We were finally in the clear. It took a few months after the Supreme Court decision before everything else fell into place. On October 2, 1964, the Brooklyn Criminal Court granted a motion by the Kings County district attorney to dismiss the information against us. The warrant against Henry was also withdrawn. At last Henry Miller and his books did not have to hide. The pivotal moment in the American travails of Tropic of Cancer had ended in victory for all of us: Henry, me, Grove Press, our attorneys, the laws of our land, our people, and our Constitution. My determination to publish Tropic of Cancer was consistent with my long-held conviction that an author should be free to write whatever he or she pleased, freedom of the reader to read anything, and a publisher free to publish anything. Anything.
13
Maurice Girodias
In many ways Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press was my French counterpart. We shared similar tastes and worked with many of the same authors. Our first contact came by way of the Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi, a friend of Henry Miller’s, who was then the editor of the Paris-based literary magazine Merlin. In a letter of May 13, 1953, Girodias wrote me:
Dear Sir,
Mr. Alexander Trocchi has already informed you of our venture. Our firm is bringing out several books by Henry Miller, D.A.F. de Sade, and Guillaume Apollinaire, and of which you will find a description on the enclosed list.
I am also sending to you, under separate cover, one sample of each of the first two volumes which have just been brought out, PLEXUS by Henry Miller, and an English unexpurgated version of LA PHILOSOPHIE DANS LE BOUDOIR by the Marquis de Sade.
We thought that you might be interested in the distribution of those works in the U.S., [although] this would involve problems of a special kind which you might perhaps not want to tackle.
In any case, I would be very pleased indeed to know what your impression is regarding those books, and I look forward to hearing from you.
My firm is also publishing jointly with “MERLIN” the English version of Samuel Beckett’s WATT, for which we would also like to find a distributor in the U.S. This is an altogether different problem, and I would like to know whether you would be interested in that title, which will be out in the first days of June, and will sell at 800 to 1,000 francs.
Yours very sincerely,
Maurice Girodias
I replied on May 21st:
Dear Monsieur Girodias,
Thank you for your letter of the 13th May. Mr. Trocchi had already informed me of your venture.
As you say in your letter, your books might present problems which we would not be equipped to handle, but I can only ascertain that after looking at them. Again, this might pertain to some but not to others. As soon as I have seen the books, I will be able to let you know.
We would be [most] interested in seeing WATT, and if you will send me a copy by airmail I will be very happy to give you a quick reply as to the possibilities of our handling it in this country.
Our catalogue is coming to you under separate cover. As you will see, we have an anthology of the works of de Sade, accompanied by an essay of Simone de Beauvoir. Thus, we have more knowledge of the field for de Sade in this country in the moment than perhaps other people.
Grove soon became closely involved not only with Girodias in France, but also with John Calder in England, another progressive publisher whose tastes I shared. I recommended to Beckett in a letter of February 17, 1958 that he work with John: “I would urge you and Lindon to take Calder as English publisher whenever possible. He is a bit odd, but I like him, we are doing many things together, he likes your work very much, and although he may be a risk he may also end up a much better publisher for you than someone like Faber.”
The three companies—Grove Press, Olympia Press, and John Calder Books—shared a certain spirit. In an interview published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Calder himself noted how our association with each other had grown:
The three publishing companies that were in constant touch with each other, exchanging rights, contracts, and information, were Grove Press, Olympia Press, and my own English company, John Calder (Publishers) Ltd. Barney had introduced the “egghead” paperback with Evergreen Books … I agreed to import them into Britain and sell them in the British and Commonwealth markets. … Our payments to Grove became slower and Barney with his own cash problems began to look for a different solution. … In spite of many years of frustration and sometimes trying to dislike him, I always found myself drawn back to a new cooperation when the chance offered. Our collaborations were often abortive, destructive, and frustrating, but never boring.74
John Calder once owed us some money, and we settled the debt while we were at the Frankfurt Book Fair by playing a game we had seen in Last Year at Marienbad. You played with matches laid out in a pyramid form on a table. If you were stuck with one at the end, you lost the game. John won and the debt was cancelled. We were playing this game at a nightclub, much, I think, to the discomfort of everyone else because we were not looking at the girls. Dick Seaver was with us and he kept telling me that I would lose. I did not care; I just wanted to get rid of the debt.
Since I have given you Calder’s opinion of me, let me also note what Girodias had to say in the second volume of his autobiography, Une journée sur la terre:75
I saw Barney … at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which I attended every fall. His personality was curiously out of place in this ultra-professional milieu and, with his incredible mood swings and aggressive behavior toward anyone unlucky enough to offend him, he soon became unbearable. I had previously seen only his charm and humor, and these sudden changes from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde astounded me: he became diabolical, exhibiting a totally gratuitous spitefulness toward innocent people unable to stand up to him. Then, abruptly, just when the tension was becoming unbearable, the frightful mask of Mr. Hyde would vanish and the good Dr. Jekyll would reappear, full of kindness and friendly mischief. There was a rather unpleasant air of mystery to all this that detracted not at all from his powers of seduction.
Our relationship had taken a curious turn since Barney met my old flame, Liline Duhême. The model for Zazie [the young protagonist of Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le metro, which Louis Malle adapted for film] had already allowed herself to be seduced by the offer of a trip to New York and—who knows?—the mirage of an American marriage. Their liaison seemed strange to me, but it created a kind of added bond between us, almost a blood tie, rather on the order of a marriage between Mafia families. …
I invited Maurice to come to New York, and he arrived in April 1959:
I realized very quickly that New York was not just a city of escaped convicts; luxury existed cheek by jowl with squalor, as the sumptuous dinner that reunited us a little later in a pseudo-French restaurant would prove. Liline was there, deeply moved to see her old pals again, one of them an ex-fiancé [i.e., Maurice himself]. … Her presence was particularly ironic. I was surprised to find her still on the trail of Prince Charming, even if it did take us back a ways, but seeing Barney in the role I had once played really was too much. … Along with my authors, did I also have to make a gift of my memories?
These few days in New York flew by at an insane pace, eight to twelve meetings a day, cocktails, interviews, dinners, lunches, not to mention breakfast meetings. George Plimpton at his club, an excruciating interview with a guy from the Village Voice who was unaware that Europe existed. … During a visit to the Grove Press offices on University Place, which is in fact not a “Place” but a mere street, I was introduced to Fred Jordan. There was also Barney’s secret, Judith Schmidt, with whom I’d been carrying on an intense correspondence for a long time, and thanks to whom my dealings with Grove had been relatively smooth, at least on the administrative level. It was a pleasure to meet a forthright, loyal person in a house where everyone talked while looking out the window.
Now Girodias, in the above reminiscence, mentions that I had been going out with Jacqueline, whom he ca
lled Liline and had once almost married. When Jacqueline and I became estranged, he tried to mediate, writing on October 3, 1959:
I just had a very heartbreaking interview with my distressed little friend, Jacqueline. I hope you won’t take it too badly if I say a word or two in her favour. She is a rare human being, even if she is not quite what she should be; and I like her very much. I was very happy that the two of you got along so well. Now I realize that she is taking it very badly. I know she is not over-dramatizing. So, forgive me for this maudlin discourse; whatever you do will be all right, but you should not leave her too long in this sort of uncertain situation. She may be hardboiled and everything—but I haven’t seen her like this until now.
Part of the problem was, with her in Paris and me in New York, it was hard for me to ignore the women who were within reach. She warned me against this in a letter of July 29, 1960: “Don’t prove Sam [not Beckett] right by going about as a skirt-chaser. You’re much better than that. You know it, and I do, too. Think of us, think of your life. I want so much for you to be happy and for you to give me the pleasure of trusting me to help you to be so and not to waste the genius that you have. Little velvet ears, don’t suggest to me that ‘you’re always prepared to help me if you can.’ The only way is to be together, truly.”76
Earlier, though, she had pinpointed the ineradicable problem that made a long-term commitment from either of us difficult. She loved Paris and I loved New York. On December 6, 1960, she wrote: “I miss you so much. New York is where my heart should be, with you. Why are you American? I didn’t like America enough to want to live there, but it taught me a lot. What are you thinking in your dear little head, how do you feel about things? With you everything’s so fast, so inventive and rushed, one never knows.”
A few days later she continued with that theme: “I wish you could see everything, that you were here with me. But I don’t like the rhythm of American life. Like your friend Beckett, I like living in Paris. I wish I were Joan and that we’d live together here as you did. … Try to come skiing in February. Then you’ll come back in May and then I can go to East Hampton. If you want, I’ll take care of our two children. A year goes by quickly, and I know that, like me, you don’t want to be unhappy anymore. We don’t have to get married right away. We really should get to know each other, be sure of ourselves and that we can adapt. It’s harder at our age, we’re neither young nor old but in between. But I love you. I don’t want to love anyone else at all.”
This was a doomed affair if ever there was one.
To return to my literary dealings with Girodias, let me take up the topic of our different tastes. Tropic of Cancer was first published by Maurice’s father, Jack Kahane, at Obelisk Press, and Maurice, as a child, had done the abstract illustration for the cover of the international edition. Maurice and I had many things in common, but not what most people would think. What he thought was erotic was very different from what I thought was erotic. I don’t know of any book we agreed upon, except for The Black Diaries of Roger Casement, the Irish revolutionary.77 Maurice did a wonderful book on him and wrote about half of it himself. And there we were totally in sync. Our hero was a homosexual Irishman.
Casement worked as a consul for the British State Department and became well known for his humanitarian efforts in the Congo and Peru. But by 1913 he had quit, and he denounced the British by saying he wasn’t British but Irish. When World War I broke out he went to Germany to ask for support for an independent Ireland and to try to obtain the release of Irish prisoners. The Germans cooperated with the British and delivered him back to Ireland in a submarine, where he was arrested on April 24, 1916, the same time as the Easter Uprising. Only four months later, on August 3, Casement was hanged by the British.
The British said he was homosexual and the Irish said he wasn’t. But he was. He had written diaries while he was in the Congo, mostly about the treatment of people there, but he also wrote about his love affairs. The British brought out the diaries and the Irish said they were forgeries. What ultimately happened is the British came to the United States and got the Catholic Church to stop Irish Catholics from supporting Casement because they were raising all kinds of money for his defense. Maurice obtained the original diaries and published part of them and made him seem very sympathetic. I published the book here and received marvelous comments from Paul O’Dwyer, who said Casement was not homosexual. He understood immediately Casement’s importance. If you don’t get somebody mad, no one is ever going to hear about it. This was all due to Maurice, who wanted the world to know that Casement was a political renegade who was fighting for the rights of people in the Amazon and the Congo, who also happened to be gay.
Grove had its share of financial problems, but only Maurice could pull off the trick of going bankrupt in Paris under the Nazis—when you could sell anything. There was a paper shortage, and if you printed something, it sold. The only real question was how many books could you get printed. But Girodias managed to go broke. He was a Jew who lived under the Nazis; he went bankrupt, but did not go to jail. I still don’t understand how he managed that.
He had feuds with a number of his authors, who thought, rightly or wrongly, that he was cheating them out of their royalties. Vladimir Nabokov was one of those who considered Girodias less than admirable. On November 25, 1959, Girodias wrote to me:
Incidentally, did I tell you that Nabokov was in Paris recently? Gallimard gave a cocktail party in his honour, and the board of directors had a heated argument before the invitations were sent out: Should I be invited or not? Should they be brave and risk a public scandal or not? Finally they decided not to invite me; but the girl in charge of the invitations sent me one in spite of the instructions she had received. I wondered what I should do when I received the invitation, then I decided that even if it were a humiliation for me to be slapped before 200 scandal-loving people, at least it should help to increase the sales; so I decided to go. … When I arrived there, there was an unmistakable commotion, cameramen got into position, etc. Good Madame Ergaz, Nabokov’s agent in Paris, offered to introduce me to “Le Maître”—with obvious misgivings. We waited a good twenty minutes in the queue of people waiting to be introduced to the urbane grand homme; then we shook hands with surprising hypocritical smiles on our faces, he asked me whether I expected him to speak in French or English, that he could speak both, and that he thought my English was quite as good as my brother’s, and that perhaps we could speak in Russian, hee hee; and then he ducked, sort of whirled around and floated away after a few seconds, pretending that he was being summoned by his wife who was standing nearby. … Well, there had been no exchange of insults or blows. On the following day, Mme Ergaz called me on the phone and told me that she had met Nabokov again later on, and had asked him in front of several people what he thought of our meeting. “Girodias?” he said, “was he there? But I never met him!” Tough, eh? The genuine Nabokovian touch …
I wrote back to him about this encounter on November 30, 1959:
Your description of your meeting with Nabokov is hilarious. I would have given a great deal to see the famous encounter. Perhaps I could have tripped him as you advanced toward each other and have created one of the great incidents in literary history. Too bad you French have no imagination in such affairs. When he asked you whether he should speak French or English, you should have said that you were happy to know that he could speak at all.
After his bankruptcy under the Nazis and when the war had ended, Girodias restarted his company, but he faced fresh legal problems in the 1960s with censorship. He wrote me on April 11, 1963: “The situation here is really most awful and disgusting. I am being sentenced once a week, or nearly, and for the most ludicrous reasons. It seems difficult to continue publishing books in France, and I am now trying to start a branch abroad—perhaps several branches.”
I brought up the idea of doing an anthology, culling excerpts from some of his books which had not been published here. Girodias agreed and
wrote me on May 20, 1964, about what would become The Olympia Reader: “I would be enchanted to be able to work out this wonderful, conclusive, exhilarating, soul-saving and hair-raising project with you, my old crony.” He did the book and we published it.
But nothing could avert his downfall. By the end of the year, Maurice was once again declared bankrupt. He lost a prosecution against him for publishing obscenity and was sentenced to jail, given a $20,000 fine, and banned from publishing for twenty years.
I wrote to Lawrence Ferlinghetti about the situation: “Maurice informs us that his prison term has been decreased to two years, the suspension of publishing decreased to three years, and fines decreased to $5,000; and all of that is also [being] appealed. This comes from Maurice himself, in a very optimistic note. You might also note that we are doing an OLYMPIA READER made up of excerpts from the books published by The Olympia Press.”
Aside from both doing battle against censorship, Maurice and I shared quite another sort of problem. Her name was Valerie Solanas.
Maurice, who had published her The SCUM Manifesto (an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men), had been her first target the day she shot Andy Warhol on June 3, 1968. Maurice was not at his office so instead she went to Warhol’s place and shot him. After the shooting Maurice visited Solanas in the hospital and gave her money. When she was released from prison in 1971, Solanas began a harassment campaign against Grove Press.
In early August in 1971, Solanas was calling the Grove offices all the time. Fred Jordan wrote in an interoffice memo after she called on August 4: “She asked if Barney would be interested if she were kidnapped. I said Barney is not interested in you at all, period. She asked who he is interested in. I said Barney is interested in the people he deals with, he doesn’t even know you. Finally I said her constant telephone calls are beginning to annoy us, and that we have nothing to do with her.”
Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Page 22
