Well, if it’s 8 February, it must be the 92nd anniversary of Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, a fascist from New Zealand who claimed to be King of Poland, going on trial for attempting to get into print a poem entitled Here Lies John Penis.
He hadn’t started out all that badly, coming to London in 1927 and having some small successes as a poet. Things started to unravel when he translated a few saucy verses by Verlaine and Rabelais and threw in a couple of his own.
These, according to historians Graham Macklin and Craig Fowlie, “describe in graphic terms the sexual failures of fellow New Zealand poet Rex Fairburn”.
The plan was to publish and circulate the filth privately, and to that end Potocki and his friend Douglas Glass went out “dressed flamboyantly” to find a printer, asking a policeman outside the Old Bailey if he could recommend one. As one does.
The copper — clearly, and rightly, taking the piss — pointed them to the people who did the Methodist Times, who said no. They tried another who (unimpressed by the antisemitism they dropped into the conversation) passed the manuscript to the police.
They were arrested and Potocki was put on trial for ‘obscene libel’. He turned up at the Old Bailey in his usual outfit — which was once described by the historian Richard Cobb (in a book about Cobb’s early adult life, A Classical Education):
I had come out on the terrace of the British Museum for a break and to have a smoke. A few yards away, I could see the familiar figure of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, his long greasy hair hanging halfway down his back, and dressed in his dubious heavily stained red velvet toga that seemed to be made out of the discarded curtains of a run-down boarding house. He was wearing sandals, though it was February, and his feet looked more than usually dirty, especially between the toes.
…but Potocki was often photographed wearing it, so we don’t have to just imagine it.
He was up before Sir Ernest Wild, a judge with a conservative reputation. So, naturally, as well as wearing the beret, cape and sandals, he refused to swear on the Bible because he worshipped Apollo, and gave a [ahem] ‘Roman’ salute:
I raised my right arm (like Julius Caesar or Benito Mussolini)
Wild steered the jury to a guilty verdict, and asked Potocki what sort of sentence he thought he should get, to which the poet replied:
I ought to be sentenced to several years in Buckingham Palace
Six months in Wormwood Scrubs it was, then.
At this point, writers including Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and H. G. Wells held or attended meetings to support an appeal, thinking the sentence too harsh, and some even donated to his defence fund. But the effort failed, and he served the full term.
It was after this that this embittered man’s fascist tendencies really started showing. When Aldous Huxley and Bryan Guinness gave him the money for a printing press, he launched The Right Review which “featured literary content”, but was mostly his antisemitic rants and claims of kingship.
A friend in the Society of Genealogists looked back to the 14th century and ‘proved’ that Potocki was royal, so…
…and started bestowing ‘knighthoods’ on selected friends. He also used that famed technique of the completely normal — referring to himself in the third person:
For the avoidance of any doubt about his politics, he named his cat ‘Franco’. Here they are together:
For the rest of his life, he pottered about on the fringes of far-right politics and got in trouble with the law. In court, he would do himself few favours by insisting on speaking only Polish or saying, in 1943, “I would like to see the Germans over-run Britain”.
In the 60s and 70s, he was putting out racist pamphlets about South Africa and Rhodesia — although he did write and self-publish other works. Here’s one:
The real question, though, which I imagine you’re already asking, is: but where, Chris, where can we read a poem called Here Lies John Penis? And it so happens I can help. In 2001, a cousin of Potocki’s, Stephanie De Montalk, wrote his biography.
…and because Google Books has a preview of some of the pages of Unquiet World: The Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk, I can present it to you here, in all its… er, glory:
You really are most welcome.
