the circumstances under which Marian got first a separation and then a divorce, so that I was completely cut off from my children, reduced me to a state in which it took all my resolution and ingenuity to keep alive and sane. Unexpected success as a soldier and as a minor diplomat set me up again, but did it by bringing out things in me that could hardly have been suspected before, at least by me. In short, it is not merely that I have had more experience, but the experience has been different in kind. I no longer feel, as I did in 1938, that I have nothing to say, but I do not know, except in some details, what it is I want to say, and I don’t think I shall know for some time yet to come … our old preoccupations now seem to me very out-of-date. I cannot go back to them if I wanted to. I do not like what has happened and is happening, but to revive, for instance, Douglas, would seem to me like pretending that nothing really had happened. So that if I were to produce a paper now, I am afraid it would be one of which Ezra would not approve. (I am for thwarting the government – all the governments, especially the more powerful and effective ones: and for not reforming backward nations: and for pushing economics out of the limelight for a century or so; and limiting free compulsory education to reading, writing and ’rithmatic.)
Perhaps that final sentence contains the seeds of some of the tensions ahead. Governments didn’t necessarily want operatives who secretly wished to thwart them in the great post-war rebuild. Another reason for not editing a magazine was Bunting’s disillusionment with poetry:
Leave out the various shams, and the rest all leads to Zukofsky, and nobody can read Zukofsky! Yeats, Ezra & Carlos Williams; Eliot; Marianne Moore; are all in a sense stages on the road to a degree of subjectivity so extreme that, in Zukofsky, it fails to realise that there is an outside world which will necessarily fail to understand … [Pound’s] conspicuous success must convince him that the road is the right one, even for those who go much further along it than he has done. The little magazines in general just wallow in its dusty ditches, without a trace of Ezra’s metric skill or Zukofsky’s logical consistency. Clearly I am not the right person to rally them.135
Pound annotated this letter so heavily that reading it is almost like overhearing their conversation. Bunting would have been surprised at how much Pound actually agreed with, and less surprised at the intemperate tone of his disagreement. ‘It is a shame that this is all so negative,’ Bunting wrote, ‘for I would have liked to oblige E.P.’ ‘To hell with the personal angle’, Pound raves from the margin.136
In the end he decided to ‘use the lump of money they gave me to buy a boat and to live again at sea – it’s cheap there – and to write. But, before I could get anything done, the Foreign Office stepped in with the offer of a job, and it would probably be well paid and I had to take it.’137 He told Dorothy Pound in January 1947 that he was negotiating the price of a yacht, ‘just small enough for me to manage alone, & large enough to live in fair comfort with a number of the more necessary books.’ He planned to take Idonea, a twelve-ton ketch, to the Mediterranean the following year.
The Foreign Office had written to him in ‘vague terms’ about returning to Isfahan but he was distrustful, believing that the government was trying to get someone with private income for the job to ‘do the work for less than it costs … Firdusi won’t impress them. The old fashioned cultured diplomat survives in the “Levant Service”, but not in Downing Street. Sir Reader Bullard valued my knowledge of Persian poetry, and might put in a word for me if they consult him, but his successor as Ambassador doesn’t know me except as a name at the foot of uncomfortable “appreciations”.’138 There had been a prospect of a new Vice-Consulate at Behbehan which was going to be offered to Bunting so he could keep an eye on the Kuhgalu tribes but he wasn’t disappointed that the scheme fell through. ‘I don’t love barbarians for their barbarism,’ he told Dorothy, ‘and there would have been little else at Behbehan.’139
The Foreign Office finally offered Bunting a post in Isfahan but the salary was insulting, £990 (‘or £90 more than is paid to a fairly good mechanic’) for a job that involved ‘much entertaining & constant travelling’. Bunting had spent over £2,000 per annum during his first posting in Isfahan and claimed not to have been extravagant as his two predecessors had each spent about £3,000. Prices in Persia had risen by 1000 per cent since 1940 but the Foreign Office didn’t seem to want to acknowledge that.
He turned the job down and bought the yacht, although the rationing system made provisioning it impossible as you could not buy ahead in 1947. He asked Dorothy Pound to send some ‘unsolicited parcels’, which he would pay for, to get round this problem.140 He had nearly provisioned Idonea – the shopping list he sent to Dorothy is a post-war rationing horror story that included tinned butter and tinned bacon but, mercifully, ‘Spaghetti (not tinned)’ – when the government offered him a job in Teheran at a sensible salary (double the previous offer, although he claimed that ‘they’ cut his pay by £1 a day in April 1948),141 and he jumped at it. He wrote excitedly to Dorothy on 20 February 1947 that he would ‘live in sight of Mt. Demavand –19,000 feet of pure snow cone’. Isfahan it wasn’t but he was delighted with the appointment and planning the acquisition of a new rifle, ‘something capable of stopping a bear or a wolf ’.142
Perhaps, as Carroll Terrell observes, the letter from the Bakhtiaris had worked.
TEHERAN, 1947–1950
Tea, we drink. They don’t understand coffee, they are one of the five great tea nations, and their tea is very good indeed. After putting the boiling water on the tea they keep the pot very hot in the embers of charcoal, and pour out small glasses of it, diluted if necessary, and take a piece of smashed sugar-loaf (or sometimes an acid-drop or similar boiled sweet) between their teeth and suck the tea through that … tea is protocol here. If you visit an official you drink three glasses of tea, very hot, before getting down to business: and you give him three glasses of it if he visits you. A round of visits such as you must make at the Persian New Year is a test of tea-drinking capacity. I have had fifteen glasses of it in one afternoon.143
Bunting’s job at the British Embassy in Teheran was immense. He was ‘chief of all our Political Intelligence in Persia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, etc.’144 in the world’s most explosive theatre. The job required intense ‘astuteness and tact’ as he wrote to Zukofsky in May 1947.145 Nonetheless he longed for a less abstracted life, something more tangible. He wrote to Dorothy Pound in May 1948:
I like a new landfall, certain graces of men and trees and hills, the greased leathern hides of Zulu girls, the lack of cupidity in remote places and places grown out-of-date, Portuguese sailor’s shirts. I like the monkeys to be in the trees, not on chains; bougainvillea; the banyan; the snake-guarded wild bananas in bush you must cut as you go; a life more physical, less logical, less covetous, less distilled out of the past, than the chained life we lead. That’s why I enjoyed the war, why I love a barbarian girl, why I hate earning a living.146
He was unable to afford a house in Teheran itself and moved instead to a village seven miles from town and fifteen hundred feet above it. ‘It’s a nice enough building,’ he told Dorothy, ‘with a pillared terrace in front and a big garden. The diningroom and drawing room are run into one, intended to be separated by a curtain, but by leaving it as it is I have a huge room with only a pillar in the middle to divide it.’147
Bunting found himself at the heart of the British establishment and he was never going to be entirely comfortable there. ‘Friction with the Embassy nabobs is very severe,’ he told Dorothy in the same letter. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised to be chucked out. There are two particularly pompous, selfcomplacent, hollowskulled jackasses, who are in the two places next to the Ambassador, and one or other of them is sure to be able to dish me in the end. They have made it impossible for me to work effectively and very difficult to remain courteous. And I never saw such a jumble of petty jealousies before.’ He must have prevailed in his battle with the jackasses however. Six months later he w
rote to Dorothy to report progress: ‘I can claim a sort of victory in the work. I have really done what was never even attempted before, and done it well enough to astonish my diplomatic bosses into (probably temporary) respectful attention, so that my personal status here has improved out of all recognition in the past two months.’148 After the British Ambassador in Iran, Sir Reader Bullard, retired in 1946 Bunting believed he was the only employee of any Western government who understood the region.149
His letters of this period, particularly those written to Louis Zukofsky, are full of lurid tales and chance encounters at the edge of civilisation. Describing a trip to Luristan he recounts how he ran into some highwaymen:
Luristan is full of castles inhabited by the same old robber barons the history books dilate on. My car broke down in sight of one such castle, and three pretty ruffians came out to collect the spoils. I was alone, but I was able to bluff them. I had in my bag an American insecticide which is sold under pressure in a case very like a hand grenade, and which hisses when you open the valve. I persuaded them it was a sample atomic bomb which I was taking to the Embassy, and that, since I didn’t really understand its mechanism, it was liable to go off at any minute. They swallowed enough of that to retreat to a considerable distance, where they watched till the car got under way again. The conversation took about twenty minutes, disagreeable ones, for I had a diplomatic bag with me, and to have lost that to robbers would have been a serious business … And on the top of a hill the car surprised a young girl having a bath in a puddle. She snatched up her frock to put it on, but the wind filled it and carried it away, and we last saw her chasing downhill like a gazelle stark naked after her only garment.150
You can’t imagine that he was making this stuff up.
One of these letters to Dorothy Pound also contains the first indication of a turn in Bunting’s emotional life. An old friend and colleague, Ronald Oakshott, had settled in Isfahan while Bunting was in Teheran. He had married a young Armenian wife and her two younger sisters lived with them in a household that lacked any trace of the ‘conventions which we have got so used to that we have forgotten that they are merely conventions’. It was a simple lifestyle:
Beds, for instance are places where you sleep, and when you feel like sleeping you get into the nearest one, irrespective of who else may be there already. Clothes are for warmth and for making a show in the street, and when you are at home and the room is warm, you take off as many of them as makes you comfortable, without the least regard to how much of yourself you exhibit. The vodka bottle gets into very strange places. Work is very like Nausicaa’s washing-day ‘What shall we do today? Let’s wash the clothes.’ – a kind of play that never seems to grow stale and become a burden as household chores do in Europe, and that is always mixed up with singing and often interrupted by dancing, and never has to be done on time or against the grain. These girls are peasants, of course, born in a Kurdish village, and perhaps more Kurdish than Armenian in everything except their religion, which sits on them very lightly. Their ambitions are simple and obvious – to see Teheran where there are so many cinemas, to acquire a gold bracelet, to have a ride in my car. It is restful to be among people who are happy and unhampered, who have so few wants and make so few demands on one. I wish I had the sense to marry someone of their sort.151
After Oakshott died in the early 1950s Bunting painted a memorable picture of his friend’s lifestyle for Louis Zukofsky:
From the other side of the compass I am asked to compose an epitaph for my old friend Oakshott, Sima’s plus que père, who died drunk a couple of years ago. Banking was his trade, intoxication his calling. He distrusted cars, but would sniff out any bottle within walking distance and had sworn to reduce Persia to Islamic obedience by emptying every bottle in the land. He died with his task less than half accomplished but it has since happily been taken up by the Minister of the Interior … He drank not less than six bottles of brandy during a day’s journey from Mosul to Suleimania and at the end of it received the local notables flat on his back in the middle of the viceconsular sittingroom without the slightest loss of dignity or scandal. I was there, officially superintending the move … His dog bit a piece out of the seat of my trousers and a larger bit out of the leg of an Iraqi colonel, but even that didn’t mar the occasion.152
Oakshott had been ‘a substitute for a father to Sima [one of the sisters] as long as she could remember’ and his friendship with Bunting clearly facilitated a romance, which had developed considerably by April the following year. He had taken a week’s holiday in Shiraz and Persepolis with two ‘Saqis’, the two sisters, ‘with one of whom I intend to commit matrimony if the gods permit … I only realised how deeply I love her while we were in Shiraz and quarrelling about the amount of wine she insisted on swallowing.’153 That week he met the national champion nose-flautist ‘who kept making the most beautiful noises in the room next door. He said it was the spirit of the kisses he believed Sima and I were exchanging.’154
There are the alps
His reflections about the change wrought on his life by the war and its aftermath, by the ‘circumstances that obliged me to abandon the reflective life for the active one, as seaman and airman and diplomat, and I have no doubt gained something by the change, but I have lost a lot … action is a lust that is hard to abandon’,155 indicated that he expected to write nothing, or nothing of interest, until he lost his job. In fact, however, he wrote some memorable poetry in the second half of the 1940s.
‘Search under every veil’, written in 1947, seems to draw on his experiences in the Middle East but is applicable to any society:
Search under every veil
for the pale eyes, pale
lips of a sick child,
in each doorway glimpse
her reluctant limbs
for whom no kindness is,
to whom caress and kiss
come nightly more amiss,
whose hand no gentle hand
touches, whose eyes withstand
compassion. Say: Done, past
help, preordained waste.
Say: We know by the dead
they mourn, their bloodshed,
the maimed who are the free.
We willed it, we.
Say: Who am I to doubt?
But every vein cries out.156
He told Zukofsky that the change of weight in the middle of this poem was deliberate: ‘up till then I have only a stock sentimental poem which I attempt to raise suddenly onto another level altogether. The fact that you don’t grumble at the sentimental beginning is quite possibly due to what is thus reflected back from the end, which I think I couldn’t have got in the same light movement.’157
‘See! Their verses are laid’, written in 1948, has a deliberate muscularity in its opening lines:
See! Their verses are laid
as mosaic gold to gold
gold to lapis lazuli
white marble to porphyry
stone shouldering stone, the dice
polished alike, there is
no cement seen and no gap
between stones as the frieze strides
to the impending apse:
the rays of many glories
forced to its focus forming
a glory neither of stone
nor metal, neither of words
nor verses, but of the light
shining upon no substance;
a glory not made
for which all else was made.158
Zukofsky objected to some of the vocabulary in ‘See! Their verses are laid’ and Bunting agreed that ‘impending’ is ‘weak, but I couldn’t find what’s wanted’, but he defended ‘shouldering’: ‘What’s the word for quarter of the solid formed by the rotation of an elipse on its axis, and has it an adjective? “Shouldering” probably has for you moral echoes which haven’t worried me. I meant it just physically, in which sense it is exact.’159 Bunting clearly felt that he had been too oblique in ‘See! Their
verses are laid’ and felt the need, unusually, to add an explanatory note to Collected Poems: ‘A friend’s misunderstanding obliges me to declare that the implausible optics of this poem are not intended as an argument for the existence of God, but only suggest that the result of a successful work of art is more than the sum of its meanings and differs from them in kind.’160 Thomas Cole detected Yeats’ ‘Lapis Lazuli’ somewhere behind ‘See! Their verses are laid’.161 There is a clear thematic link, but for all its charms ‘See! Their verses are laid’ is not ‘Lapis Lazuli’.
He was also busy translating and adapting from Persian ‘All the teeth ever I had’ and ‘Came to me’ from Rudaki,162 ‘Shall I sulk because my love has a double heart?’ from Manuchehri in 1949, and ‘Last night without sight’ and ‘This I write’ from Sa‘di.163 Twenty years later Bunting used a reading of ‘Last night without sight’ to illustrate his contention that Orientalists and translators had overstressed the mysticism of classical Persian poetry:
When you hear people talking as though the Persian poets were all mystics and thought of nothing but mysticism, in fact what it means is that the selection of Persian poets dealt with by European orientalists are mostly mystics, but they are a very tiny section and a very uncommon section of Persian literature. In fact Sa‘di, who is read by westerners to some extent, had a piquant mixture that you can twist and make them sound mystical, was in fact not mystical in the least.164
This is a translation from Sa‘di but surely the spirit of Yeats’ ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ is never far away from it:
Last night without sight of you my brain was ablaze.
My tears trickled and fell plip on the ground. That I with
sighing might bring my life to a close they would name
you and again and again speak your name till
with night’s coming all eyes closed save mine whose every
A Strong Song Tows Us Page 39
