Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

by Robin Robertson

  In the spring of 1998, however, when I finally finished my manuscript, I felt that my fortunes were at last shifting. My agent seemed pleased with the book, and suggested that others might be also. And I had a publication in the offing: Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine Zoetrope had commissioned a short story, which was soon to appear. More than that, they had invited me to read from it at a trendy Greenwich Village bar, in honour of the magazine’s new issue. I was told that I would be reading with another, earlier contributor, whom I shall call Z, a young woman whose Zoetrope short story had earned her a six-figure book contract and minor celebrity; but I somehow, wilfully and woefully misguidedly, understood that the reading was primarily in honour of my Zoetrope issue, and hence, by extension, of me.

  As I packed my overnight bag for the metropolis, I indulged in minor, oh-so-careful, fantasies. I didn’t imagine a book contract that would make the news, like Z’s, but I did imagine the trendy bar filled with eager readers, my eager readers, perhaps among them editors enamoured of my novel manuscript and prompted, by the wild (although discreet) success of my short story and reading, to up their offers by a considerable sum. I didn’t allow myself to imagine film deals (I wasn’t unreasonable!); but I did see, somehow, in this visit to New York, a new stage in my life beginning, the end of my literary isolation and my warm, if belated, welcome into the embrace of the New York literary scene. This – I could feel it – was the beginning of my real literary life.

  As it happened, the day slated for the auction of my novel was the same as the day of my reading at the trendy Village bar. It was a Wednesday, and a memorable one; although not memorable quite as I might have hoped. The day was not filled with the frenzied ringing of cell phones around the city, nor with the pounding of virtual gavels as the auction reached its height. Rather, it was a day of ever more widely spaced and ever more sober calls from my agent, informing me that one after another and then, as the afternoon proceeded, in clutches and clumps, the editors who were to have raved over my novel were, one by one, quietly declining to bid. By the end of the afternoon, as I readied myself to go downtown, to step into the literary spotlight, I had amassed ten rejections, and had none left to go. Ten submissions, ten rejections. Busy day.

  My agent, however, being a marvellous and God-like man, knew exactly what to say: ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he assured me. ‘We’ll find the right home for your book.’ (Which he did, not long after.) ‘You know, Beckett was very hard to sell, too.’ Which false flattery proved exactly what my bruised ego required to enable me to put on my make-up and high heels and head for my reading. I felt my humiliation was at least private, and my chance for glory, while diminished, not entirely extinguished.

  Until, that is, I got to the bar. There, the joint was, as I had spent the long train journey imagining, jumping. Filled to the rafters. Bursting at the seams. Except that the posters, everywhere apparent, from the street outside to the podium at which the reading was to take place, all bore only one typed name: Z’s. In big, bright letters: Z’s name. My name was there, it’s true, hastily scrawled underneath by hand, in some instances misspelled, in others frankly illegible. I was the afterthought, the charity case, the one who shouldn’t have been there. And all the fans I’d dreamed about – they were her fans, of course. Just as the book contract and the celebrity and the film deal I hadn’t even dared to imagine were hers, too. And to top it off, Z seemed a perfectly pleasant person.

  As I pushed my way through the crowd to make myself known to the bar staff, I ran into another young novelist I’d met once before, a member of the hip metropolitan set. ‘Are you a friend of Z’s too?’ he asked. ‘Is that why you’re reading with her? How’s everything going, anyway?’

  To which, fool that I was, in my shell-shocked desperation, I told the truth. ‘Actually, I’ve had kind of a rough day,’ I said. ‘My novel’s been turned down ten times since this morning.’

  From the expression on his face, you would have thought I’d announced that I had leprosy, or Ebola, or SARS. While striving to retain his society grin, he winced and flinched and grimaced; and I realized the depth of my mistake. Failure is not simply inadmissible, it can be catching. People not only don’t want to be failures, they don’t want to know them.

  But this ambitious young writer knew what to do, in order to inoculate himself and those around him from the threat that I posed. While still flinching and wincing and smiling all at once he said – his only acknowledgement of my confession – ‘Wow.’ And then, ‘Have you met A?’ – he grabbed the shoulder of the woman, or girl, beside him and spun her around to face me. She had a great mass of dark curls, and was barely of legal drinking age. ‘She’s just sold a book of stories this week for $150,000 and she hasn’t even finished it yet. Isn’t that incredible?’

  ‘Incredible. Congratulations.’

  I even smiled. I was polite. I stood up, when my turn came, and read from my story. I slipped out afterwards without speaking to anyone, and took a cab uptown. I made it through.

  Years and publications later, I was invited back to the trendy bar, this time to read with a writer in her fifties, as hip a New York writer as someone in her fifties can be. I knew her slightly, and felt fine about the event: it would, I thought, put old ghosts to rest, show me how far I had come.

  My husband came with me this time, and this writer blithely called him by someone else’s name, repeatedly, in conversation before the reading; by which I should have felt the inauspicious vibe. This writer had asked if she could read first; and of course I agreed. But I was somewhat surprised when, at the intermission, she came to me, her own husband in tow, both with anxious expressions.

  ‘How long do you think you might read for?’ she asked.

  We’d both been asked to read fifteen minutes. ‘Same as you,’ I said. ‘About fifteen minutes.’

  She winced and flinched, though not as dramatically as the young fellow of years before. ‘Oh God, this is really embarrassing, but you won’t mind if we have to go, will you? It’s just that we’ve got to get home, –’

  Her husband interrupted her, his hands out like plates in a gesture of plaintive helplessness. ‘Sopranos night,’ he said, with a shrug.

  The writer had the good grace, at least, to blush like a beetroot, in spite of her hip leather jacket, her downtown persona, her whole cool schtick. But she didn’t stay for my reading.

  Next time I’m invited to read at the trendy bar in Greenwich Village, I hope I’ll know better than to go.

  ‘It is no use trying to tug the glacier backwards.’ Tibetan proverb

  Michael Bracewell

  It all began one wet night in Rochdale, during the late autumn of 1993, at a dingy recording studio called Suite Sixteen. I had come to visit Mark E. Smith – the ex-Communist, former docker, and founder of one of the most innovative groups to emerge in contemporary music, The Fall. With an engineer he was mixing a new album, Middle Class Revolt, and he looked as though he’d been up for days. He was, in fact, unconscious when I first arrived – stretched out on the kind of broken-down sofa that you might see outside a mini-cab office on a warm summer evening. Waking, he had seemed immediately to pull all the strands of himself together, acquiring a coherence – like the shards of a Cubist portrait suddenly shooting back into their figurative state – which somehow denied that he’d ever been asleep.

  A class warrior, dandy and intellectual, Smith is one of nature’s aristocrats. Born and raised in Salford, he is now resident in Prestwich, north Manchester. His performances with The Fall – delivering the elaborate code of his lyrics in plosive, spoken bursts from the corner of his mouth, across rigid, relentless repetitions of rock chords – can seem virtually shamanic. He is Beuysian in this respect. He is also famously acerbic.

  Example: a music paper once decided that it would make an interesting story to have various rock celebrities take a train journey together, their wit and conversation being noted down by a journalist. Smith arrived carrying two plastic bags
filled with cans of lager, and settled in for the duration. Some hours later, one of the assembled stars was attempting to prove that he had the ability to read a stranger’s personality, simply by studying their face. Smith sat in silence throughout the demonstration. Had the amateur analyst been more accomplished, he might have noticed that Smith’s eyes had narrowed a fraction – always a bad sign. But at first, all seemed well. ‘I can do that, mate,’ Smith announced, amiably enough. ‘Okay, Mark,’ came the bright reply, ‘tell me all about myself!’

  ‘You’re a cunt.’

  Stories such as these had passed into legend. So much so, I felt, that they began to caricature Mark E. Smith as a kind of Alf Garnett of punk rock – obscuring his brilliance as an artist and icon who, on the one hand, had been implored by Kurt Cobain to support his group Nirvana, and on the other invited to address Oxford University’s James Joyce society. Smith’s work made a mockery of the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, or between populism and post-modernism. Thus, entangled in questions of cultural status, I took him out for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Rochdale – where he ate a rabbit – and invited him to be the subject of a public interview, to be conducted by myself, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

  In retrospect, I must have seemed like one of those eager young reporters from the early days of the BBC – tweedy and hopelessly bourgeois, yet ravenous to engage with the true avant-garde. My admiration for Mark’s work knew – and knows – no bounds. Over dinner his anecdotes were hilarious, his insights fascinating: how Nico – the former chanteuse with the Velvet Underground – had once tried to buy some speed off his mum, for instance; and how he was opposed to Manchester’s proposed celebration of L.S. Lowry – ‘He was a fuckin’ rent collector, him: “Come out or I’ll paint yer!”’

  Tickets for the event sold well; so well, in fact, that it was moved from the upstairs gallery to the 250-seat theatre. On the night, the audience filled the lobby bar and cafe, their chatter rising in an anticipatory buzz. A smell of damp cardboard, roll-ups and spilt beer announced the presence of the music press. The talk was scheduled to start at 8 p.m. At 7.45 the Talks Co-ordinator remained calm and cheerful, despite the absence of Mark E. Smith. A veteran of many ICA events, where feuding semioticians had come to blows, for instance, or distinguished speakers on Middle Eastern affairs had arrived unable to speak a word of English, there was little, I thought, that could flap her self-possession. But by 7.55 she was looking slightly clammy.

  The metallic clatter of a stage door announced Mark’s arrival. He was wearing a grey raincoat and looked sort of blurred around the edges. Unsmiling at our fools’ masks of sheer relief, his first request – aimed directly at the undisputedly well-bred Talks Co-ordinator – was for a bucket. To her undying credit, she treated this as the harmless whim of an eccentric genius. A bucket was found. After she had handed it to him, he put it on the floor in front of us and pissed into it, noisily.

  By now, the murmur of the audience – there were maybe two women there, the rest were men – was becoming restless. Backstage, too, was getting tense. At ease in the shabby little dressing room, however, Mark lit a cigarette. His temper was hard to gauge: we were both in this together, it seemed, with parity, as comrades – but at the same time I felt that I was little more than a fledgling in his palm. I would have done well to remember the first quotation of his I had ever written down; ‘I like to keep The Fall at arm’s length …’ it began. Then there was Mark’s widely publicized relationship with intoxicants and stimulants. Was he on anything? Worse, was he coming down off something? If I’d been Nick Kent, I’d have known. As it was I fiddled with my watch while Mark drank lagers and offered to massage my shoulders. The best part of an hour passed, with increasingly urgent visits from the Talks Co-ordinator. Were we ready yet? ‘Right then,’ Mark announced, at a little after 9 p.m., and for the first and last time I followed Mark E. Smith out on to a stage.

  Some generous applause, and no small amount of heckling greeted our arrival. We had kept the audience waiting – beer-less, unable to smoke – for the best part of an hour and a quarter. Then all was silence.

  There is something about the sheer speed with which a public event can suddenly go wrong. There are a few seconds of cold, broiling panic in the pit of your stomach, as you realize that you have just walked – or bounced, even, with the suave smile of the self-assured – into a room that has no floor. I had experienced other dead drops into public humiliation – that occasion on live trans-Danubian radio, for instance, when the presenter had announced, in perky, Americanized English, ‘And tonight in the studio we’re honoured to welcome Brett Easton Ellis’ – but never before in front of an audience.

  The hush had been anticipatory, as though a mob were waiting for the axe to fall. Yet still, incredibly, I maintained a belief that the interview could succeed. It was only when I began to speak – an introductory address I had prepared about Jim Morrison’s public interview at the ICA, back in the late sixties – that I suddenly realized how terminally fogeyish, how toxically Middle English, I seemed in that situation. The effect was as though A.N. Wilson had taken to the stage at the 100 Club. The audience began to snigger, first in isolated guffaws and then with abandon. I would see from the photograph in the following day’s Independent newspaper, that their hilarity was first prompted by the manner in which Mark was sitting beside me, swigging from a bottle of lager, but with his little finger crooked – a savage caricature of gentility: the class warrior unleashed on the twerpish agent of gentrification.

  I remembered too late that these kinds of events – ‘In Conversations’, bookshop appearances and so forth – are wholly bourgeois in their conception: they presuppose a complicity between the audience, subject and interviewer, in which a kind of broadsheet notion of edification is the predominant tone. And I was face to face with the man who had written ‘Prole Art Threat’ in 1979 and thrown Courtney Love off a tour bus. A man who preferred to get arrested by the LAPD rather than put out his fag on a plane. Smith had lambasted all the institutions of middle-class popular culture, from open-air festivals to student vegans; and as his greatest hero was Wyndham Lewis, so he assumed his best-known public mask of being The Enemy. No matter that I’d seen The Fall maybe twenty times, and no matter that I listened to the records with unceasing enthusiasm, and written about them as vital works of contemporary art. I came across like Wilfrid Hyde-White trying to interview Eminem.

  It occurred to me that I had missed the point of The Fall by a mile. Of course, I should have realized that shamanic class warriors don’t do cosy, ICA-style interviews; they operate on a different level, ceaselessly self-protective and necessarily resistant to the commodifying grasp – the pasteurizing process – of institutional cultural interpretation. I’d watched Jean Genet on the South Bank Show, refusing to comply with the probings of polite mediation. For Smith to become the amiable studio guest, offering insights into his creative method, would have undermined the purpose of his entire project. But that realization came later. ‘Can you remember the early concerts in the working men’s clubs?’ I asked, fingering my notes with sweating hands;’ ‘Course I can. Do you think I’m daft?’ came the sharp reply. ‘Were you always interested in music?’ ‘My uncle played the saw. Lovely instrument.’ And so on. The remaining fifty minutes became a dark vortex – somewhere in the diminishing perspectives of which I took temporary leave of my body.

  Some years later, I asked the ICA for a copy of their tape of the event. Listening to it, I was overwhelmed by just how generous, eloquent, affectionate and informative Mark had actually been during the interview. But there had been some fundamental collision of expectations and attitudes, between audience, speaker and event, which had all but drowned out the talk itself: to have thought of the public interview with Mark in terms of blurring cultural boundaries, had proved pointless. As Ken Dodd once remarked, ‘Try telling Freud’s theory of humour to the second house at the Glasgow Empire on a Sa
turday night.’

  In addition to which, the turbulence which the event had seemed to summon up – a volatility of ambience which Elvis Presley’s biographer, Albert Goldman, once described as ‘acoustic steam’ – was perhaps a version of the same intensity which Smith brings to his performances with The Fall – as though his personality becomes a poltergeist, once he hits the stage. At the end of the talk, questions from the audience had turned nasty. ‘Mark, are you still a drunk?’ some man asked from the side of the darkened auditorium.

  This comes pretty near the end of the tape. ‘Gotta split,’ Mark replies; and the void left by his departure from the stage, as recorded, is a rising roar of static electricity.

  ‘Insults should be well avenged or well endured.’ Spanish proverb

  Darryl Pinckney

  More than ten years ago I went on a national reading tour to promote the paperback edition of the novel I’d published the year before. The tour had its strange, moody hosts, its moments of validation from audiences, the schedule of fast-moving evenings that give you a Friendliness Hangover when it’s all over and done with, because you’ve talked so much and wanted to be liked so much you’ve tried to become best friends with everyone you met. The tour also had its forlorn venues. In Atlanta, during a terrible storm, the manager of the suburban bookstore where I was to appear assured me that it was not my fault that I was not Madonna and could not attract a crowd in such weather. Thunder rattled the panes. The shop was near empty. By 8.15 there were three black people seated in the front row; the rest of the chairs were vacant. Two white customers, sussing that a boring, poorly attended reading was about to take place, dived down the aisle toward the shelf of tax manuals. One of the three black people said that they ran an experimental theatre in Atlanta and knew the experience of finding more people on stage than in the audience, so if I wanted to read then they were prepared to listen. I hoped that anecdote would entertain and move the people in the publicity department back at my publishers. I had an obscure fear of them.