A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

Bunting’s visit had worked out better than I expected. He hadn’t been here a day before John was infinitely bored & looked silent & sullen in B’s presence, so that I had to keep on talking with bland cheerfulness about nothing to keep it from being noticed. But B. did notice. He stayed in bed in the morning till J. had gone & then absented himself till last thing at night. Then it would always be me who called out. ‘Hallo Bunting, had a good day?’ To-night he came home early & said to me so humbly, ‘Do tell me if I’m in the way & I’ll go out to the pictures?’ Which I told John & John was touched & turned nice to him. Have spent much tact & energy telling J. things I learnt talking to B. about his shyness & fear of people not liking him, & this together with most bombastic accounts of his exploits & adventures with women – which I did not recount to John.

  A degree of domestic harmony appears to have prevailed by the end of Bunting’s visit. The following Sunday Christabel records a ‘pleasant day. Bunting getting on with John. John happy. We eat raw cabbage with evening meal. Bunting said, “What pleasant meals you have here.”’112 Bunting liked Christabel, who died just a few months after his visit. He wrote to Adams in February 1926 that: ‘Christabel was very kind and gentle – too gentle and sympathetic for her own comfort in a world based mostly on callousness.’113

  Thomas’ death altered the Bunting family’s situation significantly. His will shows that he left £600 to his sister Sarah, £300 to his other sister, Harriet, and the rest to Annie but Annie, used to the prosperous life of marriage to a successful doctor, apparently swiftly found herself short of money. Thomas’ estate, however, was valued at £12,547 15s 10d, the equivalent of £600,000 (nearly $1m) today, and even though it was resworn as £10,924 10s 2d, that is still a significant legacy. Annie sold the family home in Jesmond and moved to a substantial, semi-detached, redbrick house with a spectacular view west up the Tyne valley. Here at 242 Newburn Road in the village of Throckley, seven miles west of Newcastle, she was closer to other members of the Cheesman family. Bunting described his attempt to support his mother in his 19 February letter to Adams:

  I became one of the ignoble army of lecturers who pretends to educate adults. I lecture on economics to working men, confuse their minds with the technicalities of the money market, and get two pounds a week for it. The institution that employs me thus wanted to make me its boss, so I took on a lot of extra, unpaid work – coaching a ‘Little Theatre’, boiling down Frazer and Freud and so on – and then they announced they couldn’t raise money enough to pay my salary.

  The school he taught in was the Adult School in Montague Street, Lemington, a few hundred yards from the house he had been born in. Once again it was a family connection that took him there. The school had been founded in 1913, with funding from the Joseph Rowntree Trust, by Bunting’s uncle, Andrew Messer. Bunting told Lionel Robbins in October 1926 that ‘lecturing to working men was the only thing I could get in the North – quite amusing, but not enough of it to keep me. It is pleasant to listen to unsophisticated views on the foreign exchanges, the origins of religion or the literary merits of various Victorians and the lectures are quite easily prepared, But thirty bob a week is less than my expenses.’114 He was less generous about it to Adams, describing the classes as comprising elementary schoolteachers (‘the stupidest people in the world’), trades union officials (‘far from bright’) and a ‘hotchpotch of detestable people who have obtrusive souls and want something for nothing’.115 He consoled himself by reading Dante, Wittgenstein, Eliot, Dryden and Pope’s Dunciad.

  Bunting returned to London and lived at 5 Osnaburgh Terrace near Regent’s Park in a ‘small but decent’ room overlooking ‘a good church’. He repaid the debt to Robbins that he had incurred when he fled to Paris in 1923 (‘I’ve owed you this money for a Hell of a time, but I’ve never forgotten it for a moment’) and explained his plan: ‘After messes and muddles inherited from my father; after two years of job-hunting without an atom of success in the North, I’m settling here again to try the cheaper kinds of journalism – not that I want it to be cheap, but that seems to be the kind there is a demand for.’116

  He told Pound that he was ‘becoming industrious’ and ‘laying the foundations of three books simultaneously … a book on Dickens as a stylist and a master of form, which badly needs doing. A book on music halls, not gossipy but treating the thing seriously as it deserves. A book on the comparative anatomy of Prisons.’117

  He began to meet some of the leading literary figures of the day, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and members of the Bloomsbury Group, various of whom he described to Victoria Forde with characteristic brevity:

  Q. Roger Fry?

  A. Fidgety.

  Q. Clive Bell?

  A. (Dismissed with a ‘hmph’).

  Q. Forster?

  A. Nice enough chap, but the whole Bloomsbury Group didn’t really like anyone not wealthy, with an inheritance, and educated.118

  He elaborated on this many years later. Asked what it was that he disliked so much about Bloomsbury he was able to reply quite specifically:

  What I resented about the Bloomsbury group in particular might be said to be two things: one, a certain cocksureness which in particular made me distrust Maynard Keynes. The other was that they were all of that well-todo middle class, bordering on country gentry who felt that if you couldn’t afford to live in Bloomsbury or Regent’s Park or some similar, desirable, but very expensive part of the world, well, poor devil, there wasn’t much to be expected from you.119

  He also remembered his first meeting with T. S. Eliot in 1926 with little affection: ‘he spent a long time urging upon me the necessity to read Dante. And being a modest young man and not wanting to put him off his stride, I never once mentioned that I had already read Dante and knew a good deal of the Inferno by heart. So that, perhaps, I wasted that first interview.’120 Bunting sent some poems to Eliot in 1926 but heard nothing from him. By the following spring he was beginning to understand that Eliot wasn’t the most reliable of correspondents. He told Pound that he had intended to send him a (now lost) story called ‘The Salad Basket’, but Eliot had his only copy and, ‘letters to him are invariably met with the assertion that he had gone into the country and would be back in a fortnight’.121 He prodded Eliot on 4 April 1927:

  You will remember that I called on you in the autumn, introducing myself with Pound’s name, and that subsequently, by your request, I sent you samples of the kind of journalism I was then doing, together with two or three of my poems, the bad as well as those I think good. I have not heard from you since.

  Could you let me have my roll of typescript back? Pound has asked me to send him something for Exile, and I think I sent you my only copy of a story which might serve his purpose, called ‘The Salad Basket’.

  I suppose I may take it, from your silence, that there is no prospect of my being allowed to do a few reviews for the Criterion?

  Eliot replied almost immediately to apologise for the delay and to return the material Bunting had requested, adding that he had seen enough to assure him that he would like Bunting to review for the Criterion and that he would send him something in a couple of months or so. ‘I should very much like to see more of your original work, such as “The Salad Basket.”’122

  Bunting and Eliot were by no means close but they kept in touch. Bunting recalled meeting him again, in a vignette from 1940s London:

  More astonishing [than Schmidt’s, also in Charlotte Street], a restaurant, I forget its name, further up the street on the other side, where I used to go for a modest meal which was quite adequate Parisienne cookery, cheap. I went back there one day about 1947 and found the same little room, but instead of the tables with the checkered cloths on them, there were tables with the most wonderful damask, these little shaded lights, and all the rest of the deluxe styling. I looked at the menu – I got a terrible shock! The prices were prodigious. I did eat my meal there and paid for it – it nearly broke me. That night I was having dinner with T. S. El
iot in the Cafe Royal. I told him of my astonishment. He said, let me guess which one it is. He named it at once, adding, ‘I believe that is now the most expensive restaurant in Europe.’123

  The depth of their relationship is measured by the fact that Eliot is an incidental bystander in a story about restaurant prices.124

  Villon

  The fifteenth-century French poet François Villon was much in vogue in the 1920s. Pound had completed his own operatic treatment of Villon’s Le Testament de Villon in Paris before Bunting arrived there,125 but was still ostensibly working on it with George Antheil in February 1924 in Rapallo. The concert version was premiered on 29 June 1926 in Paris126 and the BBC broadcast a version of the scores in 1931. Justin McCarthy’s play, If I Were King, an imaginative reconstruction of Villon’s swashbuckling life, was released as a film in 1920. Rudolf Friml’s hugely popular operetta, The Vagabond King, which appeared in 1925 was based on McCarthy’s play and Villon was also a major character in the 1927 film The Beloved Rogue. Bertolt Brecht based the poet in his Baal, written in 1918, on Villon. A poet who was unknown as such in his own time had won global recognition across a broad cultural spectrum by the time Bunting started his own ‘Villon’.

  Villon was born as François Montcorbier (or François des Loges) into poverty in 1431 but entered the University of Paris and took Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees there. We know little of Villon’s life but some events were recorded by the Parisian authorities, the first being a knife fight involving Villon, two priests, a Breton scholar and a girl named Isabeau. Villon spent much of his life in various prisons, and what we know of these experiences is contained in his Testament. He disappeared from history at the age of thirtytwo.

  Because Bunting published little and destroyed most of what he wrote we have little sense of his early development as a poet. He emerges with a fully developed, mature voice in ‘Villon’. As Philip Norman said in a feature on Bunting in the Sunday Times over forty years later, in ‘Villon’, ‘he seemed to conquer poetry all at once’.127 ‘Villon’ is a poem that is worth looking at more closely for a number of reasons. First, it is an exceptionally good and greatly overlooked poem, certainly one worth being distracted by. Second, it is Bunting’s first substantial poem to survive into his Collected Poems in 1968, so it is developmentally important. It is also a poem that draws on his own experience of prisons in England, France, Italy and Norway in the previous six years. Before we look at the poem, however, we need to clear away a pile of undergrowth that has collected around one word. That word is ‘sonata’. All Bunting’s longer poems, with the exception of ‘Chomei at Toyama’, are ‘sonatas’. But what does that mean?

  Bunting was asked in April 1976 what he meant by his assertion that Briggflatts was ‘organised on musical analogy’. His reply is an important statement:

  You could quite easily borrow the formal organisation which developed in the 18th century and early 19th century that is used in musical sonatas and symphonies and so forth. It’s a matter of making the rhythms develop and shift around themselves chiefly, partly having something to adapt in the way of matter to that. The thing seems to have happened, whether consciously or not, first with Walt Whitman, and was later developed by Pound. Whitman’s best pieces are very much like what Lizst was writing at the time – as far as form goes. Pound takes over that general idea in ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. And I carried the analogy further. Eliot did something not quite the same, at the same time. I pointed out to him – he hadn’t noticed it himself – in 1922 or 1923, that the form ‘The Waste Land’ took, if you omitted the short fourth movement, is exactly that of a classical sonata. This seems to have stuck in his mind, so that when he wrote the ‘Four Quartets’, each of them an exact copy of the shape of ‘The Waste Land’, he calls them quartets – quartets being normally a sonata form. He takes it a rather different way than I would have done, but it is making use of what you can derive from the musical form, and doing it with great skill.128

  Bunting’s frequently articulated belief in the inextricability of music and poetry was, as we have seen, a guiding principle of his own work since the very beginning of his career. The two forms are ‘twin sisters born of the primitive dance’.129 His notes for a lecture at Newcastle University show that he presented ninteenth-century poetry as providing, Whitman excepted, no more than minor variations on ‘the general Spenserian model of English poetry’. He traces a tradition of ‘cadence’ in English prose from Miles Coverdale’s English translation of the Psalms to Swift’s Tale of a Tub via two of Queen Mary’s three Oxford martyrs, Thomas Cranmer (who wrote the 1549 Book of Common Prayer) and the preacher Hugh Latimer, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici and Hydriotaphia and James Macpherson’s Ossian.130 Bunting believed that Whitman was the only ninteenth century poet who moved this particular tradition forward:

  What Whitman adds to this is to make all the words part of the machinery which causes them to cohere into a poem. The echoes & repeats are not confined to cadences. But he usually avoids immediate repeats or repeats that are too exact & obvious. Yet the taking up of a sound or rhythm again & again in a poem has just the same effect as taking up a theme, more or less transformed, has in music.131

  Bunting isn’t saying that Whitman is the nineteenth-century’s greatest poet. Wordsworth was. Wordsworth was, for Bunting, the greatest narrative poet since Chaucer, but what Whitman did for prosody paved the way for Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius and the modernist revolution in poetry. (Bunting also saw Hardy as an honorable proto-modernist.)132 As Peter Makin says,

  it is fundamental to Bunting’s idea that the word-sound it concerns is a shaping not of the prettier glitterings of aural surface (consonant patterns and the like) but of what is much more basic in the English language: rhythm. Thus Pound’s Propertius was a springboard for real development because its aural shaping was essentially rhythmic … The return to earlier-stated melodic themes, ‘more or less transformed’, is one of the builders of major structure in post-Renaissance Western music. Thus the concluding event in classical sonata form is the return of a melodic motif or motifs in a changed key. If a rhythm motif in poetry can do what a melodic theme does in music, rhythm ceases to be mere texture and becomes structure maker.133

  This was quite different from the lesson T. S. Eliot tried to teach Bunting. Asked in 1981 how he started a new poem Bunting said that his poems ‘would usually begin by catching a rhythm which is not overdone’, a trick learned from Eliot: ‘Eliot once told me when I was very young and I said I had some difficulties about what to say because I hadn’t the experience, and he said, “You don’t bother about what you have to say. Try like me, write rhymes, quatrains, and the rhymes will tell you what to say.” That I suppose must be how he wrote “Burbank with a Baedecker” and so on.’134 A few years later he illustrated Eliot’s point about rhyme by referring to, ‘the poems of the hippopotamus cycle, the Sweeney ones for instance, you will soon observe that Eliot is doing just that. Those poems are based on words that rhyme and not on any philosophical basis.’135

  Bunting believed that what Whitman and Pound took from music ‘was chiefly the notion of modifying a theme, a rhythmic theme, especially, and – bit by bit – until it could be merged in a counter-theme or in some other way combined with it. Pound was fascinated by the idea of fugue, but he found it necessary to change that notion fundamentally, and use images rather than rhythms to carry on a counterpoint in the reader’s mind.’136 Bunting was aware that the connection between music and poetry could be exaggerated (‘they’re twins, but they’re not identical twins’)137 but he believed that ‘music and poetry are very very closely intertwined, and … as soon as you begin to part them things begin to go wrong’.138 Bunting was keen to draw a distinction between the way he and Eliot had used a ‘form’. ‘I’ve never wanted to be precise in his sense of precision’, he explained to Victoria Forde in 1972:

  Now to follow anything very closely
, as the young Eliot followed certain verse forms – Jacobean blank verse for instance – is to some extent to be controlled by the model instead of controlling it. Music has suggested certain forms and certain details to me, but I have not tried to be consistent about it. Rather, I’ve felt the spirit of a form, or of a procedure, without trying to reproduce it in any way that could be demonstrated on a blackboard. (There’s no ‘one-one’ relationship between my movements and any of Scarlatti’s.) You could say the same of the detail of sound. Eliot – and Kipling – show prodigious skill in fitting words to a prearranged pattern, very admirable: yet they don’t do it without losing some suppleness … I never have, on the one hand, something I want to say, and on the other, a form I want to say it in. My matter is born of the form – or the form of the matter, if you care to think that I just conceive things musically.139

  But in what sense can a poem be said to be a ‘sonata’? We have seen that Bunting was dismissive of Eliot’s ‘Preludes’, although not entirely so. In an interview in 1981 he observed that they ‘didn’t have much relation to preludes of early pianists but nonetheless the aim was a similar one, and the effect was often very similar – some of them, not only like Chopin, but rather like preludes from Bach’s to his fugues. Something of that must have been in Mr Eliot’s mind I thought. Perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps the title was just a catch. I don’t think so though.’140 It’s true that there doesn’t seem to be much structural correlation between Eliot’s poem and, say, Chopin’s music. There is also the metaphysical problem of a prelude existing in the absence of the thing to which it is a prelude. Can a prelude exist if its reason for existing doesn’t? Bunting’s relationship with the sonata form was much more developed. Although he doesn’t seem to have acknowledged it Pound’s influence may have been critical here. According to David Gordon, Bunting learned from Pound in 1922 that Joyce had planned Ulysses as a sonata and Pound would have introduced Bunting to the work on the eighteenth-century sonata of the Paris Conservatory’s professor of harmony, Albert Lavignac, whose ‘consummate manual’, as Pound called it, La Musique et les Musiciens, had been published in 1895.141 Lavignac described the sonata carefully: