Vernon Scannell

Vernon Scannell (23 January 1922 – 16 November 2007) was an English poetry|English poet]] and author. He was at one time a professional boxer, and wrote novels about the sport.

Life
Vernon Scannell 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 left the local council school at fourteen and got 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 fifteen, 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. The war took him into action in the North African desert and then the Normandy invasion, where he was wounded near Caen and shipped back to a military hospital before being sent onto 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 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 The Tribune and 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 London, where, supporting himself with teaching jobs and boxing, he settled down to writing. In the late 1950s he was a teacher of English Literature and poetry at Hazelwood School, Limpsfield, Surrey, teaching 8 to 12-year-old pupils. See this for a comment by Sir Simon Jenkins on Scannell as a teacher: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/nov/23/comment.poetry

Scannell won many poetry awards, including war poems such as ‘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. His final collection 'Last Post' was published in 2007; he had been working on it until not long before his 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.

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


 * From Walking Wounded (1965):
 * 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.


 * 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...


 * 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.


 * 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.

Recognition
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.

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.'' a

Publications

 * 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 Laurence 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
 * Hide and Seek
 * Last Post (Shoestring Press 2007), ISBN 978-1-904886-67-9
 * A Place to Live (The Happy Dragons' Press 2007)