[In the following essay, Woodcock discusses the anger found in Harrison's poetry and asserts that its source is Harrison's “own background … and ＼his］ sense of identity in relation to the marginalisation of working-class experience by dominant middle-class culture.”]

Tony Harrison's poetry grows more extraordinary year by year. His output is increasing dramatically, and he is getting angrier. For a practitioner of classically formal restraint, Harrison is very ready to occupy outspoken extremes of expression and opinion, as his recent productions testify. There was his long poem V. set during the miner's strike in 1984 and utilising an uncompromising invective which led Mary Whitehouse to call for it to be banned. There is his play for fifteen women about the Greenham peace camp, Common Chorus, which allows Harrison to re-launch his critique of men and masculinity which figured significantly in his ‘The School of Eloquence’ sequence. But most notably there is the recently broadcast The Blasphemer's Banquet, a courageous advocacy of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses and currently in hiding under threat of death. Whereas V. took its model from Gray's ‘Elegy’, The Blasphemer's Banquet adopts the stanza form of Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyám's Rubáiyát, though it does so, as the poem ruefully admits, only ‘as best I can’.

That elegant form should not belie the angry energy of its invective: it presents a scathing attack on all ‘life-denying’ fundamentalism, not just Muslim forms of bigotry, and simultaneously celebrates ‘this fleeting life’ in the fleshly moment. The poem addresses itself to Rushdie as an invitation to take dinner in the wryly chosen Omar Khayyám restaurant in Bradford's Paradise Street with Harrison and four other renegades against bigoted holiness—Molière, Voltaire, Byron and Omar Khayyám himself. But Harrison's connection with all these personages is also that they were writers on and from the margins: Rushdie, with his contradictory Indian-Muslim and English public school background, all of which he has ‘rejected’ in a certain sense, and with his current ‘outlaw’; Byron, with his position as a marginalised aristocrat, which allowed him to exploit the scandalous extremes of experience and opinion, and epitomise the ‘Satanic School’ of his day; Molière, who was buried with no religious rights for refusing to abjure the stage; Voltaire, persecuted for his enlightened godless rationalism; Khayy m, ‘the Voltaire of Persia’ as Harrison calls him, who celebrated ‘this fleeting life’ in defiance of the demands of state religion; and Harrison himself most interestingly as far as his own work goes, because of his relation to the English class system. Rushdie's plight and the attack on his work allows Harrison a link with the continuing issue in his own work of cultural suppression. It is really from his own background, the background of the North of England and Harrison's sense of identity in relation to the marginalisation of working-class experience by dominant middle-class culture, that the anger and invective take their cue. As a preliminary to any assessment of Harrison's recent work, it is worth reminding ourselves of that context.

The bare facts of Harrison's life are well known and significant. He was born in Leeds in 1937, son of a local baker. His home in Tempest Road, Beeston, was in a respectable working-class row of terraced houses, with cobbled street, small front gardens and back yards. He went to Leeds Grammar School on a scholarship, one of only six for the whole West Riding of Yorkshire, and then to Leeds University to read Classics. These localised but dramatic contradictions between working-class home and middle-class education were further heightened by a four-year period teaching in Nigeria, and a year in Prague. What his time in Africa taught him, he has said, was ‘the internal colonialism of British education. I think that seeing it literally in black and white in Africa helped me to understand it very clearly when I came back to England.’ It was this experience which allowed Harrison to ‘put in perspective my own education’ and realise the common link of cultural exclusion and suppression between these different contexts.¹ After some long conversations with members of Frelimo, the Mozambique Liberation Army, on the relationship between poetry and politics, Harrison returned to England determined to make a living out of writing verse.

Until more recently Harrison's output as a poet had been comparatively small and, until Penguin published the Selected Poems in 1984, his work was notably difficult to obtain despite being recognised by his peers and contemporaries as that of a remarkable writer. As Ken Worpole has pointed out, his work ‘found it incomparably more difficult to gain access to the metropolitan literary and cultural journals including the New Statesman and Tribune, than the work of such poets as Craig Raine, Christopher Reid, Blake Morrison or Clive James’.² While conspiracy theories of cultural influence are not always helpful, it is significant that Harrison shares none of the Oxbridge connections of the New Establishment poets of the 1970s and 1980s. His present popularity is based more on his activities as a dramatist, the public theatre-poet Harrison has admitted he always wanted to be. And at the centre of his dramatic ventures, most famously in the dialect versions of the Mystery plays, Harrison signals the intent of his work as dramatist and poet—to reoccupy the space so long dominated by a Southern middle-class cultural hegemony, but to do so in both his own and their terms. He declares this overtly and famously in one of his ‘The School of Eloquence’ sonnets: addressing the upper- and middle-class cultural hegemony, he declares

So right, yer buggers then! We'll occupy
your lousy leasehold Poetry

（Selected Poems, p. 123）

This very project produces a tension in Harrison and his work which accounts both for its remarkable energy and for its problematic qualities.

In this respect, Harrison and his work are products of their time and context—the post-war world of the Welfare State and the 1944 Education Act. It was through this mechanism that Harrison won his scholarship to grammar school and underwent the dislocating experience described shortly afterwards by Richard Hoggart in his classic, The Uses of Literacy （1957）. This is a book which Harrison admits ‘helped me understand myself’³ and to which he owes the title of one of his best-known poems, ‘Them and ＼uz］’. Hoggart's book describes the cultural ‘chafing’ experienced by the working-class boy undergoing a scholarship education, ‘at the friction-point of two cultures … He both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyond his class’.⁴ Leeds Grammar School, founded in 1552, was a direct-grant school with fee-paying status and aspired to upper-class ideals of the public schools with their belief in preparing boys to lead the country through having the correct accent. Harrison has acknowledged how the displacement of this experience fuelled his later work. He explains his use of dialect in his translations, for example, partly as ‘a long slow-burning revenge on the teacher who taught me English when I was 13 because he would never allow me to read poetry aloud.’⁵ Equally, the context during the 1960s and early 1970s within which Harrison began writing verse about such experiences was one in which questions of language and class became major political issues, as Ken Worpole has pointed out, a battle over who defines ‘correct’ English which is still being enacted.⁶

Harrison's poems quite obviously deal with this issue of language and power. While he is quite capable of a postmodernist self-awareness about this, he maintains a seriousness of intent in relation to it which separates him from the game-playing of early Craig Raine, for example. Harrison indicated the centrality to his work of this confrontation with the politics of language and cultural control by the choice of title for his first book, The Loiners （1970）. It comes from the local name for the inhabitants of Leeds and indicates Harrison's desire to give voice to the marginalised experience of ‘＼uz］’. For Harrison, this is the ‘pronoun of solidarity’,⁷ of working-class community, family and culture, as opposed to the overweening and suppressive eloquence of ‘them’—the upper classes, professionals, public officials, bosses and bureaucrats. This advocacy of suppressed working-class experience, genuine as it is, can verge on a nostalgic idealisation of virtues in a lost past which is at best questionable and generates its own contradictions in his work.

At the same time he has indicated his chosen tools for the job would be the classical forms of middle-class British literary tradition, particularly rhyme and regular verse forms. He sees this as ‘an aggressive occupation—I was going to usurp classical forms but fit them to what I wanted to say and the kind of language I wanted to use’.⁸ In one poem he presents himself as a poetic Luddite using the sledgehammer （‘Enoch’） of his voice to demolish establishment power over language:

Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress
clangs a forged music on the frames of Art,
the looms of owned language smashed apart!

（SP, p. 112）

Hence the title of the sequence ‘The School of Eloquence’, taken from a source epigram from E. P. Thompson's classic of historical recovery, The Making of the English Working Class. The name was a cover for the working-class organisation the London Corresponding Society, suppressed in 1799 by an increasingly repressive and paranoid ruling class. It is an aptly chosen emblem for a process still at work in the twentieth century: dissent can be silenced through the control of language and publication; but equally opportunities remain for counterattack by suppressed groups through appropriating language. The experience of black slaves in the British Caribbean points one example: their appropriation of English into forms of creole and patois was, it has been argued, a deliberate strategy to forge a common language which was unavailable to the white overseers on the plantation; and the historical result has been the Caribbean ‘nation language’ celebrated and used by Caribbean writers like Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Jean Binta Breeze. Harrison's aim is similar but his approach is different. Rather than totally transform the tools given by history in terms of language and forms, as some Caribbean ‘dub’ poets have done, Harrison aims to appropriate and use them on their own terms as well as on his, to break the silence imposed by ruling-class history on working-class experience:

Wherever hardship held its tongue the job
's breaking the silence of the worked-out-gob.

（SP, p. 124）

‘Gob’ is a dialect word meaning ‘mouth’, of course, but also an old Northern coal-mining word for the space left after the coal has been extracted. Historical reclamation is part of Harrison's work, as is the job of warning the unwary:

The dumb go down in history and disappear
and not one gentleman's been brought to book:
Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
（Cornish）—
‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’

（SP, p. 121）

Along with this commitment to intervene in history's suppressions, goes an ironic awareness of the limits of the poet's role, summed up in the last verse of the poem ‘On Not Being Milton’, with its marvellous final pun on ‘writing’ and ‘putting things right’:

Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting.
In the silence round all poetry we quote
Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote:
Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting.

（SP, p. 112）

Perhaps it is the contradictions involved between the act of writing and the desire to put things right that have led to the tension we will see in Harrison's work between his eloquence and his invective.

It was his desire to appropriate established culture for his people which led Harrison to insist on giving God and Jesus Yorkshire accents in his versions of the Mystery plays, remarking ‘These are local northern classics that had been taken away from northerners and betrayed, made genteel.’⁹ At the same time, Harrison sees his commitment to traditional forms as offering more possibilities ‘if you want to reach a wider audience’.¹⁰ Thus, rhyming octosyllabic couplets, iambic pentameter quatrains or octets dominate the long poems and the sequences of shorter poems. ‘The School of Eloquence’ uses a 16-line sonnet form derived from George Meredith's sequence Modern Love （1862）, chosen for its capacity to offer stronger narrative possibilities, but also because of the dialectic available between two octets.

Harrison clearly believes that regular verse allows for a more memorable and involving reading experience, particularly perhaps for people for whom reading poetry is an irregular activity, whereas for aficionados of poetry the experience will be different. Harrison admits to using his versifying ability ‘to gratify expectations of a literary experience’ but also seeks to ‘remind the person reading the poem that they are enjoying a privilege of literary experience denied to the majority of people’. At the banquet of verse he offers, there are always ‘the ghosts of the inarticulate’, so that the reader has to pay for their cultural gratification: ‘that literary frisson—“hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère”—will cost you so much in social awareness, in the consciousness of social gaps and divisions.’ It is in this exploitation of the literary experience as well as of conflicting language codes that Harrison sees the opportunity to be ‘political’, though he recognises the contradictions involved: ‘the moment I become “poet” in that unpoliticised way I am in collusion with the reader, and part of the struggle is not always to be in collusion … but obviously by being a poet I've moved into another class anyway.’¹¹

The problematic this establishes is double-edged: in part at least, Harrison's use of regular verse forms undoubtedly accounts for the dynamic of his writing—it gives his imagination an edge to work against that seems to drive it to articulate itself with often stunning economy and precision. At the same time there is an inescapable question as to whether Harrison's dynamic isn't also contained and defused by his choice of regular verse forms and whether his appropriation of middle-class culture has not in fact worked in reverse. It is an inescapable dialectic, since without the forms the poetry as such would not exist. The problems arise when the pronounced facility with which Harrison handles formal verse leads him into a prolixity near to doggerel, as in his more recent television work The Blasphemer's Banquet, and when his self-awareness of linguistic registers leads him into an erudition which contradicts his declared aim to ‘colonise the high style’ so as to ‘present it back as a gift to those people you were brought up with’.¹²

One example might be the poem ‘Them and ＼uz］’, which graphically records the incident with the teacher who prevented him reciting verse at school. The very title, with its ironic use of phonetic conventions, throws learning back at the powerful. The poem is co-dedicated to Richard Hoggart, academic professor, and to a dialect comedian called ‘Professor’ Leon Cortez, who Harrison remembers on the radio translating Shakespeare into Cockney.¹³ They are dual emblems of Harrison's allegiances to orthodox and unorthodox learning. Hence the bitingly playful opening:

αi αî, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes
gob full of pebbles outshouting seas

（SP, p. 122）

The academically familiar choric cry from Greek tragedy, is juxtaposed with the stand-up comedian's popularly familiar ‘ay, ay’. Fourth-century Athenian orator Demosthenes is invoked since he was a stammerer who ironically enough became a great public orator by filling his mouth with pebbles, rather as the upper classes are said to speak with plums in their mouths. The problem here is with the erudition. Harrison is debunking the hegemonic power which puts ‘high culture’ in the hands of an elite, but arguably the bite of the poem can only be decoded by a reader with access to that very culture. On the one hand, Harrison is asserting the democratic availability of such culture; on the other, his poem is speaking from within it, and as such unavailable to most people. As a well-read friend of mine put it, ‘Harrison's got too much Latin for me.’

In performance Harrison reads this poem with a fire all the more effective for being contained. It acts as both indictment and incitement. It is a knowing last laugh by someone who has proved his cultural credentials and is now at liberty to challenge the hierarchy of control and social management which language enacts by making ‘classic’ poetry out of dialect registers and throwing it in the face of standard English and its chinless-wonder advocates. It seems a peculiarly male response, somehow. In the poem ‘Me Tarzan’ Harrison humorously plays off the macho male aspect of working-class culture against the suggestion that literature is somehow effeminate: while his mates are out ‘laikin’ and ‘tartin’, the young Harrison is captive to translating Cicero, who he is uneasily aware is likely to be seen as ‘Cissy-bleeding-ro’. In his poetic invective, it's as if Harrison feels the need to give as good as he gets, to show himself both a proven poet and still one of the lads. It is from this kind of tension that the edge of his work often derives.

Not one to miss a trick, Harrison makes mileage out of these very contradictions. There is a self-conscious element in ‘The School of Eloquence’, as for example when he realises that, adept now at a variety of languages, he has lost

… the tongue that once I used to know
but can't bone up on now, and that's mi mam's.

（SP, p. 114）

As so often, there's a biting edge here when we realise the overtones of ‘bone up on’ in the context of the deaths of Harrison's parents which forms a major strand in the sequence, and which parallels the other major strand, cultural displacement. Harrison recognises how the experiences of the class he records sit uneasily in middle-class forms, his father ‘lost in this sonnet for the bourgeoisie’ （SP, p. 124）. More problematically, he recognises how impossibly disparate are the audience he hopes for and the one he gets, the result in part of the class nature of literature but also of Harrison's own erudition: after one particularly rarified example, he apologises ‘Sorry, dad, you won't get that quatrain’, yet goes on to say ‘I'd like to be the poet my father reads!’ （SP, p. 114）.

This problem of audience and accessibility is not confined to Harrison's father. It is a contradiction at the heart of his stated desire to have a public role as a poet. We can see it in the extreme ranges of his linguistic register. There is the plain, homely side, the ‘man speaking to men’ with the down-to-earth blunt address of a ‘loiner’, most explicit in the dialect with which he spices his poems. Jeffrey Wainwright¹⁴ has noticed words like faff, big-wig, piddle, glugged, pop, bugger, tusky, gob, man; to which we might add smithereens, gaffers, aggro, laikin', tartin', 'oil （for hole）, gorra, among many others. But that is just one side of the Harrison lexicon. Beside this, as Wainwright points out, we need to put the strand which covers words such as glossolalia, dulciloquy, rebarbative, damascener, oviparous; to which again we might add inwit, sophomore, cynghannedd, and names as various as Caractacus, Roget, Marx, Frelimo, Farouk, Demosthenes. In addition there is Harrison's frequent recourse to foreign and ‘dead’ languages, whether Greek, Latin, Danish, French, Czech, German, Russian, with one example at least of Cornish. And he often indulges in frequently cryptic language play and puns. These can be of a literary nature: the poem ‘Study’ ends with a line which glances at Yeats's ‘Long-Legged Fly’ and Virgil in a manner which Edward Lucie-Smith recognises as deriving from Robert Lowell.¹⁵ Less rarified but still oblique, ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, a poem about a celebrated Leeds masturbator, opens with the line ‘The -nuts bit really -nis.’ （SP, p. 16）. Harrison expects his readership to work linguistically for their pleasure in a manner which can be quite uncompromising. The very enjoyment of Harrison's verse derives from his linguistic virtuosity coupled with the forceful economy of expression enforced through the verse form. In a sense he suffers from the containment he himself identifies in his classical school training, the imperative to translate potentially explosive content into a nicely turned form:

And 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.

（SP, p. 120）

As so often, the reader has to work to mine the rebarbative implications behind these wryly turned lines; and having mined them, we realise that Harrison has put his finger on a linguistic gagging his poem itself enacts.

It would be misleading to suggest that all of ‘The School of Eloquence’ is equally oblique. Much of the writing is very direct, even at times notebookish in a way similar to Lowell's verse diary of that title. But there is a real tendency in Harrison's work from the beginning towards utilising material which makes demands of knowledge on the reader, knowledge which is not part of the general culture and which therefore threatens to make his work unapproachable despite his declared desire for a popular role.

It is all the more intriguing, then, to find Harrison's slow-burning anger about class, cultural suppression and displacement exploding into the startling and powerful long poems V. and The Blasphemer's Banquet. Both productions declare themselves as pieces written for public consumption, not least because both have been presented in video format on national television. The videos have undoubtedly had a significant role to play in making the two poems generally available in terms of tangible consumption. There is the ready availability of the TV experience as opposed to the work involved in the reading experience; and in terms of the illustrative commentary to the writing, both videos are remarkably good pieces of television art, in which Harrison's most evasive expressions receive instantaneous illumination through visual equivalents. Both facts mean that these two long poems must have received more instantaneous widespread public attention than most long poems in literary history. In itself this is a fascinating illustration of Harrison's commitment, like dramatist Trevor Griffiths's, to a popular audience.

This is also true of the forms of both poems. The quatrains of V. and The Blasphemer's Banquet derive from sources which themselves are popular antecedents, enacting Harrison's belief that through regular verse you can get to more people. Like Shelley in his ballad-form political poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Harrison has chosen regularity as the vehicle for angry satire and blistering invective and both poems struggle formally to contain this more direct strain. Faced with the subject matter of both poems, it is as if Harrison's patience were exhausted and he had no option but recourse to Juvenalian tactics. Since The Blasphemer's Banquet is not yet available in printed form, it is more appropriate to consider V. textually in more detail with a glance at the other piece for further illustrations of the contradictions raised in Harrison's writing by this more overt strain in his work.

The first thing to say, though, is to state roundly the admirable risk-taking in Harrison's recent productions. In a verse culture still inhibited by the legacies of the tight-arsed well-made poem, it is all the more welcome to find a poet finding the scale of V. in terms of length and compass. V.'s 112 verses of rhyming quatrains were obviously intended as a ‘state-of-the-nation’ poem, as Ken Worpole has pointed out.¹⁶ The Leeds graveyard graffitied with ‘a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses’ and collapsing into a worked-out pit below is Harrison's emblem of contemporary Britain during the 1984 miner's strike, its culture rifted by divisions. Harrison's auto-critique of his vocation and his sense of language as a battlefield for hegemony are given particular edge by the setting of the graveyard, which allows him to point to the collapse of communication in the mixed ‘language of the graveyard’ as one source for ‘all the versuses of life’ and, with a typical pun, for his own verses. But simultaneously and daringly as in The Blasphemer's Banquet, Harrison takes on the ‘overwhelming questions’ too—death, time, the great contingent abstracts of human existence which he makes personal, specific and bitingly, unnervingly immediate. Rather than see the antecedents of this poem in a tradition of political satire epitomised by Shelley's ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, we would do better to recognise how much closer in outlook and tone V. is to its formal model, Gray's ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’. Harrison takes Gray's verse form, but he also takes Gray's elegiac stance as the tragic mask for his anger. His tone is admittedly far more sardonic than Gray's, with a grim humour more in common with Donne or Bishop King's ‘Exequy’. The verse too is much more vigorous. Gray's classically illustrative iambs have been invigorated with a strenuous resistance to the iambic norms, the trochee and dactyl of the opening line setting the stamp, along with Harrison's penchant for a verbal density akin to the best Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse. But the elegiac direction which opens the poem, however ironised or undercut linguistically, shows a central element in V. At the heart of its magnificent attempt to take on Thatcher's Britain is actually a very personal anger and sense of tragedy, a feature common to Harrison's work with its continual awareness of time and death. V. is as much a personal elegy for Harrison's father and mother as it is for his society. It is the graffitied ‘UNITED’ on his parents' grave which triggers Harrison's anger, and with it a Hamlet-like guilt and sense of responsibility at having abandoned his origins.

This self-indictment generates the main invective focus of the poem, an imaginary dialogue between Harrison and the Leeds skinhead who graffitied that ‘UNITED’ on the grave. This confrontation, like that between Marlow and Kurz in Heart of Darkness, is between self and ‘alter ego’, as the poet names his skinhead, ‘skald or skin’. It is as well to remember during this discussion that, as with the rest of his work if modern literary theory is to be accepted, the ‘Harrison voice’ in the poem is not its author as such, merely one element in Harrison's imagination. When challenged to sign his literary productions, the skin graffities his name and to Harrison's shock, ‘it was mine’. This leads Harrison to recall how he too was branded ‘vandal’ as a child when, from sheer frustration, he sprayed a fire extinguisher at a political meeting being addressed by Hugh Gaitskell. But his intent in seeing an analogy between himself and the contemporary skin disaffected by Thatcher's society is not simply to say ‘This is what I might have been.’ More subversively, it is to say ‘This is what I am’; or, as the poet puts it to his alter ego, adapting Rimbaud, ‘the autre that je est is fucking you’. The poet is a sublimated vandal confronting ‘them’ with language, and by implication, just as impotent as the angry bovver boys he berates. Part of Harrison's intent is to ask who is responsible and to lay the blame for the alienations of contemporary society at the right feet—‘It isn't all his fault though, / Much is ours.’ Harrison's sense of social responsibility, like his guilt over his parents' ill-kept grave, derives from his own feeling of what he and others like him have not done, how compromised he is by his education and social position. As the skin puts it, ‘Fuckers like that get folk like me arrested.’ The indictment is as much for Harrison's sense of abdication from his own class as for his role as poet writing elitist verses. With a precisely chosen self-irony, Harrison defends himself and his vocation to the skinhead as being ‘to give ungrateful cunts like you a hearing … to give some higher meaning to your scrawl’, only to be answered by the skinhead voicing his own deepest fears: ‘can't you speak / the language that yer mam spoke’; ‘A book, yer stupid cunt, 's not worth a fuck!’ This puts the same question Harrison asks in his translations of the fourth-century AD Alexandrian poet Palladas:

Where's the public good in what you write,
raking it in from all that shameless shite,
hawking iambics like so much Betterbrite?

（SP, p. 86）

The structure of V. is a brilliant vehicle offering a sense of refracted possibilities—history, language, art, contemporary society, self-critique etc. And it is explicitly and uncompromisingly contemporary articulating the frontline experiences of unemployed youth, as when the skin rejects the notion of going to heaven and having, when asked to give an account of himself, ‘to pipe up to St fucking Peter / ah've been on t'dole all mi life in fucking Leeds!’ Surely then, in this poem, Harrison's classical restraint, erudition and formal containment have been overtaken by the urgency of what he has to say in a way which allows him to achieve the role of the public poet and be accessible? In one sense the answer is undoubtedly ‘Yes’. It is quite unique for a contemporary poet to have his work translated almost instantaneously into video form as has happened with Harrison's recent productions, and equally unique for them to provoke the outraged response which both V. and The Blasphemer's Banquet elicited. Both programmes were the subject of attempts to ban their broadcast, V. by Mary Whitehouse because of its language and The Blasphemer's Banquet by the Lay Adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, ostensibly because it might be counterproductive to British race relations, but one suspects actually because of its outright and unashamedly atheistical attack on all religion.

But this public profile for Harrison's work does not necessarily answer the question we have just posed. From my own experience I have had two contradictory responses which give some indication of the responses to Harrison's work. In the town where I work, Hull Truck's Youth Theatre presented an immensely successful dramatised version of V. which ran to full houses and drew in a large number of young people. Equally, a poetry workshop which I run at The Warren, Hull's nationally acclaimed community resource centre for young unemployed people, were unanimous about the power and general accessibility of the video version of V. At the same time, they asked some probing questions about Harrison's presentation of the skinhead voice. They saw this as patronising, and noticed that structurally the poem plays tricks on the skinhead, as when it makes him mistake Harrison's Rimbaud quote as Greek and say ‘don't treat me like I'm dumb.’ This poetry workshop included an ex-NF ex-skinhead who was now a volunteer art worker at the centre. He pointed out that football-supporting skins as such no longer existed and hadn't existed in Leeds for years, ever since the clampdown on football violence forced them to change their image to become more acceptable and so get into Elland Road again and carry on the aggro. Skins around nowadays were more likely to be into anarchy and punk than aerosolling football team names. It seemed from the group discussion that Harrison had taken the skin as a generically representative voice of disaffection but in a quite distorting way. Not only that, but the attitudes of the poem, not just those of the Harrison voice in the poem, seemed to the group to be exactly those of the middle-class ‘wanker’ the skin accuses Harrison of being—and this from a group whose own exclusion from poetry as middle-class ‘wank’ has been transformed by their own fervour at finding they can do it too, as their self-produced magazine Inner Lines proved.

This instance brings up a central problem in V., and that is Harrison's attempt to speak ‘on behalf of’ a group he no longer belongs to. This may be partly a result of the problems of writing in an increasingly pluralistic culture. But the dialogue strategy of the central part of the poem, the aggressive confrontation between two male voices, polarises the poem in precisely the way it seeks to criticise. The maleness of the voice leads to a further problem with the invective. The masculine ethos, far from being challenged, is actively reinforced by the complicity of the two male voices through language at the point when the Harrison voice calls the skin a ‘cunt’. It would be a questionable generalisation to identify the derogatory use of words describing human sexuality as a male use of language, but there is a sense in which it belongs to a very male-orientated cultural ethos. Obviously Harrison is in part exposing and ironising this, but in another inescapable sense he is also complicit in it. His answer to the skin's charges against his ‘fucking poufy words’ is to drop all pretence and show that behind the cissy poet is still a ‘real man’ who can trade swear words with the best of them.

The problem raised here is a wider one of the language and forms appropriate or necessary for a contemporary political poetry. It is perhaps remarkable how little overtly political poetry there has been since the advent of Thatcherism. Part of Harrison's project as I take it has been to evolve ways of writing which are precisely that, without compromising his sense of the demands of art. In ‘taking the lid’ off his work in the way he seems to be doing in V. and The Blasphemer's Banquet he is both liberating his work and endangering it through the exacerbation of the inner contradictions which have driven it from the beginning. And despite the more open invective, the problem of formal containment remains. In the last sections of V. with its somewhat problematic chorus of ‘home, to my woman’, Harrison extends the range of the poem's reflection on contemporary violence to include images of Ulster and the Gulf, but with an almost gratuitous ease. It is as if the formal facility of his verse writing invites him to package his meditations in too easy a form. And from verse 84, through its introduction of Harrison's father, bewildered by the changes in his city and the influx of ‘coloured chaps’, the poem comes close to an ambiguous nostalgia for Leeds's working-class past versus its cosmopolitan present. Instead of being a badly needed ‘Mask of Anarchy’ for the 1980s, V. finally has more in common with Wordsworth's ‘Immortality’ ode, its rancour gagged by the elegiac strain and by a tendency to grand gestures.

This problem of rhetorical facility is even more pertinent with regard to The Blasphemer's Banquet. Clearly the form of this piece imposed certain limits. It is an ‘occasional’ poem in the true sense, a poem generated in response to an occasion or public event. It is also a public address by Harrison to Rushdie in part as a gesture of solidarity as Harrison makes plain towards the end when he raises his glass to Rushdie's blasphemy in defiance of all the ‘fascist fatwahs’ of all religions. From this point of view the piece undoubtedly has a heroic and courageous dimension to it. It is also in a sense documentary verse allowing Harrison the role of social commentator over the visual images of cultural displacement afforded by Bradford's contemporary changes—churches turned into curry restaurants and so on. But what it also allows Harrison to do is to indulge to the full his tendency for a wry and sometimes stagy or even ponderous sense of ‘The Tragic Realities of Life and Death’. It is a verse meditation on the Vanity of Human Wishes in a peculiarly classical mould. This generates some wonderfully audacious moments, as for example when Harrison is seen in the auction room, also a converted church, where the auctioneer, appropriately named Mr Bishop, is selling off a job lot of books, including the Selected Poems of Tony Harrison. And when Harrison successfully bids for a bust of Voltaire, the auctioneer marks it down to ‘Mr Nicholson’, before correcting himself and remarking wryly ‘Your fame's not travelled before you’. Or from the linguistic point of view, there is the stanza describing the unavoidability of death which rhymes with an audacity Byron would have relished:

That great big O of nothingness that swallers
Poets and priests, queens and Ayatollahs,
Not only infidels but fundamentalists
Whether in black turbans or dog-collars.

But Harrison retains his high seriousness, and lacks Byron's full sense of formal anarchy. At the same time, the writing skirts close to doggerel. V. was attacked similarly, but in the case of The Blasphemer's Banquet I am less ready to accept Harrison's rejoinder to his critics that ‘my ear is better than theirs’.¹⁷

The Blasphemer's Banquet was a courageous and welcome instance of a contemporary writer putting himself on the line in the most uncompromising way, and for that it deserves our full admiration. But at the end of the piece I was left frustrated by its patchy brilliance and by the sense that Harrison had allowed the ponderous themes of Time and Death to upstage his political or even cultural anger at what has happened to Rushdie. At the same time, this seems to have prevented him presenting a more complex response to the problematic issues and personal realities stirred up by the whole incident. The form invites him into an easy verse-making, but because of the grand gestures invited by the tragic sense of the human condition, it could be argued that Harrison loses the political and satirical bite Shelley sustains in his broadside ‘The Mask of Anarchy’. Obviously Harrison's piece was in a sense written to order, under the pressure of the events it describes, like Shelley's, or like the equally courageous response to the Rushdie affair, the play Iranian Nights by Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton which played to packed houses at the Royal Court in April 1989 and was broadcast on Channel 4. Shelley found a way of translating contemporary events through a fusion of medieval allegory and broadside ballad into a vitriolic satire and a great political poem in a genuinely popular mode without losing the edge of actuality. Ali and Brenton put their piece together in one week and managed to give it a strongly political focus maintained through a critique of ‘Fascism in brown skins’,¹⁸ and of Western imperialist hypocrisy. Harrison seems caught between actuality on the one hand and timeless truths of existence on the other, journalist, elegist and celebrant of ‘this fleeting life’, but losing the historical urgency which drove him to write the poem.

One reason for this is the tendency towards pessimism in Harrison's work. The title poem of his early pamphletNewcastle is Peru was a deliberate attempt to celebrate the remarkableness of the North of England and ‘to crush’, as Harrison said, ‘desperation towards a note of celebration in life which I find very difficult’.¹⁹ His admiration for Greek drama arises in part from its capacity ‘to look at its worst imaginings, its deepest nightmares, and yet not leave you feeling that life is not worth living’.²⁰ His attachment to traditional verse forms is important here: he sees them as ‘a life support system’ which enables ‘the dark imagination, the pessimistic side of myself, to go deeper into the darkness’.²¹ And Harrison finds the pessimism of the Alexandrian poet Palladus ‘invigorating’, because ‘there is no sense at all of “gracious” surrender either to the inevitability of death or to historical change’; Palladus's verse is ‘not the stylish after dinner despair of high-table, the sighing gestures of surfeit, but the authentic snarl of a man trapped physically in poverty and persecution, and metaphysically in a deep sense of the futile’.²² While we should beware of reading Harrison's comments off against his own work, this strain of thinking does help explain the genuine sense of the macabre in his work, a persistent obsession with the physical fact of death which tends to override his sense of the historical. And perhaps the only way to explain that is to return to Harrison's cultural displacement from his working-class roots. The timeless verities of existence elegantly elaborated in his beloved classics can override the historical actualities of society in a writer who feels himself an individual who can't belong, however deep his compassion and understanding. Harrison's snarling invectives against death are genuine. His snarling invectives against an unjust and unequal society have a more problematic status.

Having voiced these questions, it is still the case that Harrison is at least taking the admirable risk of addressing as a poet crucial political and cultural issues of our day in a form which challenges the continuing hegemony of the small poem and the continuing hegemony of dominant culture. And he does so with unquestionable integrity and considerable conviction. Whatever the problems, one can only be thankful for the biting vigour of the verse of this working-class pirate bent on a bit of cultural ‘aggro’.²³

Notes

1. BBC 2 ‘Arena’ programme of Harrison reading and talking about his life （1985）; Brent Garner, ‘Tony Harrison: Scholarship Boy’, Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society （1986）, p. 23.

2. Ken Worpole, ‘The Poetry of Tony Harrison’, New Left Review no. 153, September—October 1985, p. 74.

3. ‘Arena’.

4. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy （1957）, p. 239; quoted by Worpole （p. 63） and Garner （p. 18）.

5. Garner, p. 16.

6. Worpole, p. 67.

7. ‘Arena’.

8. Radio 3 ‘Third Ear’ interview with Paul Bailey, 23 February 1988.

9. Interview with Hugh Herbert, Guardian, 18 January 1985.

10. ‘Third Ear’.

11. Interview with John Haffenden, Poetry Review, vol. 73, no. 4, 1983, p. 21.

12. ‘Third Ear’.

13. ‘Arena’.

14. Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘Linkwords: Tony Harrison, Selected Poems’, Poetry Review, vol. 74, 1984, pp. 74-5.

15. Edward Lucie-Smith （ed.）, British Poetry Since 1945, （Penguin, 1985）, p. 241.

16. Worpole, p. 73.

17. ‘Third Ear’.

18. Tariq Ali and Howard Brenton, Iranian Nights （Nick Hearne/Walker, 1989）, p. 18.

19. Tony Harrison, Newcastle is Peru （Newcastle, 1969）, Preface.

20. ‘Third Ear’.

21. Ibid.

22. Alan Young, ‘Weeds and White Roses—The Poetry of Tony Harrison’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 21, nos 1-2, pp. 159-60.

23. In the ‘Third Ear’ interview, Tony Harrison talked about ‘the almost piratical way I feel I acquired my style’, which is ‘full of a little bit of aggro’.