Don Paterson: ‘The temptation is to sit on my backside’

They take winter seriously in Scotland. When I speak to the poet Don Paterson via Zoom just before Christmas, it’s below freezing in Belfast and it looks even colder where he is, in the village of Kirriemuir, birthplace of JM Barrie, 60 miles north of Dundee. The cold sun shines through Paterson’s window but he’s wearing several thick layers, as well as fingerless gloves. “Two pairs!” he laughs.

But he is a warm presence, good company as anyone familiar with his poetry – rigorous but accessible, sharp and funny – might expect. They will see this too in his newly published memoir, Toy Fights: A Boyhood, which covers his life from early childhood – Paterson was born in 1963 – up to the age of 21, when he left his home of Dundee on a one-way train ticket to London. The rest is poetry – or almost.

Paterson went to London to be a musician, which is the role he still sees for himself first and foremost (“100 per cent”). He toured and gigged “for a living through the 80s and 90s. Then literature slowly took over.”

Toy Fights spares little: not just the fine detail on Paterson’s sequential obsessions growing up – including origami – but also his mental health background, his anger at British society, even his eruption into puberty (“I crawled into bed as a child and woke up as a depilated spider monkey, smelling like a lamb bhuna and sporting an erection that appeared to have been levered upright by the Amish”), which I note with peculiar pride happened while he was staying with relatives in Belfast, a mile from where I live. (I resist the temptation to check for a blue plaque.)

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The book is consistently entertaining, with many elements that Irish readers will recognise through Scots-Irish cultural connections, and a beady eye for the sort of detail that sticks in the mind. His mother, who grew up in poverty, “60 years later still blanches at the thought of the terrible old curtains she put up upon her arrival in McLean Street, and what on earth the long-dead Alice McFarlane next door must’ve thought of them”. His father died with dementia three years ago: “His last coherent sentence was: ‘Alexa, play Lyle Lovett’.”

Spent advance

Toy Fights took almost as long to write as the period it covers. In the book Paterson jokes that he “started this book a good while ago – I think it was originally commissioned by TS Eliot – but stopped almost immediately, having spent the advance on a guitar”. Why did it take so long, I ask him?

The idea first came, he says, as a book about his life as a working musician, “daft life-on-the-road stuff. I thought it would be nice to collect all the anecdotes. And that was met with some enthusiasm by my publisher, because it wasn’t poetry! And then I just couldn’t face it. Because when I started to remember, it was, oh God, this isn’t the book that was commissioned at all.” In the end Paterson felt he couldn’t write it before certain things in his life happened, “principally my father dying”.

Did that free things up for him? “I could see things a lot more clearly. It’s the gift of perspective you get from someone close to you dying, and you get to remember them correctly.” In the book, Paterson has only praise for his father, who was determined to be different from his own father, “a gruff, rough man of few words”. Paterson’s father, by contrast, was a sensitive type and a reader. Is Paterson like his dad, I wonder?

He laughs uneasily. “I would have liked to be. No. I wish I was like my dad.” Principally, he sees this in his anger. “It’s a conversation me and my brother have a lot, where the hell we got our anger from. But I’m heavily medicated now, so I can’t get angry!” (Propranolol, he specifies: a beta-blocker.) “All men should take it all the time. Certainly over the last 10-15 years, my kids have noticed an improvement. Not that I was ever full of rage, but my father was a very gentle guy, and there’s a weird thing where you strive not to be like your parents, and sometimes, in distinguishing yourself, you end up not being as good a guy as you might be.”

Paterson’s mental health features most prominently in the section of the book describing his time in Ninewells Hospital, following severe panic attacks and what was diagnosed as an “acute adolescent schizophrenic episode”. Was this difficult to write about or cathartic?

“It wasn’t cathartic,” says Paterson firmly. “But it was necessary at some level to make some account of it to myself. It just wasn’t a period of life that I ever wanted to remember. So it was interesting… No, it wasn’t interesting, it was quite horrible. And I don’t feel lightened as a result, but it could have assuaged something at some level.”

Family readers

This is all, of course, very personal stuff he’s sharing with the world, things he hadn’t even opened up to himself about. Did he show it to his family before publication? “I showed my brother bits, and my kids have read it. My mother’s waiting for the audiobook. I’m tempted to edit it beforehand – I’ve done that before. I remember my very first book of poems [Nil Nil, 1993], my grandfather demanded to read it, but by the time I’d finished with the razor it was 30 pages long!”

Anger features elsewhere in the book too, albeit in a more external manifestation. Paterson is angry about narcissists, about his old home city of Dundee (“Bungopolis”), about social media. “It’s the feedback loop and the echo chamber and the confirmation bias that is terrifying about social media,” he says today.

But most of all this former “schemie” – a child who grew up in a council estate – is angry about how the poor are treated in society. In particular, he is cross at “the trendy left” who, amid campaigning for women’s and gay rights, “almost never think about the f*cking poor”. Poetry readers are, he acknowledges, “a largely middle-class constituency”, and Paterson was, until very recently, poetry editor at Picador.

How did he feel, I ask, about the sudden resignation of Picador’s publisher, Philip Gwyn Jones? Gwyn Jones left Picador a few months after he defended its right to publish Kate Clanchy’s Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, which had been criticised as racist. Gwyn Jones said, “I do worry about some of the younger generation [in publishing] needing to believe they must politically or morally subscribe to every book they are involved with in the way they do to an opinion on Twitter.”

Precise language

Paterson says, “It won’t surprise you to hear that I won’t be spontaneously drawn on the subject.” But we hardly need him to be: in Toy Fights, he rails against Edinburgh University’s decision to remove David Hume’s name from a building “for his crime of espousing racist views that were, miserably, as common as breathing out in the 18th century”. Paterson is particularly disgusted that no amount of previous good work can overturn such modern judgments: “Genuine exchange with a student: ‘Do you know who David Hume was?’ ‘I don’t care.’”

None of this should detract from how frequently very funny Toy Fights is. The book is beautifully crafted. To say it has a poet’s touch suggests a style that is lyrical or even glutinous, but really the language is precise, balanced and every other sentence has me wondering “How did he do that?” It’s full of set pieces, like Paterson’s description of sleeping in nylon pyjamas between nylon sheets, where “if I turned over suddenly in the night I got tased,” and “in the morning my hair was like Eraserhead, and I had learned to automatically put a foot on the floor to earth myself before I turned the lamp on”.

Now, at the age of 59, Paterson has recently retired not just from Picador but from his role in the school of English at St Andrew’s University in Scotland. What are his plans for the future? “The temptation is to sit on my backside for the next six months and have a wee video game holiday.” (Among his other jobs, Paterson also used to review video games for the London Times.)

Otherwise, he says, “I’m trying not to think of it as a retirement. There are books I want to write. But,” he adds, “the worry is you’ll just have your career in reverse and you’ll just end up at the bottom of the escalator in Oxford Street with your ukulele again! But hopefully it won’t come to that.”