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

microphones and stage lighting. The house was packed for every event, the sale of books was brisk, the lines at the signing tables long and kindly. They were so glad to meet us, so pleased to be a part of such a ‘magical event’. The air was thick with superlative and serendipity, hyperbole and Ciceronian praise. And after every event the poets – myself among them – were invited to a makeshift canteen across the street above the town’s cinema. Teas and coffees, soups and sandwiches, domestic and imported lagers, local cheeses and continental wines were put out for the hardworking and presumably ever hungry and thirsty poets who, for their part, seemed fashionably beleaguered and grateful for the afterglow among organizers and groupies. We were like rock-and-roll stars on tour, clasping our thin volumes and sheaves of new work like the instruments of our especial trade, basking in the unabashed approval of these locals and out-of-towners. It was all very heady and generous.
    A poet far removed from his own country, I felt at last the properly appreciated prophet. For every word there seemed an audience eager to open their hearts and minds. Strangeness and distance made every utterance precious. For while the Irish and Welsh and Scots were very well treated, and the English writers held their own, I was an ocean and a fair portion of continent from home and made to feel accordingly exotic and, for the first time in my life, almost
cool
.
    Home in Michigan a mortician who wrote poems was the social equivalent of a dentist who did karaoke: a painful case made more so by the dash of boredom. But here in England, I was not an oddity, but a celebrity, being ‘minded’ by a team of local literarians, smart and shapely women – one tendering a medley of local farm cheeses, another pouring a cup full of tea, another offering homemade scones, still another – the pretty wife of the parish priest – taking notes as I held forth in conversation with another poet on the metabolics of iambic pentameter and the ‘last time I saw Heaney’ or ‘Les Murray’ or some greater fixture in the firmament. And though I’d been, by then, abstemious for years, the star treatment was an intoxicant. The centre of such undivided attention, I became chatty and fashionably manic, conversationally nimble, intellectually vibrant, generous and expansive in every way, dizzy and dazzling to all in earshot, myself included.
    So it was when I espied in the doorway of this salon a handsome man I recognized as someone I had seen before, I assumed he must be from Michigan, since this was my first time ever in these parts. His dress was more pressed and precise than any writerly type – more American – a memorable face with a forgettable name, possibly a Milfordian on holiday or a fellow Rotarian, or a funeral director whom I’d met at a national convention who, having read about my appearance in one of the English dailies, had paused in his tour to make his pilgrimage to Aldeburgh to hear me read. It was the only explanation. My memory of him, though incomplete, was unmistakable: I knew this pilgrim and not from here.
    I excused myself from the discourse with the churchman’s wife and made my way across the room to what I was sure would be his eager salutations. But he seemed to look right past me, as if he’d come for something or someone else. Perhaps, I thought, he did not recognize me out of my familiar surroundings and funereal garb. The closer I got the more certain I was that he and I shared an American connection. I rummaged through my memory for a bit of a name, or place or time on which to fix the details of our acquaintance.
    ‘How good to see you!’ I said. ‘And so far from home!’
    Fully fed on the rich fare of celebrity, I was expansive, generous, utterly sociable.
    I took his hand and shook it manfully. He looked at me with genteel puzzlement.
    ‘I know I know you but I can’t say from where …’ I said, certain that he