Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk - Literary Career

Literary Career

Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk was one of a group of New Zealand poets which included his friends A. R. D. Fairburn and R. A. K. Mason. However, his proposed career as a romantic poet was severely affected by a court case in 1932. He was arrested after attempting to publish a manuscript of erotic translations of works by Rabelais and Verlaine, with three short bawdy verses of his own. Though the manuscript had not actually been published, it had been shown to a printer at the Methodist Recorder in London who reported de Montalk to the police on the grounds of obscenity. The subsequent charge was "obscene libel", specifically in relation to the work 'Lament for Sir John Penis'. On 8 February, 1932 he appeared before Sir Ernest Wild, Recorder of London at the Central Criminal Court and after a celebrated trial at which he was supported by Leonard and Virginia Woolf and many of the leading writers of the day – he was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs. He later said that when it was asked who had been libelled, the answer given by the prosecution was 'Sir John Penis'!

He emerged from prison bitter and determined to flout English convention. He adopted a mock-medieval style of dress, wearing sandals and a crimson tunic, and a cloak made from a length of scarlet curtain he had begun wearing soon after arrival in London and had worn during his trial. His hair, which had been allowed to grow in prison, continued to grow until it was waist length. After his release he travelled to Warsaw, where he was well received and reported on by the newspapers.

He returned to England in 1935, to cover the Silver Jubilee of George V, who died shortly thereafter. When Edward VIII declared his intention to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, against the wishes of Prime Minister Baldwin, and was forced to abdicate, Potocki de Montalk printed a manifesto supporting the King and chastising Baldwin, distributing copies in Downing Street and was arrested. Aldous Huxley sent his wife to arrange bail and later funded the purchase of Potocki's first printing press. Potocki married for the second time in 1939.

Over the next four decades, Potocki published his own poetry and pamphlets and intermittently produced his right-wing literary publication, the Right Review (1936–73). In 1943, informed by Poles living in London about the massacre in the woods at Katyn of 15,000 Polish servicemen by Britain's ally, the Soviet Union, Potocki published what he considered to be his most important piece of writing, his Katyn Manifesto. The British government had been keen to keep the atrocity quiet, which the Soviet Union blamed on Nazi Germany. Potocki was arrested by Special Branch and imprisoned. Later, he was sent to an agricultural camp in Northumberland. This manifesto was the only acknowledgement of the atrocity in English. The full truth of the Katyn massacre was not to emerge for another 50 years.