Tony Harrison and the Holocaust

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TONY HARRISON AND THE HOLOCAUST

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES, 39 i

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES General editors: Jonathan Bate and Bernard Beatty

* A Quest for Home: Reading Robert Southey by Christopher J. P. Smith Volume 27. 1996. 256pp. ISBN 0-85323-511-2 (cased), 0-85323-521-X (paper)

Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945 by Edward Picot Volume 28. 1997. 344pp. ISBN 0-85323-531-7 (cased), 0-85323-541-4 (paper)

The Plays of Lord Byron edited by Robert F. Gleckner and Bernard Beatty Volume 29. 1997. 400pp. ISBN 0-85323-881-2 (cased), 0-85323-891-X (paper)

Sea-Mark: The Metaphorical Voyage, Spenser to Milton by Philip Edwards Volume 30. 1997. 240pp. ISBN 0-85323-512-0 (cased), 0-85323-522-8 (paper)

Passionate Intellect: The Poetry of Charles Tomlinson by Michael Kirkham Volume 31. 1999. 320pp. ISBN 0-85323-534-0 (cased), 0-85323-553-8 (paper)

‘The New Poet’: Novelty and Tradition in Spenser’s Complaints by Richard Danson Brown Volume 32. 1999. 320pp. ISBN 0-85323-803-3 (cased), 0-85323-813-8 (paper)

Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics edited by Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead Volume 33. 1999. 421pp. ISBN 0-85323-674-7 (cased), 0-85323-684-4 (paper)

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TONY HARRISON AND THE HOLOCAUST ANTONY ROWLAND

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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First published 2001 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU

Copyright © Antony Rowland 2001 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available. ISBN 0-85323-506-6 cased ISBN 0-85323-516-3 paper

Typeset in Garamond by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire Printed in Great Britain by Bell and Bain Limited, Glasgow

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To Tom Rowland (1915–2001)

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1. Cinema, Masturbation and Peter Pan: A Non-Victim Approach to the Holocaust

33

2. Amorous Discourse and ‘Bolts of Annihilation’ in the American Poems

87

3. Mourning and Annihilation in the Family Sonnets

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4. The Fragility of Memory

195

5. Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry

248

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

Thanks are due primarily to Tony Harrison, for permission to quote from his work (and the various archival sources) and Gordon Dickerson, for dealing with matters quickly and efficiently. John Whale must be lauded for his encouragement and fine suggestions during the various stages of the PhD. Emma Liggins, with her shrewd comments and proofreading skills, has been instrumental to the successful completion of this book. Avril Horner and Jeffrey Wainwright deserve credit for their encouraging remarks on early drafts. The European Studies Research Institute, University of Salford, has been central to the book with its kind responses to my requests for research funding. I would like to thank the following proofreaders of various chapters: Angela Keane, Ian Copestake, Kirsten Daley, Isobel Clarke and Barry Atkins. The Brotherton Library, the Registrar at the University of Leeds, the Robinson Library, the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle, the British Film Institute and the Imperial War Museum must be thanked for their permission to use material from their archives on Harrison and the Holocaust. The journals English, Meridian and Critical Survey require acknowledgment for allowing me to reproduce some material in this book from printed articles. Rory McTurk kindly gave up an afternoon to translate the Norwegian interview with Harrison; Anthony Williams similarly gave invaluable help with the translation of Adorno. Angus Easson, Sue Powell, Paul Callick, Scott McCracken, Peter Buse, David Lindley, Douglas Jefferson, Kelsey Thornton and Roger Luckhurst deserve credit for chipping in with those elusive connections, allusions, books or ix

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articles. John McLeod, Matthew Pateman, Mark Robson, Eriks Uskalis, Patricia Badir and Angela Keane engaged at an early stage with the concepts, and coffee (Angela gave me a roof too). I would also like to thank all the enthusiastic students at the Universities of Leeds and Salford, but particularly Mark Byrne, Karen Harrison, Pippa Lewis, Arthur Nielson, Helen Roberts and Sarah Wilson. A special mention must go to Arthur, whose knowledge of poetry ranged from the classics to the ditty about braces and mangles in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’.

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Introduction

I Tony Harrison’s poetry is barbaric. In ‘Them & [uz]’, the schoolteacher refers to the young poet as a barbarian because of his working-class accent; this is not the particular sense of the word that I wish to evoke.1 Instead, I refer to Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’: the philosopher’s statement seems to suggest that such activity in the late twentieth century is unethical due to the sheer horror of the Holocaust; aesthetics and atrocity are incompatible.2 In this introduction, I challenge this standard interpretation of Adorno’s polemic. For now, it needs to be noted that, even if the proclamation might form a starting point from which to unpack the poems, Harrison’s reaction to the Holocaust differs from that of the philosopher. Whereas Adorno embraces scepticism, Harrison’s poetry is barbaric in that it is the product of an agonised humanist who struggles to celebrate moments of positivity in a world which, in his own words, ‘has had its affirmative spirit burnt out’.3 An adequate representation of the Holocaust remains a lacuna in post-war British culture, but this has not deterred a number of poets, including Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Jon Silkin and Harrison himself, from engaging with it. To ignore the Holocaust would be to leave it shrouded, as the Nazis intended, in silence. Section II of this introduction surveys this dilemma between the impossibility of representing, and the necessity to write about, the Final Solution across a range of post-war texts. A mimetic relationship between art and the 1

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real is not predicated, since the inscription of an event is itself an act of interpretation.4 Hence this book highlights Harrison’s mediated version of the Holocaust. As opposed to an author such as Primo Levi, whose writing about the Holocaust is partly a response to his internment in Auschwitz, Harrison’s relationship to the event is that of a post-Holocaust writer affected by his reception of it via newsreel and literature.5 This does not mean that his work is antithetical to that of Levi: both are concerned with issues such as class, humanism, poetry, and the classics. Within academia, ‘authenticity’ is a concept fraught with difficulty, but it must be acknowledged that writers with first-hand knowledge of the camps have different access to the Holocaust from that of secondary witnesses such as Harrison. If Holocaust and post-Holocaust writing are not to be conceived as mutually enhancing, but still distinct, categories, then it makes no difference whether Binjamin Wilkomirski’s controversial Fragments is a memoir, or fiction based on secondary knowledge.6 Harrison’s poems are not usually referred to as examples of post-Holocaust literature. Nevertheless, some critics have registered that the poet does try to create an art of atrocity: Rick Rylance argues that modernity figures in the poem ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ as a bombed-out, ‘open crater’, and that the depiction of the Cold War in The Loiners is ‘as powerful [a factor] in the perception of community as those of Harrison’s other great themes, the segregations of class and culture’.7 However, these ‘other great themes’ have still dominated the criticism of his poetry, whereas this book focuses on Harrison’s engagement with the Holocaust, a projected nuclear holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.8 This does not mean that I jettison the poems about class and culture completely, since these events are sometimes referred to within texts primarily about the ‘other great themes’. Hence Chapter 5 analyses the ways in which Harrison evaluates culture from a post-Holocaust perspective. The aforementioned historical events resonate throughout Harrison’s oeuvre; instead of responding to them via class and culture, in this study they are given precedence. I have limited

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myself to an analysis of the representation of atrocity in the non-dramatic poetry, since the verse plays demand extensive explication on their own.9 Class issues primarily inform the first collection of critical essays on the poet, published by Neil Astley in 1991. Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies: 1. Tony Harrison contains a representative chapter by Rosemary Burton. It begins with the poet’s premise, echoing W.H. Auden’s famous statement from ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.10 Yet the rest of the article attempts to prove that it can change the world, thereby endorsing Sartre’s declaration in What is Literature? that ‘the “committed” writer knows that words are action’.11 In a sense, Burton is right, since, for example, the proposed televisation of ‘V’ resulted in the ‘action’ of questions being asked about ‘television obscenity’ in the House of Commons on 27 October 1987.12 But Burton focuses on Harrison’s literary achievements, whereas Harrison’s statement via Auden gestures towards a wider context which includes class conflict. The poet’s pessimistic message is that even if his poems are about the latter, they have not altered it in any significant manner; he evokes the question of the value of his own literary production in terms of social effect rather than the aesthetic. Context for Burton primarily ends with Harrison’s workingclass background, whereas the historicity of the poems extends beyond Beeston (the south Leeds district where he was born) to global events.13 She does touch on the significance of the bombing of Hiroshima within the poet’s oeuvre in her statement that Harrison’s witnessing of the VJ fires in Beeston initiated the bleak tone of much of the poetry, but these are left as biographical asides to the main themes of class, linguistics and the high versus low culture debate.14 Only Jeffrey Wainwright and Peter Forbes hint in the Astley collection that the atomic era might provide a productive context in which to analyse Harrison’s poetry. Wainwright links the scorched circle left by the Beeston fire to other images of godless voids in the poems; Forbes contends that ‘Fire […] is a recurring thread […] and the big fire, the nuclear holocaust, is the most persistent of all’.15 Within the rest of the

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Astley collection a supposition persists that working-class writers muse about the oppression of the proletariat. This bourgeois critical assumption is epitomised in Sartre’s comments on political commitment in What is Literature? As soon as the ‘Negro’ writer Richard Wright puts pen to paper, the philosopher argues, ‘he discovers his subject at the same time’: the emancipation of America’s black community.16 Conversely, the white liberal writer presumably has the freedom to choose to write about the history of slavery, Chartism, or pencil sharpeners. Sartre analyses commitment as a product of an author’s uncomplicated identity. In contrast, Harrison’s working-class self (whatever that might be; perhaps the one that eats tinned peaches) does not preclude him from discussing historical events that might appear ‘other’ to that supposedly laminated identity.17 Harrison is a committed writer in the Sartrean sense both due to his attempt to create an art of atrocity, and because of his services rendered to the post-war British working class.18 Critics who respond to the poetry as a whole as a component of class war risk obscuring the Holocaust poems. Sandie Byrne challenges the perceived opposition of ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’ in Harrison’s work; for instance, she argues that his mystery plays are not specifically northern, and yet they might be regarded as authentic by a southern audience.19 A few ‘fuck’s and the odd dropped ‘h’ may indeed, at times, connote a paltry [uz], but by attacking his ‘codnorthernness’ Byrne also risks aligning her comments with the recent critical ‘Harrison-bashing’. His work as a whole does not pretend to offer a ‘true’ vision of the working class; to attack it for not doing so is thereby disingenuous. Byrne recognises this and, throughout her study, questions critics who presume the poems are political, and then attack them for not being so. Within the writing of former working-class academics and authors, such as Hoggart and Williams, there has always been a sense of embarrassed angst at their diffusion into middleclass culture, and the ensuing impossibility of speaking ‘truly’ for the proletariat. To criticise the poetry as ‘cod-workingclass’ thus risks reifying an authenticity that does not, and

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never did, exist, and which Hoggart, Williams and Harrison never accepted anyway. After all, how does the ‘true’ working class look or speak? Harrison wrestles with this impossibility of authentic representation, at the same time as refusing to eschew his status as a public poet. Even if there can be no ‘true’ representation, negating the pen would leave the unrepresented entrenched in lyric silence. It might be better to speak of embarrassment, the poems seem to say, than not to speak at all. This rhetoric of awkwardness frames not only the desire to represent the working class, but also the frustrating need, displayed by the authors I analyse in the next section, to write about the Holocaust.

II In Admitting the Holocaust, Lawrence Langer proposes that ‘we’ have not yet begun to accept the ramifications of the event because ‘we’ adhere to an outdated ontological mode: If the Holocaust has taught us anything, it is that we were other than we believed, masters of neither time nor space. Deportees were forced into zones of confinement void of a future, hostages only to death. Nazi Germany demoted its victims to the rank of less-than-human, turning them against their will into beings who found that choice was often an illusion. Armed with the weapons of hindsight and foresight, those outside the net still did little to thwart the catastrophe or help others to vault its barricades into a securer domain. They, too, lost control over time and space. Discouraged by these failures, we continue to resist their import by groping for ways to change them into limited versions of success. The result is a persisting myth about the triumph of the spirit that colors the disaster with a rosy tinge and helps us to manage the unimaginable without having to look at its naked and ugly face.20 Western humanism is typified throughout the collection as this ‘persisting myth about the triumph of the spirit’. Accord-

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ing to this reading of the post-Holocaust contemporary, the multiplicitous components celebrated by humanism, such as the notions of love, mourning, memory and culture, which feature in Harrison’s poetry and form the titles of my chapters, are negated by an event so horrific that an affirmation of ‘the triumph of the spirit’ would appear to be an obscene gesture. Humanism generally focuses on the progressive nature of humanity, rather than its altercation with a Christian God. Historically, it can be seen as flourishing in the Renaissance period, and is freely associated with thinkers such as Erasmus, and his emphasis on nurturing entities such as education, culture and eloquence. Tony Davies argues that it may be more accurate to regard it as arising out of the wider concept of modernity.21 Modernity’s celebration of man as a rational, individual subject cut off from divine will creates the notion of man (as opposed to woman) as the centre of the universe, as a champion of scientific progress, and as a universal locus. Humanism, it could be argued, became discredited at the time of postmodernity’s birth: the advent of the Holocaust and the atom bomb deride any intrinsic sense of ‘man’s worth’. In the late twentieth century, ‘humanism’ became a loose term of critical abuse, simplistically applied by some academic theorists to exponents of New Criticism, such as Ronald S. Crane, John Crowe Ransome, W.K. Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks, as if ahistorical, close readings of literature constituted the essence of humanism. As Stephen Yarborough notes, ‘such [New] [C]ritics always held humanism in disdain’.22 In what sense, then, is Harrison a humanist? Erasmus’s celebration of eloquence immediately connects with Harrison’s vocation. In 1987, the latter declared: I believe that, maybe, poetry, the word at its most eloquent, is one medium which could concentrate our attention on our worst experiences without leaving us with the feeling, as other media can, that life in this century has had its affirmative spirit burnt out.23 Like Erasmus, he celebrates poetry’s ability to engage with reality at a high level of linguistic sophistication. But it would

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obviously be wrong to label Harrison a humanist in a Renaissance sense, since ‘other media’ (television is intimated) and ‘worst experiences’ signal the effect of events such as the Holocaust on the notion of humanity’s ‘affirmative spirit’. The latter forms a correlative to Langer’s late-twentiethcentury sense of a lambasted ‘triumph of the spirit’.24 ‘Spirit’ has proved to be a loaded term in Western culture. In Christian ideology, it refers to a variety of objects and qualities, including the Holy Ghost, and a more general sense of spiritual vivacity. In Western philosophy, it has a particular resonance for Hegel: among the many definitions he offers, the one that appears most relevant to Harrison’s statement is that of Weltgeist, in which a progressive sense of global history is linked to the development of religion and philosophy. Harrison thus evokes (and then dismisses) a post-Holocaust epistemology which repudiates both the Christian God, and Hegel’s idealism. If humanity’s spirit has been ‘burnt out’, Hegel’s speculative philosophy (more specifically, the totality of his humanist notion of Geist) capitulates to negative dialectics in which progression is impossible. Instead, Harrison offers a rebuff to sceptical philosophy via poetry. In an ironic return to Hegel’s progressive dialectic, he pits poetics against Auschwitz to create ‘barbaric’ art. Hence Harrison attempts to revive the tradition of secular humanism, which has become an occluded ideology recently in academia, but not in British society at large. In ‘V’, Hegel’s notion of the spirit rears its head in the lament for the ‘versuses of life’, which deny any possibility of a harmonious Weltgeist.25 This is not proffered without reservations, since the skinhead’s scepticism interrupts the monologic discourse whenever the narrator slips into humanist piety. Poetry is only maybe one medium which might rescue idealism. But in what sense is Harrison a post-Holocaust humanist? Is the phrase ‘post-Holocaust humanist’ itself a contradiction? Did the event not dispel forever any possibility of progression in human nature, since it marked an unprecedented act of barbarism? It would be too simplistic to package Harrison’s work as humanist in a pre-Holocaust sense, since post-

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Hegelian philosophers, and the advent of the Holocaust itself, have irrevocably altered any idealist concept of humanism. Yet Sartre is commonly labelled an anguished humanist; indeed, he defends the movement in his treatise Existentialism and Humanism.26 Sartre’s focus on the orientation of individual choice is dismissed by the work of Adorno. The German philosopher argues against an existentialist evaluation of the Holocaust: There is one nearly invariable characteristic of such [war] literature. It is that it implies, purposely or not, that even in so-called extreme situations, indeed in them most of all, humanity flourishes. Sometimes this develops into a dismal metaphysic which does its best to work up atrocities into ‘limiting situations’ which it then accepts to the extent that they reveal authenticity in men. In such a homely existential atmosphere the distinction between executioners and victims becomes blurred; both, after all, are equally suspended above the possibility of nothingness, which of course is generally not quite so uncomfortable for the executioners.27 As in Langer’s Admitting the Holocaust, Adorno attacks the perceived discourse of humanism. Triumphs and affirmations of the spirit are replaced by a sense of humanity ‘flourishing’ in an extreme situation such as the Holocaust.28 Existentialists, he argues, occlude the horror of the event, and the fact – as Langer notes – that millions collaborated with the Nazis during German occupation; instead, they focus on the few incidents in which the ‘goodness’ of humanity formulated itself into active resistance.29 And yet, even in the post-Holocaust contemporary, there are still writers such as Harrison who celebrate an ‘affirmative spirit’.30 Despite the arguments of Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School, tenets of humanism are still wielded by literature; hence I propose its centrality to discussions of Harrison’s poetry. His engagement with the ways in which these tenets have been affected by the Holocaust is more central to his work than the influence of Holocaust writers such as Levi or Paul Celan. Harrison’s

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knowledge of Holocaust literature is not particularly extensive from the evidence of the existing poems, plays and prose statements. He has been much more interested in how the advent of the Holocaust has altered genres and concepts with which he was already familiar as a Classics student and scholar, such as the elegy, mourning, memory, culture, love and poetry. Langer’s rejection of the concept of humanity can be seen to comply with a critical orthodoxy initiated by Adorno, but humanist discourse does fail to represent the horror of the Holocaust adequately. For example, its contemporaneous inefficacy can be illustrated by the following extract from a report on the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp in The Times: It is to the everlasting credit of the men at the camp that, in spite of continuous hunger, the children are not in too bad shape, though they look like little old men with their yellow faces and sunken cheeks.31 Journalistic discourse here both evades and engages with the referent. The reporter summons the humanist adage of ‘women and children first’, imposes it on this episode from the Holocaust, and struggles to celebrate a moment of hope amidst horror. ‘Not in too bad shape’ then punctures the text as a grotesque litotes, a patently inadequate description of starved children. In Chapter 1, I expand on the failure of the ‘human spirit’ in relation to British newsreels of the Holocaust. Even if there are problems with such journalistic discourse, however, Langer’s purist, anti-humanist stance towards a totalised representation of the Holocaust is questionable. To whom does the ‘we’ refer in Langer’s passage above? Who exactly perpetuates the ‘persisting myth’: academics, or, as Derrida sceptically terms it, ‘[that which] is still now and then called humanity’?32 Langer challenges a chimera throughout the collection: there is no definitive ‘us’ who stubbornly champion the pre-Holocaust versions of Western humanism.33 On the contrary, the critic adheres to the dominant mode of

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thought in academia which espouses the inexpressibility of the event: his interrogation of ‘choice’, and his denouncement of any construction of the event as a limiting situation, is gleaned from the debate I outlined between Sartre and Adorno, which dates back to the mid-twentieth century. In this book, I counteract the anti-humanist theoretical strain by arguing that neither metaphor nor humanism itself is redundant in the post-Holocaust contemporary. To distinguish my work on aesthetics from other Holocaust critics, I propose the writerly phenomenon of awkwardness, which ensues from the embarrassment of engaging with humanism, and historical referents plainly so resistant to artistic representation. Langer’s premise that the Holocaust is ‘unimaginable’ reiterates the stance of previous Holocaust critics who stress the impossibility of representing such a horrific event. Any attempt to engage with the referent is doomed to failure; language is simply not sophisticated enough to represent twentieth-century atrocity. Critics Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault use Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition to pinpoint this inexpressibility: the historical, in this extreme case, is lost in the vortex of the mathematical sublime, so ‘we can conceive the Shoah or Holocaust, but every presentation […] seems to be painfully inadequate’.34 In contrast, George Steiner and Jon Harris locate the impossibility of representation in the supposed irrationality of the event. The former states that the phenomenon of Auschwitz lies outside reason; the latter that attempts at representation risk admitting ‘that the Holocaust could be seen as a rational act’.35 It would be obscene, they argue, to conceive the Nazis’ destruction of the Jews, whom they regarded as vermin, with rat poison as even a perverse rational act. Both critics tap into postmodernity’s sceptical reappraisal of reason and rationality. As early as 1941, members of the Frankfurt School were deconstructing reason during the flourish of extreme right-wing ideologues. Horkheimer registered that ‘fascism has strengthened […] suspicions’ that the cornerstones of modernity, such as ‘culture’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘reason’, were ‘in a process of rapid decay’.36 However, as opposed to Steiner and Harris, Horkheimer

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asserts that rationality, an essentially flawed, if refulgent, idea, nevertheless retains the possibility of a negative dialectic, since reason ‘from the very beginning included the concept of critique’.37 He admits that the Nazis’ version of ‘reasonable’ behaviour may have led rationality to the point of annihilation, where reason masquerades as irrationality. But the only possible censure of such action orientates itself through a negative dialectic in which rationality critiques its own limitations and perversions. A reasoned response to Nazism had to either capitulate to, or renounce, it: hence Horkheimer ends his essay with the omen that ‘The progress of reason that leads to its self-destruction has come to an end; there is nothing left but barbarism or freedom’.38 To frame atrocity as irrational precludes its renunciation through the discourse of reason. Despite the Frankfurt School’s radical critique, and reinvigoration, of reasoned argument to counteract Nazism, many Holocaust critics have persisted in rationalising the need for reverential silence. In his introduction to Lyotard’s Heidegger and ‘the jews’, David Carroll postulates that even if discourse can frame the event, it must still ‘respect and maintain within itself a fundamental silence’.39 Moreover, he locates linguistic impotence at the level of the reader as well as the author and text, since if ‘one can only fail in one’s attempt to narrate or to show what happened’ it logically follows that ‘one can only fail as a listener or spectator as well’.40 These expositions of linguistic silence cohere to form a critical norm in Holocaust studies, which Gillian Rose has termed ‘Holocaust piety’: the upholding of ineffability and non-representability mystifies something we do not wish, or dare not wish, to understand ‘because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are’.41 Christopher Ricks argues that to open a book on the event with a chapter on speechlessness, as Langer does in The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, recognises the ‘harsh unignorability’ of the failure of representation, but also capitulates to a ‘smoothly righteous triteness’.42 Disconcertingly, this triteness has been manipulated by neoNazi Holocaust deniers such as Robert Faurisson to argue that there is no proof that the event ever occurred. Some critics

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who uphold a notion of linguistic silence are influenced by a crude version of poststructuralist linguistics, in which the referent proves elusive due to an irreversible rupture between language and the ‘real’. But if the subject cannot conceive (rather than see) a referent, how can Faurisson’s claim be dismissed on its own terms? Such simplistic readings of recent linguistic theory (particularly Lyotard) find their nadir in the writing of Morris Grossman, who would just as soon ‘think of the Holocaust as a hoax than think of it as something I can objectively grasp and behold’.43 Even if a God-like perspective is impossible to achieve, it is obscene to pander to the rhetoric of neo-Nazism. Exponents of linguistic silence are also hindered by the fact that they are influenced by one of the most misquoted texts produced by a cultural critic this century. Adorno supposedly declared that ‘poetry is impossible after Auschwitz’. George Steiner asserts that Adorno sloganed ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’; Alvin Rosenfeld that he thought it ‘not only impossible but perhaps even immoral’ to write poetry after the event; Jon Harris indirectly quotes the misquotation in the first sentence of the essay ‘An Elegy for Myself: British Poetry and the Holocaust’; even the eminent critic James Young insists simplistically that Adorno reviled the art of atrocity.44 These critics focus on the second half of the following statement: To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.45 As opposed to the critics’ assertions, Adorno’s most important declaration in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ is the first half of the formulation. Any contention that the possibility of post-Holocaust poetry is denied must be tempered by the previous statement that it is barbaric. Adorno is not being speculative: he does not state that it might be barbaric, or would be, if only writers dared to try; it exists, and it is problematic. As Leonard Olschner has made clear, ‘impossible’ only refers to pre-Holocaust poems: it would be obscene, Adorno argues, to write within the genre of poetry

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without some recognition of how the Holocaust should have altered it as a concept, and in practice.46 I concur with Olschner’s point that some critics have ‘irresponsibly or at least misleadingly abbreviated Adorno’s thought to assert the impossibility of poetry at all after Auschwitz’.47 I disagree with him, however, when he contends that Adorno is referring specifically to a tradition of German lyric poetry. This is possible, but indeterminate. Adorno’s philosophy is notoriously abstract in its terminology: he does not refer to ‘die Lyrik’, ‘ein lyrisches Gedicht’ or ‘die deutsche Lyrik’, but only (and vaguely) to ‘ein Gedicht’ (‘a poem’, or, as the Webers translate it, ‘poetry’).48 Given the wide knowledge of European writers displayed in his writing, if Adorno had wished to refer to a particular German tradition within his abstractions, he would probably have done so.49 Olschner argues that the philosopher ‘can hardly have proposed that poetry in any language was impossible’, but this is only true precisely because Adorno never states this in the essay.50 His famous statement does not wish to negate representation in German lyric poetry; on the contrary, the aesthetics of post-Holocaust poetry as a whole are evaluated as of a particular ‘barbaric’ character.51 The etymology and conventional meaning of the word would suggest that such poems are unrestrained, uncultured or rough in subject matter: a new form of poetry emerges which is stylistically and thematically awkward. The language is necessarily unstable because it engages with the embarrassing struggle – which always ends in failure – to forge a language adequate to represent the Holocaust. Artistic feebleness may not be entirely negative, however, since it registers the difficulty of engaging with the deaths of millions; committed literature is inspired out of the negative dialectic of Auschwitz and poetry, as Adorno contends in ‘Commitment’.52 Holocaust and post-Holocaust literature are barbaric because they are well intentioned, but inevitably gain artistic profit by turning the victims’ suffering into aesthetic fodder. Here, as in the earlier essay, Adorno writes of these categories in the abstract, rather than referring to a German tradition. In Negative Dialectics, he does state that he may have been wrong to

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contend that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz, since ‘suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream’.53 As with many of Adorno’s aphoristic statements, this can be read in various ways. It may mean that even bad poetry – in the style of the immediate post-war poets lamented by Olschner – has a right to exist if it is produced by those who experienced the camps. If it means that he did intend his original statement to signal the negation of poetry, then he blatantly contradicts his previous claim in ‘Commitment’. My close attention to the complexity of his prose declaration from ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ in the argument above opposes this interpretation. One poet who has produced autonomous art still committed to representing the Holocaust without capitulating to banality would be Paul Celan. It would be tempting to account for Adorno’s abstraction by arguing for the influence of Celan: the repetition, surrealism and dense intertextuality of a poem such as ‘Todesfugue’ appear tailor-made for an exposition of poetic awkwardness.54 However, this is pure speculation: as Olschner states, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ was written in 1949, and first published in 1951; Adorno had only read Celan’s poetry ‘at least by the late 1950s’.55 An exposition of various awkwardnesses in Celan, Holocaust and postHolocaust poetry as a whole would be a valuable study, but it is beyond the scope of this book, since I am focusing on one writer’s representation of the event. Celan’s work has not directly influenced that of Harrison; it is only within the realms of Adorno’s abstract formulation of awkwardness that the work of the two writers could be compared. However, difficult and embarrassing writing does arise in both Holocaust and post-Holocaust texts, since both writers who have primary knowledge of the camps and those whose knowledge is secondary wrestle with the impossibility and necessity of representing atrocity. Primo Levi challenges theories of silence by forging a particular rhetoric of embarrassment to describe the plight of Auschwitz survivors. In If This Is a Man (probably the central canonical Holocaust text in Europe), the author contends that existing language cannot help but appear

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awkward when juxtaposed with the reality of the event: present linguistic resonances fail to encompass the extreme ‘hunger’, ‘tiredness’, ‘fear’ and ‘pain’ that the inmates suffered.56 He appears to follow one version of the theories of silence in his focus on linguistic inadequacy, and muses that if the camps had lasted longer, ‘a new, harsh language would have been born’. Nevertheless, Levi himself deliberately tries to forge an original ‘barbaric’ style. This is most evident in the sequel The Truce: In those days and in those parts, soon after the front had passed by, a high wind was blowing over the face of the earth; the world around us seemed to have returned to primeval Chaos, and was swarming with scalene, defective, abnormal human specimens; each of them bestirred himself, with blind or deliberate movements, in anxious search of his own place, of his own sphere, as the particles of the four elements are described as doing so in the verse-cosmogonies of the Ancients.57 The language – which describes the victims’ attempts at postAuschwitz orientations of the self – is most obviously awkward in its grammatical structure: Levi compounds several possible sentences into one with the help of commas and semi-colons, giving the impression that the words depict an epiphany. Adjectival phrases appear strange, even tortured. Allowing for the possibility of an erroneous translation, the juxtaposition of words of similar meaning (‘scalene’/‘defective’/‘abnormal’) suggests that Levi is groping for exactly the right word to engage with the victims’ predicament. ‘Blind’ and ‘deliberate’ create a problematic dialectic. How is it possible for them to move both blindly and deliberately? Perhaps the victims are struggling to direct the self after the Nazis’ debasement and commodification of bodies in the death camp. Also, the heightened tone of the passage is embarrassing, and the archaic term ‘bestirred’ and the references to ‘Chaos’ and ‘the Ancients’ make the victims appear like characters out of classical mythology. In a similar way to Harrison, with his use of classical language and literature, Levi returns to the classics and the

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seemingly paradoxical baggage of the ancient in order to forge a new post-Holocaust language.58 Like the characters in Beckett’s Endgame analysed by Adorno, ‘The individual himself is revealed to be a historical category’: Levi’s survivors scrabble about in the detritus of humanism and the classics in order to construct a post-Auschwitz sense of subjectivity.59 Similar problems of representation to those I have discussed in relation to the Holocaust arise out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and a projected nuclear holocaust, but I am not trying to collapse each event into the convenience of a single word. Each H/holocaust, even if the issues surrounding it are similar, maintains its historical or projected distinctiveness. Nevertheless, the etymology of the word suggests why it has been used to describe vastly different phenomena. Initially, its meaning was confined to a Christian sacrifice ‘wholly consumed by fire’; in the fifteenth century, it expanded into ‘a sacrifice on a large scale’.60 During the seventeenth century, it gained its modern usage as a trope for a ‘greater slaughter or massacre’. The Final Solution, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a projected nuclear war are all linked, therefore, by the referents or signified referents of fire, mass murder and Christianity. Flames function as synecdoches in my three examples of H/holocausts: the crematoria which disposed of the victims of Nazi atrocities are compared to the devastation caused by an atomic blast. This connection is central to Harrison’s poetry. The trope of fire runs throughout his work to connect diverse referents: for example, in Chapter 3 I examine the connections between the horrors of modern warfare and such seemingly innocent signifiers as ‘ovens’ and ‘crematoria’ in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence. Connotations of mass murder then fuse with this metaphor of combustion to create the contemporary meaning of the word ‘Holocaust’. It is no coincidence that it has been used (perhaps overused) in a century in which the concept of death has taken on a new meaning. It has moved from describing the demise of a single person in the thirteenth century to refer to the annihilation of millions due to technological ‘progress’,

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the invention and appropriation of vast crematoria, concentration camps, trains, the atom bomb, and so on. Another referential shift is located in the English-speaking world’s move from a religious to a predominantly secular society. The connotation of a specifically Christian sacrifice appears to have been lost, but not to some academics, who have denounced this etymological baggage as placing the Final Solution (a phrase which immediately sets the event in the linguistic and historical context of Nazi ideology) within a purely Christian referential field. Hence some critics have suggested the term ‘Shoah’ instead, which originates from a Hebrew word meaning ‘catastrophe’. However, ‘Holocaust’ is more appropriate for this book, since it examines the ways in which the events are inscribed in the poetry of a post-Holocaust poet, who views the event from the perspective of an atheist who is nevertheless familiar with, and utilises, the iconography of Christian myth. Despite these various denotations of the word, each holocaust causes different problems of representation. For example, whereas the literature of the Nazi atrocity and Allied bombings struggles with the difficulties of engaging with historical referents, writing about nuclear war confronts the radical metaphoricity of the event. Derrida terms this the ‘fabulously textual’ in his essay ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’: it has not taken place, so ‘one can only talk and write about it’; nuclear conflict can therefore only be ‘the signified referent, never the real referent (present or past) of a discourse or a text’.61 However, he does not deny the possibility that it could be in the future, and adds that the ‘“reality” of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war’ are distinct but not separate; in other words, they are contained within a single, dialectical relationship. As opposed to Derrida’s emphasis on the inevitable textuality of the nuclear holocaust, the exposition of linguistic silence has become the dominant way in which to theorise the event. Thomas Morrissey proposes that a projected holocaust is an ‘unmanageable’ theme, ‘inexpressible’ because global annihilation has not happened yet, therefore there is no existing language capable of discussing it.62 Moreover, the

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aftermath would destroy all texts and linguistic systems, so no one would be left to discuss it. This authenticist argument is weak, since it privileges a linear relationship between event and language, forgetting that present linguistic currency – such as ‘nuclear winter’ and ‘fallout’ – would be used to describe an event which might not entail global destruction. Nevertheless, David Dowling takes Morrissey’s distrust of metaphor a step further, and argues that ‘no language is appropriate to the holocaust’ because of (as with the Nazi atrocity, although he does not make the comparison) the sheer scale of its horror.63 Similarly, in his article ‘Combat’, Camus declared that journalistic representations of the 1945 bombings should be ‘full of silence’ because of the number of deaths incurred.64 A silent newspaper would presumably consist of blank pages as a gesture of respect to the victims. However, the obvious problem with this text is that it does not facilitate much information. In a ‘two minutes’ silence’, the participants know to whom they are showing respect, whereas it is possible that thousands of readers had not yet heard of the bombings. Already marginalised news would have been eradicated, leaving many ignorant of the event. Reverential silence commands respect, as Michael Freeman claims, but ‘denies all attempts at understanding’, and the possibility of building inhibitors to future holocausts.65 Hiroshima Diary, an autobiographical novel, postulates that this emphasis on textuality is the preserve of a privileged, nonhibakusha (non-victim), Western perspective. Michihiko Hachiya demonstrates how linguistic silence is a desirable and sometimes unavoidable psychological reaction to an extreme situation: his fellow survivors are initially stunned into speechlessness, and he is surprised to hear no moans of the injured, only complete silence; even a few hours later in a local hospital he asks ‘why was everyone so quiet?’66 In the psychological study Death In Life, Robert J. Lifton attributes this effect to psychic numbing, in which victims of the bombing cannot find an adequate emotional response to the apocalyptic images they receive, so they remain inarticulate.67 (A comparison can again be made here with the Holocaust,

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since a recurring feature of testimony is the desire of the victims to remain silent, to forget or repress the trauma of atrocity.) In contrast to Hachiya’s call for linguistic silence on behalf of the victims, the Japanese novelist Masuji Ibuse struggles with the historical referent in order to forge an awkward style comparable to Adorno’s conception of the ‘barbaric’. Religious rhetoric features prominently in the novel Black Rain, but Ibuse subverts and recycles it to highlight its inefficacy in the face of the devastation of Hiroshima: The stones of the river bed gradually gave way to sand, then to running water with a slowly shelving bed. As I took my clothes off, I murmured to myself the ‘Sermon on Mortality’: ‘Sooner or later, on this day or the morrow, to me or my neighbour […] So shall the rosy cheeks of morning yield to the skull of eventide. One breath from the wind of change, and the bright eyes shall be closed…’68 Awkwardness manifests itself here in the form of embarrassment. The language is excruciatingly sentimental, yet the speaker Shigematsu regards it as appropriate to the symbolic rebirth he undergoes by entering the water in his desire to purge himself of the holocaust. But the conventional religious binary between life and death is then problematised as Ibuse traces the metaphoricity of an opposite development. However, the rhetoric becomes even more disturbing by the likening of ‘rosy cheeks’ to youth, and ‘the skull of eventide’ to death. In the post-holocaust landscape Shigematsu has just encountered, corpses – not babies – have burnt ‘rosy cheeks’. He wishes to symbolically strip his body to the bone in order to be reborn. Shigematsu plainly has no vocabulary to describe the radical permutation of the holocaust, so he forges a new language out of the old. Thus, despite the proliferation of the exponents of linguistic silence, humanist discourse stubbornly remains in the post-holocaust contemporary. This is due to the dialectical mutation of language in order to cope with atrocity, a process which the Ibuse passage typifies. Hence my proposition that Harrison’s poems should be read as examples of post-Holocaust

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literature, since they too awkwardly attempt to celebrate the human after and before events which seem to have rendered the term nonsensical. Efforts at an embarrassing positivity connect Harrison’s poems with holocaust literature; his work can also be framed in the context of differing awkwardnesses of post-Holocaust poetry. For example, his production of an agonised aesthetic from the perspective of someone with no experience of the camps links with Plath’s engagement with the Holocaust in probably the most famous post-Holocaust poem, ‘Daddy’. Controversy has raged ever since Plath’s supposed decision to figure herself as a victim of the Holocaust in the text; Jacqueline Rose and Janet Malcolm summarise this debate in, respectively, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath and The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.69 ‘Figuring’ assumes that an uncomplicated relationship exists between the author and text: much of this criticism assumes that Plath functions as the narrator of the poem, and the daddy figure represents Ted Hughes. Her former husband’s publication of Birthday Letters in 1998 compounds this tendency: set pieces such as ‘The Shot’ locate Hughes as the mythic father in Plath’s overall schema.70 In fact, the gender of the speaker in ‘Daddy’ remains indeterminate. Fraying the author/text correlation has resulted in exculpations for her manipulation of the iconography of atrocity; for example, in James Young’s Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust.71 Such criticism has a peculiar resonance when placed in the context of Harrison’s poetry. He has been lambasted by critics such as Craig Raine for his supposed selfappointment as spokesperson for the working class, but not for his ventriloquising of holocaust victims in poems such as The Shadow of Hiroshima.72 And yet the same charge made against Plath could be appended to Harrison’s Holocaust poems. What right has Harrison, as a non-victim, to engage with the event; are the poems nothing but insults to the millions that died? Zygmunt Bauman’s excellent study Modernity and the Holocaust provides an answer: to ghetto the Holocaust as of significance only to its victims would be to misunderstand the various origins and ramifications of the

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event.73 Critics such as Van Dyne typify the relationship between Plath’s writing and the Holocaust as one of exteriority, whereas both the American poet and Harrison demonstrate that the event has important consequences for Western culture as a whole.74 They achieve this by questioning the very nature of their chosen genre, poetry, and the wider role of the aesthetic in post-war society. Awkwardness manifests itself in ‘Daddy’ as part of this interrogation of post-Auschwitz poetics. ‘The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna/Are not very pure or true’: whether in the guise of picture-postcard landscape or booze, the Holocaust infects all post-war notions of beauty (p. 223).75 Indeed, purity itself proved to be part of Nazi ideology in the notion of the Aryan aesthetic, the ‘pure’ body comprising ‘bright blue’ eyes, blond hair, and marvellous pecs. That the abjection of Fascism comprises horror and fascination is registered in the narrator’s statement that ‘Every woman adores a fascist’, and the imposition of daddy’s ‘Meinkampf look’ over the first manuscript version’s ‘sexy look’.76 All post-Auschwitz poetics grapple with the problem that the abstract concept of beauty was incorporated by, and is now inseparable from, the Aryan ideal. The aesthetic risks the totalitarian: hence Adorno worries in the opening to ‘Commitment’ that works of art displayed in a gallery operate in a fascistic exclusion of inferior objects.77 Plath manifests such distrust in the tortured beauty of ‘Daddy’. Just as beautiful Nauset is polluted by the proximity of daddy’s head in the second stanza, the text plays with the tensions between the horror of the Holocaust and the abstract concept of the aesthetic. A poem about atrocity composed in mellifluous iambic pentameter would insult the victims by forging an uncomplicated aesthetic out of atrocity. Hence the first stanza dares to mix heavy stresses, iambs, trochees and anapests: o B o B o B o B You do not do, you do not do Bo B o B B Any more, black shoe

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust o B o o B o o B In which I have lived like a foot o B o B o B o B o For thirty years, poor and white, B o B o o B o B o Barely daring to breathe or Achoo. (p. 222)

This extract enacts a betrayal of both the Nazi father, and the pre-Holocaust aesthetic. Victim imagery evinces itself in the daring metonym of the foot: the subjugated victim of the poem is poor (echoing ‘poorly’), and exudes the white of vulnerable, exposed flesh, in contrast with the purity of the laminated black uniform of the Nazi body, and swastika, ‘So black no sky could squeak through’ (p. 223). Squeaking links with the constructed victimhood, since Jews were figured as vermin by Nazi ideology, and, ironically, as mice in Art Speigelman’s Holocaust cartoon Maus.78 If this suggests that the narrator suffers purely at the hands of the Nazis, the rest of the poem confuses the issue: she (or he) proves to be dominated also by the devil, a witch-doctor, a medieval torturer, a vampire, and even a male teacher (p. 223). Moreover, the speaker only thinks she/he ‘may well be a Jew’: she/he also uses the ‘Taroc pack’ of gypsies, who have their origins in Hindu, not Jewish, culture. Hence ‘Daddy’ portrays an attempt to eschew this status of an abstract victim of the patriarchal symbolic, right up to the final, ambiguous ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’ (p. 224). ‘[T]hrough’ might denote the narrator’s capitulation to daddy’s authority by self-destruction, or, more likely, a projected, humanist moment of emancipation from male dominance. Metrical emancipation is coupled to this movement towards the utopia of individual freedom. ‘Foot’ in the first stanza can refer to both the foot of the Jew and the metrical unit of scansion: the narrator might also wish to ‘come through’ the pre-Auschwitz straitjacket of the pentameter (p. 222). Hence the passage above moves from the nursery-rhyme iambic tetrameter of the first line to trochees, and then the metrical break on ‘shoe’ during daddy’s disavowal in the second line.

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Although the gender of the narrator remains ambiguous, it is significant that tetrameter specifically is appropriated and subsequently rejected, since, as Gilbert and Gubar illustrate in Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, it used to be regarded as ‘feminine’ metre as opposed to the more ‘masculine’ pentameter.79 If the persona is construed as a female poet, then she breaks free of gendered metrical constraints in order to play with the anapests of the third line, and the mixture of iambs and trochees in the fifth. This metrical awkwardness simultaneously keeps the pre-Holocaust aesthetic at arm’s length, but, nostalgically, never lets it go, since the fourth line reverts briefly to tetrameter. (The comma adds the possibility of an extra syllable at the end of this line, or at the beginning of the fifth.) As with Harrison, whose metrics are nevertheless more conservative than Plath’s, the aesthetic is treated with suspicion, but never rejected entirely. By arguing that barbaric poetry challenges metrical orthodoxy, I do not intend to construct an opposition between postwar ‘free’ verse and pre-war metrics, since high Modernism had already broken, and simultaneously recuperated, the pentameter from Pound onwards. But the metrical awkwardness of some post-Holocaust poems does locate this debate in an alternative context. This is not a totalising discourse: whereas Plath and Harrison have been willing to pay the aesthetic price in order to engage with the Holocaust, the poet Geoffrey Hill appears to avoid the poetics of embarrassment in probably the second most famous post-Holocaust poem, ‘September Song’.80 Hill, as Romana Huk notes, formed (along with Harrison) part of the ‘Leeds Renaissance’ of poets in the 1950s and 1960s.81 A lecturer (and, later, professor) at the University of Leeds between 1954 and 1980, Hill attended a poetry workshop with Harrison, James Simmons and Wole Soyinka in the late 1950s, according to the Classics teacher Arthur Rowe.82 He also commended Harrison’s work on the ‘School of Eloquence’ to undergraduates during a lecture on Shakespeare in 1976.83 Yet, despite these connections, the poets have produced vastly different examples of post-Holocaust literature. Minimalism, caesura and the resigned tone combine in ‘September Song’ to

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suggest that the poet is trying to avoid linguistic awkwardness through a compressed economy of language. ‘Undesirable you may have been, untouchable/you were not’ works, as Jon Silkin notes in ‘War and the Pity’, on several levels of irony.84 ‘Undesirable’ has, Silkin argues, both sexual and racial connotations: the child might have been ‘ugly’ in both a visual sense, and a more abstract one in which the Nazis reviled its Jewish physiognomy.85 ‘Untouchable’, Silkin continues, contains a similar ambiguity; an irony might be added that the victim is both ‘touched’ and ‘untouched’ (p. 67). If killed, the child has been ‘touched’ by the Nazis (but not, in another horrific irony, by human ‘touch’ if gassed); it is also now ‘untouchable’ in the sexual sense, since it did not reach adulthood.86 Such linguistic compression might suggest that Hill avoids the extensive engagement with the Holocaust favoured by Harrison. Yet it actually foregrounds an agonising economy of language which constantly registers its failure to provide an adequate elegy for the Holocaust victim, a compromise which Harrison often eschews at the expense of enforcing his Hegelian dialectic in which humanism and positivity prevail. ‘September Song’ functions as an anti-humanist piece in which there proves to be no redemption for the poet or perpetrator. The poem’s most famous lines register the fact that the addressed victim of both the writer and the Nazis can only be evoked via fantasy, and can therefore only be a signified referent, never a real referent beyond the artifice of the text. ‘(I have made/an elegy for myself it/is true)’: Hill admits in this bathetic statement that the text is ‘about’ his own relationship to the Holocaust rather than the imagined dead child. And yet if it were purely about him, the birth date at the beginning of the poem could have been rendered the same as that of the nameless Jew in order to substantiate the (false) analogy between victim and poet. But it falls exactly one day before Hill’s birth: ‘September Song’ delineates the fantasy child as both comparable to, and separate from, the adult poet. ‘Made’ compounds this problem of textuality in relation to the Holocaust by conceding that the narrator worries about the excruciating problem faced by writers of gleaning artistic

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profit out of atrocity. By allowing the text to enter a capitalist economy in which it will be consumed by a leisured bourgeoisie, Hill recognises that he upholds a system that allowed the child to die. ‘Made’ thus links with the other words which denote the efficiency of the Nazis’ economy, which facilitated the quick disposal of victims: ‘proper time’, ‘estimated’, ‘sufficient’, ‘patented’, ‘routine’, ‘plenty’. A horrific parallel erupts between the economic language used by Hill, and the economic disposal of the victims of the Holocaust. Exploiting the dead infant for the paltry sake of artifice necessarily invites, for the critic Gabriel Pearson, an ‘inevitable callousness’, since ‘we live in a universe where knowledge of atrocity and the blitheness of song go on co-existing’.87 This ‘callousness’ arises directly out of the impossibility and necessity of representing the Holocaust. To ignore the victims would leave them enveloped in silence; to represent them can only endorse their continuing speechlessness. Hence the poem comprises a dialectic of embarrassment in which the agonising need to represent the victim is counterbalanced by a hopeless sense of artistic failure. Just as the positivity of the word ‘song’ is wrecked by its juxtaposition with the Holocaust, so the ‘innocence’ of objects associated with the event disperses into history. For Harrison, crematoria can never again be just crematoria; similarly, for Hill, ‘harmless fires’ are infected with the knowledge of the Nazis’ mass burnings (p. 67). Since the Holocaust has the potential to raise itself as a spectre behind language as a whole, the poet brings the text quickly to an end in his proclamation that fourteen sparse lines about the event are ‘more than enough’. But the atrocity does not only saturate the contemporary use of signifiers with its presence: as a sonnet, the poem also orders a revised reception of pre-Holocaust poetics. ‘September’ recalls Keats’s famous ode ‘To Autumn’, but the decaying resplendence described by Keats – more particularly, the over-ripeness of swelling gourds and plump hazel shells – is refurbished as a disturbing Holocaust metaphor.88 September ‘fattens on vines’: as the time for harvest and ensuing profit, the calendar month, along with the artifice of the text itself,

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prolongs the economy’s pact with genocide. Fruit allowed to freely ‘fatten’ appears obscene when compared with the starved Jewish victims of the Holocaust, whose bodies, in a horrific irony, were portrayed in anti-Semitic literature as obese. It also provides an image of artistic self-righteousness applicable, perhaps, to the narrator. Like a smug sculptor fashioning the ‘fatted marble’ of Holocaust memorials in another Hill poem, ‘Of Commerce and Society’, the persona might appear ‘quietly confident’ that they have created a ‘true’ sonnet commensurate to the horror of the atrocity (p. 49).89 Christopher Ricks complies with this potential obscenity in ‘“The Tongue’s Atrocities”’ when he contends that Hill ‘has written the deepest and truest poems’ about the Final Solution.90 By ending ‘September Song’ with intertextuality, however, the poet compounds his earlier, parenthetical assertion that the sonnet is only ‘true’ in its self-referentiality, and that a more productive and ethical artistic activity might be to rewrite the history of Western poetry in the context of the event. Hence, after Keats, Hardy’s poetry is next in line: ‘Roses/flake from the wall’ echoes the line ‘And the rotten rose is ript from the wall’ from ‘During Wind and Rain’.91 Hardy’s metonymic rose forms part of an elegiac lament for a dying aristocratic tradition. In Hill’s poem, it is transformed, if read in the context of the subsequent fire imagery, into a terrible metaphor for the flaking skin of burnt victims; even such a seemingly innocent signifier as ‘wall’ is infected by the history of Nazi incidents in which ‘dissidents’ were lined up and shot. For Hill, then, the reception of the past masters of literature needs to be regarded as tainted by atrocity along with post-Holocaust aesthetics as a whole. In the chapters that follow, I contend similarly that Harrison uncovers the rupturing of traditional literary preoccupations, such as mourning and memory, to the extent that, as Adorno predicted, the only ‘true’ poetry today is a poetry of barbarism.

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NOTES 1 Tony Harrison, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1987 [1984]), p. 122. Harrison is still strikingly productive in his sixties; hence a cut-off point was required for this study, which does not discuss any texts published or broadcast since July 1999. 2 Theodor Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. S. and S. Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), pp. 177–95, at p. 64. 3 Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies. 1. Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1991), p. 9. 4 I use the term ‘real’ to highlight the problem of defining what ‘reality’ is, but a philosophical discussion of this nature is beyond the limits of this book. Nevertheless, I do not wish to suggest that the real cannot exist if it is beyond linguistic representation, since this would indicate, obscenely, that the Holocaust did not happen. 5 This is not to state that Levi writes only about the Holocaust. Whereas Elie Wiesel is a self-proclaimed Jewish author who writes about the Shoah, Levi was captured as a partisan, and writes as a humanist, scientist, secularist and Italian as well as an Auschwitz Jew. 6 Binjamin Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood 1939–48 (London: Picador, 1996). 7 Rick Rylance, ‘Doomsongs: Tony Harrison and War’, in Tony Harrison: Loiner, ed. Sandie Byrne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 149, 160; Tony Harrison, The Loiners (London: London Magazine Editions, 1970). 8 In order to differentiate between them, a capital ‘H’ signals the atrocity committed by the Nazis, and a lower-case ‘h’ refers to the bombings and projected global annihilation. 9 This is not to argue that the plays and poems should necessarily be kept separate in terms of criticism, since there are clearly thematical and stylistic overlaps between the two genres in Harrison’s work. A study of the plays might include information about their relationship to the drama of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry, the classics, problems of translation, the reception of theatre and so on. Sandie Byrne demonstrates how the themes of the dramatic and non-dramatic poetry are interlinked in H, v. and O: The Poetry of Tony Harrison (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998). 10 Rosemary Burton, ‘Tony Harrison: An Introduction’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 14–31, at p.14; W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 1927– 1957 (London: Faber, 1969 [1966]), p. 142. 11 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. B. Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1967 [1948]), p. 12. 12 Tony Harrison, V (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989 [1985]), p. 60. 13 Burton, ‘Tony Harrison’, p. 16. 14 Burton, ‘Tony Harrison’, p. 29. 15 Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘Something To Believe In’, in Tony Harrison, ed.

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Astley, pp. 407–15, at p. 407; Peter Forbes, ‘The Bald Eagles of Canaveral’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 486–96, at p. 492. 16 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 57. 17 Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy champions a socio-economic definition of the working class; eating tinned fruit therefore betrays the individual as being at least residually plebeian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957, p. 26). 18 Various definitions of ‘committed’ writing exist. Sartre’s espoused freedom to choose a subject vies with Adorno’s deconstruction of the term in ‘Commitment’, which I discuss briefly in Chapter 5. Since this altercation, critics such as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton have explored the ambiguities of political writing in ‘Commitment’ (Stand, 20.3 [1979], pp. 9–11) and ‘Irony and Commitment’ (pp. 24–27). Silkin entered the debate with his anthology, Poetry of the Committed Individual (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Romana Huk discusses these variations in ‘Poetry of the Committed Individual: Jon Silkin, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, and the Poets of Postwar Leeds’, in Contemporary British Poetry, ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 175–220. 19 See Sandie Byrne’s discussion of The Mysteries, in H, v. and O, pp. 45–52. 20 Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3. 21 Tony Davies, Humanism (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 105–24. 22 Steven Yarborough, Deliberate Criticism: Toward a Postmodern Humanism (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 17. 23 In Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 9. 24 Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 9; Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3. 25 V, p. 238. 26 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). 27 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’, trans. F. MacDonagh, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. R. Livingstone, P. Anderson and F. Mulhern (London: New Left Books, 1977), pp. 177–95, at p. 189. 28 Langer’s anti-redemptive stance continues in Preempting the Holocaust (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 29 This anti-humanist critique has been levelled at Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, since it focuses on one incident of resistance in the figure of Oscar, rather than attempting to engage with the totality of the event. And yet it is still marketed as a Holocaust film. For a fuller discussion of Schindler’s List, see Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997). Overall, the collection proves hostile to Spielberg; for example, Omev Bartov argues that it promotes kitsch and stereotypical

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portrayals of Jewishness, and displays facile humanism (pp. 44–45). A notable exception is Barbie Zelizer, who argues that its status as an artefact of popular culture should not detract from its addition to the history of representing the Holocaust (pp. 18–35). 30 In Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 9. 31 The Times, 18 April 1945, p. 3. 32 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3; Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven missives)’, Diacritics, 14.2 (Summer 1984), pp. 20–31, at p. 20. 33 In an excellent review of Langer’s book, Michael André Bernstein suggests that his misguided claims are the result of American academic discourse, ‘the projective fantasies of a polemic in search of easy targets’ (‘Against Comfort’, Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1995, p. 9). 34 Tony Brinkley and Joseph Arsenault, ‘The Shoah, Annihilation, with Respect to the Sublime’, The Centennial Review, 35.3 (Fall 1991), pp. 479– 500, at p. 485; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). 35 George Steiner, Language and Silence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 75; Jon Harris, ‘An Elegy for Myself: British Poetry and the Holocaust’, English, 41.171 (1992), pp. 213–33, at p. 213. 36 Max Horkheimer, ‘The End of Reason’ [1941], in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 26–48, at p. 26. 37 Horkheimer, ‘The End of Reason’, p. 27. 38 Horkheimer, ‘The End of Reason’, p. 48. 39 David Carroll, ‘The Memory of Devastation and the Responsibilities of Thought: “And let’s not talk about that”’, in Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the jews’, trans. A. Michel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. vii–xxix, at p. vii. 40 Carroll, ‘The Memory of Devastation’, p. x. 41 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 42 Christopher Ricks, ‘“The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, in Modern Critical Views: Geoffrey Hill, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 55–68, at p. 57; Lawrence Langer, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). 43 Morris Grossman, ‘The Holocaust, or, Once More with Feeling’, The Centennial Review, 35.3 (Fall 1991), pp. 625–60, at p. 625. 44 Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 75; Alvin Rosenfeld, A Double Dying (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 13; Harris, ‘An Elegy for Myself’, p. 213; James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 62. 45 Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 34. 46 Leonard Olschner, ‘1951: In his essay “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” Theodor W. Adorno states that it is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz’,

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in The Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, ed. Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 691–96, at p. 692. 47 Olschner, ‘1951’, p. 691. 48 Theodor Adorno, Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 30. 49 Olschner refers to the kind of poetry arising in Germany between 1945–46 and into the 1950s, and argues that it did not engage with the Holocaust at all, but sought solace in metaphysical abstractions (‘1951’, p. 693). These poems ‘corresponded to a deeply felt need among both poets and readers in the ruins after the war to seek out metaphysical havens of interiority and timelessness, rather than constructive introspection and a sense of the historicity of their own time’. This is used to support his argument that Adorno’s statement is pertinent only to German lyric poetry, and yet it would perfectly comply with one view of the Apocalyptic poets writing in England in the 1940s and early 1950s. To a lesser extent, it is also applicable to many of the emerging Movement poets in the mid-1950s. 50 Olschner, ‘1951’, p. 694. 51 The etymology of the German word ‘barbarisch’ is the same as that of the English ‘barbaric’ (Das Große Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache [Mannheim: Weinzurich Bibliographisches Institut, 1977], p. 302). 52 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 188. 53 Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973 [1966]), p. 362. 54 Paul Celan, Collected Poems (London: Penguin, 1996 [1988]), p. 62. 55 Olschner, ‘1951’, p. 693. Olschner states that Adorno planned (but failed) to meet Celan in 1959. 56 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man, trans. S. Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987 [1958]), p. 129. 57 Levi, If This Is a Man, p. 208. 58 Despite this evident stylistic awkwardness in Levi’s work, Rosenfeld considers his writing to be purely ‘documentary’ (A Double Dying, pp. 55– 58). Yet heightened rhetoric conventionally has little to do with ‘documentary’ art, belonging more obviously in the realms of fiction, drama and poetry. This indicates another awkwardness inherent in Levi’s texts: they transgress conventional constructions of genre. Again, a parallel can be made with Harrison, who, as I demonstrate in Chapters 4 and 5, re-moulds the structural signs of the classical sonnet and elegy. 59 Theodor Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, trans. S.W. Weber, in Notes to Literature, I, ed. Rolf Tiedeman (New York: Columbia Press, 1991), pp. 241–80, at p. 249. 60 OED, 2nd edn, p. 315. 61 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, p. 23. 62 Thomas Morrissey, ‘Armageddon from Huxley to Hoban’, Extrapolation, 25.3 (1984), pp. 197–213, at pp. 197, 201.

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63 David Dowling, Fictions of Nuclear Disaster (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 161. 64 Albert Camus, ‘Combat’, in Actuelles: Ecrits Politiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp. 67–68, at p. 68. 65 Michael Freeman, ‘Speaking About the Unspeakable: Genocide and Philosophy’, Journal of Applied Philosophy, 8.1 (1991), pp. 3–17, at p. 15. 66 Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, trans. W. Wells (London: Victor Gollancz, 1955), p. 17. 67 Robert J. Lifton, Death in Life (New York: Basic Books, 1967), pp. 30, 56. 68 Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain, trans. J. Bester (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha, 1969), p. 277. 69 Jacqueline Rose, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (London: Virago, 1991), pp. 205–207; Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London: Picador, 1994), pp. 63–66. 70 Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 16–17. 71 Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p. 217. 72 Craig Raine, ‘Subjects’, London Review of Books, 6–19 October 1983, p. 5; Tony Harrison, The Shadow of Hiroshima and other film/poems (London: Faber, 1995). 73 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. xii. 74 Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), p. 47. 75 Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1981), p. 223. 76 Van Dyne, Revising Life, p. 53. As Professor Avril Horner has pointed out to me, Plath’s statement can be read in a different way. ‘Every woman adores a fascist’ might register the fact that every man in Western society is a potential fascist, given the nature of entrenched social and political structures that reward the display of masculine prowess. This follows the logic of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986 [1938]). 77 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 177. 78 Art Spiegelman, Maus II (London: Penguin, 1992 [1991]). 79 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. xxii. 80 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 67. 81 Romana Huk, ‘Tony Harrison, The Loiners, and the “Leeds Renaissance”’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 75–83, at p. 75. 82 Conversation with Arthur Rowe, The University of Leeds, 3 September 1993. 83 Conversation with Dr John Whale, 13 March 1998. 84 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 67; Jon Silkin, ‘War and the Pity’, in

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Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes: Philodelphia, 1985), pp. 114–28, at pp. 120–21. 85 Silkin, ‘War and the Pity’, p. 121. 86 ‘Untouchable’ can also be read as referring to the lowest Hindu caste. 87 Gabriel Pearson, ‘King Log Revisited’, in Geoffrey Hill, ed. Robinson, pp. 31–48, at p. 43. 88 Poems of Keats, ed. Edmund Blunden (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1955), p. 268. 89 Ricks, ‘“The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, p. 68. 90 Ricks, ‘“The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, p. 57. 91 Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. P.N. Furbank (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. 7.

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Cinema, Masturbation and Peter Pan

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Chapter One

Cinema, Masturbation and Peter Pan: A Non-Victim Approach to the Holocaust Belsen Newsreel and Peter Pan In the article ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’, Harrison writes: ‘When I search my childhood for something to explain what drove me into poetry [… my] images are all to do with the War’.1 As well as stressing his northern – but not, in terms of the quotation, especially working-class – credentials, he remembers his experience of the Second World War as a child in Beeston: One of my very earliest memories is of bombs falling […] myself and my mother crouching in the cellar […] lit-up streets […] the whistlings sounded so festive […] Another is the contact I had with German prisoners of war in a work party near our street. I remember only we children talked to them much […] Another is of a street party with a bonfire and such joy, celebration and general fraternity as I have never seen since. As I grew up the image stayed but I came to realise that the cause of the celebration was Hiroshima. Another is the dazed feeling of being led by the hand from a cinema into the sunlit City Square after seeing films of Belsen in 1945, when I was eight. Around all these too is a general atmosphere of the inarticulate and unmentionable, a silence compounded of the hand-me-down Victorian adage, ‘children should be seen and not heard’ and the mock-Yorkshire taciturnity of ‘hear all, see all, say nowt’.2 This quotation posits Hiroshima and the Holocaust, and the broader context of the war, as loci for his poetry. These images 33

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of a particularly British experience of the war are returned to throughout his oeuvre. Falling bombs recall the child crouching in the cellar in ‘A Close One’, and the nightmarish sound of a passing plane in ‘Listening to Sirens’; in the former poem, a montage of searchlights and Messerschmitts haunts the poet’s memory to the extent that the process of mourning for his parents’ deaths cannot be divorced from historical trauma.3 ‘Lit-up streets’ evokes the trope of fire which runs throughout his work, and connects such diverse referents as the family hearth and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.4 ‘The whistlings sounded so festive’, with its joyous reception of potential signs of death, reflects Harrison’s desire to juxtapose the celebratory with the horrific aspects of the historical; he thereby endorses a humanist triumph of the spirit in the wake of adversity, as in ‘The Morning After’.5 A more blatant reference to the origins of this poem – repeated in the introduction to the verse play The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus – is located in the recollection of the ‘[VJ] bonfire and such joy, celebration and general fraternity as I have never seen since’.6 Implicit in this statement is the perspective of a child: the older poet, who has studied at Leeds Grammar School and University, realises that ‘the cause of the celebration was Hiroshima’.7 This split perspective is enacted in ‘Black & White’, in which the concept of innocence is irrevocably altered by the 1945 bombings. As opposed to this rare moment of communal joy, the poet remembers the shock and silence which followed the British public’s reception of newsreels depicting the liberation of the concentration and death camps. An early exposure to mediations of twentieth-century atrocity does not lead to an unequivocal denunciation of the nations that perpetrated the events. In the quotation above, he remembers speaking to German POWs who were shunned by the Beeston populace: Harrison’s interest in uncovering simplistic victim/victimiser binaries informs poems such as ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ and ‘A Cold Coming’. In the former, inhabitants of Leeds construct themselves as ‘victims’ of Fascism, but then turn their wrath upon a scapegoat who is mentally unstable, thereby mirroring the Nazis’ euthanasia programme to rid the

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transcendental signifier of the Volk of ‘impurities’. In ‘A Cold Coming’, the dead Iraqi functions as a metonym for the supposed perpetrators of the Gulf War. Rather than offer an idealised vision of a soldier’s reading of atrocity, the Iraqi rejects the poet’s homilies, and refuses to apologise for the biological warfare instigated against the Kurds, or the Scud missiles launched at the Jews in Israel.8 I discuss these poems later in this chapter. First, Harrison’s statement about Belsen in ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’ requires further explication; this will help to uncover the specificity of his ‘adult’, British, and post-Holocaust response to atrocity. Since it would be impossible to conceive the totality of the Holocaust, individual countries (even regions) formulate their own metonyms of the event. Poles might focus on Auschwitz or the Warsaw uprising; Parisians may try to come to terms with Drancy; Danes might celebrate the occupied government’s relative resistance to deportations. Such metonyms appear slavishly bound to a complex intersection of the countries’ involvement in the Holocaust, and post-war formations of national identity. For the British, who, as Martin Gilbert demonstrates throughout Auschwitz and the Allies, perceived the Second World War as a personal affront rather than a campaign against the Jews, Russians, and Slavs, the Holocaust proves coterminous with their role as the liberators of Western Europe.9 Whereas the Russians liberated Adorno’s metonym, Auschwitz, one of Britain’s Holocaust enclaves turns out to be the smaller camp of Belsen in north-west Germany, which the Royal Artillery’s 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment and the Intelligence Corps discovered in April 1945. In the camp, a 2,500acre barbed wire compound meant for 10,000 prisoners, they discovered 60,000 inmates dying of starvation, thirst and typhus. 35,000 had died since the end of 1944, including, famously, Anne Frank and her sister. In Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, Joanne Reilly illustrates that British culture has focused on this camp, as opposed to the death camps in Eastern Europe, for several reasons.10 Journalists converged on Belsen primarily because Allied troops liberated it, and because the British public had already been informed of

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concentration camps closer to home, such as Dachau, in the 1930s. Newspapers were concerned that they would lose readers if they depicted the scenes at Eastern death camps: having been inundated with propaganda about the Germans during the First World War, the British public were suspicious that the stories of Nazi atrocities were merely lies; in December 1944, 40 per cent still believed that such reports were false, or only partly true.11 There was also a more mundane reason: editors thought that readers would identify with more familiar, Germanic-sounding names, such as Buchenwald and Belsen, as opposed to the strange Polish names of earlier reports. Party politics also entered the frame: the Left had criticised the Conservative government in the 1930s for not taking a harsher stance on the German camps (which, according to many Conservatives, contained only loony lefties and other undesirables after all); as Labour moved towards winning the 1945 election, they made the most of the Tories’ neglect of these sites of atrocity. Appalled by sights of death pits, piles of corpses, cannibalism and incidents such as ‘a mad woman relieving herself on a pile of dead bodies’, troops ensured that newsreel was shot; it was then transferred to Britain, and, as the camp was being cleaned up by the former guards, shown in every cinema in the UK.12 Hence, although Belsen was not a death camp in that it did not contain gas chambers like Auschwitz, it proved to be ‘the apotheosis of mass murder by systematic neglect’, and ‘gained particular notoriety [in Britain] because of the vivid film record’.13 Newsreel companies, and the Imperial War Museum, hold copies of this footage. Harrison mentions that he saw films of Belsen in Leeds City Square; more exactly, he witnessed them at the News Theatre next to the Queen’s Hotel (which is now a nightclub). Harrison has maintained that seeing such film on the big screen in black and white was a very different experience from watching it on the small, colour TV screens of today. Its profound effect on his work marks him out as a secondary witness of the Holocaust, receiving the events in Belsen, on screen, as narrative. He also seems to have viewed them on more than one occasion: footage was shared

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between newsreel companies like Reuters and British Pathé News, and incorporated into more mainstream news bulletins. The following commentary on a Belsen sequence from British News (31 September 1945), which is held in the National Film and Television Archive, reveals the British and postHolocaust framework for Harrison’s conception of atrocity. It exposes the background to his persistent interest in a form of post-Holocaust humanism, since it is this ideology that the filmmakers and British newsreel companies imposed on the event. After several shots of the exterior and interior of the British Military Court in Lüneberg, there are two frames (316 and 325) which attempt to represent the atrocities committed within Belsen. The first is of ‘bodies of dead prisoners on the ground’; the second, of ‘An emaciated prisoner slowly picking over the clothes of dead internees’. These quotations from the archive’s catalogues, and the editing of the footage, immediately locate Belsen within the discourse of humanism. Shots of Lüneberg suggest that Allied justice is capable of addressing the atrocities, and meting out the appropriate punishment to the perpetrators. The quotations then skilfully avoid the more disturbing ‘corpse’ (‘bodies’ suggests a sense of possible vivacity denied to the emaciated victims); ‘picking over’ hides the visual representation of an internee apparently stealing from the dead. Hence a value system specific to the camps – in which, in order to survive, the suspension of civilian codes of behaviour was necessary – is glossed over. And the commentary fails to note the most disturbing part of the first frame: in the top right-hand corner, an internee appears to be locked in his or her death throes. The trial, and occlusion of both thieving and the dying, creates the illusion that the moment of liberation and British intervention in the Holocaust was a pivotal one in ending the atrocities and their ramifications. In his essay ‘Shame’ from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi takes issue with this specifically Allied narrativisation of the Holocaust: There exists a ster[e]otyped picture, proposed innumerable times, consecrated by literature and poetry and picked up by the cinema: at the end of the storm, when ‘the quiet

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust after the storm’ arrives, all hearts rejoice. ‘To be freed from pain is delightful for us’. After the disease, health returns; to deliver us from imprisonment ‘our boys’ arrive just in time, the liberators, with waving flags; the soldier returns and again finds his family and peace.14

In contrast, ‘Shame’ registers the absence of narrative closure for the victims, who have to deal with the pain, embarrassment and guilt of a post-Holocaust existence. Levi attacks the same kind of humanist rhetoric that Langer reviles in Admitting the Holocaust: rejoicing, delight, health, deliverance, liberation; all these words suggest that a pre-Holocaust ideology can interpret the traumatic present. British News appears to capitulate to this anachronistic linkage of humanism and the postHolocaust, but the famous interview with Gunner Jim Illingworth (frame 423) then punctures the narrative of liberation. Asked for a soldier’s perspective on atrocity, he denies the possibility of functioning as an adequate witness. Illingworth says that ‘the scenes of this camp are beyond describing’, and he follows with the tautological statement that he ‘can’t describe it at all’.15 Despite the background of the trial, the two frames of corpses and Illingworth’s impotent commentary suggest a scale of horror which diminishes the previous implication that Allied justice might discover a relevant punishment for the perpetrators of atrocity. Langer, and the other exponents of linguistic silence, seize on such scenes as evidence of the inextricability of anti-humanism and any notion of the post-Holocaust. And yet, despite the quotation above, in ‘Shame’ and The Drowned and the Saved as a whole, Levi is not as dismissive of the fetishisation of hope. Indeed, his writing career was grounded on the premise that inarticulacy is an inappropriate response for a former internee of Auschwitz who wishes logically to uncover the truth of atrocity in the face of rising neo-Nazism. Harrison himself neither adheres to a simplistic notion of pre-Holocaust humanism – as British News would have if it were not for the introduction of Illingworth and the dying inmate – nor follows critical arguments which condone the inexpressibility of the event. His approach is closer to Levi’s in that he engages with the linguistic

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awkwardnesses which should be inherent in any competent example of Holocaust or post-Holocaust literature, whether it arises from guilt, the poverty of pre-Holocaust language, or the difficulty of applying genres such as the elegy. Barbaric writing may be produced by both authors, but Harrison differs from Levi in that the Italian writer, as a primary witness, is able to produce a documentary account of Auschwitz, whereas the post-Holocaust author has to tackle the problems of his own cultural and historical baggage. The literary nature of authentic testimony is beyond question, so in a sense both Levi and Harrison produce Holocaust ‘fictions’, but Harrison writes about the atrocity after it has already been interpreted by another medium; in this instance, by cinema. Similar post-holocaust baggage informs Harrison’s poems about the atom bomb, such as ‘Black & White’ from The Gaze of the Gorgon: If we had the cameras then we’ve got today since Oblivion, always deep, grew even deeper the moment of the flash that made VJ and the boom made almost pro ones so much cheaper, I’d have snaps of me happy and pre-teen in pale, affordable Fuji for the part of innocence that never could have been born just in time to see the World War start. The ugly ducklings changed to sitting ducks! Now everything gets clicked at the loud clock the shots and shutters sound like ’s Captain Hook’s ticking implacably inside the croc. If he wants his shadow back the Peter Pan who cowers since Hiroshima in us all will have to keep returning to Japan till the blast-cast shape walks with him off the wall.16 ‘Black & White’ – with its immediate reference to black-andwhite film and photography in the title – discusses the effects of this atrocity briefly in relation to atom bomb victims and the post-war boom in the Japanese economy, and, more

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specifically, in relation to non-hibakusha. According to the narrator – who, as in many of Harrison’s poems, is a representation of the author figure himself – the bombing has affected the concept of innocence in Western countries. Whereas Ibuse subverts Japanese legend in order to construct a post-holocaust epistemology in Black Rain, Harrison chooses Western myths about swans and flying boys.17 And whereas Geoffrey Hill rewrites pre-Holocaust signs of ‘high’ culture in ‘September Song’, the Leeds poet recycles children’s literature; more specifically, Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the facially challenged duckling, and J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan.18 Andersen’s tale documents a miraculous linearity between the impeded present, and the metamorphosis into a lovely swan. Blake had already demonstrated two centuries before the publication of The Gaze of the Gorgon that to hypostasize innocence and experience risks occluding dialectics between the categories. Harrison’s addition to Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience produces a negative dialectic in which there is no possibility of progression from one to the other; indeed, the poles appear nullified simply by the advent of the atom bomb.19 Syntax and line sense vie in the statement that ‘innocence could never have been’ in existence before the war; in contradiction, it is also ‘born just in time to see the World War start’. In other words, innocence never existed anyway, but the construction of childhood as days spent mucking about in fields full of hollyhocks was forever ruptured, according to the poet, by the moment of fission. So ugly chicks do not now change into adult swans: the projected photo of the youth presents him as a ‘sitting duck’ for both carpet bombing and a nuclear attack. A metaphorical chain then spirals between the family ‘snap’, the ‘snap’ of the camera shutter and the ‘snap’ of the crocodile’s jaws in Peter Pan: the poet subverts Pan’s conception of death as child’s play by reminding the reader that the holocaust offered a new twist to the possibility of global suicide.20 ‘[L]oud clock’ functions as a grotesque litotes for the latter (and, possibly, as an image for Japanese tourists snapping Big Ben): the current media obsession with photography is rendered as an eerie portent for

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future annihilation. Barrie’s clock inside Hook’s stomach is transformed into the atom bomb, which lurks behind surface reality in the post-war contemporary.21 The fourth stanza progresses from shattered innocence to the problems of dealing with the consequences of the bombing from a non-hibakusha perspective. Whereas Shigematsu in Black Rain wishes to shed his victim status in order to be revitalised, the narrator of ‘Black & White’ calls for a recognition of Allied guilt. Instead of exculpating the event as a necessary end to the Japanese conflict in order to save the lives of troops and POWs, Harrison suggests that the Allied population should imaginatively return to Japan in a reversal of Japanese tourists’ sojourns in Westminster. On arrival, they might soberly contemplate atomic carnage, and its effect on the subsequent Cold War. This is an ethical duty he believes the non-victim, post-holocaust writer can encourage. (Harrison’s stance here could, wrongly, be demeaned as precious by critics who despise the stink of morality in the present.) Pan then manifests himself as an allegorical indication of how the West might come to terms with the events. In Barrie’s text, he loses his shadow when he escapes from Wendy’s bedroom, and Nana closes the window too quickly.22 When he returns, he believes his shadow will rejoin him ‘like drops of water’, but when it did not ‘he was appalled. He tried to stick it on with soap from the bathroom, but that also failed’.23 This fragmentation of self is rewritten – in a similar way to that in which Hill reworks pre-Holocaust literature in ‘September Song’ – as the splitting of the atom. Pan’s shadow is transformed into the dust shadows of Hiroshima or Nagasaki victims reduced to ash by the blast, or, at the site of Ground Zero, turned from a solid into steam at estimated temperatures of ten million degrees Fahrenheit. It is also symbolic of the hibakusha. In contemporary accounts, the victims are often likened to ghostly shadows: Hachiya refers to ‘shadowy forms of people, some of whom looked like walking ghosts’; in Mikio Kanda’s Widows of Hiroshima, Sada Tatsumoto remembers that ‘the ones who were terribly burned had skin hanging off them and were

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walking along like ghosts, with their hands stretched out in front of them’.24 Harrison extends the metaphor of Pan’s shadow onto a global scale, in which the world is split into two camps, the hibakusha and non-hibakusha. Pan is representative of the latter, who cower under the constant ‘shadow’ of a possible nuclear war. The poet’s analogy looks forward to a moment when this split will be overcome, and the West, rather than avoiding the ramifications of the bombings with justifications, will engage with and accept responsibility for the horrific damage caused. This fusion of the body and shadow can only be achieved, Harrison insists, through a painful, embarrassing catharsis. Instead of silencing the referents with evasive rhetoric, the West needs to engage with representations of the events again and again in order to accept the horror of unleashing the barbarity of ‘advanced’ technology. Hence Harrison’s poetry functions as a cathartic process in which he regurgitates his didacticism: repetition in his work functions as an ethical necessity rather than vacuous padding.25 After enlightenment, he presumably hopes that the nuclear threat will diminish via a global cry for total disarmament: he capitulates to idealism in the hope that an appreciation of the original horror might make the world less likely to duplicate the events of 1945. ‘Ethical’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘catharsis’, ‘idealism’ and ‘hope’: these signifiers suggest that Harrison is an ardent humanist searching for an ‘affirmative spirit’ in a pre-holocaust context, a stance that Adorno and Langer revile in the post-Holocaust era.26 Nevertheless, the possibility of a post-Holocaust epistemology in which the celebratory arises out of a horrific catharsis forms a recurring theme in Harrison’s work. For example, in the play Bow Down, the blonde sister is recycled into a harp only after she has suffered an assault, drowning, necrophilia and dismemberment. And in his introduction to The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus, Harrison relates how Marsyas’s flayed skin turns into a finely-tuned instrument when pegged up in a public square in Celaenae.27 These classical and folk narratives from the West resonate in the twentieth century: the construction of aesthetic objects out of human remains

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parallels both the production of post-Holocaust literature, and, more worryingly, the Nazis’ infamous (but never proved) manufacturing of soap, coat hangers, strings and lampshades out of victims’ bodies. Following Adorno and Langer’s argument, to wonder uncritically at these examples of the aesthetic would be an obscene gesture which occludes millions of deaths. Harrison counters in the Astley collection, controversially, that only post-Holocaust poetry has the power to lift humanity out of despair.28 Poems, according to his prose statement, need to be evaluated as remains which have come through the atrocity and function as signs for the dead; in the alternative context of a lampshade made out of skin, the viewer must presumably, and simultaneously, appreciate the former suffering, grotesque transformation, and possibility of an appalling aesthetic. Ultimately in Harrison’s schema, such barbaric traces of the event function as acts of troping necessary to the process of mourning, and the survival of survivors. To negate culture, capitulate artistically in the wake of the victimisers’ brutality, and embrace radical scepticism, would, the narrator seems to intimate, accede to the misery that the Nazis unleashed; like the fragments of papyri uncovered in The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus, awkward aesthetics need to be cherished as evidence of an occluded referent. In Bow Down and the introduction to The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus, Harrison hovers perilously close to endorsing Adorno’s ‘dismal metaphysic’ in which ‘humanity flourishes’ by surviving atrocity, and thereby eliding the deaths of its victims.29 In the alternative historical context of the post-holocaust contemporary offered in ‘Black & White’, the catharsis is equally problematic: the victims and non-hibakusha are subsumed into the prospect of emancipation from the atomic age; the poem can only combat disillusionment with the thought that a world where there is no threat of a nuclear war can only be imagined by an age in which the prospect of annihilation has been prevalent. This barbarity of gleaning artistic profit out of horror is instilled in the structure of ‘Black & White’. Whereas Plath juxtaposes iambs, trochees and anapests with nursery-rhyme tetrameter in ‘Daddy’, and Hill mixes metres in ‘September

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Song’, Harrison forges a troubled aesthetic by playing off heavy stresses against pentameter.30 In his preface to the verse play The Misanthrope, Harrison states that ‘the effect of the rhyming couplet is like that of a time-bomb ticking away behind the desperation of Alceste’.31 If the remark is applied to ‘Black & White’, it elucidates its particular metrical pattern. Feet replace the couplet, but the effect is similar. The poem is, like The Misanthrope, composed in iambic pentameter, but irregular and bunched stresses puncture the rhythm. The first three lines scan as follows: o o B o B o B o B o B If we had the cameras then we’ve got today o B o Bo B o B B oB o B since Oblivion, always deep, grew even deeper o B o B o B o B oB the moment of the flash that made VJ (p. 13) The register switches from the conversational to the poetic: the first line begins with conventional metrical leeway; the second and third lines move into the heightened language required for a discussion of annihilation. Only the metrical break on ‘grew’ proves irregular (although ‘we’ve’ could also be a full beat); this is apt, since the outlined concern with innocence and experience delineates a lack of ‘growth’ into post-holocaust adulthood. However, by the end of the poem, the metrical pattern buckles: o o B B B B B o B o B till the blast-cast shape walks with him off the wall. The bunched heavy stresses cannot be demoted to off-beats without destroying the line’s musicality. Five consecutive beats rupture the pentameter: this forms one of the moments when the poet reminds the reader about ‘the ghosts of the inarticulate’, here in the guise of the atom bomb victims.32 It may be, as John Lucas suggests in the Astley collection, that Harrison has a propensity to bodge the metre, but in this instance such blatant metrical tension presents a challenge to pre-holocaust aesthetics.33

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Masturbation and ‘Victims’ in The Loiners ‘Black & White’ has been analysed as a representative postholocaust poem in Harrison’s oeuvre, a ‘barbaric’ text which signals the difficulties of writing about Hiroshima with the aesthetics of awkwardness. Part of the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ sequence in The Gaze of the Gorgon, it takes its place among Harrison’s more recent texts on the subject, along with The Shadow of Hiroshima. Before I offer a further exposition of these poems, I wish to go back to The Loiners in order to trace the development of Harrison’s interest in atrocity. As a first collection, it approaches the 1945 bombings in a manner less confident, but no less committed, than that of ‘Black & White’. In the latter, Harrison muses over the ontological complexities of a non-hibakusha existence, whereas in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ (reprinted in the Selected Poems) he mythologises a particular VJ celebration in order to subvert any narrative construction of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which celebrates the incidents as assertions of hegemonic masculinity. In the first two stanzas, he humorously uncovers Joe’s suffering as an obsessive masturbator. Whereas the vicar propounds such adages as ‘stop it or you’ll go blind’, the narrator indulges in private hand-shuffles, but does not gain cold or sticky palms, mental deficiency, or ‘matted tangles like King Kong’ (p. 16). However, Joe’s ejaculations are public; hence his madness provides the vicar with ‘a bogey against wankers’ doom’. Joe is then placed in a wider context of oppression (the ‘mangle’ referred to in the epigraph) outside the church: he illustrates the classic Marxist dialectic between the self and society; this is a post-holocaust version of subjectivity, which is already steeped in twentieth-century atrocity.34 He regurgitates military rhetoric to the extent that his sexuality expresses itself in terms of warfare: ejaculation is conceived as a round fired by a machine gun, and his penis (a ‘mitred bishop’) ‘gush[es] Hiroshimas’ (pp. 16, 17).35 By making the famous mushroom cloud analogous with semen, Harrison attacks the Allied forces’ crude conception of a collapsed sex/ gender binary: the decision to drop the atom bomb is located

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in a primitive male desire to exert power over the female or feminine, here manifested as Japan.36 He then undercuts it with an image of emasculation: ‘The disabled veteran’ and other victims of war hoard and display the cultural commodities of ‘Swastikas, Jap tin hats and Rising Suns’ in order to focus on a collective Allied victory, and avert attention from the physical damage they have suffered (p. 17). Hence they despise Joe both for his non-victim status, and for his intact virility. In the middle of the poem, the historical context shifts from the specificity of the 1945 bombings to a linearity of twentiethcentury warfare. The iconography of the two World Wars fuses in the lines below: In allotment dugouts, nervous of attack, Ambushing love-shadows in the park, His wishes shrapnel, Joe’s ack-ack ejaculatio shot through the dark Strewn, churned up trenches in his head. (p. 16) Madness is a theme that runs throughout The Loiners, and encapsulates figures such as the colonialist and homosexual in ‘The White Queen’ (another name for Victoria) (pp. 21–34). Here, it is troped with a mixture of the discourses of sexuality and twentieth-century warfare. Anti-aircraft guns metamorphose into penises, lovers into enemy soldiers, desire into shrapnel, and vice versa: these images expand on the title’s fusion of bishop-beating and armed conflict (‘Pocket Wars’). Such fusions of sex and war riddle Harrison’s early poetry. In the manuscript versions of ‘Newcastle is Peru’ held in the Robinson Library, Harrison forges a metaphor for creation in which ‘those first eight cells/of life burst like hot shells/over a battlefield’.37 This tendency continues in the final selection for The Loiners; tropes of gardening plots as trenches are contained within the poem ‘Allotments’. They turn into opportunities for adolescent sex; the narrator is later disturbed and berated by a former inmate of Buchenwald and Auschwitz (pp. 18–19). Unlike the Pole in ‘Allotments’, Joe has no actual experience of the war: the signs he relies on are

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mediated, like the images of Belsen that Harrison received as a child in the News Theatre. Even though his mental instability separates him from the author/narrator of poems such as ‘Black & White’, both approach atrocity from the perspective of ‘window-gazing in the Surplus Stores’ (p. 16). The problems of secondary witnessing are suppressed at this stage of Harrison’s oeuvre; later in this chapter, I demonstrate how he engages with them more directly in poems such as ‘A Cold Coming’.38 Awkwardness arises in this poem due to the problems of secondary witnessing. ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ can be evaluated as an early, and slightly cumbersome, attempt by a post-holocaust writer to link the holocaust and twentiethcentury atrocity as a whole to Harrison’s Bildungsroman in verse. By overlapping sperm and Hiroshima, it begs the question of which non-victim experiences of extreme situations (here, madness) are analogous to those suffered by actual victims of atrocity. If an author constructs a false correlation between the event and an alternative referent or signified referent (here, Joe’s ejaculate), the result will often be a negative awkwardness comprised of linguistic inefficacy, even if the intent is ‘harmlessly’ comical, as in Kingsley Amis’s juxtaposition of Hiroshima with a burnt sheet in Lucky Jim.39 Critics who lambast Sylvia Plath for her deployment of Holocaust iconography in ‘Daddy’ follow this logic. It would be obscene to compare all extreme situations to atrocity, and yet it is more difficult to demarcate exactly where insincerity begins. In The Savage God, Al Alvarez recalls an argument with Plath in which he dissuaded her from using the line ‘I may be skin and bone, I may be Japanese’ in ‘Lady Lazarus’, because it ‘hitch[ed] an easy lift by dragging in the atomic victims’.40 Alvarez refers to the immediate emotional baggage thrust upon the reader when the holocaust is mentioned: transferring his comment to ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, the analogy between sperm and Hiroshima could be said to be untenable. It certainly simplifies the plethora of historical narratives constructed to interpret the events of 1945, such as President Truman’s quandary over whether to demonstrate or

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annihilate with the atom bomb, and the build-up to the Cold War. Harrison’s gender reading might be said to reduce this diversity to a singular narrative of ‘boys with their toys’.41 Spencer argues throughout The Poetry of Tony Harrison that the poet’s depiction of a war between the sexes can sometimes be less than subtle.42 In ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, however, Harrison appears to undermine the military mixture of masculinity, sexuality and atrocity, and struggles to forge a language suitable to represent a comical fusion of adolescent masturbation and the holocaust. Awkwardnesses of conceptual inefficacy face any writer who introduces sexuality into texts about the Holocaust or atom bomb: concentration and death camps were often segregated to make heterosexual intercourse almost impossible; Holocaust testimony is riddled with accounts of how extreme situations had the psychological effect of killing the libido. Thrusting sex into texts by post-Holocaust writers has thus been at the risk of insincerity. D.M. Thomas risked this in his exploration of a collapsed sex/ atrocity binary in The White Hotel, and the forced incest and sado-masochism in Pictures at an Exhibition; Bryan Cheyette accuses him of eliding racial differences in the latter novel by blurring the border between the victim and the victimiser.43 But whereas Thomas depicts sex within the camps in order to shock and titillate, Harrison is mainly concerned with dialectics between sexuality and history located in his childhood and adolescence in The Loiners. Unsuitable responses to the holocaust, such as the VJ celebration’s banalisation of the event in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, are subverted by the poet: at a pivotal moment in the penultimate stanza, Joe mimics the military proceedings. Homi Bhabha’s notion of splitting the ambivalence aids an interpretation of Joe’s action.44 Bhabha refers to key moments in colonial history when an act of mimicry on the part of the colonised leads to a temporary power shift. By taking on the voice of the oppressor, the silenced individual breaks out of ideological gagging.45 In ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, Joe mimics the bravado of the military, and exposes it as endorsing a ridiculous concept of fixed masculinity. Displaying his penis

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during the VJ party as a sign of respect for the Allied victory, he actually usurps the proceedings: the celebrations collapse into an awkward and embarrassed silence when the member is sighted. Thus the five-fingered shuffle reverses Bhabha’s paradigm, since it is the oppressors who perceive the act as mimicry: to Joe, masturbation is only an unconscious act of celebration. The ensuing power shift creates a reverential silence which is regarded as a more suitable reaction to the advent of the Japanese surrender than the former rejection of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki through a blinkered celebration of Allied power. Banalisation through the accordion’s ‘Tipperarying’ breaks down into a funereal silence as an unintentional mark of respect for the atom bomb victims: the bonfire settles ‘as white ash’, reminiscent of the postholocaust dust clouds, and incinerated inhabitants (p. 17). Perhaps this celebration of Joe’s action focuses too much on a humanist moment of triumph within a limiting situation. Nevertheless, Harrison indicates that the ambivalence has a limited life-span: the crowd soon break the silence and ring the police; the protagonist is marched off to prison, where he commits suicide, and bequeaths ‘his gonads to the Pentagon’ in a final endorsement of fixed masculinity in the Cold War conflict. The pessimistic final message is that the military insistence upon avoiding the ramifications of the atom bomb ultimately triumphs over individual instances of rebellion.46 This acceptance of the power of military discourse complicates a victim/non-victim binary (‘pig-dog’ Brits v. Japs and Boche), and places Joe in a wider context of oppression. In the first two stanzas, Harrison illustrates how the crowd, victims of Nazi expansionist policies, construct the British town (presumably, Leeds) as a state which silences opposition through myth. Although it would be simplistic to label the inhabitants as Fascist, they certainly adhere to tenets of Nazi ideology in their victimisation of Joe. Moulded as a scapegoat for all the anti-war propagandist graffiti around the town, a parallel can be made with Hitler’s anti-Semitism, which blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and subsequent economic recession.47 In the manuscripts held

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by the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle, an early version of the poem exists which makes the Jewish connection more explicit. Joe is a ‘pasty masturbator’ (the line was changed because it scans as trochaic with an extra syllable, whereas the final version is composed of iambic pentameter). This link between his sexuality and complexion recalls (whether intended or not) a specific anti-Semitic stereotype. A few examples from modern literature suffice to identify it: in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the count’s ‘extraordinary pallor’ denotes his Jewishness; in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the cloying imagery – such as the ‘fattening [of] the prolonged candle-flames’ in ‘A Game of Chess’ – makes the same link between the queen’s sexuality and her Jewish ancestry; these myths culminate in the beliefs of Sara in Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years, who muses over the thin layer of grease that the character Abrahamson might leave in the bath.48 However, the Jews/Joe and Nazis/crowd connections do not sink into simplistic elisions in Harrison’s poem. Joe is constructed by the town as both Jewish and Nazi. In the same line from the manuscript, the crowd attribute all graffiti (such as ‘YANK GO HOME’) to him, and ironically, given their Fascist credentials, call him a Nazi (a ‘backstreet Hess’); they construct a metonym for the polyphony of underground anti-war voices which were afraid to go public during the Second World War (p. 16). Rudolf Hess is chosen above other Nazis for a number of reasons. Wrongly conceived by the outraged veterans as a pacifist, Joe evokes Hess’s almost unbelievable attempt to broker peace between Britain and Germany after he parachuted into Scotland in 1941 and demanded an audience with George VI, whom he hoped to persuade to dismiss Churchill, and align with the Third Reich against Russia. Hess was immediately interned until the Nuremberg trials. Like Joe, he was seen as suffering from mental illness: in the 1930s, unlike more intelligent Nazis such as Heydrich, Hess was always regarded as having only modest intellectual abilities; by the time of his trip to Scotland, he was considered to be quite mad. Concerns with oppression and victimhood in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ link with the overall schema of The

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Loiners. In the original blurb, held in manuscript form in the Alan Ross Collection, Harrison typifies the collection as fusing discourses of sexuality and power. The Loiners expounds the relation of public acts and attitudes to private tenderness, the realisation that the nightmare of history is not only outside but inside under the bed, and enacted in the very forms our sexuality chooses to express itself. In a letter to Alan Ross (5 April 1968), Harrison explains that ‘A “Loiner” […] is a citizen of Leeds. They are also poems about loins in a general sense.’ The White Queen’s homosexuality and neo-colonialism, Thomas Campey’s syphilis and the brooding figure of Queen Victoria, the promiscuous antiSoviet wandering around Prague; all these characters and qualities in The Loiners add up to the collection’s overall examination of dialectics between the personal and political in the Cold War period.49 Over twenty years later, Luke Spencer locates them more specifically in the climate of (supposed) sexual and political emancipation in the 1960s. Working with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation, he notes that ‘the political dimension of sexuality was a keynote of countercultural ideology, and one that sometimes [was] an excuse for getting laid’.50 Famously, Harrison’s mother was not impressed by Marcuse’s dialectic: in ‘Bringing Up’ from the family sonnets, she reads a library copy of The Loiners and cries, ‘You weren’t brought up to write such mucky books!’ (p. 166). Sexual and demotic emancipation heralded by academics in the 1960s failed to penetrate enclaves such as some working-class families in Beeston. This was reflected in the local tabloid interest over the sex and swearing in The Loiners: Harrison glued a headline, ‘4-letter word poems win Tony £250 prize’, from ‘my mother’s local paper’ onto a postcard to Alan Ross with a picture of the ‘Swastika’ stone in Ilkley. The narrators’ predilection for coitus in the collection thus only erupts out of a partial narrative of the swinging sixties. ‘Ginger’s Friday’ forms a prime example of how post-H/ holocaust poems such as ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ and ‘Allotments’ open out into wider examinations of sexuality in

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The Loiners as a whole. Here, the hypocrisy of Catholicism and adolescent onanism intertwine: Ginger spies on Mr and Mrs Daley having sex, masturbates, and then confesses; the priest then informs his father, who whips him until a ‘burning rubber and burnt bacon smell’ fills the kitchen (p. 15). This conceit of punishment and the carnivorous links with the closure of ‘Allotments’, in which, after dreaming of ‘V.E. and J.’ fires, the adolescent narrator cries ‘For the family still pent up in my balls,/For my corned beef sandwich, and for genocide’ (p. 19). Meat and atrocity fuse: cows killed at the abattoir parallel the victims of Auschwitz represented by the Pole who interrupts his lovemaking. Note the prioritisation in the last two lines: in the adolescent imagination, dialectics between the personal and historical are mitigated by an obsession with sex, before worries about eating animals, and then contemplating the Holocaust. Transferring this closure to ‘Ginger’s Friday’ allows a reading of the latter poem in terms of wider oppressions. Catholics silencing teenagers’ burgeoning interest in their sexuality, the Nazis’ systematic murder of the Jews, the meat industry’s exploitation of cattle; all these victim/nonvictim binaries are subsumed into more abstract (perhaps too abstract) dialectics of power in The Loiners as a whole. Harrison’s determination to join together various victims of religious, racial and political ideologies is made more explicit in a dropped stanza from the manuscript version of ‘Ginger’s Friday’, held by the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle: The potato-famine Irish of Maude Place Kept up their Church connections through their kids. Gangs yelled: ’ail Mary, wash yer mucky face! Or, Down wi’ Catlicks! Down wi’ Yids! Down wi’ Conservatives and Down wi’ Blacks!’ As Ginger ran the gauntlet down the street. They’d send the Jews to Dublin on your backs, Swimming with four wogs tied to your feet. Ginger becomes a scapegoat for Irish Protestants from Beeston (where Maud Place still exists) with various prejudices. ‘Catlick’

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– a northern dialect word for an ineffectual wash – puns on the correlation between Catholics and dirt set up in the third line: he is also taunted for being Jewish, black and, to complete the absurdity, a supporter of right-wing politics. The verb phrase in the sixth line links Ginger directly with Joe, since the latter also ‘faced the shrieking gauntlet’ in the manuscript version; it refers to an old military or school punishment in which the victims were required to run between two lines of people while being pelted with sticks.51 Suffering, and the linguistic silences that ensue, are developed in later collections into the forced inarticulacy of the working class. While writing The Loiners, though, Harrison was more concerned with the indices of sexuality, race, religion and atrocity.

Split Perspectives in the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ Sequence and The Shadow of Hiroshima Returning to the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ sequence, it can now be appreciated more clearly that the later poems differ from ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, ‘Allotments’ and ‘Ginger’s Friday’ in terms of their engagement with the holocaust. Instead of presenting wider contexts of subjugation, they focus in various ways on the specific atrocities unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.52 In ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, the third-person narrative utilises a victim of oppression to negotiate the relevance of the event to masturbation, whereas in ‘The Morning After’ – the first of the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ in The Gaze of the Gorgon – Harrison creates a more blatantly autobiographical text. As opposed to the fusion of innocence and atrocity in ‘Black & White’, ‘The Morning After’ muses over the possibility of a humanist concept of celebration, and a nihilist notion of universal destruction, existing within the same space. Awkwardness arises here out of the conceptual friction between these two possibilities. Representations by hibakusha of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki focus on the linguistic silence surrounding the events in Japan, as in Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, or attempts

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at an embarrassing, post-holocaust rhetoric in order to forge a positive identity for the victims, as in Ibuse’s Black Rain. Harrison’s purpose in ‘The Morning After’ diverges from that of these Japanese writers: history is written here from both the perspective of a child’s experience of the bomb, and the adult poet’s contemplation of atomic carnage. In the second part of the poem, a youngster plays with a blackout cloth in front of the VJ fire: the objects function as signs for conflict which the ‘innocent’ do not recognise; it also reaffirms that the grownup encounters the holocaust, as in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, from the second-hand perspective of a civilian ‘windowgazing in the Surplus Stores’ (pp. 16, 158). ‘Experience’ is troped by the grown-up with a recognition that joy must be dialectical. It is ‘banked’ with grief both in the sense that, although at the time he revelled in the relief of ‘war-worn adults’, he now realises that the Allied victory was at the expense of thousands of Japanese citizens, and the fact that the poet gleans profit out of the event (p. 157). The elegiac text forms part of ‘the mourning after’ the holocaust, a set of narratives struggling to represent atrocity without destroying pre-war notions of the aesthetic. In ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’, and the introduction to The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus, Harrison returns, as he does throughout his poetry, to the burnt circle left on the cobbles after VJ Day, and illustrates his need to fuse Western and Japanese responses to Hiroshima: Looking into that circle I once thought of it as the nightsky globe totally devoid of stars, an annihilated universe […] One element for celebration and terror. One space for the celebrant and the sufferer.53 Hence the joy/grief and carnival/victim dialectics result in a blend of Japanese and Beeston blazes in ‘The Morning After’. The first three stanzas appear to refer only to the Leeds flames, but then the metre begins to buckle as the events mix: o B o Bo B o B B B The morning after kids like me helped spray

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o B o B o B B B o B B hissing upholstery spring wire that still glowed o B o B o o B B B o BB and cobbles boiling with black gas tar for VJ. (p. 157) In the first line, the iambs are perturbed momentarily by the bunched syllables at the end of the line, as the ‘hangover’ begins from the fire, and, allegorically, from the holocaust. The perspective of the adult poet enters the sentence with the sinister sibilance of ‘hissing upholstery’, and the three bunched stresses in the second and third lines.54 (A northern accent might elide the third syllable of ‘upholstery’, but there would still be metrical breaks on ‘wire’ and ‘glowed’.) As in ‘Black & White’, these moments of metrical tension remind the reader of ‘the ghosts of the inarticulate’ here, again, in the form of atom bomb victims: the hissing, boiling, and ‘black gas tar’ are all subtle tropes for those turned into gas at Ground Zero, and the burnt survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.55 In the manuscript collection in the Literary and Philosophical Library, there is a letter – presumably from the London Magazine editor Alan Ross – which recognises at an early stage in Harrison’s career the need for a positive evaluation of his ‘tortured rhythm’, especially when contrasted within a single text to an overall ‘simple [and] clear rhythm’.56 ‘Tortured’, barbaric aesthetics link with other post-Holocaust poets such as Plath and Hill, since they too resist an uncomplicated savouring of the poetic line. ‘The Morning After’ forms such an example of Ross’s term: the suppressed context of the bombings rises to the surface in the final line; the fusion of celebration and suffering must bring with it conceptual and metrical tension. Punctured iambs dismiss the inability of the Beeston populace to get beyond joy: in the first stanza, it ‘Still […] celebrates’, despite the fact that melting phone cables, peeling paint, cracked windows and reeking horsehair suggest that there is always a downside to seemingly unmitigated hedonism (p. 157). This tropological mixture of celebration and grief is instigated in the very first line, ‘The fire left to itself might smoulder weeks’. ‘Fire’ is ambiguous: combustion does indeed continue in Beeston for weeks – as the second part of

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the poem demonstrates – but the image becomes more sinister when transferred to Japan, where fires burned for days after the bombing. In the second part, the latter, hibakusha component of the dialectic expands beyond nuclear war into the possibility of the annihilation of the universe. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki warns that technology could reverse any linear narrative of ‘progression’, and totalise everything into ‘a Scaleless zodiac’ (p. 158). A historical bridge between the ancient and the post-holocaust is initiated in the reference to the classical formation of constellations, and immediately taken away by the prospect of entropy. This combustion of linearity inculcates a simultaneous disorientation of time. Instead of using the expected past conditional ‘might have’, the first line is written in the present tense (p. 9). Harrison draws on a poetic convention which utilises the latter to create the artifice of contemporaneity between text and referent, or signified referent. It also indicates that the normative construction of time was punctured by the atom bomb, and, since his fire trope always compounds alternative events, the Holocaust. In Auschwitz, over six thousand prisoners were routinely cremated in the space of twenty-four hours. Famously, Treblinka contained a fake clock to fool the incomers that this railway station was like any other, and did not lead to a death camp down the Heavenly Way. Clocks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are represented in iconic photographs which show how, mangled and melted, they were frozen at the time the respective bombs struck. Hence the sense of synchronic disruption throughout ‘The Morning After’, as it shifts between adult/child and victim/non-victim perspectives. ‘[S]moulder weeks’ could mean that the holocaust freezes our conception of arbitrary time-scales; the atrocity punctures the present in the sense that ‘There’s still that dark, scorched circle on the road’; the poet remains fixated with an event that occurred nearly forty years earlier. Such synchronic disturbance arises in many other post-holocaust texts. In Death in Life, Robert J. Lifton records that a recurrent feature of holocaust testimony espouses the feeling of time freezing after the blast. One victim

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sensed ‘a blank in time’; another experienced a ‘ghastly stillness and a sense […] of slow motion’.57 And in Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, the disruption extends to diurnal time: The sky was still dark, but whether it was evening or midday I could not tell. It might even have been the next day. Time had no meaning. What I had experienced might have been crowded into a moment or been endured through the monotony of eternity.58 Lifton attributes this disorientation to a form of silence called psychic numbing. Faced with an extreme situation for which subjectivity has no precedent, and where the first concern has to be survival, former frames of reference, such as the human construction of time, are ejected. Afterwards, the apocalyptic images imbedded in the victim’s memory can lead to a sense of being stuck in time, powerless to revoke such imagery. (Similar psychological phenomena have been explored by the critics of the Nazi atrocity, such as Langer in Holocaust Testimonies.59) Does Harrison slip, therefore, into a post-holocaust iconography of apocalyptic silence, the mode of textual response that Thomas Morrissey advocates, where nuclear war is an ‘unmanageable’ and ‘inexpressible’ event?60 If the poet reflected the psychological plight of the victims, synchrony might be the overriding concern of the poem, but he focuses instead on a post-holocaust writer’s attempt to explain a split self: the creation of a humanist (joy/grief) dialectic by the adult results in an ‘innocence’ ruptured by the bomb; he remains a ‘morning-after’ kid of the atomic age. Treating the bombings with linguistic reverence would actually collude with the alternative silence of censorship: US forces in Japan from 1945 to 1952 tried to stop reports of the horror of the bombings leaking out of the country. Newspapers were censored, and, during the making of a Japanese documentary film Effects of the Atom Bomb, half the material had to be hidden because the researchers knew the US would never allow it to be broadcast during the occupation.61 ‘The Figure’ – the third poem in the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ sequence in The Gaze of the Gorgon – entertains post-

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holocaust joy/grief dialectics similar to those of ‘The Morning After’, as is evidenced by the rhyming links in the third stanza between glad/sad, and, in a more morose irony, [19]45/alive. However, this poem shifts from Hiroshima and Beeston to Blackpool in order to portray the Second World War as a metaphorical shadow cast across late-twentieth-century history. As in ‘Black & White’, Harrison deconstructs a photograph: on the surface, it denotes the giddiness experienced by a British family on holiday during the post-war summer (Berlin surrendered to the Russians on 2 May 1945). They gorge themselves on food at a hotel whose proprietor shares her name with the character Mrs Moore from E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; after seven years of restrictions such as civilian blackouts and curfews, ‘no camera would have caught them looking sad’ (p. 12).62 They enjoy a ‘brief freedom’, which indicates that the family is released from the monotony of work, and that, like the VJ celebrants in ‘The Morning After’, they indulge in the unmitigated pleasure of surviving the war. However, it could also mean that they are in a ‘honeymoon period’ of psychic numbing, after which the conflict’s effect on their lives will seep fully into their consciousnesses. Just as the Allies tried, and failed, to construct a narrative in which the liberation of the camps led to the Holocaust’s closure, their sense of history as a coherent, linear narrative is ruptured: they perpetuate a fantasy in which the war and postwar are opposite entities. Recent atrocities seen on newsreel are suppressed; the conflict is conceived ‘in parenthesis’ as an extreme event which swerved from the normative, so they try to return to the pre-war routine of holidays in Blackpool. The adult poet’s recognition that the conflict’s legacy seeps into the post-war period counteracts this tendency, and results in a text in which warfare functions as a powerful absence. It has altered the holiday-makers’ perception of the west coast landscape forever: it may be safe to bathe in the sea now the ‘subs [have] all gone’, but the fact that they are mentioned at all reveals that their image remains buried in the swimmers’ psyches.63 Hence the intertextual efficacy of Mrs Moore. In Forster’s novel, she performs the role of a benevolent

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colonialist who, despite her sensitivity to Indian culture, remains, and dies, an anachronism.64 Like Mrs Moore, the family attempt, and ultimately fail, to impose outdated qualities (such as uncomplicated joy) onto the post-war present. Pre-war nostalgia is displaced even further when the narrator focuses on an instance of punctum. ‘The Figure’ refers to an unknown character at the back of the photograph, which the poet notices before the centralised family: he forms an instance of the element in photography that Roland Barthes discusses in Camera Lucida ‘which arises from the scene [studium], shoots out of [it] like an arrow’, and pierces the viewer’s gaze.65 Punctum helps to destabilise authorial intention: in this case, the photographer wants to construct the picture of idealised happiness that the family wish to consume, but his desire is subverted by an intruder at the periphery who becomes the most interesting part of the photograph. The identity of the male in a ‘frayed suit and cap’, and his function within the poem, remain ambiguous (p. 12). Perhaps part of the photography business, he appears to usher the family into the right position in the last stanza. Whatever the case may be, he definitely wears the same clothes in 1945 and 1951, at the scene of another holiday snap. Perhaps, in an echo of the synchrony in ‘The Morning After’, this simultaneity registers the fact that the supposedly post-war world is actually fixated with 1945. Throughout the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ sequence, Harrison suggests that the year ruptured twentiethcentury British history due to the atom bomb and the liberation of the camps. As depicted by the Pan image in ‘Black & White’, there remains a sense that humanist notions of Weltgeist and progress cannot cope with the war, since it returns, certainly in this poet’s imagination, as an unpurged symbol of historical trauma. Hence the poem’s final image compounds the unease that the figure instils in the adult interpreting the picture: in a subtle trope of death, he sends the family towards the tripod ‘draped in black’. In the sequence’s colour-coding, black symbolises death or nihilism in the context of the holocaust: the ‘dark, scorched circle’ left by the Beeston fire in ‘The Morning After’ prefigures the ‘black’ hemispheres of the

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annihilated universe; the dark blue cross on the cover of the grammar book in ‘First Aid in English’ works more covertly as a symbol of universal negation (pp. 9, 15). Since the tripod is thereby rendered sinister, its status as outdated technology links it to other outmoded portents of death; ‘sun’ links with the other ‘Sun’ in the sequence, that of the Japanese flag, which is ‘blackened’ on the fire’s flames in ‘The Morning After’ (p. 10). As in most of the sequence, when the ghosts of the inarticulate creep into the text (here in the form of the figure, the photographer ‘draped in black’ and the Japanese), metrical instability is initiated. The second line of the fourth stanza reads as regular iambic pentameter, but the last one breaks up into spondees and unstressed syllables: o B o B o Bo B o B that figure in each photo at the back […] o o B B o o BB B o B and the tripod, and the biped draped in black. (p. 12) However, it needs to be added that these ‘ghosts’ do not always necessitate awkwardness in the form of metrical instability. ‘The Birds of Japan’, the last poem in the sequence, contains metrical breaks in lines such as ‘men made magma, flesh made fumaroles’ (p. 16). Despite this, the aesthetic horror of humans turned into ‘mofettes’ and ‘mephitic jets’ in lines of regular pentameter bequeaths an ethical quandary, since the poet still savours the beauty to be gleaned out of the dead.66 The Shadow of Hiroshima67 – broadcast by Channel 4 on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing (6 August 1995) – similarly risks barbarism in the form of linguistic insincerity by gaining aesthetic purchase out of the death of children. Published the same year in The Shadow of Hiroshima and other film/poems, it depicts, in a key passage, young A-bomb victims suffering ‘Burns and blisters, bloated blebs/[which] burst as the Motoyasu ebbs’ (p. 6). Here, in contrast to ‘The Birds of Japan’ as a whole, metrical instability highlights the presence of the ghosts of the hibakusha. Composed mainly in the iambic tetrameter Harrison has considered the most suitable for his television poems of the 1990s, these lines avoid

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the barbarism of a naïve post-holocaust aesthetic by switching momentarily to trochees: B o B o B o B Burns and blisters, bloated blebs B o o B oBo B burst as the Motoyasu ebbs This metrical disruption, which returns in the second line to iambs after the first foot, emphasises the historical demise of the children within a text concerned with current inhabitants of Hiroshima. Lest the survivors – and, by proxy, Western viewers or readers – become too complacent in their enjoyment of the post-holocaust contemporary, the traumas of atrocity return to haunt the present. (Clearly, the target audience is Western, given the main narrator’s demand that a telephone conversation in Japanese be translated, and the close-up on the English version of a sign warning of the horrors of park pigeons.) The passage as a whole describes Hiroshi Hara’s painting of the A-bomb dome, and then moves into a lament for the victims losing their burnt skin in the Motoyasu river: this mirrors the creation of the film text, which, like the canvas, hopes hopelessly to redeem ‘something from his schoolmates’ screams’. Despite an attempt to validate an awkward aesthetic, the section ends with the dismissive voice of a victim who argues that atrocity reduces the value of cultural artefacts to the infinitesimal: ‘The force that blew the Dome apart […] makes short work of art.’ So, positive lyrical barbarism is striven for here as in the sequence from The Gaze of the Gorgon, but is now challenged from within. This is a tangible development in Harrison’s engagement with the holocaust: as opposed to the first- or third-person narratives from The Loiners and the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’, The Shadow of Hiroshima involves itself in a dialogue between the Western narrator, and, in a realised version of the blasted shape from ‘Black & White’, a victim whose body was reduced to a fading smidgeon on a step now ensconced in Hiroshima’s Peace Museum. This ‘progressive’ act of literary ventriloquism risks the awkwardness of

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inefficacy: it might contaminate the Japanese narrator with the cultural and historical baggage of Western interpretations of the event within the artifice of an alternative narrative. Indeed, the visual and verbal metonyms for the bombing – such as trams, the A-bomb dome and the Motoyasu river – are gleaned from testimony, or a fleeting visit to the Peace Museum. These are non-victims’ metonyms, doubly reified out of photographs or text stuck behind real, or metaphorical, glass cases. Since the film had to adhere to barbarism in the form of a market economy dictating how much time a film crew can spend in a country as expensive to reach as Japan, their short sojourn could be rejected by the viewer as cultural tourism insensitive to the particularities of everyday life in Hiroshima. Hence problems arise out of the artifice of authenticity: the mockdocumentary style suggests that this is the real Hiroshima. More difficulties occur when the subject positions of the Western narrator and Shadow San appear to blur. Littered with close-ups of the neon and tin-can detritus of Cokeculture, the programme suggests a deep-seated hatred of the American presence in present-day Japan. Yet it is never made explicit whether this arises from the film crew in Hiroshima, the editor Luke Dunkley, Harrison, the Western narrator, or Shadow San. The latter might be the most likely: San’s nostalgia for pre-war Japanese popular culture is indulged when he recognises radio tai-chi exercises; appalled by the building of a baseball stadium near Ground Zero, he retorts, ‘You’d need a stadium five times higher/to seat all those who died by fire’ (p. 7). However, Harrison’s renowned hatred of mass culture might have found an ally in, or even initiated, San’s anti-Yank invective: the Western narrator is ‘sorry’ to tell him that a suspected A-bomb shrine is actually ‘a mere pinball machine arcade’; the editing compounds the obscene irony of cultural imperialism with an isolated shot of its name, ‘Parlor Atom’; the blood-red Coke signs are paralleled with the burnt skin of the hibakusha throughout the film (p. 13). Rather than a celebration of postmodern hybridity, the film displays a disturbing version of cultural difference which covertly longs for the utopia of a Japan uncontaminated by American influence.

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Nevertheless, the potential slippage between the two narrators ends with the final image of the birds of prey above Hiroshima, waiting for the peace doves to be released (bathetically, they are pigeons). In a self-referential account of his own metaphor, the Westerner explains that hawks stand for the old Japan of Shadow San, which invaded China, bombed Pearl Harbor, regulated the infamous POW camps, and ‘made us pray/for any means to bring VJ’ (p. 17, my italics). It also debunks the aggressive masculinity endorsed by San at the beginning of the piece, where Japan’s post-war recovery is rendered with the sexual pun of getting ‘the flag back up the pole’ (p. 4). Hence the main narrator locates himself in the received Western version of the bombing, in which the demise of thousands was considered ‘a “merciful deliverance” to a British populace sick of six years of war’.68 This is not a politically correct version of Japanese history, in which the atomic bombing might be a ‘crime in the same sense as the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Jews’, but the viewpoint of a Western historian offering a dialogic perspective on the event without capitulating to unmitigated pacifism or imperialist nostalgia.69 Despite the inevitable problems of literary ventriloquism, then, Harrison’s venture to engage with the holocaust in terms of a debate between East and West appears justified, if slightly weighted in favour of the latter. His stance is nowhere near as biased as original reportage. Newsreel held in the Imperial War Museum calls the atom bomb a ‘visiting card’ for Japan (WIF 25/1); another sequence depicts the rubble of Tokyo and Nagasaki, focuses on a twisted bicycle, and asserts that the Japanese are ‘anything but the sons of Heaven’ (WPN 247). As with the reports of Belsen, this accusatory tone was used partly to excuse the Allied war effort. Pictures of emaciated inmates of the infamous Japanese camps justify, according to the newsreel, the destruction of whole towns, just as the victims of Belsen provided a justification for the bombing of German cities. WIF 25/1 and WPN 243 maintain a healthy distance from the aftermath of the atom bomb so as to avoid dissent in Britain and America. Mushroom clouds provide despicable metonyms for the victims below: WIF 25/1 shows

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the origin of black rain from several camera angles before an aerial tracking shot depicts distant scenes of devastation; ‘HIROSHIMA’ in bold white letters is superimposed on the frame; melodramatic music gives way to the disturbingly mundane sound of the aircraft. This sequence betrays a sombre fascination with the subject matter, from which guilt is patently absent: the aerial shots could be of any heavy bombing raid rather than the aftermath of the atom bomb in particular. Available footage, such as medium shots of the bones of those incinerated in trams, close-ups of burnt skin, or the listlessness of radiation victims, was avoided as too disturbing for a Western audience still celebrating the defeat of the Emperor. MGH 464, released after censorship was lifted twenty years after the event, depicts such scenes; the frames gradually become more disturbing, and culminate in a close-up of a victim whose eye has been melted by the bomb. Any tendency towards the lurid is negated by the quiet voiceover by a young American, narrating the facts of the bombing in a tone meant to evoke guilt and humility. The aerial shots of early footage are replaced by intimate frames of the shadows of flowers and fence posts burnt onto wood and concrete, and patterns of kimonos imprinted on victims’ skin. Nagasaki’s mushroom cloud is followed by a fade to black in order to register the gaps in the original footage. Subsequent shots depict the blackened statues of a cathedral near Ground Zero, and a gutted factory, prison, and school. After a screening of The Shadow of Hiroshima at Pictureville in Bradford (29 September 1995), Harrison stated that such newsreel was not included in the film poem due to the amount being shown on British television during the week of its broadcast. Its inclusion might have induced boredom, he argued, compounded with the fact that the audience was already over-familiar with the material. Such faith in the viewers’ knowledge was, I think, misguided, given that many were ‘second-generation’ teachers and academics (such as myself), and the high number of schoolchildren present. The danger of assuming a level of historical engagement was clearly evidenced when a group of teenagers began to titter at footage of the Holocaust contained in The Gaze of the Gorgon.

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Dangers of false representation are immediately signalled in The Shadow of Hiroshima by the narrators’ attempts to make sense of the post-holocaust contemporary. Their acute historical consciousnesses demand a recognition, fifty years on, of the atrocity: hence present-day trams remind them of those destroyed at Ground Zero in 1945; shots of the A-bomb dome haunt the film narrative, mirroring Hiroshi Hara’s obsessive annual painting of the structure.70 Their celebration of memorialisation endorses a kind of iterative synchrony, in which the historical trauma is contemplated annually, at the same time as each event maintains its autonomy: this is registered by the bathetic aside that the peace doves from ‘’94, 3, 2, 1’ gather in the parks, and become ‘a matter for city pest control’ (p. 17). The Shadow of Hiroshima then develops Harrison’s previous post-holocaust poems by self-consciously defusing its own intentions in terms of literary commitment and value: the Western persona and Shadow San recognise that the narrative is constructed by a fictionalised victim of the bombing, and a poet immersed in images of atrocity, not an uninterested, present-day inhabitant of Japan. Mitsufuji San, representing the youth of Hiroshima, is sceptical of the memorialisation; he is more concerned with forgetting the legacy of August 1945, and playing pinball. He blocks out the historical trauma by immersing himself in the anachronism of pre-holocaust humanism divorced from atrocity, in which the human ‘spirit’ is coterminous with the amorous: his main interests are love and pigeons, not historical phenomena. Harrison signals the idealist nature of his hobbies with a montage sequence which connects frames of a burning pigeon with close-ups of his lover, Sonoko; her absent namesake, San’s beloved, was obliterated by the bomb. These birds and Sonoko symbolise peace, at the same time as they acknowledge the atrocity. (The connection between the woman and the ‘doves’ is made in a more cumbersome manner when Mitsufuji San takes a phone card out of his pocket to ring Sonoko; his trouser pockets are full of pigeon feathers.) These links are compounded with a frame of Sonoko’s silk dressing gown falling to her feet, which subtly recalls the earlier comment by the

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Western narrator that ‘skin slid off [the schoolchildren’s] flesh like clothes’ when the A-bomb exploded (p. 7).71 Sonoko and Mitsufuji San may attempt to sever love from the historical, but the film narrative insists that the amorous forms an inextricable part of the post-holocaust contemporary. This does not negate the human ‘spirit’ in the sense of an abstract affirmation of the discourse of love. Atrocity and the amorous are balanced in Harrison’s version of a progressive dialectic; any attempt to endorse anti-humanist rhetoric is avoided by both narrators. Even Shadow San, after his initial denunciation of post-holocaust art, ends up excited, frantically fanning and grappling the Western narrator when Sonoko enters the frame. If this risks the banality of a ‘love conquers all’ adage, it could be countered that ignoring it would endorse the equal insincerity of self-indulgent nihilism. Such amorous concerns indicate that The Shadow of Hiroshima might be a self-conscious rewriting of another postholocaust text, Hiroshima mon amour.72 One of the earliest, and most successful, attempts to fuse the themes of private love and public atrocity, Alan Resnais’s film depicts the plight of two lovers who might be compared with Mitsufuji San and Sonoko. However, the films are so different in style and content that the already problematic concept of influence (like ‘cause’ in historical discourse) remains indeterminate in this instance. There is no evidence to date in Harrison’s prose statements that Resnais influenced his direction. Harrison does not appear to be particularly familiar with the vast amount of holocaust literature (Ibuse, Hachiya) and postholocaust literature and film (Ishiguro, Hiroshima mon amour) available on the effects of the atom bomb. He responds to the 1945 bombings much more clearly in terms of available documentary footage, classical tragedy, and his perennial ‘fire’ trope.73 Nevertheless, the lovers’ subplot in The Shadow of Hiroshima contains remarkable similarities with the main narrative of Hiroshima mon amour. An architect and an actress confront the problems of loving in an era of historical trauma in Resnais’s film; in Harrison’s, these characters are mirrored by the pigeon owner and the waitress. Both men in

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particular appear, on the surface, to be unconcerned with the ramifications of the bombing. Exercising in the morning while overlooking the A-bomb dome, Mitsufuji San is more interested in whether his pigeons will be killed by hawks than in Hiroshima’s past; although the architect in Resnais’s film criticises the French woman’s cultural tourism of the horrors in the city’s museums, he does not pontificate on the 1945 bombings. Marguerite Duras’s complex (sometimes pretentious) script in Hiroshima mon amour is more interested in the plight of the woman, who has to overcome the trauma of having taken a German lover during the war; in contrast, Sonoko remains a figure of little interest in The Shadow of Hiroshima. During the making of the Resnais film, the co-producers insisted that the story take place in France and Japan with the leading roles shared between French and Japanese actors. The major theme is of cultural exchange, of healing public atrocity (Hiroshima) and betrayal (Vichy France) through the meeting of two lovers: hence the avowal in the final scene of ‘Nevers’ and ‘Hiroshima’; the architect has already become ‘I’ and ‘you’, the German lover. In contrast, The Shadow of Hiroshima contains only a subplot of two Japanese lovers who are not interested in discussing historical authenticity. Nevertheless, both sets of characters are ultimately forced to confront the traumas of the past. Mitsufuji San and Sonoko may revel in the unrestrained sex act that ends Part One of the TV film conveniently for the advertisement break, but the end of Part Two presents a markedly different conclusion. Love cannot be anything but historical, according to the voiceover: Sonoko wakes up after a nightmare which symbolises her demise with the image of a burning pigeon; Mitsufuji San’s beloved birds might be devoured by hawks, a sign that atrocities will happen again in the future. Whereas this denotes their separation in the script in Harrison’s film, in Hiroshima mon amour the two lovers are gradually united as the French woman overcomes the death of her German lover, and her punishment in a locked cellar. Any possibility of historical relativity is kept at arm’s length in The Shadow of Hiroshima, whereas Nazi occupation and the atom

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bombings are freely associated in the overall atmosphere of existential angst in Duras’s script. A Japanese girl’s malformed hands at the beginning of the film are contrasted with the next shot of the French woman’s manicured delights. This juxtaposition complements the dialogue between the lovers which accompanies the documentary footage: the architect reiterates that she knows nothing of the bombing, despite the fact that she has visited the city museum four times, and ruminated on Hiroshima’s attempt to overcome the event. Reification precludes historical understanding: she remains oblivious to her position as a tourist. Trauma is transformed into barbaric aesthetics in a negative sense by the secondary witness, however well-meaning she might be: the poetic language she uses to describe the skin in the city museum (‘[a] fresh bloom of suffering’) mirrors her vocation as an actress. Also, the film she acts in turns post-holocaust Hiroshima into an advert for peace; Duras connects this with her containment of Nevers in aesthetic dream narratives. This dislocation is then tempered by the images of her bloody hands in the cellar during the flashback sequences: her suffering becomes commensurate with that of the atom bomb victim’s malformed digits; the two main characters can then become ‘true’ lovers. Such a conclusion is not sacrosanct: the relationship may be a repetition of trauma in that it is only transgressive due to their different nationalities, and its adulterous nature; the earlier warning from the architect of future atrocity (‘It will happen again’) belies any certainty of its longevity. Harrison’s conclusion to The Shadow of Hiroshima is much more pessimistic: there is no possibility of catharsis in the portent of future catastrophe. Nevertheless, earlier in the film, the inability of the Western narrator to discern a metaphysics of presence in the stadium mirrors the actress’s impossible attempt to gain access to the city’s past suffering; according to the logic of the film script, she must engage with her own traumas in order to be commensurate with it. Her cultural tourism connects with the Western narrator’s declaration that he cannot hear the hum of those who died in the bomb blast; he only hears a ball hitting wire. As opposed to the woman from Nevers, he remains an

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outsider at the end of the film; the ‘split’ perspectives of the post-holocaust narrator and atom bomb victim cannot be reconciled.74

Atrocity Poems: The Gaze of the Gorgon and ‘A Cold Coming’ All the poems analysed so far in this chapter offer an engagement with the Holocaust or the atom bomb. The next two texts I wish to look at are different in that they demonstrate how Harrison’s obsession with these events opens out into more general poems about atrocity. The Gaze of the Gorgon – broadcast in October 1992 on BBC2, and then published in the same year in the collection to which it gives its name – depicts an almost mythopoeic vision of war. It examines ‘evil’ and ‘warfare’ as universal abstracts, without completely rejecting historicity, in the form of events such as the First World War, and the move towards a standardised European economy. This film poem is a much more ambitious piece than the poetry explored so far in this chapter: its main subject is no less than the totality of twentieth-century European history. However, this does not mean that it is necessarily more sophisticated, since the mythopoeic always risks reductiveness by conflating historical diversity into a convenient narrative schema. As in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ and ‘Ginger’s Friday’, Harrison investigates the ramifications of various repressive ideologies which impose linguistic silence on their victims. The poem also differs in that it forms a more extended exploration of evil, and connects diverse elements together with the Gorgon figure from classical legend. Initially, it seems that this trope attempts to make sense of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare by comparing them simplistically with those of classical myth. It appears to suggest the transhistorical notion that evil is an integral part of humanity’s tendency towards barbarism, and that classical atrocities – such as the cannibalism in The Iliad – are directly analogous to

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those committed during the First and Second World Wars. In classical legend, the Gorgon silences opposition by turning everything that looks in her eyes to stone; Harrison appropriates this myth for a modern setting, in which dictators such as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Stalin and Hitler are analogous with the monster. Harrison employs this classical figure, equipped with her venomous hairdo, to court the mythopoeic by threading together metonyms of twentieth-century warfare into set pieces of dynamic editing. At one point in the film, the Trojan War, Nazis, neo-Nazis, Hitler, Wilhelm II and Second World War concentration camps are conjoined in a dizzying and ingenious sequence of montage. At first, the viewer is offered the mise-en-scène of the Triumph of Achilles, a neo-classical picture by the Austrian artist Franz Matsch. Achilles’s famous act of barbarism, in which Hector’s corpse was dragged around the walls of Troy, is then connected with Nazism: the extra-diegetic barking of dogs functions as an aural metonym for Nazism throughout the piece; it accompanies the close-up on a door in Matsch’s work. The latter then gradually opens through graphical enhancement; it reveals a few frames of a contemporaneous neo-Nazi march. To encourage historical parallelism, black-and-white footage of Hitler, and Wilhelm II, enters the narrative; then, suggesting a culmination of evil, there are shots of camps from the Second World War, emaciated victims, a Jew undressing, and piles of corpses. At the end of the poem, Harrison’s voiceover even extends these links with the Gorgon trope to America. A moment of utopia temporarily tempts the viewer with a false closure: a statue of the Jewish, syphilitic and democrat poet Heinrich Heine is bequeathed to New York, while another has been ejected from Corfu by the anti-Semitic Wilhelm II; inhabitants of the Bronx enjoy diegetic calypso, while a girl fondles a statue’s breasts. (The latter forms a feminine adjunct to the earlier shot of a hornet’s nest resting in a marble version of Achilles’s gonads.) Instead of ending here, this celebration of cultural hybridity gives way to a frame in which the camera pans around the Bronx statues, pointing out the graffiti (‘slickster’), and then fixes on a wall with an elaborate ‘Crack’ painted on it.

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A representation of the American bald eagle on a state building is then linked to the Gorgon’s eyes. It is rendered reminiscent of the Nazis’ Adler: worn on badges, the German eagle also gave its name to an early Nazi youth group, the Adler und Falker, and the first air offensive against Britain in the Second World War (Adlertag). Even though the narrator is aware that linking Nazism with American foreign policy might be crying wolf, he insists that the advent of the Gulf War proves that the US is as capable of barbarism as any other country. Hence the viewer is bombarded with a series of complex visual metaphors interlaced throughout the film; however, does the intricate narrative simultaneously offer the conceptually banal universalisation that humanity has always been evil, and will always wage war? ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ opens with an epigraph from Simone Weil’s The Iliad, or the Poem of Force: ‘To the same degree, though in different fashion, those who use force and those who endure it are turned to stone’ (p. 59). A dialectic of evil is initiated which appears to compound the poem’s tendency towards transhistorical universalism: victims and victimisers are both affected by violence, but the two poles still remain distinct. As sufferers of barbarism, both witness the betrayal of humanist notions of civilisation and culture. They can only be ‘redeemed’, according to the humanist Heine, by art (p. 68). Dialectics are still malleable in the poem: Perseus killed the Gorgon in classical legend by confronting it with its own image in a mirror; Harrison imposes this myth onto modern history, and indicates that the imposition of silence always backfires, and the oppressor, inextricably caught in the dialectic, is destroyed. This maintains the mutual exclusivity of the victim/victimiser poles, but the film is sometimes deliberately abstruse in its use of this model: the glass panes of ECU banks are like ‘Gorgon’s eyes’, but also like Perseus’s shield; capitalism is evil in its perpetuation of poverty, but also a supposed guarantor against atrocity (p. 65). Harrison then extends the motif of the Gorgon to masks in order to bridge the gap between ancient and modern history. The horrific facial injuries suffered by chlorine gas victims during the First World War are regarded

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as symptomatic of the fixity that the Gorgon/Kaiser’s gaze imposes. In contrast, the ‘tragic mask of ancient days’ was able to stare at the Gorgon ‘with eyes that never close’ (p. 71). This distinction introduces historical difference into the mythopoeic victim/victimiser dialectic: the Gorgon may be constructed as an all-encompassing figure of evil throughout time, but Harrison portrays its presence in the twentieth century as particularly potent. Heinrich Heine, the Jewish narrator of the poem, enforces difference by demonstrating the confusion that a fantastical nineteenth-century poet suffers when he tries to write about atrocity within a tradition of European humanism developed from Erasmus to Goethe. Although he has experienced nineteenth-century anti-Semitism, he is unprepared for the Gorgon’s ultimate manifestation in the twentieth century in the form of the perpetrators of ‘ghettos, gulags, [and] genocide’ (p. 72). In a stanza omitted from the initial broadcast of the film, conceptual awkwardness results from the juxtaposition of Heine’s focus on romantic landscape, and his attempt to understand the Holocaust: And though I gaze in sunlight on springtime’s brightest hues, no longer hunted and hounded I weep for six million Jews. (p. 74)75 The rhyming link between natural colour (‘hues’) and millions of corpses (‘Jews’), the balance between mythical rebirth in the first two lines and then anti-Semitism and mass death in the third and fourth, and the disconcerting placement of twentiethcentury atrocity within the iambic trimeter and tetrameter typical of nursery rhymes; all these elements compound the dichotomy between pre-Holocaust humanism and twentiethcentury warfare. As a result of this conceptual tension, Heine asks for a twentieth-century art of atrocity: ‘Are we still strumming the right lyre/to play us through the century’s fire?’ (p. 64). He implies that the Frankfurt Opera House indulges in a fantasy of autonomous art divorced from modern history. In another complex set of visual and verbal tropes,

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opera – and, by extension, other forms of art produced by this fantasy – is linked to drug addiction, neo-Fascism, and the market economy. Heine argues that, ‘If art can’t cope’ with scenes such as the junkies shooting up in the Frankfurt park, ‘it’s just another form of dope’: both are simply attempts to escape the ‘real’, in this instance, in the guise of the signified referents of atrocity (p. 62). This connection between the audience and the drug abusers that they pass on the way to the theatre (an iteration of the juxtaposition of ‘cardboard city’ and the South Bank from the London performance of The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus) is then complicated by a parallel model between art and capitalism. The visual motif of a pane of glass held by a crane is superimposed on a television screen which advertises the opera house: the frame implies that the market economy of ‘ECU-land’ controls the production of art in the era of postmodernity (p. 60). Just as the junkies are regarded as the detritus of a reality constructed by corporate capitalism, the inextricable link between art and the economy ensures that they will never enter through the theatre’s doors while they persist in their habit. Tropologically, then, art and heroin part company at this moment in the film, and the context of neo-Nazism enters the frame: the police dogs shifting the addicts away from the opera house bark ‘raus’ (‘out’), a command which suffuses a wide range of Holocaust texts, since it was issued when cattle-trucks full of internees reached the concentration or death camp stations (p. 63). Heine appears to imply that an economic base which incurs deprivation risks producing extremist political factions such as neo-Nazism, and that since the theatre, an inherent part of the superstructure, is tied to the economic base, ergo there must be an underlying relationship between art and Nazism. This connection is compounded later in the film, when a photograph of Hitler is strewn with junkies’ needles, and urine is emptied onto Wilhelm II’s face (at the start of the film, the extra-diegetic sound of peeing is imposed on a frame of an addict urinating). Art and totalitarianism are offered as prime examples of cultural exclusivity. Despite this liberal evaluation of the junkies’ plight, the Jewish narrator regards them as an offence to art

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and humanism: following Hegel’s celebration of the ‘spirit’, Heine argues that addiction leaves the Gorgon ‘in control/of all the freedoms of the soul’, and vindicates ‘spirit-suicide’. As opposed to this fantasy of artistic autonomy projected by the Frankfurt Opera House, the sequence suggests, in a sublime moment of artistic self-confidence (if not egotism), that ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ might fulfil the literary role of ‘the right lyre’ to face twentieth-century history (p. 64). Since the text is written for a specifically visual medium, it appears that Harrison believes that only television can draw a mass contemporary audience into a radical theatre of atrocity. In the essay ‘Facing Up to the Muses’, he mirrors Heine’s call for a new kind of art: Robert J. Lifton, the American professor of Psychology, who has charted the effect of the Nazi concentration camps and the nuclear holocaust on our imaginations, and the deeply numbing effect of what must be the most petrifying Medusa-like gaze of all on our sense of futurity has called for artists to discover a ‘theatre that can imagine the end of the world and go beyond that [… a theatre] that can believe in tomorrow’, what he later has to call ‘a theatre of faith’. It sounds to me like a call for the rebirth of tragedy.76 This essay – a written version of Harrison’s Presidential Address to the Classical Association – anticipates ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ in its link between the holocaust and Medusa. Also, the ‘rebirth of tragedy’ takes place both in his verse plays, and through the medium of television. This metamorphosis inculcates a conceptual and linguistic awkwardness of a positive variety, as opposed to the negative kind in the implicit criticism of Heine’s pre-Holocaust humanism. It forms an integral part of a style which struggles to create an art of atrocity that is not ‘another form of dope’ (p. 62). This deliberate barbarity is embedded in a series of fragments of various length and rhyme, including triplets, as opposed to the usual sonnet form or couplets that Harrison prefers. ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ is often repetitious, as in Heine’s refusals to quote

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‘the poems [the Empress of Austria] claimed my spirit wrote’ (pp. 61, 66). The alliteration can also be heavy and repetitive, as in the fifth and sixth lines of the opening stanza: ‘the Gorgon under the golden tide/brings ghettos, gulags, genocide’ (p. 60). These linguistic techniques work in a televisual space: this is not the polished poetry, beyond paraphrase, that Cleanth Brooks champions in The Well Wrought Urn, but the committed writing of an author who wishes to get a message across succinctly and quickly to an audience who do not have the time, in a visual medium, to pore over the intricacies of artifice.77 Narrative immediacy has concerned Harrison ever since his partial departure from the page to the screen. His journalistic poems set in the war-torn former Yugoslavia are deliberately offered as imperfect pieces of committed art; ‘urns’ cannot possibly be produced under the auspices of atrocity when they need to be faxed quickly to a newspaper.78 This immediacy challenges traditional notions of poetic value, as can be illustrated in ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ in its attempt to operate with the televisual: o B o B o B o B o B but those that let the Gorgon out on men o BoB B o o B Are totally broken and cracked. (p. 73) This writing appears stilted on the page: the polysyllabic words in the second line create a less than mellifluous effect. To label it as awkward in the negative sense of diminished literary value does not, however, do justice to its function on screen. A metrical break occurs on the first syllable of ‘broken’, but such disruption is not limited to the auspices of ‘bad’ writing in the sense of poetry that does not scan properly. In George Herbert’s poem ‘Deniall’, there is also a metrical break on this adjective: o B o B B o o B o B Then was my heart broken, as was my verse.79 Herbert signals a mental anguish that requires a distorted rhythm. Harrison is concerned less with a dialectical relationship

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between form and content than with stressing for a television audience the link between evil and the montage of cracked statues of Stalin, which the lines above accompany. His voice pauses slightly – but not for long enough to warrant the inclusion of an unstressed syllable – after the quickly spoken ‘totally’, isolates and emphasises ‘broken’, and then aggressively spits out the onomatopoeic ‘cracked’ (p. 73). Despite this creation of a televisual version of the theatre of atrocity, Harrison remains suspicious of the medium throughout his oeuvre. Poetry, according to the poet, ‘could concentrate our attention on our worst experiences’, whereas other media can leave humanity with the sense that ‘life in this century has had its affirmative spirit burnt out’.80 I explained in my introduction that ‘other media’ includes television: Harrison follows a Marxist doctrine espoused by, for example, Adorno (but not Benjamin) that the mass media depict reality in an ‘apparently effortless way’, whereas in fact they obfuscate referents. The statement is dated 1987. It unintentionally but uncannily anticipates the furore around the mediation of the atrocities of the Gulf War, an event which inspired the ‘occasional’ poem ‘A Cold Coming’. ‘A Cold Coming’ subverts theoretical conceptions of the Gulf War as a simulacrum by being replete with the iconography of atrocity. Jean Baudrillard famously argued that, because the events were presented to the Western public primarily by television, no empirical proof existed that the war was actually happening. These comments are embedded in the article ‘The Reality Gulf’, published in the Guardian in January 1991: Baudrillard insists that ‘From the start it was clear that this war would not exist’; television blurs the distinction between the signifier and referent, so in the contemporary, ‘We are all hostages to media intoxication’.81 Critics such as Christopher Norris have attacked the article as evidence of the absurd conclusions reached by radical postmodernist critiques of warfare.82 Baudrillard’s playful tone certainly grates in the context of ‘real’ atrocities, however impossible it may be to gain access to them through language, but critics have tended to gloss over the fact that the French philosopher

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attacks, rather than condones, the mediation of the event. This debate about referentiality links with arguments surrounding the representation of the Holocaust. Baudrillard writes that television only allows a displaced access to reality; this links with the exponents of linguistic silence, such as Langer, who insist that atrocity cannot be mediated adequately. In contrast, Harrison takes the stance, which Langer would consider outmoded, of a Western journalist out to seek the truth of the event. Located in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, he illustrates the horror of the clash between Allied and Iraqi forces with the introduction of the post-holocaust iconography of burnt corpses and barren wastes. But instead of focusing on the West’s reception of the Gulf War via television, he imagines a dialogue with an Iraqi victim. Inspired by the Gulf War photograph from the Observer of the ‘charred head of an Iraqi soldier’, Harrison determines to speak out against Allied atrocities through a daring act of ventriloquism, which necessarily courts conceptual awkwardness by representing someone who cannot speak (p. 6). Ian Gregson denounces Harrison’s use of the Iraqi character in his poem ‘How Does It Feel? Thoughts On Tony Harrison’s Poem “A Cold Coming”’ as a false representation, ‘inauthentic’ because the dialogue does not adequately reflect how an Iraqi would speak.83 His argument is partial: if the latter spoke in Iraqi, the words would obviously have to be translated for a Western audience, thereby risking distortion; since Harrison’s polyglottal credentials do not extend, as far as I am aware, to this language, a native journalist and poet would be required to write the piece. Harrison confronts the bathos that no authentic voice exists anyway for the dead. This impossibility of the authentic haunts Holocaust studies: the neo-Nazi Faurisson has exploited it to argue that unless a victim of the gas chambers can testify, no one can prove they existed; Lifton espouses that ‘the right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse […] but from that vantage point, of course, there is nothing to report’; Levi famously contends that ‘we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses [of atrocity]’.84 Harrison, even if he may be unfamiliar with these specific examples, is

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aware of the wider problem of silence in relation to the Holocaust, as is evidenced by his decision to speak for, or ventriloquise, the victimised in some of the poems discussed in this chapter. So, without the distraction of a false debate about ‘true’ witnesses, he faces the impossible yet necessary task, for a committed poet, of speaking for the dead Iraqi. Does the critic need to counter that this is an obscene gesture? Is it an act of aesthetic barbarism, violating the respect commanded by a victim of atrocity, which might demand a distanced poetic response, as in Hill’s ‘September Song’, or the possibility of future articulation on their own terms, as in Lyotard’s différend? As yet, Harrison has not attempted to speak for a victim of the Nazi gas chambers, so why does he seize instantly on the prospect of an Iraqi narrator? The answer lies in the immediacy of the poetic response. Writing for a victim of the Holocaust would immediately be complicated by the arguments about the possibility of true witnesses which have raged ever since the first attempts at such writing. In contrast, ‘A Cold Coming’ was faxed to, and printed by, the Guardian during the Gulf War: a contemporaneous reaction seems to have fuelled Harrison’s desire to provide a projected witness of these events, at the same time as reminding the reader that the poem and photograph refer to a real corpse. Indeed, the metaphoricity of the Iraqi narrator is indicated within the poem. In the final couplet, after recording the dialogue on tape, the persona presses ‘REWIND and PLAY/ and [hears] the charred man say:’ (p. 54). The blank paper beyond the colon implies a linguistic silence which has two functions. First, it indicates that, in reality, the Iraqi has no voice. However, it also brings the poem full circle, back to the beginning of the dialogue: only the artifice of the poem can give the Iraqi speech; following Heine’s humanist evaluation of art in ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’, the text is premised on the possibility that poetry might redeem his suffering. ‘A Cold Coming’, though, also questions its metaphoricity by admitting that it can only replace the corpse’s silence with the artifice of literary ventriloquism; the Iraqi narrator worries that the poet will misrepresent his voice to the Western public.

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When the persona mulls over the Greek dramatist Sophocles’ philosophy that ‘the best of fates is not to be’, and implies that non-being is preferable to living in a war-ridden world, the corpse interrupts, frustrated by the obscure European cultural reference, ‘I never thought life futile, fool!’ (p. 51). In ‘V’, moments of humanist piety are subverted by the skinhead: here, an opposite stance, that of nihilism, is denounced by the Iraqi as equally insincere. Harrison insists that culture consists of untrustworthy media like poetry and television that make ‘true’ representation impossible, and echoes Wilfred Owen’s famous lines from ‘Strange Meeting’ to underline his point: ‘That’s your job, poet, to pretend/I want my foe to be my friend’ (p. 53).85 He derides Owen’s romantic vision of redemption as nonsense, and remains hateful towards the allied task-force. Hegel’s Weltgeist is equally beyond the Iraqi’s comprehension: he admits, and does not regret, the fact that he tortured in the name of Saddam, and that he cannot comprehend a humanist totality of ‘spirit’ or ‘humanity’ beyond his nation. Rather than attack Harrison for risking inauthenticity, it might be more generous to condone his work for taking on board, and constantly questioning, the awkwardness of speaking for the dead. Overall, it appears that there are at least three methodological responses to atrocity within Harrison’s production of ‘barbaric’ poems. ‘The Morning After’ forms an instance of ‘direct’ representation, in which the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is contemplated from the viewpoint of a postholocaust writer, a Western humanist eager to endorse peace, without capitulating to an unmitigated celebration of Japanese history. Similarly, the ‘Sonnets for August 1945’ discussed in this chapter rework such themes, each time from a differing perspective; in the case of ‘The Figure’, by utilising a photograph to portray the lack of a pure, ‘post-war’ existence. Some poems from The Loiners prove to be post-holocaust literature by virtue of their placing the atom bombing in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, and the Nazi atrocity in ‘Allotments’, into wider victim, and non-victim, dialectics. ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ and ‘A Cold Coming’ illustrate that Holocaust

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literature cannot be restricted to studies of the particular events in question, since twentieth-century warfare, including the Gulf conflict, has resulted in a wider literature of atrocity. What is missing from the discussion so far are examples of poems which appear to be about other matters, yet prove to be post-Holocaust texts by virtue of their insistence that, for example, the processes of love and mourning have been altered by the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the possibility of nuclear war. Such texts, which celebrate the human in the form of attributes such as memory amidst a nihilistic rendition of twentieth-century history, are discussed in the next three chapters.

NOTES 1 Tony Harrison, ‘The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 32–35, at p. 32. 2 ‘Agrippa’, p. 32. 3 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 160; The Gaze of the Gorgon (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1992), p. 18. 4 ‘Agrippa’, p. 32. 5 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3. 6 ‘Agrippa’, p. 32; The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus (London: Faber, 1990), p. vii. 7 ‘Agrippa’, p. 32. 8 Gorgon, p. 53. 9 Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Michael Joseph, 1981). 10 Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London: Routledge, 1998). 11 Reilly, Belsen, p. 65. 12 Ian Traynor, ‘Men who showed Belsen hell to Britain return’, The Guardian, 15 April 1995, p. 10. 13 Jane Caplan, ‘Introduction’, in Inside Belsen, trans. H. Lévy-Hass (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1982 [1979]), pp. vii–xv, at p. vii; Traynor, ‘Men who showed Belsen hell’, p. 10. 14 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1986), p. 52. La Vita è Bella (‘Life is Beautiful’) could be said to endorse the moment of liberation as closure, since the final shot consists of a freeze-frame of the mother and child who celebrate ‘winning’

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their freedom (dir. Roberto Benigni, 1998). Earlier, an American tank arrives to ‘save’ the surviving child: for the sake of historical accuracy, if the film is set in the Eastern death camps (to be fair, this is not made explicit), then the Soviets would have ‘liberated’ the child; but this would not have been as endearing to a Hollywood audience with the Oscars in mind. Much has been made in the media of the incongruity of an image during the 1999 Oscars ceremony of the concentration camp, which then cut to Benigni winning, and wildly celebrating, the Best Foreign Film award. Harrison and Geoffrey Hill’s sombre contemplation of the agony of the aesthetic would be anathema to a Hollywood audience. 15 In Traynor’s article to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Belsen, Hugh Stewart, then a major in command of an army film unit, remarks, ‘I’ll never forget it. You’re asking me to describe Dante’s Hell’ (‘Men who showed Belsen hell’, p. 10). Impossibility and textuality vie in his statement. Dante provides a literary framework to delineate the Holocaust, and yet ‘You’re asking me’ suggests the impossibility of the task. Harry Oakes, one of the cameramen who entered the camp twenty-four hours behind the troops, says the experience was ‘absolutely staggering’; ‘We could hardly speak.’ ‘Couldn’t speak’ would follow Langer’s exposition of silence in the wake of the Holocaust, but note the qualifying ‘hardly’. 16 Gorgon, p. 13. 17 Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain, trans. J. Bester (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha, 1969). 18 Hill, Collected Poems, p. 67; J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 [1911]). 19 Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1966]), pp. 111–26, 210–20. 20 There is also a link between Barrie’s character and the Pan figure in classical myth in the sense that both are symbols for the celebration of the earthly. 21 Since the demise of the former Soviet Union, the comfortable East– West binary, with which nuclear discourse was formerly concerned, has now fractured into NATO’s concern over the number of Arab countries (such as Iraq) now allegedly building nuclear arsenals, nuclear trading and testing, the problems of terrorists attaining such weapons, and the disposal of atomic waste. 22 Barrie, Peter Pan, p. 40. The shadow forms a precursor of the protagonist in Harrison’s ‘The Shadow of Hiroshima’. 23 Barrie, Peter Pan, p. 25. 24 Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, p. 22; Mikio Kanda (ed.), Widows of Hiroshima, trans. T. Midorikawa (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 101. Ghosts also figure in accounts of the Holocaust to register the dehumanisation process in the camps: Hanna Lévy-Hass refers to them frequently in Inside Belsen; the new arrivals from places such as Auschwitz in December 1944 are ‘ghosts, not like human beings at all’ (p. 48).

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25 For a more extensive treatment of iteration, see Hans Osterwalder’s ‘Repetition and Parallelism in Tony Harrison’s Poetry’, in Repetition, ed. Andreas Fischer (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1994), pp. 207–20. He argues that ‘Repetition, whether conscious or subliminal, is one of the hallmarks of literary texts’, and applies the comment mainly to ‘Cypress & Cedar’ and ‘V’. 26 Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 9; Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 189; Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3. 27 Trackers, p. xix. 28 Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 9. 29 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 189. 30 Plath, Collected Poems, pp. 222–24. 31 Tony Harrison, ‘Preface to The Misanthrope’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 138–54, at p. 140. 32 John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 221–46, at p. 232. 33 John Lucas, ‘Speaking for England?’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 351–61, at pp. 358–60. 34 The epigraph, ‘Poor old sport,/he got caught/right in the mangle’ comes from the various versions of the following mid-twentieth-century popular rhyme: Never let your braces dangle, They might get caught in the mangle. Poor old sport, he got caught Right in the middle of a tangle, Right in the middle he stuck, by gum, Sure and fast as linoleum. Now he’s singing kingdom come. 35 A ‘mitre’ is a bishop’s or abbot’s cap with a cleft on top; it also refers to a joint of two pieces of wood at the angle of ninety degrees (OED, 2nd edn). 36 Since they were pawns of the military during the latter stages of the Second World War, the atomic scientists are encapsulated in the trope too, and adhere to this version of masculinity: the moment the atom splits is compared to the moment the penis reaches the right temperature for sperm to be released. 37 There are no page numbers on the manuscripts held by the Literary and Philosophical Society and the Robinson Library in Newcastle, and the Brotherton Library in Leeds. The Robinson Library contains early versions of ‘Newcastle is Peru’ pertinent to the Holocaust, and letters (MSS. MISC. 75). ‘Rabbi Löw’s’ and ‘Prague ghetto graves’ are scribbled next to a dropped stanza; on another sheet, ‘Rabbi Löw’s/Big grave and the little graves’, ‘Jews, jewels’, ‘bundled in/the cattle trucks to Terezin’, and ‘A gormless Golem [illeg.] by sex/seeking to orgasm but it lost’ are mentioned. One reference is to the Jewish Cemetery in Prague, another to the transit

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camp north of the city: the former contains numerous graves packed into a small plot of land within the old Jewish Quarter, which was decimated after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. ‘Rabbi Löw’s golem’ refers to Prague legends in which he created a creature from Vltava mud, which then ran amok (this is an early version of Frankenstein’s monster). Harrison’s letters include a request for Girolamo Fracastoro’s Syphilis, sive morbus Gallicus in A. Ferri’s De Ligni Sancti (1547), held in the Pybus Collection in the Robinson Library, and a translation by Tate. He states that he is working on a modern verse translation. There is also a letter to Scottish and Newcastle Breweries Ltd, requesting money for the costs of printing (presumably, ‘Newcastle is Peru’). The proposal was rejected: at the top of the letter (24 March 1969), ‘So much for the age-old alliance between poetry and alcohol’ has been typed. 38 Joe’s frozen sperm anticipates the chilled ejaculate in ‘A Cold Coming’. 39 In Lucky Jim, after finding a burn in his bed sheets after a night of tomfoolery, Jim realises ‘with joy that he still has some cigarettes left after last night’s holocaust’ (London: Penguin, 1954), p. 70. I discuss this image in ‘Silence and Awkwardness in Nuclear Discourse’, English, 43.176 (Summer 1994), pp. 151–60, at pp. 155–56. I am indebted to Dr John McLeod at the University of Leeds for bringing it to my attention. 40 Al Alvarez, The Savage God (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 15. 41 Similar gender simplifications occur in the verse play The Common Chorus, in which the phallus is located as the origin of the atom bomb (London: Faber, 1992 [1988]). Harrison’s conception of normative masculinity prevails: even the possibility of lesbianism within the Greenham camp is ignored. 42 Luke Spencer, The Poetry of Tony Harrison (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994). 43 Bryan Cheyette, ‘A Pornographic Universe’, Times Literary Supplement, 29 January 1993, p. 20; D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 [1981]); D.M. Thomas, Pictures at an Exhibition (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). 44 Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, Screen, 24.6 (1983), pp. 18–35. 45 A good example of this is in André Brink’s Looking On Darkness, where the black South African character Jerry mimics the policeman’s construction of blacks as stupid and inferior creatures in order to avoid a search at a road block (London: Flamingo, 1984 [1974]), p. 236. 46 In the MSS held at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle, the veterans are specifically ‘World War I disabled’. Also, a scrap of paper contains fragments of verse including the lines ‘800 odd dead Loiners at the Somme/one July day’. There are mentions of Zeppelins and a character named Joe: perhaps these are early versions of the poem, which would have been set during the First World War. This switch from the battle

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of the Somme to VJ Day demonstrates further Harrison’s interest in the development of twentieth-century atrocity. 47 As with many of the Nazi myths, such as that of the Aryan, the feasibility of a non-Jewish elite proved untenable in practice: Hitler suspected his grandfather might have been Jewish, and ordered a secret investigation by the lawyer Hans Frank in 1942; his inability to prove nonJewish ancestry back to 1715 would have rendered him unsuitable for the SS. Again ironically, Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the Reich Security Head Office and Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, supported the Final Solution vehemently, but may have had Jewish ancestry. His father’s real name was ‘Süss’; he allegedly erased the forename ‘Sarah’ from his grandmother’s gravestone. In Heydrich, Charles Wighton argues that, although the father was Lutheran, ‘There can be little doubt that Martin Bormann held secret evidence that the maternal grandmother of Reinhard Heydrich was either Jewish or had at least Jewish blood’, and that Hitler and Himmler were aware of this, using it to secure Heydrich some of the most unseemly jobs during the Third Reich; his part in the Final Solution thus hides an obscene irony (London: Odhams Press, 1962), pp. 24–26. 48 Bram Stoker, Dracula (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1993 [1897]), p. 17; T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems (London: Faber, 1961), p. 54; Virginia Woolf, The Years (London: Collins, 1977 [1937]), p. 259. 49 In a letter to Alan Ross (28 January 1967), Harrison writes that ‘The White Queen’ ‘is one of a group of 10–12 poems about Europeans in Africa called A Place in the Sun, and Thomas Campey belongs to another group under the general title of The Leeds Quatrains’. During the writing of Cold War poems such as ‘The Curtain Catullus’ in 1966–67 (which were to appear three years later in The Loiners), Harrison encountered directly the public (and paranoid) bureaucracy of the Iron Curtain. The English Embassy in Prague obtained copies of the texts, and encouraged him not to publish them until he returned to the UK. Harrison writes that ‘their surveillance of my writing, and their mild apprehensions, seem to me appalling, if not a little ludicrous’ (7 March 1967). 50 Spencer, Poetry of Tony Harrison, p. 22. 51 OED, 2nd edn. 52 It is significant that Nagasaki has been almost forgotten by Western narrators. This is presumably because Hiroshima marked the phenomenon important to Western history: the first atomic bombing. 53 Trackers, p. vii. 54 Rudolf Höss, Commandant of the Auschwitz extermination camp, infamously collected women’s hair for upholstery. 55 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 232. 56 The poem in question is ‘Heart of Darkness’ from The Loiners. I presume the letter was written by Ross because the first edition of the collection was published by London Magazine in 1970. 57 Lifton, Death in Life, pp. 19, 25.

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58 Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary, p. 20. 59 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). 60 Morrissey, ‘Armageddon from Huxley to Hoban’, pp. 197, 201. 61 Lifton, Death in Life, p. 454. 62 E.M. Forster, A Passage To India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1924]). 63 This study of post-war psychology shares a narrative technique with Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983 [1982]). The novel appears to argue the humanist line, that positivity can always be gleaned from atrocity. Nagasaki breeds a ‘life goes on’ attitude to post-holocaust existence, but, as in Harrison’s photograph, the text points to moments when this emotional screen breaks down. 64 In Forster’s A Passage To India, Mrs Moore is, of course, contrasted with Miss Quested, who, despite her youth, has a less enlightened view of the colony: whereas the former thinks Aziz ‘would unlock his country for her’, the latter ‘regarded him as “India”’ (pp. 79, 81). 65 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. R. Howard (London: Flamingo, 1984), pp. 26-27. 66 Fumaroles and mofettes are crevices spurting volcanic gas; ‘mephitic’ refers to a noxious emanation from the earth. 67 The italicised version of the poem’s title refers to the film; the quotations are taken from the version of the script published in Shadow. 68 Adrian Weale, ‘Introduction’, in Eye-Witness Hiroshima (London: Robinson, 1995), p. xvii. 69 Weale, ‘Introduction’, p. xviii. 70 The Shadow of Hiroshima was actually recorded on the forty-ninth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. 71 The image also recalls the earlier poem ‘The Nuptial Torches’ from the Selected Poems, in which Carlos de Sessa’s flesh slips off like ‘bed-clothes off a lovers’ bed’ as he is burnt alive (p. 60). 72 Dir. Alan Resnais, 1959. 73 See the introduction to Shadow. 74 Although Harrison’s film escapes the charge of historical relativity, Hiroshima mon amour is still clearly a much more sophisticated film in terms of technique. The groundbreaking rejection of dissolves or soft focus in the flashbacks achieved much more for cinematic stylistics than the TV film could ever hope for. At the beginning of Resnais’s film, the documentary footage is intercut with shots of the contorted bodies of the lovers: sex and history are remarkably pitted together from the outset. This can be contrasted with the almost comic scene in which Mitsufuji San seduces Sonoko by treating her to his pigeon lullaby, and the ensuing shot of the mattress, which bounces. 75 The editor of Shadow indicates that ‘Lines within square brackets were not included in the broadcast film’ (p. 30). As Peter Branscombe notes

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in the introduction to Heine’s Selected Verse, ‘romantic nature-symbolism’ came easily to the poet early in his career; later, he debunks it in poems such as ‘Entartung’ in which neither the lily nor the violet is sufficient to symbolise innocence (London: Penguin, 1986 [1968]), pp. xxiii, 133. 76 In Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 440. 77 Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London: Methuen, 1968 [1947]). 78 At the Pictureville reading (1995), Harrison stated that he would have perfected these poems had they not been meant as ‘on the spot’ reportage for the Guardian. 79 George Herbert, The Temple 1633 (Scholar Press, 1968), p. 71. Harrison may not intentionally echo Herbert; nevertheless, the example is illustrative of the differences between the visual and written media. I am indebted to Mr David Lindley at the University of Leeds for pointing out a possible connection between Herbert and Harrison. 80 In Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 9. 81 Jean Baudrillard, ‘The Reality Gulf’, The Guardian, 11 January 1991, p. 25. 82 Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992), pp.11-12, 20-21. 83 Ian Gregson, ‘How Does It Feel? Thoughts On Tony Harrison’s Poem “A Cold Coming”’, London Review of Books, 14 May 1992, p. 23. 84 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Différend, the Referent, and the Proper Name’, Diacritics, 14.3 (Fall 1984), pp. 4–14; Lifton, Death in Life, p. 204; Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, p. 63. 85 Owen’s famous line is ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’ (The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Jon Silkin [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981]), p. 198.

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Chapter Two

Amorous Discourse and ‘Bolts of Annihilation’ in the American Poems Harrison’s Love Poetry Given its propensity to universalise the human condition, it comes as no surprise that poetry has drawn extensively on the discourses of love. Declarations of love that appear to treat the amorous as transcendent rather than affected by historical contexts have been central to the history of the lyric; contemporary theatre audiences may grapple with the difficulties of Shakespeare’s verse, but can fall back on an appreciation of some of his supposedly universal themes, such as love, death and aberrant families. In contemporary poetry, the depiction of the besotted is always double-edged: no young poet worth his or her salt has not tackled this troubled subject of narcissistic self-inquiry, and yet critical reactions to such work are often dismissive. A group of poets including Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Charles Causley judged the Arvon Poetry Competition in 1981; without Larkin’s knowledge, poems about love or nature were ruled out at an early stage. In a letter to C.B. Cox, Larkin later retorted that these were precisely the ones he might have liked.1 Falling in love is popularly conceived to be a democratic process that comes to us all; whoever we are, we have no control over its joyous pretensions. So, the logic of Larkin goes, we can all enjoy a poem about falling for the opposite, or same, sex. Hence the interest of psychoanalysis in the phenomenon: love may be a universal psychological state that can be demythologised by recourse to concepts of neurosis, or the mother’s breast. A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes’s epic 87

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exposition of the amorous via psychoanalysis, is premised on the assumption that there is a language of love.2 The musings of Nietzsche, Freud and Proust on the subject all add up, for Barthes, to a totalised langue which contextual modalities can only milk. This is not to say that poetry and psychoanalysis have not paid due attention to the agency of love within specific contexts; it is just that the temptation to universalise the amorous has always been monumental in disciplines set up to celebrate, and denigrate, the human condition. Ama Ata Aidoo, after being cherished by critics for her political snapshots of post-colonial life in Ghana, produced an ostensibly anti-political novel about relationships, Changes: A Love Story.3 However, as a whole, the book still demonstrates that personal experiences of the amorous cannot be separated from power relations in the public sphere. In relation to the working class rather than race, Walter Greenwood’s novel Love on the Dole uncovers the difficulties of loving under a capitalist system of exploitation in the specific form of severed apprenticeships.4 Tony Harrison’s poetry joins this tradition of historicist writing about love that explores its function in the past, as well as its relevance to the present. What makes his work different from that of Aidoo and Greenwood is his account of the amorous in the context of the atomic era. In Chapter 1, I demonstrated that amorous discourse is inseparable from the representation of the holocaust in The Shadow of Hiroshima. I also noted that Harrison’s interest in love and sexuality dates back to his first book, The Loiners, as is evident in the original blurb I quoted from the Alan Ross Collection: The poems develop […] the relation of public acts and attitudes to private tenderness […] history is not only outside but inside under the bed, and enacted in the very forms our sexuality chooses to express itself. At this stage in his oeuvre, the poet interprets his work in terms of a synthesis of sex and the Cold War. The infamous ‘Reds under the bed’ adage is reinterpreted by Harrison: Western paranoia in the late 1960s and early 1970s pertaining

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to Communism is replaced by a dialectical appreciation of the amorous, which forms part of a larger model in which the private and the public are inseparable. This concept is enacted in the poem ‘The Bedbug’ (from The Loiners) when the narrator pithily fuses the poles in the lovers’ moment of triumph: Comrade, with your finger on the playback switch, Listen carefully to each love-moan, And enter in the file which cry is real, and which A mere performance for your microphone.5 This engagement with a totalitarian insistence on the elision between private and public space was inspired by Harrison’s sojourn in Prague (1966–67). And yet, rather than focus on the citizens’ suffering under the occupation by the former Soviet Union – which did not end until the Velvet Revolution in 1989 – Harrison imagines that love, here in the guise of sexuality, can subvert the political by mocking the bug’s desire for incriminating information. This introduces the problem of an unmitigated endorsement of the personal in the context of totalised public power. Is the celebration of the lovers’ defiance nothing more than a humanist fantasy of the ‘triumph of the spirit’ in a limiting situation, which thereby occludes the historical?6 ‘Durham’, also from The Loiners, functions as a palinode to this fantasy in ‘The Bedbug’, since the vision of love and sexuality’s battle against the state entails an ultimate negativity. The couple do not subvert the political, but appear to remain impotently attached to the state: […] You complain that the machinery of sudden death, Fascism, the hot bad breath of Powers down small countries’ necks shouldn’t interfere with sex. They are sex, love, we must include all these in love’s beatitude. Bad weather and the public mess

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust drive us to private tenderness, though I wonder if together we, alone two hours, can ever be love’s anti-bodies in the sick, sick body politic. (p. 70)

Here, a combination of puns and metaphorical fusion connects the private with the historical. In ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, military diction mixes with sexuality in the description of masturbation as an ‘ack-ack ejac-/ulatio shot through the dark’ (p. 16). ‘Durham’ builds on such fusions by inscribing the expansionist policies of Fascism as a grotesque seduction scene: their ‘hot bad breath’ makes smaller countries sexually subservient (p. 70). ‘They are sex, love’ is anticipated in this stanza: Fascists and Communists are imagined in terms of the body primarily because their actions can be constructed and explicated through the ‘beatitude’ (blessedness) of sexuality. More importantly for this chapter, Harrison demonstrates the dialectical simultaneity in which he places amorous discourse and twentieth-century history. If ‘history is not only outside but inside under the bed’, the concepts of love and power must be inextricable. Such tropological fusions run through the rest of The Loiners: the White Queen and PWD man’s domineering sexuality cannot be divorced from neo-colonialism; in ‘The Curtain Catullus’, the narrator wishes to escape into the fantasy of sex with his ‘gorgeous red bird’ divorced from the contemporaneous Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia (p. 53). ‘The Curtain Catullus’ mentions the Hus monument, which commemorates a rector of Charles University in Prague, who was burnt at the stake as a heretic in 1415 (p. 52). This links with ‘The Nuptial Torches’, which provides the most explicit correlation between love and historical atrocity in The Loiners. Queen Isabella watches, appalled, as the king of the Dutch Republic burns heretics during his wedding ceremony. In an early version of the bedsheets/holocaust juxtaposition in The Shadow of Hiroshima, flesh falls from the victims like ‘bed-clothes off a lover’s bed’ (p. 60). Desire cannot be divorced from the spectacle, since the naked male bodies provide

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unintentional erotic entertainment for Isabella: even though, sickeningly, Carlos de Sessa’s flesh spits ‘like wood’, he proves ‘good/For a girl to look at’. At the end of the poem, she worries that the king’s annihilation of the heretics will be paralleled by violent expressions of his sexuality. After The Loiners, the lyric treatment of love in Harrison’s work is mainly restricted, for a while, to the familial bonds described throughout the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, which dominated Harrison’s output during the 1970s. In the 1980s, Harrison returns to the amorous in a series of narrative poems set in the US. These ‘American’ poems deserve to be treated in a separate chapter because they mark a turning point in his work, containing as they do the most extensive love poetry in his oeuvre. In the Alan Ross letters, Harrison suggests that his second marriage can be linked to this new output: It’s been a long haul changing my life. I have some longish poems I’ll send you in the New Year now that I’ve come out of poetic hibernation. The letter is dated 14 October 1980. After the critical acclaim of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, Harrison suddenly produced the long poem ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’. First published in pamphlet form by Bloodaxe Books in 1981, it immediately divided critics as to its importance in his work. As the poet indicates in his interview with John Haffenden, the issue of working-class inarticulacy explored in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence became overshadowed by his desire to produce love, and nature, poetry: I don’t read America with the same spikey class instincts as I read England, and I therefore feel more free – since I also live in more natural surroundings when I’m in America – to think about other issues. Those poems are often addressed to a partner, in the way Donne’s poems are addressed to a mute listener.7 These ‘issues’ include the amorous; the silent ‘partner’ is a representation of Harrison’s second wife, the opera singer Teresa Stratas.

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Critics who insisted on interpreting the poetry solely in terms of its representation of class conflict found the early American poems difficult to evaluate. Some believed the appearance of ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ was a temporary aberration from the more overtly political sonnets: in a contemporaneous review, Christopher Reid refers to it as a ‘slight’ piece.8 In contrast, Alan Young, Mary Garofalakis and Tony Harrison himself interpret it in terms of a dialectic between the personal and historical, which links and builds on similar models set up in The Loiners and the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence. Young notes that it is simultaneously a love poem and an elegy, Garofalakis that it dissolves a melancholy/delight opposition, and Harrison that it ‘asks what an undeniable capacity for joy tastes like in a world which is full of pain, misery, despair, hunger, and possible extinction’.9 The American poems written after ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ pursue the joy/pain fusion in the text’s juxtaposition of love and the atom bomb. In Culture and Identity in the Work of Six Contemporary Poets, Linden Peach assumes that ‘Facing North’ is about the writer’s fluctuation between ‘anxieties and a sense of security that he feels the North and his working-class past provides’.10 For Peach, the chaos imagery in the poem reflects the former; the espoused value of labour the latter. While such a reading is viable, I argue in my analysis of the poem later in this chapter that it sidelines the poem’s attempt to address a loved object. Due to the structure of the American poems, a different methodological approach to the holocaust is required from that of the first chapter. As I have argued elsewhere, there are three basic levels of engagement with the historical and projected events.11 The first constitutes a ‘direct’ and overt textual representation, or an extended account of the events’ relevance to the contemporary: the poems that belong in this category are discussed in Chapter 1. In the second category, literary texts could be said to be examples of Holocaust literature if they are written or read in the context of the respective events. My analyses of ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ and ‘A Cold Coming’ fit into this category, since they are not

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H/holocaust poems in the sense of speaking directly about the events. Instead, they engage with similar issues, and form part of a wider literature of atrocity. The third approach, which is central to my discussion of amorous discourse in this chapter, is that of references to the events triggered within single texts. These may be termed Zerstörungsblitze, or ‘bolts of annihilation’. This phrase originates from Hugo Friedrich’s study Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik.12 Although Friedrich applies the term to European Modernist poetry, it remains pertinent to contemporary writing: Aus deutschen, französischen, spanischen, englischen Schriften über die gegenwärtige Lyrik seien weitere Stichworte angeführt […] Zerstörungsblitze, schneidende Bilder, brutale Plötzlichkeit, dislozieren, astigmatische Sehweise, Verfremdung […] 13 Some key terms follow from German, French, Spanish and English texts about contemporary poetry […] bolts of annihilation, stark imagery, brutal abruptness, dislocation, twisted perspectives, alienation […] This list of words describes the alienating poetics of Modernist writers who disorientate the reader through a process of defamiliarisation. Friedrich interprets the ensuing dissonances and poetic fragments as part of Modernism’s attempt to indicate ‘a transcendence whose harmony and wholeness can never be perceived again’.14 Giving the example of Mallarmé, he insists that modernity’s rejection of an idealised, transcendental space inculcates a literature of silence: the French poet’s work is ‘imbued with silence in the form of “silent” objects’, which have lost the power to signify beyond their physical presence.15 Harrison’s work would not appear to fit this definition of the literature of silence, since the subjects of his work constantly struggle towards a form of articulation. ‘Disorientation’, ‘loss of order’, ‘incoherence’; none of these descriptions seems applicable either to Harrison’s accessible mode of poetry which aims at linguistic clarity and rhythm

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through classical techniques such as metre. That is, unless ‘disorientation’ is appropriated to refer to a notion of preholocaust existence. Friedrich’s phrase ‘bolts of annihilation’ is particularly relevant to my discussion of Harrison’s American poems, since Zerstörungsblitze tend to have a disorientating effect when triggered within the individual texts. This literary term is more precise for my purposes than other, similar devices, such as the epiphany, since ‘annihilation’ functions as a particularly resonant noun phrase in the context of atrocity. It denotes ‘the action or process of reducing to nothing, or of blotting out existence’.16 The specifically twentieth-century conception of genocide has resulted, therefore, in a revitalisation of the Latin-derived word, both in terms of the victims of the Holocaust, and the sense of apocalypse that this event, and the possibility of a global nuclear war, has instilled into the contemporary.

The Language of Love The term ‘amorous discourse’ requires further explication, since Harrison draws extensively on, but then historicises, the langue of love. It originates from Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, a poststructuralist survey of amorous parole. Primarily, this study provides a useful vocabulary for writing about love. It also initiates a fruitful contrast with Harrison’s poetry, since both Harrison and Barthes attempt, as postHolocaust writers, to respond to the amorous in the context of atrocity. Barthes’s terminology can be fruitfully applied to the American love poems in their engagement with various amorous situations, but the differences between the authors will also be stressed: whereas for Barthes nothing exists outside language, the poet retains the mimetic concept of extrinsic events. A ‘bolt of annihilation’ punctures Barthes’s study when he asks whether the extreme emotions that love arouses are comparable to those suffered by the victims of the Holocaust:

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The amorous catastrophe may be close to what has been called, in the psychotic domain, an extreme situation, a ‘situation experienced by the subject as irremediably bound to destroy him’; the image is drawn from what occurred at Dachau. Is it not indecent to compare the situation of a love-sick subject to that of an inmate of Dachau? Can one of the most unimaginable insults of History be compared with a trivial, childish, sophisticated, obscure incident occurring to a comfortable subject who is merely the victim of his own Image-repertoire? Yet these two situations have this in common: they are, literally, panic situations: situations without remainder, without return: I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever. (pp. 48–49) The link between love and the historical is instigated in the realms of the psychological. This passage originates from the section named ‘catastrophe’: Barthes defines the latter as a ‘Violent crisis during which the subject, experiencing the amorous situation as a definitive impasse, a trap from which he can never escape, sees himself doomed to total destruction’ (p. 48). ‘Crisis’ is the keyword: the amorous situation or relationship freezes into a constant state of confusion; nothing is or can be resolved. The amorous subject or lover cannot extricate himself or herself from the apocalyptic slide into catastrophe, and realises that he or she will be ‘destroyed’. This ‘destruction’ is psychological: the subject cannot cope with the extreme situation he or she is forced into, and a mental breakdown or psychosis is initiated. At this point, Barthes tentatively makes a link between love and the Holocaust located in the ‘real’. In The Empty Fortress, Bruno Bettelheim compares the behaviour of autistic children to that of the inmates of Dachau.17 Barthes substitutes autistic children with lovers: when they face the camp, the inmates suffer an ‘extreme situation’ similar to the amorous subject’s catastrophe; they believe that when they enter the gates they are

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doomed to die. Barthes’s discomfort with this comparison – evident in the uncertain verb phrases (‘may be close’), and selfinterrogation in the middle of the paragraph (‘Is it not indecent…?’) – arises from his embarrassment with confronting the ‘real’, in which these extreme situations are located (pp. 48–49). Barthes, in his poststructuralist phase, questions the efficacy of the term ‘referentiality’: language speaks in a textual space divorced from reality; texts thus consist of a mosaic of signifiers engaged in an infinite play of multiple meanings. However, in A Lover’s Discourse, history with a capital ‘H’ is first evoked, as in Harrison’s poetry, as a ‘real’ state in which the holocaust ‘happened’. In the passage above, the event is then transformed into an elusive linguistic technique: it is one of History’s ‘most unimaginable insults’ (p. 48). The amorous subject’s extreme situation is compared to this insult, and appears incongruous. But if the latter is beyond knowledge, it must affect the subject or inmate in the same way as the uninsulted lover, since an unimaginable insult cannot cause pain. Amorous subjects’ extreme situations are also trivial, childish, sophisticated (unnecessarily complex?) and private, as opposed to the serious, and public, atrocity of the Holocaust. Whereas the Dachau inmates are starved or worked to the bone, the amorous subject is only a victim of his or her metaphor, such as ‘I’ll die without you’, a sentence that might be uttered in the midst of the catastrophe. There is also an ontological distinction: the amorous subject enjoys a masochistic desire to ‘be in love’ more than he or she actually enjoys the loved object or ‘other’ (a symptom of ‘Imagerepertoire’), whereas the inmates of Dachau are unable to savour an existentialist notion of choice, and are trapped within the camp’s gates. Unable to make a concrete link between love and the Holocaust located in the ‘real’, Barthes falls back on the opening psychological gambit. He confidently focuses on the effect of the catastrophe rather than the extreme situations themselves, and reiterates the point made in the first sentence that the subjects of both events feel trapped in a process of

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mental disintegration (whereas the commodified inmates’ bodies are wasted, the amorous subject’s body remains intact), but takes the idea a step further: their psychological states are ineradicably altered when confronted with catastrophe. The lover and inmate cannot return to the ‘innocent’ psychological state experienced before the catastrophe; none of this is retained (remaindered) once it is under way. Barthes explains that this happens because the borders between ‘self’ (amorous subject or inmate) and ‘other’ (loved object or camp) are blurred as the former begins to absorb the consciousness of the latter. The lovers cannot then function properly without recourse to one another; the victim/victimiser opposition breaks down in the context of violence when the inmates are willing to commit the same atrocities on each other as the warders unleash. The link now appears neatly substantiated, but there is still a problem of choice that flaws Barthes’s comparison at this point. Both the amorous subject and inmate are collapsed into the unspecified pronoun ‘I’ who has projected himself or herself into the ‘other’. However, whereas the lover may choose to lose himself or herself in the Imagerepertoire and imminent catastrophe, the inmates do not have this luxury, and are forced to enter Dachau. Barthes thus oscillates between tentativeness and assertion in his collocation between love and the Holocaust in the passage above. This breakdown of a death/eroticism opposition can be seen to operate throughout the text: I. ‘I am waiting for a telephone call, and this waiting makes me more anxious than usual. I try to do something, but without success. I walk back and forth in my room: the various objects – whose familiarity usually comforts me – the gray roofs, the noises of the city, everything seems inert to me, cut off, thunder-struck – like a waste planet, a Nature uninhabited by man.’ (p. 87) The prospect of erotic communication results in a disturbance of the ‘real’ and a state of alienation that Barthes terms deréalité (disreality). In this state the subject articulates the world with great difficulty; in an ‘unreal’ state, the world is

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just plain unfamiliar. Cut off from the ‘innocent’ reality experienced before the relationship began, the amorous subject constructs a new, defamiliarised space in the form of an archetypal post-holocaust landscape. This disorientation links with the psychological state of some survivors of the camps. For them, the ‘real’ is constructed in the context of the Holocaust: the world is split into victims and non-victims who experience completely different realities. This disreality emerges in several Holocaust texts. Heinrich Böll speaks of a new, post-holocaust sense of apocalypse: he recoils from a post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki world in which ‘the baker without knowing it, can knead this new death [nuclear fallout] in bread, the postman can bring it into the house with the mail’.18 Elie Wiesel demonstrates how this new reality works in statements such as ‘that night the soup tasted of corpses’.19 The inmate and amorous subject’s disrealities are both pervaded by this strong sense of death (in Harrison’s American poems, in the guise of the atomic era). But whereas Wiesel’s reality entails a cannibalistic link between food and the dead inmates, Barthes constructs the erotic object as a corpse in A Lover’s Discourse. The body is reduced to abstract parts, ‘eyelashes, nails, roots of the hair, the incomplete objects’ (p. 71). During this description, Barthes realises that by constructing the various disembodied parts as separate sources of eroticism he has simultaneously engaged in the process of ‘fetishizing a corpse’. In the sections ‘s’abîmer’ (to be engulfed) and ‘absence’, the breakdown of a love/death opposition occurs through the projection of the amorous self into the loved object. A ‘bolt of annihilation’ in the form of an acute sense of death is experienced by the amorous subject whether he or she is in despair or fulfilment, or whether the loved object is present or absent, a phenomenon prevalent in Harrison’s American poems. In ‘to be engulfed’, this feeling initiates the subject’s metaphorical ‘death’: he or she feels the body disappear as it dissolves, falls, flows and melts away (p. 10). In ‘absence’, ‘death’ is the inevitable result of the lost, loved object. In the anxiety of the present situation, the latter is ‘absent as referent, present as allocutory’: this insupportable doubleness results in the

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subject’s need to forget the loved object (offering a convenient psychoanalytic excuse for adultery); if not, Barthes supposes, he or she ‘should [would] die’ (pp. 15, 14). In ‘to be engulfed’, he argues that the trope of annihilation is an integral part of the lover’s discourse: it articulates a narcissistic and masochistic desire to be lost completely in the Image-repertoire. Hence the amorous subject must be ‘in love with [the idea of] death’ as well as with the loved object (p. 11). The particular ‘death’ that the subject chooses is ‘easeful’ (p. 12). Quoting from John Keats’s poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, Barthes champions the discourse’s ‘death’ as ‘liberated from dying’. (Romantic and Metaphysical poetry fuel the amorous discourse drawn upon by Harrison, as I demonstrate in this chapter.) It is not ‘real’, and when the bolt of annihilation passes, the subject enjoys the ‘ecstasy’ of a psychic rebirth from this ‘engulfed’ state. Barthes moves on to discuss how the amorous subject can articulate this collapsed love/death opposition. The answer is similar to that which post-Holocaust writers such as Harrison face: he or she can only speak in codes of silence and embarrassment. In the section named ‘écrire’ (to write), Barthes muses on the inexpressibility of the amorous: the Barthes persona who writes love poems is frustrated by his texts’ evasion of the referent. For example, he uses abstract nouns, and comments: ‘I do not know that the word “suffering” expresses no suffering and that, consequently, to use it is not only to communicate nothing but even, and immediately, to annoy, to irritate’ (p. 98). This is a familiar problem with Holocaust literature: abstract language such as ‘suffering’ tends to alienate readers as it is unable to convey adequately the horror of the real camps. Barthes then follows the apologists for linguistic silence by concluding that this problem of referentiality can only be solved by ceasing to write. He argues that the amorous subject produces a mere inscription of the Image-repertoire; in other words, a self-referential text which can only discuss the impossibility of writing about the loved object. Trying to write about love or the Holocaust thus leads to hopeless embarrassment; to confront, as Barthes memorably terms it, ‘the muck of language’, a hysterical space where language is

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‘both too much and too little’ (p. 99). The signifier ‘suffering’ attempts to refer to too many moments of ‘real’ suffering, and so communicates nothing about any of them. This discourse of embarrassment conveys as much sense as the semiotics of silence. However, this pessimistic conclusion remains as a source of anxiety throughout A Lover’s Discourse. When the amorous subject or Holocaust writer refers to the inexpressibility of the loved object or camp inmates, the latter metamorphose into ‘leaden figure[s…] dream creature[s] who [do] not speak, and silence […] is death’ (p. 168). Barthes entertains a nostalgia for the ‘real’ at this point, a poststructuralist sentimentality (as he perceives it) which culminates in his last work Camera Lucida, which refers to an intractable referent in photography, which is simply there, authoritative and indubitable. In this sense, he moves closer to Harrison’s conception of extrinsic referents outside discourse. If the loved object is beyond representation, he or she is in danger of being forgotten; similarly, if Holocaust literature did not exist, the event would be shrouded in silence, and open to a complete reconception by revisionists, and ‘deniers’. Barthes bemoans this fact that the loved object cannot speak for itself within the amorous subject’s discourse. Similarly, it is impossible for atrocity to speak for itself (or resurrect itself) within the Holocaust writer’s text. Inconsequential amorous discourse is termed merely potin (gossip). Trapped in the realms of endless representation, Holocaust literature can only function in the context of A Lover’s Discourse as failed gossip. At this point, a sharp distinction needs to be made between Harrison’s and Barthes’s approach to the Holocaust. Barthes’s capitulation to potin results from the theoretical framework of a poststructuralist who has accepted the rupture of a mimetic relationship between language and reality. Even though both writers are interested in the overlap between amorous discourse and atrocity, the poet, as someone who has taught history to schoolchildren, is less interested in the theoretical inability of the ‘real’ to speak through language than in inscribing the event into his own, mediated and culturally specific narrative of a post-Holocaust author. Even if Harrison might be unimpressed

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by the tenets of poststructuralism, his self-conscious deployment of genre, tradition and intertextuality in the American poems and elsewhere suggests a link with the concept of discourse beyond authorial intention. But instead of eliding, as Barthes does, a victim/non-victim opposition by comparing the anguish of a lover to the psychological disturbance unleashed on the inmates of concentration camps or death camps, Harrison, a materialist in the tradition of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, keeps the two poles distinct. In the following discussion, I argue that he is concerned with the fusion of the opposition in terms of his humanist dialectic, in which the notion of ‘love’ should not be confused with the psychology of victims, but nevertheless remains inseparable from the pre-holocaust contemporary.

Amorous Presence in the American Poems In the American poems, the presence of the new, loved object results in extreme situations in which love/annihilation oppositions collapse.20 For example, in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, the binary dissipates due to a state of excessive happiness which results from the presence of the loved object in ‘our bedroom’, where the poem is uttered: the text begins as an aubade to celebrate the amorous, and the new day (p. 192). The poet, or amorous subject, searches for another literary figure who has depicted this excruciating situation, and recalls Keats’s problematisation of excess.21 Significantly, the poets’ articulations of the inextricability of extreme states differ in that the twentieth-century writer turns immediately to the trope of the holocaust; in line 67, the nuclear bomb is likened to Keats’s vessel in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.22 Harrison refers to the opening lines: ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,/ Thou foster-child of silence and slow time’, which are riddled with ambiguity and apparent contradiction.23 The narrator appears to address the urn as a receptacle of silence, but at this point he could also be speaking to one of the depicted women on the vessel, the text, or even the poet himself. Apparent

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contradictions contained within the adjectival phrases then compound the ambivalence: it is, apparently, both moving and still; fixed in eternal silence, but also open to mutability. ‘Unravish’d’ creates a further linguistic instability, as ‘ravished’ can mean destroyed, raped, or filled with delight. Harrison displays his sensitivity to this linguistic slipperiness when he describes the urn/bomb as exploding and ravishing ‘all silence, and all odes’ (p. 193). He reverses the conventional postholocaust iconography of silence, and replaces it with the eternal noise of a repeated or continuous explosion. And if it destroys all odes, then he subverts Keats’s premise that the urn/woman/poem/poet are both mutable and immutable. With his late-twentieth-century sense of a possible nuclear war, he projects his worry that they can only be mutable.24 Harrison then appears to evoke an analogy between rape and the holocaust, by playing with the ambiguities of ‘ravish’. To echo Barthes’s investigation of the ‘love-sick subject’ in A Lover’s Discourse, is it not indecent to compare a projected nuclear holocaust to a violent sexual act (p. 49)? And in what sense can poetry be raped? Perhaps Harrison simply implies that the explosion would destroy it as a totalised genre. A further complication is then introduced by another meaning of ‘ravish’. How can poetry or silence be both raped and enraptured? Harrison seems to entertain a problematic elision between desire and violence, but neither poetry nor the body can be filled with delight if they are annihilated. Perhaps the text indicates that the prospect of a future holocaust injects the genre with an unstable life-force, which creates its ‘essence’, ‘radical precariousness’ and ‘radical […] historicity’.25 The lines analysed so far from ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ occur within a set of Zerstörungsblitze that enact a love/ holocaust dialectic through classical imagery between lines 61 and 74: And it isn’t just the gap of sixteen years, a bigger crop of terrors, hopes and fears, but a century of history on this earth between John Keats’s death and my own birth –

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years like an open crater, gory, grim, with bloody bubbles leering at the rim; a thing no bigger than an urn explodes and ravishes all silence, and all odes, Flora asphyxiated by foul air unknown to either Keats or Lemprière, dehydrated Naiads, Dryad amputees dragging themselves through slagscapes with no trees, a shirt of Nessus fire that gnaws and eats children half the age of dying Keats (pp. 193–94) Keats’s use of classical imagery to articulate a lover’s discourse has been ineradicably altered by an intervening century of war. This creates a linearity of twentieth-century atrocity in a similar way to poems from The Loiners, such as ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, in which the two world wars are confused in the epic masturbator’s mental landscape (p. 16). But the abstract imagery here is markedly different. The firebombing and slagscapes could refer to the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, H-bomb testing, napalm attacks during the Vietnam conflict, or an imagined future after a global war. Nevertheless, the holocaust iconography is unmistakable: the ‘foul’, irradiated atmosphere was unfamiliar to Keats, and to J. Lemprière, the author of Bibliotheca Classica, which the poet drew on in his work (p. 193).26 Nature is destroyed (‘slagscapes with no trees’), and explosions are embodied as ‘Nessus fire’ that kills children; this iconography entails a rewriting of classical amorous discourse (p. 194). Chloris changed into the goddess Flora when chased by Zephyrus, and then breathed flowers, which spread over the countryside; in Harrison’s poem, she is asphyxiated by the contaminated air of the irradiated landscape. Similarly, Nessus’s robe here metamorphoses into the blast which consumes the innocent. (This garment was smeared with the poisonous blood of the Hydra, which she advised Deianeira to send to her unfaithful husband Heracles.) Such imagery accounts for the prevalence of a love/ holocaust dialectic. This phenomenon then mirrors the

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severing of other, more general binaries throughout the rest of the poem. Critics have noted that this is a poem in which oppositions are prone to collapse: for example, Garofalakis perceives that melancholy and delight are ‘in a relationship that is one of such close coexistence, one inside the other, that it has no sharp division line’.27 However, there is one fusion that critics have so far missed. Kumquats are depicted as a compound of opposites: they are both plum-sized and orangelike (plorange?), with a sweet rind and an acid pulp. (The tangelo, mentioned in the second line, is similarly a hybrid; in this instance, of tangerines and grapefruit.) ‘K/cum/quat’ also comprises a linguistic compound: it originates from the Cantonese dialect’s synthesis of the Chinese names for gold and orange (kin/kü).28 The fruit’s rejection of fixed labels then results in the metaphor at the heart of the poem: ‘Life has a skin of death that keeps its zest’ (p. 193). According to the poet, life and death, like day and night in the text, are not opposites: they collapse into the integrated metaphor of the fruit. Hence humanism is embedded in the poem’s ultimate philosophy: with the prospect of annihilation, the need to celebrate the loved object seems more necessary and precious. Conversely, to venerate the amorous, the narrator must always simultaneously contemplate life’s ‘skin of death’. This fusion of various opposites instigates fantasy. In A Lover’s Discourse, the ensuing ‘disreality’ caused by the loved object inculcates codes of silence and awkwardness, or the ‘muck of language’ (p. 99). In the following passage, disreality emerges through a disorientation of the senses: but dead men don’t eat kumquats, or drink wine, they shiver in the arms of Proserpine, not warm in bed beside their Fanny Brawne, nor watch her pick ripe grapefruit in the dawn as I did, waking, when I saw her twist, with one deft movement of a sunburnt wrist, the moon, that feebly lit our last night’s walk past alligator swampland, off its stalk. I thought of moon-juice juleps when I saw,

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as if I’d never seen the moon before, the planet glow among the fruit, and its pale light make each citrus on the tree its satellite. (p. 194) This erotic contemplation of the loved object, in which the silent Teresa Stratas blends with Keats’s Fanny, initiates a fantasy in which the moon is interchangeable with grapefruit. A simple act appears celestial: the amorous subject watches the loved object pick a grapefruit, in which she simultaneously tweaks the moon off its stalk. The glowing planet in line 91 also appears to refer to the moon. The poet celebrates it as if it were a fresh sight; instead of an uninhabited wasteland analogous with death, it appears as a life-giving force through the fruit trees. But ‘planet’ could also refer to the Earth’s landscape viewed in the gaps between the grapefruit. The term is defined astronomically as a heavenly body (but not its satellites) revolving in an approximately circular orbit around the sun, whereas historically, and etymologically, it signifies a body distinguished from fixed stars by having an apparent motion of its own, including the moon and sun.29 Hence two separate heavenly bodies are allowed to commingle in the artifice of the poem. This fantastical confusion then results in the tropological blend of citrus fruits and the moon/Earth’s satellites. Parataxis makes the scene seem even more confusing. Where does it take place? On the margins of the bedroom, or during ‘last night’s walk’ (p. 194)? The latter would appear to be the case, but then this incurs a shift in time from ‘warm in their beds’ to the previous stroll; the narrator has already noted at the beginning of the poem that ‘moon-like globes of grapefruit […] hang/outside our bedroom’ (p. 192). This disorientation of space is complemented by the slipping borders evoked in Keats’s poetry, since the scene unfolds between waking and sleeping, night and day. The state of the persona also compounds the illusions: the fantastical mixture of the moon and Earth is likened to ‘moon-juice juleps’ (p. 194). A julep is a medicinal or alcoholic drink: the persona compares his disreality to a state of illness or drug-induced intoxication. As the fantasy continues, awkwardness arises in the form of

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a heightened sense of perception which momentarily buckles the metrical pattern: o B o B o B o B o B Each evening when I reach to draw the blind B B o B B B o B B B stars seem the light zest squeezed through night’s black rind; o B B B o B B o o B the night’s peeled fruit the sun, juiced of its rays, o B o B o B o B o B first stains, then streaks, then floods the world with days. (p. 194) The first and last lines scan as regular iambic pentameter, but in the middle section, the metrical pattern gives way to rhythms of heightened language. Rhythmical stresses such as ‘zest’ and ‘peeled’ jostle with the preceding and succeeding full beats, and would need to be demoted in order to fit into the metrical pattern. By the end of the third line, natural rhythm completely replaces the metre with the breaks on ‘peeled’ and ‘juiced’. Pragmatism (‘Each evening when I reach to draw the blind’) is subverted by the need to celebrate the linguistic above a mimetic sign/referent model. Language creates its own, self-referential ‘disreality’; however, this feat cannot be sustained, and the metaphors return to the empirical. ‘Days’ then instigates metrical breaks at the beginning of the next three lines, as the narrator is capitulated back into the ‘real’. ‘Days’ are portrayed here as bleak, until the return to Micanopy, in which, in contrast with the overarching, exultant aubade, the narrator remembers his mother’s funeral (and the detail of Christmas fruit stacked next to her wreaths), bad weather in Leeds, his daughter’s accident in which she was hit by a truck in Newcastle, ‘drugged sleep’, and blubbing upon waking. The ‘ghosts of the inarticulate’, whether Holocaust victims or hibakusha, initiated metrical tension in the poems analysed in Chapter 1.30 Here, a more general sense of disillusion causes the breaks, which then give way as order is restored with the romantic vision of Micanopy. The bunched stresses in the second line above indicate the humanist’s

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desperate need to cling on to positivity: despite a sense of gloom, the ‘light zest squeezed through night’s black rind’ reflects the poet’s new desire to celebrate the amorous in the context of a nasty divorce, and his knowledge of twentiethcentury history. This metrical tension can be evaluated positively as a manifestation of ‘disreality’. In contrast, the closure – which concludes the lover’s discourse – displays a negative awkwardness in that it entertains an embarrassing celebration of a sexual encounter with the loved object: I search for buzzards as the air grows clear and see them ride fresh thermals overhead. Their bleak cries were the first sound I could hear when I stepped at the start of sunrise out of doors, and a noise like last night’s bedsprings on our bed from Mr Fowler sharpening farmer’s saws. (p. 195) This stanza forms a bathetic rejoinder to the preceding stanza’s celebration of the poet’s mid-life health, as opposed to Keats’s premature death from tuberculosis: in an early version of the birds of prey stalking the pigeons in The Shadow of Hiroshima, the buzzards instil a slight sense of doom into Micanopy. However, despite the perceived (if indeterminate) intention, an embarrassed reader response may occur partly due to the structure of the poem, rather than squeamishness. By line 118, the text appears to reach a moment of closure: the conclusion, apart from the Fury-like buzzards, does not complement or add anything to the rest of the text; ‘42!’, which ends the penultimate stanza, might have ended the poem, since it links back to the first line’s declaration of the poet’s ‘prime’ (pp. 195, 192). The depiction of love is commonly seen as celebrating embarrassment, which then leads to its annulment: Barthes describes a self-centred subject unconcerned with mores throughout A Lover’s Discourse; as Christopher Ricks notes in Keats and Embarrassment, experiencing the amorous ‘allows’ humans to do as they please and flout social norms (by, for instance, talking babble, watching each other sleep, and referring to each other as peaches).31 But Keats champions

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embarrassment as a positive reaction, and turns the word ‘awkward’ into ‘a human victory’, whereas here embarrassment is a negative response to a passage that supposedly celebrates it.32 (Although, given the self-referentiality of the lover’s discourse, perhaps the reader does not matter, apart from when he or she buys the amorous text in question.) The metaphorical interlacing of the bedsprings and saws entails negativity first of all because of its inefficacy. The rhythm of copulation, bedsprings and saws may be the same, but surely not the ‘noise’, as the poet suggests (p. 195). This makes the reader confront an ‘impossible’ metaphor similar to the earlier notion of ravished silence; Romantic excess here vies with inappropriateness. There is also something faintly embarrassing, and disturbing, about the fact that bedsprings are the first thing the poet thinks of when he hears the saws. Aside from the phallic implications of the saw and the violent sexuality it might trope, the poet recalls listening to the bedsprings when having sex. There is nothing wrong with his celebration of sex as a stylised performance, but the acute self-awareness results in the amorous subject producing a mere writing of the Imagerepertoire, a text which does not discuss the impossibility of writing about, but simply silences, the loved object. Stratas is a springboard for writing about being in love in an atomic era, rather than a muse-like object of contemplation per se. This dialectic between violence and sexuality is explored throughout the American poems. In ‘Cypress & Cedar’, the fusion continues, but here the extreme situation triggered by presence results in a more abstract engagement with sexual desire. For Harrison, violence forms an inextricable part of amorous discourse, as is signalled by the poem’s main subtexts. In lines 79–80, the poet notes that Virgil prescribed cypress odour for snake-deterrent use in the third part of The Georgics (p. 232). The reference here has been gleaned from John Dryden’s translation in Virgil: And fume with stinking galbanum [gum resin] thy stalls, With that rank odor from thy dwelling-place To drive the viper’s brood, and all the venom’d race33

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These lines, if read as allegorical, present a violent purging of female desire: the strong odour of the vagina is quashed with the cypress, along with the snake, and, since Woman is linked to the snake in Christian iconography of the Fall, all the ‘venom’d race’ (women). Elsewhere in The Georgics, bestiality is linked with desire: Virgil describes how animals snort and tremble when ‘rites of love’ are demanded.34 In lines 49–54, the poet muses that Racine’s play would never have been written if Phèdre had ‘soaped her breasts with Bois de Cèdre’, and thereby seduced her stepson Hippolyte (p. 231). In Harrison’s translation of Racine, oblivion and the amorous are merged in the destruction of Ranjit’s household, and Memsahib’s illicit desire for Thomas Theophilus: both are described as a ‘holocaust’.35 Lilamani says she was forced to watch her brothers ‘face the holocaust’; Memsahib tries to ‘douse/[his] heart’s fierce holocaust with useless vows’ (pp. 87, 82). This link between violence and desire complements the play’s images of bestiality: the Governor depicts the iconography of lust as a swamp, from which an indescribable animal ‘lumbers leering from primeval slime’; Memsahib’s amorous discourse contains her submission to ‘sizzle on love’s spit until I burn’ (pp. 106, 95). The fact that this dialectic of desire was ingrained in the poet’s imagination during the production of Phaedra Britannica is illustrated by a cutting pasted into the working script, held by the Literary and Philosophical Society in Newcastle. Inscribing the philosophical model into the genre of black comedy, the article notes that ‘A Newton man argued with his wife about sexual matters and threw a bowl of hot curry over her.’ The article is entitled ‘Threw Hot Curry Over His Wife’. Bearing these subtexts in mind, disturbing images of violence and desire begin to emerge from the poem. The phallic episode in which the persona grapples with his post for half an hour is preceded by a description of his nearmutilation by the chainsaw, and followed by a portrayal of cedarised genitals in Bob’s workshop, which is a mile from ‘the clapboard abattoir’ (pp. 231, 230). This tropological mixture of slaughter and desire then manifests itself in perhaps the most uncomfortable image in the poem (for a male reader):

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust A hog gets gelded with a gruesome squeal that skids across the quietness of night to where we’re sitting on our dodgy porch. (p. 233)

Squealing recalls the parodic scream in Samuel Beckett’s short play Breath, in which two cries – which could be those of birth or death, or sexual pleasure or pain – are evaluated, from the philosophical standpoint of positive nihilism, as the linchpins of life.36 However, in Harrison’s poem, the narrator only fears for his own testicles. Images of instability and disorientation puncture the text: the amorous subject ‘flinches from the steel’ of both the knife used to castrate the hog, and the shotgun he picks up to ward off the forest’s terrors; the squeal ‘skids’ uneasily through the clammy atmosphere; the porch’s structure is precarious (p. 233). But rather than occlude any notion of the celebratory, the narrator’s fear for his gonads actually accentuates his need to celebrate the loved object. In ‘Cypress & Cedar’, violence is also depicted more specifically in the form of a sense of apocalypse instilled into the contemporary. Initially, despair results from the narrator’s reaction to the night’s silence; it causes an uneasiness when – as in ‘Facing North’ – darkness floods into the house (p. 191). Critics have interpreted this as a trope for the afterlife. For example, Garofalakis concludes, in her essay ‘The American Versus/Verses’, that ‘union comes in the afterlife (that Harrison professes not to believe in) […] the poet is content to know that “prone” as he is “to despair [he thinks] the world of night’s best born in pairs”’.37 I disagree that there is a spiritual aspect to the text: the ‘world of night’ is a more abstract and nihilist conception of darkness; death is depicted as a sublime void (p. 233). And if the historical context of the atomic age is outlined, the ‘world of night’ can be read as early 1980s America, which was then threatened by the tangible prospect of nuclear warfare. In 1982, when ‘Cypress & Cedar’ was written, the West’s fear of this form of global annihilation was augmented by the election of Yuri Andropov (a former head of the KGB) as the Soviet President. Issues of The Times from 1982 are packed with nuclear discourse. In ‘A Gesture Andropov

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Will Understand’, Bob Crozier attacks Labour’s appeal for unilateral disarmament, and shifts the scene of the battle: The unreality of much of the current debate on nuclear weapons is depressing [… It] focuses on the highly improbable contingency of a nuclear war of annihilation between the two superpowers and ignores the far more likely possibility of a unilateral Soviet nuclear strike against Western Europe.38 Western paranoia over the Soviet Union’s vast nuclear arsenal is crystallised in the article ‘Britain “May Face U.S. Bombs By Year 2000”’ by Richard Evans, where it manifests itself in the form of a projected scenario of invasion and betrayal: If America pulls out of Europe, Europe will become expendable. They will not be willing to allow the Russians to have Britain’s command, control and communication facilities. In these circumstances the Americans will bomb us. I am convinced of that.39 I have written elsewhere about such examples of nuclear discourse.40 Euphemistic military jargon covering the possibility of a nuclear war had become common currency by 1982, in the form of phrases such as ‘megadeath’ (one million victims of a nuclear ‘exchange’) and ‘collateral damage’. As Glenn Hook notes, nuclear terminology has always been constructed from the perspective of the potential users of nuclear weapons, thereby excluding the millions of probable victims from the hegemonic discourse.41 ‘Collateral’ carried the sinister implication that projected civilian deaths would be subordinate to main objectives, such as destroying a Soviet arsenal; civilians become lumped together with ‘the Ruskies’ as an insignificant mass. Such linguistic evasions were supported by the films and lectures given to US servicemen in order to brainwash them into regarding Soviets as inferior forms of life.42 In With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War, Robert Sheer observes how this brainwashing reached the highest political level:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust The man beside me was saying, ‘We have a different regard for human life than those monsters do’. He was referring to what he said was the Soviets’ belief in winning nuclear war despite casualties that we would find unacceptable. And he added that they are ‘godless’ monsters. It is this theological defect ‘that gives them less regard for humanity or human beings’. The man telling me all this was Ronald Reagan, as I interviewed him [in 1980] on a flight from Birmingham to Orlando.43

Armed with this mythic construction of the ‘other’ as monstrous, it is a short step to agreeing that it should be eradicated as ‘collateral damage’. If Harrison’s ‘world of night’ is interpreted in the context of this paranoia and nuclear discourse (given that his response to it was likely to be more liberal than Reagan’s), the following lines from ‘Cypress & Cedar’ function as Zerstörungsblitze: Peace like a lily pad on swamps of pain – floating’s its only way of being linked. This consciousness of ours that reads and writes drifts on a darkness deeper than the night’s. Above that blackness, buoyed on the extinct, peace, pure-white, floats flowering in the brain, and fades, as finally the nenuphar we found on a pewter swamp where two roads ended was also bound to fade (p. 233) Harrison’s existentialist sense of human consciousness as imbued with the notion of choice is analogous to the lily pad; both are threatened by the prospect of global annihilation. Any Hegelian sense of dialectical progression is questioned by the instability of the poet’s central metaphor: the precariousness of ‘floating’ is the only way in which peace and pain can be balanced. In ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, ‘life has a skin of death which keeps its zest’ (p. 193). But this humanist sense of perpetual simultaneity appears to be subverted by the narrator in ‘Cypress & Cedar’, who concludes that peace has only a limited time-span. The final, nihilistic image of water-lilies

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disappearing into the swamp represents humanity’s regression to primeval ooze after global annihilation. However, despite this descent into despair and linguistic silence, Harrison does not end on an anti-humanist notion of an obliteration of ‘the triumph of the spirit’ in the contemporary.44 Characteristically, in the context of the American poems, a moment of despair is succeeded by a celebration of the loved object: […] The head and heart are neither of them too much good apart and peace comes in the moments that they’re blended as cypress and cedar at this moment are. My love, as prone as I am to despair, I think the world of night’s best born in pairs, one half we’ll call the female, one the male, though neither essence need, in love, prevail. We sit here in distinctly scented chairs you, love, in the cedar, me the cypress chair. (p. 233) The proposed amalgamation of the head and heart stresses the need to merge the personal and historical. This reading is supported by the following comments from the Haffenden interview: If I had to divide the heart and the head, I would say that my head faces human history, and has a very bleak and pessimistic view of the possibilities for mankind, while at the same time I am very conscious of having a very sensual, celebratory nature: much of my work seems to be a confrontation of the two.45 Initial despair in ‘Cypress & Cedar’ needs to be read as an intellectual response to contemporaneous events, which is then placed in a dialectical relationship with amorous discourse within the poem as a whole. This process is mirrored by the opposition in the quoted passage and in the poem’s title: Harrison suggests that the foul smell of cypress is complemented by the sweet odour of cedar, and that it would be impossible to evaluate one aroma without the presence of the

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other. These two emanations reflect the harmonious coupling of the amorous subject and object – who are isolated in the idealised Florida landscape – since the lovers lounge in chairs constructed out of different wood: ‘A sweetness [of cedar] hangs round’ the amorous object’s, and ‘a foul smell’ of cypress around the narrator’s (p. 230). When the poet wrests a gatepost from the ground, he muses – because the bottom still smells of pine – that it is as if ‘the grave had given life parole’ (p. 231). This is exactly how the relationship functions in the early stanzas: the inevitability of death signified by the ancient landscape is counterpointed by the ‘parole’ offered by the momentary in the guise of the amorous. Hence love snuggles into the armoury of a pre-holocaust humanist, who celebrates its existence under the threat of nuclear war. ‘Parole’, an individual utterance of pleasure within an overall schema of gloom, frames the poem: reading next to the loved object, the poet reads out passages of a Sanskrit text which offer ‘little clues […] to life’s light’; later, the image of ‘the flickering candle on a vast dark plain’ is appropriated for an evaluation of love under the shadow of the bomb (p. 234). Within these harmonious cypress/cedar and husband/wife dialectics, the poet imagines a fusion of biological difference: ‘essences’ of the amorous subject and loved object are compounded into an androgynous being. (Unlike A Lover’s Discourse, which was inspired partly by Barthes’s relationships with men, this is a firmly heterosexual fantasy of the amorous, since the essences are specifically male and female.) As Maureen Duffy notes in her essay ‘The Progress of Love’, the subtext to the amorous discourse here is the poetry of John Donne, who, like Harrison, rejects ‘the traditional separation into male and female’.46 She offers ‘The Ecstasy’ and ‘The Relic’ as the primary subtexts, but, particularly in the light of the candle image which recurs throughout Harrison’s poem, ‘The Canonisation’ appears more apt. In ‘The Canonisation’, the sexual union is compared to the fusion of wax and flame in one candle, and then to the androgynous phoenix (‘to one neutrall thing both sexes fit’).47 But whereas the Metaphysical poet is explicit about the specifically sexual union of the lovers,

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Harrison is more elusive: neither gender need ‘in love’ prevail (p. 233). He seems to propose a more radical state in which love simultaneously creates androgynous amorous subjects and loved objects, and a fusion of both into a single androgynous being. In ‘The Canonisation’, Donne entertains an amalgamation of love and death by punning on the verb ‘to die’, which also meant ‘to orgasm’. Hence the lovers depicted as the candle ‘at [their] own cost die’, and, after death or orgasm, live again like the phoenix (p. 62). (The pun is not defunct: in ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’, the moment the atom bomb detonates is likened to an orgasm [p. 17].) This fantasy might be said to be undercut by the depiction of masculinity throughout the poem. As opposed to the narrator’s ‘manly’, ‘dirty’ work, the woman is at home, linked with ‘Mother Nature’ and cedar; she smells ‘sweet’, so much so, that when she takes off her bras, her eroticism is determined, stereotypically, in terms of the exotic East (‘hot bazaars’) (pp. 231, 232). It appears that she is only a recourse available to the male narrator after the anxiety of dealing with the ‘womanless’ world of hard labour. At the beginning of the poem, the loved object is mainly absent; the emphasis is on a homoerotic bond with ‘the local sawyer Bob’ (p. 230). Chumminess reveals the poet’s desire to adhere to a version of masculinity in which the man is perfectly immersed in his solitary handiwork, free from any danger of feminisation: hence the proud statement in line 31 that ‘Today [he’s] laboured with [his] hands for hours’ (p. 231). As Carol Ann Duffy notes in ‘Adultery’, ‘Hands/can do many things’: the pulling at the gateposts represents male labour divorced from women, and masturbation.48 Hands, buckles and belts compound the homoerotic bond with Bob: the latter’s hand ‘leaves powerful smells’ on the narrator’s; Bob gives him a cedar buckle, and he exults in the wonderful smell emanating from his trousers (pp. 230, 231). Hence, long before the androgyny desired towards the end of the poem, an image is offered which encapsulates a perfect blend of masculinity and femininity, in which women are completely absent, since the musk of feminine cedar mixes with the delightful smell of the poet’s testicles. There is also a sense, though, that femininity

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functions as an outside force capable of emasculating the male: hence his fear for his testicles as the hog is gelded. Compare the androgynous vision of the buckle and trousers with the depiction of Racine’s Hippolyte as ‘epicene’, which means a fusion of the two sexes, but with the emphasis firmly on the dangers of such blending, since it also denotes the effete or effeminate (p. 231). Such problems are annulled for the narrator when he returns, as in ‘V’, ‘home, home, to [his] woman’ (p. 246). A disturbing vision of male autonomy is momentarily offered, and rejected: his home was named by a ‘homesick English classicist’ who drank the nights away, alone with sourmash, and perhaps committed suicide, or was killed by a snake (‘diamondback’) or alcohol (p. 232). Returning to the hearth, the poet craves his heterosexual fix of female. But even though the loved object then figures in the poem, she is mute in order to parallel Donne’s silent addressee. Given the plethora of italicised voices in the ‘School of Eloquence’ (and that of the male neighbour in ‘The Lords of Life’), and Harrison’s oftexpressed desire to give a voice to the inarticulate, it is disconcerting that the woman remains dumb in this poem, and in the rest of the American sequence (pp. 209–12). Perhaps the poet can be excused by the fact that, as Barthes states, ‘The lover’s discourse stifles the other, who finds no place for his own language beneath this massive utterance’ (p. 165). Amorous language might be said to be hermetic: within the self-enclosed codes of the Image-repertoire, there might be no space for the loved object in which to articulate. And it might not be an exclusively heterosexual discourse: the elisions between gay, lesbian and heterosexual subjects in A Lover’s Discourse create a totalised vision in which the amorous forms a utopian and inclusive model of desire. If Barthes’s logic is instilled into contemporary poetry, the love lyrics of, for example, Carol Ann Duffy, Thom Gunn and Harrison would all be drawing, despite the representations of different sexualities, on an identical language of love.49 In ‘Following Pine’, violence is inscribed into the amorous discourse in the form of an eroticisation of death. ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ and ‘Cypress & Cedar’ jostle the atheist void

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and love into a dialectic which maintains the autonomy of each pole, whereas in ‘Following Pine’, death itself becomes a site for the humanist celebration of amorous desire. The presence of the loved object during a car journey results in a bolt of annihilation: Was it the danger that made me hold my breath, the quick injection of adrenalin, the vision of our simultaneous death and the crushed Toyota we were riding in, or the giant raindrops that were pelting onto the windshield and shot through with sun, that made it seem the two of us were melting and in a radiant decay becoming one? (p. 222) In contrast to A Lover’s Discourse, the Zerstörungsblitze that articulate this eroticisation are initiated not by happiness or sadness, but fear. But it is expressed with a similarly apocalyptic trope: a projected supernova of the sun is linked to the passengers’ bodies which ‘melt’ into one another after the crash. During this extreme situation, the amorous subject is not only fearful of annihilation, but also follows the psychological state of the addresser in Barthes’s ‘to be engulfed’ by being in love with the idea of death, rather than with ‘real’ demises. He constructs the fantasy as an eroticised desire for simultaneous annulment and fulfilment: the crash and fusion of the corpses is imagined as the ultimate orgasm; such a predication suggests that the most satisfying sexual act is also the most destructive.50 The particular apocalyptic trope introduced here conveys a sense of abject pleasure: the corpses melt in ‘a radiant decay’; the oxymoron mirrors the collapse of a death/eroticism binary by crumbling an opposition between the thrilling and revolting.51 This moment of abjection links with a stanza later in the first part when the amorous subject sniffs the merging smells of pine air-freshener and ‘shit, decomposition, and decay’ in his bathroom (p. 223). Similarly, the extreme situation is instigated by an opposition relating to the state of the road (‘The west side was in sun, the east in rain’ [p. 221]). This particular binary then coalesces in the ‘raindrops

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[…] shot through with sun’, which contain distorted reflections of the loved object; this inspires the fantasy of the fusion of corpses (p. 222). Even before this, when the couple ‘follow pine’ in the sense that they are stuck behind trucks carrying the wood, ‘The sun and moon are sharing the same sky’ (p. 220). Reminiscent of the symbolic alignment of heavenly bodies in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey,52 the combination of opposite elements suggests that something mystical is afoot: hence the metaphysical intervention of the Zerstörungsblitze as the couple drive, mundanely, to buy trees for the garden. The collapse of a love/annihilation opposition initiated above is compounded two stanzas later in the analogy between the copulating love bugs and the apocalyptic vision. In the latter, the concept of ‘survival’ is of less importance than gaining the ultimate orgasm, just as the insects splattered against the car’s windscreen would ‘sooner fuck their brains out than survive’ (p. 222). However, as the extreme situation gradually passes, the eroticisation of death instigates an awkwardness of metaphoricity when the amorous subject begins to imagine the occurrence of a ‘real’ holocaust. ‘[S]ooner fuck their brains out than survive’ can be applied to an apolitical human race in this context: while eminent superpower politicians in the early 1980s planned to save themselves in the underground bunkers referred to in the poem, humanity as a whole ignored and thus tacitly condoned their actions.53 Conversely, this is not a simplistic humanist celebration of the amorous. The narrator emphasises that sexuality will not save the race from ‘real’ destruction: in a parabolic passage similar to those I discuss later in relation to ‘The Lords of Life’ and ‘The Fire-Gap’, the poet compares the rattlesnake’s predilection for savouring gophers in their own holes to the death of aged lovers in their makeshift shelters after suffering from radiation sickness.54 And yet, ultimately, the poet cannot help but applaud the love bugs’ logic, but only if it is given a specific historical context. In a pre-holocaust version of carpe diem, he argues that if global destruction is, in whatever apocalyptic form, inevitable at some stage in the future, then humans might as well ‘fuck their brains out’ for pleasure, not procreation, while they can;

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or, if they desire, choose their own, private, eroticised deaths. Hence he endorses facing the monumental with the momentary, and ‘planting an apple tree the very eve/of the Apocalypse; or the Holocaust’ (p. 224).55 These love/annihilation dialectics differ from those in A Lover’s Discourse in that the poetic mode does not capitulate to the linguistic silence inherent in Barthes’s notion of the ‘muck of language’ (p. 99). In the third part of ‘Following Pine’, the writing is certainly not embarrassed, and is only embarrassing if the reader winces at the exuberant description of the amorous subject and object’s survival of ‘the world of night’ (p. 233). At one point, the narrator does, and drops a register. Firstly, the supposed ability of insects to survive nuclear war is celebrated, whereas, in bitter-sweet alliteration, ‘all of us/are merged in the molten mess made of Mankind’ (p. 227). A reversal occurs earlier in the second part, in which the lovers symbolically rise from bed after surviving a night tinged with the possibility of annihilation: Is not extinction with its eerie light the appropriate presider when one swears to sustain each other through the world of night we’ve both decided is ‘best born in pairs’? (p. 226) The repetition of the noun phrase ‘world of night’ – if read in the context of nuclear discourse – refers both to projected nights, and to a world threatened with extinction. ‘Eerie light’ refers to the moon, which completes the love/annihilation dialectic by presiding over the poet’s celebration of marriage. Moonlight is caught in the loved object’s eye, which echoes Donne’s twisted ‘eye-beames’ in ‘The Extasie’.56 Donne follows a contemporaneous scientific theory which held that sight was caused by ‘the contact of a beam emitted from the eye with the object seen’.57 In ‘Following Pine’, the beam becomes a portent of extinction: even though the lovers’ eyes are ‘upon one double string’, the twentieth-century poet invites death into the amorous discourse in the form of the moon’s ‘Chill, sterile, waterless, inert’ surface reflected in the loved object’s pupils, and the comparable ‘pitted lunar chart’ of a post-holocaust

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Earth.58 At dawn, the moon’s aura of annihilation is dispelled as the amorous subject breaks through the straggling spiders’ threads as if breaking out of a chrysalis; the lovers are imagined as involved in the first stage of a new chapter of evolution. They found a ‘private haven’ in a projected, postholocaust scenario, just as the loggers, pioneers and gophers in the first and second parts of the poem clear a space for themselves in the ground wherein they can breed peacefully (p. 229). This exuberant celebration of the amorous eroticises the religious. Theological discourse has no specific intertextual origin here, but it is reminiscent of structural motifs contained in narratives of ‘the waking of the dead’. As in Martin Luther’s narrative ‘Of the Resurrection’, the world is seen afresh, and appears paradisal: there are rainbows, a sense of perfection, radiant landscapes and a purging of ‘venomous creatures’.59 However, God in Luther’s text is replaced by a humanist celebration of a deified loved object; in the poet’s new world, she is the ultimate object of worship. The amorous subjects and objects necessitate a comparison with the biblical figures of Adam and Eve, but with important differences: they already have the ‘forbidden’ knowledge of procreation, and so selfconsciously cover their nudity before a Fall is possible; there is no one to ‘forbid’ sex now God has been displaced by a celebration of romantic love (p. 229). Indeed, sexual union is offered as a means of coming through annihilation: in the description of the amorous subject breaking the web to arise from the ‘world of night’, the iconography of sex abounds (p. 226). He stretches against the thread until it snaps; it is ‘snagged on a nipple’ and ‘sliding on [his] sweat’ (p. 228). This eroticisation of the inanimate is anticipated by the first line in the third part: the floorboards miraculously metamorphose into multiple images of oral sex by virtue of the phrase ‘tongue in groove’. The overriding sense of the religio-erotic discourse is of a destructive sexuality which initiates a rebirth: the text here turns full circle and recalls the extreme situation in the first part of the projected car crash, but in this ‘real’, violent sexual union, the amorous subject and object are recycled into gods.60

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The switch in register that I signalled earlier, which ruptures the exuberant lover’s discourse with a moment of awkwardness, can now be explicated. After a stanza that celebrates the music of the spiders’ webs, the amorous subject confidently continues his passage to ‘the world of day’ and the loved object (p. 229). Five lines that describe this movement are then followed by the only isolated sentence in the third part: ‘I can only know the last [thread] when it breaks’. The poet comments self-referentially on the instability of his text: the lover’s discourse at this point is still exuberant, and the ‘break’ signals the release of the revitalised amorous subjects and objects; but, in keeping with Harrison’s predilection for fusing opposites, an underlying tone of scepticism enters the poem. An embarrassing awkwardness in the opulent rhetoric is detected: the narrator feels a need to root his experiences in the empirical rather than the transcendent. In a similar way to the switch from fantasy to the pragmatic ‘world with days’ in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, he refers to the assertion in the line above that the web is invisible, and then rationalises: ‘You can’t see them ahead, and anyway/I have to scan the ground for rattlesnakes’ (pp. 194, 229). In a passage where the dominating voice preaches lavish excess, the disclaiming adverb ‘anyway’ produces a moment of bathos; the moment passes, and the voice of celebration returns in the portrayal of the ‘private haven’ (p. 229). However, even the positivity of rainbows shining in the air as the naked object waters the new trees is mitigated by the ambiguity of the last two lines: ‘This private haven that we two have found/might be the more so when enclosed with pine’. Pragmatically, this means that, if the house were surrounded by pine trees, the neighbours would have even less chance of spying on the butt-naked couple watering their garden. If read in terms of the Metaphysical, it echoes the common trope of the union of lovers in death: in Donne’s ‘The Relique’, the amorous couple’s grave is famously disturbed by a third party; in Henry King’s ‘The Exequy’, the poet evinces a desire to jump into the ground and prematurely join his lover in ‘that hollow Vale’.61 Since the twentieth-century poet mentions in the first part that the loved object is trapped in the car behind

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trucks carrying ‘future coffin lids’, the missing subject in the final line’s subordinate clause might be ‘we’, who, when ‘enclosed’ in the grave, might create an even more ‘private haven’ (p. 229). Equally, the home would be even more private in the sense that the couple would be absent, locked in a macabre embrace. Hence conceptual awkwardness, as in many of Harrison’s poems, arises from a juxtaposition of the metaphysical and empirical (which, in turn, contains its own metaphysics a priori). This does not entail embarrassment in the sense of calling the reader’s attention to an overblown amorous discourse, but the shifting subject positions certainly puncture the humanist celebration of love. Strategic deterrents such as this against an unmitigated ‘triumph of the spirit’ are unnecessary in the poems I discuss in the next section, since the narrator already suffers anxiety due to the absence of the loved object.62

Amorous Absence and Snakes Collapses of love/annihilation oppositions occur just as frequently as in ‘presence’ when the amorous subject suffers from the repeated absence of the loved object. This particular extreme situation is at its most excruciating in ‘Facing North’, when the amorous subject writes to his wife, who lives abroad.63 The ensuing Zerstörungsblitze form the fourth stanza: Now years of struggle make me concentrate when [the circle of light] throws up images of planets hurled, still glowing, off their courses, and a state where there’s no gravity to hold the world. I have to hold on when I think such things and weather out these feelings so that when the wind drops and the light no longer swings I can focus on an Earth that still has men (p. 190) As mentioned above, Linden Peach commits himself to a reading of the poetry in terms of the representation of the working

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class, and argues that these lines project ‘anxieties and a sense of security that he feels the North and his working-class past provides’.64 Concentration certainly links with the poem’s correlation between manual and artistic labour: the poet struggles in the ‘flooded orchestra’ (the semi-circle in front of the Greek stage for the Chorus); he sweats and exercises ‘elbow grease’ (p. 191). Harrison’s poetry is full of such images. As Sean O’Brien notes in The Deregulated Muse, ‘Poetry is work and Harrison is at pains in all areas of his writing to show the working. Not so much Look: me Tarzan, as Listen: me rigorous.’65 But if the sweaty labour does offer a connection between the work of his male forebears and his vocation as a poet in ‘Facing North’, it proves only a minor concern in the poem as a whole. Symbolically, the poem’s position in the Selected Poems actually denotes a move away from his past. Although written after ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, it is placed first in the sequence in order to register a shift from the working-class subject matter of the ‘School of Eloquence’ to the romantic gusto of the American poems. Moreover, the past is more tangibly rendered in terms of an existentialist notion of the ‘North’; the contextual modality of class only enters the text on the extremely subtle level that Peach uncovers. ‘North’ functions as the geographical abstract which Louis MacNeice refers to in a line from ‘Postscript to Iceland’, which forms the epigraph to ‘Facing North’ (‘The North begins inside’) (p. 190).66 MacNeice paraphrases a comment by his travelling companion, W.H. Auden: ‘the North’ might be a geographical space internalised by the subject; when they encounter actual features which chime with this psychological phenomenon, a sublime recognition of the heimlich occurs. It would be possible to retort that someone from Leeds or Newcastle might internalise a completely different conception of ‘North’ than someone from Iceland, since the particular geography would enter a dialectic with the generalised notion of the uncanny ‘North’. Unless the latter is a complete fiction, the private experience of rolling hills, as opposed to geysers, necessarily creates, and sustains, the abstract totality. In ‘Postscript to Iceland’, the Auden figure contends that

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‘northern’ psychology requires the tutelage of the classical, southern climes in order to create a balanced artistic temperament.67 ‘Facing North’ enacts this fusion by describing a similarly ascetic protagonist, who practises self-discipline and solitude, and imagines the swinging lantern’s light as the ‘O’ of the ancient Greek stage, which witnesses the performance of the apocalyptic scenario in the quotation above (p. 190). MacNeice’s poem confronts ‘the fear of loneliness/And uncommunicableness’ sensed by the poet as he writes alone, and contemplates the rising terror of Nazism; similarly, the latetwentieth-century poet suffers from his isolation from the public sphere subsequently obliterated in his imagination.68 However, in contrast to MacNeice’s poem, asceticism is then juxtaposed with the proclivities of an extreme amorous situation. Barthes’s concept of amorous discourse thus precipitates a more fruitful reading of the text than Peach’s, since the insupportable present that results from a period of absence is articulated through a landscape similar to that ensuing from presence in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ (pp. 193–94). Here, though, environmental disaster is added to the horrors of global warfare in Harrison’s writing of annihilation. The circular imagery immediately recalls the image of a burnt circle on the road after the VJ celebrations in ‘The Morning After’, which fuses an annihilated universe with a humanist affirmation of life (p. 157). This dialectic continues in ‘Facing North’, but here the poet’s celebration of humanity’s mere existence is imprinted with a projected environmental holocaust. The anxiety that the amorous subject suffers from is then expressed as a dispersal of centres: gravity, the force which attracts objects to the centre of the Earth, is lost, along with the planets’ orbits. As Peach suggests, ‘off their courses’ is reminiscent of the colloquial phrase ‘off their heads’: as in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ and ‘Following Pine’, when heavenly bodies are out of kilter, an extreme situation ensues in which the body of the amorous object is always implicated (pp. 190, 194, 220).69 Hence ‘Facing North’ confronts the same ‘muck of language’ as in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, but here Harrison ends with a moment of silence as opposed to embarrassment. ‘[O]ld

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pain’ in the second stanza refers to a previous relationship, but by contemplating the present loved object, he finds an ‘inkling of an inner peace’ by the fifth (pp. 190, 191). But this precarious stability is only gained by obliterating the amorous subject. Peace is experienced by the poet when he spends time with the loved object, or finishes a poem; the only way to dispel the apocalyptic vision is to finish the text, leave the room, and seek ‘presence’, thereby annihilating the amorous subject of ‘Facing North’. As the wind reminds him that where ‘she lives the climate’s a lot kinder’, ‘the North’ invokes closure: he feels ‘the writing room [he is] leaving grow/dark, and then darker with the whole view north’ (p. 191). This ending recalls Ted Hughes’ poem ‘The Thought-Fox’, which utilises a similarly ascetic narrator to describe the process of writing: when a fox, rather than woman, enters ‘the dark hole of the head’, ‘The page is printed’, and the subject fades into non-existence.70 In the fifth stanza, the poet still laments that the loved object is absent: and she’s the one I’m needing as I see the North Wind once more strip my sycamore and whip the last leaves off my elder tree. (p. 191) Intertextuality, in the form of Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’, informs the poetry at this point. In John Haffenden’s interview, Harrison notes that the American poems are often addressed to a loved object, to which the interviewer interpolates: ‘You also take on a Marvellian air of lyric grace’.71 In a moment of self-assurance not dissimilar to the lauding of ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ as ‘the right lyre’ to interpret twentiethcentury atrocity, Harrison answers: ‘Yes, I think you’re right. I have another, unfinished poem in which I had to remind myself of “A green thought in a green shade”’.72 Haffenden’s interview took place in Newcastle in 1983, contemporaneous with the writing of ‘Facing North’.73 But whereas the persona in Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’ escapes from the horrors of the English Civil War by withdrawing into the mind’s ‘happiness’, and then ‘Annihilating all that’s made/To [an

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indistinguishable] green Thought in a green Shade’, Harrison’s persona is denied a pastoral exit, since his garden is decimated by the North Wind.74 Also in contrast to ‘The Garden’, the narrator’s escape is triggered both by a physical retreat from the scene, and possible immersion in the consciousness of the loved object when the room grows ‘dark, and then darker with the whole view North’ (p. 191). Marvell seeks rather to obliterate the female from nature, and imagines Adam without Eve, ‘that happy Garden-state,/While Man there walk’d without a Mate’.75 Does Harrison’s humanist celebration, as opposed to Marvell’s rejection, of the loved object deny any sense of political commitment? The narrator himself appears to question the point of writing at all: despite the references to the loved object, the overall tone is of despair; writing against linguistic silence after all only gives him an ‘inkling’ of ‘inner peace’ (p. 191). Does the gloom arise from his recognition that the ecstasy provided by the loved object is not enough for a ‘world of night’, which has witnessed some of the worst atrocities in history, and is now threatened by extinction (p. 226)? Is the fetishisation of the amorous not a selfish, and outdated, action which attempts to validate subjectivity above the historical? Such dilemmas are enacted throughout the American poems. As Romana Huk elucidates in ‘Tony Harrison, The Loiners, and the “Leeds Renaissance”’, they were faced by the academic community in Leeds in the late 1950s and early 1960s: After Hungary [the uprising against the Soviet Union] there was a slow deterioration of the Labour line; as a consequence, the revision of what Raymond Williams would later call a ‘New Left emphasis’ had to go forward through a process of listening to arguments from within and continually ‘reconstituting and changing itself’. The dynamics, however exciting, of the situation in both art and politics at Leeds threw any simple notion of ‘commitment’ or a Sartrian littérature engagé into spectral light; that vision found its way, I think, into the poetry of even

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those who, like Hill and Harrison, remained largely outside the political arena but who nevertheless demonstrated commitments to ‘witness’ or speak for the silences in history as well as analyse constructions of national and cultural identity.76 Sartre’s notion of ‘commitment’ is not simple; Huk refers to the way in which it has been appropriated to court direct intervention into the public sphere, since ‘the “committed” writer knows that words are action’.77 Witnessing replaces treatises for the New Left, imbued with a sense of failure after the Soviets’ violent crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1958. Harrison is certainly self-conscious in his intervention in historical silences: in ‘Facing North’, the reaction to atrocity and the prospect of global annihilation is despairing, not exuberant in its mere ‘commitment’. If Sartre’s concept of committed literature is contrasted with Harrison’s poem, the latter appears hopelessly self-indulgent: in ‘Facing North’, political action is impossible at the end of the poem, as the narrator’s consciousness deliberately tries to escape from the ‘real’, and subsume itself in the loved object’s. This forms a new departure in Harrison’s poetry: as opposed to the commitment of inscribing his working-class past into the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, the American poems sometimes espouse a desire to quit the political and historical arena entirely. Such a switch at a mid-point in his career invites a comparison with the poetry of Philip Larkin. In The Deregulated Muse, Sean O’Brien notes that Larkin spoke of his wish to be different not from other people but from himself […] and the later poems suggest that the only means of achieving this was to extinguish the self in the effort to remove it from the historical context to a transcendent artistic plane.78 Absence in poems such as ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’ and ‘High Windows’ can thus be read as this symbolist attempt to obliterate the self; O’Brien connects this to Larkin’s increasingly limited output of poetry.79 The disappearance of

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the poetic self in the closures of ‘Facing North’ and ‘Following Pine’ certainly links with Larkin’s technique. However, Harrison’s work differs in that there is a concerted return to committed writing in the texts following the American poems, such as The Shadow of Hiroshima; absence is total in Larkin’s ‘Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel’, whereas ‘Facing North’ moves from a celebration of the self and other due to the amorous situation, to negation at the end of the poem. Are the American poems’ celebrations of amorous discourse, and the disappearance of the poetic self, flawed, then, in the sense that they are a hindrance to political commitment? Repeating Theodor Adorno’s attack on ‘committed’ writing, it would appear so. To recap, in ‘Commitment’, Adorno condemns the literature of extreme situations produced by writers such as Sartre who pander to an existentialist notion of subjectivity: There is one nearly invariable characteristic of such literature. It is that it implies, purposely or not, that even in so-called extreme situations, indeed in them most of all, humanity flourishes. Sometimes this develops into a dismal metaphysic which does its best to work up atrocities into ‘limiting situations’ which it then accepts to the extent that they reveal authenticity in men. In such a homely existential atmosphere the distinction between executioners and victims becomes blurred; both, after all, are equally suspended above the possibility of nothingness, which of course is generally not quite so uncomfortable for the executioners.80 ‘[H]umanity flourishes’ in the American poems in that love is celebrated in the midst of the extreme situation of the atomic era. Do they thereby display a ‘dismal metaphysic’, a poetry of barbarism in the negative sense that it sups the tortured aesthetic to the detriment of actual victims? A distinction must be made between the specificity of Sartre’s writing about the Second World War from the perspective of the French Resistance, and Harrison’s collated Zerstörungsblitze. Sartre does indeed celebrate the Resistance as an example of humanity flowering in the midst of the atrocities, but this movement

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stood in tangible opposition to Nazism. In contrast, Harrison places his celebration of the loved object in a dialectical relationship with instances of annihilation. Adorno’s ‘executioners’ are not occluded by the poet; moreover, they are retained within the historical imagination, even in such a seemingly inappropriate space as the amorous. This distinction between Sartre and Harrison is important, as the sometimes excruciating idealism Adorno detects in Sartre’s work contrasts with the overriding mood of silence and despair in poems such as ‘Facing North’. Both the historical, and the absence of the loved object, initiate it, a process that continues in ‘The Lords of Life’. In this poem, anxiety takes the form of violent sublimation, which contrasts with the peaceful retreat at the end of ‘Facing North’. First published in the Penguin anthology Firebird 3 in January 1984 (the period of the early 1980s is significant, as I shall demonstrate), a narrative concerning another character’s concern for the absence of the loved object momentarily displaces the amorous subject. In the following Zerstörungsblitze, engulfment results in the desire to kill: (But a man might get, say, lovesick, then he shoots not one of your unendangered gator brutes that glide so gracefully through silver ooze and gladden gourmets in those Cross Creek stews, and instead of potting dumb beasts like your gators shoots the most acknowledged of all legislators, on whose scaled back as corpse and cortège glide the egret of the soul bums its last ride!) (p. 212) Initially, these lines are disorientating. The sudden supposition seems isolated from the rest of the poem, but if one of the possible historical contexts is unpacked, it becomes clear that the poet collapses a love/holocaust opposition through a narrative concerning Ronald Reagan. In the preceding passage, the neighbour mentions an incident in which his wife watches a space launch, and then rushes back ‘for the message from the Prez/who’d just been wounded by some nut’ (p. 211). This alludes to the assassination attempt on President Reagan on 30

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March 1981 outside Washington Hilton Hotel: after addressing a convention of trades unionists, he was shot in the lung by John Hinckley, a Yale University ‘dropout’.81 ‘[J]ust been’ denotes a time gap of thirteen days (p. 211). The neighbour refers to a Presidential speech, in which Reagan emoted, ‘We feel like giants again!’: this was addressed to the astronauts before the launch of the space shuttle Columbia on 12 April 1981, and continues: ‘Once again we feel the surge of pride that comes from knowing we are the first and we are the best, and we are so because we are free’.82 The ‘lovesick’ assassin and ‘the most acknowledged of legislators’ are thus respective representations of John Hinckley and President Reagan (p. 212). Harrison appropriates Shelley’s famous statement from ‘A Defence of Poetry’ that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and laments that because this is still true, a President is elected who allows humanity to teeter on the brink of extinction.83 In the same essay, Shelley represents poets as mirroring the shadow of the future: this trope of darkness becomes a projected holocaust in Harrison’s text; humanity’s soul is imagined as a white heron that clings helplessly to the alligator, humankind’s collective corpse and funeral cortège. The poet rewrites Reagan’s speech: the giants are not the whole human race – as the President’s all-embracing ‘we’ suggests – but the ‘Lords of Life’; in other words, those who have the power to destroy humanity. Amorous discourse enters the textual fray in the form of the ‘lovesick’ reference (p. 212). In ‘The Lords of Life’, it is a specifically amorous subject who attempts to assassinate the President: in his article ‘Fireside Chats and Bulletproof Living’, Nicholas Ashford notes that the perpetrator of the 1981 incident, John Hinckley, ‘claims he was obsessed by the actress Jodie Foster and apparently hoped to impress her by shooting the President’.84 Transfixed by her representation of the young prostitute Easy in Martin Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver, he mimicked the penultimate scene by shooting not the pimps, who control the character in the film, but the ultimate (human) ‘Lord’ of any American subject.85 In this case, the fusion of violence and desire in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’,

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‘Cypress & Cedar’ and ‘Following Pine’ is enacted in an extreme manner: the subject’s desire to attract the attention of the loved object leads to the attempted annihilation of a third party. This explains the love/holocaust fusion in relation to Hinckley and Reagan, but what has this to do with the persona? The loved object appears to be completely absent from the text. And yet this fact connects directly with Harrison’s representation of the Hinckley affair: the assassin’s act results from the loved object’s absence, not her presence. In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes characterises the amorous subject’s state during absence as one of stasis. It is the ‘masculine’ object who always leaves, whereas the ‘feminised’ subject is always ‘motionless, at hand, in expectation, nailed to the spot, in suspense – like a package in some forgotten corner of a railway station’.86 The narrator fulfils this description in the ‘snake’ poems of the American sequence, since he is left in the wilderness by the absent object. In ‘The Fire-Gap’, she merges with the figure of the snake to provoke anxiety in the persona: he feels ‘out of control’; his heart pounds and his Adam’s apple is ‘in a vice’ (p. 215). And, as in A Lover’s Discourse, the absence of the loved object results in the amorous subject receiving the world as ‘a [possible] waste planet, a Nature uninhabited by man’ in the Zerstörungsblitze above.87 But this is not the psychology of a Holocaust victim. Instead of eliding the difference between victims and non-victims, Harrison portrays an amorous situation in which love is not elided by, but remains inseparable from, the apocalyptic. In both ‘The Lords of Life’ and ‘The Fire-Gap’, the snake figure functions as a trope not only for the loved object, but also for the androgynous being imagined in ‘Cypress & Cedar’. This is clearly indicated in ‘The Fire-Gap’: the noun ‘snake’ denies the poet an easy gendered pronoun, and is described as ‘it’, ‘him’ and ‘her’ (p. 216). In ‘The Lords of Life’, this is borne out by the depiction of the snake as ‘the formed continuum of female/male’ (p. 213). This illustration is compounded by the dense line which occurs later on in the same passage: ‘for all the above vide sub Ouroboros!’ ‘Ouroboros’ or ‘uroboros’ comes from the Greek adjective ouobos, meaning

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‘devouring its [own] tail’.88 The ancient symbol – usually in the form of a circle, depicting a snake or dragon eating its own tail – has been developed as a visualisation of an eternal process: it has become the received mathematical sign for infinity, and a prototype of the concept of a ‘vicious circle’. Harrison draws on its deployment in D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent.89 For a moment, then, in ‘The Lords of Life’, the poet rejects the sense of an ending that the ‘world of night’ provokes in him, and appeals to the reader to ‘look below’ the projected holocaust, and celebrate love’s creation of an androgynous subject/object (p. 233). Similarly, at the end of ‘The Fire-Gap’, the poet asserts: ‘the only real eternity/is a tale (like your tail) in the mouth’ (p. 219). The tale is both Harrison’s text and the other ‘snake’ myths: the recycling of narratives about love and annihilation is conceived as an infinite process which will outlast the temporary ‘world of night’ in 1980s America (p. 226). Lawrence proves to be the main intertextual link again here, since his poem ‘Snake’ depicts the androgynous in the form of the famous reptile sneakily supping at the water-trough.90 Harrison refers to the poem directly, since the Modernist poet refers to the snake as ‘one of the lords/Of life’ (p. 101). Drawing, like Harrison, on the demonisation of the reptile in Christian iconography, the narrator in Lawrence’s poem is disgusted that he perceived the drinking snake as a rival, ‘picked up a clumsy log/And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter’ (p. 100). And, like Harrison, he rewrites Christian myth by turning the reptile into a celebrated, androgynous object: the phallic snake convulses, writhes, and disappears into a vagina, the ‘black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front’, at which, hilariously, ‘in the intense still noon, [he] stared with fascination’. Lawrence debunks the Christian obfuscation of sexuality as ‘sin’, lambasting it as an ‘accursed human education’ (p. 101). Indoctrinated by such ideology, he is revolted by the snake, and, like a child jumping onto the bed in order to stop its parents having sex, throws the log as ‘a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole’. Hence Harrison develops Lawrence’s rejection of Christian

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ideology into a humanist celebration of (hetero)sexuality throughout the American poems. However, it is not only Christian iconography that is rewritten in this sequence. Two further intertextual references in ‘The Fire-Gap’ offer alternative narratives about snakes that gender the reptile in a specific manner, rather than offering the androgynous visions of Lawrence and Harrison. Harrison describes how he battled with snakes in Africa and Brazil, and lopped off the head of a ‘laithly worm’ (p. 216). This refers to the Northumbrian and Border-country legend of ‘the Laidley worm of Spindleston Heugh’, in which an ugly and narcissistic stepmother turns the beautiful Lady Margaret – who is oblivious to her appearance – into a loathsome worm or dragon which lays waste the countryside.91 ‘Ugly’ femininity, in terms of the moral and physical, is thus equated with the Christian snake. In Bram Stoker’s bizarre novel The Lair of the White Worm, Sir Nathaniel refers to this legend, ‘the “Laidly Worm of Spindleston Heugh” near Bamborough’, and another, ‘the “Worm Well” of Lambton Castle’.92 In another version of the Bamborough and Lambton myths, the ballad ‘The Laily Worm and the Machrel’, the stepmother changes her stepson into the worm, and the unfortunate daughter into a mackerel.93 The latter transposes her narcissistic desires onto the worm: every Saturday at noon she takes the snake’s head and ‘kaims it wi’ a siller kame/An’ washes it i’ the sea’. Secondly, ‘So, snake, old rhyming slang for looking glass’ refers to the nineteenth-century phrase ‘snake in the grass’ (p. 217). This ‘homolising’ – as Julian Franklyn terms it – suggests that there is something sinister, and unreservedly feminine, for the Victorians about narcissism.94 In Stoker’s book, the snake is definitely female; revulsion towards coitus is displayed through an allegorical depiction of the vagina uncannily similar to that in ‘Snake’. ‘The Lair of the White Worm’ refers to the home of the slinkily dressed temptress Lady Arabella (p. 48). When she/the snake explodes at the end of the book, the vagina is symbolically demonised: ‘The sight was horrible enough, but, with the awful smell added, was simply unbearable. The Worm’s hole appeared to breathe forth death in its most repulsive forms’ (p. 159).95

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All these demonisations of the feminine via the symbol of the satanic snake are rejected in Lawrence and Harrison’s fantasies of androgyny. In ‘The Lords of Life’ specifically, the latter function as antidotes to the fixed conceptions of masculinity offered by both the ‘cracker’ neighbour and, to a lesser extent, the narrator. I have argued elsewhere that signs of masculinity pervade Harrison’s poetry.96 They are never embossed: the narrators of the poems vacillate between different modes of masculinity, rejecting their readings of traditional, working-class versions of ‘true’ male behaviour. Simultaneously, they feel a little disgusted at their feminisation during a process of embourgeoisement, even if the touted gender ideal is that of androgyny. A representative poem is ‘Currants’: when the father takes the son to stoke up ‘for next week’s bake’ on Sunday, the aspirating child refuses to eat the dried fruit into which the male adult’s sweat has dripped (p. 151). If this demonstrates a rejection of working-class rites of masculinity, then the rest of the poetry coheres as an elegy for a lost, ‘authentic’ male behaviour, even if the poet simultaneously recognises the limitations of masculine performance. This process of rejection, and partial acceptance, informs the structure of ‘The Lords of Life’. On the surface, the poem offers a savage indictment of hysterical masculinity as practised by the neighbour. In Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, Lynne Segal demonstrates this aspect of masculinity by giving the example of a portrait of Humphrey Bogart.97 Bogart has a ‘pipe in hand, staring firmly into space, and [is] surrounded by hound dog, tennis racket, trophies, grizzly bear’s head, sailing boat, tripod and more.’ The confusion of diverse objects seems to beg the question, ‘But is he, even so, male enough?’ In the neighbour’s hysterical display of masculinity in ‘The Lords of Life’, utilising Florida’s equivalent of Bogart’s accoutrements, he eschews what he conceives to be feminine by retreating from his wife into the swamp, with only a boat, gun and six-pack for company (p. 210). Robert Frost’s poetry forms one of the subtexts to the American sequence: the cracker’s hysterical behaviour (which appears naturally male to him) is contrasted with the utopian

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neighbourliness displayed by the sensitive and caring Baptiste in ‘The Axe-Helve’, who provides the poet with a safer, handmade helve.98 Endorsing the gendered binaries of Western culture uncovered by Hélène Cixous in ‘Sorties’, Harrison’s neighbour equates activity with the male, passivity and sensitivity with the female.99 He conceives the poet as a ‘watcher’, not a ‘doer’, and is thereby troubled by what he perceives as a display of femininity: he mocks the narrator, and thinks it a ‘queer’ reaction, when the latter gets upset after he springs into action and pummels a non-poisonous snake to death (p. 209). In the final three stanzas, the poet appears to reject such patent displays of supposed ‘maleness’ by, in turn, mocking the neighbour, here from the perspective of the almighty being in Reagan’s famous, nationalistic catchphrase, ‘God Bless America’. The neighbour becomes a minuscule, red-faced man from the projected God’s viewpoint; in a precarious rowing-boat, he is now inactive, ‘sprawled beside his shotgun and crushed cans’ (p. 213). Given that the poet reverts to Cixous’s binary in order to dismiss the ‘cracker’, a hint is offered that his rejection of hysterical masculinity might not be uncompromising. It takes 124 lines to set up the sex–gender elision which is then deconstructed in the last 74 lines. This obsession with the neighbour’s behaviour betrays the poet’s residual panic that he is somehow emasculated by being a ‘watcher’. In ‘Me Tarzan’, the young scholar trapped in his attic doing homework fears for his penis when he refuses his male friends’ call to savour the delights, amongst other activities, of Beeston girls (p. 116). Even though Harrison might feel free of the class system in America, the femininity he associates with books and embourgeoisement still rears its non-phallic head: the narrator is a ‘fairy’ because, according to the italicised speech of the neighbour, he reads encyclopaedias (p. 209). The neighbour replaces the father-figure in ‘Currants’: the narrator regresses into a child-like state of constantly seeking approval when he tries to prove to the former that he is a ‘real’ man; paradoxically, through a performance of masculinity. He indulges the cracker’s hysterical masculinity masquerading as ‘natural’

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maleness, and joins him in shooting alligators and egrets, even though he deliberately misses; he conforms to the ‘boozing match’, even though he hates the taste of Budweiser; he obsessively swings his axe ‘like I’ve seen rednecks do’, and provides an excellent barbecue to dispel the neighbour’s derisive conclusion that he is ‘some city loafer/who couldn’t gut a mullet or stew gopher’ (pp. 210, 211). These examples of negotiating gender become slightly humorous (if not absurd) incidents of seeking peer recognition, rather than steps towards an androgynous utopia. Perhaps they can be excused as the city-dweller’s anxious responses to an alien environment: as opposed to the harmony of man and nature depicted in Frost’s poems, such as ‘The Tuft of Flowers’, the Harrison figure always reverts to his encyclopaedias in order to understand the Florida flora and fauna.100 However, in the context of this propensity to accept the need to perform ‘maleness’, at the same time as it is rejected, the mocking denouement of ‘The Lords of Life’ appears a little hollow. Such endorsements of masculinity, however tentative, are anathema to the discourse of love. As mentioned above, absence creates androgynous subjects by feminising the male, nullifying a supposedly biological need for action, and providing the female object with a notional amount of power within the amorous situation. Of course, Barthes’s thesis is premised on the notion of a male subject, as is evidenced, for example, by the predominant figure of Goethe’s Werther in A Lover’s Discourse. In contrast, Harrison looks beyond the normative, extreme situation, and utilises the snake as a prefiguring of an androgynous utopia. This fantasy has severe repercussions for nuclear discourse: as writers such as Ian McEwan, in The Child in Time, have argued, contemporary performances of masculinity reach their nadir in the atomic arms race.101 Even though the anti-Soviet climate of the early 1980s depicted in the American poems is over, India and Pakistan’s decision to continue nuclear testing in 1998 was inextricably connected to the performance of masculine ‘might’ in the wake of complex political conflicts. To equate masculinity with the desire to annihilate the universe would obviously be disingenuous, but

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the two are definitely linked, albeit with regional and political modalities.102 When the neighbour blasts the egrets and alligators in ‘The Lords of Life’, Harrison links the ‘masculine’ public sphere, in the form of the anti-Soviet propaganda of the Reagan administration, with the private world of the swamp. Frontier mentality fuels the cracker’s hysterical masculinity: the ‘red peril’ is figured as fireants, which, if not stopped with gasoline, will invade the whole of the USA (p. 211). Hence the American poems’ avoidance of fixed notions of masculinity, and their celebration of the androgynous, amorous subject, are offered as antidotes to the dark days of the atomic age.

NOTES 1 ‘The leg-man said there’d been about 35,000 or 50,000, I can’t remember which. Of course they’d been weeded. When I said, Where are all the poems about love? and nature? they said, oh we chucked all those out on the first round. I bet I should have liked some of them.’ Larkin’s comments arise in a letter to C.B. Cox (13 January 1981) from The Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940–1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London and Boston: Faber, 1992), p. 637. 2 Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (London and New York: Penguin, 1990 [1977]). 3 Ama Ata Aidoo, Changes: A Love Story (London: The Women’s Press, 1991). 4 Walter Greenwood, Love on the Dole (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966 [1935]). 5 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 54. 6 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3. 7 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 228. Harrison used to despise the countryside, but then mellowed towards it as he approached forty. In an undated missive to Alan Ross, sent while living in Gregynog, he comments that his ‘love/hate for the countryside is tipping towards love. It’s unlikely though that I’ll ever actually go [to the] lengths of writing any nature poems.’ Approximately eight years later, his first nature poems were written. 8 Christopher Reid, ‘Articulating the Awkwardness’, Times Literary Supplement, 15 January 1982, p. 49. 9 Alan Young, ‘Weeds and White Roses: The Poetry of Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 167–73, at p. 173; Mary Garofalakis, ‘The

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American Versus/Verses’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 331–37, at p. 332; Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 227. 10 Linden Peach, Culture and Identity in the Work of Six Contemporary Poets (Bridgend: Seren, 1993), p. 119. 11 Antony Rowland, ‘Love, Elegies and Annihilation’, Meridian, 13.2 (October 1994), pp. 126–37. 12 Hugo Friedrich, Die Struktur der Modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956). 13 Friedrich, Struktur, p. 22. 14 Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry, trans. J. Neugroschel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 18. 15 Friedrich, Modern Poetry, p. 88. 16 OED, 2nd edn. 17 Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 18 Heinrich Böll, ‘Die Zeitgenosse und die Wirklichkeit’, in Hierzulande: Aufsätze zur Zeit (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1963), p. 65. 19 Elie Wiesel, Night, Dawn, The Accident, trans. S. Rodway (London: Robson, 1974 [1958]), p. 71. 20 Presence and absence are not binary opposites. As Barthes argues, in a sense, the loved object is always absent (A Lover’s Discourse, p. 15). By this he means that when present, the object initiates the fantasy of fulfilment. When the fact that it is a fantasy punctures the amorous vision, the subject is reduced to despair; in psychoanalysis, this would be termed a state of constant hysteria. Since love is a narcissistic process, the object is also always absent due to his or her banishment from the Image-repertoire. 21 Poems of Keats, ed. Blunden. References to Keats’s poetry abound in the poem. Apart from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ references discussed below, ‘how Melancholy dwelled inside Delight’ refers, obviously, to the lines ‘Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine’ from ‘Ode on Melancholy’ (Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 192; Poems of Keats, p. 270). ‘[P]alate/Fine, for 42!’ recalls ‘him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine’ from the same poem; ‘Proserpine’ likewise the ‘ruby grape of Proserpine’ (Harrison, Selected Poems, pp. 195, 194; Poems of Keats, pp. 270, 269). The quoted ‘of candied apple, quince and plum and gourd’ originates from the famous passage describing Porphyro’s luxurious fruit in The Eve of St Agnes (Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 192, Poems of Keats, p. 252). Although these do not culminate in a pastiche of Keats, or Romantic poetry as a whole, ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ certainly mimics the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century’s interest in a problematisation of excess in the context of the French Revolution. Hence the greenness of the limes in the poem is so brilliant that it is ‘close to pain’ (p. 195). Juxtapositions of extreme opposites run through Romantic verse; hence the image of fruit burning during the night in the penultimate stanza. Pastiche, the penchant of postmodern kitsch, sometimes elides historicity. In Harrison’s work, such blinkering

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would be unlikely, given his love of history, which ‘flow[s] to the taste buds’ in the mid-section of the poem (p. 193). 22 Poems of Keats, p. 258. 23 ‘Still’ is a word that occurs throughout Harrison’s work. It is particularly prevalent in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence due to its elegiac nature. ‘Still’ is used frequently in the genre, entertaining the same ambivalence as in Keats’s poem: it could either mean ‘continuing’ or ‘dead’. Harrison is sensitised to this in poems such as ‘A Close One’ (‘still too living dead’) and ‘Long Distance’, in which the father still renews his dead wife’s transport pass (pp. 160, 134). 24 As I shall demonstrate in Chapter 4, this concept reflects Jacques Derrida’s evaluation of contemporary literature in ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ as displaying a ‘radical precariousness’ in the atomic age (p. 27). However, Harrison differs from the theorist on one important point. Derrida believes poetry and the epic will be able to survive a holocaust due to their non-literary memory (these are conceived as oral forms which existed before literature, which was born simultaneously with the archive). Harrison sees the form as defunct in a post-holocaust context, even though the ode is historically an oral poem to be sung, for example, by the Chorus in a Greek play. 25 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, p. 27. 26 J. Lemprière, Bibliotheca Classica (1788). 27 Garofalakis, ‘The American Versus/Verses’, p. 332. 28 OED, 2nd edn. 29 OED, 2nd edn. 30 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 232. In a letter to Alan Ross (4 May 1968), Harrison explains that on the day he sent the manuscript of The Loiners to London Magazine (5 April 1968), ‘my daughter, who is rare and beautiful, had both legs crushed under a 10 ton lorry on the Great North Road’. By the end of June, she was recovering ‘slowly and can stand a few minutes on one leg’ (30 June 1968). In 1969, she suffered another (unspecified) accident (16 February 1969). In June, ‘The action against the lorry driver that maimed Jane finished’ (9 June 1969). In October 1970, ‘Jane came out of hospital […] after an operation to put a metal staple in her ankle’ (7 October 1970). Harrison’s agonised wait for her recovery from the original accident is recounted in more detail than in ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ in ‘Ghosts: Some Words at Breakfast’ (Selected Poems, pp. 72–76). 31 Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 13. 32 Ricks, Keats, p. 77. 33 Virgil, ed. John Dryden (London: W. Suttaby et al., 1808), p. 105. 34 Virgil, ed. Dryden, p. 100. 35 Tony Harrison, Theatre Works 1973–85 (London and New York: Penguin, 1986 [1985]), p. 82. 36 Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 1984), p. 211.

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37 Garofalakis, ‘The American Versus/Verses’, p. 334. 38 The Times, 16 November 1982, p. 12. 39 The Times, 20 July 1982, p. 20. 40 Rowland, ‘Silence and Awkwardness’. 41 Glenn D. Hook, ‘Making Nuclear Weapons Easier to Live With: The Political Role of Language in Nuclearization’, Bulletin of Peace Proposals, 16.1 (1985), pp. 67–77, at p. 67. 42 Peter Watson discusses Dr Narut’s lectures and films in War on the Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1980), pp. 181–82. 43 Robert Scheer, With Enough Shovels: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983 [1982]), p. 31. 44 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p .3. 45 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 227. The first comment ‘If I had to divide the head and the heart’ is possibly gleaned from George Meredith’s ‘Modern Love’ [1862] (‘Intelligence and instinct now are one’), the form of which inspired the sixteen-line sonnets of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence (Meredith’s Poetical Works, London: Constable and Company, 1912), p. 146. 46 Maureen Duffy, ‘The Progress of Love’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 338–47, at p. 341. 47 John Donne, ‘The Canonisation’, in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Helen Gardner (London: Penguin, 1972 [1957]), pp. 61–62, at p. 62. 48 Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Adultery’, in Selected Poems (London and New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 119–120, at p. 119. 49 Take Daphne Marlatt’s prose-poem sequence, Touch to my Tongue (Edmonton: Longspoon Press, 1984). In ‘yes’, lesbian amorous discourse is presumably indicated by the ‘hot estuary’ of the lovers’ mouths and vaginas; the women are ‘tidal’, and ‘leaking’. However, given that the participants’ sexuality remains unsolved, such imagery could also refer to a straight or a gay male couple: both vaginas and penises have a propensity to ‘leak’; crashing waves are hackneyed symbols of the heterosexual union. Nevertheless, amorous discourse is historically and materially determined (which Barthes does not consider). In the discussion below, for example, I refer to the way in which contemporaneous scientific theories are inscribed into the amorous discourse evident in Donne’s poetry. 50 In J.G. Ballard’s Crash (London: Triad/Paladin, 1990 [1973]), the author depicts that which Harrison only imagines. In Ballard’s eroticisation of death, characters perform car crashes in order to gain the ultimate orgasm. For example, in Chapter 1, Vaughan’s fantasy is to collide with Elizabeth Taylor, resulting in ‘her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine’ (p. 12). In the futuristic, technological society not dissimilar to the era of postmodernity, the death of the car is elegised rather than that of the humans.

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51 See Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1971 [1920]). He writes that after ‘accidents involving a risk to life’, a ‘general enfeeblement and disturbance of the mental capacities’ is experienced (p. 6). In contrast, in Harrison’s poem the extreme situation results in a heightened psychological state. 52 Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968. 53 In ‘Song of the South’ from The Frighteners (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1987), Sean O’Brien refers to these nuclear bunkers owned by those who construct the hegemonic political discourse (p. 22). They often contained decontamination rooms, early warning systems, communication centres and life support systems. Some of them, such as the Hack Green bunker near Nantwich, have recently been opened to the public as museums. 54 The most famous narrative of post-apocalyptic survival in the early 1980s was probably Raymond Briggs’s When the Wind Blows (London: Penguin, 1983 [1982]). In this savage indictment of Thatcherite responses to the possibility of nuclear war, the elderly couple follow the instructions on how to survive an atomic blast, but inevitably die. The comic book draws on public information films such as Protect and Survive (broadcast c.1980), which is held in the Imperial War Museum. Protect and Survive offers ‘helpful’ advice on how, for example, to build a ‘Fall-Out Room’, and construct a toilet using a bucket and bin liner. If anyone dies, the advice is to leave them outside wrapped up in a labelled blanket. 55 Harrison uses ‘Holocaust’ with a capital ‘H’ to refer to nuclear devastation. As I explained in my introduction, I use ‘H’ for the result of the Final Solution and ‘h’ for the nuclear destruction to distinguish the culturally and historically specific phenomena. Luther’s adage is paralleled at the end of the first part with Socrates’ desire to play his ‘novice lyre’ while dying, in order to celebrate the momentary in the form of a new chord (p. 225). 56 Donne, ‘The Extasie’, in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Gardner, p. 75. 57 Note in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Gardner, p. 75. 58 Donne, ‘The Extasie’, p. 75. 59 The Table Talk of Martin Luther, trans. W. Hazlitt (London: Bell and Daldy, 1872), pp. 322–23. 60 This again links with the representation of sexuality in Ballard’s Crash. After experiencing the extreme situation of the car crash, the characters see sexual possibilities in everything. And are these texts not the products of a particularly violent, masculine imagination? Both are obsessed with phallocentric images of destruction via penetration. 61 Donne, ‘The Relique’, in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Gardner, p. 80; Henry King, ‘The Exequy’, in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Gardner, pp. 110–13, at p. 112. 62 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3. 63 The text is blatantly autobiographical. It refers to the break-up of Harrison’s first marriage (‘old pain’), his subsequent marriage to Teresa

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Stratas, and the fact that he shifts between homes in Newcastle, New York and Florida (p. 190). 64 Peach, Culture and Identity, p. 119. 65 Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1998), p. 31. 66 Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems, ed. Michael Longley (London: Faber, 1988), p. 34. 67 ‘Our ascetic guts require/Breathers from the Latin fire’ (MacNeice, Selected Poems, p. 34). 68 MacNeice, Selected Poems, p. 36. 69 Peach, Culture and Identity, p. 119. 70 Ted Hughes, Selected Poems 1957–1981 (London: Faber, 1982), p. 13. 71 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 228. 72 Harrison, Gorgon, p. 64; Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 228. 73 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 227. 74 Andrew Marvell, ‘The Garden’, in The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Gardner, pp. 255–58, at p. 257. 75 Marvell, ‘The Garden’, p. 257. 76 Huk, ‘Tony Harrison, The Loiners, and the “Leeds Renaissance”’, p. 78. 77 Sartre, What is Literature?, p. 12. 78 O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse, p. 31. 79 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1998), pp. 163, 165. 80 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 189. 81 The Times, 31 March 1981, p. 1. 82 The Times, 13 April 1981, p. 1. 83 Shelley’s Prose, ed. D.L. Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954), p. 297. 84 The Times, 4 April 1982, p. 14. 85 Dir. Martin Scorsese, 1976. 86 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, pp. 13–14. 87 A Lover’s Discourse, p. 87. This link between nature and the apocalyptic is relevant to the Holocaust: concentration camps were often set in secluded spots to hide their existence from the outside world. In 1984, the sculptor George Segal illustrated this by situating his San Francisco Holocaust memorial among cypress trees. Both H/holocausts are thus linked in their cynical appropriation of or disregard for the environment. James Young discusses this monument in The Texture of Memory, and quotes with approval the journalist William Wilson, who wrote after the memorial’s unveiling, ‘[Segal’s] contrast may in itself speak volumes – about the beauty of the world and the dark underside of human nature’ (The Texture of Memory [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993], p. 316). 88 OED, 2nd edn. 89 D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (London: Penguin, 1995 [1926]). The ‘lords of life’ in this novel are the chosen people of the Mexican

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god Quetzalcoatl, pledged to purge the land of Christians, and restore, à la Negritude, cultural purity to the nation (p. 178). Quetzalcoatl can be translated as the ‘plumed serpent’: this mythical snake represents the origin and ‘breath of life’ (p. 58). The symbol of ‘the ring of a serpent that had its tail in its mouth’ differs, according to the protagonist, Kate, from the national emblem of an eagle holding a snake in its beak (p. 118). 90 D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), pp. 98–101. 91 William Henderson, Notes on the Folk-Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders (London: W. Satchell, 1879), p. 212. 92 Bram Stoker, The Lair of the White Worm (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon Book Publishers, 1991 [1911]), p. 33. 93 The Oxford Book of Ballads, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 61. 94 Julian Franklyn, A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang (London and Boston: Routledge, 1961), p. 122. 95 In turn, Stoker’s novel inspired Ken Russell’s parody of the horror genre, The Lair of the White Worm (1988). 96 Antony Rowland, ‘Class and Masculinity in Tony Harrison’s Poetry’, in Signs of Masculinity, ed. E. Liggins, A. Rowland and E. Uskalis (Rotterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 199–217. 97 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1990), p. 89. This picture is discussed by Richard Dyer in ‘Don’t Look Now – The Male Pin-Up’, Screen, 23.3–4 (September–October 1982), p. 72. 98 Robert Frost, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), pp.122–25, at p. 122. 99 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and the Politics of Literary Criticism, ed. C. Belsey and J. Moore (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 101, 113. 100 Frost, Selected Poems, pp. 28–29. 101 Ian McEwan, The Child in Time (London: Picador, 1988 [1987]). 102 See John Stoltenberg, Refusing to Be a Man (London: Fontana, 1990 [1989]). In the section on ‘Disarmament and Masculinity’, Stoltenberg is in danger of simplistically equating male behaviour and violence with the nuclear arms race, Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement without attention to the historical modalities of each situation (pp. 81–92).

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Chapter Three

Mourning and Annihilation in the Family Sonnets

Mourning, our Contemporary Elegies are gloriously self-indulgent poems that exult in melancholic reiterations of the dead. Along with the amorous, elegiac mourning forms a central concern in Harrison’s oeuvre; it is most extensively explored in the second, or ‘family sonnets’, section of the ‘School of Eloquence’.1 Mourning is often confused with grieving: both denote the amorous subject’s sorrow and regret for the loss, and celebration of, a loved object. However, grief denotes a common psychological state that forms only part of a process of coming to terms with absence; it is this wider phenomenon that might be more accurately termed ‘mourning’. The distinction is illustrative, since Harrison engages with a number of different modes of mourning in his work: the response to loss is satirical and irreverent in Palladas: Poems, elegiac and classical in ‘The Mother of the Muses’, loving and intimate in ‘Losing Touch’, anticipatory and nostalgic in the television programme Black Daisies for the Bride, sensual and exuberant in ‘Timer’, sentimental and apocalyptic in ‘Long Distance’, and intellectual and playful in the series Loving Memory.2 Perhaps most striking within these texts is the amount of literary material on mourning introjected by Harrison. Throughout his poetry there are references to elegists, such as Virgil and William Butler Yeats in ‘Study’, John Milton and Thomas Gray in ‘On Not Being Milton’ and William Wordsworth in ‘Remains’. As with Geoffrey Hill’s remoulding of canonical material in the wake of the Holocaust in ‘September Song’, traditional 144

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structural motifs of elegies are examined rigorously in Harrison’s work. Milton’s bitter rejections of classical modes of grieving in Lycidas are mixed with the tender, yet often ironic, tone of Hardy’s elegies; Harrison inherits this literary framework, and then adjusts it in order to satisfy the modalities of mourning for his own parents.3 Late-twentieth-century elegies within the European tradition tend to reject humanist appeals to utopia, emancipation or any other form of consolation evident in the melancholic poetry of Shelley or Milton. As Paul Hamilton has argued, contemporary elegists such as Douglas Dunn ‘play through premature conclusions’ bequeathed by this ‘aristocratic and selfish’ poetic genre.4 Similarly, Harrison invokes, and then rejects, the structural motifs of traditional elegies, drawing on non-literary models of mourning, such as public attempts to ‘work through’ the atrocities committed during the Second World War. In the ‘School of Eloquence’, the signified referent of the Holocaust enters into a continuum of annihilation: the melancholic elegist mourns for atrocity, civilians’ experience of war and the death of his parents throughout the sequence. A dialectic ensues between private grief for the lost, loved objects, and public mourning for historical events. The two poles remain distinct; they are linked, but not commensurate. Even though the Holocaust casts an immanent shadow over Harrison’s poetry, not all the poems are directly engaged with this ‘ghost’. Instead of courting praise for ahistorical, ‘urn’-like texts, the Leeds poet evokes specific contexts in the sonnets, thereby offering a framework in which to understand the poetry. These evocations are repeated throughout his work in an attempt to nudge the reader into interpreting the individual poems in the light of his overall obsession with history. Private elegies about false teeth, such as ‘Illuminations III’, can be read, if we choose to follow the poet’s directive, in terms of the continuum of atrocity which ranges across his work. In the third section of this chapter, I turn from Harrison’s fusion of private mourning with public grieving for the Second World War, and analyse three family sonnets in which a more general sense of annihilation is evoked rather than the specific shadow of the Holocaust.

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What might a wider process of mourning consist of, one that transcends subjective expressions of grief in elegies? In Freudian psychoanalysis, the ego’s temporary suffering necessarily enters a dialectic between the general and particular. In this chapter, I work through such theory, but tend to favour a conception of mourning which might stress the historical codings inherent in individual grief. Nevertheless, it must be stressed that no exposition of mourning proves definitive: it may be purely physiological, a performance, or a subversion of cultural norms. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose argues that postmodernism itself becomes a melancholic practice by endlessly mourning the loss of previous supposed certainties such as reason, power and truth.5 Yet this ‘everlasting melancholia’ proves, as she contends, that it has never really let go of these categories.6 Oedipal dismissals of tradition and the metaphysics of presence across the disciplines of philosophy and critical theory need to be readdressed, or else ‘what philosophical resources remain for an ethics’ will be forever ignored. Harrison’s work may be suspicious of power, but he does not adhere to a critical tradition typified by Althusser and Foucault in which it proliferates. His poetry is much more concerned – in a traditional manner – with the concepts of truth and reason so necessary and yet anathema to much postmodern theory. This is why I have chosen to place his work in the context of theories of mourning going back to Freud, in which the concepts of subjectivity and representation are legitimated. However, later models, such as deconstructive mourning, do not completely eschew a metaphysics of presence, as in Derrida’s plea for deep grief. This faithfulness towards the dead can be usefully appropriated for a discussion of Harrison’s textual iteration of the deaths of his parents. His poetry is also concerned with the problems of mourning for wider historical events, and whether this is possible in an aristocratic genre such as the elegy, with its traditional focus on the localised grief of the subject. Taboos of mourning are broken throughout Harrison’s elegies. In Palladas: Poems and ‘Losing Touch’, Harrison engages with polarised modes of mourning; the first remains

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faithful to Palladas’s cynicism and takes an irreverent and satirical stance. In response to classical elegies such as Virgil’s, the speaker espouses the fruitlessness of the process, and bemoans the prioritisation of the dead over the living: Agony comes from brooding about death. Once dead, a man’s spared all that pain. Weeping for the dead’s a waste of breath – they’re lucky, they can’t die again.7 This passage represents the overall nihilistic tone of the sequence. Read from a post-Holocaust perspective, Palladas’s sentiment chimes with Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno’s reevaluation of death. Musselmänner (starved inmates) suffered to an extent that Adorno responds to, in Minima Moralia, when he describes a ‘nullity’ affecting any notion of the self in the post-war era; the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate the will to live rewrites as an obscenity the Metaphysicals’ sense that extinction might be desirable.8 Ancient though he may be, then, Palladas can be appropriated for contemporary nihilism. However, his pithy attack on the prerogatives of elegy contrasts with Harrison’s sentimental tribute to his friend George Cukor in ‘Losing Touch’. It immediately fits into a more committed and elegiac tradition of mourning: the epigraph is a dedication to the lost loved object (‘in memoriam George Cukor, died 24.1.83’).9 The main text begins with the trauma of grieving, juxtaposed with the ordinariness of domesticity which suddenly turns unheimlich. Harrison describes a siskin (an unusual bird of the finch family), and notes the rare sunshine at ‘this time of year up North’, while Cukor’s death is announced on the radio (p. 37). In the second stanza, he articulates the often guilty nature of mourning. When the poet writes that he sent a postcard occasionally to the film director, he betrays, through litotes, grief deeper than that which the surface text admits. Such a statement recalls the ‘muck of language’: it is ‘too much’ in the sense that it is overtly painful, and simultaneously ‘too little’ in that it refers to a psychological state beyond the power of linguistic signification.10 In the third stanza, the poet

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experiences the joy and grief of rememory, to appropriate Toni Morrison’s term from Beloved, when he savours a shared moment with Cukor in Leningrad.11 Ensuing images entail a metaphysical rendition of mourning which would be anathema to the pragmatic satire of Palladas: the poet’s pen is made analogous to the one in the obituary photograph of Cukor from The Times; he then feels the director ‘lean towards [him] out of Nothingness’ (p. 37). One of the most extensive investigations of the process of mourning in Harrison’s work is to be found in the television documentary series Loving Memory. ‘Mimmo Perrella non e piu’ (‘Mimmo Perrella is no more’), the second programme in the series, betrays Harrison’s delightfully macabre obsession with the modalities of mourning. The episode consists of an exploration of the extended death rites peculiar to Naples: corpses are placed in a temporary vault, and then exhumed twenty months later. They are then cleaned and examined for flaws (such as disconnected bones) by the scrupulous families, and placed in a crypt; it is only after the last stage of burial that the family can cease the process of mourning. In contrast to the sympathetic stance taken by the voiceover towards this extended ritual, in the next programme, ‘The Muffled Bells’, a vindictive attitude is displayed towards ‘survivors’, gleaned specifically from the genre of the elegy. Rural England replaces bustling Naples, a more familiar setting for readers of poetry in English, typified by Thomas Gray’s elegy. However, the artifice of pastoral cosiness is undercut when Harrison focuses on an epitaph that gleefully announces that all its readers are going to die. This links with Harrison’s derision towards the consumers of skullicious lollipops in the first programme: they forget about death while on holiday in Blackpool, but unwittingly lick a sign of their future skeleton. Such a scathing tone is bequeathed by the macabre bravado of the Metaphysical poets, particularly that of the narrator in Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ (which Harrison has an alleged tendency to recite at dinner parties).12 It also originates from the humanist notion of carpe diem, typified by the narrator’s desire in ‘Following Pine’ to ‘[plant] an apple tree the very eve/of the

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Apocalypse; or the Holocaust’.13 Any notion of living is steeped in the concept of non-being: whereas the poet argues that he has accepted this dialectic – which gives him a sense of Hegelian progression in that he takes up a position of superiority – the masses collude in an ontological fantasy in which death is absent. The third programme in the Loving Memory series, ‘Cheating the Void’, broadcast on the forty-second anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, then complements this humanist resolution by celebrating the living in the wake of the Holocaust. ‘Cheating’ refers to the invention of signs to recreate the dead after their demise in the ‘real’. Harrison uses the example of the first film footage to be shown to the public in France (1895): one contemporary reviewer commented that ‘Death’s no longer absolute’.14 The programme notes that this has led to an augmented fetishisation of signs for oblivion; extra-diegetic sampling of The Doors, and Jim Morrison’s comment that ‘Death and my cock are the world’, are intended to prove its thesis (p. 95). Harrison counters the perceived perversions of popular culture by offering a specific context for grieving: it has almost been swamped by the mass mourning required after twentieth-century atrocities. For example, the grief suffered by the relatives of the hostages assumed dead in Kashmir in 1998, however acute, might be regarded as negligible in the context of the violations encountered by the inhabitants as a whole, defined by the Indian authorities as Muslim and militant separatists. More grieving must, according to ‘Cheating the Void’, have occurred in a century where fifty million died during just one war than in any previous epoch. Montages of corpses, lists of the Nazi concentration and death camps, the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943 (in which the streets were measured at a temperature of two hundred degrees hotter than an oven), the stack of a camp chimney; all these images combine to suggest that mourning is an inextricable part of contemporary culture.

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Theories of Mourning: from Psychoanalysis to Deconstruction If a rupture between the sign and referent is accepted, then it would seem to follow that the textual performances of mourning in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence have nothing to do with ‘reality’. Such a stance could imply a resistance to Harrison’s conception of poetry as mimetic, but it would also deny the possibility that the sonnets draw on modes of grieving outside the text. This does not mean that the poet needs to be psychoanalysed in order to determine whether he is melancholic or just plain loopy. A melancholic text, on the other hand, might be better understood if cultural and historical contexts for the varieties of mourning represented in the poem are uncovered. Hence I wish to introduce expositions of the process by Sigmund Freud, Abraham and Torok, and Jacques Derrida: Harrison produces such a wide range of models in the family sonnets that they can be interpreted as engaged, beyond authorial intention, with the (often polarised) deconstructive and psychoanalytic theories of mourning. Another reason for the following theoretical engagement is that melancholic sonnets are conventionally explicated within the recognised and transgressive (which then, in turn, become recognised) structures of elegy. This area of literature has already been extensively explored in works such as Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy and Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning, and has been applied to Harrison’s poetry in Rebecca Smalley’s thesis ‘The Role of Memory in the Poetry of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison’.15 In this chapter, I wish to focus instead on the tension in the relationship between theoretical and literary representations of mourning. In Stranded Objects, Eric Santner discusses the impossibility, and necessity, of mourning for the Holocaust. He draws on Freud’s essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’: The task of integrating damage, loss, disorientation, decentredness into a transformed structure of identity, whether it be that of an individual, a culture, or an

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individual as a member of a cultural group, is, as I shall argue in these pages, one of the central tasks of what Freud called Trauerarbeit, or the ‘work of mourning’.16 Drawing on a dialectical model of private and cultural mourning, the above quotation celebrates the process as equipped to overcome the ‘decentredness’ that a confrontation with annihilation initiates. It replicates Freud’s definition of ‘true’, ‘healthy’ mourning, which is ‘regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal and so on’.17 The loved object is dead (or figuratively ‘dead’ in the instances of absence I analysed in Chapter 2), so the subject needs to detach his or her libido from it in order to redirect cathetic energy to a replacement. This process is painful, so much so that sometimes a period of unreality intervenes in which the subject clings to the ideal of the object in a ‘hallucinatory wish-psychosis’.18 In ‘true’ mourning, though, ‘deference for reality gains the day’; the ego becomes free to attach itself to an alternative. How can Freud’s approach be applied to the Holocaust? The prospect of nuclear annihilation immediately presents a problem in that the loss is projected rather than ‘real’. But this does not mean that a subject cannot mourn an idea, or an event which has not yet happened, given that the loved object could be a former lover, relative, hedgehog (see Philip Larkin’s ‘The Mower’), tobacco, or God.19 Since the process takes place in the realms of the psychological, the subject could suffer from trying to come to terms with the concept of the possible obliteration of the pre-holocaust contemporary. Literature about projected nuclear warfare as a whole, including Harrison’s work, could be said to be central to this psychological process in the sense that it provides an inscription of cultural anxiety. Similarly, to mourn the Holocaust would entail an impossible struggle to register the death of millions. However, the lost, loved objects in this case would be actual referents rather than the potential referents in the projected scenario of nuclear destruction. Grieving for the loss of the contemporary could

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be said to be a valuable cultural experience if, in the case of the nuclear holocaust, it results in an avoidance of the apocalyptic, but Freud’s model appears to have more relevance for historical tragedy. ‘True’ mourning would allow survivors to work through their own traumatic experiences of hyper-cathecting the dead. ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ might be applied to Holocaust texts such as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, which might be said to contain, and try to come to terms with, the Holocaust through the genre of the documentary.20 Harrison’s poetry may engage in Trauerarbeit in order to ‘work through’ private elegies for his parents, and the public poems about the Holocaust. But is his focus on family members rather than the Holocaust per se in the sonnets nothing more than a humanist capitulation to the notion of ‘survival’, which occludes millions of deaths? By focusing on survivors, do artists endorse a bourgeois mode of mourning in which a temporary loss of psychic health must be quickly followed by a return to pulling one’s weight in the global economy? Following Adorno and Langer, grieving in this context would be a simplistic affirmation of a ‘triumph of the spirit’ rather than a complex engagement with the Holocaust.21 Anti-humanist reworkings of the process might demand a response to atrocity, and the death of any loved object, in the form of reverential silence. But then this would open up the possibility that the Holocaust might be lost as historical detritus; one of mourning’s main tasks is to perform the groundwork for the maintenance of the idea of the object in cultural memory. However, it would be simplistic to argue that the Holocaust can be easily mourned, until a point is reached when the subject can re-cathect to a replacement for the totalised, ‘lost’ event. Harrison’s poetry has not successfully ‘worked through’ either the death of his parents or the Holocaust, since poems about these subjects are still being added to the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence. Similarly, in Stranded Objects, Santner applies Freud’s concept of ‘work’ to Germany’s reaction to the Final Solution, but he finds little evidence of healthy mourning: there is no transformed cultural identity, only a disabling decentredness.22

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In his preface, he cites a speech by the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Höffner, in which the latter implored Germans to refuse to ‘exhume past guilt and mutually committed injustices, in constant self-torment’ – a refusal which would amount to an avoidance of ‘true’ mourning.23 From such evidence Santner concludes that there is still tremendous uncertainty ‘and confusion in contemporary German society about how to approach the tasks of mourning and anamnesis with regard to fascism and the Holocaust’; this ‘confusion’ is symptomatic of melancholia. In Mourning Becomes the Law, Gillian Rose discusses Dina Wardi’s Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust and Joachim Fest’s The Face of the Third Reich, and concludes that both ‘books tell the same story: that impotence and suffering arising from unmourned loss do not lead to a passion for objectivity’.24 Rose does not term this melancholia, but the ‘unmourned loss’ suggests the residue of Freudian terminology. In Freud’s essay, mourning and melancholia are, initially, an opposition. Melancholics are unable to perform the ‘true’ work of mourning because they recognise the loss of the loved object, but not how it affects them.25 The period of unreality that Freud outlines in relation to ‘healthy’ mourning is thus extended indefinitely: the ego remains cathected to the lost object and becomes ‘poor and empty’; this results in a pathological loss of self-esteem.26 According to this model, then, Santner argues that Germans are unable to respond adequately to the advent of the Holocaust because they are still influenced by an outdated notion of innate superiority over other races; the denial of the past for camp children and surviving Nazis leads, for Rose, to negative behaviour, whether directed inwards or outwards. In relation to Harrison’s poetry, it could be argued that the obsession with parents and atrocity displays a melancholic inability to re-cathect successfully to the amorous object celebrated throughout the American poems. Resultant narcissism leads to an over-evaluation of the poetic, and, in the case of the Germans, an identification with the Jews as common victims of atrocity. This national self-characterisation is perverse in the context of the millions killed during the Final Solution. And yet, as Santner illustrates in an essay on trauma,

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this process is overt in the Historiker-Streit, which consisted of revisionist debates in Germany during the 1980s that attempted to soften the ramifications of the Holocaust.27 It may be simplistic, though, to label a national identity, and a poet’s work, as purely melancholic. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Freud himself admits that the opposition he makes between the two entities is not fixed and irrefutable: even in descriptive psychiatry, ‘the definition of melancholia is uncertain’.28 He notes that the pathological distinction between the two categories is unstable, because ‘it is really only because we know so well how to explain [‘true’ mourning] that this attitude does not seem to us pathological’.29 Thus he offers a correlation of melancholia and mourning, in which their individual features are interchangeable. Despite this breakdown in the original opposition, Freud continues to detect differences in similarities: melancholia is distinguished from mourning by the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism.30 Even this distinction is untenable, according to Santner: ‘in reality, pure forms of either mode of grieving are considered rare. Since love inevitably seems to include an element of narcissism […] it might make more sense to speak of a continuum or a layering of […] modes of mourning’.31 Such vacillations between Freud’s poles of mourning and melancholia are located in the elegiac representations of mourning in Harrison’s work. One of the most significant developments in psychoanalytic theories of mourning since Freud’s essay (according to the authors themselves) is located in Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s article ‘Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia’.32 As Christopher Lane argues persuasively, their practice is actually empirical psychology rather than descriptive psychoanalysis.33 Introjection is described as a process in which the subject recognises the loss of the loved object, and sublimates the pain into language.34 This operation can be indicated figuratively through the sharing of food, an activity common in Western societies after the funeral service: ‘Such communion can mean that, rather than the person of the deceased, it is our mutual presence that we are taking into our

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bodies in the form of assimilable food; as for the deceased, we shall deposit him in the earth and not in ourselves’.35 Introjection might be represented in the family sonnet entitled ‘Book Ends’, in which survivors eat the last apple pie baked by the mother, which signifies her absent corporality.36 In contrast, in the case of ‘incorporation’ the subject refuses to admit the loss of the loved object, and fantasises ‘swallowing’ the latter to avoid the need for hyper-cathection.37 ‘Long Distance’ may perform this process, since the dead mother is ‘swallowed’ by the house, and thereby kept ‘alive’.38 Surrounding himself with her possessions, unable to accept her death, the father paradoxically allows her some alterity, and imagines her returning home in the future. Abraham and Torok typify incorporation as a result of linguistic silence: because the object is narcissistically indispensable, the subject cannot admit its loss.39 Their theory differs from Freud’s in that they realise that some subjects refuse to recognise loss in the first instance, whereas ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ has absence as its premise. However, it still remains locked in its oppositional rationalisation: there is no sense that a mourner could shift between introjection (‘health’) and incorporation (‘illness’), mourning and melancholia. Complexities, uncertainties and psychic dissociations contained in Freud’s work are reduced to an adducible schema, whereas his dialectic of mourning is given full range in Harrison’s family sonnets. Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive model of mourning follows Freud’s rejection of prescriptive binaries. (Indeed, as Lane attests, Derrida ticks off Abraham and Torok in ‘Fors’ for creating false oppositions.40) Memoires for Paul de Man – partly an apologia for de Man’s complicity with Nazism – defuses a mourning/melancholia binary into a theory of im/ possible mourning: Is the most distressing, or even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us? Or is it that of the impossible mourning, which, leaving the other his alterity, respecting

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust thus his infinite remove, either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?41

Self-reflexivity, and an acceptance of an irreversible rupture between subject and object, vie in mutual exclusivity: perhaps this is mirrored in the agonised descriptions of the ‘idols’ (the dead parents) in the family sonnets. However, the alterity of the object in another elegiac poem by Harrison, ‘The Heartless Art’, suggests an opposite movement. Possibilities of ‘heartlessness’, in the sense of being insensitive to the dead, produce faultlines in both Derrida’s and Harrison’s oeuvres: rewritings of psychoanalytic models of mourning have been admired as complex and sensitive, and dismissed as obdurate and narcissistic. Readings of Derrida by Marshall W. Alcorn and Rebecca Smalley are illustrative. Alcorn praises the theorist for refusing to devalue the loved object, and accepting instead an ethical responsibility for its fantastical prolongation: Deconstruction, here, rather than being insensitive to the particularity of a particular loss, instead expresses a deep grief of mourning – a more acute grasp of the particular value of the object lost than many descriptions offered by those analysts who would hurry the mourner to get ‘well’ and find compensation for loss.42 In contrast, Smalley argues: the word ‘impossible’ implies that Derrida feels a mourning which leaves ‘the other his alterity’ is less likely than a mourning which narcissistically entombs the dead person’s memory as mirror of the mourner’s self. The main assumption behind Derrida’s writing seems to be that the love a mourner may express at the death of a dear friend is really a manifestation of narcissism.43 It is important to uncover whether or not Derrida is more ‘positive’ about ‘deep grief’ than psychoanalysts, since the numerous texts in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence which engage with lost, loved objects suggest that Harrison too has

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little interest in re-cathecting his psychic energies to alternatives. Does this endorse narcissism, alterity, or both? Derrida’s clarification of ‘possible mourning’ appears analogous to Freud’s theory of ‘melancholia’ and Abraham and Torok’s ‘incorporation’. The interiorisation of the object led to an impoverished ego in Freud’s model and the fantasy of ‘swallowing’ the narcissistically indispensable object in Abraham and Torok’s. But Derrida subverts the negativity of the latter model, and, in a sense, agrees with Freud that psychic health and illness cannot be neatly delineated. Interiorisation allows the dead to survive tropologically in the subject’s ego, rather than being hyper-cathected and ultimately forgotten. He then undermines his own subversion, and questions whether this ‘positive’ process is actually an ‘infidelity’: does the interiorisation actually ‘swallow’ not the ‘real’ object but a subjective ‘image’, ‘idol’ or ‘ideal’ of the other?44 In contrast, ‘impossible mourning’ seems closer to Freud’s ‘true’ mourning and Abraham and Torok’s introjection: the subject is not ‘swallowed’ but is ‘removed’ from (outside) the subject. Instead of celebrating the possibility of re-cathection, Derrida challenges possible mourning as narcissistic. Love objects are exchanged as if they mattered little to the subject, whereas, he argues, it is necessary to keep some psychic energy cathected to the dead (or ‘dead’) in order to inscribe them into the subject’s memory. Derrida vindicates the necessity of an unavoidably narcissistic, ‘deep grief of mourning’, a process at the heart of Harrison’s fusion of lost objects with the historical context of atrocity in the family sonnets.45 Poems are poems, not theoretical, sociological or psychoanalytical texts: Harrison’s articulation of ‘deep grief’ is similar to Derrida’s, but also markedly different. Whereas the former remains determined to engage with the embarrassment of mourning throughout the family sonnets, the latter appears to err on the side of linguistic silence when focusing on the ‘difficulty [with which] one finds right and decent words’ when someone dies.46 Painful, ethical duties to the accused dead in Memoires for Paul de Man resist the sign: in contrast, the poet assigns such work to a continuum of awkwardness;

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public difficulties in articulating suitable responses to the Holocaust fuse with private impossibilities of respecting the loved object’s alterity. In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva accounts for texts that are able to shrug off this ‘pressure of silence’ that both Harrison and Derrida perceive within the discourse of mourning.47 She comments on the French writer Marguerite Duras, who confronts ‘the silence of horror within oneself and in the world’ during a period of grieving with the ‘aesthetics of awkwardness’.48 These aesthetics consist of a rhetorical limping: verbs forget their subjects, the grammar is stilted, clauses concatenate, the diction is artificial and speech is distorted; this is not bad writing, but a valid articulation of dulled pain.49 If applied to Harrison’s family sonnets, conservative delineations of literary value would have to be suspended when confronted with poems which consist of frequent metrical breaks, caesura, and clumped clauses. (The false purity of such standards could be dispelled anyway by observing how canonical elegists such as Milton and Wordsworth have similarly applied these techniques in texts such as Lycidas and the ‘Ode’ on immortality.50) Kristeva’s aesthetics of awkwardness appear directly analogous with Harrison’s work on mourning: both are concerned with the embarrassment of metaphoricity, but there is an important difference. Whereas Duras’s writing is ‘dulled’, monosyllabic and always in danger of slipping back into linguistic silence, in Harrison’s poems, grief requires an almost exuberant articulation. Critics have often commented on the awkward aesthetics of the family sonnets, but they are often conceived as symptomatic of bad writing, rather than as a more positive reaction to mourning’s pressure of silence. In his review of Continuous (the second collection of Harrison’s ‘School of Eloquence’ sonnets) Blake Morrison lists the components of this linguistic awkwardness. He notices ‘clumping rhymes’, ‘all-too-iambic pentameters’, ‘awkward and repetitive abbreviated “s”s’, ‘visually ugly’ couplet-stanzas, and confused diction; he concludes that ‘these must be some of the least fluent poems in the language’.51 But instead of connecting such improprieties with the process of mourning, he conventionally links them with

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Harrison’s political invective: the poems are ‘written with labour, and on behalf of labour, and out of the labouring class’. In his review of the same collection, entitled ‘Articulating the Awkwardness’, Christopher Reid also remarks on the ‘class warfare’ of this deliberate linguistic strategy.52 He notes the sonnets’ metrical unevenness, the clumsy syntax and mixed metaphors of poems such as ‘Fire Eater’, and explicates them as part of a ‘campaign of restitution, bringing back to poetry those elements which genteel practitioners have chosen to snub’. For the first time in critical approaches to the family sonnets, Reid then briefly connects this awkwardness with the work of mourning; however, he feels embarrassed by its appeal to a pre-programmed, emotional reader response, and condemns it as artificial and sentimental. In the entry on Harrison in Contemporary Poets, Neil Corcoran – who refers directly to Reid’s article – elaborates on the sonnets’ mawkishness. He agrees that awkwardness is intentional, but adds the criticism that the sonnets are often a superficial performance.53 Not only this, but they are sometimes simplistic in construction: there remains […] the awkward fact, an awkwardness presumably not intended, that not all of these poems are […] as effective on a second reading as they are on the first: there can, sometimes, seem an element of the factitious or the histrionic in them. Corcoran assumes that grief has an essence beyond adequate signification in Harrison’s poems. But if mourning provides a dialectic between individual psychology and general codes of grieving, then it can be nothing more than a performance in the first instance. There may indeed be signified referents to which the poems refer, but as soon as they are inscribed into the text, transformations occur in which, for example, the genre of the elegy modulates ‘real’ responses to death. Moreover, receptions of grief need to be iterative if they are to survive; returning to the site of the mourning might not prove as painful in the second and third instance, but this does not diminish the value of the original reading. Harrison likes the fact that some people cry when confronted with the family

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sonnets at his poetry readings: given his vast output of verse drama, these poems might be interpreted as one-off, dramatic performances which are not intended to attain literary value by affirmation through subsequent readings. A link could now be made between the sonnets and theatre, the one-off productions such as those of the Unity Theatre in Manchester and Salford, meant to capture a moment of affinity with the workers, and then be abandoned. However, I would rather argue that the family sonnets achieve the value of an immediate appeal to sentiment, and also the linguistic complexities desired by conventional literary criticism. Even isolated words like ‘blight’ and ‘popped’ still resonate with signification when ‘Long Distance’ has been read several times.54 Indeed, one of the achievements of the aesthetics of awkwardness is that the view of these poems as ‘simple’ and written with ease actually gives way, with further study, to an appreciation of the craft needed to produce such apparent artlessness.

War and the Family Sonnets Corcoran might read elegies such as ‘Illuminations’ as artificial performances of grief, but if the psychoanalytic account is momentarily accepted as an authentic commentary on mourning, this poem appears to adhere ‘truly’ to Freud’s notion of a ‘true’ work of Trauerarbeit. As opposed to other pieces in the family sonnets section of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence such as ‘Long Distance’ (where the relationship between the father and his dead wife could be termed melancholic), here the poet accepts that the loved object has been lost. Possible mourning then allows for the image of the object to be inscribed into the poem. Rememory locates the father in Blackpool’s blissful setting: conforming to an elegiac lament, the narrator simultaneously acknowledges the alterity of the dead, and fuses the conventional closure of postcards in 1946 with a desire for the parent’s presence in the phrase ‘Wish you were here!’ (p. 146). Since the poem vacillates between alterity and inscription, a dialectic between possible and impossible

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mourning is constructed: a remainder of psychic energy is still cathected to the father; the poet then addresses him in an attempt to resolve a former conflict in a textual space. Traumas of loss confront the author figure when he admits with bathos that this disagreement can now only be solved in this manner. As a child, the narrator failed to understand that his father was mourning for the trauma of the Second World War when the latter snapped at him for playing on slot machines too long. By nagging for more money, the child upset his father’s attempt to re-cathect to a future devoid of atrocity, which the Blackpool landscape superficially provided with ‘God’s fresh air’. Death provides enlightenment in the private sphere: it is only after the father’s demise that the son recognises the reasons for his temper, which leads to a complex layering in the poem in which the son simultaneously mourns for the loved object, and joins his dead parents in grieving for the Second World War. As in ‘The Figure’, where the recurring cameraman denies any diachronic conception of the conflict, no simple linearity exists between the pre-war and post-war periods.55 ‘6 years’ of conflict, and ‘50 weeks of ovens’ (both the baker’s ovens of the father and camp crematoria) cannot be detached from the present, since the family still build and bomb ‘Boche stalags on the sands’, and hunt ‘beached starfish’.56 Elegiac mourning thus provides the poet with an impossible opportunity to exorcise the ‘ghosts’ of both the war and his parents. ‘Boche’ is a derogatory French term for ‘German’, which was popularised during the First World War, and Stalag a German word for prison camps: the ‘ghosts’ remain only as idols of the narcissistic subject; this is an ‘innocent’ representation of warfare reminiscent of a Commando comic, which mixes together traces of the older poet’s responses to war, along with the child’s perspective, and pertinent cultural and linguistic resonances (p. 146). Hence private grieving proves inseparable from the public: the Second World War forms a psychic trauma for the family and poet; in order to achieve a transformed identity for himself through ‘true’ mourning, the author must engage with both ‘ghosts’.

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This dialectic between mourning for a specific lost, loved object, and for a more abstract historical event, is compounded in the penultimate stanza: I see now all the piled old pence turned green, enough to hang the murderer all year and stare at millions of ghosts in the machine – (p. 146) Shifts between money, hanging and the concept of a mind/ body split in the space of three lines are disorientating, and probably explain why critics have desisted from interpreting the stanza. As the poet makes sense of the father’s irritability, the pennies that the son decants into the slot machines become intimately connected with warfare. They oxidise, and turn green; ‘old pence’ simultaneously become signs for the dead father: they could also represent the money not given to the child that the older poet then fantasises about. Pennies are then described as numerous enough to hang a murderer all year. The introduction of an abstract character at this stage is confusing; it could refer to a figure in The Long Drop machine, any victim of capital punishment, or even – if the reference is historically specific – one of the accused at the famous Nuremberg Trials for Nazi war criminals, which were in progress during the summer in which the poem is set.57 However, at this point Harrison casts his metaphorical net wider than this particular event and refers to both the slot machine and victimisers in general. This reading of the second line in the quotation above is mirrored by the meaning of the third. The phrase ‘ghost in the machine’ appears in Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical treatise The Concept of Mind, in which he attacks the common notion of a mind/body split.58 Ryle comments: ‘I shall often speak of [the theory] with deliberate abusiveness, as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”’.59 Hence the line denotes the ghosts in the Haunted House on Blackpool pier, the image of which is inextricable from the millions of ‘souls’ of those killed during twentieth-century warfare (p. 146). ‘Souls’ can only function in Harrison’s atheist text as signs for the self rather than a Christian essence of being: endorsing Ryle’s scepticism, the image of the father, and

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the war, now comprise the ‘ghosts’ in the ‘machine’ of the author’s text. Even the ‘machine’ of the private elegiac space of an arcade in Blackpool cannot be divorced from a dialectic in which public events must be mourned in order to satisfy the poet’s sense of historicity. Following a humanist conception of mourning, which pits obliteration against procreation, the second part of the poem ends by focusing on the ‘survivor’ rather than the absent object: Two dead, but the current still flows through us three though the circle takes for ever to complete – eternity, annihilation, me, that small bright charge of life where they both meet. (p. 147) ‘[C]urrent’ refers back to a moment earlier in the second part, in which the family are linked by an electric shock machine on Blackpool pier; it metamorphoses here into an abstract sense of genealogy. It side-steps any charge of narcissism by ‘flow[ing] through’ the family still in the sense that the process of mourning allows the dead to live on tropologically in the survivors’ memories. Such closure adheres to the elegiac tradition: ‘small bright charge of life’ recalls the ‘fire’ of the ‘parent spark’ which offers consolation for Adonais’s death amongst the simultaneous ‘charge’ of sorrow in Shelley’s poem.60 But whereas ‘Adonais’ asks nature to stop moaning, and celebrate the dead’s dispersal into ‘herb and stone’, the circle of annihilation in ‘Illuminations’ takes ‘for ever to complete’ (p. 147).61 ‘True’ mourning cannot be performed: the narrator projects an infinite version of melancholia, in which generations of survivors repeat the desire to remain faithful to the loved object. And to appreciate this, the narrator argues, he must concentrate on the self: ‘eternity’ and ‘annihilation’ fuse in a progressive dialectic; out of this, the subject (‘me’) is created. But this does not entail a simplistic rejection of negativity, since life is depicted (akin to the lilypads in ‘Cypress & Cedar’) as a precarious entity, which constantly hovers above the inevitability of extinction on both an individual and global level. Moreover, in the third part of

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the poem, this elegiac (and humanist) tendency to celebrate, and denigrate, the universal is subverted by a return to the disconnections in the first sonnet. In the first part, the tickedoff child ‘wouldn’t hold [his father’s] hand’; in the second poem, the abstract ‘charge of life’ joins the family together; in the bathetic third, they ‘didn’t always feel together’, and sit silently round the dinner-table (pp. 146, 147, 148). The second part emphasises the inevitable class split between the father, the working-class baker, and the scholarship boy, who learns ‘half-baked’ physics (p. 147, my emphasis). Traditional elegiac consolation for the object’s alterity disperses in the last part to such an extent that the closure offers a macabre image of the mother’s corpse returning to watch Harrison’s next play: Ay! I might have said, and put her in her box dressed in that long gown she bought to wear, not to be outclassed by those posh frocks at her son’s next New York première! (p. 148) ‘[M]ight have said’, coupled with the rhyming link between ‘said’, and the ‘dead’ of the penultimate stanza, emphasises the disjunction between the son and mother. The above quotation is an imagined speech to an ambulance crew or crematorium staff, the obvious implication being that the son was absent when she died, and regrets not hearing his mother’s final request for her false teeth. ‘[B]ox’ refers primarily to a coffin, in which the poet wishes to place the corpse and dress. However, it also denotes the ‘box’ in the New York theatre: ‘next […] première’ could be the first performance the mother went to after buying the dress, or, in a vision reminiscent of Norman Bates’s Oedipal grooming of his mother’s corpse in Psycho, the one after her death.62 With the phrase ‘posh frocks’, the poet begins to internalise the speech of the dead, as well as playing out a Gothic obsession with corpses (p. 148). Robert Southey contributed to the history of such melancholic elegies with his admission that ‘My days among the Dead are passed’. In ‘A Close One’, Harrison joins this tradition by unfolding a similar fascination with his deceased parents, but adds, as in ‘Illuminations’, a

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more rigorous sense of the historicity of mourning (p. 160). ‘A Close One’ takes the link between private and public grieving a stage further than ‘Illuminations’. As well as performing Trauerarbeit for the parents within the context of the Second World War, Harrison illustrates that the effects of deep grief on the subject in the present are directly analogous to the effects of an extreme situation he suffered during the global conflict. He suggests that the psychological state of a survivor of a parent’s death – like that of the amorous subject in A Lover’s Discourse – might be analogous to that of a former victim of war. But, as opposed to Barthes, who concentrates on the inmates of Dachau, Harrison here represents victimhood in the form of a British civilian who experienced air raids during the Second World War. This link is made most explicit in the second stanza, in which the sense of annihilation that ‘Day old’ bereavement evokes is compared to a ‘blitz’, which ‘there’s no shelter from, no all clear whined’ (p. 160). Emotions unleashed by the present alterity of the loved object are compared with the pain of rememory, the fear of death that the poet was overwhelmed by as a child during air-raid attacks. He recalls iconic images from British civilians’ experiences of the war that were integral to his fear, such as ‘hawsers’ and ‘dirigibles’. (Hawsers were cables or ropes used to prop up bomb-damaged buildings, which were then invariably levelled by tractors; dirigibles were miniature airships attached to the ground and positioned to collide with low-flying enemy aircraft.) However, the ambiguity of ‘blitz’ (beyond authorial intention here) extends the specific period of the Second World War to the prospect of nuclear annihilation, another ‘blitz’ from which there would be no shelter or respite. In the 1950s and 1960s especially, when government information films depicted what a nuclear holocaust would be like, the iconography of the blitz provided a visual simile, complete with fire brigades dousing burning buildings, crumbling houses and air-raid sirens. By drawing on such footage, a projected holocaust and air raids are united in images of the decentredness that grieving initiates. ‘A Close One’ is a poem of almost Beckettian

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minimalism, conveying the poet’s fragmented recollections of the trauma of war. Unusually, in the context of the family sonnets, it begins with an urgency represented by the initial stressed syllables within the trochaic pentameter: B o Bo B o B o B o (B) Hawsers. Dirigibles. Searchlight. Messerschmitts.63 ‘Half let go. Half rake dark nowt to find’, the second line, is also illustrative of this minimalism: trochees give way to seven consecutive stressed syllables which disrupt the metre; it deletes the subject ‘I’ twice, and a definite article before ‘dark’, in order to depict disorientation. The ‘ghost’ of the inarticulate in this instance is the longevity of trauma: charged with images of death, such as the sand – which is reminiscent of graves rather than its place of origin (Morecambe Bay) – the cellar is evoked as both a ‘real’ place in which the child suffered, and an image for the decentredness of mourning. Melancholia entails a process in which the mother is encrypted in the poet’s memory and text: within both, the poet yearns for his mother’s physical presence but finds ‘nowt’, and is forced to recognise the alterity of the loved object. Is this Derrida’s tomb of narcissism, in which an inability to re-cathect hides the subject’s desire to preserve the ego against loss? Encryption does not lead to a denial of death in the family sonnets; on the contrary, loss is played out again and again in each individual poem. If, following Jung, the cellar is figured as a symbol of the unconscious, the room in ‘A Close One’ resonates as a trope for the ‘School of Eloquence’ as a whole. Whenever an end to the process of mourning appears close, images of the war and parents return from the unconscious in the form of psychic trauma, so the sequence continues. Harrison’s use of these extreme metaphors of the blitz and holocaust to describe ‘deep grief’ suggests that he submits to the excessive difficulties of im/possible mourning. Yet, apart from the fact that grief is textualised rather than reduced to linguistic silence, his representation differs from Derrida’s model in that he appears to have completed the process of recathection only ‘several hours’ after the mother’s death, an

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accomplishment at odds with the theorist’s plea for faithfulness. Psychic energy is re-cathected onto objects associated with the mother, such as sandwiches, the children’s game ‘Snakes & Ladders’, a thermos flask and Kensitas cigarettes (which had air-raid precaution leaflets inside them instead of the usual cards). As Peter Sacks notes in The English Elegy, the turning of an object into signs is a ‘substitutive […] act of troping that any mourner must perform’; for example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apollo gains a tree as a replacement for Daphne.64 To give an example from Harrison’s work, in ‘Testing the Reality’, a flock of starlings represents the mother’s ascent into nothingness (p. 161). However, in ‘A Close One’, this elegiac convention in ‘true’ mourning is complicated in the last two stanzas: These lines to hold the still too living dead – my Redhill container, my long-handled hoe. (p. 160) The two objects referred to in the last line are not explained in the 1987 edition of the Selected Poems, but in the original Stand publication they are footnoted as follows: The long-handled hoe and Redhill container (after Redhill between Brighton and London where they were made) went together as a domestic piece of Air Raid equipment used especially for dealing with incendiary bombs. The Redhill container [with sand or water at the bottom] was like a metal coal scuttle with a flap in which you put the fire bomb to make it harmless after scooping it up in the long-handled hoe.65 This commentary makes a reading of the image of the Grim Reaper easier. Devoid of Pythonesque humour, the stanzas seem to indicate that in the poem (‘these lines’) – and (by extension) in elegies as a whole – language is able to ‘defuse’ the pain of bereavement (p. 160). Like the bomb, it can be distanced, and then ‘worked through’ by the poem (troped as the hoe and container). ‘Lines’ signify a flawed rationality, which can, for the moment explored in the text, ‘hold’ unconscious trauma at arm’s length. But, as the Austrian artist

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Hundertwasser has stated, ‘the straight line is godless’. Following Hundertwasser’s conception of ‘god’ as creativity for a second, irrational slop cannot be contained at will: an elegiac interpretation of the stanzas proves too neat; the dead are somehow still alive. ‘Still too living’ – which piles up two adjectives and an adverb into an oxymoron – confounds Sacks’s structural motifs of the elegy: endorsing the dialectic of ‘possible’ mourning, the lost, loved object is both ‘alive’, encrypted in the mind and text, and ‘dead’ in the same instance. Even though the mother is hyper-cathected with as mundane an object as a cigarette packet, the poet remains conscious of the artifice of this action. Deep grief is so acute that – despite the surface evidence that the process of ‘true’ mourning is initiated – the self remains beyond re-cathection. As Harrison notes in the second stanza, grief may be comparable to a blitz, but it is still different in that there is ‘no shelter from [it], no all clear whined’ after the death of the loved object. In ‘A Piece of Cake’, the dialectic between private grief for the dead parents and public mourning for the advent of the Second World War continues, but here the elegiac retention of the lost, loved object results in a confusion of identities. Harrison inserts a second baker into the ‘School of Eloquence’ in the form of a suspected former Nazi (p. 147). His bread is Swiss: the poet, armed with his knowledge of the Second World War, can only conceive this as a grotesque pun; evoking neutral Switzerland with a yeasty euphemism cannot dispel the rumour that ‘there’s something Nazi in their past’ (p. 156). Fire tropes link the father’s private ovens with those of the German baker, and the incinerators in the death camps. And when the poet walks into the New York shop, cakes and sweat tap a buried vein of deep grief, which fuses the two characters: It has my father’s smell, this German’s shop, as he concentrates on his ice craftsmanship that cost him weeks of evenings to complete, a cake with V signs, spitfires, landing strip, that took too many pains to cut and eat to welcome home a niece back from the WAAFs.

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‘He’ and ‘him’ are unspecified pronouns; the syntax suggests that, following ‘this German’s shop’, they refer to the ‘Nazi’, and yet it would be illogical for him to have a cake with Allied ‘V’ signs, and a niece in the WAAFs. Definite referents are lacking throughout the poem: ‘their past’ seems to refer to the bread and the baker, but buns are not usually described as Nazis. Lexical confusion is further initiated by ‘as’, which might trick the reader into upholding simultaneity between the present (the cake for the ‘kids’) and the ‘present’ of the father’s cake construction. But if the father rather than the Nazi baker is active at this point, then why does the verb remain in the present tense? Does the elegiac adherence to the idea of the loved object inscribe the father’s actions into an infinite present? Does ‘he concentrates’ indicate – as in ‘A Close One’ – that the lost loved object is ‘still too living’ (p. 160)? If this is so, is it nevertheless irresponsible to confuse the identity of a British civilian during the Second World War with that of a Nazi? Has the inextricability of mourning and history reached a point where identities are freely exchangeable, as in the infamous case of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’, in which the father switches from a member of the Luftwaffe (air force) to the Panzer (tank) division?66 Dialectics per se maintain the autonomy of the separate poles, but have the private and public become so inextricable that the two are indistinguishable in this poem? Answers to these questions lie in the last three stanzas. Whereas in ‘Daddy’ the subject remains trapped in the fantastical projections of his or her own, and the father’s, identities, in ‘A Piece of Cake’, the fantasy of the ‘all too living’ presence is dispelled as – following Freud’s model of ‘true’ mourning – ‘deference for reality gains the day’ (p. 160).67 By the time that the icing tube ‘flows freely’ in the second to last stanza, it may be assumed that the narrator is back in the ‘present’ in which the cheesecake is being prepared for his children (p. 156). However, the disjunction of three single-line stanzas within the conventional sonnet form indicates that the poet is still immersed in the realms of the unheimlich. ‘True’ mourning cannot explicate the action to the reader’s satisfaction, since

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the narrator appears to be experiencing the process of incorporation. If the melancholic author-figure were able to initiate re-cathection, the cake would not ‘stick in [the] throat’ in the penultimate stanza. Introjection occurs when the communal cake for the ‘niece back from the WAAFs’ is eaten after the war has ended. It ‘took too many pains to cut and eat’, which denotes both the amount of energy expended by the scoffers to negotiate the complex decoration, and the act of expressing grief for the lapsed war effort signified by the ‘V signs, spitfires, landing strip’. In contrast, the poet is denied introjection: the cake cannot be swallowed; melancholic iteration means that the father cannot be ‘truly’ mourned in the family sonnets as a whole. Repeated fantasies of his presence mean that even when the narrator buys a ‘welcome home’ cheesecake for his offspring, joy, as in ‘The Morning After’, remains ‘banked with grief’ (p. 157). War and the deceased constantly return to haunt the present. However, Abraham and Torok’s model of grieving does not quite fit the poem either. Mourning is never, to repeat the title’s pun, a piece of cake. Bits stick in the throat: the food is neither completely incorporated or introjected. ‘A Piece of Cake’ uncovers a binary at the heart of this particular psychoanalytic theory: as in ‘A Close One’, the poet projects the object as simultaneously dead and ‘alive’, rather than recathected. Whereas Abraham and Torok wish for psychological health to be returned to the grieving subject, the family sonnets portray a process of mourning in which the deaths of the parents, and the advent of war, are accepted as traumas which may be beyond psychic healing. Indeed, the selfish genre of the elegy exposes the possibility that the relative ‘health’ of poems might depend upon the depth of the trauma. In this text, outpourings of deep grief affect even the surface of cakes. ‘WELCOME’ begins to be ‘frosted’ on top ‘in blue’: since the poet cannot separate a ‘private’ cheesecake from public atrocity, these adjectives subtly evoke the iconography of death (p. 156). In the final stanza, Tod (‘death’) is finally iced onto the cake in the Gothic script favoured by the Nazis. Fantasies of presence result in an unreality in which the baker

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reverts to his Nazi identity: rather than function as a substitutive object of troping for the dead father, the cake signifies both the deceased, and general atrocity. Humanist elegies offer consolation in the closure of the poem, whereas this elegist fails to find an alternative focus for his grief. He cannot even procure a decent cheesecake for his children. The only humanist gesture in ‘A Piece of Cake’ occurs in the first sentence, where aesthetics temporarily override historical guilt. Even if the baker was a Nazi, the narrator comments in a moment of bathos, the cheesecake is superb: ‘It’s made fresh every day and sells out fast.’ Compare this to the end of the poem, in which history regains the moral high ground: even if the cake proves to be ‘the best there is’ in New York, the baker’s Nazi past returns to alter the icing inscription. As in the famous post-Holocaust novel Sophie’s Choice, America does not free its citizens from their murky past; historical trauma ultimately returns to haunt the present.68 In William Styron’s book, Sophie wishes to forget her relationship with Höss at Auschwitz by inserting the episode into a psychic crypt: her silent response to the affair proves to be a ‘simple but passionately motivated reticence’.69 By refusing to grieve, she enters into a process of melancholic denial, which gradually gives way to confession. Similarly, the baker’s refusal to mourn for his Nazi past results in his secret leaking out of the psychic crypt, and onto the cheesecake. The icing tube starts writing ‘WELCOME’, but then ‘coughs’ (p. 156). When the narrator ‘coughs’ up his cake, and fails to hyper-cathect the dead father, the Nazi begins to ‘choke’ on his past, which is then inadvertently regurgitated in the form of the Gothic ‘Tod’. The narrator’s failure to mourn is paralleled by a fantasy in which the German baker might begin to grieve for his sins. In ‘Aqua Mortis’, the linearity of death and mourning explored in the poems above is usurped, since the narrator grieves for the father’s future demise. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive theories of grieving do not allow for this possibility, since they consider the state of the subject only after the loss, whether this is recognised, as in ‘true’ mourning, or ignored, during incorporation or melancholia. Yet this is a

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common occurrence in literary expositions of death: for example, in Douglas Dunn’s Elegies, the poet considers the trauma of the days before the ‘real’ grief began after his wife’s death.70 In a similar way to Dunn’s poem ‘Western Blue’ (in which the prospect of future mourning is made analogous to the Cold War and projected nuclear annihilation), ‘Aqua Mortis’ contextualises the poet’s mourning with the future anterior. Individual deaths are registered by a projected moment in which ‘all solutions in life’s beaker/[will have] precipitated one night from all our days’ (p. 137). The metaphor is apocalyptic, since ‘all’, ‘our’ and ‘life’ can be read as collectively referring to a moment in which life on earth is annihilated. Just as the alchemists in the third stanza failed to avert death on an individual level, now nations have the power to destroy entire cities, but are unable to avert death from natural causes. With a pun on the word ‘socket’, the elegist contrasts his father’s ability to ring him in seconds with the horrific bathos of the inability of modern technology to ‘re-eye dry sockets or flesh bone’. ‘[R]e-eye’ also means ‘re-I’ in the sense of recreating the self. Literature, like the telephone, is unable to ‘re-I’ the dead, despite its ability to provide fantasies of presence. Even this skill gradually dissipates as the elegist gains distance from the loved object. In a clash between syntax and line sense, the ‘good’ pupil initially appears to belong to the poet instead of the father. The author, under the auspices of the sonnet, can ‘see’ the dead parent ‘clearly’. But the eye, like the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence as a whole, is ‘failing’: after a burst of activity in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Harrison has added fewer and fewer poems to the family sonnets. This engagement with the process of mourning before the death of the loved object entails a dialectical exposition of non-/being, which is initiated in the first line, ‘Death’s elixirs have their own golden gleam’. The oxymoron of ‘Death’s elixirs’ transforms the conventional trope for immortality into a liquid, which anticipates the father’s death as he examines his urine for signs of his ultimate demise. Hence the meaning of the Latin title: ‘water of death’. This fusion of non-/being continues in the link established between the skulls of alchemists

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and the father’s: the latter’s close relationship with death is signalled by his bone structure, which ‘stretches [his] skin taut and moulds [his] face’. Such apocalyptic imagery reaches its nadir in the final line (‘My study is your skull. I’ll burn my books’), in which the poet practises two modes of mourning simultaneously in order to prepare for the father’s death.71 ‘Study’ is ambiguous: it could refer to a physical space or an activity. If the working poet is located inside the father’s mind, he subverts the theoretical models of mourning, in which the focus is on the subject’s ego; here he is projected into the object with such power that he remains trapped inside his consciousness. If a second possible meaning is applied, the process of grieving appears more conventional. In this case, the study is exterior to the father’s skull, so the poet can work through his relationship to the loved object in an act of ‘true’ mourning which the first, psychotic form could not accomplish. My discussion so far has provided explanations for the modes of mourning explored throughout the family sonnets. But are these poems nothing more than documents engaging with, and resisting, various cultural processes of grieving? How does Corcoran’s questioning of the literary value of the poems enter into explications of the tensions between theoretical and literary mourning? Avoiding explications via psychoanalysis or deconstruction does not automatically offer poetry canonical status. Indeed, ‘Aqua Mortis’ could be regarded as aesthetically deficient. Awkward syntax results from avoiding a subordinate clause in the last line of the first stanza: B Bo B o B o B o B Death’s elixirs have their own golden gleam. BB o B o o B B o B I see you clearly: one good, failing eye’s o B o B B B oB B B On morning piss caught clumsily midstream o B B B o o B o Bo B it’s your first task of the day to analyse. (p. 137) ‘Which’ is avoided in order to compress the lexis into a semblance of metrical form. The poem is fraught with metrical

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difficulty: the first line shifts into iambs after the disconcerting full beats; the pentameter falls apart by the word ‘one’ in the second; the third entertains numerous stresses after ‘piss’; the fourth juxtaposes a spondee with a pyrrhic. Loose rhythm almost abandons the iambic metre, even though each line still has ten syllables. A ghost of the inarticulate may be rearing itself here in the form of the dead father, whose disturbing image jostles with the regularity of iambs. If this is so, then the poet’s message seems to be that it is simply quite difficult to grieve in pentameters. Does this bathos excuse syntactical and metrical awkwardness in every family sonnet, though, given that the ‘ghost’ trick is one that Harrison employs throughout the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence? Philip Larkin’s comments on Dunn’s elegies may help to answer this question. Larkin detected that the latter’s desire to stretch the elegiac form to breaking point meant that he either had to dismiss Elegies as a bad collection of poetry, since it did not adhere to conventional poetic forms, or discuss it with a new critical vocabulary beyond his ability to coin. He avoids any reference to literary value in the relevant letter to Dunn, and relies on an appeal to the emotive: ‘you have gone so far beyond me in suffering that I’m at a loss to say very much […] Please excuse me if I am not saying the right things.’72 Harrison’s family sonnets could similarly evoke a critical nullity: either the first stanza of ‘Aqua Mortis’ is devoid of aesthetic value, or it challenges conventional poetics to the extent that a new vocabulary of awkwardness is required to discuss the poem. Psychoanalysis and deconstruction do not help here, since this is primarily a question of literary aesthetics. As with the more overt Holocaust poems, it appears that Harrison is arguing that it might be better to write awkwardly about mourning than not to write about it at all. Form and content are dialectical: juxtaposing metrical lapses with the expected pentameter reminds the reader that the psychological process is fraught with difficulty. Its representation might therefore demand a tortured aesthetic. A reader informed by the canon might interpose that poets have written about death for centuries without having such extensive recourse to

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metrical instability. History provides a suitable retort. The public advent of twentieth-century events such as the Holocaust means that private notions of death have altered. Mourning has no choice but to feed parasitically on death: if notions of non-being have changed, then, logically, the process of mourning must metamorphose in order to maintain relevance in the contemporary. Harrison’s poetry offers a small step towards the salvation of mourning with its dogged insistence that in the late twentieth century, the private and public spheres are merging more than ever before. Dialectical mourning constantly juxtaposes individual death with global happenings: this entails a revised notion of the aesthetic when depicted in literature; the evocation of Auschwitz jars with the reassuring regularity of metre. Nevertheless, an eschewal of pre-war notions of beauty does not excuse the negative tension ensuing from syntactical compression in ‘Aqua Mortis’. Two types of awkwardness vie for supremacy here. A positive variety entails a dialectic in which conventional poetics are subverted by subject matter which tends towards linguistic silence. This contrasts with a negative awkwardness, in which the antipoetic measures (upset metre, syntactical disruption) risk grounding the poem in the realms of bad poetry (in terms of Harrison’s poetics) without the excusing sick-note of dialectical intention.

Annihilation and the Family Sonnets In this section I analyse three family sonnets that evoke a more general sense of annihilation rather than the specificity of the Holocaust, or the prospect of nuclear war. This will help to illustrate how atrocity casts a shadow over the whole sonnet sequence. Harrison does not argue that the death of his parents is commensurate with the Holocaust; rather, the images of annihilation that dominate the sonnet sequence can be interpreted as symptomatic of the transformation of the elegy when read in the context of twentieth-century history. ‘Aqua Mortis’ shifts into this territory, since the apocalyptic nature

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of the imagery is not contextually specific. Similarly, instead of evoking war, ‘Timer’ displays a more general iconography of death, such as crematoria, hospitals, grieving relatives and memories of the deceased. Readers who know that some Nazis saved the gold fillings of those gassed in the death camps might detect this historical reference in the first two lines of ‘Timer’: ‘Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough/to make you ashes in a standard urn’ (p. 167). However, by the end of the first stanza it becomes clear that, even if a Holocaust reference remains to haunt the text, the formerly unspecified pronoun refers more directly to the dead mother, and ‘Gold’ to her wedding ring. It could be argued that, as in ‘Illuminations’ and ‘A Piece of Cake’, where ‘oven’ connects the father’s workplace to the Nazi gas chambers, the use of the signifier ‘incinerator’ indicates crematoria such as those at Auschwitz. The Holocaust does indeed enter into a continuum of annihilation here: fire tropes constantly connect the personal and historical, so that even buns cannot assume autonomy in the private sphere. Nevertheless, the difference between the poems is the depth of reference. Whereas in ‘Illuminations’ and ‘A Piece of Cake’ there are allusions to the Second World War elsewhere in the text, in ‘Timer’ more general tropes of oblivion dominate the elegy. These, as in the rest of the family sonnets, are balanced with particular facets of ‘the human’, here realised as maternal love, and the need for subjects to mourn for the deceased. Hence the sonnets simultaneously celebrate a humanist triumph of the spirit, and recognise a sense of annihilation that pervades twentieth-century, secular elegies. After all, if God is dead, then the number and validity of prerequisite objects of consolation now on offer for elegists must have diminished considerably. In ‘Timer’, memories of the dead mother rather than religious, transcendental signifiers are cherished as elusive sites of comfort. However, the father’s contention that he will meet her again in ‘eternity’ is still celebrated as a facet of the human. Memories and religious delusions are then counterbalanced by the private devastation caused by the mother’s death, the sense of unmitigated loss indicated by images of the corpse, and the

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problems of survival for the remaining family members. The father’s deployment of biblical discourse jars with the narrator’s existentialist sense of non-being: instead of believing his parents will be ‘together, “later”’, the elegist imagines the mother slipping through a metaphysical hoop, and into a paradoxically annihilated void, which, as in Larkin’s ‘High Windows’, is ‘nowhere, and is endless’.73 Despite his antiChristian demystification of the dead in this poem, the poet still remains appalled by the crematorium’s inability to give a voice to grieving within the bureaucratic process of getting rid of corpses. His deep grief is not recognised by the staff: he only receives a standard envelope ‘of coarse official buff’ explaining about the ring’s survival (p. 167). A link evident to the heightened consciousness of the poet, but ignored by the crematorium, exists between the envelope and mother. Its colour (‘buff’) is also that of human skin. ‘Buff’ registers the chasm between public, ‘official’ registers, denoted by the semiotics of the packaging, and the discourse of private grieving: it also refers to an enthusiast engaged in an activity to such an extent that their language becomes reified. ‘Buff’ also evokes the rhyming echo ‘guff’ (‘nonsense’): whereas the sonnet strives to bring the image of the dead mother to the fore, public signs of death consist of self-referential signifiers that avoid engaging with the dead. Potential objects of elegiac re-cathection (the jumbled-up ‘cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress’) are referents devoid of significance to the hospital staff, whereas the poet names them one by one as if trying to weave a spell which might bring the mother back to life. To an upset elegist, the hospital’s attitude is, like the envelope, ‘coarse’; in other words, rude, just as the envelope appeared offensive to the poet in its inability to provide solace. Ironically, its image is then inscribed into an elegy precisely in order to provide comfort for someone struggling to perform ‘true’ mourning. Bureaucratic reactions to death are, then, like the mother’s urn, just ‘standard’. By the fourth stanza, the tension between public and private discourse appears to entail a complete breakdown in communication: ‘the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1?/ Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes!’ Awkwardness

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arises here out of an unclear delineation between addresser and addressee. In the first line, does the clerk confirm the phone number, or does the poet ring the crematorium? In the second, does the persona or father ask the question? ‘Yes!’ is even more confusing, as the clerk, poet or even the father could be interjecting. Even the punctuation is evasive: the first question mark is not italicised; the second one is, like the subsequent exclamation mark, which might suggest that the same person speaks both sentences in line twelve. If this is so, then they are answering their own question. The parentheses might indicate that someone is lying, but the reader does not know who, or to whom: o B B B BBBBB the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1? o o B o B o B B B Has she still her ring on? (Slight pause) Yes! Metrical tension is instigated here by the difficulties of articulating a discourse of mourning that indicates private grief within the de-ritualised language exchanged between the addresser and the clerk. Iambic pentameter flows through the rest of the poem, but such artifice is often alien to public speech: hence the difficulty of pronouncing the telephone number within the rising and falling rhythm of the overall metrical pattern. It is as if the process of mourning has instigated an apocalyptic domestic drama in which no one is quite sure who is speaking to whom. Perhaps it is most likely that a hospital clerk phones ‘down’ to the mortuary in order to ask a mortician if the mother is still wearing the ring, since it is absent from the package of clothing. 6-8-8-3-1 would then refer to a number tag on the mother’s toe rather than a telephone number: she is necessarily dehumanised by the staff, and reduced to a number as soon as she dies. ‘(Slight pause)’ would denote the time it takes for the mortician to fumble under the sheet in order to check the mother’s finger. However, another possibility remains: perhaps the clerk phones the poet; the father then asks if the ring is still on the corpse’s finger, but, because it will not burn, the hospital clerk rather

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than the crematorium staff or mortician sends it on. The elegist then lies, and tells the father that the mother will still be wearing it in order to fulfil his vision of eternity. This is possible, if indeterminate; if I endorse this reading, ‘Yes!’ becomes the humanist highpoint of the poem in its unmitigated affirmation of a lie. At the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells the Intended that Kurtz spoke her name last to prolong her fantasy of his amorous commitment.74 Similarly, the poet avoids telling the truth so that the father will protract his metaphysical illusion. Marlow and the narrator share a vision of a Godless void which they are loath to communicate to the father or Intended. Heart of Darkness and ‘Timer’ both seem to espouse the view that it might be more productive for the religious or unashamedly humanist to remain in blissful ignorance rather than embrace nihilism. Metrical tension instigated by the disjunction between the public and private is then resolved by a more conventional elegiac register in the final stanzas. An eroticisation of mourning ensues when the mother’s decomposition is celebrated with a moment of heightened metaphoricity: It’s on my warm palm now, your burnished ring! I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs, sift through [the ring’s] circle slowly, like that thing you used to let me watch to time the eggs. (p. 167) Is this ‘feeling’ not indecent? Pain is registered by the full beats on the ashes, head, arms and so on, but by focusing on parts of the mother, does he engage – like the amorous subject in A Lover’s Discourse – in the process of fetishising a corpse? Since ‘ring’ now refers colloquially to the rim of one’s anus, does the narrator imagine a scene in which he places his sticky paw on her burnt bottom? This may be facetious, but a reading of these lines as sensual is certainly supported by the poet’s comparison of his mother with Shakespeare’s representation of Cleopatra in the stanza above. The description of the ring as burnished links with Enobarbus’s famous celebration of the queen in Act II of Shakespeare’s play:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne Burned on the water. The poop was beaten gold; Purple the sails, and so perfumed that The winds were lovesick with them. (II.ii.195–98)

Harrison rewrites Shakespeare’s pun into the context of private grief: the ring is polished (the conventional meaning of ‘burnished’), but it is also ‘burnt’ as it passes through the crematorium oven. The verbal dexterity is also sensual: the tropes of fire subtly evoke Cleopatra’s sexuality, which the poet then transfers to the mother. This eroticisation of mourning subtly plays out an Oedipal relationship which intensifies the persona’s pain. He ‘feels’ the individual body parts lovingly, but the tactile image simultaneously registers that this is only symptomatic of elegiac fancy. Nevertheless, in a review of Harrison’s Selected Poems, Claude Rawson accuses the closure of ‘Timer’ of instigating a ‘factitiously spun-out routine, exploiting a pathos of remembered detail, in which the compulsions of rhyming closure are more evident than any urgencies of grieving’.75 Does Harrison privilege artifice over the complexities of grieving? If so, then the Oedipal angst is nothing more than a vapid collection of signifiers. Rawson’s remarks are similar, in their evocation of authentic grieving, to Corcoran’s evaluation of the family sonnets as a whole as mawkish artifice. Leaving aside the critics’ appeal to a chimera of ‘true’ grief, one could argue that the poet, who believes in mimesis too, strives to simulate the pain of loss through the metrical breaks contained within the last stanza: o B o B o B B B B B I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs B o o Bo B o B o B sift through its circle slowly, like that thing o B o B o B o B o B you used to let me watch to time the eggs. (p. 167) By focusing on the legs/eggs rhyming link and the regular pentameter in the last line, Rawson ignores the heavy stresses in the first, and the inversion at the beginning of the second.

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Linguistic awkwardness ensues here not because of the demystification of death, as earlier in the poem, but due to a signified pain which punctures the text’s artifice. Rawson’s criticism, and not the poem, is indecent in its lack of sensitivity towards this failed performance of ‘true’ mourning. Successful grieving would result in the poet re-cathecting to the substitute signs for the mother, the ring and egg timer. Yet the full beats in the final stanza suggest that alternative tropes only evoke the iterative pain of grief, rather than allowing the poet to search for another love object. Eschewing the hysterical model of masculinity exposed in the American poems, the elegist is located back in the domestic sphere rather than in a future in which the dead have been hyper-cathected. Loving the absent mother, immersed in the activity of helping her cook by watching an egg timer, the poet for once does not feel any need to assert a counterbalancing bravado. Ending with the noun ‘eggs’ leaves the text exulting in the female form. ‘Eggs’ links back with the ‘womb’ in the same stanza: once upon a time the present poet was magically formed in his mother’s body; now, bathetically, his palm is ‘warm’, whereas she has turned to ashes. This nihilistic ending is counterbalanced by the celebratory tone of the poem. In a sense, the ring and sonnet are both ‘gold’, since they ‘survive’ the death of the mother, and continue to signify her absence. Bow Down celebrates the remains of the dead; I argued in the introduction to this book that the humanist desire to salvage hope from annihilation could be seen as distasteful in relation to atrocity.76 In contrast, ‘Timer’ juxtaposes the transcendent with the bathetic: the elegy and ring may ‘outlive’ the mother, but they still function as signs to remind the reader that she has turned to ‘ashes in a standard urn’ (p. 167). Anti-humanism and humanism vie for supremacy in the elegiac space: the image of the body sifting through the ring recalls Harrison’s concept of the ‘circle of annihilation’, where there is ‘One space for the celebrant and the sufferer’.77 According to this dialectic, oblivion and celebration are inextricably connected: in ‘The Morning After’, fires caused by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot be separated in

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the poet’s imagination from the joy he witnessed as a child during VJ Day (p. 157). If I apply this model to ‘Timer’, the eroticisation of the mother represents the celebratory, the domestic, the feminine, and the sonnet form; the burning corpse and Nietzschean void counteract this positivity with a sense of oblivion. However, as opposed to ‘The Morning After’, ‘Timer’ adds a genealogical aspect to the ‘circle of annihilation’: the mother and son are linked across the generations by the ring on the poet’s palm. Commitment manifests itself here in the form of elegiac faithfulness: instead of disassembling the image of the parent, the narrator rejects ‘true’ mourning and traditional elegiac consolations. (However, the re-assembled mother in line 14 might be a contradictory image of reembodiment in a transcendental space not dissimilar to the eternity lauded by the father.) He remains lost at the end of the sonnet in his selfish love for, and the sensual description of, his mother. Rawson bemoans the rhyming link ‘ring/thing’, and yet, even if it is a little forced, ‘like that thing’ highlights the poet’s retreat into the infantile (p. 167). He displays a child’s inability to name an object; this reflects the elegist’s failure to translate private grief into public, elegiac language. Losing a sustained articulacy with his inability to name such a mundane object as an egg timer, the poem lapses into silence. Genealogical ‘faithfulness’ forms the central concern of the companion piece to ‘Timer’, entitled ‘Continuous’. Male descendants in this instance are linked through a corresponding image of a ring, which not only belonged to the father, but was also ‘his father’s’ (p. 143). As in ‘Timer’, this elegiac, substitutive act of troping is thus not only a way of easing the pain of the mourning subject, but also a means by which he accepts responsibility for ensuring the continuing influence of the lost, loved object on the ‘real’. ‘Continuous’ also refers to the single collection published by Harrison in 1981, and the ‘School of Eloquence’ as a whole. The latter can be interpreted, as I have argued, as a product of the poet’s desire to remain faithful to the deceased by constantly returning to the latter’s image, rather than completing the process of grieving, as in ‘true’ mourning, and focusing attention on an alternative object.

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Alternatively, it could be argued that, by the time the reader reaches the thirteenth sonnet in Part Two of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, the regurgitation of tropes of annihilation and the parents becomes untenable. Iteration might, by this point, be symptomatic of an obsessive self-interest, and selfindulgent melancholia. For example, ‘Timer’ and ‘Continuous’ both describe the process of cremation, and repeat the maxim that rings survive intense heat. Freudian psychoanalysis might regard this as symptomatic of the pathological morbidity of the subject. In contrast, Santner notes in Stranded Objects that repetition need not be a negative aspect of Trauerarbeit: it forms an inherent part of the elegiac tradition; the subject returns again and again to the site of mourning in order to attain a ‘transformed structure of identity’.78 He terms this ‘work’ the ‘elegiac loop’.79 Elegies form, for Santner, a kind of homeopathic operation in which self-inflictions of grief help to overcome the source of anxiety. Fears remain, though, that, without a suitable ‘social space’ in which to perform mourning, the process ‘becomes a sort of elegiac loop that must repeat itself endlessly’. Elegies themselves might be regarded as a ‘social space’, given the tension and fusion I have outlined throughout this chapter between public (poetic) and private (psychological) modes of grieving. Yet they remain unsuitable sites for a reclamation of the self unhampered by images of the dead. It is no coincidence that one of the main metrical breaks in ‘Timer’ emphasises the word ‘love’ (p. 143). Without repeating grief, the subject responsible for the family sonnets suggests, it is impossible to love the dead properly. Tropological ‘loops’ are certainly a recognisable ingredient of Harrison’s poetry. In ‘Continuous’, they form an integral part of funeral rites. A ‘looped tape’ accompanies the father’s coffin as it disappears into the furnace: this reflects both the crematorium’s commodification of death, and the process Santner outlines, in which elegists perform various modes of mourning in order to remain faithful to, and celebrate, the lost, loved object. Another ‘loop’ in the poem reflects the genealogical link. In a peculiar moment of syntactical ambiguity, the poet evokes the ghost of the father:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust I wear [the ring] now to Cagneys on my own and sense my father’s hands cupped round my treat – they feel as if they’ve been chilled to the bone from holding my ice cream all through White Heat.

These final lines create a humanist dialectic by concurrently celebrating the genealogical continuity symbolised by the ring, and accepting a sense of annihilation indicated by the film title White Heat. But, as during the phone conversation in ‘Timer’, it is difficult to fix the subject and object; the two appear to merge in the poet’s imagination. Is the father ‘repeating’ himself in the text as a metaphysical presence, or as a projected corpse, which holds an ice cream next to the son in the cinema; alternatively, are both possibilities simultaneously present? This literary ambiguity fuses two models of mourning. The father is recognised in his alterity as dead, but continues to haunt the poet’s melancholic imagination; he is also interiorised within the latter’s body, an activity symptomatic of incorporation. ‘Continuous’ may fuse two recognisable modes of mourning, but ‘Long Distance’ differs from the poems in this section in that it displays a reaction to loss which confounds both the psychoanalytic and deconstructive models. Superficially, the fantasy of the ‘still too living dead’ is symptomatic in this poem of the morbidity which Freud detects in extreme cases of melancholia (p. 160). Instead of celebrating the image of the mother, the father is incapable of recognising the loss of the loved object. The latter has not yet reached a stage where a version of ‘true’ mourning can begin, even though it is two years since her death: 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. (p. 134) His absurd actions link with Derrida’s faithfulness to the lost loved object: he refuses to hyper-cathect the mother because his love for her is still raw; he wishes for no alternative for his

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psychic energy and libido. And yet, even though the poet lauds his father’s activities, he recognises that in Western cultures they are regarded as embarrassing. Awkwardness arises when contemplating his actions because they transgress a loose, communal sense of normal behaviour to the extent that they have to be hidden away from public view as if they were a crime. Such a sense of the anti-emotive is opposed, for example, to Iraqi performances of grief during the Gulf War, in which women, according to the cultural norm, wept uncontrollably by the graveside, and were then fed cigarettes in order to calm them down. Gender difference splits the mourners into different camps, though: for Iraqi men grieving took a more reticent form. Similarly, the father’s embarrassment may have more to do with masculinity than sensitivity to normative mourning. Grieving, in Western culture at least, has always been linked to the feminine, since it opens chinks in the supposedly laminated ego of the male. Since he puts the objects away before his son arrives, the father might be betraying an unwillingness to display emotional weakness to his male offspring. Harrison junior does not comment on this process while his father is alive: a ‘long distance’ remains between private performances of grief, and a more public encounter with family members. A ‘loop’ then provides the poem’s irony and closure, in which the narrator repeats the father’s private mode of mourning by pretending, irrationally, that the loved object is still alive. Telephones function, as in ‘Aqua Mortis’, as tropes for annihilation rather than communication: when the father dies the poet keeps his name in his ‘new black leather phone book’, and still calls the disconnected number. In the first part of the poem, the son and parent are still separated when alive: the title ‘Long Distance’ refers both to the phone call across continents, and the inability of both to express their love towards each other. Instead, the conversation is ‘dismal’, and lists the father’s ailments (p. 133). In a melancholic pun, the son buys ‘Lifesavers’; in other words, sweets for a loved object who is dead by the end of the second part. The only way that the poet can now ‘save’ the father’s ‘life’ is to keep plugging

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away at his elegies. ‘Calling’ thus becomes representative of elegiac looping. Harrison still ‘calls’ his parents by inscribing their images into the public space of the elegy. The rhyming link between ‘gas’ and ‘pass’ illustrates such elegiac faithfulness. ‘Long Distance’ may also refer to the class differences between the generations: whereas the son swans around JFK, so obsessed with his own affairs that he only buys sweets ‘as a last thought’, the father stays in his working-class terraced house until, as the reader learns in ‘Turns’, he drops dead by a letter box (pp. 133, 149). (Perhaps he was about to post a letter to the poet; this creates another potential image of broken communication.) ‘Gas’ and ‘pass’ evoke the father since the full rhyme only works if spoken with a northern accent. However, this ‘ghost’, even if it whispers in the voice of his offspring (like the bequeathed hands in ‘Continuous’), only affects the text in a fleeting manner, compared to the eight lines of italicised speech in the first part. In yet another moment of bathos in the family sonnets, all potential objects of elegiac consolation are rejected at the end of ‘Long Distance’. Ultimately, despite all the metaphorical ‘calling’ throughout the sequence, the dead are only ‘alive’. ‘Long Distance’ proves similar to ‘Timer’ in its eschewal of traditional elegiac celebrations in the poem’s closure. An image of annihilation, the infinite distance between the body of the poet and the absent parents, remains to haunt the text. Harrison’s family sonnets join Dunn’s elegies in their strict refusal to side-step a secular response to death, in which metaphysical consolations might have to go begging. Literary representations of mourning in the contemporary grate against the psychoanalytical, since ‘true’ instances of ‘true’ mourning cannot be located in either of the poets’ work. However, it may be easy to dismiss Freud’s particular model as inapplicable to ‘Long Distance’, but other theories of mourning appear equally irrelevant to the poem. Abraham and Torok’s narrative does not work, as the object is neither introjected (the father does not admit the mother’s death) nor incorporated (his wife is not ‘swallowed’ but allowed her alterity). Derrida’s model of ‘im/possible mourning’ fails too because

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the object’s exteriority is not regarded as symptomatic of a damaging narcissism. Sacks’s concept of elegiac mourning is not applicable either: the object is turned into signs, such as the slippers, in a substitutive act of troping, but they still denote the fantasy of presence rather than the permanent absence of the mother. A close association between the text and a theoretical model of grieving can be gleaned from Jack Kamerman’s study Death in the Midst of Life, in which he examines the process of ‘mummification’ that ‘unlimited mourning’ leads to: A room or a house [is] left exactly as it was when the deceased died. This style is somewhat disruptive. If the objects with which we surround ourselves are symbols of identities we try to communicate to others, the preservation of a scene as it was when the deceased was alive is an attempt to freeze that part of ourselves; to that extent, it disrupts the change that is normal in our lives.80 Even this model does not fit perfectly. The father’s ‘still raw love’ does create a domestic shrine to the lost loved object, but it is not fixed (as they commonly are in countries such as France). Also, he does not use the slippers and so on to communicate to others, since ‘He’d put you off an hour to give him time/to clear away her things and look alone’ (p. 134). Yet, even though the text’s representation of mourning disavows all the theoretical models I have outlined in this chapter, reader responses have recognised a model not dissimilar to their own experiences. For example, an empathetic reaction to the text is reflected in a review of Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, in which Philip Larkin singled out ‘Long Distance’ as the ‘most moving poem in the book’.81 This text, with its fusion of the complexities, awkwardnesses and embarrassments surrounding grief, can be regarded as the most successful of the family sonnets. Fraught, private responses to death are placed in the public arena of the elegy which, in turn, resonates with the secret experiences of some readers. Outside this mimetic appeal to ‘true’ experience, how

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can ‘Long Distance’ be evaluated as a poem per se? Even if it is clever enough to evade theoretical descriptions of mourning, this does not automatically grant it the possibility of canonicity in the future. Yet the second part deserves canonical status due to its fusion of ‘simple’ speech with literary complexity. Superficially, the poem is easy to read. As opposed to some of the densely wrought texts in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence as a whole, such as ‘On Not Being Milton’, with its allusions ranging from Negritude to the Cato Street conspiracy, ‘Long Distance’ aspires to complexity by making ‘simple’ language unfold to reveal levels of linguistic density (p. 112). Awkwardness arises here out of the concepts of mourning depicted by the elegy, rather than out of the lexical discrepancies of a poem such as ‘Timer’. The lack of polysyllabic words reveals a poet in the tradition of Wordsworth attempting to use the ‘language of conversation’ of the lower classes in order to create ‘poetic pleasure’ for an ostensibly bourgeois audience.82 Rather than instigate poems meant to be savoured as one-off performances which cannot be repeated without vexing the reader (as Corcoran suggests), this ‘conversation’ resonates with puns, metrical regularity and instability, complex rhyming links, evocations of previous sonnets (Milton, Meredith) and the elegiac tradition (Wordsworth, Hardy). In other words, it contains the lexical ‘stuff’ of canonical poetry. For example, the line ‘He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea’ appears, on the surface, transparent enough: the italics emphasise the fact that the father deludes himself that the mother has gone out to get the tea instead of being dead (p. 134). It forms an incredible moment of melancholic selfdeception, and links with the poet’s bathetic remark at the end of the poem that ‘You [the parents] haven’t both gone shopping’. One word is immediately highlighted by a metrical break: o B o B B B o B o B He knew she’d just popped out to get the tea ‘To pop out’ means to leave for a short while. It also subtly evokes the death of the parents by connoting the colloquial phrases ‘to pop it’, ‘to pop off’, or ‘to pop your clogs’; in other

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words, ‘to die’. The last version of the phrase simultaneously contains a reference to the late-nineteenth-century and earlytwentieth-century working class specifically: to ‘pop’ also meant ‘to pawn’. When clogs were worn by labourers in northern towns rather than New Model Army fans, ‘impoverished workers would take their deceased relatives’ footwear to the pawnbroker’s and sell or pawn (‘pop’) them for a few coppers – often to help pay for the funeral’.83 Such a buried, but pertinent, reference links with the poem’s overall fusion of death and class in the phrase ‘long distance’. ‘Popped’, although an active verb appertaining to the mother, also connects with the image of the father, since it is ‘pop’ (dad) specifically who thinks she has nipped out for some food. It also echoes the noun ‘pop’ (fizzy drink), and connects with a phrase in another family sonnet, ‘Next Door’, in which the father complains about ‘smelling curry in a pop shop’ (p. 132). ‘Pop shop’ denotes the off-licence that, the racist dad says, has ‘gone Paki’. Hence ‘pop’ joins the obsession with food and drink evinced throughout the family sonnets: buns, cakes, apple pie, whisky, curry, sweets, tea, berries, ice cream, Eccles cakes, bread, coffee, sandwiches, thermos flasks and eggs; these objects in Part Two of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence function individually as failed sites of potential re-cathection. As a whole, they illustrate Harrison’s humanist dialectic: eating and drinking are celebrated as ‘human’ actions of the ‘survivors’ of the dead; such acts are counterbalanced throughout the family sonnets with tropes of annihilation. Friction arises on both a conceptual and a linguistic level due to the stubborn failure of the elegist to endorse, separately, either humanism or nihilism. If the tropes of annihilation in the family sonnets can be read in the context of the Holocaust, Hiroshima and a projected nuclear war, the critic might expect the poems to be anti-elegies, which reject any possibility of consolation for the mourning poet. Yet this is not the case: the vacillation between empiricism and transcendence – encapsulated in the image of the narrator calling his dead parents in ‘Long Distance’ – is perpetuated throughout the sequence. Harrison’s work as a whole is riddled with this paradox. To

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capitulate to either pole wholeheartedly would betray the poet’s dialectical imagination; Harrison rejects binaries in order to give credence to life’s complexities. Other family sonnets that I do not have space to discuss fit into this pattern too. In ‘Still’, a photograph of Rudolph Valentino provides a potential site of re-cathection, but the poet just cries, and imagines his tears dripping into ‘Nothingness’; the ‘uke’ in ‘Punchline’ threatens to offer solace, but the poem appreciates the father’s alterity to the extent that it ends with an image of a strange busker instead of him; ‘Isolation’, even though it celebrates the mother, finishes with the elegist bursting into tears (pp. 140, 150, 142). I have argued that these deliberate failures to recathect are symptomatic of the contemporary elegy’s predisposition to reject traditional sites of consolation. By doing this, the connection between the melancholic inability of the poet to finish the sequence, and the individual instances of failed, ‘true’ mourning continues. However, Freud’s model does not explicate the family sonnets to my satisfaction, since a number of theoretical models are played out, rejected, and remoulded in the sequence. Melancholia does, however, come closest to providing a framework in which to interpret the poems, since grieving still continues in the next feature of the poetry I wish to discuss: its obsession with the process of memorialisation. Elegiac mourning ultimately provides the groundwork for the retention of the idea of the lost object in cultural memory.

NOTES 1 The sequence marks a distinct switch in Harrison’s oeuvre from the Kiplingesque narrative poems of The Loiners to the filial, and political, sonnets. In a letter to Alan Ross (31 October 1973), he discusses his second collection of poetry, and remarks that ‘it must be the extended sequence I want to do’. This became the ‘School of Eloquence’. 2 Harrison, Selected Poems, pp. 77–94; Gorgon, pp. 57–75; Selected Poems, pp. 167, 134; Shadow, pp. 69–111.

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3 The Poems of John Milton, ed. J. Carey and A. Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1980 [1968]), pp. 232–54. 4 Paul Hamilton, ‘Writing with Light – Elegies’, in Reading Douglas Dunn, ed. R. Crawford and D. Kinloch (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 94–107, at pp. 95, 94. 5 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 11. 6 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 1. 7 Selected Poems, p. 78. 8 Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978 [1951]), p. 16. 9 Gorgon, p. 37. 10 Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 99. 11 Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Picador, 1988 [1987]). 12 In The Metaphysical Poets, ed. Gardner, pp. 250–51. 13 Selected Poems, p. 224. 14 Shadow, p. 93. 15 Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (London and Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Rebecca Smalley, ‘The Role of Memory in the Poetry of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison’ (PhD thesis, University of Durham, 1991). 16 Eric Santner, Stranded Objects (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). 17 Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ [1917], in A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Rickman (London: Hogarth Press, 1937), pp. 142–61, at p. 143. 18 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 144. 19 Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 214. A dead hedgehog functions here as a springboard for discussing human absence. In Charles Lamb’s ‘A Farewell to Tabacco’, the ‘GREAT PLANT’ is mourned deeply, but is beyond words: ‘Nature, that did in [it] excell/Framed again no second smell’ (The Works of Charles Lamb [London, 1852], pp. 599–600, at p. 599). 20 Levi, If This Is a Man, p. 129. 21 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3; Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 189. 22 Santner, Stranded Objects, p. xii. 23 Santner, Stranded Objects, p. xi. 24 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 51. 25 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 145. 26 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 146. 27 Santner, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma’, in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (London and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 143–54. 28 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 142. 29 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 144.

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30 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 153. 31 Santner, Stranded Objects, pp. 2–3. 32 Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, ‘Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia’, in Psychoanalysis in France, ed. S. Lebovici and D. Widlöcher (New York: International Universities, 1980), pp. 3–16. 33 Christopher Lane, ‘The Testament of the Other: Abraham and Torok’s Failed Explanation of Ghosts’, Diacritics, 27.4 (Winter 1997), pp. 3–29. 34 Abraham and Torok, ‘Introjection-Incorporation’, p. 6. 35 Abraham and Torok, ‘Introjection-Incorporation’, p. 8. 36 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 126. 37 Abraham and Torok, ‘Introjection-Incorporation’, pp. 4–5. 38 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 134. 39 Abraham and Torok, ‘Introjection-Incorporation’, pp. 6–7. 40 Lane, ‘The Testament of the Other’, pp. 11–14. 41 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 6. 42 Marshall W. Alcorn, ‘Loss and Figuration: Paradigms of Constructive and Deconstructive Mourning’, The Centennial Review, 35.3 (Fall 1991), pp. 501–18, at p. 514. 43 Smalley, ‘The Role of Memory’, p. 147. 44 Derrida, Memoires, p. 6. 45 Alcorn, ‘Loss and Figuration’, p. 514. 46 Derrida, Memoires, p. xv. 47 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. L. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 33. 48 Kristeva, Black Sun, p. 225. 49 Kristeva, Black Sun, pp. 225–26. 50 The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), pp. 297–302. 51 Blake Morrison, ‘Labouring: Continuous’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, p. 219. 52 Reid, ‘Articulating the Awkwardness’, p. 49. 53 Neil Corcoran, ‘Tony Harrison’, in Contemporary Poets, ed. J. Vinson and D. Kirkpatrick (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 355. 54 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 134. 55 Gorgon, p. 12. 56 Harrison, Selected Poems, pp. 145–46. The metrical break on ‘beached’ emphasises the pun, in which Blackpool metamorphoses into a Dunkirklike landscape in the family’s fantasy. Similarly, in Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Berck-Plage’, the landscape offers traces of the Normandy landings. As mutilated veterans parade the sands, the sea, for example, ‘creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress’ (Collected Poems, p. 196). Plath’s figuring of the waves as the serpents of Medusa links with the identical image at the beginning and end of Harrison’s mythic exposition of evil in ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ (Gorgon, pp. 57–75).

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57 The trials lasted from 18 October 1945 to 1 October 1946. 58 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949). 59 Ryle, Concept of Mind, p. 17. 60 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. D.H. Reiman (London: W.W. Norton, 1977), pp. 388–406, at pp. 405, 403. 61 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 402. 62 Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960. 63 I have bracketed the last syllable to indicate the metrical leeway at the end of the line. 64 Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 5. 65 Stand, 19.2 (1978), p. 66. 66 Plath, Collected Poems, p. 223. 67 Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, p. 144. 68 William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (London: Corgi, 1980 [1979]). During the preparation of this book, I read the manuscript of Sue Vice’s study of Holocaust fiction, which includes a chapter on melodrama and Styron. It deals exceptionally well with the source text (Commandant of Auschwitz), the ‘factional’ and the documentary. Vice appears to be sympathetic to Styron rather than to Keneally, and argues that Sophie’s Choice is more complex than it might seem, while still criticising it as a ‘jackdaw’ text. Vice addresses the reasons why the book is aesthetically, but not morally, deficient. Holocaust Fiction: From William Styron to Binjamin Wilkomirski (London: Routledge, 2000). 69 Styron, Sophie’s Choice, p. 198. 70 Douglas Dunn, Elegies (London: Faber, 1985), p. 13. 71 ‘I’ll burn my books’ refers to the protagonist’s plea to avoid death towards the end of Act V of Dr Faustus (from The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Hill [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971], p. 388). As Spencer argues in The Poetry of Tony Harrison, ‘Like a latter-day Faustus who has mortgaged his soul to the pursuit of his art, Harrison now desperately craves the paternal love from which his learning has estranged him’ (p. 85). In another example of elegiac failure, the ability of the poetic ‘urn’ to contain the ideal of the father is contrasted with the poet’s inability to communicate adequately with him when he was alive. 72 Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, p. 733. 73 Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, p. 165. Larkin and Harrison are both humanist and anti-humanist poets in the sense that they constantly juxtapose the empirical with the vapidity of the metaphysical. The reference above is to the ending of ‘High Windows’, where petty concerns about ‘fucking’ vie with a Godless gloom which is paradoxically everywhere and nowhere in the same instance. 74 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 1995 [1902]), p. 121. Of course, the lie to the Intended can also be read as endorsing colonialism, since it ignores the horror of the atrocities committed by Kurtz during his pursuit of ivory.

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75 Claude Rawson, ‘Family Voices’, Times Literary Supplement, 4 January 1985, p. 10. 76 Harrison, Theatre Works 1973–1985, pp. 125–48. 77 Harrison, Trackers, p. vi. 78 Santner, Stranded Objects, p. xiii. 79 Santner, Stranded Objects, p. 25. 80 Jack Kamerman, Death in the Midst of Life (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988), p. 86. 81 Philip Larkin, ‘Under a Common Flag’, The Observer, 14 November 1982, p. 23. 82 ‘Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads (1798)’, in William Wordsworth, ed. Gill, pp. 591–92, at p. 591. 83 ‘Notes & Queries’, The Guardian, 18 February 1998, p. 17.

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Chapter Four


Nuclear Memory If Harrison’s poetry is read as a whole rather than as a collection of individual pieces, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the threat of nuclear war function as extrinsic tropes that affect any intrinsic depiction of transience or mortality. My chapter on mourning has illustrated how, for Harrison as well as for other modern poets, these metaphors have radically transformed the genre of the elegy, with its traditional movement towards reconciliation and consolation. The following section will engage with the concepts of memory and memorialisation, which, along with mourning, are central tenets of this aristocratic poetic form. Whereas grieving suggests a process that might evoke melancholic infinitude, however, memorywork may be presented as instigated by the moment in which ‘true’ mourning ceases. Given the multitude of problems involved in remembering some of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, this positive psychological phenomenon might be regarded with suspicion. Survival will prove to be a major theme of the texts in this chapter, but it could be countered that Harrison ‘survives’ only as a post-Holocaust poet with little access to the atrocities he mentions. Primo Levi’s true witnesses – those that died in the camps – do not get much of a voice in a poetry concerned more with the proclivities of the elegy. This is why the sonnets tend to engage with twentieth-century history only indirectly: Alzheimer’s patients, lovers and Tony Harrison are the subjects of the poems that follow; nevertheless, as in the family sonnets, the 195

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Holocaust and nuclear war remain as shadows outside the text which inform any reading of his work. Modern elegies that espouse anti-humanist, anti-therapeutic and anti-sentimental viewpoints do not emerge out of these extrinsic concerns: Harrison’s memory-work stubbornly operates as an act of artistic salvage, not nihilism. The process of memory consists of a constant sifting of images which inform, and are affected by, changing notions of individual and national identities. Private memories are composed of broken narratives that represent (possible) past events. Public memorialisation collects individual recollections into a unity which seems to promise, but never delivers, an objective response to historical phenomena. Memory and memorialisation need to be distinguished from similar abstractions, such as remembering and remembrance. ‘Remembering’ refers to a particular narrative in which the subject celebrates, or denigrates, the image of lost objects. A totalised conception of these states is known as memory; memory-work describes this process of concretion. In contrast, remembrance forms part of memorialisation, and indicates the performance of an institutionalised rite, such as the VE Day celebrations in Britain during June 1995. It designates moments of collective memorywork, whereas memorialisation denotes a continuous process of public recognition. This could constitute the construction of war memorials, or, in the case of Harrison’s poetry (since literature is a public genre), the creation of a sequence of sonnets to signal the death of his parents, and the advent of the Second World War. In a sense, memorialisation constitutes an answer to any plea for deep grief and faithfulness towards the dead. But whereas the theorists’ models in the last chapter refer to the process of mourning, which has a potentially limited time-span, memorialisation continues indefinitely. However, it is possible for both processes to coexist within a text: for example, in an individual poem from Harrison’s family sonnets, the poet may depict an instance of grieving at the same time as inscribing it – in the context of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence as a whole – into a wider process of memory-work.

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‘Blocks’ illustrates this bifurcation.1 It engages with mourning by subverting funeral rites which create a split between public and private grieving. The vicar drones: a figure who is supposed to imbue death with meaning for the surviving relatives spouts negative awkwardness; his delivery of the eulogy is appalling; he misquotes from ‘Ecclesiastes Chapter 3’, and bores his audience. Christian services prove too lowkey to successfully introject private grief; the congregation is forced into an alternative expression by crying in unison. The family’s attempt at articulation is mirrored by the metrics of line five, in which regional accent clamours for recognition within classical scansion. ‘Family’, a trisyllabic noun in Standard English, is inscribed into the poem as the disyllabic ‘famly’ of the congregation’s Beeston dialect in order to fit into the trochiac pentameter: B o B o B o B o B (o) All the family round me start to sob.2 However, despite this metrical nuance, the poet proves, in one sense, to be as useless as the vicar in providing solace for the family. He fails to volunteer a eulogy; all he can produce to signal the alterity of the loved object are the written words ‘VALE, MATER’ (‘goodbye, mother’). Latin, a ‘dead’, public language (like the biblical discourse), fails to express the emotive. All it signals is that his classical education has created an awkward gulf between public proclamation and private grief. The capital letters of ‘VALE, MATER’ make the phrase stand out in the sonnet as a whole: they may also indicate that the poem is an alternative gravestone, with the Latin words as an inscription. Perhaps a dead language can provide the most suitable elegy for the deceased. Mourning gives way here to memorialisation: the individual instances of failed ‘true’ mourning are totalised into a framework which succeeds in providing succour for the bereaved poet; instead of being melancholic texts, the family sonnets can be re-read as aspects of memorywork. How does this equate with the modern elegy’s propensity to avoid untimely solace? An answer might be that Harrison mirrors classical sonnets by creating densely wrought poetic

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chocks to stop emotive slop intruding onto the page; the poems are modern in that he exploits, rather than dissipates, the tension between inarticulate grief and public poetry. Moreover, even if the ‘School of Eloquence’ were to be lauded as celebratory memory-work, ‘VALE, MATER’ attests to the fact that poetry in the late twentieth century forms an exclusive literary genre which will remain unread by most of the sobbing congregation. The classical sonnet form may be usurped by the dialect and capital-letter phrases (such as ‘ABC’), but the subversion necessarily evokes the exclusive ghost of the original. In Harrison’s oeuvre, the public pole of the dialectic of memory explored in ‘Blocks’ is inextricably linked with the contemporaneous threat of nuclear annihilation: [‘Art & Extinction’ is] about the idea that used to console people, of gambling on posterity – ‘exegi monumentum aere perennius’ – the idea that you can write in a certain style because some day there would be an understanding. Now the future doesn’t look that much of a dead cert for gambling on: we are faced with a very real idea of extinction, not only of personal extinction but of the work and of memory, and it certainly takes away that feeling that you were laying up a readership in heaven or the future. That choice, which in a sense sustained poets for centuries, is no longer open to us.3 The quotation above originates from the interview with John Haffenden in 1983. It took place when the threat of nuclear war was at its most tangible since the Cuban missile crisis due to President Reagan’s initiation of the Star Wars programme. Harrison’s correlation between a nuclear war and memorialisation is stated explicitly in his justification of the ‘Art & Extinction’ section of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, situated directly after the family sonnets: the prospect of the annihilation not only of individuals and texts, but also of the process that attempts to remember them, places the contemporaneous writer in a unique historical position. His or her writing is undercut by the signified referent of its ultimate

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destruction, and is perhaps inherently uncertain in tone. ‘[C]ertain style’ may refer to poetry’s espoused inaccessibility: instead of evoking the one-off performances of the Unity theatre for a working-class audience, Harrison’s sonnets might be designed to be accessible because the whole concept of readership would be destroyed by a future nuclear war. Transience is similarly rewritten in the wake of the preholocaust contemporary in Harrison’s ‘Facing Up to the Muses’.4 In this article, he makes a similar connection between the holocaust and memorialisation in relation to his play The Common Chorus: The mountain [Greenham Common] that these Muses dance on is where our extinction is stored, an extinction that even Memory, the mother of the Muses, will not survive to make our sufferings a story like those of Hecuba and the women of Troy, an extinction that will mean no going ‘back to civilisation’, even for one learned in the Classics. (p. 448) In his introduction to The Common Chorus, memory is lauded as the ‘last resort in the ruins of time’, but the quotation above illustrates that the need to bear witness to suffering during atrocities such as the Holocaust would be negated by nuclear annihilation.5 Even though the prospect of global war has diminished since the fragmentation of the former Soviet Union – although it has not disappeared completely, due to the nuclear aspirations of countries such as North Korea and Iraq, and the growing black market in fissile material – humanity’s recognition of the possibility of selfinitiated destruction has unleashed a specific sense of fragility into the memorialisation process. Harrison registers this later in the introduction by focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who, with his invention of the atom bomb, contributed significantly towards this uncertainty. He quotes from Oppenheimer’s Uncommon Sense (as opposed to the supposed ‘common’ sense of the Greenham women in Harrison’s play), a collection of essays in which the scientist depicts the ephemerality of memory:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust Transience is the backdrop for the play of human progress, for the improvement of man, the growth of his knowledge, the increase of his power, his corruption and partial redemption. Our civilisations perish; the carved stone, the written word, the heroic act fade into a memory of a memory and in the end are gone; this house, this earth in which we live will one day be unfit for human habitation as the sun ages and alters.6

Harrison recognises the peculiarity of Oppenheimer’s notion of progress in a paragraph that leads a reader with knowledge of the latter’s invention to link the ‘unfit’ earth with nuclear annihilation rather than the environmental armageddon denoted by the disintegrating sun. The excited, almost gloating rhetoric betrays either an implicit and blinkered gamble on the ultimate ‘goodwill’ and inability of humanity to commit global suicide, or an acceptance that the nuclear age is the last chapter in humanity’s narrative of ‘progress’. Memory is described as opposite to transience: the need to revive the past is at odds with ‘the backdrop for […] human progress’, and yet neither could function without recourse to one another. And the advent of the atom bomb highlights the temporality of both. Earlier in the introduction to The Common Chorus, Harrison quotes from Edmund Spenser’s ‘The Ruins of Time’ to demonstrate that pre-twentieth-century poets were confident that the canon of literature would ensure their work remained immortal (p. vi). This is a selective reading of Spenser. Elsewhere, the poet muses on the temporality of texts: in The Shepherd’s Calendar, the narrator argues that ‘words bene wynd, and wasten soone in vayne’.7 Themes of memory and transience are obviously not unique to contemporary writing; Harrison simply demonstrates that the prospect of nuclear war has intensified the already precarious nature of such phenomena. Jacques Derrida goes a step further in an essay on the holocaust, and exposes memorialisation as a fragile, if not frivolous, activity when texts are threatened by linguistic silence in the form of a sublime, threatening, and yet unrepresentable future event.8 He argues that global destruction would

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have a unique effect on culture because it would destroy the archive, and therefore the institution of literature, which cannot exist – according to the theorist – without recourse to stockpiling and a system of origins that gives precedence to authors’ rights and standard editions. Whereas the name ‘Spenser’ relies on the archive to convey ‘his’ poetry to future readers, Derrida exults in its unique obliteration: What allows us perhaps to think the uniqueness of nuclear war, its being-for-the-first-time-and-perhapsfor-the-last-time, its absolute inventiveness, what it prompts us to think even if it remains a decoy, a belief, a phantasmatic projection, is obviously the possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces, of the juridico-literary archive – that is, total destruction of the basis of literature and criticism.9 The prospect of a remainderless, and thus memory-less, future constitutes the ‘essence’ of literature for Derrida, ‘its radical precariousness and the radical form of its historicity’.10 It occupies a luxuriously finite space: ‘the movement of its inscription is the very possibility of its effacement’. Literature and criticism ‘cannot speak of anything else’ but a projected holocaust: all literary texts, not only those which engage in direct representations of the event, gesture towards their future annihilation in the guise of an ultimate signified referent.11 Derrida’s analysis is both liberating and restrictive. It opens up another possibility of reading literature in the context of nuclear war, so that even when texts do not refer to the event via a ‘direct’ representation or Zerstörungsblitze, they can be interpreted as holocaust literature due to their production within the nuclear epoch. This can also lead to the danger of occluding other possible interpretations of texts within a totalised methodology. ‘The Icing Hand’ demonstrates this dichotomy.12 Superficially, Harrison’s poem appears to be a celebration of the immutability of the memorialisation process. The poet and dead father are yoked together in a single conceit: the lost, loved object ‘guides/[the son’s] pen’; the writing tool is made

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analogous to the icing implement used by the father to decorate his cakes. Like a parent teaching a child to write by controlling his or her hand, Harrison fantasises that the father writes the poem. The utopian fantasy of a synthesis between the subject and object dismisses the possibility of subjective distortion. Oblivion then assuages this metaphysical intensity: the poem is troped as the ‘winkle-stuccoed edifice’ of the sandcastle, which is swept away into the sea. Spenser’s edict that ‘words […] wasten soone in vayne’ is directly evoked here; the image also recalls Spenser’s sonnet number 75, in which the poet writes his lover’s name ‘upon the strand’.13 In the latter, the waves ‘washéd it away’: she argues that it is ‘Vayne’ to try and ‘immortalize’, whereas he retorts that his verse will ‘eternalize’ her ‘vertues rare’, and their ‘love shall [thereby] live, and later life renew’. Such elegiac consolation is undercut – for the contemporary poet – by the atom bomb. If images of annihilation are inseparable in post-war poetry from a projected nuclear war, then transience indicates that ‘The Icing Hand’ is fragile due to its production in the preholocaust contemporary. This Derridean reading might work for the ‘School of Eloquence’ as a whole due to the constant reiteration of its precarious nature (particularly in the ‘Art & Extinction’ section). In ‘The Icing Hand’, though, memorywork itself instigates the closure’s limbo: o B B o B B B o o B Remembrance like iced cake crumbs in the throat, o B B o B o B o B remembrance like windblown Blackpool brine o B B o B o B o B overfills the poem’s shallow moat o B B o B o B o B o B and first, ebbing, salts, then, flowing, floods this line. If remembrance is an institutionalised rite, then this stanza might refer more broadly to a celebration of the difficult process of public memory-work in the ‘School of Eloquence’. Moats (as opposed to the ditches of Anglo-Saxon fortresses) protected Norman castles against invasion. Modernist poems,

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if considered as the sparse but densely wrought linguistic artefacts conceived by Pound, were supposed to provide protection against emotional slither.14 In contrast, Harrison initially contains any predilection for sentimentality within a definite, albeit fraught, metrical scheme, but then allows such ‘slither’ to negate the poem at its closure. Attempts to evoke the ghosts of the dead, rather than the signified referent of the holocaust, ‘flood’ the poetry. Linguistic disruption reflects the psychological trauma evoked by trying to remember the lost, loved object in this stanza. As in ‘A Piece of Cake’, the image of the father causes choking; here, memory-work rather than ‘true’ mourning is disrupted as bits of cake stick in the poet’s throat. Luke Spencer detects a ‘Keatsian intensity’ in this stanza; in a more abstract sense, traditional poetics are certainly summoned in the form of simile: in the first two lines, remembering proves to be a bitter-sweet phenomenon, since it can be compared to cake, and salt-saturated water.15 However, the concurrent pain of remembrance demands a poetry of awkwardness; this is signalled by the metrical tension instigated by the bunched stresses in the first line of the stanza above. When the poet appears to succeed in finishing his work of memory – and the metrical pattern reasserts itself at the end of the second and third lines – he then indicates that the most painful memories of the father can only be signalled as significant absences. The father functions as a ‘ghost’ of the inarticulate here in the sense that contemplating the object paradoxically creates, and then destroys, the artifice of the text. A similar paradox is mulled over in Derrida’s essay, since, if all literature is written in the shadow of the holocaust, the projected event which threatens to destroy the archive simultaneously creates it. Private moments of remembering depicted in public literature are perhaps rendered more profuse and acute by the possibility of their future effacement.

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Memory and the Holocaust Profusion, in terms of the sheer amount of testimony now in print and on video in archives (particularly in America), coupled with an appreciation of the fractured nature of remembering, are also concerns of the post-Holocaust contemporary. The impossibility of ever recording a complete account of the Final Solution has nevertheless given impetus to archival projects funded recently by benefactors such as Steven Spielberg; all such representations by ageing survivors are surrounded with the silence of the sometimes nameless victims. Approximately eleven million ‘witnesses’ (including Jews, politicos, gypsies and homosexuals) are unable to testify: in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, Richard Glazar, a former inmate of Treblinka, points out that ‘no one was supposed to be left to bear witness’ to the atrocities occurring within the death camp.16 This is the most overt method employed by the Nazis to deny the possibility of a record of the Holocaust written outside their own anti-Semitic narrative. As Dominick LaCapra notes, the murder of potential witnesses was intended to result in a historical vacuum which could be filled by Nazi testimony: A concern for memorials as necessary acts of memory is quite understandable in light of the fact that the Nazis wanted the destruction of Jews to be total and to include their elimination from memory itself at least in the form of Jewish self-representation. (In this specific context, a Jewish public act of memory might function as an act of resistance.) Hitler planned to substitute Jewish memories of Jews [with] Nazi ones through monuments that commemorated his acts of destruction and oblivion.17 Humanist celebrations of survival itself can be read in this context as public, and memorial, acts of rebellion. Throughout Holocaust literature there forms a recurring desire on the part of some victims to survive solely in order to testify. In Shoah, Filip Müller, a former member of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando, was so moved by his fellow Czechs singing the national anthem and Hatikvah inside the gas chamber

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that he says he entered it, and waited to die. He recalls one of them saying: ‘So you want to die. But that’s senseless. Your death won’t give us back our lives. That’s no way. You must get out of here alive, you must bear witness to our suffering, and to the injustice done to us.’18 Unlike most of the various Sonderkommando employed by the Nazis to tend to the gas chambers during the Holocaust, Filip Müller was able to fulfil the victim’s plea. However, some of the dead Sonderkommando had already arranged to testify by burying their written accounts of the death camps. After the end of the war, some of their literature was discovered under the remains of Auschwitz gas victims. One account read: ‘Dozens of documents are buried […] which will throw light on everything that happened here […] We ourselves have lost hope of being able to live to see the moment of liberation.’19 Harrison’s humanist proclivities, in which the notions of memory and survival are celebrated amidst the atrocities of twentieth-century history, might appear obscene in the context of such testimony, but credence needs to be given to the plea of the victim recounted by Müller. Memorywork might be a notoriously exclusionary activity, but if testimony, and post-Holocaust literature, ceased, the victims’ plight would remain shrouded in the memorial silence preferred by the Nazis. Hence the desperate need to testify in order to provide a necessarily incomplete account of the Holocaust defies the Nazis’ defeated attempt to construct memorials glorifying the deeds of the Third Reich. Poststructuralist suspicions surrounding the concept of truth need to be tempered if we are to consider victims’ accounts as closer to the reality of events than these projected anti-Semitic narratives. A relativity of subject positions in relation to the Holocaust would need to be turned into a hierarchy of value if the critic is to contest that the Nazis were plain wrong.20 False narratives were clearly evident during Hitler’s reign; for example, in attempts to make slave workers transform the reality of the Final Solution

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(simultaneously easing Nazi guilt) by beating them into using euphemism. In Shoah, Motke Zaïdel and Itzhak Dugin remember digging up the corpses of the Vilna Jews at Sobibor: The Germans even forbade us to use the words ‘corpse’ or ‘victim’. The dead were blocks of wood, shit, with absolutely no importance. Anyone who said ‘corpse’ or ‘victim’ was beaten. The Germans made us refer to the bodies as Figuren, that is as puppets, as dolls, or as Schmattes, which means ‘rags’.21 This linguistic evasion did not, in the long term, affect Zaïdel and Dugin’s recollection, since they retain the signifiers ‘corpse’ and ‘victim’. But as Hermann Langbein has noted, the Nazis were more successful in avoiding any memory of the death camps’ organisation and architecture: they destroyed crematoria and documentation ‘in order to eliminate all traces of the mass extermination’.22 This makes reconstruction of the camps as memorial pieces difficult. It would be impossible to collage all the images contained in surviving inmates’ memories into a coherent whole, but those who believe the Holocaust never happened cling to this impossibility, and the absent documentation, as evidence of the impossibility of the existence of the original. Such problems of memorialisation have haunted recent attempts to reconstruct Auschwitz-Birkenau’s past.23 Hence the problems of remembering the Holocaust are manifold. And even when survivors do testify, fissures are created within the memory-work itself. Lawrence Langer indicates this in his subtitle to Holocaust Testimonies, ‘The Ruins of Memory’. He recognises that the process is a representation of the ‘real’ mediated through language: victims cannot remember the event essentially ‘as it was’; there is no ‘true’ memory, only the tragedy of a lost referent. Memorywork also suffers from a disjunction between the ‘then’ and ‘now’: too many value systems alien to the original camp experience have intervened since to enable a correct reconstruction of its ‘reality’. And even if this disjuncture is recognised, the extreme situations recalled are sometimes too traumatic to produce anything but a fragmentary narrative. If

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they are buried in what Langer terms ‘deep memory’, in which ‘now’ and ‘then’ cannot be reconciled, the testifier may repress their recollection; the result is linguistic silence. This often happens in the film Shoah, such as when Mordechaï Podchlebnik, one of only two survivors out of the four hundred thousand murdered at Chelmno, is silent, smiles, and then cries. Even if the testifier speaks, a linguistic gulf intervenes, in which langue is powerless ‘to release the specific kinds of physical distress haunting the caverns of deep memory’.24 A memorial account composed of a struggle to articulate often ensues. Lyotard addresses this problem with his model of the différend.25 A ‘wrong’ has been committed to survivors of the camps which cannot be articulated in existing language; although this skirts close to endorsing the ineffability of the Holocaust, Lyotard’s committed work paves the way for the discovery of alternative discourses. Harrison is neither a poststructuralist nor a new historicist: he retains notions of true representations of events, and refuses to relativise the past within sets of equally valid narratives. As I have indicated, it is possible to negate notions of a single truth, and treat history as story-telling in relation to the Holocaust, without risking obscenity, as long as value systems are retained in which one representation may attain more validity than another. As a historicist, though, Harrison does recognise the difficulties of memory-work I have outlined above. In his post-Holocaust and humanist mission to celebrate love, mourning, memory and culture amongst historical atrocity, his poetics connect directly with the awkwardnesses of Holocaust testimony. In Shoah, Filip Müller muses on the notions of survival and hope: The ‘special detail’ lived in a crisis situation. Every day we saw thousands and thousands of innocent people disappear up the chimney. With our own eyes, we could truly fathom what it means to be a human being. There they came, men, women, children, all innocent. They suddenly vanished, and the world said nothing! We felt abandoned. By the world, by humanity. But the situation

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust taught us fully what the possibility of survival meant. For we could gauge the infinite value of human life. And we were convinced that hope lingers in man as long as he lives. Where there’s life, hope must never be relinquished. That’s why we struggled through our lives of hardship, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, hoping against hope to survive, to escape that hell.26

This passage recalls a crisis in Müller’s notion of humanism, where distress ensues from a dialectical desire to celebrate survival and register atrocity. Humanist ideology rears its universalist head when a recollection of a particular death camp experience is substituted with a global narrative about the human race. ‘We could truly fathom what it means to be a human being’ anticipates a positive ontological evaluation of the race as a whole, but recognition follows that bodies are just glorified ashes. His faith in humanism capitulates: ‘We felt abandoned […] by humanity’. He then immediately reconstructs the ideology through a paradoxical appreciation of the fragility of life. He returns to a rhetoric that Langer denounces throughout Holocaust Testimonies as the refuse of humanism: he speaks of survival (rather than the American critic’s less consoling alternative of ‘staying alive’) and deploys the cliché ‘where there’s life, there’s hope’.27 This register is then undercut by the qualifying ‘we were convinced’, which implies that consolation might have been a fantasy.28 But the uncertain dialectic ultimately remains in place, as it does throughout Harrison’s poetry. In the poems I discuss in this chapter, Loving Memory, ‘The Mother of the Muses’, Black Daisies for the Bride, ‘Long Distance’, ‘Book Ends’ and ‘Loving Memory’, Harrison engages with this dialectic of agonised humanism which balances a celebration of human facets with a recognition of the ‘skin of death’ which surrounds the late twentieth century (p. 193). As with mourning, poetic memory-work can refer to heterogeneous processes. In the early poem ‘Thomas Campey and the Copernican System’, the process is humorous, playful and

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reverential; in the long poem ‘V’ it is linked to the poet’s anger at the desecration of his parents’ gravestone (pp. 13–14, 235– 49). The inextricability of memory and the Holocaust is overt in ‘Cheating the Void’, the last programme in the Loving Memory sequence: oblivion is described as ‘overtaking/Memory’ in the twentieth century due to the difficulties of remembering the millions of people killed during recent atrocities.29 In Black Daisies for the Bride, this historical specificity opens out into a more general link between a sense of annihilation lodged in the pre-holocaust contemporary, and the fragility of memory in the context of Alzheimer’s disease.30 It could be argued that the bleak tone of much of this poetry impresses a simultaneous nostalgia for the past upon the reader. Harrison’s work would, if this were true, fit into a recognisable tradition of post-war literature obsessed with the supposedly pre-atrocity era of Victorian and Georgian England (thereby blanking out some of the worst excesses of, say, colonialism). Larkin’s poetry gestures towards these eras not only with his traditional poetics and predilection for Hardy’s verse, but also with the sense gleaned from poems such as ‘MCMXIV’ that humanity’s innocence was lost after the advent of the First World War.31 Even the millions annihilated during that war can be forgotten by writers searching for a society untrammelled by the shadow of the Third Reich. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited fits into this tradition, since the ‘socialized snobbery’ on show bemoans the passing of a war which can allow barbarians such as the character Hooper to be lauded within an army formerly the preserve of generations of aristocrats.32 Harrison’s work proves nostalgic neither for the 1920s nor for the late nineteenth century, however. Classical Greece might be tempting as an alternative site for a lost utopia, yet in his writing it is figured as a savage and barbaric ‘culture’, as well as a celebrated origin of humanist thought. Perhaps his interest in the process of memory in a more abstract manner marks him out as a discernibly post-war writer. Recent poetry has certainly displayed a fixation with its intricacies: for example, Eavan Boland’s collection The Lost Land combines private recollections of a lost daughter with

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public reclamations of Irish history.33 Representations of painful nostalgia (‘I remember/we paid for our tea with a single pound note’) are not the same, though, as Harrison’s recognition of the fractured nature of memory, and its radical historicity.34 Recognising that the Holocaust, and the prospect of global destruction, has affected the concepts of death, mourning, memorialisation and remembering, Harrison has produced poems in which the diverse referents of Naples, Dresden, Menston and his parents are linked through his acute sense of the fragility of memory.

Fragile Memory-Work in Loving Memory, ‘The Mother of the Muses’ and Black Daisies for the Bride Preoccupations with Alzheimer’s and annihilation in ‘The Mother of the Muses’ and Black Daisies for the Bride are preceded by Harrison’s engagement with memorialisation in the television series Loving Memory. First broadcast in 1987, the quality of its script and editing do not match the astonishing achievement of Black Daisies for the Bride (1993). Nevertheless, it illustrates both Harrison’s developing interest in forging a modern elegiac style in the narrative poems and film texts, and the recycling of an idealist model evident throughout the ‘School of Eloquence’ to frame his investigations. Problems of remembering the Holocaust, and the radical historicity of the present, are subsumed into an overarching model in which memory is linked with other instances of positivity, such as amorous discourse. As opposed to this, negativity is encompassed within a continuum of suffering. For Harrison, twentieth-century atrocity connects with classical tragedy because works of art that might redeem the torment of survivors arise out of horrific events. Such a totalising model proves to be at odds with his concurrent materialist view of history: hence poems such as ‘The Gaze of the Gorgon’ stress the particularity of past events at the same time as highlighting a mythopoeic vision of evil. The upholding of concretions such as ‘suffering equals art’ has a tendency to ignore the

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heterogeneous, which could be counterproductive in a body of work that espouses a desire to speak for various inarticulate objects. This tension is dissipated, to a certain extent, by the self-reflexivity of the narrative poems and film texts: Harrison appears willing to accept that his idealism might be misplaced, at the same time as stubbornly adhering to it throughout his oeuvre. In a TV interview, he quotes the Chinese proverb that in dark times the eye begins to see, and notes that during summer thunderstorms, the colours of flowers are enhanced.35 Such an overwhelming focus on positivity within a Hegelian dialectic might be said to be naïve in a century which has witnessed the systematic death of millions. To Harrison, the choice is between meagre compensation and nihilism. In Loving Memory, the continuum of suffering is registered by the signifier ‘oblivion’, which attempts to denote everything from a secular void to a traditional elegiac concern for the maintenance of memorials. Rather than focus on the specific historical event of the Holocaust, Harrison characterises annihilation as a general sense of transience in ‘Cheating the Void’, the last programme in the series: The first Oblivion is death, the next neglect and finally the third when moss and ivy blank out mason’s text and no one cares whose body is interred.36 Gravestone inscriptions can only provide ephemeral access to the signified referent of the deceased. Hence memorialisation incurs a tropological ‘death’ after the individual’s original demise: it can only function properly as long as the relatives are willing to take note of the ‘substitutive […] act of troping’.37 Suffering can be assuaged by survivors, but only as long as they remain faithful to the signs of the dead: the precariousness of memory-work is registered here with empty signifiers; the deceased are ‘alive’ only in the form of solipsistic texts. ‘[I]nterred’ repeats the inter/turd pun from ‘V’, where the skinhead enviously notes the former working-class occupation of a tanner named Byron, who now ‘Lieth ’ere interred’.38 Shit stands as a synecdoche for oblivion throughout Harrison’s

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work; in ‘A Cold Coming’ the dead Iraqi’s inarticulacy is recorded with the image of his ‘dumb mask like baked dogsturds’.39 This transformation recalls the poet’s use of Greek masks in plays such as The Oresteia.40 By transferring the turd metaphor to his own texts, it becomes clear that his work is obsessed with its own precarious nature: the poems, when read by a future (perhaps post-holocaust) audience, might be regarded as incomprehensible and ‘dumb’, or expendable ‘shit’. Harrison’s working-class self is served up for the reader in the stanza above when the tendency of northern dialects to elide the definite article allows the phrase ‘mason’s text’ to complete the pentameter.41 The unknown body refers outwards to the poet’s future corpse, and his ‘body’ of work: such a confident proffering of identity would be negated by a future audience unaware of dialect and biographical details of the dead author ‘Tony Harrison’. This angst over posterity places Loving Memory in a long tradition of elegiac texts that endorse Spenser’s declaration that that ‘words […] wasten soone in vayne’.42 The series does, however, also attempt to create specifically modern elegies. ‘Cheating the Void’ in particular differs from the other three programmes in the series in that it shifts position within the continuum of suffering from general oblivion to an engagement with the inextricability of twentieth-century atrocity from the process of memorialisation.43 The camera pans across a packed graveyard in Venice, where most graves are on a tenyear lease: this ghettoisation of corpses anticipates the memorials to the twentieth century’s millions of dead. The First World War, the Holocaust and the Allied fire-bombing of Hamburg in 1943 are highlighted as events that challenge the memorials’ attempt to give meaning to atrocity. A victim of the bombing asks survivors to ‘Remember me, but, ah, forget my fate’, but concludes that this is impossible, since memory and atrocity feed parasitically off each other (p. 101). Oblivion appears to be stronger than modern memory-work because it threatens to annihilate the significance of the personal during events such as the First World War: it ‘[shakes] all the cemeteries [the viewer’s] seen’ (p. 100). If humanity can ‘[find]

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no meaning in the loss/of millions’, what is the point of instating memorials to meaninglessness? Normative commemoration counteracts such scepticism by reminding survivors of recent atrocities through the presence of memorials. The narrator concludes that oblivion is not necessarily omnipotent in the contemporary: as the instruments of annihilation become more complex, so do the means of memorialisation: hence, in ‘Letters in the Rock’, an excerpt from Gray’s elegy appears on a VDU as a potential gravestone inscription. Nevertheless, events such as the Holocaust are dependent on a continuing audience – watching video testimony, for example – in order to reiterate the importance of their shadow in cultural memory. If Western countries begin to ignore such atrocities, they will, in the words of Geoffrey Hill, become nations ‘with so many memorials but no memory’.44 Ramazani makes this link between memory-work and technology during his analysis of the modern elegy in Poetry of Mourning. He notes that the first English cremation took place in 1882: this way of disposing of corpses quickly became a bourgeois rite, before working-class mourners adopted it in greater numbers from the mid-twentieth century onwards.45 By 1968, more than half the annual dead were cremated. Ramazani also stresses that the advent of funeral directors augmented a discourse of mourning which contains ‘sentimental evasion, pseudo-science, and psycho-babble’.46 The modern elegy counters such rhetoric with its ‘anti-sentimental, antiscientific, and anti-therapeutic’ motives. Loving Memory eludes this description, since the script dispassionately focuses on the process of cremation, and other recent innovations in memorialisation. As opposed to the family sonnets, which respond specifically to the death of Harrison’s parents, it engages in general with rites associated with Christian ideology, but which are now subsumed, in late twentieth-century Britain, into a form of secular humanism. Religious discourse is juxtaposed with the practicalities of the cremation process: extreme closeups of the ‘Burner’, ‘End Cycle’ and ‘On System’ buttons jar with the voiceover of a priest. In ‘Letters in the Rock’, the camera cuts to a saleswoman pontificating on the delights of

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weighted flower pots: she states that, ‘if you’ve got a very windy cemetery, then you’re going to find that they will stay within the container, no problem’ (p. 104). A close-up on a ‘That’s value’ sign succeeds the statement; a sharp cut then leads to a gravestone with the inscription ‘There, I told you I was ill’. Loving Memory’s documentary style often gives way to sentimental sequences in which individual mourners describe their memory-work; for example, Maureen Street describes the teddy-bear gravestone she chose for her dead child. Yet, in a sense, the programme also proves to be a successful documentary of sentimentality: apart from in ‘Mimmo Perrella non è Piu’, the poet-narrator tends to desist from moralising about the survivors’ choice of memorial. Despite the aura of objectivity, the series brings a pantomime of approaches and styles to the process of mourning. ‘Letters in the Rock’ alone depicts humorous, serious, literary, poetic, absurd, macabre, playful, religious, scientific, sentimental, celebratory and atheist reactions to the loss of loved objects. This carnivalesque approach might be enough to deem Loving Memory a modern elegy. Moreover, despite its resistance to Ramazani’s definition, the series proves to be the most modern of modern elegies by engaging on television with contemporary ways of disposing of corpses. Aside from the medium, the modern elegiac tone is in evidence in Loving Memory with the overall desire to subvert the recent tendency in Western cultures to evade the processes of mourning and memory. Between 1880 and 1920, ‘the period of mourning was shortened more and more in both America and Britain, until it extended little beyond a few days after the funeral’.47 As opposed to this, Loving Memory paraded numerous models of memory-work across a four-week period between 16 July and 6 August 1987 (‘Cheating the Void’ appears to have been deliberately scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima). At times, the depth of detail in the documentary verges on the morbid. This proclivity is at its most potent during the sequence that details Perrella’s corpse: the camera lingers over the dried bone and skin as if delighting in the body’s dissipation. Alternatively,

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this sequence might be lauded as a modern response to varieties of memory-work on offer in countries where Britain’s evasion of the dead would be considered obscene. British reactions to death might be typified as either silent or embarrassed. In an article in The Listener the producer Michael Hutchinson focuses on the difference between the British and Italian response to death, which he locates in an opposition between silence and communality: Semi-detached Britain has forgotten how to deal with death. We try to ignore it and pretend that life goes on regardless – our high-tech lifestyle isn’t programmed for it. By contrast, in Italy people make time for death. Family and friends wash and lay the corpse on the bed for everyone to see. The undertaker merely provides the coffin and the transport.48 Italian society’s family-centred, Catholic culture demands more elaborate rites than the British: ‘love and care’ must ‘will’ the soul on its journey from purgatory to heaven; the family grieves openly in a communal group, and in Naples, ‘A funeral brings out all the street’.49 Corpses are buried until they have dried; the husks are then exhumed, cleaned with alcohol, naphthalene and DDT, the bones are put back in place, and the body is placed in a winding sheet and marble locker. This process mirrors the soul’s journey from purgatory to heaven. ‘[M]oistness […] means sin’; if the corpse is still wet the family must continue to pray for its deliverance; mourning ends after the exhumation, at which point it can be placed in the locker, and the soul awaits judgment day (p. 85). Hutchinson remarks that these rites ‘would seem macabre in Britain’ whereas they are ‘entirely natural in Naples’.50 This cultural difference was reflected in the BBC warning before the original transmission: ‘the programme contains a sequence showing in detail the examination of an exhumed body, which may distress some viewers’. Despite the producer’s validation of cultural diversity, a humanist vein in Harrison’s script attempts to fuse British and Italian death rites. The narrator espouses vindictiveness reminiscent of the Metaphysical poets:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust He always took such trouble with his hair, Even towards the end he kept it trim. He was a natty dresser, took great care over his appearance. Now, look at him! (p. 85)

His ‘scorn’ for the body’s previous ‘scorning’ of mortality is then countered by the surviving relatives’ reactions to the husk. A series of close-ups focus on the widow as she fusses over the corpse; another relation puts a necklace into the winding sheet. The programme then documents Enzo Genovese’s attention to his deceased parents, which includes making sure their bones are clean; the narrator cannot dismiss this devotion, as earlier when he admits that the relatives’ onesided conversations with the dead ‘[do] them good’ (p. 83). He concludes that his anti-Christian scepticism still requires an endorsement of these actions. Even if the relatives fool themselves into believing that the dead acknowledge the rites, the fantasy is ‘at least a healing way to handle grief’ (p. 91). ‘The Mother of the Muses’ eschews this vacillation in Loving Memory between morbidity and empathy. It explores the process of memory by engaging with Alzheimer’s disease, the bombing of Dresden, and the poet’s struggle to remember lines of verse. If the Holocaust proved to be the worst atrocity committed by the Nazis during the Second World War, the annihilation of much of Dresden by Allied bombers on 13 and 14 February 1945 proved that Britain and America were also capable of barbarism. During two air raids, Lancasters unloaded first explosives, and then firebombs, onto the unsuspecting populace. The second raid caused infernos in which victims were burnt, suffocated, or buried under debris. Although historians disagree over the exact number of civilians killed during Operation Thunderclap, the death toll was probably between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand (the Nazis falsely claimed it was two hundred and fifty thousand). One victim recalls entering a basement: You could recognise that the corpses had human shapes, but they were without clothes, hair, or eyes, just charred. If you touched one, it fell apart into ash. There was no

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skeleton, not even individual bones. I recognised a male body as my father-in-law. Nearby, quite distinctly, I spotted the slim form of my mother. The shape of her head left no doubt in my mind. I found a bin and put their ashes in it. With tears in my eyes I took my treasure out of the hellish place.51 Dresden might be placed alongside the Holocaust in a continuum of atrocity: the survivor’s attention to the charred and deformed corpses, the iconography of hell, and the humanist celebration of memorial ‘treasure’ gleaned from the inferno recall testimony arising out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (‘The Mother of the Muses’ similarly conceives memory as a form of humanist capital to be gleaned from horror: it is likened to gold, and a storehouse.52) However, there are problems with this relativity of horrific events, in which Dresden might compare with the bombing of Coventry, and Auschwitz with Hiroshima. Aside from the negation of historical specificity for the sake of a universal concept of terror, this similitude fuels the cult of victimhood in contemporary Germany. At the remembrance ceremony in 1995, some German survivors were happy to forgive Britain’s destruction of Dresden (and the unveiling of a statue of Bomber Harris in 1992), so long as it was appreciated that they represented ‘those who were persecuted by the Nazi regime’.53 Memory-work and history intersect at this point to suggest that the German populace, by extension, were not responsible for endorsing the Final Solution. Memory in this case avoids a more self-castigating way of reading this period of history. Erna Schirme, an elderly woman interviewed during the ceremony, confessed that ‘The raid was a scandal, but the biggest scandal was the choice of Hitler in 1933 which began it all.’ Even though Dresden and the Holocaust both display the inextricability of private memory and public remembrance, Harrison’s depiction of the bombing in ‘The Mother of the Muses’ avoids a continuum of horror. Problems of relativity, and discrepancies in historical accounts, are subsumed in a

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poem at pains to uncover the fractured nature of memorywork itself. Harrison’s personal difficulty in recalling lines of Greek would obviously be irrelevant to a purely historicist engagement with the bombing; this is the work of a humanist poet who plays with the tensions between private grief and public atrocity. The general and particular are also connected in ‘The Mother of the Muses’ by the discussion of Alzheimer’s, and the lovers’ visit to Teresa Stratas’s father, who suffered from the disease, and died in 1987. As opposed to Black Daisies for the Bride, which focuses on the patients’ inability to remember, ‘The Mother of the Muses’ stresses that the function of memory can be paradoxical for the Alzheimer’s sufferers. Lilian loses linguistic connections, and produces euphemism when she tries to remember the word ‘coffin’ (‘that long thing where you lie’).54 In contrast, Gene, Eugene, Yevgeny, Jock and Joan become immersed in their own minds to the point where they become trapped in the past, performing scenarios that they enacted years ago. Jock speaks what appears to be gibberish, but the nurses ‘hear Scots diphthongs in the New World twang’; the first three return ‘full circle’ to Ukrainian; a Lancashire accent ‘seeps’ into Joan’s Canadian lilt (p. 41). Harrison’s particular examples of Alzheimer’s then concur with the poem’s overarching lament on ageing and transience. Elsie appears not to be affected by the disease, and is ‘her own optometrist’: her age and declining vision are contrasted with objects she cannot see outside the home, but which the narrator conceives as the trash of Canadian culture, including Evangelism, advertising, flashing neon, strobe lights and the ‘jukebox rock’ of the ‘truck-stop dive’ (p. 39). Harrison’s sympathetic attitude towards Elsie and the other patients appears at odds with the modern elegy’s suspicious, often sacrilegious, view of the dying or the dead. In ‘Death’ by William Carlos Williams, the father figure is ‘dead/the old bastard – ’; Plath similarly refers to ‘daddy’ as a ‘bastard’; in ‘The Old Fools’, Larkin is revolted by the prospect of incontinence.55 Such anti-humanist stances are at odds with Harrison’s more traditional, empathetic celebration of the Alzheimer’s victims.

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Since the poem begins and ends with the poet’s selfreferential account of his dysfunctional memory, these patients cannot be constructed as the grotesque other of the nonsenile. Signs of totality in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence represent Harrison’s desire to provide a fantasy of harmony within the genre of the elegy; in ‘The Mother of the Muses’, they refer to the persona’s own memory-work (‘I resolve to bring all yesterday to mind,/our visit to your father, each fact, all’) (p. 38). The poem appears to be set in February 1985, on the thirtieth anniversary of Dresden, when the poet was approaching fifty; hence the desire to celebrate his capacity to remember while he still can. He wishes to test a theory that verse is closely connected with memory, and indicates this in the classical model of remembering denoted by the title: Mnemosyne, a Titan goddess who was the personification of memory, gave birth to the Muses. In the first stanza, he tries to recall a passage from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, because, he argues, ‘it’s easier to remember poetry’, since the linguistic connections invited by verse can trigger transmitters in the brain. This test allows him to investigate the ways in which memory is historically determined. As Derrida mentions in Memoires for Paul de Man, the conception of memory as an imprint originates from ancient Greece: ‘The gift (doron) of Mnemosyne, Socrates insists, is like the wax in which all that we wish to guard in our memory is engraved in relief so that it may leave a mark, like that of rings, bands, or seals’.56 Harrison indicates this classical connection between recollection and inscription when he depicts the Prometheus Bound passage as ‘scratched’ on a shard (p. 38). The trope of marking returns in stanzas 31 and 32 with the ‘whited-out recurring [road] sign/ that could well be “Where everybody goes…”’ (p. 44). (The latter phrase refers back to stanza 13, in which Anne fails to remember a holiday island; the poet transforms it into the classical myth of the Islands of the Blest, situated beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where favoured mortals spent the afterlife [p. 40].) In the contemporary, ‘engraving’ is threatened by the projected holocaust that the persona refers to in the fourth stanza:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust a Burning of the Books far more extreme than any screeching Führer could inspire, the dark side of the proud Promethean dream our globe enveloped in his gift of fire. (p. 38)

Precarious memory is thus inscribed into the fire trope that runs throughout Harrison’s work, in which the ovens of the death camps, a projected nuclear blast, the tongues of fire that descended on the apostles, and the Promethean link between fire and the human imagination are compacted into a literary device. The poet ponders whether there is any point in writing a poem which functions as a memorial for his wife’s father in the pre-holocaust contemporary, since global annihilation would destroy literature’s desire to covet a readership in the future. This contemporary threat to memory-work, and the public institution of literature, is reflected by the trope of snow, which is repeated in the final scenes of Black Daisies for the Bride. Memory is construed (as opposed to the classical ‘engraving’) as a fissured, shifting entity that constantly thaws and dissolves. Intertextuality can be established at this point with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights: the narrator complains that the signposts for towns which have taken the names of British ones near his former home in Leeds, ‘the Yorks, the Whitbys, and the Scarboroughs’, metamorphose into the ‘whited-out recurring [road] signs’; these recall the obliteration of stones by the snow during Mr Lockwood’s return to Thrushcross Grange after his second, ill-fated visit to Heathcliff’s house.57 In Wuthering Heights, this loss of signification links back to Lockwood’s constant misreading of signs: in Chapter 2, ‘an obscure cushion full of something like cats’ turns out to be ‘a heap of dead rabbits’; he is unable to make sense, initially, of the various ‘Catherines’ scratched in the paint on a window ledge.58 In ‘The Mother of the Muses’, the snow links with the lines from Prometheus Bound, which are beyond signification in the sense that they seem to have been obliterated from the poet’s memory. By extension, the trope encompasses the classics, which are in danger of becoming

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‘forgotten’ texts and languages, and Harrison’s poem, which is, in turn, threatened by nuclear annihilation. The concept of memory has changed irrevocably since Wuthering Heights was published in 1847. Socrates’s process of engraving may be seductive in its appeal to timelessness, but in the pre-holocaust contemporary it appears hopelessly fragile: Piles of cracked ice tiles where ploughs try to push the muddied new falls onto shattered slates, the glittering shrapnel of grey frozen slush, a blitz debris fresh snow obliterates along with what was cleared the day before bringing even the snowploughs to a halt. And their lives are frozen solid and won’t thaw with no memory to fling its sparks of salt. (p. 39) This passage coalesces the ‘shrapnel’ imagery from ‘The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe’ and the ‘blitz’ metaphors from ‘A Close One’ to produce a landscape replete with the iconography of warfare: Alzheimer’s patients who are unable to recollect the past are paralleled with the struggle to provide a ‘vehicle’ to remember twentieth-century atrocity. This task is reflected by linguistic awkwardness in the form of metrical tension, and the dissonant sound of the poetry. The diction is harsh (‘cracked/shrapnel/blitz/frozen’), and the first line is difficult to fit into any metrical pattern due to the bunched stresses: B o B B B o B B o B Piles of cracked ice tiles where ploughs try to push […] (p. 39) The stanza forms a kind of diptych split into metrical, and unmetrical, halves: the first four lines struggle to scan; the second set is regular iambic pentameter. Regularity in the last line is established only with the use of Harrison’s ‘mother tongue’: his Beeston dialect. Recalling the Alzheimer’s victims’ return to their native language or accent, ‘memory’ (as with the trisyllabic ‘family’ in ‘Blocks’) becomes the disyllabic

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‘memry’. Such aesthetic harmony can only be achieved, Harrison’s poetics suggest, with a balancing appreciation of the precarious nature of writing. Frozen slates metamorphose into pages of poetry; the poet functions as the snowplough, striving to order the ‘blitz debris’ of recollection. Creation duly anticipates effacement: the agony of the aesthetic is immediately covered with fresh snow; the inscription of text promises the simultaneous possibility of its being ignored, forgotten, obliterated, or reified. As throughout Harrison’s oeuvre, dialectics ensure that positivity vies constantly with the prospect of negation. Selfreferential fretting about the shelf-life of the poem is balanced throughout ‘The Mother of the Muses’ with an endorsement of cultural memory. ‘Trying’ in the above stanza connects with the text’s endeavour to ensure that Dresden is not forgotten by its perpetrators. British and American historians have tended to avoid the event: Winston Churchill’s multi-volume The Second World War fails even to mention it.59 In contrast, J.F.C. Fuller’s The Second World War 1939–45 denounces the event as barbaric: And what was the final result of this Mongoloid destructiveness? That, while the First and Second Fronts were advancing to win the war, the Third Front was engaged upon blowing the bottom out of the peace which was to follow its winning; for cities and not rubble heaps are the foundations of civilization.60 This image recalls the famous Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus, to which Adorno refers in ‘Commitment’, and Walter Benjamin in ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’.61 In the latter’s interpretation of the picture, the angel views the process of history as a pile of wreckage which ‘grows skyward’; Fuller acknowledges the backwardness of Allied ‘progress’ towards peace. Harrison and Fuller thus recognise the need for cultural memory to face the twentieth century’s increasingly sophisticated acts of barbarism. The tendency that the poet detects in naïve versions of humanism, which fetishise progress at the expense of an engagement with the ramifications of atrocity,

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links with his reference to Holocaust revisionists. He compares Ernst Zundel and other academics, ‘who [deny] the Jews were gassed’, with blinkered humanists who ‘can’t bear to think that such things [as atrocity] could ever be’ (p. 43). Ultimately, both parties ‘[restore] pride’ in human existence by ‘doctoring the past’. Against these attempts to butcher the historical, ‘The Mother of the Muses’ demonstrates that the events can be established, if not engraved, in cultural memory through oral testimony. The narrator watches a television documentary on the bombing, in which the former Tiergarten (zoo) chief remembers traumatic events such as ‘the gibbon with no hands he’d had to shoot/as it came towards him with appealing stumps’ (p. 42). Such testimony provides secondgeneration writers after the war with access, albeit problematic, to events such as the Holocaust and Dresden. This is reflected in stanza 31 with the pun (whether intentional or not) on the word ‘signs’. Road signs are blocked out by the snow; the denoted oblivion includes the war, which sometimes seems to be inaccessible to contemporary authors. White boards do not simply suggest a loss of signification: they are also representative of the blank page or television screen on which signs of atrocity are imprinted. Derrida’s dialectic of inscription and effacement can be reversed, since the former is preceded by an oblivion containing the possibility of Mnemosyne’s gift. Harrison’s agonised humanism, which fuses the bleak (death/Alzheimer’s/atrocity) and the celebratory (memory/ testimony/literature), provides closure when the amorous subject celebrates the loved object, and the recovery of the Prometheus Bound passage. A nurse offers them a ‘cot’ in the Home; instead, the poet chooses to return to his ‘home’ in order to both ‘weep’ and ‘laugh’ with his lover (p. 44). The ambiguity of the verb in the lines ‘lie/in each other’s arms more privately’ suggests that their desire to be together in a non-sufferer’s bed is grounded in a humanist fantasy in which their future demise is occluded. Nevertheless, they maintain a need to separate the amorous present from the ward, and ‘weigh in the balance all we’re heartened by’, against the sense

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of annihilation registered by Alzheimer’s erosion of memory. Harrison then transforms Lilian’s earlier euphemism for ‘coffin’ into an image which simultaneously celebrates love, sex and death: ‘I swore I’d make it known […] I loved my wife/in that long thing where we lay with day like night’. Oblivion, symbolised by the bedroom’s ‘silent dark’, is balanced with the poem’s insertion into the elegiac tradition. (The fusion of death and domestic imagery also recalls the poetry of John Donne and Henry King.) And, whereas the ‘fire’ imagery earlier in the poem refers to an opposition between the domestic hearth in the first line, and the flames of Dresden and a projected holocaust, in stanza 34 it conjoins with the celebration of ‘the oil of memory’ which ‘feeds the wick of life’: literature, tradition and private memory are offered a temporary reprieve from the possibilities of effacement (p. 44). Similarly, in the last two stanzas the atrocity of Dresden is counterbalanced with the amorous discourse of St Valentine’s Day. Dresden’s burning flamingos of stanza 23 are juxtaposed with the Valentine’s myth that ‘today’s/the day the birds sense spring and choose their mates’: I look for life, and find the only sign ’s, like words left for, or by, someone from Crete, a bird’s tracks, like blurred Greek, for Valentine’s (p. 45)62 The birds, or Emmanuel’s ghost, leave marks outside the lovers’ house; the poet transforms them into a Valentine’s message, or a completion of the Prometheus Bound memory test. Hegelian dialectics yet again provide a reason for existence: the horrific irony that Dresden burned on a day associated in the West with amorous frippery is transformed into a precarious balancing act between love and atrocity. Harrison’s refusal to eschew idealist visions of conceptual harmony might seem hopelessly outdated, since the twentieth century has witnessed events which appear to negate dialectics between ideas such as ‘Auschwitz’ and ‘poetry’, ‘love’ and ‘atrocity’. His agonised humanism could be repudiated as a form of false consciousness: during an interview on The Late Show Michael Ignatieff challenged him to justify his approach

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to Alzheimer’s disease, in which he celebrates ‘the human’ by highlighting the phenomenon of memory-work and, to a lesser extent, amorous discourse. Throughout the dialogue, Harrison recycled his perennial dialectic between the intellectual and the emotional: If I had to divide the heart and the head, I would say that my head faces human history, and has a very bleak and pessimistic view of the possibilities for mankind, while at the same time I am very conscious of having a very sensual, celebratory nature: much of my work seems to be a confrontation of the two.63 As well as the debt to George Meredith I noted in Chapter 2, the head/heart binary recalls an identical dichotomy in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, in which Arthur’s ‘dreamless head’ contrasts with the intellect of the poet, which, in turn, is distinguished from the emotive in the form of the quickly beating heart formerly experienced by the narrator when he waited to grasp his friend’s hand.64 By offering an endorsement of one of the humanist linchpins of Victorian elegists, does Harrison reject the postmodernist suspicion of nineteenthcentury grand narratives? Despite the self-conscious treatment of language and poetry in his oeuvre, Harrison appears (unwittingly) to take a traditional stance towards narrative in his insistence that the past must be reclaimed within idealist dialectics. Even though the Enlightenment concept of progress is treated with contempt in the poetry, the universal concept of ‘spirit’ remains a stubborn presence. For Harrison, the spirit encompasses any manifestation of art, a celebratory medium which can give voice to amorous discourse, and remind audiences about the tragedies of the past. When this is applied to Black Daisies for the Bride, he intuits a desire for the celebratory (the ‘heart’ pole of the idealist dialectic) in Alzheimer’s patients. Harrison perceives in Muriel Prior ‘a need for love, to find an echo […] of love’, and argues in the interview that memory, ‘the mother of the muses’, ‘blessed the occasion’ of filming when Kathleen Dickenson danced and clapped to Richard Muttonchops’s song. Hence ‘bleakness’ (the ‘head’

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pole) arises out of an intellectual confrontation with the inevitability of death, and the destruction of the process of memory; the sensual, out of his determination to extol the patients’ human qualities, and provide a visual text as a memorial to the dead, dying, or deteriorating victims of Alzheimer’s. Ignatieff seizes on this emphasis on the momentary, and counters that Black Daisies for the Bride focuses too much on rare instances of retrieved memories, and nudges the audience into identifying with these events at the expense of the patients’ daily suffering. His resistance to the idea that art might provide redemption for victims recalls Adorno’s dismissal of Sartre’s vindication of a ‘triumph of the spirit’: There is one nearly invariable characteristic of such [existentialist] literature. It is that it implies, purposely or not, that even in so-called extreme situations, indeed in them most over all, humanity flourishes. Sometimes this develops into a dismal metaphysic which does its best to work up atrocities into ‘limiting situations’ which it then accepts to the extent that they reveal authenticity in men.65 ‘In the midst of hopelessness, things that survive glow so much more brightly’: Harrison’s repost to Ignatieff mirrors Sartre’s existentialist desire to provide solace within ‘limiting situations’. Adorno refers specifically to the Holocaust, but his comment is applicable to the poet’s engagement with a more general sense of annihilation incurred by Alzheimer’s destruction of memory. The Muttonchops episode is evidence that ‘humanity flourishes’; the ‘dismal metaphysic’ is that the limiting situation provides a focus on the positive and ‘essential’ components of subjectivity, at the expense of real suffering. Instead of endorsing a healthy scepticism, the poet might be grasping fruitlessly at metaphysical straws. Harrison attempts to counteract Ignatieff’s doubts by plumping for a contumacious dialectic which balances ‘the human’ with the ‘limiting situation’ of Alzheimer’s, at the same time as admitting that his idealism may be misplaced. Potentially dismal metaphysics are served up in Black Daisies for the Bride in the form of the patients’ younger selves, played by actors: Maria

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Tobin is imagined as immersed in her opera-singing past, thereby immolating herself in the present; Kathleen Dickenson savours amorous recollections denied to her now she has ‘lost the power to reminisce’; Muriel Prior ‘should have a mem’ry brimming’ with images of her marriage, but ‘a blizzard’ denies her access (pp. 18, 24). At the end, however, the close-up on the sacks of waste self-consciously illustrates that these scenes are artifice, and necessarily unfaithful representations. In the interview, Harrison states that the blue and yellow bags represent the exuberant colours of Matisse and Van Gogh. Like the patients’ memories, they are carted off to be destroyed. The film ends with a close-up on cracked black daisies on the ward’s floor; the silent credits remind viewers that the inmates do not often dance to banjos, and are slowly dying. Such distinctions between the idealist and nihilist strains in the programme are emphasised in the editing of the opening scenes. When the camera pans up from a stone wall to reveal High Royds, the bleak colours, harsh textures and isolated shot of a window suggest that the hospital is like a prison. (The institution took on a mythic form when I was a child in Bradford; it was referred to by adults as a kind of castle for the mentally ill.) When the patients first appear, the camera focuses on their upper bodies and faces; extreme closeups on moving lips recall Billie Whitelaw’s TV performance of Beckett’s Not I; the inmates appear incoherent, but striving for articulation. Seemingly comfortable in their self-enclosed environment, this vision is shattered when the therapist enters the narrative. It is as if a contrasting spectre of the non-senile makes the patients more aware of their illness: the editing speeds up, making the inmates seem more frantic; sharp cuts between screaming victims of Alzheimer’s are overlaid with the grating, extra-diegetic sound of what turns out to be, several frames later, a cart carrying the waste sacks. Initially, Black Daisies for the Bride does highlight its status as artifice in order to counteract a purely idealist reading of the film. However, it could still be argued that the programme’s main focus remains an unproblematic celebration of the human characteristics displayed by Alzheimer’s patients. Its

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structure is both moving and manipulative: after the announcement of Muriel Prior’s death, the viewer’s potential tears are assuaged by the Muttonchops incident. Harrison focuses on the inmates’ ability to manipulate language and convey messages to an addressee, even though the linguistic signs are fragmented. They are presented as ‘news-readers or storytellers’ in the opening shots: even Kathleen Dickenson’s ‘stream of untranscribable consonants and vowels, apparently meaningless [contains] much of the intention, rhythm and ghostly structure of communication’ (pp. 1–2). ‘Rhythm’ is the key to Harrison’s humanist celebration in this poem. In the interview, he argues that ‘There’s something in rhythm which […] is celebratory.’ This links with his earlier assertion in the Haffenden interview that, when discussing historical moments of ‘blackness and self-defeat’, he needs ‘the life-support system of metrical verse and all those who have practised it in the past’.66 In order to discuss a more general sense of the annihilation of the self during memory-loss in Black Daisies for the Bride, he ‘plugs into’ the famous, ‘carpe diem’ poetry of Robert Herrick: ‘Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may’ is transformed into the choir’s insistence that the viewer ‘Gather all [his/her] mem’ries, savour every day’.67 This sense of continuity provided by rhythm and intertextuality is then complemented by the patients’ attention to the cadences of common speech. Maria Tobin appears to gabble, but she might also be narrating a set of jumbled memories: O murals, the babble of ewes, beautiful Jews. I said ‘Oo… Mm… I’ll come and buy another two.’ (Laughs.) He said, ‘Everything is right!’ I said, ‘Oo, that’s good!’ Yes, it would be better. It’s nicer when they come in and they’re not worrying all the day. (pp. 1–2) Maria was an opera singer in the 1940s and 1950s: perhaps the language recalls an incident in a Jewish tailor’s, which were

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frequent in Leeds at that time in districts such as Chapeltown. Harrison stresses the rhythmical nature of her speech by turning it into verse in the printed version of the film: the first three lines form a rhyming triplet (‘ewes/Jews/two’); they could also be rearranged into iambic tetrameter (‘O murals, the babble of ewes,/beautiful Jews. I said “Oo… Mm… /I’ll come and buy another two”’). Even if the recollection of murals in the first line is then immediately displaced by the nonsense phrase ‘babble of ewes’, the latter still functions as self-referential language that oozes aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetics are also inextricably linked with the rhythm I discussed above: the presence of four beats in each line recalls the conventional structure of nursery rhymes. The therapist encourages the patients to repeat the following verse in order to stimulate linguistic connections, and, as a result, their memories: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do! I’m half crazy all for the love of you! It won’t be a stylish marriage, I can’t afford a carriage, But you’ll look sweet upon the seat Of a bicycle made for two. (p. 4) The verse is central to Harrison’s appraisal of rhythm and continuity in the documentary because of the mixture of iambic tetrameter and pentameter, the aabbca and internal rhyme scheme, and its humanist observance of love’s rituals. Amorous discourse (‘I’m half crazy…’) provides the poet with a supposedly universal concept which might transcend an empirical observation of declining minds. A romance narrative does not appear to be an arbitrary choice, given that it fits neatly with Harrison’s celebration of love within the idealist pole of his dialectic. Exculpations of the aesthetic within the overall bleak tone of the film might still be dismissed as evasive fantasies which occlude the true horror of the Alzheimer’s condition. Scepticism pervades the programme in the guise of the various contrasts between the patients and carers. Memory is regarded as an access code to reality; the nurses and cleaners are able to

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enter the transitional space of the hospital corridor between the ‘real’ world and the ward because they have the capacity, denied to the Alzheimer’s patients, to remember the numbers 6-2-8-8, which open the door. And whereas the nurse John Tennison can make sophisticated linguistic connections over a telephone (which contrasts with the deteriorating memory of a ‘MALE PATIENT […] making a telephone call on the corridor payphone’), the inmates struggle to construct six lines of a nursery rhyme (pp. 6–7). An alternative, nihilistic narrative undercuts the celebration of rhythm and continuity, in which the patients’ reality is constructed as chaotic and threatening. The soundtrack is dominated by the noise of the electronic tug (‘like that of the chilling wind of a gathering winter storm’); its bags of waste are representative of the patients’ fragmented and then obliterated memories (pp. 2–3). This dissipation is represented with images of severing throughout the programme: rooks’ nests in the leafless trees suggest ‘the pattern of the brain’s blood supply with the sections damaged, as an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain might be revealed through positron emission tomography’; the lines of fir trees at the end, with fire gaps troping severed transmitters, are ‘a forest of forgotten Christmases’ (pp. 9, 30). Mabel Frost and Gladys Middleton appear to scream for their memories back: ‘Tell us’ in the script becomes ‘Tell me’ in the film; they appear individually more distressed and unable to understand their environment (p. 3). They suffer from a similar (if not directly comparable) effacement to the hibakusha existence I discussed in relation to the atom-bomb victims in Chapter 1: they have forgotten the ontological concept of ‘humanity’ (as Harrison defines it); they are ‘ghosts’ of their former selves. Losing access to ‘All life’s brightest moments’, they overlook social norms by ringing up friends and relatives in the middle of the night (pp. 9, 10). This constant self-questioning, evident throughout Harrison’s poetry, highlights the documentary’s artifice (such as in ‘A Cold Coming’ and ‘V’, when the Iraqi soldier and the skinhead interrogate the poet’s representations). Chiaroscuro lighting during the songs of the brides (with the white dresses

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contrasted against a black background), and the mise-en-scène of the hospital corridor, emphasise that this verse is a fantastical product within the totalising discourse of the documentary. Although Harrison is absent from the programme as a character or voice, the film constantly calls attention to itself as an artificial construction. Muriel Allen is more concerned with the presence of the camera crew than with the therapist’s acting, and appears to prepare herself for an audience, or display her nervousness towards it, by straightening her hair and complaining ‘Who are they?’ Irene Clements seems to talk disparagingly to the camera, and mentions a dog, as if mocking the camera’s desire to turn her into a fixed object of scrutiny; it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the patients’ discomfort arises from Alzheimer’s, or the presence of the film crew. When the inmates address the camera as ‘news-readers’, it is unclear whether they actually have an addressee, or are engaged in a nonsensical, solipsistic narrative with the lens; the stage directions are tentative, such as Harrison’s assertion that Maria Tobin’s repeated note ‘might be regarded as her […] surviving [one] from “Madama Butterfly”’ (p. 1, my emphasis). But, despite the alternative, nihilistic narrative and this focus on artifice, the humanist dialectic remains in place: the celebration of rhythm and continuity is balanced against the self-questioning and uncertainty within the overall structure of the piece. This is reflected in the title of the film, since the black daisies fuse the symbol on the floor of High Royds with the former brides’ bouquets. In the interview, Harrison reveals that the discourse of humanism is necessary because it fulfils the needs of the relatives, and, by extension, the ‘surviving’ audience. They (and we) need to maintain reasons for living, however flawed and embarrassing such imperatives (love, hope) may seem as concepts, and despite their (and our) detection of signs of possible, future selves in the Alzheimer’s patients.

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Re-Reading the ‘School of Eloquence’ Sequence Having outlined the connections in Harrison’s film texts between remembering, memorialisation, Alzheimer’s, Dresden, the Holocaust and annihilation, it is now possible to re-read the ‘School of Eloquence’ in terms of memory-work as well as mourning or melancholia. In Chapter 3, I argued that ‘Long Distance’ is neither a melancholic text, nor a poem which simply delineates Freud’s concept of true mourning. In the light of my discussion above, it becomes clear that, as in ‘Blocks’, the piece shifts between the processes of mourning and memory-work. Public grieving and memorialisation in the guise of the sombre narrator and sonnet form vie with the private spaces of the father’s bedroom, and the sinister ‘new black leather phone book’ (p. 134). As opposed to ‘The Icing Hand’, here the poet is not particularly concerned with the precarious state of the text per se: the comforting elegiac tradition is rendered as a bathetic series of telephone conversations with the dead. Fragility lies instead in the father and son’s private attempts at memorialisation. Gravestones and sixteen-line sonnets prove to be inadequate tools for true memory-work: hence the father utilises slippers, hot water bottles and a transport pass, and the poet failed telephone calls, as precious, if precarious, adjuncts to the memorial slab. Rather than dismiss such ‘School of Eloquence’ poems as artificial performances, it might be more generous to evaluate them as responding to fissures in conventional processes of memorialisation.68 The logic of the funeral parlour cannot successfully introject family grief; such holism results in the irrational, alternative practices described in ‘Long Distance’. These are hardly the ‘anti-sentimental, anti-scientific, and anti-therapeutic’ measures – partly as a response to twentiethcentury atrocity – that Ramazani detects in the modern elegy.69 Instead of reacting against the dominant discourse of mourning with disdain, Harrison’s poems depict elegiac scenarios in which attempts at private therapy stubbornly remain to haunt the contemporary. By gesturing towards universal consolations in the family

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sonnets, Harrison sensitively responds to secret memorywork with the ideological baggage of humanism. In humanist poems such as Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, private differences give way to celebrations of communality.70 This switch from the particular to the general similarly informs the structure of ‘Long Distance’. Initially, an ideological opposition is set up between the father and persona. Even though the poem’s monosyllables and resigned tone suggest a suspension of value judgment, the reader is coerced into recognising the futility of the father’s memorial fantasy, in which water-bottle libations evoke the ghostly presence of the mother. As a Christian humanist, he believes his wife is both alive on earth or in heaven, and ‘alive’ in the sense of a spirit protecting the house. This ideological impetus extends to his projected death. In a re-writing of the ‘pearly gates’ narrative from Revelations, the dead mother plays Saint Peter with his keys to heaven. When her key scrapes in the rusted lock it will ‘end his grief’ in the sense that she will take him away to join her in paradise rather than join him for a corporeal scone.71 As an atheist who believes that ‘life ends with death, and that is all’, the poet proves to be a heretical threat to this fantasy. He performs the role of a biblical pharaoh, who curses the father with a ‘blight of disbelief’. The last line of the third stanza ‘blights’ the latter’s humanism with typography and linguistic play. ‘[K]new’ points to the illusory nature of the mother popping out to get the tea. As I noted in the last chapter, the beginning of the line (‘He knew she’d just popped…’) anticipates the phrase ‘popped it’, but the fantasy of her shopping for two years ensues. Even though Harrison recognises the misguided metaphysics of the father’s belief, he ends with a reversal which cancels out the previous, anti-humanist ethic. By calling a disconnected number, the poet is exposed as an agonised humanist: he has a nihilistic streak, but performs similar, ‘irrational’ acts of memory-work. Such endorsements of sentimentality are excruciating, since he simultaneously recognises their falsity, and comments wryly that ‘You haven’t both gone shopping’. Instead of tins of beans, the reader is left with rotting bodies:

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as with the buff envelope in ‘Timer’, the colour and texture of the phone book are reminiscent of the skin of a corpse (pp. 134, 167). Vacillations between empiricism and fantasy remain intact, however: if the last two lines are read as allegorical, ‘calling’ is symptomatic of the whole process of memorialisation. ‘Calling’, according to this reading, would refer to a series of elegiac texts, the marketing of which under the ‘School of Eloquence’ label suggests that the poet still believes in the value (both emotional and economic) of sharing representations of human experiences. Whereas the elegies of Geoffrey Hill are revolted by the economic problem of gleaning profit from the dead, Harrison’s texts function – like the slippers, water bottles and transport pass – as substitutive acts of troping which celebrate the memory of the dead parents.72 ‘September Song’ evinces a poetry suspicious of holistic notions of consolation, whereas Harrison’s poetry freely endorses humanism. The disconnected number becomes representative of the ideology itself, which cultural critics such as Adorno and Langer have lambasted as outdated in postHolocaust culture, but which Harrison refuses to reject due to its vindication of essential human mores. Dialectical humanism is represented with linguistic ambiguity. ‘Still’ is arguably the most important word in the poem. As I noted in relation to ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’, Harrison’s fascination with the word arises from his engagement with the famous lines from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,/Thou foster-child of silence and slow time’. ‘Still’ is prevalent in the ‘School of Eloquence’. There are ‘still’ babies, clocks, rooms, houses, scholarship boys, pits, miners, grammarians, photographs, tongues, VJ crowds, scallops and fishwives in the sequence as a whole. The word appears three times in ‘Breaking the Chain’ and ‘The Morning After’; a whole poem about Rudolph Valentino is entitled ‘Still’ (pp. 153, 157, 140). ‘Still’ refers to both the ‘still’ of the text and photograph, the fact that the poet is ‘still’ performing memory-work, and the ‘still’ corpse of the father (p. 140). There are three instances in ‘Long Distance’: ‘still went to renew’, ‘I still call’ and ‘still raw love’

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(p. 134). It signifies both continuity – which, as Filip Müller stated, is the central function of memory – and annihilation: all the phrases indicate actions that outstrip the death of the loved objects, tinged with a simultaneous and self-conscious sense of their irrationality. In the second part of ‘Long Distance’, the poet’s struggle to articulate a private mode of memory-work denies the ‘still’ father direct speech. In the family sonnets as a whole, the father appears either to berate his son, or to lapse into silence, as in the first part of ‘Book Ends’ (p. 126). Moments of tenderness are rare between men informed by a tenet of masculinity in which sensitivity is allied with the feminine. Only a masochistic rite in which three ‘tumblers of neat Johnny Walker’ are consumed allows them a space in which to admit their inarticulacy (p. 127). The two ‘book ends’ of the individual poems describe this shift between silence and embarrassed articulacy. The first part begins with a possibility of failed introjection that the text then seeks to subvert. ‘Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead/we chew it slowly that last apple pie’: the pie stands as a substitute object for the mother, but instead of remaining exterior to the subject – as with the signs explicated by Sacks in The English Elegy – the food is eaten. The family then swallows the sign of the object’s body slowly in order to prolong the fantasy of her presence (p. 126). Syntactically, these two lines represent the awkwardness of public mourning. As Sandie Byrne notes, the pronoun ‘it’ is introduced before the noun (‘pie’) that it refers to.73 In addition, ‘she’, the subject of the first verb (which could also be an adjective) is elided, as if the poet still finds difficulty in acknowledging the horrific loss triggered by the signifier ‘mother’. Confronting absence is somehow embarrassing: the only phrase that the narrator can come up with to describe the father’s loss (‘shattered into smithereens’) is, like the words that the latter wishes to put on the mother’s gravestone in the second part, ‘mawkish’ and ‘stylistically appalling’ (p. 127). This is an example of the aesthetics of awkwardness rather than the fruitless clumsiness that Craig Raine detects in the poem.74 During a review of Peter Porter’s Collected Poems, he

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criticises Harrison’s deployment of ‘all’ as symptomatic of metrical padding, and accepts ‘shattered into smithereens’ as an apt, but nevertheless mawkish, cliché. Raine either underestimates the self-conscious nature of the sonnets, or believes that the self-referential depiction of mawkishness still courts artificiality by choosing false sentiment as a subject in the first instance. If Raine is right, then the whole text fails in its attempt to articulate deep grief, and yet the charge of artifice sits uncomfortably in a review from a Martian poet obsessed with the necessarily artificial nature of texts. As Christopher Ricks writes in Beckett’s Dying Words, cliché (and, by extension, padding) might actually be the best way to articulate loss because it is ‘dead’ language, over-used and repetitious, which reflects the need of memory-work to dwell despondently on the image of the loved object.75 Moreover, it addresses the dead father in a shared colloquial register at odds with the exposed lack of communication, and the alienating, literary nature of the public sonnet. An embarrassing annunciation thus punctures the dual silences in the poem caused by the stupefaction of grieving, and the ‘books, books, books’ that separate the former scholarship boy from the baker ‘worn out on poor pay’ (p. 127).76 In the second part, the poet cannot initially find any suitable words for the mother’s gravestone, but still attacks the father’s language as ‘mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling’. Nevertheless, he cannot ‘squeeze more love into their stone’. ‘Her stone’ is anticipated, given that the father produces a text for the dead mother’s gravestone; instead, their joint headstone metamorphoses into Harrison’s elegy, which mirrors the parent’s mawkish verse with its awkward aesthetics. Elegies, as public poems, are comparable to epitaphs: ‘the wording must be terse’ on the inscription for the mother; similarly, the language of the stanza in which this sentiment is articulated is itself monosyllabic (apart from ‘wording’), and is composed of two simple sentences consisting of a standard, linear subject/ verb/object correlation and regular iambic pentameter. ‘The wording must be terse’ not only because of the size of the gravestone, but also because of the danger of slipping into

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sentimentality both on the slab and in the poem itself. Visually, the sonnet appears as a projected representation of a gravestone’s inscription, with the capitalised ‘FLORENCE’ standing out at the top of the page as it would on marble or granite. In a sense, the elegy is an act of public memory-work which provides a site for the poet and reader to return to in order to celebrate the image of the mother. Yet the father’s criticism of the poet’s inability to construct a text for the gravestone also functions as a subversion of the memorialisation process in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence as a whole. An ironic reading of his speech implies that the poet’s verse is unable to contribute to the process itself. Despite this rejoinder, Harrison’s ‘whole sonnet’ allows the poet to comment on the embarrassing nature of the process at the same time as celebrating the memory of the father. And yet the persona’s ambivalence towards elegies is reflected in the ambiguous verb phrase ‘wanting’. It could also mean that they are not ‘lacking’ appropriate verse: the father implies that the educated son remembers hundreds of quotations, but is unable to choose one. This would suggest that the poet is unsure whether the public discourse of the elegy is suitable for a private memorial for his mother. The father and son react to this recognition of the embarrassing nature of memorialisation by drinking whisky. Alcohol enables them to face the sentimentality of the potential inscription. The father’s struggle to articulate is paralleled with this phenomenon: he follows his admission that he has always been a ‘clumsy talker’ with the acknowledgment that he cannot find alternatives for ‘beloved’ or ‘wife’. But this struggle is more enabling than the narrator’s silence: even though he is ‘supposed to be the bright boy at description’, he ‘can’t tell them what the fuck to put!’ He recognises his failure in the final two stanzas: whereas the father is willing to embrace the negative awkwardness of the ‘stylistically appalling’ inscription, the educated poet can only wince. Yet the latter cannot produce an appropriate elegiac text, and falls back on a need to ‘find the right words on my own’ in a sonnet which only comments on the memorialisation process itself, rather than

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finding concrete alternatives to the father’s excruciating diction. Ultimately, he celebrates the father’s negative awkwardness because he believes it provides a more direct route to the feelings of the amorous subject, whereas the elegy displaces emotion within its literary discourse. The dead, loved object is thus best remembered here in language which challenges the aesthetics of the traditional elegy. Whereas the elegiac tradition espouses the need to sublimate pain into a mellifluous text, Harrison presents the struggle which poets go through in order to achieve a plateau of eloquence when describing lost, loved objects. Consolations offered during the closure of traditional elegies are rejected at the end of ‘Book Ends’, since the mother’s death is then compounded by the demise of the father, and the final image of the inarticulate poet. In contrast, ‘Loving Memory’, a sonnet from the ‘Art & Extinction’ section of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, attempts to offset the fragility of memory with a celebration of the amorous object. Initially, the last stanza appears to offer a gloomy exposition of the precariousness of memory-work. Searching for the grave of Jenny Lind, a ‘famous’ opera singer, the narrator meets two women ‘leaving with dead daffodils’ (p. 185). Single ‘substitutive […] act[s] of troping’, in which the loved object is represented with flowers, are revealed to be transient: like the elegiac loops in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, they need to be repeated in order to remain faithful to the dead.77 In ‘V’, the poet demonstrates that social mobility results in the neglect not only of living communities, but also of the dead: during the five or so years since his parents’ death he has ‘spent 2 hours/made up of odd 10 minutes such as these’ (p. 238). ‘2’ and ‘10’ follow Harrison’s predilection for usurping the aesthetics of traditional sonnets; they also indicate a scientific rationality at odds with indefinite periods of melancholia. Despite his own admission of neglect, in ‘Loving Memory’, the narrator presumes that the women are returning from Jenny Lind’s grave. This assumption arises from the ‘fact’ that, as Harrison quotes from the New York Times in his reading of the poem on the 1992 Love in a Cold Climate

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programme, Lind is ‘the most famous woman who ever lived’. But when he asks the women: ‘Where’s Jenny Lind’s grave, please? They both say: Who?’ (p. 185). Aporias in global cultural memory are then countered by a simultaneous recognition of the need to celebrate the present loved object. If Italians are untouched by the fame of opera singers, the poet worries, what hope is there that his lover Teresa Stratas will be remembered by more than her immediate family within a few years of her death? The public and private seem equally at the mercy of oblivion. Moreover, an appreciation of both lost objects through the public grave and sonnet would seem to be subverted, as in ‘Cheating the Void’, by a post-Holocaust world in which memory-work on the behalf of individuals becomes insignificant in relation to the struggles to memorialise adequately the death of millions. ‘Loving Memory’ is also situated in the midst of a sequence written when the threat of nuclear war was arguably at its most tangible during the early 1980s. ‘Standards’, the preceding poem in the ‘Art & Extinction’ section, opens with an epigraph that highlights its ultimate signified referent: ‘in hopeful anticipation of the bicentenary of the national emblem of the United States of America, Haliaaetus Falco Leucocephalus, 1782–1982’ (p. 184, my italics). In a similar fashion to Derrida in his 1984 essay on nuclear apocalypse, Harrison recognises that any text produced in the shadow of the H-bomb has to register, overtly or covertly, the possibility of its effacement in the near future. Rather than include such a blatant reference to nuclear war in ‘Loving Memory’, the opening stanza engages with the fragility of memory-work in the context of a generalised concept of annihilation. Bruce Woodcock complains of ‘V’ that its traditional elegiac tendency to evoke a sense of universal demise detracts from the contextual specificity of the miners’ strike.78 Following this argument, perhaps it could be argued in relation to ‘Loving Memory’ that general concepts deny the poem the status of a modern elegy. It may fulfil Ramazani’s criterion of the anti-scientific, but it is certainly not anti-sentimental or anti-therapeutic. Potential necrophilia (as I shall go on to explain) might make it modern, but the

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fusion of corpses and lovers famously riddles the work of elegists from Donne to Tennyson. Perhaps only the depiction of the fickleness of global fame in the media-orientated era of postmodernity marks the text as distinctly modern. Yet if Harrison’s poetry is read as a whole, the Holocaust and the threat of nuclear war function as extrinsic entities that transform the intrinsic concept of mortality. ‘Loving Memory’ opens with the memorial signs of an ancient battle between the ‘barbaric’ Caractacus and ‘civilised’ Rome (p. 185). All that remains of the event are ‘fosses’, long, narrow excavations used especially as fortifications. By juxtaposing the dedication ‘for Teresa Stratas’ with ‘fosses’, the narrator immediately links the loved object with the oblivion denoted by the geological time-scale. He plays with the pun on Stratas/strata in the geological context of the Malvern Hills, which contain ‘“The oldest rocks this earth can boast”’. (Harrison employs a similar pun in ‘V’ with the ‘Shilbottle cobbles, Alban Berg high D/lifted from a source that bears your name’ [p. 247].) ‘Fosses’ also subtly anticipates the death of the loved object: it can also mean burial grounds, or places where women condemned for felony were drowned. Such a shift between the private lover and historical disgrace mirrors the shift from the individual, inarticulate corpse to medieval ‘branks’ used to punish errant women in ‘On Not Being Milton’ (p. 112). Harrison then counterbalances this recognition of the public humiliation of women in history by constructing a dialectic in which the present woman is simultaneously celebrated. This model appears first in the second stanza with the confession, ‘Somehow my need for you makes me seek her’ (p. 185). ‘Her’ refers to Stratas’s dead Doppelgänger Jenny Lind: Harrison explains in his reading of the poem in Love in a Cold Climate that they are connected through the shared vocation of soprano. ‘Somehow’ is explicated in the fifth stanza, in which ‘these hills,/packed with extinction, make me burn for you’. ‘Burn’ recalls the fusion of metaphors in the American poems, in which sexual desire oozes from tropes of annihilation. Memory’s fallibility is then added to the image: by searching for the grave of the dead

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singer amidst the Malverns’ fossils, the narrator underlines the ephemerality of the loved object, who will soon metamorphose into transient memorial signs. This traditional elegiac evocation of transience entails a more modern, subtle and macabre undercurrent of necrophilia. In the second stanza, Harrison appears to tease readers into a literal explanation of the line, in which the persona would seek to use the corpse or skeleton of Lind as a sexual substitute for Teresa in a fit of irrationality induced by the absence of the loved object. Similarly, in the fifth stanza ‘packed’ contains the double meaning of ‘full of’ and ‘tumescent genitalia’ in a single pun; it is ambiguous whether the ‘you’ refers to the loved object or Lind’s corpse. Such interplay between memory, love and annihilation pervades the poem. In the fourth stanza, the persona’s desire to find the Lind memorial is set against the iconography of death. It opens with a bathetic irony pertaining to cultural memory: whereas ‘Death keeps [in both senses of owning and presiding over] all hours’, he can only acknowledge Lind’s memorial during the day, since ‘graveyards close at nights’. The persona then hurries past the Malvern Hospital, for the practical reason to reach the grave in time, but also in an attempt to block out signs of oblivion and focus on the process of memorialisation, the irony being that by registering this in a public sonnet, he induces the signs’ precedence. Initially, he responds positively to the hospital with an image of a nurse going ‘round small wards and [putting] on lights’, but this is coupled with death due to the rhyming link ‘nights/lights’. The staff’s capacity to save life is inextricably linked with the inevitable death of some of their patients, since ‘someone there’s last night begins to fall’. Even the poem’s naturalistic description reflects this fusion of binaries in the poem. It is set at twilight, when the landscape becomes indistinct: the fosses ‘blend’ with the bracken into a ‘blur’; the fauna itself is a mixture of black and white. Even Jenny Lind’s nickname, ‘the Swedish Nightingale’, links with the landscape above her ‘last home’ (a euphemism for grave), and illustrates the love/ annihilation dialectic. The nightingale is a conventional poetic

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sign for a lover: as in Keats’s ode, it signals both amorous celebration and oblivion, referring to both Lind and the patient’s ‘last night’ of death in the fourth stanza. In the third stanza, night ‘soaks in’, like rain into Lind’s grave. Indistinct images of death continue in the next line with graveyards’ rowan berries blurring into a ‘glaze’ and then growing ‘dull’. The harvest moon locates the poem in a transitional time of year: at the equinox the moon rises full around 22 or 23 September. In my discussion of ‘Following Pine’, I illustrated that the moon encapsulates the dialectic above: it is the ‘appropriate presider’ for the amorous subject and object (p. 226). In ‘Loving Memory’, it ‘presides’ over the search for Lind’s grave, and the amorous subject’s celebration of the loved object, but links with the rest of the poem’s naturalistic detail in its vacillation between two states. It is ‘scraped silver’, as if the whole of its surface, not just the seas, metamorphoses into a trope for oblivion (p. 185). And yet it is, at the same time, ‘bruised tin’, as if the seas (the ‘bruises’) maintained their distinctness. Harrison here evokes a ‘Keatsian intensity’ in the sense that this is the poetry of transition: in the Romantic imagination, opposite states are fused; the twentieth-century poet is similarly ‘half in love with easeful Death’, except for the fact that the present historical epoch allies annihilation specifically with the shadow of the Holocaust.79 This notion of the partially amorous allows Harrison to celebrate the aesthetic throughout his oeuvre at the same time as highlighting the agonising struggle towards articulation. As in Geoffrey Hill’s poems, loving the production of texts must be regarded with suspicion, since, at the same time as the poet savours creation, the ghosts of the inarticulate, from ‘public’ Holocaust victims to private parents, haunt the imagination with a potential commitment to ventriloquism. As with the self-referential castigations of Hill’s ‘September Song’, Harrison never aspires to present the truth of memory, the reality of atrocity, or, in the family sonnets, his parents ‘as they really were’; the self-conscious nature of the poems as different in narrative construction as ‘Book Ends’ and Black Daisies for the Bride belies any prospect of true identity. His work openly

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endorses and denounces idealism: the hope that hope survives the dead remains a possible chimera. The prospect persists in Hill’s and Harrison’s work that by focusing on the positive pole of a humanist dialectic, as with the recouping of amorous discourse after Dresden in ‘The Mother of the Muses’, they risk obscenity. Writing, and the reception of it, is regarded in both poets’ work as a privilege: this stance harks back to the Leeds circle of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which agonised humanists as diverse in style as Harrison, Hill, Jon Silkin, Jon Glover, Thomas Blackburn and Wole Soyinka mulled over the difficulties of historicism.80 A commitment to the representation of memory, memory-work, remembering, remembrance and memorialisation in literature might appear, to these exponents of the Leeds Renaissance, as the impossible and necessary duty of a committed author dedicated to oldfashioned concepts of ethics and decency in a world in which the barbarity of market forces, and the break-up of the veneer known as civilisation, threaten their validity. Memory-work itself in both the public and private spheres proves to be a fragile and precious form of cultural activity in an epoch which, despite the recent shift in the European balance of power from the former Soviet Union to the Bundesbank, still threatens to witness the nuclear destruction of Oppenheimer’s ‘memory of a memory’.81 The relative accessibility of sonnets such as ‘Loving Memory’ proves to be a form of commitment in this pre-holocaust contemporary. In the next chapter, I go on to discuss the notion of littérature engagé in relation to the dialectic of culture that Harrison exposes in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sonnets and ‘V’.

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust NOTES

1 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 164. 2 ‘[O]’ indicates a missing off-beat. The full stop may incur a pause before the next line, in which case the off-beat is tangible rather than absent. 3 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 235. 4 Tony Harrison, ‘Facing Up to the Muses’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 429–54. 5 Harrison, The Common Chorus, p. v. 6 The Common Chorus, p. ix; J. Oppenheimer, Uncommon Sense, ed. N. Metropolis, G. Rota and D. Sharp (Boston and Basle: Birkhäuser, 1984), p. 57. 7 Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. H. MacLean (London and New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), p. 451. 8 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’. 9 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, p. 26. 10 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, p. 27. 11 Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, p. 28. 12 Harrison, Gorgon, p. 27. 13 Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. MacLean, p. 491. 14 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1960 [1954]), p. 12. 15 Spencer, Poetry of Tony Harrison, p. 123. 16 Claude Lanzmann, Shoah (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 50. 17 Dominick LaCapra, ‘Representing the Holocaust’, in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Friedländer, p. 125. 18 Lanzmann, Shoah, p. 165. 19 A Holocaust Reader, ed. Lucy Dawidowicz (New York: Behrman House, 1976), p. 8. 20 James Young discusses the debate between positivist and relativist historiography in ‘Towards a Received History of the Holocaust’, History and Theory, 36 (December 1997), pp. 21–43. Critics such as Alex Callinicos contend that Hayden White’s concept of history as narrative comes close to negating the validity of historical representation (p. 30). Young argues that White’s plea for ‘middle-voicedness’ allows for a more self-conscious historiography that does not negate ‘the event’, but offers a different, and potentially more rigorous and enlightening, approach to history. Following White, Young distinguishes between lies and interpretation, and adheres to a historicist sense of the ‘real’: there are ‘facts and events which occurred […] On these dates, these terrible things happened, and on these other dates, these terrible things got told in these various manners’ (p. 34). This book endorses Young and White’s self-reflexivity, which still allows for critical analysis of different historical interpretations, but I am wary of accepting ontological facts, events and dates as opposed to narrative. As Young accepts, events unfold within narrative frameworks; I agree with Terry

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Eagleton that dates and facts themselves are modes of interpretation (see Literary Theory: An Introduction [Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983], pp. 12– 13). In relation to the Holocaust, this does not negate the truth claim that it happened. It simply illustrates that there are various reactions to the event, and that these are of varying validity. 21 Lanzmann, Shoah, p. 13. 22 Hermann Langbein, ‘Auschwitz: The History and Characteristics of the Concentration and Extermination Camp’, in The Nazi Concentration Camps, ed. Dori Laub (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), pp. 273–87, at p. 287. 23 See David Cesarani, ‘Preserving a Death Camp’, The Guardian, 29 November 1993, pp. 4–5, for a summary of the debates about whether to reconstruct Auschwitz-Birkenau. Cesarani explicates the unsolvable dilemma between reconstruction and rotting. If the former death camp is left as it is, the buildings will crumble at some point in the future. Restoration, however, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic organisations who deny the Holocaust ever happened. With the absence of ‘original’ architecture, they question its former existence. 24 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 8. 25 See Lyotard, ‘The Différend’. 26 Lanzmann, Shoah, pp. 145–46. 27 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 175. 28 Lanzmann, Shoah, pp. 145–46. 29 Harrison, Shadow, p. 100. 30 Tony Harrison, Black Daisies for the Bride (London: Faber, 1993). 31 Larkin, Collected Poems, pp. 127–28. The tone of this poem is arguably ironic. 32 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1945]). The term ‘socialized snobbery’ arises from Theodor Adorno’s pithy critique of Waugh in Minima Moralia, p. 191. 33 Eavan Boland, The Lost Land (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998). 34 Boland, The Lost Land, p. 48. 35 This interview took place directly after the original screening of Black Daisies for the Bride. I refer to it extensively in my discussion of this film poem. This observation of flowers has a disturbing resonance in terms of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Newsreel MGH 464 mentions that flowers grew wildly in the days following the atom bomb due to the nurturing effect of radiation. 36 Shadow, p. 96. 37 Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 5. 38 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 242. 39 Gorgon, p. 53. 40 Harrison, Theatre Works 1973–1985, pp. 185–293. 41 Shadow, p. 96. 42 Edmund Spenser’s Poetry, ed. MacLean, p. 451. 43 This switch is anticipated in ‘Letters in the Rock’ when Vicky Naish

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remembers that her father requested not to be cremated: ‘He always said never burn me, Vicky, you know, because he was burned enough in the War’ (Shadow, p. 106). 44 Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love (London: Penguin, 1999 [1998]), p. 40. 45 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 16. 46 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 17. 47 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 11. 48 Michael Hutchinson, ‘Making Time for the Dead’, The Listener, 23 July 1987, p. 9. 49 Shadow, pp. 83, 82. 50 Hutchinson, ‘Making Time for the Dead’, p. 9. 51 Jonathan Steele, ‘The night it rained fire’, The Guardian supplement, 9 February 1995, p. 2. 52 Gorgon, pp. 38, 42. 53 Jonathan Steele, ‘Dresden remembers its dead’, The Guardian, 14 February 1995, p. 20. 54 Gorgon, p. 40. 55 William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 76; Plath, Collected Poems, p. 224; Larkin, Collected Poems, p. 196. 56 Derrida, Memoires, p. 6. 57 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London and New York: Penguin, 1995 [1847]), p. 31. 58 Brontë, Wuthering Heights, pp. 10–11, 19. 59 Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London: Cassell, 1954). 60 J.F.C. Fuller, The Second World War 1939–45 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968), p. 317. 61 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 195; Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, trans. H. Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 253–64, at p. 257. 62 The ‘Birdfoot Greek’ image is recycled from one of Harrison’s earliest poems, ‘Plato Might Have Said’, published first in Poetry and Audience, 4.22 (24 May 1957), pp. 4–5. 63 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 227. 64 The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman, 1987 [1969]), pp. 319, 326. 65 Langer, Admitting the Holocaust, p. 3; Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 177. 66 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 236. 67 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 236; Robert Herrick, ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’, in Cavalier Poets: Selected Poems, ed. T. Clayton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 308; Black Daisies, p. 32. 68 I refer here to Rawson’s comments on ‘Timer’, which I discuss in Chapter 3. 69 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, p. 17.

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70 Larkin, Collected Poems, pp. 102–103, 114–16. I discuss ‘Mr Bleaney’ further in ‘“All is not Dead”: Philip Larkin, Humanism and Class’, Critical Survey, 10.2 (1998), pp. 1–14. 71 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 134. 72 Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 5. I refer to the Holocaust poem I analysed in my introduction, ‘September Song’ (Hill, Collected Poems, p. 67). 73 Byrne, H, v. & O, p. 16. 74 Craig Raine, ‘Subjects’, London Review of Books, 6–19 October 1983, p. 5. 75 Christopher Ricks, Beckett’s Dying Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 2. 76 This description of the father’s life as ‘shattered into smithereens’ also fuses the father’s working-class background with Harrison’s progressive dialectic between life and annihilation (p. 126). ‘Smithereens’ generally refers to small fragments: the mother’s death has the same mental effect on the father as a blitz (see ‘A Close One’ [p. 160]). Its origin is obscure according to the OED (2nd edn), but is certainly idiomatic, and probably arose out of the word ‘smither’, meaning a hammerman or someone who works with iron. 77 Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 5. 78 Bruce Woodcock, ‘Classical Vandalism: Tony Harrison’s Invective’, Critical Quarterly, 32.2 (Summer 1990), pp. 50–65, at p. 62. 79 Poems of Keats, ed. Blunden, p. 257; Spencer, Poetry of Tony Harrison, p. 123. Keats seems to have preoccupied Harrison during the early 1980s: ‘Malvern Memorials: I. Loving Memory’ was published in the Times Literary Supplement on 7 March 1980; ‘A Kumquat for John Keats’ appeared in pamphlet form from Bloodaxe in October 1981. 80 For a fuller exposition of this period at the University of Leeds, see Huk, ‘Tony Harrison, The Loiners, and the “Leeds Renaissance”’ and ‘Poetry of the Committed Individual’. 81 Oppenheimer, Uncommon Sense, p. 57.

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Chapter Five

Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry

Culture and the Holocaust ‘Holocaust’ and ‘class’ approaches to Harrison’s work can be linked through dialectics of articulacy. Barbaric poetry’s struggle with the apparently unrepresentable nature of atrocity might find its counterpart in the battle against inarticulacy in working-class poetry; it would be disingenuous to assert that awkward aesthetics are the sole preserve of Holocaust and post-Holocaust poems. Critics have noticed the embarrassing nature of Harrison’s poetics before: for example, Spencer recognises the juxtaposition of regular pentameter with metrical tension in the sonnet entitled ‘The Queen’s English’.1 Harrison’s aesthetics might be seen to be similar whether he tries to represent the working class or atrocity: the two entities may be, to a certain extent, incomparable, but they both plague the author with ethical problems of representation. My focus in this study has been on the post-Holocaust poems which engage directly with the Holocaust, Hiroshima, or projected nuclear war, deploy ‘bolts of annihilation’ within texts about other subjects, or can be read in the context of twentieth-century atrocity. In this chapter, I widen this project to analyse Harrison’s writing about the relationship between culture and the working class from the perspective of a critic already informed by debates about silence and inarticulacy which have raged in Holocaust studies ever since the inception of this field of study. Aesthetics of awkwardness must not, however, be regarded as the key to the poet’s work. The concept is always limited in its relationship to the text; 248

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 249 critical results can only be a set of contingent observations, particularly since the author is still strikingly productive in his sixties. Concepts of embarrassment cannot be all-embracing; the differences between ‘class’ and ‘Holocaust’ readings need to be maintained so as to avoid the conflation of two approaches to the poems under the thematic umbrellas of culture and barbarism. This is why I have chosen to separate the two in this book, rather than conflate poems about the working class with texts about the Holocaust in individual chapters. Whereas the majority of critics so far have focused on Harrison’s poems as engaged in class warfare, I have attempted in this study to develop the point, noted by some critics, that tropes of the Holocaust and nuclear war are prevalent in his work. Harrison’s deployment of enraged proletarians fighting bourgeois prejudice is thus viewed through the lens of the dialectics of articulacy and inarticulacy set up in the post-Holocaust poems, rather than the latter being regarded as of minor interest in relation to his grander theme of embourgeoisement. Harrison himself signalled the connection between the postHolocaust and class poems when he appeared on the South Bank Show (28 March 1999), and stressed the importance of the fire trope to his oeuvre, since it connects his first poetic musings as a child beside the family hearth to genocide, the 1945 bombings, and the (then) recently completed Prometheus.2 In his introduction to this epic film poem, Harrison mulls over the agony of the aesthetic (‘fire-gazing’) in a world which has been, and will be, blighted by atrocity: The poetry from this fire-gazing is hard though essential to achieve, and is almost the artist’s greatest challenge. The fire we must gaze into burns in Dresden, Hamburg, in the ovens of Auschwitz, in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, in all those places where non-combatants were burned to death; in the looted and destroyed villages of the Balkans; in the millions of Greek manuscripts and books burned in the library of Alexandria by Moslem fanatics, in Jewish and so-called ‘decadent’ books in Germany burned by Nazi fanatics; in the bonfire of the books of dissidents […] in

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust front of the Temple of Zeus in Athens under the Metaxas dictatorship; in Moslem books in the Institute for Oriental Studies of Sarajevo destroyed by rockets on 17 May 1992 […] in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses burned by affronted Moslems in Yorkshire […] The meditative hearth now contains the Holocaust and the H-bomb. (p. xx)

Within this list of humanist disasters, Harrison gestures towards his own aesthetic productions, including ‘The Mother of the Muses’ (Dresden, the Nazi burning of the books), Loving Memory (the bombing of Hamburg), lyric and narrative poems from The Loiners to Prometheus (Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki), ‘The Cycles of Donji Vakuf’ and ‘The Bright Lights of Sarajevo’ (the Balkans conflict), and The Blasphemers’ Banquet (Rushdie).3 It becomes clear that Harrison regards the personal (the meditative hearth) and the historical (the Holocaust and H-bomb) as inseparable; the general is barbaric, and endangers the primacy of the particular. Perhaps it could be argued that little has changed in this statement since The Loiners: in the latter collection, the self is a victim of ideology per se; the collation of various instances of barbarism in the prose statement skirts over pertinent socio-economic and historical forces which might go some way to explaining each scenario. One ideology that Harrison has flirted with throughout his work is significantly absent in the discussion of culture here: Marxism.4 When attempting to defend cultural matter, it is as if Marxism proves to be a transcendental signifier beyond the muddy waters of religious conflict. To give it its proper name would be to risk admitting at this point that culture itself is ideological, as Harrison does elsewhere in his writing. After all, a working-class scholar striving to attain bourgeois traditions cannot exist without the notion of a dialectical conflict between class and culture. Yet culture in the quotation above is on the side of the non-ideological poet and intellectual; barbarism proceeds from religious and extremist ideologues. It may be pertinent to add that victims attain four lines, whereas libraries and books get nine. Harrison might

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 251 argue that this upholding of the literary is the natural stance of an unashamed liberal humanist, but problems arise for the critic when such labels as ‘religious ideology’ subsume complex cultural debates, as I shall argue in relation to his unequivocal condemnation of the burning of the Satanic Verses in ‘The Blasphemers’ Banquet’. To put it simply, Harrison accepts the concepts of culture and barbarism in this passage only in relation to his role as an author versus the consequences of war. In contrast, the cultural critic’s job is always to hate tradition properly; to learn about, and rigorously question, the key products of modernity.5 One of these products is the notion of culture itself.

Class and Culture In an interview with Peter Lennon, Harrison espouses a view of culture at odds with that of another working-class poet, Tony Flynn: ‘I am both the primitive and the sophisticated man.’6 ‘I think the characters who appear in Tony Harrison’s poems are often caricatures, and not the working class that I knew […] The things that come through […] about there being no books available and literature being almost anathema within his family wasn’t my experience […] You don’t get in Harrison that other articulate well-read aspect of working-class culture that was certainly around for me […] the thumping iambic pentameters and endline rhymes were for me inhibiting.’7 In the Lennon interview, Harrison argues that regional actors should not strive to acquire RP accents and thereby ‘jettison half their lives’ by suppressing any inclinations towards dialect speech.8 He then applies this general comment to his own writing, and proposes that his working-class background, and later acceptance as a poet by the bourgeois elite, produces a split self which is then dramatised in his work. In

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contrast, the second quotation takes issue with such dialectics between the primitive and sophisticated, in which the poet is simultaneously cultured and barbaric. In an interview with John Osborne, Tony Flynn suggests that Harrison simplistically constructs a ‘primitive’ (working-class) and ‘sophisticated’ (middle-class) self; Flynn offers an alternative autobiographical narrative, in which working-class culture has access to, and an appreciation of, literature. Flynn then depicts his distrust of classical poetic forms such as couplets and metre when dealing with the alienated object of the working class; hence he denounces Harrison’s aesthetics as awkward (‘thumping’) and restrictive. Harrison might be defended by the fact that he generalises about abstract working-class movements in poems such as ‘On Not Being Milton’ and ‘Them & [uz]’; in the Lennon interview he is concerned with Tony Harrison rather than proletarian subjectivity as a whole. Flynn counters Harrison’s work with an appeal to the reality of his experience: he was well read, ergo the Leeds poet is wrong, and the latter’s poems are not ‘real’, but caricatures. Flynn interprets Harrison’s poetry as engaged in a dubious conflation of the general and the particular, whereas the poet usually desists from equating his experiences in Beeston with working-class life in its totality. Indeed, his work might be criticised as obsessed with his plebeian self at the expense of any extended articulations of class conflict, as I contend in relation to ‘V’. Both quotations from the interviews illustrate the problems of representation that I discuss in this chapter – Harrison’s construction of a dialectic between culture and barbarism in relation to the working class, and the embarrassing nature of the ensuing stylistics. Does the poet’s use of classical references subsume, and thereby occlude, the relationship between the proletariat and modes of production, roughly, according to the chronology within the poetry, between 1750 and the early 1980s? Or do the aesthetic instabilities caused by the insertion of ‘inarticulate’ characters within the narratives of a poet who has attained a considerable knowledge of Greek tragedy indicate the possibility of dialectical conflict between form and content? Or does this model falsely assume that all

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 253 proletarians are inherently inarticulate, whereas, it could be argued, there are instances of culture within working-class experience that belie any simplistic correlation between ‘the good life’ and the bourgeoisie? Does Harrison really support, in philosophical terms, formal contradictions between the primitive/inarticulate/uncultured working class and the sophisticated/articulate/cultured bourgeoisie? Or do the two poles fuse in a progressive notion of culture that transcends tricky modalities of class orientation? At this point, it will be helpful to interrogate the terms ‘culture’ and ‘barbarism’ further, since their meanings depend upon their application within different interpretative communities.9 In my introduction, I interpreted Adorno’s notion of the ‘barbaric’ as a new, post-Holocaust language that is stylistically and thematically awkward because it struggles to signify the unrepresentable event. Adorno refers to the production of post-Holocaust poetry as a whole, since it refers to the genocide as an ultimate referent, whether it engages directly with the event or not: Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.10 I noted that some critics have transformed the last sentence into the ‘no poetry after Auschwitz’ claim. Harrison himself adheres to this interpretation when he asserts, in a direct retort to Adorno, that after Auschwitz there can be only poetry, since, he contends, the genre might prove to be the most successful at engaging with atrocity.11 I now wish to analyse the passage from ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ further and ask whether there are any grounds to support this myth of absolute impossibility. Why does Adorno follow the assertion of a dialectical relationship between culture and barbarism (albeit in its ‘final stage’) with a statement that ‘it has become impossible to write poetry today’? Does this not negate immediately the possibility of awkward, post-Holocaust poetics?

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Has the demise of modernity resulted in the severing of culture from barbarism, whereas before they co-existed in a progressive dialectic? Does this mean that when Harrison puts pen to paper, whether writing about Sarajevo or about chickens, he thereby commits an act of barbarism? And if the genre of poetry is already discredited by the Holocaust, does ‘Them & [uz]’ entail an exposition of the ‘barbaric’ pupil in an already barbarian form? To answer such questions, wider conceptions of culture and the barbaric need to be taken on board. Debates about the nature of culture have intensified over the last hundred years. Conventionally, it is loosely defined as the intellectual side of civilisation. Harrison’s appeal in the Prometheus passage for the preservation of books and libraries follows this definition. But, as Raymond Williams has argued, this occludes the complex etymology of ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.12 Williams demonstrates that in the fifteenth century the word referred to ‘[the] tending of natural growth’; in the sixteenth century this extended to the idea of human development, which heralded the humanist conception of culture as both an organic and a unifying entity in society, and the lauding of its artistic products. Williams notes that by 1900 the term was inextricably linked with new concepts of modernity, such as ‘industry’, ‘art’ and ‘democracy’.13 Out of these arise the modern meanings of the term: spiritual development, a way of life for a group of people, and intellectual production.14 Culture is located firmly in the realms of civilisation. It is something to be acquired or produced, and developed within industrial society. In contrast, Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy constructs an (anti-materialist) opposition between culture, with its extrinsic, spiritual nature, and industrialisation.15 Civilisation offers ‘the idea of self-transformation, of growing towards some measure of sweetness and light not yet reached’, a utopian promise at odds with material greed.16 Barbarism in the form of the market economy might appear to equate with the anarchist pole of Arnold’s binary: the pupil in Harrison’s ‘Them & [uz]’ might then be seen as barbaric not only due to the bourgeois teacher’s condescension, but also because of his

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 255 wider status as a victim of capitalism. However, in Arnold’s classless vision of culture, aristocrats are the barbarians; the middle classes are philistines, and plebeians, ‘the populace’.17 His intriguing (and flawed) argument follows Plato’s separation of material objects from the ‘real self’; anyone can become cultured as long as they split the corporeal from, and then embrace, a universal concept of the human spirit. By eschewing perpetual desires for more money, even trades union members, according to Arnold, can obtain a glimpse of ‘sweetness’. He terms such class escapees ‘geniuses’ and ‘aliens’, since they ‘make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism [or philistinism etc.] but their humanity’.18 As an educated member of the bourgeoisie ‘lucky’ enough to achieve an Oxbridge education, this is all too easy for Arnold to state. In Harrison’s work, the university is a glorious site of learning at the same time as being an elitist part of society’s superstructure; whereas the utopian bent is certainly not absent from Adorno’s writing, Arnold’s thesis could be regarded, in terms of the philosopher’s essays, as undialectical. Culture and Anarchy is at pains to sever culture from the material quite simply because it is unavoidably linked, in the present, to class divisions. Football, say (in all its disgusting coporeality), might be regarded as, originally, a form of working-class culture. For Arnold in the 1860s, culture is discernibly aristocratic or bourgeois, despite the illusory, universal metaphysics of ‘sweetness and light not yet reached’.19 Modernity occludes the concept of popular culture: the ‘real self’ of plebeians might rise to the heights of middle- or upper-class ‘spirit’ (although how this might be achieved is not explained), whereas their ‘sterner (or bodily) self’ prefers ‘brawling, hustling, and smashing; the lighter self, beer’.20 Harrison’s poetry might seem to abandon this elitist view of culture in favour of a materialist critique, and yet his work is, at times, unashamedly highbrow. Jeffrey Wainwright argues that Harrison displays an old-fashioned view of popular culture in his poems and plays.21 The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus contains satyr characters who are placated by Apollo’s offer of ghettoblasters: he reads this as evidence of the poet’s dislike of

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popular culture as ‘placatory pap dispensed from on high to distract the masses’.22 ‘Satyrs,’ he adds, ‘should not be expected to do only clog dances. Let them go to the disco.’ Harrison’s attitude towards the high versus low culture debate appears to follow early cultural critics such as Adorno and Richard Hoggart in his disgust for the popular, but his stance is actually more contradictory. According to Richard Eyre, ‘He wants […] the distinction between High and Low art to be annulled’, and yet ‘his hatred for the pap of popular culture is almost boundless’.23 In other words, he wants to bring the high to the low, but not the ‘pap’ to the high. Jack Shepherd argues that this ‘pap’ includes jazz and country-and-western.24 In an interview with Kjartan Fløgstad, Harrison enacts this contradiction with his soundbite ‘Avantgardisme i dag er å vera tilgjengeleg’ (‘Avant-gardism today is accessibility’).25 Railing against what he conceives as late-modernist inaccessibility in contemporary poetry, a link between his espoused poetics and readerly instances of popular culture would appear to be inevitable, yet he falters when asked whether working-class youths have been the most creative individuals in post-war Britain. Harrison exposes his lack of knowledge about such matters when he asks if the interviewer is referring to the Beatles.26

Barbarism Whichever definition of culture Harrison, Arnold and Adorno adhere to, all are opposed to barbarism, a term which recent cultural critics have tended to neglect.27 In the Oxford English Dictionary, it is defined thus: The use of words or expressions not in accordance with the classical standard of a language, especially such as are of foreign origin; orig. the mixing of foreign words or phrases in Latin or Greek; hence, rudeness or unpolished condition of language […] absence of culture; uncivilised ignorance and rudeness […] cruelty.28

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 257 Barbarism is simply that which culture is not. It entertains alien, non-standard words, and is thereby uncultured. From this premise arises the logical conclusion: the uncultured must be ignorant, rude and cruel. Has the opposition been reversed in Adorno’s work, so that contemporary poetry is considered to be oblivious and rude, and should therefore not be written? Presumably, the theorist is asserting that it is ethically wrong to produce poems after an event as horrific as the Holocaust. The consumption of poetry conjures up images of a leisured or academic bourgeoisie enjoying aesthetic pleasure in a context divorced from the degradations suffered in the concentration and death camps. Adorno is revolted by such a conceptual binary: poetry cannot be divorced from its historical context, so post-war poems must be infected with knowledge of the traumatic event. To attempt to preserve an opposition between autonomous art and the Holocaust would, according to the theorist, be tantamount to a betrayal of the modern intellectual condition, to promote willingly, according to the dictionary definition of barbarism, ‘uncivilised ignorance’, thereby ensuring a ‘barbarous social or intellectual condition’. Committed writing such as Harrison’s could be lauded as working towards a utopian vision of culture with its insistence that the Holocaust has irretrievably altered nineteenth-century conceptions of ‘the good life’. Problems arise, however, with the poet’s work – if considered in the light of Adorno’s philosophy – when he capitulates to historicity rather than striving for the undemocratic purity of autonomous art. Adorno’s suggestion after the tentative infinitive (‘To write’) that post-Auschwitz poetry does in fact exist (‘is barbaric’), suggests that some poets in the 1950s had already fulfilled his nihilist vision of contemporary culture.29 But how has the production of poems suddenly become totalised under the theoretical umbrella of barbarism? To compose such texts might be ethically wrong, but the passage also indicates that they might have political as well as stylistic features in common. This is suggested by the etymology of ‘barbaric’. Originating in the Greek word for a ‘foreign mode of speech’, it indicated the creation of a specifically linguistic ‘other’.30 In

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Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva states that it was coined (as Harrison, with his classical education, would be well aware) on the basis of the Greeks’ perception of foreign languages as inarticulate mumblings, and out of the (falsely) onomatopoeiac ‘bla-bla, bara-bara’.31 Contrary to the OED, Kristeva argues that it was applied as late as the fifth century to both Greeks and non-Greeks; if native speakers conversed in nonstandard Greek, they too were labelled barbarians. Applying such definitions to Adorno’s statement, post-Auschwitz aesthetics are somehow ‘foreign’ and ‘non-standard’. This is the key to his dialectical evaluation of contemporary poetry. Starting from the premise that it is ethically wrong to write, he concedes that poems are nevertheless still being written. And they appear as inarticulate, unimportant scribbling when studied in the context of the Holocaust. But their importance in terms of post-war culture arises precisely from this inarticulacy. They are necessarily unfamiliar because they are trying to cope with an unforeseen event which post-war culture is still struggling to deal with. It is possible that in the future the nonstandard will be re-evaluated as the standard, in a similar way to the process by which dialects are now beginning to be accepted as valid alternatives to the dominant mode of speaking in any given language. Post-Auschwitz mumblings such as Harrison’s poems may become the classic post-Holocaust texts of late twentieth-century culture.

Adorno, Benjamin and Culture/Barbarism Dialectics According to Adorno, then, post-Holocaust poetics elide any distinction between the cultured and the barbaric. Such arguments in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ are informed by Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in which the latter muses on the inseparability of these two entities: Wer immer bis zu diesem Tage den Sieg davontrug, der marschiert mit in dem Triumphzug, der die heute

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 259 Herrschenden über die dahinführt, die heute am Boden liegen. Die Beute wird, wie das immer so üblich war, im Triumphzug mitgeführt. Man bezeichnet sie als die Kulturgüter. Sie werden im historischen Materialisten mit einem distanzierten Betrachter zu rechnen haben. Denn was er an Kulturgütern überblickt, das ist ihm samt und sonders von einer Abkunft, die er nicht ohne Grauen bedenken kann. Es dankt sein Dasein nicht nur der Mühe der großen Genien, die es geschaften haben, sondern auch der namenlosen Fron ihrer Zeitgenossen. Es ist niemals ein Dokument der Kultur, ohne zugleich ein solches der Barbarei zu sein. Und wie es selbst nicht frei ist von Barbarei, so ist es auch der Prozeß der Überlieferung nicht, in der es von dem einen an den andern gefallen ist. Der historische Materialist rückt daher nach Maßgab des Möglichen von ihr ab. Er betrachtet es als seine Aufgabe, die Geschichte gegen den Strich zu bürsten.32 Until this day, whoever has been victorious joins in the victory procession in which the present leaders trample on those lying on the ground. As a matter of course, the spoils are borne away in this procession. They are called cultural commodities. The historical materialist views them as a distant observer. Without exception, the cultural commodities he surveys have an origin which he cannot think about without horror. They exist not only because of the efforts of the geniuses that created them, but also due to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. No document of culture ever exists that is not at the same time one of barbarism. And as it is not free from barbarism, it also taints the way in which it was transacted from one owner to another. The historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He considers it his task to brush history against the grain.33 This passage (written in more accessible German than Adorno’s) offers a key to reading ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. The cultured may define themselves in opposition to barbarians, but the opposition is not tenable when examined in relation to

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the historical. Modernity’s notion of culture is composed of commodities which it pretends are intrinsic to its refined ‘culturedness’, even though they originated in what it now terms barbaric. It thus functions on the fantastical premise of exclusion. Given that poetry is clearly a product of culture, in terms of Benjamin’s thesis it must also be necessarily barbaric due to its irrevocable historical baggage, whether this be the legacy of the Holocaust, class exploitation, or imperialism. An example of this barbaric nature of cultural commodities is located in the sonnet ‘John James Audubon’ from Harrison’s ‘Art & Extinction’ sequence. In this text, Audubon is the cultural victor: he kills twenty-five pelicans per day to produce one painting. The subject’s production of a commodity out of the death of the object is a central concern of Harrison’s representation of the Holocaust: is this a writerly act of barbarism? And what repercussions does this have for any notion of aesthetics? In ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Adorno follows Benjamin’s concept of barbaric culture, but attacks the specific, and reified, concept of cultural criticism. Primarily, he does so because it stubbornly adheres to an outdated, autonomous notion of culture: Where there is despair and measureless misery, [the critic] sees only spiritual phenomena, the state of man’s consciousness, the decline of norms. By insisting on this, criticism is tempted to forget the unutterable, instead of striving, however impotently, so that man may be spared.34 This passage can be imagined as a retort to Arnold’s notion of cultural sweetness and light versus historical and economic contingency. Adorno argues that culture is blind, due to its self-conception as ‘progressive’, to the reality of the Holocaust, which entails only ‘despair and measureless misery’, and blind also to a projected nuclear holocaust, which promises the ‘annihilation of uncounted human beings’.35 In the postHolocaust contemporary, culture is a sideline, a privilege in danger of becoming a fetish for critics who reify that which they pretend to criticise. However, it is not denigrated

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 261 completely. In a post-war rewriting of Benjamin’s thesis, Adorno argues that some of this century’s victorious leaders are not the guardians of culture but the barbaric desecrators. Nazi leaders form his prime example, such as Hitler’s spokesman for the Imperial Chamber of Culture, who said: ‘“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my gun”’.36 Adorno acknowledges the barbaric nature of culture, but, along with Harrison, retains the original opposition when it entails defending high culture against extreme historical movements such as Nazism. In the later essay ‘Commitment’, Adorno’s attack initially shifts from cultural criticism to autonomous literature. The latter is reprimanded at first for ignoring atrocity: a work of art that strives only for supreme aesthetic effects ‘forget[s] the unutterable’.37 Hence the textual neglect of the Holocaust is a ‘political falsehood [which] stains the aesthetic form’.38 In turn, Adorno attacks committed literature as aesthetically challenged. Following his argument, Harrison’s poetry is tainted by moments of barbarism because it engages directly with extreme events, and is thereby unspiritual, mindless, revolutionary, ephemeral and seminar-based. Autonomous art (such as that of Joyce, Beckett and Kafka), even though it does not represent the events directly, also moulds them as ultimate signified referents according to Adorno, but it has the advantage over committed art of resisting the barbarity of commodification due to its polyvalent production of meaning. This theoretical shift recalls Adorno’s defence of high culture: he feels that literature needs to be protected from the barbaric influx of committed writing. Committed versus autonomous literature entails a negativity within mutual exclusivity: ‘each of the two alternatives negates itself with the other’.39 Harrison’s work in this context is barbaric both because it remains too close to atrocity, and because its disavowal of Modernist poetics gives in to the pressures of the market economy in its claim to be truly democratic art. However, the failure of representation in Harrison’s poetry could be evaluated as a flawed success in its mere attempt at articulation.

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Class, Culture and Barbarism in the ‘School of Eloquence’ Sequence The third epigraph [of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence], Harrison’s own, merges the political and familial strains: How you became a poet’s a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from? I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry – one was a stammerer, the other dumb. These two uncles reappear later in the sequence: Harry in Part I, a deaf-mute who had ‘eloquent’ recourse to a dictionary when refuting ‘Tory errors’; Joe in Part III, a printer who could ‘handset type much faster than he spoke’. The poet’s inheritance, this epigraph implies, is linguistic struggle, awkward articulacy, ‘mute ingloriousness’, and the poems that follow are rife with imagery of stuttering, spitting, and chewing, the mouth ‘all stuffed with glottals, great lumps/ to hawk up and spit out’. If the metre and syntax sometimes seem strained, this is precisely Harrison’s point: his poems let us know that they have come up the hard way; they are written with labour, and out of the labouring classes, and on behalf of Labour Party aspirations.40 Blake Morrison uses the pithy epigraph from the ‘School of Eloquence’ as a key to read the rest of Harrison’s poetry in terms of class conflict. He interprets the poetry as constructing a primitive (working-class)/sophisticated (middle-class) opposition, and recognises that eloquence is dialectical in Harrison’s work: ‘dumb’ Harry is ‘eloquent’ when thumbing a dictionary; ‘stammerer’ Joe is articulate when setting type. Harrison’s aesthetics are then examined positively in terms of this inheritance of awkward articulation. A problem arises when Morrison argues that the poems are written out of ‘the labouring classes, and on behalf of Labour Party aspirations’. The dialectical conception of eloquence is dropped at this

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 263 point: Harrison is a working-class writer in the present, rather than a bourgeois poet relating experiences from his plebeian past. If this paradigm is read back into the epigraph, then the poet attains the Arnoldian notion of culture, having mysteriously become an ‘alien’. Arnold’s vision of classless culture is rejected, however: poetry is uncovered as a key facet of the bourgeois tradition of art. When the plebeian author writes verse, he subverts this tradition by remaining faithful to working-class characters such as Joe and Harry who do not usually have a voice within it. Metrical mischief ensues: the first line can only scan as regular pentameter if ‘mystery’ is read in an accent which elides the second syllable (\mIstri:\). Harrison treats culture as a material preserve of Arnold’s barbarians and philistines. His character functions like the narrator in Douglas Dunn’s ‘The Come On’, who threatens to ‘leap down, into the garden,/And open the gate’ of aristocratic and bourgeois culture through a combination of cunning and mimicry.41 Dunn has said that his first collection of poetry, Terry Street, was lambasted as barbaric compared with the smooth metre and luxuriant aesthetics of Tennyson’s and Keats’s verse; he counters such accusations with the comment, ‘Well, yes. For once I felt really useful.’42 Harrison similarly endorses the poetics of awkwardness. Enlightenment versions of culture and aesthetics are outdated; from within postmodernity, poets need to hate properly the tradition of bourgeois poetry; in other words, subvert it, but not reject it entirely. Working-class poets of modernity such as Keats had to ventriloquise that tradition superbly in order to gain artistic recognition. Formerly plebeian writers in the late twentieth century do not have it so easy, it could be claimed, since they have an ethical duty to represent the struggle towards articulacy, and to remain committed to voices outside modernity’s conception of culture. This argument is seductive, but it risks slipping into the inarticulate (working-class)/eloquent (middle-class) model. The linguistic struggle that Morrison recognises is construed, in the final sentence of the quotation, as the awkwardness of working-class articulation battling against the eloquence of middle-class culture. Following the definition of barbarism in

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the OED, this is culture defining articulacy as bourgeois, as opposed to the bla-bla or bara-bara of working-class inarticulacy. Surely the two poles are inseparable: linguistic awkwardness arises from the dialectical clash of discourses, the barbaric mixing of foreign phrases within standard forms (as in the RP version of ‘mystery’ as opposed to the elisions of dialect), rather than simply from the working class’s attempts at articulation. This model offers a different reading of the epigraph. Morrison’s use of the word ‘inheritance’ suggests that it constructs a linear narrative in which Harrison moves from his working-class past to achieve the cultured position of poet. An alternative reading might emphasise the ironic and playful tone of the epigraph. The exclamation and question in the first two lines are spoken by an unidentified representative of literary culture, whom Harrison debunks with his answer. ‘I say’ calls attention to its artifice: the phrase recalls the patter of a music hall comedian about to tell a joke, as in ‘I say, I say, I say’. In one sense, the answer is ironic: Harrison did not ‘get his talent’ from his uncles, but from reading a vast amount of literature and practising with classical forms. This form of inheritance frustrates the questioner’s desire for a genealogical production of literary talent. The speaker’s surprise at the achievements of the ‘alien’ divulges a patronising tone which can only conceive of culture as a preserve of aristocrats and the bourgeoisie, a stance even more conservative than Arnold’s utopian vision. Indeed, the poet is not really regarded as an alien at all, since he is still defined by his working-class background. The Alan Ross letters reveal that this was a common response to Harrison’s early work. In an undated letter to the former London Magazine editor, the addresser asks if the Leeds poet is ‘really hard as nails’? Ross appears to have sent the letter to Harrison, who then returned it with the following lines scribbled on it: ‘Harder, I’d say, though revealing a heart of claggy meringue to his intimates’. Arnold’s fear of, and homoerotic excitement at, the prospect of working-class bodies brawling, hustling and smashing is alive and well in the anonymous addresser’s conflation of plebeians and aggression. By focusing on the

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 265 corporeal, the addresser avoids any knotty problems of discerning just how such troglodytic forms might have hijacked the human spirit. Such are the bourgeois fantasies of the working class that the poet is at pains to expose in the epigraph: the author is either reduced to a metonym of plebeian masculinity, or disallowed entirely an alternative tradition to that of modernity. Irony is then undercut by a simultaneously serious tone, in which Harrison emphasises that his two ancestors did not have access to literary culture in the form of poetry. The eloquence of the poet seems to be set against the awkward articulation of the stammerer, and the silence of the dumb uncle. Morrison reads ‘Heredity’ this way in ‘Labouring: Continuous’ when he writes: ‘The muteness of his uncles […] becomes a symbol of the suppression of working-class speech over the centuries’. But as Morrison recognises in ‘The Filial Art’, the uncles’ inarticulacy is complicated when placed in the context of the rest of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, in which Joe’s typesetting and Harry’s use of the dictionary are described as forms of eloquence. Harrison registers the legacy of Raymond Williams in his recognition that not all forms of culture are aristocratic or bourgeois, even if the tradition of poetry that he operates in is.43 In ‘A Good Read’, the father endorses reverse snobbery, and rejects ‘Ibsen, Marx and Gide’ with a ‘you-stuckup-bugger’ look: the narrator counters with the fact that reading and numeracy are not limited to the top echelons of society; football and pub culture entail the poring over of Leeds United programmes, and the careful calculation of darts scores.44 This subversion of a false shift between the supposed barbarism of plebeian inarticulacy and the Arnoldian ‘sweetness’ of culture is applicable to the poet figure in ‘Heredity’ as well as to Joe and Harry. Harrison engages with a complementary dialectic: he represents the articulacy and awkward inarticulacy of the uncles at the same time as engaging with his simultaneously primitive and sophisticated self, which embraces his working-class past and the literary culture which attempts to subsume him. It is this version of a culture/barbarism dialectic at the heart of the poetry which produces the awkward nature of Harrison’s poetics.

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Awkwardness arises first in the title of ‘The Rhubarbarians’. Actors creating a hubbub sometimes repeat the word ‘rhubarb’: Harrison appropriates this dramatic convention to interpret nineteenth-century history from the perspective of a cultural materialist. Barbarians in this poem are those who, according to received notions of mellifluous language, cannot speak properly.45 Dins consisting of ‘rhubarb’ thus represent the blabla or bara-bara of ‘barbaric’ speech, as defined by the exponents of Standard English. As the reader might learn in the second part of the poem, the fruit was called ‘tusky’ in Leeds, and ‘most of England’s rhubarb came from’ its districts (p. 114). ‘Rhubarbarians’, are, then, nineteenth-century plebeians as well as Loiners, and representatives of the Harrison family depicted elsewhere in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence. After approximately three centuries of barbarism created by the notion of inferior speech, the poem suggests, little has changed: the Arnoldian populace is still ‘barbaric’ due to retrograde notions of dialect. It takes an educated poet such as Harrison, the second part surmises, to bridge the gap between classes, since he conducts the Smetana play and audience with a baton imagined as a ‘little stick of Leeds grown tusky’. Spencer detects condescension in the son’s claim that his father would not ‘get’ the complex opening stanza, but the second part admits that some forms of culture are not available, in the present, to the working class, due to complex modalities such as education and the prerogatives of plebeian masculinities.46 This does not deny the utopian: by proxy, the author bemoans the bourgeois savouring of poems, and asserts in parenthesis (with a hint of embarrassment) that he would like to be the poet his father reads. Whereas poetry is still generally considered to be the preserve of the upper echelons of society, it could be argued that much has altered, in terms of dialect, since ‘The Rhubarbarians’ was first published in 1978. Dialect speech is now much more acceptable in Britain, in both private and public discourses, than it was in the 1970s, even if prejudice against it proliferates in arenas such as the bourgeois job market. Whereas ‘the hegemony of state education and state culture conspired to silence working-class self-definition’

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 267 well into the 1980s, by 1998 a British Telecom advertisement could confidently reduce RP speakers to automata with the claim that ‘After all, speaking with a dialect is much better than speaking like a dalek’.47 Daleks will return in my discussion of ‘Them & [uz]’. It soon becomes clear in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ that Luddites form part of Harrison’s continuum of barbarians. In the opening stanza, an opposition between the croppers’ speech and the ‘cultured’ discourse of the middle class is set up, and immediately usurped: Those glottals glugged like poured pop, each rebarbative syllable, remembrancer, raise ‘mob’ rhubarb-rhubarb to a tribune’s speech crossing the crackle as the hayricks blaze. (p. 113) Luddite speech is typified as ‘rude’ in this stanza due to its (supposed) linguistic awkwardness compared with Standard English. Noises produced by the wholly or partly closed glottis appear repellent, unattractive, unpleasant and objectionable (‘rebarbative’). However, the mill owners only construct the ‘alien’ language as barbaric. The supposed ‘rudeness’ of the croppers’ speech links with the quotation marks placed around the word ‘mob’: as E.P. Thompson stresses throughout The Making of the English Working Class, the term conveniently, but simplistically, homogenises diverse instances of social and political dissent.48 This links with the barbaric, which – when set in opposition to an autonomous notion of culture – totalises the Luddites’ demands into the din of a mass gathering. In this sense their speech is ‘raised’ (as in ‘erased’) to inarticulacy. Paradoxically, each syllable or remembrancer (a reminder or memento) retrieved by the materialist poet strives towards the impossible task of recovering a lost articulacy. ‘Marked With D.’ (from Part Two of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence) shifts the metaphor of ‘raising’ from the public to the private sphere in order to describe the father’s sense of his own inarticulacy, and his non-participation in an imagined working-class revolution (p. 155). In contrast, the Luddites’ demands forged a discernible discourse, rather than an

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unorganised din, of political dissent. Hence the first stanza of ‘The Rhubarbarians’ enacts, for a moment, an in/articulate dialectic: ‘unpolished’ glottals and syllables are nevertheless ‘raised’ from silence into a public arena, ‘to a tribune’s speech’ (p. 113). However, maintaining a dialectic of articulacy would be difficult, since, the poem notes, surviving examples of Luddite writing are scarce. Culture is defined in the poem as the intellectual aspect of civilisation, which espouses historical narratives in which the croppers are absent. In ‘National Trust’, they are joined by a convict abused by the police, and Cornish tin miners: both are examples of the ‘dumb [who] go down in history and disappear’, in the sense of being forgotten rather than remembered in books. Dumbness in the poetry thus links the post-Holocaust poems with the texts on class: Harrison’s overriding concern is to ventriloquise silent victims, despite the risk of ensuing problems of authenticity. Part One of the ‘School of Eloquence’ appears to follow the Marxist base/superstructure model, in which cultural forms are commodified and therefore the property of, and debased by, the dominant economic system of a given society. Mills, mines and factory owners (such as Horsfall of Ottiwells in ‘The Rhubarbarians’) flourished during the Industrial Revolution due to the economic exploitation of the labour force, and therefore form part of a class controlling the production of history. Hence Horsfall’s ‘exact words’ about the Luddites are recorded, whereas the latter’s are not; the mine owners in ‘National Trust’ are figured as colonial invaders in Cornwall who attempt to destroy the possibility of a non-English historical narrative by ‘killing’ the workers’ language. The italicised words in the second stanza of ‘The Rhubarbarians’ are direct quotes from The Making of the English Working Class: It was now generally expected [in April 1812] that an attack would be made on one of two substantial establishments, whose owners had made themselves notorious for their determination to defy the Luddites. William Horsfall, of Ottiwells near Huddersfield, was choleric and impatient to meet an attack; his men were armed, and

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 269 he had a cannon mounted in his mill, with embrasures to cover the line of attack; he had boasted that he wished to ‘ride up to his saddle-girths’ in Luddite blood, and his hatred was so obsessional that even the children taunted him in the streets with shouts of ‘I’m General Ludd!’49 Notoriety in cultural history is gained through class privilege. Whereas ministers, clergymen, clothiers, soldiers, and so on, had to keep quiet after the legendary attack on Rawfolds mill in the Spen Valley (1812) in order to shelter the protagonists from punishment, the mill owners, as part of the ruling economic force, could be as choleric as they wished. That Horsfall’s articulations were not particularly well received by the populace can be established by the fact that when he was assassinated (27 April 1812), it ‘occasioned less revulsion of feeling than might have been expected’ (p. 616). Working-class silences – the frequent absence from historical records of working-class voices – are troped in ‘National Trust’ with an image of oblivion. ‘Bottomless pits’ represent the gaps in the narratives, where – like the convict in the first stanza – inarticulate victims are dangled just beyond the reach of the poet who laments the impossibility of recording their ‘exact words’ (pp. 121, 113). Similarly, as opposed to the ‘private’ elegies in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, ‘The Rhubarbarians’ functions as a public elegy for the elided political discourse, but the base/superstructure model requires an adjustment when placed in the context of the specific historical silence of the croppers. Harrison indicates this problem of representation in his intertextual references to The Making of the English Working Class. E.P. Thompson attributes the lack of information about the Luddites to the secrecy demanded by the movement itself as well as to the sinister guardians of the economic base: If there had been an underground in these years, by its very nature it would not have left written evidence. It would have had no periodicals, no minute Books, and, since the authorities watched the post, very little correspondence.50

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Since the Luddites’ silence results from a contemporaneous imposition rather than a ruling-class conspiracy to write them out of history by culling records of their movements, how can Harrison uncover authentic examples of articulacy? The poet accepts this problem by remoulding Thompson’s historical narrative into an iconography of silence. Croppers’ speech survives in the contemporary as an indecipherable, metaphysical presence, ‘parries and hush on whistling hills,/shadows in moonlight playing knurr and spell’ (p. 113).51 From one point of view, this enacts an imaginative affirmation of their dissent, since they remain part of the landscape, and escape being forced out of work due to increased mechanisation, and into the factories. On the other hand, the sibilance registers the dissipation of historical violence into an impotent literary text. Fighting metamorphoses into the more defensive ‘parries’; shouting turns into ‘hush’; the Luddites themselves become ghosts, pacifist ‘shadows’ which play the northern game of ‘knurr and spell’. Such vacillations between articulacy and inarticulacy incur the aesthetics of barbarism. Literary culture, in the form of the sonnet tradition, is regarded with suspicion; Luddites are given a voice within a genre of poetry that has tended to silence them. Awkwardness then arises from the perversion of tradition. In The Sonnet, John Fuller outlines the ‘true’ and ‘original’ nature of the form: It provides simple yet flexible means to a classic artistic end: the expression of as much gravity, substance and lyrical beauty as a deceptively modest form can bear [… it] must jealously preserve its true lineaments and their rules.52 The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, cultivated by Giacomo da Lentino around 1230–40, constitutes the ‘true’ form, whereas the sixteen-line sonnets of George Meredith’s Modern Love are ‘perversions’.53 Similarly, Tom Furniss and Michael Bath refer to the genre as a ‘closed’ form, since its lineaments are strictly formal, at the same time as they allow for a limited amount of leeway.54 In contrast, Alex Preminger argues that

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 271 the sonnet proves to be an open tradition, because ‘the ultimate effect in any given instance may override theoretical considerations in achievements of artistic integrity’.55 Despite this (vague) artistic freedom, he contends that it is debatable whether the sixteen-line sonnets of Milton and Meredith ‘should be admitted to the canon’. Harrison’s choice of a ‘barbaric’ sonnet form outside the main tradition thus allows for a dialectical link between the structure of the poem and the bla-bla of the Luddites’ speech. As opposed to the four-part structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or the octave and sestet of Petrarchan sonnets, sixteen-liners allow for an exposition of dialectical conflict within two octaves. Despite this peculiarity, they still echo the Petrarchan tradition. In order to hate ‘true’ sonnets properly, the genre is revitalised at the same time as it is treated with suspicion in Harrison’s work, since the sonnets of Milton and Meredith do not usually agonise over the privileges of articulacy. Fuller’s opposition between the true and perverted recalls the dictionary definitions of cultured and inarticulate speech forms, in which the latter represent an unpolished condition of language. In ‘The Rhubarbarians’, the ghost of the classical sonnet clashes with the ‘unpolished’ Luddites’ speech to produce linguistic awkwardness. By challenging the aesthetics of the Petrarchan, Shakespearian and sixteen-line sonnets, Harrison mirrors the original linguistic struggle between the mill owners and the Luddites. Whereas Fuller constructs an opposition between the ‘true’ and the ‘perverted’, the poet attempts a dialectical fusion of the Luddites’ non-standard phonemes with the sonnet tradition. This ‘perverted’ sonnet certainly stretches the genre while fulfilling Preminger’s desire for artistic integrity. There is no legacy of the stilnovesti (‘new style’) poets in the sense that there is no erotic paradigm or celebration of women’s parts (as in a blason). It eschews the discursive turn of the final Shakespearian couplet, and the volta of the Petrarchan sonnet, in favour of a linear narrative carried forward by four quatrains. Stanzas one and two pit the in/articulacy of the Luddites against the recorded speech of the mill owners; three and four contrast the former with the

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articulacy taught in Leeds grammar schools. Nevertheless, ‘The Rhubarbarians’ still displays the classical norms of a ‘masculine’ abab rhyme scheme, and iambic pentameter. It could also be argued that there is a ‘turn’ in the last stanza, since the rhyme scheme changes to aabb. As in the Shakespearian form, this initiates a gradatio or crescendo effect. Despite such adherence to the classical tradition, ‘The Rhubarbarians’ can hardly be construed as an example of the ‘true’ form’s lyrical beauty. It is grammatically awkward in its attempts to disorientate the reader with contractions and complex sentence structures. The first stanza piles up three noun phrases, the first of which appears, at first, to contain a subordinate clause (‘glugged like poured pop’). ‘Glugged’ appears as the main verb until ‘raise’ is reached at the end of the second line; the clauses can then be re-read as the subject with ‘raise/“mob”…’ as the predicate. ‘Mob’ is also, confusingly, transferred from a noun to an adjective. The fifth line (‘The gaffers’ blackleg Boswells at their side’) appears to be an adverbial clause, but the full stop means that the reader has to reconstruct it as a sentence with the elided verb ‘were’. Harrison shortens standard noun and verb phrases into dialect contractions alien to the Standard English of ‘true’ sonnets: ‘t’mob’ and ‘’s silence’ in the third stanza represent the Luddites’, and his own, northern dialect; in the sixth line, ‘could [have]’ and ‘would [have]’ are compressed into ‘if the bugger could,/’d’ve liked to’. The assertion that the Luddites’ speech ‘wasn’t poetry’ is ironic in this context, since the verb form ‘wasn’t’ is not usually found in sonnets either. Admittedly, ‘poetry’ relies on an abstract classical definition here that avoids concretion. Perhaps it could equally be contended that a sonnet is only a sonnet when it is not a sonnet. Just as there is no such thing as a genreless text, equally there is no text which is an example of a genre.56 The latter is both absent and present: genre remains a concept rather than an instance, while at the same time it must be applicable in order for a sonnet not to be a small pie. Most studies of the fourteen-liner conclude that there are only deviations rather than normative sonnets: in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was no clear distinction between

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 273 the Italian and Shakespearian forms; Donne’s ‘sonets’ bear little resemblance to either subgenre. Barbarism, then, is paradoxically applicable to that which is defined as normative. In terms of the metre, the normative iambs of the sixteenliner strain to contain the clash between the croppers and the mill owners. Luddites’ speech jars with the smooth rhythms of strict pentameter: o B o B o B B Those glottals glugged like poured pop […] o B B o o B o B o B What t’mob said to the cannons on the mills […] (p. 113) ‘What t’mob said’ ‘wasn’t poetry’: hence the prosaic nature of the line, which could only fit into iambs by promoting ‘to’ to a full beat, and demoting ‘said’ to an off-beat, and the break in the first example, which comes just after the rhythm of the Luddites’ speech is in danger of complying with the metrical frame. The irony of this is that ‘What t’mob said’ is now poetry due to Harrison’s engagement with their glottalised speech. This is mirrored in the last stanza: the ‘drills and chanting’ of Leeds schools are seen as upholding the social base of ‘rege et lege’ (the king and law), an orthodoxy which parallels the ‘true’ sonnet’s adherence to the conventional subjects of literary culture. But the pupils’ parroting is then reimagined as the noise of a Luddite crowd, the ‘tusky-tusky of the pikes’ the night that Rawfolds was attacked, just as Harrison moulds the sonnet to allow access to the unfamiliar subject of working-class dissent. Constructions of dialectics of articulacy in ‘National Trust’ differ from those in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ in that Harrison can offer a concrete example of an alternative working-class response to the industrialists’ production of culture. ‘National Trust’ juxtaposes dialect poetry with the sonnet forms of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Keats by ending with an extract from ‘the only original Celtic poem in Cornish’: The dumb go down in history and disappear and not one gentleman ’s been brought to book:

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr (Cornish) – ‘the tongueless man gets his land took.’ (p. 121)57

According to P. Berresford Ellis in The Cornish Language and its Literature, there are two versions of this englyn (a Celtic poem with three-line stanzas): What’s said of old, will always stand: Too long a tongue, too short a hand, But he that had no tongue, lost his land. The old saying is a true saying Never will come good from a tongue too long But a man without a tongue shall lose his land.58 Nevertheless, Harrison stresses the literary silences that lurk behind this example of articulacy. His version of the englyn is ironic in its awareness of the precariousness of the alternative cultural tradition to which it belongs. This is indicated by the change of tenses. The originals deny self-reflexivity by locating the tongueless man in the pluperfect and perfect tense (‘had […] lost’) or future (‘shall lose’), whereas Harrison places him in the present (with a non-standard past participle) (‘gets […] took’). The final line of ‘National Trust’ is both specific and generalised: due to the poet’s historical hindsight, it refers to the specific elision of the Cornish language after the country was annexed by England in the tenth century. ‘[G]ets […] took’ simultaneously places the Cornish culture in the larger context of the continuous destruction of working-class traditions that Harrison engages with throughout the first part of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence.59 The clash between the (supposedly) ‘barbaric’ Cornish literary tradition, which is composed of dialect poetry such as the englyn, and the ‘articulate’ mainstream of English literature, causes linguistic tensions in ‘National Trust’. Harrison’s use of the passive is unsettling: the non-standard ‘took’ replaces the ‘correct’ phrase ‘taken’ (p. 121). Eight full

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 275 stresses in the englyn make it difficult to read in the rising rhythm of iambs and anapests: B B B B Bo B B o B Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr Tension has the effect of highlighting the linguistic difference between the Standard English clauses in the poem, which fit into the iambic rhythm, and Cornish, which is alien to this particular metrical form. This is compounded by the metrical instability earlier in the poem: o B o B o B B B B B and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb. As in the line ‘the cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress’ from the poem ‘Timer’, the metre breaks up into the stress patterns of normal speech; this calls attention to both the physicality of the poetry, and the convict to which ‘him’ refers (pp. 167, 121). The description of the clothes in ‘Timer’ and of the convict’s state in ‘National Trust’ focuses the reader’s attention on the minutiae of the individuals, as opposed to the dehumanising treatment they receive from the state institutions of the hospital and police force (the latter are referred to scathingly as ‘[the] stout upholders of our law and order’) (p. 121). This metrical tension links with the whole poem’s attempt to subvert the Petrarchan and Shakespearian sonnet forms. Like most of the poems in the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence, it is chopped up into stanzas and lines of unequal length: linguistic awkwardness is initiated by a dialectical clash between the ‘cultured’ aesthetics of the sonnet and the alternative Cornish tradition. Barbarism in the form of post-Holocaust poetry per se is coupled here with the ‘barbaric’ clash of discourses in a single literary text.

Private Elegies for Lost Selves: ‘Them & [uz]’ and ‘V’ Harrison’s rejection of formal contradictions in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and ‘National Trust’ between the ‘cultured’ (the mill and mine owners) and the ‘barbaric’ (the croppers and tin

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miners) leads me into a discussion of ‘Them & [uz]’. Although it entertains similar dialectics of articulacy, this poem differs from the other two because it focuses on Tony Harrison rather than on wider working-class movements. The argument shifts from the private to the public (as in ‘On Not Being Milton’, ‘Me Tarzan’ and ‘Wordlists’) rather than the other way round (as in ‘The Rhubarbarians’, ‘Classics Society’ and ‘Working’). It opens with an emphasis on the performance of the primitive and sophisticated Harrisonian self: the poet forges a dialectic in which culture – in the form of the Greek language, history and the poem itself – is balanced with the young poet’s working-class background. Demosthenes’ speech is compared with the opening patter of a music hall comedian, and the dialect of the narrator: ‘ay ay’ recalls the ‘I say, I say, I say’ echo in ‘Heredity’; both the orator and ‘Tony Harrison’ have a ‘gob full of pebbles’ (pp. 111, 122). Significantly, the Greek is a ‘stutterer’: the word ‘seas’ puns on the letter ‘C’ that he strives to pronounce in the oratory space (p. 122). He enacts an in/ articulate dialectic by filling his mouth with pebbles in order to achieve eloquence, just as the character Joe from the ‘School of Eloquence’ offsets his stammer by setting type. Instead of constructing a binary opposition between the primitive and the sophisticated, the poet enacts a fusion of in/articulate voices across class boundaries. However, the opening is then exposed as the fantasy of literary artifice. The schoolmaster presents an autonomous view of culture, an empirical return to a primitive (workingclass)/sophisticated (middle-class) opposition in which pupils are denigrated. The title of the poem becomes integral to the text at this point. ‘Them & [uz]’ refers to a sociological model set up by Richard Hoggart (one of the poem’s dedicatees) in his polemical study of the early- to mid-twentieth-century working class in Britain, The Uses of Literacy.60 ‘Us’ denotes the collective identity of working-class culture, as opposed to ‘them’, the middle and upper classes. Hoggart attacks this model throughout as debilitating, because the working class construct themselves as inferior to their supposed ‘betters’, so ‘us’ remains subjugated to ‘them’.61 In contrast, Harrison

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 277 recycles the model by appropriating it, but from the perspective of ‘them’, who reciprocate by enforcing this inferiority complex. The teacher considers the scholar’s Beeston accent to be subordinate to his own RP. Hoggart’s ‘us’ becomes the phonemic [uz] to which the schoolmaster responds with derision: 4 words only of mi ’art aches and… ‘Mine’s broken, you barbarian, T.W.!’ He was nicely spoken. ‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth. ‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose! (p. 122) In one of the most quoted excerpts from Harrison’s poetry, linguistic and conceptual parallels insert this private elegy into the sequence of public elegies in the ‘School of Eloquence’. Just as the cropper’s ‘rude’ speech is not construed as raw material for poetry in ‘The Rhubarbarians’, the pupil’s ‘barbaric’ accent is conceived as tangential to the voice of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (even though – as the narrator interjects – the Romantic poet would have read his work with a Cockney accent).62 The potential pun on ‘mine’ recalls the trope of oblivion at the beginning of ‘National Trust’, which symbolises the suppression of working-class discourse by middle-class exponents of the superstructure.63 Similarly, the schoolmaster (a pawn in the State Apparatus of Education) believes that dialect is about to be superseded by the purity of RP. But the self-elegy differs from other poems in Part One of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence in its subversion of a specific ideological correlation between culture, in the form of canonical literature, and Standard English. ‘Uncivilised’ dialect, the teacher insists, must be kept at the arm’s length of a binary opposition in order to preserve canonical autonomy. He conceives the pupil’s supposed desecration of the canon of English literature in terms of the opposition inherent in the hierarchical relationship between royalty and subjects. The canon’s preservation of literature’s ‘glorious heritage’ is threatened by an uncouth working-class youth analogous to the prosaic, and

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potentially rebellious, low-life characters in Shakespeare’s work. The pun on art/heart recalls Lewis Carroll’s character the Queen of Hearts: the scholar is treated like the outcast Alice, and becomes a trespasser in the palace of English poetry. ‘Them & [uz]’ then moves into an elegiac lament for a lost self: the scholar tempers his accent in order to speak in the Dalek-like uniformity of RP, and thereby ‘E-nun-ci-ate’ properly.64 The second part appears to announce a triumphant recovery of this supposedly primitive self: the poet rejects his imposed grammar-school personality in the bold statement ‘RIP T.W.’ (p. 123). After the traumatic historical episode with the schoolmaster has been worked through, catharsis is achieved in the opening rejoinder: ‘So right, yer buggers, then! We’ll occupy/your lousy leasehold Poetry’. The royal/subject trope of the first part expands into a comparison between the canon and landownership: poetry is a ‘leasehold’ annexed by the champions of RP, but its self-defined autonomy is a fantasy; it is ‘lousy’ (in both senses of being dysfunctional and infested with insects), and open to a ‘sit-in’ protest by the working class.65 However, Harrison does not produce a miraculous reversal whereby the latter now ‘owns’ the canon: his conception of poetry in the second part is distinctly dialectical. He chooses not to deny the ‘sophisticated’ self that his education has given him, but to embrace it in order to rewrite the history and potential of English poetry. A ‘pure’ notion of literature as analogous with RP is dismissed: as he wryly comments, the archetypal canonical figure of Wordsworth needs to be reappraised for his injection of Cumbrian dialect into his poems (‘[the Romantic poet’s] matter/water are full rhymes’). On another level, the ‘sit-in’ entails a fusion of the classical aesthetics of the sonnet with the ‘barbaric’ material at the fingertips of a primitive/sophisticated self. Harrison ‘occupies’ poetry by utilising forms ‘alien’ to the sixteen-line sonnet, such as iambic tetrameter (‘your lousy leasehold poetry’), Greek language, broken and uneven stanzas, phonemic symbols, capitals (‘RIP RP, RIP T.W.’), digits rather than written numbers (‘4 words’), italics, dialect and the demotic (pp. 123, 122). His art tropologically ‘aches’: the poem functions

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 279 as a forge in which the classical and non-classical are fused in awkward, dialectical simultaneity (p. 122). ‘Them & [uz]’ can also be read as an autobiographical rejection of culture in the form of the academic. Harrison supported his early career as a poet by teaching; from the late 1960s onwards, he appears to have become increasingly embittered towards academia. After gaining a 2.ii for his Classics degree in June 1958, he began an MA in Latin in the same month, and then transferred to a PhD in October on ‘English Verse Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid (Gavin Douglas – C. Day Lewis)’. Supervised by E.J. Wood, Professor Jeffares and Mr Douglas Jefferson, Harrison had the title changed to ‘The verse translations of the Aeneid by Gavin Douglas, Dryden and C. Day Lewis’ in January 1959. After obtaining the Bodington Fund in 1960, he began a Postgraduate Diploma in English as a Second Language in October 1961. A typed note under Wood’s signature on the PhD acceptance document states, ‘Candidature to lapse if book not presented by 30.9.68’. In May 1968, Harrison wrote as follows to Professor Jeffares: I write in the hope, that it may be possible to grant an extension of one year to the time allowed for the presentation of my Ph.D. book: 3 Verse Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid. While I realise that it is ten years since I was first entered as a candidate for Ph.D. there are a number of extenuating circumstances, of which I think you are fully aware, and the work is so nearly complete, that to abandon it at this stage would, I feel, be in nobody’s interest. This was evidently granted, but the PhD acceptance document states at the bottom that the book was finally ‘Regarded as lapsed […] 18.5.70’. The Alan Ross letters document Harrison’s declining interest in academic work between 1968 and 1970. During a short-term Fellowship at the University of Newcastle, he wrote that ‘I don’t really like being an academic’ (5 April 1968). (In September 1968 he was replaced by Basil Bunting.) In 1970, shortly before the letter to Jeffares requesting an extension, he wrote to Ross that ‘the mystification of literature

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in an academic environment […] makes me ill to be associated with, (and most students I find)’ (4 April 1970). Four years later, ‘Them & [uz]’ was published in Planet.66 Twenty years later, Ian Duhig, interviewed as one of the New Generation poets on the South Bank Show, referred to himself as a bull in the china shop of academe. Both Duhig and Harrison are infamous for simultaneously debunking and upholding culture in the form of academic production. Hating the traditions of modernity in this instance means that poetry and its study are treated with suspicion, and yet the works of Duhig and Harrison also contain highly erudite and self-conscious literary pieces. While Duhig willingly embraces this paradox, Harrison appears more keen to admit it in his work than in his prose statements and public actions. He has turned down honorary degrees at the Universities of Leeds and Birmingham; his academic research is now ploughed mainly into his poetry, rather than the essay form he published in twice in the 1960s. As Rosemary Burton notes, these two pieces from the PhD were offered for publication under the name ‘T.W. Harrison’.67 ‘Them & [uz]’ thus attempts to recover the ‘primitive’ ‘Tony Harrison’, and denounces ‘T.W.’ as the ‘sophisticated’ product of Leeds Grammar School and University. At the same time, the fusion of the bullish, working-class masculinity evinced by the militant figure in the second part, and the overall, cultured manipulation of the Miltonic and Meredithian sonnet form, suggests an opposite movement. The Harrisonian self depicted in the poetry can only be analysed truly from within a barbaric dialectic of in/articulacy. In contrast, ‘V’ has been analysed mainly as a clash between the sophisticated poet and the primitive skinhead, even if, as Terry Eagleton notes, the latter ‘comes up with the odd scriptural allusion which belongs to Harrison’s culture, not his own’.68 Explaining his notion of community in ‘Them & [uz]’, the poet comments that ‘The tension is inside the person who is conscious even of the articulacy of the inarticulate – and also of its inadequacy when compared to […] ceremonious modes of articulation’.69 ‘V’ highlights such dialectics: the poem is haunted by a figure who occasionally fulfils the criteria of

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 281 elegiac form, but who does not achieve the eloquence required by the author to denounce the State Apparatus in ‘Them & [uz]’. As ‘V’ moves towards closure, the narrator comments that it is ‘almost the time for ghosts’, and that he does not ‘fancy an encounter with mi mam/playing Hamlet with me for this swearing’.70 The first declaration can be read ironically, given that it has already been the ‘time for ghosts’ in the sense that the skinhead has returned to haunt the poet: Hamlet’s father is transformed into an aggressive, hyper-masculine figure who rejects culture in the form of poetry and classical education. But despite the central dialogue between the skinhead and the narrator, ‘V’ is concerned more with Tony Harrison than with wider working-class inarticulacy. After all, when the skinhead ‘aerosolled his name’ on the gravestone, and ‘it was mine’ (‘Tony’?), he is revealed to be the lost ‘primitive’ self of the embourgeoised poet. This epiphany links with other revelations of the author’s name in ‘V’: ‘HARRISON’ appears on ‘Leeds building sites’, and on ‘books, in Broadway lights’ (p. 16). Sandie Byrne notes that ‘Harrison’s name, as “Tony”, “our Tony”, “Tony Harrison”, or “my name” appears frequently in his poetry’.71 Signatures, for this writer, allow for an egotistical recognition of the present self, whether the ownership of the object in question is a fantasy, or concerned with the pragmatics of authors’ rights. At the same time, the mere desire for self-recognition betrays a lack of confidence, as if the ‘cultured’ poet can hardly believe that he has attained the glory of eloquence. The Alan Ross letters contain many instances of these potential moments of self-identification. Harrison collects signs of Harrison, ‘beginning with my grandfather’s still existing pub in Hoggart country, the Harrison’s Arms. Recent acquisitions have been Harrison the Butcher, and Harrison and Harrison, Organs’ (8 May 1968). Excerpts from the telephone directory, all of which are lower- or uppercase ‘Harrison’, have been stuck onto a postcard with two photographs of the author cut to fit the gaps between the lines of names (9 April 1970). ‘THE HARRISON’ has been taped onto a postcard (14 September 1970). In an undated missive, there is a picture of a stag with the letters ‘th’ emblazoned

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underneath: Harrison comments that ‘all these hotels have my monogram!’ The poet engages in postmodern playfulness, in which he seeks recognition through the signifiers, at the same time as he is fully aware that they are not meant to apply to him. A poststructuralist might contend that the ‘HARRISON’ in lights attains as much false authenticity as the names on the postcards, since, even though he remains the referent of the Broadway sign in ‘V’, there is still no ‘true’ Harrison that the poem refers to. ‘V’ emphasises this lack of a fixed identity. The narrator is split into two selves: the Harrison within the text can never be the fleshy self of the present poet. He remains absent as an author figure who nevertheless feels responsible for his elegy, whereas the skinhead is absented from the Arnoldian concept of culture. Hence the narrator wonders if he should not accept the graffiti on his parents’ gravestone as an instance of authentic authoring, given that the skinhead is as present and absent in ‘V’ as Tony Harrison. Desecration momentarily becomes performance art, with the cemetery as a legitimate text, ripe for inscription. Paradoxically, the poem is also constructed as an authentic site in which to discover the true, primitive origins of the cultured poet. ‘V’ is set in Holbeck (not Beeston) cemetery where the gravestones overlook the cityscape of west and central Leeds. This setting echoes the trope of the mountain in classical literature: ‘like islands, [they] were a familiar feature of real Greek life, but they also had a fantastic literary life of their own, often standing for wildness, origins, and reversal’.72 Atlas and Olympus become Beeston Hill, on which the narrator contemplates the beginnings of his ‘cultured’ articulacy. Culture to the west, in the form of Elland Road, the ground of Leeds United FC so beloved of his father and the skinhead, is rejected. Elsewhere, the narrator imagines a fusion of high and low culture when football supporters turn into singers humming ‘the bride, the bride’ like the boys earlier who ‘la-la Lohengrin’ while naughtily kicking a ball against a tree (pp. 31, 25). In contrast, when the lyric ‘I’ loftily remarks on his origins while surveying central Leeds, culture is firmly located to the north, in the school and university where ‘Tony Harrison’ ‘learned

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 283 Latin, and learned Greek’ (p. 9). The imagined fusion between Wordsworth (organ builder), Byron (tanner), working-class corpses and the mineshaft below is only a fantasy at this point in the poem (p. 7). These Romantic poets function like the ‘HARRISON’ signs later in ‘V’: the signifiers refer to no ‘true’ referents in the context of the gravestone inscriptions and building site. They denote ghosts: there are no ‘real’ presences in the form of Wordsworth, Byron or Harrison, but if there were no lost referents, then the body of their work would not exist. Hence ‘V’ enacts an impossible search for the real Tony Harrison, at the same time as admitting that he did not, does not, and will not exist. Utopian visions of culture/barbarism dialectics are ultimately limited to this agonised appeal to the primitive and sophisticated Harrisonian self. Football is not lauded as a site of legitimate culture; the skinhead’s voice is rejected mid-way through the poem as anti-poetic. Only ‘Tony Harrison’ himself (or, perhaps, his wife, as I go on to explain) can, at the end of the poem, provide an answer to public barbarism in the private sphere by forging a link between the high culture of opera and his working-class past (pp. 29–30). Hence the poem ends with a desperate need to cling onto notions of self that the rest of the poem negates. Epiphanies such as the skinhead’s ‘Tony’ inscription might provide clues, albeit flawed ones, the poem suggests, to an authorial presence beyond signification. With this focus on origins and pre-signification, ‘V’ could be termed a lateModernist rather than a postmodernist text. Such Modernist proclivities link with a passage in the Alan Ross letters in which Harrison refers to a request for ‘Newcastle is Peru’ to be dedicated to Juanita de Mena and Malá Betková. The SpanishPeruvian woman has the name of a fifteenth-century poet, Juan de Mena; he remarks arcanely that this is ‘one of those little clues to my existence I tend to make too much of, like Joyce having a cork frame for his photo of Cork’ (8 May 1968). ‘V’, it could be argued, tends to make too much of Tony Harrison rather than working-class culture in general. This does not mean, however, that it fails as an elegy. The first forty-one stanzas follow the elegiac convention of true

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mourning by working through both the poet’s grief for his dead parents (which is disrupted by the discovery of the graffiti on their gravestone), and a series of formal contradictions, in which the specific historical disunity between the miners and the Conservative government during the 1984–85 strike is inserted into a more general lament for ‘the versuses of life’ (p. 11). Tradition is then subverted by the skinhead’s ‘barbaric’ intervention in stanza 42: o B o B o B B B o B So what’s a cri-de-coeur, cunt? Can’t you speak o B o B o B B B o B the language that yer mam spoke. Think of ’er! B o Bo B o B o B o B Can yer only get yer tongue round fucking Greek? B o B o B o B o B Go and fuck yerself with cri-de-coeur! (p. 17) Skinheads provide the poet with a prosopopoeiac excuse to treat culture, in the form of the elegy, with suspicion. His sense of the agony of the aesthetic is rendered through the youth’s desecration of the gravestone, and, by proxy, the poem. As with Adorno’s defence of culture when threatened by Fascism, Harrison takes up the (satirised) position of the bourgeois author defending his art against an alternative form of articulacy: an anti-literary voice which swears like a trooper. At first, the intervention highlights the fact that the aesthetics of the elegy suit the steady rhythm of the poet’s philosophising in the first forty-one stanzas rather than the angry invective of the skinhead character. It reminds the reader that – just like the croppers and tin miners in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and ‘National Trust’ in relation to the sonnet – ‘dole-wallahs’ are not normally given a voice in elegies (p. 18). Collisions between the poet’s ‘cultured’ use of French and Standard English, the dialect ‘yer mam’, ‘’er’ and ‘yerself’, and the demotic ‘fucking’ and ‘fuck’ are complemented by the metrical tension: the conventional iambic pentameter of the genre breaks up into the uneven rhythms of the skinhead’s speech (p. 17). Two words subvert the established pattern on

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 285 the seventh syllable: as Derek Attridge notes throughout The Rhythms of English Poetry, metrical leeway occurs at the beginning of the line, but by the middle, regularity is usually established; the tension thus occurs when the iambs are in their most assured, and, therefore, potentially disruptible state, just as the dialogue begins when the poet’s monologic tone seems to be set for the whole poem.73 The lines do scan, but ‘cunt’ and ‘spoke’ initiate metrical breaks. Significantly, these fall on the demotic or on words that denote a process of articulation: the poet’s ‘cultured’ language clashes with the skinhead’s demotic and dialect to forge the barbaric aesthetics of the poem as a whole. The assuredness of the elegiac discourse at the beginning of ‘V’ fades when it is forced to fuse with the ‘rude’ language of the skinhead. As opposed to the relatively stable metrical patterns in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and ‘National Trust’, by stanza 44 the iambs have been subverted to such an extent that the metre teeters on the brink of collapse: o B o B B B B B oB o I wish on this skin’s word deep aspirations, B o B o o B o B B B first the prayer for my parents I can’t make, o o B o B o B o B o B o then a call to Britain and to all the nations B o o B o B o B o B made in the name of love for peace’s sake. Traditional elegies written in ‘pure’ iambic pentameter are subverted by this anti-elegiac stanza which simultaneously attempts to be pro-elegiac. Four lines contain iambs, trochees and anapests. There are five consecutive stresses in the first line, which create metrical tension: ‘skin’s’ and ‘deep’ would have to be demoted to off-beats in order to maintain the iambs. The poet’s inability to pray for his parents is reflected in the metrical break in the second line, which falls on the key phrase ‘can’t’. After being lambasted with the demotic, he attempts to reassert his authorial authority: the iambs and trochees appear to stabilise the poem’s metrical regularity by

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the third and fourth lines. But the result is a collection of selfconscious, hackneyed clauses which attempt to instil the elegy’s desire for unity in the public sphere (‘a call to […] all the nations […] in the name of love’). The passage verges on linguistic silence: the poet wishes ‘deep aspirations’ on the ‘skin’s word’, but does not really believe in the efficacy of the genre’s conventions; the following stanza compounds this aesthetic instability with the bathos that these conventions cannot help the skinhead get a job. Hence the skinhead questions the term ‘aspirations’, in which the plight of the unemployed, and the poet’s submersion in the aesthetic, are connected in a single pun. It collocates the verbs ‘to aspire’ (to search for), and ‘to aspirate’ (to pronounce words with the initial ‘h’ intact): the skinhead rejects the elegiac discourse both because it cannot alter the economic base that allowed mass unemployment during the mid-1980s, and because it does not normally include dialect speech. This rejection is undercut by a completion of an in/articulate dialectic in the following stanzas. Ironically, the skinhead engages in a lament for the days before mass unemployment; his language fits into the conventions of the elegy at this point. Stanza 47 complies with the iambic rhythm without the need for metrical promotion or demotion: o B o B o B o B o B Ah’ll tell yer then what really riles a bloke. (p. 18) This shift entails a dialectical interplay between the elegiac and non-elegiac similar to the altercation between the classical and non-classical in ‘Them & [uz]’. However, the difference between the poems lies in the specific intertextual framework of ‘V’: the skinhead instils generic instability at the same time as the poet instigates a firm generic genealogy by mirroring the balladic structure of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’.74 Tradition, as throughout Harrison’s poetry, is usurped at the same time as it is reaffirmed. Nevertheless, an incisive contrast is marked between the settings of the eighteenth- and twentieth-century texts: whereas the former is inundated with the iconography of harmony, Holbeck cemetery is a desecrated urban space.75

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 287 Harrison’s solution to this generic instability appears to be a humanist celebration of his wife, a poetic proclivity which is absent from Adorno’s and Benjamin’s culture/barbarism dialectics: Home, home, home, to my woman as the red darkens from a fresh blood to a dried. Home, home to my woman, home to bed where opposites seem sometimes unified. (p. 26) Such amorous discourse is unusual in the context of the modern elegy. As Ramazani notes, most elegies today are antielegies: he argues that Adorno’s negation of the unqualified aesthetic has led to a literary climate in which appropriations of, and resistances to, the traditions of modernity have proliferated.76 The genre is typified by tropes of consolation – such as the famous endorsement of the Christian faith at the end of Milton’s Lycidas – but since the decline of religion from the nineteenth century onwards, it has searched for other solaces; love has been a decidedly problematic alternative.77 Elegies have always distrusted it; as is seen, for example, in the destructive amorous relationship outlined by Spenser in ‘Astrophel’.78 This attitude’s apotheosis lies in Hardy’s ambivalence towards his dead wife in his extended series of dedicatory elegies. In contrast, Harrison’s atheism can locate no other successor to God but amorous discourse. Indeed, ‘when the hawser of the blood-tie’s hacked, or frays’, the void is filled only by ‘the ones we choose to love’ (p. 31). The poet’s humanist response can be traced back to classical history and poetics at this point: the archaic phrase ‘blood-tie’ recalls the similar ‘bloodbond’ from his translation of The Oresteia; the Greeks’ pre-Christian fetishisation of love is re-evaluated in a contemporary elegiac context (p. 32).79 In contrast, the amorous discourse jars with the anti-humanist rhetoric of the Frankfurt School. The prospect of a fine wife to soothe away the terrors of the public sphere would no doubt have been rejected by the (adulterous) Adorno as, along with Occultism, ‘the metaphysic of dunces’.80 Throughout this book I have demonstrated that Harrison strives to celebrate an ontological notion of ‘the

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human’ at the same time as appreciating the horror of Sartre’s limiting situations, which include the extreme example of the Holocaust.81 Whereas in Adorno’s negative dialectic culture and barbarism cancel each other out, Harrison sets up a Hegelian connection between the amorous and the public sphere in ‘V’. The two poles complement each other, and, despite their inextricability, he still struggles to celebrate the love/sex paradigm. The wife seems to offer an escape from ‘the versuses of life’ at the beginning of the poem, and the clash between the skinhead and poet. When the couple are in bed, they form an empirical version of the Hegelian dialectic: ‘opposites seem sometimes unified’ (p. 26). Harrison writes an anti-elegy that is simultaneously elegiac rather than a philosophical treatise, so it would be disingenuous to chide him for not aligning his work with the anti-humanist thrust of modern literary theory. As Sean O’Brien notes in The Deregulated Muse, ‘The humanist in Harrison is always likely to win out over the class warrior’.82 Despite this, some critics have read this humanist thrust as a betrayal of the poem’s engagement with class conflict. Bruce Woodcock argues that Instead of being a badly needed ‘Mask of Anarchy’ for the 1980s, v. finally has more in common with Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ ode, its rancour gagged by the elegiac strain and by a tendency to grand gestures.83 Woodcock’s contentions are correct in that the private sphere triumphs over the public at the end of the poem. However, the ‘elegiac strain’ and ‘tendency to grand gestures’ are also lacking in confidence: amorous discourse here contains a series of instabilities which disrupt the elegiac tone. ‘Seem’ and ‘sometimes’ indicate that the narrator recognises that this ‘home’ might be an illusion; the line can be scanned with a metrical break on ‘seem’, which emphasises the uncertainty. The repetition of the word ‘H/home’ itself is unsettling. As in Plath’s ‘Daddy’, in which the repeated pronoun ‘I’ reflects the persona’s fractured ego, the narrator’s need to insist that this is ‘home’ betrays an insecurity behind the sense of wholeness that the phrase conventionally denotes. Uncertainty increases in the

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 289 description of the sunset, ‘the red’ that ‘darkens from a fresh blood to a dried’ (p. 26). As Paul Fussell contends in The Great War and Modern Memory: Dawn has never recovered from what the Great War did to it. Writing four years after the Armistice, Eliot accumulates the new, modern associations of dawn; cold, the death of multitudes, insensate marching in files, battle, and corpses too shallowly interred.84 An example of this anti-elegiac representation of dawn and dusk written during the First World War comes from Wilfred Owen’s ‘Mental Cases’: ‘Sunlight seems a bloodsmear; night comes blood-black;/Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh’.85 The movement of the sun is troped as a melancholic shift between wounds opening (‘bloodsmear’), drying (‘bloodblack’), and opening again (‘bleeds afresh’): the patients’ consciousness constantly plays out the repeated atrocities they have witnessed and suffered. T.S. Eliot’s representations of dusk in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ adhere to Fussell’s concept of the landscape of atrocity.86 The poem opens with the famous simile of the sky as a corpse-like patient: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table These examples of twentieth-century anti-elegies inform the imagery of ‘V’: the sky is similarly troped as a corpse or wound; the sunset’s ‘fresh blood’ begins to congeal; in stanza 82 the clouds are like the ‘swabs’ which absorb the spilt blood; the ‘home, home’ refrain sounds like a trooper’s song (p. 26). ‘V’ does differ from Owen’s and Eliot’s work because it accommodates the further historical wreckage of the Second World War at the same time as determining a space for the humanist celebration of love. As opposed to Adorno’s and Benjamin’s silencing of the amorous, the historical weight of twentieth-century atrocities involves a proportional exculpation of the human in ‘V’. Hence the wife is inextricable from, but also repellent to, the anti-elegiac images of annihilation.

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This elegiac uncertainty is betrayed through metrical complexity and confusion. The quoted passage scans as follows: B o B o B o o B o B o B Home, home, home, to my woman as the red B o B o B B o o B darkens from a fresh blood to a dried. B o B o o B o B o B Home, home to my woman, home to bed o B o B B B o Bo B where opposites seem sometimes unified. The flow of iambs in the previous stanza is jolted in the first line, and does not recover until the final one. Falling rhythm in the first four syllables only blends into iambs after a break for two off-beats supersedes implied non-stresses; even the iambs can only be produced after promoting ‘as’ into a full stress. Regularity is only achieved in the closure of the quatrain: the iambic pentameter re-establishes itself with only one metrical break, on ‘seem’. The faltering metre in this stanza suggests that the poet cannot avoid a culture/barbarism dialectic by slipping into an endorsement of a fantasy of amorous discourse divorced from historical atrocity: Harrison’s elegiac strain, and humanist celebration of love in ‘V’, are self-conscious and self-effacing. He follows the modern conventions of the elegy by fusing poetic disruption with an overriding desire to celebrate the continuation of the genre. However, this anti-/ elegiac dialectic is markedly different in Harrison’s poetry to the models displayed by Ramazani’s chosen authors. Harrison’s particular contribution to the elegiac form is his fusion of working-class speech and historical atrocities from the nineteenth and twentieth century with classical constraints such as the pentameter to create barbaric pieces of art.

Barbarism as Islamic Fundamentalism and Nazism The Blasphemers’ Banquet and ‘A Question of Sentences’ take up stances towards the concept of culture markedly different

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 291 from those of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence and ‘V’. In the latter poems, Harrison challenges the efficacy of a formal contradiction between culture and barbarism, and produces dialectical models of articulation. In contrast, The Blasphemers’ Banquet functions as a palinode, since he reverts to an opposition between the two poles. He follows Adorno’s retraction from the dialectic when culture, in the form of polemical literature, is threatened by the barbarism of political extremism. Instead of opposing Nazism with the defamiliarising poetics of Modernist literature (as Adorno does in ‘Commitment’), Harrison adheres to Enlightenment rationality, and sets a classical pursuit of hedonism against the fundamentalism of Islamic ideology. Literary culture is represented in the film poem by the blasphemous writers invited to the restaurant in Bradford: Voltaire, Harrison, Molière, Omar Khayyam, Byron, and Salman Rushdie. In ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and ‘National Trust’, Harrison simultaneously adheres to, and modifies, the Marxist base/superstructure model when he argues that the nineteenth-century employers controlled the production of history. The Blasphemers’ Banquet offers an alternative version: the institution of literature – which (along with historical narratives) forms part of the superstructure – is opposed to the fusion of religion and politics in the Iranian government. The ‘fundamentalist’ policies of the latter pole emerged as the barbaric antithesis to literature when the Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a death sentence on the author Salman Rushdie. Harrison then inserts this incident into a tradition of antagonism between writers and state religion. The Omar Khayyam restaurant forms a visual microcosm for the blasphemers’ opposition to state religion: they occupy a space formerly used for Christian worship. Yet blasphemy is at the mercy of temporality: Harrison wryly notes that Voltaire’s books and plays were reviled by the French government, and then ‘after a short while […] canonized as classics’.87 Harrison adds to his formal contradiction between literature and religion/politics by contrasting an elegiac and an Islamic response to ephemerality. The opposition is focused on his response to a passage in the Koran which distinguishes

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the delights of Paradise from ‘The unbelievers [who] love this fleeting life too well, and thus prepare for themselves a heavy day of doom’.88 A ‘fundamentalist’ opposition between the spiritual and ‘the earthy’ ensues: the film quotes Ayatollah Khomeini’s comparison between unbelievers and ‘the sweat of the excrement-eating camel’ (p. 54). Such fanaticism, the poem suggests, led to the Islamic response to the publication of Salman Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel The Satanic Verses. In contrast, the poem embraces ‘this fleeting life’ with an elegiac lament and celebration of transience. Harrison’s humanism manifests itself as Omar Khayyam’s hedonism in The Blasphemers’ Banquet: religious extremism is set against the Persian poet’s (and the contemporary poets’) enjoyment of food, wine and books.89 The line from the Koran is also rewritten as a refrain sung by Teresa Stratas in a wistful tone. Rather than placing an ideological straitjacket on the ‘real’, as he argues the ‘various creeds’ do (again, ignoring Marxism), Harrison’s atheism also accepts the awkward questions about humanity’s imperfections, and the dialectical inseparability of ‘the world of spirit from the world of shit’ (p. 59). As Sean Sayers writes in Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate, most religious ideologies are based on an anti-dialectical, Platonic approach to philosophy: ‘a great deal of religious thought is essentially dualist, positing a dichotomy between, say, the world of flesh and the world of the spirit’.90 Harrison’s rejection of Islam’s dualist conception of ‘spirit/shit’ is reflected in the visual debunking of the iconography of the Islamic paradise, which, the Koran promises, includes ‘a cup tempered at the Camphor Fountain, a gushing spring at which the servants of God will refresh themselves’.91 Camphor metamorphoses into the fountain in Bradford which is full of rubbish, next to the square where The Satanic Verses was ritually burnt: ‘shit’ in the form of litter and ‘sacred scrolls’ ‘come from one mind’; not God’s, but the human imagination (p. 59). The problem with the poem’s formal contradiction between the secular and the ideological (apart from the fact that atheism is itself ideological) is its construction of the barbaric pole. Harrison’s portrayal of what the director Peter Symes

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 293 termed ‘fundamentalist lunacy’ was attacked by Peter Porter in the Times Literary Supplement as complicit with the poem’s ‘racist tone’.92 Luke Spencer is seduced by the poet’s passionate defence of imaginative freedom in ‘the heat of that critical moment’, and defends Harrison’s conception of ‘fundamentalism’ because it is applied to Christianity as well as to Islam.93 Some credence must be given to the idea that The Blasphemers’ Banquet might be analogous to the one-off sonnets of the ‘School of Eloquence’, or the texts faxed from the Balkans: it is meant to be read as a heated response to the historical moment. This does not mean that the critic has to endorse authorial intention. The poem is neither racist nor exonerable in its engagement with religious faith; it is open to the charge of what Spencer terms ‘cultural insensitivity’. Visual montage which depicts the ‘bizarre funeral of the Ayatollah’, and the various protests against the publication of The Satanic Verses, is dubbed with the sounds of a dull roar and the heightened, ‘evil’ hissing of a hosepipe.94 The editing performs a similar simplification to the employers’ reaction to the Luddite political gatherings in ‘The Rhubarbarians’: religious orthodoxy is reduced to indistinguishable noises or the bla-bla of an unruly mob. This reflects the poem’s homogeneous representation of Islam. All protesting Moslems, whether they want ‘Rushdie dead’ or ‘rant, rave and revile’ are denounced as ‘bigots’: the more tolerant Sunni Moslems, many of whom refused to condone the fatwa, are not distinguished from the Shi’ites, the more extreme exponents of Islam who dominate Iranian politics (p. 53). The death sentence imposed on Rushdie is unacceptable, but the reference to the Ayatollah as ‘the fatwa Fascist’ cannot be easily defended, since it conflates vastly different religious and political ideologies (p. 54). Moreover, Harrison makes the blatant simplification, which – as Ali Mazrui states – was a common response of white critics, of assuming that the protesters were ‘burning a book […] they’d never read’.95 These problems manifest themselves because the poet complies with Voltaire’s model of fundamentalism, which avoids religious difference in its satire on ‘Moslem, Catholic, Protestant and Jew’ extremists

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(p. 62). Nor does he question whether the term ‘fundamentalism’ itself, which was first applied to Protestant Christianity, is appropriate to describe members of an Islamic culture vastly different to that of Britain in which religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Nazism replaces fundamentalism as a source of barbarism in ‘A Question of Sentences’, but whereas Enlightenment rationality prevails in The Blasphemers’ Banquet, this poem challenges the concepts of culture, civilisation and progress. It was published in Stand magazine in 1979, and remains uncollected.96 Despite Harrison’s, or the Penguin editor’s, low estimation of its literary value, the poem provides a clear illustration of the intersection of class and genocide in relation to the Holocaust. As an octave, it appears to be an uncompleted Meredithian sonnet; it is printed next to ‘Clearing’, which is inserted into Part One of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence in the Selected Poems. However, the subject matter differs from that of these poems: it engages with the Nuremberg trials (1945–46) rather than with the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury working class. ‘A Question of Sentences’ does link with ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and the like, though, due to its presentation of a variable model of articulation. Just as the Luddites, tin miners and skinhead are presented as the silenced opposition to representatives of culture, ‘A Question of Sentences’ presents a binary opposition between two Nazi war criminals, the articulate Speer and the inarticulate Sauckel. The phrase ‘tongue-tied’ creates an intertextual link between Sauckel and the Luddites in ‘On Not Being Milton’: the croppers’ destruction of machinery is paralleled with their need for ‘Articulation [which] is the tongue-tied’s fighting’ (p.112). In contrast, the statement that ‘Speer enunciates’ allocates him a place among the ‘cultured’ in ‘Them & [uz]’ who are threatened by the ‘barbarian’ scholar. Like the teacher in ‘Them & [uz]’ – who espouses a false notion of hierarchical and autonomous literary culture with his declaration that ‘Poetry’s the speech of kings’ – Speer’s speech is Hochdeutsch; in other words, couched in standard High German (p. 122). Class conflict, then, is not confined to the late nineteenth

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 295 century or the self-elegy; it is an integral part of the historical events of the Second World War. ‘A Question of Sentences’ maintains the formal contradiction between culture and barbarism that I outlined in relation to The Blasphemers’ Banquet, but for a different reason. Whereas literary culture defends itself against ‘fundamentalism’ in the latter poem, an in/articulate dialectic in a Hegelian sense could not function in ‘A Question of Sentences’, since there is no possibility of progression. The contradiction results in the destruction of one pole rather than the creation of something new (as in ‘becoming’ out of the Hegelian dialectic between ‘being’ and ‘non-being’, or the anti-/elegiac construction of ‘V’). ‘Articulate’ Speer is given twenty years’ imprisonment; the ‘inarticulate’ Sauckel is executed. Dialectics in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and ‘National Trust’ are possible because the poet imagines or uncovers historical and literary evidence to substantiate the articulacy of the silenced croppers and tin miners. In contrast, in ‘A Question of Sentences’, Sauckel’s recollections ‘could only have been ghosted’: he is never given a chance to prove his articulacy, unlike Speer, whose memoirs are published, and awarded literary acclaim. However, the epigraph ‘(Nuremburg 1946)’ reminds the reader that Speer’s acceptance into literary culture is inseparable from the barbaric when the latter manifests itself as war crimes rather than as the inarticulate.97 ‘Memoirs’ denotes Albert Speer’s autobiography Inside the Third Reich, which was first published in 1969.98 The linguistic fluency that Harrison refers to is most in evidence during a final speech in which he argues for ‘the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology’ in the wake of Nazi atrocities.99 Speer refers to Sauckel’s inarticulacy when he argues that the latter’s ‘simple-mindedness seemed rather pathetic’ during the Nuremberg trials.100 His representation of Sauckel is supported by Telford Taylor’s account in The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: The defendant himself caused some problems, partly because of his odd habit of pausing ‘between each word’

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust [… As] Dr. von der Lippe noted: ‘Sauckel speaks such vile German that the listener is in pain. Through the translation into English, grammar and composition are greatly improved, so the Tribunal doesn’t hear the defective language.’101

Harrison magnifies this version of events at Nuremberg. Whereas Speer and Taylor regard articulacy as a sideline to the charges of war crimes (Sauckel’s ‘barbaric’ speech is ‘civilised’ for the prosecutors’ convenience), the poet suggests that the distinction between the Nazis’ speech resulted in the difference between imprisonment and death. Unlike the skinhead in ‘V’, whose speech is constructed as awkward, and therefore determines his subordinate social position, Sauckel is faced with death due partly to his exposed inarticulacy in a space of ceremonious articulation. Speer’s eloquent construction of himself as a martyr in his memoirs, with clauses such as ‘What does my own fate signify [?]’, contrasts with Sauckel’s speech impediments.102 Thus, although the charges levelled at them of importing foreign workers were similar, Harrison argues that the trial is reduced to the linguistic test referred to in the title. The difference between life and death becomes ‘a question of sentences’: the defendant who displays the most proficient linguistic constructions is most likely to survive. This (constructed) formal contradiction between Speer’s articulacy and Sauckel’s inarticulacy denies the possibility of the dialectical thrust of the sonnet and elegy evident in ‘The Rhubarbarians’ and ‘V’. Oppositions are built into the chiastic structure of the opening stanza. It begins with the opposition between the inarticulate Sauckel (X) and the articulate Speer (Y), moves into a discussion of (Y), reverses the binary (Y v. X), and then completes the contradiction between the second and fourth lines: One Nazi’s tongue-tied, and one’s tongue’s loose. (X v. Y) Speer lives to see his fluent Memoirs toasted. (Y) One gets 20 years, and one the noose. (Y v. X) Sauckel’s Life could only have been ghosted. (p. 3) (X)

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 297 The tension in the metrical pattern, as in ‘V’, is focused on the phrase which denotes a character’s inarticulacy: o Bo B B One Nazi’s tongue-tied In contrast, the fusion of natural rhythm and iambs in the second line (given the metrical leeway on the first syllable) complements Speer’s acceptance into literary culture: B B o B o Bo B o B o Speer lives to see his fluent Memoirs toasted Whereas the sixteen-line sonnets of the ‘School of Eloquence’ sequence allow a dialectical fusion between the material in two sets of eight lines, ‘A Question of Sentences’ ends after the first set. It closes with the trope of Sauckel’s hanging body reworked as a symbol of articulation: ‘Sauckel’s heels go click! The whole man stutters,/strung up, a lifetime’s words he never spoke’. The court seems to endorse – and the text rejects – a barbaric, early nineteenth-century concept (prevalent in the Newgate novel) that the working-class figure’s demise on the gallows is a natural progression from social subordination.103 According to this model, Sauckel is a deprived member of the underclass, and thus tempted into crime; the vast difference between the plethora of petty laws in the 1830s which could result in hanging, and the ramifications of his importation of foreign labour during the Third Reich, is elided by the Nuremberg court. This oversight results in a negated lifetime’s words which are beyond linguistic representation, like the dead Iraqi soldier’s at the end of ‘A Cold Coming’. These words are then acknowledged in the space after ‘I heard the charred man say:’ in the latter poem, and the absent eight lines which would have completed the dialectic in ‘A Question of Sentences’.104 Whereas Sauckel’s early death in this poem denies even the possibility of representation, in ‘V’ and ‘National Trust’, the words of the skinhead and the tin miners are rescued from oblivion.

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Conclusion On 13 December 1945, barbarism entered the Nuremberg courtroom in the guise of exhibit USA-254, which consisted of the head of a former Polish prisoner in Buchenwald. With the skull bone removed, it had been shrunk, stuffed and preserved. It was presented to the court in the late afternoon, just after the tribunal and spectators had been revulsed by the delectations of Ilse Koch, who used flayed human skin as an ornament. As Lawrence Douglas states, ‘The exhibits scandalized the court’.105 The stuffed head functioned as both a sign and a referent of barbarism, primarily in the sense that it was regarded as an instance of Nazi crimes of atavism: the court was scandalised precisely because a product of irrational violence suddenly faced the rationality required by the jury. As Douglas contends (adhering to the work of Zygmunt Bauman), such a reaction constructs an opposition between progress and savagery. It ignores the fact that the Holocaust arose out of the tenets of civilisation, rather than in opposition to them. To complement his point, Douglas contrasts the Polish exhibit with two shrunken heads from Ecuador on display in Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. The latter exhibited them in order to stress the gulf between ‘civilised’ Europe and ‘savage’ Africa, but is compromised by the spectator’s pleasure in endorsing (or rejecting) such a false opposition. A similar problem affects both Douglas’s research and Harrison’s poetry. Whereas both authors conclude, along with Bauman, that culture and barbarism remain caught in an inextricable dialectic, the very fact that they themselves ‘exhibit’ the latter means that their work (and this book) risks being complicit with atrocity. Geoffrey Hill’s agonised response to the aesthetic chimes with the impossible task of separating Harrison’s poetry from this complicity. In Hill’s The Triumph of Love, eighty-two pages of philosophising result in an exculpation of the poetic, but only in so far as one line can be written with compromised confidence: the first stanza (‘Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp’) is repeated at the end of the poem.106

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 299 A perceived close relationship between culture and barbarism led to Adorno’s suspicions in the late 1940s about postHolocaust poetry. As I noted in the introduction, commentators such as Olschner have read ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ as contending that the Holocaust is impossible to represent, and have argued that early post-war lyrics in Germany influenced this declaration. Adorno comes closest to this stance in ‘Commitment’, with his plea for committed autonomous art, which might discuss atrocity without actually discussing it. Celan, whose work Adorno became familiar with later in his career, would fulfil this search for an art of indirection, the possibility of which the philosopher had detected in the writings of Beckett and Kafka. However, a revisionist reading of barbarism in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ opens out a possible re-evaluation of barbaric art in the form of more democratic, committed writing such as Harrison’s. Adorno endorses this in ‘Commitment’ when he argues that his original declaration inspires commitment in negative form; out of the negative dialectic of Auschwitz and poetry arises the necessary embarrassment of post-Holocaust poems. Harrison’s reaction to the impossible necessity of representing the Holocaust is to reaffirm constantly the efficacy of flawed art, which cannot hope to contain the totality of the atrocity, but which could offer the reader a sharp glimpse of its horror and magnitude. Hence in ‘V’, as in the rest of Harrison’s oeuvre, the poet instigates a dialectical interplay between his simultaneous desires to celebrate the survival of cultural forms as a ‘triumph of the human spirit’ and to register the ramifications of twentieth-century atrocity.107 Out of this model arises his conception of his own writing as a facet of post-Holocaust humanism, which facilitates an affirmation of culture at the same time as it recognises the darker, barbaric nature of art.

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Tony Harrison and the Holocaust NOTES

1 Spencer, Poetry of Tony Harrison, p. 19. 2 Tony Harrison, Prometheus (London: Faber, 1998). I do not analyse Prometheus because the film had yet to be released when this chapter was in preparation. 3 Gorgon, pp. 38–45; ‘Loving Memory’, in Shadow, pp. 69–111; ‘The Cycles of Donji Vakuf’, The Guardian (15 September 1995), p. 1; ‘The Bright Lights of Sarajevo’, The Guardian supplement (25 September 1995), p. 6; ‘The Blasphemers’ Banquet’, in Shadow, pp. 51–64. 4 Harrison does mention the state of the beleaguered ‘Socialist’, but this brief reference to utopian visions does not invite the ghost of Marx (Prometheus, p. viii). 5 The concept of ‘hating tradition’ comes from Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 52. 6 Peter Lennon, ‘The World Seen from the Gods’, The Guardian, 19 March 1990, p. 21. 7 John Osborne, ‘Tony Flynn Interview’, Bête Noire, 12–13 (1992), pp. 105–22, at pp. 105, 113. 8 Lennon, ‘The World Seen from the Gods’, p. 21. 9 I explore these arguments in ‘Re-Reading “Impossibility” and “Barbarism”: Adorno and Post-Holocaust Poetics’, Critical Survey, 9.1 (1997), pp. 57–69. 10 Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 34. 11 Harrison claimed this during the conversation with Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show (1999). 12 Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983 [1976]), p. 87. 13 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (London: Hogarth Press, 1993), pp. xiii–xx. 14 Williams, Keywords, p. 90. 15 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1935 [1869]). 16 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 99. 17 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 104. 18 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, pp. 109, 108. 19 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 99. 20 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, p. 88. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said challenges Arnold’s definition of culture as ‘the best that has been known and thought’, and his belief in cultural autonomy (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. xii, xiii. Said demonstrates that ‘the history of imperialism and its culture can now be studied as neither monolithic nor […] distinct’ (p. xxiii). 21 Jeffrey Wainwright, ‘Something to Believe In’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 407–15. 22 Wainwright, ‘Something to Believe In’, p. 414.

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 301 23 Richard Eyre, ‘Such Men are Dangerous’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 362–66, at p. 364. 24 Jack Shepherd, ‘The “Scholar Me”: An Actor’s View’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 423–28, at p. 424. 25 Kjartan Fløgstad, ‘– Avantgardisme i dag er å vera tilgjengeleg: Samtale med Tony Harrison’, Nordsk Tidsskrift (Syn og Segn), 92.3 (1986), pp. 219–24, at p. 219. Dr Rory McTurk translated sections of this interview for me at the University of Leeds in 1994. 26 ‘– Avantgardisme’, p. 223. 27 Some exceptions are as follows: Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Barbarism: A User’s Guide’, New Left Review, 206 (1994), pp. 44–54, at p. 45; Stjephan Mestrôvic, The Barbarian Temperament: Towards a Postmodern Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1993); Brett Neilson, ‘Barbarism/Modernity: Notes on Barbarism’, Textual Practice, 13.1 (Spring 1999), pp. 79–95. Neilson argues that Benjamin’s version of barbarism is written from the specific perspective of modernity. He demonstrates that barbarism occupies the middle position in the temporal-historical sequence of primitivism, barbarism and civilisation in the work of Rousseau and Kant, and explores the concept in relation to (amongst others) Saussure, Deleuze and Guattari, Andrew Hewitt and Robert Young. As Neilson admits, composing a set of ‘notes on barbarism’ risks relativising the term, and ‘reproducing the violence implicit in barbarism itself, glossing over social differences and moralizing divergent strategies of oppression into a shared, homogeneous victimization’ (p. 92). Something similar is afoot with the concept of abjection, which risks equating a small ball of fluff with Nazi atrocities due to its universalist concretion of the ‘other’. 28 OED, 2nd edn. 29 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 34 (my italics). 30 OED, 2nd edn. 31 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 51. 32 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1.2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 696–97. 33 My translation. 34 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 19. 35 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, pp. 19, 20. 36 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 26. 37 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, p. 19. 38 ‘Commitment’, p. 186. 39 ‘Commitment’, p. 179. 40 Blake Morrison, ‘The Filial Art’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 54– 60, at p. 57. 41 Douglas Dunn, Selected Poems 1964–1983 (London: Faber, 1986), pp. 99–100, at p. 100. 42 ‘Memories of Terry Street by Douglas Dunn’, Terry Street: A Bête Noire Special Edition (n.d.), p. 12.

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43 Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 7–8. 44 Harrison, Selected Poems, p. 141. 45 I shall not investigate the debates surrounding the creation of Standard English, since Sandie Byrne covers them more than adequately in H, v. & O, pp. 22–59. 46 Spencer, Poetry of Tony Harrison, pp. 69–70. 47 Ken Worpole, ‘Scholarship Boy’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 61–74, at p. 67. 48 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1963]). 49 Thompson, English Working Class, p. 612. 50 Thompson, English Working Class, p. 540. 51 ‘Knurr and spell’ is the northern equivalent of a game of trap ball (OED, 2nd edn). 52 John Fuller, The Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 1. 53 Fuller, The Sonnet, p. 2; Meredith’s Poetical Works, pp. 133–54. 54 Tom Furniss and Michael Bath, Reading Poetry: An Introduction (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), p. 280. 55 Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 259. 56 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, Critical Inquiry, 7.1 (Autumn 1980), pp. 55–82, at p. 65. 57 P. Berresford Ellis, The Cornish Language and its Literature (London and Boston: Routledge, 1974), p. 104. 58 Ellis, The Cornish Language, p. 103. 59 However, Harrison’s narrative does not elucidate the tenacity of the alternative tradition: as Ellis comments, ‘The wonder is not that the language died but, indeed, how it survived eight centuries after the English conquest’ (The Cornish Language, p. 1). 60 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). 61 Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, pp. 72–76. 62 Presumably, ‘even Cockney Keats’ is not in italics because it implies an interjection on behalf of the adult poet, rather than the ‘barbaric’ pupil. It links with the reference in the epigraph to Leon Cortez, who used to read Shakespeare on the radio in a Cockney accent. Even if the effect was primarily humorous, the question arises as to which is the ‘true’ way to read Shakespeare’s plays and poems. ‘[A]nd’ creates similar problematics of voice. There are only three words of Keats quoted, rather than the espoused ‘4 words’. Yet ‘and’ is still the fourth word of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense…’ (Poems of Keats, ed. Blunden, p. 255). Perhaps it attains roman type in order to create a dramatic pause before the subsequent denunciation, or because the narrator wishes to

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 303 emphasise that these are his words in the present, rather than Keats’s, the teacher’s, or the pupil’s. Whichever is the case, it certainly highlights the dialogic mixture of voices in ‘Them & [uz]’. Harrison’s performances of the poem stress the need to read it with a northern accent. It cannot be performed adequately with a ‘cultured’ accent, thereby denying access to those who formerly ‘dubbed’ the canon a preserve of RP. But which is the true voice of the poem? Is it a northern accent, a Yorkshire accent, or that of a speaker from the Beeston area in particular? Or is it Harrison’s voice, in which case every other reader, even if they originated from Tempest Road, would be reading it wrongly? Or is the only true voice that of the reader, in which case an RP speaker has as much right to read ‘Them & [uz]’ as an errant Geordie? To say that anyone can read it ‘properly’ would be to read the politics of the poem against the grain. The phonemic transcriptions allow for a certain amount of leeway in terms of locating an (impossible) authenticity of voice. A Yorkshire, Humberside or Lancashire accent would certainly fulfil the prerequisite flat a’s, and [uz] pronunciation of the RP ‘us’. 63 The same pun arises in ‘V’ when the skinhead writes the poet’s name on the gravestone, ‘And it was mine’ (p. 244). Underneath the graveyard lies the mineshaft that the narrator refers to earlier in the poem (p. 236). 64 ‘E-nun-ci-ate’ is reminiscent of the Daleks’ famous ejaculation, ‘exter-mi-nate’. 65 The ‘lousy’ metaphor appears again in ‘Deathwatch Danceathon’, where the decline of the aristocracy is symbolised by beetle holes in ancient wood (The Guardian, 12 October 1998, p. 13). ‘Us’ becomes a militant working-class voice in the second part of ‘Them & [uz]’, which attacks the ‘them’ of middle-class ‘occupiers’ of the canon. However, it is poignant that ‘us’ in Bradford dialect also means ‘me’ or ‘my’ (as in, for example, ‘give us us money’). Despite the appeal to the first person plural in the second part, I would argue that this is still very much a poem about ‘him’, ‘Tony Harrison’. Following this reading, in the penultimate stanza ‘[uz]’ might refer to the poet as much as the plebeian. Critics usually avoid interpreting the slightly arcane ‘[uz] can be loving as well as funny’ (p. 123). In Sandie Byrne’s Tony Harrison: Loiner, Martyn Crucefix, rather patronisingly himself, dismisses the line as ‘patronizing, sentimental, or just plain unnecessary’ (p.170). Primarily, it refers back to the fact that the pupil ‘played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth’ (p. 123). (The use of capitals indicates the plebeian stereotype of the inebriate.) Shakespeare gives the ‘comic bits’ to lower-class characters, ergo the pupil is intrinsically funny to the schoolmaster, and grotesquely so when he attempts to read poetry. In the early 1950s (when the first part of the poem is set) working-class accents were derided as obtuse, or, at best, humorous (as in ‘coals in the bath’ stories or the later ‘box’ sketch of Monty Python). Behind the humour, Harrison emphasises, lies the human. RP and dialect speakers are united in a humanist concept of universal love. In Yorkshire dialect, ‘love’ can also be a general term of endearment rather than a specific noun referring to a gendered

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object of sexual interest. ‘[L]oving’ in this poem thus refers to this wider notion of working-class affection. The dialect use of ‘love’ upset several southern, upper-middle-class students when I taught at the University of Leeds (1993–95). They were enraged when addressed by bus drivers as ‘love’. In February 1995, ‘a caller complained to the city council about municipal telephonists saying “love” when they answered the telephone […] The word was briefly banned […] by Richard Wixey, senior assistant director of Leeds environmental services department’ (The Guardian, 7 February 1995, p. 3). The caller was evidently unaware that ‘the word has the same romantic significance in Leeds as Good Morning’. 66 Planet, 24–25 (August 1974), p. 20. 67 Burton, ‘Tony Harrison: An Introduction’, p. 18. 68 Terry Eagleton, ‘Antagonisms: Tony Harrison’s v’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 348–50, at p. 349. I have written about this poem elsewhere in terms of class and masculinity (see Rowland, ‘Class and Masculinity’). 69 Haffenden, ‘Interview’, p. 234. 70 Tony Harrison, V (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 1989 [1985]), p. 23. I refer to the 1989 Bloodaxe version of V rather than the Selected Poems because the dialogue between the poetry and Graham Sykes’s photographs make it the definitive textual edition. 71 Byrne, H, v. & O, p. 178. 72 The Oxford Classical Dictionary, ed. S. Hornblower and A. Spawf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd edn, 1996), p. 999. 73 Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London and New York: Longman, 1982). 74 The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London and Harlow: Longman, 1969), pp. 103–41. 75 Sandie Byrne provides an excellent comparison of the two elegies in Tony Harrison: Loiner (pp. 67–83). 76 Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning, pp.1–2. 77 Milton: Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 142–47. 78 Spenser’s Minor Poems, ed. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), pp. 337–67; also see ‘Astrophil and Stella’, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. W.A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 163– 237. 79 Harrison, Theatre Works 1973–85, pp. 185–292, at p. 198. 80 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 241. 81 Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 189. 82 O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse, p. 63. 83 Woodcock, ‘Classical Vandalism’, p. 62. 84 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 51. 85 The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, ed. Silkin, p. 195. 86 Eliot, Selected Poems, p. 11.

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Culture/Barbarism Dialectics in Harrison’s Poetry 305 87 Shadow, p. 53. 88 The Koran (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 579. 89 Harrison’s interest in wine (past and present) is indicated by his translations of Greek aphorisms and verse on the subject, which are printed in the Yapp Brothers’ wine list (May 1994). This is why his utopian vision of mixed cultures, with a mortal enjoying ‘a samosa and a can of beer’ in the square where Rushdie’s book was burnt in 1989, rings a little hollow. At best, Harrison would be likely to be eating pie and chips with a decent bottle of wine. This is facetious, but the point needs to be made that the cultural complexities surrounding the racial tensions and violence in Bradford during the Rushdie affair are not given enough credence in the poem. Near the square where the utopian everyman munches a samosa, Moslems were kicked and punched by members of the unofficial supporters’ club of Bradford City FC, Ointment, in 1989. Disgracefully, they were interviewed by the BBC, shortly before the violence took place, as if they were the defenders of the liberal imagination. The discourse of Fascism moves full circle: the Ayatollah is denounced as a Fascist in the poem, at the same time as Rushdie was being defended on television by members of the National Front. Despite the high proportion of Asians in the metropolis as a whole, Bradford city centre was, in 1989, still a space designated mainly for whites. Harrison would have had to walk a fair distance from the square outside the town hall to find a shop selling samosas. 90 Sean Sayers (with R. Norman), Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), p. 27. 91 The Koran, pp. 577–78. 92 Peter Symes, ‘Blasphemy and Death: On Film Making with Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 384–94, at p. 390; Peter Porter, ‘Appropriate Icons’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 August 1989, p. 875. 93 Spencer, Poetry of Tony Harrison, p. 126. 94 Symes, ‘Blasphemy and Death’, p. 392. 95 Ali Mazrui, ‘The Satanic Verses or a Satanic Novel? Moral Dilemmas of the Rushdie Affair’, in Free Speech (London: Commission for Racial Equality, 1990), pp. 79–103, at p. 99. 96 Tony Harrison, ‘A Question of Sentences’, Stand, 20.2 (1979), p. 3. 97 Nuremberg is spelt wrongly in Stand. 98 Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York: Macmillan, 1970 [1969]). 99 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 521. 100 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 515. 101 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (New York: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 428. 102 Speer, Inside the Third Reich, p. 521. 103 For more information on the argument that plebeian boys, due to their lack of economic and marital prospects, turned to crime, and were therefore ‘born to be hanged’, see Emma Liggins, ‘“Such fine young chaps as

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—‘The night it rained fire’, The Guardian supplement, 9 February 1995, p. 2. Steiner, George, Language and Silence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Stoker, Bram, Dracula (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1993 [1897]). —The Lair of the White Worm (Dingle, Co. Kerry: Brandon Book Publishers, 1991 [1911]). Stoltenberg, John, Refusing to Be a Man (London: Fontana, 1990 [1989]). Styron, William, Sophie’s Choice (London: Corgi, 1980 [1979]). Symes, Peter, ‘Blasphemy and Death: On Film Making with Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 384–94. Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (New York: Little, Brown, 1992). Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, The Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: Longman, 1987 [1969]). Thomas, D.M., Pictures at an Exhibition (London: Bloomsbury, 1992). —The White Hotel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 [1981]). Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 [1963]). Traynor, Ian, ‘Men who showed Belsen hell to Britain return’, The Guardian, 15 April 1995, p. 10. Van Dyne, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Virgil, Virgil, ed. John Dryden (London: W. Suttaby et al., 1808). Wainwright, Jeffrey, ‘Something to Believe In’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 407–15. Watson, Peter, War on the Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1980). Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1945]). Weale, Adrian, Eye-Witness Hiroshima (London: Robinson, 1995). Weissbort, Daniel, ed., The Poetry of Survival (London: Penguin, 1991). Wiesel, Elie, Night, Dawn, The Accident, trans. S. Rodway (London: Robson, 1974 [1958]). Wighton, Charles, Heydrich (London: Odhams Press, 1962). Wilkomirski, Binjamin, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood 1939– 48 (London: Picador, 1996). Williams, Raymond, ‘Commitment’, Stand, 20.3 (1979), pp. 9–11.

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—‘Culture is Ordinary’, in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989). —Keywords (London: Fontana, 1983 [1976]). Williams, William Carlos, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1976). Woodcock, Bruce, ‘Classical Vandalism: Tony Harrison’s Invective’, Critical Quarterly, 32.2 (Summer 1990), pp. 50–65. Woolf, Virginia, Three Guineas (London: The Hogarth Press, 1986 [1938]). —The Years (London: Collins, 1977 [1937]). Wordsworth, William, The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985). Worpole, Ken, ‘Scholarship Boy’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 61–74. Yarborough, Steven, Deliberate Criticism: Toward a Postmodern Humanism (Athens, GA and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992). Young, Alan, ‘Weeds and White Roses: The Poetry of Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 167–73. Young, Andrew, ‘Weeds and White Roses: The Poetry of Tony Harrison’, in Tony Harrison, ed. Astley, pp. 167–73. Young, James, ‘I May be a Bit of a Jew: The Holocaust Confessions of Sylvia Plath’, Philological Quarterly, 66 (1987), pp. 127–47. —The Texture of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). —‘Towards a Received History of the Holocaust’, History and Theory, 36 (December 1997), pp. 21–43. —Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

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Index

Works by Tony Harrison Allotments 46, 51–53, 79 Aqua Mortis 171–75, 185 ‘Art & Extinction’ 198, 202, 238, 239, 260 The Bedbug 89 The Birds of Japan 60 Black & White 34, 39–44, 45, 47, 53, 55, 59, 61 Black Daisies for the Bride 144, 208, 209, 210, 218, 220, 225– 32, 242, 245n The Blasphemer’s Banquet 250, 251, 290–94, 295, 305n Blocks 197–98, 221, 232 Book Ends 155, 208, 235–38, 242 Bow Down 42, 43, 181 Breaking the Chain 234 Bringing Up 51 The Bright Lights of Sarajevo 250 Classics Society 276 A Close One 34, 139n, 164–68, 169, 170, 221, 247n A Cold Coming 34, 35, 47, 69, 76–79, 83n, 92, 212, 230, 297 The Common Chorus 83n, 199 Continuous 158

Continuous 182–84, 186 Currants 134 The Curtain Catallus 84n, 90 The Cycles of Donji Vakuf 250 Cypress & Cedar 82n, 108–16, 131, 163 Durham 89–90 Facing North 92, 110, 122–29, 141–42n Facing Up to the Muses 74, 199 The Figure 57–60, 79, 161 The Fire-Gap 118, 131–33 First Aid in English 60 Following Pine 116–22, 124, 131, 148–49, 242 The Gaze of the Gorgon 40, 45, 53, 57, 61, 64 The Gaze of the Gorgon 69–76, 78, 79, 92, 125, 192n, 210 Ghosts: Some Words at Breakfast 139n Ginger’s Friday 51–53, 69 A Good Read 265 The Heartless Art 156 Heart of Darkness 84n Heredity 262–65, 276

322

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322

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Index The Icing Hand 201–03 Illuminations 145, 160–64, 176 The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa 33, 35, 54 Isolation 190 John James Audubon 260 A Kumquat for John Keats 2, 91, 92, 101–08, 112, 116, 123, 124, 130, 139n, 234 Listening to Sirens 34 The Loiners 2, 45–46, 51, 52, 53, 61, 79, 84n, 88–92, 103, 190n, 250 Long Distance 139n, 144, 155, 160, 184–90, 208, 232–35 The Lords of Life 116, 118, 129–37 Losing Touch 144, 146, 147–48 Loving Memory 144, 148–49, 208, 209, 210, 211–16, 239, 245–46, 250 Loving Memory 208, 238–42, 243 Marked with D. 267 Me Tarzan 135, 276 The Misanthrope 44 The Morning After 34, 53–57, 58, 59, 60, 79, 124, 170, 181, 182, 234 The Mother of the Muses 144, 208, 210, 216–24, 243, 250 National Trust 268, 273–75, 277, 284, 285, 291, 295, 297 Newcastle is Peru 46, 82–83n Next Door 189 The Nuptial Torches 85n, 90–91 On Not Being Milton 144, 188, 240, 252, 276, 294

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323

323

The Oresteia 212, 287 Palladas: Poems 144, 146–47 Phaedra Britannica 116 A Piece of Cake 168–71, 176, 203 The Pocket Wars of Peanuts Joe x, 34, 45–50, 51, 53, 54, 69, 79, 90, 103, 115, 221 Prometheus 249, 250, 254, 300n Punchline 190 The Queen’s English 248 A Question of Sentences 290, 294–97 Remains 144 The Rhubarbarians 266–73, 275, 276, 277, 284, 285, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296 School of Eloquence 16, 23, 91, 92, 116, 123, 127, 139n, 140n, 144, 145, 150, 152, 156, 158, 166, 168, 172, 174, 182–83, 188, 189, 190n, 196, 198, 202, 210, 219, 232, 234, 237, 238, 243, 262, 266–69, 274–76, 277, 291, 293, 294, 297 The Shadow of Hiroshima and other film/poems 60 Songs of the PWD Man 90 Sonnets for August 1945 45, 53, 59, 61, 79 Standards 239 Still 190, 234 Study 144 Testing the Reality 167 Them & [uz] 1, 252, 254, 267, 276–81, 286, 294, 302–03n, 303–04n Thomas Campey and the

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324


Copernican System 51, 84n, 208 Timer 144, 176–82, 183, 184, 186, 188, 275 The Trackers of Oxyrhyncus 34, 42, 43, 54, 255 Turns 186

V 3, 7, 79, 82n, 116, 127, 209, 211, 240, 243, 252, 280–90, 291, 295, 296, 297, 299, 303n, 304n The White Queen 46, 51, 84n, 90 Wordlists 276 Working 276

General Abraham, Nicholas (& Torok, Maria) 154–55, 157, 170, 186 Adorno, Theodor 1, 8, 9, 10, 12–14, 16, 19, 21, 26, 35, 42, 43, 76, 128–29, 147, 152, 222, 226, 234, 245n, 253–61, 284, 287–89, 291, 299, 300n Alcorn, Marshall W. 156 Alvarez, A. 47 Amis, Kingsley 47 Arnold, Matthew 254, 263–66, 282 Arsenault, Joseph 10 Astley, Neil 3, 4, 43, 44 Attridge, Derek 285 Auden, W.H. 123–24 Ballard, J.G. 140n, 141n Barthes, Roland 59, 87, 88, 94– 101, 102, 104, 107, 114, 116, 117, 119, 131, 136, 138n, 140n, 165 Bauman, Zygmunt 20, 298 Beckett, Samuel 16, 110, 165, 227, 236, 261, 299 Benjamin, Walter 222, 258–61, 287, 289, 301n Bernstein, Michael André 29n Bettelheim, Bruno 95 Blackburn, Thomas 243

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Boland, Eavan 209 Brinkley, Tony 10 Brontë, Emily 220, 221 Bunting, Basil 279 Burton, Rosemary 3, 280 Byrne, Sandie 4, 27n, 28n, 235, 281, 302n, 303n, 304n Carroll, David 11 Celan, Paul 8, 14, 299 Cheyette, Bryan 48 Cixous, Hélène 135 Corcoran, Neil 159, 160, 173, 180, 188 Crucefix, Martyn 303n Derrida, Jacques 9, 17, 102, 139n, 146, 155–58, 166, 184, 200–01, 203, 219, 223, 239 Donne, John 91, 114, 116, 119, 121, 224, 240, 273 Douglas, Laurence 298 Dowling, David 18 Duffy, Carol Ann 115, 116 Duffy, Maureen 114 Duhig, Ian 280 Dunn, Douglas 145, 150, 172, 174, 186, 263 Duras, Marguerite 67–68, 158

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Index Eagleton, Terry 280 Eliot, T.S. 27n, 50, 289 Eyre, Richard 256 Flynn, Tony 251–52 Forbes, Peter 3 Forster, E.M. 58, 59, 85n Freeman, Michael 18 Freud, Sigmund 88, 141, 150–54, 155, 157, 160, 169, 186, 190 Friedrich, Hugo 93 Frost, Robert 134–35, 136 Fuller, John 270–71 Garofalakis, Mary 92, 104, 110 Gilbert, Martin 35 Glover, Jon 243 Gray, Thomas 144, 148, 158, 213, 286 Gregson, Ian 77 Grossman, Morris 12 Gunn, Thom 116 Hachiya, Michihiko 18, 41, 57, 66 Haffenden, John 91, 113 Hardy, Thomas 26, 145, 188, 209, 287 Harris, Jon 10, 12 Heaney, Seamus 87 Herbert, George 75, 86n Herrick, Robert 228 Hill, Geoffrey 1, 23–26, 40, 41, 43, 55, 81n, 127, 144, 213, 234, 242, 243, 247n, 298 Hoggart, Richard 4, 28n, 256, 276–77 Hook, Glen 111 Hughes, Ted 20, 87, 125 Huk, Romana 23, 126–27 Ibuse, Masuji 19, 40, 41, 54, 56, 66 Ishiguro, Kazuo 66, 85

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325

325

Kanda, Mikio 41 Keats, John 25, 26, 99, 101–08, 121, 138n, 234, 242, 247n, 263, 273, 277, 302–03n, King, Henry 121, 224 Kjartan, Fløgstad 256 Kristeva, Julia 158, 258 LaCapra, Dominick 204 Langbein, Hermann 206 Langer, Lawrence 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 28n, 33n, 38n, 42, 43, 57, 77, 152, 206, 208, 234 Lanzmann, Claude 204 Larkin, Philip 87, 127–28, 137n, 151, 174, 177, 187, 193n, 209, 218, 232, 233 Lawrence, D.H. 132–33, 134, 143n Levi, Primo 2, 8, 14–16, 27n, 30n, 37–39, 77, 147, 152, 195 Lifton, Robert J. 18, 56, 74, 77 Loshitzsky, Yosefa 28n Lucas, John 44 Lyotard, Jean-François 10, 11, 78, 207 MacNiece, Louis 123–24, 142n Malcolm, Janet 20 Marlatt, Daphne 140n Marvell, Andrew 125–26, 148 Meredith, George 140n, 188, 225, 270, 271, 280 Milton, John 144, 145, 158, 188, 271, 273, 280, 287 Morrissey, Thomas 17, 57 Morrison, Blake 158, 187, 262– 65 O’Brien, Sean 123, 127, 141n, 288 Olschner, Leonard 12–14, 30n, 299

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326


Oppenheimer, J. Robert 199, 243 Osborne, John 252 Osterwalder, Hans 82 Owen, Wilfred 79, 86n, 289 Peach, Linden 92, 122–24 Plath, Sylvia 1, 20–22, 43, 47, 55, 169, 192n, 218, 288 Porter, Peter 235, 293 Pound, Ezra 23, 303 Raine, Craig 20, 235, 236 Ramazani, Jahan 150, 213, 232, 239, 287, 290 Rawson, Claude 180, 182 Reid, Christopher 92, 159 Reilly, Joanne 35–36 Resnais, Alan 66–68 Ricks, Christopher 11, 26, 107, 236 Rose, Gillian 11, 146, 153 Rose, Jacqueline 20 Rosenfeld, Alvin 12, 30n Ross, Alan 51, 55, 84n, 88, 91, 137n, 139n, 190n, 264, 279, 281, 283 Rylance, Rick 2 Rushdie, Salman 291–93 Sacks, Peter 150, 167, 235 Santner, Eric 150–54, 183 Sartre, Jean-Paul 3, 4, 8, 10, 126–29, 226, 288 Shakespeare, William 23, 87, 273, 275, 278, 302n Shelley, P.B. 130, 145, 163 Shepherd, Jack 256

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326

Silkin, Jon 1, 24, 243 Smalley, Rebecca 150, 156 Soyinka, Wole 243 Spenser, Edmund 200, 201, 202, 212, 287 Spencer, Luke 48, 51, 193n, 203, 248, 266, 293 Spiegelman, Art 22 Spielberg, Steven 28–29n Steiner, George 10, 12 Stoker, Bram 50, 133 Styron, William 171 Symes, Peter 292 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord 225, 240, 263 Thomas, D.M. 58 Thompson, E.P. 267–70 Vice, Sue 193n Virgil 108–09, 144, 147 Wainwright, Jeffrey 3, 255–56 Weale, Adrian 85 Wiesel, Elie 27n, 98 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 2 Woodcock, Bruce 239, 288 Woolf, Virginia 31n, 50 Wordsworth, William 144, 158, 188, 273, 278, 288 Williams, Raymond 4, 101, 126, 254, 265 Williams, William Carlos 218 Yeats, W.B. 3, 144 Young, Alan 92 Young, James 12, 20, 142n, 244n

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