A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  The only time I broke free from my personal affairs for a bit since September, was during the coup d’état. I got in a round-robin to King Edward at the very start, offering to go to any length whatsoever to dish Baldwin, and succeeded in keeping my very short tail of young men together and active during the crisis. The police finally ousted me from the lobby of the House of Commons. The crowd at the Palace didn’t respond. But the conspirators managed the whole show very efficiently. Lack of exact information was a huge handicap. The week-end difficulty of getting in touch with Churchill or Wedgwood, and the absence of Lloyd George, made it impossible to put my proposals before anyone of importance until it was clearly too late to carry out my plan (to occupy Printing House Square and prevent the Times appearing unless the Astors and Walters consented to change its policy). I would have had to recruit more men, and couldn’t do it without help at a moment when people were actually being gaoled for singing ‘God Save the King’ in the street. The so-called Fascists would do nothing effective, while dishing Edward’s chances with the crowd by claiming that he was one of them, the rotten liars.

  Nobody any longer has any doubt that the South Wales speech was the clue to the whole business. [The King had made a speech in Wales that suggested he was likely to seek to impose his political views on parliament.] But at the time the press was so unanimous (Beaverbook and co didn’t support Edward, they merely didn’t support Baldwin as heartily as the rest) that the people at large were deceived. They didn’t see that there was a coup d’état at the expense of parliament and electorate, they only saw a marriage about which they were divided, but the unco’ guids who always speak first anyway had the opportunity of making themselves heard, the others hadn’t: and that I suppose stampeded parliament in the end. In the North it seems crowds in the cinema were hissing Edward and shouting ‘She’s nowt but a bloody hoor’ and so forth.

  The success of the wage-parers and purity-fiends is making itself felt already. I’m not clear what it portends. The whole thing is conditioned by the danger of war, which makes everybody chary of going very far against our masters. BUT King George [who had succeeded Edward after his abdication] has been publicly hissed. That appearance at the window in Piccadilly a day too early has made people look on him as a usurper.

  Now it doesn’t seem to me to matter two hoots who is King, but it matters enormously whether we elect a parliament, or merely a cabinet. I don’t know whether the unpopularity of the new King can be made to work against the gang, but I hope it will. What seems quite certain is that not only no great change, but not even any substantial alleviation of the lot of the poor in England is going to be possible in future without civil war.604

  The Thistle

  Separated permanently from his wife and three children by the Atlantic Bunting decided that ‘the best way to face up to the difficulty of life was to get a little boat and live on that. At least you were away from the mass of apes that call themselves mankind.’605 He bought the Thistle, a six tonner, in Essex and lived aboard it for a year, apparently very enjoyably. ‘One can live awfully cheaply that way.’ He stayed in Essex for a while before sailing up the English Channel intending to make a crossing to France but fell foul of nautical bureaucracy: ‘… the boat, to get its papers completed for foreign trips, has to have its whole pedigree. It has to know all its owners back to the day it was built, and I couldn’t get the list completed. So I got stuck in Devonshire and spent a very pleasant winter going out with the herring fishermen and helping the seine-net men on shore.’606

  Bunting had become a skilled sailor in Rapallo and Amalfi and the Thistle, which cost him £100, was an easy vessel for him to manage. He wrote to Karl Drerup in January 1938 from Dittisham in Devon, where the Thistle was anchored for the winter:

  I have left off being anything but a sailor. I see nobody but fishermen and naval men, and do scarcely anything but look after the “Thistle”. Of course, she is a very little yacht. I could not buy the sort of boat I really want. She is very shallow, so that she does not stand up well to the sea: and she has a big open cockpit which makes her dangerous in rough water: and there is very little room in the cabin – only three feet six inches high – and so on. But she is a good ship of her kind and brought me safely about four hundred miles, in conditions she was never meant for.607

  He had been distressed by the separation from his children and the Thistle, his own prescription, was working slowly and he was ‘less easily upset now’.608 Indeed he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed his single-handed voyage to Devon from Kent. There had been a ‘most hospitable yacht-club at Ramsgate’ and in Dover he met a ‘famous Dutch yachtsman who has been round the world alone in his boat’. After he left Dover he became caught in a gale and the subsequent five-day calm left him becalmed at sea without sleep or food. Near Southampton he passed a large German liner (possibly the Pennland) on which ‘there was a big group of sailors near the stern doing some work, and when they saw my beard (“Russian”) they all ran to the side and gave the clenched fist salute and began to sing the “Internationale”. They didn’t seem to care what the passengers thought about it.’609 He spent almost a month in Southampton mostly talking to a whaler who had been captain of a Cunard liner and a Commander in the Navy. By that point he had become enough of a seaman to be able to enter Lulworth Cove in Dorset ‘against strong, gusty winds – a tricky business – on a day when, it seems, no other boat could (or would) do it.’ He sailed on to Devon and spent time, ill and depressed, in Torquay before sailing to the estuary of the River Dart, ‘a very beautiful place – a wide, enclosed stretch of water surrounded by high hills covered with forest – mostly oak, beech and elm, but with a good many Mediterranean pines and a few palms and eucalyptuses. There are vines and figs and agaves in the cottage gardens, for this corner of England is nearly as warm as the Riviera, though much rainier.’610

  He spent the winter on the Dart estuary and went to the local pub less to drink the very cheap local cider than to talk to the men of the village, ‘kind and good natured’. In December 1937 there were strong rumours of war and mobilisation and Bunting expected to be conscripted ‘to navigate a trawler or other small coastal vessel’, but the emergency passed. He was hopeful of a job censoring films in Singapore for the British Colonial Service that he had applied for but it came to nothing.

  Bunting occupied himself on the Thistle by rewriting Shakespeare’s sonnets. Richard Caddel says that Bunting started improving Shakespeare at school, ‘cutting out the inessential bits, straightening the syntax and so on to reveal the essence of the poems’. These exercises have not survived but Caddel reproduced some examples of his ‘radical attack’, apparently from the late 1920s in a Basil Bunting special issue of Durham University Journal in 1995.611

  Bunting’s arrangement of Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 22’.

  Bunting told Denis Goacher that when he was living on his boat in Devon, if he’d got nothing better to do he would take a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets and cut out every single word that he considered unnecessary.612 Goacher also dates this to the 1920s and sees it as one of the ways Bunting learned his craft, but it is clearly from the period Bunting spent on the Thistle in the winter of 1937/8, long after he’d found his voice. Bunting had never been overawed (or even all that impressed) by Shakespeare; the fact that Shakespeare revolutionised the sonnet by treating it with disrespect being almost the only good thing he could find to say about him. ‘Everybody treats Shakespeare as the greatest writer,’ he complained. ‘All English must be subordinate to Shakespeare. And when I look at English literature and think what has moved you most, what does continually move you most, what is the most lively and lifelike of English literature, it’s Charles Dickens. Over and over and over again it’s Charles Dickens, a far greater writer than Shakespeare.’613

  His time on the Thistle was good therapy. He told Pound when he was desperate for work in the US the following year that ‘sailing the Thistle for a year was at least a man’s life, not th
is louse-like writing for money … the Thistle served her main purpose in getting me through the worst period I’ve had … Harpooning congers, netting herring, is a good life. If ultimately they won’t let me write what I have to write, I’d liefer be a fisherman than another thing.’614

  Let them remember

  Only one poem, the sonnet ‘Let them remember’, survives from Bunting’s time on the Thistle. It is a haunting statement about his separation from his children, as his brief note in Collected Poems makes clear: ‘In Samangan Rustam begot Sohrab.’

  Let them remember Samangan, the bridge and tower

  and rutted cobbles and the coppersmith’s hammer,

  where we looked out from the walls to the marble mountains,

  ate and lay and were happy an hour and a night;

  so that the heart never rests from love of the city

  without lies or riches, whose old women

  straight as girls at the well are beautiful,

  its old men and its wineshops gay.

  Let them remember Samangan against usurers,

  cheats and cheapjacks, amongst boasters,

  hideous children of cautious marriages,

  those who drink in contempt of joy.

  Let them remember Samangan, remember

  they wept to remember the hour and go.615

  Apart from ‘Let them remember’, written in 1937, and a poem dedicated to Margaret de Silver’s daughter, Anne, ‘Not to thank dogwood’, written in 1938, Bunting’s entire published output from these years was a review of two poetry translations, from Chinese and Greek, in the April 1938 edition of Criterion, in which he mounted an energetic defence of translation of the spirit rather than the word of the foundation works:

  There are those who love dead languages because they were once alive and those who like them better as dead as possible, who hate being reminded that they ever were alive and free from literary affectations and who would be distressed if they could possibly be convinced that the earliest poets did not conform to a standard of insipidity that did not yet exist, but must have shared the vocabulary and syntax of the unread mob and taken their rhythms from the play of limbs in dancing and of fingers on the lute, not from the calculations of prosodists. Every revivification of poetry has taken the same route, towards the language of the streets and the cadences of song or bodily movement: but their knowledge teaches nothing to those who fear life, the life of ‘the people’ above all. It is ‘vulgar’. It is ‘in bad taste’. It threatens to wake them up. The perverse arrangements of a University [both volumes had been published by Cambridge University Press] encourage those least fitted to feel the power of ancient poetry to undertake to translate it from living Greek into dead English.616

  Nellist’s Nautical Academy

  After a happy year on the Thistle he ran out of money, sold his boat for nearly £200 and enrolled in 1937 at ‘a very peculiar place’, Nellist’s Nautical Academy, ‘a cramming school for people who want certificates to be mates or masters’.617 Nellist’s Nautical School had been opened in the early 1920s by John Nellist, who had been born in 1870 in Robin Hood’s Bay, in South Shields. The Edinburgh Gazette of 19 June 1923 records ‘John Nellist, residing and carrying on business under the style of Nellist’s Nautical School of Navigation at 4 Charlotte Terrace, lately carrying on the same business at the Seamen’s Institute, Coronation Street, both in South Shields, county of Durham, and previously at 19 Dockwray Square, North Shields, Northumberland, nautical instructor.’618 The school was later run by his two sons, John (Jackie) and William George (Billy), who had learned their craft as assistants to their father, from a Victorian terraced house, Mercantile Marine at 10 Summerhill Terrace in Fenham, just a couple of hundred metres from Bunting’s first school, Miss Bell’s, in West Parade.

  There is real relish in Bunting’s recollection of Nellist’s:

  When I first saw it I couldn’t believe my eyes. I walked in asking for Mr. Nellist and was shown into a room in an old house across which I couldn’t see because of the thickness of the tobacco smoke – all these men smoking pipes. No window was ever opened, the smoke just accumulated and got thicker and thicker like London fog … You learned the routine things, how to handle the nautical tables and the theory of navigation and so forth. I picked and chose. Because of my eyes I couldn’t hold a certificate, so that didn’t enter into the matter at all. I just wanted to know enough to handle a boat intelligently. They were very pleased, for they had not had anybody wanting to read sailing stuff as against steamship stuff for a long time. That brought me into classes where I would not otherwise have been at all, of course; and into one class where I was with a number of shipmasters reading for the extra masters certificate. And there old Mr. Nellist explained to us the various ways of correcting the error of the sextant. There was one way, now outdated, called taking the angle of the arc, about which you were required to know something. He explained this. He said: “Now, ye dinna need to knaw much aboot it, cause its outa date. And if the examiner say to ye, what aboot the angle off the arc, ye just say to that Board of Trade Examiner, bugger the angle off the arc, there’s a new method!” I wonder how many of them did that?

  Bunting remembered sitting next to a fellow examinee during a mock examination at Nellist’s:

  The man – a mate reading for master – sitting next to me was given two or three old charts of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean and told to make a bridge-book for the ship from Suez to Karachi. The obvious thing, of course, was simply to take the ship down the Red Sea, noting the various lights you’d see on the way, any special dangers, and around the bottom of Arabia and up again to Karachi. This man next to me had not had an opportunity yet during the examination of showing off his knowledge of the way to set out a great circle route. So he set to work. He took the latitude and the longitude of both places, applied his mathematics and worked out the great circle route. And it was only when he came at last – towards the end of the time allowed for the question – to transfer it to the chart that he discovered he’d taken his ship across the middle of the Arabian Desert.619

  UNITED STATES, 1938–1939

  Equipped with Nellist’s nautical education (and a new sextant) in 1938 Bunting launched his career at sea. He sailed to Montreal from Middlesbrough on 16 April 1938, a journey that would take about twelve days.620 His plan was to take a bus to Boston to look for work and if not instantly hired there to carry on to New York. He did find work. He told Jonathan Williams that ‘in America I sailed other men’s boats, a big schooner and so forth.’621 But the Second World War put paid to all that. He was ‘awhile in New York and in Los Angeles. No good. Couldn’t get anything to do. I had to live off my mother.’622 He tried, perhaps audaciously for a poet so little known, to sell some manuscripts. He wrote to a collector to explain that ‘Unfortunately my income is not sufficient to permit the donation of manuscripts. I have several for sale from $150 up. I have also a copy of “Redimiculum Matellarum”, Milan 1930, now exceedingly rare, with which I might be induced to part for about twice that sum.’623

  He spent time with Zukofsky and nearly became a commercial fisherman. Lorine Niedecker, Zukofsky’s former lover and the only female poet to be associated with Objectivism, recalls that she nearly met him on this visit.

  Some mention at the time of his going into the fishing business (he had yeoman muscles LZ said and arrived in New York with a sextant) with my father on our lake and river but it was the depression and at that particular time my dad felt it best to ‘lay low’ so far as starting fresh with new equipment was concerned and a new partner – the market had dropped so low for our carp – and I believe BB merely lived a few weeks with Louie without engaging in any business. He’s probably a very fine person and I’ve always enjoyed his poetry.624

  You will NEVER get the hang of fascism

  Zukofksy wrote to Pound in July 1938 that ‘Basil wuz here for 2 months, trying to get job as navigator on yacht, or wut else, & now has gone for west coast on
chance that there might be a job out there for an extra in the movies. I hope he lands one. Things probably not so hopeful there either.’625

  Bunting was paying $25 per month for a small apartment at 427 S. Figueroa Street in Los Angeles which he had reached by Greyhound bus via Washington, Chattanooga, Memphis, Dallas, El Paso and Phoenix. In August he wrote a very long letter to Karl Drerup, who was planning a similar trip to the west coast and had asked for Bunting’s advice. Bunting suggested that Drerup take a different route, via Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Santa Fe: ‘These towns, which are close to big Indian Reservations, are all “artist colonies” … probably unbearably arty, but there must be money about somewhere.’ He was in good spirits. He liked Los Angeles more than any other American town he had visited. He was happy in his little downtown apartment where he was delighted to find that refrigerator, gas stove, hot water, and electric light, as well as good furniture and even sheets and towels were included in his rent. ‘And they go over the place once a week with a vacuum cleaner.’ Wine was cheap and some of it ‘not at all bad’. On the other hand work was hard to find – ‘The Japs and Mexicans will work for less than you need to keep alive.’ Fortunately Margaret de Silver had made it possible for him to carry on for at least another month.626 He would have stayed in Los Angeles if the British navy hadn’t intervened, ‘wanting to make a sailor of me during the late perils and not even refunding my wildcat fare when they called it off’.627 Meanwhile Pound was haranguing Bunting about his inability to appreciate the value of Fascism. In a letter to Bunting of 24 November 1938 he drew a rather implausible analogy: