Making broadcasts of any kind is, naturally, a mistake. The form itself can produce intense embarrassment directly: being mocked and reviled by passers-by while just wandering about like a tit, because shots of writers always show them just wandering about as if they have forgotten their own address. (In France I was once actually urinated at by a standing woman as I just wandered about.) Or the particular programme may release immense potential for discomfort. I can personally recommend just wandering about in an Ayrshire graveyard – a life-sized, wax, male, nude torso blazing quietly behind you. Passing Dog Walker: “This about Robert Burns, then?’ Shamefaced Author, ‘Erm, yes.’ PDW, with gentle contempt, ‘BBC Two?’ SA, ‘Ah, yes.’ Schools broadcasts may at first appear less perilous, but one must constantly bear in mind that they are broadcast to schools. Therefore, for every showing, you must expect a subsequent two-month period of shouted abuse from all local boys under sixteen. Interestingly, the most common and elegantly simple slur is, ‘Writer!’ This goes to prove that education does work and a whole generation has successfully learned that to call anyone a writer is a grievous insult.
Which is why any writer in their right mind will avoid answering the question, ‘So, what do you do?’ with any degree of truthfulness. The following question will always be, ‘Published?’ delivered with a darkly incredulous stare and beyond that no response will ever be believed or believable. This is tricky, but not half as tricky as those times when you’re at a normal party, or hill-walking, or buying swedes and suddenly find yourself subjected to the third degree. Party Guest, ‘So, where do you think the European novel is heading?’ Author, ‘Do you want all of those sausages?’ PG, ‘The standard of spelling has just dropped and dropped, hasn’t it?’ Author, ‘I think I can see some pie over there.’ PG, ‘Modern stuff’s just crap, though, isn’t it? I mean, not yours. Well, I’ve never read yours, actually – but it is all shit, really, don’t you think?’ Author, ‘I have to take one of my pills now.’ Better by far to claim that you are a war criminal fleeing justice, or that you rehabilitate wasps. Although it provides clean and tidy indoor work, although it allows adults to behave like children and often get away with it, although it occasionally provides a living wage, very few people – out loud, at least – will insist on being a writer.
‘A half truth in argument, like a half brick, carries better.’ Stephen Leacock
Carlo Gébler
I was in my late twenties. I had published some short stories but no first novel yet. I had no girlfriend either. One afternoon the phone rang in the flat I shared with a Dutch cameraman and I answered it.
‘Are you Carlo Gébler?’ The speaker was a young Dubliner, her voice breathy and lovely.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve read some of your stories,’ she said. Her name was Olivia, she added.
No sooner had I got her name but an image of Olivia was cast up before my mind’s eye. She was a Celtic Charlotte Rampling, tall and willowy and sensitive and lonely like me.
Olivia explained she was calling on behalf of the London branch of the graduate society of an Irish university. She was the new secretary.
‘We meet every month,’ she said. She mentioned an Irish Centre in north London. ‘We always have a speaker,’ she continued. ‘Usually from sport or business. But I want to broaden things so I wondered, would you read a story?’ Of course I would. Anything for you, Olivia, I thought. But lest I appeared eager, I asked about the evening. ‘There’ll be a bit of society business first and then you read for half an hour, say. Then everyone will pile into the bar. And we’ll pay you too.’ She mentioned a modest sum.
It was a done deal. I noted the time, place and date in my diary. We said goodbye.
Time passed, and finally what I had recklessly come to consider as the evening of my date with Olivia arrived. I dressed carefully. Assuming all the males at the meeting would be Price-Waterhouse trainees in suits, I opted for the conventionally unconventional look of leather jacket and red tie. This would impress her.
Then I went to the street and I eased myself into my car, in those days a very fogeyish 1962 Morris Oxford saloon. To avoid being seen behind the wheel I parked some way from the centre and walked the last quarter mile. The venue was a sixties monstrosity with posters of shamrocks in the windows. The bar was decorated with shillelaghs and rank with the smell of old Guinness. I hardly noticed or cared. I had eyes only for O. But striding across the vomit-crusted carpet, I was appalled to see that the figure gliding towards me with shining knees and bobbed hair, was less than five foot high. It couldn’t be, could it?
‘You must be Carlo,’ said the throaty voice. Oh yes, it was Olivia.
My mouth opened but no words came out. This was because an incredible act of fantasy reassignment was underway in the brain. Instead of the willowy woman of my dreams, Olivia had turned out to be an Audrey Hepburn lookalike.
Could I like her? I asked. Oh, you bet! came the reply.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said, beaming. That was the moment when I noticed a man lurking behind, tall and gangling and bespectacled. He was, I immediately guessed, the boyfriend, a figure I had typically not included when, over the preceding weeks, I had imagined this evening.
‘This is Declan,’ said Olivia, embracing the etiolated love object. ‘He’s also the society president.’ I shook my rival’s hand.
The next part of the evening was a blur. I had a drink and made small talk. The room filled as fifty members showed up, mainly lusty men and girls from the west of Ireland. Among these was the society’s treasurer, a lantern-jawed behemoth called Keith. As we were introduced I couldn’t help noticing that Keith refused to acknowledge either Olivia or Declan and that no sooner had he finished shaking my hand but he darted off.
‘My ex,’ whispered Olivia.
Of course, ex-boyfriends hadn’t been part of my picture of the evening any more than boyfriends had.
‘Oh, right,’ I said grimly.
We adjourned to the Limerick Lounge. I sat at the back. The members sat in rows with their backs to me. The committee, Olivia, Declan, Keith and two or three others, sat behind a table at the front facing us. Olivia had said there’d be a few minutes of business and then she’d call me down. I leafed through the manuscript of the story I had brought to read. It was about an incident in the west of Ireland in my childhood.
The meeting opened. Declan said something. Keith sniped viciously at him. Members hissed. Declan called for calm, adding, ‘It’s nobody’s business but ours.’ What must have happened, I now realized, was that her loveliness had only recently switched from Keith to Declan. The two love rivals had murder in their hearts, feelings shared by several members on the floor.
The rhetoric got nastier. I tried to slide away but Olivia caught my eye and signalled the end of this ordeal was imminent. I bolted for the door but she ran down and stopped me before I could leave. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was actually an hour of procedural hideousness, I stood. I sensed, correctly, no one wanted to hear me. Panic surged in my gut. Instead of going to the front I blurted out the first sentence to the backs of the heads before me.
Well, now I’d started, I thought, I’d best continue. I remembered the advice of my speech teacher. When reading aloud, pick someone in the audience and read to them. If they’re captivated, so will everyone else be.
There was no difficulty deciding to whom to read from among the members of the committee facing me. I locked my sights on Olivia and read on. She did not disappoint. Her liquid eyes looked back at me, full of attention and interest.
I was winning, I thought. I could win them round. I could make them listen.
Pride, as we know, comes before a fall. In the crowd, I could feel a change in mood. Something was going on. At first I couldn’t tell what it was or where it was happening. Then I saw. Keith had silently moved his seat back from the committee table to a place his rival couldn’t see him and he was now, dumb-show fashion, satirically re-enacting intercou
rse between the diminutive Olivia and the stringy Declan. This involved some ugly finger work. Suddenly, alerted by the tittering, Declan twigged. He turned and, realizing he’d been mocked and by whom, he picked up the glass in front of him, and threw its contents in Keith’s face. The sodden treasurer smirked and muttered, ‘You eejit.’
I broke off from the story and said, ‘Do you want me to finish?’
‘Not really,’ said one voice.
‘No we fucking don’t,’ said another.
A third was making mock farting noises.
For a second I contemplated saying something nasty, and then running out, hopefully with Olivia in tow. But she was holding Declan’s hand while giving Keith, who was wiping his face with a handkerchief, the finger. No, clearly discretion was the better part of valour here. I stuffed the manuscript of the story into my pocket and fled through the doors, across the bar and out into the street.
I never did get paid.
‘Silence is the unbearable repartee.’ G.K. Chesterton
Billy Collins
While on a recent trip to England to promote a new book of my poems, I was presented with a rare cultural opportunity. I was invited to join the British Poet Laureate (I like to insist on the capitalized form) in a video link-up to a literary festival in Aberdeen. Not only would the two Poets Laureate – the preferred plural – from Britain and the United States be brought together for the first time to read their poetry and discuss the poetic issues of the day, which were bound to range interestingly from the aesthetic to the political, but our poetry and opinions would be presented in a truly high-tech fashion. The plan was that on a Friday evening, Andrew Motion and I would meet in a studio in London and through the magic of satellite whatever, our images would appear on a huge screen in Aberdeen before a crowd of eager poetry lovers who would see the occasion not only as the highlight of the literary festival they were attending, but as a chance to be a small part of something truly historical. A thing unprecedented in the chronicles of British – American cultural relations, a tale for the grandkids on a winter’s evening.
I was personally excited at the prospect and grateful to our host in Aberdeen who had concocted the idea and made all the technical arrangements. Earlier that week I had given a few poetry readings and been the subject of a number of interviews, but such events were familiar rituals in what had become my life in poetry. In fact, I had been performing so often that I had lately begun to feel that I was on display, a bit like a go-go dancer only without the cage and the white boots and, of course, the dancing itself. But this – an intercountry video link-up with the only two living national Poets Laureate – this was a thing quite out of the ordinary.
Looking back on it, I see that my expectations had been pitched somewhat too high. That the building to which I was escorted by a very attractive publicist was known as the ‘Cruciform Building’ was the first hint that a measure of pain might be involved. The studio itself was a small, fiercely lit room with a long news desk which faced two television sets atop which sat the large, glassy, monitorial eye of a camera. One screen would show our faces in the studio, and the other would show the crowd at Aberdeen. In the room there were posters advertising our books and actual books displayed on the desk but no Andrew Motion. I sat uncomfortably behind the desk examining my tired-looking face on one television while a discussion ensued among the publicists and technicians about whether to display the books in a neat stack or a casual sprawl. Assured by one technician that we were on ‘mute’ so the Aberdeen audience could not hear us, I uttered a few potentially disastrous, ugly-American things like ‘Say what part of Wales is Aberdeen in, anyway?’ just to pass the time. Finally, my fellow Laureate arrived, just in the nick.
Hands were shaken, seats were taken, and then there appeared on the second screen the face of our moderator/host in Aberdeen, the warm and enthusiastic Alan Spence. The link-up was at last linked-up. Trouble was that the quality of the video picture was awful. The image was very fuzzy, reminiscent of a TV picture from the 1950s when the rabbit’s ears required constant readjustment. Plus, the image was often broken up into segments like pictures from a space capsule. At one point in the camera’s explorations, the moderator looked like a fully dressed, male version of ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’. And there was no sound, just his lips moving. When the sound did come on, he offered to give us a video-look at the venue. Somehow, I had expected an outdoor scene, like Woodstock or the Monterey Jazz Festival, or Slane Castle, but the scene was a huge classroom auditorium – a classroom that had every appearance of being empty.
‘We’re going to let the crowd in any minute,’ the moderator said, and I pictured them pressing against the doors, being restrained by heavy-set ushers. But when ‘any minute’ arrived, we were again given a long shot of the venue. A few people were making their way very slowly down the aisles, very slowly and very few. The rough count that I made in the course of the broadcast was twenty-three. They seemed to be mostly elderly women, though that impression may have been the result of all the fuzz. They were sitting as far from one another as the room would allow – as if there had been a terrible falling-out in the mini-bus that brought them all here.
Well, I read some poems, then Andrew Motion read some poems, but because we were reading to an absentee audience, to a television screen really, a dead feeling pervaded the experience. It was as if Mr Motion and I had decided to spend the evening together watching television – one for each because we could never agree on a programme – and then we suddenly broke into poetry. Never had I experienced such an absence of feedback. Then our astronaut/moderator called for questions from the audience. Pause. No questions. ‘Surely, one of you …’ A silence descended, the kind of silence that Scotland may be said to be famous for. But after some genial words were traded back and forth between the Laureates in London and the moderator floating in outer space, two of the more curious audience members had questions. For Mr Motion. None for me. A final exchange revealed that it was now raining in both London and Aberdeen.
What I will never forget about the evening is staring at the fuzzy screen about halfway through the programme and noticing a figure in black getting up and walking out, right up the middle aisle of the auditorium and out the door, reducing the audience by l/23rd. The figure in black seemed to be a woman, and I was sorely tempted to yell out from the big screen like Big Brother, ‘Hey you! In the black! Get back to your seat or you will be taken to a room not of your liking.’ I was restrained only by my suspicion that the figure could be my good friend, the novelist and festival-goer Todd McEwen, passing silent judgment on the whole affair and, for that matter, the very purpose of poetry.
‘Better a red face than a black heart.’ Portuguese proverb
Ciaran Carson
I was in Berlin in 1991, at the invitation of Jürgen Schneider and Thomas Wolfhart of LiteraturWERKstatt. The name – meaning something like Literature Workplace, I suppose, with the emphasis on WORK, was vaguely off-putting, but my misgivings were allayed when Jürgen and Thomas arrived in Belfast to check out the literary scene. Gaunt, pale, dressed all in black, they conducted themselves with a laconic intensity that seemed the epitome of urban radical literary chic. It turned out they knew people in Belfast I didn’t know. I was impressed.
And when the time came, I was delighted to be in Berlin. LiteraturWERKstatt was situated in Pankow, a suburb of East Berlin, in a mansion which had been a former Communist Party redoubt. The Wall had been down for two years, but the East was still intriguingly dark, and revolution was still in the air. The bars were pleasantly dark and musak-less. They served two kinds of beer and two of schnapps. The days were full of drink and smoke and talk, of hope and poetry and politics. Literature mattered. Being from Belfast, I was made to feel special. I represented a tough, uncompromisingly urban poetry. Exploring the gritty, dark, semi-derelict zones near the centre, I felt charged with the street wisdom of our divided cities. I saw Belfast in Berlin, and Berlin in Belfast.
On the third day I walked alone through the Brandenburg Gate into the West. After a while I found myself on a thoroughfare, where a group of people had gathered around some kind of street performance. It turned out to be a variant of the old three-card trick, or Find the Lady, where the punter has to guess which of three face-down cards is the queen, and the obvious choice is always wrong. More specifically, it was a kind of thimblerig, where a pea is placed under one of three thimbles. In this case, matchbox trays replaced the thimbles. Now, I was from Belfast, and I was nobody’s mug. I watched the proceedings with a cold ironic eye, pitying the poor saps who fell for such an ancient scam. The rig was worked by two Turks. I watched the thimblerigger’s deft movements, his accomplice scanning the crowd for potential victims. It was really quite an entertaining show. I observed that some of the punters guessed right, and went off happily clutching a fistful of marks. Of course they were in on the scam, too. But then again, as I watched closer, and longer, every so often there was a winner who looked nothing like the disreputable types who made up most of the winners. These were solid-looking Germans, family men. Even the odd respectably dressed woman. It appeared that the thimblerig operators had worked up a really good scam, one in which there were, pour encourager les autres, genuine winners. So I watched for an even longer time until I knew I had worked out the pattern, the moves that would precede a win, when the pea was under the box that everyone thought it was under. My moment came. Quickly, before anyone else could bet, I walked boldly forward from the crowd and held up a few notes.
‘Not enough,’ said the Turk. He had very good English. Not only that, he knew me for an English speaker before I’d opened my mouth. ‘You are sure. You know the box. You give me more. Make it worth your while.’
Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame Page 19