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Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press
The story of the Olympia Press is one of the most flamboyant in publishing history. In the 1950s, when dirty books (and great ones) were being banned in Britain and America, Maurice Girodias launched a career in Paris that earned him the nickname the "Prince of Porn." John de St. Jorre gives a high-spirited account of this infamous publisher whose eclectic list included Lolita, The Ginger Man, Henry Miller's several Tropics, and the outrageous romp called Candy. Photos.
358 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
3 people are currently reading
96 people want to read
About the author
John de St. Jorre
28 books6 followersJohn de St. Jorre was born in London and educated in Britain and Singapore. "I spent two years in the army, much of it in Malaya during the Communist insurgency, followed by a degree at Oxford. During my last year at Oxford, I was recruited into MI6 by my medieval-history tutor. [By age 24] I had quit MI6 – I had spent most of my time working in Africa – and begun to drift doing odd jobs to survive but enjoying the freedom of the era. It was, after all, the 1960s and it seemed the right thing to do. ...after freelancing in central Africa, the Observer hired me. I was deflected by covering political crises in Africa and the Middle East, and wars, notably the Nigerian-Biafran conflict, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the Iranian Islamic revolution."
Turning freelance in New York, he divided his time between journalism, book writing, lecturing, and writing and editing. He has written articles and reviews for The New York Times and its Sunday Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Town and Country, The Times, The Guardian, Punch, The Literary Review, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and Departures among others.
He lives with his wife and family in Newport, Rhode Island.
Turning freelance in New York, he divided his time between journalism, book writing, lecturing, and writing and editing. He has written articles and reviews for The New York Times and its Sunday Magazine, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Yorker, Town and Country, The Times, The Guardian, Punch, The Literary Review, MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History, and Departures among others.
He lives with his wife and family in Newport, Rhode Island.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 21, 2012
I had vaguely heard the name Maurice Girodias before, but I really knew nothing about him until I read this exceptional book. It is a kind of professional biography of the man who ran the infamous Olympia Press, as well as a wonderfully-evoked portrait of bohemian Paris from the 30s to the 60s.
Olympia was basically a publisher of dirty books – DBs, as Girodias called them – which were illegal under the censorship laws in Britain and the US. Works like Bottoms Up or The Loins of Amon sold like crazy in Paris, not least by mail-order to various connoisseurs and American Naval bases around the world. But Girodias (or "Gid", for short) also had a genuine eye for literature and a driving desire to piss off the Establishment in whatever form it might take, which meant that Olympia also published some of the greatest countercultural books of the twentieth century – books which no one else would touch.
The list is pretty awesome. They published early drafts of Finnegans Wake. Henry Miller was down to his last couple of francs when Olympia agreed to print Tropic of Cancer. Samual Beckett's great prose trilogy. Lolita. Jean Genet, Lawrence Durrell, JP Donleavy. Candy. Right up to Naked Lunch, and beyond. It's practically a checklist of every book I ran through deliriously while I was a teenager.
If ever there was a book to make you want to abandon remunerative pursuits and be a penniless, struggling writer, it's this one. It immerses you in the world of Left-Bank Paris, with jaw-dropping anecdotes about all the characters concerned which will make anyone with any interest in these writers very happy. The pages practically reek of unfiltered Gauloises and cheap red wine. The research is exemplary – St Jorre has spoken to everyone involved, some of whom have the most incredible recollections. . .like this from Gid's brother on his childhood:
One day I was in [my father's] apartment in a long corridor, where I was playing with my toys. Suddenly the door at the far end opened and [James] Joyce came out to go to the loo at the other end of the corridor. He was just about blind by then and those huge glasses he wore made him a little frightening. The corridor was very narrow and he was touching the walls on both sides. I felt trapped and did not want to be seen or touched by him. Thanks to French plumbing there were plenty of lead pipes running up the walls. So I climbed up to the ceiling and hung on for dear life. Just as he passed under me, he reached up, pulled me by the ankle and threw me down on to the floor. "You shit," he said and went on to the toilet.
Nabokov comes across, as usual, as a rather vindictive and arrogant man. Lolita, of course, made his name, but he deeply resented the fact that he had had to resort to such a disreputable company to get it published, and he fell out with Girodias in a big way. Gid's brother Eric Kahane translated Lolita into French, which took "sixteen months of intense effort" – "it was like lace work". Not helped by the fact that
Nabokov insisted on reading every word and conducted a huge correspondence [...] with as much as four pages of a letter devoted to the meaning of a single word. At times this would verge on the ridiculous as, for instance, finding the best French phrase to describe the "peachy fuzz" on Lolita's arms. Kahane tried out peau de pèche but Nabokov would not have it and came up with an archaic word meaning "wild gooseberry" that he said was in an 1895 edition of Larousse. "I don't remember who won that battle," said Kahane.
Sadly, Gid had a tendency to deeply upset virtually all his authors, mainly through the expedient technique of failing to pay them. He never had any money, but was so ludicrously charming that whenever anyone went round to demand cash, he would say something flattering or offer them a cigar and suddenly they were halfway home again with less money than before.
The chapter on Story of O is a masterpiece essay in itself. It was St Jorre who discovered the true identity of "Pauline Réage" (now to be found everywhere on the internet) and it's a great, great tale. Another highlight for me was the sketch of William Burroughs's character. I had always imagined that he must be a very weird and detached person, but in this book he comes across as rather kind and witty, albeit mostly junked up to the eyeballs or in bed with teenage boys. Usually both.
It was also quite a surprise to discover Girodias's involvement with Valerie Solanas, the disturbed American lesbian activist who wrote the impressively anti-male Up Your Ass and a tract called the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men). Girodias met her after he moved to New York, was impressed by her writing and thought she was great. For some time she seemed to like him too, but then one day, in the grip of some kind of episode, she went round to his house with a loaded gun. Gid happened to have flown to Canada the day before. Finding him not there, she went instead to Andy Warhol's place, and shot him three times.
For all these fascinating sidelights, this is above all a book about Paris in the golden age of underground literature. It's also the best literary history I've ever read. Girodias emerges as a tragically flawed but heroic and likeable character, and the artistic period and location speak for themselves. It's also very, very funny – the Spectator's review pointed out that "just about every chapter could be the basis for a comedy series". I could go on, but you might as well get a copy yourself. I can't imagine anyone reading this and not coming out delighted, and inspired.
Olympia was basically a publisher of dirty books – DBs, as Girodias called them – which were illegal under the censorship laws in Britain and the US. Works like Bottoms Up or The Loins of Amon sold like crazy in Paris, not least by mail-order to various connoisseurs and American Naval bases around the world. But Girodias (or "Gid", for short) also had a genuine eye for literature and a driving desire to piss off the Establishment in whatever form it might take, which meant that Olympia also published some of the greatest countercultural books of the twentieth century – books which no one else would touch.
The list is pretty awesome. They published early drafts of Finnegans Wake. Henry Miller was down to his last couple of francs when Olympia agreed to print Tropic of Cancer. Samual Beckett's great prose trilogy. Lolita. Jean Genet, Lawrence Durrell, JP Donleavy. Candy. Right up to Naked Lunch, and beyond. It's practically a checklist of every book I ran through deliriously while I was a teenager.
If ever there was a book to make you want to abandon remunerative pursuits and be a penniless, struggling writer, it's this one. It immerses you in the world of Left-Bank Paris, with jaw-dropping anecdotes about all the characters concerned which will make anyone with any interest in these writers very happy. The pages practically reek of unfiltered Gauloises and cheap red wine. The research is exemplary – St Jorre has spoken to everyone involved, some of whom have the most incredible recollections. . .like this from Gid's brother on his childhood:
One day I was in [my father's] apartment in a long corridor, where I was playing with my toys. Suddenly the door at the far end opened and [James] Joyce came out to go to the loo at the other end of the corridor. He was just about blind by then and those huge glasses he wore made him a little frightening. The corridor was very narrow and he was touching the walls on both sides. I felt trapped and did not want to be seen or touched by him. Thanks to French plumbing there were plenty of lead pipes running up the walls. So I climbed up to the ceiling and hung on for dear life. Just as he passed under me, he reached up, pulled me by the ankle and threw me down on to the floor. "You shit," he said and went on to the toilet.
Nabokov comes across, as usual, as a rather vindictive and arrogant man. Lolita, of course, made his name, but he deeply resented the fact that he had had to resort to such a disreputable company to get it published, and he fell out with Girodias in a big way. Gid's brother Eric Kahane translated Lolita into French, which took "sixteen months of intense effort" – "it was like lace work". Not helped by the fact that
Nabokov insisted on reading every word and conducted a huge correspondence [...] with as much as four pages of a letter devoted to the meaning of a single word. At times this would verge on the ridiculous as, for instance, finding the best French phrase to describe the "peachy fuzz" on Lolita's arms. Kahane tried out peau de pèche but Nabokov would not have it and came up with an archaic word meaning "wild gooseberry" that he said was in an 1895 edition of Larousse. "I don't remember who won that battle," said Kahane.
Sadly, Gid had a tendency to deeply upset virtually all his authors, mainly through the expedient technique of failing to pay them. He never had any money, but was so ludicrously charming that whenever anyone went round to demand cash, he would say something flattering or offer them a cigar and suddenly they were halfway home again with less money than before.
The chapter on Story of O is a masterpiece essay in itself. It was St Jorre who discovered the true identity of "Pauline Réage" (now to be found everywhere on the internet) and it's a great, great tale. Another highlight for me was the sketch of William Burroughs's character. I had always imagined that he must be a very weird and detached person, but in this book he comes across as rather kind and witty, albeit mostly junked up to the eyeballs or in bed with teenage boys. Usually both.
It was also quite a surprise to discover Girodias's involvement with Valerie Solanas, the disturbed American lesbian activist who wrote the impressively anti-male Up Your Ass and a tract called the SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men). Girodias met her after he moved to New York, was impressed by her writing and thought she was great. For some time she seemed to like him too, but then one day, in the grip of some kind of episode, she went round to his house with a loaded gun. Gid happened to have flown to Canada the day before. Finding him not there, she went instead to Andy Warhol's place, and shot him three times.
For all these fascinating sidelights, this is above all a book about Paris in the golden age of underground literature. It's also the best literary history I've ever read. Girodias emerges as a tragically flawed but heroic and likeable character, and the artistic period and location speak for themselves. It's also very, very funny – the Spectator's review pointed out that "just about every chapter could be the basis for a comedy series". I could go on, but you might as well get a copy yourself. I can't imagine anyone reading this and not coming out delighted, and inspired.
November 2, 2014
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the
Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Philip Larkin –“Annus Mirabilis” Collected Poems
This is a fascinating biography and social document initially centered in Paris about Jack Kahane, who ran the English-language based Obelisk Press in the thirties and his son Maurice Girodias (otherwise known as the Prince of Porn), the Olympic Press in the fifties and sixties. By their sheer determination, doggedness and devious means they managed to publish authors whose works at the time were considered to be obscene or “dirty”.
Brilliant writers such as Lawrence Durrell (“The Black Book”), Henry Miller (“Tropic of Cancer”), Anais Nin (“Winter of Artifice”), James Joyce (“Haveth Childers Everywhere and Pomes Penyeach”), Vladimir Nabakov (“Lolita”) and many others who were continuously frustrated by their inability to get published, owe their continuing success nowadays to these two remarkable publishers.
Amusing anecdotes stud the book but the most intriguing and annoying individual was the Irish American writer, J.P. Donleavy (“The Ginger Man”). He was like a dog with a bone and had an ongoing feud with Girodias over royalty payments and the like. Donleavy’s second wife Mary, who had remarried into the Guinness family, played a very significant part in the auction of the Olympic Press in France.
The description of the auction is quite fascinating because at the time, it was conducted by using three candles.
The auctioneer sat behind a high desk at the end of the room. On the desk were three unlit candles……Not for the French the singsong chant of the fast-talking American auctioneer or the crude British “Going, going, one”, ending with the whack of a hammer. In France, auctions had an almost religious air. The auctioneer would light the first candle when the bidding slowed. Each candle had a short-burning wick, and when the first one went out, assuming there were no more bids, the auctioneer would light the second candle and then, if nothing further happened, on to the third. The sale was final when the third candle went out.
I actually attended a property auction about ten years ago in France where candles were used. It really was an incredible experience to see the candles being lit. A good memory.
There is so much movement in this book with the comings and goings to the States, books being mailed by clandestine means and more. In fact some of the books were actually split into sections and sent in different mailings.
Girodias is quite a character; charismatic and he loved to womanize, eat well and was quite the flamboyant and dapper individual.
Regrettably for him, in the sixties and seventies, the relaxation in censorship in Great Britain and the States, as well as the sexual revolution at the time, proved to be the undoing of Girodias’ publishing activities.
This is indeed a compelling book that made me smile and even laugh at times.
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the
Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Philip Larkin –“Annus Mirabilis” Collected Poems
This is a fascinating biography and social document initially centered in Paris about Jack Kahane, who ran the English-language based Obelisk Press in the thirties and his son Maurice Girodias (otherwise known as the Prince of Porn), the Olympic Press in the fifties and sixties. By their sheer determination, doggedness and devious means they managed to publish authors whose works at the time were considered to be obscene or “dirty”.
Brilliant writers such as Lawrence Durrell (“The Black Book”), Henry Miller (“Tropic of Cancer”), Anais Nin (“Winter of Artifice”), James Joyce (“Haveth Childers Everywhere and Pomes Penyeach”), Vladimir Nabakov (“Lolita”) and many others who were continuously frustrated by their inability to get published, owe their continuing success nowadays to these two remarkable publishers.
Amusing anecdotes stud the book but the most intriguing and annoying individual was the Irish American writer, J.P. Donleavy (“The Ginger Man”). He was like a dog with a bone and had an ongoing feud with Girodias over royalty payments and the like. Donleavy’s second wife Mary, who had remarried into the Guinness family, played a very significant part in the auction of the Olympic Press in France.
The description of the auction is quite fascinating because at the time, it was conducted by using three candles.
The auctioneer sat behind a high desk at the end of the room. On the desk were three unlit candles……Not for the French the singsong chant of the fast-talking American auctioneer or the crude British “Going, going, one”, ending with the whack of a hammer. In France, auctions had an almost religious air. The auctioneer would light the first candle when the bidding slowed. Each candle had a short-burning wick, and when the first one went out, assuming there were no more bids, the auctioneer would light the second candle and then, if nothing further happened, on to the third. The sale was final when the third candle went out.
I actually attended a property auction about ten years ago in France where candles were used. It really was an incredible experience to see the candles being lit. A good memory.
There is so much movement in this book with the comings and goings to the States, books being mailed by clandestine means and more. In fact some of the books were actually split into sections and sent in different mailings.
Girodias is quite a character; charismatic and he loved to womanize, eat well and was quite the flamboyant and dapper individual.
Regrettably for him, in the sixties and seventies, the relaxation in censorship in Great Britain and the States, as well as the sexual revolution at the time, proved to be the undoing of Girodias’ publishing activities.
This is indeed a compelling book that made me smile and even laugh at times.
November 8, 2007
This is the book that made me said 'yes' to start my own publishing. Here is the story of Maurice Girodias and his press Olympia. He took a lot of authors out to cocktail lunches, lost a lot of money, always dressed well, had a love for both pornography and high art - really, a man I can truly admire. Maurice Girodias is my patron saint!
March 27, 2017
Some fascinating bits concerning the emergence of Histoire d'O, Lolita, and The Ginger Man. Lots of arcane details on intercontinental legal maneuvering.
December 20, 2011
Enjoyed the portraits of the universe of little and well-known literary characters who walked through the doors of Olympia, and the stories behind the books that have earned Olympia Press and Girodias places in literary history.
Good to be reminded that the romance of publishing and writing is sustained by ordinary people -- writers, publishers and sellers who are often cliquish, ungrateful and unpleasant and all driven by their love for good writing :)
In some parts St. Jorre errs on the side of comprehensiveness rather than flair. While he doesn't avoid describing Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias' flaws, he's fairly discreet.
Good to be reminded that the romance of publishing and writing is sustained by ordinary people -- writers, publishers and sellers who are often cliquish, ungrateful and unpleasant and all driven by their love for good writing :)
In some parts St. Jorre errs on the side of comprehensiveness rather than flair. While he doesn't avoid describing Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias' flaws, he's fairly discreet.
December 10, 2007
Informative but still engaging. I'd actually been ignorant of the great number of important books published by the Olympia Press. Interesting to see that Maurice had the dichotomy of a huge drive to succeed, and a huge need to undermine his own efforts. It all furthered my desire to own my own press someday.
March 12, 2017
An excellent history of one of the most interesting publishing houses of the 20th Century, right on the cusp of the revolutionary changes in social mores that are a foundation of the world today. As we are slipping rapidly into a time when books cease to matter, it's amazing to see the influence that a tiny press and its penny-pinching impresario exercised, sometimes unwittingly, on consciousness. Written when many of the principles were still alive, we hear the story of the press that published Lolita, The Ginger Man, Candy. Naked Lunch, as well as There's a Whip in My Valise, Fuzz Against Junk, and other cornerstones of declasse literature from the men and women who wrote the books, ran the business, and (often didn't) pay the bills. Mostly this is a book about Maurice Girodias, who must have been an infuriating guy to know or do business with, but who definitely left his eccentric mark on the world.
February 10, 2017
Great summary of the many controversies that made the legendary literary press, and a great study of the character of Maurice Girodias, its ill-fated publisher.
January 20, 2013
Odd book. It is a disorganized rendering of a disorganised man and his disorganized press. Some interesting stories are in here and it is curious to see the ways important and contraversal novels came to be in print.
March 13, 2015
Superb book all about Olympia Press novels which also happened to include first editions of classics such as Lolita and Naked lunch. A great introduction to those books and a detailed history of the rise and fall of a now legendary publishing company.
August 29, 2015
Brilliant 'biography' of a chaotic, wild, incredibly important publishing house, its colourful owners, the extraordinary group of writers with which it is associated (Nabakov, Miller, 'Pauline Reage' (Story of O), Donleavy...) at a time when Paris was Paris. Loved it.
May 24, 2008
Read for avant-garde authors class. Read 1/2 of it, couldn't finish the rest. 2 stars are for the chapter on Anais Nin and Henry Miller.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews