Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (7 page)

All the cables on the studio floor, raised up like snakes by the oily charm of the android, seemed to sway before me and hiss. I saw the whole sorry affair in a moment of surreal clarity amidst the piercing yellow of the studio: I had travelled far from home and got pissed on America; I had got myself drunk on small beer and fast cheer and now I was facing the terrible upchuck of a deluded fortnight. They knew and they loved Dana Plato, superstar, super-being, and now, here I was, Andrew O’Hagan from Scotland, Nonentity of the Century, being interviewed vigorously about a book that I HADN’T WRITTEN!

The point about humiliation, of course, is that it attracts more humiliation to itself. As a general rule, when someone tries to interview you about someone else’s book on live television, you don’t trust to your own character, you don’t put him down, you don’t express surprise at his stupidity and walk off – no, you don’t do any of those things. You sit up straight, you smile in a friendly way, you look at the dumb fucker with an earnestness that not only pays tribute to his but actually outstrips his, and you say something like the following:

‘Well, good morning, Chuck. It’s interesting you should ask about grandfathers and families because as you said everybody has one and they’re very important. I never actually knew my grandfathers myself, but I know a lot of your viewers will understand the value of community, which is one of the things I set out to tackle in my book
The Missing
.’

‘Right,’ said Chuck, ‘that’s interesting.’

Just so’s you understand: when an American TV anchor says something like ‘that’s interesting’, it’s code for ‘can we cut this weird fucker out before he makes us DIE OF BOREDOM?’ This is the central rule of the American talk show: it’s a stupidity contest, and, no matter what else, you must let the host win.

‘But we all love our grandparents,’ said Chuck. ‘It’s a very American thing to love your grandparents. Is that not right?’

‘Indeed,’ I said. ‘Where would we be …’

‘That’s a crazy accent you’ve got there.’

‘I’m from Glasgow, it’s …’

‘Yeah, weird. Now listen, Mr O’Haygone. We don’t have much time. Is there some change taking place in the family?’

For a nanosecond I forgot the rules. ‘Well, actually. My book is really about missing persons’

‘Exactly. There’s something missing in the way families relate nowadays. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Well, when I was growing up some children went missing and I suppose I always wanted to enter into their story. I thought it would offer a picture of ordinary lives, and I thought I might try to follow the pattern of stories like that, and maybe describe a social atmosphere in the Britain of today.’

‘Gee,’ said Chuck’s sidekick, ‘that’s some heavy stuff. And have things kinda changed since your grandfather’s day?’

‘Well, I expect so, and actually, part of my search …’

Of all the people who had ever existed in the world, Chuck wanted me to die the most. He wanted me off his fucking show. He wanted Dana Plato back on and he wanted Depressing No Good Bastard from Scotland off his sofa. He wanted it now. He wanted it, like, yesterday. Coolly, with his unreal hair, he peered into the centre of my nonentityhood, and asked his last question.

‘Do you have any advice for the mothers of America?’

I already knew my humiliation was complete. I already knew I was lost, so why didn’t I seize the chance to be myself? Why didn’t I grab him by the lapels in front of his simpering, baby-headed audience of thickos, and say something large, something true and momentous and deserving? Because I’m a coward, that’s why, and that’s the thing about mortification – it’s fed by cowardice. So, when he asked me, a man with no girlfriend and no children, what advice I had for the mothers of America, my true instinct passed like a high-flying flamingo over the jungle-canopy of my sudden humiliation, and I glimpsed it for a second, and thought: Tell him, my advice to the mothers of America is not to stick a wet finger into a live electricity socket, but this coloured bird was gone as soon as it appeared, and I took a breath.

‘Not to be too anxious,’ I said. ‘When it comes to community, and changes in protection for children and families, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the new anxieties. My advice to mothers would be to avoid that if they can.’

‘Good advice from this young author out of Scotland. He’s been talking about his book about his grandfather and families. Thanks for coming in.’

It was a small round of applause, but it fell like rain, and I walked through the studio and passed faces without words, and before long I was in the limousine, my orange face at the window, and we drove through Chicago, the driver oblivious to the world of authorly humiliations, and me in the back, dreaming of my brand-new life in an igloo somewhere north of Greenland.

‘Everyone in a crowd has the power to throw dirt: nine out of ten have the inclination.’ William Hazlitt,
On Reading Old Books

Writers can only moan to each other about all this, really: the humiliating reading to an audience of two, the book-signing where nobody turns up, the talk where the only question is ‘Where did you buy your nail varnish?’ (I nicked it from my daughter, since you ask). Nobody is really going to care, are they, if we sit alone and unloved beside our pile of books, approached only once in the two hours and that by a woman who is trying to flog us her self-published book on recovering from breast cancer? Or that we wait, alone in the darkness, on the deserted platform at Newark station, the only reading matter a VIOLENT ASSAULT: WITNESSES WANTED sign swinging in the wind, until we realize we’ve missed the last train home.

There is, however, a certain existential quality to some of these experiences which others can surely share. Humiliation, though one of a writer’s specialities, is not an entirely unknown sensation to everybody else. We do expose ourselves, of course, by offering up our work to the world’s critical stare, or, worse, its indifference. It’s what we sign up for: that people give up their money and their precious time to read about characters who have never existed. And there’s a price to be paid for this chutzpah.

I remember a corporate event in Bridlington, where bookshop staff were supposedly wooed by a dinner of scotch eggs and coleslaw into ordering a lot of our books. One of them was a Waterstone’s assistant, a stubbly bloke with an earring and a patronizing, ‘I only read Don DeLillo’ look about him. He was also very drunk. Swaying up to me, he said, ‘You write romantic fiction, don’t you.’ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘Yes you do.’ ‘Have you read anything of mine?’ ‘No,’ he slurred, ‘but I can tell.’ ‘How?’ I asked. ‘Because you’re an ageing woman wearing a leopard-skin top.’ To this I replied, with more dignity than he deserved: ‘That might make me a romantic, but it doesn’t mean I write it.’

‘Nationwide Publicity Tour’ usually means a couple of signing sessions and two minutes on BBC Radio Humberside. Never is the gulf between promise and reality wider than during an author’s publicity tour, at least in my experience. One occasion I remember, almost with fondness, was a promotion in a shopping centre in Maidenhead on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. The deal was that if a customer bought a copy of my novel (paperback), they also got a free box of Crabtree and Evelyn freesia soap and a glass of wine. In other words, they were practically being paid to take a book away. Even with these inducements, however, an hour passed and not one single person stopped. ‘Oh dear,’ said the manageress, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter, it’s so embarrassing. We had that Rolf Harris last week and his queue was an hour and a half long.’ For some reason she thought that this would make me feel better. Finally, after another half-hour a woman with Downs Syndrome approached me and asked, ‘Do you sell tights?’ I directed her to the nearby Dorothy Perkins and off she went. Nobody else came, so I went home.

Often one travels long distances to do a reading. Getting food out of anybody, once one arrives, is always a problem. Drink is even trickier. I remember travelling to the Folkestone Literary Festival, a modest affair in the front room of a defunct seafront hotel, and being offered a small dish of dry-roasted peanuts, to be shared between three authors. We had left London in mid-afternoon and wouldn’t get back until midnight but our hostess obviously believed that writers, like Citroën 2CVs, run on very little fuel. Also on very little money, as we were all told, separately, ‘Thank you for waiving your usual fee.’ (It’s a well-known fact that writers are expected to turn up for nothing; try telling that to your plumber.)

Then there was the library in the Midlands where I was booked to do a reading. However far you’ve travelled to a library you’ll be lucky to get a mug of Nescafé, but this one phoned me to ask if I’d like something to eat and drink while I was there. A sandwich and glass of wine would be lovely, I replied. A few days later the phone rang again. ‘We’ve been looking at your photo,’ they said, ‘and trying to decide if you were a vegetarian.’ ‘What did you decide?’ I asked. ‘That you weren’t.’ I took this as a compliment. They said: ‘So we thought we’d buy you a Marks and Spencer salmon sandwich, if that’s all right.’ ‘Lovely,’ I replied. Two weeks later I took the train there, to be greeted by the librarians, the sandwich and a lot of fluster. ‘We’ve got you the bottle of wine,’ they said, ‘but we can’t find a corkscrew.’ A great deal of scrabbling around followed. ‘Have you seen one, Maggie?’ ‘Didn’t Bob have one once?’ ‘A corkscrew? I don’t think so.’ ‘There must be one somewhere …’ Cupboards were ransacked. ‘Really, I don’t mind …’ I said. ‘Please don’t bother.’ ‘No, we’ve started now and we’re going to find it!’ they replied. I stood there, feeling like a pervert whose very special needs were going to be satisfied, by hook or by crook, because after all the librarians had promised. Finally the corkscrew was found, the bottle uncorked and some wine solemnly poured into a tea mug. The audience was filing in by now as I stood there, surrounded by librarians, drinking my wine and eating my sandwich. ‘I suppose we should have given you a plate,’ one of them said.

In Anne Tyler’s
The Accidental Tourist
one of the characters runs a factory that makes bottle tops. When asked about it, he replies: ‘It’s not half as exciting as it sounds.’ The same could be said about the publicity tour. What deepens the humiliation is the presence of witnesses – another writer, the bookshop assistants. Their embarrassment and pity can be too much to bear. To avoid some of this I travel alone, without a publicity assistant to share my shame. This can, however, make one feel defenceless. I remember a recent visit to Glasgow, to do a reading in the Waterstone’s there. As I was walking through the deserted shopping precinct I heard a voice hissing: ‘You got a knife?’ ‘Actually, yes,’ I replied. The man was sitting on the cobblestones, in the freezing cold, hunched over what looked like a pigeon. Peanuts lay scattered around. ‘Help me, then,’ he muttered. I took out my knife – a retractable blade I use to sharpen my eye-liner pencil – and gave it to him. Now I could see what he was doing: trying to cut some cotton thread that was tangled around the pigeon’s leg. He tried to cut it, for some time. ‘Steady me, can’t you?’ he said testily. ‘Hold my shoulders!’ I knelt down on the cobblestones and gripped his shoulders, as indicated. ‘You’ll have to throw this knife away afterwards,’ he said, ‘pigeons carry a disease that’s fatal for humans.’ This was rather a shame; I was fond of my knife and had never been able to find another one like it. As the minutes ticked by I said: ‘I really ought to go, I’m a bit late.’ ‘Hang on!’ he barked, busying himself with the purple, scabby leg of the pigeon. By this time I was really late and the pigeon’s leg was still not freed. I told him to bring the knife to the bookshop down the road, walked there and started my reading. The audience consisted of four people, including a chap in an anorak who apparently came to all the readings with his mother and just wanted autographs. In the middle of my reading the door opened and the pigeon-liberator marched in, gave me back my knife and marched out again. I couldn’t really explain to my audience what had happened. Besides, they were fast asleep.

There is much, much more. Bookshops where, when I enter and suggest signing some books, they look at me as if I’ve got dog’s mess on my shoe. The audience on the
QE2
who sat there in silence and then, after half an hour, told me they were waiting to see the film
French Kiss
with Kevin Kline. An event at Edinburgh where, in front of a large audience, Hunter Davies’ first question to me began: ‘Well, Deborah Moggach, you’re not really up there in the first eleven, are you?’ A charity lunch which had cost me £120 in train fares and where my interviewer not only got my name wrong but called the novel I was going to be talking about
(The Ex-Wives),
‘The XYs’ throughout, even though it was sitting there in front of her. The ‘should I have heard of you’s and the people who say ‘you’re my favourite writer’ and then proceed to quote from someone else’s book.

Novelists have an equivocal relationship with reality, as it is, and on a bad day we can feel as non-existent as the characters we have created – more so, sometimes. In my case this is compounded by the fact that I have never seen anyone reading any of my books, ever. Such a sight has occasionally been spotted, on buses or trains, but can one really believe this? After all, I spend my life making things up.

Still, mortification is something we feed off. We can use it in our work, just as we use everything else. And we know, deep down, that we deserve it. Every writer I know is waiting for the tap on the shoulder and the voice that says: ‘So you really thought you could get away with it?’