A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  seated in a chair, to his left seated on pillows a teenage girl acted as his cup bearer. Between sections of Briggflatts a tape recorder played Scarlatti and Bunting drank with obvious savor – his pleasure made you thirsty – from a glass of red wine offered by the blonde girl at his feet. His reading was vigorous, precise (“Each pebble its part”) and masterful. The words and lines shaped and fitted each to each with an emphatic tang. When he finished, the audience sat stunned as if waiting out the poem’s resonance. The trembling I experienced was a sensation so powerful that to remember it now is to feel it again.

  Corbett’s experience was similar to Thomas Clark’s, that sense that, even though you don’t entirely understand it, you know that you have encountered extraordinary art.

  At a party after the reading, Corbett recalls, ‘Bunting sat in a baronial armchair, his cup bearer on his lap, talking with a semi-circle of people. A friend came up to me chuckling and, pointing towards Bunting, said, “Jesus! Look at that old man will you.” Bunting’s arm was around his cup bearer’s waist and his hand delicately stroked her ribs and breast as he nodded his head and his eyebrows – large flecks of gray ash – moved up and down.’21

  He was back on Tyne Tees Television in June 1969, reading from Briggflatts, of course, but also visiting Brigflatts itself. The following August he read at the Harrogate Arts Festival and the following year he did no fewer than three BBC broadcasts.22

  His friend Denis Goacher noticed a gradual change in Bunting’s approach to celebrity. After the publication of Briggflatts his characteristic modesty prevailed, but was ‘slightly modified’ as time passed. ‘If you have got a lot of young men and people like Allen Ginsberg coming round and soaping you up like mad, then you are bound to be ever so slightly corrupted … He began, ever so gradually, to start playing the Grand Old Man.’23

  CHANGED, ALL CHANGED

  But all this glamour and attention seems to have been nothing compared to his rekindled relationship with the girl he had famously failed to reply to for fifty years, Peggy Greenbank. In July 1965 he wrote to Denis Goacher about the momentous fallout from Briggflatts:

  The extraordinary effects that have flowed from Briggflatts are still in full spate. Peggy has her copy of the poem, and has written to her sister, obviously proud and excited, but worried to death about the jealous husband. I am full of hope and delight. Clearly, she will see me, as soon as she can contrive to. Clearly, she will leave her name on the poem and risk scandalising her neighbours if she has the least reason to hope her husband will not see it. She is minimising the past suddenly served up to her, perhaps only because she is writing to her sister; but she certainly does not reject it. Can I make it become the present? Her letter was so alive and vivid, it was like having her with me.24

  A few days earlier he had written somewhat cryptically to Dorothy Pound about this latest transformation in his fortunes:

  I told you I find myself in the last chapters of a Hardy novel? Approaching the denouement, with no idea what it is to be, but a strong premonition of something tragic. [Gael] Turnbull could tell you the story. He knows most of it. The rest is between myself and her. I never told you about her in the old days. I was too ashamed to speak. But the poem Briggflatts has exploded the past into the present, and I am largely living in 1915 in the remotest dale country, whatever seems to be going on around me. No, a happy ending is not out of the question, only very unlikely.25

  Gael Turnbull could indeed have told the story but he didn’t for nearly fifty years. Turnbull died in 2004 and in 2012 his second wife, the glass historian Jill Turnbull, published his memoirs, essays and journal pieces about twentieth-century poets and poetry. Bunting was still working on Briggflatts in May 1965 when Turnbull visited him at Shadingfield with his first wife, Jonnie, and their children. Bunting persuaded them to return to their home near Worcester via Brigflatts. When he got there Turnbull sat alone for a while in the meeting house but eventually fell into conversation with an older man and told him that he had a friend who had known the hamlet as a boy and had visited the family of a local stonemason. Turbull’s new companion told him that the stonemason’s daughter still lived in the house across the lane and suggested that Turnbull went to see her. He didn’t: ‘As I walked back up the lane, I was full of troubled thoughts. Had I any business blundering into someone else’s past? We drove home.’26 Turnbull wrote up his account of his visit to Brigflatts in a letter to Bunting and received a reply by return:

  You knew of course that your report on Briggflatts [his spelling] would strike very deep. Yet what you tell me is no more than I foresaw and expected before I began to write the poem … But first I must be sure … her elder sister had no health. Still, unexpected things happen, the weakling often survives … It would be cruel to leave her to hear of the poem from anyone else. And if she is quite indifferent, it would even be discourteous … She has been with me all this half century often when nobody else was.

  There is a moving postscript to this letter that was not published in Turnbull’s article: ‘Peculiar recesses there are in man that he knows very little about. I went into a pub at lunch time, thinking about your letter. While I was drinking my beer a middle-aged man came up and said: Why, Grandad, whatever is the matter? And only then I became aware that the tears were running down my face as they haven’t done since I was a little boy.’27

  Bunting finished Briggflatts three days later, at midnight on 16 May 1965. The prospect of some sort of rapprochement with Peggy threw Bunting into a state of enormous confusion. He wrote a series of excited letters to Gael Turnbull on 13, 16, 18 and 26 May 1965. He was convinced that Peggy, rather than her sister, was still living in the stonemason’s house and at the weekend of 18 to 20 June he visited Brigflatts himself. He wrote an emotional letter to Turnbull the following Monday:

  Such a weekend. My mind and emotions in a turmoil. No, it was not Peggy, but her sister [Cissie]. Peggy is alive and married, elsewhere … Changed, all changed. A different world … I told her [Cissie] I had come to seek Peggy, to beg her forgiveness and tell her how ashamed and unhappy I had been for so long, and that I would never have had the courage to face a meeting but for the absolute need of getting her permission before I let them print her name on the poem … Little by little I learned: After my last, terrible refusal to see my dear love, she, Peggy, despaired altogether, and her face turned sad, the smile that I knew gone, almost forever.

  His excitement was causing him to project a little incoherently. He reported Edward, Peggy’s husband, as being ‘jealous almost to a madness’ before Edward could have known anything about an affair that hadn’t yet started. By now his sense of being at the heart of one of Hardy’s novels was picking up: ‘Cissie’s history of the family was like a series of stories by Hardy, all sad, some tragic. And what am I doing in the most melodramatic novel of all? I love Sima and my children. I cannot wrong them to right the wrong I did to Peggy: yet I told Cissie I would carry Peggy off if she loved me and wanted to escape from her present life.’28

  Peggy, he discovered, was living at Hope in Shropshire, coincidentally not far from the Turnbulls, with her husband, Edward Edwards, and teaching in a village school. They had had three children of whom only one, Gillian, survived. In July Peggy and Edward visited Cissie in Brigflatts and Cissie showed Peggy the poem while Edward was occupied elsewhere. Edward worked away from home during the week and by 22 July Peggy and Bunting were corresponding, carefully at first, but soon Bunting was able to time his letters to arrive while Edward was away. In August he was still hoping for an imminent meeting with Peggy. He told Goacher that he was unlikely to find time to do a reading of The Cantos for the BBC during his next visit to London. ‘Does the august BBC work on Sundays?’ he asked. ‘But even if it does, if Peggy Greenbank comes to London for the reading, as she may, I wont do anything on Sunday except sit and look at her. There is half a century of looking to be caught up with somehow … If Peggy makes up her mind to what seems the inevitable break
with her husband, how shall I feed her?’29

  Bunting made covert arrangements to meet Peggy in October while he was staying with the Turnbulls, and towards the end of the month Turnbull drove Bunting to Hope to meet, at last, the woman who had been with him for fifty years. ‘The intensity of their emotion and happiness,’ according to Turnbull, ‘was not uncomfortable, if amazing.’

  ‘At Hope’, Bunting reported to Goacher, ‘Peggy was all any man could wish. I shant leave her at Hope for ever, insha’allah. But complications are more complicated for the impecunious and there are awful complications.’30 So began an affair that was conducted surreptitiously at first. Bunting wrote letters to Peggy ‘with a variety of orthography’ so as not to arouse Edward’s suspicions if he chanced to be at home when the letters arrived. During holiday periods, when he certainly would have been, Turnbull became the couple’s postman. Bunting wrote a long account of his life for Peggy so that she would know the real person and not an idealised one.31 He was anxious about her health and confided to Turnbull in January 1966 that he didn’t know how he could go on if ‘she were taken away from me.’ There were practical as well as emotional difficulties in conducting a secret, long range affair after a gap of fifty years. He pined constantly for Peggy; ‘Peggy has been ill,’ he told Goacher in February. ‘I shall see her in May, but its an awful long time to wait. I want a private helicopter to annihilate those 200 and odd miles.’32

  He told Turnbull in September 1966 that he was,

  suffering from Peggy’s determination to have a good conscience … Let people love and unlove without having to go after divorces … I never felt like claiming exclusive rights in any of my women, after I was about 22 or 3, and I don’t see why they should require exclusive rights in me. Contracting to keep a household together is a different matter … I was ‘faithful’ to Marian, unfaithful to Sima and to Peggy … but it certainly isn’t Marian who loves me in consequence.

  Peggy’s ‘conscience’ was something Bunting didn’t really understand. He reflected ‘with some astonishment at where she draws the line between a good and a bad one’.33 Conscience notwithstanding he was prepared to undergo a fair amount of discomfort to spend time with Peggy. ‘She lives on the Welsh border, nearly two hundred miles away, hard to get at by train and bus,’ he told Roudaba, ‘but nothing soothes me more than a few days with her, even if I must hang about dismal railway stations in Leeds and Manchester, waiting for trains. She seems busy with many little things, helping all the various village institutions; and when she needs distraction, she makes pottery in a kiln in her cellar.’34

  Sima was not overly impressed by this turn of events, but she seems to have found distraction in the presence of her cousin Edmond. According to Turnbull she was, ‘mostly scornful, at least affecting not to stoop to jealousy, just remarking, “Silly old man!” … There was also Edmond, who squired Sima about, was involved with her buying and renovating and selling cottages, although also refurbishing Shadingfield. They were sometimes away on holiday together.’35 Perhaps Bunting genuinely didn’t understand how his relationship with Peggy might have affected Sima. He complained from California to Gael Turnbull, with a straight face, that, ‘as for wives, one’s own or others, nobody at Wylam has written to me since the beginning of March. Has the Tyne washed the village away? Am I toiling for a set of ghosts?’36

  It may seem strange to characterise Bunting’s relationship with Peggy as one of the great love stories of the twentieth century – after all they spent nearly fifty years apart and with no communication at all – but a passage from a letter to his daughter, Roudaba, in 1966 shows that it was nothing less:

  When I was very young I met, at the hamlet of Briggflatts in the mountains of Westmorland, a girl four years younger than myself, and loved her. The story of that love is the skeleton of the poem. As the poem grew, I understood that I had never stopped loving the girl, and that our parting (my fault) was foolish as well as wrong. I felt certain that she and I were so much one that she must feel the same, still be in love with me, after forty-five years of separation. So I took my courage in both hands and went in search of her with the finished poem in my hand. It was a slow search; but I found her, found her exactly as I had felt she must be. So I have a love again, one that has survived a lifetime’s separation and will surely last till Peggy and I die. There are great difficulties: we are both married, both have children, are both poor. But there is also, now and then, when we can meet, great happiness, such as I have not known since I was a boy.37

  Reunion with Peggy seems to have stimulated the poet; 1965 was a productive year. Denis Goacher thought that Bunting had,

  a sexual crisis at the age of sixty-five or so. He wasn’t so unfortunate as Pound was, who had a prostatectomy around seventy-five; he was not afflicted with impotence, as far as I know, as Graves was around sixty, and Yeats also around sixty-five. But he knew, because he was perfectly ready to speak about himself, that he was no longer attractive to women and he couldn’t bear it … It was at this time that he wrote the ode that starts, ‘You idiot! What makes you think decay will/never stink from your skin?’ Now, the bitterness in that poem is entirely – and consciously – applicable to the position and stage of his life that he had got to.38

  This is a peculiar observation given the enormous changes in Bunting’s personal life, and there is no hint of a ‘sexual crisis’ in any of his surviving letters. ‘You idiot! What makes you think decay will’, written when Bunting was sixty-five, does not seem to me at all bitter. It is a caricature of the ageing lover, almost a reply to Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me that some time did me seek’:

  A lame stag, limping after the hinds, with tines

  shivered by impact and scarred neck – but

  look! Spittle fills his mouth, overflows,

  snuffing their sweet scent …39

  ‘Under sand clay’, also written in 1965, was, as we have seen, consciously evoking the desert but also dealing with historical events in which Bunting played a part:

  Under sand clay. Dig, wait.

  Billy half full, none for the car.

  Quartz, salt in well wall,

  ice refract first ray.

  Canvas udders sag, drip,

  swell without splash the mirage

  between islands. Knee-deep

  camels, lean men, flap-dugged

  matrons and surly children.

  Aneiza, kin to the

  unawed dynast haggling with God.

  This brine slaked him as

  this sun shrinks.40

  Bunting wrote to Dorothy Pound from Goleta in May 1967 with a version of ‘Under sand clay’ that is slightly different from the published version. ‘Arabic poetry,’ he explained,

  is extremely hard and even rocky. That’s the desert. When they went to live in cities the poets usually became ornamental and tiresome. I was trying to evoke the desert just before I began to teach, and the results were rather contorted and tough; dry, forbidding … You dig in the wadi for a slow drip of brackish water, which freezes at night. The canvas water cooling bags drip above what looks to the eye like a shallow sea with islands, but is the heat refraction of morning. There I met the tribe Aneiza.41

  Bunting’s well-known satire on philistinism, particularly northern philistinism, ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’, was also written in 1965. The poet’s point is made in the first three stanzas, but it winds on for another eight:

  Poetry? It’s a hobby.

  I run model trains.

  Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

  It’s not work. You dont sweat.

  Nobody pays for it.

  You could advertise soap.

  Art, that’s opera; or repertory –

  The Desert Song.

  Nancy was in the chorus.42

  It isn’t inspired, but it is short and unusually accessible, so therefore found its way into anthologies.

  More interesting is ‘O, it is godlike’ which was, as he told an audience, stolen
almost entirely from Catullus. ‘People have tried again and again to do the poem as Catullus from which I take the first four or five lines there, and they’ve all failed, every one of them, failed in various ignominious degrees, and where Ben Jonson and Campion failed I’m not ashamed to fail too.’43

  O, it is godlike to sit selfpossessed

  when her chin rises and she turns to smile;

  but my tongue thickens, my ears ring,

  what I see is hazy.

  I tremble. Walls sink in night, voices

  as unmeaning as wind. She only

  a clear note, dazzle of light, fills

  furlongs and hours

  so that my limbs stir without will, lame,

  I a ghost, powerless,

  treading air, drowning, sucked

  back into dark

  unless, rafted on light or music,

  drawn into her radiance, I dissolve

  when her chin rises and she turns to smile.

  O, it is godlike!44

  Although the source for this powerful lyric is Catullus 51 (itself a translation from Sappho) it is very difficult to keep Peggy out of these lines.

  ‘Carmencita’s tawny paps’, about ‘a young lady I met in the Canary Islands’,45 and ‘Three Michaelmas daisies’ were the other poems from Bunting’s annus mirabilis that survived into Collected Poems, and both tend to undermine Goacher’s claim that Bunting was suffering some kind of sexual crisis:

  Three Michaelmas daisies

  on an ashtray;

  one abets love;

  one droops and woos;

  one stiffens her petals

  remembering

  the root, the sap

  and the bees’ play.46

  There’s no doubt about the context – Michaelmas represents the fading of the year and a gift of a Michaelmas daisy has traditionally been a way of saying goodbye. But Michaelmas daisies are one of nature’s final acts of defiance of winter, providing colour and life deep into the autumn months, and the second stanza is a rousing affirmation of life even as death beckons.