by M G Vassanji
Greater lucre was in the movies. An English producer named Jack Clayton happened to be making his first feature film in 1958, called A Room at the Top, based on a novel by John Braine. The existing film script was deemed not satisfactory, and Mordecai Richler was hired to do the doctoring. He was paid £500 but, by prior agreement, was not credited. The film went on to win a British film award and two Academy Awards, for best actress (Simone Signoret) and for best adapted screenplay (Neil Patterson). Following this success, Richler began to be called upon regularly as a screenwriter. He would work for a few weeks, make a small “fortune,” and get on with his real passion. As he wrote to Weintraub: “am very financially solid, embarrassingly so, and I can dilly dally with my novel for months and months, which was the general idea.… If things break as well as they indicate, next year I will give a grant to the Canada Council.” He did start sending money to his still struggling father. Fifty dollars on Father’s Day.
The success of A Room at the Top turned Jack Clayton, also nominated for the Academy Award for best direction, into an internationally renowned filmmaker who specialized in turning literary genres into movies. Coincidentally, his last feature film was based on a book by a former Montrealer and a friend of Richler’s, Brian Moore.
CHAPTER FIVE
Duddy Kravitz and Away
Fortune favoured the brave. Richler had taken a bold, some might even say brash, first step by going away, young, inexperienced, and without any money of his own, to become a writer. He had struggled to survive, begged and borrowed, and he surely suffered private agonies about which he remained silent. But he was also lucky in having received an early break at being published, making devoted friends despite his reserve and “strangeness,” and acquiring some measure of financial security through writing television and film scripts. He became a respected writer, though the first three novels had not sold well and received mixed reviews. In 1958 he finished The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which was published the following year. It met with immediate enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic, and he emerged at last into the limelight as a major writer.
THE APPRENTICESHIP OF DUDDY KRAVITZ is a novel about a conniving young product of Montreal’s Jewish ghetto as he struggles and schemes to push himself out of working-class poverty. Duddy is the younger of the two sons of widowed taxi driver Max. There is, as we meet him at age fifteen, nothing likeable about him. While his brother Lennie is away becoming a doctor like a good Jewish boy, Duddy leads a hyperactive gang of mischief-makers in the school and on the streets. His pranks are relentless and merciless, and it turns out he may even have driven the Scottish teacher Mr. MacPherson’s wife to her death by one of his obscene phone calls. He is uncouth and vulgar, without a hint of a conscience. But even in the early stages of this book, as we see him characterized and presented thus, we already wonder, Is his manner so surprising? For, as the author informs us, “Where Duddy Kravitz sprung from the boys grew up dirty and sad, spiky also, like grass beside the railway tracks. He might have been born in Lodz, but forty-eight years earlier his grandfather had bought a steerage passage to Halifax.”
Needless to say this is Richler’s own dear Montreal, the Jewish area around the Main reproduced with intimacy and close attention to detail.
To a middle-class stranger, it’s true, one street would have seemed as squalid as the next. On each corner a cigar store, a grocery, and a fruit man. Outside staircases everywhere. Winding ones, wooden ones, rusty and risky ones. Here a prized plot of grass splendidly barbered, there a spitefully weedy patch. An endless repetition of precious peeling balconies and waste lots making the occasional gap here and there. But, as the boys knew, each street between St Dominique and Park Avenue represented subtle differences in income. No two cold-water flats were alike.
The streets are identifiable, the characters sound familiar; and Fletcher’s Field High School is but a thinly fictionalized version of the famous Baron Byng High School on St. Urbain Street. It is the Jewish high school but, as Mr. MacPherson knows, will not be so for long because his students are moving up, and their children will not attend here. This novel is how Duddy Kravitz, hardly the school’s pride, escapes the ghetto.
There is an abiding sadness to Duddy Kravitz, whom even his father, Max, calls “a dope like me”; who grows up on Max’s fanciful heroic stories of the Jewish Boy Wonder only to discover that he was no hero at all, just a petty criminal. Duddy’s life begins its transformation when, having graduated four hundred and tenth from Fletcher’s Field, he goes to work as a waiter during the summer season at Rubin’s Hotel Lac des Sables in the resort area of Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts in the Laurentians. Among the seasonal waiters he is the only one not from college, the only one from a humble background; an uncouth outsider whose language gives him away as one from the ghetto, he is taunted and despised. But one quality Duddy Kravitz possesses: he does not allow himself to be crushed. One day, while out on a jaunt with French-Canadian hotel maid Yvette, he discovers an isolated lake in the woods, and in the firm belief impressed upon him by his zeyda that a man is nothing without land, he resolves to acquire all the real estate around the lake. This becomes his obsession; it will be his lifeline. There is nothing he will not do to acquire the separate subdivisions of the land. He lies, he cheats, he makes artistic mockery of middle-class bar mitzvah ceremonies, which he undertakes to film with no experience of his own and the help of a drunken English director. His use of his girlfriend, Yvette, and his epileptic American assistant Virgil, is callous. And yet one roots for him. This is the only way he can win, big or small. Not with looks, small and scrawny as he is and struggling to grow a beard; not with influence or birthright; not with conventional brains. But by being a pusherke, a scheming go-getter, “a little Jew-boy on the make,” as his Uncle Benjy calls him. He may not have academic smarts, but he has street smarts. He wins grudging admiration for his successes but no sympathy for his setbacks. Nobody roots for him. And at the end, when he wins, we wonder, Did he really win? He’s lost Yvette and Virgil; his brother Lennie and father, Max, are not impressed; and his zeyda walks away from him because of the way he has acquired the land. But the barman calls him Mr. Kravitz and opens a tab in his name.
ALTHOUGH RICHLER had introduced the vernacular of St. Urbain previously, Duddy Kravitz is the novel in which it finds its full glory. The ghetto is given to us in its own language—the easy informality, the casual vulgarity, the Yiddish inflection, and above all the inventiveness and humour of an essentially oral culture. “Do you all know what a penis is?” asks the enlightened Mrs. Cox, attempting to do something about the boys’ language. “Sure,” Duddy says. “A penis is a guy that plays the piano.” And here’s Max, holding forth at Eddy’s Cigar & Soda, next to the taxi stand, telling his favourite story about the Jewish Boy Wonder to a bunch of wisecracks who’ve heard it a dozen times before.
Max waited. He sucked a sugar cube. “Anyway, he’s broke, like I said. So he walks up to the corner of Park and St Joseph and hangs around the streetcar stop for a couple of hours, and do you know what?”
“He trips over a hundred dollar bill and breaks his leg.”
“He’s pulled in for milking pay phones. Or stealing milk bottles, maybe.”
“All that time,” Max said, “he’s collecting streetcar transfers off the street and selling them, see. Nerve? Nerve.…”
While Son of a Smaller Hero is an inward-looking, introspective drama, its tensions derived mainly from the conditions within an extended family and Noah’s desire to escape it, Duddy Kravitz takes in a larger slice of Montreal. Artistically, it is the flowering of the world first introduced in the earlier novel. And while the themes of the novel are far from trivial, its native humour frees it from the trap of sincerity.
The novel has been said, like other “Jewish novels,” to depict the assimilation of the Jew into America or Canada. Such a formulaic sociological reading, alas a too-easy teaching tool, denies the particularity of the novel, its setting and its
characters, let alone the quality of its writing and inventiveness. If there is such a thing as a mainstream, its granularity has to be acknowledged. It is not so easy to define anymore. Today, Margaret Laurence, or indeed even Margaret Atwood, is as ethnic as Richler or Rohinton Mistry. Moreover, in this day when cultural diversity is celebrated in a globalized world—and even in the melting pot, what does one assimilate to?—Richler’s book has resonance for Jews across many borders, as it has for non-Jews in different ways. By the same token, the readership of Canadian novels spans the world. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is, therefore, first and foremost a novel about a pusherke who happens to be a Jew in Montreal.
When the novel came out, many Jews were shocked that such an unlikeable fellow, an unethical, grasping young man, was depicted as one of them. Close-contained communities naturally get nervous at seeing their laundry hung out for the world to see; a novel does that in unexpected and shocking ways. Duddy Kravitz seemed to be playing up to anti-Semitic stereotypes. As a character in the novel, the son of a wealthy Jewish family, says, “It’s the cretinous little money-grubbers like Kravitz that cause antisemitism.” Anti-Semitism indeed is present throughout the novel; but it is not the author who is anti-Semitic. We see its awareness in the characters, and we see it portrayed in incidents, as when a teacher asks the boys, as a joke, how the Jews make an S, and illustrates his answer by drawing the dollar sign on the board. The author ameliorates the unpleasantness of anti-Semitism with humour, makes it less uncomfortable, just as the blacks in North America have used humour to soften the pain and memories of racism. With time, however, Jewish insecurities about Duddy Kravitz have largely abated. The rest of us feel fortunate that people among us whom we might have seen as alien are shown to be just like us. That is the power and gift of literature. The novel is now a Canadian classic, Duddy Kravitz a proverbial figure. There are Duddy Kravitzes wherever there are little boys trying to break out from poverty in a world loaded against them. In 1975 Ted Kotcheff made a highly successful film of Duddy Kravitz, with the screenplay written by Richler himself.
There is some truth to Brian Moore’s observation that the non-Jewish characters in this book are all flat. In particular, Yvette could have been conceived in greater depth. We don’t know much about her, she comes and goes, though it could be argued that her world and Duddy’s are far apart, and it is his world that is the novel’s concern. Hers is out there somewhere. This is not entirely convincing, for she must come surely bearing the imprint of her world upon her. In fact, throughout Richler’s work, the francophones receive rather summary treatment, if at all. There was, by Richler’s own accounts, and as reflected in the novels, little social interaction between the Jews of the ghetto and the French Canadians who were their neighbours a few blocks away. The accommodation was toward the WASP and English Canada, which fact Richler acknowledged elsewhere. He also agreed, in a letter to Weintraub, that “Yvette doesn’t quite come off. This kind of thg I hope to remedy, too, but I also fear a congenital weakness in the creation of women characters.”
Moore’s novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, incidentally, after receiving numerous rejections, had been published in 1955 after Richler’s recommendation of it to his editor, Diana Athill. The resemblance of this title to The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and A House for Mr. Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul, another writer known to Richler and published by the same house, is interesting and perhaps nothing more. Naipaul’s book appeared in 1961. The colonial worlds of Duddy Kravitz, Judith Hearne, and Mr. Biswas, however, couldn’t have been more different.
AFTER MORDECAI had parted with Cathy at Tourrettes-des-Loup in the summer of 1958, he returned to their Winchester Road flat in London, which he now shared with his friend Ted Kotcheff. This seems to have been one of the happiest periods in his life. Money was good, and the flat, well stocked with Scotch, was a place of lively entertainment. It was a period of friendship and creativity, of supreme confidence for the two of them; they had no doubt they would make it big in their respective careers, as indeed they did. In a letter to Weintraub dated November 8 of that year, Richler wrote with exuberance:
Am really beat, man … Abt the work, man, I wrote [finished Duddy Kravitz] a novel, rewrote a film, adapted a TV play, wrote two original TV plays, several stories, articles, and two radio plays. I AM TIRED. I DESERVE A REST, what?
Am in a waiting and party-going period. Brian tells me you thk I am happy, or I sound happy, or something, and what if I am, man?
He bought a tuxedo to attend a ball.
His friend Kotcheff gives us an idea of the discipline by which Mordecai lived. After making himself a breakfast of salami and eggs or an omelette, he would read two or three papers, then go to his typewriter and start clacking away until twelve. He would get up and walk to Finchley Road and buy a deli sandwich and the Herald Tribune (for the sports scores), eat his corned beef sandwich with pickles, and take a nap until two, after which he would be back at his typewriter until five. Then he would make himself a gin and tonic, and the two of them would go out to eat. His former wife, Cathy, confirms this description of Richler’s discipline, including the nap between writing spells. That’s all he ever wanted to do (i.e., write), she said. When he was married to her, of course, she cooked for him, and he had less money. Explaining his writing habit to a curious Kotcheff, who inquired why he did not wait for the muse to arrive but started clacking away as soon as he had sat down, he said, “Ted, if I sat around waiting for inspiration, I’d never write a bloody word.”
He was happiest when he wrote. And now he had Florence. The two of them were waiting for their divorces to come through so they could be married. She was already a top model, had worked for Sassoon and Dior, and during this interim an opportunity came by on the West End for her to act in the stage version of the play The World of Suzy Wong. (It would later be made into a well-known movie.) She was given a small part. On her decision would depend the relationship she would have with Mordecai. He of course pretended that he did not mind: she had a whole career in front of her; why give it up? But she knew he did not want her to take the offer; he was possessive. And so she chose not to become an actress or have her own career, in return for the love and life he gave her.
The following year, the fall of 1959, Duddy Kravitz was published in Britain, Canada, and the United States. One day Cathy walked in unannounced at the flat when only Ted Kotcheff was in. She went over to the table, on which lay the recently arrived copies of the American edition. She picked one up, saw the dedication to Florence, and had a fit, ripping the book to bits; she picked up the typewriter and threw it out the back window. As Kotcheff tells it, “And I’m shouting, ‘Cathy, stop it!’ and finally I walloped her one. I hit her so hard with the flat of my hand I knocked her down. And she was sobbing hysterically, ‘All those years, all those years … I worked so he could write. I supported him. And now he dedicated this novel to this bitch.’ She was a curious creature. It was awfully painful.”
BY THE END OF SUMMER both their divorces had come through. In December, to get away from it all, Mordecai and Florence flew to Holland with three-year-old Daniel, in a small plane that could however also fit their small Renault. They drove to Rome, where they moved into a house, which they were able to rent courtesy of his London publisher. Here Mordecai, in what one can only imagine as a blissfully domesticated life, for the first time with a woman whom he passionately loved, and a child, worked on what he called his Shalinsky-Griffin novel. Florence was with “issue,” he wrote elatedly to Weintraub. They were set to go to Canada. He wrote his plans to Moe, somewhat warily ending with: “Florence is of the Hebrew persuasion by choice … I naturally expect Daniel—Florence’s boy—to be treated very warmly. I can vouch for his Jewishness having been present at his circumcision.” Moe replied, telling him only to be careful on his way back on the snow-covered roads of Europe.
In March 1960, Mordecai, a pregnant Florence, and Daniel left Rome for London, from where they flew t
o Montreal. They were met by Lily. After staying with Weintraub for a few days, they rented places in both Montreal and Toronto. In August, Florence nine months pregnant, they were married in a Presbyterian church in Montreal. Memories of this wedding too, aided by foggy memories, have attained partly mythic status. Apparently no rabbi would have married the couple. The Christian minister who did so was a woman, who had been warned to make the ceremony short for the sake of the expectant bride and not to get into the Jesus Christ business, but she could not resist a lengthy discourse on the subject of love, and Mordecai was fit to murder her. Two days later the couple and friends went out for a lobster dinner. In the middle of it, Florence’s water broke. She was rushed to the hospital and gave birth to a boy, who was named Noah by Ted Kotcheff (who had flown in from London for the wedding), the child’s godfather.
Mordecai Richler was now a family man.
CHAPTER SIX
The Writer as Family Man
The wedding had been a small affair, with a few close friends in attendance; possibly the irrepressible Lily was present too. Members of the Richler clan, as Orthodox Jews, would not have approved his marrying a shiksa. On top of that, not counting that the bride was eminently pregnant, the groom had negatively characterized the family in a book, including its patriarch, and done more of the same to the Jews of Montreal’s Main in his recent book, Duddy Kravitz. As one of them opined, He drinks, he pisses. None of them, except Mordecai’s parents and Uncle Max, came to pay their respects to the couple. Uncle Max brought a present. Moe, when he came, acted very shy with the stunningly beautiful bride from another culture, who looked so different from an Orthodox Jewish woman. “How does she like being a Jew?” he asked his son. She of course had only formally converted, out of convenience, when she married Stanley Mann. When asked to look at the baby, reluctantly Moe followed Florence, Mordecai walking behind them with an amused look. “A baby is a baby,” was Moe’s simple verdict upon seeing Noah in the cradle. Indeed, just as many others have thought at a similar occasion. But this man of simple tastes and education, who had come from a shtetl in Galicia when he was hardly older than an infant himself, must have wondered, Would the boy be brought up a Jew? It was too much, to be presented not only with a shiksa daughter-in-law but also a grandchild, ready-made, and another one born two days after the wedding. Mordecai had always tested him. He did not believe in the legitimacy of a mixed marriage; he did not think it could work, as he had written before to Mordecai upon his first marriage; he had even sent Mordecai a magazine article explaining why. But then Moe’s own marriage had been a disaster, the unhappiness and shame of which had scarred his son.