The Letters of Basil Bunting, selected and edited by Alex Niven, OUP, 2022
98% right is not enough for a reference book
PART ONE: RIVAL AESTHETICS
A new Bunting book almost always shifts tectonic plates. In 2013 there was a scrupulously proofread and primary-source-quoting biography, A Strong Song Tows Us by Richard Burton, but it waffled and was obsequious and is most useful in its Kindle version with a search feature. Proof that characterless prose doesn’t achieve flight to memory is that several reviewers seem to believe the Letters volume is the first to say Bunting protested on the eve of Edward’s abdication with a small group, almost paramilitary, penetrating the House of Commons. The part from the relevant letter they now quote is in the 2013 biography.
Similar but different, the huge 2016 scholarly edition of the Poems of Basil Bunting may have given (me at least) the impression of being just a new typography, with annoying line numbers; but it is loaded with research, alternative takes and invaluable footnotes – again, most useful in electronic searchable form. These books are like archives; and I’ve been to Bunting archives, where what you actually want is overview, something more manoeuvrable than a tectonically unwieldy list. You want to mine, with light lifting and little scree (a Bunting metaphor that I’ll examine later). You want a sense of Bunting hopping between hills to die on.
This addition to the landscape is on its way to university reference sections, but is under-compliant. Others have criticised the editor’s editorialising: Niven’s juvenile name-calling marks the Bunting letters out from pretty much any annotated collection of a writer’s correspondence to key writers of the time. One victim is Philip Larkin, an enthusiast like Bunting both of Samuel Butler’s Notebooks and of the A68. In snippy and art-lacking propensity towards insult, Niven is not unlike his subject. Bunting himself grumps along witless with rapiers: against Levertov; against Tomlinson and Oppen (both rare readers who could hear the music of Briggflatts from the page alone); against Dickinson (a lesser poet, according to Bunting, than his pal Zukofsky's perhaps once lover Neidecker). Not that the king doesn’t have whims. Ted Hughes, if he could speak up a bit in performance, has value, and Stevie Smith “certainly got all there was to get out of her smaller stuff. I admire anything that is done with such meticulous care as her reading”).
Niven's annotations meanwhile snort about John Heath-Stubbs and Elizabeth Jennings – “TWO YOUNGER MORE PEDESTRIAN POETS”. The former, a gay partially sighted poet finally fully blind at 60, was a keen advocate for the Pisan Cantos in his anthologies (including a great one on Poets of Science). He was a translator like Bunting of the Latin poet Horace, and like Bunting wrote a poem to Scarlatti’s music “vivid as darting fireflies… against the crouching carnivorous darkness”. Jennings wrote better than Bunting about patriarch-privilege: what the male can neglect and expel ("We knew you as presence, a far/Mood, something else to war. /That evening, the cups on the dresser/Shook: my sister and I/Watched fear fall from the sky"). When the University of Sussex threaten to neglect Tom Pickard, Bunting writes to him:
“Sussex… only deal with dead writers and Philip Larkin. It isnt so easy to tell Larkin from a corpse”
His editor chimes under this:
“PHILIP LARKIN (1922-1985), HARD-RIGHT BRITISH POETASTER AND TRAD JAZZ CRITIC. HIS NEO-GEORGIAN LIGHT VERSE WAS THE ANTITHESIS OF BB'S NON-CONFORMIST MODERNISM”.
I don’t think Niven is referring to the disestablished churches. Bunting was not fraternal to even fellow Quaker Eddington, and can be said at times to be less the “non-conformist” than the mardy bugger. He was, though, just like Heath-Stubbs in championing the Pisan Cantos in lectures: oh, but perhaps this was JHS neutralising by lip service (I don't know how to do this club talk)? Niven lacks theoretical framing, I think, for announcing who non-conforms best, and most: to consider the very nice Edwin Morgan a “LATE MODERNIST”, but not Charles Tomlinson; to not feel the need to editorialise on Hugh MacDiarmid's affection for Hitler, or his being an unwanted groper of women.
Roy Campbell by Niven's account is “KNOWN FOR HIS CONTROVERSIAL RIGHT-WING POLITICS”, but not “HARD RIGHT”. Yet MacDiarmid wrote a (strange, unfocused) diatribe against Campbell, The Battle Continues, precisely for being fascist; and Louis MacNeice punched Campbell in a pub for being a fascist by repute (although, after a fight, they became friends). Perhaps we should defer to Donald Davie: that Larkin was just “a bitterly recalcitrant though unreflecting and for the most part unconscious Tory”. As Poundshop Bernard Manning, and racist alcoholic, Larkin through poetry reawakened interest in Hardy and kept Yeats in the English ear. By contrast, a generation of mainstream American bad boy bores emulated only the late Yeatsian manner (this is Davie's critique). Galway Kinnell did nothing so substantial as Larkin. Larkin apprenticed himself to the versatile, cornier, early Yeats.
If overview takes time and consistency, this comes out in good footnotes. Footnotes should be of interest about new minor characters, and fair. Here’s a minor character footnoted in John Haffenden’s Volume 3 of the Letters of T.S. Eliot:
“Basil Bunting (1900–85), Northumberland-born poet, became known to the literary world when he lived in Paris in the early 1920s, working for Ford Madox Ford at the Transatlantic Review. Subsequently he was mentored by Ezra Pound, whom he followed to Rapallo, Italy, in 1924. In the 1930s he would work as an assistant to EP and Olga Rudge (1895-1996); and it was through EP that he became acquainted with JJ, Zukofsky and Yeats. EP published his work in Active Anthology (1933); but his enduring fame came about in the post-war years with the publication of his poem Briggflatts (1966).”
Haffenden includes in this footnote a Bunting letter (to Eliot of 4th April 1927) Niven leaves out of his Letters. “You will remember that I called on you in the autumn, introducing myself with Pound's name, and that subsequently, by your request, I sent you [xyz] … I have not heard from you… Could you let me have my roll of typescript back? Pound has asked me to send him something…. take it, from your silence, that there is no prospect of my being allowed to do a few reviews for the Criterion?” Eliot replied to this three days later, by returning the work in full. Because: “I understand that you want to use some of it at once, and you do not specify which… however… I should like you to review for the Criterion as soon as the congestion of the next two months is reduced….”. Eliot slaps, and Eliot tickles.
Contemporary poetry editors may enjoy Eliot’s sly humouring, reminding his correspondent of practicalities, rising above offered bidding contest. Eliot faces Basil’s huff via intelligent detail and forgives nerves (or nerve). Bunting by contrast is haughty about Eliot throughout many mentions in correspondence. The master proffered good wine while handing back sour grapes; and his Waste Land is a clear model for Bunting’s early sonatas, Four Quartets one (homing pigeon English season by season) for Briggflatts. The latter are at first admired by Bunting (to Zukofsky, 5 May 1947):
“Have you read Eliot’s “Four Quartets”? I did in Cairo on my way here. In spite of the aggressively Church of England vocabulary, I think the mysticism he expounds might appeal to a Spinozist. The verse is exceedingly skilful – few Eliotisms. I was impressed & am hard to impress nowadays.”
This makes the experience sound moving and delighting, impressing before it is understood. By 1973, the impression has faded under questionable begrudging analysis. To Sister Victoria Forde:
“Eliot – and Kipling – show prodigious skill in fitting words to a prearranged pattern, very admirable: yet they dont do it without losing some suppleness. To my ear their beats seem to be trodden out too heavily. In the same way, the Four Quartets, with their reproduction of the architecture of The Waste Land, and the deliberate emphasis on the musical parallel which, in the Waste Land, was an accidental result of Pound’s cutting, seem stiff to me.”
Callow admiration from one’s late forties must be put aside, apparently. The remark about architecture, though, is consistent lifelong Basil talk, if less than it looks. He means the Eliot poems are each split into five sections with different rhythms. So do a 2 bed house from 1901 and a 2 bed house from 1971 have reproduction of the architecture? Bunting seems to be condescending even towards his own past senses, by 1973. If Neidecker is better than Dickinson, sensual impression is lost in order to stamp licenses. When Eliot dies, however, Bunting seems to take pride in admitting his previous undermagnanimousness.
A master reads books and quotes when addressing a bit player (in Haffenden’s case, Flowers and Caddel's A Northern Life), energised watching two writers square up and counterpoint. Haffenden knows the poetry of both subjects – and about publishers and magazines and environments they shared more than his titular subject’s steps in them. By contrast, I’m not sure Niven knows Eliot's poetry well, nor possibly French contemporaries. He has a note under a 1934 Bunting letter to Zukofsky, about two installments of Zukofsky's study of Apollinaire in Westminster Magazine. Bunting heavily dislikes the installments but Niven doesn’t quote any of either. He just gives us Bunting:
“…abstract words… elude, puzzle, tire readers, and leave millions of microbic ambiguities wherever they go… Its worse than thinking “argyraspides” has an aureole unless of laughter like “Polyphiloprogenitive”. The use and origin of language is to be spoken, written symbols only an incident: dont take Fenellosa from THAT end, or he’ll lead you effectually into the desert… ”
Here is Niven’s footnote:
“ARGYRASPIDES: SOLDIERS IN ALEXANDER THE GREAT’S ARMY. BB’S SUGGESTION HERE IS THAT OBSCURE POLYSYLLABIC WORDS DERIVED FROM LATIN AND GREEK SOUND RISIBLE, NOT REFINED.”
This may be fine for flattering a book into a quick safe read for the classroom, or light bedtime fare. But if you jot names in passing, do some searches of your own in case you got the wrong end of the stick before disseminating. Nearly all who have read Eliot's small oeuvre even once will be jarred by Niven's gloss “OBSCURE POLYSYLLABIC WORD...”. “Polyphiloprogenitive” occurs in Mr Eliot’s Sunday Service and pretty much only there, as at least one webpage shows: “Eliot's usage here is the first example in the Oxford English Dictionary, but Matthew Arnold uses it in Culture and Anarchy.” “Polyphiloprogenitive”, on a line by itself, the first word of the poem, has had a subliminal passage to the language-loving part of poetry brains for generations, even if the rest of its quatrain made less dent.
Polyphiloprogenitive
The sapient sutlers of the Lord
Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.
(Mr Eliot’s Sunday Service, Poems, 1920)
Zukofsky didn’t use the word “polyphiloprogenitive” when he said (my thanks to Mark Scroggins):
"Diction (as in all the poems of Alcools; Calligrammes seems persistently close to actual speech): a fluent blend of the rare aureoled word — ‘argyraspides,’ ‘chibriap’—and the resurrection of the common epithets, as in all great poetry, thru the vigour of the movement and the force of the sensible disposition and contiguity of the words”.
“Argyraspides” isn't beyond a rich gloss. Here is Anne Hyde Greet, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Autumn, 1965), ‘Puns in Apollinaire's “Alcools” ’
“… those learned jokes in ‘La Chanson du mal-aimée’ …. consist of saying the same thing twice, once in French and once in Greek…
‘Mort d'immortels argyraspides
La neige aux boucliers d'argent.’
“The Argyraspids, with their silver shields, were Alexander the Great's bodyguard. The repetition of the epithet in new guise provides not only a joke against the reader with little Greek but a comparison between two images of death – armies and snow.”
Bunting often seems to make lived-with points that have seethed him thin and erupted. Was his seethe saving up “polyphiloprogenitive” because of “in the beginning was the Word”? He hopefully proposes the whole is a deliberate laugh at pomposity, or if not a reflex laugh on Eliot because humbug. As if personally offended, Bunting pops – with no more reference to a larger position than his own inflammation, from which he hopes to move on.
The inflammation starts in this letter with Zukofsky's earlier use in the Apollinaire argument of the word curiality. It’s from Dante. Etymologically, it means “law-court-slang” but heard outside the court. (Dante sarks at the time Italy didn't have courts worthy of the name, anyway). Zukofsky and Dante therefore appeal wistfully to the judicious law-engaged self. Niven glosses curiality as “A KIND OF ORGANIC PRAGMATISM WHICH, [DANTE] ARGUES, MEANS VERNACULAR SPEECH IS GUIDED BY ‘THE JUSTLY BALANCED RULE OF THINGS THAT HAVE TO BE DONE’ ”. His adverb doesn’t make it quickly clear (like Dante) that this is an actual law-courts reference.
Bunting was restless about courts, and anti-humbug. But does he finally snap because “argyraspides” and “chibriap” are long and inaccessible words, or because Zukofsky alleges they’re interchangeable examples of the same type of word – a fancy and vague type, with mainly aura. What is “chibriap”? An Apollinaire neologism from chibre (slang for cock or dick) and Priape/Priapus. A Cock-Billed Prickiapus or Cupidick. “Le troisième bleu féminin/N'en est pas moins un chibriape/Appelé Lul de Faltenin/Et que porte sur une nappe/L'Hermès Ernest devenu nain” (La chanson du mal-aimé) . The vocabulary being easy (door, third, feminine, blue), the proper names harmlessly tinkling their bells, the “resurrection of common epithets” is lilting around a long rare word with a… vibe – what kind of thing shall we call it, for discussion to remain calm? The whole achieved poetry is less loadbearing than Eliot's, less able to invoke John’s Gospel because ultimately chi-chi cool snook-cockery; Apollinaire’s own name to this day is that vibe.
But is any word here “aureoled” i.e. with a halo of light? The eros of “chibriap” isn’t. It has a subtle air, but of gross bodily function, difficult to translate if you're not James Joyce. Which was Ezra Pound’s critique to Zukofsky: that Apollinaire expounds what Joyce had got to first; but since Zukofsky made greater use of mixing Joyce and Pound than any near-contemporary, this difference is not so easily settled.
Bunting may agree that “argyraspides” is not a useful word but if he disagrees are we missing a point? If “Argyraspides” does not have “millions of microbic ambiguities”, Bunting has a different complaint. Of course he may be simply objecting, with typically Swiftian puke-imagery and infection metaphor, to Apollinaire himself. Because he sometimes has narrow tastes. Pound, in one of his remaining zingers that sums up a Bunting fault, writes in a letter to the then Canaries-based Northumbrian about how frustratingly under-read the far-flung Bunting is:
“You really BLOODY fool /
‘Go Douglas’ your arse.
As you never see any printed matter, you ignor nce may be
an alibi.
T ROT is to stay communist 1918 or Douglas
1918.”
Capitalising BLOODY for “bloody-minded”, Pound nips sharply with “alibi” – a law-court-slang of a word, from a mind suing for connection, more than anger from raddled triggers. And a sort of time and space at once, or simulation of it.
If Bunting does accept “argyraspides” can specify, it would enhance his keeping Alexander the Great’s life very present: in his letters, and in Briggflatts. One might argue – since Briggflatts is detail milled from Bunting’s personal experience baked and cemented with epigram cream – that its section about Alexander the Great raises Alexander's life as near-intimately full-embodied to Bunting as his own. Imagining those silver shields glinting in some battles, missing in others; and with no one language, no language barrier, to the vision. Bunting took Alexander's life as a study, and pored over long epic verses about him in at least Spanish and Persian.
“Chibriap” springs a non-abstract whopper cock for a French reader and “argyraspides” is as reasonable in context as, say, “praetorian”. They have a time, a space, an apparel silhouette-close. I have no certainty about this, however, from which to refute Niven’s interpretation and sense of twenty-first century readership for Bunting. Our common subject doesn’t help us or himself – Bunting doesn’t do proper argumentation, reasoned response or dialectic of rival poetics. That’s best left to Pound, himself (thankfully) at a loss around Zukofsky.
One final quibble over this page in Niven: Fenellosa is fending for himself. He gets an endnote – reserved for those mentioned more than once in the book – but no cue to check for it, in this his first appearance. To be sure, Fenellosa is a token for travesty of Chinese literature in Modernism, yet he stood with an architecture for Pound as an acme for clarity. “Oak leaf never plane leaf”, Pound says; the word “red” is a matrix of cherry, rose, iron rust, and flamingo – so think on, users of it
***
PART TWO: COLLECTING ONESELF IN DIFFERENT MEDIA
Reading Bunting anywhere requires good, solid, active view of wood (and woods) for trees. We need to ask from which branches has there been a fall when Bunting rages, or when he munches a windfall with the gravity of a sage. Sometimes he is splenetic at a watery swollen fruit. Sometimes it's an unfallen melon. He mocks received dilution and received wording (on the shrinkwrap) as if they were the same thing; but you can in a letter: you can pinball. “I prefer any dialect of English or other spoken language to the sixsixsixth generation of bastard latin,” he persists (still in the Apollinaire letter), and derides “the facies of secondrate metaphysics” , the latter figuration beautifully evocative. Bunting is elaborating and surrealizing a favourite metaphor: that one can’t quickly get round a mountain. Undeniable ones happen, and block, and won’t budge for our rage. But here this is a pseudo-mountain piled from ripped-up print.
All letters, bad books, a whole bad library, a whole bad national literature are in Bunting’s sights but where is any carefully made mountainous aesthetic of his own? In the essay, “Some Limitations of English” (1932), Bunting focuses his offshoot of the Poundian project (learning sonic tricks and textures from the poetry of other languages) and gives an overview and apparatus (in a few pages) for reading all the poems and letters of his life. He extends Pound in a way not alien to the American but nevertheless more peculiar. The essay admires like a cultist the rules and taboos of another language, despite opening with a caveat that it’s discussing only style – “something that must be learned by pains and practice”. A caveat of self-mastery is something he has both ways – given the spell styles cast on him throughout his life. If I may collage from the essay:
“The delicate alterations brought about by the arrangement of the words in a latin poem… the existence of a dual number in russian and greek… one considers written chinese (cf Fenollosa's essay) or consults a chinese dictionary and sees the unfamiliar grouping of ideas under the various calligraphic signs… when one considers those savage languages which discriminate so nicely between events that a few hours difference in the moment of the event – or of the report – or a few yards difference in location may necessitate an entirely different word to describe it but which make no analysis at all so that black dog and white dog have no common dog element… The languages of western Europe… tend to lose… the conception of the event as a single complex occurrence and to substitute a series of semidetached simple abstractions… a world of self-constructed fantoms…”
Here again is matter for Bunting's exasperated and ex-communicating dismissal muscle – but also so much more. He moves against abstraction yet unconvincingly namechecks the “reunion of space and time” as an alternative. Where from? Books, newspapers, his friend Zukofsky giving Einstein a few lines in his long poem A? Spacetime theory is “the most striking of a series of reintegrations”, but it is the rest of the series that represents Bunting’s real direction, ignoring the guest star he’s just paraded. Bunting warms to his QED (ever noticed how some acronyms are short as a close-up driven blade?):
“… The reunion of space and time is only the most striking of a series of reintegrations … harmonious to our naked perceptions, our language has accustomed us to look upon as strange and difficult. Some savage languages are more in harmony with these ideas… the breakup of craftsmanship with its complex of deft motions which are not separated from one another in the mind of the craftsman into a series of simpler motions which can each be performed by a separate man and of these into still simpler motions which a machine can do. We lose contact with whole things… We gain fluency and rapidity at the expense of solidity and completeness.”
Ah savage one-man physicist-masons, come forth at this acknowledgement! Work with your hands is grounding! You have nothing to lose but an edition of the guild handbook which needs updating! Your “intensity” – lo! – will crush the sixth generation inbreds in charge. For
“English is… incapable of intensity (except by grace of rhythm and cadence: I am speaking of the words themselves at present in their normal grammatical arrangement). The connotations of its words… are subject to a constant attrition… denotation is narrow… American has much greater syntactical freedom than english because of the splendid lack of education of the middle classes in the States… synthesis will be at least partially attained by a tightening (preceded by a thorough revision) of syntax, whereas the actual vocabulary may remain as analytical as possible. (Mr. Auden's Charade seemed here and there to hint at a serious curiosity about syntax)… **
Avoid bad splitting, everyone, for better-poetry, with-perks.
“The splitting of the pronoun and auxiliary from the verb… scatters the attention which it is oftener desired to concentrate. This does not happen in latin. Sum is language. I am chatter.”
The last two sentences are a concrete poem, were concrete poetry not a form Bunting excoriates – despite its important question about what is lacking in choices of how to implement poetry on the page.
***
An incremental achievement of Bunting’s correspondence, not reached yet by 1932, is its unfolding commentary on learning and reading Persian, every step crucial. (Sadly this overlooks Bunting's reliable and very teachable work on quantitative metre, little illustrated in the Letters. But that will be exemplified by a to-date unmade patchwork of observations across different publications one day).
Bunting the slumming prodigal son of Empire may best be remembered as a dedicated and skilful emulator of languages’ poetries’ rhythms. Ezra Pound buys him an expensive Firdusi book to help him learn Persian. And then attacks the translations from it Bunting makes during the thirties; as indeed Pound attacks Zukofsky's A – wrongly – as inferior to Poem Beginning with The. Bunting defends A (quite rightly, a masterpiece that his own work and apparent aesthetic of sound will help some of us appreciate) but Zukofsky doesn’t defend Bunting’s translation against Pound, we notice. Meanwhile the 30s vituperations show Pound failing in literary tactics and critical edge.
Persian gave Bunting the adept linguist a sudden make-or-break opportunity in WW2. Having been rejected for poor eyesight at first, he had a doctor cheat a pass for him. Then at one point the army needed an interpreter immediately and Bunting could offer his book-learned Persian and get bundled to work: a jump that led into him becoming Our Man in Iran: for the military, for the Times, for the government; John Tranter says for the secret services of Britain, America and perhaps Israel over Suez. He was finally expelled by Mossadeq to squirrel back to Tyneside, fallen, disowned and stuck. This too narrowed and bore fruit, not without the rescue efforts of a new generation of writers.
A fascinating path, not least for a bullish conscientious objector arrested for disorder and jailed in more than one city in his twenties. Bunting used his only book-learned Persian in the 30s to begin to translate a King Lear-like fragment of sibling treachery and beheading as a start on the huge Persian national epic of Firdusi. In many ways Firdusi presaged Bunting’s life to war. This is some of the abandoned translation:
Tur heard. Made no answer.
Pulled a dagger from his boot,
ripped up his belly so that the blood covered him like a shroud
matching the red of his cheek and he died.
He severed the head with his knife and finished the job.
One can see Pound’s objection to the dull kitsch of what he thought Bunting was doing, and one can see objection to my calling Bunting’s work matching him to war. Is Shakespeare military? Is Kurosawa military, brutally to the point, and aware of the tragic. I see little tragedy in Bunting’s epic here, scant bliss fallen from. Pound wanted to knock the journey off course, in his 1930s criticism of both Zukofsky and Bunting. Bunting’s technical and linguistic revellings in Persian poetry may have taken a push from Pound to go deeper, but they may equally have been heading where they were regardless – and most of all Bunting may have needed to tell Pound to push off, to give himself space and bravado to grow.
Whatever it was, it resulted in extraordinary learning of technique, on which subject Kenneth Cox is less recommended than he should be. It is wondrous in the Letters to see Bunting not so much get his teeth in as his cheek hooked. Persian seemed foisted, not having to convince or unconvince the potential deserter in him, and he became as interested in the syntax as he did in Persian's class-free rich naming. The latter is wider and freer in Persian, he says; and wide and free were his causes. To translate is to throw off the corrupt sixth generation classes, and unite whom they oppress. For a writer who did not so much admire Robert Burns as envy him, Bunting sought to rival Burns in a popular intelligent and uniting radical verse. Scotland is so close, and such a model. Bunting paints an elegiac tribute to MacDiarmid on the latter’s death, recalling his then travelling companion being recognised and bought rounds by working class Scots in a roadside bar: they recited his verses to his face. Somewhere in this recollection is the essence of a goal to uproot class – and good on him for having it.
Bunting asks Pound's help on this while translating Firdusi in 1935:
“By the way, if you can suggest handy colloquial English equivalents for psyche, phrenes, noos, etc, I’ll be much obliged, for the Persian language provided F with at least 8 words with distinctions of meaning within that orbit which are, like other embarrasments of the huge Persian vocab, bloody hard to do over. One can dig it out easily enough for people who know Persian, just as the subtleties of the Greek language can be dug out for people who know Greek. But I’m not going to use modicopsychiatrical terms nor invent words a la J Joyce if I can help it. And a series of periphrastical definitions, while interesting to some people, wd somewhat hold up the tale. They are all perfectly colloquial in Persian, and imply no doubt several centuries of science and philosophy considerably different from what we’re used to. Which doesnt ease matters.”
This letter is worth keeping in mind in order to keep considering his righteous response to Zukofsky's Apollinaire work. Apollinaire ducked a challenge and Bunting wanted to yowl, even if it meant cutting off a bill to spite the duck; if it meant cutting short in suggestive abandonment; if it meant hypocritically cheating with a defensive excuse for a conscience. His commitment to his poetic line was a self-definition, against other poets – but it was also against “the people”, to burden them with his being burdened on their behalf.
There are worse things to have than graft to complain of, as Roy Fisher might have said. And cheer up, it may not immediately happen the way you’ve imagined in a 1934 letter to Pound:
“It seems likely Firdusi will drive me, not to Persia, but to England and U.S.A. to get the [English] idiom in my ears again. There is no sense in dealing with him other than as idiomatically as possible, I find. A language that has no grammar at all, like Persian, finds itself dealing in much larger units than single words, or words with a preposition attached. It doesnt lend itself in the least to logic or latinisms. That brings in the vocabulary difficulty. Firdusi sticks to Persian words pretty closely, very little Arabic: the effect would be like writing English with scarcely any latin words, IF the pure English vocabulary were about forty times as large as it is. He doesnt use words that the plowman can understand, except maybe a few military technicalities and the like, and yet he is at least as rich as Shakespeare.”
PART THREE: PROOFREADING, A CORONAL
Let me bring in my job as an academic journal proofreader here***. Please look closely at the previous quoted paragraph (as I wish other reviewers had). The first ten words of its last sentence are “He doesnt use words that the plowman can understand”. There is a typo here – it should be “He doesnt use words that the plowman cant understand.”
With full positive recognition for Alex Niven’s huge undertaking, and a high level of consistent work from faint faded notepaper and typescripts, saturation to an unimaginable point, transcribing strangely emphasised and phrased writings whose quirks would have slowed anyone down proofreading, the book's strike rate is 98%+. But for a fresh reader, there are howling errors.
Spotting my first in the book, I underlined a score more. I have been attending and emailing archives to check, to follow up names and footnotes, to see the originals. I was right – the proofing is bad. Part of me is thankful. For a lone individual, motivated by readability issues and rivalry, the whole experience was a gotcha, based on restoring a vandalised or ignored painting. This may be the case for a few others not aboard a hovercraft: it certainly makes one pay attention. Yet a dozen literary reviewers have written of this book, and none brought up any proofing error. My plane may not be where they want to live, and maybe I should approach with bicultural neighbourliness. Their account has been made, to save time and maximise use value (and for some I suspect just to skim). I may vastly contain hypocrisy, but to their takeaways, I say more fool you. This opener, this provocateur, is not a good shepherd.
Let me be precise. Good proofing works by picking out what isn’t in keeping – in this phase between 1934 and 1935, or in this writer at all. As I discovered when writing my thirtieth email to a university archive, the 1934 letter from Bunting to Pound not only agrees with me, but I found you can nowadays see for yourself. All the Pound-Bunting correspondence has been online since lockdown! See how Bunting wrote “He doesnt use words that the plowman cant understand”. See his overkill, without torque.
See too, in April 1926, he didn’t quote the Dante line “Regola equalitá mai non l'é nuova”, because it doesn’t exist. He wrote “Regola e qualitá mai non l'é nuova”. As there is no translation in the footnote, OUP might only have benefitted from a translator-proofreader who always looks up lines of foreign poetry; but it might have turned up the error by giving the work to any good proofer available.
Some other errors as they appear in the book:
“I have read E.M. Forster and consider that on the whole he is the best novelist now working, taking the works of Joyce as something over than novels”;
[for “over”, read “other]
“… a heap of valuable little knickknacks…”
[Tricky to spot, this: but Bunting used the viable late nineteenth century spelling “knicknacks”].
“(as one might gather from contents ‘Pagany’)”
[should be: “of Pagany”].
“New Review savourless and borjoy”
[again tricky: Bunting wrote “New Review savourless and savourless and borjoy.” The strange repetition is important because it warns us to analyse, and spot Bunting’s mocking joke: a line in Arthur Waley's translation by the Chinese poet whose name can be rendered Bo Juyi, “Of cord and cassia-wood/is the lute compounded;/Within it lie ancient melodies./Ancient melodies weak and savourless”. Perhaps more obvious to contemporaries, by a poet in particular admired by William Carlos Williams.]
“The investor was it later, but the industrial breakdown”
[two here: “hit” and “by”].
“If these companies do not take up a new issue, there is little hope of the ‘public’ absorbing it, to this way they control some branches of production more directly & more absolutely than the banks.”
[try “absorbing it. In this way”]
“We have three small craters within two miles of us, and there must be several hundred on the island, apart form the upper parts of the peak…”
“This doesnt render E.P.s Sig less interesting to me, but he is interesting for something that isnt, and that is only indirectly connected with, anything that Homer of Firdusi would have been likely to set down on paper.”
“What about these growing kids you mention? With some of them I thought it was their politics what seduced you.”
[This last is feasible for the kiddy speak Bunting would bat back to Pound; but the original is “politics that”].
“I expect he’ll send me a copy, that he wouldnt send it I asked for it myself.”
[if]
“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 weakness).”
[weaknesses]
“So I have been trying to turn my Persian to account with the Intelligence people. I have a certain indirect “pull”, for the President of the Board of Education is an acquaintance of mine and a close friend of my uncle, & at the same time bosom pal of the Secretary of State for War, I have done all I could”
[War. I have done all I could]
“Mat had been struck by the enormous amount of work the men were doing. One had put in 13½ shifts in a period in which, Mat said, in ordinarily prosperous, busy times, the average might be 5 shifts, Mat did not understand, he said, how any human being could have as much energy: but all the men were showing it”
[5 shifts. Mat did not]
“To Dorothy Pound, 22/11/46 p.166
To Louis Zukofsky, 7/12/46 p. 168
To Dorothy Pound, 22/11/46 p.170”
[this is in the contents page, and in the text itself. Look at the dates and how the chronological order can’t be right. The letter for p. 170 should have been dated “10/12/46”]
“What is so strange (about the Cantos, of which Dorothy has sent me a volume) is Ez’s persistent praise of maenads and such like wild behavers, whereas he stiffens and is unable to disguise his disgust at even mild or parlour drunkenness in real life.”
[no typo this time; it’s just a great quote.]
“I’ve a good camera (although it wants mending)”
["though” in original, not “although”]
“28 November 1954
242 Newburn Road, Throckley, Northumberland
Dear Ez – More oats arrived. Thankyou.
This past aeon leisure’s been rarer than ever: that’s mainly why I’ve not written, though I believe I’d have found time forcibly if there’d been anything to say likely to interest you.”
[not a typo but a misleading impression, as this is the only letter to Pound of 1954 in Niven but, in fact there were five more that year: 21 March 1954, April 1954, 12 May 54, 1 July 54, 14 Nov 1954. This excludes some great and cheery analysis of Persian poetics. It also artificially inflates the impressions that Bunting was reduced to near constipation as a correspondent, and that he had (as reviewers of this Niven edition cheerfully recounted) broken with Pound since 1938 – that he was, basically, on his tod waiting for the end of the 1950s and Pickard. In fact, the Gael Turnbull archive in Edinburgh shows viscerally (well, by a bulk of words on headed paper in folders) Gael arrived before Tom, first dropping by when Bunting was still in Throckley (1956), and stirred a response: “you have learned to master certain tools you first saw in action in their work and what you have done with the tools is cleanly and completely done, fit to stand on its own in any company, including theirs” (5.1.57, not included in Niven). The Turnbull archive thereafter doesn't show any more letters from Bunting until 1965 (including one foolishly attributed in a recent article as sent to Peter Makin, nineteen at the time; Makin was quoting it and keeping Turnbull anonymous at Turnbull's request).
From 1965, Turnbull's archive, badly represented in Niven, shows Bunting replying to Turnbull poems sent for feedback, prolifically; Bunting not only tolerated it but it stirred and even suppled him– “far far better the frequent clumsiness of Gael T, with usually some awkward stirrings of life”, Bunting said in one letter Niven excludes. Where else in his life does Bunting allow for clumsiness in a poet, even in Whitman? Garrulousness, maybe; but clumsiness?].
“The county court judge came round the other day and borrowed the only spare copy of my poems (and stood me two tumblers of whisky, so that poetry is not totally devoid of material reward). I hope it may stand me in good stead when I am sued for my rates or the gas bill – both imminent.”
[it should be County Court.]
“Allen Ginsberg was here last weekend – read to a full house for four hours. He looks like an owl in a bunch of ivy and carries excentricity quite a distance, but is amusing and very likeable. His work far too diffuse – all prime-sautier, he hasnt learned to cut nor even the respectably ancient art of the pumice. But there is quite a lot there, if it could be sewn together. Whitmanesque. I dont know what Tom Pickard has next in store.”
[in the original there is a paragraph break between “Whitmanesque" and “I dont know” – which makes sense as Pickard is not Whitmanesque but part of a new thought]
“[Cecil Day-Lewis] was standing alone, looking rather like a mummy that has come unwrapped. I intended to say ‘The last time we met was in 1930,’ but I didnt get the chance. Introduced, I put out my hand. Lewis looked at if for some time, as though it were pretty filthy”.
“While the reporters, fools to a man and woman, were being satisfied I swallowed down my fury or drunk enough not to have noticed.”
[Niven has mistyped “looked at it for some time” but, worse, skipped from a line ending “fury”, missed eleven words, and started again at “or drunk. It should be “While the reporters, fools to a man and woman, were being satisfied I swallowed down my fury and decided the best thing was to pretend I was dense or drunk enough not to have noticed”
“I got to London late on Sunday, declined to be read in public, but read for Ginsberg at Stuart Montgomery’s house; and said goodbye to that good man and diffuse poet with real affection.”
[“declined to read”; cut “be”].
“Yes, I think it was wrong of your mother to keep Bourtai then, but she had her family to contend with. I do not know whether she was free to let Bou go. Later I was very poor again, powerless to help. I suppose you lost faith in me, and that is why you stopped writing and I lost touch with you. You cannot guess how glad I as when chance put Bourtai’s address into my hands at last. “
[“Glad I as?”]
“I find a good deal in Twenty Words”
[legit, but again a good quote – one looks twice though it’s actually faithful, to Gael Turnbull. His poem Twenty Words Twenty Days is not cut to the bone but spongy, and, as Bunting says in a letter to Turnbull not featured in the book, a reminder of the strength of Williams’ measure in Paterson. The sequence is built around a concrete poetry manoeuvre of writing around a central capitalised WORD once a day for twenty days, a Turnbull synthesis of Williams with Ian Hamilton Finlay, and a most unBuntingesque masterpiece.]
“Stevie Smith certainly got all there was to get out of her smaller stuff.”
[Should be “small stuff”].
“I imagine I’d repudiate lot of what was written then now that neither of those motives operate.”
[“motives need operate”].
“what I pick from Horace or Manuchehri may be less obvious to the contemporary observer.”
[“what I pinch”]
“Well to renew the dates: Hopkins wasnt available till about 1929: it’s delusive to imagine his influence. He hadnt any on Pound, Yeats, self or L. Zukofsky.”
[“Well to remember dates”].
“We had tea in Liddesdale a week ago at the Douglas Arms in the little town of Newcastleton. They have us loads of sandwiches”.
[“gave”].
“You are, I suppose, championing Mr Ian Hamilton Finlay, who had, I gather complained to you about some of this transactions with Fulcrum Press.”
[“some of his transactions”].
“To Denis Goacher
16 December 1969
[19 December 1969]
“I’ve nothing to say about good or goodish poetry, really, or merely ‘read it.’ ”
[colon after merely]
“I’ve just been in Newcastle with Tom Pickard (Morden Tower), Philip Bomford (Northern Arts) and the head respectively of the English Department and the university theatre and its resident rep. company, and the Northern Sinfonia Orchestra”
[“heads”]
“I dont suppose I’ve remembered all I ought to write, but I lack time if I’m to catch tonight’s post. Therefore I’ll sonly send my love to your wife and children.”
[“only send… to your wife and the children”].
“Either we begin with Cantos 1 & two, which set forth the scheme of the whole, and then select cantos or longish sections of the cantos in which the scheme is seen at work.”
[“select cantos or longish sections of cantos”].
“How can a city which once was more than half civilized have become so barbarous within my lifetime? There used to be teashops in no hurry, restaurants where half a bottle of tolerable claret cost less than a shilling, a Café Royale where you were sure to meet someone worth talking to, and reasonable efficient cheap public transport.”
[Cafe Royale with no accent].
“the girl who is 12½ in once scene, 14 shortly after, and ‘about 15’ within two months of the first scene”
[I haven’t checked with the Buffalo archive but I’ll wager tuppence ha’penny it’s “one scene” not “once scene”].
“Jacques Darras (my French transalator) is to call here early in March.”
[possibly too salty a salivator? Nothing though compares to my final example, a reward for those who have come this far:]
“Iran doesnt pall, but I see little of Iran, only a series of government offices and club bars and the telegraph office, the streets that lead to them – or rather, the cars in those streets for there isnt time or space to look aside from driving – and my workroom.
I dont think I ever regret New York, but at odd intervals I think kindly of Los Angeles”
[This is 2 September 1949, to Margaret de Silva, and it is nigh impossible to see the error. The error is that an entire page of the letter is missing. The letter is written on both sides of the paper: thus, two pieces of paper = 4 sides of writing, Side 1 and Side 2 on Piece 1, Side 3 and Side 4 on Piece 2. The transcriber seems to have gone from the foot of Side 1, not turned over but moved the whole of Piece 1 to the side and started to continue transcribing from the top of Side 3. Unfortunately, the sentence successfully continues in either case, so this didn't turn up from proofreading (you’d have had to have taken the contents of the letter to heart before transcribing to have caught it yourself at the proof stage if you were the transcriber). I spotted it because I was looking at every letter in the Durham archive with the Niven book by my side to compare.]
***
Oh, underlining of words in the originals is two dozen times omitted, but not at all times. But enough of this nitpicking! Let’s finish on other kinds of nitpicking.
***
PART FOUR: MISSING BALANCES
Omission of Correspondence TO Bunting
Why? There’s so little of it (because of Bunting’s purity/contempt for his correspondents/another reason). Perhaps space was at an absolute premium? Because otherwise it’s odd, almost fed up, of the editor to point us to Haffenden to see Eliot and Bunting’s correspondence when it amounts to half a page and a few hundred words. Perhaps there are prohibitive royalties involved? There is a massive (space premium?) contrast between the Letters as we can see them free at Yale, typed or handwritten on often personalised stationery, and their far fewer words per line. Some typed letters have expressive linebreak tensions, points at which an ebbing sentence can flick. Would we present the opening of Briggflatts as
Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s
madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’
late spring. Dance tiptoe, bull, black against
may. Ridiculous and lovely chase hurdling
shadows morning into noon. May on the
bull’s hide and through the dale furrows fill
with may, paving the slowworm’s way. A
mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests, lays his rule
at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking, till
the stone spells a name naming none, a man
abolished.”
But, then, Bunting often itches for fights with visual over-fussing. To Turnbull making a literary analysis (not in this selection as so often with literary reports) Bunting says Robert Duncan breaks the line at the end of sentences too predicably – a fascinating, fussy and intuitive critique. To Ian Hamilton Finlay he is harsh, while simultaneously blindly loyal about Stewart Montgomery, their mutual acquaintance and publisher.
First Bunting to Finlay's champion Ronald Johnson:
“… necessary to consider what induces a man to deploy such gimmicks as Mr Findlay uses. It may be unjust of me to imagine that Mr Findlay did not find that the reputation of a purveyor of whimsy could satisfy his vanity. Perhaps he deceives himself as well as his readers by hiding the nullity of his verses behind a noisy blast of ballyhoo he calls ‘concrete poetry.’ But whether he deceives his readers or himself, I would be very cautious indeed about accepting any statement of his. I would suspect it of being warped.”
Niven comments: “THE FOLLOWING TWO LETTERS DETAIL A COMPLICATED QUARREL INVOLVING THE AMERICAN POET RONALD JOHNSON, THE SCOTTISH POET IAN HAMILTON FINLAY, STUART MONTGOMERY, BUNTING, AND SEVERAL OTHERS. THE FALLOUT FROM BUNTING’S INTRUSION INTO IT IS SOMEWHAT EXHAUSTIVELY DETAILED IN MULTIPLE LETTERS (ORIGINAL AND CARBON-COPIED) IN ARCHIVES IN DURHAM AND INDIANA.”
This was news to me and a number of other Bunting scholars on the main Basil Bunting forum (on Facebook). I know of the Peter Barry article that shows Finlay taking Montgomery to court and destroying Bunting’s and many other fine poets’ outlet. I wonder why there is no Niven footnote to this from Bunting to Johnson.
“I don’t think I need correct your funny account of my own imagined feelings about Stuart Montgomery’s publication of my work, at any rate here and now. My present notoriety has given me both amusement and annoyance. I was quite content without it.”
Could it have been a particular interaction response? Yes. Here is Johnson’s circular (a sort of group email / Twitter tagging of its day) addressed to Montgomery, forwarded to Bunting, to my knowledge never circulated since:
“… you told double-tongued lies to Basil and his prospective publishers in order to have this succulent bone to gnaw on by yourself. This method was so startlingly successful that you have, by all rumours, used it to effect in subsequent cases. Basil was an old man, outside your kind of world, pleased at attention after years of neglect. He was too busy reflowering, writing—I think—better than anyone had in England for years, to realize that he was becoming only pawn, or bone, and that your sole ambition in publishing him was so he would be known to the uninformed as your 'discovery.' "
Bunting did want to defend his publisher – he says Montgomery urged approaching a bigger publisher for the Collected Poems. I suspect he also deeply resented being patronised as not of good faculties. Even at 69, this would provoke intemperate insult-making back. He is also, most likely, taking Hugh MacDiarmid's side, who saw Finlay precisely as fey and trivial and said so publicly.
Johnson writes back to Bunting's intervention (this is from his archive in Kansas and from neither Durham, where I found little on the affair, or Finlay’s archive in Indiana) “Dear Basil Bunting, Since the idea that Stuart Montgomery’s motives were less than utter altruism has been originated and discussed between you and Jonathan [Williams] and I, at some length, in Aspen two years ago, your letter could not surprise or sadden me more”. Johnson, a fine poet himself, saw (a Bunting mask of?) decrepitude we don’t see, or is himself a bitchy exaggerator when defending his pal, but I believe his account that Bunting questioned Montgomery's motives in 1967.
Barry said Finlay’s quibble was that a Fulcrum reprint of a previous Finlay book with one or two new poems wasn’t a “first edition” while Montgomery wanted to say it was. A dive in the archives and in the published correspondence shows us things missing in this account. I’m sure Niven in his apparent ennui knows this fully, but I was surprised that Montgomery had proposed to impose an introduction to the Fulcrum Finlay by Jonathan Williams, in progress as a fait accompli. Finlay was furious, didn’t want the implied association and didn’t want to have been forced into an embarrassing confrontation with Williams in order to undo Montgomery's manoeuvre. Yes, he tried to take his toys away tout court, and yes he was an intemperate often quite paranoid king of his castle. But Montgomery’s part in this is undistinguished.
***
Missing in total are the Eliot half page, the short paragraph from Zukofsky's Apollinaire. And maybe three letters from Pound (see them at the Yale website, free), ten sentences from Pound’s ABC of Economics for which one of the Niven Bunting letters is a sort of reader’s report (the 1930s edition has free access an hour at a time at the Internet Archive). And I also would like a page from George Oppen's Seascape. that buttresses a bizarre revelation in the Letters about late Bunting work towards an unfinished sonata.
In 1973, Oppen, of whose strengths Bunting is always aggressively ignorant, sends him his latest, Seascape: Needle's Eye, whose poem ANIMULA begins
animula blandula vagula
Chance and chance and thereby starlit
All that was to be thought
Yes
Comes down the road
I suspect it is this poem that provokes Bunting to discuss a line he has been considering (or has put in a draft) which does not, to my understanding, appear until 1978.
“Care and attention, surely! Long labour. Complexity and what asses call obscurity. But sentence by sentence, phrase by phase, we ought to have been more perspicuous than any of us are. If I use, for instance, three words from one of Aldhelm’s letters I ought not to expect the reader to recognise the quotation and supply the possible associations. He, the reader, probably hasnt read Aldhelm and may not even know who he was. But worse still to borrow from one’s private past words and references nobody can conceivably dig out. I think I was probably trying to say to you that WCW’s clinical training, of the eyes, of the precise reporting of what’s seen, has somehow to be incorporated into the practise of the more complex poets before we get where we all set out to go.”
Niven footnotes this “SAINT ALDHELM (C.639–709), ANGLO-SAXON PRIEST, SCHOLAR, AND POET PRAISED BY BEDE IN THE ECCLESSIASTICAL HISTORY. MUCH OF ALDHELM’S CORRESPONDENCE SURVIVES”
Cross-reference this letter with the unfinished late sonata:
Light stots from stone, sets ridge and kerf quick
as shot skims rust from steel. Men of the north
‘subject to being beheaded and cannot avoid it
of a race that is naturally given that way’.
‘Uber sophiae sugens’ in hourless dark,
their midnight shimmers like noon.
“Uber sophiae sugens” is Aldhelm, though Share says in 2016
“A Latin phrase, source untraced, meaning ‘sucking [at] the breast of wisdom’.”
I was gobsmacked, and gobsmacked to search “Aldhelm” and find it already eddying in the Letters. The quote is in a letter about a Northumbrian gone native in Ireland not wanting to get off the Irish breast, having taught the Irish patterning since called Celtic. Bunting had been asserting this was Northumbrian and researching it for his work on Northumbrian being top notch. But hovering again around Zukofsky's “aureole”. Bunting likes assuming Oppen needs plucking, yet is ginger over his own eye operations. Bunting has fort-da form here: adding a Latin phrase that reveals his hand in drafts of The Spoils. He then cuts it, revealing far too little, and hampers the lot (thank you, Harry Ransom archive in Texas).
***
Glosses about Politics and Philosophy: Niven’s Recruiting Soapbox
Niven has a new book out, The North Will Rise Again, in which the prose is excellent and the neighbourly heart warm, and it gives me no grievance with his politics – although I might want to bring Santayana in, Lest We Forget. But his Bunting footnotes about philosophy and politics do varying justice to Bunting’s wrestlings, and sometimes throw a smokescreen.
Arthur Eddington
When Bunting slates Arthur Eddington in a letter, he does so seven years after the latter made the front page of the Times for giving experimental proof and mainstream acceptance for Einstein's relativity work. Niven notes Bunting rankles at Eddington’s apparent approach of philosophical idealism. Ten minutes to read the writer Eliot courted for the Criterion would have shown awareness of that school and how spacetime theory engages and departs from it. Basil is a keen advocate of spacetime consciousness by 1932 – but it’s a blip that never recurs; and science is often religiose to him.
Ramsey Macdonald
When Ramsey Macdonald turns up a few times, the most fascinating (the index fails to include it, so I’ll guide you – turn to 12.7.75) is when Bunting says
“Wilson is performing all sorts of gymnastic wriggles to try and avoid the fate of Ramsay McDonald while doing almost the same things”
Bunting may never have conceived the (to me) implicit blame that Niven ascribes in a footnote three hundred pages earlier:
“THE WALL STREET CRASH OF 1929… LED THE LABOUR GOVERNMENT UNDER RAMSAY MACDONALD TO INTRODUCE AUSTERITY MEASURES”.
Bunting himself blamed Lord Selwyn the Chancellor, in a letter to Pound only in the Yale archive. He wondered if Mosley* (then Labour) couldn’t do better, and doesn’t mention MacDonald.
Wartime Government
Niven is wrong to say that in a 19 March 1940 letter “BB LISTS PROMINENT MEMBERS OF THE WARTIME COALITION GOVERNMENT”, as his own book elsewhere says it was Tory until May. His double use of the word “neoliberal” I suspect will date the book as sure as any term in 1970s lit crit.
Toynbee
Bunting also says in the 19th March letter he is enjoying the ideas of Toynbee’s “badly written” A Study of History, more even than he would Marx. Niven comments “BB’S RECOMMENDATION TO ZUKOFSKY HERE IS A TYPICAL (FOR THIS PERIOD) AVOWAL OF LIBERAL CENTRISM IN THE FACE OF COMMUNISM AND FASCISM. THE DISCUSSION IN THIS LETTER OF THE ENERGY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, AND OF AN ETIOLATED ‘GOVERNING CLASS’ REDEEMED BY A MINORITY OF CREATIVE INDIVIDUALS, SHOWS THE INFLUENCE OF KEY THEMES IN TOYNBEE’S WORK.” In fact, Toynbee wrote:
“civilisations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively”.
Niven almost implies he thought Picasso or Britten should be PM: he misses the Toynbee admiration for community spirit, and his sense of commonalty of border peoples (implying borders exist either side of them, and in a patchwork across a nation state.
19 March 1940 shows Bunting revelling in Geordie craftsmanship and animal intelligence putting ITSELF to work (these early WW2 letters are highlights of the whole volume). He asks himself, as anyone who has travelled Britain and found Tyneside and the Black Country to be hives of such artisan industrials and wondered where and why these areas have borders, if Toynbee’s work is not the key – of a vital question living here. What do Newcastle and Edinburgh people have in common, and where is the border? It is to me moving that Bunting’s life and work focus a central curiosity of my border life. At the same time I step aside from his (are they) jokes in a letter to MacDiarmid.
“I must consider Dumfries and parts further west. After all, they were part of Oswald’s kingdom. This would have the advantage of making you a Northumbrian, for though you choose to live in Clydesdale Langholm would be well within Northumberland.”
[This letter is in not in Niven, 2022 but in Nations of Nothing But Poetry Modernism, Matthew Hart, 2010].
Shadingfield and finances
Last of all, Niven seems oddly judgmental over at least two of Bunting’s financial complaints. Bunting bought Shadingfield in Wylam in 1956, at the top of a hill above the Tyne, just over from one of two Wylam branch lines. Shadingfield had 6 trees, which Bunting likes in one letter to call a “mini-orchard”. In 1956, the housing market had dipped badly and knocked house prices down by 8% in real terms. The house had an immediate back garden then another a tier down and didn’t fence off the view down to the trainline. One line through his previous village, Throckley, went to the other Wylam station of the time – but Beeching axed it. Throckley was the family’s second home then their only home, when Basil’s father died in 1925. Bunting was moving up the line, buying ambitiously but locally, on a gamble. But he struggled with the mortgage.
Niven seems impatient, with a characteristic manner of this project. He objects that it’s a nice house in a nice area above the national average. What it actually was was part of a green baize table the size of a very parochial map, for Bunting to risk his inheritance winnings. Buying at a market low isn’t the worst kind of gamble. Reviewers have taken on Niven’s hostility and furthered it, making a fanciful phrase mean Basil had a full “orchard”, for example. Do readers take comfort too in Niven challenging Bunting’s account of not getting state benefits?
“none of us is eligible for any of the benefits of the welfare state except free medical attention”
Niven replies
“GIVEN THE UNIVERSALISM OF THE BRITISH WELFARE STATE AT THIS POINT, THIS CLAIM SEEMS UNLIKELY, AND INDEED BB SUGGESTS TO ZUKOFSKY IN A LETTER OF 27/10/53 (TEXAS) THAT HE WAS RECEIVING UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT PAYMENTS (‘THE DOLE’) IN THE AUTUMN OF 1953”.
For one of the two state benefits, Bunting either needed time worked of late in the UK or to be means-tested. Yes, Bunting had been earning, but it was as a high up in Iran so no recent UK contributions. He had some assets though little income for food and power and didn't qualify for the means-tested benefit either.
Both Niven gainsayings seem to stem from an accusation of lying or poor budgeting or financial incontinence, not moving to a more affordable if cramped property and not adopting a safe pessimistic plan. Both are quite neoliberal slants.
***
The publication of the Letters in bulk if not in toto is for people who haven’t accessed any archives, to dip and then scope out this first edition. I did not myself have the heart leap at the turn of the millenium when a selection of a mere dozen Bunting letters to Jonathan Williams appeared in The Star You Steer By, an otherwise valuable anthology of Bunting pieces – indeed, I skipped them. I would not have valued a letter to MacDiarmid about the EEC in a Bunting chapter. I would have continued to think of letters as exhibit A and B in biographies, rather than an important tidal wave of Buntingalia in on-going and newly exciting curation. I end with overlooked letters to Williams, MacDiarmid and Kenneth Cox, but I do so in genuine gratitude to Alex Niven’s scores of hours, his B-Bomb test.
To Williams (in The Star You Steer By), setting aside strong analyses of Thatcherism and the Iranian revolution I offer this:
“I do in fact have a low opinion of most contemporary poets cis- and trans-Atlantic”.
In 1982 it is an easy and obvious thought for a Latinist to consider how to counterpoint prefixes in a for him living language (albeit with risk of aureoleness).
Bunting’s first letter to Kenneth Cox in the Durham archive thanks him for analysis such as this:
“… divided into three parts, each with its own climax… [the] oppositions can be grouped:
VILLON LIFE MAROT DEATH
SOUND TRUE IMAGE FALSE
The rest of the poem will develop these themes. It will not only vary the words used to state them and apply the oppositions to elements as yet unmentioned, it will regroup the themes, invert them, revalue and resolve.”
This is from Cox's essay on Villon, and its eight categories are as hard to see as to keep clear and invert in relation, but Briggflatts readers work its densities by heart, and can hear and feel similar sonata manoeuvres to the ones Cox describes. Hpw useful to poetry-lovers. Yet also how historically fascinating, that the great critic hadn't seen Briggflatts yet. Bunting’s opening letter in their correspondence, acknowledges receipt of the Villon essay, and offers to send Briggflatts. He is almost awed. I definitely am.
Finally, fascinating to see in Hart, 2010, Bunting want
“to stir up these northerners who sleep so stolidly and pry them loose from bloody London and bloodier Winchester [. . . .] It must be done by someone before the ignorant USA steers us into an obliterating Common Market, or the task will be hopeless and the mess worse than ever.”
O judicious Lexiteer! Remainers, do not point out the “rotten liar” bedfellows of his civil war! March without second thought or referendum, and distract your cold bones at the arsonists’ lovely bonfire, or with warm nostalgia for (1918?) C-xxxxx-ism.
NOTES
I HAVE TRANSCRIBED NIVEN’S WORDS ALL CAPS TO DISTINGUISH THEM. THEY’RE NORMAL IN THE BOOK.
*Speaking of Mosley, the framing and presentation of Bunting's small part in the disturbances outside parliament on the eve of abdication needs both curiosity and restraint. Niven seems to hope Bunting’s untypical talk of potential civil war is “eloquent”, but it in fact mimics the language of headlines and posters around London in December 1936. The posters in particular encouraged a rally outside the Commons, which Bunting followed rather than in any way led. Bunting was as often drawn to Churchill, in the teeth of Pound, and preferred to see them Edward VIII and Churchill above “the so-called Fascists… dishing Edward’s chances with the crowd by claiming that he was one of them, the rotten liars” – [reader, Edward was].
This is from TEA WITH HITLER, Dean Palmer, The History Press, 2021
“Newspapers such as the Daily Mail and Express – as well as the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Sir Oswald Mosley – attempted to rally support for the King. The BUF distributed pro-Edward leaflets, chalked the walls with pro-Edward graffiti, and a specially printed newspaper, Crisis, sold 37,000 copies. One Blackshirt headline read: ‘LET KING MARRY WOMAN OF HIS CHOICE.’ A picture of the King landing at an airport, with the sub-headline ‘A Symbol of the Modern Age which the old men hate’, appeared on the front page of the fascist newspaper Action.”
This is from Stephen Dorril's book BLACKSHIRT: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, Stephen Dorril, 2006
“Senior Lords civil servant Colin Davidson congratulated Edward on his ‘determination not to encourage a “King’s Party”. It was within your power to create civil war and chaos. You had only to lift a finger or even come to London to show yourself, to arouse millions of your subjects to your support.’ On the night of 10 December Scotland Yard flooded central London with policemen hours before Edward’s abdication. Special Branch feared a ‘public uprising’ spearheaded by Blackshirts. Part of a crowd of 5,000, 500 Fascists were outside Buckingham Palace chanting, ‘One two three four five, we want Baldwin, dead or alive!’ Fascist youths led 800 demonstrators to 10 Downing Street and others picketed Parliament with placards reading ‘Sack Baldwin. Stand by the King!’ In the end, only five arrests were made.”
Bunting is quoted in the 2013 biography and by reviewers at last now as saying
“succeeded in keeping my very short tail of young men together and active during the crisis. The police finally ousted me from the lobby of the House of Commons. The crowd at the Palace didnt respond.”
The men may for all we know have been his drinking buddies. Since “police finally ousted me”, was it not just Basil made an abortive attempt to get far past the front door? There is no record of any breaching of the House of Commons in either Harold Nicholson or Chips Channon's diaries of that night.
**In the Letters no reviewer has so far noted this in Bunting’s 1931 letter:
“Auden’s volume has reached me. I am considerably impressed with first turning over the pages. He is the first person I have come across who seems to have profited duly by ‘Mauberley’. But he has also his own contributions; and the fourthrate seems to be in definite subdued minority – rare in English poets. Recommend you to get the pamphlet from Fabers, half a crown. Observe Nos XX XV, XII.”
Consult the new Princeton complete Auden for Poems, 1930, the volume including them as Bunting would have seen them and one can see how XV (“Control of the passes was, he saw, the key/To this new district, but who would get it?”) and XII (“We made all possible preparations/Drew up a list of firms”) might appeal. But XX (“these tears, salt for a disobedient dream,/The lunatic agitation of the sea”)?
Bunting actually typed “Observe Nos xx XV, XII” and then added some strokes in pen to “xx” – although not so conclusively as to become an unambiguous “XX”. Niven never differentiates typing from pen added on top, running his transcription instead as continuous, as if all typed with no pen addition. And there are many pen additions in the archives. This is crucial when Niven guesses at unresolved questions over which the archive has a query – in one case, the date of an early letter about Bunting’s ailing father has the postmark of a different year), because Niven doesn’t tell us the archive have queried a detail.
Similarly Niven puts a letter from Bunting in Tenerife starting “Dear Ezra, Sure. Happy to drop the subject of Zuk’s alleged petrifaction” as “End of May [1935]”. The original doesn’t have “1935”; Niven has added it with unexplained square brackets. And moreover Yale has this letter in the 1934 folder (when Bunting was in Tenerife) not between two 1935 letters. In Niven immediately before is “What’s Louis race anyway? Half them Rosham jews aint hebrews anyway” and immediately after “Zuk isnt rotting, as far as my contact with him goes. He’s hellish busy…”. I'm making a fiddling point that doesn’t save Pound from revealing himself antisemitic, which he truly was. But the book needs a note here and not liberal thematic collage.
***This is fascinating, but exoticising. I speak as the relatively longstanding copyeditor of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, published by Cambridge University Press. I have read a good thousand papers on bilingualism, and the processing costs of moving between two languages – changes in spatial perception, temporal perception, even personality, as a bilingual switches from one language to another. We have many of us seen a bilingual associate stop a conversation with us to take a phone call in another language. A question of relaxing, yes, but into a truer language of perception? Proving their talk with us shallow and fake, lacking a veracity being held over from their phonecall-self?
Studies abound on undercurrents of a language “primed” to come into play by encounter with another – always there, coming out in comparison. It has a poetics, and indeed the poetry may be in the compared making – as it were, tectonically – of platonic love. Love as for everyone. So consider: if the workings of power, and control for sadism and insecurity, around love do not exist in every person speaking every language that ever was, are you not a Novocastrian's uncle? I am one's father.
Translation’s act cultures: people learn from each other, great, challenge the taken-for-granted, the neglected, freedom, caring for the weak. We must see the love for those who experience challenges with costs, including with languages, reducing some costs to pay others. We must, as our own subject, be neighbourly, knowing there is relief. This includes knowledge of insecurity, and need for relief: even only as a jester-bard of it we need to know when and when not to tighten the string in song and witticism.
{Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas points out on Facebook “while we're being particular, as we should, need to watch those Zukofsky titles -- "A" (quotes required), "Poem beginning 'The'" (ditto). — a good point, but I was using so many quote marks in the piece, I cheated for easy skim reading – a popular activity these days}