A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Pound spotted the irony. He wrote to Zukofsky from Rapallo on 23 July 1936: ‘That pore fool Basil has got to London, having gone to Canaries for QUIET.’584

  ENGLAND, 1936–1938

  Bunting was desperate to get out of the Canaries for the entire time he was there. In January 1936 he told Pound that they had ‘taken Taupin’s house at Nyack on Hudson. New York will destroy me with noise and very likely starve me, but a word now and then with somebody who has something in his head will do me good.’585 This escape from the Canary Isles to New York was indefinitely postponed.

  Finally in July 1936 he wrote to Pound that the family had, ‘escaped from Tenerife (formerly Isla del Infierno)’ and were staying temporarily at 2 Doughty Street in London wc1. The journey to Southampton had not been pleasant: ‘Union Castle Line seeking to pay off overdraft by starving passengers: fog in channel, delay, avoided collision with big French cargo boat by eighteen inches measured. Ship six days late from Cape Town, one of which added between Tenerife and Sthampton. Roudaba celebrated embarkation by swallowing a big button, hullabaloo, messy voyage.’586

  By the beginning of September they had moved to 6 South Hill Mansions, South Hill Park, near Hampstead Heath.587 After the Buntings fled Franco’s coup Gertrude Drerup escaped to Holland with an English family and for a while Drerup joined Bunting in London.

  We have very few descriptions of the Buntings’ family life at this (or any other) time but Victoria Forde’s conversations with Roudaba and Bourtai provide a glimpse into it:

  Life in England must have been quite difficult for the family, living for a time with Mrs Bunting in London and for a time alone. But the children were kept free from these concerns. Bourtai can vividly picture the Christmas tree her grandmother trimmed for them and the quintuplet dolls she loved to undress completely so that her mother and grandmother would have to dress them up again. Like an echo from Basil’s own early education, Bourtai remembers both her parents reading to her from an early age, especially ‘The Cat Who Walked by Himself’ from the Just So Stories. The music Basil taught her to appreciate was quite different from Byrd’s Service, but more in line with the bawdy songs he enjoyed all his life: ‘Rollicking Bill the Sailor’, for one, and an American Civil War shanty she still sings, for another. While they were living at South Hill mansion with a view of Round Pond at Hampstead Heath, she obediently kept away from the swans though she was always allowed to run excitedly to meet the hot cross bun man. She also remembers being frightened when she rode the elephant at the London Zoo where her parents had taken her.

  Rou’s clearest and happiest memory is riding on her father’s shoulders with Bourtai walking, holding his hand, to see the Punch and Judy shows. Bourtai’s memory is of her own turn on his shoulders so she could look down into the crowd to see where Punch had thrown out the baby. That he was preparing his children to love the kind of entertainment he himself enjoyed is evident from a letter he sent me fifty years later: ‘Years ago I would have said take your students to the pantomime at the Elephant, but they pulled down the Elephant long since, and though there may still be theatres in the suburbs or in south London where they keep up the old Victorian pantomime, the lush ones in Central London are just what you might see anywhere – no real fun.’588

  This domestic idyll was about to be shattered. Apparently driven to the end of her tether by their constant poverty Marian borrowed £1 from her mother-in-law and left home with their two children in early January 1937. She was five months’ pregnant with their third child at the time. Having gained custody of the children she returned to her home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where Rustam, a boy his father never saw, was born on 15 May.589

  ‘From “Faridun’s Sons” by Firdusi’ was published by T. S. Eliot in Criterion in April 1936.590 Bunting did not include this overdraft, a translated fragment of Ferdowsi, in Collected Poems but its tone suggests some of the grief he felt at the separation from his children. Faridun prepares to greet his homecoming army led by his son, Iraj, but Iraj’s head is returned in a box, wherupon Faridun ‘fell from his horse like a dead man’.591 The poem is a translation so the subject matter is fixed but it is not difficult to imagine that the poet is expressing his own sense of deep loss:

  ‘Never fancy Fate favours you,

  the heavens turning above us

  ready to snatch whatever they smile on.

  Defy them, they smile. Call them Friend,

  they never return your devotion.’

  Bunting wrote to the Pounds after Marian left:

  The whole mess that’s been gathering constantly thicker for now three years broke just at Christmas and Marian and I are separate … I’m now able to say clearly that what has prevented me doing any intelligent work during nearly two years has been the utterly miserable situation at home. You can’t, or at least I can’t, manufacture literature while crisis after crisis at rapidly decreasing intervals keeps you in constant suspense and profound wretchedness … Marian finally kidnapped the children, and I am unhappy about them. Moreover she seems to think that since she has nearly all the money, it is reasonable that I should be left with nearly all the expenses – the lease of this flat, for example … The thing that drags most heavily on work is the impossibility of bringing Marian to any durable arrangement on any point whatsoever, so that everything is perpetually in suspense. That is still so. At the best it will be a slow, difficult business for me to make any escape from the financial quagmire I find myself shoved into: the emotional one is likely to be far more tenacious.592

  Bunting’s friends seem to have had little sympathy for him in his marital difficulties, clearly feeling that art came first. Pound complained to Zukofsky from Rapallo in March 1937 that ‘Las’ I heard of Bzl his wif had left and took the chillens. It wuz preyin on his cerebrum/ why? Some folks iz never satisfied’593 Pound may have felt thoroughly vindicated by the course of the Buntings’ marriage. Bunting told Zukofsky that when ‘Ole Ez found me and Marian drinking German beer to celebrate two years of [marriage], he bade us cheer up, the first seven years are the worst.’594 This may seem tactless since this letter was congratulating Zukofsky on his recent marriage, but the tone is playful. Bunting and Marian split after seven years, and they clearly hadn’t been easy ones. Zukofsky replied to Pound in April 1937 saying, ‘Yes Basil wrote me about the mess. Easy enough to understand why he feels as etc. But the worst of it is he’s prob. so in the dumps, he won’t even write. Maybe if he cd. be published –.’595 Perhaps only a poet could believe that being published could compensate for being separated from one’s children by three thousand miles of ocean.

  By December 1936 Pound was writing to Bunting from Rapallo in an austere mood:

  The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice. [Rot] to submit to the transient. But poetry does not consist of the cowardice which refuses to analyze the transient, which refuses to see it.

  The specialized thinking has to be done or literature dies and stinks. Choice of the field where that specialized analysis is made has a percentage of relevance. In no case can constipation of thought, even in the detail, make for good writing. LUCIDITY.596

  Not many concessions to Bunting’s emotional turmoil there. In any event it was around this point that Bunting the poet dried up for nearly thirty years. His 1935 collection, Caveat Emptor, was never published although it was regarded as a milestone of modernism by modernist poets. William Carlos Williams wrote to Zukofsky in March 1943 suggesting some scripts (‘not my own’) that James Laughlin could publish in his New Directions imprint: ‘Basil Bunting’s Caveat Emptor of which I have the ms, J.L. refused it a long time ago – it’s better than the work of any Englishman he’s published.’597

  Apart from ‘To Violet’, some Odes written in the late 1940s and ‘The Spoils’, the published poet disappears until his magnificent re-emergence with Briggflatts in 1965. He told Dorothy Pound in November 1946 that ‘I have written nothing (e
xcept official reports, “appreciations”, & such) since Marian walked out on me.’598

  Marian Bunting’s account of her marriage to the poet makes for uncomfortable reading. It needs to be heavily discounted because, as we have seen, by her own admission she found it impossible to write about her life with Bunting without becoming highly emotional. There is more than emotion at work in this account:

  He worked systematically at learning Persian while we lived in Brooklyn & I taught school, & for a period in Tenerife, but from the moment we landed in the Canary Isles he became so enmeshed in his hatred of the islands, and Spaniards, and so frustrated by the hatred the English in the islands felt for him & by (our estrangement) [‘his impotence’ written above ‘our estrangement’] that he was almost insane. The idea of working for a living was so hateful to him that he screamed & raved if it was ever mentioned. It took me years to get the courage to open my mouth to express an opinion after I returned to America & I was amazed at the freedom with which my sisters-in-law conversed and expressed opinions before their husbands. I was told to shut up & never open my mouth. B. regretted audibly and in public that I was too old when he married me (I was younger than he) and that if he had caught me 10 or 15 years earlier he could have brought me up right. His second marriage at 50, was to a 14 year old girl, so this was really a strong feeling. He developed a crush on a 12 yr. old ‘chica’ we employed at Las Arenas, Puerto Cruz, Tenerife. This was so slavish & so absurd I felt ashamed, because the other Spanish servants were snickering about it & the little girl, Juana, found it distasteful. Basil was broken hearted when we moved from a pension to ‘La Casa Las Arenas’ because, I learned with surprise, his main interest in moving there was to have privacy to teach Juana English. Juana did not want to learn English and Basil was genuinely dejected for days. My surprise was because I thought his liking for little girls was an act he put on like his pretending to have visions that told him not to do things (a là Yeats). He only tried the vision thing once. This was useful at the time he tried it out, but he knew better than to try it twice.

  Hilaire Hiler, when I told him at a party in New York that I was going to marry Basil Bunting, commented “But Bunting is insane! He’s raving, totally mad!” He was. He screamed & slashed out at me because I couldn’t be in 2 places at once, and often. Our children were subjected to, or were affected by his violent tantrums. The son, born after I left him, was our only normal child.599

  The other reason to put pressure on Marian’s account is its near hysteria. The implied physical and sexual abuse seems almost designed to discredit her ex-husband in a way that couldn’t be seen as libellous. None of it rings quite true. How could his pretence to have visions be an act if it happened only once? Could their children really be said to be ‘abnormal’, especially in the light of the fact that Bunting had congratulated her on her parenting (see p. 421)? And by the time their parents split weren’t they too young in any event to have been traumatised in the way Marian suggests? Even the public statements about wishing he had met Marian ten to fifteen years before he did, while tactless, would have put her in her mid to late teens; hardly the confessions of a paedophile.

  In any event Bunting had a far more interesting gloss on his relationship with Juana. For Bunting it was part of a traditional Spanish way of life that had lasted for centuries. Pound had a puzzling reference to Bunting in Canto 81:

  Basil says

  they beat drums for three days

  till all the drumheads were busted

  (simple village fiesta)

  and as for his life in the Canaries … 600

  The editors of Paideuma, a journal devoted to Pound studies, asked Bunting for an explanation of these lines, eliciting a fascinating story of traditional rural Spanish customs:

  I was fortunate enough to be invited to spend Easter one year with an uncle or cousin of J. R. Masoliver (and therefore also a relative of Bunuel) who was the lord of a large village in Aragon … At that time it was a perfect survival from the middle ages, with a wall around it and no house newer than four or five centuries old, and it had kept its mediaeval practices long after almost everywhere else had given them up … The village had an hermandad, which behaved most of the year as other hermandads did – it buried people, especially the poor, or those who required special celebration, and to do this the brothers dressed in voluminous black smocks and huge black hood-masks, shaped much like the white ones of the Ku Klux Klan. That preserved their anonymity and therefore the merit of their charity. But at Easter everybody in the village, strangers too and even women, became for a day or two members of the hermandad and hid themselves in these hideous costumes. You couldn’t tell who was a man and who was a girl unless you heard their voice. Then everybody took drums, huge drums, biggish brass drums or side drums, and beat them in one dull repetitive rhythm all the time Jesus was harrowing hell – that is, from noon of Good Friday (the agony on the cross) till noon of Easter Sunday (the resurrection). There was no pause for meals or sleep. The drums went on all night, only becoming slightly less noisy as one by one was destroyed by the violence with which they had to be beaten. I was hidden in the proper mask and smock and provided with a big drum and a very sturdy drum stick, more like a club or a cosh, and banged away like everybody else. As long as your drum lasted you must go on beating it, pausing only to drink wine … My hands blistered, each in turn, and the blisters burst, and it hurt like hell; so after about a day and a half I sneaked away and let the devil rejoice at my cowardice.601

  After this splendidly evocative story Bunting turned to Pound’s reference to his life in the Canaries, and explained the relationship with his criada in a way that can only be properly understood in the context of a society where such deep traditions persist:

  We had a criada of our own in Tenerife, but I could never get my Wisconsin wife to understand that it wasn’t just cheap labour – we had undertaken serious responsibilities. A criada is a girl who comes to live in your house and does all the jobs she can without pay, though she gets her clothes and her food. Gradually she learns house work and civilised behaviour, until she marries: whereupon you are expected to provide a dowry, and you will be judged to some extent by how well you have brought her up … But Marian thought of the criada as just a kind of slave who was so dumb that she didn’t make you pay wages, and it was all I could do to get her to dress the girl decently. She could not realise that it was a relationship intended to last for life, in which money played a very small part, but in other ways you owed as much to the girl as she did to you.602

  Perhaps Bunting was ‘broken hearted’ because his wife had prevented him from fulfilling his part of a centuries-old contract.

  Even heavily discounted, however, Marian’s account of the marriage suggests that Bunting wasn’t an easy man to live with in his thirties. Their mutual acrimony had been festering for years when Marian wrote this letter. In January 1940 Bunting told Karl Drerup that he had received from Marian ‘the cruellest, wickedest letter I have ever seen’. She had begun divorce proceedings during the previous September,

  as soon as the war made it practically impossible to oppose her effectively. She has invented a new lie for this purpose – she says I attacked her with an axe. She pretends to believe that I want to kill my children, and therefore I shall never see them again unless she becomes satisfied that they would be safe in my presence. She says she will have Roudaba give evidence in court about my cruelty – my dear daughter that was not even three years old when she was taken from me … She says it never mattered to her how poor I was, it was only my murderous violence that she could not stand.603

  It is a heartbreaking letter.

  COUP D’ÉTAT, 1936

  Bunting arrived back in the UK during an eventful year. As soon as he arrived an attempt (on 16 July) was made on the life of the controversial King Edward VIII. In October the Battle of Cable Street took place between Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the police and anti-Fascist demonstrators, and t
he following day the iconic Jarrow March began, bringing protesting shipyard workers on the long walk to London from Tyneside. But all this was nothing compared to the crisis precipitated by King Edward VIII’s relationship with the American socialite, Wallis Simpson. Edward had already rattled royal protocol watchers earlier in the year when he publicly oversaw the proclamation of his accession to the throne accompanied by Simpson, who was then still married to the shipbroker Ernest Simpson. By November a real constitutional crisis was brewing. The King told the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of his intention to marry Simpson and Baldwin told the King that the British people would not accept her as their Queen. The King then announced that he would abdicate if the government opposed the marriage. The crisis raged through November, but it raged privately. There was a complete media blackout, even though the crisis was being widely reported overseas, particularly in the US. The British people and their representatives in parliament had no idea that there was a crisis, let alone a serious one. The issue even divided the society that was aware of it. A bizarre alliance of politicians including Churchill and Lloyd George, Mosley’s fascists and the communists supported the King. The Times and most of the rest of the media opposed the King but newspapers owned by Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, supported him. The media blackout ended when the hapless Bishop of Bradford, Alfred Blunt, referred to the crisis in what he thought was a low key speech to his diocesan conference on 1 December.

  This combination of Royal politics, hobbled democracy and press connivance with the rich and privileged pushed so many of Bunting’s buttons that it is not at all surprising that he found himself at the thick of it. His otherwise abjectly miserable letter of January 1937 to the Pounds crackles into life when he describes his part in the ‘coup d’état’: