A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Bunting saw T. S. Eliot’s magazine The Criterion, not unreasonably, as the literature department of the establishment, and he had no fear of expressing his contempt for it:

  Mr. Eliot’s Criterion is an international disaster, since he began to love his gloom, and regretfully, resignedly, to set about perpetuating the causes of it – kings, religion and formalism … The Criterion has gone about the business of blunting the English intelligence as systematically as the quarterlies of a century ago, but less crudely … Mr. Eliot’s intelligence, turned to the work of drugging intelligence (having first, let’s charitably suppose, drugged itself), can do much more havoc in England than in America; for kings, priests and academies are not living issues in the States … I have nothing to say against his poetry, amongst the finest of the age; but against his influence on the poetry of others, the involuntary extinguisher he applies to every little light, while professing, maybe truly, to hate the dark.

  Bunting realised too late that he wasn’t doing himself any favours with his principled assault on Eliot. He wrote a slightly panicky letter to Harriet Monroe from Rapallo on 21 January 1932: ‘Enclosed is a mitigatory letter, which please print if possible in the same number with my article, if not, in the next. I don’t want to call Eliot names, as I almost appear to in the article as it stands.’ The letter itself is hardly a model of retraction:

  I see from the proofs of my article on English poetry, which arrive at this remoteness too late for revision, that it might appear to a rapid reader that I was making a personal attack on Mr Eliot, whereas I want to have it quite clear that it is only his influence I want to denounce; his influence acting probably far beyond his intentions, maybe even contrary to them. So far as I am aware he has always encouraged whatever decent poetry came his way, independent of its political, religious and so forth aspects. It is the pressure of his phenomenal prestige that extinguishes the sparks, etc. It is all so much weight added to the existing inducements to retrogression in England. If the mournful cadences of The Waste Land have turned out to be as hypnotically effective as the Eat More Fruit advts., it is, of course, Mr Eliot’s fault, but in a sense in which one might as justly call it his misfortune.426

  The damage had probably already been done. Bunting had already published ‘Attis, or: Something missing’ which (according to Michael Schmidt) satirised Eliot as the eunuch.427

  Harriet Monroe may have thought that Bunting was digging himself into an even deeper hole with this passive aggressive recantation. Although the February issue provoked a lively correspondence, selections of which were printed in the April issue, Bunting’s letter was never published. In any event she had had quite enough of Pound’s disciples and wrote to him on 17 December 1932, ‘You think a lot of Zukofsky … while I think he is no poet at all, his ‘objectivist’ theories seem to me absurd, and his prose style abominable. Bunting’s verse and prose are better, but after all he is no great shakes. If these are the best new ones in sight, the magazine may as well quit.’428

  Bunting didn’t blame Eliot himself for the work of his followers. In his essay on Eliot in The New English Weekly of 8 September 1932 he announced at the outset that he was not concerned with Eliot’s opinions which had had, ‘an illegitimate influence, that is to say, imitators have tried to make poetry out of Eliot’s emotions instead of their own, have borrowed the content of his verse instead of studying its form and applying its devices … to matter of their own’.429 He explained his position once again over forty years later: ‘when one attacked Eliot that didn’t mean that one didn’t value Eliot; it meant that one felt he ought to be up and doing with the same sort of vigour and uncompromisingness of Pound, Zukofsky and Carlos Williams. Perhaps it was unfair because I’ve never myself been as uncompromising as them either.’430

  Given the tone of Bunting’s assault on Eliot it wouldn’t be surprising if Eliot had felt distinctly undervalued by the younger poet. Eliot might have been the archdeacon of modernism but Bunting had no patience with his absorption in his own role, with the fact that, as Wyndham Lewis memorably put it, he went around disguised as Westminster Abbey.431 He explained his frustration with Eliot to Morton Zabel, Associate Editor of Poetry, in January 1933, ‘Eliot apparently finds a need to complicate himself and erect artificial selves and stalk about on stilts. He mistrusts his own verve and so cheats the reader.’432

  None of this mattered greatly because, as Bunting continued in his ‘Comment’ essay, the British poetry-reading public was equally moribund: ‘the divorce between literature and the British subject is complete. The gulf is unpassable. The intelligent reader in England is the frequenter of two small public-houses in Bloomsbury, plus a few isolated idiosyncratic scholars in the provinces.’433 The consequence of a philistine establishment encouraging mediocre poets to write for an indifferent public was, of course, disastrous, breeding middlebrow contempt on the one hand and involution on the other: ‘When they see what is given out publicly as poetry, men of good but not specifically literary intelligence conceive a contempt for poetry similar to that traditional amongst the army and hunting people, and still fostered in the schools.’ The result? Poetry

  withdraws into itself. It can reach but a small audience, small enough to have special learning and, as it were, passwords; too small to hope to influence even a corner of the national culture, so that, proposing no end but the exercise of its special knowledge, it delights more and more in approximations to the acrostic, less and less in true concision, which implies force and clarity as well as paucity of words. The cure? – I can see nothing for it but patience.434

  One might think that Bunting’s misery is complete, but he has barely started. Having surveyed the scorched earth of contemporary British poetry he becomes more granular. Roy Campbell (‘the successor to Mr. Masefield, if not in the Laureateship at least in middle-class favor’) has Masefield’s ‘meaningless violence’ and ‘coarse, primitive, but often strong beat’. Campbell’s poetry is ‘good enough for the New Statesman, but not for export or cold-storage.’ So no place for Campbell in the British edition. Nor was there a place for John Collier who had ‘lapsed into a novel called His Monkey’s Wife: or, Married to a Chimp. (And there’s an end of him? as formerly of Mr. Huxley?)’ Bunting was correct in this. Collier pretty much abandoned poetry after the modest critical and commercial success of his first novel, His Monkey Wife, in 1930. He concentrated on novels and short stories and became a prolific writer of screenplays for film and television. Bunting regarded Collier as, ‘something between a pimp and a buffoon in person, but his poems move me even when I have very little idea of what he is driving at’.435

  Bunting wasn’t particularly impressed by the poets he did include. J. J. Adams, for example: ‘neither sends his manuscripts to editors nor revises them for publication, having had his exhibitionism removed by psychoanalysis, as it might be his appendix. His poetry is therefore unfinished, profuse, abounding in lax passages: often as full of dross as unsmelted ore.’ But even so Adams was better than most: ‘it seems to me that his satiric-ironic method, even in its crude state, is individual enough and enough of an improvement, as method, over the usual thing, to attract a great deal more attention … A good editor would take Mr. Adams in hand and force him to revise and cut; but it is better to have him unrevised than not at all.’436 Bunting didn’t give up on Adams. Nearly forty years later in an essay on Herbert Read Bunting asked if it is ‘irrelevant that I find in Read’s 1923 volume [Mutations of the Phoenix] phrases here and there that have the very tone of that strange man, John J. Adams, who will be dug up one day by the scholars? But Adams has more emotion.’437

  Macleod enjoyed an easier ride. The Ecliptic ‘interested me more than any new thing since The Waste Land’ and in ‘The Foray of Centaurs’, Macleod ‘seems to have been preoccupied with the versification, which is consummate, even surpassing the best of The Ecliptic’. On the other hand ‘the force of the poem’ isn’t clear to Bunting, it isn’t well organised, and ‘there
is not much zeal in it; and zeal, if not indispensable to poetry, is at least at present a desideratum. But who in England can be zealous, being hopeless?’

  Are there any redeeming features? Well, nearly: ‘Of the group of young men who edited The Criterion about five years ago in opposition to Mr. Eliot’s ex cathedra decrees, two have not yet given up the attempt to do something worth the effort.’ These two are Edgell Rickword who may ‘produce a sufficient body of good stuff for us to remember him by’ and Bertram Higgins who is, at least ‘not a case for despair’. And then there’s W. H. Auden, but ‘most of his poems seem fragments only. Some are rather silly. Lack of content is always detectable, even the satire becoming frivolous from lack of depth.’ But at least Auden’s case is ‘far from hopeless’, although looking back forty or so years in 1975 it had become clear that it was indeed hopeless:

  When Auden sent his first book to Rapallo I thought there was something there that ought to be encouraged. Pound didn’t. Pound thought there was nothing there and there’d never come out of it anything but bunk. I tried to write and suggest to Auden the way I thought things should go. He wrote back, quite pleasantly, but stating that what he really wanted to do was go on teaching rugby football at a prep school.438

  The other poets Bunting included, Day Lewis, Gower and Roberts, don’t merit even a negative mention and, unlike Auden, didn’t get to be damned with faint damnation forty years later. It is surprising that Bunting overlooked Clere Parsons, an English poet who had died in 1931 at the age of twenty-three. Parsons, like Bunting, believed that the meaning of poetry is communicated through sound and rhythm. The evidence of Poems, published the year after his death by Faber, suggests that he would have been a significant voice in twentieth-century poetry.

  Poetry’s doubtless rather bemused American subscribers might well have been asking themselves why, if British poetry is this bad, it is being visited on them at all. Bunting, too, may have asked himself why he had bothered. He concluded his introduction to the cream of British poetry in despair, ‘There is a long and dreary list of highly advertised failures, beginning with the Sitwells; but nothing with which to prolong a catalogue, if each item is to have the interest of a possible winner. Adams, Macleod, Rickword, Higgins and Auden exhaust the category; and two of these are long shots, and one really belongs to the last generation.’ Zukofsky told Pound in April 1931 that Bunting, ‘shd. go to it anyway & remove some of the monthly manure by the way’,439 but it seems that Bunting thought he had merely added to it.

  By this time Bunting had seen two of his poems published in Poetry, ‘Villon’ in October 1930 and ‘Nothing’ in February 1931.440 Pound had, as ever, been working hard behind the scenes on Bunting’s behalf. He had written to Monroe in November 1929 to urge her to consider ‘Villon’ for a prize: ‘I don’t think you will have any trouble in accepting this poem of Bunting’s [Villon] … you will probably find same … well in the running for one of the heavier prizes.’441 And he was happy to clear up, in that Poundian way that almost always made matters more incomprehensible, Monroe’s suspicion about her new contributor’s name: ‘Bunting has had a fit of modesty and refuses to divulge his heroic past. He is far from a pseudonym. Old Saxon tribal ending in =ing. Northumberland.”442

  Monroe reprised part of ‘Villon’ in the November 1931 issue of Poetry to mark Bunting’s award of the Lyric Prize. Bunting managed to be simultaneously generous and unappreciative in acknowledging receipt of the prize. He wrote to Monroe in January 1932: ‘I don’t know what I ought to say about my prize. It went some way towards paying the expenses of my daughter’s birth, arriving the same day. But I am inclined to quarrel with the judges in that they preferred me to Zukofsky, who in my judgment had the better claim on any laurels that were going.’443 Zukofsky followed up the Objectivist issue of Poetry with an Objectivist anthology which was published in 1932 but Bunting seems not to have involved himself in it. In October 1931 Zukofsky wondered aloud to Pound why, ‘didn’t I ever hear from him re- the Anthology. Too late now – but give him my best – the Trotzskiite.’444

  For Bunting the poet 1932 was a good year. His ‘Verse and Version’ appeared in Il Mare on 1 October 1932. He contributed the first two sections of ‘Villon’ to Ezra Pound’s Profile, published in May 1932 in Milan, a collection of poems, ‘which have stuck in my memory and which may possibly define their epoch, or at least rectify current ideas about it in respect to at least one contour’.445 For the first time Bunting was published in the company of some of the greatest writers of the age, Eliot, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Joyce, Marianne Moore and Cummings among them. In the same year he also contributed four poems to Sherard Vines’ Whips & Scorpions: Specimens of Modern Satiric Verse 1914–1931.446 In summer 1932 Zukofsky published his long-awaited An “Objectivists” Anthology with poems mainly from the Objectivist issue of Poetry from the previous year (but also with poems from Pound, ‘Gentle Jheezus sleek and wild’, and Eliot, ‘Marina’, who had not been included in that issue of Poetry). Bunting’s contribution to the anthology was a fragment of ‘Attis: Or, Something Missing’. To Bunting’s fury Yvor Winters launched a scathing attack on Zukofsky in a review of An “Objectivists” Anthology in Hound and Horn:

  Mr. Zukofsky’s preface is so badly written that it is next to impossible to disentangle more than a few intelligible remarks … It is symptomatic of the intellectual bankruptcy of the middle generation that Mr. Pound will actively back such a man, that Mr. Eliot, Dr. Williams and Miss Moore have been willing to put up with him … none of the talented writers of Mr. Zukofsky’s generation are included, and theories that Mr. Zukofsky struggles hopelessly to express, the methods of composition that he and his friends have debauched till they no longer deserve even ridicule, seem to be sinking rapidly to lower and lower literary levels.447

  Bunting wrote to James Leippert, editor of the new Lion & Crown magazine, on 30 October 1932: ‘Hound and Horn has recently published Y Winters disgusting review of Zuks Objectivist anthology … please run a fair review of that anthology as soon as you can, since that is ultimately the best answer to such disappointed spite … I have sent a letter to H & H which if it doesn’t get printed will at least make them sit up.’448

  It would indeed. The letter was printed; Bunting described Winters’ review as ‘the vomit of a creature who … found his own name omitted from an anthology that proposed to sample everything at this moment alive in poetry’. He claimed that his own poem in the first pages of the anthology was a direct attack on Winters himself. ‘No fool much likes being laughed at,’ he continued. ‘He was afraid, maybe, to go for someone who seemed to have discovered the disgrace he fondly believed secret, so he turned his spite on the anthology’s editor.’449 Marian Bunting recalled in 1969 that ‘Basil slashed [Winters] to pieces … He loathed him & his works.’450 Winters’ response in the same issue rather suggests that he didn’t understand the fact that he had been insulted rather than challenged by Bunting. The ‘something missing’ is genitalia. Typically Bunting worked the machismo exchange up in an account he gave of it to Gael Turnbull many years later. Winters, he told Turnbull, ‘wrote to him in Italy, making a physical challenge of it! It so happened that Gene Tunney was there, and wrote back for him, saying that he (Tunney) would accept the challenge on Bunting’s behalf. They didn’t hear from Winters again!’451 Gene Tunney was at the time the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. What actually happened was that Bunting wrote the following letter to Hound and Horn containing a masterly put-down: ‘Yvor Winters’ offer to take me on at prose, verse or fisticuffs (180 lbs was, I think, the weight he mentioned) shows a stout heart, but I am afraid such an unequal spectacle would draw no good gate. Winters would be better matched in all these respects with Gene Tunney.’452

  Pound had conceived Profile as a ‘critical narrative, that is I attempted to show by excerpt what had occurred during the past quarter of a century’. The following year he followed up with a new anthology, Active Anthology, which
collected an ‘assortment of writers, mostly ill known in England, in whose verse a development appears or in some case we may say “still appears” to be taking place, in contradistinction to authors in whose work no such activity has occurred or seems likely to proceed any further’.453 It is astonishing that the ringmaster of literary modernism could introduce the most gifted writers of a generation with a sentence as horrible as that. But there is no doubt that they were the most gifted writers: Williams, Zukofsky, Aragon (translated by Cummings), Cummings himself, Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Oppen, D. G. Bridson, Bunting and, of course, Pound. This is quite a list. Not many editors have selected ten contemporary poets, nine of whom would be literary household names eighty years later. What’s really surprising about this anthology is the amount of it given over to

  Bunting, who occupies nearly a quarter of the book (51 pages out of 216 pages of poetry). The fact that Bunting takes 25 per cent of a book with so stellar a line-up indicates his gathering importance. In fact though Pound himself points out that he had confined ‘my selection to poems Britain has not accepted and in the main that the British literary bureaucracy does NOT want to have printed in England’.454 Pound introduced Bunting as a slightly special case:

  Mr Bunting probably seems reactionary to most of the other contributors. I think the apparent reaction is a definite endeavour to emphasize certain necessary elements which the less considering American experimenters tend to omit. At any rate Mr B. asserted that ambition some years ago, but was driven still further into the American ambience the moment he looked back upon British composition of, let us say, 1927–8.455