Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk (1903 –1997) was a poet, polemicist, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne; a right-winger with fascist leanings.
Born in New Zealand, he was the eldest son of Auckland architect Robert Wladislas de Montalk, grandson of Paris-born Professor Count Joseph Wladislas Edmond Potocki de Montalk, and great-grandson of Polish-born Count Jozef Franciszek Jan Potocki, the Insurgent, of Białystok.
In 1926, de Montalk left his wife and small daughter in New Zealand to be a poet by "...follow(ing) the golden road to Samarkand". He travelled to England but moved in 1949 to Draguignan in the south of France where he obtained land and a ramshackle stone cottage – the Villa Vigoni – deep in the Provençal countryside.
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. 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 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 did not return to New Zealand until 1983. Between 1984 and 1993, he followed the sun by spending summers in either New Zealand or France. He died at Brignoles in France in 1997 and was buried at Draguignan.
Thanks Thomas

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