Ivor Gurney Poet-Composer - Reviews of Anthony Boden’s Stars in a Dark Night, Anthem for Doomed Youth, The Five Western Watercolours, Ivor Gurney and the Battlefields; by Rolf Jordan, Janet Anderson, Philip W. Guest

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Rolf Jordan’s ‘Stars’ Review
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Anthem’ Review
Janet Anderson’s ‘Watercolours’ Review
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Review of
Anthony Boden’s Stars in a Dark Night

© 2005 by Rolf Jordan

     Sutton has just published Anthony Boden’s Stars in a Dark Night in paperback (ISBN 0-7509-8467-0, 224 pages), priced £7.99. There is a slight reduction if ordering online from www.suttonpublishing.co.uk.
     The book first appeared as long ago as 1986: as the Prefatory Note indicates, the Gurney revival has gathered steam ever since. You may well be saying ‘but I already have the original book’, and leave it at that. However, this edition is quite different, and almost entirely revised. Bang-up-to-date, the reader is even pointed to the new Kavanagh edition.
     The main content of the book is the correspondence between Gurney and the Chapman family. The original reprinted the letters without a date: here (largely following the example of the Collected Letters) they are not only dated, but re-ordered.
     But the most significant changes are in the Introduction and Postscript, which are considerably enlarged and offer a more fully-rounded biography than the original, opening up a wider picture of Gurney’s life and acquaintances. Indeed, it’s a great beginners’ guide to Gurney, far more so than the original. The casual WW1 reader (not just those seeking poetry and music that is) will find it insightful, because in much the same way that Boden’s biography of Will Harvey works, it has plenty of background colour.
     It’s in presentation that this book wins over the original most of all. And not just in the heavy paper and glossily redesigned cover. All the original photographs are preserved, in some cases ‘de-scratched’, and in most cases the images are stronger. I’d not noticed, for instance, Gurney wearing carpet slippers before! There is a wealth of brand new photographic material. Some are superior reproductions of pictures that appear rarely elsewhere, such as Gurney (in uniform) with Howells, or taken on daytrips from Dartford; others are appearing in print for the first time: Gurney in 1906, Ronald Gurney, and (most interesting of all to those of us who rely on the fuzzy Ordeal picture) Reverend Cheesman.
     But more than mere visuals, the book - particularly in this new form- has a treasurable quality: it’s very much the equivalent of finding a ribboned box of letters in the attic. Highly recommended!

Rolf Jordan

The Citations:

Stars in a Dark Night: The Letters of Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family. [Edited by] Anthony Boden with a foreword by Michael Hurd. NEW EDITION! Completely new and expanded second edition. Gloucester, UK: Sutton Publishing , 1986. [224 pp., ISBN: 0750934670, paperback, More Information & Reactions] www.amazon.co.uk, www.abebooks.co.uk, www.suttonpublishing.co.uk

Stars in a Dark Night: The Letters of Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family. [Edited by] Anthony Boden with a foreword by Michael Hurd. 1st Ed. Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1986. [126 pp.] Amazon*OP - but still available 8/05

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To Respond
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Stars’ Review
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Anthem’ Review
Janet Anderson’s ‘Watercolours’ Review
Philip W. Guest’s ‘Battlefields’
Back to Perspectives

Review of
Anthem for Doomed Youth
A Report on the Exhibition at the IWM
31 October 2002 – 27 April 2003

© 2005 by Rolf Jordan

     Private Eye printed a cartoon a few years ago picturing a private reporting to his superior officer in a trench on the Western Front. The caption was ‘We’re down to our last poet, sir’. I can’t remember whether this was before or after the screening of Blackadder 4, where similar (apparent) debunking of    Great War poetry went on – Private Baldrick’s hilariously inept war poem (‘The guns go BOOM BOOM BOOM’) readily recognisable to a whole generation of viewers through the enforced hardship of English lessons at school. Few can have misread what the scriptwriter was getting at: not deliberately in bad taste, more a point that poetry (good and bad) is part of the absurdity of that war, and that the poets are now part of Great War mythology. Their legacy stretches right into our bestselling lists of modern fiction: Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong. It is clearly not a marginal literary subject. Despite the vast amount of manuscript material, the Anthem for Doomed Youth exhibition at the Imperial War Museum chose, astutely, to explore the actual lives of the twelve featured poets in much the same way those fictions do. The companion volume by Jon Stallworthy (Constable, £14.99) naturally focuses on the documents instead, and a good crack at criticism is achieved despite the relatively small space given over to text. (The ‘colour supplement’ with this newsletter reproduces many ephemeral items not reproduced in the book). No particular anti-war stance seemed to be in evidence – refreshingly – and despite the numerous examples of violent contemporaneous art, the exhibition, helped by the low lighting levels to aid conservation, and aided by the ever-present tinkling of Ivor Gurney’s piano music made for an aura of peace and churchyard-like tranquillity.

     The layout meant that visitors entered via the Rupert Brooke exhibit. Notably, it had a room of its own, as the tendency later to pair poets off is irrelevant in Brooke’s case. This is where it all began, a cynic might remark, as many of our poets might not have seen the light of day but for the massive commercial success of Brooke’s volume containing The Soldier, ensuring printing houses were kept busy with verse of all quality during the war. Brooke happened to be (unluckily for him) in the right place at the right time, so the myth of the war poet was there right from the start: his being the first honoured war poet may just as well have made him Private Eye’s last one. The IWM played up to the deification of Brooke nicely. Amongst the interesting family relics such as his schoolboy cap was a somewhat unexciting attaché case with the lavishly over-the-top book-shaped red leather box Eddie Marsh preserved it in. The famous ‘young Apollo’ photographs by Schell lined the walls, Grantchester made prominent, and a large white cross mounted on the wall above three lidded displays marked ‘Death of Rupert Brooke’. These holy casks contained such fragments as olive leaves from his grave, last leters, and his red leather identity tag. Oddly, and worryingly so early on, Grantchester was misspelled throughout the display, just as it is in Stallworthy’s book.

     I found the next part of the exhibition the most difficult, not entirely because the three poets (Julian Grenfell, Francis Ledwidge and Charles Sorley) were almost entirely new names to me, but because of the long trench-like passage they were located in. The idea to design the exhibition space in terms of the Vorticist images of Nevinson and Nash (look at the duckboards in the etching reproduced on the leaflet) was very effective but problematic- both here and in the Graves/Blunden display. I imagine the designer had a few sleepless nights trying to make the floorplan work.

     The display for the aristocratic Grenfell, writer of Into Battle, had all the trappings of Empire: Colonial uniforms, a huge Constable-esque painting of Taplow Court, his family ‘seat’, Singer Sargent portraits of his parents, and a large posthumous bronze. Not to mention those references to classical mythology all those highly educated chaps loved: we are told Grenfell’s last words to his mother were ‘Phoebus Apollo’. Those expecting an exhibition of ‘peace poets’ probably baulked at much of Grenfell’s personal history: he brandished his horse-whip at Oxford aesthetes and stalked snipers in France with great enthusiasm, even keeping a game book on them.
Francis Ledwidge was a patriotic Irishman who fought for England, yet bewilderingly found himself wearing the same uniform as the executioners of his friends during the Easter Rising. I came away wanting to know more about him: Seamus Heaney is a modern champion. One of the tricks this exhibit used was an idea similar to the one by Michael Hurd in The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney: displaying wartime and peacetime places known to the poet side by side for contrast. It was utilised frequently throughout the exhibition. I’ve always found it a fairly weak device, but there is irony to be found if you ponder long enough- Ledwidge’s peacetime photograph was of the Boyne Valley. Among other items were fragments of metal from the area of Ledwidge’s death. I found the inclusion of these, and various other items retrieved from battlefields artless, though larger items such as a stretcher carrier and duckboard filled gaps quite unobtrusively. To have made these poets live we should not have seen items grubbed up from the earth – surely a preserved rifle with fixed bayonet has more vitality than the rust-encrusted relics on show. Or are all those yellowing documents and manuscripts little more than relics too?

     Charles Sorley’s major artefact was an original signpost from the Marlborough Downs. The visitor could leaf through a flip folder of Sorley’s work, the first of the tactile exhibits. These were nice additions, and a little easier to deal with than the rows of manuscripts in cases: one can never peer close enough! Museum fatigue is a well-known phenomenon, and I hereby confess that despite two long visits to this exhibition I barely scratched the surface of the actual writings despite the presence of my eye-strain glasses and large doses of caffeine. Perhaps it was the effect of Sorley’s signpost pointing the way out into a welcome spacious area, but I found myself impatient to leave this section. Stallworthy’s book is essential for those seeking more information on these (what must be for most) rare names. A ‘further reading’ section in the back is indispensable, and a key factor in persuading me to buy it. The book is, incidentally, packed with dozens of superbly reproduced wartime photographs and top notch reproductions of manuscripts.

     That the exhibition’s biggest space was dedicated to Sassoon and Owen is unsurprising. These poets have long been paired up as the stars of war poetry, and I could well imagine the amount of schoolchildren ushered into this area. The curators had thoughtfully attached a magnifying glass to Sassoon’s display – his original handwriting is tiny - quite unlike his trench boots helpfully displayed at floor level nearby. Like Grenfell, the huntsman Sassoon must have been physically formidable. Another hands-on book was mounted next to the glass cases, this time a highly convincing replica of the manuscript volume of his Fifty Poems. Wilfred Owen’s large display contained a vast number of personal items, such as the toy boat he was photographed with as a child, hairbrushes, and his archaeological hammer. The doomed youth was well in evidence. The military cross he never saw, a looted German bugle and his cigarette case are fascinating to see, but like the Brooke exhibit earlier on, it was, in this case, the famous manuscripts that made the deepest impression of all.

     Visitors could take a deserved rest at this point and sit down (next to an original Craiglockhart War Hospital fire grate) to watch some short and truly bizarre contemporary films of convalescing soldiers playing sports on crutches, having prosthetic limbs attached and cowering under beds in absolute shell-shocked terror to the creepy sound of incongruously jaunty 78s.

     Another grotesque item mounted by the seat was a tiny badge showing a typically bonny girl leading a maimed man by the hand and captioned ‘Blinded for you’. Four Henry Tonks drawings of disfigured serviceman’s faces added further pity to this brief rest (!) in the exhibition.

     The pairing up of the authors of two classic memoirs came next. The fine Kennington portrait of Robert Graves, and the boxing trophy from Charterhouse (explaining his broken nose) seemed to be the best of a small display, until you turned a corner and found more. The Edmund Blunden display was a mirror image, with a pointed glass case containing his tunics from both school and the battlefield (another juxtaposed image), separating them. The problem with the remaining part was those Vorticist angles again; it felt uncomfortable looking into the display windows – the intention was to taper the walls parallel with the tunic case, but it must have looked better on paper. One of the more alarming items in Blunden’s display looked surprisingly like another war relic – his battered wicket-keeping glove.

     Around another corner was the homely Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney room (and to be honest, at this point I’d totally forgotten about Gurney!). I say ‘homely’ because the central display in this room included a table made by Thomas with several of his red handkerchiefs spread out on it, and the upright piano used by Gurney (see newsletter 26). The source of the constant ‘background’ music was this room – more of which in the article below. One of the unexpected items in Thomas’s display was a lock of his fine, reddish hair. This was one aspect to the exhibition that remained in my mind after the first visit - not only did we have the manuscripts and personal items but bits of the poets themselves: as well as Thomas’ hair there were also locks from Brooke, Owen and Gurney. How much more personal could this exhibition have been? The most remarkable Thomas artefact will always be the diary retrieved from his body, along with the watch he carried that stopped at the same time as his heart. The diary has unnatural creases, like the ridges on a sea shell, caused by that fatal shell blast (illustrated above the cabinet by a stark Nevinson painting).

     Of the Gurney items on display, Marion Scott’s wooden chest – the original Gurney archive – was the most fascinating to see at last. The manuscript of ‘By a Bierside’ communicated a great deal, too; mud from Flanders still stains it. There was an unmarked stone bench in the middle of this exhibit. I’m not sure of its significance, but it certainly brought an air of Gloucestershire into the room, as did the first headstone from Twigworth with its touching ‘A lover and maker of beauty’ inscription. It was a shame that the photograph of Gurney with Howells was printed back to front, not the only one in the exhibition to suffer that fate.

     Gurney may have been the only composer-poet in the exhibition, but last up, around another corner, were two artist-poets. David Jones’s display had another facsimile to leaf through: his trench sketchbook, full of marvellous pencil drawings of soldiers, rats and kitbags. Those strong, immediate drawings remain in the memory, and Stallworthy thankfully reprints several. It was interesting to see the early war sketches develop into the mature Gill-influenced etchings of his In Parenthesis, which remains one of the most vivid war memoirs ever written. One item of ephemera, a candlestick, had a label stating ‘he had few possessions other than books’. Isaac Rosenberg’s was the last headstone of many in the exhibition. Along with Grenfell’s, the memorial shown was to be the eventual replacement for the Commonwealth War Grave Commission stone already in situ, a renewal policy I didn’t previously know existed. Rosenberg’s display was smaller than most, surprisingly. He left a great number of self-portraits, plenty of which were on display- both in and out of uniform.

     The bleakly sensual Youth Mourning by Clausen (note the ambiguity – the figure has blonde hair) ended the exhibition, and a small study room full of books (yet only three seats) and etchings was left for those who didn’t yet want to shoot all the way downstairs to the café. Those that did would have missed one of the highlights of the exhibition. For despite the audio programme phone I’d been carrying about, the inclination to listen to it was never really there, and all the truly interesting audio items, it turned out, were to be discovered on headphones in the study room. Here was a fascinating set of historical recordings: the voices of Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, Cathleen Nesbitt and Helen Thomas. There were other musical excerpts too: a moving modern song by Sean Tyrell (accompanied by mandocello) setting Ledwidge, Gurney’s Sleep, and most interestingly, the Elegy for String Orchestra by Frederick Kelly in memory of Rupert Brooke (Kelly was a doomed youth too).

     Anthem for Doomed Youth was a remarkable achievement, bringing together so many of the greatest names in war poetry in such a thorough way. It would be churlish to complain that such a vast amount of information could never have been read through in one visit. Perhaps the inevitable result is that the poetry itself was diminished, but there is always the companion book to fall back on- which if anything has less to read in it than the exhibition. The stock of related books in the shop, though by no means comprehensive, was also there for further scrutiny.

     Of the poets represented in the exhibition, seven of the twelve were killed in the war (the youngest was nineteen), four survived to live well past their allocated threescore years and ten (the oldest was ninety), and Ivor Gurney belongs to neither group, remaining a Doomed Youth in his own category.

     How typical that a modern conflict should occur at precisely the same time as the exhibition dates. The streets were deserted as I walked over Westminster Bridge into Lambeth for my second visit at the beginning of April, and all the traffic had been diverted away. There was a peace march coming. I heard a priceless comment from an elderly Cockney lady to a policeman while walking underneath the train bridge: ‘bleedin’ peace marchers! The war’s over, innit?’.

Rolf Jordan

To Respond
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Stars’ Review
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Anthem’ Review
Janet Anderson’s ‘Watercolours’ Review
Philip W. Guest’s ‘Battlefields’
Back to Perspectives

Review of
The Five Western Watercolours
A Performer’s Perspective

© 2005 by Janet Anderson

    In the fall of 2003 I did several performances of Ivor Gurney’s ‘Five Western Watercolours’ as part of a recital of twentieth century British piano music, together with works by Roger Quilter, Frank Bridge, Cyril Scott and Carol Barratt.   None of the music on the program would have been familiar to most of the audience; indeed I would not be surprised if every single work was a Seattle premiere. I can be quite certain that ‘Five Western Watercolours’ were new to my listeners, because it was only through the kind offices of the Society's Pamela Blevins that I was able to trace down the music, apparently long out of print.

    Of the pieces on my program, British all, Gurney’s most clearly presented a sense of place, a representation of the countryside he so loved. Some of the titles even refer to specific places, Twyver River and Alney Island among them, that Pamela was able to find for me on her map of Gloucestershire. To bring this sense of place to the concert audience, and to point out the composer’s other side as a poet, I introduced the pieces by reading Gurney’s poem ‘By Severn’ which begins, ‘If England, her spirit lives anywhere/It is by Severn, by hawthorns and grand willows.’ A poem at a piano recital may have been something of a surprise, but it was very well received.

    In choosing the title, Gurney showed his poet’s sense of words. ‘Watercolours’ he called these pieces, and watercolours they are: small, intimate works whose details come clear only when the viewer, or rather the hearer, is near enough to perceive them. Picture yourself at an art gallery, backing away from the grand canvases and peering right close to the little watercolours. The parallel should have been obvious to me as I studied the pieces, but in fact it was only the experience of taking them on stage that brought it home. Of the three venues in which I played the set - a small salon, a chapel and a fair-sized concert hall - I was surprised to find them most successful in the smallest room. The small scale and intimate character of the music is clear from a glance at the score, but I only realized how delicate the nuances are when I tried to project them across the wide gulf between stage and audience. When the audience was closer to me and to the piano, they could hear these details more vividly, just as the hues of a watercolour, apparently pale from across the room, brighten as one moves closer.

    Maurice Ravel is said to have remarked that Francis Poulenc ‘wrote his own folk tunes.’ The same might be said for the melodies Gurney here gives to the piano. Any one of them would make a good whistling tune for a tramp through the countryside he paints. The simplicity of their setting, not particularly easy to play, but understated and transparent, is a contrast to the typical character of his song accompaniments, which tend to be thicker in texture and more chromatic in harmony. In a way, the simplicity is deceptive, as indeed is Poulenc’s, for the ‘Western Watercolours’ also contain, in addition to their delicate melodies, some strange twists and turns of key, as if our walk had wandered off the path into the edge of the woods. These modulations seem a musical parallel to shifts of light and dark we find in Gurney's poems; but here, strolling through the countryside, the beauty of nature seems to console him, as it so often does, so that the music turns back to the sweet folk song-like melodies and always finishes on a clear and ringing note.

Janet Anderson

To Respond
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Stars’ Review
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Anthem’ Review
Janet Anderson’s ‘Watercolours’ Review
Philip W. Guest’s ‘Battlefields’
Back to Perspectives

    In recent years the Wilfred Owen Association has visited the battlefields of France and Flanders, following in the footsteps not only of Wilfred Owen, but also of other Great War poets, including Ivor Gurney. I have been one of the tour leaders. It has always been a most moving experience. Of the dozen or so poets we have studied, two stand out as having had a particularly ‘hard war’, not only for their length of active service but also because of the campaigns in which they were involved - for example, the Somme, Neuve Chapelle, Arras and Passchendaele. Edmund Blunden, an officer and Ivor Gurney, a private soldier are the two concerned and on occasion were serving in the same area almost at the same time.

    So what moved me the most? Certainly standing on the railway embankment just beyond Vermand Station looking along the D33 road towards Bihécourt, where in 1917, a British soldier coughing had alerted the enemy in the wood beyond and brought down heavy fire upon his patrol. It was along this road that Gurney was wounded on the 7th/8th April. The cemetery at Vadencourt where some of the casualties are buried can just be seen in the hollow beyond the wood.

    The Duck’s Bill on the Laventie front was another place we visited. The crater held at enormous cost is still there today, a place where some of us like to think that David Jones of the London Welch could have met Gurney when the Glosters were being instructed by them in trench routine.

    Gurney was involved in the aftermath of two tremendous battles. The first was the attack by the Australians and British on the ‘Sugar Loaf’ at Fromelles on the 19th July 1916. The Australians lost 5533 men whilst the British casualties numbered 1547. German humanity made it possible for an informal truce to be declared whilst the hundreds of dead and dying were removed from the battlefield – a task in which Gurney took part that day. Standing on the steps of V.C.Corner cemetery in which over 400 of those who lost their lives in that battle are buried and looking over the battlefield, it is quite impossible to imagine how the scene must have affected Gurney.
Gurney had seen the formidable Hindenburg Line at Bihécourt in April 1917. He was to meet its other end outside Arras one month later at Guémappe where once again the 2/5th Glosters were to “clear the battlefield”. This time the task before them must have been even more unpleasant, for many of the dead had lain there since the battles for the village in late April and possibly even from the 9th April. The result of the Glosters efforts can be seen in nearby Tank cemetery.

    Whatever the reason for Ivor Gurney’s eventual mental collapse, I cannot but feel that his experiences ‘clearing the battlefield’ at the Sugar Loaf and at Guémappe must have had a deep effect. Even decades later, as we stood on the battlefields imagining the 1916 and 1917 scenes, all our travellers were deeply affected.

--Philip Guest is joint author, with Helen McPhail, of three On the Trail of the Poets of the Great War books in the Battleground Europe series published by Leo Cooper. The books are guided tours of areas in the lives of Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, and (joint volume) Graves and Sassoon.

To Respond
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Stars’ Review
Rolf Jordan’s ‘Anthem’ Review
Janet Anderson’s ‘Watercolours’ Review
Philip W. Guest’s ‘Battlefields’
Back to Perspectives

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