Andrew Hussey
It’s Not Porn, It’s Literature
Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-Garde in Mid-Century Paris and New York
By Barry Reay & Nina Attwood
Manchester University Press 312pp £20
As all authors know, writing about the sex act is a perilous task. This much is, of course, very familiar to readers of Literary Review, the former editor of which, Auberon Waugh, co-founded the magazine’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 1993. Waugh aimed to lambast the kind of ‘ham-fisted, otiose, coy, mind-blowingly awful’ sex scenes that were rife in fiction at the time. Unsurprisingly, Dirty Books, which tells the story of English-language pornography and erotica published in Paris and New York from the 1930s to the 1960s, bulges with what Father Ted called ‘this sort of thing’. Almost every page throbs with febrile prose extracted from books with titles like White Thighs, The Whip Angels, Lust, Lash and, my own personal favourite, Lady Take Heed! On one page alone we find sentences such as ‘I sank into her like a dagger into a perfumed sheath’ and ‘Ram yourself into the very depths of my womanly center.’ These extracts are amusing at first, but bad sex quickly becomes hard work. As the authors continue to pile it on, the overall feeling soon becomes one of boredom followed by fatigue. This is not helped by the often unnecessary and mirthless analysis which accompanies the quotations. The authors’ tone is also sometimes strangely prim, an egregious example being the way in which the word ‘prostitute’ is avoided and replaced by the modern term ‘sex worker’. When this term is used to describe the prostitute in George Bataille’s Madame Edwarda, it is to severely distort Bataille’s literary intent. The meaning of the book is predicated on the poetic conceit that ‘God is a pute’ – to be unequivocally translated as ‘whore’, and not ‘sex worker’.
This is a shame, because Dirty Books in fact tells the quite extraordinary tale of the pornography mini-industry created in Paris by Jack Kahane and his son Maurice Girodias. Kahane and Girodias have a historical importance because, as well as producing ‘straight porn’, they published some of the most notable writers of the era. Kahane published works by Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell while Girodias was the first to publish Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable and J P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man.
The story begins in the unlikely setting of Salford, where Jack Kahane was born in 1887, the son of Romanian Jewish immigrants. Kahane fought in the Great War and was badly wounded. Staying on in Paris after the war, he married a French Catholic, Marcelle Girodias, and set up Obelisk Press in 1929. His ambitions were threefold. First, to make a lot of money by producing light erotica for ‘the Anglo-Saxon tourist visiting the continent, spicy enough to attract those timid souls, and yet not too much so as to avoid trouble with the French authorities’. Second, with the profits from these books, he intended to buy the rights to any title that had been banned in Britain or America, thus ensuring controversy and even larger profits, along with a reputation for literary daring. Finally, Kahane sought to finance his own more modest literary projects (he fancied himself as a writer as well as a publisher).
Kahane died in 1939, two days after the Second World War broke out. After the war, Girodias followed his father’s business model and set up the infamous Olympia Press in 1953. With the help of the Harvard-educated writer Austryn Wainhouse (later translator of the Marquis de Sade), he encountered a group of writers centred around a new literary review called Merlin, edited by Alexander Trocchi, whose contributors included Christopher Logue and George Plimpton. Girodias lured the young Merlin writers to Olympia by promising that they could win money, if not fame, by knocking out ‘dirty books’. This worked well for Girodias but not so well for his writers, whom he rarely paid on time or in accordance with their contracts, and sometimes not at all. He was equally rackety in his dealings with his ‘serious’ authors, earning him the silent treatment from Samuel Beckett.
In 1967, Girodias founded a division of Olympia Press in New York, hoping to build on his Parisian empire, but by now the cultural climate had changed. The transgressive avant-garde writers he had championed – Burroughs, Miller, Jean Genet – were all now heroes of the counter-culture. If not exactly mainstream, theirs were names to be dropped by the sexual revolutionaries of the period. Girodias was left behind and his business floundered. His troubles were compounded by his incompetent dealings with hard-headed American publishers (Olympia’s back catalogue was ‘plundered’ by the mainstream Grove Press and US pirates).
Reay and Attwood tell the story of Obelisk and Olympia with admirable scholarly precision. They are also right to argue in conclusion that the border between pornography and literature is all too often artificial (but this is hardly new). It’s harder, however, to agree with their assertion that above all what motivated Kahane and Girodias was opposition to censorship. They were just not that high-minded. Rather, they were chancers and rogues. Weirdly, we are given no sense of their rascally heroism. In the absence of this, the reader is left, like Baudelaire’s disappointed libertine in his poem ‘Sed Non Satiata’, greedy for just a little bit more action.
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