A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  In the third and fourth lines the noise seems to lose some of its potency: the hills and olive are ‘deaf’ to the bells’ ‘oratory’, and ‘dim to farce of man’s fashioning’, the artificial, regulated, fettered tolling of the bells. As the landscape changes space is opened up. The antiquity of nature (‘stars’, ‘hills’, ‘easeless age’) is contrasted with the modern ‘farce’ of man. However, the latent threat, which initially provokes the actively defensive image of ‘the shrinking nightflower’, hasn’t disappeared in this landscape, as the ‘toll’ from the word ‘intolerant’ echoes in the word ‘olive’. This epitomises the subtle and powerful tensions Bunting conjures within the poem’s soundscape. The olive, a symbol of peace, is disturbed in its ‘easeless age’; it ‘stirs and dozes’ rather than sleeping peacefully. Without the word ‘easeless’ we might be tempted to read the two verbs in a tranquil isolation. The words ‘deaf ’, ‘stirs’, ‘dozes’, and ‘dim’, however, are separated by ‘easeless’ – an uncomfortable, uneasy presence in the stanza. I read ‘easeless’ as a word which interrupts and at the same time captures the entire movement of the stanza, positioned in the final line to remind us of the unsettling presence of the bells which dominates the first three lines. All the natural images seem vulnerable and threatened.

  The poem has an extraordinary sonorous density. An ABAB rhyme sequence reflects the regularity of tolling, amplifying the pervasive bells. It is another structural restraint which contains the natural images that struggle for freedom: shepherds, stars, ‘abstracts … absorbed into the incoherence’. The regularity of a rhyme scheme like this might suggest the inflexible and restrictive conventions of pre-modernist poetry. In the first stanza the end rhyme traces the now familiar conflict between indifference and restriction. ‘Closes’ rhymes with ‘dozes’ to suggest a quiet resilience to the impotent bells, unable to wake or startle the ‘deaf hills’ and ‘olive’, and unable to permeate the nightflowers’ ‘tender’ protection of its ‘stars’, closed off to the noise. But the images are also closed within the rhyme pattern. ‘Hectoring’ and ‘fashioning’ couple to evoke a sense of harassment and artificiality, antagonising the dozing and closing. There is a similar antagonistic effect in the second stanza where ‘solitude’ rhymes with ‘private features of your mood’, and ‘disembody’ with ‘fray your shoddy’. This alternating rhyme pattern both emphasises and enacts the tensions and conflicts.

  The poem’s epigraph: ‘Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave’ reaches into the final lines. This world we have ‘desiccated’ and subordinated with a Christian totalitarianism is a world that is dying within us, closing a silent grave around itself like the nightflower closing itself around its stars in the first lines. Christian symbolism has even appropriated the most natural spiritual images, such as the stars which primitive man used to navigate through the incoherence and beautiful enormity of the world, and shepherds, nomadic men who live freely within it in a close relationship with nature. The sound of Christianity (‘Loud intolerant bells’) saturates the poem. The epigraph comes from Milton’s ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’ so the presence of Christ is with us from the very beginning. The ‘fettered ghosts’ are those of a ‘damnèd crew’ that ‘Our Babe to show his Godhead true,/Can in his swaddling bands control … ’ The conflicts Bunting approaches in this poem reflect the conflict between monotheism and paganism that is integral to the narrative Milton weaves in his. Milton’s poem is utterly engrossed in the music and sounds of God, his voice, man’s voice, nature’s voice, and the resonant and spiritual relationships and clashes between them.

  Bunting absolutely loathed this kind of analysis. His frequent quarrels with academia were, as Peter Lewis says, motivated by a desire to ‘protect poetry from … a type of analytical criticism that promised to offer up its “meaning” or “message” or “significance”’.227 Bunting may have scorned it but this analysis of ‘Loud intolerant bells’ is an attempt to show how much craft underpins this poem. Every word works hard to pull together complementary and contradictory ‘meanings’, but every word too is a note in the overall music of the poem. The poet was mastering his craft during his twenties and if ‘Villon’ is the most impressive expression of that craft his early lyrics are evidence of very precise technique.

  RAPALLO, 1928–1930

  These years in England, ‘earning a very meagre living and growing stupid’, had been largely wasted but,

  then I kicked, decided that I’d rather not earn a living than write any more reviews for weeklies, and have been the better for it ever since. I tried my own North Country for a while, and it wasn’t so bad but I got very little done that I wanted to keep, so I took advice and went to Berlin and it was the worst thing I ever did. In the end to save my sanity I went suddenly to the station and bought a ticket for Italy to look up Pound again. And here I’ve been ever since, with the exception of eight months in the States to get married.228

  After six months in the Simonside Hills Bunting first ‘cleared off to Germany – but for a very short time, for I found I didn’t like the Germans at all. And then into Italy again. I went to Rapallo and settled down there close to Pound.’229 Pound wrote to his mother in October 1928 from Rapallo: ‘Bunting is exmusic critic of the no longer extant London ‘Outlook’, wanted or rejected by the police in several countries.’230 Buried in all this is a casually announced, anonymous tragedy. Bunting wrote to Pound at the end of 1928, ‘I am off for the continent, and I hope to be in Italy sometime in the spring and I hope to visit Rapallo and I hope to see you there. My girl died.’231

  Bunting was back in Rapallo when Pound wrote to his mother from there on 3 March 1929232 and by the summer he was in love. Marian Gray Culver, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, was in Venice as part of the European tour her father had presented her with on her graduation from Columbia University. Marian recalled their meeting on Corpus Domini day some forty years later: ‘We were both staying in a pension in the Clock Tower in Venice. We watched Mussolini’s Black Shirts give an exhibition to the music of “Giovinezza” and watched a solemn procession march around the Piazza and into St. Marks. There was even a Cardinal from Rome present to mark the occasion.’233

  Marian was immediately impressed by his erudition. ‘B’s standards were very high & I can remember his going over my library (I carried Van Doren’s anthology of World Poetry around Europe with me). Basil got hold of it while we were in Venice … & he went thru it page by page saying “Shit, Shit, Shit, Shit; he’s left out the best poems in most cases! (and quoted them) He doesn’t know a God-damn thing about Poetry etc. etc.”’234

  When Bunting met Marian he was trying valiantly to interest the newly established publishing company, Wishart & Company, in a translation of Paterne Berrichon’s 1912 biography of his brother-in-law, Jean-Arthur Rimbaud. He wrote in April 1929 to C. H. Rickword at Wishart to offer it as a ‘companion book to your brother’s’ for 30/- per thousand words, noting along the way that the originating French publisher, Mercure de France, would require £24 for the rights. At that price he could guarantee to finish in two months ‘well done, an improvement on the original etc. etc.’235

  Rickword wasn’t especially impressed by this idea. Berrichon was out of date, Mercure wanted far too much money ‘and so, if I may say so, do you. Even the great Scott Moncrieff only gets about a pound per thousand!’236 Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff was the period’s most celebrated translator from French and was just completing his masterly translation of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Bunting was never short of chutzpah.

  In this letter Rickword also told Bunting that Higgins had mentioned to him the fact that Bunting had ‘unearthed an Austrian’ whom he considered worth translating. ‘Bertie has got the details wrong again,’ Bunting replied. ‘It is not an Austrian but a Hungarian and I haven’t unearthed him, he is confoundedly famous already. Name of Jokay, novelist. Probably some little bits of his big output are translated already.’237 Most of Mór Jókai’s o
utput had been available in English for over twenty years. Rickword wasn’t very interested in this idea either.238

  Bunting was restless as soon as he arrived in Rapallo. He told Louise Morgan as early as April 1929 that he was by no means sure that he would stay: ‘I am fond of the place, but after Ezra & Yeats & Antheil are gone it might be as well for me to make a change of scene & avoid being bored in a place where I’ve never yet made any but good memories. So I don’t know where I’ll be in June. I don’t want to live in London again yet not before 1930. And France is still forbidden. Perhaps the south of Italy – or Greece.’239

  The tiny resort, however, and its celebrated artists stirred Bunting’s creativity. Five of the poems he wrote in 1929 went the distance to Collected Poems. ‘Dear be still!’, a poem ‘which is quantitative’, as he told an audience in February 1982,240 is a riposte to Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’, celebrating delayed gratification:

  Dear be still! Time’s start of us lengthens slowly.

  Bright round plentiful nights ripen and fall for us.

  Those impatient thighs will be bruised soon enough.241

  He was still experimenting with metre. As Victoria Forde points out, the music of ‘Dear be still!’ revolves around the skilful use of spondees242 but there is still a languorous fin de siécle tone about this poem.

  Generally the 1929 odes show the poet in an uncompromising mood. Ode 11, ‘To a Poet who advised me to preserve my fragments and false starts’, is a harsh riposte to what was probably well-meant advice:

  Narciss, my numerous cancellations prefer

  slow limpness in the damp dustbins amongst the peel

  tobacco-ash and ends spittoon lickings litter

  of labels dry corks breakages and a great deal

  of miscellaneous garbage picked over by

  covetous dustmen and Salvation Army sneaks

  to one review-rid month’s printed ignominy,

  the public detection of your decay, that reeks.243

  Ode 12, ‘An arles, an arles’, takes a slightly more light-hearted view of the role of the poet but it is hardly free from bitterness:

  An arles, an arles for my hiring,

  O master of singers, an arlespenny!

  –Well sung singer, said Apollo,

  but in this trade we pay no wages.

  I too was once a millionaire

  (in Germany during the inflation:

  when the train steamed into Holland

  I had not enough for a bun.)

  The Lady asked the Poet:

  Why do you wear your raincoat in the drawing-room?

  He answered: Not to show

  my arse sticking out of my trousers.

  His muse left him for a steady man.

  Quaeret in trivio vocationem.

  (he is cadging for drinks at the streetcorners.)244

  Victoria Forde detects ‘ironic humour’ in this poem245 which, I think, underplays the poet’s resentment that his work should be so little valued. The poem draws on a real experience. Bunting told a creative writing class many years later that he had once had to leave his overcoat on at a party so as ‘not to show my arse sticking out of my trousers’.246

  An arles is an advance payment on a signed contract and the salon scene in the poem is bracketed by his plea for cash at the opening and his destitution at the end, ‘arles’ playing off ‘arse’. In between, in a beau monde vignette, the poet’s honesty causes him to blow his opportunity to raise funds from a benefactress. The implication is that by holding up a mirror to the world the poet automatically excludes himself from it.

  Bunting wrote to Otto Theis’ wife, Louise Morgan, in April 1929. He had been entertaining Margaret de Silver’s son for the previous ten days or so and, Pound being away in Venice, his chief source of conversation was W. B. Yeats. He gave an intriguing glimpse of the ageing poet: ‘He walks about – absent: sees nothing, apparently. But his huge curiosity is busy all the time, & in the evenings there comes upon him an urgent need of conversation and he lets loose metaphysics, mysticism, anecdotes, literary criticism and the history of Ireland all stirred up well together. References to Sligo have the power of making him look almost young again.’247

  At some point in 1929 Bunting went south. He wrote to Otto Theis on 28 Setember 1929 from Santa Caterina, Amalfi, telling him that ‘Counting syllables is the only way to write!’, and adding a poem that has not been published previously:

  Do not think I am contented here

  Although I am idle, wellfed and brown.

  There’s nothing to see but the sun

  And nothing but the wind to hear.

  The sea is always flashing messages

  But I can’t decode his conversation

  Mountains give no occupation

  To the mind: damn’d sterile ridges

  As to the natives, they are gay but dull,

  And that imbecile who tries to teach me

  Is the blockhead of Italy:

  Teacher! Pah! Qu’il me lèche le cul!

  Besides this, to say nothing of the flies

  Or of the other visitors, the wine

  Is Spanish toothwash (that’s wine) –

  And the long and short of it is

  I may turn up in London any day

  And put up with the noise, to get blotto

  In some good pub with you Otto,

  And listen to what you’ve to say!248

  He wrote to Louise Morgan, by now Theis’ wife and working for Everyman magazine, from Amalfi on 18 October. He was at that time probably briefly juggling two romances, one with Marian and one with Antonietta, with whom he shared, as we shall learn, ‘submarine Amalfitan kisses’. Morgan had asked Bunting to help her source a photograph of Ford Madox Ford but he couldn’t be of much help. Ford, he told her, had ‘quarrelled with everybody, even Ezra’ and no one seemed to know where he was. In any event there weren’t many pictures of Ford in existence because he was ‘too watery-bovine … to want his photo broadcast’. Although he couldn’t help much with the photograph he was keen for commissions from Everyman. Perhaps his anecdote about Yeats looking ‘almost young again’ had interested her enough to ask for an article on Yeats because Bunting told Morgan that he didn’t know Yeats’ poetry well enough to write one until he returned to Rapallo the following month, but that he could write articles on Pound and Eliot straight away as he knew their work ‘almost by heart’.249

  Bunting, disguised as ‘the late Mr Surtees’, sent an article on Yeats to Morgan from Rapallo early in the new year. He had been busy:

  I was in bed with the liver, and then my mother came here and then I went to Switzerland on a job for W.B.Y. and then it was Xmas, so I had a hell of a time getting back to work at all. This is done straight onto the machine at midnight with a very bad cold, in the hope that in those conditions all highbrow inclinations, (as well as all sense of the English language I fear), will be in abeyance. Hence the resurrection of the late Mr Surtees, who contributed once or twice to the Outlook. I can say nothing in favour of this timeserving and unscrupulous journalist except that he gives all his earnings to me – and that he is not known to Yeats!250

  Bunting wrote again to Morgan on 6 May 1930, two days before he left Rapallo for Frankfurt (to hear an Antheil opera), London and then New York, in a beleagured but cheerful mood. He enclosed an article which he hoped might get an airing in Everyman and, unusually, he wasn’t too worried about money: ‘My clothes are appalling, my prospects nil, I am quite cheerful and not bothering at all.’251 He was cheerful sometimes but he was occasionally sleeping rough in London and he wrote to Pound in June that he had

  got through one of the worst five weeks I have ever spent (including night on the embankment and Primrose Hill) and having apparently landed (but it is not quite sure yet) a commission to translate Lionardo da Vinci [sic] for the Mandrake people, two drafts have turned up that have been wandering uselessly about the world for over two months and I am able to go to the bloomi
ng U.S.A.

  He asked Pound for introductions in the US. His earnings in five ‘fairly strenuous weeks’ had been 31 shillings and 6 pence (around 30p a week at a time when the average weekly salary in the UK was £3.75).252

  A NEW YORK INTERLUDE, 1930

  Marian Culver, twenty-nine, of Wading River, New York, and Basil Bunting, thirty, of Rapallo were married on 9 July 1930 (not 1929 as in some accounts, including, surprisingly, Marian’s own)253 at Riverhead, Long Island. They lived in Wading River for a while and then moved to an apartment at 62 Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. Marian taught English in state schools and Bunting tried to find paid writing work. Bunting claimed to be almost allergic to artistic society, as we have seen, but in New York the Buntings’ friends included the poets, William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky, as well as the French critic René Taupin, the American artist Adolf Dehn, recently returned from Europe, and the Hungarian musician Tibor Serly.254

  On 11 July 1930 Bunting sent a postcard to Zukofsky which started a lifelong friendship:

  Dear Mr Zukofsky – Ezra Pound says I ought to look you up. May I?’255

  Nearly four years Bunting’s junior, Zukofsky had grown up as a Yiddish speaker in New York’s Jewish community. He became a Marxist early in life and his youthful poetry impressed Pound. Zukofsky is another relatively uncelebrated genius. His ‘A Foin Lass Bodders’ of 1940 is proto-rap:

  You may go now assuredly, my ballad,

  Where you please, you are indeed so embellished

  That those who’ve relished you more than their salad