Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler Page B

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 records 18 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. ButTerry 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 Boogie and I, ambling down the boulevard Montparnasse, searching café terraces for friends from whom we might cadge a drink or a roach, came upon Terry at the Café Sélect, writing in one of his notebooks. “I’ll bet you ten to one,” I said, “that the covers of his notebooks are numbered and dated out of consideration for future scholars.”
    Terry, a man of daunting integrity, naturally took a dim view of Boogie. For a much-needed five hundred dollars, Boogie had churned out a steamy novel for Maurice Girodias’s Traveller’s Companion Series.
Vanessa’s Pussy
was dedicated to the unquestionably constant wife of the Columbia professor who had failed Boogie in a course on Elizabethan poetry. The dedication read:
    To the lubricious Vanessa Holt,
in fond memory of priapic nights past
    Boogie had thoughtfully sent copies of
Vanessa’s Pussy
to his professor and Columbia’s arts-faculty dean, as well as to the editors of
The New York Times Book Review
and the book pages of the
New York Herald-Tribune
. But it is difficult to know what any of them made of it because Boogie had written the novel under a pseudonym: BaronClaus von Manheim. A disdainful Terry returned his complimentary copy unread. “Writing,” he said, “is not a