David's resurrection

A combination of an innate sensitivity and over the counter amphetamines (designed to relieve nose congestion) tipped the poet, David Gascoyne, into the nether regions of mania and breakdown: once in Paris and once in London he was to be arrested trying to bring his message of impending apocalypse and hoped for global redemption to the respective country's head of state (Charles de Gaulle and Queen Elizabeth II respectively). For this he found himself sectioned in mental hospitals.

The last stay was in a hospital on the Isle of Wight, where he was then living, alone, in the house his parents' death had left him with.

Enter Judy, an unhappily married woman, wife of a vet, with an interest in literature, coming to read poetry to the inmates. One poem she chose, describing it as difficult, was by David. After she had finished reading it, a rather shambolic, though well-dressed, tall, stooped man, touched her arm and told her, 'I am David Gascoyne'. 'Of course, you are dear,' she replied but he was!

She loved to tell that story. She had liked his poem, drawn from an anthology, but knew nothing more of him. Now she found herself talking to him and discovering that he was indeed the poet. She quite rapidly discovered that she cared for him and came to love him.

In due course they were married - a marriage of abiding affection and complexity and difference. David after all was homosexual though always responsive to, and in need of, the attention and love of strong women. Judy was exceptionally ordinary - lively, practical, interested - but unlikely to follow, find her way through the depths David had navigated. But it worked - it gave him the care and security he needed and it gave her entrance to a world of literature and life to which she responded with enthusiasm.

I recall, Kathleen Raine, telling me that, of course, Judy could never understand David (and we learn in the biography that she wrote to Judy telling her that the marriage would never work, well, relationships were never her strong suit). At one level this was true but she did understand what he needed and she was happy to offer it, and he cared for her deeply in return. We may never 'understand' the people we love but we may love the venture of trying and of just being with them in the venture.

I liked her very much and I am delighted to possess a copy of his Selected Poems signed by her.

Robert Fraser's biography, I am happy to say, shares this liking and a recognition of her true importance to David and of her's to him. Never has the miracle of being loved by a strong woman yielded a more compelling narrative of renewed life (for both of them).

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog