… years, like an open crater, gory, grim,
with bloody bubbles leering at the rim;
a thing no bigger than an urn explodes
and ravishes all silence and all odes.
Flora asphyxiated by foul air,
unknown to either Keats or Lemprière,
dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees,
dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees,
a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats
children half the age of dying Keats …
(‘A Kumquat for John Keats’)
It’s not only our lateness in history but the dark catastrophes of our century that undermine creativity at its very roots. Exactly sixty years ago to this day in April the then Regius Professor of English Literature at Glasgow, a man called Macneile Dixon, stood in the very same area on Helicon as we were standing. He had been prompted to go there by an ‘unaccountable firm determination’ to visit, what others have found frozen or foul-tasting, the spring of Hippocrene. He was led, as we seemed to be, by something outside his control. He stood on that spot on Helicon and he mused:
Is there anywhere in human history to be found a more charming conception than this of the Muses … which, like so many of our most fruitful thoughts we owe to the Greek imagination? … They stand apart … alone and peerless, without parallel, look where we will in the many mythologies … [They make] a direct appeal to the modern spirit … remaining, even in a world of change, eternally acceptable.
And what he really found unique about these deities was that
in honour of these, unlike other divinities, no blood was spilt; … flute and voice became the substitutes of victim and burnt offering.
The problem, true as this may be, is that the Muses have to inspire work in a world where the many other ‘divinities’, the personifications and the ideologies, continually have the blood of victims spilled and holocausts created. And Macneile Dixon knew this too, although he was writing sixty years ago. And if he himself had a favourite Muse among the nine it would be Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, and he wrote an interesting book on tragedy in 1924. In it he says about tragedy that it ‘must deal with the most monstrous and appalling that life can offer when it turns upon us its Medusa-like countenance of frenzy and despair’. It’s the frenzy and despair of the Fifth Age of mankind, the iron age, and the gaze turns men to stone and numbs their sources of affirmation. Sixty years since Macneile Dixon saw life turn its Medusa-like gaze on us, there have been greater quantities of blood spilled, greater horrors, and it has created a very ‘weary nine’ and a darker and darker Helicon.
At the time I began feeling my way in life as a poet, there was, in reaction to our century’s terrible events, what George Steiner has characterised as ‘a retreat from the word’. Unfortunately for me, while this retreat from the word was happening, I was beginning to acquire what Harold Pinter called my ‘voracious appetite for language’. I acquired this appetite for language both from my background and my education. People often ask me who my ‘influences’ were, and when a poet is asked that question the expected answer is usually a roll call of distinguished literary mentors, great models of eloquence. Of course there were those, and they have included the great names of Greek drama. But I have always related that particular question to the puzzlement my mother always felt as to ‘where it all came from’, as there had never been any artists in the family before. So I wrote a short poem to answer both questions, and it’s called ‘Heredity’:
‘How you became a poet’s a mystery.
Wherever did you get your talent from?’
I say: ‘I had two uncles, Joe and Harry,
one was a stammerer, the other dumb!’
I was born into an uneducated working-class family in Leeds, and at the age of eleven I won one of those scholarships created by the Education Act of 1944, to Leeds Grammar School, where, as ‘scholarship boys’ were considered ‘bright’ if nothing else, I was set almost automatically, it seems to me now, to study the classics. And I was very conscious at the same time as I was being shepherded towards these great founts of eloquence that I had family about me, with an uncle who stammered and an uncle who was dumb, and others who were afflicted with a metaphorical dumbness and lack of socially confident articulation; and also their forebears, who, although their mouths had been shaped for speech like all meropes anthropoi, had been silenced and went unrecorded in the chorus of history. And so it seemed to me then that the greatest gift that I could acquire for myself was the gift of articulation, the treasure of eloquence, the power over words, the power of words. I had a hunger, an appetite for all modes of articulation, for English and for other languages, and even in those very early days, though the teaching was often horrendous, for Latin and Greek, and above all a hunger for that supreme form of articulation, the highest eloquence, poetry. So when I discovered that there was supposed to be a ‘retreat from the word’, I wasn’t prepared to retreat. And when I heard about the ‘death of tragedy’, I wasn’t prepared to attend the funeral, because at that time of my life when I most hungered for articulation and models of eloquence, at the maximum point of my need and hunger I was brought face to face with Greek tragedy, in which, I think, the primacy of language is paramount. I had quite a wrestle, however, with those who taught me. I have described in one of my poems from The School of Eloquence called ‘Them & [uz]’ how one English teacher wouldn’t allow me to read Keats aloud because of my Leeds accent. Much of my writing has been a long, slow-burning revenge on the teacher who taught me English when I was eleven or twelve, and full of retrospective aggro. I think that to these feelings are due my reclamation of the Mystery Plays for northern speech and actors, and why there’s a strong northern character to the language I used for the National Theatre Oresteia, which proved too much for some people. One critic wrote that the chorus ‘sounded like fifteen Arthur Scargills’! I make no apologies. There’s no earthly reason why a Greek chorus should sound like well-bred ladies from Cheltenham in white nighties. I had also some problems with my Classics teachers, one of whom was engaged in a campaign to keep all colloquial language out of the translations his pupils were required to do from Latin and Greek. It’s easy to deny the colloquial roots of a dead language. The upshot of what seemed to me like a conspiracy was to pretend that the language had never been alive or spoken at all. I wish I could remember the piece of Latin that I was translating, but I think it was Plautus and there was some official or other moving a group of people on in a crowded street. My translation went something like: ‘Move along there!’, true to constabulary vernacular. I do remember that this was crossed out with a heavy red pen, and the alternative I was offered in the margin by the teacher was: ‘Vacate the thoroughfare!’ I’m sure that such terrible things of forty years ago don’t happen today, even if the National Curriculum permitted the possibility of translating Plautus. I gave expression in another poem which I’ll read to you about some of the frustrations I had as a working-class boy with a Leeds accent translating upper-class English into patrician Latin and vice versa. It’s a poem called ‘Classics Society (Leeds Grammar School 1552–1952)’. The grammar schools were founded in the belief that poor old English hadn’t the benefit of being a dead language, and the poem begins with a quotation from 1552, the year of my school’s foundation, from one who felt humbly cowed by the gracious eloquence of Ciceronian rhetoric:
The grace of Tullies eloquence doth excel
any Englishmens tongue … my barbarous stile …
The tongue our leaders use to cast their spell
was once denounced as ‘rude’, ‘gross’, ‘base’ and ‘vile’.
How fortunate we are who’ve come so far!
We boys can take old Hansards and translate
the British Empire into SPQR
but nothing demotic or too up-to-date,
and not the English that I speak at home,
not Hansard standards, and if Antoninus
spo
ke like delinquent Latin back in Rome
he’d probably get gamma double minus.
So the lad who gets the alphas works
the hardest in his class at his translation
and finds good Ciceronian for Burke’s:
a dreadful schism in the British nation.
That dreadful schism regrettably still exists in the British nation, and an awareness of it has helped to make me the kind of poet I am and the kind of translator I have become when I approach the classics. The tensions in that schism made me into the kind of poet who uses an immensely formal classical prosody against colloquial diction and against the working-class speech of Leeds and even the language of street aggro and graffiti, as in my much-reviled (and, I’m glad to say, much championed!) poem v., where the language of the Beeston graveyard ranges from Latin and biblical to obscene graffiti and four-letter words. And the same tensions between my background and my education, between my awareness of the inarticulate on the one hand and being presented with the models of eloquence from the ancient world on the other, at a time of my maximum need to discover utterance, also made me into the kind of translator that I am.
My earliest experience among people I loved who felt hugely inadequate when it came to using language made me value the word above all, even though there seemed to be a ‘retreat’ from it under the Medusa-like gaze of the Fifth Age of mankind, and the pressure of other media. My feeling was then, and still is, although I have every poet’s despair at times, that language could take on anything and everything, the worst things perhaps above all, and this lesson I learned at that impressionable period of my life in Greek tragedy. However galling it could be at the time, the fact is that I learned ancient Greek, and the sad thing about the new National Curriculum is that no one from my kind of background especially, with my kind of hunger and appetite for language, will have the chance to make his own way to those founding models of European eloquence. While the world of expression was losing its belief in the word, I was busily acquiring mine. ‘Words! Words! for me, alas, there was no other salvation!’ as the great Cretan writer Nikos Kazantzakis wrote.
This doesn’t mean that I haven’t had other intimations that not everything was well on Helicon. I have had intimations of the mortality of the Muses that may surprise you. The Muses can have other homes than the mountain top in Boiotia, ‘the Grove of the Muses’, as Pausanias calls it. It may astonish you, but for the last twenty years, on and off, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I have lived not only in The Grove but no. 9 The Grove. And that’s not all. This may be harder to believe, but I swear to you it is true and can produce evidence to prove it. For some years I have been receiving mail, which I assumed had been misdirected, addressed to Mrs Muse, 9 The Grove! I was very alarmed, but it was more than my existence as a poet was worth to put it back in the letter box marked ‘Not Known at this Address’. After a while I had to open one of these missives to the Muse. I opened one (and I said at the very beginning I was going to make a revelation about the Muses) and inside the envelope was a football coupon! Why not, I thought, after contemplating it for some moments, why not? The ancients, after all, didn’t have our problem about reconciling culture and sporting activities. The oppositions and divisions I partly dramatised in my poem v. would have been incomprehensible to the spectators of the Pythian Games at Delphi. So why shouldn’t the Muse receive her football pools? Good luck to her, I thought. I went on receiving these missives from time to time, and only a few days ago, addressed to Mrs Muse, 9 The Grove, there was a brown envelope franked ‘Newcastle Health Authority’. I had to open it, and it said that ‘the doctor will see Mrs Muse at 9.15’. I thought, is this then the last ailing survivor of that thiasos on Helicon who inspired my Boiotian synadelphos, Hesiod? You will remember that in Hesiod’s time, the Muses, though he gave them names which he probably invented himself, were represented as an indissoluble chorus, holding hands in their dance and not yet presiding over the specialisms that they were later to be credited with. I prefer to think of them like that: Tragedy and History holding hands with Lyric and Music, because some of the work I do, which I regard as all poetry, seems to be critically unclassifiable and resistant to being placed under the care of any specific Muse of the distinguished nine. It’s all poetry to me, whether it is for the printed page, or for reading aloud, or for the theatre, or the opera house, or concert hall, or even for television. But if there were to be only one Muse left of all the ‘weary nine’, one silent, ailing Mrs Muse with an early appointment to see the doctor, and with a poste restante address at my house, 9 The Grove, which one is it? I think I would have to choose, like Macneile Dixon, Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy. She may be ailing, but I think the announcement of her death is premature.
This is the Muse, as Macneile Dixon wrote sixty years ago, who deals ‘with the most monstrous and appalling that life can offer, when it turns upon us its Medusa-like countenance of frenzy and despair’. Whatever it was in my early experience that didn’t allow me to despair of the word turned me also towards tragedy. This frenzy and despair of the Fifth Age is that terror that tragedy allows us to gaze into, as Nietzsche said, ‘yet’ (and this is a very important yet), Nietzsche added, ‘without being turned to stone by the vision’. In an age when the spirit of affirmation has almost been burned out of us, more than ever we need what Nietzsche also called tragedy in Ecce Homo, ‘the highest art to say yes to life’. The mother of the Muses, or of the one frail, ailing, afflicted daughter still surviving, is Memory, so that we can’t celebrate our existence, we can’t have those ‘unalloyed pleasures’, that ‘happiness … without qualification’ that E. R. Dodds wrote about, simply by forgetting the terrors of the recent past or by ignoring the frightening future. Robert Jay Lifton, the American Professor of Psychology, who has charted the effect of the Nazi concentration camps and the nuclear holocaust on our imaginations, and the deeply numbing effect of what must be the most petrifying Medusa-like gaze of all on our sense of futurity, has called for artists to discover a ‘theatre that can imagine the end of the world and go beyond that … [a theatre] that can believe in tomorrow’, what he later was to call ‘a theatre of faith’. It sounds to me like a call for the rebirth of tragedy. And this theatre he calls for, this tragedy has to believe in the primacy of the word. I think my obsessive concern with Greek drama isn’t about antique reproduction, but part of a search for a new theatricality and also a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the current theatre, where I want to work as a poet. There are a number of occasions when an obsession with Greek drama has been used to focus dissatisfaction with theatrical cliché and create new forms of expression. The Camerata in Florence thought they were reviving ancient tragedy, and discovered opera with Peri and Rinuccini’s piece about Orpheus leading to Monteverdi’s Orfeo in 1607. And there was Wagner’s obsession with Greek tragedy, especially the Oresteia, which gave him not only a form to search for new theatricality, but also the means to express his total impatience with the theatre that he found about him. And he did create a new form which was finally realised in the festival theatre at Bayreuth. And I should say, since these examples both produced operatic results, that when I began my long and very fruitful collaboration with Harrison Birtwistle on the Oresteia, I said to him that Greek tragedy was opera, but I added hastily, with a poet’s understandable nervousness, opera where the words are primary.
None of this means going ‘back to civilisation’, a going ‘back to the Greeks’, a reactionary cry I sometimes hear at the Delphi drama meetings, but ‘forward to the Greeks’, or ‘forward with the Greeks’. What are some of the things I think when I stand facing up to the Muses in an ancient theatrical space? What are some of the resources from which a poet of the Fifth Age can learn from the Greeks? How was it, I ask myself, that the Greeks could present the worst things they could imagine, gaze into terror, as Nietzsche said, and yet not be turned to stone? From his vantage point in that same theatrical space Oliver Taplin has posed many difficult questions an
d come out with brilliant answers which are of enormous help to us in the theatre. The questions I ask when I face in the opposite direction up to the Muses are very simple ones, and you might even find them simple-minded, but it’s in such simple first questionings that we can create theatre.
The first and most obvious fact about Greek tragedy is that it was played in the full light of day. To this is due a great deal of its unique character. It helped first and foremost, to create what Harbage also found in the theatre of Shakespeare and called ‘an obvious reciprocity’. This ancient theatre, this theatron, this place for seeing was not only where the audience saw actors bringing dark events eis to phōs, ‘to the light of day’, as Sophocles himself puts it in Oedipus Tyrannus; the audience also saw each other, everyone else, so that the bearing of terror was not only shared but seen to be shared, and that is very important. As it was seen to be shared so was it communally endured. The audience were not segregated by armrests and darkness into individual pockets of anxiety and troubled thought in the face of tragedy. Our lights are always dimmed, except by fire regulations for the ‘EXIT’ signs, which I’ve always found a great inhibitor of theatrical concentration. And fire regulations can be great inhibitors otherwise. I had to go to court with Peter Hall, and with the wonderful support of R. P. Winnington-Ingram, to persuade a judge to allow us to use real fire for the conclusion of the Oresteia at the National Theatre. Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power says how spurious the sense of community is in a modern auditorium if fire breaks out! When a dramatist like Brecht, in his poem ‘The Lighting’, writes: ‘Give us some light on the stage, electrician …’, or the poet/dramatist Yeats longs for ‘a Shakespeare play with all the stage lights in every scene’, or we leave the house lights on in our modern auditoriums it is partly from a deep nostalgia for the theatre of full daylight. Prometheus can cry out at the end of Prometheus Bound:
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