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.

At Last the Obelisk

A round of half-hearted applause, please, for the Toronto Public Library. After just nine or ten months it's come through with Neil Pearson's Obelisk. I picked it up today and from what I've read so far it was worth the wait. (Try as I might, I couldn't find a copy to buy, hardback or paper, anywhere in Hogtown.)

It's the history of Englishman Jack Kahane and his publishing house Obelisk Press in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s. Pearson writes that Kahane has been unjustifiably overlooked and I couldn't agree more. Kahane published early works by Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Lawrence Durrell and others and books by James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Cyril Connolly, Radclyffe Hall, Frank Harris and many more. He also published piles of money-spinning porn, employing the likes of literary writers such as Kay Boyle to churn it out.

Now then, if I can only persuade the TPL to release from its steely, steely stacks-only grip Boyle's Monday Night or Mon Ami Maigret by Georges Simenon or Bernard Poli's Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review or FMF's memoir Return to Yesterday or Ronald Weber's News of Paris or Lethbridge U prof Craig Monk's Writing the Lost Generation or.......

I Love the Toronto Public Libraries

Yes, it's true, I absolutely love TPL. But I'm beginning to think TPL doesn't love me back. Is waiting months for a copy of Obelisk, Neil Pearson's book about the groundbreaking Paris-based publisher of the early work of some of the great modernists - and reams of pornography some of them wrote - a sign that TPL doesn't care? Why won't TPL circulate such important-to-literary-history works as Samuel Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress? Why can't I check out Lethbridge U prof Craig Monk's still new book on American writers of the Lost Generation? Why can't I get my hands on The Expatriates by Ishbel Ross unless I sit in the Reference Library and read it? Why can't I check out Ford Madox Ford's Return to Yesterday?

I understand that some books are just too valuable to place in circulation since, for one thing, it's unlikely they will be reprinted. But a book (Craig Monk's) from the U of Iowa Press published in 2008? Or what about British historian Simon Kitson's excellently reviewed The Hunt for Nazi Spies: Fighting Espionage in Vichy France? It's just been published! But can't leave the Reference Library.

There are few things sadder than unrequited love. TPL, please don't break my heart.