In Memoriam T.H.
Years ago my centaur’s random course through lifecrossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days– the poet’s daughter & son-in-law – to a reading in London, and wentalong, vaguely imagining a brief, small event in a cramped bookshop. Instead afigure walked sideways into the limelight of the National Theatre with amodest, self-deprecating smile and proceeded to turn the cavernous space of theLyttleton auditorium into an intimate nook in which we joined him on a voyageof discovery, understanding, memory and passion. Later on, in the bar, he was great company -& when I mentioned to my friend that I found her dad to be dazzlinglystimulating and engaging but clearly not a man to tolerate any kind of shit,she said that I’d got him about right. Learningthat in his study at home in Newcastle he had a small gallery of portraits ofpoets that he admired, a few days later I sent him a photograph I’d taken yearsearlier in Italy of the death mask of Dante Alighieri. Grainy, grey and withthe shallowest of focus on facial features, it’s one of the very few images I’msatisfied to have captured. The Italian looks out from blurred death withlidless eyes, drawn and exhausted by the malaria that probably killed him, transmittingto us the pain suffered and the wisdom grasped during a journey through and outof hell. At our next meeting the poet waskind enough to thank me for the gift. Thiswas at a meal after a performance of ‘The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus’, averse-drama based on a long-lost Sophoclean satyr play, in which he’d mixedclassical scholarship, Victorian colonialism, Greek myth and notions of highand low culture into a titanic parable of the uses and dangers of art, class, truthand power. (My abiding memory of thatmeal is actually a bawdily low conversation with the costume designer who had giveneach of the masked and clog-dancing satyrs of Sophocles’ chorus personality by creatingwildly individual designs for the alarmingly prominent prosthetic penises theysported).
And some time later, the poet sent me a gift in return– a signed and dedicated copy of some just-published poems about the Gulf Warof 1991. The cover photograph was animage straight out of hell – the burnt-to-bits head of an Iraqi soldier killedby American fire during his retreat from Kuwait. (The picture is well-known in the UK, but neverseen in the USA according to American friends). In ‘A Cold Coming’, the poet imagines meeting the dead Iraqi, beingupbraided by him for shirking the poet’s responsibility to tell the truth, andthen going on to hear his story and that of the three American soldiers whokilled him. It’s a chilling, terrifyingtale of an individual life snuffed out by forces utterly beyond itscontrol. And it takes as its departurenot just Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – to which it was compared at thetime – but Dante’s incontro with Virgil at the gate of hell, and thenreaches further down to Homer’s account of the chthonic world where youencounter the spirits of the unappeasable dead, and if you’re lucky or know theright words, you might just placate them for as long as it takes you to speak.
And this poem was published on the newspages – not the culture section or entertainment supplement, please note – of a national newspaper. It’s difficult now to imagine, in our worldof enshittified social media, that a poet can command that size of readershipand speak with that sort of moral seriousness in a form that’s accessible andin language that scintillates with intellect, humanity, erudition andcompassion, via such a channel (The Guardian, as it happens). But TonyHarrison did so, and gave us strength and understanding in the face ofevil.
But we live in diminished times, and a time diminishedstill further by his passing. Where nowthe scholarship, the wit, the intelligence, the compassion, thebursting-with-relish-and-energy language, the profound learning (much Latin andmore Greek), the wisdom, the utter commitment to telling the truth about ourcondition?
I weep for Tony Harrison - he is dead. His words shineback to us across the void and the gathering years, and will illuminate everyone of our tomorrows.
