‘An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.’ Jean Cocteau
‘Events’, as publishers call them – readings, festivals, signings – seem to have a tropism for disaster. The audience is bored, drunk, uninterested, or simply absent; the writer is embarrassed, humiliated, under-prepared (as well as bored, drunk, uninterested or simply absent); the wrong venue is booked; the introducer pronounces your name wrong, or talks about books you haven’t written, or introduces someone else; there’s a fire alarm, or better still a real fire; the other person on the platform turns out to be a sworn enemy, and then after the reading has a signing queue which stretches halfway to Reykjavik while you sit there twiddling your thumbs; the copies you open to sign turn out to have already been signed. (This might seem like a small point, but to the writer it is exquisitely and instantaneously humiliating: it means these signed copies have already been returned unsold by a bookshop somewhere else. I’ve seen this happen twice, never thank God to me, and both times it was like someone taking a blow to the heart.)
In a sense, all these stories are the same story, and they have the same underlying cause. The truth is that the whole contemporary edifice of readings and tours and interviews and festivals is based on a mistake. The mistake is that we should want to meet the writers we admire, because there is something more to them in person than there is on the page, so that meeting them in the flesh somehow adds to the experience of reading their work. The idea is that the person is the real thing, whereas the writing is somehow an excrescence or epiphenomenon. But that’s not true. The work is the real thing, and it is that to which readers should direct their attention. The writer herself is a distraction, a confusion, a mistake – she should be heard and not seen. If you want to meet her, go to meet her on the page. The failure to see this basic reality is the reason why books events are so prone to go wrong; and the melancholy truth is that even when they go right they are usually, in the words of Dave Eggers, ‘aggressively boring’.
That’s what I’ve come to believe. I feel strongly on the point – just not strongly enough to put the belief into practice. When the invitations arrive, and especially when a new book comes out, I start to feel, what the hell, is it really so bad to go and actually meet a few readers? Isn’t my view that it’s all a mistake just a fantasy of uncontaminated purity, a low-key version of megalomania? Everyone else does it, what’s so special about me? What’s the worst that can happen?
Ah yes, the worst that can happen … My personal worst – perhaps I should say, worst so far – was at a Waterstone’s gala dinner. I was one of twelve writers whose job was to make a short speech plugging our books and then give out an award. The first writer was Henry Cooper, who after a short and funny chat with Steve Knott of Waterstone’s took the microphone and told boring stories for what felt like a long time. When it came to the question of the book, he explained that he was looking forward to sitting down with his ghost.
As the other writers came and went – Murray Walker, Mel B, Gordon Banks – I began to think that it would be a good idea, when it came to my turn, to be as short and to the point as possible. Sandi Toksvig got the biggest laugh of the night when she said that ‘I knew it was going to be a long evening, but I didn’t expect to be accruing pension rights.’ I was on after her, the ninth or tenth turn of the evening, and gave myself a strict brief: keep it short. When Steve Knott asked me to talk about my new novel, I said how pleased I was to be a Book of the Month. I said, ‘It’s difficult to talk about the book, having finished it.’
My feeling was that this was a concise yet subtle, humane, and not often remarked point of difficulty in the whole business of talking about your own books. I meant that it was difficult to talk too much about the book, because it was finished and done with, a completed artefact, and they are harder to discuss, I’ve always found, than something you are currently working on, in the way that some of the other writers here are still working on their books.
At least, that was what I meant to say. It was what I thought I was going to say when I opened my mouth. But what I actually said was, ‘It’s difficult to talk about the book, having written it.’ I could hear a half-laugh, half-gasp. I opened my envelope and handed it over – Best Individual at Head Office, which went to the great Rupeen Anarkat in Accounts – and was halfway back to my chair through a silent and not especially smiley audience when I realized what I had done. By and large, you only get in trouble for saying things which are true: I had inadvertently implied that most of the other writers present at that evening hadn’t written their own books. There was just enough truth in this remark to make it fantastically, almost hallucinogenically offensive, especially since the whole business of ghost writing is, in publishing circles, radioactive. There were about 500 people in the room, and about 300 of them were at tables occupied by people I had just grossly insulted. I had planned to make an eirenic general point with which anyone could agree, and had ended up behaving like a more than usually drunk and boorish Liam Gallagher. If I was in any doubt on the point, the next writer to present a prize was Alan Titchmarsh, and his first words on getting to the stage were (not jokily), ‘I’d just like to assure John Lanchester that I wrote every single word of my book myself.’
I turned to the person on my left, Will Atkinson from Faber. ‘Am I imagining things or did Alan Titchmarsh just call me an arsehole?’
‘Yes.’
This happened a year ago. I have stopped thinking about it once every ten minutes and am down to thinking about it once every week or so. It still makes me groan and double over and say ‘never again’. Worse things happen at sea, I suppose. But I don’t work at sea.