by M G Vassanji
This was perhaps the first time Richler ventured to ask Weintraub for a loan. There was also an invitation to come to visit. Mordecai was hoping Mavis would be willing to share the house he had rented in a village called San Antonio on Ibiza. But Mavis was not around. Weintraub went to consult a map to look up Ibiza.
Richler had gone to Spain for a cheap place in the sun where he could write, perhaps also to escape the chattering, partying expatriate crowd of Paris; one could, after all, talk oneself silly and be left with nothing to write, or become plagued by doubts. A writer needs to be lonely. Moreover, Spain occupied a rather special and romantic place in his youthful mythology: it was where the Republicans had fought the Fascists in the civil war of the 1930s, all the good men on the side of the former; a war to which many idealistic young men of the time from many nations had gone to fight on the good side and which Hemingway had used as a setting for his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The three-bedroom house Richler rented on the island was far more comfortable than the rooms in Paris; it came with a cook. And he was treated royally by the local men, who assumed he was a runaway from the Korean War. Food was cheap, as was alcohol; wine was delivered on the doorstep every morning instead of milk. Then there was the brothel at Rosita’s, where the men would creep off in the dark, in secrecy (they hoped) from their wives. The fishermen all hung out at the Bar Escandell, and this, too, became Richler’s watering hole and his postal address. His wavy hair was long and he sported a light beard; small and dark, he could have been taken for a Spaniard.
There was a jetty on the island where folks would go to greet the odd boat coming in from the mainland. It would have been the highlight of the day. On one such vessel arrived a beautiful, dark-haired American girl called Helen, accompanied by her mother. She stayed on the island for some weeks, during which she and Mordecai became lovers.
On another boat one morning arrived William Weintraub. He spent a few weeks. On a typical day that he describes, the two would spend all morning at their typewriters, then go for swims in the afternoons and repair to the Escandell for drinks.
Richler’s youthful letters to friends regarding life in Paris and Spain might suggest a debauched existence, but one suspects a good deal of it was boasting or mere highlighting. Richler was an obsessive writer; nothing else mattered more. Thus, a letter to Dad from Ibiza:
im very tired. its just about six pm and im knocking this letter off after a hard afternoon of working in a bastard heat.…
… Pops—abt the money.…
He was desperately trying to finish a long first novel.
Spain, Ibiza, was a profound experience and rite of passage. He had time to write and think, to be alone. He lived among a simple people surviving modestly, whom he did not have to impress with his ambitions, who seem to have taken him seriously. He also had some intriguing experiences, which not only provided him material for the work of first fiction at hand, but also were profound and unforgettable enough for him to return to in a subsequent novel many years later. It was less than a year since he had left home.
When William Weintraub returned to Montreal, Lily naturally wanted news about her son. Did he drink too much? What was this Helen like? Weintraub, reporting positively, put Lily’s fears at rest, and earned a dinner at her home in gratitude. She was very much in Mordecai’s life. Previously, when Mordecai wrote to her about Helen, she had replied asking if he was using contraceptives. It was advice Mordecai had already received from Moe on the eve of his departure from Montreal.
To Daddy, a request from Ibiza:
here’s what I would like you to send me pronto in a parcel.
1. a camera (please) …
2. three typewriter ribbons. black. royal portable.
3. two clip on bowties. they are for friends.
Kindly, accommodating Moe must have questioned finally the wisdom of indulging his son on hard-earned money. Other young men Mordecai’s age were already working, or in university training to be doctors and lawyers. Couldn’t Mordecai have stayed in Montreal and worked while writing his bestseller? Mordecai had, in fact, worked with his uncles for a few months before he left, earning more money than Moe. Now here he was, on the one hand starving, on the other, travelling to England, Italy, Algiers, of all places, and now he was on some backward island in Spain.
One day, Moe wrote a harsh letter to his son, threatening to cut off funds. It must have taken some thought and desperation on his part. We have Mordecai’s reply to guide us about the “misunderstanding,” as he called it.
if you don’t continue to send me the $50 monthly until sept. i’m screwed. i have nothing to fall back on here in spain.… if your attitude is still the same as the one in your last letter to me, you may be sure i will never again burden you with my troubles. in fact, if you really feel the way you represented yourself in that letter, we can terminate all relationships in sept.… every bloody cent will be paid back to you some day. now that money, and not me and my work, seem to mean so much to you.
regards to sarah and the kids.
Mutty [by hand]
What is a father to do, with such a meaningless threat from a child? So disturbed was Mordecai, he continued the letter overleaf, writing an afterthought by hand.
my threats may sound feeble in comparison to yours, but if you decide to abandon me, i want you to know that if my book is published—or if not this one, the next one—i want the Richler family to never speak of me, or claim me as a relative simply because i have suddenly acquired fame.
you may think i’m being unfair—but if you have a copy of your letter … and re-read it, you will see it is you who has been unjust—terribly unjust.
i hope that—for both our peace of mind— your next letter will be more friendly and that our difficulties will [be] resolved.
Think the matter over carefully.
love [almost illegible]
M
His letters to Moe are touching, all the more so when we realize what a tender relationship developed between the two over the years. They provide the needed corrective to the exuberant, boastful letters of the novice writer to his friends, to the character references supplied by them and other more casual acquaintances. In these letters to Moe he is the private Mordecai Richler, son and child, struggling with emotion, survival, family. All the more the pity that letters from this period to and from Lily are unavailable.
Clearly in the above letter Mordecai acknowledges himself as a Richler, a member of the large clan among whom he grew up; and he demonstrates a fear of abandonment. Both factors are significant for someone struggling with, as we shall see, the question of Jewish identity and assimilation.
ONLY A FEW WEEKS LATER Richer ran into a problem and left Ibiza in a hurry. It was early July when he departed for France. The problem was this.
Among the expatriates on the island were a few Germans, including a former SS colonel called Mueller, under death sentence in France but decorated by Franco, a suave and overbearing personality who enjoyed taunting the younger, somewhat intimidated, and unsophisticated Richler. The young man finally one day plucked up the courage to tell the German off in a café. What made matters worse between them was that the pretty Helen had chosen to favour Mordecai instead of Mueller. The German group began a campaign against Richler, informing the local secret policeman that he was a spy. The island was small, which was its attraction, but it could also make a person quickly undesirable. As someone who kept mainly to himself, writing, and who received money from abroad, he was a curious creature on the local scene, anyway. Mueller was a more established figure and a friend of the regime. Told by the local policeman to leave or be deported, Richler left for the south of France. That departure would haunt him; it had been too hasty, he would think, and many years later, a much older man, he would return to confront the scene once again.
He spent time first at Tourrettes-sur-Loup and then Haut-de-Cagnes, both a short distance from Cannes, where he continued work on his nove
l, banging away feverishly at his typewriter up to ten hours a day. Helen, who was close by in Cannes, would come to see him, and is described as wonderful, just like a wife, gentle and sweet. She cooked for him.
On August 14, 1951, Richler wrote a triumphant, somewhat patronizing letter to his father.
Dear Dad & Sarah: i finished my novel this morning! cheers and all that. i feel empty and exhausted and clean—never write, old boy, do anything, but never write. dig ditches, make money, build monuments, live and die, bring babies into the world—but don’t write. we bleed, boy, we bleed.…
He asked for money, and offered to buy for them lovely French stuff—scarves, tablecloths, table napkins.
What did he “bleed” into his first novel? The typescript is called “The Rotten People” and is fairly long, at some four hundred pages. It describes a young man called Kerman Adler who leaves Canada for London, from where he departs for Paris and ends up in Ibiza. On a page of rough notes for the book, the author has written “Knowledge, Guilt, Death, Evil, Pain.” These were the existential questions of the day, no less important to a young man for being trendy, and a far cry from “fuckey fuckey” at Rosita’s. What comes as a surprise is that, although thus far, judging by available correspondence, Mordecai’s Jewishness does not seem to have been an issue, his narrator, Kerman, is obsessed by it:
[Says Kerman,] “Larkin thinks I’m trying to conceal my being a Jew.”
Frank laughed derisively. “I don’t think you’re trying to conceal it,” he said. “In fact you’re the most obviously Jewish person I know. You’re so damn sensitive to the whole problem that you try your best to minimize it. But actually being a Jew boy torments you so much that you’re at the same time a vicious anti-Semite and a typical nauseating Jewish intellectual. Being a Jew is what has driven you to Paris, and what is driving you now.”
This is where one wishes for a confession from the author. In its absence one cannot help seeing in the above passage young Mordecai speaking to a mirror, making a confession of sorts. So much of this first novel is autobiographical. In a letter to Moe he had asked for an English translation of the Kaddish, a Jewish prayer, to use in the book. Evidently Kerman is based on Mordecai, and Frank’s charge against Kerman is what Mordecai would himself face from his detractors in the future.
Elsewhere in the novel, Kerman asks, “But, after all, what is a Jew?” He goes on to answer the question.
The Concise Oxford Dictionary … says, quote, “Jew,1 Person of Hebrew Race; (trans; colloq.) extortionate usurer, driver of hard bargains; rich as a Jew.; incredulous person; tell that (unlikely tale) to the J.; … J,2 v.t. (colloq.) cheat, overreach …”
As we know, Richler’s greater novels are studies of this question in various forms. But it was a secret burden not shared openly with friends, and his were the doubts he could not raise with his Orthodox parents. It was in the privacy to which he had escaped, away from his drinking and cavorting buddies talking literature and art, that he struggled with his Jewish identity.
A doggerel he considered including in the novel ran
O, Come on you Jews, & hear!
Why must you wander—
Wander alone, from scene to scene
Is to assimilate so obscene?
A current of anxiety then runs through Richler’s early life regarding the issue of assimilation and Jewishness; a despair any young man or woman from a closed community might feel facing the larger world and the prospect and thrill of breaking away, as well as the guilt and loneliness that result.
Richler was told by his literary friends in Paris that though he was “young and brilliant,” his manuscript “The Rotten People” could not get published because the bourgeois public was not ready for it—the kind of comforting endorsement from friends that can mean anything. He did send it around, without success. Cynically he said that if he were a homosexual, New Directions might just publish it. But he immediately began revising it; that revision, over the next few months, became another novel, which he provisionally called “The Jew of Valencia.” He produced it during his second year in Europe, which he spent going back and forth between France and England. He was also anticipating returning to Montreal. Helen was still in his life and they corresponded. She had already had an abortion the previous summer, and he thought he would take her back with him to Canada and marry her. But he also had two other girls in his life: a Swede called Ulla and another girl called Sanki. In March, from England, he asked Moe to send him $200 to book a passage back. By this time he had run up an account of approximately $2,000 with Moe, a considerable sum, for which he sent a carefully prepared statement. He hoped he would not have to pay much more. Moe meanwhile had been having a hard time financially, and his monthly payments to Mordecai had been reduced. But he was now “Zeyda,” his older son Avrum having recently become a father. “DEAR GRANDPAPA … MAZEL*TOV,” wrote Mordecai from Cambridge and wondered about the kid’s name. He spent the following summer in Tourrettes-sur-Loup, close to Helen (in Cannes), though Ulla was with him, and this complicated the matter, as he put it. About Helen he remained ambivalent. He had said he had fallen out of love with her and marriage was off, though not sex. She, on the other hand, was evidently still in love with him. From Tourrettes-sur-Loup, however, he wrote to Weintraub that Helen was coming back to Montreal with him. “Imagine me steering her into Ruby Foo’s on Wednesday nights.” Ruby Foo’s was Montreal’s popular kosher Chinese restaurant.
In late August or early September 1952, Richler departed by boat from Liverpool for Canada. He arrived on September 13 in Quebec City, where his brother Avrum met him. He had “a scraggly beard” and came with a large box of books. Helen was not with him.
Richler’s relations with women during the two-year sojourn in Europe present an interesting conundrum. We don’t know enough. We don’t have the women’s, especially Helen’s, versions of the relationships. There is a certain crudeness in his references to women, though at times he does show qualms as soon as he’s typed something awful. Since he was known, only a few years before, to be awkward with girls, can we suppose an element of youthful boastfulness, a macho affectation in his letters to other men at this time? He would be known for his reserve, to the point of absolute silence at a gathering, and was a monogamist and devoted husband and family man the rest of his life, following a failed first marriage; with Helen, at barely twenty-one, he did contemplate marriage and commitment.
HE WROTE TWO NOVELS in two years, the second one, “The Jew of Valencia,” becoming The Acrobats in its final form. A compact novel, in a style vastly different from the one he would develop in later years, it examines the interactions of a group of émigrés in Valencia, Spain. The main character, insofar as there is one, is a young Canadian painter, André, in the midst of an existential angst. It seems that Richler, after the failure of “The Rotten People” to find takers, had reworked its material to produce the considerably shorter Acrobats. This is indicated, for example, by the fact that in the draft manuscripts of the first book, “Kerman” is sometimes cancelled and overwritten with “André” by hand. Both young men are in the midst of a crisis; but, perhaps on advice, André is not a Jew. His crisis is simply his failure to connect. Both novels also have in them the snarky German character Roger Kraus, based on the real Mueller.
By the time he reached Montreal from Quebec City, Richler must have shaved off his beard, for his friend Weintraub describes him as clean-shaven. In Montreal he lived with his mother to begin with and found a job with the CBC as a writer for the newsroom, working the evening shift; he also worked for his uncles. He met several people who would turn out to be important in his life. One of them, in Toronto, was the charismatic Ted Allan, who, having served with Norman Bethune in the Spanish Civil War, had just recently co-authored a bestselling biography of Bethune; Richler left a copy of his manuscript with him. Also in Toronto, he met Robert Weaver of the CBC, a well-known producer of Canadian short stories. And finally, over drinks at the Montreal
Press Club, Weintraub introduced Richler to Brian Moore. A long-lasting friendship would develop among the three men; Mavis Gallant, now a resident of Paris, made up the fourth of a peculiarly Montreal literary quartet. Weintraub would remain anchored in Montreal and maintain a closeness with the others of this group. Gallant, on the other hand, did not like Moore very much, and with Richler maintained a distant relationship. And the friendship between Moore and Richler, though warm, carried from the beginning a thin toxic streak that finally overcame it.
In Montreal, Mordecai Richler had met Cathy Boudreau, a young woman with whom he started going out and subsequently, moving out from Lily’s, living together. But he was far from settled, in life or in career. It was a nerve-racking time for him. Before he left London, he had left a copy of his manuscript with an agent called Joyce Weiner, who had been introduced to him by a Paris acquaintance. The manuscript was now doing the rounds of publishers in New York and London, and news came from Weiner of one rejection following another.
One day, however, Weiner called to tell him that the London firm of Andre Deutsch wanted to publish the book. They offered a small advance and stipulated some changes. Mordecai Richler was overjoyed. All his self-confidence, his cockiness as others saw it, had been vindicated. He had always believed that among those who were doing the café rounds in Paris, he was the one who had “It.” He left the CBC job and started revising the manuscript. And he decided to go back to Europe.
CHAPTER FOUR
An Expatriate in London
In August 1953, elated that he would now be a published novelist at the age of twenty-two, Mordecai Richler crossed the Atlantic on the Samaria, ostensibly to promote his novel. So much had happened since he had dropped out of college and left Canada the first time, hardly more than a boy. He was now a man of experience. Those two years away had been his university, and it was a year since he returned. Barring New York, where he had made no headway, it was evident that for him the action was in London. In his decision to return there he showed the typical attribute of the self-exiled, a longing for home and the familiar, and yet an inability to abandon the metropolis. London was the source of his prestige at home, the place where he could further his career. His exile, moreover, gave him a measure of freedom and distance, a sense of perspective that many would argue are vital to a writer. We may be thankful therefore that he returned to Europe, where he developed the distinct voice in which he wrote his great novels. In London, too, Richler could promote himself; his notorious reserve did not extend to the business and networking aspects of his career. Not for him hiding out and letting the work speak for itself. As Moe had advised him once in another context (arguing against university), it is not what you know but who you know. Another piece of Moe’s advice would soon be forthcoming: since the title of his first novel began with A, why not let his second title begin with B, and so on, a whole alphabet series of them? This only gave his son an amusing something to write about him, albeit in the warmest terms.