by M G Vassanji
“Drama Guild Presentation Proves Mediocre” ran the December 1949 headline of his damning review of Out of the Frying Pan.
It is difficult enough to review a play when you will never have to face the cast again, unless by way of an accidental meeting. But when it is a critic’s duty to pan a production in spite of the fact that he will doubtless have to meet the cast from day to day, and exchange meaningless “hellos” and weather comments with the group, things are apt to prove rather unpleasant.…
Perhaps, the most admirable thing about the production were the usherettes, and the programme, both of whom were very well designed.
The editor thought it fit to note at the end, tongue in cheek, that “M.R. will be very scarce around the College these next few weeks.”
Mordecai Richler was enjoying himself writing.
A few weeks later, in February 1950, he wrote a much more provocative editorial against the recognition of the Hillel Society as an official group at the college.
The recognition of this group would not only mean toleration—but active endorsement—of religious segregation on our campus.
In theory Hillel claims its membership is open to Christians, Moslems, Witnesses of Jehovah, and what have you, but in practice the whole concept of an “open membership” Hillel is meaningless.
Letters of protest poured in, addressed to the editor: “It seems M.R., the cantankerous embryo, boy genius of the ‘High News’ has caused some new annoyance in his inability to furnish with civility the more intelligent objections to Hillel recognition,” wrote one piqued correspondent. Another opined with sarcasm that perhaps the “M.R.” who signed the editorial was not Mordecai Richler but “Moishe Rebaynim (known to Goyim as Moses) himself … returned to lead the Jews.… Even if the lowly Mordecai … did write the controversial column, I propose it be inscribed on twin tablets and hung on the notice board.” Another writer, “Son of Israel,” however, approved of M.R.
Mordecai Richler had begun to engage the Jews.
He did not think much of the curriculum at Sir George, wrote contemptuously of it in his later years, and his grades there reflected his disengagement from it. He believed there was a Jewish quota at the college, a proposition affirmed to him indirectly by a faculty member over a drink. Still, those were basically years of fun, when his education outside of the ghetto began. It was at Sir George where he made his first gentile friends. Terry introduced him to opera; Phil to the poets Eliot, cummings, and Auden; surprisingly, as he put it, “I had never heard of any of them before.” Stuart was inspirational—he signed up on a ship headed for the West Indies.
On the one hand, drinking was what college education was about—drinking and retching. On the other, “new, mostly literary, worlds” were opening up for him: it was an exhilarating experience. And “when we weren’t drinking, or arguing about Kafka or Thurber, both sacrosanct, we were at the afternoon movies.”
There were the Marx Brothers revivals and the new Montgomery Clift film, Virginia Mayo doing Dana Andrews dirty in The Best Years of Our Lives, Robert Ryan in The Set-Up and Rita Hayworth of blessed memory peeling off her gloves in Gilda.… We read Partisan Review, Commentary, and the New Yorker, and the writers who excited us were Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, S.J. Perelman, Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, Graham Greene, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
As did Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Dylan Thomas.
He wangled a job at the Montreal Herald, for which he covered college basketball games and amateur theatricals. Once he went as a critic to the famous Gayety Theatre, where the legendary Lili St. Cyr had performed. The stripper whom he interviewed, however, was one Candy Parker. The only Canadian writer who excited these young people was Morley Callaghan, who had sat with Hemingway and Fitzgerald at the Dôme in Montparnasse, Paris.
But there was already a literary group in the city, consisting of older writers and hopefuls, dedicated to a kind of writing that was more reflective of their experience as Canadians. It was associated with the Northern Review, a little magazine edited by John Sutherland, and included both Irving Layton and Louis Dudek. Later they were joined by Phyllis Webb and Leonard Cohen. Richler came to know Sutherland, how well is not clear (he “fell in” with him is how he put it), but to the older avant-gardists the nineteenyear-old recent arrival from the ghetto and Baron Byng, though a genius to his mother and his classmates, must have seemed callow and naïve and he perhaps embarrassed himself. He also hung around a college bar called the Shrine with a crowd of potential writers, according to one of whom, “Mordecai was a little kid, hanging around. He was raw, very raw, very brash.”
Which is exactly what Sutherland told Mavis Gallant when—as she relates it—she asked him about Richler: “What’s he like?” Sutherland replied, “He’s very brash. Everything goes through his head, he’s a know-all.”
The early Richler seemed to create such an impression. None of the older literary crowd could know that the kid elbowing himself into their midst was not just a dreamer or a talker but absolutely serious about his writing. And he in turn found the literary scene in Canada mediocre and wanting. Perhaps this was a natural reaction to being overlooked or dismissed. But he would not wait to be admitted into this pond; he would rather go out into the world of real writers and prove himself.
It has been suggested that he was asked not to return to Sir George after his second year due to his having written offensive articles in the Georgian. Certainly, an anonymous report, titled “Nite-Cap: a blemish on college due to closeness: one reporter’s view,” had been published about the notorious Nite-Cap Café during his watch as the day editor; the café, recommended by taxi drivers and cops alike, was used as a pickup place for prostitutes. It is also possible that Richler left the college because he did not get the post of Georgian editor-in-chief, the money from which would have paid his school expenses. Whatever the trigger for his departure, there was nothing to keep him at Sir George if he wanted to become a serious writer like Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, or Callaghan. One day in 1950, he and his friend Terry from the Georgian walked into Thomas Cook’s travel agency and bought one-way steamship tickets for Liverpool. They departed in September.
CHAPTER THREE
Out in the World
Mordecai’s friend Ed Koch describes meeting him in France a few years after the former had left home to be a writer:
… I went to the south of France. Mordecai was living in a village.... We drank in the town’s only bar, a café with tables set up in the town’s small square. Mordecai was taciturn, watchful, rabbinical. I did most of the talking. There was not much indication of the wit that he possessed, though at one point he asked me who my favourite novelist was. I answered, somewhat pretentiously, “Henry James.” “Then you’ll be right at home with my novels, won’t you?” We chuckled and kept drinking.
It is a precious picture of the writer as young man, out in the world alone, uncertain; a contrast with what others had seen as the brash young pup, overconfident. This was the private Mordecai.
MUCH AS THE MONTREAL of the 1940s and 1950s has been described as a lively and exciting city, it was still a backwater compared with the great metropolises of London, Paris, and New York. These centres defined the cultural and political beat of the times; consequently their attraction for the young man or woman out in the colonies or backwaters anywhere was enormous.
In Europe lay the romance of the bohemian: the young artist as revolutionary. Paris, the City of Lights, in particular, was still the cultural capital of the Western world, the spiritual home of the painter, musician, and writer, its name associated with a seemingly endless list of intellectual and artistic luminaries of the past. In the 1920s it had attracted a number of literary expatriates, dubbed “the Lost Generation” by Gertrude Stein, for they had come of age during the First World War. They had included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos. Joyce and Pound might also be found in the city in the 1920s and, later, Beckett. All of them were of iconic status by the 195
0s, having left a trail of artistic genius, exile, and freedom.
In the 1950s, while the United States lay in the grip of unbending McCarthyism, a new wave of North American émigrés appeared in Paris, inspired partly by that earlier generation of cultural superstars. While the previous generation had patronized the cafés of Montparnasse, the 1950s crowd took their leisure at the cafés of the Left Bank and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Here in the cafés—the Mabillon and Les Deux Magots the better known among them—the urgent questions of art, existence, and world revolution found expression; in the streets outside you could run into Sartre or Camus, Beckett or Malraux. The world’s exiles too found in Paris a congenial home; and Hollywood, not to be left behind, found it a profitable setting.
In 1951 Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron danced to Gershwin’s music in An American in Paris. Albert Camus, already the author of The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, published The Rebel that same year. A rift between Camus and Sartre set Paris abuzz. Beckett’s Watt and Molloy and Nabokov’s Lolita were all published in early 1950s Paris. Waiting for Godot premiered there in 1953, and then the rest of the world got to see it.
For this romantic yet artistically exciting world, Mordecai Richler, as he was to write later in Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album, “sailed away from Canada without regrets.”
His first letter to his father was written on board the RMS Franconia. He had caught a cold, he said, and had become seasick twice. They docked at Liverpool, from where he took a train to London. He stayed there for a week, and then on a lovely Paris autumn afternoon emerged at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés Métro station, “exhilarated beyond compare.” London was not half the city Paris was, he wrote to Dad. He had found a room on the Rue Cujas, 5th Arrondissement, and planned to make his own breakfast and dinner. Meanwhile, could he get a food parcel? Immediately having moved in, he hurried over to a café and sat outside at a table with a notebook and pen, doing his best, he would mock himself many years later, to look writerly. He was being cruel to himself, surely; what writer, young or old, would not wish to note down his first impressions of Paris? But wearing a blue beret as he sat there pensively was perhaps overdoing it.
It was a grubby, penurious existence he lived, the type many a foreign student or apprentice can attest to in a foreign city: cold and hungry nights inside dingy, dark apartments, skimping on food and clothing (even on underwear, he once said), awaiting food parcels and money from home, borrowing from fellow exiles, in his case those from North America. Mavis Gallant, a little older than he was and having preceded him in Paris, describes going to visit him once during those early months.
… I bought some fruit and whatever you take to someone from Canada who is dying of flu. I remember going up a very dark staircase that frightened me. It was an unheated room on a court. I knocked and he had a toque or hockey cap pulled down over his head, and he had on scarves and a sweater and he was sitting up in bed reading from the light of the window....
But this was his own life, hardships and all, an adventure and a discovery; he was meeting new young people, ideas came pouring into the mind, and he was writing all the time. He continued to read voraciously, completing his literary education. Gallant had caught him with a copy of Robert Herrick; he also soaked himself in Malraux, Céline, Sartre, Camus, Hemingway.
He wrote regularly to Moe and Lily. From Moe, he received $50 every month, from Lily, $20. This seems to be what had been promised to him. From both he received regular food parcels and that much-beloved item, cigarettes. Sometimes he requested typewriter ribbons for his Royal portable, which Moe had bought for him before he left. There seems to have been an understanding that Mordecai would pay back his father upon his return, after a two-year absence. Moe’s letters are good-natured, not overly long, with news from home; sometimes he sent magazines. He was not doing well but came up with the money every month. Mordecai’s “Dear Daddy” letters were often brisk, with reports about his work, and requests—rather, demands—for the money, in the manner of any twentyyear-old abroad. The operative word seemed to have been pronto, and he had taken on the affectation of using only lower case:
about the next parcel. i would appreciate it if on dec. 25th, not earlier, not later, you would mail me another parcel to cambridge, eng. [where he would be spending a few days with a friend]
[signed] mutty
He was not above manipulating or bullying the gentle Moe: “i got my mother’s parcel all right.” “… i’m counting on you! my mother has also sent money … Mordy.” And “my mother will continue to send $20 a month.”
Mentions of Lily are important to take note, for whereas Moe’s letters have been preserved from the time of Mordecai’s departure for Europe on the Franconia right until his father’s death, Lily’s early letters are absent from the archives he deposited. Perhaps they were culled because of the painful falling-out later of mother and son. That would be a pity, for those letters, which must have arrived with the money and the parcels, were no doubt as long and detailed as her later, preserved correspondence and would have revealed the relationship between the two at that early stage in Mordecai Richler’s career.
There existed a lively and closely linked expatriate community in Paris that included would-be writers and publishers of small magazines and presses, many of them Americans. In December 1950 there arrived in Paris another Montrealer, recently fired from the Gazette, now a freelance journalist and prospective writer. He was twenty-five and already known to Mavis Gallant, who had quit her job at the same newspaper to come to Paris and write, and who introduced him to Mordecai Richler. He is young and is determined to be a writer, Gallant told him. During the next few days the three of them hit the fashionable night spots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Latin Quarter, and Montparnasse. Writes William Weintraub:
We were all writing, or pretending to write, but at the cocktail hour some of us would gather, for Pernods or fines à l’eau, with a growing tribe of expatriates. On prosperous days it would be the Deux Magots, on thin days it would be the Mabillon. If a cheque arrived in the mail, there was the possibility of dinner at the Brasserie Lipp or in the ancient rooms of the Procope, where Voltaire used to dine. Other times it was in the dim little student restaurants. It was the golden age of the Left Bank and in its watering holes we were on the alert to catch sight of Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Prévert, Albert Camus, Juliette Greco.
Richler continued to create the impression in his older friends and acquaintances of a brash know-all, pushy but single-minded. It is easy to forget, reading these recollections, that he was a teenager still; they were all young, but he might well have been the youngest and perhaps was often merely tolerated. They thought of him as someone who wanted to be a writer, that is, who had dreams or boasted or was naïve. What did he know? Legions came to Paris claiming to write or become artists. Thus, Weintraub to his friend Brian Moore:
Did I tell you about this Richler? He’s from Montreal, has a peculiar first name—Mordecai— and wants to be a writer. Very young and rather cheeky, without proper deference when dealing with older citizens like myself.
But after the partying and hanging around in cafés, back in his dank room, the youngster exhausted himself at his typewriter. He wrote short pieces that he sent off, receiving rejections, and he was working on a novel. Little did his new acquaintances know the private demons he was wrestling at the time, which would find their place in the novels and in a manner define him. As Richler himself would admit, they never discussed “our stuff,” or admitted “that we laboured long and hard in our hotel rooms, real Americans after all, shoulders to the wheel, determined to make our mark.” Among them were Terry Southern and James Baldwin; Mavis Gallant was already sending off her first stories to The New Yorker. William Weintraub, as he wandered about Europe on his sabbatical, dispatched journalistic pieces back to Canada.
Mordecai Richler and William Weintraub began a close friendship during those months, despite the difference in age and experience between them,
and when the latter regretfully returned to Montreal eight months later (he had had a good time, but by his own admission his dedication to art did not extend to be “willing to scrape by in abject poverty, living on borrowed pittances, sleeping on someone’s floor and desperately waiting for that cheque from home”), the two continued a correspondence that lasted into the 1970s. Weintraub, moreover, had financial means in Montreal, and he seems to have been exceptionally generous, on several occasions coming to Richler’s timely assistance with emergency funds.
Before Weintraub departed for Montreal, on April 1, 1951, a surprising letter arrived from his new friend Mordecai Richler from, of all places, an island off Barcelona in the Mediterranean called Ibiza. “DEAR BILL:” the letter began,
i am broke and i’m not broke, a rather curious position to be in.… mavis said—god bless you— you might be able to lend me a few bucks until sept.—if so, fine—if not, i know the type!… if you … can spare $25 or $50 until sept. or oct. to say i would appreciate the whole thing would be putting it mildly.…
