Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson Read Free Book Online

work for the British Council, and I’d been enjoying the visit until, towards the end, I was pole-axed with a stomach upset. The flight back to Heathrow set the tenor for the next few weeks: panic in public or confined spaces, long spells hunched on a toilet. My GP in Brighton thought it was ‘Delhi belly’, and wouldn’t respond to antibiotics, so didn’t bother prescribing any (I found out, over a year later when my notes had been transferred up to the Lake District, that I’d had Campylobacter with e-coli cysts). I had a few engagements coming up, one of which involved a reading: what to do? For some reason – and I’m at a loss now to account for this – I decided to go ahead. It’d be OK. I’d shut myself down with Imodium. I couldn’t cancel: they’d sent out flyers and everything.
    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
Edna O’Brien
    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