A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  473. EP to HM, undated but 1933, CHIC.

  474. BB to HM, 2 August 1933, CHIC.

  475. BB to HM, 30 August 1933, CHIC.

  476. R Caddel (ed.), Basil Bunting: Three Essays (Durham, 1994). There is some doubt about the authorship of ‘The Written Record’, Andrew Crozier having suggested it is the work of Zukofsky’s friend Irving Kaplan.

  477. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1951), 13.

  478. For instance this: ‘The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’; and: ‘The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all’; and ‘to divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim’, (Eliot, Selected, 19, 21, 22). I think Bunting may have been alienated by Eliot’s implausible accommodation of chemistry into the creative process in this essay. What is certain is that Bunting was deliberately picking a fight that couldn’t possibly advance his career.

  479. The Lion and Crown, 1.1, October 1932, 26–33. It is mentioned in a letter from Bunting to Pound written on 21 November 1930.

  480. Caddel, 30–31.

  481. Caddel, 4.

  482. SSLT, 212.

  483. BB to LZ, 27 April 1934, HR.

  484. BB to EP, undated but January 1931, BRBML.

  485. R. Murray Schafer, Ezra Pound and Music: The complete criticism (London, 1978), 333. According to Omar Pound, Bunting and Pound were ‘on the “foreign affairs” staff of the literary supplement of Il Mare’. O. Pound and R. Spoo, Ezra and Dorothy Pound: Letters in Captivity, 1945–1946 (Oxford, 1999), 162.

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

  487. An exclusion made the more unforgivable for being justified by Eliot at his condescending worst: ‘I have omitted one long poem, which Mr. Pound might himself have included: the Homage to Sextus Propertius. I was doubtful of its effect upon the uninstructed reader, even with my instructions. If the uninstructed reader is not a classical scholar, he will make nothing of it; if he be a classical scholar, he will wonder why this does not conform to his notions of what translations should be.’ E. Pound, Selected Poems, ed. T. S. Eliot (London, 1948), xxiii.

  488. New English Weekly, 1, no. 6, 26 May 1932, 137–8.

  489. Carpenter, 510.

  490. E. Pound, ABC of Reading (London, 1961), 92.

  491. BB to EP, 18 July [1934], BRBML.

  492. BB to William Cookson, 21 December 1979, BRBML.

  493. Interview with Pitkethly and Laughlin, October 1982.

  494. BB to James Leippert, 4 January 1933, CHIC.

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

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

  497. Marian Bunting to Helen Groves, 11 September 1968, DUR.

  498. Ahearn, 145 and 149. See also DESC.

  499. BB to Peter Russell, 18 May 1950, SUNY.

  500. Marian Bunting to Helen Groves, 11 September 1968, DUR.

  501. SSLT, 193.

  502. FORDE, 36. This account is a little incoherent.

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

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

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

  506. BB to EP, 8 April 1934, BRBML.

  507. BB to EP, 8 April 1934, BRBML.

  508. BB to EP, 21 March 1934, BRBML.

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

  510. DESC.

  511. FORDE, 36.

  512. BB to EP, 21 March 1934, BRBM.

  513. BB to EP, 21 March 1934, BRBML.

  514. FORDE, 36.

  515. Postmarked (Tenerife) 16 April 1935, DUR.

  516. BB to EP, 5 March 1935, BRBML.

  517. Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 25 September 1968, DUR.

  518. DESC.

  519. BB to EP, undated but 1934, BRBML.

  520. Ahearn, 158.

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

  522. BB to EP, 21 March 1934, BRBML.

  523. BB to EP, 21 October 1934, BRBML.

  524. CP, 153.

  525. CP, 168.

  526. Reading in February 1982, London.

  527. The Lion and the Throne: Stories from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, transl. D. Davis (Washington DC, 1998), 117–8.

  528. FORDE, 39.

  529. BB to LZ, 28 October 1932, HR.

  530. Plymouth State University, Karl Drerup: A Modernist drawn to life (Plymouth, 2010), 22–3.

  531. CP, 124–5. Bunting told Gael Turnbull that ‘The Orotava Road’ is ‘a tribute to Dr Williams. Just a deliberate exercise in his style. Trying to use what he discovered. That’s all it is’ (Turnbull and Whyte, 49). Fittingly Cambridge Opinion published ‘The Orotava Road’ in a special William Carlos Williams issue in 1965 (Cambridge Opinion, 41, 1965, 21).

  532. Reading in 1980 in London. This was the first of Bunting’s poems to be translated into Spanish by Andres Sanchez Robayna of La Laguna University, Tenerife.

  533. Quoted in Stock, 283.

  534. B. Ahearn (ed.), The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Middletown, 2003), 176.

  535. Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 18 December 1968, DUR.

  536. FORDE, 39–40.

  537. BB to EP, 23 June 1934, BRBML.

  538. BB to EP, 18 July 1934, BRBML. ‘I lived,’ he wrote in 1976, ‘for some weeks in a hotel where they gave me a bedroom and a sitting room and all my meals, very good meals, and did all my washing for the equivalent of about 11d a day.’ (Multi: Basil Bunting from the British Press (1976), unpaginated).

  539. BB to EP, 18 July 1934, BRBML.

  540. BB to EP, 5 March 1935, BRBML.

  541. BB to EP, 11 December 1935, BRBML.

  542. BB to EP, 8 April 1934, BRBM.

  543. BB to EP, 21 October 1934, BRBML.

  544. BB to EP, 22 November 1934, BRBML.

  545. In a letter to Louis Zukofsky, 29 September 1935, FORDE, 129.

  546. FORDE, 131.

  547. SYSB, 202–3.

  548. Reading in 1976 at the University of Essex, published by Keele University in 1995.

  549. CP, 126.

  550. BB to DG, 13 December 1964, DUR.

  551. Reading, February 1982, London. Bunting described ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ as ‘a very bitter poem’ at an earlier reading in London in spring 1977.

  552. E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1994), Volume II, 64.

  553. CP, 39–40. Pound urged Bunting to cut the opening of ‘The Well of Lycopolis’. ‘Much thanks suggestion re first lines of Lycopolis, wh. seems likely to be very useful. Don’t know how you do it (find the key to weaknesses). Said excision suggests many emendments’ (BB to EP, 28 March 1936, BRBML). He accepted much of Pound’s advice but was conscious that Pound would not have accepted some of the fundamental conceits: ‘I have parodied part of the Belle Heaulmiere for a poem now in the making. But I don’t think you’d approve’ (BB to EP, ‘Day after saint bloody John’ [so 25 June], 1935, BRBML).

  554. CP, 40–1.

  555. CP, 41.

  556. CP, 43.

  557. BB to LZ, 28 October 1935, HR.

  558. Dante, The Divine Comedy: Hell, transl. Dorothy L. Sayers (London, 1949), 113.

  559. CP, 44–5.

  560. BB to LZ, 28 October 1935, HR.

  561. B. Ahearn (ed.), The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Middletown, 2003), 199.

  562. ‘Carlos Williams’ Recent Poetry’, Westminster Magazine, 23, 2, Summer 1934, 149–54.

  563. ‘The Roots of the Spanish Revolt’, Spectator, 24 July 1936, 138.

  564. Criterion, 15, 41, July 1936, 714–16.

  565. Criterion, 15, 41, July 1936, 762–3.

  566. B.
Bunting, ‘Mirage and Men’, Spectator, 5648, 25 September 1936, 510–12.

  567. SSLT, 36. Anyone who has doubts about the interconnectedness of the British literary establishment should consult V. Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, (Oxford, 1988), 134–5, for an almost comical, certainly biblical, account of the English public school and Oxbridge connections of virtually every literary name one can think of.

  568. New English Weekly 9, no. 25, 1 October 1936, 411–2.

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

  570. I. Hunter, Malcom Muggeridge: A Life (London, 1980), 97.

  571. Hunter, 106.

  572. G. Wolfe, Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography (London, 1995), 148.

  573. Hunter, 106.

  574. For instance by Peter Quartermain and Roger Guedalla, SSLT, 36.

  575. M. Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, Volume 2 (London, 1973), 32–3.

  576. J. Bright-Holmes (ed.), Like it Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge (London, 1981), 152.

  577. ‘Mr Wordsworth’, The Spirit of the Age (1825) in J. Cook (ed.), William Hazlitt: Selected Writings (Oxford, 1991), 357.

  578. Ahearn, 194–5.

  579. L. Zukofsky, Ferdinand (London, 1968), 38.

  580. ‘Observations on Left-Wing Papers’, SSLT, 46–7.

  581. Marian Bunting to Roger Guedalla, 25 September 1968, DUR.

  582. DESC.

  583. BB to EP, 22 January 1936, BRBML.

  584. Ahearn, 187.

  585. BB to EP, 22 January 1936, BRBML.

  586. BB to EP, 13 July 1936, BRBML.

  587. BB to EP, 3 September 1936, BRBML.

  588. FORDE, 40–3.

  589. Marian was eventually granted a decree absolute in 1940. Martin Duberman describes how, in 1949, Bourtai made a rather bizarre announcement to members of the Black Mountain community: ‘The Buntings and Ezra Pounds had shared a house in Rapallo for a time, and Bortai [sic] let the community know that her younger brother was a Pound and that she suspected the youngest Pound might be a Bunting’ (M. Duberman, Black Mountain: An exploration in community (New York, 1972), 317). Ezra was almost certainly not Omar Pound’s father, but neither was Bunting. Dorothy Pound became pregnant with Omar during a visit to Egypt. (Bunting referred to Omar cheekily as ‘Omar-i-bin-Ezra’ (Carpenter, 453–6). Rustam was conceived in September 1936 when the Buntings were living in London. In any event, there is no evidence that the Buntings shared a house in Rapallo with the Pounds. Pound already had a virtual ménage à trois at the time with Dorothy and Olga Rudge in Rapallo.

  590. Criterion, April 1936, 421–3.

  591. CP, 209.

  592. BB to DP and EP, 9 January 1937, BRBML.

  593. Ahearn, 191.

  594. BB to LZ, 31 August 1939, HR.

  595. Ahearn, 191.

  596. Paige, 277.

  597. Ahearn, WCW–LZ, 323.

  598. BB to DP, 22 November 1946, LILLY. Poems 1950 was published in the US by Dallam Flynn.

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

  600. Pound, Cantos, 518.

  601. B. Bunting, ‘The Village Fiesta’, Paideuma, Winter 1981, 619–20.

  602. Paideuma, Winter 1981, 620–21.

  603. BB to KD, 19 January 1940, DUR.

  604. BB to DP and EP, 9 January 1937, BRBML. The reference to ‘unco guids’ is taken from Robert Burns’ ‘Address to the Unco Guid, or the rigidly Righteous.’

  605. DESC.

  606. DESC.

  607. BB to KD, 25 January 1938, DUR.

  608. BB to KD, 25 January 1938, DUR.

  609. BB to KD, 25 January 1938, DUR.

  610. BB to KD, 25 January 1938, DUR.

  611. SSLT, 50.

  612. SSLT, 206.

  613. Interview with Andrew McAllister and Sean Figgis, recorded at Bunting’s home near Hexham on 10 November 1984, published by Keele University, 1995.

  614. BB to EP, 11 November 1938, BRBML.

  615. CP, 127, 227.

  616. Criterion, April 1938, 557–9.

  617. DESC. According to Garth Clucas, ‘Basil Bunting: A Chronology’ in PI, 71. The chronology of this period of Bunting’s life is difficult to establish exactly. Caddel and Flowers, for instance, claim that he spent 1938 sailing in the Mediterranean and joined Nellist’s in 1938 (BBNL, 39–40). He couldn’t have done this as he sailed to Montreal in April 1938. In any event Bunting claimed that ‘the chap [Clucas] who compiled an alleged chronology, one page in Poetry Information, got almost every item wrong’ (BB to TP, 18 January 1979, SUNY).

  618. Edinburgh Gazette, 19 June 1923, 899.

  619. DESC.

  620. BB to LZ, 12 April 1938, HR.

  621. DESC.

  622. DESC.

  623. BB to C. D. Abbott, 2 June 1938, SUNY.

  624. Faranda, 88.

  625. Ahearn, 196. In fact Bunting did have work. He wrote to Drerup in May 1938: ‘I got a job and have to leave for Annapolis at once … I come north again, with the yacht, in June. Then I’ll be at Oyster Bay …’ (BB to KD, 11 May 1938, DUR.)

  626. BB to KD, 27 August 1938, DUR.

  627. BB to WCW, 14 October 1938, BRBML.

  628. EP to BB, 24 November 1938, BRBML.

  629. Carpenter, 481.

  630. R. Preda (ed.), Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, 1933–1940 (Gainesville, 2007), 115–16. See also Howson, 268–9.

  631. BB to EP, 5 March 1935, BRBML.

  632. EP to BB, undated but December 1935, BRBML.

  633. BB to EP, 31 December 1935, BRBML.

  634. BB to EP, 22 January 1936, BRBML.

  635. BB to EP, 16 December 1938, BRBML.

  636. Ahearn, 198.

  637. BB to KD, 25 January 1938, DUR.

  638. Paige, 324–5.

  639. Ahearn, 203. The ‘kumrad’ was e. e. cummings.

  640. Witemeyer, 294. Bunting did not appear in the series.

  641. CP, 65.

  642. B. Ahearn (ed.), The Correspondence of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky (Middletown, 2003), 262–3.

  643. Ahearn, Williams and Zukofsky (Middletown, 2003), 265–6.

  644. BB to EP, 11 November 1938, BRBML.

  645. W. C. Williams, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (London, 1968), 264.

  646. BBNL, 41.

  CHAPTER 3:

  SWEET SHIT! BUY!

  1. BB to LZ, 3 November 1939, HR.

  2. BB to DP, 28 August 1948, LILLY.

  3. BB to LZ, 3 November 1939, HR.

  4. BB to KD, 2 May 1939, DUR.

  5. BB to LZ, 3 October 1939, HR. Bunting was certainly caught up in it. He wrote to Zukofsky about ‘the tremendous display of energy on the part of the English people – “One thinks of … Rome in Hannibal’s time; military genius, superior wealth & the command of the seas were all helpless against it. And yet nearly all the Roman leaders were mediocrities or worse” (BB to LZ, 18 December 1939, HR).

  6. Annie Bunting to KD, undated but 1939, DUR.

  7. Manchester Guardian, 10 June 1939.

  8. BB to LZ, 3 October 1939, HR.

  9. BB to LZ, 18 December 1939, HR.

  10. BB to LZ, 3 November 1939, HR.

  11. BB to LZ, 18 December 1939, HR.

  12. BB to KD, 19 January 1940, DUR.

  13. BB to LZ, 27 April 1940, HR.

  14. BB to LZ, 11 July 1940, HR.

  15. BB to LZ, 9 August 1940, HR.

  16. BB to LZ, 9 August 1940, HR. This complaint about Marian resurfaced frequently until the couple were partially reconciled in the 1960s. In 1951, for instance, he complained to Zukofsky that he wouldn’t ‘list the series of dirty tricks she has played using the children as a kind of bait. Bourtai, since her marriage or a bit before it, seems to be completely estranged’ (BB to LZ, 19 April 1951, HR).

  17. DESC.

  18. DESC.

  19. I am indebted to Hull’s Own Air Force Station by Leonard C. Bacon (Hull, 2002) for information about 17 Balloon
Centre.

  20. There are ten Luftwaffe folders in the Imperial War Museum, London, dated March 1939, which contain details of eleven specific targets in Hull, with accurate descriptions, locations and accounts of the strategic importance of each, as well as guidance on how to find them, and their likely defence capacity. See Revd P. Graystone, The Blitz on Hull (1940–1945), (Hull, 1991).

  21. Bacon, chapter 3.

  22. The effects of the attacks on Hull are vividly described by Esther Baker in A City in Flames: A Firewoman’s Recollections of the Hull Blitz (Beverley, 1992).

  23. AIR 27/2287, 5 November 1940, KEW.

  24. J. Penberthy, Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970 (Cambridge, 1993), 128.

  25. AIR 27/2294, KEW.

  26. DESC.

  27. DISJ, 141. Quartermain is probably correct. Bunting wrote to Dorothy Pound that the Golden Hind’s job was protecting convoys, (BB to DP, Throckley, 22 November 1946, LILLY). On the other hand, ‘I got a beautiful job,’ Bunting told the Newcastle Evening Chronicle in 1965, ‘taking balloons up and down the coast from Flamborough Head to Aberdeen’ (‘Eldon’, Evening Chronicle, 9 June 1965, 6).

  28. DISJ, 134. In fact Bunting wasn’t promoted to leading Aircraftman until May 1942.

  29. AIR 27/2294, KEW.

  30. AIR 27/2294, KEW.

  31. BB to GT, 20 January 1965.

  32. BB to LZ, 9 September 1941, HR.

  33. BB to LZ, 12 September 1941, HR.

  34. CP, 129.

  35. BB to LZ, 9 September 1941, HR.

  36. BB to LZ, 22 September 1941, HR.

  37. BB to LZ, 15 December 1941, HR.

  38. BB to LZ, 18 February 1942, HR.

  39. BB to KD, 1 April 1942, DUR. Bunting enjoyed the company of adolescent girls. Apart from Peggy and Violet there was his second wife, Sima, and in later life Tanya and a string of ‘saqis’. I have come across no evidence (with the possible exception of Briggflatts itself, although that is a poem) that these girls ever became more than companions. He was intensely attached to some of them but there is no evidence that any of them became either muses or lovers.

  40. CP, 57–8.

  41. BB to VF, 23 October 1972, DUR.

  42. BB to KD, 1 April 1942, DUR.

  43. Gael Turnbull, ‘A visit to Basil when he was at Washington New Town’, unpublished journal.

  44. BB to LZ, 4 October 1942, HR.

  45. DESC. ‘When that finished, I wrote the Air Force authorities in medieval, classical Persian – I only knew it as a literary language’ (‘Eldon’, Evening Chronicle, 9 June 1965, 6).