Them & Uz - Tony Harrison At 80

An existential pessimist given to well-documented bouts of depression, Tony Harrison must have been surprised to reach the age of eighty in April, more still to be the beneficiary of renewed media attention. Since the broadcast of his incendiary, but much misinterpreted, polemical poem, 'V', on Channel 4 in 1987, his work has met with a mixture of anger, critical approval, and indifference.

And there is a paradox in the fact of this Leeds-born classicist and class-antagonist frequently turning his pen to the tenderest of lyrics. When he conceived the following lines in his poem 'The Queen's English', he was making an effort to build a metaphorical bridge. He recalled seeing his father off at Leeds station before embarking on a long sojourn to the US, and the thought had ranged large in his mind that he might not see him again. His intuition turned out to be prophetic, and the keepsake book father bought son that day became the unspoken gift of love from an otherwise inarticulate man:

He picked up Poems from the Yorkshire Dales -

'ere tek this un wi' yer to New York
to remind yer 'ow us gaffers used to talk.
It's up your street in't it ? ah'll buy yer that !'

The broken lines go through me speeding South -

As t'Doctor stopped to oppen woodland yat...
and
wi' skill they putten wuds reet i' his mouth.


Harrison devoted a compendious sonnet sequence and the better part of twenty years of sustained emotional effort, to 'making up' with his parents and to laying the ghosts of the past finally to rest. That the collection of poems bore the title The School of Eloquence gave notice of one of the poet's intentions. As a schoolboy from the working class area of Beeston, Harrison won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School at a time - the late 'forties - when such an occurrence was a rarity. The University of Leeds followed and, through the 'sixties and early 'seventies, a gradual ascent to fame as a poet, adaptor of Greek tragedy for the modern stage, and librettist.

Harrison had now acquired a 'language' and a cultural repertoire unknown to his parents. The embracing of a new middle class social milieu had, by his own estimation, distanced him from the class of his origins, and The School of Eloquence embodies an attempt to repair the 'damage' and to open a dialogue, especially with his neglected parents, in a language he thought they might understand. But that dialogue is imagined: what became known as the 'family' sonnet sequence is an elegy, an act of remembrance for parents who were deceased by the time of writing.

What distinguishes these short and deeply moving poems from the character of those of Harrison's post-war contemporaries is the deliberate simplicity of the language in which they are written. They successfully disentangle complex emotional dramas whilst avoiding sentiment. Looking, in hindsight, at his parents' gravestone in Holbeck cemetery, he is able to reflect, at distance, and in a simple Yorkshire vernacular of loss and grief, on the meaning of a love which ultimately gets beyond the limitations of speech. Here, the poet gives voice to the memory of his father: 'putten', in the Dales dialect noted earlier, 'wuds reet i' his mouth':

I've got to find the right words on my own
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.

(from 'Book Ends I')

Harrison's mother predeceased his father, and the son here imagines his father struggling with the 'right' words to inscribe his grief for posterity. This process of 'articulation', of giving life to language is Harrison's ongoing preoccupation. But, ever mindful of the bigger social picture, the poet is also speaking for a working class generation who's language - in grammar schools and universities, in the professional workplace, in the theatre - was deemed unfit for national representation by the purveyors of what was known as 'Received Pronunciation'.

Richard Hoggart, writing his seminal volume The Uses of Literacy in an immediate post war period of austerity and still-rigid class distinction, conducted his research in his native Leeds and identified the new phenomenon of 'scholarship boy' anxiety which appeared to be caused by sudden cultural dislocation. He might have been describing Harrison's own experience, and it is no surprise to learn that the two were, in fact, acquaintances for many years.

The resilience of the poet's bond with his class of origin has met with much criticism in recent times: he has been accused of hanging tenaciously onto a class system which has altered out of all recognition since he light-heartedly christened Leeds 'Hoggarty' as a compliment to the accuracy of Hoggart's examination of the city of the 'fifties. But the fact of Harrison's affiliation with place and people, his reclaiming of the forgotten voices of the past through a poetry of commemoration, remains heartening and sincere.

During the time of Hoggart's Leeds observations, Harrison was a student at the city's university, and his undergraduate years were marked by frequent visits to a second-hand bookseller in Kirkgate Market who provided sustenance for the young man's appetite for learning. Thomas Campey, his back gradually bent under the burden of carrying books from house clearances on a hand-cart, comes to represent, in Harrison's poetry, the down trodden and back-broken, who proceed 'for life', uncomplaining and mostly unnoticed. There is some irony in the fact of Thomas bringing 'knowledge' to the people, providing books for the public for little reward, and it is entirely fitting that Harrison should wish, if only in imagination, for his pain to come to an end:

Keen winter is the worst time for his back,
Squeezed lungs and damaged heart; just one
More sharp turn of the earth, those knees will crack
And he will turn his warped spine on the sun.

(from 'Thomas Campey and the Copernican System')

These lines are drawn from a life and they are moving because sincere. The love of son for parents, of son for place and for the language and culture of his origins, may yet become Harrison's epitaph; far from being adversarial, these poems restore broken connections. As Philip Larkin, a Yorkshire-dweller by inclination if not by birth, once said - 'What will survive of us is love'.