William Levy

“Hello, Bill,” he croaked.

“Hello, Bill,” I echoed.

“Where did you get that manuscript of The Wild Boys?” he asked.

“From Gerrit Komrij.”

“Who’s that?” He cried out with exasperated incredulity.

“He’s Maurice Girodias’ agent in Holland.”

“You mean Maurice gave you permission to publish it?”

“Well, not exactly,” I sputtered. Even back then, Burroughs and I had known each other a long while, over a decade. We had first become acquainted in 1960 and in 1961 at the now famous, albeit then deeply shabby “Beat Hotel” on rue Git le Coeur in Paris, had seen each other in New York at his loft on Centre Street and also often in England, and he had generously given me manuscripts to publish in other magazines I edited, The Insect Trust Gazette(USA) and International Times (London).

“Your book came up at a dinner party. I asked to read the manuscript and Maurice gave his agent, this Komrij, permission to give it to me. I took it on my own to publish it,” I admitted. “Out of admiration for your work, Bill. I wasn’t trying to harm you.”

William Levy

“Numberless are the world’s wonders,
but none more wonderful than man.”
– Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

For over half-a-century whenever authors met talk would eventually come around to the maverick Maurice Girodias, and his Olympia Press. Did you or didn’t you? Did you or didn’t you hit him for money? Did you or didn’t you hear about what he had just published? Written. Done. Amazing really. Awesome. He seemed to internationally float about on some magic carpet surrounded by a suave fog both elegant and dangerous, ecstatic and ironic. For all the writers who claimed Maurice “ripped me off” there was an equal amount that used him. For every novelist like J. P. Donleavy—who had a justifiable vendettic rage against Maurice and spent an enormous amount of time and energy pursuing it, finally buying back the rights to The Ginger Man at public auction—there were versifiers like Christopher Logue. Plagiarist or premature post-modern deconstructionalist? According to a rare bookseller’s catalog, Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks was “in fact, almost entirely lifted by Logue from G. Legman’s then recent The Limerick, from a copy borrowed and not even bought.”