The Garden of Eros: The Story of the Paris Expatriates and the Post-war Literary Scene by John Calder (review)

John Calder’s career in the London book trade began in 1949, when he was twenty-two, and in the sixty-five years since then, he not only has published and promoted the literature he cares about but written about it too. This latest work takes as its title one used by the publisher Maurice Girodias for the second volume of his memoirs (Les Jardins d’Éros), and it offers what Calder calls “a history of the expatriates who went to Paris after World War II to revive the Anglophone literary tradition that had ended with the German Occupation.” He sees the events, he says, in a triple perspective: his own, plus that of Girodias and his Olympia Press, founded in Paris in 1951 (a second-generation effort: Girodias’s father, Jack Kahane, was famous in prewar Paris for publishing books that censors forbade in England and the United States), and of Barney Rosset, celebrated for the flamboyant daring with which he chose controversial titles for the Grove Press, which he bought in 1951 in New York.

Leaving aside the sentimental cliché of Paris as a garden of Eros and the dubious assertion that reviving a literary tradition was the aim of the many anti-traditional writers who turned up in Paris after the war, we can find certain patterns in Calder’s account. He, Girodias, and Rosset were similar in various respects, despite their strikingly different personalities: for all of them, book publishing was but one interest among many; they enjoyed dabbling in, or anyway tried to make a go of, other activities—literary festivals, restaurants, magazines, films. And none of them was a particularly good businessman—Girodias was in addition slippery and unscrupulous—so their publishing firms, chronically short of cash, suffered many financial woes. Book publishing was always a business with narrow profit margins and difficult cash flow problems.

In addition to their perilous adventures in the book trade, all three men had colorful, sometimes melodramatic experiences with women; Calder relishes telling us about the many wives, mistresses, and girlfriends who populate the Girodias and Rosset stories—their sex appeal, their clothes, their hair, their eager willingness to fling themselves onto the nearest bed—though we do not learn much about his own love life. The women are integral to Calder’s vision of what drew the three men together and kept them afloat: a libertine enthusiasm for books whose ambitions or unbuttoned vocabulary rattled the bourgeoisie, as well as for DBs, as Kahane and his son called “dirty books,” which Girodias especially liked to publish. He would announce titles allegedly forthcoming from Olympia, wait to see how many orders came in for which ones, then tell his writers to compose stories fitting the most popular candidates. The rather stolid Calder enjoys such mischief.

Calder’s gossipy yet wooden version of the well-known drama about American writers in postwar Paris offers few new insights. And there is no way of knowing where the factual data in any given paragraph comes from: from newly researched materials (only some citations and passages get source notes at the back), or his own memories, or Girodias, on whom he openly depends, though critics and writers have been pointing out for decades that Girodias was as unreliable with historical fact as he was with a royalty statement. The many slapdash inaccuracies in Calder’s often mean-spirited assessments of American writers in Paris hardly encourage trust in his plodding record of their activities. And beyond chronological slips there are stylistic and tonal errors. For example, he grudgingly acknowledges the importance of George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Southern, Robert Silvers, and the others who helped to create the Paris Review but is dismissive of the upper-crust voices and cultivated airs he erroneously ascribes to them all. And Richard Seaver, a talented editor with excellent judgment who translated Samuel Beckett and...