Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (14 page)

When the applause faded, I downed an entire bottle in front of an astonished waiter, scurried off to a telephone kiosk, pulled out the small effigies of the jury I had made and hacked them to pieces with the axe, uttering small cries and dribbles. Then I strode keening through the New Kremlin Library, scattering a paper trail of betrayal and indignity. I freely admit that in my heart I wished to commit a crime that would reverberate down the centuries. I could not, however, think of one dreadful enough and so I rushed off to find a taxi to bear myself incognito from that dreadful spot, hating myself, loathing the whole detestable show, admitting to myself that, yes, I had compromised myself utterly by submitting to the whole disgusting charade, all because some public relations shark had decided it was good for publicity and
may a dog fuck his mother and the mother of the central committee
. I had done what I’d always sworn I’d never do (and would never do again); I should have stood defiantly on that stage, thrown my book at the audience, blown my nose on my beard, unzipped my fly, wee-weed over my fellow poets where they sat dumbly staring up at me, shouted
Long Live the Revolution!
and then gone home for pickled herrings and a glass of milk and allowed the thrilling glow of pure civil disobedience to resume uninterrupted usurpation of my heart.

V. Blobchinsky (poet)

‘It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.’ Mark Twain

The lowest moment in my literary career was when I found myself bidding for a middle-aged oil magnate in a mock slave auction at a dinner in Dallas. I was bidding for the sake of Bloomsbury and for the honour of England, but I think that compounds the shame. I don’t often look back at that evening. It is all a bit of a blur.

I can’t even remember what year it was. It must have been after Michael and I were married, because it was largely his fault. In marrying Michael, I married into Bloomsbury. I had long enjoyed a vexed and sometimes tearful relationship with Virginia Woolf, who would have despised me as much as I admire her, but I had not taken on board all her family, friends and associates, nor had I ever expected to find myself in Texas on a fund-raising trip for the conservation of Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex. I was anxious in advance. Like Thoreau (or was it Emerson?) I distrust all enterprises that require new clothes, and this trip strongly suggested that I needed additions to my wardrobe. I consulted a friend familiar with the soap opera named
Dallas,
who told me I needed a cocktail dress and a hairstyle. I have never had a hairstyle. I went to a hairdresser and asked for one, but he didn’t seem able to help. I’ve got the wrong kind of hair for a hairstyle.

The trip had its good moments, and we travelled in good company. The tall, slender and ever-charming Duke of Devonshire was one of the party: he would rise gracefully to his feet on any occasion and declare that this was the happiest and proudest moment of his life. The diminutive Hugh Casson was equally suave and equally appealing. Michael and I did our best, in our own fashion, delivering respectable lectures in aid of the good cause. Mine was on Mr Bennett and Mrs Woolf, in which I daringly suggested that Arnold Bennett and Virgina Woolf had more in common than was usually recognized. We also appeared with Lynn Redgrave in a performance of Virginia Woolf’s not very entertaining home entertainment,
Freshwater
. But despite these eccentric efforts to enlist the support of the rich art-lovers of Texas, the walls of whose ranches were hung with works by Monet and Degas, we failed to open their purses for Charleston. The price of oil was at that time very low – I think it had fallen to eight dollars a barrel – and the Prince of Wales had been in Dallas just before us begging on behalf of some other British charity. He had mopped up whatever spare cash they had, and there was nothing left for us.

All hung on the success of the final Gala Dinner and Auction, which was held in the newly-opened Versailles-style hotel in which we were all lavishly accommodated. The actor Robert Hardy was to play auctioneer for us. We dressed up as best we could, and descended to meet the wealthy guests, one of whom bore the familiar name of Ellen Terry. She was small and plump and in real estate. She glittered tremendously in a splendid ball gown. I felt quite shy in my modest Monsoon silk. We drank a cocktail or two, and mingled. We went on and on mingling. Something had gone wrong with the catering, and the dinner was seriously delayed. The Texans, angered already by the oil slump, were not amused. By the time we staggered to our tables, we were all completely drunk, and the guests were turning nasty.

Poor Robert Hardy had die task of trying to sell various bejewelled trinkets that had been donated to the appeal. These were mere trifles, worth only a few thousand dollars apiece, and the Texans despised them. They refused to bid. In vain did he urge them on with many blandishments: the old English charm had ceased to work. I can’t remember how the suggestion of a slave auction arose – certainly not from our Bloomsbury party. A tanned, gold-bangled JR look-alike offered himself as a prize, but again, nobody bid. In the end, urged on by fellow diners at our table, I boldly opened the bidding. I can’t remember what I offered for him, nor can I recollect what happened next. Somebody must have outbid me, for at least I didn’t have to claim him. Or if I did, I soon lost him, because I certainly haven’t got him now.

How did the evening end? How did we manage to put ourselves to bed? We both woke with spectacular hangovers, worthy of Lucky Jim himself, and I had the added shame of knowing that I had been a disgrace to Bloomsbury, and had given Virginia Woolf yet more reasons to despise me. What vulgarity, what immodesty! I am left with a lingering sense of horror, and a feeling that I had wandered into the wrong kind of novel. And it wasn’t even the kind of novel that I could write. But will I ever learn to stay at home? Well, I hope not. It will all come in handy one day, surely.

‘My Oberon! What visions have I seen!
Methought I was enamoured of an ass.’
Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream

I had published my first novel. It was called
The South
. I was on my first tour and this was Boston. The schedule said I was to do a TV show, and thus I found myself, make-up on, ready to appear, sitting in a room waiting to be called into the studio. The show was live, and when I looked at the screen I saw that Norman Mailer was already on the programme.

‘That is Norman Mailer!’ I said to the two women in the room. ‘That’s amazing!’

I don’t remember how I realized that one of the people to whom I was gushing was Mrs Mailer. She was very beautiful and very cool. Her skin was perfect. She stared at the screen, expressionless.

‘Am I on after him?’ I asked the production assistant.

‘Yeah, you’re on after him,’ the production assistant said.

I smiled at Mrs Mailer as if to say that we were in this together, but she remained placidly staring at her husband as he spoke, his wonderful worn face in full flight on the screen, his arms gesticulating.

Time went on. We continued to watch in silence. I knew the show was twenty-nine minutes long. Mailer was still on
The Deer Park
after fifteen. Then he talked about Marilyn and the Kennedys. He smiled, he laughed, he shrugged his shoulders, he interrupted the questions. At twenty-five, he was discussing
The Executioner’s Song
.

‘Don’t worry,’ the production assistant said to me, ‘keep calm. It’ll soon be your turn.’

At twenty-seven and a half minutes, they rushed me past Norman Mailer and put me sitting in his chair and miked me while the camera focused on the host holding up a copy of Mailer’s new book.

The chair where Mailer had been sitting was still warm. I thought about Mailer’s ass, I imagined it short and muscular and strong, hairy but not fleshy, the grey hair darkening towards the deep cleft. The heat from his ass was going through me as I said a few words about my book and then the show came to an end before the heat had faded.

Mailer was outside putting on his coat. I placed my book down on the table while I reached for my bag. He looked at the book. I wondered if I could start to tell him how much I admired his work, how the sweeping, fiery tones of
The Armies of the Night
and
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
had made me want to be a journalist, but how I believed that
The Executioner’s Song
was a masterpiece, as good as it gets, how that book made me want to do nothing except read it again.

‘You’re Irish,’ he said and took me in with his clear gaze.

I nodded. He studied the book again. I wondered if he was going to ask me if he could have a copy of it. I wondered if I should offer him one. It had taken me years to write.

“The Outh,’ he said, approvingly, touching the jacket of the book.

‘No,’ I said almost breathlessly, ‘
The South
.’

He seemed puzzled. We both looked down at the jacket.

The graphic designer had made a beautiful’S’ in a different colour and type-face to the ‘O-u-t-h’ so that the last four letters were perfectly clear against a blue background, but the ‘S’ was not so clear. I traced my finger along the ‘S’ to show him it was there. He smiled sadly.

‘So it’s not
The Outh
?’ His tone was amused, relaxed, mellow. He seemed to have liked saying the word ‘Outh’, he had made it long and glamorous-sounding and the afterglow of saying it stayed with him now in a slow smile.

He began to turn. His wife was waiting for him.

‘I thought it was an Irish word,’ he said.

Then he gathered himself up and left. I glanced sharply at his ass as he moved towards the door. It was everything I thought it might be and more. And then he was gone.

‘There still remains, to mortify a wit,
The many-headed monster of the pit.’
Pope,
Epilogue to the Satires

Some people have a taste for humiliation. When I worked as a secondhand dealer there was a collector of tawse
¹
who was famous around the markets. He excused his obsession by explaining he was planning to open a school museum. We suspected instead a rare Scottish strain of ‘the English disease’.
²
Humiliation was undoubtedly his kink and he worked hard for it. It saddens me that this man had to trawl car boot sales and secondhand shops in search of humiliation, while I experience it so frequently and with so little effort.

Describing the beautiful romance between Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny Osborne, I told a lecture theatre of young students, ‘Stevenson went across the Atlantic in search of Fanny.’ The hilarity stretched all the way to Silverado. At least that got a laugh. Unlike when (I’m cringing as I write this) I asked a member of my visually impaired writer’s workshop about the lack of description in his writing and he reminded me he’d been blind from birth.

Some humiliations feel like triumphs. Initially flattered to be hailed by a hard-drinking young literary lion in a hotel corridor, I started to wonder why he was telling me of the mess he had made of his bathroom. Was this monologue on his lack of aim some kind of metaphor? Then it dawned. He thought I was a cleaner and was instructing me to erase his jottings. Keeping in character I told him he was too old to expect anyone to mop up his toileting accidents and to do it himself or I’d phone the
TLS
.

Masochists note, an audience salts any wound. I enjoy readings. I prepare and don’t feel that nervous. It’s my body that lets me down, hands that tremble too much to lift a glass and, occasionally, a shaking leg which must have the audience wondering why the woman on stage is doing an impersonation of Elvis Presley. I remind myself the audience have paid good money to attend. They wish me well. This is a foolish delusion. At an Edinburgh Festival event entitled
Provocations
the first question came from an elderly woman. She looked handknitted, but was about as woolly as a Rottweiler. In polite shortbread tones she began by recounting avant-garde writers she admired, including Burroughs and Trocchi. Surprised but delighted, the readers on stage cast coy glances at each other. Then she got to the meat of her statement.

‘I would like to know why this event is called
Provocations?
I’ve been sitting here all morning and I haven’t been provoked once! No,’ her voice rose, ‘nothing I’ve heard this morning has provoked me.’ Her friend patted the woman’s arm soothingly. But the old lady would not be pacified. ‘I came here expecting to be provoke d,’ the voice reached a pitch dogs find uncomfortable, ‘and I have been sorely disappointed!’

Later I asked my sister what we had looked like sitting on the platform before the unprovoked woman’s tirade.

‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘you looked like a group of West Coast councillors being quizzed about their expenses.’

What could be more humiliating?

¹
Leather belt until fairly recently used by Scottish teachers to ritually humiliate children by strapping them across their hands in front of the rest of the class/school.

²
Spanking.

‘One place is everywhere, everywhere is nowhere.’ Persian proverb

I haven’t even finished reading the letter of invitation to the Aran Islands Poetry Festival and I’m daydreaming of lonely sheep scrambling over the stones, and the wind blowing a salty mist over Inisboffin. Men in thick cable sweaters and thicker brogues. Hot whiskey with lemon on a raw night. Seals watching from the rocky shore. Will I come for airfare and enough money to buy dinner in Dublin? You bet.