Career
As a very young man he moved in London literary circles championing more traditional verse and writing against modernism. He ran the Twyn Barlwm Press, a small press publishing some well-known poets, its title inspired by the mountain Twyn Barlwm in South Wales, beloved by one of his literary idols Arthur Machen. Machen was one of the remaining writers of the 1890s he admired and befriended, others were Edgar Jepson and M. P. Shiel, whose literary executor he would later become. Gawsworth's longest piece of written work was a biography of Machen, but he could find no publisher for it in the thirties. It was finally published in 2005 to much critical acclaim.
He gave Hugh MacDiarmid a roof over his head in London in 1934 (MacDiarmid returned the compliment in When the Rat-Race Is Over; an essay in honour of the fiftieth birthday of John Gawsworth (1962)). At this time he was very much involved in compiling story collections, generally of the fiction of the supernatural. Poetry collections of this time were Lyrics to Kingcup (1932), Mishka and Madeleine. A Poem Sequence for Marcia (1932), Poems 1930-1932 (1936), New Poems 1939. Later he published through the Richards Press.
In 1931 he published the poem In Winter by W. H. Davies in a limited edition of 290 numbered copies, illustrated by Edward Carrick and all invidually signed by Davies. A further special limited edition of 15 were printed on handmade paper and also hand-coloured by Carrick.
He met and befriended the young Lawrence Durrell in 1932, when Gawsworth was living in Denmark Street. He made friends as well as enemies (Dylan Thomas, George Woodcock) throughout literary London.
Read more about this topic: John Gawsworth
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