On earth there is no death.
All are immortal. All is immortal. No need
To be afraid of death at seventeen
Nor yet at seventy. Reality and light
Exist, but neither death nor darkness.
All of us are on the seashore now,
And I am one of those who haul the nets
When a shoal of immortality comes in …
I only need my immortality
For my blood to go on flowing from age to age.
I would readily pay with my life
For a safe place with constant warmth
Were it not that life’s flying needle
Leads me on through the world like a thread.
Arseniy Tarkovsky
(trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)
Although I knew little Russian, and though I got some whispered translations from my companion, there were no English subtitles as the cinema was in Leningrad, but I could hear the strong metre and the rhymes of the poem, and the combination went deep into my heart. A clue perhaps to dealing with those terrible images I saw at the News Theatre in Leeds thirty years before. As that other Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky, wrote: ‘At certain periods of history it is only poetry that is capable of dealing with reality by condensing it into something graspable, something that otherwise couldn’t be contained in the mind.’ Was the poem the fittest narration for terrifying newsreel screen images? Mirror first compelled me to ask that question.
There was another poem of director Tarkovsky’s father over an extended shot in black and white of Margarita Terekhova walking down a very long corridor in the printing works where the mother she was playing worked. It made you both watch and listen to the poem. It also stayed deep in my memory, and was still there when Peter Symes and I were filming Black Daisies for the Bride (1993) in High Royds Hospital in Menston, Yorkshire, and found a similar but more sloping corridor for our brides to walk down, singing. I think the idea of a snowstorm made out of wedding confetti was also somehow influenced by that Russian film I saw in a welcome break from The Blue Bird.
So that, though involved in the kitsch of The Blue Bird, I had had my eyes opened to a modern cinema which was unashamedly poetic, which had poems read by the poet himself, which made the images you saw, even from newsreel reality, mean a great deal more. One depended on the other. It sowed seeds I was only partially aware of then, though I longed more for the world of Mirror than that of The Blue Bird.
The other seeds were sown in a more jocular but, in retrospect, equally significant way. In 1974–5, I was in Leningrad four times, in the Lenfilm studio in the winter and on location in the park of Pavlovsk in June 1975, doing some of my writing in a room overlooking the battleship Aurora, which fired the first shot in the October Revolution, moored on the river Neva. I was rather impressed that the Lenfilm studio was where one of my great heroes, Eisenstein, had made Battleship Potemkin in 1925. The British actor Richard Pearson, who played Bread, made a speech on his arrival at the studios saying how honoured he felt that he was to be working in the studio where Eisenstein had made his great film fifty years ago. The Russian cameraman, Jonas Gritsius, smiled and said, ‘You won’t feel half so honoured when you realise we’re using the same equipment!’
When I had to be away from The Blue Bird with the National Theatre and The Misanthrope in the United States, I would receive cables from George Cukor in Leningrad, the teasing tone of them scarcely concealing their desperation. The first when I was in Washington staying at the infamous Watergate Hotel and working in the Kennedy Center:
TONY OH MY POET TONY WHERE ARE THEM COMIC COUPLETS WITH THE TOUCH OF ASPERITY FOR LIGHT AFTER SHE HAS CREATED FIRE WATER AND A CHARMING BUT BRIEF VERSE AS THEY ALL ARE OFF TO CATCH THE BLUEBIRD STOP MY TONGUE IS HANGING OUT STOP COULD YOU FIND IT IN YOUR HEART TO WIRE THEM STOP SHAKESPEARE AND MILTON ALWAYS SENT THEIR SONNETS BY WIRE SO WHY CAN’T TONY HARRISON?
YOUR DESPERATE ADMIRER GEORGE
Then, a few weeks later, when we opened on Broadway at the St James’s Theater, I got another cable at the stage door:
DEAR TONY I KNOW YOU WILL TAKE NEW YORK BY STORM BUT DON’T ABANDON YOUR POOR FRIEND IN RUSSIA STOP HOW ABOUT A COUPLE OF COUPLETS KID.
LOVING REGARDS GEORGE
Although I was used to writing and rewriting in rehearsals from work with the director John Dexter on the National Theatre Misanthrope, I hadn’t yet liberated myself from the practice of having to retire to a room on my own to write. It was some years later, when I started to direct my own plays, that I developed the ability simply to change a text verbally and have the stage management write it down, so the idea of wiring poetry by Western Union was not then what I felt I could take to naturally, but with George Cukor’s gentle goading I began to wean myself off being only able to create after long hours of brooding. This developed in me and stood me in great stead when I began to make film poems, or write political squibs for the newspapers or write from a battle in Bosnia and send the poem via satellite to the Guardian in London. But the gently mocking cables of George Cukor somehow began the process, though I wasn’t aware of it then.
When I’d cabled my couplets I would get a teasing, courteous picture postcard of Lenin from George: ‘Grateful thanks to my favourite Long Distance poet!’ Then another sentence begging me to make another trip to Leningrad, though the added caution of ‘only if a working harmony is established between Petrov and Kostal’ hinted that the strained relations between composer and arranger were little better. Then he concluded: ‘The white nights will be upon us, what an opportunity for Britain’s greatest poet (Newcastle Division). Huge thanks, Anthony, and affectionate regards, George.’
He also sent me contact strips from photographs in the studio or on location taken by Henry Wynberg, the used-car salesman who was Elizabeth Taylor’s beau between her first and second marriage to Richard Burton. One of them shows Cukor in his black beret gesturing to someone. That someone had been me when we were discussing some of my couplets on location in Pavlovsk. He had inscribed the one of himself as ‘a character’. This was joined to two of me listening to Cukor. He had captioned them as ‘the brooding poet’. I heard of his death on 24 January 1983, on the one o’clock news, and then the obituary in The Times used the same photo as he had sent to me, the contact print that he was addressing me from. I wrote the following poem:
‘Losing Touch’
In memoriam George Cukor, died 24 January 1983
I watch a siskin swinging back and forth
on the nut net, enjoying lunchtime sun –
unusual this time of year up north
and listening to the news at five past one.
As people not in constant contact do,
we’d lost touch, but I thought of you, old friend,
and sent a postcard now and then. I knew
the sentence starting with your name would end:
‘the Hollywood director, died today.’
You’re leaning forward in your black beret
from The Times obituary, and I’d add
the background of Pavlovsk near Leningrad
bathed in summer and good shooting light
where it was taken that July, as I’m
the one you’re leaning forward to address.
I had a black pen poised about to write
and have one now and think back to that time
and feel you lean towards me out of Nothingness.
I rummage for the contacts you sent then:
the one of you that’s leaning from The Times
and below it one of me with my black pen
listening to you criticise my rhymes,
and, between a millimetre of black band
that now could be ten billion times as much
and none that show the contact of your hand.
The distance needs adjusting; just a touch!
You were about to tap my knee for emphasis.
It’s me who’s leaning forward now with this!
<
br /> I grew very fond of Cukor during our work in Leningrad and my two visits to his house in Hollywood, and I only wish we could have worked on something more congenial to my own talent and more worthy of his. But I learned a little of how to collaborate, happily with him and less so with the warring musical factions. Their quarrels made me aware that it was important to find other artists who were truly open to collaboration and not scrabbling to buff up their own egos or squeeze a more prominent credit. It made me very choosy about composers, and the wariness created by this early film experience made me grateful to discover composers I could collaborate with in theatre and film, such as Harrison Birtwistle, Dominic Muldowney and Richard Blackford.
In my Blue Bird notebook there are some ‘couplets’ that I wrote but which were never used where I can see myself trying to match image and word in a way I found myself doing later in the film poems I had a fuller and more creative involvement in. Some are for a scene where the children of the poor woodcutter, Tyltyl and Mytyl (played by the seven-year-old Patsy Kensit), watch as the rich children skate on the lake, eat and watch fireworks. The word ‘rich’ is associated with the hiss of skates on ice, the spray of shaved ice as a skater stops a glide, foaming champagne, the sharpening of knives to cut a roasted joint, the whoosh of sky rockets, the swish of skirts, the drawing of curtains, servants sweeping the crumbs up off the floor of the banquet:
Six white horses pull a sleigh
of laughing children who can say
we’re rich, rich!
The fireworks cascade, each spark
that swooshes through the dark
says rich, rich!
Look, the ice skates as they glide
hiss and hiss, self-satisfied
rich rich!
Look at all the children skating,
what’s everybody celebrating?
being rich!
The champagne bubbles effervesce
in surfeits of rich happiness …
rich, rich!
The happy boy who only eats
one or two from heaps of sweets
is rich, rich!
The happy girl who’ll only taste
her cake and leave the rest to waste
is rich, rich!
The swish of silken crinolines
swirling as the lady spins
says rich, rich!
The knives being sharpened for the meat
for all the well-fed guests to eat
say rich, rich!
The velvet curtains that are drawn
by servants in the chilly dawn
say rich, rich!
The brushes that sweep up the mess
of other children’s happiness
say rich, rich …!
This was a kind of song/montage that might have used some of the later techniques of my film poems had it ever got any further than my notebook. I seem to remember it was considered to have tipped a degree too far towards the ‘Soviet’ half of the co-production! As was a duet I wrote between the Dog (George Cole) and Cat (Cicely Tyson), the one inciting the forest trees into revolution and the other suggesting appeasement:
CAT
I sing to you this day of days
the forest kingdom’s Marseillaise.
The time has come, you forest glades,
to use your boughs as barricades.
Be chopped no more to logs and sticks,
you servile trees, turn Bolsheviks.
The end’s in sight to saw and axe
the tyranny of lumberjacks.
O sycamore, O elm, O beech
Liberty’s within your reach.
DOG
Don’t listen to those servile lies
there’s always room for compromise.
O little shrubs and trees think twice
compromise can be rather nice.
I beg you all to reassess
Man’s power and your powerlessness.
You humble trees were never meant
to question the Establishment.
You vegetables learn your place
to live and serve the human race.
etc., etc.
Admittedly uninspired, but it helped to teach me to write quickly when needed and also to bin lines almost immediately. It was good training for my later film poems, when I was trying to articulate things closer to my heart, or a greater burden on my spirit, but with something of the same pressures to produce the poetry.
I went over to Hollywood to see Cukor after the film had been almost universally savaged, except by a loyal Cukor fan on the Los Angeles Times. The reactions depressed him, but he showed it only fleetingly. It fared so badly it was never released in the UK, so I went to see it at a cinema in LA, and was horrified. I couldn’t tell George Cukor that the critics were wrong and I tried to make him feel better by saying that I felt that I had let him down. It seemed to me he was thinking that The Blue Bird that had turned into a turkey had finished him in Hollywood. It finished me before I got started, though I’d always known it wasn’t the place for me and didn’t care. Seeing Tarkovsky’s Mirror in the middle of the making of The Blue Bird stamped my poetic film priorities for the rest of my career. I felt sorry for George, but he wasn’t so depressed that he couldn’t go on making fun of me, of both what he called my ‘humble origins’ and my much-mocked ‘elevated status’ as a translator of ‘highbrow’ classics, with a hit on Broadway. ‘I thought’, he said, ‘that someone of your humble origins might like to be picked up in a green Rolls-Royce.’ And that’s what he sent, and I rode in it down Sunset Boulevard. I’d given him some of my books of poems and theatre texts, and he said that he’d put me in his library with other authors who had been his friends and had inscribed books to him. He wasn’t sure, he mocked, quite where I belonged, and pointed out my tomes wedged between Thomas Mann and Irving Berlin. Katharine Hepburn, who lived next door, dropped in for tea. He showed me the place in the garden where Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had a blazing row.
When I was next in Hollywood I took my son Max with me. I had been asked to meet with John Williams, the film composer most famous for Jaws and Star Wars, to discuss the possibility of working together on a musical based on Bernard Shaw’s early novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession (1882). Max, though still very young, had also been inspired by the great cinematographer Freddie Young when I’d taken him with me to Leningrad on one of my Blue Bird trips. He had by this time an 8 mm cine camera and was filming in George Cukor’s garden, where I was talking with George and another person, who told Max not to intrude. Cukor threw a fit and berated his other guest for discouraging the boy. Then he went through the motions of setting up the scene for Max and calling ‘Action!’ Max wasn’t discouraged. We also went to the studios to watch John Williams conduct the recording of his soundtrack to John Frankenheimer’s film Black Sunday. John Williams and I came to a mutual decision that we weren’t really suited to each other, and my Hollywood career ended for ever.
These were seminal experiences also for Max. It was my son Max who was to teach me many of the technicalities of film and deepen my understanding of the process. From an early age he had a brilliant grasp of the medium. I remember him coming with me to Cinecittà, the great film studios in Rome, where Franco Zeffirelli was shooting La Traviata, with my then wife, Teresa Stratas, singing the role of Violetta. Zeffirelli gave Max a giant wheel of Dolcelatte cheese as a reward for spotting that in the sets for Traviata at Cinecittà you would see the camera and crew reflected in the highly polished and gilded antique furniture. We watched films together, and he would provide a fascinating commentary on how the shots were set up. He came with me when we were filming The Blasphemers’ Banquet in Bradford and in London. Before his cruel illness he became a camera assistant and worked in that capacity on Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. My son taught me a great deal about film, passed on as he learned it with passionate commitment himself.
Certain seeds had been sown in these earl
y experiences which meant that the tentative first verse commentary I made for Arctic Paradise in 1981 was not a venture into totally unknown territory, though it was my first experience of the cutting room, which by degrees became the place I did more of my work, rather than in a secluded room or study. For this film, produced by Andrée Molyneux, I used the metres of Robert Service, the Scots-born Yukon Balladeer. This story for a World About Us slot was of a young man, Roger Mendelsohn, who’d left his job in the city to go and live as a trapper with his wife and family in the Yukon. The first thing that struck me in trying to write verse for already cut film was that I often needed a longer hold on the beginning or end of shots. Even later I’ve found cameramen, even those who’ve worked with me on more than one film, using their free eye to raise an eyebrow at the length of time elapsing before being asked to cut. In a second shoot in the new Yukon gold rush, Andrée Molyneux brought back longer shots and it helped the verse to develop a story in a different, more concentrated way than in coinciding with a continuous, quickly intercut sequence. Later, working with my great collaborator, Peter Symes, we developed an understanding of the length of holds on close-ups and the pace and momentum of tracking and crane shots.
Arctic Paradise was a tentative beginning, but it led to another work for television produced by Andrée Molyneux, The Big H (1984), not strictly a film poem of the kind Peter Symes and I pioneered, but again another step on the way to understanding the processes that made verse work or not on the screen. It was also the beginning of a screen collaboration with the composer Dominic Muldowney, who later worked with me on The Blasphemers’ Banquet (1989) and Black Daisies for the Bride (1993), as well as the ambitious theatre piece for the National Theatre, Square Rounds (1992). The Big H (1984) was important too in that poet and composer collaborated from the beginning, even before the text was finished. All stages towards the fluid collaborations of the later film poems.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 35