Bravig Imbs
Bravig Imbs was an American author and journalist, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American parents. He grew up in Chicago and was raised in a fundamentalist church. Imbs attended Dartmouth College, financing his education through various means, including music and odd jobs. In 1925, he moved to Paris, where he initially struggled but eventually found work in journalism and as a music critic, despite facing challenges such as job loss due to critical reviews.
His literary career began with the publication of his poetry collection, "Eden: Exit This Way, and Other Poems," in 1926, marking a transition to free verse. His first novel, "The Professor's Wife," published in 1928, satirizes social pretensions and garnered positive attention from notable figures, including Gertrude Stein, who became an important mentor to him. Imbs's personal life was marked by his marriage to Countess Valeska Balbarischky and subsequent tensions with Stein, leading to a estrangement. Despite some of his works not finding publishers, he continued to write, eventually publishing "Confessions of Another Young Man" in 1936, which reflects on his literary circle in Paris. Tragically, Imbs's life was cut short in 1946 due to a car accident, ending a career that intertwined literary ambition with complex personal relationships.
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Subject Terms
Bravig Imbs
Writer
- Born: October 8, 1904
- Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- Died: May 30, 1946
- Place of death: France
Biography
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Norwegian-American parents, Bravig Imbs grew up in Chicago, where his family belonged to the fundamentalist United Brethren Church. He enrolled at Dartmouth in 1923, and financed his education by playing the violin, giving music lessons, and acting as a butler for a professor’s family, later satirized in his first novel. In the summer of 1925, he took a cattle boat to Europe and arrived in Paris with five dollars and no job. He got a job with the Paris Tribune by pretending to be a reporter and to know French, but was soon fired. He taught at an American school until he had learned French and was then rehired by the Tribune in the advertising department. He worked as music critic for the Paris Times but was fired for writing too many negative reviews.
Imbs’s first book, Eden: Exit This Way, and Other Poems (1926) consists mainly of poems that he had written at Dartmouth and the title poem written in Paris. Imbs considered this work as his transition from the style of Vachel Lindsay to free verse. His father agreed to support him for six months while he completed a biography of Chatterton, and Imbs completed The Professor’s Wife (1928). The narrative satirizes the social pretensions of Mrs. Ramson, who regards James Barrie as superior to Shakespeare and thinks that Robert Louis Stevenson was a gentleman and great writer. Professor Ramson shares his wife’s dislike of the moderns, Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. This novel was warmly received by Elliot Paul, who along with Eugene Jolas, had launched the literary magazine Transition, and by Gertrude Stein, who became Imbs’s literary mentor.
In 1928, Imbs married Countess Valeska Balbarischky, whom he met in Riga on a tour through Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. Gertrude Stein seems to have disliked this marriage; the break became permanent in 1931. Imbs antagonized Stein by announcing that he was going to send his pregnant wife to spend the summer near Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Toklas called him the next day to tell him that his pretension was unpardonable and that they never wished to see him again. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein wrote, “We liked Bravig, even though his aim was to please.”
Imbs was unable to find a publisher either for his novel Parisian Interiors or for his biography of Chatterton. The biography was translated into French, and the French translation was then serialized by Comte A. de Luppe in the Correspondent during May to July of 1931. In 1936, he published Confessions of Another Young Man, an account of his literary friendships and acquaintances in Paris. Imbs supported his family in Paris by working for an advertising agency and then for the United States Information Service as a radio announcer during World War II. He set up a free radio station in Cherbourg after its liberation in 1944. His career ended abruptly in June, 1946, when he was killed in an automobile accident.