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

2. British Censorship, French Liberalism, and Paris Editions, 1918–1960

44 chapter 2 / British Censorship, French Liberalism, and Paris Editions, 1918–1960 In 1915, a British postal official noted that the traffic in pornography coming from France was virtually “killed by the war.”1 But the business in Paris editions that developed with the internationalization of pornography quickly resumed after the fighting ended, newly linking pornography with experimental modernist writing, and expatriate Britons with lost Americans engaging in different kinds of internationalism as they moved through Gay Paree after the First World War. Powerful myths of anglophone repression and French liberalism have proliferated to explain the allure of Paris during these years. It was the city of dance halls, theaters, and boîtes de nuit full of flappers, chorus girls, prostitutes, homosexuals, and lesbians, alongside colonial immigrants and exotiques. The city seemed to offer social experiences and expressive liberties unimaginable in either the British Empire or America. Visions of Parisian pleasure grounds and its denizens were contrasted with images of Britain’s “old grey ones,” who made hunting down immoral literature their pastime, and “illiberal Puritanism” in America, which took the form British Censorship, French Liberalism, and Paris Editions 45 of Comstockery, Prohibition, and anti-vice campaigns.2 An expatriate literary haven built up since the 1890s thus flourished against these restrictions, bringing together British,American, French, and other exiled writers in unprecedented ways through overlapping pornographic and modernist publishing and distribution circuits. Though the disposition of French press laws was fundamentally liberal and allowed Paris to become a kind of literary sanctuary, this static picture of anglophone repressiveness and French liberalism does not bear out when looking more closely at the unfolding cultural politics surrounding the internalization of pornography from the interwar period to postwar reconstruction. Behind this polarizing stereotype were, in fact, numerous negotiations, policy reversals, local factors, and personality-driven agendas in different national and international contexts that made for a more convoluted history, which was complicated further by international realignments following the devastation of the Second World War. A wealth of materials buried in British and French government archives—from lists of banned books, to government decrees, to minutes from international conferences—reveals the changing international climate and cultural policies that created the conditions for Paris editions for over forty years until they finally became redundant. Jix’s “Censorship Regime, ” 1924–1929 One of the most important findings in British government records from the interwar period is that cultural policy on literary censorship at home was closely interrelated to the business of Paris editions abroad. These records show how British government book banning in the 1920s, usually interpreted as a local phenomenon and a sign of British repressiveness, responded to the expatriate literary haven across the Channel. Myths of British repressiveness turn especially on the sensational literary trials and government book banning of the 1920s that have come to be seen as the excesses of modernist culture wars and the folly of puritanical politicians hostile to modernist literature.Adam Parkes has looked at the ways in which modernist writing evolved within this culture of censorship, whereas Jonathan Dollimore has analyzed the subtle forms of literary censorship exercised both by the crown prosecution and the defense during high-profile literary trials, most famously the trial against Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928).3 How this modernist “theater of chapter 2 46 censorship” developed in counterpoint to Paris editions and the liberal cultural politics of the French has not yet been considered, however. Paris was not simply a place where authors such as James Joyce and Radclyffe Hall found refuge from British and American censorship; by the 1920s, it was the center of an expatriate trade in sex books that fed the British censorship machine, the nation most closely affected by the trade. Edward Said’s method of analyzing political culture contrapuntally (linking actions usually kept apart and enlarging the global scale of interaction) allows us to reconsider modernist censorship in relation to the dirty books coming from across the Channel.4 This censorship was informed by AngloFrench relations set against the internationalization of pornography , crucially shaping the British government’s thinking about indecent materials, its own repressive cultural politics, and its participation in international agreements. In other words, we can look anew at this well-known chapter of British literary censorship and repression as a symptom of the pornographer’s paradise flourishing in Paris. William Joynson-Hicks (aka Jix), who served...