was taken to one side and under the disapproving gaze of a woman I took to be his wife was obliged to empty the contents of his suitcase, revealing far more than the government quota of duty-free Scotch and cigarettes, and several evidently pornographic paperbacks, but not from the Olympia Press catalogue. It was soon our turn in the barrel. I noticed from the corner of my eye mother nervously shredding a lace hanky with her teeth, but my father strode purposely forward and was soon talking familiarly with the inspector who, I discovered shortly afterward, knew my father well through his job with the airline company. We were soon waved through.

On another occasion, I asked Ramsey Campbell to do a bit of smuggling for me, and pick me up a copy of Akbar del Piombo’s (Norman Rubington’s) Book of Bawdy Ballads during a trip he was making to Paris accompanied by his mother. I agreed to meet him on his return at Victoria station, London. As I’ve recounted elsewhere, the trip home across the English Channel hadn’t agreed with him at all and he looked far from well – a sensation with which I was well familiar myself from a similarly rough crossing I’d made some years earlier. Yet, true bibliophile that he was, he triumphantly held aloft my precious book, carefully wrapped in plastic.

I’d made the acquaintance of Ramsey Campbell when he was still John Ramsey Campbell and writing his stories in school exercise books in a careful, copperplate hand. I was much impressed by his H.P. Lovecraft pastiches, and urged him to submit his stories to August Derleth of Arkham House. He followed my suggestion, and the rest is history. But Ramsey’s immersion in fantasy and horror fiction was matched by an equally strong interest in erotic literature, and we exchanged many letters in which we discussed, in particular, the works of the marquis de Sade, whose translations under the Olympia Press imprint we had both acquired. One day I was greatly surprised and not a little embarrassed to receive a letter from his mother, who had apparently had her modesty shocked by one of my own letters. She accused me of trying to corrupt her son, but her tone was not angry, more one of gentle sadness, and she asked me if my own mother knew the sort of books I was reading and whether I had abandoned my faith. As it happened, my mother was perfectly aware I had a mind like a sewer; and from my name I imagine Ramsey’s mother supposed me to have been a Catholic. I had to answer her, but I didn’t feel that it would be prudent to repeat those facts. At the time I was without a typewriter for some reason, and I toiled very late into the night at the travel agency where I worked creating a carefully worded and conciliatory reply, which seemed to have eased the situation, for my correspondence with Ramsey continued for a while afterward without any further trouble.

I eventually reached a point where I felt the need to meet Girodias. I’m at a loss to know why, but I suppose it was not entirely unconnected with the desire experienced by others to meet their favourite film actor or sports figure. In my case it was a publisher. The only problem was how to do it.

The solution presented itself when Ivor Mayne, hearing that I was to make a run to Paris, asked me if I’d pick up a manuscript for him that had been submitted for publication in Olympia, Girodias’s short-lived literary magazine, but rejected. Although the magazine was openly on sale in the more progressive bookshops in England and, probably, the United States, it ran into trouble with the authorities in France, and only four numbers were published. Ivor’s manuscript was a short story called “Domes of Silence,” and I got the impression from him that Girodias had become nervous of entrusting anything thicker than a letter to the mails, and where possible preferred authors to collect their own rejects.

---

Whenever Ivor Mayne passed a religious bookshop he made a point of going in and enquiring if they stocked The Rosy Crucifixion. When they asked if they could order a copy for him, he explained that it was published by a devout order in Paris called Olympia who would be more than welcome to supply several volumes. I often wonder if the Vice Squad raided any shops that tried to oblige Ivor. I think Ivor stopped doing this when Girodias rejected his story.
              --Jim Linwood

---

On this particular Paris trip, Sue Lionnel, my girl friend, accompanied me. It was the first time she’d been abroad, and while she looked forward to visiting Paris, she didn’t share my interest in meeting Girodias and on the day I decided to go to the Olympia offices on the rue St. Séverin she chose to wait in the street outside and do some window-shopping.

I climbed up a flight of dark stairs and entered a small, cluttered office. Behind a desk sat a man of mixed black and white parentage who was definitely not Girodias. Years later I was to discover it was Gerry Williams, the anonymous translator of A Bedside Odyssey, Michel Gall’s erotic re-telling of Homer, written in French but first published in English by Olympia. I explained the reason for my visit.

Sue Lionnel, the girl I took to Paris and who got to speak to Maurice Girodias whilst I was in the office retrieving Ivor's manuscript is on the extreme left.  I took the photo c. 1962 on the set of It Happened Here, the political fantasy directed by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo which attempted quite well to show what might have happened if the Germans had occupied England in WWII.  Several fans aside from myself took part in the film, including Jim Linwood -- who disgraced himself by whistling 'The Red Flag' whilst in Nazi uniform -- and Bruce Burn.  The cameraman taking a light reading is Peter Suschitsky, who was later to become David Cronenberg's favourite cameraman and therefore, to add to the Olympia Press connection, was the Director of Photography on Naked Lunch.               –Patrick Kearney

“Are you the author?”

I denied it, an admission I immediately felt to have been unwise.

“Do you have an authorization from the author to collect his manuscript?”

I produced it. “Could I discuss with M. Girodias the reasons for its rejection? Mr. Mayne is a little unclear…”

“I’m sorry. M. Girodias could only do that with the author himself. I’m sure the covering letter with the manuscript will clear up any problems. Also he is out.”

He disappeared briefly into an adjoining office and returned quickly with a quarto-sized envelope addressed to Ivor. I took it and stared at him, trying to think of some other ruse by which I could meet the great man at a later time, but my mind was as blank as my stare.

“Was there something else?” He clasped his hands, and for some reason I was reminded of the way barbers in England would, after cutting one’s hair, ask the same question, on the off-chance you wanted to buy contraceptives. I settled for buying some books and left, frustrated. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen minutes, and I was not amused at the time to discover that as I’d entered the office, Maurice had exited by another door, noticed Sue looking in a shop window, and spent almost the whole time I was gone talking to her.

I first made direct contact with Maurice about twelve years later, by mail, thanks to a bookseller friend in New York who gave me his address. Maurice was still in the United States, and living in Boston. Although he’d stopped publishing by the time I got to know him, two of his last books had provoked dark forces to move against him.

President Kissinger (New York: Freeway Press, 1974) and Inside Scientology (New York: Olympia Press, 1972) outraged two groups. The former started life as a piece of political fiction dreamed up by Maurice in which a constitutional amendment made it possible for foreign-born individuals to become President of the United States. Much of the writing was done by Monroe Rosenthal and Donald Munson whose names appeared as the authors, but additional material was added by Girodias himself, Susan Wasserman, the wife of Maurice’s attorney, and Marco Vassi, one of the more interesting writers discovered by the Olympia Press in New York. Vassi’s contributions consisted of some outrageous incidents that allegedly took place just after WWII when Kissinger apparently acted as an interpreter for the American occupation forces in Germany. According to Vassi, Maurice expressed reservations about including the passages, but agreed to their use after Vassi asked him what had happened to the famous champion of literary freedom.

A few days after publication, an anonymous note signed “A Patriot” was received by the US State Department, complaining of the book. Almost immediately, the entire stock disappeared from the distributor’s warehouse, although a few copies managed to slip into circulation. Who the author of the anonymous note might have been is not known, but one theory is that it was a female employee of Maurice’s who’d been planted by the Scientologists following the publication of Robert Kaufman’s exposé, Inside Scientology. The Church of Scientology had attempted unsuccessfully to prevent the book’s publication, first by direct representation and later through the courts. About two years before the anonymous letter had been sent to the State Department – around the time Kaufman’s book appeared – a fabricated bankruptcy notice on stolen Olympia letterhead was widely circulated in England, which effectively ended the company’s operation there.

Attempts were made to deport Maurice from the United States. His residency papers were said to be out of date, and it was suggested, quite untruly, that his marriage to Lilla Lyon was undertaken as a convenience for the purpose of staying in the country. The final straw came when Maurice and his wife were driving to a friend’s for dinner. On the way, State and Federal law enforcement officers stopped them and in a highly improbable scenario claimed to have discovered several bags of cocaine in his pockets. Given the choice of ten years in prison or immediate deportation, Maurice wisely chose the latter.

During all these ennuis, Maurice and I remained in contact by mail. I knew nothing of his troubles with the law, and he never made reference to them. Our letters dealt strictly with the Olympia Press, its history and bibliography. He seemed amused at my interest in the subject, but was very helpful and patient with my questions. At times he appeared vague on specifics – he once wrote that I was mistaken to ascribe publication of I’m for Hire to him, saying that it had been one of the books his father, Jack Kahane, had published. I pointed out, gently, that he was probably thinking of To Beg I am Ashamed his father had published, a different book on the same subject. I found him to be very loyal to his writers, even though he may not have paid them as diligently as they might have liked, and in two instances asked me not to reveal the true names of two pseudonymous authors who had written for him in New York, a Russian journalist living in Italy and a deceased woman whose family were unaware of her erotic writings. He also tended to acrimony, and spoke harshly of people he felt had betrayed him.

Perversely, I didn’t actually meet Maurice in person until I had moved to California in 1982, and Maurice was back in Paris. Visits home to London invariably included side trips to Paris, and it was on one of these that we first met, briefly, at his apartment, on the top floor of a tower block overlooking Père Lachaise cemetery.

I commented on the view, and he laughed, explaining that he’d chosen the high altitude “to be closer to God.” He walked over to the window, spread his arms and said he enjoyed looking out over the cemetery where so many of his friends were buried. His accommodations were Spartan to say the least, barely a stick of furniture in the place, and I wondered if he might have just taken possession of the place and hadn’t yet moved his belongings in.

Our second meeting was longer and more convivial. By chance Lilla Lyon was visiting Maurice. The nature of their relationship at the time was a little unclear, and since she was living in New York and Maurice in Paris, I didn’t feel inclined to make inquiries. But they appeared very fond of each other. My own wife was with me, and the four of us went for lunch. It was late on a Sunday afternoon, and had trouble finding a restaurant that was open. When we eventually did, it was little better than a greasy spoon and Maurice was evidently not happy with the venue. He looked askance at the menu and gave an exasperated groan when he picked up the wine list, but our order was taken and we settled down to talking. I forget exactly what we discussed, but I was struck by the fact that the cuffs of Maurice’s jacket were wrapped in Scotch tape, presumably to prevent fraying, and it suddenly occurred to me that he must be a poor as a church mouse. When the meal was over, I pulled out my wallet to pick up the tab, but he insisted on paying himself in a tone that suggested argument was pointless.

The next time we went out to eat, I remembered this. On this occasion, it was for dinner, and Maurice steered my wife and I to a small and evidently expensive restaurant not far from the old Olympia Press offices on rue St.-Séverin. He remarked with curious emphasis I thought that a pair of homosexuals ran the restaurant, and that the staff was similarly inclined. He wasn’t kidding either, but the food was excellent, and in comparison to the wine list at the greasy spoon the one we had to negotiate that night was more like a family bible. At the end of the meal, while drinking coffee, I made my excuses and headed for the gents. On the way I asked for the bill and settled up, since I didn’t want Maurice to pay for us a second time. When he found out, he was absolutely furious and nothing my wife or I could say seemed to lessen his anger, which seemed to get worse the more he thought about the situation. It was as if I’d broken some tribal taboo.

Eventually I said, “Look here, Maurice, how about if we finish the evening by going to a bar. You can buy Linda and me a drink. A fine cognac or something like that.” He immediately perked up, and we walked a couple of blocks to a really fancy place, full of ferns and cut glass and more like a club than a bar. I forget what Linda and Maurice drank, but I had a particularly good glass of Calvados. The balance of the universe having been restored, Maurice sat back in his chair beaming.

One rendezvous started badly, for me at any rate, but finished quite spectacularly. Linda was off somewhere with a woman friend, and I’d arranged with Maurice to meet him at a bar in the shadow of the Pompidou Centre at noon. It was early July, very warm and muggy, and by the time we met I had a serious thirst. I asked for a beer, but somehow botched the order. I wanted a large draft, so I ordered a “grande pression.” Maurice looked at me in surprise. “Are you sure?” He asked in something akin to wonder. I nodded, but was shocked when it arrived. The glass looked a bit like a brandy snifter, but was big enough to contain at least as much beer as one gets in a pizza parlor pitcher.

Starting in on the beer, I asked Maurice about a series called “Party Books” he’d published in New York that I was interested in. It was a short-lived series, and their curiosity for me was their miserable quality. Ill-written texts printed on the worst paper money could buy, they were uncharacteristically poor publications, stroke-books of the worst kind. Maurice at first denied all knowledge of them and seemed a little embarrassed that I had raised the subject. I persevered and he continued in his denials. On reflection, it was unkind of me to do so, but I eventually pulled out a New York Olympia Press catalogue and showed him a list of Party Books titles it included. He shrugged. “Self censorship,” he sighed. I wanted to know why he’d stooped so low as to publish dross of this quality, but I never asked the question; a combination of the growing effect of the beer and an unwillingness to embarrass him further prevented me.

I managed to get it all down but it was a struggle and by the time Linda and Noisette, her friend, arrived I was in a state that Private Eye would describe as “tired and emotional.” I don’t remember very much of what followed, but evidently an arrangement was made for the four of us to meet up later that evening, at a restaurant. Maurice was late and I still felt fragile, but immediately rallied when he did show up and presented me with a small package containing copies of l’Affaire Lolita, a scarce Olympia Press pamphlet, and President Kissinger. I must have mentioned earlier that I was looking for copies, and had contrived to find them somewhere.

That night was the last time I saw Maurice. Noisette offered to drive him home, so we piled into her aging Mercedes and headed up the Champs Elysées. It was July 13 th and the final touches were being put to the Bastille Day decorations. There were a lot of police and military in evidence. Approaching the Arc de Triomphe, our lane of traffic was stopped by the police to allow special lines to be painted along the street by a small, apparently remote controlled machine on caterpillar tracks. As it passed alongside us, Maurice looked through the car window at it. “A French tank,” he murmured.

Early in July 1990 I was awakened at about three in the morning by a ‘phone call from Michael Neal, a bookseller friend who lives just outside Paris. “Did I wake you? Sorry. I called to say our friend Maurice has died. He was being interviewed by French radio, and had a heart attack.”

Much has been written about Maurice Girodias, usually about his faults, the shabby way he is supposed to have treated those who wrote for him, his lack of business sense and disdain for money. With so much negativity it is difficult not to accept there is some truth to it all. To me, though, he was a good friend, generous, amusing and always happy to help with my many questions. Despite his declining fortunes in his last years, he maintained an almost courtly elegance, especially around women whom he charmed easily. But his greatest legacy was his ability to know a great book when he saw it. In Paris, he had a fairly short career as a publisher; aside from the period during the war when he wasn’t able to be adventurous, it lasted less than 30 years, and yet his track record at publishing great books – real literature – is extraordinary. It is doubtful that we will ever see another publisher quite like him.

- - -

Copyright 2005 by Patrick J. Kearney. All rights reserved. Scissors and Paste Bibliographies http://www.sonic.net/~patk/

---

Those literary orgies, those torrents of systematic bad taste were certainly instrumental in clearing the air and cleaning out a few mental cobwebs. The imbecile belief that sex is sin, that physical pleasure is unclean, that erotic thoughts are immoral—all those sick Judeo-Christian ideas were exposed for what they are.

            --Maurice Girodias

---

Our Lady of the Flowers
(Related correspondence between Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset on the lawsuit.)

By Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset

---

If Maurice was a pornographer, it was a very special kind….People like Terry Southern, Norman Rubington, and Marilyn Meeske…were closest to Maurice’s kind of taste. I could always spot a Girodias book—it would have an intellectualized sexual content and polished style.

            --Barney Rosset

---

September 4, 1959

Dear Barney,

Barney Rosset and Maurice Girodias in East Hampton in 1960. Courtesy Barney Rosset/Evergreen Review Collection.

Following your last letter and in accordance with criticisms formulated by several people, I have reworded the second half of the Lawrence Durrell’s “Open Letter to the French Government.” I am sending enclosed twenty copies of the draft which I hope you will find more satisfactory than the first.

Our lawsuit for “Our Lady of the Flowers” comes up on the 16th of September. It is absolutely essential for us to have this letter published by the American/French papers before the day (although the Courts’ verdict will not be made public on the 16th but one or two weeks later; at any rate this decision will have been made on the 16th).

The matter is therefore terribly urgent and I would be extremely grateful if you could help us as much as you possibly can!!!

Can you send me immediately a list of the people you can get in touch with, directly or indirectly, so that I can work out a list of people I still have to contact? Of course, you are in a much better position to approach the American writers and critics than we are at this end.

I had never met Barney Rosset. I had admired him for years. I had spent some of those years ripping him off and taking a hell of a lot of money directly out of his hands, only I wasn't doing any of that deliberately and it was nothing personal and he was still the single person within the entire erotica industry, world-wide, for whom I held a heavy load of genuine, worshipful respect….             We lived and worked in different worlds, Barney and I, because he was in the uptown, classy book industry, producing volumes that anyone would be proud not only to own but especially to have produced. I, on the other hand, was in the degenerating downtown, dirty book industry, better known as the periodicals trade, and I was producing volumes that people read only once then discarded after the pages got too sticky for comfort. Barney's books were forever and my books were, by definition, destined for a lifetime of only 30 days. Imagine my surprise, many decades later, to discover that people were paying hundreds of dollars, even thousands, for single copies of some of those 50- to 75-cent beat off books.             Rosset was doing things exactly the way I wanted to do them but wasn't allowed to do. He made me feel quite proud just to think I was a sort of bastard relative.             Barney and I were constantly in competition for the same exact book titles at the time, and the only real saving grace was that we existed in those different worlds. I don't mean that he was in New York City and I was at the far opposite corner of the States in San Diego. I mean he was the respected boss of Grove Press who flooded bookstores with some of the very best of Maurice Girodias' shoddy, unprotected output…starting with My Man Henry Miller.             I, on the other hand, was the notorious smut peddler from Greenleaf Classics who flooded newsstands, bus stations, gun shops, liquor stores, and sleazy area adult bookstores with almost the exact same product…Maurice Girodias' shoddy, unprotected output…starting with My Man Henry Miller. At times it was touch and go to see who would hit the marketplace first, me or Barney. I called him Barney and thought of him that way…even though I respected him beyond reason, I felt especially akin to him. We walked the same streets in the same manner for the same reasons. What's not to like about him?             I had even gone to the extreme, on two different occasions, of living inside our then typesetter's shop and literally hand setting two of the Miller books [The Rosy Crucifixion], working straight through without even stopping to sleep or eat, in order to beat Barney's on-sale dates for those titles. Fortunately I had the help of my first assistant who got as good at hand setting as I had become by then…that's Peter V. Cooper. Prior to that, neither of us had ever touched a piece of type, much less sat those pieces into any kind of coherent order. It was quite a learning experience for both of us and needless to say, we beat Barney on sale with both of those books by a wide margin.             --Earl Kemp, “Wet Dreams in Paradiso,” eI15, August 2004 #             New-Cal Publications in Gardena, California, was engaged in a publishing race worthy of something on the order of The Front Page. The presses had been running, eight in the morning until midnight, for a week. In the binding and trimming room, the high-pitched wheen-wheen-wheen screech of the $85,000 hot-glue binding machine made conversation impossible, and the paper dust from the trimming machines covered the workers heads like fine, dry snow. In the 10,000-foot-square shipping room, perhaps 50 skids, piled high with cartons of books, were clustered near the scales. The shipping foreman, Henry Martinez, a short swarthy man with a cold cigar stub clenched in his teeth, was feverishly gluing labels onto cartons, his clerk was weighing the skids and moving them to the loading dock. Western Trucking would be by at five; it was imperative that the books get out.             New-Cal had the print order of 500,000 copies of an “unauthorized” version of Henry Miller’s trilogy, The Rosy Crucifixion. At any time, Grove Press (the publisher of the “authorized” edition) might obtain an injunction forcing Greenleaf Publishing Company of Evanston, Illinois, and New-Cal, to suspend production pending court rulings on copyright validity, thus allowing Grove to get its paperback edition in circulation first.             New-Cal—and Greenleaf—won the race unhampered by injunction. What made it remarkable was the fact that Greenleaf had opted to break each of the three books into two volumes; thus New-Cal had to crank out one million books in two weeks.             --Lawrence Dietz, “Notes on the Smut                   Renaissance,”  New York World                    JournalTribune, October 16, 1966. #             I got my books from the bus station…. It was in bus stations, of course, that I discovered D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller….             …what do you suppose the dirtiest book in [this library] is?… You would say it was sex. Lots of people have thought that to write a sexy book is an easy way to make a lot of money but it hasn't worked out that way. Henry Miller has written probably the sexiest book in [here], The Rosy Crucifixion. You can't write a sexier book than that but it doesn't sell well. So there is something more to it than sex.                --Kurt Vonnegut, "Teaching the Writer                 to Write,"   Kallikanzaros 4, March-April 1968

Much depends on this new campaign. If it helps us to obtain the legal victory I am looking forward to, you will be certain to be left in peace by the French authorities forever.

So please do you very best to help us!

Yours,

Maurice

#

September 9, 1959

Dear Maurice:

Enclosed is a copy of the letter Barney will send along with your Open Letter to the French Government. It will go to the people you mentioned, plus Dalton Trumbo, Howard Fast, Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac and Elliott B. Macrae (president of Dutton). If we think of any others, we'll let you know. (Also James Farrell, Irwin Shaw, and ErskineCaldwell.)

The enclosed letter to Henry Miller is self-explanatory. A copy has also gone to M. Filipacchi.

Barney just read THE WORLD OF SEX for the first time and was very favorably impressed. What are the chances of our getting the rights to this book, as opposed to the TROPICS?

If you think of any other writers to whom you would like us to send the Open Letter, it might be best if you cabled. Sorry for the delay, but yesterday was a holiday and the material only arrived this morning.

Best wishes,
Judith Schmidt
[Secretary to Barney Rosset]

#

September 9, 1959
73 Perry Street
New York 14, New York

Dear Mr. Mailer:

Maurice Girodias and The Olympia Press have had may of their books banned in France. The list of banned books includes such famous ones as LOLITA by Vladimir nabokov and OUR LADY OF THE FLOWERS by Jean Genet. In earlier trials, Mr. Girodias won the case of LOLITA in the lower courts. The cases are now coming up again and, on behalf of the Olympia Press, Lawrence Durrell has written the enclosed "Open Letter to the French Government." Among those writers who have agreed to sign the letter thus far are Stephen Spender, Richard Wright, Philip Toynbee and Henry Miller.

I feel that Mr. Durrell, Mr. Girodias, and the others who will sign the letter, are in the right and, if you are in agreement, we would very much appreciate it if you would sign the enclosed copy of the letter and send it back to us as soon as possible. One of the cases will be decided next week, and a fast response from you might influence the decision.

Sincerely yours,

Barney Rosset
BR:js

[THIS LETTER HAS ALSO BEEN SENT TO:
John Steinbeck on September 10, 1959
Robert Frost on September 11, 1959]

#

September 10, 1959

M. Maurice Girodias
The Olympia Press

Dear Maurice:

In addition to the names I listed to you the other day, we've sent letters to W. H. Auden and John Steinbeck. Since Auden, Steinbeck, and Irwin Shaw are all in Europe, we asked them to reply directly to you, if they should decide to sign the letter.

I do hope that some replies come through in time.

Best,

Judith

P.S. Would you please send us two copies of Alex Trocchi's YOUNG ADAM, in separate packages, via first class sea mail? Many thanks.

- - -

Special thanks to Astrid Myers of Evergreen Review for much help with this piece.

---

Barney Rosset I met in Paris…. He was definitely an intriguing person, impressively nervous, self-centered, alternating between moments of catatonic near-slumber and bouts of frantic speech and activity. Bizarre. The convulsive, grating laugher, coming as it did at unexpected moments, broke any possible continuity in the conversation. This man was as ambiguous as they come; there was a ferocious insanely possessive and ruthless child hidden somewhere inside; and on the outside a reasonably friendly person, well-meaning, clever, daring, sometimes witty, and apparently devoted to all the liberal causes of the time…. The second phase started shortly after we met. Barney discovered a whole new area in which to redirect his publishing activities: to fight for freedom of expression was as good a cause as any. And it might make money as well.

            --Maurice Girodias, “Commentary,” The New Olympia Reader

---

Repentance, Desire and Natalie Wood*

By Barry N. Malzberg

Check it out; here is the afterword to a chapter from Oracle of the Thousand Hands, which appears in…The New Olympia Reader:

Barry Malzberg at Millennium Philcon. Photo by Michael Resnick, September 2001.

Barry Malzberg lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan and is worried about having recently reached the ominous age of thirty….Mr. Malzberg’s first hardcover novels, Oracle ofthe Thousand Hands and Screen are seriously-intentioned works which, according to the author, were neither fun to write nor fun in retrospect. Major influences on his work in no particular order are Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Gogol.

Not quite. The major major influences upon the author’s “seriously-intentioned” hardcover novels, as well as eight paperbacks done for the Olympia Press America between 1968 and 1973 were really: Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, Hope Lange, repentance, desire, lust, resentment, ambition and the collected opi of the Four Coins, Four Preps, Four Seasons and the Belmonts. (Dion, too.) Heady stuff for the kid, though, writing for Nabokov’s publisher, citing Gogol and Dostoyevsky as influences; I recommend this experience to everyone having real or even slight pretensions to artistry.

---

Barry Malzberg’s Olympia Press (NY) Bibliography

LP/2 Screen, by Barry Malzberg, 1968 boards
LP/3 Oracle of the Thousand Hands, by Barry Malzberg, 1968 boards
444 The Circle, by Francine Di Natale, May 16, 1969
460 Southern Comfort, by Gerrold Watkins, 1969
474 A Bed of Money, by Gerrold Watkins, 1969
476 A Satyr’s Romance, by Gerrold Watkins, 1970
479 Giving It Away, by Gerrold Watkins, 1970
483 The Art of the Fugue, by Gerrold Watkins, 1970
OPS/8 Screen, by Barry Malzberg, 1970 paperback
OPS/17 In My Parents’ Bedroom, by Barry Malzberg, 1971
OPS/29 The Confessions of Westchester County, by Barry Malzberg, 1971

And editor: The New Olympia Reader, 1970, 1993

---

Girodias fils left Paris in a flurry of debt, lawsuit and governmental revulsion in 1967, decamped to New York, found financial backing (but not too much) from obscure sources, set up active shop here as the reincarnation of that insouciant and eclectic Left Bank spirit which in the 1950s had given bewildered culture lovers the works of Akhbar del Piombo, Henry Miller, Terry Southern and even Vladimir Nabokov whose Lolita had come to Paris in 1955 at the behest of an author whose agent had been unable to place the novel anywhere.

Maurice Girodias, 49 when he came to New York, 36 then, had been unable to sell many copies of Lolita; he hadn’t done too well with Miller either (Akhbar on the other hand had been a staple) but he had ideas, he would reconstitute the age of enlightenment within the borders of a city located on the far eastern seaboard of a country which was demonstrably going mad.

Clearly, it was going mad, it was his kind of country. First the assassination, then Vietnam, then some other, discreditable assassinations, then the Summer of Love, then Olympia Press America. Then Martin, Robert, Nixon, Apollo, Cambodia, Kent State and Wallace. But by the time of Wallace, Olympia Press was already speeding into Chapter 11 and Girodias, a year after that was, sans his new wife, sans everything sailing for Paris. “Sunk without trace” is not exactly the phrase for Olympia America, nothing is sunk without trace in this country, McGovern is on the lecture circuit and Jefferson Airplane/Starship are heading toward the third incarnation, but it is close. Fairly close. “Sunk almost without trace” probably can be risked.

The New Olympia Reader , 300,000 words of excerpts by about 50 writers, compiled by your faithful undersigned for a freelancer’s pittance (but not the author of the authorial biographies or the cited blurb) sold about 500 copies in hardcover, sold no copies in paperback since there was no paperback edition and hasn’t been off my shelf in 15 years. Shortly, speedily, it will go back on my shelf.

That anthology was reviewed in a defunct literary journal by a novelist of minor reputation and high recrimination who mentioned none of the selections, spent 4,000 words talking (in the abstract) about the prevalence of voyeurism in early twentieth-century culture as capitalized upon by senior and junior Girodiaoux and sickeningly exhibited here. Not a review but a poisonous meditation.

“Don’t worry about it,” the publisher said, “don’t think about this twice, because of all the American literary crowd, the litterateurs in the fifties, sucking around the Rue de Whatever, he was the grubbiest, the silliest, the most desperate and the only one whose work I would not buy, I found him effete and senseless. He’s been waiting to get back at me for 18 years and oh that wife of his!” This gave me little comfort, not much did give me comfort in those difficult post-prandial years when I came to understand that being Olympia’s Best Writer, talisman of a disastrous hardcover program, was in effect to be Girodias’ Worst Writer.

“Why am I so self-destructive?” the publisher said to me in a somewhat different context months later when British lawsuits had resulted in his first lot of hardcovers being confiscated at the warehouse and burned at the instigation of a member of the House of Lords whose name had been appropriated for spite as the title of a Traveller’s Companion, “why do I do this to myself over and over again?”

“Well, Maurice,” I could have said but did not, having even less wit than comprehension in that aftermath of the Summer of Love, “maybe it’s because you turned 50 on April 12, 1969 and men like you, men who have always formed themselves in terms of the debonair, the practical, the outrageous have a lot of trouble at 50 and feel at least that they are going to destruction on their own terms.” I could have said that, I could have added that Maurice was exactly 15 years younger than my mother and equally capable of finding guilt in those he implicated, but I did not. One has to get fairly close or closer yet to 50 oneself to be offered such perceptions by which time, usually, it is too late to do much about them.

My mother, speaking of her, was not terribly pleased with her son, so recently the Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow but now a hounded and increasingly desperate novelist manqué in search of a real market becoming Girodias’ Best Writer. The fact that I was also writing science fiction and selling some of it to strange-looking magazines with androids on the cover was—for her at least—no particular compensation. She was however somewhat mollified to note in the Christopher Lehmann-Haupt April 7, 1969 review of the two novels that they were defined as “a kind of anti-pornography”; this enable her to seize the day with her friends.

“The problem with your pornography,” an editor at Olympia named Uta West said to me in relation to the problem, “The only real trouble is that you write about sex the way that 95% of us experience it 95% of the time but it’s hard to get us to pay to read about it, you know?”

Still, like the Common Man in Marat/Sade, I had plans. If my sex scenes were dreamy, my intentions and style were, I trusted, not: I wrote the opening chapters of Oracle of theThousand Hands in a dead fever of February 1968, trying to figure out what might impress Nabokov’s publisher’s first reader and came up with a crazed pastiche of Pale Fire and Despair, the memoirs of a compulsive masturbator narrated in the alternating first- and third-person with quarts of semen spewed over electric fences, cattle mooing nostalgically in the background at the instant of self-defloration and ultimately a powerful shock from that electrified fence at the moment of final consummation. Girodias or someone there noticed what was going on, he summoned me to Gramercy Park (the Press and four employees worked out of his apartment, skirting the mattress on the floor as they sidled from room to room) and offered me a $2,000 contract.

“Well,” he muttered six weeks later when on an impossible June afternoon I came to hear the verdict on the completed novel mailed oh-so-recently, “it’s not your number one best seller but it’s amusing and interesting isn’t it?” Amusing and interesting were his favorite attitudes and everyone in the ideal Traveller’s Companion or Ophelia Press book would climax with a smile and a sigh. “I have to accept this, I guess, but now you do something for me. I have a novel I want you to do as a special project for me.”

That novel I soon discovered had been offered to and declined as an idea by every writer who had come trooping around or past the mattress: a young man with an empty life and much seminal backup is obsessed with film, watches five films a day, falls vividly in love with actresses, has an imagination so passionate that he can place himself on the screen with and make passionate love to Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia and the ever-popular “others.” “Use their real names,” he said, “I want scandale; without scandal this cannot work.”

“What becomes of the boy?”

“I don’t know. Who the hell cares? Maybe he becomes Joe E. Levine, what’s the difference. I’ll give you a clause protecting you against lawsuits. I love lawsuits,” he reminded me.

I delivered Screen in two weeks, taking Martin Miller, a Department of Welfare investigator in Brooklyn (as I had been) through a series of Bijoux and into and out of the genitalia of some actresses, also to Aqueduct race track in the borough of Queens and also through more desultory (if unrequested) collision with a fellow social worker whom he did not love (roman a clef here) but who intimated his obsession and pointed out that Martin had better get wise, “because I’m for real. I’m also your last chance.” (No, she wasn’t.) I hold no great brief for the novel but doubt if any better has been written faster, pace A.J. Liebling, and it contains for whatever it is worth probably the best sentence I ever wrote and maybe the best sentence published in a novel of lust in 1969; the last sentence of that novel as Martin Miller having walked away from the suddenly desperate colleague, pounds it into a star (and pounds it an pounds it and pounds it, “her body a map, her hands a road to carry me home”):

It is strange and complex, complex and strange and my orgasm is like a giant bird torn wing to wing by rifle fire, falling, falling, in the hot drenched sun of that damned Southwestern city.

That sentence written (as were many of the sentences of that and Oracle) with two-year-old Stephanie Jill burbling and cooing and muttering and bounding and volubly discussing matters of climate at her father’s knee didn’t have in draft the word “damned,” something seemed to be lacking and in the only revision in either of those two novels, the word was put in for rhythm and emphasis and all of it placed on or next to the Girodias mattress shortly after Independence Day.

“You son of a bitch,” he pointed out, “you made me crazy, do you know that? I ask you this time for pornography, a simple work of pornography, give you a plot and everything and ask you to keep it simple and low-class, I publish one book for you and ask you to this for me and what do you do? You give me 40 pages which are beautiful, just beautiful, you even know the color of that one’s bush how you tell that? And then what do you give me? You give me horse-racing, you give me existentialism, you give me despair! You give me terrible anxiety and depression! You give me pain and thwarted desire! This book will sell 400 copies, I have to publish it hardcover too because in paperback everyone will throw it away; I have to publish it because it is a masterpiece, but you destroy me, do you understand?”

It sold 350 copies in hardcover, actually, making it the leader of the second “new hardcore line” (Oracle sold half that and a novel by Alex Austin, Eleanore, sold according to statement 52 copies) but none of this was my fault, was it? I mean it was indeed (Lehmann-Haupt backed me up on this) anti-pornography for the coming age of Nixon and under the circumstances, the time could have been right.

But times were never right for the doomed Girodias. They had been laying for him in the American press for years and years, he said, because he had embarrassed them by putting into print consistently masterpieces that the American publishing establishment had been too cowardly or stupid to undertake: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and the Nexus trilogy and Candy and Lolita and virtually everything else that Barney Rosset or Walter Minton had taken on after he had broken ground. (And because the books were published in English outside the borders of the United States, they were by old copyright law in public domain in this country.) Perhaps he was right; it is not difficult—I can see this as clearly at 27 as I would be unable to admit it at 50—to do justly, to do mercy, to walk humbly and to be buried anyway.

Besides, Maurice had said, “written pornography, it is finished. Finished! Visuals are coming, visuals are where it will be, that and high-toned classy books which hairdressers can hand their clientele. Softcore for the ladies, yes, but nothing for the gentlemen. Our basic audience would rather stare than read which they can hardly manage anyway. The ladies on the other hand will call it romance. It will be finished by 1972, just two years from now.”