Tony Harrison in Conversation

At the heart of Tony Harrison's recent play, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, is his version of a fragmentary satyr play by Sophocles. But in Harrison's adaptation the Chorus of Satyrs - still goat-like and phallic, to be sure - is transformed into a squad of beery, North-Country clog-dancers. It is perhaps an attempt at resolving the conflict at the core of Harrison's work - between his polyglot erudition and his roots in working-class Leeds, between classical culture and class culture. Harrison has degrees in Classics and in Linguistics, has travelled all over the world and is conversant with several modern languages, including Hausa and Czech. Yet the more he travels in his art, the more insistently he returns to his home territory, where he finds himself cut off from his class, his family and - most ironically - the language he grew up with.

Harrison's adaptations for the stage of Moliére, Racine, Aeschylus and the medieval Mysteries represent a one-man renaissance of verse-drama in English. And at the same time, the power of his lyric poetry, too, seems to increase with each new publication: the controversial 'v', 'The Fire Gap', his poem for television 'The Blasphemers' Banquet', the hefty Penguin Selected Poems.

Clive Wilmer: I've heard it said that when you were quite young, you made a resolution to earn your living from writing poetry. Is that true?

Tony Harrison: I don't actually remember a date where I made a specific resolution, but I certainly had a kind of grim determination that I would like the whole venture of my life to be poetry -including earning my living.

You've scored another success recently in the theatre with The Trackers. It seems to many of us that with your dramatic works you've managed to do something which for a long time was thought impossible -which is to write verse-drama for the modern stage. How do you think it is that you've succeeded in that where others have failed?

I think it is by taking a circuitous route through translating and adapting some of the plays when verse was extremely ambitious dramatically. When I was wanting to write plays when I was very young, I moved on to a world of theatre which I felt had been anaesthetized and genteelized by Eliot and Fry; that it had really become drawing-room plays versified rather than finding a real use for verse. It seems to me that the great periods of theatre - the ones that draw me, whether it's the Greeks or Shakespeare and the Jacobeans or Moliére or Racine or Goethe - they were always poets who worked directly with actors and found a style which, rather than concealing the fact that it's verse, drew attention to the physicality of its mechanics. I was very drawn to that, not only from my studies, but also from traditional pantomime - which was my first experience of theatre - which was in verse and which in fact includes many of the things I like to include in the theatre I do: men playing women, women playing men., verse, transformations .

So in a sense one of the things that happens in The Trackers specifically happens in all your plays, in that you introduce something of what is normally thought of as 'low art' into 'high art' .

Oh yes, I think that I've taken very strong impressions from popular theatre that I had as a child and often used them to unlock classical plays. In fact I remember having a dream when we were casting for The Oresteia which I did with Peter Hall at the National Theatre, and I had a dream in which a lot of old men came to sign a book I had by the door, wanting to be in the Chorus for The Oresteia, which begins with a chorus of old men, and in the morning I read this book and all the names were Norman Evans, Nat Jackley, etc. -all the people I'd seen in pantomime as a child - and that gave a kind of clue to the always audience-directed intention of popular theatre. The difference between that theatre and verse theatre that I found as an aspiring verse-dramatist is enormous.

It might be thought that that was not possible with something like Racine or even Moliére, which is thought to be rather frigidly classical, but in those cases you found devices for making them more relevant to modern conditions - like making The Misanthrope happen in 1966 rather than 1666. Do you think you always have some notion of relevance behind what you do?

If it's a question of re-theatricalizing a classic from a previous period, then you use a tactic like that often as much to allow the kind of language you can feel creative in as much as to simply change the costumes.

Some of the plays we've been talking about - for instance, The Trackers - share obvious themes with the poems - themes about class, for instance, themes about division of one sort of another. It struck me looking again at your Selected Poems that those weren't exactly the themes at the outset. I mean, with The Loiners the most obvious theme was sexual life of one sort or another and I wondered if you came to think that that was really the same theme that you've made your name with - which is the class theme?

After the publication of The Loiners, I remember my mother being offended by the book - by its sex, its outspokenness about sexual activity; also that a great deal of the poems were not understood by my parents, and by people like my parents, and I began to wonder what was this enormous effort to acquire what I call eloquence, which was through long commitment to becoming a' poet, but also an obsessive commitment to all forms of articulation, language-learning and so on. I think the shock of that reaction made me think, 'Well, for what purpose is this eloquence being acquired if it has no direct access to the people I grew up amongst and whom I love?'

And did that then lead you on to what you might broadly call a political theme - I mean in the broad sense of politics?

I think it's both that in a narrow sense and also in a broader sense - I think many of the poems dramatize the divisions which are later dramatized in Trackers. That is between having what you could call a literary or poetic experience - being a reader - and a device or a technique I think I've developed of suddenly looking over my own shoulder or suddenly, to take an image from cinematography, of moving the camera back and showing the reader either in a sort of privileged isolation or in relation to those things which do not seem accessible or convertible or metamorphosable into poetry. And I've always wanted to know what is left out when you make certain choices to create a style.

Can you give an example of that perhaps? It's a bit abstract as it stands.

Well - it's like Baudelaire saying 'Hypocrite lecteur' - saying you've got to the point of being gratified with literary experiences or theatrical experiences but let us now pay our dues - let us pay the cost of that privilege of literacy by using our sharpened senses to look beyond the poem or the play in which we are momentarily contained.

Is that partly why, for instance, a lot of the sonnets in 'The School of Eloquence' - your sequence of sixteen line sonnets - contain quotations from non-literary persons?

Yet, it's a deliberate contrast to the kind of poetry which bolstered itself up with quotations from many other cultural sources, like other languages whether they were Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.

Like Pound and Eliot?

Like Pound and Eliot. In a way I was educated in that tradition but then I seemed to want to set . rather than a jewel from past literature, a found iambic pentameter in the speech of the working class for example - so that often they're very deliberately non-literary sources which actually could be taken absolutely untouched from speech. I often quote examples of hearing perfect iambic pentameters all around me. If your ear is tuned to it, you hear them. I always remember the one I've often quoted - the woman I heard on the train explaining to a stranger where her son-in-law worked and she said, 'He works for British Gypsum outside Leek' - which is a perfect iambic pentameter. And then she made one that was rather more adventurous like 'Well, it's the whole world over, the unrest'. I enjoy finding things which will fit the metre - like the first poem in 'The School of Eloquence', which will always be the first poem, 'On Not Being Milton', ends with a quotation from a condemned Cato Street conspirator .

'Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting. '

Yes, which is metrically sound in that context, but which comes from a source whose speech normally disappears with them, which is never recorded in the rolls of honour or by historical scribes or in any other form - except in a moment like this when he was about to be executed. Therefore death had given a weightier significance to his language.

A kind of Shakespearean unconscious tragic grandeur.

Mmm.

It seems to me that there's a sort of irony behind this: that in that sequence, 'The School of Eloquence, you talk about the ownership of language - it being owned by a class. And you also talk in one of the poems about losing your mother-tongue, meaning in a sense the tongue that you learnt with your mother. But it also seems that, by these means you've been talking of, in a sense you've regained your mother-tongue, you've regained ownership of what was lost. Do you feel that?

Yes, it's like taking an odyssey and returning and finding what you're looking for at the place you left. I feel that very strongly. So when you're first exposed to the kind of education that we were exposed to . I have a poem describing how I wasn't allowed to read poetry …

'Them & [uz]'.

'Them & [uz]'. And in fact that retrospective aggro has been a source of a lot of my theatrical activity - reclaiming Northern classics like The Mysteries, of using Northern inflections in The Oresteia, for example, and in the most recent work, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus. But the speech I had was considered ugly by comparison with RP or Queen's English or whatever the standard form was, which we know is based on the speech of the Southern public school, and there was a process of dubbing which I found very bewildering - and it works in the theatre in some ways still - that you learn a certain way of speaking Shakespeare or other classical plays. And there's no reason for this except cultural and political reasons.

This reminds me particularly now of a more recent work, the poem 'v', where you have a little dialogue between yourself and an imaginary skinhead 'who's defaced your parents' grave, who then turns out to be in a sense a kind of alter ego, and I wonder how strongly you sympathize and identify with that skinhead. For instance, there was a kind of scandal surrounding the poem because you read it on television and it was mentioned in Parliament and so on, and it did actually occasion your using four-letter words in the nation's sitting rooms. I wonder how much you chose to do that, wanted to do that, or how much you were unconsciously relishing the opportunity?

Everything about 'v' was deliberately public and public certainly means - in our terms - television, so that I was very glad that it was on television. That's the kind of audience I feel poetry should have. I certainly didn't put in four-letter words in order to make a scandal - they were an essential part of the poem; it's a poem which ranges from the graveyard's use of Latin for epitaphs down to the 'fuck' and the 'shit' that are inscribed on the graves. And these are examples of modes of language - both of which have their own kinds of power and the poem really is about power and the power over language.

But I mean there is a sense, isn't there, in which by - as a poet - taking on the four-letter words you give that skinhead a kind of power which he actually didn't have before .

But he has a certain kind of power when someone like me sees the grave of his loved ones defaced. I mean, that is a powerful act and it comes from some need and my wanting to understand that need is what created the poem. And also thinking about where I should be buried for example. Then you realize that the graveyards of the past which were centres for fairly stable communities who assumed generations would stay in the same place - no longer so - and that everywhere in Britain you could duplicate the graveyard that I wrote about. I had many letters from people saying exactly that - several graveyards in several cities were equally defaced.

Of course, this brings us to another side - almost the opposite side of your poetry - which is that in some ways it's very traditional. That poem is obviously based on Gray's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard' …

True .

. and in all sorts of ways your poems invoke what has been done in the art in the past -as indeed lots of other people's poems do - but it comes across as rather striking in your case because you seem to be so consciously speaking for the dispossessed and inarticulate but you're making them speak in effect through these ancient forms, metres, conventions, etc. Do you ever find that a contradiction, or is it to you a seamless construction?

No, it's a deliberately dramatized contradiction. It's a way both of testing the aspiration towards eloquence - of giving it a place in which to be heard - but also a way of subjecting the classical form, which I think still has its meaning, to those things which you would think most likely to destroy it. Like putting a beautiful object in a wind tunnel to test its stress. So the two things happen at the same time: there's a reclamation, re-energizing of the classical form to the point when it might begin to crumble and by doing that you also give voice to an aspiration or a motivation that would not normally seek a poetic place to be heard.

In doing that, do you think that you in some sense salvage the classical, as well as speaking for the dispossessed?

Yes, there is a recycling process, a reclamation deliberately going on there. There are many things being dramatized, many ways of looking at the same form, the same art that has had a life of many generations, many centuries - how can it be reclaimed, how can it be rescued from simply being the kind of art which creates a closed order of appreciators, for example. This is what The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus dramatizes. You're in a desert in which there are two Oxford archaeologists who are reclaiming - trying to rediscover -fragments of a spiritual past with workmen who look at the fragile papyri - because it's in a desert and it's the only organic matter around - as fertilizer. So the idea of fertilizer is there in both senses. And at another level - and one of the deepest levels of the poetry - it's what is the difference between material need and spiritual need, or between cultural need and material need.

You talk in your introduction to The Trackers of Greek drama as 'open-eyed about suffering but with a heart still open to celebration and physical affirmation'. Is it the case that you're drawn to ancient drama because you see in it an opportunity for healing - if only for a time - the sorts of division and conflict we've been talking about?

Yes, I think I'm drawn to Greek drama for many reasons and one of the reasons why I didn't want to let oblivion totally reclaim the satyr play was that that seemed to be one of the clues to how the Greeks maintained a kind of celebratory route in the sensual and everyday to follow their tragedy. What I have used it to look for is a style with which we might be able to confront our worst: just as when I take the most traditionally literate form and subject it to an illiterate attack and see if it sustains it, so do I think that our need for celebration has to admit and openly acknowledge the huge darkness of the 20th century in which it seems that simple spirit of affirmation has been burnt out.

So, behind all the darkness of the poetry, there's a kind of hope present all the time?

The poem itself is that act - I think the poem itself is that act of affirmation.

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This interview was recorded in London on 14 January 1991. It was broadcast as part of the Radio 3 series, 'Poet of the Month', on 4 February 1991 and is here transcribed by kind permission of the BBC. It was edited by the producer, Fiona McLean.