A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Bunting was fond of teasing Americans. A note in Gael Turnbull’s unpublished journal of a visit to Bunting in Washington New Town recalls:

  laughing at the pub, the Honest Boy, and the mural of the chopped cherry tree. ‘Cashing in on the Americans. When Washington never had any connection with this place. His family went to America from somewhere down south, in Northampton I think. Though they came from here before that. Someone once bought up a field next to the hall and subdivided it into 1 ft. square sections. Went to America and sold them as parts of the Washington Estate. Made a fortune out of it. But the Americans will believe anything.’ He seemed pleased, however. Just the mischief of it.289

  Carroll F. Terrell recalled an eventful drive across northern England in Bunting’s DAF car during his first visit to Britain. On the way he learned that DAF is short for ‘daffodil – a Swedish [?] invention’; and discovered that part of their journey was on the top of Hadrian’s Wall; he was forced to brave a terrifying but in the event inoffensive bull on a detour that Bunting himself avoided; he learned that the entire curriculum of Sedbergh School, one of England’s most celebrated private schools, consisted of rugby and cricket. Eventually he realised that the purpose of the narrowly missed traffic accidents was that Bunting was ‘having tons of fun trying to scare the pants off me and succeeding very well’.290 He told Victoria Forde an implausible story about his dog, Fortnum, having nearly killed the Ambassador’s pet European brown bear in Persia, the bear later recognising Bunting in London Zoo.291

  He arrived with Williams and Meyer at St Andrews College on 15 April. Whitney Jones, who was teaching at the small, liberal arts college in Laurinburg, North Carolina, had invited Bunting to read to what he expected to be a receptive audience and then spend a few days with a chance to rest and catch his breath in the middle of a hectic tour. According to Whitney Jones:

  Spring had hit Laurinburg in full force that week and temperatures were in the high 70s. Basil arrived wearing a heavy, dark wool suit. The features of his face, looking both chiselled and weathered, and the posture of his walk, in which he used a cane, not so much for support as for touching out the pattern of his footprints in advance, both reminded me strangely of the films of Ezra

  Pound I had seen. He seemed at once very frail and yet very resilient, a reed who had survived a lifetime of buffeting about by winds stronger than most of us even dream of.292

  Later that day he found the poet reading an essay on Pound and wondered what he thought of it:

  He seemed to grope for the exact way of replying to my question and for a moment the silence made me feel that I had asked the wrong question. At last he broke the silence by saying that people who wrote about Pound all meant well, and he liked many of them very much, but quite frankly literary criticism was of little interest to him. Poetry, he said, is above all else sound. What a poem says might be interesting, but the way a poem sounds is what gives it true meaning. He then began talking of Spenser’s poetry and the importance of sound to Spenser. He recited several verses out loud as an example and I was struck by the beauty of his voice. I had read Spenser in numerous undergraduate and graduate courses, had written a dissertation on Spenser, and had been teaching Spenser for six years, but I had never heard Spenser before. For the next several days I was to hear Basil read or recite from memory lines from Spenser, and I never failed to be enthralled by the experience.293

  The following day, 16 April, Bunting gave an influential talk to a creative writing class about the poets of the sixteenth century and that evening ‘was in rare form’ for a public interview with Williams, Whitney Jones and Meyer. Meyer asked Bunting if ‘there’s another poem coming’; Bunting’s reply was self-deprecating:

  I have no idea. I wish there were. I would like to write another thing before I get too old to be credible. Old men become silly, so I’ve begun distrusting myself. In another 4 years I shall be 80, and God knows men of 80 are not fit to listen to. I have doubts, but I hope something else may yet be written … I think that all men ought to be put an end to at the age of 70. The humane killer ought to be applied to them. I think a great mistake was made by the British government in the early 1930s when in the Southern Sudan they prevented one of the tribes, I think it was the Dinka, from eating every woman who became a grandmother. Obviously that’s the time to eat her, isn’t it? She’s no more use to anybody after that.294

  He answered questions about his poetry, read ‘Chomei at Toyama’ in its entirety and explained his selections for his anthology of English poetry. According to Whitney Jones: ‘The conversation was frequently punctuated by sounds from a rock band warming up outside for a student beer party, but the audience was with Basil all the way. Knowing that Basil really frowns upon interviews and literary discussions, Jonathan brought along a bottle of Basil’s favorite scotch.’295

  The following morning Williams and Whitney Jones took Bunting and a small group on a tour of the birthplace of the local dialect poet, John Charles McNeill, in Wagram, about nine miles north of Laurinburg. Bunting was delighted to find that a Temperance Hall shared McNeill’s property and that it sported an upside down wine glass on its roof. The following day was Easter Sunday and Bunting joined faculty and students for a picnic by the lake in the middle of the St Andrews campus:

  Basil chatted with a few students and faculty, but he seemed to enjoy being by himself, enjoying the sun of a beautiful Sunday. At one point I noticed him standing in front of a large magnolia by the lake. He told me of a mockingbird in the tree which reminded him of home. In all our later correspondence he referred to that mockingbird. He seemed especially relaxed on Sunday, and my image of his frailty had long since faded. He had abandoned his cane and was in a lively mood.

  That evening we had dinner with a suite of girls who shared an interest in feminism. They served homemade bread and various kinds of health foods, and we sat on the floor in their suite, enjoying the food and the wine. Outside, on the lake, the coots were chattering, and the evening had a kind of homemade exotic feeling about it. Basil suddenly began regaling everyone with a story of dining in the palace of the Shah of Iran. The girls, who really had little interest in poetry, had invited us over because they know that I was desperate for hospitality since none of the faculty had invited Basil to dinner. Nonetheless, they all warmed up to Basil, and by the end of the evening he seemed to feel very much at home with them.296

  The following day Bunting began yet another reading with a lengthy introduction to Briggflatts. He seems to have felt the need to explain the obscurer references in the poem. Whitney Jones noticed at this reading that Bunting’s voice was ‘strong and his energy level was running high’ and concluded that Bunting’s reluctance to talk about specific poets was largely due to the fact that he was pacing himself, saving his strength for the public readings: ‘The reading was indeed a great success, and it was a success on Basil’s own terms. It was an evening of pure sound. Most of the audience left without a single line to quote the next day, without a single image to remember. Instead, they remembered the voice. In fact, the audience responded so well to the voice that Basil read for over two hours, covering all of Briggflatts and much of his other work, and ending with a very recent poem.’297

  Carroll F. Terrell had helped to organise the tour but was unable to be there during Bunting’s visit. His students, however, were extremely positive about the elderly poet:

  …they liked him because for his age he had a remarkable eye for any female who wasn’t too old or too skinny, and he enjoyed the local pub more than other more scenic places and would talk freely about anything anyone brought up while the beer was flowing. They also admired the fine figure he cut with his beard, his loose-flowing garments, his walking stick, his tall and straight posture, and a clear-cut no-nonsense attitude. And they liked his dislikes: his hatred of shame and hypocrisy, of the fake and the meretricious. In a word, for the young ‘a wonderful old coot’ was someone they would like to become at the age of seventy-five, but knew
in their secret hearts they couldn’t or wouldn’t.298

  Bunting, however, was not positive about any part of the tour:

  In North Carolina all went well and as agreeably as my still indignant mind would let it. I liked the campus, though I don’t think I’d like to be a student at St. Andrews – rather like a jail, so far from the things students value. I liked the mocking-birds that are ready to converse, and to learn a tune, and the countryside … Buffalo is still itself, dignified, etc; but I couldn’t escape two hours in the Poetry Room at the library, looking at mss of James Joyce which don’t interest me in the slightest … Alas for Madison! That agreeable-looking city hasn’t changed. It consists of academics and politicians exclusively. The academics are quite indifferent to me, the politicians are all over me. Barbara Lesch is unfortunately one of those New Yorkers who believe that the smallest gap in the chatter is a disaster to be averted at all costs. In her laudable desire to protect me from the other academics she more or less confined me to a narrow circle of exactly similar people. She cannot have any idea how tiring she and they are. They took a lot of trouble and were kind, and that was at least a refuge from the famous Student Union, where I was put up in a pleasant enough room, but where the food is possibly the worst in America, or even in the world … I was taken to a horrible party where six professors and their wives, besides a number of less exalted persons, asked silly questions on the assumption that I must be an admirer of Lowell and Larkin, and pressed whisky on me, without any food (I’d been told it was a dinner party but it wasn’t) till I fell decorously asleep … The reading the next day was a disaster. Few people came, and those few almost unanimously disapproved of me. I didn’t even read really well.299

  His complaint to Williams doesn’t stop in New York – he found little to like in any of the locations he visited.

  A STENCH OF REPRESSION

  In 1966 Jonathan Williams had half jokingly asked if Bunting was ever likely to become head of the Northeastern Council of the Arts, an idea that Bunting met with characteristic scorn: ‘Oh, most improbable. Most improbable. No seat on the Committee should ever go near an artist. They’re unreliable people. They actually like art.’300

  The Arts Council files in the archive of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum reveal the period of Bunting’s presidency of Northern Arts to have been an intensely political one, with Northern Arts actively pursuing a devolution agenda. Bunting’s name appears little in the correspondence but he can’t possibly have been too distant from the high-energy wrangling between 105 Piccadilly in London and New Bridge Street in Newcastle, where Director David Dougan was ‘clearly determined to establish Northern Arts as the Arts Council of the North, and is pushing devolution to the limit in his region’.301 Bunting wanted independence for Northern Arts, not just devolution. His experience with the Poetry Society had shown him that subsidies came with intolerable interference. ‘The men who run the Arts Council,’ he said in his final Presidential Address to Northern Arts in 1977, ‘are quite aware of the power that [money] gives them to impose their own views. They will not, they say, interfere in detail; yet the recent history of the Poetry Society shows them interfering in considerable detail with the society’s internal affairs, exerting their power, as it seems to me, almost always to stifle and to thwart.’302

  Minutes of the Literature panel on 4 November 1974 reported on Bunting’s proposed fellowship that ‘the University has now agred [sic] to continue the visiting Fellowship for Basil Bunting for the next two years when it would terminate finally. The officer was congratulated on achieving this as a result of delicate negotiations.’ I’m sure they were. The minutes of the previous meeting on 9 September record that the English Department of the University of Newcastle had agreed to contribute £300 towards Bunting’s fellowship for the coming academic year, with the hope that the Senate, when the proposal was put to them, would increase it to £400, the amount Bunting had received for the previous two years. The committee recommended that £500 would be contributed by Northern Arts with the hope that the university would match that amount.

  In any event Northern Arts wasn’t much better than the Poetry Society or Arts Council: ‘There’s a Pound Memorial concert here on Sunday Nov. 26 … But I’ve got to cope with idiocy here: one of the readers wants to make a speech denouncing EP’s fascism before he reads! I got the guarantee out of Northern Arts, and now I must find a way round this folly.’303

  His Presidential Address to Northern Arts in 1974 makes a point of celebrating the fragile distinctiveness of northern culture:

  The beautiful work of northern Britain was coarsened and almost disappeared during the years of Roman domination, but it was capable of blazing again with extraordinary splendour as soon as the Romans were gone … The great power of design that produced the Codex Lindisfarnensis, the astonishing originality of the sculpture on the Bewcastle Cross, the two Acca crosses, and the stone at Hexham called the tomb of King Aelfwald, survived war and havoc, conquest by Wessex and by the Danes, for at least four and a half centuries, as you can see by visiting the gravestones of the Bolbec family now built into the church wall at Bywell, still fertile in distinctly Northumbrian designs.304

  All this was to be encouraged and yet the Arts Council continued to fail British artists, in Bunting’s view, by spreading what few subsidies it did grant too thinly. He wanted arts administrators to place their bets on fewer artists and accept that they would back many losers. He developed this theme the following year, urging administrators to take ‘startling chances’ and pointing to the most ‘triumphant patrons’ who ‘never backed anything unless the odds were at least ten-to-one against it’.305 By 1976 he was criticizing Arts bodies for evading responsibility, encouraging censorship and spending too much money on ‘rich men’s recreations’.306 He told Jonathan Williams that he thought this particular speech might have had some effect: ‘I believe I stirred up Northern Arts a bit more deeply than usual this year by opening their annual general meeting with an attack on Lord Redcliffe-Maud’s long dull report on the arts. Some of them looked seriously uneasy, and I hope they may, for once, reflect. Doing such things and still keeping one’s phrases “diplomatic” is at least good exercise.’307 Some members of Bunting’s audience may have been looking ‘seriously uneasy’ because the tone of his address was not in the least diplomatic, and its target was plain for all to see.

  By the time of his resignation speech in 1977 he had run out of hope. If the Northern Arts administrators had been wondering why their own President despised them so much, they were about to be enlightened:

  When you made me your president I still hoped [that Northern Arts would be useful to artists], though I was beginning to feel impatient. I believe now that we are further from what was our aim than we were several years ago. The mistakes have been made and the false steps taken mainly in London, not here; but we have acquiesced. A system that leaves many artists, men of some achievement, as poor as some of them are after a life of putting up with poverty has something seriously wrong with it … I now ask you please to relieve me of the task of being your president.308

  If Bunting was contemptuous of the cultural micro-politics of the Poetry Society and Northern Arts and, at a higher level, the Arts Council, he positively despised the prevailing national political culture. ‘It seems to me that every kind of reactionary is flourishing just now,’ he wrote to MacDiarmid in November 1973. ‘The infection spreads quickly from politics to morals to literature. I’ve been patient all my life, but it’s got progressively harder to resist the conviction that nothing short of the guillotine will ever make this island tolerable.’309 He told Jonathan Williams about a visit to Cardiff:

  a very attractive city, new to me, and looks alive too … But they told me the speculators have persuaded it to get rebuilt in huge flatsided towers of offices. To no useful end whatever, merely to fill the pockets of fools who are too rich already. However the bulldozers haven’t got there yet, and I hope some general bankruptc
y of all the greedy idiots may yet save Cardiff and what’s left of Newcastle. There’s a smell of bankruptcy in the air, something like, say, 1928; and a stench of repression such as I don’t remember even in 1926. It’s hard to compare depths of stupidity and baseness, yet I’ve a suspicion that I’m watching the worst bout of misgovernment there’s been in my lifetime, and not only in England. I’m not usually a revolutionary, too aware of what’s rightly permanent, but I’d welcome a 1789 or a 1917 rather than another decade of this. Also I think that unless financial incompetence destroys the system first, as it almost did in 1930, some revolution, whether from the people or from a lot of would-be Diocletians and Mussolinis, is sure in much less than a generation. I don’t often bother you with politics. Overlook it.310

  We saw how prescient Bunting could be as early as 1928 during his stint at The Outlook and this survey of the gathering political crisis in Britain in the early 1970s is remarkable. Edward Heath’s Conservative administration was an economic and social disaster. In January 1972 the number of unemployed people in the UK rose to one million for the first time since the 1930s, having doubled in the eighteen months of Heath’s government. A miners’ strike had resulted in a national state of emergency being declared in February, followed by a second state of emergency in August after a prolonged strike by dock workers, and what are always euphemistically referred to as ‘the Troubles’ began in Northern Ireland. The day after Bunting wrote this letter to Williams rail workers and civil servants went on strike, and in May 1973 1.6 million workers withdrew their labour to protest at the Heath government’s pay policies, and the Lonrho scandal became the very first ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’. Apart from IRA bombing campaigns in Northern Ireland and on the mainland and the continuing Cod War with Iceland, there were serious disasters at Lofthouse and Markham collieries and troops were drafted in to cover striking firefighters in Glasgow. All this was before the real chaos and misgovernment of 1974 with the three-day week, the oil crisis, the arrival of Harold Wilson’s toothless minority Labour government in March, IRA bombs on the M62 motorway and in London, the Birmingham and Guildford pub bombings, the lethal explosions at the Flixborough chemical plant and Golborne colliery near Wigan, the emergence of the far-right National Front as a politically significant force and the street rioting it caused. And it was well before the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979 under James Callaghan’s government, when lorry drivers went on strike in January causing serious fuel and food shortages, gravediggers went on strike leaving thousands of corpses unburied, tens of thousands of public sector workers went on strike to protest against the pay freeze, refuse collectors went on strike leaving millions of tons of rubbish rotting in Britain’s streets, National Health Service ancillary staff went on strike, blocking access to hospitals to all those who were not emergency cases. And there was yet another explosion at Golborne colliery in March.