Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [48]
“You’re not coming with us. Forget it.”
“I shall be humble. I will gasp at his metaphors and applaud each use of le mot juste.”
“Boogie, I want your word that you’re not going to heckle him.”
“Oh, stop being such a kvetch,” said Clara. “You’re not Terry’s mother.”
Folding chairs had been provided for forty, but there were only nine people there when Terry began to read, a half-hour late.
“I believe Edith Piaf is opening somewhere on the Right Bank tonight,” said Boogie, sotto voce, “otherwise there would surely have been a better turnout.”
Terry was in mid-flight when a bunch of Letterists barged into the bookshop. They were supporters of Ur, Cahiers pour un dictat culturel, which was edited by Jean-Isador Isou. The redoubtable Isou was also the author of A Reply to Karl Marx, a slender riposte that was peddled to tourists by pretty girls on the rue de Rivoli and outside American Express — tourists under the tantalizing illusion that they were buying the hot stuff. The Letterists believed that all the arts were dead and could be resurrected only through a synthesis of their collective absurdities. Their own poems, which they usually recited in a café on the Place St-Michel, consisted of grunts and cries, incoherent arrangements of letters, set to an antimusical background and, for a time, I was one of their fans. And now, as Terry continued to read in a monotone, they played harmonicas, blew whistles, pumped the rubber bulb of a klaxon, and, hands cupped under armpits, made farting noises.
Deep down, I’m a homer. I root for the Montreal Canadiens and, when they were still playing ball in Delormier Downs, our Triple-A Royals. So I instinctively sprang to Terry’s defence. “Allez vous faire foutre! Tapettes! Salauds! Petits merdeurs! Putes!” But this only served to spur on the rowdies.
A flushed Terry read on. And on. And on. Seemingly in a trance, his fixed smile chilling to behold. I felt sick. Hold the phone. Yes, I was truly concerned for him, but, bastard that I am, I was equally relieved that he hadn’t drawn a crowd. Or won acclaim. Afterwards, I told Boogie and Clara I would catch up with them at The Old Navy, but first I was taking Terry out for a drink. Before we parted, Boogie startled me by saying, “I’ve heard worse, you know.”
Terry and I met at a café on the boulevard St-Michel, and sat on the terrace, the only people there, a couple of Canucks who didn’t mind the cold. “Terry,” I said, “those clowns were out for blood and wouldn’t have behaved any differently had Faulkner been reading there tonight.”
“Faulkner is overestimated. He won’t endure.”
“All the same, I’m sorry for what happened. It was brutal.”
“Brutal? It was absolutely wonderful,” said Terry. “Don’t you know that the first performance of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was booed in Vienna and that when the Impressionists first showed their work they were laughed at?”
“Yeah, sure. But —”
“ ‘ … you ought to know,’ ” he said, obviously quoting somebody, “ ‘that What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.’ ”
“And just who said that, may I ask?”
“William Blake wrote that in a letter to the Reverend John Trusler, who had commissioned some watercolours from him and then criticized the results. But what did you think, not that it matters?”
“Who could hear in all that racket?”
“Don’t be evasive with me, please.”
Sufficiently irritated by now to want to crack his carapace of arrogance, I knocked back my cognac and said, “All right, then. Many are called, but few are chosen.”
“You’re pathetic, Barney.”
“Right. And you?”
“I’m surrounded by a confederacy of dunces.”
That prompted a laugh from me.
“Now why don’t you just settle the bill, because after all it was you who invited me, and move on to wherever you’re meeting your oafish Trilby and foul-mouthed Paphian?”
“My foul-mouthed