The only heroism
There comes a time, when people are old and ill and tired, that they abandon the debilitating struggle of daily life and take to their beds. That, it’s generally agreed, is when they turn their face to the wall and die. Not Vernon Scannell.
His life included desertion from the Army in North Africa, wounds in Normandy, boxing in a fairground booth, astonishing alcoholic binges, some shocking episodes of violence, and a long list of romantic and sexual conquests – but one of the most remarkable things about it was its end.
The only available Collected Poems, published by Faber, ends in 1993, a full 14 years before his death. Those who have relied on that, and on their memories of a few poems like Nettles or A Case of Murder that they studied at school, have a cornucopia of treats in store – a few of them printed at the back of Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell. Everything – age, weakness, cancer, even approaching death – was more fuel for his poetry.
And he wasn’t maudlin or self-pitying. The old man in his eighties still had the wry humour of his youth. In Small Mercies, for instance, he acknowledged that he was “waiting for the end’, and said he would rather die with dash and élan from a bullet in the brain or plunging from a mountaintop.
Yet you and I both know
That I must stay marooned
On this bleak isle of impotence
To wait here for the finis
Grateful for God’s providence,
For Schubert and chilled Guinness.
He was so tired and weak in his last years that he told his friends that each of his last four books was “definitely the last”, but still he kept working – a reminder to the world that you don’t have to retire from life and gradually wind down. As long as we’re alive, there’s a chance of doing something that we love better than we’ve ever done it before.
Scannell, battered by cancer and worn down by a crippling lung disease, had eventually had enough of shuffling from room to room, from oxygen cylinder to oxygen cylinder. But instead of dying when he retired to his bed, he produced Last Post, a final collection of some of the best poems he had ever written.
There is the achingly tender ‘Last Song, for JP’; the thrilling and threatening ‘Black-Out’, or the glance at his treasured library in ‘Missing Things’:
“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 wellwishers on land
convey to troops who sail away to where
great danger waits …”
Scannell, of course, knew all about sailing away to where great danger waited. Last Post appeared in September 2007 – if you’re very lucky, you might find a second-hand copy, but I doubt it – and two months later, still writing, he was dead. There was a lot to regret in his life, but you can’t fault the courage of those last poetic dispatches from the cliff edge of death.
After all, that’s the only heroism you can really ask of a poet.
