Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (18 page)

It was much worse, an own-goal of the most embarrassing kind. The music. I had a CD on low to fill in the background silence. Just a hint of sound leaking out from the speakers to colour the air. Everybody was talking so much, in any case, that you would not even notice who was playing.

Music is the enemy of literature, I recall George Steiner saying at one time. I never realized how true it was until that night. I suppose he meant that the two are so close in nature that they compete like rejected lovers, that music has the edge because it goes straight to the heart. On the night, the music killed everything. The writer I had invited to dinner was beginning to talk about the book she was just about to write, telling us how it involved researching certain human rights issues. Everyone was listening, paying attention to every word. And then, I thought, the music was too loud, an interference, the enemy of writers.

I decided to turn it down. I didn’t want to switch it off altogether, but it needed to be put in its place a little. I picked up the new remote control on the table and zapped, just a tiny touch to allow the writer centre stage. She was in full flow now and we were inhaling every word, nodding, occasionally prompting her to say more.

The music was still too loud. It was Buena Vista Social Club, all the rage and appropriate enough, at the time, to the conversation we were having. But it was overpowering. It sounded like a right fiesta going on in the background, too raucous, too happy and too much of a defiant celebration.

As she continued talking, I picked up the remote control again and discreetly zapped once more. Down. Stay down, music. She looked at me with a strange expression, a little irritated, I thought, as if she didn’t want me to turn it down. Everybody loves those dilapidated Cuban bars with the faded paint and slow fan overhead and the musicians pounding out their songs in a great spirit of survival. But hold on, we wanted to hear what this writer was saying.

I zapped again, and this time she seemed even more surprised than before. She stopped talking for a moment. Her husband looked up in shock. What I failed to realize was that I was actually turning the music up, instead of down. With great subtlety, I was increasing the volume each time, pressing the wrong button so that the music was getting louder and louder. As if I had no interest in her new book. As if I was hinting that any half-forgotten old musician from Cuba had more in his little finger than three hundred pages of her next novel.

It wasn’t true of course. I was immensely interested and kept nodding, despite the jubilant rhythm which was now blasting out like a persistant menace, telling us to dance instead of talk. This time I decided I would turn the volume right down. I mean, there is a time for music and a time for talking. I took the zapper one last time and squeezed my thumb on the button with great vigour. Down, you guys in Havana. We’re trying to talk here. Instead, they suddenly came to a proper jazz band, blasting and hooping. Brass instruments yelping like profane circus. It was deafening.

Only then did I realize what I was doing. I immediately corrected and switched off the music altogether. I tried a lame apology, but there was a look of hurt shock in her eyes. She stopped talking. She said she didn’t really like talking about her work.

‘Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.’ Ambrose Bierce

It took me four and a half years to write my second novel, a seemingly endless span endured in relative isolation in Washington DC, where I had few friends (none of them literary), precious little money, and barely any outside employment. Every so often, I would stop work on the novel and, in a fit of despair, apply for jobs – a fair number of them over the years: teaching jobs, management consulting jobs and everything in between – but I was so clearly unsuitable for the wider world that I never got so much as a rejection letter in return.

In the spring of 1998, however, when I finally finished my manuscript, I felt that my fortunes were at last shifting. My agent seemed pleased with the book, and suggested that others might be also. And I had a publication in the offing: Francis Ford Coppola’s magazine
Zoetrope
had commissioned a short story, which was soon to appear. More than that, they had invited me to read from it at a trendy Greenwich Village bar, in honour of the magazine’s new issue. I was told that I would be reading with another, earlier contributor, whom I shall call Z, a young woman whose
Zoetrope
short story had earned her a six-figure book contract and minor celebrity; but I somehow, wilfully and woefully misguidedly, understood that the reading was primarily in honour of my
Zoetrope
issue, and hence, by extension, of me.

As I packed my overnight bag for the metropolis, I indulged in minor, oh-so-careful, fantasies. I didn’t imagine a book contract that would make the news, like Z’s, but I did imagine the trendy bar filled with eager readers,
my
eager readers, perhaps among them editors enamoured of my novel manuscript and prompted, by the wild (although discreet) success of my short story and reading, to up their offers by a considerable sum. I didn’t allow myself to imagine film deals (I wasn’t unreasonable!); but I did see, somehow, in this visit to New York, a new stage in my life beginning, the end of my literary isolation and my warm, if belated, welcome into the embrace of the New York literary scene. This – I could feel it – was the beginning of my real literary life.

As it happened, the day slated for the auction of my novel was the same as the day of my reading at the trendy Village bar. It was a Wednesday, and a memorable one; although not memorable quite as I might have hoped. The day was not filled with the frenzied ringing of cell phones around the city, nor with the pounding of virtual gavels as the auction reached its height. Rather, it was a day of ever more widely spaced and ever more sober calls from my agent, informing me that one after another and then, as the afternoon proceeded, in clutches and clumps, the editors who were to have raved over my novel were, one by one, quietly declining to bid. By the end of the afternoon, as I readied myself to go downtown, to step into the literary spotlight, I had amassed ten rejections, and had none left to go. Ten submissions, ten rejections. Busy day.

My agent, however, being a marvellous and God-like man, knew exactly what to say: ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he assured me. ‘We’ll find the right home for your book.’ (Which he did, not long after.) ‘You know, Beckett was very hard to sell, too.’ Which false flattery proved exactly what my bruised ego required to enable me to put on my make-up and high heels and head for my reading. I felt my humiliation was at least private, and my chance for glory, while diminished, not entirely extinguished.

Until, that is, I got to the bar. There, the joint was, as I had spent the long train journey imagining, jumping. Filled to the rafters. Bursting at the seams. Except that the posters, everywhere apparent, from the street outside to the podium at which the reading was to take place, all bore only one typed name: Z’s. In big, bright letters: Z’s name. My name was there, it’s true, hastily scrawled underneath by hand, in some instances misspelled, in others frankly illegible. I was the afterthought, the charity case, the one who shouldn’t have been there. And all the fans I’d dreamed about – they were her fans, of course. Just as the book contract and the celebrity and the film deal I hadn’t even dared to imagine were hers, too. And to top it off, Z seemed a perfectly pleasant person.

As I pushed my way through the crowd to make myself known to the bar staff, I ran into another young novelist I’d met once before, a member of the hip metropolitan set. ‘Are you a friend of Z’s too?’ he asked. ‘Is that why you’re reading with her? How’s everything going, anyway?’

To which, fool that I was, in my shell-shocked desperation, I told the truth. ‘Actually, I’ve had kind of a rough day,’ I said. ‘My novel’s been turned down ten times since this morning.’

From the expression on his face, you would have thought I’d announced that I had leprosy, or Ebola, or SARS. While striving to retain his society grin, he winced and flinched and grimaced; and I realized the depth of my mistake. Failure is not simply inadmissible, it can be catching. People not only don’t want to be failures, they don’t want to know them.

But this ambitious young writer knew what to do, in order to inoculate himself and those around him from the threat that I posed. While still flinching and wincing and smiling all at once he said – his only acknowledgement of my confession – ‘Wow.’ And then, ‘Have you met A?’ – he grabbed the shoulder of the woman, or girl, beside him and spun her around to face me. She had a great mass of dark curls, and was barely of legal drinking age. ‘She’s just sold a book of stories this week for $150,000 and she hasn’t even finished it yet. Isn’t that incredible?’

‘Incredible. Congratulations.’

I even smiled. I was polite. I stood up, when my turn came, and read from my story. I slipped out afterwards without speaking to anyone, and took a cab uptown. I made it through.

Years and publications later, I was invited back to the trendy bar, this time to read with a writer in her fifties, as hip a New York writer as someone in her fifties can be. I knew her slightly, and felt fine about the event: it would, I thought, put old ghosts to rest, show me how far I had come.

My husband came with me this time, and this writer blithely called him by someone else’s name, repeatedly, in conversation before the reading; by which I should have felt the inauspicious vibe. This writer had asked if she could read first; and of course I agreed. But I was somewhat surprised when, at the intermission, she came to me, her own husband in tow, both with anxious expressions.

‘How long do you think you might read for?’ she asked.

We’d both been asked to read fifteen minutes. ‘Same as you,’ I said. ‘About fifteen minutes.’

She winced and flinched, though not as dramatically as the young fellow of years before. ‘Oh God, this is really embarrassing, but you won’t mind if we have to go, will you? It’s just that we’ve got to get home, –’

Her husband interrupted her, his hands out like plates in a gesture of plaintive helplessness. ‘
Sopranos
night,’ he said, with a shrug.

The writer had the good grace, at least, to blush like a beetroot, in spite of her hip leather jacket, her downtown persona, her whole cool schtick. But she didn’t stay for my reading.

Next time I’m invited to read at the trendy bar in Greenwich Village, I hope I’ll know better than to go.

‘It is no use trying to tug the glacier backwards.’ Tibetan proverb

It all began one wet night in Rochdale, during the late autumn of 1993, at a dingy recording studio called Suite Sixteen. I had come to visit Mark E. Smith – the ex-Communist, former docker, and founder of one of the most innovative groups to emerge in contemporary music, The Fall. With an engineer he was mixing a new album,
Middle Class Revolt,
and he looked as though he’d been up for days. He was, in fact, unconscious when I first arrived – stretched out on the kind of broken-down sofa that you might see outside a mini-cab office on a warm summer evening. Waking, he had seemed immediately to pull all the strands of himself together, acquiring a coherence – like the shards of a Cubist portrait suddenly shooting back into their figurative state – which somehow denied that he’d ever been asleep.

A class warrior, dandy and intellectual, Smith is one of nature’s aristocrats. Born and raised in Salford, he is now resident in Prestwich, north Manchester. His performances with The Fall – delivering the elaborate code of his lyrics in plosive, spoken bursts from the corner of his mouth, across rigid, relentless repetitions of rock chords – can seem virtually shamanic. He is Beuysian in this respect. He is also famously acerbic.

Example: a music paper once decided that it would make an interesting story to have various rock celebrities take a train journey together, their wit and conversation being noted down by a journalist. Smith arrived carrying two plastic bags filled with cans of lager, and settled in for the duration. Some hours later, one of the assembled stars was attempting to prove that he had the ability to read a stranger’s personality, simply by studying their face. Smith sat in silence throughout the demonstration. Had the amateur analyst been more accomplished, he might have noticed that Smith’s eyes had narrowed a fraction – always a bad sign. But at first, all seemed well. ‘I can do that, mate,’ Smith announced, amiably enough. ‘Okay, Mark,’ came the bright reply, ‘tell me all about myself!’

‘You’re a cunt.’

Stories such as these had passed into legend. So much so, I felt, that they began to caricature Mark E. Smith as a kind of Alf Garnett of punk rock – obscuring his brilliance as an artist and icon who, on the one hand, had been implored by Kurt Cobain to support his group Nirvana, and on the other invited to address Oxford University’s James Joyce society. Smith’s work made a mockery of the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, or between populism and post-modernism. Thus, entangled in questions of cultural status, I took him out for dinner at an Italian restaurant in Rochdale – where he ate a rabbit – and invited him to be the subject of a public interview, to be conducted by myself, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

In retrospect, I must have seemed like one of those eager young reporters from the early days of the BBC – tweedy and hopelessly bourgeois, yet ravenous to engage with the true avant-garde. My admiration for Mark’s work knew – and knows – no bounds. Over dinner his anecdotes were hilarious, his insights fascinating: how Nico – the former chanteuse with the Velvet Underground – had once tried to buy some speed off his mum, for instance; and how he was opposed to Manchester’s proposed celebration of L.S. Lowry – ‘He was a fuckin’ rent collector, him: “Come out or I’ll paint yer!”’