A true poet of war

‘On a hazy day Jerry comes droning over, three miles up.’ May sound Biggles-ish now, but it was OK for then, November 1940, in the commentary for Humphrey Jennings’s brief film Heart of Britain. Nine minutes is all it takes to cover the Lakes, Lancashire, the Pennines and Sheffield, homing in on aircraft spotters, air-raid wardens, mill hands and Sir Malcolm Sargent and then panning around the blitzed centre of Coventry to the sound of Beethoven’s Fifth. The action ends at full throttle with a Hallelujah Chorus from the Huddersfield Choral Society as a newly built Whitley takes off in freezing mist to give Jerry hell.

Where ordinary documentary film-makers tended to show folk joyously gutting herrings or consulting government pamphlets Jen- nings, grounded in Milton and knowing his Metaphysicals backwards, produced cinematic masques and sonnets. He was brilliantly clever, people agreed: starred double first and, to some, incorrigibly enthusiastic. Stephen Spender, who met him when their paths crossed in Germany after the war, noted in his diary that everything about him was irritating, ‘beginning with his Adam’s apple, his flappy ears, his pinhead face and his bumptious expression’.

Jennings the director, don manqué, poet, painter, occasional critic, one-time lover of Peggy Guggenheim and erstwhile set designer, can’t have had much time for the assiduously plodding Spender. Most of his accomplishments — painting especially — were assimilative, which meant that he was always eager to bunch ideas and spark connections. That was why he died, eagerly scrambling to the top of an unstable cliff on a Greek island in 1950, scouting for camera angles.

Not long after Jennings’s death Lindsay Anderson saluted him as ‘the only true poet of the English cinema’, implicitly preferring him to the more arty Michael Powell.