Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

by Robin Robertson

  Only once, though, at a reading in Edinburgh, have things almost come to a head. In the heart of a stillness I deliberately, and, I thought, dramatically, created, the bloke in the front row (at least I think it was the bloke in the front row) executed the loudest arse-raspberry I ever hope to hear. Maybe it was blood, maybe the poetry of repeated history suggesting itself. Whichever, in the space of a split-second, I found a horribly persuasive understanding with my long-dead Granny McBride. Some notion of personal dignity seemed to be at stake: the old lady’s words were forming on my lips. In the same split-second, however, I recalled my son, aged ten, was watching from the back row of the audience. The sudden recollection of my mother’s forty-five-year-long blush made the choice: there was nothing else for it. I struck a pose of transcendental deafness, unfocused my eyes, and carried, if not sublimely then at least determinedly, freshly, on.

  Grace, you see. It’s worth striving for.

  I think my mother would have been proud.

  ‘Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.’ Logan Pearsall Smith

  Rupert Thomson

  In the winter of 1992–1993 my girlfriend, Kate, and I went to live in La Casella, an isolated farmhouse some forty miles south-east of Siena. It was a good place to write, and I had the vague but oddly compelling feeling I always have when it’s time to start work on a new novel. I was relieved to be out of London, partly because I wanted to avoid another grim English winter, and partly because I wanted to forget all about the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1993’, which was to be announced early in the New Year. By a strange coincidence, I had been staying in the same house exactly ten years before, when the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1983’ had been announced, and I had devoured that issue of Granta, eager to acquaint myself with a new generation of writers, writers whom I hoped one day to emulate. This time, though, I qualified: I had published two novels – Dreams of Leaving and The Five Gates of Hell – and I was not yet forty. People who moved in literary circles had told me that I might be on the list – some had even said I should be on the list – whereupon I would usually smile or shrug. I may have affected a certain indifference, but deep down, of course, I was desperate to be on the list. At the same time I felt fatalistic about the whole thing: I fully expected to be passed over, and I had no intention of being in London when that happened.

  It was a great winter. Kate read novels and cooked goulash and went for long walks through the Tuscan countryside. I wrote. Some of our favourite people came to stay and we sat up late, drinking bottle after bottle of the colonel’s red wine (he charged three thousand lire for two litres). One of the house rules was that I shouldn’t be interrupted during working hours – unless, of course, there was some kind of emergency. I don’t think we had any emergencies that winter, though, so I wasn’t disturbed at all – not, that is, until a certain afternoon in early March. It must have been cold in the house that day because Kate had decided to light a fire. While tearing up strips of newspaper – neighbours would often pass papers on to us, though we rarely read them – her eye fell on a small black-and-white photograph of me. She scanned the article. The ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1993’ had been announced the week before. She ran upstairs with the paper and burst into my room.

  ‘You’ve been chosen,’ she said. ‘You’re on the list.’

  I turned to face her.

  ‘You’re one of the Best Young British Novelists,’ she said.

  ‘Really? Let me see.’ My heart was racing.

  We scanned the list of writers, but my name wasn’t there. We scanned the list again. There was no mention of me at all.

  ‘But your picture’s here,’ Kate said, her finger poised over one of the black-and-white mug shots. ‘Look.’

  We both looked. It wasn’t me. It was Jeanette Winterson.

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said at last. She had turned away from me. She was facing into the corner of the room.

  In retrospect, I suppose the photo did look vaguely like me – or like a version of me anyway (there must have been a time when Jeanette and I had a similar haircut, or perhaps we narrowed our eyes in the same way when we were looking into the sun). I stared and stared at the picture, as if the closeness of the resemblance could somehow lessen the hurt.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said again, then she went downstairs.

  It was humiliating for both of us, of course – for Kate because she had mistaken Jeanette for me, and because she had raised my hopes only to dash them seconds later, but it was humiliating for me too – especially for me – because I had responded with such eagerness, such desperation, with such incontinent desire, all my ambition and longing exposed; I felt like someone who had been disembowelled and then left to stare dumbly at the brightly-coloured mess of his own intestines.

  The days that followed were difficult. There was only one consolation that I could think of. The next time they chose the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists’, in 2003,1 would be too old. I would never have to go through this again.

  ‘You should punish your appetites rather than allow yourself to be punished by them.’ Epictetus, Fragments

  John Burnside

  It’s hard to think of an isolated instance of mortification that is worse, or more typical, or more mortifying than any other, since mortification seems to me the natural, and fairly predictable consequence of any public display of lyricism. Still, there are degrees of mortification (from Ecclesiastical Latin: mortificare, to kill or subdue), which may be classified thus:

  1: Mild Form: Reading to any audience in a ‘cabaret’ setting (i.e. they’re only there for the beer/wine/vodka mixers/cold sausage pies/raffle).

  Optional variation: audience member vomits/passes out/dies halfway through the performance.

  2: Persistent Form: Former lover turns up and sits brooding in front row throughout reading.

  Optional variation: Former lover weeps/sniggers/bleeds in front row throughout reading.

  3: Virulent Strain: Any award ceremony where the shortlisted poets, ignorant as to the result that is about to be announced, are obliged to wait, in a roomful of their peers (and other hostile parties), while the sub-sub-minister for Sport, Leisure and the Creative Industries demonstrates his or her complete ignorance of anything even remotely related to poetry or the arts (including the name of the award, and the institution making it).

  Optional variation: Announcement of the winning book/poem/project which is not one’s own; c.f. Gore Vidal, ‘Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.’

  Bewildering and occasionally fatal variation: Announcement of a winning book/poem/project that is not only not one’s own, but transparently political/transparently autobiographical/absurdly technical/pure Home Service.

  Its etymology notwithstanding, mortification is rarely fatal and is relatively short-lived. The usual treatment is stoicism and temporary withdrawal. In cases where mortification is suspected, the patient should on no account be offered, or allowed to partake of, alcohol.

  ‘If we heard it said of Orientals that they habitually drank a liquor which went to their heads, deprived them of reason and made them vomit, we should say: How very barbarous!’ La Bruyère, Of Opinions, Characters

  David Harsent

  It’s 1969 or ’70, my first book is just out, and I’ve been asked by Alan Hancox to read at his bookshop in Cheltenham. Reading with me will be John Fuller, James Fenton and Peter Levi. John has offered to drive us all to Cheltenham from Oxford, so I get the bus to Oxford and arrive early to have a lunchtime beer with my friend Fred Taylor who is up at Keble. We get drunk. It’s not difficult, but it is unexpected.

  Being pissed, we do the logical thing and buy some bottles of wine to take back to Fred’s flat in Botley (a deliberate socialist league or more from the dreaming spires). By mid-afternoon I am seriously confused but also happy and confident. F
red’s a student so, of course, has no phone. I call John from a phone box to let him know that I am somewhere in Oxford and ‘opposite a garage that looks like a cathedral’. Somehow or another, he tracks me down to where I am dozing on the kerb with my legs stretched out into the road and the traffic making little detours round me, and takes me back to his house. The others are already there. I accept a drink and sit on Peter Levi’s glasses.

  The drive to Cheltenham takes three or, maybe, four minutes and I spend the time with my head out of the window, like the family labrador. We get to Alan’s shop where I accept a drink. The reading isn’t scheduled to take place for an hour or more, so the plan is that we’ll first go for an Indian meal, then read, then return to Alan’s house for a bit of a party. All this sounds terrific to me, insofar as I can make sense of it. I nod and smile and accept a drink.

  At the Indian restaurant I order most of what the menu has to offer, eat it, and clear up the residue of others’ meals from the little dishes on the hot-plates. I’ve switched from wine back to beer, now, which seems a safe and sensible move. Somewhere a conversation is going on, of which I am a part. Somewhere else, a coracle is afloat on a dark and boisterous sea, myself adrift in that craft, but still happy and confident and anticipating safe landfall.

  We return to the bookshop where an audience has assembled: people sitting on the floor in penumbral gloom. At the other end of the shop and, by contrast, under fierce lights, is a trestle table and four chairs. We read in alphabetical order, so Fenton, Fuller, Harsent … who (so far as I can judge) stands, reads, sits, perhaps even acknowledges the applause with a wry smile and a tilt of the head. Peter Levi then gets up to read and I go to sleep – instantly – as night falls on the veldt.

  The next thing I know, I’m being woken by James because Alan Hancox has thanked the poets, but also called for a last poem from each of us. Okay, I’m slightly flustered now. In fact, I haven’t a clue where in hell I am or where I’ve been. What I do suspect is that I didn’t sleep silently. (I was given, in those days, to whimpering in my sleep, a characteristic that some girls claimed to find endearing; so much so, in fact, that I had become pretty adept at faking sleep-and-whimper to make myself seem interesting and vulnerable.)

  Faint sounds of a running sea give way to anticipatory applause. A reflexive response gets me to my feet. James is also standing, it being his turn to read. I sit. He sits. I stand again and fumble through the pages of my book, muttering that I don’t know quite what to read. Peter Levi suggests I re-read the last poem from my set. Since I haven’t the faintest idea what it was, he helps me find it, despite having trouble with his glasses which, I notice now, are badly bent and sitting askew on his nose. The poem he finds for me is the longest poem in the book. I assume this to be an act of sabotage, but can’t find it in me to blame him.

  I read it. I sit. James stands. I stand, too, not in error, but because it has suddenly been borne in upon me that I am about to be sick. Pretty soon. Any minute. In fact, about now. I come out from behind the trestle table as James begins to read, and plunge through the audience (all on the floor, all in semi-darkness) raising a small chorus of screams and yelps as I tread on fingers and kick shins. The lavatory is a little beyond the last row. I go in, I kneel, I experience that fractional pause, then I throw up.

  There can, I know, be discreet upchucks of the cough-and-gob variety, or even the girlish whisper-and-slip. This is not either of those, nor is it the twenty-gauge-shuck-and-reload or even the storm-drain-rib-racker. No. This is volcanic. This is a fully-orchestrated, bass-pedal-active, hog-hollerin’, bootsoles-to-bogbowl, ten-gallon tsunami.

  I emerge, pale, shaky and still drunk, with (I’ve no doubt) all sorts of evidence of my recent activity on display. The imprint of the lavatory seat lugs on my forehead, for instance. Detritus. Smearing. That sort of thing. The lights in the shop are up. The poets are mingling with the audience. Drinks are on offer. I wonder vaguely whether my whimpering might have raised, in some blonde, slim, young, pretty member of the audience feelings of protectiveness and lust in equal measure. Or brunette, slim, young; or more or less any shade of reddish-brown, etc., etc. Steadied by the possibility, I accept a drink.

  Later, we go to Alan’s house for the promised party. I am destined to remember little of this, though I am aware of accepting several drinks and dancing with someone who seems slim, young and pretty and definitely has hair.

  I wake next morning in the attic. I must have started out on that camp bed over there, but now I’m over here and feeling … well … okay, as it happens. Happy and confident, you might say. This lasts for several blissful seconds, before someone enters the room, stealthily, creeps up behind me, clubs me to the floor and stamps repeatedly on my head. It’s my hangover saying ‘Good morning’.

  I have always thought it fair and reasonable that a hangover should be proportionate to the previous night’s intake of booze to its behavioural excesses. It’s a sin thing. You cut a deal with a vengeful God. This hangover, it seems to me, is way out of line. In fact, if it takes one more step towards lethality (being only a step-and-a-half away) it will probably be ordered to retreat and reform. Surely I can’t deserve … Then grimy little scraps of last night’s doings start to come together in my mind; tawdry sense-impressions; mucky images; an acrid smell. And I realise I must have earned the lot. In fact, I’m probably lucky to be standing upright. (Am I standing upright?) The only hope is that what I’ve so far remembered will be all memory serves up. Except I know it won’t. That smell isn’t mice in the wainscot or rot in the beams; it’s the low, cloacal stench of humiliation and guilt.

  I dress (which act poses certain questions) and go downstairs. No one’s up. I make myself a cup of tea. I find the bathroom and throw up, not quite the whisper-and-slip I hope for, but not much more than a whoop-and-splatter. A little later, Alan appears, wearing a wide smile and takes me to breakfast at George’s in the market, where I consume the full English morning-after cure and manage, against some odds, to hang on to it. Alan seems worryingly cheery, to say nothing of chatty and smiley. After the second egg, I can stand no more. I look at him through bruised eyeballs.

  ‘Alan, I’m really sorry about last night.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Last night. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Last night what?’

  ‘You must have noticed.’

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘I was drunk. I was drunk when I arrived. I was drunk in the Indian restaurant. I was drunk when I read. I threw up massively and comprehensively in the lav at your shop – I had to hack my way through the audience; you can’t have missed that.’

  ‘No, well, you went to the loo at one point, yes. I didn’t know you were feeling unwell.’

  ‘Didn’t know … But, wait a minute, I went to sleep during the reading. Didn’t I do that?’

  ‘Did you? Can’t have been for more than a second or two. I certainly didn’t notice.’

  ‘Or that I was shitfaced?’

  ‘Not at all. You must hold your drink pretty well, that’s all I can say.’

  A miracle. It’s a miracle. And as Alan’s assurances mount up, so the skull-clamps ease and the black bile in my gut begins to dissolve. Not guilty. But wait a moment – the party.

  ‘Alan, when we got back to your place … I had a good time … did I?’

  ‘Seemed to enjoy yourself. I remember you danced a bit. Well, we all did.’

  ‘And then –?’

  ‘Then … nothing. Went to bed, I expect.’

  He pays for breakfast, walks me to the Green Line station and waves me off. I wave back. I am beginning to formulate the notion that drunks look better, behave better, act better than they sometimes think. I survive the bus-ride and get home where – sure – I throw up, but it’s little more than a hiccough-and-plop.

  A week later and I’m having a drink at the Pillars of Hercules with Ian Hamilton. We’re catching up. He asks me to review a volume of poetry. I say I hate tha
t poet’s work. He says, Exactly. I say, en passant, that I gave a reading at Alan Hancox’s bookshop last week. He says, ‘I know.’ His eyebrow lifts a fraction; and there’s that lopsided smile. Suddenly, the head-clamps are back, and the black bile.

  I say, ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was on the phone to Alan and he mentioned you’d been up there.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘In so many words?’ Ian chuckles. He becomes Alan Hancox on the phone:

  It was fantastic! David Harsent was totally rat-arsed! He staggered about talking drivel, he left the restaurant without paying his share, he passed out and snored through most of the reading, he threw up at top-decibels in the shop loo, he signed his books indecipherably, he told people repeatedly to fuck off, he danced round my living room like a wallaby on amphetamines, he propositioned every woman in the place, he …