Where Have You Been? (19 page)

Shortly thereafter, Marian, pregnant with a third child, borrowed a pound from her mother-in-law, took her daughters, and went back to Wisconsin and divorced her husband of seven years. Bunting took it unexpectedly hard. He wrote little or nothing for the best part of thirty years. Pound observed drily—in his customary horrid epistolary style—“las' I heard of Bzl his wif had left and took the chillens. It wuz preyin on his cerebrum/why? Some folks iz never satisfied.” Bunting managed to buy a fishing boat and lived on it for a year—
The Thistle
: even the name is a sort of protest—cutting down on his expenses and his human contacts, drifting in self-imposed quarantine. It's a suggestive image for a man who hadn't been able to make a go of things abroad, couldn't then stand to be on his home island, and could regroup only in the changeable element. He sold the boat, went to America, achieved nothing (wasn't even able to see the children), came home again. The war came at a good time for him—as wars are apt to do for individuals in abject or complicated circumstances—though he had a hard time actually getting taken. In July 1940, he was finally accepted by the RAF, after being turned down by the army and the navy. (Having very poor sight—he wore glasses as thick as pint pots—it was said he was allowed by a sympathetic doctor to memorize the eye chart.) Bunting began in Balloon Operations in the North Sea, then was sent to Persia, fought his way from Basra to Tripoli, served in Malta, then in the Sicilian invasion, then in 1944 returned to Persia, this time as an intelligence officer. It wouldn't have been Bunting if it hadn't involved the occasional spree. Driving the lead lorry of a large convoy in Scotland and spotting a brewery, he promptly took the turning, and there resulted the inevitable free drinks all round—but it wouldn't do to overstress these Compton Mackenzie–style yarns, which seem to crop up variously at all points of Bunting's life. The astonishing thing, rather, is that he performed at all: he worked, he was reliable, he was smart, he was respectful, “all the stupid military things,” as he put it. For the suspicious, antiestablishment, conscientiously objecting Quaker boy of twenty years before, it was quite a turnaround. Perhaps it was the acceptance of a higher, common cause—the defeat of totalitarianism—to which he submitted himself; perhaps the corners of the air force and intelligence in which he found himself were sufficiently unconventional and improvised and reshuffled to attract and keep his loyalty and devotion. Or again, it was the Empire, which as a sort of blend of home and abroad didn't have quite the stifling values of home. “Action is a lust,” he discovered, for which it was perhaps worth abandoning the reflective life, not that it was ever a consciously taken decision. At any rate, “I learned my Wing-Commander-act.”

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 closed. 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.