Books: Shy Pornographer

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For years, U.S. tourists leaving Paris have consoled themselves that one pleasure still lay ahead: smuggling one's cache of naughty books, wrapped up in the soiled laundry, past U.S. customs. But official acquiescence is outflanking civil disobedience. This year both Henry Miller's hot-panting Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence's lukewarm Lady Chatterley's Lover are sold openly in the U.S. But what is no longer forbidden loses half its charm. For the first time since Petronius wrote his Satyricon to titillate Nero, were the printers of the unprintable in danger of insolvency?

The man most concerned is Maurice Girodias, a 42-year-old Parisian who runs Olympia Press, the world's most notorious publisher of English-language pornography. Girodias, an amiable, vague, unbusinesslike man, plays the role of a monster of depravity with vigor but no consistency, registering at different times belligerence, shy embarrassment, prosperous self-satisfaction, artiness, guilt, and a well-practiced sinister leer. Last week it was artiness; he would like nothing better than to be put out of business, he said—in fact Olympia's sole aim has been to batter down the bastions of censorship and make the world safe for experimental literature. Supporting this seven-eighths hypocrisy, Girodias points loftily to a one-eighth truth: both Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man are works of high merit, and both were published first by Olympia.

600,000 Lost Souls. But the bulk of Girodias' list consists of such works as Who Pushed Paula?, by "Akbar del Piombo," Houses of Joy, by "Wu Wu Meng," and Until She Screams, by "Faustino Perez." Girodias pays about $1,000 a book and chooses the pseudonyms himself—"Otherwise, they always pick something like J. Walter Thompson." He prints 5,000 copies of each standard pornographic novel in chaste green jackets labeled "The Traveler's Companion Series," and invariably sells out at 3.75 francs (75¢) a copy. For bulk sales, he finds that the best markets are France and, in descending but inexplicable order, Venezuela, Lebanon, Italy, Greece, Mexico and Scandinavia. Some 25 to 30 new Companions are issued each year, and Girodias figures that at least five people read each copy. "Which makes," he says, flashing the sinister leer, "an average of 600,000 people corrupted every year."

Whether anybody is really harmed by Girodias' 4-franc dreadfuls is the sort of question that befogs all discussions of pornography. Between the extremes of the puritan, who thinks all nonclinical mention of sex is evil, and the libertine, who is a puritan turned inside out, is the broad-minded man, who is not very helpful either. His definition of pornography is clear, but only to him: "Anything that shocks me too much." Olympia's output shocks almost everyone, at least momentarily. But in the view of New England-born Author Akbar, "The books have so much filth that they're not filthy. They're zany, like the Marx Brothers."