Mordecai Richler

by M G Vassanji

  Mordecai Richler

  ALSO IN THE

  EXTRAORDINARY CANADIANS

  SERIES:

  Big Bear by Rudy Wiebe

  Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards

  Norman Bethune by Adrienne Clarkson

  Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto

  Tommy Douglas by Vincent Lam

  Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell

  Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine and Robert Baldwin

  by John Ralston Saul

  Wilfrid Laurier by André Pratte

  Stephen Leacock by Margaret MacMillan

  René Lévesque by Daniel Poliquin

  Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray

  Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland

  L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart

  Lester B. Pearson by Andrew Cohen

  Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden

  Pierre Elliott Trudeau by Nino Ricci

  SERIES EDITOR:

  John Ralston Saul

  Mordecai Richler

  by M.G. VASSANJI

  With an Introduction by

  John Ralston Saul

  SERIES EDITOR

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © M.G. Vassanji, 2009

  Introduction copyright © John Ralston Saul, 2009

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Vassanji, M. G

  Mordecai Richler / M.G. Vassanji.

  (Extraordinary Canadians)

  ISBN 978-0-670-06672-8

  1. Richler, Mordecai, 1931–2001. 2. Novelists, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. 4. Jewish authors—Canada—Biography.

  I. Title. II. Series: Extraordinary Canadians

  PS8535.I38 Z88 2009 C813'.54 C2009-900458-5

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

  This book was printed on 30% PCW recycled paper

  For Shahbanu and Edward Goldberg

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by John Ralston Saul

  1 Always the Writer

  2 Origins

  3 Out in the World

  4 An Expatriate in London

  5 Duddy Kravitz and Away

  6 The Writer as Family Man

  7 Goodbye, London; The Embrace of Canada

  8 The Haunted Jew

  9 “Maw” and Mutkele

  10 Engaging with Canada

  11 True to Himself to the Last

  SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CHRONOLOGY

  INTRODUCTION BY

  John Ralston Saul

  How do civilizations imagine themselves? One way is for each of us to look at ourselves through our society’s most remarkable figures. I’m not talking about hero worship or political iconography. That is a danger to be avoided at all costs. And yet people in every country do keep on going back to the most important people in their past.

  This series of Extraordinary Canadians brings together rebels, reformers, martyrs, writers, painters, thinkers, political leaders. Why? What is it that makes them relevant to us so long after their deaths?

  For one thing, their contributions are there before us, like the building blocks of our society. More important than that are their convictions and drive, their sense of what is right and wrong, their willingness to risk all, whether it be their lives, their reputations, or simply being wrong in public. Their ideas, their triumphs and failures, all of these somehow constitute a mirror of our society. We look at these people, all dead, and discover what we have been, but also what we can be. A mirror is an instrument for measuring ourselves. What we see can be both a warning and an encouragement.

  These eighteen biographies of twenty key Canadians are centred on the meaning of each of their lives. Each of them is very different, but these are not randomly chosen great figures. Together they produce a grand sweep of the creation of modern Canada, from our first steps as a democracy in 1848 to our questioning of modernity late in the twentieth century.

  All of them except one were highly visible on the cutting edge of their day while still in their twenties, thirties, and forties. They were young, driven, curious. An astonishing level of fresh energy surrounded them and still does. We in the twenty-first century talk endlessly of youth, but power today is often controlled by people who fear the sort of risks and innovations embraced by everyone in this series. A number of them were dead—hanged, infected on a battlefield, broken by their exertions—well before middle age. Others hung on into old age, often profoundly dissatisfied with themselves.

  Each one of these people has changed you. In some cases you know this already. In others you will discover how through these portraits. They changed the way the world hears music, thinks of war, communicates. They changed how each of us sees what surrounds us, how minorities are treated, how we think of immigrants, how we look after each other, how we imagine ourselves through what are now our stories.

  You will notice that many of them were people of the word. Not just the writers. Why? Because civilizations are built around many themes, but they require a shared public language. So Laurier, Bethune, Douglas, Riel, LaFontaine, McClung, Trudeau, Lévesque, Big Bear, even Carr and Gould, were masters of the power of language. Beaverbrook was one of the most powerful newspaper publishers of his day. Countries need action and laws and courage. But civilization is not a collection of prime ministers. Words, words, words—it is around these that civilizations create and imagine themselves.

  The authors I have chosen for each subject are not the obvious experts. They are imaginative, questioning minds from among our leading writers and activists. They have, each one of them, a powerful connection to their subject. And in their own lives, each is engaged in building what Canada is now becoming.

  That is why a documentary is being filmed around each subject. Images are yet another way to get at each subject and to understand the
ir effect on us.

  The one continuous, essential voice of biography since 1961 has been the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. But there has not been a project of book-length biographies such as Extraordinary Canadians in a hundred years, not since the Makers of Canada series. And yet every generation understands the past differently, and so sees in the mirror of these remarkable figures somewhat different lessons. As history rolls on, some truths remain the same while others are revealed in a new and unexpected way.

  What strikes me again and again is just how dramatically ethical decisions figured in these people’s lives. They form the backbone of history and memory. Some of them, Big Bear, for example, or Dumont, or even Lucy Maud Montgomery, thought of themselves as failures by the end of their lives. But the ethical cord that was strung taut through their work has now carried them on to a new meaning and even greater strength, long after their deaths.

  Each of these stories is a revelation of the tough choices unusual people must make to find their way. And each of us as readers will find in the desperation of the Chinese revolution, the search for truth in fiction, the political and military dramas, different meanings that strike a personal chord. At first it is that personal emotive link to such figures which draws us in. Then we find they are a key that opens the whole society of their time to us. Then we realize that in that 150-year period many of them knew each other, were friends, opposed each other. Finally, when all these stories are put together, you will see that a whole new debate has been created around Canadian civilization and the shape of our continuous experiment.

  Mordecai Richler cuts across a half-century of Canadian writing and mythmaking in a way that is continually surprising. His ability to find creative truth in the Jewish community of Montreal has become central to the image Canadians as a whole have of themselves at home and abroad. The southern, urban novelist was the one to make the Arctic a reality for everyone, as only a great fiction writer can. By driving his literary knife into every aspect of Canadian self-congratulation, he created our modern standards of creative edge. M.G. Vassanji has an unparalleled skill for making one community’s story everyone’s story. And so here he has created a literary biography—because Richler was a great writer who lives on through his words—that reflects the imagination of each of us.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Always the Writer

  In 1954 a young writer, having just published his first novel in London, says to a somewhat bemused studio interviewer, “I don’t want to be respected, man, I just want to be accepted.” There is a certain nerviness to his manner, an edgy defiance in that direct gaze that will become a trademark, on that face that will age and crumple to become, a half-century later, iconic in his home country. At twenty-three it is no small feat he has achieved. He now belongs to the select company of published novelists, among whom he can count the titans who inspired him not so very long ago. The question is what he will make of himself, what kind of writer he will become. There is apprehension, to be sure, but the ambition is boundless, the self-confidence supreme. Not long after that interview, he would declare to a friend, “I don’t consider myself a Jewish or Canadian writer. I am a writer.” Like many another young artist having arrived in the metropolis from a province, he defiantly refuses to be corralled as a provincial or “ethnic,” for such a label becomes ultimately a way to belittle, disregard, excuse. He will be judged by his writing; he will not be excused or patronized.

  Mordecai Richler had dropped out of college to go to Europe and become a writer, away from what he perceived as a small-minded, limiting Canada and a stifling Montreal Orthodox Jewish community. He could not escape these origins, nor did he deny them. If anything, they came to obsess him. Through most of his adult life, it was these two inheritances—on the one hand, a small nation with only a thin veneer of history, as he saw it, culturally and politically inconsequential on the world stage, and on the other, an ancient tradition with a baggage of too much history and tradition—that he battled to come to terms with.

  Nations become small by their genius escaping them; great artists inevitably mature to refashion the cultural map of their day. Fortunately for Canada, Richler’s imagination constantly returned to the “ghetto” of his native city, the clamorous, enclosed world of his childhood. It inspired his acclaimed fiction, comical and entertaining and yet bearing the imprint of grim and large collective memories. His novels and his very presence—even at a distance—brought much-needed tonic to an English-Canadian literature long benumbed under the weight of its own inheritance, infusing it with new language, new themes, an often rambunctious irreverence and wit, and lively controversy. He might well be called an early postcolonial novelist, one of those who, coming from a province or colony, extended the scope of the novel in English. Like any expatriate writer, finally, he was faced with a choice: to be influenced by absence or to return home. Richler chose to return to Canada.

  What was Canada to him? Jewishness he knew intimately; he was a descendant on his mother’s side of a long line of Orthodox rabbis. Montreal, too, he was intimate with, at least the area where he grew up and how it related to the rest of the city. Canada as a nation, however, was more abstract and distant; as a child of Jewish immigrants, he had thought it belonged to “them”—the WASPs. As an adult, therefore, he had to rediscover and claim it, and engage with it even as it reinvented itself with increasing rapidity, and defend it when it threatened to come apart at the seams in which he had been raised, until today he is considered one of its central, and indeed defining, cultural figures of the twentieth century.

  He was always highly controversial. His antipathy toward mediocrity and “boosterism,” which he satirized with the utmost relish, earned him the ire of cultural nationalists; his fictional portrayals of Jews caused offence in sections of the community. His references to women and race in his novels raised concerns. His send-ups of the more absurd claims of political correctness earned him accusations of picking on easy targets. His observations of his native Quebec raised storms of protest and also shouts of approval. His reply was that he did not write to please. He was a witness to his time. Eventually the charges of self-hate and betrayal which had been hurled at him lost much of their sting, proving that he had been ahead of his time, and he came to be respected for what he was: a gifted novelist and a witty commentator who remained, essentially, honest and called it as he saw it.

  I FIRST MET MORDECAI RICHLER at a festival in Sydney, Australia. I had just published my first novel; he was about to win a prize for yet another one. Among the places where we read to audiences was a bookstore, its narrow aisles crammed with people, its acoustics depressing. For me, an unknown in this kind of milieu, the experience was a nightmare. I recall Richler’s sympathy and encouragement during that occasion and his telling me I should do more justice to my work in my readings, I had spent time on it, it was mine. He of course was doing fine, riding on fame, fortified by Scotch, his elegant wife, Florence, by his side. I would discover later that he did not like readings either. What impressed me that time, however, was that he had considered me just another Canadian writer, albeit inexperienced, when he could have stuck up his nose and been the haughty celebrity. That was not his style. I met him a few years later at one of those lavish dinner events where writers, much to their embarrassment, find themselves having a good time. We happened to emerge from the stifling hall for air and met in the lobby, where he told me he visited Toronto regularly, we should get together for a chat. I agreed, very flattered; but the opportunity never came; and what would we have spoken about? Neither of us was the chatty type. But at a reading I subsequently gave in London, I discovered that he had asked his daughter to attend. Still a few years later we again met outside the same hall as our previous fruitless tryst and sat down together, away from the din. We nodded to each other and stared silently before us.

  When I was asked to write a biography for Penguin about an extraordinary Canadian, I knew of only two such characters who could possib
ly interest me. One was Mordecai Richler. Here was a chance to get to know him. That I would be able to compensate for the one or possibly more chats we never had seemed a funny twist of fate. We had more in common, I soon realized, than sitting beside each other staring silently ahead, unable to start a conversation. We both grew up in an urban colonial setting, in closed, religiously observant, jealous communities. One in Montreal, the other in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Who could have guessed such a commonality in two such diverse lives? If I may indulge in a curious coincidence, it is this: the first place I stayed when I arrived in Canada from the United States was on Jeanne Mance Street in Montreal, where Richler’s fearsome grandfather Shmariyahu had lived, and where Richler recalled being belted by the old man for religious non-observance. I had not heard of Mordecai Richler then.

  MORDECAI RICHLER left prodigious information about himself. His archives are vast. His novels freely and profusely use material from his life, and he has also written directly about his childhood and literary apprenticeship. He constantly wrote and received letters, the more so during his two decades away from Canada. Besides his novels and stories, he published two works of non-fiction, a clutch of television and film scripts, and a large number of columns and essays. He is a Canadian legend about whom numerous anecdotes are told. Paradoxically, he was also a very private man, a trickster character who did not readily reveal himself. He did not confide in journals; his letters speak of his writing life, his plans, ephemera about his current life and work and sometimes the family. His inner worries and anxieties, the aching wounds and scars of an intense, driven man of “appetite” who is a writer, are not exposed for all to see. When he does occasionally reveal that tender core, we are shocked.

  My purpose in this book has been to describe the man Mordecai Richler, as I have come to discover him, based on what I hope has been a judicious and consistent selection of material. Anecdotes I have listened to with amusement, for they are amusing, but not relied on in my construction. Memories of him, of which numerous exist, I have treated with caution; what people recall of a person or an event most often are only isolated moments, and as such tend to be the odd or the uncharacteristic or rare occasion, the offhand remark; moreover, who, getting on in age, doesn’t use memory to embellish, reinvent, settle scores? This becomes glaringly evident when we come across memories that actually conflict with one another.