Essay:The huge, but often forgotten, contribution made to Irish literature by poet, publisher, translator and traveller George Reavey (1907-1976) will be celebrated in Dublin next weekend. Sandra Andrea O'Connellremembers his work and remarkable life
In the Paris of the early 1930s, the young Irish-Russian poet, George Reavey, could be regularly spotted in the legendary Cafe Dôme, where he would spend long hours at a table writing, socialising and escaping the gloom of his seedy pension. It was the custom then for the waiters to leave a saucer for each ordered drink, which Reavey memorably captured in a poem: "on the table hours are heaped/ in crags of numbered saucers". Yet unlike many young hopeful poets who would live out their days in the bustle of the cafes of Montparnasse, the ambitious George Reavey had already made a remarkable literary career in his early 20s. Within a few years of his arrival in Paris, in 1929, as a young Cambridge University graduate, he had catapulted himself to the centre of Paris's expatriate literary scene.
For his close-knit circle of Irish friends - Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin - who shared Paris with Reavey for some time as their creative base, he represented a formidable cultural force. Owing to his impressive connections with writers, publishers and editors, Reavey ensured the presence of MacGreevy and Beckett in a pioneer anthology of contemporary European writing, entitled The European Caravan (1931), which he also co-edited.
Reavey himself was a regular contributor to Paris's literary journals, such as Transition and This Quarter, and released his first book of poems, Faust's Metamorphoses, in 1932. Around the same time, he started, with Russian émigré Marc Slonim, an enterprising literary agency, the European Literary Bureau, representing writers from all over Europe and Russia. Among Reavey's greatest achievements was the placing of Beckett's novel, Murphy, with London publishers Routledge, after more than 40 rejections.
Increasingly frustrated by the lack of publishing opportunities available for avant-garde poets, Reavey set up his own publishing imprint in 1935. The enterprising Europa Press not only published three remarkable collections by Reavey but also gave a voice to fellow Irish poets Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin, whose work, at the time, was perceived as difficult, avant-garde and outside the traditional Irish canon. The Europa Press played a decisive role in the recognition of Irish Modernist writing and part of its enduring legacy is Beckett's beautifully produced first collection of poems, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates.
From the start, Reavey had devised the series as limited editions in collaborations with modern artists and engravers. All of the illustrations came from SW Hayter's legendary print- making studio, Atelier 17, in Paris, with Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Pavel Tchelitchew and Hayter among the contributors.
Yet today we know little of Reavey's profound influence, cultural significance and wide-ranging achievements. A symposium at Trinity College Dublin next weekend will mark the centenary of Reavey's birth and is intended to restore him to his place in modern Irish and European literary history.
As an experimental poet, untiring publisher and internationally renowned literary translator, Reavey represents one of the most fascinating and influential figures in Irish literature. He is also one of the most European of Irish writers. His mixed Irish-Polish ancestry and Russian birth forged a complex and cosmopolitan personality. His first publisher, the American expatriate, Samuel Putnam, wrote perceptively of Reavey's ability of "electing", if not "eclecting", his nationality and tradition, concluding that no "poet could be more European, more difficult for the average American to understand".
BORN ON MAY 1ST 1907 in Vitebsk, Belarus, which formed part of the vast Russian tsarist empire, Reavey was the only child of Polish-born Sophia Turchenko and Irishman Daniel Reavey, who had left his home in Lisburn, Co Antrim, as an ambitious 18-year-old expert in flax-spinning to pursue a career in the booming linen industry of eastern Europe. Daniel Reavey quickly rose to the position of director of flax-spinning mills and his professional success resulted in frequent relocations until the family settled in 1914 in the Russian city, Nizhny Novgorod. It was here that George, as a 10-year-old schoolboy, experienced the outbreak of the 1917 October revolution and his father's sudden demotion, under Bolshevik rule, from director to ordinary worker on the factory floor.
Yet the Reavey family remained in Nizhny Novgorod, seemingly prepared to give the revolutionary government a chance. These hopes were crushed by Daniel Reavey's sudden arrest and imprisonment during the ensuing Russian Civil War of 1918-1921.
Although a petition of his fellow workers ensured his release from prison, Daniel Reavey understandably lost faith in the new regime and decided that his wife and son should flee war-torn Russia. Leaving his father, home and belongings behind, George Reavey became a refugee at the age of 11, when he embarked, in the company of his mother, on a harrowing escape from Russia via Finland, Sweden, Norway and Scotland to join his grandfather, who belonged to an up-and-coming Belfast Catholic middle-class family.
A temporary calm and stability returned to Reavey's life i1919 when his father was able to rejoin the family in Belfast. However, faced with growing sectarianism in Northern Ireland as the War of Independence raged, Catholic Daniel Reavey was unable to revive his career and moved his family to London in 1920.
In 1926, George Reavey won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he started to write poetry, rediscovered Russian literature and co-founded the influential review, Experiment, with fellow students William Empson, Jacob Bronowski and Kathleen Raine. His student friend, English Surrealist painter Julian Trevelyan, later recalled that in Reavey's company "there was always the feeling that we were at the centre of things".
REAVEY'S NATURAL ABILITY to gravitate to the centre, combined with an adventurous spirit and a sense of belonging to a wider European culture, would inspire his frequent relocations, from Paris and London to Madrid and Moscow until he finally settled in New York. Not surprisingly, the Spanish adventurer, Don Quixote de la Mancha, became a favoured poetic mask.
Reavey's most prolific decade was the 1930s, which saw the publication of four remarkable poetry collections, including Quixotic Perquisitions (1939). During this time, he also released books of poems by Beckett, Devlin and Coffey, the first English translation of Paul Eluard's love poetry, Thorns of Thunder, and a collection by American expatriate Charles Henri Ford. Plans for the publication of Dylan Thomas's short story collection, The Burning Baby, were cut short due to the objections of British printers, who considered the material "obscene" and feared prosecution.
As the second World War drew near, Reavey, in a panicky reaction, sold his literary agency and ceased his publishing activities. Like many of his writer friends, his life took a dramatic turn during the war years. After a stint with the BBC, writing broadcasts on Britain's new ally, Russia, he joined the foreign office and was posted as second secretary to the British embassy in Russia, charged with starting a Russian-language propaganda newspaper on Britain's war effort.
Reavey's return to Russia in 1942 proved as eventful and traumatic as his childhood exile. Travelling as part of a large convoy that carried war supplies for the Russian allies, the threat of a German attack of the Norwegian coast was ever-present. On May 2nd, a combined air and submarine attack by German forces struck and sank the ship Reavey was travelling on, as well as the convoy leader, the cruiser HMS Edinburgh.
Although Reavey was rescued from his lifeboat in the freezing waters of the Barents Sea by a Russian fishing trawler, the shipwreck brought deep-rooted anxieties to the surface and Reavey experienced serious health problems and insomnia in the months after his arrival in Russia. His sense of exile was reinforced by his return to a depressed post-war Britain in 1945, just after he had started to feel a renewed sense of belonging to Russian cultural life. For the next four years, Reavey fought writer's block and depression, as his first marriage to Gwynedd Vernon failed and he struggled to revive his pre-war literary life in the gloom of London.
A ROCKEFELLER FELLOWSHIP to the US in 1949 brought a spiritual and creative renewal, as Reavey immersed himself in the lively New York arts scene. Mark Rothko became a good friend, while Reavey courted, and later married, the highly regarded American painter, Irene Rice Pereira.
After a break of some 10 years, he was also able to revive his poetic career and, in 1955, Barney Rosset's enterprising Grove Press published Reavey's collection, The Colours of Memory. Yet American reviewers were unsure of what to make of this distinct European voice. The words of his first publisher, Samuel Putnam, who had argued that "no poet could be more European, more difficult for the average American to understand" would prove ominous in his new home. But while Reavey lacked recognition as a poet in the US, his significance as a literary translator steadily rose. He had been a lifelong champion of the work of his friend, Boris Pasternak, and his translations of Pasternak's work were suddenly in demand, following the latter's enforced refusal of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature for his epic, Doctor Zhivago, which caused a literary sensation in the West. Reavey also promoted the work of younger poets, such as Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and stoically refused to be drawn into anti-Soviet arguments at the height of the Cold War.
Tragically, a street assault in 1974 severely shook the foundations of the home life that Reavey had created for himself and his third wife, dramatist Jane Bullowa, in their small New York brownstone apartment, filled with his books and treasured paintings. He never recovered emotionally from this incident and died on August 11th 1976.
George Reavey's achievements as a writer, publisher and translator are of tremendous significance and relevance today and set an example for art created in an Irish-European context.