Mordecai Richler

by M G Vassanji

  Writers are notoriously jealous creatures. A good review of a fellow novelist sinks the heart of many a scribe fretting over his own career and potential greatness. Therefore Richler’s generosity toward a fellow novelist, at a time when he was still a novice and could have been more wary of competition, was admirable. It was a trait remarked upon by many who knew him. Brian Moore too was generally well liked. What could have needled him about Richler that erupted in this puerility, the occasional dart thrown behind the back of a writer whom he also called a friend? It could be lingering bitterness from the fact that Mordecai Richler, barely twenty-two, had been accepted by a London house with a novel that was, understandably, far from great, when Moore himself, ten years older, was still a reporter on the beat, writing pulp fiction for pocket money; and then the younger writer going on to greater glory, with less than masterpieces, and finally putting in a good word for him. It could be envy at the confidence and arrogance of a youngster who went away to became a writer and became one, through the kind of perseverance Moore himself was too old for, and sheer good luck. According to Diana Athill, their common editor for some years, Moore was not envious, he was more “respected” in England than Mordecai. This was later, however. Richler was better known in Canada, was almost a public figure when the two met again in Toronto at the Boxing Day party in 1960 and the restaurant dinner that followed. Moore, after all, was an immigrant or expatriate writer in Canada; his Judith Hearne was set in Ireland.

  Well into the 1960s the friendship continued. Moore’s letters to Richler were always affectionate, though not as mischievous as those to Weintraub—which used witty noms de plume for the addressee and author; and of course he had come to the Richlers’ rescue with a generous loan. In 1962 he had found them a house at the summer writers’ and artists’ resort of Amagansett in Long Island, where he and Jackie were regulars. Moore had been Emma’s godfather and that summer taught Daniel to ride a bicycle. He introduced the Richlers around. Mordecai would be remembered from that summer with his Schimmelpenninck cigar and a snifter of Scotch or a bull’s-eye cocktail of beer and tomato juice.

  Surprisingly, Mordecai seems not to have been aware of Brian’s barbs. He would send Brian copies of his manuscripts or books, to which Brian sent honest comments, praising or criticizing. He disliked A Choice of Enemies, liked Duddy Kravitz. Brian Moore evidently considered himself the older and wiser and a superior writer, the more so because he did not see the need to debase himself with journalism. As he wrote once to Richler, who was then fretting about money, “Biggest point of all is that, in my limited experience ‘serious’ work eventually pays much more than other stuff.” One cannot help feeling that he must have been an unhappy man at heart. At some point starting in the late 1960s, Brian turned cold toward Mordecai, as he seemed to do with many of his friends. He was also no longer with Jackie.

  Florence Richler, who liked Brian Moore and believed he too was fond of her, once said:

  Brian could be absolutely wonderful, but he was not the most generous of people. That may sound unkind, but it’s true. I think there was always a lot of jealousy and Brian was always quite unkind about Mordecai. I think so, from very early days. And making easy derogatory remarks about Mordecai as a young man. I don’t think he really thought he was a novelist. I think he hurt Mordecai very badly, although Mordecai did not show it. With Brian, those little daggers were never more than a quarter of a centimetre below the surface. And they were shot and thrown in every direction.

  The two rarely met now, and if they did, at a common event such as a reading, it was the briefest of encounters. As Richler describes the last years of their relationship, in an article following Moore’s death in 1999:

  The last time I saw Brian was at the Booker Prize dinner in London in 1990. He had been shortlisted for the third time, me, the second. Neither of us won, but that’s not the point. We stood there, I feeling foolish and uncomfortable in my tuxedo, exchanging pleasantries awkwardly, which was a damn shame, because we had been the closest of friends for many years.… The last time I heard from Brian was when I was in hospital [in 1998] for some unpleasant surgery. It was a note wishing me well, and, in my vulnerable state, I shed a few tears for our foolishly aborted friendship.

  The writing careers and styles of the two offer a study in contrast. Brian Moore did not spread himself thin writing journalism, though he did write some screenplays. He produced numerous works of fiction and became one of the most respected novelists of his time. Richler in his novels was the storyteller and explorer of Montreal’s Jewish life; in that he had rewritten the Canadian novel; eventually he returned to live in Montreal because that was home and the source of his inspiration. Richler’s style, too, was energetic, his language, as we have seen, deploying the inflections and the humour of the ghetto, reflecting its easy informality. It is acknowledged that Richler’s women characters were weak. Brian Moore was the opposite, his writing sparer, his women strongly painted and sympathetic. Ever the exile, he had left his native Belfast at the age of twenty-two and worked in Algiers, Rome, and Marseilles during the war years, and done a journalistic stint in Poland, before going to Toronto and then moving on to Montreal. Later he went to New York, and then California, though he never disavowed Canada. His novels are set in different places and in different periods. Almost as if he had his friend Mordecai Richler in mind, in a 1992 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he said, “I often wonder what would have happened to me if I had stayed in Ireland and written about my own world all the time. And I’m going to die now not knowing if I made a mistake or not.” And throwing us a clue about his discomfort with Richler, he also voiced his suspicion of literary fame, calling it the angel of death. In Canada, meanwhile, it was questioned that Moore was even a Canadian novelist, an obsession periodically voiced by those apparently idling during writer’s block, or old age, holding up the national flag.

  WHERE WERE THE PROMISED Montreal novels eagerly awaited after Duddy Kravitz? St. Urbain Street, real and imagined, awaited their creative genius. Was Mordecai Richler dissipating his creative energies seeking exposure and fame, playing up to the Toronto gallery? His next work of fiction was a small novel, developed from what he had called the Shalinsky-Griffin novel, which became first “It’s Harder to Be Anybody” and finally Cocksure. It was inspired by an experience related to him by Doris Lessing. Set in London’s publishing world, Cocksure is a crisp and amusing satire of political correctness in its attitudes to sex, education, and race in 1960s England. The central character of the novel is Mortimer Griffin, senior editor at Oriole Press, originally of Caribou, Ontario, and hapless WASP. On the one hand, he’s hounded at his weekly lectures at a local college by J. Shalinsky, who believes Mortimer to be a closet Jew, only ashamed of the fact; on the other hand, he’s snarled at by Hy Rosen, his rival and “best friend” at Oriole Press, who believes Mortimer to be anti-Semitic and is ever ready to put up his fists to defend the cause of the Jews. No manner of protestation can satisfy either of Mortimer’s persecutors. He is a liberal, who will bend over backward to prove—or protest—that he is not a racist or anti-Semitic. But the more he tries, the more he appears to incriminate himself. His wife Joyce, also an Ontarian, works appropriately and fashionably for the Anti-Apartheid League and Oxfam. Oriole Press is owned by the “saintly” Lord Woodcock, “a Fabian with the purest Christian motives.” (Besides the pun, there is a dig here at George Woodcock, Canada’s somewhat saintly man of letters, English born, whom Richler did not care for too much.) Ready to take over Oriole, a pillar of old English establishment, is the Star Maker, a tycoon from Hollywood, who sends to London his Italian-American henchman Dino Tomasso.

  The book received some very positive reviews. In Canada it went on to win the Governor General’s Award. It had its fans splitting their sides with laughter. Others found it stylish but slight, picking on easy targets without offering much in return. A spoof such as this may titillate for a time, delight those whose targets are hit, but run
s the risk that its issues will become passé. And indeed, since the 1960s they seem to have become so. Extremes of political correctness are often laughable and annoying, and sometimes dangerous, but they come and go, and are as often based on legitimate issues. Speaking many years later, Richler’s American editor, Robert Gottlieb, who was also a close friend, used for this and the previous novel, The Incomparable Atuk, the very appropriate term “japes.” While he published this novel, Gottlieb was awaiting Mordecai’s next major novel that the author was already struggling with.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Goodbye, London; The Embrace of Canada

  Over the years Mordecai Richler had continued to contemplate returning home. He had come back for brief periods, and made close friends and acquired ardent admirers (and furious detractors). He had sought employment, to enable him to stay, and when nothing steady came up, Canadian sources—CBC, Maclean’s, and others—were ready to commission material from him, contributing to his sustenance abroad. He received grants from the Canada Council. His largest literary success, in terms of readership and celebrity, was also in Canada. His breakout novel was set in his native Montreal. There could be no question that he was a Canadian. In London, moreover, even though he was well known and had connections, he was one among many writers, including Americans, vying for attention. And as he well knew, America and things American have always held greater attraction for the British. Canada was Richler’s home and inspiration; what he said had relevance there and was listened to; but he had been away too long. Already the occasional letter would arrive from an irate editor that he was out of touch with the country, he did not know what was going on. It must have hurt. A letter from Jack McClelland chided him, not without a note of understanding, for choosing to go to Cannes over Winnipeg. Therefore, twenty-two years after he first left the country, in 1972 he decided to return to stay permanently. As he explained to Weintraub in a letter:

  The truth is I prefer living in London but, but, I fear for my novels. Looking around at others in my position … [Dan] Jacobsen, [Doris] Lessing, [J.P.] Donleavy, even Brian [Moore], I fear the work is thinned by too long an absence from roots. I do not wish to consume my 40s writing historical novels (Jacobsen). Or about imagined worlds (Doris). So honoring my “talent,” I will return. So far the kids don’t know.…

  This is a trauma that writers away from their homelands inevitably come to face, and cope with in their own ways— from Joseph Conrad, who wrote great novels, but never an “English” one, to Nabokov, whose America was singularly offbeat, to Joyce, who wrote about Dublin from Europe. Doris Lessing would of course go on to win the Nobel Prize for her work, of which only her early collection of stories was set in her native Zimbabwe. V.S. Naipaul, another colonial he had known, stayed on in England and also went on to win the Nobel Prize. But Mordecai Richler was hooked on Montreal; he was thoroughly North American in his sensibilities; and Canada would not let him go—unlike, it might be argued, Lessing’s Rhodesia or Naipaul’s Trinidad—however much he had mocked its provincial ways.

  He had passed forty, was no longer young. There had been health issues: a false alarm for a heart attack, a recurring back problem that laid him up in bed. It was the time of life when a writer, older and domesticated, and battleworn, might begin to think of legacy, definition. What would he write for the remaining years of his life? What kind of writer was he? Atuk had been quirky, Cocksure not quite rooted. His recently completed novel, St. Urbain’s Horseman, was rooted and major, its issues timeless. It would last. He knew it, everyone knew it. And it was Montreal, it was Jewishness, even though also partly London.

  He would confess later to feelings of nostalgia about Montreal, even its winters, that had helped pull him home:

  With immense excitement, I read about Montreal’s historic 1972 blizzard, a two-day humdinger, cars abandoned everywhere, downtown streets impassable; the men, unable to make it home from their offices, consoling themselves in hotel bars; and snowmobiles displacing ambulances. Instead of being grateful to watch it on the telly, snug in my Surrey home, I felt deprived. I had also come to pine for sweltering summers and the mountain lakes of my boyhood. I sent home for seeds and planted Quebec Rose tomatoes in our greenhouse. They failed to take. Surely, an omen.

  He himself had not taken much to the city that had given him his first break and nurtured his writing. Albeit with interruptions, he had spent half his life there, but he was too much a St. Urbain boy. He never learned to speak like the English. He did not develop an interest in cricket or football (soccer); British culture and politics remained peripheral to his existence. Baseball and hockey remained his passions, and he followed the league scores avidly across the Atlantic. One gets a sense throughout his writings that he did not care much for England, or English ways. The class system unsettled him. And so his close friends in London would always remain fellow expatriates. Of his novels set in England, one was about a set of expatriates, another was a spoof whose main characters were also expatriates.

  Nevertheless, the move was not easy. His children were English in their ways, and Florence loved England. She never had any intention of returning to Canada. Now she had a stable home, a beautiful house, a life she loved. She would visit the theatre and the concerts, while Mordecai stayed with the children. (There was also a nanny.) They had their circle of friends, their social life, there was the children’s schooling to consider. But the greater trauma was the prospect of uprooting, for someone whose first break in the continuity of her existence had been the knowledge that she had been adopted. She was unhappy with his decision, perhaps depressed and angry. With a family of six, you don’t just pick up and leave. Richler knew the sacrifice she was making, giving up a life she knew and loved so he could go back to his roots. “The last thing she wanted was to marry someone who wanted to come back to Canada,” he said. He worshipped her, their friend and his editor Robert Gottlieb said. And surely she reciprocated that devotion, she who went along with this departure from the life they had built, purely on his say-so, whose outcome they could not be completely sure of. Not that he did not have qualms. He had left Canada with no regrets, he had said, and could recall the mediocrity and small-mindedness that he had escaped. “Literary London had been uncommonly hospitable. It was still exhilarating.” They decided not to sell their house on Kingston Hill, just in case they had to come back.

  It took Florence ten years to get used to her new life. Canada was quieter; the cultural life sparer and out of the mainstream of the Western world; the circle of friends less diverse and less challenging, less cohesive. The children, too, were uprooted. They were not consulted, having been given the impression that the move would be temporary. The youngest, Jake, was four years old; the oldest, Daniel, had to stay behind for a few weeks to take his O Level exams.

  One morning, in the presence of their long-time friend Ted Kotcheff, they loaded their luggage into a car and set off for the Southampton docks. With them came the nanny. It was a sad moment. Richler for some reason brought out the family toaster and stomped on it, saying, “I always hated that toaster!” Was it the toaster or something else? Florence broke into tears. They arrived at the harbour and boarded the Soviet ship Alexander Pushkin, car and all, where in their cabin they gave a farewell party for their friends. Then they headed west to Canada on a voyage that would be remembered more for its bad food than anything else. As he strolled the decks, he could not help brooding on the wisdom of the move. “I wondered if I had left matters too late, if my return was ill advised, a sentimental and potentially costly form of self-indulgence.”

  Richler never regretted his return. As the years wore on, a mellower man and adulated by many in his native land, he would even criticize his previous attitudes to it as simplistic; but in the same breath, as it were, he always remembered the provincialism he had escaped more than once; and surely he was forgetting the freedom of being footloose in exciting Paris, and in Spain and in London, free to look back, find himself, and write.
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  And Florence, what did she brood about as the Alexander Pushkin skimmed the waves of the Atlantic, racing westward “home”? Surely it was to the needs of his literary inspiration she had given in, not to his nostalgia for Montreal winters and Quebec tomatoes and hockey. When his financial situation was better, he sent Florence to London to buy an apartment. It would become their wintering place; and two of their children would eventually return to make it their home.

  A POSITION at Ottawa’s Carleton University already awaited him upon arrival; he was required to be in the city only two days a week, coming in from Montreal, where the family rented a house in Westmount. The former St. Urbain’s boy had gone full circle to return to live in his native city’s poshest neighbourhood. It was not love for teaching that brought him to Carleton. He agreed to teach what he believed was the unteachable, creative writing, and he was neither a good teacher nor an encouraging one. He was brutally honest and, one imagines, somewhat grumpy. The students were in awe of him.

  The two-year stint ended with his 1973 Plaunt Lectures at Carleton, in which he took up with gusto his role of national commentator and attacked his favourite target, “nationalist zealotry.” Much of what he said was true. “I have warned students again and again that if twenty years ago Canadian writers suffered from neglect, what we must now guard against is overpraise.” Obvious, but it often needs to be repeated in a country afraid it might run out of heroes. He excoriated those who would put a measure on Canadian content. (More than thirty years later, they still exist.) But he also overstated the case. “When, as is often the case, a Canadian novel is not published outside of Toronto, then the trouble is … that the novel is not good enough.” Easily said, from his perch, but was it true? He acknowledged the frustrations of a writer not from Britain or America: “An American or British writer can lecture abroad and take it for granted that any literate audience will readily grasp what he is about.” Even the non-literate audience, one might add, will identify more with an American or British novel; and potential sales, determined by the numbers of such readers, as Richler well knew, is what often largely determines publishability. He could hardly have denied that his great success was due to the Canadians’ lavishing of praise on one of their own; in London or New York, he was after all just another writer. Even today, on Google, Duddy Kravitz comes up first as the name of a movie, whereas in Canada it is a celebrated novel. But Canada needed a vanguard against mediocrity, and fearless Richler was the man. A nation celebrating mediocrity renders all its artists mediocre in the world’s eyes.