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Unread 11-28-2011, 04:53 PM
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Steve Bucknell Steve Bucknell is offline
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Hi Andrew,

I first read David Gascoyne in the influential 1996 Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos edited by Iain Sinclair.”The work I value is that which seems most remote, alienated, fractured. I don’t claim to “understand” it but I like having it around.” Sinclair. In this anthology Sinclair “Invited a number of poets to nominate significant figures from previous generations; thus demonstrating that a Ouija board wasn’t required to establish contact with an intelligent and provocative body of poetry.” Gascoyne was invited and accepted an invitation from Jeremy Reed.

Jeremy Reed wrote, in his introduction: “Gascoyne personifies the youthful genius who risks everything and burns out early. His incandescent, powerful, visionary poetry, which looked back to the tradition of Holderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lautremont, and forward to the violently juxtaposed images of the French surrealists, was largely written in his twenties.” You can’t help feeling that Reed does Gascoyne a disservice, implying again and again in this short introduction that it was “the poetry that Gascoyne wrote in the 1930’s” that was valuable. “He is a marvellous antidote to the pedestrianism of so much post-Larkin writing.” The selection of Gascoyne’s work focuses on the Surrealist-influenced early work: the wonderful “And the Seventh Dream Is the Dream of Isis” and “SalvadorDali” (who Gascoyne knew.) “The face of the precipice is black with lovers;/The sun above them is a bag of nails...”

I think that this focus on Gascoyne as an important conduit of European modernism and Surrealist influence has buried his interesting, and brave post-war development as a poet with strong personal, political and spiritual themes.

“In 1937 he first made contact with the poet-philosopher Benjamin Fondane and discovered Pierre Jean Jouve. It was a significant turning point. He entered into analysis for several months with Jouve’s psychiatrist wife, Blanche Reverchon. Gascoyne’s Hölderlin’s Madness (1938), with four original poems interpolated in the "free adaptations" of the German poet, was his response to Jouve’s Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin. In Gascoyne’s third collection, Poems 1937-42 (1943, with eight striking reproductions in colour by Graham Sutherland), he found his mature voice and emerged as a religious poet”. Times Obituary 2001.

“Cyril Connolly claimed that the poems "take us in their chill, calm, sensitive language as near the edge of the precipice as a human being is able to go and still turn back"” Times Obituary 2001.

A work like “Miserere” echoes back to a poet like Clare and forward to Geoffrey Hill and R.S.Thomas.In Ecce Homo he provides the unknown Christ to go with Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion.

Gascoyne struggled with depression into the post-war years. After his father’s death he endured periods in hospital. I wonder whether the treatments included ECT, common at the time, which may have further compounded his problems with writers block.

It was in Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight that Gascoyne met his wife, Judy Lewis, in a remarkable coincidence. Judy explained: “ One of my favourite poems was called September Sun. I read it one afternoon and one of the patients came up to me afterwards and said 'I wrote that', I put my hand on his shoulder and said 'Of course you did, dear'. Then of course when I got to know him I realised he had.” Wikipedia.

September Sun: 1947.


Magnificent strong sun! in these last days
So prodigally generous of pristine light
That’s wasted only by men’s sight who will not see
And by self-darkened spirits from whose night
Can rise no longer orison or praise:

Let us consume in fire unfed like yours
And may the quickened gold within me come
To mintage in due season, and not be
Transmuted to no better end than dumb
And self-sufficient usury. These days and years

May bring the sudden call to harvesting,
When if the fields Man labours only yield
Glitter and husks, then with an angrier sun may He
Who first with His gold seed the sightless field
Of Chaos planted, all our trash to cinders bring.

His marriage in 1975 to Judy Lewis brought about a renaissance: he began writing poetry again and new editions of his earlier work brought him back to public attention. Before he died, he was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

“ His anguish at the fate of the world's "Bombed and abandoned cities" ('Ecce Homo') remained undimmed. In his late poem, 'Prelude to a New Fin-de-Siècle', this takes the form of a litany of the century's wars. In the face of atrocity Gascoyne wonders aloud what poetry can do: "- If this is a poem, where are the images?/- What images suffice?". Gascoyne's imagination was always stalked by despair but his strength in not yielding to it gives his poems their iron-like durability. He believed in "The faithful fire of vision" ('The Sacred Hearth') even though it abandoned him for long periods of his life.” Poetry Archive. http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya....do?poetId=173

I have a copy of his 1965 Collected Poems OUP , edited and introduced by Robin Skelton. Thanks to this thread I am now reading it beyond the early, astonishing, surrealist poems.

Having read more about Gascoyne I am struck by the fascinating story of his life, his early fame, his embrace of European modernism and his “excommunication” by Andre Breton as his poetry changed and developed. A good biography is needed.

Steve.

Last edited by Steve Bucknell; 11-29-2011 at 03:04 AM.
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