Hardly a falute
P. J. Kavanagh
COLLECTED LETTERS OF IVOR GURNEY edited by R. K. R. Thornton
Carcanet, £25, pp. 578
It is still difficult to guess whether the general reader has done more than vaguely hear of Ivor Gurney. But to introduce him briefly is to make him sound sensation- al — poet and composer who went mad. There are many distractions on the way to actually reading Gurney.
R. K. R. Thornton, who edited Gur- ney's War Letters, begins his edition of these Collected Letters by talking of 'the dramatic scale of the increase in Gurney's reputation in recent years'. But at a recent and crowded Summer School devoted to his work it was possible to suspect that most were there to hear his song-settings. When talk got round to his verse the distractions popped up at once, and public discussion followed the usual tangents, his 'lack of education' — will Gurney ever be forgiven a father who was a tailor of Gloucester, and therefore not be thought, when he is unlike other poets, to have been so only by mistake? — and also, inevitably, his madness. He spent the last 15 years of his life in asylums, though whether, at least initially, he was mad by contemporary definition must remain doubtful. His fate was tragic enough without his work becom- ing obscured by it.
These engaging letters ought to clear away some of these misunderstandings. They show him to have been a selfcon- scious artist of great ambition; intelligent, humorous, passionate, subject to swings of mood, with an unshakable confidence in his own judgment of art. In 1918, for example, he insists upon the worth of Edward Thomas, roughly 50 years before that became generally accepted.
As for his 'education', or lack of it, in 1912, aged 22, he criticises a detail of the versification of Samson Agonistes and sub- edits Walt Whitman —
he has taken me like a flood. And, as a poet, he among others has this enormous virtue — that when he has nothing to say, you may divine it a mile off. A marked copy may be read in half an hour; but, oh, what gorgeous stuff it is!
As a private in the Gloucesters he recommends to the composer (and civilian) Herbert Howells, to settle Howells' nerves: War & Peace & Shakespeare & Whitman & St Matthew & Wordsworth & Plutarch is a pretty complete diet — mental pabulum.' Most of his war letters seemed designed to cheer up his neurasthenic friends at home, some of them written during shelling, with musical descriptions of each thump. He tries to tell them what conditions are really like — 'excuse me, this louse. . — but it looks as though they clung to their civilian complacencies and sometimes the worm turns: 'My dear girl, there's not a patriotic man in the BEF!' and, 'Your remarks on Pain and Death are very good and true. But.'
Both these protests, patient enough, are from letters written in France to his patron, Marion Scott, 'Miss Scott', as he called her to the end. Thirteen years his senior, she had befriended him on his arrival at the Royal College of Music, where he was a composition scholar before and after the war. It was she who arranged to have his two books of poems published while he was in France and, after the war,, when his third book was rejected, he continued to send his poems and music to her, and she to guard them. That we have any of the later Gurney poetry is due largely to her. She also kept his letters, and a high proportion of those printed here are addressed to her, which gives them a uniformity of tone which could be mislead- ing. But letters to others are hardly differ- ent. His friend and senior, John Haines, solicitor and friend to Edward Thomas, himself commits a volume of verse, upon which young Gurney pronounces: 'An unpretentious, half successful book, with hardly a falute in it. . . a companionable thing.'
Gurney's vow was to celebrate the humour and goodness of the 'ordinary' unfaluting soldiers he had lived among. This has led to talk of the 'homo-erotic' element in him, and in other trench poets, which is a reasonable tangent to follow, but one that leads away from the poems, not into them, in his case. Between 1919 and 1922 he could not settle, or find a decent job, or a publisher for his celebrations; he picked stones from a field, played the cinema organ, worked in a tax office.
During that period he was writing most of the poems on which his reputation is based. He was poor and alone, self-driven and unrecognised; enough to make anyone break down. But then, without warning, as the letters are printed here, he comprehen- sively does so, and is in an asylum. It is entirely shocking, we have grown attached to the brave sound of his voice. He continued to write, sometimes wonderful- ly, well into the asylum period; but here we are presented with an articulate man who without explanation loses control of his tongue, can barely write English, can only 'Plead for Death'. Did they dope him? It seems likely. But the dreadful nature of this transition must have to do with the state of the letter-archive; the poetry does not present so brutal a picture of collapse. It is small comfort, but it is some, that the process was slower, and there is poetry to prove it.
Up to this point his letters show Gurney risen above his time and, in his own phrase, 'free of useless fashions'; less afflicted by 'falute' than any one else of that period one can think of, except D. H. Lawrence. Although the conventional early poems, included in the letters printed here, give little indication of the striking poet he was to become.
Ivor Gurney, Selected Poems (edited by P. J. Kavanagh) was published in OUP paper- back last year, the centenary of Gurney's birth.
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