A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Alas, a much more dire offence was alleged against him. He had been found to be in possession of a prohibited arm! The weapon was a penknife, three inches long. But the blade could be fixed. It was one of the Scandinavian, barrel-shaped affairs that some gentlemen use for cleaning their finger-nails. The unfortunate young man was remanded in custody.

  The kindly sergeant did his best to lighten the irksomeness of the young man’s captivity. He visited him in his cell, declaimed to him his own vocéros and other poems to the glory of the vendetta. He listened with attention to the poems of the young man and to the music of Mr Pound, who had brought his bassoon and rendered on it the airs to which the poems of Arnaut Daniel had been sung. That sergeant even brought half-bottles of thin wine and slices of the sausage called mortadella. With this he fed the captive. It is good to be a poet in France.

  The Higher Court before whom the case was tried was less placable. The poor young man had just, when Ezra visited me, been sentenced to a fine of frs. 4, with frs. 66 for costs and, it having been discovered that as a conscientious objector he had been in prison in England; he was sentenced to expulsion from France: – Ezra’s proposition now was that I should pay the fine and approach the authorities with assurance of the excellence of the young man’s poetry and of my conviction that he would not further offend … I had never read the young man’s poetry and I had only seen him for ten minutes at the Dôme, so I knew little about his character. But I perjured myself all right. I did it rather reluctantly, for I dislike the militant sides of the characters of conscientious objectors and, having once seen a man’s ear bitten off by an American trooper, I felt some distaste at the idea that my own nose might leave my face between the teeth of an English poet … Eventually, on the assurance that the young man was in my service, the authorities decided that as long as he kept that job he might stay in Paris.66

  Pound recalled an interchange of his own with the ‘kindly sergeant’, ‘the officer learning that I was a man of letters, and concerned with the welfare of another man of letters, produced from his pocket a poem of his own, with the lady’s name running in acrostic down the initial letters, and when I had read it said in a tone of apology, “Ça plait beaucoup aux dames.”’67

  We should register the ‘definitive’ version of this story that Bunting gave to Carroll F. Terrell at Orono in 1980, although Terrell freely admits that even this account is ‘at best impressionistic’ as he didn’t write it until several hours after he heard it:

  A friend of mine had received a hundred pounds which in those days was quite a lot of money so he invited me along with another friend on a party to celebrate. We went out on the town. Around midnight the other friend gave up and left, but we kept on drinking and celebrating until quite late in the morning until he gave up. After that, I had nothing to do but to go home. The Paris streets laid out in the time of the Empire often had four corners which looked exactly alike, so that my hotel on one corner looked like the one on the next corner. My taxi driver drove up in front of one which I took to be mine. I got in and found my room but the damn key wouldn’t work! That got me quite frustrated and furious. Finally, I had to relieve myself on the wall of the stairs, but I went back and tried to knock the door down. Eventually the noise aroused the concierge whose husband appeared. He’d never seen me before so concluded I was a burglar who had broken in. I’d never seen him before, and couldn’t imagine what he was protesting about or why he should be trying to kick me out of my own hotel. Finally, he threatened to call the cops if I wouldn’t leave quietly. I invited him to do so and while he was gone jumped into bed with his wife. She was fairly old but made up for a lack of youth by a whole lot of enthusiasm. Imagine my chagrin and surprise, right at the height of my own enthusiasm, to be dragged out of bed by the police, who for some mysterious reason wanted to take me to jail. Well, now, as an innocent man, it was my duty to refuse to go. I was outnumbered, but while they were trying to restrain me, I managed to give one of them a good swift kick in the pants. In the end, they overpowered me. By this time I could be charged with a number of crimes: minor ones such as disturbing the peace, but also serious ones such as resisting arrest and what the French call ‘rebellion’.

  The next day I was herded into the grande salle along with a flock of petty thieves, pickpockets, prostitutes, pimps, and other assorted characters. I happened to have a copy of Villon in my pocket, so while waiting my turn, I sat on a bench reading him, quite aware of the ironies. For Villon himself, centuries before, had sat in the same salon and waited his turn before the magistrate. Here it was that Ezra found me. He was always interested in helping young writers in trouble; but I think it was seeing me reading Villon that really got him. After he heard my story, he rushed away to get lawyers and money or whatever to get me off and see justice done.

  The case came to trial. But since a key witness in the prosecution’s case was the wife of the hotel keeper, I was saved. She refused to say anything against me or support any of the story the police were telling. She told them that I was a very nice, polite, young man and she hadn’t seen me doing any horrible things they were accusing me of. Thus, I was only sentenced to two weeks in jail. But it was probably lucky things happened the way they did. If the hotel keeper hadn’t come and got me away from the door I was hell-bent to break down, I’d have doubtless been killed. I found out afterwards that sitting in the middle of the room facing the door was an old man with a loaded pistol. If I had come through it, he had every intention of shooting to kill.68

  The 23-year-old Bunting was probably feeling pretty sorry for himself. As he said at a reading in London over fifty years later: ‘I suppose young men are attracted to people like Villon. Villon was very sorry for himself and young men are all sorry for themselves, and I suppose I must have been too about 1925.’69

  Ford’s account of the offence differs from Bunting’s only in minor detail, but their description of the trial and sentence could hardly be more different. In any event Bunting’s tenure at the transatlantic review was short-lived. He worked on the first issue only and was replaced in early January 1924 by Ivan Beede, who ‘wore large, myopic spectacles in front of immense dark eyes, wrote very good short stories about farming in the Middle West and boasted of his Indian blood’.70 Ford’s account of Bunting’s departure beautifully captures the essence of both men:

  The conscientious objector had had to go. He had worked quite well till Christmas. I sent him to England to do some private work for me and to get a rest. Whilst there he discovered inside himself that I regarded him as an object of charity, and resigned his post in a letter of great expletive violence. I had never regarded him as an object of charity, but as one who was by turns quite useful and a great nuisance. As he had had nowhere to go to after he left the Santé, I had taken him to live with me. His salary was rather small, so he was really under no obligation to me … He was eventually arrested and conducted to the frontier. I regretted it, because he appeared to be a young man of real talent. He has since pursued the career of a poet and savant in a country bordering on France …71

  Certainly Ford was already looking to replace Bunting by the end of December.72

  Although it is difficult to reconcile the ‘nice young man’ of Bowen’s memory with the psychotic nose biter of Ford’s there is something about Ford’s style that suggests he relished embellishing this story. JC described this feeling well in the Times Literary Supplement:

  Ford is a loquacious writer, and there is often an air of untrustworthiness when he’s about. In a yellowing article from The Times pasted into [a secondhand copy of Ford’s Joseph Conrad: A personal remembrance] … we found this: ‘Almost everything Ford wrote about Conrad has a false ring, even when it may be asserted to be the literal truth’. Having devoured the book that very evening, our impression was the opposite: ‘almost everything’ had the ring of truth, even when implausible.73

  I too take ‘almost everything’ in Ford’s account of Bunting’s Parisian escapade to be
essentially true. In his (possible) embellishments reside the essential Bunting.

  Bunting liked Ford, although he wasn’t sure that the feeling was mutual. In 1930 William Carlos Williams invited Bunting to a function that Ford was to attend in New York but Bunting was ‘not so sure that Ford would be at all pleased to see me again’.74 He complained in a letter to Bernard Poli that all Ford’s biographers had ‘missed the point’:

  what’s it matter if he told lies? He was a writer of fiction. What does matter is his kindness to young men and men in distress, his readiness to talk to them at length, without being patronising or pedantic, his willingness to consider everything, the tolerance in his frivolity, the care for living English, the generosity, the fun. Ford did a great deal of good one way or another, and has never been given full credit for it. He was a good poet and a good novelist too. To dwell on what was comical or exasperating in him is to mislead a generation that cannot meet him.75

  In Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal he remembered his time as Ford’s companion:

  He liked eating and drinking expensively and well and he wanted somebody to talk to meanwhile. Now Ford may have been the biggest liar you like. No doubt he was quite a considerable one, but he was always exceedingly entertaining and the untruths were there not for the sake of untruth but for the sake of turning a mediocre story into a very good one. To feed in his company while he talked was always a pleasure. I’d say he was a kind-hearted man, and I’m fairly sure that the root reason behind a large party he gave that year was not so much that he was anxious to entertain his literary friends as that he thought it a good opportunity for me to dance with the daughter of one of his American colleagues whom I suddenly had a fancy for. Unfortunately he didn’t ask me beforehand whether I could dance! It was rather a failure.76

  Nearly fifty years later Bunting edited a selection of Ford’s poems and without claiming too much for them pointed carefully at some of their attractions. He noted Ford’s muscular approach to writing: ‘Ford sweated up his halliards like a sailor. He took a fresh purchase and another swig again and again till the sail’s last wrinkle was smoothed out.’77 In another way, though, Bunting used Ford’s ambiguities to reinforce his own tirelessly offered message about the importance of imperfection of meaning in poetry: ‘Some vagueness is inherent in his subjects; words – and ears – flinch from some precisions. There are explorations that can never end in discovery, only in willingness to rest content with an unsure glimpse through the mists, an uncertain sound of becks we shall never taste: approximations.’78 At this point Bunting’s introduction changes direction abruptly and, unusually, to illustrate the character of the man rather than the work of the artist. As he had in his letter to Bernard Poli he praised Ford’s kindness, and having established Ford’s human credentials Bunting turns on Hemingway, who had caricatured Ford ruthlessly in Fiesta, Or the Sun Also Rises and particularly in A Moveable Feast, with a burst of sustained, cold fury:

  Among the young men who owed Ford thanks, few owed more than Ernest Hemingway … But his sketch of Ford in A Moveable Feast … [is a] deliberately assembled [lie] to damage the reputation of a dead man who had left no skilled close friend to take vengeance; a lie cunningly adjusted to seem plausible to simple people who had never known either Ford or Hemingway and to load his memory with qualities disgusting to all men and despicable to most.79

  How Ford would have relished the fact that half a century later his bespectacled student had taken revenge on his behalf against the shadowboxing bully whose literary career had benefited so greatly from Ford’s generous patronage.

  As we have seen Ford recalled that Bunting left the transatlantic review because while he was in England he decided that Ford regarded him as an ‘object of charity’. In a radio interview in 1974 Bunting remembered events differently. On the one hand Ford was:

  the most friendly and tolerant boss you could possibly have. I occupied a room on one side of the studio, Ford and his wife were in rooms the other side. But if I turned up at breakfast in the morning with an unannounced and unintroduced young lady Ford would never turn a hair, merely shout that we wanted four eggs or something like that. Altogether life could have been very comfortable. I left for a reason which it is a little difficult to explain. The great drawback to working with Ford at all times was that he was overcome so easily by little worries. Small things would go wrong, they would pile up and then instead of doing a little general cursing and getting on with it as most folk do, Ford would weep on your shoulder. It’s very uncomfortable for a young man of twenty-two to have someone a generation older than himself and very heavy weeping on his shoulder and in the end I couldn’t put up with it and moved on.80

  One of the reasons for Bunting’s abrupt departure from Paris was probably embarrassment. Bunting expanded on the dance at the American Embassy in a letter to Carolyn Burke, biographer of the poet and artist, Mina Loy, written in July 1980. Loy frequently visited Ford for tea and Bunting fell ‘at least half in love’ with her. He was struck by her ‘dark, melancholy beauty that didn’t seem to sentimentalise itself ’, a beauty (‘Oval face, thin eyebrows wide of the eyes’) that he celebrated in his Ode 17, ‘Now that sea’s over that island’. Loy was nearly twenty years older than Bunting but ‘not only did they share an affinity … but Mina let him imagine that she enjoyed his attentions’.81 Ford, as we have seen, frequently sent Bunting to the Gare de Lyon to greet his friends and visitors and on one occasion he was sent there to meet Loy’s sixteen-year-old daughter Joella with a bouquet of flowers on her return from holiday:

  From then on, the young man found himself ‘split, as it were, between mother and daughter.’ Bunting took every opportunity to call, until it occurred to him that Ford had concocted the plan as a way of ridding Mina ‘of my altogether too young attentions. I felt as much attached to her as ever,’ he went on, ‘but it was Joella I now wanted to make up to.’ Next Ford threw a party intended, Bunting thought, to give him the occasion to woo Joella. But the young man, who could not dance, spent the evening glowering at her partner, Tristan Tzara. Mina tried to make up for the evening by inviting him to a gala at the American Embassy. ‘I had had enough drink already to set free my taste for mischief,’ Bunting recalled in a letter that must be quoted at length: ‘When I came in some American lady, goodness knows who, introduced me to a very august looking female sitting with another like her in full evening regalia with a very cutaway bodice. She was said to be the wife of the missionary bishop of somewhere or other. As she held out her hand for it to be kissed in the French fashion I reached beyond it and scooped her exuberant bosom out of its corsage. Scandal. She, however, seemed to like it, set about drinking a great deal, and was presently doing cartwheels on the dancing floor. The scandal of the bishopess (or whatever you call her) was at its worst just as Mina Loy and Joella arrived.’ Joella told him to leave, and he slunk off ‘in disgrace’. When sober, he was so worried that Mina and Joella were angry that he left Paris without saying goodbye.82

  This incident is recalled in the closing couplet of Bunting’s ode to Mina Loy:

  Very likely I shall never meet her again

  or if I do, fear the latch as before.

  In an uncharacteristic departure from his usual line Bunting threw a little light on his ‘adventures’, particularly the troubles with the Parisian authorities, in a letter to Eric Mottram, written more than fifty years after the events:

  When I got drunk with Boris de Kruschev and locked up in the Conciergerie to be tried for a long list of miscellaneous offences I was alleged to have committed, but chiefly for kicking a cop, Ezra, looking for a chess opponent, missed me from the café and looked around, most generously getting me a (damn bad) lawyer and so forth. That was just before I joined Ford Madox Ford on the transatlantic review (no capitals, which upset the critics). The dungeon of the Conciergerie was, probably still is, the same in which Villon landed for burglary, and they stuff everybody in there who is waiting to be tried, whores, thugs, ta
x-dodgers, pickpockets, all higgledy piggledy. Ezra never stopped marvelling that I was there, with a tattered copy of the Grant Testament in my pocket. I knew a great deal of it by heart then, and I think that’s what first drew EPs attention to my merits, if any. Amusing, afterwards, to have been in there with Grosse Margot and the rest of them.83

  Bunting is misremembering or romaticising a little here. He wouldn’t have needed a lawyer before he joined Ford. An account in a 1982 interview is probably closer: ‘I was in Paris with no money, and I used to play chess in a café with a lot of Poles and other oddments about the place, and Ezra wanting a game of chess, came in. Having tried a couple of Poles, he also tried me, and we became quite friendly.’84

  Closer still, perhaps, is an account written in a letter to James Leippert nine years after the event:

  I met him [Pound] in Paris about ten years ago playing a swashbuckling kind of chess. I believed then, as now, that his ‘Propertius’ was the finest of modern poems. Indeed, it was the one that gave me the notion that poetry wasn’t altogether impossible in the XX century. So I made friends. I was then digging the roads outside Paris for a living. I got locked up for a colossal drunk. It was Ezra who discovered me, still half blank with something approaching D.T.s, and perjured himself in the courts to try to get me off. When I came out of quod, and was working as a barman at the Jockey, he introduced me to Ford Madox Ford and I became sub. and sec. to the Transatlantic Review.85

  In his last letter to Mottram Bunting followed his tale of his encounter with the Parisian authorities with an extraordinary meditation:

  Jails and the sea, Quaker mysticism and socialist politics, a lasting unlucky passion, the slums of Lambeth and Hoxton – these have had some effect, I think; but all the reviewers are likely to notice is that my verse has a rather superficial resemblance to Ezra’s. One man, one only, in the quarter century the stuff has been in print, one only, has noticed my manipulations and adaptations of Greek metres. No one, until I proclaimed it myself, perceived Horace somewhere in my background. Condensation must be due to Ezra because he made use of my pun: not, of course, to Dante. And the word Wordsworth has only come into their writings since I practically put it there for them. I don’t want to minimise my debt to Ezra nor my admiration for his work, which should have ‘influenced’ everybody, but my ideas were shaped before I met him and my technique I had to concoct for myself. And, back to condensation: I could never get Ezra to do what I thought enough of it. I’ve usually more to the page than he has. And the silly bugger despised Wordsworth. Oh well! More shreds for your waste paper basket.86