SOURCE: Girodias, Maurice, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsburg, Carl Solomon, and James Grauerholz. “The Struggle Against Censorship: A Round Table Discussion.” In The Art of Literary Publishing: Editors on Their Craft, edited by Bill Henderson, pp. 212-29. Yonkers, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, adapted from a 1974 radio program, Girodias of Olympia Press speaks with William Burroughs, whose controversial novel, Naked Lunch, he published in 1959, and Allen Ginsburg, the author of Howl, which was the subject of a landmark censorship trial in 1957. Also part of the conversation are Carl Solomon, who published Burrough's 1953 book, Junkie as a pulp paperback, and James Grauerholz, Burrough's assistant. The 1962 trial of Naked Lunch was the last major censorship trial of a literary work in the United States. In the 1966 case Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the court “found that Naked Lunch was not without social value, and therefore, not obscene.”]

[Girodias]: It was Allen who first brought the manuscript [of Naked Lunch] to me, in '58, in Paris. I was publishing books in the English language at the time, books which were unpublishable in America … the prose was scintillating but the typing was pretty horrendous. I don't know what happened to that manuscript before it reached me.

[Ginsberg]: Kerouac had typed part of it in '57 in Tangier and Alen Ansen had typed part of it and I typed part of it. It was a composite of different typings.

[Girodias]: It was dazzling, but it was difficult to make out. So, I must say that I reacted very badly. I remember saying, ‘This is great but I can't even get a straight judgement on this book. Can you do something about it?’ That was our first conversation. I also remember your looking like a very elegant, dapper young American. You looked extremely business-like, you were doing your job as an agent, I suppose. ‘Come back later’, I said, ‘and bring me a better manuscript’ …—A month later, Allen came back with a retyped, rearranged manuscript which was published in 1959.

[Burroughs]: The point is that the manuscript which you saw in 1958 was not even approximately similar to the manuscript published in 1959.

[Girodias]: A lot of work was done.

[Burroughs]: Yes. As I remember the story, you became interested after publication of excerpts in Chicago Review and then in Big Table. One morning, Sinclair Beiles came to see me and said you did want to publish the manuscript and that you wanted it in two weeks. So, we all got busy and reorganized the material. The manuscript you got then was not at all the same as the manuscript you saw in 1958, which was really fragmentary and confused.

[Ginsberg]: I must have taken the initiative to see you at the time we were preparing the material for Big Table.

[Girodias]: I remember the meeting very clearly. When the Big Table piece came out and reminded me about the whole thing, we got into it and the book was published.

[Burroughs]: The book was out on the stands one month after the morning Sinclair Beiles came to see me. I think that's a record. We had made the selections from about one thousand pages of material which overflowed into The Soft Machine, into The Ticked That Exploded and into Nova Express as well. You got it printed and out in two weeks. I was producing it in pieces, and as soon as you got it, it was sent to the printer. When it came back from the printer instead of rearranging the proofs, Brion Gysin, myself and Sinclair Beiles took one look and said, “this is the order, just leave it the way it is.”

[Ginsberg]: It was all happening about one block from the Seine river within a few streets from each other from rue Git-le-Coeur to rue Saint Severin. We were living on rue Git-le-Coeur in Paris, so actually, it was a very short walk back and forth. It was in the neighborhood and everybody was seeing each other for coffee in the mornings anyway.

[Girodias]: Everything was happening within a radius of three hundred yards or so.

[Ginsberg]: That's one reason why it was possible to do it so fast.

[Girodias]: That's only one reason. I still can't understand what all the rush was at the time, can you remember?

[Ginsberg]: We wanted to take advantage of the publicity that was emanating from Chicago.

[Burroughs]: Yes, that was part of it. But I remember Sinclair Beiles saying he wants to publish it and he wants to do it quickly, can you get it ready in two weeks? And I said yes, we can do it.

[Ginsberg]: Maurice, what other books were you publishing that year?

[Girodias]: Well, '58-59 was a bit slow. I had run through a number of pretty fantastic books in the mid-fifties. I started Olympia Press in 1953. My first list had a book by Samuel Beckett, WATT, and a book by De Sade, I think The Bedroom Philosopher or Justine, I don't remember which and a book by Henry Miller, Plexus. It was a great start for a completely new imprint and a new publishing firm with no money in the bank. We were very lucky. We really had a nice literary list to start with.

[Ginsberg]: And you also had a long series of books written by young Americans in Paris.

[Girodias]: Yes. Mason Hoffenberg was one of them, Iris Owen was another.

[Burroughs]: Ed Bryant …

[Girodias]: Yes, and others, like Chester Himes, but his book was published under his own name. All the other ones were pseudonyms and we invented colorful names for everybody such as Akbar Del Piombo that was Norman Rubington, and Ataullah Mardaan.

[Burroughs]: Yes, people still ask me if I'm Akbar Del Piombo.

[Ginsberg]: We may as well stop the myth that Burroughs is the author of that Piombo work once and for all.

[Girodias]: Yes. I never understood why so many people have thought that William Burroughs had written Fuzz Against Junk. Years later, I was asked for the first time, whether Burroughs had written Fuzz Against Junk. I discovered that there was once a mistake by which you were credited in the contract page. The copyright page had been misplaced by the printers, this was the reason for the mistake. I think it was all my fault and I apologize profusely. I never understood it until many years later …

[Ginsberg]: Norman Rubington was the author of Fuzz Against Junk.

[Grauerholz]: Didn't he write Diary of a Beatnik?

[Ginsberg]: Yes, but many years later.

[Girodias]: That was published in America when I was trying to reestablish Olympia Press in the late '60's.

[Burroughs]: Maurice, didn't you publish Zazie in the Metro in '59?

[Girodias]: Yes. After the mid-fifties, when I published Lolita, The Ginger Man, Candy which came out in '58 and a number of books by Beckett. My list was fluid and bizarre in those days. The last important thing I did then was Naked Lunch in 1959. After that, it was a down hill evolution. I had been harassed by the French administration to the point where I was almost out of business. Also, censorship had started to recede in America and it became possible, partly thanks to Barney Rosset's Grove Press, to publish, in America, some of the books I had first published in France. Unfortunately, this happened years after their publication in French and because of the American copyright regulations, most of those books were out of copyright, and were pirated later by American publishers. But that was not the case with Naked Lunch. Naked Lunch and Lolita were the only two that escaped being pirated. So, after '59, there were two other books that we published by William Burroughs. The first one was The Soft Machine, I think in '61 or '62 and after that, The Ticket that Exploded. … Well, after that, the next step was the publication, in America, of Naked Lunch by Grove Press in '64. There was a long interval and you must realize that in '59 there were still incredible problems that most American citizens have completely forgotten about. For example, the fact that in '59, Lady Chatterley's Lover was published for the first time by Grove Press. It was a breakthrough and a very daring thing to do.

[Girodias]: That was only a short time ago. It's a hard thing to believe.

[Ginsberg]: The point I'd like to make is that most of the American literary establishment, the publishers and the editors, adopted a party line which said that the reason “obscene” books were not published in America was that there were not very many of literary merit anyway. They were claiming that they were not leading any kind of fight, because there were no real manuscripts of great importance.

[Burroughs]: That's a very devious cover.

[Ginsberg]: For present historical memory, I think the point should be made, that the cover story for not publishing this book was that there were no books.

[Burroughs]: Allen, I remember the correspondence between Barney Rosset and Maurice Girodias. Barney was saying, very emphatically, “do you really think Naked Lunch could be published? You're absolutely out of your mind. It is impossible. It must be done in a series of steps starting with Lady Chatterley's Lover and then, Miller. Perhaps, after that, depending on how the litigation goes. …”

[Ginsberg]: That's right. There was a world's delay on publishing Naked Lunch.

[Girodias]: Yes. That's what Rosset did, and I see that it was a rational approach. It worked very well. He slipped in Jean Genet and Frank Harris. It had to be that way. It's very interesting to see that, in fact, it's the publication of a number of books like that which really changed the rules of an entire generation and made things possible that were impossible before. What happened by way of books was extended to all our forms of expression.

[Ginsberg]: By the time Naked Lunch was published, that was precisely the time of the great battle in N.Y. over Lenny Bruce and of the battle of the movies over Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures with New York Filmakers. There had been a meeting of district attorneys in New York, somewhere in the early sixties, to take concerted action against one or another of Grove's items to see if they could break it.

[Grauerholz]: So in fact, there was a kind of conspiracy.

[Ginsberg]: I would say a concerted effort not a conspiracy, because it was very public.

[Girodias]: It was quite open and funds were poured into attacking publishers. In fact, it was not expensive for the establishment side to do because, of course, they had the police and the courts at their disposal so they could do it easily.

[Grauerholz]: I mean conspiracy in a sense, like Barney Rosset's having to plan which books to publish.

[Girodias]: Oh, yes, it was on both sides.

[Ginsberg]: But I don't think of the word conspiracy there. I would say a concerted effort, because conspiracy involves secrecy, and this was done very openly.

[Grauerholz]: Yes, it was planned. The point is that he had planned a series of progressive, more liberal steps.

[Burroughs]: Yes, definitely Barney did plan a series of steps.

[Ginsberg]: Brilliantly, I think.

[Girodias]: The first step, before Grove Press did anything, was the publication of Lolita in 1958 by Putnam's. I think it was the first event of this sort, an open challenge to censorship, which Putnam's did not follow up. The district attorneys had to let go of Lolita because of a completely stupid, irrelevant incident of a copy sent to a literary critic in N.Y. which had been stopped by the customs people and which had been released. I wrote a letter to this customs officer after hearing about this incident and asked him if indeed he had stopped a copy of Lolita, examined that book and released it after examining it. He answered in the affirmative. Therefore one copy of Lolita had been processed through customs. Since customs was one of the two bodies which were actively in charge of censorship, the other being the Post Office, this created a legal situation whereby an American publisher could then publish Lolita and have a precedent strong enough to defeat the effort to suppress the book in court. It's very weird but this is really what started the whole thing going.

[Ginsberg]: There were a couple of books of small explosions before that. One was with Howl in San Francisco. It was printed in England and then brought back to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. The customs stopped it. But we got it out of customs. Then a local vice squad officer picked it up in City Lights and it was prosecuted. We won a trial there. That was while I was in Tangier and in Paris, visiting Bill. Then there was a Big Table thing, which was a censorship battle in '58. The other thing I remember, was the battle about Lady Chatterley, which involved Arthur Summerfield who was the Postmaster General. He put a copy of Lady Chatterley on President Eisenhower's desk with the dirty words and passages underlined. Eisenhower was quoted, in Time or Newsweek, as saying “Terrible, we can't have that.” He gave Summerfield the green light, “Go ahead and prosecute anywhere possible Lady Chatterley!” That involved a couple of hundred thousand dollars in legal fees expanded by Grove Press to defend it.

[Girodias]: Lady Chatterley's Lover didn't get as much opposition as Tropic of Cancer which was the next one on the list and was published by Grove Press in 1960. That's where they really had trouble with local police and cases being started against them all around the country. They fought, and finally won all the cases when the whole thing was reviewed by the court.

[Ginsberg]: … The other thing that should be pointed out, is that when Grove went over the barbed wire and got Lady Chatterley's Lover legalized, immediately all the other publishing companies in New York jumped in, Putnam's among others and printed their own editions of Lady Chatterley.

[Girodias]: That's when the notion of public domain and copyright came out.

[Ginsberg]: Well, what I mean is that all the other publishers were too chicken, or too cowardly or conservative to actually fight for their own rights in regard to the earlier classic texts. As soon as Grove established the classic legal nature of Lady Chatterley, they began pirating it …

[Ginsberg]: The government's attitude in those years was in some way expressed by J. Edgar Hoover, who made a public statement in the early '60's, saying that the three greatest threats to America were the Communists, the Beatniks and the Egg-heads.

[Girodias]: There were editorials in the New York Daily News, attacking either the new culture, or literary publishing or freedom of letters. So there was, to some extent, a concerted government conspiracy which involved the FBI who officially had started its counter-intelligence program back in 1956. There may have been illegal manipulations by the FBI to discredit the literary community that far back to say nothing of the activities of the CIA. An international literary atmosphere which was a big wet blanket was created to discredit any literary breakthough of either the old or the new classics that would have been considered obscene.

[Burroughs]: Yes, it's true that Encounter magazine, which definitely turned out to be partially subsidized by the CIA, was among the bitterest critics of my work and also of Maurice Girodias. There was an article against Maurice and Olympia Press written by George Steiner.

[Ginsberg]: Yes. We sent early chapters of Naked Lunch to Stephen Spender when he was working on Encounter. That was in '58 when manuscripts were being solicited by Grove Press for Evergreen and Big Table in Chicago, Spender wrote back that the chapters that I had sent might be of interest to a psychiatrist but that they were not literary material.

[Girodias]: Well, that's typical of Stephen Spender.

[Burroughs]: You were the first to publish Genet in English, were you not?

[Girodias]: Well, there had been a privately printed edition of Our Lady of the Flowers …

[Solomon]: I bought it in the Gotham Book Mart under the counter.

[Girodias]: It was published by a Cocteau protege whose name was Maurian and who shortly after that started the Club Mediterranee and made a fortune, which he didn't do as a publisher. He was trying to run a very interesting bookstore and publishing firm and he was the first one to publish the book in English … But that was only a few hundred copies and it was never really put for sale in bookstores.

[Ginsberg]: Well, the copy that Carl had, I saw in Kerouac's room. It had a tremendous effect on us.

[Solomon]: I came into contact with Genet's work when I lived in Paris, in '47. I had jumped ship and I had a girlfriend there, a prostitute whom I took out. She took me to see a Genet play and so then I wanted to read Genet in French so I bought Pompe Funebre and was really carried away by it.

[Girodias]: He was a great discovery for French letters at the time. That was during the late forties.

[Ginsberg]: It's funny, it made such an impression here, too, just at that time. At least, in our small circle of people.

[Girodias]: I suppose the first shocker the French had was Celine, before the war, but there was nothing else which was that provocative and that intense in French letters until Genet came out. Of course, he was another of my authors, I published two of his books in English, Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief's Journal. I got into serious trouble with the French authorities because of Genet. At the same time, the French version of his books were published by Galimard who was a great importer and wealthy literary publisher.

[Ginsberg]: Didn't Gallimard publish edited versions of Genet?

[Girodias]: No. They were the complete texts. My English versions were banned and I was prosecuted for it by the French, which doesn't make much sense. But that was another illustration of what we were saying earlier: that it was really not just an American effort to stop the liberation of writing and thinking but it was really an international effort. My problems in Paris started with the British Government bringing pressure through Interpol and the French Government to stop me from publishing those horrible books in English.

[Ginsberg]: The Traveler's Companion which you were carrying across the Channel.

[Girodias]: Right, they were a mixed bag in which I had some amusing pornography written by very good writers who were doing this as a lark.

[Ginsberg]: And to make some money.

[Girodias]: Yes, these were interspersed with books like Lolita, which I could only sell because I was selling them as if they were dirty books. It was the only way to get the nice tourists to grab a copy and pay the nine francs that we were charging for them. Of course, we had to take the position that we were publishers of pornography, which we were to a very large extent—and very proud to be that at that time. But there was also a counter effort to stop us and to completely wipe me out of existence because I was the only publisher in the world who was able to publish books in English and who made an effort to select these books and to try to give an audience to good writers. So this is how, after weeks and weeks of litigation, I was completely run out of business by the French administration. They took my case seriously because they had been told it was important by their British colleagues and presumably, by their American colleagues.

[Ginsberg]: Well, if Summerfield was taking the matter up with President Eisenhower and they were having such a shocked reaction in the Oval Office, then obviously it was an international plot.

[Burroughs] Well, I think that Wilhelm Reich made this point as well in his The Sexual Revolution. From their point of view, it seems very rational that this would be a menace to their position and that the cultural revolution is the important revolution. Thus we know that in Russia, even in the Tzarist days, they were always oriented toward the control of thought. They regarded this as highly important.

[Girodias]: We also know that one of the aims of the revolution was, at first, sexual freedom.

[Ginsberg]: The Russian Revolution?

[Girodias]: Yes, and the Bolsheviks immediately wiped it out from the revolutionary program because it was a cause of social disorder.

[Grauerholz]: Well, in fact, the Bolsheviks in 1917, repealed all the laws against so called sexual perversion or homosexuality. It wasn't until the years of Stalin that the laws were reinstated. Now this is only what is on the books.

[Girodias]: In practice I think that one was actually forced to get married, one was forced by social, or professional pressures to lead a straight life. Morality among Communists is still the iron rule. You can't deviate, and if you do, you really get in trouble with the Party. No person of authority in the Party can have a mistress and things like that.

[Ginsberg]: In the western world, what was the reason for such concerted action that would have stretched through Interpol, through Arthur Summerfield, the Postmaster, through President Eisenhower, through the British; what was their motive?

[Girodias]: I think that their motive was the suppression of any discussion, any free discussion of sex. Remember the problems that Freud himself had in those same years, and before those years. He was fighting the same fight. In fact, now, we have forgotten the political aspect of the fight that Freud and all his followers were having at the time. It was exactly the same thing. I think it springs from the beginnings of the industrial revolution, particularly in England which was the most conservative and repressive country in Europe, and the world at the time. There was a necessity to keep working classes well-disciplined and the notion that sexual freedom would destroy the social order completely. To force the people to follow moral rules in their sex life was the only way to impose the same old rules in terms of politics and social conduct. I think that a package was imposed, and the way to impose this was by sexual repression and by forbidding people to read certain books. So you had the British society in the Victorian era split in two; the working classes were not allowed to read anything and the upper classes were having a good time, quite deviously.

[Ginsberg]: Enjoying privately printed, deluxe editions of Fanny Hill.

[Girodias]: That's right. But this was not the French attitude at all. Before WWII France was probably the only free country in the entire world. Then it was knocked out of existence by Germany and was subjected to the rule of the German Army for the four years of Occupation, during which the French middle class got a taste of censorship and found out what it could do with censorship. After the war, when “Petain's disciple,” de Gaulle, came into power, he just adopted the rules which Petain had followed during the war: he applied censorship, not just political censorship, or military censorship, but moral censorship as well. So this is really, in a very practical and historical sense, a fascist weapon to keep the masses under control.

[Ginsberg]: Probably ‘authoritarian’ would be a better word there, because we are applying this to the condition in Russia as well as to the West …

[Girodias]: In my case, it was pretty atrocious because I was publishing books in English in France. The French Police are absolutely unable to understand the English language … I was being prosecuted and sentenced for books in English that the judges could not read. So, this gave life to very strange court scenes. But this was not just an accident. If the French authorities were trying so hard to suppress me and my production purely because I was a dangerous element in a well organized society then Interpol was playing this wonderful role of a liaison between the various police forces in England, America, France and Italy.

[Ginsberg]: How do you know it was Interpol?

[Girodias]: Because I saw the files on me.

[Ginsberg]: Interpol files?

[Girodias]: Yes. I mean the French Police more or less willingly let me see some of the files denouncing me and in particular right before Lolita was banned which was my first big brush with the French authorities. I saw a big file and letters from the British police, addressed through Interpol to the French police, asking them to do something about stopping the crazy activities I was engaged in in Paris.

[Ginsberg]: The point I was making before was that if Summerfield actually approached President Eisenhower in his White House office, to put pressure on, and Eisenhower gave the go ahead to prosecute Lady Chatterley, then it must have involved a very large police bureaucracy push from every direction.

[Girodias]: I'm sure that Hoover was playing a very positive role in all that. I mean, he was trying very hard. He was the great fighter against pornography, obscenity, and any kind of leniency.

[Burroughs]: I think that the point that Maurice has made, I've always said the same, that all censorship is political.

[Girodias]: It's not moral censorship per se, I mean it has always meant to serve the purposes of the ruling class, or the party.

[Burroughs]: But that attitude in England I've heard this directly from the upper English class, ‘Well, it's alright for us to read books like this, but we don't want them to get into the hands of the working class’, about my book for example.

[Ginsberg]: Well, what is their reasoning on that or didn't they ever propose reasons?

[Burroughs]: They just don't want the working class to think. It's as crude as that. I've heard this also from the upper class English, ‘We just don't want them to think, we want to keep them in ignorance.’ In those very words.

[Girodias]: I mean, if reading is a secret pleasure, it's the first one to be suppressed.

[Ginsberg]: Well, the conclusion that I would derive from all of our experiences, is that there is a great fluctuation back and forth in this question of liberty, and the old American saying ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’ It would be a good thing for later generations to bear in mind that you can't take it for granted that the ruling classes will allow questionable works to circulate freely. You always have to fight for them, and probably, we'll still have to continue battling for them for the next decade or so. Especially as there will be greater and greater repression.

[Burroughs]: Certainly. Well, at some point, of course it becomes difficult for the ruling class to take back liberties which they've had …

[Ginsberg]: Well, they'd have to ban the books, bring out a bunch of police to arrest people for possession.

[Burroughs]: No, they would not do that. They would have a war. That's what happened in France.

[Girodias]: Exactly. You have to have a military regime in charge …

[Ginsberg]: Well, one fantasy I had very early in the game in the mid and late fifties, was that once a few of these books were put through, like Lady Chatterley, or I'm thinking about in the case of Howl, or once Naked Lunch got out, once those books got out, and Henry Miller was out in hundreds of thousands of copies, in paperback and was secretly hidden on people's book-shelves and dining rooms and attics, they'd never be able to completely roll everything back because there would always be these secret artifacts, which younger generations would be able to pick up on secretly within the family.

[Girodias]: Oh yes, I mean in the healthy society, the desire to fight the rules is so strong that freedom is bound to win, but it can take several generations, it's a waste of time and a waste of life. Look at the two or three generations in Soviet Russia …

I've been through the experience of the French Occupation, the war in France and the occupation by the Germans and I can assure you that it is absolutely devastating to see how a completely free country, educated and raised in the culture of freedom and in the respect of absolute freedom, individual freedom, can turn around and in a few months become a nation of slaves and idiots. I mean it's dazzling.

[Ginsberg]: There is that point though, that they never will be able to completely suppress the new liberated mind because there are all these new copies around so that new little pubescent boys will be able to go up in the attic and find grandfather's books.

[Girodias]: Well, let's hope there are too many copies around. …