In March 1928 he was scornful of the undiscriminating (mainly Italian) audience at the Aeolian Hall and the Poltronieri Quartet they were applauding, an ensemble which seemed to prefer noise to music; enchanted by the harpsichordists Mme Wanda Landowska at the Wigmore Hall and Mrs Gordon Woodhouse at the Aeolian, although unfortunately ‘Madame Landowska also composes. Alas!’; impressed by the folk singing of Ursula Greville at the Purcell Rooms and Elisabeth Schumann’s lieder; and disgusted by Sir Thomas Beecham’s butchery of Handel’s ‘Solomon’.205
The Outlook was nearing the end of its life and Bunting had only three more music pieces and two book reviews to come. On 19 May he signed off for ever with a review of Human values and verities by Henry Osborn Taylor. After months of deriding composers, performers, ensembles and audiences one cheers silently that he was able to leave on a positive note, mainly. All Mr Taylor writes ‘has pondered breadth and is worth serious consideration. His writing is clear and, in the best sense, popular. A little too much unction here and there is easily forgiven.’206
His piece on Elizabethan composers encouraged Philip Heseltine and the Scottish composer and music critic, Cecil Gray, to seek him out in Kleinfeldt’s, ostensibly to discuss sixteenth-century music but as likely is the fact that Heseltine recognised a kindred spirit in Bunting. In that period Heseltine and fellow composer Jack Moeran were leading a life of drunken chaos in rural Kent, behaviour that frequently attracted police attention, as when he was arrested for riding his motorbike naked. Hesletine moved to Eynsford in Kent with his lover, Barbara Peache, Moeran, ‘his Maori factotum Hal Collins, and a number of cats’207 in January 1925. Better known as Peter Warlock, Heseltine was a talented composer. By the time he met Bunting he was well known for The Curlew, which linked four poems by Yeats as a song cycle, but he was perhaps even better known as the inspiration for the characters of Julius Halliday in D. H. Lawrence’s 1920 novel Women in Love and the irrepressible drunk, Coleman, in Aldous Huxley’s 1923 satire of the post-war cultural elite, Antic Hay (a novel that also caricatures Wyndham Lewis and Nancy Cunard). There’s no doubt that Elizabethan music was discussed by Gray, Bunting and Warlock in Kleinfeldt’s in the 1920s, just as Shakespeare was, perhaps, fifty years later by Oliver Reed, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton in the Duke of Hamilton a couple of miles up the hill. By 1928 when Warlock met Bunting his fortunes were waning. He had little money and less work and his musical self-confidence had deserted him. We can get some sense of his lifestyle from a letter written to his friend the bon viveur Bruce Blunt on 20 July 1928: ‘Please excuse this tardy reply – I have been in soak for several days and even now (10 a.m.) can, as you see, barely hold a pen.’208
Towards the end of the year Warlock was living in London and spending considerable time in the British Library (at that time housed in the British Museum in Bloomsbury) researching an anthology of drinking songs. Kleinfeldt’s is a few hundred metres from the rear entrance of the museum and since Warlock was spending at least as much time in pubs as in the library it seems reasonable to date Bunting’s acquaintance with him to late 1928 and early 1929. His letters of the time show him to be considerably more preoccupied with contemporary than with Elizabethan music, lending weight perhaps to the possibility that his relationship with Bunting was as social as it was professional. To be fair, Warlock was a genuine expert on Elizabethan music, and he had attempted to correct what he saw as Fellowes’ hijacking of the Byrd Great Service discovery.209 Bunting, too, retained his devotion to Elizabethan music for the rest of his life. Asked, at the age of eighty, which five recordings he would save from a flood he had no hesitation: ‘The Monteverdi bit out of Ariosto … Some Dowland played by Julian Bream … A concerto grossi from Corelli … Any of D. Scarlatti’s five hundred or so harpsichord sonatas played by Ralph Kirkpatrick … And maybe Stravinsky’s Petrouchka.’210
It is also possible that the artist Nina Hamnett was the main attraction as she and Heseltine had been friends since 1920 when Hamnett was installed in Modigliani’s studio near the Café Mère Charlotte in Paris. According to Bunting Heseltine and Gray ‘used often to come to Kleinfeldt’s to drink with me and talk about music. And that was useful because both of them knew more about 16th century music than I did, and in those days hardly anyone knew anything about it. All the present knowledge was simply non-existent in 1926 and 1927.’211
SIMONSIDE INTERLUDE, 1928
The Outlook died in 1928 of ‘a libel action that it didn’t want to face’212 leaving Bunting once again penniless, but a meeting with Margaret de Silver, the wealthy widow of prominent American civil liberties activist, Albert de Silver, who had died under an express train in 1924, gave Bunting the opportunity to escape a London he detested. At that time Margaret was lonely and depressed, dispensing largesse until she met the Italian revolutionary Carlo Tresca in 1931 and found a new investment focus. It is possible that she was attracted by Bunting’s Quaker credentials – she was herself from a wealthy, elite family of Philadelphia Quakers – but her artistic philanthropy was well known and she welcomed many writers as friends to her sophisticated Greenwich Village home.213 It is easy to mock de Silver’s perhaps undiscriminating generosity, as her good friend, the novelist Dawn Powell did: ‘October 6 [1933]: 24 days to raise $500 to save rent, piano and all establishment my cocksureness of future got us into. Decided to do play on Margaret and her house – the fortunate rich woman surrounded by artists, radicals, schools, dancers, etc., all telling her she’s a bourgeois. Her constant expiation of sin of wealth.’214
On the record Bunting himself remembered Margaret de Silver more generously and, naturally enough, certainly not as undiscriminating:
She had been left a great deal of money by her husband … and she spent [it] in the course of her lifetime very largely on subsidizing artists, poets, politicians, lawyers, civil liberties, etc. Before she died, I believe she got rid of practically all of it, just giving it away in this very wonderful and rather discriminating generosity. I met her and found when she had left London that she had left word with Otto Theis that I was to have a subsidy of 200 pounds a year for two years to give me a chance to get going writing. I could hardly refuse! It was the greatest possible help.215
Off the record he was less generous, although sufficiently oblique to remain loyal. During a conversation with Carroll F. Terrell in 1979 he remembered Margaret as his salvation as an artist:
These memories led to the story of John J. Adams, who was sort of an Eliot on one side and a nature lover and vegetarian on the other. He was also the ugliest man in London with a head and face which suggested nothing so much as a bedraggled horse. His chances of getting married seemed to be nil until someone introduced him to the ugliest woman in London, who also happened to be one of the wealthiest women in England. They married and lived quite happily until she died. But before dying, she exacted a promise from him to marry her best friend, who was the second ugliest woman in London. He did with happy consequences. He had inherited all his first wife’s wealth. The happiest consequence of all was that, with John J. Adams’s encouragement, his new wife became a great patron of struggling artists.
The context of the story suggested he was talking about … Margaret de Silva [sic], but he wouldn’t say so directly. I had the impression he didn’t want to be so ungallant as to nominate any candidate for unqualified ugliness.216
Bunting was tired of London and his first instinct was to get as far away from urban life as he possibly could.217 Armed with Margaret’s bursary he immediately fled back to the north of England. He lived for about six months in the Simonside Hills in Northumberland, sharing a small cottage with Ned Wilson, a local shepherd. He remembered that the cottage, Coldside, was seven miles to the nearest cigarette shop and four miles from the local pub.218 This is a bit of Bunting hyperbole, although to be fair to him he was recalling distances from fifty years previously. Coldside Farm is five miles from Rothbury (for cigarettes) and a few hundred yards from the Crown and Thistle public ho
use (which almost certainly sold cigarettes). Nevertheless it was as remote a location as one could find in England, and still is. Only fifteen thousand years ago this part of the world was buried under a kilometre of ice and it feels, more than other parts of northern England, as though that is its natural state, as though the windswept wilderness of the Simonside Hills is showing itself briefly and reluctantly before it welcomes back the ice. It is a cold, unforgiving and beautiful landscape, perfect for a lover of Wordsworth seeking to chisel out his own poetic epitaph. According to Caddel and Flowers, Wilson had moved to Coldside as he was unwell and he and his wife let a room to guests to supplement their reduced income. Wilson’s daughter ‘who was six at the time, remembers Bunting with his moustache and pipe – not surprisingly she found him intimidating! He was writing during the time he was staying with them, and she was under strict instructions not to disturb him.’219
The Crown and Thistle in Forestburn Gate now calls itself The Gate, but it is still really the Crown and Thistle. The pub sign that swings alarmingly in the gusts that roar down from Simonside, just two miles to the north west, depicts a gate sure enough, but a small red velvet crown is perched surreally on the left-hand post and two blowsy thistles bloom underneath the other. In 1928 the building was shared by a blacksmith, Robert Carmichael, and a publican, the pub being the tiny back room. Astonishingly the one photograph that was hanging on the wall of the Crown and Thistle when I visited in 2012 is of Forest Burn AFC, winners of the Coquetdale League 1928–29.
In later life Bunting was not above spinning tall tales about the folly of the inhabitants of the rural north for credulous American friends. He told Carroll F. Terrell a story about a Simonside shepherd who
in his whole life never got further than a small market town nearby, and that only a couple of times. But when he was quite old, he was called upon to be a judge of sheep in some national contest near London. The managers of the contest provided him with a first class train ticket, expenses, and a fancy hotel room. Basil got much fun out of the man’s trying to get out of train windows, not finding the door, and his general disorientation in the modern world. After it was all over, they put him onto the underground for King’s Cross Station, so that all he saw of London was through the window of the train. When they asked him later at home what he thought of London, he said all he could remember about it was that it was very dark.220
Bunting’s audience doesn’t appear to have asked itself how many sheep trials took place within a tube ride of King’s Cross, even in 1928.
By his own admission221 he didn’t achieve much in England but two poems from 1928 survived into Collected Poems, ‘The day being Whitsun’ and ‘Loud intolerant bells’. ‘The day being Whitsun’ evokes a wet and dreary quotidian London:
The day being Whitsun we had pigeon for dinner;
but Richmond in the pitted river saw
mudmirrored mackintosh, a wet southwest
wiped and smeared dampness over Twickenham.
Pools on the bustop’s buttoned tarpaulin.
Wimbledon, Wandsworth, Clapham, the Oval. ‘Lo,
Westminster Palace where the asses jaw!’222
So far, so dismal. Bunting is in south London, and far from happy. (Peter Quartermain has pointed out that Whit Sunday in 1928 fell on 27 May, shortly after The Outlook folded.223) We imagine his wet bus journey from Richmond in south west London to Westminster via the suburbs of Twickenham, Wimbledon and Wandsworth and up through Clapham, past the Surrey County Cricket Club ground at the Oval, over Vauxhall or Lambeth Bridge to the Houses of Parliament where politicians debate (‘asses jaw’). ‘Asses jaw’ also invokes a biblical scene of course. In Judges Samson takes bloody revenge on the Philistines for the loss of his wife: ‘And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth his hand, and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. And Sampson said, With the jawbone of an ass have I slain a thousand men.’224 The suggestion is that although politicians are asses their talk can be lethal. We might think that he has in mind the First World War, a conflict he considered an unnecessary and unjustified construct of the European business and political elite, but the final stanza of the poem suggests that his gloom is deepened not by the political classes but by their victims:
Endless disappointed buckshee-hunt!
Suburb and city giftless garden and street,
and the sky alight of an evening stubborn
and mute by day and never rei novae
inter rudes artium homines.
never a spark of sedition
amongst the uneducated workingmen.225
The quotation from Livy is a little ugly, but it doesn’t spoil the surprising turn the poem takes. Perhaps his time teaching at the Adult School in Lemington had convinced him that a proletarian revolution was impossible in a society that accepted the insults and injuries the ruling classes inflicted upon it with cheerful stoicism.
‘Loud intolerant bells’, by constrast, attacks the Church as the chief agent of betrayal, a target that was highlighted by the title under which it appeared in 1930 in Burling’s first collection, Redimiculum Matellarum, ‘While shepherds watched’. Its first stanza contains hints of the Georgian style from which Bunting was desperate to distance himself:
Each fettered ghost slips to his several grave
Loud intolerant bells (the shrinking nightflower closes
tenderly round its stars to baulk their hectoring)
orate to deaf hills where the olive stirs and dozes
in easeless age, dim to farce of man’s fashioning.
To my ears there is something a little too Rupert Brooke about these tender closings and dozing olives, but the second stanza is a less bucolic call to action:
Shepherds away! They toll throngs to your solitude
and their inquisitive harangue will disembody
shames and delights, all private features of your mood,
flay out your latencies, sieve your hopes, fray your shoddy.
The Church then will rob you of your humanity, and the deft reference to the Inquisition suggests that it will do so by force. To retain our simple virtues and pleasures we must get away from the Church and the final stanza makes it clear that there is no point in trying to reach beyond the Church to get direct access to the mysteries it has politicised for itself and its blood brother, the ruling elite:
The distant gods enorbed in bright indifference
whom we confess creatures or abstracts of our spirit,
unadored, absorbed into the incoherence,
leave dessicated names: rabbits sucked by ferrets.226
Even if they cared the pagan deities would be unable to help. They have been sucked dry by priests.
These short poems provide a useful opportunity to assess the development of the 28-year-old poet’s technique, for there is a great deal going on under their surfaces. They also help us to understand what Bunting meant by his insistence that sound in a poem carries ‘meaning’. In ‘Loud intolerant bells’ Bunting weaves a web of sound which gives the stanzas a unique musical quality, and the music of the language both expresses and creates some of the complex tensions in the poem. The bells evoke musicality immediately and the repetition and echoes of particular sounds help to structure the poem. Of course, good poetry always uses music and metre to deliver and create meaning, but here Bunting focuses very deliberately on sound as an object, as well as a mechanism, and in particular ‘tolling’, a word that also intimates rhythm. Specifically ‘tolling’ suggests monotony and regular, restricted (‘fettered’) measure. The sound doesn’t ring out a melody but ‘tolls’ ominously.
The sound ‘toll’ appears four times in the first two stanzas: ‘intolerant’, ‘olive’, ‘toll … solitude’. But even these few cases have an audible impact. In both stanzas the first ‘toll’ echoes disturbingly in the word that follows (‘intolerant … olive’; ‘toll … solitude’). The sound invades the peace of the language, occupying the phonetic space of the words ‘olive’ and
‘solitude’. This is emphasised at a semantic level in the second stanza where the ‘inquisitive harangue’ of the tolling threatens to ‘disembody’ and ‘fray’ the shepherds’ privacy and ‘solitude’. The effect is condensed in the phrase ‘toll throngs to your solitude’, whereas in the first stanza the echo of ‘intolerant’ in ‘olive’ is protracted over three lines. This compression amplifies and intensifies the effect, and amplification (noise) could be read as a negative and disruptive force in the poem. The very first word, ‘loud’, threatens the other images in the first stanza: the ‘shrinking nightflower closes/tenderly round its stars to baulk [the loud bells’] hectoring’. The parenthesis emphasises discomfort in these two lines, the whole threatened image trying to defend itself within a protective shield, the parenthesis closing around the lines reflecting the nightflower closing around its stars. And at a denotative level the image is comparatively ‘tender’ and vulnerable, in contrast to the loud, obnoxious bells.
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