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

a lengthy, sniffy review in the Sunday book section of the
New York Times
. Even on the telephone he can sense the awful plunge in morale at his American publishers: the gloom is palpable, bitter disappointment practically drips from the telephone receiver. For a foreign writer in America there is really only one review that counts: the
New York Times
Sunday book supplement. If that’s bad, to put it bluntly, then everything else – including all the other good reviews this book has had – is a waste of time and such is the implicit message relayed to him by his suicidal editor. The writer thinks to himself – as he boards the plane to Cleveland, Ohio – that, if indeed this is the case, then what the hell is he doing on a book tour across the USA? Why is he flying thousands of miles to Cleveland and Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles? Why doesn’t he just go home? The writer was me; the date was 1988 and the book was my novel
The New Confessions,
a near 500-page fake autobiography of a Scottish film-maker who throughout his long life is driven to try and film
The Confessions
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
    At Cleveland airport I am met by my ‘escort’, whom we shall call ‘Phyllis’. Phyllis is the wife of a lawyer or a dentist or a doctor. She loves books and she drives a big expensive car. As the writer travels across America he is met in each city by reproductions of these benign matrons who will shepherd him from hotel to book-signing to radio station to lunch with a journalist. They are kind and well-meaning: the relationship is of aunt to favourite, talented nephew (or niece). They are rooting for you. Phyllis checks me into my anonymous hotel in downtown Cleveland. I say I will order from room service for my evening meal. She runs through my schedule: an early rise for a radio show then to a TV station for a breakfast show, then a tour of bookshops before I catch a midday plane for San Francisco, or is it Seattle? See you tomorrow at 6.00 a.m. Phyllis says, and then adds that she’s started my book and is loving it.
    I order a club sandwich from room service and drink steadily from the mini-bar while watching some TV. I think about going down to the hotel bar; I think about going out for a stroll; I decide to stay in my acceptable room. Literature? – I’m in it for the glamour.
    In the early morning sunshine Phyllis drives me through Cleveland’s outer suburbs. I get glimpses of the enormous inland sea that is Lake Erie. Every house we pass seems to possess three cars and a boat of some description. This radio station appears to be miles away.
    Eventually we find it – like a clapboard bungalow with a thirty-foot aerial set at the apex of its roof. The interviewer is a genial, bearded man. In between MOR standards he asks me questions about the Royal Family and London’s notorious pea-souper fogs. 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 ‘r’. “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.
    That went great, Phyllis enthuses, as we drive to the TV station. Here in the green room I am offered coffee and muffins and am introduced to the other breakfast guests: an enormous young man, whose back is the size of a kitchen table and whose neck is thicker than his head, and a little girl in a pink dress who’s accompanied by her awestruck parents. The little girl goes on first, followed by me, then the giant.
    By now I’m on a form of auto-pilot and am strangely calm as an assistant producer tells me that the little girl has won some high-school spelling bee and