Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

by Robin Robertson

  There is much, much more. Bookshops where, when I enter and suggest signing some books, they look at me as if I’ve got dog’s mess on my shoe. The audience on the QE2 who sat there in silence and then, after half an hour, told me they were waiting to see the film French Kiss with Kevin Kline. An event at Edinburgh where, in front of a large audience, Hunter Davies’ first question to me began: ‘Well, Deborah Moggach, you’re not really up there in the first eleven, are you?’ A charity lunch which had cost me £120 in train fares and where my interviewer not only got my name wrong but called the novel I was going to be talking about (The Ex-Wives), ‘The XYs’ throughout, even though it was sitting there in front of her. The ‘should I have heard of you’s and the people who say ‘you’re my favourite writer’ and then proceed to quote from someone else’s book.

  Novelists have an equivocal relationship with reality, as it is, and on a bad day we can feel as non-existent as the characters we have created – more so, sometimes. In my case this is compounded by the fact that I have never seen anyone reading any of my books, ever. Such a sight has occasionally been spotted, on buses or trains, but can one really believe this? After all, I spend my life making things up.

  Still, mortification is something we feed off. We can use it in our work, just as we use everything else. And we know, deep down, that we deserve it. Every writer I know is waiting for the tap on the shoulder and the voice that says: ‘So you really thought you could get away with it?’

  ‘It matters not what you are thought to be, but what you are.’ Publilius Syrus

  Thomas Lynch

  It was in Aldeburgh in East Anglia at a poetry festival there where I first got a whiff of delectable celebrity. The airfare paid for by my publisher, the car and driver waiting at the train station, the posters with my photo and name in bold Garamond, the banner over the high street proclaiming the long weekend’s literary events, the welcome from the festival committee and the chummy greetings of the other luminaries – each added a measure to the gathering sense of self-importance.

  We all had put our public faces on. There was Paula Meehan from Dublin, Deryn Rees-Jones, a young and comely Liverpudlian, Charles Boyle, then a junior editor at Faber & Faber. I was the American with Irish connections whose day job as a funeral director struck folks as sufficiently odd to merit mention in the local press. The publication, the year before, of my first UK collection of poems meant that I was now on the record and ignored throughout the English-speaking world, my books for sale if unsold in Adelaide and Montreal, Wellington and Edinburgh, New York, Vancouver and London. We were all poets of the book or two-book sort, on the edge of greater greatness or obscurity, to whom the keys to this eastern seaside town had been given in the first week of November 1995 for the 7th Annual Aldeburgh International Poetry Festival. The tide of good fortune to which celebrities become accustomed was rising as we strolled the esplanade, Ms Meehan and me, talking of friends we shared in Ireland and America, the rush of the off-season surf noising in the shingle, the lights coming on in tall windows of the Victorian seafront lodges. At one corner, a pair of local spinsters standing in their doorway called us in to tea and talk of literary matters. They had prepared an elegant spread of finger foods and relevant questions about contemporary poetry and the bookish arts in general. We were, Paula and me, asked for what was reckoned expert testimony on verse and verse makers – the long-deceased and the more recently published. Then there were the panels and interviews, recorded for the local radio stations, and readings held in the Jubilee Hall, a vast brick warehouse that had been turned into a performance space by the installation of amphitheatric seating and microphones and stage lighting. The house was packed for every event, the sale of books was brisk, the lines at the signing tables long and kindly. They were so glad to meet us, so pleased to be a part of such a ‘magical event’. The air was thick with superlative and serendipity, hyperbole and Ciceronian praise. And after every event the poets – myself among them – were invited to a makeshift canteen across the street above the town’s cinema. Teas and coffees, soups and sandwiches, domestic and imported lagers, local cheeses and continental wines were put out for the hardworking and presumably ever hungry and thirsty poets who, for their part, seemed fashionably beleaguered and grateful for the afterglow among organizers and groupies. We were like rock-and-roll stars on tour, clasping our thin volumes and sheaves of new work like the instruments of our especial trade, basking in the unabashed approval of these locals and out-of-towners. It was all very heady and generous.

  A poet far removed from his own country, I felt at last the properly appreciated prophet. For every word there seemed an audience eager to open their hearts and minds. Strangeness and distance made every utterance precious. For while the Irish and Welsh and Scots were very well treated, and the English writers held their own, I was an ocean and a fair portion of continent from home and made to feel accordingly exotic and, for the first time in my life, almost cool.

  Home in Michigan a mortician who wrote poems was the social equivalent of a dentist who did karaoke: a painful case made more so by the dash of boredom. But here in England, I was not an oddity, but a celebrity, being ‘minded’ by a team of local literarians, smart and shapely women – one tendering a medley of local farm cheeses, another pouring a cup full of tea, another offering homemade scones, still another – the pretty wife of the parish priest – taking notes as I held forth in conversation with another poet on the metabolics of iambic pentameter and the ‘last time I saw Heaney’ or ‘Les Murray’ or some greater fixture in the firmament. And though I’d been, by then, abstemious for years, the star treatment was an intoxicant. The centre of such undivided attention, I became chatty and fashionably manic, conversationally nimble, intellectually vibrant, generous and expansive in every way, dizzy and dazzling to all in earshot, myself included.

  So it was when I espied in the doorway of this salon a handsome man I recognized as someone I had seen before, I assumed he must be from Michigan, since this was my first time ever in these parts. His dress was more pressed and precise than any writerly type – more American – a memorable face with a forgettable name, possibly a Milfordian on holiday or a fellow Rotarian, or a funeral director whom I’d met at a national convention who, having read about my appearance in one of the English dailies, had paused in his tour to make his pilgrimage to Aldeburgh to hear me read. It was the only explanation. My memory of him, though incomplete, was unmistakable: I knew this pilgrim and not from here.

  I excused myself from the discourse with the churchman’s wife and made my way across the room to what I was sure would be his eager salutations. But he seemed to look right past me, as if he’d come for something or someone else. Perhaps, I thought, he did not recognize me out of my familiar surroundings and funereal garb. The closer I got the more certain I was that he and I shared an American connection. I rummaged through my memory for a bit of a name, or place or time on which to fix the details of our acquaintance.

  ‘How good to see you!’ I said. ‘And so far from home!’

  Fully fed on the rich fare of celebrity, I was expansive, generous, utterly sociable.

  I took his hand and shook it manfully. He looked at me with genteel puzzlement.

  ‘I know I know you but I can’t say from where …’ I said, certain that he would fill in the details … the friend we had in common, the event, the circumstances of his being here.

  ‘Tom Lynch,’ I smiled, ‘from Michigan’ and then, in case our connection was professional, ‘from Lynch & Sons, in Milford.’

  ‘How nice to meet you Mr Lynch. Fines … Ray Fines…’ His voice was hesitant, velvety, trained; a clergyman I thought. They were always doing these ‘exchanges’ whereby one rector traded duties and homes for a season with another, the better to see the world on a cleric’s stipend. Or a TV reporter, the UK correspondent for CNN perhaps, maybe wanting an interview with the visiting American poet?

  ‘Are you here on holidays?’ I asked him.
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  ‘No, no, just visiting friends.’ He kept looking around the room as if I wasn’t the reason for his being here.

  ‘And where did we first meet? I just can’t place it,’ I said.

  ‘I am certain I don’t know,’ he said, and then almost shyly, ‘perhaps you have seen me in a movie.’

  ‘Movie?’

  ‘Yes, well, maybe,’ he said. ‘I act.’

  It was one of those moments when we see the light or debouch from the fog into the focused fact of the matter. I had, of course, first seen him in America, in Michigan, in the Milford Cinema, where he’d been the brutal Nazi, Amon Goeth, who shoots Jews for sport in Schindler’s List and more recently in Quiz Show where he’d played the brainy if misguided golden boy of the American poet, Mark Van Doren. He was not Ray Fines at all. He was Ralph Fiennes. His face was everywhere – the globalized image of mannish beauty in its prime, and dark thespian sensibility, privately desired by women on several continents and in many languages whilst here I was, slam-dunked in the hoop-game of celebrity before I’d even had a chance to shine. Across the room I could see the rector’s wife, watching my encounter with the heartthrob. She was wide-eyed and blushing and expecting, I supposed, an introduction.

  A contortionist of my acquaintance, whose name would not be recognized were I to use it, though he has accumulated some regional fame for something he does with thumbs, once theorized that if the lower lip could be stretched over one’s head, and one could quickly swallow, one could disappear. Never had I a greater urge to test the theory than that moment in Aldeburgh.

  ‘There are more ways of killing a dog than choking it with butter.’ Proverb

  D.B.C. Pierre

  The Art Beast spoke to me on the road to becoming a writer. It urged me to explore every opportunity for life experience, because as an artist it would be my job to probe the edges where others mightn’t go. The taste of these edges must one day fly off a written page, said the Beast.

  This was a bloody stupid thing to say to me.

  I sometimes visited Australia in spring or autumn. This is when flies in the outback swarm fewer than eight deep to your nostrils, eyes, and mouth; an opportunity certain mates and I took as a mandate to pack a car with baked beans, port, and rifles, and drive across nowhere looking for animals to shoot. Hunting, we called it. Wild goat by day, fox by night, for these were introduced pests, doing violence to the balance of nature.

  We never once suspected our testicles of contriving this excuse.

  Conditions on these trips were traditionally cold and prickly. Then one day a mate secured a cautious invitation to use a distant relative’s homestead as a base. The offer came after much lobbying of the mate’s elders, the kind that don’t answer when you ask them favours, that just sort of creak, or suddenly sneeze and have a stroke.

  We leapt at the invitation, though it was made clear our host’s property was a working farm; we would camp in the shearing shed, and our behaviour should be beyond reproach.

  And so, while three city boys debated whether an ice-cream machine or a taco dinner kit would make a better gift for the host, our mate with the country connection quietly slung a sack of oranges into the car, and we drove one crisp evening with our guns and spotlights towards the back of beyond. Two-horse towns along the road became one-horse, then semi-horse, until finally no town slipped behind us.

  We arrived next morning at the homestead of a sheep station that underlooked a rusty spine of mountains. A pair of large ears bobbed to the door, as if attached to the wrong farmer. We waited as the old boy scratched at a subdued flannel shirt beneath a dutifully knitted, and just as dutifully eroded woollen waistcoat, while his wife, a kindly wraith in combat boots, squeaked comfortingly in the dark behind him. Between them sat the family dog; a kelpie whose quicksilver eyes confirmed that he’d not only run the farm for the last decade, but was the only one in the house who knew how to work the video.

  Then, carefully re-working the sixteen words that had formed their verbal life since the Great War – sensible, God-given words – the couple bade us welcome with such awkward charm that we felt like rocking them in our arms. We couldn’t, obviously, due to country etiquette, which regarded even handshakes as perilously intimate. No, the protocols of outback conversation demanded that we stand on the veranda, arms folded, and stare at the ground until we were shown to our quarters. The shed wasn’t much, but it had a fireplace, and we were glad of that. It’s much easier to fart competitively, and invent new words for genitalia, when not covered in frost.

  We set out in camouflage later that day, the car a hedgehog of protruding gun barrels. But our plan to rid the world of evil hit a snag. Nothing of any size moved in the ranges, save the odd kangaroo. We would have to travel some distance, and beware of sheep resembling goats.

  All alcohol had been left at the shed, that’s how responsible we were, and we kept our guns unloaded in the car, except for one of the mates, Steve, whose name I should’ve withheld. He shot a hole through the roof as we bumped through a creek bed. I spent the rest of the day dissuading him from firing at parrots and crows.

  Spiders and moths were in danger by the second day. A fur of bean skins upholstered our teeth, and clots of instant coffee in tepid rainwater failed to rinse away the sting of a cold night’s sleep. We fell prey to goatlessness, goatlessness and foxlessness, in a big way. At home our women and peers would be waiting, not for triumphant hauls of game, but for their absence. They would be like that illusory strain of public opinion to which a government loses face if it recalls its troops unbloodied, having sent them primed for war.

  The reckless eddies at death’s edge sucked at us. Alright, at me.

  On the last night we stayed out late, relentlessly spotlighting for so much as a rabbit. To no avail. God’s creatures survived us. We finally turned the car toward the homestead, defeated.

  Then, as we passed through the boundary fence, a pair of eyes flashed in the headlights. Textbook eyes, away in a far paddock. The spotlight burst back into life, weapons were quietly loaded. There it was. Fox. Check the ears. Unmistakable.

  ‘Hang on,’ said a voice of reason. ‘We’re in the homestead grounds …’

  ‘Bang.’ Too late. Eyes and ears dropped behind the grass.

  We dispersed on foot to retrieve the kill. It was around here somewhere. Or maybe it was over there.

  After two hours we still hadn’t found the carcass. The spaces were wide and deceptive, it was dark. The animal may have been there, dead, hidden. Or horribly, unthinkably, it may have had life enough to crawl away and die.

  So here, true mortification being such a personal, slow-dawning emotion, I abandon you to the interactive bosom of the written word for the tale’s dread punch-line. Feel this one in your guts.

  Next morning, the bright-eyed, spiky-eared, reddish-brown farm dog, the farmer’s only friend and colleague – was nowhere to be found.

  ‘Hay is more acceptable to an ass than gold.’ Latin proverb

  Val McDermid

  Writing genre fiction is a calling more prone to humiliation than most fields of creative endeavour. Yes, we face the same rejections from agents and publishers, the mortification of being asked if we write under our own names, the shame of events where only two people turn up. But we also face the indignity of being one of a bunch in the review section’s crime round-up. And possibly worst of all, the perennial question: ‘Have you ever thought of writing a proper novel?’

  You’d think after fifteen years, nearly twenty novels and a slew of awards I’d be inured to it. But it still stings to be treated like the unfortunate member of the family who’s a bit mentally defective.

  Picture the scene. A Sunday morning at one of the country’s most prestigious literary festivals. To protect the guilty, let’s call it Wheat-on-Rye. I had crawled out of bed at the crack of dawn to drive myself and a fellow crime writer from Manchester to the middle of nowhere to take part in a panel with a literary novelist who had written a no
vel that ‘subverted the conventions of the crime novel’. We’re used to this sort of thing. It usually translates as, ‘I’m a literary novelist, so it doesn’t matter if my detective procedure bears no relationship to reality and my plot has more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire, because I am writing deep and meaningful prose.’

  With some misgivings, we settled down in front of a packed house. The moderator’s first question was to my colleague. ‘So, you write about a police officer. Do you actually spend time with real police officers to find out about their work?’ Next question to me. ‘You’ve written about a psychological profiler. You must have had to do a lot of research to find out how they do the job.’ And to the literary writer? ‘You’re clearly very concerned with language and style. What made you want to experiment with form in this way?’

  And so it continued. Patronizing questions to the crime writers that allowed little or no discussion of our craft or the wider ideas that inform our work. No suggestion that we might be writing something that went beyond the crossword puzzle with the neat resolution. And fawning questions about literature and society to the literary novelist (actually a rather nice man who had the grace to look embarrassed about the whole thing …).