The Olympia Reader E-Book

Edited By Maurice Girodias

• Herausgeber: Olympia Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Legendary anthology, featuring works published in Paris from 1949-1964, from authors too bold and daring for North America and the United Kingdom. Thankfully, we don't have to worry about that kind of censorship anymore.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

SELECTIONS FROM THE TRAVELLER’S COMPANION SERIES

INTRODUCTION

The World Of Sex

HENRY MILLER

I Hear Voices

Paul Ableman

The Adventures of Father Silas

BEAUREGARD DE FARNIENTE

Roman Orgy

MARCUS VAN HELLER

Stradella

JAMES SHERWOOD

The Ginger Man

J.P. DONLEAVY

The Black Book

LAWRENCE DURRELL

The Pleasure Thieves

HARRIET DAIMLER

HENRY CRANNACH

The Young and The Evil

CHARLES HENRI FORD & PARKER TYLER

Watt

SAMUEL BECKETT

Plexus

Fanny Hill

JOHN CLELAND

Story of O

PAULINE REAGE

Kama Houri

ATAULLAH MARDAAN

The Thief’s Journal

JEAN GENET

My Life and Loves

FRANK HARRIS

Candy

MAXWELL KENTON

The Enormous Bed

HENRY JONES

The Gaudy Image

WILLIAM TALSMAN

Justine

MARQUIS DE SADE

Naked Lunch

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS

Young Adam

FRANCES LENGEL

Teleny

AUTHORSHIP

Steiner’s Tour

PHILIP O’CONNOR

Under the Hill

AUBREY BEARDSLEY

JOHN GLASSCO

The White Paper

AUTHORSHIP

A Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita

Quiet Days in Clichy

Sin for Breakfast

HAMILTON DRAKE

The Ticket That Exploded

Houses of Joy

WU WU MENG

Pinktoes

CHESTER HIMES

the soft machine

Sexus

Zazie Dans Le Metro

RAYMOND QUENEAU

Madame Edwarda

GEORGES BATAILLE

Our Lady of the Flowers

The Woman Thing

The American Express

GREGORY CORSO

The Black Diaries of Roger Casement

SELECTIONS FROM THE TRAVELLER’S COMPANION SERIES

“THE OLYMPIA PRESS!”

The very name raises eyebrows, invites controversy, and whets the appetite for the bizarre... the bold... the unique literary experience.

In only twelve years this small, daring publishing house in Paris issued more books in English which are damned, banned, praised and devoured than most publishers in a lifetime.

Maurice Girodias, founder and moving spirit of THE OLYMPIA PRESS, discovered and brought to the attention of the English-speaking world an astonishing number of important writers... Miller, Durrell, Beckett, Genet, Sade, Burroughs, and a succession of brilliant literary gems... Candy, Lolita, Pinktoes, et al.

In this illustrated anthology, editor Girodias has gathered a ripe harvest of Olympians — the great and near great from the rich list of THE OLYMPIA PRESS — with special emphasis in this collection on material that has never before appeared in this country. In addition, he has written an informative and charming history of his publishing house together with notes about the now-famous writers whom he first knew and published in Paris.

EDITED BY MAURICE GIRODIAS

Illustrated by Norman Rubington

The World of Sex copyright © 1959 by Henry Miller, copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.; Stradella copyright © 1962 by James Sherwood; The Ginger Man copyright © 1958 by Ivan Obolensky, Inc. and reprinted by permission; The Black Book copyright © 1938 and 1959 by Lawrence Durrell and reprinted by permission of E, P. Dutton and Co., Inc.; The Young and Evil copyright © 1933 and 1960 by Henri Ford and Parker Tyler; Plexus copyright © 1953 by The Olympia Press, copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.; Story of O copyright © 1954 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, copyright © 1963 by Evergreen Review, Inc.; The Thief’s Journal copyright © 1949 by Librairie Gallimard, copyright © 1964 by Grove Press, Inc.; Candy copyright © 1958 by The Olympia Press, copyright © 1958, 1959, 1962, 1964 by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg and reprinted by permission; The Gaudy Image copyright © 1958 by William Talsman; Justine copyright © 1965 by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse; Naked Lunch copyright © 1959, The Ticket That Exploded copyright © 1962, The Soft Machine copyright © 1961 by William Burroughs; Fuzz Against Junk copyright © 1959 by Akbar del Piombo; Steiner’s Tour copyright © 1960 by Philip O’Connor; Under the Hill copyright © 1959 by John Glassco; Quiet Days in Clichy copyright © 1956 by The Olympia Press, copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.; Pinktoes copyright © 1961 by Chester Himes, copyright © 1965 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons and reprinted by permission; Sexus copyright © 1962 by The Olympia Press, copyright © 1965 by Grove Press, Inc.; Zazie copyright © 1959 by Raymond Queneau; Madame Edwarda copyright © 1956 by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, copyright © 1964 by Evergreen Review, Inc.; Our Lady of the Flowers copyright © 1951 by Librairie Gallimard, copyright © 1963 by Grove Press, Inc.; The American Express copyright © 1961 by Gregory Corso; The Black Diaries of Roger Casement copyright © 1959 by The Olympia Press and Maurice Girodias. Copyright © by The Olympia Press: I Hear Voices, 1958; The Adventures of Father Silas, 1958; Roman Orgy, 1956; The Pleasure Thieves, 1958; Watt, 1953; Kama Houri, 1956, My Life and Loves, 1958, 1959; The Enormous Bed, 1955; Young Adam, 1954; Teleny, 1958; The White Paper, 1956; Sin for Breakfast, 1957; Houses of Joy, 1958; The Woman Thing, 1957. Fanny Hill was first published in the United States by G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

TRANSLATORS

Story of O translated by Sabine Destre

The Thief’s Journal and Our Lady of the Flowers translated by Bernard Frechtman

Justine translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse

Madame Edwarda translated by Austryn Wainhouse

Zazie translated by Akbar del Piombo and Eric Kahane

INTRODUCTION

Maurice Girodias

I founded The Olympia Press in Paris, in the spring of 1953. It was a shoestring operation if ever there was one. It was conceived as a desperate move on my part to escape complete social and economic annihilation. During the three preceding years I had led an uncertain, inactive life, trying to absorb the enormous blow I had suffered when my previous publishing business had collapsed — or rather had been taken away from me — in 1950. I had lived in near-complete bumhood during that period of obscurity, dragging myself from miserable room to even more miserable room, spending what little energy I still had devising extravagant and pitiful stratagems to borrow or otherwise procure money. My only companion was my brother Eric, who was in nearly as bad shape as I; but he was 27 and I was 34, and I felt utterly senile. He, at least, was still man enough to cook pathetic little meals on an alcohol lamp, which helped us survive from day to day. Ugh.

Publishing books in English, in Paris, books that would sell easily because they would belong to the “not to be sold in U.S.A. & U.K.” category, appeared at one point to be the only possible way for me to make money and build up a new publishing business in spite of my lack of capital. My father, Jack Kahane, had, before me, founded his own publishing house, The Obelisk Press, in the ‘thirties. I was still in touch and on very friendly terms with Henry Miller, who had been his major literary discovery. Henry would certainly help by giving me one of his unpublished manuscripts to start me off; only a few years before, in 1947, I had put up a big fight on his behalf. My other chance was that I had made friends with a couple of printers who said they would extend some credit on the first books I would give them to print.

But if I am to tell here, however briefly, the story of The Olympia Press, I must begin at the beginning, that is, with my father’s experience in the ‘thirties.

My father was born in 1888, a Jewish gentleman from Manchester, one of three brothers who came after a group of nine sisters. His family was wealthy but the early demise of my grandfather soon caused the tribal fortunes to be dissipated. My father was thus successively a silver-spoonfed infant and a very poor orphan; he did not go to the University but nevertheless he developed a great taste for the theater, writing, and music, which arts he practiced with great amateur enthusiasm. He made quite a bit of money; became an attraction to the ladies and an expert in elegant living, being the owner of seven bulldogs and fifty pairs of trousers. The outbreak of the first World War coincided with a great emotional catastrophe in his life. He gave away everything he owned and volunteered to die; but instead of quickly dying he discovered through a telescope, from the top of the gray-white cliffs surrounding Marseilles, a new facet of the life he was not yet to quit — a bubbly, charming, piquant young French bourgeoisie, Marcelle Eugenie Girodias, whom he was to marry three years later, in 1917, after having been through the hell of Ypres and a good bit of what followed.

In the spring of 1919 I awoke to the light of life under the sign of Aries with Leo in the ascendant, the son of that Entente Cordiale couple, in the mellow comfort of my French grandparents’ apartment on Avenue du Bois, now the Avenue Foch. My first years were thus spent in the quiet luxury of drapes and lace, velvet and gilt, Louis XV furniture and Chinese art, rich smells of Sunday roasts and the whiffs of lavender coming from the linen closet. Far below, under the tall trees bordering the Avenue, red-faced nurses from Auvergne or Brittany were pushing baby carriages filled with the hope of France, and eyeing gauche soldiers from under their bonnets; immaculate horsemen were torturing their mounts for the benefit of a pale lady, mysterious in the shade of a frilly parasol.

German gases had ruined my father’s lungs and he fell very ill shortly after I was born. Tuberculosis, in those days, was quite as frightening and deadly as cancer today; the only known cure was crisp mountain air, and it was only by a miracle, and thanks to my mother’s care, that he pulled through. But after that my father’s protracted convalescence forced us to live in the country, and he spent the postwar years shut off from all practical activities. As a reaction, no doubt, he started to write light novels, usually quite funny, with such titles as To Laugh and Grow Rich, Suzy Falls Off, etc. His publisher, Grant Richards, went bankrupt. My father had invested some capital in a small French publishing venture and that went down too. Then came the depression of the ‘thirties in France and my grandfather in turn quickly lost all his money, of which he had had quite a lot. The home of my childhood, the poetic Chateau-du-Fond-des-Forets, with all its memories, had to be sold for a small portion of what it was worth, both in dreams and in money, to a French family of primitive nouveaux riches who started growing potatoes on the well-manicured lawns. The house was fortunately destroyed by fire a few years later.

My father was more or less on his feet by then. We settled in Paris. He decided to publish his own books and went into partnership with a French printer. The first book he brought out under the imprint of The Obelisk Press was one of his own, Daffodil, a refreshing, neatly recounted tale about a young lady losing her virtue by stages, which sold well and regularly for years to eager, naive tourists.

England was still so completely Victorian in those years, so strangely prudish. It seems hard to understand how a whole generation of men who had been through the toughest of wars — and won — could be reduced to the level of schoolchildren, and be told what to read and what not to read by a conglomerate of spinsters and bowler-hatted policemen. My father had emigrated for good to a country where freedom was not a vain word, and I wonder what would have happened to him if he had ever returned to England to live. He was revolted by the near-hysterical conformism of that society which covered with abuse a man like D. H. Lawrence, and let him be tormented and quartered by the hounds of decency.

The little my father had ever said on the subject had made a deep impression on me. And I was awakening to the social reality of that time of the greatest of all horrors: the Spanish Civil War. I saw freedom in agony, I saw the victory of the mercenary legions from Morocco over that grandiose, improvised, ill-fitted Republic. I understood how the forces of reaction at work in Spain were the same as those which had caused Joyce to be morally exiled from England; the same on which the German and Italian dictators were building their black and brown empires. Since my earliest childhood, the notion of individual freedom had been deeply rooted in me. Everything I saw or felt as I was growing up turned into a passion — a passion I shared with millions of contemporary Frenchmen, although my own brand drew me toward a form of individualistic anarchy while the others usually went toward practical communism or socialism. I resented and hated l’esprit bourgeois in all its manifestations, but I also distrusted all forms of human association.

I had, by inclination, elected Proust as my literary god, but Celine’s Voyage au bout de la nuit came as a revelation of a totally different order. Soon after came another similar shock when I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which had been published by my father for the first time in 1934.

Miller had been my father’s pet genius during the brief career of The Obelisk Press. My father had also published young Lawrence Durrell’s first novel, The Black Book, and others by Anais Nin, Cyril Connolly, a fragment of Joyce’s Work In Progress (Haveth Childers Everywhere, printed in a limited edition) and his Pomes Penyeach; also, not to be forgotten, that cosmic monument of sexo-journalistico-literary bombast, Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves.

War was imminent. My father hurriedly finished the manuscript of his Memoirs of a Booklegger, and was discovered dead on the morning of September 3, 1939, stricken by the sheer horror of it all. I was twenty. I found myself in the situation of a middle-aged male with a sizable family to feed, but I had strictly no experience of any sort, and, in the guise of capital, all I had was a collection of bar debts left by my father.

After a number of very disconcerting adventures which happened in quick succession during those months when our Gallic civilization was so easily falling apart I started a publishing firm of my own, Les Editions du Chene, which specialized in art books and was quite successful from the start in spite of my complete ignorance of all technical, commercial, or financial matters; in spite, also, of the fact that my initial capital consisted merely of one ton of canned celery, acquired on the black market but which proved to be entirely worthless.

After the war, I extended my activities toward literature and I revived my father’s Obelisk Press; we did new printings of Henry Miller’s books, which sold in immense quantities as compared to the few hundred copies sold before the war, and became part of the G.I.’s European education. We compiled a new version of The Memoirs of Fanny Hill from the two earliest known editions of that archetype of libertine literature, and sold, I believe, close to one hundred thousand copies. I was also still very active as a French-language publisher: I put out a series of Russian classics in French; launched a few good novels, among them Nikos Kazantzakis’ Alexis Zorba (his first published work, I believe), side by side with political essays, books on art and archeology, a literary-philosophical review, edited by Georges Bataille and titled Critique (which later was taken up by other publishers and, much to my surprise, has survived through the years), and a variety of other publications including a journal devoted to the art of knitting. All this was done in my new headquarters which consisted of a small palace situated at 4, rue de la Paix.

I had never had any really brutal contacts with the law until the two legal battles which took place in those postwar years. One of them was when I was sued for libel jointly with Yves Farge, a prominent French Resistance figure who was the author of a pamphlet I had published in which he exposed the collusion between certain big business interests and the French administration. Our opponent was one of the bosses of the Socialist Party which was in power at the time: Felix Gouin. He had also been the first President of the Gaullist Republic in Algiers, in 1942, and carried much ponderous weight. The trial lasted close to one whole week, with several members of the government appearing in court as witnesses for the prosecution; it was quite an exciting experience. Finally, we won the case against our formidable adversary, which fact should certainly be held to the credit of the French judicial system of the time.

The second scuffle has been known as I’affaire Miller, the first case of literary censorship to occur in France in many years. It took place shortly after the war, in 1946 and 1947, when I first released a French translation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn, shortly after which Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Black Spring were printed in French by two other firms. I was prosecuted together with the two other publishers under the 1939 law on obscene publications: this was not only the first application of that law, it was also the first case of this nature to be tried publicly since the famous prosecutions against Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal one half-century before, which had left such an uncomfortable impression in the memory of all French magistrates.

France had been considered the land of freedom, of intellectual and political liberties, ever since the eighteenth century, ever since Diderot and Voltaire, ever since the rules and principles of modern democracy had been set up by the 1789 Revolution. There had been difficult moments, naturally, under the reigns of the two Napoleons, before and during the 1870 and 1914 wars, or during such crises as I’affaire Dreyfus. Conservatism, colonialism, racism, and religious intolerance are part of the make-up of the French bourgeois, who is just as bigoted, brainlessly selfish, and frightened as his counterparts in the other countries. But in France the liberal and progressive elements have, in the last two centuries, asserted a generally dominant influence on the political and intellectual life of the country. People really believed in the dogmas represented by such words as Freedom, Progress, and Democracy, which seemed as necessary to any Frenchman as food or air.

But in the last twenty years a sinister change has taken place. What looked like a perennial tradition has been dismantled in less than a generation; Freedom, Progress, and Democracy are now no more than quaint slogans from the past, which are only to show how naive and inefficiently romantic the prewar Frenchmen were.

Many believe that this change in a nation’s attitude has been brought about by the recent political upheavals. It seems to me that it works the other way around: the change of regime is but one consequence of a much deeper, subterranean alteration of the national psyche. The French bourgeoisie constitutes the backbone of the country; they were scared nearly out of their wits by the socialist and communist offensive which developed in the country at the time of the Spanish Civil War; they were mortally humiliated by the German victory a few years later; and now they are reacting convulsively against their earlier fears and humiliations. Modern bourgeois extremism is being built up against bourgeois liberalism of old. France is now entirely dominated, owned, manipulated, exploited, milked, policed by les bourgeois for les bourgeois. The victims of a strange osmosis, the French Communists themselves have turned bourgeois, and, quite naturally, they are even more intolerably bourgeois than the bourgeois-born bourgeois. The whole country reeks of ennui, of priggish virtues; everywhere you come up against Nietzschean clowns, dyspeptic Machiavellis. All the fun and gaiety have left this nation; the Algerian war chased the last colonies of young artists and loafers away from Paris; in this hygienic-looking city, whitewashed by governmental decree, the spirit is dead, the secular feast is ended...

The prosecution against the Miller books was the first sign of the evolution which was to culminate, after some fifteen years, in the present unhappy state of things. However, at that time, the French intellectuals had just regained their precious freedom after four years of German occupation and everybody protested very loudly. Committees were formed for the defense of Henry Miller and, through him, of freedom of expression. It seemed to work, at first. After two years of uncertain litigation, the case was dropped by the Ministry of Justice. I took this as a victory; and I did not know how wrong such a view would prove to be in the long run.

But I had other worries. My affairs were in bad shape, as I had expanded my business too quickly without paving the least attention to the notion of money — a habit rather deeply ingrained in me, I confess. I was forced to make an agreement with my chief creditors, which now appears to me as a masochistic trap I had laid for myself: I slaved for three years on the tiniest salary in order to pay my debts, and I had nearly accomplished that noble aim when one of the creditors conspired to get control of my firm — and then sold his ill-acquired interest to a big publisher. I was expelled from my own company, unable to understand or resist that piece of classical capitalistic maneuvering.

It was a cruel lesson, as Les Editions du Chine had become my flesh and blood, and losing it made me feel like King Saul must have felt being suddenly deprived of all his wives. I tried to put up a fight to recover my property and wasted in the attempt one whole year, as well as money I did not possess, and what little energy I still had in me. As to my adversaries, once they had obtained control of my publishing house, they found that they had acquired, dishonorably and at an enormous expense, a handful of sand: Les Editions du Chene was left to vegetate and slowly perish.

This long digression has brought me back to the beginning of my story. Perhaps it will make the founding of The Olympia Press comprehensible: I would never have launched into that next phase of my publishing career had I not acquired over the years the urge to attack the Universal Establishment with all the means at my disposal. To fight one head of the beast rather than another had no real importance; to fight French intolerance or Anglo-American moral conventions really came to the same thing.

In the spring of 1953, then, The Olympia Press was founded, a shoestring operation par excellence.

The offices consisted of a small room at the back of a rundown bookstore at 13 rue Jacob, and the staff of myself and a part-time secretary: tiny, gray-eyed Lisa.

The first manuscript I acquired was Henry Miller’s Plexus; this came out in a two-volume numbered edition together with Sade’s Bedroom Philosophers (the first and so far only English translation of La Philosophie dans le boudoir), Apollinaire’s Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, and Georges Bataille’s Tale of Satisfied Desire (in French: L’Histoire de l’oeil — published anonymously under the sweet pseudonym of Pierre Angelique).

Apollinaire’s famous exercise in the eroticism of adolescence had been translated by Dick Seaver, and Austryn Wainhouse had done the English version of both the Bataille and Sade books. They both were members of a very colorful group whose nucleus was an English-language, Paris-based literary quarterly called Merlin, which had been founded in the spring of 1952. The erratic pope of that pagan church was Alex Trocchi, of Italo-Scottish extraction, Alex of the somber, fiery brow — who turned himself into a literary lady of little virtue by the name of Frances Lengel and wrote a novel titled Helen and Desire which was to become the model of a new brand of modern erotic writing. Pale, ill-fed, ill-garbed Christopher Logue was tortured by many poetic ambitions of high stature, but nevertheless allowed himself to write a pre-Jamesbondian novel entitled Lust; and to give him encouragement I bestowed on him the pseudonym of Count Palmiro Vicarion. Patrick Bowles, Philip Oxman, Baird Bryant, Alfred Chester, John Stevenson and John Coleman were all more or less directly connected with Merlin, as was also, at a prudent distance, George Plimpton. Iris Owens became an important addition, and Marilyn Meeske. Some of them contributed to The Olympia Press novels which were usually violently extravagant and outrageous.

I usually printed five thousand copies of each book, and paid a flat fee for the manuscript which, although modest, formed the substance of many an expatriate budget. My publishing technique was simple in the extreme, at least in the first years: when I had completely run out of money I wrote blurbs for imaginary books, invented sonorous titles and funny pen names (Marcus van Heller, Akbar del Piombo, Miles Underwood, Carmencita de las Lunas, etc.) and then printed a list which was sent out to our clientele of book-lovers, tempting them with such titles as White Thighs, The Chariot of Flesh, The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, With Open Mouth, etc. They immediately responded with orders and money, thanks to which we were again able to eat, drink, write, and print. I could again advance money to my authors, and they hastened to turn in manuscripts which more or less fitted the descriptions.

It was great fun. The Anglo-Saxon world was being attacked, invaded, infiltrated, out-flanked, and conquered by this erotic armada. The Dickensian schoolmasters of England were convulsed with helpless rage, the judges’ hair was standing on end beneath their wigs, black market prices in New York and London for our green-backed products were soaring to fantastic heights.

Enough has been said about the influence of the printed word; but never enough about the liberating influence of the printed four-letter word. Those literary orgies, those torrents of systematic bad taste were quite certainly instrumental in clearing the air, and clearing out a few mental cobwebs. The imbecile belief that sex is sin, that physical pleasure is unclean, that erotic thoughts are immoral, that abstinence is the proper rule which may be broken at rare intervals, but merely for the sake of procreation — all those sick Judeo-Christian ideas were exposed for what they are. I insist that no little boys were ever corrupted by bad books of mine, and I do hope that they enjoyed them to the full, and gleaned at least a Utile useful knowledge therefrom; nobody seems to have died of shock, no reader was ever reported killed by a four-letter word.

After a few years the black market prices began to collapse. The first shock was over, and formerly obsessed readers had become used to the notion that their clandestine world was open to all, that the secret was a fake, that nothing was reprehensible or forbidden. Once a Soho bookseller wrote to me angrily after I had published Lolita, and fulminated because I was ruining my business (and his) printing such wishy-washy stuff, and that it was not worth the risk of smuggling it through customs. I answered that my books were quite as dirty as ever, and that I was happy to have helped cure a whole nation of its immature delusions.

The d.b.’s (short for “dirty books”) were published in the green paperback volumes that constitute The Traveller’s Companion Series, side by side with more respectable items. That confusion was deliberate, as it made it easy to sell the higher class of literature: the d.b.’s fans were as fascinated by the ugly plain green covers as the addict by the white powder, however deceptive both may prove to be. The confusion was also meant to keep the police at bay, as I had soon become the object of their special attention.

Samuel Beckett, with Henry Miller, was the first contemporary writer of importance to appear in our earliest catalogue. Merlin, whose editors — Trocchi, Seaver, and Wainhouse — were Beckett’s enthusiastic supporters in the early ‘fifties, had published his work extensively in their magazine, and had negotiated a contract with him to publish several of his novels and thus begin their own book-publishing enterprise in Paris. But eventually Collection Merlin — as the publishing house was to be called — joined forces with Olympia, and the first work issued under this arrangement was the last novel Beckett wrote directly in English, Watt. Soon afterward Beckett himself was introduced to the backroom of the rue Jacob.

Watt is the archetype of the Beckettian hero, the servant-hobo who moves in a clockwork world of repetition, and attends to the enigmatic needs of a never-present master; the creatures in Waiting for Godot, Molloy, Malone Dies and their likes all derive from the same mold. But that earlier novel was written directly in English and it seems to me that it was never surpassed by the later novels or plays, nearly all of which were written in French (and later translated into English by Beckett himself, once in collaboration with Patrick Bowles). In Watt the dialogues are sumptuous, and the Beckettian approach to the Beckettian reality is most impressive.

Bernard Frechtman had privately published his translation of Jean Genet’s novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, and offered it to me to take on, which I gladly did, and we followed that with The Thief’s Journal. Those first years were full of excitement and great discoveries: the word went around in Britain and in America that there was a new English-language publisher in Paris who seemed ready to publish everything that was unconventional and likely to be outlawed by the archaic censorship rules which were still being enforced at the time (the early ‘fifties) in England and in the United States, and I was flooded with daily waves of unpublished literature.

Thus I received in the spring of 1955 two manuscripts, one by a young unknown American writer living in England by the name of J. P. Donleavy, who had written a rather unruly but scintillating novel: The Ginger Man; the other by a Russian-born professor from Cornell University, Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita. I was moving from wonder to wonder.

Donleavy accepted with good grace our remarks concerning the rambling, redundant form of his book and Austryn’s wife, Muffie Wainhouse, did a great job of editing it. Nabokov also complied — to a certain extent — with our suggestion that he suppress a number of French phrasings and locutions which endangered the delicate balance of his style. In both cases I think we acted efficiently and intelligently, as very few legitimate publishers would have done, and I was repaid in each instance by the blackest ingratitude. As one consequence of this, Vladimir Nabokov has refused to let us publish any part of Lolita in this volume, which is infinitely regrettable; and thus, in the space formerly reserved for that excerpt, the reader will find the gloomy recital of my encounter with a man of near-genius: Vladimir Nabokov.

Mason Hoffenberg was always trying to convince me that his manuscripts were glorious little achievements and that they were thick enough to be converted into books; and I was quite relieved when, one day, he brought over his friend, Terry Southern, who was then living in Switzerland, with a proposal that they write a book together for The Traveller’s Companion Series. I had never met Terry before, although I had heard about his wild sense of humor, and I sensed that working with Terry would help bring out the constructive aspects of Mason’s submerged talents. We agreed that the story should be about sweet, blue-eyed, curvaceous Candy, an entirely comestible product of the New World Establishment, and about her delightful discovery of our inconsequential world. The deal was set — and by the by it was to lead to one of the most extravagant adventures in publishing, an adventure which is reaching its unforetold climax in the United States at the time of this writing.

One rainy day — in the spring of 1957, I believe — Allen Ginsberg brought in a rather bulky, pasted-up manuscript and declared that it was a work of genius such I could never hope to find again in my publisher’s life. William Burroughs, the author, was then living in Tangiers and this first full-length book of his was made of jigsaw illuminations harvested in the course of fifteen years of drug addiction. It was a brilliant, completely iconoclastic work, but I gave it back to Allen after a few days of reflection with the philistine remark that the material was wonderful but it would be inaccessible to the lay reader due to the deliberate lack of any rule whatsoever in the organization of the text. Allen left me with an ugly expression on his face — but came back one year later with the same manuscript, allegedly redone. I read it again and immediately decided to print it; the first edition appeared in 1959.

I had moved from the rue Jacob to vaster precincts in a tumble-down house at 8 rue de Nesle, which I shared with Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a young publisher who had published, among other things, the complete works of Sade in French — a very courageous undertaking at the time. One day Jean-Jacques handed me a manuscript that Jean Paulhan (the gray eminence of the famous firm of Gallimard) had recommended to him. He was not certain he wanted to publish the book for all kinds of reasons, among them safety, and wanted me to read it. The author was anonymous — allegedly a woman — and Paulhan had refused to reveal her, or his, identity. The book was quite amazing: the first erotic novel conceived as such, and written with a care, an intelligence and restraint which are not usually associated with under-the-counter literature. I persuaded Jean-Jacques to print it in French, and I simultaneously released an English version: thus began the career of Histoire d’O.

We had by then developed a certain style in publishing which was leading in all kinds of interesting directions. The circumstances were favorable, although the group which had developed around Merlin a few years before had gradually disintegrated. But Paris was still filled with the remains of the postwar generation of expatriates, who often combined a good classical background with a great desire to do away once and for all with the gray shades of the past.

Writing d.b.’s was generally considered a useful professional exercise, as well as a necessary participation in the common fight against the Square World — an act of duty. What the Square World exactly was, nobody could have explained with any precision: but the notion was very strong, indeed; and it was not the usual routine of a new generation picking a quarrel with the old, it was a much stronger and deeper protest; not a protest against war or hunger, or against the bomb, but, beyond that, a protest against the mental weakness, the poverty of spirit, and the general lack of genius and generosity of a rich and sclerotic society. The colorful banner of pornography was as good as any other to rally the rebels: the more ludicrous the form of the revolt, the better it was, as the revolt was primarily against ordinary logic, and ordinary good taste, and restraint and current morals.

The contributors to The Olympia Press usually were genuine writers and even the most one-sided and single-minded creations of that time often reveal attractive talents. Harriet Daimler’s books are obviously the work of a very gifted novelist — and it is quite possible that the person behind that pseudonym would never have had a book published had it not been for the facilities offered by Olympia’s specialty of d.b.’s. Akbar del Piombo (in real life an American painter long established in Paris) wrote extravagant masterpieces of burlesque humor which earned themselves quite a large underground reputation. Chester Himes (Pinktoes) and Jock Carroll (Bottoms Up, recently republished in New York as The Sky Photographer) both contributed novels which used humor to dismantle certain myths of the time. But I mention those names merely as examples, and I hope that the reader will find in the selection contained between these covers many other enjoyable authors — including those whose works did not contain any sort of sexual provocations. I am thinking now of writers such as Philip O’Connor, and, more particularly, Paul Ableman, whose novel (I Hear Voices) is perhaps the one which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.

But as we went along, a rather ominous situation developed which was to alter the course of Olympia’s evolution. From 1956 onward, French censorship gradually became more inquisitive and obnoxious. On principle my publications should have been ignored by the French censors as they were all printed in English and obviously not meant for local consumption. But the fact that my business appeared to be flourishing certainly gave some wrong ideas to certain members of the police.

One day a police inspector of the Vice Squad (romantically known as La Brigade Mondaine: The Worldly Brigade) visited me; he wanted some reading copies of a number of books listed in our latest catalogue. I obliged. His allusions and general attitude were rather disquieting, and I asked a friend of mine, who knew the fellow well, to sound him out. The policeman made no difficulty in explaining that the British government had requested information about The Olympia Press, and that it was his job to build up a file on us. Then he changed the subject and said that he had just had a car accident, and that it would cost him a goodly sum (which he quoted with precision) to have it repaired. My friend reported to me; I gave the matter careful consideration. Then I decided, for better or for worse, not to do anything, and to see what would happen.

A few weeks later things did start to happen: the twenty-five books the inspector had taken with him were banned by official decree signed by the Minister of the Interior. One of them was Lolita: subsequent inquiries revealed the fact that neither Lolita, nor for that matter any of the other books, had been read, or translated into French, or seriously examined in any manner before they were banned.

I immediately proceeded to sue the Minister of the Interior — and strangely enough, eighteen months later, I won my case at the Administrative Tribunal of Paris. I was very proud of my success but I should have known better: not to give bribes is one thing; but to win lawsuits against the police is a much more serious matter.

That victory was won in January, 1958. In May, the Fourth Republic fell and the new regime was installed under the guidance of General de Gaulle. The powers of the police were considerably reinforced, and the overall orientation of national policies reverted to the famed Petain-Vichy philosophy: Travail, Famille, Patrie. The Minister of the Interior appealed against the earlier judgment of the Administrative Tribunal, and I was ignominiously beaten when the case was re-tried by the Conseil d’Etat — France’s highest jurisdiction.

Thus the ban on Lolita was restored — only a few months before the book appeared in New York, obtaining an immediate success.

I had earned and learned my lesson, and yet when Lolita was released in Paris in a French version, published by Gallimard, I was unable to resist the temptation: I sued again. The Minister of the Interior who had banned the original English-language version of the book had not banned its French translation, presumably under the feeble excuse that the French publisher, Gallimard, was dangerously influential. However, there exists a principle in French judicial lore (which does nothing, after all, but reflect the basic principle of democracy) that all citizens are to be treated equally. Basing my plea on that sacred dogma, I sued the Minister of the Interior for damages on the grounds that I had been subjected to unfair treatment. I was soon called to the Ministry and offered a compromise: the Ministry offered to cancel the ban if I agreed to withdraw my plea. I agreed.

Things went from bad to worse after that. A few months later, my English version of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers was banned, although I had had it in print for many years, and in spite of the fact that the original French version had been on sale everywhere in France ever since the war. The mistake was even more ludicrous than in the case of Lolita, as Genet was a French writer of unquestionable importance whereas Nabokov was a foreign writer practically unknown in France at the time. I sued once more, confident that it would be an easy matter to win a real victory — or at least to reach a compromise as in the Lolita precedent. But I had not taken into account the rapid evolution of judicial mores under the regime of the Fifth Republic: what would have been so simple only two years before was now impossible, unthinkable. I lost my case, and the Minister of the Interior, this time, did not deem it necessary to propose any kind of compromise. I appealed, and lost again when the case was re-examined by the Conseil d’Etat. The Minister of the Interior, the Conseil’s judgment pronounced, has the absolute right to interpret the law itself as he wishes, and the Conseil has no power to question the Minister’s decisions. (A weird finding indeed, considering the fact that the function of the Conseil d’Etat is precisely to verify the legality of the government’s acts and decisions.)

Independently of those erratic bans, I was now being tried for every single book I printed (the offense being known as outrage aux bonnes moeurs par la voie du livre; O.B.M. for short on the judges’ files). I was tried for books which had been out of print for four or five years; I was even tried, in two or three instances, for books published by others. As the judges had practically no knowledge of English those trials often turned into entertaining vaudevilles.

My record, only recently, was pretty impressive: eighty years’ personal ban from all publishing activities, from four to six years unsuspended prison sentences, and some $80,000 in fines. Fortunately this was reduced to more reasonable proportions when my various cases were re-tried by the Appeals court a few weeks ago; but although I have practically ceased publishing new books in the past three years new cases keep cropping up which concern books I have nearly forgotten. For instance, I am now being indicted by yet another court for having published... Aubrey Beardsley’s sweetly decadent (but, alas, devastatingly innocent) Victorian tale, Under the Hill. My edition of the book, which is limited, numbered, and expensive, contains illustrations by Beardsley himself, and I cannot resist the pleasure of calling back to memory the recent vision of the magistrate (who, do I have to labor the point again, does not read English) poring over those images in furious, vein-bulging concentration, in the hope of discovering some half-hidden improper detail on which to rest his case. Alas, no peg for his hat was found, there was not an inch of obscene flesh to be clawed at in the Beardsleyan oceans of lace and frills; and yet the good man obviously suspected the existence of some esoteric meaning attached to those innocent illustrations; and he suspected that only I could have explained it to him. But he dared not ask; he just sat there and hated me for my unshared knowledge.

In those grandiose judicial comedies, common sense is seldom invoked, and the censorship laws in France have become so totalitarian and all-encompassing that it is quite useless to try to fight back with the traditional legal methods. Leo Matarasso, my dear, infinitely patient and cunning attorney, is only concerned by the psychological conduct of the ceremony, and he always spends the last minutes before each trial numbing my conscience with lengthy recommendations. We usually have a big meal before, with lots of wine to induce drowsiness and mollify my amour-propre. Then Leo drags me to court while entreating me, one last time, to be humble, to listen, to answer briefly and to the point, and not to look the fellows straight in the eye, etc., etc. Then the rigamarole starts once again, always the same: my ugly past; the horrible fact that I plain forgot to appear in court the last time I was summoned, and did not even excuse myself; the fact that I am a specialiste de ce genre d’affaires, a remark designed to indicate that the debates are once more to be perfunctory. It may go well if I manage to doze off a little in my standing position, but sometimes the attorney-general is too much, and then all goes wrong. The man insults me, calls me names, asks me with a sneer if I can read English and if I say yes, asks me if I am aware of the disgusting contents of the book — which he, himself, cannot read. It is difficult to control oneself in such emergencies, and I have to quickly choose between two solutions: either to burst out in Homeric laughter, or bawl back at the man as if I were taking him seriously. Instinct makes me opt for the latter solution, and venom is slung back and forth. From the corner of my eye, I see the unhappy grin on Leo’s face gradually disintegrating: he becomes smaller and smaller on his bench. The presiding judge, who had earlier proved unable to pronounce the title of the book, frowns at me with a terrible, ferocious look on his face; but at heart he is relaxed and content: everything is back to normal. And I think we are all finally pretty satisfied with each other’s performance, and it all ends up in an atmosphere of general goodwill, and with the fine feelings which warm the connoisseur’s heart for a job well done. And the huge sentences which are clamped down on me as a conclusion to these Alice in Wonderland exercises are made to appear as special distinctions reserved for the very few.

Many British and American writers have signed petitions in my favor, usually addressed to Andre Malraux as the Minister of Culture in the present French government. Those petitions are sometimes read in court but clearly the names of the signatories ring no literary bell: I thought once that the name of Bertrand Russell had elicited a glint of recognition in the eye of one of the Court’s officials, but I later found out that he had heard the name of Dr. Schweitzer instead.

As to Andre Malraux, who has been questioned publicly about my general status at an Anglo-American press luncheon, this is what he was recorded as saying:

“I do not find it is serious, after what has been said during the last hour, to raise the problem of Mr. Girodias. You tell me that I have been sent a petition. Very true! It was sent to me yesterday morning.

“Thirdly, you tell me: the Americans are concerned with freedom.

“The works, not the pornographic but the books of genius, which have been published by Mr. Girodias, were they published in the United States or in France? Joyce, is he to our credit or to yours?”

Interruption: “To both!”

Mr. Malraux: “Yes, but he was first published here. So, I find it excessive that France be presented in such a case, which is after all negligible, as a country which, in the name of good morals, opposes works that have been tolerated here for the last thirty years.

“On the other hand, judgment has been pronounced. There have been many others. There was also one against Baudelaire. If I may say so, there was one against myself. Well! Such is France that sometimes judgments like that are reversed!

“So, let us simply say this: it is not opportune to discuss the problem of Mr. Girodias here.

“Freedom, of which you spoke earlier, is a true problem which it is opportune to discuss here. Well! When we discuss what the attitude of France has been (and, mind you, I am not speaking of the Fifth Republic), the attitude of France on the freedom of spirit, of thought and of genius, insofar as English-language literature is concerned, in the name of so many, and first of all Joyce, I do not think that France has much to blush about.”

Whatever the exact meaning of those words, it seems that Mr. Malraux has received and at least partly digested the message that a change has taken place in our literary world, and that my own publishing firm has played a certain role in the promotion of freedom in literature. And such an admission on the part of a member of the French government is like sweet music.

But naturally that is not true of France herself, and Mr. Malraux is purposely vague on that issue. The astonishing, the incredible truth of the matter is that moral and artistic freedom has become quite suddenly a reality both in Britain and in the United States, while the very concept is being denied, denigrated, and officially ostracized in France. On both sides, centuries of traditions have been liquidated in the space of one generation.

In fact, it all happened in less than a generation, in only a very few years. The first significant step forward in America was the publication, by Putnam, in 1958, of Lolita, a book which had been turned down in fright and horror by several of the most representative publishers of the land no more than three or four years before. Lolita escaped from the censors unscathed on its own merits — and yet the theme of the book was hardly compatible with the Puritan way of life.

The rest of the story, as they say, is well known. On Lolita’s sweet heels followed in hot succession Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Our Lady of the Flowers (at the day of writing still banned in France in its English version), and finally Fanny Hill and Candy. Britain followed suit with one or two years’ interval for each book.

The first five books on the above list were all defensible on artistic grounds; but the last two dealt with the offensive subject of sex in such an open and unabashed manner that one would have expected a brutal reaction from the censors. In fact, very little happened, and this in itself is quite remarkable. The implication is that the old hypocritical idea that certain allegedly immoral books could be defended on the grounds of “literary merit” had been discarded by the courts — and therefore by public opinion.

The conclusion, therefore, is that our society (or at least the two major English-speaking countries) has slowly elaborated a new definition of freedom. Freedom must be total; to restrict it to literary or artistic expression is not enough. It must govern our lives, our attitudes, our mental outlook.

It may be expected, then, that we will soon move to the next level. Moral censorship was an inheritance from the past, deriving from centuries of domination by the Christian clergy. Now that it is practically over, we may expect literature to be transformed by the advent of freedom. Not freedom in its negative aspects, but as the means of exploring all the positive aspects of the human mind, which are all more or less related to, or generated by, sex.

I have supplied additional information about the authors and their work in notes appended to the selections.

Paris, February 1965

The World Of Sex

Henry Miller

Like every man, I am my own worst enemy. Unlike most men, however, I also know that I am my own savior. I know that freedom means responsibility. I know too how easily desire may be converted to deed. Even when I close my eyes I must be careful how I dream and of what, for now only the thinnest veil separates dream from reality.

How large or small a part sex plays in one’s life seems relatively unimportant. Some of the greatest achievements we know of have been accomplished by individuals who had little or no sex life. On the other hand, we know from the lives of certain artists — men of the first rank — that their imposing works would never have been produced had they not been immersed in sex. In the case of a certain few these periods of exceptional creativity coincided with extravagant sexual indulgence. Neither abstinence nor indulgence explains anything. In the realm of sex, as in other realms, we speak of a norm — but the normal accounts for nothing more than what is true, statistically, for the great mass of men and women. What may be normal, sane, healthful for the vast majority affords us no criterion of behavior where the exceptional individual is concerned. The man of genius, whether through his work or by personal example, seems ever to be blazing the truth that each one is a law unto himself, and that the way to fulfillment is through recognition and realization of the fact that we are each and all unique.

Our laws and customs relate to social life, our life in common, which is the lesser side of existence. Real life begins when we are alone, face to face with our unknown self. What happens when we come together is determined by our inner soliloquies. The crucial and truly pivotal events which mark our way are the fruits of silence and of solitude. We attribute much to chance meetings, refer to them as turning points in our life, but these encounters could never have occurred had we not made ourselves ready for them. If we possessed more awareness, these fortuitous encounters would yield still greater rewards. It is only at certain unpredictable times that we are fully attuned, fully expectant, and thus in a position to receive the favors of fortune. The man who is thoroughly awake knows that every “happening” is packed with significance. He knows that not only is his own life being altered but that eventually the entire world must be affected.