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Published in Paris
For years, ever since the first stirs in my groin, I'd hungered, like my brothers, for forbidden works, forbidden images. Equivalent to an ancient quest, Hebraic word-mania. ... It's fitting that the forbidden sacred words of my early quest were not those Kaballistic glyphs and maps but smudgy-covered worn paperbacks from Paris.... These books and words within their smirched fronts were capable of strong magic.... --David Meltzer
The importance of certain publishers in the history of erotic literature cannot be overemphasized. Indeed, their tastes and their receptivity to new kinds of erotic writing have been almost as influential in the development of the genre as the authors they have published. In this century the most important publisher of erotic writing in English has been The Olympia Press, the successor to The Obelisk Press, which was started in Paris in the early nineteen-thirties. The publisher of The Obelisk Press was an expatriate Englishman named Jack Kahane, and the first book to appear under the imprint of his new press was his own erotic novel, Daffodil. It was followed by a number of books which have become modern classics, including Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934. Kahane also published--in the years between 1934 and his death in 1939--Lawrence Durrell's first novel, The Black Book, Frank Harris' erotic autobiography, My Life and Loves, and books by Cyril Connolly, Anai's Nin, and James Joyce, as well as Miller's Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Here was a rogue publisher who was interested in something more than financial gain; the erotic fantasies he published supported the printing of literary works of little commercial promise. Kahane's son, Maurice Girodias (he took his mother's name) revived The Obelisk Press after the Second World War and operated it according to equally high standards. In the spring of 1953, Girodias founded The Olympia Press, and in the next twelve years published in his plain green Traveller's Companion Series not only some of the brightest literary names (Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Genet, William Burroughs, and J. P. Donleavy among others) but dozens of serious novels. The writers of these novels--Harriet Daimler, Alexander Trocchi, Marcus Van Heller, Ataullah Mardaan, Terry Southern, Mason Hoffenberg, Akbar Del Piombo, Henry Jones, William Talsman, James Sherwood, and others--approached the writing of what Girodias fondly called "d.b.'s." (dirty books) with high spirits and genuine talent. The novels they wrote for Girodias comprise a new wave of erotic writing in English. Most of these writers were American or English expatriates. They were young men and women with serious literary ambitions in the Paris of the fifties; Girodias paid them small advances and set them to work producing erotic novels for sale to Englishspeaking tourists. Exotic, often funny pseudonyms were dreamed up (Carmencita de las Lunas was one of the more inspired of these) and novels, which were often written in no more than a week, were printed in editions of five thousand copies each. When Girodias ran out of money he would write blurbs for nonexistent books, and then, when the orders for these came in, assign writers to come up with novels to fit his fanciful descriptions of them. It isn't a method of publishing to be recommended if erotic novels of quality are to be produced, but it worked because Girodias was fortunate in his authors, and encouraging of their wildest efforts. His authors were gifted writers, and literary talent will surface in the most improbable circumstances. Twenty years later at least a dozen of The Olympia Press novels published in the fifties still seem fresh and imaginative forays in the genre. Before we look at them, however, we should consider for a moment some of the work which influenced them. A few of these novels are nostalgic parodies of Victorian erotica; a larger number make use of the French surrealist tradition discussed in the last chapter; many are Sadean in their implications; a humorous view of sexuality seems the most prevalent approach, however. Their books possess buoyancy of spirit, a sense of fun and adventure in the midst of existentialist misery. In this sense the literary godfather of these writers is Henry Miller. Miller's books need not be analyzed here. Although the erotic sections of his novels once caused a sensation, and although he was extremely important both to Olympia Press (Girodias published his later books as his father had published the early ones) and to the development of erotic writing, there has been ample comment on his work. It is sufficient to point out that Miller's tone, first of all--that optimistic, experience-embracing voice of the Tropics--and secondly, his freedom in describing his sexual adventures, were of great importance to the writers who published under The Olympia Press imprint. The most notable of these writers is a Scotsman named Alexander Trocchi, who first published with Girodias under the pseudonym of Frances Lengel. His books-- Young Adam, White Thighs, Thongs, School for Wives, Helen and Desire, and The Carnal Days of Helen Seferis --all appeared in the fifties when Trocchi was living in Paris and editing the literary magazine Merlin. In 1967 Brandon House, a California publishing firm, reprinted five of Trocchi's erotic novels, some with new postscripts by the author. In his postscript to the Brandon House edition of Helen and Desire, Trocchi tells us that it was the first of the works he wrote under the Frances Lengel pseudonym, and that it was written in just over eight days in 1953. He seems most satisfied with the lightness of touch he was able to achieve in writing the novel, and certainly, it has its comic aspects; but Helen and Desire offers more than deft entertainment. Trocchi's heroine is Helen Smith. She tells her story in a manuscript which has supposedly been "found" by a French policeman in Algeria, who got it from an Arab he'd picked up. At the beginning of the novel she tells us that she is a prisoner in an Arab tent, somewhere in the desert. After this brief introduction she relates her life story. She grew up in an isolated village in Australia, and decided that she had to escape her narrow background. One day after she has been swimming naked in the sea and has masturbated herself against a tree trunk, she sees one of the local men attempting to rape a village girl. She sees in the man her chance to escape the village, and allows him to make love to her, suggesting that they run away to a large city. He offers to marry her, but Helen has other ideas. In one paragraph Trocchi shows us his ability not only to write from a female point of view (the novel is written in the first person) but to create an independent woman character. In Helen and Desire, and in all of Trocchi's erotic novels, strong women play leading roles, which in itself is unusual in erotic fiction by men. Helen's anger at the man's proposal indicates the level of sympathetic understanding with which Trocchi approaches his female characters.
What a fool he was! The thought of marriage had never crossed my mind. To be a house slave as my mother had been, to lose my freedom and adapt myself to his absurd male requirements! That was my first experience of this kind of idiot male presumption--why do they assume that because we have need of their bodies we will be willing to submit ourselves to the drab pattern of their everyday existence? If a man is poor and must work, what an overbearing impertinence to expect a beautiful woman to harness herself to his venal and constricted existence! Such men should be housed in a stable after their toil and, if it is a woman's pleasure, they should be loaned to her for her occasional enjoyment....
Once she is in a city Helen leaves the man and takes another train to Sydney, where her money is stolen and she goes to work for a pimp whose business is providing beautiful young women for his female clientele. When Helen tires of prostitution she uses another man to take her out of Australia, and her adventures continue in various eastern ports until she reaches North Africa, where a man betrays her and she ends up the prisoner of desert nomads. It is an exotic, melodramatic narrative, always lively, and obviously written with great gusto. Trocchi's handling of eroticism is seductive and literate, although at times he lapses into purple prose in his sexual descriptions. Although the erotic episodes are frequent, the book is unremittingly sensual in its other physical descriptions as well. Helen is an utterly sexual being, one of the best descriptions of the type in erotic literature, and the perfect vehicle for Trocchi's principal theme, one we discussed in connection with Georges Bataille: the obliteration of the individual consciousness through eroticism. These are Helen's reflections on the subject just after a scene in which her body has been used by one of her Arab captors:
... Once again I have experienced the terrible joy of annihilation, the deliverance of my whole being to the mystery of sensual union, and this time with a male whom I would not recognize in daylight…
But Helen retains her independence outside of sexual union:
I rejoice again in my separateness, in the vital isolation that makes it possible for a human being to collide, to coalesce, and for a short while to coexist with another.
Published in Paris continues... |
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