Why is it, Lord, although I’m right,
I find it hard to sleep at night?
Sometimes I wake up in a sweat
they’ve not found WMDs yet!
The thought that preys most on my mind
is the only arms they’ll ever find
(unless somehow I get MI6
to plant them to be found by Blix
that’s if the UN sneaks back in)
are Ali’s in the surgeon’s bin.
This went to the London Review of Books, but I later extended the poem into ‘Holy Tony’s Prayer’, which features ‘Holy Tony’ imagining an Iraq victory photo op, with little Ali Ismail Abbas standing next to him making a ‘V for victory’ sign with his prosthetic arm, and ends with an injunction from Blair to the spin doctors to make sure they
twist his wrist the right way round.
I cheered Harold’s naming of our home-grown war criminal, Tony Blair, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The contemplation of the apple blossom is continually broken by rage at political events. As Brecht says in another of his poems, ‘To Posterity’:
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice.
We must never forget that here in our own country there is a lust for censorship lurking in the undergrowth that could easily be inflamed. We need wide-eyed vigilance over our freedom of speech and must never be silent about injustice. But for the moment, while Myanmar (Burma), Iran, China and many other countries monitored by PEN put their poets in prison cells, we put ours in Poets’ Corner! I sincerely hope to be spared both.
It’s not that I shun monuments to, or busts and statues of, poets. In fact, I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in The Gaze of the Gorgon.
Heine had one monument in a park outside the Frankfurt Opera which is used by heroin addicts to shoot up in. Heine’s hair was covered in blood sprayed from the veins of junkies when the injections went wrong. The other Heine was in Corfu, in the palace of Sisi, Empress of Austria, who adored the poet. At her assassination the palace was bought by the German Kaiser, and his first act was to get rid of what he called ‘that syphilitic Jew’.
Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I even have busts in my home. Before you enter my house you will see a brass classical lyre on my door. It is my door knocker. It marks the door into a poet’s lair. What do you do with this lyre, the lyre that sets the key for ‘lyrical’ poetry, the lyre that accompanies the poetry of the trees you will walk through to the lyre on my door? What do you do with this lyre? You bang it hard against the door. You change it into percussion. When I hear the lyre banging on the door I will open it, and the first thing you will see in my hallway is a large eighteenth-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and seriously committed role of the poet, and who, though he was blind, had one of the most unflinching and unswerving gazes of all English poets. He is one of my great heroes.
I have a mini-version of this bust looking at me as I type in my attic. I have small busts of Homer, Dante, Byron and Strindberg, and framed engravings of Molière, Shakespeare, Kipling, a photo and a manuscript of Yeats. There is also on my staircase a manuscript of Victor Hugo, along with a pressed flower from his spectacular funeral, at which, it was said, ‘The prostitutes of Paris, as a mark of respect, draped their pudenda in black crêpe.’ I made a republican version of his Le Roi s’amuse, with a libidinous Victorian Prince of Wales and an obsequious Poet Laureate in his rowdy retinue. I often find myself quoting from Victor Hugo after one of my many theatrical ventures. ‘Now that my play is a failure,’ he once said, ‘I find I love it all the more.’ I quoted that after Square Rounds at the Olivier in 1992. Fifteen years after, I re-directed Square Rounds in Russian translation at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, where it is still in the repertoire. Every morning I walked into rehearsal up a staircase which had on every step on both sides a different statue of Pushkin.
From this venture I acquired another set of more portable writers’ monuments: a Russian matrioshka doll, only this has a Turgenev inside a Pushkin inside a Tolstoy inside a Dostoevsky inside a Chekhov.
If the busts of John Milton and the others urge me on, there is also watching me a bust of John Nicholson as a cautionary reminder of what happens to a poet who betrays his true voice for the praise of genteel admirers, money or fame. John Nicholson, known as ‘the Airedale Bard’, was a Yorkshire woolsorter who etched his poems in the grease left by the fleeces he worked with in the mill. He acquired the condescending appellation ‘the woolsorter poet’.
He drowned in the River Aire, drunk, near Salts Mill, Saltaire, in 1843. He wrote about the exploited children in the factories of Leeds and Bradford, then was bribed by attention and money to become more pastoral and pleasing to his aristocratic patrons. I wrote a play about him for Salts Mill in 1993 which was revived in 2003. It was called Poetry or Bust. Nicholson swapped his integrity for a bust that meant fame, acceptance, compromise.
An old Yorkshire woman who saw the play at the Mill said she had the original bust of Nicholson, a plaster one, and that I could have it. She said, ‘It’s about as much use to me as a chocolate fireguard.’ So I am urged on by the one John and served a warning by the other.
And my house is full of more important monuments to poets: their books. There are thousands of them in my house, from all ages and in many languages. There are ancient authors, especially the Greek tragedians, in hundreds of annotated editions; there are Czech poets, Polish poets, Russian poets, Italian, Spanish, Greek, South American, French, Sanskrit, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc., etc…. Poets who have been or are in prison, poets who have been murdered, poets whose books have been burned. There are signed copies by friends, like Wole Soyinka, with whom I did shows when we were both students at Leeds, whose crossing of the Nigerian junta resulted in his solitary confinement. Partly because of him, I spent four years in Nigeria.
After Africa, I spent a year and a half in Prague, and I got to know that wonderful poet and scientist Miroslav Holub, whose signed books I also have. He had long experience of surveillance and censorship. I dedicated a poem to him that I wrote in Cuba in August 1969, exactly a year after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia.
The Soviet fleet was making a very show-of-force visit to Havana. There was a torrential tropical downpour which brought all the celebratory posters down from the harbour lamp posts. I collected one, and the image was used on the cover of the London Magazine (April 1970), in which I wrote one of my rare pieces of prose, on Cuba (see ‘Shango the Shaky Fairy’, this volume, pp. 53–80). I framed the poster later to remind me. It is large and I’ve never put it up as the Soviet battleship’s gun barrels are too central and too threatening. The poem I wrote for Miroslav Holub was called ‘On the Spot’:
Watching the Soviet subs surface
at the side of flagged battleships
between Havana harbour and the USA
I can’t help thinking how the sword
has developed immensely …
while the pen is still only
a point, a free ink-flow
and the witness it has to keep bearing.
Miroslav, you must remember
there’d be no rumba now,
if the blacks who made Cuba
had not somehow evolved
either when shackled or pegged
or grouped for a whiplash harangue …
together, somehow, with slight spasms
of only the nipples or haunches,
a calf muscle tugging the chain taut,
the art of dancing on the spot
without ever being seen to be moving,
not a foot or a hand out of place.
I went back to Prague during the Soviet occupation and saw Holub. I brought
back with me, hidden in a child’s puppet theatre, many recent anti-occupation cartoons by Jiří Jirásek. I arranged an exhibition of them. The front of the catalogue had Jirásek’s cartoon of a Soviet tank, with its gun barrel belching forth smoke, that read in Cyrillic capitals, ‘PRAVDA!’
And among these busts and these thousands of books in my house I have one of Jocelyn Herbert’s masks for the Oresteia I did with Peter Hall at the NT in 1981. The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.
Along with all this, from my first film for the cinema I have the burned head of my golden statue of Prometheus, the great Titan who gave man fire and the inwardness and poetry that came from its contemplation. I keep it for its unflinching, unswerving, even still almost hopeful gaze, staring from the earliest times to our own. I had the twenty-odd-foot golden statue chained to a Caucasus I created in the appropriately named Titan cement works in Elefsina in Greece, next to the petrochemical works.
The film ends with a conflagration that consumes the golden statue except for the raised, still chained, though still defiant right hand, all its digits clenched. When the crew and actors had left, I found his burned head, which had fallen while it was blazing into the quarry. It was completely burned and black except for the two eyes, which remained golden, so though destroyed it still shone with its first glorious visions for mankind.
Like the tragic mask that I have with its always open eyes and the mouth always open for poetry, this charred head of mankind’s first champion helps to remind me that the poetic gaze must keep unswerving and unflinching, as does the example of poets persecuted, silenced, killed in previous centuries and in our own.
Yiannis Ritsos, the great Greek poet whose books were burned before the temple of Zeus in Athens by the Greek colonels, has a poem about the eye of Geo Milev (1895–1925), the Bulgarian poet. Milev had a blue glass eye, and when he was arrested and burned alive by the police all that was left of him in the crematorium was the blue glass eye. This is from the poem of Ritsos:
His eye is being kept in the Museum of Revolution
like a seeing stone of the struggle. I saw his eye.
In his pupil there was the full story of the Revolution,
blue scenes of blood-stained years,
blue scenes with red flags
with dead who carry in their raised hands a blue day.
His eye never closes,
this eye keeps vigil over Sofia.
This eye is a blue star in all the nights.
This eye sees and illuminates and judges.
Whoever looks at this eye wins back his eyes.
Whoever looks at this eye sees the world.
(trans. Ninetta Makrinikola)
So I do not shun monuments to poets.
And though I have to confess I do not care for it, I even have visited the poets in Poets’ Corner, late in my life, and more than once, for reasons that I will explain.
In my last play for the NT, Fram, the opening scene begins in Westminster Abbey, where light from the stainedglass Aeschylus in the rose window falls on the memorial to Gilbert Murray, one of his most renowned translators, and brings him back to life. Though I have a great resistance to making a Greek tragedian an honorary Christian, as T. S. Eliot also made of Virgil, this wonderful combination gave me the opening scene of my play. But I had gone to the Abbey on an entirely different, quite other quest. I went to the Abbey and to Poets’ Corner to search for the monument of Thomas May, secretary to Cromwell’s Parliament and the translator of the Roman republican poet Lucan, who committed suicide at twenty-six after being exposed as being part of a plot to remove the Emperor Nero, and whose epic, the Pharsalia, is regarded by Shelley for one as greater than the Aeneid of the Imperial Laureate, Virgil.
Though I came to share Shelley’s preference for Lucan and knew May as one of his translators, I first came across him as a translator of the Roman epigrammatist Martial, some of whose satirical epigrams I used to make fun of New York when I lived there, in a pamphlet of poems called US Martial. But the poem that May had translated and which was my first experience of him wasn’t satirical at all but a poem about Vesuvius, a volcano I had become obsessed with since the time when I made one of my film poems in Napoli called Mimmo Perrella non è piu in 1987. I have been often to Napoli since, most recently two days after I was told I would be given this prize. I also translated the same Martial poem myself and I have it in my notebook opposite a photograph of a wall painting from Pompeii showing Vesuvius before its great eruption in AD 79. It is verdantly green and covered with vines. My translation reads:
Vesuvius, green yesterday with shady vine,
where the crushed grape gushed vast vats of wine,
ridges, Bacchus loved and put before
his birthplace Nysa, Venus favoured more
than Lacedaemon, and where Satyrs stomped
till now, and Herculaneum, all swamped,
engulfed by cinders in a flood of fire:
power like this not even gods desire.
(Martial IV, 44)
Thomas May translated the last line, ‘The gods are grill’d that such great powers they had.’ And I called the entire long poem The Grilling after his word, as it’s a dialogue with the ghost of Goethe, who had climbed Vesuvius two hundred years before I did. I use Vesuvius as a metaphor for all the fiery devastation of our times, the power that not even gods desire grabbed blindly by men. This had also been prompted by my being told that officers in the Italian army were taught in the cold war that Napoli was the first target for Soviet nuclear weapons in the event of atomic warfare. And I had to advise Goethe that since his day the city of Würzburg, from where throughout his life he ordered his favourite wine, had been levelled by Allied bombing, and the special bottles associated with Würzburg wine, the Bocksbeutel, or ‘goat’s scrotum’, exploded in the raid and all their glass fused together, and clouds of Riesling steam rose into the air.
I included my own translation of Martial’s poem and Thomas May’s together in The Grilling, set on the slopes of Vesuvius. And I had gone to Poets’ Corner to look for my fellow poet and translator and, I should say, my fellow republican.
But Thomas May is no longer in the Abbey. As secretary to the Long Parliament and translator of the great republican epic the Pharsalia of Lucan, his remains were removed at the Restoration in 1660 and flung in a pit and the monument reused. Behind the present monument to a sub-dean, Thomas Triplet, there are the ghostly remnants of a larger monument. It had been that to Thomas May. It had an inscription from the republican Lucan. As David Norbrook says in his book Writing the English Republic: ‘English literary culture has never entirely undone those expulsions.’
Opposite this space where Thomas May once had his resting place, and close to Gilbert Murray and either insensitively placed or put there maliciously, is Gilbert Murray’s cruellest critic, T. S. Eliot. The Abbey geography of the Greek scholar and translator of Greek tragedy Murray set between the inspiring stained glass of his Aeschylus and his most vicious critic got me going on my play Fram, but it made me look at the qualifications needed to enter that sacred and exclusive club. The official guidebook to Poets’ Corner (PC) says: ‘Sometimes a poet’s lifestyle or politics preclude him from being given a Poets’ Corner honour (until a new generation has forgiven or forgotten).’ For some the forgiveness takes a long time.
Shelley, who died in 1822, was refused a memorial ‘because of his atheism’, and didn’t qualify till 1946 – 124 years! But he is still largely accepted for ‘The Skylark’ rather than:
I met Murder on the way –
He had a mask like Castlereagh
and when I got to Parliament Square
the mask had changed to Tony Blair
– at least that’s what the pencilled addition reads in my copy of Shelley.
Byron, who died
in 1824, was excluded till 1969 – 145 years. In 1924, on the centenary of his death, a petition for an Abbey memorial was turned down by Dean Herbert Ryle, who said that Byron, ‘partly by his openly dissolute life and partly by the influence of his licentious verse, earned a world-wide reputation for immorality among English-speaking people’. It took Milton, who died in 1674, sixty-three years to pass muster.
T. S. Eliot, who is critically sniffy about Shelley and Milton and was a self-proclaimed ‘Royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature’, only had to wait two years to get into the Abbey after his death!
Robert Graves called Eliot ‘the Senior Churchwarden to English Literature’. He was the first president of the Virgil Society, and I was president in 2000. It is interesting to compare our addresses. What will happen to T. S. Eliot when all his known, reputedly pornographic verses are published in the Complete Poems promised by Faber & Faber? Will he be removed like Thomas May?
It was my obsession with Vesuvius that led me to seek the now desecrated tomb of Thomas May, and just after I was informed that I would be the first recipient of the PEN/Pinter Prize I had to go to Napoli to read my poetry. The Italians have taken to my poetry far more readily than the British, if I am to be honest. I have three books of poems published by Einaudi, and that gets me many very welcome invitations to read there. And Napoli I especially love after I made one of my film poems there in 1987. I have been there many times since and know the city well. Sian and I always try to stay in the same little old-fashioned hotel. The rooms have a great view of Vesuvius. In the evenings we eat in the Piazza Sannazaro in Mergellina. There are, very close to the trattoria Da Pasqualino, the tombs and monuments to three poets whose presences have been important to me, one way or another. I visit them every time I am giving a reading or showing a film in Napoli.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 37