Dirty books: Erotic fiction and the avant-garde in mid-century Paris and New York

by Barry Reay, Nina Attwood

Overview

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, and women writing as men - and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty books tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526159243
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	823,096
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

Nina Attwood is the author of The Prostitute’s Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian England (2011) and a co-author of Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015)

Barry Reay's most recent books include Sex in the Archives (2019) and Trans America (2020)

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

 

 

Pornography is a gauge of the social and cultural temperature of an era. Today we live in an environment where ubiquitous sexual explicitness and easily accessible erotic material exist along- side cancel culture, where (for perfectly understandable reasons) the sexual behaviour of a creative can trigger the death of their work. But not so long ago, during the period covered by this book, the sexually explicit was hidden. Censorship determined – or attempted to determine – what could or could not be written and published.

We first came across the story of writing pornography to order when we were researching Gershon Legman, a fascinating maver- ick in the history of sex.1 Legman, who seemed to know everyone involved in the realms of sexual folklore, literature and medical research, referred both to a 1940s New York syndicate of struggling artists, poets and writers (some destined for fame) providing por- nography to a wealthy US collector, and to what Legman termed a 1950s combine of young hack writers churning out English- language pornographic books, dirty books, for a Parisian publisher. We were hooked, not least because some of those involved were, or became, well known: the writer Henry Miller was involved in each enterprise. We researched more. We consulted the archives. We read the dirty books. The story grew. It turned out that the Paris publisher used his dirty books to subsidise important works of modernist literature, serious stuff. It transpired that he had a father who had earlier published censorable material, using lighter litera- ture (much of it written by himself) to support more high-quality writing. We discovered that the Paris publisher later moved to New York, where he was involved in the publishing milieu of the 1960s sexual revolution. We also realised that the boundary between the dirty books and the modernist literature – the ‘serious stuff ’ – could be hard to discern.

In New York and Paris from the late 1930s until 1970, daring publishers produced banned English-language literature, and young writers, poets and some artists wrote pornography to order, many anonymously. The names of some of those involved may already be familiar to the reader (Miller, Anaïs Nin), others less so (Legman, Iris Owens). In New York in the earlier period, they wrote for a broker for a mysterious oil magnate who sought pornography for his own sexual gratification, though some of the product would later go on to be published more widely. In Paris, the publication of English-language erotic writing was generated by two innovative publishers. Jack Kahane, with Obelisk Press in the 1930s, pub- lished work banned or impossible to publish in England or America (Radclyffe Hall, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Nin). In the 1950s and 1960s, Kahane’s son, the publisher Maurice Girodias, and his Olympia Press, pro- duced avant-garde, modernist literature (Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, J. P. Donleavy, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet, Miller, Vladimir Nabokov and Alexander Trocchi) as well as unadulterated porn – dirty books, or ‘dbs’. Many of the pornographers mobilised by the New York syndicate and by Girodias wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity pro- vided. Men wrote as women; women wrote as men.

Themes emerged from this story. Anonymity and fake author- ship clouded gender and provided freedom of sexual expression. Women, we discovered, played a central role in the production of erotic literature, exploring and challenging the relationship between feminism and pornography. Writers in exile felt the free- dom to experiment; Paris was central to English-language pornog- raphy, aided by legal loopholes and French liberalism, although, as Girodias found out, that situation changed. It is debatable whether this pornography undermined ‘heteronormativity’, as one commen- tator has claimed, but it certainly ‘reflected a wide variety of tastes and sexual proclivities’.2 That modernism and pornography were linked is unsurprising. Modernism employed the sexually graphic in the service of literary innovation in what has been called ‘aes- theticized obscenity’.3 Pornography produced the sexually explicit for the sake of arousal, sex for the sake of sex. But the relationship between modernism and pornography was ambivalent. When, as we will see, both pornography and avant-garde texts were being produced by the same publisher, or when the former was writ- ten to support the latter, the relationship could become somewhat blurred.

This book is literary history rather than literary criticism or liter- ary analysis (though the latter approaches will inform our work). It examines some of the themes of twentieth-century English- language written erotica by focusing on moments in pornographic history that produced avant-garde literature and what arguably became a literary wing of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1 Beginnings: Jack Kahane and Obelisk Press
2 The syndicate: pornography for the private collector
3 Olympia, Paris
4 Repurposed pornography: the role of erotic classics
5 Dirty books
6 Sexual revolution: Olympia, New York
7 Literature or pornography?
Conclusion
Index

Editorial Reviews

'Reay and Attwood tell the story of Obelisk and Olympia with admirable scholarly precision.'
Andrew Hussey, The Literary Review

'Reay and Attwood’s chapter on Kahane’s Obelisk Press... is one of the best.'
James Campbell, The Spectator

'Dirty Books is calculated, stylised, elegantly written and necessarily respectful of the kinds of vernacular expression in which pornographic literature is steeped.'
Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times

'Avant-garde art has long been associated with the shock of the new but in Dirty Books, Barry Reay and Nina Attwood show the extent to which erotic fiction fuelled modernist writing in London, New York and Paris. Drawing on a motley cast of characters from Anaïs Nin to Alexander Trocchi, Dirty Books is a gripping account of sex, censorship and the avant-garde. '
Douglas Field, author of All Those Strangers: The Art and Lives of James Baldwin

‘By pushing the boundaries of legally and artistically valid expression, avant-garde literature often blurred the lines between art and pornography. But Reay and Attwood go further, arguing that even the sleaziest paperbacks from Obelisk and Olympia Press also contain unheralded moments of aesthetic brilliance. Filled with absolutely wild quotes from a plethora of titles and authors well beyond the modernist canon, Dirty Books just might be your guide to a whole new reading list!’
David Church, author of Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema

‘A short guide to the world of twentieth-century, English-language pornography where pseudonyms abounded, men wrote as women, women wrote as men, classics were eroticised, and new works were passed off as classics of the genre. Reay and Attwood describe a dizzying world where sex and money chased each other into books.’
Lisa Z. Sigel, author of The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America

'Dirty Books lays bare the secret history of the mid-century literary underground, where modernist classics and porn-for-hire travelled along the same clandestine transnational circuits. A unique combination of scholarly analysis and anecdotal wit, it promises to be the authoritative resource on this crucial strand of modern literary history.’
Loren Glass, author of Rebel Publisher: How Grove Press Ended Censorship of the Printed Word in America

'Barry Reay and Nina Attwood's Dirty Books is proof-positive that the infamous have more fun. Maybe. Gathered in this clutch of microhistories of literary publishers and their coteries are tales elucidating the glittering and sometimes brutal oscillations between pornography and art in the period right before the sexual revolutions of the late 1960s.'
Andy Campbell, author of Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives and Contemporary Art

From the Publisher