Remembering the Dead
From Poems, 1950, where the draft was entitled ‘Recitative from an Oratorio in Commemoration of the Dead’. Unpublished until 1959 in X, Vol. I, No. 1 (November), p. 77.
Haiku: Urban Autumn After the War
From an orange notebook. First published in Etruscan Reader III, op. cit., Limited Edition 1996.
Haiku: ‘My own sophistry’
Untitled in the orange notebook. First published in Etruscan Reader III, op. cit.
Cartesian Haiku
Entitled ‘Sum’ in the same orange notebook. First published in the Haiku Quarterly, No. 16, edited by Kevin Bailey, 1995.
Amiguous Haiku
From the orange notebook. First published with title in the Haiku Quarterly, op. cit.
Metropolis by Night, Night-Watchers’ Ruminations, Night Thoughts
Early versions of the ‘radiophonic poem’. The first two poems appeared in Points, No. 19, Paris (Spring), the third in Botteghe Oscure XVII (Spring).
Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of Paul Eluard
For an earlier version deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ by DG, entitled Elegiac Improvisation in Honour of Paul Eluard, see APPENDIX B.
At some point, DG drafted a preface that was never published to his new poem:
‘Introductory Notes to ELEGIAC IMPROVISATION ON THE DEATH OF PAUL ELUARD’
He cancelled the first three paragraphs that follow:
[The French poet Paul Eluard died suddenly towards the end of last year (1954), to be mourned by countless numbers of his fellow countrymen and by lovers of France and of poetry all over the world, as one of the best loved among the famous modern men of letters.
Paul Eluard was a poet whose life and writings expressed all the love, warmth and tenderness so conspicuously lacking in most of the French literature of his time. His emotions were pure. His heart was true, it was just, as it refused nothing. He therefore inspired love in far more readers than modern poets are able as a rule to reach.
I would call this poet above all an imagier français.]
Paul Eluard had served as a very young man as a soldier in World War One, and his very earliest poems were written out of his experience, and then as the expression of joy at the Armistice: the joy of finding that the simple everyday happiness of ordinary things, flowers and objects, could be returned to once again by men who had discovered during the War that they had brothers. He wrote then, already, from the first one might say, not for himself merely but for all men, or for a perhaps ideal common man, and that was the reason for his effort then and later to use a simple language, a language of clear, colloquial expressions, candid and purified by ardent appreciation of the pristine originality of the utterance that is unhesitatingly spontaneous.
I first met Eluard in 1935. I had by that time already made a few translations from his poetry and, having written to him asking his permission and advice, had received letters from him having a mysterious magical virtue (as it then seemed to me and indeed does still), in the beauty of the almost anonymous yet unique personal clarity and simplicity of the author’s handwriting and the unforgettable signature in which the Christian and the surname were as though married by a large superalgebraic ‘X’ formed by a line continuing the ‘l’ of Paul and the beginning of the letter ‘E’ of Eluard. The address at the head of these letters was in the rue Legendre, and it was at his apartment in that street that I saw him for the first time. It is a not at all remarkable street, situated somewhere off the railway cutting by the rue de Rome running north from St Lazare, but at that time the word ‘Légendre’ was for me not a proper name that could be taken to mean and was in fact the name of the son-in-law, but the French for ‘Legendary’ (this would of course have been ‘Légendaire’, but I never stopped to think of that, as it seemed so entirely appropriate that the poet should have his elected domicile in Legendary Street.)
Albert Schweitzer says somewhere in one of his writings on Bach: ‘Painting is suffused with poetry and poetry with painting. The quality of either of the arts at a given moment depends on the strength or the weakness of this intercolouration. As regards their means of expression each of them passes into the other by imperceptible gradations.’ These observations are particularly à propos in relation to any consideration of the poetry of Eluard. No poet living in Paris in the 20th Century can have had a more intimate relationship with all that was most alive in modern painting than Eluard. Many of his books are devoted to painting and painters, above all to Picasso – mon grand ami, mon bon ami, Picasso, mon vieux ami. A great many of the limited editions of his poems were accompanied by drawings, lithographs, engravings, photos, collages by a large and varied number of contemporary artists; a very large number of his poems scattered throughout his whole output were about or inspired by painters who were his friends.
And this was in spite of the fact that like Picasso, he had been a member of the Communist Party and for some time before his death a devoted humble follower of the ‘party line’. He even wrote a routine poem, I say ‘routine’, for it is really not a distinguished piece of writing in any way, for Stalin’s ?60th birthday, which was printed in a book of similar offerings about the size of a telephone directory. It simply is not possible to suppose that the late Russian ‘Father of his country’, leafing through this volume, suddenly exclaimed ‘Oh, there’s a poem by the great French poet Paul Eluard, who used to be a Surrealist, and how very gratifying!’ [Draft ends here] David Emery Gascoyne Special Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.
See DG’s comments on Eluard in his ‘Introductory Notes’ to Collected Poems 1988, his review of Eluard’s La Rose Publique in Selected Prose 1934–1996, and references in the Collected Journals 1936–1942.
NIGHT THOUGHTS
This ‘A Radiophonic Poem’ in verse and prose was commissioned in 1953 with the working title of ‘Night and the Watchman’ by Douglas Cleverdon for the BBC Third Programme. The work, for voices and orchestra, in three parts or movements, was ‘written in a relatively short space of time’ in 1954 although DG was struggling with writer’s block, and first broadcast on 7 December of the following year with music specially composed and conducted by Humphrey Searle. DG said that he used the title because Edward Young’s poem ‘Night Thoughts’ had been illustrated by William Blake and the phrase fitted what he wanted to say (MDC), p. 51.
In his memoir Quadrille with a Raven, Humphrey Searle writes: ‘Night Thoughts was probably one of the first BBC productions to use musique concrète. There was no BBC electronic workshop in 1955 and only discs, not tape, were available. To accompany the long dream sequence in the centre of the feature, we asked the famous percussionist James Blades to record all possible kinds of percussion sounds. We then played them backwards at various speeds; we could only make the speed either twice or four times as fast or slow; the BBC had no variable speed control in those days. In spite of these technical handicaps we produced some very interesting sounds and were later congratulated by a French composer of electronic music on what we had been able to achieve with such meagre resources’ (online at http://www.musicweb-international.com/searle).
‘Night Thoughts,’ DG told Remy, ‘is the struggle of the individual to reach his true self, in order to distance himself from the man in the street and from the world of statistics. The city, it’s the creation of Cain, he is the first creator of the city; so that is linked in part to the notion of transgression in Christian mythology, whereas for the Greeks, it is linked to the idea of reconciliation, with the figure of Athene, protector of cities, a parthenogenetic figure, you know: so not tainted by Original Sin. I have always been interested in the Oedipus cycle, this trilogy which explains the birth of urban civilization, of what we call civilization, and which is developed in a crime scene. This has been well realized by the French filmmaker, Jean Luc Godard in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, particularly in the famous scene where two characters are talking while a pneumatic drill is operating beside th
em. In Night Thoughts, London isn’t the sin, but a multiplicity which is a breaking of the spirit and a place of temptation … The section of dreams isn’t London any more, but an oneiric city that a Londoner would be capable of seeing in a dream. I refer also to the Garden of Eden, to the primordial forest … The word “omphalos” is an interesting word, at once a boss (in Greek) and a hollow. “Boss” is ambiguous and could signify a chief, and the chief of Hell, that’s Pluto, whom I introduce later. The character who makes a speech, it’s the devil with his tail. The whole metropolis is a labyrinth where the individual’s personality and the possibility of becoming a person are dissolved, in the sense employed by Keats and Kierkegaard …The third part of Night Thoughts, it’s the third part of a dialectical movement, it’s a resolution’ (MRUI), pp. 134–35.
See the following: DG’s essay, ‘The Poet and the City’ in Selected Prose 1934–1996, op. cit., pp. 126–132; Roger Scott, ‘David Gascoyne’s Night Thoughts: “The Infernal Megalometropolis”’ in Temenos Academy Review, 4 (Spring 2001), pp. 107–22; Alan Munton, ‘Night Thoughts: David Gascoyne’s Excess’, in Cambridge Quarterly, 31, 1 (March 2002), pp. 33–55.
LATER POEMS 1956–1995
Half-an-Hour
First published in Isle of Wight Poets, 1.
On Rereading Jacob Boehme’s ‘Aurora’
A modified, retitled poem first written in 1953 as Lines After Reading ‘The Aurora’
It was read by Dennis McCarthy on BBC Radio in New Soundings No. 12, edited and introduced by John Lehmann, broadcast on 11 March 1953. DG re-titled the poem when it was first published in 1975, and the date of composition was given misleadingly as 1969. There are small differences in what is, in effect, a later version of the earlier composition.
None are can now deny
All that the blessed shoemaker foretold
Is come about indeed. Babel is builded high
About us. Nothing avails to save
The old world like a brand from burning. We must die
Before our eyes can see. The dead must live
Before the sound or mourning cease to be.
All that is is heard to rise from earth’s vast grave.
Of chaos. Out of the triple void
Of no religion, no communion, no hope, Boehme
Foresaw the sun at midnight would be seen
To rise with rays like healing wings and shine
On all the world men’s fears had else destroyed.
Three Verbal Sonatinas
First published in Adam International Review, Vol. XXV, 337–339 (1970).
DG said of the third poem: ‘The last one […] really reverts to a kind of surrealism […] and at the same time it also refers to my interest in music […] finally I think I have understood modern music.’ The poem is intended to be amusing. Based on the atonal music of Schonberg (David Gascoyne and Anne Ridler Read and Discuss Selections of Their Poems, Critics Forum Series, cassette tape, Norwich, 1983).
Speechlessness
In a rare occasional poem, DG would confront the choice as a writer to be silent, the route taken by his early hero Arthur Rimbaud who renounced poetry, or the very condition forced upon Hölderlin: Speechlessness was written August-September 1979, after the murder of Lord Mountbatten by the IRA on 27 August, then published in The Listener (4 October) that year.
Whales and Dolphins: a Poem for the Greenpeace Foundation
First published in A Garland of Poems for Leonard Clark (Enitharmon Press & Lomond Press, 1980). Again, with typical honesty and forthrightness, DG engages with the question of language.
His prose piece, ‘Departures’, offered in 1983 what is effectively a mission statement: ‘If I choose to think of our time in terms of a metaphor such as The World’s Midnight, and thus risk seeming to be inclined to the speciously dramatic, that is my own affair. I would only submit that it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the blatant contemporary reality of violence, aggressive hostility, terror, dehumanisation, polarisation, explosive disruption and all the other all too familiar phenomena presented to us daily as evidence of what such words must inadequately be used to express. How can any of us ever suppress some longing to depart from such an overtly catastrophic ambience and from the nihilistic hegemonies of power, self-interest and autonomously proliferating technology – or avoid expressing, however indirectly, some symptom of this longing in the poems we manage to produce?’ First published in New Departures, 15 (1983), edited by Michael Horovitz, and reprinted in Selected Prose 1934–1996, pp. 45–46.
Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siècle
First published in Italy in Nuova Rivista Europea, No. 19–20 (October-December 1980) in English and in Italian. I’m grateful to James Fergusson who sent me copies of this first publication of the poem with DG’s corrections to the text, incorporated in the final version published in Collected Poems 1988: in the third stanza the Italian printing read: ‘[…] Chile, Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan, / Belfast’s Bogside, Derry and Crossmaglen / Up in Strathclyde or down on Porton Down, / On Three Mile Island or in Northern Italy […]’. The poem then appeared in Summer 1981 in Poetry in the Town, Third European Festival of Poetry, Cahier no. 30 (Leuvense, Scheijversaktie).
Variations on a Phrase
First published in Poetry Review, Vol. 72, No. 3 (September 1982), and in La Nuova Rivista Europea, No. 29/30 (giugno-agosto 1982). Charles Seluzicki issued a broadside in 1984 with a magnificent lithograph, Figure Caught in a Net, by Stanley William Hayter. See DG’s obituary for his long-time friend in Selected Prose 1934–1996, op. cit., pp. 250–51. I am indebted to Charles Seluzicki who sent me copies of letters to him by DG and Hayter regarding the project, together with a master copy of the engraver’s original design. Seluzicki recalled that DG ‘felt it was his most successful poem in a long time’ (email dated 25/6/2002), and it would be difficult to disagree. DG’s ‘passionate interest’ in Rimbaud in the 1930s developed into a less intense but lifelong admiration and fascination for both man and poet. It seems reasonable to assume that Variations on a Phrase represents in effect DG’s late hommage to the writer. The first two lines of DG’s poem are a translation of the slightly modified epigraph, whereas Rimbaud’s opening line in ‘Après le Déluge’ from Illuminations is as follows: Aussitôt que l’idée du Déluge se fut rassise’ [‘As soon as the idea of the Flood had subsided’]. In a letter to Seluzicki dated 12 October 1983 DG wrote: ‘[…] the rainbow […] is central I suppose to the poem as a symbol of hope (with regard to which the poem is open-ended) […]. To me, the key word (or image) of the poem is connected with the syllable fil, from the Latin filum, a thread, and the idea of the substantial world as woven, […].’ DG chose an interesting form: rhymed couplets with a blank line in-between.
Rare Occasional Poem
At the end of his response of ‘inordinate length’ to Authors Take Sides on the Falklands (London: Cecil Woolf Publishers, 1982), DG addressed the editors Cecil Woolf and Jean Moorcroft Wilson as follows: ‘[…] I must quench my explanatory verbal flow. Just in case you should find, understandably enough, that this contribution to your dossier is too long to print as it stands, I now append a short poem which you might care to use in place of the preceding pages [in the event, both prose piece and poem were published]. It was hastily written on the day mentioned in the title and revised the day after. The rather feeble intended pun contained in the title refers to the quite insignificant fact that I have seldom written what are generally known as “occasional poems”. It is clearly a non- or apolitical poem, and is distanced from the burning Falklands issue by the use of a deliberate form, which is that of a verbal square made up of 144 syllabic units as follows […]’, pp. 43–44.
Arbres, Bêtes, Courants d’Eau: Improvisation (for Salah Stétié)
DG met Stétié through the Jouves. Poet, essayist, art critic and diplomat, Stétié was born in Beirut in 1929. This poem was published in Poésie 92. La Poésie entre les langues, No. 41 (février 1992), pp. 61–63. DG read i
t at the Institut Français in London in 1996 when he was presented with the prestigious award of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He translated Stétié’s essay, ‘On Novalis and the Night’ for publication in Temenos 9 (1988), pp. 115–16.
Hague Haiku
Originally ‘Hai-Ku for Stétié’. Written at Wassenaar, The Hague, 5 September 1984 when the Gascoynes were staying with Stétié who was then the Lebanese ambassador to the Netherlands.
Entrance to a Lane
Written 22–23 July 1985, this was DG’s contribution to the Tate Gallery Anthology With a Poet’s Eye, edited by Pat Adams (The Tate Gallery, 1986). He was offered three choices: Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows; Dubuffet’s The Busy Life; Sutherland’s painting, which had convinced DG in 1942 that he should suggest to Tambimuttu that the artist might undertake to illustrate Poems 1937–42, just accepted for publication by Poetry London Editions.
Ivy
First published in The Independent on DG’s birthday, 10 October.
UNPUBLISHED POEMS
‘Sonnet to Alida Monro’ and ‘Hinterland’
Two poems sent to Alida Monro in 1932 were accompanied by a letter, now in the British Library Manuscript Department:
402 Richmond Rd.
East Twickenham
M’sex
Dear Mrs. Monro.
I want to thank you again (the first time was before I had read it) for your kind letter. I have always wanted someone to read my work whose opinion I can revere and respect. But I am sorry that you should think that I neglect technique. It has always been my goal, my ideal. Just recently I have been devoting my entire attention to it, you will be glad to hear. I am sending you a new poem, which I think is, technically, the best thing I have done so far, and would be very glad to know what you think of it. I shall probably never write another poem in free verse, except by way of recreation. It is my belief as a poet that every poem, or rather poetic germ, or idea, gives birth spontaneously in the poet’s mind to its own, individual form and cadence, suitable only to that idea, being its only possible expression. So I do not yet regret all the poems in my book. But of that I should like to talk with you at length. I have asked Miss Wright and we should both love to come to supper with you one night. Technique is really a thing that calls for length, discussion and cannot be treated with justice in letters.
New Collected Poems Page 37