Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (6 page)

Under normal circumstances, it would have been the most straightforward of gigs, but the state of my bowels knocked everything out of whack. On the train it was easier to stay locked in the toilet for the journey. The Imodium wasn’t really kicking in. I was supposed to take a taxi from the station to the venue, but I didn’t fancy being sat in a cab in an ‘historic city’ I didn’t really know, stuck in traffic, a driver trying to chat to me. So I walked it, stopping off at McDonald’s, British Home Stores, Waterstone’s, Boots and a pub along the way: I still remember the place as a series of disabled toilets, and can recall the graffiti I sat staring at for minutes on end better than its architecture. What did Edward Hopper say about our impressions when entering or leaving a city? But I shouldn’t try to raise the tone.

I rolled up in a pretty undignified state, but nobody seemed to notice when I was met, and I’d come this far, etc. The reading was in an arts centre, and about thirty people had shown up I was told. I always smile to myself when people rue the state of poetry in these islands, with its phoney populism and hype, its pandering to audiences. What events had they been going to? The reality – at least the one I’ve experienced repeatedly – is an edge-of-town arts centre, a small audience listening carefully, a few books sold, a fumbling for receipts. I’d never been so aware of the discrepancy, waiting to go on that evening, a flop sweat staining through my jacket. I can’t recall how much scratch I was doing it for.

If it wasn’t money that got me out of my sickbed, then it must have been stupidity. Sitting there, anxiety began to take hold. I’ve been mildly nervous before giving readings, but this was of a new, suffocating order I’d never experienced before (or since, I’m happy to say). I wondered whether the microphone would pick up the squawks and whines my insides were making. The organizer of the event was introducing me, and she was giving it the full welly. I was a rising star, I was one of the most talented voices to have emerged in recent years, I was hip, I was full of pop-cultural references, I was a crackling performer, I was laddish, and I stepped up to the stage wearing a broad, confident grin and, unbeknownst to my audience, a press-on towel.

‘Ignorance and incuriosity are two very soft pillows.’ French proverb

In the heady Sixties, I was not long in London when I had been mysteriously invited to a dinner party, somewhere in Belgravia. I was seated next to Groucho Marx, whom I can safely say was one of the most reserved and taciturn people I have ever met. Eventually and in answer to some garbled compliment of mine, he asked me what I did. I confessed to being a writer. He recognized that I was Irish arid had a moment of rumination with himself, then called across to his wife, who was seated at another table, to ask the name of the young Irish woman who wrote hilariously about convent life and whom they both so admired. I waited, already basking in the ensuing compliment, but as the fates would have it, the writer they admired was Bridget Brophy.

That glorified term ‘book tour’. It was a department store in Birmingham, a busy Saturday with shoppers coming and going and myself at a table with piles of my novel
Johnny I Hardly Knew You
stacked around me. Mothers, with small children, irate children, restless children, passed by without giving me a second look. No one stopped to buy a book, or even glance. News of this mounting failure must have reached someone in an upper office because presently it was announced on the tannoy that I would be happy to sign copies of my novel, just hot off the press. I waited and looked at people, embarrassed. My pleas were not returned, nor were my prayers. When the hour at last had expired, I got up, withdrew into my coat as into a shell and thanked a young assistant who said, ‘Got to laugh, love, haven’t you.’ At the main door I was accosted by a fellow countryman – inebriated – who enquired if I was me and then with familiar spunk said ‘Would you ever loan us a fiver.’ I am quite proud of my reply – ‘I’ll give it to you because it’s not likely that I’ll be back here again.’

I am attending a performance of my play
Virginia
at the Haymarket Theatre and I am alone. Just before the curtain of the first act, there was a somewhat spry, erotically charged scene between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, played with verve by Maggie Smith and Patricia Connolly. As the lights came up, the two women who were behind me and who had been muttering throughout, yielded to a state of high dudgeon and moral indignation. I had got it wrong. ‘She’s got it quite wrong, Vita Sackville-West was a married woman with children and here we are being told that she is a lesbian, a lesbian,’ one of them said. Her companion shook her head in exemplary disgust and then in imperious tone delivered her coup – ‘But of course she’s got it wrong darling, Edna O’Brien writes for servants, everyone knows that.’ They received the full brunt of my glacial stare and scurried off.

‘Radio and television … have succeeded in lifting the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.’ Nathalie Sarraute

Maybe I’m just being excessively Catholic, but I’ve long suspected there might be a certain, defiant, limited pleasure to be had in the pain of humiliation. After all, embarrassment reminds us as much of our abundant needs as our abject failings, and a writer might do well to listen carefully to the drama of his own requirements. In the true black night of humiliation, in the bloodletting hours, a writer becomes most fully and most properly himself. We might venture to call it the Writer’s Life: the only success you can count on is success on the page; the rest – golden whispers from the F. Scott Fitzgerald handbook of instant triumph – are nothing more than throat-clearing exercises in preparation for the three-act opera of mortification that must follow.

Aged twenty-six, with an acre of smiles and hopes, I was very happy to find myself on my first American book tour. The weather was fine, the
New York Times
liked my book, I had a new suit, and I went from city to city in a mild swoon of short drinks and long evenings, feeling certain the writer’s game was my kind of fun. Everywhere I went, it seemed, there was someone new stepping forward with a kind proposal: write for the
New Yorker,
come on the
Studs Terkel Show,
travel to Butte, Montana, marry my daughter; the days grew long with sustainable pleasures, and I understood it would only be a matter of time before I was asked to give the State of the Union Address. Then my plane and my self-satisfaction broke through the clouds to land in Chicago.

Now, Chicago is a friendly town. There are plenty of college kids and small magazines: they liked the book, and, if you were happily stupid, as I was, you might have allowed yourself to imagine that their enthusiasm described a general mood, that the whole of America indeed was turgid that day with love and recognition for the author of
The Missing
– a non-fictional meditation on the subject of missing persons. At that early stage I was not familiar with the concept of the ‘quiet news day’, therefore, when a producer from
Good Morning Chicago
rang to invite me on, I could only imagine they too were gasping for a bit of the O’Hagan goodness.

The make-up room was quiet at eight a.m. Around the wall they had framed photographs of American comics – Phyllis Diller, I remember, and Sid Caesar, caught laughing in that particular limelight-drunk way I’d been rehearsing since New Jersey – and so I sat in the chair with a perfect sense of belonging as the girl got to work with her orange sponge. A blonde woman was sitting in the next chair along and we caught one another’s eye. She was smiling at me, and something in her experienced face seemed to draw all the light from the lightbulbs surrounding the large mirror. ‘Do you mind if I say something to you?’ she asked.

‘No bother,’ I said.

‘Well. You look like you’ve got a whole lot of God in you,’ she said, her elastic smile seeming quickly to lunge across her cheek to land in a snarl.

‘God?’ I said. ‘Well, it’s been a good week, but …’

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘Definitely God. Like Godliness.’

She put out her hand between the chairs. ‘My name’s Dana Plato,’ she said. ‘You probably know me?’ (Her voice had that semi-plaintive, questing upward swing at the end of sentences, the one Americans deploy so effectively, seeming hurt and demanding at the same time.) ‘I used to be in a big TV show called
Diff’rent Strokes
. It was really huge.’

She was speaking to me now in the mirror.

‘There was a lot of bad luck on the show,’ she said. ‘Everybody on the show, well … all of us, we had bad luck.’

‘Really?’ I said. But I knew fine well who she was.
Diff’rent Strokes
was a feature of my Scottish youth, famous for Gary Coleman, the bizarrely small black guy with the grin and the catchphrase – ‘What you talk’n’ about?’ – and Dana Plato played the wise-cracking girl in his adoptive family. I even knew about the ‘bad luck’: it had been a tabloid story for years, ‘The Curse of
Diff’rent Strokes
’, but I stared at her in the mirror as my face became more orange and her eyes got glittery with memory.

‘I got busted for armed robbery. It was a video store in Vegas,’ she said. ‘It was money, you know? And the other guys on the show … oh, there was guns and more drugs, the whole deal.’

‘God,’ I said.

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘I got out of all that when I became a Christian, and I went to rehab, and now I’m here in Chicago to star in a wonderful show called
Hollywood’s Greatest Moments
.’

I had to consider this for a second. Dana Plato was sitting next to me. She was wired. She was going on the show. With her blonde hair, her video store saga, her Godliness, the new production opening tonight – Jesus Christ almighty! How was any poor bugger supposed to compete?

‘She says you’re a
wrider,
’ said Dana.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I love
wriders
. You’re a famous
wrider,
good heavens.’

‘No. Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve just started …’

‘Gee,’ she said. ‘A famous
wrider
. And we’re on the same show. You must be famous. You’re being cute. They don’t usually have
wriders
on shows like this.’

Several sorts of panic entered my soul at once. Some of those panics are the sort that might cause you to feel pity for me, but others were only shaming, and reveal a native understanding of the machinations of showbusiness self-interest the likes of which might serve to make Diana Ross look like Miss Congeniality. I took a deep breath and asked the most selfish question of my career. ‘On the show: am I following you?’

‘Yes. I think so,’ said Dana.

My heart almost erupted in the lower depths. I could just imagine it out there: first up, Mrs Popular-70s-TV-Show-Insider-Gossip-Rags-to-Riches-Riches-to-Rags-to-Riches-Motherfucking-Video-Store-Robbing-Rehab-Attending-God-Discovering-and-Now-Topping-the-Bill-in-Hollywood’s-Greatest-Moments-Goddam-Arse-Shattering-Showbusiness-Miracle-Survival-Extravaganza-Big-it-Up-to-the-High-Fucken-Heavens-for-Miss-Dana Plato!, thereafter to be immediately followed onstage by Young Mr Who-the-Fuck-is-He-With-His-Motherfucking-Nonentity-Book-and-Giant-British-Forehead-Dishing-Out-All-Sorts-of-Boring-and-Depressing-Crap-About-Missing-People-in-His-Weird-Accent. Jesus Christ! It was going to be a bloodbath. It was going to be the massacre at Glencoe. Dana Plato was showbiz King Kong and I was scantily-clad Fay Wray writhing in her massive, pounding, hairy palm.

I asked her again.

‘Is that right? They have ME following YOU?’

‘Yen. I love your accent. You’re cute.’

Somewhere in the universe, the applause for Dana Plato is still resounding and travelling, and the flow of love from that Chicago audience is still passing star formations that are yet to be observed by the strongest telescopes on earth. To say they loved Dana Plato will not do: they wanted Dana Plato for ever, they wanted the story of Dana Plato to go on and on, and for the message of Dana to sing out and fill all the terrible voids in our lives. They wanted Dana to never stop talking, never stop being, and for every home in America to keep an eternal light shining on their porches for the wise and suffering existence of Dana Plato.

Then I came on. The show was live. The studio set – like all those studio sets in America – looked like a terrifying screech of blue optimism under the yellow lights, and the studio audience was invisible as I took my place on the sofa. The two ‘anchors’ in front of me were the very soul of mild-mannered derision: attentive to nothing but their earpieces, they bent lovingly into the visiting powder brush – it was the ad break – and continued praising the departed Dana.

‘You bet. Just terrific. Super-terrific. You bet.’

My new suit felt old. I felt old. My hair felt old and my limbs felt heavy and my shiny-covered new book seemed dead on the table between us. I looked at the two presenters and made a swift and expensive mental note: they had that look, the anchors, that look that male American television presenters often have, that android appearance, sprayed-in, permatanned, so handsome they’re ugly. ‘Yeah,’ I heard one of them say to the gallery. ‘Keeping it short.’

The adverts were over. I could hear someone count down across the dark studio floor. ‘Okay!’

‘Welcome back. You’re watching
Good Morning Chicago
. Wasn’t Dana Plato just terrific? Well, let’s move on. Maybe you’re watching with your family this morning. We all have families, and our next guest, Andrew O’Hagan, is from Scotland. He is a writer, and he’s just produced a book about his grandfather.’