Loser takes most
Patrick Skene Catling
THE SHY PORNOGRAPHER by Peter Kinsley Amherst, £16.99, pp. 192, ISBN 1903637236 0 frabjous day! Here is a comic novel that is really funny, with funny jokes about a funny hero. At the same time, Peter Kinsley wreaks a satisfactory vengeance on behalf of all those writers who have been exploited by wicked publishers and producers. Baxter Burns is an American writer, a Harvard drop-out, in voluntary exile on Ibiza. His literary career has been in abeyance since he wrote Down Mexico Way, a polemical novel against militant nationalism, which, of course, was a commercial flop. In straits traditionally known as dire, down and out in Paris, he rewrites his book as pornography for Gregoire Grisbi, of Hard Chancre Press, a recognisable caricature of the infamous Maurice Girodias, who owned Olympia Press until one of his authors, J. P. Donleavy, managed to take it away from him. Burns's revamped novel is called The Victim by 'William Darcy'. Baxter has been doing his best to forget it, living close to penury with '2,000 [other] alcoholics clinging to a sundrenched rock' in the Mediterranean.
Baxter, like some other novelists, is an obsessively introspective anal neurotic who drinks everything he can get his hands on, but, because of hypochondria, eats occasional oranges for his health. His Ibiza diet is scant. When hard pressed, he has gone into the supermercado with a can-opener and a spoon and eaten his way around the shelves. His customary diet is vodka, and absinthe is available on the island. 'If you bought six bottles they gave you a free white stick.'
He sometimes maintains surprisingly cordial relations with women, though one of them tells him he has a second liver where a heart should be. And so the bohemian days in the sunshine drift by, until he hears from his loyal, practical sister Roberta, a teacher in Minnesota, that a Hollywood producer seeks to offer him $100,000 for the film rights to the novel — unsuspected by Baxter, the second version.
The plot is galvanised into picaresque activity, from Ibiza across America, where 'the only way to go drinking in complete safety was in a fire-proof suit, wearing a crash helmet, and driving a tank'.
Having encountered a dangerous old friend in a celebrated Irish bar on Third Avenue, Baxter recklessly ventures into the Bowery, and wakes up the next morning penniless in Central Park, with his shoes placed for polishing beside the bench he slept on. A sympathetic panhandler takes Baxter for breakfast, though he usually has 'just a lightly buttered aspirin between two rose petals', and pays to have Baxter's hair dyed green so he can crash a St Patrick's Day party at the 21 Room.
Roberta, a useful goddess from the machinery, enables him to continue his westward journey. In Hollywood, he is cheated (again) by the French publisher and by Lucius Silver of Silverscreen Productions, and eventually is able to retaliate with wonderfully devastating, greater ingenuity. Roberta then gets Baxter to give a university lecture in Minneapolis; thus Peter Kinsley delivers an eloquent message on the ideals of the artist in our society. Callooh! Callay!
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