Bunting, Jefferies, Edward Thomas

Books, like events, can be overtaken by others more pressing. Basil Bunting's letters were a diversion but not a priority for me. Having reached the end of the first part, I'll go back to them one day when more attractive propositions are harder to find. It's a good place to leave it, in December 1938, just as Bunting has told Ezra Pound where he stands vis a vis Ezra's unpalatable views,

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one individual guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-Jews have contributed their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty...

Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorish, that I recall in history was base...

and so, whatever one might decide about Bunting's poetry in due course, he has made his point and deserves much credit for that. I'm still not convinced I'm going to like him but that one letter makes the £1 I spent on the book £1 well spent and I'm glad of having read it.

--

There's an equally memorable, if entirely different passage in Restless Human Hearts by Richard Jefferies. There are several but one in particular for me. These shifts into meditation in some loose way are reminiscent of how Tolstoy makes his books the length they are, extrapolating lines of thought at intervals in his involved narrative.   

I've had to make a diagram to keep track of the relationships and dynamics between the characters in Restless Human Hearts. The title is rightly in the plural. Quite how all the infatuations relate to each other remains to be seen but I'm ready to guess that the vain, glamorous but hideous Carlotta is to be contrasted with the almost unearthly Heloise. 

The second part has already become melodramatic with a duel and a tragic riding accident and critics who find the book flawed- as only Jefferies's second attempt- might have a point but, such reservations aside, it still makes for great reading.

The pages that I was most taken by reflecting,

What a curious system it is to teach us, not only at school, but at home, and in the early part of our life, ideas and feelings which we must afterwards spend years in endeavouring to unlearn...

and the next long paragraph,

We know so much nowadays. Everything has been done. Every possible emotion has been felt in every imaginable manner. Every combination conceivable of human relationship has been worked out, and the quarry is empty....

And that was in 1875.

That by 2026 it seems to us that maybe it wasn't quite the case then suggests that if it seems so now, it might not be so yet, either. And thus might never be. As with Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the 'end of history', we are all tempted to think we've arrived at a crucial point only for the next generation to find themselves in among the next pile of theories, wonders, crises and absurdities. It must be a state of mind to think everything has been done rather than a piece of cultural analysis.

Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Derrida then Baudrillard all came and went but none of them turned out to be the last word. To arrive at Boulez two hundred years after Bach shows that it's not always linear progress. Surely pop music has run its course but only older people whose time has come and gone would say so. Mark Radcliffe on Sounds of the 70's said that the Bowie and T. Rex sounded so 'fresh' and could have been made now. But, no, they sounded tremendous because they were from the 1970's.

 

Alongside the Jefferies novel, I'll go further into the Edward Thomas biography of him that I remember the first chapter of- the detailed, evocative description of Wiltshire- which is gorgeous. And from there, we will see how far Jefferies Studies can go. There's no shortage of material. 

However, two other books due this week will be making their demands. 

Oh Mother, What Did You Do? Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn by Graham Dixon promises a reassessment that will be interesting to assess, mostly because it depends what sort of assessment it reassesses.

Paul Bessell's Finding Dad might not prove to be uplifting, it being Peter Bessell's son's findings about his life which is likely to be louche, salacious and probably scandalous although it depends where one's scandal threshold is set. The story of Jeremy Thorpe, my teenage political hero, seems a bit quaint, a bit Midsomer Murders, post-Boris, in the Age of Trump and so quite cosy. We will see. I wouldn't have ordered it if I expected it to be a vindication of Bessell including evidence for his beatification.  

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.   

Bargain Bunting

Yesterday I bought a book in a bookshop. That wouldn't have sounded remarkable years ago but it's extremely rare now. For a long time I've been much more likely to buy a cup of tea in a bookshop than a book. It's my fault when bookshops close and I have no recourse to disappointment. The Letters of Basil Bunting were in among sundry sale items for £1 in Waterstones and I even had to think about it at that but it looked worth a try. The sticker underneath the one that said £1 said £8. Today I looked it up on Amazon and there it's £37.50.

It's possible the letters are a reverse way in to understanding Bunting. I derive about as much from the poems as I do from his mate, Ezra, and that's not much. But the likes of Donald Davie and Thom Gunn held him in high regard and he is a 'major' figure of C20th poetry, if in a tradition that has never done much for me.

Any friend of Ezra's comes with any amount of warning signs and to call Bunting a maverick might be an understatement. But his political imprisonment was not for the same reason's as Pound's. He was a Quaker, pacifist and conscientious objector. I still can't help being suspicious of him, his severity and acerbic attitudes bringing to mind Geoffrey Hill, who he looks a bit like in old age and shares some aesthetic principles with, I'd guess.

So maybe the book will be enlightening. Whether it will lead to a Damascean conversion to Modernism, 'high church' seriousness and the elitism of difficult poetry remains to be seen and seems unlikely but there's a limit to have far one can get reading more and more about a handful of favourites and time spent outside of a comfort zone must be at least occasionally necessary even if it turns out to be unproductive. 

For a long time I've thought of Bunting and his like as generally a bad thing for poetry while not in the least objecting to that minority who write, read and enjoy such esoteric work. I suppose I take an equal if opposite view of those whose writing is too obvious. So maybe I'll report back on any alteration that this bargain buy brings about, either that I've embarked on an in-depth study full of enthusiasm or that my prejudices were only confirmed.