Dweller in Shadows

A Life of Ivor Gurney

Kate Kennedy

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691218540
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylum Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the First World War and composed some of the greatest works in the English song repertoire, such as "Sleep." Yet his life was shadowed by the trauma of the war and mental illness, and he spent his last fifteen years confined to a mental asylum. In Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy presents the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary and misunderstood artist.A promising student at the Royal College of Music, Gurney enlisted as a private with the Gloucestershire regiment in 1915 and spent two years in the trenches of the Western Front. Wounded in the arm and subsequently gassed during the Battle of Passchendaele, Gurney was recovering in hospital when his first collection of poems, Severn and Somme, was published. Despite episodes of depression, he resumed his music studies after the war until he was committed to an asylum in 1922. At times believing he was Shakespeare and that the "machines under the floor" were torturing him, he nevertheless continued to write and compose, leaving behind a vast body of unpublished work when he died of tuberculosis. Drawing on extensive archival research and spanning literary criticism, history, psychiatry and musicology, this compelling narrative sets Gurney's life and work against the backdrop of the war and his institutionalisation, probing the links between madness, suffering and creativity.Facing death in the trenches, Gurney hoped that history might not "forget me quite." This definitive account of his life and work helps ensure that he will indeed be remembered.

PART I

Youth

CHAPTER ONE

‘The Young Genius’

In Room 53 of the Royal College of Music, with oil paintings of composers lining its walls and a view of the Royal Albert Hall through its large windows, sits the great Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, frowning through his pince nez as he marks a composition with ‘his gold propelling pencil’. He shakes his head, shakes it again, hums a little, then, with a flourish, holds up the altered song. ‘There, m’boy’, he exclaims to one of the two students eagerly watching him. ‘That’ll be half a crown’. An unkempt, dark-haired student in a rather shapeless blue coat takes one look at the corrections and leaps to his feet. ‘But Sir—you’ve jiggered the whole thing!’

Stanford looks at him in silence, slowly rises from his seat, takes his student firmly by the ear, and expels him from the room. The other observer, the young composer Herbert Howells, looks on aghast. With his back to the door, Stanford smiles. ‘I love Gurney more and more. He’s the greatest among you all, but the least teachable.’¹ He returns to look at some of Howells’s immaculately presented musical offerings as the sound of footsteps stamping on the stone stairs rings down the corridor.

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By the time the twenty-year-old ‘young genius’, as Gurney referred to himself (with only partial irony), reached the imposing marble entrance hall of the Royal College of Music on 8 May 1911, he was hardly a child prodigy. His compositions showed promise and flair, but they were a long way from remarkable. Gurney knew he had hardly begun to investigate the depth of his gift, and he had a deep conviction that he possessed the capability to write something extraordinary, if only he could discipline and train himself. These were early days, and his education was just beginning. For now, with the real possibility of future greatness, and a capital city full of world-class music-making to explore, optimism outweighed anxiety.

One year before, Gurney had been sitting in the draughty pews of Gloucester Cathedral. He had watched the many colours the stained glass cast across the great building as the sun set, as he listened with rapt attention to a piece that was unlike anything he had ever heard. Both he and Howells were organ scholars, and Gurney had practically grown up in the cathedral, having been a chorister there from the age of ten. Howells sat by Gurney’s side, the two overawed by the importance of what they were hearing. Dr Herbert Brewer, the cathedral’s music director, had announced to the choir that there would be a premiere of a ‘queer mad work’ by an ‘odd fellow from Chelsea’.² His curmudgeonly description had hardly prepared them for the sheer magnitude of what they were now experiencing, with string writing that sounded simultaneously new and ancient, the sound appearing to rise from the very building as if it had been hewn from its stone. This was the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

FIG. 1.1: Ivor Gurney at the Royal College of Music, from Herbert Howells’s personal collection. © Gurney Trust.

After the final applause had ended, and a starstruck seventeen-year-old Howells had obtained Vaughan Williams’s autograph, the two young organists walked out of the cathedral, unable to speak. The cathedral was only a stone’s throw from Gurney’s home on Barton Street, above the family’s tailoring business. From his glass-fronted shop, with counters piled high with rolls of plaid and corduroy, Gurney’s father David served customers, cut cloth and took measurements for the gentlemen of Gloucester who required suits; he was assisted by his rather truculent wife, Florence. Their son Ivor jostled for space in the handful of gloomy rooms upstairs, alongside his sister Winifred, who was his senior by three years; Ronald, who was four years younger than Ivor; and Dorothy, the baby of the family, who was born when Ivor was ten.³

FIG. 1.2: Gurney’s father’s tailor shop in Barton Street, Gloucester. © Gurney Trust.

That night Ivor Gurney did not go straight home. Instead he and Howells walked, for hour after hour. They strode through the cobbled streets around the cathedral cloister where during the day Gurney often perused the secondhand books that were piled high on wooden barrows. They passed the crossroads where the straight Roman roads of Westgate and Eastgate meet at the city’s centre, past the darkened windows of the tailor’s shop at 19 Barton Street, past the ancient sign of the grocers—a great brass grasshopper which stretched the length of the shop front—and the battered façade of a disused eighteenth-century theatre that had once hosted the royalty of the acting profession. A few hours earlier the streets had been bustling with horses and drays, ambling farmers in leggings with corduroy coats and bowler hats, clergymen on bicycles and red-faced women in from the countryside with gossiping voices and bulging shopping baskets. Now the only sound was the boys’ footfall as they walked on. Little Howells, immaculately dressed, was obliged almost to run to keep up with the typically furious pace set by his friend. After a while the initial shock of the Tallis Fantasia wore off, and as they walked, they talked animatedly about what they had just heard. They knew that these new sounds meant something momentous for British music, and they were equally determined to have a role in shaping its future.

For the past decade, Vaughan Williams had been trying to establish a new English music through folk song and the amalgamation of ancient church music and modern harmonies.⁴ Both Gurney and Howells felt the calling to be part of this ‘New English Musical Renaissance’, as it was to become known, and knew that the Royal College of Music in London was certainly the best place to begin preparing for the challenge. The College, far more than the Royal Academy, flourished as a centre of composition in the years before the war. A look through the generally adventurous Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert programmes in the autumn of 1913 shows the Royal College to be impressively overrepresented: in one season audiences could hear works by Stanford, Walford Davies, Vaughan Williams, Landon Ronald, Thomas Dunhill, Frank Bridge, Harry Keyser, Eugene Goossens and Coleridge Taylor—all either teachers or alumni.

Three years after hearing Vaughan Williams’s music ringing round the pillars of Gloucester Cathedral, both Gurney and Howells were enrolled at the College. The teachers there quickly found that Gurney was no ordinary student. He was enchanting and frustrating in equal measure.⁵ Exceptionally talented, his ambitiousness could occasionally slip over into a naïve arrogance, which, coupled with his stubbornness, led to frequent clashes with his teachers. The compositions Gurney had brought with him from Gloucester showed great potential, but were really only charming, well-crafted Edwardian parlour pieces. How would an inexperienced, provincial boy with a general disregard for convention progress in the professional musical world?

He had written his juvenile piano and violin works for sisters Margaret and Emily Hunt, music teachers who lived close to the family’s shop. They had practically adopted the lonely teenager, who was keen to escape from the frequent arguments at home, in search of music and inspiration. In turn, Gurney adored them. Imagining himself perhaps as a Brahms secretly serenading his Clara Schumann, he had written a piano waltz for Emily’s birthday in 1918, with her initials as a musical monogram. There is no doubt that Emily meant a great deal to him, but it was always Margaret who inspired his most passionate devotion. The diminutive, dark-haired ‘Madge’ was his earliest muse, despite the sixteen years between their ages.⁶ This was not a romantic relationship in the conventional sense. When Gurney visited Margaret during what was to be her final illness, he described her as a ‘brave little woman’, a phrase redolent of respect and deep affection, but not of a love affair. During the years in which he might have been considered to be in love with her, he did not feel it inappropriate to propose to two other girls and continue an almost daily correspondence with another older woman. If Margaret was indeed his ‘love’, then he loved her for providing him with an audience and beneficiary to whom he could direct his work, when his own family had neither time nor inclination to listen.

The Gurney family home was not entirely devoid of music, however. There was a piano on which Gurney learnt, and both his father David and mother Florence sang in local choirs. Florence, always keen for social advancement, had insisted that all the Gurney children learn an instrument, but practising was a challenge; there was little opportunity for quiet in the parlour, and no music to study. The Hunt sisters provided both, and Gurney learnt a great deal from leafing through books of Schubert’s Lieder at their Bechstein. Gurney soon aspired first to copy, then to rival Schubert.

FIG. 1.3: Gurney at the piano, September 1905. © Gurney Trust.

On arrival in South Kensington, Gurney found the Royal College to be an elegant red brick affair, with a glass and iron portico and distinguished-looking miniature towers—a monument to proud Victorian prosperity. It nestles between Imperial College and the Royal School of Mines. Overlooking the Royal Albert Hall, it is surrounded everywhere by testaments to the Victorian penchant for the lavish and impressive. Behind the Albert Hall is Regent’s Park, with the outrageously golden Prince Albert memorial. This was an area of London in which the very pavements leaked confidence, and every new museum and academic establishment (largely funded by the triumph of the Great Exhibition) boasted artistic and intellectual achievement. It was, in short, the perfect destination for a young man with a clear sense of his own self-importance.

The College itself, whilst impressive, was then crammed into a site of only an acre. The limitations of the site necessitated building upwards, but there were no lifts. To get from lunch back to the organ room, Gurney had a climb of 186 steps. When he took up his scholarship, the College was still comparatively new, and proud of its illustrious beginnings (it had opened, in a flapping extravaganza of bunting, in 1894). In 1911 it was an exciting place to be. Moreover, it was dominated by two of the most influential men in musical Britain.

Sir Hubert Parry had long been established as the College principal, and was unanimously respected, and his colleague Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was the most eminent composition teacher in the institution. They were both to play a large part in Gurney’s student life, and to take an interest in him far beyond that of an average undergraduate. Parry gave four lectures a term on music history, as an attempt to broaden the horizons of performers, who were often focused on their instrumental skills to the exclusion of all else. He was a farsighted and inspiring man, in favour of students ‘talking wild’, by which he meant the exuberant bandying about of big ideas, and thinking widely and ambitiously.⁷ Gurney, who had wild talking down to a fine art, held an instant attraction for him, and the feeling was mutual. ‘Sir Hubert is a great man.[…] He speaks with authority, not as one of the scribes’, Gurney wrote.⁸ The friendship was not simply deferential, but warmly affectionate: ‘Sir Hubert, of course, was a darling.’⁹ It was a popularly held view; Howells also revered him, and with good reason: Parry was to be generous enough to pay all Howells’s substantial medical bills when he became dangerously ill with Graves’ disease in 1916.

Two years younger than Gurney, Howells had also begun his life above a shop, although not in the cramped city centre. The Howells family lived in the Gloucestershire village of Lydney, surrounded by the Forest of Dean. Their home was larger than Gurne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Frontispiece
• Epigraph
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Gurney’s People: A Checklist
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Youth
• Part II: War
• Part III: Civilian
• Part IV: Asylum
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index