Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (25 page)

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

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

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.’

Not unwillingly, I gave him more. The equivalent, I think, of about eighty pounds sterling. After all, I
was
sure. I was Belfast streetwise, good enough for anything Berlin could throw up. Asking me for more was just a way of diverting my attention. So I never let the box with the pea under it out of my sight. I gave him the money and pointed.

The other Turk flipped over the box. There was nothing there. He lifted an adjacent box to reveal the pea. I stared for a few seconds in disbelief. Then, cheeks burning with shame as I realized the Turks must have seen me coming, had noticed my attention from the first moment I had set foot in the circle, had drawn me in hook, line and sinker, I walked away.

In retrospect, I consoled myself with the fact that I had witnessed an artistic performance of the highest quality. In fact, when you looked at it in the proper light, I had done no more than donate an honorarium to a group of fellow artists. I was being paid for being in Berlin, after all. Here was an authentic WERKstatt, real street theatre, in which my disbelief had been successfully – and comically, I had to agree – suspended. Was it not right that I should pay a tithe to these people, so admirably living off their wits?

Therein lay the Turks’ real triumph.

‘All poets are mad.’ Robert Burton

Plato warned that poets are powerless to indite a verse or chant an oracle until they are put out of their senses so that their minds are no longer in them, and ever since no one feels entirely comfortable sharing a cab with one. In fact, a cabbie once pulled over and ordered me out when my travelling companion introduced me as a poet. Incredible? Mind you, my friend had just introduced himself as ‘a philosopher’. Normal people don’t want to hear that sort of thing. But I’m sure it wasn’t always as humiliating as it has been in these days of professionalism, promotion and ‘bringing poetry to the people’, running after them imploring
Come back! It doesn’t have to rhyme!
The Moderns were dignified, right? Apart from Edith Sitwell’s turban, I mean. Tell me Yeats got a bit of diced swede stuck in his ear dodging a food fight on an Arvon Schools course. Tell me Pound saw his photo in the local
Advertiser
under the headline RHYMESTER EZ SEZ POETRY IS EASY AND FUN. Up until the end of the war Pound thought humiliation meant having to work in a bank. I guess public readings have changed everything.

Take the case of Dylan Thomas. But there’s a class/gender issue there. Sure, many (most?) poets take a drink, often to legendary excess. But name me three working-class male poets not already in AA who don’t routinely douse their brains out after every reading. And oh, afterwards! The waking up still drunk next to a strange woman, waking up next to a man, or an animal! Waking up beside a strange dead male animal in a pool of … well, in a pool. And
teaching
poetry! Coaching your students in the finer points of rhetoric and prosody so they too can experience the misspelled rejection slips, the personally inscribed copies of their books in the charity shop, the reading fee consisting of the festival souvenir mug and book token, the laid-on meal at McDonald’s, the floor spots who make up half the audience and who all leave before – no – during your first poem, and the MC who introduces you as Matthew Sweeney. Twice. And best of all, the waking up alone in the middle of the night biting and tearing at the sweaty hotel sheets whimpering no no no.

Am I confusing the humiliations visited upon poets with the humiliations poets create for themselves? The business already provides plenty without any help from me so I no longer mix drink and verse. Not much. But I used to put away a bottle of vodka during my readings. It wasn’t nerves. It was shame. I’d secretly fill the regulation pitcher by the lectern and appear to be knocking back water after every poem. As you do. But drink only ever made things worse. Once after reading at the Poetry Society I saw a pattern of pages laid out on the bookshop floor where a member of staff had been painstakingly collating his concrete poem consisting of large bar codes. I’m told I blurted something about
hopscotch,
broke free of the friends who were carrying me to the door, and executed what was later described to me as ‘an ape dance’ all over his efforts.
¹
I remember the shock turning to rage on his face as I slowly realized what I’d done. He would
not
forgive me, though I hung from his lapels weeping, pleading with him to accept my apology. I had subjected myself to another indignity. As for the concrete poet, I was the indignity poetry had inflicted upon him. In
Keats and Embarrassment,
a book I was once caught out pretending to have read, Christopher Ricks suggests that indignation drives out embarrassment,
one hot flush drives out the other, as fire fire
. And speaking of driving, a generous arts officer once gave me a lift back to the station the morning after a reading and for her kindness watched me sicken, open her car door, miss the tarmac, and fill the map pocket, drowning her
Leeds A-Z
in an acid indigo porridge of red wine, Jameson’s and aubergine curry. Many years passed before I was invited back to Leeds. And once I was sick on Paul Farley.
He forgave
me. People do. That’s the worst part, isn’t it? Phoning round the next day to grovel and being told ‘No no, you were
charming
!’