![]() ![]() Recently liberalized federal laws concerning the censorship of printed matter and a changing cultural climate in the U.S. At length, his personal life out of control, his nightclub bankrupt, his press paralyzed by punitive fines and publishing bans pronounced by the courts, Girodias fled to the United States to re-establish the Olympia Press in New York city.Īrriving in America in the mid 1960s, Girodias busily set about making and losing fortunes. At the same time, the Olympia Press was being relentlessly harassed by the Paris vice squad and was the object of multiple law suits. ![]() Closely related-both in terms of cause and effect-to this reckless enterprise was Girodias' excessive drinking. This pleasantly unwonted circumstance proved, however, less than a boon for Girodias for it permitted him to indulge in an extravagant, not to say grandiose, project: the creation of a lavish, sumptuous nightclub called La Grande Séverine, an unrealistically ambitious undertaking that was an economic disaster. Slowly, Olympia attained a precarious solvency, then-largely as a consequence of the popularity of Lolita and a favourable contract with Vladimir Nabokov-achieved outright prosperity. After an extended period of poverty and depression, in the early 1950s Girodias succeeded in founding the Olympia Press on little more than daring and desperate desire. After the war, the presence in Paris of large numbers of British, Canadian, and American soldiers (and later, the return of tourists) provided Maurice with a readership sufficient to resurrect the Obelisk Press and reissue the more popular titles of its prewar catalog.Īccording to Girodias's version of events, it was due to the machinations of his business partners, Hachette Publishers, that he lost ownership of both Les Editions du Chêne and the Obelisk Press. Upon the sudden death of Jack Kahane at the outbreak of World War II, young Maurice inherited the debt-ridden Obelisk Press, but the war and the German occupation (during which to avoid deportation as a Jew, Maurice changed his surname to that of his French mother) compelled him instead to establish himself as an art publisher, forming his own imprint, Les Editions du Chêne. Racy, risqué novels in English were the speciality of the Paris-based Obelisk Press, and Kahane's prize literary discovery was Henry Miller. Indeed, I have sometimes speculated whether his often turbulent personal fortunes were not, at least in part, the result of a species of subconscious self-sabotage.Ī self-described "second-generation pornographer," Maurice Girodias was born Maurice Kahane in Paris in 1919, the son of English expatriate author and publisher, Jack Kahane, proprietor of the Obelisk Press. The mixture of literature and lust reflected in the publications of Girodias's Olympia Press may perhaps be seen as an expression of divisions within the man himself whose behaviour encompassed shady practices and impetuous generosity, irrepressible audacity and shy reserve, conspicuous dissipation and secret spirituality. ![]() Published in Paris, Olympia books were forbidden throughout the English speaking world but were smuggled through Customs by returning tourists, merchant seamen, servicemen and others. Burroughs's The Naked Lunch, as well as notable works by Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, and Jean Cocteau, was made possible by the sale of a series of pseudonymously written sexually explicit novels with lubricious titles such as Chariot of Flesh, White Thighs, Sin for Breakfast, and There's a Whip in My Valise. The publication of modern classics such as Samuel Beckett's Watt, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, J.P. Rogue publisher and himself a bit of a rogue, Maurice Girodias, founding editor of the infamous Olympia Press, chief purveyor of English language pornography during the postwar period, loosed upon an eager reading world a handful of scandalous masterpieces together with what were (by his own bemused admission) torrents of bad taste. ![]()
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