by Karl Shaw
And from writing poetry I would have to refrain,
Because I was suffering from inflammation of the brain.
He performed public recitals of his work in bars and taverns, which became enormously popular for their sheer awfulness, but McGonagall welcomed the attention and the little money it brought, despite the abuse. As he became more famous, thugs hassled him with trumpets and football rattles during his performances or showered him with dried peas.1 He soldiered on as fruit, eggs and other missiles were thrown at him and, on one occasion, he was in mid-recital when he was felled by a brick. But nothing discouraged him. He would simply raise his voice above the uproar, determined that his inspired words should be heard.
The literary critic William Power saw McGonagall wearing full Highland dress, wielding a broadsword, oblivious to catcalls and laughter from the audience. Power left the hall early, “saddened and disgusted”.
His public readings were often halted by the police on the grounds that they constituted a breach of the peace. Most of the time, he was serenely unaffected by the reaction to his work; he put the audience’s reaction down to drink. Despite the fact that most of his recitals were given in pubs, he was a staunch supporter of the Temperance movement and produced several works on the evils of strong drink (although, ironically, he attended court on at least one occasion when his daughter was “had up” for drunken brawling).
McGonagall was the butt of many cruel jokes, like the time he was sent a fake invitation to meet the actor Sir Henry Irvine in London’s West End. Friends raised the £1 train fare and, in June, he set off southwards on the 480-mile journey. When he finally arrived at Drury Lane Theatre and demanded to see Sir Henry, the stage door keeper chased him off. The experience gave rise to his “Descriptive Jottings of London” with its opening verse:
As I stood upon London Bridge and viewed the mighty throng
Of thousands of people in cabs and busses rapidly whirling along,
All furiously driving to and fro,
Up one street and down another as quick as they could go.
Some of his best known works were dedicated to Queen Victoria. He sent her reams of dire verse and once trudged fifty miles through the night in atrocious weather to Balmoral hoping to deliver a personal recitation of his latest poem, but didn’t succeed in getting beyond the palace gates where he was threatened with arrest. Eventually, he elicited a frosty letter of acknowledgement from the Queen’s private secretary, Lord Biddulph, stating that Her Majesty did not wish to receive samples of his work. This near-brush with royalty went to McGonagall’s head and he had some business cards printed, on which he had restyled himself “Poet to Her Majesty”.
In his lifetime, McGonagall sold just one piece of work, for which he received two guineas; a rhyme to promote Sunlight Soap:
Ye charwomen, where’er ye be
I pray ye all be advised by me,
Nay, do not think that I do joke,
When I advise ye to wash with Sunlight Soap.
In my time I’ve tried many kinds of soap,
But no other soap can with it cope,
Because it makes the clothes look nice and clean,
That they are most beautiful to be seen.
Ye can use it, with great pleasure and ease,
Without wasting any elbow grease,
And, while washing the most dirty clothes,
The sweat won’t be dripping off your nose.
Therefore think of it, charwomen, one and all,
And, when at any shop ye chance to call,
Be sure and ask for Sunlight Soap,
For, believe me, no other soap can with it cope.
You can wash your clothes with little rubbing,
And without scarcely any scrubbing,
And I tell you once again without any joke,
There’s no soap can surpass Sunlight Soap;
And believe me, charwomen, one and all,
I remain, yours truly, the Poet McGonagall.
He also wrote one praising Beecham’s Pills but, as far as anyone knows, it went unsold.
In 1889, in the interests of keeping the peace, Dundee magistrates terminated his public recitals permanently and he was forced to leave the city to find work elsewhere. He gave the ungrateful people ample warning when he wrote:
Welcome! thrice welcome to the year 1893,
For it is the year I intend to leave Dundee.
Owing to the treatment I receive,
Which does my heart sadly grieve.
Every morning when I go out,
The ignorant rabble they do shout.
“There goes Mad McGonagall”
In derisive shouts as loudly as they can bawl.
Despite this threat, he stayed on until October and only left then as he and his family were evicted due to “family disturbances”. After a few months in Perth, he returned to Edinburgh.2 Despite failing health from years of working in jute dust and giving recitals in smoke-filled bars, he embarked on one final adventure in 1888 when a friend paid his steerage passage to New York so he could seek theatrical work. Three weeks later, he wired his friend for more money to return home.
William Topaz McGonagall died in poverty, unaided by the people who had paid to laugh at him, from a cerebral haemorrhage on 29 September 1902, and was buried in a pauper’s grave. His final work, a poem for the coronation of King Edward VII, showed the maestro was still on form to the very end:
The coronation ceremony was very grand
There were countesses present, and duchesses from many a foreign land.
The death certificate misspelled his name – “McGonigal”.
Rubbish by Royal Appointment: Worst Poet Laureate
The post of Poet Laureate has existed, with just one short gap, since 1668, when John Dryden was appointed as propagandist for the recently restored Stuart monarchy. The post has no job description to speak of and the salary is small, although in the old days there used to be a butt of best Canary wine thrown in. All the holder is expected to do is produce some verse if something important happens – a royal wedding, for example. It used to be a job for life until it was fixed to a term of ten years in 1999. Since Dryden, the office has been held by a handful of greats, including Wordsworth and Tennyson, several mediocre poets and two truly terrible poets. In the latter category was Henry James Pye.
Pye once said he would “rather be thought a good Englishman than the best poet or the greatest scholar that ever wrote”. Which is just as well; the compiler of the Cambridge History of English Literature judged that Pye “was, in fact, not so much a bad poet as no poet at all”. He was given the job in 1790 as a reward for his faithful support of the Prime Minister William Pitt. He specialized in rambling dirges on largely agricultural themes, including his extraordinary The Effect of Music on Animals. His position was also compromised by the fact that his patron, King George III, had gone completely and irretrievably mad during his laureateship. Pye did his best to avoid or to manfully circumnavigate the subject, a tricky business at the best of times, especially when it came to the obligatory annual King’s Birthday Ode.
Another candidate for “worst ever Poet Laureate” was the eighteenth-century playwright Colley Cibber who got the job in 1730 for his support of Sir Robert Walpole rather than for his poetry – which, to be fair, even Cibber himself didn’t think was up to scratch. The appointment was particularly irksome to Alexander Pope, who wrote a few scathing lines about Cibber in a couple of his poems. Cibber retaliated by pointing out that he had once stopped Pope from sleeping with a syphilitic prostitute, thereby saving Pope’s life and his translations of Homer. Pope then made Cibber the “hero” of the next edition of the Dunciad, which has since been Cibber’s main claim to fame.
The worst ever Poet Laureate was the Yorkshireman Alfred Austin, appointed after Lord Tennyson’s death in 1896.3 Austin trained as a barrister but, when he received a large inheritance, he left the Bar and took up writing. Law’s loss was also literature�
�s loss. He became a leader writer in the Conservative newspaper The Standard. He had just published his first book of prose, which sold just seventeen copies, when he was mysteriously awarded the laureateship by the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. When asked why he had chosen such a terrible poet, Salisbury said, “I don’t think anyone else applied.” It has been suggested that Salisbury appointed Austin as a joke at the expense of the literary establishment because he hated intellectuals. If so, Austin didn’t let him down. To celebrate the news that the Prince of Wales had fallen ill, Austin wrote:
Across the wires the electric message came:
“He is no better. He is much the same.”
Austin was chiefly known for overblown epics and political insensitivity. One of his most infamous works, a poem celebrating the Jameson raid (a notoriously embarrassing incident for the British Government in South Africa in 1896, and a precursor to the Second Boer War a few years later) in which Austin acclaimed Jameson as a hero, was considered to be in such poor taste that it even earned a reprimand from Queen Victoria. In typical Austin fashion it began:
They rode across the veldt
As fast as they could pelt . . .
Austin’s efforts were universally panned by the critics, who followed his career with mounting disbelief, but the poet struck a pose of lofty indifference, continuing to churn out rubbish and to lecture his public about the literary deficiencies of his contemporaries. When it was pointed out to him that his poems were full of basic grammatical errors, Austin replied, “I dare not alter these things. They come to me from above.” Austin once complained to the judge Lord Young that he was always broke, but added, “I manage to keep the wolf from the door.”
“How?” Young enquired, “By reading your poems to him?”
Worst Poetic Tribute to a Root Vegetable
Queen Victoria had the misfortune of being pursued by two talentless but patriotic poets. The second was Joseph Gwyer, (1835–90), the “McGonagall of Penge”, a potato salesman who followed his two great obsessions – poetry and potato growing – with roughly equal enthusiasm. He often combined the two, as seen in his 1875 volume Sketches of the Life of Joseph Gwyer (Potato Salesman) With His Poems (Commended by Royalty).
The title was optimistic, given that at no time in his career was any of Gwyer’s work ever commended by anyone, certainly not royalty, even though he had volunteered his services as unofficial Poet Laureate on several occasions over a period of twenty years. When sales of his book proved slow, Gwyer offered to throw in a sack of potatoes and a photograph of the author and his horse with every copy. A reviewer in the New York Tribune recommended that customers not sure whether to choose the poetry or the potatoes should choose the latter.
The potato theme looms large throughout Gwyer’s work. In Love and Matrimony, the poet points out that the most important thing a man should look for in his choice of bride is an ability to cook and roast “POTATOES” (in Gwyer’s work, the word “potatoes” was always underlined or written in capitals). Gwyer’s potato theme often baffled his public but was not lost on his critics. Punch began a review of his work “The Alexandra Palace, Muswell Hill, Destroyed by Fire”, with the observation: “We consider this work no small potatoes.”
The Ode Less Travelled
“The quality is often vile
Of cheese that is made in April
Therefore we think for that reason
You should make it later in the season.”
Dairy Ode, James McIntyre (1827–1906)
Love . . . friendship . . . death . . . daffodils. These are just a few of the things that have inspired poets for centuries.
For James McIntyre, it was cheese.
McIntyre was born in Scotland and his family emigrated to Canada in 1841 when he was fourteen. He later moved to Ingersoll, Ontario, a town of 5,000 in the heart of Canadian dairy country, where he set himself up as a cabinet maker, furniture dealer and undertaker. Meanwhile, he published a couple of volumes of his poems on a variety of subjects – patriotism, Canadian authors, Ontario towns, farming, foreign wars, to name but a few. The great theme of his life’s work, however, was the poetic celebration of dairy produce. His output included “Lines Read at a Dairymaids’ Social”, 1887; “Fertile Lands and Mammoth Cheese”; “Lines Read at a Dairymen’s Supper”; “Father Ranney, the Cheese Pioneer”; and Hints to Cheese Makers”. His best known work – “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds” – celebrated an actual cheesy comestible produced in 1866 for an exhibition in Toronto:
We have seen thee, queen of cheese,
Lying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze,
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.
All gaily dressed soon you’ll go
To the great Provincial show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto.
Cows numerous as a swarm of bees,
Or as the leaves upon the trees,
It did require to make thee please.
And stand unrivalled, queen of cheese.
May you not receive a scar as
We have heard that Mr Harris
Intends to send you off as far as
The great world’s show at Paris.
Of the youth beware of these,
For some of them might rudely squeeze
And bite your cheek, then songs or glees
We could not sing, oh! queen of cheese.
Wert thou suspended from balloon,
You’d cast a shade even at noon,
Folks would think it was the moon
About to fall and crush them soon.
The Toronto Globe and the New York Tribune published a few of his poems for comic relief but the general mockery did not dampen his enthusiasm and he continued to write until his death in 1906.
For the lactose intolerant, cheese was not the only challenging subject James McIntyre rose to. This is his ode to orthopaedics entitled “Wooden Leg”:
Misfortune sometimes is a prize,
And is a blessing in disguise;
A man with a stout wooden leg,
Through town and country he can beg.
And when he only has one foot,
He needs to brush only one boot;
Through world he does jolly peg,
So cheerful with his wooden leg.
In mud or water he can stand
With his foot on the firm dry land,
For wet he doth not care a fig,
It never hurts his wooden leg.
No aches he has but on the toes
Of one foot, and but one gets froze;
He has many a jolly rig,
And oft enjoys his wooden leg.
McIntyre’s genius was rediscovered by William Arthur Deacon, literary editor of the Toronto newspaper Mail and Empire, who republished some of McIntyre’s work in an anthology entitled The Four Jameses (1927), reprinted in 1974. His art has since been perpetuated in Oh! Queen of Cheese: James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet (1979), edited by Roy Abrahamson, and in Very Bad Poetry (1997) by Kathryn and Ross Petras. An annual poetry contest is held in Ingersoll, Ontario, in his honour.
Least Successful Attempt to Spot a Great Writing Talent
Even the greatest writers have experienced rejection. When George Orwell submitted Animal Farm, he was told it was “impossible to sell animal stories in the USA”. H. G. Wells’ book The Time Machine was dismissed as “not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader”. Vladimir Nabokov was told that his Lolita manuscript should be “buried under a large stone”. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, was rebuffed as “not at all suitable for the juvenile market. It is very long, rather old-fashioned.”
Before it was eventually printed, the 1981 Pulitzer Prizewinning book A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by two dozen publishers. Unfortunately, belated success did little good for the author, John Kennedy Toole. In despair over his repeated failures
to find a publisher, he committed suicide at the age of thirty-one. The book was submitted to a publisher by his mother Thelma and published posthumously eleven years after the death of her son.
The origin of Toole’s title, a quote by the author Jonathan Swift, was grimly ironic. “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
“Guitar bands are on the way out, Mr Epstein.”
Decca executive Dick Rowe, explaining to Beatles manager Brian Epstein why his band failed their audition.
Worst Published Author of Pulp Fiction
“Keeler is to good literature as rectal cancer is to good health . . . given the choice of reading three Keeler novels back to back or being imprisoned in an Iranian jail, you’d need to think about it.”
Otto Penzler, book critic at the New York Sun
Between 1924 and 1967, the American author Harry Stephen Keeler churned out seventy novels and scores of short stories containing plots so nonsensical and characterization so badly written that they have been called “coincidence porn”.
Harry Stephen Keeler’s home town, Chicago,4 features a lot in his writings. His childhood there was troubled. His mother, a widow several times over, ran a boarding house for theatrical performers. For reasons unknown, when Keeler was about twenty, she had him committed to a mental hospital. This was the beginning of his lifelong obsession with the insane and a deep hatred of the psychiatric profession.5
In 1912, he got an electrical engineering degree and for the next two years worked as an electrician in a South Chicago steel mill, writing short stories on the side. Typical of these early tales is “Victim No. 5”, which he sold to Young’s Magazine in 1914 for $10. The protagonist Ivan Kossakoff is a professional strangler of women, who ends his days locked in a vaudeville performer’s theatrical trunk and is squeezed to death by the pet boa constrictor living inside it.
Between 1914 and 1924, Keeler sold dozens of short stories with titles such as “The Trepanned Skull”, “The Stolen Finger” and “The Giant Moth”. His first novel The Voice of the Seven Sparrows published in 19246 introduced the public to Keeler’s complicated “webwork” storylines, in which several strings of outrageous coincidences and odd events would end in a surprising and completely implausible denouement. It is almost impossible to provide a plot summary of a Keeler book because they have no plot – or perhaps, more accurately, they have a hundred plots all leading nowhere. He claimed to have built his stories from randomly selected newspaper articles: he would reach into a thick file of cuttings he kept, randomly pull out a handful then try to work them into a narrative.