Vernon Scannell

One book leads to another, and it's good when they do. Rory Waterman's impressive sense and judgement in Endless Present were always good company. Apparently using Larkin as a reference point as much as some of us do, it was noticeable how when writing about books he had reservations about, he usually had the time or good grace to find something positive to say. But if you agree to review everything you agree to be sent then maybe that's the price one has to pay. One doesn't want to take someone else's work apart for the sake of it. I'd rather that their audiences were left to their own devices but Rory is kind enough, having made it clear that some work isn't much good, to try to see the point of it.

The book that he led me to is Walking Wounded, the Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell by James Andrew Taylor. While still taking refuge from the heavy detail of the Pushkin biography at a suitable halfway point, this isn't an easy read, either, but for entirely different reasons. It's gripping but unpleasant.

Scannell was a prominent name in the 1970's even if it wasn't originally his own name. John Bain was a brutalized child at the hands of his abusive father and was further damaged by his army service in WW2. By that law that makes it necessary for such victims to re-distribute their suffering, he became less than the ideal husband more than once.

It's not easy to sympathize with him. It happens as often as not with poets. Byron, Hughes, Eliot, Yeats, Gunn, Shelley, Baudelaire- one comes out of their life stories thinking none the better of them. They don't always look as heroic in real life as they thought they were. But if Scannell's life is painful to read with its horrendous bullying, the boxing, the army and the later life, there are reasons to understand him to be found.

His time spent being mistreated by sadists who enjoyed their work, as a deserter in military prison, came at least partly from the horror he felt at seeing the dead being looted for wedding rings, watches and all by their surviving comrades. But, what were you going to do? Leave the gold to the enemy? 

He was a serial absconder, not only from the army but his early shotgun marriage. Violence almost inevitably became a default reaction, in due course against his father but also against the bloke in the pub with who his 'little town flirt' future wife had allegedly shared her attentions. But in the old nature v. nurture debate in which nobody's shortcomings are their own fault, I don't know in how much of this misery story he's the culprit or the victim.

I'm not convinced his poems justify such a deeply researched biography. He's a competent versifier without going much beyond his formats. His memoirs might have foreseen the fashion for unreliable narrators by claiming to have been at El Alamein when the evidence suggests he was not. A life in the military would have been bad enough without it being in time of war and I don't blame Scannell for 'cowardice'. He was brave enough to be a renegade within the army and take the consequences which in some ways were worse than gambling on one's chances of surviving the fighting.

If not ultimately memorable as a poet, it's still another lurid story of a poet's life, grim though it mainly is. Who would have thought that this contributor to 1970's poetry, whose name made him sound as mundane as a Larkin, Jennings, Davie or Thwaite, safe in their peacetime institutions, had such a back story. And there must have been thousands like him who never wrote poems and so whose lives never got written.    

Schubert and Melancholy

It's like being a 'face' at the racecourse. I'm regularly to be seen at various local music venues. Enough for many of those involved to know who I am by now even if I'm severely underqualified in the technicalities of music to write anything authoritative about it. But I'm indulged by the community, a bit like the Toby Jones character in Marvellous who is so keen to be involved at Stoke City that Lou Macari appoints him as kit man.

Much of the time I appear to get way with it but once in a while it becomes alarmingly apparent that I'm an impostor among the music professionals. Yes, yes, Mozart, Shostakovich. Op. 57, K.545. But, no, I've no idea what B flat minor is.

Thus, it was all going well after the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata and then I said I never found Schubert 'down-hearted' and the whole thing fell apart. He's the most approachable, kindly and helpful musician you could wish to meet but the look on his face was one of horror, disbelief, bewilderment or all three. I should have quit while I was ahead.

Hamlet is melancholy. Most artists, with the possible exception of Haydn, can express it but beyond the general premise that a certain sort of creative artist must be touched by some of it sometimes, I'm not sure how many are outright melancholics in their work.

It is a 'Romantic' trait, surely. It's Keats, Goethe and Baudelaire. Schubert, for me, is where Classical moves into Romantic, if we need to deal in these vague terms. The C20th organ music of Vierne is devastatingly dark - what I've heard of it- and Shostakovich can be bleak. Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman are melancholy personalities in their work but musicians rarely so thoroughgoingly so, it seems to me. I've been giving it plenty of thought. 

I don't know if there are right or wrong answers or if my melancholy threshold is higher than average. Neither Larkin or Sean O'Brien seem melancholy to me although Larkin at least has been called 'miserabilist'. What did we expect from this life ? So yesterday I played 3 discs of Schubert- sonatas, quartets and the Quintet, D. 956, to investigate. Not even the intensity and stillness at the centre of that was what I'd call 'melancholic', so do we use adjectives in slightly different ways in the same way that we can see colours differently.

D. 956 is where Schubert 'goes beyond', like Beethoven in the Grosse Fuge - is it- Bach in that particular Cello Suite and Shostakovich in the Viola Sonata. By then we have transcended the contingencies of transient feelings. 

But without writing whole essays or dissertations on an artist, one thinks of them summed up in more of a snapshot and Schubert remains for me more notable for his lightness of touch, a delicacy that maybe even Beethoven doesn't always have. Premier League among composers because the Premier League consists of twenty names.

I could still be wrong, of course, but as Prof. Bill Murray said of the dissertation I provided on Andrew Marvell in 1981, he didn't agree with a word of it but he had to admire the argument and give it a respectable mark.

A biography of Schubert has gone onto the 'to do' list. To read one, not to write one. It was said on the wireless yesterday that he was 4ft. 11. I know he contracted dubious diseases and was possibly disappointed in love as per Beethoven, Brahms and perhaps quite a few of us. Saturday's little chat might have been worth the trauma it put me through if a better understanding of him is the result of it. And I can survive to write about music another day, as Robbie Williams sang in Angels,

whether I'm right or wrong.

Mikhail Lezdkan & Béla Hartmann in Petersfield

 Mikhail Lezdkan & Béla Hartmann, St. Peter's, Petersfield, January 31 

One's shortlist of favourite local musicians is long but Mikhail Lezdkan and Béla Hartmann are high on it, both individually and together. The same might be said of favourite composers where Schubert and Mendelssohn make the top dozen. 

Schubert's 229th birthday was marked with a gorgeous performance of his Arpeggione Sonata, its blithe spirit exuding happy times with Mikhail's cavorting fingers making for something to watch as well as listen to. The rapid exchanges of phrases with Béla made for the most good natured of interaction.

Some anxiety in the piano part of the Adagio contrasted with a more serene cello part before the breezy Allegretto finale was full of good cheer. I rarely find Schubert downbeat although he quite clearly could be but art can be its own salvation.

To begin, Janáček had made a convincing case of his own with the gentle Pohádka, a fairy tale told more impressionistically than programmatically. Mikhail's pizzicato motif was mysterious until developing into something more passionate and in the second movement we were as if in half light into which the rich theme was introduced. Hints of dance in the Allegro led to its happy ending.

After an interval, Mendelssohn's Sonata, op. 58, opened in celebratory style with the duet making an abundant sound between them. Béla's quasi-classical part augmented by pizzicato cello in the Allegretto was followed by a continuing series of arpeggios and some homage to Bach in an Adagio which is the least Johann Sebastian owes to Felix without who he might still be lesser known and we'd have launched a piece by Telemann into space. In many ways the most complex piece on the programme, it here went from pensive to ardent before an effervescent, acrobatic Molto allegro e vivace brought to an end a gorgeous set by two musicians we are lucky to have round these parts.

But it was Schubert's birthday and Piers Burton-Page, the godfather of radio announcers, whose homework had been most useful throughout, wondered if there might be one more, short piece ready and prepared. And it turned out there was ! One from the song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin. Graceful and if here without words, regrets he surely had a few, but it's ever consolatory for me with a lightness of touch all of his own or at least comparable to Mozart's.

It was a three-way split today on where to go. I hope it all went well at the Menuhin Room. I probably did well to leave Sandown races alone and if Schubert's birthday doesn't justify such an exquisite memorial then I don't know whose would. 

Take a look at the lawman Beating up the wrong guy.

 It's in Life on Mars? that,

    Lennon's on sale again. 

 

And now, it would appear, so am I. Here, 

E-Bay, The Perfect Book 

 

It's remarkable what happens once books go out of print. Prices sky rocket to £4.38 plus p&p. There's always somebody ready to cash in.

Once in a while I google myself - vanity, vanity, all of it vanity- but it's not often there's anything new to be found about such a low profile poet.

It's just slightly saddening that I never took any money for those books and yet someone else would. They are cheap to get printed and I gladly gave them away to good homes. So the e-Bay seller never paid the £5 it says the book cost on the back. I have only the vaguest of ideas of how it might be in Guildford with a book by Maggie Sawkins, also of this parish.

But good luck to them. It might not be that the book was unappreciated. It could conceivably be that a genuine poetry lover has died and their family have less interest in this obscurest of titles.

But there is no need to pay £7.08 for it.

Yes, it is officially out of print but I could probably find you a copy if you wanted one.   

--

Much more dispiriting is what reaction 'twins theory', at Strange Fowl gets when it gets any.

For most it is unthinkable, 'bizarre' and almost, one might think, disloyal to the point of insurrectionist. But we're not like that at all. Mr. Curtis and I are entirely compos mentis and only ask if our modest proposal is disprovable.

Strange Fowl continues to add up, for me, and there are those Oxfordians, conspiracy theorists and much more of a host of those who don't believe in William Shakespeare that I ever imagined. And, distressingly, really, it is the likes of them from who we get some support.

They are welcome, of course. Few campaigns turn away any followers except we are exiled in mainstream, we are among the Stratfordian faithful and have nothing more dangerous to offer than some adjustment in Shakespeare's biography to the number of children he may or may not have been the biological father of.

And yet there is more in the news about the authorship question and The Real Shakespeare: Emilia Bassano Willoughby by Irene Coslet who,

comes to Shakespeare as an expert in feminism. She has studied feminism for 20 years and has been involved in the promotion of gender equality in multiple organisations and countries around the world. 

and I'm impressed that she does. But her reading of Shakespeare makes her a perfect fit for the tendency identified by Jonathan Bate that we all make Shakespeare into who we would like him to be, as per Virginia Woolf,

that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.

 

I'm not at all confident that modest proposals, carefully threaded together by gently thoughtful people, are loud enough to be heard any more. That is by no means a reason to give up on them but it might be a reason to put it in place once and for all and let the world go to bad if that's what it is intent on doing.  

Oh, Babe, What Would Poetry Say

When the opportunity to take a break from the biography of Pushkin presented itself, I took it up. It is more detailed than I require and the broad sweep of a story is in danger of being lost under a welter burden of contiuning affairs, flirtations, controversies and much of what was once expected of poets, 200 years ago, before they retreated into universities. Never wanting to waste a good joke, when Pushkin came to Shove-kin, I decided to give him a rest for a while. With him now married and having published Eugene Onegin, halfway through seemed like an appropriate juncture. But corny jokes can be recycled from e-mails to friends, too.

Julian Barnes was a very good reason to leave off a story that will be easily returned to, then a Christmas present cataloguing all those brands and memories from our shared, generic, 70's childhood was the harmless diversion it was meant to be.

But then, there having been that review in the TLS purporting to survey 'the state of British poetry', I wanted to see it. Only TG Jones, the inheritors of the WH Smith's shops, in Southsea, stock the TLS so I went to the Central Library first except it's a couple of years since they had newspapers and journals one can look at. It turns out they have plenty online but not the TLS. So, not very much like WH Davies, free-loading on public transport, I took the scenic route to Southsea and found the words I so wanted to read.

I doubt if I'm ever going to be a Tristram Fane Saunders admirer any more than one of Ed Sheeran. I'm sure they are both talented at what they do but to me they seem young, safe, anodyne types like those who did their homework, came top of the class and went on to successful careers without having been interesting- see also, Coldplay. But I'm glad I saw Tristram's essay and it's not his fault if what he finds to say about the current condition of British poetry could as equally be appropriate to Business Studies as the English Department.

However, I'm grateful to it for how it brought my attention to Rory Waterman's reviews in Endless Present. One has it confirmed once more that one is no longer middle aged when you are reading books by middle aged poet-academics whose father's poems one once bought, like Andrew Waterman's in Faber's Modern Poets Five, 1981, where he appeared alongside CH Sisson, Craig Raine, Robert Wells, Tom Paulin and Andrew Motion which wouldn't be the worst six-a-side team one ever played in.

But Rory is very soon a most amenable guide through some books one knows well and others one hasn't seen. It's not really a look at the 'state of the poetry nation' in 2026, it being Selected Articles, Reviews and Dispatches, 2010-23. That period included a number of Larkin-related books and they form the foundations of the book early doors and references back to Larkin continue afterwards which some might think is backward-looking, as Larkin himself was said to be in his time. But without helping to establish where poetry has arrived at by 2026, I'm with Rory entirely about what is entirely still worth obsessing over.

He is judicious and wise. As a professional critic, he sets himself a standard of honesty and stands by it. He is ready to find fault with those bits of Larkin that were never meant to see print but also, as sympathetically as he can with the likes of John Agard and Patience Agbabi but it's not a racial thing because his is more caustic when he simply doesn't reckon much, as with James Sutherland-Smith who,

Since the poet is here congratulating his perspicacity, the tired language is particularly unfortunate.

The more of him you read, the more it becomes desirable for Rory to award those poetry prizes we must have.

The big shock comes in the review of James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: The Life & Poetry of Vernon Scannell. Scannell was a name that had always been there, the name at least redolent of a tweed-jacketed, bespectacled composer of careful verses only designed to make Larkin look more Byronic or Hughesian in comparison. I knew he'd done a bit of boxing but I didn't know much of that art was rehearsed on a conveyor belt of victim female partners. It's unfortunate to have to find out as late as this what some of those names in The Listener or those booklets left his sixth form room by Linden Huddlestone at school were really like.

In those days I vaguely imagined poets as the gods who sent down their words from a place beyond our finding, partly so that we could do 'A' level English. I never imagined them much less than saints and never thought I'd meet one. But it wasn't like that at all.

Rory's very good, ever alert to non-sequiturs, the emptiness of what he resorts to calling 'poesy' and one would only want one's best stuff to come before his diligent judgement and even then you'd not be sure until you got some sort of pass, if you did. But if you did, you'd have deserved it. 

It's true to say I've been losing faith in poetry - not to mention a number of other areas of human activity- in recent years. I wouldn't like to think I wasted so much of my life on something that proved to be no more than a charade. But I've been having another look at some of the books here for the purposes of the Anthology list and then I wondered what Rory Waterman had to say about it all and it's turned out that I do still care. 

The state of British poetry

 What is it, then? I'd be interested to know.

The weekly e-mail from the TLS is headlined by a review of five books that purports to enlighten us. Except if I can still fiddle my way into the whole article, I've forgotten how; the nearest shop that may or may not sell the TLS is some way from here and I simply don't know if Tristram Fane Saunders is who I'd like it all explained to me by. Maybe he is the new Messiah but he could equally be a new kid on the block who's done his homework and got good marks.

The 'state of British poetry' now, as elucidated by one come lately to it, is - much to my demerit- of as much interest to me as what a young person on the street thinks of the latest pop records. Entirely valid, I'm sure, but not guaranteed to be something I'd understand. But I'm not going to find out unless I try.

One of the five books in Tristram's survey is a collection of reviews by Rory Waterman. And that, being trustworthy, arrived today. It looks like a book worth having but in the same way that it's going to be good to see his particular form of words regarding books about Larkin published in the last fifteen years, it's not Larkin that I'm trying to catch up on.

So, what can you do?

One could, at a stretch, find the TLS or even read some poetry by younger writers and see what I think for myself. But I don't listen to Radio 1, I only listen to Tony Blackburn's 60's and Bob Harris's improving 70's shows.

There was a time when something aspiring to the canonical was essayed by Alvarez, then Motion/Morrison, Hulse/Kennedy/Morley, O'Brien and Lumsden but, convenient as it was to be informed about where we were, the wholesome diversity of British poetry meant that the Identity Parade looked more like an identity crisis.

One can't have it both ways. 

Julian Barnes, Departure(s)

Julian Barnes, Departure(s), (Jonathan Cape)

'Fiction Review' is a dubious label for the Julian Barnes swansong. He's a novelist and novels are fictional but he's also a writer of this 'hybrid' stuff - part fiction, part true- except there's not much imaginary material in the mix this time. And so we are already into the sort of discursion that he specializes in so elegantly himself. The book discusses itself, we discuss the book and find that although we might have covered a lot of ground most eruditely we've got no further than any other liberal, left, London elite dinner party.

IAM is involuntary autobigraphical memory, sometimes brought on by a stroke, and can be much more severe than that brought on by Proust's madeleine. It can get as bad as one girl who could remember every detail of every day of her life and turns out to be a terrible curse. It's far worse to be able to recall everything than to have a dubious, selective memory that has at least edited out a big proportion of raw material. But it's a great subject with which to open what is essentially a memoir by a writer who often used unreliable narrators.

The central, main part of the book relates the relationship between Jean and Stephen, two friends brought together by Barnes at Oxford and then again, forty years later, at Stephen's request. Barnes becomes confidant to both parties, with far too much involvement in the difficulties of the relationship which he candidly shares with his readers now that they are both dead. While at first this might seem pruriently fascinating, it is soon more than one wants to know especially for those of us who like the wording of the law about 'between consenting adults in private'. The stratifications of Barnes's many-layered writing have probably never gone as deep but there must be a limit to how much we want to know.

In summary, Stephen loves Jean more than she wants him to. She feels the need of more 'freedom'. It occurs to him that she might want more than him and while that doesn't seem to be the case in their later role as 're-kindlers', Barnes is aware at first hand that first time around she very nearly did.

All of which has to be unpacked at some length in the sort of coda that Barnes has gone into before, investigating all the implications not only of 'love' but age, dementia, loss and literature. It's a short book and is readily soon read because he's never less than a pleasure to read but one still wonders if such exhaustive analysis was necessary or if, over the three years it took him to write it, he was stretching it out to make it book length. One can lose sympathy for the perceived sufferings of the well-to-do intelligentsia if the intricacies of why two people find themselves to be incompatible twice over is the most they have to worry about.

And so it's farewell from Julian Barnes, still one of the finest writers of his generation even if by the end, almost inevitably, he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself. At least he was well-organized enough not to leave his last book unfinished.