A horse’s neck is a mixture of brandy, ginger ale, bitters and lemon, and I am here to tell you that, while it may be a wonderful pick-me-up in all sorts of circumstances, it will not miraculously transform a tongue-tied inadequate into an accomplished public speaker in the space of a couple of minutes.

My publisher and I were in the bar of a riverside hotel in Windsor, as I recall, and I was on the verge of passing out from anxiety. It was 1994, and I was a brand-new author clutching a comic novel about gardening. A literary lunch was about to take place, at which I was to speak alongside Bernard Levin. In the car to the event, I had jotted down four or five weak horticultural jokes, and had now gone very, very quiet — partly because my material was self-evidently paltry and would take only three minutes to deliver, and partly because my entire attention was now focused on the feasibility of escape through the window in the ladies’ lavs.

“I’ll get you another horse’s neck,” said my publisher, brightly. “Mm,” I said, mentally measuring that window: what if I were to climb out of it, steal a motorboat, make for Maidenhead, go underground for five years or so, and finally adopt a new identity as a lowly lock-keeper? “Here we are,” said my publisher, returning. “Drink that. Honestly, with two of those inside you, you can’t fail.”

I died, of course. People had paid good money not to see anyone die, but I died horribly anyway, powerless to prevent it. At least it was quick. However, the reason I recall this ghastly episode is not just to join other authors who have shared their mortification experiences in print, or even to point to the perils of drink; it’s to pinpoint a moment in literary life when I think it was (just) still permissible for writers to be shockingly bad at performing. After Windsor, I made the decision, “Well, I'll just be an author that doesn’t appear in public. After all, Barbara Pym didn’t do all this.” No such decision, it seems to me, is open to the shy or reluctant author of today.

It’s all quite recent, this author-as-performer thing. While it’s true that Dickens blazed a trail in the 1860s, he obviously didn’t make it necessary for anyone else to follow his example. Between the death of Dickens and the rise of the literary festival in the late 1980s, one looks in vain for stories of literary giants turning up for “events”. There are no legends of Virginia Woolf sitting with a brave smile at a lonely signing table while queues snaked around the block for AJ Cronin. A couple of years ago, I was with Beryl Bainbridge when a large woman approached her with two of Margaret Drabble’s novels and demanded, in all seriousness, “Now, I want this cleared up: these aren’t based on your own experience, are they?”

My point is: this sort of thing never happened to DH Lawrence, did it? “Admit it, you've never even set foot in the desert. Seven pillars of wisdom, my arse.”

Authors have always given readings, of course — just not public ones with commercial activity attached. Tennyson famously recited Maud (which took three hours) whenever he spotted a lull in social proceedings; a glance at the diary of Hans Christian Andersen finds him reading to Danish ladies virtually every day. In his 1996 book, A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel reminds us that Herodotus read his own work aloud at Olympic festivals, that Pliny the Younger complained about people walking out before he’d finished, and that the great image we have of Geoffrey Chaucer (in the illuminated Corpus Christi manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde) is of a chap in a hat reading aloud to Richard II from a pulpit. What interests Manguel in all this, of course, is the benefit to literature of an author reading his work aloud.

But the world has moved on, and an author’s public-reading skill is now just part of the all-round showmanship demanded of every literary person. I have started noticing in modern novels the particularly fine passages that have been specially devised to work as stand-alone readings (“Ah, here it is!”). Instead of reading in order to write, many authors now write in order to read. Some of our literary performers are so brilliant, in fact, that they unwittingly endanger their own book sales. People dither at the book stalls afterwards much as they might dither over merchandise at Spamalot; the text is seen as merely a souvenir of the event. I was deeply impressed by William “White Mughals” Dalrymple a couple of years ago at the Charleston Festival, when he managed to preserve his audience’s interest in buying his book by telling five sixths of his story (magnificently well) and then pulling that old Scheherazade trick of refusing to be drawn on what happened next.

When authors get together nowadays, we don’t talk of Matthew Arnold or the demise of the apostrophe. We compare experiences of American media escorts, and tell stories about going all the way to Alaska to speak to an audience of four, or (in my own case) going all the way to New Zealand to be insulted. We keep our spirits up by remembering that great moment in Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils when a punter dares to tell the Great Welsh Author that one of his novels wasn’t up to snuff, and the GWA replies, genially, “And what makes you think I’d be interested in the opinion of a young shag like you?” I like to tell people the story of the British lady novelist at an Australian event who said, pen poised, “Emma Chissett? And how do you spell that?” before it finally dawned on her that the person had asked, “How much is it?” However, it always makes me ponder: what if your name were Emma Chissett, and every time you asked for a book to be signed in Australia, the author said, “Oh, I think it’s $12.99”?

OXFORD LITERARY FESTIVAL

Lynne Truss talks about her radio monologues, A Certain Age, at the festival on Thursday, March 22, at 6.30pm. The event includes a glass of wine

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