Tony Harrison, now dead at 88, dug into the trenches of war and division, elevating the vernacular to forms of classicism that grappled with some of the most historic events of our times
“I’ve got the envelop that he’d been scrawling, mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling but I can’t squeeze more love into their stone.”
— Tony Harrison
There is a scene in that infectious film The Damned United.
The piston-mouthed football manager Brian Clough (deftly portrayed by Michael Sheen), after rousing success at a modest northern football club Derby County, moves to a southern football club, Brighton and Hove Albion. Bored and slumped, he is offered the grand opportunity to manage England’s leading team, a relentless winning machine,
Leeds United.
He tries to convince his long-time coach, Peter Taylor (played brilliantly by Timothy Spall) to make the move.
Taylor is resistant, committed to promises and loyalties made to the southern seaside club. Frustrated and verging on the rage he is often prone to fall into, Clough, himself from the north of England, foams, “and you want to fester here, with all these bloody Tories”.
North. South. In political terms, in the ideologically committed UK of those decades, the divide took the form of colour and walls — Red: Labour, socialist, in the north; Blue: Conservative (Tory), capitalist, in the south.
The advent of Thatcherism further entrenched these divisions, culminating in the busting of the unions and the vicious Miners’ Strike of 1984/85. The schism would only grow greater till the introduction of a medieval tax — the Poll Tax — that would result in outright popular rebellion, a violent protest in Piccadilly and the Conservative Party’s own inner rebellion against Margaret Thatcher, signalling the end of the reign of the Iron Lady, but not the divisions that would continue to blight Britain, and much of the rest of the world till today.
The North, for me, was this: 1991. Second year in university, six university mates, different tastes and persuasions, sharing a house in a working-class area of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Drab, cold, prone to damp, and with inadequate and expensive heating, our house was, at least, at the border of the city where it was safe. Further down the road was “not a place you want to go with that colour of skin”.
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At the heart of a community riven by racial and ideological division was football. St James Park, Newcastle United’s stadium, had long been a recruitment ground for the party of the far right — the British National Party.
By the turn of the 1990s, however, the club had taken a firm stance against racism, forcefully initiated, first by a former manager and one of the World Cup-winning team of 1966, Jackie Charlton, and later by “Mighty Mouse” himself — Kevin Keegan, one of England’s greatest footballers, who had also spent some time in Malaysia training the Malaysian Under-21 team, and later, manager of Newcastle United. By the late 1980s, Newcastle United had signed on Tony Cunningham, a speedy, spectacularly skilful black player of West Indian origin, bringing about an end to far right recruitment, at least for a while.
In the drab house, on a rare occasion, we six housemates gathered for a television screening. The film was Richard Eyre’s powerful depiction of Tony Harrison’s poem V.
For some years controversy surrounded its broadcasting, with the moral crusader Mary Whitehouse at the forefront. The objection? The very thing that lay at the heart of the poem itself — language.
V begins with an epigraph from the leader of the Miners’ Strike, Arthur Scargill — “My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to
master words”.
A poem of alienation, by a poet estranged from his own working class roots by language. Visiting his parents’ graves one day, Harrison finds their gravestones desecrated by profanities, mostly racial.
V is a poetic encounter between the “bard” and what we have come to know as a “hooligan” — Keats meeting curses on the football terraces. Upon its broadcast on Channel 4, the conservative Daily Mail described it as “a torrent of filth” while enthusiasts called him “a giant among poets”.
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Few could have captured the turning of historical tides, served the craft of poetry with the kind of urgency and timeliness like Harrison.
Born into a working class family in Leeds, the elder Harrison was a baker, and would be commemorated frequently in his son’s poetry. Leeds was also a city that gave birth to another colossus of English language poetry — Geoffrey Hill, also working class, the son of a policeman.
Between them, they would take English language poetry to elevated, if contrasting, heights. Hill was a modern-day Desert Father, keeper of the august tradition in English language poetry, while Harrison would infuse the vernacular with the fire and ferocity of the ancients, notably Aeschylus and Aristophanes.
Harrison would later transform the National Theatre, bringing the classics into a route of wild trajectories: Moliere, Racine and the ancient Greeks. Entering the University of Leeds where he studied the Classics, Harrison established a firm friendship with the Nigerian author and playwright (and later Nobel laureate) Wole Soyinka. The kinship would take Harrison to Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria, and from Africa to Prague where a deep immersion in classical theatre, as a form of subverting censorship, would take place. It would prove, as Harrison would confess, “a really important part of my life”.
A formalist, Harrison innovated with metre, especially the elusive Meredithian sonnet. His second acclaimed collection, From “The School of Eloquence” and Other Poems, boasted the lines, “These sixteen lines that go back to my roots …” in On Not Being Milton.
“The roots” would take him through a labyrinth of politics and poetry with “the looms of owned language smashed apart”. One that would culminate in the writing of V, described by a Conservative member of parliament, Sir Gerald Howarth, as “another probable Bolshie (Bolshevik) seeking to impose his frustrations”.
Harrison would rise to most political occasions, covering the Bosnian War as a journalist and writing vociferously against the invasion of Iraq, even taking aim at the position of Poet Laureate.
His last collection of poetry Under the Clock was published in 2005; no further collections followed though he continued to publish single poems in various publications.
He eventually moved to the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, where a vibrant poetry movement had been gravitating around Bloodaxe Books, publisher of V.
Work in theatre continued even as he began to gain the accolade of the “people’s poet” — an epithet he did not claim for himself even as he described his work as a “part of the same quest for a public poetry”.
For all the expression of “public” and “political”, the hallmark of his sensibility and disposition lay within: the convergence of class, contrast, contradiction.
In his poems are frequent commemorations to his father and mother, such as in the fine Long Distances II, which concludes, “I believe life ends with death, and that is all”. That which lifted Harrison from the fate of “the bakery” is what became his deepest poetic aspirations. In V, he meanders through the desecrated gravestones and wonders,
“Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard/to find my slab behind the family dead/butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard/adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread”.
Not curse, but constant wonderment and that which brings change, transformation and roots, upon the death of Harrison, was the refrain from one of his best-loved poems Book Ends, which might best serve as his epitaph, “Back in our silences and sullen looks/for all the Scotch we drink/what’s still between’s/not the thirty or so years/but books, books, books.”
