‘The title […] is intended to indicate that the poems relate to a period of spiritual death and anticipation of rebirth – of spiritual rebirth and not religious revival – and not only to such a period in the life of an individual, but to the present moment in the history of western civilization as is indicated also by the four brief lines from the French poet, Pierre Jean Jouve, chosen as an epigraph to the sequence’ (which he quoted in French: Le désespoir a des ailes / L’amour a pour aile nacre / Le désespoir / Les sociétés peuvent changer’ / ‘Despair has wings / Love has mother of pearl for wings / Societies can change / Despair’). DG said that the epigraph was added after [my emphasis] writing the eight poems ‘because of the echo they supplied’ (MRUI), p. 124. Benjamin Fondane had introduced him to the work of the philosopher Chestov, who wrote: ‘The abyss is our element. Flung into it […] we sprout wings.’ (Quoted by Brian Merrikin-Hill in Temenos 7, p. 273).
DG was aware that certain readers and critics have assumed that both the title and production of the poems that make up the ‘dark, brooding’ Miserere have been influenced by Georges Roualt’s series of prints also known as Miserere. This is not so, as he explained in a talk he gave in Piccadilly at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1983, the subject of which was the importance of painting in his life and work. ‘Two other painters, however, probably did condition the imagery of at least two of the eight poems: the anonymous Provençal master responsible for that superb and unique work known as the Pietà d’Avignon, now in the Louvre, where the poem “Pieta” is concerned; and the image of the Christ of Revolution and of Poetry that is evoked in “Ecce Homo”; the last poem in the sequence, was undoubtedly influenced by my having been presented in 1938 with a folder of black and white reproductions of the Isenheim Altarpiece of Grünewald, a work hitherto unknown to me’ (pp. 2–3 of eight pages of A4 typescript). The reproductions of the triptych were given him shortly after his return from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War in 1936 by Christian Zervos (chief editor of Cahiers d’Art), who had published them in his periodical. ‘It is, above all, the central panel to which these texts refer [from left to right: the Incarnation of the Son of God; the Annunciation and the Resurrection, where the motif of the Open Tomb is visible; the triumph of the Ascension and of the suspension of bodily weight]’, DG told Remy (MRUI), p. 124. The Altarpiece is a complex polyptych constructed on three levels: ‘The Shrine’, ‘The Middle Position’ to which DG refers, and ‘The Closed Position’.
He told Remy that he had always had a liking for foreign language or Latin titles: ‘Certain of these titles [in Miserere] refer to particular sections of the religious service, but in a very loose manner (Kyrie, Sanctus, De Profundis). These texts were written in the order in which they are presented, as far as I can recall.’ What is particularly interesting is the following comment: ‘The basic idea was to compose a sequence of ten texts [my emphasis].’
The completed sequence of eight was first published in Poetry in Wartime, edited by Tambimuttu (Faber & Faber, 1942), pp. 67–73.
Tenebrae
In Poetry London, Vol. 1, No. 2 (April 1939) this poem was entitled ‘The Last Hour’, and line 2 read: ‘Has consummated the stigmata and the veil’.
See DG’s ‘metaphysical’ journal entry for 5.III.40 (2.30 a.m.), (CJS), p. 293. On the same page he quotes from a poem by Jean Wahl: ‘We are at the lowest point in the universe, unable to climb back up’ (my translation).
Pieta
The poem was inspired by that visit DG made to the Louvre in 1938 and his vivid and acute response to a version of the Pietà, ‘that amazing French primitive of the Avignon school […].’ See the journal entry for 31 October 1938 (CJS), p. 200. First published in Seven, No. 6 (August 1939), p. 21.
Ex Nihilo
DG had written in his first letter to Benjamin Fondane, 11.VII.37, about the complex relationship between despair, destruction and creativity, and addressed the notion of creatio ex nihilo: ‘You see I, no more than you, hold that despair (or rather the negation of despair) is an end in itself. A phrase that I found in Chestov expresses my ambition “Creation Ex Nihilo”. In the destructive element immerse said Conrad, that is what one must do before being able to create, obviously. But most people who would agree with this, do not understand how absolute, how extreme this really is. One can strip oneself and yet not be naked. I now hold the opinion that there is no creative work which is not, for its creator, the result of the need to find some protection against the powers of destruction, a shield against affliction. A work of art should grow like one’s skin in response to the hostility of nature. To believe this is the same as believing in the cry which arises from us in spite of ourselves is it not?’ (From ‘Meetings with Benjamin Fondane’, translated by Robin Waterfield, in Selected Prose 1934–1996, op. cit., pp. 137–138. See, too, Gascoyne’s journal entry for 22.VIII.39 (CJS), p. 255.
Ecce Homo
On its first appearance, in Poetry London, Vol. 1, No. 3 (November 1940), and later in Poetry in Wartime, this poem was entitled ‘Miserere’, and the last three stanzas were in italics.
‘Line 13, “And we must never sleep during that time”, is a direct quotation from Pascal, number 553 precisely of the Pensées, about the Mystery of Jesus’ (MRUI), p. 124.
In each of the final three stanzas DG directly addresses the ‘Christ of Revolution and of Poetry’, a line which has developed a particular resonance since the first publication of the poem, but which also contributed to his expulsion by Breton from the Surrealist Group after the war when he returned to Paris. DG records how, revisiting ‘the Surrealist group’s Montmartre meeting-place, I found myself facing a severe Breton at the head of the communal café table: “I am told that you have become not only a Communist” (meaning Stalinist rather than Trotskyite) “but a Catholic”, he announced to me in his iciest manner’ (CJS), p. 393. On p. 395 DG refers to ‘the refusal of Breton and his followers to realize that a recognition of the all-important power of love, combining Eros and Agape, is inseparable from the discovery of the philosopher’s stone, the corner-stone of a truly human society’. See Brian Keeble’s insightful essay, ‘“Whose Is This Horrifying Face?” Reading David Gascoyne’s Miserere’, in Temenos Academy Review 15 (2012), pp. 153–65.
METAPHYSICAL POEMS
There are two epigraphs to the Metaphysical Poems, the first taken from ‘The Book of the Dead’, from the culture of ancient Egypt, the second from a text of Chinese wisdom, ‘The Book of the Open Flower’.
Jouve’s important essay, ‘The Unconscious, Spirituality, Catastrophe’, the preface to his collection of poems, Sueur de Sang (1935), was translated by DG at the end of the 1930s (published in Poetry London, Vol. 1, No. 4 (January-February 1941) and clearly provides his alternative heading, ‘Metapsychological’, for the poems collected in this section II: ‘Incalculable is the extension of our sense of the tragic that is brought us by metapsychology’. I have inserted Concert of Angels and Elsewhere here where they belong. The title of the latter appears in Add. 62947 as ‘Concert of Angels (Grünewald)’.
Inferno
A reproduction in colour of Graham Sutherland’s powerful gouache for this poem, dated 1978, appears in Poetry London/Apple Magazine, Vol.1, no.1, ed. Tambimuttu (Editions Poetry London, 1979), facing p. 70. Sutherland’s illustration for Mountains was included in Tambimuttu. Bridge Between Two Worlds, op. cit., between pages 76 and 77. The artist’s ten images for Poems 1937–42 may be found in Robert Fraser’s biography, Night Thoughts.The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne (Oxford University Press, 2012), plate 18, between pp. 236 and 237.
Lowland
The version first published in Delta (April 1938), p. 18, was more than lightly modified by DG for inclusion in Poems 1937–42:
Shadow was violet and brown among the rains,
Among the rain-logged tombs. The wet fields ran
Together in the middle of the plain; and there were heard
Incessantly the thud of violent horses, and
a cry,
More long and lamentable as the rain increased,
Which came from beyond.
O sumptuary
Appeal of our mortality out of the slow decline
Of our dark day! Among the lowlands of despair
Build us a savage and enduring monument!
Winter Garden
A direct reference to the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. DG told Remy that the poem was written in Paris after he returned from a Montmartre nightclub to his attic flat in the rue de la Bûcherie at about 5 a.m., at the very moment when dawn was breaking and ‘I was walking alongside the Luxembourg Garden which becomes this winter garden’ (MRUI), p. 125.
The Fortress
‘This is a text on the subject of Eros and Thanatos’ (MRUI), p. 125.
I.M. Benjamin Fondane
Written in England, said DG, ‘shortly before Benjamin Fondane was arrested by the Nazis and taken to Birkenau where he was gassed. It is thus, a premonitory poem because I didn’t learn of Fondane’s death until after the war’ (MRUI), p. 125. ‘Fondane was hostile to any fixed ideas; he always wanted to question everything. The state of certainty of which I speak at the end of the poem, is that of serenity, not a state of total immobility, but of accepting things as they are, of the necessity of evil if, on the other hand, there is God – “to care and not to care” Eliot would say – the idea of a paradise where everything is marvellous, is intolerable and would be a veritable source of boredom’, op. cit., pp. 125–6.
Mozart: Sursum Corda
First published in Seven, No. 4 (Summer 1939), p. 33. It is difficult not to see here an echo of Jouve in his poem, ‘Mozart’ in Les Noces (1931). For Jouve, ‘The only human parallel to this rarified emotion [the particular joy of spiritual illumination] is […] the music of Mozart,’ records Margaret Callender in her The Poetry of Pierre Jean Jouve (Manchester University Press, 1965), pp. 86–87. ‘and he sees in its “divine gaîté” a purity that raises it on another plane from our own, [stressing] the uniqueness of the music.’ An alternative version, without the dedication to Rainier, appears in a signed typescript in one of two folders in the Royal Music Academy Library (See Editor’s Preface):
Filters the sunlight from the knife-bright wind
And rarifies the rumour-burdened air
The all-receptive heart in pure hands upheld
Towards the sostenuto of the sky.
Supernal voices, flood the ear of clay
And break through the dense skull: reveal
The immaterial world concealed
By mortal deafness and the screen of sense:
World of transparency and utmost flight,
And world within the world: beyond our speech
To tell what equinoxes of the absolute
The spirit ranges in its long upward release
Cavatina
In its first printing in Delta (April 1938), p. 8, line 3 began: ‘Brutality of ecchymosis …’; line 16 read: ‘Yet through disaster some transcendent melody’; the last line began: ‘To carry starwards …’
Artist (later Philosophical Artisan)
‘The sense of the word “artist” here,’ says DG, ‘is that which is used in alchemy, that is, the author of the Work. The text was written the day after these dream visions, each of which served as a basis for the successive fragments of the poem. I tried to reproduce as faithfully as possible the way the episodes unfolded and linked together’ (MRUI), p. 126.
Legendary Fragment, Eve, Venus Androgyne
DG pointed out that Legendary Fragment is ‘a mixture of the kind of mysticism and sexuality that recurs sometimes in my poetry’. Of Eve and Venus Androgyne he says: ‘I think that these texts must have helped me express my nature which is deeply bi-sexual’ (MRUI), p. 126. His own views on his sexuality are expressed in the Collected Journals in a long entry in 1938 following several sessions of psychoanalysis with Blanche Reverchon, Jouve’s wife (CJS), p. 346, but he had previously attempted a case history headed ‘Myself’, dated 18th January 1937, that remained unpublished until my edition of April: a Novella [1937], (Enitharmon Press, 2000), pp. 111–112 which included this psychic profile in the Appendix.
Venus Androgyne
First published in Delta (1938), p. 14, where lines 3–4 read: ‘The breast is female and the fist is male / The red-eyed sphinx …’. In the second stanza, lines 10–15 read:
The gentle athlete flank,
That sacrificial blood may flow,
Atone
The secret heresy of human seed:
The twin spasmodic tides of our desire
Incarnate in this third apostasy.
DG told Remy that the myth of Androgyne is ‘one of the poles of Surrealism’ (MRUI), p. 126.
Amor Fati
‘The expression must have come from my reading of Fondane then probably of Chestov. It relates to “the need to submit oneself to destiny, to one’s own destiny, the idea that each of us must accept his own sexuality”. I admit that this doesn’t represent a very optimistic view of sexuality’ (MRUI), pp. 126–7.
Post-Mortem
Add. 56045. First published in Despair Has Wings, op. cit., p. 182. The poem was ‘written under the influence of Jouve’, and planned as part of a sequence, ‘Cortège and Hymn of Death’, which has not survived. DG grimaced in what seemed almost like distaste when I showed him it.
The Fault
Also published in Delta (1938) where lines 5–7 read as follows:
An hour in the condition of our blood
And not known how a sacred wound and black
And ever more irreparable.
DG’s comments to Arta Lucescu-Boutcher are enlightening: ‘The theme of the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man, the nostalgia of the origins, is the fundamental theme of European literature […]. The Garden of Eden is just a symbol for the pure state’: ‘Interview with David Gascoyne on Benjamin Fondane’ (typescript dated February 1992), p. 8. Earlier in that interview, he had remarked:
‘To me, man and God are one; man and God were one; the source of being. And religion is turning back to this source. After the disaster which man called “la chute” – the Fall, this pure being (that is, man and God together) no longer existed. Religion is thus binding back to the pure being’ (p. 3). He explained that ‘When we refer to Original Sin we are referring to the idea of breaking away from the source of being. The word “sin” means “separation” – which is the result of breaking away,’ op. cit.
The Descent and The Open Tomb
DG remarked to Remy that he’d never met anyone who properly understands the sense of these two poems. ‘They refer to the Prophecy of the Great Pyramid in which I’ve never wholly believed, but it is something that you could call a vision of the artist, an aesthetic symbol, which was very popular at the beginning of this century.’
‘According to this myth,’ says DG, ‘the Great Pyramid contains a passage, a double corridor [“shaft” in the poem]: one section descends and the other rises towards the surface. The descent is measured from the entrance in “pyramid inches” (slightly different from the British inch), each of which corresponds to a year; the length of this descent thus corresponds to the time which separates the moment when the pyramid was built and the moment of reincarnation, of the death and Resurrection of Christ. If we calculate it, we are at this moment in the ascending section. It should be made clear, too, that the pyramid was not designed to be the tomb of a pharaoh but to be a temple of initiation’ (MRUI), p. 127. The initiate ‘must climb the stairs and lie down in the tomb which wasn’t looked upon as a sarcophagus but as a bed; he was, perhaps, rendered unconscious by a drug’ (MDC), p. 36, then ‘plunged into a state of suspended animation, hypnotized, if you like. After having spent three days and three nights in the Great Pyramid, the initiate left the illuminated open tomb. Reading behind all that, mankind descends towards sleep and death and what follows in the progressive illumination of the soul’ (MRUI), p. 127. The poem, The Descent, ‘is
a kind of fusion of Egyptian and Christian mythologies: as far as I know, the Egyptians didn’t have angels in their religion …’ op. cit. ‘In Egyptian mythology, as in the fundamentally Christian concept, it’s a question of death and resurrection. I’m trying to show that we pass through what Carlyle calls Palingenesis’ (MDC), p. 36.
DG explained that The Open Tomb isn’t ambiguous but has a double meaning, as is frequent in English poetry, and he references Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (MDC), p. 36. He commented that Piranesi’s imagery continues to fascinate him, how the painter’s Prisons ‘represents the unconscious, the open tomb’, op. cit., p. 39.
Duclos commented: ‘Your Christ seems to me sometimes a bit pagan, and appears to be identified with the sun.’ DG replied: ‘Yes, I attach great importance to Anaktaton, the heretical pharaoh who instituted the religion of the sun which, on his death, was suppressed’ op. cit., p. 38. His uncollected poem Oleograph, from 1934, confirms the accuracy of this, with the emphasis on the sun and its association with ancient Egypt.
The Plummet Heart
Norman Cameron, poet and translator, and DG’s close friend whom he saw almost every weekend for a period during the 1930s, introduced him to the poetry of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, and to that of Hart Crane. In 1938 DG bought the first English edition of The Collected Poems of Hart Crane, edited by Waldo Frank (London: Boriswood, November 1938), which had just been published. ‘Before long I knew most of the poems by heart’ (‘Anniversary Epistle to Allen [Ginsberg]’, published in Kanrecki: A Tribute to Allen Ginsberg, Part 2, edited by Bill Morgan (New York: Lospecchio Press, 1986). While in Paris that year he commented in his journal: ‘Have been reading rather a lot recently: among other things the horrifying life of Hart Crane’ (CJS), 31.XI.38, p. 234. He handwrote his own poem with its punning title ‘The Plummet Heart (for Hart Crane)’1 on the front free endpaper of his copy, signing and dating it ‘David Gascoyne 27.V.39’ [See APPENDIX B]. He used the first words of the fourth line in the fifth quatrain of Crane’s ‘Recitative’. There are minor variations in the printed version in the punctuation of lines 4 and 11. In his copy of Crane’s Collected Poems, ‘Cape Hatteras’, Part IV of The Bridge (pp. 51–56) is annotated in pencil by DG, with directions for reading the poem aloud. The date is significant because ‘The Plummet Heart’, unaccountably, was not included in Poems 1937–42 (1943), though it had appeared in print for the first time in 1942 in Poets of Tomorrow 2 (London: The Hogarth Press), then not until twenty-three years later in Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1965). I am grateful to the late Peter Jolliffe of Ulysses Bookshop in Bloomsbury for showing me this copy and for providing photocopies of the pages mentioned.
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