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Surrealism in England

‘It’s got here at last!’ So Cyril Connolly greeted the appearance in 1935 of David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism with a degree of surprise we may still share. Why had it taken so long for Surrealism to arrive in England? Andre Breton had, after all, presented the founding manifesto back in 1924 and the first experiment in automatic writing, The Magnetic Fields , which he co-produced with Philippe Soupault, had appeared four years before that. The war, of course, had closed borders, literally and metaphorically, and having survived the conflict without suffering invasion or revolution, England in the immediate wake of 1918 would be largely untroubled by the waves of crisis and nihilism which swept most European countries and which generated the newest avant-garde tendency, Dada. While Italian Futurism had launched itself on London in a spectacularly dramatic fashion, Dada would remain an obscurely ‘foreign’ phenomenon, receiving only patchy mention in literary magazines and never generating sufficient oppositional energy to initiate a parallel English movement in the way that Marinetti had lit the charge for Vorticism. What was known of the Dada group and the Surrealist tendency it had spawned by 1920 came mostly by way of little magazines rather than from direct personal contact, and the time-lag in picking up on the new movements also meant that it was difficult for most English readers to disentangle Dada, with its poetics of outrage and negation, from Surrealism, with its more affirmative and often prophetic stance.