Ladies and gentlemen,
I apologise sincerely for being unable to attend this evening’s performance. Owing to pressure of work, an increasing sense of unreality, and the fear of drowning in a sea of upturned faces, I have employed an out-of-work actor to impersonate me.
On my behalf he will read poems, answer questions, sign books, get drunk and generally keep up the poetic image.
Of course, there will be weaknesses in performance, the overeagerness to please, the nervous mannerisms too consciously affected, and it goes without saying that he lacks the charisma, charm, wit and raw animal sexuality of the real poet.
I trust, however, that you will enjoy the evening, and forgive my underpaid stand-in should the mask slip and his true self show through.
This is a letter I often read out before a performance, usually in a foreign country where I am unknown, and where the only photographs of the author available are those on the back covers of books published long ago. Occasionally it will result in puzzled mutterings in Czech or Portuguese which I interpret as ‘Is he really an actor?’ … ‘Is he reaIly the poet?’ … ‘Does it matter either way? I’m only here for the wine and canapés.’
It has long been a daydream of mine to have impersonators going around the world at other people’s expense, reading my poems in packed auditoria, selling my books, forging my signature, and popping a huge cheque and a thank-you letter to me in the post. In that way I could stay at home and quietly get on with writing works of flawed genius. My dilemma is that I have always regarded the creative impulse as something pure and seen a paradox in the need to show off the result, to have it published, sung, or hung on the wall, the shy extrovert, or the wheedling introvert ‘Look at me, look at me’, I have never fully resolved the conflict between the privacy of the poet and the public face of the performer, and the trick has always been to try to achieve a balance between the two.
I have been quoted as saying (a risk you take when someone asks for a quote and you oblige) that my favourite journey is not the one over Hammersmith Bridge on a summer’s evening, or the one on the ferry crossing the Mersey, but the one I make at the end of a show from the microphone centre stage to the dressing room. It’s terribly coy isn’t it? The image it conjures up of the performer in a hurry to escape the warm embrace of the audience to the solitude backstage, the empty dressing room, the unforgiving mirror. It is true, however, that I’m not very good at bowing and saying thank you, and coming back for encores because I feel embarrassed, afraid of overstaying my welcome, but it’s equally true that one of my favourite journeys is the one from the wings to the centre of the stage – but please don’t quote me on that.
Inevitably, the older the writer-performer becomes, the more difficult it is to achieve that balance between having the time and space in which to write, and the need to go out and earn some money. Friends who are actors and musicians are at a loss when the engagement diary is empty, and it’s not only the wage they miss it’s the prospect of being isolated, passed over, of not being up there in front of an audience, doing what they do best. But for me the dilemma is that although I enjoy being on stage I don’t like people looking at me and, with age, the business of packing a bag and taking the bus, tube and train, of checking into a hotel, turning up at the theatre for a sound check and performing has become wearisome, and most times I’d rather be at home brooding.
And long-haul travel has certainly lost its allure. My eldest son Finn, who writes and directs films for television, is forever dashing around the world, from Arkansas to Azerbaijan he’s off at the drop of a contract. If he has time off between projects, he travels to Laos, Vietnam, wherever the fancy takes. Funnily enough, Tom, who is three years younger and generally studio-bound as a TV film editor, rang me just now to tell me he’s leaving for Rio de Janeiro on Friday. Every opportunity they get, it’s up, up and away – as far away from north London as they can get. Ah, youth! Ah, genes! Ah, DNA! I can see where they get it from, this wanderlust, this need to travel and explore. (Their mother, obviously. Living 12,000 miles away at the time of writing.)
Yesterday I turned down an invitation from the Christchurch Book Festival to spend a week in New Zealand in August, followed by a trip to Melbourne. My first reaction was yippee! Travel and adventure. Book signings and bungee jumping, unlimited kiwi fruit and lionisation. Then Captain Cautious kicked in with ‘Ooh, it’s a long flight, and it will be their winter, and you’ve been before and … Pardon? Bungee jumping? Are you mad?’ I declined on the grounds that I was already committed to appearing at the Edinburgh Festival, which is true, except that as I’m only doing two nights in the Book Tent and as it’s not yet contracted, I could easily have pulled out. But I didn’t. Why? Whale watching off the Kaikoura coast or bagpipe watching on the Royal Mile, which would you choose? Over the last twelve months I have turned down invitations from literary festivals in Bratislava, Olomouc, Medellín in Colombia (at the third time of asking), Buenos Aires and Chicago. Nearer home, an exciting opportunity was the offer of a part in The Twelve Just Men, which played at the Assembly Rooms during the Festival. The show starred a giggle of comics playing it straight, including Bill Bailey, Stephen Frost and Owen O’Neill, so I gave it some serious thought. A new challenge, the chance to hang out with the cream of British comedy for a month. The offers that would come winging in from film and television producers. It’s Edinburgh, after all, and who’s to say that’s not Steven Spielberg out there whispering to his aide, ‘Who’s the bespectacled baldy guy? We could use him in our next film.’
‘You mean The Night of the Bespectacled Baldy Guys?’
‘That’s the one.’
But the prospect of untold excitement, not to mention all that rehearsing, resulted in a polite refusal. What is happening to me? Am I so happy here in south-west London that I can’t tear myself away? I don’t think so. My mates in the pub don’t understand and, to be honest, neither do I. Buenos Aires? Chicago? And you’re getting paid to go there? You’re mad to turn them down. I think back to those days in the early sixties when I was a schoolmaster wearing down-at-heel spectacles and a brown corduroy jacket with patches at the elbows. Not a penny to my name but fit as a fiddle, fancy free and not a care in the world. Where were the gilt-edged invitations then to cavort in sunny climes? The warm overtures to mingle with the glitterati, read my poems and sign my books? Not having published anything at the time may have had something to do with it, but even so, it does seem to be poetic sod’s law that by the time you’re famous enough to be invited anywhere you are too old to take advantage. And now I can’t raise the enthusiasm for long-haul travel because I remember the reality of those far-off festivals and book bangs. Leaving a family behind, I could never extend my visit and so it was never a holiday, but rather a vortex of public readings, interviews, hangovers, more interviews, school visits, more hangovers. I’ve made a good living out of impersonating myself, but that ‘pretending to be a poet’ syndrome that Larkin worried about, can be very debilitating. In fact, maybe I’m developing a Larkinesque agoraphobia? Experiencing the first ominous signs of an all-enveloping psychosis? What bad luck finally to settle down and write the story of my life while succumbing to clinical depression. I can see the chapter headings: ‘Poetry. What’s the point?’ … ‘The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel’ … ‘Scaffold. The Wasted Years’ … ‘The Sound of One Hand Booing’… ‘Overdose or Over Beachy Head?’
I wish I had kept a journal in the sixties. What was Reg Dwight, before he became Elton John, wearing at the Scaffold recording session when he was a backing singer? What did Bob Dylan actually say that night in the Adelphi Hotel? ‘Roge, I’m gonna tell you something now I ain’t ever told anyone …’ Did I really have a threesome with Marianne Faithfull and Julie Christie, or was I just dreaming? (Just dreaming.) Did Keith Moon and I jump fully clothed into the pool at his twenty-first birthday saturnalia? Did John Lennon ever give me back the half-crown he took off the table in Thelma’s flat in Princes Avenue? Questions, questions – and I don’t have the answers. As Adrian Henri once remarked, plucking a scintilla of nostalgia from his paint-stained beard, ‘If I’d have known that I was living in one of the most exciting periods of recent history, I’d have taken more notice.’