Eight years old

I am dressed like a falling leaf

Though I am sturdy as a mushroom

Rust, burnt orange, russet corduroy

The hillocks of my scabbed and warty knees

Raised to my vermillion chin, furrowed echoes

Of the cattle-trodden sliced-up earth

Below my perch of crenelated stone

Hoary and xanthic-splashed

Hard, sharp flat wind

Tang of sea

Sweet stench of decay

My palms sting, rust-streaked, raw

Their ferrous stigmata witness that

Despite my swooping dreams

I am too solid

To fly.

The Surrealists on Holiday

A few lifetimes ago, I was in Falmouth, Cornwall, with several hours to kill and so found myself in a  small room, looking at some of the most extraordinary and arrestingly beautiful photographs I had ever seen.

In 2004, Anthony Penrose, son of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, discovered a cache of photographs taken on holiday in 1937; his parents had taken a house at Lambe Creek on the River Fal and invited a bunch of friends - artists, poets, some wanted by the police, others by furious fathers.  

The black and white images, some snapped, some carefully staged, were taken mainly by Roland Penrose, and heavily feature his wife, the traumatised, troubled and talented Lee Miller. At that time she was already a successful surrealist and commercial photographer, whose later images as war correspondent for Vogue were some of the most harrowing and important photographs taken during and in the aftermath of World War II, including the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau. Read this.  You will be transfixed.

It was a tiny, delightfully curated exhibition; the photos were simply mounted and I felt as though I were pottering about a sunny house, nosing at the holiday snaps of almost all my artistic and poetic heroes.

For three weeks, with Europe on the brink of war, they ate, drank, slept, quarrelled, took lovers, swam and fished in sunny creative bliss -  the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, Man Ray, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Henry Moore and Eduard Mesens all turned up at some point to join the poets, artists, photographers, sculptors and writers. 

They looked like they were having a ball - Lee larks happily in many of them.  In one photo she is backlit, her pale hair haloed against the sun as she hangs from an upstairs window, in another she demurely pours tea from a silver pot, dressed in dowager tweeds.  The groups laugh; wreathed in smoke, they lie across one another on deck chairs, on grassy slopes, on slumpy chintz armchairs.  Max Ernst has wrapped his head in what seems to be freshly-sheared sheep's wool and embraces Lee.  They look naughty, silly, frequently drunk, bursting with creative spirt, their love of the surreal and ridiculous evident in every shot. 

The most compelling photograph was of an open-air picnic; two topless women and three men - shocking for its time, it is the faces which intrigue me the most; expressing open joy, bashfulness, eroticism, thoughtfulness.  The rough low table bears empty plates, bottles, glasses.  There are huge cushions to lie on; the sun dapples through the woods.  It has become a well-known image, but at that time, I had never seen anything like it. My fascination and admiration for Miller, as I have learned more about over over the last decade, has mushroomed.

I have seen many exhibitions of Miller's work since.  I even attended a surreal dinner hosted by her thoughtful, charming son and featuring some of the mad dishes she created in her later years, when food became her obsession. But for me, the images mounted simply on the walls of that simple little room in Cornwall, were the sweetest and most seductive introduction to an artistic movement that I can imagine.

I'm not sure when Paul Eluard wrote the poem below, but I think it captures Lee's essence perfectly.

For the splendour of the day of happinesses in the air

To live the taste of colours easily

To enjoy loves so as to laugh

To open eyes at the final moment

She has every willingness.

Sunday Sonnet

Other loves may sink and settle, other loves may loose and slack,
But I wander like a minstrel with a harp upon my back,
Though the harp be on my bosom, though I finger and I fret,
Still, my hope is all before me; for I cannot play it yet.

In your strings is hid a music that no hand hath e'er let fall,
In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;
Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,
Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow's name.

Not as mine, my soul's annointed, not as mine the rude and light
Easy mirth of many faces, swaggering pride of song and fight;
Something stranger, something sweeter, something waiting you afar,
Secret as your stricken senses, magic as your sorrows are.

But on this, God's harp supernal, stretched but to be stricken once,
Hoary time is a beginner, Life a bungler, Death a dunce.
But I will not fear to match them - no by God, I will not fear,
I will learn you, I will play you and the stars stand still to hear.

The Strange Music, GK Chesterton (1874 - 1936).
 

Isn't this gorgeous? I was once sent it by a man on the very cusp of a love affair; I was smitten. The poet was a giant of a man - literally and in terms of literary output, sparring with Shaw, Wilde, Belloc and other luminaries on religion, philosophy and the occult. His poetry is less well known than his books, essays and plays, but are well worth an hour or so's reading out of your life.

Sunday Sonnet*

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain,has such small hands

Another silly summer job was being a torch lady (nope, not belting out Gloria Gaynor in drag)  - a lovely old-fashioned role, showing people to their seats in a cinema. I saw Hannah and her Sisters about 150 times that summer, and was word perfect. Not quite so enraptured with Karate Kid II; then I passed the time accidentally landing snogging couples in the full searchlight of my little torch. Anyway, I thought that the bookshop scene and subsequent reading of ee cummings was the most romantic thing I had ever seen in 19 years. Gorgeous film, gorgeous poem.

*Am assuming you're over this by now

Sunday Sonnet*

Photo by Lee Miller, one of the original Surrealists

image from here

The Lover

She is standing on my eyelids

And her hair is in my hair.

She has the shape of my hands,

The colour of my eyes,

She is absorbed in my shadow,

Like a stone upon the sky.

She keeps her eyes open

And doesn't let me sleep.

Her dreams in broad daylight

Make the suns evaporate,

Make me laugh, weep and laugh,

And speak, without a thing to say.

Paul Eluard (1895-1952) - key surrealist, gave up his first wife to Dali, wrote streams of surreal love poetry to her. Great chums with Andre Breton (founder member of the Surrealists) until he (Eluard) joined the Communist Party, thus pissing off the whole of the movement and being chucked out. Sadly lived on in Paris after the war, being sent to Coventry by possibly the most interesting group of artists/poets/writers/drunks/libertines to ever live there.

And I happily include the Murphys AND Satre and de Beauvoir in that sweeping statement.

*Nope, I know it's not a sonnet, don't get all pedantic on me. It just alliterates better.