163. The Leeds Mercury did occasionally publish short (and usually intensely patriotic) poems, including one by Thomas Hardy that I have not seen collected elsewhere (‘Up and be doing, all you who have a hand’ on 13 March 1917) as column fillers. No issue of the Leeds Mercury of 1916 and 1917 carries a poem attributed to Bunting. The only unattributed poem, a dialect poem entitled ‘T’War Loan’, is so terrible that one hesitates to suggest that Bunting had anything to do with it.
164. DESC.
165. DESC.
166. MT.
167. CP, 226.
CHAPTER 2:
FELLS FORGET HIM
1. Leightonian, July 1920, 157.
2. DESC.
3. CONJ, 157.
4. PAID, 40.
5. See G. Wallas, ‘An Historical Note’, London School of Economics Archive, Wallas 2/6 91701, 67.
6. L. Robbins, Autobiography of an Economist (London, 1971), 75.
7. Although Bunting joined the Royal Air Force at the beginning of the Second World War he spent the first part of it flying balloons in the North Sea.
8. Robbins, 76.
9. J-P. Potier, Piero Sraffa: Unorthodox Economist (London, 1991), 1–4.
10. R. Murray Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music: The complete criticism (London, 1978), 336. Susan Howson has, however, made the very valid point to me that it is likely that Bunting knew Piero Sraffa because of the Rapallo connection but that it is less likely that they knew each other earlier at the London School of Economics, where there would not have been much contact between a research student and an undergraduate, especially one who attended as infrequently as Bunting did.
11. S. Howson, Lionel Robbins (Cambridge, 2011), 65.
12. BB to EP, undated but August or September 1934, BRBML. Nearly sixty years after Robbins introduced him to Ulysses Bunting still thought it the funniest book he knew in English (PAID, 128).
13. MONT, 68.
14. Interview with Lawrence Pitkethly and James Laughlin, October 1982, in R. Swigg, ‘Basil Bunting on Ezra Pound’, Paideuma, 38, 2011, 12.
15. In a letter written over sixty years later he explained that Orage’s writers ‘were few, and mostly turned out to be Ezra Pound in disguise, yet I never met EP till later’ (BB to ‘Mr Bradshaw’, 25 September 1982, SUNY).
16. H. Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston, 1988), 356.
17. Although even an issue as apparently straightforward as Pound’s anti-Semitism is not clear cut; see Carpenter, 359–62.
18. J. L. Finlay, Social Credit: The English origins (Montreal, 1972), 103–4.
19. As did the British Communist Party, and particularly a poet who later became a close friend of Bunting’s, Hugh MacDiarmid; see Finlay, 176, 193–4, 196.
20. Interview with Pitkethly and Laughlin, 1982. When Orage died in November 1934 Bunting told Pound that Orage ‘was the first chap ever gave me any serious encouragement’ (BB to EP, 22 November 1934, BRBML).
21. PAID, 42–4.
22. Carpenter, 315.
23. Carpenter, 314.
24. Carpenter, 235.
25. Carpenter, 346.
26. Howson (66) quotes Lionel Robbins: ‘In the diggings which I then inhabited at St John’s Wood, there was also residing a student from the London School of Economics’, who introduced him to other students. Through Basil Bunting he met Jacques Kahane. See Howson, 66. Bunting’s Fabian Society membership card shows that he also lived at 63 Brocash Road, near Clapham Common in south London.
27. ‘Passed Internal Intermediate B.Sc. (Econ.) Examn. 1921’ added as a handwritten note. Michaelmas was the first term of the 1920–21 session.
28. BB to LR, undated but 1920, LSE. I am grateful to Dr Susan Howson for alerting me to the existence of these ten letters from Bunting to Robbins.
29. BB to LR, 12 October 1920, LSE. Bunting told Dorothy Pound in August 1971 that he had ‘sold my few Armstrong shares’ to pay his fare to Russia (BB to DP, 6 August 1971, LILLY).
30. This experience gathered patina over the years. In 1965 he told Edward Lucie- Smith that he had embarked on this journey to Russia ‘to convert Lenin and Trotsky to more peaceable means of creating heaven on earth. But they wouldn’t let me in’, the consequence being a ‘wild tour of Scandinavia’ (E. Lucie-Smith, ‘A man for the music of words’, Sunday Times, 25 July 1965, 33).
31. Howson, 75.
32. Bunting’s ‘Attendance Record Sheet’ for 1922–23, the third year of his course, has figures for the Michaelmas term only, so he had left by December 1922. He attended only twenty-six of his seventy-seven lectures that term.
33. Not unreasonably since Thomas was covering his son’s costs. His annual applications show the cost of Bunting’s fees for the third year of his course as £22 1s 0d, which he paid on 4 October 1922. He applied to do his final exam in 1923 with Honours in Currency and Banking.
34. Howson, 107. BB to LR, 22 April 1923, 1 May 1923 and 6 October 1926, LSE. The first of these letters reveals that Bunting was still being subsidised by his longsuffering father.
35. So-called because Bonar Law and Lloyd George, leaders of the Conservative and Coalition Liberal parties in the coalition government, had sent letters (which the Independent Liberal leader H. H. Asquith derided as ‘coupons’ to link them to wartime rationing) to 159 prospective Liberal MPs endorsing their candidacy.
36. Bell died in 1922 and Barnes contested the seat again in the 1923 by-election but the Labour candidate, Arthur Henderson, increased Bell’s majority from 13 per cent to 18 per cent. Barnes stood in Tynemouth at the 1923 and 1924 general elections, losing the first narrowly and the second emphatically to the Conservative Sir Alexander Russell. His final attempt to return to parliament was in the July 1928 by-election in Halifax, in which he lost heavily to Labour’s Arthur Longbottom.
37. Hansard, 13 February 1919, vol. 112, cc325–407.
38. Hansard, 13 February 1919, vol. 112, cc384–5.
39. Hansard, 13 February 1919, vol. 112, cc387.
40. Hansard, 18 February 1919, vol. 112, cc795–6.
41. H. Barnes, Valuation & Revaluation for Poor Rate and Income Tax (Post War) (London, 1923). Housing: The Facts & The Future (London, 1923) is slightly less testing and its dedication would have mollified the young socialist:
To the Homeless
One dwelling, one family
Every family, a dwelling
We have seen that Bunting misremembered his deathless footnote in a book supposedly written by Graham Wallas on prison reform. He almost certainly worked on one of Harry Barnes’ books on tax and possibly confused the Royal Commission he referred to with the Royal Commission on Income Tax of 1920. Not so romantic perhaps but Bunting was prone, as we shall see, to talking up his part in events that are historically obscure.
42. BBNL, 30.
43. DESC.
44. BB to LR, 1 May 1923, LSE.
45. BB to LR, undated but spring 1923, LSE.
46. BB to J. J. Adams, undated but 1923, DUR.
47. BB to J. J. Adams, undated but 1923, DUR.
48. F. M. Ford, It was the Nightingale (London, 1934), 255. The artist, sculptor and architect, Fernand Léger, was that time in the middle of his ‘mechanical period’.
49. W. Lewis, Rude Assignment (Santa Barbara, 1984), 131.
50. R. Aldington, Life for Life’s Sake (London, 1941), 150–1.
51. J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris, 1908–1925 (Pennsylvania, 1990), 332.
52. Nightingale, 259.
53. Nightingale, 259–60.
54. See M. Sanouillet, Dada in Paris, revised by A. Sanouillet, transl. S. Ganguly, (Cambridge, 2012).
55. Interview with McAllister and Figgis, 10 November 1984.
56. CP, 29.
57. BB to HM, 30 Nov 1930, CHIC.
58. DESC.
59. J. Turnbull and H. White (eds), More Words: Gael Turnbull on Poets and Poetry (Bristol, 2012), 45.
60. S. Bowen, Drawn from Life (London, 1941), 116.
62. R. M. Ludwig (ed.) Letters of Ford Madox Ford (Princeton, 1965), 160–1.
63. Nightingale, 273.
64. Nightingale, 272.
65. Nightingale, 258.
66. Nightingale, 301–4.
67. H. Kenner, The Pound Era (London, 1991), 527.
68. TERR, 41–2.
69. Reading in spring 1977 at the Air Gallery, London, published by Keele University, 1995.
70. Nightingale, 311. For date see M. Saunders, Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1996), 156. Ford spells it ‘Bede’.
71. Nightingale, 310.
72. B. J. Poli, Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review (Syracuse, 1967), 28.
73. Times Literary Supplement, 20 May 2011.
74. BB to WCW, 7 October 1930, BRBML.
75. Poli, 144.
76. DESC.
77. F. Madox Ford, Selected Poems, ed. Basil Bunting (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), vii.
78. Ford, Selected Poems, viii.
79. Ford, Selected Poems, ix. Hemingway’s malicious caricature of Ford is made the more incomprehensible by his observation in 1925 of ‘Pound the major poet devoting, say, one fifth of his time to poetry. With the rest of his time he tries to advance the fortunes, both material and artistic, of his friends … And in the end few of them refrain from knifing him at the first opportunity’ (Carpenter, 200). Bunting doesn’t always seem to have loathed Hemingway so. He told Philip Norman of the Sunday Times a story in 1969 of going to meet Hemingway after Hemingway had reported discovering a ‘deposit of pre-war Guinness. That was in 1922, so the Guinness would have been almost 10 years old. Ford was removed after eight hours or so, by business; and Hemingway and I remained two days and three nights, playing billiards until we had drunk all the Guinness.’ (P. Norman, Sunday Times supplement, 19 January 1969, 34–8).
80. A. Judd, Ford Madox Ford (London, 1990), 350–1.
81. C. Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley, 1996), 344–5.
82. Burke, 345.
83. BB to EM, 27 March 1978, KCL. Was Bunting in La Conciergerie or La Santé as Ford believed? La Santé was a relatively new prison (built in 1867) and had none of the bloody history or terrifying Gothic echoes that reverberate around La Conciergerie, a Valois palace that had been converted into a prison in 1391. La Conciergerie had effectively been the office accommodation of the Terror in the aftermath of the French Revolution and its prisoners included the most romantic and bloodstained characters in modern and early modern French history. The fact that Bunting believed the subject of his first great poem, François Villon, to have been one of them doesn’t add much to his claim, but Villon was arrested so frequently that it is far from impossible.
84. Interview with Pitkethly and Laughlin, October 1982, Paideuma, 38, 2011, 3–28. Another version, intended primarily to illustrate Pound’s prudish nature, substitutes the sculptor Brancusi for Boris de Kruschev. See PAID, 65.
85. BB to James Leippert, 30 October 1932, CHIC.
86. BB to EM, 27 March 1978, KCL. Pound did despise Wordsworth, ‘a silly old sheep with a genius … for imagisme, for a presentation of natural detail, wildfowl bathing in a hole in the ice, etc., and this talent … he buried in a desert of bleatings’ (Carpenter, 222). Pound’s ability to dragoon long dead poets into his Imagiste movement stretched as far as the third century bce Chinese poet ‘Chu Yüan, Imagiste’ (Carpenter, 220).
87. BB to J. J. Adams, 14 January 1924, DUR.
88. BB to J. J. Adams, 19 February 1926, DUR.
89. Hemingway wrote to Pound on 17 March 1924: ‘Bunting, they say, is in jail in Genoa.’ C. Baker (ed.), Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1962 (New York, 1981), 112.
90. DESC.
91. E. Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London, 1987), 108.
92. DESC.
93. Interview with Peter Bell, 3 September 1981.
94. Wilhelm, 335.
95. BB to James Leippert, 30 October 1932, CHIC.
96. DESC.
97. PI, 43.
98. FORDE, 16–17.
99. FORDE, 17.
100. Letter from Matthew Kahane to the author, 19 April 2011. According to Kahane his father had been:
born Jacques Cahane (the spelling of the surname was changed to Kahane when he was travelling from the UK to Romania via Berlin in 1916) in Galati in Romania on 25 September 1900. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 Kahane was able to obtain Polish citizenship on the basis of his father’s birth in Czernowitz, which the resuscitated Polish state claimed. He came to the UK on a Polish passport and enrolled at the London School of Economics where he met Bunting, and on graduating joined the London office of the prominent grain merchants Louis Dreyfus, for which he worked until the autumn of 1950. He took a number of walking tours in the UK, mainly in England, and became a British subject by naturalisation on 20 September 1932, being described as ‘of uncertain nationality’. (Letter to author, 7 May 2011.)
101. Robbins, 264.
102. BB to James Leippert, 30 October 1932, CHIC.
103. According to James Laughlin (a disciple of Pound’s from the age of eighteen, and later his somewhat undiscriminating publisher) who ‘studied’ at the Ezuversity, ‘EP disapproved of the funivia. He preferred to walk.’ Quoted in M. Bacigalupo ‘Tigullio itineraries: Ezra Pound and friends’ in M. Bacigalupo and W. Pratt (eds), Ezra Pound, language and persona (Genova, 2008), 413.
104. CP, 97.
105. FORDE, 102
106. Reading in 1980 in London, published by Keele University, 1995.
107. BB to EP, 29 April 1926, BRBML.
108. British Medical Journal, 28 February 1925.
109. The Lancet, 14 March 1925.
110. Supplement to the British Medical Journal, 11 April 1925.
111. FORDE, 26.
112. Excerpt from Christabel Dennison’s Diary, 11 May 1925, DUR. See also V. Nicholson, Among the Bohemians: Experiments in living 1900–1939 (London, 2002), 192–3.
113. BB to J. J. Adams, 19 February 1926, DUR.
114. BB to LR, 6 October 1926, LSE.
115. BB to J. J. Adams, 19 February 1926, DUR. According to Richard Caddel and Anthony Flowers Bunting also wrote speeches and lectures for the shipping magnate William Noble, First Baron Kirkley (BBNL, 32). This is likely to be the ‘rich man’ he referred to in a letter to J. J. Adams who promised him a job, promises on which he lived ‘for months’ (BB to J. J. Adams, 19 February 1926, DUR).
116. BB to LR, 6 October 1926, LSE.
117. BB to EP, 2 December 1926, BRBML.
118. FORDE, 26.
119. MONT, 75. Bunting regarded Keynes as a consummate crook (BB to EP, undated but 1931 or 1932, BRBML).
120. DESC.
121. BB to EP, 10 April 1927, BRBML.
122. V. Eliot and J. Haffenden (eds), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 3 (London, 2012), 467.
123. DESC.
124. By 1968 Bunting had inflated Eliot’s observation a little: ‘Oh, you know what Eliot says about that restaurant – it is one of the three most expensive restaurants in the world now’ (SSLT, 203).
125. See A. Conover, Olga Rudge and Ezra Pound (New Haven, 2001), 5–6. Pound had written two ‘Villonauds’ in 1907, when he was 21 (Carpenter, 72–3).
126. Conover, 66.
127. P. Norman, Sunday Times supplement, 19 January 1969, 34–8.
128. PI, 38.
129. MAK, 19.
130. By ‘cadence’ Bunting means those recurrent phrases at the end of clauses that are so familiar in sixteenth-century religious writing, such as Cranmer’s liturgy of 1544: ‘ … from everlasting damnation, Good Lord, deliver us … from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us …’
131. MAK, 85.
132. MAK, 106.
133. MAK, 93.
134. Interview with Tom Pickard on 17 and 18 June 1981, recorded at Bunting’s home near Hexham, published by Keele
University, 1995. Bunting had no intention of giving ground to Eliot on this issue. ‘I do claim copyright, and bugger TSE’, he wrote to Zukofsky. ‘He was before me with Preludes, but I’d a bunch of Sonatas before he thought up his Quartets’ (BB to LZ, 22 March 1951, HR).
135. Interview with Andrew McAllister and Sean Figgis, recorded at Bunting’s home near Hexham on 10 November 1984, published by Keele University, 1995.
136. MAK, 154–5.
137. MAK, 160.
138. MAK, 170.
139. BB to VF, 23 May 1972, DUR.
140. Interview with Peter Bell, 3 September 1981.
141. TERR, 107. Pound referred to Lavignac in Guide to Kulchur (London, 1952), 136.
142. A. Lavignac, Music and Musicians, transl. W. Marchant (London, 1904), 346.
143. TERR, 110.
144. CP, 26. Steven Matthews plausibly cites these lines as a crucial influence on Yeats’ ‘Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop’, which was written shortly after the publication of ‘Villon’ in Poetry. K. Williams and S. Matthews (eds), Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and after (Harlow, 1997), 100.
145. AG, 22. Quizzed a few months before he died about the introduction of Marot into the poem Bunting said, ‘I like Marot. I have respect for him. The fact that he was wrong about Villon doesn’t destroy that.’ (Interview with McAllister and Figgis, 10 November 1984).
146. FORDE, 151.
147. BB to Donald Davie, 25 September 1975, BRBML.
148. ‘Yes or be it the Emperor of Constantinople of the golden fist’ in Galway Kinnell’s translation. G. Kinnell (transl.), The Poems of François Villon (London, 1982), 51.
149. See I. Kalavrezou, ‘Helping hands for the empire: Imperial ceremonies and the cult of relics at the Byzantine Court’ in H. Maguire (ed.), Byzantine Court Culture from 829 to 1204 (Washington DC, 1997), 53–79. Peter Makin thinks it ‘fairly clear from his poem that Bunting thinks Villon’s lines refer to manuscript illuminations. Villon students have generally taken them to refer to the gilded tomb of Alphonse, court of Eu, at saint-Denis, whose inscription stated that he was the son of the emperor of Constantinople. However, it has been pointed out that Villon is more likely to be speaking of the gilded orb in such a figure’s hands, as commonly depicted in the danse macabre’ (P. Makin, Bunting: the Shaping of His Verse (Oxford, 1992), 28). There are, of course, many ways of interpreting ‘Villon’. Brian Conniff, for instance, sees it as Bunting’s first strike in a class war that he singlehandedly conducted for forty years. See B. Conniff, The Lyric and Modern Poetry: Olson, Creeley, Bunting (New York, 1988), 137–61.
A Strong Song Tows Us Page 70
