{"id":3199,"date":"2013-11-16T10:11:20","date_gmt":"2013-11-16T09:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3199"},"modified":"2016-01-23T18:00:51","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T17:00:51","slug":"a-strong-song-tows-us-the-life-of-basil-bunting-richard-burton-infiniteideas-30-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3199","title":{"rendered":"Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting<\/em> (InfiniteIdeas) \u00a330"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Under Briggflatts<\/i>, Donald Davie declared that Thom Gunn has a public, whereas Basil Bunting has a following.\u00a0 That the former may no longer be guaranteed might have been confirmed with the recent news that August Kleinzahler has had to step in and buy the deceased Gunn\u2019s library, because no-one else wanted to. But those who might have constituted Bunting\u2019s \u2018following\u2019 might have been surprised to hear Richard Burton\u2019s exhaustive new biography of Bunting, being discussed on Radio Three\u2019s flagship arts programme, Night Waves.<\/i> Perhaps more surprised to find \u2018The Poet who Hated\u2019 as the tagline atop one of ALDaily.com\u2019s columns, when Matthew Sperling\u2019s Literary Review <\/i>review of this biography was linked in to the website.\u00a0 And if the spikey poetry of Britain\u2019s last major high modernist still remains a coterie interest, then a biography of the great man is likely to remain such, too. Perhaps that will all change when Faber finally publish Don Share\u2019s long delayed Complete Poems<\/i>.<\/p>\n

If that poetry often seems spikey and difficult, as if shouldering the reader away, then the person who produced that writing was clearly even more so, particularly in the first half of his life.\u00a0 The man whose wife leaves him part way through her pregnancy with that man\u2019s child (the son, Rustam, who died before Bunting ever met him), can\u2019t have been easy.\u00a0 And Burton produces a number of comments from Marion Bunting, his American first wife, which show, from her point of view, just how difficult Bunting was.\u00a0 For most of his marriage to Marion, the family finances were sustained by money sent by his wife\u2019s father sent each month. In 1934, when his father-in-law had brought off a land deal, Bunting wrote to Pound, \u2018To celebrate [the land-deal], he deducted the cost of Xmas presents for the children from the monthly cheque.\u2019\u00a0 At this time, Bunting seems to have lived a life of parallel penury and spendthriftedness:\u00a0 taking taxis when there were buses and travelling first class by train when there was a third class.\u00a0 It is clear that, until the beginning of the second world war, and usually deep in family life and commitments, Bunting made few attempts to find real work, even when provided with a range of introductions;\u00a0 as Pound gave him when Bunting went to New York.<\/p>\n

He was a man who seems, from an early age, to have made an equal art out of biting the hand that fed him. This started at school when Bunting appears almost systematically to have squandered his chances of a place at Oxbridge. \u00a0When his first major poem \u2018Villon\u2019 won the Lyric Prize in Poetry <\/i>in 1931, after considerable personal lobbying by Pound, Bunting wrote to the editor, Harriet Monroe, explaining that the money had gone \u2018some way towards paying the expenses of my daughter\u2019s birth, arriving the same day\u2019; but quarrelling with the judges by saying that Zukovsky should have won the prize.\u00a0 Bunting\u2019s fulminations against T.S.Eliot fill more pages in the biography than it is possible to summarise here; at one point he compares Eliot unfavourably to Kipling, and calls The Criterion <\/i>\u2018an international disaster \u2026 blunting the English intelligence as systematically as the quarterlies of a century ago.\u2019\u00a0 So when Eliot, at Faber, turns Bunting down finally in 1952, one wonders why Bunting is surprised!! And Eliot was only one of many on whom Bunting turned his excoriating critical pen.\u00a0 It was a practice Bunting continued well into his seventies;\u00a0 Burton quotes a letter from 1970 which virtually attacks the Arts Council for giving him a grant!!<\/p>\n

The sense of deliberate waywardness changed with the outbreak of the Second World War.\u00a0 Bunting \u2018rushed across the Atlantic\u2019 from New York to enlist.\u00a0 And he did so, after having been turned down by the Army and Navy on grounds of ill health and poor eye-sight, and only after memorising the sight test for the Air Force.\u00a0 After stints in Hull and Scotland where he was involved in the operation of barrage balloons, he sought and was given a position in Persia. Here, for the next ten years or so, with a short stint in Italy, he was, more or less \u2018Our Man in Teheran\u2019.\u00a0 His knowledge of medieval Persian meant that, initially, he was better at communicating with local tribesmen than with the inhabitants of Teheran.\u00a0 Bunting had \u2018a good war\u2019; and, like others, it seems to have brought out the best in him; as a more than capable administrator, and, as someone who made contacts easily and effectively. At the end of the war, Bunting became The Times <\/i>correspondent in Iran. In both those situations, it\u2019s clear that Bunting worked long hours for not very much remuneration.<\/p>\n

It was during that period that Bunting met and married the fourteen-year-old Sima Alladian.\u00a0 She wasn\u2019t the first fourteen-year-old with whom he\u2019d had a relationship, as Burton tells us of a fourteen-year-old secretary whom Bunting had fallen in love with in his time in Hull.\u00a0 And one of his comments to his first wife, Marian, was that he wished he\u2019d met her when she was ten years younger i.e., in her early teens.\u00a0 In his sixties, he rekindled the relationship with Peggy Greenbank which is at the heart of Briggflatts<\/i>, a relationship of two pubescents.\u00a0Burton shows that Bunting was deeply in love with these young women. When Sima broke off the relationship, at one stage, his secretary locked his small arms away.\u00a0 But official attitudes to the subsequent marriage were just as censorious as we might adopt today.’<\/p>\n

After Mossadeq threw him out of Iran, Bunting converted the car The Times<\/i> had provided him with so that Sima, pregnant with their second child, Thomas, could lie across the back.\u00a0 Then Bunting drove them from Teheran to his mother\u2019s house in Throckley. Burton makes rather less of this astonishing journey than Keith Alldritt in his<\/span> biography of Bunting;\u00a0 and that seems like an opportunity lost.<\/p>\n

The marriage to Sima and the return to the North-East at the start of the fifties with their two children was the start of period of extraordinary poverty for Bunting. At first, he couldn\u2019t get any work, and since he\u2019d lived abroad for most of his life was not eligible for monies from the newly instituted welfare state.\u00a0 And his previous employers, the Foreign Office and The Times <\/i>also did nothing to help;\u00a0 for which Bunting mercilessly satirised the editor, Hugh Astor, in Briggflatts. <\/i>For most of this time, Bunting\u2019s family lived with his mother and for some of that time at least, they owed so much money that his mother\u2019s house was under threat of repossession. It\u2019s quite clear from Burton\u2019s book that Bunting was the absolute opposite of work shy at this period, finally getting menial work as a copy editor at a local printer\u2019s and eventually moving onto the Newcastle Express. <\/i><\/p>\n

In the sixties comes the legendary, fateful meeting with Tom Pickard, that led to Bunting\u2019s writing Briggflatts<\/i> and the publication of that and most of Bunting\u2019s other verse by Stuart Montgomery\u2019s Fulcrum.\u00a0 The reviews for these books are somewhat \u2018over-enthusiastically\u2019 reported by Burton. But the net result was that Bunting was suddenly catapulted into the position of Grand Old Man of British poetry. None of which did an awful lot for his finances, and the university posts he gained in America were always temporary and the fees tempered by the demands put on him.\u00a0 Famously, his \u2018lecturing\u2019 was to read chunks of his favourite poets out loud to his students. \u00a0And August Kleinzahler, who attended Bunting\u2019s classes, notes that the classes got smaller, and ended up in his bungalow! But that was nothing to the scrapes he repeatedly got into with staff in North American universities.<\/p>\n

Finally, one simply wonders \u2018why\u2019.\u00a0 It\u2019s not enough to erect over Bunting\u2019s epic life, the tag-line \u2018The poet who hated\u2019. Though it\u2019s certainly true he had little time for poets normally placed in the Pantheon.\u00a0 When Robert Lowell wanted to visit Bunting, Bunting read through as much of Lowell as he could get hold of and found, \u2018\u2026not a single poem worth a damn.\u2019.\u00a0 He found Geoffrey Hill \u2018empty\u2019.\u00a0 When asked to judge the Arvon Poetry Competition, in the 1,800 entries he was asked to read, Bunting found five lines that he liked.<\/p>\n

The question has to be asked where all this stemmed from.\u00a0 Some have speculated that Bunting might have been bi-polar.\u00a0 And perhaps it is the way of the early twenty-first century to turn to the pharmacopoeia to provide answers.\u00a0 That seems like a question that Richard Burton can\u2019t answer in the midst of this magnificently researched book, which is clearly a labour of love. Burton tells a complicated tale mostly clearly and mostly well, and this is ans near as we are likely to get to being a definitive biography. In the early chapters, Burton is often too keen to show all the research he has done and we meet characters such Graham Wallace, who was clearly an exceptional lecturer at LSE.\u00a0 There are also moments where Burton is far to keen to throw in wild interpolations, such as, \u2018Is it an exaggeration to suggest that Mossadeq\u2019s expulsion of Bunting and the refusal of The Times <\/i>to support him set back diplomacy for sixty years in what I\u2019m afraid we still call the Middle East?\u2019 \u00a0But this is a good book about a man who was a character on a gargantuan style, of a kind it would be difficult to envisage in the early twenty-first century.\u00a0 And finally we are left with the poetry, of which Donald Davie also said, \u2018Briggflatts <\/i>is where English poetry has got to, it is what English poets must assimilate and go on from.\u2019 It is certain that Bunting will be with us in a hundred years time; as he write in \u2018On the Fly-Leaf of Pound\u2019s Cantos\u2019, \u2018There they are, you will have to go a long way round\/if you want to avoid them.\u2019
\n 
\nIan Pople<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Under Briggflatts, Donald Davie declared that Thom Gunn has a public, whereas Basil Bunting has a following.\u00a0 That the former may no longer be guaranteed might have been confirmed with the recent news that August Kleinzahler has had to step in and buy the deceased Gunn\u2019s library, because no-one else wanted to. But those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nRichard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (InfiniteIdeas) \u00a330 - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=3199\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Richard Burton, A Strong Song Tows Us: The Life of Basil Bunting (InfiniteIdeas) \u00a330 - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In Under Briggflatts, Donald Davie declared that Thom Gunn has a public, whereas Basil Bunting has a following.\u00a0 That the former may no longer be guaranteed might have been confirmed with the recent news that August Kleinzahler has had to step in and buy the deceased Gunn\u2019s library, because no-one else wanted to. 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