Vernon Scannell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Contents 1 Personal life 2 Teaching 3 Awards 4 Death 5 Memorable lines 6 Works 7 References 8 External links

[edit] Personal life

Scannell was born John Vernon Bains in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, and brought up principally in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. He left school at 14.

During World War II he served in the British Army in the Gordon Highlanders, in France and North Africa. He was imprisoned for desertion, but released early to take part in the Normandy landings, was wounded near Caen, and once more deserted after VE Day and spent two years on the run. It was during this time that he changed his name to Vernon Scannell.^[1]He wrote about these experiences in An Argument of Kings (1987).

Scannell subsequently worked as a boxer, and later studied at the University of Leeds, encountering Bonamy Dobrée and G. Wilson Knight. He was arrested as a deserter in 1947, and sent to a mental hospital. He returned to Leeds in 1948, and put together a first poetry collection, Graves and Resurrections,^[1] published by the Fortune Press. He subsequently worked as a teacher and for BBC Radio, while developing his range as a writer. He wrote poems such as "Apple Raid", "Nettles" and many others.^[2]

Among his recreations in Who's Who, Scannell listed "drink, boxing (as a spectator), learning French" and "loathing Tories and New Labour." Vernon Scannell married, in 1954, Josephine Higson; they had four sons and two daughters.^[3] His long marriage to Jo Higson eventually broke down: of their six children, one handicapped son died as an infant (movingly written about in The Tiger and the Rose), and another son much later died in a motorcycle accident.^[4] In 1979, while poet-in-residence at Canterbury, Kent, he met Angela Beese and they moved first to Filkins in Gloucestershire then to Leeds and finally Otley. Although the relationship foundered in 1986, Angela remained a close friend for the rest of his life. His final relationship of more than 15 years was with Jo Peters who cared for him in his long, final illness. He continued writing fine poetry almost to the day of his death. His final publication was a small collection of poems Last Post (Shoestring Press) which came out in September 2007.

[edit] Teaching

In the late 1950s he was (from the personal experience of this contributor) a gifted teacher of English Literature and poetry at Hazelwood School, Limpsfield, Surrey, and instilled a lasting love of Shakespeare, Shelley, Matthew Arnold and Byron in a good many of his 8 to 12-year-old pupils.

[edit] Awards

He received the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1961 and the Cholmondeley Poetry Prize 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.^[5]

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 delightful and candid memoir, The Tiger and the Rose (1983). The delight derives from the unadorned narrative, taking in five years' military service and a brief boxing career. The candour lies in Scannell's willingness to write 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.^[6]

[edit] 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.^[7][8][9]

[edit] Memorable lines

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

• From Walking Wounded (1965):
  

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.^[10]

• From Missing Things:
  

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...^[11]

• From A Note for Biographers:
  

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.^[12]

• From The Long and Lovely Summers recalling idyllic times walking on the Chilterns above Wendover:
  

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.

• From Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit:
  

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.

• From The Loving Game (1975):
  

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.^[13]

[edit] Works

• Graves and Resurrections (1948) poems
• The Fight (1953) novel
• The Wound and The Scar (1953)
• A Mortal Pitch (1957) poems
• The Big Chance (1960) novel
• The Masks of Love (1960) poems
• The Face of the Enemy (1961) novel
• The Shadowed Place (1961) novel
• A Sense of Danger (1962) poems
• New Poems 1962 : A P. E. N. Anthology of Contemporary Poetry (1962) editor with Patricia Beer and Ted Hughes
• The Dividing Night (1962)
• Edward Thomas (1963)
• The Big Time (1965) novel
• The Loving Game (1965) poems
• Walking Wounded - Poems 1962-65 (1965)
• Pergamon Poets 8 (1970) with Jon Silkin
• Epithets of War - Poems 1965-69 (1969)
• The Dangerous Ones (1970)
• Mastering the Craft (1970)
• Selected Poems (1971)
• Company of Women (c. 1971)
• The Tiger and the Rose (1971) autobiography (i)
• Incident at West Bay, a poem (The Keepsake Press 1972)
• The Winter Man (1973)
• Wish You Were Here (1973) broadsheet poem
• Meeting in Manchester (1974)
• The Apple-Raid (1974) poems
• Three Poets, Two Children: Leonard Clark, Vernon Scannell, Dannie Abse, Answer Questions by Two Children (1975)
• A Morden Tower Reading (1976) poems, with Alexis Lykiard
• Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War (1976) editor
• A Proper Gentleman (1977) autobiography (ii)
• Of Love And Music (1979)
• A Lonely Game (1979)
• New & Collected Poems 1950-1980 (1980)
• Catch the Light (1982) poems, with Gregory Harrison and Lawrence Smith
• Winterlude (1982) poems
• How To Enjoy Poetry (1983)
• Ring of Truth (1983) novel
• How to Enjoy Novels (1984)
• An Argument of Kings (1987) autobiographical, World War II
• Funeral Games And Other Poems (1987)
• Sporting Literature (1987) editor, anthology
• The Clever Potato A Feast of Poetry for Children (1988)
• Soldiering On. Poems of Military Life (1989) poems
• Love Shouts and Whispers (1990)
• A Time for Fires (1991) poems
• Travelling Light (1991)
• Drums of Morning - Growing up in the Thirties (1992) autobiography (iii)
• The Black and White Days (1996) poems
• Collected Poems, 1950-93 (1998)
• Feminine Endings (Enitharmon Press 2000) poems
• Views and Distances (Enitharmon Press 2000) poems
• Of Love & War (2002)
• Incendiary
• The Gunpowder Plot
• House for sale
• Moods of rain
• Nettles
• A Case of Murder poems
• Uncle Albert
• Half Past Two
• A Place to Live (The Happy Dragons' Press 2007)
• Last Post (Shoestring Press 2007), ISBN 978 1 904886 67 9

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• "Vernon Scannell, painter and poet": an article in the TLS by Paul Trewhela, December 5 2007
• Obituary in The Times, 20 November 2007
• Vernon Scannell at the Poetry Archive
• War Poets' Association Entry for Vernon Scannell
• Alan Brownjohn, Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Guardian, 19 November 2007
• Vernon Scannell (obituary), The Telegraph, 19 November 2007
• Anthony Thwaite, Vernon Scannell Obituary, The Independent, 19 November 2007
• Hazelwood School where Vernon Scannell taught History and Boxing
• Simon Jenkins, Created on a canvas of needless pain: a poet who inspired the underbelly, The Guardian, 23 November 2007