This particular theory - that in a relationship of two people, their respective intellectual percentages should be relatively equal or only chaos and bad decisions will ensue - came in for an awful amount of flak when first mooted, and is rarely discussed now as a result.
Instead, we hear mosh such as opposites attract. But Mendel's theory sounds very reasonable to me. Torvill (89) and Dean (84) were a lot closer intellectually than Elizabeth Taylor (59) and any of her 17 husbands (five to eight). And look what happened with those 17 husbands. When the two percentages are distantly apart, only incomprehensible behaviour will occur.
In our marriage, I am delighted to report my wife is a 96. I often introduce her as this at prestigious dinner parties, and I am extremely proud to do so. However, I am a four. This explains why I like Rod McKuen records. I don't especially collect them, good grief, there are nearly 150 at last count, and at one stage, and I hope you are sitting down for this, he was the world's biggest-selling poet. But when I see an interesting Rod McKuen album I will always snap it up. Unfathomably, until a thrilling shopping trip to South Dunedin last week, I did not own a live Rod McKuen record, but now I do, Rod McKuen Grand Tour, which has four sides of performances from six different venues in 1971.
Nearly two hours of everything he is known for.
In fact what he is known for is the essence of the Rod McKuen debate. Some dispute he could be the world's biggest-selling poet because he isn't even a poet. Others merely describe the sounds that come out his mouth as laryngitis, gravel, sandpaper and Old Dutch Cleanser. But some of the media have been far kinder. The reviewer for The Bloomington Evening Pantograph, a preposterously unlikely publication, used the words sends, soaring, songs, sweetest, sad, since, Swinburne, Shelley, shocks, soars, scintillates, swoops, sounds, sensational and side of heaven in just five lines.
Never has sibilance bedfellowed alliteration to such spectacular effect.
McKuen, some assuredly pretty songs and his work with Jacques Brel notwithstanding, will forever be hung by the petard that is his duel with the spoken word. This is really something else. I love this stuff to bits. Mawkish?
There is more mawk here than anywhere, mate. This is where my 4% intelligence leaps from its chair so loudly I often wonder how the 96 copes. His poem on whether to share a toothbrush with a lover The Morning After is probably the most riveting poem written since Snake by D.H.Lawrence.
You cannot breathe or swallow when listening to him reading this. Alas, his toothbrush thoughts are not on this set, but the spoken word here hits home with the power of a thousand hammers.
McKuen delivers words like deathbed confessions, a man with, well yes, there is no other word for it, laryngitis, laryngitis and a tongue swimming in half-set cement.
McKuen's Grand Tour leaves us with a message that is not just 1971, and McKuen is very much a 1971 man, but timeless for all the ages, fit to be imprisoned in steel and buried at sea for aliens three trillion years hence to scratch their huge foreheads over until they bleed.
"It doesn't matter who you love or how you love," says McKuen, "but, especially now, that you love."
Rod McKuen's birthday is on Sunday. His records are in second-hand stores all over town. Buy one and have yourself a Rod McKuen party.
Drink and think. Then drink again. And by the way, I made up all that stuff about Mendel's Law of Complementary Intelligence. Yes I know it made perfect sense.
- Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
