Mordecai Richler

by M G Vassanji

  His fears about its reception seem surprising today, but he was right, it did cause offence. Maclean’s awarded the novel first prize in a competition, but its editors refused to serialize it—as the award stipulated—calling the book anti-Semitic. Malcolm Cowley, reader for Viking in England, rejected the novel, saying, “it might well become an anti-Semitic document.” Walter Allen for Deutsch, however, said that in it “the Canadian novel emerges for the first time.” Obviously, no one could mistake the Main for anywhere else, and Montreal’s Jews were living a modern Canadian reality. The book was published by Deutsch in England and distributed in Canada; it had trouble finding a publisher in the United States.

  William Weintraub, who had seen the galleys, wrote a seven-page letter expressing disappointment and pointing out numerous errors, instances of bad taste, clichés, and caricatures of Jews. Weintraub warned his friend that he would be accused of anti-Semitism. “But if he [the protagonist, Noah] dislikes Jews I, personally, have trouble feeling sympathy for him. Especially in view of the fact that the Jews he dislikes seem to me to be set up as caricatures and even burlesques.… The rabbi (p. 171) who dips ‘his beak’ into his black prayer book belongs in an anti-semitic pamphlet. It’s hackneyed, in awful taste and very ugly. And there are other offensive burlesques.” A damning critique, and Weintraub agonized about having written it, questioned his own motives. But his perceptions echoed those of others.

  The novel was published in 1957. The Jewish press condemned it. The Congress Bulletin of the Canadian Jewish Congress placed it in the “genre of self-hate,” adding that it was “a caricature of Jewish life one might expect in Der Sturmer [a Nazi newspaper].” A Jewish reviewer in the Montreal Star wrote that the book “should have been clothed in shiny paper and sold under the counter at the corner newsstand.”

  All these reactions, including Weintraub’s, seem gross overstatements by today’s standards, though the offence taken by the Richler family is understandable. Richler had done what young writers often do, and not many readers appreciate that a character in a novel, even when directly inspired by a real person, has been shaped by narrative and form, is no longer real. In the larger world, however, Richler had scored. The dreaded second book was out of the way, and critics were awaiting the big success that was surely to come. No one had created Montreal, or any Canadian city, with this same immediacy.

  His mother, Lily, had meanwhile obtained a copy from Weintraub and read it. She praised the book, including the portrayal of the Jews and of the ghetto; obviously she saw herself in the character of the mother, and she defended herself.

  RICHLER’S FRIENDSHIPS in the 1950s reflected his attraction to liberal-left politics. His own background was working class, from Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, with its cold-water flats and their outside staircases—where his neighbours included peddlers, plumbers, tailors, factory workers, and taxi drivers. At Sir George Williams College, run by the YMCA, the student body was for the most part left-leaning and activist, and during Richler’s time there it had agitated against anti-Semitism and for allowing communists to speak on campus.

  Fifties London was home to many young people from the colonies of Africa and the Caribbean. West Indian writer George Lamming would come around to the Richler house; the two would frequent the Mandrake Club, a haunt for the artistic types, which Brian Moore, visiting Richler in 1954, had described—with a touch of envy, perhaps—as “a club with bearded Britishers, black Little Englanders, all sorts of … phony lit people.” Doris Lessing, recently from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), was also a good friend. Her place was frequented by some of Africa’s future leaders, currently agitating for the independence of their countries. Richler mentions them only in passing. There was a prolonged and brutal guerrilla war in Malaya and another one in Kenya, which quite gripped the Western world—many still recall them—but in his letters from those times, his novels, and his recollections, Richler (with perhaps one minor instance) is silent about them. One concludes that this other world, so much also a part of London, capital of a now-defunct empire, and close to his friends Lamming and Lessing, was alien to him. Lessing, in her autobiography, certainly spends a long time on this involvement in her life. And while Richler had delighted in meeting the older and established E.M. Forster and Archibald MacLeish, British writers closer to his age, including “The Angry Young Men”—Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, and others—who defined the literature of the time in their country, were not part of his circle.

  His closest buddies in London, starting in the mid-1950s, were in fact fellow Canadian and American expatriates, mostly Jews, from film and TV, who had been blacklisted for their politics. They included television and film writers Ted Allan, Reuben Ship, and Stanley Mann, all former Montrealers. London was attractive to the Canadians because it had a booming television industry, and they could work without permits. Allan, an ardent communist since his youth, had co-authored a bestselling biography of Norman Bethune, with whom he had served in the Spanish Civil War. Ship, named as a communist for his left-wing activities, had been declared an enemy alien in the United States and was deported to Canada in 1953 in handcuffs and on crutches; he subsequently wrote a much-celebrated radio satire on McCarthyism, The Investigator (1954), that was broadcast on CBC and went on to become an underground classic. Mann’s credits would include the screenplay for the film adaptation of John Fowles’s The Collector (1965). In 1957 this expatriate group was joined by Ted Kotcheff, a director from Toronto who had worked at CBC. It is remarkable what a vital role that organization played in nurturing creative film and writing talent at the time.

  RICHLER HAD SET his recent novel in the Montreal of his younger days. What better subject next than to examine the lives of himself and his acquaintances as left-wing exiles in London? In the novel that he published next, called A Choice of Enemies, he does exactly that. It would seem that two tendencies were competing within him—to bring to life Montreal’s ghetto or to be the cosmopolitan commentator on life’s great questions, through the medium of fiction. Of course, the former does not preclude the latter. But it runs the risk of becoming marginalized. As the TLS reviewer of Son wrote, “Jewish writers are always in danger of becoming fascinated by the problems of Jewry to exclusion of all other interests, so that Mr Richler’s next novel will be awaited with anxiety as well as hope.…” One wonders what other interests the reviewer had in mind. The problems of the English middle classes? Why couldn’t “the problems of Jewry,” looking beyond differences, be also the problems of others?

  A Choice of Enemies describes the 1950s expatriate London of Mordecai Richler, a city to which colonials still flocked from the vestiges of the far-flung Empire, drab and grey, often miserable, always lonely. Many of them would stay and progress and transform themselves, becoming British of sorts, acquiring accents and manners—or, more exactly, finishing them, for British ways were not alien to them. Their children and grandchildren would go on to become part of a new and arguably much more exciting multicultural Britain. Richler and his friends, a generation or a little more removed from their Eastern European Jewish ancestry, were North Americans formed in the cauldrons of the immigrant neighbourhoods of the great cities to which their grandfathers had arrived to start new lives. They did not share a culture with England. (It is interesting to note that Indians have had greater contact with Britain.) These North Americans, as fictionalized in A Choice of Enemies, form a foreigners’ clique, with no intention of integrating, and little empathy for the host society.

  Proud they were. They had come to conquer. Instead they were being picked off one by one by the cold, drink, and indifference. They abjured taking part in the communal life. They mocked the local customs from the school tie to queuing, and were for the most part free of them by dint of their square, classless accents. Unlike their forebears, they were punk imperialists. They didn’t marry and settle down among the natives. They had brought their own women and electric shavers with them.... For even those who had lived in London fo
r years only knew the true life of the city only as a rumour. Around and around them the natives, it seemed, were stirred by Diana Dors, a rise in bus fares, test matches, automation, and Princess Margaret. The aliens knew only other aliens.

  In this London, the émigrés of A Choice of Enemies conform to their own pecking order, as they build up their precarious film and writing careers and work at their fragile social lives. It is this little clique, held together by Canada-America, their fashionably leftist views, their escape from the States worn like a badge of honour, that Mordecai Richler takes apart. Is the choice of good and evil, a choice of sides, a choice of enemies, still possible today as it had been in the recent past—during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War?

  Their certainties begin to unravel when into their little group arrives Ernst, a tall, blond, and very physical and uncouth German. His mere existence among them tests the presumptions of their beliefs. This mysterious German must likely have escaped something; he must have been a Nazi, a Hitler Youth. They hate him, abuse him, but lack that legitimizing certainty. The exception is Norman Price, a principled and gifted but somewhat weak man. That he is a WASP may not lack significance, for Richler often portrays the WASP as weak. When Norman refuses to judge Ernst, in fact tries to help him, he is subjected, with great irony, to the sort of inquisition that the exiles have escaped from, in the United States.

  But Norman does not come out of this with any moral certainty or victory; he too is taken apart. For as a survivor in postwar Europe, Ernst has lived the life of a petty criminal and has recently killed by accident a young soldier who happens to have been Norman’s beloved younger brother Nick. This incident inserted at the beginning holds the novel’s tension, because Norman does not know of Ernst’s deed, and we await to discover how he will respond when the time comes. To add to Norman’s angst, a young Canadian innocent with whom Norman is in love turns out to have fallen for Ernst. The plot is clever.

  The novel on the one hand examines meaning in the lives of the postwar generation, questioning the certainties of good and evil; it is also very Canadian: Montreal and Toronto lurk in the background as permanent presences, and the wishy-washy but decent Norman represents the more genteel face of the old Canada. In contrast to his ilk, A Choice of Enemies highlights the generation of postwar Jews, no longer the frightened inhabitants of the shtetls but strong, aggressive, and successful. They represent a new Canada. And Mordecai Richler, one of them, was already being celebrated back home for having injected a new sort of excitement into Canadian letters.

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1958, Mordecai Richler and his wife Cathy stayed with Stanley and Florence Mann in a rented villa in Roquebrune, by the sea, near Monte Carlo. One afternoon when Cathy returned from the beach, Mordecai told her he no longer loved her, their marriage was over; he was in love with Florence. Stanley had gone to London at the time.

  Mordecai and Florence’s is a rare love story, a romantic tale of two people ideally suited and lucky enough to find each other and spend their lives together. It defined Richler’s life thereafter, as a writer who was a devoted family man; it inspired the subplots and settings of several novels; and it defined Florence as Mrs. Richler, his companion and support, his anchor. Arguably she was the hero of his life story. Cathy is cast in the role of the loser, but this is partly because we know so little of her.

  Florence Mann was “drop-dead” gorgeous, according to those who knew her. She was a successful model in London at the time, and a favourite story told about her is that she had been pursued by both Sean Connery and Christopher Plummer. Her marriage to Stanley Mann, the film writer, was not working out; by many accounts he was a philanderer. In 1957 they had separated, and taking the villa in France that summer in 1958 was an attempt to get back together. Her maiden name was Florence Wood; she had been adopted by a couple named Ethel and Albert Wood soon after her birth, in 1929, and brought up in the Montreal working-class neighbourhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles. Finding out about the adoption in her teenage years was a traumatic experience, more so because she could not subsequently discover the identities of her birth parents, the records having been destroyed in a fire. This disappointment had left her with an unhappy sense of incompleteness. She married Stanley Mann in 1953, having met him while working as a model and actress in Montreal. This was the year Mordecai was in Montreal, but she did not see him.

  As she tells the story in an interview, one day Ted Allan gave her the manuscript of Mordecai’s first novel, The Acrobats, to read, which the author had left with him. She was impressed by it, as she reported to Allan, coming as it did from such a young man.

  The Manns and the Allans were friends. Ted and Kate Allan went to London, where prospects seemed bright in film and television; Stanley and Florence Mann followed. It was at the Allans’ house that Florence and Mordecai first met briefly. She would recall a strange and very awkward young man, yet appealing and sensitive. He had a powerful effect on her. It was the day before his marriage to Cathy. The following day, at his wedding reception, Richler offered to get Florence a drink and followed her to the bar, very obviously smitten. Over the months his friends gradually came to know of his attraction to Florence. They warned him against being silly. Recollections of this growing romance decades later undoubtedly bear the character of legend, part of Richler lore. Richler himself fictionalized the story in his final novel, Barney’s Version. Did Richler, then, live a lie with Cathy? Perhaps only partly. And Cathy? Years later Brian Moore wrote with relish to Weintraub that Kotcheff had told him that Cathy had been “tromping” Richler, that is, was unfaithful to him. The truth of the statement is anybody’s guess; there is no other indication of it.

  By 1957 Florence’s marriage was already on the rocks; there was a child by then, called Daniel. And Mordecai, who with Cathy would visit the Manns for an occasional drink, meet them at expatriate parties, and was a friend of Stanley’s, became more and more obsessed with Florence. Once, as she recalls, he came to visit her in her apartment. She and Stanley had separated; Daniel, who was a few months old, was with her. She and Mordecai went out for a walk, and there he told her he found it difficult to be just near her; he was in love with her and had been for some time. She was surprised, not offended. He kissed her on the cheek and departed. Subsequently she described him to her analyst as a difficult personality who had problems with people, but added, “Of all the people I have met in the past few years, he is perhaps the only one whose intelligence I admire and respect and is a man I would trust completely.” She had found the right man.

  Cathy was bitter and angry. “I had looked after him, made his meals, entertained his friends,” she would say later. But they had had good times together, partying until 4 A.M., making latkes, travelling. Following that unhappy afternoon when Richler gave her the news, Cathy moved to Villefranche, a fishing village nearby, where she gave swimming lessons at an American children’s camp. Mordecai was left in the villa with Florence, and Ted Kotcheff, who had come to visit.

  Florence and Ted soon left, and Mordecai stayed behind by himself to finish his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which he would dedicate to her. On July 25, from France, he wrote a dejected letter to William Weintraub, giving him news of the breakup.

  The irony in all this was that Florence always liked Cathy and understood her. Cathy had a nervous breakdown at some point and later apparently became a Buddhist nun. Richler would continue to support her for a few years.

  BY THIS TIME, in 1958, Mordecai Richler’s financial prospects were at last beginning to look brighter.

  Only a year before, in June 1957, Richler had written to Weintraub from Tourrettes-sur-Loup, his former haunt on the Riviera where he had first come from Spain; he was holidaying with Cathy and there was no hint of the marital problem. Financially he was not doing very well, and he wrote that it was 90 percent certain that the two of them would be returning to Canada. He hoped that he would find a film job, and he might need to borrow $500 from his
friend. He planned to stay in Toronto, not Montreal, perhaps to avoid problems with his father. It appears that Richler did go to Canada briefly by himself at the end of that year, but there was no job, and he returned to London. This was for the best, judging by the turn his personal life and his career were about to take.

  A few months after his return, early in 1958 he received a grant from the newly formed Canada Council to work on the manuscript of his new novel. And then the breakup with Cathy in July, back in France.

  It was with television and film writing that the avenue to financial security finally opened up to him. He had already written some material for the CBC. In London, his Canadian friends in the business had found him commissions, mostly hack writing, good to make a living while he wrote his fiction, and sometimes he would use a pseudonym for this purpose. He seemed to possess a knack for the work. With Ted Allan he had co-authored scripts for a Robin Hood serial, using the very Anglo-Saxon name of John Snow. Ship had sent him some work, which included an early Peter Sellers comedy.

  Now Ted Kotcheff was working for the Sunday-night program for ABC-TV called Armchair Theatre, which brought socially relevant drama to a large British public. Its producer was Sydney Newman, also from Canada and the CBC. Kotcheff had already read and liked The Acrobats, on the basis of which he had met Richler at Tourrettes-sur-Loup in the summer of ’57, when, famously, Richler had hardly spoken a word. But Richler had subsequently written a letter of apology, saying he had been too absorbed with his novel during their meeting, and the two made up and went on to become the closest of friends and collaborators. Kotcheff’s first directorial assignment in London was the production of an old British drama called The Sunshine Hour for television. The normal fee for such an assignment was £15, but the script on hand was so bad that Kotcheff got Richler to write a new one, for £100. This was a fortune. Over the 1958–59 seasons, Mordecai Richler and Ted Kotcheff went on to make four other collaborations for Armchair Theatre. Currently not listed among its best offerings, they nevertheless at the time brought Richler much-needed financial relief.