A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  hair pierced my scalp like a lancet. That was

  not wine I drank far from your sight but my heart’s

  blood gushing into the cup. Wall and door wherever

  I turned my eyes scored and decorated with shapes

  of you. To dream of Laila Majnun prayed for

  sleep. My senses came and went but neither your

  face saw I nor would your fantom go from me.

  Now like aloes my heart burned, now smoked as a censer.

  Where was the morning gone that used on other nights

  to breathe till the horizon paled? Sa‘di!

  Has then the chain of the Pleiades broken

  tonight that every night is hung on the sky’s neck?165

  Zukofsky included two fragments of Bunting’s translations from Sa‘di

  Night swallowed the sun as

  the fish swallowed Jonas.

  and Lucretius (‘Darling of Gods and men…’) in his A Test of Poetry in 1948.166

  Bunting’s major achievement of the 1940s, however, was not a translation but a generous tribute to the friend with whom he had fallen out so badly ten years previously. ‘On the fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, written in 1949, is a moving, if slightly Ozymandian (in the hostage-to-fortune sense), monument:

  There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?

  They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,

  jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,

  et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.

  Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

  There they are, you will have to go a long way round

  if you want to avoid them.

  It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,

  fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!167

  ‘Once,’ Bunting told an audience in 1982,

  in the period when you were supposed not to say a word to anybody for many years, Pound sent me a little tape which he had spoken. It had a small amount of letter on it, and then having exhausted what he had to say I suppose, it wasn’t much, he started reading my poems. He read them very well, and he read them right through until he came to ‘the fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos’. And then he started it, and half way he got stuck. He started it again and he got stuck half way. He started it a third time. He said ‘God damn it. I can’t!’… he had obviously felt this as an enormous compliment.168

  There is no doubt that Pound thought Bunting had paid him an immense compliment. When Denis Goacher visited Pound in St Elizabeths Hospital in 1954 Pound told him that Bunting had written a small amount of extremely good poetry, ‘some of which I even remember’. Then, according to Goacher,

  he brought out his copy of the collected Cantos up to that date, because he had been re-reading them for the purposes of Rock Drill. There was, in front, a letter from Basil Bunting containing his poem ‘On the fly-leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, which begins ‘There are the Alps’. Pound took out this letter, in which Basil had typed out the poem, and when he read this to me, he broke down in the middle of it. He couldn’t finish it because he was so upset. It is not often that one poet gives another poet as great a compliment as that.169

  Bunting was enjoying life, although Margaret de Silver wouldn’t have guessed it. She wrote to Bunting in 1948, prompting a reply from Teheran that rekindled their correspondence for several years. The subtext of these letters seems to be an attempt by Bunting to emotionally blackmail Margaret into renewing her bursary from the late 1920s. By this time he had been on a payroll of sorts for eight years and yet, even though the salary was ‘nominally good … they juggle with it so wildly that I have actually grown poorer instead of richer during my time here’.170 It seems inconceivable that this could be the case given he was not supporting his two children and had not at that stage remarried. Indeed even the remarriage was a problem:

  I’ve been working, and the work has got sillier and sillier, more and more futile delays, bureaucracy gone mad. In addition I’ve been illish, not in bed but near it. Brrr. Grrr. Finally, Sima has changed her mind and doesn’t want to marry me after all, which is depressing, even though she may yet change it back again. She was an unexpected stroke of fortune in my middle-age, and now I feel like the chap who hears that he has won the lottery, and then that they have made a mistake over the number and he hasn’t after all. I believe I told you about Sima – very young, beautiful, barbarous (Kurd and Armenian), without any of the usual assumptions and inhibitions. She was bound to get tired of me in time, but I’d hoped it might last a few years.171

  He wrote on the same day to Dorothy Pound that colleagues had been congratulating him on his ‘escape’ from Sima; she would have acted as a brake on a career that he neither wanted nor sought. ‘Just another savage won’t do,’ he told her. ‘It was the particular brand of barbarism.’172 When his secretary saw his face after Sima left him, she locked up the small arms and hid the key.173

  He told both Margaret and Dorothy that he was considering not renewing his contract when it became due in March 1949, the work was so life-sapping. ‘If I had just a little more money …’ He believed that he had a few poems still to write, ‘but I’ll never get them out unless I stop working for the government’. It isn’t very subtle. A year later he wrote again. Margaret’s heart must have sunk even further at the dismal opening: ‘My dear Margaret, When shall I get a little leisure again?’174 By then he had married his ‘wild girl’ and had left the embassy as a consequence but the weariness of this letter is overwhelming:

  In a few months now it will be ten years since I had any rest at all except the few months of demobilisation, when I was looking for work. From 40 to 47 I had just over fourteen days leave and worked mostly at tasks far more continuous and often more strenuous than fell to most men. From 47 to today I’ve had a period when it was necessary to waste a certain amount of time, not to employ it sensibly or for pleasure, and a longer period now growing intolerable of work at a pressure equal to that of the war in its more strenuous phases. Since February this year I have had two days precisely in which I was free to do what I fancied – no Sunday off, no Friday off – and most days I have worked more than ten hours, often fourteen or fifteen for weeks together. It is stupefying. When I look back without actually tasking my memory I can remember only the few hours here and there when there was nothing official to be done – walks ashore in Scotland, amongst the bushes by the river at Ahvaz, through the bush at Durban, shooting in the mountains over Isfahan … I spent sixteen hours every day under a sun dispensing 145 Fahrenheit in the shade chasing around driving Bakhtiari workmen to greater efforts … sat for three twelve hour tours and one of seventeen hours every four days at the telephone collating the reports of the Sicilian landings … rose at five and worked until the night raiders came home about midnight or later every day at Catania … worked, as they told me, an average of eighteen hours a day for over six weeks at the beginning of the invasion of France, until for lack of sleep I nodded off riding my motor-bicycle down the runway of the airfield.175

  If only, he seems to be musing, I knew some wealthy patroness of the arts who could relieve me of all this Sisyphean toil so I could buy a boat and read.

  I’m getting too garrulous

  On 2 December 1948 Bunting married Sima Alladadian, a Kurdo-Armenian from Isfahan, at the embassy. Bunting’s profile locally was high; the Persian press went ‘all gooey over my marriage and splashed baseless romances all over its columns for several weeks, and I haven’t resented the silliness’.176 There followed a six-week honeymoon in England. ‘It was amusing,’ he told Dorothy Pound in a letter in April 1949, ‘to see how it struck someone who had never been in any city bigger than Teheran, nor ever seen the sea nor ridden in a train. We spent all our money on clothes. I think the Times printing office made the biggest impression, closely followed by Kew.’177

  Bunting had anticipated problems with the Foreign Office e
ight months previously. He told Dorothy Pound in April 1948 that the FO would

  not approve and may forbid. There is a new law to discourage the bloody slaves my compatriots from marrying foreigners by refusing to give their wives citizenship, so that they become stateless and have to find Nansen passports. Above all, the difference of manners and habits makes what is a suitable and right match in Persia very shocking for the English community, so that I shall not only marry a Wop or Wog, but also a child by their standards, and be accounted a Nasty Old Man. But Sima who is actually fourteen (though we have agreed to call it sixteen to appease the English) would probably have been married to a still older man at least a year ago but for some odd circumstances which have left her the ward of an ageing, hard-drinking ex-British officer ‘gone native’.178

  Marriage forced Bunting to leave the Foreign Office and he became the Iran correspondent of The Times, although he suggested to Zukofsky that he had left the embassy of his own accord.179 It could be, however, that the Foreign Office was concerned that Bunting had himself gone native, and not just by marrying a Persian wife. In May 1967 Bunting wrote a letter to Dorothy Pound that contained an early version of the poem ‘Under sand clay’, a poem that touched on desert politics. The poem mentions Bunting’s first encounter with the Aneiza tribe without hinting at the turbulent politics underneath. ‘Abdulaziz Ibn Saud was a member of it, and brought up in the desert,’ he explained to Dorothy.

  I have an unbounded admiration for that last of medieval kings, who tried so hard to reconcile kingship with his conscience. When Rashid Ali escaped to his court, Abdulaziz had a fearful problem. (a) The then all-powerful allies demanded that he should be surrendered (b) Abdulaziz abhorred Rashid as a rebel against kings, who should help each other (c) If he didn’t surrender him, it might mean war against both the Hashemi kingdoms, Iraq and Jordan, both backed and equipped by the allies. (d) The Qur’an is silent about refugees. BUT (e) sanctuary is an ancient, sacred custom, and if God as author of the Qur’an says nothing about it, that’s because he took it for granted that everyone respected the custom. So the king argued with himself, with his advisers, with his ambassadors here and there. His telegrams at that time were apt to begin with long prayers to almighty God. In the end he did right, pensioned Rashid at the risk of ruining his kingdom and destroying his dynasty. I don’t think he ever really hesitated. He delayed announcing the decision, partly from dread of the consequences and partly till he was sure that he was getting the best terms that he could from God for doing right. There were many similar struggles, though that was the most striking and important. (It never occurred to any of these old barbarians that international law would protect the protectors of a refugee.) Don’t ask how I know all this. The facts might as well be public, but the evidence is still very secret. I tried to minimize allied pressure on the old ruffian, and I don’t think it was ever really severe; but he feared it.180

  The suggestion that Bunting may have been using his influence in support of local, tribal rather than strictly British ends may have curtailed his career for these were not merely tribal squabbles. Although if you take out the word ‘telegrams’ this account could have come straight from Ferdowsi, in fact it describes momentous power struggles at the heart of the world’s most turbulent and politically sensitive region, events that continue to reverberate to this day. The intimacy with which he recalls the main protagonists shows that Bunting was at the heart of it. ‘There are other men,’ he told Dorothy

  I’d like to get into verse somehow; but their qualities seem to need something more argumentative and expansive than poetry. Nuri as Saed – his wisdom needs demonstrating, an historian’s task. Behauddin Nuri, who found all men funny, and so managed to be the most tolerant and gentle of Arab statesmen. The cunning of king Abdullah, like a story from the Dark Ages, original, naïve, without any conscience at all (which prevented him from having the kind of success Abdulaziz had). And Morteza Quli Khan, the aging barbarian revolutionary, who ordered his clothes from St. James’s Street, but refused to wear a collar and tie with them.

  I’m getting too garrulous.181

  Bunting’s friendship with some of the most important politicians in the region shows that he had been operating at the highest political level throughout the Middle East, not just in Iran. A coup in Baghdad in April 1941 overthrew the pro-Allies’ Regent, Abd al-Ilah, who had largely been controlled by the Prime Minister Nuri al-Said. Nuri fled to Jordan and the Iraqi nationalist, Rashid Ali, immediately forged an alliance with Nazi Germany, prompting a British counter-coup in May which reinstalled Nuri al-Said as Prime Minister in the British occupation. Rashid Ali fled to Germany while he negotiated with King Abdulaziz ibn Saud for sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. The pro-British Nuri signed the Anglo–Iraqi Treaty in 1948 sparking off angry popular demonstrations in Baghdad. The six-year British occupation of Iraq was bad enough; a treaty that gave the British even more influence over Iraqi affairs was deeply unpopular. Bunting may have thought that Nuri al-Said’s wisdom needed demonstrating but to his countrymen he was little more than a traitor, albeit an enormously powerful one.182

  King Abdullah of Jordan certainly was ‘cunning’. He had been agitating since the 1930s to turn 20 per cent of Palestine into a small Jewish state while merging the remaining 80 per cent into Transjordan, as it then was. When this move failed he entered into secret negotiations with the Jewish Agency for Palestine in 1948 over the partition of Palestine, still with the aim of annexing all of Arab Palestine, a plan that was supported by the British government. When the state of Israel was established in May of that year Abdullah joined a pan-Arab military assault on it. By 1949 however he was back in secret negotiations with Israel and his compromise, the annexation of the West Bank into what was now Jordan left a disastrous political, military, cultural, religious and social legacy that continues to fester to this day.

  Morteza Quli Khan whose clothes came from St James’s Street belonged to the Duraki clan which had ruled the Bakhtiari tribe continuously for nearly four hundred years. From 1934 he was the supreme tribal leader of the Bakhtiaris and one of the richest and most powerful men in Iran. In 1939 Reza Shah, in an attempt to curb Bakhtiari power, launched a legal case against Morteza Quli Khan to force him to sell all his considerable property to the state but he delayed it for long enough to be rescued by the Allied invasion of Iran in 1941. When the war ended Morteza Quli Khan was still Governor General of the Bakhtiari province, still the richest tribal leader in Iran and still a personal friend of the Persian celebrities of the day.

  Bunting’s friends were the most important men in the region. The nature of his work is well illustrated in a letter he wrote to Dorothy Pound in September 1948:

  Talking of opium, last night I supped with a colonel of police and an exgovernor general of one of the southern provinces, who, after much vodka and endless kebabs, produced the most sumptuous opium outfit I have ever seen – the charcoal in a chased silver brazier, the pipe of the finest porcelain, and ebony, in a soft leather case embroidered with silver thread, the tongs of silver, etc. etc. A special carpet, very fine, was brought for the brazier to rest on. I smoked my two pipes as I always do when these people press me, and I am getting quite skilful in manipulating it.183

  He might have become skilful at manipulating it but not necessarily of mastering its effects.

  Once I and a couple of friends – one of them happened to be the head of the Persian Secret Police at that time – were smoking opium round my stove in my living-room and drinking vodka, drinking tea and smoking another pipe when the stove went out. Now in Persia the usual way of lighting a stove is to pour paraffin over it and just light the paraffin. We forgot that the coals all being still hot and the thing full, when you poured paraffin in, would carburette on its way down and when you put a match to it would cause an explosion. So the thing did explode – little bits of the stove flew in all directions – very nearly cut off my friend’s head – and all the curtains and carpets and hangings
everywhere were on fire and we sat there without moving, laughing ourselves silly at the sight of it while the servants came in and put the fire out.

  One has to wonder how funny it seemed to the servants, who hadn’t spent the day drinking vodka and smoking opium. ‘That’s the effect of opium,’ he continued with unintended irony, ‘Nothing more exciting than that, it’s cheerful.’184

  The Times is bellowing

  Bunting blamed institutional racism for his departure from the embassy, but Tom Pickard has speculated that the Foreign Office may have considered that Bunting could better serve British interests as a journalist and that it was the embassy itself that was behind his move to The Times. They would have been aware that The Times had no local correspondent and getting their own man into the job would have made it easier to present the British point of view as objective reportage. Bunting wrote to Charles Deakin, Foreign Editor of The Times, in early November 1948 to ask if he needed a correspondent in Iran, as the newspaper hadn’t had a man on the spot for some time.185 Two months later he told Deakin that he had ‘reason to suppose that my appointment would not be unwelcome to our Embassy and that I could hope for their help in appropriate matters’.186

  According to his employment file Bunting began work for The Times as special correspondent in Teheran on 28 January 1949 on a salary of £350 per year, with £50 towards his travel expenses. The work was harder than embassy work, he told Margaret de Silver in September, but it got him out from behind his desk: ‘I spend a fortune in petrol and am as handy in the Teheran traffic with a big car as any of the taxidrivers from constant practice. So I get about three times as many interviews into a morning as I could on foot, feeding the afternoon and evening session at the typewriter.’187

  For all his complaints, he had more free time at The Times than he’d had for years. In February 1949 he and Sima visited a friend who had a camp in the mountains, helping him make a bridge across the river between his camp and the road and then going hand-net fishing. This was a regular visit. The previous year he described short weekends at the camp where ‘the vodka is too plentiful, but the river is cold and very fast, just melted snow from the summits. And the fish is fried in batter and tastes excellent.’188 On another occasion they had a picnic by another river in even higher terrain, ‘with a stream far too fast and cold to bathe in, under white mulberry trees, the mulberries dropping over us as we sat’. On this occasion there was a bull tethered nearby which ‘snorted only for the fun of it and was friendly beneath the conventionally fierce exterior’.189 On another occasion he drove to Isfahan and back and had a morning free to eat ‘the excellent kebab at Nejafabad and bought their cotton sandals there and watched Sima and her cousin trying to catch fish in the Zayandehrud by hand and tumbling in’.190