A Strong Song Tows Us
Page 30
not the least of which was their pacifism and liberal politics. They had all been living in Italy, where Bunting’s teacher was Ezra Pound in Rapallo, and Drerup’s was Felice Carena in Florence; Gertrude and Bunting were both gifted linguists who had studied at the London School of Economics, and Gertrude and Marian were keen tennis players. The Drerups were comparatively well off, as long as Drerup could receive financial support from his family in Germany, supplemented by Gertrude’s English teaching.530
Bunting and Drerup were fascinated by the peasant life around them. One of the best poems Bunting wrote in Tenerife, ‘The Orotava Road’, closely observes the simple rural scenes that Drerup illustrated:
Four white heifers with sprawling hooves
trundle the wagon.
Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway.
The chisel point of the goad, blue and white,
glitters ahead,
a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand
who does not shave …
Camelmen high on muzzled mounts
boots rattling against the panels3
of an empty
packsaddle do not answer strangers …
Milkmaids, friendly girls between
fourteen and twenty
or younger, bolt upright on small
trotting donkeys that bray (they arch their
tails a few inches
from the root, stretch neck and jaw forward
to make the windpipe a trumpet)
chatter. Jolted
cans clatter.531
Many years later, at a reading in London in 1980, Bunting expressed some surprise at the enduring appeal of ‘The Orotava Road’:
A couple of years ago I got a letter from the Canary Isles. To my great astonishment they now have a university there – it wouldn’t have been imaginable in my day – and a professor wrote and said that he had made a translation, in fact a very good translation of a poem of mine, which he had read some time or other to his father, or was it his grandfather, I forget what, who was in the Canaries when I lived there and who said that it was the most perfect picture of the islands he’d ever come across.532
Bunting was making no money in the Canaries, but it seems that this was a consequence of his unwillingness to compromise. Pound wrote to Rabindranath Tagore seeking funding for him from the Roerich Museum: ‘Bunting has done what I think a very good condensation of Cho Mei, and writes Persian very beautifully (I mean as far as the handwriting goes. I don’t know any, so I can’t tell whether it is correct). He has no money, and simply will not melt himself into the vile patterns of expediency.’533 As William Carlos Williams wrote to Zukofsky in January 1934: ‘Bunting is living the life, I don’t know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can’t be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year’s rent and to be backing at the same time a book of my own poems. It’s dog eat dog in the end I suppose anyway you look at it.’534
Living from odd jobs and handouts was clearly unsustainable so he used some new funds from Margaret de Silver to try his hand in the Algarve on the southern coast of Portugal. Marian was not impressed:
He found a place in the Algarve, miles from civilization and expected me to follow him there with a 2 year old and a 6 month old baby. To get there entailed travelling 3rd class on a Spanish ship –1st class is reputed to be filthy, and taking a bus from Cadiz through all of Portugal in mid-summer. I did not have the money to do this and refused to take the trip. I felt Basil would be forced to go to England to get a job and earn a living of some kind for us. I did not dream that he would return to go on living on hand-outs from my family.
He returned and there was nothing left for us after that.535
According to Victoria Forde while Bunting was away the Drerups helped Marian move from the house which they were waiting to move into to the pension Las Arenas run by Dr Isadore Luz and Baron and Baroness von Louen. ‘The Baroness was the widow of the Kaiser’s youngest son, a mentally deficient boy who committed suicide when she ran away with the Baron. Since by Hitler’s order the Germans could not spend their money outside of Germany, there were not many tourists. So the proprietors took in the Buntings at low rates.’536 This slightly mangled bit of German history hardly does justice to what must have been a fascinating milieu. After an unhappy childhood during which she suffered deeply from her parents’ disintegrating marriage Princess Marie Auguste married, at the age of just seventeen, Prince Joachim of Prussia, the youngest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Joachim, who was five years older than his bride, was a Captain in the Fourteenth Regiment of Hussars. The families were, naturally enough, deeply embroiled in the First World War. Joachim was with the German Army on the Russian front and Marie Auguste’s father, Prince Eduard, was also in the German Army, serving with the Crown Prince, Joachim’s brother, in the Verdun area. According to Countess Emilie Alsenborg, who served as one of Empress Auguste Viktoria’s ladies-in-waiting, Joachim was an epileptic, spoilt child who was physically, mentally and morally weak. At the time of their wedding Joachim was in love with another woman, Erna von Weberhardt, whom he robbed of an enormously valuable collection of jewellery in order to pay off his equally enormous gambling debts. Astonishingly this theft became a factor in the Kaiser’s war strategy (particularly in regard to Zeppelin raids on London) as these highly politicised, aristocratic families jockeyed for position in an attempt to suppress the scandal. Joachim was forced into marriage with Marie Auguste as part of this plot, so by the time of their marriage he was already an unattractive catch. In 1919, amid rumours that Joachim was physically abusing her, she left him. Prince Joachim’s mental state was already weakening when Marie Auguste filed for divorce, although the estranged couple were still married when Prince Joachim shot himself with a revolver at his home on 18 July 1920. By the time Joachim killed himself the ‘mentally deficient boy’ was a thirty-year-old wife beater, thief and sociopath with serious mental and physical health problems. It’s no wonder that she left him.
In 1924 Princess Marie Auguste became engaged to a wealthy businessman but she broke off the engagement on the eve of the wedding and disappeared for three years before marrying, on 27 September 1926, her childhood friend, Baron Johannes Michael von Loën, who was four years her junior. By 1930 this woman, having moved in (or been a pawn of) the highest levels of European society and politics, was running a pension in Santa Cruz. Bunting appears to have overcome his intense dislike of ‘the Germans’ to take advantage of the need of these particular Germans for rental income.
The family moved to the new pension in July 1934. Bunting had written to Pound from Lisbon on 23 June 1934 and told him he expected to find a place there for the family. He had been badly shaken up by three fatal accidents he had witnessed in Lisbon during the week, including ‘a woman cut in two by a railway train within three feet of me’, but generally the Portuguese were far more tolerable than Spaniards.537 By 18 July he was back in Tenerife and reporting that all the houses in Portugal had been taken up for the summer, but that they may try again in autumn because although outside Lisbon the country was ‘amazingly primitive’ it was cheap.538 He does not tell Pound that he was away when the move occurred but he explains the circumstances: ‘Check from Eauclaire failing to turn up, irate landlady seized all baggage, down to the babies napkins. We moved to another pension [and] … now inhabit with German aristos: Roudaba is actually swaddled in napkins from the august arse of an imperial highness.’
The previous pension had ‘possessed bedbugs, lice, mice, fleas (more than the usual large Canary quota) and the worst cook without exception on the entire face of the globe. Sometimes one couldn’t swallow his productions, other times one swallowed them and they came back. Here we get excellent food but not enough.’539 The new pension owned by the German ‘aristos’ threw up challenges of its own. He wrote to Pound the following March:
Three weeks before we left the pension the chaufeur [sic] there was found in
bed with the twelve-year old housemaid. The other servants rigged up a mirror and even succeeded in taking a photograph of the rape in progress. Next day everything returned to normal, except that the chaufeur was strutting more than usual because everybody knew of his conquests. Our own twelve-year old, Bourtai’s nurse, may or may not be a virgin. I wouldn’t trust anybody but a surgeon to say.540
The fact that the other servants rigged up a mirror to set up a photoshoot rather than acting to stop the rape says something about the prevailing culture. Bunting later ‘calculated the rape-rate at one woman in six on Tenerife. Have no data for the seduction rate, but imagine four of the remaining five would barely cover it.’541
By 1934 Hitler’s tentacles had spread as far as this, the furthest outpost of Europe. ‘I’m sick of all the bloody Huns, all alike,’ Bunting told Pound in April. ‘Here they all talk Hitler, except the tailor who told me some specific instances of people who had NOT talked Hitler, had gone back to Germany and been instantly sent from the port to the Concentrazienslager. They all evidently think all the other Germans and an appreciable number of Spaniards and English must be Hitler spies, which makes them extremely enthusiastic Nazis.’542 By October Hitler was having a direct affect on Bunting’s life: ‘Our aristocratic landlord turns out to be a pal of Roehm, hence his sourness in speaking of Hitler.’ Ernst Roehm, the too-powerful head of the Brownshirts, had been murdered by Hitler’s SS just four months earlier. ‘Hitlerian finance is forcing our local Hohenzollern back to Berlin. But the pension will carry on a few months longer I think, after which we will have to swim to Europe if we haven’t raised the fare otherwise.’543 Just a month later he reports that the ‘Local Boches all now completely bankrupt. We have this pension to ourselves, Baron Loen and the Princess of Anhalt doing the cooking when the cook is drunk, which is pretty often.’544
The Well of Lycopolis
The Canaries did not bring out the best in Bunting the poet or, perhaps, the man. Apart from ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ and ‘The Orotava Road’ Bunting preserved only a handful of adaptations and translations. ‘You leave’, for instance, when first written acknowledged itself as a translation from the fourteenth-century Persian poet, Hafiz,545 but by the time it reached Collected Poems Hafiz had disappeared. The reason, Bunting said, was that ‘if I’d thought there was very much of Hafez left in the product, I’d have put it in with the other translations’.546 Bunting clearly thought he had made a new poem, albeit based on a theme by Hafiz, but as Parvin Loloi and Glyn Pursglove have shown it is actually a very accurate translation.547 ‘When the sword’ is a more straightforward translation from Ferdowsi. ‘O Ubi Campi!’ (‘The soil sandy’), written in 1936, is a ‘poem about the farm troubles in the United States in the middle of the ’30s,’ he told an audience in 1995,548 but although thematically similar it is no return to the complaining Morpethshire farmer:
O ubi campi!
The soil sandy and the plow light, neither
virgin land nor near by the market town,
cropping one staple without forethought, steer
stedfastly ruinward year in year out,
grudging the labour and cost of manure,
drudging not for gain but fewer dollars loss
yet certain to make a bad bargain by
misjudging the run of prices. How glad
you will be when the state takes your farm for
arrears of taxes! No more cold daybreaks
saffron under the barbed wire the east wind thrums, nor wet noons, nor starpinned nights! The choir
of gnats is near a full-close. The windward
copse stops muttering inwardly its prose
bucolics. You will find a city job
or relief – or doss-and-grub – resigned to
anything except your own numb toil, the
seasonal plod to spoil the land, alone.549
There is not a hint of sentimentality here. The ‘flurry of the grouse’ and the ‘lowing of the kye’ have been replaced by irony, ‘ubi campi’ (fruitful fields) contrasted with the American Dust Bowl.
‘The Well Of Lycopolis’, however gloomy, was on the other hand a major achievement. The odes are effective enough, some of them are very beautiful, but Bunting was much more powerful when he worked on a larger canvas. He was aware of this:
I am impelled by love of a larger shape, more architectural, which has been so much neglected … The Well of Lycopolis begins and ends as I intended, but the middle movements fail to fill out the shape as they should … Chomei has the shape, but at the cost of some pretty dull brickwork. No one else but Eliot seems to care about the plan – they all get engrossed in detail – and Eliot is apt to make the plan to[o] plain – council houses where we want temples. (‘Quando flautos, pitos’)550
‘The Well of Lycopolis’ is a very carefully constructed poem. Bunting explained to a London audience in 1982 that it was
the most disgruntled of all my works, the one which takes the gloomiest view of everything I suppose … I used large passages some from Villon, some from Dante, translated in my own manner, as a large part of the body of the poem. I learned of it from Edward Gibbon … He describes … the Well of Lycopolis which is visited by the Emperor Hadrian … There are four parts, they’re not very long. The 1st part has the epigraph … which of course is the opening in Villon of the Lament of the Belle Heaulmiere. The Belle Heaulmiere was the wife or daughter of a helmet maker, and in Villon’s day, the 1400s, next to the goldsmiths the helmet makers were the most skilful, the most highly paid, much the richest of the artisans. They were the foundation of what became the middle class. Many heaulmieres became bankers just as goldsmiths did. They were rich people. So when you read the people discoursing on Villon who treat La Belle Heaulmiere as a prostitute it is absolutely wrong. She was nothing of the sort. She was a rich woman, and she had no doubt spent her money and become poor and all the rest of it, but the man she is regretting and worried about is not as you find in half the French editions of Villon, a pimp. Nothing of the sort. He’s her boyfriend, that she no doubt is exploited by in every possible way but he’s the boyfriend of a rich woman … I use her for the introduction of Venus the first part being a dialogue between the goddess Venus, and the goddess Polymnia, the muse of the more complicated kinds of song.551
Part I describes the meeting of the poet, Venus and Polymnia in a setting that is far from salubrious. To some extent we have been set up for this by the epigraph to the poem, ‘cujus pota signa virginitatis eripiunter’ (by the drinking of which [the well of the title] the signs of virginity are taken away), taken from note 112 in chapter 27 of Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a ‘very convenient fountain’ as Gibbon says,552 and by the epigraph to Part I, the quotation from Villon’s ‘Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière’ (‘Advis m’est que j’oy regretter’ or ‘by chance I heard the belle complain’). Here it is:
Slinking by the jug-and-bottle
swingdoor I fell in with
Mother Venus, ageing, bedraggled, a
half-quartern of gin under her shawl,
wishing she was a young girl again:
‘It’s cruel hard to be getting old so soon.
I wonder I don’t kill myself and have done with it.
I had them all on a string at one time,
lawyers, doctors, business-men:
there wasnt a man alive but would have given
all he possessed
for what they wont take now free for nothing.
I turned them down,
I must have had no sense,
for the sake of a shifty young fellow:
whatever I may have done at other times
on the sly
I was in love then and no mistake;
and him always knocking me about
and only cared for my money.
However much he shook me or kicked me I
loved him just the same.
If he’d made me take in washing he’d
and I’d have forgotten my troubles.
The selfish pig, never up to any good!
He used to cuddle me. Fat lot of good it’s done me!
What did I get out of it besides a bad conscience?
But he’s been dead longer than thirty years
and I’m still here, old and skinny.
When I think about the old days,
what I was like and what I’m like now,
it fair drives me crazy to
look at myself with nothing on.
What a change!
Miserable dried up skin and bone.
But none of their Bacchic impertinence,
medicinal stout nor portwine-cum-beef.
A dram of anaesthetic, brother.
I’m a British subject if I am a colonial,
distilled liquor’s clean.
It’s the times have changed. I remember during the War
kids carrying the clap to school under their pinnies,
studying Belgian atrocities in the Sunday papers
or the men pissing in the backstreets; and grown women
sweating their shifts sticky at the smell of khaki
every little while.
Love’s an encumbrance to them who
rinse carefully before using, better
keep yourself to yourself.
What it is to be in the movement!
‘Follow the instructions on page fortyone’
unlovely labour of love,
‘or work it off in a day’s walk,
a cold douche and brisk rub down,
there’s nothing like it.’
Aye, tether me among the maniacs,
it’s nicer to rave than reason.553
Venus’ rather improbable claim to be a British subject is validated by the fact that she is a Cypriot, Cyprus having been declared a Crown Colony by the British in 1925. ‘Every little while’ was a popular sentimental song of the second part of the First World War, with sugary lyrics that describe a world in which there was no place for ‘sticky shifts’.