Hugh Sykes Davies

Hugh Sykes Davies

1936 review of 'Narration' by Gertrude Stein

John Tranter
Gertrude Stein as Miss America, photo by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964)
Gertrude Stein as Miss America, photo by Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964)

Gertrude Stein was not always revered as a muse of literature. Far from it. Her climb to fame was long and arduous.  The English surrealist Huge Sykes Davies dropped this boulder in her path.

Narration. By Gertrude Stein. (The University of Chicago Press.) 11s.6d. [Eleven shillings and sixpence.]
 This piece was first published in ‘Books of the Quarter,’ in Criterion, UK, 15/61, July 1936, pages 752–5.
 It is 1,700 words or about four printed pages long.

“In fact all Miss Stein’s old virtues have forsaken her. The trick of constant repetition which gave pleasure when it was used in prose with no rational end, for purely aesthetic purposes, has adapted itself very ill to the making of statements with meaning. It is bad enough to hear a silly theory advanced once, it is agony to hear it advanced twenty times in quick succession.”

More … In Jacket 20, here.

Hugh Sykes Davies

'A lioness in the sidecar'

John Tranter
Hugh Sykes Davies
Hugh Sykes Davies


In the special Cambridge UK issue of Jacket, number 20

"He had done so many things and played so many parts that you never felt you had come to the end of him. Some knew Hugh Sykes Davies as a wit, some as a lover, some as a teacher; and there were those who read his novels and even his poems. He also married a good deal. He had many wives, four of them his own; taught at Cambridge for nearly half a century — a communist for half the time; was a surrealist in the Paris of the mid-1930s; and finally, as faith and dogma ran dry, a structural linguist. He was once to have been a candidate for the House of Commons too, in 1940, in an election canceled because of invasion fears..... Lowry’s «Under the Volcano», when it finally appeared in 1947, meant nothing to Hugh. It was alcoholic fiction, he declared, though near the end of his life he was persuaded by Canadian television to make a program; and he did it on the symbolic condition they supplied a bottle of brandy in a Cambridge UK pub during the interview. That put him in a high good humor. As he walked home late he came upon a lonely policeman standing outside King’s College and approached him unsteadily. ‘Have there been any interesting fires in the colleges this evening, constable?’"

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