Extract from the Introduction to The Comic Legend of William McGonagall

This work was the product of two midlife crises mine and McGonagalls. A midlife crisis is that point when you realize you have wasted the first half of your life, and it is now time to decide how you are going to waste the other half. For McGonagall, sometimes known as the Clown Prince of Poets, the decision was easy. Having wasted the first half of his life as a penniless weaver, he decided he would spend the second half as a penniless poet. Besides, he was acting on the direct orders of the Muse who had visited him during the Dundee holiday week and whispered her instructions in his ear.

Unfortunately, the Muse did not present herself to me in quite such a dramatic fashion. Unlike McGonagall, I did not decide to forsake my day job, as a teacher, in pursuit of artistic glory, but just changed the way I disposed of my spare time. Hitherto this had consisted of painting landscapes. A noble pursuit but one I felt that had not provided enough challenges, even though I still enjoy doing it when I get the chance. No, I wanted to do something different. Naturally, I considered cutting a Highland cow in half and pickling it in formaldehyde, but I didnt know Charles Saatchi so there wasnt a lot of point. I needed something less messy but more shocking.

My moment of inspiration came at a McGonagall Night Supper, a superbly anarchic event for which the high point of the evening was a recitation of the bards tragic masterpiece The Tay Bridge Disaster. To give dramatic emphasis to salient points in the verse, a variety of props were required. These ranged from an inflatable sex toy to a toilet bowl filled with dry ice. As the only artist among the performers, I was asked to create some cardboard cut-outs to enlarge the number of props. One was to be of God and another of a catastrophe. God was easy enough but a catastrophe proved more difficult, until a friend, Richard Alexander, deliberately mispronounced the word cat-arse-trophy during a rehearsal. In no time at all I had cut out the shape of a cat perched on top of a trophy, whilst exposing its rear end. It was a satisfyingly surreal image which gave me the idea for a book illustrating the life and poems of the great man. However, I needed to know more.

I had known for many a long year that McGonagalls doggerel had become a byword for all that was bad in poetry, but I hadnt realized that he only decided to abandon his trade as weaver and follow the Muses command in middle age. I didnt know that he was well versed in the works of Shakespeare and had even tried his hand at acting. I knew nothing of his ill-fated trips to London, New York, Fife and Balmoral.

Most of this information I gleaned from his three published autobiographies, all of which contain slightly varied accounts of his adventures. But then there was MacDiarmids essay, The Great McGonagall, which casts some doubt on the authenticity of these stories, claiming that many of them may have been made up by bullies who tormented him. There were I also discovered, when browsing the Internet, those who claimed that McGonagall knew his poetry was bad and only feigned that he was serious to gain public acclaim.

Disentangling fact from fiction was going to be well-nigh impossible; the only thing anyone could be certain of was his desire to be recognized in the face of ridicule, poverty and misfortune. If some of the more bizarre episodes in his autobiographies were made up by others, McGonagall made no attempt to deny them. Even if it had dawned on him that his poetry was bad, he seemed to conduct his life according to the principle that it is better to be known for being awful than not at all...

Charles Nasmyth