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A Strong Song Tows Us

Page 63

by Richard Burton


  Bunting wasn’t just another old codger complaining that the country was going to the dogs. It really was. If his diagnosis of the situation was spot on, his prediction of the likely outcome was even better. The Secretary of State for Education and Science in Heath’s appalling administration became the leader of the Conservative opposition in February 1975, and when she won the general election in 1979 Margaret Thatcher began a neo- Diocletian revolution that transformed British society for ever. Given the woeful catalogue of disasters in 1970s’ Britain the fact that the Thatcher revolution was and is regarded in many quarters as an even greater national disaster is some measure of how deep that revolution was. Bunting stuck to the basic premise of his prediction that the emergence of ‘a lot of would-be Diocletians and Mussolinis’ would be the consequence of the political chaos of the 1970s. He wrote to Jonathan Williams in December 1983:

  I’m afraid I have left Christmas greetings too late to reach you; but after all I don’t feel much devoted to such ecclesiastical holidays, especially since the BBC now expends so much time on reminding us of our proper station – low, low – before God and Die Fuehrer, whose latest feats of near-abolishing the trade unions and local government might easily bring us to civil war or something like it before the time comes for new elections. More Tories are complaining, but there are so many that she still has a majority of 100 in parliament. She is about where Hitler was in 1933. And accelerating.311

  He retained his liberal outlook to the end, albeit grudgingly: ‘I’m disgusted by the general reactionariness of everything and everybody lately. It laps over from politics into morals and literature, as though there were a universal hate of anything honest. I’ve just told McDiarmid [sic] I’ll back him when his party reintroduces the guillotine. I don’t like Communism, but at least it might butcher off a decent proportion of even worse folk.’312 Jonathan Williams asked him in 1980 what he thought of the Thatcher government, provoking an unambiguous response: ‘It shows an intention of being the worst government since 1906. And the people in it seem as bad as those in Lloyd George’s 1919 cabinet.’313

  He was contemptuous of the Thatcher administration but he also derided Labour’s retreat from socialism, and the claims to it of some of the left’s more iconic figures of the period. He wrote to Jonathan Williams on Guy Fawkes Night (5 November) 1984:

  The bonfire waiting to be lit tonight in the pub’s paddock is ample to celebrate a man who made as good a near miss as the IRA scored at Brighton. James I was a pretty target too; but poor Guy actually precipitated the long eclipse of his church in Britain, Holland and Denmark, just as the IRA puts an end to all wishes to rearrange Northern Ireland in a workable, tolerant way. Assassination always risks its intentions against an incalculable reaction, and Lord knows we have reaction enough in this country, where men who would have been called mild socialists by Webb or Shaw, such as Arthur Scargill and Tony Benn, are half-repudiated by a Labour party that has quite forgotten its origins and most of its history. Scargill hasn’t even got a jail record like some of his predecessors, or ‘Lord’ Manny Shinwell who has just been much praised by the Tories for living long enough for them to forget how frightened of him they used to be. I don’t often get political with you. But I was active once upon a time.314

  He reserved his supreme contempt, however, for Ayatollah Khomeini, the despotic leader of the revolution in Iran in 1979: ‘An exemplar of the very worst breed of political reactionary, from which one can expect nothing whatsoever. He’s a bloody priest … The man is as bad as St. Bernard.’315 A year later he was hoping that Khomeini would soon ‘die at last by the assassination he has done so much to make customary’.316

  NO HOME … NO GRUB

  Bunting was capable of putting a brave face on his poverty. He wrote to Jonathan Williams in May 1976: ‘The tax people look menacing, and prices are about to increase again, with no corresponding increase in pensions; but the May seems sunny, and I consumed a pint of beer yesterday that tasted pretty.’317 But by 1977 poverty was really depressing him: ‘Midst of crisis – the last, I hope, till a final crisis which I’d welcome. It seems I’ll have no home these coming months; soon, perhaps, no grub.’318

  Shortly after he wrote this letter to Eric Mottram Bunting and Sima separated and he was effectively ejected from the family home in Wylam. Bunting’s own account of the break up of his second marriage carries more than a whiff of the paranoia that coloured the first. At no point does he seem able to have acknowledged that he may have played a part himself. He wrote to Jonathan Williams in January 1977 that

  Sima has been behaving as though she were actually mad, though I fancy it is only an exaggerated form of the ‘change of life’ trouble women undergo. She finally drove me out (after miscellaneous violence and what seemed to be a try at strangling me) into a snowstorm. I had nowhere whatever to go. At Hexham the snow was thick: up the Hexham Rothbury road it became very dangerous driving with lots of skids, next to no visibility and some drifts. When I stopped in a lay-by to smoke a cigarette and rest, a lorry driver told me the road was impassible [sic] on the high ground beyond Wallington. I had to turn back a long way before I could find a side road to Morpeth.’319

  After an exhausting journey the 77-year-old poet eventually made it to Belford, where he stayed the night at the Blue Bell. That night the locals told him of a furnished cottage nearby that was rented cheaply during the winter and the following morning a gang of men dug his car out of the snow and Bunting moved into 4 Fenwick Village in Beal. ‘It’s a cold place,’ he told Williams,

  fixed for summer visitors only, I suppose, and in this weather thoroughly forbidding. I am sitting almost on top of an electric fire, with a car blanket round my head and shoulders, and still shivering. For the first time in my life I’ve had to thaw out my fountain pen – not very completely, it seems – by toasting it in front of the fire. But the type-writer has not enjoyed its journey and is not co-operating. Besides, I’d have to go to the table and freeze myself to use it … Next door – old Scotsman – has just been in with the cheerful news that two old people, one in this village, one in the next, died of cold last night.

  His friends were deeply concerned about his accommodation. Tom Pickard recalls:

  It took me a couple of weeks to locate his refuge, along rain soaked roads lined with bushes dripping sea fret. With a miserable fire burning and not much in the pantry I found him, cigarette in his mouth, reading Dante, a historical biography and a couple of detective novels. He was wrapped in a short woollen scarf and a woollen jacket that his wife had purchased from a church jumble sale.320

  Michael Shayer and his wife, Denise, visited with Tom Pickard and were convinced that he would die if he remained there for long.

  Although there is some of the old paranoia in his account of his eviction another ‘new’ Bunting emerges from this period of temporary homelessness: ‘I worked very hard at very disagreeable tasks for nearly 20 years to buy Shadingfield,’ he told Roudaba, ‘and when at last it was paid for I made it over to Sima, to give her some feeling of security that she seemed to lack. There was nothing else to give. But little by little, over a good number of years, Sima has grown more and more implacable; and lately, with the approach of the change of life, I think she has become, in some respects, mad.’ But Bunting clearly felt responsible: ‘She is so obviously and extremely unhappy – and I feel so responsible for her, having brought her so far from her family and her country – and there’s long companionship as well as love to reckon in – that I am afraid of some irrational act.’321 Given the circumstances of his departure from the family home, as he told it himself at least, this is a remarkably generous view of events. There is no rancour, just compassion.

  Sima sold Shadingfield, and Bunting had no desire to make any trouble for her. ‘I am sorry for her. She has sold it and bought a bungalow in the next village, where I hope she will be able to be content and get back her balance. And also, she has divorced me – after 29 years of marriage.’322
A few months later Bunting and Sima were on cordial terms. ‘I see Sima once in every ten days or so,’ he told Roudaba, ‘drive over to her bungalow at Ovingham, near Wylam, and drink a cup of tea or eat a curry. I think whatever was wrong with her a year ago has pretty well cleared up, and I even get the impression that she would like to remarry me, but it would be very hard to arrange now everything is dispersed and no real room for me in her bungalow.’323 By the summer he reported that he was on ‘excellent terms’ with Sima.324

  Jonathan Williams offered him Corn Close until he and Tom Meyer returned in June,325 but Bunting hesitated as matters with Sima seemed to be on the mend and she asked him to return to Wylam. ‘Everything was tranquil and fine,’ he told Williams, ‘for exactly one week. Then as soon as she got a bit of life in her again she started the old ploy – not with violence indeed; but I am not able to cope with what I think is some kind of madness.’326 So, with some reluctance (‘I don’t like to make free with things or places other people set a high value on’), he accepted Williams’ offer and moved into Corn Close on 16 February. It must have been a relief. Fenwick was four and a half miles away from the nearest shop, an impossible journey when Bunting’s car failed to start, as it frequently did. He sent regular ‘Corn Close Bulletins’ to Williams in the following months. He had a few visitors; the poet Gael Turnbull spent some time with him before Easter,327 and Kelsey Thornton and his wife and Robert Creeley also visited in April.

  Bunting loved Corn Close and his letters became gradually more relaxed, but the problems with Sima (‘domestic atom bombs’ as he described them to Cid Corman328) were getting worse. He had found her, he told Williams, ‘without a penny in her pocket and no food in the house but a couple of eggs. She has always been foolish about money, but mustn’t be left to starve as a result, so I parted with a bit of my fast dwindling bank balance which, it’s fair to say, she was reluctant to accept. She is getting public assistance, but not enough, and can’t budget for what she does get.’329 He was also convinced that Sima had been swindled by an unscrupulous relative.

  He wrote to Williams and Tom Meyer from Corn Close in May 1977 with the catalogue of an accomplished natural historian. He was sensitive to all the activity in his environment:

  The last ten days have been brilliant. A few of the sheep have reappeared, but find the bull and his eleven concubines in possession of the field. A second [pine] marten got indoors and shit here and there before I persuaded it to use an open window as an exit. The heron which fishes the Corn Close reach of the beck every afternoon has been missing for a couple of days – I hope no jealous angler has shot it. Where is the heronry? One of the cuckoos behind the house stammers and cries ‘Cu’ cuckoo’. It needs psychoanalysis, no doubt. Cuckoos must have frightful complexes, with infantile murders and what not on their consciences. A very cocky cock-mizzle-thrush bosses the back garden. One large bird of prey noted, spreading its wing feathers to prevent stalling, but against the sun I couldn’t guess what it was – buzzard, maybe. Or perhaps just a raven. No recent sight of the weasel. If the family has grown up she probably finds foraging less pressing and waits for concealment. The inexhaustible succession of large spiders who get into the bath and can’t get out again has culminated in a monster. Let him stay there for a few days – I prefer the shower. Or should I exhibit him as the Dentdale Tarantula?330

  Bunting seems to have had a problem with the local wildlife soiling his accommodation. He wrote to Jonathan Williams on 4 December 1982: ‘The blue tits are beginning to remind me that winter is here and they would like to find breadcrumbs on my window sill. The nearest robin has taken to coming into the lobby where he makes my telephone his shit house. He takes no notice of the cards that say “WASHROOM FURTHER IN”.331

  SIX

  CODA

  A strong song tows

  us, long earsick.

  Blind, we follow

  rain slant, spray flick

  to fields we do not know.

  Briggflatts, Coda

  AN INTENTIONAL SLUM

  ‘Do you think if I made my tea with whisky instead of water’, Bunting asked Tom Pickard in June 1978, ‘I would find Washington more endurable? … The New Slum Development Corporation has made a splendid job of it. All we need is a large Borstal and a big annex to Durham gaol.’1 Bunting left Corn Close on 29 June 1977 (according to the ‘welcome home’ letter he left for Williams and Meyer) and moved to 107 Stridingedge, Blackfell, Washington New Town, at the beginning of July 1977. He hadn’t been looking forward to the move to a ‘huge slave barracks designed by a team of lunatics’, as he put it in a letter to Roudaba.2

  ‘I must change the country and the fells for a loathsome industrial town on the latest improved principles,’ he lamented to Eric Mottram. The town had offered a house to Northern Arts and Northern Arts offered it to Bunting. He conceded that his new home was better designed than standard council accommodation, indeed that it was a lot bigger than it seemed, but he wasn’t terribly happy: ‘Outside, you might hold a competition for hideousness without finding anything so ugly; and the view is of its twins, or of the unrelieved brick walls of garages. There is a minute burn running by the door, spared as a sop to nature; but already a dump, with wrecked prams and skinned umbrellas in it. And the distance to fields is in all directions 15–20 miles of frantic traffic and squalid houses.’3 To some extent, as Gael Turnbull noticed, his new environment was no more than a symbol of a world that had self-destructed:

  ‘Those buildings are a disgrace. Only put up 10 years ago. From prefabricated sections. Falling to bits already.’ But he couldn’t specify exactly where and how they were defective. It was all just part of the general slovenliness of a world that admired the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. ‘He’s got all the technique. He knows just how to do nothing wrong. Except that there’s nothing right. Just nothing there. And they once had the cheek to ask me to write something praising it. Even the Tower isn’t what it was. But then, nothing is. Everything changes. It’s a natural process.’4

  He quickly developed a jaundiced view of his new home. He told Carroll F. Terrell that he ‘lived in a nest of criminals; that most of the people in Black Fells village had been in jail one time or another; and that hardly a family in his row of houses didn’t have one member, male or female, in jail right now.’5 With at least four spells in jail himself in four different countries perhaps he felt that he had a right to such a view. Tom Pickard thinks that Northern Arts was using Bunting as a guinea pig in a social experiment to see what happens when a poet is embedded in one of the most deprived estates in the region.6

  One compensation was the presence of the local children. According to Peter Quartermain ‘his great tolerance of and patience with children extended to, embraced, and delighted in children of three shouting “fuck off!” or “kick the dog in the balls!”’7 Bunting wrote to Jonathan Williams in August 1977 that

  children alone make the place endurable. Four or five boys last night who had made their bicycles horses to drag home-made chariots racing round our nearest spot of green at a great pace, in defiance, apparently, of the police, who do not notice that if they prohibit such an entirely harmless infringement of the laws there’d be nothing left for the boys to do but break street lamps, telephone kiosks and people’s cars. They got on fine with me, made me Emperor to start the races. Or two little boys and a little girl so loquacious that she kept me sitting ¾ of an hour on my doorstep without ever closing her lips for ten consecutive seconds, telling me about a deceased goldfish.8

  The admiration was mutual. Carroll Terrell described his arrival in Blackfell: ‘A few hundred yards into a dell from the bus stop, two little girls around nine or ten ran down to greet Basil and give me a careful scrutiny. He called them by name, answered their questions, paused to be pleasant, and after a bit waved them back to their play. His smile said he liked them. They certainly liked him.’9 Tom Pickard also noted the permanent presence of the children: ‘the children are always knocking on his
door. And he answers it. Children love him. Sometime I hear Washington intonations dancing in his speech.’10

  Bunting had a real affinity with young children. During his disastrous visit to the University of Victoria in 1971–72 he made friends with Mike Doyle’s youngest daughter, Meki, then two years old. He wrote to Doyle from Wylam in July 1973: ‘I’m glad to have news of my friend Meki. I was reminded of her strongly the other day when, in Newcastle Central Station, a little girl of two or two and a half ran up to me and embraced my legs, then held up her hand for mine – a child who had never seen me before but knew a grandfather when one hove in sight.’11 William Corbett recalled Bunting’s two-week visit to his family home in 1975: ‘Our daughter Arden, then six, took a shine to him as he did to her. Opening our front door late one afternoon Beverley saw and heard Basil charging up our very steep stairs with Arden on his back. Both of them flushed and yelling for joy. Unabashed boys and girls indeed, and he meant to keep them that way.’12

 

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