David Gascoyne

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David Gascoyne (born October 10, 1916 in Harrow , † November 25, 2001 in Newport , Isle of Wight ) was a British poet , translator and artist who was associated with the Surrealist movement .

life and work

David Gascoyne grew up in England and Scotland as the son of a bank manager; he attended Salisbury Cathedral School and the Regent Street Polytechnic in London , which he left in 1932 without a degree. He spent part of the early 1930s in Paris .

Perseus and Andromeda
David Gascoyne , 1936
collage
Tate Gallery, London

Link to the picture
(please note copyrights )

Gascoyne's first book, the novel Balcony and Other Poems , was published in 1932 when he was 16 years old. The Roman Opening Day followed the next year . His reputation grew with the appearance of Man's Life is This Meat (1936), which brought together his first surrealist works and translations of French surrealist literature, and Hölderlin's Madness (1938). With these publications, his 1935 work A Short Survey of Surrealism and his participation in the " International Surrealist Exhibition " in the New Burlington Galleries in London from June 11 to July 4, 1936, which he organized with Roland Penrose , Herbert Read and others was involved, he formed part of the small British surrealist group, which for example still consisted of Hugh Sykes Davies and Roger Roughton. He created three collages for the exhibition , which were published in the catalog. The titles were Perseus and Andromeda , The Annunciation and A Critical Visit ; In the 1950s he exhibited some abstract drawings.

Salvador Dalí had worn a deep-sea diving suit during his lecture Fantomes paranoiaques authentique during the surrealist exhibition on July 1, 1936. It was Gascoyne who had to rescue Dalí from the suit that threatened to suffocate him. Gascoyne cut the wetsuit and freed the panting Dalí from the helmet. The audience applauded this supposed show performance, believing it was a perfect staging of the self-promoter.

Also in 1936 Gascoyne joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but after a short time he left disaffected. He spent the years before the Second World War in Paris, where he became friends with Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst , André Breton , Wolfgang Paalen , Paul Éluard and Pierre Jean Jouve . After the war he returned to France, where he lived in Paris for a year from 1947 and in Aix-en-Provence from 1954 to 1964 . Later work from the 1950s, such as A Vagrant and Other Poems (1950) and Night Thoughts (1956), turned away from surrealism and took a more metaphysical and religious direction.

After a nervous breakdown caused by depression and amphetamine abuse , Gascoyne returned to the UK in 1964 and lived in his parents' house on the Isle of Wight until his death. When his father died, he was admitted as a patient at Whitecroft Hospital, where he met Judy Lewis (1922-2010), who worked there as a therapist. When she read the poem September Sun to her patients and told Gascoyne it was his, she initially thought it was one of his pipe dreams. They married in 1975. Gascoyne was hardly active as a writer. Further publications mainly consisted of summaries of already published works.

In 1996, the French Ministry of Culture appointed him “Chevalier dans l ' Ordre des Arts et des Lettres ” for his life's work, which has rendered outstanding services to French literature. In 2001 Gascoyne died on the Isle of Wight at the age of 85.

Works (selection)

  • 1932: Roman Balcony
  • 1933: Opening Day
  • 1935: A Short Survey of Surrealism
  • 1936: Man's Life is this Meat
  • 1938: Hoelderlin's Madness
  • 1943: Poems 1937–1942 with illustrations by Graham Sutherland
  • 1950: A Vagrant and Other Poems
  • 1952: Thomas Carlyle
  • 1956: Requiem
  • 1956: Night Thoughts
  • 1965: Collected Poems
  • 1970: Sun at Midnight
  • 1976: Three Poems
  • 1978: Paris Journal 1937-1939
  • 1980: Journal 1936-1937
  • 1980: Early Poems
  • 1984: Journal de Paris et d'Ailleurs 1936–1942
  • 1984: Five Early Uncollected Poems
  • 1984: Recontres with Benjamin Fondane

A bibliography of David Gascoyne's work, compiled by Colin Benford, was published by Heritage Books in 1986.

literature

  • Robert Fraser: Night thoughts. The surreal life of the poet David Gascoyne. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-955814-8 .

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Times , London, November 28, 2001
  2. ↑ Quoted from the Tate Gallery, see web link Perseus and Andromeda
  3. ^ Candida Ridler: Transcription of British Library podcast. (PDF; 105 kB) In: Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900 - 1937. British Library, accessed on December 17, 2010 .
  4. ↑ Valentine Cunningham, Guardian , Nov. 27, 2001
personal data
SURNAME Gascoyne, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet, translator and artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 10, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH London Borough of Harrow , UK
DATE OF DEATH November 25, 2001
Place of death Newport , Isle of Wight