This is a strange observation. Pound included Bunting’s most progressive poems to date, including ‘Villon’, ‘Attis – Or, Something Missing’ and ‘Chomei at Toyama’, poems that challenged the literary status quo as much as did those of William Carlos Williams or Zukofsky.456
Bunting had a special role in the creation of the Active Anthology, one that seems to have cast a long shadow across twentieth-century poetry. The year before he died he recalled that:
In 1930, or thereabouts, Ezra decided to make an anthology called the Active Anthology and he was too … busy, so he picked out great lumps of Zukofsky and great lumps of me and said, ‘that’s the core of it; now you do Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore’ and I forget who else, two or three others. So I had to read all the works of Carlos Williams and pick out what I thought were the best for the anthology. And I did that, and for years and years and years after, until Williams was quite an old man, every anthology that included Williams had poems selected from my selection.457
The only obscure inclusion in the anthology is that of the author and long-time BBC producer, Douglas Geoffrey Bridson. By the time he retired from the BBC in 1969 Bridson was widely seen as the organisation’s ‘cutural boss’.458 In the 1930s Pound held Bridson in high regard, bracketing him with Bunting as the twinned hope for the future of British poetry. In a letter to the American poet T. C. Wilson in January 1934 he complained that, ‘Surely Bunting and Bridson must be better than Eliot’s deorlings.’459 More than a year later he wrote to Eliot himself to encourage him to consider the two young poets, Bridson was only twenty-four at the time, as a kind of pair: ‘However, gor ferbidd that I speak modest ever again about anything I find fit to recommend. If you print Brid.[son] you can print Bunting’s Firdusi, which certainly is good enou(bloody)gh fer ’em.’460
Active Anthology was sufficiently visible to attract a satirical attack in 1934 when Samuel J. Looker mocked Pound’s collection as Ephraim Pundit in Superman: being the complete poetical works of Robert Baby Buntin-Dicebat. Looker thought that Pound’s circle showed real contempt for its readership. ‘When the dead dogs of romanticism are indecently buried’, he wrote in a spoof introduction,
I shall feel much happier about the state of modern poetry and criticism. That they are dead at all is largely if not entirely due to my activity. Englishspeaking poetry, not to say the Italian and Bantu, owes to me an almost unpayable debt, which, with the usual snout-like quality of their skunkish kind, modern critico-poetico imbeciles will not make the slightest attempt to repay, nor do I expect even elementary gratitude from this collection of critical cowards, intellectual impotents, eunuchs, and mangy doctored cats and jackals.461
A very sympatico old Jap
From January 1932 Bunting tried to interest Harriet Monroe in ‘Chomei at Toyama’ and, from July, James Leippert, of The Lion and Crown. He had sent Monroe some fragments of the poem but withdrew them in February, preferring to try to find a home for the whole poem.462 The problem with Leippert was that he wouldn’t pay so Poetry was a far better option.463 (Bunting mischievously suggested in 1984 that Zukofsky wrote poems with lines containing only two words because Poetry paid by the line.464) Leippert was desperate to secure contributions from Pound but Bunting, by then acting as Pound’s informal secretary, continued to rebuff, though not in an unkindly way, Leippert’s entreaties throughout 1932. He suggested a number of alternative contributors, including J. J. Adams:
Have suggested to John J Adams he should send you something. What he writes isn’t fashionably dressed. End-stopped blank verse. But if you look further into it you will find a skill in satire and irony that no one else has just now. He’s the most unpublished man of his age I know of. Nobody likes satire that isn’t utterly obvious and on obvious subjects … I suppose Adams is as old as Pound and Eliot and he’s only made a few appearances in print – partly his own fault since he makes no effort to get printed and MSS have to be dragged out of him.465
But if Leippert must have Pound the best he could offer was translations of the articles Pound had written for Il Mare. The value of this would be to remind parts of the literary world that Pound still mattered: ‘The fact that Ezra spotted quite a number of winners – Williams, Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, H.D., Aldington, etc etc – at that period [before the war], before anybody else had so much as heard of them, if insisted on, may make some of the literary snobs take more notice of what he has to say NOW.’466
Another way to Pound’s heart though, Bunting suggested, would be to publish Bunting. Pound was a great admirer of what the Little Review had achieved and saw The Lion and Crown as a possible successor:
I am sorry to keep thrusting myself forward, but I really think [Pound] would consider publication of my ‘Chomei’ a long step in the direction of a new ‘Little Review’. Maybe he would modify his opinion if he saw it in print! I too, however, think ‘Chomei’, in spite of defects I haven’t been able to remedy, a poem which, whatever its worth or worthlessness in itself, might have a useful influence; showing, for instance, that poetry can be intelligible and still be poetry; a fact that has come to be doubted by the generation that took most of its ideas indirectly from Eliot.467
The following day Bunting urged ‘Chomei’ on Monroe once again468 and she seems to have asked to see the whole poem.469
Bunting apologised to Leippert for his long silence in January 1933, the confusion of a house move and a fortnight ‘on the sick list’ being the reason. He wrote to congratulate Leippert, in a rather tepid way, for his first issue of The Lion and Crown, as ‘pleasantly got up and as good as a mag need be, but not as good as it could be. There is a too goddam gentlemanly air about your contributors, including me (the thing having been written with the Criterion in view). It is true that some camouflage of that sort aids chances of survival, but it also produces premature senile decay, as in Eliot’s quarterly tombstone.’ A string of criticisms of individual contributors follows, trumped by a bizarre conclusion, ‘On the whole, therefore, a success. Congratulations.’470
On the same day he wrote to Morton Dauwen Zabel, Associate Editor of Poetry, to explain that the reason he was resisting the suggestion of publishing parts of ‘Chomei’ rather than the entire work, which would have taken up about eighteen pages of the magazine, was that it depended
in a very high degree on the general design: the balance of the calamities and consolations pivoted on the little central satire, the transmogrification of the house throughout, the earth, air, fire and water, pieces, first physical then spiritual make up an elaborate design which I’ve tried not to underline so that it might be felt rather than pedantically counted up. Also the old boy’s superficial religion breaking down at the end needs what goes before to give it relief, and what goes before needs the breakdown to anchor it to its proper place.471
This abridgement problem was, as we shall see, to resurface decades later, when his international reputation was secure and he became eligible for inclusion in anthologies.
By March 1933 he had given in and reluctantly accepted Zabel’s proposal to publish fragments of ‘Chomei’ even though ‘the picking out of four somewhat “poetical” bits rather misrepresents the very sympatico old Jap’.472 Pound had, as always, been agitating behind the scenes. He had written a typically forthright letter to Harriet Monroe early in 1933 saying: ‘If you don’t print Bunting’s long poem I shall have to believe that you have had a really acute attack of the kind of inferiority complex that has upheld your hatred of having good stuff in the magazine, even when you have tolerated and permitted it.’473 The September 1933 issue of Poetry carried seven fragments of ‘Chomei at Toyama’, around 150 lines, being about half of the whole poem. Bunting and Monroe had nearly fallen out over the poem during the previous summer, after Bunting’s testy announcement on 2 August that Pound was to publish the poem in its entirety in his ‘Active Anthology’ which was due to be published in October.474 He demanded the return of his fragments which, he felt, she had accepted the previo
us December but had not published. Monroe reacted quickly and a mollified Bunting thanked her on 30 August for both proofs of the poem that was about to be published and a welcome cash advance.475
Essays in criticism
A number of essays written in the early 1930s show how Bunting was developing intellectually. The longest of these, ‘The Written Record’, probably written in the late 1920s, remained unpublished until Richard Caddel collected the essays in 1994.476 It mounts a sustained attack on the ‘modern-western vogue of the illusion of Permanence’ in literary criticism, that sense that understanding a work of art is possible only with a kind of scientific rigour and the precision of expression that are commonly understood by the priesthood that administers the rites, scholars. Its chief exponent, in Bunting’s view, was T. S. Eliot, ‘Archdeacon in the Province of Literary Criticism’, particularly as he presents himself in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. Eliot’s contention that ‘criticism is as inevitable as breathing’ was anathema to Bunting.477 Basil Bunting would not countenance for a second the notion that ‘fitting in is a test of … value’. The canon, ‘paper art’, once established simply creates exponentially more paper – commentaries, interpretations, theories – all of no real value. Against the Sisiphean misery of professional critics in the academy of the precise Bunting celebrates ambiguity in an essay which, if it is a bit of a rant, is a learned one. He engages with logic and philosophy on their own terms and comes out of the encounter rather well. There is much in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ with which Bunting would have agreed so one has to assume that his attack was in some way political.478 In any event he was brave to take on Eliot so directly at this stage of his career. Either that or he was banking on modernism moving on, leaving Eliot marooned in the new establishment while he himself became a mover in the next revolution. If so he was a generation ahead of his time.
‘Some limitations of English’ was written by November 1930 and published in The Lion and Crown in October 1932. It moves the attack from the priesthood to the very medium of its communication, showing with a clear grammatical eye why ‘our philosophy and our religion are bound to a stupid monism derived from the grammarbook’. ‘The Lion and the Lizard’ remained unpublished in Bunting’s lifetime. He uses a comparison of Edward FitzGerald’s translation of Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám with Omar’s original to launch a general attack on English poetry: ‘English poets are too often on their dignity, they strive too constantly to be sublime and end by becoming monotonous and empty of life-giving detail, like hymn-tunes. They have often been the slaves rather than the masters of their metres. (The sonnet exploited Wordsworth, not he the sonnet.)’479
T. S. Eliot finds himself in the dock again. He is identified as the exemplar of those poets who ‘have sought yet remoter abstractions even by forced adjectives, and conceits, like some of Mr. Eliot’s, painful to follow. They have often thought more carefully about the impression made by their own personality than about that made by the ostensible object of their verse.’ Bunting singles out Eliot’s ‘Ash-Wednesday’ as a poem that ‘might serve to demonstrate many of these errors’.480
These seem to me to be angry essays. As Caddel points out they are ‘noteworthy for their spirit of attack … As such, they reflect a radical, even subversive temperament in Bunting which has perhaps not yet been fully recognised.’481 As Peter Nicholls noted in a review of Three Essays, they ‘give access to some of Bunting’s most deeply-felt ideas’ while revealing ‘that habitual movement of his thought which so impressively places the detail of poetic language at the very centre of our large concerns’.482 In 1934 Bunting told Zukofsky that, ‘half the evils in the world come from verbalism, i.e. imagining that abstract words have anything more than a grammatical meaning or function. Adjectives, numbers, symbols like the word God, eat away all sense of reality and land us in every kind of social and economic mess, when people begin to think they correspond to anything genuine.’483
The essays, particularly the first two, also seem to me to be closely linked, written in a tight sequence. The tone of professional disdain doesn’t let up at any point. It is though a very different disdain from that shown in some of Bunting’s articles in The Outlook. Here we sense a deeply committed mind engaging with subjects that it really cares about, very personal statements that carry none of the baggage or compromise of an identifiable readership that mattered to it.
Perhaps the most succinct description of his view of society in the 1930s, however, appears in a letter to Ezra Pound written in 1931. Once again it addresses issues that British society is struggling with as I write; how to punish bankers and media barons, the financial politics of devolution, supertax, reform of the House of Lords. It is incredible how little progress we have made:
If Wales and the North don’t rise this autumn, there’s little hope of anything but extinction. The new program of the T.U.C. should be drawn up quite simply, thus:
1. Hang Rothschild and a select retinue of ‘merchant bankers’.
2. Confine Rothermere in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum with public warning to Beaverbrook and the Berries.
3. Warn Australia Canada and S Africa that if they don’t both pay up their proportionate share of the cost of the fleet and loosen up a bit on the immigration restrictions, they will be put up for public auction to any buyer who cares to undertake the job of reconquering them, such as Germany or U.S.A.
4. No import dues, and a bloody big supertax.
5. Abolish the game laws.
6. Abolish the Home Office.
7. Confiscate the Church lands and royalties.
After that elect a new House of Commons and omit to summon any of the hereditary peers to parliament.484
Bunting certainly had a reasonable amount of his prose published in the early 1930s, with regular appearances in the Rapallo weekly newspaper, Il Mare, including a Pound–Bunting double-header on Scriabin on 8 July 1933.485 Il Mare published a literary supplement every second issue which, Bunting claimed improbably in a letter to James Leippert, is ‘read all over Italy’.486
On 26 May 1932 New English Weekly ran Bunting’s remarkable essay on ‘Mr. Ezra Pound’. Remarkable because of the sure-footed way it summarises Pound’s pioneering literary scholarship and remarkable too in identifying an unjustly neglected poem, ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’, which Eliot had unaccountably excluded from his selection of Pound’s poems in 1928 (and again in 1948):487 ‘In my considered opinion, “Propertius” was the most important poem of our times, surpassing alike “Mauberley” and “The Waste Land”.’ Bunting marshals the evidence in favour of Pound’s genius like a barrister:
He was [first] heard of as a scholar, explaining the ‘Spirit of Romance’, the poets of Provence and Tuscany, the French and Spanish epics. He translated Bertran de Born, Arnaut Daniel, Guido Cavalcanti, the Anglo- Saxon ‘Seafarer’. He interested himself in every branch of the technique of verse, rhymed, rhymeless, accentual, quantitative, alliterative, as strict as the ballade and altogether free. He wrote Sapphics successfully in English, and a Sestina stronger than, and almost as musical as, Spenser’s. He made himself, early in his career, one of the most consummate masters of the techniques of versification that our literature has ever seen.488
All this enormous achievement, Bunting reminds us, was before his pioneering work on modern French poetry, Catullus and Propertius, Japanese Noh theatre, Chinese classical poetry, Fenellosa, Cavalcanti; before his discovery of Joyce and Eliot, his study of music, his book on Antheil and his Villon opera; before his ‘two long poems of modern life’, ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ and ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. Ten lines into this essay one realises afresh just how much the world of letters lost when Pound disintegrated into an anti-Semitic amateur economist and Mussolini worshipper. Pound taught a generation of poets to condense, to rid their work of superfluous words. Humphrey Carpenter says that Pound ‘cited with delight Bunting’s discovery that a German–Italian dictionary rendered di
chten (to write poetry) as condensare, to condense’,489 and in Pound’s ABC of Reading, published in 1934, there is a chapter heading ‘DICHTEN = CONDENSARE’, and acknowledgement of ‘Mr Bunting’s discovery and his prime contribution to contemporary criticism.’490 In fact, however, Bunting had intuited the connection. He wrote from Tenerife to thank Pound for the mention but to correct him: ‘Mention of me an ad gratis: however, dichten–to condense aint nobody’s property unless Hitler wants it for the Reich. But I didn’t get it mucking about with a dictionary, but because I have some feeling for words of Indo-European origin which has often been useful: and when it occurred to me that this word might be useful to you, I then looked it up and confirmed what was already my firm belief.’491
Bunting never failed to acknowledge his debt to Pound although he was always careful to contextualise it. Nearly fifty years later the editor of Agenda, William Cookson, asked Bunting if he could reprint the New English Weekly article on Pound in a special Pound issue, prompting an anguished response, ‘No no no no no no. The article you have exhumed from the New English Weekly is altogether too jejune for any purpose worth considering this lifetime later. Leave it to be dug up, if it ever is dug up again, by the pedants who will gnaw any carrion when I’m dead (and out of copyright).’ He went on to tell Cookson how the article had originated and his account shows why the article seems so remarkable. It was an inside job.
I’ve been trying to recollect how it came to be concocted in the first place. There was a time when The Listener asked for a piece on Ezra to go with something or other the BBC was doing, and what I said was, they said, far too highbrow for their readers. They wanted something in the style of ‘Told to the Children’. So Ezra and I got together and made what we thought was the simplest possible statement of his career, something that might do for a publisher’s blurb, only longer. We cut out anything that we thought too hard for a middling intelligent child of ten, but the Listener still found it too hard, so it went elsewhere … I perceive in it bits that sound like me and bits that are certainly Ezra shifted over into my words; and it has none of the things that I would have said if I’d been writing for, for instance, the Criterion which might have irritated EP. In short it’s a joint performance of a chore neither of us fancied … I would never, on my own, have bothered with his ‘studies of modern French poetry’. I would have left the Treatise on Harmony to slumber undisturbed. On the other hand, it is me rather than Ezra who insists on the merits of Propertius, but too circumspectly, for Pound would not have liked me at that date to draw attention to the relationship with Whitman. The bit of balls about ‘Trois Contes’ is, again, pure Ezra – bunkum to me.492
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