One glass and no refill
is life for men,
so keep on pouring till
Death says when.
[Strasbourg]
The David Cohen Prize for Literature 2015
* * *
I wrote my first poems seventy years ago, and have literally spent my lifetime producing poetry for page, stage and screen. The unexpected recognition and enormous encouragement from this generous David Cohen Prize helps me to confirm my commitment to what I have always believed to be a united body of work, wherever the words were printed or performed. In this lifetime of writing I have tried to balance the isolation necessary for serious composition with the communal creation of producing poetry for actors or going on the road in my filming boots. This generous award for the body of my work is accepted with huge gratitude as I approach, with my energy renewed by it, my eighth and, I hope, most creative decade yet, with the poems, plays and films flowing till the end.
I have a short poem which has become a kind of signature tune. I wrote it in response to a woman I overheard talking about my work in the interval of the first night of The Misanthrope of Molière, for the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1973. She was saying of me, ‘He has such a command over language! But they say he comes from Sheffield.’ It was Leeds actually, but it was all up north as far as she was concerned. I also wrote the poem because my mother around the same time would keep saying to me, ‘Where does it come from, our Tony? There’s never been anybody artistic in our family.’
The poem is 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 feel very much the nephew of Joe and Harry when I have to speak in public like this. And I have always felt very much their nephew in my struggle for the ceremonious articulacy of poetry. From where I am now I can see quite clearly this family awareness of inarticulacy made me hunger for the gift of language. This deep appetite extended even to the dead languages of Latin and ancient Greek that I studied at Leeds Grammar School, to which I won one of the scholarships created by the 1944 Education Act, and later at university. This is a route now firmly closed to young people of the same background as me. From a very young age my head became full of rhythms and rhymes from those I learned on my mother’s knee or at school in Beeston, or the Wesleyan hymns from Sunday school, to the ruder ones I learned on the street with other kids, like one that always accompanied the audible fart:
’ark! ’ark! T’sound o’thunder!
Must be t’peas we ’ad on Sunda!
Quick! Quick! t’ closet door!
Too late! too late! it’s over t’floor.
I was drawn to the rhymed recitations of Cyril Fletcher’s Odd Odes on the wireless and the rhyming of the pantomimes at the Leeds Empire, where I also saw the great northern comedians. Often when I went to the Empire I’d have my classics homework in my pocket, maybe a Greek text of the Alcestis of Euripides, and the direct address of the stage I used to unlock the tragic texts I had to study. Years later, when I was preparing the text for the masked NT Oresteia for Peter Hall, I had a dream. I dreamed that in my hallway in Newcastle there was something like a large, ornately bound volume embossed on the cover with golden Greek capitals saying ‘Oresteia’. It was intended as an audition roster for the chorus of the Aeschylus trilogy. At dawn there was a queue of old men in my garden. They all wrote their names in the book and disappeared. I picked up the book and read the names. They were all names of the comedians I’d seen as the panto dame or as a solo act at the Leeds Empire: Norman Evans, Frank Randall, Nat Jackley, Robb Wilton, Arthur Lucan (‘Old Mother Riley’) … The list went on for pages, and it was that ghostly chorus that was to enable me to unlock the gravitas of Aeschylus, using the so-called ‘low’ art to unlock the so-called ‘high’.
As well as my devotion to the music hall I became a constant collector and reader of all the poetry books I could consume, though the two often found themselves mingling, as when I used to find myself singing Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to George Formby ukulele tunes:
Four grey walls and four grey towers
Overlook a space of flowers
And the silent isle embowers
The Lady of Shalott.
I was also drawn to the most serious poetry of the messenger in Greek tragedy. A messenger who comes on stage and says, ‘I have seen things too terrible to speak about,’ and then for two hundred lines speaks about the terrible things he’d seen. I became obsessed with the Greek mask, with its eyes that are always open to see everything and a mouth that is always open to speak or sing about it.
In my poem ‘Them & [uz]’ I recount how my English teacher stopped my reading of Keats in my Yorkshire accent. But I was allowed to play the drunken porter in Macbeth. And I was allowed to take part in a reading at the Classics Society of the Cyclops of Euripides, the only Greek satyr play that, so far, survives intact. It was in Shelley’s translation.
It sowed a seed, and later I looked to the satyr play, where it seemed to me the great tragedians incorporated the low art into the high. Though most are missing or have been air-brushed out of classical literature, all the great tragedians wrote satyr plays. After the trilogy of tragedies on came the chorus of dancing satyrs, half man, half goat, with enormous phalluses. I couldn’t resist trying to reclaim them, and I wrote a play about the discovery in 1907 in the deserts of Egypt at Oxyrhynchus the fragments of a lost satyr play by Sophocles, which became The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. It had its world premiere in the ancient stadium of Delphi in Greece in 1988. Delphi has become important for me since then as I have been back scores of times to prepare and create a new work which was designed for the building site for a new classical-style, open-air theatre in 1995, and ten years after that taking Vanessa Redgrave in Hecuba to inaugurate the completed space. I have celebrated the importance of Delphi in my life in a new poem, ‘Polygons’, in the current issue of the London Review of Books. I’m indebted to the LRB as exactly thirty years ago they were also the first to publish another long poem of mine, v., in 1985.
I want to read a speech from this play, Trackers, for a number of reasons. It’s about the divisions of high and low art. And also because the play represents another enormous debt of gratitude to the John S. Cohen Foundation, without whose funding I could never have taken my clog-dancing satyrs to clatter under the Delphi cliffs. Or indeed take it back to the National Theatre, and from there to tour Britain and Europe. It was this tour that brought me into hugely creative contact with Jonathan Silver at Salts Mill in Saltaire, and Piero Bordin in Carnuntum, on the Danube between Vienna and Bratislava. For both of their special spaces I wrote and directed new works.
I write my poems for my own voice and don’t often like to hear actors read them, but it is a great liberation to write for other voices in dramatic roles I couldn’t do myself, and wouldn’t try. The best thing for a dramatic poet is to write for actors he knows and loves. I’ve done this when I’ve written for Yorkshire actors like Barrie Rutter, Jack Shepherd or Mark Addy. I’ve also written roles for my partner, Sian Thomas, whom I met in the National Theatre revival of my version of Molière’s Misanthrope in 1989. She then played the German chemist Justus von Liebig in my play Square Rounds in 1992. I wrote her the role of Faustina in The Kaisers of Carnuntum in 1995, and then, and for me the best of the roles, that of Sybil Thorndike in Fram at the National Theatre in 2008, with Jasper Britton as the Norwegian explorer Fritdjof Nansen.
Having said all this, I’m going to dare myself to read this ‘messenger’ speech from Trackers.
Despite having in some ways ‘occupied’ Apollonian literature, I am still the nephew of my uncles Joe and Harry and still feel a brother to Marsyas, who picked up Athena’s discarded flute and became a virtuoso, and got flayed by Apollo for his presumption. When I worked in Prague in
the 1960s, Titian’s painting of The Flaying of Marsyas was in a local castle I could visit. It went deep into my imagination. Though I have to confess the nearest I ever get to being flayed is the occasional scratching by literary or theatre critics, like the one who thought that the chorus in my Oresteia ‘sounded like fifteen Arthur Scargills’.
SILENUS
That’s Marsyas screaming! They ripped off his skin
and all he ever wanted was to join in.
Marsyas suffered his terrible flaying
for a bit of innocent aulos playing.
The aulos, Athene’s flute. She flung it away
so why shouldn’t Marsyas pick it up and play?
A few blows and the goddess gave the flute
she’d just invented the elegant boot.
She flung the thing aside. Do you know why?
Well, think of the aulos. Ever had a try?
You puff your cheeks out, like this, when you play
and she didn’t like her face to look that way.
She thought it unattractive. Well, it’s true
her cheeks looked like balloons when she blew.
And who should find the flung flute in the grass
but my brother satyr, Marsyas?
Questions of cosmetics scarcely matter
to one who has the ugly mug of a satyr.
It’s not for good looks that us satyrs are noted
so Marsyas blew and let his cheeks get bloated.
He took himself off to a quiet bit of wood
and girned and puffed and grunted and got good.
That peeved Apollo. He’d crossed the bounds.
Half-brutes aren’t allowed to make beautiful sounds.
And can’t you just hear those Muses say:
‘Who gave a common satyr licence to play?’
Music’s an inner circle meant to exclude
from active participation a beast so crude.
‘How can he be a virtuoso on the flute?
Look at the hooves on him. He’s half a brute!’
His one and only flaw was to show that flutes
sound just as beautiful when breathed into by brutes.
It confounds their categories of high and low
when your Caliban outplays your Prospero.
[…]
They set up a contest, rigged from the start,
to determine the future of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art.
They had it all fixed that Apollo should win
and he ordered my brother to be flayed of his skin.
And the Phrygian skinner with his flaying blade
saw Apollo’s pointing pinkie and obeyed.
While Marsyas suffered his terrible flaying
Apollo looked on with his ‘doodah’ playing.
While the Phrygian flenser slices and flays
Apollo plucks out a glib Polonaise.
And the skinners applauded Apollo’s reprise
as my brother’s flayed nipples flapped on to his knees.
The last thing Marsyas saw was his own skin
like a garment at his feet with no one in.
Wherever the losers and the tortured scream
the lyres will be playing the Marsyas theme.
You’ll hear the lyres playing behind locked doors
where men flay their fellows for some abstract cause.
The kithara cadenza, the Muse’s mezzo trill
cover the skinning and the screaming still.
Wherever in the world there is torture and pain
the powerful are playing the Marsyas refrain.
In every dark dungeon where blood has flowed
the lyre accompanies the Marsyas Ode.
Wherever the racked and the anguished cry
there’s always a lyre-player standing by.
Some virtuoso of Apollo’s ur-violin
plays for the skinners as they skin.
(Silenus drinks from his wineskin as if to blot out the memory of Marsyas.)
So I don’t make waves. I don’t rock the boat.
I add up the pluses of being man/goat.
Unlike my poor flayed brother, Marsyas,
I’ve never yearned to move out of my class.
In short, I suppose, I’m not really averse
to being a satyr. I could do a lot worse.
I just have to find the best way to exist
and I’ve found, to be frank, I exist best pissed.
CLARISSA LUARD AWARD
I would like to bestow the Clarissa Luard Award on the Wordsworth Trust at Grasmere, to continue to support a young poet in residence. The great spirit behind the Wordsworth Trust was my friend and great encourager Robert Woof, who helped me when I moved to Newcastle some forty-five years ago. He believed the new poetry needed the old as the old needed the new. And I’ve always believed that too.
Now, to help you to concentrate on your drinks, a short ancient Greek poem from the fourth century BC poet Amphis:
One glass and no refill
is life for men,
so keep on pouring till
Death says when.
Notes
* * *
These notes were researched and compiled by Edith Hall. The assistance of John Kittmer, Hallie Marshall, Richard Poynder, Anna Reeve, Sarah Prescott and her team at the Brotherton Library, and especially Caroline Latham, proved indispensable.
FOREWORD
1 ‘over-mastered by some thoughts’: An Apologie for Poetrie, Written by the right noble, vertuous, and learned, Sir Phillip Sidney, Knight (London: Henry Olney, 1595).
2 This learned Dr Agrippa: Dr Agrippa appears in Mary Shelley’s short story ‘The Mortal Immortal’ (1833) and in Søren Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way (1845).
3 But it turns out that: these Leeds Grammar School chapel windows were unveiled in 1931, and there is a description of them in the Yorkshire Post for 21 September 1931, p. 6. I am very grateful to Dr Emma Stafford and especially Anna Reeve, a graduate student in the Classics Department at Leeds University, for helping me research these windows.
4 ‘bound in with shame’: from John of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act II, scene i.
5 There is a philanthropic ‘charity’: see the letter by Tom Phillips to the Independent, quoted in Christopher Butler, ‘Culture and Debate’, in Sandie Byrne, Tony Harrison: Loiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 114.
6 ‘Vates in the whole Import’: The Works of Mr John Cleveland, containing his poems, orations, epistles, collected into one volume, with the life of the author (London: R. Holt, 1687), p. 3.
7 ‘With the possible exception of Louis MacNeice’: E. R. Dodds, Missing Persons: An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 57.
8 ‘every Digit dictates’: John Bulwer, praised in a poem by John Dickenson prefixed to Bulwer’s Chirologia: or the naturall language of the hand. Composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof (London: Thomas Harper, 1644).
9 ‘the philosophy of nature’: Strabo, Geography, Book 4, chapter 4, section 4.
10 In the 1960s, he published: T. W. Harrison, ‘English Virgil: The Aeneid in the XVIII Century’, Philologica Pragensia, vol. 10 (1967), pp. 1–11 and 80–91.
11 This in turn led to a flowering: see further Kevin J. Wetmore, The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2002).
12 a development which has been traced: see the Introduction to E. Hall, F. Macintosh and A. Wrigley (Eds), Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (Oxford: OUP, 2004).
13 ‘a procession of arresting images’: Edith Hall, ‘Tony Harrison’s Prometheus: A View from the Left’, Arion, vol. 12 (2004), pp. 129–30.
14 He is intrigued by horticulture: see Edith Hall, ‘Classics, Class and Cloaca: Tony Harrison’s Humane Coprology’, Arion, vol. 15 (2007), pp. 111–36.
15 ‘Tony wants the whole body’: Richard Eyre, ‘Tony Harris
on the Playwright’, in Byrne, Tony Harrison: Loiner, p. 45.
16 ‘ribald generic indeterminacy’: Adrian Poole, ‘Harrison and Marsyas’, in Lorna Hardwick (Ed.), Tony Harrison’s Poetry, Drama and Film: The Classical Dimension (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1999), p. 57.
17 ‘a diabolically gleeful grin’: Joe Kelleher, Tony Harrison (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), pp. 20, 34, 64.
18 ‘the deft and opportunistic annexation’: Patrick Deane, At Home in Time: Forms of Neo-Augustanism in Modern English Poetry (Montreal and Kingston, London and Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), p. 30.
19 ‘profanation of holy and glorious antiquity’: Jules Janin, in Journal des Débats (1859).
AIKIN MATA
This essay was first published in The Lysistrata of Aristophanes, translated and adapted by Tony Harrison and James Simmons (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1966).
1 ‘the greatest disturbance in Greek History’: Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I chapter 1.
2 ‘The Greeks’: Werner Jaeger, Paideia (New York: OUP, 1986, originally published in 1939), vol. 1, p. 359.
3 ‘It may well be’: Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (London: Random House, 2014, originally published in 1950), p. 370.
4 Aikin Mata was written: Aikin Mata was written and staged in collaboration with James Simmons (1933–2001), a poet and lecturer from Northern Ireland who had studied at Leeds alongside Wole Soyinka and Tony Harrison. At the time, he held a position as lecturer at Ahmadu Bello University in Northern Nigeria.
5 the Oshogbo Agbegijo: see Ulli Beier, ‘The Agbegijo Masqueraders’, Nigeria Magazine, no. 82 (September 1964).
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 39