Maurice Girodias writes in his introduction to The Olympia Reader, Grove Press, 1965: “Since my earliest childhood the notion of individual freedom had been deeply rooted in me. Everything I saw or felt as I was growing up turned into a passion — a passion I shared with millions of contemporary Frenchmen, although my own brand drew me toward a form of individualist anarchy while the others usually went toward practical communism or socialism. I resented and hated l’ésprit bourgeois in all its manifestations, but I also distrusted all forms of human association.”
Maurice Girodias, purveyor of some of the best erotic writing ever published which united the obscene and the beautiful, was the son of a French mother and Jewish father from Manchester, “a silver spoonfed infant and a very poor orphan.” Jack Kahane came to Paris in the 1930s and set up the Obelisk Press to publish books in English which, thanks to a loophole in French law, could not be printed in America or England because of censorship. He published Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1934, Anais Nin, Cyril Connolly, a fragment of Joyce’s work in progress, Haveth Childers Everywhere, as a limited edition. The Young and the Evil (1933) by Charles Henri-Ford and Parker Tyler depicted gay life in Harlem and Greenwich and men earning their living there — Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein praised it to the skies. Continue reading Spotlight | Maurice Girodias & Olympia Press | Indie Publishers Remembered
