A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Bunting told Zukofsky in November that he had with some difficulty persuaded the Westminster Press, which owned fifteen regional newspapers, to employ him as its first foreign correspondent in Italy,227 but that before he left he was required to spend ‘a bloody six weeks of senseless, pointless, useless drudgery’ in London learning the newspaper business he already knew.228 At first he felt that The Times had been generous: ‘The Times was awfully nice about it and paid my wages after I came home until I found another job. Since I hadn’t given them above a week’s warning of the move, I think that was bloody generous.’229 He had brought with him some fresh caviar for Astor but didn’t think that was a factor. His attitude to The Times was to change sharply in the coming months.

  The Buntings drove from Newcastle to Rome, a long and tedious journey with a new baby, and rented a ‘villattino’ ‘some way from the sea and out of sight of it, but with a view of the Alpi Apuana when it isn’t raining’;230 ‘rather a nice house’, he told Zukofsky, ‘belonging to a marchesa who unfortunately wants it back again as soon as the weather improves in May’.231 It was the start of a hectic period for Bunting. ‘I have just got back from Milan,’ he told Dorothy at the end of November, ‘driving far too fast over the Cisa pass in a fog, and leave tomorrow for Siena, and thereafter Garda. That will be followed by Rome again, and I may also have to make a trip to Sicily before I get time, sometime in January, to look in at Rapallo … I see little except the surface of the road and the cyclists who get in my way: and even in an inn I just gobble my spaghetti, swig my wine, and away again at 60 mph, no time to talk or taste.’232

  He was busy in Italy but at least beginning to re-engage intellectually. He corresponded with Pound about a proposed series of translations from Oriental classics mainly, he told Zukofsky, to ‘give EP something to think about. Nothing can come of it. At present he’s rushing after it most magnificently. Especially since I revealed that Arabic historians aren’t totally blind to economic and currency problems.’233 Bunting put a fair amount of effort into something that was conceived only to give Pound something to think about. In December 1950 he sent Pound, Bertrand Russell, Ahmad Suratgar, Arthur Waley (a celebrated Sinologist but also a member of the Bloomsbury Group, so despised by Pound and Bunting) and the Arabist, G. M. Wickens, the draft of a prospectus for the proposed Oriental ‘Loeb’ and asked for their permission to use their names as a ‘provisional and (I hope) temporary committee’. He was aware that this was not a committee that would have fallen together naturally: ‘If any of you does not entirely like the company you are asked to keep, please reflect that the ends for which you keep it are limited and common to all. If we get the thing going we can, I hope, part and let others carry on with it.’234 The response was discouraging.235

  He also started work on a new sonata and began to read some contemporary poetry. ‘I looked at the fellers I’d more or less missed out,’ he told Pound in March 1951, ‘the Audens and Day Lewises and the Welsh blighter [Dylan Thomas], and found I’d done damn right to miss them out.’236 He expressed this rather more forcibly to the less strait-laced Zukofsky: ‘Feeling I’d maybe been over severe on too little acquaintance I recently bought a collection of Auden & his friends. I was wrong. I was far too indulgent. They are a useless set of cunts.’237 Hundreds of Bunting’s letters survive in various libraries in the US and the UK, as well as in private hands, and in not one of them is there vocabulary like this. ‘Auden & his friends’ enjoyed a fruitier send off from Bunting than his real hate figures Margaret Thatcher, Ayatollah Khomeini, Mosaddeq, Hugh Astor, Hitler.

  The notorious Fascist Bandit

  He had clearly learned a thing or two about propaganda. In contrast with the ‘Audens and Day Lewises’ Zukofsky was the real article and Bunting deeply (and generously in the circumstances) lamented the fact that Zukofsky’s genius was going unnoticed. Perhaps if Pound were to raise his voice in support? ‘If you,’ he wrote, ‘the notorious Fascist Bandit and arch-antisemite were to recommend him as he ought to be recommended, people might be non-plussed, but they’d take notice.’238

  Privately Bunting had conceded that Pound might have been losing his mind. He told Peter Russell in May 1950 that he wanted to help get Pound released but that ‘it would be difficult to maintain that Pound is NOT mad. He always had some eccentricities, and they have grown steadily queerer during the thirty years I have known him.’239 Reading Pound’s correspondence it is impossible to disagree with Bunting’s diagnosis, but his circumstances were not being helped by his friends. Olga Rudge, Bunting told Zukofsky,

  seems to me to have become embittered by jealousy of Dorothy, who, of course, has all the honour and glory, besides being infernally unjealous, which must be maddening … I think she now disapproves of me because I don’t take sides in family squabbles which she magnifies until everybody who isn’t a partisan of her or at least her point of view is an enemy to be maligned and combated. It is all damn silly. She goes so far as to assert that Dorothy prevents Ezra from being released for fear he should run away to her, Olga … Old Pea says she is much madder than Ezra, and he ought to know: mad as a hatter himself.240

  A month later he told Zukofsky that the point about Pound was that ‘he is mad, a prisoner, and getting I think, very near the end of the nervous strength which has enabled him to put up an undaunted and unrepentant show so far …’241

  Bunting knew that Olga Rudge’s demands for more direct action could only be counterproductive, given the mood of the American public, although he did recommend a change of lawyer. The husband of his old friend Margaret de Silver had a partner, George Richards, a Wall Street lawyer who looked after accounts such as General Motors. Bunting was friendly with Richards and considered him a man of ‘great kindliness and immense worldly wisdom’.242 Dorothy responded positively to Bunting’s suggestion that she get Richards to take on Pound’s case and Bunting enquired but Richards told him that he was too old and ill, and anyway busy ‘prosecuting gangsters in New York’.243

  Bunting was frustrated by Rudge’s unsubtle maneouvring. He wrote to Eliot in May 1952:

  It seems that some of Ezra’s friends here and in England have got impatient at his long incarceration and are planning in a vague and restless way some move which, I fear, might only make things worse by setting up the backs of the Great American People and perhaps also of their rulers. To keep these folk quiet … I’ve undertaken to recommend EP and DP to consult another lawyer, namely George Richards of Wall Street, if he will be consulted … Meanwhile I am told (for I haven’t seen her) that Gabriela Mistral wants to make a letter, manifesto, petition or something of that nature to be signed by all the literary Nobel Prize winners and a few others of similar standing. If it were tactfully drafted such a performance might do no harm, even conceivably a very little good: and it seems to me that you, American by birth and much experience, would be the obvious bloke to do the drafting.244

  Part of Pound’s problem was his inability to compromise his lunatic beliefs even to those people with whom he had fallen out, such as Bunting. ‘An unexpected note from EP,’ Bunting wrote to Zukofsky in July 1953, ‘after silence. He thinks the Kikes are terrifying the Americans and seems to want me to go there and reveal this horrible business to the world. They have made schoolteachers afraid of expressing anti-Semitism … I am discouraged from argument. It is beyond argument.’245

  Bunting recognised that Pound’s anti-Semitic ravings were, if obnoxious, unlikely to cause any real damage. By now Pound’s credibility as a social scientist, if he ever had any, had evaporated. There was even less chance of him affecting the political classes in the 1950s than there had been in the 1930s. Bunting pointed out to Zukofsky that Pound’s ‘hebraiophobia’ was ‘as mad as Yeats’s Rosicrucianism and perhaps hardly more mischievous. See WBY’s diary: he was thrust into awful doubt when the devil whispered to him that that fellow Bunting didn’t believe in anything: and that fellow Bunting had written some quite decent poetry.’246

  Po
und wrote to Bunting in 1955 to criticise him directly for not doing anything to ‘contradict lies’ told about him. Bunting replied that he ‘would make considerable efforts for any plan that seemed to me likely to help, or even not to harm, your prospects or your reputation’.247 But there never was a coherent plan to liberate Pound, and Bunting’s suspicion from the outset that Pound’s case would have to wait until the American public had forgotten him, and that Olga Rudge’s manoeuvring was only likely to keep him in the spotlight, to his detriment, was correct.

  For someone so uncompromising and absolutist, Bunting had an extraordinary ability, sometimes, to bury the hatchet. In 1964 he wrote to Pound just to remind him that ‘silence doesn’t mean lack of love’.248 He didn’t expect a reply, having been told that Pound neither talked nor wrote by then. He merely wanted to reassure Pound that he had ‘forgotten neither what I owe you nor the deep affection I now and always feel for you. And so it will be, whether I write or not, and whether you reply or not.’ Even in the mid-1960s he thought that it was Rudge rather than Pound who was still fomenting discord. He told Goacher, as he was finishing Briggflatts, that Pound wouldn’t be pleased with Briggflatts, ‘partly for sound reasons, I expect, but partly because Olga has him persuaded that I (and probably TSE) wouldnt cooperate in getting him out of the madhouse, whereas we merely wouldnt cooperate with her in publicity which seemed likely to make it harder than ever to get him set loose.’249 Bunting continued to write sporadically until Pound died in 1972.

  TEHERAN 1951–1952

  The Italian job didn’t work out. He had, as usual, been complaining about lack of money and the cost of living since the day he arrived, and by the end of January 1951 he reported to Dorothy that his job was ‘extremely shaky’. By the middle of May he knew he was ‘definitely finished here at last’ though a desk job in London was a possibility.250 Before he left he wrote to Margaret de Silver in April 1951 with family news. Sima Maria was now fourteen months old and he longed to see his three children from his first marriage but was certain that ‘Marian would find some way of preventing it and turning it to my harm’.251

  In June 1951 the Buntings returned to Northumberland by car, an ‘overstrenuous’ journey that included one stretch of uninterrupted driving for twenty-four hours because the hotels in England were full with visitors to the 1951 Festival of Britain.252 At that stage he was hoping to return to Iran for The Times, the Italian job having rendered him even poorer than he had been when he began it.253 He was beginning to despair of Britain where ‘everything involves papers and permits, the limits that are set to you in every direction, the assumption that if you aren’t a civil servant you must be predatory or in some way dishonest’.254

  But matters were worse elsewhere. On 20 July 1951 Abdullah bin al- Hussein, King of Jordan, was assassinated while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem. Abdullah, friend of T. E. Lawrence and one of the moderate nationalists in the region, was one of the giants of Middle Eastern politics in the twentieth century and Bunting was deeply shocked by his death. ‘Today they’ve murdered Abdulla,’ he wrote to Dorothy Pound. ‘In two years, three men I knew and admired, one my friend: Hazhir, Razmara, Abdulla.’ Abdolhosein Hazhir, who had been Prime Minister of Iran in 1948, was assassinated on 5 November 1949. Sepahbod Haj Ali Razmara, Prime Minister of Iran in 1950 and 1951, was assassinated on 7 March 1951. ‘They kill the patient men,’ Bunting explained to Dorothy, ‘who do the best the conditions allow: never the fools whose brains can’t contain more than one political idea, & who are therefore loudmouthed, the extremists. They get killed only after they’ve brought a generation to ruin.’255 ‘Razmara was a good guy and my friend,’ he wrote to Zukofsky,

  ready to tackle the extraordinarily difficult job of reforming Persia without defying facts or initiating a new dictatorship. He released the jailed communists, including the several-times-over murderer Boghrati, and imagined that would ease tension. An error. And I was stopped from advising him, even when he asked it, for fear of ‘British interference’. He took on the PM job just after I left Iran, and he was the man for it, but I’d have liked him to let the Nationalists make a mess of it first and discredit themselves. Now there’s no one left with both sense and authority. Even uprightness is none too common among politicians in Persia as elsewhere.256

  Bunting’s assessment of the post-assassination political situation in Iran was astute. He wrote to Dorothy Pound on 20 July 1951:

  Hazhir could do very little: only whisper to the Shah the names of those who were shamelessly dishonest. His funeral was hissed by a hired mob. Razmara, whom I regarded as a friend, saw that he could best serve the West by composing the disputes with Russia: so those who benefited by his sense were calling him a traitor before he was shot. Abdulla has been the most patient statesman of this age: counter-mining for a whole generation: not personally ambitious (his kingship was a move in the long attempt to unite the Arabs). He has never risked the peace: nobody has ever been killed to serve his purposes. And he has found no ally – his own people full of jealousy, the British backward, [Sir John Bagot] Glubb an impetuous intriguer … And now he’s dead, the poor muddled Regent of Irak will muff the business: the little king is too young, & his British tutors too determined to minify him & kill the military spirit he was born with (something of Feisal in him) … This assassination has filled me with horror.

  It’s hard to fault the diagnosis. Bunting understood the region better than any of his Western contemporaries. He overheard a colleague at The Times on the phone to someone at the News Chronicle saying, ‘he told us two years ago exactly what was going to happen in Persia, & the Foreign Office said Pooh! & so did the oil people.’

  On the positive side The Times had ‘re-doubled [his] salary & brought the News-Chronicle into the partnership, so between the two of them I can afford to go back to Persia’. In June he was in London ‘buttering’ Ali Soheili (a former Prime Minister of Iran) who was the Iranian Ambassador to Britain, to secure a visa. He was aware of the stakes in this dangerous game: ‘Soheili knows I know more of his past than he likes anyone to know, but I couldn’t judge by his face what he intends to do. I hope the visa isn’t delayed. Maybe the Fedayan will murder me too (or Hosein Makki [a key figure in the nationalisation of Iran’s oil industry] might like to), but I’ve been threatened before & by more formidable folk, & it’s a reasonable risk.’257 Bunting was acutely aware of the issue that was driving the politics of the region, then as now. ‘Oil, oil, oil,’ is the first sentence of a letter to Dorothy in August 1951.258

  Although he still hadn’t acquired a visa in August 1951 his work for The Times continued and it is clear that there was a strong overlap between his journalism and diplomacy. ‘I’ve managed to keep the Times more reasonable than other English papers,’ he wrote to Dorothy,

  and even conspired with them to influence the govt. Difficult article to write – mustn’t be detected attacking the foreign office that is, not by the general reader: but must be perfectly plain to the cabinet etc that we know all about their neglect and disapprove of their policy. Since we disapprove even more strongly of what the Tories would have liked to do and are in fact pretty completely isolated in England, the caution is justified. The Times wants its say on other matters attended to, as well as Persia.259

  Meanwhile the BBC had turned down his application for a job in Northern news, even though, he believed, he was the only northerner who had applied and the only ‘seriously experienced journalist … Not even an interview.’260 Fortunately his visa came through and he returned to Teheran in the autumn of 1951. The city was uncontrollable and foreign correspondents were abandoning it as quickly as they could:

  They were terrified, by mobs and by other threats. I have never seen people like them. Very few of them showed the slightest spunk of any sort. There was just one from the Daily Express who was not afraid to go with me into the middle of a big riot. But, after the Greek journalist got hit on the head and was killed during a riot, the rest departe
d. It was shocking. I think all the cheap English papers and the American papers, without exception, disappeared within the next two or three days. In fact, all these kinds of things are much less dangerous than people imagine. You can go about with threats against your life for a long time and nothing happens at all – there’s no use taking the slightest notice of them. I’ve been shot at once or twice, and often had people looking for me supposed to be going to kill me if they could, but they never got around to it. If somebody hires a man to kill you, that man doesn’t want to earn the money. He wants to get the money, but once he kills you he’s taking a risk for it and he’s not likely to kill you at all. One time there was a mob. I don’t know quite who had hired them but I’ve no doubt they were hired all right. They came around and began shouting outside the door of the Ritz in Teheran for my life. They wanted to kill me. And I sat in the flat of the Reuter’s correspondent and watched for some time and then said I want to go hear what they’re saying. And Reuter’s man was a bit afraid to go out. I said what the hell, no one knows what I look like or anything. I went out. I walked into the crowd and stood amongst them and shouted DEATH TO MR. BUNTING! with the best of them, and nobody took the slightest notice of me. Another time, two men with pistols arrived at our door while I was taking an afternoon nap. My wife told them I wasn’t in. That was all; they accepted that and went away again. There’s no great determination on the part of hired assassins.261

  He held American foreign correspondents in especially low regard. He told Dorothy in June 1949 that he couldn’t understand how a word of truth ever made its way into even the best US newspapers. ‘The chaps who write for the [New York] “Times” and the “Herald-Tribune” not only wouldn’t be tolerated by the London Times, I believe the Daily Mail itself would sack them for irresponsible inaccuracy. One who was here for a few weeks practically advertised for anybody to sell him false news so long as it was sensational. I have begun to look at any telegram marked UP or APA as untrue until I see evidence to the contrary.’262