David Gascoyne

David Gascoyne
David Gascoyne, by Patrick Swift, 1958
Born	(1916-10-10)10 October 1916 Harrow, London
Died	25 November 2001(2001-11-25) (aged 85) Isle of Wight
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	English
Education	Salisbury Cathedral School and Regent Street Polytechnic

David Gascoyne (10 October 1916 – 25 November 2001) was an English poet associated with the

Gascoyne was born in Harrow the eldest of three sons of Leslie Noel Gascoyne (1886–1969), a bank clerk, and his wife, Winifred Isobel, née Emery (1890–1972). His mother, a niece of the actors Cyril Maude and Winifred Emery, was one of two young women present when the dramatist W. S. Gilbert died in his lake at Grim's Dyke in May 1911.^[1] Gascoyne grew up in England and Scotland, attending Salisbury Cathedral School and London's Regent Street Polytechnic. He spent some of the early 1930s in Paris.

Gascoyne's first book, Roman Balcony and Other Poems, appeared in 1932, when he was 16.^[2] A novel, Opening Day was published the following year.^[2] However, it was Man's Life is This Meat (1936), collecting his early surrealism and translations of French surrealists, and Hölderlin's Madness (1938) that established his reputation. These, with his 1935 A Short Survey of Surrealism and his work on the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition, which he helped to organise, made him one of a small group of English surrealists that included Hugh Sykes Davies and Roger Roughton. At the exhibition, Gascoyne had to use a spanner to rescue Salvador Dalí from a deep-sea diving suit he had worn to give his lecture.

Political outlook

Gascoyne was an active

The diaries Gascoyne kept for six years from 1936 projected an existentialist auto-criticism, recording with honesty his acute emotional and spiritual crises, his struggle to accept his sexual identity as a homosexual, and his affairs. Apart from his involvement with communism and Mass-Observation, he had friendships with Dylan Thomas, Kathleen Raine, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and others. Also apparent is strong engagement with existentialist philosophy.^[5]

When later interviewed for the book Authors Take Sides on the Falklands, Gascoyne expressed strong opposition to the Falklands War.^[6]

Later life and works

Gascoyne spent the years just before World War II in Paris, where he became friends with Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, André Breton, Paul Éluard and Pierre Jean Jouve. His poetry of this period appeared in Poems 1937–1942 (1943) with illustrations by Graham Sutherland.

His poem Requiem, dedicated to the future victims of war, was written for his friend Priaulx Rainier to set to music. Her Requiem was first heard in 1956. She died on Gascoyne's 70th birthday, 10 October 1986.

Gascoygne returned to France after the war and lived there at intervals until the mid-1960s. His work from the 1950s appeared in A Vagrant and Other Poems (1950), and Night Thoughts (1956). These moved away from surrealism towards a more metaphysical and religious approach.

After suffering a mental breakdown, Gascoyne returned to England to spend the rest of his life on the Isle of Wight. He appears to have written little by then. Publication continued due to various "rediscoveries" of his works, with several collections and selections from Oxford University Press, Enitharmon and other imprints. Two books of his journals were returned to him after being lost for some time and were published in separate volumes by Alan Clodd at Enitharmon Press. When a third book was found, a collection including the additional material was edited by Lucien Jenkins for Skoob Books Publishing. For this Gascoyne himself provided what he called a "postface", one of the most extended pieces of writing from his later years.

In 1996, with the editorial assistance of Roger Scott, Gascoyne penned a tribute to his late friend of sixty years George Barker entitled The Fire of Vision, privately printed by Alan Anderson for Alan Clodd.

It was in Whitecroft Hospital on the Isle of Wight that Gascoyne met his wife, Judy Lewis, in a remarkable coincidence. Judy explains:

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. They married in 1975. David Gascoyne died on 25 November 2001 at the age of 85.^[7]

Reputation

In a poetic field dominated by

In later years, Gascoyne seemed remarkably resigned to not altogether achieving in poetry what he had set out to do when young, and not sustaining a remarkable early promise. Still, he was pleased whenever he received critical notice. In his later years his attention was drawn to a balanced assessment of his work by

• Robert Fraser, Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne, OUP, 2012.
  ISBN 978-0-19-955814-8
• Colin Benford, David Gascoyne A Bibliography Of His Works, Heritage Books, 1987.
  ISBN 978-0-9512220-0-3