A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  You can’t grip years, Postume,

  that ripple away nor hold back

  wrinkles and, soon now, age,

  nor can you tame death

  not if you paid three hundred

  bulls every day that goes by

  to Pluto, who has no tears,

  who has dyked up

  giants where we’ll go aboard,

  we who fed on the soil,

  to cross, kings some, some

  penniless plowmen.

  The following two quatrains explain the consequences of resistance:

  For nothing we keep out of war

  or from screaming spindrift

  or wrap ourselves against autumn,

  for nothing, seeing

  we must stare at that dark, slow

  drift and watch the damned

  toil, while all they build

  tumbles back on them.

  The poem ends with a mature acceptance that the future is for others:

  We must let earth go and home,

  wives too, and your trim trees,

  yours for a moment, save one

  sprig of black cypress.

  Better men will empty

  bottles we locked away,

  wine puddle our table,

  fit wine for a pope.183

  An old, old, probably too old guy from England

  Bunting, said the poet and academic Charles ‘Mike’ Doyle, ‘stirred things up in Victoria over forty years ago’.184 Doyle had been trying to secure a position for Bunting at the University of Victoria for months. At that time the English department was dominated by the flamboyant and charismatic poet Robin Skelton who was pioneering the new field of Creative Writing. Although Skelton had a devoted following he also aroused deep scepticism in the department and in the university as a whole. He cheerfully admitted to having an enormous ego and he enjoyed his considerable influence on the English department. Skelton, while a tactician, was not very tactful and Bunting was a not entirely innocent victim of Skelton’s domineering style.

  Doyle proposed to the head of department that Bunting teach Doyle’s own course on modern American poetry but warned that even if accepted Bunting would be required to teach another course in return for a full professor’s salary. He presented Bunting’s curriculum vitae to the departmental appointments committee in the hope that if it wasn’t going to be possible to offer a position in the visiting poet category, then ‘any appropriate position’ would be better than not having the poet on campus at all.

  An undated (but December 1970) memo from Skelton to the head of department contains in its opening line the seeds of the problem that was about to unfold, although Bunting himself was to play his full part in it: ‘I am a little surprised that Dr. Doyle should profess not to understand why I was not eager to support Bunting as a full-time member of the Creative Writing Division.’ Skelton goes on to cite Bunting’s lack of experience of Creative Writing, which rather points up the difference between Creative Writing and creative writing, a difference that Bunting was cruelly to expose later on. Skelton then makes the point that he wouldn’t support a similar application from his friend, Robert Graves, whom he considered a more significant poet than Bunting.

  On 4 January 1971 Bunting copied to Doyle a letter he had sent to the head of department. It is a quiet model of Bunting’s style, a curious mixture of intense honesty, self-parody, modesty and occasional mocking self-regard:

  A telegram from Mike Doyle which has been relayed to me here [Madison] and reached me yesterday says that there may be a position vacant at Victoria University next year and that I should write to you about it. I need a post.

  I shall be at the above printed address [Binghampton] after about January 20 till the end of May, when I must return to England to undergo an honorary degree from the University of Newcastle. My address there is Shadingfield, Wylam, Northumberland.

  I do not know what I can say about myself. I think my work is now fairly well known: and I have taught at Buffalo, Santa Barbara, Newcastle, Durham, and British Columbia without any manifest disaster, though I daresay my amateur methods are not in accordance with academic precedent …

  … I am fairly honest and often sober, vigorous for my age.

  This application assumes that its recipient has a developed sense of irony. Claiming that he has taught without manifest disaster, is often sober and that he is looking forward to ‘undergoing’ a degree, even an honorary one, as though it were a haemorrhoid operation is a high-wire strategy for securing an academic position that he clearly needed. He finished his letter to Doyle with a personal note that may have had some bearing on events: ‘Thankyou very much for taking so much trouble. Here snow and lumbago limit me, and will, no doubt, at Binghampton too. If I survive such horrors, it seems I may see you again next year. Excellent.’185

  Bunting arrived in Victoria in September 1971 and rented a cottage on the southern shore, with a view of the Olympic Mountains across the US border, getting around in an old car that he bought. It seems as though someone was gunning for him from the outset. Brent Mackay recalls that the ‘academic advisor from the creative writing department informed me that that section of creative writing was Bunting’s, “an old, old, probably too old guy from England”.’186

  On 14 October 1971 he gave a reading at the university. According to Quartermain, ‘Robin Skelton introduced Mike Doyle who introduced BB. The reading was packed (people sitting in the aisles, standing at the back, in a room whose official capacity was about 200). That day, or the one before, BB was interviewed in two local papers.’187 Doyle had set up the interviews with the Victoria Daily Times and Daily Colonist and at some point in the course of each of them Bunting told the reporters that ‘the only thing worse than a creative writing student is a creative writing professor’.188 Perhaps unsurprisingly Skelton accepted this as the personal insult that was probably intended.

  On 16 October 1971 Bunting wrote about the interviews to Quartermain:

  I’m writing because the reading had a curious sequel. After you’d gone I called at the University for mail; and amongst it was a letter from Skelton, the most astonishing I have ever received (not excepting the book-long essays in abuse of Hamilton Finlay). He took exception to things the newspaper reporter said I said: to the effect (near enough, as reporters go) that classes didn’t help to make poets, and that academicism is not being good for north American poetry. He does not understand how I ‘find it possible to accept a salary for teaching students the writing of poetry’ (which, of course, I never pretend to teach). This is ‘the most despicable cynicism’, leads to the ‘demoralization’ of my students, undermines my colleagues authority, prevents students registering for writing classes, and so on. I owe an apology to my colleagues, particularly the ‘poet-professors’. He does not understand how I can face my students, or the faculty, without shame. I ought not to be teaching a subject where honesty is a necessary qualification.

  This bundle of stupid pomposities was addressed, not to me only (when I could have despised it completely) but to five others in the department. It is obviously intended to make my position here impossible. If there were any doubt about that, he demands that I shall write to the newspaper and contradict myself under penalty of some imperfectly expressed threat.

  Two of the other addressees … came round to see me at once: not, however, to disown Skelton but to beg me to forgive him, because, poor fellow, he is under such provocation. (From me? Who have spoken to him perhaps three times in all, to pass the time of day!) I do not think Skelton knew they were coming, and they did not even pretend that he could be brought to apologise.

  Now, of course, it will spread. Five people do not remain discreet. I do not know how far the wording of Skelton’s letter will bear the interpretation of libel, though the intention is obviously libellous. However, I pretended to have no doubts about it and told his pals to tell Skelton that if the letter were not retracted instantly and completely I would take it to a lawy
er, and had no doubt of what the ultimate result would be. I know they were convinced I was determined, and I hope they may affect him.

  If not, I certainly will have to see a lawyer and whether there is a court case, with all that bother, or whether he advises me that it’s too uncertain to go to law on, it is obvious that the peace and quiet I’d expected here, as some mitigation of the exile, is gone, and forever, in Victoria. Somebody or other in England told me that Skelton would try to get me out (can’t abide a better poet), but I never imagined such a gratuitous assault. Russell implied that it is, in some obscure fashion, a part of the war Skelton and Doyle wage endlessly, and even that it was a result of the misunderstanding about who was to introduce me at the reading, which I would have put down to sheer inefficiency, which this place abounds in.

  Anyway, here’s pore ole granpa up to his neck in shit. And even the best in prospect will leave me regarding about half my colleagues with contempt, not a nice feeling.

  I dunno why I bother you with it: but I have no other friend nearer than London. I’d quit here on the spot, but for the money. I need that.

  May no such nastiness engulf you!189

  Two weeks later he started to escalate the circulation of Skelton’s letter: ‘I have stumbled into what must be the most unpleasant society I have ever had to frequent,’ he told Gael Turnbull. ‘Skelton (with whom I have only spoken once, on introduction) saw fit to address a letter to eight or nine people in which he called me a cheat and several other kinds of thief, who ought to be ashamed to meet his classes. The object, I’m told, is to discredit the man who got me invited here.’190

  Bunting refused to teach again until Skelton withdrew what Bunting saw as his libel, proposing a deadline in early December. Skelton offered some form of apology on that very day, which happened to be the last day of term. The apology seems to have broken some kind of departmental dam: ‘Skelton signed a letter of retraction and apology – approximately one hour before the writ was to be issued,’ he told Turnbull. ‘The sequel is almost past my own belief: several people who hadn’t spoken to me for three months rang up and asked me to meals. I had to leave the phone off the hook so as to economise the number of lies I had to tell to avoid their unwelcome attentions. Can you imagine such worms?’191

  He told Jonathan Williams in November 1971 that: ‘this university is full of the most repugnant people you can imagine. Those who are not blackguards are bores … None of them seem to mean any good and my situation is very precarious … I’ve had to bring a libel action against Skelton, an outrageous attack, without provocation, calling me all sorts of cheat … there’s a smell of blackmail pervading the campus like a whole tribe of skunks, and public scandals in every department.’ 192 He summed up his relationship with Victoria in a single sentence in a letter to Dorothy Pound on 1 December 1971: ‘This is a foul place I don’t want to mention.’193

  Bunting taught only two courses in the second term, one of which he took over from Doyle. (One student characterised Bunting’s courses as ‘Pound and Zukofsky’ and ‘Zukofsky and Pound’.194) He might have been unhappy (it seems that he was ostracised by virtually the entire faculty) but he left his mark on at least one young poet. August Kleinzahler was at the University of Victoria in 1971, having just discovered Briggflatts:

  When I got to Victoria, I had one of the real shockers of my life, and I used to not tell people about it because they wouldn’t believe it. It was a startling coincidence. Six months earlier I was living with my brother in Greenwich Village, and I went to the Eighth Street Bookshop where I discovered the Fulcrum edition of Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts. I went hog wild over that. As soon as I got to Victoria, I went to see whether I could get into the contemporary poetry course. I was told that the professor couldn’t see me right away, so I went to the library, where I looked up Loquitur — Bunting’s poems other than Briggflatts — and I sucked it up like a beer on a warm day. After that, I went racing back to register for the course, and the person there said, It’ll be taught by an elderly British poet you won’t have heard of. His name is Basil Bunting. And I said, You’re not going to believe this. Oh, he said, ‘you’ve heard of him?195

  Kleinzahler got into Bunting’s class and recalled him as a controversial teacher:

  I took two classes with him. One was called Problems in Contemporary Poetry, which … well, there weren’t any problems at all. He began with some poems by Hardy and Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland, and went up to Yeats and Pound, then David Jones, Williams, the poets who were important to Bunting, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lorine Niedecker, and H.D. All he did was smoke unfiltered Player’s and read to us – the entirety of the Cantos, Jones’s Anathemata, including the introduction – and when he got tired, or out of breath, he’d say, ‘Do you have anything to say?’ Someone would start talking gibberish, and he’d start reading again. There was a revolt: he’s not interested in what we have to say! I remember telling one of the girls, ‘Why should he be interested in what you have to say? He’s the world’s greatest living poet.’ ‘Well’, she wanted to know, ‘why aren’t we reading E. E. Cummings or Richard Brautigan? Why doesn’t he care what we want?’ You could see the seeds of what poetry in creative writing programs was to become thirty years down the road. A lot of people were very unhappy and the class got rather small, and he just read to us, beautifully. There were only three of us in his creative writing class by the end. Everyone was very upset with him, the department was upset, and we began to meet in his bungalow. There he’d read to us, give us beer – Charrington Toby – and play music. He liked the seventeenth-century English musicians, Dowland and Purcell, and Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He’d tell us stories. He was very much disapproved of.196

  Kleinzahler also enjoyed the mentoring style that Tom Pickard had learned to endure a few years earlier:

  I recall two poems I gave to Mr. Bunting, one close to the beginning of our year together, and one toward the end. The first poem was an ornate jam of tropes and queer rhythms which had taken me weeks to confect. Mr. Bunting looked at it for a long time, then put his face in his hands for a considerable length of time. Perhaps he was dozing. But no; he finally took his hands away from his face, looked again at the poem and then at me.

  ‘Mr. Kleinzahler, I am suddenly very tired and dizzy; I’m not certain if I’ve taken ill or if it’s your poem.’

  The final poem I gave to Mr. Bunting … was much shorter, plainer, had come rather swiftly, and I was concerned that it was too thin. The old man considered the poem for a long time and then looked up.

  ‘Mr. Kleinzahler, the difference is so slight as to be indistinguishable, but there may be some very minor improvements here. Throw it out and try again.’197

  In fact he was mildly impressed. He wrote to Tom Pickard in June 1976 that Kleinzahler seems ‘to have some glimmer of how to set about it … economical and fairly objective’.198

  Brent Mackay, having overcome the ‘dubious bit of p.r.’ that announced Bunting’s arrival, also remembered Bunting’s classes as rigorous and inspiring. Bunting clearly expected a lot from his students, and those who remained loyal to his class seem to have delivered it: ‘The tapestry unfolded firsthand to an eager handful.’199

  It was a lonely time for Bunting. In February 1972 he complained to Mottram that: ‘you must know something about the kind of muck I am compelled to read and comment on, not too harshly, in this job. The staffs of this and other universities are much worse than the students, and their pet outside poets hardly better.’200 He was longing for home and looking forward to spending some time with Mottram in the North East: ‘It’d be fine to run you round the moors and fells, and through the forest to Liddesdale (Hermitage about the grimmest castle in the island) or over the enchanting run to Briggflatts – 100 miles with never a factory or a town above 3000 population in sight, unlike anybody’s idea of England. And if we see any bloody Jutes or Saxons we can chuck dirt at them. Or Bewcastle. Or even just Hexham and Bywell, next door to us, splend
id places.’201

  Doyle remained close to Bunting during his remaining weeks at Victoria: ‘The distance between my house and Bunting’s cottage was about twelve miles, but every now and again I brought him to my house for a Sunday dinner or some such and he formed an attachment to my youngest child, my daughter then a two-year-old … Other than that I would visit him at his cottage and drink Bols gin … with him. There were always just the two of us.’202 Even with Doyle’s occasional visits he was very lonely: ‘I sit here, looking at the sea,’ he wrote to Roudaba,

  and sometimes the mountains across the sea, but I have no visitors. Often the only voices I hear for two or three weeks together are the shopkeepers or students in class. It has been a vile four months … If anything could drive me mad this place would have done it by now. A harmless, quiet old man, knowing not a soul in the place; but libelled and shunned because a sinister sort of fool imagines that by discrediting me he can discredit the rival who got the job for me … They snake around, the whole faculty, looking for chances to bite one another. I haven’t found a trace of learning or even of commonsense among the lot of them … One woman came up to me in the faculty club and screamed a lot of abuse about conspiracies at me. I’m not sure whether she thought I was a conspirator or was warning me against others.203

  Mike Doyle’s is not the only surviving account of Bunting’s miserable winter in Victoria. Kleinzahler’s review of Keith Alldritt’s biography of Bunting in 1999 in the London Review of Books sparked a lively correspondence. Another former student, the Canadian writer Marilyn Bowering, claimed that it was Skelton who, knowing that Bunting was short of money, had invited Bunting to apply to Victoria: