Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (17 page)

It was decided, with my encouragement, that Joseph Brodsky wasn’t coming. This was confirmed when the man himself was finally contacted. He was tired or having a good time or maybe both. He took some persuading, but granted another interview in two days’ time at ‘his’ place, in Hampstead. I felt a nuisance.

‘Alfred Brendel’s house,’ sighed the publicity person, putting the phone down. ‘They’re good friends.’

I pictured Brodsky singing poignant Russian songs at the home piano of the greatest pianist in the world as I downed vodkas on the sofa and clapped along. I couldn’t imagine being so famous that one actually turned down exclusive interviews. It increased Brodsky’s status even more. Two days later I was walking on Hampstead Heath, trying to raise mine. I tested my voice; it was squeaky with nerves. I passed the house in Well Walk several times. It was impossibly large, half-hidden behind venerable foliage.

I rang the bell. The door was opened by two small girls. They looked at me and burst into giggles. I tried to explain. Somewhere beyond the hall’s gloom a woman’s voice was chartering. The girls, giggling all the while, showed me into a dark sitting-room with a rumpled sofa, ethnic statues and a grand piano. I waited for their unseen mother – Lady Brendel, I assumed – to come off the phone. Now and again, the two girls ran in to take a look at me, finding me just as funny each time. After three-quarters of an hour I began to feel helpless. The phone call went on and on. It was strange being in Alfred Brendel’s house without either of the Brendels knowing. There was a new voice, booming in the hall. The sitting-room door was flung open and Joseph Brodsky strode across the room without stopping or looking at me. He shouted, ‘
OK! This way!
’ He was waving a chicken-leg.

By the time I had picked up my ghetto blaster and briefcase, he had disappeared through another door. I followed. A small landing, stairs going down. No Brodsky. I decided to try the stairs and found myself in a basement bedsit with French windows. Brodsky was walking about, gnawing the chicken-leg as if he hadn’t eaten in days. A typewriter with a Cyrillic keyboard showed a poem in progress. He seemed very bad-tempered.

‘OK, which magazine are you?’

‘The
Literary Review,
’ I said.

‘Owned by an Arab, no?’

‘Em, I think so.’

He grunted disapprovingly, indicating a chair. He threw the chicken-leg away and sat down opposite me. He looked quite like Neil Kinnock, I realized.

‘OK. Start.’

I was searching around for a socket, the ghetto blaster’s lead being short. He stared at the ghetto blaster.

‘What’s that?’

‘A tape-recorder.’

‘What the hell for?’

‘To record you.’

‘Why?’

He appeared genuinely alarmed. I pictured KGB cells, interrogations with cigarette-ends. I stammered out that I liked to catch precisely what people said, their rhythms and turns of phrase. The man who had been under attack recently for his poems’ not-quite-natural English phrasing glared at me. I was bright red.

‘Better to use your brain and try to listen,’ he growled.

I plugged it in, anyway; it had cost me too much money to waste. I am a worm, I thought. I cleared my throat.

‘You have called Auden “a stoic who prays”. Could this also be a self-definition?’

‘What?’

I repeated the question. My voice sounded even worse, as did the question. He snorted.

‘If somebody else would do that, I wouldn’t object.’

Silence.

‘But you wouldn’t describe yourself as that?’ I asked, weakly.

‘I wouldn’t describe myself in any fashion, period.’

Jesus Christ.

‘Why is that?’

I was wet with sweat. I wanted to leave.

‘I am not interested in myself.’

He chuckled. It was a sardonic chuckle, but it was Russian. It was a tiny light in the darkness. The tiny light grew, if fitfully. He said some memorable things. Larkin was the last of the Roman poets. The novel is the marriage and poetry is the one-night stand, yah? By the end he was almost friendly. I gave him my slim volume and he promised to read it. He nodded towards the French windows. I picked up my briefcase and the ghetto blaster and backed out like an incompetent burglar, but smiling all the way.

‘Open thy bowels of compassion.’
Congreve,
The Mourning Bride

Book-touring, in America, is a slog. The process is much less romantic, so much less a coronation, than some might imagine. It’s churlish to complain about the effort of one’s publisher to bring a book to the light of an audience, and I won’t complain here: I’ll book-tour again this year, and I’ll see many good friends – booksellers, interviewers, and my publisher’s remote operatives – acquired in earlier rounds. But the net effect is a slog through a morass of Sartrean repetitions. I begin tours cheerfully, and end them as a zombie, hoping not to be ungracious in any number of dazed moments.

I think of my escorts. Not the type found in ads in the back of weekly newspapers, but ‘literary escorts’, those local sprites schlepping writers in and out of airports, hotel lobbies, radio stations and bookstores. Escorts are not the cause of mortification, but the witnesses to it. They’re the human link, the local flavour. I think of my dear escort in Minnesota, who drove a battered Toyota, its dashboard decorated with gopher skulls and dried branches of herb, and who escorted authors to support finishing an epic, book-length poem on the subject of roadkill. I remember my Vietnam vet escort in Kansas City, bravely limping with his cane around the car to open my side door. I remember many others and love them all.

I think of the radio. The radio is, for me, the void. A tour consists of waking at five, breakfasting in the airport, landing in a new city and dropping one’s bags in a hotel room, then being whisked to a radio station to make a nine or ten a.m. live talk show, where a jaded local host who’s read only a summary of your book and barely learned to pronounce your name will ask you questions about your mother and father and whether you know anyone really famous. Later that night you’ll see local friends, you’ll read aloud to live humans who’ve put aside part of their lives to come and see you stand at a podium. If you’re lucky you’ll have a nap in your hotel, you’ll be treated to an elaborate meal – sometimes a good one – and you’ll have time to figure out which city you’re in. But not before you’ve been put on the radio. When you’re talking on the radio you’ve had a flight and a coffee in a paper cup and a crumb of something. You’ve had time to empty your bladder – but only your bladder. Then you reply to questions asked by someone uninterested in the answers, into the whispery microphones of a padded booth. Your listeners, if they exist, are invisible, distant, and likely missed your name even if it was pronounced correctly. The radio is the void where you stare into your own soul on book-tour and find nothing staring you back.

Once, a particular escort in a particular city came together with the radio experience, in a way which was not so much mortifying as edifyingly humbling. She was a big, rowdy, middle-aged blonde who had been, some years before, the lead anchorperson on the local news. She’d also obviously been stunningly beautiful in her youth. She reminded me, immediately and delightfully, of Gena Rowlands in the Cassavetes film
Opening Night
– a character modelled, in turn, on Bette Davis in
All About Eve
. That is to say, a
real star,
made insecure by age. What I couldn’t know was that her new job as escort – and I was evidently one of her very first authors – made, by design or accident, a beautiful cure.

We stopped at two or three radio stations that day, and one local television station. It happened at the first stop, and every stop to follow: she was received as a returning comet. From the receptionists to the producers to the technicians to the interviewers themselves, everyone was in awe that she’d swept in – and I was a token at her side, a negligible presence. How good she looked! How they missed her! What a young bimbo they’d replaced her with! How shocking that she’d been cut from the air just for getting a bit older – nobody in this business had any respect any more for the true giants! By dint of my tour itinerary, prepared months before and thousands of miles away in an office in Manhattan, this greatest of local media stars was making her return tour of local media outlets. They fell over themselves for her. Here was true fame, a face they’d gazed at five evenings a week for ten years. I could have been Rushdie, I could have been DeLillo, I could have been T.S. Eliot, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least. She took her courtiers graciously, I should add – and was always forgiving when they spoke of the betrayal of her firing. ‘Oh, that’s just this business, you know how it is …’

That’s my story, a gentle one. I’m glad to share it. More important, though: I must be certain you understand – you out there, whoever you are, faceless army, listening to morning talk shows. I know you’re there somewhere, and I have something to tell you. Those authors you hear at nine or ten in the morning, speaking so tenderly or angrily of their childhood or broken marriage, or meticulously defending their book against this or that possible misunderstanding, or answering unexpected questions about their hair colour or their pets, or explaining why no one will ever know the final truth about what resides in the human heart, you
must know
this: they are holding in a bowel movement.

‘When an elephant is in trouble, even a frog will kick him.’ Hindu proverb

One
story, of a bad experience in front of the reading public? Just the one? That’s impossible. There are far too many to choose from. Just off the top of my head, we have:

– The time when I agreed to appear at a crime writers’ festival (Why? I’m not a crime writer), was scheduled to read at the same time as Colin Dexter, and got an audience of precisely one. ‘I’m so glad you came along,’ I said to the amiable punter, after twenty minutes’ chat. ‘Think how terrible it would have been if there’d been nobody.’ ‘Actually,’ he admitted, ‘I’m the person who was supposed to be introducing you.’ (It was Ian Rankin.)

– The time I had another audience of one, in Stamford, Lines – a sclerotic middle-aged businessman who seemed to have wandered in by mistake – and when I told him I didn’t intend to write a novel about the collapse of the Berlin Wall (this was 1989) he started bellowing at me, ‘You’re a coward, man, a bloody coward!’

– The time I was on a panel discussion on French TV, and the recording over-ran, and knowing that I had to catch the last Eurostar to London I gestured frantically to the floor-manager, and he came over to fetch me but told me to leave unobtrusively, so in order to miss the camera-line I had to crawl off the set on my hands and knees in front of the studio audience, thinking, ‘I bet this never happens to Julian Barnes’.

– Signing-queue mortifications: the woman who picked up one of my novels in Brighton, read the author’s biog (a functional listing of my previous books), sniffed ‘Is that your only claim to fame?’ and when I said ‘Yes’ put the book back on the pile; or the female student (also in Brighton) who sweetly said to me, ‘Can I ask you a question?’ and when I said ‘Yes’, demanded briskly, ‘Why are all your women characters so crap?’

There are others, even worse, that I have probably suppressed. All helping to form the same resolution, taken time and again: not to put myself through this sort of thing any more. To stay at home, and sit behind my desk, as real writers are supposed to do.

My next scheduled reading is in two days’ time.

‘This is the posture of fortune’s slave: one foot in the gravy, one foot in the grave.’ James Thurber

Nothing could go wrong. I was in charge of the cooking myself. My favourite fish dish – hake with an Asian cross-over flavour, a real winner. I had already tried it out on various guests and each time received this winsome, tearful puppy-look across the table after the first forkful, that simultaneous look of sadness and ecstasy as if to say – you’re killing me, this is so delicious. Some people have even uttered dust-jacket terms like amazing, stunning, genius.

Everything was on course for a great night. What could be more exciting than sitting down with another writer, an internationally well-known novelist to whom I had promised dinner in Dublin. She and her husband were in town and coming around for a quiet chat. Just four of us around the table. Lots of shop talk, no complications with mismatched guests, no writer running into vicious reviewer, no awkward questions and nobody saying ‘sorry, I haven’t read any of your books – yet’. Nothing like the time I was once invited to dinner in Canada myself and sat beside somebody who was fascinated by the fact that I was a writer and then said: ‘I know somebody who reads.’

Of course there were the usual pre-dinner anxieties, irrational paranoia that every host experiences over the unlikely odds that you might actually poison your guest with kindness, that they will turn suddenly blue in the face at the whiff of peanuts, do a Saint Vitus dance or just drop dead from the spice. You do your best. After that it’s guest beware.

It was none of these things that went wrong on the night. No choking, no spluttering, no famous writer suddenly rushing off to the bathroom. In fact I soon got the familiar nod across the table, the one that makes you feel you’ve pulled off the great miracle once again by some sheer fluke. Everything was perfect. No big conversation gaffe either, no clanger hanging in the air with an awkward silence.