Obituary: ‘Tony Harrison was a public poet, writing in his own working class, Yorkshire voice.’
Tributes have been paid to poet and dramatist Tony Harrison from staff at the University of Leeds following his death aged 88.
Born to a working class family in the Leeds suburb of Beeston in 1937, Harrison won a scholarship to Leeds Grammar School and went on to enrol as a student at the University in the late 1950s. Class – and the sense of estrangement from his roots that came as a result of his education – was a theme that he would return to throughout his career.
Harrison’s formative experiences at the University included the appearance of his first published poem in the student magazine Poetry and Audience in 1957. He engaged with a number of practising artists in residence on campus under the ground-breaking Gregory Fellowships programme, notably the sculptor Hubert Dalwood, who gave him a primer on the principles of working with clay in his Headingley studio. His friendship with fellow student and future Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka led to Harrison taking a job at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria in the early 60s. Alongside Soyinka, comedian Barry Cryer and other contemporaries he wrote sketches and performed in student revues at the Empire Theatre on Briggate.
His love of, and instinct for, the stage was later realised in an extraordinary run of plays for the National Theatre, including his modern English adaptation of Molière's Le Misanthrope (1973), and Racine’s Phèdre transposed to the Raj (1975). The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, a liberal adaptation from Sophocles featuring football, phalluses and clog-dancing, was premiered at Delphi in 1988, with a later performance at the National and a "homecoming" staged at Salt's Mill, Saltaire. Harrison’s translation of Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride, opened at the Metropolitan Opera in 1978, and he wrote the libretto for Harrison Birtwistle's 1986 opera Yan Tan Tethera.
Harrison's belief in the public purpose of poetry found expression in his work as poetic war correspondent for The Guardian. The Bright Lights of Sarajevo, a poem he wrote in the city during the Bosnian War, was printed on the front page of the paper, and he produced more uncompromising verse on the Second Gulf War.
His work for television reached an even wider audience: in 1987 his ‘film poem’ V, was screened on Channel 4, inflaming the likes of Mary Whitehouse and the Daily Mail, and inspiring an early day motion on ‘television obscenity’ in parliament. One of his most trenchant meditations on a divided society, V opens in Holbeck Cemetery, where graves including those of Harrison’s parents had been desecrated with graffiti and empty beer cans. His deeply moving poems about his mother and father, including Book Ends, Long Distance, Marked with D and Timer are perhaps his best-loved works.
The Tony Harrison Archive in the University’s Cultural Collections reflects the extraordinary breadth of his output, with project files, notebooks letters, cuttings and ephemera relating to his work for publication, theatre, film and television. Harrison himself denied any distinction between his poetry and his work for stage and screen, saying: “poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the opera house and concert hall, or even for TV.”
“His output was prolific and internationally significant with collaborators across Europe and in North America”, says John Whale, Professor of Romantic Literature at the University of Leeds. “ A major figure in the University’s rich engagement with poetry, his achievement characterises the social mobility and optimism of the post-War era - alongside those other key Leeds figures, Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson.”
“Tony Harrison was a public poet, writing in his own working class, Yorkshire voice, which was remarkably consistent throughout his work”, says Sarah Prescott, Literary Archivist in Cultural Collections at the University of Leeds. “It can be heard across his work for stage, screen and print.”
“He was a poet of Leeds – moulded by the city – and his time at the University was central to his development. He studied for a PhD here which he did not complete, and he was finally awarded an honorary doctorate in 2004. He left the University determined to live by his writing. He briefly supported himself with teaching posts and writers' fellowships but was soon able to make a full-time career from poetry.
“The University of Leeds was very lucky to be offered Harrison’s archive in 2007. Collections of this calibre would often go to institutions in the United States, but Harrison’s decision that it remain in the country, and come to the Brotherton, was characteristic of his generosity and integrity.
“The archive is one of the highlights of our collections, and one of the best-used for teaching and research. It has a truly international reach – people come from all over the world to access it. Its significance lies not just in Harrison’s stature as a poet, but the richness with which it documents his life and creativity.
“The creative process is brought to vivid life in the notebooks (over 250 of them), hundreds of files and thousands of letters that trace the development of many of his most famous works. The notebooks are meticulous records of his working process and inspiration. They contain photographs, labels and objects that inspired him, as well as multiple drafts of poems, and chart the complex evolution of his work.
“The archive’s richness is peculiar to Harrison. His febrile creative activity – working on so many creative endeavours and collaborations simultaneously, at the height of his powers – was numbered and recorded meticulously by Harrison, with notebooks on the shelves of his study in Newcastle acting as repositories of his memory. Harrison described – with humour – the process of the ‘marauding Brotherton’ removing them from these shelves to the stacks in Cultural Collections.”
Last year Harrison’s 1993 play Poetry or Bust, and the typically mischievous, rambunctious story of its creation, was celebrated with a display of material from his Archive in Treasures of the Brotherton. He had given his blessing and support to an exhibition of artists from working class backgrounds opening in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery in November. The forthcoming show, ‘[uz], [uz], [uz]’, takes its name from another of his greatest poems, Them & [uz].
“A new generation of poets continues to benefit from Tony Harrison’s pioneering example”, says Professor Whale. “His presence here in the University is guaranteed by the substantial archive he has left in our Cultural Collections.”
This obituary was contribute by the Cultural Collections team at the University of Leeds