Then of course, there was Persia. Bunting adored Persia, “a country where they still make beautiful things by hand.” Isfahan was his favorite city in the world. He loved the courtliness, the hospitality, the pleasure seeking, the childlike color and drama of the Persians: after all, they sang to the same qualities in him. He delighted his hosts by having named his children after their heroes and by speaking an antique form of their language that he had learned from reading the tenth-century poet Ferdowsi; “it was as if someone came along in England speaking a Chaucerian mode.” If there was a place for him anywhere, then surely it was in the wonderfully named Luristan. The tribal Bunting took tea (and much else) with the tribes of Persia. In 1947 and 1948, Bunting assisted our man in Teheran, met and married a Kurdish girl, Sima Alladadian; left the Foreign Office—a sort of sideways move—to become Teheran correspondent for the Times; in 1952 he was finally expelled by the nationalist—and nationalizing—Mossadeq government. It was a loss all round, because Bunting really seems to have understood and liked the place, and managed to operate in it better than most. A press colleague admitted: “He told us two years ago what was going to happen in Persia, & the Foreign Office said Pooh! & so did the oil people.” He wasn’t easily intimidated either. At the Ritz in Teheran there was a sanctioned demonstration that Bunting insisted on joining: “I walked into the crowd and stood amongst them and shouted DEATH TO MR. BUNTING! with the best of them, and nobody took the slightest notice of me.” As I say, Tintin.
If it had happened in more recent times, Bunting would have enjoyed kudos as an expert, with his serialized memoirs and semidetached television appearances on daytime sofas to look forward to. But in 1952, things weren’t like that. He returned to England, with a new young family, to find himself basically unemployable. The Buntings moved in with his mother and braced themselves for hard times. Long absence disqualified Bunting for state assistance, and the better part of what he had done while away did not redound to his credit for the simple reason that he was not able to talk about it. He was rejected for better jobs and did badly paid clerical tasks: proofreading—if you will, a man with his eyesight—bus and train timetables, gently revising sensitive trade unionists’ grammar. A man meeting him for the first time was dumbfounded by his humdrum semimilitary appearance: “the story-book image of a scout-master.” In 1954, he got a job as subeditor (working nights) on the Newcastle Daily Journal; in 1957, he moved to the Evening Chronicle.
For ten years—not the dishonored prophet but the returned expat and expoet in his own country—he led a plaintive, low-key existence, grumbling about money, feeling he had missed his moment, whenever that might have been. It was from this condition that he was rescued by the young Newcastle poet Tom Pickard who, having picked up a couple of leads as to Bunting’s importance and local availability, telephoned him and shortly afterward turned up on his doorstep. With Pickard’s encouragement, Bunting was tied into a local writing scene in Newcastle (he read several times at the newly opened Morden Tower), he found publishers for some of his old poems, and even began writing again. His long poem “Briggflatts” was written on a commuter train; the last of his “sonatas” (it’s only twenty pages), it was cut down from something apparently very much longer. It was published to widespread acclaim in 1965, and Bunting was rediscovered (mostly for the first time). He was able to retire from the Chronicle and parlay his continuing existence—here after all was something like the Stephen Spender of Modernism, he had known Yeats, was an associate of Pound’s, could remember Eliot as a progressive—into readings and teaching jobs in America, grants from the Arts Council and Northern Arts, radio and television appearances on the BBC, and then—surely mistakenly—honorific presidencies (in the sense that he was honoring them) of the Poetry Society (at a particularly horrible time in its history) and Northern Arts. The scout master was elbowed aside by a strange new act: the Grand Old Man, the English Celt (listen to the recording of “Briggflatts,” where he seems to have caught Pound’s Scottish accent). Oxford published his Collected Poems in 1978 and a posthumous Uncollected Poems in 1991. He continued to be shunted around from house to house (he never seemed to find rest or comfort), wrote little, but had leisure to opine and reminisce. He didn’t have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (“Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs”), a few eclectic names—Pound, Zukofsky, Whitman, Wordsworth, Spenser, Horace, Villon, Ferdowsi, Manuchehri—and a few ideas—poetry as music, poetry as carving and parsimony—resonated perhaps a little more after the stifling Amis-Larkin fifties and sixties. The Beatles—Northern Songs!—bought expensive limited editions of his books and took care to be seen reading them. Bunting died in hospital in Hexham in 1985; his ashes were scattered in the Quaker graveyard at Brigflatts that he had first visited as a small boy in the early century.
* * *
And the poetry? It’s acquired an oddly strategic quality. So much depends on … Basil Bunting. Without Bunting, Pound is a greatly diminished figure, the enabler of Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway but of no one of real consequence since the ’20s; with Bunting he remains central past the 1960s, and England for the first time plays in the Modernist colors alongside Ireland and the United States. Donald Davie wrote that Bunting was “very important in the literary history of the present century as just about the only accredited British member of the Anglo-American poetic avant-garde of the Twenties and Thirties.” Yes, he holds the century together, but almost more important he holds the two sides of the Atlantic together as well. Richard Burton cites Martin Seymour-Smith, for whom Bunting was the only English poet to solve the problem of how to assimilate the lively spirit of American poetry without losing his own sense of identity (a nice and a true description). So somehow the persistence and adequacy of British English in the twentieth century is also dependent on Bunting. I think all of this is true, and obviously nowhere more so than in “Briggflatts,” which looks across fifty years at a harsh, cold, bright reality in curt speech that is in touch with Ezra Pound’s “The Seafarer.” Hence, America, Modernism (the sealing couplet), the century, and England all together, with a touch of sweetness:
Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,
head to a hard arm,
they kiss under the rain,
bruised by their marble bed.
In Garsdale, dawn;
at Hawes, tea from the can.
Rain stops, sacks
steam in the sun, they sit up.
Copper-wire moustache,
sea-reflecting eyes
and Baltic plainsong speech
declare: By such rocks
men killed Bloodaxe.
Partly following Bunting himself, Burton is often at pains to defend Bunting from Pound. He groans when a critic remarks that you could track Bunting “everywhere in Pound’s snow.” But I think it’s a question of the intention with which his name is brought up: Pound is not only and everywhere a menace, and in any case Bunting was never his creature: “I don’t want to minimise my debt to Ezra nor my admiration for his work, which should have ‘influenced’ everybody, but my ideas were shaped before I met him and my technique I had to concoct for myself.” Bunting gave Pound the magnificent punny formula “DICHTEN = CONDENSARE”: poetry is not so much to make new as to make dense. He went through Shakespeare’s sonnets cutting lines and shuffling phrases. I can’t imagine a Pound reader not enjoying Bunting (the change of ear and vernacular), and vice versa. Both seemed to enjoy writing English like a foreign language, whether it’s Pound’s “The harsh acts of your levity! / Many and many, / I am hung here, a scare-crow for lovers” or Bunting’s “You idiot! What makes you think decay will / never stink from your skin?” Both wrote many poems that are pure trope, ubi sunts and aubades and the rest of them. The distance between translation and original poem, between lyric and “mask” or “persona” is c
losed. You get Bunting as a Japanese hermit (“I do not enjoy being poor, / I’ve a passionate nature. / My tongue / clacked a few prayers”), Bunting as a Middle Eastern nymphet (in “Birthday Greeting”), Bunting as a queasy Eliotish visitor to Berlin (“Women swarm in Tauentsienstrasse. / Clients of Nollendorferplatz cafes, / shadows on sweaty glass, / hum, drum on the table”), Bunting as a splendidly tiddly businessman (“I’m not fit for a commonplace world / any longer, I’m / bound for the City, // cashregister, adding-machine, / rotary stencil. / Give me another // double whiskey and fire-extinguisher, / George. Here’s / Girls! Girls!”), Bunting as an aging madam in “The Well of Lycopolis.” Language becomes the sum of its possibilities. Bunting extended Pound’s writ to Persian and the Queen’s English. To me, it’s a virtuous and a mutually reinforcing association. One reads both with the same senses and nerves and parts of one’s brain, the author of A Lume Spento (1908) and Lustra (1916) and the author of Redimiculum Matellarum (1930) and Loquitur (1965), the author of Cathay (1915) and the author of Chomei at Toyama (1932), the author of The Cantos and the author of Briggflatts (1965). Both espoused a fresh, flexible, original style, the style of young men for thousands of years, assembled from beauty, learning, satire, and irreverence. The Bunting who in the early twenties and in his own early twenties first approached Ezra Pound wrote: “I believed then, as now, that his ‘Propertius’ was the finest of modern poems. Indeed, it was the one that gave me the notion that poetry wasn’t altogether impossible in the XX century.” Pound, I think, remained for Bunting the poet of “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” and nothing that Bunting wrote is very far from it: the “Sonatas,” the “Odes,” and the “Overdrafts,” as Bunting amiably called his own translations.
W. S. GRAHAM
The Scottish poet W. S. Graham—Sydney Graham, but also “Troubleyouas Greyhim,” “Double Yes Gee,” and “Sadknee Graham” (he had a patella removed when he fell twenty feet onto concrete, but strangely the drunken accident happened after the sobriquet), also via Jock (the generic name for a Scotsman) Graham, “Joke Grim,” and numerous other variants—was born in 1918, and died twenty-eight years ago, in 1986. Death has treated him better than it treats most poets—the “no doubt I shall have a boom” of Pound’s Propertius stands revealed as a false prospectus, a false Propertius, even—perhaps better than his life did. An outstandingly well-chosen volume of Selected Poems (presumably by Christopher Reid) in 1996 followed three years after what you’d have to call a book of rejected poems (drafts and manuscript pages, etc.) titled Aimed at Nobody, and then a book of letters from one of the more fascinating writers—and one of the more interesting lives—of twentieth-century poetry, and a large and beautiful sea-colored Collected Poems. Both books are lovingly and aptly edited, the one by two long-term friends and correspondents of the poet, the other by a younger British poet.
The fascination and the interest are almost completely separate in Graham; the one is stylistic, the other biographical-circumstantial; the one is in the poetry, the other in the letters—which are by no means to be described as the lesser book. Both should be read—though not necessarily together. Each is an absolutely characteristic product of the man and his life, the one a sound or texture, the other maybe a taste.
The poetry—to begin with that—seems to me to exist on the edge of many things: abstraction, mannerism, Scottishness, a whimsical, almost childish falsetto, a homemade philosophy of reading and communication. The poems were written by the sea’s edge, in Cornwall, mostly at night, and on a typewriter, and I fancy that these things show too: a slightly spooked sense of one’s own eccentric noise heading out into great expanses of space and time. “TAPTAP. Are you reading that taptap / I send out to you along / My element?” “The great abeyance,” to use Plath’s term for the sea—though it would serve as well for night, or a phantom readership—that was what Graham wrote into. Graham is a specialist, almost a technician of voice. His speech is never natural, and never quiet, but begins unexpectedly, and continues unpredictably. In letters he starts, “Yes, it is myself,” or “It is indeed myself, Graham.” He proposed once to begin a radio broadcast of his poetry with “Can you hear me?” He makes other writers appear as though they did without grammar, and without surprise. As he puts it, he is the “flying translator, translating / English into English.” He writes as though he had invented the essential miracle of poetry, those marks that speak to us from the page, and continue to do so even after the poet’s death. The mixture of detachment and address, of generosity and caginess, the loss of the “fourth wall” of conventional illusionist poetry, the harping on the strange, depleted nature of what is transacted between writer and reader—all these characterize Graham’s mature work. By way of one preliminary instance of his sound and his method, here is one part of “Approaches to How They Behave,” from 1970:
The words are mine. The thoughts are all
Yours as they occur behind
The bat of your vast unseen eyes.
These words are as you see them put
Down on the dead-still page. They have
No ability above their station.
Their station on silence is exact.
What you do with them is nobody’s business.
I hold no special brief for the early poems of the ’40s and ’50s—they strike me as having been, for almost everyone then writing, two rank bad decades for poetry. Rather like John Berryman, his close contemporary in America, Graham started off writing a larded idiolect of poemese, derived from Yeats, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. The letters show him at pains to try and simplify the calamitous diction of his peers (David Wright, Edwin Morgan), but the poems don’t show too many signs that he was receptive to his own teaching. A short poem like “Gigha”—it’s the name of a tiny Hebridean island—shows all the problems of a kind of second-generation Imagism:
That firewood pale with salt and burning green
Outfloats its men who waved with a sound of drowning
Their saltcut hands over mazes of this rough bay.
Quietly this morning beside the subsided herds
Of water I walk. The children wade the shallows.
The sun with long legs wades into the sea.
I suppose our time tends to punish literary gestures as much as the 1940s rewarded them, but as far as I’m concerned, the attempted addition of drama to the Imagist recipe produces only distracting clutter. Is the poem action or contemplation? Is it waving or drowning? It seems not to know. “Outfloats” and “saltcut” have a deadly callous literariness, it almost defies belief that they are the words of a man who lived among fishermen most of his life and often went out on trawlers, “beside the subsided herds” is ghastly euphuism, “mazes” is pointless, and the repetition of “wade” only serves to weaken the only tolerable line—though of course I like “green”—the last. Oh for the Coan ghost of T. E. Hulme, or, geographically closer, Eliot’s lovely and cogent “Rannoch, near Glencoe.”
Similar strictures might be applied to most of the first third of the Collected, though, like most poets, Graham continued to have an ill-advised soft spot for his early production. Even the celebrated long poem “The Nightfishing” of 1955 (and hence a direct contemporary of Berryman’s “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”), though some sort of tour de force, doesn’t have much to do with the poet that W. S. Graham became. It leaves me not exactly cold, but lukewarm, though I like Graham’s ambition for it: “if it made somebody seasick (a good unliterary measurement) I would be pleased.” The new emphasis on “unliterary,” however, and the suggested conversion rate of poetry (the supreme fiction, remember) and reality are both salutary, and indicative of the future turn of Graham’s writing. “The sea sails in. The quay opens wide its arms / And waves us loose.” The sea, also, “as metaphor of the sea. The boat / Rides in its fires.” Graham is at moments somewhere close to Stevens’s terrain, “Imaginary Trees with Real Birds in Them.”
Along with night, with language and typewriter noise, with
Scottish words and Cornish place-names, with painter friends and spectral readers, with his early memories of Greenock, a sugar port west of Glasgow, the sea takes up residence in Graham’s world. These things offer bearings, quiddity, scale. They accommodate the highly self-conscious movements of Graham’s poems, which may be memory based (like “The Greenock Dialogues”) or fictional (like the sequences “Malcolm Mooney’s Land” or “Ten Shots of Mister Simpson” or “Clusters Travelling Out,” about Arctic exploration, a photographer, and on communication among prisoners, respectively), or again consist almost entirely of his highly characteristic ontological maneuverings and jockeyings. But the temptation to be abstract is denied by the properties and settings of the poems. Even the writing about words and the writing and reading of them has something pragmatic and physical about it. Sometimes, it’s the beautiful Scots vocabulary—surely unarguably a tender and more palpable speech, and in any case the language of his childhood, and always produced by Graham with exquisite tact and timing and naturalness. (As an “exile” in England, and, though as Scottish as anyone, a nonparticipant in the sort of Scots supremacist renaissance of the midcentury, Graham was in a difficult position with the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid, who—much as Marx saw communism as something on the way to the ultimate nirvana of socialism—proposed Scots as a way station toward the ultimate grail of writing in Gaelic. Graham for his part disdained what he called the “plastic Scots” of some of his peers—a thing, incidentally, that shows signs of returning in contemporary Scottish writing. I admire his language politics; a poet should be able to help himself to what he needs, rather than take politically inspired direction from himself or, worse, from others.)
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