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

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
Andrew O’Hagan
    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