This is the third title H. has written or edited on Tony Harrison's work in recent years: previously New Light on Tony Harrison (ed. 2019), The Inky Digit of Defiance (Harrison's selected prose, ed. 2017). Her shared interests and wide-ranging knowledge of the classical world and its reception, besides her sympathetic understanding of Harrison's outlook, make this a most engaging study. A useful timeline precedes the preface, listing all 28 of the Classics-informed works by Harrison in chronological order, an order roughly followed in the book, although there are other priorities such as genre or recurring themes (e.g. sculpture and conflict). The book in H.'s words ‘addresses the relationship between Harrison's poetry and the ancient Graeco-Roman world’ (p. 1). The phrase ‘radical classicism’ is a shorthand for that relationship. Harrison was quoted in The Times (3 November 1987): ‘without the many years I spent acquiring Latin and Greek I should never have been able to compose my poem v’. But it is not just v that has classical roots. H. quotes a similar acknowledgement of his debt to Classics in 2011: ‘Classics has been in my bloodstream since I was eleven. It gave me all kinds of models of excellence’ (p. 1). This final phrase ‘models of excellence’ links Harrison not only with the classical canon, but also with the radical politics of the London Corresponding Society and the education of the working class.
The foundations of Harrison's engagement with the Classical world are most clearly represented in the sonnet sequence The School of Eloquence, in which are to be found the most graphic poems about Harrison's education and the conflict that it caused between the language of home and school. Me Tarzan is one sonnet appositely picked out for its dramatic expression of the conflict of cultures created by his scholarship to Leeds Grammar School: he shouts from his skylight window to his mates (who are ‘off laikin’) that he is ‘gorra Latin prose’. His protruding head is likened to Cicero's with a daring tmesis (Cissy-bleeding-ro's) that embodies the cultural division: Cicero vs sissy, classical eloquence vs demotic (‘bleeding’ is also of course appropriate to beheading). The contemptuous treatment he received in school because of his regional accent influences his determination to write in his own voice as he expresses it in a sort of defiant manifesto (or threat!):
When he came to translate the Oresteia, Harrison wanted to keep the ‘weighty, craggy quality’ of Aeschylus’ language. He recalls his exclusion from reading aloud at school because of his Yorkshire accent: ‘And while my translation of Aeschylus isn't what you could call deliberate revenge, it is most emphatically a rediscovery of the dignity of the accent’ (in N. Astley [ed.], Tony Harrison [1991], p. 290). On Palladas (1975) H. flags up the key features of the epigrammatic genre in Greek, qualities that Harrison reproduces in translation, ‘the tension between his formal control and exuberant demoticism creating his distinctive voice and soundscape’ (p. 33). Probably the most idiosyncratic, yet extremely effective poetic style Harrison developed, that for his translation of the Oresteia, is written in a rhythm owing much to Anglo-Saxon verse with ‘four stresses, caesura and alliteration’. H. notes that the alliterative consonants in combination ‘with short, Northern vowels’ (p. 62) were suited to the musical score by Harrison Birtwhistle and the masks through which the cast had to deliver their lines. Consideration is also given to the use of compound nouns and their effective representation of Aeschylus’ style.
H. sees Newcastle is Peru (reprinted in ‘his pivotal collection’ The Loiners [1970]) as a turning point in Harrison's early work. Although she gives prominence to statuary in The Loiners and indeed in Harrison's subsequent work, she does not fail to observe the important role played by sexual intimacy too. The contrast between the public artefact and private lovemaking features prominently.
Chapter 7 discusses Harrison's abiding interest in film, with details of his youthful exposure to the cinema, most movingly in the sonnet Continuous, in which Cagney films are the only art form shared with his father. Later Harrison was influential, perhaps instrumental, in forging a new genre of film poetry, although this part of his oeuvre is probably less well known because most of his films are in quarantine for copyright reasons. As a result, H. gives more detailed descriptions of the content, besides offering evaluation. Prometheus, despite its lukewarm reception, she considers ‘a significant artistic reaction to the fall of the British working class’ (p. 132). This is slightly less fulsome than her earlier version, where she ‘is convinced’ Harrison's Prometheus will be appreciated as ‘the most important’ (Arion 10 [2002]). Prometheus and other film scripts are available, although a script, even with detailed scene directions, hardly allows the audio-visual elements to be appreciated. H. points out the attention Harrison paid to the editing of images. She also reveals his ambition to make poetry a more accessible art form, and to put it on television was a way of getting attention. The TV film of v certainly achieved celebrity or rather notoriety. Press reactions were printed at the end of the second edition. They were not favourable (‘Scargill poem is the pits’ was a Daily Express headline), but they secured attention.
Although the focus is on the literary output, the book contains a wealth of biographical information, and much geographical detail too since Harrison is widely travelled. H. lists his travels (Nigeria, Senegal, Prague, The Soviet Union, Cuba and Brazil) before he settled in Newcastle. He has also lived in the USA, where his US Martial was written in New York, and later in Micanopy, Florida, from where A Kumquat for John Keats, The Fire-Gap and other poems emerged. The final chapter includes some more intimate details of his life. The ‘I’ of much of Harrison's poetry has all the hallmarks of the poet in propria persona, and in her final chapter H. examines his ‘self-crafted authorial persona across the decades’ (p. 167) especially as it appears in Polygons (2017, Salts Mill in celebration of his 80th birthday).
The book as a whole, although nominally confined to Harrison's classicism, also serves as a good introduction to the poet-dramatist-film director and his work. Both H. and Harrison have a wide, even astonishingly wide knowledge of both the classical world and the reception of its culture. Their long association has allowed H. to construct an authoritative analysis of the poet's classicism. In the penultimate paragraph she remarks that ‘it is the exuberance of his classicism for which he may be best remembered’ (p. 178). The political is never far from the surface. The system that allowed Harrison to attend Leeds Grammar School, the result of the 1944 education act, gave opportunities to bright young working-class pupils like Harrison who passed the 11+ examination to receive a free grammar school and university education. Now the system is ‘taken over by commercial interests’.
