‘Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.’ Virginia Woolf
Michael Holroyd
Seldom have I written an essay feeling so spoilt for choice. Which episode, from a career glittering with mortifications, shall I choose? Should it, for example, be my first literary lunch? The other speaker was Harry Secombe. He had written a serious book and wished to speak seriously about it. I had also written what I hoped was a serious book, a serious comedy of manners, and wanted to make some jokes. But his reputation as a famous ‘Goon’, and the description of me as a literary biographer, completely prevented us from doing what we wanted. When Harry Secombe rose to his feet and said ‘Good afternoon’, people fell off their chairs with laughter and rolled around in ecstasy; while I, firing off some jokes, saw the same audience frown learnedly and begin making notes on their menus. It was a fiasco, and we agreed afterwards that we should have swapped speeches.
Worse than this was my first literary festival, the Bedford Square Book Bang. I hadn’t been asked to do anything very difficult – simply stand in the rain next to a wheelbarrow full of books and sign all those that were bought. The trouble was that none was being bought. Seeing me standing damply there, like an unemployed gardener, my publisher commandeered a megaphone and bellowed out the news that ‘the famous biographer’ was even now signing copies of his book. ‘Roll up!’ he cried – and suddenly out of the gloom someone did roll up. He was carrying a copy of my book which, he explained, he would like to return as not being worth the paper it was written on – an insult that, as the rain fell on its pages, swelling and distorting them visibly, was much magnified. A scuffle developed during which, I like to think, I inserted my blurred name. But in the end I sold minus one copy – a score that should surely earn me an entry in The Guinness Book of Records.
But perhaps it is wiser to choose an overseas humiliation, such as the time I gave a lecture in a very large, totally empty hall in the United States. ‘We’ll wait a little for stragglers,’ said the polite professor who was to introduce me. We waited but no one straggled. Eventually we clambered on to the stage and the professor introduced me in glowing language –1 only wish someone had been there to hear him. It seemed he was too paralysed by embarrassment to call off the event, and I, needing the cheque, was obliged to deliver my lecture, speaking for forty minutes into the thin air. Halfway through this performance someone came through the door, stopped and stood staring at us. Was this surreal soliloquy a rehearsal for something? I turned to him and, like the Ancient Mariner, tried to hold him there. But with a look of alarm he turned on his heel (a movement I had read about but never seen before) and ran out. I felt exhausted by the time I finished speaking, and, there being no questions, the professor rose and thanked me. As we climbed off the podium together, he remarked without, so far as I could tell, any trace of irony: ‘Your lecture would have gone down even better, Mr Holroyd, with a larger audience.’ I consoled myself with the thought that there had been an audience of two: us two. Later I heard that there was a students’ uprising that day, sounds of which – a muffled chanting – had wafted through the hall, accompanying me as I stood mouthing my words.
Irony, I have discovered, is often a good defence against mortification, but sometimes it can backfire, especially when you are abroad. A prime example of this happened to me in Moscow where I went as a member of a GB/USSR conference of writers. We fielded a distinguished team: Matthew Evans (now Lord Evans), Melvyn Bragg (now Lord Bragg), my wife Margaret Drabble, Francis King, Penelope Lively, Fay Weldon and myself. These were pre-Gorbachev days and the Soviet team of writers seemed to us old and dour. When it was the turn of one of us to speak, they would put their feet on the table, read their newspapers, and tell each other incomprehensible jokes. I was scheduled to speak on the last morning and, angered by what I had witnessed, I rewrote my speech and gave a copy to the simultaneous translator. I spoke slowly, with withering scorn, even contempt, and was gratified to see that I was getting the full attention of the Soviet team. They put down their feet and their newspapers, ceased joking and listened attentively. Much encouraged, I assumed my most acid tone, piling one ingenious insult upon another, building up a Gothic edifice of cunning invective. My final crescendo of abuse was greeted with loud applause, and one of our team passed me a brief note: ‘Does irony translate?’ Evidently mine did not, and what left me as subtle and devastating satire arrived at the other side of the table as a peculiarly sophisticated hymn of praise.
The afternoon sessions of our conference were jollier affairs, largely because of the excellent lunches which featured many simultaneously translated, simultaneously drunk, toasts. I drank for England that week and often appeared at breakfast wearing dark glasses. At lunch, on the final day, much to Maggie’s embarrassment, I rose swaying to my feet and raising my glass high (before attempting to smash it to the floor over my shoulder) proposed a toast to the great spirit that had brought us, and our literature, together – ‘the spirit of vodka!’
Maggie said she would never take me anywhere again. But occasionally she relents and I am able to send her children evidence of some fresh mortification – such as the photograph of us before dawn in Ireland, in front of the cream of Irish literature, singing along with that notorious pop group, the Dubliners.
‘OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.’ Ambrose Bierce
Sean O’Reilly
… There was that party remember. She wanted it. She wanted me. I was sure she did, she told me once, no she didn’t. I was younger then, believed in everything just in case. She was tormenting me but if I had reported her to the authorities she would have denied it to the death, that was the type of her, she didn’t know what she wanted you see, she was in conflict with her own desires. I wasn’t. I was free. It was the mushroom season. The world was dank. The way she looked at me blinking with surprise like she had forgotten my presence was the perfect camouflage for her hunger or the way she opened one eye, the bigger eye, the brows didn’t match either, that sly bit wider when she spoke to me and laughed at the institutional egg-box ceiling when I couldn’t find the words to answer and glared at her, the strangest laugh I had ever heard, a gurgle at the back of her throat culminating in a hoarse splutter through her lips – it was all typical of a woman repressing her deeper instincts. She was driving me mad. With her fucken theory about Mrs Radcliffe and de Sade and Les Crimes de l’Amour and her cowboy boots and her plastic toadstool rings and she never had a pen for she liked to give the impression of spontaneity and eccentric inspirations. She had it all worked out. She devoted the beginning of every class, no, seminar was the new institutional egg-box word, to testing the various pens offered by her assembled slaves, the Apostate Queen, putting her name to the order for the brutal rape and execution of a hundred virgins, this kind of innocence must be stamped out. I never offered her mine, my pen I mean, innocence had not yet sprouted in me, and she was wise to my rebellion, that’s what the whole show was about every week, to see whether I would succumb. Even so it was the only seminar I went to. For three hours every week I sat in Gothic Literature and listened to the stories of sex-fiend monks and randy nuns and diabolical confessions from her big toothy mouth. She had freckles on her teeth. Her tongue was undersized. I was beginning to understand that there were types of violence I had never dreamed of. I was on edge permanently. The mushies were out, did I mention that? People were disappearing. The bars were empty or the next minute incredibly vicious. One day in class I saw her nipples growing and growing and they were about to tell me to do something only I got out the door in time. She came straight after me into the corridor. She started unbuttoning her shirt. This is what you want isn’t it, she said. No she fucken didn’t. I was ordered into her office. Then she lay across the desk and pulled up her long denim skirt. Like fuck she did. I got a mouthful about my behaviour, my bad confrontational attitude. I knew it was code. She was really saying that she couldn’t, it w
as too risky, maybe after I graduated. I played along with her; I was able to grasp the real truth behind her words. We had to wait for the right moment. Then there was that party at her house for some visiting writer, a bloody poet. I only went because I could tell she wanted me to be there. I’d been on the go for a few days before it. My piss had turned black with fungal ink. I remember when I went into the house that the stairs were too narrow for even my finger to get up to the bathroom. She was talking to the poet in the kitchen, drinking punch. She was barefoot. Artfully, she showed some uncertainty about my name. Then she asked me if it was raining. I had no idea. But you’re soaking wet, she said with a weird look to the malevolent scheming poet. That’s when I understood. The back door was open: I fought my way through its emptiness. In the garden I started searching, in the bushes, under a wheelbarrow, down on my knees sweeping the leaves away. Luckily there wasn’t a shed or I might have been there all night. I studied the arrangement of the pegs on the clothes line for a sign. Eventually I found it. She had left me a message under a stone which commanded me to hide in her bedroom before everyone left. I decided to stay outside and prepare myself, cleanse my mind, in the rain, a delicious misty rain. The Queen had chosen her mate for the night. My time had come. My people looked to me in dread and awe. Then I saw the lights go off in the house. I went back in. I must have been surprised to find so many people still there. It wasn’t particularly dark either. I was already naked to the waist, art agaric warrior, rained on, maybe a bit mucky. The guests stared. Halfway up the stairs I stopped and looked down. They were gathering in the hall to behold me. Some of them were shouting at me: one man with horns attempted to grab hold of me and I swung my boot at him. This ugly rabble were nothing more than shadows, figments, the exteriorization of my guilt which she had shown me must be confronted and eradicated. This was the test, I was telling myself, I have to show her that I have courage, that I am a man. I began to take off my trousers. There she was now herself among them, the sarcastic poet beside her, screaming at me to get out of her house forthwith. But that’s how she had to play it, this was part of the foul phantasmagoria to be fought through. I had my cock out in my hands by this stage. I held it up against them like a crucifix. The demons shrieked with horror. The poet smirked: it was all going according to plan. Then I ran for her bedroom, held the door shut behind me. There was a big bed with a red eiderdown, unmade. The pillows were lilac and the size of sheep. I had never seen anything so beautiful. My whole life made sense. The ghouls were whispering through the door. They were talking about the police, the fucken spoil-sport squad. I heard sirens but it might have been the souls in the underworld calling to me not to give in. You can imagine the rest. But if you can’t be bothered then let’s just say they must have decided to leave me alone to calm down and I must have got under the Eiderdown of Bliss and passed out. When I opened my eyes, my girlfriend of the time was sneering down at me with a kind of disgust that should never have been made known to her. Her face would never look the same again. Not that I saw much of it. The only other person in the room was the poet lurking in the corner with my clothes in her hands. The Queen was nowhere to be seen as I was led out of the house into my girlfriend’s car. They must have called her to come and get me. I sat in the back seat of course. It was still dark. The streets were as empty as I was. My girlfriend bent the rear view mirror so that she wouldn’t have to look at me. Neither of us spoke. I had the feeling something momentous had happened. I’m sorry, I said when we stopped outside my flat. She told me to fuck off and drove away to another life. The university were informed of course. I was not allowed to continue with my studies in Gothic literature. They were going to throw me out altogether but for some mysterious reason I was reprieved under condition I attended counselling three times a week. The counsellor was gorgeous. She was lonely. She was dying for it, I could see it in her eyes. We went for walks together in the woods. No we didn’t.
‘We must travel in the direction of our fear.’ John Berryman
Charles Simic
One night in New York, it was so hot and humid in a bookstore where I was reading my poems, I was soaked with sweat, my pants kept sliding down, so I had to constantly pull them up with one hand while I held the book in the other. A fellow I knew told me afterwards that he was enthralled. He and his companion were sure I’d forget for a moment and let them fall down. Another time in Monterey, California, I was reading in a nearly empty auditorium of the local college adjoining one in which the movie King Kong was being shown to a packed audience. At one point, during one of my most lyrical love poems, I could hear the great ape growl behind my back as he was on his way to strangle me. Back in the 1960s, in some youth centre in some miserable little town on Long Island, I was put on the programme between an amateur magician and a fellow who was a mind-reader and the audience of local punks was not told who I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I recall their bewildered expressions as I was reading my first poem. In Detroit, I had a baby howl while I read and then a lapdog someone had sneaked in started to yelp. I was so drunk in Geneva, New York, I demanded that all the lights be turned off except the one on my lectern, and then I proceeded to read for two hours, some of the poems twice, as I was told the next day. In the 1970s, after hearing my poem ‘Breasts’, a dozen women walked out in Oberlin, Ohio, each one slamming the door behind her. In a high school in Medford, Oregon I was introduced as the world-famous mystery writer, Bernard Zimic. In San Jose, I lost the fellow I was supposed to be following in my car at the peak of the rush-hour traffic and realized I had no idea where the reading was. I drove ahead thinking he would notice I’m not behind him and stop by the side of the road. I went past all the downtown and suburban exits and finally figured the hell with him, I’m going home to San Francisco. Since I had to go back the way I came from, I decided on the spur of the moment to take one of the exits and ask, except there was no one to ask at eight in the evening in a neighbourhood of small apartment houses and tree-lined streets. After circling for a while, I saw an old Chinese man walking alone. I stopped the car and asked him, very conscious of how ridiculous I was, did he happen to know of a poetry reading? Yes, he said, in the church around the corner. In Aurora, New York on beautiful Lake Geneva I gave the shortest reading ever. It lasted exactly twenty-eight minutes, whereas the crowd and the organizers expected a full hour. I had an excellent excuse, however. I squeezed the reading between the first and final quarter of an NBA playoff game and ran back to my motel outracing a couple of women who wanted me to sign books. In Ohrid, Macedonia I read into a dead mike to an audience of thousands who would not have understood me even if they had heard me, but who nevertheless applauded after every poem. Now, I ask you, how much more can one ask from life?
‘It’s the admirer and the watcher who provoke us to all the insanities we commit.’ Seneca
A. L. Kennedy
Literary gatherings are, of course, to be avoided for many reasons: people asking who you are in the polite expectation that they will have heard of you – they won’t – while others engage you with enthusiastic praise, having mistaken you for someone whose work they admire and you freeze behind the ghastly smile of a trapped iguana. It is equally possible (if you’re me) to spend an entire evening lavishly complimenting a Great Man who turns out to be another Great Man entirely – although enthusiasm always renders me incoherent, so I may have got away with that one. Beyond these minor troubles, I would also not advise wearing black trousers and then sitting carelessly on white patio furniture – this may lead to your spending the rest of the evening at a distressingly A-List affair (your invite being due to typing error) wandering about with white stripes across your arse and thighs which nobody mentions until you get home and are then more than able to point them out to yourself.
Writers’ trousers are famously unpredictable in many ways, but I haven’t met another author whose trousers simply disintegrated en route to a reading. There I was, young and nervous and not wearing a frock due to
poor body image issues, stuck on a late afternoon train to Edinburgh, leafing through my notes in a preparatory way and yet also feeling, somehow, chilly. After a brief investigation I discovered that the outside seams of both legs were merrily falling apart and that I was not asleep and therefore would not wake up and find I didn’t have to deal with this. I then participated in the perfect preparation for a gig – namely sprinting (gingerly) through Edinburgh in search of a sewing repair shop that was still open. I did, miraculously, find such a place and persuade it to stay operational while I removed my trousers and had the unparalleled joy of standing in my jacket and socks as the sewing machine chattered away and a small but interested crowd gathered outside the plate-glass window to wish me well – or certainly to wish me something.
Obviously, I am one of the many authors who should not be encountered semi-nude without prior warning. Which means that visiting the ablutions before an event should always be undertaken with great care. A Radio Three outside broadcast and a dodgy lock once combined to introduce me to an audience member rather more than we would have wished. That particular event was already going swimmingly – I am never anything other than delighted to arrive and find a poster on the door showing the other participants’ names clearly printed and my own name scrawled at the bottom in biro as a late and unwilling addition. This is always a tactful way of indicating that the other twelve people they asked before you all died or went insane and they’ve finally settled for you, rather than an empty seat: but it was a close-run thing.
Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Page 18