A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  At the age of nineteen Bunting was introduced to the poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. According to Bunting he ‘had arrived via a somewhat strange route at the conclusion that poetry should try to take over some of the techniques that I only knew in music. So that when I discovered Eliot writing poems and calling them “Preludes”, even though the resemblance to, say, Chopin’s Preludes was slight and superficial, I was extremely interested. He was obviously thinking on lines not dissimilar from my own.’165 He was a poet throughout his life (although he gave up in his early fifties until he was rescued by the young Newcastle poet, Tom Pickard), but alongside the poetry for the next twenty to thirty years there was an awful lot of rough and tumble life to be lived. To some extent this was self-willed. He looked back in the mid-1970s on a life lived consciously: ‘It was always my idea, when I was a youngster, that there were a certain number of things which every man ought to do, to experience, without which he would hardly be whole, and my notion was that somebody like Sir Walter Raleigh was such a person one ought to be; he did a mass[ive] variety of things, did them all well, some of them supremely well.’166

  How does the first part of Bunting’s verse autobiography represent his tumultuous youth? Barely at all in terms of coverage of events. It starts and ends in Brigflatts and appears to go nowhere else in-between. In twelve beautiful thirteen-line stanzas the poet celebrates love and mourns its loss, blaming himself, guilty of spring. We will come to Briggflatts later. Here it is enough to say that the sexual relationship with Peggy that he remembers is qualified by a note: ‘An autobiography, but not a record of fact. The first movement is no more a chronicle than the third. The truth of the poem is of another kind.’167

  Throughout this chapter I have tried to trace the events of Bunting’s early life while examining the many political, intellectual and cultural influences that he encountered. The rapidly industrialising Tyne, Montgomery Colliery and the poor miners who visited his father’s surgery in Scotswood and provided a platform for his lifelong dislike of capitalism; the family friend Joseph Skipsey who brought that world into poetry; the Cheesman family, which provided a strong sense of the northern-ness that he never lost; his father’s restless, enquiring mind and progressive views, his love of poetry, particularly Wordsworth, and the hills of the Lake District where he had taught Bunting to climb; the extensive collection at the Newcastle Lit & Phil, where Bunting absorbed so much north country history and folklore, and the lively lectures on all aspects of the arts and sciences; the music of Scarlatti, J. C. Bach and Monteverdi that he absorbed at school and the Lit & Phil; his parents’ early involvement in the Fabian Society with its progressive democratising principles, and the presence of the foremost British social scientist of the time, Graham Wallas, as a family friend; the gentle Quaker Greenbank family, the timeless mysterious serenity of their hamlet and Meeting House at Brigflatts and the time spent there with the great love of his life, Peggy Greenbank; his pacific Quaker education, under inspiring leaders like Frederick Andrews and Charles Evans, that led to his imprisonment for refusing to fight in the First World War, refusing even to accept work that made another man available to fight.

  Within three years he was in prison again, this time in Paris, and for persistent drunken violence.

  TWO

  FELLS FORGET HIM

  Who sang, sea takes,

  brawn brine, bone grit.

  Keener the kittiwake.

  Fells forget him.

  Fathoms dull the dale,

  gulfweed voices …

  Briggflatts II

  LONDON, 1919–1923

  The Leightonian of July 1920 reported that Bunting was ‘still at the London School of Economics. He is hoping to go to Russia shortly via Copenhagen, but the Danish authorities say that the “desire to study Danish literature” is not a good enough lie and refuse to viser his passport. Meanwhile he has been appointed to write articles on English art, music, and literature, for a Roumanian newspaper. He is also growing a beard.’1

  Having been rejected by Cambridge the London School of Economics (LSE) was the obvious university for Bunting to go. New, progressive, social sciences oriented and founded by the Fabian movement, it had rapidly become a powerhouse of liberal intellectualism since its foundation in 1895. Bunting didn’t exactly seize his opportunity.

  He enrolled in October 1919 and left (formally at least) in April 1923 without taking a degree, but having ‘got enough of all that [economics] to last me a lifetime’.2 This was quite literally true. He had absorbed enough to earn a living as a financial commentator until the very end of his career as a journalist, and Eric Mottram noted in his diary of 2 August 1966 that during a lunch in Buffalo, New York, Bunting had ‘talked very good economics indeed’.3 As late as 1979 he gave a ‘long and informed disquisition on money, banking, and economics’ to Carroll F. Terrell during an extended discussion of Pound’s Douglasite economic theories (which Bunting came to deride).4

  Graham Wallas would have been a strong influence on his decision to enroll at LSE and there was doubtless some fatherly arm-twisting behind it. Wallas had turned down the role of founding Director of LSE in 1895 but had joined as a teacher of politics when the school opened and was still there when he retired in 1923, continuing to teach occasionally until his death in 1932.

  The school was formally founded in 1895 and quickly became an important institution, the kind of establishment that was then common in the rest of Europe, a polytechnic for training the next generation of the business and administrative elite. This was at some variance from its benefactor’s desire that LSE encourage socialism.5 In that same year LSE had been at the vanguard of the new discipline of economics, offering the first BSc degree in the subject, and following this in 1909 with the creation of a Department of Sociology. The London School of Economics combined academic rigour in the new social sciences with a proudly utilitarian streak, offering vocational courses in management and administration for instance.

  We know something of the scope of Bunting’s intended learning at the London School of Economics from his contemporary, the distinguished economist Lionel (later Lord) Robbins:

  The first year course for the B.Sc. (Econ.), then even more than now, was widely spread: Elements of Economics (Dr [Hugh] Dalton), with applications in Money, Banking and International Trade (Dr [T. E.] Gregory), Economic History (Professor [Lilian] Knowles), British Constitution (Mr [Hastings] Lees Smith), Logic and Scientific Method (Dr [Abraham] Wolf), Geography (Dr [Hilda] Ormsby) – this, together with a translation paper, was what we were expected to cover in the short space of nine months … The majority survived it satisfactorily and were in a position to proceed to more intensive studies in the final with a very satisfactory grounding and with a wide range of interests suitably kindled.6

  This is a stellar line up of tutors. Hugh Dalton was later to become Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Labour government that came to power under Clement Attlee in 1945. Hastings Lees Smith became a Cabinet Minister in 1931. Lilian Knowles was the first of only two Professors of Economics appointed at London University before the Second World War and she was Dean of the Faculty of Economics from 1920 to 1924, the first female Dean of Faculty at London University. She was widely recognised as a superb teacher. Hilda Ormsby was to be the only female founding member of the Institute of British Geographers. Indeed Bunting may have owed more to Ormsby than a fleeting interest in geography as she worked as a cartographer for the naval intelligence division of the Admiralty during the Second World War.7

  Unhappily, even with a faculty as distinguished as this, Bunting did not find himself in Robbins’ ‘majority’:

  The lectures … were extremely good and well delivered; although we did not know it, it would have been relatively easy to have passed the intermediate examination … on the strength of lecture notes alone. Indeed, this was done by a fellow student, Basil Bunting the poet, who having been distracted by other matters during the greater part of the session, borrowed
my notes at the end and, having read them intensively for three or four days, lying on the grass in the Green Park opposite Buckingham Palace, emerged from the ordeal triumphant.8

  It is possible that Bunting was acquainted at LSE with a man who was later to become an influential socialist economist, Piero Sraffa. Sraffa was a friend of Antonio Gramsci, perhaps the most important Italian Marxist of the period, and Filippo Turati, Italy’s foremost socialist. Two years older than Bunting, Sraffa attended the London School of Economics in 1921 and 1922, becoming one of the most important economists of his generation and a major influence on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Sraffa was a frequent visitor to Rapallo, Bunting’s home for part of his twenties and thirties. His father, the lawyer and academic Angelo Sraffa, had a villa, San Michele, in Rapallo9 and he was one of the patrons of the concerts Bunting helped Ezra Pound to organise there in 1933.10

  It is possible, as Lionel Robbins’ biographer, Susan Howson, says that Bunting and Robbins met at the Fabian Research Department,11 but they lived in the same house in St John’s Wood for a period. Robbins was certainly an important early influence on Bunting. Bunting wrote to Pound later that Robbins was,

  a bloke abt a year or two older than me, good war record, son of the chap who used to be president or secretary or something of the National Farmers Union – anyway a man of some importance. I met him just before I went to the L.S.E. and did him the bad turn of persuading him to go there too … He was one of the first people I met to show any interest in [Clifford Hugh] Douglas. Subsequent hostility is at least not result of ignorance, as in many cases. Tastes more or less better class Bloomsbury – i.e., aware of a lot of things you might not expect a prof of economics to have heard of. First person, I think, to show me any of Eliot’s work, certainly first to show me bit of Ulysses in The Egoist (or was it Portrait of J.J.?) … He used to like yr works and probably still does.12

  Bunting used the Fabian common room above its shop in Westminster when he was a student at the London School of Economics. He recalled that, ‘when I was in London in 1919 I usually got my food, apart from my supper at night and breakfast in the morning, by having tea and toast in the Fabian common room which was above its shop in Westminster and there I must have met all of that famous gang sooner or later, and some of them frequently. Some of them I was on such terms with as a young man can be with those who are very much his seniors.’13

  The other meeting place he used in this period was, ‘the Mecca café, in Gentry Lane closer to the street where the offices of the New Age were. And there I used to go and sit with [Alfred Richard] Orage [editor of the New Age] and [Clifford Hugh] Douglas, and occasionally Marmaduke Pickthall, the great translator of the Koran.’14 This highlights one of the problems of transcribing from old taped interviews. There is no ‘Gentry Lane’ in London’s West End. The offices of the intellectual weekly, the New Age, were in Cursitor Street and the newspaper was printed in Rolls Passage off Chancery Lane (easily confused with ‘Gentry’), about 50 yards from the London School of Economics. Bunting started to show up at the fringe of a group that collected around Orage, including Douglas and Wyndham Lewis, in 1919 and the early part of 1920.15 It couldn’t have been later than that because the celebrated orientalist Marmaduke Pickthall, who had converted to Islam in 1917 at the age of forty-two, left Britain for India in 1920 and didn’t return until 1935. Douglas was an engineer turned economist whose theory of social credit had a profound influence on Ezra Pound. As a young economics student Bunting would have valued his brief acquaintance with Douglas. At that time Douglas was looking for a publisher for his first book, Economic Democracy. Orage serialised it in the New Age in 1919 and Douglas took Orage on as a collaborator on his second, Credit-Power and Democracy, which was published in 1920. Douglas had become concerned with the nature of the money supply in capitalist economies and developed a theory to rectify its anomalies. Pound clearly didn’t understand Douglasite theory even in 1920, when it had become the driving force of the New Age, as his review of Economic Democracy in the Little Review in April 1920 shows.16 Pound may have been attracted by the part of Douglas’ theory that calls for the destruction of the power of ‘money-lenders’. Social credit quickly became seen as anti-Semitic and Pound’s own anti-Semitism was gathering force at this time. The New Age of March 1920 carried a piece by Pound that praised Douglas’ ‘profound attack on usury’.17 Douglas was not anti-Semitic18 and he regarded fascism as evil, but once Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists took to social credit it became linked inextricably with anti-Semitism.19

  Orage himself was widely credited with bringing the British modernist movement together by providing it with an intellectually credible forum. Pound had been writing for him since 1911 and he published rare (at that time) essays on Freud, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read and T. E. Hulme. He promoted Fabian socialism and the works of Nietzsche, as well as Douglas.

  Bunting liked Orage ‘very much’.20 Towards the end of his life he told Carroll F. Terrell how Orage ‘by paying Pound regularly for contributions in his own name as well as several pseudonyms, literally kept him from starving … According to Basil, Orage began to show signs of fear, mental stress, and symptoms of paranoia by 1922 … [but he] could not provide any certain evidence that Orage’s mental state in any way contributed to Pound’s mental state.’21

  Bunting did not meet Pound in 1919, but Pound was certainly an important part of Orage’s circle at the time. His contributions to the New Age had started in 1917 with a series of articles, ‘Studies of Contemporary Mentality’ on the stupidity of British journals and magazines. Towards the end of that year he began to write art criticism for the New Age as B. H. Dias and in December he began a series of astonishing music reviews as William Atheling. Pound was tone deaf, knew nothing about music and got away with, for example, a description of part of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata where ‘the piano jabs in, and jerks on the violin, tum, tum, ti, ump, tum, tump, ti ump’.22 Pound earned four guineas a month from the New Age and later described it as ‘the SINEWS of his income in the period’,23 but Bunting’s claim that Orage had ‘literally’ kept Pound from starving is an exaggeration. By that time Pound had married Dorothy Shakespear, the daughter of Yeats’ former lover Olivia Shakespear, whose parents had settled on her an annuity of £150 per annum, more than enough to keep the couple from starving, and Pound did generate other income from his tireless output.24 Possibly Bunting didn’t run into Pound in 1919 because Pound and Dorothy spent quite a large part of that year in France.25

  A reluctant student

  Bunting’s student dossier is a delight. It shows that the relationship between the benign, but necessarily slightly formal, broadly sympathetic and supportive, but nonetheless a little bewildered academic and the feckless student who is supposedly in his charge hasn’t changed much in a hundred years.

  Bunting applied for admission to the London School of Economics on 21 August 1919 and paid the £15 15s fee. At this time he was living at 44 Hamilton Gardens in St John’s Wood, as was Lionel Robbins.26 The views around his ‘garret’ in St John’s Wood inspired the earliest poem he preserved, ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’.

  By the autumn of 1919 he had moved, according to a postcard to an unnamed London School of Economics authority, to the much more convenient address of 20 Great James Street near Holborn. He started solidly but after just two terms of his first year he was restless and agitating for a move. An extract from a letter to the Academic Registrar, dated 14 March 1921, requests that Bunting be excused for having been absent without leave for two terms of the previous year, ‘in order to journey to Russia to study Communistic conditions there’.27

  A letter from the Secretary to the Academic Registrar on 26 May 1921 shows that Bunting’s application had been successful, and the interruption of his course of study during the third term of the session 1919–20 and the first term of the session 1920–21 was excused.

  Bunting spent the second half of 1920
travelling in Northern Europe, returning to the London School of Economics in January 1921. He wrote to Lionel Robbins from Copenhagen with a full account of Danish particularity:

  The Danes are a curious race. They ride their bicycles on the wrong side of the road.

  Now every Dane has a bicycle, or, if he is too old, a tricycle, and every morning every Dane pedals to his work, every evening he pedals home again, and after dinner he pedals to the Tivoli to ride on the roundabouts, bet on the mechanical horses, and see the famous clown who performs nightly in the open air theatre there what he calls ‘Balleto pantomimes’. There is no trace of dancing about it, and the fun is extremely crude, but let that pass.

  On his bicycle the Dane is a beautiful creature, but off it he does not feel at home, and looks as awkward as an automaton. Luckily he speaks either English or German or both, for his own language is a hideous affair of snorts and grunts, and Swedes and Norwegians say they can learn English more easily than Danish.

  He eats twelve or thirteen meals a day, to the amazement of foreigners. He has Morgenkaffee twice, and then breakfast: more coffee meals, tea at 4, dinner at five, more coffee and beer and punch, and then a grand extra big coffee meal to finish up with, and a bottle of Pilsner to wash it down. All this is very expensive. But what he eats! Not bread and butter, but butter, beautiful butter, with a little slice of Ruybread hidden away behind it somewhere. And wonderful coffee.

  Also he smokes. His pipe is about a yard long, and the bowl holds a good pound of tobacco. He smokes it after every meal, and at pauses between whiles as well. Luckily baccy is cheap – about ½ lb for about 9d. …

  … The Dane drinks Swedish Punch. Now this is a marvellous drink, and I can recommend it to you … It is sweet and very pleasant, and while still you sit at table you can drink bottle after bottle with no visible effect. But rise once, and drunkenness is upon you. The after effects are not so good. But it is a drink worth trying, if you don’t know it already. It should be drunk iced like champagne. A Norwegian skipper, his chief engineer, two American-Swedish sailors (skippers, both) and a Swedish economist, with me sat and drank four bottles of it, in a café in the Radhusplads [Rådhuspladsen] on top of the usual supply of excellent Pilsner. Then we topped it with Madeira, and Rum, and felt sufficiently bad. It was an excellent drink.