Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [47]
Terry intrigued me. The rest of us, blithely unselfconscious, didn’t brood over whatever our ages were at the time: twenty-three, or twenty-seven, or whatever. We didn’t think in terms of life spans. Or, put another way, shells had not yet begun to land close to the trench. Terry, however, was aware that he was young and experiencing his “Paris period.” His life was not his to enjoy and spend recklessly, like Onan’s seed. It was a responsibility. A trust. Like a black-and-white drawing in a child’s colouring book that was his to crayon, filling it in with the utmost autobiographical care, mindful of future criticism. So he appeared to relish rather than endure penury, a rite of his literary passage. Dr. Johnson had known worse. So had Mozart. Everything he did and heard was fodder for his journals, the entries twisted, as I discovered too late.
Terry, who mocked his parents’ politics, nevertheless inherited some of their prejudices, inveighing against all things American. He despaired of Coca-Cola culture. The New Rome. “Remember the night,” he said, “Cedric took us out to celebrate his signing a contract for his novel, being so damned ostentatious about his new affluence. I didn’t want to rain on his fanfaronade, the clash of those Nubian cymbals, so I was mute at the time, which you, no doubt, ascribed to envy. But the truth is Scribner’s had just sent back the first three chapters of my novel-in-progress with a flattering letter and a caveat. Alas, there was negligible interest in matters Canadian. Would you consider resetting your novel in Chicago? Hugh MacLennan, whom I hold in no high regard, was right in this instance: ‘Boy meets girl in Winnipeg. Who cares?’ And how are things going with the unpredictable Clara these days?”
“She would have joined us for dinner, but she wasn’t feeling well.”
“You needn’t prevaricate with me. I don’t suffer from your compulsion to be approved of, surely an appurtenance of your Jeanne Mance Street heritage. But what I don’t fathom is why you persist in trailing after Boogie like a poodle.”
“You’re such a prick, Terry.”
“Come now. You worship that mountebank. You have even acquired some of his gestures.” Terry — having scored, he felt — leaned back and regarded me with a condescending smile.
Terry’s initial publication was in Merlin, one of the little magazines current in Paris at the time. “Paradiso” was insufferably poetic, Joycean, written, and sent us chortling to our dictionaries to look up words: didynamia, mataeology, chaude-mellé, sforzato.
I am now a collector of sorts of Canadiana, my special interest the journals of early travellers to Lower Canada, and dealers regularly send me catalogues. I recently espied the following entry in one of them:
Exceedingly Rare and in Fine Condition
McIver, Terry. The author’s first publication, “Paradiso,” a short story. An early but seminal pointer to the future obsessions of one of our master novelists. Merlin, Paris. 1952.
See Lande, 78; Sabin, 1052.
C $300.
One night an exuberant Terry caught up with me at the Café Royal St-Germain. “George Whitman read my story,” he said, “and has asked me to read at his bookshop.”
“Why, that’s terrific,” I said, feigning enthusiasm. But I was in a foul mood for the rest of the day.
Boogie insisted on accompanying Clara and me to the bookshop opposite Notre-Dame Cathedral. “Unmissable,” said Boogie, obviously stoned. “Why, in years to come people will ask, where were you the night Terry McIver read from his chef-d’oeuvre? Less fortunate men will be bound to say, I was cashing in my winning Irish Sweepstakes ticket, or I was screwing Ava Gardner.