A SHREWD AND MISCHIEVOUS KIPLING
By now Bunting was beginning to be anthologised. He had already, as we have seen, been included in anthologies collected by Zukofsky, Hugh Kenner and Pound, but in the early 1970s he attracted the attention of editors with whom he was not closely associated. In 1970 Anthony Howell’s collection of Erotic Lyrics included ‘Yes, it’s slow, docked of amours’, Geoffrey Summerfield included twenty-five lines from Briggflatts in the third volume of his Junior Voices: An anthology of poetry and pictures, a book designed for classroom teaching, and Edward Lucie-Smith included ‘The Spoils’ in Penguin’s prestigious British Poetry since 1945. John Matthias included ‘Vestiges’, ‘What the Chairman told Tom’, ‘Chomei at Toyama’ and parts of Briggflatts (stanzas printed in the wrong order) in his 23 Modern British Poets and ‘A thrush in the syringa sings’ appeared in William Cole’s anthology of ‘short, short poems’, Poetry Brief. In 1973 Jon Stallwothy included Bunting’s translation from Rudaki, ‘Came to me’, in The Penguin Book of Love Poetry.
Anthologies presented a real problem to Bunting. As he explained in an increasingly acrimonious exchange of letters towards the end of 1970 about ‘An Active Anthology’, which the ‘axial’ artist and poet, George Quasha, was preparing: ‘I am not inclined to figure in Mr. Quasha’s anthology, for several reasons. If you have examined ‘Briggflatts’ Part 3 you must have seen that it needs what goes before and what follows. By itself it would have no excuse, either as sense or as music.’
There were other reasons for Bunting to spurn Quasha’s exercise. The financial offer was ‘funny’; he required at least $1,000 for a contribution of the length suggested. In any event, ‘Mr. Quasha must have noticed, and very many people could have told you, that my work is at the furthest possible distance from ‘Found Poetry’, ‘Concrete Poetry’, ‘Mixed Media Poetry’, ‘Protest Poetry’, etc. I prefer to work at the job and make as good a poem as I can without looking for short cuts to notoriety.’150 Quasha’s response to this rejection hasn’t survived but however it was couched it prompted a long Christmas lecture from Bunting: ‘I don’t give a damn whether anybody reads the poems I make or listens to them: never did. I am not on show, and if ever I want to “communicate” anything I’ll do it in prose. I never dreamt of making a living out of poetry. If what I make seems to me well-made, that’s an end of my interest in it; and if it doesn’t, I suppress it so far as I can. If what I write is really good it is likely that people will find it out sooner or later, but that is their affair, not mine.’151
The increased attention should have secured Bunting’s enduring reputation but, if anything, it harmed it. Bunting’s great work is painted on large canvases. It is possible to select parts of the longer poems that seem to stand alone but the effect of those poems is cumulative and gradual, and dismembering them for anthologies diminishes both the whole and the part. Bunting wrote many short poems, of course, but even the best of those considered in isolation give the impression that he was a meticulous and skilled but essentially minor poet. The great poems, ‘Villon’, ‘Chomei at Toyama’, ‘The Spoils’ and Briggflatts are essentially irreducible to the anthology format.
In August 1968 The Times’ Pooter column carried a feature on Pickard and Bunting, ‘looking with his high forehead, minatory eyebrows and total moustache, like a shrewd and mischievous Kipling’,152 and wider public recognition of Bunting’s achievements allowed him to pass the acid test of celebrity; he became the subject of satire. Edward Pygge ribbed Bunting in The Review in June 1970:
After years of cringing and soul-destroying notoriety, Basil (“Crushed Grit”) Bunting has at long last been granted the obscurity he deserves. Born in Hailey, Idaho in 1785, this dour and remorseless skald has of recent years been tempted into a cryptic silence. We visited him in his eleventh century granite nightsoil pit in Newcastle last week. Pulling a plaid scarf round his inert and aristocratic neck, he listened attentively when we asked him to describe how he first met young Tom Pickard. After a moment’s ruminative silence, he began to move his grizzled lips, and spoke: ‘Pickard, ay, the fluffy bum, the shite hawk. Telt meyis name wus Stoppard. On to a gid thing, I telt mesel. Wait till I seeyim. Kick ees pills, ah will, boorim in the nackers, wipe ees face wiya rasa, suck ees plums …’ We could bear it no longer and as he ranted on, we slipped quietly out into the damp Tyneside air, his rich verbs ringing unforgettably in our offended ears.153
Pygge’s satire provoked a rather po-faced response from Jonathan Williams:
Sir, I don’t know who Edward Pygge is (Bill Hook? Or, perhaps, Aeon-Ton- Ill-Ham?), but I don’t think he’s very funny when he subjects Basil Bunting to the sort of undergraduate calumny received in No. 22 of your magazine. Bunting’s major crime has been to devote a life quietly to making decent durable poems and staying out of Soho pubs and editorial offices. His Northumbrian burr, even to my foreign ears, connects him to Morpethshire and the Cheviot hills, not to the Geordie sound of the streets of Tyneside.154
Williams was right with his ‘Aeon-Ton-Ill-Ham’ suggestion. Ian Hamilton, editor of The Review, invented the pseudonym Edward Pygge to write a page at the back of the magazine ‘where somebody would get it in the neck’.155 I think Bunting would have enjoyed the joke. Only a few letters separate Tom Pickard from Tom Stoppard but they constitute an unlikely couple.
Bunting caught the eye of reference book editors as well as that of anthologists, feature writers and satirists. He told Jonathan Williams in 1970 that World Who’s Who was proposing to list him as the author of Briggflatts, Loquitur, ‘The Spoils’ and The Rise of the South African Reich. ‘I am thinking of adding Papist Malignancy in Northern Ireland and A Child’s Guide to the Cello.’156
Bunting hadn’t been entirely happy with his selection for Fulcrum Press’ 1968 Collected Poems and he took the opportunity of a second edition in 1970 to exclude nine previously published poems and introduce a couple of new ones, including the beautiful, reflective ‘Stones trip Coquet burn’:
Stones trip Coquet burn;
grass trails, tickles
till her glass thrills.
The breeze she wears
lifts and falls back.
Where beast cool
in midgy shimmer
she dares me chase
under a bridge,
giggles, ceramic
huddle of notes,
darts from gorse
and I follow, fooled.
She must rest, surely;
some steep pool
to plodge or dip
and silent taste
with all my skin.157
He sent this poem to Jonathan Williams in March 1970 and told him that Mottram thought it ‘sexy’,158 and that was clearly an intentional effect. He told an audience that ‘Coquet is a little river in Northumberland. It struck me a long time ago that the Greeks thought all rivers had nymphs, and so if you go near the fountains of a river, where it is very little, it must have nymphettes, and I decided to write a poem which, without going into great detail, would suggest that.’159
Bunting also read Wordsworth’s ‘The Brothers’ and ‘Michael’ for BBC Radio 3 in October 1970. He told his audience that all he could claim for his reading, ‘is that my vowels are nearer to those Wordsworth uttered than a Londoner’s might be, and my intonation perhaps less foreign to his … His music is lost if his poems are read in Southern English, and no doubt that is why so many of his critics imagine he had none.’160
Kenneth Cox helped Bunting with the Wordsworth recording:
Bunting’s attitude to the job throughout was in the highest degree ‘professional’. At his home I heard him practising passages behind closed doors. When the day came to record he kept silence while we journeyed to the studio. It was as though he were carrying something in his head too precious to be disturbed or distracted from, or something too fragile to be exposed to the air. In studio he referred to me questions about pronunciation of certain words which might, he thought, affec
t comprehensibility in other countries. When something he had recorded seemed to him to fall below the result he had rehearsed, or aside from the one he had intended, he corrected himself on the instant without reference to me. When I returned to London I was told a bill for the bottle of whiskey we had shared had already been received from the regional office.161
According to Hugh Kenner he read ‘Michael’ with the vowels and burr he shared with Wordsworth as well as with Spenser and Swinburne ‘to reclaim the regionality of these poets … from the awful subsuming dominance of London received pronunciation. It was part of his lifelong protest against the BBC.’162
Bunting thought that the broadcasts had been a great success, and a thoughtful review in the Guardian by Keith Dewhurst suggests that he was right to. Dewhurst thought that Bunting had touched on ‘one of the central and most important mysteries of the English literary tradition’.163 In July 1971 he expressed some surprise to Dorothy Pound that ‘how much of what I said about Willy Wordsworth two years ago has been taken up and is now being said by all sorts of people who dont very well understand what they are repeating; and lots of people seem to have found the two broadcasts … quite exciting’.164
Wordsworth came back into Bunting’s life significantly in his later years. He read from ‘The Excursion’ for the BBC in August 1972165 and in February 1978 he told Jonathan Williams that he had been to London to read Wordsworth for the fund to repair the roof of Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s Lakeland home, but that the reading had been poorly attended because it was at 6 o’clock when most people were struggling to get home from work.166 According to Gael Turnbull he was pleased that scholars had begun to notice what he had been saying about Wordsworth, that he didn’t speak ‘Standard’ English but Westmorland and that Wordsworth alone constituted one of the four great pivotal movements in English poetry in English.167
Goacher never understood what he called Bunting’s ‘over-estimation’ of Wordsworth:
I think this, perhaps, indicates the weakness of too strong an identity with one’s roots. He liked to marshal himself up alongside Wordsworth, because Wordsworth was a great North Country poet. This is why he loved Dunbar so much. It’s why he vaunted MacDiarmid so much and why he championed the young Tom Pickard – because he wanted to feel there was a continuity of great Northern poets who were distinct from us softies down South. I’m not exaggerating on this point.168
He wasn’t. You could add Joseph Skipsey and Swinburne to the list of poets Bunting admired because they were northerners not because they were great poets; but it is still a depressing observation. How can you ‘overestimate’ Wordsworth? Wordsworth was what he was to Bunting. The fact that Goacher rated Wordsworth less highly than Bunting did is trivial.
CANADA, 1970–1971
‘No, life is not comfortable often or for long, but fortunately life isn’t long either.’169
Poverty pushed Bunting back to North America. As his Fellowship at Newcastle and Durham Universities was drawing to a close he wrote to dozens of universities in North America to try to secure a position for the following academic year. He told Rodger Kingston in May 1970 that it was possible that he would be in Canada by autumn:
45 Canadian and US universities have no use for me. My appointment here ends in June and when it ends I must endeavour to live on my old age pension – about £6 a week – and a Civil List pension which has just been awarded me of £5 a week less income tax! Not much for a man and wife and two university age children in a country where £25 a week is considered too little for a bricklayer’s hodman … As you’ll gather, I’m depressed. Perhaps it’s only due to the long winter, longest for many years; but I do see a general resurgence of everything unscrupulous, illiberal and brutal in Great Britain. Lord Chief Justice Parker, the worst LC in fifty years, is in favour of abolishing the rules of evidence because they hamper the police. Lesser lights advocate police perjury – the police are so honest they would never perjure themselves except to convict someone whom they know to be guilty. Besides, even when the prisoner isn’t guilty, his conviction is a warning to those who are. We had better send all the Pakistanis in England home for fear the sight of them annoys the South African cricket team.170
He taught briefly at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1970, describing his flight there to Pound with a poet’s eye:
the plane showed me northern Greenland. Like Dante’s worst circle: and the needle sharp rocks and razor ridges sticking out of the ice for Judas’s nose and Satan’s fangs. Near the west coast an ice-fall, perpendicular for maybe 2,000 feet, ending in a huge conical moraine, started in Noah’s time or before. I scarcely believed what I saw. If Harald Fairhair could scare people so badly that they preferred Greenland to Norway I think he must have been an ugly bugger.171
He wrote fairly cheerfully to Tom Pickard at the beginning of term, seemingly comfortable in his ‘little flat, four miles from my work’,172 but within a month had come to dislike Vancouver. ‘The students are like oxen,’ he told Pickard, ‘but they don’t moo.’ And the charms of the city itself were illusory: ‘it’s incredible how a place so beautifully sited can be so damned uninteresting’. To Bunting Vancouver was obsessed by size, nowhere better exemplified than by Simon Fraser University at the other end of the city, which he hated: ‘a monstrous building … stairs and stairs, wider than the M1, and a central room you could drill a couple of regiments in … The very essence of a bully’s architecture.’173 ‘You can’t teach British Columbians,’ he wrote to Ezra Pound. ‘They are made of the timber they trade in. And if there is anything more disheartening than the class it is the faculty.’174 This letter to Pound had been prompted by a welcome, if typically terse, letter from Pound. Peter Quartermain recorded that in October 1970 ‘a depressed Ezra Pound wrote to Bunting in Vancouver: “If I had paid your attention to detail, I might have done something decent.” (Bunting showed me this letter the day he received it, when I immediately copied it from memory in my notebook. So far as I know Bunting destroyed the original.)’175 He did destroy Pound’s letter but not before writing in some excitement to Tom Pickard: ‘a surprise letter from Ezra Pound. First time I’ve seen his fist for years. Concise – he wasted no energy on superfluities. “Dear Basil, Thanks for your note from Vancouver. If I had your eye for detail I might have done something decent. Yours E.P.” What it means I’m not sure. I thought he had demonstrated fairly often that he had at least as good an eye for detail as anyone whatever. However, it’s a fine compliment and I’m not disposed to quarrel with it.’176 He wrote a generous reply to Pound: ‘I don’t know anyone with a keener eye for detail than the chap who wrote the Cantos: not in every line, but whenever he wants it. If you had had my taste for looking at things when I can and books only when I have to, you would have been as ignorant as I am, and there would not have been any Cantos.’177
On 2 November Lorine Niedecker wrote to Cid Corman: ‘Yes, Basil is in Vancouver according to Deirdre Montgomery … at least she said he would be there for one term, however long that is up there.’178 Niedecker had seen Bunting for the last time. She died on 31 December 1970 at the age of sixty-seven. Bunting’s contribution to Jonathan Williams’ Epitaphs for Lorine expresses his sense of loss as it celebrates the precision of her art:
To abate what swells
use ice for scalpel.
It melts in its wound
and no one can tell
what the surgeon used.
Clear lymph, no scar,
no swathe from a cheek’s bloom.179
He spent the second half of the 1970–71 winter at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and didn’t much enjoy it. ‘The snow melted last night,’ he wrote to Jonathan Williams in April 1971, ‘nearly all of it, ending, I hope, a winter which has kept me more or less in solitary confinement since early December … (I’m sick of universities – students and faculty).’180
Once he had escaped he wrote to Eric Mottram from Wylam in June 1971 to complain: ‘Bin
ghamton was a dreadful climate and in every way a most discouraging place. Dull, dull students; boring faculty; continual snow – the last fall about May 9; air line on strike, so that I was a prisoner in my apartment, except for three days in Ottawa to read there. I didn’t love British Columbia … Victoria BC, where I’m due in September, wants to work me far too hard.’181
The following month he wrote to Peter Quartermain about his ordeal:
Can you imagine me teaching poor devils to read Bellow, Styron (who’s he?), Cary, to say nothing of Lawrence, Brecht, Beckett, Fitzgerald; or in another course Stevens, Hart Crane, Berryman, Lowell, somebody called O’Hara, Cummings, Duncan? The prospect appals me. If I hadn’t dependants I’d never pretend to do it. It makes me quite sick to anticipate it, and the only comfort is that … I should save enough to live a year or more without working, if the work doesn’t kill me first. This syllabus will prevent me being the only real use I can be to the university, which would be to let them know of the existence of David Jones, Zukofsky, MacDiarmid and so on. Even by A-level standards their syllabus is fifteen years or more out of date. By what I’d reckon of university standards, thirty years.182
During this bleak and unhappy winter Bunting had been negotiating new contracts for the following academic year with the Universities of Victoria and Glasgow. He could, of course, take only one of them and he made the wrong decision.
The only poem Bunting preserved from 1971, ‘You cant grip years, Postume’, a translation from Horace, is a reflective meditation on death that perhaps draws on his recent experience of life. A single, thoughtful sentence winds through the first three quatrains giving an easy rhythm that suggests that the poet has learned from experience that resistance is useless:
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