‘I’m all in favour of free expression provided it’s kept rigidly under control.’ Alan Bennett
I could start with the reading at Yale in the 1970s, where I was met by two affable undergraduates, explaining to me that the tutor who had asked me there was so busy running for political office that he had deputized the task of meeting me to them. Unfortunately he had not remembered to advertise the reading itself, so when I gave it later, in the corner of a library, there were only three to the audience. But they were the two sturdy undergraduates joined by somebody I recognized at once must be Holly Stevens, from her similarity to the famous picture of her father on the cover of his Collected Poems. That compensated for my mortification, and my vanity kept up very well.
Everybody has had such an experience, or worse. (I know one poet who flew all the way from San Francisco to the Mid-West to give a reading where nobody turned up.)
Fast-forward to Chicago, October, 1995. I had been unwise enough to write a sequence of songs to be sung, in a hypothetical opera, by Jeffrey Dahmer. He was the famous mass-murderer who sodomized his victims and then ate them. I thought that if Shakespeare could undertake an examination of such a man in Macbeth, then I could try to do it with Dahmer.
Even more unwisely, I started the reading with all five poems. As soon as I had finished them, a number of old ladies sitting together in the front row simultaneously rose and started to leave. I thought I ought to address their backs as they climbed the steps out of the auditorium. ‘I am sorry I upset you ladies,’ I said, ‘but if I had written a poem to be spoken by Napoleon or Julius Caesar you wouldn’t have thought anything of it. They killed millions more people, and at least Jeffrey Dahmer enjoyed his victims.’ (I said this, or I think I said it. It is on tape somewhere.) They continued to climb the steps, and none so much as looked around before leaving. I remember each of them as identical, rather like Baudelaire’s hallucinatory old men, each of them the same age. (They were probably not as old as I was, already in my sixties.) A multitude of thoughts hit me: had they foreseen that I might read the distasteful poems, which they already knew from my book three years earlier, and thus sat in the front row with the intention of walking out, so as to teach me a lesson? Was it spontaneous, Matrons of Chicago? Probably my remark about his enjoyment didn’t help at all. Perhaps, after all, it was not mortifying but rather splendid that I had finally succeeded in offending people after having tried unsuccessfully to do so all my life.
Or on the other hand, perhaps they were just bored.