The Three Stars, A Prophecy, Epode (initially ‘The Prophetic Mouth’)
Termed ‘crisis poems’ by DG, and written like Artist on II.IX.39. According to the poet The Three Stars ‘refers to the Three Wise Men, but more than anything, it represents the very simple application of dialectic in a spiritual sense’ (MRUI), p. 128.
Epode
DG did not recall precisely what ‘gave birth to this image, but the main theme is certainly that of the oracle which etymologically comes from the mouth. But I also had in mind the enormous statue of Pharoah or a photograph of Memnon, or even the immense statue commissioned by Rameses II in Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”’ (MRUI), p. 128.
PERSONAL POEMS
The epigraph to the Personal Poems comprises two quotations from Marcel Jouhandeau whose work had interested DG very much before the two writers met. ‘He has written some beautiful texts, like Jeunesse sous l’Occupation, or Monsieur Godeau Intime which I associated then with the problem of the condition of the artist,’ he told Remy (MRUI), p. 128.
‘The poems of this last section reflect civilian experience of the early years of the war’, he said. He found an affinity in Sutherland’s last drawing with some of Paul Nash’s wartime paintings: ‘the chalky quality of a dead moon, the desolation of Nash’s dead sea of crashed planes,’ op. cit., pp. 114–5.
Sonnet: From Morn to Mourning
Published as ‘A Sonnet – Morning’ in New Road (1943).
The Fabulous Glass
With regard to the lines, ‘A Peacock, which lit up the glass / By opening his Fan of Eyes’, DG acknowledged that the peacock comes from alchemy: ‘I’m convinced that alchemical symbols are produced in the collective unconscious’ (MRUI), p. 128.
Camera Obscura
First published as ‘The Projections of Desire’ in the polyglot bi-monthly Agonía, Revista literaria, No. 8, Julio – Septiembre (Buenos Aires, 1941), pp. 82–83. This title was included in the planned collection The Conquest of Defeat: Poems 1939–40, in the second section, ‘Personal and Confessional Poems’, of three sequences. The poem would seem to belong to a group alongside Legendary Fragment, Eve, Venus Androgyne and Amor Fati, and confronts sexual ambivalence.
Another poem with the title ‘Camera Obscura’ exists in draft form in Add. 56045 (1940–44): ‘Documentary Poem (Experimental Text), Plan of contents: Documentary poem / Phenomena / The Lion’s Mane / Extension of Reality’ / Mirror – Fugue / Enigmatic Communication / Soma / The Great Day.’ The first section begins: ‘Reverie made up of a sequence of unco-ordinated bestial and archaic elements. Emerges gradually from a tight mucous-coloured “atmospheric” sheath situated somewhere at the centre of the partially-concealed zone of Secondary Consciousness (Accompanied during later stages of development by occasional sub-luminous vibrations and a certain amount of intermittent auditory disturbance in the higher registers).’
The Sacred Hearth
Dedicated to George Barker, one of DG’s closest friends in the 1930s and 1940s, and after. For a full treatment of their friendship, see The Fire of Vision: George Barker and David Gascoyne, edited and introduced by Roger Scott (Tragara Press for Enitharmon, 1996). Gascoyne told the publisher and bookseller Alan Clodd that he couldn’t understand why this visionary poem was not included in Poems 1937–42. The basis of the poem is DG’s experience ‘one night when I had just left George Barker’s house for only a few moments’ (MRUI), p. 133.
An Elegy. Roger Roughton (1916–1941)
First published as ‘In Memoriam’ in Today’s New Poets Resurgam Books, n.d., 1941?), then as ‘Elegy’ in Poems of This War by Younger Poets (Cambridge University Press, 1942), pp. 37–38.
Roger Roughton, DG’s senior by one month, gassed himself in his birthplace, 70 Wellington Road, in ‘that sordid city’, Dublin. See my article with DG, ‘Roughton, Roger Edmund Heude’, for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). They first met during the winter of 1933–4 in the famous left-wing Parton Street Bookshop in Holborn, London, where they were introduced by the proprietor David Archer. Shortly afterwards, DG visited Roughton in Hampstead where he was living with his half-sister and his mother, with whom relations were strained. Eventually Roughton moved to share DG’s small flat in Southwark for a short period (CJS), pp. 345–48. The latter stressed his friend’s utter despair; he told me that for Roughton the last straw was the betrayal of Czechoslovakia by Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement: ‘Seeing the world’s damnation week by week / Grow more and more inevitable’. The closing lines of the sixth and last stanza refer to a Surrealist prose poem, ‘The Journey’, published by Roughton in his review Contemporary Poetry and Prose No. 8 (December 1936), pp. 152–54, in which a child journeys through a large park on the back of a huge Saint Bernard whose legs have been broken: ‘that lonely child […] was borne / Slowly away into the utmost dark’. Several of DG’s poems and translations were published in Roughton’s review.
Fête
‘This is the direct transcription of an experience following a long walk along the canal Saint-Martin […] in the spring of 1938 a short time after I had moved to the rue de la Bûcherie’ (MRUI), p. 130.
Chambre d’Hôtel
‘It’s the direct transcription of a personal experience with Bent von Müllen, a young Dane whom I knew then. It happened in the hotel in which I was living in the rue de la Bûcherie in Paris after August 1937. I have dated this experience as July 27 1938 in my Journal 1937– 1939’ (MRUI), p. 130. See (CJS), pp. 165–66. Earlier, on II.V.38, DG had written in French of his love affair (CJS), pp. 153–155. He was to learn of von Müllen’s death after the war, but his account (CJS, p. 397) differs from that of his biographer, Robert Fraser, who managed to discover the precise circumstances of von Müllen’s murder in Denmark under Nazi occupation: Night Thoughts, op. cit., pp. 210–211.
Jardin du Palais Royal
Dedicated to von Müllen, ‘my friendship with whom was closer to my ideal than that with anyone else I ever met’ (CJS), p. 370.
Noctambules
First published in Daylight – European Arts and Letters, Vol. 1 (January 1941).
On 18 September 1938, DG sat for ‘R.’ for a couple of portrait-sketches, the second of which, ‘bolder and more harsh in style, made me look like a Parisian noctambule’, haunter of cafés, slightly ‘“diabolic”, probably drugged: a vicious, androgynous face with enormous eyes and a sensual mouth’ (CJS), p. 181.
The poem is dedicated to the American author of Nightwood, Djuna Barnes, whom DG knew through Antonia White and Peggy Guggenheim. ‘The reference at the end to the “snarling lions” which are in the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris suggests the Freudian notion of the angry father because the son arrives home so late. I think it was 5 a.m.,’ he told Remy (MRUI), pp. 130–1.
The Anchorite
Add. 56046. Written Spring-Summer of that year, and planned in five sections, only two of which were begun. First published, together with the later incomplete The Bomb-Site Anchorite, in Encounter With Silence: Poems 1950, with an introduction by Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon Press, 1998), pp. 26–28, 29.
TIME AND PLACE
Snow in Europe
First published in New Writing n.s. II (1939), p. 175.
The epigraph for the first poem in the final section, Time and Place, is taken from Jouve: ‘Au temps où la douceur / Est cruelle et le désespoir est brillant’ (‘At a time when sweetness / is cruel and hope is shining’). The time in question for Gascoyne was Christmas 1938. He and Denham Fouts, to whom he dedicated To a Contemporary, were living in the rue de Bac in Mégève ‘during the winter that followed Munich; we realized that war was inevitable’ (MRUI), p. 131. They had met for the first time at the lecture given at the Sorbonne by W.H. Auden. DG wrote in his journal: 31.X11.38 ‘There has been a lot of snow, but now it has all melted away. Have written a new poem […]’ (CJS), p. 234.
The last three lines invoke James Joyce’s description of the altered Irish landscape in the
final paragraph of his story The Dead. In this visionary sequence, Gabriel’s mind is on the brink of sleep, and the snow falls ‘faintly through the universe […] upon all the living and the dead’ covering all things with a neutral whiteness. As in DG’s poem, it erases all differentiating details, effaces frontiers with indifference. But if, in The Dead, the snow symbolises the egotistical protagonist’s accommodation with the world, in a sense of total unity, ‘Snow in Europe’ has no such optimistic ending.
Zero (formerly Zero: September 1939)
The poem can be read with the journal entry for 1.IX.39: ‘When reality is as painful as it is at this hour, how can the disillusioned few who are capable of seeing it hope to be able to make other men open their eyes to what they see. Is the “ordinary man” even capable of a moral suffering great enough to force itself inescapably upon his consciousness and to make him admit its existence openly?’ (CJS), p. 260. Two pages later DG refers to the ‘stunning blow struck by the horror of actuality.’ Following Jouve, he employs the Spanish ‘nada’ (the ‘nothing’ of the Spanish mystics, like St John of the Cross) in the second stanza, linking the words ‘zero’, ‘the Void’ and ‘Negation’. Two days later, he wrote: ‘Zero is over. […] I feel today that midnight has struck and […] the worst of the night is still to come […]’, p. 262.
An Autumn Park
Written a month later, this is, in effect, Richmond Park which DG often crossed on his way back to Twickenham, not far from a house for disabled ex-servicemen from the First World War, where they made paper flowers (MRUI), p. 131.
The Conspirators
DG told Lucien Jenkins that ‘My poem […] is not exactly Audenesque but it is an attempt to write a narrative poem which was not out of key with the kind of poetry Auden was writing’ (LJI), p. 24.
Farewell Chorus
First published in Partisan Review, Vol. VIII, No. 1 (January-February 1941), pp. 20–23.
‘The basic metaphor is that of the departing trains full of servicemen, but essentially it is, of course, a goodbye to the 1930s’ (MRUI), p. 131. ‘And that poem of mine “Farewell Chorus”. It’s Thirties political poetry by someone who has read and loved Guillaume Apollinaire’ (LJI), p. 24.
A Wartime Dawn
The setting is his parents’ house in Teddington. ‘ […] “A Wartime Dawn” would probably never have been written had I not by then already become an inveterate benzedrine user’ (CJS), p. 384. He told Remy: ‘In the garden there was a mulberry bush and beyond the garden extended a housing estate for the Shell Mex employees with houses completely white and lawns in front with a thick chain like a fence. Our house was very large because it was situated on a corner’ (MRUI), p. 131.
The Gravel-Pit Field
The terrain described in this poem is in the suburbs of Teddington, and mentioned in a journal entry four years earlier: ‘26.IV.37: We all went down to the weir the other night and sat on the island till two in the morning, talking and watching the moon scatter its light across the water – then withdraw behind a film of cloud. There was a mysterious fire blazing in the middle of the Ham gravel-pit fields on the other side of the river’ (CJS), p. 100. Of all the drafts for published and unpublished poems (and translations) that I have examined in the notebooks in the British Library and elswhere, this (Add. 56045) is the most assiduously worked over. See APPENDIX B. The final scene seems to chime with Yves Bonnefoy’s notion of the arrière-pays.
Strophes Elégiaques à la mémoire d’Alban Berg
Originally written in English in the summer of 1936, not long after Berg’s death, in two versions, Elegiac Stanzas I.M. Alban Berg which DG found ‘unsatisfactory’. The earlier attempt is in a notebook in the British Library and the second in the Berg Collection in New York Public Library (See APPENDIX A). He began a translation into French just before the outbreak of the war (the MS is dated ‘Eté 1939’), following his return from Paris in March to his parents’ home, and it was published the following year in Cahiers du Sud (Marseilles) No. 220 (janvier 1940), pp. 49–52.
Three of the subtitles for the five sections are, DG explains in his essay on Sutherland’s illustrations, ‘borrowed from movements of the composer’s Lyric Suite for String Quartet (p. 114). These are “Andante Amoroso” (first section), “Tenebroso” (the second), and “Misterioso” (the fourth); the third and fifth are entitled “Intermezzo” and “Epilogue”. Berg’s six movements are: “Allegretto giovale”, “Andante amoroso”, subtitled “trio estatico”, “Allegro misterioso” (subtitled “trio estatico”), “Adagio appassionato”, “Presto delirando” (subtitled “Tenebroso”), and “Largo desolato”, which denote successive psychological states.’
A VAGRANT AND OTHER POEMS
A Vagrant
Composed in a Paris hotel room. DG characterizes the poem as ‘a distinctly “anti-bourgeois” poem, whose approach is comparable to the freer and more declamatory poetic style of [Allen] Ginsberg and his American companions’: ‘Le surréalisme et la jeune poésie anglaise: souvenir de l’avant-guerre’ by David Gascoyne in Encrages No. 6 (Eté 1981), Departement d’Etudes des Pays Anglophones, Université de Paris VIII Vincennes, p. 23. DG met the Beat poets in the 1950s, and again in San Francisco many years later, after his marriage.
Innocence and Experience
The setting here is the private mansion of Madame Edwards, in the Faubourg Saint-Germain district in which she had lived for many years, including the period of Occupation. She was South American by birth, and wife of the owner-director of one of the famous Paris department stores, ‘Les Magasins du Louvre’. Before the war, Madame Edwards was persuaded to give the poet a small monthly allowance, and she became ‘a sort of patron’ (MRUI), p. 133. This long poem (sixty-three lines) commemorates the second visit made there by DG, this time in 1947 after a gap of ten years, accompanied by Jenny de Margerie, and is ‘almost a transcription’ of the visit, written immediately afterwards, as he told Duclos (MDC), p. 31. He invented the notion that Madame Edwards was the daughter of a South American dictator (MRUI), p. 133.
The line, ‘To play the cello to a foreign bard’s guitar’, ‘was suggested by the famous portrait by Augustus John of Suggia, the celebrated Spanish violincellist of the 1920s, a very beautiful woman’, op. cit., p. 133. The ‘sad lady’ is Mme de Margerie as Mme Edwards smoked her cheroots.
The speaker tries to see behind the masks. See Saturnalia below.
DG critiques the world of private art collectors who own paintings which no one sees: they are ‘wasted, these valuable paintings which ought to be available for everyone to look at because too often reproductions lie’. He is also criticising bourgeois society, and told Duclos that he was lower-middle-class by birth and upbringing, but considered himself to be classless; however, he admitted to having a conscience about it, because he had read Marx and Engels, op. cit., pp. 31–32.
Photograph
DG said that the inspiration for the poem came from the portrait of Soupault taken by the famous American photographer, Bérénice Abbott, which appears in Philippe Soupault, no. 58 in the ‘Poètes d’Aujourd’hui’ series, selected by Henri-Jacques Dupuy, between pp. 128 and 129. ‘This text isn’t specifically about Philippe Soupault; it is concerned above all,’ said DG, ‘with an ideal modern face. It begins with a concrete image of a photograph and doesn’t include any metaphor or image; you could say that it’s an “ethical poem”’ (MRUI), p. 133.
This poem was first dedicated to Soupault in Collected Poems 1988, after DG had written asking his permission. Like René Crevel, Soupault was one of the Surrealist group in Paris whom he was unable to meet in the 1930s. Soupault had gradually severed contact with the Surrealists, concentrating on poetry as well as novel writing and travel journalism, which were unacceptable to Breton as he considered they must be intended for commercial gain. DG and Soupault met eventually when the French poet was in his mid-80s (c.1982), not long before DG completed his remarkable translation of Les Champs Magnétiques by Breton and Soupault, publish
ed in 1985 (Atlas Books) as The Magnetic Fields. DG translated several poems by Soupault, including his ‘Ode à Londres bombardée’.
Eros Absconditus
DG told me that this poem (two stanzas of nine and six lines) was written in memory of Bent Von Müllen, to whom he dedicated Jardin du Palais Royal. The later poem takes a line from Hölderlin for its epigraph: ‘Wo aber sind die Freunde? Bellarmin / Mit dem Gefahrten …’ (‘But where are the Friends? Where Bellarmine / And his companion’). The translation from the poem ‘Remembrance’ is Michael Hamburger’s, from his Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments (Penguin Books, 1998), p. 253. David Constantine suggests that Hölderlin ‘may have had his own friend Sinclair in mind’ in Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems, translated by Constantine (Bloodaxe Books, 1990), p. 78. Hölderlin had first met Isaak von Sinclair in 1793; after they met again in 1800, ‘Sinclair was to prove a most loyal and helpful friend to Hölderlin in the next few years’ (Hamburger, ‘Introduction’, op. cit., p. xxv.
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