A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  As we have seen, Bunting requested that the people he wrote to destroyed his letters. We should be deeply grateful that Mottram had the good taste not to shred this lyrical, passionate, monumental statement.

  RAPALLO, 1924 – 1925

  Bunting returned to Newcastle to find his father desperately ill with what Bunting described as ‘a particularly persistent & violent form of angina’. He described to Adams a harrowing encounter with Thomas during the previous week:

  He was brought home in a taxi by his partner, after a very bad attack. He had another attack on the way home & then he lay on the sofa and had another. His face went a dirty grey colour, almost heliotrope, & it looked as though all the flesh had fallen off it & left just the skull & the skin. His eyes sank back into his head behind perpendicular black cliffs. There were huge deep lines where a normal man of sixty has wrinkles. He stared & stared at the back of the sofa & held tight to it. You know the Greco ‘Agony in the Garden’? Greco knew how agony manifests itself but he was afraid of exaggerating & so he’s very much understated it. My father was like that Christ, only far worse, far more intensely hurt. He couldn’t speak – not for weakness, he was no weaker than usual, but for sheer agony. All of him concentrated on that burning pain, & the most dreadful fear in his expression … I was also once locked up in a cell with a homocidal [sic] maniac who got a terrible fear at times that shone out of him like a flaming light, but it was not so terrible as the fear I saw in my father.87

  There is horror in this account but little genuine affection, and yet when his father died Bunting ‘read the whole of Hardy in three weeks to quiet my soul’.88

  The problem was compounded by the fact that Bunting’s mother was also ill with angina and that his sister was very busy at her own practice. Thomas’ health improved sufficiently for Bunting to get away again after a couple of months in England. After another spell in jail in Genoa89 he went to Rapallo to find Pound, who wasn’t there. Bunting stayed on though and earned a living sailing boats carrying sand for construction from Sardinia to the Ligurian coast. This was his first experience of sailing, an activity that became a significant part of his life until the Second World War, after which he never went to sea again.90 Bunting was one of those celebrated by Pound in Canto 23:

  And in the morning, in the Phrygian head-sack,

  Barefooted, dumping sand from their boat

  ‘Yperionides!91

  He learned how to handle ‘the big lateen sails’ of the sand boats before sailing ‘a fair amount at Amalfi in a little lateen rig. Then I bought a boat on the beach near Rapallo – quite a large boat, 26 or 28 feet long I think, undecked, a heavily built fishing boat. Perfectly good once I’d repainted her. She’d looked pretty bad on the beach. I bought her for four pounds and sailed that for some years.’92 He had bought the boat on the beach at Chiavari, ten kilometres or so down the coast from Rapallo, according to an interview in 1981, by which time it had grown a little: ‘It was a great, heavy fishing boat, 32 feet long, half decked. It was fully rigged, good sails, good rope, wanting nothing but a lick of paint. It cost me £4. I suppose a similar boat today would cost me six or seven thousand at least now.’93

  Pound and Bunting had been reunited in Rapallo by 12 March when Bunting ‘just stopped by for tea’ at Pound’s apartment.94 Bunting described his reunion with Pound in a letter to James Leippert: ‘I climbed a mountain, and on top of the mountain, to my astonishment, Ezra appeared. So I saw more of him. He was busy writing his first opera, and I was busy with poems.’95 Thirty-six years later this scene had collected some incidental detail:

  One day I walked up the mountain. I had to walk in those days, there were no cable railways and no roads. I walked up the mule track and there was a little inn at the top. As I passed the inn someone rushed out of the doorway and began shouting, ‘Bunting! Bunting!’ And I looked around and there to my astonishment was Ezra Pound, followed almost immediately by Dorothy, running after me up the mountain.96

  His father had encouraged in Bunting a love of walking and climbing, particularly in the Lake District. ‘My father used to take me up to Capheaton sometimes and he knew some of the Swinburnes,’ he told an interviewer in 1978.

  We walked about the park and looked at the lake and so forth and it’s just chance that when I was a small boy Swinburne never had met me. He’d do what he would always have done, what he did to all the children on Putney Heath: he’d pat me on the head and present me with half a crown. And that would have been very interesting to me because when he was a little boy of eight or nine, as I, he was taken to Grasmere where he met an old gentleman who patted him on the head, but did not offer him half a crown – he was too frugal – and that was William Wordsworth!97

  According to Victoria Forde Thomas Bunting was:

  an experienced climber … and saw to it that Basil at ten began climbing big boulders. Walking and climbing were sometimes serious undertakings, and at twelve a friend was giving climbing lessons to Basil who remembers him as ‘occasionally a little impatient, what the hell’. With a shake of his head, Bunting described to me the simple preparations for climbing in those years, relishing the story about the time that his father and a group of climbers struggled to the top of a mountain in Switzerland only to find a shepherd there, calmly eating his lunch and enjoying the view. However, as late as 1982 he still shuddered to remember the time he was alone, climbing in the fog, when he slipped to a chalk ledge between two steep sides about a thousand feet from his starting point at the base.98

  Bunting was prone to exaggeration, if not outright invention, but in a sense even those of his stories that we might not take entirely at face value are important in building a picture of the man and the poet. Even if some of the detail is embellished all his tales could have described events as they happened, and the fact that he tells them says something about the way he wanted the world to see him. That anyone would climb a mountain in fog, alone and in a place where it is possible to fall down a steep ledge is beyond the understanding of this writer at least, but that doesn’t make it impossible.

  Forde continues with another Bunting walking story, this one perfectly plausible:

  Though he had difficulty walking without a cane during the last few years of his life, Basil spoke to me proudly of the vigour which until those final years had kept him walking about twenty miles every afternoon. Even in 100° heat he walked daily in Persia, and once in 129° without a hat. In this connection he told me about Ezra Pound in Italy inviting him to take ‘a long walk’. He laughed at himself, remembering that after his extensive preparations, Ezra was satisfied with only one or two turns around the promenade, about two and a half miles.99

  There is, of course, a long history of writers composing on long, solitary walks. Apart from Wordsworth one thinks of Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and, more recently, the German writer W. G. Sebald. Bunting, however, seems to have been a more gregarious walker. We know that he enjoyed walking holidays in the 1930s. Matthew Kahane offers a story that has some quintessential Bunting in it:

  I have heard my father [Jacques Kahane] say that he was a friend of Basil Bunting, I take it in the 1930s, and that they went on at least one walking holiday together, I believe in Wiltshire and the area of Salisbury Plain, during which they quarrelled bitterly over which of them was to carry the bar of soap they shared in his rucksack … The point of this particular story, in my father’s retelling of it, was that even good friends, of open and straightforward character, could quarrel about some trivial matter when it was taken past some point – and that we (my sister and I) should never allow some trivial point to spoil a friendship.100

  Jacques Kahane, ‘universally loved and never to be sufficiently lamented’, was a significant influence on Lionel Robbins’ life. The two had been introduced by Bunting during their first year at the LSE and became great friends, travelling together to Salzburg where ‘the vagaries of the exchange in hyper-inflation permitted us, poor students, to buy front-
row stalls and sit just behind Richard Strauss conducting the Mozart cycle at the first festival’.101

  The ‘mountain’ on which Bunting re-encountered the Pounds was almost certainly Mount Rosa which rears up nearly 700 metres behind Rapallo. It is difficult to believe that after so steep a climb Bunting passed up the opportunity for refreshment as he reached the Hotel Ristorante Montallegro on the right-hand side of the shady ilex-lined path that approaches the Sanctuary of Montallegro, but we must take his story at face value. He described the terrain himself as ‘steep and rugged … a mountain with no path at all and the devil to climb’.102 It was one of the Pounds’ favourite hikes and when the funicular to which Bunting refers opened in August 1934 Pound refused to use it.103

  Weeping oaks and sequent graces

  Two short poems survive from this period. ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’ and ‘Farewell ye sequent graces’ were written in 1924 and became the first two odes in ‘The First Book of Odes’ in Bunting’s Collected Poems. The first appears to take the opening of Eliot’s The Waste Land as its point of departure:

  Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise

  mournful candles. Sad is spring

  to perpetuate, sad to trace

  immortalities never changing.104

  Bunting linked music and poetry from the outset of his career. He described his longer poems, with the exception of ‘Chomei at Toyama’, as sonatas. The odes, however, reach back to choral elements in classical Greek drama. In his first collection, Redimiculum Matellarum, which appeared in 1930, and where ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’ was called ‘Sad Spring’, he referred to them as ‘carmina’ so it is clear that he intended them to be seen (and read) as songs. ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’ is a world-weary song. Victoria Forde observes that it is difficult ‘to believe this youthful ennui, especially for readers who know that at this time he is 24, poor but hale and hearty, and enjoying life with Pound and Yeats in Rapallo. Even if he is looking back at the chestnut trees of Paris, it still seems a pose … preserved for the melody of some of its lines.’105 There is indeed a laconic pose struck in some of these lines:

  Weary on the sea

  for sight of land

  gazing past the coming wave we

  see the same wave

  ‘Farewell ye sequent graces’ reached back to nineteenth-century wistfulness:

  Farewell ye sequent graces

  voided faces still evasive!

  Silent leavetaking and mournful

  as nightwanderings

  in unlit rooms …

  but ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’ is more powerful, closing with a celebration that is far from melancholy, reminiscent in tone of Siegfried Sassoon’s beautiful ‘Everyone Sang’ written five years previously:

  drift on merciless reiteration of years;

  descry no death; but spring

  is everlasting

  resurrection.

  A sense of release similar to Sassoon’s emerges from this studied lament about a world that is fated to recreate itself perpetually. In fact the poem is not about Paris, it is about London’s Regent’s Park. At a reading in London in 1980 Bunting said of ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’ that:

  This is the oldest fraction that I’ve preserved. It’s only a little bit of what was a poem; the rest of it was too dreadful to preserve at all. And really it concerns Regent’s Park. You know, I used to live just round the corner from Regent’s Park, in a little garret, and I was often there, and that avenue of horse chestnut trees is in the spring so magnificent. I was in love with Regent’s Park and once wrote a poem to say quite falsely that it was the finest park in all Europe and all the rest of it. It had to be abolished, that poem, it wasn’t good enough, but I did feel very strongly about Regent’s Park.106

  LONDON, 1925–1928

  Bunting returned to England around the time of his father’s death in February 1925. He told Pound that he would never have left Rapallo if his father hadn’t ‘begun to die’.107 Thomas’ obituary in the British Medical Journal begins conventionally enough:

  The announcement of the sudden death of Dr. Bunting, on February 18th, has been received with deep regret by the medical profession of Newcastle and Tyneside. It was known to his intimate friends that his health had recently given cause for anxiety, owing to attacks of precordial pain, which were believed to be anginal. Some months ago he had taken a rest from his professional duties, but he had returned to work and was quietly carrying on when the blow fell.

  Thomas’ obituarist goes on, however, to offer some personal observations of a man who was clearly an exceptional person as well as an outstanding medic:

  The writer of this note had the opportunity of reading the thesis which won this distinction [the Gold Medal at Edinburgh] for Dr. Bunting … and was much impressed by the originality of the views therein expressed, many of which have since been accepted … Eventually he took up the study of radiology and visited various important centres where x-ray work was being carried on, and he had already achieved considerable success in the practice of it when the war broke out; this gave him the opportunity he required. He was appointed radiologist to the Northumberland War Hospital at Gosforth. Those of us who were his colleagues have cause to remember his patience, his urbanity, and the great assistance he rendered to the visiting staff. Nothing seemed to be a trouble to him if he could be of service in clearing up a doubtful point in diagnosis.

  Having established Thomas’ sensitive professional side the obituary goes on to describe a man who generally quietly carried the day in spite of his progressive tendencies:

  Dr. Bunting was keenly interested in the politico-social movements of the times. A man of rather advanced views, he did not hesitate to express his opinions, but he never unpleasantly enforced these, nor did he disagreeably differ from an opponent. It was this circumstance which made him so beloved by all, and caused him to be chosen as the mouthpiece of the medical profession when disputable matters had to be considered by a joint body of the profession and insurance, health, or education authorities. At committee meetings on national insurance matters there was no one, quite independently of the subject under discussion and the divergent views expressed, who was more carefully listened to than the subject of this memoir. He had a wonderful grasp of the intricacies of the Act, what it could and what it could not do, and as he invariably spoke from conviction the opinions he expressed carried great weight and were received with respect.108

  We learn from Thomas’ obituary in the Lancet that he had started his career with a short spell as asylum medical officer near Buxton, and that his work on the histology of lymph glands had won for him a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1911 he had passed the degree of Bachelor of Hygiene and the Diploma of Public Health both with honours, at the University of Durham. The Lancet’s obituary also traces the source of Thomas’ ‘advanced’ social views:

  Dr. Bunting was also interested in social questions, an interest which dated from his student days when he was associated with Prof. Patrick Geddes’s work in founding the Town and Gown Association, for promoting students’ sympathies in the welfare of the poor of Edinburgh.109

  Popular and successful, Thomas was laid to rest in Old Jesmond Cemetery on 21 February 1925, just a few weeks before the Montague Colliery disaster of 30 March 1925, when water from a nearby pit flooded the mine, killing thirty-eight people. The medical profession attended Thomas’ funeral in numbers and the various organisations with which he was connected were all represented: ‘The British Medical Association was represented by Dr. R. A. Bolam. Dr. Bunting passed away at the comparatively early age of 57 years, before he had time to enjoy the fruits of the greater success which we all believed was in store for him. He left a widow, one son, and a daughter, who is in the medical profession.’110 We learn a good deal more about Thomas from these notes than from anything the ‘one son’ wrote or said.

  Bunting worked for a while as the Br
itish correspondent for Rivista di Roma, until he discovered ‘that enterprising review hadn’t the remotest intention of ever paying for its contributions’.111 He didn’t see Pound again for roughly another five years, but they exchanged letters every six months or so, and he never lost touch with Pound again, although their friendship was seriously tested by Pound’s anti-Semitism in the 1930s.

  He spent a week in May 1925 with the eccentric poet J. J. Adams and his lover, the artist Christabel Dennison, at their unhappy home in Primrose Hill in north London. Christabel’s first impression was not positive. ‘He has a horrible face,’ she wrote in her diary on Sunday 11 May 1925. ‘Heavy features, smooth & white with a farouche moustache, perpetual nervous smile. Speaks with a slow studied imitation of what they call the Oxford accent … I try to be a good hostess & not to show that I don’t like his face … ’ By the following day she was beginning to change her mind about her visitor: ‘B is a good guest. He makes his own bed & only wants a few raw tomatoes for breakfast.’ Christabel’s version of events doesn’t make Bunting’s holiday sound idyllic but by the end of the week she had warmed to him considerably: