The Incomparable Atuk

by Mordecai Richler

  Atuk, with Rabbi Glenn Seigal almost constantly by his side, made only one short, simple statement.

  ‘Is much sadness for me here. Man against man. Ungood. Tell them back at the Bay, Atuk will try to die tall, even as the Old One taught us in happier hunting days.’

  Only Jean-Paul McEwen came out fearlessly against the Eskimo. She demanded the death sentence for Atuk. But, as the Gazette pointed out compassionately in a later editorial, McEwen had relatives in the United States, and it was just possible that their safety had been threatened. Under a headline, NO COMMENT, the Post published a picture of McEwen shaking hands with an American lady senator. The columnist’s effectiveness was undermined, and the concept (shortly to become an alarming actuality) of the Committee to Investigate Pro-American Activities was born.

  BZZZ … zzzz … zzz. . zz. . z. . z …

  Singing, full of fight, the marchers moved on the jailhouse.

  GOLDIE: In the condemned cell of the jailhouse,

  his head hanging low,

  sits my love, Atuk,

  a-waiting to go.

  ‘45.8,’ Rory said. ‘Good.’ He reached for the mouthpiece. ‘All right, Brunhilde. Zero in.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Zero in, Brunhilde!’

  All eyes were on the hatch. Clang! It seemed, oddly enough, like something had been jammed into place outside.

  ‘Brunhilde, will you zero in please.’

  All the senior directors of Twentyman’s vast, interlocking pyramid of food enterprises were assembled in the board room, waiting.

  ‘Can’t understand it,’ Farley said. ‘Rory’s never been late before.’

  Another director spoke up bitterly. ‘I don’t blame him for being late. I’ve never questioned Buck’s judgement before,’ he said, turning to the others, ‘but I don’t see how we’re going to get Esky-Foods off the ground. Do you realize that this puts us in direct competition with one of America’s largest, most deeply entrenched, go-ahead food combines?’

  Nobody dared add that Twentyman, to the astonishment of all of them, had suddenly leased the rights to STICK OUT YOUR NECK to the same American combine. His arch-competitor in a new field.

  ‘I think this time Buck has over-stepped the mark in more ways than one,’ another director finally said.

  ‘Harry’s right. He’s created a Frankenstein. If Atuk’s pardoned, and it just looks like he might be, there’s no saying what in the hell he’ll do next.’

  ‘And if he isn’t the country will go hog-wild. A beast without a head.’

  ‘But Buck can—’

  ‘They’d never accept Buck as a leader. Let’s face it, he’s universally despised.’

  ‘Buck’s bitten off big pieces before and he’s never gone wrong.’

  ‘I think the trouble is he never figured on Atuk getting so much support across the country.’

  ‘Nonsense. Buck always figures every angle.’

  ‘Maybe, but this time, whatever happens, he’s in for trouble.’

  It was almost time for STICK OUT YOUR NECK. Bette was escorted to a waiting limousine.

  ‘Easy does it.’

  ‘But Atuk’s in jail. How can he—?’

  ‘They’re letting him out under armed escort to appear on the show.’

  ‘Well,’ Bette said, ‘you have to give him credit no matter what. He’s certainly shooting for the bull’s-eye tonight.’

  Rory seized his mouthpiece again. ‘Brunhilde, I know you’re out there. Now listen, listen carefully. I have an important appointment in town. This joke has gone far enough. Now will you please open up?’

  But it seemed to Rory he heard a car, his car, drive off.

  The marchers shouted, ‘We want Atuk! We want Atuk!’

  Panofsky shielded his eyes from the brilliant light. ‘I’d like to help you, captain. But there were so many, so many names. It was all in the interest of scientific research, you know.’

  Derm Gabbard skipped onstage before the cheering studio audience. ‘Hiya, folks!’

  ‘Hi, Derm!’

  ‘Folks, it’s time for …?’

  ‘STICK OUT YOUR NECK!’

  An electronic button was pressed, a curtain lifted, and revealed was an enormous wire tub packed with a million in one dollar bills.

  ‘Ooooh!’

  ‘Wow!’

  Derm dived into the tubful of money, threw a shower of bills in the air, giggled, and dived again as four guards released the safety catches on their sub-machine guns and stepped closer to the audience. Derm came up again, his eyes crossed. He sang, ‘It isn’t raining rain, you know … it’s raining GOLD! SILVER! DOLLARS!’

  Another electronic button was pressed, another curtain rose, the Calgary Coyotes struck up ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’, and for the first time the audience saw the contestant, Atuk, his head locked in a guillotine.

  ‘Come on, folks,’ Derm demanded, ‘let’s have a great big hand for Atuk.’

  Everyone applauded.

  ‘Is he a good sport?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You said it, Derm!’

  ‘I want you to know, folks, that this is no phoney-style American quiz show. Have you been given any hints, Atuk?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Have you been coached?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Derm winked at the studio audience. ‘Nervous?’ he asked, grinning.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You betcha. You betcha life he is! Whoops, time for the commercial.’

  The message from the frozen food combine, one of the largest in the United States, had been filmed in New York.

  Twentyman waved and smiled. Atuk smiled back. Above, the blade gleamed.

  ‘Watcha going to do with all the loot, if you win?’ Derm asked.

  ‘Build a hospital for my people on the Bay.’

  ‘Waddiya say, gang? Isn’t he terrific?’

  Cheers. Whistles.

  ‘Well, folks, you all know the rules. Two warm-up questions and then the question and then he …?’ Derm leaned toward the audience, cupping his ear. ‘He …?’

  ‘STICKS HIS NECK OUT!’

  ‘Righty-ho! If he’s right the million smackers are his but if he’s wrong …’ Derm made a sweeping gesture. ‘KER-PLUNK!’

  Cameras cut to nurses and male attendants as they assumed their places among the audience. A doctor and two nurses, the latter wearing black tights and net stockings, appeared onstage. One of the nurses stooped, kissed Atuk’s head, and placed a basket underneath it. The other wound a strap round his arm. Atuk winked at Goldie.

  ‘What’s his blood pressure?’ Derm asked.

  ‘High-ish.’

  ‘You betcha life it is! Pulse?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Whoops. Time for a word or two from our sponsor. Back in a mo.’

  Niagara Fruit Belt Jr and Best Developed Biceps of Sunnyside Beach stood watch in the shadows. Doc Burt Parks’s instructions had been clear. Nobody on board must be allowed to molest her. And there were drunken flirts everywhere.

  Jock pulled his shawl more snugly round his shoulders and looked out to sea. It was lonely, so bitterly lonely, without her. What did all those stars, the moon’s enchantment, a closet full of ravishing gowns, mean to him without Jean-Paul. Who did he dress for, if not Jean-Paul. And yet, and yet, if he did win the Miss Universe contest, wouldn’t she be proud? Col Smith-Williams too. Why, it would be another first for the force. An historic first.

  ‘Okey-doke,’ Derm said. ‘Your category of questions Atuk, is HOCKEY!’

  ‘Gevalt!’

  But Twentyman smiled discreetly and gave Atuk the V for Victory sign.

  ‘Who won the Stanley Cup last year?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Tempus fidgets, tempus fidgets, Atuk.’

  Twentyman flashed a little card in the palm of his hand.

  ‘The Montreal Canadians?’

  ‘Kee-rect!’

  ‘What’s the name of the firs
t man to score fifty goals in a regular season?’

  ‘Rocket, em, Richardson?’

  ‘Close. Very close, but—’

  Again Twentyman flashed a card.

  ‘Richard!’

  ‘Kee-rect. And now, Atuk, you …?’

  ‘STICK OUT YOUR NECK!’

  ‘For a million bucks, Atuk, can you tell me the total number of third period goals scored by Howie Morenz in regular season play and how many of these were slap-shots, how many rebounds, and how many were scored when the opposition was a man short … Atuk, STICK OUT YOUR NECK.’

  Atuk turned confidently toward Twentyman, but his seat in the first row was empty. He had gone. The drums rolled, the studio clock began to tick, and a man in a black hat stood ready to draw the cord.

  ‘There’s been a mistake, sir. I—’

  KER-PLUNK!

  ‘Tough luck, Atuk, next week, folks …’

  On the square outside the prison where the thousands stood with their torches and placards, Twentyman mounted the platform, stepped closer to Snipes, and whispered something in his ear. Snipes nodded. He approached the microphone and called for silence. Slowly the singing, the shouting, died; the crowd quietened. Snipes tugged at his baseball cap, looked scornfully into the television camera, and rubbed the beard that was just beginning to grow.

  ‘Atuk is dead.’ He told them how, where, and pointed out the country of origin of the show’s sponsor. ‘Friends, Canucks, countrymen,’ he went on, ‘use your noggins …’

  Afterword

  BY PETER GZOWSKI

  A photograph on the back of the first edition of The Incomparable Atuk shows the author in familiar costume: white shirt, collar unbuttoned, thin tie loosened. His head is cocked, and he is gazing, with uncharacteristic earnestness, at what one takes to be an off-camera interviewer. His forearms are crossed, and his hands are out of frame, but to anyone who remembers him from those days it is almost certain that in the fingers of the right is a small smelly cigar – probably, in fact, a Schimmelpennick, which he used to buy at the Park Plaza smoke shop when he was in Toronto, and which, in Atuk, he puts in the hands of the columnist Jean-Paul McEwen. He looks freshly shaven, so my guess is it’s morning; otherwise, I’m sure, there’d be a snifter of Remy Martin somewhere near as well.

  Mordecai was thirty-two in 1963, when Atuk was published. He’s a bit older than I and Robert Fulford, a bit younger than Ken Lefolii, who was managing editor of Maclean’s, where Bob and I also worked, and Jack McClelland, who’d published all his books. But he’s of the same time. For a while at least, he was also of the same place. All of us wore white shirts, loosened our ties, and tried to hone our craft or, in his case (for the craft of journalism, which he practised with his own sardonic skills, was a base from which to aim for a higher league), art.

  In 1958, when he was living in England, he’d sold Maclean’s a piece called “How I became an unknown with my first novel.” (The four-hundred-dollar fee, he said, was more than he’d made out of The Acrobats.) The next year, we ran a couple of excerpts from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and later, a “For the sake of argument” (a catch-all for stuff we wanted to publish but not necessarily endorse) called “We Jews are almost as bad as the Gentiles.” Somewhere around then – neither of us remembers exactly when – Mordecai and Florence and their brood moved back to Canada, splitting a year between Montreal and Toronto. He wrote regularly for us in those years, including a memoir called “Making it with the chicks” (“It had all started, it seemed to me … on the day I had begun to look up bad words in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, which they kept right out in the open at the Y”), which we bought when Ralph Allen, the editor, was on holiday. “Making it” made Ralph, who was puritanical about what ran in Maclean’s, furious. “Masturbating behind the barn,” I remember him saying, though it’s pretty tame if you look it up now.

  Maclean’s isn’t Metro, the magazine for cool canucks, if that’s what you’re thinking. If there is a model for Harry Snipes’s mag, it’s Liberty, in which Frank Rasky, and sometimes Hugh Garner, ran articles of the sort Richler attributes to Snipes. Garner, in fact, under such pseudonyms as Jarvis Warwick, used to specialize in writing both sides of Liberty’s balanced pros and cons: both “A Moose Jaw housewife tells how fluoridation saved her marriage” and “ ‘Rat poison!’ says a Fredericton hygienist.” At the top of those and other pieces, Liberty used to run the “reading time.” Twelve minutes or more, as I remember, was a toughie. Frank Rasky used to have himself paged in airports, too, so people would know he was in town. But Mordecai, who has always seen with his own eyes, either didn’t know those things or didn’t care.

  With other clefs as well, it’s easy to be misled. Nathan Cohen, of course, was Toronto’s pre-eminent drama critic of the time, as well as the host of Fighting Words, a program remarkably similar to Seymour Bone’s Crossed Swords (it’s too bad it’s Dr. Burt Parks who gets to say, “I’m world famous all over Canada”). And Pierre Berton was writing his justly famous column in the Star, making good use of “operatives” (not operators) – most of Pierre’s agents, by the way, were one remarkable housewife – as well as carrying out most of the extracurricular work Mordecai attributes to Jean-Paul McEwen. (I wonder what the author of the wonderful Jacob Two-Two books makes now of having poked fun at someone publishing the “bedtime stories she made up for her nieces.”) But Nathan for all his pretensions, and he doubtless was the “Canada’s rudest drama critic,” made neither secret nor fuss of his Jewishness, and came from Cape Breton, not the prairies. Pierre, heaven forfend, didn’t smoke – Schim-melpennicks or anything else. As for cross-dressing, are you kidding?

  And so on. Others in Atuk’s antic cast with obvious roots in reality – Jimmy McFarlane, of “McFarlane and Renfrew,” Rabbi Glenn Seigal (surely Abraham Feinberg of Holy Blossom Temple), Sunny Jim Woodcock (Nathan Phillips was “Mayor of All the People”) – play minor roles. They’re included, I think, only because it amuses Mordecai to see them, as it amused him once to insert into a movie script a thug called “Zosky.” (“What you dare to dream, dare to do,” by the way, is straight out of a booklet published by Ben Weider, the Montrealer who has made himself rich and famous as a body-builder, and the subject of another Richler magazine article.) The big parts – Bette Dolan, Rory Peel, Twentyman himself (though there are touches of John Bassett there, and maybe Jack Kent Cooke) – are all either composites, fabrications, or, like Bone and McEwen, skewed away from recognizability. The characteristics that skew them, moreover, are satirically pointless – funny, of course, but harmless.

  However tough the book is on Toronto of the time, in other words, and on the excesses of cultural nationalism, the personal attacks are missing; no one’s hurt.

  Which is, when you think of it, not surprising. Among many other qualities that might confound people who know him only by reputation, Mordecai Richler is a very nice man, a gentleman, as my grandmother would have said, old-fashioned. In person, he cares more than anyone else I know about marriage, the family, loyalty to his friends. In his non-fiction, to be sure, he is capable of writing down every stupid thing people say to him and reporting it with a scathing lack of guile. But in his fiction, like a boxer who realizes his fists are lethal weapons, he holds back, attacks the idea, not the holder. He is, dare I say it, a Canadian.

  Thirty-two, eh? So much is already there. The exquisite ear, the eye for the vainglorious, the staccato rhythms, the sentences boiled down to Jesus-wept economy, and, even in this slim volume, the Dickensian richness of the dramatis personae. Some of the jokes in Atuk reach too desperately, of course, (a reindeer knuckle? smoked caribou at “Benny’s?”), and some of the language (“Negroes,” “ofays”) rings dated, or smacks of dangerous stereotype. But even then, you can tell, Richler had found his voice.

  Anti-Canadian? No, anti-folly. In his determination that we honour that which is excellent rather than simply that which is Canadian, Richler could be seen, in fact, as the most pro-C
anadian of writers. “The truth is,” he wrote once, “if we were indeed hemmed in by the boring, the inane, and the absurd, we foolishly blamed it all on Canada, failing to grasp that we would suffer from a surfeit of the boring, the inane, and the absurd wherever we eventually settled.”

  In Canada, in 1963, he put our world through the lens of his comic imagination, saw some things the rest of us didn’t see, amused himself, and warned us all where we were heading.

  I still wonder if we heard him.

  BY MORDECAI RICHLER

  ESSAYS

  Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)

  Shovelling Trouble (1972)

  Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)

  The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)

  Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)

  Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990)

  Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions (1998)

  FICTION

  The Acrobats (1954)

  Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)

  A Choice of Enemies (1957)

  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

  The Incomparable Atuk (1963)

  Cocksure (1968)

  The Street (1969)

  St Urbain’s Horseman (1971)

  Joshua Then and Now (1980)

  Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)

  Barney’s Version (1998)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)