Read Online Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson - Free Book Online Page A
Book: Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Robin Robertson
Ads: Link
were fast asleep.
There is much, much more. Bookshops where, when I enter and suggest signing some books, they look at me as if I’ve got dog’s mess on my shoe. The audience on the
QE2
who sat there in silence and then, after half an hour, told me they were waiting to see the film
French Kiss
with Kevin Kline. An event at Edinburgh where, in front of a large audience, Hunter Davies’ first question to me began: ‘Well, Deborah Moggach, you’re not really up there in the first eleven, are you?’ A charity lunch which had cost me £120 in train fares and where my interviewer not only got my name wrong but called the novel I was going to be talking about
(The Ex-Wives),
‘The XYs’ throughout, even though it was sitting there in front of her. The ‘should I have heard of you’s and the people who say ‘you’re my favourite writer’ and then proceed to quote from someone else’s book.
Novelists have an equivocal relationship with reality, as it is, and on a bad day we can feel as non-existent as the characters we have created – more so, sometimes. In my case this is compounded by the fact that I have never seen anyone reading any of my books, ever. Such a sight has occasionally been spotted, on buses or trains, but can one really believe this? After all, I spend my life making things up.
Still, mortification is something we feed off. We can use it in our work, just as we use everything else. And we know, deep down, that we deserve it. Every writer I know is waiting for the tap on the shoulder and the voice that says: ‘So you really thought you could get away with it?’
‘It matters not what you are thought to be, but what you are.’ Publilius Syrus
Thomas Lynch
It was in Aldeburgh in East Anglia at a poetry festival there where I first got a whiff of delectable celebrity. The airfare paid for by my publisher, the car and driver waiting at the train station, the posters with my photo and name in bold Garamond, the banner over the high street proclaiming the long weekend’s literary events, the welcome from the festival committee and the chummy greetings of the other luminaries – each added a measure to the gathering sense of self-importance.
We all had put our public faces on. There was Paula Meehan from Dublin, Deryn Rees-Jones, a young and comely Liverpudlian, Charles Boyle, then a junior editor at Faber & Faber. I was the American with Irish connections whose day job as a funeral director struck folks as sufficiently odd to merit mention in the local press. The publication, the year before, of my first UK collection of poems meant that I was now on the record and ignored throughout the English-speaking world, my books for sale if unsold in Adelaide and Montreal, Wellington and Edinburgh, New York, Vancouver and London. We were all poets of the book or two-book sort, on the edge of greater greatness or obscurity, to whom the keys to this eastern seaside town had been given in the first week of November 1995 for the 7th Annual Aldeburgh International Poetry Festival. The tide of good fortune to which celebrities become accustomed was rising as we strolled the esplanade, Ms Meehan and me, talking of friends we shared in Ireland and America, the rush of the off-season surf noising in the shingle, the lights coming on in tall windows of the Victorian seafront lodges. At one corner, a pair of local spinsters standing in their doorway called us in to tea and talk of literary matters. They had prepared an elegant spread of finger foods and relevant questions about contemporary poetry and the bookish arts in general. We were, Paula and me, asked for what was reckoned expert testimony on verse and verse makers – the long-deceased and the more recently published. Then there were the panels and interviews, recorded for the local radio stations, and readings held in the Jubilee Hall, a vast brick warehouse that had been turned into a performance space by the installation of amphitheatric seating and
There is much, much more. Bookshops where, when I enter and suggest signing some books, they look at me as if I’ve got dog’s mess on my shoe. The audience on the
QE2
who sat there in silence and then, after half an hour, told me they were waiting to see the film
French Kiss
with Kevin Kline. An event at Edinburgh where, in front of a large audience, Hunter Davies’ first question to me began: ‘Well, Deborah Moggach, you’re not really up there in the first eleven, are you?’ A charity lunch which had cost me £120 in train fares and where my interviewer not only got my name wrong but called the novel I was going to be talking about
(The Ex-Wives),
‘The XYs’ throughout, even though it was sitting there in front of her. The ‘should I have heard of you’s and the people who say ‘you’re my favourite writer’ and then proceed to quote from someone else’s book.
Novelists have an equivocal relationship with reality, as it is, and on a bad day we can feel as non-existent as the characters we have created – more so, sometimes. In my case this is compounded by the fact that I have never seen anyone reading any of my books, ever. Such a sight has occasionally been spotted, on buses or trains, but can one really believe this? After all, I spend my life making things up.
Still, mortification is something we feed off. We can use it in our work, just as we use everything else. And we know, deep down, that we deserve it. Every writer I know is waiting for the tap on the shoulder and the voice that says: ‘So you really thought you could get away with it?’
‘It matters not what you are thought to be, but what you are.’ Publilius Syrus
Thomas Lynch
It was in Aldeburgh in East Anglia at a poetry festival there where I first got a whiff of delectable celebrity. The airfare paid for by my publisher, the car and driver waiting at the train station, the posters with my photo and name in bold Garamond, the banner over the high street proclaiming the long weekend’s literary events, the welcome from the festival committee and the chummy greetings of the other luminaries – each added a measure to the gathering sense of self-importance.
We all had put our public faces on. There was Paula Meehan from Dublin, Deryn Rees-Jones, a young and comely Liverpudlian, Charles Boyle, then a junior editor at Faber & Faber. I was the American with Irish connections whose day job as a funeral director struck folks as sufficiently odd to merit mention in the local press. The publication, the year before, of my first UK collection of poems meant that I was now on the record and ignored throughout the English-speaking world, my books for sale if unsold in Adelaide and Montreal, Wellington and Edinburgh, New York, Vancouver and London. We were all poets of the book or two-book sort, on the edge of greater greatness or obscurity, to whom the keys to this eastern seaside town had been given in the first week of November 1995 for the 7th Annual Aldeburgh International Poetry Festival. The tide of good fortune to which celebrities become accustomed was rising as we strolled the esplanade, Ms Meehan and me, talking of friends we shared in Ireland and America, the rush of the off-season surf noising in the shingle, the lights coming on in tall windows of the Victorian seafront lodges. At one corner, a pair of local spinsters standing in their doorway called us in to tea and talk of literary matters. They had prepared an elegant spread of finger foods and relevant questions about contemporary poetry and the bookish arts in general. We were, Paula and me, asked for what was reckoned expert testimony on verse and verse makers – the long-deceased and the more recently published. Then there were the panels and interviews, recorded for the local radio stations, and readings held in the Jubilee Hall, a vast brick warehouse that had been turned into a performance space by the installation of amphitheatric seating and
Similar Books
