Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

by Robin Robertson

  At school, when I was seventeen, I had a band. That is to say I had a shiny red Gibson SG copy, a wah-wah pedal, an amp, and a couple of friends with similarly noisy pieces of equipment. On weekends we’d score a bag of ganja, lay in some fine barley wines, get good and smashed, and start jamming.

  That summer the school decided to honour its growing contingent of young rockers with an afternoon concert. Nobody had heard our band play, but this, combined with our generally stoned demeanour, merely added to our mystique. We were called ‘Barbarossa’s Body’; I don’t remember why, but I do remember overhearing some juniors who passed us in a corridor whisper admiringly: They’re Barbarossa’s Body; they’re playing in the concert, and feeling rather grand.

  The time for the concert drew near. I prepared for it by buying an afghan sheepskin waistcoat on the Portobello Road. It was embroidered with silk stars and small mirrors, and bordered all around with long, thick, yellowish-grey sheep hair which, particularly at the armholes, where it sprouted out like two enormous shaggy sunflowers, gave me a primitive appearance that I found pleasing.

  At lunchtime on the day of the concert itself, I felt suddenly unwell. So unwell that I had to be excused from the table to get a breath of fresh air. I’d never gone on stage before, and it hadn’t occurred to me to get nervous, but as I walked across the schoolyard, I realized I was suffering from an anxiety so acute it was making me nauseous. There was something else too. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it was giving me the dim feeling that something in my life was going truly, catastrophically wrong.

  In this uncertain condition I put on my new waistcoat and went to meet my band backstage. The group before us did rockabilly covers – efficient, fast, and much appreciated by the audience. We took the stage. As we stood there looking at each other in our magnificent outfits, with waves of joyous expectation streaming up at us from the audience, there was a moment where reality seemed on the brink of miraculously breaking its own laws in order to conform with the infantile fantasies of effortless brilliance and adulation that had brought us up here. And then the little detail I had managed to overlook or suppress all this time, namely that we knew not one single song, that we barely knew which way up to hold our instruments, that our ‘jam’ sessions had been about on the level of children flying imaginary airplanes, swung suddenly into the foreground of my mind. In a blind panic I began thrashing at my guitar. My friends did likewise. There were a few seconds of puzzled silence in the hall. Then, like a coordinated wave going through a soccer crowd, the expressions on our audience’s faces changed as one from bewilderment to incredulity to savage hilarity, and our cacophony was drowned out by the most powerfully demoralizing sound I had ever heard: the sound of five hundred schoolboys booing. Astonishing to relate, we didn’t immediately give up. As if this reaction were not quite enough to gratify my apparently bottomless need for humiliation, not enough to acquire permanent mortification status as an event capable of turning me scarlet whenever I should happen to think of it in later life, I had to go up to the mike and make a bleating plea to the audience to ‘give us a chance’. That done, I maxed the volume on my guitar for another thunderburst, this time pumping furiously on the wah-wah pedal, as if I could reverse the situation through sheer noise and will power, only to be greeted by a still more appalling sound than before: the audience’s boos had turned to baas. My friends, getting the joke, and no doubt seeing an opportunity to salvage their own reputations, pointed at my sheepskin waistcoat, burst into treacherous laughter, and fled.

  Mortify: to deprive of life; to kill, put to death (OED). In the sepulchral inner space I entered then, I understood one very simple thing: either the world was going to have to cease to exist, or else I myself was. No doubt the mark of a genius (or a madman) at such a juncture would be to choose the former. I didn’t: I died. And what I think of now as I see myself standing there dumbstruck in my furry pelt, is the poor sheep Abraham put to death in his son Isaac’s stead. My primordial sheep-self had been sacrificed in order that my new, cautious, responsible, realistic, adult self might be given life.

  At any rate, I have made it a point, since then, to have a little something prepared on the rare occasions when I have to get up on a stage and perform.

  ‘I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.’ Richard Steele

  Maggie O’Farrell

  The room is tiny. There are no windows and as far as I know the door may be locked from the outside. On the miniature, doll-sized desk in front of me are two pieces of chalk, a roll of gaffer tape and a razor blade. Strange acts have been committed here, by extremely small people. A man with a body odour problem has just come in and snapped a pair of excruciatingly tight headphones over my ears.

  I hate doing live radio. I loathe and detest it. I don’t even like talking on the phone, let alone doing an interview down a wire, with someone I can’t see and have never met. I’m always convinced it will bring out my long-dormant stammer. And then there’s the horrifying idea that people might be out there listening, from their cars, offices and kitchens. None of them, I am sure, will have the slightest interest in anything I have to say. Why have I agreed to this? What conspiracy of decisions or chains of events has brought me here, to this, sitting obediently in a head-manacle in a broom cupboard, sweating into my beloved best shirt, waiting for a sign from someone or something?

  A trickle of notes down the line heralds my connection to the distant radio station, across the breadth of the country. A soupy jazz record is playing. I strain for the voice of a technician, telling me what’s about to happen, but instead, over the tinkly piano, I hear the presenter yell, ‘Who’ve we got next?’

  There is a pause. A scuffling of papers. I sit up straighter, even though they can’t see me, just to be ready.

  ‘Eh …’ another voice says over more paper-scuffling, ‘… Maggie O’Farrell.’

  ‘Who?’ the presenter barks.

  ‘She’s a writer.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he yells, ‘who booked her? I’ve never heard of her.’

  I stop sitting straighter. Some part of me realizes that at this point I should cough or clear my throat to let them know that I’m here, but the presenter is still shouting:

  ‘I’m sick of you booking these bloody nobodies. When are you going to get me some proper guests?’

  The headphones are so tight I feel as though I’m undergoing a cranial lobotomy. I gaze blankly at the razor blade as the presenter harangues the producer for his bad choice in guests, demanding to know what my books are called, what they’re about and what on earth I’m going to want to say.

  ‘And where is she, anyway?’ he snaps.

  ‘She’s in the other studio,’ the producer says.

  There is another pause while the jazz record spirals on, the pianist still tinkling away politely. We listen to each other breathing. The producer, poor man, clears his throat. ‘Are you there, Maggie?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Can you hear us?’ he asks weakly.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  The record ends. The presenter fills his lungs. ‘And now I have a special treat for you all. Here in the studio to talk about her new book is authoress Mary Farrell.’

  ‘To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.’ Walt Whitman

  Paul Muldoon

  Worst of all, surely, was the occasion on which I set out by train from New York City to read at a university one or two states up the track. The university should remain nameless, though if I were to mention its name you’d probably never have heard of it. It was not a university of the first water, one might say. I alighted at the station, expecting to be met, though, since the arrangements had been made a good month earlier, I began to doubt my memory of them. I waited long enough for a little dusting of snow, then took a cab to the campus. Nondescript is too colourful a word. I was carrying a letter from my host which gave his office building and number. I found my way
to his door. No response. At least not from him. There was, rather, the scraping of a chair from the next office. Its inhabitant appeared. Professor So-and-so? There was a glance over the shoulder, a shaking of the head. Professor So-and-so had been on a three-week-long bender. Dreadful. In a moment of lucidity, however, Professor So-and-so had been in touch with the departmental secretary and had let her know that an announcement of my reading should be made. This had happened as recently as yesterday. There hadn’t, alas, been much time to run up a flyer. He rustled a khaki invitation which had already been all but obscured by an ‘Anxious? Depressed? Suicidal?’ poster.

  Not to worry. Rough with the smooth. Hang loose. Stiff upper lip. The neighbour had to rush, alas, but he pointed me in the direction of the room in which the reading was meant to take place and informed me of the location of the hotel into which I’d been booked for the night. Needless to say, no arrangements had been made for my fee. Such considerations are not uppermost in the mind of someone committed to a three-week-long bender. The cheque would be in the mail. No need to worry about the hotel. That would be billed directly to the department. I agreed with the neighbour that it would probably have been better if someone had been available to give an introduction but, under the circumstances, I also had to agree with him that no introduction is better than one hastily cobbled together. I thanked him for his trouble and assured him I was perfectly happy to take things from there. I treated myself to a pizza in the student cafeteria and made my way to the room for a quarter to seven. The reading was due to start at seven and I was gratified to discover that there was already a core of five or six audience members. There to get a good seat, one would have thought, though they were all somehow huddled at the back. The core audience turned out to be the entire audience. Okay. Still better, I always think, than that time in the Moy when Jimmy Simmons and I read to his wife, my father, and my sister. At about five minutes past seven I got up and launched into my first poem. It was met with smiles and glances. They liked me. They really liked me. The second poem was guaranteed to knock them dead. But just before I’d got to the end, one of my fans put up her hand and asked me how long I expected to be. What? The thing was, these students were involved in a study group and had settled in this empty classroom in the hope of finding a little peace and quiet.

  I made my way to the hotel. Nondescript would definitely be too colourful, though the pillowcase had a scent which, to borrow a line of MacNeice, ‘reminded [me] of a trip to Cannes’. At about four in the morning I awoke to find myself vigorously scratching myself here, there and everywhere. Reddish lumps here, there and everywhere. Fleas. I myself hopped out of bed and took the first train back to New York City.

  ‘Better a quiet death than a public misfortune.’ Spanish proverb

  André Brink

  This goes back a good number of years, when I was a young and eager writer (I’m still eager, but not quite so young), anxious to make a good impression, and only too conscious of the value of meeting the right people. I’m not normally all that eager to meet people, right or wrong, but it had been impressed upon me that this was the Right Thing To Do. So when I received the invitation to the birthday party of a Quite Important Publisher in Cape Town, I grimly resolved to go. Not so much for the sake of the birthday man himself as to meet another publisher who, I had been told by friends in the know, was just the man I should entrust my writing future to. I had a newly-completed manuscript, and this was the moment to decide its – and my – fate.

  The evening started off on an uncomfortable note. The writer who had organized the gathering was known as a queer bird, as egocentric as they come; he had arranged it in what was undoubtedly the top hotel in town, and had in fact checked in a few days earlier (on the publisher’s expense account) to make sure that everything would be Just So. He had chosen the menu (which meant all his own favourite dishes), ordered the wine (not so much by label as by price tag), picked two or three people who would ensure, unobtrusively but with great sophistication, that everything would Run Smoothly. When the guests arrived, he was there to look them over from a distance, and once everybody who Mattered had arrived, he haughtily withdrew to his room upstairs where, we learned later, he dined in solitary splendour, leaving the rest of us to our joint and several pursuits.

  I am rather allergic to large gatherings of strangers, and hovered mostly on the periphery of the lively group in which everybody, except me, appeared to know everybody else. I managed to chat to a few people who seemed vaguely familiar, but they soon drifted off to what was, no doubt, more lively or more profitable conversation. I was left to myself, trying with as much enthusiasm as I could muster to enter into a passionate relationship with my glass of wine.

  And then, suddenly, through some cosmic prestidigitation, the man appeared beside me. The Publisher. The One. I could not but recall a rather obvious graffito on the wall of a public toilet in São Paolo which had confidently informed me that, ‘You are holding your future in your hands.’

  I engaged The Man in conversation. Amazingly, he seemed interested in what I had to say. It became animated. All diffidence and anxiety left me. This was Going Well. Only, after a while it began to flag. I noticed that his eyes were wandering. He was looking for a new partner in conversation. I simply had to find something to keep him there, even if just for a few minutes, until the moment was ripe to broach the matter of my manuscript.

  Looking round frantically in search of something to say, I noticed at the far end of the bustling room a rather heartrending sight: a woman on her own, clearly out of her depth, in clothes that simply did nothing for her at all. Feigning sophisticated sympathy, I turned to The Publisher, pointed in the direction of the ungainly female apparition, and asked, ‘Who on earth is that wretched-looking woman over there?’

  For some reason there seemed to appear a lull in the hubbub around us, as if not only The Man, but everybody, was listening to us.

  And The Publisher said in very clearly demarcated words, each stressed separately, ‘It is my wife.’

  ‘The idea that the media is there to educate us, or to inform us, is ridiculous because that’s about tenth or eleventh on their list. The first purpose of the media is to sell us shit.’ Abbie Hoffman

  Duncan McLean

  On the whole, professional writers are a lot of whingeing bastards who wouldn’t last a day in a real job. They get flown around the world for launches and festivals, treated to meals out and free room service, then have the gall to moan that their hotel’s only four-star. They get off with translators, post-grad students and easily impressed publisher’s publicists, then complain because only seventy-three of the seventy-six folk who struggled through the blizzard to attend their in-store reading loved them enough to actually buy the book. Of course I include myself in this miserable roll-call of inadequate no-lifers. Is my writing autobiographical? Yes it fucking is, for once.

  The true mortification of being a writer is having to meet other writers from time to time, and listen to their mundane egotistical rantings. Like the ones I’m going to scratch down now about a typically humiliating day in a promotional tour I was asked to do a couple of years ago. The place: a large college town in the south-western USA. The start time: 7.14am.

  Breakfast TV. Very like you’d imagine (so why waste words?), with the writer sandwiched on the mauve couch between a diet guru (‘Fruits of the Desert weightloss plan – store those nutrients like a cactus’) and the Texoma spelling-bee champ, muttering between her braces, ‘Chrysanthemum, ineradicable, diarrhoea …’

  The host was plump and shiny. An assistant dashed in during the ad breaks to dab his sweat away. His left shoelace was undone and trailing.

  ‘And we’re back,’ he said. ‘Our guest today has written a novel called Bunker Man. What’s that all about?’

  ‘Golf,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘Witty repartee in the sand trap.’

  His face brightened. ‘Really?’

  ‘No, but I thought you’d like that mor
e than a psychosexual horror story full of squalid under-age copulation in a concrete bomb-shelter.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said.

  During the phone-in section of the show there were quite a few callers for the ‘Have you ever seen a fat cactus?’ guru, but only one for me: ‘Dance with the one who brung you,’ said the voice over the monitor.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t mentioned this evening’s sponsor once, and we’re paying for free beverages until eleven. Show some gratitude! And there’s not nearly as much golf in your book as we were led to believe’

  ‘Thank you so much,’ said the host, sweating again. ‘Next!’

  ‘Diarrhoea?’

  Next stop was a lunchtime reading and signing at a big chain in a big mall in a big retail park on the edge of town. There was no one there. Not just no audience for me, but no customers at all. And no staff either. Well, there had to be someone somewhere: otherwise, who had pressed play on the CD of Boston Pops covers of Billy Joel’s greatest hits?

  Eventually I managed to find a cash-desk, where HI I’M CLEBO (according to his lapel badge) looked astonished when I introduced myself.

  ‘I guess it was Appalachia who booked you, was it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just got given this list of places to show up to …’

  ‘May I see? Oh … yeah. That is us. What’s the date?’

  ‘The fourteenth.’

  ‘That’s what it says here.’

  ‘I know. That’s why I came today.’