Not OKay (Boyle)

The personal blog, that instrument of atomic clock precision, can be, well, er, wrong. Or, rather, its writer can be. I was I know now. Reading Neil Pearson's excellent book Obelisk, a biography of the Obelisk Press, Jack Kahane's 1930s Paris-based venture that published first or early editions of James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller, Anais Nin and others - and stacks and stacks of porn - I discovered that Kay Boyle didn't write some of that smut as I wrote in my last post. Boyle, a fine writer now unfortunately too little read, wasn't on Kahane's roster, as Pearson makes clear with his fascinating Obelisk Press author bios. That's a disappointment given her talent and Lost Generation credentials. However, it's almost made up for by the personal details of those who did churn out pornography for Kahane: they were decidedly odd or utterly degenerate or, in almost all cases, bereft of talent. Kahane himself, incidentally, wrote smut, either under his own name or a pseudonym. He also published Cyril Connolly's only completed novel, the clunk-along Rock Pool. Mercifully, Connolly followed this up with his exceptional critical work, Enemies of Promise, next on my reading list. So thank you, Toronto Public Library. You're back in my good books, so to speak. You made me wait a long time for Obelisk but the Connolly classic took less than a week to deliver.