A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  So my responsibility for telling our two governments what happens in Western Asia – between the Jordan and the Indian border, between the Hadhramaut and the Ukraine – is ended at last. So are the pleasant journeys ended, amongst mountain tribes, long trips on horseback, moufflon hunts, banquets with provincial governors and cocktail parties with diplomats … All the tribesmen had the same question: ‘Why are you taking these officers away from us? Who will be left to understand the Kurds and tell the Powers what we need?… The Bakhtiari sent a note to the British Govt asking for my return to Persia.106

  Given what happened to the Kurds in the second half of the twentieth century this is prescient. Victoria Forde quoted this letter to Zukofsky in her short life of Bunting and when Bunting read the proofs he wrote ‘modestly’ to her saying, ‘“I’d rather have all this omitted … It sounds too presumptuous altogether.” But he had written these same stories of life in Persia to others. They had sounded so amazing to his daughter Roudaba that not until much later did she realise that the lavish banquets with the tribesmen in the mountains, the princes he rode with, and the exotic animals he wrote about, the leopard which jumped onto his lap, were not just fantastic stories for her amusement.’107

  Bunting readily acknowledged that the war had been good to him. He told Peter Quartermain that it ‘did me a lot of good: it gave me confidence, assurance in myself as a man of action; it gave me power of decision under great responsibility. It gave me authority: I learned my Wing-Commanderact.’ 108 Bunting’s various reflections on his war show a man at ease with his contribution:

  ‘War … an activity which has pleasures of its own, an exercise of certain faculties which need exercise: in which death is neither a bugbear nor a consummation but just happens.’109 And, ‘freedom from war, like freedom from poverty, can be pursued at the expense of things better worth preserving than peace and plenty, of which, I should say, the most important, and the most threatened, is personal autonomy’.110

  Many years later he told an interviewer that ‘I can say with complete immorality that I enjoyed the war very much. I managed throughout to keep things lively for myself.’111 He told another interviewer about the challenge of performing with the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra, reading his poems with the music of Vivaldi, Corelli and Albinoni: ‘I will be reading some of my poems, of course, at the concert. But not being a trained opera singer, I cannot throw my voice softly. That is why mechanical aid is needed [i.e. loudspeakers]. Otherwise I think I would manage all right. I used to have to bawl orders at 600 men in South Africa during the war, and I was for a time a sailor as well and used to plenty of hailing.’112

  It is hard to reconcile this dynamic self-possession with the life he led in the twenty years that followed his expulsion from Iran in 1953.

  Ezra … indomitably out of date

  Bunting had disappeared from the literary world during the war years leaving barely a bubble at its surface. Pound wrote to the Japanese modernist poet Katue Kitasono from Rapallo on 29 October 1940: ‘Any news of living authors would be welcome. Gornoze what’s become of Possum and Duncan and Angold or the pacific Bunting.’113 As the war ended he was making the same complaint. He asked Robert Duncan on 24 January 1946 if there was ‘any news of Bunting or Nancy [Cunard] or anyone’,114 and he reported to Dorothy Pound on 31 January that there was ‘still no news of Basil …’ On 2 April 1946 he told William Carlos Williams that he knew ‘mostly who’s alive and who’s dead = but no news of Bunting or of Nancy Cunard’.115 By this time Pound was incarcerated in a psychiatric ward in Washington DC.

  The following month he told Dorothy that ‘Jas [Laughlin] thinks Basil was on a trawler – Oh hell. I thought it was groundwork @ air base.’116 He complained again to Dorothy in late March and again in early May about the lack of news of Bunting’s fate.117 He wrote to Dorothy’s son Omar on 3 May 1946 that ‘Navy or Air Force ought to trace Basil (best Eng. poet of his decade)’,118 but Dorothy told him later that month that ‘Basil can’t be traced unless we can give his date of birth & the ship he served on – Somebody will hear abt. him I suppose, in time.’119 By 1949 even Bunting was complaining about it. He wrote to Margaret de Silver: ‘I am losing track even of my more personal American friends. Only Zukofsky writes regularly, and Dorothy Pound passes on the news from Ezra’s loonybin. I’ve lost track of Archie Roosevelt somewhere in the Levant. I’ve not heard from Drerup for ages. I think Carlos Williams has forgotten he ever knew me.’120 He’d had no time to write letters but wouldn’t have written even if he had the leisure because, as he wrote to Drerup, ‘it is so easy to give away secrets unintentionally’.121 Moreover all this action had driven literature from Bunting’s horizon entirely. He told the poet Robert Creeley that ‘I regret the time I waste on earning a living, but not the sea and the desert and the unremitting need of knowing facts, calculating character or forseeing [sic] the run of events. If ever I met a poet (English or American) in Persia or Arabia or Cyrenaica I never knew it: we talked about rainfall, tribal movements, the price of whisky, where the game has gone, anything except literature.’122

  Pound had been having a bad time. He had been broadcasting pro-Axis propaganda from Rome since 1935 and had been indicted for treason in the United States in July 1943. As the war ended the US authorities were put in an awkward position. The administration was legally obliged to prosecute Pound but the situation was complicated by Pound’s high profile, doubts about his sanity and the fact that, in reality, there were rather more pressing issues confronting the nation. On 24 May 1945 Pound was arrested and taken to a US prison camp near Pisa where he was treated with extraordinary brutality. He began to write the Pisan Cantos while housed in one of the death cells, a six-foot wide steel cage with a concrete floor and no shelter from the blistering heat, no communication with other prisoners and in the glare of powerful floodlights that kept him from sleeping at night. He was kept in inhumane conditions in this ‘Disciplinary Training Center’ until the middle of November, when he was transferred to a jail in Washington DC. An intricate legal battle ensued which centred on the issue of whether or not Pound was sufficiently mentally stable to stand trial. In December a psychiatric report by four doctors judged him unfit to plead and he was transferred to St Elizabeths Hospital on 21 December, and there one of the finest literary minds of his generation was incarcerated for the next twelve years, during which time a struggle for the very soul of Ezra Pound developed, conducted by his friends and lawyers but fuelled by the hatred the two women in his life, his wife Dorothy and his mistress Olga Rudge, felt for each other. At its peak St Elizabeths housed over eight thousand patients. As we shall see the British political establishment used Bunting very badly after the war but maltreatment of cultural heroes was not a uniquely British embarrassment. However un-American his activities, however disgusting his anti-Semitism, the US authorities’ persecution of Ezra Pound was a shameful dereliction of cultural duty, robbing the world of one of its great geniuses, albeit a flawed genius.

  Bunting was willing to help but was doubtful of the likely impact. In a letter of 19 October 1946 to William Carlos Williams Zukofsky copied part of a letter which Bunting had written to him:

  From Bunting:

  ‘Please ask Bill Williams to convey to Dorothy that I will do anything for Ezra that may be in my power: but that I don’t think there is anything in my power. Let her have my address and tell her my mother often wishes to hear from her. We cannot help Ezra by asserting his literary value. In fact, the only defence likely to go down with a tribunal would be, that he was so easily tricked & outwitted by Fascists of high position who ministered to his unfortunate appetite for flattery: and I daresay that would be too humiliating for him to own to. Otherwise, so far as I can see, they must endeavour to prove him mad: an untrue defence, but it could easily be supported from his eccentricities.’123

  Bunting wrote to Dorothy in November 1946 offering to use his contacts as best he could on Pound’s behalf, but he was far from confident th
at any action could succeed in the prevailing climate:

  The US public has made up its mind that he is guilty, & must, if possible, be allowed to forget him, before anything effective can be done … My power to help is very limited indeed. I have very few contacts at all. The best would be Archie Roosevelt, but he is not at present in America: through him, we might ultimately be able to get Eleanor’s [Roosevelt] powerful help, but I think, only after Archie returns & after a longish time for the public to lose interest. I am pretty sure Archie would trust me, & I believe the Roosevelt family think a lot of him. I don’t think it would be any use for me to approach Field-Marshall Wilson: he would listen attentively to what I might say about Iraq or Persia, but probably not on any other subject. Eisenhower wouldn’t remember me – I only actually met him twice.124

  Pound, apparently annoyed, annotated this letter. He underlined the word ‘guilty’ and put two question marks in the margin.

  ‘Ezra – in correspondence – seems indomitably out-of-date’, Bunting wrote to Zukofsky in January 1947.125 They seem to have tried to put their disagreements of the 1930s behind them. In March 1947 Bunting wrote to Pound’s daughter, Mary, newly married to Boris Barrati, that he had received ‘an ebullient note from Ezra, wishing he could have a job on my (imaginary) “staff” in Teheran. He would enjoy Persia, I believe: a country where they still make beautiful things by hand. But I am myself a hard mouthful for the Russians to swallow (an “international reactionary”) and I am afraid Ezra’s sudden appearance in a country they covet would be altogether too much for them!’126 Bunting’s generosity of spirit is striking, considering the abuse Pound had directed at him over the years. He berated Zukofsky for his principled refusal to visit Pound. Pound was

  an old man in distress, who seems to look to me and Eliot for a kind of help no one else can give him. Omar says his father waits eagerly for letters from me, and is quieter for days after one. Well, how could I hold back? Eliot describes him as the same, except that all the eccentricities have become exaggerated tremendously. Of his two or three letters to me, the greater part was so incoherent as to be incomprehensible. Eliot says he does not realise his situation in the least. He refused peremptorily to let me approach the Roosevelts or Lord Wilson to help in getting his conditions eased a little, at a time when I could have done so with some prospect of success.127

  A little disingenuous this, in view of the letter he had written to Dorothy Pound six months previously.

  THROCKLEY, 1946–1947

  As the war ended Bunting, back in Throckley, was considering his options. These were writing for a living (‘unpleasing’), settling in southern Italy (he liked Policastro and the villages near Reggio and Cotrone) or ‘out of political cussedness’ in Andalusia or Spanish Morocco. Sierra Leone would have been nearly perfect but too expensive and Persia best of all but ‘the Russians would kick up such a row’.128 He told Zukofsky of a plan to buy a boat and sail to Sierra Leone, Greece and Malabar.129 He also told friends130 that he was planning (and had apparently begun) a book about his experiences in Persia. It is a great pity that this was never written as Bunting captured the charm and eccentricity of Persia beautifully in letters. In December 1946 he wrote to Ezra Pound lifting scenes and anecdotes, seemingly at random, and weaving them into a memorably exotic narrative:

  sitting in judgment in the mountains, in support of the Ilkhan, in an embroidered tent pitched in a grove by a spring, and while the shaggy plaintiff was expounding his case there was a leopard slowly crossing the snow field on the mountain opposite: or capping quotations from the older classics with the aged Poet-laureate and an ex-Prime Minister, by moonlight, in a garden, with girls passing the wine: or Shalamzar, the palace of the Ilkhan of Bakhtiari, under a prodigious alp, remote from all roads, where the largest carpet I have ever seen is also one of the finest, & the few chairs have little mirrors set in them and the huge ceiling is of polished walnut: but everybody sits on the floor and the darvish outside, in his wolfskin with his two headed axe over his shoulder, sings a long ballad about the magical deeds that were done in – 1943! There are also Ra’is Touma’s Assyrian trousers – sky blue, wide, short, with a spray of roses embroidered on each cheek of the arse, which he wore with dignity – And the Mujtahed’s funeral, with the horse-tail standards, the black banners of the Abbasides, & the men scourging themselves with chains while dancing before the corpse: and the six horsemen who apologised for stopping my car: ‘We were only waiting to murder a man, your Honour’, and they did murder him an hour later … the Armenian archbishop of Jerusalem swapping cups with me & drinking first to demonstrate the absence of poison.131

  This is heady stuff. We lost a great travel writer when Bunting decided that he could no longer risk the Persia book. His account of his journey from London to Teheran is a catalogue of rich incidents:

  I flew to Cairo – a little less noisy without the troops – visited a friend at Ismailiya, where we got caught by a fierce sandstorm, out on the lake in a very tippy dingy – flew to Baghdad, more old friends, including the ferryman who embraced me: Abbas Hilmi, the anti-British stalwart of the Arab League, who cheerfully informed me that he was in Baghdad without papers, though he is still ‘wanted’ for his share in Rashid Ali’s rebellion. Behauddin Pasha gave me a fine lunch & told queer Kurdish stories. And I went again to one of those indescribable music halls, where you leave your rifle at the door but pistols are allowed, and are often used either to criticize the performance or argue with a man on the other side of the balcony. Then by car to Teheran – two very long days of high passes & deep gorges. The Irani Kurds were on the move – luggage tied on to the sheep’s back: the men dressed in their best – striped peg-top trousers, sash, very white shirt with very long sleeves turned back & tied over the jacket sleeve, the jacket tight, very short, in contrasting stripes, & the heavily fringed black turban over all: with rifles & cartridge belts. The women wear turbans too, and a rather shapeless frock open down the front to below the navel, so that you see their great udders going floppety flop as they jog along with a load on their head & a child on their back (but the young girls look very nice that way). The little boys wear carbines, & to me their faces always look like those of Edinburgh urchins – freckly, blue-eyed, oval. At one place we disturbed thirty or forty vultures eating a dead donkey. They lurched to the side of the road all together, too full of corpse to fly, and others who had been circling overhead swooped down to take their places, even before the car was past … I haven’t looked up my old friends here yet, but happened to meet one of the Bakhtiari Khans in the street, & got a surprisingly warm welcome. I believe he was really very glad to see me. I also, conforming to Persian custom, had my Friday picnic in a garden near Demavend village, by a stream, huge mountains all around: jug of wine (or anyway vodka) and all that, but no ‘Thou’ to sit beside me in the wilderness, only a ragged boy who made my tea & brought me meat and eggs.132

  If he had had the opportunity to thread these observations and anecdotes into a narrative of mid-century Persia it would probably be the definitive account today, he understood the country and its people so intimately. Bunting knew though that the Foreign Office would do its best to prevent him publishing a book on Persia because so much of his experience there was gained on secret business in the service of the British government, although it’s difficult to see what more he could have lost. As we shall see, the British government didn’t cover itself in glory when he left its service. He wrote to Ezra Pound in March 1947: ‘I saw Eliot the other day, & promised to keep in touch with him. I must drop the book I began on Isfahan – can’t afford to be “indiscreet” now. But I may get time to do some writing nevertheless. Eliot says: poems. Perhaps: but tranquillity is hard to get – He was kind and very friendly.’133

  If Britain lost a significant travel writer to the Official Secrets Act it lost an even more significant diplomat. Bunting wrote an extraordinary twentypage letter to Zukofsky in November 1946 in which he described the politics of the
Middle East in such intimate detail that one imagines it can only have been written for posterity. He couldn’t possibly have imagined that Zukofsky, who had barely stepped out of Manhattan for the previous twenty years, would be interested in these tales of Bahrain, political intelligence work, Basra, slavery and piracy, orientalists, oil, the Kuwait–Iraq dispute, the role of the Americans in the oil dispute, the source of disputes, the facts that have been distorted by media, the Arab world’s indifference to comfort and Western theorists’ assumption that it was a priority, the fact that economics are irrelevant to the Arab mentality, the problem with newspapers, the lie campaign against the Poles, a thousand of whom had been in his care in Isfahan. Eighteen pages into this spectacular diatribe he pauses for breath and with deep, if unintended, irony writes: ‘Dear Louis, you must be bored to tears by now. I have no news.’134

  I am for thwarting the government

  He might have had a good war but it changed him utterly. In 1946 Pound tried to incite him to edit a magazine. Bunting gave Dorothy his reasons for not doing any work of that kind in a letter on 10 December 1946 that is heavily annotated by Pound’s pencil. It is a long statement of a new Bunting. Although we have been able to follow his activities during the war it hasn’t been possible to follow his development in the same way as he was incommunicado for such long stretches of it. We have barely heard from him since we left him complaining to Zukofsky and Drerup about having no war work early in 1940. He emerges in this letter to Dorothy Pound with newly felt responsibilities: ‘I want, if convenient, to earn a living, so as to help my children through their education. Bourtai thinks in terms of the University, Roudaba wants to breed horses … I don’t think Marian can provide all this unaided.’ More fundamentally though divorce and war had altered him permanently: