A memoir? Don Paterson? That Don Paterson? The idea that Scotland’s phlegmatic laureate of gloom, the laconic sensei of Zen Calvinism, should drag out his entrails and read them for our edification across 400 pages of autobiographical prose seems, well, a bit unlikely. Bare his soul? I once saw him deliver an hour-long lecture to a transfixed – and slightly scared – freshman English class at the University of Aberdeen without removing his Crombie overcoat. Or even unbuttoning it. He was like an eloquent undertaker. “Whatever I do with all the black,” he wrote in an early poem, “is my business alone.”
Now, it seems, it’s our business, too. And that turns out to be a very good thing. Toy Fights, Paterson’s attempt to answer the question posed by the man in the mirror (“Why did we end up this guy?”), is wise, tender, eloquent, dark and funny. It takes the story of Don Paterson up to his 20th year when he leaves his hometown of Dundee for the dubious delights of 1980s London. Along the way, it throws out entertaining insights into pretty much everything you could think of: the folk music revival, competitive origami, sex, municipal corruption, the Protestant work ethic, Kraftwerk, narcissists, school discos, self-loathing, ring roads, Enid Blyton and Greek mythology.
What it doesn’t treat, in any great detail, is poetry. Paterson is one of the most prodigiously gifted, lavishly garlanded poets currently at work in English, winner of the TS Eliot Prize (twice), all three Forward Prizes and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He is the author of a monumental treatise on poetics and for 25 years served as poetry editor at Picador. Toy Fights covers none of this: it cuts out before Paterson has fashioned a stanza.
And yet, for those asking, “Where is the poetry?”, the answer must be “everywhere”. On every page, Paterson handles language with a poet’s muscularity and verve, with a poet’s attention to scansion and assonance. What he jokingly refers to as “the quaint and dinky skills of old-school versifiers” are abundantly present. Whether relating his failings as a teenage trombonist (“I panicked and immediately shanked the big glissando”) or characterising a wayward uncle (“A certain what-happens-in-Troon omertà surrounds his activities”), the style swings dizzily between mandarin and vernacular. Good luck finding the dull and clunky sentences in Toy Fights. They don’t exist.
The “toy fights” of the title refer to a cheerfully violent playground game, but Paterson is also signalling some rather graver engagements – namely, his “fights with God, drugs and insanity”. His clear-eyed accounts of youthful fundamentalism, teenage drug-taking and eventual schizophrenic breakdown are excoriating, brave and shot through with shafts of gallows humour.
He also writes with grim vividness on the pervasive violence of his schooldays, where beatings were meted out not just by schoolyard bullies but also Lochgelly-wielding teachers. (A Lochgelly, named after the Fife town where the implement was manufactured, was a “fork-tongued, hand-tooled leather tawse”, kept in the teacher’s desk drawer or, for the real gunslingers, worn under the jacket like a shoulder strap and whipped out before quailing miscreants with a sadistic flourish.)
But it’s not all bitterness and bile. The passages on his father – a gentle, unfulfilled man who drove long hours as a jobbing musician when his day job was over, providing for his family – are simply beautiful. And Paterson’s reflections on the Scottish diet (it “draws heavily from the Tan Food Group”) are reliably hilarious. There’s a page-long paean to Scottish tablet – that fudge-like Caledonian traybake – that reads like an ecstatic prose updating of Robert Burns’ Address to a Haggis and maybe the finest passage of prose I have read all year. I won’t start quoting it because I wouldn’t be able to stop.
The book is also a cultural gazetteer of Scotland’s most unwarrantably – okay, sometimes warrantably – disparaged city. Dundee, optimistically described here as “a kind of boreal Naples”, is the home of secretive media behemoth DC Thomson, publisher of the Beano, the Dandy and the Sunday Post (a popular Scottish tabloid described by the author as “a kind of Kailyard Pravda”). Paterson, who briefly worked there, gives us the inside scoop on DCT. He also provides the lowdown on Dundonian cuisine (the legendary “Buster”), Dundonian music and literature, and the oscillating fortunes of Dundee United FC, whose competitive record against the mighty Barcelona (played four, won four) is indeed “the most absurd stat in world football”.
Despite the frequent bleakness of its themes, Toy Fights is a blast of pure reading pleasure: pleasure in the searching intelligence at work; pleasure in the humane, self-deprecating sensibility; and, above all, pleasure in the gloriously exuberant prose. It is the literary equivalent of Scottish tablet: madly addictive, impossibly good and, at least in the short term, likely to spoil your appetite for anything else.
Toy Fights: A Boyhood, by Don Paterson (Faber, $39.99)
