Where Have You Been? (18 page)

Necessarily, I think, the poem of a foreign place, or the poem of the self in a foreign place (the house that Jack didn't build), is a poem of incomplete witness. Lowell's “Buenos Aires” is an intermittent line drawn around next to nothing: leather, abrasiveness, neoclassical curves, “frowning, starch-collared crowds” (strangely both like and unlike the “cowed, compliant fish” in “For the Union Dead”). “Remembering Teheran” has an electrifying diligence about it, a continual openness to impressions, to terror, to strangeness, to awe. As it takes us through politics, religion, sex, history, technology, climate, geography, and what all else, it takes up imagery drawn from thunder, drought, electricity, music, malfunction, plants and insects, and harmonizes them, so that we lose our sense of these things originally having been distinct. It's a glorious synesthetic operetta (Hughes can be extremely funny) made from his sympathetic crackle to the crackle of the place. With his living phrasing, his imaginative connections, even his spiny dashes and asterisks, he fuses things together and himself with them, and causes the thorns of strangeness to flow, and then to sing.

 

HEANEY'S HAIKU

1.1.87

Dangerous pavements.

But I face the ice this year

With my father's stick.

 

“1.1.87” follows the title poem in
Seeing Things
(with its
Tempest
-like reference to “my undrowned father”), about an earlier near thing, and “The Ash Plant,” about Patrick Heaney's last days and willing spirit (“He'll never rise again but he is ready”); and it is itself followed by the exquisite, absolving dream of “An August Night” (“August” surely stressed on the second syllable, as in “great” or “auspicious”: his father's hands “two ferrets, / Playing all by themselves in a moonlit field,” a charmed take on the literary trope, the hands of the dying man plucking at the hairs of a blanket) and by one of Seamus Heaney's poems about the importance of keeping on and toughness and fixity of purpose, this one called “Field of Vision.” (There seem so many of these that, on reflection, this eldest son was much more delicate and suggestible than he cared to appear.)

Often the poems in Heaney's books are put together half-overlapping, like fish scales or roof tiles. The burden of a theme or an argument or (often) a geometrical conceit is taken up in poem after poem: the concentric rounds of
The Haw Lantern
; the wavy tide lines and touch lines of
Seeing Things
. The stress on any individual piece is shared among its neighbors. They bend to a common purpose.

Heaney's mother, Margaret, had died in 1984, and is commemorated in the sonnet sequence “Clearances” in
The Haw Lantern
. His father died in 1986. One of the suggested “lines” that abound in
Seeing Things
is that of moving into the senior generation, as though life were Thermopylae. (I am put in mind of the French noun
le trépas
, a poeticism or archaism, I think, meaning “death,” but from stumble, or “trespass.” A line too far.) Another line, another hurdle or hurtle, is the new year. “1.1.87” combines both. It marks the beginning of a new and ultimate dispensation. This is the way life is going to be from now on. Heaney is weakened, and quite possibly frightened; typically he describes himself as strengthened and emboldened: “But I face the ice this year / With my father's stick.”

I am always surprised the word “armed” does not feature in the poem, so adversarial is it, so imbued with the idea of life as struggle. When I try to recite “1.1.87” from memory—not much of an ask, you'd have thought—I often put it in; I conclude, if it doesn't actually appear, it's only because it's somehow there already. The old sorcerer has gone on, the old magician, the old Prospero, but he has left his wand to the no longer young sorcerer. In breach there is continuity, in loss there is reinforcement.

I reviewed
Seeing Things
at some length when it appeared, and I was actually teaching it when a student pointed out to me that “1.1.87” is a haiku. I don't mean to advertise my impercipience, but somehow this was something that caught me entirely unawares. The great Seamus Heaney, at a great and terrible juncture of his life, writing a haiku! Reacting as (his dedicatee Derek Mahon's) Basho would have done—and if not Basho, then a schoolkid.

I am not sure if it is the humble poet of fifty—newly on his own, and into his own—trying his hand at the not-quite-serious haiku form of the beginner, or the licensed tyro (“One-off, impulsive”), crashing the summit of centuries of court tradition: “1.1.87” partakes of both. At any rate, something in me finds it almost unbearably moving that in among the quatrains and sonnets, and facing the eleven-thirteen-eleven-syllable “August Night” (is that a supersize haiku?), Heaney slips in this inconspicuous compression of a compression, with every bit of the traditional obliqueness, every edge of implication for the future that is ascribed to the Japanese form. Gratitude for the ash plant—“Guardian of travellers and psychopomp”—is matched by gratitude to (in every sense) form.

 

BASIL BUNTING

Just as there are some faces that are a gift to the photographer (Artaud, Patti Smith), so certain lives are a gift to the biographer. These are, broadly, of two types: the hard and gemlike, abbreviated, compressed, intense; and the lengthy, implausible, exfoliated, whiskery, picaresque. Vehement or even violent emotion is good, overt drama, prominent contacts or associations, sudden changes of orientation, movement through different societies and settings; physical distance is helpful (the father of letter writing), marriages (more than one—important), a hint of scandal or controversy is useful, achievement and neglect, both in moderation (poverty is a great preservative, celebrity or laurels a terrible corrosive, too-obvious or excessive greatness is dreary). A late flowering is ideal, but not essential. For the former, one might nominate Trakl, Laforgue, Keats, and Shelley (I don't think I breathed while I was reading Richard Holmes's
Shelley: The Pursuit
all those years ago); for a rare, artful blending of the long and short, one can't do better than Rimbaud and Hölderlin; and for the latter, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw—and Bunting. Incidentally, or maybe not, Bunting also shows beautifully on film and still photographs, from the waggingly imperialed steely young man (“one of Ezra's more savage disciples,” Yeats called him) posing in Rapallo in 1930 or 1931 on the cover of the New Directions
Complete Poems
, to the waggingly eyebrowed, scruff-bearded, snaggletoothed, twinkling-eyed dome he presented as an old man in his eighties.

Basil Bunting—not a nom de guerre but his actual given name, as Pound hastened to assure a doubtful Harriet Monroe, long-suffering and mostly tame editor of
Poetry
—was the missing link back to the heyday and personalities of modernism. He wrote little (“The mason stirs: / Words! / Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write”), but what he wrote ever more powerfully endures. Reading him now, there is an overpowering drench of the 1920s and 1930s, and a suggestion of how the style of progressive verse might have gone on, if Pound hadn't disappeared into funny money, the Cantos, and obloquy, or Eliot into verse drama and High Anglicanism. Bunting's
Complete Poems
are a tantalizingly small and pure uchronia—and as for his life, his model in these things was Walter Raleigh.

“A Life of Bunting,” then, was for many years the most obviously “missing” book I could think of. For all the reasons—the ticked boxes—above; for a beautiful relation between the long life as old as the century (1900–1985) and the small, sharply flavored work (the
Complete Poems
are with difficulty bulked up to 240 pages: they make Elizabeth Bishop look lax if not garrulous); for the unusual way time—history—is precipitated in a literary life. “Bunting had a knack of being in the thick of things,” Richard Burton observes in this first proper biography of the poet: it feels like a flagrant understatement. Adventures of the mind are two a penny; here are actual, palpable scrapes: individuals sent to kill him, crowds baying for his blood, a life spent on four continents (and at sea), never far from the bread line. In 1934, when he wasn't even halfway into it, and most of the most outlandish things still lay ahead of him, and he was stuck in the Canary Islands, William Carlos Williams wrote: “Bunting is living the life, I don't know how sufficiently to praise him for it. But it can't be very comfortable to exist that way. I feel uneasy not to be sending him his year's rent and to be backing at the same time a book of my own poems.” Imagine Tintin not as a supposed journalist with a cowlick but Haddock-bearded and a rare poet, and you get Bunting. Even if he had written nothing at all, his life would still be worth telling: as an extravagant shape, as an example of what is possible, or just to give oneself a fright.

Bunting was born the son of a progressively minded doctor in Scotswood-on-Tyne. He was not a Quaker, but was educated at Quaker boarding schools. In 1918 he was sent to prison for being a conscientious objector; this seems to have involved a certain deliberateness, even willfulness, on Bunting's part. Quite often, Bunting's life frays into uncertainty, competing versions, colorful mists of low factual density, ultimately the beguiling wraiths of myths, suitably embellished by himself or the other gifted embellishers among whom he mostly lived. (Take a bow, Ford Madox Ford, take two!) Pound tells the story (in Canto LXXIV) of “Bunting / doing six months after that war was over / as pacifist tempted by chicken but declined to approve / of war.” Burton agrees that the
Sun
-worthy “Pacifist Tempted by Chicken”—when Bunting went on a hunger strike, a freshly roasted chicken was said to have been brought to his cell on several successive days by his jailers—sounds a little too good to be true. On his release, he enrolled in the newish London School of Economics, but left in 1922 without taking his degree. He was radical, brilliant, but also “a great poseur,” feckless, improvident, and prone to “nerve storms”: the type of individual that looks if not to poetry, then to some other reevaluative hierarchy to adjust his low standing, his perceived lack of usefulness, his reversed poles. A scalene peg. He was impatient with institutions, with convention, with medium term thinking and planning, with England. He began to go abroad: to Denmark (“on his bicycle the Dane is a beautiful creature, but off it he does not feel at home, and looks as awkward as an automaton”), to Paris, to Rapallo. In 1924 he met Pound there, supposedly—the inevitable mythopoeic embellishment—on top of a local hill. “Villon,” his first long poem, was written in 1925, and published, with Pound's help—one might say, passim—in
Poetry
five years later. The poem won a $50 prize, which straightaway went to pay the expenses incurred by the birth of a daughter, Bourtai, in 1931. (Bunting's three children with his first, American wife, Marian, all had Persian names; two later children, born to his Persian wife, Sima, were called Maria and Thomas.)

Between 1925 and 1940, Bunting was really all over the place—not that that couldn't be said about the time before and much of the time after as well. He came and went between Rapallo and England, where he took a job as a music critic; he did good work, breaking lances for very old and very new music, Monteverdi and Schoenberg alike, but he was never enthusiastic about employment in general, or journalism in particular, and was always grateful when they lapsed from him. (I think of Les Murray's lovely and perplexed line, “In the midst of life, we are in employment.”) His relations with London, and with “southrons” in general, were not straightforward, though not as negative as they are sometimes painted either. He acquired a temporary patron in the form of a rich American widow, Margaret de Silver. He had book plans, rather English subjects, all: one on Dickens, one on music halls, one on prisons, but he was never that sort of jobbing writer. He lived for six months in 1928 in a shepherd's cottage in Northumberland. He visited Berlin, and (perhaps the only Englishman to do so) hated it. In Venice he met Marian Culver—she was a recent Columbia graduate “doing” Europe—and married her on Long Island. He spent time in New York with his Poundian confrères Williams and Zukofsky, but (small surprise) there were no openings for him in the States; “It was better to go back and see how long we could live on nothing in Italy—rather than the very short time you can live on nothing in the United States.” It is a little hard to imagine how the Buntings got by in Italy, and the biography doesn't really help. “We have very few descriptions of the Buntings' family life at this (or any other) time,” Burton notes. Marian had a remittance from her family; he may have been helped by his mother (who joined them in Rapallo periodically; his father was dead); I don't think there was much paid work involved. Bunting advances the perverse and implausible claim, “It seems as though Italy were the only climate in which I can get up any energy.” He sailed, he taught himself Persian, but when you look at him lolling in white ducks and singlet, an eccentric monument, ripped, evenly tanned and rather dazzling, everything about him seems to scream
dolce far niente
at you.

Then, whether it was because of the increasing expense of Italy, the disagreeable impact of fascism, the still more disagreeable relaying of Fascist and anti-Semitic paroles from his friend Pound, or just his own innate restlessness, Bunting upped sticks and the family moved to the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession sixty miles off the coast of southern Morocco: “Just got back from a visit to the local Sahara. Seven or eight miles wide and ever so many long, sand covered with loose pieces of pumice about as big as a man's head. A sort of pale grey thorn scrub, and a few camels eating it. A sort of green shrub much rarer, and a goat or two eating that.” A second daughter, Roudaba, was born in Tenerife in 1934, but mostly Bunting was pretty wretched. He wrote to Pound that “the people of this island [are] so unspeakable, and the food so uneatable, they make prolonged residence impossible, in spite of great cash saving.” Out of aesthetic disappointment or anthropological pique, he declined to learn Spanish. (Bunting, born during the Boer War as Ladysmith was relieved, has a rather Empire way with him: smartly dividing the world into good and bad natives, with little in between; but for the appearance of that brusque trait, he would seem to have made rather a bad expatriate.) At the end of three years and much moving around, Bunting “escaped from Tenerife,” only, alas, to return to London.