Christopher Prendergast is a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and was the general editor of the Penguin Proust.
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Vol. 17 No. 5 · 9 March 1995
page 27 | 2369 words
Tears in the Café Select
Christopher Prendergast
- Paris Interzone: Richard Wright, Lolita, Boris Vian and Others on the Left Bank 1946-1960 by James Campbell
Secker, 305 pp, £20.00, September 1994, ISBN 0 436 20106 2
- Foreign Correspondent: Paris in the Sixties by Peter Lennon
Picador, 220 pp, £16.99, April 1994, ISBN 0 330 31911 6
- The Good Ship Venus: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press by John de St Jorre
Hutchinson, 332 pp, £20.00, September 1994, ISBN 0 09 177874 3
Paris figures in the titles of both James Campbell’s and Peter Lennon’s books, but this is a restricted, specialised Paris. Campbell takes us into something called the ‘Interzone’ (the term is odd, and troublesome), inhabited by assorted exiles, misfits and drop-outs during the Fifties and late Forties. Lennon’s jaunty impressionistic book takes us into the Sixties, with an account of his experiences as a young journalist writing, sporadically, for the Guardian, while, in the intervals, getting caught up in all kinds of adventures (best of all an improbable encounter, in the company of Samuel Beckett, with Peter O’Toole).
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Letters
Vol. 17 No. 9 · 11 May 1995
From John de St Jorre
Christopher Prendergast (LRB, 9 March) gives short shrift to the publisher Maurice Girodias in his review of three books on the Paris literary scene in the Fifties. Yet he praises the Merlin group for publishing Beckett, apparently ignorant of the fact that Girodias played a vital role in publishing not only Watt but also Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable. The Merlin group came to Girodias because they needed a French manager to be able to publish at all, and because Girodias, who admired Beckett’s work, was prepared to provide the necessary financing. Girodias and his Olympia Press then went on to publish the first editions of Nabokov’s Lolita, Donleavy’s The Ginger Man and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, as well as the first English translations of works by Apollinaire, Bataille and Genet and Dominique Aury’s Story of O.
Christopher Prendergast also gives my book, The Good Ship Venus, short shrift, dismissing it in a single phrase. That is his prerogative as a reviewer. But it does raise questions. Surely fairness demands a modicum of explanation – an example or two would do.
John de St Jorre
Mallorca
