Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame by Robin Robertson Page A

minutes past seven I got up and launched into my first poem. It was met with smiles and glances. They liked me. They really liked me. The second poem was guaranteed to knock them dead. But just before I’d got to the end, one of my fans put up her hand and asked me how long I expected to be. What? The thing was, these students were involved in a study group and had settled in this empty classroom in the hope of finding a little peace and quiet.
    I made my way to the hotel. Nondescript would definitely be too colourful, though the pillowcase had a scent which, to borrow a line of MacNeice, ‘reminded [me] of a trip to Cannes’. At about four in the morning I awoke to find myself vigorously scratching myself here, there and everywhere. Reddish lumps here, there and everywhere. Fleas. I myself hopped out of bed and took the first train back to New York City.

‘Better a quiet death than a public misfortune.’ Spanish proverb
André Brink
    This goes back a good number of years, when I was a young and eager writer (I’m still eager, but not quite so young), anxious to make a good impression, and only too conscious of the value of meeting the right people. I’m not normally all that eager to meet people, right or wrong, but it had been impressed upon me that this was the Right Thing To Do. So when I received the invitation to the birthday party of a Quite Important Publisher in Cape Town, I grimly resolved to go. Not so much for the sake of the birthday man himself as to meet another publisher who, I had been told by friends in the know, was just the man I should entrust my writing future to. I had a newly-completed manuscript, and this was the moment to decide its – and my – fate.
    The evening started off on an uncomfortable note. The writer who had organized the gathering was known as a queer bird, as egocentric as they come; he had arranged it in what was undoubtedly the top hotel in town, and had in fact checked in a few days earlier (on the publisher’s expense account) to make sure that everything would be Just So. He had chosen the menu (which meant all his own favourite dishes), ordered the wine (not so much by label as by price tag), picked two or three people who would ensure, unobtrusively but with great sophistication, that everything would Run Smoothly. When the guests arrived, he was there to look them over from a distance, and once everybody who Mattered had arrived, he haughtily withdrew to his room upstairs where, we learned later, he dined in solitary splendour, leaving the rest of us to our joint and several pursuits.
    I am rather allergic to large gatherings of strangers, and hovered mostly on the periphery of the lively group in which everybody, except me, appeared to know everybody else. I managed to chat to a few people who seemed vaguely familiar, but they soon drifted off to what was, no doubt, more lively or more profitable conversation. I was left to myself, trying with as much enthusiasm as I could muster to enter into a passionate relationship with my glass of wine.
    And then, suddenly, through some cosmic prestidigitation, the man appeared beside me. The Publisher. The One. I could not but recall a rather obvious graffito on the wall of a public toilet in São Paolo which had confidently informed me that, ‘You are holding your future in your hands.’
    I engaged The Man in conversation. Amazingly, he seemed interested in what I had to say. It became animated. All diffidence and anxiety left me. This was Going Well. Only, after a while it began to flag. I noticed that his eyes were wandering. He was looking for a new partner in conversation. I simply had to find something to keep him there, even if just for a few minutes, until the moment was ripe to broach the matter of my manuscript.
    Looking round frantically in search of something to say, I noticed at the far end of the bustling room a rather heartrending sight: a woman on her own, clearly out of her depth, in clothes that simply did