Yours very gratefully,
David Gascoyne
The Very Image
Add. 56042.
Asylum
Add. 56043.
The Perpetual Explosion
Add. 56043. DG told me he had no recollection of this. He wrote in his journal on 1.X.36: ‘[…] “Something great and obscure is striving to express itself through me.” One day, perhaps, I shall genuinely explode. A perpetual explosion would be my ideal mode of life. I must be very repressed after all’ (CJS), p. 20. In that year DG planned a collection of surrealist poems, The Winged Victory, in three sections:
I ‘The Symptomatic World – 30 poems’ (sic). Published as a sequence of 8 poems only. A single poem, Symptomatic World exists in draft form. See APPENDIX A.
II ‘Reflected Violence’, published as Reflected Vehemence; ‘Invitations to the Voyage’, unpublished; The Great Day, published; The Light of the Lion’s Mane, published; ‘“I” is another’, unwritten (refers to Rimbaud’s ‘Je est un autre’); Phenomena, published; ‘Sleep & Riches: Crime & Sleep’, unwritten; The Perpetual Explosion, here published for the first time; ‘Inverted Coma’ (sic), written; ‘The Winged Victory’ became the third of Three Verbal Objects.
III The Lycanthrope – a poem. Unwritten.
The Hills, and in the light, daily
Add. 56042.
Compline for the Occident: a cantata for choir and solo voice
Add. 56044.
Two Untitled Fragments
Add. 73537.
Come Dungeon Dark
The poem to which DG refers twice in his journal: ‘1939. April to the end of June: […] First part of “Come Dungeon Dark”’ (CJS), p. 248; in one of the entries for 12.XI.39 he writes: ‘New Writing’s next issue is still supposed to be coming out this Winter, and if it does, it will contain part of “Come Dungeon Dark”’, p. 272. He is referring to part I, The Conspirators. The incomplete section first published here is, in effect, Part III.
The Dark’s Fidelity
Add. 56046. Like Post-Mortem, the poem was ‘written under the influence of Jouve,’ as DG told me.
Epilogue to an Episode and Dead End
Previously known to me only as titles of projected or completed poems in a notebook entry headed The Conquest of Defeat – Poems 1939–40. Add. 62947:
I DEDICATORY AND COMMEMORATIVE POEMS (15)
Lives of the Poets To George Barker To the Young
Poets of America
(September 1st) Letter to Jean le
Louët
The Plummet
Heart (Hart Crane) Poetry’s Evidence
(to Paul Eluard) Lines for Stephen
Spender
The Urn (P.J. Jouve) To Antonia White
Ode to Rimbaud Elegy for Léon
Chestov
An Epistle to All
II PERSONAL AND CONFESSIONAL POEMS (20)
Paris Remembered (inc.)
In 1937 Apologia The Projections of
Desire
A November Night Dead End The Fabulous
Glass
Chambre d’Hôtel The Writer’s Hand Sotto Voce
Fête in February To a Contemporary My Road is Flight!
Jardin du Palais Royal Odeur de Pensée Destination
Les Noctambules Dichotomy Epilogue to an
Episode
Epilogue 1940 Inside the Whale
Three Poems of
Childhood
III POEMS ON CONTEMPORARY AND GENERAL THEMES (15)
Snow in Europe Farewell Chorus Zero
An Autumn Park A Wartime Dawn ‘Wozzeck’ Act III, Scenes 4—5
Spring MCMXL Walking at Whitsun Tobias
Apocalyptic Ode Barcelona 1936-39 The Conquest of
Defeat
Epilogue 1940–41 and A la Fenêtre
In notebook 56045 Gascoyne planned a sequence of poems, ‘Paris Remembered’ or ‘Reminiscences of Paris’, on a page headed Miscellaneous Notes / 1940: 1. In 1937; 2. A November Night; 3. Chambre d’Hôtel; 4. Fête in February; 5. Au Jardin du Palais Royal; 6. Noctambules; 7. Epilogue (June 1940).
‘Fête, Chambre d’Hôtel, Jardin du Palais Royal and Noctambules are in the section ‘Personal Poems’ in Poems 1937–43. The draft of Epilogue: 1940–1, was recovered from a different notebook, and the incomplete draft of another poem in the series has come to light:
A La Fenêtre may possibly be ‘In 1937’ retitled.
Dear Thomas Eliot
My transcription from a draft in the Berg notebook, Poems 1950.
The Porch before these Poems is the Entrance into Night
The unpublished poem of eleven lines was added to the script during rehearsal for the BBC programme, ‘David Gascoyne: A Selection from his poetry made by the author’, broadcast on 29 May 1949 and produced by Frank Hauser. The script was written and read by DG with Cathleen Nesbitt. [Poems included ‘Miserere’, ‘Zero (September) 1939’, ‘The Post War Night’, ‘Rex Mundi’, ‘Birth of a Prince’.] This is the only extant version of the poem, with a slightly different first line, handwritten in Add. 71704, and in thirteen rather than eleven lines. A rehearsing of ideas and themes for Night Thoughts.
The Hand that in the darkness
Add. 71704. Given that DG also composed a French version of the poem, it is possible that he wrote it under the inescapable influence of Pierre Jean Jouve whose verse he had continued to translate since the end of the 1930s. I’m not suggesting, however, that this is a work of conscious imitation.
The Son of Man is in Revolt
Also handwritten in the same notebook.
It seems that in these two poems Gascoyne rehearsed some of the ideas that he wished to develop in what became Fragments Towards a Religio Poetae. It is clear that he incorporated several lines or parts of lines in different sections of that poem. He took seven lines from ‘The Porch …’ and inserted them in each of the sections 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10. Five lines from ‘The Son of Man …’ are employed with modifications in sections 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
When I am able to think at night
Written in a notebook c. 1950, like the two preceding poems.
Haiku: Rain globules on glass
From an orange notebook, c. 1950.
And tell me, how is Christ preached now?
Unpublished draft from ‘ledger-sized manuscript notebook’ held in the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. Undated, but probably c. 1954, and a rehearsing of themes and ideas for Night Thoughts because of the jottings that follow on a separate page: ‘Megalometropolis / City: Troy: Rome: Labyrinth, arena, / Circus, games, dances, gates of entrance to the / Underworld, the earthly city, Vanity / Fair, Babel-civilization under / the rule of Pluto. Carnival by Night: / Sleep: dreams / Descent into Cavern, cave / Night as Womb, or Cave / of Initiation Mystery through experience / of vision’.
A Summer Evening at Caesar’s Tower
This is a composite of three drafts in Gascoyne’s final notebook ‘1988–1996’, the first dated ‘August-September, 1992’, and two later incomplete, one of which is dated ‘16.X.95 – 4 p.m.’ A series originally planned as Fading Snapshots, then became ‘Prose Poems’ to be entitled Snapshot Album (November 11th ’95.). This may well be the very last poem he planned and began to compose. Remanences, comprising three poems, was published by Enitharmon in 1996.
David Gascoyne in the late 1990s
New Collected Poems Page 38