A Short Survey of Surrealism

David Gascoyne

(Enitharmon, £8.95)
Buy it at BOL

One of the brightest small poetry presses, Enitharmon has smartly reissued David Gascoyne's classic 1935 history of the artistic and literary movement that, if it was short-lived in itself, continues to have an enormous influence on today's mass media. Born in 1916, still with us, and no mean poet himself, Gascoyne was one of the few English members of a group that counted André Breton, Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Tristan Tzara and Salvador Dalí among its infighting, posturing membership. Gascoyne helped curate the London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and broadcast from Barcelona for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil war.

This book covers the birth and growth of the movement; though it swiftly became less a case of manifestos and a unitary identity than of the self-promotion of individual writers and painters. The art side has proved more durable (in part because of the poster ubiquity of Dalí's work), but there is much of enduring literary interest here, including analysis of and excerpts from many of the poets. Of these - leaving aside Gascoyne himself - Paul Eluard seems the most important 50 years on. But who's to tell what's what? As Dalí is proposed to remark in Paul Muldoon's poem 7 Middagh Street (see overleaf for two new Muldoon poems): "this lobster's not a lobster but the telephone / That rang for Neville Chamberlain".