The Scan Man Books: There once was a Scouser McGough, whose poetry really took off
The Story of Roger McGough
Roger McGough’s house in the verdant south London suburb of Barnes is called Dunrhymin. Should we read anything ominous into this? Is McGough – a national treasure, “the patron saint of poetry”, according to his mate Carol Anne Duffy – about to refuse the muse? It seems unlikely. Rather, it is another example of his undying love affair with words, the way they sound, the way they connect, making mayhem and music and mirth. He is addicted to punchlines and awful puns, such as “Discretion is the better part of Valerie” and “Put the carp before the horse”. It is, McGough concedes, an incurable affliction, but one he struggles in vain to contain.
A Small Life of Great Themes
Having said that, he can’t help but laugh when he recalls that in one of his books Penguin described him as the son of a “doctor” when his father was actually a “docker”. Twas ever thus. He once went into a bookshop and asked for the poetry section and was directed to books about poultry. In the world according to McGough, a misplaced vowel or a mispronounced word can make all the difference.
McGough has just turned 66, an occasion celebrated with the publication of his Collected Poems. Here, in more than 400 pages, is the story of his life. It is, he says, in his lilting Liverpool accent, “a small life”. He has gone in search of the great themes and found them conspicuous by their absence. When he started to write poetry more than four decades ago it was full of teenage angst and concern, “about leading mankind across the swamp of innocence or degradation or some rubbish”. Thankfully, he soon abandoned such high-mindedness and concentrated on what he’s good at, carving out wry, witty, observant poems about everyday life which may be joyful but are more often than not tinged with melancholy. If McGough is an incorrigible jester, he is one who frequently wears a black armband.
A Man of His Times
He has arranged his Collected Poems not in chronological order of publication but by genre or theme. In the editorial process, a few poems “seemed to fall on the floor and disappear” while several others have been amended but only, he insists, to tighten them up technically. He has resisted the temptation to revise. For better or worse, he is what he is, a man of his times, a child who lived through the war and experienced firsthand the swinging 1960s, courtesy of his Liverpool passport.
From a Huge Extended Family to a Child of War
McGough was born in 1937 into a huge extended family. “My mum was one of 13,” he says. Consequently, he had an army of aunts, all of whom were characters. They crop up constantly in his poems. One was everybody’s favourite aunt, “a cuddly toy adult/ That sang loud and out of tune.” She was a “goose” among adults but let loose on children: “She was an exploding fireworks factory,/A runaway pantomime horse.”
His father was one of seven children, six of whom were male. The McGoughs were of Irish extraction, many of them sailors, as his father was before he began working at the docks. “There’s something dark about that side of the family,” he says. “Me grandmother – she’d obviously suffered. Her husband had been a drinker.” In contrast, McGough has just the one sibling, his sister Brenda.
Inevitably, his formative years were dominated by the war. When the bombs fell the family rushed to an air raid shelter but when they couldn’t get there in time they crowded into a tiny cupboard under the stairs. Later, he and Brenda and his mother were evacuated to Wales where they lived for a spell with a miner’s family. “At the time,” he recalls, “I was excited by it all, but I also picked up some of my father’s fears.”
The Power of Words
McGough was always drawn more towards language than literature. He failed his O level English, he says, because he never read the books. At Hull University in the late 1950s he studied geography and French. He also began to read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and write his own poetry. Fortuitously, the sub-warden at his hall of residence was Philip Larkin, in his capacity as the university’s librarian. McGough remembers him as a towering, bald, stooped figure who said grace every morning. “I was terrified of him,” he says. Nevertheless, he sent Larkin some of his poems and received an encouraging letter in return. Larkin remained an admirer of McGough’s, including a couple of his poems in the Oxford Book Of Twentieth Century English Verse; high praise indeed.
A Career in Poetry and Pop
When McGough left Hull, he returned to Liverpool to teach. Poetry, from which he never dreamt of making a living, was for nights and weekends. He formed The Scaffold with Mike McGear, Paul McCartney’s brother, and John Gorman, and was seen on Top Of The Pops belting out Lily The Pink, Thank You Very Much (For The Aintree Iron) and other momentous anthems. Then, in 1967, together with Adrian Henri (who died in 2000) and Brian Patten, he was included in The Mersey Sound, the 10th volume in the Penguin Modern Poets series. It sold over a million copies and shook the poetry establishment to the core, but McGough and his colleagues were dismissed by the critics as performance poets or pop poets.
Those were heady days, says McGough. Before he gave up teaching he would slip into telephone kiosks on the way to gigs and – “like Superman” – shrug off his corduroy jacket and tie and emerge dressed like a beatnik puffing a Gauloise. He read in coffee bars and pubs and had a weekly TV slot for which he had to produce a topical poem at short notice. Later The Scaffold fused with The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band to form Grimms. It was licensed anarchy and inevitably the late nights and long hours on the road took their toll. McGough’s first marriage, which yielded two sons, floundered and he moved to London, where poetry took precedence over his pop career. He has since remarried and acquired two more children, who are now teenagers.
Enduring Talent
Unlike some, however, he does remember the 1960s, in three poems in particular: Bob Dylan And The Blue Angel, in which tells His Bobness to forget “the folksy stuff and go electric”; Hey Dude, in which he reveals how he told McCartney that Hey Jude would be a better title for his song; and A Bolt From The Blue, in which he “in no way” claims credit for kickstarting Jimi Hendrix’s career. Truth or wishful thinking? McGough morphs into Mona Lisa. “They’re all sort of true,” he says. He did meet Dylan and Hendrix and he was there when McCartney previewed Hey Jude. “I remember thinking at the time it didn’t seem to be as good as everything else that had gone before.”
But, then, so were a lot of us. Time, the infallible arbiter, has sorted out The Beatles from the one-hit wonders. It has confirmed, too, that McGough’s talent was much more substantial than many of his long-forgotten detractors suspected. If he was a pop poet it was not in any ephemeral sense. A shy extrovert and a soft-spoken champion (in his role as presenter of Radio 4’s Poetry Please), he has given voice to poetry and found a voice of his own which is humourful, introspective, irreverent, easy on the ear, conversational. It is also memorable and enduring and fresh. It may be decades since he wrote lines like: “Let me die a youngman’s death/not a clean & inbetween/the sheets holywater death/not a famous-last-words/peaceful out of breath death.” But age has not withered them nor diminished their potency. Of how much modern poetry can you say that?
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