Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

by Robin Robertson

  A few days later, in misty Portland, Oregon, I met up with an English friend, a poet, who the day before had read to an audience of 3000 in a downtown Portland theatre. Surprising, wonderful, cultured, hippy Portland. As my friend and I entered the bookshop where I was to give a reading, I put the paperback copy of my book in my pocket. Then this weird thing happened: ‘Hey!’ I paid no attention. ‘Excuse me, I’m talking to you.’ I turned about and saw a clerk, his tag around his neck. ‘Could you step this way, please?’ That was a rather brusque way to invite me to sign books, I thought. But, no, the clerk wanted to know if I’d just slipped something into my pocket. Yes. But that was all I was going to say. The clerk wanted to see what I had just slipped into my pocket. I saw the sign above the cashiers’ station, a sign that warned shoplifters that they would be prosecuted. My friend barked, ‘He’s reading here tonight!’ He couldn’t believe it either. I was being stopped as a suspected shoplifter. I know a painter who refuses to have anything to do with a canvas once he’s decided it’s finished. He wants his gallery to take it away and sell it as quickly as possible. The painting must begin its own life, one independent of the artist, immediately. The clerk didn’t blink at the photograph of the black guy on the back cover of the copy of High Cotton in my unsteady hand. My friend was going ballistic. I fled. I went outside for a cigarette. Someone came and got me when it was time for me to go on. I didn’t see that clerk. My friend sat in the rear, fuming. Otherwise, my audience amounted to about thirty people, seven of them either high-school classmates or the siblings of classmates. But I had a great time after all and I wanted the publicity department back at my publishers to be glad to hear it. As he held the door for us, the bookstore manager made apologies to my friend again. He’d really scared them, which nicely covered up for what I like to pretend was my complicated lack of reaction to being asked to frisk myself in a bookstore.

  ‘He that riseth late must trot all day.’ Benjamin Franklin

  Irvine Welsh

  I’m very fortunate in that I’m not that easily embarrassed, which is a good thing as my behaviour has often not been up to scratch, this particularly being the case in my youth. I think that, over the years, I’ve become inured to the type of embarrassment that really fucks some other people up. I’m not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. Like most of us, the bulk of my cringe-worthy moments have come about through intoxication on drink or drugs. Now I’ve got to the point that I get somewhat red-faced if I wake up to find out that I haven’t made a complete tit of myself. It always seems a waste of a night out.

  Of course, although it certainly helps, I don’t need drink and drugs to make an absolute prick of myself. Even sober, I’m the master of the faux pas. I blame this on the incredible arrogance of being so wrapped up in myself that I can’t be bothered to pay attention to what’s going on around me. Once, when I had taken a new job in London, after the first week my boss took me out for a drink. It was a relaxed, cordial affair although the alcohol was slipping down a bit quickly. He asked me if I was enjoying the job. I told him that it was fine. He then asked if I was getting on with everybody at work. I explained that they were all very nice, but there was one woman manager who worked upstairs. I told him that everybody hated her, thought she was a ‘poisonous cunt’. At this point I perhaps should have noticed the slightly pained, if thoughtful, reaction on my boss’s face.

  The next day, suitably vulnerable and hung-over, I was having a lunchtime game of pool with a girl who worked upstairs beside the woman in question. She asked me if I’d had a good time last night. I told her that I did, but I’d had more to drink than I thought I would. She asked me about the boss and how I got on with him. I told her that I thought that he seemed a really nice guy. (It was very unusual for me to feel that way about any boss I’ve had.) She agreed that he was okay, but then she said, ‘It must be strange for him to be working so closely with his wife …’ Of course, I knew straight away whom she meant by this, experiencing what myself and a good friend called ‘the crumbling dam effect’. This occurs when you feel your face suddenly collapse in response to, well, mortification.

  This type of embarrassment is intense, but relatively routine. The big problem in trying to dredge up a really mortifying memory is that there are so many and you suspect that you’ve repressed the best (or worst) ones. Anyway, one that always sticks in my mind was when I was ticketless at the Scotland v. England game at Wembley in 1979. I sat with two friends and a huge carry-out in the car park outside the stadium. We had been in a state of alcoholic oblivion for a few days and we wouldn’t have thanked anybody for tickets at that point, we just wanted to finish our session.

  I farted and followed through. Despite the quickening of the pulse and sweating of the brow in response to the warm feeling in my underpants, I nonchalantly headed up and off to the toilets in Wembley Way. I thought that I would defecate, get cleaned up best I could, probably flushing my keks away if the damage proved to be too bad.

  The problem was I found that the toilets had been so badly vandalized that they looked like the footpath at Edinburgh’s Royal Commonwealth Pool. Only they had a couple of inches of pishy water all over the floor, which you had to paddle through to get to the toilet traps, urinals and sinks. My hole-ridden trainers wouldn’t stand a chance, so I took them off, then my socks. Rolling up my jeans, I paddled along to a smashed up toilet-bowl. I then shat and wiped myself with the clean portion of my underpants. (There was no toilet paper.) I jettisoned the pants and took off my jeans and paddled my way to a wash-hand basin. As, naked from the waist down, I tried to wash out my arse, a group of Weedgies stood at the entrance, just pishing into the toilet and laughing loudly at my predicament. I carried on with as much dignity as one can muster in such circumstances, climbing up onto these boxed-in pipes and washing my piss-soaked feet in the sink. Then I scrambled along the ledge to the door and jumped out emerging into the car-park, where to the laughter of loads of drunken football supporters, I pulled on my jeans, socks and trainers.

  I left the scene as quickly as I could and walked round the stadium to compose myself. On my return to our drinking camp, an irate pal asked me where I had been. I explained that there was a big queue in the toilets. At this point I really thought that I’d got out of jail. I had been embarrassed – brutally, shamefully embarrassed – but I’d never see those people again in my life. We’d get back to my flat where I’d change into fresh keks before going out again and this time I’d switch from lager to Guinness. Just as I was feeling a little bit pleased with myself, I heard a shout go up, quite close: ‘Hey, there’s Shitey-Pants!’ It was the Weedgies who’d witnessed my plight in the toilets, now laughing again and pointing me out to their pals. They gathered round and with great delight started filling my friends in with the details. For years, the story of my Wembley humiliation was a favourite amusement in several London and Edinburgh bars. Aye, that one still haunts me. One day I’ll write about it …

  ‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually informing – and filling some other Body.’

  Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse, Oct. 27, 1818

  Andrew Motion

  It was early 1977, a few months after I’d started lecturing in English at Hull, and I was trying to revive the university’s Poetry Society, which had sunk into one of its occasional lethargies. I’d asked some big names to come and give readings, and most of them had said yes – mistakenly thinking the time and trouble of getting to the campus would be rewarded by an encounter with Larkin. And (as you do) I’d also invited some less well-known people. Carol Rumens, then near the start of her writing life, was one of these; I’d never met her, but I liked her work and thought she’d add some range and surprise to the series. I arranged to collect her off the train from London, thinking there’d be no difficulty about this. The journey was long but straightforward, and I’d be able to recognize her, having seen her author photo.

  So the
re I was at 6.30 at Hull Paragon scanning the faces as her train pulled in. And there was Carol, slightly taller than I expected, wearing a pair of glasses she’d obviously bought since the photo-shoot, carrying an overnight case and a shoulder-bag which presumably held her poems. I greeted her, explained we had time to get something to eat before the reading began, and led her towards the taxi rank. She looked slightly bemused but only slightly, and didn’t say much. That was okay. I’d heard she was shy, and anyway I was the one who had to do the talking; she needed to compose herself. ‘Where will I be staying?’ was her only question, and I explained there was a hotel just across the road from the university.

  It seemed like a good idea to avoid much mention of the reading – that might make her nervous, and would in turn feed her shyness. So we chatted about ordinary things – the journey, the bizarrely beautiful name of Hull’s station, the city – and eventually took our seats in an Indian restaurant. Here our small talk started to run out and poetry became more or less unavoidable. Whom did she know? What kind of stuff did she like? Evidently not much. In fact, judging by her mumbles as she fiddled with the menu and then her specs and then the menu again, the whole subject of poetry was not one she enjoyed. Oh well. ‘I too dislike it,’ I told her, meaning to be affable, and explained that the previous week we’d had Geoffrey Hill over from Leeds. He didn’t seem to like much either.

  ‘Geoffrey Hill?’

  ‘Yes, you know, Carol. Geoffrey Hill. King Log. Mercian Hymns.’

  Her menu was on the table now, and she leaned back in her chair. ‘What makes you think I’m called Carol?’

  ‘It’s your name, isn’t it?’

  ‘My name’s Natalie.’

  ‘But I thought…’

  ‘I know what you thought.’

  ‘But I didn’t … And anyway, you didn’t have to…’

  I fled. Apologised and fled. Back to the station, and the sight of the real Carol leaning against a pillar, waiting for me – the Carol who was just the height I expected, and still had the same pair of specs she’d worn for her photograph. I didn’t have the heart to explain why I was so late collecting her – at least not then, as she was about to give a reading, the very time when she would want to feel confident, most securely herself. But I did tell her later, and said I’d felt, well, mortified. She forgave me. As for Natalie, who knows?

  ‘When there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.’ Samuel Johnson

  Karl Miller

  Philosophers have thought about the difference between shame and guilt and about the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture. For my part, I haven’t been able to get beyond the untutored view that shame is likely to be a result of the public exposure of an act experienced by the actor as wrong, but that the two states are often indistinguishable. Mortifications have been defined as shames or ignominies, but they needn’t be public. They can be felt in unrelieved secrecy, in the silence of your room.

  One of mine came early and lasted for the rest of my life. I was in the Army at the time, doing my basic training as a National Serviceman and a sapper, a Royal Engineer. I was to be seen lying on my bed, or standing by it to attention, in a creosoted hut or ‘spider’ near Farnborough in Hampshire, or sallying out to march up and down and stamp my feet. My platoon was ruled by two men rather more unlike one another than shame and guilt tend to be. The lance-corporal was gentle, lean and elegant, nothing like the raving bullies among the parade-ground NCOs. He was an East Anglian waterman in civilian life, and would tell us what it was to be rowing or poling the Fens. The corporal was the bad cop, not given to reminiscence, miles less endearing than the man from the marshes, but with a hint of these in his looks: an old young man with thinning hair, a round, muddy, doughy face, piercing brown eyes and a croaking wire-cutter voice.

  There arose this issue of weekend passes, which took you for thirty-six hours out of your spider, bound for the brief encounter. You had to queue and sue and plead for a pass. This particular weekend, one savourless Saturday morning in a camp deserted save for a few left-behind conscripts and their minders, I was still hoping, with time running out, for a trip to London to see a woman old enough to be my mother. I set myself to argue my case, which clashed with the claims of another sapper, a shy man. The corporal let go with a fiercely moral diatribe about cutting in and jumping the queue, every word of which I believed. I felt guilty and ashamed.

  The corporal hated me and my brief encounter, hated me for trying to parlay a respite at someone else’s expense. And I hated me for it too, though I’m not sure that shoving someone aside had been a feature of my conscious intention. I apologize for an unhappy lack of the lurid in this confession, and hope to do a bit better presently. I have certainly performed many worse actions. Why then have I held on for so long to this memory of the Farnborough disgrace?

  I think it was a device for not thinking about what was worse, an ongoing worse. None of my early mortifications shows me in a very bad light: they are more like embarrassments than disgraces, revealing inexperience and, in this case, a less than Hitlerian will to power, and their reverberations are like a cover story for actions that came later. But this durable memory may also testify to an idea of fairness which is always around but was especially cogent during the war and after it. I was not shamed for this action before the other soldiers, and the shy sapper didn’t seem to mind. They recognized that you had to stick your neck out and push your luck, at times, under the Army’s regime of insult and frazzling punctilio. But there was also then, more than now, a sense that you shouldn’t take advantage, or steal a march, and it was this sense that stung me, and stung me. Advantage became more of an option for people in the years to come. Ahead lay a familiarity with the chief executive who receives a salary of millions and a proportionate bonus when he brings down his firm.

  No one would expect an unclouded fairness from custodians of good order and military discipline, and this was as true then, in the Forties, as it is now. But I remember Farnborough as a better place than the camp at Deepcut, with its recent bullyings, mysterious deaths and attempted cover-up. There were only two deaths not caused by enemy action during my days as a soldier, one of them the reported stamping on a homosexual man by Scottish Territorials on the spree at a summer camp.

  In the Scotland where I grew up there was plenty of room for the survival of a guilt culture whereby pleasure was hard to excuse and homosexuality an outlandish evil. Hostility, contempt, violence of the tongue or boot, were accounted less deadly than the sexual sins, in parts and patches of the country, and there were those people by whom poverty was considered a disgrace. An earlier mortification, suffered at the age of fifteen, made me aware of the importance of sexual misconduct. A teacher summoned me to his classroom to ask what I knew of homosexual behaviour rumoured of one of the school’s sportsmen. I don’t believe I knew anything; this was the time when I’d had to look the word up in a dictionary, after a reading of Aldous Huxley. But I felt guilty about being consulted, and about feeling grave and consequential during the interview. A year or so before this, a teacher, with a sad and swampy dough face quite like the corporal’s, had chosen to sew a fly-button on my shorts. I seem to recall that this was experienced as a shame, on social grounds, because of that missing button, by the kindly ‘guardians’ with whom I lived – my parents had been separated at birth, my birth. My guardians felt, I think, that we had been shown up. I was not amused, and not aroused, by the sewing session. I was bemused. I couldn’t even look it up in the dictionary.

  Guilt has receded in a world where there is more to be guilty of. War is even worse, more unprincipled in its execution, than it was when I narrowly missed waging it. Guilt has become unpopular, can be thought ugly, unhealthy, with the splendours of the Victorian conscience long since seen as shams, and so on. It seems to me that it’s worth enduring if it helps you, though it often doesn’t, to be unto others ‘as you’d have others be to you’, in the words of my grandmother Georgina’s sa
mpler. The poet Auden had words to say (before he softened them) about a ‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’. This description of Auden’s eventually renounced histrionic political Thirties might lead one to consider the bullying unelected American President of the present day, who can look like his worst enemies – full of blame and bad at feeling guilty. But he can also look as if he is capable of it. And guiltiness can reasonably be suspected of a degree of complicity in the ‘necessary murders’ of the past.

  There was a nineteenth-century admiration of Thomas Carlyle which rushed to agree with him that ‘we are all wrong and all like to be damned’. Feeling, and blaming others for being, guilty as hell has given guilt a bad name. But let’s just go on feeling it. It can appear to be a way of trying to find the plot, to know what you are doing, and have been driven to do. Not the only way, though. The waterman I met in the Army seemed to know what he was doing, where to steer his boat and how to weather the Army. But I don’t suppose he was ever to make much use of the rudder of self-incrimination. I hope you are still with me.

  While writing this piece, I dreamt that my mother had died in some sort of car mishap on the doorstep of the house of one of my sons. Round I went to kiss the blood that stained the pavement. There’s a possible Scots mortification or compunction here, to do with telling such a dream, confessing the kiss. But I don’t feel that, or approve of that. For me, the mortification is not being able in old age, when your middle years are apt to vanish, to remember my mother’s death.