posted on 15 Mar 2023

Obelisk: A history of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press by Neil Pearson

There may be some people who know the author, Neil Pearson for his stage and television work but he’s also well-know in the book world as a bibliophile and scholar of all things bookish. Obelisk: A history of Jack Kahane and the Obelisk Press hovers somewhere between a labour of love and an obsessive devotion to one of those odd publishing phenomena that are a quintessential part of the literary world.

The literary world of Paris between the two world wars is legendary enough to have tempted plenty of authors and historians to try and capture the febrile atmosphere of a city that opened its arms to legions of authors from Britain and the USA who were seeking artistic freedom and the right to publish without censorship. The names of the authors who found their way to France’s capital in those years – the likes of Hemingway, Pound, Joyce and numerous other luminaries – will be well known to anyone likely to be reading this review but a socially awkward, lanky, tubercular, monocle-wearing Manchester playwright by the name of Jack Kahane will be less familiar.

Kahane was, until his move into publishing, something of a loser. In his home city of Manchester he tried and failed to become a leading playwright and, after falling in love with France and all its works, he attempted to become a light popular novelist in the French taste. But, although he had work published, he failed to make any significant progress at that either.

Ultimately, it wasn’t Kahane’s own writing that earned him a place in literary history but his discovery of a simple publishing model that allowed many authors, who wouldn’t have found a publisher because of the supposed ‘immorality’ of their work in Britain or America, to see the light of day for the first time. And what was this model? He reasoned that in an environment that tolerated the publication of titillating populist pornography, publishing and selling this in numbers could provide the funds he needed to also publish alongside it, the experimental and artistic works that would go on to later be acknowledged as literary classics. In many ways he took his lead from what Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop had started when she took on the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Works by the likes of Frank Harris, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Lawrence Durrell were published under the Obelisk imprint and this idea of publishing salacious popular scribbling to cross-fund the publication of significant works of literature that would have been seized and destroyed in the author’s home country, was picked up by Kahane’s son, Maurice Girodias (he retained his mother’s maiden name to avoid being arrested as a Jew by the Nazis) who went on to have similar success with his Olympia imprint featuring a later generation of banned writers.

Pearson has constructed what must be the ultimate catalogue of Kahane’s Obelisk empire. He starts with a biography of Kahane that runs to 70 or so pages and then gives us a definitive catalogue of all the Obelisk publications with all the printing and publishing points that any collector or dealer could possibly need. This is followed by shortish but informative pen portraits of the authors Kahane took on and ends with a page of reference titles and an easy to consult catalogue of the authors featured in the book. In all its 500 pages of scholarly work and if you’re interested in the crucible of Modernist publishing that was Paris between the wars, this is likely to be a must have for your future reference.

Published in 2007, I’m not sure it ever made its way into paperback but hardcover copies are available on the second hand market and are likely to cost you between £15-25.

 

Terry Potter

March 2023