Education
Rety attended an English nursery school in Budapest.
Rety attended an English nursery school in Budapest.
After a job translating for a Czechoslovakian publisher who spoke no English, he started a Soho underground paper, Intimate Review, with contributions from young writers including Doris Lessing, Bill Hopkins, Laura del Rivo, Frank Norman, Alan Owen, Cressida Lindsay and Bernard Kops. Feliks Topolski and Ralph Steadman produced artwork. In 1953 he published a comic epistolary novel, Supersozzled Nights.
After the threat of libel action forced Intimate Review to close, he co-edited other short-lived publications, Cheshire Cat and Fortnightly: Rety was the first to publish Colin Wilson.
(At the time, he later confessed, he"d never read any of the anarchist classics - and though he later found Kropotkin readable, he could never really understand Proudhon or Bakunin) He was active against the Vietnam War, participating in the Grosvenor Square demonstration as well as a thirteen-day fast at Speaker"s Corner. Initially convinced of the innocence of Stuart Christie, accused of carrying explosives to assassinate General Franco, Rety helped coordinate an international solidarity campaign, despite a personal feeling of betrayal on learning the truth.
In 1982 he co-founded the Torriano Meeting House in Kentish Town, hosting weekly poetry readings. Stephen Spender and Adrian Mitchell were among the hundreds of poets who performed at Torriano.
A 2003 anthology included the work of Dannie Abse, John Arden, Oliver Bernard, John Heath-Stubbs and Dilys Wood.
The anthology appeared with his Hearing Eye Press, founded in 1987, which ultimately published over 150 books He also became poetry editor of the Morning Star: an anthology of work which appeared there, Well Versed, went into two editions. As a chess player, reaching a FIDE rating of 2034, he played for Middlesex and London University as well as representing England in the European Senior Chess Championship.
Foreign most of his life he travelled on a stateless person"s document, but finally obliged to obtain a British passport in his late seventies, after Hungary joined the European Union.
Politically involved in the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, from 1964 to 1969 he edited the anarchist weekly Freedom, increasing its circulation and smoothing over sectarianism in British anarchism with his cheerfully inclusive editorial approach.