Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (9 page)

Next morning, the bright-eyed, spiky-eared, reddish-brown farm dog, the farmer’s only friend and colleague – was nowhere to be found.

‘Hay is more acceptable to an ass than gold.’ Latin proverb

Writing genre fiction is a calling more prone to humiliation than most fields of creative endeavour. Yes, we face the same rejections from agents and publishers, the mortification of being asked if we write under our own names, the shame of events where only two people turn up. But we also face the indignity of being one of a bunch in the review section’s crime round-up. And possibly worst of all, the perennial question: ‘Have you ever thought of writing a proper novel?’

You’d think after fifteen years, nearly twenty novels and a slew of awards I’d be inured to it. But it still stings to be treated like the unfortunate member of the family who’s a bit mentally defective.

Picture the scene. A Sunday morning at one of the country’s most prestigious literary festivals. To protect the guilty, let’s call it Wheat-on-Rye. I had crawled out of bed at the crack of dawn to drive myself and a fellow crime writer from Manchester to the middle of nowhere to take part in a panel with a literary novelist who had written a novel that ‘subverted the conventions of the crime novel’. We’re used to this sort of thing. It usually translates as, ‘I’m a literary novelist, so it doesn’t matter if my detective procedure bears no relationship to reality and my plot has more holes than Blackburn, Lancashire, because I am writing deep and meaningful prose.’

With some misgivings, we settled down in front of a packed house. The moderator’s first question was to my colleague. ‘So, you write about a police officer. Do you actually spend time with real police officers to find out about their work?’ Next question to me. ‘You’ve written about a psychological profiler. You must have had to do a lot of research to find out how they do the job.’ And to the literary writer? ‘You’re clearly very concerned with language and style. What made you want to experiment with form in this way?’

And so it continued. Patronizing questions to the crime writers that allowed little or no discussion of our craft or the wider ideas that inform our work. No suggestion that we might be writing something that went beyond the crossword puzzle with the neat resolution. And fawning questions about literature and society to the literary novelist (actually a rather nice man who had the grace to look embarrassed about the whole thing …).

By the end of the panel, I was inches away from physical assault on the moderator, who was only saved by the Q&A session. The audience at least understood that crime fiction as it is currently practised is light years away from Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, and asked the sort of questions a reasonable moderator might have thought of. By the end of the hour, my blood pressure had almost reached normal levels.

But as usual, just when you think it’s safe to go in the water, something comes up and bites you on the bum. We were whisked away from our tent to the Green Room. As we entered, our festival escort drew in her breath sharply. There, sitting round the central coffee table, was a group that included Stephen Fry, Michael Ignatieff and Steven Berkoff. Clearly, we couldn’t be allowed to contaminate such an intellectual gathering. So with breathtaking chutzpah, she steered the scuzzy crime writers away from the heart of the room to a little table in the corner where we could wait for our fee without tainting the high tone of the gathering.

Really, I was astonished that we were paid our fee in champagne. Given the flavour of the rest of the morning I fully expected a crate of brown ale.

‘A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.’ Samuel Johnson

The writer is on leg four of his seven-leg book tour of the USA. He has done New York, Washington DC and Boston and is about to head for Cleveland, Ohio, when he receives the bad news. His latest, ambitious, big novel has received a lengthy, sniffy review in the Sunday book section of the
New York Times
. Even on the telephone he can sense the awful plunge in morale at his American publishers: the gloom is palpable, bitter disappointment practically drips from the telephone receiver. For a foreign writer in America there is really only one review that counts: the
New York Times
Sunday book supplement. If that’s bad, to put it bluntly, then everything else – including all the other good reviews this book has had – is a waste of time and such is the implicit message relayed to him by his suicidal editor. The writer thinks to himself – as he boards the plane to Cleveland, Ohio – that, if indeed this is the case, then what the hell is he doing on a book tour across the USA? Why is he flying thousands of miles to Cleveland and Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles? Why doesn’t he just go home? The writer was me; the date was 1988 and the book was my novel
The New Confessions,
a near 500-page fake autobiography of a Scottish film-maker who throughout his long life is driven to try and film
The Confessions
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

At Cleveland airport I am met by my ‘escort’, whom we shall call ‘Phyllis’. Phyllis is the wife of a lawyer or a dentist or a doctor. She loves books and she drives a big expensive car. As the writer travels across America he is met in each city by reproductions of these benign matrons who will shepherd him from hotel to book-signing to radio station to lunch with a journalist. They are kind and well-meaning: the relationship is of aunt to favourite, talented nephew (or niece). They are rooting for you. Phyllis checks me into my anonymous hotel in downtown Cleveland. I say I will order from room service for my evening meal. She runs through my schedule: an early rise for a radio show then to a TV station for a breakfast show, then a tour of bookshops before I catch a midday plane for San Francisco, or is it Seattle? See you tomorrow at 6.00 a.m. Phyllis says, and then adds that she’s started my book and is loving it.

I order a club sandwich from room service and drink steadily from the mini-bar while watching some TV. I think about going down to the hotel bar; I think about going out for a stroll; I decide to stay in my acceptable room. Literature? – I’m in it for the glamour.

In the early morning sunshine Phyllis drives me through Cleveland’s outer suburbs. I get glimpses of the enormous inland sea that is Lake Erie. Every house we pass seems to possess three cars and a boat of some description. This radio station appears to be miles away.

Eventually we find it – like a clapboard bungalow with a thirty-foot aerial set at the apex of its roof. The interviewer is a genial, bearded man. In between MOR standards he asks me questions about the Royal Family and London’s notorious pea-souper fogs. He makes great play with the fact that I have the same name as the actor who was TV cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. He also uses me to introduce the ad breaks. ‘Do you like potato chips, William?’ ‘I do,’ I confess, ‘but we call them “crisps” in England.’ He repeats the word several times, rolling the ‘r’. “Then I think you’d like these American potato chips, too.’ In the course of our interview I similarly endorse Shake ‘n’ Vac carpet cleaner (‘Do your carpets ever get dirty, William?’) and a brand of motor oil.

That went great, Phyllis enthuses, as we drive to the TV station. Here in the green room I am offered coffee and muffins and am introduced to the other breakfast guests: an enormous young man, whose back is the size of a kitchen table and whose neck is thicker than his head, and a little girl in a pink dress who’s accompanied by her awestruck parents. The little girl goes on first, followed by me, then the giant.

By now I’m on a form of auto-pilot and am strangely calm as an assistant producer tells me that the little girl has won some high-school spelling bee and that the giant is a foot-balling superstar from a local college team, the Spartans or the Mavericks – I don’t take it in. ‘Could you tell us a little about your book, William?’ the producer asks, pen poised. I decide not to mention Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

I greet my hosts on the stage as we wait for the weather report to be read and the little girl is led off. ‘Isn’t she cute?’ Very cute, I concur. The male and female hosts look impossibly healthy, creaselessly neat. ‘You know you have the same name as Hopalong Cassidy?’ the man says. ‘You got your horse tied up outside?’ I laugh along with them both.

We’re on air. ‘Our next guest today is British writer William Boyd with his latest book
True Confessions
. Morning, William.’ I say good morning back. ‘So, William,’ the woman presenter asks me, ‘tell me all about your Princess Diana.’

That went great, Phyllis enthuses, as we drive to the first of three bookshops I will sign stock in. I duly meet the earnest, amiable booksellers who sympathize about the
New York Times
review (‘Shame about the
Times
’) but who congratulate me on my morning TV appearance. Everyone agrees it’s great publicity. Great publicity for the British Royal Family, I reflect, as I sign a dozen books in each shop before Phyllis says we’re running late and had better race for the airport.

I assure Phyllis she doesn’t need to check me in, that I can manage the task myself, unsupervised. So we make our farewells at Departures. ‘Oh my God, I almost forgot!’ she says reaching into the glove compartment for a copy of my book. I think of the cities up ahead waiting for me and I want to go home. ‘For Phyllis,’ I write, knowing it’s not her fault, ‘thanks for everything.’

‘The artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.’ André Gide

Search childhood for those undying harvests of humiliation and faithfully they come scuttling back. In weary tones of classroom despair, the careless arrows are still cast,
V. Poor
inscribed a thousand times. ‘You wrote a poem,’ a voice calls down the table while teatime sausage-rolls are passed along the rows. Surreptitiously written, surreptitiously delivered to I.G. Sainsbury, more man than boy, editor of the subversive magazine. ‘How did you know?’ I whisper beneath the clatter of feet as we leave the dining hall, and learn that Sainsbury needed something to light his cigarette with.

Employment nurtured more of the same. But when the years begin to pile up, mockery loses its sting, as if it has done with you at last; and matters less, then not at all. What follows now should have been a mortification, yet wasn’t when it happened.

I received a letter from the Arts Council informing me that I had been awarded a literary prize and binding me to secrecy until after the presentation. In due course there was a telephone call from the Arts Council’s public relations department, with details of a few publicity wheezes that might be put in place then too. I explained that I wasn’t good on publicity but agreed to give a reading. This was to be an item in an arts festival which by coincidence would be in full swing in and around London at the same time. The Thames was mentioned when I asked and I thought of Marlow, or Hampton perhaps.

It turned out to be neither. On the evening after the award ceremony my wife and I met a young man from the festival and an attractive lady from the Arts Council in the hall of Durrant’s Hotel, where we all waited for the taxi that was to take us to our rendezvous. ‘And where exactly is that?’ I asked and was told it was the Thames Flood Barrier. Agitated telephone calls were made when our taxi didn’t arrive. When it still didn’t we picked one up on the street.

We crawled through heavy traffic, taking longer about it than our minders had intended. Meditating on which bridge to cross, the driver took the opportunity to enquire if we were certain that the Flood Barrier was where we wanted to go, since at this time of night there mightn’t be much doing out there. We reassured him and he drove patiently on, identifying for us the impressive riverside buildings when at last we reached them. In time we left Southwark behind, and Bermondsey and Deptford. A sign to Greenwich looked promising, but stylish Greenwich wasn’t for us. We’d been on the road for more than an hour when we turned out of the traffic, into docklands that for the most part were pitch-dark.

‘Well, now you’ve got me,’ the taxi-driver confessed, his headlights sweeping over a vast concrete nowhere, roadless and signless. ‘I have a telephone number,’ the young man said.

As he spoke, two figures were suddenly lit up, gazing at our approach. They were schoolgirls, who asked us when we stopped if we were Gilbert and George. We said we weren’t and they despondently wandered off into the dark again.

We drove on, windows down, all of us peering out. ‘That could be a telephone box,’ someone said, and it was. We drew up beside it and watched the young man prodding in his number and then waiting to be answered. We heard a very faint ringing that ceased when he put the receiver down. We passed this on to him when he returned to the taxi and he hammered on the door of what in the glow from the telephone-box appeared to be a shed. Nothing happened, so we all got out except the taxi-driver.

A touch of fog had developed and we made our way cautiously through it, aware of architectural shapes that were not quite buildings, and of silence and the rawness of the air. As we turned to go back to the taxi, shadows moved in the far distance and, while we watched, three tall men materialized. They were carrying soundboxes and other electrical equipment; behind them there was a woman with two plates of sandwiches. Someone had seen a car driving about, she said.

We followed them and the taxi followed us. The doors of a building that had eluded us before were unlocked, lights came on and we went in. Chairs were arranged in rows but no one was sitting on them. ‘What’s going to happen now?’ the taxi-driver wanted to know, keen for more adventure. He was surprised when I said I was going to read a story but, obliging as ever, he sat down in the front row with some of the sandwiches. Then a boy and his father joined him. Reading it, I made the story rather shorter than it was.