Toy Fights by Don Paterson

Don Paterson, Toy Fights (Faber) 

There have been three generations of poets since the end of the line of the effete, other-worldly stereotype that defined the species from Wordsworth to Stephen Spender. The non-poetry world that doesn't take any notice of poets still thinks they're all much like John Keats. Never mind that there's been Tony Harrison, Ciaran Carson, Derek Mahon, Sean O'Brien, not to mention Carol Ann Duffy or Kathleen Jamie since. And Don Paterson. Toy Fights, his memoir up to the age of 20 would do much to redress the misconception if anybody outside of those poem-reading people likely to read it would also do so. Not only that, they would be richly entertained.

Toy Fights bears comparison with that paragon of the droll literary memoir, The Gatekeeper by Terry Eagleton, which is the highest of endorsements since that is one of the best books I've ever read and won for Prof. Eagleton the Emeritus chair of Literary and Cultural Comparative Sinecure at the University of Lancaster, that renowned centre of scholarship that gave me 47% for my essay on Vanity Fair that could hardly have persuaded Prof. Carroll that I'd sat in front of Thackeray's dreary masterpiece never mind read it. That some of that paltry effort had been slung together at Cambridge University on a visit specially undertaken to see Thom Gunn didn't seem to count for much. Insight into Regency Lit is apparently not acquired by osmosis.

Don's story might be even better than Eagleton's but The Gatekeeper has become so hallowed and shrouded in haloes of beatific light that it has gone beyond doubt into those realms of works that one can only shiver and burst into tears at the mere mention of, like Al Green or Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres. At first it might have been going to be a finely-written, acerbic misery memoir full of loathing, dread and Dundee. I live in Portsmouth so I know a bit about grim insularity and places that regard themselves as sui generis without caring what it means but I didn't have my formative years here. Gloucester was idyllic on the edge of what was then fields and Dundee clearly was not but at least deserves the credit for making Don Paterson, and thus this book, what they are. But it weren't all the luxury that creative writing professors have become accustomed to since then, was it, with lino floors that we had Fife to thank for, ice on the inside of our bedroom windows, Nottingham smog so thick that I walked into a lamp-post and school could be barbaric, the in-bred sadism of rugby union in the West Country only now, fifty years too late for me, being revealed as more hideous than character-building.

 

In a way that might not be intended but, as he would appreciate, Lancaster from 1978-81 did its best to instil in me the catechism that the author's intentions are out of bounds, Don's prose books are - for me at least- much better than his poems. By all means, I also,

            love all films that start with rain

and all that Rain entails but am less convinced by aphorisms whereas the books on Shakespeare's sonnets and Michael Donaghy are brilliant and The Poem would probably be, too, if it weren't so exhausting with even him advising the reader once or twice that they can miss out the next 50 pages without missing anything crucial. But we see that obsessive need to fulfil himself, if it were possible, with the whole art, in his account of his juvenile career as an origamicist except one can never tell the whole story, as those 698 pages regularly acknowledge.

 

Like The Gatekeeper, which one reviewer described as the doyen of Literary Theory doing an unforeseen stand-up comedy turn, Toy Fights bangs out the often coruscating laughs like a T20 batter whacking the bowling out of the ground harder and further than he reasonably needs to but 'reasonably' isn't funny. The comparison with the endless host of stand-ups with their routines on Live at the Apollo, many half Don's age and hoping to make their way through a field as over-populated as punk bands in 1977, is highly appropriate because they're doing very much the same thing - exaggerating their real life stories for the benefit of their art and the entertainment of their audience. But why it's funny is for the most part because we recognize it as true. It might not even be overstated. When once asked 'how I did it' in a newsletter I once produced irregularly at work, I said it wasn't me that did it, I just told it how it was.

I'm on page 186 out of 365. I'm likely to finish it tomorrow and then it will be gone, one having to use up the thing one loves until there is no more of it. We could hopelessly hope for more Eagleton one day, some more Danny Baker or anybody else who can make more of their story in the telling than perhaps there really was to it and maybe the childhood episodes are the most fertile but it is devoutly to be wished we get more from Don Paterson. I haven't quoted anything from it because I don't want to ruin it and, anyway, one is spoilt for choice.

I did once try to tell Don, when he was in captivity having to sign books at the Cheltenham Festival, how good I thought the Shakespeare book was but he was having none of it. You can take the man out of Dundee, as far as Kirriemuir anyway, but you can't take Dundee out of the man.

Having yesterday been able to begin the short list for the Event of the Year 2023, today the list for the Book of the Year can be declared open, too.