SCAMMELL, William

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Nationality: British. Born: Hythe, Hampshire, 2 January 1939. Education: University of Bristol, 1964–67, B.A. (honors) in English and philosophy. Family: Married; two sons. Career: Lecturer in English, University of Newcastle, 1975–91. Chair, Northern Arts Literature Panel, 1982–85; artist-in-residence, Djerassi Foundation, California, 1985; guest artist, Akademi Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, 1991; writer-in-residence, Nottingham Polytechnic, 1991; selector, Poetry Book Society, 1990–92. Awards: Cholmondeley award, 1982; British Arts Council award, 1985; Arvon Poetry Competition prize, 1987; Northern Arts Writers award, 1988, 1991, 1994; Poetry Society National Poetry Competition first prize, 1989. Address: Heathfield Cottage, Heathfield Farm, Aspatria, Cumbria CA5 3SP, England.

Publications

Poetry

Yes and No. Liskeard, Cornwall, Peterloo, 1979.

A Second Life. Liskeard, Cornwall, Peterloo, 1982.

Time Past. Liskeard, Cornwall, Treovis Press, 1982.

Jouissance. Liskeard, Cornwall, Peterloo, 1985.

Eldorado. Calstock, Cornwall, Peterloo, 1987.

Bleeding Heart Yard. Calstock, Cornwall, Peterloo Poets, 1992.

The Game: Tennis Poems. Plymouth, Peterloo Poets, 1992.

Five Easy Pieces. London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993.

Barnacle Bill and Other Poems. Dublin, Dedalus, 1994.

All Set to Fall Off the Edge of the World. Northumberland, Flambard Press, 1998.

Recording: William Scammell and Elizabeth Bartlett, Peterloo, 1984.

Other

Keith Douglas: A Study. London, Faber, 1988.

Editor, with Rodney Pybus, Adam's Dream: Poems from Cumbria and Lakeland. Ambleside, Cumbria Literature, 1981.

Editor, Between Comets: For Norman Nicholson at 70. Durham, Taxus Press, 1984.

Editor, The New Lake Poets. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1991.

Editor, This Green Earth: A Celebration of Native Poetry. Cumbria, Ellenbank Press, 1992.

Editor, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose by Ted Hughes. London, Faber, 1994.

Translator, with others, The Biggest Egg in the World, by Marin Soresen. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1991.

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Critical Studies: By Victoria Rothschild, in The Spectator (London), 270 (8606), 19 June 1993; by Keith Turner, in Poetry Review, 83 (2), summer 1993; by Roger Garfitt, in Poetry Review, 84 (2), summer 1994.

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In the poem "Neighbours" William Scammell writes, "Intellectual consanguinity / is deficient in roughage." The typicality of the sentence lies in the Audenesque mixing of registers, the chuff collision between abstraction and concreteness, a frequent Scammell trick. Writing about Robert Lowell in his first book, he talks about the American's "baroque wrangle with God," thereby hauling into one line enough images for a medium-sized lyric.

This is clearly related to another Audenesque feature, a highly developed sense of play with words, a hedonistic gusto revealing itself in complex verse forms that can race at length delightfully. "A Letter from Cumbria" in Jouissance is one of the best examples of this, a nimble, surefooted poem inclusive enough to pay homage to lambs "jump-jetting on all fours," "Callaghan, Wilson, Thatcher, Foot, / Sir Clement This, Lord Keeper That, / the whole great bumbling apparat / of Whitehall," several—ologies, an IUD (gratuitously glossed in otherwise helpful, non-Eliot-like notes), Paul Simon, Jane Austen, and, among many others, "Lord / ('Civilisation') Clark."

The immaculate freshness of most of the rhymes serves, unfortunately, to point up the poor ones, for example, "it's/arithmatics," "apt/tact," and "enrobes/roads." But such lapses can be forgiven in the face of one stanza that uses rhymes never dreamed of before: "ELO / Lao tse To / who (as in 'wholly') / Lo" (as in Lowell).

Scammell delights in difficult words like "topos," not in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary but, oddly, in Collins. (Auden could have had Scammell in mind when he described a poet's study as containing, among other things, "dictionaries [the very / best money can buy—].") He also likes archaic usages, like "threat" as a verb, as well as familiar words rinsed of accretions by odd contexts ("Nabokov, that ilk").

To read Scammell intensively is to be aware of a rich crush of names, whole lists alliteratively and delightedly assembled. An example in Yes and No is "Passchendale, Ypres, the Somme, Verdun…." A Second Life develops the mannerism by making it moreinclusive and surprising, like a shopping bag that contains soap powder, engine oil, Charlie Parker LPs, and a book on Frege: "Paddington, / Tarzan, Charlie's Angels, Liverpool / ('Champions of Europe'), the Bionic Man …." By the time we get to Jouissance atwo-page spread offers us "Not Mau Mau, not Makarios, Korea …," "Not Beowulf, not Kyd," and "Laurence Sterne, / Borges, Prokofiev, Arp, Stevens, Joyce …." Scammell might hone histechnique, one occasionally feels, with a spurt of ignorant irritation.

Scammell wears his culture everywhere, not just on his sleeve. Rereading his books intensively over one weekend feels like scanning an elegant brochure for a high-level course on European culture that takes in music, twentieth-century history, Victorian writers (especially Tennyson), modern poetry, philosophy, the Lakes crew, painters—Scammell's listing mannerism is contagious. But it is sometimes hard to penetrate a poem. I have read and reread "The Small Rain" in A Second Life over eight years and think that it is very beautiful. But I have not got near the center of it, despite noting the reference to "Western Wind" and all the sex it implies. Now and then one thinks of the note in Eliot (of all people!) to the effect that "obscurity is swank."

Yet all this culture is not a disguise. Scammell is clearly a presence in his work, fantasizing sexually, drinking, making love to his wife. If he has a motto, it is found in his lyric "Spring Song":

Of all the symphonies, Jupiter wears best.
A kitten abseils down the wicker chair.
This whisky augurs well. After tennis
my wife glows in the dusk like earthenware.
 
When mildly drunk, Richard Strauss will do—
 
Four Last Songs to polychrome the head.
Sex and death forever! One fits like a shoe,
the other, barefoot, amorously tiptoes

to
my
 bed

Later, in Jouissance, Scammell develops this theme in his own context and that of Tennyson's life ("Love is death! and sex is death! / and death is all around!"). The words he uses constantly enact his hedonistic delight in life, and there is at the end a unity between the poet as lover, eater, drinker, and so forth and the poet as reveler in words and rhymes. The other side of this antithesis is shown in moving elegies for friends. "Into Our Heads," "Point Blank," and "The Right Distance," all in Jouissance, are fine poems.

Love and death are not the only opposites in these poems. It is clear, in fact, that Scammell's obsession is with antitheses in general, for example, the "two dangers (that) never cease threatening the world: order and disorder" as Valéry puts it in the epigraph to Jouissance. Scammell's concern is to use his highly developed formal technique to impose a kind of temporary order on a world that is messy and confusing. He is not merely displaying his knowledge but rather learning through the collision of order and disorder.

Scammell is strong when he describes nature, occasionally in the manner of Elizabeth Bishop. His description of a swan eating a frog in Yes and No is almost as compulsive as the event must have been to watch. Nine measured, varied, elegant sentences describe a heartlessness that is unforgettable. A later poem, "The Tall Hedge," describes cows in a similar manner:

...A dozen cows, heads giant
dreamy sycamore seeds, swayed down
to bathe in the smoking ash...
For one whole week they anchored in that place
shifting and bumping like fat rowing boats
tied to a pier...

Nothing in Scammell's work has been dull. He conveys his own pleasure in language, can be vivid and suggestive, and is moving on the great matters by bringing them down to the details they really are:

The gold watch that I brought from
Curaçao is fastened on your speckly
wrist, turning heirloom by the hour.

—Fred Sedgwick