The sad, extraordinary life of Basil Bunting

Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out that Mark Knopfler once worked as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when Basil Bunting was working there as a sub-editor. Knopfler being Knopfler, he eventually wrote a sad sweet song about it, ‘Basil’, in which he describes England’s most important modernist poet sitting stranded in the newspaper offices, surrounded by up-and-coming Bri-Nylon-clad jack-the-lads, wearing his ancient blue sweater, puffing on his untipped Players, clearly ‘too old for the job’ and ‘bored out of his mind’. ‘Bury all joy/ Put the poems in sacks/ And bury me here with the hacks.’

Good old/poor old Basil: the sweater-wearing, sharp-bearded Bunting is periodically disinterred by poets and scholars seeking out alternative histories of English verse in which the off-beat, the eccentric, the experimental and the downright odd are shown to truly express and characterise the national spirit rather than the usual bland mainstream pap.

The academic and poet Alex Niven – one of the UK’s rather more interesting younger cultural critics, the author of both New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England (2019) and a short book about Oasis’s Definitely Maybe – now adds to this history with a selected edition of Basil Bunting’s letters. In his introduction to the volume, Niven acknowledges that even during his lifetime, Bunting was a ‘relatively unknown figure’ and that there is a ‘gappiness’ to the correspondence. Gappiness is well put – and a bit of an understatement. In both Bunting’s letters and the poetry there are years of billowing nothing. But what is there is remarkable and certainly deserves to be added to the alt. Eng. Lit. canon.

For those unfamiliar with Bunting, it’s probably worth noting that he led both a rather sad and most extraordinary life, the sort of life you want a writer to live but wouldn’t necessarily want to live yourself.