Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [1]
“I think continually of those who were truly great” by Stephen Spender. Copyright © 1934 and renewed 1962 by Stephen Spender. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.
First four lines from “Howl” from Collected Poems 1947–1980 by Allen Ginsberg (Viking, 1985). Copyright © 1955 and 1985 by Allen Ginsberg. Reprinted by permission of Frederick Warne & Co., and HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
v3.1
For Florence,
and in memory of four absent friends:
Jack Clayton, Ted Allan, Tony Godwin,
and Ian Mayer
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Other Books by This Author
1 Clara 1950–1952
2 The Second Mrs. Panofsky 1958–1960
3 Miriam 1960–
Afterword: by Michael Panofsky
A Note about the Author
ALSO BY MORDECAI RICHLER
NOVELS
The Acrobats
Son of a Smaller Hero
A Choice of Enemies
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
The Incomparable Atuk (Stick Your Neck Out)
Cocksure
St. Urbain’s Horseman
Joshua Then and Now
Solomon Gursky Was Here
STORIES
The Street
ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers Under Glass
Shovelling Trouble
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album
Broadsides
Belling the Cat
Dispatches from the Sporting Life
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur
Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case
ANTHOLOGIES
The Best of Modern Humour
Writers on World War II
NON-FICTION
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
This Year in Jerusalem
On Snooker
1
Clara
1950–1952
1
TERRY’S THE SPUR. The splinter under my fingernail. To come clean, I’m starting on this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life (violating a solemn pledge, scribbling a first book at my advanced age), as a riposte to the scurrilous charges Terry McIver has made in his forthcoming autobiography: about me, my three wives, a.k.a. Barney Panofsky’s troika, the nature of my friendship with Boogie, and, of course, the scandal I will carry to my grave like a humpback. Terry’s sound of two hands clapping, Of Time and Fevers, will shortly be launched by The Group (sorry, the group), a government-subsidized small press, rooted in Toronto, that also publishes a monthly journal, the good earth, printed on recycled paper, you bet your life.
Terry McIver and I, both Montrealers born and bred, were in Paris together in the early fifties. Poor Terry was no more than tolerated by my bunch, a pride of impecunious, horny young writers awash in rejection slips, yet ostensibly confident that everything was possible — fame, adoring bimbos, and fortune lying in wait around the corner, just like that legendary Wrigley’s shill of my boyhood. The shill, according to report, would surprise you on the street to reward you with a crisp new dollar bill, provided you had a Wrigley’s chewing-gum wrapper in your pocket. Mr. Wrigley’s big giver never caught up with me. But fame did find several of my bunch: the driven Leo Bishinsky; Cedric Richardson, albeit under another name; and, of course, Clara. Clara, who now enjoys posthumous fame as a feminist icon, beaten on the anvil of male-chauvinist insentience. My anvil, so they say.
I was an anomaly. No, an anomie. A natural-born entrepreneur. I hadn’t won awards at McGill, like Terry, or been to Harvard or Columbia, like some of the others. I had barely squeezed through high school, having invested more time at the tables of the Mount Royal Billiards Academy than in classes, playing snooker with Duddy Kravitz. Couldn’t write. Didn’t paint. Had no artistic pretensions whatsoever, unless you count my fantasy of becoming a music-hall song-and-dance man, tipping my straw boater to the good folks in the balcony as I fluttered off stage in my taps, yielding to Peaches, Ann Corio,1 Lili St. Cyr, or some other exotic dancer, who would bring her act to a drum-throbbing climax with a thrilling flash of bare tit, in days long before lap-dancers had become the norm in Montreal.
I was a voracious reader, but you would be mistaken if you