I’d taken a bottle of Glenfiddich. With a little help from Valda we finished it in the afternoon.
In sum, rather better than I feared; but no doubt I saw him at what is now his best, and I rather gathered that the day to day scene is pretty depressing. I don’t suppose I am likely to see him again, which will be goodbye to quite a lot that I can share with nobody else …
His huge Collected Poems is due out next month. “They’ll take no notice,” he said. “They’ll boycott you and me till the end.” I think he suggested that that was because we were not gentlemen, but maybe that was something I thought later at the inn.41
The following month he wrote wistfully to Jonathan Williams about the death on 12 May of his old friend Louis Zukofsky:
I had heard nothing about Zukofsky’s dying until your letter arrived, nor had I any idea that he was ill, except in so far as he had always been ill since the 1920s. None of my friends told me, and I imagine it is quite possible that no English newspaper took any notice of it. Now, if it had been Mr. Larkin there’d have been acres of obituaries.
For a long time I’ve had to think sadly of Louis as a man who had no further use for my friendship – no quarrel, just apparent indifference: nevertheless I’m saddened further to think that there’s no chance now of any renewal of our long correspondence; and that there’ll be no more gritty poems to puzzle us. A step further towards isolation. Another affection banished to memory … I’m glad he finished ‘A’. I daresay that he felt his business was completed.42
MacDiarmid’s death on 9 September 1978 was no shock but Tibor Serly’s on 8 October hit him hard. He wrote to Diana Collecott on 20 November 1978:
McDiarmid’s [sic] death I expected and was prepared for. But Tibor Serly was killed by the London traffic actually on his way to meet me. The ghosts of his friends, Bartok and Kodaly are wailing regularly over the radio, and his death seems to me to snap the very last link with music, painting and poetry of the 1920s apart from my shaky recollections. Oh, maybe there are hangers-on still hanging on, but no originator left. And this town is like a tomb in a very bad part of the Inferno.43
Perhaps the loss of Zukofsky and MacDiarmid in 1978 prompted Bunting to put his own affairs in order. His last will and testament was drawn up in 1979. It left everything, such as it was, to Sima but expressed ‘the clear wish and desire that she shall take account of the advice left in a letter which is to be found with this will and that she should deal with the items mentioned in the letter accordingly’. Though he and Sima had separated nearly three years before the will was lodged he clearly felt a keen responsibility towards her. His final ode is dated 1980 and deals unflinchingly with his marriages. It is addressed to his imaginary boat, and the first two stanzas show the ageing sailor reflecting on life:
Now we’ve no hope of going back,
cutter, to that grey quay
where we moored twice and twice unwillingly
cast off our cables to put out at the slack
when the sea’s laugh was choked to a mutter
and the leach lifted hesitantly with a stutter
and sulky clack,
how desolate the swatchways look,
cutter, and the chart’s stained,
stiff, old, wrinkled and uncertain,
seeming to contradict the pilot book.
On naked banks a few birds strut
to watch the ebb sluice through a narrowing gut
loud as a brook.
The poem was originally titled ‘Perche no spero’ (perhaps to recall Cavalcanti’s ‘Perch’i’ no spero di tornar giammai’) when published in Agenda in 1978. Bunting improved the poem in 1980 and it was published in its final version in the US edition of Collected Poems in 1985. The final stanza turns to face a certain future:
Soon, while that northwest squall wrings out its cloud,
cutter, we’ll heave to
free of the sands and let the half moon do
as it pleases, hanging there in the port shrouds
like a riding light. We have no course to set,
only to drift too long, watch too glumly, and wait,
wait.44
There is no sentimentality in this poem, no self-pity and, for once, no selfrecrimination. Somehow the way that the poem is spoken to the cutter removes the element of loneliness and allows the poet to speak as a kind of Everyman rather than as a disillusioned old man facing death.
I HAVE LIVED FOR TEN YEARS TOO LONG
‘The eightieth birthday is past. I managed to ward off all proposals for celebrations, at least for a time, and just had my immediate family to lunch with me at a Greek place in Newcastle where we drank plenty of retsina and ouzo.’45 Literary celebrations of Bunting’s eightieth birthday were, however, unavoidable. At Warwick University, where Tom Pickard was Writer-in-Residence, Roy Fisher, Eric Mottram, Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull and others read alongside Bunting but the event seems to have been something of a shambles, at least in Bunting’s view. He wrote to Denis Goacher in April 1980 that the entire congress was organised by the students’ union while Pickard was in Poland and that some of the invited poets had been selected by the students against Pickard’s advice: ‘The only invitees present whom I had suggested were Turnbull and Roy Fisher; and one or two had been brought against my express wishes. I think perhaps a lot of the students would have been quite happy to have me omitted if I hadnt been the excuse for the jamboree.’46 If it was a shambles it was, at least, a shambles that Bunting fully expected:
They crowded into Tom’s little rooms and ate and drank everything they found there without consulting him or Joanna [Pickard’s partner]. They talked alternatively bawdy with little point to it and the politics of their calling. One section seceded to some other room to devise means of ridding the Arts Council of Mr Osborne, pointless because his successor, whoever he might be would soon be up to the same tricks and manipulations. Others spoke ill of those who were absent from the room. All of them insisted on disorganising the programme that had been fixed by exceeding their alloted time, usually by about 60%. Many read so badly they couldn’t be heard – a dreary drone: yet perhaps it was as well they werent heard, for there was no sense or point in their stuff … an alleged ‘folk’ singer from the group called Lindisfarne, hitting a guitar the way these people do, as though it were a banjo or a ukelele. No ‘folk’ I can imagine had ever had anything to do with his words, which he’d doubtless concocted himself … The universities own music man played the harpsichord, but did not understand how to phrase the Scarlatti sonatas he had practised for the occasion.47
The boorish behaviour that enlivened the Poetry Wars appears to have outlived the Battle of Earl’s Court.
Birthday celebrations aside, Bunting’s melancholy was growing. He wrote to Forde in May 1980:
I am to go to a sort of miscellaneous jamboree at Orono, Maine, in August. It is partly concerned with Pound, partly with me, and partly just a general (pointless) gathering … After that, I’ll be finished with public reading, except for the two local universities and the Morden Tower, to which I feel some obligations; but first I may possibly read in Paris where my French translator Jacques Darras seems to be arranging something …
I have lived ten years too long. It is cheating the Bible to keep on after three score and ten; and so all my surviving friends of the past have died and I sometimes feel very much alone. MacDiarmid died, Zukofsky died; Tibor Serly gave me the hardest blow, because he was on his way to see me. He telephoned about his journey from London, stepped out of the telephone kiosk and was knocked over by a bus and killed – within a minute of talking to me about our old, dead friends.
Old men talk nonsense and write silly stuff, so I don’t write any more.48
Orono and Europe, 1980
Bunting went to Orono in Maine in August 1980 and stayed with the Kenners. Bourtai joined her father for the final time. Kenner’s daughter, Lisa, published her own version of Bunting’s visit after Bunting died in 1985. Lisa
told how she flew up with her parents to Orono, where she was told that the family would be hosting
an illustrious, and probably crabby, old poet in our summer house. Upon first seeing Basil Bunting I was taken by his ferocious grey eyebrows. His face, too, was intriguing – constantly seeming ruffled, annoyed, yet in control. At dinner that night, as Dad taught him how to crack lobster claws and suck out the meat and juices, I watched his eyes closely. They were hypnotically bright and expressive for such an old man. I thought this was perhaps the sign of a great poet … Before long Basil had taken an interest in this chubby ten-year-old who laughed and gibbered continuously, but who became remarkably quiet whenever he spoke. Maybe it was my giggles, or my love of producing all sorts of sounds, my youth, or perhaps even my brown expressive eyes; in any event, Basil informed me that I was to be his saqhi. It was at lunch that Basil clarified the duties of a saqhi. Ideally, the following sequence of events would take place in Persia. I, being the saqhi, would sit bowed on an embroidered pillow and pour wine for the hallowed poet. It would be a potent, exotic wine which I would pour into a thick goblet … The plans for the reading began with a banquet given in his honor. Then we would all go to hear him in the auditorium. I was to sit on a little wooden step-stool while he sat in an armchair and read Briggflatts. The wine was to act as a ‘poetic aphrodisiac,’ and I was to keep his glass filled.
Lisa was terrified at the prospect of being a saqi, but performed her duties well. Her account of the reading and of the rest of the week in Bunting’s company is a moving account of friendship across generations:
I was inexplicably moved. All thoughts of the hard bench and the itches on my nose and my aching back left me. I was no longer mesmerized by his eyes; actually, I felt that I could not truly see them, because they were not registering on this plane. It was his voice – raspy, deep, purring, falling like water – that carried me away to a level of thinking which I can barely describe, truly remember or convincingly relate. All I know is that we were alone (he and I) in poetry. We were a self-sufficient unit which read poetry and poured wine … What else could I feel but love for this old man who linked arms with me at cocktail parties … After going upstairs and pulling out the book of poetry he autographed for me, I flip through the pages trying to impress on myself the genius of this man. All the same, it is not a celebrated English poet whom I miss; rather an old man who shared a week of his life with a lonely ten-yearold.49
Bunting accepted an invitation to Seattle from Roudaba after the Orono convention. ‘I have to talk or read or lecture or something for three days at Orono, and then sit through four or five days of other people’s literary guff.’ After Seattle he was expecting to go ‘to read and talk’ in Paris and he was also planning a visit to Venice ‘to see some pictures’.50
Paris turned out to be ‘rather a queer trip’:
They never left me alone for a second … I was driven about in Embassy cars and Ministry cars. When I wanted to see the only Balthus picture the French government owns, it turned out that the Museum of Modern Art was having its weekly day off, so I was quite reconciled to being disappointed: but someone telephoned to the Ministry, a number of the staff were recalled from their holiday, including the Director of the Museum, who showed me round, and I had the whole place to myself. Much the same happened at Amiens, where they closed the cathedral (on a Sunday afternoon!) so that the alleged chief expert could show me all its beauties in private.51
Venice was even better: ‘Mr Ferry took it into his head to pay my expenses to go to Venice to see the show of Balthus’s paintings. They were marvellous, better even than I’d expected.’52 During this trip to Venice, he told Diana Collecott, he sat near Olga Rudge’s apartment but couldn’t knock on her door because he was so ashamed that he hadn’t the wherewithal to buy her lunch.53
GREYSTEAD, 1981–1984
Bunting was never happy in Blackfell and was looking for an alternative home as soon as he moved in. He told Jonathan Williams in December 1979 that there were few options:
Disappointments succeed one another, even when the cottage is suitable – I’m too old, or the landlord wants it back in six months to put his mother in, or I must have a wife who will help in the farmhouse etc etc. Mostly they are too small to get the books in, or too tumbledown. But we keep looking, while Blackfell grows more and more loathsome. There’s a colony of ‘skinheads’ now amongst the boys of early teenage. One tried to hold me up with a knife the other day, demanding ten pounds. I told him he was going the right way towards the gaol and walked on, whereupon he stood and shouted abuse at me as long as I was within sight, but he hadn’t the courage to knife me. Another pair tried to hold me up at my own door. I shut it, whereupon they crapped on the doorstep. An old man elsewhere in Washington was beaten up by such boys. There are still pleasant boys too, mostly very young. I chased most of the girls away who used to visit me. Too many of them stole in a small way.
Altogether the place has grown more solitary than any rural cottage is likely to be.54
Bunting moved to The Cottage at Greystead in Tarset in May 1981 just as construction of the nearby Kielder Water, the largest artificial lake in the United Kingdom, was being completed. He was happy enough with the reservoir but unimpressed by the fact that the Queen was travelling north to officially open it: ‘royalty’s a big expense, no use’.55 He was happier for the move, writing in an upbeat mood to Victoria Forde:
But first let me call attention to my new address. It signifies that I have at last escaped from Washington, a place I detested, and am just settling in to a little house, pretty nearly where I’ve wanted to be for many years. I look out over a big garden (not mine but I can use it) to the hills of the dale of the North Tyne, covered with sheep, and lambs too at this season, with a glimpse of the river and quiet all around. Very big trees shelter me from most winds – an enormous ash grows right up against my chimney, and an owl lives in it which never fails to say goodnight to me. I’ll miss the children who were the only good things about Washington, since the population of Tarset is only about 30, and no doubt I’ll find shopping awkward, for the nearest shop is six miles away and for anything more than basic needs I’ll have to drive 25 miles into Hexham, down an exceedingly twisty road, which makes it nearly an hour’s drive. But the place is so lovely nothing of that sort matters.56
Forde described Bunting’s new home as a ‘comfortably renovated stable, two stories. A small entryway led into a living room with a fireplace, the only heat source, with postcards on the mantel and books on each side, and wood and materials for a fire which he went down on his knees with difficulty each time to light, morning and evening. Stairs led to the second floor, icy cold, his small spare bedroom, the bathroom, and the small guest room with bed, chair, and dresser under a slanted roof with a skylight.’57 He was clearly happy to be in the heart of his favourite landscape, watching the wildlife, even if it did lead to complications. He wrote to Peter Quartermain in September 1972:
Did I tell you about the cats? The snake-and-lizard man [poet and naturalist Colin Simms] came to see me, hunting a lizard said to have been seen in Northumberland, where it had no business to be. I mentioned casually the wild cats (Felix Sylvestris) now plentiful in the border forests. He got enormously excited, got on his motor-bicycle and rushed off to the forest, where he found three wild cats in a single evening. Apparently none of the farmers or forestry people had ever thought of mentioning wild cats to the naturalists, so it was news to Nature, which ran an article, and to the BBC’s natural history section. They asked Simms who was an expert on wild cats and the damn man said I was; so for a week the BBC was ringing me everyday, trying to get me to admit that I knew all about wild cats. Now I had never even seen one loose, only heard about them in the pubs near the forests. They wouldn’t believe me. At last I choked them off (their photographers got a good picture of one eating a pheasant), and went out for a ride, which took me into the forest. Coming down a very narrow remote lane I stopped to exami
ne a hedgehog, deciding not to take it home to our garden because the dog and two cats would have gone mad trying to bite it, and just as I was about to get into the car again I saw a wild cat, stalking a couple of young rabbits. It was unmistakeably the wild creature, heavier on the haunch than the domestic cat, and with a head smaller in proportion to the body.58
The move was good for his health. He reported to Roudaba that he was in ‘excellent health … far better than I ever was at Washington. I even walked nearly a mile the other day without my stick. It can only be (a) the good air here (what we had to breathe in Washington I don’t know); (b) that I am content, and happy every time I look out of the window and see the hills and the sheep.’59
Greystead is as remote a location as any to be found in England, and much more remote than most. Five miles of upland moor separates it from the nearest tiny village. The minor road on which the two Greystead properties are situated winds up for another ten miles or so past the source of the North Tyne river and over the Cheviot Hills and the border with Scotland. It is classic Reiver country. Throughout the Middle Ages and well into the early modern period the area around Tarset suffered from crossborder raids most winters, and the bastles (squat stone-built, earth-covered homes) the local communities built provided little protection. ‘I’m not sure that you realise how remote my cottage is,’ he wrote to Diana Collecott in November 1981. ‘When you get to Hexham there are still 25 twisty miles to drive’.60
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