Wynn Wheldon

Deserter, wifebeater, great poet: the shame and glory of Vernon Scannell

James Andrew Taylor's Walking Wounded: the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell does justice to a contradictory character

Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward. Plenty of material for a biography, then, especially
given that he was also a novelist, a critic, a memoirist, a boxer, a teacher, a broadcaster, a loyal friend, a passionate lover and ‘a fun grandfather’. Most of all, he was a poet.

Walking Wounded was the title of a Scannell poem and collection published in 1965, and James Andrew Taylor is right to use it as the title for this biography. Beaten viciously by a thug of a father, uncomforted by an unloving mother, by the time he was 19 he was himself a father (of a son he never met) and a soldier, and soon to be a deserter, wounded chronically in mind if not in body.

He escaped his loveless childhood through books (he was ‘reading fairly comfortably by five’) and boxing, which he took up with alacrity and success at around the age of 12. He became, in time, perhaps the finest poet of sport in the language.

He left school at 15, got a job as a filing clerk and began lifelong loves of sex and drink and music (the St Matthew Passion was his favourite desert island disc).

All his life Scannell, who began it as John Vernon Bain (he acquired the new name ‘by chance in a Soho brothel’), was haunted by his action following the battle for Wadi Akarit in North Africa in March 1943, when he simply walked away from the battlefield, as in a trance. Nowadays he would have been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Then he was detained for months in a military prison in Alexandria. As Taylor illustrates, in both prose and poetry Scannell returned often to the subjects of cowardice and shame.

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