Ian McMillan: ‘Tony Harrison gave me linguistic strength’
Poet, playwright and broadcaster
As a young man in the 1980s I made my living going round libraries and community centres in South Yorkshire running poetry workshops for the Workers’ Educational Association; at each workshop lots of older people turned up clutching their folders of verse and the poems usually rhymed and they were often in Yorkshire dialect.
To my eternal shame I asked these people to take out the rhymes, to have a go at writing something that was “modern” and “contemporary”, and I jokingly threatened to chuck them out of the class if they brought another piece in dialect because I stupidly believed that Yorkshire dialect could only handle comic ideas, and that if it tried seriousness and gravitas it would just drown in a sea of Yorkshire pudding batter.
And then I encountered the work of Tony Harrison and my poetic life changed for the better. Here was a poet from not too far away from me; he was Leeds, I was Barnsley. In my mind, I had believed that places like ours were far from the literary centre of things and here was proof that that wasn’t the case. Here was a poet who used rhyme with skill and love. Here was a poet who used dialect to great effect, using it to deepen and strengthen the language rather than just standing at the side of it dealing out wisecracks in a flat cap and muffler.
I read the poems from his School of Eloquence series of sonnets and was moved to tears by poems like Them and Uz with its battle cry of “and used my name and my own voice: (uz) (uz) (uz) / ended sentences with by, with, from, / and spoke the language that I spoke at home” and its revelation to me that “All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see / ’s been dubbed by (az) into RP, / Received Pronunciation please believe (az) / your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.” Not any more! As he writes in the same poem: “So right, yer buggers, then. We’ll occupy / yer lousy leasehold poetry.” Harrison spoke to me directly as a grammar school lad who wanted to be a poet but was unsure about what his subject might be or what language he would use to write it in, or indeed, (and this seems preposterous now) whether someone could be a poet round here, wherever Round Here happened to be. He taught me that the way I speyk is a fit and proper vehicle for poetry.
The first time I presented a show on BBC Radio Sheffield someone came up to me in Barnsley bus station and said: “I heard thi. Tha can’t talk like that on’t wireless!” and I said: “But I were talking like thee,” and he said: “Ar. But tha can’t talk like that on’t wireless.” Which is more or less what a critic said when I had a series a few years later on Radio 4: “Ian McMillan, with his Eeee By Gum Ecky Thump, clogging up the airwaves like bindweed on an allotment.” Tony Harrison gave me the linguistic strength to reply to those accusations, and I’ll always be grateful for that.
Mind you, once I’d discovered him I took some of his poems to a writing workshop in Rawmarsh near Rotherham and the class weren’t impressed. “He’s from Leeds,” one of them said, putting his betting shop pen in his pocket. “They know nowt.”
Edith Hall: ‘We have lost a towering wordsmith’
Classics professor at Durham University and author of Tony Harrison: Poet of Radical Classicism
Tony Harrison, my fierce, eloquent, sardonic, loyal friend of 35 years, who died last Friday, produced over his 88 years an abundance of plays and translations; it is scandalous that his pioneering film poems, especially Gaze of the Gorgon, The Shadow of Hiroshima and Prometheus, first broadcast on Channel 4, are not publicly available. He is most familiar as the author of poems about his working-class Leeds youth. Studying classics as a scholarship boy at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University, he was hurt by the chasm that his widening intellectual horizons had exposed between him, his mother and his father, a taciturn baker. The pain is explored in his pivotal 1978 collection From the School of Eloquence.
His most famous poem is V, written during the 1984-85 miners’ strike and representing the uncouth speech of an alienated skinhead; the 1987 televised version, directed by Richard Eyre, caused outrage. A Conservative MP tried to have the broadcast proscribed by tabling an early day motion entitled “Television Obscenity”. But the right’s real objection was to Harrison’s resolute support of the working class.
His breakout 1970 collection The Loiners (residents of Leeds) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize but offended many because it frankly discussed sexual relations with several women, and implied that political oppression was similar whether in England or behind the Iron Curtain.
In 1981, when Peter Hall used Harrison’s extraordinary translation of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in a path-breaking production at the National Theatre designed by Harrison’s theatrical muse Jocelyn Herbert, they insisted on an all-male cast, as in the ancient theatre. Harrison believed this was the only way to apprehend the trilogy’s misogyny. Feminists complained that female actors had been deprived, as they saw it, of an opportunity. Supercilious critics deemed men wearing female costumes inappropriate to “high art”; they lambasted Harrison’s diction, designed to be delivered in a consonantal working-class Yorkshire accent by actors including his longtime collaborator, Barrie Rutter. As usual, unease with Harrison’s class politics masqueraded as aesthetic derision.
Harrison’s profoundly class-conscious Trackers of Oxyrhynchus premiered in Delphi in 1988, featuring Rutter, Jack Shepherd and Juliet Stevenson. It incorporated fragments of a Sophoclean satyr drama — a genre requiring patricians to revel in a subversive musical-comedy with satyrs wearing semi-erect phalluses.
Trackers impressed Alan Rusbridger, then features editor of the Guardian, who in 1991 invited Harrison to write about the Gulf war. Harrison responded with two celebrated poems, Initial Illumination and A Cold Coming. Harrison’s association with the newspaper continued, with gaps, for more than a decade. In September 1995, he witnessed the Bosnian war in person. He came under fire in an armoured vehicle, and the newspaper published his searing The Cycles of Donji Vakuf.
It was at the time of Trackers that I first met Tony, although I had seen the televised version of V and the Oresteia and revered him. He was smaller than I expected, and quieter, but his electrifying presence changed the atmosphere in every room he entered. We clicked straightaway; I had recently finished my Oxford doctorate on what would now be called racist ideas in Greek tragedy, and felt alienated from the Oxford academic establishment. I had worked as a volunteer for the NUM during the miners’ strike and had become an ardent socialist. He could be trenchant, even rude to people who irritated him, but he always treated me the utmost respect, I think because we shared a dark and mordant sense of the absurd and a loathing for religious hypocrisy and the monarchy.
We often met after that, always quaffing large quantities of good white wine, and eventually I edited his prose essays for publication and helped him research his brilliant radio play Iphigenia in Crimea. We went on an unforgettably riotous research trip to the ancient Greek sites in that peninsula, shortly before the Russian invasion, with his daughter Jane, his partner the actress Siân Thomas, and Black Sea archaeologist Professor David Braund. I later organised a conference and event at the British Academy for his 80th birthday, and was delighted by the queue of luminaries wanting to join in toasting him, including Andy Burnham, Lee Hall, Vanessa Redgrave and Melvyn Bragg.
When Tony was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago, he responded with grace, wit and courage, retiring completely from public life to be tenderly and selflessly nursed by his beloved Siân. She features in some of his most moving poems, especially the hilarious Fig on the Tyne and the valedictory Polygons. I visited as often as I could, and have the warmest memories of boozy lunches where we ranted at the corruption and egotism of those in power in the cosy kitchen and quiet garden of Tony’s modest Newcastle terraced house, with its bust of Milton greeting all who entered. He enjoyed even his last months, and could still recognise close friends as well as family. We have all lost a towering wordsmith, an inimitable poetic voice and a steadfast custodian of humane values, social justice and candour.
Michael Billington: ‘His artistic manifesto should be required reading’
Theatre critic and Guardian journalist
Peter Hall once said of Tony Harrison: “We have a great poet back in the theatre.” What is impressive is that, in the late 20th century when prose was paramount, this learned metre-reader from Leeds should have proved so dramatically dominant. He did this through language that was robust, vigorous and direct and that always puts me in mind of a remark by Jean Cocteau that “theatrical poetry is not tenuous like gossamer but thick like the rigging of a ship and visible at a distance”.
Harrison’s poetry had that high visibility but was also richly varied. Looking back over his work for the National Theatre I am struck by his capacity to encompass French comedy, Greek tragedy and medieval Mysteries with equal panache. He made a big impact in 1973 with his masterly version of The Misanthrope in a production whose dexterity – well, it was the work of John Dexter – I initially failed to grasp. But there was no doubting Harrison’s virtuosity in updating the text and matching the comic energy of Molière’s own verse. To take just one example, look at the way the heroine harpoons a friend’s fake rectitude: “She’d daub a fig leaf on a Rubens nude / But with a naked man she’s not a prude.”
Harrison’s work on Phaedra Britannica and The Oresteia was no less impressive but it was in his version of The Mysteries that he showed an ability to match the earthy and the elevated that lies at the root of English drama. Realism and alliteration also achieved a perfect synthesis in a line like Judas’s self-justifying vaunt: “Bursar was I, balancing t’brethren’s budgeting book.” The Mysteries, among many other things, showed Harrison’s determination to heal the fracture between high and low culture.
The great thing is that he was able to practise what he preached as proved by The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, first staged in Delphi in 1988 and two years later at the National. It showed two Oxford scholars discovering a lost Sophoclean satyr-play and then turning into its leading characters, Apollo and Silenus. My review was illustrated by a Nobby Clark photo showing three clog-dancing satyrs with prodigiously erect prosthetic phalluses: something that at the time caused a mixture of shock and delight. The published edition of the play came with a preface by Harrison that eloquently argued the case for a unified culture that ignored the divisions of class and category and that embraced the tragic and the comic, the mystic and the mundane. It was Harrison’s artistic manifesto and should still be required reading today.
The Trackers marked yet another stage in Harrison’s multifarious career as he then increasingly directed his own work, made films for television and created live events in non-theatre spaces: one (Poetry or Bust) in a Yorkshire wool-combing shed, another (The Kaisers of Carnuntum) in a Roman stadium near Vienna, a third (The Labourers of Herakles) on an excavated site in Delphi. Harrison was always an explorer and pioneer pushing the boundaries of poetry in performance but I suspect he will be remembered theatrically for his ability to take classic texts and to prove that you could be erudite without being elitist and popular without being condescending. I got to know him a bit through having worked with Siân Thomas, his long-term partner and devoted helpmeet during his difficult final years of illness. My recollection is of a shrewd and kindly man who embodied, in his character, the unified sensibility that was always his aesthetic goal.