Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (13 page)

I glanced at my watch, and at my reading list. God, I wasn’t even halfway through yet. This was the worst reading I’d ever do in my life. I asked the audience if any of them were dentists, but all I got were grinning shakes of head. I started on another poem, noticing with horror that it was the most s-ridden of them all. Halfway through the piece the tooth came flying out of my mouth and bounced on the floor, rolling under the feet of the fat boy who was in the front row. The momentum of the poem carried me on for a few lines toothless, lisping, until embarrassment made me stop. The audience was in stitches now. One of them cried out, ‘I think it rolled over there!’ Another shouted, ‘There it is! Don’t put your foot down! It’s under your shoe!’

‘Give me my tooth back,’ I croaked, and watched as two squeamish girls recoiled from it, leaving the fat boy to pick it up and bring it to me, shaking his head.

This time I couldn’t fix it in at all. The teacher was on his feet now, telling the audience that because of my dental problem the reading had to be abandoned. As the audience filed out, looking back at me, I was still struggling to get the tooth into my mouth.

‘Abuse is often of service. There is nothing so dangerous to an author as silence.’ Samuel Johnson

My favourite signing story is about Stephen King, who one time signed books in Seattle until his fingers cracked and started to bleed. The publicist who watched this says how she had to hold an ice pack to King’s shoulder the whole time, and the moment he asked for a bandage, a fan in line shouted for some of the blood. At that, all the fans shouted for some of Stephen King’s blood on their books. The bandage never arrived, and after hours of bleeding, King left the event pale and flanked by bodyguards.

My point is, I always thought: ‘What a pussy …’

On tour for my book,
Lullaby,
in September 2002 I had to rethink all that. In Chicago, while I signed books, mobbed for five hours, a young black man stood in my face and shouted, ‘Every generation has to have its Dolph Lundgren …!’

In Austin, Texas, where they give out free beer while you sign, I did my job while a woman stood a foot away from me, asking the bookstore staff, ‘Why should I wait in this long line to get my books signed by
that dickwad
?’

In Phoenix, a stunning transgender woman handed out Vicodins in the crowd. Her name was Margo, but her friends called her ‘the Margo Monster’. She heckled – which was fine and cool – until the college guys around her started yelling for the ‘… fucking bitch to fucking shut the fuck up’.

In Ann Arbor, Michigan, where people slept outside the bookstore to get good seats, I signed books for hours while someone trashed my room at the Sheraton, throwing food all over the bed.

In Washington DC, an angry woman pounded the outside of the store windows. She and her sons couldn’t get inside because of over-crowding. Halfway through the signing, the manager leaned close to say the woman had called the fire marshal for revenge. At that, the police shut down the store.

In Boston, a small mob of people chased the car while my escort drove backwards down an alley, trying to escape. The whole time, as people banged on the car roof with their hands, the escort kept saying, ‘This never happens with John Grisham …’

But in San Francisco …

I’d drunk two Red Bulls and swallowed four Advil, and still I could barely hold a pen. The room was packed with people, everyone sweating in the heat. As the event started, even more people forced their way in. Dressed as waiters, they each had a towel folded over one arm. They each had black eyes, bruised cheeks and split lips. As I started to read, they started throwing dinner rolls at each other. The store assumed I’d hired them for extra drama. I thought the store had.

The first ten minutes, I didn’t acknowledge them because I thought I might be hallucinating from the Advil and Red Bull. Then a waiter vomited clam chowder down the front of the lectern. It was the local Cacophony Society, God bless them.

In Providence, Rhode Island, the bookstore manager put a bag of frozen peas on my shoulder, and it felt like heaven.

At that, Mr Stephen King, I apologize.

‘Competitions are for horses, not artists.’ Béla Bartók

Memoir Included in the Report to the Investigative Committee on Literary Crimes

The only possible attitude one can have to literary prizes is that they are worthless appendages, gratifying to collect should one be lucky, not to be confused with literary merit but thank you, anyway, and this is the number of the appropriate bank account. I, Viktor Blobchinsky, contemplated the fact that my name had appeared on the shortlist for the O. Telsit prize, therefore, with considerable scepticism. It would be nice to have a weekend in Moscow. It would be good to get out of Omsk, where it was currently minus thirty-five degrees. Perhaps Peta Citanje, the birdwatching poetess, would be there. She too was a candidate. It later transpired she had prudently absented herself to Turkmenistan.

Following detailed instructions, I took a plane to our traffic-befouled capital, and turned up to read ten minutes’ worth of poems at the Ada Emil Theatre in Gonlinsit, a suburb of Moscow not otherwise recorded on maps. The reading would take place on the first evening; on the second evening the prize would be awarded in the grand salon of the New Kremlin Library. Usually I looked forward to meeting my fellow poets, exchanging the time of day, telephone numbers, gossip. It was not quite like that, this time. A Damoclean sword hung over the proceeding, well illuminated, in the form of a blue
toile,
with the legend ‘O.Telsit Prize’ upon it in yellow cursive, and a fuzzy photo of the great Oskar himself, his beaky visage peering down at posterity. No doubt he disapproved of us. But there we were anyway, gathered round each other like dogs in the park, exhibiting classic symptoms of cordiality and paranoia:
the poets
. I recalled my peasant mother’s dictum:
always show grace under fire my son
. In fact, the word that kept pounding through my brain was
run
.

Libra Cernow, the organizer, instructed me on the importance of timekeeping. ‘
Ten minutes only, Blobbo
’ she instructed me, Although I do not mind the driver of the number 29 tram calling me Blobbo, I resent this affectionate soubriquet being used by an apparatchik of the Committee of Letters. There was no room in the tight schedule, however, for protest. There were ten of us altogether. One hundred minutes of quivering poetry voices. I slurped down some of the Red Dragon (a fiery, Georgian wine) served in the bar of the Ada Emil and wondered whether it had not been laced with some homicide-inducing substance. I was itching to slip round the corner to buy an axe. Certainly I was not anxious to perform.

Inside the theatre, we discovered the readings were to take place on the stage set of the Nikolai Gogol play
Dead Souls,
currently in production at the Ada Emil Theatre. This stage set resembled an exploded diagram of a Russian log house, its floorplanks sagging, its tables leaning, and all around it, rearing brokenly up at the edges, black sharks’ teeth, as if a gargantuan mouth were about to swallow the entire construction. An alarming tilt had been applied to the stage floor, so that walking on it one felt one was on the deck of a ship that was about to capsize. One by one, my colleagues skipped or tripped (one actually fell) across the skewed living-room stage to a microphone that refused to be lowered or raised, and read their poems. A reverse alphabetical order of performance had been dictated by the Central Committee, so that I, Blobchinsky, would have to wait ninety nail-biting, Red-Dragon-swilling minutes before my turn would come. Peta Citanje being absent, her work was read by Janos Inkslane, a Hungarian hack from the Writer’s Association. Inkslane reminded me of Hlestakov the trickster, a character in another play by Gogol. With limelight-hogging indifference to the plight of those who were waiting to follow him, he over-confidently overran. One hundred and twenty minutes. One hundred and thirty. I kept revising my appearance back. Conscious of the silent auditorium behind me, I began to speculate that the listless, capacity crowd was in fact constituted of unemployed actors who had failed to get a part in the current production of
Dead Souls
. They should not have failed. It was a superb performance.

When reading poems to an audience, I like to keep eye-contact with it, notice when it has fallen asleep or has started to do the
Pravda
crossword (even help it in that enterprise should the size of the public be sufficiently small to justify such interactivity – as is often the case). Tottering across the alarming stage to the microphone, however, I suspected the entire house had succumbed to slumber. The house lights were dimmed, and a blinding spot was trained on my face, so I could not confirm this. The combination of Red Dragon and stage-tilt were also ruinous to my composure. But I carefully placed my open fob-watch on the lectern. The exactness of my timekeeping would be a reprimand to the self-indulgent. At the very least my performance would wake people in time for the last tram back to town. But who were they, that invisible audience? Could it be that, asphyxiated in their seats in lifeless simulacrums of the poetry-loving, they were merely paid extras? Could it be the Committee of Letters had engaged them to convince foreign journalists Russian literature was alive and well? To convince
us
Russian literature was alive and well?

I took a deep breath, and began to recite the interesting lines that Gogol had written for my presentation. No, no, no! Where were my own poems? I riffled through the little pile of books in the hope of finding a poem that had been written by me. Once or twice I found something that bore a resemblance to a poem I had perhaps composed in my own person. Quite often, the poems seemed to be the interior monologue of a character called, in the Irish fashion, himself. What a subtly drawn portrait that was! Not only was this Blobchinsky full of fraud, guile, melancholy, Red Dragon, and unreasonable hope, he was also a grotesque nullity who brought tears of laughter into the eyes of the speechless audience. When the insincere applause came, he staggered off. Blobchinsky, the poet. A man who had simply renounced poetry. Who had written it and then denounced it and then denounced himself and been shot. Taken out and lined up against the wall of the Ada Emil Theatre and shot. Bang. Not a tragic character. By this time the audience was recovering its departed spirits. How rarely did it get to see a one hundred per cent holy Russian fool?

On the Monday following these dismal histrionics, I spent the morning in bed. From the copy of
Pravda
which had slithered under my hotel room door, I began to fashion little pipe people. I then drew simulacrums of the faces of the Telsit Prize judges on each one and placed them in my cloak. I now had the judges, Beria, Malenkov, Krill and Arsine Bone – all of them – in my pocket. Ho ho ho. At noon, I raised myself up, walked to a local ironmonger’s and bought a short-handled axe. Then I returned to my hotel room. The telephone was ringing. What could that be? Notification that I had in fact won and would be awarded the prize that evening? Trembling, I picked up the receiver and heard the distant voice of Plumpchov assuring me that my book
Nicaragua
was certain to carry off the laurels. I put down the receiver. The phone rang again. It was Dobrilovic. My book
Argentina
was sure to win. Just his little joke. But I, Blobbo, had been in the system long enough to know when I was being set up. Had I not, myself, sent thousands of innocents to an early grave? Well, no, actually. Although it felt like it. More phone calls. Half the Committee of Letters. Their egregious friendliness finally managed to dupe me, sweetly bolstering my self-esteem. Should I leave the axe behind? I was halfway down the grubbily-carpeted stairs when I changed my mind, went back, and secreted it in my sleeve.

The New Kremlin Library’s grand entrance might have been designed as a reproach to the meekness of poetry. I was late. A frosty Libra Cernow attempted to get me to deposit my bearskin hat, my thick sheepskin cloak, with the cloakroom girls. The press were waiting to take everybody’s photograph. Well, why did they not simply wait to photograph the winner when he, or she, had won? Why such a display of inclusiveness, when the mechanism was designed to propel us forcibly out of the entrance we had just been ostensibly welcomed in by? I refused. The beaming attendant who took my invitation card recoiled gratifyingly from proximity to my cloak. I returned his beam. He led me to a concourse alive with the drone of talent-assassinating gossip, and I stood for a moment contemplating the vivacious body language of the assembly. It suggested lustful participation at a mass hanging. My photograph was taken. A battery of flashes exploded. Did they have film in their cameras? I hailed many people by their wrong name. Waiters who found the quickest way to offload their little trays was to cruise in my vicinity ferried me glass upon glass of
Skrimskaia
. This was a very different crowd from the night before: literary editors, cultural bureaucrats, publishers, critics – people who would not be seen dead at a mere poetry reading.

Executions were another matter.

I looked around at my fellow-poets. It was pitiful. I could see by their glowing faces that they thought they had got away with something, that they had pulled something off. One look at the Central Committee should have told them otherwise. The moment came. Angelica Krill, the bulky Chairman of the Judges, rose to her feet and began to read out assessments of the candidates’ books. Her speech developed horrid momentum. Every warm sentiment contained a barb, each laudatio a dagger. I watched the apprehensive faces of my fellow literati, ignominious mugs that we all were, with a mixture of hostility, contempt and pity. For myself, I reserved those same emotions – only twice times over. Krill was reading out the list of names of the candidates as if they were signed confessions. We had simply lined ourselves up, had we not? We had wept and testified that yes, yes we wanted to be hanged, now please. We had imputed all manner of disgusting literary crimes to ourselves. I learned from the prune-like lips of Krill that my own writing ‘taught us what it feels like to be a man’ – slanderous balderdash, if ever I’d heard it. The roll call was complete, all the names had been read out, only one name had not had a reservation attached to it. I could see the lugubrious Arsine Bone smirking. Of course! His protégé! The well-known name of the short Kazakhstan informer was pronounced the winner, a man who had plea-bargained himself into freedom and sacrificed everyone of his comrades as he did so. As soon as the extent of this treachery became apparent to me, I felt I was falling, and the New Kremlin Library was really a vast literary mauseoleum into which poets like myself would forever be poured and concreted over whilst a small orchestra played patriotic music, flashbulbs popped and
Skrimskaia
was swigged by the cheerful.