Gioia on Kees and other stories

 Not for the first time, one is indebted to Anecdotal Evidence. This time for a link to a new film by Dana Gioia on Weldon Kees,

It's a good match. It sent me straight back to the Kees books - the poems, the stories and the biography and the best of them were vividly much better than I remembered them, possibly helped in no small way by Dana's seal of approval. It is such things that make one's continued interest and desultory participation in 'poetry' worthwhile.

The Pushkin biography was set aside to accommodate Rory Waterman's essays, then the John Lucas novel has to wait its turn in deference to the Vernon Scannell biography which itself had some time off while Kees was given an updating look. I'm not necessarily putting him in the very top echelon but there are poems and stories that belong alongside the best.

--

The upstairs room where the ceiling fell in is back together again, like Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway. Re-arranged, not exactly pristine but at least serviceable for my unfussy requirements. 

Putting back the books on the Novels, M to Z, shelves I felt some sorrow for 50 year old paperbacks showing their age. Most of them won't be read by me again and could hardly be given away to anybody who wanted them. So, why continue to give them houseroom. 

Firstly because it's not clear which of them won't be read again and one can't tell what's going to happen to make me want to look back at something. And, secondly, I never really recovered from the trauma of disposing of the pop vinyl that was ostensibly only taking up space and wouldn't be played again. And so I lost that essential archive of 'personal heritage', those sacred items that represented 'who I was' - the Yellowman albums, the first singles I bought, the PiL Metal Box. It's necessary to enjoy living in a library of one's own making while one can.

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.