Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (27 page)

But I don’t blame Germany. And I don’t blame my escort, although his disappointment was there in his sad, red eyes; stuck with an Irish writer who wouldn’t drink with him under the table – it was in his sighs, in his disappearances and returns. But I don’t blame him.

I blame myself. I should have gone home after the second day. And I blame the sheets. It was the nylon that did it. I went to bed cold, lay awake, cold, woke up, cold. Got on the wrong train; got off. Got on the right train. The escort suggested a drink. Half-ten in the morning.

No, thanks.

Silence. All the way. He went away, and came back. Went away, came back. (I remember the book I was reading.
In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent,
by Timothy Garton Ash. I took it down off a shelf a few minutes ago, and it opened at Page 208. ‘The degree to which the German nation actually had been “held together” can also be overstated.’ That must have been the page I read on the train to Hamburg, over and over, while my escort sighed, and went away.) Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne. We got on the wrong train, twice. We missed the right train, once. We got off in the wrong town, once. Nine days, ten.

Most of the readings were fine. They even paid me for some of them. Money in brown envelopes.

Count it, please.

A few drinks with the organizers.

How are the relationships between the Irish writers and the English writers?

They’re grand, thanks.

But always back to the nylon sheets. Cold floor, cold radiator. Remote control – no batteries. The grey towel that followed me all around Germany. One hotel was bang against the tracks; another, I swear to God, was on the centre of a roundabout, on the far edge of the outskirts of I can’t remember where. Broken phone, no phone. Cold coffee, no coffee. The only thing warming me was my self-pity.

We walked down a street – I don’t remember where; we’d an hour to kill because a journalist hadn’t turned up. We passed a café. I read the name – The Writer’s Café.

Will we go in for a coffee? I said.

No.

My escort had given up on me. Four days to go, maybe five. I whinged on the phone, every night. I held the hand-set out the window.

Listen.

A train passed.

What was that?

Germany’s economic fuckin’ miracle.

Why don’t you come home?

Why didn’t I?

I don’t know. Loyalty to my publisher? Cowardice? Fear of the consequences? I don’t know.

But, really, I do. I began to enjoy it. I woke up each morning hoping that this new day would be worse than the last one, or at least as bad. A missed train, the wrong train. A frosty silence. (‘Such, then, were the sad puddles of Germanity which were all that was left, at the founding of the Federal Republic…’: page 232 of
In Europe’s Name
. There’s a small coffee stain on the page. The sudden news that we were going in the wrong direction? The dash to get off? I don’t remember.) An obnoxious journalist; no journalist at all. A photographer who wanted me to stand in a river and stopped talking to me when I wouldn’t.

I pointed at a line on the menu.

What’s this?

The bowel of the sheep.

And, always, the hotel. And, always, the sheets. I slid between them and lay there, cold, lonely, happy. This was what it was all about – this was misery, this was writing, and this was the writer’s life.

It ended.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

It was very successful, I think.

Yes. Goodbye.

Home. Three in the morning. The bed was too warm. I lay on the kitchen floor and missed Germany.

‘An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.’ Jean Cocteau

‘Events’, as publishers call them – readings, festivals, signings – seem to have a tropism for disaster. The audience is bored, drunk, uninterested, or simply absent; the writer is embarrassed, humiliated, under-prepared (as well as bored, drunk, uninterested or simply absent); the wrong venue is booked; the introducer pronounces your name wrong, or talks about books you haven’t written, or introduces someone else; there’s a fire alarm, or better still a real fire; the other person on the platform turns out to be a sworn enemy, and then after the reading has a signing queue which stretches halfway to Reykjavik while you sit there twiddling your thumbs; the copies you open to sign turn out to have already been signed. (This might seem like a small point, but to the writer it is exquisitely and instantaneously humiliating: it means these signed copies have already been returned unsold by a bookshop somewhere else. I’ve seen this happen twice, never thank God to me, and both times it was like someone taking a blow to the heart.)

In a sense, all these stories are the same story, and they have the same underlying cause. The truth is that the whole contemporary edifice of readings and tours and interviews and festivals is based on a mistake. The mistake is that we should want to meet the writers we admire, because there is something more to them in person than there is on the page, so that meeting them in the flesh somehow adds to the experience of reading their work. The idea is that the person is the real thing, whereas the writing is somehow an excrescence or epiphenomenon. But that’s not true. The work is the real thing, and it is that to which readers should direct their attention. The writer herself is a distraction, a confusion, a mistake – she should be heard and not seen. If you want to meet her, go to meet her on the page. The failure to see this basic reality is the reason why books events are so prone to go wrong; and the melancholy truth is that even when they go right they are usually, in the words of Dave Eggers, ‘aggressively boring’.

That’s what I’ve come to believe. I feel strongly on the point – just not strongly enough to put the belief into practice. When the invitations arrive, and especially when a new book comes out, I start to feel, what the hell, is it really so bad to go and actually meet a few readers? Isn’t my view that it’s all a mistake just a fantasy of uncontaminated purity, a low-key version of megalomania? Everyone else does it, what’s so special about me? What’s the worst that can happen?

Ah yes, the worst that can happen … My personal worst – perhaps I should say, worst so far – was at a Waterstone’s gala dinner. I was one of twelve writers whose job was to make a short speech plugging our books and then give out an award. The first writer was Henry Cooper, who after a short and funny chat with Steve Knott of Waterstone’s took the microphone and told boring stories for what felt like a long time. When it came to the question of the book, he explained that he was looking forward to sitting down with his ghost.

As the other writers came and went – Murray Walker, Mel B, Gordon Banks – I began to think that it would be a good idea, when it came to my turn, to be as short and to the point as possible. Sandi Toksvig got the biggest laugh of the night when she said that ‘I knew it was going to be a long evening, but I didn’t expect to be accruing pension rights.’ I was on after her, the ninth or tenth turn of the evening, and gave myself a strict brief: keep it short. When Steve Knott asked me to talk about my new novel, I said how pleased I was to be a Book of the Month. I said, ‘It’s difficult to talk about the book, having finished it.’

My feeling was that this was a concise yet subtle, humane, and not often remarked point of difficulty in the whole business of talking about your own books. I meant that it was difficult to talk too much about the book, because it was finished and done with, a completed artefact, and they are harder to discuss, I’ve always found, than something you are currently working on, in the way that some of the other writers here are still working on their books.

At least, that was what I meant to say. It was what I thought I was going to say when I opened my mouth. But what I actually said was, ‘It’s difficult to talk about the book, having written it.’ I could hear a half-laugh, half-gasp. I opened my envelope and handed it over – Best Individual at Head Office, which went to the great Rupeen Anarkat in Accounts – and was halfway back to my chair through a silent and not especially smiley audience when I realized what I had done. By and large, you only get in trouble for saying things which are true: I had inadvertently implied that most of the other writers present at that evening hadn’t written their own books. There was just enough truth in this remark to make it fantastically, almost hallucinogenically offensive, especially since the whole business of ghost writing is, in publishing circles, radioactive. There were about 500 people in the room, and about 300 of them were at tables occupied by people I had just grossly insulted. I had planned to make an eirenic general point with which anyone could agree, and had ended up behaving like a more than usually drunk and boorish Liam Gallagher. If I was in any doubt on the point, the next writer to present a prize was Alan Titchmarsh, and his first words on getting to the stage were (not jokily), ‘I’d just like to assure John Lanchester that I wrote every single word of my book myself.’

I turned to the person on my left, Will Atkinson from Faber. ‘Am I imagining things or did Alan Titchmarsh just call me an arsehole?’

‘Yes.’

This happened a year ago. I have stopped thinking about it once every ten minutes and am down to thinking about it once every week or so. It still makes me groan and double over and say ‘never again’. Worse things happen at sea, I suppose. But I don’t work at sea.

‘Only the deep sense of some deathless shame.’
John Webster,
The White Devil

I was shortlisted once for the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction. It was all a bit long for putting in a short biog, but still, I thought, this is nice: I have a few Kerry Ingredients myself; a grandfather who left Ballylongford, just up the road from Listowel, in the 1920s.

The letter said that the winner would be announced during the actual Writers’ Week and they were hoping that I would make it down, but I had various deadlines and a small baby so I let the invitation slide. Then one of the organizers rang to follow the invitation up. She was really most persuasive. Although, of course, she could not, would not tell me who had won the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction, she did say how much they would be really,
really
pleased to see me there. It seemed churlish to refuse. What the hell. Even if I hadn’t won, I would have a good time. And besides … she sounded very keen.

It is only a six-hour drive to Kerry, but I had to pack the baby up first and bring her across town to stay at my mother’s, so that added another two or three and suddenly we were looking at eight, maybe nine hours and I was late already by two o’clock. I didn’t stop for lunch. On the other side of Limerick I was hurtling on such a trajectory that I had forgotten where Kerry was and how you got to it, and was too busy driving to reach for the map. I wrenched myself off the road, finally, outside a shop in Adare, where I bought six cotton pillowcases and two beaded things you put over milk jugs to keep out the flies, and I asked my way to Listowel. They pointed down the road.

Actually, I don’t have a milk jug. It is one of my ambitions to get beyond the litre box on the kitchen table, but I saw the perfect milk jug once and didn’t buy it, so now I keep waiting until I come across it again. Also beaded bits and bobs aren’t really my thing, but I think I was a little mad by now. I was late. I was starving. I was missing the baby. I wound down the windows and turned the music up high.

North Kerry is very beautiful and, as the roads got narrower, I wondered why our grandfather left this place, and what kind of man he might have been. He married a schoolteacher’s daughter in County Clare and farmed the land that came with the deal. I thought of her life; the piano that ended up in the hen house, the way she called her father ‘Papa’, the remnants of French, the front parlour gentility and, in the middle of it all, this Kerry man who got the farm. I am not sure they got along. I passed through a village and saw ‘Enright’s’ written over a pub facade. There would be pictures in
The Kerryman
of Listowel Writers’ Week; they would lean over the bar counter and say, ‘Is she one of ours?’

My ironed dress hung from its hanger, and flapped a little from the breeze in the back of the car. When
The Third Policeman
got turned down by every publisher in London, Flann O’Brien told the old lags in the Palace Bar that he had left the manuscript on the back seat of the car, and it had blown out the window on a trip from Donegal, page by page.

How different everything was, now. I was getting quite emotional. All these various thoughts – of success and failure and greed and homecoming – were by way of avoiding making acceptance speeches in my head. Because, of course, I did not know if I had won the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction or not. Even so, it was quite a tease. There were no obvious big hitters on the list. Besides, I had done some other prizes with this book, and they didn’t expect the shortlist to turn up. The Whitbread waves a few names around and then invites the winner (not me). The Encore Prize just rings you up and says ‘You’ve won!’ – fantastic. Whereas … the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction says, ‘Please come. No really, please.’

So, as I bowled along, I tried not to draft a few modest remarks about the Kerry grandfather who came from just up the road – in which I certainly didn’t mention the junked piano, or the nuptial acquisition of land. I strenuously avoided the phrase ‘coming home’. I did not say that, by a strange coincidence, one of the two judges had been, for some years, my English teacher at school. Nor did I quip that she had only ever given me a C. Actually, that last bit I really kept scrubbing out of the acceptance speech that I was not writing on the roads of North Kerry. No matter how I phrased it, it seemed a little
small
. Also the bit about how she had given me a B once ‘up to the last paragraph’, but then a C overall because the ending was too sentimental. Nor that this essay was about summers on my grandmother’s farm. Nor that this childhood essay was the foundation, in many ways, for a section of the book that had just been awarded (or not awarded) the Kerry Ingredients Listowel Writers’ Week Prize for Irish Fiction. None of this made it into the speech that I wasn’t writing in my head – there was always that niggling thing that said ‘She didn’t like it so much in 1976…’ and then a niggling hope, ‘It will all be set to rights, now.’