“I’m sorry, Tamara. I want to touch people like a magician, to change them or hurt them, leave my brand, make them beautiful. I want to be the hypnotist who takes no chances of falling asleep himself. I want to kiss with one eye open. Or I did. I don’t want to any more.”
She loved the way he talked.
They returned to the room on Stanley, unofficially, from time to time. A twenty-year-old can be very tender to an ancient mistress.
“I know I never saw you. I blur everyone in my personal vision. I never get their own music….”
After a while her psychiatrist thought it would be better if she didn’t see him again.
15
Breavman won a scholarship to do graduate work in English at Columbia but he decided not to take it.
“Oh no, Krantz, nothing smells more like a slaughterhouse than a graduate seminar. People sitting around tables in small classrooms, their hands bloody with commas. They get older and the ages of the poets remain the same, twenty-three, twenty-five, nineteen.”
“That gives you four years at the outside, Breavman.”
His book of Montreal sketches appeared and was well received. He started seeing it on the bookshelves of his friends and relatives and he resented their having it. It was none of their business how Tamara’s breasts looked in the artificial moonlight of Stanley Street.
Canadians are desperate for a Keats. Literary meetings are the manner in which Anglophiles express passion. He read his sketches for small societies, large college groups, enlightened church meetings. He slept with as many pretty chairwomen as he could. He gave up conversation. He merely quoted himself. He could maintain an oppressive silence at a dinner-table to make the lovely daughter of the house believe he was brooding over her soul.
The only person he could joke with was Krantz.
The world was being hoaxed by a disciplined melancholy. All the sketches made a virtue of longing. All that was necessary to be loved widely was to publish one’s anxieties. The whole enterprise of art was a calculated display of suffering.
He walked with pale blonde girls along Westmount Boulevard. He told them he saw the stone houses as ruins. He hinted that they could fulfil themselves through him. He could lean against a fireplace with all the ambiguous tragedy of a blind Samson against the temple pillars.
Among certain commercial Jews he was considered a mild traitor who could not be condemned outright. They were dismayed by the possibility that he might make a financial success out of what he was doing. This their ulcers resented. His name was in the newspapers. He might not be an ideal member of the community but neither was Disraeli or Mendelssohn, whose apostasies the Jewish regard for attainment has always overlooked. Also, writing is an essential part of the Jewish tradition and even the degraded contemporary situation cannot suppress it. A respect for books and artistry will persist for another generation or two. It can’t go on forever without being reconsecrated.
Among certain Gentiles he was suspect for other reasons. His Semitic barbarity hidden under the cloak of Art, he was intruding on their cocktail rituals. They were pledged to Culture (like all good Canadians) but he was threatening the blood purity of their daughters. They made him feel as vital as a Negro. He engaged stockbrokers in long conversations about over-breeding and the loss of creative vitality. He punctuated his speech with Yiddish expressions which he never thought of using anywhere else. In their living-rooms, for no reason at all, he often broke into little Hasidic dances around the tea table.
He incorporated Sherbrooke Street into his general domain. He believed he understood its elegant sadness better than anyone else in the city. Whenever he went into one of the stores he always remembered that he was standing in what was once the drawing-room of a smart town house. He breathed a historical sigh for the mansions become brewery and insurance head offices. He sat on the steps of the museum and watched the chic women float into dress shops or walk their rich dogs in front of the Ritz. He watched people line up for buses, board, and zoom away. He always found that a mystery. He walked into lavatory-like new banks and wondered what everyone was doing there. He stared at pediments of carved grapevines. Gargoyles on the brown stone church. Intricate wooden balconies just east of Park. The rose window of another church spiked to prevent pigeons from roosting. All the old iron, glass, rock.
He had no plans for the future.
Early one morning he and Krantz (they hadn’t gone to bed the night before) sat on a low stone wall at the corner of Mackay and Sherbrooke and admonished the eight-thirty working-day crowds.
“The jig is up,” Breavman shouted. “It’s all over. Go back to your homes. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to your homes. Return to bed. Can’t you see it’s all done with?”
“Consummatum est,” Krantz said.
Later Breavman said, “You don’t really believe it, do you, Krantz?”
“Not as thoroughly as you.”
No plans for the future.
He could lay his hand on a low-cut gown and nobody minded. He was a kind of mild Dylan Thomas, talent and behaviour modified for Canadian tastes.
He felt as though he had masturbated on television. He was bereft of privacy, restraint, discretion.
“Do you know what I am, Krantz?”
“Yes, and don’t recite the catalogue.”
“A stud for unhappy women. A twilight peeper of Victorian ruins. A middle-class connoisseur of doomed union songs. A race-haunted exhibitionist forever waving my circumcision. A lap-dog who laps.”
Therefore, according to the traditions of his class, he did penance through manual labour.
On one of his walks around the Montreal waterfront he passed a brass foundry, a small firm which manufactured bathroom fixtures.
