Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  He won his share of literary prizes, including two Governor General’s Awards, two Commonwealth Prizes, and a Giller Prize. As well, there have been four biographies since Richler’s death, including Charles Foran’s definitive and multiple-award-winning Mordecai: The Life & Times. The ultimate accolade, though, is that his books have outlasted him and continue to attract eager readers.

  MORDECAI RICHLER WAS born on St. Urbain Street in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal on January 27, 1931, the younger son of Moses and Leah (née Rosenberg) Richler. His parents’ arranged marriage was supremely dysfunctional. His mother, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, was socially ambitious; his father, the uncouth yet gentle son of a scrap dealer, was ruined by the Depression. The family often had to change lodgings in the middle of the night, hauling away their paltry possessions a step ahead of the bailiff.

  The Richlers separated when Mordecai was thirteen and his older brother, Avrum, was a first-year student at Queen’s University in Kingston. That left Mordecai estranged from his father, with whom he had quarrelled violently, and living with his mother and her lodger, a German Jew named Julius Frankel, who doubled as her lover. One morning, the prepubescent boy found his mother hiding under the covers in the lodger’s back bedroom, and on other occasions he had to feign sleep while the lovers had noisy sex in the adjacent bed in the room he shared with his mother. Offensive behaviour by any account, but to a moralistic boy with an unforgiving nature it was a deep affront, one that later fuelled the devastating and hilarious fictional portrait of the licentious mother who performs a striptease at her son’s bar mitzvah in Joshua Then and Now, among other caricatures. His mother attempted a rebuttal in her memoir The Errand Runner: Reflections of a Rabbi’s Daughter, but she lacked her son’s lacerating wit and coruscating talent.

  As an adolescent, Richler was regularly outraging his relatives with his unruly and unorthodox behaviour — smoking in the street, skipping Hebrew school, claiming to be an atheist. An indifferent student at Baron Byng High School, he didn’t have the marks to get into McGill University, let alone the tougher requirements to surmount the unofficial entrance hurdles for Jews. Instead he attended Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University but dropped out after a couple of years, cashed in an insurance policy, and headed to Paris to find his way as a writer.

  He returned to Montreal in 1953 with a draft of The Acrobats, working at nights at CBC Radio International while he rewrote his novel. André Deutsch published it the following year in London — a coup for a twenty-two-year-old writer. Later he dismissed the novel as derivative and refused to have it republished during his lifetime, but it gave him an important entree to an innovative publisher and outstanding editor, Diana Athill.

  By then Richler was romantically involved with Montrealer Catherine (Cathy) Boudreau, a divorcée a decade older than he, and a Gentile. His parents were horrified. Their reaction to their son’s choice of bride was not amel­iorated by his virulent depiction of his childhood in his second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, in 1955. Richler claimed the novel is not autobiographical, bluntly stating in an author’s note that readers looking for “real people” were “on the wrong track” and had misunderstood “my whole purpose.” But, as biographer Charles Foran points out in Mordecai, “The novel wasn’t looking to critique his family and Jewish Montreal; it was calling them out to a brawl, an Apostate taking on Everybody.” The novel received good reviews in distant London, where the setting was considered exotic and the angry narrative voice deemed intense and refreshingly candid. Montrealers were generally aghast. The Star reviewer called it a “distasteful story” about a “blindly selfish” young man of “limited intelligence” who “succeeds in reducing all those around him to rubble,” according to Foran.

  More turmoil was looming on both the creative and emotional horizons. His marriage was doomed because the principals were a turbid mix and also because Richler had fallen in love with a beautiful married woman, the model, actress, and script reader Florence Mann, an obsession that had begun with a chance meeting with mutual friends on the eve of his own wedding late in August 1954. Mann’s marriage, troubled by her husband Stanley’s womanizing, limped along, although she and Richler verbally acknowledged their mutual attraction when they met at a huge march in Trafalgar Square protesting the British intervention in Suez in early November 1956. She was seven months pregnant.

  Bizarrely, but surely a reflection of the intermeshed nature of the expatriate community, when Daniel Mann was born just before Christmas that year, his father, Stanley Mann, suggested to Florence that their mutual friend Richler should be godfather. What’s more, Richler agreed.

  The following year, in September 1957, Richler, who had been paying the rent by writing scripts for film and television, published his third novel, A Choice of Enemies. In a thinly veiled portrait of the political machinations of the expatriate crowd in London, Richler borrowed characteristics and dialogue liberally from his friends, including the screenwriter Ted Allan, who had fought the fascists in Spain with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and co-written a biography of Norman Bethune.

  Having thoroughly slagged his family and his friends, Richler seemed to have detoxified himself. Cleansed of the particulars of his own disaffections, he began writing from absorbed rather than merely observed experience, and he had found his ideal partner and editor. By the time Daniel was eighteen months old, the Manns and the Richlers had split after a sojourn together at a rented house in Roquebrune on the Riviera. As Reinhold Kramer writes in Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain, “In the beginning of June 1958, there were two couples — the Richlers and the Manns. By July, there was one — Richler and Florence.”

  Richler’s new novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, propelled by the adventures of a gloriously irreverent, shamelessly opportunistic, and brash Jewish kid on the make from the Montreal ghetto, was gobbled up by critics and readers. Besides the memorable Duddy, a Sammy Glick character who is striving for something — ownership of a hidden lake in the Laurentians on which he dreams of building a grotesque holiday village — rather than merely rejecting everything he knows, there were a number of blackly comic set pieces, such as Duddy’s scheme to produce films of bar mitzvahs directed by an auteur (and alcoholic) British director. Having lightened up, and with the benefit of Florence’s discerning editorial eye, Richler was having fun with his material, and so too did readers.

  Duddy made Richler’s name at a time when his life was solidifying as well. Writing for the movies was padding his pocketbook and stoking his inventory of satirical subjects, and his unhappy marriage to Cathy Boudreau was finished and he and Florence were lovers, although discreet ones because of the arcane divorce laws and their custody worries about Daniel. All went well and the couple married on July 27, 1960, in Montreal, two days before their son Noah was born.

  Can-cult and the film industry supplied the focus for Richler’s next two satirical novels. The Incomparable Atuk (1963) parodied the boosterism of cultural nationalism and our neophyte star system that made broadcasters such as Nathan Cohen and Pierre Berton “world famous all over Canada,” as a character boasts. Cocksure (1968) lampooned both the power structure within the film industry and the craziness involved in adapting novels for the screen. The movie business also supplied an occupation for Jake Hersh in St. Urbain’s Horseman, Richler’s bestselling and Governor General’s Award–winning novel about the Montreal ghetto, its entangling alliances, and his own preoccupations as a Jew, a Canadian, and a man born out of sync with the huge battles occurring elsewhere. The novel was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost out to one of V. S. Naipaul’s lesser books, In a Free State.

  The gap between books was growing larger, but so too were the ambitions of the novels, the size of his family, and the number of other projects, including journalism, essays, and film. As well as wanting him to adapt other people’s books for the screen, producers and directors were clamouring to m
ake films of his novels, especially Duddy and Horseman. After almost twenty years in England he had moved back to Montreal — although not to the ghetto — with his wife and five children in the early 1970s because he recognized that the city and the country supplied the writerly pulse that quickened his prose and whetted his imagination.

  He had more books in him: the delicious children’s story Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, the introspective Joshua Then and Now, and the innovative Solomon Gursky Was Here, a postmodern invocation of what it means to be a Canadian, as well as an excoriation of the Bronfmans, a family he had always despised because to him they seemed to care only about mammon. Years earlier, Saidye Bronfman (wife of Samuel, the patriarch of the distillery family) had said to him, at the premiere of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, “Well, you’ve come a long way for a St. Urbain Street boy.” Never one to sidestep a slight, Richler retorted, “Well, you’ve come a long way for a bootlegger’s wife.” Solomon Gursky was also short-listed for the Booker but lost to A. S. Byatt’s Possession in the 1990 contest.

  Above all, there was Barney’s Version. The novel completes Richler’s quasi-autobiographical odyssey of the Jew’s progress through life, sharpens and refines his favourite satirical targets, and allows Barney to breathe with emotional depth even as he is wandering onto the foggy shoals of Alzheimer’s. More than anything, it is a love song to Florence. The novel won his pal Jack Rabinovitch’s glitzy Giller Prize, chosen by a jury that included his Parisian friend Mavis Gallant. Unlike many novelists whose creative energy seems spent in mid-career, Richler got better as he aged, like cognac.

  Richler had proved you can go home again. He was more celebrated than reviled, except in Quebec, where he divided his time between a two-storey house on Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships and a Montreal apartment — although he and Florence escaped the blustery winters for a flat in London. Most important, he wasn’t ignored. Sought after as a contributor to magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and on either side of the undefended border, he was that rarest of creatures — a prosperous Canadian writer. And if he was a celebrity at home he was an icon in Italy, where Barney’s Version was such a spectacular success that it sparked a regular newspaper column in Il Foglio called “Andrea’s Version” and a slang expression, “Barneyano,” for a man who was politically incorrect and unapologetically so.

  Life was good, especially with the arrival of grandchildren and the stirrings of an eleventh novel in the gnarled reaches of his imagination. Sedentary decades of smoking, drinking, and sitting in front of a typewriter every day for several hours exacted a price, however. His health was failing. He had survived surgery for kidney cancer in 1998, but in early May 2001 he was informed that a small-cell carcinoma in his lungs had metastasized to his abdomen and chest. The prognosis was one to three years. That proved optimistic. Richler died in hospital in Montreal after a series of hemorrhages on July 3, 2001. He was seventy.

  A month before, he had handwritten an addendum to his will giving Florence power of attorney in medical matters and asking that he be buried in Mount Royal Cemetery, provided that an adjoining plot was reserved for his wife “so that eventually we may lie beside each other in death, as we did so happily in life.” That final testament to his love for Florence was found after his death, as Foran writes in Mordecai. She had a double tombstone erected with their first names, his dates, and her incomplete ones. Then, in a public affirmation of their enduring love, she added Richler’s poignant comment about lying together in death. Across from the stone she placed a bench for visitors to sit and planted a mulberry tree, an affecting reference to Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe and the lovers’ union after death.

  Builders

  Obituaries Are the Biographical Building Blocks of a Country’s History

  THE TEN PEOPLE in this chapter combine daring, vision, dedication, and plain hard work. They lived in many parts of the country, from the Arctic to the Maritimes to northern British Columbia. A few of them were immigrants, two were First Nations — an Inuit and a Nisga’a — one could trace his ancestry to the United Empire Loyalists, while another had an impoverished childhood and died the richest man in the country. What appealed to me were their achievements: Bertha Wilson, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada; Frank Calder, the First Nations chief who helped to persuade Pierre Trudeau to change his mind on aboriginal rights; Ken Thomson, the newspaper scion who could have coasted on the gushing profits from his father’s investment in North Sea oil and instead built a global communications empire and shared his art collection with the rest of us; Celia Franca, the ballerina who built our premier dance company and trained the dancers who keep it strong; Louis Robichaud, the Acadian premier who hauled New Brunswick into the modern world and made it the first bilingual province in the country; Kananginak Pootoogook, the Inuit artist who helped his people make the transition from nomadic life on the land to self-sufficiency in built communities.

  Their stories form a collective narrative that speaks to how this country matured as a nation. That is the power of obituaries. As a literary convention, they go back long before Canada existed as a nation. Sadly, we don’t have a strong or lengthy tradition of writing or collecting obituaries or of using them as a resource in writing cultural history. Our record, with the exception of the monolithic Dictionary of Canadian Biography, is rudimentary at best.

  Elsewhere, obituaries have spawned grand historical, social, and literary materials. You can trace the form as far back as the ancient Egyptians, who used hieroglyphics to record the lives of the pharaohs and the wealthy elites on tablets and sarcophagi and later on papyrus. Homer’s account of the great warrior Achilles in The Iliad — his heroics, his rage, his vulnerability — was spoken, not read, but otherwise his epic poem has all the components of a modern obituary.

  In the Middle Ages, religious scribes painstakingly created illuminated manuscripts detailing the lives of saints and martyrs. Over time the practice morphed from the spiritual to the secular and became more and more individualized. However, it wasn’t until after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 that writings about notable lives could reach a non-scholarly audience. By the seventeenth century, printing and production methods and general literacy had all improved sufficiently to enable the dissemination of pamphlets and “relations,” which were the precursors of newspapers. The first newspaper obituary, documenting the life and death of Captain Andrew Shilling, appeared in 1622 in a British journal called The True Relation of Our Weekly News, according to Australian journalist-turned-academic Nigel Starck.

  Reportage on Shilling’s death was tucked into an account of a sea battle between the rival fleets of the East India Company and Portugal, but the commentary was very similar to a modern obituary, according to Professor Starck in his book Life after Death: The Art of the Obituary, because “it offered some description of Shilling’s life along with an attempt, albeit brief, of posthumous character assessment.” The unnamed obituarist offers “a richer dossier on a life lived than does the simple chronicling of a death died,” wrote Starck. There’s even a Canadian note in that the Arctic explorer William Baffin, after whom Baffin Bay and Baffin Island are named, knew Shilling and sailed with him on the ship London to Surat for the British East India Company from 1617 to 1619.

  Along with newspapers, books of biographical sketches were being published and consumed by a bourgeois audience interested in learning about the exploits of the celebrated and notorious characters of their times, especially with the return to court life, the reopening of theatres, and the end of overt Puritanism in 1660. That’s when Charles II was crowned, thus bringing back the monarchy after the bitterly divisive Civil War, the beheading of his father, Charles I, in 1649, and the demise of Oliver Cromwell and his republican Commonwealth.

  Reports called “The Life and Death” began appearing in two English weekly newspapers, the Intelligencer and
the Newes, in the 1660s. “The subjects were exclusively royalty, nobility, those in high office or those with distinguished roles in the armed forces,” according to Elizabeth Barry, an associate professor in the department of English literature at the University of Warwick in England. “The obituaries were also, in the Restoration context, Royalist in outlook, the papers rewarding loyalty and service to the monarchy as part of the propaganda machine of the restored Crown,” she writes in “From Epitaph to Obituary: Death and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century British Culture.”

  Thomas Fuller, a clergyman who was made chaplain to Charles II, compiled A History of the Worthies of England, which was published in 1662, a year after his own death. Aboout the same time a researcher and compiler named John Aubrey (1626–97) began collecting materials for biographical sketches that even today are held up as exemplars of the obituarist’s craft, especially in England.

  Aubrey, an only child, was born into a prosperous gentry family in Wiltshire during the reign of Charles I. The English Civil War interrupted his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, and although he pursued the law for a while at the Middle Temple in London, he never acquired a profession. Instead he collected books, explored, and wrote about the megalithic remains at Avebury, and, on his father’s death in 1652, in the early years of Cromwell’s Protectorate, inherited large estates and complex debts. In the 1650s he began to write Lives of Scientists and later embarked on a two-volume survey of his native Wiltshire.

  In 1663, three years after Charles II’s ascendancy, Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society. But by 1670 he had lost all his property and spent the rest of his life living on the generosity of others. He loved gossip and conviviality and collecting information about his vast circle, which included scientists, politicians, writers, aristocrats, and more common folk in trade, manufacturing, and service. As a charming guest at country estates and London houses, he jotted down his memories from the night before while his hosts were still sleeping and he himself was battling a hangover. Fascinated by people’s thoughts, attitudes, and eccentricities, as well as their conversation, he brought a psychological curiosity to his scribblings, and as time went on he added notations about where his subjects were buried and what had happened to their books and pictures.