Tom Leonard - The 6 O'Clock News

Hear Tom Leonard reading 'The 6 O'Clock News'
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The following few excerpts are basically provided for the thousands of English school students presently cursed with having to come up with exam answers if they choose this poem in their GCSE. What follows is not meant to "explain" the poem but simply to provide some context from some of Tom Leonard's other writings about the political nature of language in Britain. The poem itself was published in 1976.

Other prose and poetry connecting with the below can be found in Intimate Voices and Reports from the Present.

• The Proof of the Mince Pie
• Opening to essay The Locust Tree in Flower, and why it had difficulty flowering in Britain
• A Short History of the British Judiciary
• A Short History of the British Army

Here's a university past-paper question on English Literature-it's one taken literally at random from some I've been looking at recently: "'Their imagery is rarely decorative, it is used to intensify their meaning. And it is through their imagery that we can distinguish their very different concepts of the relationship of man to God." Discuss with reference to two or more of the metaphysical poets." Well, discuss, but not in a Glasgow accent: simulate the middle-class modulations and bon-mots of the question to "discuss", in an exam hall with your brain packed with "key quotes" on your way to �2,000 a year, the different ideas some men had on "the relationship of man to God". Is nothing sacred? No, nothing is as far as the university is concerned; and the university is at the heart of the perpetuation of the "culture" myth. The university (and here I speak specifically about the arts faculties) is a reification of the notion that culture is synonymous with property. And the essentially acquisitive attitude to culture, "education", and "a good accent" is simply an aspect of the competitive, status-conscious class structure of the society as a whole.

What do a lot of people think of when one mentions the word "poetry" to them? More than once I've been told it's "Keats, and that"-sometimes I got Shelley, Milton and Shakespeare thrown in. As I heard one teacher put it, she always felt proud that she spoke the same language as "the byootiful lengwidge of Milton". And how often do you hear those letters on "Any Answers" etc. on the radio complaining about the corruption of "our beautiful English language"? The "beauty" of a lot of English poetry (particularly the Romantics) for many, is that the softness of its vowel-enunciation reinforces their class-status in society as the possessors of a desirable mode of speaking. And of course Keats's "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" goes down a bomb with the "Any Answers" brigade; where beauty in language is recognised as the property of a particular class, then naturally truth is assumed to be the property of that class also. So a person who doesn't "speak right" is therefore categorised as an ignoramus; it's not simply that he doesn't know how to speak right, but that this "inability" shows that he has no claim to knowledge of truth. That supposed insult "the language of the gutter" puts forward a revealing metaphor for society. The working-class rubbish, with all its bad pronunciation and dreadful swear words, is only really fit for draining away out of sight; the really great artist though, will recycle even this, to provide some "comic relief" to offset the noble emotions up top

What I like about Williams is his voice. What I like about Williams is his presentation of voice as a fact, as a fact in itself and as a factor in his relationship with the world as he heard it, listened to it, spoke it. That language is not simply a means of snooping round everything that is not itself - that's what I get from Williams.

The British are very sensitive about voice. Not sensitive the way Williams was sensitive, but in a very different way. And the answer lies as usual, not in the soil, but in the bankbook. There are basically two ways of speaking in Britain: one which lets the listener know that one paid for one's education, the other which lets the listener know that one didn't. Within these two categories there are wide variations, the line between the two is not always clear, and there are always loads of exceptions to any rule. But one can say of the two categories, the latter - the "free" education one - has much the wider variety. It is this very variety of regional
working-class accents which the "bought" education has promised to keep its pupils free from, and to provide them instead with a mode of pronunciation which ironically enough is called "Received". The "Received Pronunciation" of Edinburgh will differ from that of Oxford (in its retention or elision of the "r" in a word for example) but the message of the medium is basically the same: this pronunciation is not received at all, but mummy and daddy paid for it: this pronunciation is important not so much for what it is, but for what it isn't.

All modes of speech are valid - upper-class, middle-class, working-class, from whatever region: linguistic chauvinism is a drag, pre-judging people just because they speak "rough" or with the accent of another region, or equally, pre-judging people just because the speak "posh". But to have created, or at least to have preserved, a particular mode of pronunciation on a strictly economic base, cannot but have very deep repercussions in a society, and in the literature of a society - and there's no use in anyone trying to minimise the importance of this fact, because it's got to be seen for what it is, and what it's done.

When you have in a society on the one hand a standardised literary grammar (standardised spelling and standardised syntax) and on the other hand a standardised mode of pronunciation, the notion tends to get embedded in the consciousness of that society, that one is part of the essence of the other. Prescriptive grammar, in other words, becomes the sound made flesh of prescriptive pronunciation. The tawdry little syllogism goes something like this:-

1. In speaking of reality, there is a standard correct mode of pronunciation.
2. In writing of reality, there is a standard correct mode of pronunciation.
therefore,
3. In reality, correct spelling and correct syntax are synonymous with correct pronunciation.

Putting it another way, if a piece of writing can't be read aloud in a "correct" Received Pronunciation voice, then there must be something wrong with it. It's not valid. And this might not merely apply to the grammar of the writing, but the semantic content as well: since the standard pronunciation, having to be bought, is the property of the propertied classes,then only such content as these classes do not find disagreeable, can be "correct". Enter the inevitable assertion that the language of these economically superior classes is aesthetically superior - then in the interests of "Beauty" and "Truth", the regional and the working class languages,whatever else they're capable of, certainly aren't capable, the shoddy little things, of great Art.

Now this was bound to stick first, on any large scale, in the throat of the American voice; after all America,like Britain, is a property-based hierarchical society. Folks pay for their own education, folks stand on their own two feet. Why then should an American follow grammatical rules of prose or poetry which in effect simulated a voicehe not only didn't have, but didn't want? By the early years of this century it was America, not Britain, that was the great economic industrial powerinthe English-speaking world. The times were ripe, as they say, for a fundamental change in the nature of written English. It's important I believe to see Williams against this background of a shift in linguistic-political power; it's one important aspect, that is, amongst several. The following is how Williams himself, in his autobiography, saw the fundamental change that was taking place:-

That was the secret meaning inside the term "transition"during the years when the painters following Cezanne began to talk of sheer paint: a picture a matter of pigments upon a piece of cloth stretched on a frame.

... It is the making of that step, to comeover into the tactile qualities, the wordsthemselves beyond the mere thought expressed that distinguishes the modern, or distinguished the modern of the time from the period before the turn of the century.
(William Carlos Williams: Autobiography New Directions 1967, p. 380)

Granted that repeatedly in hiswriting,andinhis disagreement with Eliot, Williams insists on the necessity of recognising the non-English nature of the American idiom. But the quoteabove from Williams's autobiography illustrates that Williams was not interested in simply replacing one linguistic-political tool (or bludgeon) with another. His inclination to see and treat language as an object in itself might havebeenmotivated bythethought that this was a necessary initial process prior to the consolidation of a specifically American poetic mode - but in treating themediumofpoetry, language, as an object in itself, he was simply keeping abreast of developments in the other arts of his time.

And their judges spoke with one dialect
but the condemned spoke with many voices.

And the prisons were full of many voices,
but never the dialect of the judges.

Q . What is the percentage of people in command of the British Army who have working-class accents?
A . I'm sorry, he would have been pleased to speak to you, but he is in bed with laryngitis.

Q . What is the percentage of British troops in the front line who have public school accents?
A . I'm sorry, he would have been pleased to speak to you, but he is in bed with laryngitis.