A Strong Song Tows Us
Page 66
There was even a possibility of starting to write again in this isolated spot on the edge of the Kielder Forest: ‘I don’t expect to write any more. What a man of my age writes can seldom be any good. Nevertheless in such a splendid place, if there are no nagging worries, something might happen to get down on paper at last – even perhaps “The New Moon”.’61
His confidence in May 1980 that his reading days were over, except locally, was wide of the mark. In the winter of 1982 he travelled to London for a series of readings, accompanied by Victoria Forde:
people stood outside in the cold evening drizzle, uselessly hoping to squeeze into an already overcrowded room. At Riverside Studios where crowds were able to be accommodated, Bunting’s unassuming son Tom could not get in because he did not have a ticket. When I discovered this and because I knew Tom from his welcome visits to our Notre Dame classes in London, I explained at the door and of course they let him in to hear his father. The Michael Henshaws were his attentive and gracious hosts who had small and large gatherings for him and his friends. Once after a three-hour dinner at a fine French restaurant with two publishers, we walked in and out of bookshops on our way to Foyles. At some places he asked quietly about the sales of his poems. A shop manager who recognised him treated him with deference, getting him a chair so he could browse at a table in a small room. With evident pleasure Bunting looked carefully through books about friends he had known in Paris and Italy and also earlier ones. But the walk to Foyles became too long and taxing, and he had to return to the Henshaws’ home by taxi.62
Back in Greystead he wrote to Forde in February 1982, still enthusing about the local wildlife:
Since two days after I got home we have been having beautiful weather, bright sunshine and warm enough to do without a fire until the evening. There are hundreds and hundreds of snowdrops and crocuses out in the garden besides other flowers …
I was very tired after London. It took almost a week to wear off, but I’m much as usual now. The Henshaws must be tired too. [The Henshaws had taken Bunting back to Greystead from London.] It was very cold the two days they stopped here.
The wild pheasant is back on the garden wall crowing, and the other birds were making quite a noise this morning, though the winter must have killed some of them. I don’t see the finches around. I did see two of the peacocks from the farm, a bit bedraggled, but very selfpossessed strutting down the middle of the road, holding up the traffic.63
Barry Miles described Henshaw in his obituary in the Guardian:
Michael waged a one-man crusade against what he saw as the unfair treatment of artists and writers by tax inspectors. He insisted that the arts made a substantial contribution to the economy and, as far he was concerned, for a poet to go on a walking tour of the Lake District was just as valid a business expense as a visit to a factory by a businessman – a concept the Inland Revenue had trouble understanding. But many artists and writers were delighted to discover someone who appreciated what they were doing and was prepared to take on their financial problems, and his reputation quickly spread … Michael’s other media clients [other than the BBC’s then director-general, John Birt] included television and film producers Ken Loach, Ken Trodd and Tony Garnett, theatre director Michael Bogdanov, broadcaster Humphrey Burton and actor Anthony Hopkins. Among his writers were David Mercer, David Hare, Fay Weldon, Alexander Trocchi, Simon Gray, Monty Python collectively, then Terry Jones and Michael Palin, as well as poets Ted Hughes, Basil Bunting, and even Allen Ginsberg when he was in Britain.64
No wonder Bunting liked him. Henshaw’s creative energy made a real difference to his life. ‘Maria has got a very good grant from the Northumberland County Council for her university,’ he told Roudaba, ‘the result of the rascality of an accountant whom I have employed to deal with my income tax. He’s a nice chap, who does it for next to nothing “for the love of art” and who used to be an income tax collector himself. Somehow he conjures up allowable expenses which eat up almost all the income, thus reducing the tax and making a deplorable show of poverty which the County Council has to count in when it assesses Maria’s grant.’65
Forde visited Bunting in March. Sima had prepared a room for her but, to Forde’s regret, the two didn’t meet: ‘ever since I had read Basil’s letter to Louis Zukofsky about Sima’s surreptitiously putting a piece of the Communion Bread in her husband’s meal so that he made his Easter Communion in Persia, I had wanted to meet her.’66 It isn’t clear whether Sister Victoria Forde, Sister of Charity, admired Sima’s piety or her mischief.
They must have made an odd couple. Bunting, the octogenarian ‘atheist Quaker’ and the young, devout, Catholic, American research student, but he made her welcome, ensuring that the windscreen wipers worked on his car so that he could drive her around the country he loved so much:
Basil drove me all over the countyside proudly pointing out so much that would help me to absorb the atmosphere of Northumberland. Its distant past was like recent history to him, and in the evenings he could enthrall a listener by telling stories of past and present before the fire which warmed his small cottage.
His deep love of the north was evident as he showed me such places as Hadrian’s Wall, nearby Hermitage Castle and Newcastleton, and the little pub in Liddisdale, Scotland. At Hexham Abbey he persuaded someone to open the crypt so we could see the ancient fragments. Each place he knew so well, not only geographically but historically, with all the famous people of each age discussed as if they were intimate friends. He was not strong enough to share everything he spoke of – a walk along the Roman Wall, Lindisfarne when the tide was out, and Briggflatts. But with the help of his daughter Maria when his car broke down, we covered even more of the area around Hexham.67
The fabled anthology
Jonathan Williams described discussions about Bunting’s ‘fabled Anthology’ in 1983:
Along with 1983’s longest day and the mysterious advent of actual sunshine on the center court at Wimbledon, Mr. Bunting has arrived in his venerable, rusty Daf motor car at Corn Close for his annual siesta-cum-fiesta. This features Tom Meyer as chef de cuisine and conversationist, serving up opinion, linguistics, joints of beef, pesto, Blue Wensleydale, curries, apple tarts, etc., for washing down with Theakston’s bitter beer, the Wine Society’s aged Rioja, and Hugel’s Gewürztraminer. Tennis and the deracination of dandelions from the garden occupy my mind this week until evenings. And then it’s time to open the Caledonian fire-water and discuss the vagaries of poetry and the miseries of the times. Last night we did considerable damage to a bottle of Lagavulin malt whiskey from the Island of Islay … Basil got to grumbling about the infirmities of the aged. But, he’s still driving a car at 83 (often at 83 mph); he’s quicker in the head than most men in Northumberland or anywhere else.68
I wish Bunting’s anthology had appeared. It would have been a wonderful book, with few of the obvious candidates and many surprises. Williams tried. While Bunting was asleep he ‘got to thinking that we should devote some time this week to putting down on paper the poems and poets he would put into the fabled Anthology that he has spoken of compiling for many years now. Lest he never get around to the job, the basic information ought to be made available.’69 Bunting had described his proposed anthology to Williams six years previously:
The plan was not to put in the best poets necessarily, or the best poems, but to try and demonstrate, from the English everybody knows – without going to Old English, and even excluding Middle English – to try and show the principles on which poetry works … Right up to 1640 you can say that a poet wasn’t a poet unless he was capable of playing a musical instrument and composing his poems to that … If you will read Wyatt and Sidney and Campion you’ll get a good idea of poetry as song. But Sidney’s slightly older contemporary, Spenser, invented a new thing which has given a complexion to English verse ever since, so one must have Spenser there also. Spenser made the words produce their own music, instead of depending on the musician to do it.70
Dante: ‘The combination of extremely terse and vivid language with a sonority which is always adapted to what is going on makes practically the whole of the Commedia (for people who bother to read it in Italian) absolutely unforgettable. You’ll remember more lines and passages of Dante than any other poet.’
Wyatt: ‘Wyatt learned to write lyric poetry in Italy to his own accompaniment on the lute, which is what the Italian poets were used to doing. Naturally, he made use of the devices of song-writers and composers of his day … All Wyatt’s editors until well into this century thought they could write better poetry than Wyatt and altered him accordingly. Notably, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in the Oxford Book of English Verse. Wyatt’s poetry is practically all for singing.’
Malherbe: ‘still writing to be sung. He complained to his friend Racan that he had been handicapped all his life because he had never been taught to finger the lute. He paid immense attention to the texture of his verse, so that he could make a perfectly smooth stanza out of the ordinary spoken syntax of French.’
Spenser and Sidney: ‘They were particularly interested in the sound of English words. Sidney spent a great deal of time investigating quantity in verse instead of stress. Spenser tried his hand at it, but he was interested in so many aspects of versification that he let it drop. He wrote “The Shepherd’s Calendar” to show the great variety of English versification, so that poets, for several generations after, could dip into Spenser and find what they wanted to imitate.’
Wordsworth: ‘very musical. He wrote in very plain language, usually with very plain syntax, and made it musical and forceful all at once … What’s never mentioned is his extreme narrative skill, greater than any other English poet save Chaucer, perhaps. Secondly, they overlook entirely his humour. Very comic stuff, an early kind of humour that again reminds one of Chaucer.’
And … Darwin: ‘I sometimes recommend a non-poet to aspiring writers as someone who can teach them about putting things together: and that is Charles Darwin … Any competent writer must know the importance of things. The moment you leave off into abstract words you lose touch, with the reader and the music and the world. So stay away from Plato.’
So there was to be no Chaucer, Shakespeare or Keats, but he included two poems by Tom Pickard, rather implausibly, between Zukofsky and Cranmer. Yeats had only three poems included and Eliot just the first part of The Waste Land. The eccentricity of this splendid enterprise is nowhere better celebrated than by the inclusion of ‘John Lennon’s “Yellow Submarine”’ (actually Paul McCartney’s) between Ben Jonson and Edward Lear.
The interview must have got lost in the Lagavulin. We know from an earlier interview that Bunting planned to include Samuel Butler, Lewis Carroll and Swinburne and it’s inconceivable that he would have omitted Pound.71
What innocence!
In March 1983 Bunting celebrated his eighty-third birthday in London with Stuart and Deirdre Montgomery, who ‘had a little party … much wine, much laughter, going home at 2.30 a.m. I stayed at Henshaw’s house by Regent’s Park, but I have aged enough to prevent me going out onto the streets of London even once.’72 But not so much to prevent him from travelling the length of the country to Devon later that month to help judge the Arvon International Poetry Competition. Anyone who submits poems to national competitions will be interested in Bunting’s description of the selection process:
In the South I spent several days with six other poets in Devonshire, as guests of Ted Hughes, finishing the judging of 33,000 poems! Three of them had first of all reduced the number to 1,800 or so by throwing out those they thought the very worst. Adrian Mitchell lightened his share (11,000) by making a private collection of the most preposterous entries. He read us a few of them for fun. A poem about the soldiers who were killed by a bomb while parading through Hyde Park began ‘Klip-klop, klip, klop, kilp-klop, BANG!’ but then, I’m afraid, fell off into maudling. I read all my 1,800 poems without finding a good one, or more than three or four that were excusable. That was exhausting, if you like! One of the judges was a tiresome fool, who spent half a day reading entries aloud in order to tell us why he didn’t recommend that one. That might have gone on for ever, if I hadn’t made an alliance with Stephen Spender to reverse the procedure and get them to exhibit only the poems they did recommend for the main prizes, and in that way we polished the poems off at a good pace and finished with half a day to spare. They were all so bad that I didn’t care what the result was, yet three of the first five prizes were poems I had chosen. After the choice, we were told the names of the authors, and not one of the 35 prizewinners was anybody we had ever heard of. Earlier, I had recognised, from the style, one poetess, but her poem was bad and I chucked it out, and nobody else mentioned it.73
This process was written up by Michael Davie in the Guardian. Bunting
sits attentively, beard jutting forward: a spry presence, not saying a great deal, but when he does speak, being very much to the point, like Attlee in Cabinet … his sharpest expression of disapproval is to say that a poem is ‘an English Department poem’ … Over the pheasant Mr Bunting reminisced. He went to Paris in 1922 with 10s. 6d., and left for Italy a year later with £25. He met everyone. What was Ford Madox Ford like? ‘Fat. Enormously fat.’ Eliot? ‘You could joke with him, and you could laugh at him. You can’t be friends with someone you can’t laugh at.’ George Barker, sitting next to him, whispered to me behind his hand: ‘What a man! What innocence!’ Back in the hotel where the poets were staying, the conviviality continued. Mr Bunting sat beside a huge log fire, upright, hands resting on his stick in front of him. At two o’clock in the morning, glass at his side, aged 83, he seemed immortal. He said he had put Eliot on to Kipling, but didn’t think Eliot had done him justice.74
Bunting made a tremendous impression on Spender, who recorded his memories in the London Review of Books. He recalled that Bunting told the other judges, Gwendoline Brooks, Adrian Mitchell, George Barker and Spender himself, ‘stories that held us spellbound. With his domed head, beard, glittering eyes under Mephistophelean eyebrows, Basil Bunting has the buccaneering look of one who has sailed a bâteau ivre through oceans of poetry and arrived in port. I envy him. Of the 33,000 poems submitted there were only about five lines that Basil Bunting – harking back to the crystalline standards of Pound and Eliot’s generation – approved.’75
Bunting was clearly on form but it was a huge effort. He returned to Tarset exhausted ‘having been nearly three weeks in the South judging that silly poetry competition’.76 One wonders which element of this he found more painful, the competition or the ‘South’.
He may have been tired of London but he loved the environment around Greystead, and there is a poignant identification with the self-possessed dog fox in his description of the local wildlife to Forde in March 1983:
Your flowers are further on than ours. Our daffodils are only promising to blossom, though we have our usual early profusion of snowdrops, thousands of them, amongst the trees and by the path.
We’ve a very fine fox about, astonishingly big and astonishingly bold. He often comes to raid our rubbish bins. Sometimes he brings his lady friend with him, so that we could reconstruct what they were up to from their tracks in the snow while there was snow. The fox goes and peeps through the pub window to see who is there, and the vixen goes every night to a house at the Eals where they put out food for her. She is partial
to bread and marmalade. No one will help the Tynedale hunt to get either of those two. We are really proud of the dog-fox, who walks amongst the flocks of an afternoon, scared of no one and nothing.77
He was thrilled by the visit of a rare goshawk. ‘I’d no idea it was such a lovely bird till it trapped itself in my lobby,’ he told Tom Pickard. ‘In fact I’d been told that it did not live in this island but that seems to have been a mistake. Its red-brown zigzag bars and rounded wings, its tail and its claws were all shown to me in detail before I could manoeuvre it safely out to the air again.’78
Bunting loved the quiet environment of Greystead but he hadn’t forgotten how to enjoy himself in company. Derek Smith remembered the 83-year-old poet after a reading he filmed before Newcastle’s literati:
The magnificent job done, our 83-year-old poet revelled until late, oblivious of the party going on in full swing around him. Basil was busy entertaining two attractive young women, one on his knee, while the other seemed to be enjoying the grip of his right arm and frequent kisses. The last drops of wine and whisky consumed, Basil and Colin Simms staggered to a taxi and headed towards the Keelman’s Hospital on Sandgate for Hexhamshire and home, singing bawdy songs in thick Northumbrian to the tune of ‘Cushy Butterfield.’79
An inoffensive old piece of rubbish
In the autumn of 1983 a film crew led by Richard Else spent a week making a documentary about Bunting at Corn Close. Jonathan Williams facilitated it and, according to Else, Bunting too ‘got fired up – the notion of a plan devised around good beer and food guides; the run of Corn Close and a whole week talking about anything BUT his work was novel.’80 Else brought a case of Glenfiddich to lubricate the process. Bunting talked more freely than usual about his life and told stories about climbing in the Lake District with the Abraham brothers of Keswick, imprisonment as a conscientious objector at the end of the First World War and exotic opium-laced tales from Persia: