ALAN YOUNG 157

Weeds and white roses: the poetry of Tony Harrison

In 1929 the publishers J. M. Dent & Sons chose Baker and Miller‘s 1739 English translation of Moliere’s plays for their popular Everyman series because ’it is thought to have more of the spirit of the original than would be found in a more modern version’ (Introduction p. xix). Here is part of a speech from LeMisanthrope in this edition. Alceste, the man-hater of the title, takes his coquettish mistress C6limGne to task about another of her many men friends:

But, however, tell me, madam, by what chance your Clitander has the happi- ness to please you so much? Upon what fund of merit and sublime virtue do you ground the honour of your esteem? Is it by the long nail he has upon his little finger, that he has gained the great esteem with you, which we see him have? Did you surrender, with all the beau-monde, to the shining merit of his fair periwig?Or are they his large pantaloons, that make you in love with him?

And so on. The sparkle and humanity of Moliere’s comedy is lost entirely in a galumphing translation which manages to turn the quick and sensitive Alceste into a boorish eighteenth-century English country squire. Until recently, such indifference to the possibility of providing a text of Moliere suitable for the English stage was not so untypical. But is it reasonable to expect any English writer to capture the essentially Gallic panache of Moliere’s comedies?

The National Theatre’s 1973 production of The Misanthrope in Tony Harri- son’s new version showed that an English audience can enjoy Moliere’s energy and wit. Harrison’s Alceste is brought to life because the verse is such persuasive artifice:

But what I’d like to know‘s what freak of luck’s helped to put Clitandre in your good books? What amazing talents does the ‘thing‘ possess, what sublimity of virtue? Let me guess. I’m at a loss. Now let me see, I know! It’s his little finger like a croissant, so, crooked at Angelina’s where he sips his tea among the titled queens of ’gay’ Paree! What makes him captivate the social scene? Second-skin gauchos in crepe-de-chine? Those golden blow-wave curls (that aren’t his own)? Flamingo trousers or obsequious tone? Or is it his giggle and his shrill falsett- 0 hoity-toity voice makes him your pet?

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As in Moliere’s French original, Harrison’s verse for the character of Alceste performs a complex dramatic function. It is simultaneously an expressive vehicle for a vulnerable and frustrated sensibility and a method of distancing or critically placing that sensibility. Because of the way he rings all the changes of rhyme Harrison’s couplets delight us continually with their conscious artifice. He is skilful too in using the verse simply at times to convey, for instance, the astonishment and anguish of idealism betrayed. Here Alceste wonders most at his own failure to act in harmony with his knowledge:

Just how degrading can a passion get? Now watch me grovel. You’ve seen nothing yet. There’s more to come. Just stay and watch the show. You’ll see my weakness reach an all-time low. Never call men wise. Look how they behave. There’s no perfection this side of the grave.

Harrison’s mastery of the rhyming couplet has earned him much well- deserved critical acclaim in the theatre press. Even Le Monde called his Moliere ’une adaptation brilliante’. This success has encouraged him to take on more work for the National Theatre, including Phuedru Britunnica (a version of Racine’sPkdre, again in rhyming couplets), an adaptation of the York Mystery Plays (The Passion), and, most recently and most famously, The Oresteiu of Aeschylus. His now established trade as writer for the theatre - including music-theatre - should not allow us to forget that originally he was, and is still, a poet of unique and disturbing character.

Nobody who had read Harrison’s first collection - The Loiners (1970) - would have been very surprised by his apparently effortless deployment of dramatic rhymed verse. What wus surprising about The Loiners was the almost exclusive use of rhymed forms to convey experiences of raw and often appalling character as well as wild and rollicking ones. It is as if these forms were used by Harrison as non-literary (or even anti-literary) devices, enabling him to avoid ‘literature’ as he created poems of jazz-like spon- taneity.

Inevitably there was an unevenness about the poems in The Loiners. Hamson’s subject-matter ranged from adolescent memories of his native Leeds (the inhabitants of which city are called ’Loiners’) to the homosexual exploits of a fifty-year-old professor and poet in Africa; from Isabella and Ferdinand’s horrendous wedding- night bonfires of heretics to love-affairs behind the Iron Curtain. The forms vary too, from two-line couplets appar- ently scribbled on post-cards to long. formal (and rhymed) poems in several sections. The tensions to be perceived in these poems were indicated by the traditional verse which appeared as tag to the book:

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There was a young man of Leeds Who swallowed a packet of seeds. A pure white rose Grew out of his nose And his arse was covered with weeds.

In some of the poems in The Loiners, as in MoliPre’s Alceste, the ironic surface barely keeps in check a sense of outrage against human intolerance, duplic- ity, and cruelty. In ’The nuptial torches’, for instance, Ferdinand’s evil sadism absorbs both condemned heretics and his new bride in a single lust:

Young Carlos de Sessa stripped was good For a girl to look at and he spat like wood Green from the orchards for the cooking pots. Flames ravelled up his flesh into dry knots And he cried at the King: How can you stare On such agonies and not turn a hair?

Human indifference to or enjoyment of suffering is not much more terrifying than nature’s indifference. ’Newcastle is Peru’ is a poem of the 1960s in which the need to celebrate love is more than balanced by fear:

The fire I laid and lit to draw you downstairs to the second floor, flickers and struts upon my bed. And I’m left gazing at a full-page spread of aggressively fine bosoms, nude and tanned almost to nigritude, in the Colour Supplement’s Test Yourself for Cancer of the Breast.

Desperation is also the keynote of the poem ’Ghosts’ in which Harrison recreates family scenes from the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle- upon-Tyne:

I will her breaths. Again! Again! my daughter heaves in oxygen and lives, each heaved breath another lurch away from death, each exhalation like death throes, a posser squelched down on wet clothes, and the only sign of life I see is a spitting tracheotomy.

Harrison’s 1974 Preface to his version of seventy poems by the fourth- century A.D. Alexandrian poet Palladus (Palladas: Poems, Anvil Press, 1975) suggests that this writer was chosen for translation because he shared Harrison’s bleak vision: ’What is unique and even invigorating about Pal- ladas is that there is no sense at all of ’gracious’ surrender either to the

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inevitability of death or to historical change. . . He is one of those embarras- sing but heroic figures who are not dignifiedin despair, refusing to be noble on the gallows or to make peace with their maker.’ The first poem in this black-humoured collection is as much in the voice of the furious Loiner as in that of the pagan grammarian and teacher:

Think of your conception, you’ll soon forget what Plato puffs you up with, all that ’immortality’ and ’divine life’ stuff. Man, why dost thou think of Hemen? Nay consider thine origins in common clay ’s one way of putting it but not blunt enough. Think of your father, sweating, drooling, drunk, you, his spark of lust, his spurt of spunk.

Palladas’s (says Harrison) is ’not the stylish after-dinner despair of high- table, the sighing gestures of surfeit, but the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile’. One savage epigram from Palladas perhaps encapsulates much of thls:

A lifetime’s teaching grammar come to this - returned as member for Necropolis!

Harrison’s pain, like Palladas’s, is not usually borne with either stoical resignation or gentlemanly decorum. There is a good deal of deliberate bad taste. His bitterness is directed as much against himself as others. The principal formal vehicle for Harrison’s poetry in recent years has been a sixteen-line sonnet, the form developed by George Meredith for his fifty- poem sequence Modern Love (1862). In The School of Eloquence (1978) and Continuous (1981) Harrison explores this extended sonnet form with great inventiveness. At a general level the subject-matter of the sequence - still in progress - is, once again, human failure and injustice, but the core of the early part of the sequence is Harrison’s rage and anguish about the suffer- ings of his own family and class.

He was born in Leeds where he was a ’scholarship boy’. From Leeds Grammar School he went on to read classics at Leeds University. Much of the self-directed anger of The School of Ebquence comes from his sense of betrayed roots, as when Latin homework frustrated his wish to join in with the evening pursuits of other working-class lads:

He shoves the frosted attic skylight, shouts: Ah bloody can’t ah’ve gorra Latin prose.

Weeds and white roses: the poetry of Tony Harrison 161

His bodiless head that‘s poking out‘s like patriarchal Sissy-bleeding-ro’s.

(‘Me Tarzan’)

Or when he was told by a master at the grammar school how to speak ’properly in Received Pronunciation:

’We say [as] not [uzl T.W.’ That shut my trap. I doffed my flat a’s (as in ’flatcap‘) my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great lumps to hawk up and spit out . . . E-nun-ci-ate!

(‘Them & [uzl’)

He sees his role as spokesman for the inarticulate, for the mass of people who have been exploited throughout history without being able to protest even or to cry out in rage, as in a ’sonnet for the bourgeoisie’ which remembers a fourteen-year-old girl coal-miner:

Patience Kershaw, bald hurryer, fourteen, this wordshift and inwit‘s a load of crap for dumping on a slagheap, I mean th’art nobbut summat as wants raking up.

(‘Working)

’National Trust’ is a horrifylng poem which ends:

The dumb go down in history and disappear and not one gentleman’s been brought to book: Mes den hep tmas a-gollas y dyr (Cornish) - ’the tongueless man gets his land took.‘

Most of all, though, he speaks for his family- for ’two uncles, Joe andHarry - / one was a stammerer, the other dumb’, and particularly for his parents from whom he has been estranged by education.

In ’Study’ he broods about a room which has seen a good deal of the family’s distress. Between each short sentence of the poem there is a full stop of anguished realisation and reflection:

Mi aunty‘s baby stilL The dumbstruck mother. The mirror, tortoise-shell-like celluloid held to it, passed from one hand to another. No babble, blubber, breath. The glass won’t cloud.

If the language is often plain and direct this is because he would like to be ’the poet my father reads’, just as the language he would wish to speak is not to be found in any of the many dictionaries of living and dead tongues which he owns, but is ’the tongue that once I used to know / but can’t bone up on now, and that‘s mi man’s’.

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The emotional responses to and colloquial speech of a remembered working-class childhood, taken out of the context of whole poems, might seem to leave Harrison open to being labelled sentimentalist, except that his style never settles into one manner and he recognises his parents' limita- tions and weaknesses, as well as his own in relationship to them. In 'Book ends' he recalls his mother's words about father and son as they usually sat, silent in front of the fire:

You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare. . . The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay, only a silence made us seem a pair.

And now she is dead, but they still cannot find speech: Back in our silences and sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, whaYs still between 's not the thuty or so years, but books, books, books.

He sees that human ignorance, prejudice, and clumsiness do not in them- selves make us any less capable of love, or deserving of both compassion and love, as when he thinks of his father's efforts to find the right words for his mother's memorial stone:

I've got the envelope that he'd been scrawling, mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling but I can't squeeze more love into their stone.

It is possible to discern recently some diminution of the bitterness in Tony Harrison's poetry, though there is no lessening of his anguish that the world is as it is and that men behave to one another as they do. Personal grief has been collated with a more general lamentation in the sonnet-sequence 'Art and extinction' (1981), and there is a more reflective and lyrical threnody in 'A kumquat for John Keats', another poem first published in 1981 which has been beautifully reprinted as an illustrated pamphlet (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; these two poems first appeared in PN Review).

Perhaps time has begun to heal some of the deeper wounds, or perhaps some of the darker human emotions have been channelled into the transla- tions of tragic drama. What is certain is that his poetry and translating work have helped to develop his technical assurance. The rhyming couplets of 'A kumquat for John Keats' may take some getting used to in an age which has deliberately avoided such forms, but this meditative love-poem and elegy is a most skilful and moving lyric.

It is moving partly because it is a poem of celebration- a mood which does not come easily to Tony Harrison. It is certainly not a poem of resignation;

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the kumquat fruit which is both subject and emblem is most bitter (as well as, initially, sweet) to the taste. The poem mourns and celebrates also the poet's reaching middle-age:

For however many kumquats that I eat I'm not sure if it's flesh or rind that's sweet, and being a man of doubt at life's mid-way I'd offer Keats some kumquats and I'd say: You'll find that one part's sweet and one part's tart: say where the sweetness or the sourness start.

But though the dark past still haunts and threatens, there is more of accep- tance and mystery, of grudging celebration, here. Tony Harrison will doubt- less remain a poet of the minor keys but he has developed a quite distinctive voice:

A strong sun bums away the dawn's grey haze I pick a kumquat and the branches spray cold dew in my face to start the day. The dawn's molasses make the citrus gleam still in the orchards of the grove of dream. The limes, like Galway after weeks of rain, glow with a greenness that is close to pain, the dew-cooled surfaces of fruit that spent all last night flaming in the firmament.