![]() 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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