In New York, Lamantia found two mentors, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler.  It is worth noting here that New York surrealists were fascinated by H. P. Lovecraft, as Lamantia had been (and probably still was).  The issue of VVV following the one that first published Lamantia, in fact, had a pioneering study in Lovecraft’s work by Robert Allerton Parker called “Such Pulp as Dreams Are Made of.”  According to Franklin Rosemont, the works of Lovecraft and his circle are a “central source” for surrealists.  During his time here, Lamantia was exploring a kind of automatic writing, his poems held together by the hidden—esoteric, occult, one  might say—connections between otherwise dissimilar images.  The poems he wrote are, in a very real sense, impenetrable.  Images are repeated—especially fire, rape, hair, clowns, the moon—but they are not subject to textual exegesis.  They are meant to experienced—to be entered and to enter the reader.  The poems that came out of this period were variously collected in his Erotic Poems (1946), Touch of the Marvelous (1966; 1974), and Selected Poems (1967).

Potted biographies of Lamantia have it that he broke from surrealism around 1945, after having found it stagnant.  His papers at the University of California Berkeley give a more . . . dramatic . . . interpretation to this period.  An undated autobiographical note, probably written around 1961 or 1962, offers this brief biographical nugget:

Born Oct 23, 1927.  Died 1945.  Resurrected 1954. 

Dying, it must be admitted, is something different than finding a particular artistic movement decadent and returning home.

The poet Philip Lamantia was not only interested in Forteanism—his life, with its lost works and drastic changes of viewpoint—is itself almost a Fortean artifact.

Lamantia was born in San Francisco on 23 October 1927 to Nunzio and Mary Tarantino Lamantia, both of whom had emigrated from Sicily and settled in with San Francisco’s Italian community.  He was interested in poetry from a young age—but also in the growing mass culture of the time.  He took great enjoyment in radio plays—he called them “A child’s bed of sirens” later in life.  Lamantia also delighted in comics—and the weird.  A scrapbook in his papers at UC Berkeley, apparently put together when he was about twelve, included numerous cut-outs from Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics.  In junior high school, he started reading Poe and Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.  According to some reports, these enthusiasms had him tossed out of school for “intellectual delinquency.”

When he was fourteen, he saw the surrealist works of Dali and Miró at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art.  It was a signal moment.  He read through all the works on surrealism available to him, eventually quitting school for New York, where he was welcomed enthusiastically by Andre Breton and other European exiles who had fled the war and Nazism for safer shores.  He first published a poem in View and the surrealist organ VVV when he was only fifteen.

At the time, it seems, Lamantia was a committed materialist.  In a series of lecturing letters to George Leite, he complained that Circle was too eclectic and tended to publish poor work.  Surrealists, by contrast, had a definite agenda.  Surrealism, he said, is based on materialism and is uninterested in mysticism or religion.  But it is fascinated by magic: because magic preceded mysticism and was a way of manipulating the universe.  Science was thus its heir.  Mysticism, he said, supplicates, while magic transforms: it was revolutionary, and he was interested in revolution.  He disavowed any connection with Stalinism but was in sympathy with the Trotskyites.