A sad, furtive figure in a raincoat …

So there he is – a sad, furtive figure in a raincoat, skulking in the bushes of some suburban garden and trying to get a peek through a chink in the curtains at people undressing for bed. Not exactly someone to admire, still less to emulate.

And yet, figuratively speaking, that’s what I spent three years or so doing, sitting in a library poring over the private diaries of the poet whose biography I was writing. Vernon Scannell kept a regular diary for more than fifty years, jotting down his most intimate thoughts, sometimes scrawled drunkenly across the page after he’d got home from the pub late at night.

And when I’d finished with his diaries, I would turn to his personal letters, and read them too. Even his address book – I phoned several people who had no idea how I had managed to track them down. He was dead, of course, but I’m not sure that makes ripping open his privacy any more excusable.

Hacking a phone and eavesdropping on someone’s voicemail had nothing on what I was getting up to as a sort of literary Peeping Tom, sitting there under the benevolent eye of the librarian, with my wife at my side.

And the outcome, from one standpoint at least, was horrendous. Stories about Scannell’s sex life, his occasional violence, his drunkenness, and the numerous desertions which were scattered throughout his army career were plastered across the newspapers when my book appeared. It was deeply hurtful to his family, his lovers and his friends, many of whom had had suspected a little, but known next to nothing.

“He’s a bloody great poet. What scandal? I don’t know much about him,” was the response from one fellow-poet, which made me pause. Maybe “bloody great poet” was all anyone needed to know. Maybe all the people I’d come to know and like – people who had trusted me – had suffered all that hurt needlessly, like the victims of some tabloid monstering.

But I don’t think so. More importantly, I don’t think they thought so. And most importantly of all, though it’s easy enough to say this about a man who’s been dead for six years, I don’t think he would have thought so.

If he is a bloody great poet – and I don’t think there’s any doubt about that, although you’d practically have to draw teeth to get literary scholars in a university to admit it – then knowing about the man who wrote the poetry, where the poems came from, can only help us to appreciate his work more. John Carey, the critic who wrote the Foreword to the book, and who is an honourable exception to my grumbles about literary scholars in universities, saw it from the start. It’s all about the poetry.

Many of Scannell’s poems, he wrote, make us want to know more about his life. “He is not the sort of poet whose work remains iconic and remote. It is drenched in humanity. It resounds with memories … That is why a biography is needed – not by Scannell, but by us. The poems, as personal as a fingerprint, make us want to know the man who wrote them, and who had those thoughts and experienced so much, and lived through convulsions of history that we escaped.”

And then, a few days ago, I read Virginia Ironside’s review in The Oldie. “This book inspires the reader to go back and look at his poetry all over again,” she wrote. That’s the best plea for the defence that I could make. I’ve never met Ms Ironside, but if I do, she had better watch out. I shall want to hug her.

Walking Wounded – the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell  by James Andrew Taylor is published by Oxford University Press.