A GREAT MIND SPEAKS OUT

Tomer Tamar is one of the great names of modern letters. Accomplished poet, esteemed though greatly feared critic, playwright, aphorist, polemicist, political speechwriter and professor, Dr. Tamar has spent a lifetime illuminating and elucidating the world of ideas.

Dr. Tomer Tamar, watercolor on paper, Serge Mahfouz

After years of championing the work of my good friend David Schoffman, it appears that Tamar has finally gone rogue.

Thirty years ago while serving as editor and chief of the now defunct periodical Eruditio Humanitas, the professor was a tireless advocate not only of Schoffman but also of the entire band of expatriate miscreants who flooded the bars and bistros of la Rue de Rennes in the early 80's.  No superlative was too hyperbolic for the dazzled don. It seemed that every other week some essay would surface extolling the visionary genius of this American insurgent. Needless to say a noisy claque of malcontents from l'École nationale supérieure simmered with both a vehement and a jingoistic vintage of bitter resentment.

I too was among them.

We cried foul but to no avail. Dr. Tamar remained unmoved. It was as if he had a gambling debt or was the subject of blackmail. One day Schoffman was the heir apparent to Derain the next he was the visual equivalent to Lacan or the visionary twin of Lévi-Strauss. It was obviously all just flagrant unabashed connerie but the professor was so powerful at the time that nobody had the nerve to challenge him.

Now that the esteemed scholar has retired from public life and is living in quiet retirement in Samois sur Seine his ardor has cooled and his influence has waned into near irrelevance. I would love to report that his memoirs have been eagerly awaited but that would be a gross exaggeration. The fact is, after all these years he had trouble finding a publisher.

As a courtesy I received an advanced copy and I confess that the first thing I did was scour the index for references to me. I was slightly wounded to have merited a mere two paragraphs but was content to find that our long-standing grudge was airbrushed into a vague form of "intellectual friction" (divergence d'opinion). Schoffman on the other hand did not fare as well.

In a chapter with the ominous heading "Charlatans, Knaves, Fools and Frauds," (Bouffons, faussaires, imbéciles et les fraudes), my dear friend David is described as "a blowhard whose fractured French was as agreeable as a day-old brioche." He goes on to depict an atmosphere of debauched dilettantism where "the rightful heirs of Ingres were supplanted by a coterie of cowboys who left New York to try their meager luck in the small, parochial pond of Paris."

It gets much better and ultimately leaves Schoffman battered and bleeding in a raw, turbulent soliloquy of scorn, slander and ridicule.

I'm not entirely sure how Tamar's book will be received by the public. For a variety of reasons his ideas are not taken very seriously any longer.