St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  Jake shook his head, he waved his hands imploringly, no, but he didn’t know what to say.

  “It would be so encouraging for him to know,” Pamela continued, “that somebody in your position admired his talents.”

  “Couldn’t I just write him a letter?”

  “But you’d adore Archie. He has such a wonderful sense of humor.”

  “He has?” Jake’s voice quivered.

  “And courage. Buckets of courage.” Then Pamela started into what Jake figured must be her set piece for women’s club luncheons. “If a man has the talent and urge to paint,” she said, “he will paint. He will paint even if it means living in a back street garret on a near starvation diet. If he has no arms he will paint with the canvas on the floor and a brush between his toes. If both arms and feet are lost he will grip the brush between his teeth.”

  The upstairs light went on. Jake gripped his brandy glass tighter and hastily lit a cigarillo.

  “Speaking as a creative person, wouldn’t you say, Jake,” Pamela asked heatedly, “that art thrives on difficulty?”

  Another upstairs light was turned on. “You’re goddam right,” Jake said.

  The au pair girl raised her voice, a pause, then Eliot began to shriek. Ormsby-Fletcher leaped to his feet. “I’ll see what it is, darling.”

  “It seems to me,” Pamela said, “the sterner the trials of creation, the finer that which is created.”

  “My wife isn’t feeling well,” Jake said, shooting Nancy a fierce look.

  “Pardon?”

  “I must take Nancy home immediately.”

  In the house again they ran into a flushed ill-tempered Ormsby-Fletcher; he was coming from the kitchen, carrying a pump.

  “What is it?” Pamela asked.

  Eliot sat at the top of the stairs, tears running down his cheeks. “Didn’t do it,” he wailed. “Didn’t do it.”

  “He’s been naughty,” Ormsby-Fletcher said tightly.

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” Jake pleaded compulsively.

  Ormsby-Fletcher seemed to notice Jake for the first time. “Not going so soon, are you?”

  “It’s Nancy. She’s unwell.”

  “Just an upset stomach,” Nancy said, trying to be helpful.

  “No. Not a –” Jake stopped himself. “What I mean is … she’s being brave. Good night, everybody.” He assured the Ormsby-Fletchers that they had had an absolutely super evening and, clutching his Montgomery portrait, he hurried Nancy to the car. Eliot’s howling pursued him.

  “What in the hell’s got into you?” Nancy asked.

  But Jake wouldn’t talk until they reached the highway. “I’ve got a splitting headache, that’s all.”

  “What do you think the child did?”

  “Stuffed his bloody golliwog down the toilet, that’s what.”

  While Nancy got ready for bed, Jake poured himself a stiff drink and sat down to contemplate his Montgomery portrait. What am I doing in this country, he thought? What have I got to say to these nutty, depraved people?

  Well, Yankel?

  3

  IF. IF, IF. IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEFT TORONTO FOR London.

  London, Why, in God’s name, had he come to London in the first place? Because, thanks to the Horseman (and his own big mouth), New York wouldn’t have him.

  As a boy England had signified many things to him, but he had never been drawn toward it. He was a Labor-Zionist. He had despised the British because they stood between him and his homeland. He used to sit by the radio with the rest of the family when Churchill spoke. “… some chicken, some neck …” He could recall toothy photographs of Elizabeth and Margaret in their Brownie uniforms. The blitz. “The King,” his mother said one night, “only pours one inch of hot water into his bath now. It’s to set an example to the people.”

  “Who knows what he does when he’s alone in the toilet,” his father said.

  They played commandos in the alley behind the synagogue, pelting Narvik with frozen horse buns. He read books by G. A. Henty and H. G. Wells. Crunching through the snow, bundled against the wind, on his way to Fletcher’s Field High each morning, he passed the armory of the Canadian Grenadier Guards and outside, under a funny fur hat, there always stood some tall unblinking goy. “If they were ordered to do it,” he was told, “they’d march over a cliff. There’s discipline for you.” He helped collect money for Bundles-for-Britain and later, from the same houses, more money to buy arms for Hagana. A British Ferry Command pilot with a handlebar mustache came to sell his father a Victory Bond. “The Russians aren’t such a bad lot, actually,” he said. “You have to look at it this way. They never had an industrial revolution. They’re squeezing a hundred years of progress into a generation.”

  He had been misinformed. Not everyone on St. Urbain Street was a red.

  “In Finland,” his father said, “they had to chain them to their guns. That sort of thing is bad for morale.”

  England was George Formby, Tommy Farr, and fog. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Big Ben. His mother coming home with puffy eyes from Mrs. Miniver. On Empire Day, in Shawbridge, the ghetto’s summer swimming hole, a young girl drowned after eating too many latkas. Over the mountain, where there was a real lake, the Gentiles swam. England was where they drank tea all the time. Without lemon. They were the finest craftsmen in the world. Once, one of ours had been their prime minister. England was the fox hunt. G.B.S. Bulldog Drummond. Charles Laughton tossing a chicken leg over his shoulder. Ed Murrow. A Nightingale Singing in Berkeley Square. It also meant his own Scots schoolmaster making them memorize Tennyson: “Break, break, break/At the foot of thy crags, O sea!” and Scott: “The stag at eve had drunk its fill/As danced the moon on Monan’s Rill.” They felt no attachment.

  At college, where they began to borrow from a different set of ideas, England came into another, equally distorted focus. A literary experience. The exquisite novels of Jane Austen. Decency, wit, political maturity.

  England, England. He and Luke set out to conquer.

  Standing by the ship’s rail, as they slid out of Quebec City into the broadening St. Lawrence, impossibly exhilarated, Jake demanded of Luke, “I say! I say! I say! What’s beginning to happen in Toronto?”

  “Exciting things.”

  “And Montreal?”

  “It’s changing.”

  Their first contact with England was sooty Liverpool. On the boat train they were amazed by the enormous dessert spoons, grit in your luke-warm tea, and a notice that read, “Gentlemen will please lift the seat.” Trundling into London in a taxi, they experienced only a moment’s self-doubt when they espied all those bow windows on either side of the road, dressing tables shoved against them from within to shut out the obtrusive sun. Should it appear.

  They froze.

  Jake remembered the first weeks in London as an unending fight against the bone-chilling damp. A spill of shillings down the gas meter because parsimonious Luke insisted on the cheapest hotel available while they looked for a flat. They made the required, wearying pilgrimages to the British Museum, the Tate, and Westminster, scornfully avoiding (though they were both desperate to see it) the changing of the guard.

  Earlier, in Montreal, Jake had earnestly assured his troubled relatives that their city was a cultural desert, a colonial pimple, and he was off to nourish himself at the imperial fountainhead, but once he was there and rid of them, all he thought about was girls. Where were the girls? Take me, have me. Oh my God, the ones he saw in the pubs were so depressingly lumpy, all those years of bread-and-dripping and sweets and fishpaste sandwiches having entered their young bodies like poison, coming out here as a mustache, there as a chilblain, and like lead through the teeth. And the elegant shiksas of Belgravia, the ones he ravished with his eyes, who for generations had packed their tomato-faced husbands (C. Aubrey Smith, Ralph Richardson) off to take India, Canada, and Rhodesia (or come back, God forbid, to get four white feathers in the mail); those insufferably arrogant-looking women, he th
ought, would see him only as a boy late with the avocado delivery from Harrod’s.

  Within weeks, Jake was miserable. London, he came to believe, was no more than a gum-gray, depressing city. Where the workers were short with black teeth and the others were long and pallid as forced asparagus with a tendency to stammer.

  Goysville. Tasteless white bread. Sawdust bangers at the local. Brussels sprouts floating in tepid greasy water. At the Windmill Theater, he and Luke watched an aging stripper with jellied thighs. No sooner had the febrile comics bounced on stage –

  “Do you know we’ve got a plane bigger than any plane the Yanks ever built?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, we have. Salisbury Plain.”

  – than the countrymen in tweed caps, who filled the first two rows, lit matches and bent over their girlie books.

  “I’ve been to Brighton to watch the football matches under the sea.”

  “Ruddy fool. There are no football matches under the sea.”

  “Haven’t you heard? There are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.”

  The very day of Jake’s arrival, as the pavement continued to heave up at him like the deck of a Cunarder, he went to Canada House, in Trafalgar Square, to inquire about mail.

  “Anything for Hersh?”

  “What initial?”

  “J.”

  “You’re not J. Hersh.”

  Affronted, Jake slapped his passport down on the counter.

  “Oh, I see. There must be two of you, then.”

  “Can you give me this other J. Hersh’s address?” Jake asked, excited.

  “I don’t think he’s in London any more. He hasn’t been around in months.”

  “Has he left a forwarding address?”

  “Are you a relation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he knew better than to leave an address.” The girl pulled out a wad of letters bound with an elastic. “Overdue bills. Registered letters from his bank. Final notices. Summonses. It’s shameful.”

  “I’d like to leave my address for him, then. Just in case he shows up.”

  The girl watched, tapping her pencil, as Jake wrote it out. “Have you just come over from Canada?” she asked.

  Jake nodded.

  “Travelers abroad should think of themselves as good-will ambassadors for our country. We’re well-liked here.”

  “Like Willy Loman. I know. But you see,” Jake said, “I’m a drug addict. I came over to register with the National Health.” And scooping up his parcel, he retreated to the reading room.

  The parcel was from Jake’s father. A Jewish calendar, listing the holidays to be observed, a skullcap, and a prayer book. There was a message tucked into the skullcap: WRITE WEEKLY, NOT WEAKLY.

  Jake and Luke arrived in London riding the crest of a TV play which Luke had written and Jake directed, in Toronto, that was to be repeated on British commercial television.

  It was, as it turned out, a most propitious time for Canadians, however callow, to descend on the United Kingdom. Commercial television was burgeoning, but desperate for skilled hands. Whereas Americans, who required work permits, were prohibited, overeager colonials, like Jake, like Luke, were elected to fill that office. In those frenetic, halcyon days of live television drama, when plays were usually rehearsed for two weeks with two additional days of camera rehearsal, the Canadians bullied the indolent native camera crews, cajoling in the morning, proffering baksheesh in the evening, into actually moving their hitherto static cameras, zooming in here, dollying out there, imitating film everywhere, improvising from the control room when camera three blew out during transmission and waiting exhausted by the telephone all the next day for the summons from on high that didn’t come. From the Holy Trinity: M-G-M, Columbia, Twentieth. The chance to break into film.

  Until Jake became entangled with the girl who was his production assistant, moving into a flat of his own, he and Luke shared a place in Highgate. In the semi-detached houses around them, wherever there flourished a salesman or shopkeeper, who had only yesterday slipped in under the middle-class wire, there bloomed not an aspidistra but a Tory poster in the window, the badge of breathless arrival, as Sir Anthony Eden led his party into an election. Jake, convinced it was time he entered fully into the life of his adopted country, scooted round to the local Labor Party office to volunteer for work, secretly expecting that considering his rising reputation his name would be instantly recognized by the dreamiest deb in the place, unfortunately sex-crazed (Yes, I’m the Hersh), and that he would be prevailed upon to direct a party political piece for the telly, sweeping Hugh into office, and creating totally unexpected conundrums for himself when he emerged as the cynosure of the Hampstead set. “Yes, I do appreciate it’s a safe seat. I’m not ungrateful, Hugh. But …”

  The flaking Labor Party office, a bankrupt laundromat on short lease, was empty except for a stout middle-aged lady in a tweed suit. “Yes,” she asked sharply, “what is it?”

  Disheartened, Jake nevertheless inquired whether there was any work he could do.

  “Do you know my son?” she demanded. “Do you know him personally?”

  Her son was the candidate. “No,” he confessed.

  “Then why do you want to work for us?”

  “I’m a Labor supporter,” Jake said, retreating.

  “I see. Well, I really don’t know …” She flapped about, a startled hen, finally perching on a pile of pamphlets. “I guess there’d be no harm in your putting these through letter boxes …”

  Gradually Jake climbed from roistering bottle parties to invitations to dinner, cards left out on his mantelpiece to be scanned by lesser types, the uninvited. He directed, Luke wrote. Within a year they had become the darlings of Armchair Theater and, to fill the time, began work on their parody script, The Good Britons.

  Jake regularly took his lunch at the Partisan Coffee Bar, on Carlisle Street, though his revanchist stomach rumbled against the militant Irish stew. With Luke, he stood in blinking attendance, on Easter morning, 1957, when Canon Collins led CND marchers into Trafalgar Square one more time.

  When the summons from on high finally came it wasn’t from Columbia, M-G-M, or Twentieth Century-Fox. Neither was it Jake they wanted, but Luke. A play he had submitted to the Royal Court, rewritten since Jake had first directed it for Canadian television, had been accepted for production. It was then that the two friends, seemingly inseparable partners, came unstuck through a variant of an affliction that was peculiar to Canadian artists of their generation: a suspension of belief in each other’s real rather than national trading stamp value. They had emerged, pace Auden, from tiefste Provinz, a place that had produced no art and had exalted self-deprecation above all. They were the progeny of a twice-rejected land. From the beginning, Canada’s two founding races, the English and the French, had outbid each other in scornfully disinheriting them. A few arpents of snow, Voltaire wrote contemptuously, and Dr. Johnson dismissed the dominion as “a region from which nothing but furs and fish were to be had.”

  Jake, Luke, and others of their generation were reared to believe in the cultural thinness of their own blood. Anemia was their heritage. As certain homosexuals pander to others by telling the most vicious anti-queer jokes, so Jake, so Luke, shielded themselves from ridicule by anticipating with derisive tales of their own. Their only certitude was that all indigenous cultural standards they had been raised on were a shared joke. No national reputation could be bandied abroad without apology.

  Adrift in a cosmopolitan sea of conflicting mythologies, only they had none. Moving among discontented commonwealth types in London, they were inclined to envy them their real grievances. South Africans and Rhodesians, bona fide refugees from tyranny, who had come to raise a humanitarian banner in exile; Australians, who could allude to forebears transported in convict ships; and West Indians, armed with the most obscene outrage of all, the memory of their grandfathers sold in marketplaces. What they failed to grasp was the ironic truth in Sir W
ilfred Laurier’s boast that the twentieth century would belong to Canada. For amid so many exiles from nineteenth-century tyranny, heirs to injustices that could actually be set right politically, thereby lending themselves to constructive angers, only the Canadians, surprisingly, were true children of their times. Only they had packed their bags and left home to escape the hell of boredom. And find it everywhere.

  When the summons from on high finally came, Jake’s girlfriend cooked a dinner to celebrate. After she retired, the two friends became uneasy with one another. Luke was in a turmoil. He was reconciled to Jake’s directing his play at the Royal Court, if he insisted, a most unlikely prospect, but he wasn’t going to ask. Luke had faith in Jake’s talent, even though it was forged in Canada; he had a deeper rapport with him than he could possibly enjoy with another director, and yet – and yet – given his first big chance for a breakthrough, unsettled by enormous self-doubts, he yearned for the reassurance of somebody unknown to him. A reputation. Somebody real, somebody British. Jake, on his side, was already casting the play in his mind’s eye, worrying about the second act, when he realized with a heavy heart that Luke, his manner surreptitiously pleading, would be happier with somebody else.

  Initially, Jake was not inclined to let Luke off the hook. Dangle, baby. Suffer. Flitting about the periphery, but never confronting the problem, the two friends waited each other out. One didn’t ask, the other didn’t volunteer. Desperately, they retreated into reminiscences, surprisingly finding no restorative warmth there, but, instead, unsuspected resentments. Finally, Jake had had enough.

  “I should have said as much earlier, Luke, but much as I’d like to do your play, I’m not going to be free.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s a terrific play. I always thought so. But I’ve got to think of my own career, don’t you think?”

  Luke recoiled warily.

  “I’ve already done the play in Toronto. I’d only be repeating myself.”