{"id":5996,"date":"2017-02-06T18:25:35","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T23:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/margaretharrell.flywheelsites.com\/?p=5996"},"modified":"2017-05-31T15:34:18","modified_gmt":"2017-05-31T19:34:18","slug":"maurice-girodias-a-bit-of-adventure-the-sixties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/margaretharrell.com\/2017\/02\/maurice-girodias-a-bit-of-adventure-the-sixties\/","title":{"rendered":"Maurice Girodias – A bit of Adventure – the Sixties"},"content":{"rendered":"

There was a time when books were regularly censored – not just in Communist countries. Right here in the U.S. Living in Greenwich Village, I made a friend of my next-door neighbor, and she in turn used to take trips to Europe in the pay of Maurice Girodias, a publisher\u00a0notorious for bringing out banned books.\u00a0Above is an interesting bit of memorabilia from my\u00a0 Greenwich Village days that I turned up just an hour or two ago in my basement archives. The short excerpt below describes some of Maurice’s publications:<\/p>\n

In the 1950s, almost everything one wanted to read was published in Paris by Maurice. And banned. Lawrence Durrell, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, \u201cPauline Reage &\/or Dominique Aury\u201d aka Anne Desclos\u2019 Story of O<\/em>, Marquis de Sade, Jean Cocteau, Vladimir Nabokov, Chester Himes, Alexander Trocchi, Terry Southern, \u201cAkbar del Piombo\u201d aka Norman Rubington, \u201cHarriet Daimler\u201d aka Iris Owens, Nikos Zorba the Greek<\/em> Kazantzakis, \u201cWu Wu Meng\u201d aka Sinclair Beiles\u2019 only novel Houses of Joy<\/em>, Gregory Corso\u2019s only novel The American Express<\/em>, Philip O\u2019Connor\u2019s Steiner\u2019s Tour<\/em>, Raymond Queneau\u2019s Zazie dans Le Metro <\/em>and Georges Bataille to name just a few. American graduate students earned their tuition by renting out reading copies to undergraduates of the books published by Olympia Press. So when I arrived on the Left Bank during the summer of 1960, having reached the age of my majority, the first thing I did, like so many others of my generation in search of meaning, was head for the bookstalls on the quays along the Seine to buy my Traveller\u2019s Companions, green-covered copies of Henry Miller\u2019s Tropics<\/em> and William Burroughs\u2019 dust-jacketed The Naked Lunch<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Continue reading.<\/a><\/p>\n

Below in the excerpt from Keep This Quiet!<\/em> My Relationship with Hunter S. Thompson, Milton Klonsky, and Jan Mensaert<\/em>, I discuss my interactions with Sarah (who lived in the brownstone next door on Bleecker Street) and, by extension though not in person, Girodias:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Ensconced in my old Village apartment, I was now a Random House copy editor. My own book begun, whomever I met I looked at as a possible character. Bits of many people might figure in.<\/p>\n

Next door in another Bleecker Street brownstone was beautiful, thin, elegant, groovy Sarah Uman, the daughter of a black Chicago jazz musician. She was the mistress of Barney Rosset, Grove Press publisher, and would lead me to my main male protagonist. Waging legal wars in the US on behalf of Lady Chatterly\u2019s Lover<\/em> and Tropic of Cancer<\/em>, publishing Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl\u201d and Burrough\u2019s Naked Lunch<\/em> along with Beckett\u2019s Waiting for Godot<\/em>, to name a few, Rosset, with his Grove Press and Evergreen Review<\/em>, successfully toppled censorship. In \u201cThe Most Dangerous Man in Publishing,\u201d Louisa Thomas wrote, \u201cHe found writers who wanted to break new paths, and then he picked up a sledgehammer to help them whale away at the existing order.\u201d\u00a0 More later.<\/p>\n

I cultivated Sarah, who occasionally – in tiptop fashion and knockout sophistication – was sent to Paris on business . Rosset told her, she said, \u201cYou don\u2019t know how to talk.\u201d He then taught her. Sometimes I babysat her son. I believed he was Rosset\u2019s, though perhaps he wasn\u2019t. For my book I confiscated his line: \u201cWhat\u2019s a mecent mixer?\u201d<\/p>\n

I have to admit that babysitting was a ploy. I hoped through this association to get back with Lawrence . Once again I found myself in a room with a bowl of pot, which she said to help myself to and I didn\u2019t. One night Sarah invited me to have a drink at the Corner Bistro. She stopped across the street at 375, to pick up the eccentric Marguerite Young\u2014almost fifty, newly famous for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling<\/em>\u2014whose apartment I remember for the angels hanging from the ceiling. Young had received a Guggenheim and taught at Columbia, the New School, and the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop.<\/p>\n

Walking three abreast\u2014 Marguerite Young with short, straight, unglamorous hair, in a long dress with shawls and scarves\u2014we headed out. Marguerite had spent nearly eighteen years on her thousand-plus-page novel. I was to beat that record, though I had no idea of such a prospect. Under other circumstances, this chapter would recall my unforgettable evening with Young. But that was wiped from memory by what happened next .<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click here for the NYT obituary<\/a> of Girodias: A very colorful life, with many literature classics published by his press – Lolita<\/em> (1955, Vladimir Nabokov)\u00a0and The Ginger Man<\/em> (1955, J. P. Donleavy), for example – which, at the time, battled charges that they were pornographic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was a time when books were regularly censored – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6546,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[129,365,336],"tags":[493,494,62,492],"class_list":["post-5996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-keep-this-quiet-1","category-news","category-personalities","tag-greemwich-village-sixties","tag-hunter-thompson-keep-this-quiet","tag-margaret-harrell","tag-maurice-girodias"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMaurice Girodias - A bit of Adventure - the Sixties - Margaret A. 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