He commented to Duclos that ‘The poem on Dalí isn’t a Dalian transcription [of images] but a homage’ (MDC), p. 122.
‘And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis’
‘The first authentically automatic poem that I wrote, following the orthodox Surrealist technique.’ (MDC), p. 21.
See Michel Remy’s brief illuminating analysis of the poem in his On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain (Carcanet Press, 2013), p. 8.
SURREALIST AND OTHER POEMS (1936–1938)
The Entrance to that valley stands alone
First published in a limited edition on the occasion of DG’s 85th birthday on 10 October 2001. As I wrote then in a note on the text, this ‘is a transitional poem on the cusp of that conscious thrust, following his growing dissatisfaction with Surrealism, to find a different kind of language. It seems to anticipate that used in the four original poems interpolated in Hölderlin’s Madness (1938), yet in the later stanzas of this poem Surrealist imagery echoes the speaker’s disjunction.’ Add. 56043.
Phenomena
A prose poem ‘influenced by the texts of Jennings and Charles Madge’ (MRUI), p.123.
The Very Image
DG emphasized that the window is the subject which struck him most forcibly in Magritte’s work (MRUI), p. 122, and explained that when, early in the 1980s, he read this poem at the Tate Gallery, he thought it would be interesting to give a title of a Magritte painting to each of the six stanzas accordingly: 1 ‘The Human Condition’; 2 ‘The Charms of a Landscape’; 3 ‘The Man of the Sea’; 4 ‘Memory of a Journey’; 5 ‘The Reckless Sleeper’; 6 ‘The Captives’. ‘They are not actual Magritte paintings; I simply wanted to indicate some paintings that he would have been able to produce’, (MDC), p. 22.
The Great Day
Prefaced on publication in Janus (January 1936) by the following, in parenthesis: ‘[Simulation of Paranoia: Acute Mania, Delirium of Interpretation, Delusions of Grandeur.]’. Gascoyne had purchased a copy of L’Immaculée Conception in Paris in December 1933 and brought it back to London with him. Before that ‘momentous’ first visit to the French capital, he had studied the translated texts, which made up the ‘Surrealism and Madness’ section of the September 1932 issue of This Quarter. These included André Breton’s article ‘The Treatment of Mental Disease and Surrealism’, and passages from three of the five essays by Breton and Eluard which form the section ‘The Possessions’ in The Immaculate Conception: ‘Simulation of Mental Disability Essayed’; ‘Simulation of General Paralysis Essayed’; ‘Simulation of the Delirium of Interpretation Essayed’. DG told Lucien Jenkins that it was ‘a very brief period in my life belonging to the Surrealist Movement, writing Surrealist poetry. I disliked the label “Surrealist Poet” which was hung around my neck for years and years, long after I had stopped writing automatically.’ (LJI), p. 23. Asked by Michel Remy about the importance of Surrealism, he replied: ‘It’s very great. Never for a moment have I regretted taking part in the movement, but I could not have remained in it for long, like many others who left it, with the exception, indeed, of [Benjamin] Péret …I think the spirit of Surrealism is eternal’, (MRT) pp. 270–71. ‘I had to begin by separating myself from Surrealism in order to develop what was in me’, op. cit., p. 270.
The Symptomatic World
Five ‘Fragments’, first published in October 1936, pp. 113–115, were followed by two further ‘fragments’ that same year in the next issue of Contemporary Poetry and Prose, pp. 134–135. These seven sections were presented together for the first time in Early Poems (Greville Press, 1980) with this statement: ‘This sequence originally contained XII poems, but the remaining five were never printed, and the MS is now lost.’ I have seen no evidence to support the existence of the missing five. The earlier section, ‘At the age of nine months I entered the world’ from Janus, No. 1 (January 1936), became the first, when the eight appeared complete in Collected Poems 1988.
Eau Sifflé
DG inscribed a copy of his second book of poems ‘A Georges Hugnet, grand amitié toujours, David Gascoyne, October 15th 1936.’ On the rear inside blank page he handwrote the poem first published in 1992 in Poésie 92, No. 41 (Paris). This copy of Man’s Life Is This Meat is part of the Gabrielle Keiller Collection now in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Hugnet’s comments in his long contribution, ‘1870–1936’, in Surrealism, edited by Herbert Read (Faber & Faber, June 1936), represent a useful attempt to characterize Surrealist poetry which is ‘in opposition to the usual conception of poetry’. Surrealist poetry, he suggests, can be ‘roughly divided into the automatic text, the dream narrative, and the poem properly so called’ (p. 214).
Goût du Jour, Cafard, Récupération
Recovered from a 1930s notebook and first published in Poetry Review, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Spring 1996).
Fool’s Paradise
Add. 56040. First published in Maggie O’Sullivan, David Gascoyne, Barry MacSweeney, Etruscan Reader III (Etruscan Press, 1997).
Symptomatic World
Add. 56040. First published in Etruscan Reader III, op. cit., in 1997.
Elegiac Stanzas In Memory of Alban Berg
The first draft, Adds. 56041, 56043 is in four sections I, II, III and Elegiac Stanzas IV. The second draft in two sections is in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. First published in Despair Has Wings. Selected Poems of Pierre Jean Jouve, translated by David Gascoyne, edited by Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon Press, 2007), pp. 168–174.
‘Chorus’ to Procession in the Private Sector
DG’s Surrealist film scenario, ‘The Wrong Procession’ (1936) was first published from a notebook in the British Library by Michel Remy in David Gascoyne, ou l’urgence de l’inexprimé (1984). In his Author’s Note, DG indicated that he ‘had originally intended a Surrealist-type poem to be incorporated as a spoken commentary at a certain juncture of the film, but I do not think I was ever able to produce a poetic text suitable for this purpose.’ I found the poem in 1992 out of place in the same notebook, and it was published in 1998, together with the renamed Procession to the Private Sector, in Selected Prose 1934–1996, pp. 357–72, 460–62.
The Moon Over London
From notebook 1937–8. First published in The Independent in 1996, and in Nineties Poetry: Winter 1995–96 (Lansdowne Press).
An Unfinished, Post-Auden Pre-War Proem (for J[oan] S[cully]
Originally ‘Proem’ in a 1930s notebook and retitled by DG for publication in the London Review of Books, 25 January, 1996.
His ‘Notes’ survive: ‘Proem’: This is to be a long poem, of some fifty or more six-line stanzas, on
the pattern
-------------------x
--------------------
---------o terminations
-------------------x indicate
-------------------half-rhymes
--------o
The title implies the tradition of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. Theme of the poem is a young man addressing a young woman on the life of their times which they are to share with one another; an introduction to modern existence, sketching in the basis of an attitude, a philosophy, a morality, and taking account of all the facts, outward and inward, which are likely to mould the sensitive today. The intimate and the public world. Love and death as they appear in the light of contemporary historic upheaval.
Introductory
But think: have we filled our map?
This summer evening’s like your country dream.
The City’s facts
The Moral Journey
The Moral Journey
The Moral Journey
The Social World
The Moral Journey
The Moral Journey
Three Verbal Objects
Included as untitled poems in the catalogue Surrealist Objects and Poems for the exhibition at the London Gallery which opened in November 1937. The three prose poems were posthumously dedicated to the author of a series of
‘Reports’ and short texts, Humphrey Jennings, of whom Gascoyne spoke to me warmly. They first came into contact in the mid-1930s through Surrealism and Mass-Observation. ‘I must have been one of the last people to see Jennings, apart from the film technicians, just before he died [in a bizarre accident when he slipped and fell on a Greek island, while filming in 1950]. “I know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” he told me, “I’m going to paint”.’
‘Transparency of the vegetable world’
From a notebook dated 1937–8. First published in Etruscan Reader III, op. cit., 1997.
Phantasmagoria
In a prefatory note to a selection of his poems in Poets of Tomorrow, Third Selection (Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 25, DG wrote, ‘“Phantasmagoria” was written ‘primarily as a divertissement, […] the first Surrealist poem I have produced since I decided a few years ago, to abandon the “Surrealist” technique and general approach to poetry. It will probably be my last poem of this sort.’ He added a final paragraph, dissociating himself once again at that time from Surrealism: ‘I feel that poetry of the “magical” category – product of sheer imagination, unrestricted by pure design and untempered by the wisdom of disillusionment – may be more stimulating, more immediately satisfying to write; but in the long run is probably less rewarding, less consoling, than that resulting from conflict between the instinctive poetic impulse and the impersonal discipline, the unadorned sobriety of realistic “sense”.’
HÖLDERLIN’S MADNESS (1938)
In 1937, DG contributed his only published short story, ‘Death of an Explorer’ to the anthology Under Thirty, edited by Michael Harrison (London: Rich & Cowan Ltd.), with an autobiographical preface of four paragraphs. In the third he wrote: ‘I no longer have any desire to be connected with any particular group, ideology, or programme, but wish to be entirely free to develop my own individual preoccupations, which centre round the inner problem of modern man: the necessity for greater consciousness of himself: as a social being, as a psychological being and as a spiritual being – a problem too great to be perceived from a single, fixed point of view’, p. 172.
His journal entry for 24.IX.37 reads: ‘Until I wrote Hölderlin’s Madness a few days ago, I had scarcely written poetry of any kind for well over a year.’ He continues: ‘Anything of the kind I may write from now on will be entirely different: no more themeless improvisation, no more autonomous lyricism, no more “pure” effect. I want depth, solidarity, experience. Poetry that will say something definite. Emotion, a raised voice, but clear and coherent speech’ (CJS), p. 129.
On 30.V.38, DG noted that the eight months’ period in Paris from August 1937 until the end of March 1938 had ‘brought a definite enrichment and an approfondissement I did not have before, – a greater understanding of solitude, poverty and despair, and of the nature of human relationships. I wrote Hölderlin’s Madness and “Despair Has Wings”’ (CJS), p. 156.
Remy questioned DG in the Temenos interview: ‘You say that to write creates the possibility of danger.’ The reply is particularly relevant: ‘Yes, that is the theme of one of Heidegger’s essential commentaries on Hölderlin, who referred to writing poetry as “the most innocent of all occupations” but designated language on the other hand: “most dangerous of possessions”. To create is to take risks. Hölderlin wrote that “God is near and difficult to grasp but danger strengthens the rescuing power” (opening of the poem “Patmos”), and it is true that a hard winter will produce a good harvest. That seems pitiless, Neitzschean: perhaps, but the danger lies in that as a writer one sets in motion a renewal of vision, and one can come to grief.’ (MRT), p. 270.
DG had no German, and his own versions were ‘made with the help of two German friends who were living in Paris at the time’, as he explained in his contribution, ‘A Paris, en 1937 …’ to L’Autre (juin 1992), Jouve number, p. 11. In a presentation copy of Hölderlin’s Madness from the author to John Arlott, inscribed in 1944, DG wrote: ‘Entirely superceded [sic] by more recently published works, such as Michael Hamburger’s and J.B. Leishmann’s [sic] authoritative versions. The awful truth is, you see, that I don’t really know a word of German, & all I ever understood of Hölderlin – if anything – was acquired solely through the exercise of sheer, or mere, intuition …’
His Introduction to Hölderlin’s Madness (J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1938), pp. 1–14, was reprinted in Selected Prose 1934–1996, (London: Enitharmon Press, 1998), pp. 155–162. At the end of his preface there is an important note: ‘The poems which follow are not a translation of selected poems of Hölderlin, but a free adaptation, introduced and linked together by entirely original poems. The whole constitutes what may perhaps be regarded as a persona’ (p. 162).
Orpheus in the Underworld
Gwendolyn Murphy included the poem in her anthology The Modern Poet (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1938) and DG told her that ‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ was ‘from a new series of religious – or “metaphysical” – poems on the theme of Death’. This poem, he said, ‘is not meant to be a transcription of the Orpheus legend but an allegory of the spiritual condition of the twentieth-century poet’ […] and ‘refers to the poet Hölderlin exiled to the underworld of insanity.’ At the same time it has the above general reference ‘to the poet in the world of today’ (p. 202).
POEMS 1937–42 (1943)
In his journal entry for 12 September 1939, DG had recorded his intention to write to T.S. Eliot ‘to try to make him come to a final decision about the collection [of his poems] that T.S. Eliot is supposed to be considering for Fabers’ (CJS), p. 272. Eliot rejected the poems. ‘He said,’ DG told me with a smile in 1998, ‘that they “lacked sufficient objective correlativity”.’ Eliot also decided against publishing Kathleen Raine’s first collection of poems, returning the manuscript to her. Some years later, she recalled in her autobiographical The Land Unknown (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975, p. 156), Eliot admitted that he had had afterthoughts about both younger poets: ‘Another mistake I made was over David Gascoyne,’ he told her.
A note by DG to the first edition (and subsequent second and third impressions, 1944 and 1948) of Poems 1937–42, explains that:
‘The poems in this collection were originally planned as two separate ensembles: “The Open Tomb” (1937–39) and “The Conquest of Defeat” (1939–42); but it has now seemed expedient to combine the two under the present title, and to rearrange the whole order of the poems so as to present them here in five main groups, roughly classifiable as follows: (1) Religious poems; (2) metaphysical (or “meta-psychological”) poems; (3) a longer poem; (4) poems on themes of a “personal” nature; (5) poems of time and place.’
Graham Sutherland’s eight designs for Poems 1937–42
DG’s illuminating description of the drawings (gouache, coloured chalks and inks) may be found in his contribution to Tambimuttu: Bridge Between Two Worlds, edited by Jane Williams (London: Peter Owen, 1989), pp.113–15. Equally as interesting is Sutherland’s own attempt in a handwritten letter dated Feb. 1st 1945, to reply to a correspondent’s query about how the artist had set about making the drawings for DG’s collection. I have retained his underlinings. ‘Firstly, I don’t really believe that poetry should be illustrated, unless by the poet himself, or at least by somebody who thinks very much in the same way as the poet does himself. Therefore the drawings must not actually illustrate the poems; they must merely try to give an equivalent in terms of drawing to the feeling & mood of the poems. I decided to do a full page drawing for each section:
No (1) Religious. This is the only drawing which has in any way an illustrative motive. The units derive from the lines ‘The Rock-hewn tomb. There is no more Regeneration in the stricken sun’; but it is a mood which pervades all these religious poems. In the sky a hooded stricken sun. The hooded sun was used in Byzantine paintings of the crucifixion to express the stricken elements of the sky. The jagged lines in the foreground – blood: a feeling of silence and emptiness.
(2) Meta
physical. The science which investigates the first principles of nature &. Thought. Therefore something of a primitive nature & something suggestive of thought. In my drawing a mysterious rock-like figure, half-human, shrouded: the flames emanating from the head are intended to be a symbol of thought. Ο This form at R.H. & repeated in the figure is an ancient symbol of the soul. Ʌ
(3) Elegiac. This should speak for itself. Song of mourning. Cromlech-like rocks: suggesting the tombstone; above: the thorns of life. Below: the reverie of the tomb.
(4) Personal. Perhaps the most obscure drawing. Idea: intimacy and intensity: symbol; a curved branch of thorn. The small figure on the branch perhaps has the gift in personal relationships, so enviable, of walking between thorns: i.e. the gift of nursing his friendships & avoiding the thorns of enmity.
(5)Time & Place. What suggests time? The sun & moon. What suggests place most fundamentally? Something immovable: stones: monoliths. What eats away place? Time. Therefore here are two monoliths: their tops eaten away symbolically by time i.e the sun & moon.
(6) The cover. The poet’s pen, ablaze with black flame (hotter than white flame: look at the sun, close your eyes & you can see a black sun transfixes the earth (pointed mountains with long shadows).
(7) Back cover. The objects are moths. The circle is not an apple, but a huge sun. The idea: Tragedy (for these are in the main tragic poems) symbolized by moths attracted by the light (sun) but unable to look at it. They are covering their heads with their arms … they fly above a barren landscape, desert-like: (more cactus-like plant L.H.).’
I’m most grateful to Marcus Williamson for sending me a copy of this letter.
RELIGIOUS POEMS
Miserere
On Sunday 29 May 1949, DG broadcast ‘A Selection from his poetry made by the author’ on the BBC Third Programme. In his introduction to the ‘octet of poems’, Miserere, with which the selection began, he explained:
New Collected Poems Page 33