Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (21 page)

at the Cuirt Festival in Galway being interrupted mid-flow by an American voice: ‘Why are you so bitter?’ (Hm, yes, why?);

at the end of a reading in New York being asked by an ancient bag-lady: ‘Why don’t you read like Dylan Thomas?’ (Hm, yes, why not?);

prior to a group reading in Derry being cornered by a pretty young woman with tears in her eyes: ‘Are you Michael Longley?’ A fan, I thought. ‘May I shake your hand?’ A fan indeed. Glad hand proffered. ‘I’ve always wanted to shake the hand of the man to whom Seamus Heaney dedicated “Personal Helicon”.’

Mortification can cut two ways. Poetry readings used to be launched on a tidal wave of alcohol. Long ago in the seventies I was giving a joint reading at the Morden Tower in Newcastle. I was pie-eyed but, unfortunately, not yet paralytic. I could still stand up and communicate in a rudimentary fashion. I introduced my first poem and then went on introducing it. After more than twenty disconnected minutes I crumpled into my seat without reading a single line. I don’t know who my co-reader was. I can’t remember anything. A friend who was present tells me that someone made a tape-recording of my preposterous wittering. May it unravel and autodestruct as I did.

About the same time, I shared a poetry reading with James Simmons at Trinity College, Dublin, my alma mater. I had been an undistinguished student, but did not choose this occasion to make amends. The setting was more professional than it often is: two chairs, a lectern, a table, glasses of water, sympathetic lighting. I think I read first. I was in my cups. While Jimmy was up at the lectern reading his poems and singing his songs, I dropped off and started to snore. A sodden drone. A floodlit kip. Jimmy told me afterwards that I had snored all the way through his performance. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ ‘You were making such a lovely rhythmic sound.’

Next comes post-reading mortification – more drink at the home of the resigned, forbearing host. On the campus of a great American university at a reception in my honour I challenged a world expert on the life and poetry of Robert Frost. A Guinness and whiskey man, I had forgotten that dry martinis consist of more than fortified wine. In no time at all I was telling the professor that he knew fuck-all about Frost or anything else. My host tried to humour me by suggesting that I recite one of my own poems. I wobbled through ‘The Linen Industry’ to the penultimate line but, with the end in sight, found myself back at the beginning. This happened three or four times. Refusing to step off my demented roundabout, I was led by the elbow upstairs to bed.

There were worse readings and worse receptions. They have vanished into the black hole of alcoholic amnesia. I was not an alcoholic, just a practitioner of what in Belfast we call ‘serious drinking’. After the deluge of a St Patrick’s Day bender in 2000 I decided to jump off the deadly dull merry-go-round. I haven’t had a drink for more than three years. Mortification still comes my way, but less frequently.

‘If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.’ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I received a package in the post containing my American travel book,
No Particular Place to Go,
a stamped addressed envelope and a letter from someone in Warwick requesting my signature, or, if possible, a signed photo of myself. She enclosed a few of her poems, in case I was interested. She didn’t want to put me to any trouble. I signed the book and had a look at the poems. They were good in a very up-to-date, knowing sort of way, mostly about sex. I wrote a few suggestions on them, then sent everything back with a complimentary letter and a photo of myself. The following week she wrote back saying she was putting a collection together and wondered if I would mind casting an eye over it before she sent it off. I agreed to this, adding that I would like a signed photograph of her. I knew that she would recognize this request from a story in my travel book in which I ask for an American fan’s photo, only to be met off the Greyhound bus in San Francisco by her irate Italian boyfriend.

Some months went by before the typescript arrived. Attached to it was an old black-and-white photo of a ladies hockey team, signed on the back with a big heart ‘Love from Natalie’. I edited the book and sent it back to her. A few weeks later she wrote saying she was working for the Leamington Spa Poetry Festival and invited me to come and do a reading. A couple of school workshops were thrown in for the following morning, which, together with the reading, would make up quite a handsome fee. I agreed to this and she wrote back saying that the Festival was putting writers up in private houses, in order to save money, and that, if it was all right with me, I would be staying with her. I wrote back saying this was all right with me.

When the time came, I set off for Leamington wearing my best shirt and feeling optimistic. To get to Leamington, you take the train from Paddington, change at Reading, then take a train north. I got out at Reading, made enquiries and got on the next train to Lymington on the south coast. (I found out later that this is where you take the ferry to the Isle of Wight.) Realizing what I had done, I ran up and down the compartment like a trapped animal, asking people whether I should get out at the next stop, or stay on the train to Lymington and start again from there. Opinion seemed to suggest that I should stay on the train. So it was that I arrived at Lymington just as my audience were taking their seats for my reading at Leamington. Instead of amusing them with stories of mishaps in the States, it seemed I was off gathering material nearer home.

I rang Natalie on her mobile, explaining what had happened. She said not to worry, jump on the next train and she’d keep the audience happy. I changed trains at Reading again and arrived at Leamington Library exactly three hours late for my reading. Natalie was waiting in the entrance for me – a pretty graduate student on work experience.

The audience was sizeable and everyone was very nice about the long ‘intermission’, during which they were afraid to say they’d made a start on the wine and nibbles. Natalie whisked me to the podium and I began the difficult task of being worth waiting three hours for. Almost as soon as I started it became apparent that this was not going to be possible. Within a minute, the audience were shuffling their feet, as if they were getting ready to leave. Although they had been able to control themselves, even enjoy themselves, while sitting there doing nothing, to have this feat capped by a reading was too much for them. I understood how they felt. I apologized once more and asked if I could buy anyone a drink. As I descended from the podium, Natalie approached, saying what a valiant job I’d done and would I mind signing a few copies of my book. Not a trace of dismay, or even surprise, showed on my face as she introduced me to her parents, in whose house I was going to be staying. They were teachers at the school where I was going to be taking the workshops next morning, so they could take me there in their car. I expressed my delight with these arrangements.

There were one or two copies of my libidinous travel book to sign, then it was a short walk to where I would be staying. As we left the library I found myself walking with Natalie’s mother, who, to my alarm, was holding a copy of the incriminating item in her hand. She told me how much she’d enjoyed the reading and how pleased they were that I was going to be staying with them in their spare room. Looking me in the eye and with almost no hint of irony in her voice, she added, ‘I’ve read your book.’

‘Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.’ Oliver Wendell Holmes

Let’s just say I deserved it. I had angered the Gods of Mortification through hubris: I had mortified another writer, my friend Ann Patchett. My mortification of Ann was unsubtle and entirely accidental, without nuance, without evil, and the Gods of Mortification looked down upon me and clucked their terrible, humiliating, lemon-meringue-pie-to-the-face tongues, and decided to show me how it was done.

It started like this: Ann and I sometimes do a dog and pony show at public libraries in the US. We stand at a podium and argue about who’s the dog and who’s the pony, and it’s much easier than appearing alone and we get to go on trips together and it’s all very fine. Ann is better at most things than I am, and so she usually negotiates the fee: I’m liable to agree to read for a pat on the back and unlimited use of the library’s ladies’ room. Last year I got an e-mail from a library inviting us to come. So I asked Ann, and she said it sounded great, and I passed along the contact information.

Or so I thought.

Turns out I had received two invitations to read: one for Ann and me, and one for me alone. I had passed along the information from the second library. Happily, Ann was laughing when she called me to say that I owed her big: they’d agreed on a fee, and then Ann gave
her
travel information as well, and the librarian was confused. ‘You don’t want both of us?’ asked Ann. Well, said the librarian, she couldn’t pay Ann an honorarium, and she couldn’t pay for Ann’s travel, and, moreover, she really hadn’t planned on Ann reading at the library, but if Ann wanted to come with me and share my hotel room, she was more than welcome. If it was all right with me, of course. She’d have to ask my permission.

You see how I had it coming.

Flash forward a few months. I fly to Florida and check into that selfsame hotel. It’s on the interstate, with a window that, the desk clerk has told me, looks onto the pool. Actually, it looks onto a wall; the pool is merely audible (children cannonballing into it, children screaming). It is conveniently located next to two other motels, and exactly nothing else, and so I have to wait for a librarian – different from the one who’d invited me, who was on vacation – to pick me up. But she does and she’s charming and doesn’t blink when I say I need to have two glasses of white wine before I read to calm my nerves, she just takes me to a bar.

The library is very nice, too.

When I walk into the auditorium, I am met by a man who tells me his name is Ed. He tells me his name is Ed in such a confidential tone, while shaking my hand, that I wonder whether he has ever before broken down and confessed to anyone that his name is Ed. Ed has teeth like flying buttresses, sandy brown. He tells me he’s awfully glad to meet me, he likes to meet all the authors, he hasn’t read my books but he’s hoping that the librarian will allow him to take away the photo of me that is now resting on the easel by the auditorium door. He wants me to sign it. He wants to compile a book of all the pictures of all the authors who ever read at this public library, starting with me. ‘I want that picture,’ he says, looking at my picture. Then we are mercifully interrupted.

‘Ed, leave her alone,’ says a dour woman. She is short and plump and wearing stiff blue shorts that show off her skinny calves. The shorts are so immense, and so stiff, and Ed’s teeth so very like flying buttresses, that she appears to be waiting for Quasimodo to swing by and ring her.

‘I’m just talking!’ says Ed.

‘Can’t you see she wants to talk to her fans? I’m Ed’s wife,’ she confesses to me.

It’s true: I do want to talk to my fans. I try to adopt a look of modesty and approachability, and scan the auditorium to see: Ed, his wife, the librarian. I shake all of their hands again.

Eventually a few more people show up, though not enough to justify the generous fee that Patchett has negotiated. Still, there’s one nice little old lady in the audience, wearing a strange plastic brace around her torso. I assume it’s meant to straighten out an osteoporotic back. I give her a comforting smile, and she returns it. Most readers know the comfort of picking out an attentive, cheerful audience member to calm their nerves, especially if the crowd is small. She’ll do.

I read just a little, and then I talk about my writing. Look, I’m right: there’s Grandma in the front row, nodding and smiling. She looks like she’s having the time of her life. I’m probably her favourite author! This is probably a big thrill! She can’t get enough of me! What a fool I was! What a poor, sad, sick, pathetic fool!

‘And sometimes I just indulge myself,’ I say about my own writing process, and Grandma calls out, ‘Those must have been the times when I had trouble.’

‘Oh?’ I say brightly.

She says, ‘Yes. I read your short stories, and sometimes, I just couldn’t understand them.’

Make no mistake: the Gods of Mortification recognize false modesty. I should have said, ‘Gosh, too bad, sister. Maybe if you take a night course you could become halfway literate, and then you wouldn’t stumble over perfectly straightforward English.’

Instead, I deliver a fine speech about how every short story is a collaboration between writer and reader, and every reading of a short story is valid, and how I was sorry that she didn’t enjoy them but that didn’t mean that there was anything wrong with her reading of them –’

‘I know!’ she says excitedly. ‘I mean, I’d get to the end of a story, and I’d say to myself, what was the point of that?’

I nod.

“That was a complete waste of time!’ she says. ‘I mean, really, every single story, I thought –’

I nod again.

‘That was the dumbest thing I ever read!’ she says.

‘I’m going to crawl under the podium now,’ I say, and briefly, and literally, I do.

When I resurface, she has her hand up again, but so does an overtan, unwashed man sitting at the back who has the square head and tiny mouth of a police sketch.

‘I have an easy three-part question,’ he says.