‘Oh,’ I say. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘A book like that,’ she says flatly. ‘It would be a big hit. You could go on Rosie O’Donnell. It’s needed.’
‘All right,’ I tell her. ‘I’ll think about it.’
And so I left without even being able to feel sorry for myself.
On the bright side, Patchett felt a hell of a lot better.
‘Their tricks and craft hae put me daft,
They’ve ta’en me in and a’ that,
But clear your decks, and Here’s the sex!
I like the jads for a’ that.’
Robert Burns, “The Jolly Beggars’
Louis de Bernières
A few years ago I went to Perth, Western Australia, to participate in the literature festival, and for the most part had a wonderful time, especially as part of the deal was to go to Karratha and Broome to do literary events. In Broome, a tropical paradise, I went fishing in an alligator swamp, and had the misfortune to run over a wallaby. In Karratha, a mining town set in a landscape from Mars, I had to do the first-ever literary event. It was co-hosted by the Rotarians and the Soroptimists, and we had to approve their minutes before my reading could actually begin. I later discovered that the latter were locally referred to as the Soropticows. Driving around the countryside the next day, I came across the bronze monument to Red Dog that would eventually lead to my eponymous small book.
In Perth, one of my duties was to appear on panels. I don’t often do this any more, as I am fed up with hearing myself and other writers bullshitting fluently and speciously about whatever topics the audiences care to raise. In France the cult of the literary intellectual is farcically out of control, and I would hate to be part of any such tendency in the Anglophone world. There is, after all, no reason for a writer’s opinions to be thought superior to anyone else’s, and you might as well have a panel of my dad, the vet, the tobacconist, and the two fat people from the St John Ambulance Brigade who usually sit at the back of the audience.
I was still fresh in the wake of Captain Gorilla’s Mandarin, and so was the natural choice for a panel about love. I never claimed to be brilliant at it, or particularly knowledgeable about it; it was enough that I had created characters who could do it. Out in the sparkling sunshine, seated at a long table overlooking a crowd of expectant Australians, I found myself improvising opinions that sounded worryingly like those of my mother.
I can no longer recall who the other members of the panel were, but one of them was a bright young Aussie, whose gimmick for the day was to bring along an S&M prostitute. This formidable lady was nearly young, and was built like the proverbial brick shithouse. She was adorned with much colourful warpaint, and she wore the standard-issue stiletto boots, black fishnet stockings, and that odd scarlet garment which is half frilly swimming-costume and half corset. One look confirmed that in the unlikely event of there ever being a sexual encounter between us, it would have to be she who coughed up the wherewithal.
She took over the entire event. Cracking her whip, she commanded the audience to stand up, sit down, stand up, bow down. The respectable, mainly middle-aged and elderly Aussie audience meekly obeyed, and I suddenly realized why it had been so easy to get the Anzacs to commit suicide at Gallipoli.
These antics naturally made our panel ridiculous. My irritation caused me to suffer a fit of pedantry, because the panel was supposed to be about love, and I couldn’t see what S&M prostitution had to do with it. Sounding ever more like my mother I tried to make the distinction between love and sex, and found the audience agreeing with me vigorously. Everyone knows, after all, that the best sex arises out of emotional connection. Even so, for a long time afterwards I felt embarrassed by the whole thing. The event, however spurious, had been sabotaged, the audience had been humiliated, and I came out of it feeling that I had exposed myself as pompous and puritanical.
‘There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which, reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.’ Samuel Johnson
John Banville
It was a cold March in North America, and I was on a publicity tour: ten cities in eleven days: the usual. I was midway through the trip when my publishers suggested I might like to make a detour to Florida, to read at a book festival there. Why not? Another day, another city.
I arrived in Miami on an afternoon such as I thought might only be experienced in Araby, everything in burnous white and limitless gradations of soft ochre and pale blue. Seen from the airport road, the city shimmered in a violet haze, its silver-and-glass towers trembling. My hotel, on South Beach, faced a purplish sea. On the sand a rout of sun-bronzed gods and honeyed maenads mellowly romped, all of them naked except for the odd strip of candy-bright cloth applied here and there to their perfect persons. The hotel itself seemed to date from the 1930s – big wooden ceiling-fans lazily turning, jalousie shutters on the windows, a walnut-panelled bar – but later I learned that the place had been distressed to make it look old. ‘Distressed’ in this usage was new to me; so were roller-blades. Between the beach and the road there was a palm-lined pedestrian way, where more glistening, chocolate-skinned giants swirled and spun as if on air. I stood at the window and looked down upon this bright scene of prelapsarian play and thought I might have landed on another, infinitely finer planet, than the one, off on the other side of the galaxy, upon which the world as I know it was hamfistedly modelled.
I went for a walk. That was a mistake. All the clothes I had brought with me were fit only for winter weather. The spectacle of a tweed-clad, pale, perspiring dwarf staggering amongst them must have amused the South Beachers, those lordly inhabitants of the planet Miami. I fled to the safe distress of my hotel room, where I lay on the bed through the rest of the long afternoon. The fan circled above me. The sun fell slowly down the sky. The liquid hissing of the air conditioner seemed the sound of time itself trying not to pass.
The reading took place next day in a large, glass-walled auditorium with the acoustics of an echo-chamber. On the stage along with me was a chap who the previous day had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. There was a large audience, all of whom, I felt sure, had come to hear him, and for that thrill were sullenly willing to put up with me. After the reading, of which I remember nothing, there was the book signing. This took place in a wide, sunny plaza that made me think of an execution yard in some South American republic of drugs and banditry. Against one wall – there could have been bullet marks, there could have been bloodstains – two small tables stood, piled with books, the Pulitzer laureate’s, and mine. He had a queue of excited autograph hunters that stretched halfway up the spine of Florida; I had three customers, or so I thought, one of them an academic who had written on my work, the second of whom looked decidedly unhinged, and the third a kindly fellow who stepped up first and leaned forward confidentially and, with a smile that was nothing but tender, whispered to me a sentence I often hear, even yet, in my dreams. ‘I’m not going to buy a book,’ he confided, ‘but you looked so lonely there, I thought I’d come and talk to you.’
‘Other people’s eggs have two yolks.’ Bulgarian proverb
Don Paterson
After some unspeakable business at Goole Arts Centre, we head for what the promoter proudly introduces as ‘the best restaurant in Goole’. I default to the chicken bhuna, which turns out to be a kind of artificial mycelium woven into a chicken effect and drowned in luminous chemicals. Throughout the meal the promoter recites his own poems from memory. I return to the digs. In the hotel bar the wall-eyed landlord carefully inscribes a perfect arse in the foam of my Guinness, which promptly evaporates before my eyes. I retire to a tiny bare room built around an irregular nonagon, or rather accidentally formed by the unequal pressure of several other rooms; through one of the many walls a couple, possibly human, are making love, though it sounds more like someone is killing them with alternate blows. I attempt to make a cup of tea. The two tiny UHT individual milk-pots are both sour. I hear a l
ow and long intestinal gurgle, the sort of sound that heralds the onset of tropical giardia. I assume it is coming from me, but then the plug pops out of the little washhand basin and raw sewage foams up to form a little pulsing brown wellhead, and the room quickly fills with the smell of hydrogen sulphide and death.
A recurring dream. Hours of inaccurate Pali chanting and 150cc of Macallan concealed in a Volvic bottle finally sees one of the hell-planes’ of my nightmares (the DC 10 with its bolt-on engines; the lopsided Fokker 50) dump me unceremoniously on the ground again. The heat or the cold slams into me like a door, and I stagger down the steps onto the melting or icebound tarmac. I pass through customs as through the lower bardos, and am led to the waiting car by the gentle psychopomps of the British Council, as a man to his doom, which always takes the image of himself, of his own book.
Exeter. After a tolerable meal of egg and broccoli quiche and beansprout salad in the cafe – there being no meat alternative – my friend Michael Donaghy and I do the reading. We also throw in a little music. Mildly euphoric after an evening which contained no major disasters, we retire to the dressing room. Michael produces two bodhrans, an instrument for which I have no gift, but an obscure and persistent enthusiasm. Iron John was heavy in the air that year, and we drum and sweat a whole bunch in our vests. We lose track of the time. We walk to the digs. The building is in darkness. We have no key. No amount of ringing and banging will raise the landlady. We return to the venue, which is now also in darkness. We resign ourselves to a night in the car. It is now bitterly cold, and ice is forming on the windows. We find one tiny tartan blanket in the boot. We try to sleep, but the beansprouts are starting to talk – for me, at least, the promotion of raw vegetables beyond their decorative role is something of a novelty. At least, MD philosophically observes, these eruptions have the effect of raising the temperature briefly; but since opening the window is not an option, the trade-off eventually proves too difficult to stomach. Heartily sick of each other, we separate at 5 a.m. I leave for the station to wait two hours for the nine-hour journey home, while MD heads off, I vividly recall, for no reason – to Redcar. I sit on the freezing platform and watch the dawn spread in the east, like blood beneath a shirt.
I have been booked to address the Penang Poetry Society on Open Mic Night. I am playing music elsewhere in the country (a tour that will culminate in a concert in the Bornean rainforest, where we will be met with a silence beyond mere human indifference: the whole Earth fell silent, as it did for Orpheus. As our last number died away I heard only the cry of a rabid monkey fifty miles upriver, the dead thump of a falling breadfruit.) A Malaysian lady, spotting the bodhran – the bodhran, the last refuge of the charlatan, the instrument which should always stay at home – insists that I accompany her reading. She clicks her fingers to give me the tempo. I lay down an acceptable 4/4 shuffle with a hint of a backstick. She looks at me with a kind of blank contempt. Then she closes her eyes, composes herself, and begins to shout. ‘Fred’s dead/in his bed/hit his head/in the shed/then he bled/got all red/in the shed/Fred’s dead …’
At the interval I leave the superchilled striplit room, and go outside to try and revive my circulation in the hot night. Moths the size of giant pigeons are swarming under the palms. One lumbers towards me. I think, for some reason, of the little cabbage-white alighting on the racket of the young and shyly pretty Chris Evert at Wimbledon, and how the whole game stopped while its tiny blessing was conferred. I realize I cannot open the doors of the venue to get back inside. I start thumping on them frantically. The giant moths start to dive-bomb my head. On their backs they carry the faces of demons.
Soiled underwear in the guest bed is a popular motif in reading stories. In the long years before they learned to say No to all offers of ‘hospitality’, most writers will have encountered this at least once, especially when the bed has been vacated by the host. Though once, in a hotel in Telford, I found some red silk thongs under the pillow, rolled into a little torus; I found this rather touching – it was almost as if they had been left there as part of the turndown service, along with A Belgian Chocolate For Your Dreams. But experience means you no longer dare stretch your toes near the very foot of the bed, where the grubby Ys and jockeys hastily discarded in passion are most likely to be wedged. Nothing, though, could have prepared me for the cardboard-stiff ‘special pants’ I once found jammed under the headboard of my student host.
We are often put up in children’s bedrooms; I have frequently woken crapulously to ant-farms and terrifying ranks of My Little Ponies, and more than once to the ejected child standing silently above me at 6.30 a.m., their expression balefully fixed on the very old and ugly Goldilocks before them. The Worst Bed was in Wivenhoe: a shapeless, single fold-down foam chair lined with a kind of 70s olive-black fake newt-skin. I was so exhausted after my long journey I would happily have fallen into it, though, had it not been in the centre of a living room where the organizer had thoughtfully decided to throw a party for his students. I finally crawled into it at 4 a.m. and woke three hours later, my skin stuck everywhere to its plastic hide with beer and vodka, and my hair full of ash.
Weeks spent in a van full of other men – where the social highlight of the month has been a brief encounter with a Hilton hand-towel – can leave you, like, in a really bad way, man. Hence most itinerant male musicians’ familiarity with that early-morning manoeuvre known as ‘coyote arm’, named for that most pragmatic of animals, who will gnaw off a limb to free itself from a snare. I suspect, though, that there are far more one-armed women walking the streets: confused and disarmed by the magical fug of smoke and candlelight, they have mistaken the saxophonist’s fluent choruses for conversational urbanity and his suit for linen, only to wake beside a drooling and twitching beast identical to the one she has left at home. I’ve been lucky in the friends I’ve found on the road. I have never had the experience, as others have had, of retiring with a lady who turned out not to be, or being talked into wearing a gimp suit, or being introduced to the husband upon arrival at the flat (cheerfully), or suddenly realizing that my partner’s wild orgasm was in fact a grand mal seizure. But the contract between such international lovers always states that you must never meet again. It is an understanding both parties must honour. (Dishonesty in this regard is a Very Bad Thing – for either party. Musicians, remarkably, get hurt too.)
I was back in an East European town I never thought I would see again. Last time, I had given a reading there; this time I was back, guitar in hand, for the annual Jazz Festival. I was already badly bruised from a kind of Oedipal showdown: I was supporting an American guitarist called Ralph Towner, a musician from whom I have derived my entire playing style, and a guitarist so wholly superior to me in every department I can barely claim to play the same instrument. I was positively eviscerated by the experience, and hit the bar.
And heavens, there she was again, that pale, pale face … Oh. She was with the Americans. Worse – I quickly registered – with the bass player. Bassists are the fastest workers in the ensemble. As everyone knows, all jazz musicians play with a deeply pained Jazz Face. (For the record, this look is 3% affectation and 97% concentration: jazz is a tightrope with absurdity on one side, and disgrace on the other.) True, the sound the bassist produces often resembles a series of low raspberries, but because of the beautiful big instrument he wrestles it from, he is the only musician whose Jazz Face looks like lovemaking. This is a fine way of advertising yourself. Compared with the rest of the band – who appear to be flailing around in a welter of agonized constipation, memory loss and recent bereavement – he always presents a figure of attractive self-possession.
The bassist was obviously relating some incident that had happened onstage that night. She threw her head back and laughed her laugh, that perfect little staccato arpeggio, three ascending fifths ending in a squeal; she had one white arm held out before her, and the other raised above her head, like a flamenco dancer. I realized she was cradling an imaginary bass, finge
ring – uh – its imaginary headstock. I approached her. She’d obviously missed my set, and had no idea I was in town; she looked at me with that vague repulsion you feel when you encounter a thing in the wrong element: a fish on a lawn, a bird on the road, a fully-dressed man face-down in a swimming pool. We talked, while the bassist looked on with a perfect expressionlessness. (Very clever. This is how you play this one: you shut down your aura.) I addressed her by the shortened form of her name he had yet to learn; I reminded her of a joke we’d shared, which we clearly no longer did; I even – all fake-innocent, but cruelly, unforgivably – asked who was looking after her child that evening. I took the hint. I somehow managed to effect a slow dematerialization, and reappeared like a spectre at the bar again. From there I watched the whole lovely negotiation; I couldn’t hear a word, but knew it well enough. Look. Bottom line. I go to Padua tomorrow, Stockholm Sunday, back to Chicago Monday morning. You and me both know there’s more chance of lightning hitting us now than us two ever … and so on, until…but we’ve got tonight. Then her even more lovely mock-disbelief, amused shrug, coy acquiescence. They disappeared into the dressing room and emerged fifty minutes later (reader, I counted them; by then all that was left to me was to make a masochistic fetish of my solitude). They stopped on the stairs, and he turned to her and took her face in both hands, and muttered some poignant sincerity – for only fools and those who have never known the road believe these liaisons are unbeautiful and insincere – and they left together for the hotel.
Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Page 17