Check it out, here is the afterword to a chapter from Oracle of the Thousand Hands which appears in The New Olympia Reader, 1970:
Barry Malzberg lives with his wife and daughter in Manhattan and is worried about having recently reached the ominous age of thirty . . . Mr. Malzberg's first hardcover novels, Oracle of the Thousand Hands and Screen are seriously-intentioned works which, according to the author, were neither fun to write nor fun in retrospect. Major influences on his work in no particular order are Norman Mailer, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, James Agee, Vladimir Nabokov, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nikolai Gogol.
Not quite. The major major influences upon the author's "seriously-intentioned" hardcover novels, as well as eight paperbacks done for the Olympia Press America between 1968 and 1973 were really: Jayne Mansfield, Natalie Wood, Hope Lange, repentance, desire, lust, resentment, ambition and the collected opi of the Four Coins, Four Preps, Four Seasons and the Belmonts. (Dion, too.) Heady stuff for the kid, though, writing for Nabokov's publisher, citing Gogol and Dostoevsky as influences; I recommend this experience to everyone having real or even slight pretensions to artistry.
Girodias fils left Paris in a flurry of debt, lawsuit and governmental revulsion in 1967, decamped to New York, found financial backing (but not too much) from obscure sources, set up active shop here as the reincarnation of that insouciant and eclectic Left Bank spirit which in the 1950s had given bewildered culture lovers the works of Akhbar del Palumbo, Henry Miller, Terry Southern and even Vladimir Nabokov whose Lolita had come to Paris in 1955 at the behest of an author whose agent had been unable to place the novel anywhere.
Maurice Girodias, 49 when he came to New York, 36 then, had been unable to sell many copies of Lolita; he hadn't done too well with Miller either (Akhbar on the other hand had been a staple) but he had ideas, he would reconstitute the age of enlightenment within the borders of a city located on the far Eastern seaboard of a country which was demonstrably going mad.
Clearly, it was going mad, it was his kind of country. First the assassination, then Vietnam, then some other, discreditable assassinations, then the Summer of Love, then Olympia Press America. Then Martin, Robert, Nixon, Apollo, Cambodia, Kent State and Wallace. But by the time of Wallace, Olympia Press was already speeding into Chapter 11 and Girodias, a year after that was, sans his new wife, sans everything sailing for Paris. "Sunk without trace" is not exactly the phrase for Olympia America, nothing is sunk without trace in this country, McGovern is on the lecture circuit and Jefferson Airplane/ Starship are heading toward the third incarnation, but it is close. Fairly close. "Sunk almost without trace" probably can be risked.
The New Olympia Reader, 300,000 words of excerpts by about fifty writers, compiled by your faithful undersigned for a freelancer's pittance (but not the author of the authorial biographies or the cited blurb) sold about 500 copies in hardcover, sold no copies in paperback since there was no paperback edition and hasn't been off my shelf in 15 years. Shortly, speedily, it will go back on my shelf.
That anthology was reviewed in a defunct literary journal by a novelist of minor reputation and high recrimination who mentioned none of the selections, spent 4000 words talking (in the abstract) about the prevalence of voyeurism in early 20th century culture as capitalized upon by senior and junior Girodiaoux and sickeningly exhibited here. Not a review but a poisonous meditation.
"Don't worry about it," the publisher said, "don't think about this twice, because of all the American literary crowd, the litterateurs in the fifties, sucking around the Rue de Whatever, he was the grubbiest, the silliest, the most desperate and the only one whose work I would not buy, I found him effete and senseless. He's been waiting to get back at me for 18 years and oh that wife of his!" This gave me little comfort, not much did give me comfort in those difficult post-prandial years when I came to understand that being Olympia's Best Writer, talisman of a disastrous hardcover program, was in effect to be Girodias's Worst Writer.
"Why am I so self-destructive?" the publisher said to me in a somewhat different context months later when British lawsuits had resulted in his first lot of hardcovers being confiscated at the warehouse and burned at the instigation of a member of the House of Lords whose name had been appropriated for spite as the title of a Traveler's Companion, "why do I do this to myself over and over again?"
"Well, Maurice," I could have said but did not, having even less wit than comprehension in that aftermath of the Summer of Love, "Maybe it's because you turned 50 on April 12, 1969 and men like you, men who have always formed themselves in terms of the debonair, the practical, the outrageous have a lot of trouble at 50 and feel at least that they are going to destruction on their own terms." I could have said that, I could have added that Maurice was exactly 15 years younger than my mother and equally capable of finding guilt in those he implicated, but I did not. One has to get fairly close or closer yet to 50 oneself to be offered such perceptions by which time, usually, it is too late to do much about them.
My mother, speaking of her, was not terribly pleased with her son, so recently the Schubert Foundation Playwriting Fellow but now a hounded and increasingly desperate novelist manque in search of a real market becoming Girodias's Best Writer. The fact that I was also writing science fiction and selling some of it to strange-looking magazines with androids on the cover was—for her at least—no particular compensation. She was however somewhat mollified to note in the Christopher Lehmann-Haupt 4/7/69 review of the two novels that they were defined as "a kind of anti-pornography"; this enabled her to seize the day with her friends.
"The problem with your pornography," an editor at Olympia named Uta West said to me in relation to the problem. "The only real trouble is that you write about sex the way that 95% of us experience it 95% of the time but it's hard to get us to pay to read about it, you know?"
Still, like the Common Man in Marat/Sade, I had plans. If my sex scenes were dreamy, my intentions and style were, I trusted, not: I wrote the opening chapters of Oracle of the Thousand Hands in a dead fever of February 1968, trying to figure out what might impress Nabokov's publisher's first reader and came up with a crazed pastiche of Pale Fire and Despair, the memoirs of a compulsive masturbator narrated in the alternating first- and third-person with quarts of semen spewed over electric fences, cattle mooing nostalgically in the background at the instant of self-defloration and ultimately a powerful shock from that electrified fence at the moment of final consummation. Girodias or someone there noticed what was going on, he summoned me to Gramercy Park (the Press and four employees worked out of his apartment, skirting the mattress on the floor as they sidled from room to room) and offered me a $2000 contract.
"Well," he mumbled six weeks later when on an impossible June afternoon I came to hear the verdict on the completed novel mailed oh-so-recently, "it's not your number one best seller but it's amusing and interesting isn't it?" Amusing and interesting were his favorite attitudes and everyone in the ideal Traveler's Companion or Ophelia Press book would climax with a smile and a sigh. "I have to accept this, I guess, but now you do something for me. I have a novel I want you to do as a special project for me."
That novel I soon discovered had been offered to and declined as an idea by every writer who had come trooping around or past the mattress: a young man with an empty life and much seminal backup is obsessed with film, watches five films a day, falls vividly in love with actresses, has an imagination so passionate that he can place himself on the screen with and make passionate love to Elizabeth Taylor, Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia and the ever-popular "others." "Use their real names," he said, "I want scandale; without scandal this cannot work."
"What becomes of the guy?"
"I don't know. Who the hell cares? Maybe he becomes Joe E. Levine, what's the difference. I'll give you a clause protecting you against lawsuits. I love lawsuits," he reminded me.
I delivered Screen in two weeks, taking Martin Miller, a Department of Welfare investigator in Brooklyn (as I had been) through a series of Bijoux and into and out of the genitalia of some actresses, also to Aqueduct race track in the borough of Queens and also through more desultory (if unrequested) collision with a fellow social worker whom he did not love (roman á clef, here) but who intimated his obsession and pointed out that Martin had better get wise, "Because I'm real. I'm also your last chance." (No, she wasn't.) I hold no great brief for the novel but doubt if any better has been written faster, pace A. J. Liebling, and it contains for whatever it is worth probably the best sentence I ever wrote and maybe the best sentence published in a novel of lust in 1969; the last sentence of that novel as Martin Miller having walked away from the suddenly desperate colleague, pounds it into a star (and pounds it and pounds it and pounds it, "her body a map, her hands a road to carry me home"):
It is strange and complex, complex and strange and my orgasm is like a giant bird torn wing to wing by rifle fire, falling, falling, in the hot drenched sun of that damned Southwestern city.
That sentence written (as were many of the sentences of that and Oracle) with two year old Stephanie Jill burbling and cooing and muttering and bouncing and volubly discussing matters of climate at her father's knee didn't have in draft the word "damned," something seemed to be lacking and in the only revision in either of those two novels, the word was put in for rhythm and emphasis and all of it placed on or near the Girodias mattress shortly after Independence Day.
"You son of a bitch," he pointed out, "you make me crazy, do you know that? I ask you this time for pornography, a simple work of pornography, give you a plot and everything and ask you to keep it simple and low-class, I publish one book for you and ask you to do this for me and what do you do? You give me 40 pages which are beautiful, just beautiful, you even know the color of that one's bush how you tell that? and then what do you give me? You give me horse-racing, you give me existentialism, you give me despair! You give me terrible anxiety and depression! You give me pain and thwarted desire! This book will sell 400 copies, I have to publish it hardcover too because in paperback everyone will throw it away; I have to publish it because it is a masterpiece, but you destroy me, do you understand?"
It sold 350 copies in hardcover, actually, making it the leader of the second "new hardcover line" (Oracle sold half that and a novel by Alex Austin, Eleanore, sold according to statement 52 copies) but none of this was my fault, was it? I mean it was indeed (Lehmann-Haupt backed me up on this) anti-pornography for the coming age of Nixon and under the circumstances, the time could have been right.
But times were never right for the doomed Girodias. They had been laying for him in the American press for years and years, he said, because he had embarrassed them by putting into print consistently masterpieces that the American publishing establishment had been too cowardly or stupid to undertake: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and the Nexus trilogy and Candy and Lolita, and virtually everything else that Barney Rosset or Walter Minton had taken on after he had broken ground. (And because the books were published in English outside of the borders of the United States, they were by old copyright law in public domain in this country.) Perhaps he was right; it is not difficult—I can see this as clearly at 27 as I would be unable to admit it at 50—to do justly, to do mercy, to walk humbly and to be buried anyway.
Besides, Maurice had said, "Written pornography, it is finished. Finished! Visuals are coming, visuals are where it will be, that and high-toned classy books which hairdressers can hand their clientele. Softcore for the ladies, yes, but nothing for the gentlemen. Our basic audience would rather stare than read which they can hardly manage anyway. The ladies on the other hand will call it romance. It will be finished by 1972, just two years from now."
Like Fitzgerald, like Raymond Chandler, like Thomas Wolfe, my publisher could coolly observe his disaster as if from a distance and by seeming detachment from cataclysm feign control. The boat sailed anyway. The Frog Prince, the first volume of his proposed series of memoirs, takes him only up to the age of 19 (and is classically uninteresting as would, say, be the biography of the extra-instrumental life of Heifetz or Nixon), was published in France many years ago, perished in a Crown edition here at the start of this decade and bulletins are distant and infrequent. Which is a way of saying "There is no news." I am, then, or am not near the end of this memoir but would not want to finish without discussing the issue of courage. He had a crazy, a manifest, a royal physical courage which I much admired as did almost anyone who had witnessed its display; he had a true general's detachment, an indifference to consequence founded upon metaphysic. In a dangerous, a perilous Times Square bar at 2 a.m. once where we had repaired, me shuddering he debonair, after a "debate" with an ex-Congressman and a Citizens for Decency League leader on the Farber show, a debacle which had left me exhausted and trembling, ("I don't have to read your filth to know what kind of filth it is," O.K. Armstrong, the Congressman, only two months ago reluctantly but administratively passed on at 92 had snapped to me), we were drinking beer for which Girodias had paid when a truly menacing, a truly dangerous fellow approached, an even less ingenuous companion lurking in the background, pointed a menacing finger at Girodias's sleeve, a knife seeming to glint from a shrouded place and said, "Nice threads, man. Really nice threads."
"Oh," said Maurice, "oh yes, of course, thank you." He began to remove the jacket, rose from the stool, finished the job, extended it. "Would you like?" he said, "it's all yours, my pleasure." The menace went away and Maurice went away and the brave, haunted, doomed Olympia America went away too (in metaphor at least, I am still in that bar, however) and they are to be saluted. Torn wing to wing by rifle fire.
—New Jersey, 1989
Footnote to an unpublished memoir: Maurice did write and publish a sequel to The Frog Prince, was interviewed on French radio in consequence of its publication in the summer of 1990, died suddenly after the interview. One would like to think of this as further evidence of the poised irony with which this difficult man attempted to conduct his life; the jaunty bow, the tilt of the eyebrow, exercise in self-publicity and then, aha! at the apex and astride his history, that graceful tumble to the pit, the Wallenda of autobiography. But death is too magisterial to command easy, balletic grace from most of us; I cannot imagine (I was not there) how it afflicted Maurice but if anyone could, like Don Giovanni salute the abyss it was the son of Jack Kahane. And two months later, Leonard Bernstein. Larger and larger pieces of time—
—New Jersey, 31 December 1990