Simon Turner - A Look Forward to a Surrealist New Year

February looks set so be something of a bumper month, at least as far as my expenditure goes.  Not only are Alcest, my all time favourite shoegaze influenced French post-black metal band, releasing a new album, but there are two - count them, two - new publications on British Surrealism appearing almost simultaneously.  OUP are putting out Night Thoughts, a long-overdue biography of David Gascoyne, whilst Carcanet have an anthology on British Surrealism, On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight, waiting in the wings.  Edited by Michel Remy, a leading expert in the field, On the Thirteenth Stroke (hereby referred to as Stroke) is something of a pioneer, selling itself as the first anthology of British Surrealism in the world, which is true: it's certainly, by the looks of things, the first properly rigorous anthology of its kind, including not only poetry within its remit (never Surrealism's strong suit, either here or on the other side of the Channel), but paintings, manifestos (ah, that's more like it: the avant garde's real innovation in form) and 'declarations', which are always fun.  But Remy's anthology - which looks to be designed as a kind of companion to his academic work on the same movement - is not without precursors.  Specifically, it has one (problematic, though enthusiastic) ancestor, Edward B. Germain's 1978 Penguin anthology English and American Surrealist Poetry (retitled in subsequent editions as Surrealist Poetry in English, which smooths over at least one of the problems with the anthology that I detail below).

Where Remy seems to be restraining himself editorially to the historically specific movement of British Surrealism (taking in the big guns - Gascoyne, Penrose, Sykes Davies - and more subsidiary figures, like Conroy Maddox and the other Birmingham Surrealists), Germain lets himself roam across the entirety of English-language poetry in the twentieth century, and he seems to find Surrealists wherever he goes.  The Penguin anthology's very useful as a compendium of poets who might otherwise have fallen completely off the map - useful, too, in drawing the reader towards points of affiliation with Surrealism in poets we might never have thought capable of such antics (Robert Conquest?  John Crowe Ransom?  Hmmm...) - but its editorial omnivorousness is simultaneously its chief strength and its greatest weakness.  The problems with Germain's approach are spelled out in the conclusion of his introduction, where he states that:

"The spirit of surrealism has become the spirit of modern poetry: the search for the marvellous; the desire to break through the boundaries between subject and object, between desire and reality; the need to create a vision superior to the ugliness of contemporary civilisation.  Surrealism endures in its insistence on a vivification of language, so that pre-learned categories crumble, and desire can reveal the beauty that categories cannot.  Poets believe in this beauty."

Basically, Germain comes dangerously close to saying that surrealism - an historically specific, politically minded, and aesthetically revolutionary movement - is just a modern form of the universal poetic impulse, a formulation that suggests that all poems - and all poets, for that matter, in spite of their feelings on the subject - are potentially surrealist: it just depends on how you choose to read them.  Hence, I suppose, the out of nowhere choices of Ransom and Conquest. 

This ahistoricism explains the jumbled and decontextualised manner in which the poems that follow are arranged.  We are given no biographical details on the poets chosen, aside from what's mentioned in the introduction, so unless the names happen to be familiar (and some, but by no means all, are, relatively speaking, household names: Ashbery's in here, as are O'Hara and Koch; the Deep Image crowd are represented by Merwin and Bly; whilst the British Poetry Revival only manages to field Tom Raworth), we're very much navigating without a compass (or, indeed, a paddle.  Or a canoe, in many instances: Bravig Imbs, anyone?  No, I didn't think so.  Oh, and I've just Googled him, so don't try and palm me off with a half-digested Wikipedia entry dressed up as original scholarship: that won't cut any dice with me, sweetheart).  Germain does group the poets officially connected to the British Surrealist movement together, so there's a degree of concession being made to collective affiliation, but otherwise it's something of a free for all, with Deep Imagists, Black Mountaineers, New Apocalyptics and narrative surrealists like James Tate all placed on an equal footing, as if there were no way of distinguishing between them.  Biographical details would at least give the interested reader a starting point, a means of coming to the conclusion that, say, Tate and Bly were very different poets, rather than assuming - as we're pretty much forced to do - that their inclusion in this anthology implied an equal adherence to an agreed-upon set of aesthetic and political principles that have remained pretty much unchanged since the inception of Surrealism in the early 1920s. 

Considering surrealism's relation to post-war movements would have also helped draw attention to the rather odd editorial omissions: of the Beats, why McClure and not Philip Lamantia or Bob Kaufman, who were actively engaged with the heritages of surrealism to a far greater extent than any of their peers?  Why Bly and Merwin, but not James Wright?  Tate but not Charles Simic?  In addition, let's look at that title again, or at least its first half: English and American Surrealist Poetry.  'American' isn't an issue, but I suspect that the national affiliation implied by 'English' might come as something of a shock to Dylan Thomas (Welsh), Norman MacCaig (Scottish), and J. F. Hendry (also Scottish).  Again, such a seemingly minor oversight speaks of an editorial policy that tends to ride roughshod over complexities of affiliation and difference.

Of course, it's not all bad news, and Germain's anthology did - and does, as it's readily available in the form of second hand copies - proffer a great deal of interesting material that might otherwise have been denied the general reader who's not tied up in academia (where British Surrealism as a subject has languished for some time).  Moreover, Germain's rather cavalier editorial decision to bundle all his poets together under a generalised 'surrealist' label, in spite of the inherent shortcomings of this approach, does throw up some interesting juxtapositions: certainly, I can't think of another anthology that would place Robert Conquest and Tom Raworth in such close proximity, nor one that would rescue Norman MacCaig's Apocalyptic juvenilia from the poet's own aesthetic disavowal.  As I said, the anthology's weakness is also its greatest strength: we just need to be cautious, as readers, to fill out the over-simplifications, and fill in the gaps, of Germain's methodology as we go along.  Hopefully, Remy's new anthology might make that task a little easier.                            

Simon Turner - A Beginner's Guide to British Surrealism (1): Introductory Comments

Surrealism, that hoary old conglomeration of Freudian psychoanalysis and good old-fashioned turn of the century French decadence, never really took off in this country, for a number of reasons.  Herbert Read helps to clarify matters in long essay on the subject, where he defines aesthetics not in terms of historical forward momentum - symbolism overturning realism; Modernism overturning symbolism; the Movement overturning Modernism, and so on into the sunset - but as a continuous Manichean struggle between Classicism and Romanticism.  The Classical impulse is towards linguistic and formal order, intellectuation and orchestration, the Romantic towards an overabundance of imagination, a realiance upon organic rather than imposed form (Creeley's dictum that 'Form is never more than an extension of content' comes to mind).  It's an oversimplifcation - or my rendering of Read's argument is a crude oversimplification - but it's a useful one.  Generally, British poetry hasn't trusted Romanticism until its practitioners are good and dead (Keats and Shelley helped matter by dying young), or can be proven without a shadow of a doubt to adhere to old fashioned Tory principles (step forward, Bill Wordsworth).  When they're alive and kicking, writers of a Romantic bent tend to be labelled hellraisers, poetasters and general disruptors of the common good: those writers most lauded in the public imagination, at least in the twentieth century, are of a distinctly Classicist hue: Auden, Eliot, Larkin, Betjemen, all fit the pattern, however greatly their work varies in terms of its aesthetic choices.

Unsurprisingly, Read sees the Surrealists - both on the continent and in Britain - as following the Romantic camp, and his reading of the British Surrealist movement attempts to place them within a tradition of Anglophone visionary writing, including Blake and Coleridge, looking further back to Christopher Smart and the Book of Revelation as founding texts for Brit-born Surrealist practice.  

Another reason Surrealism didn't quite take is that it swiftly mutated into something quite different, as its chief exponents - David Gascoyne, Hugh Sykes Davies, Humphrey Jennings - found themselves drawn towards other methods of expressing their poetic vision.  In Gascoyne's case, the limitations of orthodox Surrealism quickly made themselves felt, and his later work fits broadly into the category of mystic of religious visionary writing.  Sykes Davies only produced a small handful of strictly Surrealist poems and, whilst powerful, he rapidly shed that method of composition, and moved towards instead a brand of Eliotean high Modernism, as a critic and a writer.  Jennings, meanwhile, was a pioneer of documentary film-making, as well as having a hand in the foundation of the Mass Observation movement, though neither career-branch was entitrely free from the influence of Surrealist philosophy.  Aside from the defection of its high priests, British Surrealism was, more importantly, overshadowed by the internationalist Modernism of Pound and Eliot, and the more meliorative elaboration on Modernism proposed by Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Day-Lewis.  Later, the New Apocalyptics - Henry Treece, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, and Norman MacCaig amongst them - raked up the embers of Surrealism, but it was never a coherent movement, and was equally afflicted with the defection and ambivalence of its individual members as British Surrealism had been.

What will follow over the next few weeks will be a series of short sketches of the leading figures of British Surrealism: what I think their important works were, why I think they matter, and why I think they're ripe for re-engagement.  Don't say you weren't warned.  First up: Hugh Sykes Davies.          

News and Events

The Birmingham Book Festival has been running since the 6th of October, and is ongoing until the 29th, and loyal fans of Gists and Piths should know that the Editors are involved in a couple of upcoming events. Simon Turner will be talking on Roy Fisher as part of the seminar series on Saturday 17th of October (the series as a whole looks very interesting, with Luke Kennard on David Foster Wallace, and Heather Child talking on Will Self being among the highlights). On the 20th of October, meanwhile, Nine Arches Press are hosting Surreal in the City, where Simon Turner (again) will be reading alongside luminaries such as penned in the margins supremo Tom Chivers, the world's youngest ever Forward nominee Luke Kennard, and Matt Nunn, the Brummagem Neruda. George Ttoouli, Turner's partner in crime in the G&P mayhem, will be acting as compere. If you want to book tickets (Surreal in the City is free, but I think it pays to book), the box office number is: 0121 303 2323.

In other news, editors' favourites Baroness are currently streaming the entirety of their startlingly good new album Blue Record on their myspace page, in advance of its imminent arrival tomorrow. God Bless the digital age.

The longer nights and colder weather have been driving the editors indoors in preparation for their long and terrible winter slumber, but we've still been managing to get a lot of reading done. Here's what's been exciting us collectively over recent months:

Beats at Naropa, an anthology published by Coffee House Press, consisting of nuggets from the audio archive of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Contributors include Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Anne Waldman, Diane Di Prima, and Amiri Baraka; there are interviews with Burroughs and Ginsberg; and big retrospectives on neglected figures like Bob Kaufman. Now if that does't get you excited, nothing will:

Matthew Welton, We needed coffee, but..., a brilliant second collection from a one-man Oulipo revolution:

Voice Recgonition and City State, two new anthologies of young poets, one covering the whole country, the other focused on London, but both packed with genuine talent and promise. I'm excited about where a lot of these poets go next. Expect full coverage soon:

British Surrealism in Context. Okay, that doesn't count as reading, but it is exciting. Leeds Art Gallery are showing an exhibition of, you guessed it, British Surrealism, taken from the private collection of Dr Jeffrey Sherwin, the most prominent collector of the field in the UK. Sadly, the Editors weren't able to make it to Leeds, and the exhibition closes at the end of October. But if anyone does make it up there, we would love to hear your thoughts: perhaps a review might be in order? The Editors, however, do hope to get a chance to see:

Angels of Anarchy, an exhibition of Surrealism (there's a pattern emerging here, isn't there?) which focuses on female artists, and the movement's (often troubled) relationship to feminism. Big names like Frida Kahlo and Dorothea Tanning are included, alongside lesser known artists such as Emmy Bridgwater (one of the Birmingham Surrealists). More news once we've been to see. Why do these exhibition always happen so far away from the Midlands? Why did I never learn to drive?

Simon Turner - Close Encounters (2) - David Gascoyne, 'The Very Image'

I must admit to having been slightly obsessed with this poem since I first read it years ago (context unknown). Apparently, you can judge how much someone loves a book by the numbers of editions they have in their house (Ulysses: 6; The Divine Comedy: I've lost track; Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book: 0), and I think much the same rule applies to individual poems. 'The Very Image' is printed in at least four texts I own, including Gascoyne's selected, and an excellent Penguin anthology entitled English and American Surrealist Poetry, which does exactly what it says on the tin, more or less; so that should give you some indication of how much esteem I hold this poem in (or the degree of my manic hoarding disorder, your call).

Anyway, the reason I want to discuss this poem here and now - aside from proving my co-editor wrong about my status as some kind of nascent hermit - is because I find it interesting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I think it is one of Gascoyne's strongest Surrealist poems, and one of the best examples of linguistic Surrealism produced by the English Surrealist group. Secondly, I think the poem has great value as being in some ways indicative of the English Surrealist group's poetics as a whole, though I'll get on to that shortly.

'The Very Image's' greatest strength is its simplicity. It's built in five line stanzas, each on containing a single image. Here's the opening:

An image of my grandmother
her head appearing upside-down upon a cloud
the cloud transfixed on the steeple
of a deserted railway station
far away

There is a distinct 'purity of diction' (to borrow Donald Davie's phrase) on display here, and the connection to Davie is an instructive one. One of the Movement's main bugbears was, of course, Modernism (though how much of that was literary leg-pulling is up for debate, and Davie's own unceasing aesthetic support for Pound and Bunting rather complicates the picture), but their real ire was saved for Dylan Thomas and the New Apocalypse crowd (including Nicholas Moore, Henry Treece, George Barker, and Norman McCaig for a short while). One of the primary well-springs of the New Apocalyptic aesthetic was, of course, Surrealism, and Gascoyne's Surrealist poems in many regards pre-empt the Apocalyptic project. 'The Very Image' is striking precisely because it forgoes the apocalyptic (small-a) tone that dominates in other poems of his, such as 'And the Seventh Dream is the Dream of Isis', favouring instead a rhetoric almost of plain statement, which is much more effective in allowing the startling images to show through.

The poem is dedicated to René Magritte, the Belgian artists whose paintings, alongside those of Dali, have become a visual shorthand, via poster prints of his most famous works, of what Surrealism is supposedly all about. In the process, his paintings have lost much of their capacity for strangeness: we come to a Magritte thinking we already know the score. Gascoyne's poem succeeds in making Magritte strange again, creating a series of uncanny and vertigo-inducing images through the plainest of means:

An image of an aeroplane
the propeller is rashers of bacon
the wings are of reinforced lard
the tail is made of paperclips
the pilot is a wasp

Which brings me on to my second point. Whilst the visual heritage of Surrealism enjoys a great deal of popular success - however much that success has stripped its greatest practitioners of the capacity to shock and appall - the literary possibilities of Surrealism have either been relegated to the status of a cult, with writers such as Gascoyne enjoying a small but committed readership, or the processes which gave birth to classics like The Magnetic Fields and Paris Peasant have been watered down by several generations of 'soft' Surrealists. It is strange, then, that many of the great writers seem to pre-empt their own redundancy, as the visual is repeatedly given precedence over the written, the linguistic, in many of the great theoretical texts of Surrealism. Basically, these lads were bare obsessed with eyes, with what the eye could produce imaginatively: language was only valuable insofar as it coulld produce new images for the mind's eye to confront.

Gascoyne's poem, however, seems to be rather more ambivalent. Yes, it's dedicated to Magritte, yes, it's entitled 'The Very Image', but the poem's effects - that of accumulation, whereby the image only makes 'sense' (or rather, feels complete) once each individual stanza is over - are chiefly linguistic in character. The shock of learning that the pilot of the insane plane in the quotation above is a wasp is only possible, I would argue, in a written text: a visual text could not withhold information in this way. Likewise, in the poem's final stanza, the reader is confronted with new information which alters all that has gone before:

And all these images
and many others
are arranged like waxworks
in model birdcages
about six inches high

What begins, then, as a hymn to a great painter becomes, to my mind, a celebration of the almost godlike capacity of the poet to control the reader's perceptions, finally belittling the images he has created in the foregoing stanzas.