A Strong Song Tows Us Read online

  Many of us are ‘held by the voice’, but we are held also by the performance. To those who know Bunting’s voice only from his readings there is something puzzling about Christabel Dennison’s observation in 1925 that he talked with ‘the slow studied imitation of … the Oxford accent’.36 What sort of an accent is that for the proud northerner who had been expressing contempt for ‘southron’ ways since at least 1916? His friend, the poet Denis Goacher, threw some light on this:

  His own Northumbrian accent was a manufactured one. He had, in fact, a very refined voice but had two things in mind when reading his poetry aloud. He was very careful to keep the flat A’s and a bit likely to roll his R’s, but he certainly did not, in normal speech, roll his R’s to the prodigious extent that he did when reading his poems. I never heard any sort of Northumbrian sound like that! … Now, that is very interesting as – what shall we say – autobiography? He is really tracing back his past, recovering the accent he was born with, with a layer of nostalgia. But, I repeat, there is an over-emphasis on regionality, because he wished to make a point against Southern speech. Now, I think we could agree that we none of us make our best points by being against something. So, to my mind, he spoilt the readings of his poems by concentrating on those two things. If this poem does not stand up without being read in some sort of Northumbrian accent, then it is ridiculously limited – and it is not so.37

  I have come round to Goacher’s view on this. There are none of these flat As and rolled Rs in his interviews. In fact his ‘normal’ voice is exactly as Christabel Dennison described it, middle class Home Counties. Bunting the poet can rarely be accused of reaching for effect; Bunting the performer always did. This is one of the many contradictions in Bunting’s life and art. On the one hand we need his voice to read a poem like Briggflatts; on the other reading it in his ‘poetry reading’ voice limits the poem.

  * * *

  Other factors have contributed to Bunting’s current neglect. Bunting in later life reflected on the penchant that his generation of poets (and the previous generation, Pound’s) had for the classics:

  The world doesn’t spend all its time reading books, and we all assumed that they do. We have far too many references to things. There we tumbled below Yeats. Yeats is very careful. He produces very few references to previous literature. His references are those you can find in the life around you, and that is much easier, and much better, and more provident, especially where literary fashions change. Eliot above all, of course, is using other literature all the time. Pound, to a considerable extent; Zukofsky, to some extent; me also – and that will weigh against us as the century goes on. Which of us will be remembered at this time in the next century I can’t, for the life of me, imagine. I think it’s quite probable that all those I’ve mentioned will be remembered, but your notion of what will be remembered is often very likely to be wrong.38

  He was confident that he would be in that select group. As he said in a television interview in 1984, ‘If you have practically no readers, but those readers were people like Yeats and Pound, and Eliot, and Carlos Williams, well, you’re pretty confident some notice will be taken sooner or later.’39

  Furthermore, his association with Ezra Pound didn’t help, even though, as we shall see, he forcefully rejected Pound’s politics. He was no more sympathetic to the reactionary giants of twentieth-century poetry, Yeats, Pound and Eliot, than he was to the group of poets that emerged in the 1930s to replace them – Auden, MacNeice and Spender. Additionally, his total output makes a slim volume. It could have been even slimmer; he wished in later life that he had discarded more. He wasn’t a lover of Shelley’s poetry but he appreciated Shelley’s predicament: ‘I’m sure when Shelley drowned he thought “If only I could get my hands on the works. So I could destroy them. They’re no good.”’40

  Another barrier is Pound’s observation that his verse is ‘more thoughtful than toffee-lickers require … much more so than the public desires’,41 which points to ‘difficulty’ that is more apparent than real. And, of course, Bunting’s best poems are long and complex and do not lend themselves readily to anthologies.

  John Seed points to more complex social, political and cultural crosscurrents that combined to isolate Bunting from the literary world:

  Bunting’s predicament was much more than a matter of his own perversity or his isolation from the networks of the English literary establishment. It was more complex than that, involving the intersection of multiple histories – an individual biography of immense complexity, literary modernism’s English demise and its continuation by the political values of the extreme right, a sense of the futility of poetry in a time of crisis, the deep elitism and savage torpor of powerful literary institutions, the disruptive impact of the Depression and the Second World War on a particular generation.42

  All true, but if we have to point to one single obstacle to proper recognition of Bunting’s importance in his lifetime, and his near-disappearance since, his auto-regionalisation is the culprit.

  Ezra Pound wrote both historically and prophetically to Henry Swabey in 1946, ‘What the … hell CAN you say for a pen Empire that lets best poet of the generation Bunting (B. Bunting) disappear sans trace, and no breath of curiosity even among the ten alleged literates still on the dung heap.’43 More recently, and temperately, Peter Quartermain summed up Bunting’s problem well:

  Bunting is both outside and inside the culture/the koiné at the same time, using what he subverts, subverting what he uses … The Northumbrian writer insofar as he nourishes his difference, his distinctness, his Northumbrian-ness, like any outcast views society politically, yet at the same time – if he is to write at all, if he is to be heard or to be read – he is obliged to work within the culture too, presenting himself perhaps as apolitical. Prefiguring subversion, his work equally signifies order. Which is why there are so many apparent contradictions, conflicts, and inconsistencies in Bunting’s work – between the private personal verse, individual, and the public; between the strictly local and the koiné; between the insistence on the primacy of sound and the demand that the poem have matter.44

  His deployment of his voice, as we have seen, was not straightforward. The nature of Bunting’s regionalism is even more complex. On the one hand, as Matthew Hart has noted, it is only possible because of a life lived largely elsewhere, ‘Briggflatts, in the end, can’t be reduced to the poetry of the North. It is only through its protagonist’s metropolitan sojourn that the poem is able, in retrospect, to measure the rhythm of city and country alike.’45

  On the other hand it is possible to see it as a kind of platform from which the poet engaged with the rest of the world. As Donald Wesling says, Bunting is ‘a provincial internationalist, because from his Northern vantage he looks over the top of London for cultural values, to Italy, Persia, America. If Southron thinking is metropolitan and represents the singleness of the State, for him Northern thinking connects whatever is marginal, local, plural, adulterated, and inconvenient, with the imaginativeness of the global modernist avant-garde.’46 Either way it was no mere isolationism. Bunting didn’t retreat to Northumbria in order to avoid everywhere else.

  It is the task of the rest of this book to show how Bunting navigated around these contradictory impulses. Bunting was a committed Northumbrian and I hope this book will both leave him there and yet liberate him from it. No great surprise there. Small, disorganised raiding parties have been robbing the people of the Borders of their treasures for centuries.

  ONE

  GUILTY OF SPRING

  Drudge at the mallet, the may is down,

  fog on fells. Guilty of spring

  and spring’s ending

  amputated years ache after

  the bull is beef, love a convenience.

  It is easier to die than to remember.

  Briggflatts I

  KHAKI FEVER, MARCH 1900

  I was born amid rejoicings for the relief of Ladysmith during the Boer War. That perhaps serves t
o date me.1

  By the end of February 1900 British forces had been fighting a vicious war in Southern Africa for over four months. The British public’s thirst for revenge for the humiliating defeat at the hands of the Boers at Majuba Hill in 1881 (egged on by a hysterical Daily Mail) was overwhelming, but the British were struggling. The Boers won a series of important battles and by the end of October 1899 a garrison of fifteen thousand British troops led by Lieutenant General Sir George White was besieged in a place hardly anyone in the United Kingdom had heard of, Ladysmith.

  This war was unusual. The quality of photographic images sent back from the front was unprecedented thanks to a combination of new film technology and the sharp edges caught by Africa’s fierce sunlight. Moreover for the first time ever domestic audiences could see moving images from the front and could appreciate the full scale and bloodiness of battles fought six thousand miles away.2 A wave of irrepressible jingoism overtook the nation, borne up by an enormous flood of stories, poems and music-hall songs.

  During the war’s early stages ‘khaki fever’ raged throughout the land. Kipling’s ‘Absent-Minded Beggar’, which Mrs Beerbohm Tree recited nightly and to which Arthur Sullivan wrote accompanying music, earned at least a quarterof- a-million pounds for soldiers’ wives and children. Sub-Kiplingesque bombast formed a staple of music-hall fare, a particular favourite being Will Dalton and F. J. Willard’s ‘A Hot Time in the Transvaal To-night’:

  There is trouble in the Transvaal,

  And England wants to know

  Whether Mister Kruger or

  John Bull shall boss the show.3

  Khaki fever or not, the British suffered one humiliating defeat after another and sustained massive battle casualties as well as one thousand men lost to a typhoid epidemic caused by drinking water from rivers that bobbed with the rotting corpses of soldiers and horses. The public was baffled by and angry at the continuing tactical ineptness of the generals on the ground.

  Troops led by Sir Redvers Buller blundered into a disastrous defeat at Spion Kop on 24 January and another at Vaalkrantz on 5 February, but eventually broke into Ladysmith on 28 February. The following day news of the relief of Ladysmith reached the world, sparking off celebrations across the Empire. The Manchester Guardian described the celebrations following the relief of Ladysmith:

  To describe with any degree of adequacy the excitement in London, and indeed throughout the country, consequent upon the announcement yesterday of the relief of Ladysmith would be an almost impossible task … Those around the Mansion House were electrified, and the crowd grew by thousands every minute. Men and women went frantic with delight, hats were thrown into the air, handkerchiefs were waved, and the cheers became a mighty roar … The City was excited throughout the day, and last night there was constant cheering in the streets. Nearly every omnibus and cab driver had a red, white, and blue ribbon attached to his whip. Many pedestrians were carrying Union Jacks, and everywhere there was an air of rejoicing which could not be mistaken.4

  The new century was still young but the relief of Ladysmith was by a long way its biggest event so far. The celebrations were by no means confined to the capital. ‘The scene in [Newcastle’s] Grainger Street was unusually exciting, tradespeople rushing out of their places of business to procure war editions, and people assembled in groups to talk over the news. Cheers were loud and frequent.’5

  On 1 March 1900, a cold, dark Thursday, in Scotswood-on-Tyne in the north east of England, as a delirious Empire celebrated the relief of Ladysmith, Annie Bunting gave birth to her first child, Basil Cheesman Bunting. 6

  Bunting was born as Britain was waking up to the fact that the old order was vanishing. The longest reigning monarch in British history was close to the end of her life. Her empire was at its height, with a quarter of the world’s population and twelve million square miles in its control, but it faced challenges that presaged its rapid decline. British politics was entering a period of crisis on many fronts – the constitution, Ireland, rapid militarisation and the inexorable rise of suffragetism, the labour movement and socialism. The 1890s had seen a profound agricultural depression during which wheat prices dropped to half the level of those enjoyed by the previous generation of arable farmers. In the cities overcrowding and deplorable housing conditions were creating a new kind of depravity that polite society was only just discovering, in books such as Andrew Mearns’ Bitter Cry of Outcast London, books that were in themselves fostering a new kind of poverty tourism as the middle classes shivered deliciously at the lurid behaviour of the underclass, while at the same time complaining that the most shocking activities of the remotest corners of the Empire were beginning to be enacted on their back doorsteps. Business was just recovering from a severe recession during which Baring Brothers had to be rescued by its competitors, led by the Bank of England, because of its overexposure to Argentinian securities (bankers don’t read history). Prospects for the British economy were murky as foreign competition overran domestic suppliers in both agriculture and manufacturing.7 The muscles of the relatively new trades union movement were beginning to ripple, the great dock strike of 1889 being still hot in the memories of workers and employers alike (the dockers had won). There was a huge amount of progress in the period, of course. Wages overall had risen by about a third in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Health statistics were positive, class distinctions were being slowly eroded, crime levels were dropping, although in all these areas there were still enormous regional variations. In the first ten years of the twentieth century the average wage in Durham, where agriculture successfully cohabited with mining and manufacturing, was nearly twentythree shillings whereas in Wiltshire, which was almost exclusively rural, it was just sixteen shillings, a huge difference; and this was just the average wage.8 The arts had entered a period of revolution as modernism began to sweep away Victorian realism, much of it drawing on startling new theories of the unconscious that had recently been unveiled by Boris Sidis and Sigmund Freud. The social world was being transformed as new forms of transport (and therefore of warfare) were developed9 and electrical power began to be deployed in the home. With hindsight, of course, it’s possible to point to almost any period in the last three hundred years as one of profound change but it is clear that people in the early twentieth century themselves identified a significant transition. Two months after Bunting’s birth one journalist wrote that, ‘we stand upon the threshold, not so much of a new century – for that merely signifies a mechanical calculation of time – as of a new era in political and social life’.10 For some it was the beginning of the end. For others – artists, writers, musicians, activists, scientists, academics, businessmen – it was the longed-for beginning of a new beginning, the birth of a new century. It is no accident, I think, that Basil Bunting linked his birth to an iconic moment in British imperial history. He was to become an important messenger of a new world order.

  PLATEFULS OF TAPIOCA, 1900–1912

  Bunting’s parents, Annie Cheesman and Thomas Lowe Bunting, had been married at the parish church of St Michael and All Angels in Newburn on 1 November 1898. Annie was a striking woman. A photograph taken of her at twenty-six, a year after Bunting was born, shows her to have been dark and slim, with a strong chin. Bunting himself had a Cheesman face and photographs of him in later life show a striking resemblance to his maternal grandfather Isaac.11

  Annie, born in 1876, was the fourth daughter of Ann Forster and Isaac Taylor Cheesman, manager of the Throckley Colliery, with strong Border family connections. Ann and Isaac were both born in 1844 in the village of Ryton, seven miles west of Newcastle, on the south bank of the River Tyne. In 1881 they were living in Bank Top Cottages, Throckley, on the opposite side of the river, with their six children and Isaac’s brother Edward, who was also a mining engineer. By 1891 another daughter, Maggie, had been added to the family and Edward had moved on to the Blaydon Main Colliery. Mining ran deep in the Cheesman family. Two of Bunting’s Cheesman uncles, Nicholas
and Matthew, were also mine managers in the Throckley pits. Bunting’s grandmother, Ann, died in October 1892 and Isaac remarried in 1894. He died in the summer of 1916.

  Bunting’s father, Thomas Lowe Bunting, was born on 6 April 1868, the son of Mary Elizabeth Lowe, from Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire, and Joseph Bunting, a draper from Heanor, in Derbyshire but deep in D. H. Lawrence country.12 In 1881, when Thomas was twelve, Joseph’s business, Tag Hill Draper’s Shop, employed a milliner, an apprentice and a general assistant who all lived with Joseph and Mary and their children, Thomas and Harriet, above the shop. Mary died at the age of fifty-three two years later. It appears that Joseph’s business failed as a result of his heavy drinking and he died at the age of fifty-four when his son was just nineteen. Thomas had to borrow from one of his uncles in order to pursue his medical qualifications in Edinburgh.

  The 1901 census shows the Bunting family to have been prosperous, with an Irish male assistant medical practitioner, Lachlan Gollan, two female servants (Margaret Cowell and Isabella Bainbridge) and a further female ‘visitor’, Isabella Young. By 1911 the household included an Australian assistant medical practitioner, John Gormley, and two young female servants, Bessie (cook) and Barbara Clark (housemaid). The family’s relationships with these young girls was deeply traditional: ‘My mother’s servants came to her very young, daughters of pitmen, often from her own native village. They were paid very little – about enough to buy themselves one walkingout dress every year. The rest of their clothes were provided, and of course their food. But when they married, they were married from our house and a good part of their trousseau was provided by us.’13