The Asymmetrical Mouth: David Gascoyne’s Elegy for Paul Éluard – an essay by Daniel Barbiero
English poet David Gascoyne had recently returned home after a visit to family in British Columbia in Canada when he heard of Paul Éluard’s 18 November 1952 death, of a heart attack. Remembering his friendship with the French poet, he was moved to write the Elegiac Improvisation on the Death of Paul Éluard.
Éluard had played a significant role in Gascoyne’s life as a Surrealist in the 1930s. The two met sometime during Gascoyne’s first stay in Paris, which began around the time of Gascoyne’s seventeenth birthday in 1933. During a second stay in Paris in 1935, prompted at least in part by Gascoyne’s correspondence with Éluard, Gascoyne with substantial help from Éluard collected information for his book A Short Survey of Surrealism. It was also through Éluard that Gascoyne met fellow English Surrealist Roland Penrose, with whom he helped to organize the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. Éluard had taken part in putting the show together as well. In addition, Gascoyne translated a number of Éluard’s poems into English, which were published in various journals between 1934 and 1936. Although Gascoyne no longer considered himself a Surrealist by the time of Éluard’s death, his elegy is a moving tribute to the memory of a poet who had inspired him in his youth.
Gascoyne’s poem is striking for the way it communicates an immediacy of feeling through an elegantly balanced, formal coherence. It opens with a tercet centered on an image of the poet’s mouth:
A tender mouth a skeptical shy mouth
A firm fastidious slender mouth
A Gallic mouth an asymmetrical mouth
This image of Éluard’s mouth is the kernel from which the rest of the poem derives; after this first appearance it will recur as Gascoyne develops his portrait of the Éluard he recalls. Initially the image serves as a synecdoche, presenting the essential part through which we grasp the whole of the man. Gascoyne gives us a physical description of Éluard’s mouth, which was in fact thin and asymmetrical; the peculiar geometry of Éluard’s appearance struck others and it’s notable that both Brassaï and André Thirion invoked it as well, the former in his Conversations with Picasso as “the pink carnation of a long, and curiously asymmetrical face” (quoted in Sayer, p. 13), the latter in his memoir as an “asymmetrical but handsome face” (Thirion, p. 180). Gascoyne goes beyond plain physical description and derives from the shape of the mouth some of Éluard’s personality traits: the skepticism, which often showed itself in an ironic sense of humor, and the shyness and fastidiousness that Thirion observed in Éluard’s manners, which he described as “distinguished and serious, and slightly condescending” (Thirion, p. 180)—possibly a reflection of Éluard’s relatively affluent upbringing.
The Éluard Gascoyne is most concerned to memorialize is Éluard the poet, and it was as a poet that Éluard had made himself memorable to those who knew him and those who only knew of him. Even as far back as his days in Paris Dada in the early 1920s he stood out for his commitment to the art; in his memoir of his time in Paris Matthew Josephson recalled Éluard as “the self-conscious craftsman of poetry” within the Dada group (Josephson, p. 120). In an interview years later, André Breton took him to task precisely for this sense of craftsmanship and for preferring “poetry in the traditional sense” to orthodox Surrealism’s prioritizing of the dream and the automatic text (Breton, p. 182). Granted, Breton’s interview took place after a falling out between the two that left bitter feelings on both sides; still, his criticism of Éluard is telling for what it says of Éluard’s fundamental choice of poetic art over Surrealism as a revelatory mode of life.
In the second tercet Gascoyne addresses Éluard the poet by shifting the image of the mouth from a synecdoche for the person to a signifier for the faculty that made that person the person he was. That faculty was language and the mouth, through its function as the site from which speech emanates, now represents the relationship to language and metonymically represents the essential medium through which the poet constitutes himself as a poet:
He opened his mouth he spoke without hesitation
He sat down and wrote as he spoke without changing a word
And the words that he wrote still continue to speak with his mouth
Gascoyne here captures Éluard’s at-homeness in language and links his ease of speech to his facility with the written word, as the latter preserves the sound of his voice even after the voice itself no longer speaks. With this second tercet Gascoyne strengthens the signifying force of the mouth as proxy for the person as he shifts it into a sharper register. Éluard is a poet, one who lives through language and for whom language is at the center of his life, hence the mouth, the site of language’s being spoken into being, is the essential part through which the essence of the whole person can be signified.
Gascoyne’s elegy is for Éluard the poet, a poet whose voice spoke
Warmly and urgently
Simply, convincingly
Gently and movingly
Softly, sincerely
Clearly, caressingly [...]
That poet isn’t Éluard the Surrealist poet but Éluard
the poet
Of France’s resistance, the spokesman
Of unconquerable free fraternity.
It was precisely for the qualities of his poetic voice, qualities that Gascoyne adroitly identifies in a catalogue of adverbs and other descriptors, that Éluard was able to become one of the leading poets of the resistance. In direct words and images his 1942 poem Liberté expressed the aspiration of French men and women living under German occupation to become free; it was printed up as a leaflet and airdropped by British aircraft to French resistance units. It was widely distributed and read, giving hope and encouragement to many during one of the darkest periods in the country’s history.
For Gascoyne, it was the direct simplicity of the poet’s voice, as well as his message of hope in freedom, that gave his poetry a kind of universality, making it accessible to French men and women of all stations. And not only during France’s moment of crisis. Gascoyne asserts that Éluard’s “inspiring mouth” continues to speak “in all weathers”
to the man at the bar and the girl on the staircase
The flowerseller, the newspaperwoman, the student
The foreign lady wearing a shawl in the faubourg garden
The boy with a bucket cleaning the office windows
The friendly fellow in charge of the petrol station
The sensitive cynical officer thwarting description
Éluard emerged from the war as one of France’s major poets, a status underlined and secured by the 1946 publication of his collection Poésie ininterrompue (“uninterrupted poetry”). Gascoyne’s elegy was itself modeled on the poetry in Poésie ininterrompue; we can see it in the straightforward language and in the way he piles up images in symmetrically structured, syntactically direct sentences set out in blocks of long, unpunctuated cascades. This gives the elegy an incantatory quality that was quite deliberate: in the “Introductory Notes” to his 1988 Collected Poems, Gascoyne reveals that the poem was meant to be read aloud. We can imagine it delivered as a powerful graveside recitation.
In death Éluard had passed out of an existence as a living, self-conscious being transcending itself into an open future and had instead become a past that is opaque, existent in-itself, and fixed for all time. And with the life completed, so is the work, as Gascoyne acknowledges:
And now his printed words add up to a sum total
And it can be stated that he wrote just so many poems
But unlike the life, which has become objectified as a past, the body of work, even when completed on account of the death of its author, is never quite a closed totality exhausted in its meaning, as long as it’s still read. And those readings may reveal ironies and contradictions as individual works within the corpus rub up against each other, throw light on and even eclipse each other as readers determine their weight of significance in relation to each other and—this seems inevitable—in relation to the choices and actions of their author. In Éluard’s case this becomes more than a moot issue. For, the poet of Liberté was also the propagandist who wrote the Ode à Staline (1950) and the text to the 1949 film Staline, L’homme que nous aimons le plus. To what extent Éluard’s encomia to a brutal tyrant compromise his entire body of work isn’t a question that can be addressed here. It’s enough to say that as egregious as these hagiographies were, on a personal level, there would be worse.
In June 1950, Záviš Kalandra was tried on invented charges of treason by Czechoslovakia’s Soviet-installed government. On the basis of a coerced confession to crimes he hadn’t committed, he was sentenced to death. Outraged, Breton and 47 other intellectuals sent a telegram to the Czech authorities asking them to spare Kalandra and his co-defendants.
Breton’s intervention was more than a principled protest; it was a gesture of fidelity to a friend. In spring 1935, he and Éluard had gone to Czechoslovakia to give a series of lectures and to meet with the Czech Surrealists and others. Among those others was Kalandra, a critic, literary theorist, and member of the Czech communist party. Éluard and Breton were warmly received by the Czechs; the two Parisians were particularly struck by Kalandra’s openness to their ideas, in marked contrast to the hostility shown Surrealism by France’s own communist party. (Kalandra would be expelled from the party the following year, after he protested against the Zinoviev-Kamenev show trial then being staged in Moscow.)
In an open letter published on 13 June in Combat, Breton appealed to Éluard, by then a leading member of the French communist party, to raise his voice in support of Kalandra. Breton in effect called on Éluard to put personal conscience over politics and to speak out in defense of their old friend, asking how Éluard could “tolerate, deep down, such degradation to be inflicted on a man who was a friend to you?” That Breton felt compelled to reach out to someone who’d once been his closest friend, but from whom he’d been estranged since the late 1930s, shows the importance he placed on this point of personal loyalty and, it isn’t too much to say, honor. Given the bitterness of the break between them, it could not have been easy for him. Éluard’s response in the 19 June issue of Action is notorious: “I have too much to do for the innocent who proclaim their innocence to care for the guilty who proclaim their guilt.” Kalandra was hanged on 27 June, only a couple of months after Éluard’s visit to Prague in April as a guest of the same government that soon enough would condemn his friend (Sobanet, p. 170).
Éluard’s refusal to speak out in the face of what he surely must have recognized as the framing of an innocent man who’d once befriended him is disconcerting. (Whether or not it actually was his wife who originated Éluard’s response, as some have argued, ultimately doesn’t matter. It was published as his. By putting his name to it, he took responsibility for it.) The contradiction between Éluard’s image as the poet of freedom and justice, and Éluard the endorser of an execution on politically motivated, manufactured charges, is both dramatic and disturbing. Wasn’t this the same Éluard who, in admonishing ex-Surrealist-turned-Communist Louis Aragon in 1932 for betraying Surrealism in order to conform to Party orthodoxy, quoted Lautréamont’s declaration that “All the water in the sea cannot wash away a stain of intellectual blood”? (quoted in Sayer, p. 369) (But was this the same Éluard? Did the sudden death of his wife Nusch in 1948 drive him to the fundamental choice of embracing Party orthodoxy, as others might embrace religion, as a substitute for the emotional security and sense of self-worth he’d obtained from her and had now lost? And could that choice have made him actually believe in the truth of the absurd confession that quite obviously had been coerced from Kalandra? Possibly. But even so…) And wasn’t his betrayal of Kalandra, a friend whose life was at stake, a more serious matter than simply taking an intellectual position for or against an artistic and philosophical movement? Speaking of the contradiction between Éluard the poet of love and liberty and Éluard the Stalinist apologist, in an interview with Philip Roth many years later, Milan Kundera lamented that “the hangman killed while the poet sang […] Éluard […] soared over Prague like the great archangel of the lyre, while the smoke of Kalandra’s body rose to the sky from the crematory chimney.”
Éluard’s willingness to close his eyes to the truth of Kalandra’s framing and to participate in what in effect was one of the Stalinist world’s recurring rituals of knowing complicity—the phrase is Sayer’s (Sayer, p. 10)--bitterly mocks Gascoyne’s eulogizing him as the “one man awake in a sleeping crowd.” But at the time he wrote his elegy, Gascoyne had been unaware of Éluard’s role in the Kalandra affair. He only discovered it much later, after reading about it in Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In his introduction to the 1988 Collected Poems he wondered whether he could’ve written the kind of poem he did, had he known about Éluard’s silence and the way politics had perverted the poet of resistance and hope--one who’d been capable of writing in a “fraternal” register. Had he known, perhaps his elegy would’ve been closer to Paul Celan’s In Memoriam Paul Éluard, with its allusion to Éluard’s betrayal of “him/ who addressed him as thou.” But he hadn’t known. What Gascoyne remembered in 1952 most likely was the kind of feeling he had in 1937, when in his journal he wrote: “Dear Éluard! It does one good to think of him, too. To have known him will always be one of the things that give me greatest pleasure and pride. Already I feel stronger, happier” (Journal, p. 73).
Knowing what we know now about Éluard’s choice in 1950—which Gascoyne in 1952 did not know--we can read this elegy not only as a memorial to a poet friend whose lyrical gifts could speak of liberty and fraternity to millions, but as a reminder that those same gifts are as capable of concealing as of revealing.
It’s bitterly ironic that Éluard’s words of betrayal in the Kalandra affair came from the same mouth Gascoyne eulogized as “The only candid mouth/ Truth’s sole remaining witness.” In light of that betrayal, Gascoyne’s earlier image of Éluard’s mouth as “asymmetrical” takes on additional weight and forces itself to attention as the central image of the poem. It isn’t just speech per se that the asymmetrical mouth stands for metonymically, but speech of bad faith: speech that approved a politically motivated judicial murder rather than protested an obviously unjust trial and sentence. The visual appearance of the asymmetrical mouth—lopsided, uneven, crooked—reads as a symptom, the outward sign of an inner asymmetry in which ideological conformity and political expediency outbalance personal loyalty and concern for what Éluard must surely have know was the truth of the matter. The result was that the words coming from the crooked mouth themselves were crooked.
And to that extent, Éluard speaks for all of us, since the temptation to misuse language is always there as a possibility, as long as there is language to use, and the motivation to abuse it. What the image of the asymmetric mouth suggests goes beyond its metonymic connection to Éluard’s verbal act of betrayal and reaches toward the more general truth that what can represent can misrepresent. In doing so, it surpasses itself and the particular instance of Éluard’s abandonment of Kalandra to become a metaphor for the broader problem of the relationship between language and bad faith.
Sources and References
André Breton, “An Open Letter to Paul Éluard,” in Cavalier Perspectives, tr. Austin Carden (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2025). Internal cite to Breton.
André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, tr. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Paragon House, 1993). Internal cite to Conversations.
Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, tr. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1988).
David Gascoyne, Collected Poems 1988 (Oxford: Oxford U Press, 1988).
David Gascoyne, Journal 1936-1937 (London: Enitharmon Press, 1980). Internal cite to Journal.
Matthew Josephson, Life Among the Surrealists (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). Internal cite to Josephson.
Philip Roth, “The Most Original Book of the Season” (interview with Milan Kundera), The New York Times, November 30, 1980. Accessed at https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/kundera-roth.html
Raphael Rubinstein, “Varieties of Silence, and Near Silence (Jabes, Éluard, Celan, Kundera),” Jacket2, 22 July 2020. Accessed at https://jacket2.org/article/varieties-silence-and-near-silence .
Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 2013). Internal cites to Sayer.
Andrew Sobanet, Generation Stalin: French Writers, the Fatherland, and the Cult of Personality (Bloomington IN: U of Indiana Press, 2018). Internal cite to Sobanet.
André Thirion, Revolutionaries Without Revolution, tr. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Macmillan, 1975). Internal cites to Thirion.
Daniel Barbiero is a Washington, D.C., area writer, double bassist (largely retired), and composer of graphic and verbal scores. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, with a focus on the continuing influence and relevance of Existentialism and Surrealism. His essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, Rain Taxi, Heavy Feather Review, The Amsterdam Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, OffCourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, Utsanga, The Compulsive Reader, and elsewhere. As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press, appeared in 2021.
