Count Geoffrey Wladislas Vaile Potocki de Montalk (10 June 1903 – 14 April 1997) was a poet, polemicist, and pretender to the Polish throne. Born in New Zealand, he was the eldest son of Auckland architect Robert Wladislas (Potocki) 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. 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.
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"!
