TONY HARRISON
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The Inky Digit of Defiance
Selected Prose 1966–2016
EDITED BY EDITH HALL
Contents
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Title Page
Foreword: An Inky Tribute by Edith Hall
Introduction: Inkless and Digital
Aikin Mata
Fellowship
Shango the Shaky Fairy
The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa
The Misanthrope
Palladas
Phaedra Britannica
Facing Up to the Muses
The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
Hecuba to Us
Honorary Doctorate, Athens: Acceptance Speech
Prometheus: Fire and Poetry
The Tears and the Trumpets
The Fanatic Pillager
Egil and Eagle-Bark
Square Rounds
Weeping for Hecuba
Even Now
Flicks and this Fleeting Life
The Inky Digit of Defiance
The Label Trail to Strasbourg
The David Cohen Prize for Literature 2015
Notes
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright
Foreword: An Inky Tribute
by Edith Hall
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In his Apology for Poetry (1595), Philip Sidney explains that he never consciously set out to be a poet. But he could not help writing poetry: ‘over-mastered by some thoughts, I yielded an inky tribute unto them’. This is my inky tribute, albeit in prose, to Tony Harrison. Ink is the physical liquid in which he writes his poems, using his fountain pen. And ink is an image binding these essays across the eight decades of his life, from a storybook he read in his childhood to his speech accepting the PEN Pinter Prize in 2009.
Harrison has never explained the title of a short essay he wrote in 1971, included in this collection, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’. The essay illuminates some of the poems in The Loiners (1970), because in it he describes some of his earliest memories of growing up in Leeds. Understanding the full significance of Dr Agrippa’s inkwell for Harrison requires looking at an illustrated children’s book which made a profound impression on him when he was small. ‘The Story of the Inky Boys’ is told in The English Struwwelpeter, or Pretty Stories and Funny Pictures for Little Children, first published by Friedrich Volckmar of Leipzig in 1848. A copy of this much-reprinted English-language text was possessed and read by Harrison. It is anonymous and in rhyming couplets. Although Heinrich Hoffmann’s striking pictures are reproduced without alteration, the words offer a free version rather than a translation of Hoffmann’s original German verses of 1845. Despite being rebuked by Dr Agrippa, three racist little white boys are cruel to a black boy:
Then great Agrippa foams with rage –
Look at him on this very page!
He seizes Arthur, seizes Ned,
Takes William by his little head;
And they may scream and kick and call,
Into the ink he dips them all;
Into the inkstand, one, two, three,
Till they are black as black can be …
Harrison has told me that he particularly likes the grave expression on Dr Agrippa’s face in the drawing reproduced opposite: putting the naughty boys morally right is a serious business.
Curiously, in the German version the tall bearded sage is named Saint Nicholas – Santa Claus. It was the anonymous author of the English text who changed him to Dr Agrippa, a mythologised version of the famous early-sixteenth-century German polymath and occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim. This learned Dr Agrippa was in 1848 culturally familiar, having recently featured in works by both Mary Shelley and Søren Kierkegaard. But by the 1940s none of this will have concerned a little boy in Leeds. What is fascinating is the way that the image and the story stayed in Harrison’s mind, to re-emerge in the title of his short psycho-biographical essay thirty years later. The rhyming couplets of English popular verse, typified in this children’s book, fundamentally affected his evolution as a poet. He explains this process in his essay here on translating Molière.
Such a fusion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture – the significance of children’s rhymes to the translation of canonical French drama – has been central to all Harrison’s work, above all The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. It is here personified in the august figure of Dr Agrippa. The celebrated Renaissance man of letters, a representative of elite intellectual culture, appears as a moral exemplar in a popular book for children and speaks like a good fairy in a pantomime. Baptism by ink in the inkwell of an illustrious thinker is, moreover, a suitable image for a poet’s initiation rite. A poet whose voice has always been activated in the cause of the voiceless and oppressed will have been drawn to the ‘moral’ of the tale: that ink can be instrumental in the exposure of racism or any other narrow-minded form of prejudice or inhumanity. And Arthur, Ned and William are made to realise, through their submersion in Dr Agrippa’s inkwell, that, as human beings, they are indistinguishable from their black victim; their rite of passage could symbolise the progress of the human soul as it learns about universal human values by being refined through experiencing fine poetry. This collection of Harrison’s essays could, therefore, just as well have been entitled The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa as The Inky Digit of Defiance.
A visual memory from his youth which Harrison does describe, in the same 1971 essay, is of the windows over the altar in the chapel of Leeds Grammar School. There were figures, he writes, representing possible professions that the pupils might later follow. One was MILES (‘soldier’) and another MERCATOR (‘businessman’). In my favourite sentence in this volume, Harrison writes that he can’t remember the figure portrayed between them, but in adulthood,
when I close my eyes now I see Poeta, the poet, sometimes as poised, saintly and acceptable as his worldly flankers, sometimes like some half-naked shaker in the throes of a virulent scribendi cacoethes, being belaboured by public-school angels wielding gamma minuses like immense shillelaghs over their glossy Cherry Blossomy hairstyles, driving the poet from the Garden of Eton.
The vocation of POETA and Harrison’s working-class identity were thus indissoluble from the start. But it turns out that there were in fact two other figures portrayed in the chapel window: an academic, SCHOLASTICUS, and a BENEFACTOR (‘philanthropist’).
The chapel has long since been turned into the Business School of Leeds University. The British educational system, in which underprivileged children like Harrison could once hope for free grammar-school and university educations, has been taken over by commercial interests, like England in Shakespeare’s Richard II, ‘bound in with shame, / With inky blots, and rotten parchment bonds’. But the two figures in the window which Harrison had forgotten are not irrelevant to his achievements. He is certainly a scholar: the range and depth of his reading and research are staggering, as the notes at the end of this volume, detailing the sources of most of his rich range of quotations and citations, reveal. He is also a benefactor. It is true that in the public imagination he is primarily associated with his most snarling poetic voice – his characteristic, embittered railing against stupidity and injustice, which made him identify with the cynical epigrammatist Palladas from the fourth century ad. Palladas’ biting epigrams, a selection of which are reprinted here, along with Harrison’s essay introducing them, scoffingly deprecate the fall of pagan literary and artistic culture to the intolerant theocrats of the new Christian regime. Yet for all his bitterness, the fundamental outlook of Harrison’s poetry
is always humane and benevolent. There is a philanthropic ‘charity’ in the best sense, a non-judgemental, inclusive social vision, even in his most superficially harsh and most controversial poem, v. (1985).
As an example of his breathtaking erudition, the title of his ‘Newcastle Is Peru’ (1969) was drawn from an obscure poem attributed to John Cleveland, ‘News from Newcastle; or, Newcastle Coal-Pits’. Cleveland was a seventeenth-century satirical poet, little read today, whose scathing tone (although not his Royalist politics) Harrison admires. Cleveland’s biographer said that he struck people as a ‘Vates in the whole Import of the Word, both Poet and Prophet’. Vates is the oldest Latin word for a creator of poetry. In 1977, the retired Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, E. R. Dodds, wrote in his autobiography:
With the possible exception of Louis MacNeice, Yeats is the only poet I have known or encountered who looked just like what he was, a poet – no mere rhymester, but a vates, a poet in the full, ancient, arrogant meaning of the term. He behaved like the consecrated priest of a mystery – the mystery of words, which alone are certain good.
All four of these men – Cleveland, MacNeice, Yeats and Dodds, who himself wrote poetry as a young man – are quoted approvingly by Harrison in this book. I gasped when I read Dodds’s description, because it fits Harrison perfectly. Charisma, magnetism, a human energy field – none of this language is adequate to describe the effect of his physical presence and his way of talking. He habitually speaks in a manner not too far removed from the sound of his poetry – intermittently elated or playful, but dominantly sardonic and caustic, uncompromisingly honest, sometimes explicit, and always in the resounding Leeds accent of his northern childhood.
The difference lies in the matter of rhythm, for he does not normally converse in metre. But he has devoted his whole life to writing poetry, and has made every penny of his livelihood from it, as a true ‘consecrated priest’ of ‘the mystery of words’. He has published, in comparison, little prose. This makes this volume unique and indispensable to understanding the man, his voice in conversation, his methods and biography. Its title alone, The Inky Digit of Defiance (the title also of the published version of his speech on accepting the PEN Pinter Prize in 2009), is informative. He tells us in the eponymous essay that he first heard the phrase on radio in 2009. In Afghanistan some courageous women exercised their right to vote. This was in the face of intimidation, even though the Taliban’s ban on women entering polling centres had supposedly been rescinded following the fall of the Taliban government in 2001. Listening to the BBC World Service, Harrison heard the reporter speak ‘of women coming from the polling booth proudly displaying fingers marked with indelible ink to show they had voted. “The inky digit of defiance”, the reporter called it.’ This reminded Harrison of his Uncle Harry, who was deaf and dumb and needed to use signs to communicate. A famous teacher of rhetorical gesture was praised in a 1644 poem for using his hands so eloquently that ‘every Digit dictates and doth reach / Unto our sense a mouth-excelling speech’. But Uncle Harry also used a dictionary to communicate, licking his finger to flick through the pages and point to words, often to express anti-Tory opinions. The ink in which the dictionary was printed stained his digit-tip.
These two anecdotes, unified by the image of the inky finger, speak volumes about Harrison’s attitude to human life. He has been consistent in his defiantly dissident stance in a class-ridden, sexist world. He has always used his poetic gift as a public vehicle to give voice to the poor and the oppressed. The essays here reveal him speaking up for women everywhere abused, insulted or repressed by men, but also for causes less frequently espoused by the Establishment liberal left. We hear his praise of Cuban poets of the 1960s for their revolutionary project and the insights they gained from Marxism; we feel his sympathy with socialism and his support for the highly unfashionable cause of the British miners during the 1984–5 strike; we come to understand his uncompromising dislike of monarchy and the parts of the Establishment that fawn upon the British royal family; we respect his sense of fellowship and a project shared with all the other republican, rebellious and revolutionary wordsmiths who have used their art as a vehicle for public dissent, and often suffered marginalisation, ridicule or even persecution for it: Milton and May, Shelley and Hugo, Heine and Brecht, Holub, Ritsos, and Zargana, the imprisoned Myanmar poet with whom Harrison chose to share the PEN Pinter Prize in 2009.
Dodds’s word for describing Yeats as a poet, ‘vates’, is suitable for Harrison in other senses. Dodds, as a Classics professor, was aware that ‘vates’ was the primordial Latin word for a poet, related in the most remote human antiquity to the Sanskrit verbal root vad, ‘speak’ or ‘utter’. The Romans used the word ‘vates’ to describe not just singers or the composers of songs, but also the sacerdotal men in what they saw as the barbarian countries to their north, such as Britannia. It was to the barbarian vates that communal rites were entrusted; his role included safeguarding the tribe’s understanding of ‘the philosophy of nature’. In this volume, Harrison is seen most intensely in touch with his ‘barbarian’ northern roots in the chapter ‘Egil and Eagle-Bark’, describing his quest for a poetic diction in which to translate Aeschylus’ Oresteia for the National Theatre. This took him back beyond the language of the medieval mystery cycle to Old English and early Teutonic poetry, and thence to the visceral ‘kennings’, new words compounded out of two existing elements, in Old Norse and Icelandic. He discovered a linguistic ancestor for his own raw, compounded, consonantal version of Aeschylus, ‘eagle-bark’ and all, in the tenth-century Icelandic poet Egil Skalla-Grimsson, who once lived in England himself.
The word ‘vates’ fell out of use for a time amongst the culturally insecure ancient Romans. They came under the spell of Greek literature, began to distrust their prehistoric Italian heritage with its ‘vatic’ priests, and instead used their Greek word ‘poeta’ when they meant a civilised ‘poet’. The term ‘vates’ was reintroduced by Virgil, a poet with whom Harrison has had a long and intense relationship. In the 1960s, he published, as ‘T. W. Harrison’, two academic articles on the eighteenth-century reception of Virgil; much more recently, he served as president of the Virgil Society. But he has moved, as he explains in this volume in the essay ‘The Tears and the Trumpets’, from admiration and emulation of Virgil’s craftsmanship to an increasing unease with his political stance as celebrator of the Augustan imperial project.
Virgil liked the term ‘vates’ because it has a visionary connotation, meaning ‘seer’ as well as ‘poet’, and he wanted to convey the idea of a bard with a sacred task of transcending time to gaze into the future imperial destiny of the Romans. Harrison, who is not a religious man, makes no such oracular claims. He is constitutionally incapable of using poetry to celebrate any political regime, let alone an empire on a massive scale. But his work, if not oracular, has nevertheless proved consistently prescient. Those scholarly articles on the ‘reception’ of Virgil in the eighteenth century prefigured the emergence in the 1980s of Classical Reception Studies, now a central sub-discipline of academic Classics. In the 1960s, when he was writing them, and in the 1970s, he visited and lived in places that few British poets have ever experienced: Nigeria immediately after it secured full independence from Britain in 1960; Cuba in the early years of the revolutionary government; cold war Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring; Brazil at the height of the hard-line dictatorial regime. His prose pieces provide shrewd and humane witness to these places at momentous historical moments. They are both prescient and riveting.
Aikin Mata, his 1964 adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata to fit local north Nigerian voices, performance styles and social structures, was years ahead of its time. With student actors at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, he evolved an unprecedented theatrical language transcending the cultural divisions between Europe and Africa. Within Africa this subsequently encouraged indigenous writers, especially those from Nigeria, to consider the ancient Greek plays when mountin
g new stage productions. This in turn led to a flowering of homegrown adaptations by writers including Ola Rotimi and Femi Osofisan. Globally, it anticipated the explosion of interest in performing Greek drama, which is now in the professional repertoires of significant theatres in every continent, a development which has been traced precisely to the last years of the 1960s. But in grafting the Aristophanic situation of a war between Athens and Sparta onto the contemporary tribal rivalry between the Yoruba and Ibo peoples, and utilising their indigenous rituals and performance traditions, Aikin Mata broke new ground. It anticipated by a decade the ‘intercultural’ or ‘transcultural’ trend in world theatre, which saw directors abandoning narrow ideas of national or ethnic theatre traditions to mingle ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ repertoires, performance styles, rituals and ethnology: the Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki using Noh conventions to realise Euripides from the late 1970s; and the Russian-French-English Ariane Mnouchkine harnessing Kathakali, Kabuki and Balinese mask and dance traditions to Aeschylean tragedy in her Les Atrides in 1990. Harrison’s production was infinitely less well funded and far less widely reported, but he and his collaborator, James Simmons, were some of the earliest pioneers of ‘intercultural’ Greek theatre.
In Aikin Mata, Harrison required some of his male actors to perform female roles. A mixed group of Yoruba and Ibo men were required to forget their tribal rivalries and merge identities as a chorus of old Hausa women. Such gender-role-inverting or ‘gender-blind’ practices are familiar enough in serious theatre today, but in the 1960s and 1970s, they were regarded as shockingly avant-garde or vulgarly suggestive of the drag roles in children’s pantomimes inherited from the Victorian music-hall tradition of burletta en travesti. So when Harrison insisted on using an all-male cast for the Oresteia at the National Theatre, being convinced that the full misogyny of the trilogy could only be realised by having all the female roles delivered by male actors, as they had been in the ancient theatre, he encountered opposition from a range of viewpoints. Feminists objected to female actors being deprived, as they saw it, of the opportunity to star in an important production, and aesthetic aficionados disliked seeing men in female costumes, which they felt inappropriate to the dignity of ‘high art’. But Harrison’s fascination with the light that cross-dressing can throw on restrictive gender ideology has persisted. His most recent play, Iphigenia in Crimea (to receive its premiere on BBC Radio in 2017), features British soldiers in ‘drag’ taking female roles, in a burlesque version of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. For the performance they wear frocks that they have looted from a deserted aristocratic house near Sebastopol – something which Harrison, with typically scrupulous research, has discovered actually happened in the British camp, located on the site of the ancient Greek city of Tauric Chersonesos, during the 1854–5 siege.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 1