While generous in his acknowledgement of Pound’s influence on him Bunting was always firm about the fact that he (and Zukofsky) would have got to where they did get to, or somewhere very close to it, without Pound:
It wasn’t a question of absorbing a man and then reproducing. It was a question of finding a man whose thoughts were working on parallel lines who happened to be senior. But I think both Zukofsky and myself would have got exactly where we are, not exactly but in the main, without Pound and Eliot. So that I reckon we both belong to the rather small group of innovators as Pound does. I should say that the most important is certainly Ezra Pound; Eliot was the one who first and most decisively got to the public; Zukofsky is the one who has taken things furthest.267
Bureaucrats and tinkers
As we have seen, Bunting saw incompetent, overpaid bureaucrats as the cause of much of the woe of contemporary British culture, and he seems to have had a point. On 4 July 1973 Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams to report that a Pound reading had gone well, but that the infrastructure was dreadful:
The stink of condescension and patronage at the ICA and at the Arts Council is overpowering. The other reading was buggered up by [Charles] Osborne, who informed me and MacDiarmid two minutes before it started that we must cut down our prearranged time by about a third to make room for an appalling bore who speechified in a somewhat Will Rogerish way, but much duller, in between our dos (and took a good deal more than HIS allotted time)…They will have to pay a lot to get me back to London.268
Bunting is referring here to the annual Poetry International summer festival of spoken poetry which the Arts Council had been presenting each year in London since 1967. Charles Osborne became the festival’s sole director in 1973, and his own belligerent account of his years at the Arts Council form a large part of his 1986 memoir, Giving it Away: Memoirs of an Uncivil Servant. He takes centre stage in his own first festival and certainly doesn’t stoop to mention Bunting or MacDiarmid:
As usual, Wystan Auden was the star attraction, and at Wystan’s request I also invited his friend Chester Kallman to read. For my sideshows I engaged John Betjeman (who was then the Poet Laureate) and Roy Fuller to present ‘Homage to C. Day Lewis: poetry and prose by the late Poet Laureate’, a programme in which Cecil Day Lewis’s widow, Jill Balcon, also participated. I encouraged Ian Hamilton and Clive James to devise and present ‘The Poetry International Revue’ (out of which grew those long narrative poems of Clive’s).
I also presented a programme, ‘The Poet as Lyricist’, in which the lyrics of Noël Coward, Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ogden Nash and others were introduced by Benny Green and read by Constance Cummings, John Gielgud, Vincent Price and me. I asked Jack Lambert to chair a discussion on ‘The Poet as a Librettist’, but on the night he was indisposed and I had to step in and do it myself. The other participants included Auden, Kallman, Ronald Duncan, Elizabeth Lutyens, Nicholas Maw, Myfanwy Piper and Malcolm Williamson. The most enjoyable of the sideshows, however, so people told me, was ‘An Evening of Innocent Austral Verse’, in which Mrs (as she then was) Edna Everage was assisted by Mr Barry Humphries and myself.
It was a highly successful week. The Times wrote: ‘This has been the most various and ambitious season of Poetry International, which can now be regarded as a miniature poetic equivalent of the Proms. Nursed through infancy by Patrick Garland, helped by Ted Hughes, and now in the capable and imaginative hands of Charles Osborne, it was a triumphant week, Ginsberg or no Ginsberg.269
Even in his own account the 1973 festival was more about Charles Osborne than it was about poetry. Along the way he seems to have turned the entire festival into an antipodean pantomime. I have little doubt that celebrating contemporary poetry with a combination of the saxophonist Benny Green, the horror movie actor Vincent Price and Edna Everage irritated more than just purists.
A few months after the festival MacDiarmid spent a week with the Buntings at Shadingfield: ‘I ferried him from and to Biggar, and drove him a bit about the Northumberland countryside. He is a reformed character. In seven days (apart from what he got in the pubs) he only drank four bottles of Glen Fiddich, and even diluted it with water to a slight extent. Seven or eight years ago he managed three bottles (and at least another in the pubs) in 36 hours. I like talking with him. He is a thoroughly good chap as well as our best island poet.’270
Further confirmation of Bunting’s increased acceptance in the poetry establishment came with Philip Larkin’s The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Verse in 1973, in which Larkin included ‘On the Fly-Leaf of Pound’s Cantos’, ‘Chomei at Toyama’ and ‘What the Chairman Told Tom’. Furthermore an invitation to address the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that year confirmed him as one of the grand old men of modernism. He was there to talk about the Yeats he knew in Rappalo rather than Yeats the poet. He told Peter Quartermain a classic story of Bunting cussedness from that visit:
I had a conversation with three donkeys. They were wandering along a road, where I was taking a morning stroll. I patted the first that reached me, whereupon it instantly laid its head in my bosom, while its mates joined it. One donkey isn’t too hard to manage, but three, all trying to eat your jacket at the same time, are a handful. A tourist car arrived and couldn’t get past. The man honked awhile, then stuck his head out of the window and bawled: “Take your bloody asses out of my way!”; so I let on to be a bit stupider than I am, and held him up quite a while.271
Bunting enjoyed his visit to Ireland. It satisfied his taste for the absurdity of the human condition. He wrote to Jonathan Williams in September 1973:
I worked hard at Sligo amongst dull people – a lecture, two readings, and five seminars (where the students were all university lecturers) in a week – to earn a total of fees and alleged expenses which together came to just a pound or two short of real expenses; but I got a glimpse of preposterous Ulster and two days wandering about Connemara, a place worth seeing. Witnessed a fight of tinkers, thirty of them, men and women, fighting each against all; and saw the same thirty an hour later sitting in a line by the church wall looking crestfallen and silent. I suppose all defeated each, a fairly satisfactory result. As picturesque as Spaniards were 40 years ago. All Irish cars have bent front fenders, and are driven at night without lights on the wrong side of the road. Bulls, rams, donkeys etc obstruct all roads, dead dogs and cats litter them anywhere near a town. Perhaps you know the place.272
The poet Mike Shayer accompanied Bunting in Sligo:.
We had agreed to meet at Cleggan quay, where the boat went to Inishbofin. He had driven down from Northern Ireland. I had some kind of re-meeting with people on the island in mind (where I had written Poems from an Island) … We arranged that I would spend a night on Inishbofin, while he stayed at the bar in Cleggan. It was there that he had his adventure with the donkeys. The next day we set off toward Sligo – where on the way I regret not having followed my own intuition that we explore the local life around Lough Mask. We stayed overnight on the coast somewhere, and the next day on the way in to Sligo we encountered the tinkers well-sloshed and fighting alongside a church. In a pub around lunch we met the red-haired tinker lass and had a little conversation … later, or the next day, in the pub the girl (who I think had met with some hostility from the locals) went straight up to Basil and kissed him on the lips.273
More evidence that Goacher’s ‘sexual crisis’ theory has feet of clay.
DELIGHT IN TRANSIENCE, 1975
‘I did what I could to prevent 75th birthday celebrations,’ he told Victoria Forde after the event, ‘but I couldn’t dodge the Poetry Society of which I am still president for a final year, so I had to turn up in London for two days of what seemed to me suspiciously like a rehearsal for my funeral.’274 In March 1975 the Poetry Society (or, rather, Eric Mottram) organised a two-day event in Bunting’s honour.
A few days before his birthday Bunting contemplated the prospect of the celebrations: ‘I lack experience of being 75 and am not sure what I shou
ld or what I want to say.’ A reading had been planned but Bunting was doubtful that Briggflatts was the right poem on account of its length (it takes an hour to read, and an hour and a quarter if accompanied by the Scarlatti sonatas). He suggested Tom Pickard reading his own Dancing under Fire as an alternative, and Colin Simms or ‘my fellow-struldbrug [sic] Hugh MacDiarmid … always a pleasure, whether he reads his very excellent best or his incomprehensible worst … My close or closish personal friends, Gael Turnbull, Stuart M.[ontgomery], (Gael has a new poem, unfinished, which sounds interesting) – Roy Fisher, Mike Shayer I’d like to see. D.G.Bridson remains an asset to all occasions.’275
In fact Bunting read the beautiful meditation, ‘At Briggflatts Meeting House’, and according to Peter Barry the event was ‘a great success, a defining moment of the radicalised Poetry Society, and by paying homage to Bunting the radicals celebrated their own lineage, linking themselves, through Bunting, to the pioneer modernists like Yeats and Pound’.276 Bunting sent the poem to Mottram on 16 June 1975 with a short note, ‘I sit anxiously, waiting for the editor-regrets note’, but Mottram published it in Poetry Review that year, the only poem by Bunting that Poetry Review did publish.277
Written to mark the tercentenary of Briggflatts Meeting House it is the only poem, he told an audience in 1982, that he was ever able to write for a particular occasion. ‘I can’t do that kind of thing. But, I did it that time – it took me about six months of doing.’278
Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun’s fires sink.
Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saints’ bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter
silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind’s wing, and leaves
delight in transience.279
Peter Barry compares ‘At Briggflatts Meeting House’ with Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, and, rather less plausibly in my view, with Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘The poem is like the last echo of that intensely stark Poundian lyricism which Bunting was heir to, a lyricism which had its roots deep in the nineteenth century. Certainly this is one of the poems which (in Bunting’s own words, though he did not say it of his own work) Poetry Review should be proud to have published.’280 It actually took Bunting four months to write this short lyric. He told Jonathan Williams that ‘The rhymes (as they might call them) dissembled in the Welsh manner hold it up, more or less, I fancy.’281
Bunting’s own account of the Poetry Society celebration was unusually generous. He told Jonathan Williams that ‘the intentions were good. One night they read poems at me, the other they listened to Briggflatts and got very enthusiastic. I got a double sized bottle of very good wine, everybody else had to drink plonk of the plonkiest.’282
Was Peggy at Bunting’s seventy-fifth birthday celebrations? It is difficult to know for certain, but probably not. She has disappeared from the record rather since the end of the 1960s. The person who was closest to the couple, Gael Turnbull, didn’t have the heart to track down the date of the second, final, parting:
How much was it a mutual decision, how much hers, how much Basil’s? I don’t know. [Aldritt quotes from a letter to Denis Goacher, that it was Peggy who insisted on the break.] Certainly, as late as 1974, he was still corresponding with her, but unable to go to visit her. Some of the initial emotional intensity undoubtedly faded. Basil was aware that he had, perhaps once again, upset her life. Peggy was uneasy about it almost from the start. Whatever the details, a decision was made. Certainly, Peggy could not face abandoning Edward, who had been very upset at the possibility, of which he was aware, even if the practicalities of money would have allowed it.283
After Peggy’s husband’s death there was apparently no attempt to reestablish contact. As Turnbull says, Bunting was not someone to compromise a decision he had already made, and Turnbull himself lost contact with Peggy towards the end of 1974.
JUST THE MISCHIEF OF IT
In October 1975 Jonathan Williams and Larry Fagin, Director of the Poetry Project in St Marks Church in the Bowery in New York City’s East Village, cooked up the idea of a US reading tour for Bunting. They told him that if he had the strength and time at seventy-six to visit in April they would be sure to get him $5,000 net from ten readings.284 The idea of the tour was that Bunting would read in America’s major poetry centres and universities where there was established interest in Pound and his circle. Each of the readings would net Bunting $500 plus travel expenses. Bunting arrived in Boston from the UK on 2 April 1976. Over the next ten days he gave readings at Harvard, the University of Maine at Orono, Yale and the Poetry Center, New York, before flying to Charlotte, North Carolina, on 13 April, where Jonathan Williams and Tom Meyer met him and drove him to Davidson College.
As far as Bunting was concerned the entire tour was a disaster. He wrote to Jonathan Williams on 4 May 1976:
I think I’d better rehearse the tour now, to avoid errors. Corbett and wife were kind and their children dears, but Harvard paid only 200 dollars for what I think was a reading much more valuable than that … But Yale’s cheque for 150 dollars seemed to me a deliberate insult. Even English provincial universities pay as much or more, sometimes twice as much. This angered me … For some reason, maybe only forgetfulness, I was left to pay my own trainfare to New York – no great sum.
In New York Monahan had appointed himself my mentor. I don’t know what to make of him. He talks too much, flatters too blatantly, and I suspect him over overreaching me, or trying to, in his bargain for a copy of ‘Redimiculum Matellarum’; but he took a lot of trouble and seems as angry as I was with the doings of Fagin. But the hotel, Pickwick Arms, is a dirty place, unswept, undusted, and with linen that may have been washed or not. The photographic lady bored me extremely, but was better than the hotel room or than Monahan’s incessant chatter … The reading was possibly the best I ever gave, judging as well as I can, and the audience enthusiastic, with a crammed hall, people standing wherever there was space to stand on. It was also exhausting, so that though I was glad to see Ginsberg, I had no spirit left to talk with him. Naturally, when I found they had given me a cheque for 300 dollars, in spite of having insisted I cable an acceptance of an offer of 900 plus all expenses; and in spite of the fact that the full hall and the sale of some sort of program which I never saw must have brought them in well over 4000 dollars, I was exceedingly angry.285
David Gordon recalled collecting Bunting from a motel in Orono during the tour to return him to the English department. He was ‘genially nonchalant in manner and gesture … He was wearing brown tweed jacket and pants, and carrying a walking stick in his right hand, and in his left, a satchel of dark, tooled leather with a rain-proof slung over it. His patent leather shoes fastened with black buckles. His bearing, his being at ease, selfconfident and compact, the natural-born traveller.’286 At their conversation over a lobster lunch Bunting seems to have led Gordon a bit of a dance, with stories that become more improbable (to me at least) with each arriving Manhattan:
He described his Northumbria as very hilly and filled with bracken (a kind of fern). It was being reforested and a lot of new wildcats and ptarmigans were re-appearing; many of the new species that were showing up were those that had been thought extinct …
Bunting said that he would drive the 25 miles over to the coast of Northumbria (cruising at 80 mph) and catch lobsters. One day his child, knowing that he liked them, caught a bucket of them, carried them in a sack to his room, and emptied the sack on the floor … he liked horses; had raised Clydesdales …
… once in Provence he has asked a waitress which was the best wine and the young girl had blushed to the roots of her hair as she moved her thumb down the menu, ‘La pisse de vieille’ [The old woman’s piss] …287
I’m sure Bunting expected these in
nocent tall tales to appear in a biography some time in the future, and now they have. But there haven’t been ptarmigans in Northumbria for a very long time, if ever, certainly not in the twentieth century. The wine exists though, and Bunting was careful to mix his stories, so who is to say that the family home in Wylam wasn’t occasionally awash with disoriented lobsters? It doesn’t solve the mystery of where the poet kept his Clydesdales. His own version of the lunch was recorded in a letter to Jonathan Williams: ‘At Orono the man in charge had vanished. His substitute did all he could; nevertheless the time was harassing and money only turned up two minutes after the bank closed and four minutes before I had to leave for the plane. The hotel was comfortable, and a man, name forgotten, who took me to lunch, though unpunctual even beyond American wont, was agreeable and fed me an admirable lobster.’288
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