One for the paperweight

Roger McGough is now a living monument of British cultural history. He can reminisce about both Jimi Hendrix and Philip Larkin. The Pythons wanted him on set for Life of Brian. Carol Ann Duffy called him the “Patron Saint of Poetry”. For more than twenty years he has presided genially over Poetry, Please on BBC Radio 4 – the most prominent mainstream platform available for contemporary poets. His new 752-page Collected Poems is more to be unveiled than read, with a smattering of reverent applause.

Hecklers should beware. Included here is the poem “Scorpio”, describing a souvenir from New Mexico: a paperweight, a scorpion encased in glass. On the base McGough has inscribed the names of eleven critics of his verse: “though forgiven, / they are not forgotten, their names weighted down / beneath a scorpion”. Forgiven? It’s a revealing poem from someone so often seen as “nice”:

Only one is a woman. A poet whose photograph
never appears on the back cover of her books.
And on meeting her recently for the first time
I could understand why, and it cheered me no end.
But fleetingly, for she is old now, and semi-retired.

That number – eleven – is impressive. Few poets get the attention of a negative review these days. But why did the critics carp? In the past McGough has turned on his critics of the 1970s and 1980s: “They weren’t wielding that sort of power because they were the best but because they were well-connected”. McGough, of course, came to fame without connections. Liverpool-based in the era of Beatlemania, he was in a pop group with Paul McCartney’s brother. Would McGough’s breakthrough, The Mersey Sound (1967), have been published without the trail blazed by the Fab Four?

The more “literary” critics were doubtful. Certainly there were sneers. Ian Hamilton had published McGough in the 1960s, but quickly began to cultivate disdain for his “crowd-pleasing” work. A special edition of Hamilton’s magazine The Review surveyed the “Poetry Scene”, inviting a critical verdict on the success of The Mersey Sound. Here’s David Harsent: “A nasty piece of cross-breeding between the Beats and rock music spawned a gruesome monster in Liverpool.” Here, in the same edition, is Clive James: “When you think … of how easily McGough could be out-Rogered by anybody with a touch of class, it seems a terrible pity that serious poets let all the available enthusiasm go by default to twelfth-raters.” But the sneering wasn’t confined to Hamilton’s circle. In 1978 Michael Schmidt, in PN Review, lamented McGough’s inclusion in a Spanish anthology of contemporary English poetry: “What will serious Spanish readers feel when, looking here for the best English writing of our time, their eyes fall on the words of Roger McGough?”

By the 1990s, when “New Generation” poets dealing in slang and jokes were “the new rock’n’roll”, McGough began to be spoken of in kinder terms. When he was accused, in 1998, of plagiarizing a poem by one of his students, prominent poets came to his defence, writing in the Independent that “Roger McGough is one of the most generous poets we have”. When he took over at Poetry, Please – around the time that Ian Hamilton, only five months younger, died – the sneering mostly stopped. PN Review’s first notice this century of McGough was by the fifteen-year-old daughter of an old Liverpool acquaintance: a young Caroline Bird gave him the thumbs-up.

But for anyone under that scorpion paperweight, this Collected Poems will bring vindication. It exhibits, in poem after poem, the same imbalance present in “Scorpio” between sweet and bitter, nice and nasty. McGough’s poems are unstable. Excited by the power of writing, but also terrified, he calms himself down with little wisecracks and asides. The performance poet is stage-struck, but has stage fright. In the spotlight he hurries cringingly towards his punchline. Mostly this results in amiable but groan-inducing whimsy: popcorn. But McGough wants to be taken seriously too, so he turns to difficult or tragic subjects. The result is often a bathetic mess. Here’s “A Coincidence”:

I was sitting on a grassy knoll
in Dallas
Listening to a tape
of John Lennon
When I heard about the death
of Princess Diana

Bad things always happen in threes
Three minutes later
three men wearing three-piece suits
Jumped off a number three bus
and beat the shit out of me.

“There’s a coincidence,” I thought.

The starting point is a cliché. The idea develops into the larky 1960s surrealism of “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream”, with a 1960s hint of hippie persecution by suited goons, and a 1960s bus like the one in “A Day in the Life”. The ending is a shrug the reader will mirror. This is a throwaway poem. That someone who actually knew John Lennon would reference his murder so lightly seems quite staggeringly shallow.

McGough has often written about death. But the compulsion to write in his jocular style undermines any touching or elegiac notes. Perhaps straining for the laureateship, he wrote a serious poem on the death of Princess Diana, “Just The Way You Are”, which solemnly begins:

Break, break through the glass
We love you just the way you are
Avoid narrow spaces after midnight
And the back of a black escaping car

His poem on the death of Elizabeth II contains the immortal line “The future, fearful, has gone awol”. In a later sombre poem about (relatively) current affairs, we hear that “In the Ladies, Weinstein exposes himself to a suicide bomber”. This kind of tastelessness was encouraged early on, as part of the 1960s ethos of barrier-breaking and “anything goes”. Indeed, it contributed to McGough’s best work: Sporting Relations (1974), with its mordant tales of a surreal extended family, so blackly funny it should have been illustrated by Edward Gorey; and the poems about the break-up of his first marriage, which were unsparingly bitter and explicit. In small doses this uneven tone could be excused; it could even be powerful. But here, in this unsorted and apparently unedited Collected Poems, it is a repeating unpleasant surprise, as though every fourth piece of popcorn tasted of earwax.

In “So Many Poems, An Apology”, McGough addresses his overstuffed oeuvre with his usual self-effacing bonhomie (“realizing I may not, after all, be its patron saint”). Defiantly (if derivatively, borrowing a phrase that has been applied to art for decades), he suggests that his poetry comes “From trying to prove that, if not for everyone, it is for anyone”. But publication on this level of indulgence is patently not for anyone. Even the dampest of squibs is included. The poem at the heart of the plagiarism allegation is here, without anything resembling an explanatory footnote. Readers can, however, find the controversy (and the superior original poem by Jenny Lewis) in the Independent online.

This Collected Poems constitutes history written by the victor. Poets live far more in Roger McGough’s world now than Hamilton’s. Perhaps, in 1967, in the face of critical stricture and educational snobbery, The Mersey Sound was indeed liberating. But what once was light and accessible can quickly come to seem flimsy and footling. Too many poets are too easily satisfied with their work. Critics, fearful, have gone awol. But throwaway poems get thrown away. And how many more volumes of this size by a living poet will Penguin publish? We will not see his like again.

Graeme Richardson is the poetry critic for the Sunday Times

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