‘There is nothing more dreadful to an author than neglect, compared with which, reproach, hatred and opposition are names of happiness.’ Samuel Johnson
It was a cold March in North America, and I was on a publicity tour: ten cities in eleven days: the usual. I was midway through the trip when my publishers suggested I might like to make a detour to Florida, to read at a book festival there. Why not? Another day, another city.
I arrived in Miami on an afternoon such as I thought might only be experienced in Araby, everything in burnous white and limitless gradations of soft ochre and pale blue. Seen from the airport road, the city shimmered in a violet haze, its silver-and-glass towers trembling. My hotel, on South Beach, faced a purplish sea. On the sand a rout of sun-bronzed gods and honeyed maenads mellowly romped, all of them naked except for the odd strip of candy-bright cloth applied here and there to their perfect persons. The hotel itself seemed to date from the 1930s – big wooden ceiling-fans lazily turning, jalousie shutters on the windows, a walnut-panelled bar – but later I learned that the place had been distressed to make it look old. ‘Distressed’ in this usage was new to me; so were roller-blades. Between the beach and the road there was a palm-lined pedestrian way, where more glistening, chocolate-skinned giants swirled and spun as if on air. I stood at the window and looked down upon this bright scene of prelapsarian play and thought I might have landed on another, infinitely finer planet, than the one, off on the other side of the galaxy, upon which the world as I know it was hamfistedly modelled.
I went for a walk. That was a mistake. All the clothes I had brought with me were fit only for winter weather. The spectacle of a tweed-clad, pale, perspiring dwarf staggering amongst them must have amused the South Beachers, those lordly inhabitants of the planet Miami. I fled to the safe distress of my hotel room, where I lay on the bed through the rest of the long afternoon. The fan circled above me. The sun fell slowly down the sky. The liquid hissing of the air conditioner seemed the sound of time itself trying not to pass.
The reading took place next day in a large, glass-walled auditorium with the acoustics of an echo-chamber. On the stage along with me was a chap who the previous day had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize. There was a large audience, all of whom, I felt sure, had come to hear him, and for that thrill were sullenly willing to put up with me. After the reading, of which I remember nothing, there was the book signing. This took place in a wide, sunny plaza that made me think of an execution yard in some South American republic of drugs and banditry. Against one wall – there could have been bullet marks, there could have been bloodstains – two small tables stood, piled with books, the Pulitzer laureate’s, and mine. He had a queue of excited autograph hunters that stretched halfway up the spine of Florida; I had three customers, or so I thought, one of them an academic who had written on my work, the second of whom looked decidedly unhinged, and the third a kindly fellow who stepped up first and leaned forward confidentially and, with a smile that was nothing but tender, whispered to me a sentence I often hear, even yet, in my dreams. ‘I’m not going to buy a book,’ he confided, ‘but you looked so lonely there, I thought I’d come and talk to you.’