A couple of poems that remained similarly forgotten until recently are ‘Elsewhere’ and ‘Concert of Angels’. They appeared originally in Miron Grindea’s Adam International Review just after the end of the War, though they may have been written earlier, perhaps at about the same time as the ‘Requiem’ later set to music by Priaulx Rainier. The second is recognizable as having been inspired by one of the panels of Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece. The ‘horrifying face, discoloured, flayed’, in ‘Ecce Homo’ was likewise the result of having been impressed by the central figure in the black-and-white reproductions of this masterpiece that I first saw before the War. It was not until at least ten years later that I was taken to Colmar to see the original. ‘Elsewhere’ is an unmitigated overstatement of an underlying theme that has remained constant in almost everything I have written since then: the intolerable nature of human reality when devoid of all spiritual, metaphysical dimension.
I first returned to Paris after the War in 1947, and remained there for a year. At least half-a-dozen of the items collected in 1950 as A Vagrant & other poems were written during this visit or as a result of it. ‘A Vagrant’ represents the apologia of a premature beatnik or drop-out, and is partly based on the idle, hotel-room existence I led at that time, increasingly disappointed with post-war governments’ failure to implement the dreams and promises of a radically improved new future that had helped the Allies bring the Third Reich to an end. In my case this disappointment was compounded by the realization that I could no longer depend on the untramelled spontaneity of inspiration I had assiduously cultivated before the War. During the War, Tambimuttu’s Poetry London Editions had published my Poems 1937–42, illustrated by Graham Sutherland; after which I had little time to write poetry as, unfit for military service, I turned professional actor for a couple of years, adopting Emery as my stage-name after that of my mother’s family. The return of genuinely gifted demobilized young actors after the War meant that I was soon once more out of regular employment. I mention this in passing only because my intention during this period was to prepare myself through first-hand experience to contribute something to the revival of poetic drama that was still in the air at that time. The only result of this ambition was the production in 1950 of a satirical one-act piece concerned with the state of English theatre just before the abolition of censorship and the renaissance brought about by John Osborne and his contemporaries and successors. All that remains of The Hole in the Fourth Wall, as this production was called, is one of the Cabaret songs to be found here under the heading Light Verse.
The city setting of ‘A Vagrant’ is identifiable as Paris from its reference to straying ‘slowly along the quais towards the ends of afternoons’. Young visitors to present-day France may no longer come across the ‘cosy-corner’, a franglais expression applied to a combined bed-head and book-shelves once a familiar feature of Parisian hotel rooms and bed-sits, and so fail to understand the allusion to a ‘cosy-corner crow’s-nest’ also occurring towards the end of the poem. One or two other poems of this period require slight elucidation. The intention behind ‘Innocence and Experience’ was to produce something in the tradition of Eliot’s early ‘Portrait of a Lady’, modelled on my experience of a couple of meetings with a certain Mme X, the wife of the owner-director of one of the best-known Parisian department stores. The line ‘I still knew of her nothing less than this’ leads to a complicated image intended to suggest a combination of two well-known portraits, one of Ellen Terry in the role of Portia, the other of the cellist Suggia by Augustus John, each of them intimating an aspect of Mme X’s character and appearance. The imagined incident from her childhood is purely speculative. The setting is the hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain district in which she had lived for many years. The occasion narrated is close to what actually occurred when another lady belonging to her circle took me with her to call on Mme X again, for the first time in ten years. The works of art referred to were almost exactly as described.
The following piece, ‘Photograph’, was inspired by a portrait of Philippe Soupault in his prime by the American photographer Berenice Abbott. When I wrote this poem, which deliberately avoids anything visually concrete except the subject’s eyes, I had still never met Soupault, who at the time of my frequenting the surrealist group in 1935/6 had fallen out of its official favour, having begun to write travel journalism and novels that might have been intended to be commercially successful. When I was finally able to visit him, he was in his mid-eighties. He will be ninety-one this year, the last survivor of the original surrealist movement, except Dalí. A final explanation here: ‘The Other Larry’ refers to Lawrence Durrell. How I can have expected the reader to realize this in the absence of footnote or formal dedication, I don’t know. The poem is in a sense an answer to one by Durrell, dated 1939 and addressed to me (his ‘Paris Journal’: Collected Poems, Faber & Faber 1957), and it attempts to sum up certain differences between our points of view that had first become apparent during our discussions in pre-War Paris. It is republished in the hope that its argument is of sufficient interest to be appreciated without consideration of the specific persons involved in it.
In the autumn of 1951, I accompanied Kathleen Raine and W. S. Graham to America, where we gave a series of readings in New York and certain NE States under the guise of ‘Three Younger British Poets’. I returned to England a year later, having first gone on from the States to Vancouver Island BC to visit my parents who at that time were living in retirement there. It was immediately after arriving back in this country that I learnt of the death of Paul Eluard. I had met him again only once since the War, during which his fame and popularity had increased enormously. So had his commitment to the PCF and Stalinism, largely, it seemed to me, as a result of his third marriage. The ‘Elegiac Improvisation’ I wrote after his death was an expression of the admiration of him I had first felt when not yet twenty. Passages of the poem use brief lines imitative of his Poésie ininterrompue; others introduce imagery derived from the kind of French painting he loved and interpreted so well. It refers to him as the great poet of the Resistance that he was commonly supposed to be. It was not until quite recently, on reading Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which contains a bitterly ironic account of Eluard’s inexcusable failure to speak out in defence of his one-time friend the surrealist Zavis Kalandra, who was hanged in Prague in 1950 during the French poet’s visit to the city at the invitation of the Czech authorities, that I fully realized what kind of man he had become at the end of his life. If I had been aware of this incident at the time, and fully understood the way authoritarian politics can transform even so fraternal a poet as Eluard, it would not have been possible (or, at least, I hope not) for me to write the kind of poem that the ‘Elegiac Improvisation’ turned out to be. The poem was intended for recital and I first read it at the Institute of Contemporary Art, then still located in Mayfair; it was later published in the review Botteghe Oscure.
Soon after my return from America, Douglas Cleverdon of the BBC commissioned me to write a work for voices and music for the Third Programme. This turned out to be Night Thoughts, written in a relatively short space of time, and with the exception of the Eluard elegy the only poem of any kind I had been able to write since 1950. It was finally broadcast in December 1955, with music specially composed by Humphrey Searle. By that time I had gone to live in France, and was to spend the summer in Aix-en-Provence, the winter in Paris, for ten consecutive years, except for occasional brief return visits to England. During this period I was incapable of writing a line due to the block, or crampe as the French call it, that had resulted from a long abuse of amphetamines dating from as far back as the beginning of the War. In one of the 50-odd ‘aphorisms’ collected in The Sun at Midnight (edition limited to 350 copies, Enitharmon Press 1970), I discuss this addiction at some length, explaining that amphetamines ‘have powerful and most undesirable side-effects which probably were responsible for reducing my output to th
e strict minimum of work on which a poet’s reputation can plausibly rest’.
The title of the fragment entitled ‘Half-an-Hour’, dedicated to my generous hostess during those years of unproductivity, derives from one of the most mysterious phrases to be found in the Book of Revelation: ‘And there was silence in heaven for the space of half-an-hour.’ It is all that remains of an attempt to break my silence of years by exploring its nature and conditions. ‘Remembering the Dead’ was my only contribution to David Wright’s review X, in which it appeared in 1959. The poem first published in 1970 in Penguin Modern Poets 17, under the optimistic title ‘Part of a Poem in Progress’, now changed to ‘Unfinished Poem from Elsewhere’, had suddenly emerged as though by dictation from the unconscious, unexpected and inexplicable, in 1964, just before the onset of a severe nervous breakdown, as a result of which I had to return permanently to England.
The ‘Three Verbal Sonatinas’ (which conclude the Light Verse section) were written in 1969 when I was convalescing in a psychiatric hospital from a further breakdown as chronic as that of five years previously. Several of the small number of poems produced since my final recovery from a third breakdown and my marriage in 1975 were written as a result of requests from editors. ‘Whales and Dolphins’ was produced for the Greenpeace organization’s enormous anthology Whales A Celebration (Hutchinson 1983). The tribute to Miron Grindea was composed on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, and printed on the cover of a special 45th anniversary number of his Adam International Review (also 1983). Its title is intended to indicate that it is what could be called a ‘verbal square’, consisting of twelve dodecasyllabic lines, or alexandrines, a form I had used the previous year to contain a comment on the Falklands conflict. The latter appeared at the end of a contribution to a compilation called Authors Take Sides on the Falklands. ‘A Sarum Sestina’ was written specially for Satish Kumar’s anthology Learning by Heart, published in 1984 to raise funds for The Small School founded by him in Hartland, near Bideford in Devon. Similarly, ‘Thalassa: The Unspeakable Sea’ was written simultaneously in English and French for the international anthology Thalatta (Hommage à la Mer), published by Editions Internationales Eureditor of Luxemburg on the occasion of the 8th Congress of the World Organization of Poets held in Corfu in 1985, though it did not reach the editor in time to be included in it; the French version (‘Au delà de toute expression’) eventually appeared later that year in no. 35 of the review Phréatique, and the English in Temenos 7. It is dedicated to Mimmo Morina, Secretary General of the World Organization of Poets. Finally, ‘Entrance to a Lane’ resulted from a request for a contribution to the anthology With a Poet’s Eye (Tate Gallery, 1986).
The seventh verset of ‘Thalassa: The Unspeakable Sea’ combines allusions to Prospero’s book of magic spells, to two of the Fragments of Heraclitus, and to Tennyson’s early poem ‘The Kraken’. ‘A Further Frontier’ was inspired by the view to be seen from the North of the isle of Corfu of the frontier dividing mainland Greece from Albania. Greek-hay is a variant of fenugreek, a herbal plant the green of which is distinguishable from that of coniferous foliage. The last lines of the poem derive from the conclusion of Schiller’s lyric Gruppe aus dem Tartarus, set as a lied by Schubert. ‘November in Devon’ contains a reference to an autumn landscape clad in the colours of DPM, the military term for ‘disruptive pattern material’, in other words the camouflage-type stuff of uniforms now worn by troops and guerrillas throughout the entire civilized world.
In addition to those I have already acknowledged throughout these introductory notes, I would like to thank particularly my bibliographer Colin Benford, Alan Clodd of the Enitharmon Press, and Professor Norma Rinsler of King’s College, London; and belatedly, Robin Skelton, whose edition of the first Collected Poems has paved the way for this fuller and more complete edition of my poems from 1932 to 1986.
DAVID GASCOYNE,
Isle of Wight, July 1987
Collected Poems 1988.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to record my deep gratitude for the friendship, unfailing help, kindness and encouragement shown throughout the gestation of this book by the following: Allan Ingram, Anthony Astbury, Colin Benford, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Fraser, Anne Goossens, Jeremy Reed, Anthony Rudolf; Michel Remy and Michèle Duclos who continue to keep Gascoyne’s work alive in France; booksellers James Fergusson, Peter Ellis and Charles Seluzicki; the late Alan Clodd, Yves de Bayser, Michael Hamburger, Peter Jolliffe, Alan Smith, I.D(avid) Edrich and Kathleen Raine.
Stephen Stuart-Smith’s gentle guidance and sympathetic understanding, as always, have been crucial.
I am indebted, too, to Sally Brown and Chris Fletcher, formerly of the British Library Manuscript Department; to Erin O’Neill at the BBC Written Archives Centre; to Melissa Burkhart and Ruth Carruth at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa; to Kevin Repp and Becca Lloyd of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and to Andrew Morris at the Royal Academy of Music Library. Their prompt, patient and friendly response to my numerous queries and requests has been of immense value.
And finally, for the constant support given and time taken, my inadequate thanks to my wife, Pat, and to our daughter Kate and son Mark.
R.S.
POEMS WRITTEN AT SCHOOL
(1929)
STORM
With a mighty rush the wind goes by,
Singing a weird sad prelude of the Soul,
Driving black clouds before the moon,
With its thunder in a mighty roll.
In fitful rush the rain comes streaming down
Filling with water the streets of the old town,
And round the steeple the wild gale howls,
Catching the laughter of fiendish ghouls,
Throwing higher the dreary song
The dreary wild song of the storm.
OCTOBER NIGHT
I stood outside that October night
I stood outside in the dim half light
‘Dark deep clouds the moon half obscure
Clearing the sky a few stars fewer
The Wind that rustles in the leaves
Rises sighing to the eaves.’
I took a breath of the sharp clean air
The Autumn tang was rich and rare
‘A clanging peal breaks forth from the spire
Offering the stars its musical fire
The lawns of the Close, dim white outspread
Are a mist on the sea’ I said.
‘This Autumn is but a stage
A step, on the house of my pilgrimage.’
From ROMAN BALCONY AND OTHER POEMS
(1932)
ROMAN BALCONY
FAR-OFF, palpitating tide!
In the pale light I sit here,
Sad with sin, gazing on the city,
On the yellow waters of the distant Tiber,
On a stone sphinx at the gate of my villa.
A wild pipe-tune climbs through the cold air
From the rain-beaten roses under the balcony,
Like the vast, tumbling cloud that sweeps
Whirling over the faded sky,
Full of the shadow of death.
Far-off, palpitating tide!
There is a fluttering of wings
As a withered petal falls from the trellis,
Creating a swift, fantastic shadow
Across the purple wine within my golden cup.
FADING AVENUES
At my feet, trembling in the wind,
lies a rusty and serrated leaf,
alive with sun-caught moisture,
with a scarlet stem.
Above my head as I stand, cold, dreaming,
a tattered projection of black-spotted leaves
on a branch.
The avenues are fading
and my sight is fading fast as they
for I see but vaguely the figures that pass:
… There is a crimson coat …
The s
ound of the wind is like water; …
(water falling only in dreams,
for the fountain is choked, the fountain is stained,
at its food a few burrs rotting lie).
The sound of the wind is fading,
and fading the sad sound of feet
drifting over the lawns
where grey’s on the sheen of green.
The sound of the wind is fading …
The wind creeps slowly up my spine
and creeps up the boles of the trees.
The trees stand brooding over their disintegration:
The ichor within grows lifeless and cold.
Above them one pine exulting stands
for the green of its foliage never fades.
But the avenues are fading
and the mould of the flower-beds is sour and dark
and the stems of the shrubs are black
with a sudden ignition of leaves at their tips.
New Collected Poems Page 4