7 ‘There is a poem by Victor Hugo called “Ce que dit la bouche d’ombre”, the mouth of shadow; the poet is a mask, through whom words from beyond come. Baudelaire is an example and Rimbaud and Mallarmé.’ Lucien Jenkins, ‘Gascoyne in interview’: Stand, Vol. 33, no. 2 (spring 1992), p. 21.
8 Gascoyne’s epigraph for Night Thoughts.
9 Stand, op. cit., p. 25.
10 I have quoted here from my article, ‘Gascoyne, David Emery (1916–2001)’ in the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press).
11 David Gascoyne. A Bibliography of His Works (1929–1985), compiled by Colin Bedford, though incomplete has been invaluable (Ryde, Isle of Wight: Heritage Books, 1985).
12 ‘Desired Reading’: his review of The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin in The New York Review of Books (7 June 2012).
13 All references to specific notebooks in the David Gascoyne collection in the British Library Manuscript Department are indicated by the following, Add. + number, e.g. Add. 56043.
14 Collected Journals 1936–42, op cit. Cited as CJS.
Michel Remy, op. cit. ‘Notes et Commentaires de David Gascoyne sur les Collected Poems’ [1965], pp. 119–137. Cited as (MRUI). My translations.
Michel Remy, ‘Extracts from an interview with Michel Remy’, translated by Kathleen Raine in Temenos 7 (1986), pp. 273–84. Cited as (MRT).
Michèle Duclos, editor, Cahiers sur la Poésie, numéro spécial: David Gascoyne. Groupe d’Etudes et de Recherches Britanniques (GERB), Université de Bordeaux III, 1984. ‘Entretien avec David Gascoyne’, Londres, juin 1984, pp. 9–61. Cited as (MDC). My translations.
Lucien Jenkins, ‘David Gascoyne in Interview’ in Stand, op. cit, and in Selected Prose 1934–1996 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1998). Cited as (LJI).
Mel Gooding, ‘David Gascoyne, 1916–2001’, Artists’ Lives collection, recorded 1991, available online at http://sounds.bl.uk Cited as (MGI).
15 ‘Mood’ in Jon Stallworthy (ed.), First Lines (Manchester: Carcanet, 1987), pp. 107–8; ‘Vista’, ‘Rain Clouds’, ‘The Bridge’ in Allan Rodway (ed.), Poetry of the 1930s (London: Longmans, 1967), pp. 174–6; ‘Rain Clouds’ also appeared in A.T. Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties (London: Gollancz, 1975), pp. 231–2; ‘Prison’ in Robin Skelton (ed.), David Gascoyne, Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. ix-x of the ‘Introduction’.
16 In the Gascoyne Collection in the Beinecke Library, Yale University.
17 ‘Priaulx Rainier writes about her setting of David Gascoyne’s “Requiem”’, 10 August 1972, p. 185.
18 Files IPR/6/1/1 and IPR/6/1/2 [c. 1940].
INTRODUCTORY NOTES (1988)
THE first poem of mine to be accepted for publication was entitled ‘Transformation Scene’, and appeared in the literary weekly Everyman. In 1932, while still a day-boy at a West End secondary school, I persuaded an obscure publishing firm in a Court off the Charing Cross Road to publish, under the title Roman Balcony, a collection of poems including ‘Transformation Scene’. My mother (who never considered herself to be much of a judge of poetry) told me: ‘You’ll only regret it later.’ Before long this proved to be true. For many years after the mid-’30s, I did not wish this early ‘slim volume’ ever to be alluded to. During recent decades, however, Roman Balcony has from time to time appeared as a rarity in bookdealers’ catalogues at ever more extravagantly high prices; which has encouraged me to reprint in the present collection nine of the forty or so items it comprises, though my choice includes neither ‘Transformation Scene’, ‘Prison’ (reprinted in Robin Skelton’s Introduction to my Collected Poems, OUP 1965), nor ‘Mood’, republished recently in Jon Stallworthy’s anthology First Lines (Carcanet 1987).
In April 1933, a weekly column called ‘Poets’ Corner’, run by Victor B. Neuburg (an endearing eccentric once involved with the black-magician poet Aleister Crowley), began to appear in The Sunday Referee. Among the younger poets whose work subsequently appeared in this column were Dylan Thomas, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Ruthven Todd, Julian Symons, Laurie Lee, and myself. ‘Slate’, the first poem in Collected Poems of 1965, was first printed in The Sunday Referee. I now reprint for the first time ‘Seaside Souvenir’ and ‘On the Terrace’ (Richmond Terrace, near where I then lived), both of which also first appeared on a 1933 Sunday.
One of my mother’s best friends had lodgings for many years when I was a boy in the house of Alida Monro, who with her husband Harold ran the Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury. I was first introduced to this shop at an early age, and once heard T. S. Eliot give a reading there, not of his own poetry but of Christina Rossetti’s. In 1933 Mrs Monro, then not long a widow, edited Recent Poetry: 1923– 1933, in which she magnanimously included three poems of mine, one of them ‘Slate’. Barely seventeen, I must have been the youngest contributor to this anthology, arranged in alphabetical order and intended to represent a sequel to the Georgian Poetry series of Edward Marsh, and was undoubtedly gratified to find myself in the company of Yeats and Eliot, as well as of the poets of Auden’s generation, and of George Barker, whose 30 Preliminary Poems had just been published by David Archer’s Parton Press, which three years later was to publish a small collection of my own.
1933 was something of an annus mirabilis for me. It was the year when Geoffrey Grigson, at that time working for The Morning Post, began publishing from his Keats Grove home his small, adventurous, and soon influential periodical New Verse. In one of its earliest issues Grigson published ‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’, the result of my first attempt to produce a sequence of lines of poetry according to the orthodox surrealist formula: ‘Pure psychic automatism by which is intended to express … in writing … the real process of thought … in the absence of all control exercised by the reason and outside all moral or aesthetic preoccupations’, in the words of André Breton, instigator of the surrealist movement. I was not to become a fully-fledged and committed member of this movement until two years later; but already before leaving school earlier that year I had been in the habit of visiting Zwemmer’s bookshop in the Charing Cross Road, on my way home via Waterloo, to purchase not only back numbers of Eugene Jolas’s avant-garde transition but also previous issues of La Révolution surréaliste (1924–9) and then of the more recent Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. In November 1933, A. R. Orage published in his New English Weekly, to which I was to become for a few years an occasional contributor, the series of short surrealist texts that in the present volume I have retitled ‘Automatic Album Leaves’.
The semi-autobiographical stream-of-consciousness account of a day in the life of an adolescent literary aspirant to be found in Opening Day, my only novel, completed the year I left school, gives no indication of an awareness of Surrealism, though it contains a passage of enthusiastic reference to Rimbaud. After finishing it I had given it to Alida Monro to read, and she eventually decided to submit it to Cobden-Sanderson, who had just become the publishers of Harold Monro’s posthumous Collected Poems, prefaced by Eliot. The novel was duly accepted; and the advance royalties I received on its publication from Cobden-Sanderson contributed to financing my first visit to Paris, where I was able to spend the last three months of 1933.
At this point I am tempted to digress into a detailed account of what was for me a momentous first encounter with France, a country in which I was subsequently to spend, on and off, at least fifteen years of my life. For the purpose of introducing the poems in the present collection, however, I must restrict myself to recording that although I did not then make initial personal contact with any of the representative writers of the surrealist group, I did visit Max Ernst’s rue des Plantes studio for the first time, and brought away with me from it one of his gouaches, a Oiseau en forêt; and from a visit to the shop at the foot of Montmartre of the official surrealist bookseller and publisher, José Corti, I brought away copies of recent collections by such poets as Breton, Eluard, and Tzara.
Some of the poems arranged together for
the first time in the present volume under the general heading ‘Surrealist’ were first collected (confusingly accompanied by a certain number of non-surrealist items) in the little book published under the title Man’s Life Is This Meat in the summer of 1936 at the time of the London International Surrealist Exhibition. All these poems are united by the basic aim of achieving the greatest possible spontaneity, but this aim can produce results of considerable variety. In 1935, Geoffrey Grigson published in New Verse 15 a group of short pieces of a type quite dissimilar from the apparently incoherent pellmell outpouring of images and phrases characteristic of ‘And the Seventh Dream …’. Each of them appears to have some underlying theme or subject, though never a preconceived one. The title was usually added after the poem’s completion, as is said to have been the case with the poetic pictures of Paul Klee. ‘Gnu Opaque’, for instance, was the watermark faintly distinguishable in the paper on which it was written. The title of the 1936 Parton Press collection was the result of a meeting with Geoffrey Grigson during which he produced a sample-book of printers’ type-faces, which when opened at random showed the words ‘man’s life is’ in one sort of type at the end of the bottom line on the left-hand page, and ‘this meat’ in a different type of lettering at the beginning of the top line of the page opposite: as an example of what the surrealists described as ‘objective hazard’, this seemed at the time an ideal title. ‘The Truth is Blind’ is a title applied without reflection to the result of an attempt to create a poem by adopting the technique of collage: three cuttings were selected at random from Argosy Magazine, The Listener, and an evening newspaper, which happened to be the sources nearest to hand at the time, and then stuck on two sheets of paper with spaces left between them to be filled in such a way as to link them into a more or less coherent whole, while avoiding stopping to consider anything like a normally logical connection between the three disparate component elements. A scarcely avoidable presupposition in this case was that the result would read like the account of a specific dream.
A French professor of English once asked me: Why did you call one of your poems by the name of a village near where I live outside Lyons? He was referring to ‘Lozanne’, the result of a specific conscious premeditation, to elucidate which requires some explanatory gloss. In 1933 there occurred in France a cause célèbre that, while scandalizing the general public, so aroused the indignation and sympathy of the surrealist group that its members collaborated in producing a collection of poems and drawings inspired by it. This was the case of Violette Nozière, put on trial for parricide and sentenced to life imprisonment. When in 1977 Louis Malle made a film based on the Nozière affair, portraying it as a classic instance of the triumphant hypocrisy of bourgeois morality, he made a point of referring in it to the poem contributed by Paul Eluard to the Surrealists’ collective plaquette of protest and homage to the accused. In the summer of 1935, England was for weeks shocked and electrified by the Rattenbury/Stoner case (to be dramatized by Terence Rattigan in his last play, Cause Célèbre). Readers of any British newspaper at the time would have been aware that Mrs Rattenbury had already made a name for herself as a composer of light music under the pseudonym ‘Lozanne’; they would also have seen photos of her invariably wearing a slim bandeau across her forehead. After a trial resulting in her acquittal and the sentencing to death of her young chauffeur lover, Alma Rattenbury committed suicide by drowning. Though genuinely touched by her fate, I doubt whether I should have written ‘Lozanne’ had I not recently seen a copy of the Surrealists’ Violette Nozière.
As it is no longer possible to present the poems in the Surrealist section of this book in strictly chronological order, I have found it preferable to place together the four poems inspired by or dedicated to painters. ‘Charity Week’ is inspired by the sequence of Ernst’s collages entitled Une Semaine de Bonté, the ‘hero’ of which is the Lion of the Place de Belfort. ‘Yves Tanguy’ attempts to evoke the atmosphere of his earlier unearthly landscapes. ‘Salvador Dalí’ was originally entitled ‘In Defence of Humanism’; it does not attempt to present in verbal terms the imagery to be found in Dalí’s best-known works, but to provide some sort of parallel equivalent of the personal ‘mythology’ his paintings embody. To each of the six stanzas of ‘The Very Image’ the title of one of Magritte’s pictures could be affixed, though I had no idea when starting the poem what images were going to occur to me in the course of writing it: I had decided in advance only that each stanza should have five lines.
A similarly convenient grouping together is that of all the items in prose. I hesitate to designate them ‘prose poems’, since this category has been denounced cogently and with wit by George Barker as representing a ‘Jubjub Bird’. The sequence now retitled ‘Automatic Album Leaves’ is no more than early exercises in uncontrolled word-play. ‘Reflected Vehemence’ probably represents the most successful of my attempts to register what Breton called ‘le fonctionnement réel de la pensée’; it was written in haste, without hesitation or the least intention to mystify, though its content defies analysis. The longest piece, ‘The Great Day’, was obviously written in emulation of the texts in L‘immaculée conception, produced in collaboration by Breton and Eluard with the intention of simulating various types of mental disorder. Paranoia would appear to be the most easily imitable of such derangements. The pieces retitled ‘Three Verbal Objects’ were first published in the catalogue to an Exhibition of Surrealist Objects at the London Gallery in the winter of 1937, by which time I had moved to a Paris attic and virtually ceased writing in the surrealist vein. They are posthumously dedicated to Humphrey Jennings, in acknowledgement of the influence that his ‘Reports’ and other admirable short texts, first published by Roger Roughton in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, undoubtedly had on me.
‘The Supposed Being’ first appeared in the original Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts and published in 1935. ‘The Symptomatic World’ was originally planned as a sequence of a dozen parts, each to be written at a session. Some appeared in the short-lived review Janus, some in Roger Roughton’s magazine; the remainder appear to have been lost. ‘Phantasmagoria’ was written early in 1939, when I had returned from Paris and was no longer writing poetry classifiable as surrealist. A young friend of friends insisted that I should write a poem especially for her. Unable to produce a suitable poem to order, I proceeded to employ the formula of quasi-automatism I had been accustomed to use during four previous years. The deliberate repetition of such a motif as a little black town on the edge of the sea is a device I would not formerly have allowed myself (except perhaps in the poem about sleep, ‘Unspoken’). John Lehmann included it in the 1942 issue of Poets of Tomorrow, together with other poems of a quite different description.
In the autumn of 1937, my discovery of a copy of the 1930 edition of Pierre Jean Jouve’s Poèmes de la Folie de Hölderlin in a book-dealer’s box on the Paris quays marked a turning-point in my approach to poetry. I had not so much become disillusioned with Surrealism as begun to wish to explore other territories than the sub-or unconscious, the oneiric and the aleatory. Jouve’s Hölderlin translations led not only to my essay, poems, and translations published by Dent the following year as Hölderlin’s Madness, but to an excited first reading of Jouve’s own poetry and prose, and before long to an acquaintance with the poet and his psychiatrist wife that was to last nearly thirty years. The use of lines quoted from Jouve as epigraphs to certain sections of Poems 1937–1942 is insufficient indication of the enormous influence that his poetry, outlook, and conversation were to have on me for many years to come. Anyone familiar with Jouve’s Sueur de Sang, Matière Céleste or Kyrie will recognize this influence in such poems of mine as ‘World Without End’, ‘The Fortress’, and ‘Insurrection’.
This is not the place to pay further homage to a poet I still regard as the greatest it has been my good fortune to know. I should however add that ‘The Fabulous Glass’ now appears, as it should have done from the first, with a
dedication to his wife, Dr Blanche Reverchon, as it represents a half-rhyming versification of a sequence of images that actually occurred to me during a psychoanalytic session with her in late 1938 and noted down immediately after: the Virgin and child in an alcove were in fact a medieval statuette of the Virgin with her child’s face obliterated by an iconoclast or time, treasured by Jouve and kept in a recess in the study adjacent to his wife’s consulting-room, to become the inspiration of his collection La Vierge de Paris (1939–44).
The place of ‘The Conspirators’ in the present collection should strictly speaking be between ‘Snow in Europe’ and ‘Farewell Chorus’. I first read W. H. Auden’s paperbacked Poems and his The Orators soon after their appearance, the New Signatures and New Country anthologies likewise; and it is not improbable that, had I not been carried away by enthusiasm for contemporary French poetry, and for le surréalisme in particular, I should have endeavoured to find a way of my own to express the politico-social awareness cultivated by many of my contemporaries and their immediate predecessors. I was as keenly conscious as they were of the meaning of current events in Europe, as well as of the hunger marches, and the menace of Mosley at home. In the summer immediately preceding the outbreak of war with Germany, in my family’s home at Teddington, I was seized by an anomalous impulse to embark on a long narrative poem to be entitled ‘Come Dungeon Dark’. Its setting was an imaginary European country on the brink of a fascist coup and the installation of a reign of terror and tyranny. The hero was to be a left-wing social scientist with the impossibly romantic name of Flambow. If my memory still serves me faithfully, this character, after the take-over of his country by dictatorship, was to retreat with a band of his comrades into hiding in a disused mine, finally to emerge, after numerous Resistance-type sorties and forays followed by a disastrous flood, to inaugurate the triumph of socialism after the dictator’s downfall. That I could ever have carried out such a scenario in verse was of course a delusion; but I reprint the pages I did succeed in writing because they not only convey something of the atmosphere peculiar to the period, but also represent a reminder of my brief involvement with Mass Observation during those evenings in Blackheath in late 1936 when Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings were about to launch it as a movement (in which later I took little part). The introductory episode of this unfinished epic was published by John Lehmann in the new series of his New Writing in the winter of 1939, and remained unreprinted and forgotten until recently.
New Collected Poems Page 3