âSo there we all were, looking our best and on our best behavior, when all of a sudden just as the photographer says âCheese!â Angus has to stick his tongue out and go âPBBT!â It was so loud IÂ swear the poor man almost hit the ceiling, and people in England thought the Queen had broken wind â again!â
A little known member of The Lost Generation was poet Charles Bowkowski, who was kicked out of the group after biting Ernest Hemingway on the foot. Hemingway had told Bowkowski that his epic poem âWhere The Trees Have No Name,â was nothing more than a cheap imitation of âUnder Milkwood,â something which Bowkowski found especially galling given that âUnder Milkwoodâ hadnât been written yet.
Bowkowski had settled in Paris after spending two years as part of the Messenger Dog Corps during the First World War. He later wrote in his autobiography âThe Fleas And Iâ, that âIt was mindless slaughter, slaughter and insanity, the battlefields were hell on earth – there were severed dog limbs and squeaky toys everywhere.â
Disgruntled by his treatment after the Hemingway incident, the poet returned to America, where he became Professor of Comparative Literature and Post-Modern Sophistry at Princeton University. Bowkowski, whose sense of smell had started to fail him, died in 1967 after accidentally eating three pounds of chocolate, having apparently mistaken them for Hemingwayâs foot.
