Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (5 page)

After the soup comes the main course. The hostess serves a dish of peas and ham. It has been cooked in the same raven fat or bat droppings which was used to such effect in the soup. The ham is maroon to black, thickly stratified with white. There is a not-fully-poached egg in the middle of the peas. I cut the egg and watch the yolk leak out into the green surroundings. Then the old man has a coughing fit. It sounds like he’s tumbling gravel deep in his chest or regurgitating lightly poached eggs. When it’s over and he is sufficiently recovered he lights another cigarette. There is a distinct splashing sound. Jules is taking a piss on the tiles of the hallway. The door-bell rings and the dogs go apeshit again.

I put down my fork and glance down at my watch. There are several hours to go. The local red wine is excellent and seems the only refuge. I get tore in.

‘Of all the thirty-six alternatives, running away is best.’
Chinese proverb

Literature offers endless opportunities for embarrassment and humiliation because it operates at that boundary where private thought meets its public response. Live literary events are the front-line, the human interface between writing and reading. Sometimes the two elements mix, sometimes they curdle, and sometimes they stand like oil and water, resolute and opposed. I give readings at least a hundred times each year. No single incident amounts to much more than an anecdote, but when taken as a whole …

I am met off the train by an extremely nervous woman in a hire-car who is generating a thermo-nuclear amount of heat and cannot locate the de-mist function on the console. In a cloud of condensation we drive to a local café where she restricts my choice of meal according to her authorized budget. I have forgotten to bring any books. I visit the local bookshop to purchase a copy of my
Selected Poems
and am recognized by the man at the till. He says nothing, but his expression is one of pathos.

The venue is a Portakabin in a car-park. The p.a. system is a Fisher-Price press’n’ play karaoke machine. I am introduced as, ‘The name on everyone’s lips: Simon Armriding’. A well-intentioned youth doing voluntary work for the aurally challenged (of which there is none in the audience) has offered to ‘sign’. He stands to my left all evening, giving what is a passable impersonation of Ian Curtis dancing to ‘She’s Lost Control Again’ and eventually passes out. Five minutes before the interval, a nice lady from the WI goes into the kitchenette at the back to begin tea-making operations. My final poem of the half is accompanied by the organ-like hum of a wall-mounted water-heater rising slowly towards boiling point. There is no alcohol but how about a cup of Bovril? Following the break, an old man at the front falls asleep and farts during a poem about death/suffering/self pity, etc. Afterwards, there are no books for sale but some kind soul asks me to autograph her copy of
Summoned by Bells
.

My designated driver, the radio-active woman, transports me in her mobile sauna to an Indian restaurant on the high street. She is allergic to curry (for fear of melt-down, presumably) but waits for me in the car while I guzzle a meal of not more than five pounds in value (including drinks) paid for by food voucher. I am staying with old Mr Farter in the suburbs. He has gone home to give the Z-bed an airing and to prepare a selection of his poems for my perusal, the first of which, ‘The Mallard’, begins, ‘Thou, oh monarch of the riverbank’. I ‘sleep’ fully-clothed on a pube-infested sheet.

Ungraciously and with great stealth I leave the house before dawn and wander through empty, unfamiliar avenues heading vaguely towards the tallest buildings on the skyline. It is three hours before the first train home. I breakfast with winos and junkies in McDonald’s. Killing time in the precinct, I find a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop. The price is ten pence. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, ‘To mum and dad’.

‘Memory is the thing you forget with.’ Alexander Chase

It was my first literary party, in a London garden. I was in my late twenties, a hand-to-mouth reviewer with no day job. I took a girl I wasn’t quite going out with. We ran into a friend of mine. “This is Chris Reid,’ I said. ‘What do you do?’ she asked. ‘I’m a poet,’ he replied. She laughed with such forceful scorn that she recoiled back into a flower-bed and spilled half her wine. When Chris had wandered off, I asked why she’d reacted like that. ‘You can’t say you’re a poet if you
just write poems,
’ she answered. I felt glad I had never described myself – to anyone, let alone her – as a novelist, even though my desk contained the full draft of a novel.

The party moved on. Someone introduced me to Elizabeth Jane Howard, and then scarpered. She seemed to me formidable: tall, poised, coiffed and gowned, waiting to be diverted out of some grand boredom. As it happened, I had recently reviewed a collection of her short stories,
Mr Wrong,
for the
Oxford Mail;
better still, I had been enthusiastic about them. I mentioned this as unobsequiously as I could; she was neither diverted nor, as far as I could tell, remotely interested. Fair enough. ‘I gave you a decent review in a four-book fiction round-up in a provincial newspaper,’ or words to that effect, was probably not the conversational key to literary London.

How to engage her? Something more recherché, perhaps. I remembered, in a book-nerdish way, that whereas collections of stories normally list on the reverse of the title page the original places of serial publication, there were no such attributions in
Mr Wrong
. I decided that such silence must have been a deliberate authorial decision. I wondered what her reasons might have been. I asked her about it.

‘I didn’t know that was the case.’

‘Ah.’

‘No.’

‘So it wasn’t deliberate?’

‘No.’

The conversation was definitely lacking brio. I doubted she would be interested in my own modest literary breakthrough. A few months previously I had entered a Ghost Story competition organized by
The Times,
had been chosen as one of the dozen winners, and was soon to be rewarded with publication in a hardback anthology by Jonathan Cape! Who were Elizabeth Jane Howard’s own publishers!! No, she definitely wouldn’t be interested in that.

I gazed rather desperately across the party and saw a tall, windblown figure who could well be Tom Maschler. What a coincidence – the editorial boss of Jonathan Cape.

‘Is that by any chance … Tom Maschler?’

‘Yes, would you like to meet him?’ she replied instantly, then marched me across and left me there.

My nerves were by now pretty shot. Still, I wanted to try and impress.

‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m one-twelfth of one of your authors.’

He didn’t look even faintly amused. I explained ploddingly about
The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories
and its dozen contributors. He asked me my name again. I told him again. He shook his head.

‘Sorry, I don’t remember names. What was the title of your story?’

I looked at him. He looked back expectantly. I paused. My mind was filled with a terrible blank. What the
fuck
was the title of my story? I knew it, I was sure I knew it. Come on, come on, you’ve just read the proofs. You’ve just written your own contributor’s note. This is your publisher. You
must
know. It’s impossible for you
not
to know.

‘I can’t remember,’ I replied.

So there we were: a publisher who didn’t recognize one of his writers’ names, and a writer who couldn’t remember the title of his own – his only – work. Welcome to the literary life.

And the girl I wasn’t quite going out with? Oh, she dumped me soon afterwards.

‘It is a hard matter for a man to go down into the valley of Humiliation … and to catch no slip by the way.’
Bunyan,
Pilgrim’s Progress

You’re lucky to go on tour. You’re lucky to meet readers who prize your work and who seem as though they might be honoured to meet you. You’re lucky to eat the pretzels in the mini-bar. You’re lucky to see cities you have never seen, like Cincinnati and Baltimore. These things are indisputable. Anyone will tell you.

It was my first time, for a novel called
The Ice Storm
. Not a big tour, because it was my first. Six cities. Minneapolis, L.A., San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, DC. Most of the audiences numbered in the single digits. When I called my publicist in NYC, she offered consolations: it was
so
important to
break in new audiences
.

What if my heart broke first?

I managed to survive the first five cities. Then it was time to go to DC.
Our nation’s capital
. Back then, my mom didn’t live too far from DC. She lived in Virginia. She volunteered to come up to hear me read. This was complicated for a few reasons. My mother had a lot of opinions about my work, not all good. She once reviewed a book by me on Amazon.com and gave me three out of five stars. Then she told me that it was a
positive
review.

I gave my name at the hotel, and the woman at the front desk seemed incredibly impressed. ‘Mr Moody, we are honoured to have you here in the hotel!’ Or some similarly inflated greeting. I can’t imagine who the desk clerk thought I might be. A diplomat from the nation state of Dishevelment. Or a high-ranking functionary from the Association for Arrested Development. Nevertheless, she took the VIP designation on her reservation list to heart, and she ladled on politeness.

Probably I’d stayed in a
suite
as a kid, or visited one. But not by myself. Never had I roamed lonely through the extra living room with the extra fax machine and the extra mini-bar for pilfering, etc. Never had I watched hotel porn on someone else’s credit card. This was clearly the beginning of world domination. This was clearly the beginning of Rick Moody, branding opportunity; Rick Moody, LLC.

My mother called from the front desk. She came up. We had tea. How civilized. I could see here in the
suite,
drinking tea with my mother, that my tides were turning.

Later, we headed out for the bookstore where I was to read. The publicist had made clear that this was a
great
DC store.
Great reading series!

Humiliation is imminent. Let’s just skip ahead. It began upon passing through the threshold of the store. ‘Mr Moody!’ a young woman with glasses said good-naturedly. “Thanks for coming!’ I looked around. Even by the standards of my six-city tour, where double-digit audiences were an accomplishment, things were looking sparse.

The young woman with spectacles herded me toward one wall, probably in the psychology section. ‘There has been a little problem we’d like to tell you about. We’re really sorry about it. But there was a –’

‘Yes?’

A typo in the schedule!
A typo in the schedule
. A typo!

“The schedule we mailed out shows you as reading last night. I’m so sorry.’

The schedule was empty for the night. So was the store.

‘Someone did leave a note for you, though.’

She handed over the note as though it would compensate for the typo in the schedule. ‘Dear Rick, so sorry I’m not going to be able to make the reading tonight. I was looking forward to it, but something came up. Hope it goes well. See you soon. Elise.’

Well, I’d
almost
had an audience member. Besides my mom. Who was cowering over in history, pretending that nothing bad was happening.

Then, as if according to miracle, a friend
did
stride into the store. Katya, the art historian from New York. She went to high school with my brother, smoked pot with him, and then became a very successful art critic. At present, she was the only person in the audience who had not expelled me from her uterus.

‘We’ll wait just a few more minutes for the stragglers,’ the girl with the glasses said eagerly. I disappeared into the stacks. Several minutes passed there, and the little bell in the door at the bookstore did not jingle even once. At last, I trudged miserably to the table that served as my podium. The little table before the entirely empty constellation of chairs, wherein Katya and my mother sat, as apart from one another as they could sit. No, wait! Now there was a gentleman edging into the audience. A homeless guy? Maybe. He’d definitely never been to a reading before, nor since.

Here I was in
our nation’s capital,
at this, the dawn of my career, and I was reading, as briefly as possible, to my mother, to a woman who had smoked pot with my brother in high school, and to a guy persuaded to sit through the reading for 10% off any purchase. My mother wore a frozen smile throughout. The truth was plain to see. My career as a fiction writer was launched! And it was founded upon neglect, disappointment, misunderstanding, familial resentment, and typos.

‘Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.’ Thomas Mann

Several years ago I was in India doing some work for the British Council, and I’d been enjoying the visit until, towards the end, I was pole-axed with a stomach upset. The flight back to Heathrow set the tenor for the next few weeks: panic in public or confined spaces, long spells hunched on a toilet. My GP in Brighton thought it was ‘Delhi belly’, and wouldn’t respond to antibiotics, so didn’t bother prescribing any (I found out, over a year later when my notes had been transferred up to the Lake District, that I’d had Campylobacter with e-coli cysts). I had a few engagements coming up, one of which involved a reading: what to do? For some reason – and I’m at a loss now to account for this – I decided to go ahead. It’d be OK. I’d shut myself down with Imodium. I couldn’t cancel: they’d sent out flyers and everything.