A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Days‘ll hold you hallowed and away from shoddy –

  You can’t stand making friends with everybody.256

  I think that Zukofsky is the closest poet to Bunting in spirit. For Zukofsky, as for Bunting, the sound of a poem was its most important quality: ‘The melody! the rest is accessory: … /My one voice.’257 Elsewhere in “A-12” Zukofsky is more explicit:

  I’ll tell you.

  About my poetics –

  An integral

  Lower limit speech

  Upper limit music

  No?258

  As Charles Bernstein says, ‘The music of poetry, in Zukofsky’s sense, refers to the intricate patterning of sound that everywhere pervades his work. This poetry leads with sound and you can never go wrong following the sound sense, for it is only after you hear the words that you are able to locate their meanings.’259 It is true that close attention to sound patterns delivers Zukofsky’s message just as close attention to syntax usually delivers Yeats’. The clue is here:

  The vowels

  abide

  in consonants

  like

  Souls

  in

  bodies –260

  In ‘Peri Poietikes’, in a sideswipe at Sir Philip Sidney, Zukofsky ridiculed poets who were obsessed by metre, much as Pound had complained of English translators of Homer who were ‘deaved with syntax.’261

  What about measure, I learnt:

  Look in your own ear and read …

  Mind, don’t run to mind

  boys’ Greeks’ metres gnome,

  rummage in tee tomes, tee-tums,

  tum-tees.262

  Zukofsky also shared Bunting’s preference for controlled simplicity:

  Everything should be as simple as it can be,

  Says Einstein,

  But not simpler.263

  Zukofsky is more playful than Bunting, but rarely as sonorous: ‘For Zukofsky, it’s all about toggling: between I and I, it and we, eye and you, seen and unseen, present and absent, here and there; a re-doubling-asre- doubting of the senses. “See sun, and think shadow”.’264 Bunting was himself well aware of the ludic quality of Zukofsky’s poetry in contrast with his own, or indeed with most poetry written in Britain, seeing immigration as the key factor, and noting that homonyms and puns are:

  a constant feature of his poetry, connecting things together; not only as jokes, [but as] a serious means of knitting together the poetry; as would be done, by an English poet, rather with the ancient cousinships of words which you hardly even notice. Puns are much more prominent. That is more natural to an American than to an Englishman because of the difference that has grown up between the two dialects because of the immigration.265

  The image of Zukofsky pirouetting with cap and bells around an unsmiling Bunting as the English poet chisels his great monument is a caricature of course. Bunting’s poetry has its light-hearted moments and Zukofsky wouldn’t exactly fill out an anthology of twentieth-century comic verse. But caricatures can be useful shorthand and certainly reading Zukofsky alongside Bunting is fascinating. They have distinct voices but they wind around each other and you can often hear phrases in both poets that could have been written by the other. Bunting wouldn’t have written:

  Ye nó we see hay

  io we hay we see

  hay io we sée no … etc

  but a few stanzas earlier there is a short passage of Buntingesque lyricism:

  Neither can bent hobnails flung

  chance’s play equated aleatorical notes

  hurt public oblivion, no more

  than skiddaw rock emitting tones:

  the sea is our road

  the land for our use,

  damp cannot warm the houses –266

  It’s hard to keep Bunting’s voice out of these lines. It is not my intention to denigrate the earlier lines from Zukofsky as nonsense. It is a carefully wrought adaptation of an Arapaho song, but one cannot hear Bunting in it. These quotations from Zukofsky are taken from the middle of “A”, an enormous poem in twenty-four parts that he wrote between 1928 and 1974, but Bunting’s influence can be felt throughout Zukofsky’s work, and vice versa. The stonemason in Briggflatts appears as a prototype in Zukofsky’s 4 Other Countries:

  Sculptures

  in the shadow

  of round

  wall –

  Primitive

  monumental

  nameless

  as the carver

  Who hewed –

  constraining

  his shapes

  to rocks267

  Zukofsky’s poem ‘The’ contains only five words, including the title:

  The

  The

  desire

  of

  towing

  Zukofsky explained to Ian Hamilton Finlay that ‘he’d been thinking of tugboats, “which tow very seriously”’.268 ‘The’ is a masterpiece of condensation and so close to the spirit of the opening lines of the ‘Coda’ to Briggflatts that the two poets seem to be operating in tandem. The only overlapping feature is the reference to towing, but both are infused by the spirit of a relentless sea-borne force that drives our destinies. ‘The’ had a profound effect on Bunting. He wrote to Pound in 1935 that he had been ‘looking at [Zukofsky’s] “The” again the other day I thought it much more accomplished than anything I’m ever likely to do.’269

  Bunting reflected towards the end of his life that ‘you could go a long way before you found two poets who are so close in their general ideas who remain so completely different.270 A few months before his death he returned to the theme:

  The curious thing is that he and I, from the moment we met, which would be in 1930 I think, until within a couple of years of his death, were very, very close in writing. Everything I wrote I sent to Zukofsky and paid great attention to whatever he said about it. And about three quarters of what he wrote he sent to me with the same object and for the same thing, close, detailed criticism which he usually attended to – not always, but usually. Our output certainly must look very different. His is very different indeed from mine, mine very different from his. And though somebody looking at our verse might think we came from quite different points of view, he would be wrong ultimately. The conception of what a poem is, and what it should be, and what it should be about, and so on, would be pretty much the same.271

  In spite of the opportunity to spend time with Zukofsky and William Carlos Williams Bunting was dismissive of his time spent in the US, although he recognised that in 1930, at the depth of the Depression, his timing wasn’t perfect:

  I soon found out that I wasn’t going to earn anything in America. American papers didn’t at all like my way of things. It was better to go back and see how long we could live on nothing in Italy – rather than the very short time you can live on nothing in the United States … I was ready to write music criticism for anybody who would employ me. I think I did some for one of the Philadelphia papers. There were some for the New York Times and some in The Nation, but you didn’t get much for them and there weren’t many of them in the first place. There certainly was no living in it.272

  Bunting wrote to Harriet Monroe, somewhat tactlessly misspelling her name, on 2 August 1930: ‘I am now in the United States, and seeing what prices you Americans charge for eats I could very well do with the price of my “Villon”. If I were likely to be in Chicago before the end of September I would collect it in person. But I am never likely to reach Chicago at all, nor to get farther than the Brooklyn cemetery unless I can collect it before that. Besides, I have got married and my wife eats too.’273

  Bunting’s heart was never in journalism but the American media seems to have been more inhospitable even than the Fleet Street he detested. He complained to Pound: ‘Journalism, nix. The atmosphere of Irita Van Dorens office at Herald Tribune nearly finished me off – the rows of books for review, the general tiredness of books in everybody, the hatred of the authors who inflict them on them.’274

&nbs
p; Marian’s recollections of Bunting’s attempts to secure paid writing work in 1930 pull no punches, although she admits that ‘it is almost impossible for me to give … any account of Basil Bunting that is not highly emotional’. She told Roger Guedalla that Bunting wrote nothing for any paper while in New York.

  He had lunch with Malcom Cowley but they did not hit it off & no writing of Basil’s appeared in the Nation. Much to my disappointment since this was the kind of writing I had hoped he would do. During his stay in N.Y. Basil made no attempt to work, to obtain commissions, and did not even (except for the luncheon w[ith] Cowley) present the letters of introduction to possibly productive contacts with which Pound had supplied him in quantity.275

  By his own account he had been ‘disgustingly lethargic. It seems as though Italy were the only climate in which I can get up any energy’,276 but the problem was clearly more deep-rooted than that. It had been building up since his troubled adolescence. He wrote to Pound: ‘I fell into worse than doldrums a while ago and still cant get up anything like distant relative of energy. Why I cant say. It’s a recurrent disease with me. Environment has something to do with it, but I don’t think suffices to explain it.’277

  But it wasn’t completely miserable. Bunting and Marian had an active social life. William Carlos Williams wrote to Zukofsky in January 1931: ‘The Buntings … and I had supper in Brookly [sic] last week.’ Bunting was part of a team that ‘flayed’ Carlos Williams for his naive reverence for classical Greek beauty.278

  These were Prohibition years in the US. Alcohol hadn’t been freely available since 1920 and many years later Bunting recalled the comedy of Prohibition in conversation with Victoria Forde: ‘He told me that once in Rhode Island when Margaret de Silver said she would have to go to New York because she was out of whiskey, Bunting forestalled her by going out and asking the first policeman he saw where he could find a bootlegger. “You came to the right person,” the officer replied. “I’m the only bootlegger in town!”’279 He told Contempo magazine in 1932 that prohibition ‘is the most effective red-herring yet invented. It beats even religion for keeping people from thinking about more fundamental structural defects in their society. It beats even baseball.’280

  Towards the end of 1930 Bunting’s six month visa was due to expire. According to Marian this in itself was no excuse to return to Italy. She wrote in 1968 that

  he could have renewed it by going to Canada but did not choose to do this. Instead acting on a suggestion from Pound, Basil decided to give up trying to make a go of it in N.Y. & decided we should go to live near Pound in Rapallo. The idea thrilled me, but I was reluctant to leave a good job and proceed with these plans when we had no means of support … From this time on our life was one nightmare, for me, at least, of financial insecurity.281

  REDIMICULUM MA TELLARUM

  During his tumultuous time in Rapallo, Paris and London Bunting had been writing the poems that would form his first collection, Redimiculum Matellarum (‘necklace of chamberpots’), which was published privately in Milan in 1930 and priced at ‘Half a Crown or Twelve Lire’. Everything about this slim volume is interesting, from the copyright line: ‘This volume is copyright in all civilised countries but not (yet) in the United States. March 1930’ to the epigraph: ‘La même justesse d’esprit qui nous fait écrire de bonnes choses nous fait appréhender qu’elles ne le soient pas assez pour mériter d’être lues’282 to the preface: ‘These poems are byproducts of an interrupted and harassed apprenticeship. I thank Margaret De Silver for bailing me out of Fleet Street: after two years convalescence from an attack of journalism I am beginning to recover my honesty. Rapallo, 1930’; and then triumphantly to the poems, nearly all of which survived Bunting’s editorial scythe in his first Collected Poems. Redimiculum Matellarum starts with ‘Villon’. A section head ‘Carmina’ is followed by a rather Yeatsian epigraph on the title page:

  Coryphée gravefooted precise, dance to the gracious music

  Thoughts make moving about, dance to the mind’s delicate

  [symphony.

  These lines are from a subsequently discarded poem. (A coryphée is a leading ballet dancer just beneath the soloists in importance.) The poems in ‘Carmina’ are ‘Weeping oaks grieve’, ‘I am agog for foam’, ‘Against the tricks of time’ (which was omitted from Collected Poems although the five central stanzas appear as ‘Farewell ye sequent graces’), ‘After the grimaces of capitulation’, ‘Narciss, my numerous cancellations prefer’ and ‘Empty vast days’.

  A second section, ‘Etcetera’, consists of six short poems: ‘An arles, an arles for my hiring’, ‘Loud intolerant bells’, ‘Dear be still!’, ‘Chorus of Furies (overheard)’, ‘Darling of Gods and Men’ and ‘As to my heart’.283

  The final page of Redimiculum Matellarum has a quotation from the epilogue of book six of Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables:

  Bornons ici cette carriêre,

  Les longs ouvrages me font peur.284

  The only review that Redimiculum Matellarum attracted was by Louis Zukofsky in the June 1931 issue of Poetry, and that review was observant rather than evaluative,285 although Pound immortalised it Canto LXXIV:

  hast killed the urochs and the bison sd/Bunting

  doing six months after that war was over

  as pacifist tempted with chicken but declined to approve

  of war ‘Redimiculum Matellorum’

  privately printed

  to the shame of various critics

  nevertheless the state can lend money

  and the fleet that went out to Salamis

  was built by state loan to the builders

  hence the attack on classical studies

  and in this war were John Gould, Bunting and cummings

  as against thickness and fatness286

  By May 1930 Bunting reported to Louise Morgan that Redimiculum Matellarum was ‘actually selling and now nearly out of print – without ads or reviews I think that is pretty good.’287

  RAPALLO, 1931–1933

  On their return to Rapallo from New York the Buntings settled down

  half-way up the mountain, and on the whole it was a very pleasant time. I got a good deal of poetry written, I enjoyed conversation, enjoyed sailing my boat, enjoyed the sunshine. And enjoyed having a baby. My first daughter. Pound was there then and various other people. Yeats was there. I saw a good deal of Yeats. But of few others. I don’t enjoy literary society or literary conversation.288

  Annie Bunting had joined her son in Rapallo in the spring of 1930. This was more than a vacation since, according to Victoria Forde, her furniture followed from Newcastle upon Tyne later in the year: ‘If she had left Italy when Basil went to the United States, she had returned and moved into her own apartment before Basil and his wife arrived in Rapallo in February 1931 since Marian remembered her already there and well liked by Dorothy Pound.289

  Marian was pregnant with their first child for most of 1931 and in November she went to Genoa to give birth to Bourtai, named after the nineyear- old bride of Genghis Khan, a procedure that was at least partly funded by the $50 1931 Lyric Prize Bunting had just received for ‘Villon’ from Poetry, as Pound had predicted – ‘I spose Basil B’s 50 will be absorbed in maternity fees.’290 Marian had a difficult time giving birth to Bourtai and she remained in hospital for several weeks. She recalled in 1968 that

  when Bourtai was born we did not have one cent, but on that day Basil got a poetry prize for $50.00 which paid the hospital expenses. Pounds gave us $300 & when I had to stay in the hospital (no pre-natal care) from Nov 8 to Jan 13th my family & everybody pitched in so we were inundated with cash – We stayed w. Mrs. Bunting after I came home from hospital – it was fantastic. I was so nervous I cried if the baby slept & if she was awake I was sure that 10 lb. hunk would die if we didn’t fight for her life every minute. [Annie] was a meticulous housekeeper – she had a beautiful kitchen but wouldn’t let me cook a chicken in it for fear of getting it messy. When we left she had the whol
e apartment re-decorated and the furniture re-covered.291

  Bourtai clearly recovered quickly from her difficult birth. Within months Bunting wrote to Dorothy Pound that she ‘has demonstrated reactionary instincts by tearing up the portrait of Lenin. Ezra thinks that qualifies her for the Balilla.’292 Marian claimed that the $50 prize from Poetry comprised Bunting’s entire earnings during their seven year marriage and yet that, with her allowance, they lived in ‘comparative luxury’.293

  A beautiful lyric embedded in the second part of Briggflatts describes Bunting’s life in Italy. In Bunting’s recordings of the poem you can almost feel him relaxing into it. Although loaded with self-recrimination it captures a sense of ease and fulfilment that appears nowhere else in Briggflatts:

  It tastes good, garlic and salt in it,

  with the half-sweet white wine of Orvieto

  on scanty grass under great trees

  where the ramparts cuddle Lucca.

  It sounds right, spoken on the ridge

  between marine olives and hillside

  blue figs, under the breeze fresh

  with pollen of Appenine sage.

  It feels soft, weed thick in the cave

  and the smooth wet riddance of Antonietta’s

  bathing suit, mouth ajar for

  submarine Amalfitan kisses.

  It looks well on the page, but never

  well enough. Something is lost

  when wind, sun, sea upbraid

  justly an unconvinced deserter.294

  Rapallo was indeed a kind of paradise. Yeats loved it:

  ‘Sligo in heaven’ murmured uncle William

  When the mist finally settled down on Tigullio.295

  Yeats described Rapallo’s irresistible charm in ‘A Packet for Ezra Pound’:

  Mountains that shelter the bay from all but the south wind, bare brown branches of low vines and of tall trees blurring their outline as though with a soft mist; houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting. Rapallo’s thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water’s edge … On the broad pavement by the sea pass Italian peasants or working people, people out of the little shops, a famous German dramatist, the barber’s brother looking like an Oxford don, a British retired skipper, an Italian prince descended from Charlemagne and no richer than the rest of us, a few tourists seeking tranquillity.296