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5. Paris Editions from Charles Hirsch to Maurice Girodias, Circa 1900–1960
- University of Massachusetts Press
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141 chapter 5 / Paris Editions from Charles Hirsch to Maurice Girodias, circa 1900–1960 The English sex book in Paris was bigger than its expatriate creator, Charles Carrington. His rivals and contemporaries, his immediate successors, and other small independent publishers published Paris editions from the turn of the century through to the 1960s. Although some of these publishers have been studied, this publishing history has been habitually compartmentalized. James Nelson and Peter Mendes have studied the intersection of pornographic and Decadent publishing circles in London and Paris in the 1890s. Hugh Ford has looked at the small Paris presses publishing cuttingedge Anglo-American modernist works in the 1920s. Neil Pearson has compiled a bibliography of Jack Kahane’s Paris-based business in “dirty books” from the 1930s, and Patrick Kearney has done the same for Kahane’s son, Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press.1 No one has considered the overlapping publishing and distribution networks that connected these publishers over a seventy-year period. There are a number of reasons why these connections have not chapter 5 142 been drawn and why they have not been traced back to Carrington’s business in Paris editions. The secret nature of their dealings, the involvement of expatriates and foreigners, the outlying production , moral squeamishness about the pornographic material, and the cataclysmic effects of the two world wars have obscured the links among these publishers and the possibility that their lives and work were part of a larger expatriate experience. Perhaps more importantly, though, the producers and consumers of these books did not position themselves as part of a larger cultural formation that relied on material and social infrastructures built up during Carrington’s time. Historical nearsightedness is not to blame for missing the connections, but rather, the lack of a discourse for a publishing phenomenon whose cultural vitality was not consistently translated into historical consciousness, and whose influence was even actively and repeatedly thwarted. The historiography of the expatriate moment in Paris is another significant factor behind these missed connections. The Paris moment has largely been seen as an American cultural migration of the 1920s, in part because it was memorialized so widely by many of the expatriate writers of the time in their fiction, journalism, and memoirs. Brent Hayes Edwards importantly expands this history to explore black diasporic gatherings in interwar Paris.2 Brooke L. Blower also writes compellingly about the ways in which Paris remained a base for American internationalism for figures like John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Langston Hughes well beyond the 1920s. She focuses on the other buried history of expatriation that saw Paris remain “an entrepôt of causes and connections” after the hedonistic 1920s.3 An extended look at expatriate publishing in Paris, I contend, challenges the constricted timeline and American soul of expatriate literary culture Paris even further, while still acknowledging the difficulty of undertaking a history of such a diverse group of people, career trajectories, political and social agendas, and forms of internationalism that converged in the city. The challenge of historicizing and conceptualizing expatriate Paris, and seeing how Paris editions were part of this history, is answered to some extent by the work of Raymond Williams on “paranational” (or “extranational”) cultural formations. Such formations, he notes, developed alongside a growing market in the arts and European imperial structures. They have a metropolitan base, attract immigrant groups, include members distanced from their received social and national contexts, and harbor dissident [44.201.131.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:07 GMT) Paris Editions from Charles Hirsch to Maurice Girodias 143 tendencies. Edward Said, drawing on Williams’s work, argues that such extranational cultural formations highlight the “interdependent histories” and “overlapping domains” of those moving between exiles and cultures.4 Together, these scholars offer a theoretical framework for understanding the expatriate experience in Paris as not just a localized moment, but as a collection of discrepant moments involving many actors and groups who were part of a wider and more general pattern of cultural migration and haven flow.Their insights prompt me to look at the Anglo-American roots and routes of Paris editions in the City of Light as a cultural map of an extranational formation. If we consider the pornographer’s paradise that grew up in Paris as part of a larger extranational cultural formation, Bruno Latour and Michel Lacroix provide specific methods drawn from social network theory for analyzing its development, structure, and survival. Latour takes an apostate approach to...