The Irish poet, translator and publisher George Reavey was born a hundred years ago, on May 1st, 1907. Reavey was quite a figure: born in Belarus of a Northern Irish father and a Polish mother, he became a refugee from the Russian Revolution at the age of 11. Widely published as both a poet and a translator of Russian writers including Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Reavey was a key link between the emerging Irish modernists of the 1930s and their European peers and elders. This role was enhanced by his close contacts with many of the leading French Surrealists and Russian and Irish literary émigrés in 1930s Paris.
However, he is probably best remembered as founder and editor of Europa Press, a small press publisher whose roster of authors included Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, Charles Henri Ford and Paul Éluard. In fact, the 1936 volume Thorns of Thunder was the first time Éluard's love poetry appeared in English translation. The press's publications were handsomely designed and frequently included prints by artists associated with SW Hayter's Atelier 17 studio. With the outbreak of the second world war, Reavey decided to shut up shop and move to London where, among other things, he worked for the BBC for a time. In 1949, he moved to New York, where he lived until his death in 1976.
Last weekend, Trinity College held a conference to mark his centenary. As well as readings and papers, there was a discussion panel on "Small Press Publishing: Europa and After" on Saturday evening, and I was invited to sit on it.
Small presses and little magazines, frequently edited and paid for by writers themselves, have played a fairly vital role in the literature of the last 100 years or so. Ulysses, The Waste Land and the early instalments of The Cantos were all published by small presses. Paris in the 1920s and 30s would not have been such a vital literary scene without ventures such as Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions and Eugene Jolas and Maria McDonald's journal transition. And where would the Beats have been without Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights?
The panel on Saturday was asked why they are involved in small press publishing. Most of the answers revolved around ideas of freedom and flexibility. You can publish quickly, in whatever format works for the text from a single sheet to a big fat A4 book, and in a print run that is appropriate. Harry Gilonis (poet, editor and publisher of Form Books) told a story that illustrated this flexibility. He heard that a poet he liked was doing a reading in London, phoned the poet to ask permission to do a booklet, typed up and printed some long unavailable work after hours at work, took it to his local copy centre, and had a booklet ready to sell and/or give away at the reading. The whole process took five days. You just couldn't do that as a bigger press.
Inevitably, old chestnuts like the impact of digital technologies and the internet come up, too. On the whole, these seem to be viewed as just another tool that small presses can use: many have websites to promote their publications and produce e-books in the form of downloadable PDFs.
Another point that seemed to carry consensus was that there are two basic types of writers. One of these are the "readerly" writers whose work addresses itself directly to an audience in an I/thou relationship and who, therefore, have a lot invested in reaching the widest possible audience. These writers obviously prefer to publish with larger presses who have the PR and distribution capabilities to meet their needs. The second type are the "writerly" writers whose basic relationship is with the text. On the whole, this group seem to be more private, and the relative obscurity and absence of pressure to get out and meet the public that small press publication affords often suits them better. As long as these writers exist, small presses will, it seems, be there to work with them.
