A strong song tows us: the Life of Basil Bunting (2013) by Richard Burton.Infinite press ltd.
This is a fine book. The narrating voice is
enthusiastic, friendly, critical, knowledgeable. Don Share’s use of
“companionable” on the dust jacket is an inspired description.
Basil Bunting’s position in the history of
twentieth century poetry is decidedly odd. At the end of his long active life, he could wryly comment
on a circle of readers that had been painfully small, but which had consisted
of Pound, Zukofksy, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, David Jones and Hugh
MacDiarmid. His collected poems in
the Blood Axe edition (2000) only runs to 176 pages (the book is bolstered by
some ‘uncollected’ pieces to 238 pages but it’s still tiny compared with the
collected poems of any of his friends).
Poets from Ed Dorn, Thom Gunn to Alan
Ginsberg, to Roy Fisher and Tom Pickard
admired his work. Hugh Kenner not only dedicated his book on British
poetry, the Sinking island, to him, but thought his obscurity a
national disgrace. Donald Davie called his history of poetry in Britain from
1960-1988, Under Briggflatts,
acknowledging that Bunting’s great poem dwarfed its contemporaries.
By
the time he died there were numerous well-informed voices arguing he was one of
the greats of the twentieth century and Briggflatts
was as good as or equal to The Waste Land, Four
Quartets or any other poem you want to put beside it.
He died in 1985. And then, he disappeared.
Compared to the outpourings of books about
someone like Ted Hughes, it’s a fascinating glimpse of how poetry world
works.
In the years since his death the number of
book length studies of his work can be counted on one hand (there are two that
I know of, possibly three
depending on your definition). The number of books devoted to him might require both hands to count them, if you are generous and include slim
pamphlets like “Descant on Rawthey's Madrigal” or “Basil Bunting, a Northern Life” in the list,
both of which can cost you more pounds or dollars on the second hand book
market than they have pages. (This is not an exaggeration. Descant’ does not have fifty pages but it cost me fifty pounds.)
The Faber Collected has been endlessly
delayed, new books about Bunting might be advertised by they tend to disappear
unpublished. So for a poet of his
stature there is no critical collected or complete poems to set beside his old
friends. There is no edition of his letters. The only book length
biography, Kieth Alldritt’s The
Poet as Spy (1998) was described to me as “so inaccurate as to be worthless.”
So a full length biography was long overdue
and the chances of it being awful or just disappointing were fairly good. The good news is that Burton’s
biography is a long way from awful, in fact it’s very good. It’s readable, and
if you knew nothing about Bunting or his work and you ignore Bunting’s own
belief that the biography of a poet is an unnecessary distraction from the
poems, this book should have
“START HERE” written on it.
Alldritt’s biography is described and
dismissed in two crushing one sentence summaries. The first is worthy of Roy Forster: “That said, Aldritt’s
biography is a good story, and it subject would undoubtedly have approved of
its sacrifice of accuracy to imaginative narrative”(p6). Like Forster, Burton is good at the art of the footnote. The footnote to
that sentence adds: “Almost every verifiable assertion in Alldritt’s book ,
from Thomas’ entry on the Bunting’s birth certificate to the cause of death
cited on his death certificate, is wrong.”(Intro, fn 8. P531)
For anyone who hasn’t read Alldritt this
isn’t a problem, but if you have, then the book hangs round like an unwanted
guest who wants to be involved in the conversation and isn’t getting the hint he should depart.
Incidentally, if you do want to know the cause
of death, you’ll have to read Burton’s footnotes.
The first task of the biographer is to get
the facts right and create the scaffolding of a chronology. With Bunting this is difficult. The
outline of the life is fairly straightforward and well known. But the devil is
in the detail. There is a lack of evidence: Bunting didn’t keep a diary and liked
to burn letters, urging his correspondents to burn his. There is also the
problem of Bunting’s ‘diplomatic years’.
Although his RAF record was released in 2010, exactly what he was doing
In Persia in the early 1950s might never be known.
If that isn’t problem enough, what evidence
there is often partial, incomplete and contradictory. The Elizabethans believed ‘lover liar poet” were synonyms,
and Bunting was obviously not above embroidering a story. Did D.H. Lawrence
really feed him hash cakes? Nor can other witnesses be taken at face value. His
first wife’s testimony seems anything but objective which is
understandable in human terms but difficult for a biographer.
Burton deftly works his way through this
problem. He gives contending
versions, weighs their merits when he can, has obviously worked hard to track
down “objective facts” and sensibly refuses to get bogged down in the
impossibility of trying to discover exactly what got Bunting arrested in Paris,
or how many countries he was arrested in and what for.
It’s a delicate balancing act, mostly
pulled off with a cheerful aplomb. At times it seems to falter: having proved
Bunting’s habit of embellishing a story,
Burton seems willing to take everything he wrote from and about Persia
as fact. It’s true his letters
suggest the world lost a great book on Persia, but while Burton writes: “You
can’t imagine he was making this stuff up.”(302) I’ve bent too many similar
stories; so I can.
Scaffolding in place, create the character.
And here Burton does a good job, with an awkward, sometimes baffling subject.
The book raises questions the evidence won’t answer. Burton quotes Roy Fisher:
“..But there was also the inaccessible sense of a demon of delinquency and
improvidence –the absences, the goings to ground, the impulsive initiatives,
the periods of yielding to circumstance in a curiously-I’m tempted to say
suspiciously –passive manner. A sort of anti-matter countering the will to
achieve good things, and in some way ministering to it.”(454)
But can never really explain the essential
conundrum Fisher outlines: there’s an almost willful self-destructiveness at
work. Before and after Persia BB seems to have regularly shot himself in the
foot. It’s almost as if he needed
to lash out; at school, at Eliot, at the arts council, at the universities that
hired him, at the students he was hired to teach. But why he did this is remains a mystery. Burton suggests
some kind of mental problem, as early as his run in with his headmaster at
Leighton park “Bunting’s parents had clearly feared for their son’s sanity for
some years” (p51), but it’s dropped though the incident itself is explored with
an admirable thoroughness.
Likewise his love affair with Peggy, which
Burton describes as one of the great love stories of the century, seems
curiously off stage. The only evidence for their youthful passion is in Briggflatts, and while there was a reunion after the poem’s publication,
it slips past us.
A literary biography has to deal with the
work. It stands or falls on the
biographer’s ability to do so on two fronts. The first is the extremely
delicate task of trying to relate fictive texts to lived experience and using
the texts as biographical evidence. The second is to give the reader some sense
of why that work is important.
Burton is very very good on the second one.
He provides the evidence for the reception of poems and books. Unlike Harriet Munroe who returned some
of Bunting’s marked ‘Ret’d too
complicated for me”(p133), Burton’s close reading of the poems, particularly Villon is able to demonstrate why the
poem is good, and what is most characteristic of Bunting’s poems. As someone
who already thinks Villon is excellent,
it’s almost comforting to read someone explaining why it is. If you didn’t know
the poem, after reading this you’d want to find it and read it. Burton also
resists the temptation to write an essay on each poem, though using the
structure of Briggflatts to shape the
book makes the whole book an essay on Briggflatts.
Using the poetry as biographical evidence
is more difficult. Burton is wary, and judicious but his problem can be easily
demonstrated.
The evidence for Bunting’s adolescent
relationship with Peggy Greenbank is in Briggflatts,
and no where else any more. Burton writes: ”It is a great twentieth century love story and it is commemorated
in one of the century’s most influential and moving poems. Indeed it is a love
story that is contained almost entirely within
the poem”(P33 his italics) The within suggests something that isn’t
explained. But it’s assumed that
what is described happened.
Later
Tanya Crossey is named three times in two pages (522/3) and it’s not til
the third that she is identified in any way, as “Bunting’s young friend”. This is a minor stylistic tic, but
anyone who has read Alldritt will remember meeting her, opening Bunting’s door
dressed in her underwear (188). Alldritt gives no source for this story. Alldritt’s book manages to avoid and
simultaneously ghost an evil innuendo.
Burton buries the slur, but
does the burial in a foot note where suddenly the fictive nature of Briggflatts invalidates itself as
evidence:
“I have come across no evidence (with the
possible exception of Briggflatts itself,
although that is a poem) that these
girls ever became more than companions. He was intensely attached to some of
them but there is no evidence of any of them became either muses of
lovers.”(Chapter three, fn 39, Page 567 Italics in the original.)
It’s a fine book. There are a couple things
I was surprised to miss: one of my favorite Bunting stories is about his appearance
at Tom Pickard’s trial: Alldritt tells it briefly. Pickard tells it
dramatically in More Picks than Prizes
building to a great exit line. But you can’t have everything.
A reader not particularly interested in Bunting
will still find a lot to think about. Bunting’s long life, and his dedication to
the craft of poetry, meant that not only was he a part of the modernist
revolution, but he lived long enough to see the institutionalizing of poetry:
in Arts Council Funding, in the Poetry Society, and in the development of creative writing
programs in universities. That none of these could deal with Bunting, who
epitomized everything they were supposed to celebrate, support and stand for,
is a damning comment on them, not on Bunting’s awkwardness.
A final point, the book raises the question
of why Bunting seems to have disappeared. Burton argues that Bunting’s
presentation as a specifically Northern Poet, and as a Quaker poet, have isolated
him. I think he’s wrong. The academic process thrives on such distinctions. Critic
A writes that Bunting is a Quaker, critic B demolishes A’s argument, but C
comes along, supports A by refuting B, developing a new argument which A and D can
then attack. And so it goes on. The absence of poetry as good as Briggflatts from the general knowledge
of poetry, says so much about how the world of poetry works, how academic
treatments at both school and tertiary levels work, and what it says is not
complementary to any of them.
(But I want to come back to that last point later. It's no flaw of the book. Read it.)
