Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [135]
“Toil on, dull crowd, in extacies,” he cries,
“For wealth or title, perishable prize;
While I those transitory blessings scorn.
Secure of praise from ages yet unborn.”
This thought once form’d, all council comes too late,
He flies to press, and hurries on his fate;
Swiftly he sees the imagin’d laurels spread,
He feels the unfading wreath surround his head.
Warn’d by another’s fate, vain youth, be wise,
Those dreams were Settle’s once and Ogilby’s.64
Once I was not only an unredeemed sadist, given to ridiculing a classmate with a stammer, but on occasion a coward, and also a petty thief. When I was a boy one of my chores was to deliver and collect our sheets from the Chinese laundry on Fairmount Street. One afternoon the stooped old man ahead of me, bearded, wearing a yarmulke, didn’t notice that he had dropped a five-dollar bill on the floor as he paid for his laundry. I covered it with my shoe immediately, retrieving it once he had shuffled out of the shop.
In fifth grade, I was the one who wrote FUCK YOU, MISS HARRISON on the blackboard, but it was Avie Fried who was expelled from school for a week as a consequence. Our principal, Mr. Langston, summoned me to his office. “I am obliged to strap you, young man, because I know you were aware Fried was the culprit. However, I do admire your pluck for declining to snitch on a classmate.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, extending my hand, palm upward.
I have many more claims to obloquy. It was not an accident that at Sheila Ornstein’s Sweet Sixteen party, up there in the higher reaches of Westmount, I knocked over a lampstand and shattered a Tiffany shade. I did it because I detested them for being rich. Sure, but I was indignant when, maybe five years ago, ruffians broke into my Laurentian cottage and not only stole my TV set, among other movables, but also shat on my sofa. I am an impenitent rotter to this day, a malevolent man, exulting in the transgressions of my betters.
Case in point.
I understand why our most perspicacious men of letters object to the current trend in biography, its mean practitioners revelling in the carve-up of genius. But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit. I’m a sucker for studies of those who, in the words of that friend of Auden’s (not MacNeice, not Isherwood, the other guy) “ … travelled a short while toward the sun / And left the vivid air signed with their honour.”65 But took no prisoners en route, now that the facts are known. Say, the story of T. S. Eliot having his first wife locked up in the bin, possibly because she had written some of his best lines. Or a book that delivers the dirt on Thomas Jefferson, who kept slaves and provided the prettiest one with an unacknowledged child. (“How is it,” asked Dr. Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) Or reveals that Martin Luther King was a plagiarist and a compulsive fucker of white women. Or that Admiral Byrd, one of my boyhood heroes, was actually a smooth-talking liar, a terrible navigator, an air traveller so frightened of flying that he was frequently drunk while others did the piloting, and a man who never hesitated to take unearned credit. Or tells how F.D.R. cheated on Eleanor. Or that J.F.K. didn’t really write Profiles in Courage. Or how Bobby Clarke slashed Kharlamov across the ankles, taking out the better player in that first thriller of a hockey series against the incredible Russians. Or that Dylan Thomas was a shnorrer born. Or that Sigmund Freud faked some of his case notes. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. And, in any event, my feelings are licensed by no less a moralist than Dr. Johnson, who once pronounced on the uses of biography to Edmond Malone, a Shakespeare scholar:
If nothing but the bright side of characters should