I'm rummaging through my books looking for a book to counteract the effects of the book I'm reading. The idea is that I'll dutifully endure as many pages as I can of the one and switch to the other as needed but half the time I don't bother to switch back. I return with three, none of which I thought of before I retrieved them. The first is a thick volume, the collected stories and novels of Saki. According to the inscription, it was given as a gift to "Kate" in 1989. Set that aside for later. The next is a cult writer's essay collection, bought on impulse years ago. After sampling a few pages, it'll probably be donated. The last, also an impulse buy, is called Mortification (2003). It's an anthology of writings on the title theme. Nearly every one takes the reader to the dark side of the literary life.
The editor, Robin Robertson, came up with the idea thinking back on the day he was doing a poetry reading for an audience of six at a bookstore when he looked up to see some football hooligans (soccer enthusiasts) pressing their bare asses to the window. Inspired, he sent forth a request to writers to tell their own such stories, publicly, for inclusion in a book. Some replied. Of those who didn't, Robertson required no explanation.
The form I'm most interested in these days, as a writer, allows for a piecemeal read. I keep my favorites close at hand to page through upon waking, as a change of pace from another book, during meal preparations, in the bathroom. The entries in Mortification are the right length for it, as short as a couple of pages and no longer than seven, and while the book isn't essential, not what I'd keep closest at hand, I'd have it around to pick up now and then.
The benefit of multiple contributors is variety: voices (in Mortification, mostly Western European and North American white men and women), approaches, pain levels. The entries I placed an asterisk next to in the table of contents, to indicate the best, outnumber the entries I crossed out. And since almost everyone writes about real mental bruises and scars, the book isn't an empty or frivolous read.
Irvine Welsh, awarded an asterisk for what is by far the most revolting entry, tells two stories, with an important distinction tucked in between:
This type of embarrassment is intense, but relatively routine. The big problem in trying to dredge up a really mortifying memory is that there are so many and you suspect that you've repressed the best (or worst) ones.
Routine embarrassment and scalding, traumatizing embarrassment. The book contains both.
Common experiences can be gleaned. Interviewers on radio and TV shows who get the writer's name wrong, couldn't care less about the book being promoted, look past the writer to a worthy guest. Although William Boyd, a novelist, has one encounter that tickles rather than rankles me:
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 "er." "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.
Maggie O'Farrell, on the other hand, has more tolerance than should be expected of anyone for a radio show host she overhears loudly complain about booking "bloody nobodies" like her. Leave, I scribbled in the margin. She stays and he demands to know where she is. Insult him, then leave. She stays and the producer asks weakly whether she's heard. She says uh huh and stays. Stay long enough to insult him on the air, then leave. The show starts. As he introduces her, the host gets her name wrong.
2021: Podcasts, hosted by readers and recorded for a niche audience of readers, have no doubt mercifully reduced such encounters. Also 2021: Social media and everything that comes with it, the least of which is mortification.
Then there are sparsely attended readings. The luckier ones, it seems, greet an audience composed entirely of a few friends and family members, a fan or two, a sympathizer. But it's the unlucky ones, like Paul Muldoon, who make me laugh most. He goes to the trouble of traveling to a remote university campus. The professor who scheduled his appearance, he discovers, isn't there, having been indisposed after a three-week bender. No one with any serious commitment to the guest has replaced him, so the promotion for the reading consists of a single flyer posted the day before it's to take place, already "obscured by an 'Anxious? Depressed? Suicidal?' poster." And though the university has booked him a hotel room, no arrangements have been made to pay him. Nevertheless, Muldoon forges on, gets lunch, and goes where the reading is to be held. Some students enter and take a seat at the back. The time for him to read arrives. Without introduction, he gets up and begins. His audience seems to like the first poem. He starts reading another poem when one of the students interrupts to ask how long he's going to be. It turns out his "audience" picked that room to study, thinking it was unoccupied. Muldoon travels some distance without getting paid to read for no one. And there's one more disaster awaiting him.
Naturally there are some words on alcohol. A poet named David Harsent most vividly illustrates why, telling the story of a day spent drinking, leading up to a group reading at a bookstore. Hammered, he orders everything on the menu at an Indian restaurant and consumes it all. Later on, after he finishes his reading, he takes a seat in the audience and quickly falls asleep, snoring. Then he rouses himself to fight through the audience to get to the only bathroom in the store. Harsent shows off his music producer's ear for the many sounds of vomiting:
There can, I know, be discreet upchucks of the cough-and-gob variety, or even the girlish whisper-and-slip. This is not either of those, nor is it the twenty-gauge-shuck-and-reload or even the storm-drain-rib-racker. No. This is volcanic. This is a fully orchestrated, bass-pedal-active, hog-hollerin', boot-soles-to-bog-bowl, ten-gallon tsunami.
Harsent is among the survivors. He continues drinking.
Because the book prompts one to reflect on personal mortifications, because the tone is casual, stories related as if over dinner, and out of fairness, I share some gems from my own archive.
After finishing the book, it now strikes me as odd that the last reading I did, close to a decade ago, seems downright triumphant by comparison. San Francisco. An audience of about thirty people, few of whom I knew, no one I knew well. The woman who informed me of when I was supposed to read didn't make eye contact as she spoke. Waiting, idly flipping through a book, listening to the chatter and clatter of the bar, I felt alone and awkward but no more than usual. It wasn't my first reading and, with preparation, public speaking isn't so bad. My introduction, improvised, more or less, got laughs. My piece got laughs. Afterward, I was told some of those in attendance actually wanted to read the rest of the little literary magazine we were promoting. Success. Well, I only had one drink.
Not so on the day I took the train to Berkeley to watch the latest Jim Jarmusch movie, Paterson, at the United Artists theater on Shattuck. It's about a poet living in the city of Paterson, in the state I now call home. I didn't like the movies of his I'd seen previously but I was intrigued that he made one about a poet, an unpublished poet at that. It was as good as the reviews made it out to be. Perhaps most of all I admired Jarmusch's skill at telling the potentially boring story of how a writer gets material from mundane surroundings and incidents. The mundane, for some synonymous with banality and vacuousness, can so easily blur past, unseen. One may come to believe that there's nothing of value in it, nothing to see, and nothing lived. That's a mistake. The real problem is whether one cares to see what's there to see or not. Life, the full scope of life, is within reach, thriving, and the mind is perfectly free to roam beyond the self and its perceived interior boundaries to graze. An astonishing gift. In Paterson, the viewer follows a writer as he uses that gift to transmute experience (which, with proper attention, becomes a message to decode) into humble lines. Without sentimentality, without romance. With affection, with mischievous humor. Feeling invigorated, I thought I'd extend my trip by stopping at a bar located a couple of blocks from the university for a drink before heading back to Castro Valley. As I settled on a stool, I remembered this was the place, years before, where I was having a conversation with my brother about literature. While speaking, I'd noticed a waitress and a bartender glancing at us, stepping closer, obviously eavesdropping. I became uncomfortable, worried about what I was saying. I stammered. The waitress and bartender exchanged dubious looks. The waitress crowed: "Oh, he's just drunk!" I hadn't taken a single sip of my drink. (Routine.) I ordered a beer and finished a long article about Albert Woodfox. A woman sat a couple of stools over. Soon a man walked up to her and introduced himself. He asked her what she was reading. This led to them revealing that they were both writers. Shakespeare came up because she was a playwright, I think. The man said, with excessive cheer, that he'd been working on his first novel for over twenty years. He proceeded to summarize the plot in detail. She listened patiently. Closing the magazine and finishing my drink, I thought: What lies behind this mundane scene? A continuation of the writing theme of my day, that much was clear. But what message was I receiving? Finally, the woman climbed off the stool and said she had to go. They exchanged farewells. I ordered another drink and started reading a novel. The bar was becoming more crowded. I sipped and thought about Paterson and Woodfox and writing. Twenty years. I doubted he'd ever finish. Maybe his novel existed merely as something to talk about. Putting my glass down, I spilled beer on the page of the novel I was trying to read. The bartender and I looked down at the huge brown drop. (Routine.) Time to go. I pressed a napkin to the wet spot, finished the rest of my drink, and headed for the station. To my credit: I had no trouble getting there and stepping aboard the correct train. I took a seat in the middle of the car and fell asleep clutching my backpack. I awoke with a jolt as the train neared my transfer point, Bay Fair. And I started vomiting on my backpack. So often Miguel and I had exchanged BART horror stories. Now I was the story! (Scalding!) The train came to a stop and I jogged out, my backpack held under my chin like a tray to catch any additional blown chunks. Across the platform, down the stairs, to the bathroom. And I blacked out again. I woke up to pounding on the door and a man's incoherent shouting. I was lying next to the toilet, in the fetal position, on the filthy floor of a BART station bathroom, with its flickering fluorescent light, clutching my vomit-covered backpack. By then I was lucid enough to realize this was a low point for me. (Traumatizing.)
Another distinction: Earned mortification, such as when you overestimate your ability to handle strong drink and pay the price, and unearned mortification, a price paid for getting out of bed and facing the world. (Suddenly I remember the terse phrase "nothing comes free.") Discussing the book's subject at length with Miguel, he shared one of his gems. A high school kid spread his arms to hug a girl. As she approached, a seagull shit on his chest. The girl fled, screaming. I like to imagine he stood there for a while with his arms outspread. A symbol. But in the book, the embarrassments that come through no fault of one's own, that can't necessarily be anticipated, feel more like stabs. Bitterness is also common. The genre writer repeatedly looked down upon. The invitation to an event that turns out to be worse than a waste of time, a series of petty humiliations. And bitterness is magnified by what's expected. Some writers harbor thoughts of fame and fortune. Some, though, simply expect better, after the work put into writing the novel or stories or poems, than indifference or contempt.
I felt sympathy but no shock. How many readers are there? And among those, how many are truly devoted to reading - reading more, reading deeper, reading with aesthetic appreciation, reading to refresh memory, reading to be shaped, reading to make the most of one's capacity for absorbing the world, reading because it's inextricable from the way they lead their lives? I've met a startling number of writers or people who aspire to be writers. I've met many people who find it notable or strange or unsettling that I read. I've met very few readers. And among those few who do build a life around reading, one inevitably runs into snobs, cavilers, creeps, touts, maniacs, and their worshippers, types that don't exactly fill one with confidence that they know how to read at all. So, presented with stories of indifference and contempt for the writer, not just bad writers or troublemaking writers but any writer, I think: Of course. That's closer to the rule than the exception. And the book doesn't cover other aspects of the literary life, like "creative writing" programs or the academy or publishing, each of which could have a book of mortifications.
On the other side: Hope. The writing matters, whether there's anyone in the audience or not. The reading matters even more. And there are and will be true readers. Sometimes they manage to find each other, on or off the page, and laugh.
