PORNOGRAPHY.
Olympia Comes to Swinging London
By KENNETH ALLSOP
rr‘HOSE absinthe-green paperbacks always used 1 to have on the back cover in dwarf type `Not to be sold in the USA or UK.' How quaint; how sweetly derriere-garde. Not now, they don't. The famous dirty books of Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press of Paris, bearing that cosy seal of approval of the tried-and-true `Traveller's Com- panion Series,' are not only to be sold in Britain but are to be published here. Between twenty and thirty of the Olympia cannon are to be distributed annually from London in collaboration with the New English Library under its Four Square imprint.
Ali, the wheel of fortune, the pinball table of pornography, how it does scutter into unpre- dictably curious arrays. Once was the time when France was the shoulder-shrugging, libertarian Athens of the off-beat arts. This was when J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man and Henry Miller's Sexus and William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch could find, via the backdoor of the Olympia Press, the outlet to the English-speaking world then denied them by their own bluenose home- lands. But that of course was before France began stiffening the national backbone into the glory posture by tirelessly banning films, barring Beatle-haired foreigners and, among other clean- up crusades, harassing M. Girodias and his erotica industry into bankruptcy.
So where else should M. Girodias find both sanctuary and the business opening for a new start but in groovy, kinky, pacey Britain? For, ever since Miss Keeler replaced Mrs Grundy as OUT Britannia figurehead, and the Jolly Roger Buttered where the Union Jack had hung so limp, London is—as not only our own colour supplements but Time magazine, too, deliriously tells us—the randy, anything-goes celestial city of the swingers of the world. Anything Paris won't take, well have.
As a matter of fact, it might be thought that there is a haze of, well, dissembling about M. Girodias's debut here and his alliance with the New English Library. Sunny side up; shady side almost invisible. I have before me a letter from the E. D. O'Brien Organisation at their Mayfair address, and than which no concern could exhale a heartier atmosphere of sturdy British propriety. Toby O'Brien, who has been described as 'one of the Establishment's best communicators,' is or has been public relations consultant for such as the Conservative Central Office, the Golf Society of Great Britain, the Portuguese Government, the Union Miniere of Katanga, Saudi Arabia, and the Royal Tournament. The letter is an invitation to a Savoy hotel party to meet M. Girodias 'to mark the launching of his new British publishing venture.' Accompanying it cam. e a biographical note, the three inaugural books, and a news release.
The news release states that this `major new step in international publishing' results from 'distribution problems in France' which have caused M. Girodias to 'extend his operation from Paris to London and New York.' Books by Beckett, Miller, Durrell, Donleavy, Burrough (sic) and Genet are `under consideration.' It continues: 'In a sentence, the series will provide the highest standard of original fiction, mass- distributed in soft-cover, at a. price anyone can afford.' Is that sentence condensing to the point of ellipsis what sort of `original fiction' we might
expect from the New English Library? The bio- graphical note does contain a hint: it attributes much of his success to 'the ruse of circulating a list of books with titillating titles, receiving pay- ment from the customers, and passing on the money to authors who then produced books to fit the titles.' Perhaps the E. D. O'Brien Organisa- tion felt it necessary to be a bit more explicit to forestall any accusation of disingenuousness, be- cause, with a light laugh, the hint is uneasily circled round again—and I can imagine the smoke-screen of cigar smoke at the conference table behind which this throwaway line was trimmed and polished. `Over the years,' it says breezily, `he frankly states, his company pro- duced many "dirty books" '—then, getting serious again—`but he takes pride in the solid literary works which appeared under the same imprint. Beckett, Donleavy, Nabokov and Burroughs (right this time) are among those whose works he published.'
Certainly he did, and quite properly he takes pride in it. Yet it seems to me that the thunderous emphasis on the serious aspect of M. Girodias's activities does disservice to his own candour. When, five years ago, I interviewed him for the SPECTATOR, he said with a languid smile: `I am a pornographer. I accept the title with joy and pride. I enjoy annoying people, people I dislike deeply—the bourgeois class which is in power everywhere. I think it is very healthy to shock them.' The present biography states that because of France's totalitarian and all-encompassing censorship, he is shifting here where 'moral and artistic freedom has become quite suddenly a reality.' That hadn't happened back in 1961. Then he was pretty fed up with us as an overseas market. 'I avoid sending to Britain like hell,' he told me. 'I did try an arrangement with a ship's engineer. The first time he was caught by the customs and the books were confiscated. The second time his ship sank and he was drowned.' Torpedoed by an MTB commanded by Mrs Mary Whitehouse? He didn't say.
What he did explain, without any public re- lations concealment, was that three-quarters of his output were 'Ms,' his dirty books. 'Titillating titles?' It depends what titillates you, I suppose. The raw material I brought back for the article (wrapped in my dirty washing, naturally) were Whips Incorporated by 'Angela Pearson' (graphic and sometimes shockingly realistic detail of the clandestine flagellatory activities of the English upper classes) and The English Governess by `Miles Underwood' (study of female domination, corruption and indulgence). Not to put too fine a point on it, the bulk of Olympia Press paper- backs has been hard-core pornography, the real, obsessional, concussive bashing-and-grinding through every gradation of sexual athleticism and preference, performed, usually en masse, by insatiable, knickerless girls and men built like the Post Office tower.
So I was interested to examine what we shall be getting hot from the New English Library presses. There is Paul Ableman's I Hear Voices, first published in 1958, a blameless piece of experimentation very much of that period in its attenuated surrealism. There is Stradella by James Sherwood, a 1962 Olympia Press issue about a Woody Allen weed's frolics with a Hollywood TV goddess of _ love, bawdily frivolous In the
manner of Terry Southern's Candy. There is A Bedside Odyssey, which advances the claim of being Homer's original unedited text of Odysseus's rovings, and which pullulates with such imagery as thumping hammers striking anvils, arrows flying into targets, and tall masts ramming into keel-slots. Quite honestly, there isn't much here that, with Lady Chatterley and An American Dream and Fanny Hill and Last Exit to Brooklyn freely on sale, can't be found in almost any routine new novel.
This is not said with either disappointment or satisfaction. However artful the terms in which M. Girodias is being introduced here, he doesn't seem to me to constitute a threat to our moral well being, for, indeed, as has been asked with increasing frequency, does pornography matter? While questioning M. Girodias's claim that `Pornography would fade out like a bad dream if there were no censorship,' there is little reason, income benefits apart, to be sceptical about his genuineness in saying: `I publish it to show how harmless it is.' Harmless, perhaps, but the fact about most pornography, and, ipso facto, most of the Girodias list, is that it is banal, silly and inevitably (because of the cramped area of mechanical repetitiveness available to it) boring.
I would not take it upon myself to dictate an embargo on the consumption demands of a ready-made public, whose maxim is that self- composed Latin epitaph of a Victorian porno- grapher, Vivat Lingam, Non Resurgam. Yet it is difficult to feel, on the evidence of these first three publications, the thrill of an imminent re- naissance. The E. D. O'Brien Organisation has a tough assignment, but let us not underestimate the charm and persuasion of the men who put the Golf Society of Great Britain on the map. Girodias has always picked the pseudonyms for the hard-up writers who hammer out his porn— `Otherwise,' he told me, 'they always choose a name like J. Walter Thompson' At least, he must be glad now that he didn't say Toby O'Brien.
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