William McGonagall: Quixote of the North

A hundred years after his death, why do we still remember McGonagall, that drab Dundonian bardie? Nobody debates the fact that he was a truly terrible writer, who led a miserable life of poverty and public ridicule, so why? Is it that we dislike poetry so much we actually need him as a scapegoat for the whole pretentious profession? Kick McGonagall, you might say, and we’re kicking that whole clan of smart-arse softies. Or is it that we sneakingly love him for his artlessness, his sheer have-a-go awfulness? He may be a scabby dug, but he’s our scabby dug.

McGonagall had all the qualifications to be a great poet – except for the talent. He certainly had the pose and the persistence: although buffeted by life just as the Tay Bridge was by that storm, he never fell down, and this is a clue as to his longevity. McGonagall is a genuine archetype: the fool who has a touching but totally unfounded faith in his own genius. His gift was to convey this with absolute transparency in his writing: all his flaws are displayed, and they are hilarious and wretched. Unlike many far better poets, McGonagall’s verse is instantly recognisable, unmistakably him. See how, in ‘The Tay Whale’, he’s inexorably drawn to the ridiculous detail:

Oh! it was a most fearful and beautiful sight,
To see it lashing the water with its tail all its might,
And making the water ascend like a shower of hail,
With one lash of its ugly and mighty tail.

Then the water did descend on the men in the boats,
Which wet their trousers and also their coats.

He shares this combination of pathos and absurdity with the great clowns: Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel – no wonder Spike Milligan made a film about him. If only he had lived a little longer. You can easily imagine him in a silent movie, constantly attempting to declaim his verse, constantly being pelted with brickbats and bananas, with only the occasional dreadful couplet appearing in those deckle-edged dialogue boxes.

A teetotal twit who thought he was Tennyson – McGonagall sounds like a comic character out of Dickens. And his continuing prominence in Scottish culture may be due to the relative rarity of such characters in our fiction. While Shakespeare and Dickens created a host of English archetypes, we only have a few historical figures of comparable stature. The cast-list of Scottish icons is depressingly small and mostly consists of double acts: Wallace and the Bruce, Mary and John Knox, Tam O’Shanter and Holy Willie, Hogg and his Justified Sinner, Jekyll and Hyde.

Compared to these McGonagall is bound to stand out. He’s a loner and a loser and a lousy poet, but he thought he was the business. It’s no surprise he liked to play Shakespeare’s only significant Scot, MacBeth: he too was deluded by ambition. Lacking the genius to be another Cervantes, he had the dubious luck to become our Quixote. A shabby Dundonian Don, granted, but isn’t that the very best kind? After all, Dundee has been a purveyor of journalistic mediocrity for about a century now. It’s surely appropriate it also produced this couthy cartoon nemesis of all that is talented. Dundee: home of the Twa Corpses, McGonagall and The Courier.

In McGonagall’s biography we have a fantastic recurring idea – in that Wagnerian opera of his life which should surely have greeted his centenary, it would require a leitmotif. This can be defined as the journey towards failure. At least twice in his life, he attempted to succeed by moving away from Dundee – proof that he wasn’t a complete eedjit. First, he took a ship all the way to New York, only to be unable to get a gig.

I have this fantasy that, whilst there, he bumps into Walt Whitman, Manhattan’s homoerotic master of the rolling line. They have a passionate affair, Whitman cures him of his addiction to rhyme, and he becomes a great New York poet. Instead, after a couple of days, he came all the way back, just in time for the new railbridge:

The New Yorkers boast about their Brooklyn Bridge,
But in comparison to thee it seems like a midge…

Then, famously, he walked to Balmoral to see the Queen. It sounds like a nursery rhyme, and it is similarly memorable. Such journeys constitute one of poetry’s central motifs: Odysseus spends ten years getting home; Dante treks through Heaven and Hell; Byron wanders Europe, writing a couple of bestselling poems. And McGonagall walks to Balmoral in search of what? A good reference.

He tries to get acknowledgement of his genius from as potent a figure to him as Spenser’s Fairy Queen: Victoria, the Empress of dowd. Here she is, in his ‘Attempted Assassination of the Queen,’ depicted in a way which makes it hard not to think of Peter Sellers in drag accompanied by a tutt-tutting Billy Connolly. The wonderfully shoe-horned rhyme completes the picture:

Long may she be spared to roam
Among the bonnie Highland floral,
And spend many a happy day
In the palace of Balmoral.

McGonagall’s abject failure to get past the palace gate confirms him as the evergreen laureate of bad poetry. It also confirms that his real claim on our attention is not his work, but his biography. The poetry is just a by-product of McGonagall’s attempt to be significant (who can doubt he would have walked to London to get on Big Brother?), and it is in his life that we find his real achievement.

McGonagall was indisputably Scotland’s first Dadaist: he drew out from all levels of the population their essential mistrust of poetry, and crystallised this philistinism in his totally anarchic performances. From Dundee publicans to Edinburgh students, they all lined up to throw peas and oranges. Meanwhile he rewrote Shakespeare as he went, refusing either to die or to distinguish between verse and stage direction. This points to what was wrong with his verse. He didn’t write poetry at all: he wrote stuff which sounded like poetry to him. Since he had neither ear nor intellect, naturally the result was appalling.

Because he had no imagination, he had no insight into what makes a poem in the first place, so he hung everything on a would-be exalted tone, and the obsessive pursuit of rhyme. There’s no imagery, and the metre is famously and fabulously out of kilter, the second line of any couplet always in flat-footed pursuit of the first. The cumulative effect of a pageful of this is like watching the Keystone Kops trying to stay in their police car.

Because he had nothing to write about, and precious little insight into his motives for writing, he takes all his subject matter from the newspapers: battles, disasters, the splendours of municipal shrubberies, bridges being built and, above all, bridges falling down:

So the train mov’d slowly along the bridge of Tay,
Until it was about midway,
Then the central girders with a crash gave way,
And down went the train and passengers into the Tay!
The Storm Fiend did loudly bray,
Because ninety lives had been taken away,
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

All this, of course, makes his work absolutely perfect for performance. Which raises an interesting spectre: how conscious was he of his extraordinary badness? After all, he nearly made a living out of it for decades. Is it possible that, at some semi-conscious level of self-abasement, he knew exactly what he was doing? If so, then he becomes the precursor of  those poets who play with their audience’s preconceptions, challenging and undermining them. Could he have been the legitimate ancestor of Ivor Cutler or John Hegley – our first performance poet?

Finally, when we assess McGonagall’s lasting reputation, we have to consider his bizarre description of the arrival of his muse:

A flame, as Lord Byron has said, seemed to kindle up my entire frame, along with a strong desire to write poetry; and I felt so happy, so happy, that I was inclined to dance, then I began to pace backwards and forwards in the room, trying to shake off all thought of writing poetry; but the more I tried, the more strong the sensation became. It was so strong, I imagined that a pen was in my right hand, and a voice crying, ‘Write! Write!’

For all its melodrama, this carries an uncanny echo of the great Spanish poet Lorca’s description of duende. This, the dark spirit that animates the greatest guitarists, dancers and singers, also enters through the feet. It strips away all refinement, presenting something compulsive and true. McGonagall’s performances seem to have been similarly possessed. Perhaps he was expressing something that, if not profound, was certainly revealing about his own time. Perhaps the most radical thing we can say about McGonagall is that he was awful because Scotland – wee sleekit, shortie-slurping bourgeois North Britain – was awful too. And every now and then, whether reading a work of ‘proper’ contemporary literature, or listening to our politicians – or  ourselves – we can catch a glimpse of that true McGonagallian awfulness, still hinging about our culture like an aff fish.

As a small nation on the extreme edge of Europe, we are fortunate to have been similarly extreme in our poets. In Burns, we produced one of Europe’s finest, and in McGonagall perhaps the world’s worst. Between such an Alpha and Omega there has to be room to manoeuvre. For this, if nothing else, we owe McGonagall our gratitude: he makes the rest of us look talented.

(A version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times' Ecosse section)

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