The Auden Generation by Samuel Hynes

Author:Samuel Hynes [Samuel Hynes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1992-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

III

Documentary was one obvious way of putting the verbal and visual materials of art at the service of urgent issues. Another, and far less likely, way was Surrealism, which came into prominence in England at about the same time, in late 1935 and 1936. The movement had existed in France by then for more than a decade, and advanced members of the ’thirties generation had known about it since their undergraduate days: there are references to Surrealist painting in both the Oxford Outlook and Experiment before 1930. Michael Roberts was aware of French surrealist poets in 1932, and a year later Hugh Gordon Porteus was finding ‘a modified surréaliste technique’ in Auden:33 in 1933 one could see paintings by Miró and Ernst in a London gallery, and there was a Dali show in London in 1934. But the movement had engaged English imaginations so little that in 1936 David Gascoyne (then barely twenty years old) could be described as ‘England’s only wholehearted surrealist’.34

It was Gascoyne and another equally youthful surrealist, Roger Roughton, who gave the movement in England its first real momentum. Gascoyne published A Short Survey of Surrealism, the first English book on the subject, in December 1935 (Cyril Connolly, who knew all about French movements, headed his review disdainfully, ‘It’s Got Here at Last!’);35 and Roughton’s Contemporary Prose and Poetry, which during its brief life was the leading English surrealist journal, first appeared six months later. The thrust that they gave did not last long; virtually everything that was notable in English surrealism had happened by the end of 1936: the best surrealist novel, Hugh Sykes Davies’ Petron, appeared in the autumn of 1935, Gascoyne’s book of surrealist poems, Man’s Life Is This Meat, in May 1936, Roughton’s ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan Dance’ in October, and Surrealism, a collection of essays edited by Herbert Read, in November. And in the middle of this year, the International Surrealist Exhibition, England’s first major surrealist show, opened in London.

In such a brief flowering, English Surrealism scarcely had time to become a movement, in the French sense; there were no real leaders (certainly no English Breton), no factions, and no doctrinal controversies, or at least none that have left traces. But for that short period there were plenty of surrealists around, plenty of surrealist paintings and poems, plenty of manifestos; it may not have been a movement, but it was a highly visible phenomenon while it lasted.

The moment of highest visibility was 11 June 1936, when the International Surrealist Exhibition opened at the New Burlington Galleries. The opening was a sort of Dadaist happening: one of the exhibitors, Sheila Legge, appeared as the ‘Surrealist phantom’, strolling through the crowds dressed in white samite, her head and face covered with roses, and carrying at first a pork chop and later, when the chop had gone bad in the heat, a model of a human leg; and Dali delivered a lecture while dressed in a diver’s suit with the helmet closed (and nearly suffocated). William

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.