Pretender, poet, pamphleteer

Press, 3 February 1987, Page 15

Pretender, poet, pamphleteer

Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk is probably New Zealand’s greatest eccentric.

“The Count — Profile of a Polemicist,” screening on One tonight at 9 p.m., is a documentary filmed in 1984 in Wellington during his first trip home in 56 years.

It looks at the poet, pamphleteer, private printer, pagan, and pretender to the throne of Poland, whose obscenity trial and imprisonment in London in 1932 outraged the literary world, and whose medieval dress has made him a distinctive figure in the streets of London and other European cities. Potocki, aged 82, was born in Auckland, the grandson of a Polish count, and he became one of New Zealand’s earliest serious poets. He believes he is a poet by divine right.

He was one of a close group of poets that included A.R.D. Fairburn and R.A.K. Mason, and

his friendship with Fairburn in the 1920 s and

early 1930 s is considered by many to have been a major influence upon the development of Fairburn’s early talent. In 1927 Potocki abandoned the group and the barren cultural environment of New Zealand to

follow the “golden road to Sammarkand.” He settled in London where, for the next 20 years, his waist-length hair, robes, bohemian lifestyle, and Right-wing political activity ensured him a continuing presence in the British press.

His obscenity trial in London has been described as the “most extraordinary obscenity trial of the century.” The trial was, in some quarters, considered an onslaught upon freedom

of expression, while Potocki’s appearance and conduct in the face .of stuffy English legal ritual generated tremendous popular interest.

His appeal fund was contributed to by such writers, as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, J. B. Priestly, Walter de la Mare, Laurence Houseman, T.S.. Eliot, Hugh Walpole, W.B. Yeats, and Aldous Huxley who later helped fund the purchase of his first printing press.