A Strong Song Tows Us Read online

  Bunting went on to praise Jones’s technical skill, his successful absorption of the complexities of Welsh poetry into his verse, his knowledge and versatility; but … Jones had become stuck: ‘he had said his say. After The Anathemata he could write only what were in effect more anathemata. Considering how widely The Anathemata ranges, that is not a great deficiency, but it does leave him less universally available than Pound or Yeats or Zukofsky.’

  In short Jones was a one-trick pony, even though that trick was brilliant, and his disciples, over whom he had no influence, bent his message in a way that was not always entirely innocent. There’s no doubt that Bunting felt a close poetic bond with Jones. A few days after Jones died in 1974 Bunting paid tribute to him: ‘He was the oldest – the last remaining of the friends of my youth, and also the last except myself remaining on this side of the Atlantic of the generation of writers who between 1914 and 1930 made such very large changes in the notion of poetry in twentieth-century England.’13

  League tables are as invidious in the arts as they are anywhere else outside sport. It doesn’t matter if Jones outshines Bunting slightly or vice versa. My contention is that it simply isn’t possible to understand the development of literary modernism without engaging with the poetry of Basil Bunting. His friendships with W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in the 1920s and 1930s put him at the heart of the modernist revolution. ‘Villon’, his first great poem, was as heavily edited by Pound as The Waste Land had been. Written when Bunting was twenty-five it bears easy comparison with two of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, The Waste Land itself and Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’.

  No twentieth-century poet, not even Yeats, prickles the scalp quite as Bunting does. His voice is so assured, his lexical choices so deadly accurate, his timing so impeccable. There are hardly any instances in his work where you feel that he is reaching for an effect. His mastery of his material appears to be effortless, even when he delivers passages of the most precise, hardedged beauty:

  Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,

  each his own, the longer known the more alone,

  wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.

  Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,

  yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm

  places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.

  Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone …14

  Why then is Bunting not celebrated as he should be? There are several barriers to his proper recognition. The first is his self-rooting in the north.

  Bunting’s northern credentials are impeccable but they have become an obstacle to his wider recognition as one of Britain’s great national poets. Bunting was in some ways the architect of his own ghetto. He played down the influence of his paternal grandparents and drew heavily on his mother’s Borders family history to localise the legends and mythology that coloured so much of his work. The ‘gruff Anglo Saxon brevity which survives in local speech informed his poetic language … and the landscape and social and political environment [of the north east] provided a backdrop never far away in any part of his work.’15 This influence is easy to exaggerate: ‘Far from limiting our understanding of Bunting’s achievement, it is hard to overstate the importance of Tyneside and Northumbria as recurrent presences in his work.’16

  Not hard enough. Critics such as Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain17 have emphasised Bunting’s northern influences, inspired, admittedly, by Bunting himself, and this has acted as a brake on public recognition of an internationally important poet. The assertion that ‘Basil Bunting is the most important poet in the North-East of England since Caedmon in the latter seventh century,’18 is well-intentioned but damaging. It isn’t that it’s faint praise. In itself it is a significant achievement to be the best anything anywhere for thirteen hundred years, but it doesn’t do justice to Bunting’s importance and influence as a world poet. Nobody claims that Ted Hughes is the best Yorkshire poet since Alcuin in the latter eighth century.

  It is as though Bunting had some kind of posterity death wish. Not only did he proclaim himself a poet of the North, he went out of his way to position himself as a Quaker poet of the North when not only was he not a Quaker poet, he wasn’t even a Quaker. It is not my intention to disparage Bunting’s Quaker influences in any way. He was well rooted in the Quaker tradition during his teenage years (notably by Ellen Fry at Ackworth School) and found much in it to value in his declining years, but Bunting had a tendency to inflate the role of Quakerism in his life. He told an interviewer that he had been ‘brought up entirely in a Quaker atmosphere’, which, as we shall see, isn’t true. The most we can say is that he was a Quaker by (secondary) schooling. Quakerism and Northumbria were very important to Bunting and his poem, ‘At Briggflatts Meetinghouse’, is the most exquisite meditation on meditation of the twentieth or possibly any other century. But that doesn’t make Bunting a Quaker poet of the north any more than Robert Graves was a mystic poet of the Balearics or Louis Zukofsky a Jewish poet of the Lower East Side.

  A second obstacle to a sensible critical and public awareness of Bunting’s genius is his voice, and this for two reasons. The reading voices of most British poets of the first half of the twentieth century are remarkably similar. It isn’t that you can’t tell them apart, but listening to Spender, Auden, MacNeice and Day Lewis, for instance, makes you feel as though you’re in a special kind of club where poetry is intoned as if from the pulpit of a particularly self-important priest. The weight of empire suffocates these voices. Even the stridently Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, a lover of English culture but no lover of the English, is a member of the club, as are George Barker, Robert Graves, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield and David Gascoyne. Bunting described exactly the effect of listening to these poets:

  Composers are not always the best players of their own compositions, nor poets the best readers of their own verses … Some lack a voice, or have not learned to control it. Some are so immersed in the mechanics of their craft that they, for instance, make an exaggerated pause at the line’s end and lose the swing of the metre. Some have mannerisms, such as the constant repetition of a particular cadence, producing an effect rather like the detestable noise parsons make in church.19

  You have only to listen to Masefield’s toe-curling attempt at the demotic shanty in his 1941 recording of ‘Sea Fever’ to see Bunting’s point.

  But mainly we are used to reading these poets. When we hear poets speaking their own poetry (all of them, arguably, the worst possible readers of their own work), the uniformity of tone, pace and rhythm homogenises the output, so listening to Bunting reading Briggflatts comes as something of a shock. The voice, so essential to appreciating his poetry, has at the same time been a barrier to his acceptance as the great British modernist that he is. First it marks Bunting out as a nonconformist in an age of conformity. When you hear them read you might initially mistake Spender for Day Lewis but you would never mistake Bunting for anyone else. Second it is uncompromisingly a northern voice and this has doubtless contributed to his reduction to a ‘poet of the North’ (and therefore, by implication, of nowhere else). To Richard Caddel and Anthony Flowers Bunting’s voice is not merely ‘northern’, it is much more regionally specific than that:

  Bill Williamson in Class, Culture and Community describes the language of his grandfather, a miner who lived in Throckley, as being a soft Northumbrian accent with rolling ‘r’s, liberally sprinkled with the archaic pronouns ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. Bunting’s much-loved grandfather Isaac Taylor Cheesman and his uncle Matthew Taylor Cheesman (both Throckley men) would have used this dialect, and Bunting would have grown up used to hearing it being spoken. Bunting’s own speech – both in poetry reading and in conversation – had much of this local quality. The accent which Bunting carried with him all his life is thus evidently the highly specific, local language from the place where, and the people amongst whom, he spent his childhoo
d.20

  Bunting is lucky that some of his more enthusiastic disciples didn’t present him as a Quaker poet of Throckley. As we shall see, Bunting’s deployment of his rich voice is much more calculated and complex than this suggests.

  It isn’t difficult to imagine the poetry establishment regarding Bunting as an outsider who was happy to remain an outsider. Bunting’s voice put him at a geographical, cultural and arguably political distance from the poetry establishment. The high priest of that establishment, T. S. Eliot, was clearly unsure of how to handle Bunting, so he didn’t. It was difficult to gain acceptance as a poet in the first half of the twentieth century without Eliot’s endorsement and in the early 1930s Bunting mounted a sustained attack on Eliot (or rather, on Eliot’s influence) that more or less destroyed any possibility of a relationship with the literary establishment. As Peter Quartermain says, ‘Basil Bunting’s writing is inevitably political; he is a northern nationalist and his writing is profoundly subversive of the literary establishment.’21 But the literary establishment didn’t have much time for the North either. In 1974 the Director of Northern Arts described as ‘a bit fatuous’ Bunting’s work on behalf of Northumbrian arts. ‘I’m not from these parts,’ he continued. ‘I’m from the Home Counties. I regard my mission as bringing arts to the North. Northumberland is dead, and its so-called folk-culture. So are the pits.’22 He was right about something. Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street just five years later and one particular British working class way of life lasted barely another five.

  Carol Johnson, reviewing Bunting’s Collected Poems, was quick to spot ‘another instance of the death-wish’, seeing clearly the gulf between Bunting’s sense of poetic self and the wider cultural expectations of British poets in Britain: ‘There are no compromises in this book: no competitive posturing for the benefit of a literary clique, none of the defenses of self pity or paranoia against the condition of the outsider. Forty years of going his own way have not diminished this poet’s receptiveness to life, vitiated his sense of humor or precipitated a sterile retreat into sensibility at the expense of intelligence.’23

  Bunting’s contempt for the literary establishment is given unqualified expression in the preface he wrote for Tom Pickard’s 1967 collection of poems, High on the Walls: ‘tradition and fashion have no power over a man who has escaped education, with fresh eyes, a fresh voice, and skill to keep the line compact and musical’. He is writing about Pickard but he could just as well be describing himself. ‘He is poor, and must feel the temptation to dilute his spirit till it is acceptable to the flock of inferior poets who peck up all the gleanings society leaves for literature. He has to endure the hatred of art which persists in the north of England, the insolence of officials, and of those who pirate the money subscribed “for the arts”,’24 he thundered from Wylam in September 1966. It didn’t stop him from becoming President of the Poetry Society a few years later, even though he had very publicly observed that the ‘most insidious charlatans fill chairs and fellowships at universities, write for the weeklies or work for the BBC or the British Council or some other asylum for obsequious idlers. In the Eighteenth Century it was the Church. If these men had to read in public, their empty lines, without resonance, would soon give them away.’25 This may be as true today as it was in 1966 but voicing it wasn’t going to drum up much establishment support for him. As Carol Johnson observed, ‘So long as the practice of literature in England by original and independent outsiders remains as embarrassing as vice, and the endorsement of mediocrity a motivating factor of cultural life, Basil Bunting may continue with every reason for tranquillity of mind to ply the poetics of disregard. England does not deserve him: the only worthy successor to Hopkins … who also had to wait.’26 I’m not sure that Bunting would have recognised the bridge to Hopkins but the point about the ‘poetics of disregard’ is well made.

  Bunting’s voice is particularly important, however, because his poems were designed to be read aloud, to be heard. We learn more about how to read Bunting’s poetry from the way he read it himself than from any other recorded British poet in history:

  Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life, just as music, on the stave, is no more than instructions to the player … Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry … Poetry is seeking to make not meaning, but beauty; or if you insist on misusing words, its ‘meaning’ is of another kind, and lies in the relation to one another of lines and patterns of sound, perhaps harmonious, perhaps contrasting and clashing, which the hearer feels rather than understands; lines of sound drawn in the air which stir deep emotions and which have not even a name in prose.27

  Listen to Bunting once (maybe twice) and you will never again read his poetry without that voice in your head, so inseparable is it from the work. His distinctive cadences are a kind of sub-soundtrack to Briggflatts on which Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas float. It provides a way of reading poetry in both senses. As I was writing this book I was reading Bunting’s near contemporary, the Irish poet Austin Clarke. Inevitably I began to read Clarke in Bunting’s voice, producing some startling effects. Read in Bunting’s voice this stanza from Clarke’s Song of the Books could place you in the Borders if you replace the cod Irish names with those of Wilson and Telfer, the shepherds in Briggflatts:

  Dreaming of Virgil and Blind Homer,

  Schoolmasters cuffed behind a loaning

  Or clamp, hearing the cowherds, dog-boys

  Hurrying by.

  Lurchers at heel, cold whistling fellows,

  Giddy O’Hackett, Coxcomb O’Boland,

  Buffoon O’Malachy, Pighead Moran

  Watched on the sly,

  Irish and English words hobnobbing

  Where dealers buy,

  In Castletown or striking the cobbles

  Of Athenry.28

  The authentic voice of the poem fixes it geographically.

  But more striking still is to read the work of another northern poet, Wordsworth, as if read aloud by Bunting. Wordsworth had a pronounced northern accent. As Hazlitt observed, he talked ‘with a mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, a deep guttural intonation, and a strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine’.29 In a lecture on Wordsworth Bunting observed that

  Two hundred years ago standard English had not been invented and there was neither a BBC nor a system of education determined to make us all talk alike. Wordsworth spoke as men spoke where he was born, with broad accents and a marked R. He kept his native tongue in spite of Cambridge & London & Somerset and Leicestershire. Southerners found it hard to follow his conversation … Wordsworth did not write dialect; but he composed aloud, very loud according to the anecdotes, in the language he spoke, and that was not the Koiné we are all taught to use now.30

  Listening to Wordsworth read in a northern accent reveals a quite different poem from the one you thought you knew and loved. Stephen Logan’s attempt to reconstruct Wordsworth’s authentic reading voice shows very clearly how meaning (not that Bunting would have been interested in that) and certainly understanding of even Wordsworth’s best-known poems change subtly when they are read as the poet himself would have read them. ‘Remember that the word “water” was unknown to him,’ Bunting pointed out to an audience in 1970. ‘He rhymes it with “chatter” and “shatter” because he pronounced it “watter”; and though he spells Yarrow with OW, as the map does, he rhymes it with the word he (and we) pronounce “marra”, and rhyme with “Jarra”.’31

  Wordsworth’s decision to retain that voice despite his many years spent away from the north west of England, and despite the substantial barrier it intruded between the poet and most of his (southern) readership, was a proudly political one, as it was f
or Bunting. Because we have no recordings of poets before Tennyson and Browning, linguistic orthodoxy, received pronunciation, has effectively subsumed authors like Wordsworth. Our entire understanding of Wordsworth has been hijacked and twisted by Oxbridge. As Stephen Logan says, received pronunciation is the voice of an educated minority and ‘the fact that we implicitly and without question read the poets that we read in this accent might mean that we’re subjecting them to a kind of sociological transformation’.32 Wordsworth’s retention of his ‘burr’ is a deliberate expression of allegiance to a region and a class. It is as deliberate a rejection of the establishment as Bunting’s was a hundred years later.

  Poetry, even ‘humorous’ poetry, provides few moments of genuine comedy but undoubtedly listening to Ezra Pound reading Canto XLV (‘With Usura’) is one such. It isn’t difficult to find online and it is very funny. Where on earth did he get that accent?33 Certainly not from his friends and family in Wyncote, Philadelphia. Bunting claims to have changed (with Louis Zukofsky) Pound’s reading voice:

  I can remember our saying something to Pound … in the days when he used to read in the Yeatsian manner, which we didn’t approve of … whenever anybody asked Yeats to read or recite, or when it came into his head to do so, he almost visibly wrapped an imaginary cloak about him and set off on one of those expeditions to the peaks of Parnassus or something, in a voice which owed more to the least desirable habits of the Church of England than to anything else: a terrible pulpit drone.34

  The irony in this is that if Pound sounded like anyone (apart from Yeats) it was Bunting himself. Pound’s pronunciation of the word ‘stone’ and his elongation of his Rs is pure Northumbrian.

  Bunting’s voice is essential to a rich reading of his poems, and in a sense he has been separated from his own work by technology. Until the publication of the Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts in 2009 recordings have not been packaged with the poems, separating the reader from the authentic voice of the read. Bunting’s flame has always shone more brightly in North America than in Britain, and in North America his reading voice is all but incomprehensible. Nevertheless it is hard to disagree with the poet Gael Turnbull who wrote that, ‘it is by the voice that I am held. Not sound in any way cultivated for itself, as separate; but spoken and heard with the full sense that it is only by articulate speech that we can know anything, and that no word exists until it is spoken and heard.’35