A romantic interlude in Sofia, 1959
Maurice Shadbolt stayed in Poland for a fortnight and then endured a gruelling train journey to Belgrade. Here he discovered that his Bulgarian visa had expired. At the Bulgarian embassy he found French and Americans had been waiting days for visas and despaired of catching his onward train. Then he was taken in hand by an Italian who had grown up in Sofia and who made some kind of deal with the embassy officials who produced visas for them both. Then he persuaded Maurie to forget the train and go to Sofia in his 1935 Ford, which was loaded to the gunwales with suitcases and bags. ‘Fred’ was carrying contraband American cigarettes, nylons, instant coffee and other goodies in demand on the Bulgarian black market. He tactically chose to cross the frontier in the middle of the night when the guards were sleepy and disposed to be distracted by free packets of cigarettes.
Kevin Ireland arrived by train soon afterwards and brought news from [Shadbolt's wife] Gill: "K says I’m likely to be a Daddy, well, well, well - this is news indeed. Really I take the news so calmly; I’m surprised at myself." Around the time she first suspected she was pregnant, Gill wrote, "Somehow life doesn’t seem to be worth living when you haven’t got the main reason for living it around, even if he is bad tempered and inclined to live in a dream world at times." On receiving the good news in Sofia, Maurie reassured her, "Don’t worry, darling; all is fine", knowing that, inevitably, she knew he would be seeing Jenny Bojilova again.
Maurie met her in the same café where they had parted nearly a year before, the setting for [his short story] 'Thank you goodbye'. "Lunch was quiet and introspective. We didn’t dwell on the details of our fiasco. They were in the story." Jenny had moved on, knowing that, realistically, Maurie could not have lived in Bulgaria and it was unlikely she could have lived in New Zealand. She was about to "share her life" with Nikolai Haytov, a prominent novelist, and with whom she was to remain married until his death in 2002. Kevin Ireland observed that Vasil Popov and others who had befriended Maurie on his first visit, and tried to find him work for his anticipated return to Jenny, were distinctly cool towards him: he carried the odour of betrayal.
He proposed. "She was so astonished she keeled over with some sort of cramp and had to be taken to hospital"
Maurie took Ireland around Sofia to show him the sights. Along the Russian Boulevard, Maurie waved to acquaintances in a café who invited them in for a coffee. "Among them was a woman called Donna Marinova, who could have been a double for the actress Ingrid Bergman." Ireland asked who she was, Maurie asked why, and Ireland replied, "I’m in love with her."
Maurie was distraught: "Don’t you think we’ve already had enough international poetic near-disasters without you starting one of your own?"
Ireland said, ”I can’t help it. I’m going to marry her."
He proposed. "She was so astonished she keeled over with some sort of cramp and had to be taken to hospital." Despite him having no Bulgarian and only bad French - Marinova’s second language - they were married a few weeks later.
Perhaps Ireland’s quixotic proposal was a consequence of having drunk too much slivovitz during the "poetic near-disaster" the evening before. Maurie and he had both been at a literary dinner for the cantankerous Scots socialist poet Hugh McDiarmid who was on an east European tour to mark the 200th anniversary of Robbie Burns's birth. McDiarmid had been commissioned to translate the work of 19th Century Bulgarian poet and hero Hristo Botev, in order to secure him a "place in the pantheon of the world’s best poets".
At the dinner McDiarmid, half drunk, announced that Botev’s work was "sub-Byronic" and banal. This caused Vasil Popov, sitting between Maurie and Ireland, to turn puce. When an official asked if he would, nevertheless, fulfil his commission, McDiarmid declared he was "too old to waste his time on rubbish", whereupon Popov stood up and announced that he had both insulted a great poet and the hero of the nation and would now knock his block off. Maurie and Ireland rose together and pinned Popov between them while Ireland raised his glass to propose a toast to Bulgarian and Scottish friendship. Following this, McDiarmid shouted that, just in case anyone had missed his meaning, Botev’s poetry was crap. Immediately, Ireland rose again and proposed a toast to the friendship of the peoples of New Zealand and Bulgaria and then he and Maurie grabbed Popov and propelled him through the door.
Botev’s poetry did get translated into good English by Ireland himself when he found work in Sofia after his marriage as a "translation polisher" in a state publishing house.
Maurie began his journey back to London in September, using the return segment of Ireland’s train ticket. He told Jenny he had dedicated to her the last story in [his short story collection] The New Zealanders, one whose characters would resonate between them, and then said thank you and goodbye forever. Maurie also said goodbye to Ireland for, not just a couple of years this time, but for more than a decade. Ireland later wrote: "... he then remembered more than 15 years ago an express train hauling Shadders out of Sofia station - leaving him abandoned to private ridicule and conflict. Maurie wrote to him: ‘I fear already we may have said the great farewell of our lives’."
In London, increasingly anxious, Maurie packed up Ireland’s belongings and sent them off to Sofia: "More & more I wonder if you’re doing the right thing. Are you, for Christ’s sake? Is your poetry worth a woman? Is Donka [sic] really ... the kind of girl who will share the life you want to lead? Do you really think so? This is one question you must face before it is too late."
But neither was any good at taking the advice of the other in matters of the heart.
A mildly abridged version taken with kind permission of the author from Life as a Novel: A biography of Maurice Shadbolt - Volume One 1932 to 1973 by Philip Temple, published by David Ling in 2018. ReadingRoom is devoting all this week to matters concerning Kevin Ireland on the occasion of his latest memoir, A Month at the Back of my Brain (Quentin Wilson Publishing, $40). Tomorrow: the book is reviewed by CK Stead.
