Overview
When an excerpt from John de St. Jorre's Venus Bound, unmasking the pseudonymous author of Story of O, appeared in The New Yorker - thus solving a forty-year-old literary mystery - it made worldwide news. In its entirety, Venus Bound recounts the astonishing but true story of the flamboyant rogue publisher Maurice Girodias, whose Paris-based Olympia Press gave birth to a curious mixture of raffish pornography and some of the most significant fiction of the twentieth century. Dubbed "the Prince of Porn" and "the Lenin of the Sexual Revolution," Girodias helped breach the barriers of literary censorship in Britain and the United States. His father was Jack Kahane, an Edwardian dandy who capped his life by publishing Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Anais Nin. Girodias (he changed his name to elude the Nazis in occupied France) carried the family tradition to new heights - and depths. In shabby postwar Paris, he recruited a lively crew of starving but talented American and British writers to pump out the porn that financed, among other things, Olympia's literary list. Deftly navigating between the French vice squad and financial disaster, Girodias and his writers set off on a memorable voyage through seedy back-street offices, glittering parties, international law courts, and one another's beds. The result was such mortal works as White Thighs, The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, and There's a Whip in My Valise. But Girodias also published some bestselling - and enduring - novels, notably The Ginger Man, Candy, Lolita, Naked Lunch, and Story of O, as well as books by Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Henry Miller.The story of the Olympia Press is one of the most flamboyant in publishing history. In the 1950s, when dirty books (and great ones) were being banned in Britain and America, Maurice Girodias launched a career in Paris that earned him the nickname the "Prince of Porn." John de St. Jorre gives a high-spirited account of this infamous publisher whose eclectic list included Lolita, The Ginger Man, Henry Miller's several Tropics, and the outrageous romp called Candy. Photos.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Anyone old enough to have traveled in Europe in the 1950s and '60s probably remembers those green paperbacks with black lettering, affectionately known by both their creators and many of their readers as dirty books; the best "DBs," by common consent, were those published by Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. If that were all Girodias did, he would be no more than a shabby footnote to literary history; but because his press, in those puritanical times, was the only one on either side of the Atlantic unafraid of censorship, authors with notable but racy books went to him too-including Henry Miller (who first published with Girodias's father, Jack Kahane), J.P. Donleavy with The Ginger Man, Vladimir Nabokov with Lolita, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg with Candy and William S. Burroughs with Naked Lunch. Girodias undoubtedly had good taste, and his contrary nature made him a formidable litigator; unhappily, he was also deeply reluctant to pay his authors, and relations with the best of them quickly became bogged down in endless recriminations and suits. De St. Jorre (The Patriot Game) tells the lively and often comic story of Girodias, his escapades and his Olympians with great verve and good humor, and his excellent research should make it catnip to book people. Photos not seen by PW. (June)Library Journal
De St. Jorre, a journalist and coauthor of The Marines (Doubleday, 1989), offers a history of the infamous Olympia Press, 1953-73 (owned by Maurice Girodias in Paris and New York), and its predecessor, the Obelisk Press, 1931-39 (owned by Girodias's father, Jack Kahane), which were notorious for their popular "dirty books" (a.k.a. DBs). Obelisk Press first published Henry Miller and Anas Nin, among others, and Olympia Press put out rather pornographic volumes written under pseudonyms, as well as first publishing Nabokov's Lolita and J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man. For both father and son, the DBs financed these more lofty literary works. De St. Jorre has based his engaging story of struggling expatriate writers, litigation, censorship, and morality on published and unpublished sources, as well as on interviews. A chronology and checklist are useful. Highly recommended, but gratuitous if the British edition (Hutchison, 1994) is already owned.-Janice E. Braun, Mills Coll. Lib., Oakland, Cal.Mike Tribby
Englishman Jack Kahane founded what became the Olympia Press in Paris in the early 1930s to publish banned English-language literature at a time when banning in the U.S. or the U.K. effectively killed access to the prohibited material. So Kahane's venture filled a definite niche and let the works of an astonishing number of modernist masters see the light of day (meanwhile, publishing garden variety erotica kept the bottom line black). Even after Olympia brought them out, such books as "Tropic of Cancer", "Lolita", and "Naked Lunch" had for years to be bought in France and other outposts of decadence and smuggled into their authors' democratic homelands: people went to jail for this. Kahane and his son and successor, Maurice Girodias, were actually brash pioneers of free expression, championing the likes of Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, and Anais Nin, whose travails de St Jorre also examines. Sadly, in places where "challenging" (no, no, no, it's "not" censorship!) library materials is in vogue, this history itself may be too hot for some guardians of public morality.Kirkus Reviews
A between-the-covers look at the Parisian Olympia Press of Maurice Girodias, the man Vladimir Nabokov (whom he published) called the "Olympian Pornologist." De St. Jorre labels him "the Mr. Micawber of publishing."Facing a dizzying array of eccentrics, scandals, feuds, and conflicting testimonies, journalist de St. Jorre (The Marines, not reviewed) admirably sorts out the evidence from accounts already put to paper, adding his own interviews with surviving employees and authors. The resulting narrative is a highly readable, colorful picaresque of publishing. The tale begins with the Obelisk Press, founded by Girodias's father, an Englishman named Jack Kahane. In the 1930s Obelisk published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Lawrence Durrell's first novel, as well as risqué potboilers. After the war, Girodias launched the Olympia Press with the hard-core "Traveller's Companion" series of "D.B.'s" (Dirty Books), featuring titles like Whips Incorporated and Lust, written by assorted flamboyant English and American bohemians. Girodias became even more notorious when he issued the translation of The Story of O (de St. Jorre unravels the true story of the book's genesis with aplomb). As a doubtful haven for "unpublishable" writers, the Olympia Press ironically attracted notable work from Nabokov (Lolita) and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch). But despite his writers' notoriety, the groundbreaking censorship cases were fought and won by others. Girodias's questionable business practices—such as verbal contracts and irregular royalties—landed him more often in lawsuits with his authors than with the censors. The crowning feud surrounded The Ginger Man: Girodias and J.P. Donleavy spent 20 years suing each other over US and British publishing rights, until Donleavy's wife dramatically bought the bankrupt press at auction in 1970, effectively ending the dispute and sending Girodias into publishing exile.
De St. Jorre shows the mercurial Girodias in all his guises—debonair publisher, avant-garde patron, and unscrupulous opportunist.