In 1979, at a conference on Pound in Durham, Bunting revealed another Poundian hoax, the sleight of hand that underpinned ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ itself, the unravelling of which served only to highlight Pound’s skill. Pound had planned to collaborate with Eliot to write not a great poem but simply one that was better than any of their contemporaries could have written. ‘The point about Mauberley is an odd one,’ Bunting told James Laughlin and Lawrence Pitkethly in 1982:
Pound and Eliot got together and decided to do a great hoax. They would produce a poet, an imaginary poet, who would have all sorts of virtues, but always all the vices they believed belonged to English poetry, and was therefore a complete failure – though he had to be good enough to be convincing, to be someone Eliot and Pound could take an interest in. And they set to work on it. But in fact Eliot was lazy and didn’t, and the whole thing was done by Pound. That was Mauberley … They got their notion of doing it, I’m sure, by their reading of Samuel Butler which happened about that time, just about the beginning of the First World War, or a little after the beginning of it.493
CANARY ISLES, 1933–1936
It appears that Bunting had been planning to leave Italy for some time. Money was the problem. He told James Leippert in January 1933 that ‘an old peasant gave me a mongrel dog (and its kennel) for Xmas. Together with baby and cat, the household is now complete. If I had enough money to keep all these creatures fed and those that need it clothed and my boat painted and to buy a few books I need and pay my worst debts, I’d be perfectly comfortable.’494 A letter sent to Morton Zabel on the same day explains that he is not prepared to finance a collection of his own since ‘I have no intention of wasting my substance, which never more than barely suffices my family, on printing it myself. I should say, my wife’s substance, because my own doesn’t even cover the cigarettes I smoke.’495 By March he reported to Zabel that he had not possessed trousers of his own for months and that the only pair he could borrow didn’t fit.496 Some of this constant penury was clearly self-inflicted. Marian later recalled that ‘both Basil and his mother were wildly extravagant – almost penniless, he took the train from Rapallo to Genoa each morning to visit me at the hospital – travelling 1st class when there was a 3rd class coach on the train’.497
Pound told Zukofsky in April 1933 that Bunting was going to Spain, prompting Zukofsky to ask if he had gone ‘for good? & does that mean the next war?’, but Bunting recalled that he left Italy for the Canary Isles towards the end of 1933 because it was cheaper.498
Many years later he reflected on his time in Paris and Rapallo in a letter to the editor of Nine, Peter Russell: ‘What went on in Paris and Rapallo … ? Mainly a comedy. Most of the dramatis personae were comically vain, and the clash of their vanities was funny. Little by little the spectacle reduced my own vanity to manageable proportions, but that didn’t appear to be the usual result.’499
His wife remembered their life in Rapallo as a more private drama. ‘He was out of this world – he didn’t know up from down except in literature, music, and poetry. I had the best years of my life with him,’ she recalled in 1968,
and they were some of them pretty bad. He had chosen to make no attempt to earn a living – let ordinary men do this if they wanted to. We lived & lived well in Rapallo on $35.00 a month my parents sent me. Married him to support him while he wrote poetry, but he took me away from my job to live in Italy – the insecurity was horrible for me – didn’t seem to bother him.500
He clearly wasn’t a perfect father. Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, said that Pound’s mother, Isabel, ‘raised her hands in despair at the mention of B.B. – he had parked the pram with two infants on the Rapallo Lungomare, went into a café and forgot all about them’.501
The move from Rapallo to the Canaries seems to have been a subject of domestic dispute. Victoria Forde claims that Marian believed that Bunting’s mother would help her to prevent the move and that she ‘tried to use all their money to pay bills, but on the day that Mrs Bunting was to arrive they left for the Canary Isles’.502
The Canary Isles (named after the wild dogs that once inhabited the islands, not after the songbird) consist of seven main and six smaller islands in the Atlantic Ocean, sixty-five miles west of Cape Yubi on the southern coast of Morocco. After three weeks on the island the Buntings were struggling to find accommodation and the poet’s first impressions were of a colourless landscape: ‘Just got back from a visit to the local Sahara. Seven or eight miles wide and ever so many long, sand covered with loose pieces of pumice about as big as a man’s head. A sort of pale grey thorn scrub, and a few camels eating it. A sort of green shrub much rarer, and a goat or two eating that.’503
Although the Buntings lived an impoverished life in Tenerife, it had its colourful compensations:
Alarming bus ride with driver just lively drunk, most dangerous road I ever travelled, hairpin bends with precipices beneath every ten or fifteen metres. Took it at thirty-five miles an hour. Shot the conductor clean out of the bus at one corner, but he wasn’t killed. Missed a child by about one inch, and nearly got busted by the one railway engine on the island. Total casualties (twenty minute ride), one billy-goat, fairly and squarely squashed according to all the rules of the game, after a chase of about fifty metres.504
He wrote to Pound a few months later that ‘the people of this island so unspeakable, and the food so uneatable, they make prolonged residence impossible, in spite of great cash saving’.505 He even refused to learn Spanish because ‘the natives are so disgusting’.506 He loathed the island and its people. As early as April 1934 he told Pound that the family was returning to Rapallo as soon as convenient, provided no war developed to prevent it.507
Alcohol clearly played a big part in local life. He related a tale of drunken woe to Pound that is ironic given Isabel Pound’s memories of Bunting’s paternal care in Rapallo:
detecting and getting rid of a dipsomaniac servant during last twentyfour hours has left me a bit bewildered. She got dangerous at the end, otherwise I dare say she would have gone on puzzling us some while longer. Its incredible the cunning of that gentry. She took Bourtai out for a walk to the lowest ginshop in the neighbourhood, kept her there three and a half hours and finally fell down on the highroad, leaving the kid in the middle of heavy motor traffic all alone.508
The locals were bad enough, but even they were better than the visitors: ‘An aroma of tourist about the towns, not much to my liking – too strongly flavoured with German.’509 The climate, the scenery and the prettiness of the women seem to have comprised Bunting’s lasting memory of the Islands:
There are perpetually clouds being blown up against the mountains. Rain doesn’t fall. The clouds simply condense on the mountains and the water trickles from the condensed cloud into the ground and has to be mined from the galleries in the mountains. The sky is very often overcast for a long time. Still, through the clouds enough sunshine comes to sunburn you faster than the bare sun on the Mediterranean.510
Bourtai, was similarly struck by the climate. Her recollections of it are remarkable considering she was four years old when she left the Canary Isles. She remembered unusual weather, ‘red rain once or twice when the Sahara sand coloured it, a hurricane which lifted the thatched roof of a peasant’s cottage straight up in the air, and all the trees down in the garden. Frighteningly, the window before which Marian was holding her youngest daughter while she was looking out at the chaos was broken immediately afterwards.’511
Bunting described the vagaries of the climate in Tenerife to Pound:
The east wind blew for over a week. It picks up fine black dust in the Sahara and carries it here, and on out into the Atlantic … The air is so dry it cracks your lips. The moisture condenses round the particles of dust, and then it rains in torrents. I was in a taxi, crossing the island, when the rain began. It wasn’t water that fell, but thin mud mingled with oil. I never saw anything so extraordinary … and since there’s no provision for rain, n
o drains, everything was flooded, a torrent eighteen inches deep tearing down the mainstreet of Santa Cruz, stinking of this filthy oil.512
This letter rather bears out Marian’s claim that Bunting’s grip on personal finance was at best fragile. He is crossing the island in a taxi when the storm blows up, but in the same letter he complains that, ‘the impending breakdown of the attempt to live cheaply and manage that way, leaves me a bit in the air. It is clear we can never, anywhere, rely on what Marian’s parents dish out, so that even here, at 40% saving on Rapallo prices, we can’t live. Its also clear that I have no money earning qualifications.’513
Bourtai also recalled moving home a few times, ‘once from Hotel La Orotava to a favourite place, a small house at Salto del Barranco among banana plantations near Puerto Cruz. Here a woman living next door invited them to help themselves from her garage full of bananas whenever they wanted.’514
Marian sent a postcard to Pound’s parents in Rapallo telling them that: ‘We have a good house which we rent completely furnished. It has a lovely tropical garden & we grow our own vegetables. The children are very well and enjoying the bathing beach here. Basil finds it hard to work in this climate but hopes to do something now we have house.’515 The new house was comparative luxury for the Buntings. He enthused to Pound in March 1935, ‘We have got a house again, furnished, for six months … nice garden, bit of land, equivalent of three hundred lire. About eight or nine rooms, plus bath etc.’516 In fact, according to Marian housing was scarce in Tenerife and the family moved nine times before finally settling at Casa Fortuna, Las Arenas, Puerto Cruz de Tenerife, where they stayed for two years until they left for England.517
Perhaps the climate affected Bunting’s spirits. He became ‘very gloomy’ in the Canaries and wrote there ‘The Well of Lycopolis’, ‘which is about as gloomy a poem as anyone would want.’518 He told Pound in 1934 that his ‘personal depression’ was ‘deep and durable’,519 and he was beginning to overreact to relatively trivial matters. Pound wrote to Zukofsky in May and mentioned a letter he had received from Bunting: ‘Note from pore ole Bzl/all of a tetter cause he has taken the trouble to try to tell you sumfin or other. Evidently thinks you’ve a weaker head than I think you have. At any rate you had orter be glad he takes thet much interest’.520
Not all his income came from writing while he was in the Canaries. He did odd jobs and handouts arrived periodically from Margaret de Silver and from Marian’s parents. Marian’s parents were sending $50 regularly each month,521 and Bunting justified to Pound his sponging on a father-in-law he seems to have despised: ‘If my father in law has more money than he needs and does nothing for it but bleed the pore buggers who want offices and houses in a country town in Wisconsin, I don’t see why I, who do something I conceive to have a certain degree of use, shouldn’t get as much of it as I possibly can … The drawbacks are practical, not moral. It’s a fairly difficult job bleeding flints.’522 A few months later he wrote to Pound that ‘Marian’s Pa brought off another lucrative real estate deal a while ago, the news has just leaked through. To celebrate it, he deducted the cost of Xmas presents for the children from the monthly cheque.’523
Bunting’s poetry from 1933 and 1934 is not conspicuously distinguished. A translation from Catullus, ‘Once so they say’, peters out in despair:
I will talk to you often in my songs, but first I speak to you, bridegroom acclaimed with many pinebrands, pillar of Thessaly, fool for luck, Peleus, to whom Jove the godbegetter, Jove himself yielded his mistress, for the sea’s own child clung to you
- and why Catullus bothered to write pages and pages of this drivel mystifies me.524
‘How Duke Valentine Contrived’, also written in 1933, takes the theme of ‘The day being Whitsun’, the urge the powerful feel to destroy the people and institutions which impede their political advancement, but delivers it in casual, throwaway lines that emphasise the cruelty without being in any way convincing:
The Duke’s soldiers
were not satisfied with plundering Liverotto’s men
and began to sack Sinigaglia, and if he hadnt
checked their insolence by hanging a lot of them
they would have finished the job.525
Bunting wisely left both these poems out of Collected Poems. More convincing were the odes, ‘Vessels thrown awry’, which reflects on the different experiences of statesmen and workers, ‘An appleblossom to crocus’ and ‘Two hundred and seven paces’, both of which take a wry view of urban life. Reading ‘Two hundred and seven paces’ to a London audience nearly fifty years after it was written he explained that
there used to be a pub in the Kennington Road – it was still there two or three years ago but they’ve pulled it down at last – where when I was in my 20s it was possible to go in and get a pint of beer, a cut off the joint, two vegetables, and a plate of apple tart for 10 pence. (Yes, think of the days you’ve missed.) And in there I heard this gentleman:
Two hundred and seven paces
from the tram-stop
to the door,
a hundred and forty-six thousand
four hundred
seconds ago,
two hundred and ninety-two thousand
eight hundred
kisses or thereabouts; what else
let him say who saw and let
him who is able
do like it for I’m
not fit for a commonplace world
any longer, I’m
bound for the City,
cashregister, adding-machine,
rotary stencil.
Give me another
double whiskey and fire-extinguisher,
George. Here’s
Girls! Girls!”
I still like that you know, crude as it is, after all these years it has a certain life in it.526
On the Orotava Road
The birth of the Buntings’ second daughter, Roudaba, on 4 February 1934 in Santa Cruz was an uplifting event. Perhaps Roudaba was so named to exorcise Marian’s difficult first childbirth with Bourtai. Roudabeh was Rustam’s mother in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. According to Ferdowsi, Roudabeh felt intense pain while giving birth and fell unconscious. Her husband, Zaal, remembered that the legendary bird Simorgh had given him a feather to use in time of great danger. He told his mother-in-law, Sindokht, to light a fire and he conjured up Simorgh by placing the magical feather on it. Simorgh told Zaal that Roudabeh would give birth to a courageous and heroic child but advised Zaal that
for this noble child to be born you must prepare a sharp knife and summon a wise and experienced doctor. Then have her attendants make Rudabeh drunk with wine, so that she forgets her fear and becomes insensitive to pain. Next the doctor must cut open the mother’s womb and bring this lion cub forth: then he must sew up the womb. Meanwhile, you must grind certain herbs that I shall name, together with musk and milk, and dry the mixture in a shady place: then reduce it to powder and apply it to the scar, which you must also stroke with one of my feathers … Rudabeh will soon be out of pain and danger.527
By following Simorgh’s advice to have what later became known as a Caesarean section Roudabeh gave birth easily to the prodigious Rustam. This is pure speculation of course but Bunting had by now been steeped in Ferdowsi for three or four years and it is attractive to think that Marian and Bunting chose their second child’s name as a kind of charm against a difficult second childbirth.
Although she was too young to remember life in the Canaries, she does remember her father as the dapper young man in photographs of this time and recalls hearing of the lively parties in Italy of “Haas, Mas, and Baz”, Eugene Haas, Masoliver and Bunting.’528
With the notable exception of Diana Collecott, Bunting scholars (and his biographers) have rather overlooked the importance of Bunting’s relationship with the German artist Karl Drerup and his Jewish wife, Gertrude. The Drerups lived in Tenerife from 1934 to 1937, Fascism having followed them around Europe until they emigrated to th
e US. The Nazis made life in their homeland untenable; Drerup’s graduate work from 1930 to 1933 in Italy at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence was destroyed by Mussolini’s rise to power and when they fled to Madrid in 1933, and then to the Canary Isles, they couldn’t have known that Francisco Franco’s revolution was about to tear Spain apart. Drerup cast a wry gaze over the anti-Semitism of his native land. Bunting wrote to Zukofsky in October 1935: ‘Certain German towns having ordained that Jewish cars may not park in their streets, Drerup is trying to think out a process for circumcising cars.’529
The Drerups lived in Puerto de la Cruz (formerly Puerto Orotava) which had an established British colony and regular German and American visitors. The Buntings found that they were unable to pay the rent on their hillside home overlooking the port and the Drerups moved in when Bunting and Marian moved to a simple cabin in a banana plantation. As Diana Collecott points out in her illuminating essay on Drerup in Tenerife the Buntings and Drerups had much in common,
A Strong Song Tows Us Page 29
