A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  All the cants they peddle

  bellow entangled,

  teeth for knots and

  each other’s ankles,

  to become stipendiary

  in any wallow;

  crow or weasel

  each to his fellow.

  Yet even these,

  even these might

  listen as crags

  listen to light

  and pause, uncertain

  of the next beat,

  each dancer alone

  with his foolhardy feet.80

  ‘Whoever has been conned,’ he noted in Collected Poems, ‘however briefly, into visiting a “poets’ conference” will need no explanation of this ode.’81 Although ‘All the cants they peddle’ was written in 1969 it wasn’t finished to Bunting’s satisfaction until 1974, when it was published in Agenda. ‘Finished at last, after five years,’ he wrote to Jonathan Williams in April 1974, ‘the 16 lines about current literary amenities which has been on my desk all that time, waiting for one word in the last line, now supplied. At least the delay removes the lines from suspicion of personal animosity.’82

  In New York he read at the Guggenheim to ‘a considerable audience who took their cue from Ginsberg and stamped, jumped, clapped and yelled when it was over’.83 The Harvard reading was a more sedate affair but he enjoyed a ‘charming, quiet time’, and his hosts drove him out to Gloucester and Concorde.

  The New York leg of the tour provided some painful encounters. He met the poet Denise Levertov and ‘disliked her heartily’. More importantly he called on Zukofsky but found him ‘very bitter and, strangely, very jealous. A painful hour. He did not go to the reading because of “drafts”.’84 He wrote to Pound that Zukofsky was ‘sunk in bitterness, in spite of all the American poets calling him father (you’re grandfather now).’85

  Bunting’s time in California coincided with a period of immense student unrest and riots on campus were frequent. ‘Mr Ronald Reagan, Governor of Californa, has dismissed the head of the university,’ he told Gael Turnbull. ‘He will charge students about £150 a year on top of the £100 they already pay … Protests are going on.’86 In spite of the chaos in the California university system J. M. Edelstein remembered that Bunting was comfortable there and that he was liked by his students:

  He would walk, sandaled, with a tweed jacket on, through that Goleta campus which looks like a stage set, sand blowing through the streets, weeds growing in the gutters in front of new glass and stone buildings, and he was always followed by a retinue of kids.

  One day we went to hear Robert Duncan lecture on poetics; I remember many allusions to Dante. It was a Saturday afternoon and there were twenty, or maybe thirty, people in the dimly lit, abandoned movie house where the lecture was being given. Duncan spoke brilliantly, but dryly – and for hours. Bunting slept soundly and snored loudly. When it was over, he said: ‘I like talks like that.’ Personally and poetically, that is what we expect from Basil Bunting: the heart of the matter. And that is what we get.87

  Bunting frequently dined with Hugh Kenner’s family during his year at Santa Barbara ‘to the repeated delight of one of [Kenner’s] daughters, who thought that for once a poet looked like a poet. He looked trim and twinkly-eyed, with a white moustache, and I suspect she was projecting on his features the undoubted fact that he sounded like a poet.’88

  He was an inexperienced but memorable teacher. At one of his Santa Barbara classes he asked his students to read aloud Wordsworth’s ‘Idiot Boy’: ‘as first one, and then another, took up the reading, they gradually began to find that tall tale – funny. (It has never been officially acknowledged that Wordsworth might anywhere be funny.) And the laughter grew contagious, and the roomful of California adolescents were helpless with hysterics, and from the next classroom there came bangs on the wall to get them to shut up.’89 Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams about this event in April 1967: ‘The class are astonished to find that Wordsworth was not a humourless old woman. They even laughed often and long at the Idiot Boy. I’ve hopes of them. We’ll see what they make of The Old Cumberland Beggar.’90 Bunting didn’t always reciprocate this enthusiasm. One of his Santa Barbara students ‘had eaten rattlesnake in all but one of the 50 states, but my interest was not excited’.91 He was, he wrote to Ezra Pound, ‘pretending to teach, a kind of unteacher, trying to prevent the kids getting the sort of education they do get in such places’.92

  He tried to supplement his income with readings in California, but it was slow work. He wrote to the poet Cid Corman in April 1967 that in the previous eight months he had given only two readings, one free at the university and another for $100 in San Francisco, but he had been required to pay his own expenses.93

  Much is forgotten and all forgiven

  The year 1966 was important for the man as well as the poet. Victoria Forde, until very recently the source of nearly all the information we have about Bunting’s American family, reports that he met his daughters Bourtai and Roudaba for the first time in thirty years.

  Although they had corresponded sporadically throughout this time, they had never been reunited. The summer he arrived in the States he first travelled to Wisconsin where Bourtai and her family lived near their mother. His grandchildren immediately loved their newly found grandfather and his fabulous stories. Bourtai more slowly renewed her acquaintance with a pleasant stranger, a father she had idealised and fantasised about all through her youth. Earlier he had tried to convince Rou to go to nursing school in England, but Rou had decided on the University of Honolulu. That Christmas Bunting sent Rou a ticket to California for their first reunion. Though Bourtai had been invited also, she was unable to accept. In her last year at the University of Wisconsin, she was trying to balance her family responsibilities and studying by getting up at four in the morning and staying up late at night. When Rou travelled from Hawaii to see Bunting in Santa Barbara, she expected a flamboyant ‘Poet’ – something like the barefoot Poet with swirling cape who had been described to her. To her amazement she met an ordinary looking, quiet, cultured, gentle man with whom, from that time on, she and her family never lost close contact. Later when her father had a cataract removed from one eye, Rou, a nurse, was able to be with him in California for the operation.94

  Forde describes what seems to have been an idyllic summer for the reunited family:

  From Wisconsin Bourtai and her son Ahab, Bunting and Maria drove on to Montreal’s Expo 67 before Maria and Ahab set sail for Wylam where Ahab lived for a year. Returning to Madison, Bourtai packed up her four youngest sons and their belongings to travel to California with Bunting. Leaving with her mother one son who wished to finish high school in Madison and dropping off another and his pet monkey in Chicago with his father, Bourtai with her three youngest sons and Bunting drove across the country in a holiday spirit. Crossing the Nevada desert, Bunting pretended with the children that they were in the Sahara with water and dates rationed. At Isla Vista in Bunting’s home close to the Pacific, they all lived together companionably for several months until Bourtai found a job in Los Angeles.

  To make up for all the lost years, Bourtai with her family travelled from Los Angeles to see her father on weekends. One time he had made kidney stew for them, but he was not sure what was in it since his cataracts hindered his sight. But to be sure it would be ready, he had had it cooking on the stove for three days.95

  In 2006 Roudaba Bunting Davido deposited letters to her from her father at the Basil Bunting Poetry Archive in Durham and this rich resource allows us to fill out the picture sketched by Victoria Forde. In the summer of 1966 he met Marian for the first time since Christmas 1936 when she left London with their two children, while pregnant with their third. ‘I saw your mother,’ he told Roudaba, ‘and made friends with her again – she told me all her woes, without much pause for me to get a word in, but I tried to make the few things I could say helpful to you and Bou. Poor woman. I think she brought most of her troubles on herself needlessly, and I don’t think
they have taught her much.’96

  According to Marian, Bunting congratulated her on her parenting of his two daughters. ‘They were just what he would have liked them to be – free, unconcerned about public opinion, independent, living the lives of their choice. So he said.’97 She was quite right about this. Bunting never seems to have lost his intense dislike of Marian’s family and considered that in the circumstances she had done a good job. Bourtai and Roudaba were ‘like the rest of the people I love best – free of humbug, free of greed, very open … to love’.98 He told Roudaba that peace had been established between himself and Marian:

  Much is forgotten and all forgiven. I know the difficulties she found, better than she knew them when she chose to face her awful family rather than poverty. Eau Claire has left a powerful mark on her, and it would be false to pretend that I am not glad she divorced me, for I could not long endure contact with her as she now is. But there would have been no divorce, no separation, if I could have prevented it, for I loved my two daughters beyond anything else in the world. I would have put up with anything to have kept you with me. Dear girl, you tell me that when you were a little girl you wrote to ask me to take you; believe me, I never received any such letters.99

  We saw how profoundly Bunting’s experiences in the Second World War affected him. By 1950 he was a man of action, a diplomat, spy, a mover and shaker in one of the world’s most sensitive, dangerous and politically vital theatres. He honed his Wing-Commander Bunting act and cut a commanding figure throughout the Middle East. Briggflatts and the reunion with Peggy, Roudaba and Bourtai seems to have had an equally profound effect. There is something of the spirit of the final scene of King Lear in Bunting’s letters to Roudaba; the anger and paranoia have abated and he appears reconciled, gentle, atoned:

  What else can I say to you dear daughter now? Only, I think, that I hope very earnestly that you can come to Santa Barabara: that I love you: that writing poetry is a skill like weaving carpets or shaping bowls on a potter’s wheel and is not an intellectual exercise to make people afraid of the poet. Bourtai feels that she needed a father, and I that I needed a daughter even more. I think it will be the same with you and me.

  Sun is shining here. All omens good! (except the rheumatism!) Goodbye for now, dear Roudaba, and let us meet and kiss soon, soon.

  Love from your stranger father.100

  When he got back to California Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams in August 1967:

  I’m back here again at last; now accompanied by my eldest daughter and three of my grandsons, but for how long I don’t know. Bourtai is looking for a job in California … I had to give up the idea of revisiting Harvard, and came home instead by way of the forests in northern Ontario, very dense and tangled. We saw Sullivan’s bank in Iowa (Maria disdainful) and Lloyd Wright’s monastic school at Taliessin (a bit too pious-memory for me), and visited Lorine Niedecker (very nice).101

  He was amused to find Niedecker living in dread that her neighbours would discover that she was a poet. ‘It’s almost a crime in rural Wisconsin,’ he told Tom Pickard.102 He described Niedecker to Gael Turnbull as a ‘shy, nervous old lady (though some years younger than me) terrified lest the neighbours should find out that she is anything as eccentric as a poetess. She is, I think, poor; but not so poor as to be uncomfortable in her pretty village.’103

  Niedecker certainly enjoyed the visit. She wrote excitedly to Cid Corman:

  Basil came! With two daughters. I was staying out home on the river and they came down from Madison where the older girl, Bourtai, lives. Not having planned for company so far as groceries were concerned, I took them to a tea room in Fort for lunch. Basil, ‘I don’t suppose it would be possible to get a glass of beer here?’ Have you ever met him? His manner is timid and tender. Withal so kindly. O lovely day for me. He had seen the LN Origin – ‘so much more there than is implied’. Asked if I’d ever written a long poem. And of course the question came up of reading poems aloud … Would somebody would start Meditation Rooms, places of silence, so silent you couldn’t help but hear the sound of your page without opening your mouth, and reading books would come back. Glad, tho, that Basil is earning a living thru reading poetry. (He teaches but does it he says mainly by reading good poetry aloud to his classes.)104

  She clearly loved his gravelly Northumbrian voice: ‘It was so pretty as we drove into our yard the evening we came home,’ she wrote to Cid Corman in October 1968. ‘So pr-r-r-r-it-ty as Basil said.’105 Niedecker confided to Jonathan Williams that Bunting’s visit was a high point in her later life106 and by the end of 1967 she had completed ‘Wintergreen Ridge’:

  Nobody, nothing

  ever gave me

  greater thing

  than time

  unless light

  and silence

  which if intense

  makes sound

  Unaffected

  by man

  thin to nothing lichens

  grind with their acid

  granite to sand

  These may survive

  the grand blow-up

  the bomb

  When visited

  by the poet

  From Newcastle on Tyne

  I neglected to ask

  what wild plants

  have you there

  how dark

  how inconsiderate

  of me107

  Niedecker and Bunting had the highest regard for each other. Her ‘The Ballad of Basil’, in mentioning Bunting’s influences, quickly identifies him as completely his own poet:

  They sank the sea

  All land

  Enemy

  He saw his boats stand

  and he

  off the floor

  of that cold jail

  (would not fight

  their war)

  sailed anyway

  Villon went along

  Chomei

  Dante

  and the Persian

  Firdusi –

  rigging

  for his own

  singing108

  Bunting said of Niedecker that ‘No one is so subtle with so few words’,109 and when she died in 1970 Roudaba remembered her father’s anger that the event didn’t get the media attention he felt it deserved.110 A few years later he paid her a significant posthumous compliment: “There are some very fine female poets. One of the finest American poets at all, besides being easily the finest female American poet … – Lorine Niedecker never fails; whatever she writes is excellent.’111 When Jonathan Williams was considering an edition of Niedecker’s poems in the 1960s Bunting was delighted. ‘Nobody else’, he complained, ‘has been buried quite so deep.’112 He considered her a ‘much better’ poet than Emily Dickinson for instance.113

  In early 1967 Bunting went to New York. The Academy of American Poets paid him $500 to read there but, he complained to Cid Corman, ‘left me to pay my own fare there and back. (If I’d realised that before I’d have refused to go.)’114 His profit, he told Denis Goacher, was $150.115 If the pay was insulting the accommodation was worse. He wrote to Gael Turnbull from ‘The Filthy Hotel, New York’: ‘They’ve lodged me where Dylan Thomas died.’116

  Jane Kramer recalls Allen Ginsberg teasing Bunting about his reading of Briggflatts at the Guggenheim Museum and confessing that he had ‘tried to write a poem like you once … The one about Piccadilly. I set it up for myself like kind of an exercise. I said, like, “How would Basil write this poem?” and then I went ahead. Like I revised and revised. It ended up pretty rigid and condensed.’ Ginsberg laughed, ‘That kind of writing’s not my scene – I haven’t got the strength,’ he said. ‘I know that poem,’ Bunting said. ‘I thought it was rather good myself.’117

  Bunting was being kind. Ginsberg’s poem, ‘Studying the Signs’, had been written eighteen months previously and published in the Oxford magazine Isis in November 1965, and although it is much more terse than most of his work one wouldn’t know that Bunting’s Briggflatts was an influe
nce if the fact had not been announced in an introductory note.118 Bunting liked Ginsberg, but not his poetry. ‘I like the notion of Ginsberg singing to the sheep,’ he wrote to Jonathan Williams in September 1973, ‘but I myself find his music so dismally platitudinous that I don’t think even my friendly feelings towards him will ever get me to sit out another hour of it.’119 A few years later even Ginsberg’s kindness was becoming a nuisance. He told Williams that he had Been

  put to great confusion and embarrassment by Allen Ginsberg. He wrote, offering me an obviously manufactured place in his Boulder Buddhist tushery, full of kindness and concern; and then offering me his farm up New York State; and then telling Cape to send me a cheque – his royalties, I suppose. His motives are as kind as they well can be, and that hinders me from explaining how ill all these plans strike me. I detest Gurus, Tibetan or any other breed. I am utterly sick of students, couldn’t face them now. A rather rickety farm scares me. And I can’t accept his royalties. If Cape actually sends the cheque, I’ll put it in the bank to be held for Allen. But how do you tell a kind, friendly man that you prefer any misery that comes along to the kind of help he can give you? I must invent some excuse, and I not only lack invention but am quite clumsy enough to give offence. I’m postponing my answer as long as I can in the hopes of some inspiration. Do you think I am being perverse? I fear a lot of people would think so.120

  A lovely gaudy world

  Bunting struggled with his eyesight all his life. The earliest recording of it appears to be the doctor’s certificate he presented to the London School of Economics in June 1922 and, as we have seen, he was only able to join the Royal Air Force during the Second World War because a doctor who had known his father allowed him to cheat in the eye test. Tom Pickard recalled that by the time he met Bunting in the early 1960s the lenses of the poet’s glasses were ‘as thick as a safe-door’.121