Unquiet Flows the Don

Some books have a turning point and sometimes one can find it a halfway through. In Don Paterson's memoir of his Dundee teenage years, it comes two-thirds of the way through, exactly where I was when I hurried here in my excitement to proclaim one of the funniest books I'd ever read. Continuing from there, it became the one of the most terrifying and I could tell that because it seemed to stop describing various aspects of life in 1970's Dundee as such and began to 'show' rather than 'tell', in that much-used creative writing tutor's advice.

Maybe not all sufferers from mental illness are quite as well-equipped to let others into the experience as one who recovered his senses and went on to be a writer and, if prizes can reflect genuine worth as well as a cheque from a sponsor, a very good one at that. The book suddenly stops being bleakly hilarious and undergoes a key change into the hellish Crazy Z minor which also seemed to be the key that most of Don's jazz musician friends played in anyway.

You wouldn't want to go there. You wouldn't have wanted to have ever been there. Whereas one can, if one sees fit, read his evocations of the 'schemes', which in America I think they called 'projects', with some appreciation that he's indulging himself with some hyperbole, mostly for dark humour's sake, that suddenly stops.

One can't help wondering if the almost essential flirtation with madness that might be required of anybody who is going to become a 'creative artist' of any profundity is worth the ticket. Not all of us found it necessary to devote ourselves to the posturings of Frank Zappa however clever he might, or might not, have been. I was devoted to The Faust Tapes, aged 13, but somehow avoided the worst of what Don went through before he was 18 by retrieving that perilous situation and finding my way back, not only through Beethoven and Shostakovich, but to Al Green and Tamla Motown. 

The breakdown and the inside of the sanatorium, we might like to think, were of the time of Cuckoo's Nest, Sylvia, Salinger and Phil Spector and highly fashionable in their way but the mainstream was safer even if it didn't enlighten you into how Eric Clapton only borrowed a dozen licks from Buddy Guy. Don still almost deboanirly slips a mention of Dark Side into a list of three records he approved of some I'm left hoping there's something else out there that doesn't need of the Moon to be understood.

Don, and the book, recover. As much as any of us ever recover from anything. And the rest, from thereon in, was mostly an upward trajectory to the very minor celebrity of poetry stardom which by now has long since not been the equivalent of what Tennyson achieved and much less likely to get one mentioned on the wireless than if you are much less eminent in, say, British tennis, cookery or the more demented factions of the Conservative party.

The turn that Toy Fights took made it less of a glorious exposition of Don's capacity for grim, devastating wit and into something more harrowing which gives it considerably more depth and makes it yet more memorable than it would have been if it had only been the tour de force stand-up routine it was looking like being.

I'm not entirely convinced he's got it exactly right yet. Surely best known for his poems, I've never heard him play guitar and guess I'm not qualified to understand him doing so if I did, but the prose books, the prose books. He is very good at them.