Rollicking tale of faux woe to distract from reality
Vengeful people who write 600-page autobiographies are in for the long haul, ending up bruised, bleeding and “encrusted with alluvial deposits,” as P.G. Wodehouse once said of long train journeys. But then so do their readers.
Barbara Joan Estelle Amiel’s “Friends and Enemies” — its subtitle should have been “They Only Pretended to Like Me” — is a picaresque, a huge, rollicking tale of faux woe, if you like that sort of thing and I’m afraid I very much do. It’s huge and weird, its carbonation just the right distraction for this doggedly decent country during maximum Trump crazy.
Younger readers may not know the background here. Amiel, a former British-Canadian extreme-right columnist, now nearly 80, is married to Canadian former newspaper owner (National Post, Telegraph) Conrad Black, 76, who spent nearly three and a half years in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice. Their loss of fortune — social, financial and personal — began in 2003 and steadily rolled downhill.
The mansions, private planes, “oily” jewels and caverns of costumes dribbled away during 14 years of legal quarrels. Now they live in a less grand Toronto home where, she has said bewilderingly, the pool is not deep enough. For what?
I admire unflappability in my fellow humans, an air of calm, as well as the ability to cover pain with jokes. Amiel, clinging to the wreckage, doesn’t have these qualities. The best word for her book is “screamy” and initially at least, that’s all to the good. She tells the reader everything except for the full answer to the basic question for any acidic memoirist: Why are you like this?
It was certainly my question by page 42 when Amiel, then young and paired with a wealthy older man in New York, tortured his pet dog.
Gogo, an adorable, tail-wagging tiny little ball of delight, loved Amiel and she him. They comforted each other. What a cuddly pair. “I held her and I loved her and I kicked her, hard, really hard in the stomach and groin,” Amiel writes. “I kicked her viciously. She would never bark, only whimper this low mewing sound of pain, and I’d do it again and again.”
Over time the dog began bleeding internally and externally. Amiel “rushed her to the animal hospital” but told no one that she was the cause. Her motive eludes her, though the reader may have ideas.
We learn about Amiel’s shingles, bowels, faulty blood, hormonal illnesses, embonpoint and leg skin, etc. but get only a brief recitation of a difficult mother and the childhood shame that turned Amiel into a lifelong peeled nerve.
She says her father, Harold, was a charming embezzler who abandoned both his families. Her mother, Vera, then married a Canadian and moved to Hamilton, Ont., which Amiel found unbearable. Harold, newly poor, shot himself.
Her mother repeatedly attempted suicide, using a version of a painkiller Amiel would take all her life. Amiel describes her own suicide attempts, by hanging, overdose and hypothermia.
I only dwell on this because much of it happens before page 42. Incidentally, her second husband, George Jonas, used to kick her, fracturing two of her ribs and dislocating her jaw. She weighed 125 pounds, the husband 185, she points out. (Gogo the dog weighed in at 27.)
Status anxiety is Amiel’s constant rippling, pumping theme, though she may not know that. She reminds me of Moira Rose, played by the brilliant Catherine O’Hara in the CBC comedy “Schitt’s Creek,” the matriarch of a rich family stripped bare, living in a rundown motel in a shabby Ontario village and trying to cope.
Moira, ever the painted and pasted drama queen, talks like Conrad Black writes and wears the remnants of her flamboyant wardrobe like armour, an Amiel in chain mail and feathers.
Amiel frequently wonders why people, particularly women, don’t like her. But she doesn’t like them either, never has. Her sadistic columns often kicked women, particularly when they were down, which they still are, as it happens.
Amiel, a creature of her time, as I am, as we all are, doesn’t know herself, but she wouldn’t like herself if she did. The kicked dog is Amiel and that’s the tragedy of it.
I wanted to like “Friends and Enemies” and I mostly do, though I cannot ethically recommend it without coming to your home and gluing the pages together where Amiel makes appalling references to race.
Yes, there is a place in the museum for the figures Amiel has drawn on her cave wall. The book is a useful medical case study in fear of female aging. Black was happy to look like a mudslide — men can do that — but he liked his traumatized, beautiful middle-aged wife to look young. Why the hell should she? Age has other comforts like blithe independence, or huggy grandchildren who take you as they find you, or pet dogs. Skip that last one.
“Friends and Enemies” is a goat’s head soup, hi-vis orange fluid thick with Wrongthink and Badfeel, rife with bone slivers and dosed with Amiel’s favourite potion, Carnation milk + codeine + fruity pop Ribena. I thank her editors for permitting this level of candour from a raging human who wants her enemies executed or injected with Ebola. They even agreed to print her anguished teen-diary list of Friends and Enemies. Some, post-Gogo, may resent being cast as Friends. She does not see this.
At this late date, I would like to make peace with Amiel, who says that after Black’s knighthood, I referred to “that clot Conrad Black and his ancient friends.” Fine, I retract that. Henry Kissinger is 97. But spry.
But then I think of Gogo, who, when Amiel stopped kicking her, “would sigh with relief and lick my shoe and lick my face when I went on the floor to comfort her.”
I would not kick a dog. I will not kick Amiel. I am patting myself for my restraint and happily scratching behind my ears.
Amiel, a creature of her time, as I am, as we all are, doesn’t know herself, but she wouldn’t like herself if she did