Vernon Scannell

Vernon Scannell

Vernon Scannell
Born John Vernon Bain
(1922-01-23)23 January 1922
Spilsby, Lincolnshire
Died 16 November 2007(2007-11-16) (aged 85)
West Yorkshire
Subject Poetry, English
Spouse Jo Peters
Partner Jo Peters
Children 6 (six) Children

Vernon Scannell (23 January 1922 – 16 November 2007) was a British poet and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport. His published poem count stands at 53.

Personal life

Vernon Scannell, whose birth name was John Vernon Bain, was born in 1922 in Spilsby, Lincolnshire. The family, always poor, moved frequently: Ballaghaderreen in Ireland, Beeston, Eccles, before settling in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, where his father, who had fought in the First World War, developed a reputation as a good portrait photographer and the family's severe financial difficulties began to ease. Scannell attended the local Queen's Park Boys' School, an elementary council school[1] and left at the age of 14 for a job in an accountant's office. His real passions, however, were for the unlikely combination of boxing and literature. He had been winning boxing titles at school and had been a keen reader from a very early age, although not properly attaching to poetry until about aged 15, when he picked up a Walter de la Mare poem and was "instantly and permanently hooked".

In 1940 Scannell enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland highlanders but two years later was transferred to the Gordon Highlanders, part of the famous 51st Highland Division.[2] The war took him into action in the North African desert. He deserted (from revulsion at his colleagues' behaviour rather than cowardice) in a forward area, was caught and sent to one of the harshest military penal institutions in Alexandria. Released on a suspended sentence, to take part in the Normandy invasion, where he was wounded near Caen and shipped back to a military hospital at Winwick in Lancashire [3] before being sent on to a convalescent depot. Scannell had always very much disliked army life, finding nothing in his temperament which fitted him for the part of a soldier. So "on impulse", after V.E. Day, with the war over as far as he was concerned, he deserted again and spent two years on the run, earning his living with jobs in the theatre, professional boxing bouts and tutoring and coaching, all the while teaching himself by reading everything he could. During this evasive time Scannell was writing poetry and was first published in Tribune and The Adelphi. He was also boxing for Leeds University, winning the Northern Universities Championships at three weights. In 1947 he was arrested and court-martialled and sent to Northfield Military Hospital, a mental institution near Birmingham. On discharge he returned to Leeds and then went to London, where, supporting himself with teaching jobs and boxing, he settled down to writing.

Scannell, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [2] won many poetry awards, including for war poems such as his collection Walking Wounded. A. E. Housman said that "the business of poetry is to harmonise the sadness of the universe" and Scannell quoted this with approval. Scannell's poems, with their themes of love, violence and mortality, were shaped and influenced by his wartime experiences. Scannell was awarded a Writing Fellowship in 1975 as Resident Poet in Berinsfield, Oxfordshire, an experience he recounts in A Proper Gentleman[4] and later, in 1979 he spent a term as Poet in Residence at the King's School, Canterbury.[5] His final collection, Last Post, was published in 2007; he had been working on it until not long before his death.

Teaching

In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was a teacher of English Language and English Literature at Hazelwood School, Limpsfield, Surrey, teaching 8- to 13-year-old pupils. He brought his enthusiasm for boxing into the school and, while he did not exactly teach it, he ensured there were interesting bouts between boys ill-matched in size and weight. He was also able to write poetry about boxing.

Literary life

He received the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1961 for an early poetry volume, The Masks of Love,[4] and the Cholmondeley Award for poetry in 1974. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1960 and granted a Civil List pension in recognition of his services to literature in 1981.[6] Stephen Spender, the poet perceptively wrote to Scannell in a letter in 1953: "you write good poetry and that is all that matters."[7] Seamus Heaney in a letter to Andrew Taylor said he admired Scannell's poems "not only for their sturdy metrical pace and structure, but for their combination of mordancy and a sense of mortality".[5] John Carey, the critic commented: "Scannell nearly always works on two levels, one realistic and external, the other imaginative, metaphorical, haunted by memory and desire. A master of the dramatic monologue, his work is drenched in humanity. It resounds with memories."[8] Scannell also wrote the verse narration for BBC Television film A House that Died.[9]

He also received a special award from the Wilfred Owen Association "in recognition of his contribution to war poetry". Scannell's best-known book of war poetry is Walking Wounded (1965). The title poem recollects a column of men returning from battle: "No one was suffering from a lethal hurt, They were not magnified by noble wounds, There was no splendour in that company."

Scannell is also the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Rose (1983). The unadorned narrative covers five years' military service and a brief boxing career. Scannell writes about the conclusion to his army life, "Twenty-five years ago, 1945...was the year I made what might seem like a desperate decision and performed what might appear to be an act of criminal folly, manic selfishness, zany recklessness, abject cowardice or even, perhaps, eccentric courage. I deserted from the Army. The first recipient of the Owen Award, Christopher Logue, author of some of the best war poetry of the past half century (in the form of versions of the Iliad), spent two years in a military prison, on a charge of handling stolen pass books. What would Owen say? He'd say: Never trust the teller, trust the tale."[10]

Death

Scannell spent the final years of his life living in Otley, West Yorkshire, where he died at his home at the age of 85 after a long illness.[11]

Memorable lines

His obituarists heap praise on Scannell's verse and give their readers some examples of his most memorable lines:

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.
In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;
The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane
Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,
Their green and silent attics sprouting now
With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes
And ripe grenades ready to drop and burst...
Then into sight the ambulances came,
Stumbling and churning past the broken farm,
The amputated sign-post and smashed trees,
Slow waggonloads of bandaged cries, square trucks
That rolled on ominous wheels, vehicles
Made mythopoeic by their mortal freight
And crimson crosses on the dirty white...
The mist still hung in snags from dripping thorns;
Absent-minded guns still sighed and thumped.
And then they came, the walking wounded,
Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained,
Dragging at ankles exhaustion and despair...
Remembering after eighteen years,
In the heart's throat a sour sadness stirs;
Imagination pauses and returns
To see them walking still, but multiplied
In thousands now. And when heroic corpses
Turn slowly in their decorated sleep
And every ambulance has disappeared,
The walking wounded still trudge down that lane,
And when recalled they must bear arms again.[12]
I'm very old and breathless, tired and lame,
and soon I'll be no more to anyone
than the slowly fading trochee of my name
and shadow of my presence ...
There's something valedictory in the way
my books gaze down on me from where they stand in disciplined disorder, and display
the same goodwill that well-wishers on land convey to troops who sail away to where great danger waits...[13]
What captivates and sells, and always will,
Is what we are: vain, snarled up, and sleazy.
No one is really interesting until
To love him has become no longer easy.[14]
And yet we still remember them – the long
And lovely summers, never smeared or chilled-
Like poems, by heart; like poems, never wrong;
The idyll is intact, its truth distilled
From maculate fact, preserved as by the sharp
And merciful mendacities.
Disposed in their scattered dozens like fragments of a smashed whole, each human particle
Is almost identical, rhyming in shape and pigment,
All, in their mute eloquence, oddly beautiful.
A quarter of a century ago
I hung the gloves up, knew I'd had enough
Of taking it and trying to dish it out,
Foxing them or slugging toe-to-toe.[6]

Works

Poetry

Autobiography

Fiction

Other

Further reading

References

  1. ↑ Scannell, Vernon, Drums of Morning, London: Robson Books, 1992. ISBN 1861052464
  2. 1 2 Cover note, Not Without Glory, London: Woburn Press. ISBN 0713000945
  3. ↑ Cover note An Argument of Kings, London: Robson Books. ISBN 978-0-86051-444-2
  4. 1 2 Cover note, New & Collected Poems 1950 - 1980, London: Robson Books, 1980. ISBN 0860511049
  5. 1 2 James Andrew Taylor, Walking Wounded: The Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ISBN 9780199603183
  6. 1 2 "Vernon Scannell (obituary)", The Telegraph, 19 November 2007.
  7. ↑ Scannell Vernon, Tiger and the Rose, London: Hamish & Hamilton, 1971. ISBN 978-0-241-02054-8
  8. ↑ Foreword to Taylor, Walking Wounded: The Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell, 2013.
  9. ↑ Cover note, Tiger and the Rose, London: Hamish & Hamilton, 1971. ISBN 978-0-241-02054-8
  10. ↑ "Network your poetry", The Times, 27 July 2007.
  11. ↑ "News in brief", The Observer, 18 November 2007.
  12. ↑ Walking Wounded by Vernon Scannell – Poetry Archive
  13. ↑ Alan Brownjohn, "Vernon Scannell (obituary)", The Guardian, 19 November 2007.
  14. ↑ Anthony Thwaite, "Vernon Scannell Obituary", The Independent, 19 November 2007.
  15. ↑ "A Place to Live by Vernon Scannell". Retrieved 30 September 2009.

External links

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