John Cournos

John Cournos (1881-1966). Courtesy Amazon.com.

John Cournos (1881-1966) was an American poet and prose writer of Russian-Jewish background.

Life

Cournos was born Ivan Grigorievich Korshun (he himself used the form Johann Gregorevich for his original name) in the Ukraine.

His family immigrated to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, when he was 10 (and knew no English). He went to work at 13, first in a knitting mill, and then as an office boy for the Philadelphia Record, where he became a reporter and then assistant editor of the Sunday paper.

In 1912 he moved to London, England, to pursue a literary career, adopting the Pseudonym "John Cournos". He befriended and corresponded with Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, and Ezra Pound. Pound included Cournos's prose poem "The Rose" in his 1914 anthology, Des Imagistes.

In the aftermath of the October Revolution Cournos was involved with a London-based anti-Communist organization named The Russian Liberation Committee. On its behalf he wrote in 1919 a propaganda pamphlet named London under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner's dream on returning from Petrograd.

In 1919 Cournos published his first novel, The Mask; the first in a autobiographical trilogy that included The Wall (1921) and Babel (1922). He published several other novels, plus a volume of poetry, and translations from Russian.

Cournos returned to the United States in 1931. During the Depression, in financial hardship, he was reduced to selling his letters from Lawrence, Frost, and Pound; and returned to newspaper work, writing reviews for the New York Sun and New York Times.

Later in life he married Helen Kestner (1893–1960), who was also an author, under the pseudonym Sybil Norton. However, he is probably best known for his unhappy affair with Dorothy L. Sayers, fictionalized by Sayers in the detective book Strong Poison (1930) and by Cournos in The Devil Is an English Gentleman (1932).

Writing

In London under the Bolsheviks, Cournos' lurid but humorous future history, a British revolutionary regime introduces a new currency named "The MacDonald" for Ramsey MacDonald; MacDonald is, however, soon shoved aside by the Bolshevik leaders MacLenin and Trotsman (sic). A counter-revolutionary drive by General Haig is defeated at St Albans. Lloyd George is imprisoned in the Tower of London. H.G. Wells, too, is imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, despite his left-leaning book Love and Mr. Lewisham. London is portrayed as plagued by poverty, with black market cigarettes and broken lifts, and the narrator wanders round the Strand exclaiming at the filth of the streets, the idlers, and the jealous envy displayed towards his new boots.

Quotations

Cournos on Ezra Pound: ""To have anything to do with E.P. in a personal way is to step in a heap of dog's dung. You'll never get your boots quite clean of it afterward." (Letter to F.S. Flint, 22 February 1917)

Publications

Poetry

• In Exile. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1923.

Play

• Sport of Gods: A play in three acts, with prologue and epilogue. London: Ernest Benn, 1925.

Novels

• The Mask. London: Methuen, 1919; New York: Doran, 1919; New York: AMS Press, 1976.
• The Wall. London: Methuen / New York: Doran, 1921.
• Babel. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1922; London: Heinemann, 1923.
• The New Candide. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1924; London: Bodley Head, 1924.
• Miranda Masters. New York & London: Knopf, 1926.
• O’Flaherty the Great: A tragi-comedy. New York & London: Knopf, 1928
• Wandering Women / The Samovar. New York: Charles Boni, 1930.
• Grandmother Martin Is Murdered. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1930.
• The Devil Is an English Gentleman. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1932.
• A Boy Named John. New York: Scribner, 1941.
• Pilgrimage to Freedom (with Sybil Norton). New York: Holt, 1953.
• With Hey, Ho / The Man with the Spats. New York: Astra Books, (1963)
• The Lost Leader. New York: Astra Books, 1964.

Short fiction

• London Under the Bolsheviks: A Londoner's dream on returning from Petrograd. London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919.

Non-fiction

• Gordon Craig and the Theatre of the Future. London: 1913; Florence, Italy: Goldoni, 1914.
• A Modern Plutarch: Being an account of some great lives in the nineteenth century, together with some comparisons between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon genius. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928.
• Autobiography. New York: Putnam, 1935.
• An Open Letter to Jews and Christians. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.
  • also published as Hear, O Israel. London: Methuen, 1938
  • also published as An Epistle to the Hebrews. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1940.
• A Book of Prophecy: From the Egyptians to Hitler. New York: Scribner, 1942.

Juvenile

• Famous Modern American Novelists. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1952.
• Candidate for Truth: The story of Daniel Webster (with Helen Sibyl Norton Cournos; illustrated by Rus Anderson). New York: Holt, 1953.

Translated

• Leonid Andreyev, Silence: Tranlated from the Russian. Philadelphia: Brown, 1908.
• Fyodor Sologub (Fyodor-Kuzmich Teternikov), The Old House, and other tales. London: Martin Secker, 1915.
• Fyodor Sologub (Fyodor-Kuzmich Teternikov), The Created Legend. London: Martin Secker, 1916.
• Leonid Andreev, Abyss (with engravings by Ivan Lebedeff). Waltham St. Lawrence, UK: Golden Cockerel Press, 1929.
• Alekseĭ Remizov, A White Heart. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1997.

Edited

• The Best British Short Stories of 1922 (edited with Edward J. O'Brien). Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922; New York: Dodd Mead, 1922.
• The Fifteen Finest Short Stories. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1928.
• Short stories out of Soviet Russia. London: Dent / New York: Dutton, 1929.
• American Short Stories of the Nineteenth Century. London, Dent / New York: Dutton. 1930.
• A Treasury of Russian Life and Humor. New York: Coward-McCann, 1943.
• A World of Great Stoties (edited with Hiram Collins Haydn). New York: Crown, 1947.
• Best World Short Stories, 1947 (edited with Sibyl Norton). New York & London: D. Appleton-Century. 1947.
• A Treasury of Classic Russian Literature. New York: Capricorn Books, 1961.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• Imagist poets
• List of British poets

External links

Poems

• John Cournos in Poetry: A magazine of verse, 1912-1922: "The Rose," "Among the Rodins"

Prose

• John Cournos' online introduction to "Taras Bulba and Other Tales" by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Books

• John Cournos at Amazon.com
• List of books on the Open Library
• Works by John Cournos at Project Gutenberg

About

• John Cournos at The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A portal to Bohemia
• An account by Alfred Satterwaite, John Cournos' stepson
• review of The Devil is an English Gentleman