A STRONG SONG TOWS US
THE LIFE OF BASIL BUNTING
Richard Burton
Copyright © Richard Burton, 2013
The right of Richard Burton to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by
Infinite Ideas Limited
36 St Giles
Oxford
OX1 3LD
United Kingdom
www.infideas.com
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of small passages for the purposes of criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except under the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP, UK, without the permission in writing of the publisher. Requests to the publisher should be addressed to the Permissions Department, Infinite Ideas Limited, 36 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LD, UK, or faxed to +44 (0) 1865 514777.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-909652-49-1
Published in North America by Prospecta Press
P.O. Box 3131
Westport, CT 06880
(203) 903-5176
www.prospectapress.com
ISBN 978-1-909652-49-1
Brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Designed and typeset by GRID
Printed in Britain
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 GUILTY OF SPRING
2 FELLS FORGET HIM
3 SWEET SHIT! BUY!
4 AN ACKNOWLEDGED LAND
5 THEN IS NOW
6 CODA
Notes
Acknowledgements
Index
To Elizabeth, Jamie and Jo.
This spuggy has fledged.
INTRODUCTION
Fifty years a letter unanswered;
A visit postponed for fifty years.
She has been with me fifty years.
Briggflatts
Brigflatts, 6 March 2013. The snow filling this tiny Quaker burial ground in the far north of England is delivered horizontally. It arrives on a gale that picked up its wings somewhere north of Franz Josef Land. It is barely possible to make out the simple headstones in the blizzard. Not a soul stirs. There is no birdsong. In this weather this is one of the bleakest places in Britain.
One hundred years ago, in March 1913, a thirteen-year-old boy called Basil Bunting stood in this graveyard for the first time. How little he could have known then how the spirit of this place would give him his own wings for seventy more years of what was, by any standards, an astonishing life. Along the way he was a conscientious objector, prisoner, artists’ model, journalist, editor, sailor, balloon operator, interpreter, wing commander, diplomat, spy and, above all these, a poet. It wasn’t just Brigflatts’ spirit of place that buoyed him up through these adventures. The clink of its stonemason’s chisel shaped his art. Meditation in the Quaker Meeting House shaped his philosophy. His love for the stonemason’s young daughter, Peggy Greenbank, stayed alive through fifty years of separation. It was, as we shall see, one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.
* * *
A Strong Song Tows Us began three years previously. As I read Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal in the Upper Reading Room of Oxford’s Old Bodleian library I wondered if I really wanted to write this book. As I turned the final page I saw that it was a limited edition, signed by its authors, Jonathan Williams and Bunting himself. I found myself staring at Bunting’s signature – it was as intricately patterned and layered as a Lindisfarne illumination. I tried to follow its loops and curlicues. Like the bull that bellows us into Briggflatts it was ridiculous and lovely.
But what was it for? Bunting, for whom the slightest superfluity was an artistic failure, was one of the great parers of twentieth-century letters, a ruthless editor of his own work. He famously urged writers to use a chisel rather than a pen so as to load each individual mark with its maximum freight of meaning and intensity.1 I was familiar enough with his habitual signature, a flowing single B with a dot. How could Bunting of all writers represent himself with this rococo fantasy? I tried to follow the ebbs and flows of his script as extravagant Bs rippled into almost formless Ns and then lurched away in search of a crowning T and plainsong G. It must have taken him longer to sign these books so generously than to complete the interviews they contain. It was, of course, entirely unlike his ‘normal’ signature. My foreboding about writing a life of Bunting gathered; its subject would have despised the entire enterprise.
Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal is a transcript of interviews that Williams conducted with Bunting when the poet was in his mid-sixties. Williams wanted Bunting to recall his life but his interviewee was clearly reluctant. The book begins with a statement from Bunting: ‘Jonathan, I am surprised at you. What the hell has any of this to do with the public? My autobiography is Briggflatts – there’s nothing else worth speaking aloud.’2 It ends with his florid signature as though to bracket the work with a kind of benign contempt. If you want superfluous guff, he seems to be saying, take a look at this.3
For Bunting Briggflatts was autobiography enough. He scorned any kind of life writing as a channel into his or anyone else’s art. For Bunting you can’t understand a poem just by knowing the historical events that charge it. You can’t even understand a poem by reading it. The only way to uncover the mystery is to hear it. ‘Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing,’ he writes in Briggflatts. When Bunting read that line the pause he inserted before the final word is pregnant with contempt for clue followers, patient or otherwise.
My concern deepened as I read those of Bunting’s letters that survive in various archives in the US and UK. Is it altogether decent to write a biography of someone who loathed the idea of one, who destroyed all the letters he received and who urged his friends to destroy his own in order to make a project like this as difficult as possible?
I was encouraged, however, by the ‘benign’ part of the benign contempt I had detected. After all, Bunting had participated fully in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal and approved publication. It reminds me of Yeats’ dismissal of Friedrich Von Hügel at the end of ‘Vacillation’. It is a sympathetic kind of grumpiness. In any event Bunting himself was not above using biography in pursuit of what he saw as a good cause. His introduction to his edition of the poems of Joseph Skipsey begins with a detailed account of Skipsey’s life and he confesses to having sought out surviving family members for their memories. He did this because he recognised that the way to interest people in the work of a neglected poet is to tell his story, not to harangue them.4 In a 1974 lecture on the American poet Louis Zukofsky he conceded the necessity of introducing the man in order to encourage interest in his poetry5 and late in life he wrote another autobiography, albeit one that consists of only five words, ‘Minor poet, not conspicuously dishonest.’ Jonathan Williams suggested to him that this implied the virtues of modesty and honesty and asked if there were any other ‘Quaker virtues’ he hoped for from himself and from his friends, drawing a classic Bunting response: ‘I’m not convinced I have any virtues.’6
My other plea of mitigation is that I consciously use Briggflatts, Bunting’s verse autobiography, as the spine of this life. Brigflatts sits high in the Pennine mountains, which separate the east and west of northern England and are often described as the country’s backbone. (The
addition of the extra ‘g’ in Bunting’s title seems to be the poet’s attempt to Norse-up his dossier.)7 Bunting’s poem acts as the Pennine Chain of this book, holding its landscape together on the one hand and, I hope, providing vistas that help us see the hinterland of Bunting’s work.
Briggflatts is structured in five parts, with a short coda, and this is the pattern I have tried to follow. Four of the parts broadly describe the four seasons of the poet’s life. The first chapter, ‘Guilty of Spring’, considers Bunting’s early life, his visits to Brigflatts and his eventual desertion of Peggy, his sometimes troubled times at school and his trial and imprisonment for his absolutist conscientious objection in his late teens. His sense of loss as expressed in Part 1 of Briggflatts is almost overwhelming:
Guilty of spring
and spring’s ending
amputated years ache after
the bull is beef, love a convenience.
It is easier to die than to remember.
The second chapter, ‘Fells forget him’, describes the summer of the poet’s years and a second desertion, that of his home. He moved to London to study and then fled to Paris where he met Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford and suddenly found himself at the epicentre of modernism. He returned to London and worked as a journalist before joining the Pounds in Rapallo. He married his first wife, an American, and poverty pushed them and their first child from Italy to the Canary Islands. He wrote some of his most memorable poems during this period. The rise of General Franco and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War pushed the family back to London. His wife left him and returned to the US with their two children, while pregnant with their third, a son Bunting was never to meet. During these two decades of poverty and poetry he spent only around six months in his beloved Northumbria. He describes the consequence in part two of Briggflatts:
Who sang, sea takes,
brawn brine, bone grit.
Keener the kittiwake.
Fells forget him.
Fathoms dull the dale,
gulfweed voices …
The third chapter, ‘Sweet shit! Buy!’, covers the poet’s middle years. Bunting spent the early part of the Second World War as a balloon operator in the Firth of Forth, helping to protect convoys in the shipping lanes to Murmansk. Later in the war his knowledge of classical Persian allowed him to find work as an interpreter in Iran, and he rose rapidly through the ranks to become Wing Commander Bunting, one of the most respected intelligence officers in the region. He developed a diplomatic career in the Middle East which brought him friendships with its most important politicians. His second marriage, to a Persian girl, required him to leave the embassy in Teheran, and he became the Middle East correspondent for The Times newspaper until he was expelled by Mossadeq as tension between Britain and Iran over oil boiled up in the early 1950s. His expulsion began a miserable decade back in the north east of England. The poetry dried up and he struggled to find work. He eventually found a job as the Newcastle Evening Chronicle’s financial correspondent. ‘Sweet shit! Buy!’ is his crisp reflection on journalism in general, and The Times in particular.
‘An acknowledged land’ departs from biography briefly to consider Briggflatts, one of the three or four truly great poems of the twentieth century. The poem was inspired by the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, who:
condensed so much music into so few bars
with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,
never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes
echo him and the copse drums out his measure,
snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight
and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.
‘Then is Now’ takes us into Bunting’s winter. The phenomenal success of Briggflatts turned the poet into a celebrity. He was plucked from the obscurity of the Evening Chronicle to give readings and lecture tours in New York and San Francisco. Film crews turned up at his door to make documentaries. He was President of the Poetry Society during the ludicrous Poetry Wars. He was celebrated as one of the twentieth century’s most important poets. With professional success came reunion with the children he hadn’t seen since his first wife left him in January 1937. But the most important reunion of all was with Peggy, the young girl whose presence lights up Briggflatts:
Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.
A coda takes us through Bunting’s final years. They were characterised by debilitating poverty, loneliness and meditation on his own past and inevitable future, as well as the broader historical narrative. The first stanza of the ‘Coda’ to Briggflatts captures human insignificance:
A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.
* * *
This is not the first life of Basil Bunting. Victoria Forde included a biographical chapter in The Poetry of Basil Bunting, as did Carroll F. Terrell in his much earlier Basil Bunting: Man and Poet. Forde’s chapter is particularly useful for its insights into Bunting’s relationships with his elder daughters, but it is necessarily brief. Another short life is Basil Bunting: A Northern Life by Richard Caddell and Anthony Flowers, the strengths and limitations of which are embedded in its subtitle. The first full-length biography, Keith Alldritt’s Basil Bunting: The Poet as Spy, appeared in 1998. The sense that it was compiled from increasingly erratic notes taken during lengthy sessions in the pub with Bunting’s old friends is enhanced by some of the wilder speculations. That said, Alldritt’s biography is a good story and its subject would undoubtedly have approved of its sacrifice of accuracy to imaginative narrative.8
In 1979 Tom Pickard proposed a biography of his older friend. ‘As to writing my life,’ Bunting wrote to him, ‘I can’t stop you, but suggest you might preface it with the enclosed note. You can’t possibly get it right – even the chap who compiled an alleged chronology, one page in Poetry Information, got almost every item wrong.’
The enclosed note says: ‘Take Heed. My biography appears in Who’s Who, complete except for the date of my death which will not be delayed very long. Whatever else anybody writes must be looked on as fiction. Tom Pickard has a vigorous imagination and I hope whatever he writes will amuse you. I haven’t read it; and once it’s in print I shall not trouble to deny it unless it seems to libel someone else.’9
If A Strong Song Tows Us is ‘fiction’ it is at least based squarely on Bunting’s own testimony. Although he urged his friends to destroy his letters many sensibly didn’t and hundreds have survived. They describe his life unflinchingly. Bunting’s commitment to describing the picture as he saw it never wavered, and it caused him no end of trouble.
* * *
I know that my subject would not have supported this project but I hope that he would have approved of my objective, which is to try to raise Bunting’s profile for a generation that appears to be forgetting him. As we shall see, by the late 1960s some of the finest critical minds of the century were placing Bunting at the apex of literary modernism.
Thom Gunn: ‘Briggflatts is one of the few great poems of this century. It seems to me greater each time I read it.’
Cyril Connolly: ‘Briggflatts … is the finest long poem to have been published since T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.’
Hugh MacDiarmid: ‘[Bunting’s] poems are the most important which have appeared in any form of the English language since T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and such poems as W. B. Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” and ‘“The Second Coming”.’
Gunn compared Briggflatts favourably with The Waste Land and Pound’s Cantos. Sir Herbert Read compared it in durability and weight to that Anglo- Saxon icon, ‘The Seafarer’.
What are we missing? How could we have
got into a situation where a giant of modernism is so unloved? Mention Bunting to a literate, educated young person these days and you will be met with polite incomprehension. It wasn’t always so. In the 1960s and 1970s he was arguably the world’s most celebrated living poet. Gordon D. Brown recalled the Morden Tower readings of the early 1960s and the profound effect they had on Bunting’s reputation, ‘if we are to celebrate the 75th birthday of Basil Bunting, we should do so realizing that 75 sees the poet in a situation very different from that of 10 years ago. Yet, there is always the danger that things will repeat themselves, and, as the first flood of recognition subsides, Bunting will again be allowed to sink into a relative obscurity. We must be his guards.’10 One is tempted to ask where his guards have been these last forty or so years. In 1988, just three years after Bunting’s death, Hugh Kenner complained about our remarkable indifference to this poet, apologising in his pessimistic collection of essays on British literature, A Sinking Island, for having to quote such large chunks of Bunting’s poetry: ‘if Bunting is quoted copiously, that’s to throw light on mid-century norms that couldn’t accommodate him. I’d have copied out less of “Villon” and “Briggflatts” if I could assume readers familiar with them; but the dearth of such readers is precisely my point.’11
Bunting often reaches the heights that Yeats and Eliot reach and he always soars above contemporaries like Auden, MacNeice and Spender. The only other serious contender for the title of ‘greatest British modernist poet’ is David Jones, whose case has long been championed by Thomas Dilworth, among many others. In 1979 Dilworth wrote to Bunting to ask for his opinion of Jones, prompted by Hugh MacDiarmid’s claim that Jones was ‘the best English poet of the twentieth century’.12 Bunting’s reply is carefully considered, generous but scrupulous: ‘David Jones seems to me one of the bouquet of poets who have made this century the most fruitful in English poetry since the XVIth … Most people would agree that Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Carlos Williams and Zukofsky form an astonishing centrepiece for the century’s literary history and David Jones must be placed very close to them.’
A Strong Song Tows Us Page 1
