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

3. Charles Carrington, 1867–1921

B II Publishing “This page intentionally left blank” 67 chapter 3 / Charles Carrington, 1867–1921 Shifting from the cultural politics that led to the rise and fall of Paris editions to the principal personalities behind their production and distribution, we discover front and center the man who went by the name Charles Carrington (1867–1921). He was the Paris-based publisher-bookseller who appeared repeatedly on British government watch lists and who helped turn the city into a publishing haven for banned English books. Over a thirty-year period he published nearly three hundred books. These included reprints ofVictorian pornographic classics like Venus in India (1898), a story of the sexual adventures of a married officer, and the Yellow Room (c. 1907), a whipping fantasy. Original works were also part of his list, including his two most successful books from a literary standpoint, The Memoirs of Dolly Morton (1899) and Suburban Souls (1901).1 He also dared to republish Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1901) when its British publisher would not touch it, and he issued English translations of contemporary French novels by Pierre Louÿs, Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Anatole France, which would have been deemed obscene in English courts of the period.2 Carrington built up his publishing career by negotiating Anglo-French cultural politics and operating in the interstices of two cultures. chapter 3 68 But, who was the man who published these books from abroad? How did he become the most notorious expatriate publisher of English pornography? And how was his life shaped by the internationalization of pornography and the dynamics of Anglo-French cultural politics? These questions have been difficult to answer because Carrington’s life has been shrouded in mystery and rumor, some of his own making. My research has uncovered records and letters in French and British archives that offer a clearer picture of the man behind the books. They reveal the extraordinary life of a socially ambitious outsider:3 a man perpetually out of place, whether ethnically, geographically, culturally, or linguistically, in ways that likely awakened his passion for foreign travel and scholarship , but also disconnected him from home, family, and nation. His life was representative of many of the other expatriate dealers on the fringes of society who dealt in pornography and lived eternally on the run from the law and the state. Such were the career trajectories of Adolf Estinger, C. G. Bellak, Richard Gennert, August Brancart, H. S. Nichols, and other dealers chased down and monitored by the British government, sometimes in league with the French. What makes Carrington’s biography exceptional is the way in which he used his outsider status for social and commercial advantage. Being out of place provided him an opportunity for self-reinvention and intellectual stimulation. For the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, social and geographical distance means being continually out of step. His example is nineteenth-century writer Léon Cladel, the son of a provincial saddler who was “eternally” displaced and could never quite fit into the Paris literary scene.4 In his view such people often make lousy speculations on life and career. Carrington’s pattern of moving and changing his name throughout his life, however, reveals a more complicated picture of expatriation. His cultural and geographical distance became his means of social progress and transformation: it allowed him to rise from his humble beginnings in London to become one of the most influential expatriate publishers of his generation . He also took extraordinary personal and professional risks, for which he sometimes paid a high price. Being an expatriate not only shaped his publishing business, but also became what defined him and his approach to literature and pornography. His biography is that of a man who lived his life strategically out of place, sometimes to his advantage and sometimes not. Though he was exceptional in many ways, his life nonetheless helps us understand the Charles Carrington 69 political, social, and cultural forces that gave rise to the figure of the expatriate publisher and the emergence of Paris editions. Ferdinando from the Ghetto Carrington was born Paul Harry Ferdinando on November 11, 1867.5 The year of the Second Reform Act when 1.5 million men in Britain were granted the vote and the year the first ship passed through the Suez Canal, Carrington began his life in Bethnal Green, one of London’s poorest districts in...