My designated driver, the radio-active woman, transports me in her mobile sauna to an Indian restaurant on the high street. She is allergic to curry (for fear of melt-down, presumably) but waits for me in the car while I guzzle a meal of not more than five pounds in value (including drinks) paid for by food voucher. I am staying with old Mr Farter in the suburbs. He has gone home to give the Z-bed an airing and to prepare a selection of his poems for my perusal, the first of which, ‘The Mallard’, begins, ‘Thou, oh monarch of the riverbank’. I ‘sleep’ fully-clothed on a pube-infested sheet.
Ungraciously and with great stealth I leave the house before dawn and wander through empty, unfamiliar avenues heading vaguely towards the tallest buildings on the skyline. It is three hours before the first train home. I breakfast with winos and junkies in McDonald’s. Killing time in the precinct, I find a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop. The price is ten pence. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, ‘To mum and dad’.
‘Memory is the thing you forget with.’ Alexander Chase
Julian Barnes
It was my first literary party, in a London garden. I was in my late twenties, a hand-to-mouth reviewer with no day job. I took a girl I wasn’t quite going out with. We ran into a friend of mine. “This is Chris Reid,’ I said. ‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘I’m a poet,’ he replied. She laughed with such forceful scorn that she recoiled back into a flower-bed and spilled half her wine. When Chris had wandered off, I asked why she’d reacted like that. ‘You can’t say you’re a poet if you just write poems,’ she answered. I felt glad I had never described myself – to anyone, let alone her – as a novelist, even though my desk contained the full draft of a novel.
The party moved on. Someone introduced me to Elizabeth Jane Howard, and then scarpered. She seemed to me formidable: tall, poised, coiffed and gowned, waiting to be diverted out of some grand boredom. As it happened, I had recently reviewed a collection of her short stories, Mr Wrong, for the Oxford Mail; better still, I had been enthusiastic about them. I mentioned this as unobsequiously as I could; she was neither diverted nor, as far as I could tell, remotely interested. Fair enough. ‘I gave you a decent review in a four-book fiction round-up in a provincial newspaper,’ or words to that effect, was probably not the conversational key to literary London.
How to engage her? Something more recherché, perhaps. I remembered, in a book-nerdish way, that whereas collections of stories normally list on the reverse of the title page the original places of serial publication, there were no such attributions in Mr Wrong. I decided that such silence must have been a deliberate authorial decision. I wondered what her reasons might have been. I asked her about it.
‘I didn’t know that was the case.’
‘Ah.’
‘No.’
‘So it wasn’t deliberate?’
‘No.’
The conversation was definitely lacking brio. I doubted she would be interested in my own modest literary breakthrough. A few months previously I had entered a Ghost Story competition organized by The Times, had been chosen as one of the dozen winners, and was soon to be rewarded with publication in a hardback anthology by Jonathan Cape! Who were Elizabeth Jane Howard’s own publishers!! No, she definitely wouldn’t be interested in that.
I gazed rather desperately across the party and saw a tall, windblown figure who could well be Tom Maschler. What a coincidence – the editorial boss of Jonathan Cape.
‘Is that by any chance … Tom Maschler?’
‘Yes, would you like to meet him?’ she replied instantly, then marched me across and left me there.
My nerves were by now pretty shot. Still, I wanted to try and impress.
‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m one-twelfth of one of your authors.’
He didn’t look even faintly amused. I explained ploddingly about The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories and its dozen contributors. He asked me my name again. I told him again. He shook his head.
‘Sorry, I don’t remember names. What was the title of your story?’
I looked at him. He looked back expectantly. I paused. My mind was filled with a terrible blank. What the fuck was the title of my story? I knew it, I was sure I knew it. Come on, come on, you’ve just read the proofs. You’ve just written your own contributor’s note. This is your publisher. You must know. It’s impossible for you not to know.
‘I can’t remember,’ I replied.
So there we were: a publisher who didn’t recognize one of his writers’ names, and a writer who couldn’t remember the title of his own – his only – work. Welcome to the literary life.
And the girl I wasn’t quite going out with? Oh, she dumped me soon afterwards.
‘It is a hard matter for a man to go down into the valley of Humiliation … and to catch no slip by the way.’
Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
Rick Moody
You’re lucky to go on tour. You’re lucky to meet readers who prize your work and who seem as though they might be honoured to meet you. You’re lucky to eat the pretzels in the mini-bar. You’re lucky to see cities you have never seen, like Cincinnati and Baltimore. These things are indisputable. Anyone will tell you.
It was my first time, for a novel called The Ice Storm. Not a big tour, because it was my first. Six cities. Minneapolis, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, DC. Most of the audiences numbered in the single digits. When I called my publicist in NYC, she offered consolations: it was so important to break in new audiences.
What if my heart broke first?
I managed to survive the first five cities. Then it was time to go to DC. Our nation’s capital. Back then, my mom didn’t live too far from DC. She lived in Virginia. She volunteered to come up to hear me read. This was complicated for a few reasons. My mother had a lot of opinions about my work, not all good. She once reviewed a book by me on Amazon.com and gave me three out of five stars. Then she told me that it was a positive review.
I gave my name at the hotel, and the woman at the front desk seemed incredibly impressed. ‘Mr Moody, we are honoured to have you here in the hotel!’ Or some similarly inflated greeting. I can’t imagine who the desk clerk thought I might be. A diplomat from the nation state of Dishevelment. Or a high-ranking functionary from the Association for Arrested Development. Nevertheless, she took the VIP designation on her reservation list to heart, and she ladled on politeness.
Probably I’d stayed in a suite as a kid, or visited one. But not by myself. Never had I roamed lonely through the extra living room with the extra fax machine and the extra mini-bar for pilfering, etc. Never had I watched hotel porn on someone else’s credit card. This was clearly the beginning of world domination. This was clearly the beginning of Rick Moody, branding opportunity; Rick Moody, LLC.
My mother called from the front desk. She came up. We had tea. How civilized. I could see here in the suite, drinking tea with my mother, that my tides were turning.
Later, we headed out for the bookstore where I was to read. The publicist had made clear that this was a great DC store. Great reading series!
Humiliation is imminent. Let’s just skip ahead. It began upon passing through the threshold of the store. ‘Mr Moody!’ a young woman with glasses said good-naturedly. “Thanks for coming!’ I looked around. Even by the standards of my six-city tour, where double-digit audiences were an accomplishment, things were looking sparse.
The young woman with spectacles herded me toward one wall, probably in the psychology section. ‘There has been a little problem we’d like to tell you about. We’re really sorry about it. But there was a –’
‘Yes?’
A typo in the schedule! A typo in the schedule. A typo!
“The schedule we mailed out shows you as reading last night. I’m so sorry.’
The schedule was empty for the night. So was the store.
‘Someone did leave a note for you, though.’
She handed over the note as though it would compensate for the typo in the schedule. ‘Dear Rick, so sorry I’m not going to be able to make the reading tonight. I was looking forward to it, but something came up. Hope it goes well. See you soon. Elise.’
Well, I’d almost had an audience member. Besides my mom. Who was cowering over in history, pretending that nothing bad was happening.
Then, as if according to miracle, a friend did stride into the store. Katya, the art historian from New York. She went to high school with my brother, smoked pot with him, and then became a very successful art critic. At present, she was the only person in the audience who had not expelled me from her uterus.
‘We’ll wait just a few more minutes for the stragglers,’ the girl with the glasses said eagerly. I disappeared into the stacks. Several minutes passed there, and the little bell in the door at the bookstore did not jingle even once. At last, I trudged miserably to the table that served as my podium. The little table before the entirely empty constellation of chairs, wherein Katya and my mother sat, as apart from one another as they could sit. No, wait! Now there was a gentleman edging into the audience. A homeless guy? Maybe. He’d definitely never been to a reading before, nor since.
Here I was in our nation’s capital, at this, the dawn of my career, and I was reading, as briefly as possible, to my mother, to a woman who had smoked pot with my brother in high school, and to a guy persuaded to sit through the reading for 10% off any purchase. My mother wore a frozen smile throughout. The truth was plain to see. My career as a fiction writer was launched! And it was founded upon neglect, disappointment, misunderstanding, familial resentment, and typos.
‘Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.’ Thomas Mann
Paul Farley
Several years ago I was in India doing some work for the British Council, and I’d been enjoying the visit until, towards the end, I was pole-axed with a stomach upset. The flight back to Heathrow set the tenor for the next few weeks: panic in public or confined spaces, long spells hunched on a toilet. My GP in Brighton thought it was ‘Delhi belly’, and wouldn’t respond to antibiotics, so didn’t bother prescribing any (I found out, over a year later when my notes had been transferred up to the Lake District, that I’d had Campylobacter with e-coli cysts). I had a few engagements coming up, one of which involved a reading: what to do? For some reason – and I’m at a loss now to account for this – I decided to go ahead. It’d be OK. I’d shut myself down with Imodium. I couldn’t cancel: they’d sent out flyers and everything.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been the most straightforward of gigs, but the state of my bowels knocked everything out of whack. On the train it was easier to stay locked in the toilet for the journey. The Imodium wasn’t really kicking in. I was supposed to take a taxi from the station to the venue, but I didn’t fancy being sat in a cab in an ‘historic city’ I didn’t really know, stuck in traffic, a driver trying to chat to me. So I walked it, stopping off at McDonald’s, British Home Stores, Waterstone’s, Boots and a pub along the way: I still remember the place as a series of disabled toilets, and can recall the graffiti I sat staring at for minutes on end better than its architecture. What did Edward Hopper say about our impressions when entering or leaving a city? But I shouldn’t try to raise the tone.
I rolled up in a pretty undignified state, but nobody seemed to notice when I was met, and I’d come this far, etc. The reading was in an arts centre, and about thirty people had shown up I was told. I always smile to myself when people rue the state of poetry in these islands, with its phoney populism and hype, its pandering to audiences. What events had they been going to? The reality – at least the one I’ve experienced repeatedly – is an edge-of-town arts centre, a small audience listening carefully, a few books sold, a fumbling for receipts. I’d never been so aware of the discrepancy, waiting to go on that evening, a flop sweat staining through my jacket. I can’t recall how much scratch I was doing it for.
If it wasn’t money that got me out of my sickbed, then it must have been stupidity. Sitting there, anxiety began to take hold. I’ve been mildly nervous before giving readings, but this was of a new, suffocating order I’d never experienced before (or since, I’m happy to say). I wondered whether the microphone would pick up the squawks and whines my insides were making. The organizer of the event was introducing me, and she was giving it the full welly. I was a rising star, I was one of the most talented voices to have emerged in recent years, I was hip, I was full of pop-cultural references, I was a crackling performer, I was laddish, and I stepped up to the stage wearing a broad, confident grin and, unbeknownst to my audience, a press-on towel.
‘Ignorance and incuriosity are two very soft pillows.’ French proverb
Edna O’Brien
In the heady Sixties, I was not long in London when I had been mysteriously invited to a dinner party, somewhere in Belgravia. I was seated next to Groucho Marx, whom I can safely say was one of the most reserved and taciturn people I have ever met. Eventually and in answer to some garbled compliment of mine, he asked me what I did. I confessed to being a writer. He recognized that I was Irish arid had a moment of rumination with himself, then called across to his wife, who was seated at another table, to ask the name of the young Irish woman who wrote hilariously about convent life and whom they both so admired. I waited, already basking in the ensuing compliment, but as the fates would have it, the writer they admired was Bridget Brophy.
That glorified term ‘book tour’. It was a department store in Birmingham, a busy Saturday with shoppers coming and going and myself at a table with piles of my novel Johnny I Hardly Knew You stacked around me. Mothers, with small children, irate children, restless children, passed by without giving me a second look. No one stopped to buy a book, or even glance. News of this mounting failure must have reached someone in an upper office because presently it was announced on the tannoy that I would be happy to sign copies of my novel, just hot off the press. I waited and looked at people, embarrassed. My pleas were not returned, nor were my prayers. When the hour at last had expired, I got up, withdrew into my coat as into a shell and thanked a young assistant who said, ‘Got to laugh, love, haven’t you.’ At the main door I was accosted by a fellow countryman – inebriated – who enquired if I was me and then with familiar spunk said ‘Would you ever loan us a fiver.’ I am quite proud of my reply – ‘I’ll give it to you because it’s not likely that I’ll be back here again.’
I am attending a performance of my play Virginia at the Haymarket Theatre and I am alone. Just before the curtain of the first act, there was a somewhat spry, erotically charged scene between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, played with verve by Maggie Smith and Patricia Connolly. As the lights came up, the two women who were behind me and who had been muttering throughout, yielded to a state of high dudgeon and moral indignation. I had got it wrong. ‘She’s got it quite wrong, Vita Sackville-West was a married woman with children and here we are being told that she is a lesbian, a lesbian,’ one of them said. Her companion shook her head in exemplary disgust and then in imperious tone delivered her coup – ‘But of course she’s got it wrong darling, Edna O’Brien writes for servants, everyone knows that.’ They received the full brunt of my glacial stare and scurried off.
‘Radio and television … have succeeded in lifting the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.’ Nathalie Sarraute
Andrew O’Hagan
Maybe I’m just being excessively Catholic, but I’ve long suspected there might be a certain, defiant, limited pleasure to be had in the pain of humiliation. After all, embarrassment reminds us as much of our abundant needs as our abject failings, and a writer might do well to listen carefully to the drama of his own requirements. In the true black night of humiliation, in the bloodletting hours, a writer becomes most fully and most properly himself. We might venture to call it the Writer’s Life: the only succ
ess you can count on is success on the page; the rest – golden whispers from the F. Scott Fitzgerald handbook of instant triumph – are nothing more than throat-clearing exercises in preparation for the three-act opera of mortification that must follow.
Aged twenty-six, with an acre of smiles and hopes, I was very happy to find myself on my first American book tour. The weather was fine, the New York Times liked my book, I had a new suit, and I went from city to city in a mild swoon of short drinks and long evenings, feeling certain the writer’s game was my kind of fun. Everywhere I went, it seemed, there was someone new stepping forward with a kind proposal: write for the New Yorker, come on the Studs Terkel Show, travel to Butte, Montana, marry my daughter; the days grew long with sustainable pleasures, and I understood it would only be a matter of time before I was asked to give the State of the Union Address. Then my plane and my self-satisfaction broke through the clouds to land in Chicago.
Now, Chicago is a friendly town. There are plenty of college kids and small magazines: they liked the book, and, if you were happily stupid, as I was, you might have allowed yourself to imagine that their enthusiasm described a general mood, that the whole of America indeed was turgid that day with love and recognition for the author of The Missing – a non-fictional meditation on the subject of missing persons. At that early stage I was not familiar with the concept of the ‘quiet news day’, therefore, when a producer from Good Morning Chicago rang to invite me on, I could only imagine they too were gasping for a bit of the O’Hagan goodness.
Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Page 4