• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 560 0

a point of buying works by as-yet-unknown painters and sculptors who are, in Mike’s parlance, “on the cutting edge.” My up-to-the-minute, state-of-the-art son is into gangsta rap, information highways (as distinct from libraries), “dissing,” quality time, Internet, all things cool, and every other speech cliché peculiar to his generation. Mike has never read The Iliad, Gibbon, Stendhal, Swift, Dr. Johnson, George Eliot, or any other now-discredited Eurocentric bigot, but there isn’t an overpraised “visible minority” new novelist or poet whose book he hasn’t ordered from Hatchard’s. I’ll wager he never stood for an hour contemplating Velásquez’s portrait of that royal family,9 you know the one I mean, in the Prado, but invite him to a vernissage that promises a crucifix floating in piss or a harpoon sticking out of a woman’s bleeding arsehole, and he’s there with his chequebook. “Oh,” I said, determined to keep our transatlantic phone call going, “I don’t mean to pry, but I do hope you’ve spoken to your sister recently.”

“Watch it. You’re beginning to sound just like Mom.”

“That’s no answer.”

“There’s no point in phoning Kate. She’s either just rushing out, or in the middle of a dinner party, and can’t talk now.”

“That doesn’t sound like Kate.”

“Come on, Dad. As far as you’re concerned, she can do no wrong. She was always your favourite.”

“That’s not true,” I lied.

“But Saul phoned yesterday to ask what I thought of his latest diatribe in that neo-fascist rag he writes for. Hell, it had only arrived in that morning’s mail. He’s incredible, really. It took him fifteen minutes to bring me up to date on his imaginary health problems and work difficulties, and then to denounce me as a champagne socialist and Caroline as a penny-pincher. Who’s he living with these days, may I ask?”

“Hey, I see the British are up in arms, because calves are being shipped to France, where they’re confined to crates instead of being booked into the Crillon. Has Caroline joined the demos?”

“You can do better than that, Dad. But do come and see us soon,” said Mike, his voice stiffening, and I guessed that Caroline had just floated into the room, glancing pointedly at her wristwatch, unaware that I was paying for the phone call.

“Sure,” I said, hanging up, disgusted with myself.

Why couldn’t I have told him how much I love him, and what pleasure he has given me over the years?

What if this were to be our last conversation?

“But death, you know,” wrote Samuel Johnson to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, “hears not supplications, nor pays any regard to the convenience of mortals.”

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

2

We have all read too much in literary journals about the unjustly neglected novelist, but seldom a word about the justly neglected, the scratch players, brandishing their little distinctions, à la Terry McIver. A translation into Icelandic, or an appearance at a Commonwealth arts festival in Auckland (featuring a few “writers of pallor,” as the new nomenclature has it, as well as an affirmative-action mélange of Maori, Inuit, and Amerindian good spellers). But, after all these years as a flunk, my old friend and latter-day nemesis has acquired a small but vociferous following, CanLit apparatchiks to the fore. That scumbag is ubiquitous in Canada these days, pontificating on TV and radio, giving public readings everywhere.

It was through that self-promoting bastard’s father, who is also traduced in Of Time and Fevers, that I met Terry in the first place. Mr. McIver, sole prop. of The Spartacus Bookshop on St. Catherine Street West, was the most admirable, if innocent, of men. A scrawny Scot, bred in the Gorbals, he was the illegitimate son of a laundry woman and a Clydeside welder who fell at the Somme. Mr. McIver would urge books on me by Howard Fast, Jack London, Émile Zola, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, Edgar Snow, and the Russian, you know, Lenin’s laureate, what’s-his-name? Anathema to Solzhenitsyn. Come on, Barney. You know it. There was a splendid movie made in Russia about his memoirs of childhood.