A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  In the same month Evans’ file note reports that Bunting had been awarded a Royal Life Saving Society bronze medal and that in general, ‘In work want of balance in character has played [‘less’ erased] a smaller part than before: grind at uninteresting work must be faced and carried through. He has justified his appt. as a prefect.’97 Bunting continued to make good progress.

  The minutes of the seventy-third meeting of the LHA on 5 November 1917 record the results of a debate about the merits of the politicians of the moment; British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, US President Woodrow Wilson, and the Russian Prime Minister, Alexander Kerensky.98 Bunting presented Kerensky as ‘an impassioned idealist, with a commanding personality, and a practical statesmanlike grasp of present problems’. Bunting (or Kerensky) won the ensuing debate by one vote over Wilson, Lloyd George coming in ‘a very poor third’ according to The Leightonian of December 1917, not altogether surprisingly given the way the war was going.

  Later that month Bunting read an essay to the (Senior) Essay Society entitled ‘A Revival of a Forgotten Art: A Romantic Allegory’. He must have been reading Edgar Allen Poe:99

  There lies in the island of Britain a vale more beautiful than man has ever dreamed. Tall mountains guard it, & the flanks they give the world are so bleak & so uninteresting, that for many years no man has essayed them. But, beyond the summit of the greatest, lies ravine [sic], & beyond the ravine, the vale. Few trees cheer the way; the pass to the great canyon is difficult & dangerous; & the black stream that has carved for itself this channel swirls & bubbles with a sound of all foreboding.

  The story concerns a young witch and wizard who are sent by the master wizard to collect a rare weed for some unspecified act of magic. The enchanter has warned them on no account to enter the vale where ‘a fearful fate’ would await them. They fail to find the weed despite diligent searching but then spot a specimen in the forbidden land of the vale; ‘small wonder they disobeyed’. In a kind of reverse Fall they find themselves suddenly alive: ‘an intense wonder seized their souls, & they felt, for the first time, things, & that they were alive’. The Edenic reference is well trailed: ‘He glanced towards the ravine & shuddered; for the home that had harboured him lay like the abode of Satan on Eden’s bounds, &, like the snake’s slimy track, the watercourse retired in sinuous curves to the depths of the abyss.’ The young couple are befriended by a ‘gaunt hermit’ who shelters them in his cell for the night. At midnight they are visited by the enchanter, an outlandish figure with ‘fangs polluted by unholy orgies’, who offers to make the hermit, in return for his two ‘children’, ‘abbot of the richest foundation in Britain’. The hermit’s somewhat dismissive reply (‘Fudge’) sets off a debate about liberty and God that ends in another reversed myth, this time Faustian. The wizard agrees to let the hermit keep the children and teach them the true ways of liberty and nature but only for six months. In November he will return to destroy them and the whole vale if they refuse to renounce ‘this madness’. The day of reckoning is marked by a colossal storm: ‘A rusted suit of armour stood in a corner; the busy maid had polished it to a semblance of its old glory, but it was treacherous and weak. An old sword, dented & battered leant against the wall. As in a dream the boy suffered himself to be armed & girded: as in a dream he saw the hermit unbar the door: dreaming still, he stood a moment on the threshold. Then, raising the cross of his sword hilt to his lips, with a valiant cry he rushed into the storm.’

  This is important as Bunting’s second surviving work of fiction. There wasn’t much more to come. It is a carefully constructed and elegantly written allegory of good and evil but any ballooning temptation to read into it more than it deserves is rapidly punctured by the surviving minute of the meeting that was filed on 12 November 1917: ‘B. C. Bunting read an essay entitled “The Revival of a Forgotten Art”. This was an allegory, medieval in plot and style, very modern in its moral. The essayist has a great power of description …’

  To this point all is true. Bunting does indeed describe the vale and the holy lake with real Gothic verve, and the moral, with its Fabian triumph of liberty over capitalism, could hardly be more ‘modern’. But, the minute writer continues, ‘his paper was felt to be somewhat spoilt for the listeners by his amusement at the more lurid patches of it. It was discussed whether an essay of this sort was of any real value to the society.’ The ensuing debate went in Bunting’s favour but the presenter’s sniggering clearly robbed the allegory of some of its power.100

  Bunting resubmitted his allegory for another prize but wasn’t given a place because it contained ‘too little substance and too much flamboyant description’. That was a rather unfair judgement. The flamboyant description is powerful for such a young writer; the judge doesn’t seem to have appreciated that whiff of Poe. The account of the discussion of Bunting’s verse submission is even more damning: ‘One judge thought that it would fit well into a poem on “Freedom & Nature”, while the other thought that as a fragment it contained little to make it part of the whole promised by the title or at least that a whole with such a part had better remain unwritten.’101 The poem didn’t survive Bunting’s ruthless self-editing; probably a good thing.

  Bunting also entered the 1917 Elocution Competition, which contained four elements – a prepared speech, an unprepared speech, a reading and a recitation. The judges’ reports for three of these survive. For the set speech Bunting took as his text, ‘A School should be judged by the boys it turns out’ and the judges reported that he was ‘a fluent speaker, & attempted to make a slashing attack on our Public School System, arguing that our Civil & Diplomatic Services, & our Ruling Classes, recruited from our Public Schools, are a failure, & that Athletics are the very foundation of our Public School System. This took most of the time at his disposal. An introduction of this immoderate length was quite out of proportion, & upset the balance.’

  He had chosen Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ for his recitation and the judges’ report on this is perhaps the first example of the way Bunting’s voice could unsettle the establishment: ‘This is a difficult piece, but proved an excellent choice, as Bunting, in a sound effort, did some justice to it. In three or four places, however, his emphasis was at fault; and further there were several verbal inaccuracies. It is a pity that Bunting failed to adapt his strident voice to the room, which re-echoed his twang in a painful way.’ Bunting’s twang was to re-echo through rooms in Europe and America with immense power and drama for another sixty years. The report on ‘prepared readings’ praised Bunting’s careful preparation of his extract from ‘The Golden Age’, being ‘easy to follow, without hesitation & freer than usual from mannerisms’. Bunting was awarded second place in the 1917 Elocution Competition.

  Two years before Bunting’s arrival at Leighton Park the outgoing (and first) Chairman of Governors, Jonathan Backhouse Hodgkin, had inaugurated the ‘JBH’, an annual public speaking competition. Bunting could have written JBH’s six golden rules himself as instructions to young poets in how to address their readers:

  1. Conciseness: It is a painful thing to listen to diffuse addresses. Many people, when they have said what they meant to say, start afresh and say most of it again in different words …

  2. Clear Enunciation: Much of the effectiveness of speech is lost if parts of it are not distinctly heard …

  3. Earnestness: I should therefore like each competitor to choose his own subject, so that he may be able to forget himself in his desire to convince his hearers.

  4. Simplicity and Lucidity of Literary Style: … I should like all tricks of oratory or evidence of self-centredness to be discouraged.

  5. Sympathy with Audience: A speaker who can convince his audience that he is in sympathy with them … will do much to secure their sympathy with him, even when their general attitude is hostile.

  6. Presence of Mind: … I should like a decided preference given to those competitors who speak without notes.102

  These principles chime with those Bunting
later articulated for poetry. It is impossible to believe that they were not on his mind as he embarked on his career as a poet. Perhaps it is not surprising then to discover that a winner of the J. B. Hodgkin Speech Competition of 1917, with a speech on Conscientious Objectors, was one Basil C. Bunting.103

  Bunting’s final recorded contribution at Leighton Park was to the Hobbies Competition in December 1917 and he was commended for the originality of his researches into the ‘employment of men and women in the British Isles’. He’d had another busy term. Evans’ file note on Bunting at the end of that term was positive:

  Dec. 1917 A boy of considerable power – with evident difficulties of wh. he has been made well aware!

  The restraint shown in public appearances in the last week is very encouraging – it has allowed his good points [emended from ‘his good parts’] to show themselves & is of good promise for the stand on the question of military service wh. he believes he is called to make. Much interest in his schol. exerc. work in January & shall follow his career with [‘great’ erased] interest.

  His ‘schol. exerc.’ was going well enough for his application to Peterhouse, Cambridge to proceed but it was not successful. A letter from H. J. Edwards to Evans, dated 16 February 1918, explains why:

  The examiners reported that his work in Ancient History and Medieval European History was very promising, as regards both style and matter. In the paper of General Questions there were signs of immaturity and of a certain recklessness; and his English essay made a very unfavourable impression for its lack of taste and even of sense. His French was fair: in Latin he only just qualified.

  It was felt that there was a possibility of brilliance in him, but that his work was as yet too uneven and unbalanced to merit the award of a scholarship.

  Quaking leadership

  Bunting attended Leighton Park school at a time of rapid expansion, materially if not financially. New buildings were springing up. After a generously supported appeal for funds, Peckover Hall appeared, ‘a fine example of a modern building’ according to governors writing in 1940.104 The number of boys however stuck obstinately at around one hundred, and the school was in constant financial peril. An old boy and former Governor, Kenneth Wright, wrote that ‘Charles Evans had many virtues as a headmaster … but the ability to administer and to exercise financial control was not among them.’105 The school didn’t even employ a bursar until Evans retired in 1928. Evans’ stewardship has been divided into a period of success (while Bunting was there) and failure during the 1920s when continuing financial problems and lack of discipline destabilised the school,106 but even the successful period was clearly marred by a static headcount and crumbling finances. Evans was an engaging and charismatic leader with his constant motion and ‘intellectual twinkle’.107 With so few boys in the school he would have been a direct influence on most of them, with his deep love of the natural world and his fervent but undogmatic brand of Quakerism. S. W. Brown drew a fine picture of the man:

  He tried to know everyone and he practised the arts of developing intimate and self-revealing contacts. His casual remarks, made while walking round the farm buildings or some other part of the park, would suddenly lift his companions – small boys or prefects, or O.L.s [Old Leightonians] visiting because they liked him and liked his ways – from mental apathy into a consciousness of their own importance. There was something psychic about the way he did this, its suddenness, its aptness, with his quiet hesitating voice, unmusical but sympathetic, his slightly bent figure, pausing as he spoke to point out some object that took his fancy. Those delicate and scholarly hands that were never in his pockets would gesticulate as he spoke, gently but expressively. He was gentlemanly always, with fine instincts and perceptions, never thrusting himself into company where he was not welcome, or into conversations that were foreign to his nature.108

  It is easy to imagine Evans defusing Bunting’s hostility to his new environment with his combination of gentle humour and resolute belief in people.

  From histories of Leighton Park one gains a distinct impression that Evans’ stewardship was generally liberal, sophisticated and cultured. One near-contemporary of Bunting’s, Eric Southall, however, remembered music teaching at the school as ‘very poor‘: ‘The small orchestra had few players and, as was general in those days, no wind or brass … I don’t recall Mr Ballard [music and geography teacher from 1895 to 1918] ever playing to us at a school concert or at any other times. Nor were the visual arts cultivated.’109 (Rather remarkably the school seems to have had no dedicated teacher of English between 1896 and 1919.110) There may be a touch of pique in this (Southall was clearly a talented musician) as Brown recalls that music flourished at Leighton Park at precisely this period: ‘in place of the miscellaneous items of songs, recitations and pieces by the band, whole evenings were spent on the works of single composers – on Mozart, Purcell, Bach, Coleridge-Taylor and in 1916 on Glinka, Moussorgsky and Tchaikowski.’111 So, pace Southall, it’s likely that Bunting’s musical interests developed at Leighton Park. Certainly the school’s Literary, Historical and Archaeological Society was taking modern literature seriously, with readings of poetry by Newbolt, Masefield, Kipling, Brooke, Tagore and the plays of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Bunting’s first two published poems certainly show the strong influence of two of these poets.

  Evans was anxious to build the sixth form but only about fifteen boys were admitted to it each year at that time. Although his parents sent Bunting to Leighton Park with a view to him progressing to Oxford or Cambridge, to some extent that went against the Quaker grain. Many Quaker parents (not that the Buntings were Quakers) were hostile to Oxbridge because those universities had denied admission to members of the Society of Friends until 1854. Quakers had not been able to take an MA (and therefore were barred from teaching) at Oxford and Cambridge until 1871. Thomas was an unusual parent, perhaps precisely because he was not a Quaker, in valuing university education in its own right. Many Quaker parents, while in no way undervaluing the acquisition of knowledge, felt that Oxford and Cambridge provided education that was inferior to that which might be got in the ‘real’ world.112

  Quakerism in any event was at odds in principle with the entire private school ethos. The Society of Friends were dissenters who had a long history of exclusion from privileged English society and yet, in a school such as Leighton Park (and Ackworth), it had in a sense created an institution that could be socially divisive and with rules that could seem derived from the necessary discipline of a military environment. On the other hand it was, of course, an opportunity to inculcate and preserve traditional Quaker values of self-reliance and the ability to think for oneself, as well as to protect the school’s charges from a society that encouraged ambition above principle.

  But the Society of Friends’ ambivalence towards Oxbridge was as nothing compared to its leadership’s moral desertion regarding the war. Bunting was considering his future, and Cambridge was a possibility, but he was clearly a very confused young man. Bunting’s second publication of 1916 appeared in The Leightonian in December. ‘Keep Troth’ is straight out of the ‘Vitaï Lampada’ school of jingoism, but as Richard Caddel says it is ‘in no way militaristic’,113 and to be fair the young poet catches Newbolt’s tone and rhythms well:

  And while we’re still at school, boys,

  The principle’s the same;

  Stick to the golden rule, boys,

  Play up, and play the game.

  What do you do for England,

  Who does so much for you?

  Keep troth, speak true for England,

  Be straight, keep troth, speak true.

  No doubt the Quaker sentiment of the final line of this stanza caught the eye of The Leightonian’s editor. As Caddel observes, the remarkable feature of ‘Keep Troth’ is the fact that it reveals nothing of his current enthusiasms, Whitman, Blake, Kerensky. One might have expected at least some of the fiery mysticism or blazing revolutionary activism he was absorbing to
bubble to the surface, but if they did the waves of Newboltian convention submerged them entirely. As a vanishingly small moment in twentiethcentury poetry ‘Keep Troth’ clearly points in the wrong direction. Compared with another poem written in 1916, H. D.’s ‘Amaranth’, its plodding metre thumps out a death march for Georgian poetry where H. D. asserts the new all-questioning, self-confident modernist note:

  I was not asleep.

  I did not lie asleep on those hot rocks

  while you waited.

  I was not unaware when I glanced

  out toward sea,

  watching the purple ships.114

  Taken broadly as a ‘war poem’ though ‘Keep Troth’ is surprisingly mainstream. We now think of the poetry of the First World War as overwhelmingly critical of political and military leaders’ strategy and tactics, articulating a sense of hopeless valour in the teeth of insuperable horror, but this is largely because the poetry that has survived (because it is the best) was written by poets – Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves – who subscribed to the view that it was the futility and horror that needed to be in a perverse sense celebrated. In fact, of the 2,225 poets who published during the years of the war hardly any expressed the views that have for generations of students defined its poetry. Read in this context ‘Keep Troth’ is absolutely of its moment.115