The Garden of Eros: The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-War Literary Scene

by John Calder

A poignant memoir of the Paris literary scene in the 1950s and 1960s by one of its protagonists  Some of last century's leading cultural figures are brought to life here, people who shaped our modern thinking and defined the tastes of an entire generation, changing forever the way we look at literature and the world around us. Drawing from the accounts of two fellow publishers—Maurice Girodias and Barney Rosset, who were also active in the heady days of 1950s and 1960s Paris, London, and New York—and from his own personal recollections, John Calder talks about the challenges of being a publisher in that era of censorship and political persecution and the problems faced by such writers as Beckett, Burroughs, Trocchi, and Miller to have their work accepted and recognized. Told in John Calder's trademark raconteur style and peppered with salacious, revealing, and entertaining anecdotes, this book will appeal both to the general reader and anyone who is interested in the social and cultural history of the 20th century.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Biography, Literature

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't write free promotional reviews for Amazon anymore, but I thought I'd break my self-imposed silence and absence to say something brief about this book, seeing that John Calder died this week. I read Garden of Eros over a year ago, so surely many of its millions of details have already slipped into the stream of forgetting, but the book itself remains strongly present in my thoughts. This is also probably because around the time I was reading it I was making decisions in my own life on whether or not to continue down my regular path or to commit fully to a creative life, centered around creative acts and the communities those engender. I couldn't have encountered a more powerful argument for the value of free expression, especially among the spectacular ruins of the history of the Western world. You and I are traipsing these ruins still, so these are calls we must heed.

What is told here is the story of a very specific time and place in the transformaion of modernity in Western culture, after a long period of total collapse into barbarism and destruction, when certain survivors, traumatized, decimated, but alive and hungry again for a vital life in peace time, came together in Paris from sundry parts of the world, to live and create with an energy that has to be categorized as blindly intense, erotic, pornographic, destructive in the service of regeneration of the human spirit, moral in a Nietzschean sense, and truly revolutionary. Calder was there to witness it all and to fight for the right of these works to exist. The list of important names that participate in Calder's recounting is practically endless, so I won't name them, but encourage you to go find them out yourself - these are some of the foundational literary artists to emerge from that ambiguous fold of recounted historical time where Modernism began to slip inexorably into Postmodernism.

What impressed me above all in The Garden of Eros, in Calder's writing, and the personalities revealed through it, is the importance of fighting for the recognition that all work done in the service of creative expression (and so in the service of the creation of empathy, the broadening of perspectives, and the understanding of human consciousness and experience) has innate dignity, even, and especially, the voices of the damned, doomed, marginalized, and outcast, emanating from the wreckage of the post-war industrial wasteland and capitalist junkspace, which are the conditions of existence you reading this, and I, were born into and are navigating today. These voices will always be attacked and attempts will always be made to silence them, by authorities and the status quo, whose existence they necessarily threaten.

Calder took up arms in this battle and won many victories, large and small, against censorship, and for the voices of the outcast. The stories told here are also hilarious, disturbing, absurd, insane, sad and beautiful. Calder's life and the lives he evokes in this memory-world, can provide a strange mirror of how to carry forward with creative activity, when similar threats are emerging on a world-historical scale today. The Garden of Eros is an essential memoir.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exciting and thoughtful account of the 1950s Parisian lit scene, focusing on Olympia Press founder/misunderstood charmer Maurice Girodias, and Glaswegian troublemaker/misunderstood charmer Alexander Trocchi. Calder’s book is an entertaining mix of personal reminiscence, well-researched corrective historiography, and a colorful account of a radical time in literature lost to the bygone days. He also discusses the Tangiers literary crowd (Paul Bowles and William Burroughs at the helm), the Beat movement, and reflects on his own travails as a publisher, listing Sam Beckett among his mates. His reflections on risk-taking as a publisher are fascinating (more of these can be had in his memoir Pursuit), and reminds us of the courageous work undertaken by publishers back then so that the bulk of these authors can now be read unexpurgated. A sexier, more seditious and sensational time there never was.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

When people talk about Paris and the literary scene, they tend to think of the 1920s. That is forgivable, but a pity. John Calder – whose firm, Calder & Boyars, published Samuel Beckett, Alexander Trocchi, Hubert Selby Junior and others – has written an engaging, wayward memoir of Paris and its literary expatriates after World War 2.

It makes the previous era sound as tranquil as an aquarium. Things were rarely as they seemed. Free French forces, which had formed a tiny part of the Allied army at Normandy, re-entered Paris on the 25th August 1944, symbolically retracing Hitler’s steps from four years earlier. Amid all the morale-boosting and ceremony, British, American, and Canadian troops were trading shots with German snipers on the rooftops. They almost had no city to fight over: Hitler had ordered Paris to be dynamited. Had it not been for the disobedience of the German High Command in France, seemingly advised by Ernst Jünger, his wishes might well have been carried out.

The war didn’t touch everyone. What surprises is how people lived as near to normal as possible. The summer of 1944 was, for many, just like any other – a time to visit the beach, the mountains, Spain (if they could get the Visas) or Switzerland. The large and thriving wartime black market continued for long afterwards, enabling many to live well who had the means, but also protecting those who could not dare to take ordinary employment in Nazi territory.

The speed with which writers, artists and editors rebuilt the Parisian cultural world is commendable. Having seen it brought to the point of annihilation, there was an almost missionary zeal in bringing it back. Older magazines, such as transition, were revived; newer journals like Merlin and The Paris Review were launched. After inheriting the Obelisk Press from his father, Calder’s contemporary, Maurice Girodias, successfully relaunched the company as The Olympia Press. He was the right man at the right time.

Girodias had also retained from his father’s press a list of some 400 buyers of erotica, and knew the main booksellers of Paris, Amsterdam, Geneva and other cities with a market for books in English, especially those considered pornographic. The firm’s bread-and-butter books had titles like Thongs, Until She Screams, and Roman Orgy, and soon foreign GIs posted to France were buying them in droves.

Where some saw licensed immorality, others saw opportunity. For it was not Viking, Knopf or Random House who first saw Lolita and Naked Lunch into the haven of print – it was The Olympia Press. Soon the very cover designs – plain black text on a green background, so as to play down the content – became symbols of cultural freedom. However the authors came to feel about Girodias – not the best at accounting or financial management – he made their names, and risked jail for doing so repeatedly. Nor were they the only titles to be thankful for – Girodias also published The Ginger Man, the Beckett trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable) and one of the first exposes of Scientology. You can’t grow flowers without a little dirt.

Calder rescues figures like Girodias from the history books, and gives them flesh-and-blood vividness. The book’s best parts are all pen-portraits of writers and editors. Girodias, newly married, was soon bedding an old acquaintance named Germaine Riedberger, who treated her lover’s scruples with amused condescension: ‘I really like your wife. She has an undeniable charm, and you are very lucky to have her, my dear. Many others would like to be in your shoes.’ It was Germaine who later triumphantly announced at a formal dinner that Girodias’ wife was pregnant.

Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi was in Paris on a travelling scholarship, despite having mistimed a Benzedrine overdose and fallen asleep during his final philosophy exam. He seems to have been a nightmare to know – full of get-rich-quick schemes, outlines for books never started, and a lifelong drug user who eventually prostituted his own wife to buy heroin. Even to those who regard Trocchi as, to poach Hugh MacDiarmid’s phrase, ‘cosmopolitan scum’, his portrait is sympathetic and makes you feel just how much Trocchi had to lose.

When poet and fellow Merlin editor Christopher Logue fell in love with a rich Brazilian teenager, the girl’s parents spared no time in taking her out of the country. Devastated, Logue intended to commit suicide by taking a boat out to sea and sinking with it. On arrival, finding he didn’t have enough francs to even hire a boat, he bought sleeping pills. Trocchi, having learned of the plan, followed Logue to Canet Plage and found him trying to open the tin by smashing it on a rock. Logue looked up and said ‘Alex, I can’t open this.’ A minute later, he added, in surprise, ‘Alex, what are you doing here?’ Trocchi replied, ‘I’m here to embarrass you’ and confiscated the tin. ‘Come on, Christopher. Enough of this. Let’s go into town and talk...d’accord, old man?’ They went to a cafe and took a sleeper back to Paris, first class, eating an excellent dinner in the dining car accompanied by two bottles of wine and a generous amount of brandy.

Equally memorable is Calder’s portrait of Henry Miller, but for somewhat different reasons. Miller, still basking in the glory of Tropic of Cancer, published by Girodias’ father in 1934, was famed for his approach to life as much as his writing. (‘Fuck your capitalistic society! Fuck your communistic society and your fascist society and your other societies! Society is made up of individuals. It is the individual who interests me.’) After the success of his reprinted work – or perhaps due to his continuing presence in French newspapers - the censors pounced.

The effect on Miller’s sales was immediate – 125,000 extra copies printed and sold. Seeing the publicity value, Girodias persuaded Miller to appear before court voluntarily in an attempt to quash a prosecution. The result was somewhat less heroic. Miller arrived at court in a state of abject terror, which increased as matters proceeded. When asked to give his name, all the great underground writer and champion of freedom of speech could manage was a low ‘Hmmmm’ of fright. When asked, via an interpreter, if he was the author of the works in question, he said, ‘I have a terrible need to piss. Ask if I can go.’

Surprisingly there is little here about Samuel Beckett, a close friend of Calder’s and whose work he published in its near entirety; and even less on other second-wave expatriates such as James Baldwin. I wish, also, that Calder would drop his bad habit of introducing something pivotal on one page, then introducing it again, as if for the first time, barely a few pages later. But the overall experience of reading this rich, informed book by a man of heroic taste is something all should be introduced to without delay.

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Along with Grove Press's Barney Rosset and the legendary Olympia publisher Maurice Girodias, John Calder is part of the powerful trio of visionaries who presented and published remarkable literature in the 20th century. "The Garden of Eros" is both a literary history of publishing as well as a memoir of those years. Calder also wrote "Pursuit" which is interesting, but also in the need of some editing. "The Garden of Eros" is a better book that focuses on a huge subject matter - publishing in the 20th century. The subtitle is correct, but rather limiting when one reads the book. Paris is pretty much the focus with respect to the publishing history, but it also deals with the Paris Review crowd to Terry Southern to Alexander Trocchi, who is without the doubt, one of the great characters of the 20th century - both in a good, but a mostly bad way. In fact, Calder's book may be the best with respect to writing about Trocchi's sordid history as writer and junkie. The book is gossipy, as well as information regarding Trocchi, but also Girodias, who is an important figure in not only publishing but in his troubled relationships with his writers. Henry Miller, Beckett, Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Alain Robbe-Grillet and so many other writers/ personalities are in this volume of delight. As a publisher myself, I can easily identify myself with the Maurice Girodias and John Calder passion for making books and presenting authors - even those who wrote DB (dirty books). An important document on publishing and its incredible personalities that ran into that world.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

here is a good review of this book
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

here is a not good one
calder, who i guess is a famous publisher in uk, writes a smooth, integrated history of lit in paris after wwii. focusing on olympia press and its impresario giordias, rosset and his grove press, trocchi and his mates journal 'merlin' and plimpton and his mates with 'paris review' (and calder's own history too of publishing and fighting the good fight) and book shops . so this is a smooth wave , a big big wave, but enjoyable and readable, of books, authors, literature, swinging, drugs, art, travel, cia, business, gutlessness and heroes. a must for serious readers.
note from back of book: calder has published starting in 1949, 18 nobel prize winners, 1500 titles, one of the pioneers of bringing modern literature into the english language. cool dude, in my book.

from page 314 ".....America still had some good small publishers on the European model, which is not usually departmentalized in the same way [as random house for ex]. Michael Brazliller (son of George) of Persea Books, Noel Young of Capra Press, John Martin of Black Sparrow and John O'Brien of Dalkey Archive, some still alive, spring to mind [as good, brave, literary presses]."