British Surrealism Is What Will Be

PN Review has a straw-hatted Jeremy Over writing about On the Thirteenth Stroke of Midnight: Surrealist Poetry in Britain, edited by Michel Remy (Carcanet Press, 2013), "the first anthology to focus on surrealist poetry in English since Edward B. Germain’s 1978 Penguin anthology and the first ever to feature surrealist poetry written exclusively in Britain." The review is taken from the current print edition, PN Review 218, which excitingly also features a poem by Miles Champion, "Lolita in Wonderland" and an article by Aram Saroyan, "War of the Worlds: T.S. Eliot versus D.H. Lawrence" [sub only]. Anyhow, the sunflowers are that:

Over notes "[t]hat David Gascoyne’s first English Manifesto of Surrealism is only being translated into English for the first time in this book is, as its French editor Michel Remy notes, ironic but perhaps typical of British surrealism, whose existence, particularly in the form of poetry, has been a pretty ghostly affair until now."

And then a detailed sense of the contributors and participants of this largely overlooked moment, including Roland Penrose, whose work tends to be overshadowed by his counterpart, Lee Miller:

Roland Penrose has several gentle love poems in the anthology which don’t always catch fire but combine a lyricism reminiscent of Paul Eluard and the kind of heavenly absurdity you might come across in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights: ‘My love was hidden behind the branches / the badger took her by the hand leading her / barefoot through the woods / and meadows kissed her feet / with sugared lips’ (‘Half Born’).

Then there's this bit of turning:

One of [editor Michel] Remy’s primary requirements when assessing the quality of a surrealist text is that it should possess an ‘inexhaustible power of creating astonishment’; a tall order after nearly eighty years of surrealist surprise certainly, but Hugh Sykes Davies’ work seems to me to stake a better claim than many to this. In ‘Poem’, we are spun mesmerically through six stanzas that move forwards and backwards, as in a pantoum, linking together and repeating warnings about what may be growing within:

[…] in the stumps of old trees, where the hearts have rotted out,
there are holes the length of a man’s arm, and dank pools at the
bottom where the rain gathers and old leaves turn to lace, and the
beak of a dead bird gapes like a trap. But do not put your
hand down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees with rotten hearts, where the rain
gathers and the laced leaves and the dead bird like a trap, there
are holes the length of a man’s arm, and in every crevice of the
rotten wood grow weasels’ eyes like molluscs, their lids open
and shut with the tide. But do not put your hand down to see, because […]

Davies viewed surrealism as a natural extension of Romanticism (its prehensile tail) and there’s a curious echo of the boat-stealing episode in Wordsworth’s Prelude in one of the engaging excerpts from Davies’ surrealist novel Petron included in this anthology. As the disembodied mouth of an ‘idiot’ pursues the hero down a lane jeering and cursing him, it undergoes fantastical transformations stretching ‘more and more widely, until at last it seems to overspread the whole horizon’. Finally, to Petron’s relief he sees that the mouth is ‘nothing more than the sunset, his throat is the gathering night, and the sounds that issue from it are those of roosting birds, newly-risen nightingales, and owls perched in the tips of his teeth’.

Remy mentions some of the precursors to surrealism in English literature in the introduction – Coleridge, Swift, Carroll and Lear – but there is silence as to how surrealism has developed or what has followed in its wake. John Ashbery once commented on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry that ‘like surrealism it will become more fascinating as it disintegrates… it’s like there’s a certain hard kernel that can stand the pressure only for so long, and then it starts to decay, giving off beneficial fumes’. It would have been nice to see some of the effects of those fumes on British contemporary poetry included in this book.

Surely someone can or has taken this on? Regardless, we're glad to see the anthology out. Read the full review (we're quite taken with the end!) at PN Review.

At top: David Gascoyne, sigh.