Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [91]
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Well maybe yes and maybe no. But I’ve never known a writer or a painter anywhere who wasn’t a self-promoter, a braggart, and a paid liar of a coward, driven by avarice and desperate for fame.
Hemingway, that bully, his built-in shit-detector notwithstanding, concocted his First World War record on his typewriter. That old sweetie, Lewis Carroll, beloved by generations of children, wasn’t the guy you wanted to babysit your ten-year-old daughter. Comrade Picasso sucked up to the Nazis during the occupation of Paris. If Simenon actually screwed ten thousand women, I’ll eat my straw boater. Odets ratted on old friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Malraux was a thief. Lillian Hellman lied outrageously. Lovable old Robert Frost was actually one mean son of a bitch. Mencken was a rabid anti-Semite but not as bad as that notorious plagiarist T. S. Eliot, or many more I could name. Evelyn Waugh was a social climber and Frank Harris probably died a virgin. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Resistance record was iffy and later he became an apologist for the Gulag. Edmund Wilson was a tax cheat and Stanley Spencer a boor. T. E. Lawrence did not read every book in the Bodleian. The closest Marco Polo ever got to The Middle Kingdom was most likely the Piazza San Marco. Why, if the facts were known, I’ll bet it would turn out old Homer had 20/20 vision.
I had lit out for the cultural territories, going to Paris, hoping to be enriched by associating with the pure of heart, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” and came home determined not to have anything to do with writers or painters again.
Except for Boogie.
Following my departure, the Boogieman was reported to have been seen in Istanbul, Tangier, and that island off the coast of Spain. Not Majorca, but the other one. Crete? Don’t be stupid. The one that was ruined by the hippies.38 Anyway, the first letter I got from Boogie, in 1954, two years after I returned to Montreal, came from a Buddhist monastery in what used to be called Formosa,39 but is now named something else, just like Coke has been reborn Coke Classic. Fuck it. At my age, I’m not obliged to keep up any more. I scan the movie ads, promoting films starring this or that surly toy boy and tit-enhanced starlet, each one scoffing ten million dollars a shot, and I have no idea who they are. Fact. Once women who had become stars of the silver screen had to don dark glasses and a headscarf in order to pass unrecognized on the street, but now all they have to do is get dressed. While I’m at it, I have no idea what “snogging” means, or “whingeing,” or why young trendies started the grazing shtick in restaurants. I’m not online and never will be.
Boogie wrote:
Mankind, manifestly imperfect, is still riding the evolutionary cycle. In the far future, if only for the sake of convenience, the genitals of both men and women will rise to where our heads are now, and our increasingly redundant noggins will sink to where our genitals once rested. This will enable young and old to lock into each other without tiresome romantic foreplay or the inevitable struggle with buttons or zippers. They will be able to “only connect,” as Forster advised, while waiting for a traffic light to change, or lining up before the supermarket cashier, or on a synagogue bench or church pew. “Fucking,” or the more genteel “love-making,” will be known as “a header,” as in, “Walking down Fifth Avenue, I sniffed this fetching chick, and threw her a header.”
The flip side of this cultural refinement is that the brothel, or cat-house, will yield to the library as the forbidden place where sinners meet to tryst (unzipping or lowering panties, to converse grammatically) under constant threat of closure by the antiliteracy squad. And the new social disease will be intelligence. Remember, you read it here first.
Terry returned to Montreal a year after I did to wind up his father’s estate, the old man’s