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Times Books - 29th October 2005 SAID AND DONE - the autobiography
ONCE I LIVED IN CAPITALS That self-mocking, quintessentially McGoughian, quatrain appeared in ‘Gig’ as long ago as 1973, when the poet had already ridden high - the raucous sixties sequeing into the reckoning of the seventies, the wildest times already over, the bloodstains dry on the Scaffold. If that seems a downbeat note with which to start an appraisal of the people’s poet, the gentlest Muse of Merseyside, that’s because his status as national treasure belies a more complex truth: that if McGough has never been taken as seriously as he’d have liked/deserved, it is partly his own fault. Here I must nail my colours to the mast: an unreconstructed fan, and fellow victim of elocution lessons and Liverpudlian exile, I understand the quick quip as a means of survival, identifying you with the tribe yet giving outsiders permission not to take you seriously - sprinkling vinegar on your chip. For me the 1992 volume ‘Defying Gravity’ is not only McGough’s finest achievement, its very name sums up his work: apparently weightless in senses good and bad. The title poem - about the incipient death of a close friend - is as moving and profound an elegy as any I have read and could stand alone as McGough’s own legacy. Nothing can convey the excitement we felt when, in 1967, the tenth volume of Penguin Modern Poets, ‘The Mersey Sound’ burst on our horizon, singing the detritus of urban life and making poetry funky. There were the finger-snapping Ginsbergian riffs of the late, great Adrian Henri, the steely lyricism of Brian Patten, and sitting cosily between them the plangent wit of Roger McGough - who ‘amusedandannoyed’ and wanted to die ‘a youngman’s death.’ Now (so many years and honours later) he knows that the spaces between words speak volumes. And there is much deliberate space in this fascinatingly witty, impeccably frustrating memoir, which reveals so much by its omissions, yet cheats us of the definitive picture of an era we might have expected. McGough always said he didn’t intend to write an autobiography, which is presumably why it is not a chronology but a series of vignettes, well-shuffled and laid out in a game he’s made up, changing the rules along the way with characteristic sleight of hand. His childhood home is described as a ‘Through The Keyhole’ script, (brilliant but baffling) and all the way through time is telescoped, so that it’s hard to know what happened when. As late as page 244 he refers to the end of his first marriage thus: ‘Thelma had found another lover and I was living out of a suitcase. (I had thought of writing ‘battered suitcase’ but feared it might conjure up an image of something deep fried.) Does the parenthetic joke deflect remembered pain, or serve to underline it? Does it matter that o many significant deaths (like that of Adrian Henri) go sadly unrecorded, yet an anecdote about Salman Rushdie gets a chapter? You blink, think you've missed something, go back and find you were right, but there’s something else there. Of course, the winsomely accidental style is deceptive; he knows exactly what he is doing - ending one chapter with a verse which mocks both himself and the reader’s expectations: ‘His life, like this poem, / out of sequence, / a series of impressions./unfinished,imperfect.’ So truly perfect is that to describe the book’s structure - the dazzling virtuosity of its limitations - I assumed it was written especially, until I found it in ‘Gig’, closing a clever poem about a Liverpool down-and-out I wondered if this too was a coded message.....You never know with McGough. Roger McGough was born in 1937, the son of a docker who observed his son ‘through the railings’ and a mother whom Roger adored. We don’t learn much about them - not really - in this book, but when (on page 74) you read McGough’s reticent but exquisite evocation of the loss of his beloved mother, you know exactly why. The pain has to be kept at bay, for no rhyming quips could cope, were it to be released. There is, however, plenty about schooldays, the Liverpool scene, skiffle, beaknik posing in coffee bars, the mad, faux-pop world of The Scaffold and the Grimms, names like Lennon and McCartney (Paul and Mike), Neil Innes (of the Bonzo-Dog-Doo-Dah Band) Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, the brilliant guitarist Andy Roberts, and so on - in all its zestful, bittersweet richness. Reading it, you wish you’d been there, knowing that if you had, you’d have been too spaced-out to remember. (Lucky Roger kept all those notebooks and programmes to feed into this book, otherwise his life might have been swept up with the fag-ends). Interestingly, McGough doesn’t seem to have changed at all. In 1962 he told a ‘hard-bitten fifteen year old’ reporter from the Bootle Times, called Brian Patten, ‘Today poets are...concerned with the sadness of life and convey it in terms of the social settings we live in.’ At the end of ‘Said and Done’ he asks, in a rare moment of frankness, ‘Has writing been a form of displacement activity to keep the encroaching darkness at bay...?’
Being Roger McGough means performing as a public figure and accepting much
affection, inspiring children to love verse, introducing Radio 4’s ‘Poetry
Please in that wry, evolved Liverpool-posh accent, worrying about growing old
when he still has school-age kids, loving his wife but knowing she’d
be embarrassed if he wrote it, and (above all) spinning his words into poem
after quixotic poem, comic, profound, still full of verbal dexterity, surprises
and sorrow, and still sent out to the parts poetry used not to reach. It also
means quietly having it in for critics who patronised or rubbished him (and
there were plenty) whilst knowing there were squibs published which should
have been lost. Being Roger McGough means peeping cautiously out at the hall
to see if it’s full, knowing it will be, coming on like the Laureate
of Liverpool, yet longing to go home. But - ‘Said and Done?’ Hey,
come on, Roger, it aint over yet! This is what I say:
italics whisper, never shout
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