New Collected Poems Read online

  Despair Has Wings: Selected Poems of Pierre Jean Jouve, edited and introduced by Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon Press, 2007)

  NOTE

  Thanks to the dedication over many years of the indefatigable

  Michèle Duclos, and the commitment of the editor Anne Mounic, much of David Gascoyne’s work is available online (both in English and French) in several of the sixteen issues of temporel: revue littéraire et artistique: http://temporel.fr

  See, for example, the following, prefaced by my English versions:

  David Gascoyne: poésie et environnement;

  David Gascoyne à Henry Miller;

  David Gascoyne et Benjamin Fondane;

  Gascoyne traducteur / traduire Gascoyne.

  In chthonic labyrinth where we now stray

  Do Thou in us make peace, O Lightbringer.

  Submerged in darkness glows the serene day.

  David Gascoyne: from ‘Variations on a Phrase’ (1982)

  The spirit that flickers and hurts in humanity

  Shines brighter from better lamps; but from all shines.

  Look to it: prepare for the long winter: spring is far off.

  Robinson Jeffers, from Selected Poems

  The true point of the spirit sways,

  Not like a ghostly swan,

  But as a vine, a tendril,

  Groping toward a patch of light.

  Theodore Roethke, from The Notebooks

  In our time, more than ever before, poets are the transcribers of a kind of truth to which only they can give articulate expression, and without which society becomes eventually one vast undifferentiated Buchenwald. Even in the extermination camps, poetry struggled out of men’s dumb suffering into articulation, because poetry is the native tongue of hope, – the language of possibility.

  David Gascoyne, Commonplace Book, 1948,

  Beinecke Collection,

  Yale University (unpublished)

  It is a terribly painful thing to feel oneself able to see and understand the truth about contemporary man’s situation, the total human crisis in which we must all realize ourselves to be involved, and yet to feel oneself powerless to act in a way which will effectively contribute to the spreading of such understanding as can alone enable man to resist the subhuman forces threatening to destroy him from within and to produce in him that complacent indifference which can make him accept destruction and non-being as his destiny. The evil of the modern world is entirely the result of lack of faith. The kind of faith that is lacking is synonymous with love: this is not the kind of faith that expresses itself in dogma or ideology which are always substitutes for it.

  From a notebook in the Gascoyne Collection,

  McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa

  (unpublished)

  Certain writers and poets manage to remain ‘balanced’ by separating their high spiritual thought or the exploration of the depths from their lives – they do not Surrealistically synthesise the dark and the light, the man and the poet, but remain sane by dichotomy. Certain writers and poets like Blake – and Gascoyne refuse this escape.

  Brian Merrikin-Hill, ‘The Transparent Mirror’

  David Gascoyne in the 1930s

  EDITOR’S PREFACE

  The poet and critic Peter Levi wrote that ‘It is still impossible for me to recall certain lines by Auden without a physical excitement,’ and he went on to quote an example: ‘O Love, the interest itself in thoughtless heaven […]’1 The spark which ignited the thrust of my research emanates from the frisson of my first encounter with David Gascoyne’s poetry in the form of lines from his poem ‘Tenebrae’2:

  The granite organ in the crypt

  Resounds with rising thunder through the blood,

  With daylight song, unearthly song that floods

  The brain with bursting suns:

  Yet it is night

  lines which still resonate rhythmically down all the years since my days in the Lower Sixth in the 1950s. Trying to get to grips with an essay on diction in modern English poetry, my reading had brought me with a marked degree of excitement to a discovery of poems by the Auden of Look, Stranger! and Another Time, George Barker, Stephen Spender and the line, ‘Crowns and head bounce like hoops down stone steps’, Dylan Thomas and Gascoyne. It was to Gascoyne that I returned most frequently at university and afterwards, collecting first editions of his work and literary magazines with his contributions. Many years later in the 1990s we became friends, exchanging letters and telephone calls, and I visited the Isle of Wight on several occasions. He asked me to edit for publication several poems and a novella, long-forgotten and unpublished works which I had found in notebooks in the New York Public Library and the British Library (other books, such as Selected Prose 1934–1996, would follow as part of Enitharmon’s ongoing Gascoyne project). I had embarked by then on my PhD thesis, David Gascoyne: From Darkness into Light. A study of his poetry 1932–1950, researching his published, unpublished and uncollected work.

  I have commented elsewhere on Gascoyne, Barker and Thomas in the context of 1930s’ poetry.3 Here is a cultural terrain which the prevailing critical concensus by and large still tends to characterize as the province of ‘the Auden generation’. There were arguably three generations of poets writing during the decade. Gascoyne, Barker and Thomas belonged in their precocious and prodigious productivity to the youngest. Gascoyne wrote of ‘feeling a great gap’ between his own work and that of Auden and his circle in the 1930s, while acknowledging that ‘the New Country poets of the generation before mine were exciting because of their awareness of society’s urgent need of drastic change, their expression of a longing for “new styles of architecture, a change of heart”’.4

  For me, there was from the outset the spur of researching a body of work about which there is no book-length study in English,5 and a strongly felt need to try to redress the critical balance and rehabilitate a writer who has been unjustly marginalized. Initially, my central concern was to examine Gascoyne’s poetry and the way it intersected with Surrealism, the avant-garde connection allied to the 1930s’ context. However, a re-framing rapidly became necessary as my perceptions changed. Gascoyne’s involvement with Surrealism was a necessary but brief journey of liberation. That phase, as he told me, tended to hang like an albatross around his neck in the public consciousness until the remarkable scope of his lifetime’s work became apparent in the 1990s. My focus became Gascoyne’s development from precocious avant-garde theoretician and practitioner of Surrealism into a religious poet of major significance.

  Other areas and issues rapidly assumed centrality not least my growing awareness of the significance of specific texts: Roman Balcony and other poems; Hölderlin’s Madness; the Collected Journals 1936–42 as a major document both for research and, more broadly, in terms of the map of twentieth-century literature and cultural history; Poems 1937–42 and the need to investigate the context and genesis of its production. There was, too, the shift in his poetry after the crucial encounter in 1937 with the work of Pierre Jean Jouve and the Romanian Benjamin Fondane, both of whom became friends and mentors,6 and later, the engagement with the mystics, especially Jacob Boehme, and the existential philosophers Kierkegaard, Chestov and later Heidegger. Gascoyne’s was a truly European sensibility: like T.S. Eliot’s, his verse reflects the presence of ‘the mind of Europe’.

  Darkness is represented in: Gascoyne’s mental state described with excoriating honesty in the Collected Journals; the notion of ‘la bouche d’ombre’, the Orphic voice;7 the inescapable awareness of the Void; his characterization of the Zeitgeist in the late 1930s as ‘The Time of the Open Tomb’. Light, or the search for it, is present in the brightness and warmth of the sun (even at midnight); in the visionary quality so prominent in a number of poems; above all in his articulation of the need for man to acknowledge his lack of faith and to embrace the spiritual.

  ‘From Darkness into Light’ signified for Gascoyne an on-going, an incomplete journey, but one that mankind m
ust make. Like Hölderlin, he saw his, and successive generations, ‘walk[ing] in Night, dwell[ing] as in Hades, without the Divine’.8 In 1992 Gascoyne asserted, citing Hölderlin again, that ‘It is the job of the poet to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith, what Buber calls the eclipse of God’.9 Gascoyne’s was a constant quest, clearly expressed by the Solitary in Night Thoughts: ‘I am a man of a benighted century, famished for light and praying out of darkness in the dark’, and informing all his mature poetry.

  Gascoyne was attuned to the spiritual ambience of his age. His poetry, essentially religious, continues to be discovered by successive generations, and has a particular relevance to the twenty-first century. He articulates the human condition profoundly but yet with such visionary clarity,10 seeking an accommodation with the agonizing problems of living in the modern world.

  David Gascoyne’s first Collected Poems, edited by Robin Skelton, was published by Oxford University Press & André Deutsch in 1965. It was succeeded by the more substantial Collected Poems 1988 (Oxford University Press), and a Selected Poems was issued by Enitharmon Press in 1994, all appearing in his lifetime. Thirteen years after his death, the New Collected Poems is a comprehensive edition, which incorporates in one volume a selection of his published and unpublished verse together with previously uncollected poems, reinstating others omitted from the three previous collections. Unlike Archie Burnett’s recent, exhaustive if not ‘forensic’ Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems, this Enitharmon edition does not reprint every poem Gascoyne ever wrote, but represents an attempt to set his achievement as a poet in a clearer and more accurate perspective, and add considerably to an overall understanding of his identity as a poet.

  In compiling the New Collected Poems, I have referenced the notebooks and manuscripts in the British Library, the Berg Collection in New York Public Library, the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa and the Beinecke Library at Yale University.11 I have chosen to retain the volume-arrangements of poems published between 1932 and 1956 so that the reader finds them in their first context, and I have wherever possible presented them in the order of their composition or first publication. The dates appended to each poem in the main text are extracted from a number of printed sources together with details from the numerous notebooks kept by Gascoyne throughout his life. I have found it useful to employ Skelton’s system of dating in his Poetry of the Thirties at the end of each poem as follows: ‘w’ showing the date of composition; ‘p’ before a date, indicating a poem printed in a periodical or anthology of that year; ‘c’ before a date, marking a poem first published in a collection of the poet’s work at that time. A few errors in the chronological order in previous editions have been corrected.

  A number of unpublished poems are here in print for the first time. To avoid raising their profile in the absence of Gascoyne’s imprimatur, I have resisted the temptation to place them in the main text alongside uncollected and previously published titles. They are referenced in italics in the list of contents but located in Appendix A between pages 313 and 335. While a few of them have come to light since his death in 2001, I was able to show Gascoyne several of the early notebook poems I had found in the 1990s. Although he possessed a remarkable memory for details of people and places throughout his long life, he had no recollection of any of these MS drafts. Uncollected poems are clearly indicated by the letters UNCOLL.

  I have borne in mind as far as possible Christopher Ricks’s observation that it is not the job of an editor to issue ‘critical pronouncements or appreciations, but the provision of such information, textual and contextual, as makes possible the common pursuit of true judgment.’12 The notes are selective only, offering information not easily accessible now, and drawing attention to the genesis of specific poems, or to modifications made between the notebook drafts and/or first printing(s), and their first book publication; they may reveal aspects of Gascoyne’s personal life and artistic development.13 I have drawn on his journals, his contributions to anthologies, talks and BBC radio programmes, and on comments made to me and to his principal interviewers Michel Remy, Michèle Duclos, Lucien Jenkins and Mel Gooding.14 These notes may be read in conjunction with Gascoyne’s own ‘Introductory Notes’ (pp. xxvii–xxxvii). Unlike Auden or Yeats, Gascoyne chose not to revise previous work in the editions of his collected and selected poems.

  While a small proportion of individual poems (fifteen out of forty-one) in Roman Balcony and other poems had appeared since 1932 in various books and anthologies,15 Gascoyne had firmly resisted the re-publication of any others or of the collection as a whole. The nine poems he included in the Collected Poems 1988 were reduced to five in the Selected Poems of 1994. This was in the face of strong opposition from those of us involved in the selection who were convinced of the quality of the poems in that first collection by an adolescent and of their significance for the more mature work that was to follow. We very much wished to bring others to light and see them in print.

  A year later in September 1995 I spent an afternoon with Gascoyne at his home when, out of courtesy but with a lack of enthusiasm he did not attempt to conceal, he started to leaf through the collection, flicking aimlessly it seemed through the eighty-seven pages. I watched as his attention became less and less cursory and his interest grew rapidly; he began to look intently at particular poems. After we had discussed several of them briefly, he suddenly turned to me and said, ‘I’m surprised to say that some of these are rather better than I’ve always thought.’ In the light of his response, I have felt justified in making the editorial decision to bring back into print for the first time a small number of poems from that 1932 publication.

  At one point in our discussion Gascoyne had commented that the collection ‘does show a considerable knowledge of and familiarity with music.’ His lifelong love of and engagement with music was nurtured at Salisbury Cathedral choir school which he attended as boarder and chorister. He was playing Satie and Schönberg on the piano at fourteen. In Gascoyne’s ‘Commonplace Book, 1948’, a short passage headed ‘Music’ begins: ‘I recognize more and more clearly that music is the expression of the highest development of the (mental) spiritual life of man. In a future incarnation, if I shall be granted one, I hope I shall be able to be a composer […]’16

  He always believed that one of the strongest links in his friendship with his mentor Pierre Jean Jouve was their mutual admiration of Mozart and Bartok but, more particularly, their shared passion for Berg. Gascoyne’s long poem in French, ‘Strophes Elégiaques à la mémoire d’Alban Berg’, was written in 1939, and his poems ‘Cavatina’, ‘Concert of Angels’, and ‘Mozart: Sursum Corda’ (dedicated to the South African composer Priaulx Rainier), between 1937 and 1938. He presented ‘Requiem’ to Rainier in 1940 to set to music. In an article written for The Listener in 1972, she recalled a walk in the Tuileries when ‘he expressed a wish to find words for a long poem suitable for vocalising, which he would lay out in some musical format that would help to intensify its meaning.’ Later she saw the first draft in Gascoyne’s attic ‘looking across the Seine to the flying-buttresses of Notre-Dame.’ He had described how ‘Requiem’ was ‘conceived as a libretto with words chosen specially for singing.’17 It wasn’t until 1945 that she felt able to write the music first performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1956.

  Rainier, born in Natal in 1903, had won the Cape University Scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music for her violin playing in 1920. It seemed then apposite as I was drawing up what was to be the definitive version of the Contents list that I should by chance discover that among the Priaulx Rainier Papers in the Royal Academy of Music Library in London there are two files holding poems by Gascoyne.18 The first contains fourteen ‘New Poems’ in typescript (most of which are signed), including the unpublished ‘Dead End’ and ‘Epilogue to an Episode’. I have added them to this new edition, together with an alternate version of ‘Mozart: Sursum Corda’, one of five poems in the second file.


  It is plain to all who are familiar with Gascoyne’s verse that his output as a poet was slender in comparison with that of Auden, say, or Lowell. Like Larkin, he was astonishingly prolific from his mid-teens to his late twenties, but less so in the following decade and after when the creativity which he had richly enjoyed began to desert him due in no small measure to the crippling effects on his mental and physical health of his methedrine addiction, which led to a series of breakdowns. Although Night Thoughts was completed in the mid-1950s after writer’s block, he was unable to write more than a small number of poems in the last forty years of his life, developing instead a remarkable facility as a very accomplished translator, essayist, memoirist, obituarist and reviewer.

  I feel immensely privileged to have known David and his wife, Judy, and to have been asked by him to edit some of his work, both poetry and prose. Privileged, too, to have been part of the ongoing Gascoyne publishing project, set in motion devotedly by the late Alan Clodd in 1978, and continued with an enduring commitment into the present century by Stephen Stuart-Smith who took on the running of Enitharmon Press in 1987.

  1 The Noise Made by Poems (London: Anvil Press 1977, 1984), p. 53

  2 Hölderlin’s Madness (London: J.M. Dent, 1938).

  3 Introductory essay, The Fire of Vision: David Gascoyne and George Barker, edited and introduced by Roger Scott (Tragara Press for Enitharmon Press, 1996), pp. 5–21.

  4 ‘Afterword’ to Collected Journals 1936–42 (London: Skoob Books, 1991), p. 391.

  5 There is the monograph by Professor Michel Remy, David Gascoyne, ou l’urgence de l’inexprimé (Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1984), but there is no English translation. Remy is also the acknowledged expert on British Surrealism. In 2012, Oxford University Press published Robert Fraser’s biography Night Thoughts. The Surreal Life of David Gascoyne.

  6 See Despair Has Wings. Selected Poems of Pierre Jean Jouve, translated by David Gascoyne, edited with an introduction by Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon Press, 2007), and my dossier, ‘David Gascoyne and Benjamin Fondane’ / David Gascoyne et Benjamin Fondane (translated by Michèle Duclos) in the ejournal temporel, revue littéraire & artistique, Num. 9, 26 April 2010, online at http://temporel.fr