The English in English Surrealism

Abstract

The 1930 spring–summer double issue of Eugene Jolas’s transition 19–20 featured a section entitled “Cambridge Experiment: A Manifesto of Young England.” Prefaced with an unsigned manifesto, this section collected many of the contributors to the Cambridge-based magazine Experiment (1928–31), and this event has served for several literary historians of English Surrealism as an early instance of the Paris-based movement’s engagement by British writers.¹ Yet, it is clear from the selection in the pages of transition that its British adherents would treat Surrealism very differently. None of the work published could be described as “automatic writing” or in any sense engaged with avant-garde formal experimentation. “Experiment: A Manifesto” establishes the following ground:

A sense that literature is in need of some new formal notation: an attempt to show how such a notation can be built out of academic notations, where academic means perhaps no more than non-moral and is after all best explained in our poetry: a belief in the compact, local unit: and in the impersonal unit: a belief finally, and a disbelief—for it is about this mainly that we are at odds—in literature as a singular and different experience, something more than an ordering of life. (106)