I S S U E  9

A Bog of One’s Own: Basil Bunting’s Selected Letters

Alex Niven, ed., Letters of Basil Bunting, Oxford University Press, 2022

Noreen Masud on bluntness and silences in the Letters of Basil Bunting

O

n boxing day 1930, thirty-year-old Basil Bunting wrote to his poetic mentor, Ezra Pound, asking for help. Bunting was running out of money—as usual—and he and his brand-new wife Marian were looking for a place to stay in Italy. Did Pound know of anywhere suitable near Rapallo? ‘Kitchen, bedroom, workroom’, Bunting wrote. ‘Quiet. View. AND a bog of its own’.

It’s characteristic of Bunting in these letters—200 out of 800-or-so extant, carefully selected and annotated by Alex Niven—that he should twist Virginia Woolf’s famous phrase into something blunter and blacker. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, published the previous year, imagined a private room where a woman could write in peace and solitude. Bunting, meanwhile, dreams of a private loo.

For most of Bunting’s life, the bog is a more pressing concern than the study. Niven divides the letters into three parts: Late Spring (with pleasant resonances of an Ozu film), Midway, and Revival. This last part, coinciding with the publication of Briggflatts and Bunting’s stunning late ascent to fame, in his sixties, is by necessity the longest. Until then, for the first two parts, the letters always seem to capture Bunting in mid-flight: from one country to another, one job to another, and—above all—in fugitive escape from the poetry he knows he ought to be writing. Bunting first caught Pound’s eye before he turned twenty-five; certain letters show him sending the older poet work for feedback (see, for instance, p. 20). But these are far, far fewer than the letters which make excuses for not writing poetry. He can’t work, in 1934, in a pension full of under-fives; in 1937 he separates from Marian, who takes the children and leaves Bunting to distract himself by painting his boat. By the Second World War, writing feels futile. ‘I haven’t written a line of verse or a word for publication for years’, he writes to Louis Zukofsky in 1944, ‘ . . . no sense in advising a corpse or exhorting a decomposing civilisation’. By 1953, Bunting has remarried, and pleads the pressures of an aging mother and the new babies of his second wife, Sima: ‘No hope of writing anything that takes time or thought’. His days are filled, he says, with ‘domestic chores’: the bog and its exigencies rear their heads once more. Life simply happens to Bunting, again and again.

Most of this edition, then, reads as an account of early talent not fulfilled: that small, everyday tragedy, almost too common to mention, but no less potent for that. Families get in the way—as they do so often—and wars, and the need to make a living. In this light, the first three-quarters of Bunting’s life is rather a delight to think about because he packs it full: fuller than many of us could hope for or aspire to. When he’s not painting his boat or juggling babies, we find Bunting doing almost everything else imaginable. In his own words to Zukofsky in 1945, he describes how he’s ‘been on almost every British front . . . seen huge chunks of the world . . . been sailor, balloon-man, drill-instructor, interpreter, truck driver in the desert, intelligence officer of several kinds, operations officer to a busy fighter squadron, recorder of the doings of nomadic tribes, labour manager, and now consul in a more or less crucial post’. And he enjoys it. For a while, it seems that this transition from poet to jack-of-all-trades was a happy and fruitful ending. Circumstances, Bunting writes to Dorothy Pound in 1947, ‘obliged me to abandon the reflective life’, but it’s not altogether bad. He’s having a fascinating time in Iran, enjoying colleagues and travel and his absorbing work at the British Embassy there. In fact, he writes, he’s discovered that ‘action is a lust that is hard to abandon’.

In a sense, therefore, the pain of Bunting’s story might lie not in his long fallow periods, but most acutely in his return to poetry. It’s then—approaching old age but fired up by the teenage Tom Pickard—that he begins to think, as he puts it to Zukofsky in 1964, ‘that there isnt so long to write what I want to write’. He lays out his poetic programme in this letter: he owes poems to his dead son Rustam, to lost friends, to the Rawthey valley, and the fells and to lost love. ‘Well,’ he concludes, ‘that looks like the programme of an old man revisiting the scenes of his youth, casting up with his accounts . . . I have no means to carry it out, but I must try’.

And he does try. The trying is audible. Words don’t come easily to Bunting. Over and over again, the same feeling comes through in the letters: a reluctance to speak, to disclose, to share, to write. Bunting apologises constantly for not having written, for having nothing interesting to say. Things are held back by the censor, by his role in the British Embassy, by unknown hands which tear chunks out of the letters. Sometimes he just has nothing to convey. ‘If I do get an idea of any sort I will let you have it at once’, he promises Ezra Pound in 1926. At other times, his silence is more agonised: ‘I am shy of giving partial explanations which often seem to mislead people, which is probably worse than leaving them in the dark’, he apologises to Harriet Monroe in 1930. There is, too, an anxiety about what’s written becoming permanent. His letters, Bunting claims to Zukofsky in August 1949, are just ‘a rather tired man’s turning away from the stupid preoccupations he earns his living by’; ‘I would hate to have nobody with whom I could be unguarded or even foolish’, he adds. Perhaps, also, a prosaic anxiety is in play: the longer you wait to write, the better you feel it has to be. The earlier letters are a testament to the many kinds of silence there can be. The nature of Bunting’s reticence—its underpinning motivations and feelings—changes over time, but the empty pages which result are just the same.

No wonder, therefore, that the extraordinary Briggflatts took so long to appear. In the circumstances, the miracle is that it appeared at all. Briggflatts—distilled, urgent, blunt—bears the marks of this lifelong reluctance to write. It reads like words squeezed out with huge effort, spat out, past something held back or held in the mouth like a marble. 

Thole-pins shred where the oar leans, 
grommets renewed, tallowed; 
halliards frapped to the shrouds.
Crew grunt and gasp. Nothing he sees
they see, but hate and serve. 

What presses through, however—in the letters and in the poetry—is always surprising. In Briggflatts, the similes: ‘sunset the colour of a boiled louse’, ‘stone white as cheese’. They are small and perfect, skinned by the friction of their passage into the world.

We’re lucky, in 2022, to be able to read Briggflatts from a good edition, alongside a good edition of the letters. Niven’s book is the latest in a decade of stunning Bunting scholarship and editorial work: from Richard Burton’s 2013 biography, A Strong Song Tows Us, to Don Share’s 2016 edition of the collected poems. Itself, the Selected Letters is the work of almost a decade: it bears the traces of that deep meditation. Niven’s introduction ably traces the swelling of Bunting scholarship in the 2010s. He sets his account apart from Burton’s 2013 biography by noting how its ‘smooth-edged narrative’ elides just how much of Bunting’s life is unknown and cannot be recovered. ‘This fact’, Niven writes, ‘must be stated plainly rather than tidied up for the sake of narrative flow’. Bunting would have approved. No account of his work could be complete without stubborn silences.

Niven holds these holes open well and widely. In a letter to Pound dated ‘Last of 1928’, Bunting writes ‘I hope to be in Italy sometime in the spring and I hope to visit Rapallo and I hope to see you there. My girl died’. Niven notes that he can ‘find absolutely no context’ for this extraordinary remark, and notes ‘how little we really know of the minutiae of BB’s early years’.

This same care extends throughout the book’s apparatus. The Glossary of Names at the back is useful; the only thing I found myself missing might have been a timeline, at the front, of key events in Bunting’s life. Niven’s footnotes are marvellous: brief, useful and unpedantic. Instead of just translating a quotation from Dante in one of Bunting’s letters, he paraphrases the line and explains the import of the allusion. When Bunting asks Pound to look out for houses, in the 1930 letter with which I began, Niven does not take geographical knowledge for granted in his reader: his footnote maps the locations mentioned on to upland areas and coastal villages. Nor does Niven assume that his reader is going straight through the book from beginning to end; where it is appropriate to repeat an annotation, he does so (for instance, across two letters written to Pound in 1930—p. 37, n. 115, p. 40, n. 121). The value of this book to the most serious scholar of Bunting and of modernism is obvious: hinting at new models of modernist cosmopolitanism, suggesting new connections between (for example) Bunting and Dylan Thomas, foregrounding the crucial relationship with Ezra Pound (and its breakdown over the latter’s anti-Semitism), the edition is uncontroversially a landmark text across studies of modern British and American poetry. More telling, and praiseworthy, is the fact that I could recommend it to a second-year undergraduate without embarrassment.

What the notes also reveal is the immense value of a Bunting editor as steeped as Niven in the culture(s) of north-east England. When Richard Burton writes, in his 2013 biography, that the poet’s ‘northern credentials . . . have become an obstacle to his wider recognition as one of Britain’s great national poets’, we might add that the problem may not in fact lie with how Bunting frames himself, nor with how subsequent critics have framed Bunting, but indeed with Britain’s inability to incorporate the north accurately into its national identity. Burton goes on to describe, in fact, how Wordsworth’s northernness has been forgotten as he has been absorbed into British institutions, and this at the expense of our understanding: his rhymes make more sense when we return his vowels home. Instead of neutralising Bunting’s northern framing, we need to know the north, and use our knowledge of it. For this reason, we are lucky to have Niven’s deeply knowledgeable notes to add nuance, for instance, to Bunting’s laments about his poverty in the 1950s. When Bunting describes to Ezra Pound the new house he has bought in Shadingfield, Wylam, Niven adds in a note that Shadingfield was and is ‘one of the most affluent postcodes in the north-east’. A lesser editor—and/or one outwith the currents of Northern life—would have taken Bunting’s word for it.

Especially valuable, in the introduction’s consideration of Bunting’s style, is its connection of the poet’s ‘curt, coal-black formulations’ in his letters with his ‘long immersion in the northern English soundscape’:

Besides I have got married and my wife eats too. (2/8/32)
What a BORE the hull bloody creation is. (5/3/35)
They have all cut off their own bollocks. (21/3/34)

Niven connects this persona, valuably, to Rowan Atkinson’s ‘caustic, world-weary’ Blackadder. Of all the good reasons to read these letters, the pleasure of Bunting’s stubborn fury is well up there. When Bruce Berlind of Colgate University invites Bunting to speak in 1969, for a fee Bunting considers too low, Bunting storms: ‘I am continually astonished at the arrogance of institutions which offer a poet sums which they would be ashamed to pay a railway porter . . . whether the sum you mention expresses your opinion of poetry or your opinion of Englishmen, it is an insolence which I resent’. Auden and his friends are ‘a useless set of cunts’. Bunting does not even spare himself: after outlining his late-blooming poetic plan to Zukofsky, he ends abruptly by saying: ‘We are all very little more than turds’.

Bluntness can, however, become repulsiveness. It often does with Bunting. In a letter to Lionel Robbins of 1 May 1923, Bunting writes from Paris: ‘The little whores in white silk have been being confirmed all the weekend. It was very amusing to see them going out cock-teasing in their communion dresses’. There are too many examples to list. In a letter of July 1930, he tells Pound, in an offhand postscript, ‘By the way, I got married to that American girl I was with in Venice’—meanwhile, the main text enthuses about ‘the breastless American virgin of twenty’, ogled from a distance. His objectification of extremely young girls sits strangely alongside the love and respect he expresses in his letters to his daughter Roudaba. 

This is just one way in which love adopts strange contours in these letters of Bunting’s. When his father falls ill, he writes to J. J. Adams on 14 January 1924, ‘What a nuisance!’ and complains of the filial duty which delays his plans to travel to London. His extraordinary description of his father’s face and demeanour, though, is harder to parse:

He was brought home in a taxi by his partner, after a very bad attack. He had another attack on the way home & then he lay on the sofa and had another. His face went a dirty grey colour, almost heliotrope, & it looked as though all the flesh had fallen off it & just left the skull in the skin. His eyes sank back into his head behind perpendicular black cliffs. There were huge deep lines where a normal man of sixty has wrinkles. He stared & stared at the back of the sofa & held tight to it.

And when Gael Turnbull tracks down the dedicatee of Briggflatts—Peggy Greenbank, whom Bunting had met and loved when they were children—Bunting is deeply moved. He reunites with Greenbank, and they perhaps have a relationship. Niven sounds a note of caution in his nuanced commentary on Greenbank’s role in Bunting’s broader life, noting that Bunting makes few references to her after 1966 and suggesting that Peggy seems to have been ‘a powerful and relatively short-lived afflatus in his imaginative life’. As always Niven’s reading bears the richness of the long and deep thought, of almost ten years, that he has brought to this work. Afflatus it may be—and I’m reminded (savours again of the bog) of the relationship between ‘afflatus’ and ‘flatulence’—but Bunting’s postscript to Turnbull shows it (even if just for a moment) to be a strong one:

Peculiar recesses there are in a man that he knows very little about. I went into a pub at lunch time, thinking about your letter. While I was drinking my beer a middle-aged man came up and said: Why Grandad, whatever is the matter? And only then I became aware that the tears were running down my face as they havent done since I was a little boy.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. She is author of Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism (OUP, 2022) and a flat place: a memoir (Hamish Hamilton and Melville House, 2023).