The short, unhappy life of Ivor Gurney — wounded, gassed and driven insane

The poet and composer Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) is a classic but nevertheless shocking example of literary neglect. Although he brought out two respectfully received collections of war poetry during his lifetime, the idiosyncrasies of his style have prevented him from being widely recognised as the equal of his greatest contemporaries. His history of mental illness has further destabilised the reception of his work, not just by encouraging people to think of him as crazy, but by compounding practical difficulties surrounding its publication. In the 1980s Michael Hurd wrote a somewhat sketchy biography, and P.J. Kavanagh edited an expanded, but still partial, sample of his work. Only now has Kate Kennedy, in her enthralling, meticulously researched and deeply sympathetic life, finally done justice to his story.

Gurney was the son of a tailor in Gloucester (no kidding), but began to strain against his shopkeeper inheritance the moment he became a chorister at the cathedral school. In the process, he also acquired a reputation for eccentricity — one of his fellow pupils, William Bubb, remembered him as ‘always… batchy’ (a local colloquialism meaning something like ‘strange’). Right from the start, his personality mixed various kinds of oddity and ineptitude with bursts of self-confidence. Not entirely self-mockingly, when he first left the west of England and went to study for a degree at the Royal College of Music, he identified himself as a ‘young Genius’. ‘The sad fact is,’ he said, ‘that I do not know what it is to feel well, and what work I do has to be done in spasms very quickly over.’

Kennedy is careful not to sentimentalise these conflicts, or interpret them as evidence of a ‘fatal flaw’. But at the same time she realises how especially vulnerable Gurney was, and how grievously he was disturbed when the outbreak of war interrupted his studies and turned his attention from ‘Beauty’ towards the trenches.