“The course of my life is an indictment of the whole
dishonest racket which calls itself democracy.”
—Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk 389
Geoffrey Potocki was one of the generation of the Golden Age of New Zealand literati, which included Potocki’s friend and fellow poet Rex Fairburn, Allen Curnow, R. A. K. Mason, D’arcy Cresswell, and others. As one would expect, most of those who were politically inclined during this inter-war period turned to Marxism. Like Ezra Pound, 390 however, Rex Fairburn rejected Marxism in favor of Social Credit, 391 and also like Pound he even considered fascism, 392 albeit briefly. 393
Potocki, on the other hand, turned unequivocally to the Right. Among bohemian eccentrics, he was surely the most noticeable in the London literary milieu in which he spent a significant amount of his life.
Potocki emerged from a New Zealand that was very much a British cultural outpost. Depression-era New Zealand afforded the country the opportunity to forge a sense of national and cultural identity that was something other than an imitation of Britain, while striving for its own level of excellence. Such was not to be the case, however, and what developed instead was a parochial form of Americanization, and consumer culture, particularly as the period following the Second World War saw the eclipse of British authority in favor of U.S. commercial banality.
Potocki, Fairburn, and even Marxists such as Mason were acutely aware of their responsibility to forge a “new civilization” in the antipodes, and some, such as Potocki in particular, self-exiled to Britain and elsewhere in the hope of finding a more fruitful cultural environment. Disgusted at the cultural climate, Potocki had left New Zealand and persuaded Fairburn to join him in London. As Potocki put it, New Zealand prevented them from doing what they were born there for, “to make and to mould a New Zealand civilization.” 394
However, in Britain, neither Fairburn nor Potocki were impressed with bohemian society, although Potocki dressed and conducted himself as an eccentric bohemian par excellence. 395 Nor were they impressed with the Bloomsbury intellectuals, who were riddled with homosexuality, for which both Potocki and Fairburn had an abiding dislike.
FORMATIVE YEARS
Potocki was born in Remuera, Auckland, New Zealand, on October 6, 1903. His description of his birth, related to Greig Fleming in 1993, consists mainly of astrological correspondences, showing his lifelong mystical inclination. 396 Potocki also speaks from the beginning about his own “heathenism,” a problematic tendency for the claimant to the throne of Poland and Hungary, mentioning elsewhere that he “hated and despised Christian morality.” 397
Potocki, ever flamboyant, was not inclined to modesty, describing his countenance from childhood as one of great nobility which appeared “fabulous in comparison to the low level of New Zealand in that regard,” one that indicated a person destined for talent and brilliance. 398
Potocki began writing poetry at the age of eight, and decided from then that he was to be a poet. 399 Having lost his mother at an early age, and living with a step-mother who was unsympathetic, the life of Potocki and his brother became hard, including frequent starvation when his father, an architect, had financial difficulties. 400A Renaissance Man out of his time (a “man against time”? 401), Potocki was fluent in French, Provencal, Latin, Greek, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, German, and Sanskrit, and in the last years of his life was learning Maori (he considered the Maori to be superior to the common run of New Zealanders).
Known for his outspokenly pro-fascist and pro-Nazi sentiments—an outspokenness not dampened by the war and life in wartime England—Potocki was, however, more than anything a traditionalist and a royalist, a neo-aristocrat who in some respects can be compared to another mystic, Julius Evola. Potocki was profoundly conscious of his identity and his lineage, and New Zealand—which prides itself on being the egalitarian society par excellence—could do nothing but repulse such a man. Potocki was to reminisce of his native land: “Life in New Zealand is a wonderful training for a future King—a superb lesson in ‘How a nation ought not to be governed.’” 402His appearance was that of another era. In London, he sported flowing hair, a billowing cloak, large beret, and sandals. In later life, including his years back in New Zealand, he adopted the appearance of a large-bearded, robed magus, a style that during and immediately after the war was also supplemented by a self-designed “uniform” in the manner of the Polish army.
Potocki’s claim to Polish royal linage was legitimate enough, despite being dismissed as an “embarrassment” by his New Zealand family. 403 Count Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk dispensed with his title and reduced his name down to de Montalk upon migrating to New Zealand from France in 1868, as befits a land without noble traditions other than those of the Maori. 404 The Potocki family is of ancient royal lineage, and is prominent in the history of Poland, being one of the oldest families of the nation. 405
EARLY MUSINGS
Potocki’s family moved to Nelson, in the South Island, in 1917. He did well at High School, winning a prize for excellence in English, French, Latin, and history, and was regarded by the headmaster as having a very personable character. 406 Moving to Wellington in 1918, Potocki continued to excel at school. 407 In 1919, at only 16, he became a teacher and privately studied Greek at Victoria University College. In 1921, he returned to Auckland with the aim of studying law and entered the employ of a law firm as a clerk.
By 1923 Potocki had entered the literary scene, and had met R. A. K. Mason. Despite being a newcomer, a literary group formed around him, which saw itself as a “poetic aristocracy” 408 which would revitalize English poetry. Potocki still had faith that New Zealand, as a colony, had not been infected by the decadence of the “old world.” He published his first collection of poems as a four-page leaflet.
Potocki then dropped law and entered a seminary to study for the Anglican priesthood, not because he felt he had a divine calling but because he was attracted to the ritual and liturgy. This did not leave him in his later years, as he would attend Evensong at the Anglican Cathedral in Wellington for the same reason as he had done in his youth at the Christchurch Cathedral, despite his continued adherence to paganism. It was in seminary that he learned about missionary printing in the 19th century, and this prompted his own lifelong interest in self-publishing limited editions of his works on antiquated presses.
Potocki was briefly married in 1924. It was perhaps predictable that he could not settle down to family responsibilities. He tried to work as a milk vendor, although he could not compel himself to demand the money owed him by poor families, nor did he have an interest in money-making per se, surely itself a sign of innate aristocracy. He returned to Christchurch with his family and re-entered law for a short time, but continued with his real passion, poetry. 409
In 1926 Potocki received a letter from Rex Fairburn, whom he had briefly known at primary school, and a life-long friendship ensued. Potocki assumed the role of mentor, as the more worldly-wise of the two. 410 At Easter 1927, Potocki published his first collection of poems, Wild Oats, which he dedicated to Fairburn. 411
Not surprisingly, given the Left-wing character of much of the literary milieu, Fairburn was flirting with communism as a means by which the artist could become economically independent to pursue his profession. However, he was not by temperament a rationalist or a materialist, and was also drawn to a spirit of aristocratic feeling that did not settle easily with socialism. Others of an artistic or literary calling who turned to the Right around the same time, men such as Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Wyndham Lewis, did so for similar reasons, fearing that a cult of the proletariat or of mass, undifferentiated humanity, as much democratic in spirit as communistic, would result in the drowning of all real individual excellence.
Fairburn asked his royalist friend Potocki to read Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 412 to show him that the aristocratic spirit and the creative genius could be accommodated under socialism. 413 However, in 1931 when Fairburn met A. R. Orage, editor of the New English Weekly, 414 he discovered that such freedom for creativity could not only be maintained but also enhanced by the economics of Social Credit. (Orage’s magazine was from 1932 on discussing new social and political ideas, with a focus on Maj. C. H. Douglas’ proposals.) 415 Fairburn had in 1930 already read and been heavily influenced by Spengler’s Decline of the West, 416 so his rejection of Marxism was a natural development.
Fairburn was avid in promoting Social Credit and in opposing usury, whereas Potocki’s perspective must be discerned from more meager sources. For example, in his pamphlet on New Zealand race relations written in 1987, Potocki stated: “But as far as I am concerned the present financial system busy plundering and misgoverning the world is in its higher reaches a criminal anti-human conspiracy.” 417
Stephanie de Montalk writes of the significance of Potocki and his contemporaries of this period:
Although Wild Oats collected the writings of youth and, in keeping with a young man’s follies, contained moments of extravagance and grandeur, it was nonetheless one of the starting points in the development of New Zealand’s poetic identity. It placed Potocki among the generation of writers who would lay the basis of New Zealand literature as it developed in the 1930s. 418
This was the Golden Age of New Zealand culture, and one which Fairburn, Potocki, Mason, Curnow, and others of the time wanted to see flourish. However, unlike what might be called the New Zealandist commitments of the rest, including Marxists such as R. A. K. Mason, and above all Potocki’s protégé Fairburn, Potocki was not foremost a New Zealander but a royalist and a traditionalist.
While Fairburn and others achieved wide recognition in New Zealand, Potocki left, and only returned much later in life. He was keeping the commitment he had made to Fairburn when Wild Oats appeared, that his first collection was a “test” which, if it failed to gain a good response in New Zealand, would prove that the country was not fit for Potocki and he would have done with the place. 419 Potocki got mixed reviews, partly because of the bias against someone who was “in the process of dissolving his marriage.” Fairburn too had had enough of New Zealand, and Potocki wrote to him that poets are treated badly there, in “this land of white savages and All Blacks” while “they are feted, laurelled and crowned in Merrie England.” In October 1927, he left for England.
By 1931 Potocki was earning sufficient money to devote himself to writing and was being published regularly back home in the Auckland and Christchurch newspapers as a feature writer. 420 It was his imprisonment in 1932 on “obscenity” charges in relation to poetry, together with his actions during the Second World War, that were to block his path to the sort of success achieved by Fairburn, Mason, and others.
By 1930, Potocki’s poetic vision was already showing aristocratic and elitist traits. That same year Surprising Songs was published, in the foreword to which Potocki condemns “Christianity and democracy,” against which he “raises the banner of the aristocratic gods, and their sons, the kings and the poets.” He describes New Zealand as “Hell” from which he had fled as soon as he could. In both mystical and traditionalist tenor Potocki states that poetry is the expression of the “great spirit, the outrider of the hordes of men, the king proclaiming his kingdom, the avatar bearing in his own being a light against the darkness.” 421 This and other volumes were favorably, even enthusiastically, reviewed from Europe to New Zealand.
Fairburn too now arrived from New Zealand, as disheartened by the low cultural level as Potocki, and seeing the hope of establishing a “native literature” as unlikely. However, to Potocki’s disappointment, Fairburn, the quintessential New Zealander, was more interested in pub-crawls than in cathedrals.
ENGLISH LITERATI & PRISONS
At this time, Potocki was learning more about his lineage and began a tentative claim to Poland’s throne, the main obstacle as he saw it being that he was not a Catholic. The claim was strengthened several years later when, in Poland, he found that the Potockis had married into the Piast family, which had reigned over Poland until the mid 17th century. 422
By now a rather well-established poet, Potocki embarked on a controversial publication that was to end his acceptance among mainstream publishers. Here Lies John Penis was a collection of poems, including translations from Rabelais and Verlaine, and some explicit verses in an account of some sexual misadventures by Rex Fairburn. It was intended only for distribution among friends, and was to be printed by Potocki himself on his small press. 423
Potocki’s efforts to get the type set by Leslie de Lozey resulted in the MS being taken to the police. Potocki’s room was raided, and he was arrested, along with fellow New Zealand expatriate Douglas Glass. 424 Both were remanded in custody in Brixton Prison. At trial Sir Ernest Wild warned three women jurors that “this was a very filthy case indeed,” two of whom excused themselves from service.
Potocki’s refusal to swear on the Bible caused some consternation in court, and there was the question as to whether a pagan’s oath would be acceptable. 425 The oath he swore in court was to Apollo, raising his right arm “in the Roman salute,” “like Julius Caesar or Benito Mussolini,” he was to later recount. 426 The verdict was “guilty.” Justice Wild had not only made it very clear how the vote should proceed, he had not even allowed the jury leave to deliberate. Potocki was sentenced to six months in Wormwood Scrubs.
The case was widely reported and commented upon, generally with sympathy for Potocki. Among those who tried to help financially were W. B. Yeats, J. B. Priestly, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Rebecca West, Aldous Huxley, and Augustus John. 427 Leonard and Virginia Woolf organized a campaign for Potocki, and questions were asked in the House of Commons for the case to be reviewed. 428 In the end, actual support from his well-wishers turned out to be meager. 429 The appeal heard in March 1932 was rejected.
Potocki was to relate much later to his cousin and biographer Stephanie that he believed his predicament, which ended his success as a recognized poet, 430 had actually been the result of Douglas Glass muttering unfavorable remarks about Jews in front of de Lozey when they had taken the proofs to the publisher for typesetting. Potocki had not known de Lozey was Jewish and did not understand Glass’s references at the time. Potocki was informed after trial by the publisher Knott that de Lozey had taken exception to Glass’s comments, and wanted him arrested, which could not be done other than by also having Potocki arrested. Potocki opined that it was really Glass that the police had been after, because he was a petty thief and a swindler. 431 These experiences in Britain left Potocki embittered towards both the justice system and the British class system. An antagonism towards Jews also emerged at that time. 432
Some, such as the Woolfs, assumed that Potocki would go “Left,” like the common run of Bloomsbury. But it is evident from his general character and outlook that Potocki was, like his contemporaries Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Roy Campbell, and others, innately and indelibly of the “Right.” His royalist sympathies were manifest at an early age, and well prior to his escapades with the British Establishment.
In a chapter called “Quack, Quack” in his Social Climbers in Bloomsbury, 433 Potocki was to record his one meeting with the Woolfs in which Virginia sought agreement on her belief that her husband’s race was much more civilized than the English and had been since ancient times. Potocki replied that, to be frank, he did not at all agree.
After his release from prison, Potocki assumed the style he was to retain throughout his life: medieval robes and a crimson cloak, modeled after the clothing of Richard II, with sandals, a velvet beret adorned with the Polish royal eagle and the Potocki coat of arms, and waist length hair that he had first allowed to grow out while in jail.
He set off for Poland in 1933, where he was welcomed by the literati and obtained employment as a translator of Polish poetry and prose into English. He was greeted with celebrity status by the press, which recognized his royal pedigree—despite the ill-informed denigration it had received from the Court in England—and remarked upon his aristocratic character and bearing. 434
Stephanie de Montalk hypothesizes that his “anti-Semitism” might have been galvanized in Poland, having been seeded by experiences in England. However, at that time there was little need to visit Poland to draw conclusions about Jews, given on their conspicuous roles in communism and the “Left” in general. That was how Jews were widely perceived among well-informed and high-born quarters since the time of the 1917 Revolution.
THE RIGHT REVIEW
The outbreak of the Civil War in Spain in 1936 polarized the intelligentsia and literati. Some, such as Potocki and in particular Roy Campbell, 435 identified with the rebel cause. In 1935, Potocki returned to England in 1935. The following year, with funds from Aldous Huxley and Brian Guinness, Potocki bought a printing press, and began publishing his long-running literary and political journal TheRight Review. TheRight Review, like all of de Potocki’s works, was printed as limited editions but did garner the adverse attention of John Bull and the positive reaction of the reviewer for The New English Weekly and T. S. Eliot’s Criterion.
Potocki’s editorial in the first issue, which appeared in October, cogently describes his position:
It is our aim to show that the Divine Right of Kings is the sanest and best form of government. . . .
We are as much opposed to Capitalism, if by that term is meant Plutocracy, as any communist could be—but we are not opposed to capitalists so long as they function without damaging the interests of the whole State. . . .
Neither do we consider Fascism as anything but a very bad form of government, being as it is based on demagogy, but we point out that it is a natural reaction, based on a thoroughly justifiable instinct of self-protection, whereby nations rid themselves of the socialist and communist plague. . . . 436
Thus, Potocki’s support for fascism was critical and conditional. Fascism is a populist movement, and elitists such as Potocki were suspicious of such movements, in whatever form they took, whether Left or Right. Others of similar opinion were Evola and Wyndham Lewis.
His views on Jews did not constitute the common sort of “anti-Semitism,” where Jews are generally placed in a no-win position no matter what they do. Potocki saw certain actions of many Jews as detrimental to humanity as a whole due to their own ethnocentricity and support for communism. “Aryan racialism,” which presumably means Hitlerism, was therefore seen also as a “reaction” to Jewish exploits since the time of the Old Testament. Nonetheless, in disagreeing with both fascists and communists on the question of race, Potocki stated “men are to be judged by their worth as members of the human race as a whole—by their beauty, breeding, wisdom, and good will.” This applies “even to Jews,” but there was a duty to be “very suspicious of a race” which itself “invented inhuman racialism” to the detriment of non-Jews. 437With TheRight Review being published on a rudimentary press in small numbers, Potocki nonetheless started to become known among the British “Right,” and he met both Sir Oswald Mosley and Mosley’s propaganda chief, William Joyce, 438 the later “Lord Haw Haw” for whom Potocki’s affection never wavered. Potocki seems to have retained his aristocratic suspicion of fascist demagogy, but he did undertake printing for the British Union of Fascists. 439
As we shall see, whatever Potocki’s suspicions regarding fascism and Hitlerism before the war, it was after the war that Potocki (in contrast to many others, such as Wyndham Lewis, who had supported fascism before the war) became an avid supporter of National Socialism and fascism. Perhaps he felt obliged to make a commitment as both a diehard rebel against the democratic status quo, and in realization that the post-war world was one of global democratization and Sovietization. At any rate, his sympathies after the war became more radical, rather than moderate.
The abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 was the occasion for what Potocki calls his “first political manifesto,” 440The Unconstitutional Crisis. Accompanied by the writer Nigel Heseltine, who assisted with editing TheRight Review, and the artist George Hann, who provided the woodblock illustrations for Potocki’s publications, they distributed large quantities of the pamphlet supporting the King in Whitehall, “at the very moment the arch-traitor Baldwin was announcing the abdication.” 441 He and Heseltine were later arrested for obstruction and briefly held at Buckingham Palace. At court, Whitehall tried to intervene and have Potocki charged on the text of the pamphlet, but the judge refused, and minor fines were imposed for obstruction. 442In 1939 Potocki set up The Right Review Bookshop in his flat, barred to “communists and racial enemies.” 443 During the late 1930s he also elaborated on his pagan religious views, stating in Whited Sepulchers that he opposed Puritanism, Calvinism, Democracy, Christianity, and appealed to fellow pagan avengers of “the great Apostle of Paganism, Divine Julian.” 444 Potocki’s primary deity was Apollo and remained so throughout his life. He was by now also in the habit of greeting friends with the “Roman”—fascist—salute, a gesture that was surely part of his rebellious nature.
KING OF POLAND
In 1939, Potocki crowned himself “Wladilsaw 5th, King of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Silesia and the Ukraine, Hospodar of Moldavia, etc., etc., etc., High Priest of the Sun” in a Rite of the Sun. 445
In 1940, he and his wife Odile were jailed for two months and one month, respectively, for resisting arrest, having barricaded their flat against the police, on a “black-out offence.” 446 Their occupations were entered in the register as King and Queen of Poland.
Potocki’s effort to register as a conscientious objector was unsuccessful, but he did succeed in evading military service. He founded the Polish Royalist Association and exchanged his robes for a military style uniform adorned with the Polish eagle and Potocki coat of arms. In the midst of war, a photograph of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley adorned Potocki’s cottage in Surrey, which belonged to a member of Arnold Leese’s Imperial Fascist League.
KATYN
Apart from his escapades connected to the controversy surrounding Here Lies John Penis, Potocki was most proud of being the first person in England to expose the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by the USSR. The Soviets insisted (until quite recently) that Katyn was a German war crime, and the British authorities tried to suppress knowledge to the contrary during the war lest it reflect badly on the British-Soviet alliance.
As claimant to the throne of Poland, Potocki was of course interested in Poland’s future after the war. He regarded the USSR as the greatest threat to Poland’s nationhood, and foresaw the likelihood of a Soviet Poland emerging from the war. 447 He put his printing skills to work for Polish exiles, which included reports that were censored in the British press. He believed that occupation by Germany was preferable to that of the USSR, despite his liking for Russians as individuals. 448 Potocki’s contempt for Britain was increased by its failure to come to Poland’s aid when the USSR invaded, and his support for fascism and Hitlerism in this context became more pronounced, particularly when the USSR and Britain became allies in 1941. 449In 1943, hearing rumors of Soviet atrocities among the Polish community, Potocki sought the help of the Duke of Bedford, an opponent of the war and an avid proponent of banking reform, which the Duke—like Potocki 450—saw as a major aspect of the Hitler regime, and incidentally as a cause of war. The Duke in correspondence with Potocki also alluded to the rumors he had heard about the massacre of Polish officers by the Soviet Union. 451In May 1943 Potocki was asked by Poles in London to expose the atrocity to the British public, and so he wrote the Katyn Manifesto. This was distributed by the thousands with the help of the Polish-government-in-exile. It was a “Proclamation to the English, the Poles, the Germans and the jews [sic],” 452 from the King of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, etc. Potocki spelled out the basic facts behind Katyn and called for a negotiated peace with the hope that Germany would recognize a united Poland and Hungary, that the “jews” would be helped “if they will even at this late hour repent and behave themselves,” the Tsar to be restored to Russia, and the King to France. 453
Potocki was placed under surveillance, questions were asked in Parliament, and Potocki was attacked by the press, including the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, which described the manifesto as “poisonous filth,” 454 calling Potocki a “crazy Fascist Count.” It was at this time that Potocki was jailed for “insufficient black-out,” his wife Odile having left him for fear of his anti-government views during the war. 455 After release he was ordered by the Ministry of Labour to serve six months in an agricultural camp in Northumberland, which he attended in preference to conscription, adorned with his royal attire. After a month, he bade a “Heil Hitler” to the camp manager and left.
POST-WAR ENGLAND & PROVENCE
During another four years in England, Potocki maintained himself by printing and translations for the Polish-government-in-exile. 456 After seeking help from the Duke of Bedford for the renewal of his passport, Potocki left for France. Seeking employment at an Indian University, Potocki wrote that he had had problems with the English because of his “violently pro-Axis” outlook during the war, an attitude that would not have been necessarily offensive to an Indian given that India continues to maintain esteem (probably about equal to that held for Gandhi) for the pro-Axis Subhas Chandra Bose. He also wrote to the American Ambassador offering his services to the USA against the USSR, his naiveté concerning the USA presumably being the result of judgment clouded by his hatred of the Soviet Union. 457
In 1949, Potocki settled in Provence, which would be his home for much of the remainder of his life, apart from sojourns in New Zealand in later years, now thoroughly “hating” the “english” (sic), 458 a word that he never seems to have capitalized. Before he was able to leave, however, the British legal system had one last go at him, charging him with assault on a female admirer after he pushed her out of his flat when she attempted to prevent his departure.
Before being fined £2, he had been assessed for several weeks at a psychiatric ward, but was found to be “perfectly healthy in every respect, both in body and mind.” The authorities had expected to find a New Zealand-born claimant to the throne of Poland to be mentally unsound, but the psychiatrist was instead treated to a lucid exposition of the possibility, albeit unlikely, of Potocki becoming King on the basis that in the event of confrontation between the USA and USSR the Americans would be looking for someone who could be trusted by both Germans and Poles. 459
Potocki settled into an old cottage in the Draguignan countryside, bought for him for £100 by the Countess de Bioncourt. Chris Martin, who knew Potocki, writes of this period:
The Count spent his later years living in a beautiful farmhouse surrounded by olive trees in Provence. He was accompanied by a variety of lady friends and continued to work on his press. Driving around in a Citroën 2CV, flying the Polish Royal Standard he was a well-liked local figure. He also produced a translation of Adam Mickiewicz’ Dziady, or Forefathers, which is the Polish national epic and the translation of which is now a standard text in a large number of American universities. The irony, if one should look for one, is that this same standard text, beautifully produced, comes with an introduction by a Jewish professor. 460 The work was—characteristically—the subject of a prolonged legal tussle between the Count and the Polish Cultural Foundation, at whose instigation the work had been translated. (It is, in passing, worth mentioning that parts of the work were recited by the translator at a concert at Leighton House, West London, together with a recital by the Count’s compatriot, the pianist Richard Bielicki.) 461
Stephanie de Montalk states that by 1958 there was a renewed interest in Potocki as part of a general interest in the literati of the 1930s and 1940s, and there was again media reportage, and his publications—mostly limited, small-run, hand-bound editions—became collectors’ items, as they still are, fetching high prices. 462
POST-WAR FASCISM
Directly after the war Potocki was not only defiantly pro-fascist but also expressed overtly pro-Nazi sympathies. His 1945 Christmas card To Men of Goodwill had the “X” of “Xmas” printed as a swastika, and included a six-verse poem including the words “to save his life, our William Joyce.” This was at the time when Joyce, the infamous “Lord Haw Haw,” was hanged for treason for his wartime broadcasts to England from Germany. It clearly shows the nature of Potocki’s contempt for the era of democracy. Equally as rebellious is his 1946 four-page leaflet, The Nuremberg Trials, including the words “Hitler und Goering Sieg Heil.”
Not surprisingly, then, it was Potocki who printed Savitri Devi’s 11,000 swastika-emblazoned leaflets and posters that she distributed throughout war-ravaged Germany, throwing them from the back of a train and surreptitiously posting them on walls, an action that not surprisingly resulted in her detention by the Occupation Authorities. Savitri had met Potocki in England in 1946 463 and also spent time with Potocki when she returned to London in the early 1960s. 464
In 1959, Potocki obtained a hundred-year-old platen press and started The Mélissa Press. He now resumed his special editions, and had maintained friendships with a number of prominent literary figures, in particular Richard Aldington, who admired his efforts. Aldington wrote to Potocki that his creative work is “the only answer to the lavatory-seat wipers of literature who naturally don’t recognize a poet and a gentleman when by chance they meet him.” 465Despite his disgust at England he nonetheless commuted between Provence and Dorset, set up a press there, and issued a pamphlet advising residents of A New Dorset Worthy, who was “opposed to virtually every movement or line of thought triumphant at present,” but that was to be expected of a “genius.” 466 Among his publications was Two Blacks Don’t Make a White: Remarks about Apartheid, published in 1964. He also printed The National Socialist, the journal of Colin Jordan’s British National Socialist Movement. 467Remarks about Apartheid begins with lines from fellow Right-wing (but Catholic) poet Roy Campbell, expressing a cynicism in regard to humanitarianism as a façade for ignoble purposes: “The old grey wolf of brother love / Slinks in our track with slimy fangs.” Secondly, from William Blake: “One law for the lion and for the ox is oppression.”
Potocki’s outlook on South African Apartheid was based decidedly on the general inferiority of the blacks to whites, insofar as they had not, and could not, make a civilization. However, Potocki did not extend this white supremacy to other races, for he considered the Japanese, Chinese, and Hindus equals. In the case of white New Zealanders, he considered the Maori to be a superior race, deserving cultural and language accommodation as well as land compensation—the illiberal Potocki being far ahead of the liberals in his pro-Maori outlook. 468
Attacks on Apartheid, Potocki claimed, were the result of the post war era of “universal humbug,” the product of a coalition of Christians, communists, and democrats. He pointed to the selective hypocrisy of the liberal conscience, which was silent about communist dictatorships, and to the record of the British Empire in their treatment of colored colonials. He drew heavily on South African Government publications citing the services that had been rendered to the blacks under Apartheid, pointing out that the Afrikaners did not dispossess indigenous blacks, but had met the Xhosa while both were migrating from opposite directions. He believed that whites should react against “racial hatred” from fellow whites “whether in South Africa, Rhodesia, Smethwick or in the Deep South.” 469 According to Stephanie de Montalk, the authorities in England placed an injunction against the sale of the pamphlet. 470In 1966, Potocki took up the cause of Rhodesia. His solution to the crisis was for “Sir Ian Smith” (sic) and the Rhodesian people to proclaim Rhodesia a Kingdom and to “offer the Crown to His Grace the Duke of Montrose.”
In this way the Rhodesians will set the whole world a good example, take the wind out of the sails of the minority of piratical hypocrites in England, & provide a turning-point for the Good in the history of the world, at a time when it never needed it more. This would also be a piece of poetic justice, whereby the Grahams would be rewarded for their courage and loyalty during the disgraceful wars which England waged under the criminal Cromwell against Scotland and against the true interests of humanity. 471
Potocki then outlined the genealogy of the Duke to legitimize claims to royal blood, suggesting that Rhodesia adopt the Montrose Arms as its own, which would make the country “the first of the (ex) British colonies to acquire a blazon which is a decent piece of heraldry and not an offence against good taste as e.g. the so-called coat of arms of New Zealand. . . .”
In regard to Queen Elizabeth II, Potocki declared himself to be “a pious Legitimist” and that the only lawful King of England and territories is Albrecht, “de jure King of Bavaria,” and suggested that the Duke of Montrose might even be ahead of Elizabeth in royal succession, through Baden. Nonetheless, Potocki considered Elizabeth “an intelligent and honest girl” who should be “liberated from her servitude to her humbugging inferiors & allowed to use Her Own words as She sees fit.” 472 Hence, Potocki remained as ever foremost a Royalist.
In 1977 Potocki returned to Southern African themes, namely:
Let The Rhodesians Not
Be surprised that England should try and sell them down the river to a gang of bolsheviks and other terrorists.
For after having plotted the most gigantic blood-bath and world-wide flood of misery that the world has ever seen, and carried it through by fiendish means (Dresden etc.) backed up by Hellish lies (six millions etc.) on the pretext of safeguarding the independence and territorial integrity of Poland, England shamelessly sold that great country (once the largest kingdom in Europe) to the wickedest terrorist of known history, calling himself Stalin. England has Holy Joes enough, proclaiming that “your sins will find you”—but even more surely the crimes of your country, connived at by you, will find you out. Nemesis is completely impartial. 473
In 1987, the Count addressed New Zealand race relations, pre-empting much of what the liberals and Maori activists have subsequently sought and obtained. Potocki’s plan was to restore authority to the traditional chieftains, and with the setting up of land tribunals to address grievances, to place compensated resources under the trusteeship of the Maori Sovereign. Potocki was concerned about outside interference and subversion utilizing the Maori radicals, and the likelihood of United Nations meddling in such matters or supranational law courts, which would mean that New Zealand would be “muzzled and hamstring by all the odious humbug she herself has gone in for about South Africa.” Once again, he was prescient.
He regarded the Maori as having genuine grievances, which he did not accord to the Blacks in South Africa, as they had not settled that region prior to the Afrikaners, and furthermore he had an altogether higher regard for the racial qualities of the Maori than for either the Africans or for the pakeha. 474 He believed that a racial clash was coming, and that in the long run the pakeha might get the worst of things. He advocated Maori language programs and held that “they should become an integral part of the social and political organization of Aotearoa.” He also sought to remind New Zealanders that he was the most high-born individual who had ever been conceived in New Zealand. 475In the arts, he predictably saw little to praise and considered that a cultural renaissance could still be launched from New Zealand, with his assistance. 476 This optimism is surprising, since he had left New Zealand at what now transpires to have been the country’s Golden Age of culture, dominated by his friends such as Rex Fairburn and R. A. K. Mason. Certainly, it reflects a degree of optimism and idealism that also accounts for it “not being impossible,” given the circumstances of the post-war world, that he could have been named king of Poland.
Unsurprisingly, as part of the New Zealand literati, his cousin and biographer Stephanie de Montalk agonizes over Geoffrey’s “bigotry.” Yet she recalls his avid support for Maori, the genuinely warm manner with which he mingled with students of all races at Victoria University, and his enthusiastic interest in their cultures. Students for their part were impressed by his learning and his personality, Indian students by his knowledge of Sanskrit. 477
NEW EUROPEAN ORDER
In 1969 Potocki received an “amiable invitation from the Secretary General of the New European Order to attend the biennial Assembly of the Order at Easter in Barcelona, as Polish delegate.” 478 Potocki was skeptical, having had bad experiences with “English Fascist, semi-Fascist & pseudo-Fascist organizations,” which he considered, at least among the leadership, to have been police agents and agents provocateurs. He was particularly scathing of Colin Jordan’s’ British National Socialist Movement, but regarded as genuine William Joyce’s National Socialist League.
The New European Order had emerged as a radical faction from out of the European Social Movement, or Malmo International, founded in 1951 at the suggestion of Swedish fascist Per Engdahl, and including support from the British Mosleyites, the Italian Social Movement, Germany’s Socialist Reich Party, etc. The leaders of the New European Order were the Frenchman Ren Binet, and the Swiss Guy Amaudruz, 479 who continues to publish a bulletin of that name.
Potocki replied to the invitation by writing that his attendance was conditional on Colin Jordan not being there, and that he could propose a motion “recognizing the nullity of the Partitions of Poland (18th century) and Hungary (20th century).” The acceptance of his conditions gave Potocki “a very good opinion of the honorableness of the New European Order.” 480 Potocki recounts: “I was elected enthusiastically Delegate for Poland, and my motion passed unanimously.” 481 The motion reads:
Poland and Hungary
The Assembly did not believe a new order can be based on the domination of another European nation, and recognizes the invalidity of the partitions of Poland (late thirteenth century) and Hungary.
The meeting considers that an understanding between the peoples directly concerned is desirable and is awaiting proposals based on the agreement of representatives of nations touched by this problem.
Potocki mentions that a few days after the congress the Croatian Delegate, General Vjekoslav Luburić, was murdered on what Potocki believed to have been the orders of Tito. He states that Luburić was “sincerely friendly to Poland and Hungary and spoke fluent Hungarian. PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME.” 482
Potocki also moved another resolution calling for recognition of “any human freedom” so long as it does not harm the citizen or the state, stating that some social and moral changes are irreversible and there can be no return to the 19th century. “Mindful also of a renaissance of European culture, the New European Order recognizes that ‘a state of rigid disciplinary spirit could harm the development of the arts.’” The resolution deplores the political consequences of Puritanism, starting with the Cromwellian revolution. Potocki, as an advocate of aristocracy and traditional hierarchy, also considered the rebirth of high culture to be predicated on the freedom from the burden of work by the culture-bearing stratum, and the necessity of “a leisured class as useful to the culture.” 483
RETURN TO NEW ZEALAND
Potocki returned to New Zealand in late 1983, after an absence of fifty-six years, accompanied by some media interviews and commentary, and the publication of his Recollections of My Fellow Poets. 484 His respect among certain sections of New Zealand intelligentsia endured, however, and he was given access to an old platen press at Victoria University. Traveling to the South Island, he stopped off at Christchurch Cathedral and expressed dismay at the modernization of Anglican procedure there.
He also visited the University of Otago. The Otago Daily Times described Potocki as “vigorous, learned and cosmopolitan,” “an avowed royalist and an enemy of democracy.” Potocki was reported as stating: “The whole thesis upon which democracy is based is totally unjust . . . like one man, one vote. The biggest idiot can have a vote whereas a valuable person also has one vote.” The undimming of his aristocratic views in the aftermath of the victory of democracy might be accounted for by the Times comment that, “he said he did not care about public opinion because the public were stupid.” 485 With such views, it is clear enough why he had not been in New Zealand, the epitome of democratic and egalitarian values, for 56 years, “where no creative life exists except in animal form, and where all the loveliness of European civilization exists only in a weird state of caricature.” 486 An interesting and worthy account of his life was produced and aired on the Tuesday Documentary of Television One in 1984, entitled The Count—Profile of a Polemicist.
Spending the summer in Provence in 1985, he returned to New Zealand later that year, and moved into a friend’s house in Hamilton, a city of loathsome pseudo-academics and charlatans with an equally loathsome university administration.
Dr. F. W. Nielsen Wright, an energetic poet, critic, and chronicler of New Zealand culture, describes Potocki as “the all time bad boy of Aotearoa letters.” 487 Wright, a notable figure in New Zealand literature, and former professor of English at Victoria University, also involved in the obscure and short-lived Communist Party of Aotearoa, states that “nobody else comes close to Potocki,” and that he was “treated as a pariah by New Zealand academics 488 without exception to the day of his death.”
Potocki should long ago have been awarded a Doctorate of Letters for his translation into verse . . . of the Polish classic, Forefather’s Eve, a romantic verse play by Adam Mickiewicz. This translation has a higher standing internationally than any other piece of New Zealand verse. 489
In 1990, Potocki travelled to Poland at the invitation of Dr. Andrzej Klossowski of Warsaw University and the Polish National Library and gave well-attended readings of his poetry. 490 In 1993 Fleming’s collection of interviews and writings by Potocki was launched. That same year, Potocki returned to Provence despite declining health.
Potocki died on April 14, 1997 at Draguignan. His grave was marked by a simple granite slab etched “G. Potocki de Montalk 1903–1997.” 491
Wright states that on Potocki’s death in France of “extreme old age” his personal papers were shipped back to New Zealand. This caused protest from the French Government which regarded them as a French cultural treasure. To Wright it was Potocki who was
. . . the leading figure in a group of Aotearoa writers who in the 1920s asserted the value of poetry and challenged their fellow countrymen and women to give them recognition and honor as poets. . . . All felt that the country in fact rejected them and all went into external or internal exile. But their claim remains true. They are the most outstanding group of poets so far in our literature in English.
He has never been forgiven in New Zealand for espousing fascism, even though other literary figures who went the same way have long since been rehabilitated and count as honored writers: people like Knut Hamsun in Norway, Maurras in France, Ezra Pound in the United States, and P. G. Wodehouse in Britain. 492
“A GOOD EUROPEAN”
In pondering the Count’s character, Chris Martin wrote:
How best to describe the Count? Whilst possessed of opinions with which I personally often disagreed, he was a small and handsome figure, extremely attractive to the ladies, exceptionally well-spoken (to the extent of correcting my own English), obviously extremely talented but, equally obviously, an embittered victim of the English judicial system, and what in 1932 passed for reality. His nephew Peter Potocki described him as “Uncle Nero.” I can state personally that the Count was an extremely interesting person to know; his position in literary history is pretty well irrefragable. However, I will say that he was most interesting company and one of the most informed people one has met about virtually any aspect of European history. For a person born in New Zealand in 1903, the Count was what, with Nietzsche, we might term “a good European.”
Counter-Currents/North American New Right
August 14–16, 2010
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