Maurice Girodias' inherited more from his father Jack Kahane than just The Obelisk Press. He also inherited a love of publishing "smut". He published quite a lot of smut titles under the name The Olympia Press which was to be a rebranded reincarnation of the Obelisk Press.
It is Jack Kahane that showed his son how to get around censorship by using a loophole in French law that didn't subject books published in English in France to the same penalties. Sure the books still got confiscated when they were discovered in the mail in the countries where the books were banned, but some were still ocassionally getting through or were being transported illegally by soldiers as was the case with The Obelisk Press edition of
"Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer" (which I myself am proud to own along with an Obelisk edition of
Sexus).
The Olympia Press would publish some infamous "dirty books" as well.
"Writing d.b.'s (dirty books) was generally considered a useful professional exercise, as well as a necessary
participation in the common fight against the Square World --an act of duty." Girodias said.
The History of O; Fanny Hill; Marquis de Sade's Justine; these are just a few of the titles Girodias published as naughty "literature". He published other literature as well. Over sixteen years Girodias published J.P. Donleavy's "The Ginger Man", Burroughs "Naked Lunch", and Nabokov's little "Lolita".
The above edition of Lolita published by The Olympia Press sold at auction (Christie's) for $273,500 USD.
Here is the description given:
"2 volumes, 8o. Original green printed wrappers (lightly worn and rubbed). Provenance: GRAHAM GREENE, writer (presentation inscription); [Bernie Taupin, composer.]
FIRST EDITION, price hand-corrected on rear wrappers. A REMARKABLE LITERARY ASSOCIATION COPY, INSCRIBED BY NABOKOV TO GRAHAM GREENE on the half-title of volume one: "For Graham Greene November 1959 from Vladimir Nabokov." Nabokov has then drawn a small butterfly and written the quotation: "'green swallowtail dancing waisthigh.'"
Ironically, Lolita sold poorly for Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press. It was not until Graham Greene included the book in a year-end list of best novels in 1955 that public attention focused on the tragic story of Hubert Humbert and Dolores Haze. Both Nabokov and Girodias were dissatisfied with the arrangements for the release of Lolita and both parties were pleased to terminate their contract in 1957. Lolita was not published in the U.S and U.K until 1959 (see lots 234 and 369).Critic Jeff Edwards notes: "Although Lolita's first printing of 5,000 copies sold out, there were no notable reviews, and the book would likely have gone unnoticed for some time had not respected author and critic Graham Greene, in an interview published in the London Times, called it one of the best books of the year. Greene's statement outraged John Gordon, editor of the popular Sunday Express, who responded in print, calling 'Lolita' 'the filthiest book I have ever read' and 'sheer unrestrained pornography.' The British Home Office ordered customs officials to seize all copies entering the United Kingdom and pressured the French Minister of the Interior to ban the book. On December 20, 1956, the Paris police did just this, and Lolita remained banned in France for two years" (Jeff Edwards, "'Lolita': Complex and often tricky and a 'hard sell'").
INSCRIBED COPIES OF NABOKOV'S "LOLITA" ARE VERY SCARCE. American Book Prices Current does not record a single presentation copy of the first edition of Lolita for at least thirty years. Bibliographers record only five presentation copies of the first edition, including the present, and those inscribed to his wife Véra, his son Dimitri and the early Russian aviatrix Lucy Davidova. A VERY FINE ASSOCIATION COPY OF NABOKOV'S MOST IMPORTANT BOOK. Juliar A28.1.1. (2)"
I desperately wanted to go off on a minor tangent here and find the other two auctions so I did. Lot 234 is for the first Putnam published edition of Lolita, and here's where all the troubles begin. "Lolitagation" as Girodias himself coined it was what he claimed to have suffered at the hands of Nabokov after Graham Greene gave the book a sales boost.
In The Olympia Reader is an essay Girodias wrote about his side of the table called "A Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita". He begins from the beginning - about how he was approached about a writer who had "written a book with a rather dangerous theme which had, for that reason, been rejected by a number of prominent American publishers" that he agreed to read.
Girodias praises Lolita. He openly and unabashedly confesses and calls it magical. He calls it an exercise in genius. ". . . the apparently effortless transposition of the rich Russian literary tradition into modern English fiction. This was, in itself, an exercise in genius; but the story was a rather magical demonstration of something about which I had so often dreamed, but never found: the treatment of one of the major forbidden human passions in a manner both completely sincere and absolutely legitimate."
He mentions that Nabokov felt differently about his book. "Succès de scandale" did not interest Nabokov. Lolita meant something else to him entirely. Nabokov's feelings would change again.
"I shall always be grateful to you for having published Lolita." Nabokov wrote those words to Girodias. They would be the last nice words Nabokov would ever write to him.
"After that came more and more morose exchanges on the subject of the American publication of the book and I finally received a registered letter from Nabokov dated October 5 of the same year, informing me in elaborate legal style that he was exercising his right to "declare the Agreement between us null and void.""
Meanwhile Girodias was fighting possible censorship in France for his edition of Lolita. In the end Girodias would threaten to sue the government for money and they would offer him a compromise - don't sue and he could publish Lolita sans problème.
Girodias' essay is literary venom. He admits to being happy when Putnam's edition of Lolita is usurped by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago on the best seller list. He thinks he has been treated horribly by Nabokov and is willing to sue. You feel horrible for the guy, but that's what he intended.
Nabokov responded with his own essay
"Lolita and Mr. Girodias", which it wouldn't take a stretch of the imagination to think perhaps Vladimir was casting himself in the role of the ripe but helpless Lolita and that Mr. Girodias was someone who had cruelly picked a rose in mid-bloom.
"From time to time, in the course of the 1960's, there have appeared, over the signature of Mr. Girodias or that of some friend of his, retrospective notes pertaining to the publication of Lolita by me Olympia Press and to various phases of our "strained relations." Those frivolous reminiscences invariably contained factual errors, which I generally took the trouble to point out in brief rejoinders; whereupon, as I detected with satisfaction, certain undulatory motions of retreat were performed by our flexible memoirist. An especially ambitious article, with especially serious misstatements, has now been published by him twice in Evergreen Review (No. 37, September, 1965) under the title Lolita, Nabokov, and I, and in his anthology (The Olympia Reader, Grove Press, N.Y., 1960) under the less elegant title of A Sad, Ungraceful History of Lolita. Since I have religiously preserved all my correspondence with Mr. Girodias, I am able, I trust, to induce a final retraction on his part.
I shall now proceed to point out a number of slippery passages and a few guileful inexactitudes in Mr. Girodias' article. For some reason, which presumably I am too naive to grasp, he starts by citing an old curriculum vitae of mine which, he says, was sent to him by my agent together with the typescript of Lolita in April, 1955. Such a procedure would have been absurd. My files show that only much later, namely on February 8, 1957, he asked me to send him ''all the biographical and bibliographical material" available for his brochure "L'affaire Lolita" (which he published when fighting the ban of the book in France); on February 12, I sent him photographs, a list of published works, and a brief curriculum vitae. With the sneer of a hoodlum following an innocent passerby, Mr. Girodias now makes fun of such facts in it as my father's having been "an eminent statesman" or the "considerable fame" I had acquired in émigré circles. All this he had published himself (with many embellishments and additions gleaned elsewhere) in his brochure of 1957!
I began to curse my association with Olympia Press not in 1957, when our agreement was, according to Mr. Girodias, "weighing heavily" on my "dreams of impending fortune" in America, but as early as 1955, that is, the very first year of my dealings with Mr. Girodias. From the very start I was confronted with the peculiar aura surrounding his business transactions with me, an aura of negligence, evasiveness, procrastination, and falsity. I complained of these peculiarities in most of my letters to my agent who faithfully transmitted my complaints to him but these he never explains in his account of our ten-year-long (1955- 65) association.
Nabokov does not mince words and unfortunately he is the better write in this war of "he said" vs. "he said". The last words of Girodias' battleship essay are:
"I then wrote to Barney Rosset to tell Minton that if Nabokov were to persist in his refusal, I would have no choice but to write the story of our relationship. The answer came by return mail: "This is blackmail. And you know what you have to do with blackmailers: sue them.""
When the Grove Press wanted to print The Olympia Reader, Girodias told them they might have problems with getting Nabokov to agree with them including an excerpt of Lolita, but maybe not "after all these years". Nabokov's answer was "no, certainly not."
In the end it was Girodias who had to cough up 44,220 "anciens" francs for Nabokov's coffers and Nabokov further seals his victory when he has the last words:
"As I wrote him on August 3, 1957, I was, and am, deeply grateful to him for printing that book. But I must also point out to him that he was not the right person to undertake the thing; he lacked the means to launch Lolita properly - a book that differed so utterly in vocabulary, structure, and purpose (or rather absence of purpose) from his other much simpler commercial ventures, such as Debby's Bidet or Tender Thighs. Mr. Girodias greatly exaggerates his powers. Had not Graham Greene and John Gordon clashed in London in such providential fashion, Lolita - especially its second volume which repelled so-called "amateurs" - might have ended in the common grave of Traveller's Favorites or whatever Olympia's little green books were called."
No matter what Nabokov says, The Olympia Press books are pretty badass. Girodias did have an eye for genius. The Olympia Press published Beckett, Henry Miller, Paul Abelman, Beauregard de Farniente, Raymond Queneau, and George Bataille - which is a pretty impressive literary roster nonetheless. I'm sure not even Mr. Nabokov could argue with that.
