Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (15 page)

I don’t pay too much attention to the disclaimer that the conference actually takes place in Galway City, but the reality of this hits home the morning our taxi enters the driveway of the ‘Hospitality Village’, a compound on the edge of the university. A sprawl of concrete dorms, some bushes planted here and there, a flat brown building full of vending machines – it looks like an apartment complex in either Iowa City or Bratislava. We’re given a key and a map, and wander our way around dozens of identical compounds to find OUR compound. By now we’ve decided it’s an apartment complex on the outskirts of Prague. Our room seems meant to standardize life for the struggling classes. Two beds, each wearing a grey-striped mattress thin as an overcoat, are bolted to the walls; overhead, a sizzle of fluorescent bulbs makes the whole place vibrate. Nothing anywhere indicates anything about the possibility of heat.

Well, what matter a spartan accommodation? We’re off to find the conference. The path winds beside the dorms, beside a somewhat scruffy meadow and a dour stream, underneath what must surely be the only freeway in Western Ireland, past various discarded appliances rusting in the grass, nearly loses itself in some parking lots, and after a mile gives reluctantly onto the campus. A good bit of wandering and some puzzling campus maps lead us to the information table, where we’re face to face with Mary-Grace, the travel agent who’s put all this together. A line of senior citizens with rather strained expressions waits to talk to her, but nothing in her face betrays the least bit of stress. In fact, her dome of blonde hair seems as if it might serve as a kind of protective shield, repelling all difficulties. She waves the troubled participants aside to hand us name tags and a packet of information, and point out where to get something to eat.

Indeed we’re starving, especially after more map consultation and wandering to find the school cafeteria. Eventually a pair of unmarked swinging doors lead us into a basement chamber from which – were there justice in this world – we’d have heard the cries of the damned arising. For indeed the school cafeteria turns out to be half-Dante, half-Dickens. The staff has been recruited from a nineteenth-century orphanage. They stand, pale and defiant with gloom, behind trays of foods relentlessly brown and grey: porridges, gruel, sad toasted things, sorry boiled items, heartbroken sausages swimming in grey juice. We are too hungry to turn back, and choose what we think we can abide, and carry our trays to the towering, pale cashier – in her grey uniform she’s either a moonlighting prison guard or a recently deinstitutionalized patient recovering from electroshock. At our table we translate the alarming bill from pounds and realize we’ve just spent twenty-five dollars on a breakfast that seems to be made of boiled, chilled elastic stockings.

Now despite these complaints, I am not particularly fussy about my circumstances. I have a friend, for instance, a well-known poet who is famous for refusing the rooms he is offered by well-meaning sponsors, referring to himself in the third person and declaring, ‘—does not sleep here!’ I have never done this, though here in the infernal cafeteria I begin to think I should. I have been too grateful to be asked; I have been so surprised and pleased that people wanted to hear my work, or ask me what I thought, that I’ve said yes too easily. This phase of my life seems to be ending, even as I fail to finish my breakfast.

A quick conference with our fellow conferees reveals that the only other food to be had is in Galway City, a walk of another mile or more. We set off, passing Mary-Grace at her table where a longer line of participants with problems wait to enlist her help. We note that all the clientele seem to be elderly, all rather alike in their appearance, and a bit familiar – of course, they’re Boston Irish! Here for a vacation on the old sod with a bit of literature thrown in. My writerly colleagues and I are the lure to get them to plunk down their dollars for a vacation at Hospitality Village – but wait, where are my fellow writers? Wiser than me, clearly, or maybe they read the fine print; they appear for their readings and promptly vanish into rental cars, gone into the rain. Said rain now slicks the path to Galway City and then the way home, and then the path. Rainwater cascades down from the freeway; truck tyres throw out gritty spray, and there’s nothing to do but make a run through it.

I will skip the increasingly long lines shadowing Mary-Grace, and the anguished pleas spoken into the pay-phone outside our door, and go right to the outing which lent the festival its name. A couple of hundred participants, so much white hair among us that altogether we call up something of those fine Aran sheep I imagined so long ago, are herded onto buses, and from the buses to a ferry, and across the chilly sound toward the fabled islands. The air’s exuding something heavier than mist but lighter than rain. We huddle inside the unheated big cabin of the ferry, where you can buy coffee and tea and buns.

Lucky those who do! Since once we arrive at Inishmore, there is no food to be had. The reception organized to greet us turns out to be a tiny, rather pleasing band, playing a pair of welcoming tunes. We listen politely, though it is a bit chilly to be standing here by the dock in the more-than-mist. Once they’re through we begin our march in the now only slightly-less-than-rain. Our destination: a ring fort, an ancient site on a high spot from whence one could indeed see much of the world, were there any world today to be seen. The path wends on, past stones and the requisite, rather glum sheep. Soon the path is going over the stones, since of course the pastures are divided by stone walls just tall enough to keep those wandering clouds in place. At each of these hurdles we lose at least one or two of our company: ‘Oh, I think I’ll just sit this out,’ or ‘I’ll wait here, Helen, you go on and don’t worry about me.’ It’ll be a long wait.

It is quite a hike to the ring fort still, and among our troupe a restless apprehension has begun to spread: we are too polite to say it at first, and surely someone has thought of this problem, but there don’t seem to be any bathrooms. Did you happen to notice a bathroom? We would ask Mary-Grace but she seems to have stayed back at the ferry. Or did she vanish with the bus?

The best the sun can manage is a sort of coppery blush, and then it seems to give up entirely and things grow darker. Our band has diminished but we are still plenty, and we are committed; we want to see the ring fort at the summit of our journey, and we want to hear the reading promised there; Edna O’Brien herself will speak among the ancient stones.

And indeed, at the summit, to the wonder of a crowd now damp, hungry, and accepting that the shame of simply going and relieving oneself beside one of the stone walls is preferable to the misery of keeping one’s pride intact, Edna O’Brien appears. How has she done it? She looks as though she has just returned from the powder room. She is radiant, untouched; she is funny, smart and wise; her tenderness toward the world is balanced by her unmistakable, perfectly pitched anger. We love her.

And then we walk down again.

The elderly Irish of Boston are sore, their stockings torn. They are faint with hunger and exposure, and mildly seasick. Thank heavens tomorrow’s the day to go home. The buses will be late, and there won’t be enough of them to get us all to Shannon on time. Paul and I are lucky to claim seats. Mary-Grace gets on the bus and makes an announcement that only those on early flights should take this bus. She asks Paul and I to get off and take a later bus. I do not have a shred of faith that there will BE a later bus, and I am finished with Mary-Grace. No more Mr Nice Guy poet; Doty does not sleep here! Mary-Grace, I say, with a steely ferocity in my voice which makes six rows of heads swivel, and which startles me, though I rather like it, we are riding on this bus.

And we do. We barely make the plane. We’re not surprised to see, as we fit ourselves and our carry-ons into the tiny space of our coach seats, Mary-Grace looking back at us with a quick, evaluative glance, just before she disappears into First Class.

‘We are more anxious to speak than to be heard.’ Thoreau

I did hear this one true story – the nightmare event at a reading.

A well-known American novelist, after her successes, was invited back to her high school. They had put on the dog for her and she had therefore put on the dog for them. She dressed well and stood up at the lectern to give her formal speech about writing, the arts, culture, education – all the noble things writers never talk or think about when they are not on panels or speaking publicly.

It was a full auditorium. Halfway through the talk she began to feel sick and, knowing she was soon going to throw up, announced in a calm voice that she had left a few pages of her speech offstage, in her bag. She walked off slowly and as soon as she was out of sight ran to the bathroom and threw up noisily. She had been doing this for about a minute when someone came into the bathroom to tell her that the lapel mike was still on.

‘He who is wrong fights against himself.’ Egyptian proverb

One of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms goes: ‘an erratum in the list of errata’. I’ve always liked this spindly joke, not only because the double negative is witty (might an erratum in the list of errata be not wrong but mysteriously right, as in algebra a minus times a minus equals a plus?) but because Lichtenberg seems to imply that error attracts more error; or rather that the urge to correction carries the seeds of its own destruction, as saintliness attracts martyrdom.

For those who make a living from writing, getting things wrong constitutes the formal, not to say canonical nightmare. To publicize error is to multiply it infinitely. And how much more acute is the embarrassment of error for one whose job, as a critic, is to correct others’ fallacies? That error attracts more error I know to my cost. My first book, a collection of essays, contained a piece on Jane Austen. Though I knew perfectly well that Lady Catherine de Bourgh belongs to
Pride and Prejudice
and Lady Bertram to
Mansfield Park
– though who will now believe me? –1 placed Lady Catherine de Bourgh in
Mansfield Park
. Stranger still, in the same paragraph, I misspelt that formidable lady’s name (as de Burgh, like the near-singer Chris de Burgh) and wrote that throughout the novel she is more interested in her rug than in her children. Austen in fact wrote that she was more interested in her pug than in her children.

As far as I know, these were the only errors in my book; yet in one small paragraph, three howlers! (And how painful that word howler is when it is used not by you but against you in a review, conjuring flocks of correctors cawing at you in unison.) Two reviewers of the book noticed, and both, of course, rightly went to town on the information – went to town and had dinner at my expense. One of them suggested that such howlers – that word! – shook his confidence in the entire book.

Like most writers, and certainly most journalists, I work, and work most happily, from memory. Memory is organic. The notorious fact-checkers of the
New Yorker
are irritating not only because they often prove how fallible are our memories, but because they seem to mechanize what ought to be a natural, unmediated, fast-moving process. As a teenager I loved Ford Madox Ford’s opinionated and breezy
The English Novel
(I still remember its sky-blue Carcanet paper cover) and found romantic Ford’s preface, in which he says, or so I recall, that he wrote the book in six weeks on a becalmed ship, far from home and far from his books. Erich Auerbach famously wrote his great work
Mimesis
in Istanbul during the Second World War, again far from his books, and without access to libraries. Chesterton deliberately quoted, and certainly misquoted from memory at all times, on principle. This is surely the scholar’s and writer’s ideal, and I have a curious ritual, in which, if forced to look a quote up that I once knew by heart, I try to read it through, close the book, and put it into my piece using my lightly renewed memory. I did this when writing the Austen essay. I consulted
Mansfield Park
for the quote in which Austen writes that Lady Bertram was more interested in her pug than her children, closed the book, and then reproduced the quote from memory. In my mind, I had fixed Lady Bertram as perhaps doing needlework in her drawing room while her children came and went, or perhaps, like Emma Woodhouse’s hypochondriacal father, fussing with a rug over her knees. I had utterly forgotten about the pug, as one does forget such things years after reading a novel. That I misremembered the pug is uninteresting; but that I made two other errors in the same paragraph seems to be a perfect example of my unconscious madly semaphoring to my conscious mind – ‘stop, stop: you are in error and wading deeper with every step!’

But why do we all prefer to use our memories rather than look things up? The memory, after all, is an error-producing organ, as the police know only too well from millions of fallacious eyewitnesses. We do it not only because it is easier than trotting to the shelves, but to show off – not to others, who after all can’t know we have used our memories unless we tell them so in print. We do it to show off to ourselves. But since using our memory is certainly bound to lead to error, the conclusion must be that showing off to ourselves is really – however unconsciously – commending ourselves for getting things wrong. Showing off to ourselves is getting things wrong to the secret satisfaction of our unconscious. And the further conclusion to be drawn from this is that we want to be caught at it. We want to be mortified. We want to be punished for being the kind of people who get things wrong; we want to be mortified for being the kind of people who show off to ourselves. Memory is vanity; all is vanity, saith the preacher. This is circular, you’ll protest. Yet mortification is a religious notion at heart, and a great deal of Dostoevsky and Hamsun turns on precisely the idea that we really crave our own mortification. It was Augustine, the great religious theorist of error, who first proposed a real theory of memory. He suggested that we only remember things by having already forgotten them beforehand. Or at least I think he said this. I can see the passage, underlined, in my Penguin copy of his
Confessions
. But I am far from home, and writing this far from my books …