Lucas, Bach Piano, Scannell

There was always much to like about John Lucas, Many years ago I read his survey, Modern English Poetry: From Hardy to Larkin. Later his book on Notts cricket, The Trent Bridge Battery. Another time I'd ordered books from his Shoestring Press. And eventually I realized it was all the same bloke, also jazzman, Prof. of English and novelist. 

Recent obituaries mentioned his last novel, That Little Thread (Greenwich Exchange, 2023), thought it sounded worth a go and was proved right. Peter Simpson, Professor at a Midlands university, is approached by a 'wide boy' who had been the unlikely father of a child born to 'Paddy', a star student from twenty years earlier who left before graduating and reportedly died during childbirth. And thus we are on the trail of what really happened.

One might think a novel about middle class academic life written by one such could be a bit self-contained and there are larger concerns beyond its limited milieu but they have lives like anybody else and the fact that theirs is based around writing essays in pursuit of a certificate shouldn't detract from its potential too much.

It's a steady, good book done by one who had done it before and knows how to. It brought to mind Jane Jarmain who is the similarly brilliant, tragically early casualty in Sean O'Brien's Afterlife and perhaps there are comparisons to be made beginning with that motif. 

The future of thge novel is perenially in question but there's no shortage of them. The problem might be that Finnegans Wake seemed to have knocked the ball out of the ground once and for all but, like Theodore Adorno's dictum that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, there still was. 

Further novels by Lucas might well be on their way here soon. 

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The disc Allusions and Beyond by Piano Dup Takahashi-Lehmann arrived with its 2.33 of the Bach/Kurtag Gottes Zeit from Cantata BWV 106. Two further such miniatures follow it without achieving the same stillness.

Before them, an arrangement for four hands of Brandenburg Concerto no. 5 is worth having although for once perhaps the very familiar orchestral original is difficult to improve on.

Although I can see how an album or programme can benefit from contrasts, I think I prefer discs that are 'more of the same'. The shift into Bernd Alois Zimmerman's 'Monologe' takes us immediately faraway when we might not be ready to go. If it's philistine not to find its modernist plink, plonk and crash intellectually invigorating then it must be the effect of time increasingly putting a cap on my sympathies for the avant garde. Having been there and done that, I don't feel much need to go back. And then the Brahms Haydn Variations come as some relief but it turns out to have been a disc mainly bought for 2.33 of outrageous charm.

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Not dissimilar to the Lucas book is Vernon Scannell's Feminine Endings (Enitharmon, 2000), a set piece of the contemporary poetry world all about a residential poetry course. One of the tutor poets is older, male and traditional, the other is female and more challenging. The marital situation of the hosts is becoming fragile as are some of the paying guests, one of who is taking a lot of interest in news reports about the latest woman found murdered. And the premises where it all takes place with readings and writings of poems is haunted.

For all the ready-made humour to be found in the poetry world and the forseeable attitudes and opinions of those involved, it's a neat book encompassing more than might have been expected ot it and Scannell gets it right. It's fairly clear where he stands, that he is more or less Gordon Napier, brought in as a last-minute, stopgap replacement for the indisposed Brian MacDuff, who is presumably George MacBeth.

Some of the poets mentioned are fictitional but most of the poems are real. I don't think it's obvious who Gabriella Cornwell is which is a good thing because it might be actionable but at least she wins a major, international prize for her opaque efforts. It could be used as a text to introduce the poetry of its time and might yet be if I pursue the recently occuring idea to do something about the 1990's which, whether or not it did at the time, looks like a Golden Age by now. 

The Lives of the Poets and other stories

 There was a time, a long time ago, when I didn't ever read biographies. It might have been part of a purist thing when I thought novels were proper writing. It was probably related to how I didn't write anything apart from poems. But the story of a life can often be how one changes from one thing to another, like Wittgenstein writing the Tractatus and then, later, another book that contradicts it. So now I write poems rarely but have tried, with less or even less success, most genres except libretti or a maintenance manual for the Triumph Herald.

Similarly with biographies. I read more of them than novels these days. Mostly poets, my shelves overflow with them. Any number relating to Shakespeare, 4 Auden, 3 Larkin, 3 Eliot, 3 Donne. I'm not sure there's anything one can generalize from them and sometimes wonder about the biography of an apparently more mundane tradesperson, like the proprietor of a local grocer's shop. Why would that not be more interesting.

The lives of Pushkin and Byron are the high lives of Romantic excess. Those of Larkin, Charlotte Mew and Elizabeth Jennings not quite so much. Poets in previous centuries were mostly men of some privilege until the C20th it became a bit more democratic. Poetry can be a self-indulgent thing. Do those who dedicate themselves to it do so heroically for the sake of their art and do they use it as an excuse to sacrifice consideration for others in the interests of their pre-occupation.

How much suffering is it worth to produce art of some value. Beethoven surely suffered but was rewarded with a body of work that precious few can compare with. But since it was his own suffering, it's mainly up to him. I'm more concerned with those who made others suffer.

We might think of Ted Hughes, Eliot and Hardy whose treatment of the women in their lives was selfish. And now Vernon Scannell.

Finishing Walking Wounded today, these questions arose. He dedicated himself to his art and his manifesto is to be admired but he was one among several names of his period and hardly one of the greatest names of his generation. But the cost it came at was immense. That he couldn't help his drinking and habitual violence is one thing and his own distress as a result of it is what he had to bear. But it's not a pleasant book to read and one tends to think that a life's work of well-made but not colossally brilliant poems does not balance out the way he treated a succession of partners.

I'd never like to say that any mere art work would be worth the real life pain inflicted on others. Poems, and art of any kind, is second-hand, not real and only words on a page - however much they are valued as such- whereas bruises and injuries are first-hand and not imaginary. We must never allow ourselves to become so precious about art that we forget its secondary status.

Scannell was a novelist, too, and this reading sequence continues into an order for Feminine Endings, a late book apprently very thinly based on Arvon Creative Writing course with tutors who may not be but probably are Scannell and Hughes. It sounds very much like an industry insider job but that might not prevent it being any good. It follows on from the TLS review on 'the state of poetry', Rory Waterman's essays and reviews and the Scannell biography, which each suggested the next. In between, and loosely related, begun today, is That Little Thread, the last novel by John Lucas, admirable man. That has begun most readably.

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But, on the subject of 'bodies of work', the end of the Complete Works of Bach is sort of in sight. There's much organ music to go, the big oratorios and miscellaneous discs but the full picture is coming into sight.

It's never a chore but one only gets through 172 discs by applying oneself to them dutifully.

After 50+ discs of cantatas one can't help but think that his reputation would have been no less if he had written half as many and the same is passably true of the organ music. I'm naturally suspicious of anybody too prolific but there are some who, having provided so much, you can hardly throw any away and, anyway, it's not the complete Bach because a couple of further pieces have been discovered and accredited to him while I've been listening to them.

And we need not worry too much about 'authenticity'. Some of us - me, at least- have been tuned in to the keyboard music through the piano, not invented in Bach's time so clearly not how he heard them, but the accidental stumbling across transcriptions for four hands by Gyorgy Kurtág. The fact that Cantata 106 is sublime overrides any consideration of how Bach heard his own music and whether it was keyboard music or a cantata in the first place doesn't matter much. All Bach played on the piano is a transcription.

Perhaps the vastness of Bach's output is reduced slightly by realizing that he had his way of doing it. It's not 172 discs of brand new ideas. But if we reduce our assessment a little bit on account of that, it gets multiplied back up again by thinking that if he had only written the solo violin music or only the Cello Suites, or only some of the cantatas or only the keyboard music, as examples, he would be a great composer. One thinks of the Beatles and their reputation, how they gave away songs to Cilla and others, and I have this way of gauging pop artists by how good no. 30 in their Top 30 is. Bach is light years ahead of Lennon-McCartney, individually and collectively, on that score and he's most likely seeing off the whole of the Motown Hit Factory, too.

It was a blessed day I picked up that box in Chichester. Maybe I should have bought the Schubert, too. 

Scannell and Discipline

James Andrew Taylor's biography hasn't made Vernon Scannell any more appealing to me as it progresses but in real life there were plenty ready to be charmed by him and I'd like to think that any friend of Anne Stevenson's might be a friend of mine. None of us can do very much about what we are like and the upbringing he had augmented by his army experiences can't have been of benefit.

I haven't really regarded his poems as much more than a C+ - in what would be a rigorous marking system- until Chapter 12 pointed out the rhyme scheme of Enemy Agents. If nominative determinism is at work in a poet called Scannell, he could equally have been called Rimell. In the first three lines, 

Expert in disguise and killing blows,

Fluent in all languages required,

They wrote me ardent letters but in code.   

 he establishes the subtlest of rhyme schemes in which the consonant sound in 'blows' and the 'd' and the end of 'required' come together in 'code'.

That's good form for you in more ways than one and entirely puts into practice his repeated criticism of 'pop' poetry, like that from Liverpool, and the wider idea of vers libre that Eliot is quoted here as saying, 

No 'vers' is 'libre' for the man who wants to do a good job'. 

 Having set off on this rescue mission, Chapter 12 goes on to describe how Scannell, in a mostly disastrous brief period on a fellowship near Oxford in 1974, found it difficult with students who weren't interested in close reading or technical improvement but wanted to hear fulsome approval of their efforts. Never having attempted such a job, I can't concur with him first hand but I can see how it would be, up and down the country, with thousands of such homemade talents all thinking it was them and not the other thousands that were the naturally gifted one.

Scannell fits the certain stereotype of the poet as penniless, wayward and itinerant all too well but his application to his art is admirable. And it was all too little appreciated during this posting. Not just unappreciated but targetted by local no-marks who made a point of abusing him in public and taking their animosity s far as a sustained campaign against him whether or not they knew of his pugilistic prowess and propensity to use it.

And so it's taken some time to find a lot of sympathy for him but a degree of it arrived in due course.   

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.