PRETTY bad, eh? But not bad enough to be great. Only Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant of Burmah, could achieve immortality by being truly awful. The above lines are not to make light of the twin disasters in the Far East but
merely to make the point that such calamities and catastrophes were meat and drink to the peerless poet and tragedian. He could not have resisted giving vent in verse and would have wallowed in human helplessness in the face of the forces of nature and the mass loss of life.
Indeed, not to say verily, one of his verse epics is 'The Great Yellow River Inundation In China': "'Twas in the year of 1887 and on the 28th of September/ Which many people in Honan, in China, will long remember... " His account of the river breaking its banks has echoes in today's headlines: "'Twas then fathers and mothers leapt from their beds without delay/ And some saved themselves from being drowned/ but thousands were swept away." McGonagall himself made news on Friday when a collection of the broadsheet poems he autographed and sold around the pubs and streets was sold at auction in Edinburgh for £6,600. It included one that proved he was a man born before his time, 'Women's Suffrage': "The time is not far distant when I earnestly trust/ Women will have the Parliamentary vote/ And many of them, I hope, will wear a better petticoat."
The essence of his greatness is he could churn out ballads that went from bad to verse while remaining blissfully unaware how poor a poet he was, making him a heroic figure – Scotland's Don Quixote.
McGonagall's life and adventures have clear parallels with the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, who also suffered ridicule and rejection yet remained naively optimistic. As poet and critic Seamus Cooney says: "To achieve memorable badness is not so easy. It has to be done innocently, by a poet unaware of his or her defects. The right combination of lofty ambition, humourless self-confidence, and crass incompetence is rare and precious."
Like Cervantes's Don, he travelled the land in the long-lost cause of his own literary and acting prowess, accepting rebuffs and recognition… The weaver workmates who set him on his way by paying a theatre owner (no doubt for a joke) to allow McGonagall to play Macbeth… the arrival of his muse during Dundee holiday week when "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"… the gruelling walk to Balmoral in the hope of performing for Queen Victoria only to be repulsed at the gate with: "Tennyson is the poet to Her Majesty."
A Dundee website, which should be kinder to the man who is the best thing to come out of that city (apart from the Dandy and Oor Wullie), sneers: "Dundee's best remembered nobody. He was a man without talent…" Typical of the town that mocked its greatest literary asset and let him go unrecognised for a century: "Every morning when I go out/ The ignorant rabble they do shout/ 'There goes Mad McGonagall.'"
The same Mad McGonagall, "the writer of the worst poetry in the English language", is actually the best of Scottish. As long as we treasure him, we are treasuring our ability to laugh at ourselves and remember that our heritage is richer for its colourful characters as well as the doom, gloom and greyness of the darker chapters in our history.
And was he really such a bad poet? He is the one and only doyen of doggerel, but some of our greatest poets have written lines every bit as bad. Robert Burns, apart from the songs and the narrative poems, wrote some terrible stuff. The first two lines of 'To A Mouse' and 'Address To A Haggis' and all of 'Scots Wha Hae' are sheer doggerel and, but for the juxtaposition of dates, you might think Burns was doing a take-off of Topaz. Wordsworth wrote in 'The Idiot Boy': "This piteous news so much it shocked her/ She quite forgot to send the doctor."
What makes McGonagall outstanding is that, while these others could also write great poetry, he wrote nothing but bad. Although another was Alfred Austin, who succeeded Tennyson as poet laureate – and wrote on the death of the King: "Across the wires the electric message came/ 'He is no better, he is much the same.'"
Luckily for us, McGonagall was resurrected by enthusiasts like the Goons, the Monty Python team, the Muppets, the 'Gonnagles' in Terry Pratchett's books and Professor McGonagall in Harry Potter. He is so modern, he is online and 1,000 people all over the world have a "gem of the day" sent to them.
If he lived now, mass media would have made him a celebrity. He would make a fortune in advertising, having written a commercial for Sunlight Soap which earned him two guineas: "You can use it with great pleasure and ease/ Without wasting any elbow grease/ And when washing the most dirty clothes/ The sweat won't be dripping off your nose."
As poet laureate of TV, he would be hired to produce verses on demand about great occasions and tragedies. What he might have penned on the death of Princess Di/ would have brought a tear to many an eye. Help, it's catching!
The full article contains 966 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
