Existential Writings. With an introduction by Dr Ramona Fotiade - from the author's library

David GASCOYNE

Published by Oxford: Amate Press, 2001

About this Item

Orange-brown wrappers. Edition limited to 150 copies, this copy from the library of the author, with the Gascoyne library book-label. "For many years," writes Robin Waterfield in a publisher's note (signed "R.E.W.") on the lower cover, "David Gascoyne collected material for a book to be called Religio Poetae. The present volume is largely the fruit of that aspiration and indeed fulfils it admirably." The last of Gascoyne's books to be published in his lifetime (apart from the 18-page, 85-copy The Entrance to That Valley Stands Alone issued by Enitharmon on his birthday, 10 October), it was advertised first as coming from the Round Robin Press, not Amate/Amaté, and includes his "A Little Anthology of Existential Thought", "Meetings with Benjamin Fondane" (in Waterfield's translation, first published in Aquarius, 1987), "Essay on Léon Chestov" and "The Sun at Midnight". Most significantly, it gathers in print (for the first time in book form?) Fondane's letter to Gascoyne of July 1937, in a translation by Ramona Fotiade, author of the learned 17-page introduction. Gascoyne had mislaid it, and wrote: "I cannot say how much I regret having not been able to keep this letter, which I carried about in my pocket for years." The letter turned up, reports Fotiade, in 1996, among manuscripts in the British Library. (Roger Scott, however, editor of Gascoyne's Selected Prose 1934-1996, 1998, reports, p.136n, that it was he who found the text, copied by Gascoyne into one of his notebooks, now in the British Library, and that it was published in the Bulletin de la Société d'Etudes Benjamin Fondane in 1995.) David Gascoyne died on 25 November 2001, aged 85. His friend Robin Waterfield outlived him by little more than two months, dying on 9 February 2002, aged 87.

Seller Inventory # T500273

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Existential Writings. With an introduction by Dr Ramona Fotiade - from the author's library
• Publisher: Oxford: Amate Press
• Publication Date: 2001
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine