A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Terrell described his first impressions of Bunting’s home in Washington New Town and doesn’t seem to have been shocked by the deprivation:

  The hall was about eight feet long with a small but complete kitchen to the left. It opened onto a large L-shaped room with an alcove under a staircase to the right, which had a telephone stand and chair and bookcases against the wall. To the left was a large oblong dining table of old gleaming wood, which could seat ten people with no trouble. A bookcase against the wall held a small radio. The dining area opened without walls to a long rectangular room about ten by twenty feet, which formed the base of the L. On the left, some wide windows and a glass door opened onto a garden area outside. To the right another large glassed-in bookcase was against the wall. In the center of the back wall was a working desk jutting at right angles into the room. One sitting at the desk and typewriter would look down the base of the L. The desk was covered with papers and correspondence. In the area before the windows, which reached from ceiling to floor, there were three overstuffed easy chairs, where one could sit and talk. Altogether the setting seemed bright and cheerful.13

  To Quartermain, however, the environment was bleak: ‘he lived in a bare and ugly row house in a cramped jungle of concrete-block and brick houses in dead-end curving streets where by car it is a mile or even two to a neighbour’s house less than fifty yards along the footpath; impossible to police; crammed with unemployed (like many another ‘new town’); hundreds of snotty-nosed kids running round with nothing to do and nowhere to play except scruffy minute patches of grass, or the dead-end street.’14

  Apart from the children the only other compensation in Washington New Town was the supermarket which, perhaps surprisingly, had a ‘truly excellent range of cheeses. Their wine too is not bad. And the fish. Not up to Lisbon, of course, but quite impressive. Not that I buy any. It stinks up the house. I prefer my fish from the fish and chip shop.’15 Turnbull painted a deft portrait of the ageing poet in Washington New Town:

  Coming away, up the path, past the roses gone wild and all to hips, reminding [me] of MacDiarmid ‘umber burnt madder and straw’, and the fire-weed, and two white butterflies on the thistles, very attentive to the purple heads, and to each other. ‘They’ll be off to lay their eggs on Mr. Rutherford’s cabbages.’ Having showed me a typescript of his introduction to his last reading in London. ‘It was my last. I’ll never go there again. It’s a dreadful place.’ Very much the ‘poor old man’. After ‘sixty years of work without pay.’ While the children shouted at him ‘Hello, Mr. Bunting!’ and he’d reply ‘Hello, hinny.’ Muttering ‘On two tiny pensions, together not as much as the standard Old Age Pension.’16

  Another visitor to Washington New Town was the poet August Kleinzahler who has left a touching anecdote about Bunting and Sima, now semi-reconciled. Even after their divorce, Kleinzahler noticed that

  there remained great affection between them and Sima liked nothing better than taking the piss out of him, especially in front of an adoring, young American admirer. She made us a beautiful Persian dinner of lamb in pomegranate sauce and said: ‘Do you know why I divorced him? Because he promised me he would die twenty years ago and he never did. The old bastard will never die. He’s preserved in whisky and cigarette smoke!’ Basil laughed his always alarmingly violent, sixty years of unfiltered Players, chainsmoker’s laugh. Sima was very much a Near Eastern woman: warm, voluble, emotionally intense, sharp as a tack. And at 44, still extremely handsome and a strong sexual presence. Basil was very proud of her.17

  During this visit, in spring 1978, Bunting told Kleinzahler how Robert Lowell had written to him to tell him how much he admired Bunting’s work and that he wished to pay Basil a visit. As Bunting put it to Kleinzahler, ‘as is my custom with visiting writers I went to the library to find a book of his so I could quote to him a poem, or passage from a poem, that I especially admired. I wound up wasting an entire fooking afternoon going through his entire output and not finding a single poem worth a damn. Fortunately, he changed his mind at the last minute about coming up for a visit.’18

  Bunting was convinced that his health suffered as a consequence of his accommodation. In the summer of 1977 he had what his doctor described as: ‘the ghost of a stroke. It hasn’t disabled me, only all my right side is numb. My hand does what it’s told, but it doesn’t feel things – light things not at all – so that I cannot pick up a needle anyhow and my handwriting has become very laborious and more illegible than ever. Also it affects the corner of my mouth so that once in a while a word is slurred, which rather hampers my public reading though I can control it with an effort.’19 He told MacDiarmid he was in ‘the nastiest place I’ve ever had to inhabit … a stroke has made my right side numb – cant hold a needle, cant help dropping my cigarette, which complicates life for an old man all alone’.20 Turnbull noticed that he turned his right hand over on the table and moved his fingers, ‘like a sheep dog, once entirely faithful, now a bit suspect.’21

  He had had in 1970 a ‘rodent ulcer, which they’ve burned, and forbidden me to wash the north-west corner of my face for the next three months’,22 and since then he had undergone an annual check-up on his ‘cancerous tendencies’.23 Constant poverty can’t have helped his health, but his friends continued to be generous. He told Jonathan Williams in May 1978 that:

  Ping Ferry and his wife Carol came and were very pleasant … They left, secretly, an envelope on my desk with a cheque for 500 pounds … And still I’ll be broke. Sima is in great difficulties and though she hasn’t asked me for anything I’ll have to come to her rescue. How she gets into these messes is partly mysterious, but just as I couldn’t leave her with empty cupboards a few months back or with no heating during the cold spell, I can’t leave her to be sold up for rates and taxes. Being divorced is proving almost as expensive as being married, though there’s no alimony.24

  Bunting was generous himself when he could be. He sent Tom Pickard a cheque for £50 in July 1978 to help with the cost of his wedding, but the overall picture is consistently bleak.25

  He delivered an extraordinary peroration the following year at a reading at Keats House in London, during which he told his audience that it was almost certainly the last time he would speak in London given his age (it wasn’t):

  I’ve noticed in the past few years a darker reaction than any I remember except at the beginning of the 1930s, in all things, in politics, in social morals, in literature. To be sure there are always of course wild men to be laughed at – not pelted – by people who refrain from making rash experiments in order to follow recipes that have been tried before and didn’t work … I do find a ridiculous number of young men who are, as Pound said of Dante … ‘ideas of long ago, unburied though rotten’. Of course I’m thinking chiefly of poetic techniques, but there’s also a great rush to throw reason overboard and trust in one magic or another, to achieve wisdom without toil by practising the rights of some church or other, or stilling the argumentative parts of your brain with drugs. Those who have neither gone Buddhist nor psychedelic are apt still to desert God for the church which exists by concealing God, and which is partly responsible for the revival of censorship by irresponsible police or customs men, and for blasphemy prosecutions and laws against undefined obscenity, for all that Mrs Whitehouse symbolises. … If I set aside the handful of people who over-praise my verses and the few who take the trouble to run them down, I think nobody takes any notice of them … I live on two small pensions, which together amount to somewhat less than the usual old age pension, in a house which is not mine, where Northern Arts allows me to stay, in part of a new town, planned for the greatest possible density of population; in short, an intentional slum. I’m not complaining, but describing conditions an honest poet must expect, and they will get worse not better. Yet I think something is wrong where arts administrators draw salaries immeasurably more generous than any income that they find appropriate for an originating artist, though they can be quite generous to performers.
And I think it’s unfortunate for England, as well as for myself, that after 60 years of fairly good work without pay I haven’t even a house of my own to die in.26

  This is classic Bunting rhetoric, rolling up a number of sincerely held criticisms of the modern world – ‘in all things, in politics, in social morals, in literature’ – in an overarching metanarrative of disgust at the way society treats some of its most talented individuals, with himself as the prime example.

  He wasn’t enjoying his old age, he told Denis Goacher: ‘I cannot really blame anybody for even a part of it, since I chose the path I have followed with my eyes open. If I am very poor and very uncomfortable and decidedly lonely, I foresaw it all when I took to poetry. And yet I don’t kick myself. I know I was right to do so.’27

  AC KNOWLEDGEMENT OF HIS GREATNESS

  In 1976 Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery decided to fold Fulcrum Press and so Collected Poems went out of print. Bunting offered a third (revised) edition to Oxford University Press although James Laughlin had been trying to obtain the rights for New Directions in the US.28 He told Jonathan Williams in February 1977 that the syndics had accepted a third edition of his Collected Poems, although he was predictably scathing about the proposed royalty.29

  Oxford’s new edition of Collected Poems was released in 1978. Philip Toynbee reviewed it in the Observer and agreed with Cyril Connolly’s judgement that Briggflatts was ‘the finest long poem to be published in English since “Four Quartets”’. Collected Poems was one of Toynbee’s three books of the year in the Observer. Martin Booth celebrated the poetry’s ‘truth, its integrity and its intense, soft power’ in Tribune. The Guardian described the appearance of First Book of Odes and Loquitur in 1965 as ‘one of the most electrifying literary moments of the sixties resurgence’ and thought that Collected Poems put ‘a major literary collection … back into circulation’. Jeff Nuttall, in the Guardian, dismissed some new collections, despairing of public taste as much as Bunting did: ‘It is obviously not widely understood among both the amateurs and the conservative literati that form and tradition are not the same thing, that there is more painstaking craftsmanship and metrical skill in one line of Basil Bunting than there is in the entire work of John Betjeman.’

  Nigel Wheale gave Collected Poems a baffling review in Poetry Review in which he considered Bunting’s poetry as falling back ‘to Tennysonian orderings of the poetic surface’. It is difficult to understand how anyone might reach this conclusion. In fact Craig Raine, in the New Statesman, had already specifically excluded any ‘Tennysonian’ effect where he hailed Briggflatts as Bunting’s ‘great, tragic masterpiece … the voice is totally achieved, consonantal, shy of Tennysonian bel canto, chary of the definite article, mutedly alliterative. The overdraft is paid off.’

  Donald Hall put Pound’s influence in context in the New York Times Book Review and pointed out that Wordsworth and Browning are just as important. G. S. Fraser noted in the Times Literary Supplement that the publication of a poet’s ‘Collected Poems’ by Oxford University Press was ‘an acknowledgment of his greatness, a recognition that he belongs to the canon’. Roger Guedalla was quick to point out in Time Out that, OUP notwithstanding, there wasn’t much reward in ‘a life devoted to exploring all the possible resources of language. Little fame and no reward to speak of, but the sense of a very difficult job very well done.’30

  In 1978 Bunting was also fretting about publishing The Pious Cat, a loose translation of a fouteenth-century Persian children’s story by Obaid-e Zakani: ‘You must call him “Obeyed”, like the English word “obeyed a command”, “obeyed a zaw-kaw-nee”; and save most of the breath for the “nee”,’ Bunting wrote in a note to the poem. ‘He wrote this story about six hundred years ago, and Persian children still read it at school, or they used to, twenty years since. Any story that lasts as long as that is worth listening to, I think. Perhaps not everything in it is true, but bits of it are very true indeed.’31

  He wrote to Mottram on 7 February 1978 to apologise for the delay in sending the manuscript, ‘Put it down to irresolution’, and the sources of that irresolution were numerous: ‘I doubt whether it is worth preserving, whether the time when it was apposite (1939) will ever have a parallel; and I feel that publishing it might look like a severe criticism of Omar Pound’s version (Gorby and the Rats) which I don’t intend in the least. All the same, having gone so far, read it to an audience, interested Susan Bland, it might be difficult and might look pusillanimous to draw back now.’ As though an unintentional slight of Dorothy Pound’s son Omar were not enough, there were other sensitivities: ‘“Matamora”[sic], Guedalla’s concern, wants to print it, but cant take pictures, or only line drawings, which Mrs Bland hasnt been asked for. I’m in two minds about that too. On the one hand it might increase the chance of snaring a commercial publisher, on the other it might look like an attempt to jettison Mrs Bland.’ Even if this dilemma could be reconciled, ‘in such a high-flown, ambitious publication as Matamora it would look out of place and cause some eyebrow raising, I suppose that might have worried Guedalla.’32 It’s something of a shock to find the resolute Basil Bunting in such a dither. Bunting didn’t admire Omar Pound’s ‘Gorby and the Rats’. It was as though, he told William Cookson, Omar had ‘written in gloves and with an eye on the orientalists. Mine cant be called a translation, beyond a line here or there, but an adaptation, which seems to me funny, and the only audience I’ve read it to laughed a good deal.’33 He was still worrying it to death in March, though with an element of hand-washing: ‘I dunno about the Pious Cat. I’m not so fearfully keen on printing it. I’m chiefly concerned about Mrs Bland and her drawings. Still, if you want it for your new paper I’ll try to square it with her provided you let me know in time to write a little fore-note, bowing to Omar Pound etc etc.’34 I’m sure he wouldn’t have struggled like this when he wrote the poem forty years previously, but forty years previously Omar Pound, Roger Guedalla and Susan Bland weren’t around to be consulted and Bunting wasn’t a lonely old man of seventy-eight living on an unlovely council estate in Washington New Town.

  The reissue of Bunting’s Collected Poems by Oxford University Press in March 1978 should have been cause for celebration but he had little time for OUP. He complained to an audience at a reading at Keats House in London in 1979 that ‘even my publisher hasn’t bothered to let me know for all but a year whether any copies of my Collected Poems have been sold or not; and I’ve never seen the book on sale in a bookshop.’35

  It seems that the contempt was mutual. Even the launch of the OUP edition was a disaster. Eric Mottram recalled it bitterly, although the occasion gave him the opportunity to rehearse his hatred of the Poetry Society:

  Of course when Oxford University Press published Basil Bunting finally, was there any acknowledgement at all, as to who had published Basil over the years, and looked after him? Not in the least. Oxford University Press just crowed. There was no acknowledgement and thanks anywhere to Stuart Montgomery, or Tom Pickard, or Migrant Press, at all. Just to support Basil, I went to the launching of Oxford University Press’s edition of his Collected Poems. When I got there, Basil was seated on his own, in a pretty ragged jersey and jacket and trousers, and nobody was talking to him at all. He didn’t even have a glass in his hand. But the dreaded Abcess was there, yacketing on. A ghastly person called Josephine Fox, who was Charles Osborne’s assistant at the trial that interrogated me [the Witt enquiry], was there. She comes marching across and says: “I wonder if you remember me?”, I said “Yes I do. Fuck off, you bitch!”. “Oh” she says. I said “Yes, oh”. They think it’s all some sort of game. It was dreadful, in fact; humiliating for Basil and everything he stood for.36

  In a review of Collected Poems Peter Mortimer described Bunting’s life and noted that living in Washington New Town ‘must simply seem gruesomely unimaginative to one who has led such a life’.37 Collected Poems was not a major success. In 1984 he complained to Tom Pickard that his publisher had taken ‘no pains t
o sell anything – I had last year’s statement from O.U.P. Royalties £4. Back where E.P. was in 1930, or worse, since £4 then was worth about £100 now.’38

  WE HAVE NO COURSE TO SET

  Grudgingly accepting an invitation from Mottram for an event in August 1977 Bunting complained about the accommodation to be provided (‘huggermugger bunk beds’), the fee (‘nowt’), the young (‘let them find out by failing, as I had to’) and, most of all, the trappings of age: ‘It’s bad enough to be old without advertising one’s disabilities – obscene teeth, fuzzy lenses, worn out clothes and skin. What I didn’t mind when I was vigorous and curious, among soldiers and barbarian huns, has become hard to endure.’39

  Bunting’s health was now starting to fail. He suffered a slight stroke in 1979 and he was deeply lonely. Colin Simms wrote to Victoria Forde on 27 November 1979 that ‘his loneliness, since the departure of most local poets to the South, is more acute. A great tragedy.’40 Old friends were beginning to fade. He visited Hugh MacDiarmid on 25 April 1978:

  … Valda had warned me I might only be allowed to talk to Chris for a few minutes – she would give the signal when he might be getting too tired. But the signal never came, and when I myself insisted on going after four and a half hours they both lamented. Valda said he had been better than she had seen him for a long time, she wished there were other old friends to come and put life into him.