A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  The story went that the committee (all non-writers) reviewing applications had turfed out Bunting’s at once on the grounds that they had never heard of him. It may have been Bunting himself who later told the story that he had been turned down, similarly, for a Guggenheim many years before when the committee refused to recognise the validity of references from Yeats, Eliot and Pound. In any case, once that embarrassment was out of the way, Bunting arrived to lead what was by all accounts an inspired class, although he was quoted in the local press, to Robin’s great chagrin, as saying that creative writing could not be taught.

  Bunting was always courteous, if not courtly, and often wore a blue tweed jacket that brought out the blaze of his eyes. I am surprised that Kleinzahler didn’t comment on his eyebrows, unlike any I have seen before or since. It wasn’t just their size – each the wing of a small bird – but that they were groomed and waxed, predatory and, well, sexy. They gave me shivers: odd, I thought then, when he was such an old man, although it doesn’t seem so odd now.204

  While Marilyn Bowering’s recollection of Skelton’s role (and the date of Bunting’s visit) may be faulty her remarks about the poet’s eyebrows rather undermine Denis Goacher’s ‘sexual crisis’ theory. A chivalrous Kleinzahler replied in the issue of 29 April:

  Marilyn Bowering was apparently so smitten by Basil Bunting’s eyebrows that she has forgotten what year he was at the University of Victoria. It was 1971–72. Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’ was on the jukebox and my distinguished fellow alum was, if I recall, in charge of the mimeograph machine at the English Department, which always made visits there worth looking forward to.

  Bunting that year got himself into a nasty scrape with Robin Skelton, one that eventually involved lawyers; but of course you can’t teach someone to write poetry, just as you can’t teach someone to be kind or a wizard with languages. Bunting’s method of teaching was simply to read good poetry aloud and, when possible, to have us listen to music. In this he favoured Dowland, Byrd and Purcell. I remember him playing a recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as well, the first time I’d heard it. I believe he thought we might absorb some of the possibilities for rhythm in poetry by keeping our mouths shut and listening. Can you imagine trying to get away with teaching a writing course in this manner now?205

  The last word was left to the Scottish poet and translator Alexander Hutchinson who had been part of the attempt to mediate between Bunting and Skelton:

  Marilyn Bowering and August Kleinzahler, in conjuring up Basil Bunting’s eyebrows, and memories of a dispute during his visit to Victoria in the early Seventies provide details which could still be improved on. I’m pretty sure wax didn’t come into the picture, for instance – though it could have stiffened Bunting’s beard and moustaches in the very early days. There were at least two factions involved in inviting the poet to the University of Victoria – Robin Skelton being party to one of these – and there were tensions throughout the visit. Once there, Bunting did, as Bowering relates, say to a local paper that poetry couldn’t really be taught – inflaming Skelton, who had fought to get creative writing on the university curriculum. He fired off a reproachful and intemperate letter to Bunting, and made the mistake of putting copies in various faculty pigeon-holes. Bunting, discovering this, threatened suit. When my colleague Lawrence Russell was sent as an intermediary, I went along as someone friendly to both parties. Basil met us at the door of the house provided for him on the Victoria waterfront and said: ‘This is a bad business!’ He then said something along the lines of ‘Skelton retracts, or I blow him out of the water.’ Lawrence and I said nothing to this, though it was clear the message would be relayed. We moved inside to be regaled with drams and stories. Skelton in due course had a change of heart, and any lawyers on the scene would have twitched their tails in disappointment.206

  A few weeks into the winter term of 1972 Bunting succumbed to lumbago. If he hadn’t already referred to it in his letter from Binghampton one might assume that it was psychosomatic. He claimed to be unable to drive and therefore unable to get to the university, which was about six miles away. He stayed at home, Doyle apparently his only regular visitor, until he decided to return prematurely to the UK, on the way pocketing a full year’s professorial salary for about one third of a year’s teaching.207

  A GABERLUNZIE MAN

  Despite increasing celebrity Bunting was beginning to feel under intense financial pressure, real or imagined. He did have assets. As Jonathan Williams said a few years later: ‘There’s still a copy of Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedecker [sic], 1923, on the shelf, which he would never consider selling for the thousand dollars it’s worth in 1983.’208

  By August 1971 he had bought 150 shares in ICI and a few debentures, and was beginning to feel like a man of property for the first time since 1919 when he sold some Armstrong shares to pay his fare to Russia. It added about ten shillings a week to the family’s income.209

  This brief glimpse of prosperity apart, however, his complaints about poverty became relentless. Liquidity was a problem and his supporters and friends rallied to secure him an Arts Council grant. In a superb example of Bunting churlishness he made a lot of trouble for himself and others. He wanted no charity from ‘desk and pen vermin’.210

  Arts Council Confidential Council Paper number 446 reported that:

  At their last meeting on 24th June [1970], the Council discussed the letter from Mr. Basil Bunting, the poet, that The Times had printed the same day and the Secretary-General’s reply which was subsequently published … As a consequence of the Council’s withdrawal of the requirement that Mr. Bunting’s next volume should contain the acknowledgment ‘The author of this book received financial assistance from the Arts Council in 1970–71’, Mr. Bunting then accepted the grant. In the light of this exchange of correspondence, which resulted in considerable publicity for the offer of £750 to Mr. Bunting, the Council will wish to decide upon the type of acknowledgment (if any) to be required of recipients of grants of this nature in the future.211

  The writer of this paper, Mr K. H. Jeffery, goes on to condemn, politely, Bunting’s ingratitude and points out that other recipients of grants had not reacted as Bunting had, drawing particular attention to a letter received by The Times, but not published, by Mr R. Breckman, dated 26 June 1970. Bunting’s letter to The Times appeared on 24 June. It is not exactly a model of fawning gratitude:

  The Arts Council of Great Britain has made me an offer of £750, which I have not solicited, on condition that my next published book should contain the sentence: ‘The author of this book received financial assistance from the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1970–71.’

  I do not know whether the Council requires a similar sentence to be carved on the pedestals of statues, painted on the frames of pictures or sung before the opening bars of symphonies; but I do know that nobody in this generation who is not an artist of some sort is expected to wear the badge of a gaberlunzie man in public. Even those who administer what used to be called the Poor Law are careful not to demand such a humiliation.

  Bunting quickly gets into his stride with a series of accusations that seem designed specifically to get under the skin of London mandarins:

  The condition is arrogant, for I am sure neither Parliament, which votes most of the funds, nor any other subscriber has authorised it. It is impudent, since it claims for a set of clerks and bookkeepers a share of the credit for work made possible only by a life-time of concentrated effort such as they, perhaps, cannot imagine. It is dangerous because men who find they can impose one condition are quick to impose others. If the Arts Council can enforce such a public obeisance I do not think it will be long before it undertakes to censor literature and art.

  It is also needless, since the Arts Council can claim all the credit it is entitled to by publishing and publicizing its accounts; but I do not think it will call any more attention to its accounts than it must, for fear Parliament and the public should notice the disproportion between t
he salaries it pays to administrators with neither artistic competence nor conspicuously good taste and the income it considers appropriate to the men and women who are engaged in making art.

  In sum, it seems to me that to accept the condition attached to this grant would be to betray artists into the hands of their parasites. I prefer anxiety, labour, exile and perhaps, later, starvation to such a slavish means of survival.212

  He was hard to help. In this particular case he clearly used the opportunity to attack the arts establishment, not to justify his own highly principled position. We know this because the Secretary-General of the Arts Council, Hugh Willatt, wrote to The Times to explain that he had telephoned Bunting as soon as he received his letter to tell him precisely that they would not require their usual acknowledgement. He fairly hoped that Bunting ‘will feel that his attribution of motives is unjust, and that he may be now willing to accept a grant for which, as a poet, he was so strongly supported’.213

  Those supporters must have been deeply frustrated by Bunting’s very public intransigence, by his ‘which I have not solicited’ and by his continuous complaints about lack of money. There’s no doubt that the Arts Council won the public relations battle on this occasion although in later confrontations with the Arts Council the establishment lost the PR battle badly. Bunting’s letter drew hostile (and well-reasoned) responses from other beneficiaries of Arts Council largesse, J. C. Hall, Phoebe Hesketh and the unpublished letter from Breckman. Over fifty years later we could be once again back in Charles Evans’ office at Leighton Park School looking at a bewildering series of unfounded attacks presented with barely concealed hysteria and paranoia. He certainly put the Arts Council on the alert as far as the issue of acknowledgement of grants was concerned and the minutes indicate that a lot of hard work went into generating suitable formulae for various forms of artistic output.

  The Arts Council file contains clippings from the Newcastle Evening Chronicle which, predictably enough, supported its own with headlines like ‘Basil Bunting faces the dole’ and ‘Bunting takes on the Arts Council and wins’. Even the Yorkshire Post got in on the act. One of the clippings has a note in the hand of one of the ‘parasites’. ‘I see he doesn’t mention his Arts Council grant!’ In another article in the Evening Chronicle Peter Anthony claimed that Bunting had won a famous David and Goliath victory having ‘emerged with a significant victory for himself and other writers’. Bunting apparently told Anthony that the Council had ‘given in completely. “They have withdrawn this demand both from me and all other artists in the future.”’ In the margin of the copy in the Arts Council archive the parasite muses, ‘Have we indeed?’

  As Roy Fisher observed:

  He had a variable attitude to his paymasters and benefactors, quite often prickly, particularly when the assistance came from official quarters or from those who would sentimentalize him, for he was a very tough man. He kept ready to hand a shifting persona, made up from a cast of archaic roles – the medieval mendicant poet, the cultured Imperial slave, the dispossessed exile – and employed it from time to time in whatever way suited him … Along with the affable, anecdotal man one met there was something that remains to me inscrutable. On the one hand there was the high and genuine sense of artistic standard, respect and ethics. But there was also the inaccessible sense of a demon of delinquency and improvidence – the absences, the goingsto- ground, the impulsive initiatives, the periods of yielding to circumstance in a curiously – I’m tempted to say suspiciously – passive manner. A sort of anti-matter countering the will to achieve good things, and in some way ministering to it.214

  Nevertheless, and perhaps not surprisingly, towards the end of 1971 Bunting’s financial problems were deepening and he complained to Mottram: ‘I have had a lot of troubles … which have kept me away from the typewriter except to deal with tax collectors and equally unwelcome business.’215

  In July 1973 Bunting wrote to Mike Doyle in Victoria: ‘The University of Newcastle takes up very little of my time, but contributes, accordingly, very little to my income, so that I expect to be finally broke, for ever and ever, in about four months. No means of livelihood offers and at my age even American State Universities in their prosperous days (now past) would hesitate to take me on.’216 This could have been lifted verbatim from one of his letters to Margaret de Silver in the 1950s.

  After the predicted four months of financial survival he sounded defeated in a letter to Mottram: ‘By this time you must have forgotten that you ever knew anybody of the above name. However, local irritations, progressive bankruptcy, and chores, chores, chores, haven’t yet completely banished you from my mind … That’s all the news, except the cheerless item that I set out tomorrow to sell my tiny investments, which may just carry us through the winter. If you know any university anxious to pay a good salary to an antediluvian zombie for doing nothing in particular, let me hear of it.’217 It seems that Mottram responded positively as by January 1974 Bunting was rising to the bait: ‘Sure, if you can raise the wind for me in USA, I’m not above earning something. In fact, I’ve just told a correspondent that I can see the workhouse door agape for me, even if they’ve changed the place’s name.’218 He was aware enough of the financial problems of his friends, particularly those of Tom and Connie Pickard,219 but his grumbling about his own plight was relentless. In June 1974 he told Mottram, ‘the last items of my income have ended, except the old age pension and the civil list pension. The Lord Chamberlain has ordered me and Sima to show ourselves (morning dress or lounge suit) at Buckingham Palace for the garden party on July 23, but thinking of the train fare, taxi fare and clothes – I suppose Sima would have to have a new frock – I fancy we’ll find ourselves unfortunately too ill to attend. What a pity if her majesty should miss the chance of gazing on me! In my 1947 suit.’220 As it turned out it seems that Sima was the star of the show. Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams in August that ‘Sima, looking very elegant for the first time in her life, had a conversation with the queen, which made her next neighbour in the crowd faint with envy. She tackled the Chinese embassy contingent too. Enough to exalt her at Wylam Tennis Club for a long time to come.’221

  A DROP OF MOLTEN SILVER

  Little of Bunting’s verse written after 1965 survives although he was busy repaying a fair number of poetic debts. In 1971 Bunting edited the Selected Poems of his second boss, Ford Madox Ford, and in 1976 those of Joseph Skipsey, the miner poet who had held him on his knee (‘one small lifelong commitment discharged at last’ as he told Jonathan Williams).222 He prefaced his edition, unusually, with a brief biography. Needless to say it starts from his familiar anti-biographical position: ‘A man’s circumstances seldom matter to those who enjoy what he makes. We buy our shirts without asking who the seamstress was, and should read our poems without paying too much attention to the names they are printed over. Things once made stand free of their makers, the more anonymous the better. However, there are exceptions.’223

  Bunting made this exception out of a sense of regional solidarity. His interest in Skipsey was two fold: ‘First of all he was a very local man who has been neglected. He was not a great man but he was one who ought not to be completely neglected, and secondly, Skipsey lived just long enough to come as a visitor to my father’s house and hold the baby on his knee, which was me, so I suppose the whole poetic afflatus must have been passed on to me and there’s a pious duty towards Skipsey.’224

  Skipsey really was a local poet, an autodidact who went to the Percy Main pit near North Shields at the age of seven and, apart from a brief and unhappy period when he was, improbably, custodian of Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, barely emerged from coal mines for the rest of his life.

  A report in the Newcastle Journal of 1975 announced a reading of Skipsey’s poems by Bunting, and once again regional pride seems to cast a glow on ‘one of the North East’s remarkable literacy [sic] sons’. The report announces with some justifiable pride that ‘There’s never been a read
ing of Skipsey’s work, but tomorrow, in the Northern Arts Gallery, New Bridge Street, Newcastle, another famous Geordie Bard, Basil Bunting, makes a rare appearance to read Skipsey’s poems. For Basil, there’s more than a literary interest. As a young child Skipsey would visit the Bunting household and bounce the youngster on his knee.’ Bunting wouldn’t have liked the ‘Geordie’ bit. He spoke Northumbrian, the voice of the region before ‘Irish navvy immigrants had made “geordie” of it’.225 ‘Geordie is a bastard language,’ he told Tom Pickard. ‘It’s a mixture mainly of south Northumbrian with the Irish that was brought in by the labourers who came first to dig canals, then to build railways, and finally settled down largely in the coal mines … Where I was born, Scotswood wasn’t Geordie. Geordie stopped at Newcastle, and we were in those days separated from Newcastle by two miles of fields.’226

  Sister Victoria Forde was completing her PhD thesis on Bunting in 1972 and he wrote to her frequently. On his return voyage to the UK from Canada in May he had time to write as the quantity of books he was bringing back with him had forced him to return by boat through the Panama Canal. Back in England Bunting wrote to Forde about an epiphanic moment that had occurred on this voyage:

  I’d had a number of themes in my head for at least three years, some longer, but could do nothing with them because they didn’t seem to join together or oppose each other in any way that suggested their proper shape. Then one night I saw the new moon, the very first new moon, emerging from the old moon as Helen, Selanna, the new moon, must have emerged from Leda’s egg; and the next night I watched Jupiter occulted by the then invisible old moon reappear as a drop of molten silver sliding down the flank of the new moon. And as I turned away from this marvellous sight I caught a glimpse of a very young girl who seemed obviously the new moon in flesh, slim, graceful, blond; and instantly many old themes began to assemble themselves as though this were the keystone enabling them to form an arch, themes of renewal, mainly, closely bound, though I had never perceived it. And this was wonderfully reinforced when I spoke to the girl and found her name was Linnaea and she a descendant of Linnaeus who named all the flowers, as though she were Persephone as well as Selanna. There was even the germ of an antitheme ready to fit in, though that needs more perception before I can use it. I cannot say more yet: but it seems to me that I shall soon be able to begin work on a sonata, or what is more likely to prove a sonata than not, with the transformations of the first theme all worked out though those of the second may delay me.227