A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  In 1966 he told Robert Creeley that he had ‘half a notion in my head to do a Salome, as different as possible from Wilde, Flaubert, Laforgue and so on. She jigs and wiggles and makes no fuss about stripping off. No wiles, no purpose, no afterthoughts. She probably dances to the sound of the Beatles.’47 It was still cooking a couple of weeks later when he told Gael Turnbull that it was beginning ‘to show some very faint, misty outlines of a shape’,48 but by his sixty-eighth birthday in March 1968 it ‘had refused to take shape’49 and he appears to have entirely dropped the idea.

  It was around this time that another ghost from Bunting’s distant past appeared, this one rather less welcome than Peggy. Stuart Montgomery’s wife Deidre told Tom Pickard this strange story:

  Shortly after they had set up as publishers in the mid sixties the Montgomerys were living in a couple of attics in Lawn Road, Hampstead, with their new baby. Despite the cramped accommodation Basil, who had become good friends with them, used to stay there on his rare visits to London. They looked forward to his coming because he was an excellent storyteller especially when his vocal chords were oiled with good drink, and he was happy amongst children. In other words he was an amiable, amusing and illuminating guest. In the basement of the house in Lawn Road a handsome but elderly woman lived. Stuart and Deidre knew her as a neighbour with a beautiful bone structure and thought it a mere coincidence that one of Basil’s early poems had been dedicated to a woman of the same name, Helen Egli. One day the Montgomerys were walking around the Tate Gallery and discovered a portrait by Augustus John of a beautiful young woman whose features reminded them immediately of their elderly neighbour living in the basement. They were curious to know; was she the Helen Egli of the John portrait and the Bunting poem? They weren’t on sufficiently intimate terms to ask her, but on his next visit to London they would ask Basil.

  So, after the baby was put to bed, a meal and a good wine, and as the single malt whisky bottle was opened, they told him about the handsome old woman who lived in the basement and could she be the same Helen Egli? The cheery flush of alcohol drained from his face and the hand holding the glass discernibly trembled. Stuart said, ‘he turned white as a sheet and stood up saying, “I’ll never come and visit you again, never come back to this house again.”’

  According to Montgomery, ‘the affair was quite tempestuous and he couldn’t get on with her at all and the child that she had by somebody else Basil’s parents helped to bring up at the time. But Basil actually left England and went to France, originally, to get away from her effectively. And for years he would avoid all comment on her.’

  Some three or four weeks later she died, so they never met and he returned as a visitor to their house. But the coincidence didn’t end there; Helen had a son who was also the local postman and he would see letters addressed to Basil Bunting c/o Montgomery, his publisher. Even though he was aware of their past relationship he had never mentioned Bunting’s current connection with the house on Lawn Road to his mother. After her death the son carried out the requirements of her will, to burn the letters that Basil had written to her three or four decade earlier.50

  BUFFALOONATICS AND SANTA BARBARIANS, 1966–1967

  Bunting was invited in 1966 to the State University of New York at Buffalo where he first met the poet and academic Eric Mottram, who spent every day with him from 27 June until 5 August.51 It was the start of a long friendship. Shortly after Bunting’s death nineteen years later Mottram published extracts from the diary he kept at the time. On 29 June Bunting gave his first reading in the US, followed by a reception at the Main Book Centre, which ‘went off very well’. Mottram recalls Bunting being in a sociable mood, enjoying the company of other writers ‘very freely’. Bunting and Mottram went to a concert in Blair Hall on 11 July and drank whisky in Mottram’s room afterwards, talking and listening to Schumann’s Fantasia. On 16 July the pair went with a party of six others (including the poet Tony Connor, who recorded his impressions of Bunting in verse, Ed Davidson, Aaron Poulker and ‘three girls’) to Niagara Falls, ‘marvellous weather, completely ideal. Evening: Basil, Aaron, and I dined well and amusingly at the Chinese’. On 19 July Mottram had ‘dinner with Basil, who was celebrating some letters and contacts which made him happy – his sister [daughter] in Wisconsin, and Peggy, his girl-friend, among others.’ Four days later there was a party ‘at Professor Thomas Connolly’s place … everyone there. Lots of beer. John Barth on drums, with Jack Clarke on piano, and two others on saxes. In fact, Basil and I had drinks with Barth beforehand at his place.’

  Mottram’s diary records five or six weeks of endless drinks, parties, dinners, readings, singing and lectures but Mottram was open to Bunting’s darker side. On 13 July he went with ‘Bunting to Eduoardo’s on Bailey Street, for a huge Italian meal and excellent Valpolicella and Bardolino. Bunting spouted and said some shrewd, and some very silly, things – about Lawrence and Ginsberg especially. He is sometimes garrulous and pigheaded.’ Two weeks later (on 28 July) they spent a ‘sad evening somehow’ at Stephen Rodefer’s house: ‘Idle talk never got far beyond the relaxed stage. Basil asserted and laid down the law … (Everyone behaved aggressively that evening. Perhaps the endless hot rain did it?).’ Three days later they went to Alan DeLoach’s house for dinner and Mottram recorded an ‘excellent conversation about poetry, Basil’s saying how his sense of poetic vocation came on his grandfather’s knee when he was five – and that this is what carried him through all the difficult years. But, also some strangely reactionary views of art.’ Bunting had a tendency to ‘mythicize these weeks together and tell a number of highly amusing stories about it, but always with a sense of a happy time he could draw on’.52

  Tony Connor captured moments with Bunting at SUNY in his poem ‘Reminiscences Remembered’. Bunting is seen throwing off anecdotes to faculty and students in Tiny’s Modern Café:

  ‘It must have been the summer/of ’28. Fordie had/taken me to visit/one of Proust’s minor duchesses …’/’Yes, Eliot/didn’t hit it off at all/with Isadora. He threw,/or tried to throw, Ezra’s coat/from the window of her flat,/as a gesture of protest/at Isadora’s neatness./I should say ‘her studio’ –/which was bare, completely bare;/as – so it must be confessed –/was ‘Dora, who greeted us/in the hall stark naked!…’/ … ‘Cat’s-piss! – which reminds/me of that cat Willie was/always fondling: Minnaloushe./Used to pedicure its paws,/claimed it had psychic powers –/especially after it peed/all over George Moore’s valise/stuffed full with reams of his prose./I got the tale from Arthur –/Symons: he witnessed the deed!’

  This is the professional raconteur in action but Connor’s poem goes on to give a snapshot of a more private Bunting at SUNY:

  His private being, shrunken/and myopic, occupied/the apartment next to mine –/where, sometimes, I’d visit him./With memory fixed upon/himself among the great dead,/the rest of his mind would strain/nobly to deal with the dim/fellow-countryman he saw/in the room … /He endeared himself to me/by late summer: he refused/to allow the library,/or anybody, to tape/his reminiscences./’No,/my boy: I won’t have them used./Damn these university/confidence-tricksters, in lip-/service to literature!/They want articles, footnotes,/anything in black and white/that’ll help ’em get tenure…’/The old poet shook his head,/as though to be rid of flies./He popped a couple of pills/into his mouth, muttered ‘Turds!’/saw me beside him, and said:/’There are lies, and there are lies./What you’ll remember of me –/years from now, in some pub, say,/or perhaps in a poem,/speaking from the pure pleasure/of telling a good story –/will be warped, changed, pulled awry/into your own idiom./You’ll soon make my stories your/stories – that’s how it should be./Murrain take accuracy!/Speak with a rich man’s freedom,/leave facts to the sober poor!’53

  One can’t help but feel that Connor has caught Bunting’s authentic voice in this caricature.

  Denis Goacher considered Bunting ‘a tremendous pedagogue, a really born teacher, which is one of the reasons why young people were so impresse
d by him. He had a way of stating things so ex cathedra that you felt that he must be right. He told me, à propos, that when he was living in Italy Ezra Pound once said to him that he ought to go back to London and set himself up as a new Dr. Johnson.’54 Bunting certainly tried to bring some by then already old-fashioned concepts to the classroom. Peter Lewis recalls Bunting’s stories about his teaching in America, ‘including the women students who “were prepared to do anything for an A” – to which his reply was: “Are you prepared to work?”’55

  Robert Creeley also considered Bunting a gifted teacher56 but his style would certainly fall foul of current educational requirements. On 2 August Mottram took Bunting’s class on Yeats: ‘He had been teaching Eliot, Pound, and Yeats to the SUNY students by getting them to read the poems aloud in class. But he was aware that they had to gain other information about poetry – this is where I was supposed to be the channel.’57

  We don’t really associate Bunting with action for a common good. Although he hated oppression of any kind we rarely see him doing anything other than inveighing against it. He left SUNY, however, with an unusual gesture of militancy on behalf of his visiting colleagues. Never good with figures of authority Bunting was clearly stung into action by the conditions under which visiting lecturers were hired: ‘For some reason I did not record Basil’s fight to get visiting professors paid at the end of the session, rather than have to wait months and have nothing to spend in America. He won for us all by storming the President of the University’s office, and by writing a sharp letter to him. Nor did I record his final gesture to the office he had been assigned to and to its regular occupant: he cellophane-taped the tables, desks and drawers together – and called for me to approve.’58 Buffalo wasn’t ‘stupider than other universities,’ he wrote to Pound in July 1966, ‘just dead’.59

  His visit to the US was, culturally, a disappointment. He wrote to Cid Corman in April 1967 that it had given him none of the lift he had come to expect in America: ‘Too many shams, too little disposition to distinguish between the sham and the real article. Brains absent or in cold storage, often. I’m not sure that I don’t prefer the bitter philistinism of England to this sludge of culture.’60 He was also considerably preoccupied while he was in Buffalo with events at home, and the burden of managing his domestic finances by remote control. Sima infuriated him by borrowing £50 from Turnbull to pay bills:

  (a) I left Sima more money than I ever have to meet the bills, and all bills but one small one paid. I also sent her an extra £30. (b) she has gone, or is going, to France for a holiday with the children, which horrifies me, for wherever the money came from (Edmond, I expect), it could have been used for the bills or to repay you. This kind of thing makes me ashamed and angry. She had already committed quite a large slice of the Arts Council £1,000 before I left England, though she knew I needed it to pay off our mortgage and so improve our weekly budget.61

  (He repaid the debt two days later.) The domestic situation hadn’t improved much by the time he returned. For one thing he found ‘Sima deeply disturbed by bad (and I believe false) news of her mother. Ma-in-law is a cunning and very selfish old woman who is constantly dying, and has been for the last 28 years at least. She does not worry about the possible effect of these demonstrations on a distant daughter, and of course she really will die someday, so Sima gets upset.’62

  This was compounded by new financial problems. Bunting was planning to take his daughter, Maria, to California but ‘Edmond (nothing new in this) has waited to the last moment and then tried to throw a spanner in the works, demanding instant repayment of a debt. What the real state of the account is I cannot tell, for I do not believe that he has ever paid a regular board-and-rent (certainly I’ve never seen a penny of it); but if I pay him, Maria cannot go to California, and I doubt whether I can, so I wont.’63

  A few days later he told Pound he had returned from ‘six weeks among the Buffaloons’ and was off ‘to pass a year among the Santa Barbarians on the Specific Coast’, a prospect he didn’t relish: ‘I’d rather not go to California; rather stay in my own place, Northumberland, go to meeting once in a couple of months at Brigflatts, keep away from the horrors of the literary life. Avoid pontificating.’64 But the children had to be fed, and he found himself in Goleta, California, just two months later.

  Bunting left his detested job at the Evening Chronicle on 30 August 1966. He was replaced by the journalist, Peter Stansill, who recalled his awe at being led to Bunting’s chair:

  The deputy editor steered me to the huge subs’ table, around which clustered a dozen journalists, and pointed to the vacant seat that I was to occupy for the next seven months. ‘You’re filling the chair of an officer and a gentleman,’ a neighbouring colleague announced, ‘a poet and a scholar who translates from the ancient Persian.’ I had inherited not only the chair but also the workplace effects (though not the job) of Basil Bunting, who had retired only a few days before. These included a foot rule, a copy of the house style book and thick wads of copy paper, all kept in a locker in the hallway to the printing plant.

  It was a terrifying honour … Even more worrying was my recent pathetic attempt to write something intelligent about Briggflatts for International Times, London’s first countercultural publication. The review was cryptic and hurried, silly but enthusiastic. I can just imagine his ‘violently alarming’ laugh as he read it (if he did) … Seeking some trace of this glory, I searched for Bunting the poet in his workaday world, for some clue to the ‘remote blood and ancestry’ that preoccupied him. Nothing but a few squiggles on scraps of paper which I took for shorthand notes and discarded, though they may indeed have been immortal lines from some Persian epic he was translating between copy-editing and headline-writing for the evening financial page.65

  Safe from drowning

  In 1966 Bunting accepted a Visiting Lectureship at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Alan Brilliant and Jack Shoemaker had just founded the Unicorn Press and Bookshop. He was distressed at leaving Peggy66 but was straightaway in their midst, contributing poems for a Unicorn chapbook and giving readings at the book store. Alan Brilliant recalls that he ‘wasn’t a garrulous person while among us … he seemed to be gently tolerating all of us while his mind was elsewhere’.67 Unicorn Press published Bunting’s Two Poems (‘Birthday Greeting’ and ‘All You Spanish Ladies’) in May 1967 with a cover price of $1 in a short run of 250 copies, of which 30 were numbered and signed by the poet at the reading on 27 May 1967 at the Unicorn Bookshop.68 (Both poems had been published in Agenda the previous year.)69 In the same month Pym-Randall Press in Cambridge, MA, published ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’ in a limited signed edition of two hundred copies. ‘Pym, by the way, was a cat,’ he revealed to Dorothy Pound. ‘Randall took him into partnership to satisfy the law about how many shareholders a limited company has to have. The firm is now in mourning for its senior partner, dead of old age at sixteen or so.’70

  He was enjoying himself, although he expressed it cautiously, and he must have had some money for once. If his claim, in a letter to SUNY in January 1970, is to be believed the University of California paid him $16,500 per annum, worth well over $100,000 today.71 He wrote to Jonathan Williams in December 1966:

  The Pacific – what there is of it under the oil – cuts back our cliffs, but I believe it will be several years before it reaches this house, so I’m safe from drowning. The sun does shine, mostly: but I understand it does that in North Carolina too. (Maria has discovered a headline: “Southern Black farmers fading…” Perhaps you’ve observed this peculiar physiological phenomenon? It should solve the colour problem in the end.) … Here I talk to silent rows of milk-shakes, with never a dash of salt in a classroomful. I am endeavouring to make David Jones known to their elders, and annoying people by saying obvious things that they didn’t expect about Carlos Williams or The Cantos. Kenner, however, is a pleasure, and one or two others are kind and friendly to the poor prisoner on the campus who has still n
o car to go to town with or explore the country. Any chance of seeing you here? A nice hike across the desert? We have cheap wine and can cook cakes and bacon.72

  His apartment was seven minutes from the beach, fifteen from his office at the university.73 It could have been worse. On the whole though he preferred the Buffaloonatics to the Santa Barbarians. They might drive one crazy but at least they were ‘more aware of the world around them than the Santa Barbarians, who look like the milkshakes they live on and seem as tasty’.74

  The following February, he told Dorothy Pound, he was unwell – ‘dragged myself to class then subsided in or on my bed, for several weeks’.75 He may have been depressed by news from home. On 10 January he had discovered that his mother had cancer and couldn’t ‘hope to add much to her 92 years’, as he told Robert Creeley.76 In fact his mother held out for another eighteen months; she died in July 1968: ‘She was about the house until a few hours before she died, but she had a bad night and the next day she seemed to be failing rapidly – fainted a couple of times. Then she rallied, talked a lot about a new frock and joked with Sima and ate her dinner. A little later I saw her lying half asleep, complaining quietly to herself, and an hour after that we found her dead. She would have been 93 in a few more days. Nothing there to grieve about. She is buried with my father.’77

  March saw a tour of Texas, for a Pound symposium, where the ‘locals tried to drown me in Bourbon’,78 New York and Harvard. He complained to Pound that ‘it rained whiskey’ at the conference: ‘They bath the babies in whiskey in Texas. They drink it out of their ten-gallon hats. They wash their clothes in it. I asked for beer, but that consternated everybody. I asked for water and they looked puzzled.’79 Bunting met Pound’s daughter (with Olga Rudge), Mary, for the first time at the symposium and warmed to her. He thought she was moved by meeting her father’s old friend. Mary aside, his view of such conferences was caught in a poem written in 1969, ‘All the cants they peddle’: