[In the following essay, Widdowson analyzes how Harrison's use of pronouns in his “The School of Eloquence” and Other Poems illustrates his ambivalent relationship to his parents.]

EDITOR'S PREFACE

‘You weren't brought up to write such mucky books!’is the final line in italics of Tony Harrison's poem ‘Bringing Up’. It refers to what his mother said when he showed her his first volume The Loiners, and it epitomizes the social dislocation of a working-class boy who won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and subsequently graduated in Classics.

In this chapter Henry Widdowson demonstrates in a sensitive reading that the way in which the grammatical categories of person （first, second, and third） are distributed across Harrison's poem ‘Long Distance II’ throws into relief its basic theme of estrangement; of loss of contact, person to person.

Widdowson points to a significant distinction between the pronouns of the first and second person （I and you） on the one hand and those of the third person on the other （he, she, they）: the former are terms of address used to talk to people, while the latter are terms of reference used to talk about people. To put it differently: it is only the first and second person that are actually participating in a speech event. They are equals in terms of communication, in that their roles are potentially transferable as the speech event proceeds. The third person is not associated with any positive participant role; it has a distancing effect and people referred to in this way are cut off from communication.

Starting from this fundamental distinction, Widdowson soon recognizes that at crucial junctures in the poem the use of certain second- and third-person items is artfully blurred. As a matter of fact, this linguistic ambiguity appears to reflect that in his relationship with his parents the poet feels both intellectually detached and emotionally involved. Widdowson also points out some other formal and linguistic features dramatizing this state of mind, and comes to the poignant conclusion that this patterning of language, this casting of emotions in a poetic mould, would have been lost on his parents. Both the ambivalence and the estrangement will persist.

This chapter is an excellent example of how seemingly insignificant linguistic details can be related in such a way that they confirm and expand our initial responses to a poem. It also demonstrates that language as such is ‘innocent’, but that it loses this innocence and becomes a ‘loaded weapon’ （Bolinger 1980） as soon as it is used in communication, that is, in social discourse. This social ground of language, to which Harrison has shown to be highly sensitive, has been a key issue in much recent literary theory （Rylance 1991: 53-67）.

                                                                                                                                  P＼eter］ V＼erdonk］

First a general comment to set the scene. The particular poem I want to analyse is one of a pair among a number of poems in the volume ‘The School of Eloquence’ and Other Poems （1978） which are about the relationship between the poet and his parents. A recurring theme is one of disparity of values and guilt that his scholarship has estranged him from them and their working-class ways. Even his portrayal of them is betrayal of a kind, since it can only be based on the dissociation of his experience and expressed in a poetic idiom they cannot understand.¹ He cannot talk about his parents in the way he talked to them. What comes across in these poems is a sense of exile and uncertainty of self. They are expressive of an ambivalence of position, a dilemma of identity: they are intellectually detached with descriptions distanced in the third person, the poet apart from what he describes, but at the same time he is emotionally involved in the first person, a part of it all as well.

This, then, is the poem: one of several variations on a theme of estrangement; of loss of contact, person to person.

Though my mother was already two years dead
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed
and still went to renew her transport pass.
You couldn't just drop in. You had to phone.
He'd put you off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone
as though his still raw love were such a crime.
He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief
though sure that very soon He'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
He knew she'd just popped out
to get the tea.
I believe life ends with death, and that is all.
You haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new black leather phone book there's your name
and the disconnected number I still call.

“Long Distance II”

At the most obvious referential level of paraphrase summary this poem is about family relations and their severance by bereavement. It is about communication and its loss in two senses, physical contact and emotional ties, telephone connections and human relationships, the one expressed in terms of the other. It is about being cut off, disconnected, distanced.

Linguistically, human relationships are mediated through the grammatical category of person, and in particular the personal pronouns. To quote from the recent Collins Cobuild English Grammar: ‘You use personal pronouns to refer to yourself, the people you are talking to, or the people or things you are talking about’ （Sinclair 1990: 29）. It is through the categories of person （first, second, and third） that we make a connection between self and others and establish positions of identity. We might expect, therefore, that, given the obvious theme of the poem, the category of person should repay closer study. This, then, can serve as the starting point for our analysis.

A word or two to begin with about pronouns and person in general. The first- and second-person pronouns （‘I’ and ‘you’） identify participants and provide the necessary terminals so to speak, whereby people are connected in communicative interaction. They coexist in the same plane of involvement. Thus they are, in principle, interchangeable in the turn-taking of talk: the second person is a potential first person, and each presupposes the existence of the other. The same human person shifts role into the different grammatical persons of ‘I’ and ‘you’, addresser and addressee. And these pronouns are, of course, independent and self-contained. In spite of the term we give them they are not pro-nouns. We can of course use them in association with nouns, as when they are specifically identified （‘I, Claudius’; ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’）, but they have no proxy function. They are terms of address, not terms of reference.

The third-person pronouns, on the other hand, indicate a non-participant role; they are terms of reference rather than of address. When people are referred to in third-person terms they are distanced, put at a remove from involvement with first-person self, no longer interactants. When you talk about people in the third person, rather than to people in the second person, you in effect disconnect them from communication: ‘Does he take sugar?’

So what, then, of the pronouns and persons in this poem? The first two lines establish the relationships of child （let us assume son in this case） as first person with parents as third persons: ‘my mother’, ‘Dad’: me, the poet, and them. There is a difference, though, between these two expressions. The first of them is a straightforward term of reference. The second ‘Dad’, however, can serve as a term of address also, a vocative （for example, ‘Sorry, Dad’） so although it is used here in the third person, it carries the implication of involvement, indeterminate, so to speak, between reference and address. He is not just being talked about in detachment but is also marked as a potential participant. ‘Dad’ seems appropriate as suggesting a continuing relationship: he is still alive. ‘My mother’, already two years dead, is distanced as a third-person entity by the use of the standard referential phrase. One might consider the difference of effect if the lines had been otherwise:

Though mother was already two years dead,
My father warmed her slippers by the gas. …

There is a further observation to be made about the distancing effect of these terms. ‘Dad’ is not only to be distinguished from ‘my mother’ because of its address potential, it is also a less formal term and expresses closer familial ties, more personal involvement. The version which is unmarked for such affect is ‘Father’, just as the marked versions for the address term ‘Mother’ are ‘Mummy’ or ‘Mum’ or （in Harrison's dialect） ‘Mam’. And, of course, these affectively marked terms can also be used for reference as well as address. Indeed, they are so used by Harrison himself in other poems. For example:

I asked mi mam. She said she didn't know.

（‘Wordlists’）

Since mi mam's dropped dead mi dad's took fright.

（‘Next Door’）

Here too, of course, the use of dialect forms is a further device for reducing distance, expressing empathy, identifying the first person with third-person description.²

What we seem to have here, then, is a kind of fusion of participant address and non-participant reference perspectives. We might suggest that there is a set of three terms of reference of increasing affective involvement in Harrison's poetry:

my mother my father
mi mam      mi dad
mam           dad(3)

⁴

If we use these possible alternatives in the first two lines of the poem we are considering, with other modifications to retain the metrical pattern, we can propose a number of variants:

Though mam was then already two years dead,
Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas. …
Mi mam was then already two years dead,
But dad still warmed her slippers by the gas. …
Though mi mam was already two years dead,
Mi dad still warmed her slippers by the gas. …

And so on.

Each variant, I would argue, represents a different relationship with the parents. And so it is with the original lines. The father, unlike the mother, is still, as it were, affectively connected, the relationship is alive as a potential participation. And yet to some degree distanced by third-person reference. The writer is connected in a way, and yet, in another way, disconnected. The ambivalence I referred to earlier is already present in the first two lines of the poem, represented, I would suggest, by the very choice of referential expression. In this sense, the end of the poem is anticipated by its beginning.

But what of the lines in between? They too, I suggest, are expressive of this ambivalence. And again, it is the grammatical category of person that is crucial. Consider the second-person pronoun in the first two lines of the second verse. It occurs three times. But it does not have a participant sense. It is the informal equivalent of the third-person impersonal pronoun ‘one’:

One couldn't just drop in, one had to phone. …

And this is the non-participant equivalent of the first-person pronoun ‘I’:

I couldn't just drop in, I had to phone. …

Again, there is distancing, but at the same time some retention of affective involvement represented by the residual participant force of the second-person pronoun ‘you’.

Consider now how the third person is used to talk about the father in the poem. In the first verse, there is an account of what he actually does, his physical actions, expressed as a series of objective statements of observable fact. In the second verse, there is an interpretation of his action. It is not a matter simply of what he does, but why he does it. The first person intervenes to give reasons and adduce motives. He is drawn into subjective involvement. And in the third verse he is drawn even further in. Here it is not just a matter of interpreting action but attributing feelings and attitudes to the third person which cannot possibly be accessible to observation, and which would normally, therefore, be associated only with first-person expression:

I couldn't risk his blight of disbelief. …
I'm sure that very soon I'll hear her key. …
I knew she'd just popped out to get the tea.

There is, then, in these three verses an increasing involvement, a gradual identification of the first person with the third person until they at times in effect fuse one into the other and the son articulates the feelings of the father in the father's idiom （‘… just popped out to get the tea’）. And yet he retains some detachment and separate identity: expressions like ‘my blight of disbelief’ and ‘end his grief’ are of his thoughts in his idiom carried over from the last line of the second verse: ‘as though his still raw love was such a crime’.⁴

These verses, then, represent an ambivalence of position of the first person: he is both apart from and a part of what he describes, detached from the actions, and able to comment on them, but drawn into empathy with the feelings. Then in the first line of the last verse this ambivalence disappears with a definite assertion of separate and independent identity with the first occurrence （as the first word） of the first-person pronoun:

I believe life ends with death, and that is all.

This is clear and straightforward enough: a change of tone, a first-person assertion of present reality in contrast to the paternal illusions of the past that he has been recounting. And this shift is also marked, we might notice by a change in rhyme scheme in this last verse: a different form for a different kind of statement. Life ends with death: that is all, and that is that: no ambivalence or uncertainty here. But that is not all. Consider the next line. Here the second-person pronoun makes another appearance. This time, however, it is used not as before （in verse 2） but in its full participant sense: he is addressing his parents. They are both dead, and life ends in death and that is all, and yet he is talking to them nevertheless, reviving the relationship by this direct address. The line is disconnected, but he is making a call all the same. The ambiguity of his relationship as represented in the earlier verses is resolved into the definite distinction between first and second persons ‘I’ and ‘you’. But this only serves to create the poignant anomaly of addressing the dead, as if there were a possibility of continuing relationship. The uncertainty persists, in spite of the assertion of belief in the first line of this last verse.

And it persists, we should note, in spite of the assertion of actuality expressed in the phrase ‘my new black leather phone book’. This elaborate noun phrase （by far the most elaborate in the poem, with all its adjectives） seems, we might suggest, to insist on objective reality. Here is my phone book, new, black, made of leather, a real and tangible object, here and now. And yet it is black, suggestive perhaps of mourning, and though emphatically new and present, it contains the old and the past: your name and number are in it, even though you are dead and disconnected. Notice that this ambivalence is suggested even by the phrase ‘there's your name’ not ‘here's your name’: distal, not proximal; there （and then） not here （and now）. And notice too that the number is ‘there’, as if it appeared on its own. There is no indication of human agency. The line does not after all read:

In my new phone book I write down your name. …

The line is disconnected, then, the parents dead. He still calls, just the same.

‘Just the same’: the concessive phrase that ends the poem itself relates to those that precede （‘though’ makes an appearance in each verse）. Although … yet. Concession runs throughout: the very first word of the poem sets the key （‘Though my mother’）. This much is certain, and yet. … And the poem ends on the same note. Ultimately, what the son believes is also undermined by concession. His certainty has no more substance than his father's. In spite of his assertion, he behaves like his father, and so is subject to the same disbelief in spite of what he claims to believe. There is even a recurrence of lexical items to link them: ‘still/（re） new’ in the last line of the first verse, ‘new/still’ in the last two lines of the poem: appropriately enough a kind of mirror image. The father still got a new transport pass for his dead wife, the son still puts a disconnected number of dead parents in his new phone book. So the father's resistance to the reality of severed relationship is shared by the son, and this itself represents a continuity of their relationship. Life in a way, then, does not end in death. And yet … the number is nevertheless disconnected.

The ambivalence remains unresolved, except in the resolution that its representation provides in the very patterns of language of the poem. For although the poem is referentially about disconnection, the patterns, the prosodic regularities, the links, and correspondences, represent the opposite. The end of the poem paradoxically connects up with the beginning, and one might almost propose combining words from the first and last lines to provide a summary:

Though dead and disconnected, I still call.

This patterning of language though, this casting into poetic form, is a mode of communication which his parents would not have understood or recognized as significant. As the ambivalence persists, so does the estrangement. The persons, parents and son, first, second, and third, ultimately remain distinct.

And yet. … Just the same. …

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER WORK

1 Compare the original poem with the following variant. What do you think the effect is of the different changes that have been made?

Though Mam was then already two years dead,
My father warmed her slippers by the gas,
put hot water bottles her side of the bed,
and still went to renew her transport pass.
I couldn't just drop in. I had to phone.
He'd put me off an hour to give him time
to clear away her things and look alone,
as if his still raw love was such a crime.
He couldn't risk my blight of disbelief.
He knew she'd just gone out
to get the tea,
and sure that very soon He'd hear her key
scrape in the rusted lock and end his grief.
I believe life ends in death, and that is all.
They haven't both gone shopping; just the same,
in my new phone book here I write their name,
and the disconnected number that I call.

2 The following is another poem by Tony Harrison, again one of a pair, about his parents:

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don't try.
you're like book ends, the pair
of you, she'd say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare …
The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.
Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.
A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us We're alike!
Your life's all shattered into smithereens.
Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between's
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

“Book Ends I”

Consider these questions:

a Personal pronouns are much in evidence in this poem as well: first person （‘me’, ‘we’, ‘us’）, second person （‘you’）, third person （'she’）. What relationships do you think they express in this case? Do you think they represent the same attitudes as in the other poem?

b How would the effect of the poem differ （i） if the second person was replaced by the third, （ii） if the two persons were interchanged, or （iii） if the address terms ‘mam’ and ‘dad’ were used? For example:

i Shocked into sleeplessness, he's scared of bed. …
The ‘scholar’ me, him, worn out on poor pay. …
etc.
ii Baked the day you suddenly dropped dead. …
A night he needs my company to pass
and you not here to tell us We're alike. …
iii Baked the day mam suddenly dropped dead. …
The ‘scholar’ me, dad worn out on poor pay. …

c Both of the poems consist of sixteen lines. They are, however, arranged differently. The first consists of a series of four-line verses, this one consists of six two-line verses, then a single line, and then a final verse of three. What significance, if any, do you think this arrangement has? Is it in any way suited to the theme of the poem?

d Verses 5 and 6 have the appearance of sentences. But they lack a main verb and so are grammatical fragments. In what way does this linguistic feature relate to the arrangement of lines as expressive of the poem's theme?

e What do you think the effect would be if the first lines of the poem were altered to read as follows?

We slowly chew mi mam's last apple pie,
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead.

f What do you think the effect is of: i The use of direct speech, the mother's actual words, in verse 3? ii The inverted commas round the word ‘scholar’ in verse 4? iii The repetition of the word books in the last line of the poem?

Notes

1. Sorry, dad, you won't get that quatrain （I'd like to be the poet my father reads!） （‘The Rhubarbarians’）

2. Dialect forms are frequent in Harrison's poetry. They sometimes occur as the representation of direct speech （typographically marked in italics）, as for example in the first of the ‘Long Distance’ poems:

   Ah can't stand it no more, this
   empty house!
   Carrots choke us wi'out your mam's
   white sauce!

   They sometimes occur unmarked in a text of otherwise standard English:

   Mi aunty's baby's still. The dumbstruck mother.
   The mirror, tortoise-shell-like celluloid held to it, passed from one
   hand to another.
   No babble, blubber, breath. The glass won't cloud.

   （‘Study’）

   And, again, sometimes the forms are set aside in single inverted commas:

   Mi mam was ‘that surprised’ how many came
   to see the cortege off and doff their hats—
   All the ‘old lot’ left gave her the same
   bussing back from ‘Homes’ and Old Folk's Flats.

   （‘Next Door I’）

   The variation in representation itself perhaps indicates an ambivalent attitude. We should note too that although the use of dialect can be interpreted as mockery, an ironic distancing of self. This again suggests the uncertainty of position that I have traced in this particular poem, and which seems to me to run through all of Harrison's work.

3. There are variants of ‘Mam’ and ‘Dad’ as terms of address in other social dialects, of course: ‘Ma（ma）’ and ‘Pa（pa）’, ‘Mater’, ‘Pater’. Some people （but not Harrison） use the unmarked referential terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ for address as well, in which case we of course only have a two-term system of third-person reference:

   my mother my father
   mother my father

   With regard to the terms that Harrison uses, all six make their appearance in his poetry (together with the minimal referential pronouns ‘he’ and ‘she’). It would be interesting to explore the significance of their alteration. Consider, for example:

   My writing desk. Two photos, mam and dad.

   Dad's in our favourite pub, now gone for good.
   My father and his background are both gone.

   (‘Background Material’)

   My mother said: It suits you, your dad's
   cap.

   Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR).

   (‘Turns’)

4. As I suggest in note 2, Harrison seems to be especially sensitive and uncertain about this difference of idiom. See the pair of poems ‘Them & ＼uz］ I, II’. See also ‘Wordlists II’, a poem about the ‘tongues I've slaved to speak or read’, which ends with the lines:

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