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

that the giant is a foot-balling superstar from a local college team, the Spartans or the Mavericks – I don’t take it in. ‘Could you tell us a little about your book, William?’ the producer asks, pen poised. I decide not to mention Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
    I greet my hosts on the stage as we wait for the weather report to be read and the little girl is led off. ‘Isn’t she cute?’ Very cute, I concur. The male and female hosts look impossibly healthy, creaselessly neat. ‘You know you have the same name as Hopalong Cassidy?’ the man says. ‘You got your horse tied up outside?’ I laugh along with them both.
    We’re on air. ‘Our next guest today is British writer William Boyd with his latest book
True Confessions
. Morning, William.’ I say good morning back. ‘So, William,’ the woman presenter asks me, ‘tell me all about your Princess Diana.’
    That went great, Phyllis enthuses, as we drive to the first of three bookshops I will sign stock in. I duly meet the earnest, amiable booksellers who sympathize about the
New York Times
review (‘Shame about the
Times
’) but who congratulate me on my morning TV appearance. Everyone agrees it’s great publicity. Great publicity for the British Royal Family, I reflect, as I sign a dozen books in each shop before Phyllis says we’re running late and had better race for the airport.
    I assure Phyllis she doesn’t need to check me in, that I can manage the task myself, unsupervised. So we make our farewells at Departures. ‘Oh my God, I almost forgot!’ she says reaching into the glove compartment for a copy of my book. I think of the cities up ahead waiting for me and I want to go home. ‘For Phyllis,’ I write, knowing it’s not her fault, ‘thanks for everything.’

‘The artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.’ André Gide
William Trevor
    Search childhood for those undying harvests of humiliation and faithfully they come scuttling back. In weary tones of classroom despair, the careless arrows are still cast,
V. Poor
inscribed a thousand times. ‘You wrote a poem,’ a voice calls down the table while teatime sausage-rolls are passed along the rows. Surreptitiously written, surreptitiously delivered to I.G. Sainsbury, more man than boy, editor of the subversive magazine. ‘How did you know?’ I whisper beneath the clatter of feet as we leave the dining hall, and learn that Sainsbury needed something to light his cigarette with.
    Employment nurtured more of the same. But when the years begin to pile up, mockery loses its sting, as if it has done with you at last; and matters less, then not at all. What follows now should have been a mortification, yet wasn’t when it happened.
    I received a letter from the Arts Council informing me that I had been awarded a literary prize and binding me to secrecy until after the presentation. In due course there was a telephone call from the Arts Council’s public relations department, with details of a few publicity wheezes that might be put in place then too. I explained that I wasn’t good on publicity but agreed to give a reading. This was to be an item in an arts festival which by coincidence would be in full swing in and around London at the same time. The Thames was mentioned when I asked and I thought of Marlow, or Hampton perhaps.
    It turned out to be neither. On the evening after the award ceremony my wife and I met a young man from the festival and an attractive lady from the Arts Council in the hall of Durrant’s Hotel, where we all waited for the taxi that was to take us to our rendezvous. ‘And where exactly is that?’ I asked and was told it was the Thames Flood Barrier. Agitated telephone calls were made when our taxi didn’t arrive. When it still didn’t we picked one up on the street.
    We crawled through heavy traffic, taking longer