‘Open thy bowels of compassion.’
Congreve, The Mourning Bride
Book-touring, in America, is a slog. The process is much less romantic, so much less a coronation, than some might imagine. It’s churlish to complain about the effort of one’s publisher to bring a book to the light of an audience, and I won’t complain here: I’ll book-tour again this year, and I’ll see many good friends – booksellers, interviewers, and my publisher’s remote operatives – acquired in earlier rounds. But the net effect is a slog through a morass of Sartrean repetitions. I begin tours cheerfully, and end them as a zombie, hoping not to be ungracious in any number of dazed moments.
I think of my escorts. Not the type found in ads in the back of weekly newspapers, but ‘literary escorts’, those local sprites schlepping writers in and out of airports, hotel lobbies, radio stations and bookstores. Escorts are not the cause of mortification, but the witnesses to it. They’re the human link, the local flavour. I think of my dear escort in Minnesota, who drove a battered Toyota, its dashboard decorated with gopher skulls and dried branches of herb, and who escorted authors to support finishing an epic, book-length poem on the subject of roadkill. I remember my Vietnam vet escort in Kansas City, bravely limping with his cane around the car to open my side door. I remember many others and love them all.
I think of the radio. The radio is, for me, the void. A tour consists of waking at five, breakfasting in the airport, landing in a new city and dropping one’s bags in a hotel room, then being whisked to a radio station to make a nine or ten a.m. live talk show, where a jaded local host who’s read only a summary of your book and barely learned to pronounce your name will ask you questions about your mother and father and whether you know anyone really famous. Later that night you’ll see local friends, you’ll read aloud to live humans who’ve put aside part of their lives to come and see you stand at a podium. If you’re lucky you’ll have a nap in your hotel, you’ll be treated to an elaborate meal – sometimes a good one – and you’ll have time to figure out which city you’re in. But not before you’ve been put on the radio. When you’re talking on the radio you’ve had a flight and a coffee in a paper cup and a crumb of something. You’ve had time to empty your bladder – but only your bladder. Then you reply to questions asked by someone uninterested in the answers, into the whispery microphones of a padded booth. Your listeners, if they exist, are invisible, distant, and likely missed your name even if it was pronounced correctly. The radio is the void where you stare into your own soul on book-tour and find nothing staring you back.
Once, a particular escort in a particular city came together with the radio experience, in a way which was not so much mortifying as edifyingly humbling. She was a big, rowdy, middle-aged blonde who had been, some years before, the lead anchorperson on the local news. She’d also obviously been stunningly beautiful in her youth. She reminded me, immediately and delightfully, of Gena Rowlands in the Cassavetes film Opening Night – a character modelled, in turn, on Bette Davis in All About Eve. That is to say, a real star, made insecure by age. What I couldn’t know was that her new job as escort – and I was evidently one of her very first authors – made, by design or accident, a beautiful cure.
We stopped at two or three radio stations that day, and one local television station. It happened at the first stop, and every stop to follow: she was received as a returning comet. From the receptionists to the producers to the technicians to the interviewers themselves, everyone was in awe that she’d swept in – and I was a token at her side, a negligible presence. How good she looked! How they missed her! What a young bimbo they’d replaced her with! How shocking that she’d been cut from the air just for getting a bit older – nobody in this business had any respect any more for the true giants! By dint of my tour itinerary, prepared months before and thousands of miles away in an office in Manhattan, this greatest of local media stars was making her return tour of local media outlets. They fell over themselves for her. Here was true fame, a face they’d gazed at five evenings a week for ten years. I could have been Rushdie, I could have been DeLillo, I could have been T.S. Eliot, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least. She took her courtiers graciously, I should add – and was always forgiving when they spoke of the betrayal of her firing. ‘Oh, that’s just this business, you know how it is …’
That’s my story, a gentle one. I’m glad to share it. More important, though: I must be certain you understand – you out there, whoever you are, faceless army, listening to morning talk shows. I know you’re there somewhere, and I have something to tell you. Those authors you hear at nine or ten in the morning, speaking so tenderly or angrily of their childhood or broken marriage, or meticulously defending their book against this or that possible misunderstanding, or answering unexpected questions about their hair colour or their pets, or explaining why no one will ever know the final truth about what resides in the human heart, you must know this: they are holding in a bowel movement.