Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (23 page)

At the interval I leave the superchilled striplit room, and go outside to try and revive my circulation in the hot night. Moths the size of giant pigeons are swarming under the palms. One lumbers towards me. I think, for some reason, of the little cabbage-white alighting on the racket of the young and shyly pretty Chris Evert at Wimbledon, and how the whole game stopped while its tiny blessing was conferred. I realize I cannot open the doors of the venue to get back inside. I start thumping on them frantically. The giant moths start to dive-bomb my head. On their backs they carry the faces of demons.

Soiled underwear in the guest bed is a popular motif in reading stories. In the long years before they learned to say
No
to all offers of ‘hospitality’, most writers will have encountered this at least once, especially when the bed has been vacated by the host. Though once, in a hotel in Telford, I found some red silk thongs under the pillow, rolled into a little torus; I found this rather touching – it was almost as if they had been left there as part of the turndown service, along with
A Belgian Chocolate For Your Dreams
. But experience means you no longer dare stretch your toes near the very foot of the bed, where the grubby Ys and jockeys hastily discarded in passion are most likely to be wedged. Nothing, though, could have prepared me for the cardboard-stiff ‘special pants’ I once found jammed under the headboard of my student host.

We are often put up in children’s bedrooms; I have frequently woken crapulously to ant-farms and terrifying ranks of My Little Ponies, and more than once to the ejected child standing silently above me at 6.30 a.m., their expression balefully fixed on the very old and ugly Goldilocks before them. The Worst Bed was in Wivenhoe: a shapeless, single fold-down foam chair lined with a kind of 70s olive-black fake newt-skin. I was so exhausted after my long journey I would happily have fallen into it, though, had it not been in the centre of a living room where the organizer had thoughtfully decided to throw a party for his students. I finally crawled into it at 4 a.m. and woke three hours later, my skin stuck everywhere to its plastic hide with beer and vodka, and my hair full of ash.

Weeks spent in a van full of other men – where the social highlight of the month has been a brief encounter with a Hilton hand-towel – can leave you, like, in a really bad way, man. Hence most itinerant male musicians’ familiarity with that early-morning manoeuvre known as ‘coyote arm’, named for that most pragmatic of animals, who will gnaw off a limb to free itself from a snare. I suspect, though, that there are far more one-armed women walking the streets: confused and disarmed by the magical fug of smoke and candlelight, they have mistaken the saxophonist’s fluent choruses for conversational urbanity and his suit for linen, only to wake beside a drooling and twitching beast identical to the one she has left at home. I’ve been lucky in the friends I’ve found on the road. I have never had the experience, as others have had, of retiring with a lady who turned out not to be, or being talked into wearing a gimp suit, or being introduced to the husband upon arrival at the flat
(cheerfully),
or suddenly realizing that my partner’s wild orgasm was in fact a
grand mal
seizure. But the contract between such international lovers always states that you must never meet again. It is an understanding both parties must honour. (Dishonesty in this regard is a Very Bad Thing – for either party. Musicians, remarkably, get hurt too.)

I was back in an East European town I never thought I would see again. Last time, I had given a reading there; this time I was back, guitar in hand, for the annual Jazz Festival. I was already badly bruised from a kind of Oedipal showdown: I was supporting an American guitarist called Ralph Towner, a musician from whom I have derived my entire playing style, and a guitarist so wholly superior to me in every department I can barely claim to play the same instrument. I was positively eviscerated by the experience, and hit the bar.

And heavens, there she was again, that pale, pale face … Oh. She was with the Americans. Worse – I quickly registered – with the bass player. Bassists are the fastest workers in the ensemble. As everyone knows, all jazz musicians play with a deeply pained Jazz Face. (For the record, this look is 3% affectation and 97% concentration: jazz is a tightrope with absurdity on one side, and disgrace on the other.) True, the sound the bassist produces often resembles a series of low raspberries, but because of the beautiful big instrument he wrestles it from, he is the only musician whose Jazz Face looks like lovemaking. This is a fine way of advertising yourself. Compared with the rest of the band – who appear to be flailing around in a welter of agonized constipation, memory loss and recent bereavement – he always presents a figure of attractive self-possession.

The bassist was obviously relating some incident that had happened onstage that night. She threw her head back and laughed her laugh, that perfect little staccato arpeggio, three ascending fifths ending in a squeal; she had one white arm held out before her, and the other raised above her head, like a flamenco dancer. I realized she was cradling an imaginary bass, fingering –
uh
– its imaginary headstock. I approached her. She’d obviously missed my set, and had no idea I was in town; she looked at me with that vague repulsion you feel when you encounter a thing in the wrong element: a fish on a lawn, a bird on the road, a fully-dressed man face-down in a swimming pool. We talked, while the bassist looked on with a perfect expressionlessness. (Very clever. This is how you play this one:
you shut down your aura.
) I addressed her by the shortened form of her name he had yet to learn; I reminded her of a joke we’d shared, which we clearly no longer did; I even – all fake-innocent, but cruelly, unforgivably – asked who was looking after her child that evening. I took the hint. I somehow managed to effect a slow dematerialization, and reappeared like a spectre at the bar again. From there I watched the whole lovely negotiation; I couldn’t hear a word, but knew it well enough.
Look. Bottom line. I go to Padua tomorrow, Stockholm Sunday, back to Chicago Monday morning. You and me both know there’s more chance of lightning hitting us now than us two ever …
and so on, until
…but we’ve got tonight
. Then her even more lovely mock-disbelief, amused shrug, coy acquiescence. They disappeared into the dressing room and emerged fifty minutes later (reader, I counted them; by then all that was left to me was to make a masochistic fetish of my solitude). They stopped on the stairs, and he turned to her and took her face in both hands, and muttered some poignant sincerity – for only fools and those who have never known the road believe these liaisons are unbeautiful and insincere – and they left together for the hotel.

‘Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.’ Virginia Woolf

Seldom have I written an essay feeling so spoilt for choice. Which episode, from a career glittering with mortifications, shall I choose? Should it, for example, be my first literary lunch? The other speaker was Harry Secombe. He had written a serious book and wished to speak seriously about it. I had also written what I hoped was a serious book, a serious comedy of manners, and wanted to make some jokes. But his reputation as a famous ‘Goon’, and the description of me as a literary biographer, completely prevented us from doing what we wanted. When Harry Secombe rose to his feet and said ‘Good afternoon’, people fell off their chairs with laughter and rolled around in ecstasy; while I, firing off some jokes, saw the same audience frown learnedly and begin making notes on their menus. It was a fiasco, and we agreed afterwards that we should have swapped speeches.

Worse than this was my first literary festival, the Bedford Square Book Bang. I hadn’t been asked to do anything very difficult – simply stand in the rain next to a wheelbarrow full of books and sign all those that were bought. The trouble was that none was being bought. Seeing me standing damply there, like an unemployed gardener, my publisher commandeered a megaphone and bellowed out the news that ‘the famous biographer’ was even now signing copies of his book. ‘Roll up!’ he cried – and suddenly out of the gloom someone did roll up. He was carrying a copy of my book which, he explained, he would like to return as not being worth the paper it was written on – an insult that, as the rain fell on its pages, swelling and distorting them visibly, was much magnified. A scuffle developed during which, I like to think, I inserted my blurred name. But in the end I sold minus one copy – a score that should surely earn me an entry in
The Guinness Book of Records
.

But perhaps it is wiser to choose an overseas humiliation, such as the time I gave a lecture in a very large, totally empty hall in the United States. ‘We’ll wait a little for stragglers,’ said the polite professor who was to introduce me. We waited but no one straggled. Eventually we clambered on to the stage and the professor introduced me in glowing language –1 only wish someone had been there to hear him. It seemed he was too paralysed by embarrassment to call off the event, and I, needing the cheque, was obliged to deliver my lecture, speaking for forty minutes into the thin air. Halfway through this performance someone came through the door, stopped and stood staring at us. Was this surreal soliloquy a rehearsal for something? I turned to him and, like the Ancient Mariner, tried to hold him there. But with a look of alarm he turned on his heel (a movement I had read about but never seen before) and ran out. I felt exhausted by the time I finished speaking, and, there being no questions, the professor rose and thanked me. As we climbed off the podium together, he remarked without, so far as I could tell, any trace of irony: ‘Your lecture would have gone down even better, Mr Holroyd, with a larger audience.’ I consoled myself with the thought that there had been an audience of two: us two. Later I heard that there was a students’ uprising that day, sounds of which – a muffled chanting – had wafted through the hall, accompanying me as I stood mouthing my words.

Irony, I have discovered, is often a good defence against mortification, but sometimes it can backfire, especially when you are abroad. A prime example of this happened to me in Moscow where I went as a member of a GB/USSR conference of writers. We fielded a distinguished team: Matthew Evans (now Lord Evans), Melvyn Bragg (now Lord Bragg), my wife Margaret Drabble, Francis King, Penelope Lively, Fay Weldon and myself. These were pre-Gorbachev days and the Soviet team of writers seemed to us old and dour. When it was the turn of one of us to speak, they would put their feet on the table, read their newspapers, and tell each other incomprehensible jokes. I was scheduled to speak on the last morning and, angered by what I had witnessed, I rewrote my speech and gave a copy to the simultaneous translator. I spoke slowly, with withering scorn, even contempt, and was gratified to see that I was getting the full attention of the Soviet team. They put down their feet and their newspapers, ceased joking and listened attentively. Much encouraged, I assumed my most acid tone, piling one ingenious insult upon another, building up a Gothic edifice of cunning invective. My final crescendo of abuse was greeted with loud applause, and one of our team passed me a brief note: ‘Does irony translate?’ Evidently mine did not, and what left me as subtle and devastating satire arrived at the other side of the table as a peculiarly sophisticated hymn of praise.

The afternoon sessions of our conference were jollier affairs, largely because of the excellent lunches which featured many simultaneously translated, simultaneously drunk, toasts. I drank for England that week and often appeared at breakfast wearing dark glasses. At lunch, on the final day, much to Maggie’s embarrassment, I rose swaying to my feet and raising my glass high (before attempting to smash it to the floor over my shoulder) proposed a toast to the great spirit that had brought us, and our literature, together – ‘the spirit of vodka!’

Maggie said she would never take me anywhere again. But occasionally she relents and I am able to send her children evidence of some fresh mortification – such as the photograph of us before dawn in Ireland, in front of the cream of Irish literature, singing along with that notorious pop group, the Dubliners.

‘OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.’ Ambrose Bierce

… There was that party remember. She wanted it. She wanted me. I was sure she did, she told me once, no she didn’t. I was younger then, believed in everything just in case. She was tormenting me but if I had reported her to the authorities she would have denied it to the death, that was the type of her, she didn’t know what she wanted you see, she was in conflict with her own desires. I wasn’t. I was free. It was the mushroom season. The world was dank. The way she looked at me blinking with surprise like she had forgotten my presence was the perfect camouflage for her hunger or the way she opened one eye, the bigger eye, the brows didn’t match either, that sly bit wider when she spoke to me and laughed at the institutional egg-box ceiling when I couldn’t find the words to answer and glared at her, the strangest laugh I had ever heard, a gurgle at the back of her throat culminating in a hoarse splutter through her lips – it was all typical of a woman repressing her deeper instincts. She was driving me mad. With her fucken theory about Mrs Radcliffe and de Sade and
Les Crimes de l’Amour
and her cowboy boots and her plastic toadstool rings and she never had a pen for she liked to give the impression of spontaneity and eccentric inspirations. She had it all worked out. She devoted the beginning of every class, no, seminar was the new institutional egg-box word, to testing the various pens offered by her assembled slaves, the Apostate Queen, putting her name to the order for the brutal rape and execution of a hundred virgins, this kind of innocence must be stamped out. I never offered her mine, my pen I mean, innocence had not yet sprouted in me, and she was wise to my rebellion, that’s what the whole show was about every week, to see whether I would succumb. Even so it was the only seminar I went to. For three hours every week I sat in Gothic Literature and listened to the stories of sex-fiend monks and randy nuns and diabolical confessions from her big toothy mouth. She had freckles on her teeth. Her tongue was undersized. I was beginning to understand that there were types of violence I had never dreamed of. I was on edge permanently. The mushies were out, did I mention that? People were disappearing. The bars were empty or the next minute incredibly vicious. One day in class I saw her nipples growing and growing and they were about to tell me to do something only I got out the door in time. She came straight after me into the corridor. She started unbuttoning her shirt. This is what you want isn’t it, she said. No she fucken didn’t. I was ordered into her office. Then she lay across the desk and pulled up her long denim skirt. Like fuck she did. I got a mouthful about my behaviour, my bad confrontational attitude. I knew it was code. She was really saying that she couldn’t, it was too risky, maybe after I graduated. I played along with her; I was able to grasp the real truth behind her words. We had to wait for the right moment. Then there was that party at her house for some visiting writer, a bloody poet. I only went because I could tell she wanted me to be there. I’d been on the go for a few days before it. My piss had turned black with fungal ink. I remember when I went into the house that the stairs were too narrow for even my finger to get up to the bathroom. She was talking to the poet in the kitchen, drinking punch. She was barefoot. Artfully, she showed some uncertainty about my name. Then she asked me if it was raining. I had no idea. But you’re soaking wet, she said with a weird look to the malevolent scheming poet. That’s when I understood. The back door was open: I fought my way through its emptiness. In the garden I started searching, in the bushes, under a wheelbarrow, down on my knees sweeping the leaves away. Luckily there wasn’t a shed or I might have been there all night. I studied the arrangement of the pegs on the clothes line for a sign. Eventually I found it. She had left me a message under a stone which commanded me to hide in her bedroom before everyone left. I decided to stay outside and prepare myself, cleanse my mind, in the rain, a delicious misty rain. The Queen had chosen her mate for the night. My time had come. My people looked to me in dread and awe. Then I saw the lights go off in the house. I went back in. I must have been surprised to find so many people still there. It wasn’t particularly dark either. I was already naked to the waist, art agaric warrior, rained on, maybe a bit mucky. The guests stared. Halfway up the stairs I stopped and looked down. They were gathering in the hall to behold me. Some of them were shouting at me: one man with horns attempted to grab hold of me and I swung my boot at him. This ugly rabble were nothing more than shadows, figments, the exteriorization of my guilt which she had shown me must be confronted and eradicated. This was the test, I was telling myself, I have to show her that I have courage, that I am a man. I began to take off my trousers. There she was now herself among them, the sarcastic poet beside her, screaming at me to get out of her house forthwith. But that’s how she had to play it, this was part of the foul phantasmagoria to be fought through. I had my cock out in my hands by this stage. I held it up against them like a crucifix. The demons shrieked with horror. The poet smirked: it was all going according to plan. Then I ran for her bedroom, held the door shut behind me. There was a big bed with a red eiderdown, unmade. The pillows were lilac and the size of sheep. I had never seen anything so beautiful. My whole life made sense. The ghouls were whispering through the door. They were talking about the police, the fucken spoil-sport squad. I heard sirens but it might have been the souls in the underworld calling to me not to give in. You can imagine the rest. But if you can’t be bothered then let’s just say they must have decided to leave me alone to calm down and I must have got under the Eiderdown of Bliss and passed out. When I opened my eyes, my girlfriend of the time was sneering down at me with a kind of disgust that should never have been made known to her. Her face would never look the same again. Not that I saw much of it. The only other person in the room was the poet lurking in the corner with my clothes in her hands. The Queen was nowhere to be seen as I was led out of the house into my girlfriend’s car. They must have called her to come and get me. I sat in the back seat of course. It was still dark. The streets were as empty as I was. My girlfriend bent the rear view mirror so that she wouldn’t have to look at me. Neither of us spoke. I had the feeling something momentous had happened. I’m sorry, I said when we stopped outside my flat. She told me to fuck off and drove away to another life. The university were informed of course. I was not allowed to continue with my studies in Gothic literature. They were going to throw me out altogether but for some mysterious reason I was reprieved under condition I attended counselling three times a week. The counsellor was gorgeous. She was lonely. She was dying for it, I could see it in her eyes. We went for walks together in the woods. No we didn’t.