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Thursday 27 August 2015

The Write Advice 070: FORD MADOX FORD


I should say that on the whole an agent is of little use to the author who has any business faculties at all, but so many have not.  The agent's function is to be a sort of bar-loafer who hangs around, finding what publisher, magazine or paper wants what.  He may be of use.  But few agents will handle the work of young authors, who have always been my particular preoccupation.  And the agent's interests are not by any means always at one with the individual author's.  He will place a highly paid author in preference to another on his list; he gets more commission.  He will place an author who is indebted to him rather than one who isn't.  He is then sure of getting his money back.  It is not always to his interest to press a dishonest or defaulting publisher to the point of definitely offending them.  He has other authors that he will wish to place with that publisher.
     All out then, you had better do without an agent unless you are a very big seller...


Return To Yesterday (1931)



Use the link below to visit THE FORD MADOX FORD SOCIETY, an international organization founded in 1997 'to promote knowledge of and interest in the life and works of Ford Madox Ford':


http://www.fordmadoxfordsociety.org/

  

 

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A Call: The Tale of Two Passions (1910) by FORD MADOX FORD

 
The Write Advice 050: FORD MADOX FORD

 
The Write Advice 030: FORD MADOX FORD

 

Thursday 20 August 2015

Poet of the Month 031: MALCOLM LOWRY



MALCOLM LOWRY
c 1940







 
THIRTY-FIVE MESCALS IN CUAUTLA


 
 
This ticking is most terrible of all––
You hear the sound I mean on ships and trains,
You hear it everywhere, for it is doom;
The tick of real death, not the tick of time;
The termite at the rotten wainscot of the world––
And it is death to you, though well you know
The heart's silent tick failing against the clock,
Its beat ubiquitous and still more slow:
But still not the tick, the tick of real death,
Only the tick of time––still only the heart's chime
When body's alarm wakes whirring to terror.
 

In the cantina throbs the refrigerator,
While against the street the gaunt station hums.
What can you say fairly of a broad lieutenant,
With bloody hand behind him, a cigarro in it,
But that he blocks a square of broken sunlight
Where scraps of freedom stream against the gale
And lightning scrapes blue shovels against coal?
The thunder batters the Gothic mountains;
But why must you hear, hear and not know this storm,
Seeing it only under the door,
Visible in synecdoches of wheels
And khaki water sousing down the gutter?
In ripples like claws tearing the water back?
 

The wheels smash a wake under the jalousie.
The lieutenant moves, but the door swings to
What of all this life outside, unseen by you,
Passed by, escaped from, or excluded
By a posture in a desolate bar?
No need to speak, conserve a last mistake;
Perhaps real death's inside, don't let it loose.
The lieutenant carried it into the back room?
The upturned spittoons may mean it, so may the glass.
The girl refills it, pours a glass of real death,
And if that death's in her it's here in me.
On the pictured calendar, set to the future,
The two reindeer battle to death, while man,
The tick of real death, not the tick of time,
Hearing, thrusts his canoe into a moon,*
Risen to bring us madness none too soon.
 
 
 
 


1937
 
 


*Author's note: Soma was mystically identified with the moon, who controls vegetation, and whose cup is ever filling and emptying, as he waxes and wanes. 




 

 

 

Clarence Malcolm Lowry, who wrote and published as 'Malcolm Lowry,' was one of the most uniquely gifted and consistently self-destructive British writers of the twentieth century.  His second novel Under the Volcano –– a harrowing, myth-based recreation of the final day in the life of an alcoholic British Consul living in a small Mexican town –– was rejected by twelve different publishers before going on to become a literary bestseller when it finally appeared in both the UK and North America in 1947.  While the book, instantly hailed as a masterpiece by many critics, briefly made Lowry a world famous writer its success did not encourage him to curb his ferocious drinking, a habit he'd first adopted at the age of fourteen.

 

Lowry was born in the Merseyside town of New Brighton, close to the northern English city of Liverpool, on 28 July 1909, the fourth son of successful cotton broker Arthur Osborne Lowry and his wife Evelyn (née Boden).  He was educated at the Leys School in Cambridge, the expectation being that he would go on to attend that city's university and subsequently enter the family business.  Eager to avoid this fate and see something of the world before being forced to settle down, Lowry asked his father to allow him to defer entering Cambridge for a year so he could serve as a deckhand in the British Merchant Marine.  With his father's consent grudgingly obtained, Lowry shipped out for the Far East in May 1927 aboard the SS PyrrhusWhat he experienced during this voyage would serve as the foundation for his first novel Ultramarine, published in 1933 by UK publishing house Jonathon Cape Limited.


 

Arthur Lowry urged his son to pursue a diplomatic career following his return to England in 1928, a suggestion Lowry responded to by enrolling at Weber's English College in the German city of Bonn.  His stay in Bonn, while shortlived, proved to be a significant one in an artistic sense because it was here that he read and was, in his own words, 'overwhelmed by' the novel Blue Voyage written by North American poet (and friend of TS Eliot, among others) Conrad Aiken. 

 

Lowry immediately wrote to Aiken, establishing a sometimes helpful and sometimes injurious friendship with the older writer that would endure for the rest of his life.  He went to North America in 1929 to visit and study with Aiken before returning to England where, to keep his family happy, he finally did as they wanted and took his place at Cambridge.  Despite spending very little time at St Catherine's, the college he belonged to, and doing as little academic work as possible, Lowry nevertheless managed to graduate in 1932 with a third class honours degree in English Literature.  By this time he was already hard at work on Ultramarine, alternating periods of writing and obsessive revision with periods of sustained heavy drinking.

 

In 1933 Lowry accompanied Aiken and his wife to Spain where he was introduced to a young American writer named Jan Gabrial (born Janine Vanderheim in New York City in 1911).  Immediately smitten, Lowry set about wooing Gabrial, writing her long passionate letters whose frequency and intensity only increased following his return to England for the June publication of his debut novel.  Gabrial and Lowry were married in Paris on 6 January 1934 and lived there until April, when Gabrial left her new husband for what would be the first of many times, explaining her hasty departure to their friends by insisting she had to return to North America to care for her sick mother.  Lowry followed his estranged bride to New York in early 1935, spending part of his time there in the Psychiatric Ward of Bellevue Hospital in the hope of curing his by now chronic mental health problems following a severe alcohol-induced breakdown.  (The time he spent as a patient in Bellevue inspired his posthumously published novella Lunar Caustic.)  'Malcolm was very seductive –– could take you over,' Gabrial would remember after they divorced in 1940.  'There could be periods of great lucidity –– then Walpurgisnacht!!!!'  (Walpurgishnacht is a German religious festival during which witches hold a wild party in celebration of the arrival of Spring, causing widespread chaos to erupt across the land.)

 

1936 saw the reconciled Lowry and Gabrial leave New York for Los Angeles and San Diego, from where they travelled to the Mexican town of Cuernavaca which was to remain Lowry's home until 1938.  It was in Mexico that he attained some measure of domesticity and began what was to be the eleven year process of writing Under The Volcano and getting it published –– a task often interrupted but never completely derailed by his drinking and Gabrial's decision to leave him, after pleading with him yet again to give up alcohol, in 1937.  Alone now and severely depressed by the fact that his wife had left Mexico with another man (although the man was not, as Gabrial's enemy Conrad Aiken unhelpfully suggested, her lover), Lowry began to drink like someone with a death-wish, eventually becoming such a problem for the Mexican authorities that they were forced to arrest him and suggest that, for his own good (and theirs), he should immediately leave the country.  (All of these experiences would later find their way into the pages of Under The Volcano.)  

 

Lowry arrived in Los Angeles on 27 July 1938 and went straight to the new apartment Gabrial had rented following her return from Mexico.  Although she did her best to help her estranged husband find the psychiatric treatment she continued to insist he needed, her concern for his welfare did not extend to reconciling with him again.  After a period of largely unsuccessful treatment in a Californian sanitarium paid for by his family and an extended stay in a Los Angeles hotel (also subsidized by his parents without his knowledge), Lowry's visa expired and he left North America for the western Canadian city of Vancouver, arriving there in August 1939.  

 

Vancouver was not, however, to be his final destination.  In 1940 Lowry moved to a small wooden fishing shack in the tiny town of Dollarton in the Canadian province of British Columbia with his new lover, a former silent film actress and mystery writer named Margerie Bonner who had loyally followed him to Canada after meeting him in 1938, bringing his vast collection of uncompleted manuscripts across the border with her.  He and Bonner went on to marry in December 1941, soon after his divorce from Jan Gabrial became final.  

 

It was in the shack in Dollarton, with Bonner (who also drank heavily) acting as his editor, muse and nurse, that Lowry continued to work on what became the final version of Under The Volcano.  He completed the book on Christmas Eve 1944, working in the Toronto apartment of a friend where he and Bonner had gone to stay following the accidental destruction of their beachfront shack by fire.  

 

They rebuilt the shack the following year and continued to share it for the next nine years, leaving their remote corner of Canada to take trips to New York, Haiti, France, Italy and Mexico (from which Lowry was officially deported this time for public drunkenness and other anti-social behaviour).  It was here that Lowry worked on the books and poems that would not be published until several years after his death and collaborated with Bonner on an unproduced film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel Tender is the Night, all the while continuing to drink as excessively as he'd done all his life. 

 

In time, the couple's formerly devoted relationship became severely strained and sometimes violent, with Lowry reportedly attempting to strangle his wife on at least two occasions.  Age and deteriorating health eventually obliged them to leave Dollarton in 1954 where, after a period of time spent travelling on the Continent again, they re-located to England and, following Lowry's short stay in yet another psychiatric hospital, rented a house in the Sussex town of Ripe. 

 

It was in Ripe, on 26 June 1957, that Malcolm Lowry died at the age of forty-seven of what was deemed by the local coroner to have been 'death by misadventure' caused by the combination of barbituates and lifelong alcohol abuse, a verdict later challenged by his biographer Gordon Bowker and others who believed that the many inconsistencies in Bonner's version of what happened were her attempt to disguise the fact that she had murdered him.  Bonner herself died in 1988 following a debilitating stroke, having established what, in the eyes of some critics, was a questionable career for herself as 'the widow of a genius' in the meantime.  Jan Gabrial, who remarried in 1944 and subsequently abandoned writing for a successful career in real estate, wrote a memoir about her life with Lowry titled Inside The Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry which, at her request, was published after her own death in 2000.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a short essay about MALCOLM LOWRY and his 1947 novel Under The Volcano

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/05/100-best-novels-observer-malcolm-lowry-under-the-volcano

 

 


 
 
 
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Last updated 6 June 2023
 
 

Thursday 13 August 2015

The Write Advice 069: NICCI GERRARD


I hate the beginning of a novel, when it's like a cloud gradually gathering and taking shape, before it becomes a book in my head. I carry a notebook and make lots of notes, but it's always such a jumble. Then I'll start writing and find I've set off in the wrong direction, or I'll hit an absolute blank wall and have to find a way round it. When I'm writing as Nicci French it's a bit different, because they're thrillers, so the plot's more important.  We have to use a synopsis, because we take it in turns, one chapter each, so you can't just go off at a tangent. But it's still a journey and you can still find yourself in unexpected places.

Mslexia: For Women Who Write [date unspecified]


 

Use the link below to read a selection of articles written by British novelist NICCI GERRARD for The Guardian:

 

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/niccigerrard

 

 

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The Write Advice 048: HILARY MANTEL

 
The Write Advice 038: NICK HORNBY

 
The Write Advice 018: KEITH RIDGWAY

Thursday 6 August 2015

Collected Stories 1900–1944 (2007) by IVAN BUNIN


Ivan R Dee Publisher US edition, 2007



 

 

She had small, dark freckles on her stomach and her back as well –– and they delighted him.  Because she wore soft shoes without heels, her whole body seemed to sway under the yellow sarafan* when she walked.  The sarafan was light and loose-fitting, and her tall, girlish body moved freely under it.  Once, her feet soaked by the rain, she ran from the garden into the living room: he hurried to remove her shoes, kissed the narrow, wet soles of her feet –– and there had never been such happiness in his life.  Everyone had gone to sleep in the darkened house after lunch; more and more fresh-smelling rain was pouring over the patio beyond the open doors –– and how terribly the rooster frightened them as he too ran from the garden into the living room, his black feathers shot with a strange, metallic green, his crown as brilliant as a flame, his claws clicking on the floor at the very moment when they'd lost themselves and let all caution go.  Seeing how they jumped up from the couch, he ducked his head, as if embarrassed, and politely trotted back into the rain with his shimmering tail drawn down.

 


 
Rusya (1940)
 
 
 
 
[*sarafan = a sleeveless loose 
 
fitting peasant dress]

 
 
 
 
 
Translated by
  
GRAHAM HETTLINGER
   



 

 

 

The Collection:  The early days of a lovely Russian autumn.  Fields of new green wheat surveyed from the seat of a tarantass as it slowly rolls through them, its horses guided by a mumbling but kindly old peasant.  A grizzled cobbler seated in the doorway of his rudely built hut, beating his uncomprehending dog because it refuses to learn the trick of shaking hands with him.  The blue-grey face of a wealthy tourist, slowly stiffening as life departs from it in a luxury hotel room on the Mediterranean island of Capri.  Peasant girls, their strong smooth legs bare beneath their rough homespun skirts, sorting good potatoes from bad as it softly, ever so gently begins to snow.  The delight felt by a lonely hunchback when he receives a note from an anonymous admirer, begging him for a rendezvous in the park the following day.  The familiar but comforting taste of blinis and fresh raspberry preserves, washed down with hot smoky tea poured straight from the samovar.  The fashionable restaurants of Moscow, richly ornate in the gilt-edged glow of candlelight, where new lovers sit dreaming of the perfect if unrealistic future they one day hope to enjoy together. 

 

These are just some of the moments to be savoured in the moving, elegiac and, above all, poetic stories of the great Russian writer Ivan Bunin, rendered magnificently into English by North American academic Graham Hettlinger.

 

Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is best known these days –– outside Russia, at least –– for his 1915 story The Gentleman From San Francisco.  While that story –– a perfectly told tale of a wealthy Yankee businessman vacationing in Europe whose fortune nevertheless fails to save him or his dignity after he succumbs to a stroke –– is excellent and obviously very deserving of its place in this collection, it is by no means typical of Bunin's work or representative of what characterizes his unique and occasionally disquieting genius.  

 

Like many a Russian writer before and after him, including his contemporary Vladimir Nabokov, Bunin was an unwilling exile from his homeland whose life and work were intimately bound up in his memories of a childhood and adolescence spent on his family's vast but crumbling ancestral estate.  Like another great recreator of the past, the Frenchman Marcel Proust, memory is both Bunin's central theme and his most compelling subject, the past something that did not and could not really die for him because he never stopped re-experiencing it in his imagination day after achingly nostalgic day.   

 

The most affecting stories in this collection –– Rusya, Tanya, Mitya's Love, Zoyka and Valeriya, The Scent of Apples –– are generally those which place the reader directly in Bunin's pre-revolutionary Russian past, recapturing the vanished world of his youth by presenting it as a series of vivid, stirring and sometimes tantalizingly erotic images.  This emphasis on the visual component of memory makes it easy to understand why he first gained recognition as a poet.  These thirty-five stories are less stories in the traditional sense –– narratives that move from point A to point B by cleaving to a continuous narrative line –– than collections of vividly recalled, sharply drawn impressions, interlaced with images which capture and reflect emotions in a manner that masterfully evokes and recreates a certain place (Russia) at a very specific time (the years before the Bolsheviks took over and wiped out, virtually overnight, everything that 'home' had symbolized to people of Bunin's class and generation).  While Bunin does all that's expected of any gifted writer –– creates believable and memorable characters, places them in interesting situations, shows how conflicts arise and how these conflicts are confronted and resolved –– he also reaches beyond this, offering the reader glimpses into the innermost souls of his characters which are as honest as they are profound, as moving as they are, on occasion, uncompromisingly brutal and shocking. 

 

 


OneWorld Classics US edition, 2008

 

 

 

As great as all of these stories are, for me Bunin's masterpiece is the very different tale Chang's Dreams –– a story told from the point of view of a dog who belongs to a drunken old sea captain.  Chang's memories of his life with the captain, of the adventures they have had at sea and in scores of exotic foreign ports, are interspersed with scenes from the new life they live together in the Russian city of Odessa, where his master lurches from restaurant to restaurant in search of the cheap vodka which has become his only comfort since the woman he adored impulsively abandoned him to run off with another man.  The scene describing Chang's reaction to the captain's not entirely unexpected death is an unforgettable piece of prose, revealing the dog's emotions as it simultaneously offers us penetrating insights into his loyal, devoted and infinitely patient personality.

 

Later, when the door is taken from its hinges, when all the different people come and go in noisy conversation –– the yardmen and police, the artist and his top hat, the other men who joined the captain in the restaurants –– Chang is like an object made of stoneBut now not even horror registers with Chang.  He lies on the floor with his face in the corner, his eyes closed tight to keep from seeing the world –– to forget it.  And over him the world's noise is dim and distant, like the sea above one who is descending deeper and deeper into the abyss.   

 
Remarkably few writers possess the skill required to tell a story like this without making it seem completely artificial or, worse, embarrassingly twee and mawkish.  It serves as further confirmation of Ivan Bunin's genius –– as well as that of Graham Hettlinger, whose translations capture every nuance of his poetic and uniquely subtle style with incredible acuity –– that he was able to make Chang (and his pain, which is as real as any experienced by a human being when they lose a loved one) so believable without stooping to the Disneyfied trick of sentimentalizing him to obtain the reader's sympathy.  Like all the stories selected for this superb and important collection, Chang's is one that remains fixed in the mind long after it has been read and absorbed, demanding to be reconsidered not just as a piece of literature but as an uncannily perceptive slice of what feels like an actively pursued, vividly recalled life.   
 
 
 



IVAN BUNIN, c 1888
 
 
 
 
The Writer:  'The general sound of the piece is created in the very beginning of the work,' Ivan Bunin once declared in an essay titled How I Write.  'Yes, the first phrase is decisive.  If you don't manage to capture that primordial sound correctly, then youget all tangled up and set aside what you started, or just throw it away as useless.'  This principle was one that Bunin adhered to throughout his career, applying it as rigorously to the stories he wrote after fleeing his Bolshevik-run homeland in 1920 to those he wrote as an impoverished, largely forgotten old man living in the French town of Grasse during the harshest years of World War Two and beyond. 

 
Bunin's eventual obscurity would have come as a shock to the crowds of reporters who mobbed him in Paris following the announcement that he had won the 1933 Nobel Prize for Literature.  He was the first Russian writer to receive the award and, for a time, became one of the world's most celebrated and widely translated authors, one whose work and achievements the Russian emigré community took justifiable pride in boasting of.  But Bunin's fame did not endure and nor did his prize money, much of which was donated to literary charities while the rest was squandered on bad investments or found its way into the hands of the swindlers for whom he was always an easy and reliable target.  He was virtually penniless when he died in his tiny attic apartment in Paris on 8 November 1953, the victim of nearly two decades of unmerited literary neglect and of the generosity which made it impossible for him to say no to any friend or fellow writer who approached him for a loan.

 
Bunin was born on his family's estate, near the village of Glotovo in the Russian province of Voronezh, on 22 October 1870, the third and youngest son of a hard drinking nobleman of Russian-Polish ancestry who, by the end of that decade, had managed to gamble away the larger part of his family's considerable fortune.  Things had become so grim by 1886 that sixteen year old Ivan was expelled from school in the nearby town of Yelets because his family could no longer afford to pay its modest tuition fees.  After that he was educated at home by his elder brother Yuly, a political agitator placed under house arrest by Czar Alexander III, who taught him philosophy and psychology and encouraged him to write by insisting that he familiarize himself with the work of classic Russian authors including Pushkin, Lermontov and Tolstoy.  

 
An intelligent and highly sensitive boy, Bunin began writing poetry at a young age and had his first poem Village Paupers published in a St Petersburg literary magazine in 1887.  This was followed four years later by the publication of his first short story Country Sketch in the magazine Russkoye Bogatstvo [Russian Wealth] –– a liberal minded journal that his brother, who belonged to the same Populist Party whose members helped to fund it, most likely exerted a strong influence on in both a political and an editorial sense.  Yuly remained the dominant force in the budding author's life and in 1889 Bunin moved to the city of Kharkov to be close to him, working first as a government clerk before taking jobs as a librarian and then as a court statistician.  

 
Bunin next moved to the city of Oryol, not far from Glotovo, where he found work as an editorial assistant on one of its local newspapers –– a job which offered him the chance to publish much of his newly written poetry and fiction in its pages.  It was in Oryol that he was reunited with Varvara Paschenko, a former schoolmate he had fallen passionately in love with but had tried hard to forget after leaving Glotovo.  By August 1892 Bunin was living with her in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, where for a time they shared a house with Yuly.  In the meantime, Bunin's first, favorably received poetry collection had been published, creating enough of a stir in literary circles to ensure his work was printed in some of St Petersburg's leading newspapers.  These successes did not help to salvage his stormy relationship with Varvara Paschenko, who left him for good in 1894 and shortly afterwards married one of his closest friends, the actor and writer AN Bibikov.
 
 
 

IVAN BUNIN, 1901
 
 
 
Between 1894 and 1895 Bunin spent most of his time traveling through the Ukraine, acquainting himself with peasant life in what was considered to be the emotional and spiritual heartland of Russia.  In 1895 he visited Moscow for the first time, where he met a number of important political figures and fellow writer Anton Chekhov, establishing a friendship with the playwright that would endure until Chekhov's death in 1904.  After 1895 Bunin began to divide his time equally between Moscow and St Petersburg, consolidating his position as a writer of tremendous promise and originality with the publication of his first story collection To The Edge of the World and Other Stories (1897) and his second poetry collection In the Open Air (1898).  After moving briefly to Odessa, he returned to Moscow in the winter of 1899 where he began attending meetings of the Wednesday Literary Group, at which he was introduced to and befriended by many important writers of the day including Nikolai Teleshov and Maxim Gorky.  In 1910, shortly after the publication of Bunin's bitingly realistic and controversial novella The Village, Gorky would publicly describe his new friend 'the best Russian writer of the day.'  Between 1909 and 1913 Bunin would be Gorky's annual winter guest on the Italian island of Capri, where the latter had temporarily relocated partly for reasons of health and partly to escape the increasingly repressive and chaotic regime of Czar Nicholas II. 

 
In September 1898 Bunin married Anna Tsakni, the eighteen year old daughter of a Greek-born activist and newspaper editor whom he had originally met in Odessa.  The relationship quickly soured and within a year Bunin left his young bride despite the fact that she was pregnant with what proved to be his only child, a son named Nikolai whom he rarely saw prior to the boy's early death from scarlet fever and associated heart problems.  In 1906 Bunin met Vera Muromtseva, the niece of a high-ranking Russian civil servant whose family were firmly opposed to the idea of her becoming romantically involved with an upstart writer.  They soon became inseparable –– and remained so despite the many affairs Bunin had with other women –– and married in 1922 following his divorce from Anna Tsakni.  It was with Vera that he traveled to Egypt, Palestine and eventually to Ceylon –– journeys that inspired a series of travel writings that were collected and published in 1931 as The Bird's Shadow.  These writings came as something of a surprise to the critics, some of whom had already begun to dismiss Bunin as a talented but largely irrelevant peddler of nostalgia, pining for a world that, even before the Revolution, no longer existed even for the most privileged members of Russia's land owning gentry.  

 
As the decade progressed, opinion would become increasingly divided about Bunin's work, with many on the left accusing him of not going far enough in his criticism of the Czar and the effect his repressive policies had on the Russian peasantry while those on the right declared him to be too negative in his depictions of the lives of the poor and the Czar's painfully slow attempts to modernize.  Bunin himself refused to participate in this debate, preferring to spend his time writing either in Moscow or in what remained of his family home in Glotovo.  He continued to do this throughout the first two years of World War One, preparing a six volume collected edition of his work which was published to widespread acclaim in 1915. 
 
 
 

IVAN BUNIN, 1933
 
 
 
By the following year, depressed about the conduct of the war and with talk of violent revolution becoming ever more prevalent among his countrymen, Bunin more or less stopped writing altogether, unable to continue in the face of what he deemed to be such pointless brutality.  The war also cost him his friendship with Gorky, who by 1917 had become an outspoken advocate of the Bolshevik cause –– an affiliation which remained, for a romantically minded artist like Bunin, unthinkable if not detestable.  He was in Moscow when the Bolsheviks seized power from the interim Kerensky government in October 1917 but soon relocated, with Vera, to Kiev and eventually to Odessa where he worked for a time as the editor of Iuzhnoe Slovo [The Southern Word], a newspaper which openly supported the White Russian (ie. anti-Bolshevik) cause in what had now become a bitter and very bloody civil war.  The couple fled Odessa on 26 January 1920 aboard a French ship bound for the Turkish capital Constantinople.  Although neither suspected so at the time, they would never set foot on Russian soil again.  

 
After brief stays in Greece and Yugoslavia –– Bunin was robbed of his academic medals and nearly all his money in the Greek city of Sofia, where Vera was also robbed of her jewellery –– the couple somehow found their way to Paris where a thriving Russian emigré community had by now established itself.  Bunin received a warm welcome from his fellow exiles but, according to Vera, never felt comfortable in his adopted homeland –– a discomfort that was to be intensified by his winning of the Nobel Prize and the unwanted (and unmerited) attention it drew to him as the voice of anti-Bolshevism.  He refused to see himself as anything but a writer and certainly not as a political or polemical writer, a point of view which influenced his decision to move from his apartment at 1 Rue Jacques Offenbach to the relatively isolated town of Grasse, located high in the Alpes-Maritimes region.  It was here, in a house known as the 'Villa Jeanette' that he shared with Vera and several other emigrés of both sexes, that he spent the late 1930s and the war years.  

 
Although he was technically a stateless person and by now extremely poor –– one French neighbor remembered him cutting grass on its hillsides that he would then carry home and boil for soup –– he did not flinch when it came to publicly denouncing Hitler and Mussolini or hiding refugees, including several Jews, inside his home.  Throughout this time he continued to write with the same feverish zeal he had nearly always shown for his work, refusing to publish as a form of protest against Nazism while he gathered the stories that would be published in New York in 1943 as Dark Avenues, with a French edition appearing three years later.
 
 
 

IVAN BUNIN, c 1945
 
 
 
Bunin and Vera returned to their former Paris apartment following the Liberation and remained there, except for visits to hospitals and convalescent homes, for the remainder of their lives.  For a time, during the immediate post-war years, it seemed that Bunin was on the verge of being officially welcomed back to the USSR by the Soviet government, representatives of which he met in Paris and apparently provided copies of his work to in the hope it might be published in his native land in a new, state-approved collected edition.  (This edition eventually appeared, in fifteen volumes, in 1965.)  These negotiations came to an abrupt end, however, following the publication of his Memoirs (1950), in which he was scathing in his condemnation of Communism and of the debasing impact he felt it had had on all aspects of Russian life and culture.  His last years were marred by the combination of chronic ill health and almost universal neglect, although his death in November 1953 saw lengthy obituaries appear in French and especially Parisian Russian-language newspapers.  His final book, an important critical study of his friend Chekhov, was completed by his wife and published in 1955.
 
 

 
 
 
Use the link below to download two digital story collections by IVAN BUNIN from Project Gutenberg:
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Last updated 25 September 2021 §