A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  THE TRAVELLER: Sir, I would like you to see

  This very fine perfume invented by me.

  It penetrates more than the smell of a bug.

  It’s stronger than chloroform, attar of roses

  Or lemons in blossom. Its virtue suffuses

  Itself through the body – one drop on the skin

  Will make your intestines smell pleasant within,

  The sweat of your arm pits will be such a liquor

  As ladies delight in, and as for your feet,

  Wherever you set them a footprint of sweet

  Honeysuckle will be and inhere in the street

  For a month. It will vanquish the stifling fug

  Of the Tube or the odour of petrol and rubber

  In Great Portland Street or convert the damp slubber

  Of stale fish in Billingsgate into a chic-er

  Aroma than Coty can furnish, and quicker

  Than any explosion or Edison’s brains

  It will make a Kurot of the sewers and drains –

  You can sell off your urine for Clicquot!

  If you want to deodorize belches and farts

  To a delicate flavour of Pekoe

  Or conquer the stench of your sexual parts,

  We have tried out the mixture on several tarts

  And assure you it makes the vagina distill

  An odour of oranges. Now Sir, I will

  Take your order?

  THE CUSTOMER: That’s a poor stunt.

  Can’t you make oranges smell like a cunt?

  The second, ‘Grandma’s Complaint’ is more succinct:

  Yesterday morning my old man Jack

  Left off his waistcoat and got a stiff back;

  And the day before that the doddering wreck

  Left of his collar and got a stiff neck.

  I wish to the Lord that the bloody old crock

  Would leave off his trousers and get a stiff cock.

  Pound clearly enjoyed these diversions. Bunting sent him a truncated limerick from Tenerife in 1935:

  What a pity that Bela Bartok

  Cannot give his smug public a shock

  By writing in parts

  For the hiccups and farts

  And conducting his piece with

  Yes, obviously.395

  Poetry, the Bri’ish number

  By 1930 Bunting the poet was in play, although the material world was already leaving him behind. Pound had heard about Bunting’s nights on the streets:

  I hear via Lunnon that Mr. Buntin’ left them parts wearin the full regalia of the reignin’ house of Assam. He’d been sleeping on the Embankment for a time previous.396

  His friends were aware of the mild paranoia that he had started to display at Leighton Park School.397 Zukofsky’s reply suggests that there was already a cartoon element to Bunting’s behaviour, ‘The last I heard of Buntin’ some mysterious “they” wuz planning to send him to Colorado.’398

  In 1927 the 23-year-old Zukofsky had sent Pound ‘Poem beginning “The.”’ Pound published it in The Exile and suggested to Harriet Monroe that she give Zukofsky an issue of her magazine, Poetry, to edit. The result was the ‘Objectivists’ issue of February 1931. Pound had been Harriet Monroe’s ‘foreign correspondent’ since she founded Poetry in 1912. He had effectively launched the Imagiste movement in the second (November 1912) issue. In fact the ‘Imagistes’, Pound’s friends Richard Aldington and H.D., were unaware that they were part of a movement. H.D. was barely aware that she was a poet at that stage, let alone part of the vanguard of the ‘American Risorgimento’ that would make the Italian Renaissance ‘look like a tempest in a teapot!’399 At the outset Imagisme had no manifesto, no followers and no practitioners, but it was the birth of Pound the impresario. As Humphrey Carpenter puts it, Imagisme ‘was just a clearing of the ground, a blast to announce the appearance of a new circus-act’.400 Imagism (it became Anglicised in 1913), however meretricious, represented the first contractions of the birth of Modernist poetry.

  Nearly twenty years later Objectivism was only slightly better conceived. William Carlos Williams recalled the birth of Objectivism in his autobiography: ‘With Charles Reznikoff, a New York lawyer and writer of distinction, and George Oppen, in an apartment on Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, we together [with Zukofsky] inaugurated, first the Objectivist theory of the poem, and then the Objectivist Press. Three or four books were published, including my own Collected Poems. Then it folded.’

  Objectivism was a reaction against Imagism which, according to Williams, had been ‘useful in ridding the field of verbiage’ but which had run its course because it lacked any structure: ‘It had already dribbled off into so called “free verse” which, as we saw, was a misnomer. There is no such thing as “free verse”! Verse is measure of some sort. “Free verse” was without measure and needed none for its projected objectifications. Thus the poem had run down and became formally non extant.’

  The Objectivists argued that the poem is an object, ‘an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes. Therefore, being an object, it should be so treated and controlled – but not as in the past. For past objects have about them past necessities – like the sonnet – which have conditioned them and from which, as a form itself, they cannot be freed.’ It followed that, the poem being an object (‘like a symphony or a Cubist painting’) the poet’s job must be to create a new form for the poem, ‘to invent, that is, an object consonant with his day. This was what we wished to imply by Objectivism, an antidote, in a sense, to the bare image haphazardly presented in loose verse.’401

  Hugh Kenner, in his ground-breaking study of Modernism, The Pound Era, sees a direct US–Paris axis underneath Objectivism, ‘The Parisian 1920s underlie the term, language as if indifferent to hearers, and an American quality underlies it too, American preference for denotation over etymology, for the cut term over association and the channelled path.’402 In a nutshell Objectivism (vanished within a year and barely ever a movement as such) eschewed symbolism.

  Although Bunting agreed with Zukofsky that poetry was a kind of craft, he wasn’t greatly interested in Objectivism. He sent an open letter to Zukofsky to Il Mare in October 1932 specifically refuting Objectivism as a ‘flight into darkness’.403 Privately he confided to Pound that ‘Oglethorpe University wants a harticle on Hobjectivists not by Zuk. I may send them something … but probably not. I don’t know at all clearly what Zuk means by Objectivists.’404 Asked much later if he felt that his poetry had enough in common with the other Objectivists to merit inclusion in An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology he was dismissive:

  Precious little. That was also Zukofsky’s view. I think that he would probably have omitted me altogether but submitted to pressure from Pound, possibly also from Reznikoff. I wasn’t anxious to be with them because I didn’t like the manifesto he had decided on. And this in spite of the fact that so far as there is any having things in common, some general principles which were very much akin to the same general principles Ezra had laid down long before, and Wordsworth a hundred years before that again, apart from a few general principles, there wasn’t much to have in common; but those I did have with Zukofsky.405

  Although he didn’t see himself as an Objectivist he thought the term perfectly adequate to describe Zukofsky:

  There is a sense in which ‘Objectivist’ is not too bad a term for Louis and the people who are closely connected with him. The idea was a double one: one that a poem is an object which must stand by itself, a thing, and should have ideally no connection whatever with the chap who wrote it. It’s just a thing in itself … And secondly that the proper matter for poetry is objects, things about the place, which is of course derived from Wordsworth ultimately, though Wordsworth didn’t put it that way in his own prose writings. And you don’t bother yourself about your own inner feelings. Wordsworth did of course in ‘The Prelude’ and ‘The Excursion’, but those were written about that and he treats his own thi
ngs as things instead of expanding on his heart and this, that and the other. Zukofsky wanted to look at the things about him and put them down as things, and he wanted the completed poem to be a thing, totally independent of its author. In those two points I would be in complete agreement with him, though we differed very strongly on many other things.406

  Pound bombarded Zukofsky with advice during the latter part of 1930 in a tyrannical campaign of micromanagement in which Bunting’s name featured frequently. If Zukofsky’s Objectivist issue were to be a success Pound thought Bunting could be drafted in to edit his own ‘British’ edition. He wrote to Zukofsky on 24 October, ‘This also wd. make it a murkn [American] number; excluding the so different English; though you cd. be broadminded an mention ’em in a brief article Basil’s from L’indice; or a condensation; or yr. own. If you cover yourself with glory an’ honour, H. M. might even let Basil try his hand at showin what Briton can do.’407

  Zukofsky saw Bunting’s role differently, as adding ‘the “Foreign critic sees us” in a later issue,’408 but Pound wasn’t easily deterred. He told Zukofsky on 25 October, ‘You can in ten lines of yr, prose cover the facts re/Bunting and J. Gorrdun Macleod. whose Ecliptic is now pubd.’409 Three days later, reflecting on Bunting’s prospects, he wrote again, ‘As to Basil/ I spose his six months visa will make it oblig: fer him to git out of the U.S.A. I want to insert him as Eng. Correspondent for H & H or Poetry or everywhere possible: to choke off snot from Beligions Ray Mortimers and bloomsbuggers in generl/(confidenshul as is most of the rest).’410 ‘Beligions’ was the British essayist, Montgomery Belgion, and ‘Ray Mortimers’ was Raymond Mortimer, a British art historian who was closely associated with the Bloomsbury group. Pound already clearly saw Bunting as the antidote to the British arts establishment.

  By 6 November Zukofsky had his contributors pretty much in place. He told Pound that it included Bunting for ‘a poem or so, because, I wrote him, & to introduce him previous to the subsequent English issue you plan’.411 By 9 November he had decided that

  Basil: Will be the only Englishman I’ll print. Apprenticeship or Debut for his appearance as coming Eng. corresp. If he doesn’t send new stuff – I’ll have to choose from Redimiculum (of which Harriet doesn’t know) – possibly Sad Spring or Against the Tricks of Time or While Shepherds Watched or Chorus of Furies or To Venus. None of these as good as Villon but handling of quantity always pretty expert. Myself – liked his traduction of La Bonne Lorraine – ending possibly too uniwersul … Will hint to Harriet he should be prized when I see her in Chicago Dec 19 …412

  In the end he selected just one poem by Bunting for the issue, ‘Nothing’, here given the title ‘The Word’ for the only time.

  Zukofsky’s lobbying for Bunting was successful. He wrote to Pound in February 1931 celebrating the, ‘good news about Basil’s British number: Harriet evidently thought I was a nice boy suggesting it and accepted Basil’s proposition after I told him to write to her. He ought to criticize my number – and perhaps invite one American to contribute – preferably one who did not appear in my Feb. issue.’413 Pound already knew. On 22 January 1931 he wrote to Zukofsky that ‘Basil writes me that our sportin’ frien’ Miss Monroe has axd him to do a Bri’ish number.’414 The letter that Zukofsky had urged Bunting to write to Monroe was written on 15 December 1930, the day after Zukofsky had visited Bunting in Brooklyn. He lists a number of poets he would include in a British number including J. Gordon MacLeod, W. H. Auden, J. J. Adams, Bertram Higgins, John Collier and possibly Edgell Rickword and Peter Quennell.415 This seems a fairly undistinguished list today and the quality issue was, as we shall see, not lost on Bunting even then.

  Pound wrote to Monroe on 16 February, still pressing Bunting’s case:

  Bunting said some question of his doing an Eng. Number or getting Brit. Mss/ had arisen. He don’t see how he can solicit mss [‘especially from men whom he knows very slightly’ added by hand] unless he has some sort of standing, such say, as Zuk. had in doing the American number. Macleod (J. Gordon) has sent me a mss/ and with that to start on I think Bunting could find enough material.

  I think that if you decide to let him do a number it wd. be advisable to submit to him whatever English stuff you have already on hand. The more material to choose from (even he don’t use a line of it) the better the number will be, i.e. greater enlightenment and knowledge of the FIELD in the mind of the selector.

  BB’s copy of Poetry not yet here. He spent an hour on mine the other evening and did not feel he cd. raise against it the objections he had some months ago raised against Amurikun poesy in general …

  … Basil is quite aware that the Yenglisch cant be lined up to as stiff standard or provide any sort of intellectual unity. [‘That don’t mean that there is no way of assessing values’ added by hand]

  By way of further endorsement of Bunting’s merit Pound appended a note from William Carlos Williams to this letter: ‘I liked, we liked, Bunting – also his bride, whom you have not seen. They must be in Rapallo by now. He is a piece of metal sure enough. Fine chap and his poetry the most seductively musical that I know. It has a weird effect on me. I hope to the god of fishes and swollen prostates that he gets out a book for my pleasure soon. I enjoy reading him.’416 Williams never lost this feeling about Bunting’s work. He told Zukofsky nearly twenty years later: ‘My taste has developed so that … I can’t read anything but the sort of work represented in the Active Anthology, your work for instance, Basil’s work and some of the other work presented there.’417

  Bunting expressed his own concern about being properly commissioned to edit an issue before soliciting contributions in early March. Now back in Rapallo, he wrote to Monroe on 5 March that he was ‘diffident about definitely asking for material unless I can say that I am really commissioned to do so. One of my possible contributors [the Australian poet Bertram Higgins] has gone to Papua in search of gold and may shortly be eaten by the cannibals who abound there, so I want to get busy pretty soon, (before the savages).’418

  It seems that Bunting quickly changed his mind about a formal editorship as Monroe replied to him on 19 March agreeing with him ‘that it is inadvisable to offer you the editorship of the number, as in Zukofsky’s case; indeed, distance makes it impracticable – it was difficult enough in February, with Zukofsky only 60 miles away’. Instead Monroe wanted him to encourage the poets he had mentioned the previous December to send their submissions directly to her, while he prepared an article about the ‘English situation’. She told Bunting that Michael Roberts had also offered to write an article and that it might be interesting to include both. Roberts had also recommended including Julian Bell, William Empson and Cecil Day Lewis.419

  Bunting started work and reported to Monroe on 1 May that he had contacted the poets and enclosing his own ‘Attis’ and ‘Fearful Symmetry’ as well as submissions from Bertram Higgins (which he later agreed were ‘uninteresting’)420 and J. J. Adams.421 By July his foreboding about the quality of a British number was gathering:

  I am very sorry no one else [apart from Higgins and Adams] seems to have sent anything to you. I thought you would get something from Macleod at least and probably Auden and Rickword as well. Unless you can get something from these yng men it hardly seems worthwhile to have a special English number, since the rest of the existing English poets, so far as I know anything about them, are not worth printing: this is not intended to be fearfully high praise for the abovementioned.422

  By October the issue was put to bed and he was already regretting missing one particular young writer: ‘Putnam has published a poem by a young man who ought to have been mentioned if I’d known of him – name of Becket, Irish, I believe.’423

  The ‘Bri’ish number’ would be the February 1932 issue of Poetry for which Bunting selected the first part of a long poem, ‘Buckshee’, by Ford Madox Ford, two poems by Michael Roberts, Julian Huxley’s ‘Spitsbergen Summer’, two poems by Cecil Day Lewis, three by M. G. Gower, J. J. Adams’ ‘
The Sirens’ and Gordon Macleod’s ‘Foray of Centaurs’, along with his own short poem ‘Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow’. If there is any music in this selection it is drowned by Bunting’s angry barrel scraping.

  What is astonishing about Bunting’s British number is his ‘Comment’ piece, ‘English poetry today’. Bunting’s must be the most bad tempered garland of other men’s flowers ever constructed. He begins by excoriating contemporary English poetry (that is poetry written in English by British writers): ‘There is no poetry in England, none with any relation to the life of the country, or of any considerable section of it.’ The establishment is to blame:

  the rulers of England for a generation or more have never been indifferent to literature, they have been actively hostile. They have even set up and encouraged the frivolous imbecilities of cat-poetry, bird-poetry, flower-poetry; country-house Jorrocks-cum-clippership poetry (as Mr. Masefield does it); country-family cleverness (the Sitwells); and innumerable other devices for obscuring any work that smells of that objectionable quality, truth.424

  Bunting was onto something here. Masefield had been appointed poet laureate in 1930 and his style of pastoral nostalgia promoted conservative values in an uncertain world. Clipper ships and R. S. Surtees’ comic working-class sportsman, John Jorrocks, evoke an early nineteenth century landscape (and seascape) of honest endeavour, imperial security and political innocence that bore no resemblance to the turbulent 1930s. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to imagine that the establishment was engineering a cultural shift in its own favour when, in 1933 and at Masefield’s suggestion, George V established the annual gold medal for the first or second poetry collections of British citizens under the age of thirty. Such a prize was unlikely to encourage the subversive or experimental. Nor was Bunting alone in seeing the Sitwells as cheerleaders for mediocrity. In New Bearings in English Poetry F. R. Leavis had famously derided them as belonging more ‘to the history of publicity rather than of poetry’.425