A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  FIVE

  THEN IS NOW

  Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,

  its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane

  spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith

  spun when the slowworm lay in her lap

  fifty years ago.

  Briggflatts V

  ALL MY LUCK HAS TURNED

  Bunting’s letters are generally gloomy. Partly this was the deliberately curmudgeonly persona he adopted, but much of it was his customary desire to look life in the face and tell his story as it was. A life of sapping poverty and disappointment had taken its toll on the poet, but in June 1965 a glimmer of hope appeared. ‘My own news,’ he told Dorothy Pound, ‘for now nearly a year, is a series of small miracles, or things as unexpected and welcome. I am still tied to my deadly drudgery, make no mistake, with hardly any leisure and a mere pittance to feed the family on, but everything else seems changed.’1 He told Dorothy about Tom Pickard’s first visit and his decision to start writing again, his recent completion of Briggflatts, the start of the Morden Tower readings which had become ‘famous with extraordinary speed’, the gathering media attention (all this before publication of Briggflatts), the Northern Council for the Arts’ decision to subsidise publication of ‘The Spoils’, a proposal from ‘a guy I’d never heard of in London’ to reprint Poems 1950 and an Arts Council grant of £300. He suddenly found himself at the heart of the swinging sixties: ‘The Beats, apparently are among my admirers: and though they seem to me mere improvisers, they are amusing company. I am also informed … that the Beatles, no less, spent a lot of money getting secondhand copies of Poems 1950 and carry them around.’ Even family life was looking up:

  My children are pleasant to have about. Maria is a painter … I’ve the impression that she really is an artist of sorts … Lately she has begun to take an interest in poetry and a pride in her dad … The boy, Tom Bunting, after lethargic beginnings, has astonished his prep school, is a year ahead of others of his age, and, after failing his exam at 11, passed into the Royal Grammar School here at 12 as one of two admissions out of more than 300 trying for it … Sima is still all I ever hoped, dear lass …

  This is the first inkling of Basil Bunting the proud father and contented family man, and it comes as a bit of a shock. No wonder his letter to Dorothy was excited. ‘I find it very hard to believe myself,’ he confessed. ‘I keep waiting for the bubble to burst. But even if it does, I will have had a lively year after all the deadliness.’

  He was interviewed on Tyne Tees Television in August 1965 and read a selection of his poems. In October the BBC’s Third Programme celebrated Pound’s eightieth birthday and Bunting read parts of Cantos 2, 4 and 81; and in November 1965 a rather bizarre collection of twelve of Bunting’s poems, and notes and images relating to him were published in a loose-leaf collection, King Ida’s Watch Chain,2 but it doesn’t seem to have greatly engaged the wider world, even when it turned itself into a band.3 Briggflatts, even before it was published, continued to turn Bunting’s fortunes. ‘Its magic still goes on,’ he wrote to Dorothy in September 1965. ‘All my luck has turned good since I began to write it more than a year ago. More to your point, it’s the best thing I’ve done by miles.’4

  Bunting’s first reading of Briggflatts was at Morden Tower on 22 December 1965, the month before its first publication in the January 1966 edition of Poetry, and the poem turned Bunting into a celebrity, or as much of a celebrity as a poet ever makes. His poetry suddenly started to become available in a way that it had never been before. Pickard had published ‘The Spoils’ earlier in the year to mixed reviews. Richard Howard described it in Poetry as being: ‘like the best of the Cantos, or anyway the prettiest: Turkish delight, and indigestible without something more fibrous along the way’. Charles Tomlinson, however, wrote of it in Agenda that ‘experience prepares the ground and music plays over against that ground’, and praised its ‘intricate rhyme and line’.

  Other reviewers predictably drew attention to Bunting’s apparent debt to Pound: ‘The Spoils is a difficult, pamphlet-sized poem which sometimes reads as if the Master of the Cantos had got to work refurbishing not the classical- Mediterranean brand of English nostalgia but the gorgeous-East tradition that erupts in Flecker or in Sohrab and Rustum.’ This review from the New Statesman by Francis Hope goes on to identify ‘Poundian jokes’ and ‘Poundian rhetorical simplicities’ that are no more Poundian than Shakespearean, but this reviewer had a ‘savage disciple’ point to hammer home.

  Al Alvarez was supportive in the Observer: ‘Bunting deserves all the recognition he can get. He has kept unflaggingly out of the limelight and never relaxed the standards of his verse,’ without ever getting out ‘from the aegis of ol’ Ez’s style.’ Cyril Connolly reviewed ‘The Spoils’ in the Sunday Times noting that it was ‘undoubtedly a good poem, repaying several readings’, but was baffled by obscurity that he too attributed to the Pound effect.5

  Stuart Montgomery’s Fulcrum Press published Bunting’s First Book of Odes in November 1965. Montgomery was the ‘guy I’d never heard of in London’ but he became a good friend of Bunting and was one of the catalysts of the poet’s resurgence. The selection is the same as that of Poems 1950 although the order of appearance was rearranged so that Bunting’s poems were published for the first time in chronological order with the dates of their composition. Bunting also took the opportunity to add two poems, ‘On highest summits dawn comes soonest’ and ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’.

  The following month Fulcrum published Loquitur as a limited edition of a thousand copies. It was effectively a new edition of Poems 1950, minus ‘They say Etna’ and with the addition of ‘On highest summits dawn comes soonest’ and ‘Verse and version’ as well as four or five poems that had been written in 1949, too late for Simpson’s edition. This was a rather baffling piece of publishing. Loquitur must have been in production at the same time as First Book of Odes and it contains all the poems included in the earlier book, even using the same typesetting. First Book of Odes was given just one month to earn its keep before it became redundant.

  Martin Seymour-Smith, in a hugely positive review in the Scotsman, described Loquitur as, ‘certainly one of the most important poetry-publishing events for many years.’ Bunting, he thought, was the only English poet to solve the problem of how to assimilate the lively spirit of American poetry without losing his own sense of identity.

  The Newcastle Evening Chronicle was confident that Loquitur would find a place in any collection of the work of major twentieth-century English poets: ‘It is highly wrought, chiselled with the care and love of a true craftsman … a book that everyone who cares for modern literature needs to have.’

  John Raymond, in a Sunday Times review, after the inevitable introduction of Bunting as ‘friend and disciple of Ezra Pound’, said that Bunting, ‘has played many parts, fulfilled many roles in a life seemingly crowded with interest and excitement. Always he has possessed the password.’

  Thomas Clark gave Loquitur a positive review in Poetry. His response to the poetry was sensitive and arresting:

  A great and (at its best – as in Villon) simple dignity in the placement of words provides an equal light and clarity in Bunting’s poems – the consummation and creation of experience as language is so complete that the central personality is reduced to a transparency through which the action of the words can be seen … The similarity to Pound in Bunting’s works is less a matter of technique than of attitude, a toughness of regard that makes possible the expression of bitterness as a description of realities and not simply as a complaint.

  This was a considerably more nuanced assessment of Pound’s influence on Bunting than most. Clark captured the experience of many readers who come to Bunting for the first time: ‘The first time I read this book I was shaken, without knowing anything more about Bunting than a few biographical facts concerning his relation with Pound. Today, copying out some words to include them in this revi
ew I was struck by their integrity as I was on first reading. The poetry here is permanent – it’s a really important publication.’

  Charles Tomlinson reviewed Loquitur in Agenda (‘a lucid music’) and in the same issue Robert Creeley praised the ‘lovely dense sensuousness’ of Bunting’s work. Richard Kell, however, damned it with faint praise in the Guardian: ‘stylish in a Poundian or Black Mountain Way … there are things worth discovering but the search can be tedious.’ An anonymous review in the Observer, was much more encouraging, noting that: ‘One poem, ‘Villon’, hovers on the edge of being a masterpiece.’6 ‘Villon’ is a masterpiece.

  The Times Literary Supplement wrote off both Loquitur and ‘The Spoils’ as Poundian pastiche. You can track Bunting ‘everywhere in Pound’s snow’, the anonymous reviewer sneers in a tone that is reminiscent of Bunting of The Outlook nearly forty years previously. He makes fun of Bunting’s name (‘put out more Bunting’) as Bunting had of Norman Haire’s. Michael Hamburger sprang to Bunting’s defence (and that of Christopher Middleton, who had also been scornfully dismissed in the same review), prompting another supercilious response from the reviewer, which Hamburger deflated effectively.7

  Zukofsky wrote in February to thank Bunting for a copy of Loquitur, and particularly for its preface which had identified Zukofsky as one of ‘the two greatest poets of our age’.8 He wrote again in March to commiserate with him about some poor reviews: ‘The hell with ’em – there’ll be “good” ones come fawning etc … So don’t feel low.’9

  Montgomery followed Loquitur two months later with Briggflatts, issuing a second edition in December 1966. Briggflatts opened the floodgates. Herbert Read rather threw up his hands at it in Agenda, recognising it as a work of art that had to be heard to be properly appreciated: ‘I can only say that here is the score of a great oral symphony, one that awaits a worthy performance.’ In Encounter Charles Tomlinson celebrated its combination of ‘strength and delicacy in patternings that to the reader are a constant delight and that to the young poet should prove of intense and liberating technical interest’. Read’s position was ridiculed by Patric Dickinson in the same issue of Encounter: ‘It might seem from such different viewpoints as Nicolson and Bunting that poetry was a noise. The words don’t matter. Bunting goes further in his horrible analogy: “Music in the stave is no more than instruction to the player. Poetry must be read aloud.” This is muddled thinking indeed but it implies an interpreter – what sort?’ But Alasdair Clayre was positive, praising Bunting’s ‘firm, individual voice’ and hoping that the poem would be a springboard for a new poetic.

  Jim Burns drew attention to Bunting’s music in Tribune: ‘Briggflatts is as finely constructed as a well-wrought symphony, the different movements having common themes, and the skilful instrumentations forming dense, but perfect, textures of sound and meaning … I admire it immensely, and that a man can speak with such nobility in our mealymouthed age astounds me.’ Edward Lucie-Smith interviewed Bunting for the Sunday Times and praised his ‘meticulous craftsmanship’ and, refreshingly, while acknowledging Pound’s influence on Bunting’s early work, was careful to point out that they are, ‘by no means imitations. They have, for one thing, a certain obstinate Englishness, a close-knit organization which is alien to Pound.’10 Bunting wrote to Gael Turnbull entertainingly about the Lucie-Smith interview: ‘Mr Lucie Smith has got the editor of the Sunday Times to send him to Wylam to interview me at length … He met me at the Arts Council and fed me expensively. Golly, what a BOUNDER. The old word fits perfectly. His remarks revealed that he hasn’t read (though he may have glanced through) any of my work, but he is clearly convinced that I am the coming thing and he means to be in on it.’11

  Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times was, ‘quite unprepared for Briggflatts, which seems to me one of the best poems I have read and re-read for a long time’.12 Denis Goacher thought the Connolly review was ‘great good luck’, but didn’t think Bunting cared to acknowledge it as such.13 Donald Davie put Briggflatts in its historical context in the New Statesman. Bunting was ‘very important in the literary history of the present century as just about the only accredited British member of the Anglo-American poetic avant-garde of the Twenties and Thirties’.

  Tom Pickard reviewed Briggflatts in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, and perhaps made rather too grand a claim for it in his enthusiasm. Picking up on Sir Herbert Read’s comparison Pickard claimed that, ‘since “The Seafarer” it [Briggflatts] is the only poem in this language to deal adequately with man exiled from that which he loves.’ That seems to sideline a great deal of sixteenth-century verse, if nothing else, but Pickard was quick to pick up the theme of exile in Briggflatts.

  In the Scotsman Martin Seymour-Smith rejected the Poundian label that had dogged Bunting for forty years, and described him as, ‘one of the most consciously English of English poets’, concluding that Briggflatts is a ‘notable English poem, and there can no longer be any excuse for the neglect of its author’.

  The Nottingham poetry magazine Tarasque praised Briggflatts as ‘an important poem that demands attention. Important because it is one of the few poems of real maturity since “Four Quartets”.’ This thoughtful essay was accurate in predicting Bunting’s impact on a wider readership:

  I suppose there is not much chance of his being read generally, largely because ‘Loquitur’ and ‘Briggflatts’ are cumbersomely printed and prohibitively priced, and ‘The Spoils’ is perhaps too wilfully Middle Eastern to be read with much sympathy. Moreover Larkin and Hughes are too much in the ascendance. I believe he is known and read by practising poets. Graves once wrote: ‘To write poems for other than poets is wasteful.’ That, of course, is pernicious: it is also full of point.

  Robert Woof was positive in Stand: ‘surely a properly large and appreciative audience will read this poem’, as was, once again, Charles Tomlinson: ‘Bunting has come, in his late poetry, to a music that combines strength and delicacy in patternings that to the reader are a constant delight and that to the young poet should prove of intense and liberating technical interest.’ Robert Creeley praised the, ‘lovely dense sensuousness to Bunting’s poetry and it is as much the nature of the words as the nature of the man who makes use of them’. Kenneth Cox contributed a thoughtful essay on ‘The Aesthetic of Basil Bunting’ in the same issue. Hugh Kenner inevitably pointed to Briggflatts as a beacon of hope: ‘If there’s a hope just now for English poetry … it’s here, in this return to actual plain speech (not “simplicity”: Bunting isn’t an easy poet).’

  These were heavyweight reviewers but there were plenty of complaints. Bernard Bergonzi in the Guardian thought Briggflatts a ‘rambling, bitty, and extremely obscure autobiographical poem … [which] suggests that [Bunting] has a very limited talent, and that he has inherited more of Pound’s vices than his virtues.’ The Observer agreed: Bunting ‘has only recently been rediscovered and – like most literary exhumees – overpraised … line by line its blunt alliterating progress offers faint basis for the current fuss.’ The Times Literary Supplement, never a Bunting cheerleader, thought Briggflatts ‘a failure; lacking any theme other than the poet’s sense of home after much travel, it has no forward driving movement. Its exoticism is attractive but finally unsatisfying.’ And a young D. M. Thomas, many years before The White Hotel brought him fame, really disliked it: ‘absence of strict metrical pattern, added to telegrammatic clumsiness and his expressed contempt for the printed poem, leads to many an irritating confusion of meaning.’14 Clumsiness doesn’t get much clumsier than the telegrammatic kind.

  ‘Briggflatts is selling well, in spite of the T.L.S.’, Bunting wrote to Pound from California in March 1967. ‘Herbert Read and Hugh MacDiarmid have been boosting it, and Connolly did a silly but very “pro” review, which helped the publisher. Here Ginsberg and Creeley are the missionaries.’15 Allen Ginsberg was certainly doing his best. He wrote in the International Times that Bunting was the most alert prosodist in England and that poetry had become a ghos
t there because Bunting’s work had been ignored.16

  His new fame brought him an Arts Council Bursary for 1966 although it is a measure of how little known he was that the Guardian reported that ‘for the first time the [Arts] council is making four awards of £300 each – with no strings. One recipient is Basil Bunting, who does the stocks and shares list for the ‘Newcastle Journal’, and who says he has been writing poetry for 65 years.’17 That ‘says’ speaks volumes.

  Agenda released a Basil Bunting Special Issue with two new odes (‘Birthday greeting’ and ‘Carmencita’s tawny paps’) in Autumn 1966, coinciding with the publication of George Steiner’s Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, which included parts of ‘Villon’, in November 1966.18 Bunting read Briggflatts on the BBC’s Third Programme in February 1967 and at Harvard and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in March. There were television and radio interviews and unprecedented press attention. He was back on the BBC reading Briggflatts in November 1968 and in February 1969 he read at the first Albert Hall Poetry Festival (a reading that was later broadcast by the BBC). Suddenly poetry magazine publishers were hungry for new work. He wrote to Anthony Rudolf, founder of Menard Press, in January 1969: ‘I’ve written nothing for a long time, and have no poems, no translations at all on hand or in hand … What’s wanted? Current poetry – most of it, I imagine, Spanish. Competent version of Gongora, swift version of the Cantar del Cid, an attempt on Metastasio, almost anything Arabic or Persian. You know, I expect, Omar Pound’s bits of Arabic. I am sorry I’ve nothing.’19

  Philip Norman wrote in the Sunday Times that ‘almost everyone is at his feet or studying hard to be … At the age of 66, Bunting was revealed and applauded as among the most important poets of the century … the work is as hard as tombstones’20 After decades of being ignored, by the public, if not by poets, he took to celebrity gladly. William Corbett recalled hearing Bunting read Briggflatts at Harvard in the spring of 1966 (actually 27 March 1967) and feeling that the poet was enjoying being at the centre of a Bacchanalia: