Sunday, November 14, 2010

The Book of McGonagall: Chapter One

McGonagall's trek to Balmoral is, as I have yodelled elsewhere, one of the great Quixotic acts. This novel, in the poet's mantic utterance, is an account of that walk and the strange visions which come to the famished imbecilic bard en route.

I begin this eternal work on Friday the 13th of July 1878, because my Angel tells me I am to crack all convention. My name is Guglielmus Nasreen Caspar Triskodekophilus McGonagall, and I am in a state of temperate hilarity. This means no drink has passed my lips, but they tremble with the joy of the Lord that is in every word he has donated to us as the English language. When I say hilarity I do not mean to suggest that this volume will be in any way humorous: my Angel who enters me through the left foot and through my stocking sole (where there is a convenient hole my wife has not yet darned) informs me that the poet Dante from Florence did not mean his Divine Comedy to be a joke, but to have a happy ending. And so, I pray most devoutly, may my tale.

Dante was a very famous poet of the Italian peninsula, the country of Garibaldi, just as Shakespeare was in Britain, and Rabbie Burns in North Britain. But Rabbie Burns was a partaker of alcohol, which could not be said of Shakespeare, nor, judging from his portrait by Rossetti which hangs in the Municipal Gallery of Dundee, of Dante either. All great poets are temperate souls like me, though filled with the inspiriting hilarity of divine intervention. I am indebted to this spirit for all the things hidden from me by my poor upbringing in this magnificent city of Dundee and on the island of Southronaldsay. So if there are words you are not familiar with, dear reader, then we must blame my Angel (how I tremble again at the thought of you clutching this book to your bosom in your study like that of my great friend the Reverend George Gilfillan. I am sure you are a pure girl and well-thought of by your parents.) My parents were only Irish, but very good people, and came from a village in the County of Donegal that neither me nor my Angel is able to spell.

But to my purpose, which is to tell you of the journey I am about to undertake. I am to keep a diary throughout this trip, which is a kind of pilgrimage like the poor folk of Ireland used to undertake to Loch Derg which you might know as St Patrick’s Purgatory. Of course I am talking of Catholics here and I am sure you are a good Protestant girl, my dear reader. My pilgrimage has nothing to do with papacy or idolatory of that sort, but is a visit to our dear Queen who is sitting in Balmoral with her ponies and her good friend the Scotsman John Brown. You see I am a poet, and my verses are often about the doings of her Majesty. If this book has, as I pray it will, a fine frontispiece picture of your humble servant William, then you will see from my long nose and wrinkled brow and the depth of feeling in my eyes that, like Dante, who I resemble somewhat, I am truly a poet.

(Will you call me William in the tranquillity of your study? Which, now I consider it, would surely be more lady-like than my friend the Reverend Gilfillan’s, who is a great scholar and critic as well as a holy man. Your study is perhaps filled with more romantic volumes as befits the gentler sex, though I am sure your loving parents will have placed a temperance tract and something on the good morals of young people therein. But I mean it will have more of the air of a boudoir, with perhaps lacey curtains and a picture or two, perhaps that picture of Dante that is in the Municipal Art Gallery mourning his beloved Beatrice, thanks to the beneficence of our Majesty the Queen in memory of her beloved Prince. But my Angel tells me I must return to my subject.)

A poet does not earn any more money than a handloom weaver, which is what I was before I was seized by the left foot and compelled to utter verses, and still am in those short intervals in between poems, so a poet requires a patron. I have written many letters to the rich and famous of our thriving burgh of Juteopolis (which is what we call Dundee), to the Lords of the industries of weaving and the blubber trade – the Baxters gave shelter to the young Mary Shelley who wrote about the horripilating monster Frankenstein, and so had little change to spare for me; similarly the Glendales told me they had a great interest in the arts, and wished me very well, and I have heard nothing back as yet from the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company, perhaps because so many of their able skippers are at sea, hunting the great beasts of the deep in the far-off frozen wastes.

So I have decided to make a pilgrimage to our great Queen and Empress, Victoria herself. Surely a lady so noble as to build us the Albert Institute and surround it with such magnificent and decorative shrubberies will hear the solemn pleas of a humble poet and subject.

Whilst I am on my voyage, for which I shall have to employ Shank’s Pony, a noble beast, though his shoes need a little cobbling to keep out the wet (you see, my dearest reader, I am not totally without fun in my hilarity), I will regale you with tales of my various adventures and voyages, including my trip to the United States of America, to London, and also to Crieff. Of course several of these pilgrimages have not yet taken place, but my Angel informs me they shall all go splendidly and add immeasurably to my reputation which shall ring down the ages like a large dinner gong in a splendid hotel.

But before I do perhaps I should say a word about my Angel who is my constant companion in my trials and tribulations with the people of Dundee and publicans. I was a weaver by trade as was my parents, and earning a little money and living in a dwelling in Paton’s Lane near the Perth Road when I felt a curious itching in the sole of my left foot. Thinking that a tack had come through the linoleum, I bent to examine the floor, attracting the curiosity of my wife who was sewing by the range.

‘What are you doing now, William? Cannot you sit still for a moment? I swear the man has a glass _rse,’ she said. (I apologise for the profanity, but those were the words she uttered, and, as our great poet Rabbie Burns said in a moment of sobriety, Facts are chiels that will not ding. Chiels being children. In any case, when this is a book I will insist that the printer disguises the offending word. Dear reader, I would not like any harm or corruption to come to you through the foolish mouth of my wife who, I must say, has not always supported me in my divine task.)

‘I feel a something in my foot, dear,’ I replied, ‘and it is rising to my bosom.’

‘I feel something in my foot, and it’ll be rising to your _rse if you don’t settle down. I’ve twelve more of these to finish this evening,’ replied my dear wife.

At that moment the sensation reached my brain and I saw my hand begin to twitch. I heard as clearly as the larksome voice of my wife a strong voice saying to me ‘Write! Write!’

‘But what shall I write?’ I asked the voice. ‘Where is that pencil?’ I asked my wife.

‘What are you blethering about the now?’ she replied, while the voice continued to intone solemnly, ‘Write! Write!’

I felt like Samuel in the Bible when he wakes and goes to Eli. My mind was ablaze and my hand was twitching on the table. The voice was light and sonorous, a pleasing tenor, though it had an element of the foreign about it, like a dago or an Italian. I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps this is the voice of Dante himself.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said the voice. ‘Now just write! Write!’

My eye fell on a copy of the Weekly News, which contained an article by the Reverend George Gilfillan, which I had recently been perusing after my labours at the handloom, and it came to me that I should address my first ever poem to this great soul, who Dante would be sure to place in the Paradise section of his magnificent hilarious poem. And so I commenced to writing verse.

And ever as I faltered the voice of my Angel recited to me the next line, teaching me how to beat out the rhythm just as Shakespeare does in his penny plays MacBeth, Richard III, Hamlet and Othello, and ever I was careful to place a rhyme at the end of the necessary lines, and it all came out very naturally as if I had been doing it since my early youth.

‘Whit on earth is this rubbish ye’re wasting paper on?’ asked my wife, a woman until this moment unacquainted with the workings of a poet’s mind, so I explained what had happened and she struck me about the head.

‘In yir head is it?’ she asked. ‘Well, I’ll soon knock it out of there, the foolish cratur. Let it go and live in Holy-face Gilfillan’s heid if it wants. It’ll be better off there. Less draughty for a start.’

And as she was saying these dreadful calumnies on the good man to whom I had just written my first ever verse, she was smacking and cracking me about the head with her hands and fists, and grabbing hold of my hair and shaking me as if to loosen the Angel from its residence within. I tholed all this with forbearance, for wife-beating is the provenance of drunkards, though I interjected now and then that the Reverend Gilfillan was a man of the Lord and of good folks everywhere.

Meanwhile inside my Angel’s voice was clear as the clapper on a bell (and indeed my head felt like a bell, so light was it with all the dinging it was getting from my dear wife), and it was saying unto me, ‘Well done, McGonagall, your career is begun. You shall crack all conventions and see the queen. You shall cross oceans and your fame shall cross the centuries. Well done, McGonagall, well done!’

Now whenever I sit at my loom and listen to the shuttle click and clack I feel transported to the clouds that rest in awful majesty above the Tay, frowning and lowering. I hear the train upon the track and think: this is how the Storm Fiend sits and watches us go back and forth across the Firth, all the time weaving his broad cloth of disaster, grey and grim, grim and grey.

My head aches and thrums and I’m in an awful dover till my wife comes upon me and skelps me around the lug, saying, ‘Wake up ye lazy skelf! Whit dye think ye’re daein, making lace doilies for Her Majesty? We need bulk tae gather tanners, sae stop yir idling and set to it, man!’

But my Angel is with me always, though my wife will often shoo it with her besom up the lum, where it lurks among the soot and flinders and whispers to me, ‘Shabby treatment indeed, but I have a word for you: shrubbery. Remember it, McGonagall, for it is a good word and one of Shakespeare’s finest.’

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