Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame (20 page)

I left the scene as quickly as I could and walked round the stadium to compose myself. On my return to our drinking camp, an irate pal asked me where I had been. I explained that there was a big queue in the toilets. At this point I really thought that I’d got out of jail. I had been embarrassed – brutally, shamefully embarrassed – but I’d never see those people again in my life. We’d get back to my flat where I’d change into fresh keks before going out again and this time I’d switch from lager to Guinness. Just as I was feeling a little bit pleased with myself, I heard a shout go up, quite close: ‘Hey, there’s Shitey-Pants!’ It was the Weedgies who’d witnessed my plight in the toilets, now laughing again and pointing me out to their pals. They gathered round and with great delight started filling my friends in with the details. For years, the story of my Wembley humiliation was a favourite amusement in several London and Edinburgh bars. Aye, that one still haunts me. One day I’ll write about it …

‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually informing – and filling some other Body.’

Keats, letter to Richard Woodhouse, Oct. 27, 1818

It was early 1977, a few months after I’d started lecturing in English at Hull, and I was trying to revive the university’s Poetry Society, which had sunk into one of its occasional lethargies. I’d asked some big names to come and give readings, and most of them had said yes – mistakenly thinking the time and trouble of getting to the campus would be rewarded by an encounter with Larkin. And (as you do) I’d also invited some less well-known people. Carol Rumens, then near the start of her writing life, was one of these; I’d never met her, but I liked her work and thought she’d add some range and surprise to the series. I arranged to collect her off the train from London, thinking there’d be no difficulty about this. The journey was long but straightforward, and I’d be able to recognize her, having seen her author photo.

So there I was at 6.30 at Hull Paragon scanning the faces as her train pulled in. And there was Carol, slightly taller than I expected, wearing a pair of glasses she’d obviously bought since the photo-shoot, carrying an overnight case and a shoulder-bag which presumably held her poems. I greeted her, explained we had time to get something to eat before the reading began, and led her towards the taxi rank. She looked slightly bemused but only slightly, and didn’t say much. That was okay. I’d heard she was shy, and anyway I was the one who had to do the talking; she needed to compose herself. ‘Where will I be staying?’ was her only question, and I explained there was a hotel just across the road from the university.

It seemed like a good idea to avoid much mention of the reading – that might make her nervous, and would in turn feed her shyness. So we chatted about ordinary things – the journey, the bizarrely beautiful name of Hull’s station, the city – and eventually took our seats in an Indian restaurant. Here our small talk started to run out and poetry became more or less unavoidable. Whom did she know? What kind of stuff did she like? Evidently not much. In fact, judging by her mumbles as she fiddled with the menu and then her specs and then the menu again, the whole subject of poetry was not one she enjoyed. Oh well. ‘I too dislike it,’ I told her, meaning to be affable, and explained that the previous week we’d had Geoffrey Hill over from Leeds. He didn’t seem to like much either.

‘Geoffrey Hill?’

‘Yes, you know, Carol. Geoffrey Hill.
King Log. Mercian Hymns
.’

Her menu was on the table now, and she leaned back in her chair. ‘What makes you think I’m called Carol?’

‘It’s your name, isn’t it?’

‘My name’s Natalie.’

‘But I thought…’

‘I know what you thought.’

‘But I didn’t … And anyway, you didn’t have to…’

I fled. Apologised and fled. Back to the station, and the sight of the real Carol leaning against a pillar, waiting for me – the Carol who was just the height I expected, and still had the same pair of specs she’d worn for her photograph. I didn’t have the heart to explain why I was so late collecting her – at least not then, as she was about to give a reading, the very time when she would want to feel confident, most securely
herself
. But I did tell her later, and said I’d felt, well, mortified. She forgave me. As for Natalie, who knows?

‘When there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.’ Samuel Johnson

Philosophers have thought about the difference between shame and guilt and about the difference between a shame culture and a guilt culture. For my part, I haven’t been able to get beyond the untutored view that shame is likely to be a result of the public exposure of an act experienced by the actor as wrong, but that the two states are often indistinguishable. Mortifications have been defined as shames or ignominies, but they needn’t be public. They can be felt in unrelieved secrecy, in the silence of your room.

One of mine came early and lasted for the rest of my life. I was in the Army at the time, doing my basic training as a National Serviceman and a sapper, a Royal Engineer. I was to be seen lying on my bed, or standing by it to attention, in a creosoted hut or ‘spider’ near Farnborough in Hampshire, or sallying out to march up and down and stamp my feet. My platoon was ruled by two men rather more unlike one another than shame and guilt tend to be. The lance-corporal was gentle, lean and elegant, nothing like the raving bullies among the parade-ground NCOs. He was an East Anglian waterman in civilian life, and would tell us what it was to be rowing or poling the Fens. The corporal was the bad cop, not given to reminiscence, miles less endearing than the man from the marshes, but with a hint of these in his looks: an old young man with thinning hair, a round, muddy, doughy face, piercing brown eyes and a croaking wire-cutter voice.

There arose this issue of weekend passes, which took you for thirty-six hours out of your spider, bound for the brief encounter. You had to queue and sue and plead for a pass. This particular weekend, one savourless Saturday morning in a camp deserted save for a few left-behind conscripts and their minders, I was still hoping, with time running out, for a trip to London to see a woman old enough to be my mother. I set myself to argue my case, which clashed with the claims of another sapper, a shy man. The corporal let go with a fiercely moral diatribe about cutting in and jumping the queue, every word of which I believed. I felt guilty and ashamed.

The corporal hated me and my brief encounter, hated me for trying to parlay a respite at someone else’s expense. And I hated me for it too, though I’m not sure that shoving someone aside had been a feature of my conscious intention. I apologize for an unhappy lack of the lurid in this confession, and hope to do a bit better presently. I have certainly performed many worse actions. Why then have I held on for so long to this memory of the Farnborough disgrace?

I think it was a device for not thinking about what was worse, an ongoing worse. None of my early mortifications shows me in a very bad light: they are more like embarrassments than disgraces, revealing inexperience and, in this case, a less than Hitlerian will to power, and their reverberations are like a cover story for actions that came later. But this durable memory may also testify to an idea of fairness which is always around but was especially cogent during the war and after it. I was not shamed for this action before the other soldiers, and the shy sapper didn’t seem to mind. They recognized that you had to stick your neck out and push your luck, at times, under the Army’s regime of insult and frazzling punctilio. But there was also then, more than now, a sense that you shouldn’t take advantage, or steal a march, and it was this sense that stung me, and stung me. Advantage became more of an option for people in the years to come. Ahead lay a familiarity with the chief executive who receives a salary of millions and a proportionate bonus when he brings down his firm.

No one would expect an unclouded fairness from custodians of good order and military discipline, and this was as true then, in the Forties, as it is now. But I remember Farnborough as a better place than the camp at Deepcut, with its recent bullyings, mysterious deaths and attempted cover-up. There were only two deaths not caused by enemy action during my days as a soldier, one of them the reported stamping on a homosexual man by Scottish Territorials on the spree at a summer camp.

In the Scotland where I grew up there was plenty of room for the survival of a guilt culture whereby pleasure was hard to excuse and homosexuality an outlandish evil. Hostility, contempt, violence of the tongue or boot, were accounted less deadly than the sexual sins, in parts and patches of the country, and there were those people by whom poverty was considered a disgrace. An earlier mortification, suffered at the age of fifteen, made me aware of the importance of sexual misconduct. A teacher summoned me to his classroom to ask what I knew of homosexual behaviour rumoured of one of the school’s sportsmen. I don’t believe I knew anything; this was the time when I’d had to look the word up in a dictionary, after a reading of Aldous Huxley. But I felt guilty about being consulted, and about feeling grave and consequential during the interview. A year or so before this, a teacher, with a sad and swampy dough face quite like the corporal’s, had chosen to sew a fly-button on my shorts. I seem to recall that this was experienced as a shame, on social grounds, because of that missing button, by the kindly ‘guardians’ with whom I lived – my parents had been separated at birth,
my
birth. My guardians felt, I think, that we had been shown up. I was not amused, and not aroused, by the sewing session. I was bemused. I couldn’t even look it up in the dictionary.

Guilt has receded in a world where there is more to be guilty of. War is even worse, more unprincipled in its execution, than it was when I narrowly missed waging it. Guilt has become unpopular, can be thought ugly, unhealthy, with the splendours of the Victorian conscience long since seen as shams, and so on. It seems to me that it’s worth enduring if it helps you, though it often doesn’t, to be unto others ‘as you’d have others be to you’, in the words of my grandmother Georgina’s sampler. The poet Auden had words to say (before he softened them) about a ‘conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder’. This description of Auden’s eventually renounced histrionic political Thirties might lead one to consider the bullying unelected American President of the present day, who can look like his worst enemies – full of blame and bad at feeling guilty. But he can also look as if he is capable of it. And guiltiness can reasonably be suspected of a degree of complicity in the ‘necessary murders’ of the past.

There was a nineteenth-century admiration of Thomas Carlyle which rushed to agree with him that ‘we are all wrong and all like to be damned’. Feeling, and blaming others for being, guilty as hell has given guilt a bad name. But let’s just go on feeling it. It can appear to be a way of trying to find the plot, to know what you are doing, and have been driven to do. Not the only way, though. The waterman I met in the Army seemed to know what he was doing, where to steer his boat and how to weather the Army. But I don’t suppose he was ever to make much use of the rudder of self-incrimination. I hope you are still with me.

While writing this piece, I dreamt that my mother had died in some sort of car mishap on the doorstep of the house of one of my sons. Round I went to kiss the blood that stained the pavement. There’s a possible Scots mortification or compunction here, to do with telling such a dream, confessing the kiss. But I don’t feel that, or approve of that. For me, the mortification is not being able in old age, when your middle years are apt to vanish, to remember my mother’s death.

I notice that my piece on mortification has turned into a family matter. The ability to be pained by what you’ve done has many faces, a touchingly capacious repertoire, ranging from compunction to contrition and the drama of remorse. They seem to include the guilt of the elderly child of parted parents.

‘Art is a human product, a human secretion, it is our body that sweats the beauty of our works.’ Émile Zola

In his more curmudgeonly mode John Hewitt once said to me: ‘If you write poetry, it’s your own fault.’ By extension, if you are vainglorious enough to consider your poems and your plangent drone sufficiently titillating to tempt the punters from their firesides, then you should be beyond mortification. But of course none of us is.

Reciting my kind of lyric poetry requires being private in public without embarrassing either the listeners or myself. Once in a while I feel so discomfited I perspire Satchmo-style, sweat stinging my eyes and percolating through my whiskers onto the page. Apart from passing out or running away, there is no escape. I stand there stammering while self-humiliation irrigates the sheugh of my arse.

More often it is your supposed admirers who stoke up the self-doubt. Here are a few examples:

driving the length of Ireland to Wexford to read to no one. ‘You coincide with the opera,’ the two young organizers explained;

in North Carolina locking myself in my host’s lavatory – breaking the lock – and having to climb through the window and down a ladder to get to my reading;

in a Tokyo university reading to an audience of one, the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities;

being introduced by Fred Johnston in Galway as ‘quite well-known’ (true, but a somewhat derumescent overture);

in Arizona being announced thus: ‘With an audience like this one, Michael Langley requires no introduction’;