David Gascoyne Books

This book is about the intersection between art and revolutionary politics.In the 1930s the leading figures of the surrealist movement and a few other artists and writers tried to cut out some political space for artists who supported a revolutionary overturn of the system that birthed fascism and world war - capitalism .The same "globalized" capitalism that exists today, and which is marching toward fascism and world war all over again. In the 1930s, there was another challenge for would-be revolutionary artists : the obstacle of the mass
"Communist" parties which betrayed them and workers and farmers around the world in the interests of the "Soviet" bureaucrats headed by Stalin, which same bureaucracy stifled and suffocated all art and creativity inside the USSR.The struggle of those artists, led by Andre Breton and Diego Rivera, and their direct collaboration with the Russian revolutionary leader in exile Leon Trotsky, has rich lessons for those artists of all kinds who are already beginning to reject and revolt against the "globalized" capitalism of today. As well as those who will do so tommorow.

This book will give you a good understanding of the surrealist movement. You will read the artists' writings not only on this subject, but also their views on the important political questions of the day which they understood were tied to cultural questions. A photo display in the book gives you a sampling of surrealist works. There is also an excellent glossary of names that reveals the evolution of the surrealists in later years. You gain an appreciation for the international breadth of the movement. 'What is Surrealism?' is not just for art history students. Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between art and politics will be fascinated by collection of articles in this book.

Well, what a shock. A totally human, big, fat tome on an art form that I've never enjoyed. Makes understandable and useful for one's own life the surrealists' aim of dissolving the alienating barriers between thought and action, dream and consciousness, art and life. Their appreciation of Freud; their collaboration with communists, with Leon Trotsky; their rejection of fatherland, religion, family - all flowing from their determination to be part of the birth of a new world in which there would be no poets because all would make poetry. Fascinating section of documents including a brief homage to Hopi art, denunciation of Salvador Dali for being pro-fascist, support to the Algerian independence fight. Still don't enjoy the surrealists' work. But do enjoy them now.

Today most artists seem to be on a short leash. I have friends who paint and sculpt and they don't even think about the fact that their art rarely reaches even middle class people let alone the working and farming majority. When something stirs them and they want to take action, they get afraid about their grants, their patrons, that artist in resident spot at a university, or that artist on a cruise, or on a rich person's art club trip to France or Egypt. They get scared to make a phone call or even write a letter because art in the US in particular is on strings to the rich.......................................................

Once it was different. Read this. I don't say follow surrealism, because it was just one school, born of another time, trying to surmount problems that only a socialist revolution and retransformation of society can solve. As a revolutionist as well as an artist--I have a MFA in Creative Writing and write fictional and poetry--what is remarkable about Breton is not his narrow precepts or methods, but about the militancy to which he tried to find truth and resonance and joy without surrendering to acceptance of bourgeois society..................................
The remarkable writings of Andre Breton, as gifted as a writer, as he was a painter, and more gifted as a thinker than he was either. After World War II US imperialism went to work to try to stifle the courage and outrageousness of people like Breton to channel art into the lack of statement of abstract expressionism. Surrealism is no more revolutionary than any other form of art. The most famous surrealist to most people today is Dali, who didn't mind Franco at all and tried to turn himself into an NY advertizing money maker. What is important about Breton, besides what he says about surrealism and art--and on those things I am no big judge--he was trying to find a way to fight for a free, fighting, critical, irreverant art, faced with the nauseating conservatism of formalism and the smothering idiocy of socialist realism? What was important about Breton is that in these writings and in the manifestos here signed by non surrealists like Leon Trotsky and Diego Rivera, Breton was fighting for more than his art? The quest to upturn (boulverser is better but not English) speak out of turn, penetrate, and speak openly that he developed in his art, in the 1930s and 1940s when most of this work was done, was connected with the struggle of artists to link up with the revolutionary struggle against imperialism, and at the same time, with the fight within the workers movement to free it self of the syphilis of Stalinism.
Buy this book. Read this book. Use this book to try to say what life really is.

It is far past time that poets of the present pay their dues and recognize the greatness, inhuman resilience, and almost perfectly ideal life of poet-warrior David Gascoyne.

As Kathleen Raine puts it in her introduction to this indispensable work on the life of this authentic seer, Gascoyne's existence consisted of a "total commitment to the role of the poet."

On the fringes of the Surrealist movement because of his unwavering Roman Catholicism and discriminated against, like Artaud, for his refusal to make one concession or compromise to the bureaucracy Breton eventually created (perhaps unwittingly), it is neither exaggeration nor sentimentality to characterize this Promethean figure as a sort of poetic saint.

His unwavering and frenetic pursuit of visionary truth is evidenced by his statements such as the following: "The poet's job is to go on holding on to something like faith, through the darkness of total lack of faith, what Buber calls the eclipse of God."

These days unimaginative poetry is the rule rather than the exception, and even today a giant like Gascoyne might seem curiously out of place in a world that has backed off from the intensity of figures like Poe, Rimbaud, Artaud--a lineage Gascoyne fits in quite well.

His was a life plagued by misfortune: bouts of madness, mostly from the mental overstrain he imposed on himself for the sake of his craft, drove him to long periods of tragic silence more than once.

Few stories are as painful to read as an older Gascoyne crashing the gates of Buckingham Palace, insisting that they listen to the transcendental dictation he had received from another world. Sacrificing himself and the integrity of his rational mind in favor of Rimbaud's derangement of the senses, his amphetamine addiction became a death-grip until there was nothing left to do but flame out.

Gascoyne, however, did more than wait for "The Sun At Midnight" to arrive: he was engaged in the cultural, political, and literary endeavors of his time as much as anyone else. The early essays in this book, most of which were written by a younger and more naive Gascoyne, are seminal to any understanding of the man.

His intuitive understanding of Novalis' thirst for eternal night, his fascination with thinkers like Leon Chestov, and his impassioned theories on the role of the poet are as vital to our survival as poets caught in the throes of capitalism as Shelley's "Defence of Poetry".

As a struggling young poet myself, I have found this text to be the sort I carry around with me everywhere to arm myself against the inevitable onslaught vision suffers everywhere in this world. Like Maldoror, Rimbaud's "Illuminations", and the work of Villon, it is an extra conscience of sorts keeping me from compromise.

Read not for leisure but necessity, that someday this seemingly forgotten "Christ of Revolution and Poetry" might start appearing more in bookstores and warm us by the fire of his Sacred Hearth.

David Gascoyne's elegantly measured prose provides the reader with the rare instance not only of how a visionary poet reads his contemporaries, but of how he blueprints ideas which provide the instructive dynamic informing his poetry.

Gascoyne's mind is awesome. An isolated spiritual journeyer in a materialistic century, Gascoyne's integrity stems from his belief in visionary imagination as inspired interface between conscious and unconscious worlds. From his first youthfully audacious paper, Gascoyne distinguished between poetry as activity-of-the-mind and poetry as means-of-expression. His powerful affirmation of the superior value of an imaginatively alive poetry over one that simply describes was from the start his inspired credo.

This book is a moving human document of what it means to be a poet, and to survive by that means alone, in a society radically unsympathetic to this calling. Having experienced the defenceless vulnerability of being a committed poet in a capitalist ethos, I find Gascoyne's survival heroic, his courage paradigmatic to the poetic calling.

Although David Gascoyne writes warmly of the darker aspects of T.S. Eliot's psyche, Eliot was in large to prove the prototype of the poet deserting his art for the sanctuary of an editor's desk. Many poets have done an injustice to poetry seeking personal security in acceptable professions. They relegate art to the status of a consuming hobby. How can one be fully open to the possibilities of experience if one's days are given over to immersion in establishment values? Gascoyne is among the best antidotes to this duplicitous trend.

Gascoyne's poetry of imploded mystic hallucination sounded a completely new, revolutionary note in British poetics. He found, for the English language, visionary continents already mapped out by Lautreamont, Rimbaud and the surrealists. He was to encounter madness in the process, often the way for those who pursue the journey to the interior. He says: "I am a poet who wrote himself out when young and then went mad. I tried to write poetry again and succeeded to a certain extent but it is not the same as the poetry I wrote before." Gascoyne's greatness hinges on this tragic concept of burning out.

Collateral with the inspired poetry he was writing in the 30's came the equally eventful prose essays which form the early part of this book, chief amongst them being Gascoyne's preface to his book of free translations Hölderlin's Madness (1938). This particular essay is one of the finest ever written on the subject of visionary poetry. It achieved an empathy for its subject's plight prophetic of Gascoyne's own. At only twenty-two his declarative statement in defence of poetic vision was published. Already he inhabits the great night of the German romantics in which the poet anticipates imagination becoming reality."They are poets and philosophers of nostalgia and the night. A disturbed night, whose paths lead far among forgotten things, mysterious dreams and madness. And yet a night that precedes the dawn, and is full of longing for the sun. These poets look forward out of their night: and Hölderlin in his madness wrote always of sunlight and dazzling air, and the islands of the Mediterranean noon."

To have realised this at such a young age was also an initiation experience into the excruciating social isolation which comes of holding these secrets. Gascoyne was not only set apart from the predominantly social concerns of British poetry in the 1930s, but from the main thrust of twentieth-century British poetry, with its attempts either to repress or sanitise the imagination. "Persistence is all" Rilke was to advise, and David Gascoyne, as poet, has never wavered. The price has been high. Lacking any support structure for his undertaking, David Gascoyne the private man has been broken by his quest. He returned home to his parents in middle-age, broke, ill, conceiving himself a failure in their eyes.

In 1965, his Collected Poems were published. He felt it was some sort of justification for having lived, some vindication of an identity denied him by a capitalist ideology. These are the sufferings inherent in pursuing a poetic vocation, as opposed to writing poetry as an avocation to a career. Gascoyne is one of the few who in every generation are prepared to sacrifice their lives in the interests of poetry. In his "Note On Symbolism" Gascoyne further enforces his conviction that the way to apprehending spirit is through the inner evaluation of experience. He writes: 'Each man must undertake alone and in silence the task of objective and empirical reality's changing and uncertain surface.'

Of extreme interest are the two autobiographical essays: "The Most Astonishing Book In The English Language" and "Self-Discharged." In the first of these Gascoyne describes having discovered in the early 1940s at Watkins bookshop an extraordinary book named OAHSPE: A New Bible. Its prophetic contents are subscribed to by a cult called Kosmon, purporting to expound the secrets of the visible and invisible universes. These became inextricably linked to the delusional promptings about apocalypse which eventually led to Gascoyne's confinement. (The poet at one time believed it his mission to break into Buckingham Palace and alert the Royal Family to the coming of a new spiritual awareness.) The consequences of his compulsive actions were to have Gascoyne sectioned, and in 'Self-Discharged' he describes life inside the dystopian precinct of an asylum.

Gascoyne's prose and poetry are of the highest significance, products of an imagination in discourse with the archetypal Kingdom. If both Hölderlin and Rimbaud "believed the poet to be capable of penetrating to a secret world and of receiving the dictation of a transcendental inner-voice," David Gascoyne did, too. The poetry stopped. His continued celebration of the exalted visionary dynamic did not. His later criticism, especially of surrealism, involves a generosity of spirit which is in itself a monumental achievement.

This book represents poetic truth as we seldom encounter it, and as such should be a touchstone for all future poets. A hard-won achievement of a great poet.

In terms of finding a wild, uninhibited introduction to the radical and mindspinning worlds of Breton and friends I can assure you that this is a challenging but rewarding read. However, take note that those who feel prose must have structure and communicate linear thought, please leave your textbook at the door. This is work that burrows deep into the subconcious and festers like a tick.

Poet David Gascoyne has suffered a strange fate, even for one whose place is firmly within the canon of great visionary artists; his continued obscurity is puzzling for any reader who has even merely sampled the power of his epic, imaginative lyricism.

These pages document Gascoyne's unrelenting pursuit of poetic vision at all costs in the face of abject poverty, alienation from friends and family, taking us on his unforgettable journey from the celestial heights
of the "seer" (in the tradition of his idols Holderlin and Rimbaud), to the depths of a psychotic depression which would leave him silent for more than twenty years.

Gascoyne's concerns were unfashionably religious--though not in any orthodox sense--and his quest for a "religio poetae" which would restore a sense of the sacred in the human being through imagination charged his life in Paris with famous contemporaries (Henry Miller, Claude Cahun, Dylan Thomas) and even friends (George Barker, Paul Eluard, Roger Roughton, Lawrence Durrell) a sense of separateness which constantly drove him into an impassioned solitude.

It is incredible that anyone, poet or not, could manage to pack the amount of intensity Gascoyne did into these 335 pages. Packed to the hilt with philosophy, poetry, translations, and accounts of his daily interactions with some of the most well known literary figures of the twentieth century, I can only imagine Kafka's "Diaries" equalling it.
It somehow transcends even the great time period in which it was written.

This intensity is of necessity short-lived. His addiction to a (then legal) form of methamphetamine and a monstrous self-hatred that grows worse and worse as the journal continues slowly erode the will toward creation.

The "Afterword", written thirty years after his mental breakdown, is sombre, compelling and sort of sad--Gascoyne documents his return home to his parents in Teddington, England and his subsequent loss of belief in himself as poet, and a series of hospitalizations which would eventually result in a lifelong marriage.

Gascoyne would indeed gain the recognition he deserved and craved, but tragically it happened very close to the time of his death when he was not fully able to appreciate the fruits of his labor. It came via Enitharmon Press and also commendably through the influence of poet Jeremy Reed.

These pages are as great as anything I have ever read, whether in literature or poetry; it is a time capsule and also a monumental achievement on the part of Gascoyne.

It is way past time for a re-introduction of David Gascoyne's poetry to a younger generation of readers.

I discovered this book at Arizona State University's, Hayden Library when I was in school in 1993 and it totally changed what I thought about literature. Its absolutely intoxicating freedom of creation was like nothing I had ever read except maybe Arthur Rimbaud. This book, I believe, points in the direction of pure human creativity not constrained by logic, form or anything that disconnects us from existence itself. On these roads maybe we can get back to the beginnings, not writing stories but why we write stories, why we scratched on cave walls.

David Gascoyne's classsic text of 1935 was the first comprehensive work on Surrealism to be published in English. His membership of the Surrealist movement and his association with its leading members - among them Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Mac Ernst, and Salvador Dali - placed him in an ideal position to witness and record the development and significance of its foremost writers and artists. David Gascoyne lived in France in 1937-39, 1947-8 and 1953-64, during which time he became one of the most distinguished of British poets and translators. He now lives on the Isle of Wight. --- from book's back cover

This book, along with Desnos' "Liberty or Love" and Soupault's "The Last Nights of Paris", is probably one of the most important texts on the Surrealist movement of the 1930's from the perspective of not only a member, but a president of the club--Gascoyne would later, with his "Journals" and a handful of interviews he gave, be one of the only impartial critics of the movement as it existed during a period of legendary poetic discovery.

On the other hand, for enthusiasts of David Gascoyne's work itself apart from the Surrealist influence, this may be a bit disappointing. Gascoyne was young when he wrote this and was still a little naive about the red tape he would encounter later with Breton and the gang, being a Catholic and having some strength of personality. I was actually surprised that in this text he backed up Breton's Second Manifesto, which ultimately destroyed the movement by ejecting its most valuable members. Later on he would say of Breton: "He was a Trotskyist and you didn't argue with him for long. All the same, Breton was to Surrealism what Freud was to Psychoanalysis."

The youthful naivete notwithstanding, Gascoyne's feverish passion for all things rebellious and surreal makes you feel as though you are there with him in the streets of Paris when the spirit of Rimbaud and Lautreamont were resurrected by a few men who got sick of war, drudgery, and society's determination to make everything banal.