Life
1907-1976 [occas. err. Reavy]; b. 1 May 1907, Vitebsk, Russia, where his
father was director of flax mill; early years between there and Belfast;
Northern Irish parents; ed. Cambridge, co-found Experiment; moved
to Paris to complete education; co-ed., with Jacob Bronowski, The European
Caravan (Paris 1931), included Samuel Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy;
established Europa Press and published early collections of verse by Beckett,
Denis Devlin, and Brian Coffey; quit Paris for London, 1934-1951; visited
Dublin, 1936, visiting Francis Stuart at Laragh with Beckett; placed Beckett’s
Murphy (Routledge 1938), through good offices of Herbert Read;
moved to America, 1951- ; had affair with Lydo Arco, a Russian descended
from a line of actors in the Yiddish theatre who ran a salon in Chelsea,
NY; issued Russian translation anthologies in prose and verse; translated
Turgenev and Gogol as well as Yevtushenko and Vosnosensky; photos and
letters of George Reavey included among the papers of Lyda Arco were deposited
in YIVO Institute, Manhattan by Bradford J. Verter, Princeton Univ.
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Works
Poetry, The Colours of Memory (NY: Grove Press 1955) [sixty
poems incl. ‘Singing of SS Jutland’ and ‘Hiroshima and
After’]; Faust’s Metamorphoses [sic]; Nostradam;
Signes d’Adieu; Quixote Perquisitions; ed., Thorns
of Thunder, selected poems of Paul Eluard (London: Europa Press 1936);
ed., with Samuel Putnam, Maida Castelhun Darnton, and Jacob Bronowski,
The European Caravan: An Anthology of the New Spirit in European Literature
(NY: Brewer, Warren & Putnam 1931), p.475.
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Notes
George Reavey, cited with MacGreevy, Beckett ‘and others’,
as part of the Irish transition group, in Samuel Putham’s Paris
was Our Mistress (1947), quoted in John P. Harrington, The Irish
Beckett (1991), p.11. Reavey left Ireland to study in Cambridge [...]
and later turned to Soviet literature. [idem]; Reavey’s new European
Literary Bureau [ibid., p. 38]; Reavey was a recipient of letters from
Beckett, explaining the writing of Watt, in 1947. [ibid.] Reavey’s
Europa Press published a collection of poems, Third Person, by
Brian Coffey in 1938. See also Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The
Last Modernist (1996), p.113.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)