A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  This seems to me one of the best summaries of ‘meaning’ in Briggflatts and in Bunting’s poetry generally. Thom Gunn’s comparison of the poem with The Waste Land and ‘Canto 47’ concludes with a remarkable disclaimer: ‘I am not trying to say that Bunting’s poem is better than Eliot’s or Pound’s. Certainly The Waste Land has meant too much to several generations of readers, and Canto 47 means too much to me, that I should want to supplant them.’ Bunting’s masterpiece is so towering an achievement that such a thought – that it might be the greatest poem in the English language in the twentieth century – is permissible. For Gunn Briggflatts sits alongside its peers and somehow illuminates them:

  Briggflatts addresses itself to certain of the same barely formulable needs of ours as they do. We seek some kind of reconciliation with our beginnings, or at least an understanding of how such a reconciliation might be brought about … In Briggflatts Bunting – among his many other achievements there – shows us a full reconciliation, though brief, tentative, and qualified by its own transience. Ceremony has matured to tradition; the representative man has become the specific man of autobiography; a montage of places has become one place. He does indeed show us.39

  As for the poem being an ‘autobiography’, Bunting said that Briggflatts follows the, ‘phases of a lifetime in line with the phases of a year without any attempt to bring in historical facts’.40 As Gunn says: ‘“Then is diffused in Now.” He has recovered those [memories of natural] rhythms in the present, and more than Pound has recovered them in terms not only of the imagination but of literal fact. This is the sense in which Briggflatts is autobiography: he has arrived at the essential beginnings by returning to his own beginnings.’41

  SCARLATTI AND LINDISFARNE

  If Briggflatts is a feat of memory it is an even more impressive triumph of technique. The sonata patterns were thoroughly structured: ‘there are symmetries – matching one another here and there. They are not followed out pedantically in full detail and so forth, but they are there. There’s the contrast between Bloodaxe here and Saint Cuthbert here, the extreme opposite of each other in things.’42 Bunting drew a map of Briggflatts during an interview in 1970.

  He explained that

  you’re going to have five parts because it’s got to be an uneven number. So that the central one should be the one apex, there. But what is new, the only new thing … was that instead of having one climax in the other parts you have two. In the first two the first climax is the less and another immediately comes out of it when you’re not expecting it. So you have it for those two. In the others the first climax is the greater and it trails off … the second part rises up slowly to a very nice climax with the murder of Eric Bloodaxe … but then it rises up to a still higher climax which has to fade almost immediately afterwards.43

  Later in the interview he annotated the first drawing:

  ‘The middle one is a nightmare or a dream or whatever you fancy … Spring is around Briggflatts, Summer is all over the place – London, the Arctic, the Mediterranean. Autumn is mostly in the Dales, and the last part is mostly on the Northumberland coast.’44

  The two structural models for Briggflatts were Scarlatti’s sonatas, particularly the B minor Fugato which was to accompany Bunting’s readings of the fourth section of the poem,45 and the Lindisfarne Codex. In an interview in 1981 he explained of the latter that,

  it’s all interlacings of one sort or another. Nothing follows through without being crossed by something else, which is a good analogy to some kinds of poetry. On the best of these pages the theme is always the cross, but on the best of those pages you’ve got to look twice and three times before you can spot the cross. It’s not in any way underlined. It emerges slowly out of this extremely complex design around it. There’s no mistaking it. It is there, it does emerge, but it’s not thrust at you. That again is a parable for poetry.46

  In ‘The Codex’, a lecture at Newcastle University in 1969, Bunting displayed a surprisingly intimate knowledge of the Codex Lindisfarnensis. It was to him one of the triumphs of Northumbrian art, but by no means the only one: ‘There are perhaps half-a-dozen books in the world comparable with the Codex Lindisfarnensis,’ he told his audience, and they were all of them produced by Northumbrians or people who were working under the immediate influence of Northumbrians. He described one particular page in a way that helps us to understand the patterning of Briggflatts:

  The abbreviation for Christ’s name, ‘chi rho iota’, occupies the whole top of the page, more than half the page, and the three letters are woven together into a single monogram, very irregular in its shape, and yet perfectly balanced … Every millimetre of the letters in the monogram is occupied by an enormously complex system of ribbons and spirals, and knots, and circles, and they spill over at the corners and in the loops of the letters and at the cross of the ‘chi’, yet without disturbing either the clarity of the writing or the proportions of the design … There must be hundreds of elements in this one monogram. They repeat, and they echo and they balance one another, and yet I think none is ever repeated without some variation.

  This could be a description of Briggflatts. ‘That is the way you’ve got to write poetry,’ he said later in the lecture, ‘every word has got to be thought of with all that care.’47 The Lindisfarne Gospels were, for Bunting, the ultimate manifestation of a uniquely Northumbrian art that had at one time been the wonder of the world.

  Bunting didn’t regard Briggflatts as a ‘long’ poem, as Pound’s Cantos, Zukofsky’s “A” or William Carlos Williams’ Paterson are long. Indeed he felt that such poems, written over a working life, were impossible for modern writers because the world changed so quickly in a way that it hadn’t for, say, Dante. ‘I think it’s important there shouldn’t be great lengths to a poem in times like these,’ he said in an interview in 1984, ‘because otherwise you dislocate your structure because the world will have changed and you won’t be able to fit it together without the signs of this dislocation showing … that’s true of both the Cantos and of A’.48 He included Wordsworth’s The Prelude in this list of failed poems; failed not because they did not contain great poetry and great poems, but because they cannot in themselves constitute a single coherent poem.49

  A QUAKER POEM?

  Bunting inscribed a copy of the Fulcrum edition of Briggflatts that is on display at Brigflatts Meeting House with the words ‘I hope this book may have leave to lie quietly in the meeting house where I worshipped as a boy and again when I grew old.’ Unease among some Quakers about the seemliness of a poem that celebrated carnality so lustily caused him to add a postscript in 1977: ‘Some Friends think words I have used to picture Hell unseemly, yet it is as much of God’s making as heaven. Good poetry praises all his work. This is my small contribution to his glory.’

  During his first visit to Brigflatts and on subsequent visits, Bunting attended meetings in the seventeenth-century Meeting House there. Though Bunting was profoundly affected by his Quaker education he stopped short of becoming a member of the Society of Friends, never describing himself as more than an ‘attender’; there are no records of his attending meetings in Newcastle. Despite this Bunting didn’t discourage his Quaker image. Even a close friend such as Jonathan Williams thought that Quakerism was deeprooted in Bunting’s family. It wasn’t at all, but in his reply to Williams’ query regarding his supposed Quaker roots Bunting emphasised the small part that was: ‘I don’t know much of the history of my family, but, certainly, between my uncle, who was a member of the Society of Friends, and others, there was a great deal of Quakerism about and I was brought up entirely in a Quaker atmosphere.’50 This is disingenuous. It is difficult to detect any specifically Quaker influence on him before the age of twelve. There was a similar interchange in 1975 when Eric Mottram interviewed Bunting for a BBC radio broadcast. Mottram recalled that Bunting had told him ‘quite recently’ that he considered himself a Quaker poet. ‘Yes,’ Bunting had replied, ‘I’m a Quaker by upbringing’, which
isn’t strictly true, although clearly he was a Quaker by (secondary) schooling.51 In his lecture to the Yeats Society in Sligo in 1973 he claimed he was ‘a Quaker if not in intellectual persuasion, at least by temperament and education’,52 so if you take away belief and six years’ education at Quaker schools you are left only with ‘temperament’. This suggests to me that the extent of Bunting’s Quakerism was a meditative and relatively non-judgemental nature. The most significant Quaker influence on Bunting was Ellen Mary Fry at Ackworth School, who Bunting described as an old lady well past retirement age and the sister of a celebrated Quaker: ‘She was a very penetrating woman with children. She found out a great deal more about me in the course of a very few conversations than I think anybody else has done in the whole of my life. And she certainly encouraged me to take Quaker doctrine seriously.’53 Ellen Fry was forty-nine when Bunting joined Ackworth, so not exactly ready to be put out to pasture, but Bunting’s recollection of her ability to understand children was certainly shared by many, as her obituary in Ackworth Old Scholars’ Association Report in 1941 generously demonstrated.54

  Bunting made an important statement about the limits of his Quakerism in an interview published in 1977:

  Quakerism is a form of mysticism no doubt, in that it doesn’t put forward any logical justification whatever, only the justification of experience. It is comparable pretty easily with a pantheistic notion of the universe. It would be very difficult to avoid picking logical holes in it if you approached it from any other aspect. It is an extremely liberal organisation, that is to say it will tolerate almost anything so long as you behave yourself reasonably … what you believe in is your own affair, so long as you follow out the process of simply waiting quietly and emptying your mind of everything else to hear what they would call in their language the voice of God in your inside … I should say that mainly my view of things is an extremely pantheistic one which finds no expression in any organised society except, perhaps to a limited extent but still a very useful extent, in the Society of Friends.55

  There are so many implied caveats in this passage that one can only assume that he was firmly trying to distance himself from the reductive ‘Quaker poet’ tag.

  In another interview Bunting clarified his position on God and religion generally. He shared Swift’s disgust with the human species and conceded that it’s ‘true that by considering oneself as just a product of the various chemicals that one is made up of, it is easy not to bother’; but that shouldn’t necessarily open a door for God:

  So long as you stay clear of humanism there is nothing to complain of. But if one is obliged to judge things from a humanistic point of view, there is no escape from pessimism. The Middle Ages distorted God, making a God who cared only for humans. Then the Renaissance came along and substituted man for God at the centre of things. If you do that, Swift’s pessimism is inevitable. The universe is very large and in it man is no more important than animals or trees … I have no use for religion conceived as church forms or as believing as historical fact what are ancient parables, but I do believe that there is a possibility of a kind of reverence for the whole creation which I feel we all ought to have in our bones if we don’t, a kind of pantheism, I suppose. If the word ‘God’ is to have any use it must include everything. The only way to know anything is to consider yourself a student of histology, finding out as much as carefully controlled commonsense can find out about the world. In so doing, you will be contributing to the histology of God.56

  In 1981 Bunting was asked how important ‘being a Quaker’ had been to him. There is a long pause while he considered his answer. Although it is a question he had faced on many occasions I suspect that it had rarely been formulated in quite this way before. Interviewers tended to ask about the influence of Quakerism on the poet, rather than describing him as a Quaker:

  I think it has affected me one way or another all my life. At first I paid more attention to their literal doctrine and so on than I would now, but I believe my outlook and their outlook are fundamentally the same, though they might differ in almost every detail … Putting together the kind of things believed by the very earliest Quakers and those which are now regular, things which rather faded from sight during the 19th and 20th centuries, you have something amounting to pantheism. The God worshipped by Quakers is just as manifest in all the little beasts and the trees and the grass and so on as it is in anything else, and in the rocks. Man does not have the central place which he has in most modern thought … I think that old fashioned Quakers, 19th century Quakers, certainly would regard me as an atheist and I’m perfectly certain that Roman Catholics, Anglicans, probably Wesleyans and so forth would regard me as an atheist too.57

  Those (such as Sister Victoria Forde and Donald Davie)58 who want to find Quakerism, mysticism or any form of religion or belief in Bunting’s life and work have some hard evidence to the contrary to sidestep. He described himself as one ‘who believes nothing because he can’t, not because there are no pleasing or even useful beliefs to choose from’.59 In ‘Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty’ Yeats wrote respectfully of Bunting’s pantheism:

  A poet whose free verse I have admired rejects God and every kind of unity, calls the ultimate reality anarchy, means by that word something which for lack of metaphysical knowledge he cannot define. He thinks, however, that a baptismal and marriage service and some sort of ceremonial preparation for death are necessary, and that the Churches should stick to these and be content. He now writes in the traditional forms because they satisfy a similar need … I find among some of the newer school of poets hatred of every monotheistic system.60

  Nevertheless we can certainly acknowledge something deeply meditative in the life and work of this atheist and no doubt that can be attributed to his lifelong attachment to the Society of Friends. Peter Lewis remembered Bunting wishing to see Durham Cathedral one night after a reading. The snow was falling and the floodlights lit up the great space.

  He was in one of his celebrated meditative moods and for a while he contemplated the Cathedral, outlined by snow, without saying much. What he did say indicated that for him the Cathedral embodied in its very fabric the turbulent history of Northumbria, not only the nine centuries since the Normans had begun work on the present building, but the Anglo-Saxon and Christian centuries before that, encompassing the world of Aidan, Bede and Cuthbert … When Basil, gazing at the Cathedral, said that no-one could ignore this, he wasn’t referring to the vast stone structure in front of him but to the long history it represented, a history which also contained him, he made clear, however much he wanted to distance himself from religious authoritarianism and dogmatism. He did admit that there were ways in which he could be considered a ‘religious’ poet. Yet it was surely the bare meeting house at Brigflatts that spoke to him more clearly about lux eterna than the great Cathedral in Durham.61

  It wasn’t just the history of the Church he was referring to, however. ‘Religion is not a matter of intellect or desire or anything,’ he wrote in 1976. ‘It’s just that you cannot avoid it. It’s so bred into you when you are young that it becomes part of your general system.’62

  In his interview with Eric Mottram Bunting went on to explain the appeal of Quakerism to him:

  fortunately it is a religion with no dogma at all – and consequently there’s very little you can quarrel with, and I don’t have to believe this or that or the other. I think what the real essence of the Quaker business is exactly what it was at the beginning: if you sit in silence, if you empty your head of all the things you usually waste your brain thinking about, there is some faint hope that something, no doubt out of the unconscious or where you will, will appear – just as George Fox would have called it, the voice of God; and that will bring you, if not nearer God, at any rate nearer your own built-in certainties.63

  Among the ‘this or that or the other’ that Quakerism didn’t force Bunting to believe in was God.

  Quakerism gave Bunting what he
needed spiritually, but not religiously. In a letter to Louis Zukofsky in 1939 he insisted that he was, ‘fundamentally averse to acts of faith. Faith being belief contrary to the available evidence.’64 He forcefully rejected the idea that religion had any influence on his poetry: ‘You know quite well that no muse, no Apollo, no Holy Ghost whispers in my ear. Nothing outside a man’s mind suggests what he should write.’65 Mysticism was worse than religion. In his lecture on Wordsworth at Newcastle University in the 1969–70 series he ridiculed the concept: ‘As for mysticism, whenever that word turns up those who use it can find support in anything or nothing. It is by definition an unreasonable belief. There is no arguing about it. You like what Plotinus tells you, or you don’t: there is no room for evidence, and hardly any for discussion.’66

  ‘The meeting [at Brigflatts] has formally accepted me as an “attender”,’ he told Gael Turnbull. ‘They called that ass Whittier “The Quaker poet”. Absit omen.’67 That ‘absit omen’ clinches it. The last thing Basil Bunting wanted to be known as was a ‘Quaker poet’.