Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (2 page)

‘Do you consider yourself
feminine
?’ he said.

Nice Canadian middle-aged women go all strange when asked this by Mexican talk-show hosts somewhat younger than themselves, or at least I did. ‘What, at my age?’ I blurted. Meaning:
I used to get asked this in 1969 as part of being mortified in Edmonton, and after thirty-four years I shouldn’t have to keep on dealing with it!
But with eyelashes like that, what could I expect?

‘Sure, why not?’ he said.

I refrained from telling him why not. I did not say:
Geez Louise, I’m sixty-three and you still expect me to wear pink, with frills?
I did not say:
feminine, or feline, pal? Grr, meow
. I did not say:
This is a frivolous question
.

Whacking my eyelashes together, I said: ‘You really shouldn’t be asking
me
. You should be asking the men in my life.’ (Implying there were hordes of them.) ‘Just as I would ask the women in
your
life if you are masculine. They’d tell me the truth.’

Time for the commercial.

A couple of days later, still brooding on this theme, I said, in public, ‘My boyfriends got bald and fat and then they died.’ Then I said, ‘That would make a good title for a short story.’ Then I regretted having said both.

Some mortifications are, after all, self-inflicted.

‘The dumbness in the eyes of animals is more touching than the speech of men, but the dumbness in the speech of men is more agonizing than the eyes of animals.’ Hindustani proverb

The West Midlands, 1990

‘There smites nothing so sharp, nor smelleth so sour As shame.’ Langland,
Piers Plowman

My granny had no patience with books and writers. None at all. A miner’s widow, she had a glass eye (a coal explosion in her own grate), a clay pipe (mostly unlit) and a habit of saying out loud what you hoped she wouldn’t. ‘Away and work’, was a favourite
bon mot
for oblivious glass-screen TV announcers; ‘Is that smell you?’ a witticism directed at doorstepping Mormons; ‘I’ve got my eye on you’ whilst removing the aforementioned glass appendage, the perfect remark to drain the blood from the faces of small children – you know the kind of thing. Years after she died in a house fire, my mother, unwell herself, told me in the manner of it being a last confession how much she had loved her mother, yet how embarrassed by her she had been. Not just embarrassed,
marked
. The worst, it seemed, needed to emerge.

As a teenager, maybe eighteen or nineteen, she had taken her mother on a very rare, very special Big Night Out. The dazzling first showing of
Gone with the Wind
was the occasion in question, and women for miles had come in their fanciest duds to sit in the dark and watch it. The local fleapit had been done up and paper hankies and specially drafted-in boxes of Milk Tray were available in the foyer. This was glamour indeed, and my mother was enthralled with all of it before the movie even started. By the time a daring onscreen clinch reduced the cinema to sex-tingled silence, she was rapt almost beyond recall. At the pitch of the silence, however, a man sitting next to my mother, possibly despite his best efforts, possibly from a surfeit of unaccustomed chocolate, broke wind. My granny jumped to her feet, grey bun outlined in the projection beam, roaring, ‘It wasny me, it was him.’ She roared it repeatedly, pointing. By the time they were asked to leave, my mother already had and my granny had started a fight with two usherettes. ‘All those people,’ my mother sighed. Forty-five years later, she still blushed at the memory, the loss of fragile, teenage dignity. ‘She wasny what you’d call
graceful
.’

Twenty years later still, I have no idea what either my mother or grandmother would have made of my being a writer, and that’s probably a damn good thing. I don’t know what I make of it either. I do know it works best when I’m alone and it’s when I haul myself in front of ‘all those people’ too that things seem more fraught. From the very first surreal radio interview, where I expected to be asked questions about the book I had just written and was instead asked by a ferociously chirpy Angela Rippon what I’d be doing to celebrate National Foot Week, this has been the case. It honestly never seems like me.

Book in hand, I have been introduced in Leeds as ‘an up-and-coming comedienne from Billy Connolly country’. I have been heckled in Haworth as the organizer of a lesbian ‘happening’ about which I knew nothing, and had my invitation to a feminist conference in Motherwell rescinded on the grounds of being found out as ‘not feminist enough’. I have been thrown out of Amman University for being unable to truthfully promise I would not use the word ‘thighs’ during my session on the platform, yet dismissed as roundly as if I had won the Bad Sex Award by the all-too-audible snoring of a blue-rinsed lady as I read what I had hoped would be a pretty in-your-face fellatio story. I have been offered, free, a ‘cheerier ending’ for that story about ECT I just narrated, and one rather timid-looking chap waited for over an hour in a queue to tell me, as I signed his book, that he only wanted to say how much he hated my stuff and, while he was at it, my fucking earrings as well. I have been booked into a posh, would-be chic hotel with such vile green lighting I got a headache almost at once, and off-loaded into a dimly-lit warren where the wallpaper peeled down the wall, where the holes in the skirting looked too big to have been made even by Scottie dogs, where the locks didn’t work and the phone was disconnected and the local knocking-shop activity seemed set to begin at any second. I have even been asked if I minded not being paid.

Only once, though, at a reading in Edinburgh, have things almost come to a head. In the heart of a stillness I deliberately, and, I thought, dramatically, created, the bloke in the front row (at least I think it was the bloke in the front row) executed the loudest arse-raspberry I ever hope to hear. Maybe it was blood, maybe the poetry of repeated history suggesting itself. Whichever, in the space of a split-second, I found a horribly persuasive understanding with my long-dead Granny McBride. Some notion of personal dignity seemed to be at stake: the old lady’s words were forming on my lips. In the same split-second, however, I recalled my son, aged ten, was watching from the back row of the audience. The sudden recollection of my mother’s forty-five-year-long blush made the choice: there was nothing else for it. I struck a pose of transcendental deafness, unfocused my eyes, and carried, if not sublimely then at least determinedly, freshly, on.

Grace, you see. It’s worth striving for.

I think my mother would have been proud.

‘Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.’ Logan Pearsall Smith

In the winter of 1992–1993 my girlfriend, Kate, and I went to live in La Casella, an isolated farmhouse some forty miles south-east of Siena. It was a good place to write, and I had the vague but oddly compelling feeling I always have when it’s time to start work on a new novel. I was relieved to be out of London, partly because I wanted to avoid another grim English winter, and partly because I wanted to forget all about the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1993’, which was to be announced early in the New Year. By a strange coincidence, I had been staying in the same house exactly ten years before, when the ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1983’ had been announced, and I had devoured that issue of
Granta,
eager to acquaint myself with a new generation of writers, writers whom I hoped one day to emulate. This time, though, I qualified: I had published two novels –
Dreams of Leaving
and
The Five Gates of Hell
– and I was not yet forty. People who moved in literary circles had told me that I might be on the list – some had even said I
should
be on the list – whereupon I would usually smile or shrug. I may have affected a certain indifference, but deep down, of course, I was
desperate
to be on the list. At the same time I felt fatalistic about the whole thing: I fully expected to be passed over, and I had no intention of being in London when that happened.

It was a great winter. Kate read novels and cooked goulash and went for long walks through the Tuscan countryside. I wrote. Some of our favourite people came to stay and we sat up late, drinking bottle after bottle of the colonel’s red wine (he charged three thousand lire for two litres). One of the house rules was that I shouldn’t be interrupted during working hours – unless, of course, there was some kind of emergency. I don’t think we had any emergencies that winter, though, so I wasn’t disturbed at all – not, that is, until a certain afternoon in early March. It must have been cold in the house that day because Kate had decided to light a fire. While tearing up strips of newspaper – neighbours would often pass papers on to us, though we rarely read them – her eye fell on a small black-and-white photograph of me. She scanned the article. The ‘Best Of Young British Novelists 1993’ had been announced the week before. She ran upstairs with the paper and burst into my room.

‘You’ve been chosen,’ she said. ‘You’re on the list.’

I turned to face her.

‘You’re one of the Best Young British Novelists,’ she said.

‘Really? Let me see.’ My heart was racing.

We scanned the list of writers, but my name wasn’t there. We scanned the list again. There was no mention of me at all.

‘But your picture’s here,’ Kate said, her finger poised over one of the black-and-white mug shots. ‘Look.’

We both looked. It wasn’t me. It was Jeanette Winterson.

Neither of us spoke for a while.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said at last. She had turned away from me. She was facing into the corner of the room.

In retrospect, I suppose the photo did look vaguely like me – or like a
version
of me anyway (there must have been a time when Jeanette and I had a similar haircut, or perhaps we narrowed our eyes in the same way when we were looking into the sun). I stared and stared at the picture, as if the closeness of the resemblance could somehow lessen the hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kate said again, then she went downstairs.

It was humiliating for both of us, of course – for Kate because she had mistaken Jeanette for me, and because she had raised my hopes only to dash them seconds later, but it was humiliating for me too –
especially
for me – because I had responded with such eagerness, such desperation, with such incontinent desire, all my ambition and longing exposed; I felt like someone who had been disembowelled and then left to stare dumbly at the brightly-coloured mess of his own intestines.