The Curmudgeon Speaks
I even had a guest post for tonight* but then this morning I read Lucy Coats’ blog post on author antics: http://awfullybigblogadventure.blogspot.com/2010/10/hubris-and-art-of-good-behaviour-lucy.html and decided I wanted to put in a word for the peevish and ill-tempered.**
Long long ago when I was younger and stronger I did rather a lot of travelling to talk at schools, libraries and bookshops. I didn’t do a lot a lot because even in those days the public thing wore me out extremely. And because it wore me out I started drawing up lists of what I would and wouldn’t do. Let me emphasise: this was a survival mechanism. I was not making demands to prove that I could, or to see what I could get away with, or to make myself seem so desirable that I could jack my fees up some more.*** Not all writers are like this. Some of us, of course, are even crankier and more misanthropic than I am. But some of us are witty, charming extroverts who can do six presentations in a day and still keep a dinner party of thirty in stitches that evening.
One of my basic requirements was that I could only do three presentations in a day. This is crucial when you, which is to say I, was out on the road for more than a day or two. If I was going to have anything left to continue to engage my audiences with, I could not do more. And I was very sorry, but situations involving ‘presentation’ and ‘audience’ included hanging out in the staff room with the teachers—and going out to dinner with Everyone Who Had Worked Hard to Make My Visit a Success.
I do understand that small cash-strapped school systems or equivalent want to wring every droplet out of any cultural enrichment programme they’ve hired, including the breathing, two-legged kind. But I have to earn a living too, and this means not only not making too awful an impression on the last small cash-strapped school system or equivalent on the tour (‘All she said was ungh!’) but not taking a month to recuperate once I get home again. I also understand that it’s very flattering that everyone wants a word or an hour with you—and that there may have been positively shoving matches over who gets to drive you from point A to point B. But you—which is to say I—are being expected to engage with the person-eager-to-meet-you who is driving you from Point A and your first gig to Point B and your second—when what you need is silence and if not strictly solitude then anonymity and, in a perfect world, a cup of tea. And then there will be another person to drive you from Point B to Point C. . . .
One of the stand-out moments of my life as an author-on-the-road—and one that always comes back to me whenever I’m thinking about Gigs I Have Lived to Tell the Tale of, so I may well have told it here before—happened at the end of a long day. The third and final presentation at the local library had run long, but it was the final presentation of the day so I was willing to let it go on a bit. Then I signed books for a while. I looked around for my minder because I badly wanted to go back to my hotel and go to bed. She bustled up to me, smiling, and escorted me . . .
. . . into a function room at the back of the library, where a long buffet table was set up with food and wine and a gigantic milling throng not only of any of the audience who wanted to stick around but an alarming selection of the local Great and Good. I think we may have even had the mayor. Dear gods. I looked at her and stammered something about the letter she should have had from my publisher about what I would and would not do, and I didn’t do, you know, parties, especially at the end of a long day. . . .
And her eyes got larger and larger and larger and she said, or rather wailed, But I thought you’d like it. . . . And burst into tears.
But I have lots of stories like that, barring the minder bursting into tears, which I’m glad to say is unusual. There was the occasion when they hadn’t bothered to tell me that they had auctioned off Dinner with the Author because they figured that I wouldn’t be such a bastard as to blow off a kid whose fault it wasn’t and who was thrilled that she’d won. And they were right: I wasn’t. They’d already got their three presentations out of me, you know, and I was some other school’s problem tomorrow. They told me about the kid and the Dinner with the Author auction in this cute little aren’t-we-clever way that made me want to . . .
So I’m glad Lucy stayed the twenty minutes and talked to the kids, whose fault it also wasn’t that they were late. And I have also had wonderful times out on the road, with minders who have taken me sightseeing and horseback riding and shopping and old-bookstore-haunting, and even to the cinema and the theatre—or indeed home to dinner with the family, where I’m not An Author but some weird colleague of mum or dad. But on behalf of crusty old introverts everywhere . . . sometimes authors behave badly because they’re exhausted, they’ve been shoved over a line that very likely the present company has no way of knowing is there, and they can’t frelling cope. There are stories out there of the awfulness of Robin McKinley. But I want to believe that there are extenuating circumstances to all of them, even if the tellers of the stories don’t know what they are.
* * *
* YAAAAY! for guest posts. There’s absolutely nothing better than a guest post or two sitting quietly in the admin queue. A safety net for this nightly high-wire act. I feel it when it’s not there.
** I also want to mention the blog that set Lucy off: http://www.amandacraig.com/pages/blog_01/blog_item.asp?Blog_01ID=252
Which has set me off too, but in another direction. I had a few moments of serious Britain-is-not-just-another-country-but-another-planet, reading it. I entirely agree with the basic premise of both Lucy and Amanda’s posts—authors should mind their manners in public, and if they can’t, they should stay home and stop embarrassing not only themselves and their readers but the rest of us by association—but here’s one quote that knocked my socks off, not in a good way:
Needless to say these stories are all about men, simply because women – even the most prize-laden – just have it drummed into them that they had better not get uppity.
What? British women never behave badly? British women writers never behave badly? Arrogantly? Condescendingly? Crushingly to the lesser mortals around them? No. Wrong. Maybe my American accent brings out the worst but . . . no. I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s relevant in the present context: One of the last British publishing events I attended, nearly a decade ago now, when I was barely up off the sofa from a year and a half of acute ME, and still wasn’t handling my new situation as a semi-invalid all that well, and I have always found Going Out in Public as An Author a strain and a drain . . . I was cut up in small pieces and handed back to myself on a shovel by an Award Winning British Woman Writer. I have no idea what her deal was, except she was in a bad mood and I didn’t get out of the way fast enough. And then there was the edifying evening I spent as Peter Dickinson’s bimbo wife when he was elected into the Royal Society of Literature—at which event I was not only more or less called a slut to my face by a mere award-winning bloke, but cut spectacularly dead by another Award Winning British Woman Writer—one famous enough that I only knew who she was because I’d seen her photo so often. Grrrrrrr. Let me also say in a small polite aside here that being a successful bimbo wife is harder than it looks. You can either try to stay in your husband’s shadow when, after all, you’re attending something that’s about him not you, and be despised and called a slut, or you can say, well, um, actually, I’m a writer too, you know, published, I earn a living and all that, that’s how Peter and I met—and be despised and called a social-climbing slut. And while I’m actually a pretty good live-author dog-and-pony show, professional social mixing is my idea of the deepest pits of hell, and I’m sure I don’t put myself over very well. But slack could have been extended in both the cases cited above—and wasn’t.
One more quote that had me going ‘gah gah gah gah gah what?’:
If, like myself, you believe that there are no major living authors in our time – not one of the stature of Tolstoy, Dickens, Eliot etc – then absolutely everyone is simply quarrelling over degrees of mediocrity.
No, I do not agree, although I’m not going to list the first—oh, let’s say six—living writers I would put on the same list as, um, well, Dickens and Eliot anyway, Tolstoy kind of gets up my nose^, because Pollyanna works in reverse too, and I don’t want to say YES this person is a MAJOR WRITER^^. . . but by omission this other person is not.^^^ Furthermore, I would myself say there’s an enormous gap between ‘genius’ and ‘mediocrity’—most of the writers I know and love live in that gap, I fancy including myself, thank you very much. Genius is pretty frelling rarefied—but mediocre is mediocre. I throw mediocre books against the wall. And I have quite a few books by living authors on my shelves.
^ I should try one of the new translations
^^ And then of course there’s the ‘define major’ conversation.
^^^An omission which could be caused by Menopause Memory as well as by evil cowness.
*** And then there’s the story of when and how I stopped doing things for free, because people only respect what they pay for.
† Signing books didn’t/doesn’t count. I’ll always sign books.
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