Ivor Gurney by Kate Kennedy

 Kate Kennedy, Dweller in Shadows, a Life of Ivor Gurney (Princeton)

I needed persuading about Ivor Gurney's poetry and for the most part I still do. Julia Copus provided plenty of evidence to upgrade the impression I've long held about Charlotte Mew but Kate Kennedy has more of a job on with Ivor who is less easy to like.

One can form one's own impressions of poets from biographies and letters. Elizabeth Bishop is easy to like, as are Auden, and maybe Keats. One has to accept the shortcomings of Hardy, Edward Thomas and Larkin while retaining some residual sympathy for them, especially in the light of what they achieved. My big hero, Thom Gunn, was done few favours by his letters. I don't regret having not met Shelley, Baudelaire, Ted Hughes, Robert Lowell or Byron.

Gurney can't have been an easy job for Kate Kennedy because it is a grim story not alleviated much by his poems but she does him what justice she can in this admirable work of detailed research and objective sympathy.

While 'war poetry' is often one of the first genres of 'poetry' readers are likely to be introduced to, its message being clear and not hard to sympathize with, it is only subject matter and it is somehow inevitable that poetry isn't sufficient for the job. The horrors of war for those that were there are possibly more than poetry is equipped to deal with but the best poets, and poetry, might need something more nuanced to bring the best out of them. Not all the most talented poets went to war but Gurney wasn't one of them. My interest in him relates to most of my school having been done in Gloucester and the area to which he was so attached. Barnwood House Hospital, which proved not secure enough to prevent Ivor's repeated escape attempts, was close to where we lived but Kate's caption to the photograph of it that says it was 'burnt down' is not supported by any memories in my immediate family or anything to be found on the internet.

One reads things from time to time that one has reason to doubt which makes one wonder how much else one has taken on trust that wasn't true. One thing that this book does much to establish, though, from Kate's research and evidence she was provided with, is that Gurney's mental instability was not entirely due to the trauma of war and subsequent damage. He had every right to it, having been injured twice, but witnesses from pre-war Gloucester report him being known to be 'batchy' and known as 'Crazy'. Well done, that man.

It's a complicated psychiatric case to take on for anyone whose interests are mainly literary and musical but if we begin at the beginning, the difficult, unloving mother is hard to omit from any attempt. Having formed close attachments to older women, possibly as surrogate mother figures, a major disruption occurs with the ending of what might have been a more appropriate relationship with a nurse, Annie Drummond, that immediately precedes the first mention of his identification with Beethoven. He has already found some kinship with the Gloucester poet, F.W. Harvey, who described himself in lines that might equally apply to Gurney, as walking,

             behind himself, as if to catch

The motive: - An accessory to the fact

Faintly amused, it seems,

Behind his dreams.

 

Those lines are more coherent that many of Gurney's that arbitrarily leave out the definite or indefinite article or habitually put adjectives after their noun whether for laboured emphasis or to accommodate a rhyme but Gurney's poems often look unfinished as well as clinging unhealthily to his much beloved Gloucestershire background with its deep traditions of elvering, big, brown River Severn and the story of an ox so fat it got stuck in the street between what came and went as Debenhams and the shops opposite. Gloucester and its idyllic surroundings begin to look like another substitute mother that he can love. 

Without wanting to encourage comparisons with another self-obsessed poet, Walt Whitman, or giving any credence to ideas that Gurney's vague associations made him any sort of Modernist like Ezra Pound, there are things worth having in his poetry, such as,

The nurses move like music through the room;

 

and, from this account, it seemed to me the best poetry came post-Barnwood, which had been 'more like a genteel retirement home for deluded generals than an asylum', in the early days of the less salubrious time spent in Dartford, in poems like Cut Flowers.

Comparisons with the genuinely inventive poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins aren't useful. Strings are pulled to find Gurney a job in the tax office in Gloucester but despite his short-lived best efforts he proves unemployable. Any amount of Freudian analysis leads drearily to questions about 'sexuality' and gets us nowhere. The biography 'takes off', in the wrong direction, and eventually demands our sympathy as Gurney's condition deteriorates, with moments of lucidity and heroic support from his life-long friend, Marion Scott, and gestures from the likes of Vaughan Williams but the world can be a cruel place and only has so much time to try to help those so locked into themselves that they are capable of believing themselves to be Beethoven or Shakespeare. There's not much comfort to be had. Gurney as a poet is no more than a poor man's Edward Thomas. If we go anywhere in search of something to make a case for him it needs must be as a composer, possibly in the song settings of poems by his contemoparies but, I suspect, better in the sonatas and other chamber music that took Brahms as a model.

There must have been any amount of talent that went astray or was wasted having not been aligned with some organizing principle, some direction or less of an inclination in the artist to indulge themselves. The pieces need to be made to fit together. Lesser talents than Ivor Gurney's have made more of themselves by having been better directed. We might compare where Gary Lineker and Paul Gascoigne eventually found themselves with respect to what gifts they were born with.

It's a sad story and if you must read the biography of a suicidal writer there are better writers and less grim stories available but Kate Kennedy's been through it on our behalf and, if you feel any need to know, it is all here. You will be forgiven if afterwards you only feel like retreating into something less dispiriting, like Balzac or the recent best-seller, Hamnet. That's what I did.