You will NEVER get the hang of fascism if you persist in E habit of regarding every ACT as a precedent.
Surgeon amputates leg/NOT as precedent/ he dont mean to go on amputating the patients leg every week or year.
Operations to save life/ ONLY in an emergency/What are called CONTINGENT. Things to be done ONCE and NOT erected into a system.628
Bunting didn’t want to get the hang of Fascism and he loathed Pound’s anti-Semitism, which he described as an ‘obsessive redherring’ in a letter to Dorothy Pound.629 Bunting and Pound had been corresponding about economics, communism, anti-Semitism and Fascism since 1934 and the correspondence had become increasingly fractious.
Pound and Lionel Robbins had already fallen out spectacularly over Douglas’ economic theories. Pound wrote a series of increasingly rude and aggressive letters to Robbins which rarely rise above invective and barely skirt theory. Robbins emerges with enormous credit from the spat. In August
1934 Robbins put Pound in his place in a way that Bunting, a London School of Economics drop out, never had the intellectual authority to do, although he knew a lot more about economics than Pound did. It was a letter that, as Robbins’ biographer Susan Howson says, Robbins clearly enjoyed writing:
I am neither over 80 and paralysed nor a God damned English mutton. I am a type you have not encountered recently – a man who can think logically and without prepossession.
Put your questions by all means. There is a large sum of money for the charities of Rapallo if I am worsted.
But don’t think I don’t know you already – a damned good poet led up the garden path by a set of second rate moth-eaten currency cranks. Don’t you realize that I’m as good a specialist on money as you are on poetry? What would you say if Mr. Selfridge came and tried to tell you how to write verse?
Well you see I’m more tolerant to you. Come and feed with me next time you’re in London instead of seeing that dull dog Douglas. You shall have some good wine and a completely painless extraction of all your fallacies.
Extract from a future history of poetry In the year 1934 the economist Robbins persuaded Pound that he was making a fool of himself about Douglas. Thank Gawd! After that he wrote good verse again.
According to Howson Robbins added a postscript which suggested to Pound that if he wanted to know more about him he should ask Bunting, which Pound did, but the correspondence became no more amiable after that. Pound acknowledged Bunting’s attempt to take some of the heat out of the conversation. He wrote to Robbins in September 1934: ‘even Buntin sez I got to be lenient cause you got wife and family and can’t afford to lose yr/ job/ … ’ But the rest of his letter is not a model of leniency: ‘Read tr/Jefferson (if as a god rotted Briton you have heard of him) … read up on Monte dei Paschi your a buggarin prof/ PAID to know a subject. even by so lousy and obscurantist a gang of counterfeiters as the London School/ but you orter know a bill from a mortgage … YOU are just plain DUMB.’630
Robbins’ diagnosis of Pound’s problem – ‘a damned good poet led up the garden path by a set of second rate moth-eaten currency cranks’ – is brilliant. If Pound had followed Robbins’ advice the literary landscape of the mid-twentieth century could have been very different. Pound’s incarceration in St Elizabeths psychiatric hospital after the Second World War effectively finished him off as a poet and, more damaging yet, as an editor. Although it is doubtful that Robbins could have cured Pound of his Mussolini worship.
In March 1935 Bunting wrote to Pound that ‘you surely got a bloody big bat in the belfry about economics. It seems to me just one of a good number of matters that are all pretty equally wrong.’631 An extraordinary tirade from Pound632 that started: ‘You really BLOODY fool/ “Go Douglas” your arse. As you never see any printed matter, you [sic] ignorance may be an alibi’, and carries on in much the same vein for two pages, brought an exasperated response from Bunting. ‘It makes me irritable trying to answer a letter that doesn’t say anything,’ he wrote, and it is true that Pound’s letter says absolutely nothing about anything, but does so in an extremely intemperate way. ‘Calling me a bloody fool,’ Bunting continued, ‘does me no good unless you attempt to show WHY.’633 Bunting’s lengthy, reasoned letters seem to have goaded Pound further. By January 1936 Bunting pointed out to Pound, quite fairly, that ‘a chap who writes the letters you’ve been writing lately obviously isn’t at his best … I desire to continue profiting by you, but don’t get any profit out of mixed abuse and political intolerance. A bad bargain for you? I don’t give anything in exchange? That’s your affair. If I’m not worth better than what I’ve got lately I’d rather be dropped. I would lose a good deal, no doubt of it. I’ve enough confidence in my own abilities to think you’d lose something too.’634 Tempers settled a little after this warning shot across Pound’s bow, but by the end of 1938 Bunting had had enough of Pound’s lunacy, the catalyst being a letter that Pound wrote to Zukofsky on 2 December 1938, preposterously blaming the Rothschilds, rather than the Nazis, for the persecution of Jews in Germany. Bunting saw the letter and wrote an angry rejection of its contents to Pound: ‘No, I am sorry, and thankyou: but I cant take it. I wish I were not as much indebted to you as I am.’ He goes on to berate Pound for his failure to acknowledge fascist atrocities such as Guernica and for the ‘abomination’ of his anti-Semitism:
Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorism, that I can recall in history was base, had its foundations in the meanest kind of envy and in greed. It makes me sick to see you covering yourself with that filth. It is not an arguable question, has not been arguable for at least nineteen centuries, Either you know men to be men, and not something less, or you make yourself an enemy of mankind at large.
To spue [sic] out anti-semitic bile in a letter to Louis, as I yesterday accidentally discovered you to be doing, – to Louis who has shown his devotion to you over many years, and who even now insists that you are to be forgiven because after all you are Ezra – to write such a letter is not a mere lapse of taste: it is uncommonly close to what has got to be called the behaviour of the skunk.
He broke off his relationship with Pound in a sign-off that was written more in anger than in sadness: ‘I suppose if you devote yourself long enough to licking the arses of blackguards you stand a good chance of becoming a blackguard yourself. Anyway, it is hard to see how you are going to stop the rot of your mind and heart without a pretty thoroughgoing repudiation of what you have spent a lot of work on. You ought to have the courage for that: but I confess I don’t expect to see it.’635
Zukofsky’s response to Pound takes a strangely neutral poisition, but ends with precisely the same sentiment that Bunting’s had: ‘your letter which offended Basil because he feels I’m a very Jewish Jew, which I don’t feel, was written to me. It was none of his business to take it upon himself etc, but I admire him for having done it, whatever reservations I may have as to the usefulness of his action. He thinks it may lead you to think again. Frankly, I don’t.’636 Bunting’s hostility to Pound over his absurd letter to Zukofsky may have been exacerbated by the fact that he felt deeply indebted to his Jewish friends at the time. ‘Do you know,’ he wrote to Karl Drerup in January 1938, ‘I believe at this time you are my only close friend who is not a Jew? You and I will have to get circumcised. Only the Jews have stood by me in real misfortune.’637
In spite of their quarrel Pound’s fundamental honesty about poetry meant that he never failed to promote Bunting to anthologists and editors who asked him for contributions. He wrote to Douglas McPherson in September 1939 saying, ‘There is plenty of room for a new mag … But you must realize first, that the actual output of good poetry is very small … Were I forced to make one I shd. have to go into retrospect as far as my own Active Anthology and take Bunting’s “Northern Farmer” and a few other pages of him, plus a couple of Angold’s satires … Plus a few poems by Cummings … ten lines quoted from my new Cantos … If you can find six pages outside that lot, go to it.’638
Pound had sincere belief in his protégés. He told Zukofsky in 1940 that ‘mebbe if you and Boozle B[unting] & me & the kumrad keep at it, we’ll evolve a style of the period’.639 In June 1955 Pound tried to enlist William Carlos Williams’ support in persuading Lawrence Ferlinghetti to include Bunting in his new Pocket Poet series: ‘if yu write em yu cd/putt in a plug fer Basil the Bunter, that wd. circumvent the idol of yr. optic Mr Ellyut.’640
London, Paris, Rapallo, New York, Spain: Bunting accounts for his twenties and thirties with characteristic obliqueness in Briggflatts. Here is part of the poem that deals with London:
Poet appointed dare not decline
to walk among the bogus, nothing to authenticate
the mission imposed, despised
by toadies, confidence men, kept boys,
shopped and jailed, cleaned out by whores,
touching acquaintance for food and tobacco.
Secret, solitary, a spy, he gauges
lines of a Flemish horse
hauling beer, the angle, obtuse,
a slut’s blouse draws on her chest,
counts beat against beat, bus conductor
against engine against wheels against
the pedal, Tottenham Court Road, decodes
thunder, scans
porridge bubbling, pipes clanking, feels
Buddha’s basalt cheek
but cannot name the ratio of its curves
to the half-pint
left breast of a girl who bared it in Kleinfeldt’s.
He lies with one to long for another,
sick, self-maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still-born.641
It is not very self-forgiving.
* * *
Bunting was still in New York in December 1938. Zukofsky wrote to William Carlos Williams on 3 December 1938: ‘I’m very sorry I was out the other night when you dropped around – if it was Thursday, I went uptown to see Basil. I’d enjoy it a lot, if you feel like it, if you’d come here next Thurs. or the Thurs. after., I could make some supper – and if you’d like to see Basil, I’ll try and shanghai him.’642 And on 12 December he was still trying to fix up the rendezvous: ‘If you can possibly come here this Thursday without inconveniences, do so – because I arranged for Basil to come that night, & René [Taupin] may possibly show up, too.’643
However, Bunting was, as usual, struggling to make ends meet in New York. ‘NOTHING,’ he wrote to Pound in November 1938, ‘from digging to reviewing will yield me a living. I am now lying about imbecile books for cigarette money.’644 Fortunately global events came to his rescue.
When war was declared Bunting, according to William Carlos Williams, ‘rushed across the United States from California to go to England, as fast as he could, to enlist’.645 Caddel and Flowers say that he explained his reaction to the outbreak of the Second World War as follows: ‘During the First World War it was possible to believe, I did believe, that it was a totally unnecessary war fought for purely selfish ends, to get hold of markets and things like that. You couldn’t believe that, in the second one at all. It was perfectly obvious for years beforehand that nothing short of war and violence would ever stop Hitler and his appalling career.’646
Many participants made the same case, and no doubt it is true. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Bunting at eighteen, psychologically vulnerable and having been immersed in private Quaker education (however inept its moral leadership) for six years was not the poverty scarred, worldly, forty-year-old wanderer, sea dog and convict who engaged so energetically with the second war.
No conscientious objections this time.
THREE
SWEET SHIT! BUY!
Heart slow, nerves numb and memory, he lay
On glistening moss by a spring;
as a woodman dazed by an adder’s sting
barely within recall
tests the rebate tossed to him, so he
ascertained moss and bracken,
a cold squirm snaking his flank
and breath leaked to his ear:
I am neither snake nor lizard,
I am the slowworm.
Briggflatts III
THROCKLEY, 1939–1940
We know more about Bunting’s war service now than we did just a few years ago. In 2010, under the twenty-five year rule (Bunting died in 1985), the Royal Air Force released as much information about his record as we are ever likely to receive from that source. We now have his ‘Promotions, Reclassifications, Reversions’ and ‘Movements’ as both aircraftman and officer. Having been rejected by the navy and army, apparently on health grounds, Bunting was eventually accepted by the RAF although he had to wait until September 1940 to enlist. He had been largely unoccupied since his return from the US, apart from a series of six history lectures that he gave to working men in Lemington in September and October 1939. By early November he was complaining to Zukofsky that his earnings had ‘dwindled to £5 – and led to such a mass of red tape that I am determined never to have anything to do with a body which evidently exists to put as many hindrances as possible in the way of education.’1 It seems, however, that he may have pitched these lectures inaccurately. It all ‘grouped very nicely around Alexander, Abu Bekr, Genghis, and Columbus: or if you prefer the thinkers to the men of action, Isocrates, Al-Ghazzali, Galileo, Andy Jackson.’ He seems to have been surprised that the ‘workingmen listened politely and asked no questions whatever. They were not interested in anything except Marx.’2 Although Bunting claimed that his classes were reasonably popular he was asked at least one question which ought to have suggested to him that he wasn’t taking his students on a journey to enlightenment. He reported this ‘jewel of half-knowledge’ to Zukofsky: ‘“Please, what was the connection between this Caliph Omar and Omer that wrote the Iliad?”’3
In May 1939 Bunting reported to Karl Drerup that Britain was on a war footing: ‘tanks on all the roads, trenches in every garden, balloons anchored at sea off the Tyne, big guns on railway trucks travelling to the coast to go to Gib[raltar] or Malta’.4 By October this activity had been scaled up. He wrote a vivid account of Britain at war to Zukofsky:
When it began, the weather improved instantly, which of course shows that Jehovah approves. Also the lights went out. It is inconceivably dark without the moon. From my doorstep I should see a largish industrial town & a number of big industrial villages: but an hour after sunset I might as well be looking at a totally uninhabited stretch of country. Occasionally a furnace flares up for a moment, but not often. Even the tramcars which pass the house are so dark that in about a hundred yards they become invisible – though not inaudible … We all carry gasmasks – little kids making mud-pies in the gutter & Lord Mayors at public functions. Drunks take their gasmasks to gaol with them, judges have theirs on the desk before them.5
Bunting was waiting to know what ‘they’ wanted of him. Annie was concerned about him. She told Karl Drerup that, ‘Basil is still here with me. He has not found any work yet, and gets very depressed about it sometimes. He has very few friends here, and does not go out much.’6 He was already feeling a burden on his mother and he planned to borrow a tent and take a long walk along Hadrian’s Wall and then across the heather and bogland to the mountains. His frustration spilled into a letter to the Manchester Guardian in June 1939:
I learn from your leading article that General Valle has given a list of ships attacked or sunk in Barcelona harbour by the Italian Air Force. You do not state whether our Government has sent in any claim for compensation. Since the responsibility is now admitted there can be no excuse for overlooking it. It would hardly be consistent with our national independence to acquiesce in acknowledged acts of war against us, particularly since the nearness of these attacks to the time of our agreement with Italy makes them conspicuous examples of treachery.
Our Government ‘reserved the right’ to exact damages from Franco for ships sunk by his force
s. It is surely extremely important that those claims should be fully met before there is any question of loans, public or private, to Spain. But if Italy asserts responsibility for some of the sinkings, it is Italy that should be made to pay.7
This strikes me as the view of someone who wants to be seen to be involved at any level rather than that of an economist of war reparations.
By October he had a sniff of a job at the Ministry of Information. He told Zukofsky that a friend of his uncle, who was a cabinet minister, thought he should be employed to write ‘articles for America’, but that when he went to the ministry he found it ‘four times overstaffed with the nephews, daughters, etc of the men in charge. Hardly a journalist among them.’8 This rather improbable acquaintance was Buck de la Warr or, more properly, Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, two months older than Bunting and the Labour Party’s first hereditary peer in 1923. By 1939 he was Secretary of the Board of Education in Chamberlain’s government and Bunting was urging him, in English and Persian, to put in a word for him to his ‘bosom pal … the Secretary of State for War’, the long-forgotten Leslie Hore-Belisha.9 One might wonder how the gritty, unemployed, seemingly unemployable Bunting might move in a circle that included an Old Etonian toff like de la Warr (pronounced ‘Delaware’ of course). The only point of connection, apart from Bunting’s uncle, seems to be that de la Warr had been a conscientious objector at exactly the same time as Bunting, although the 9th Earl de la Warr spent no time in Wormwood Scrubs.
Bunting’s first brush with espionage occurred in this period. A few years later he was to be deeply involved in the real thing. ‘Imbeciles in a motorcar the other day,’ he wrote to Zukofsky in November 1939, ‘tried to get a village policeman to arrest me as a spy. I was out for a walk. Fortunately it was an intelligent policeman, who realised that spies don’t make themselves conspicuous by growing beards. After some talk I suggested to him that he might also enquire whether the motorcar was stolen, which he proceeded to do, very thoroughly, to the enormous indignation of the four fools in it.’10
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