Calvert’s abolitionism gets a solid B+, Bunting noting that ‘the argument is bad though the conclusion is true’. Calvert’s book is still occasionally cited182 but Bunting believed Calvert should have waited to read the translation from the Swedish of the late Andrej Bjerre’s masterpiece of ‘field-naturalist’ criminology, the clear pick of the three titles under review.
It is astonishing how contemporary many of the subjects on which Bunting ventures opinions now seem. His next target, on 16 July 1927, was the UK’s public library system which seems today to be in some kind of nuclear winter. Lack of insight into popular culture and popular taste was the problem for Bunting as it is for today’s vote mining front bencher:
It is no use blaming the public for its garish taste. We are democratic and State-educated. We know what we want, and we are entitled to get it, whether we choose to pay for it privately at the bookseller’s, by voluntary co-operation at the circulating library, or by the compulsory co-operation of a rate in support of the Borough or County Library. Unfortunately, many librarians take our insistence ill. They regard themselves as missionaries of Culture and plenipotentiaries of Education, and it gives them the hump to have to circulate a hundred copies of ‘Did She Fall?’ and only one of ‘Science and the Modern World.’ They regret, lecture, protest, conduct propaganda, mutinously continue to buy and stock works of acknowledged intelligence that leave their shelves so seldom that it would be cheaper and as satisfactory to borrow them from the Central Library for Students.183
Bunting was becoming as skilled at manipulating his constituency as any politician, although he couldn’t resist the opportunity for a spot of light class warfare, setting the ‘high-brow middle class of to-day’ against working class readers: ‘Some of the most illuminating comments on Richardson I have heard were uttered by a cook, and one of the best critics of poetry in the second half of last century was Joseph Skipsey, a working miner.’ Needless to say the library system, its funding, philosophy and organising principles, were decidedly tilted against the latter.
Bunting’s articles for The Outlook offer a fascinating example of the tightrope many of us walk between principle and profession. It must have been a relief for Bunting to get onto relatively neutral ground by contributing to The Outlook’s regular ‘Some of Our Conquerors’ column. He used his first, on the dancer Lydia Sokolova, to showcase her interpretation of Stravinky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’, choreographed by Léonide Massine in 1920, and the second, on Nina Hamnett, to attack contemporary art and art criticism.184 The article on Hamnett that appeared in the issue of 24 September is provocative, an early example of his lifelong need to undermine the establishment:
Most of the pictures, the good as well as the bad, that are exhibited in London are so monotonously alike in subject matter and technique that the painters have to invent mannerisms to distinguish their own work from the general level of dull competence. The bewildered critic, surrounded by bowls of geraniums, dishes of apples, landscapes, roofscapes, and nudes, or portraits which might all have been painted from a group of half-a-dozen assorted models rigged up in miscellaneous suits and surroundings, tries in vain to appraise them by the minute criteria of craftsmanship … with the aid of a labyrinthine technical vocabulary scarcely surpassed by that of medicine. But it would take more hard words than even Mr. Bell has learned to persuade us that many of these masterpieces are anything but careful imitations of what was being done in Paris when the painter passed his pupil-year there. A few well-defined designs that can be learned by heart in half a year, two or three tricks of colour conscientiously repeated, laborious drawing painfully dissimulated as careless ease – that is the London Group as well as the Academy.
The dismissal of the Academy is to be expected but the casual sideswipe at the Bloomsbury art critic, Clive Bell, and the Bloomsbury Group generally, effectively widens the notion of the ‘establishment’ that is under attack. Who does Bunting advance as the alternative to this tide of conformism? Wyndham Lewis, Isaac Rosenberg’s friend David Bomberg and, naturally enough, his own drinking buddy, Nina Hamnett, artists who have ‘perilously kept their independence in a wilderness where the pleasant fruits of patronage don’t grow’. Bunting emphasises the humour in Hamnett’s work, seeing her as the ‘contemporary representative of the long line of English Comic draughtsmen that extends from Hogarth’, and he uses his own experience of her life in the Fitzroy Tavern to describe her art: ‘She seems to view the world as an agreeably ridiculous place, a huge bar-room, full of Rabelaisian tipplers, sometimes sad, always hard up, but never without a joke. She has something of the spirit that animated the immortal partnership of Boz and Phiz.’
In-between the two ‘Some of Our Conquerors’ pieces there were reviews of John Macy’s The Story of the World’s Literature (on 23 July), Harold Montgomery Belgion’s translation of Ramon Fernandez’s Messages (6 August) and René Fülöp-Miller’s The Mind and Face of Bolshevism (27 August). Macy’s survey suffers a real drubbing, chiefly, one suspects, because he had published
those horrible sham translations from Hugo and de Musset and pulled your leg by turning Villon at his most straightforward into – well, let us be polite and call it Wardour Street English? Do you imagine that to be a translation that renders
Plus becquetez d’oyseaulx que dez à couldre
as
Our cheeks, ah me,
Like thimble-tops are full of hollows small?
What cheeks? What hollows small? ‘Translation,’ you write elsewhere, ‘should be one of two things, strictly literal, or recreated art in the language of the translator.’ Which is this?’185
The notable feature of Bunting’s positive review of Fernandez’s Messages is its criticism of Belgion’s translation. This may be because it is a pedantic and precious translation, or it may be because Montgomery Belgion was, as we shall see, one of Pound’s ‘bloomsbuggers’.186 Bunting rejected the opportunity that Fülöp-Miller’s apologia for Bolshevism gave him to express his own Fabian brand of socialism. Instead he turned his review into an attack on the cult of the ‘new’: ‘it never occurs to Herr Fülöp-Miller to trace his list of ‘amazing’ isms not to Bolshevik theories but to the painters and poets of Montparnasse, who are more likely to be Camelots than Communists’.187
Bunting contributed two more book reviews in October 1927 before becoming the newspaper’s full time music critic towards the end of the month. His review of Jack Lindsay’s William Blake: Creative will and the poetic image appeared on 1 October and gave him an opportunity to rehearse his (or at least Skipsey’s) view that Blake was a better metaphysician than poet, while lambasting Lindsay for his execrable prose. Lindsay, like the subject of his book, ‘was always running for shelter under hard words borrowed from the more illiterate philosophers’. Bunting seems to have taken a real dislike to Lindsay. Born in Australia in 1900, he moved permanently to the United Kingdom in 1926 and as a prolific author and publisher (he wrote 170 books in a long life that ended in 1990) he and Bunting would have been moving in similar circles. We can’t assume that Bunting’s hostility was excited by any personal animus but ‘Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Blake’ is more ad hominem than was Bunting’s usual style, although he was always forthright. Indeed Bunting’s style in this particular review is adversely affected by the very problem he identifies in Lindsay’s: ‘Are we so dull as to be unable to accompany Mr. Lindsay in his critical excursions? It is to be hoped that, having by now read some of the other Centenary books, he is ashamed of this sneering superiority, which he assumes on almost every page.’ Bunting’s own sneering superiority mars this, his penultimate review in The Outlook.188
His final outing before becoming the paper’s music critic was a review of Hymen, or the Future of Marriage, written by another Australian, the sexologist Norman Haire. By now Bunting was seriously off form and the patronising tone he adopts suggests that his reviews were becoming more about him than about the book supposedly under consideration. Norman Haire wasn’t exactly a
lightweight. Not only was he controversial, but already at the age of thirty-five, when Hymen, or the Future of Marriage was published, he was also a globally recognised pioneer in sexual studies, including the Steinach vasectomy to increase male potency, which he performed on W. B. Yeats in 1934. After a little headmasterly fun with Haire’s name (‘The cautious Mr. Haire runs a little way behind the hounds’) he coyly introduces his own love life to protest at what is, after all, a serious sociological study of the role of sex in society. Haire, a friend of Havelock Ellis and the first sexologist to have a Harley Street consultancy, deserved better than this response to his contention that marriage was not instituted for the procreation of children:
Heaven forbid! Man is a jealous animal, and the clash of desire and jealousy that the Restoration wits could not contrive to soften will never be avoided by mere benignity. The question (which Mr. Haire avoids asking) is whether it is better in the mind to suffer the pangs and buffets of outrageous jealousy or for us all to consent, as now, to nurse a certain proportion of unacted desires in consideration of being allowed to have our wives and husbands more or less to ourselves. The reviewer is not to answer the question he asks, thank goodness! He is neither philosopher nor prophet, and finds his own very simple love affairs embarrassment enough without undertaking to regulate those of the world at large.189
So, one might ask, why are you reviewing this book? It is an abdication of journalistic responsibility similar to that of his review of Conrad’s The Rover. I doubt that Norman Haire had ever heard of Restoration wits. If anything Bunting’s review becomes even more pompous, patronising, self-serving and embarrassing, but we probably have enough evidence that it was time he moved on to a subject about which he knew something. Bunting was writing for his audience, of course, but it is easy to see what he meant when he told Victoria Forde that he wouldn’t have liked himself much in his Outlook days (see p.145). Two observations stand out from ‘What are we coming to?’. The first is that Haire’s book quotes ‘from learned scientific books long passages in praise of incest’, passages that doubtless informed the conversation with the recently Steinached W. B. Yeats a few years later (see p.173–4). The second is Bunting’s uncanny ability to showcase ideas that seem particularly relevant in 2013, in this case not to his credit. ‘How glad we are to learn, on page 92,’ he sneers airily, ‘that long before Mr. Haire’s earthly paradise is established, “Society will have recognised and legalised the citizen’s right to suicide!”’ Game, set and match to Haire.
For all his talents Bunting of The Outlook is sometimes difficult to like. To be fair to him he was doing a job that he detested. In 1927 he wrote to his twelve-year-old cousin, Billy Swann, back in Throckley:
I sometimes see people playing [tennis] on the hard courts in Lincoln’s Inn Fields when I am on my way to the dusty offices of dreary editors in Fleet Street, who say ‘Nothing today, thankyou’ as though I were a peddlar selling bootlaces instead of the Celebrated Mr Bunting trying to sell articles, but sometimes they print things and then the chief troubles are:-
(a) that they don’t pay enough.
(b) that they don’t pay at all unless you go round and bother them.
(c) they always choose the bad articles instead of the good ones, and the worse an article is the surer they are to stick your name at the bottom of it in big letters so that you get a bad reputation instead of a good one.190
Young Billy might well have asked himself what he’d done to deserve this tale of woe from the glamorous capital.
Mostly I wrote drunk
Bunting told Jonathan Williams in a televised interview that his music criticism was ‘not art in any sense. I was merely a journalist who knew nothing whatever about music pretending to be a music critic. That went well enough. England was full of highbrow papers in those days … I even wrote High Tory leaders [for The Outlook] though I was a socialist.’191 None of his identifiable contributions to The Outlook was a leader although, as we have seen, he was indeed usually able to disguise his socialism.
Bunting wasn’t proud of his music criticism. He told Victoria Forde that a young man earning his weekly guineas is not particular what he writes. Indeed, The Outlook told me that when I wrote sober I was too highbrow for them, so mostly I wrote drunk, and goodness knows what foolish things I may have written. Besides, I hardly recognise the author: I am not the same person I was fifty, forty, thirty years ago, and I don’t think I would like my early self very much if I met him – too conceited by far, and even more ignorant than I am today.192
This casual self-deprecation belies a considerable sensitivity to music. In Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal Jonathan Williams took the poet back to the link between Chopin’s and T. S. Eliot’s Preludes and nudged him on to the next stage of his thinking:
I had thought all along that the sonata was the more likely one to be of use. But I got off on the wrong foot trying to imitate Beethoven’s sonatas, using extremely violent contrasts in tone and speed which don’t actually carry well onto the page, and had to puzzle about that for awhile before I discovered it was better to go back to a simpler way of dealing with the two themes and to take the early or mid-eighteenth-century composers of sonatas – John Christian Bach and Scarlatti – as models to imitate.193
We have seen Bunting’s advanced use of the sonata at work in ‘Villon’, but he admitted that in his early twenties he couldn’t make much of a Bach sonata. In any event his period at the Outlook was clearly one of musical selfdevelopment:
Before my twenties ended, after I had that spell as music critic on the Outlook and was able to spend some money on scores and to listen with the scores before me, I could for a number of years – I’ve lost the art now – read a score and hear in my mind pretty roughly, but accurately enough for my general purposes, how the thing goes. So I read quite a lot of music of that period. Not precisely the same as is now fashionable – Vivaldi was not above the horizon at that time.194
Bunting wanted to get ‘the public to take notice of composers despised at that time’,195 and he singled out Monteverdi, Schoenberg and the Elizabethan composers. He clearly felt himself to be part of the musical public education revolution that Edward Clark had started at the BBC in 1924, deliberately giving ‘the public what it didn’t want until it changed its mind and did’.196 In 1970 he recalled the
squalid state music was in in England before that [Clark]. As late as the middle twenties I remember a respected critic excusing Beethoven’s late quartets on the ground that the poor chap was deaf and couldn’t hear the ghastly noise they made. Caruso sang ‘The Yanks are Coming’ and Dame Clara Butt never gave a concert without ‘Home Sweet Home’ and ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’. Even the cultured few limited their pleasures to Beethoven’s successors or to Wagner and Verdi. Only the real intellectuals could put up with Debussy. Stravinsky was to be endured, but Schoenberg was merely a mad pedant. Mozart was not often heard, Handel only in edited versions: and musical history began with Bach, who was to be put up with in spite of his dryness and terrible difficulty.197
Seen against this philistinism Bunting’s crusading was brave and principled.
The Outlook, however, supplied more than intellectual stimulation. It provided Bunting with an element of stability in what had become a fairly chaotic life:
I suppose I made, between what the Outlook paid me and what other jobs I was able to get on the strength of that one – writing music for a monthly magazine, an occasional review for the Musical Times, sometimes standing in for one of the daily newspaper critics, and so on – I made something like 250 pounds a year. You multiply that by five and you’ve got the present equivalent. It’s not bad for a youngster of 27.198
This recollection, forty years after the event, of a new-found and unfamiliar financial security is seriously compromised by a letter he wrote to Lionel Robbins at its apparent height. In September 1927 he asked Robbins for a loan of £20 with no great hope that his request would be granted. He had pawned all his pos
sessions except his typewriter and had ‘only a very few pounds in prospect’. He was expecting an advance from Duckworth for a book on pubs that never materialised, and he was trying to sell a ‘wardrobetrunk, a kind of portable pantechnicon of a brute of a box … I hate the monstrous thing, but it will hold all one’s clothes and half one’s household effects into the bargain.’199
On 29 October 1927 Bunting began (with a review of four recent piano concerts)200 an almost unbroken run of weekly music articles and reviews that lasted until 19 May 1928. With the responsibility he seems to have discovered a sudden desire to serve the reader thoughtfully:
A seat on the fence may afford a wide view of the contemporary scene, but it gives no one a lead. The critical journalist, writing for a mainly non-technical public, is called upon to give a very decided opinion; if he falters modestly or seeks refuge in discussions of technique he is abdicating his function.201
His judgements certainly weren’t infallible. Arnold Bax’s reputation has survived this mauling in the same article:
Bax is an excellent specimen of the composer whose work has been instructive and valuable to contemporary musicians, but does not seem likely to interest another generation … That he should ever have written this dull work [Fantasy Sonata] betrays his crucial fault – a strained, mechanical, and often trite invention used to cover an embarrassing lack of imagination.
In a review of the same concert The Times described it as ‘full of characteristic poetic feeling … beautiful in sound’.202
Bunting’s tone in his music articles for The Outlook is frequently condescending and scornful but he was capable of unalloyed praise as well. He applauded Segovia’s sublime guitar artistry on 12 November 1927: ‘Segovia does not play his guitar with his mind and fingers only but with something much deeper and more fundamental – his soul, his whole life. One feels that Segovia without his guitar would be like a dumb man; he is like a poet, with it.’203 He was enthusiastic about Peter Warlock’s ‘Capriol’, which may have encouraged their first meeting a few months later. He championed the out-of-fashion Liszt, the Italian composer, Ferruccio Busoni, the ‘pagan mystic’ Stravinsky and the (then at least) bewildering Arnold Schoenberg. He attacked the musical establishment fearlessly, for demanding subsidies for opera, for failing to plan the London season to avoid musical feast and famine, for preventing the British public from hearing Schoenberg’s ‘Gurrelieder’ for eighteen years. He described the London music scene as ‘a wilderness of dull days when nothing is to be heard but mediocrities playing to a meagre audience of deadheads, pupils and relatives’. He warily celebrated William Walton’s early work and was willing to handle roughly popular favourites such as Schubert and Beethoven, Elgar and Franck. And almost anything, it seems, was better than ‘the purely descriptive talent of Dr. Vaughan Williams, whose Lark ascends apparently interminably’.204
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