A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  The famous German dramatist was Gerhart Hauptmann whose appearance in Rapallo Bunting gently satirised in ‘Aus Dem Zweiten Reich’:

  The renowned author of

  more plays than Shakespeare

  stopped and did his hair

  with a pocket glass

  before entering the village,

  afraid they wouldnt recognize

  caricature and picturepostcard,

  that windswept chevelure.

  Who talked about poetry,

  and he said nothing at all;

  plays,

  and he said nothing at all;

  politics,

  and he stirred as if a flea

  bit him

  but wouldnt let on in company.297

  By 1931, when Bunting wrote ‘Aus Dem Zweiten Reich’, the 69-year-old Hauptmann was a Nobel laureate with thirteen novels and thirty-two plays under his belt.

  Rapallo’s other resident Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats, described Pound’s apartment:

  I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years lived in rooms opening onto a flat roof by the sea. For the last hour we have sat upon the roof which is also a garden, discussing that immense poem of which but seven and twenty cantos are already published.298

  Bunting thought Pound’s apartment ‘queer … like a couple of parallel corridors cut into sections. Unfinished wall decorations. Drawings by Lewis, scupltures by Brzeska, etc. His wife’s excellent watercolours everywhere … Small magazines lying about. Not very many books. There is no alternative to the homemade chairs.’299

  Ezra Pound had moved to Rapallo with his wife, the painter Dorothy Shakespear, in 1924, after sixteen years in London and Paris, and he stayed there until he was arrested for treason in May 1945. He wrote most of The Cantos in Rapallo and ran his ‘Ezuversity’ from their attic apartment in Palazzo Baratti, a huge and impressive building on the seafront, just behind the Lungomare. (If you look up at Palazzo Baratti from the sea the Pounds’ apartment occupied the right half of the top floor.)

  The Buntings lived at Villa Castruccio, ‘a peasant’s cottage’,300 on a path going uphill from the Funivia in Rapallo (the house is still there but it is no longer called Castruccio) until late 1932, when they moved to an apartment at Corso Cristoforo Colombo 30/7 nearer the seafront. W. B. Yeats and his wife George had taken an apartment in what was then and is still one of the largest and most impressive buildings on the west side of the River Borte, Palazzo Cardile on Corso Cristoforo Colombo, from 1928 to 1930. Homer and Isabel Pound, Pound’s parents, took it when the Yeatses departed.

  Bunting saw plenty of Pound: ‘I didn’t on the whole work with Pound. I did some odd jobs for him. Proof-reading, things of that sort. Otherwise we met very frequently, I dare say, four times a week, and we’d spend several hours together in the afternoon or evening. That was always instructive and useful. Pound was very willing to impart whatever help he could.’301

  Ezra’s savage disciple

  Bunting continued to write and to mix with the artistic community that was gathering around Pound in Rapallo, earning him Yeats’ description as ‘one of Ezra’s more savage disciples’: ‘He got into jail as a pacifist and then for assaulting the police and carrying concealed weapons and he is now writing up Antille’s [sic] music. George and I keep him at a distance and yet I have no doubt that just such as he surrounded Shakespeare’s theatre, when it was denounced by the first Puritans.’302 Many years later Bunting told the Yeats Summer School in Sligo that Yeats was ‘disturbed by my conversation, though he is also kind enough to say that he had admired my verse. The conversation was about God and the church, and young men are apt to be very summary in their judgements of such matters, and crude in expressing them.’303 This impression was confirmed by Bunting’s chance remark about Shelley:

  We were sitting inside the café on a wet afternoon, eating cakes, George Antheil and I, when Yeats joined us. He must have said something about Shelley, when I, intending to wave a red flag at the bull to liven up the afternoon, announced that there was no good in Shelley whatsoever, except perhaps that he had recommended incest, which I said, must be the best foundation for domestic tranquility. Yeats did not bother to come to Shelley’s rescue, but began considering my proposition about incest in detail. I forget what he had to say about it, but presently he said: “Ssshh! If the general public could overhear the conversation of poets, they would hhhang the lot of us.”304

  Bunting recalled their meeting in Rapallo: ‘I dined or lunched or supped or underwent some similar formal presentation in the flat he had taken at the top of a big modern block overlooking the bay. I remember nothing about it, but a little later at some similar meeting he astonished me by reciting to his guests the whole twenty-eight lines of one of my poems, word-perfect, though to me, at first, almost unrecognisable in his hieratic chant.’305

  The poem Yeats recited was ‘I am agog for foam’. Shortly after meeting Bunting Yeats asked him to dinner, Bunting recalled at a reading in London in 1980,

  and meanwhile he had taken the trouble to look at what little work I had available then and do you know, the old man had (it’s mere decency of course to learn two or three lines out of the poet you’re entertaining and quote them – it shows you’ve read the thing) but he read all the twenty odd lines of this poem, he spouted them off by heart and much later again he referred to it and obviously Yeats liked it; so though it’s early stuff and not the stuff I’ve devoted myself to trying to make it has his sanction.306

  Ezra’s savage disciple was sufficiently close to Yeats to witness (with Pound) Yeats’ emergency will on 21 December 1929 (although, as he freely admitted, ‘the next passerby would have done as well for that’)307 and to collect his children, Michael and Anne, from their Swiss school in May 1930.308

  Bunting enjoyed the great man’s company: ‘Yeats liked gossip. He was ready to talk about anything at anytime. He was always entertaining, often very intelligent on whatever you chose to talk about.’309 There was a dark side to Yeats’ gossip however. After a confusing anecdote about an encounter in Cefalu between the occultist Aleister Crowley, his student, the British Modernist novelist Mary Butts, and a goat, Bunting noted that sometimes ‘his pleasure in scandals which must have been terrible to the people concerned rather disgusted me’.310 Bunting certainly was no more overawed by Yeats than he had been by Eliot:

  If conversation were in any danger of flagging, you could always revive it by a reference, in any context, to George Moore. Yeats’s invective about Moore was always as fresh as though their difference had happened only yesterday … Fortunately, one of the first pieces of literary work I ever did had been done for George Moore, so that the bait was always at hand and the big fish always rose to it.311

  Victoria Forde offers some details about the relationship between the Bunting and Yeats families, gleaned many years later from Bunting’s ‘American’ family: ‘Yeats’s father, the painter Jack Butler Yeats, gave the first Bunting child a playhouse, and W. B. Yeats himself became a friend of Basil’s mother, a great reader of astrology books. For the rest of her life she remembered with pride that she had read Yeats’ horoscope.’312 Forde does not record the source for this and it neatly encapsulates the problem of writing an authoritative life of Bunting. For a start, Yeats’ father, John Butler Yeats, had died in February 1922, nearly ten years before Bourtai was born. WBY’s brother, who was Jack,313 may have supplied the playhouse but who is remembering? Bunting? Bourtai? Marian? It is understandable that someone who was four years old at the time doesn’t know the difference between W. B. Yeats’ brother and his father but it throws some doubt on the anecdotal evidence that has been used to build a picture of Bunting’s life. In fact Bunting was quite explicit about the source of the playhouse; Yeats himself was the donor: ‘Yeats was kind and thoughtful of ot
her people. His children possessed a very splendid Wendy-house, but had grown out of it. He handed it over to my little daughter and she and the dog wore it out in a year or two. It must have been troublesome to arrange its transport to Italy. We could never have afforded such an expensive toy.’314

  My guess is that Bunting himself originated the confusing wrinkle to the playhouse story. There is also something very Bunting about the idea of his mother being a ‘great reader of astrology books’. Bunting had an interesting take on Yeats’ magic.

  Yeats was ill a good deal of the time. He had the disease which was called, in those days, Malta fever, because Maltese were said to catch it from the goats whose milk they drank; but it had been called relapsing fever, a better name, since patients are continually getting better and then suddenly showing all the symptoms again as badly as ever or even worse. At one time Yeats certainly thought that he was dying, and that is why Ezra Pound and I were suddenly called to witness his will. However, he got better again and again and relapsed again and again. At one time he would be strolling about the town – a little town still in those days – and at another he would be what the hospitals now call ‘serious’. This went on so long that he began to think he had been bewitched, so that the doctors were helpless: what he needed was a powerful and well-disposed wizard. But for magic he had only himself to rely on in that time and place, and he was often too ill even to think fruitfully about magic. However he did at last convince himself – perhaps I ought to rephrase that – he did at last manage to humbug himself into believing that his illness was caused by a certain ring he wore, and the next time he was strong enough to venture out, he and Mrs Yeats made their way to the end of the mole and cast the ring into the sea, with the appropriate formula; and it seemed to work, for that time he did not relapse, which confirmed him in his half-belief in magic.315

  In his Sligo lecture Bunting padded out his recollections of Yeats in Rapallo with a tedious story involving himself, Ezra and Homer Pound, the Italian poet Sem Benelli, Yeats and a suicidal Persian cat. He was aware that he was padding it out. He described the lecture to the editor of Agenda, William Cookson, as ‘a lot of desultory blah but leading gently to some suggestions that I think are not without relevance. At any rate it isn’t disguised in the jabber of literary criticism.’316 He was also well aware that his audience knew a great deal more about Yeats than he did but these personal anecdotes, however tangential to his subject, gave him a slight edge. When he returned to his subject, leaving the deranged cat ‘sitting in the sun with that kindest of old men [Homer Pound]’, it was to the subject of magic:

  Sometimes he tried to convince me that magic, theosophy, and the rest of his paraphernalia were not just a subjective source of symbols for him, but were real, objective happenings. He gave me some notion of Madame Blavatsky, and her mixture of obvious charlatanry with feats which he thought she really believed, and which he was, provisionally, willing to believe. I had met Annie Besant and had been impressed by the force of her personality, but Yeats said she was not to be mentioned in the same breath with Blavatsky.317

  Bunting regarded Yeats’ ‘half belief’ in magic as a kind of poetic pragmatism. Rosicrucianism, theosophy and freemasonry equipped Yeats with a set of symbols that had not been worked to death by previous poets (as legendary Ireland had been so worked), and it was too precious a resource to allow scepticism to get in the way of its exploitation, even if the scepticism was there underneath. Yeats belonged with the mass of semireligious people: his ‘faith’ was no less real than it was for a ‘great many people who have what they call religious beliefs’ but he was no mystic: ‘Their faith is not that of the mystics who have seen God nor the philosophers who have invented him. In most cases I think it is merely self-indulgence, and in others, as with Yeats, a utility, a means to perfectly human ends.’318

  Bunting also rightly detected a political dimension to Yeats’ magic. Yeats’ commitment to the occult and to reactionary politics are inextricably linked319 and Bunting’s observation that magic is ‘primarily a means of exercising power or persuading yourself that you can’ is acute:

  love of power underlines a great deal of what is not even superficially mystical in his poetry. He thought of himself as one of a governing class, with obligations, but with privileges too. Disdain of shopkeepers, readiness to snub stone-breakers with political opinions, contempt for the mob, even when the mob was an abstraction, show clearly enough that Yeats felt he had a right to power that he did not share with the greater part of mankind. If you have none of the real power of armies and police and huge fortunes, magic is an unsatisfactory, but often irresistible way of pretending to yourself that you have an equivalent.320

  Bunting was also correct to point out that we tend to view Yeats’ ‘Fascism’ (and that of Eliot, ‘the more insidious for being disguised as an English gentleman’, and Pound) through a false prism. Fascism is a technical term that requires careful handling. Partly we are so horrified by the brutal excesses of inter-war Fascist machines that there is a feeling that to treat the subject as suitable for serious debate is to invite its reappearance. Partly, too, by the time Bunting was addressing the Yeats Society in Sligo in 1973 the prevalence of Marxist critiques of twentieth-century political history had debased the term. The problem of assimilating into a Marxist system a proletarian-based revolution that, ideologically at least, is the antithesis of that system had reduced Fascism to little more than paramilitary capitalism. We retain the term because its disturbing associations are useful, but its allinclusiveness has rendered it virtually meaningless.321

  Ideologically Fascism is committed to continual renewal and to continual preservation, fusing past and future. Another way of putting it is that it is, as Stanislav Andreski demonstrated, both the ‘extremism of the centre’ and the ‘centrism of the extremists’.322 But in the 1930s those forces were already clearly classifiable. Fascism was founded on a strong sense of racial and national identity, an urgent militarism that expands that racism and nationalism into foreign affairs, a violent antipathy to socialism (although not to a number of significant socialist principles), and a clearly defined ruling elite, supporting a charismatic leader whose presidency over a totalitarian state is uninterrupted. Yeats, Eliot and thousands of other intellectuals were ‘Fascists’ in this sense. Fascism was intellectually, morally, socially and philosophically defensible, even attractive, in the first half of the 1930s. As Gertrude Himmelfarb observed, ‘passive, social anti-Semitism was “the prerogative of English gentlemen”’.323 The evil that Fascism spawned was unimaginable to the fashionable intellectual elite in 1932 and we should not allow anachronistic judgements to prevail. Eliot’s casual anti-Semitism is disgusting: but it doesn’t make Eliot a Nazi sympathiser. Yeats’ flirtation with Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts was borne of a desire for national resurgence, not racism. Pound was a different matter. Pound couldn’t accept that any intellectual could be honest in opposing Fascism. In British Union Quarterly, an unashamedly Fascist review, he ‘chided Eliot for declaring that there was no “intellectual interest” in British Fascism, and when he claimed that “Mr Bunting considers himself anti-fascist, nevertheless he and Mr Jorian Jenks [a regular contributor to the paper] are ineluctably OF the same party, when you get down to any real bedrock, to any real honesty.”’324

  Marian Bunting’s recollection of Pound’s politics, although clearly based on considerable personal contact with him, seems wide of the mark. ‘I can say with certainty,’ she wrote in 1968,

  that Pound was hostile to Mussolini & scornful of him at the time when we left Italy for Tenerife in September, 1933. Mussolini had refused to allow Hemingway to come into Italy & this was one count against him. We felt we were likely to be spied upon there & while conversing in public places we never mentioned Mussolini’s name – used a substitute. The only praise I heard of him was that he had forbidden Italians to shoot small birds. His law against profanity was considered absurd since both Basil & Ezra enjoyed the l
usty fertility of the Italian’s swearing.325

  In fact Pound had written approvingly about Mussolini’s regime to Harriet Monroe as early as 1926326 and on 30 January 1933, eight months before the Buntings left Italy, Pound had an audience with Mussolini in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome during which he presented Douglas’ Social Credit theory as a natural economic policy for a Fascist state, and after which he ‘swiftly developed a world view in which the Fascist leader played a central part, and was portrayed as the ideal ruler, but where Social Credit rather than Italian Fascism was the political dogma.’327 Perhaps Marian was trying to protect her ex-husband from the toxic effect of association with Pound in post-war America, although she didn’t try to protect him from much else.

  Bunting for his part found Pound’s Fascism incredible even in the mid- 1930s. He told Pound in September 1936 that ‘Angold accuses you of connections with the British Union of Fascists: which I refuse to believe … I am not a Left sucker, I don’t go mad at the idea of a blasphemy against democracy, don’t think I’m talking blindly. But they spell Finance with three letters, J E W, and that’s all you’ll get out of them.’328

  If we must judge Yeats, Eliot and many others, we should be scrupulous about doing so by the standards of the poets’ own times, not ours. Bunting recognised this:

  What these poets and many other writers really had in common was a love of order. With order in society it matters little whether you are rich or poor, you will not be harassed by perpetual changes of fortune, you can plan your life’s work within known limits … Yeats’s love of order is something he shared with Dante and Shakespeare and probably far more than half of the world’s great poets, as well as with nearly all the philosophers and historians.329