by Joshua Cohen
It was difficult to believe that this tearful boy sucking my penis was the same as the one who had raped Carla. In any case, I flung him away. He returned, and I pushed him again, harder than I intended. Coming back, he deliberately provoked me into hitting him, and he continued to do so. We both became a little wild, and I pounded him with all my strength. It was a while before I realized how much he was enjoying it. He moaned and sighed; his penis was in an enormous state of erection. I’d gone so far, I couldn’t stop, and I continued beating him, pinching him, tearing at him until he was bloody. With each wound I inflicted, his passion rose, and he rubbed against my body, giving it small wet kisses. He dropped into a heap at my feet, begging me to kick him, and I did, again and again, and each time he came back to stroke, lick, kiss my ankles, knees or thighs. Half-crazy I threw myself on him; his buttocks rose under me, and suddenly we were locked together. And while we rolled and swayed, I continued pounding him and pinching him as if this last horrible act must purge me of all the terrible degeneracy of the past two weeks. My member throbbed in and out of him, tearing at him, and finally I came.
“D” IS FOR DONLEAVY, J. P.
James Patrick Donleavy was born in 1926 to Irish immigrants in New York. Joining the U.S. Navy brought him to Europe. After WWII, Donleavy settled in Ireland and wrote. His first and best book, The Ginger Man, about the sexual exploits of Sebastian Dangerfield, was published by Olympia in 1955, but would bring down the press a decade later. Naïve Donleavy had expected his book to be published in the manner of Henry Miller’s, which is to say respectfully, as literature. However, Girodias decided to publish it as Volume 7 in the Traveller’s Companion series of raunchy sex books (Chester’s Chariot of Flesh was Volume 12 of the series, whose other titles included Rape, The Loins of Amon, The Libertine, and Tender Was My Flesh). Piqued, Donleavy made the cuts necessary to avoid prosecution under Britain’s obscenity laws and resold his book to a U.K. publisher in 1956, depriving Olympia of an audience for its edition. Adding to the lawsuits already proliferating, the expurgated version of The Ginger Man appeared in America in 1958. As the novel went on to sell tens of thousands of copies, Girodias felt that his press was due a portion of the royalties. There were problems, however, with Olympia’s filing of copyright and with Girodias’s always late reports of sales to the author, causing courts to rule in Donleavy’s favor. Girodias and Donleavy would litigate against each other across two decades and two continents. In 1968, Olympia went bankrupt and was put on the block. Despite Girodias’s attempts to keep the auction secret, Donleavy sent his then-wife, actress Mary Wilson Price (later, Mary Guinness), to Paris, where she bid against Girodias for ownership of his press. Price’s deeper pockets won out and Olympia remained her property until her death. With the press that had sued him for rights to the royalties of his book now part of his own portfolio, Donleavy was essentially suing himself, and The Ginger Man killed the press that, a decade earlier, had given it life.
“E” IS FOR ÉDOUARD MANET
Olympia was named after Olympia, a painting by Édouard Manet (1832–83). Manet’s entry into the 1863 Salon, the annual exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Art, had been the rejected Le déjeuner sur l’herbe, which, in its subsequent showing in the Salon des Réfusés, scandalized with its depiction of a nude woman (modeled by fellow painter Victorine Meurent), whose nudity and pose allude to Classical mythology, but who is enjoying a picnic with men in modern clothing. In 1865, Manet offered the Salon his roughshod, frank portrait of a lounging odalisque, or prostitute (also modeled by Meurent), being attended to by her African servant. Upon its inexplicable acceptance, Olympia caused a furor that Manet had to have expected. Still, he complained to Baudelaire: “Abuses rain upon me like hail. I have never before been in such a fix….I should have wished to have your sound opinion of my work, for all this outcry is disturbing and clearly somebody is wrong.”
“F” IS FOR FRANCE
France is a French-speaking country located just across the English Channel from the most formidable English-language literary market outside the United States. Lost Generation conspirators as disparate as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein found the cheap, libertine Paris of the ’20s conducive to reflection on American home. But their freewheeling, freespending spirit was crushed in 1929 with the onset of Depression. As American novelists, painters, and composers evacuated the Left Bank in droves, Kahane’s Obelisk opened shop. The spirit of France’s third and fourth republics, from the fall of Napoleon III, the last French emperor, to postwar reconstruction in the wake of Nazi devastation, is best embodied by Obelisk and Olympia’s smutty paperback books, which liberated the world once clearing customs between Calais and prudish Dover.
“G” IS FOR GIRODIAS, MAURICE
Olympia’s founder, “a second-generation Anglo-French pornographer,” as he described himself, was born Maurice Kahane in Paris in 1919. The Nazi occupation compelled him to exchange his Jewish surname for his mother’s Spanish sobriquet. As Girodias, he survived WWII by publishing a weekly film guide, Paris-Programme, and supplying paper to the Reich. Following the war, Girodias and his publishing ventures were accused of committing every conceivable offense under the guise of free speech, including obscenity, indecency, defamation, and what would later come to be called hate speech and child pornography. With Anglo-American censorship disappearing by the late ’60s, Gallic glamour fading under de Gaulle, and Olympia collapsing around him, the occasionally dishonest, always disorganized Girodias relocated to the United States, where his attempts to establish various American Olympia imprints were perennially frustrated. Girodias was forced to return to France and died in Paris in 1990. Though chiefly known for publishing prose, Girodias was also talented at writing it, as evinced by this excerpt from The Frog Prince, the first of his three autobiographies. Here the author loses his virginity to Didi, a Provençal waitress:
For my part, I am so carried away in delight that I’ve completely forgotten my own desires. A need more subtle than mine has me captivated. I ask nothing more than to serve my beautiful Didi, for she and I are now bound by a common passion, which is for her body. The desire in my hands penetrates her flesh deeply. She loves that beautiful skin of hers as it glows with the pleasure of my caresses. My clumsy admiration arouses in her a narcissistic voluptuousness, for she takes my beginner’s errors for subtle refinements; and she no longer knows what is happening, she’s deliciously disoriented. I thank my stars, I treasure my luck, I even congratulate myself on my ignorance.
“H” IS FOR HARRIS, FRANK
James Thomas (Frank) Harris, born in Ireland in 1856, was a short, husky sex maniac who slept and talked and wrote his way around the world, paying his bills as a cowboy, lawyer, journalist, playwright, and “sandhog” (caisson excavator) on the Brooklyn Bridge. Kahane met Harris in 1912 in Manchester, where Harris was lecturing at the Midland Hotel in support of his book The Man Shakespeare, which opined that the playwright had encoded his personality in the soliloquies of his leading men and argued that Mary Fitton, maid of honor to Elizabeth I, was the Dark Lady of the sonnets. That book was unanimously derided, though it could not do as much damage as My Life and Loves, Harris’s prolix memoirs in four volumes, which he self-published throughout the ’20s, destroying himself financially. After Harris’s death in Nice in 1931, however, Kahane put out a reprint, and My Life and Loves, rife with vain, preening coitus, would become an exceptional seller for both Obelisk and Olympia for decades. A fifth volume of lewd hagiography appeared in 1954, ghostwritten in grand impersonation of Harris’s style by Alexander Trocchi, and is commonly regarded as the best of the set.
“I” IS FOR INSIDE SCIENTOLOGY
Inside Scientology: How I Joined Scientology and Became Superhuman was written by former Scientologist Robert Kaufman and published by Olympia U.S.A. in 1972 (Olympia U.S.A. was one of the press’s American incarnations, founded after Girodias lost Olympia Paris and became, like his father, an expatriate). Kaufman�
�s book was the first to publicly criticize the Church of Scientology and also to reveal its organizational secrets by reproducing founder L. Ron Hubbard’s staff instructions and training techniques. The Church is said to have immediately responded: Allegedly, it mailed thousands of letters to Olympia’s U.K. associates, informing them, on forged Olympia letterhead, that Olympia U.S.A. had gone out of business. One morning, a blond woman appeared at Girodias’s office, claiming an interest in his legal affairs. According to Girodias, she drove him to New Jersey and abandoned him, under false pretense, at the Port of Newark, having planted marijuana on his person. Girodias was charged with trespass on property without legitimate purpose and possession of a controlled dangerous substance, but this being his first offense, he was only given probation. In 1974, however, a letter accusing Girodias of violating the terms of his U.S. visa was sent to Henry Kissinger at the State Department, on the occasion of Olympia U.S.A.’s publication of the horny dystopian novel President Kissinger. Girodias would be forced to leave the country unless he could find another way to maintain his status. The Church of Scientology, which Girodias suspected was behind the Kissinger letter, would then be responsible for Girodias’s marriage to medical student Lilla Cabot Lyon, a union that briefly extended his American residence.
“J” IS FOR JOYCE, JAMES
Hoping for literary glory, Kahane wished to reproduce the success of Sylvia Beach’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses through her bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, in 1922. By 1929 all the great avant-garde English-language publishing houses of Paris had died—Shakespeare, Three Mountains Press, Contact Editions—and so, in search of an unattached name with which to launch his venture (which he was then calling the Fountain Press, operating in collaboration with printer Henry Babou), the dandyish Kahane pestered the spinsterly Beach into introducing him to that blind Irishman he called God. For 50,000 francs, Kahane purchased the rights to publish five thousand words entitled Haveth Childers Everywhere, the first excerpt of Joyce’s last novel, Finnegans Wake. H.C.E. was published by Obelisk in 1930 in a deluxe edition of six hundred copies (one hundred printed on “mother-of-pearl Japanese vellum paper”). Two years later, Obelisk published Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, with illustrations by Lucia Joyce, the author’s daughter. Kahane, in a letter praising the sketches, admitted he found her father’s texts unreadable.
“K” IS FOR KAHANE, JACK
Jack Kahane, born in 1887, the Mancunian son of Romanian Jews, first made his name as a poet and dramatist, and as a polemicist who accused Hans Richter, famed German musician and principal conductor of Manchester’s Hallé Orchestra, of too infrequently programming French repertoire. Richter quit the orchestra in the wake of Kahane’s press campaign while the young arch-Francophile, newly understanding the value of publicity, went on to found the Swan Club, Manchester’s leading literary salon, the denizens of which included playwrights Harold Brighouse and Stanley Houghton. Kahane served in WWI, was wounded, and convalesced in France, where he met and married Marcelle Girodias, the Spanish-born Catholic French daughter of an engineer who’d built railroads across Spain, Portugal, North Africa, and South America. During his recovery, which was also the couple’s honeymoon, Kahane began writing fiction. His most popular novel was his first, a bubbly but prim concoction called Laugh and Grow Rich. Kahane’s other books include six erotic novels written under the name Cecil Barr, after a favorite pub, the Cecil Bar, and his 1939 Memoirs of a Booklegger. Natalie Barney held Friday soirées; Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had their klatsch on Saturdays; while Sylvia Beach’s bookstore was open for business daily; but by 1929, as those great salons disappeared, and Americans left for home, Kahane began to envision two possibilities for his literary future. First, he could step in to publish the work of eminences like Joyce; second, he could support such idealism by making money off British tourists interested in buying English-language books, of all kinds, which were banned in their own countries. Kahane was the only expatriate publisher in interwar Paris who wasn’t independently wealthy and so found it necessary to profit from everything he chose to put between covers. Kahane’s Obelisk published work by Joyce, Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Richard Aldington, and Cyril Connolly, alongside mild smut such as To Beg I Am Ashamed (“the autobiography of a London prostitute”) and Mad About Women, by “the Marco Polo of sex,” N. Reynolds Packard, Rome correspondent for the New York Daily News. Obelisk died when Kahane died, in September 1939, with the Nazis invading Poland, the Vichy regime a winter away.
“L” IS FOR NAKED LUNCH
Olympia originally rejected William S. Burroughs’s seminal novel because, literally, its manuscript was soaked—it’d been steeped in alcohol, burned by cigarettes, and nibbled by rats. Always a footloose collation of pages, Naked Lunch would be resubmitted in a fresh copy, with organizational help from Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso and typing assistance from Jack Kerouac, who also suggested its title. Girodias accepted and published the manuscript in 1959. Purportedly, Girodias was convinced to acquire Burroughs’s book not by any intrinsic quality of the writing, but thanks to the scandalous publication of excerpts in a magazine called Big Table, a name Kerouac had suggested as well. Barney Rosset at Grove Press purchased the American rights, but proceeded to warehouse ten thousand copies of the book, awaiting the resolution of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer obscenity trial to know whether works like Miller’s and Burroughs’s would be allowed American distribution (Obelisk had published Miller’s book in Paris nearly three decades earlier). However, following the press interest in Burroughs’s raucous appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival, a landmark literary gathering that also featured Miller and Norman Mailer, Grove decided to release the novel, censors be damned. If not for this Scottish coup, Naked Lunch would have hungered much longer, as Miller’s case was resolved only in 1964 and censorship in America was not itself censured until 1966 with the Supreme Court decision in the matter of Memoirs v. Massachusetts. Mary McCarthy lent her crucial support only three months after publication. A 1963 newspaper strike provided the opportunity for the launch of The New York Review of Books, the inaugural issue of which featured McCarthy’s Naked Lunch assessment, which remains among the best: “The literalness of Burroughs is the opposite of ‘literature.’ ”
“M” IS FOR MILLER, HENRY
Henry Miller dealt with both Obelisk and Olympia and so had working relationships, however strained, with both Kahane and Girodias. The relationships were consummated simultaneously when Obelisk first published Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1934, two years after it had been submitted to the press. It took that long for Kahane to come to terms with its subject matter and to feel comfortable printing it after the relatively tame titles of Sleeveless Errand and The Well of Loneliness; Joyceiana aside, Miller’s was Obelisk’s first important literary work. The cover image of a woman being abducted by a gigantic crab—Cancer—was the work of Maurice Girodias, then still Maurice Kahane, fifteen years old and not even allowed to read the work himself. After such a delay, Kahane had no more excuses for not publishing when money for the printers was loaned him by Miller’s lover and fellow Obelisk erographer, Anaïs Nin, who’d borrowed the money herself from her mentor and occasional tryst, the psychoanalyst Otto Rank. Nin’s own Obelisk book, The Winter of Artifice, was the last title published in Kahane’s lifetime, released a week before the beginning of WWII, nine days before the publisher’s death. That book was financed by another Obelisk author, Lawrence Durrell—Miller’s friend and, again, a lover of Nin’s. Henry Miller lived a long and productive life (1891–1980) in two cultures, so it’s unsurprising that his books, lovers, and friends gave rise to so many connections. Frank Harris’s tailor in New York was none other than Heinrich Miller, a German immigrant to Yorkville, Manhattan, and Henry Miller’s father.
“N” IS FOR NABOKOV, VLADIMIR
In 1955, Parisian literary agent Denise Clarouin introduced Girodias to her colleague Doussia Ergaz, a muse to Russian émigré writ
ers and, occasionally, their representation. At the drunken business lunch that followed, Ergaz sold Girodias a manuscript previously rejected by four American publishers: a licentious, cerebral book about a European scholar’s obsession with an American suburban girl, Lolita, which Olympia published that same year. Its author, the Russian exile, lepidopterist, and chessmaster Vladimir Nabokov, was then teaching literature at Cornell University and, with an immigrant’s fear of losing his livelihood, initially wanted his novel to appear under the nom de plume V. Sirin, which he’d used to publish in Germany amid the heyday of Russian Berlin. Eric Kahane, Girodias’s younger brother, translated Lolita—Nabokov’s third novel written in English—into French, though the novel would be banned in France until 1958 (in an odd reversal, Lolita was always legal in Britain). Putnam, the American publisher, claimed it was prepared to defend any challenge to the book in court, ready for what Nabokov would refer to in correspondence as “lolitigation,” but the glory of Stateside prosecution was never to be. Instead, the deal Nabokov signed between Olympia and Putnam enriched all involved. The novel sold over one hundred thousand copies in the first three weeks, thanks to masterful publicity and hints of illicitness with no real illegality. Putnam editor Walter Minton, who first read the Olympia edition thanks to the influence of his showgirl girlfriend, Rosemary Ridgewell, became one of the most influential editors of the decade. Nabokov quit academia to live the rest of his life in Swiss hotels. Girodias, however, squandered his nymphet’s fortune—which would have run his press for years—in the construction and operation of a two-floor pleasure palace. Initially wanting to call this establishment Chez Lolita, Girodias reconsidered after he was threatened with legal action; he named the place La Grande Séverine, after its address, 7 rue Saint-Séverine. The place featured an Oriental red room; a blue room called Le Salon Cagliostro, after its tarot-card theme; a Winter Garden replete with rococo birdcages; La Salle du Grand Siècle, a candlelit formal restaurant; La Batucada, a Brazilian-themed dance club; Club de Jazz (later Le Blues-Bar), which hosted the likes of Chet Baker, Memphis Slim, and Marpessa Dawn; La Salle Suèdoise, a late-night restaurant specializing in light Scandinavian fare; and Chez Vodka, a Russian cabaret with a balalaika orchestra.
