If I Can’t Get a Memoir Out of This

Toy Fights: A Boyhood by Don Paterson, Faber & Faber, 384pp.

‘I knew the game was up for me the day / I stood before my father’s corpse and thought /  if I can’t get a poem out of this…’ –  Phantom, Don Paterson

Don Paterson is not a poet whose work you will often hear described as memoiristic. The three time Forward Prize winner is best known for the formal control and metaphysical scope of his verse. Indeed, anyone who has battled through Paterson’s treatise on poetic theory, Poem: Lyric, Sign, Meter – a tome that might be more appropriately titled Poetry’s Answer to String Theory – would know Paterson conceives of the form less as a substitute for a diary entry, more as ‘a machine for remembering itself.’ Yet, in this debut memoir Paterson mines the biographical facts of his childhood and adolescence to moving effect.  

Toy Fights begins with Paterson’s birth in Dundee in 1963 and takes us all the way to his emigration to London as a musician aged twenty. Divorced from the pared-back patterning of his poetry his experiences of ‘the St Mary’s Council Estate’, ‘the peculiar insanity of Dundee’ and ‘the sexual excesses of the Scottish club band scene’ are recounted with a tone that is broadly self-deprecating and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Within a few chapters the phrases ‘permaerections’ and ‘psycho Nazi’  have appeared more times than in the previous millennium of publishing history – Lowell or Plath style confessionalism this is not.

Despite having next to no mentions of poetry in this book, the themes and topics that it covers – ‘the working class, drugs, religious mania, football, origami’ – share a lot with the poems in Paterson’s early collections. Fans of Nil-Nil and God’s Gift To Women will likely get a sense of satisfaction in connecting dots between anecdotes in this memoir and poems like ‘Elliptical Stylus’ and ‘Dundee Ward Road.’ Even for those less familiar with his work, it is hard not to find joy in Paterson’s outrageous capacity for comparison: his first band, he writes, sounded like ‘testing day at a cartoon bed factory’, his first pubescent erection ‘appeared to have been levered upright by the Amish’, and an early guitar idol was ‘the David Brent of jazz.’

Out of context, such lines might appear laddish or facile – certainly criticisms Paterson’s poetry also once faced – but in this memoir his language is often at its most colloquial when he is being most serious.  ‘My anger is really about only one thing,’ he writes. ‘The unfair treatment of the poor.’ There is a lived-in specificity to his observations, many of which relate to the matter-of-fact suffering of the Scottish working class. He relays the death of his grandfather from pneumonia, caught while fixing a drain, with a tragic casualness. In the same way, the eventual fates of his classmates are listed with an inevitability that almost feels like it should rhyme: ‘AIDS living murder junkie junkie jail living missing AIDS suicide.’

Most moving though are the moments of guilt-tinged reflection on the sacrifices of his father. Paterson describes him as ‘one of the best accompanists’ he had ever met, a tribute that captures his selfless skill as a musician but also his life spent in service to other people as a father, husband and working man. We are encouraged not to forget that this is ultimately a ‘thankless craftsmanship’ dictated in large part by his social class.

His father’s guitar playing also clearly had a strong influence on Paterson’s relationship with music, another major theme of the book. Paterson’s musical obsessions have often made their way into his poetry, whether that be the Forward Prize winning ‘Love Poem for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze’ or some of the stray shots he fires at jazz guitarists in Zonal – Julian Lage, for example, is brilliantly dismissed as ‘one of the many jazz smilers’. But in Toy Fights, Paterson also shows a talent for the type of music writing done by critics like Simon Reynolds or Robert Christgau. The music of John Martyn, whose greatness Paterson claims is ‘incontestable’, is the focus of one excellent passage. Paterson is able to convey not only the nursery rhyme beauty of Martyn’s lyrics or the saxophonous density of his voice, but also the complex person behind the songs, ultimately offering a convincing call to ‘consider the life and the work separately.’

The other topic which gets significant treatment, and takes up much of the final chapters of the book, is mental illness. This may not come as a surprise if you read any of the press in the run up to this book’s release. In an interview with The Guardian Paterson described poetry as ‘one corner of a larger syndrome’ and suggested that as a general rule poets can’t drive, and the ones who do drive shouldn’t. At other points, he has suggested that ‘poet’ would be better labelled as a ‘diagnosis’. At times it has felt like an image he was slightly too keen to indulge about himself. And this certainly rings true in Paterson’s presentation of his youth, in which he flips through various obsessions as if he were shuffling a deck of cards. First, bubblewrap, then chemistry, then origami. Next, are his many hypochondriacal afflictions: flat feet, bed wetting, impetigo, asthma. But, once again, the truly striking parts of this memoir are when the comedic is made serious and Paterson recalls the time he spent in hospital, sectioned as a result of an acute schizophrenic episode.

As well as featuring some of the best writing on psychosis I have read, it also lifts a mirror to the great theme of his poetry: the metaphysical, almost scientific, obsession with the human condition. For Paterson, a successful poem strips back our experience to its constituent parts, revealing the ghosthood that lies beneath. To write anything decent, Paterson argues, you need to have absorbed some fundamental truths, namely ‘our double-realmed twin-citizenship status of being both now and eternal, alive and dead.’ The panic attack that saw him sectioned is described in these terms and is best quoted in full:

It began as a circling, self-feeding fear, a fear of fear, a fear of fear of fear, that accelerated like the flywheel in a gyroscope, tightened on me as its epicentre, then made a kind of whirring lift-off: the sudden disappearance of the mouth and tongue, a terrible lightness underfoot, a weird bounce in the heels, and a tight band vicing one’s forehead. And then a view of yourself from above and from one side, and a feeling that you were choking and about to die; and then the mortified calm horror of complete perfect depersonalisation.

His experience of the mental health ward, which he is able to recall with extraordinary detail, is a poignant and uncomfortable account in equal measure, but also serves to accentuate the weaker points of this memoir – specifically, its petty excursus on identity politics. Paterson describes himself as a ‘radical centrist’ but has little interesting to say about the ‘alt-right’ or the ‘BLMers’ to the left of him, both of which he dismisses completely. It might have been easy to forgive this kind of aside – clearly, the book has more important concerns – if it weren’t for the fact that he insists on bringing it up every ten or so pages, often in the form of protracted footnotes. As is usually the case with the kind of political debates that live largely on Twitter or other corners of the internet, in print they are almost always going to age poorly. Which is a shame, because this memoir does have a lot of interesting things to say about class, poverty and the ‘staggering indifference’ of the elites towards the poor; ideas which feel comparatively, and depressingly, timeless.

In one of several typically aphoristic moments Paterson remarks that, ‘the life we end up with should ideally be far less interesting than the one that got us there: we contribute most when we specialise and this generally means we have to simplify ourselves.’ We should hope that this wisdom, applied to Paterson – a poet, aphorist, musician, critic and teacher, who has never entirely specialised – doesn’t prove true, because another memoir as funny and affecting as this, covering the next twenty years of his life, would be very gratefully received. No doubt he would have some things to say about Tony Blair, the ‘Poetry Wars’ and the publishing world too.