modernist-rural-

Nikhil Govind


In this paper I will concern myself chiefly with Basil Bunting’s (1900-1985), Briggflatts (1964), while also briefly glancing at the lineation of an occasionally similar theme in William Carlos William’s (1883-1963) Paterson, finally published in full in 1992, and Allen Tate’s (1899-1979) The Swimmers (1953). This common theme that I am concerned with tracing out is that of the conceptualizations and investments in the idea(l) of the “rural”. I hope to investigate in a preliminary manner how this notion of the rural may be positively conceptualized (if at all- or is it only the obverse of the urban?), and what the criteria of such a “rurality” may be- especially with relations to other literary questions such as language, history, the polity, and the tasks and pleasures of personal memoration. As said I will focus chiefly on Bunting, while occasionally invoking Paterson and The Swimmers.
I do not have a simple answer as to why I bring these works together- by the end of the paper I hope it will be made clearer, but for now, perhaps the biographical facts of literary history might start one off. It is well known that Basil Bunting and William Carlos Williams poets were old friends and mutual admirers from the nineteen twenties onward. Bunting, for example, was to write to his colleague the poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), in 1951-“ My excellence, if I have one, isn’t new or striking…I’d say I remember the musical origin of poetry, the singing side of it, better than anybody else except Ezra and Carlos Williams” (Forde 1973: 125). I will discuss Allen Tate, who wasn’t directly part of this circle, but who was, though perhaps in a different way, equally invested in the question of the “agrarian”, in a separate section.
The theme of the space- (if not perhaps the rural qua rural) is central to Paterson too. In that same year of 1951, Carlos Williams was to write in his A Statement by William Carlos Williams about the poem Paterson:

Thus the city I wanted as my object had to be one that I knew in its most intimate details. New York was too big, too much a congeries of the entire world’s facets. I wanted something nearer home, something knowable. I deliberately selected Paterson as my reality. My own suburb was not distinguished or varied enough for my purpose. There were other possibilities but Paterson topped them (William Carlos Williams 1951: xiii).

Speaking then in telegraphic fashion, one conventionally understands modernism to be interwoven with the names of the great urban centers- Paris (especially in the twenties), New York, London. Sometimes, these legendary urban spaces can be looked at even further down a microscope- not just London, but the northern part of Soho, Charlotte’s street, perhaps Klenfeldt’s Fitzroy Tavern (Alldritt 1998: 155). But what is overlooked is that many of these same major players- Ezra Pound (1885-1972), D H Lawrence (1885-1930) and Bunting to name a few, moved rather quickly away from these metroplii and spent much of their lives in more picturesque, perhaps ‘rural’ places. Already by 1920, Lawrence had spoken of “leaving London forever”. Around the same time, Pound was to leave too- perhaps then, this leave-taking of the city was also a leave taking of an overly urbanized “history”, and the chief appeal of places as far afield as Mexico or Italy seem to carry with them at least some residue of a past that wasn’t entirely wiped out by urbanization and the standardization of labor. This leave taking of the city for the country was of course a gesture that would be repeated again and again, in England and the United States- one need only think of the renewed importance of “nature” in influential post war British poets like Ted Hughes, and in the ideologisation of the agrarian south in the United States at different times -I will discuss Allen Tate briefly a little later. This gesture of the turning away from the city- articulated in its classic modern form from at least as early as Rousseau in the third quarter of the eighteenth century- is one that never entirely fails to work, nor yet entirely succeeds in failing. Perhaps at some point in the future, in an urban science fiction world, it will lose its ideological charge, but for the twentieth century, beleaguered as it was from the turn of the century, it has failed to wholly fade its charm and fruitfulness.
Nevertheless, among the many uneasy questions such a “rural nationalism” raises, is the danger of the too-easy linking of this rural, organic community to a pre-capitalist age, where then, consequently, by an inexorable logic, capitalism is often signaled by the legitimacy of usury, which again then, is often linked to a fascism/ anti-semiticism. Pound of course was the one most implicated in this line of thinking, of generalizing the individual on supposedly racial or national characteristics- but what does one make of Bunting making comments such as these in the 1936, even he was living amongst the Spanish in the Canary Islands, playing chess with the then Colonel Franco:

I don’t like Spaniards at all as a rule. I like them better than Germans, but they are a cruel people, the Spaniards. One gets tired of their cruelty, of their neglect of comfort, of the horrible food the Spaniards find good enough for themselves even when they’re rich enough to afford decent food. But the climate in the Canaries is delightful. The scenery is very good. The girls are very pretty. (Terrell 1980: 51).

All this is certainly of relevance in following the career of Bunting- after not only London, Rapallo, the Canary Islands, as also Teheran, he returned to the Northumbria of his youth, and sufficient literary criticism has centered on this provincialized, yet thereby renewed, nationalism and commemoration of his “cattle stealing ancestors, Quaker ancestors”. As early as the late twenties, Bunting had said of the city:

I said goodbye to London. I knew London very well, but I never did like towns, especially big ones. My first instinct was to get as far away from towns as possible. I went up to a shepherd’s cottage in the hills in central Northumberland. It was seven miles walk to the cigarette shop and four miles walk to the pub. It was a very pleasant place up thee. I learned a little about how they train sheep dogs”. (Terrell 1980: 47)

And yet, later in life, after the world journeys, when he had to stay for some decades in Northumbria, a little of the charm of the rural wore off as he found himself living the life of a minor proofreader of seedsmen’s catalogs, suburban train times and electoral lists. He was then to say:

Provincial journalists are not capable of any thought of any sort at all… They go to newspaper offices from the most ignorant parts of secondary-modern schools. That’s where they are recruited… They see nothing and their notions of life are probably adopted from out-of-date novels.” (Terrell 1980: 60-61).

Then again, in the more official, formal lecturing that he did after the fame of Briggflatts, he also found himself saying:

Perhaps I am too hopeful in imagining that the impulse of Northumbrian culture may not yet quite have vanished from the North. I think that our best hope of an art of a literature doesn’t lie in imitating what has come to us from Rome or Europe or from the south of England, but in trying to discern what is our own and to develop it…” (Terrell 1980: 234).

But this Northumbrian culture is not merely in the present, in the spoken language of its farmers, but more so in its (vanishing) linguistic history:

There were various characteristics of Northumbrian art which I find repeat themselves through the centuries now and again when you get Northumbrians who are at all sensitive doing anything in the way of the arts. The first great achievement, of course of the peculiar mixture which grew there, which I suppose must have been two-third Celtic and one-third Anglic, the Codex Lindisfarnensis, the big famous pages and some of the initials in it, are among the major achievements of Western art (Terrell 1980: 244).

Furthermore, in some defiance of his earlier organicist thinking, he uses the figure of the craftsman as mediating the metaphysical life (and the literacy of high urban culture or ‘art’ or archived and written ‘history’) with the labor of the peasant- one recalls how central the mason, timing his mallet, is in Briggflatts:

I have never supposed a poem to be organic at all. I don’t think the thing grows, its built and put together by a craftsman (Terrell 1980: 235).

But the craftsman then belongs equally, if somewhat problematically, to the “lower” life of the urban proletariat too, as is indicated in much of the beginning of Part Two of Briggflatts:

Every revivification of poetry has taken the same route, towards the language of the streets and the cadences of song or bodily movement (Terrell 1980: 236).
From the very first reviews that appeared of Briggflatts, this uneasy fungibility of rural mythmaking was at issue. Kenneth Cox was to opine:

Yet it is the long practice of the translator, the persistent testing of every word, which has made possible the unfailing discretion with which the life and appearance of the country is represented without a trace of provincialism or lapse into the banal (Forde 1991: 242).

Briggflatts is named after a place, as is Paterson. The location, and siting, of the poem is thus not a secondary theme but a fundamental semantic horizon. Before I begin a slower and more detailed analysis of Briggflats the better to reflect on the elements that constitute this “narrativizability” of rural space, I would like to digress briefly to two other related works.

ALLEN TATE’S THE RUNNERS

One notices from the very First Book of Briggflatts that the language does not attempt a dense linguistic history- as perhaps Bunting’s friend and contemporary Hugh MacDiarmid (the pen name of Crisdean Mac a’ Ghreidhir, 1892-1978) does in Drunk Man looks at a Thistle (1926). So language specifies place then in a more indirect mode, if at all. Furthermore, Bunting does not bring up the classic rural scene, either in its simple, or in its more elaborated and indirect modes. Such a writing of the rural was used by poets like MacDiarmid’s contemporaries- Robert Louis Stevenson(1850-1894) and J M Barrie (1860-1937), and the group known as the “kailyard” tradition of poets, which brought back folklore and fantasy into a renewed pastoralized (i.e. the stylized rural) landscape (Bold 1988). But one may also say it was used in poets like Allen Tate, a poet clearly, and perhaps primarily, concerned with the agrarian-rural fighting the good fight against industrialization. Tate’s classicism often elaborated precisely such scenes of the stylized rural, the rural often being invoked by simply the proper names of the region- in his famous poem The Swimmers discussed below, the subtitle is: Scene: Montgomery County. The specific-rural could also be invoked by the botanical names of local plants- this single poem, a “long poem” by Tate’s standards, but only three pages long, has the word-names poison-oak, mullein (though mullein has an origin stretching clearly back to the old world, through Latin, Anglo Norman and Middle English), sycamore, sassafras (this being specifically a North American tree, though again with a late Latin and Spanish-origin name), horse fly, stonecrop (again a plant name of Middle English origin), as well as words like scuppernong (a clear North Carolina Americanism, probably of American Indian origin from the early nineteenth century, for the silvery, amber green muscadine grape vine of the south eastern United States)- this last especially leavening Tate’s perhaps over-smooth classicism (American Heritage Dictionary 2006). These scenes were often contemporary- even anthropological, with its perceptive eye for the rural scene, idiom, farmer’s names. They were also often historical, especially in relation to the particular history of the American South. Very briefly then, one may look at the following lines that capture Tate’s keen visual perception of the rural scene (both the image of children at play in a rural landscape, and the marriage of dual accuracies of the phonetic with the visual- (“When a thrush idling in the tulip tree”), his classical allusions (“…mullein under the ear / Soft as Nausicaa’s palm”), his sense of Southern history, and the overall direct clarity of the invocation and interpretation of that history- one can keep all this mind when comparing it to Bunting’s more indirect treatment of similar concerns. Here below are Tate’s lines, in the latter half of the poem, an adolescent (as Bunting would be in large parts of Briggflatts, with a similar loosening of the bonds of innocence) witnessing a lynching. This is written in the same moment of the early fifties (here, 1953) that we have been discussing with regard to Bunting and Carlos Williams, and with whom we are comparing Tate’s use of ‘rural-historical material’.

Kentucky water, clear springs: a boy fleeing
To water under the dry Kentucky son
His four little friends in tandem with him, seeing

Long shadows of grapevine wriggle and run
Over the green swirl; mullein under the ear
Soft as Nausicaa’s palm; sullen fun

Savage as childhood’s thin harmonious tear:
……..

Dog-days: the dusty leaves where rain delayed
Hung low on poison-oak and scuppernong…(Tate 1965)


CARLOS WILLIAMS’ PATERSON

We have thus come up with a cluster of themes- the rural and childhood, the historical- personal for Tate, perhaps a sense of the “mythic” for Bunting. Bunting’s “mythic” world, which I discuss more comprehensively in the next and last section, is insistently not just pre Empire (including the time of the colonial occupation of North America), but pre Norman- a time of that most spectacular mythic political moment of all- that of conquest. This pattern of mythic sovereignty consistently puncturing history is repeated often in Paterson too. I will discuss just one instance for this paper.
If the attempted foreground of Paterson is the building of the cityscape, not quite rural or suburbia or New York, what underlies this foreground and threatens to keep appearing is the underlife of extraordinary crime, or strange physical acts of madness and freakishness. Repeatedly, in Paterson the calm history writing of progressing (and progressive) America is interspersed with the prose of the counter narrative of the insurgent madness of the unaccomodated, yet well loved historical Subject. This excerpt is from very early on, in the first book, on the very ground of the origin and nomination (i.e. naming) of the city of Paterson.

THE GRRRREAT HISTORY of that

Old time Jersey Patriot

N.F PATERSON!

(N for Noah; F for Faitoute; P for short

“Jersey Lightning” to the boys.

[The poem then digresses- focusing less on the great N F Paterson and his founding act of getting the town a large bridge, an engineering marvel- than on his alter ego, the boss of the cotton spinners, Sam Patch. This entire section of a page is almost exclusively in prose. The narrative tells of how this Sam Patch:]

…had declared so frequently that he would jump from the rocks that he was placed under arrest at various times. He had previously been locked up in the basement under the bank with a bad case of delirium tremens, but on the day the bridge was pulled across the chasm he was let out. Some thought he was crazy. They were not far wrong.

[Indeed, the narrative then traces the subsequent legendary character of Sam Patch, who became famous throughout the country, traveling far up west, his only companions being a fox and bear which he picked up in his travels- once he had even thrown his pet bear from a cliff overlooking the Niagara, and then jumped after it to rescue it further downstream. Finally though, Patch died, perhaps because he was suddenly asked to make a speech before jumping, to a large assembled crowd, and this call to eloquence so befuddled him that he confusedly plummeted to his death (Williams 1992: 15,16).

Here we have the contrast of a bridge being built by the great patriot Paterson, ushering in the “place” from its purely “natural-rural” topography into the modern age, the latter with its concomitance of technology and the ‘historic’. But we find that what the poem actually ends up narrating (and what the people of the town reminisce most about) is instead that shadow-character of progressive America, Sam Patch- the itinerant freak, with strange skills of uncertain use, closer to animals and pure physical action and pleasure than to words. Indeed words prove to cause his eventual death, and wordlessness would be the condition of slipping through the archivization required of official historical consciousness, only to be briefly resurrected or ghosted again by prose within a poem.
What I am trying to show here is how the question of rural-space is always shot through with other questions- and that the singularity of narrative and memory can only be glimpsed in the refraction caused by the pull of a teleological modernity against the infarct of the “rural”- this latter always doomed to live within quotation marks, and at least as much as the more self-explicitly constantly constructive category of its conceptual twin- the ‘urban’ (but also, in a further second series of twinning, urban is twinned to ‘written, self-archiving history’). The urban-rural is thus a double headed, spirallous asymptote.





BASIL BUNTING’S BRIGGFLATTS

I will now concentrate the rest of the paper on Bunting’s Briggflatts. Bunting himself had been invisible to written, self-publicizing history a long time after the great “first generation” of the twenties and thirties, when he was a contemporary of Pound and Zukofsky. This first generation had been well institutionalized as “history” by the literary community, and the tales of Paris and London in the interwar years were the staple of much post War scholarship. But Bunting, perhaps not unlike the later Pound, had largely disappeared from the more active literary minds of the same post war generation- history here thus having its double connotation of both being revered and canonized and valued- but also, “as history”, as over, as less piercingly relevant. Thus it was only by the somewhat-accidental encouragement of the much younger fellow Northumbrian poet Tom Pickard, in the early sixties, that Bunting was to seriously begin writing verse again- and perhaps paradoxically, it was this almost forgotten and ex-revered poet who only now set out to write his most memorable poem, and perhaps cause a further reshuffling of key modernist literary genealogies, and inaugurate a new rememoration of modernism.
What then was it that chiefly inspired this flowering of the later Bunting? They were, according to Bunting himself, two key debts. One was to music, to Beethoven’s last quartets, the music of Byrd and Monteverdi. The other was to:

Peggy Greenbank and her whole ambience, the Rawthey valley, the fells of Lunedale, the Viking inheritance all spent save the faint smell of it. The ancient Quaker life accepted without thought and without suspicion that it might seem eccentric: and what happens when one deliberately thrusts love aside, as I did then- it has its revenge. That must be a longish poem… Briggflatts comes from the name of a small hamlet in the Pennine mountains in a very beautiful situation in what the Americans call a valley which we Northerners call a dale. (Forde 1991: 207, 213)

Briggflatts was the place the thirteen year old Bunting spent half of every summer holiday till the end of his school years with his friend’s sister Peggy, who was four years younger than him. There was also an old, much ruined castle there, believed to be King Arthur’s, as well as, in addition and more historically accurately, a Viking settlement. One may also remember that Northumbria was D H Lawrence’s and Wordsworth’s country, and there was a fairly strong tradition, even in Bunting’s childhood, of a self conscious, broadly rural and proletarian regional consciousness, a pride in their distinct kind of life. Bunting’s father used to read out Wordsworth to him when he was a child, and later, Bunting was to carefully use the Whittaker’s North Countrie Ballads and Song’s. In fact, Bunting cited his differences with Pound over the evaluation of Wordsworth as a chief and decisive difference between their historical poetics.

Bunting famously planned the poem from a five part schema, and then

…simply looking at the diagram say obviously what any poet thinking of shape would say which is Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter (Forde 210).

[Then this “natural”, rural reckoning of seasons is juxtaposed to the urban- historical]- “Spring is around Briggflatts, Summer is all over the place- London, the Arctic, the Mediterranean, Autumn is mostly in the Dales, and the last part is mostly on the Northumberland coast. Love and betrayal are spring’s adventures, and the wisdom of elders and the remoteness of death, hardly more than a gravestone. In summer there is no rest form ambition and the lust of experience, never final…Autumn is for reflection…Old age can see at last the loveliness of things overlooked or despise, frost, the dancing maggots (Forde 211).

The poem does not of course follow the schema neatly. In the first few stanzas of the first Part itself, set in a Briggflatts spring, there is already death and betrayal. There are the exquisite first lines on the bull:

Brag sweet tenor bull
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebbled its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe bull
black against may ( Bunting 59)

Bunting does insist that close observation does reveal that the bull in fact does have a melodious tenor voice, in contrast to the raucous contralto of the cow, and that in spring, when with the cows, he does dance on his toes, showing off his protective indispensability to the accompanying cows.
But as said, the rural is not idyllic, and only a few lines later we are introduced to the slowworm- in fact as the line says, the poem is “paving the slowworm’s way”. The slowworm is a non Indo European, Old English word, a shiny snake like lizard feeding on slugs and popularly believed to be blind- “cold squirm snaking flank”. The slowworm also probably references the song of the forest bird in Wagner’s Siegfried, a song that the hero hears only when he has slipped into an unfamiliar world; equally it may have been the song of the wood dove in Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, a work that Bunting had long admired- and one knows how crucial the translation of musical effect into print and reading was to Bunting (Alldritt 1998:160).
This close observation of the rural is nevertheless capable of abstracting itself from such close empiricism-

Delight dwindles. Blame
stays the same (Bunting 62)

And a few lines earlier:

The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot (Bunting 59).

It is in this atmosphere that the theme of adolescent love is picturized- and already we are visited, a few lines further on, by the central figure of Bloodaxe-

By such acts
men killed Bloodaxe (Bunting 60).

Eric Bloodaxe, the favorite son of Harald Finehair, was the chief protagonist of the Icelandic sagas composed in Iceland in the early thirteenth century- Eric himself lived in the tenth, frequently invading Scotland, the region around the Irish Sea, and had declared himself King of Northumbria. His wife Gunnhild was often believed to be a powerful witch, perhaps helping him kill all of his brothers for the throne- however, there is no mention of Eric in the contemporary Anglo Saxon chronicle of Athelstan, a fact that would surely have appealed to Bunting who so often insisted on the separateness of Northumbria. Bloodaxe is more widely discussed in the skaldic poem, the Eiriksmal (The Lay of Eric), where he is represented in heroic mode as he enters Valhalla, and is welcomed by the gods after his death at Stainmore (Hall 1984). The skaldic poems themselves were believed to have been composed by poets in chains, in the eye of death.
Thus the coupled organic kinship of the childhood-rural:

her girdle is greased with lard;
hunger is stayed on her settle …(Bunting 74)

This memorable adolescent love is disturbed by the coupling, on the other side, of myth-fractricide- facilitated by the historical memory of the passionate love of the stereotypally gendered Gunnhild the witch and Bloodaxe the warrior-king-one of the Latin texts even rename Eric Bloodaxe as fratris interfector, the brother-killer. Again, my concern in this paper is to show how the evocation of organicity (and in this paper I prioritize the rural, but as we can see, the rural functions often as a mnemonic for other forms of organicity- kinship itself, a sort of almost pre-sexual sexual love, youth) inevitably seems to require the unrelenting counter cluster of images- of vivid murder, scandal, betrayal, the freakish as in Paterson and the lynching as in The Swimmers. The counter-organic is evoked by images of uncontainable violence, conquest and re-conquest with little emphasis on administration- this latter being of course the quintessential modern political preoccupation. In contrast, in Eric’s time, the only sovereign value (and value of sovereignty) was conquest - the great King was the great warrior, not the great administrator. All this is opposed in Bunting to the narrativizable archive, the nameable sequence of events that we can call “history” (this includes bureaucratic notions of progress and administration), this latter, in Bunting’s reckoning, beginning after the Norman-Anglican invasion, with all its originary resonances for later “histories”, with its attendant new understandings of kingship and language.
The poems unfolds in phasic fashion, as the coupling and violent decoupling incarnate in various avatars in spring, summer, autumn and winter- in this very organizing trope of ‘rural, cosmic, atmospheric rhythms’, one can see again how myth is not sublatable to the homogenizing effect of historical time. The city (in the “summer” phase of the poem) is the conventionally classic site of alienation, human crowds, loveless promiscuity, squalor, abortion, failed poem-making, “rash, chancre, fistula”:

he lies with one to long for another,
sick, self maimed, self-hating,
obstinate, mating
beauty with squalor to beget lines still born.” (Bunting 63)

These still born lives of the city are contrasted to the almost specialized knowledge of rural life and Northumbrian terms that recur throughout the poem- tilled acre, steading smell, hearth’s crackle, bergs and fogs.
In the autumnal Part Four, there is a sense of return from travels (and the image of Alexander realizing the vanity of the world) to the specific rural locale of the local Dale. But lest it be understood for the comfort of the return of a prodigal son to the womb of the mother and the law of the father, there is, immediately the evocation of masculinist killing:

I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,
being adult male of a merciless species (Bunting 73)

This evocation is achieved through the figure of the great Welsh poet Aneurin. Aneurin, according to Bunting, deserved to be far more widely known than he was- in the early Dark Ages he “left a splendid poem called Goddoddin, mourning the men killed at the battle of Catterick by the newly arrived English”(Forde 1991: 233). Here again, these great medieval poets are offered as a contrast to the staid conventional English scholarship of the literary mainstream of the South:

Clear Cymric voices carry well this autumn night,
Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls
for whom it is never altogether dark, crying
before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game (Bunting 73).

In conclusion then, I wish to reiterate the chief point of this paper, which is that the rural, a persisting crucial fount of value in much modernist poetry, nevertheless is not autonomous or sovereign, and indeed receives much of its power by aligning itself as an equal term in a long, linear series of related organic mnemonics- adolescent love or trauma (like the witnessing of a lynching, history made painful and suddenly clear), rich linguistic histories, the pre industrial pastoral, the ‘innocent’ itinerant Sam Patch close to animals and raw physicality, and finally as obverse of the city’s lovelessness and squalor. The rural thus cannot be a simple idealization of hyperlinked organicities, but rather exists solely in the intertexture of the dramatic contrasting of such organicities with their obverse- the betrayal of that childhood love, of the abandonment of home and the discontents of return, of the provinciality of mofussil intellectual life, of the vacuoles of empty progressiveness, of the richness and vitality of crowded urban proletarian living.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aldritt, Keith. The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting, Aurum Press, London, 1998.
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Bunting, Basil: Complete Poems, New Directions, New York, 2000.
Forde, Victoria, The Poetry of Basil Bunting, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1991.
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Hall, Richard. The Viking Dig; The Excavations at York, Bodley Head, 1984.
Tate, Allen. Collected Poems, Farrar Straus Giroux, New York, 1965.
Teller, Caroll F. (ed.) Basil Bunting: Man and Poet, National Poetry Foundation Inc., Maine, 1980.
Williams, William Carlos. Paterson, New Directions, New York, 1992.