Fraser was born in
Glasgow, Scotland, later moving with his family to
Aberdeen. He attended the
University of St. Andrews, where he read History and English. During
World War II he served in the
British Army in
Cairo and
Eritrea. He was published as a poet in
Salamander, a Cairo literary magazine. At the same time, he was involved with the
New Apocalyptics group, writing an introductory essay for the anthology
The White Horseman, and formulating as well as anyone did the idea that they were successors to
surrealism. After the war, he became a prominent figure in London's literary circles, working as a journalist and critic. Together with his wife Paddy, he made friends with a gamut of literary figures, from the intellectual leader
William Empson to the eccentric
John Gawsworth. He worked with
Ian Fletcher to have Gawsworth's
Collected Poems (1949) published. Fraser's direction was that of the traditional
man of letters (soon to become extinct). In 1948, Fraser contributed an essay entitled "A Language by Itself" to a
biblio-
symposium honouring the 60th birthday of
T. S. Eliot. Drawing comparisons with
John Donne, Fraser praised the poet's profound refreshment (particularly in
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) of the English poetic tongue, together with his subtle facility for transitional verse and his potent effect on the poetic youth; but, more importantly for present purposes, he also confessed: "I am not a very original writer myself; I am lost, on the whole, without a convention of some sort [...]." In 1949, he accepted the job of replacing
Edmund Blunden as Cultural Adviser to the UK Liaison Mission in
Tokyo. This ended badly when Fraser suffered a breakdown in 1951 while in
Japan. Subsequently, he was much less the poet than the all-purpose writer. He became a lecturer at the
University of Leicester in 1959, where he was an inspiring teacher, remaining there until retirement in 1979. He married Eileen Lucy Andrew (who was known as Paddy from birth) in 1946. She wrote a brief memoir of her life with Fraser:
G. S. Fraser: A Memoir. Together they had two daughters, including
Helen Fraser, and a son. Paddy died in 2013. == Books ==