A Publisher's Paradise: Expatirate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

Introduction

1 Introduction / It has been the custom of some Englishmen, who trade in indecent books, when for obvious reasons they leave England and take up their abode in Paris, to continue selling these indecent books, etc., by means of circulars which they forward to England from Paris. One of the most notorious of these figures is Carrington, probably known to many of our readers through circulars which they have received relating to objectionable books bearing his signature. —“The Work in France,” Vigilance Record (March 1902) From 1890 to 1960 some of Anglo-America’s most heated cultural contests over books, sex, and censorship were staged not at home, but abroad in the City of Light. Paris became a haven for interrogating and reimagining the margins of sexual culture and literary expression, and a wide variety of English “dirty books” circulated through loose expatriate publishing and distribution networks.The writers, publishers, printers, booksellers, and readers who were part of this expatriate print culture came and went, but the social and material infrastructures of their networks remained in place as long as such books could not be published elsewhere. It is difficult to generalize about the type of book that circulated through these networks , and equally difficult to generalize about the people involved because of the wide gaps in their economic, social, and symbolic capital as well as their aesthetic and political points of view. And yet it is possible to trace six degrees of separation between the person responsible for a late-Victorian book with the provocative title Randiana, or Excitable Tales and the publisher of Valerie Solanas’s rage-infused lesbian feminist SCUM Manifesto from the late 1960s. introduction 2 At the end of the 1890s, an expatriate British publisher in Paris who went by the name Charles Carrington clandestinely issued books with enticing titles, one being Randiana. In 1901 Carrington bought the copyright to Oscar Wilde’s infamous Decadent novel The Picture of Dorian Gray after it was dropped by its British publisher following Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency,” and he distributed it through the same networks as Randiana. Carrington’s Paris edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray continued to circulate in these networks in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century. When the American bookseller Sylvia Beach opened up her bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank in 1919, she not only stocked Carrington’s edition of Wilde’s novel, but also supplied the Irish writer James Joyce with English-language pornography issued by Carrington and his successors. While writing the last episodes of Ulysses in Paris, Joyce drew on some of these publications by speciously named authors (the likes of James Lovebirch and Barbary Birchenough), incorporating them into his modernist masterpiece in varying modes of citation, parody, adaptation , and intertextuality. Subsequently branded as “obscene” in Britain and America, Ulysses was ultimately published in Paris by Beach in 1922. In the late 1920s, Joyce’s Ulysses and Paris piracies of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover ended up on Britain’s Customs list of banned French books. That predicament not only provoked Evelyn Waugh to open his 1930 novel Vile Bodies with the scene of a British Customs officer seizing what he assumes are “pretty dirty” books from Paris and taking them into an inner office filled with “contraband pornography and strange instruments,” but also gave Beach’s British friend Jack Kahane the idea in the early 1930s to market himself as a renegade who would publish from Paris anything banned in Britain. Over thirty years later, Kahane’s son Maurice Girodias reminisced about taking over his father’s publishing business, which he eventually split into London and New York branches in the 1960s when Paris was no longer the capital of the English “d.b.” (dirty book).“I am a second-generation Anglo-French pornographer,” Girodias wrote, adding, “I suppose that, between the two of us, my father and I have covered a lot of ground, from James Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere (the first published portion of Finnegans Wake) and Henry Miller’s Tropics in the 1920s and 30s, to Frank Harris’s My Life and Loves and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto in the 1960s.”1 Girodias published SCUM Manifesto in New York, but he had been responsible introduction 3 just a decade earlier for publishing a vestigial Paris edition—one...