The cottage itself was small and poor with grey cement walls unpainted except for the bedroom Rou and Tanya shared which Tanya had painted white. Shelves of books which covered the living-room walls softened its starkness, but the kitchen/dining room were not so camouflaged. Maria and others who wished to make his life more comfortable were continuously and adamantly refused by this proud man who wished to remain independent to the end. Though Bunting had trouble walking, the group occasionally went to the next door pub for a meal. The week passed pleasantly, and the night before Shayer was to go back south, they all stayed up till the early hours, reminiscing, talking about poets and poetry, drinking and singing ballads, including the bawdy Northumbrian ones Bunting knew so well. These Rou had learned in childhood from her mother who used to sing them while they washed up the dishes together.113
Tanya wrote to thank ‘Uncle Basil’ on 15 April. She told him how much she had enjoyed her visit and particularly the company of Roudaba and Mike Shayer: ‘Tell Roudaba I miss her company very much. I never met anyone so happy and fun to be with as her.’114
Bunting felt unwell the following day but put it down to a hangover, although Roudaba, who had trained as a nurse, had misgivings. Bunting refused to see a doctor but his daughter prevailed in this rather sad but familiar battle of wills, and he reluctantly agreed to call one. Bunting was shocked when the doctor immediately summoned an ambulance to get him into intensive care at Hexham General Hospital as quickly as possible. He was ill but in good spirits:
As soon as he was settled in the cot too short for him to stretch out in, he began half-seriously complaining, “What’s the use of having daughters? One comes all the way from America to put me into hospital!” … As [Roudaba and Maria] were about to leave, with a loud crash the man next to her father fell out of bed with his bedpan, and Bunting exclaimed, “See what happens in hospital?” But everyone in good spirits teasingly consoled him with the thought of all the pretty nurses about.115
The following morning Maria and Roudaba called the hospital early and were told that their father was well. They were just leaving Maria’s home ‘when another call came, about 10 a.m., to tell them that their father was dead. For exercise he had walked down the hall with a nurse and returned to bed, but something had made the nurse, who was leaving, turn back – to find he had just died.’116
Shortly after Bunting’s death Jonathan Williams reflected that it was ‘curious to think that his contemporaries – dead 50 years ago – were Hart Crane, George Gershwin, and Thomas Wolfe. Basil was precisely one day older than Kurt Weill, dead since 1950. Bunting was the last of the Victorians.’117
His ashes were scattered in the Quaker graveyard at Brigflatts, and a suitably understated stone was placed among the other memorials. A more elaborate memorial in the Botanic Gardens at Durham University quotes from Briggflatts:
Words!
Pens are too light.
Take a chisel to write.
Peggy attended Bunting’s funeral, which Gael Turnbull thought was ‘much dominated by one of the American daughters from his first marriage’. Peggy wasn’t mentioned at the funeral, an omission which upset Turnbull who wrote to her afterwards to assure that she had not been forgotten, by him at least. His letter was returned with a note, ‘No Longer at this Address’. Michael Shayer tracked her down and called on her in the social services home in Bishop’s Castle where she died in February 1988. Turnbull recalled that one of the poets at Bunting’s funeral ‘did publish a little account of that event, which, among other stupidities, does contain a reference to her, but derisory in context … She was a warm and gallant lady, much torn and jolted by the hazards of life and passion.’118
* * *
‘Three days ago,’ Bunting wrote to Tom Pickard in 1978,
I learned, from Jonathan W. by letter, that Louis Zukofsky had died. That thins the population of good poets rather drastically. I hope MacDiarmid can make a fool of the doctors, but I fear that, bar road accidents and strokes of lightning, I’ll soon be the only survivor of what was rightly a famous generation. Louis had finished ‘A’, and maybe it seemed to him that his business in this world had been completed.
W. B. YEATS
EZRA POUND W. C. WILLIAMS
T. S. ELIOT LOUIS ZUKOFSKY
DAVID JONES HUGH MACDIARMID
And a lot of pretty good secondaries, such as Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Hilda Doolittle and what not, besides, rather isolated, yet part of it, Lorine Niedecker. All these, except H.D., were among my friends; and I think there have been a great many generations that could not match them. Perhaps I could claim, like WBY, that my best epitaph would be ‘He had such friends’.119
The fact that he set them up as if on a tombstone suggests that he meant it.
1. Thomas Lowe Bunting, c.1916.
2. Annie and Basil Bunting, 1901.
3. Basil and Joyce Bunting, c.1904.
4. Basil and Thomas Lowe Bunting, 1916.
5. Denton Road, Scotswood, c.1908. The Bunting family home is located between the two small boys standing in the street. Thomas used the building as his surgery when the family moved to Jesmond Road in Newcastle.
6. Ackworth School leavers, 1916. Bunting stands at the far right of the back row. John Allen Greenbank is at the far left of the back row. Ernest Cooper Apperley Stephenson is seated, arms folded, in the middle row. Frederick Andrews is seated third from left in the middle row.
7. Bunting’s passport photographs, 1920–1933.
8. Marian and Basil Bunting, Rapallo beach, 1933.
9. Basil and Bourtai Bunting, Rapallo, c.1933.
10. Marian, Annie and Basil Bunting on the balcony of Annie’s apartment, Rapallo, 1932.
11. Marian and friend (Berthe), Rapallo, 1933.
12. Architect and designer Giulio Minoletti, essayist and Surrealist Juan Ramon Masoliver, Bunting and artist Eugen Haas, Rapallo, 1933.
13. Marian, Bourtai and Roudaba Bunting, Las Arenas, Canary Islands, December 1934.
14. Basil and Bourtai Bunting, Las Arenas, Canary Islands, December 1934.
15. The Thistle, c.1938.
16. Bunting in uniform, c.1942.
17. Bunting standing (rear, right) next to Violet Harris and her father, George. Seated (left to right) are Violet’s Aunt Lizzie, her cousin, Jean, and her mother, Jessie. This photograph was taken in the garden of the Harris family home in Wellesley Road, Methil, in 1941.
18. Basil Bunting, self portrait, 1939.
19. Bunting’s Maltese ID card, July 1943. It reveals him to have been 5’ 9¾” with grey eyes.
20. Wing Commander Bunting, c.1945.
21. Sima Alladadian in Ronald Oakshott’s garden, Isfahan, c.1947.
22. (top right) and 23. (below left) Bunting, Qolhak, Teheran, c.1948.
24. Bunting, 1958.
25. Bunting and Allen Ginsberg in Tom and Connie Pickard’s apartment, Jesmond, 22 May 1965.
26. Bunting and Peggy Edwards (Greenbank), Brigflatts, 1960s.
27. Bunting with Gael Turnbull, Wylam, winter 1965.
28. Bunting and Cissie Greenbank (Jean Armstrong), Brigflatts, c.1965.
29. Bunting with Tom Pickard (left), Gael Turnbull (rear) and Stuart Montgomery (front), Wylam, 1966.
30. Bunting in Aspen, Colorado, 1967.
31. Bunting at Stifford’s Bridge during a visit to the Turnbulls, 1970.
32. Bunting and Allen Ginsberg, Durham Cathedral, 1973. Ginsberg wrote on the bottom of this photograph: ‘“Haic sunt in fossa/Bedae venerabilis ossa.” At Bede’s tomb, Durham Cathedral 1973, Basil Bunting, & Allen Ginsberg sightseeing. Camera in Connie or Tom Pickard’s hands.’
33. Bronze portrait of Bunting by Alan Thornhill, spring 1973.
34. Bunting in his 80s.
35. Bunting, 1983.
36. Bunting looks down at Sima and Diana Collecott from the wall of the Reading Room, Palace Green, Durham, March 2004.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
The foll
owing abbreviations have been adopted for frequently recurring publications, names and places. Otherwise, for printed sources the usual convention has been adopted of a full citation in the first instance, followed by a recognizable shortened form.
AG Agenda, 16, 1978
BB Basil Bunting
BBNL R. Caddel and A. Flowers, Basil Bunting a Northern life (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1997)
BRBML Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
CHIC Ronald Lane Latimer Papers, University of Chicago Library
CONJ Conjunctions 8, 1985
CP B. Bunting, Complete Poems, edited by R.Caddel (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2000)
DESC J. Williams (ed.), Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal: Conversations with Basil Bunting (Lexington, 1968), unpaginated
DG Denis Goacher
DISJ P. Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge, 1992)
DP Dorothy Pound
DUR Basil Bunting Poetry Archive, Durham University Library
EM Eric Mottram
EP Ezra Pound
FORDE V. Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991)
GT Gael Turnbull. Bunting’s letters to Gael Turnbull are currently in the private collection of Jill Turnbull.
HM Harriet Monroe
HR Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin
JW Jonathan Williams
KCL Eric Mottram collection, King’s College, London
KD Karl Drerup
KEW The National Archives, Kew
LILLY The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
LR Lionel Robbins
LSE Lionel Robbins Papers, London School of Economics and Political Science
LZ Louis Zukofsky
MAK P. Makin (ed.), Basil Bunting on Poetry (Baltimore, 1999)
MONT Montemora 3, Spring 1977
MS Margaret de Silver
MT Meantime, 1, April 1977
MTBB J. Williams (ed.), Madeira & Toasts for Basil Bunting’s 75th Birthday (Highlands, 1977), unpaginated
PAID Paideuma (9, 1), Spring 1980
PI Poetry Information (19), Autumn 1978
RBD Roudaba Bunting Davido
SSLT R. Caddel (ed.) Sharp Study and Long Toil: Basil Bunting special issue (Durham, 1995)
SUNY The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo
SYSB J. McGonigal and R. Price (eds), The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism (Amsterdam, 2000)
TERR C. F. Terrell (ed.), Basil Bunting: Man and Poet (Orono, 1981)
TP Tom Pickard
VF Victoria Forde
WCW William Carlos Williams
INTRODUCTION
1. This is how Bunting thought poetry should be written. Bunting offered an anecdote about his contemporary, the poet David Jones: ‘A year or two ago I had tea with David Jones while he was engaged on a piece of lettering in the Roman manner … He’d got the letter T at the beginning of one line. As we talked, he suddenly fell silent. A look of abstraction came into his face. And he set down his teacup and his piece of cake, fiddled about till he got a pencil, and stood up to his easel, and slowly, slowly, very carefully, drew in the letter H. Then he sat down again; with a sigh, he said, “I’ll have the E by Friday!” … That is the way you’ve got to write poetry, you know: every word has got to be thought of with all that care’ (MAK, 8–10).
2. DESC. Williams decided not to reproduce Bunting’s final sentence, ‘Damned if it isn’t bugging ____’ (undated note from Bunting to Jonathan Williams, SUNY).
3. I felt the heat of Bunting’s posthumous scorn less intensely when I discovered that he used this medieval manuscript-like sign-off for all documents he regarded as ‘official’. Diana Collecott interprets the flourish of Bunting’s formal signature as signifying ‘Artist/Poet’ and believes the Arts and Crafts Movement may have been an influence. (Conversation with author, May 2012.)
4. J. Skipsey, Selected Poems, ed. B. Bunting (Sunderland, 1976). His careful research didn’t prevent several important factual errors from marring his account. See http://gerald-massey.org.uk/skipsey/index.htm
5. MAK, 151–70.
6. PAID, 132. Bunting’s ‘autobiography’ appeared in the Who’s Who of modern poetry, J. Vinson (ed.), Contemporary Poets (London, 1975), 213–14.
7. Bunting might have argued that he was merely restoring a ‘g’ that had been stolen from the hamlet by the Ordnance Survey after the 1950s series of maps. Until then it had been ‘Briggflatts’ since the beginning of organised government mapping of the country.
8. Almost every verifiable assertion in Alldritt’s book, from Thomas’ entry on Bunting’s birth certificate to the cause of death cited in his death certificate, is wrong.
9. BB to TP, 18 January 1979, SUNY.
10. MTBB.
11. H. Kenner, A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers (London, 1988), 7.
12. Dilworth’s account of this interchange was published in Poetry Review, Summer 2010, 122–3.
13. MAK, 151.
14. CP, 80.
15. BBNL, 9. Folk culture had an enduring appeal for Bunting. He told Tom Pickard that he had made a small selection of skipping songs in the 1920s. (Interview recorded at Bunting’s home in Whitley Chapel on 17 and 18 June 1981, published by Keele University, 1995.)
16. BBNL, 9.
17. P. Quartermain, Basil Bunting: Poet of the North (Durham, 1990).
18. Basil Bunting 1900–1985: A life in images, catalogue for an exhibition in Durham University Library, January–February 1987.
19. ‘A statement’ in DESC. Poets are ‘mostly dismal’ readers of their own work, he said in an interview in 1981, and ‘actors will bugger up any poetry they’re allowed to speak unless they’re drilled hard’ (interview with Peter Bell, 3 September 1981, recorded at Bunting’s home in Greysteads, published by Keele University, 1995).
20. BBNL, 33–5.
21. Quartermain, 5.
22. Quartermain, 10.
23. C. Johnson, The Disappearance of Literature (Amsterdam, 1980), 51.
24. T. Pickard, High on the Walls, preface Basil Bunting (London, 1967), 7.
25. ‘A statement’ in DESC.
26. Johnson, 57.
27. ‘A statement’ in DESC. Bunting thought that The Waste Land, for instance, should be read without the notes. The poem ‘needs no explaining that is not contained in its own lines. Every reference is a red-herring to drag the reader away to hunt the “meaning” of the poem anywhere but in the poem itself ’ (New English Weekly, 8 September 1932, 500).
28. A. Clarke, Collected Poems (Manchester, 2008), 314.
29. Hazlitt remarked on the ‘great depth and manliness and a rugged harmony in the tones of his voice … His language may not be intelligible; but his manner is not to be mistaken.’ This could be a description of Bunting’s reading voice. J. Cook (ed.), William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (Oxford, 1991), 224–5, 353.)
30. MAK, 103.
31. MAK, 103.
32. See Stephen Logan’s fascinating analysis of Wordsworth’s voice at www.english.cam.ac.uk/cambridgeauthors/conversation-with-stephen-logan
33. He got it from Yeats. Pound was introduced to Yeats in London in 1909 by Yeats’ lover Olivia Shakespear, whose daughter, Dorothy, thought Pound’s accent ‘odd … half American, half Irish’. When Pound first heard a recording of himself reading he was surprised by his own ‘Irish brogue’. Whether conscious or not Pound’s imitation of Yeats’ unique chanting sounded ridiculous to Bunting and sounds ridiculous now (H. Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, 1988), 133, 138).
34. PI, 4. Bunting and Zukofksy may well have had a profound effect on the development of literary modernism with this intervention. Carroll F. Terrell has pointed to the striking prosodic differences between Canto XXX, written after Bunting and Zukofsky made their recommendation, and those beginning Eleven New Cantos (PAID, 3
5.) In any event anyone who has heard Yeats reading ‘The Lake Isle of Inisfree’ is unlikely to disagree with Bunting’s broader point about Yeats.
35. Gael Turnbull, ‘An Arlespenny: Some notes on the poetry of Basil Bunting’, King Ida’s Watch Chain (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1965), unpaginated.
36. Diary, 11 May 1925, DUR.
37. SSLT, 204.
38. PI, 40.
39. ‘83 Answers … and Some Questions’. Basil Bunting and Jonathan Williams, introduced by Eric Robson, BBC North East, 17 August 1984 and 19 April 1985.
40. DISJ, 144.
41. E. Pound, Polite Essays (London, 1937), 153–4.
42. SSLT, 110.
43. C. D. Heymann, Ezra Pound: The Last Rower (London, 1976), 222–3.
44. Quartermain, 15.
45. M. Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford, 2010), 85–6.
46. SSLT, 93.
CHAPTER 1:
GUILTY OF SPRING
1. DESC.
2. In theory anyway. Much of the action shown had been staged.
3. G. R. Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford, 2004), 285–6.
4. Manchester Guardian, 2 March 1900.
5. Evening Chronicle, 1 March 1900, 3.
6. Weather reports for 1 March 1900 from Evening Chronicle, 28 February 1900, 4, and Newcastle Courant, 10 March 1900, 7. Ferocious storms during the week had seen two ships from the north east sunk without survivors.
7. Cheap wheat from Canada and frozen meat from New Zealand, brought over in the newly developed refrigerated ships on the one hand, and chemicals and electrical goods from Germany, for instance, on the other.
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