How did the evening end? How did we manage to put ourselves to bed? We both woke with spectacular hangovers, worthy of Lucky Jim himself, and I had the added shame of knowing that I had been a disgrace to Bloomsbury, and had given Virginia Woolf yet more reasons to despise me. What vulgarity, what immodesty! I am left with a lingering sense of horror, and a feeling that I had wandered into the wrong kind of novel. And it wasn’t even the kind of novel that I could write. But will I ever learn to stay at home? Well, I hope not. It will all come in handy one day, surely.
‘My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.’
Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Colm Tóibín
I had published my first novel. It was called The South. I was on my first tour and this was Boston. The schedule said I was to do a TV show, and thus I found myself, make-up on, ready to appear, sitting in a room waiting to be called into the studio. The show was live, and when I looked at the screen I saw that Norman Mailer was already on the programme.
‘That is Norman Mailer!’ I said to the two women in the room. ‘That’s amazing!’
I don’t remember how I realized that one of the people to whom I was gushing was Mrs Mailer. She was very beautiful and very cool. Her skin was perfect. She stared at the screen, expressionless.
‘Am I on after him?’ I asked the production assistant.
‘Yeah, you’re on after him,’ the production assistant said.
I smiled at Mrs Mailer as if to say that we were in this together, but she remained placidly staring at her husband as he spoke, his wonderful worn face in full flight on the screen, his arms gesticulating.
Time went on. We continued to watch in silence. I knew the show was twenty-nine minutes long. Mailer was still on The Deer Park after fifteen. Then he talked about Marilyn and the Kennedys. He smiled, he laughed, he shrugged his shoulders, he interrupted the questions. At twenty-five, he was discussing The Executioner’s Song.
‘Don’t worry,’ the production assistant said to me, ‘keep calm. It’ll soon be your turn.’
At twenty-seven and a half minutes, they rushed me past Norman Mailer and put me sitting in his chair and miked me while the camera focused on the host holding up a copy of Mailer’s new book.
The chair where Mailer had been sitting was still warm. I thought about Mailer’s ass, I imagined it short and muscular and strong, hairy but not fleshy, the grey hair darkening towards the deep cleft. The heat from his ass was going through me as I said a few words about my book and then the show came to an end before the heat had faded.
Mailer was outside putting on his coat. I placed my book down on the table while I reached for my bag. He looked at the book. I wondered if I could start to tell him how much I admired his work, how the sweeping, fiery tones of The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago had made me want to be a journalist, but how I believed that The Executioner’s Song was a masterpiece, as good as it gets, how that book made me want to do nothing except read it again.
‘You’re Irish,’ he said and took me in with his clear gaze.
I nodded. He studied the book again. I wondered if he was going to ask me if he could have a copy of it. I wondered if I should offer him one. It had taken me years to write.
“The Outh,’ he said, approvingly, touching the jacket of the book.
‘No,’ I said almost breathlessly, ‘The South.’
He seemed puzzled. We both looked down at the jacket.
The graphic designer had made a beautiful’S’ in a different colour and type-face to the ‘O-u-t-h’ so that the last four letters were perfectly clear against a blue background, but the ‘S’ was not so clear. I traced my finger along the ‘S’ to show him it was there. He smiled sadly.
‘So it’s not The Outh?’ His tone was amused, relaxed, mellow. He seemed to have liked saying the word ‘Outh’, he had made it long and glamorous-sounding and the afterglow of saying it stayed with him now in a slow smile.
He began to turn. His wife was waiting for him.
‘I thought it was an Irish word,’ he said.
Then he gathered himself up and left. I glanced sharply at his ass as he moved towards the door. It was everything I thought it might be and more. And then he was gone.
‘There still remains, to mortify a wit,
The many-headed monster of the pit.’
Pope, Epilogue to the Satires
Louise Welsh
Some people have a taste for humiliation. When I worked as a secondhand dealer there was a collector of tawse1 who was famous around the markets. He excused his obsession by explaining he was planning to open a school museum. We suspected instead a rare Scottish strain of ‘the English disease’.2 Humiliation was undoubtedly his kink and he worked hard for it. It saddens me that this man had to trawl car boot sales and secondhand shops in search of humiliation, while I experience it so frequently and with so little effort.
Describing the beautiful romance between Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny Osborne, I told a lecture theatre of young students, ‘Stevenson went across the Atlantic in search of Fanny.’ The hilarity stretched all the way to Silverado. At least that got a laugh. Unlike when (I’m cringing as I write this) I asked a member of my visually impaired writer’s workshop about the lack of description in his writing and he reminded me he’d been blind from birth.
Some humiliations feel like triumphs. Initially flattered to be hailed by a hard-drinking young literary lion in a hotel corridor, I started to wonder why he was telling me of the mess he had made of his bathroom. Was this monologue on his lack of aim some kind of metaphor? Then it dawned. He thought I was a cleaner and was instructing me to erase his jottings. Keeping in character I told him he was too old to expect anyone to mop up his toileting accidents and to do it himself or I’d phone the TLS.
Masochists note, an audience salts any wound. I enjoy readings. I prepare and don’t feel that nervous. It’s my body that lets me down, hands that tremble too much to lift a glass and, occasionally, a shaking leg which must have the audience wondering why the woman on stage is doing an impersonation of Elvis Presley. I remind myself the audience have paid good money to attend. They wish me well. This is a foolish delusion. At an Edinburgh Festival event entitled Provocations the first question came from an elderly woman. She looked handknitted, but was about as woolly as a Rottweiler. In polite shortbread tones she began by recounting avant-garde writers she admired, including Burroughs and Trocchi. Surprised but delighted, the readers on stage cast coy glances at each other. Then she got to the meat of her statement.
‘I would like to know why this event is called Provocations? I’ve been sitting here all morning and I haven’t been provoked once! No,’ her voice rose, ‘nothing I’ve heard this morning has provoked me.’ Her friend patted the woman’s arm soothingly. But the old lady would not be pacified. ‘I came here expecting to be provoke d,’ the voice reached a pitch dogs find uncomfortable, ‘and I have been sorely disappointed!’
Later I asked my sister what we had looked like sitting on the platform before the unprovoked woman’s tirade.
‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘you looked like a group of West Coast councillors being quizzed about their expenses.’
What could be more humiliating?
* * *
1 Leather belt until fairly recently used by Scottish teachers to ritually humiliate children by strapping them across their hands in front of the rest of the class/school.
2 Spanking.
‘One place is everywhere, everywhere is nowhere.’ Persian proverb
Mark Doty
I haven’t even finished reading the letter of invitation to the Aran Islands Poetry Festival and I’m daydreaming of lonely sheep scrambling over the stones, and the wind blowing a salty mist over Inisboffin. Men in thick cable sweaters and thicker brogues. Hot whiskey with lemon on a raw night. Seals watching from the rocky shore. Will I come for airfare
and enough money to buy dinner in Dublin? You bet.
I don’t pay too much attention to the disclaimer that the conference actually takes place in Galway City, but the reality of this hits home the morning our taxi enters the driveway of the ‘Hospitality Village’, a compound on the edge of the university. A sprawl of concrete dorms, some bushes planted here and there, a flat brown building full of vending machines – it looks like an apartment complex in either Iowa City or Bratislava. We’re given a key and a map, and wander our way around dozens of identical compounds to find OUR compound. By now we’ve decided it’s an apartment complex on the outskirts of Prague. Our room seems meant to standardize life for the struggling classes. Two beds, each wearing a grey-striped mattress thin as an overcoat, are bolted to the walls; overhead, a sizzle of fluorescent bulbs makes the whole place vibrate. Nothing anywhere indicates anything about the possibility of heat.
Well, what matter a spartan accommodation? We’re off to find the conference. The path winds beside the dorms, beside a somewhat scruffy meadow and a dour stream, underneath what must surely be the only freeway in Western Ireland, past various discarded appliances rusting in the grass, nearly loses itself in some parking lots, and after a mile gives reluctantly onto the campus. A good bit of wandering and some puzzling campus maps lead us to the information table, where we’re face to face with Mary-Grace, the travel agent who’s put all this together. A line of senior citizens with rather strained expressions waits to talk to her, but nothing in her face betrays the least bit of stress. In fact, her dome of blonde hair seems as if it might serve as a kind of protective shield, repelling all difficulties. She waves the troubled participants aside to hand us name tags and a packet of information, and point out where to get something to eat.
Indeed we’re starving, especially after more map consultation and wandering to find the school cafeteria. Eventually a pair of unmarked swinging doors lead us into a basement chamber from which – were there justice in this world – we’d have heard the cries of the damned arising. For indeed the school cafeteria turns out to be half-Dante, half-Dickens. The staff has been recruited from a nineteenth-century orphanage. They stand, pale and defiant with gloom, behind trays of foods relentlessly brown and grey: porridges, gruel, sad toasted things, sorry boiled items, heartbroken sausages swimming in grey juice. We are too hungry to turn back, and choose what we think we can abide, and carry our trays to the towering, pale cashier – in her grey uniform she’s either a moonlighting prison guard or a recently deinstitutionalized patient recovering from electroshock. At our table we translate the alarming bill from pounds and realize we’ve just spent twenty-five dollars on a breakfast that seems to be made of boiled, chilled elastic stockings.
Now despite these complaints, I am not particularly fussy about my circumstances. I have a friend, for instance, a well-known poet who is famous for refusing the rooms he is offered by well-meaning sponsors, referring to himself in the third person and declaring, ‘—does not sleep here!’ I have never done this, though here in the infernal cafeteria I begin to think I should. I have been too grateful to be asked; I have been so surprised and pleased that people wanted to hear my work, or ask me what I thought, that I’ve said yes too easily. This phase of my life seems to be ending, even as I fail to finish my breakfast.
A quick conference with our fellow conferees reveals that the only other food to be had is in Galway City, a walk of another mile or more. We set off, passing Mary-Grace at her table where a longer line of participants with problems wait to enlist her help. We note that all the clientele seem to be elderly, all rather alike in their appearance, and a bit familiar – of course, they’re Boston Irish! Here for a vacation on the old sod with a bit of literature thrown in. My writerly colleagues and I are the lure to get them to plunk down their dollars for a vacation at Hospitality Village – but wait, where are my fellow writers? Wiser than me, clearly, or maybe they read the fine print; they appear for their readings and promptly vanish into rental cars, gone into the rain. Said rain now slicks the path to Galway City and then the way home, and then the path. Rainwater cascades down from the freeway; truck tyres throw out gritty spray, and there’s nothing to do but make a run through it.
I will skip the increasingly long lines shadowing Mary-Grace, and the anguished pleas spoken into the pay-phone outside our door, and go right to the outing which lent the festival its name. A couple of hundred participants, so much white hair among us that altogether we call up something of those fine Aran sheep I imagined so long ago, are herded onto buses, and from the buses to a ferry, and across the chilly sound toward the fabled islands. The air’s exuding something heavier than mist but lighter than rain. We huddle inside the unheated big cabin of the ferry, where you can buy coffee and tea and buns.
Lucky those who do! Since once we arrive at Inishmore, there is no food to be had. The reception organized to greet us turns out to be a tiny, rather pleasing band, playing a pair of welcoming tunes. We listen politely, though it is a bit chilly to be standing here by the dock in the more-than-mist. Once they’re through we begin our march in the now only slightly-less-than-rain. Our destination: a ring fort, an ancient site on a high spot from whence one could indeed see much of the world, were there any world today to be seen. The path wends on, past stones and the requisite, rather glum sheep. Soon the path is going over the stones, since of course the pastures are divided by stone walls just tall enough to keep those wandering clouds in place. At each of these hurdles we lose at least one or two of our company: ‘Oh, I think I’ll just sit this out,’ or ‘I’ll wait here, Helen, you go on and don’t worry about me.’ It’ll be a long wait.
It is quite a hike to the ring fort still, and among our troupe a restless apprehension has begun to spread: we are too polite to say it at first, and surely someone has thought of this problem, but there don’t seem to be any bathrooms. Did you happen to notice a bathroom? We would ask Mary-Grace but she seems to have stayed back at the ferry. Or did she vanish with the bus?
The best the sun can manage is a sort of coppery blush, and then it seems to give up entirely and things grow darker. Our band has diminished but we are still plenty, and we are committed; we want to see the ring fort at the summit of our journey, and we want to hear the reading promised there; Edna O’Brien herself will speak among the ancient stones.
And indeed, at the summit, to the wonder of a crowd now damp, hungry, and accepting that the shame of simply going and relieving oneself beside one of the stone walls is preferable to the misery of keeping one’s pride intact, Edna O’Brien appears. How has she done it? She looks as though she has just returned from the powder room. She is radiant, untouched; she is funny, smart and wise; her tenderness toward the world is balanced by her unmistakable, perfectly pitched anger. We love her.
And then we walk down again.
The elderly Irish of Boston are sore, their stockings torn. They are faint with hunger and exposure, and mildly seasick. Thank heavens tomorrow’s the day to go home. The buses will be late, and there won’t be enough of them to get us all to Shannon on time. Paul and I are lucky to claim seats. Mary-Grace gets on the bus and makes an announcement that only those on early flights should take this bus. She asks Paul and I to get off and take a later bus. I do not have a shred of faith that there will BE a later bus, and I am finished with Mary-Grace. No more Mr Nice Guy poet; Doty does not sleep here! Mary-Grace, I say, with a steely ferocity in my voice which makes six rows of heads swivel, and which startles me, though I rather like it, we are riding on this bus.
And we do. We barely make the plane. We’re not surprised to see, as we fit ourselves and our carry-ons into the tiny space of our coach seats, Mary-Grace looking back at us with a quick, evaluative glance, just before she disappears into First Class.
‘We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.’ Thoreau
Michael Ondaatje
I did hear this one true story – the nightmare event at a reading.
A well-
known American novelist, after her successes, was invited back to her high school. They had put on the dog for her and she had therefore put on the dog for them. She dressed well and stood up at the lectern to give her formal speech about writing, the arts, culture, education – all the noble things writers never talk or think about when they are not on panels or speaking publicly.
It was a full auditorium. Halfway through the talk she began to feel sick and, knowing she was soon going to throw up, announced in a calm voice that she had left a few pages of her speech offstage, in her bag. She walked off slowly and as soon as she was out of sight ran to the bathroom and threw up noisily. She had been doing this for about a minute when someone came into the bathroom to tell her that the lapel mike was still on.
‘He who is wrong fights against himself.’ Egyptian proverb
James Wood
One of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms goes: ‘an erratum in the list of errata’. I’ve always liked this spindly joke, not only because the double negative is witty (might an erratum in the list of errata be not wrong but mysteriously right, as in algebra a minus times a minus equals a plus?) but because Lichtenberg seems to imply that error attracts more error; or rather that the urge to correction carries the seeds of its own destruction, as saintliness attracts martyrdom.
Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Page 11