New Collected Poems

by David Gascoyne

  DG indicated that ‘the central idea is that of male friendship’, clarified in the final lines of the poem: ‘[…] The squalid inhibitions of those only half alive. / In blind content they breed who never loved a friend’. He insisted to Remy that ‘it is not a “gay” poem’ as the kind of love he describes ‘exists over and above homosexuality’ (MRUI), p. 134.

  The Goose Girl

  Previously ‘No End in Sight’ in Botteghe Oscure, No. IV (1949). The title comes from a fairy story DG read when he was a child, and ‘is probably a reflection on desire or on the chances I had of getting married’ (MRUI), p. 134.

  Beware Beelzebub

  This sonnet ‘is an ironic poem, satirical if you like, against British puritanical hypocrisy’ (MRUI), p. 134.

  Rondel for the Fourth Decade

  Here DG uses two four- and one five-line stanzas, thirteen lines, like Charles d’Orléans’s development of the form, but instead of his Rondel rhyming abba, abba, abbaa, DG’s version follows abba, abab, baabb. The poem was published in 12th Street: Poetry Issue 1 (USA, 1949), together with Absconded Eros and Rex Mundi (pp. 17–19). DG made substantial modifications to the first before it appeared the following year in A Vagrant and other poems:

  The mind if not the heart turns cold

  Seeing the calendar’s leaves flying;

  Still dare not cease trying

  To make the heart resigned to growing old.

  However often heart’s fortune be told

  By sceptic mind, it beats on still relying

  On consanguinity for help to hold

  By against age’s chill and sighing.

  But when the last leaves are swept flying

  From our life’s tree, a stone is rolled

  Over the hole where as they turn to mould

  The heart’s remains still lie denying

  That mind can know the truth of dying.

  In the typescript (see APPENDIX B), line four reads: ‘To coax the heart to accept growing old’.

  September Sun

  At the time he wrote it DG was living in Paris in the Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais, and ‘it was a magnificent day during an Indian Summer. I went for a walk in the gardens at Versailles’ (MRUI), p. 134. He added that he had always loved public gardens and parks. DG told Mel Gooding that before taking the train from Montparnasse he had bought ‘a little selected poems by O.V. de L. Milosz’ from ‘a little bookshop which was also a publisher, André Silvare […]’ and ‘during all of this wonderful afternoon I read Milosz for the first time, and it was very exciting to me. And that resulted in a poem called “September Sun”’ (MGI), p. 87. An additional verse (written in 1981) was first published in 1983 in Michael Horovitz’s New Departures, Third International Poetry Olympics, Number 15. The contribution, including the original poem, was headed ‘An Old Poem Updated’, p. 58, as it was in Lo Spezio Humano, No. 6 (gennaio-marzo 1983).

  The Post-War Night

  One of those poems which DG recognized with hindsight in conversation with me in 1995, were ‘rehearsing for, leading up to Night Thoughts’ throughout the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, effectively a long gestation period. The other poems are: They Spoke of a New City; Noctambules; The Moon Over London; Phantasmagoria; The Anchorite (incomplete); The Conspirators (incomplete); A Vagrant; Fragment of an Unfinished / Unpublished Poem; Metropolis By Night, Nightwatchers’ Ruminations; Night Thoughts (an earlier version).

  Demos in Oxford Street

  This poem ‘was actually originally intended to be called … to be about the Edgware Road, because I was living at that time with Robin Waterfield in Paddington. And I felt that the Edgware Road was one of the most dreary streets in London or any modern capital […] and I changed to “Oxford Street”. Somebody once asked me, “What were those demos in Oxford Street about?”’ (MGI), p. 88.

  DG said that ‘There is in this text a kind of deception and disillusionment’ (MRUI), p. 134, his own disillusionment stemming not from Socialism itself, but from dissatisfaction with ‘the Socialists in power after the Second World War’ (MDC), p. 33. He added in that same conversation with Duclos: ‘this is an ironic and satirical poem.’ The statement is clarified in the final lines where ‘those who say at the end of the text “We’re not the Working Class” are actually the workers who’ve become “petit bourgeois” and consider themselves superior now’ (MRUI), p. 134.

  Evening Again

  The original title was ‘The Unfulfilled’ in Botteghe Oscure, No. IV (1949). The poem recalls a journey DG made with his friend, Jenny de Margerie, mother of the French Ambassador to England, to visit her cousin, Jean Rostand, near Saint-Germain-en-Laye. On their return they crossed the Seine on a level with the Ile de la Cité. He found the buildings he could see on the other side of the river very impressive (MRUI), pp. 134–5.

  Three Venetian Nocturnes

  ‘I knew that Princess Marguerite Catani, editor of the review Botteghe Oscure, paid well for material written for her, and I wrote them in one week and sent them to her’ (MRUI), p. 135.

  On the Grand Canal: There were 39 lines in the version printed in Points, No. 8 (Paris, Dec.1950-Jan.1951), pp. 43–4. The poem as published in A Vagrant, shows a large number of alterations.

  The lines ‘a young girl’s head / In a near window, her sweet fresh-coloured face / Vividly lit with eagerness, whose aspect made / Me wonder what it was she held before her,’ replaced the following in Points: ‘[…] and I observed / Was imaginatively moved by, a girl’s head / Fresh and vivid with an earnest eagerness / That made her face seem rescued out of time / As by some novelist’s or painter’s genius’.

  Fragments Towards a Religio Poetae

  The epigraph is taken from Meister Eckhart whom DG had read before and during the war. He also had a copy of Jacob Boehme’s Aurore which he read from time to time (MRUI), p. 135. He added, ‘There are perhaps too many upper-case letters.’ See my note to the unpublished ‘The Porch before these poems is the entrance into night’ and ‘The Son of Man is in Revolt’.

  When The Bomb-Site Anchorite was published for the first time in An Enitharmon Anthology for Alan Clodd, edited by Stephen Stuart-Smith (Enitharmon Press, 1990), p. 23, there was a note by DG about this uncompleted poem on the facing page which is particularly relevant to A Vagrant and other Poems, and to matters such as tone and DG’s state of mind:

  ‘[…] My reluctance to give any definite expression of my persistent residue of faith resulted in the fragmentary nature of the Religio Poetae section of A Vagrant and Other Poems, and prevented me from elaborating the kind of discourse it would have been appropriate for my anchorite to deliver to the impartial narrator of my poem. Awareness of the pitfalls besetting specifically philosophical poetry inhibited me from risking the completion of this particular poem altogether,’ op. cit.

  MAKE-WEIGHT VERSE

  A second section in A Vagrant styled, self-deprecatingly, ‘Make-Weight Verse’, not included in the Collected Poems (1965), but restored to the Collected Poems 1988, and to Selected Poems (1994) under the heading ‘Light Verse’, comprises seven light pieces, three of which: An Unsagacious Animal or The Triumph of Art Over Nature, The Decay of Decency and With a Cornet of Winkles, are fully developed. DG very much enjoyed reciting the first at poetry readings. The Three Cabaret Songs include one (unidentified) which is all that remains of DG’s satirical one-act play, The Hole in the Fourth Wall, produced in 1950. He does not name the song, but it seems likely that he is referring to the second, What a Way to Walk into my Parlour, Little Man! since a draft of the poem with a different heading, ‘Cabaret Song: De Haut en Bas’ appears on two pages in Notebook IV.

  With a Cornet of Winkles

  First published that year in Botteghe Oscure, V, pp. 304–306.

  DG’s apparently effortless homage in the form of a parody to Wallace Stevens whom he had long greatly admired. The mimicry is self-conscious and playful. At the same time there is an element of pastiche to highlight Stevens’s ‘gaudy’ language
, eccentric word-play and humour, with a seductive collation of examples of the more extreme aspects of the American poet’s diction. DG recreates the rhythms and sounds created by players of the lute, mandolin and clavier.

  ENCOUNTER WITH SILENCE. POEMS 1950

  A limited edition, published in 1998, edited and introduced by Roger Scott (Enitharmon Press), comprising a selection drawn from an orange manuscript Notebook, Poems, 1950, which has been for some years in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The catalogue description reads: ‘31 holograph poems, unsigned, 66 pp. (Bd. 25cms.). Contains translations and some prose passages’. It seemed before my visit to America in 1997 that these must represent no more than the draft pages of A Vagrant and other poems, rather than any new or forgotten work. However, my assumption was proved wrong.

  The relationship of these Poems, 1950 to the collection brought out by John Lehmann in that same year is both interesting and problematic. DG himself had no recollection of the notebook which contains drafts of two of the poems in the Lehmann publication, A Tough Generation, and Three Venetian Nocturnes, together with Sentimental Colloquy (first published in the Times Literary Supplement, 2 April 1954, p. 215) and ‘Elegiac Improvisation. In honour of Paul Eluard’ (sic), (published that same year in Botteghe Oscure, XIII, pp. 118–21 as Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of Paul Eluard). The poem ‘Recitative from an Oratorio in Commemoration of the Dead’ appeared in 1959 as Remembering the Dead in X, Vol. 1, No. 1. In addition to several unpublished poems and translations, and light verse (in the vein of the ‘Make-Weight Verse’ in A Vagrant), there are fragments, and half-completed, never developed plans.

  The chosen selection echoes in miniature the format of A Vagrant in that original poems are followed by translations and light verse. However, another section is added after the translations, offering two versions of a poem neither of which was completed, begun at different times during the 1940s: DG’s original plan for and first draft of The Anchorite, dating from Spring-Summer 1941, and the later fragment, The Bomb-Site Anchorite, written then abandoned c.1948/9 according to the poet.

  The title, Encounter With Silence, is mine, appropriated from that of Section 3 of Night Thoughts, as silence is a recurring theme, addressed much earlier in two unpublished poems from the 1930s: Compline for the Occident, a cantata for choir and solo voice, the long ‘automatic’ Surrealist poem The Perpetual Explosion, and The Entrance to that valley stands alone.

  Silence is explored in several poems, some complete, others unfinished, in the Berg notebook (DG also chose to translate Char’s ‘Affres, Detonation, Silence’). Apart from Give Up Dead Words, Stele and Terminal there are fragments which also engage with the state of being silent or unable to speak, as in ‘Silence in Heaven’ which begins, ‘To be as nothing, being unable to speak’, and the incomplete draft, ‘Silence on Earth’: […] Cramped in a rambling house / With blinded windows / Assailed by constant sounds / On the edge of an abyss / How can one speak / Or know what to say?’

  Concerned to address the nature of language and to ask whether it still has validity or whether silence must be the choice of the writer, DG quoted both Hölderlin and Heidegger on the significance of language in Encrages, op. cit., p. 24.

  In one of his orange notebooks from c. 1950, I found two separate and somewhat enigmatic jottings relating to silence: 1. ‘Silence. Shutupness. The daemonic testimony withheld / Refusal of acknowledgement. Tacit negativity. Unspoken falsehood. / Silence, confidence, acceptance of transcendence, realization of temporal and approximate, limited and partly confusing nature of all verbal communication. Faith in reciprocity. Deliberate repose. Fulfilment.’ 2. ‘Equivocal evasion of theological conclusions in Platonic idealist approach to “problem of Being”, beyond a certain point. Silence eventually equivalent to dissimulation. / Notion of silence in H[eidegger]. Two experiences of silence. Anguish – plenitude. Wrath or bliss pre or post articulate silence’ (no pag.).

  Give Up Dead Words

  George Steiner, often quoted by DG, points to the situation of a writer who may feel that ‘the condition of language is in question, that the word may be losing something of its humane genius’. One of the choices he faces is ‘the suicidal rhetoric of silence’, in ‘Silence and the Poet’, Language and Silence: Essays 1958–66 (Faber & Faber, 1967), p. 69. The title, ‘Give Up Dead Words’, appears to address these issues.

  Stele and Terminal

  These are interdependent texts which appear on facing pages in the Berg notebook, compelling in their concision and steely rejection of any false consolation. DG is writing two versions of the same kind of poem: an epigraph or inscription. His choice of ‘Stele’ refers to an upright stone slab or tablet decorated with inscriptions or figures. It also references Victor Ségalen’s Stèles, ‘undoubtedly a neglected book […]. To me, I must say, it is worth all the poetry Claudel ever wrote (with the exception of “Cinq Grands Odes” perhaps)’. In one of the orange 1950 notebooks Gascoyne goes on to emphasize ‘the virtues of compression and reticence displayed’ in Stèles [1912] some of which ‘I feel I can identify myself with in every word’ (no pag.).

  Fragment of an Unfinished, Unpublished Poem

  Another attempt by the poet to examine his vision of the modern metropolis, – ‘(here all wear masks)’ – and predates Night Thoughts by six years.

  Saturnalia

  DG acknowledged the Modernist fondness for masks and for creating personae. Here, the constant blare and din of everyday living, the anxiety and alienation in contemporary urban society, require the necessary adoption of masks to hide our vulnerability.

  The incomplete poem is an early version of the passage in ‘Megalometropolitan Carnival’ in Night Thoughts, which begins: ‘Smoothburnt by artificial sunrays, cold with sweat …’. Another draft (undated) of the opening 13–14 lines is in the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.

  In an unpublished fragment in the Berg notebook, ‘The Rahjah’s [sic] Rite’, the wearing of masks is again an accepted requirement for living: ‘[…] And all we, merchant, clerk, comedian, / Housewife and handy-man, shopkeeper and whore, / Teacher and business-woman, soldier sailor, all / Must wear the same mask of disguise: a smile / To reassure the inquisition that we are employable, / A cloak of small-talk, and a shield of brass / To hide too shifty eyes / To draw across the eyes, when it’s / expedient, and gloves / Of skintight antiseptic scepticism, lest / Our getting too involved leaves the palms stained …’

  The Bomb-site Anchorite

  The character was invented by DG ‘in order to give utterance through him to my own meditations on the question as to whether it is possible any longer to envisage the divine in the second half of the 20th century’, An Enitharmon Anthology, op. cit..

  MAKE-WEIGHT VERSE

  A Post-Card from Venice to T.S.E.

  My transcription of the draft in Poems, 1950.

  However, the version below is the poem that was written on the postcard actually sent by Gascoyne to Eliot from Venice in 1950. It was sold at Bonhams from Roy Davids’ catalogue in April 2013, described as follows: ‘Item 169, GASCOYNE, DAVID (1916–2001) […] AUTOGRAPH IMPROMPTU VERSE ON A POSTCARD TO T.S. ELIOT, 6 lines, beginning ‘Though some pigeons and tourists seem to fraternize, the birds / Got too absorbed in grain to pay attention to their class …’, with two lines on the picture side showing the Lion of St Marco in Venice, 2 pages, small octavo, Venice, June 1950 almost certainly unpublished […].’

  Though some pigeons and tourists seem to fraternize, the birds

  Get too absorbed in grain to pay attention to their class.

  I pose among them Baedeker in hand, with a cigar,

  Wishing a Princess predatory as Volupine would pass.

  P.S.

  Lucky for B. it was not on the bell-tower

  He was together with her in that fell hour.

  I am most grateful to James Fergusson who drew my attention to this sale and transcribed for me some words on the card.

>   OTHER POEMS 1950–56

  Qu’est-ce que la decadence?

  Published in 84, Numéro 13 (Paris, Mars, 1950), p. 28. This issue also included DG’s translations of three poems by Kathleen Raine.

  Yes, You! and ‘Yes, thank you. Now I can start the day’

  Add. 56057. At the end of the 1940s, DG was still trying to come to terms with the virtual disappearance of the verbal facility he had enjoyed throughout the 1930s and the early years of the war. He was, too, beginning to recognize painful signs of the silence that can be enforced by ‘writer’s block’, and there was for him the unavoidable question, that faced by Samuel Beckett, too, in the post-war condition: is the living truth no longer sayable, capable of utterance? In addition he had to contend with his post-war disillusionment, neurasthenia, and the unrelieved nagging of accusatory inner voices which had to be silenced. Yes, You!, the poignant poem addressed these voices in a notebook dated c. 1950. DG explained in his contribution to Encrages that he didn’t find it strange that he ‘could always distinguish the words “the gods, the gods”,’ because of what he knew of Hölderlin’s experience, op. cit., p. 23 (my translation). In ‘Guilt by Association’, her review of Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour-Jones, Hermione Lee observes that T.S. Eliot ‘wrote a prayer for himself which ran, in part, “Protect him from the Voices / Protect him from the Visions / Protect him from the tumult / Protect him in the silence”.’ Times Literary Supplement (30 November 2001), p. 3.

  In another notebook from 1950, the heading ‘Bile and spleen, nausea, self-reproach’ precedes a further attempt to produce another poem in which he confronts the intolerable, tormenting voices. At least there is a recognizable rhythm and a regular rhyme scheme, but some passages are disturbing to read, revealing a tenuous hold on reality; it is as if the need to write and the practice of jotting (in a large, wandering and spidery hand) are barely enough to stave off mental collapse. The fragment of a projected poem, ‘Silence in Heaven’, in the notebook in the Berg Collection in New York Public Library indicates DG’s continued mental instability, abandoned with the words ‘Poem sabotaged by demonic raving and impatience, 29.XII.52’. Another, longer fragment of what was intended to be a companion piece, ‘Silence on Earth’, begins: ‘Always the voices […].’