A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Grimmer and grimmer

  But rock bottom had still not been reached. The joy at the birth of the Bunting’s second child, Thomas Faramarz Bunting, on 29 November 1952 came on the back of disaster. In October Roudaba called Bunting to tell him that Rustam had died at the age of sixteen at a boarding school in New Hampshire, apparently after an eighteen-hour polio attack. His sense of estrangement is painful. ‘My son Rustam died last autumn,’ he wrote to Dorothy Pound in March 1953, ‘far from his home, and so far as I can learn, amongst strangers.’324 Father and son had never met.

  ‘Grimmer and grimmer’, begins a letter to Margaret de Silver in April 1953. He had reached the final stages of a selection board for a government ‘information service’ job, which sounded as though it could have been glamorous but which was in reality routine journalism with a salary that was 20 per cent higher than that of a dustman. He would have jumped at it even so but was rejected because he had not been a journalist in the 1930s, ‘only in the 20s and 40s and 50s’.325 The fact that he had reached the rank of General Staff Officer Grade 2 during the war also told against him. How could someone of that calibre not ‘be safely fixed in a very highly paid job’? The Buntings were now so poor that he was facing the possibility of having to send Sima and their children back to Persia to live with her relatives, and a hint of suicidal thinking crept into his letter to Margaret. How much of this was emotional blackmail it is impossible to say. Margaret certainly had the resources to help his family out of starvation, but his letters to other, less financially secure friends, also reveal a level of despair that was clearly becoming unbearable. There’s no doubt that the Buntings and their young family were wretchedly poor. He wrote to Margaret de Silver in desperation:

  Things here – I mean our personal affairs – seem to be very close to a climax. We spent the last few days entirely without money and with very little to eat, though we managed to feed the babies. Mother has run her overdraft to the limit the bank will allow: it is secured on her house, and she is being pressed to sell the house to pay the bank its five hundred pounds. Meanwhile I’ve been applying for ‘National Assistance’ – the new name for outdoor relief. They are not polite, and I doubt whether we will get it. We have not sold Sima’s engagement ring nor my irreplaceable Persian and Arabic books, and I am still nominally owner of a car, or the rusty remains of one, which the customs will not let me sell; and they cannot even make up their minds how much duty they mean to charge on it. It is clear that the car will not fetch even the minimum they can charge – they have caused it to lie rusting for over a year. Unfortunately our National Assistance area is the Marxist stronghold hereabouts – Blaydon – and we are bourgeois parasites, or so I gather.

  I had been led to believe several times during the past ten years that I had deserved well of my country in a small way, and eighteen months ago half the papers in the country were praising me for my work in Persia – just after Mosaddeq chucked me out. But in that time I have earned only about ten pounds.

  He owed £150 on his own account and, as he told Margaret, he was also really responsible for half of his mother’s considerable overdraft. This is an abject letter:

  What is to happen now I don’t know. Perhaps the bank will insist on Mother selling her house: if so, she will have to go and live with my sister who does not want her and with whom she quarrels terribly, frequently and bitterly. My sister is generous in an overcalculated way, without any apparent kindness, and it would be a wretched life for the old lady, who is happy with Sima. Mother would have only just enough to keep herself (and she has nothing to leave). I suppose I would have to beg whatever balance remained from the sale of the house to send Sima and my children to their relatives in Persia – if the Persians would allow it. They could manage there for some years, declining little by little into the helpless starvation of the Armenian poor in Teheran. Then I would be left alone, with no place even for my few books, no money, no prospect of reuniting the family.326

  It is surprising that Margaret did not offer him funds, if only to stop the tidal wave of relentless misery that accumulated in letter after long letter from her former protégé.

  He was becoming bitter. He wrote to Zukofsky in March 1953 that ‘my very considerable services to the state haven’t entitled me to anything whatever. They are even, by the workings of the Official Secrets Act, sometimes a handicap – I mustn’t satisfy the perfectly legitimate curiosity of prospective employers about what I did in such and such a post. Penalty, fourteen years in jug.’327 A few months later, on 18 June 1953 Bunting wrote again to Zukofsky, noting the painful irony of his position:

  ‘“Dispatches … always been scrupulously fair and objective,” said the Times leader writer “a sound judge of Persian affairs … deep sympathy with the Persian people … devoted his life to the country”. Another time, “Persia’s best friend in the West.” For which my children must starve and I be denied any chance to show sagacity elsewhere. This week we cannot pay the butcher.’ Also in the same letter we learn that:

  The government is applying a last turn of the screw, demanding duty and purchase tax on the car the Times abandoned to me. I can’t pay, I’m not even allowed to sell the car which is running up debts in a garage. But if now they fix a government debt on me I’ll end in gaol for having refused to falsify news to the disadvantage of our government. Such is democratic gratitude … And little worms who hardly know enough Persian to construe a few pages of the Chahar Maqaleh have lectureships, because they listened to professors nearly as ignorant as themselves, but I who know their literature – and their newspapers – and their conversation – and the ways of their tribesmen – I cannot be the slightest use, or at any rate, cannot be paid for it.328

  In July 1953 he wrote to Pound: ‘I can’t get a job at seven quid a week (no experience) let alone get listened to. What they mean by experience Lord knows. Last board that interviewed me simply refused to believe my record. Wouldn’t even take the trouble to check up and find it true. “You mean to say a former GSO2 and Counsellor is applying for a piddling little job like this? Make your claims more modest next time.”’329 And in September he complained to Zukofsky that,

  Mother’s bank won’t let her overdraw any more – she owes them £500 – and I owe £150 that I’m sure of and an unspecified amount to the Customs and something like another sixty to the garage … the Bank might want to sell Mother’s house to repay itself – I don’t think so, but it’s possible. And we may get from the State, if we’re lucky … enough to pay the grocer and the butcher, but not the baker, not the gas, water, electricity, nor any share of the rent, nor clothes, postage, travel, tobacco … So I reread the Times’ leader after my expulsion from Persia – what a fine fellow I am, what high qualifications; how unrighteous to kick me out, and I wonder a bit where the hell I am. And the Manchester Guardian asks my advice, but expects it for nothing (though it did pay £8 when I wrote its first leader for it – well over twice my train fare).

  And the Air Force expects me to keep my uniform handy for the next war ‘to serve in the same position you occupied before demobilisation,’ ie, chief of intelligence for a very big region. I wonder, by the way, how many General Staff Officers, Grade Two, are now drawing public assistance?

  Not many, probably. He asked Zukofsky to help him find work: ‘What! Do you think you’ll ever have the chance of such a bargain again? GSO2, Times staff-correspondent, diplobloodydoormat, Middle East expert, poet, unofficial scholar, all under one shirt and for the price of one. Oh yes, and listed by the Communists as a dangerous adversary: that should go down with the Re Publicans and Sinners.’330

  Bunting was once again at odds with the establishment in his usual selfdestructive way. He had a point though and his friend Peter Quartermain made it forcefully:

  His own damn pride no doubt got in the way, that Victorian or is it Edwardian rectitude, that code of gentlemanly conduct, of not making a fuss, of not airing your linen (clean or dirty) in public. But if he wa
s at all bitter in his later years he had every right to be. Because he had lived so much abroad, he did not qualify for a full old-age pension, which at 65 was pitifully small. So at the Queen’s pleasure he was awarded a Civil List pension to make up the difference – but, indexed at a lower rate and taxed at a higher one, it barely paid for his cigarettes. In the middle 1950s Basil Bunting and his family, valued servants of the state, were supported with food parcels sent by Ezra Pound, inmate of St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The British treatment of Basil Bunting is a national disgrace.331

  It was.

  He had sent Pound a copy of ‘The Spoils’ and asked for his help finding work. Pound had clearly replied in ferociously negative terms on both counts, prompting an extraordinary riposte from Bunting that is eloquent in its self-justification while defending his position in a much more mature way than would have been the case before the war:

  Well, well! Ole Ez does shy a profuse shower of stones when I ask him the way to the baker’s. It is almost exhilarating. One of the craters on Etna does the same if you provoke it. (I used a snowball; but its aim was no better than Ez’s – that is, if he really intends to break any heads or windows.)

  Or else he doesn’t know the knob from the ferrule. But I haven’t time to put him right, and maybe its twenty years too late anyway. I mean, he did so much for me in so many ways that I never had the heart to argue with him, and I suppose he often thought I agreed – or acquiesced – when I didn’t: for I dare say I began by having to see the rough of the world at closer quarters than he, and never valued men and their works at his estimate: but I’ve come in the end to think of Man (capital M) a detestable nuisance invented to decoy Ez and other remarkable energies away from their game.

  I had a hand in saving Azerbaijan from Uncle Joe Stalin, and I spent a long time trying to save Britain and Persia from mutual follies which only profit the lovers of uniformity (in this case especially Russian and American). After I’d been choked in the Foreign Office (by le Rougetel and Strang) I tried through the Times, and eventually persuaded the leader-writers to come half way: difficult, because by then the Persians had Mosaddeq on their back, and to put it shortly he was indifferent to the fate of the Persians if only he could destroy the Shah. And through the Times I got a little, too little, sense into the Brit govt, and might have kept it there if the Astors hadn’t saddled themselves with an editor after doing without one very nicely for several years. (Barrington- Ward was dead before I joined, and Sir William Haley came in just in time to decide to drop me after I’d returned to England.) To weigh, I had to have the news, all of it and all correct. And to get that I took risks. My wife, the Embassy and the Persian correspondents thought I’d be murdered: I think they exaggerated. However, I was stoned, I was continually threatened, I stood on the pavement and watched a crowd of thugs howling for my life at the door of the Ritz Hotel (after which the remaining foreign US correspondents packed and ran away): and because I wasn’t ‘their man’ my own Embassy made only a very halfhearted, very formal attempt to protect me – nothing like what they did for the tame Reuters’ man. I went into the riots – after that Greek got thwacked and bayoneted during the November one I never succeeded in getting another journalist to go near one, except Bill Hamsher of the Daily Express, though my wife once went into the thick of it without my knowledge and got me some useful facts. Apart from that, I worked more than twice as long every day as anybody else on the job. Well, even worse errors might have been made if I hadn’t – Loy Henderson seemed likely to give bad advice to your govt at one time, but after a whole afternoon with me he didn’t send the despatch. Well, is that ‘ganging up with criminals’? It is trying to prevent follies which, even in the world ruled by its rulers, are preventable, instead of wasting my time howling at the moon … The same invincible repugnance to whole-hog lying which prevented me complying with the wishes of either Mossy Dick or Sir John le Rougetel prevents me from pretending to believe the things you’d like me to believe (or at any rate Ez would), and I on my part see no reason why I should deplore Ez merely because he isn’t another me.

  On ‘The Spoils’ he notes that, ‘If Ole Ez had had time or inclination to read “The Spoils” attentively instead of being put off by the pair of Jews in part one of it, he might have noticed plumb in the middle of it a remark that God is the dividing sword. It isn’t there just for the noise. That’s what I’m writing about, and that’s why the spoils are for God in the epigraph from the Qor’an. It is shorthand for quite a lot, or if you like for something I think fundamental.’332

  Wretched newspaper job

  In September 1953 Bunting was given some low paid, part-time work by the Manchester Guardian, which promised much but paid next to nothing. According to Denis Goacher he briefly found work as a ticket collector at the local railway station,333 but this may be a confusion because he worked for Thomas Reid & Son, a publishing business, proofreading bus and train timetables.334 This wasn’t very fulfilling. He wrote in an exasperated tone to Zukofsky in October 1953:

  You are not likely to get many more letters, old friend, because at the end of this week, if the trade-union concerned gives its exalter permission, I shall start a 9½ hour day plus 1½ hours travelling, correcting the proofs of railway time-tables: and for that I shall get, after off-takes, (tax, insurance, fares, union subscription) less than 25% above what I get on the dole: or, to put it in Sir W. Beveridge’s terms, still a good deal less than a minimum subsistence wage. Maybe that’s all the stupid work is worth, but the poisonous task and the starvation pay, looked at as the reward for all the years of strenuous, intelligent and uncorrupted service at, however modestly I try to look at it, a highish, a certainly influential level … I shall end by hating the Western world. Even for this I must express loud gratitude: it is a most generous gesture (if they make it) for a trade-union to allow someone who has ‘written for Conservative papers’ to correct time-table proofs.335

  Within weeks he had moved on from timetables to ‘seedsmen’s catalogues and from those to electoral lists, which now occupy about six of my daily nine hours. The rest is bill-heads, receipt-forms and technical journals of such unbelievable illiteracy that it is often not possible to guess what the authors imagine themselves to be saying.’336 He spent an enormous amount of time doing this exasperating proofreading for the National Coal Board’s magazine. He complained bitterly about it to Dorothy Pound:

  The National Coalboard runs a magazine called ‘Mining’ for the technical information of mining engineers, and the firm I work for prints it. Considering the illiteracy of most mining engineers they might have been expected to appoint an industrious and skilful editor, but though I hear he’s very highly paid, you cannot imagine anyone more slovenly. I have to correct about half the proofs for his paper: but I may not make a verb agree in number with its subject, or supply a verb that’s been omitted, or put in or take out a comma that’s making nonsense or even see that a word is spelt the same way twice if it occurs twice. It might hurt the customer’s feelings. As the proofs leave me they often contain whole paragraphs of which nobody could possibly make head and tail without protracted study. The authors get their friends to put in corrections, which adds handsomely to the bill the Coal Board pays my boss and still leaves the magazine, when it goes to press, short of verbs and entangled to such a degree that I wonder how many engineers ever read each others articles.337

  He was hankering after Persia and took a week off work to go to London in the early summer. He had been invited to the Persian Embassy for an interview, but when he got there

  Hamzavi only wanted to give me the gist of a letter from Foreign Minister Entezam without committing anything to paper or showing me the script. Entezam wanted him to convey to me discreetly and noncommittally the idea that Zahedi’s govt was perfectly aware that my expulsion was not only indefensible but a bad mistake which had left Persia without its only friend in the English press, but that they were afraid to cancel it just yet b
ecause Baqai and his thugs were still capable of rioting about it and even more capable of putting an end to me, which would embarrass Zahedi: so would I please wait a few months and then apply … No doubt they have some colour for this. I think they exaggerate. After all, Baqai has had at least two shots at murdering me before, but between inefficiency and irresolution he couldn’t get his thugs to do the job properly, and that was when he was really powerful: now he’s not. Hamzavi added some interesting stuff about his and Makki’s efforts to prevent Mosaddeq turning me out, and Mosaddeq’s consternation when he saw what the press in general had to say about it. But since I’m not altogether convinced that Zahedi’s government will survive very long unless the oil consortium offers him better terms than I think they are doing, I don’t feel much nearer Teheran.338

  He also had interviews at The Times and the BBC, where Bridson, who by now held a senior position at the BBC, tried to help and told him he would do a Bunting programme on the Third Programme in the autumn. This was, it seems, the only promise that Bunting collected during his week in London that was ever fulfilled. Denis Goacher had approached Bridson on Bunting’s behalf and recordings of his poems (not read by Bunting himself, but by a Scottish actor) were broadcast by the BBC in 1954 and 1957.339 The cheque for the broadcast ‘provided Sima with a superfine sewing-machine, which will of course contribute to the family budget as long as she and the children need clothes’.340