A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Eric Mottram recalled that he and colleagues went regularly to the cinema, ‘Basil never. His eyesight at this time was extremely poor. He needed guiding over curbstones and across the busy main road between Clement Hall and the shopping and restaurant district.’122

  By the end of May 1967 he had a serious disability. He complained to Dorothy Pound that he was becoming ‘blinder and blinder’. Although he could still read books in large font and good light ‘the stars disappeared three years ago, but I can make out the moon. I fall over invisible steps and kerbs, but see enough of the traffic to get across the road. And I can see the girls’ legs if not their faces. Not too bad.’123

  Bunting responded to Jonathan Williams in April 1967 that ‘on present schedules I’ll have full use of my one working eye just in time to catch the plane home. And I want a job for 1969–70, but it can’t be in the US because of your laws. I wonder what they pay in Trinidad, Ubangi-Shari, Seychelles, Upper Amazon etc etc.’124 Suddenly in the middle of December 1967 his right eye ‘retired from business’. He wrote to Tom Pickard that it was now very difficult to read and write and that he could lose his job as a consequence: ‘I’d expected to go more or less blind, James Joyce fashion, bit by bit; but this was sudden (a few hours) and I can just distinguish light from darkness with that eye.’125

  He wrote to Turnbull at the same time about the cataract in his left eye. His doctor had told him that he required an immediate operation but Bunting’s insurance didn’t cover his eyes and he needed to find $1,000 to pay for it.126 He went ahead with the operation and on 7 January dictated a fairly cheerful letter to Turnbull: ‘They dug a bit out of my left eye in the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara where they also overfed me for a week until I insisted on going home for fear of getting too fat for my clothes.’127 The first letter he typed himself after his operation was also written to Turnbull, reporting success: ‘If you start from a state of complete blindness every little step in recovery is a delight. The first time the surgeon took the bandages off and I saw a shapeless red thing that must have been his hand – like the Ancient Mariner enjoying the sunrise. Then as the eye cleared the colours, untampered even by the normal lens which filches some of their exuberance – a lovely, gaudy world.’128

  On 30 January 1968 Lorine Niedecker wrote to Cid Corman about ‘Basil’s eyes. Has had cataract removed from the one and will have to have the other eye done. Students come in and cook and write letters for him. He seems to have a great companionship with his students.’129 He had to wait until the summer to have his other eye operated on, ‘not quite such a long job as the left’, he told Jack Shoemaker in November, ‘and it did not disable me so much or for so many weeks. Now I see well with glasses, and by March I’ll be able to return to contact lenses. Only at arm’s length I cant see well, so I still drop cups and spill my food.’130

  FEAR ADJECTIVES, THEY BLEED NOUNS

  In 1968 Fulcrum Press published one thousand hardcover copies of Collected Poems at 35/- and Stream Records recorded Briggflatts. The Fulcrum Collected Poems brought together for the first time everything Bunting felt was worth keeping. His preface is a rueful retrospective:

  A man who collects his poems screws together the boards of his coffin. Those outside will have all the fun, but he is entitled to his last confession. These verses were written here and there now and then over forty years and four continents. Heaped together they make a book.

  If ever I learned the trick of it, it was mostly from poets long dead whose names are obvious: Wordsworth and Dante, Horace, Wyat and Malherbe, Manuchehri and Ferdosi, Villon, Whitman, Edmund Spenser; but two living men also taught me much: Ezra Pound and in his sterner, stonier way, Louis Zukofsky. It would not be fitting to collect my poems without mentioning them.

  With sleights learned from others and an ear open to melodic analogies I have set down my words as a musician pricks his score, not to be read in silence, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may sometimes, I hope, be pleasing. Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs.131

  Collected Poems was well received. Andrew Wylie praised it in Agenda: ‘permanent … must be heard’. Martin Dodsworth, however, in the Listener was unimpressed. Bunting aimed for ‘crisp, curt perfection’ but it ‘left a rather gritty taste in the mouth … The diction, careful, heavily monosyllabic and particular, certainly commands respect, but rhythmically he is very monotonous, the omission of definite and indefinite articles is an irritating mannerism, and there is an overall want of originality.’ Richard Holmes was much nearer the mark in The Times. He noted the link between Briggflatts and The Waste Land in terms of impact: ‘In 1922 a generation recovering from war opened a slim volume and read. “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land”, finding its own voice in the painful, regretful cadences. Now our own Spring comes round. In 1966 we opened Briggflatts to find a tough, intricate music, full of hope.’ Holmes went on to praise the translations from Villon, Dante, Horace, Rudaki and Chomei, poets who were ‘crushed to a dense mineral glitter in the substrata of his work’. For once there was no use of the words ‘Poundian’ or ‘disciple’. Peter Stansill, who, as we have seen, replaced Bunting at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, celebrated Collected Poems in the International Times with a bewildering mixture of metaphors as ‘a concentrate of bristling, clanking words formed into a sculpture of timeless myth and continuous motion’. At the time most readers would have agreed with Stansill that Bunting’s was ‘English Poetry – the Eng. Lit. that our kids will ponder over in the decades to come in their spacious comprehensive schools’, but that is a prediction that is yet to be fulfilled. Patrick Kavanagh in the Guardian singled out ‘Chomei at Toyama’ for special praise and noted Bunting’s ‘splendid ear, not for tinkles but for strong, rhythmic speech, the words hard, clear-edged’. Cyril Connolly gave Collected Poems an enthusiastic review in the Sunday Times.

  Roy Fuller, the newly appointed Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, praised the ‘fresh energy and simplicity’ of the later poems, their ‘narrative subtlety’ and ‘integrity’, in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, but a by now predictably negative review of Collected Poems appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, though this time sweetened by an acknowledgement that Bunting had talent: ‘Phrase after phrase demonstrates his command of resources that better-known poets have not acquired.’ On the whole though it suggested that Bunting’s entire career had been a waste of energy.

  Alan Brownjohn in the New Statesman praised Bunting’s ‘stark, powerful and chastening poetry … a poetry of barren magnificence and no ease’, while noting that he could be ‘coldly impenetrable’.

  Reviews in America (where Collected Poems was published by Horizon) were positive. Thomas Lask in the New York Times praised the later poems in particular: ‘Now the lines are hard, spare and weighted. The beat is almost reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon verse … His is not the kind of poetry that wears away with a single reading.’ In Library Journal Robert Regan described the collection’s ‘superbly wrought poems’. Atlantic Monthly averred that ‘this remarkable poet has dragged the whole history of English verse into the twentieth century and proved it relevant’.

  Roger Guedalla, who compiled the first Bunting bibliography, accepted Pound’s influence but put it in perspective. His use of ‘alliteration and hard, compressed consonants derives as much from his independent reading of Anglo-Saxon as it does from his reading of Pound … He defies classification, and his contribution to English poetry is unique. But this very independence [from universities and schools of poetry] seems to limit his reputation, much to the frustration of his admirers.’ Queen lamented the public’s neglect of Bunting but decided that ‘time is on his side’.132

  Perhaps the most illuminating review of Collected Poems, however, appeared in the Quaker magazine, The Friend. It illustrates why many Quakers were suspicious about acknowledging Bunting as a Quaker poet, even if non- Quakers were sleepwalking into it: ‘Skimming thr
ough the volume one might at first be inclined to lay it down in disgust,’ wrote Wyatt Rawson, ‘nauseated by the outspoken portrayal of the flesh and its desires. But a second and slower reading could give quite a different impression. For beneath the repellent surface there will begin to glow an ever-present love and compassionate understanding in which men’s scars and failings, pains and tragedies, are seen in a diviner light.’133 This is a more profound insight into Bunting’s poetry than anything to be found in the broadsheets or the Times Literary Supplement.

  Douglas Jones reviewed Collected Poems in Odysseus and added a note from Denis Goacher which claimed that Bunting was the only one of Pound’s close associates to have managed a long poem … which will ‘hold a permanent place in our literature’,134 which might have disappointed Zukofsky and which certainly would have puzzled Eliot had he been alive.

  On 16 August 1968 Jonathan Williams’ Gnomon Press published Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting, which included ‘A Statement’, an uncompromising document which deals with the relationship between poetry and the arts establishment that he soon had even greater reason to condemn: ‘All the arts are plagued by charlatans seeking money, or fame, or just an excuse to idle. The less the public understands the art, the easier it is for the charlatans to flourish. Since poetry reading became popular, they have found a new field, and it is not easy for the outsider to distinguish the fraud from the poet. But it is a little less difficult when poetry is read aloud. Claptrap soon bores. Threadbare work sounds thin and broken backed.’135

  Bunting’s influence was beginning to be acknowledged and for the first time he was able to make such comments from a position of strength. The editor of New Measure, Peter Jay, noted that with the publication of ‘The Spoils’, Loquitur and Briggflatts Bunting now occupied a position similar to that of William Carlos Williams.136 The poet Roy Fisher recalls sitting ‘at a table in Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery’s flat overlooking Southampton Row, correcting the galleys for City for the Fulcrum Press Collected Poems 1968, with Basil sitting quietly in the corner peering at The Times with the pages held close to his face. Every time I looked in his direction I felt for an adjective to cut or a construction to contract. It was the nearest I could get to asking for a blessing on my prose.’137

  Publication had also brought Bunting the recognition in Great Britain that he deserved. The North East Arts Association’s proposal to create a twoyear Poetry Fellowship depended on the financial support of the Universities of Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne and after protracted negotiations that subsidy was secured, although the NEAA still supplied most of the funding. By the time the negotiations had been successfully concluded in 1967 Bunting had accepted an offer from the US and his Fellowship was delayed until 1968.

  Bunting was a controversial choice for academic institutions. When he was awarded the NEAA Fellowship one senior academic at Durham is reported to have asked ‘Who’s Basil Bunting?’138 He had never courted academic favour. He described his experience of proofreading an academic journal to Zukofsky in the 1950s: ‘I am also responsible for one University journal: in two numbers of it I haven’t found one sentence which wasn’t humbug – conscious and deliberate humbug in my opinion – which has enormously increased my regard for soldiers and politicians, not usually thought of as very intelligent or scrupulous classes, but less dishonest and less fatuous than the academics.’139

  He was consistently hostile towards any academic influence on poetry and particularly towards academics’ drive to uncover ‘meaning’. But, according to Peter Lewis, ‘once in post … Bunting made it clear that his quarrel was not with academe as such but with certain prevalent modes of literary study.’140 Indeed Bunting broke with tradition to give a series of lectures, which Fellows were not expected to give, at Newcastle University. Bunting saw his students regularly, and directed them – sometimes forcefully – on their apprentice writing. He printed a postcard for young poets embodying the wisdom of half a century of experience, and advised them on how best to develop their poetic voice:

  I SUGGEST

  1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.

  2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.

  3. Use spoken words and syntax.

  4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.

  5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape

  Put your poem away till you forget it, then:

  6. Cut out every word you dare.

  7. Do it again a week later, and again.

  Never explain – your reader is as smart as you.141

  An interview with the Durham University student newspaper, Palatinate, in October 1968 reveals him in characteristically uncompromising form. He was ‘highly critical of the charlatans who get away with imitation and he thinks that many of the young see the Arts as an excuse for being lazy’.142 That criticism, as we shall see, was to deepen sharply in the coming decade.

  One student from the south of England (Wilko Johnson, later of Doctor Feelgood) asked which ‘southrons’ wrote well. ‘Keats,’ said Bunting after some thought. ‘Keats is for Cockneys.’143 (In fact Bunting thought the only way Keats’ poetry becomes even tolerable is when it is read in the poet’s own ‘old cockney’ accent.) Bunting thought that one half-line from the ode ‘To Autumn’, ‘Hedge-crickets sing’, was the only impressive phrase in the whole of Keats’ work.144 Another of Bunting’s Newcastle students astutely noted that ‘obscurity seems to have given him a freedom that few major poets have had and a means for personal expression without the inhibitions of public taste and morality’.145

  He could be as curmudgeonly with students as he was with bureaucrats. Roy Fisher recalls turning up at a ‘new and fashionable university’ to give a reading:

  My student host was a bright, optimistic young woman, running a wellorganized reading series. I asked who the other poets were and she named the names of the day. Then:

  – We did invite Basil Bunting.

  – And he sent you a dreadful letter that made you cry.

  – Well yes!

  – I hope you sold it for a lot of money?

  – I tore it up and flushed it down the loo!

  … his standard refusal-note, in some such terms as that poets should not have to peddle their wares for mean fees in the public markets … seemed to [be delivered] with renewed vehemence each time. When he chose, he could be generous. At about the same time, Eric Mottram and I tutored a course at Lumb Bank and invited Basil to be guest reader, a two-hour engagement, modestly paid. He arrived early, and left only on the third day, having given two long evening readings … and conversed amiably and usefully with anybody who wanted to talk to him.’146

  Bunting was neither proud nor ashamed of his grumpy approach to readings and their organisers. He was pragmatic, although with an element of barely disguised class contempt. He wrote to Jonathan Williams:

  Your adventures in Cambridge don’t surprise me. Never a year goes by but I am invited to Cambridge in terms which, at their extreme, reached: ‘Of course we cannot afford to pay any fee, but we will make sure you get a good meal.’ I answer roughly. Oxford doesn’t quite treat me as a beggarman, still, it’s much the same. Poorer universities have more sense, but yet one’s usually out of pocket by going to them. London institutions are worse, if you allow for the extra expense. So far as my experience goes only Cardiff and Newcastle try to make a reading worthwhile.147

  Tom Pickard remembered Bunting’s disgust at the expectation that poets would perform without being paid:

  One day I showed Bunting a letter from the Oxford Poetry Society responding to my refusal to read without payment and it outraged him. The society secretary told me that most people consider it an honour to read for them, and money was never mentioned. It was bad form. Basil was getting similar letters, and a few days later someone gave him a John Bull hand printing set with which he produced this:

  ‘Thank you for your invitation;
but I am not keen to read. Reading poetry is much like playing music. I find it hard to understand people who read who are too haphazard, with no matched or contrasted programme and no rehearsal. I think that people who pay to see films or hear concerts should pay no less for poetry, if they want it; but some are willing to sponge on poets who never think of treating a fiddler so. I believe readings will go on being sloppy till poets insist on proper pay and conditions.

  So I have fixed these fees for readings:

  In the North Country (Humber & Ribble to Solway Firth and Tweed) forty guineas

  Elsewhere in Britain eighty guineas

  Overseas 500 US dollars

  ______ all plus fare, bed and board.

  Most school societies have no money. I will oblige them if I can conveniently. Many student societies could squeeze rich colleges but don’t. If you think your case is special by all means state it. (Letters addressed to Shylock may not always reach their destination.)’

  He was always sympathetic and knocked the self pity from my helpless rage at the dole authorities with a “What the hell! You keep at those poems and you’ll have a good book in no time.” Then he might break into a music hall song because we were next to the Empire Theatre, or a bawdy one from the First World War, assuming for the latter frowning eyebrows, a chin firmly set on chest and ponderous bishop-like scowl from which he uttered the brilliant trench profanities that inspired him to a howl of appreciative laughter.148

  Curmudgeonly or not, his readings were attracting audiences that poets today can only dream about. The poet and academic Charles (Mike) Doyle wrote to Sylvia Bowman at Twayne Publishers on 19 January 1971 with a proposal for a book he was proposing to write on Bunting: ‘Some months ago he gave a reading at U.B.C., Vancouver, and the noted American poets Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan flew from San Francisco specifically to attend the reading. An audience of about 500 gave Bunting a standing ovation at the end.’149