He landed what seemed to be a better job as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Daily Journal on 26 July 1954.341 He loathed it. His ‘wretched newspaper job’ was ‘a tiresome drudgery and there is nothing good to be said about it. It brings in very little money but, at least, it keeps the children fed.’342 He described his Sisyphean life on the Journal to Pound in a letter of 28 November 1954: ‘5 p.m. to 2 a.m, or later … usually in bed by 3.30, but sometimes not till 4 or later, and I have to read several papers in the time between getting up and getting on the bicycle again’.343
He tried to find other work. In 1955 he wrote to Bridson to tell him that he had applied for a job as a BBC reporter and given Bridson’s name as a referee: ‘I’m above the age they mention, but please endeavour to earthquake them into taking me nevertheless, for I am perishing in the swamp still where Mosaddeq threw me and the Times left me … We have kept alive, but it has taken all our leisure and all our energy to accomplish it.’344 He didn’t get the job and in June 1957 he asked if Bridson could find him work at the BBC’s Newcastle office as the family was now committed to the area because of accommodation and schools.345
He said a few years later that he had lasted at the Journal a year beyond the normal retirement age of 65, ‘because I don’t think they could get anybody else to do such dreary work or such heavy work for anything like the money they pay me. They would have to get two men, or they would have to pay one man a lot more than they pay me.’346 He was as contemptuous of local journalists as he was of the national and international press who had fled Teheran. In one of those flashes of prescience of which Bunting was so capable he excoriated the local media in a way that suggests he could see fifty years ahead:
Provincial journalists are not capable of any thought of any sort at all … By now I’ve had a long life. I’ve seen very many odd situations and I have never at any time seen people so wholly without experience of life as journalists. They go to newspaper offices from the most ignorant parts of secondarymodern schools. That’s where they’re recruited. And they are never outside the newspaper office again for the rest of their days, except to do a little shorthand writing in the police court or something like that. They see nothing and their notions of life are probably adopted from out-of-date novels. The stupid things you see in newspapers are going to be there as long as newspapers are run the way they are. Like anything else that lives upon advertising – they’ll be run the same way. That is the horror of all these attempts to extend the sphere of advertising to television and so on.347
His job on the Journal was a far cry from the high political intrigue of his years in Teheran but it had its compensations. He worked a late shift, and after work he rode his moped home through the Northumbrian countryside to Throckley. He told Jonathan Williams, ‘that was worth doing. In the middle of the night you saw all sorts of creatures on that road that you never see in the daytime. Every kind of owl I got familiar with, and foxes carrying chickens in their mouths, and things of that sort. It was very nice in some ways, of course you were terribly tired, a tiring business being up all night working on a newspaper and then trying to sleep when everyone else is up and about in the day.’348
These are generally regarded as Bunting’s empty years. He was bringing up a young family in poverty, was writing no poetry and was working at a job he detested. In 1957 he moved from the night job on the Newcastle Daily Journal to a day job on its sister paper, the Evening Chronicle. Even the move from daily to evening backfired. ‘That was a great mistake I made,’ he told Victoria Forde. ‘I wanted to see more of my children and I could by working on the Chronicle that had reasonable working hours. But they put me on to doing the damned stock exchange report and that sort of thing.’349 ‘It gave me some grim satisfaction,’ he told Gael Turnbull, ‘to print as prominently as I could in the Evening Chronicle the Board of Trade’s estimate of average incomes for 1963. It seems that, pensioners included, the average income then was £22 per week … at that time what the Chronicle paid “Our Financial Expert” to advise its readers what to do with their money and to perform the longest, drudgingest task in its daily round, was £17.’350
He didn’t entirely lose his spirit. Caddell and Flowers describe the way he was perceived by colleagues:
Bunting is remembered by a colleague on the ‘subs’ bench as an unassuming man, with a good financial brain. He was responsible for, among other things, the financial page with its listing of the movement of stocks and shares: ‘he could always tell you where to put your money!’ A popular man, he told stories of his times in Persia and how he had had to leave while correspondent for The Times. He was always writing, and fellow journalists were aware of his poetry, although he was also known for his humour – the story is told of a local councillor who had risen to the rank of Major during the war – a fact that he regularly reminded the local press of, when they reported on him. On one occasion he rang the Evening Chronicle and was put through to Bunting: ‘WING COMMANDER BUNTING here,’ said Basil, with impressive solemnity.351
He had little contact with the literary world. Zukofsky wrote to Pound from Brooklyn on 1 October 1956: ‘P. sent an announcement to Basil – but the perennial question? Where is he? Do you know? Has not answered to several letters since I saw you last.’352 The poet Gael Turnbull, however, did visit Bunting in Throckley in 1956:
It was his mother’s home, a fairly substantial terraced [actually semi-detached] house. Sima and the two children were in Persia … up some high steps, to an ordinary door, any door. With a man to open the door, to say, ‘Yes, I am …’ and to greet me. A little amused perhaps at my obvious surprise that he existed. How could it be? And how could it be otherwise? My first bizarre reaction: how much he was the story-book image of a scout-master. Then, another image of dignity and humour.353
According to Caddell and Flowers Bunting, when he read this account later, said ‘that would be Wing Commander Bunting’. But another poet, the American Robert Creeley, turned up in Newcastle in 1964 and was surprised to hear that Bunting was still alive. The journalist and poet Barry MacSweeney was a trainee reporter with Bunting at the Chronicle. He would have been in his late teens at the time. He showed a poem, ‘Walk’, to Bunting and ‘it came back sliced down to about four lines and a note: start again from there’.354 The older poet also taught MacSweeney how to calculate correct tide times for the crossing to Lindisfarne after MacSweeney had published potentially disastrous incorrect information. ‘You have always to be accurate,’ Bunting admonished the teenager.
An aged aunt died in 1956 leaving ‘a few thousand pounds’ to Bunting, and the family moved, with his mother, from Throckley a few miles further up the Tyne valley to Shadingfield, a good-sized semi-detached house in the village of Wylam, ‘a pleasant house,’ he told Gael Turnbull, ‘with some space in it … There’s a big garden over the river, pleasant walks all round a pleasant village …’355 He spent the next twenty years trying to pay off the mortgage, he reflected ruefully in a television interview in 1984.356 At the time though the legacy was a lifesaver. He wrote to Zukofsky in April 1957:
I had an astonishing legacy from an aunt – not enough to change the wretched way I have to live, but enough to do two mitigations. Sima took the children off to Persia for a long holiday. When they get back at the beginning of June they will have been eight months gone. And, by selling the house we live in, which has been engulfed in the suburbs of Newcastle and poisoned by a power station, with the balance of the legacy, I’ve bought a great hideous house with lots of space, a splendid garden and a beautiful view … It is nearly twice as far from town as this house, and I shall probably kill myself riding home at night on the scooter, at least when things ice up next winter. But it’s a genuine warranted village, complete with eccentric squire and six pubs to serve its minute population.357
The inheritance was indeed ‘astonishing’, as far as Bunting was concerned. He told Pound that his aunt had led ‘such a starveling existence I supposed her to be penniless
, but she left several thousand pounds’.358 With this legacy he bought Wylam ‘at the very bottom of the market … Edwardian, not a modern dog-kennel and about half an acre of garden where the children get strong playing and I cultivate cabbages. The view is very pleasant, down the garden to the river, across the cricket field to the village jammed around its church, and up the hill to the Roman Wall.’359
Bunting summarised his situation in the early 1960s in a rather depressing letter written in February 1963 that began his long friendship with Jonathan Williams. Williams had written to the older poet to enquire about publishing a selection of his work. Bunting’s reply offered Williams accommodation at Shadingfield on the nights of 17 and 18 March, and longer if Williams cared to stay on: ‘a friend of Zuk’s is bound to be welcome in my house’. Hospitality offered, the rest of the letter is a series of dispirited grumbles:
But you must be warned that the drudgery by which I feed my family will probably make it impossible for me to be at home on a Monday before 5:30 p.m. I shall try to get off for the day, but haven’t much hope of it. That doesn’t mean that you must waste your time at Wylam. Sima, my Persian wife, is not a reader even in her own language, but she is lively and entertaining: and if you prefer to write, there’s a room for it. Also, Wylam is a pleasant place. The children don’t get home from school until late afternoon, so their inquisitiveness and noise need not interrupt you much … No, it wasn’t that I wouldn’t have liked you to do an edition of my poems: but (a) I had little to offer you beyond what Flynn printed – only, in effect, The Spoils. (b) I didn’t, and don’t, know what became of Flynn and his edition: there must have been complications (c) I thought you were better occupied in printing Zuk, who is still a poet, than in reviving an extinct man. You will see for yourself how my circumstances prevent correspondence: what I would write would be too depressing.360
After a long silence Bunting was back in touch with Zukofksy, prompted by ‘old affection’. In November 1962 Zukofsky urged him to raise some cash by selling his papers to the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Letters from Pound, Eliot and Williams were particularly prized and Zukofsky thought Bunting would ‘fetch at least a thousand bucks’.361 Zukofsky had been planning such a sale for many years. Bunting wrote disapprovingly about his scheme in 1953: ‘Letters are meant to be written to affect one bloke, not a public. What is true in the context of sender and recipient may be a bloody lie in the context of author and public … secondly: the bane of the age is running after remnants and rubbish heaps to avoid having to face what a man has made with deliberation and all his skill for the public.’362
Bunting wrote to Denis Goacher in 1964 that he felt as though he ‘had been dead for ten years now, and my ghost doesn’t walk. Dante has nothing to tell me about Hell that I don’t know for myself.’363 By November that year his despair was deepening. He told Goacher that ‘they’ve cut off our gas, and the water is threatened, there’s no coal, the mortgage and the rates are due, and the prospect is so bleak that with a wife less courageous than Sima I’d despair’.364
Bunting captured the spirit of this period of his life in a section of Briggflatts that strikes a jarring note for many readers:
Tides of day strew the shingle
tides of night sweep, snoring;
and some turned back, taught
by dreams the year would capsize
where the bank quivers, paved
with gulls stunned on a cliff
not hard to climb, muffled
in flutter, scored by beaks,
pestered by scavengers
whose palms scoop droppings to mould
cakes for hungry towns. One
plucked fruit warm from the arse
of his companion, who
making to beat him, he screamed:
Hastor! Hastor! but Hastor
raised dung thickened lashes to stare
disdaining those who cry:
Sweet shit! Buy!
for he swears in the market:
By God with whom I lunched!
there is no trash in the wheat
my loaf is kneaded from 365
This is grim portrait of the journalist’s trade, and especially of Hugh Astor of The Times.
A BOY OF EIGHTEEN, LONG-HAIRED AND FAIRLY RAGGED, 1964 –1965
In the midst of this financial despair in the summer of 1964 Bunting’s life took an enormous change for the better. He recalled the turning point in a letter to Dorothy Pound written a year later: ‘First, about a year ago, somebody rang me up on the phone and asked if I would like to read some poetry. It turned out that the voice thought it belonged to a poet of sorts, so I said: Come out. He took the next train and turned up inside an hour, a boy of 18, long-haired and fairly ragged, with a fist full of manuscript. He said: I heard you were the greatest living poet.’366
Jonathan Williams had advised the young Newcastle poet Tom Pickard to contact Bunting for some poems for a new magazine he was starting. As Caddell and Flowers observe367 that the two Newcastle poets should be introduced via Black Mountain College (although by then the college had been closed for several years) in North Carolina is a measure of Bunting’s obscurity at the time. Pickard remembers their meeting:
One Sunday night shortly after receiving Jonathan’s letter I decided to look up Mr. Bunting in the telephone directory, and I gave him a ring from a public box. His Persian wife Sema [sic] answered the call, then sent Basil to the phone. Nervously I explained that I was putting together a magazine and wanted some contributions from him. He invited me over, and I caught the next train out … The door was opened by a man of sixty-three with a bushy moustache and thick glasses. He took me into the kitchen where I met his Persian wife Sema and her mother, who spoke no English. The kitchen overlooked the Tyne and their garden, well kept, ran down to the railway line. They had a small dog and a cat, which was famous in the village for accompanying the Buntings on walks. Their two children, Maria and Thomas, lived with them as did Basil’s mother. She was a proud old woman with all her own teeth and a piano in her room. Until her death at ninety-odd she would take unaccompanied trips to Newcastle and back.
I was given a whiskey and sat at the table while Basil kindly asked me what I was up to. Sema’s mother had brought a lot of caviar from Persia, and since neither she nor Sema enjoyed it, Basil and I were given heaps of it on bits of toast. I got the impression there was very little else in the pantry. Sema was a happy, strong, wild-eyed Armenian, who looked a little pale in those northern days. We always got on well. I remember a number of visits in which I was pinned to the wall in an Armenian arm-lock and rib tickled, while Basil laughed coughing into his Senior Service, pleading for my release. Over the caviar sandwich he read me the ‘Spoils’, which I took away to publish.368
Which he did. ‘The Spoils’ was published by The Morden Tower Book Room in 1965 with a photograph of a Persian mosque on the cover and at a price of 5/-, beginning an extraordinary period in an already extraordinary life. Bunting started to write in earnest once more and the result was the biggest event in the world of poetry (in English at least) since the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, Briggflatts. Tom Pickard, and his wife Connie, were responsible for more than Bunting’s reawakening. They fostered a local cultural revolution more generally. The Evening Chronicle of 12 June 1964 noted that: ‘Newcastle’s ancient city wall will become the centre of modern poetry for the area if an 18-year-old youth’s scheme proves successful. Thomas Pickard of Buston Terrace, Jesmond has rented the famous Morden Tower from Newcastle Corporation for 10 shillings a week and is busily turning it into a bookroom where he plans to stage exhibitions and poetry readings.’369
Pickard’s visit and the constant encouragement of friends such as Zukofsky, Jonathan Williams and Gael Turnbull released the genie and Bunting re-engaged with his art. By November 1964 well-known poets such as Robert Creeley were beating a path to Wylam, and he was thrilled by the response to his readings at Morden Tower. Tom
Pickard described the reaction to Bunting’s first reading there:
… we had a packed house, maybe seventy people. The audience was mainly young. There were students, grammar school kids, apprentices and the unemployed. We charged less money, nothing, to those like myself ‘on the dole’. The young people loved him and were attentive. We listened carefully, not always understanding, but hearing. We recognized and respected this sailor come home. He sat by gas-light (we had no electricity then), his safedoor glasses gleaming, and he read (for the first time in how many years?) to a young audience, who literally sat at his feet (we couldn’t afford chairs and besides they took up precious space).370
Bunting wrote to Zukofsky in July 1964:
it was a curious experience, reading to these youngsters. They were not hindered by the difficulties that annoy their elders. They took poetry as poetry – a nice noise – without questions about its ‘meaning’. They laughed at the comic bits, they were rapt at the passages of intricate metric that nobody ever took any notice of before – not that they understood what was attracting them, but it certainly did attract – and the piece about the sick child made at least one girl cry. I found it all very encouraging.371
On 7 September he acknowledged the role that Zukofsky and Pickard had played in his sudden revival. He wrote again to Zukofsky: ‘Perhaps it is enough to say that between you and Tom Pickard and Denis Goacher, somehow the old machine has been set to work again, and I have actually been writing. Therefore I send you the first fruits.’ The poem Bunting enclosed with this letter was his heartbreaking ‘A song for Rustam’, ‘facing at last the death of my elder son, I have courted the risk of platitude and even cliché by trying to banish “literature” as far as I can from the statement of what I feel, or felt’.372
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