Tony Harrison's 'Study'

Don Paterson on the best room

Tony Harrison’s ‘Study’ addresses that great working-class signifier, ‘the best room’. The parlour of the terraced house was burdened with a number of roles: the room ‘kept good’ for special occasions, for Sunday use, for rare visits from one’s betters (the minister, usually); for those brief family celebrities, the dying or the dead; or the room where the family’s golden child – a grammar-school boy, say – might improve themselves in its silence. It might be pressed into more regular use in an emergency, for an old, infirm or indigent relative. (A ‘houseless aunt’ is not a ‘homeless’ one; no family member would ever be allowed to sink so low.) Its role was heavily self-signalling. To keep a room like this was only a ‘symbol’ of working-class propriety and dignity from a middle-class perspective; from that of its keepers, it was merely evidence of it.

There was always a touch of the music hall in Tony’s work, and he could rarely resist a punning title. The good room may have been described as a ‘study’; as a child, I remember the word connoting more silence than learning, or indeed books. But in this case, the word also tells us what took place there, and indeed what’s taking place now: the poem itself is a study – of working-class mores, aspirations and contradictions, in particular the two-edged gift of Harrison’s own education. (Harrison, like Heaney, never used a word without being fully conscious of its etymology: L. studere – to be diligent, eager, zealous; PIE (s)teu– push, thrust, knock, beat. Best … best … best.)

This study’s made even quieter by the presence of the family dead. Two are named. There’s the awful sketch of the brief cousin: the poet’s aunt, silent in her shock; the whispered conference of the women of the house, as they pass the cheap plastic mirror before the baby’s mouth. The other is Harrison’s famous Uncle Joe, who also features in poems like ‘Heredity’: ‘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. Joe’s word was presumably a good one when he finally got to it: he d-d-d-ds his way not to dumb but the delicate decorative art of the damascener. Elsewhere, Harrison ties Joe to that great lisper, Demosthenes, who cured himself by declaiming his speeches with his mouth full of pebbles. Tongue-tied speech was Harrison’s inheritance. His early theme was the pursuit of the eloquence that would unknot it.

The best room/parlour/ study was also something else that our betters tended to overlook, perhaps in embarrassment: aspirant. Its furnishings impersonated the better life to which the working class – given the slightest encouragement or opportunity – will generally aspire. Some of us regard the closure, rather than the reform, of the grammar schools under Wilson and Thatcher as a disaster for the working class – and especially for the working-class girls they had only just started to accommodate. They were lost to the pincer movement of two cultural forces: a decent liberal instinct to make the system more meritocratic, and break the upper middle/upper class stranglehold on Oxbridge places (did it work? I must check); and attempts by middle-class Marxist educationalists to actively discourage working-class talent and intellect from leaving the council schemes and poorer postcodes. (The theory was that the cultural or material aspirations of the working class actively threatened their own solidarity; we can’t be having that.)

But back in the day, the parlour or study was the kind of room to which labouring-class grammar school pupils like Dennis Healey, Alan Bennet, Richard Hoggart, Barbara Castle, Jean Floud, David Hockney and indeed Horace from The Broons would’ve been confined with their homework. The kind of room where the junior Tony Harrison might find himself stuck translating his ‘Cissy-bleeding-ro’ while his mates played footie in the street … Although I recall that that poem describes an attic skylight and foldaway green-baize card table. (It was Jean Floud, incidentally, who diagnosed the problem as lying less with the grammar schools than the class bias of the 11-plus which served as an entrance exam. Exactly the same problems remain today with university admissions: the poor can’t afford to hire private tutors, nor can they write their kids’ personal statements for them.)

Who’s speaking here? The boy Tony, the adult Tony, Tony’s own ghost come back to haunt the place? The deixis is fuzzy; the voice seems out of time, what with the good clock too precious to wind, the silence too precious to disturb. The poet turns to his books. ‘My mind moves upon silence’ is from Yeats ‘Long-legged Fly’, which is about …? I really thought I knew. I don’t think I’ve ever been sure. The necessary condition of an attendant silence at the most critical moments in the human story? When the great can move on the surface tension of time, which is timelessness? Aeneid VI invokes at least half the great Harrisonian themes: the honouring of the dead, filial devotion, the fear over the future of ‘one’s people’. And, of course, the dead languages in which he became fluent.

The poem itself is from Harrison’s early sequence, ‘The School of Eloquence’, whose epigraph explains its origin. ‘The School of Eloquence’ was one of several covers for The London Corresponding Society – itself a rather deliberately misleading name for what was effectively a pre-Chartist movement which agitated for working-class suffrage, organised solidarity and parliamentary reform at the end of the 18th century. It was quickly outlawed. (Harrison then more-or-less dedicates the book to his own father via the proxy of a chunk of Milton’s ‘Ad Patrem’, which he reprints untranslated; its being in a language of which his Dad could not understand a word makes his point with heartbreaking, well, eloquence.)

I won’t go too deeply into my own ‘hysterical conversion experience’ upon hearing Harrison for the first time in the 1980s, when – bored trying to follow the snooker on a black-and-white telly in my Tottenham bedsit, and specifically by the notoriously lifeless Canadian, Cliff Thorburn – I switched over to BBC2 to hear Tony read his astonishing elegies for his mother and father. I was far from alone: with the publication of his first Selected Poems, Harrison proved to many folk from the working and lower-middle classes that poetry was also for them. Modernism had seen it creep away from us. But it was ours too, all of it: the good stuff, not just the funny stuff. No one owns poetry, he told us. Remember, Keats was a Cockney. You have a library card. Get to it. Study.

This was electrifying at the time. Though one soon encountered far more sanitised and downgraded accounts of his influence: by the time we crawled into the 90s, I would regularly hear that Harrison’s poetry was about ‘the representation of working-class voice and experience’, and taught us that we should ‘be proud of our accents’ and ‘not be ashamed of our roots’. Bollocks: we were always proud of our accents, of our history, of our mother and fathers’ love and labour. One recalls no shame over any of these things until one was shamed for them. Harrison’s poetry wasn’t a Kailyard essay on the inherent virtue of the underclass, nor a performance of identity. It was about familial love, about capital and labour, about language, about free speech, about social history, about the complexity of inheritance. ‘Study’, like many of Harrison’s many great poems, refuses to let its subjects be easily and comfortably simplified.

His poetry was also about the minor tragedy of working-class aspiration: what families often wanted for their bright kid – learning, articulacy, ‘betterment’, prospects – could open a social chasm between the kid and their own kin. The difference is usually language, the one lost and the one gained. (‘For all one tries to hide it: lost / like the silver bangle I lost / at the shows one Saturday / tried to conceal, denied / but they’re not daft’ – ‘The Graduates’, K. Jamie; ‘I’d naw and aye / And decently relapse into the wrong / Grammar which kept us allied and at bay,’ – ’Clearances’, S. Heaney.) Harrison’s education alienated him from the very folk for whom he’d been charged to speak. To quote that annihilating ending from ‘Bookends’, where grieving father and son sit up late into the night: ‘Back in our silences and sullen looks, / for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between’s / not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.’

Later in his career, Tony was sometimes accused of working seams he’d long mined empty. This may have been true of the Meredithian elegies for his parents, which perhaps should have ended after Continuous, for all we don’t have the right to tell anyone else when they should be done grieving. At other times the relentlessly grim subjects of his poem-films, and his own role within them as the viewer’s miserable and lugubrious Virgil, risked backing into self-parody. (I recall a conversation with Armitage at some point in the ‘90s; he’ll tell the story correctly, and better, but here’s the gist as I recall it: Simon had an appointment at some independent TV company, and was looking for his meeting room. Pulling at the wrong door, he found a cupboard with Tony Harrison inside. Tony was hunched over a small desk. Stiff greetings were exchanged. ‘What are you working on?’ asked Simon, for want of anything else to say. ‘Hiroshima,’ replied Tony gloomily. At which Simon nodded gravely, slowly backed out, and quietly closed the door behind him.)

But all Harrison’s subjects were important. No other poet addressed the outrages and enormities of the age so angrily, articulately and publicly. This was what Harrison thought poets were for. Tony did not, as most poets do these days, merely engage with the idea of a general audience while principally addressing only other poets; he actually engaged with a general audience. And in the 80s and 90s he got up all the right noses. The poem-film V was Harrison’s howl across the sociocultural divide in the Thatcher years, provoked by the sight of vandalised gravestones in Leeds’ Holbeck cemetery, where his parents were buried. Before V was even broadcast, questions were asked in the House. (Can you believe that? Of a poem?) The offence seemed less that some oik intended to say ‘cunt’ on TV; they had before. It was more that they intended to do so in the consecrated line of Shakespeare and Milton.

And if you want a reminder of why you used to enthusiastically pay your TV license fee: seek out The Blasphemer’s Banquet, Harrison’s blistering defence of Salman Rushdie, written shortly after the Satanic Verses fatwa. It’s a ruthless demolition of religious fundamentalism and the anti-art, anti-life, anti-joy Ayatollahs of all faiths, and a celebration of all the earthly, fleeting, sensuous delights that these monstrous fools would have us believe are mortal sins. Its ‘insensitivity’ would mean it would never be broadcast now in million years: Tony would have the police at his front door in the middle of the night. Draw your own conclusions. These days, poetry seems to find it harder and harder to shift the needle – any needle – one millimetre: no questions are asked in the House. But Tony was committed to making all the right people deeply uncomfortable. He did this through the direct address of the reading public. This may be a good time to make a more careful study of his tactics.

I didn’t know Tony well. I hope that the few poets who knew him better – Armitage, Sean O’Brien maybe, but very few others – will write about him in the coming months. Tony didn’t hang with the poetry crowd, and maybe that was wise. When he was forced to, I don’t think we always brought out the best in him. I knew him just well enough, thank God, to have been able to tell him how much I was in his debt. I cooked for him once, and I have never been more terrified of any public reception, knowing his reputation as a bon viveur. He didn’t choke and die, which was a win. He was with his partner, the wonderful Siân Thomas, which helped. And the wine was good, which helped even more. And then we got an evening of Tony with his guard down, full of stories, gossip, terrific swipes at Eliot that would’ve been far beyond anyone else’s means, travel, learning, love, life, and what everyone at that table shared: books, books, books.

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A Scanner, Dorkily

I’ve confined this bit on prosody to ‘nerd corner’ so you can freely ignore it. For those of you still reading: remember the first rule of Foot Club. We were never here, okay. (If anyone fancies a NSP class or two on this stuff, let me know and I’ll stick one up.)

Anyway: I feel the first line of ‘Study’ presents such an interesting prosodic crux, it’s worth separate consideration. Read in isolation, the auxetic line ‘Best clock. Best carpet. Best three chairs.’ – appears to be tetrameter, albeit one with some serious tensions. Which is to say it’s one foot short of the iambic pentameter in which, with a few effective variations, the rest of poem happily sits. That might seem to pose an immediate question: is it accidentally short, or deliberately short? For those who know Harrison’s work well, only the latter explanation is possible. (Even Heaney made more unforced errors than Tony ever did).

So whether we resolve this basically unresolvable line – it’s right up there with ‘To a green thought in a green shade’ in its potential to start a fight at The Footsniffer’s Arms – as either a bold deviation from the i.p. or an extreme variation all depends where we ‘project the metrical template’, i.e. how we choose to line up the i.p. against the poet’s actual words.

A point often missed by my fellow scanners is that the initial line of the poem is in something of a unique situation, and it can sound very different depending on whether you have the metrical template already ‘good to go’ in your head, or whether you prefer to greet the poem as an innocent, even on a rereading. (Strictly speaking – admittedly, very strictly – no poem or line is ever ‘in’ iambic pentameter, or any other metre: i.p. isn’t a real thing, just a binary pattern of space and event to which we sense a few lines have been magnetised. No single line can incarnate it, and it doesn’t exist any more than bossa nova can exist outside of ‘Girl from Ipanema’ or ‘How Insensitive’.)

The first and simplest option is to say that TH has deliberately left a silence. This is a great idea, though it assumes that we’ve arrived at the poem with i.p. in our heads.

You can see immediately that there are a couple of effective tensions on the first two ‘bests’ (some folk call them ‘inversions’, though I don’t hold with that kind of frivolity, myself) but otherwise, it fits well. What you’re then left with is a kind of ‘timed hiatus’ at the end, an ‘inward count’ where you can pause and listen to the silence of the study itself.

Silent feet are very common in poetry – in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, you don’t stop counting four strong stresses in your head, even when there are only two on the page – but it’s very rare that you kick off the poem with a missing foot. (The timing of the space between successive lines of i.p. is supremely unstable, which is one reason why it’s such a great line.) While I think I prefer this account of the line, I confess I sometimes read it in an even more unjustifiable way, with a huge foot-long gap after ‘Best carpet’ – but that’s really just a performance preference. But there is another reading that fits the rules. Just. Maybe.

I won’t get too deep into ‘English can’t do spondees’ controversy (basically: we’re not ‘allowed’ consecutive strong stresses in English because it’s too insistently weak-strong alternating). But while you can’t have true English double-strong spondees as part of your abstract metrical template (Sapphics and all that don’t count; literally) they are often performed in English, and many syntactic and semantic contexts seem to compel them. Nonetheless these remain projected into and not intrinsic to the metre.

However, I believe there’s one semi-exception to this, the ‘initial rule’: an initial strong stress (say, a bold content word like ‘best’) will always be assumed to indicate an acephalic line (one missing the first weak stress), and be automatically strong-positioned; by the time you get a second strong stress (‘clock’) it’s arguably too late to correct it. That’s not to say folk won’t learn to say ‘best CLOCK’ once the iambic groove is in their heads; all I’m saying you have the right to perform a spondee here if you fancy one, and indeed the poet will often suggest you should. This one seems a screamer, given the word ‘best’ is a superlative, as well as so semantically loaded.

This is especially the case with the high-key first line in a metred poem, where no one knows what the hell is happening yet. Shakespeare pulls this stunt about one sonnet in four, e.g. ‘They that have power to hurt, and will do none …’ If that line had appeared later in the poem after the i.p. groove had kicked in, the function word ‘that’ would have sounded merely ‘tensive’ as a ‘promoted weak’ – i.e. as a weak function word in a strong position; most folk would then perform the first phrase / x x /x/ (‘THEY thət həv POWR tə HURT’) against the i.p. In its line-one position, though, I feel I can almost get away with a full fat, sod-it ‘THEY THAT həv POWR tə HURT … ’ spondee. Anyway, try this on for size (i.p. metrical template above, lexical stress below):

The [:] is a ‘mora’ – a timed grunt, a vowel-lengthening or a micro-silence that that acts as the placeholder where you’d expect a weak syllable to be. You’ll often find one lurking in a caesura, smoking a roll-up in the shadows. (The second ‘best’ is now grammatically anaphoric, so we can account it weak. The third pops back up again, in the alternating way of threes.) Assuming you somehow buy the insanity of this alignment, here’s how it then scans, i.e. how we account for the pattern of agreement and disagreement between the words and the metrical template. The symbol ‘|’ marks the caesurae.

This performance - to exaggerate, ‘Best clock uh Best car-pet uh Best three chairs’ – instead distributes the silence of the missing foot between the objects the line describes. Here, the first ‘best’ is a tensive strong; the second is a tensive weak, and the third is back up to a full strong. (‘Tensive’ doesn’t just mean ‘a syllable fighting with the metre’ but also means ‘totally unstable re how you choose to perform it’.) Here, the first two ‘bests’ are tensive, but in opposite directions (demoted strong [\], promoted weak [X]); the last ‘best’ is emphatic. The pub-fight would be over the way I’ve placed the word ‘carpet’, i.e. so wrongly against the metre, it just looks misaligned: you’re obviously not going to say ‘best carPET’, but nonetheless I think it strains against its wrong position expressively, and its weak/strong stresses can be more even than usual. That’s all a scansion is – a sort of self-justifying explanation of your performance preference. Don’t let ‘em tell you otherwise. A science it is not, but it is a bit of an art.

I hear in all this a kind of hyper-strain placed on the supremely class-loaded word ‘best’. Though almost everything now falls under the same umbrella emphasis – the effect is practically suprasegmental – and almost nothing is simply weak: even the carpet’s an active participant in the class war, and the grunting caesurae come on like hired heavies. With five tensive syllables, metre and line are now going at it like Kendo Nagasaki and Mick McManus on a Sunday afternoon in the ‘70s. Analysed like this, the line is either ‘so tensive as to render it technically unmetrical, so you’ve scanned it wrong’, or ‘right on the edge of explosion’ – which is what I hear, or prefer to. Even if the clock isn’t ticking, something is.

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