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...annoyed, by Jude's rapid acceptance and success in the literary world or just perceptive, could not tell. Certainly it was not a journalistic desire of setting the record straight and getting to the truth that motivated Poorhouse's insistence. Such alleged desires were one of the lies about journalism we were fed ill those years. But Poorhouse had not been a journalist for nothing. He had no more commitment to the unvarnished truth than any other journalist still in the business. Nor, for that matter, did Jude.
Certainly Jude had been readily accepted. There was a sentimental love for an old con, an eager romanticizing of gaol and crime and social delinquency. The older libertarians had always maintained associates in the criminal fringe, and were not especially romantic about it. They saw it all as reality, social organization a crime anyway committed by self-styled authority, and in the world of whatever you want, get it, the existence of crim contacts was useful. But the new wave of libertarians like Gwen came from their bourgeois bowers very dewy-eyed about it all. St Genet and such like shit. Now they had their own jennet. His needle aubades and psalms of smash and grab, songs of statutory rape and anthems of amnesia sat well in the underground paper alongside the full and unexpurgated text of "Eskimo Nell" and whatever that ballad was that James Joyce allegedly wrote.
Poorhouse pursed his lips. Possibly Poorhouse was fiction editor and columnist but not overall literary editor, not in command of poetry. Possibly Ozzie Cambridge had acquired that role. Possibly neither of them had handled Jude's manuscript, but the poet himself had thrust it on Gwen in the pub one night with a suitably ingratiating lisp, shirt tail hanging out of his trousers over his buttocks like a French maid in a theatrical farce or a specialist brothel such as Poorhouse claimed to patronise. Though Gwen was equally capable of soliciting it herself, coyly complicit in their campaign, less clearly against society than scrambling up its facades to some convenient roosts on the higher window ledges, ready to pop in at the top. A shock for Poorhouse admiring the view of the war memorial from...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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More articles from Quadrant
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