Book Club: Tony Harrison

Tony Harrison was about to celebrate the start of his 80th year when we met this month’s group of readers at the Hexham Book Festival, not far from where he lives in north-east England. It’s worth mentioning his age, because he is a poet who spans the generations – an inspiration for many poets writing today, and a voice that retains its power. The poem we chose was ‘V’, a long account of a visit he made to his parents’ grave in Leeds in the 1980s, and a poem that brought him great acclaim and notoriety all at the same time, as so often the poet’s lot. The trouble for some of the self-appointed guardians of public morality was that in his exploration of his feelings on discovering that the grave had been desecrated by vandals, he used the words they had scrawled on the stone (how else could he describe it, you may well ask). So there was a storm. When Channel 4 decided to broadcast a reading, Tony found himself on the tabloid front pages. But he also attracted some unlikely admirers (for a man of the Left), including Bernard Levin and Auberon Waugh, who saw immediately that in the 112 stanzas there was an elegant and powerful poetic voice at work.

He told us how the title came about. V is for versus, as in conflict (Leeds United v Manchester United, to take the obvious example), but is also the way we describe the verses of a poem. That tickled him. What’s more, the letter v was spray-painted again and again on his parents’ grave. These were marks that prompted deep feelings, and confusions. He said, ‘I wrote the poem to find out these contradictions. That’s what I do, because I can keep contradictions alive in poetry that I can’t keep alive in my ordinary thoughts.’

We listened together to his reading of the poem on Radio 4 a couple of years ago, and the immediacy of its sentiments moved our readers – taking them back to a different era. Tony spoke about his political anger (it was the time of the miners’ strike, and heavy unemployment) and his belief that the poetic voice can add a great deal to public discourse. For ‘V’ he chose to write in quatrains, echoing Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, which he used to read to students in the graveyard at Stoke Poges when he was working in the 1960s. ‘I always loved writing poetry. Lots of kids do at school. I won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar school, helped to edit a magazine called Poetry and Audience at Leeds University where I went to study Classics. I grew up with inarticulate people. My father was inarticulate, he stumbled with words and I thought articulation is the most wonderful gift to acquire. And the most articulate form of language, the most expressive form of language is poetry.’

Tony calls the imagined vandal in the poem Skin, and one of V’s achievements – one that gave its critics their field day – was in expressing the poet’s own understanding of the anger that caused people to behave in this way, so hurtful to him and so disrespectful to his parents. ‘I do think if I hadn’t had one of these scholarships – I don’t know how I did it - and started learning Latin and Greek, I would have been like him probably. So I do identify quite deeply.’

As it was he went on to sink himself in Classics. But he never lost his own voice. And that’s what this month’s programme celebrates. You may wonder what the grave is like now. One of our readers asked the question. The answer is that it’s beautifully kept, and there’s even a nicely-painted sign at the cemetery gate that will direct you to it. The power of poetry.

I hope you enjoy hearing Tony Harrison. Next month’s programme will be another recording from a festival – we’re recording Maggie O’Farrell at the lovely Borders Book Festival in Melrose in two weeks – and you can hear it on Sunday July 3. The recording after that is on July 11th in London with Helen Macdonald, talking about her prize-winning book H is for Hawk. If you want to come to recording you can find details on the website.

Happy reading,

Jim.