Neil Pearson
OBELISK
A history of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press
494pp. Liverpool University Press. £25 (US $39).
978 1 84631 101 7
Jack Kahane arrived in Paris from Manchester in the 1920s, bent on making his
name as a novelist and publisher. As a writer, he leaned towards the
flippant, dashing off a series of tales, the saucy titles of which are
surely more entertaining than the contents: Suzy Falls Off, It’s Hard To
Sin, Amour French for Love, The Gay Intrigue, etc. It was as a publisher
that Kahane hoped to be a true original – the daring pioneer who uncovers a
scandalous masterpiece. From 1929 onwards, he was the proprietor of several
imprints (collectively discussed here as the Obelisk Press). He wanted a
book that would appeal to the discerning and the vulgar reader at once, “an
unprintable book that is fit to read”, in the words of Ezra Pound. Lady
Chatterley’s Lover was such a book, and Kahane published it in 1936, though
there had been half-a-dozen previous editions, including the expurgated one
produced by Secker in 1932. James Joyce had acquired the reputation of a
risqué author, and Kahane almost put himself out of business before he
started by paying Joyce an enormous advance for Haveth Childers Everywhere,
a seventy-six-page section of what would become Finnegans Wake – a book that
reviled readers for all the wrong reasons. Not content with that, Kahane
went on to issue a “de luxe edition” of Pomes Penyeach (1932), with “initial
letters designed and illuminated by Lucia Joyce”, the author’s daughter. The
price for a sheaf of unbound signatures housed in a green folder was 1,000
francs – twenty times the cost of a regular Obelisk potboiler. Of the
twenty-five copies produced, ten were impounded by Customs at Dover – not
for being seditiously arousing, but as subject to “a luxury tax amounting to
a third of their retail value”.
Kahane was the kind of roguish publisher that most writers are glad to know
exists, but are grateful not to be dependent on. His first successful title
was Daffodil (1931) by Cecil Barr, aka Jack Kahane. According to Neil
Pearson in his highly entertaining Obelisk: A history of Jack Kahane and the
Obelisk Press, the first edition was issued as “3rd impression”, in order to
“give the appearance of healthy sales, and so stimulate demand”. The second
impression became the “5th”, the third the “9th”, and so on towards a
mythical eighteen printings recorded by trusting historians such as Hugh
Ford in his seminal book, Published in Paris (1975).
Kahane’s opportunity to establish Obelisk as the publisher of works of
literary merit that defied authority and convention came with the arrival of
a parcel from the Paris-based literary agent William Bradley, in October
1932. In addition to the French translation of one of Kahane’s own novels,
“We are also sending you . . . TROPIC OF CANCER, as promised”. The author,
for the time being, was “Anonymous”. Even Kahane felt faint-hearted when he
sat down to read a work that now seems almost inconceivably obscene for the
times, and he took two years to publish it. Tropic of Cancer, published
under Henry Miller’s real name, went through five (genuine) impressions in
as many years, and Kahane proceeded to build his list around his single
genuine discovery, with whose name the Obelisk Press is forever linked. In
succession, he issued Aller Retour New York (1935), Black Spring (1936),
Scenario: A film with sound (1937), Max and the White Phagocytes (1938) and
Tropic of Capricorn (1939). The last was among the final Obelisk titles
delivered by the printer before the outbreak of war on September 3. On the
same day, Kahane died of heart failure, aged fifty-two.
By then, as Pearson’s 240-page bibliography shows, the list was coming up.
Kahane never lost faith in the appeal of a spicy title – who wouldn’t be
tempted by Half o’clock in Mayfair by Princess Paul Troubetzkoy, or To Beg I
Am Ashamed, or Lady, Take Heed! (the last “Cecil Barr” novel, dedicated by
the author to his inventor, Jack Kahane)? – but war and death caught him
with a number of proper improper books on the presses. In addition to Tropic
of Capricorn, the bulk of which lay in storage until the war was over, they
included Winter of Artifice by Anaïs Nin, Some Limericks by Norman Douglas,
and an illustrated French translation of a fable by Ovid. In the preceding
years, Obelisk and its associates had published works by Richard Aldington
(Death of a Hero), Cyril Connolly (The Rock Pool), James Hanley (Boy) and
Lawrence Durrell (The Black Book).
Kahane had succeeded in achieving a curious personal infamy, being, as Pearson
says, “the last resort of an author unable to place his work with anyone
else”. It was on these grounds that Miller recommended him to Durrell, then
on the rebound from Faber and Faber. Miller urged the twenty-five-year-old
novelist not to yield an inch to fearful British publishers. “It seems to
me, at the moment \[1937\], that Kahane would be the only man to do it.” He
added that the publisher was a writer, too: “under the name of Cecil Barr –
vile vile crap, the vilest of the vile – and he admits it, but with that
English insouciance that makes my blood creep”. Connolly was kinder: he
described Kahane as “faintly Mephistophelean” but praised his “lonely
guerrilla war against prudery”.
The modern mind boggles at what prudery withheld from the British reader in
the late 1920s and 30s. Kahane’s first title, Sleeveless Errand by Norah C.
James, had originally been issued by Scholartis Press in London (run by Eric
Partridge). On publication in February 1929, booksellers were raided, the
edition seized, the publishers charged, the novel judged obscene. The
prosecution argued that Sleeveless Errand contained “conversations by
persons entirely devoid of decency and morality . . . . Blasphemy is freely
indulged in by all the characters, and filthy language and indecent
situations appear to be the keynote”. Pearson professes himself puzzled by
the action, since the language complained of – “bloody hell”, “whores”, “for
Christ’s sake”, “bitch”, “homos”, etc, “most of which appear no more than a
couple of times” – had been allowed in other novels. Nevertheless, Kahane
knew that the public likes nothing better than a banned book, and his
edition, with a preface by Edward Garnett, was in the Paris shops by April.
Pearson complains that “the achievements of Kahane the publisher” are
overlooked in accounts of English-language publishing in Paris during the
period. He compares Kahane to the likes of Harry and Caresse Crosby, the
proprietors of Black Sun Press (publishers of Pound, Hemingway, Hart Crane,
Raymond Radiguet), Robert McCalmon of Contact Editions (Gertrude Stein, H.
D., Djuna Barnes, Hemingway), Edward Titus, Nancy Cunard, and not least “the
saintly Sylvia Beach”, who published Ulysses from her bookshop, Shakespeare
and Co. However, through his lively “Author Biographies”, he undercuts his
own argument, demonstrating why Kahane is unlikely to command the respect
shown to the others (to speak of him as “comprehensively forgotten” is
plainly wrong). Sleeveless Errand is a “deeply terrible book”. The Gentle
Men by Marika Norden is the work of a “non-writer”. Jam To-Day by Marjorie
Firminger, who was briefly courted by Wyndham Lewis and left an unpublished
memoir of his bad behaviour, is “not so much a book as an arbitrary
collection of mildly salacious prattle”. Storm Tarn by Princess Paul
Troubetzkoy is “a sort of Wuthering Heights but without the laughs”.
Kahane’s own novels probably speak more accurately for his taste than the
streaks of quality in his list. His desire was for something salacious,
produced by genius; lacking the second, he would happily settle for the
first. In this he resembles the publisher who carried on the Obelisk
tradition after the Second World War, Maurice Girodias – Kahane’s son.
Girodias, who at the age of fourteen drew the cover illustration for Tropic
of Cancer (a giant crab holding a woman in a faint), opened for business in
1945 by unpacking the boxes of Tropic of Capricorn that had lain in storage
all through the war. He continued to sell the book under different imprints,
in English, French and German, for the next seventeen years, in addition to
Nexus, Sexus and Plexus and other Miller titles. Having taken his French
mother’s name in order to shield his Jewishness in wartime, he went on to
publish far more risqué books under the Olympia Press and related imprints
than his father dreamed of (for Sleeveless Errand read The Whipping Club;
for Lady, Take Heed! read Rape) at the same time, by some mysterious
magnetism, attracting one defining modern work after another: Watt, Molloy,
Lolita, The Ginger Man, Naked Lunch. Alexander Trocchi, several of whose
novels were published by Olympia, defamed Girodias as “the man who published
Watt under the impression it was a dirty book”, but no mere pornographer
could have been as lucky as Girodias was. The explanation lies partly in the
fact that he basked in the freedom that came after the war, whereas his
father struggled in the climate that gave rise to it.
Pearson writes with brash style, occasionally muscling in on his reader: it is
enough to learn that To Beg I Am Ashamed was undone by the Public Morality
Council, without being bullied into seeing it as “a body every bit as stupid
and sinister as it sounds”. The phrase “one-handed readership” should have
been stifled the first time it swelled towards the pen, without being
pressed into service over again. But this unusual, tripartite labour of love
– a bibliography, profile of the publisher, and a history of the press, all
bound as one – is a valuable addition to the literature of anglophone Paris
publishing. Mr Pearson does not say so, unless I overlooked it (the book
lacks an index), but the Kahane name lived on in Parisian literary life in
the person of Jack’s other son, Eric (d 1999), translator into French of
Lolita, Naked Lunch and the plays of Harold Pinter; and, in reverse
direction, of Zazie dans le Métro in the English version published by the
Olympia Press.
James Campbell's books include Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita,
Boris Vian and others on the Left Bank, 1994. A collection of essays,
Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and writers in the dark, will be published
in the new year.
