A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  So our days continued: B.B. walking amongst the ruins of Pendragon Castle. Sixty-five and more years ago he cycled here as a kid up from Sedbergh and Garsdale … Looking at those images the day after his death it became more clear. Another friend of Basil’s rang and confirmed what I sensed: that in allowing us into the lives, Basil had a clear sense of a few glimpses that would do to remain after he’d gone. “I think I’ll fade away quite soon … probably this winter,” he said on film. J.W., visibly alarmed, reached for the Bells, determined to put it off a little longer. Basil thought our film “wouldn’t do any harm.” Praise indeed.81

  In fact Bunting was impressed by the result. He wrote approvingly to Williams in March 1984: ‘Else’s film proved to be good – I even think, very good. Not that there was any fearfully good photography, but he not only avoided the usual T.V. claptrap and impertinence, he put his bits together without explaining to viewers who need no explanation, just leaving them to add up to their own total, Ezra-fashion. Colin Simms said it was “moving” – not an adjective I would have picked – and at least it seemed to show me as an inoffensive old piece of rubbish, which is reasonable.’82

  Bunting seems to have been plagued by film-makers in his eighties. He told Roudaba in June 1981 that he was ‘worn out by a damned film that is being made of me’.83 Another ‘infernal camera crew are coming here again on the 10th to tire me out,’ he complained to Victoria Forde in March 1982.84 Just a few months later another crew arrived from the US ‘making yet more film, an exhausting business’.85 In December he reported that: ‘Philip Trevelyan has at last finished that film, eighteen months in the making, and I am told that the Arts Council is showing it in London on the fourteenth. Philip suggests showing it here first, in Mrs Grierson’s [Bunting’s landlady] big sitting room, to a very small invited audience.’86

  WHITLEY CHAPEL, 1984–1985

  Later in 1983 Mrs Grierson’s lack of funds forced a move from the home he loved so much. He wrote to Jonathan Williams in April: ‘Mrs Grierson’s debts have multiplied till she feels obliged to sell the house, cottage and all, so I’m under sentence of moving again but at a date yet to be fixed. The best hope is that she will be too greedy to attract any buyer. Otherwise I must look about for a new home, and I’m not likely to find one as good as this – if any at all.’87

  That year was spent in an increasingly dispirited search for suitable new accommodation. By the end of the year he was hoping to secure a National Trust property at Cambo but, as ever, the establishment had parked its tanks between the poet and his goal. He wrote to Williams again on 19 November 1983:

  The prospects of the house at Cambo seem dim, though not quite vanished, chiefly because of the red-tape in the National Trust. God knows how many people have to agree before they can let it to me, and I think a lot of that many must have their own candidates. Officials of the Trust seem to have first call, and then perhaps relatives of the Trustees. Poets come low in the scale, after ruined county gentlemen. They asked me whether I hunt! (I should have responded “Only Tories – out of season.”)’88

  He was in good shape in spite of his accommodation worries. He wrote to Tom Pickard in fine spirits in November 1983: ‘I stay healthy. It is wonderful how my rheumatisms have disappeared since I came to live here, and I am afraid of them coming back when I move away, but though I can’t walk more than ¼ mile or so I am fairly spry, eat fearfully, drink a lot and sleep perfectly. Not bad, for nearly 84.’89

  He stayed with friends and family and then spent the winter in rented accommodation in Bellingham. This wasn’t ideal. He wrote to Williams in March 1984:

  No home has been traced yet, though there is one which will not be finally struck off the list of possibilities till Monday, so I am likely to take advantage of Corn Close in the first week of April, in spite of the extreme unreliability of my car. (I have to be out of here on March 31, but can probably stretch it a few days.) This address will do a bit longer because my landlord here is the postmaster and will take care of forwarding mail – he’s an obliging expoliceman. His is, however, the coldest house I have ever inhabited. The only fire in it has been ingeniously designed to send all the heat up the chimney. You can hang a damp handkerchief on the fireguard and after an hour it will be just as damp as ever. I am only warm in bed, this cold March.90

  He was still at Corn Close on 15 May when he wrote to Williams to give news of the spring – plenty of cuckoos but no ospreys – and appended a limerick:

  An overfat guest at the Ritz

  Tried a diet of casseroled tits.

  But it can’t be denied

  It did no good. He died

  Of a series of fits of the squits.91

  He continued to write in his eighties but circulated little and published nothing. He worked on poems on Linnaeus, the new moon and on his old school friend, Ernest Cooper Apperley Stephenson. Only one complete work, ‘Such syllables flicker out of grass’, was circulated to friends. Jonathan Williams asked him in 1980 how his new long poem was going and received the reply, ‘Stuck. S-T-U-C-K.’92

  But he continued to play a bit part in the war the Arts Council was waging against British literature. The egregious Charles Osborne contributed a typically belligerent ‘Diary’ entry to the London Review of Books in June 1984:

  A few weeks ago, in New York, I accompanied a friend on a shopping expedition. While we were in a novelty gift shop on Columbus Avenue, she bought me a rubber stamp which she said I’d find useful when I got back to my Arts Council office in London. I know what she means, though, in fact, I’ve found myself using it, not on office memos (strong at times though the temptation has been), but on press clippings relating to the Arts Council. The stamp reads ‘BULLSHIT’ and it has recently been slapped on articles in the Sunday Times, Publishing News and the Times Educational Supplement. As the 1940 Deanna Durbin song says, ‘it’s foolish but it’s fun’.93

  This provoked a lengthy, stinging reply from Michael Horowitz, editor of New Departures, part of which put some distance between poets like Bunting and the mediocrity that Osborne promoted:

  It’s typically irrational and prejudiced of Osborne to have stayed away from the Albert Hall reading at Easter, yet smugly to cast his judgment on what was done by whom: ‘Ginsburg, Corso, Ferlinghetti and our own … survivors of the Sixties’ Beat generation, all read … sloppy, mindless ersatz poetry.’ For your readers’ information Ferlinghetti wasn’t there, and none of the British poets who were are definable as survivors of the Beat generation, which was the Fifties. Liz Lochhead, Tom Pickard and the Liverpool poets were going strong in their respective styles and dialects before they’d heard of the Beats, whilst Basil Bunting, Bob Cobbing, Roy Fisher and Adrian Mitchell (though invariably open and internationalist) are unimpeachably their own men as poets.

  It’s hypocritical, self-persuasive and patronising of the Director to boast his abhorrence ‘of deciding which of my fellow poets should be supported’, and then to insult makers of the above-mentioned’s calibre as ‘poets’ in quotemarks only – ‘amiable enough non-talents who have never even understood that poetry is made of words’. Anyone who knows contemporary oral verse in English knows that Bunting, Corso, Fisher, Ginsberg, Patten and Pickard are among the most fastidious word-musicians alive. One deduces from his ‘less-means-better’ touchstone that it’s Osborne’s fearless conviction that he is ‘a real poet’ which has made him publish an output of verse incomparably more banal in quality, as well as laughably more sparse in volume, than any of these.94

  On 13 June Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams. He was looking forward to moving into Fox Cottage in Whitley Chapel:

  I hope to be there by the end of June. If I am not in the workhouse – for the balance sinks fast and steadily. It’s not Greystead and no Corn Close, but a presentable spot for all that, with air I can breathe without disgust and fields not yet strewn with bubblegum wrappers, old condoms and plastic wrappers of all kinds. The move will be vexation and chaos, I’ve no dou
bt, but that done, I can reach my books, my files, my spoons and corkscrews without a week’s work and maddening frustrations. If the car is ready at the same time I can begin to live at something better than half-throttle again (I hope).

  They’ve been putting in a damp-course, or what passes for one and murdering woodworm larvae, and I, with what hands I can press-gang, will have to do some painting, in and out, and twisting screw hooks here and fixing glue hooks there and no doubt fifty jobs I have never dreamt of. You must come, with whisky, to placate the spirits of past owners, as soon as you have been welcomed back to Dentdale. I hope there will be enough money to put in a decent stove for Tom to play with instead of the squalid wreck now in situ. A disagreeable large Alsatian may have been placated by that time (I’m told I’m good with dogs, which perhaps is merely a way of saying I’m not too good with girls), and I ought by then to know what beer is best in the pub next door.95

  On 20 June Bunting wrote to Tanya Cossey to tell her that he had not yet taken possession of his new home but that it was his from that day and that he will visit it every day to air it to dry out the new plaster. Meanwhile he stayed with his daughter in Corbridge.96 Bunting moved into Fox Cottage in July 1984. Whitley Chapel is another remote village, though not as remote as Tarset. At least his new home had a pub next door (sadly no longer), and Fox Cottage enjoys stunning views north over the Tyne valley. Once the move was over he wrote to Forde about his despair during the ordeal: ‘I’ve been so hassled and worried and confused by being turned out of my pretty cottage at Tarset that I’ve not had either a calm mind or a trace of energy … For a very long time we searched for a new home, I, helped by my daughter and son-in-law, my ex-wife and Colin Simms, but there was nothing even tolerable.’97

  His son-in-law, John Halliday, helped him to secure a mortgage on the property in spite of his age, but the repairs necessary to secure it put him in debt that he found stressful. He made the best of it, while acknowledging that it wasn’t ‘a patch on Tarset’:

  The cottage stands next door to a well-kept pleasant old pub. It has no immediate outlook, but as soon as I go out of my door I have pretty wide views, still with forest on the horizon – Slaley forest, oak and other deciduous trees, but open and very windy and comparatively high up. It may be cold in winter. I wish it were on the North Tyne, of course, but these parts (Hexhamshire) are also thought beautiful, and the lanes are narrow and twisting. I shall be a little more cramped than I was, but not badly, and when we can finish furnishing it there will be a bed for visitors. The pub’s drinkers park their cars all around me, which is noisy at night, but I’ll get used to that in the end.98

  It took some time to settle in. On 17 July he invited Jonathan Williams to visit him, complaining that:

  I’m surrounded by grotesque details. At this moment none of the doors in the house will shut, or if they shut, nothing will open them again. That may be only a matter of a few days, but while it lasts the weekend evening crowds leaving the pub are perfectly capable of engendering some surprise. All my tools except a screwdriver and saw have strayed during their migration, having fled with a number of the more valued books, a rolling pin, and other things mysteriously dissatisfied with a career in my society. In spite of these disconcerting, anti-hospitable circumstances, I think a short sojourn here would not cripple you permanently.99

  The Niedecker scholar Jenny Penberthy recalls meeting Bunting in his new home:

  We arrived, Peter and Meredith Quartermain and I, at his bare home in Whitley Chapel, Tyne Valley, Northumbria, to be met at the door by a delighted, even festive host. Companionship came too seldom, it seemed. Over strong tea and Bellingham bramble tart he told stories that would, I feel sure, have enchanted Lorine – the small creatures and birds that entered through the never-closed doors of his succession of Northumbrian homes; the fox that tapped for its evening meal at a local pub window. When I ventured to say that I was writing about Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky he was, for a while, no longer the indulgent raconteur. He fixed on me a sad, heavy stare and after many seconds, he growled: “Be sure to do her justice.”100

  As well as a new home he acquired a new car in July. ‘It is very little, and has a very little engine,’ he wrote to Tanya Cossey.101 He remained physically strong, enjoying walks and whisky right up to his death, although in 1984 he complained to Victoria Forde that his latest visit to London had tired him ‘beyond reason … I keep well, free of rheumatism, but in some ways feeble. My utmost walk must be about a mile, and I wont willingly venture on foot more than half a mile.’102

  His eye for the written word was as sharp as ever. In Hexham with Peter Quartermain and others in November 1984 he waited in a shop while his watch was being mended: ‘“There’s a watch that has an eye in it where it shouldn’t have.” Facing us, a placard promoting ACCURIST. Our slow wits took some time to read “accurst.”’103 He had an eye for ambiguous signs. He saw one in Prescott, Ontario: ‘“ST PAUL ST BILLIARDS. Popular saint, that last.”’104

  He never lost his strange blend of political radicalism and cultural conservatism. In November 1984 he wrote to Jonathan Williams: ‘I hate our bosses. Only old age, and the uselessness of resisting them keeps me quiet. If England goes to hell via Thatcherian economics, as it may, we might eventually escape, and Hugh MacDiarmid and I will share a bottle of celestial malt to celebrate the break-up of Great Britain into a new heptarchy.’105 Earlier in the year he had written ‘in jest’ to Victoria Forde: ‘And let us have a new Pope please, this one is too conservative.’ I doubt he was jesting.106

  Bunting began to weaken physically early in 1985. He wrote to his young friend, Tanya Cossey, in January to complain that he had been ‘struggling with a kind of gastric flu, very unpleasant … I have hardly even cooked, but lived on whisky and a little bread and butter bit by bit … Sima got here once only. Apart from that and a crack with the landlord of the Fox and Hounds, I’ve not heard a human voice for 12 days. (I don’t really miss it, but it is odd.)’107 ‘I am only wreckage,’ he told Gael Turnbull in February 1985. ‘It is weeks since I ventured as far as Hexham. Eating is a chore – cooking an imposition – making my bed is labour. I can’t even read for more than about an hour, and only old stuff that spares me the effort of understanding. I sleep.’108

  On 3 February 1985 Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams in a reflective but touchingly anticipatory way:

  I’ll be blest if I can imagine why I have begun a letter to you today, seeing that I have no news whatever to give you and no business to transact. Between Tanya’s long visit over Christmas and New Year and the snow that’s been falling ever since, I’ve been imprisoned in my cottage, except that the pub opens at midday to sell me a pint on Saturdays and Sundays, but none of my acquaintances turns up …

  Makin has been comparing my verse with Dante’s: amusing, but not very convincing. I put right one or two wild mis-conceptions for him. Two young men from Hull did a taped-interview, and I have cut a good deal of it out. I am too old to be trusted near a tape, and they are too young to dare bluepencil me as they should.

  I daresay there is now some ground for expecting that I might reach the age of 85 in less than four weeks, bar accidents; but why? I’ve been good for nothing for fifteen years and most people have very properly forgotten me. No doubt the Times has an acid obituary ready in its morgue, but three days after the funeral I’ll be in Limbo for a long stay. I’ve filled out a coupon for Littlewood’s Pools. If I win a million, there might be some fun yet!109

  The recording of the interview with the ‘two young men from Hull’ survives, and he was right to suspect the outcome. If he did cut a good deal of it out he didn’t go far enough. At times, especially on the relationship between meaning and sound, he becomes uncharacteristically incoherent. He acknowledges that it is difficult for him to ‘talk about it clearly, especially since I no longer read anything. I’m not familiar even with my own works any more.’ The interviewers were not particularly generous to the old man.1
10

  He was starting to say his goodbyes. On 19 March 1985 he wrote to Forde, still worried about debts but in good humour: ‘My central heating is effective but costs an awful lot to run. Fortunately people sent me so many bottles of whisky for my birthday that I am thinking of bathing in it. That should warm me up … Last week there were crocuses and such blossoming and we all thought spring had come; but they were just codding us. Inches of snow lying again today. The rooks, which had all come home, escorted by flocks of starlings and a few jackdaws, seem to have gone away again.’ He then began the closing paragraph unusually, with the prophetic, ‘Goodbye now …’111

  In an undated (but February 1985) letter Bunting wrote to invite Tanya Cossey to visit him at Easter: ‘Tanya dear … Did I tell you that my daughter Roudaba has decided to come and see me? She is due about the 8th of April. She is quite able to share your room. She’s a very energetic, lively, amusing person, though of course about 49 or 50 now.’112 According to Forde it proved to be:

  a very enjoyable time although the little cottage was quite crowded with visitors and Rou had to share a room with Tanya Cossey, a young art student who had been almost a daughter to Bunting for years (and his saki on television). Another good friend, Michael Shayer, arrived on April 15 and slept on the small couch in the living-room with his feet hanging over one end. Maria, his youngest daughter, was in and out during the visit, often taking Rou sightseeing since Bunting had given his car to the Cosseys, afraid that he would injure someone if he kept on driving.