Full of grace
The making of a poet and musician in Don Paterson’s eloquent memoir
Don Paterson — much-lauded Scottish poet and successful jazz guitarist — had, in his telling, a fairly raucous childhood. Growing up in Dundee in the ’60s and ’70s certainly had its moments, and Paterson mines them with gusto, eloquence, and humor, sharing his obsessions, his worries, his questions, his moments of defeat, and his moments of glory in this invigorating memoir.
Take his first day of school, for example: “…I’m not convinced anyone properly explained to me what school actually was,” Paterson writes. “I thought it was something we were trying out, like a new kind of cereal.” Deciding that the chaos of “coloured blocks, farting and wailing” was not for him, he cheerfully walks home mid-morning. His dad returns Paterson to school by lunchtime: “I had to be carried bodily into the classroom, flailing and flexing like a landed conger eel and roaring my head off, my distraught father holding my neck and the atrocious Miss Fabb, the assistant headmistress, grabbing my ankles.”
Soon, he begins making friends and noticing girls: “I started to fall in love, serially, and endlessly. At seven I wrote my first and last valentine, for Mandy Martin, a small, fast-legged, red-haired, freckle-faced alpha girl. I thought I was in with a shout because we were already comrades-in-arms: we’d marched side by side on my first political demo, protesting the BBC’s decision to cancel Scooby-Doo.” (Don’t worry: The BBC reversed that decision).
That remarkable voice, pragmatic, idealistic, and seriously funny, propels this memoir in a pleasurably engaging way. A child of endless inquisitiveness, an independent spirit, and a semi-cau
tious willingness to try just about anything, Paterson experiences young life pretty much to its fullest degree.
He develops a fear of rabies after watching a documentary and a fascination with primal screaming after reading “The Primal Scream” (“I did worry that if I started screaming I might not stop.”); his dental escapades are both harrowing and hilarious (“‘Hold him still! Hold him still!’ were the last words I heard on this earth, as I was sucked into the void like a dying bee up a hoover”). He immerses himself in Scottish football cards, chemistry sets, and (very temporarily) stamp-collecting — equally early obsessions with origami and guitars have clearly had staying power — and innovates a hair-straightening technique, which “involved encasing my entire head in Sellotape while the hair was still damp and letting it dry within the transparent helmet. This would work for a day or two, and the glue gave it a high sheen.” At one point, Paterson dresses himself for a school disco: “I had correctly divined that an androgynous look was currently de rigueur amongst the painfully cool, but not what it actually was.” On his arrival at the dance, he “went from glam heartbreaker to fat clown in about half a second. The girls didn’t recoil exactly, but instead regarded me with the combination of repulsion and curiosity you feel when you encounter a thing in the wrong element: a fish on a lawn, a bird on the road, a fully dressed man face-down in a swimming pool.”
By the time Paterson describes his breakdown as a teenager, an “‘acute adolescent schizophrenic episode,’” you are fully invested in his story. This section is truly astonishing, both in the specificity of detail as well as in its gentle compassion for himself and others in the hospital. It’s a terrifying tale, told with grace.
Paterson’s community was firmly entrenched in a lower rung of the class system, and Paterson describes, in no uncertain terms, the relentlessness of systemic debt on the working poor, the oppression of social immobility, the noxious shame, and the insidious analgesics of “bingo, gambling, alcohol and sugar”: “Sugar is the most effective way of keeping the lower orders fat, addicted, distracted and controlled in numbers. Obesity, diabetes, docility and death are the object of the exercise…” (He is equally unsparing in his no-holds-barred descriptions of narcissists.) At one point, Paterson describes hiding in the hall closet with his mom — they were hiding from debt collectors, though he didn’t realize it at the time. To him, it was just a game. (“We played it a lot and we always won.”)
He shares his family’s stories — one grandfather, originally a coal miner, became a minister by studying part-time — with palpable love, appreciation, and affection. (In one particularly funny scene, Paterson and his mother bond over the serious business of popping bubble wrap). Paterson’s father worked as a colorist at comic-book and newspaper publisher DC Thomson (his sole training session consisted of being told “‘Sky’s blue, grass is green, denner’s at twelve…’”), but his life’s passion lay elsewhere: Russ Paterson was a well-known folk musician and a founder of Dundee Folksong Club, and little Don had a pram-side view of the club-circuit singer-songwriters who came to town, including Shirley Collins, Ewan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, and a young John Martyn. His father’s love of music ignites Paterson’s own lifetime appreciation of it, and Paterson’s deep-dive observations of jazz, the folk scene, and many, many cool musicians and instrumentalists, give this book as much of its electric energy as do the childhood incidents mentioned above. This early-life memoir — it closes when Paterson is 20, off to London to join a band — is a generous glimpse into the making of not just a poet, but a person.