Books: Shy Pornographer

For years, U.S. tourists leaving Paris have consoled themselves that one pleasure still lay ahead: smuggling one’s cache of naughty books, wrapped up in the soiled laundry, past U.S. customs. But official acquiescence is outflanking civil disobedience. This year both Henry Miller’s hot-panting Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence’s lukewarm Lady Chatterley’s Lover are sold openly in the U.S. But what is no longer forbidden loses half its charm. For the first time since Petronius wrote his Satyricon to titillate Nero, were the printers of the unprintable in danger of insolvency?

The man most concerned is Maurice Girodias, a 42-year-old Parisian who runs Olympia Press, the world’s most notorious publisher of English-language pornography. Girodias, an amiable, vague, unbusinesslike man, plays the role of a monster of depravity with vigor but no consistency, registering at different times belligerence, shy embarrassment, prosperous self-satisfaction, artiness, guilt, and a well-practiced sinister leer. Last week it was artiness; he would like nothing better than to be put out of business, he said—in fact Olympia’s sole aim has been to batter down the bastions of censorship and make the world safe for experimental literature. Supporting this seven-eighths hypocrisy, Girodias points loftily to a one-eighth truth: both Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man are works of high merit, and both were published first by Olympia.

600,000 Lost Souls. But the bulk of Girodias’ list consists of such works as Who Pushed Paula?, by “Akbar del Piombo,” Houses of Joy, by “Wu Wu Meng,” and Until She Screams, by “Faustino Perez.” Girodias pays about $1,000 a book and chooses the pseudonyms himself—”Otherwise, they always pick something like J. Walter Thompson.” He prints 5,000 copies of each standard pornographic novel in chaste green jackets labeled “The Traveler’s Companion Series,” and invariably sells out at 3.75 francs (75¢) a copy. For bulk sales, he finds that the best markets are France and, in descending but inexplicable order, Venezuela, Lebanon, Italy, Greece, Mexico and Scandinavia. Some 25 to 30 new Companions are issued each year, and Girodias figures that at least five people read each copy. “Which makes,” he says, flashing the sinister leer, “an average of 600,000 people corrupted every year.”

Whether anybody is really harmed by Girodias’ 4-franc dreadfuls is the sort of question that befogs all discussions of pornography. Between the extremes of the puritan, who thinks all nonclinical mention of sex is evil, and the libertine, who is a puritan turned inside out, is the broad-minded man, who is not very helpful either. His definition of pornography is clear, but only to him: “Anything that shocks me too much.” Olympia’s output shocks almost everyone, at least momentarily. But in the view of New England-born Author Akbar, “The books have so much filth that they’re not filthy. They’re zany, like the Marx Brothers.”

Knockabout Bankrupt. Maurice Girodias is a second-generation pornographer. Obelisk Press, the spiritual father of Olympia (it published Lady Chatterley, Miller’s two Tropics), was founded by Girodias’ father, a knockabout Englishman named Jack Kahane, who wore a monocle and may have been the only man ever to serve in both the French Foreign Legion and the Bengal Lancers. Kahane was the sort of bankrupt who in the ’60s would pose for vermouth ads. But it was the ’30s when he ran out of money, and his solution was to turn out such teasers as Susy Falls Off and Daffodil. Young Maurice helped wrap packages.

Father died in 1939, and Maurice found it expedient to take the name of his French Catholic mother. He tried going straight but finally went broke and applied his father’s remedy. He set up Olympia in 1955 with Miller’s Plexus and Apollinaire’s Memoirs of a Young Rakehell. New authors were no problem: the G.I. Bill was running out, and Girodias became a foster uncle to a number of stranded Americans who owned typewriters but not money.

Little Golden Dream. Like race horses, pornographic writers have short, strenuous careers. Mostly, it is imagination that fails. One promising panderer began to sneak dialogues about music into his work only to find that “the type of people I write for do not care for my subjects to discuss Scarlatti.” He is still hoping to write the sort of novel he can show to his parents. Girodias treats his burnt-out cases well; he will empty out his pocket for a hungry writer. Says one of his few female pornographers, a Barnard graduate: “Maurice has a very old-fashioned sense of honor.”

The profits of pornography enable Girodias to indulge himself in a hobby—running a questionably successful nightclub —and a passion for lawsuits. “My only pleasure is legal conflict,” says the publisher, and Olympia’s history is a maze of such pleasure, most of it involving the French government and its sporadic efforts to put the firm out of business. Girodias’ weakness is his disastrous yearning for respectability. Some suspect that he hopes the law’s brigade mondaine will close Olympia. If they do, Girodias has a new career in mind: he talks of becoming a publisher of children’s books.