A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Bunting caught working-class vernacular in a way that Eliot, for instance, never did. Giving it to the goddess of love is a stroke of genius. The poem gathers pace as the poet takes Venus to visit Polymnia, the goddess of music, song and dance. Polymnia is as grumpy as Venus:

  Took her round to Polymnia’s, Polymnia

  glowering stedfastly at the lukewarm

  undusted grate grim with cinders

  never properly kindled, the brass head of the

  tongs creaking as she twitched them:

  ‘Time is, was, has been.’

  A gassy fizzling spun from among the cinders.

  The air, an emulsion of some unnameable oil,

  greased our napes. We rhymed our breath

  to the mumble of coke distiling.

  ‘What have you come for? Why have you brought the Goddess?

  You who

  finger the goods you cannot purchase,

  snuffle the skirt you dare not clutch.

  There was never love between us, never less

  than when you reckoned much. A tool

  not worth the negligible price. A fool

  not to be esteemed for barren honesty.

  Leave me alone. A long time ago

  there were men in the world, dances, guitars, ah!

  Tell me, Love’s mother, have I wrinkles? grey hair?

  teats, or dugs? calves, or shanks?

  Do I wear unbecomning garments?’

  ‘Blotched belly, slack buttock and breast,

  there’s little to strip for now.

  A few years makes a lot of difference.

  Would you have known me?

  Poor old fools,

  gabbing about our young days,

  squatted round a bit of fire

  just lit and flickering out already:

  and we used to be so pretty!’554

  The line ‘Time is, was, has been’ is a reference to the Faust-like medieval monk and scholar, Roger Bacon. Friar Bacon was said to have created a brazen talking head which could answer any question. In Robert Greene’s play about Bacon, The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, written in the late sixteenth century, the Brazen Head speaks three times to Bacon’s hapless servant, Miles, before falling to the floor and shattering: ‘Time is … Time was … Time is past.’

  The chief event in Part I of ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ is the reduction of love and music to such dereliction, but it is almost overshadowed by Polymnia’s heartless rejection of the poet. In just four lines she mocks his ambition:

  There was never love between us, never less

  than when you reckoned much. A tool

  not worth the negligible price. A fool

  not to be esteemed for barren honesty.

  The poet has never put music into his words, has failed, is failing, will always fail.

  Part II of ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ starts in a very similar mode to Part II of ‘Villon’. In ‘Villon’ it is:

  Let his days be few and let

  his bishoprick pass to another,

  for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust …

  Part II of ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ also starts with a hearty curse:

  May my libation of flat beer stood overnight

  sour on your stomach, my devoutly worshipped ladies,

  may you retch cold bile.555

  Bunting continues to contrast music hall sentimentality with the reality of the lives of the goddesses:

  ‘Let’s be cosy,

  sit it out hand in hand.

  Dreaming of you, that’s all I do.’

  ‘Dreaming of you, that’s all I do’ is the first line of Beth Slater Whitson’s 1909 song, ‘Meet me tonight in dreamland’. Dreamland for Polymnia was less romantic:

  Open your eyes, Polymnia,

  at the sleek, slick lads treading gingerly between the bedpots,

  stripped buff-naked all but their hats to raise,

  and nothing rises but the hats;

  smooth, with soft steps, ambiguoque voltu.

  The Latin phrase ‘ambiguous looks’ is a quotation from Horace’s ‘Be patient’ and is there to suggest the androgyny of the ‘sleek, slick lads’ with their lack of erections. Polymnia’s world is sexless:

  Daphnis investigated

  bubless Chloe

  behind a boulder.

  Still, they say,

  in another climate

  virgin with virgin

  coupled taste

  wine without headache

  and the songs are simple.

  We have laid on Lycopolis water.

  And the target of this accusation of passionless impotence? Bloomsbury:

  The nights are not fresh

  between High Holborn and the Euston Road,

  nor the days bright even in summer

  nor the grass of the squares green.

  Part III piles up fresh images of decay and disappointment in a way that occasionally suggests The Waste Land:

  – with their snouts in the trough,

  kecking at gummy guts,

  slobbering offal, gobbling potato parings,

  yellow cabbage leaves, choking on onion skin,

  herring bones, slops of porridge.

  Way-O! Bully boys blow!

  The Gadarene swihine have got us in tow.556

  Bunting undoubtedly has the shanty, ‘The Banks of Newfoundland’, in his sights,557 but ‘swihine’ shows that he has more than half an eye on Eliot’s

  O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag –

  It’s so elegant.

  So intelligent.

  Part IV begins with a quotation from Canto VII of Dante’s Inferno:

  Ed anche vo’ che tu per certo credi

  che sotto l’acqua ha gente che sospira.

  In Dorothy Sayers’ translation this is:

  Further, I’d have thee know and hold for true

  That others lie plunged deep in this vile broth.558

  These are the Wrathful, those who tear each other ‘piecemeal with their teeth’, and they announce Bunting’s reflections on war which, by 1935, he was certain was inevitable:

  Surrendered in March. Or maybe

  ulcers of mustard gas, a rivet in the lung

  from scrappy shrapnel,

  frostbite, trench-fever, shell-shock,

  self-inflicted wound,

  tetanus, malaria, influenza.

  Swapped your spare boots for a packet of gaspers.

  Overstayed leave.

  Debauched the neighbour’s little girl

  to save two shillings …

  muttering inaudibly beneath the quagmire,

  irresolute, barren, dependent, this page

  ripped from Love’s ledger and Poetry’s:

  and besides I want you to know for certain

  there are people under the water. They are sighing.

  The surface bubbles and boils with their sighs.

  Look where you will you see it.

  The surface sparkles and dances with their sighs

  as though Styx were silvered by a wind from Heaven.559

  ‘NO one will publish the W of L,’ he wrote to Zukofsky in October 1935. ‘Perhaps as well, not sure I want it published.’560

  He has gnawed too much on the bridle

  Bunting kept up his journalism in the mid-1930s. William Carlos Williams wrote to Zukofsky in September 1934 saying, ‘Just received Bunting’s criticism of my book, not bad. In fact he has done me a service that is of great value. Why not a world with a few more Bunting’s in it? Damn ’f I know.’561

  This was in response to Bunting’s review in Westminster Magazine of Williams’ recent poetry. In it Bunting praised Williams’ ‘extraordinary technical virtuosity’ and drew a parallel between Williams and Yeats: ‘Nobody else has taken America for a permanent subject. Whitman’s was Democracy, an abstraction a much more competent technician would have found as difficult to keep at heel … He is like Yeats a national and nationmaking poet
.’ His verdict was unequivocal: ‘In case the implicit intention has been missed let me state plainly that Williams is one of less than a dozen poets now writing who have a reasonable certainty of literary longevity and whose work repays study.’562

  An informed and detailed article on the coup that started the Spanish civil war in the Spectator in July 1936 shows an appetite for political analysis that would resurface when Bunting worked for The Times in Teheran. General José Sanjurjo’s botched coup on 17 and 18 July split an already deeply divided nation but Bunting denied that the coup was Fascist and with extraordinary prescience described its likely consequences: ‘General Franco, who is believed to be a moderate republican, may be forced into the arms of the Monarchists, or driven to disguise a purely military dictatorship as Fascism. His manifesto commits him to nothing … In my opinion, the Left has the better chance in the long run, for it has, in Spain, the better cause. You cannot starve a nation for ever. But the long run may be a Marathon of blood.’563 Three years of vicious civil war followed the coup in which the Republicans (broadly the left) were defeated by Franco’s Nationalists.

  Bunting also reviewed E. Stuart Bates’ Modern Translation, negatively, in Criterion.564 His by now familiar haughty put-down enters as early as the close of the first paragraph: ‘Closing Mr. Bates’s book, one may repeat his introductory statement: the subject of modern translation “does not appear to have yet been dealt with”.’ Bates’ error was to engage with modern translation without proposing a plausible theory of it, without properly engaging with Dryden’s identification of different types of translation as metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation, and most egregiously of all, without any reference to Edward Fitzgerald or Ezra Pound. His review of Janko Lavrin’s Aspects of Modernism in the same issue is also largely dismissive but he admires from a distance Lavrin’s clinical approach: ‘In a series of skilful dissections we are invited to the mortuary table to contemplate the remains of lately adulated leaders of literary fashion. We have the sensation of assisting at a slightly cynical burial-service.’565

  In September 1936 Bunting reviewed three books on desert adventures in the Spectator. The Paradise of Fools by Michael Mason and Adventure in Algeria by a former French Foreign Legionnaire, Brian Stuart, pass muster, although at that time Bunting knew as much about the desert as did most of his readers. The Scourge of the Desert by Operator 1384, however, is handled roughly: ‘Operator 1384 has “adhered strictly to facts, and related no incident which did not actually occur and in which he did not personally take part.” I don’t believe him. A stage American and stage Arabs uttering Hollywood dialogue amongst scenery kindly lent by the British film industry at its worst surround his incredible adventures. People who read beyond page 15 without being paid for it deserve to have to finish the book.’566 Bunting was soon to have some ‘incredible adventures’ of his own in the desert.

  He appeared to extend the suicide mission over the British literary establishment that he had set off in his attack on Eliot in ‘The Written Record’ with an uncompromisingly hostile review of Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Earnest Atheist in New English Weekly in October 1936. Muggeridge’s study of Samuel Butler infuriated Bunting and the impression that its author was influential in London literary circles wasn’t going to prevent Bunting from fully expressing himself in what Peter Quartermain calls ‘an almost textbook example of a devastating exposure of individual Grub-Streetism’.567 It is, indeed, almost surgical in its dismemberment of Muggeridge:

  I don’t know Mr. Muggeridge’s circumstances, but dare swear his ‘study’ of Butler, from the false implication in the title to the scamped précis of ‘Erewhon Revisited’ in the final chapter, would not have been brought to any length if he had expected to be called upon to foot the printer’s bill. I doubt whether his contentions would have been those I think I can disentangle from the bluster, if he had taken time to disentangle them a little more himself … The author who most delighted in tumbling the dull-witted into false analogies and specious inductions has found another victim posthumously, one who perhaps has never read how Wordsworth murdered Lucy because she bored him. Or perhaps he has: no beacon can put a Muggeridge on guard against his own lack of humour.568

  Bunting goes on to mock Muggeridge’s judgement and ridicule his learning. Whatever influence the author of The Earnest Atheist did have in literary London it certainly wasn’t going to be exercised on Bunting’s behalf after this hatchet job. Marian Bunting recalled that he wrote this review in ‘one of his ferocious hate-moods … [the review] was murderous … Both his mother and I tried to keep him from sending it in, but he was adamant.’569

  In fact Bunting had unwittingly put his finger on the issue with his remarks about money. Muggeridge had begun his book on Butler with no great enthusiasm but he was desperately short of money, confiding to his diary that ‘I badly need some money, and feel cynical enough to do nearly anything to get it.’570 He had sent advance copies to friends who advised him to change the proofs substantially. Hugh Kingsmill warned him that he would be ‘flayed alive by every single critic’.571 He was right. Bunting was by no means the only commentator to be deeply disturbed by The Earnest Atheist and its debunking of Butler, the great Victorian debunker. The Sunday Times devoted two articles by Desmond MacCarthy to attacking the book. Stephen Spender ‘singled out the harsh tone and barbed rhetoric of the book as its own worst enemy’.572 E. M. Forster wrote that the book was ‘an attack so disgruntled and so persistent that it may well be the result of a guilt complex’ and the Daily Herald called it ‘an extravagance of peevishness and spitefulness’.573

  It is often said that Bunting’s review of The Earnest Atheist further prejudiced the London literary elite against him574 but there is no real evidence of that having happened. First, Muggeridge’s book had been universally panned and its author would have had no reason to single out Bunting’s review from all the rest. Second, Muggeridge himself later acknowledged that it was a poor book and that his own circumstances while writing it had affected his depiction of Butler.575 Third, Muggeridge doesn’t appear to have been unduly upset by the hostile reception his book received. He noted in his diary of 16 November 1936 that he’d ‘had a happy day. In the morning there were newspaper cuttings about The Earnest Atheist, which I read twice.’576 And fourth, Muggeridge at the time was no more a part of that London literary elite than was Bunting, although he certainly later became an influence. I think we can detect Bunting’s own hand in this deft bit of mythmaking. Bunting would certainly have known Hazlitt’s warning to Wordsworth: ‘He did not court popularity by a conformity to established models, and he ought not to have been surprised that his originality was not understood as a matter of course. He has gnawed too much on the bridle, and has often thrown out crusts to the critics, in mere defiance or as a point of honour when he was challenged, which otherwise his own good sense would have withheld.’577 He has gnawed too much on the bridle. There’s a badge that Bunting would have worn with pride.

  Chess with Franco

  Bunting’s politics were regarded as complex by his friends. Pound wrote to Zukofsky in July 1938 hoping that he and ‘BZL’ would accept the dedication of his forthcoming Guide to Kulchur. Zukofsky described Bunting’s obscure position thus: ‘Dear Ez: Can’t guess what Kulchah is about, but if you want to dedicate yr. book to a communist (me) and a British-conservativeantifascist- imperialist (Basil), I won’t sue you for libel, and I suppose you know Basil. So dedicate.’578

  Zukofsky gently satirised Bunting in his 1961 short story, Ferdinand: ‘An Englishman, who loved to sail with them in a catboat someone had given him, analysed international desirabilities for them, as though they depended on English common sense and England’s will to rid itself of the thieves in the Merrie Isle. A decent British empire, he believed, could be the best government in the world.’579

  In fact Bunting’s politics in the 1930s were relatively straightforward. In his ‘Observations on Left-Wing Papers’, written in November 1935,
he is explicit that he is not a communist but, it seems to me at least, only just:

  Personal. I am not a Communist, nor have much sympathy with the communist dogmas: but the revolution I desire has several things in common with the communist revolution. I am also in favour of any serious improvement on existing conditions in the world at large, and a strong communist movement in the U.S.A. would certainly improve existing conditions, provided it were a movement based on fact and action, not merely another of the ineffective emotional disturbances that have from time [to time] wasted themselves in vague aspirations and popular phrases in the United States. Such a movement must be built up from the workingman, not down from the ‘intellectual’.580

  The political situation in Europe was heating up towards the end of the Buntings’ time in the Canary Isles, although Marian claimed that the American Ambassador in Spain ‘didn’t even see the war coming & was caught up there for 6 months’.581 Bunting claims to have played ‘indifferent’ chess with Franco when he was the military governor of the islands.582 This is certainly possible as Franco had arrived in Tenerife as military governor of the Canary Isles on 23 February 1936, four months before the Buntings fled to the UK. Bunting had a knack of being in the thick of things. The military rebellion that sparked the Spanish Civil War was announced in the Canary Isles on 17 July 1936, after months of intrigue including a (now famous) secret meeting between Franco and Emilio Mola in La Esperanza forest in Tenerife.

  Not long before the Buntings left the Canary Isles he described to Pound a storm that seemed to mirror the political turbulence in Europe,

  two days of fury not seen here for a generation, they say. The houses aren’t built for it and I had a worrysome night, especially after the neighbours roof rose up and flapped away like a seagull. One of our cedars came down – all I could hear above the gale was a noise like tearing calico – and every tree in the garden lost some of its bigger branches, so that the litter is inconceivable. A huge eucalyptus three yards from our front gallery, and another cedar that leans over the roof and kept banging on it, as though there were half a dozen heavy men fighting in an upper story [sic], were the chief trouble … We were in the lee of twelve thousand feet of mountain. What it must have been like on the other side I cant easily imagine, there were pretty big things floating about in the atmosphere on our side.583