Bunting told a story from his time in Baghdad which illustrates his first point beautifully:
I do know a man in Baghdad; he was a ferryman working a very tough job, for the Tigris is an extremely fast river; the labour of getting across it is considerable. I felt sorry for the old man and was very much astonished when one day he invited me to come to the wedding of his daughter. I went along and it was the most magnificent affair. There inside the mud compound that he lived in were all manner of magnificent carpets and there were no less than three bands of musicians, everything on the most tremendous scale; all the dishes were silver and so forth – it was admirable. I was in a position then when I could get things found out for me and I got some people on to finding out all about this old boy and it turned out that he owned … the only efficient dairy farm in Iraq – he was a very wealthy man – but because he was a good religious man he also had to earn his living by the labour of his hand and went on being a ferryman.292
Is it an exaggeration to suggest that Mosaddeq’s expulsion of Bunting and the refusal of The Times to support him set back diplomacy for sixty years in what I’m afraid we still call the Middle East? Possibly, but at any rate the loss of someone as knowledgeable and politically sensitive as Bunting was clearly a blow to stability in the region.
THROCKLEY AND WYLAM, 1952–1964
The Buntings’ journey back to Britain was eventful. He told Denis Goacher that he was ‘fired at twice, out of the blue; one bullet hit the windscreen, just above his head, and the other one dented a back mudguard but by a miracle didn’t penetrate the tyre’.293
Bunting wrote to Ezra Pound in May about his journey home, unaccountably forgetting the bullets. The family had reached Sirmione in the Italian lakes after only a
very moderate crop of disasters – half drowned by torrents of rain in Persia, washed out the electric system, hid the quarry like holes in the asphalt under two inches of muddy water, hence a broken back spring & 4 days delay in Baghdad: our good battery stolen in Baghdad & a dud put in its place: 5 days delay in Istanbul (3 too many) in a cursed German garage: an unfindable short circuit between Belgrade & Zagreb: but our first puncture happened in Italy.294
Once again, Bunting’s en route letter to Pound gives us a glimpse of the travel writer that could have been in a filmic description of his experiences:
The Iraqi customs officer who gave us a feast in his poverty-stricken lodging: the petrol pump attendant at Mafraq (Jordan) who sent out for tea & gave Maria a live starling (which we afterwards set free): the innkeeper at Gerede (Turkey) who’d never had foreign guests before & overcame the language difficulty by drawing pictures while his mother took Sima into the larder to choose our food; and was with difficulty persuaded to present a bill for his hospitality: the Greek soldiers who built a fire at our bivouac in Macedonia & made coffee & gave us cheese & wine: even the Servian [Greece] communist officer who, after examining our luggage & passports pretty strictly with a grim face, finally borrowed Sima’s accordion & gave us a tune to which the frontier sentry danced; duty sat heavily on him, but he had enough spirit left to be a man again once it was over.295
They arrived back in Britain in June and shared his mother’s ‘very small house in Throckley’.296 Bunting tried to find work as a journalist but found that other newspapers were put off by the fact that The Times had let him go. Working for The Times had cost him whatever savings he had accumulated, Sima was heavily pregnant with their second child, and because he had worked overseas for so long he had ‘no rights in the vaunted Welfare State. We can draw no insurance nor help of any kind. In short, I don’t think I’ve been in a worse situation in the whole of my life, hard as it mostly was.’297 Bunting closed his letter with an entreaty to Margaret to help him find work in the US, summarised his by now considerable skills and experience, enclosed copies of his curriculum vitae and signed off with an admission that he had not even tried to be ‘social and interesting’ in his letter, such an activity being unthinkable ‘while my anxiety lasts’. He also asked Zukofsky to spread the word that he was willing to move to the United States if he could find a job. Zukofsky forwarded Bunting’s letter to William Carlos Williams who returned it on 17 October: ‘I return Bunting’s letter as you asked me t. The curriculum vitae I have sent on to Norman Pearson at Yale who as far as I know is more likely than any one else to be of assistance. I sent him also Bunting’s address on the chance that he want to communicate direct with him.’298
Nothing came of this. Williams wrote to Pound on 17 April 1954 telling him that, ‘when I last heard from him [Bunting] via Louis Zukofsky he included in his letter a summary under a Latin title giving a summary of Buntings scholastic accomplishments. It was impressive so I sent it off as it was to Norman Pearson of Yale asking him if he could find a place for him as a teacher of Persian there. He said in reply that no one there was interested in learning the language.’299
Bunting had written, as Williams had suggested, to Professor Norman Holmes Pearson who had returned to Yale, after intelligence work in London during the war, to set up a new American Studies department. He believed that he ‘could be of real use in a University, either to bring a rather wider range of reading in foreign languages than is usual to the exposition of English poetry or, more directly, to teach Persian as a literature from which we can learn much that has never been absorbed into European literatures and at least something that used to be got from Latin and Greek before the syllabus was choked with philology,’300 but a few weeks later he told Zukofsky, ‘Pearson. Never a word.’301 Academic orientalists were something of a bugbear for Bunting but he got his own back on one of them. In his quest for employment he had written to America’s most distinguished orientalist, Arthur Upham Pope, recently retired Chancellor of the Asia Institute in New York. Pope had replied to Bunting that, ‘(1) there aren’t any jobs, (2) I am retired and can’t be asked to know of jobs (3) if there were any jobs there are lots of people much better qualified than you, Sir.’ Bunting told Zukofsky a story about ‘the high priest of USA Orientalism’ that I am sure he hoped would one day become public: ‘Well, Louis, last time I saw [Pope] he stopped his car to beg me to translate to his chauffeur the difficult piece: “I want to go to the railway station.” I suppose I could manage that in at least a round dozen of languages, let alone those I profess to know something about or would presume to teach.’302
The Spoils
Bunting wasn’t entirely unpublished in the post-war years. ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’ was published in Four Pages, a periodical edited by Dallam Flynn mainly to promulgate Pound’s social theories. In May 1948 Bunting told Zukofsky that Flynn hadn’t asked for permission to publish but ‘they were most flattering. I like butter (in moderation)’.303 ‘All the teeth I ever had…’, ‘Night is hard by’ and ‘Last night without sight of you’ were published in Peter Russell’s Nine; Rainer Gerhardt’s German translation of ‘Empty vast days…’ appeared in Fragmente, and ‘Now that sea’s over that island’ was published in Imagi.304 Nine published ‘You there’, ‘This I write’ and ‘The Thundercloud’ in its April 1956 issue and Hugh Kenner included ‘Let them remember Samangan’ and ‘Vestiges’ in The Art of Poetry in 1959, each poem followed by a series of critical questions. In 1960 ‘Darling of Gods and men’ was included in Poetry for Pleasure: The Hallmark Book of Poetry. ‘You leave’ (from ‘Aus dem Zweiten Reich’) was reproduced in Kenneth Patchen’s privately published Journal of Albion Moonlight in 1961, but without attribution to Bunting. Bunting couldn’t complain, he had grandly announced to Zukofsky in 1948 that ‘I hereby inform my literary executor that I disapprove of copyright, and anybody can print whatever they like of mine anywhere and over any name, so long as they don’t alter it.’305 So as far as Patchen was concerned he had little to complain about, although he didn’t like his longer works being dismembered.
Much more importantly, however, ‘The Spoils’, Bunting’s poem of the Second World War was published in Poetry in No
vember 1951. ‘The Spoils’ is one of the more ‘difficult’ poems Bunting wrote, something the poet himself acknowledged at a reading in 1977.306 It is condensed almost to the point of paralysis and the oriental references sometimes seem alien to a Western ear so that getting to the memorable episodes can feel like hard work. Even Bunting’s explanation of some of the terms of the poem can feel like heavy going:
Bashshar bin Burd was an Arabic poet of Persian race who was put to death for heresy in the eighth or ninth century. It’s not clear exactly what his heresy was, but it seems that he ‘glanced back’ at the achievements of the Sassanian kings and the Zoroastrian religion, and in particular at the communist rebellion of Mazdak which was put down after a temporary triumph in about 570 a.d. He was probably some kind of pantheist, though he didn’t get as far as Hallaj, who said ‘Ana’l-haqq’, or some kind of Manichean, but most likely a bit of both. He ‘speculated whither’ by forseeing [sic] only evil from the caliphate and rousing a rather vague spirit of rebellion. The first great Persian poets who wrote in Persian, a century or more later, thought well of Bashshar, at least as a poet.307
He told an audience in London that ‘The Spoils’,
begins with the four sons of Shem … They are here to show four different aspects of the Semitic peoples. Arabs and Jews are very much alike. Perhaps they wouldn’t like to hear that in New York but it’s true. And not only in their language but in much of their habits and way of looking at things. So I have a rather militant Jew and an Arab merchant and a Badu and a Zionist … and then go on in the 2nd part to another fine thing, finer than I think the Semitic thing too, the civilization of Persia, for one part. But the poem became lopsided. It was intended to have four parts as a sonata ought to have of course, and I sent it all to Louis Zukofsky who wrote back and complained that the last two parts were pretty thin. And I read them through again and he was quite right. They were pretty thin. And the only thing I could think to do about it was to shrink them both into one. So the sonata is a lopsided affair … One of the suras of the Koran deals with what is to be done with the spoils of war, and it begins with the words ‘The spoils are for God, the spoils are God’s’… and it struck me during the last war that that was precisely the state of affairs. What you got out of it was nothing you could enrich yourself with much, but in a way it was something you could dedicate to God, or to whatever in the modern mind takes the place that God would have taken in the medieval mind.308
Bunting worked hard on ‘The Spoils’. He told Peter Quartermain that he had taken six months or more to find the last half of one line and when he did it contained just three words, ‘Halt, both, lament’. These were a translation from the Mu’allaqát of ‘Amr al Qais, two Arabic words represented by the three English words, though ‘four syllables in somewhat the same rhythm’.309
‘The Spoils’ is obscure but some passages shimmer with conviction and beauty, the lines that describe the North Sea convoys for instance (p. 274). Bunting describes a real scene from the Malta campaign in part 3 of the poem:
Tinker tapping perched on a slagheap
and the man who can mend a magneto.
Flight-Lieutenant Idema, half course run
that started from Grand Rapids, Michigan,
wouldn’t fight for Roosevelt,
‘that bastard Roosevelt’, pale
at Malta’s ruins, enduring
a jeep guarded like a tyrant.
In British uniform and pay
for fun of fighting and pride,
for Churchill on foot alone,
clowning with a cigar, was lost
in best blues and his third plane that day.310
This stanza tilts, I think playfully, at Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’ and does so with complete integrity. Yeats had no direct experience of participation in war. The answer to his question in ‘The Man and the Echo’, ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’, is probably ‘no’, and even if it did the question is more about Yeats than about the men. But Bunting counted his pilots home after every flight and felt the direct pain of each loss. The day Flight Lieutenant Idema didn’t reach his home airfield Bunting was searching the skies for him. A few years later, desperate for work, he wrote to Idema’s father, Walter Idema, to ask if he knew of a job. ‘Lord knows I did it reluctantly,’ he told Zukofsky. ‘He is the father of one of my pilots when I looked after Spitfires in 43 and 44. His son was one of the bravest men I ever met and a particularly individual and picturesque one. You’ll maybe remember the lines in The Spoils. Father Idema saw them and wrote to me when I was in Persia, and I was able to give him some particulars of his son’s last hours which must have wrung his heart with pride.’311
Keith Alldritt described ‘The Spoils’ as a work of ‘ironic undeludedness and quiet stoicism. It is more sensuous than Little Gidding; it is more restrained than The Pisan Cantos. But it has the same kind of literary stature as theirs and its essential purposes as a work of art are the same.’312 Little Gidding and The Pisan Cantos are good enough company for any poem to keep but ‘The Spoils’ didn’t dazzle the literary world (although it was read on the BBC’s Third programme in July 1957).313
Bunting was armed with ‘The Spoils’ when he visited T. S. Eliot in 1952 to, as Denis Goacher puts it, ‘beg for a favour’. Bunting wanted Faber & Faber to publish Poems 1950 in the United Kingdom but, according to Goacher, Eliot turned him down because, ‘he considered that Basil’s style was too notably influenced by Pound – that there wasn’t sufficient divergence to really justify his being published by them. Now, timing is everything, Eliot died in January 1965, so he didn’t live to see Briggflatts. If he had, I am perfectly certain that Fabers would have published Basil.’314 If ‘Villon’, ‘Chomei at Toyama’ and ‘The Spoils’ weren’t enough to convince Eliot that Bunting had a powerful, distinctive voice of his own I doubt that even Briggflatts would have done the job. In fact Eliot had told Bunting that he thought ‘the poetry is good, some of it very good indeed, and writing is clean and workmanlike, with no fluff, but … they are still too much under the influence of Pound, for the stage which you have reached’.315 Bunting certainly felt that Eliot was deaf to his music. He told Pound that ‘TSE must always have been a bit muddled and he gave up the chance of unmuddling himself when he took to smokescreens such as religion to hide his poetry behind. The screen distracted his own attention from the poetry, I imagine, as well as that of the public, and his perception of poetical technique diminished.’316 It’s unlikely that Eliot was as deaf to Bunting’s music as Goacher claims, and it is hard not to conclude that his rejection of Bunting was inspired by some personal animus. Eliot wouldn’t have forgotten Bunting’s heavy handed criticism of his influence in the 1930s and Goacher tacitly admits as much when he refers to Bunting’s attitude to Eliot: ‘He was always trying to cut Eliot down to size … He would say, “Oh, history will show that Eliot is a minor poet, like Coleridge.”’317 Goacher had a point here. Bunting seems to have enjoyed comparing Eliot unfavourably with, particularly, Rudyard Kipling. Bunting held Kipling in high regard but to a wider audience a comparison of Eliot with Kipling, even a favourable one, would have seemed like damning with faint damnation. As early as 1935 he was delighted with his discovery of the ‘astonishing correspondence’ between Kipling’s story, ‘How the Kangeroo got his Legs’ and Eliot’s ‘Sweeney Agonistes’, noting that ‘The rhythm exactly corresponds, the diction is very similar. Some phrases seem to be perfectly parallel with phrases in the Eliot.’318 And thirty years later he told Gael Turnbull that he thought Four Quartets was ‘badly flawed’ and that Eliot had a dead ear. ‘He beats a drum. His beat is too obvious and boring. It goes thump thump thump. It isn’t even as subtle as Kipling can be.’319
Bunting was too astute to believe that Eliot was really a minor poet. There was a lurking mutual mistrust between Bunting and Eliot that doesn’t do great credit to either of them. Bunting even managed to be condescending about Eliot’s
Nobel Prize in 1948: ‘I hope he enjoys it, but fear he will try to do good instead.’320
In the mid 1960s Bunting showed Tom Pickard a letter from Eliot that Pickard described as ‘mean spirited’. Eliot once again refused to publish Bunting at Faber, which was no great surprise, but the ‘bitterness’ puzzled Pickard and he asked the poet Ed Dorn about it. Dorn’s reply sheds some light on the way Eliot used his position of power:
Eliot occupied the position of power and one of his strategies was to write essays and redefine what literature could be and was according to his own lights. Basil wouldn’t have been a threat exactly. I mean what could threaten T.S. Eliot? But he certainly wouldn’t have conformed to what Eliot wanted, as a buttressing element in his own position in the canon … T.S. Eliot was the midwife who was constantly trying to kill the baby. He was the abortionist of the post modern movement; he controlled who was going to be born and who wasn’t insofar as he could.321
But Bunting knew Eliot’s worth. In later life he reflected on Eliot’s achievement. He told Dennis Goacher, ‘I said a few hard words about TSE from time to time. I thought he surrendered too easily to the damned orthodoxies he had no real need of. But he was a kindly man, affectations and all; and people of my age remember how much Prufrock and the Waste Land did for English taste and understanding. Even persistence in what everyone said was a foolish marriage was a fault of kindness, though it was there he first put his foot in the grave, I think.’322
For all the mutual mistrust Bunting’s relationship with Eliot is best expressed by Bunting himself in a letter he sent to Zukofsky before the meeting about ‘The Spoils’, which reprimanded Zukofsky for his standoffishness:
I like the gin-sodden holy reprobate, long may he flourish and exhort us to repentance. No malice more certain, no kindness more ready. A good bloke, Zuk, not to be shied off from on skimpy excuses. Don’t be so goddamned proud. He’s busy, he’s plagued by idiots, he doesn’t answer letters if they’re difficult to answer nicely, BUT he leaves word with his sec. Don’t let BB get through London without seeing me, if you have to cut an engagement with Almighty God out of my diary. Considering he don’t really like anything I’ve ever written, and knows I got a lot of reservations about his work, and considering he’s now an OM and Nobel Prize and high archangel of English lit., I think it’s a sign of something somewhere. In the Café Royal the waiter remembered him after a while. Then he stood in thought and finally remembered me too, ‘Weren’t you the man who was always being turned out drunk?’323
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