A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  324. Carpenter, 552–3.

  325. Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 18 December 1968, DUR. ‘Do you still swear as much?’, Bunting asked Karl Drerup in January 1938. ‘People don’t in America. But here [in Devon] no one opens his mouth without swearing’ (BB to KD, 25 January 1938, DUR).

  326. Carpenter, 458.

  327. Carpenter, 492.

  328. BB to EP, 3 September 1936, BRBML. He wrote to Eric Mottram thirty-six years later about the poet and artist J. P. Angold, who was killed in action with the RAF in 1943: ‘I met him only a couple of times, when I was in great trouble with my first wife and couldn’t pay much attention. He seemed intelligent, but I cant say I found much in his poetry, though I’m not clear enough to speak with certainty. I think he was one of the set EP was in with then, Green Shirts, or something, half Fascist half Douglasite’ (BB to EM, 13 November 1973, KCL).

  329. Agenda, 12, 45–6.

  330. FORDE, 34–5. Forde quotes from an article of 5 January 1932 that Bourtai kept from her mother’s collection.

  331. Bacigalupo, 382–3. Bacigalupo’s chapter is essential reading for any visitor to Rapallo.

  332. Bacigalupo, 384.

  333. Bacigalupo, 398–9.

  334. R. Murray Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music: The complete criticism (London, 1978), 332.

  335. N. Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound (Harmondsworth, 1970), 316.

  336. FORDE, 35.

  337. Schafer, 332.

  338. Interview with Pitkethly and Laughlin, October 1982.

  339. Musical Times (August 1934), 750.

  340. Carpenter, 521.

  341. Zukofksy arrived in August 1933; the Buntings left in September. Bunting sent a postcard to Zukofsky in Budapest in June asking him to stay with them in Rapallo and another on 8 August arranging to meet him off his train at Genoa (BB to LZ, June 1933 and 8 August 1933, HR).

  342. C. Norman, Ezra Pound (London, 1969), 317.

  343. FORDE, 35–6. Margaret de Silver had withdrawn her regular financial support, according to Marian, when Bunting married but she continued to supply them generously with cash (Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 18 December 1968, DUR).

  344. Norman, 318.

  345. DESC. Bunting’s generation was perhaps more familiar with Ferdowsi’s epic than we are today. Matthew Arnold’s beautiful ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ was adapted from an episode in the Shahnameh.

  346. FORDE, 46.

  347. BB to DP, 14 September 1932, LILLY.

  348. Morning Post, 1 October 1934, 14.

  349. Pound, Cantos, 474. Bunting had written ‘Firdowsi’ in Persian script on his door in Rapallo. When Pound wished to reproduce it in ‘Canto 77’ Bunting sent the script to Dorothy Pound, explaining that ‘it is as near as I can make it from memory to the lettering used on the oldest tiles in buildings of the Seljuk dynasty, which began about 1050 – half a century after Firdausi died’ (BB to DP, 27 November 1946, LILLY).

  350. H. Witemeyer (ed.), The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (New York, 1996), 163.

  351. D. D. Paige (ed.), The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941 (New York, 1950), 305.

  352. BB to EP, ‘Twentyumpth’ January 1934, BRBML.

  353. EP to BB, 17 January 1935, BRBML. Reading Pound’s correspondence for longer than thirty seconds is not for the faint-hearted. His execrable spelling and grammar, absurd contractions, swaggering jargon and, worst of all, his man-toman, backslapping alternation between chumminess and abuse are hard to take for extended periods. Zukofsky’s is nearly as bad. This is not a twenty-first-century prejudice. Ford Madox Ford complained in 1938 about Pound’s ‘incomprehensible scrawls’ and suggested that he ask the waiter at his hotel to write his letters for him. Yeats told him that he read his letters without much understanding them and asked him to write in future in ‘old-fashioned English’ (Carpenter, 557).

  354. O. Pound, Arabic & Persian Poems (London, 1970), 5.

  355. BB to Peter Russell, 8 Sept 1949, SUNY.

  356. BB to HM, 20 November 1932, CHIC.

  357. Document in BRBML.

  358. D. Share (ed.) Bunting’s Persia: Translations by Basil Bunting (Chicago, 2012).

  359. P. Loloi, Hâfiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A critical bibliography (London, 2004), 18, 328.

  360. Share, back panel.

  361. Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 7 March 1969, DUR.

  362. St Andrews Review, Spring–Summer 1977, 38.

  363. Interview with Tom Pickard, 17 and 18 June 1981.

  364. CP, 110.

  365. CP, 114.

  366. Reading in 1980 in London. Bunting was well aware of the danger of being inextricably associated with a single, often not particularly distinguished work. The poet Gael Turnbull visited Bunting in 1964: ‘While there, an anthology arrived from Philadelphia. Co-edited by Ezra Pound. And we both laughed in glee, that he has two poems in it, and only one each for Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore etc. I remark, “But you must be getting a little tired of the ‘Morpethshire farmer’. You’ll notice that we didn’t ask you to read that last night.” He laughs. “Yes, I can see it’s going to be to me what ‘The Lake Isle’ was to Yeats!”’ (Turnbull and Whyte, 48).

  367. CP, 113.

  368. C. Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Berkeley, 1996), 345.

  369. D. Annwn, ‘Her pulse their pace: Women poets and Basil Bunting’, SYSB, 126–7.

  370. CP, 227.

  371. CP, 150.

  372. H. Gilonis, ‘Soiled Mosaic: Bunting’s Horace Translations’, SYSB, 209.

  373. SYSB, 214.

  374. CP, 225.

  375. P. Hobsbaum, ‘Beyond the Iambic Norm’, SYSB, 48.

  376. CP, 30–1.

  377. BB to HM, 13 July 1931, CHIC.

  378. Reading in spring 1977, London.

  379. Interview with Peter Bell, 3 September 1981.

  380. P. Quartermain, ‘Take Oil/and Hum: Niedecker/Bunting’ in E. Willis (ed.), Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (Iowa City, 2008), 276. In later life he regretted that his early poems were not as skilful as they might have been (A. Hall, ‘The Irony of Bunting’s Climb to Fame’, Newcastle Journal, 6 December 1968, 8).

  381. CP, 118.

  382. First published in Poetry, October 1934, 13, as ‘Fishermen’.

  383. ‘Verse and version’, also written in 1932, is unusual in that it is a translation into Latin. Louis Zukofsky had sent Bunting a poem, ‘In that this happening’, and asked him to translate it into Italian. Bunting’s Italian, however, was not yet up to the job so he translated it into Latin instead which seemed to him more suited to the poem’s ‘monumental terseness’ (BB to LZ, ‘September ?th [sic] 1932’, HR).

  384. Reading in February 1982, London.

  385. BB to HM, 20 November 1932, CHIC.

  386. BB to James Leippert, 30 October 1932, CHIC.

  387. Turnbull and Whyte, 46.

  388. FORDE, 146. Letter from Niedecker to Cid Corman, 7 March 1969, L. P. Faranda (ed.) ‘Between Your House and Mine’: The Letters of Lorine Niedecker to Cid Corman, 1960 to 1970 (Durham, 1986), 186, and letter from Niedecker to LZ, 30 December 1950, in J. Penberthy (ed.), Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970 (Cambridge, 1993), 172.

  389. BB to William Cookson, undated but before his Round House reading of Wordsworth on 14 February 1978, BRBML.

  390. V. Slade, Tarasque, 3.

  391. A. Hall, ‘Basil Bunting Explains How a Poet Works’, Newcastle Journal, 17 July 1965, 7.

  392. PI, 37.

  393. CP, 85–6.

  394. BB to WCW, ‘August the umpth’ 1932, BRBML.

  395. BB to EP, undated but 1935, BRBMB.

  396. B. Ahearn (ed.), Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky (London, 1987), 37.

  397. Pound wrote to Zukofsky from Rapallo on 22 November 1931 that ‘Intellectual life costs about ten dollars a week in europe. Basil must do it on less, but he is a bit torp
id and can’t be said to be plumb in the centre etc. etc.’ (Ahearn, 105).

  398. Ahearn, 39.

  399. Carpenter, 184–8.

  400. Carpenter, 189. The development of Imagist theory, such as it was, is well charted in S. K. Coffman, Imagism: A chapter for the history of modern poetry (New York, 1972), 120–62.

  401. W. C. Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (London, 1968), 264–5.

  402. H. Kenner, The Pound Era (London, 1972), 404.

  403. BB to LZ, 2 October 1932, HR. Bunting wrote in 1976 that ‘a work of art is something constructed, something made in the same way that a potter makes a bowl. A bowl may be useful but it may be there only because the potter liked that shape …’ (Multi: Basil Bunting from the British Press (1976), unpaginated).

  404. BB to EP, 18 November 1933, BRBML.

  405. MONT, 72.

  406. Interview with McAllister and Figgis, 10 November 1984.

  407. Ahearn, 47. Pound refers to Bunting’s ‘Scrittori Inglesi Contemporanei’ which appeared in L’Indice of 20 May 1930 and which was reprinted in English as ‘Directory of Current English Authors’ in Front, 3, April 1931. Pound considered this article a ‘very good summary of state of things in Briton’ (EP to HM, 28 January 1931, CHIC).

  408. Ahearn, 49.

  409. Ahearn, 58

  410. Ahearn, 52.

  411. Ahearn, 64.

  412. Ahearn, 71. By ‘prized’ Zukofsky meant he would lobby Monroe to award Bunting the Lyric Prize for poetry. Zukofsky’s reference to La Bonne Lorraine relates to lines from Villon’s Ballade des dames du temps jadis:

  Et Jehanne, la bonne Lorraine,

  Qu’Anglois bruslèrent à Rouen;

  Ou sont-ils, Vierge souveraine? …

  Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!

  which Bunting rendered as:

  In those days rode the good Lorraine

  whom English burned at Rouen,

  the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust (CP, 26).

  413. Ahearn, 89.

  414. Ahearn, 92.

  415. BB to HM, 15 December 1930, CHIC.

  416. EP to HM, 16 February 1931, CHIC.

  417. B. Ahearn (ed.), The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Middletown, 2003), 409.

  418. BB to HM, 5 March 1931, CHIC.

  419. HM to BB, 19 March 1931, CHIC.

  420. BB to HM, 13 July 1931, CHIC.

  421. BB to HM, 1 May 1931, CHIC.

  422. BB to HM, 13 July 1931, CHIC.

  423. BB to HM, 28 October 1931, CHIC. For a while Bunting was under the illusion that Samuel Beckett was English. ‘Found I like Mr Becket,’ he told Pound in 1931, ‘glad he’s English, as a matter of national pride. Sorry he’s English, since he’s thereby liable to succumb to the triplecursed gentleman-idea, destruction of all things’ (BB to EP, undated but January 1931, BRBML).

  424. Poetry, February 1932, 264.

  425. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (London, 1932), 58.

  426. BB to HM, undated but 21 January 1932, CHIC.

  427. M. Schmidt, An Introduction to 50 Modern British Poets (London, 1979), 196: ‘T. S. Eliot … appears as a eunuch (Attis’s self-emasculation in service of Cybele is the legend at the back of the poem). Bunting claims his target was Lucretius and Cino de Pistoia – in fact, it is an ageing Prufrock.’ Schmidt’s ridiculous misreading of the opening lines of Briggflatts (197) renders this interpretation rather suspect. Schmidt seems to have taken this theory somewhat uncritically from Anthony Suter’s commentary on the poem in Durham University Journal, March 1973, 189–200.

  428. Parisi and Young, 303.

  429. The New English Weekly, 8 September 1932, 499. Incidentally Bunting had a letter published in the same edition in which he sought to distance himself forcefully from the work of another contributor: ‘Sir, Kindly make it known to your readers that the B. C. B. who contributes occasionally to your paper is NOT me. Those are indeed my initials, well enough known to a certain number of people, but I have never signed them to any printed work, and the only work I know of the other “B. C. B.” I don’t like’ (508). It is interesting that the two reviews ‘the other “B. C. B.”’ contributed in 1932 were written very much in the sarcastic and superior tone of some of Bunting’s pieces for The Outlook. See New English Weekly, 19 May 1932, 119–20 and New English Weekly, 7 July 1932, 287. Perhaps Bunting was looking to distance himself from New English Weekly generally. Its pro-Douglas economic position was attracting anti-Semitic contributors including, needless to say, Pound.

  430. MT, 77–8.

  431. Kenner, 444.

  432. BB to Morton Dauwen Zabel, 4 January 1933, CHIC.

  433. Poetry, February 1932, 264.

  434. Poetry, February 1932, 265.

  435. BB to EP, 2 December 1926, BRBML.

  436. Agenda, spring 1969, 42.

  437. Agenda, Spring 1969, 42.

  438. MONT, 74. Bunting told Denis Goacher that he had met Auden and was ‘baffled by a sort of heaviness and dullness of mind’ (BB to DG, 4 July 1973, DUR).

  439. Ahearn, 96.

  440. The short-lived Pagany: a native quarterly published ‘Please stop gushing about his pink’ in the Summer 1931 issue and this translation from Horace reappeared in the Winter 1931 edition of New Review.

  441. EP to HM, 30 November 1929, CHIC.

  442. EP to HM, 2 March 1930, CHIC. Bunting was sincere in his desire for anonymity. He wrote to Pound:

  Hope you wont think me ungrateful or something – I have replied to Poetry that I don’t like blurbs, prefer to be as near anonymous as practically possible … I do intensely detest personal publicity and wish I could put out my productions in papers or elsewhere as Op 23 by Writer 347 … I was always like that. It has nothing to do with ‘being a gentleman’ to which animal I have small resemblance, but simply with my idea of what poetry is or ought to be – the opposite of gossip (BB to EP, undated but February 1930, BRBML).

  443. BB to HM, 21 January 1932, CHIC.

  444. Ahearn, 100.

  445. E. Pound (ed.), Profile (Milan, 1932), half title verso.

  446. S. Vines (ed.), Whips & Scorpions (Glasgow, 1932), 40–3. These were ‘To a POET who advised me to PRESERVE my Fragments and False Starts’, ‘Crackt Records: Number One’ (‘Please stop gushing about his pink’) and ‘Number Two’ (‘Yes it’s slow, dockt of amours’) and ‘Reading X’s Collected Works’. The Leightonian, ever keen to get in on Bunting’s act, noted that ‘two of the famous ‘Crackt Records’ were composed in part at least while he was at Leighton Park, and the opening lines of the second have all the world-weary disillusion of the Upper VIth’ (Leightonian, December 1932, 251).

  447. Hound and Horn, 6, 1, Oct–Dec 1932, 158–60.

  448. BB to James Leippert, 30 October 1932, CHIC.

  449. Hound and Horn, 6, 2, Jan–Mar 1933, 322–3.

  450. Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 7 March 1969, DUR.

  451. Turnbull and Whyte, 49.

  452. A copy of this letter, dated 22 January 1933, was sent to EP, BRBML.

  453. E. Pound (ed.), Active Anthology (London, 1933), prelims.

  454. Active Anthology, 9. In the case of Hemingway’s single poem, ‘They all made peace – What is peace?’, I’m on the side of the British literary bureaucracy. It is dreadful. But so is the Eliot poem included, ‘Fragments of a Prologue’, representing the greatest poet of his generation at his embarrassing pseudo-demotic worst. To be momentarily fair to Pound he did concede that ‘20 or 30 poets between the ages of 20 and 40 have written better poems than some of those here included’ (253). Nowhere can the unevenness of the anthology be better appreciated than by reading Bunting’s cool sonata against Hemingway’s tuneless whistling.

  455. Active Anthology, 23–4.

  456. The complete list is: ‘Villon’, ‘Attis – Or, Something Missing’, ‘How Duke Valentine Contrived’, ‘They Say Etna’, ‘Yes, it’s slow, docked of amours’ (p
reviously published as ‘Crackt Records: Number Two’), ‘Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise’, ‘Molten pool … ’, ‘The Passport Officer’, ‘Chomei at Toyama’, ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’ and ‘Gin the Goodwife Stint’. He told Gael Turnbull that he wanted to suppress ‘They say Etna’ but ‘Pound wouldn’t have that … I think it sounds horrible …’ (BB to GT, undated but January 1965). It is as bad a poem as he wrote, but he recognised the futility of suppression. He told an interviewer late in life that ‘it’s very difficult to suppress something once you have printed it, and I think it is usually best not to try to suppress it. So there are several poems in the Collected Poems which I feel ought not to be there, but it would be no use leaving them out because as soon as I’m dead somebody will print another collection that will include them. Better to chop them a little myself ’ (PI, 39). Which is exactly what happened. In any event, according to Pound Bunting was ‘NOT satisfied with HIS stuff. Finds Marianne better on rereading (enforced in Canary Isles, as he has no other books) thinks W. C. W. the best (apart from me and Possum [Eliot], who are merely umbrellas to the vol), but uneven’ (D. M. Gordon (ed.), Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (New York, 1994), 8–9).

  457. Interview with McAllister and Figgis, 10 November 1984.

  458. Bridson commissioned two broadcasts from Bunting for the BBC’s Third Programme in 1963 and 1964.

  459. Paige, 250.

  460. Paige, 272. Letter dated 28 March 1935.

  461. E. Pundit, Superman: being the complete poetical works of Robert Baby Buntin-Dicebat (London, 1934), xiii.

  462. BB to HM, 26 February 1932, CHIC.

  463. BB to James Leippert, 17 July 1932, CHIC.

  464. Interview with McAllister and Figgis, 10 November 1984.

  465. BB to James Leippert, ‘September nth 1932’, CHIC.

  466. BB to James Leippert, 26 September 1932, CHIC.

  467. BB to James Leippert, 26 September 1932, CHIC.

  468. BB to HM, 27 September 1932, CHIC.

  469. BB to HM, 20 November 1932, CHIC.

  470. BB to HM, 20 November 1932, CHIC.

  471. BB to Morton Dauwen Zabel, 4 January 1933, CHIC.

  472. BB to Morton Dauwen Zabel, 24 March 1933, CHIC.