The Global View

---

Book excerpt

Chapter One

Toronto, 1995

            My father, Ephraim Goldman, was considered a great man by reputation, by aura and through a highly visible public identity.  Who considered him great, you may well ask?  Well, he hobnobbed with Prime Ministers, advised Presidents and was on intimate terms with royalty; albeit in his words, ‘ersatz aristocrats’.  He knew Berenson, Bertrand Russell and Marc Chagall.  In his office, behind his desk, there is a photograph of him shaking hands with a shy, rumpled Albert Einstein.  Einstein, the man who put absolute destruction within man's reach and with his halo of white hair looked so harmless, like a kind uncle. 

            Once, he shared a private plane with Armand Hammer of Occidental Petroleum.  They played chess together and my father remembered it as ‘fun’.   Mr. Hammer named his chess pieces after famous works of art, so it was even more painful for him to lose.  “My, my,” he muttered as my father swept a bishop, “there goes  ‘Guernica’.”  Hammer chewed his purplish lips in pain as my father snatched Van Gogh's self-portrait.  After Hammer lost the match, he advised my father to invest in drilling futures.

            "I don't know why such people would pay attention to me," Dad used to say.  “After all,” he'd continue, “I'm just a modest history teacher who thinks about politics and world affairs, that's all.  Nothing special about that.”

            But there was, of course.  My father wrote a book, ‘The Global View’, that was published by William Dent & Sons in 1955.  His editors thought the book far too academic, but went ahead anyway.  They'd had a bad year and hoped to crack the college market. It sold 100,000 copies in hard cover and that made it a publishing phenomenon. And now, some forty-five years later, it continues to sell 75,000 copies every year without fail.  The book has been a miniature gold mine.

            The Global View has been through six printings, revised twice and issued in paperback.  It has been translated into fifteen languages and sold in sixty-five countries worldwide.  The BBC, CBC and PBS have all filmed documentary specials about my father.  He has become a TV star, although it is a medium he cares little about, but he acknowledges that it plays a vital role in global communications and reflects many of our cultural values.  That's an intellectual's way of saying it's bullshit.

            He has written other books, of course, but none of them were as well-received as the first.  And what a success it was.  It brought both academic and popular acclaim.  He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne and Salzberg.  Editors snapped up every article he wrote.  Prestigious magazines like Harpers, Fortune, the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker published his essays. Both Time and Newsweek featured stories on him, and all of his books have been reviewed, usually favorably, by the New York Times Review of Books.  His career has been long and fulfilling, especially so for a humble teacher of history.

            Apart from being his son, how do I know these things?  As it turns out, I am writing my father's biography.  Writing his biography while he's still alive has advantages and disadvantages. He intimidates me, to be blunt about it, but mainly it has forced me to examine our relationship, which has been remarkably lousy.

            "Don't worry about objectivity," my publisher, Julian De Groot said. "Just write from the heart.  Readers aren't interested in a clinical analysis.  They want to know the man.  And who is better qualified, I ask you?"  Then he smiled, leaned back in his leather chair, and lit a cigarette.  He ran long, slim fingers through his sleek white hair.

            De Groot stared at me impassively, his thin lips slightly pursed, fishing for an angle.  "Do you know", he asked lazily, "whether your father was always faithful to your mother?"

  His words sank in slowly.  It was a question I had asked myself many times but wouldn't admit it to the likes of De Groot.  The truth was; my father was very much a stranger to me.  We had never really talked in the way I would have liked.  In the way other fathers and sons, who shared things together, talked.  Baseball.  Stamps.  Fishing. Girls.  Music.  These were a few of the things we never shared.  We had never gone out and got loaded together.  Never goofed off together.  I had no idea what sort of inner life he lived.   He'd always been thrifty with his feelings, saving all his excess energy for work. 

            "After all, he traveled a great deal on his own, didn't he?" De Groot reasoned and slid one fine transparent eyebrow up to his hairline, giving his long face a lopsided appearance, like a disproportionate mask.

            "Yes, he traveled quite a bit," I replied.  "But that doesn't mean anything, you know."

            "Have you seen his correspondence?" De Groot countered, glancing at a mass of disheveled papers heaped on his desk, then flicked his eyes up at me.

            "No, I haven't," I admitted.   "But I don't intend to pursue this line in the book, De Groot.  This is not a book for supermarket check-outs." 

            De Groot smiled again and pointed a nicotine-stained forefinger at me.  It looked like the finger of death, long and knobby.

            " There's nothing wrong with supermarkets," he sniffed.  " They sell a lot of books.  I've even bought some there myself.  Just remember," he warned me, "we want the man, Bernard.  All of him, the warts, hidden thoughts, nestled secrets."

            "I'll do what I think is best," I said.

            "You have illusions about him?"

            "Probably," I snapped

            "You may have to shatter some, you know, to get what you want.  Press him until he's uncomfortable and tells you the truth.  Some of it may come as a shock to you but ultimately, it will be very revealing.  You will gain from this," he assured me, pulling at his thin nostrils, "It will be worth the pain."

            "Jesus, he's not dead, you know.  He's my father and I have to deal with him.  And the rest of my family.  I have to think about that too."  I saw myself ostracized, but De Groot wasn’t listening to me. He was hearing the coins drop into the till, his head ringing with the music of silver.

            De Groot looked at his wristwatch, a Concord, then rose smoothly. He eased me out of the office, smiling like an undertaker, sizing me up for the coffin.  "I just want you to be productive, Bernard, and write a book that will build on your reputation and also..." here he paused and looked down at me fixedly, crooning in a low mellifluous tone, "…sell as well as can be expected."  He took my hand in his.  It was very dry, like smooth, light paper.  The palm was curved and quite plump. 

            "Keep me posted on your progress.  I want to see a draft by October first.  Make it brilliant."

            How did I get myself into this? I thought.

            To my shame, a $20,000 advance had been a very powerful persuader.  So, I felt guilty about the money and guilty about the subject. What if my father had been a philanderer?  Or worse?  It would make a juicier story on the surface.  If people wanted to divine his thoughts, they could read his books… that seemed reasonable.  But his books were cerebral, full of cogent analysis and layered anecdotes set out in logical sequence.  My father's writing left himself, the blood, the heart and the guts, very much out of it.  His intelligent vista curtained the background, fashioning a ‘spiritual form’ for the dialogue in which he enjoined the reader.  I pictured that phrase – spiritual form –  liberally sprinkled throughout his text.  He'd popularized it.  His thoughts were so painstakingly shaped that admiration might be the only genuine reaction upon realizing, as a reader, the intricate body he'd constructed.   Very impressive, indeed and appealed to every bloodless, sterile sensibility imaginable.  He wrote like a soulless, mirthless automaton, albeit one with sophisticated circuitry. I’d read ten words and drop from boredom… and frustration.

            No matter how clever, it was still just a construction, like the shell of a skyscraper – clean and flawless and built like a pragmatic machine.  A literary Volkswagen that gets you where you want to go.  Up, in this case.  De Groot slavered after a portrait of Eph Goldman which let it all hang out.  He wanted to give the mundane reading public something to drool over. Did I want to write a tell-all book for the tabloid-obsessed masses? I think I did. I really think I did. Jesus.

            My nuts were in the squisher.  An interesting dilemma.  And the only person who could help me solve the dilemma was the elusive subject himself. 

Daddy-O.

Chapter Two 

            I located him by the glowing tip of a medium-sized Rheas which brightened then lessened in intensity, like an uneven pulse.  He was seated on the flagstone patio watching the blinking lights flicker across Georgian Bay.  We were staying at the summerhouse for the weekend.  Just he and I.  It was a chance to try out our new roles because of this new ‘connection’ between us. I was now his official biographer and that changed things.  He was acting as if everything he did or said would be recorded for the book.  As if he expected me to follow him into the john with a microphone, asking what it's like to pee and think simultaneously. I could imagine his response: “Hard to say, but my right leg is wet.”

            The cigar end drew a short arc in the air as my father waved at a mosquito buzzing near his face.  The night was pleasant and light and full of smells.  Pungent smoke, damp grass, the sweet musk of roses and the luxuriousness of buttercups.   The humidity wafting up from Georgian Bay rotted everything.  Especially wood.  That's why Eph decreed that the deck should be cast in stone, the summerhouse built of brick and the furniture forged of wrought iron. Nothing would ever give way or crumble beneath us.  There were no let-downs from the physical world.  We would never be disappointed by a chair, the stone picnic table, or the plastic laundry stand.  “Brick is more permanent,” my father often said, “wood is a natural disintegrater.” 

            De Groot didn't know my father well and imagined a self-effacing academic with a lot of secrets.  A man who held his chin in hand and thought deeply about everything, but did not put himself above normal feelings and temptations. Someone he suspected of being a closet hedonist with at least two pregnant coeds hidden away in some secluded dorm.  De Groot always suspected something more. 

            The tip of the cigar brightened again as he held it close to his face, exhaling smoke.  I made out his profile, the still-thick white hair, curling in the back around his neck, the broad nose and pointed jaw.  The high forehead, breastplate for a brain of rare ability, many would say. It was a sensual face, full and fleshy, except for his eyes which were too small and a limpid blue.  They were a bit chilling, I thought, revealing a crunchy layer of perma frost piled deep within.  I'd felt it many times when I'd made him angry, just playing about the house, making noise, knocking over things – as kids do.  He’d stalk out of his study, teeth clenched, fists balled, eyes hardened like ice crystals. Growl like a bear, bellow like a pig caller. I was the one who always got into trouble.  When not fighting with me, my brother, Harry was really a very good child and quite placid.  But I liked to act things out and whoop and holler in the throes of make-believe.  Things seemed far more real if they were vocalized but my father didn't seem to understand the needs of the imagination because he didn’t have any.  And imagination demanded noise.  So, he wasn't at all appreciative.  I realize now I was just trying to attract his attention, attention that was glued to the books and notes in that gloomy room. Any sort of attention was better than none at all.

            "Come on out and sit down," he said gruffly.  "Would you like a cigar?"

            "No thanks."

            "They keep the mosquitoes away."

            "I know," I replied.   "But they're not too bad tonight."

            "Why are you doing this book thing?" he asked suddenly, although he continued to gaze at the water.  The bay wasn't visible but we could hear the sound of water lapping faintly on the shore. A ghost sound.  My throat tightened.

            "I'm not really sure, to be honest," I said hoarsely, then made a guttural noise deep down in my chest. I snorted. “I was given an advance.”

            "Do you think writing about me will make you famous?  Is that it?  Do you want to expose me?"  He sounded like a political columnist now, pressing a sensitive point. 

            I laughed.  "Expose you how?  What is there to expose?"

            "Isn't that what De Groot wants, Bernie?  An exposé?"

            "I think he wants a good book, Dad.  That's all.  People are interested in you.  Biographies are very popular these days."

            "I see," he answered in a non-committal, dead tone.  "Bernie?"  The voice came hard like pressed cement.

            "Yes?" I stuttered.

            "I'll make you a deal..."

            "What kind of deal?" I asked, clearing my throat.

            "A fair deal. You know I don't like De Groot. He has a low mind and thinks only of exploiting people to make money. I know this project could mean a lot to you.  Don't forget that before I wrote The Global View, I hungered for an audience.  I wanted to reach out, to influence people with my thoughts and aspirations.  So, I can understand that impulse, son, better than you think."

            "Okay," I said.   "What's the deal?"  In past situations, where we had made deals, I had come out on the short end.  Consequently, I was wary of deals.  There was a pair of skis, I recall, that I never owned, a trip to France on which I was never sent and a loan that never materialized.  "And it better be good," I warned him.