Reviews
Humanistic Texts Review
Tony Harrison -- Fruitility. London Review of Books, 28 October, 1999. pp 12-13.
This poem probably also appears in Laureate’s Block and Other Occasional Poems, which was due out in England in 1999. It starts off with the lines:
What a glorious gift from Gaia,
raspberries piled on papaya,
In four-beat rhyming couplets, it is a bouncing, rollicking argument for
enjoying the gifts of the world while they are available to us.
The poem takes its name from a neologism invented by Harrison for what he calls the fruit in futile humankind. He argues that although our lives may be meaningless, they are blessed with fruitility. He then goes on to list some joys of the fruitilist:
Retsina and grilled squid in Greece,
that death-bed cut-out of Matisse
I chanced on on a trip to Dallas,
Sempre libera sung by Callas,
love-making in the afternoon, . .
to transcribe a few. It draws its philosophic origin from the poet’s mother, who taught him to adore the meager amount of fruit she was able to get hold of in England during the Second World War. This leads him to reject philosophies that view life as a disease we suffer from until we die under the supervision of a priest:
I'd barter nebulous nirvana
for carambolas or bananas.
He then turns to a portrait of the view from the his apartment at 73rd and Broadway in New York, and an account of how friends deal with Aids by concentrating on the good things in their lives. Their response is a little unusual. One spends the money his family sends for AZT on opera music. He tells Harrison,
Got all of Callas’s CDs
To comfort me through this disease.
Another raves on the answering machine of the applause he received for his singing in Brazil. And in his delirium imagines the forest of the flame-flayed parrot where he searches for a cure for Aids from blazing trees, dressed as Violetta and seeing pink dolphins.
At the end the poem returns to the wisdom of the poet’s mother who always told him: ”Never wish your life away.” He remarks that of all his muses, she was the one who taught him to love fruitility.
The poem is a little under 300 lines long and well worth reading.