by M G Vassanji
IN TORONTO AND MONTREAL, the superstar who was a grandson of a major Hasidic rabbi was invited to give talks at synagogues and felt free to vent his opinions on Judaism. His audiences were confused, offended, infuriated. At one question session he was asked why he had not given Duddy Kravitz, hero of his “so-called novel,” an Italian name, for instance; and, if on St. Urbain they had called the French Canadians “Frogs,” what was the point of telling the world about it?
In a long article he wrote for Maclean’s, titled “We Jews Are Almost as Bad as the Gentiles,” Richler said that after an absence of seven years, he found the changes in the Jewish community “astonishing.” Religion had been “modernized and, in the process, emasculated, shorn of most of its beauty and mystery.” Where there was one ghetto, now there were several wealthy but similarly exclusive enclaves. Where learned men had commanded respect, now it was those with cash. He goes on thus, in a serious, almost old-fashioned rabbinical vein, but can provide no prescription for being Jewish. Elsewhere he vented on Canadian culture. He gave his views on Canada in an article titled “The White Americans,” published in London’s The Spectator. “Like Jews and homosexuals,” he said, “we are quick to claim international celebrities and people of distinction living elsewhere as our very own.” Young people left Canada because they got bored with it. “Living in Canada again, as I am right now, one is immediately struck by the fact that there is no indignation here.… Our Canadian society lacks excitement and direction. We are one of the underdeveloped countries.… There’s nothing to do here but make more money than your neighbour, and anti-Americanism is reaching such a pitch that I can foresee the day of Castro on our five-dollar bills and an un-Canadian activities committee.”
There was a certain arrogance and self-importance in this attitude, but the role of bad boy seemed almost de rigueur under the circumstances. For Mordecai Richler to have made it in England and in the United States gave him a particular status in Canada. A superior attitude toward the limitations of home was also a common colonial affectation of the time; it justified why one had gone away. The haughty V.S. Naipaul, a Trinidadian who was in London and known to Richler, was increasingly called a racist back home for his opinions. At the same time, in the United States, Philip Roth’s recent novels had caused both sensation and offence, and Norman Mailer seemed always up to something spectacular. Richler had things to say in Canada, and people paid attention even when he offended. Being blunt was his way, this person of few words of talk, who only said what he meant. One must keep in mind, too, that he was still twenty-nine, one year below the suspect, compromising age of real adulthood.
Still, he was home, and you criticize vehemently only what you care about. To cut yourself off completely you have to stop caring. How could he? The novel which had just pro-pelled him to fame was all about Montreal’s Jews, they were a part of him; he was forged in the milieu that was the ghetto, as he liked to call it. He had every right to speak his truth about his people, his country. Having lived away he could as a matter of fact hold them up to objective scrutiny and higher standards. He had his detractors, naturally, but he also had his supporters, for whom he had brought much-needed excitement to the culture debate.
BRIAN MOORE was in Toronto that Christmas and was invited to the Richlers’ Boxing Day party, at their rented home at Lawrence and Dufferin. All the literati were there, he reported in a letter to Weintraub: Jack McClelland, Robert Fulford, Robert Weaver, Ross McLean, and Morley Callaghan. Moore reciprocated with dinner at an expensive restaurant where, as he put it, the waiters “warm[ed] the cognac.”
Mort, depressed because it was me who was squandering on the cognac and not him, called for the plug-in telephone and made two long and hideously expensive calls to London, just to say hello. This threw me into a state of nerves, to the extent that I had to have my cognac rewarmed.… “I enjoy these things,” said Mort. “You don’t know what it’s like to once have been poor.”
In the late spring of 1961, running short of money, Mordecai and Florence returned to London. Just before they left, Richler learned that he had been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. On St. Urbain Street, as Moe reported, he and his friends celebrated the award with a cake inscribed with “GUGGENHEIM”; and they nicknamed him “Guggy.” Who said the boy didn’t belong? Soon after Mordecai’s arrival in London, Ted Kotcheff asked him to write the script for a British comedy, Tiara Tahiti, starring James Mason and John Mills, “a month’s work at an embarrassingly high sum per wk.,” as he described the commission to his Canadian publisher Jack McClelland, adding, “I will finally be able to tackle my very own stuff for a long time to come.”
He meant his novels, though magazine assignments arrived at his doorstep with a regularity, to tempt and divert him. Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Commentary, and Holiday all beckoned. He went along. The gain was that journalism, to use a broad term for it, would keep him in touch with a reading public and allow him to speak directly. Novelists often feel that in the isolation of their careers, they risk becoming irrelevant storytellers. The world outside is often so much more bizarre and interesting. Surely the writer, as observer, must have something to say about it. People expect it. And the prospect of timely extra cash is not to be scoffed at. But he was walking a tightrope.
Jack McClelland, with whom he had started a growing friendship in Toronto and who would publish him for the next twenty-five years, warned him: “The pay is hardly worth it. I don’t think it does one’s prestige as a writer any good.… It’s an open invitation to other critics and novelists to slander the hell out of your next book when it appears.” Here spoke a true literary publisher. During the 1960s, Richler wrote almost thirty journalistic pieces, in addition to film scripts.
By 1963 his enthusiasm regarding his finances had abated, and he was again tempted to take the way of many writers—find a steady job in a related field, such as broadcasting or teaching. He wrote of his decision to a few friends in Canada. He asked McClelland to find him a place to stay in Toronto. And he wrote inquiries about jobs there, but to no avail. Florence, too, was against uprooting the young family. So in England they stayed. They had lived in a small flat in Hampstead; now with three children (Emma was born in 1962), they looked for a bigger place.
Richler asked Brian Moore for a loan toward purchase of a house; Moore generously replied that though he was considering a house himself, he could come up with half the amount, which was the not inconsiderable sum then of $1,500. In 1963 the Richlers found a large house in Surrey. In 1965 a fourth child, Martha, was born, and in 1967 the fifth, Jake. Mordecai Richler, brought up in a broken family, became a family man with a vengeance. And Florence, who had been given away as an infant and never knew her real parents, now had a large brood to call her own. They would be brought up privileged and secular; the boy from Baron Byng enrolled his children in English private schools.
GOING BY THE NAMES of their circle and the people who came to their Surrey house—Sean Connery, Philip Roth, Rod Steiger, Mel Lasky (the editor of Encounter), Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Doris Lessing—the Richlers lived a glamorous life. Arguably writers had a greater status in London film circles than in Hollywood. And then there was the Canadian group, a mafia, as someone called it—Ted Kotcheff, Sid Newman, Ted Allan, Reuben Ship, Mordecai Richler, and their wives. They had their beers and Montreal smoked meat, played poker, discussed baseball and hockey. And yet a list of friends and dinner guests is hardly indication of a writer’s life. Richler was still a private man, gruff and reserved, single-minded in his needs and pursuits; after marriage he actually withdrew, became engrossed in his family—“disappeared into his marriage,” is how his theneditor Diana Athill, who had known Richler for many years in London, puts it. Is it possible that he was happy? Contented, is Mavis Gallant’s assessment; deeply contented; but then he was married to Florence. That’s too easy, but perhaps a good approximation. Mordecai Richler never revealed himself, except in his writing.
Contented, perhaps, bu
t financial worries still remained. Film scripts were lucrative, journalism brought in extra cash, but these were occasional and piecemeal. There was as yet no big splash with a novel. Mordecai Richler’s four novels were not huge sellers, especially in the United States, where it mattered. They were not his main money-makers.
WITH DUDDY KRAVITZ, Mordecai Richler knew he had found his true voice, his literary calling. He had in mind now a series of novels about Montreal; in effect, as he put it to Brian Moore in a letter, he desired to be its Balzac or Faulkner. But his stay in Toronto meanwhile had produced a brainwave, an irresistible inspiration for a biting satire on the cultural life of the city, and by extension on the public culture of Canada. The result, published three years later as The Incomparable Atuk, is a crisp, fast-paced, and funny novel about the adventures of an Inuit (“Eskimo,” then) called Atuk, who is befriended by an RCMP officer on Baffin Bay, introduced to an advertising executive who has flown up north on behalf of a business corporation, and brought to Toronto. Using this “minority” character, a far from noble or simple savage, who is patronized and used politically and culturally but who in turn learns to play the game to his personal advantage, Richler exposes all the pettiness and smallness of the cultural scene as he saw it, hanging out to ridicule the pretensions and absurdities patently obvious in the cultural nationalism of the day, the cynicism and greed of big business, the gullibility of the masses, and the hypocrisies and contradictions of special interest and identity groups. In the process he even foreshadows the more absurd manifestations of the political correctness that was to follow two decades later. Every group is fearlessly caricatured to an extreme—even discomforting— degree: the smelly, simplistic, savage “Eskimo”; the “Negro” stud; the witless WASP; the thin-skinned Jew. In addition, there are characters whose real-life models are easily recognizable to those who were around at the time.
The novel poses issues he would return to again and again. It is a mark of his maturity at this point that he uses the bare bones of a simple, conventional plot on which to pin his criticisms, producing a highly amusing and engaging little novel. His lampoon of the mediocrity lurking behind the mask of nationalism is best demonstrated in the now immortal words “I’m world famous all over Canada,” uttered by Dr. Burt Parks, the bodybuilding guru and patriot as he accepts a plaque from the blind bodybuilders of Canada. The requirement for Canadian content on national television, the author tells us, is satisfied by cynically showing such programs early in the morning, for the few desperate souls who watch the tube at this hour. Atuk’s argument with Old One about intermarriage could well be that of a young modern Jew, one that indeed Richler himself might have used. It is an argument that any young man from any religious or ethnic background might use. An opinion on Zionism is expressed by Atuk quite innocently when he compares the Eskimos’ situation to that of the Palestinians.
The book, however, does raise concerns regarding Richler’s attitudes. There is first the arrogance, already mentioned, of a young man who has spent twelve years abroad and returns home briefly to ridicule a country then seeing a real resurgence of cultural and national identity. Richler might answer that he was still very much a Canadian and he called the game as he saw it; not criticizing, playing along with silliness and celebrating mediocrity, would be precisely the attitudes not to take. No one now, forty years later, would argue with that. But it is ironic nonetheless that the provincialism he ridiculed was what in fact gave him the opportunity to express himself. His celebrity, after all, was to a large degree due to his having made it in London and New York.
Did he go too far in his racial caricatures? Richler’s fearlessness regarding this aspect of his work was due, one might observe, to the fact that he too came from a people demeaned and put upon for centuries. Racism, caricatures, discrimination? They were his heritage, from the Inquisition and before, through the pogroms and the Holocaust, and the exclusive beaches, clubs, and schools in the Canada of his youth. This gave him licence. He was not, could not be a racist. And yet, to counter that, it might be all right to caricature a people (the Jews, the WASPs) who are treated in their complexity using a variety of characters, but why is the only black man in the novel a large stud who goes about humping frustrated white women, the Eskimos all smelly, and the only black character in his forthcoming novel a stereotypical hot black woman, and in the one following that, another black stud humping a white woman? Nevertheless, it could be argued that it is the hapless WASP, never quite sure of his guilty self, therefore easily manipulated, who is made the cruellest butt of Richler’s satire. But this argument will not satisfy all critics.
This novel seemed to confirm Richler as a very Canadian writer when, according to his earlier declarations, he would rather be seen as just a writer. Even Jack McClelland had warned him about the “local” jokes; London’s The Tatler called the book “a bizarre Canadian in-joke.” Richler himself had had doubts about its worth. But he had been inspired to write it, he finished it, and this is what it was. Four years had passed since his last novel. He was thirty-two and, increasingly, time mattered. It may have seemed minor at the time, and certainly is, compared with Duddy Kravitz; but it has stood the test of time and it set the course for Richler’s future role as a witty, ruthless, and fearless public commentator, especially on matters Canadian.
TO BRIAN MOORE, journalism was a compromise, “a dissipator of talent.” There is some truth to that, though that depends also on the writer’s temperament and need. Many writers avoid having children for the sake of their careers. Mordecai Richler had an abundance in his five. If he kept himself busy, scrounging desperately for money to support them, it is also true that his family was his sustenance and anchor.
Richler’s relationship with Moore is a fine little twist in the story of Montreal’s rich and varied literary culture; it is also the narrative of a friendship that began over a drink between two writers at the onset of their careers, only to end unhappily decades later when they had reached their pinnacles. Moore was ten years Richler’s senior. An immigrant from Belfast, he started out in Montreal with the Gazette first as a proofreader, then a reporter. To make extra cash, in the early 1950s he began publishing pulp thrillers, some under his own name, others pseudonymously, though his ambition was always to write serious novels. It was at the Montreal Press Club, when Richler returned from Europe in 1952–53, that the two were introduced by William Weintraub. A three-way friendship began, though the older two seem to have been closer and exchanged greater confidences. Moore was married to Jackie Sirois, whom Richler already knew as a young pup from Sir George Williams College hanging around the older literary types. When Richler returned to London in fall 1953, already with an offer from Deutsch to publish his first novel, he invited the Moores to visit him and Cathy with their son.
Brian Moore, having finished his first serious novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, set off for Europe the following March with a stopover planned for London. Something about Mordecai Richler seemed to have already irked Moore. Writing from the ship, which apparently had a few literary types on board, Moore began taking digs at Richler. “Many points in Mordecai’s vocabulary have been revealed to me as jargon,” he wrote to Weintraub. Negative observations such as these would continue. He stayed with Mordecai and Cathy at their flat in Hampstead, which he found dingy but not uncomfortable. He could never live in such a place, he wrote. Mordecai, he complained, was too concerned with money. There was a jibe at the younger writer’s accent, his long hair, his dressing, and the Mandrake, the club they visited together. Later he took to calling Mordecai “the Bard” behind his back and to using a mock-Biblical style to refer to him—“the Bard is soon off to Israel”; “He saith England is fucked …”; “Mordecai speaketh with a strong West Indian intonation which makes all conversations disconcerting.…”
And yet, when Moore’s Judith Hearne was undergoing serial rejections—it was turned down by at least ten publishers—Richler recommended it warmly to his edi
tor, Diana Athill. She read it, liked the novel, and Brian Moore’s career and reputation were made. It is possible that she would have read the manuscript anyway; but Richler had recommended it, and she read it only afterwards. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne became a literary sensation.