at wilfulness until the gods require
renewed inevitable hopeless calm
and the foam dies and we again subside
into our catalepsy, dreaming foam,
while the dry shore awaits another tide.153
The poem starts at low tide with the poet at one with nature in a kind of dynamic inertia. Underneath the ‘midday parched and numb’ is ‘expectation’, the immobility is ‘restless’, the sterility ‘anguished’, ‘indifference’ threatens annihilation. With full tide comes intense erotic fulfilment as ‘mad waves spring, braceletted with foam’, intense but brief before the ‘inevitable’ subsidence of tide and desire. ‘I am agog for foam’ draws heavily on Mallarmé’s ‘Les Fenêtres’ and Bunting had doubts about its lasting value but retained it in his various collections out of deference to Yeats.154
Bunting’s first translation to survive into Collected Poems, ‘Darling of Gods and Men’, also dates from 1927. Pound had been encouraging young poets to translate the classics for many years, apparently unconcerned that his own translations had aroused the derision of readers who had even a scant knowledge of the original. ‘If Mr Pound were a professor of Latin,’ snorted Professor William Gardner Hale of the University of Chicago, when he read the parts of Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ that Harriet Monroe dared to print in Poetry, ‘there would be nothing left for him but suicide.’155 ‘Translation is … good training’, Pound wrote in ‘A Retrospect’ in 1918156 and in ‘Notes on Elizabethan Classicists’, published in The Egoist the previous year he justified his cavalier approach to the technicalities of translation as an artistic obligation:
A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations; or follows it. The Victorians in lesser degree had FitzGerald, and Swinburne’s Villon, and Rossetti … we have long since fallen under the blight of the Miltonic or noise tradition, to a stilted dialect in translating the classics, a dialect which imitates the idiom of the ancients rather than seeking their meaning, a state of mind which aims at ‘teaching the boy his Latin’ or Greek or whatever it may be, but has long since ceased to care for the beauty of the original; or which perhaps thinks ‘appreciation’ obligatory, and the meaning and content mere accessories.157
Bunting, as we shall see, strongly endorsed Pound’s position in a review of E. Stuart Bates’ Modern Translation in the Criterion in July 1936. The job of the translator is to ‘make an English poem, not to explain a foreign one’.158 In his Collected Poems Bunting collected many of his translations in a section he called ‘Overdrafts’, a subject about which he sadly came to know quite a lot. His only comment on these translations is an oblique statement of his modus operandi, ‘It would be gratuitous to assume that a mistranslation is unintentional.’159
‘Darling of Gods and Men’ renders Lucretius’ invocation to Venus directly in clear, confident modern English, entirely free of the archaisms from which many previous translations suffer:
Therefore, since you alone control the sum of things
and nothing without you comes forth into the light
and nothing beautiful or glorious can be
without you, Alma Venus! trim my poetry
with your grace; and give peace to write and read and think.160
Finding publishers for his poetry was, however, a challenge. He submitted some to Poetry in 1926 and asked for them to be returned if Harriet Monroe was ‘unable to use them’. Monroe’s handwritten note on the letter is deadly, ‘Ret’d too complicated for me!’161
Humanity, information, throb
The Leightonian of October 1927 reported that ‘Basil Bunting is understood either to have shaved or to have grown a beard (we forget the phase) and to spend his evenings as Musical critic of The Outlook.’162 Apart from the slightly dippy review of Conrad’s novel The Rover in the transatlantic review of July 1924 the bulk of Bunting’s journalistic output during the 1920s appeared in The Outlook, a Conservative London weekly to which his old friend Lionel Robbins contributed regularly in 1926 and 1927. It is likely, as Susan Howson says, that Robbins had a hand in finding Bunting work there.163
Bunting wrote reviews and articles from February to October 1927, when he became the paper’s official music critic until it closed in 1928. Otto Theis, the literary editor of The Outlook, was looking for a music critic and had called Bunting at Kleinfeldt’s, a pub in Charlotte Street in London’s West End, where he was a regular. ‘I used to go to Kleinfeldt’s to meet Nina Hamnett, and then people came to meet both of us there, and, gradually, from being a quiet place where a small number of people met from time to time, it became more and more crowded.’ Bunting claimed to have told Theis that he didn’t know ‘a damn thing’ about music,164 but he got the job anyway.
The pub Bunting (and many others) referred to as ‘Kleinfeldt’s’ was never so-called. The licence to run the Fitzroy, described by Augustus John as ‘the Clapham Junction of the world’,165 was bought in 1919 by Judah Morris Kleinfeldt, an immigrant from Polish Russia, who had arrived in London with fourpence in his pocket and who quickly became an influential figure in the Jewish community of London’s West End. Previously called the Hundred Marks (because it was the favourite pub of the West End’s German community that had grown rapidly until war became inevitable), the Fitzroy, situated on the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street, acquired its current name as soon as Kleinfeldt bought the licence.166 It quickly became the epicentre of London’s Bohemia. The undisputed queen of Bohemia was Bunting’s friend, Nina Hamnett, who had rejected her Welsh background for study at the London School of Art before spending time in Montparnasse with her lover, Roger Fry (‘fidgety’), where she was influenced by Modigliani and Sickert. It was Hamnett who decided to settle her court at the Fitzroy where ‘sitting erect on her bar stool, she ruled supreme’.167 Hamnett bought the pub an autograph book which, as Sally Fiber says, ‘vividly reflected the artistic and literary clientele of the tavern from 1927 to 1930’, the time of Bunting’s apparent near-residence there.
The customers not only signed their names but composed music, did sketches and wrote poetry. E. J. Moeran, the volatile Irish composer, scribbled eight bars of his First Rhapsody, while Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine), Constant Lambert, Michael Birkbeck and Dennis Arnold all contributed some music. Artistically Nina set an example by sketching people drinking at the bar, and Geoffrey Nelson drew the ‘snob windows’. But the most famous artist was undoubtedly Augustus John.168
Bunting professed to detest London, and he probably did, but his relationship with the city was complex. Later in life he was astonished by the deterioration he perceived in London, and cast an enrosed eye on the Bohemia of the 1920s. ‘How can a city which once was more than half civilised,’ he asked Roger Guedalla in his 70s,
have become so barbarous within my lifetime? There used to be teashops in no hurry, restaurants where half a bottle of tolerable claret cost less then a shilling, a Café Royale where you were sure to meet someone worth talking to, and reasonably efficient cheap public transport. There was a madam – what was her name? – in Jermyn Street whom any personable young man could count on when his pockets were empty for a guinea, tea and toast, and chatter; and Harold Monro feeding poor poets while he listened; and the shop in Red Lion Street where pork and pease pudding cost one penny, take it away, or a halfpenny more for the use of a plate.169
Bunting was in love with one of Nina Hamnett’s friends, Helen Rowe, during this period. According to Susan Howson he may have lived with her for a short time.
But, as Lionel [Robbins] recorded in his diary, by 1921 she had a child by Dr Hans Egli, who was also at the London School of Economics in 1919–21 and whom she married. Lionel did not identify her husband, but Bunting did when he wrote to Ezra Pound in December 1926. She was a fine writer, Bunting told Pound, ‘who was about to do good work, when she got married, produced three infants and became so taken up with domestic duties that I doubt whether she will ever make time to do anything
’.170
There’s no doubt that Bunting had a close relationship with Helen Rowe. Two days after he fled London for Paris in 1923 he wrote to Robbins:
I ran away from London on Friday. I have quarrelled with Helen (my fault) & London has become unbearable to me.171
Helen was much on his mind at that time. He was still in touch with her in May 1925. Christabel Dennison recorded in her diary for 18 May that Bunting, during his week-long holiday with her and Adams, ‘left to go into the country for a day or two. I devine to look up his old love Helen Egli whose husband is away on military service in Switzerland.’ 172
He dedicated a poem he wrote in 1927, ‘Empty vast days …’ to Helen:
Empty vast days built in the waste memory seem a jail for
thoughts grown stale in the mind, tardy of birth, rank and inflexible:
love and slow selfpraise, even grief ’s cogency, all emotions
timetamed whimper and shame changes the past brought to no utterance.
Ten or ten thousand, does it much signify, Helen, how we
date fantasmal events, London or Troy. Let Polyhymnia
strong with cadence multiply song, voices enmeshed by music
respond bringing the savour of our sadness or delight again.173
The notion that ‘shame changes the past brought to no utterance’ eerily reaches forward nearly forty years to Briggflatts. As a statement about his relationship with Helen Rowe it seems to me that Bunting here regrets an opportunity unfulfilled, an affair acknowledged but unconsummated. The replacement of Helen of Troy by Polyhymnia suggests that an erotic interest has been transferred to an artistic obligation, a greater, almost sacred good.174 Another poem that survives from 1927, ‘Personal Column’, suggests that the relationship with Helen Rowe, however it was configured, had left him emotionally disarrayed:
… As to my heart, that may as well be forgotten
or labelled: Owner will dispose of same
to a good home, refs. exchgd., h.&c.,
previous experience desired but not essential
or let on a short lease to suit convenience.175
It isn’t a good poem and we must assume that it survived the poet’s selfediting because it had such charged autobiographical significance.
Bunting’s inaugural contribution to The Outlook was ‘Throb: An Inquiry’, a satire on contemporary British journalism that appeared on 19 February 1927. The ‘greatest journalist in England’ advises Bunting’s imaginary friend that to ‘succeed in journalism … you must make your stuff Human, Throbbing, and Informative. Informative you are; Human you may become; but you will never manage the Throb.’ Bunting and his wannabe journalist friend set off to discover Throb, encountering a fourth dimension, Snap, on the way. Having found some of the great prose stylists of the previous three centuries (Browne, Gibbon, Johnson, Swift and Burke) disastrously lacking in Throb, the pair turn to modern journalists to see if they can do better, and of course they can:
After a very short study we discovered that there are two distinct schools of reporting, the one in use in twopenny papers, the other in penny ones. The ‘Times’ of January 26th, 1927, describes an incident thus: –
Two horses attached to a van bolted from Lumley-street into Oxford-street yesterday and then turning into Duke-street ran on the pavement and crashed into the window of S. and M., Limited, costumiers and furriers.
“Attached” means “harnessed,” not “glued” or “nailed”.
The ‘Evening News,’ January 25th, 1927, has it: –
Many pedestrians in Oxford-street to-day ran wildly for safety when a pair of horses, attached to one of Selfridge’s vans, took fright, bolted, and careered madly along the busy street, etc., etc.
Commas, used by the ‘Times’ for formality, are used here for speed.
The ‘Times’ account is Informative, The ‘Evening News’ account is Human, Throbbing and Informative. The most obvious difference between them is that while the ‘Times’ begins by relating the matter in hand the ‘Evening News’ practises a kind of inversion and puts one of the minor consequences first.
The purpose of the inversion is to make the article Human. That conventionally depraved half-wit, the Office-boy, for whom journalists delight to toil, is sure to be tickled by a vision of pedestrians (staid persons) running wildly, whereas he might be bored by mere runaway horses.176
This gentle satire is designed to amuse but it makes a serious point about persuasive prose, suggesting that Bunting had been studying his craft. It foreshadows an essay written eight years later when Bunting was living in Tenerife. In ‘Observations on Left-Wing Papers’, unpublished until 1995, he advised newspapers and journalists on the use of propaganda:
Propaganda can only have a durable effect when it is based on full and exact information, without exaggeration or false implication. If you write ‘Negroes are lynched’ the public will understand you to mean ‘all (or at least a great proportion of) negroes are lynched’. But when it has had time to reflect, it perceives that this is not true, and you not only fail to produce the effect you intended but actually create distrust and hostility in your readers … The argument against lynching is that it is wrong for a fragment of the public to take the law into its own hands, and that it is wrong to discriminate against a man on racial grounds. Effective propaganda against it can only be made on those lines, backed up with accurate information.177
In other words effective journalism needs to rouse and persuade, while being believable, just and informative: Humanity, Information, Throb.
‘Alas! The Coster’s End’ which appeared on 26 March 1927 is a remarkable display of retail prescience that anticipates today’s battle for the hearts and minds of consumers. It effectively predicts the death of the High Street eighty years before it started to happen, although Bunting does stretch this one observation out to a half page; more signs of craft. The article laments the enforced disappearance of costermongers from London’s streets. Costermongers were the mobile street traders who distributed vegetables, fish and meat to the suburbs from central markets such as Covent Garden (fruit and vegetables), Smithfield (meat) and Billingsgate (fish). The following sentence could, modernised a little, be seen in any lament for the demise of small retailers in 2013:
To-day the poor shopkeeper, like the coster, is browbeaten as an economic anachronism by the apologists of the big multiple shops; the coster has been tamed by the Board of Education and lives as decent and orderly a life as his means permit; but the old rivalry is still there and it looks as though the shop may triumph awhile over the barrow before it too gives way before the ten thousand branches of Stunter’s Stupendous Stores.
Bunting was learning to disguise his own views and prejudices to appeal to his readership. It is amusing to see him celebrating a disappearing London that in reality he had come to detest:
Needy ghosts who write books of Oriental travels for illustrious authors must henceforth journey to Constantinople to see a Bazaar instead of strolling observantly down Berwick Street of a Saturday evening between stalls canopied with lace and draped in real silk stockings at three-and-six the pair. The prodigal strewings of vegetable matter in the gutters will be missed by Borough scavengers, themselves vegetating on the Dole. What will bank holiday be like without a Pearly King or Epsom without a ‘moke’?178
The extent of the development of Bunting’s craft is demonstrated by this willingness to write what his audience wanted to read rather than what he necessarily believed. There is another small example of this in his next article in The Outlook, which was a review on 7 May 1927 of London’s Squares and How to Save Them: ‘The sentimental Cockney middle-classes will certainly resist such a deprivation [of “fresh air, sunlight, greenness and good-temper”] with all their usual posthaste fervour as soon as it is too late to prevent it. The hoardings are up around Mornington Crescent, Endsleigh Gardens have become a Friends’ House.’ The conversion of a public space into a Quaker Meeting House is hardly som
ething one would expect Bunting to have objected to very strongly, but The Outlook was a conservative weekly and, with the memory of the sacrifice of the First World War still fresh in the public memory, pacifists were a legitimate target. ‘Endsleigh Gardens have become a Friends’ House’ was Throb. But he wasn’t yet a master of disguise and he couldn’t keep it up. A few lines later he lets his true Fabian colours show:
while all other important cities have such gardens [as those in Bloomsbury], publicly owned and open to the public, we in London have allowed them to be private property, shut up, hidden behind forbidding iron railings and generally deserted. It is nothing to be proud of that it was possible for so long to prevent patients from the adjacent hospitals from walking in Queen’s Square or that the gardens of Russell Square should be reserved for the use of a handful of residents who are careful to lock the gate after entering.
So he still had a bit to learn and though he was on form in this review his closing observation might have jarred with a few of his readers: ‘It is possible but unlikely that these fickle forces will combine to give the squares to the people, but is more probable that London will continue to edify us with an exhibition of that imbecile corporate timidity known approvingly to England as “muddling through”.’179 This had, perhaps, Humanity, but no Throb. Interestingly, three weeks later his review of Edgar Thomas’ The Economics of Small Holdings gave him a platform for a similar assault on ‘the system’, but he gave the opportunity a wide berth so perhaps he had been warned to throw a blanket over the Fabian fire, at least as far as readers of The Outlook were concerned.180
His next assignment, a review of three recent titles on crime and punishment, was a gift for so experienced a convict. ‘Crime and Punishment’ appeared in the issue of 4 June 1927. It is a thoughtful and insightful consideration of Andreas Bjerre’s The Psychology of Murder and E. Ray Calvert’s Capital Punishment in the Twentieth Century. A third title, Sydney A. Moseley’s The Convict of To-day, is put away in a dismissive final paragraph that smokes with contempt: ‘“The Convict of To-day” is a poor journalistic write-up of English prisons, full of irrelevancies and inaccuracies. It is difficult to believe that the author is really as ignorant, prejudiced, and sensational as he appears in his work.’181
A Strong Song Tows Us Page 18
