Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (10 page)

As we passed the schoolgirls on our way back to central London we offered them a lift but they were suspicious and refused. Gilbert and George hadn’t felt like performing artistically in a waterworks was what they reckoned, and said with some feeling that they didn’t blame them.

The taxi-driver drew up in Wigmore Street, where the young man visited a hole-in-the-wall before attempting to settle the taxi bill. ‘Come in and have a drink,’ I invited him and the Arts Council lady when we reached Durrant’s Hotel. I invited the taxi-driver too because he’d been so nice, but he said he’d better not. I signed the story I’d read and gave it to him instead.

Over drinks, I dismissed what signs there were that apologies might be in order. Blame does not belong when the circumstances are flawed and in the warm, snug bar it seemed neither here nor there that twenty-four hours hadn’t been time enough to spread the word of a forthcoming event; neither here nor there that the docklands at night were perhaps not quite the place for Gilbert and George’s subtleties. As for us, our evening out couldn’t be decribed as anything less than grist to the fiction-writer’s mill; and more enjoyable – although I didn’t say it – than the tedium of what might have been.

“The critic’s pretence that he can unravel the procedure is grotesque. As well hope to start with a string of sausages and reconstruct the pig.’ B.H. Streeter

The world is divided into novelists who do and novelists who don’t. I don’t blame the ones who don’t: it’s not well-paid and it’s the quickest way to make enemies this side of the divorce courts. Incest some people call it, others denounce you as a hack. Why, they ask, just because you write books, should you want to review them? But if you write fiction yourself, I’d reply, what could possibly be more satisfying and exciting than the chance to respond in print to the work of your contemporaries? At its best, it’s an exhilarating exercise, attempting to explore in words why a novel scorched your heart.

I always do think of it as a response, not a judgement. Part of a feisty, ongoing dialogue – words fired at words. But I know I’m fooling myself. The dialogue can quickly turn to war. So I’m careful. I don’t review my friends or authors whose work I already know I don’t like. And I start every novel with a sense of hope. But then sometimes, for all your optimism, you just don’t like it. And then, yes, you have to say so. But as a novelist myself – who knows how it feels to have your life-force sucked out by the crushing power of a bad review – how do I ever justify pulling another author’s work apart?

Well, my theory is that if you dish it out (criticism that is), then you’ve simply got to be able to take it. So I made two rules for myself:

1. Read every review, even the good ones, once and only once – then file and forget.

2. Be very nice to People Who’ve Given You Bad Reviews. Shock them into liking you. Make them regret what they wrote!

And have I stuck to The Myerson Rules? Well, there was the dinner party where I realized as I walked in that the woman whose hand I was about to shake had given me The Worst Review I’ve Ever Had. Not just bad but personal too – she’d made assumptions about the rest of my work (and its apparently undeserved success) based on the one slim tome she’d read. Voodoo pins were not agonizing enough for this woman.

But had I read her review just the once? Hmmm. That’s a tricky one. I do know that as I was introduced to her, all her weasel words came sneaking back. But, I rallied, it’s a whole lot worse for her than for me. So I stuck to Rule Number 2. I never (of course) referred to her (ludicrous) review. I made as if I’d forgotten it completely. Instead I told her how much I liked her last book (unutterably dull), how interesting her new one (verging on pointless) sounded. I dazzled her, I flattered her – actually I think I scared her! A few days later, my reward plopped through the door: a sweet, hand-written letter from her apologizing for the original review. Two years too late perhaps, but hell, I wasn’t complaining. One Nil.

Sometimes as a critic you just take a deep breath and hope the author doesn’t remember it was you. I was sitting next to a really nice young man at a literary lunch, a formal affair with silver cutlery and waiters and a seating plan. ‘Why do I know your name?’ I asked him over and over as I stared at his place-card.

‘Oh,’ he said vaguely, ‘I write a kind of a column for …’ He named the paper.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I never see that paper. It’s not that. This is really getting to me. I’m convinced I know you from somewhere.’

After half an hour of this (me digging deeper, him frantically filling the hole), the poor man lit a cigarette and gave in.

‘Well,’ he said rather sheepishly, ‘I think I reviewed one of your novels. I mean – I know I did.’

I beamed at him. ‘Oh – well then!’

‘It wasn’t a very good review,’ he muttered quickly, ‘in fact it was rather scathing. I’m so sorry.’

I don’t know what he expected me to do. Move table? Slap him Bette Davis-style across the cheek? Break down and sob? No, I laughed and told him that it was quite alright. I told him that I think Authors Learn From Their Bad Reviews. ‘Quite often as the months or years go by, you realize a certain critic’s response was right, more or less.’

He looked relieved. ‘Really? You really mean that?’

I nodded sweetly.

Did I mean it? Did I really? Let’s put it this way: I tried very hard to. I still do. And this so-called reviewer and I got on extremely well and by the end of the lunch were the firmest of friends. I still know him. Last year he invited me to his birthday party. Two Nil. (So there’s another critic who’s going to have to think twice before dissing one of my books ever again.)

‘Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.’ Shaw,
Man and Superman

Mortification: the default mode of anyone involved in writing or other forms of self-exhibition, deliberate or accidental. Like the time I was sitting naked on the toilet of an outdoor portaloo at a racecourse, when all four doors spontaneously collapsed outward to reveal Her Majesty the Queen and the entire royal family staring at me in horror as I relieved myself … Oh, but that was a dream, of course, and yet how natural it felt; how strangely true to life – my life at any rate. And the fact is, when it comes to real mortification, the kind where you spiral inward past the circumstances themselves, and sink into the deep dark matter of your own psyche, it can be hard to tell whether you’re awake or dreaming.

At school, when I was seventeen, I had a band. That is to say I had a shiny red Gibson SG copy, a wah-wah pedal, an amp, and a couple of friends with similarly noisy pieces of equipment. On weekends we’d score a bag of ganja, lay in some fine barley wines, get good and smashed, and start jamming.

That summer the school decided to honour its growing contingent of young rockers with an afternoon concert. Nobody had heard our band play, but this, combined with our generally stoned demeanour, merely added to our mystique. We were called ‘Barbarossa’s Body’; I don’t remember why, but I do remember overhearing some juniors who passed us in a corridor whisper admiringly:
They’re Barbarossa’s Body; they’re playing in the concert,
and feeling rather grand.

The time for the concert drew near. I prepared for it by buying an afghan sheepskin waistcoat on the Portobello Road. It was embroidered with silk stars and small mirrors, and bordered all around with long, thick, yellowish-grey sheep hair which, particularly at the armholes, where it sprouted out like two enormous shaggy sunflowers, gave me a primitive appearance that I found pleasing.

At lunchtime on the day of the concert itself, I felt suddenly unwell. So unwell that I had to be excused from the table to get a breath of fresh air. I’d never gone on stage before, and it hadn’t occurred to me to get nervous, but as I walked across the schoolyard, I realized I was suffering from an anxiety so acute it was making me nauseous. There was something else too. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but it was giving me the dim feeling that something in my life was going truly, catastrophically wrong.

In this uncertain condition I put on my new waistcoat and went to meet my band backstage. The group before us did rockabilly covers – efficient, fast, and much appreciated by the audience. We took the stage. As we stood there looking at each other in our magnificent outfits, with waves of joyous expectation streaming up at us from the audience, there was a moment where reality seemed on the brink of miraculously breaking its own laws in order to conform with the infantile fantasies of effortless brilliance and adulation that had brought us up here. And then the little detail I had managed to overlook or suppress all this time, namely that we knew
not one single
song, that we barely knew which way up to hold our instruments, that our ‘jam’ sessions had been about on the level of children flying imaginary airplanes, swung suddenly into the foreground of my mind. In a blind panic I began thrashing at my guitar. My friends did likewise. There were a few seconds of puzzled silence in the hall. Then, like a coordinated wave going through a soccer crowd, the expressions on our audience’s faces changed as one from bewilderment to incredulity to savage hilarity, and our cacophony was drowned out by the most powerfully demoralizing sound I had ever heard: the sound of five hundred schoolboys booing. Astonishing to relate, we didn’t immediately give up. As if this reaction were not quite enough to gratify my apparently bottomless need for humiliation, not enough to acquire permanent mortification status as an event capable of turning me scarlet whenever I should happen to think of it in later life, I had to go up to the mike and make a bleating plea to the audience to ‘give us a chance’. That done, I maxed the volume on my guitar for another thunderburst, this time pumping furiously on the wah-wah pedal, as if I could reverse the situation through sheer noise and will power, only to be greeted by a still more appalling sound than before: the audience’s boos had turned to
baas
. My friends, getting the joke, and no doubt seeing an opportunity to salvage their own reputations, pointed at my sheepskin waistcoat, burst into treacherous laughter, and fled.

Mortify: to deprive of life; to kill, put to death (OED). In the sepulchral inner space I entered then, I understood one very simple thing: either the world was going to have to cease to exist, or else I myself was. No doubt the mark of a genius (or a madman) at such a juncture would be to choose the former. I didn’t: I died. And what I think of now as I see myself standing there dumbstruck in my furry pelt, is the poor sheep Abraham put to death in his son Isaac’s stead. My primordial sheep-self had been sacrificed in order that my new, cautious, responsible, realistic, adult self might be given life.

At any rate, I have made it a point, since then, to have a little something prepared on the rare occasions when I have to get up on a stage and perform.

‘I have often lamented that we cannot close our ears with as much ease as we can our eyes.’ Richard Steele

The room is tiny. There are no windows and as far as I know the door may be locked from the outside. On the miniature, doll-sized desk in front of me are two pieces of chalk, a roll of gaffer tape and a razor blade. Strange acts have been committed here, by extremely small people. A man with a body odour problem has just come in and snapped a pair of excruciatingly tight headphones over my ears.

I hate doing live radio. I loathe and detest it. I don’t even like talking on the phone, let alone doing an interview down a wire, with someone I can’t see and have never met. I’m always convinced it will bring out my long-dormant stammer. And then there’s the horrifying idea that people might be out there listening, from their cars, offices and kitchens. None of them, I am sure, will have the slightest interest in anything I have to say. Why have I agreed to this? What conspiracy of decisions or chains of events has brought me here, to this, sitting obediently in a head-manacle in a broom cupboard, sweating into my beloved best shirt, waiting for a sign from someone or something?

A trickle of notes down the line heralds my connection to the distant radio station, across the breadth of the country. A soupy jazz record is playing. I strain for the voice of a technician, telling me what’s about to happen, but instead, over the tinkly piano, I hear the presenter yell, ‘Who’ve we got next?’

There is a pause. A scuffling of papers. I sit up straighter, even though they can’t see me, just to be ready.

‘Eh …’ another voice says over more paper-scuffling, ‘… Maggie O’Farrell.’

‘Who?’ the presenter barks.

‘She’s a writer.’

‘For fuck’s sake,’ he yells, ‘who booked her? I’ve never heard of her.’

I stop sitting straighter. Some part of me realizes that at this point I should cough or clear my throat to let them know that I’m here, but the presenter is still shouting:

‘I’m sick of you booking these bloody nobodies. When are you going to get me some proper guests?’

The headphones are so tight I feel as though I’m undergoing a cranial lobotomy. I gaze blankly at the razor blade as the presenter harangues the producer for his bad choice in guests, demanding to know what my books are called, what they’re about and what on earth I’m going to want to say.

‘And where is she, anyway?’ he snaps.

‘She’s in the other studio,’ the producer says.

There is another pause while the jazz record spirals on, the pianist still tinkling away politely. We listen to each other breathing. The producer, poor man, clears his throat. ‘Are you there, Maggie?’