POET Roger McGough has written more than 50 books for adults and children and has been made a CBE for his services to poetry.
However, the Liverpudlian didn’t study English at university, opting for French instead.
In an interview with Eleanor Fullalove he tells Connexion why he is glad he eschewed the more traditional path.
Why were you attracted to languages?
Because I was worse at everything else. I got my best marks at O-level in French, geography and history. I decided to do French to degree level because it sounded exotic but I was never a natural linguist, I never had the courage to speak it aloud and never went to France.
What was exciting about French as opposed to geography was being exposed to French literature. It was reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire that exposed me to poets and poetry.
The benefit of doing a degree in French and geography was that I knew the capital was Paris very quickly!
Did you have to spend a year abroad as part of your course?
Yes, I’m slightly blushing: we were supposed to. Because I did a joint degree, you didn’t have to do a whole year but I still didn’t want to go.
I think I had a girlfriend at the time and I was in the cricket team, so I made an excuse – my grandmother’s illness came in very handy.
I remember going to the professor and saying that I couldn’t do it but I wish I’d done it now.
Nowadays it’s easier, there are gap years and all that sort of thing. My children all wanted to travel and loved it but I was a bit insecure.
My parents didn’t encourage it, they thought it was a strange thing to do.
While at university, how did you hope to combine your studies of French and geography in the outside world?
I didn’t think about it. Obviously, I wasn’t going to be a linguist but I used my French for teaching. I stayed on at Hull, did my teaching year and came straight back to Liverpool where I taught French and geography, drama and anything that moved in a comprehensive school, all the while writing poems.
My best job, though, was at a technical college in Liverpool – the Mabel Fletcher – where I taught catering French.
My degree opened me up to this wonderful course where the students were chefs. I knew what un chinois was and why it was called that, but I didn’t know what it was used for – sifting flour, it’s in the shape of a Chinaman’s hat.
Florentine they knew meant something made with spinach but I was able to tell them it was because when Henri II of France married Catherine de Médicis, a princess from Italy, she came from Florence and introduced spinach into the cuisine. That was all fascinating.
Why did you go into teaching?
They say 40% of boys and girls in primary school now will end up in jobs that have not yet been invented. In those days, there was very little work out there.
You either became a teacher or went into retail. If you were good you could be a doctor or a lawyer. Or a priest – that was really it.
While I was doing my catering French, The Scaffold happened – I was writing and performing with Mike McGear, Paul McCartney’s brother, though we didn’t know it then.
How long were you working as a French teacher? Is it possible you could have stayed in the job?
I took retirement after four years for Top of the Pops and all that stuff with the Lily the Pink song, then the poetry was published.
I wanted to be an artist and a poet and a writer, I wasn’t interested in teaching.
Do you remember much of your own French teachers?
I was taught by Irish Christian brothers at grammar school in Liverpool. The French teacher was Mr Boggiano, obviously Italian.
He’d been in the RAF, a very good-looking guy, energetic, great enthusiasm for the French language. I remember him with affection.
Why didn’t you do English if you wanted to write poetry?
I failed English at O-level. I was good at language and the grammar side of things but I remember at 15 having to read Hardy – I never actually got through the books, so I dropped it.
English was never an option at university.
I’ve talked to lots of people, like Ted Hughes, who did do it and there’s always that sense that you go there wanting to be creative and get it criticised out of you. You’re very aware of what’s gone before – the canon – and you start writing to please your peers or your tutors.
I was always outside that. I was quite naïve, in a good way. I thought I had discovered poetry when I was 18, I couldn’t compare it with anything. I think it would have helped.
It makes sense of why I became a poet. I might have been a different sort of poet. One of the reasons I took the job presenting Poetry Please on BBC Radio 4 was because I thought it would expose me to gaps in my own education.
Do you try and keep your French up?
Weird things happen. My books have been translated into Italian and German but never into French.
I’ve never spent much time in France, though I like going.
It just happened that I met Robert Graves years ago and have always ended up going to Spain and inevitably to Italy because of my work there. So even if my first foreign language would be French, I don’t go enough.
Your style of rhyming poetry must be difficult to translate into French…
Maybe that’s why it hasn’t been. I do use rather a lot. I suppose one day someone will do. I did translate one or two of my poems for children into French, which seemed to work all right.
Do you think learning a foreign language is still an important skill?
I do. One of the things that has always been a sadness to me in my professional life as a poet is going to different places abroad – if there’s ever a few English poets, we stick together because we speak the language but we are joined by Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Chinese who speak English. They can join us but we can’t join them.
You did two very successful adaptations of Molière plays. How did that come about?
I did Molière at university but didn’t enjoy it very much – possibly my fault, possibly the lecturer’s. You had to do it on your own really and having been to the sort of school that was highly disciplined, as soon as I got to university things fell apart. My essays on Sartre and existentialism got me through.
Liverpool was designated European Capital of Culture 2008 and the Liverpool Playhouse director asked me to do something and suggested Molière’s Tartuffe. I thought: “It’s nice to be asked but I can’t do it, I didn’t enjoy it at university and my French isn’t good enough.”
I picked up a prose version of it anyway and a very good version in verse and saw that it could be adapted.
I was employed to go on one of these Saga cruises – don’t laugh, it’s a good gig – I thought I would take the books, have a go and have two weeks to think up an excuse for not doing it.
But once I started Tartuffe and its characters, I found I was able to give each a distinct voice. I got back and said “I’ll do it” then picked up Molière in French to see that what he was doing was what was in the English translations.
I did it quite quickly. His voice came to me. I had Molière’s picture on the side of the desk and tried to be true to him.
That was a success and then we did another one, The Hypochondriac (Le Malade Imaginaire). Again, you look at it and think “Can I do this?” and then the voices – Argan – speaks to you and the whole thing takes care of itself. There were little McGoughisms in it.
Will you do another one?
They want another one. We decided not to do another Molière, but we’re both getting withdrawal. I’m having problems finding one.
The Misanthrope has been done by Keira Knightley in the States, so I wouldn’t do that. I’ve been looking at The Miser.
Incidentally, I had several versions of The Hypochondriac – none of them rhymed and I thought ‘Lazy lot!’ I did my normal rhyme, then got Molière out and having done the first act I found out that he hadn’t rhymed it either.
At that point, I was into it, so my version rhymes. I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t rhyme, what I’m good at is verse.
Have you studied much French poetry?
Not a lot, only at university and occasionally people like Georges Perec. Have you read that poem of mine, called Georges Perec Reviews the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse?
It’s quite funny, it doesn’t use the letter e – La Disparition was his novel (also written without using the letter e).
When I was in France a couple of years ago, a questionnaire came round: the French were very worried – there was a time when it was all Alain Robbe-Grillet and Françoise Sagan, influencing English writing – they wanted to know was there anyone since then?
There didn’t seem to be. They were probably quite rightly worried. It’s like French film – it’s still there, very potent but the literature doesn’t seem to cross the Channel much.
You have actually written (and read) some of your own poetry in French haven’t you?
Je suis un auto – of course! Who would get that? ‘Je suis un autre’ – who was it that said that? That’s almost one for myself.
Wonderful! I always think I got a degree in schoolboy French, that’s really what happened to me.
Was your poem In a Baker’s Shop Somewhere in Northern France inspired by an actual place?
No. I read that in English, then I say it’s all to do with Sartre, that it’s lost in translation and I should do it in French, which I do. It works, it’s funny as a performance piece.
You sometimes give your poems, such as Cadeau and Beau Geste, French titles. Any particular reason?
It’s just part of me, I suppose. I love the language more than I know. If you study French for three years, it’s in you. It was reading Sartre that I first became interested in the ideas.
Then learning how to write an essay and get good marks for it, I was encouraged by the French department saying ‘you’ve got a brain, why don’t you use it’? That was a great compliment, I’d never had compliments before.
Until then, literature was like history. Nobody was living or dealing with life as we knew it. Reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire was idealistic in a sense, these men who were into drink and women appealed to me as a teenager.
You will shortly be hosting a poetry workshop in the Dordogne (June 11-14). Have you visited the area before?
Never. I used to run classes in Grasse – a friend, Peter Usborne of Usborne Books, had a lovely house and I spent many summers there for years on the trot.
We’d go to St Paul de Vence, Nice and Cannes, it was gorgeous.
I got this offer from some other friends – Les Soeurs Anglaises. I’m looking forward to it. The Dordogne will be very different.
