A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  One might sympathise with those who were hostile to Osborne. It is difficult not to be, even after an interval of forty years. There’s no doubt, however, that the Poetry Society in the 1970s was unfit for public subsidy. Some cameos from the period paint an unlovely scene. This is the Cardiffbased poet and performer Peter Finch:

  We’re sitting in the White House, the hotel bar next to the Poetry Society in Earls Court Square. Criton Tomazos is standing on the mantle piece ripping bits out of a book and chanting. Bob [Cobbing] has drunk almost half a bottle of whiskey and is still standing, or leaning. Jennifer [Jennifer Pike, Cobbing’s wife] arrives in her small car to take us home. The vehicle is full of boxes, papers and bits of equipment. We push Bob into the front seat but there’s no room for me in the back. I climb onto the roof rack. We drive. Somehow we get back.247

  For ordinary poetry lovers who were not part of what the poet Ira Lightman called the ‘beer-sipping, anarcho-syndicalist tendency with scattered residual Marxist undertones’ an evening at the Poetry Society could be an intimidating experience. One member complained about a reading by David Jaffin that it had been a ‘distressing and disgusting experience’ for all present, ‘13, including the poet’: ‘The smell of beer pervaded everything, the hallway was dirty and the noise from the bar made one think of a back alley public house. After ten minutes of struggling to hear David Jaffin, the door flew open and a long-haired lout screamed “Bomb” – it was dirty paper which fell all over the disillusioned audience. We cleared up the mess, only shortly after to have the same fool plus half a dozen more come shoving into the room shouting “Litter Bomb”.’

  One staff member’s statement to the Witt Panel paints an unforgettable picture: ‘She said she did not know Jeff Nuttall [poet, painter, jazz musician, anarchist] very well, but when he had given a reading at the Society she had found broken eggs on the rostrum next morning, a tin of golden syrup underneath the piano, with a doll stuck in the syrup and there was talcum powder everywhere. Mr Nuttall had also run around in his underwear. There were only twelve people at the reading.’

  Bunting had a view on all this and was always willing to express it. The Guardian reported that he sent ‘a fierce little message to the [Poetry Society’s extraordinary general] meeting: “If the reformers succeed in their ludicrous aims, the society will be cutting its own throat and bankrupt in six months.”’248 His real, and unlikely, role in the Poetry Wars, however, was as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker, a job for which the previous seventy years had hardly prepared him. By the end of 1972 he was already finding the politics of the Poetry Society distinctly tedious, and his attempt to reconcile two friends was conducted with resigned grumpiness. A distance had grown between Mottram and Stuart Montgomery:

  In London I found that Montgomery had tried to phone you several times, but couldn’t get through, no doubt because you were moving house; and you hadn’t phoned him, as I asked you to, perhaps for the same reason – he was moving house simultaneously. Then, so I’m told, you rejected his attempt to get in touch with you at the reading, and that, I’m afraid, has huffed him. So there’s a pair of you.

  It is bloody silly, since I think, so far as I’m kept in touch at all (not very much I’m afraid) that Montgomery has done more than anybody else to keep you editor against the impatience of a lot of old dumbbells. You resent the financial calculations which he made in answer to specific questions by the committee because the committee decided, against his advice, to cut down the size of the paper. Unfortunately he is badly overworked at present, which prevents him doing much beyond his medical stint and isn’t good for his temper either. He thinks mal-distribution is the magazine’s trouble, and since it seems I can’t get it anywhere, I’m inclined to suppose him right.

  You can almost hear Bunting’s energy for this kind of mollifying politics draining away in the course of this letter: ‘You cant suppose it gives me any pleasure to hobnob with the crowd I’ve now met three times. It is very difficult not to show my impatience with them. I do it because I want a platform on which whatever good poets turn up (and I’m not the judge of that) can prove themselves by showing brightly amongst the mass of dullness.’249

  A week later Bunting urged Mottram to recognise that he and Montgomery were essentially on the same side in seeing the main problem of Poetry Review as distribution. He went on to explain that if Mottram was himself ‘busy and harassed’ Montgomery’s day job (‘enduring the conversation of lunatics, largely incurable’) meant that his publishing, literary and family interests needed to be squeezed into the limited time that remained. He clearly sympathised with Montgomery in this disagreement: ‘I have watched Stuart trying to get you on the phone fruitlessly. Now I will send him your address and number, but I think the response you gave him at the reading may have put his back up.’ It is clear, though, that he considered this trivial stand-off between two friends as symptomatic of a much deeper problem within the British arts establishment:

  I am president of the damned outfit (and now of the Northern Arts too) not because I like either the aims or the set-up of either institution, but in the hope that the people who are really concerned will pay a little attention to my advice, and that so I may steer each of the outfits a trifle nearer usefulness. It is not a very hopeful enterprise, but a weary one. And in each case the direction must be inclusiveness – unless both Cobbing and the post- Georgian zombies can be heard, there’d be nothing left shortly but a ring of mutual backscratchers of the usual pattern. [You and Montgomery] both want the Poetry Society to represent Good Poetry. But unless it also represents bad poetry (within very wide limits) its chances of advancing good poetry will diminish.

  As well as distribution and finances there was also a row about the cover price of Poetry Review in which Bunting felt obliged to play the peacemaker. It is uncomfortable to see such an uncompromising character actively seeking compromise in order to make bureaucratic progress. This was a job he was simply unfitted for, and you can feel the strain in this letter: ‘Probably some rise in price is inevitable … But what is all this about ‘elitists’? What a word! The Poetry Society can’t give a free service. Even Adrian Henri charges people to hear him read. The review costs a good deal less than a cinema ticket. There’s a point in between charging yourself out of the market and charging so little that you can’t carry on … An accountant’s opinion is likely to be nearer than the rest of us get, but wont necessarily be right either.’

  In no other aspect of his life would Bunting have countenanced such a compromise or been interested in any point between two extremes if he believed in one of them. As a senior officer of a society he was obliged to do exactly that. Later in this letter he comes close to expressing that explicitly in his denunciation of the Arts Council, particularly with its preoccupation with a plan for a Poetry Centre (‘whatever the meaning of that notion may be. It is the kind of irrelevance they seek by nature. Anything, so long as it can be of no direct use to the chap who actually writes the poetry.’) The Arts Council is managed by ‘zombies’ so: ‘Codding them along towards tolerable decisions must be a ticklish job at best. Nothing to be got by intransigence, beyond a momentary publicity.’250

  It is unimaginable that Basil Bunting could say ‘nothing to be got by intransigence’ in any environment other than one that was grinding him down so relentlessly. Poetry Society politicking would have broken his heart if his heart had ever been in it. He wrote to Mike Doyle as early as July 1973:

  No, the Poetry Society is no pleasure, but another chore I undertook to help other people rescue it from the fools who have run it for so long: but with very limited results so far. The president has no duties and hardly any privileges, nine tenths of the members are dullards; but I’ve tried to prevent some of the more sordid wrangles and, vainly, to persuade them to adjust their subscriptions to inflation before bankruptcy puts an end to their society. I am also president of Northern Arts, with even less influence.251

  Predictably enough, the problem
s at the Poetry Society rumbled on beyond Bunting’s presidency. By the middle of 1974 it had started to act in a way that Mottram approved of. Bunting avoided the AGM on grounds of age and infirmity but the real reason was the issue he thought he had left behind, the society’s continuing financial crisis and its executive’s continuing refusal to face it: ‘Refusing the Arts Council’s dictatorship (as they should) makes it more necessary than ever to multiply the subscription by a pretty large factor. They can’t count on W H Smith every year. And if they don’t pay poets better, they’ll end up with only the duds to read to them.’ He concluded, somewhat against the grain of his letter, with the hope that a ‘more intelligent contingent in council’ would address the issue properly.252

  Bunting continued to support Mottram’s editorial position (though he regarded editing as an ‘insidious vice’) but warned that he shouldn’t carry on for too long even though he predicted that a ‘booby’ would be selected to replace him: ‘No man, said Thomas Eliot, can edit a magazine WELL for more than two years. As he demonstrated later.’253

  THE GREAT EST POET OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  By now though another challenge was appearing, this time on his own doorstep. In December 1972 Columbia Broadcasting made a film about him: ‘I rashly took them to Blanchland for lunch, and they’d never seen anything like that before, so I was kept reading poetry and walking about in icy winds on the fells near the top of Bolt Law for three days … There was some fun. When I was feeling fed up I warned them that the place swarmed with vipers, and enjoyed watching them step delicately around, examining every tuft of heather before gingerly putting their feet down.’254

  The ensuing film, rather bizarrely narrated by the actor Patrick Macnee at his most urbane and Steed-like, has no interview with Bunting. Instead it links readings by the poet mixed with moody footage of a bleak Northumbrian landscape. The winds do indeed look as though they were icy, and Bunting looks stoic rather than enthusiastic. The film’s writer, Stephan Chodorov, wrote in April 2011 that Bunting was ‘affable, cooperative, in no way a primadonna. I was particularly interested in anything he might have to say about Ezra Pound but he didn’t offer much. We had a small BBC crew and shot it in a couple of days. Stayed in a local inn, drank various great whiskeys, walked on the heath.’255 He doesn’t mention the vipers.

  Bunting had a sharp eye for situation comedy. He wrote to Quartermain in September 1972:

  One day I stopped at the Farmer’s Arms in Muker, in Swaledale, for a sandwich. I ordered two, one beef, one cheese. I’d forgotten I was in Yorkshire, where people really eat, and the sandwiches were enormous by English standards (you wouldn’t gasp at them in North America). The girl brought them in and set them down and went off to the kitchen again. Within a minute a man came in, went to the bar and ordered two sandwiches, one beef, one cheese. The barman hollered out to the kitchen: “Another beef and another cheese, quick”, and there came back the most astonished voice I have ever heard saying: “What! Has he eaten them already!”256

  But the mood was soon to become heavier. On 1 November 1972 Bunting’s old friend Ezra Pound died in Italy at the age of eighty-six and the Sunday Times published an obituary by Bunting. As he had in the 1930s he put Pound ahead of every other twentieth-century literary figure: ‘There are not many people left, perhaps, who remember the rice-pudding poetry on sale before Ezra Pound restored crispness and density to English verse … When Mauberley and Homage to Propertius and the earliest cantos were published, before The Waste Land and before Ulysses, Pound had set a standard capable of lasting.’

  He paid tribute to his kindness. Pound had little enough money himself but he was unusually generous with what he did have. He remembered his conversation: ‘Unexpected ideas, surprising phrases, leapt out continually. I have listened to other good talkers, but to none whose wit was so sudden, so unfailing and, when you recalled it, so illuminating. He did not talk to himself aloud in company, he conversed, he kept his mind on what the other man said, answering and inciting.’257

  This doesn’t square with Humphrey Carpenter’s analysis of the older poet’s conversational skills. Carpenter’s judgement is that Pound was a ‘bad conversationalist’:

  ‘If there IZ anything qui ne m’interesse pas,’ he wrote in 1935, ‘c’est de la CONversation. especially yawpin’ ’bout licherchoor.’ He could be a consummate verbal performer if he had the chance to construct his aphorisms in advance, or was allowed to pursue paths he knew well already, but throughout his life he was unable to respond quick-wittedly to unexpected verbal challenges … When in the company of others, he had to have free rein to say everything he wanted, in his own time, or he could contribute next to nothing to the proceedings.258

  I think we have to give this one to Bunting. He had spent a huge amount of time in Pound’s company and was well placed to judge his conversational skills. He didn’t hesitate to criticise Pound when necessary so the fact that he singled out Pound’s conversation skill in his obituary suggests that it was striking. As Bunting said in an interview in 1984, ‘before I got things clear about poetry I was over 30 … it was arguing with Ezra that helped to get it clear in my head. Where I differed from Ezra, the more violently I differed the more likely I was to get things clear. I spent three years arguing with Ezra four or five times a week.’259

  Bunting went on to celebrate Pound’s physicality, his sporting prowess and swaggering walk, and his moral rectitude. (Pound despised drunkenness for instance. Bunting told Zukofsky that Pound ‘stiffens and is unable to disguise his disgust at even mild parlour drunkenness’.)260 Most of all though Bunting celebrated Pound’s elusiveness:

  It took the critics a long time to forgive Ezra for puzzling them with new, misleading, complex, endless poetry. He said in the Thirties that Eliot had got stuck because he could not understand Propertius, and all the rest had got stuck a few books earlier still … If you will read the Cantos aloud and listen without troubling your head about their meaning, you will find, especially in the later Cantos, a surge of music that is its own meaning. Every year more people seem to hear it. By now there must be considerable backing for my opinion that Ezra Pound has been the greatest poet of the twentieth century.261

  In spite of all their differences Bunting bitterly resented anything that he felt trivialised Pound’s memory. The Guardian reported in February 1973 that Bunting:

  upset the Mermaid Theatre by withdrawing yesterday from a poetic tribute to Ezra Pound, planned for tomorrow night. Sir Bernard Miles arranged the evening … and invited Bunting to read: Frank Kermode divised [sic] a programme of readings and recollections, which he describes as a fairly light-hearted portrait of Pound as a person and as a poet. A summary was sent to Bunting in Newcastle a fortnight ago. Bunting arrived in London yesterday, saw the full script for the first time, and pulled out – on the grounds, apparently, that it was not the straightforward poetry reading he expected. What has upset the organisers is that Bunting must have known well enough from the summary two weeks ago that it was planned to include discussion.262

  This prompted an immediate response from Omar Pound: ‘Sir, – For the record: Basil Bunting withdrew from the Programme at the Mermaid Theatre, intended to honour my father, Ezra Pound, because he considered the script denigrated E.P. Had I seen the script beforehand, I, too, would not have attended. Bunting’s integrity is completely vindicated.’263

  Bunting sent his own version of events to Denis Goacher: ‘Maybe you have already seen in the papers that I shall not be reading at the Mermaid on Sunday. Kermode’s “script”, which only reached me this morning, was more than I could stomach, with its constant belittling of Ezra … I don’t want to influence you: but if you too feel like walking out on this ugly minstrel show, I’d surely welcome your company.’264

  Any interference with Pound’s literary legacy angered him. In 1977 Faber’s Editorial Director, R.B. Woodings, asked Bunting for an endorsement for the cover of Pound’s Collected Early Poems, prompting a stingin
g response:

  Dear Mr Wooding – Thank you for sending me the book. It makes me shudder. No doubt it is fitting that maggots consume us in the end, or at least the rubbish we scatter as we go; but I’d rather leave the lid on my dustbin and the earth on my friends’ graves. Piety takes curious forms: the toenail clippings of Saint What’s His Name are revered. I don’t think religion is much advanced by that. It would be more profitable, more to his glory, to throw away some of the poems Pound printed than to print those he threw away himself. I apologise for my lack of sympathy for the industrious compilers.265

  He was pragmatic about Pound’s influence on his own work and generous about his influence on that of everyone else. An interviewer asked him about Pound’s influence, noting that some reviewers regarded Bunting as no more than a follower of Pound:

  I don’t think it’s surprising. They knew of me, in so far as they knew of me at all, only as somebody who was mentioned by Pound from time to time. And it must be obvious to anybody that I, like all the poets worth mentioning, all the poets worth bothering with, have learned a great deal from Pound. Pound tried out very many styles and ways of doing things which it would be folly to ignore. You can save yourself a lot of work by just going over what he did. It is an extraordinary parallel between the career of Ezra Pound and that of Edmund Spenser. In the beginning trying every conceivable form of verse; the amount of concentrated experiment there is in The Shepherd’s Calendar for instance is something very similar to those multitudinous attempts to revive this or alter that of Pound’s youth. And the fact that Spenser undertook an enormously long poem, which he had indeed planned but not in that complete detail with which Dante planned the Divina Commedia, and that this was undertaken in an age when it’s impossible to write an enormously long poem because things were changing too fast. They were changing far too fast in the sixteenth century and they were changing far too fast in the twentieth to allow the long poem to have the kind of coherence that Dante gives to the Divina Commedia or even the kind of coherence, at a much lower level I think, that Virgil gives to the Aeniad. The similarity in the characters of Pound and Spenser is very great and I have the feeling that the influence of Pound is likely to be as lasting as that of Spenser. Which means that three centuries hence, though they may have forgotten to be aware of it by then, anybody who knows the history will still be able to trace it all over the place.266