A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Unfortunately, Robbins, there is no trades union in this business. Individual bargains & don’t they put it across the poor foreigners! This week I am doing 7 hours a day at one of the most respectable academies, for which I shall touch 80 francs at the end of the week, plus a subscription from the students. In England I could get 15/- a day for the same work. In America, a dollar an hour. Well, anyway, I’ve got nearly two months of this work, & I hope to learn in that time enough French to get a job on the barges. Paris – Lyons – Marseilles – & then I’ll take a summer tramp somewhere or other.

  This long letter continues with his early observations of life in Paris, including some rather unpleasant reflections on the local women. He was much more positive about café life, the food and wine, the language and, particularly, the waiters, ‘Waiters are the glory of Paris. I set no limit to the admiration that may be legitimately paid to them.’ The architecture of public buildings is ‘hideous beyond anything I have ever seen’, Notre Dame in particular needing ‘breeches or some such wear to hide its external genitals’. Good French art was difficult to find; sanitation was inadequate; French morals were better than British in matters of money but hypocritical in matters of sex. Bunting found it particularly irritating, in view of the generally casual attitude to sex, that he was required to wear, when modelling before young girls, ‘a pair of striped bathing drawers that stretch from knees to navel’. His chief delight in Paris was a Rabelaisian sign outside a café which showed a naked waiter ‘walking between the tables, balancing three trays, one in each hand, & one on the end of his erect penis’.44 He had been in Paris for just ten days but he had formed a view.

  The modelling work was precarious. He told Robbins that he was ‘out of work till October. Models are as thick as dust in the Montparnasse cafés now because all the artists have gone away for the summer & the schools are closed.’ He was hoping to find work ‘stevedoring or portering at the markets’, and he had developed some new complaints. The views (excepting that from the Pont du Carrousel at sunrise) were ordinary; the revues ‘much over-rated’; the women (again) even worse than American women; the people ‘mostly dull’. ‘Still,’ he told Robbins, ‘I like Paris, & don’t intend to leave it. It is deuced comfortable.’ It could have been more comfortable if he had accepted a ‘fine offer – new suits, 2000 francs and a voyage in central Europe to become bugger to an entertaining old gentleman, but I turned him down. That was financial folly. Still, I value my liberty, and buggery is a profession in which one works twenty-four hours per day.’ He had already met Pound at this point: ‘Pound entertains me. So does Nina Hamnett.’45

  He found some work charring and tutoring ‘to a lovely girl of fourteen – I wish it had been a permanent job – a ravishing Juliette!’46 But it wasn’t. In the summer of 1923 Bunting decamped to Bourron-Marlotte, about two miles from the artists’ colony at Grèz-sur-Loing, to stay with a ‘pleasant but dull old boy, who gives me very little time to write or think’. The dull old boy was the English artist and art collector Arthur Heseltine, uncle of the musician Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) with whom Bunting was to have a fine time in London’s Fitzrovia a few years later. He wrote to J. J. Adams that before he left Paris he had discovered that ‘most of the “artistic” bunch of Montparnasse are bores’.47 ‘France,’ he observes, ‘is traditionally the home of wit. I suppose the government, true to the motto “Egalité”, serves out the available wit all round, & the separate portions are not enough to go very far.’ He is moved to a sudden burst of apparently impromptu satire:

  In Paris there is no one dull,

  No one a block-head or a fool.

  Wit is the birth-right of the masses.

  Wit sparkles from the dotard’s glasses;

  Wit in the maiden’s tongue resides

  And – hidden somewhere else besides;

  Wit is the basis of their laws;

  Wit opens every Frenchman’s doors,

  And every woman’s legs (the whores!)

  And all the visitors are witty

  In the gay intellectual city.

  Perhaps you wouldn’t notice it.

  They do not always show their wit –

  Their conversations are often boring –

  Their faces, too, are reassuring,

  Placid & flat, debauched & bleary.

  Their deeds & thoughts & looks are dreary.

  Their learning is not evident.

  Their work is heavy, tho’ well-meant,

  Both flatulent and constipated,

  Pompous & pious & inflated;

  Or else loose-bowelled and ecstatic;

  Or too-much-laboured-empty-Attic,

  Yet themselves aver they’ve wit

  And that’s strong evidence of it.

  It’s their reserve that makes them seem

  Like other folks. Their leader’s dream

  It wise to exercise their wit

  In private places where they – sit

  And make a canvas for their art

  On walls of places where they –.

  Their privy walls are covered over

  With witty words that stink to Dover.

  But still they are not witty born

  Nor yet by learning. They would scorn

  To get wit in that prosy way.

  They buy it with their carte d’indentité.

  This rather enjoyable neo-Augustan squib didn’t make it into Bunting’s Collected Poems; indeed this may be its first publication in full.

  A flabby lemon and pink giant

  Ford Madox Ford arrived in Paris with Stella Bowen in September 1923, and that autumn the transatlantic review was born in slightly bizarre circumstances. Ford recalled that:

  my brother stood beside me on a refuge half-way across the Boulevard St Michel and told me that some Paris friends of his wanted me to edit a review for them. The startling nature of that coincidence with the actual train of my thoughts at the moment made me accept the idea even whilst we stood in the middle of the street. He mentioned names which were dazzling in the Paris of that day and sums the disposal of which would have made the durability of any journal absolutely certain. So we parted with the matter more than half settled, he going to the eastern pavement, I to the west.

  Ten minutes after, I emerged from the rue de la Grande Chaumière on to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Ezra, with his balancing step, approached me as if he had been awaiting my approach. – He can’t have been. – He said:

  ‘I’ve got a wonderful contribution for your new review,’ and he led me to M. Fernand Léger, who, wearing an old-fashioned cricketer’s cap like that of Maître Montagnier [the avocet] of Tarascon, was sitting on a bench ten yards away. M. Léger produced an immense manuscript, left it in my hands and walked away … Without a word.48

  Pound had by this time known Ford for fourteen years. The novelist May Sinclair had introduced them in 1909 when Pound was struggling to establish himself in literary London and Ford, then Ford Madox Hueffer, was editing the newly established English Review from a flat above a fishmonger in Holland Park. Ford was the grandson, on his mother’s side, of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. His mother had married a German music critic and Ford was happy to emphasise his German-ness until war broke out in 1914, at which point he rapidly changed his surname. Bunting was, as we shall see, struck by Ford’s grotesque appearance, but he was by no means the first. Wyndham Lewis described Ford memorably as, ‘a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the Zoo inviting buns – especially when ladies were present. Over the gaping mouth damply depended the ragged ends of a pale lemon moustache … a typical figure out of a Conrad book – a caterer, or corn-factor, coming on board – blowing like a porpoise with the exertion – at some Eastern port.’49 Ford was a notorious, and brilliant, fabricator of stories. The poet Richard Aldington described him as ‘a sort of literary Falstaff’ whose ability to exaggerate could spin out of control even with the most gullible audience. Aldi
ngton described a conversation at his parents’ home:

  The food and wine were good, and Ford, ever susceptible to the genial influences of the table and good fellowship, opened the flood-gates of his discourse and babbled o’ the green fields – I should say, of celebrities – in his most imaginative strain. A scholarly recluse like my father … was an ideal subject for Ford’s experiments. He sensed the virgin sucker at once. So we had the stories about Ruskin, and my uncle Gabriel and my aunt Christina [Ford never shied away from his Pre-Raphaelite connections]; the Conrad and James stories; the story of the abbé Liszt’s concert and how Queen Alexandra took the beautiful infant Ford on her knees and kissed him; the ‘old Browning’ stories, and the Swinburne stories; gradually working back through the 19th century. My father was swimming in bliss, although once or twice he looked a little puzzled. And then Ford began telling how he met Byron. I saw my father stiffen …50

  Pound and Ford became firm friends. Ford published Pound’s sestina, ‘Sestina: Alteforte’, in the English Review as May Sinclair had suggested, giving him his first break in literary London.

  Pound repaid the favour in Paris by providing Ford and the transatlantic review with a deranged White Russian sub-editor, one E. Séménoff,51 who was immediately convinced that Ford was a Russian agent, and, as his private secretary, Basil Bunting, ‘an English Conscientious Objector, an apparently mild, bespectacled student. He too was starving.’ By that evening Ford possessed ‘all the machinery of a magazine – sub-editor, secretary, contributions, printers, subscribers [ … ] It was as if I had been in one of those immense deserts inhabited by savages who have unknown methods of communication over untold distances.’52 The transatlantic review, a pivotal instrument of literary modernism, was launched just three months later in December 1924 (though dated January 1925). The contents list of the two volumes reads like a roll call of modernism, with poems by H. D., F. S. Flint, William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings (in upper case guise) and two of Pound’s Cantos; a serialised novel by Conrad (with Ford) and stories by John Dos Passos and Jean Rhys; letters from H. G. Wells, Pound and T. S. Eliot; the score of a sonata by George Antheil and a song by Erik Satie; reproductions of paintings and drawings by Braque, Gwen John, Man Ray, Picasso, Nina Hamnett and Brancusi; essays by Gertrude Stein, Paul Valéry, Havelock Ellis and Djuna Barnes; work in progress from Joyce, Conrad, Jean Cocteau and Hemingway. Ford memorably described the milieu in Paris as the transatlantic review was born:

  Paris gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the treetrunks. They came from Tokio, they came from Petrograd; they poured in from Berlin, from Constantinople, from Rio de Janeiro; they flew in locust hordes from Spokane, from Seattle, from Santa Fé, from all the states and Oklahoma. If you had held up and dropped a sheet of paper on any one of the boulevards and had said: ‘I want a contribution,’ a thousand hands would have torn you to pieces before it had hit the ground …53

  All this, of course, was happening at the same time as that distinct strain of Parisian Dada was tearing itself apart. In 1923 Paris Dada was effectively dead and was replaced in 1924 with its more portentous younger sibling, André Breton’s Surrealism.54 Bunting knew many of the Surrealists, without ever having been particularly influenced by them, ‘I just enjoyed the liveliness about the place and tried to take my part in it.’55 Although he acknowledged that in his ‘earliest poems … you’ll find many places I think where the sound is underlined by purely Surrealistic words’. The closing couplet of his 1925 poem ‘Villon’ is surely one such:

  How can I sing with my love in my bosom?

  Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.56

  Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, was one of many who were confused by these lines. In November 1930 Bunting wrote from Brooklyn to praise her stewardship of Poetry and to express hope that he would be able to meet her in New York City before he had to leave at the end of the following February.

  On a postcard which followed me here from Italy you ask me ‘Why salmon?’ It would be easy to answer why not? But though I am shy of giving partial explanations which often seem to mislead people, which is probably worse than leaving them in the dark, I will say that by line 180 odd I have been angling a long time for a very big fish and only landed something for which the Board of Fisheries formula seems an exact and fitting description.57

  At twenty-three Bunting found himself, albeit briefly, at the epicentre of an intellectual earthquake that changed the artistic landscape for ever:

  It was the strangest type of set-up you can imagine. One young man after another performed the same functions, oh, for many years … You did all sorts of things. I acted as assistant-editor, and sub-editor, and various other things for the transatlantic review, which he was starting. I also bathed the baby, and answered the telephone. I corrected the proofs and made various alterations of my own – some of them with and some of them without his knowledge. I changed a few words in a Ford–Conrad novel which I was reading the proofs of at that time too. Nobody troubled … What else did I do? Chiefly I kept him company.58

  It has only recently emerged that Bunting played an important part in the shaping of Ford’s Parade’s End. He told Gael Turnbull that he ‘helped correct the proofs of the first book of the Parade’s End sequence. Ford had some sort of verbal tic, ending sentences with the same word. B. had crossed this out through the whole ms. At first FMF seemed upset. Then sat counting them, up to 40 or more. Then let B. finish.’59

  Bunting stayed with Ford and Stella Bowen for a short time. Bowen recalled that Bunting, a ‘nice young man … slept in a damp, little store-room beyond our kitchen and was kept on the run by Ford for eighteen hours a day. He endured much in the cause of Literature.’60 When Ford, Bowen and daughter Julie moved Bunting moved with them into, if anything, even more unlovely accommodation, ‘The studio was immense. It had neither gas nor electricity, and its kitchen was a black underground dungeon, reached by a perilous flight of narrow, slippery stone steps. There was a gallery at one end, filled with stacked canvases, and here the unfortunate Bunting had his shakedown.’61

  Ford described Bunting to the British short story writer and poet, A. E. Coppard, in preparation for Coppard’s visit to Paris, as ‘a dark youth with round spectacles, in a large Trilby hat and a blue trench coat with belt who shall hold up a copy of the TRANSATLANTIC REVIEW towards passengers arriving at the barrier and smile’.62

  Ford was by no means immediately impressed by Bunting. The day after the momentous meeting with his brother in the middle of the Boulevard St Michel Ford asked Pound where his ‘Conscientious Objector was. He ought to have brought those MSS. round to me that morning. Ezra said: “Oh, he … That’ll be all right … You mustn’t keep his nose too close to the grindstone … He’s not used to discipline. But he’ll be invaluable … That’s what he’ll be … Only your excremental Review will be in the gutter tomorrow … ”’63

  Ford had taken on at the same time Ernest Hemingway as a second sub-editor (alongside the Russian lunatic who was able to find communists breeding in every drawer), having been persuaded by Pound that the young man shadow boxing in Ford’s office was, in fact, the ‘finest prose stylist in the world’.64 Bunting quickly found himself in jail, having converted into alcohol the entire advance that Ford had given him against his salary as, according to Ford, he ‘embarked on a career of martial adventure’.65 Ford’s account of Bunting’s adventure is a minor comic masterpiece. As we shall see, its surreal prison scene sits underneath Bunting’s first great poem, ‘Villon’. Never referred to by name in Ford’s memoir, It Was the Nightingale, Bunting is only ever the ‘Conscientious Objector’ or the ‘bespectacled student’. Bunting clearly threw himself fully into the spirit of the times:

  The ten shillings or so that I had given that studious and bespectacled young man as earnest money had proved h
is undoing. He had been really near starvation, having been earning what living he did earn as an artist’s model. So, instead of spending the money on a square meal he laid it out on the normal products of the Dôme. That is not a good thing to do.

  When he got home he found that his concierge’s lodge had been moved to the other side of the passage: its furniture was quite different and the concierge was a new man. In his own room an aged gentleman was sitting on the bed. The aged gentleman threw him down the stairs. The kindly agent to whom he told this unusual story patted him on the back and recommended him to go home, as a good, spectacled student should.

  The young man walked round the block and tried again. Things were worse. The strange concierge blocked the way. The young man knocked him down … The aged gentleman was still on the bed. This time he held a gun. Outraged by their offences against the laws of hospitality the young man smashed some windows, defiled the staircase, yelled at the top of his voice, and got into bed with the concierge’s wife.

  When the agents arrived in great numbers the young man made a spirited attempt to bite off the nose of the sergeant in charge of them. He was carried, spread-eagled, to the Santé. Next morning a kindly magistrate told him he had acted very wrongly. Poets have a certain licence, but his deeds were not covered by that indulgence. The concierge pleaded for him; the old gentleman pleaded for him; the sergeant, who was a poet too, if a Corsican, asserted his conviction that the prisoner was an excellent young man. He had indulged too freely in the juice of the grape – but to indulge freely in wine was in France an act of patriotism.

  He was ordered to pay frs. 15 for injuries to the aged gentleman; frs. 12 for the broken window; frs. 5 for the cleaning of the staircase and frs. 9 to the wife of the concierge, all these with sursis – the benefit of the First Offenders Act. He expected to go free and unmulcted.