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David Gascoyne
‐
Poet, writer and translator, known for his promotion of the Surrealist movement in Britain
Place of birth
Place of death
Newport, Isle of Wight
About
David Gascoyne was an English poet, writer and translator. In 1933 he visited Paris and became acquainted with Surrealist artists such as Max Ernst, Paul Éluard and Salvador Dalí. Gascoyne played a significant role in promoting the Surrealist movement in Britain; he wrote A Short Survey of Surrealism (1935) and organized the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 with Herbert Read and Roland Penrose. He also translated some key Surrealist works into English, such as André Breton's What Is Surrealism? In 1936 he travelled to Barcelona to help the Propaganda Bureau of the Catalonian Government during the Spanish Civil War. In the 1940s and 1950s he worked at the BBC, presenting programmes on poetry.
Gascoyne started his career as a poet in his teens, publishing his first collection of poems in 1932 when he was only 16. He gained critical recognition when his Poems, 1937–1942, illustrated by Graham Sutherland, was published in 1943 as a volume of Tambimuttu’s Editions Poetry London. His poems were also collected in Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime (1942), and he was a contributor to Tambimuttu’s literary periodical journal Poetry London.
Gascoyne kept journals in the late 1930s, Paris Journal 1937–1939 (published in 1978) and Journal 1936–37 (published in 1980). These are important documents, not only of Gascoyne’s spiritual journey but also of the intellectual milieu of the period; they record his friendships with Dylan Thomas, Kathleen Raine, Roger Roughton, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and others.
George Barker, André Breton, Alan Clodd, Cyril Connolly, Salvador Dalí, Lawrence Durrell, Paul Éluard, William Empson, Humphrey Jennings, Pierre Jean Jouve, Henry Miller, Alida Munro, Roland Penrose, Kathleen Raine, Herbert Read, Humphrey Searle, Stephen Spender, Edith Sitwell, Graham Sutherland, M. J. Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas, Robin Waterfield.
Roman Balcony (London: Lincoln Williams, 1932)
Opening Day (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1933)
A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1935)
Man's Life Is This Meat (London: Parton Press, 1936)
Hölderlin's Madness (London: Dent, 1938)
Poems, 1937–1942, with drawings by Graham Sutherland (London: Nicholson & Watson/Editions Poetry London, 1943)
A Vagrant, and Other Poems (London: Lehmann, 1950)
Thomas Carlyle (London and New York: Longmans, Green, for the British Council, 1952)
Night Thoughts (London: André Deutsch; New York: Grove, 1956)
Collected Poems, ed. by Robin Skelton (London and New York: Oxford University Press/André Deutsch, 1965)
The Sun at Midnight (London: Enitharmon Press, 1970)
Three Poems (London: Enitharmon Press, 1976)
Paris Journal 1937–1939 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1978)
Journal 1936–37, Death of an Explorer, Léon Chestov (London: Enitharmon Press, 1980)
Early Poems (Warwick: Greville Press, 1980)
La Mano del Poeta (Genoa: Edizioni S. Marco dei Giustiniani, 1982)
Antennae (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982)
Rencontres avec Benjamin Fondane (St Nazaire: Editions Arcane, 1984)
Tankens Doft, ed. by Lars-Inge Nilsson (Lund: Ellerstöms, 1988)
‘PL Editions and Graham Sutherland’, in Jane Williams (ed.) Tambimuttu: Bridge between Two Worlds (London: Peter Owen, 1989), pp. 112–18
Selected Poems (Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1994)
Encounter with Silence: Poems, 1950 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1998)
Atkinson, Ann, ‘David Gascoyne: A Check-List’, Twentieth Century Literature 6 (1961), pp. 180–92
Benford, Colin T., David Gascoyne, a Bibliography of His Works, 1929–1985 (Ryde, Isle of Wight: Heritage Books, 1986)
Christensen, Peter, ‘David Gascoyne: Confessional Novelist’, Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal 1 (1992), pp. 72–90
Cronin, Anthony, ‘Poetry & Ideas-II: David Gascoyne’, London Magazine 4.7 (1957), pp. 49–55
Duncan, Erika, ‘The Silent Poet: Profile of David Gascoyne’, Book Forum: An International Transdisciplinary Quarterly 4 (1979), pp. 655–71
Duncan, Erika, Unless Soul Clap Its Hands: Portraits and Passages (New York: Schocken Books, 1984)
Jennings, Elizabeth, ‘The Restoration of Symbols’, Twentieth Century 165 (1959), pp. 567–77
MacNiven, Ian S., ‘Emblems of Friendship: Lawrence Durrell and David Gascoyne’, Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal 2 (1993), pp. 131–3
Quinn, Bernetta, ‘Symbolic Landscape in David Gascoyne’, Contemporary Literature 12.4 (1971), pp. 466–94
Raine, Kathleen, ‘David Gascoyne and the Prophetic Role’, Sewanee Review 75 (1967), pp. 193–229
Ray, Paul C., ‘Meaning and Textuality: A Surrealist Example’, Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 26.3 (1980), pp. 306–22
Silkin, Jon, ‘David Gascoyne’, Agenda 19.2–3 (Summer – Autumn 1981), pp. 59–70
Stanford, Derek, ‘David Gascoyne: A Spiritual Itinerary’, Month 29 (1963), pp. 156–69
Stanford, Derek, ‘David Gascoyne and the Unacademics’, Meanjin Quarterly 23 (1964), pp. 70–9
Stanford, Derek, ‘Gascoyne in Retrospect’, Poetry Review 56 (1965), pp. 238–47
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Gascoyne Notebooks, Manuscripts, British Library, St Pancras
Sound Archive, British Library, St Pancras
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds
Buffalo State College, State University of New York
McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma
Berg collection, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, New York Public Library
As I shall ever be indebted to Tambimuttu for publishing the first collection of my poems to be taken seriously by certain critics, it is not possible for me to express in conclusion a wholly unbiased or definitive opinion regarding him. He was warmly impulsive and loyal; he inspired loyalty and affection in a wide variety of not inconsiderable people; he could at times be exasperating but, as our wise mutual friend Robin Waterfield sometimes said of him, ‘One has to take Tambi like the weather’. His worst fault may well be said to have been his generosity. The reproach that someone, especially a man of letters, is generous to a fault, is unfortunately one that is now in increasing decline.
David Gascoyne, ‘Tambimuttu (1915–1983)’, PN Review 34 10.2 (1983), p. 8
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
