Afterword

For Tony at 80

Forgive me, Tony, if I celebrate

Your birthday in a form you’ve made your own

And in the same metre try to imitate

What is your literary flesh and bone.

I know that imitation’s flattery’s mate —

Priestly genuflections and flunkeys’ bows

Are society’s icing, which of course you hate:

You want as much truth as humankind allows.

I first met you in the early 80s

In the NT’s green room, when I was loath

To leave that life-devouring Thespian Hades

Where it helped to be a man, or drunk, or both.

You wore your uniform of denim, faded

Like a mechanic’s, a French railwayman;

You smiled, red wine in hand, as you dissuaded

Your burly crew, who revered you as a shaman,

From thumping some milksop twat who’d not

Appreciated Glover, Rutter, Shepherd, Hill,

Or objected to their Yorkshire scattershot

‘Less noise, more sense’, you said, until

The crowd subsided and I shook your hand.

‘I’ve read your work’, I said and tried to quote

A line from August 45, full of loss and

Pain, and you said ‘That’s not quite what I wrote,

It was “smoulder” not “burn for” in my sonnet.’

Humbled but too insecure to show it

Then I began my exegesis on it:

The life and works of Harrison the poet.

I learned your raw material’s stuffed like evidence

In quarto notebooks of quotes and chance remarks

And fragments culled and beaten into sense

In your several rooms in Gosforth Park,

Where, after oysters you had shucked,

You gave me sea bass cooked in salt and rosemary,

New potatoes, samphire salad, and then we tucked

Into cheese, with jelly from your medlar tree,

And I discovered that gewürztraminer

Is not an Alsace region but a grape,

And that behind your often grave demeanour

A mordant wit would frequently escape.

I found that, like a sculptor, your work was hewed,

Carved out of stubborn blocks of words —

Latin, Greek, Italian, Hausa, Czech, construed

Into eloquence from — well, you’d say it — turds.

‘The beat is in the blood’, you wrote, encrypted

In our veins and should be pulsing without waiver,

While the whole body should be conscripted

With mind and ears and lips and tongue to savour

Language, to make it dance from East to West.

And in New York, London, Delphi, your work succeeds

In a universal bardic conquest

For you, the baker’s son from Leeds.

You’re tender, stoic, tough and taciturn,

Often stubborn, not beholden, free

To bollock, blast and castigate and burn

Your enemies — without recourse to allegory.

I’ve known you now for thirty years or more

Read all your poems, films and plays,

I’ve a superfluity to thank you for,

Yet from all your work two items still amaze

And startle me. Some literary fellows,

Professors, masters of the intellect,

Confront their opposites who, with atavistic bellows,

Burst out of crates with pricks erect —

The Oxyrhynchus Yorkshire satyrs.

They wave their cocks and stamp their clogs

And in demotic language settle matters

With the reigning cultural demagogues.

Fierce, passionate and magnificently gross,

In Trackers you gave us a paradigm

Of how to be ourselves, yet make us close

To lives two thousand years ago in time.

You seduced us into managing the jump

Between the past and present, High and Low —

Sophocles and Harrison combined to dump

Our notions of a well-made theatre show.

And in case Sophocles might complain

That you’d usurped his play and made it up,

You drank his health each night in brut champagne

From a three-thousand-year-old Attic cup.

But of all your works that speak to me,

That touch my heart and atheistic soul,

Not one speaks so vividly as v.

None has such power to inspire and to console.

V.’s the syntax of my daily life

The valences of soul and body, heart and brain,

Of family, freedom, culture, husband, wife —

The opposites that my heart contains.

You roam throughout this territorial divide

For harmony and often find despair

Which, though not your constant state, is allied

To sadness or to worse and I’m aware,

Because you told me once, that you’d go mad

If you couldn’t write, that writing is a kind

Of antidote to bedlam, giving the bad

Thoughts and feelings form to purge the mind.

Reticence is the usual English mode

And RP — like my voice — is the default tone,

Which v.’s direct address sought to erode

And the tyranny of ‘good form’ dethrone.

You articulate a sense of place and class

Between your heart’s demand and your head’s call

And always try to pierce the ceiling’s glass

To make art accessible to all.

But, like Chekhov, you say ‘Don’t offer pap,

Bring the people up to the level of the art,

Don’t dumb it down, don’t serve them crap,

Don’t patronise, speak simply from the heart.’

When I became director of the NT,

I asked what I should choose to do, what play.

‘Improve the wine’, you said; it was not to be.

And of my verses now you’d surely say:

‘Don’t give up the day job, show concern

For language, rhyme and rhythm, look with open eyes

At everything around you — oh and spurn

Those British Empire honours I despise.’

You offer tough love and so my bequest

To you should be an enduring Eyreloom

That’s suited for such men, as Yeats suggests,

Who come open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.

So, no, I haven’t baked a birthday cake,

Or served champagne in a cup from ancient Greece;

Instead I have a gift from William Blake —

A yearning prayer for Love. And Mercy. Pity. Peace.

Richard Eyre