LYMINGTON, Lord [Gerard WALLOP]. Spring Song of Iscariot. Poem by Lord Lymington. Paris: The Black Sun Press. 1929.
8vo. Original card wrappers with wraparound dustwrapper and publisher’s glassine, lettered in black and red to the front panel; in publisher's stiff card slipcase, quarter silver over gold paper; glassine toned with some tears and loss, slipcase, with loss to upper and lower edges and one tear to the rear spine-fold, expertly refurbished; a clean, near fine copy in a carefully restored slipcase.
First edition, one of 100 copies on Holland Van Gelder Zonen from a total edition of 125, printed in the Autumn of 1929 by the Maître-Imprimeur Lescaret for Harry and Caresse Crosby at their Black Sun Press in Paris.
Lord Lymington [Gerard Vernon Wallop] (1898–1984), politician and environmentalist, was born in Chicago, spending his early years on his parents' ranch in Wyoming, before moving to England, where he was educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. Following his studies, he became involved with maintaining the family estate in Hampshire, developing “a bleak yet prescient view of the environmental impact of arable monoculture and [the] indiscriminate use of chemicals in farming” (ODNB), publishing widely on the subject, including the volumes Famine in England (1938) and Alternative to Death (1943), the latter issued by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber. Indeed, Eliot occasionally corresponded with Wallop and, as Chase writes, “took a particular interest in [his] work, review[ing] him favourably in The Criterion and absorb[ing] something of his distaste for inter-war society.” (ibid.). Acknowledging his “seminal influence on the early environmentalist and organic farming movements”, Wallop’s career, “mixing muck, mysticism, and the more esoteric reaches of British fascism, might at best seem to qualify him for a place in the rich gallery of English eccentrics.”
Spring Song of Iscariot was published by Wallop under the name Lord Lymington (at the time, a title he held) by Harry Crosby’s Black Sun Press in Paris, famously the publisher of Hart Crane’s The Bridge and fragments of Joyce’s ongoing Work in Progress. Lymington had published an earlier volume of poems – Git Le Coeur – with the press in 1927.
The poem is divided into two sections, “Caveat” and “Rahla”, the latter in three parts (“Black Tents”, “Spring Song of Iscariot”, and “Attainment in Heliopolis”). The whole is preceded by a prose “Prologue and Dedication” (“the poem, whose rhythm apes no modernity […] grew of itself. I had no choice in its form.”).
Minkoff A-28
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