Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [27]
You strain spaghetti with a colander. Mary McCarthy wrote The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit or Shirt. Whichever. Walter “Turk” Broda was the goalie for the Toronto Maple Leaf team that won the Stanley Cup in 1951. Stephen Sondheim it was who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story. I’ve got it. I didn’t have to look it up. The Mississippi, Life on.
To recap. This sorry attempt at autobiography, triggered by Terry McIver’s calumnies, is being written in the dim hope that Miriam, reading these pages, will be overwhelmed by guilt.
“What’s that book you’re so absorbed in?” asks Blair.
“Why, this critically acclaimed best-seller is the autobiography of my one true love, you inadequate little shmuck on tenure.”
Where was I? Paris 1951 is where. Terry McIver. Boogie. Leo. Clara, of blessed memory. Nowadays when I open a newspaper I turn to the Dow Jones first and then to the obits, checking the latter page for enemies I have outlasted and icons no longer among the quick.
Nineteen ninety-five got off to a bad start for boozers. Peter Cook and a raging Colonel John Osborne both gone.
Nineteen fifty-one. Quemoy and Matsu, if anybody can find those pimples on the China Sea now,17 were being shelled by the Commies, a prelude, according to some, to an invasion of what was then still called Formosa. Back in America everybody was still scared by The Bomb. Something of a jackdaw, I still own the Bantam paperback of How to Survive an Atomic Bomb:
Written in question-and-answer form by a leading expert, this book will tell you how to protect yourself and your family in case of atomic attack. There is no “scare talk” in this book. Reading it will actually make you feel better.
Rotarians were digging A-bomb fall-out shelters in their backyards, laying in supplies of bottled water, dehydrated soups, sacks of rice, and their collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books and Pat Boone records18 to help while away the contaminated weeks. Senator Joe McCarthy and his two stooges, Cohn and Schein, were on a rampage. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were for it, and just about everybody liked Ike for ’52. In not-yet-querulous Canada Inc., instead of a prime minister we were being managed by an avuncular CEO, Louis St. Laurent. In Quebec, my cherished Quebec, the thuggish Maurice Duplessis was still premier, riding herd over a gang of thieves.
Mornings, waking late, our bunch could usually be found at the Café Sélect or the Mabillon, gathered at the table where Boogie a.k.a. Bernard Moscovitch presided, reading the International Herald-Tribune, starting with Pogo and the sports pages, monitoring how Duke Snider and Willie Mays had performed the night before. But Terry never joined us. If Terry was to be seen at a café table, he would be seated alone, annotating his Everyman’s Library edition of Walter Savage Landor’s Imaginary Conversations. Or scribbling a rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre’s lead essay in the latest issue of Les Temps modernes. Even in those days Terry appeared not to be worried that, as MacNeice put it,19 “not all the candidates pass.” No sir. Terry McIver was already sitting for his portrait as the handsome young artist fulfilling his manifest destiny. He was intolerant of frivolity. A rebuke to the rest of us, time-wasters that we were.
One evening, strolling down the boulevard St-Germain-des-Prés, bound for a bottle party Terry hadn’t been invited to, I caught a glimpse of him maybe half a block ahead, slowing his pace, hoping I’d ask him to join us. So I stopped to look at the books in the window of La Hune, until he faded into the distance. Late another night, a far from sober