Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk (1903–1997), poet, private printer, pamphleteer, pagan and pretender to the Polish throne, was born in New Zealand, 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, disillusioned by the cultural paucity and intellectual impoverishment of colonial New Zealand, Potocki de Montalk left his wife and small daughter to "follow the golden road to Samarkand"; to be a poet. He continued to live abroad, basing himself in England until 1949, and then in Draguignan in the south of France where he obtained land and a ramshackle stone cottage - the Villa Vigoni - deep in the Provençal countryside. He returned to New Zealand for the first time in 1983. Between 1984 and 1993, he followed the sun, spending summers in New Zealand and France. He died at Brignoles in France in 1997, and was buried at Draguignan.

Literary Career
Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk was one of the glittering generation of New Zealand poets which included his friends A.R.D. Fairburn and R.A.K. Mason. However, his proposed career as a romantic and peace-loving poet took a strange and life-affecting turn in 1932 when – after a celebrated trial in London 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 for publishing a manuscript of erotic translations by Rabelais and Verlaine, with three short bawdy verses of his own. The manuscript had not been published, but merely shown to a typesetter who reported Potocki to the police. The charge was "obscene libel", specifically in relation to the work 'Lament for Sir John Penis'. Potocki 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 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, distributed 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 quiet the atrocity, which the Soviet Union blamed on 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.

Recognition
In 2001, his cousin Stephanie de Montalk authored a biography of this enigmatic and colourful figure. His Right Review is currently archived in the Alexander Turnbull Library at the National Library of New Zealand, which also holds all his 105 original works. (These are available at the National Library's National Bibliographic Database.)