MAUREEN KATHERINE STEWART Forrester was born on Fabre Street in the impoverished east end of Montreal on July 25, 1930, the youngest of four children of Thomas Forrester, a Glasgow-born cabinetmaker, and his wife, Marion Forrester (née Arnold), an aspiring singer from Belfast. Times were tough for the Scottish-Irish immigrant family in the wake of the stock market crash, and they didn’t get better through the long, lean years of the Depression.
Forrester went to William Dawson Elementary School. By the age of eleven she was working after school and on weekends selling cigarettes and ice cream cones in a corner store on Laurier Street, earning enough to indulge in lipstick and twin sweater sets and to try smoking, a habit she never acquired because she couldn’t inhale.
School bored her and she craved financial independence, so she quit at thirteen and got the first of a succession of clerical jobs, handing over her weekly paycheque to her parents, who gave her back a small amount as an allowance. Her life might have trundled along happily and anonymously enough had her older brother Arnold not intervened. Back from fighting overseas in the Second World War, he heard her singing as she went about her household chores and noticed that her voice had changed from soprano to alto. He suggested she take singing lessons from a woman named Sally Martin, and he offered to pay for them. Years later, after Forrester had begun paying for the lessons herself, she learned the real reason for her brother’s patronage: he was keen to meet one of Martin’s other students.
She began earning a little money singing in church choirs and found a new teacher in Frank Rowe, who improved her breathing technique and diction. Soon she began getting paid engagements on CBC radio and other places and entering competitions. At eighteen, while working as a secretary and switchboard operator at Bell Telephone, she realized she might make a career as a singer, a path she pursued with gusto and determination.
Eventually she found her way to voice teacher Bernard Diamant, a Dutch baritone who had fled Europe after the war. As she related in her 1986 memoir, Out of Character (with Marci McDonald), he listened to her sing and pronounced: “You certainly have a gift from God. That’s a very big voice. But I must tell you something, my dear. You don’t know how to sing.” His first remedy was to order Forrester to quit her bread-and-butter freelance gigs and to stop singing entirely for at least six months. Her mother was horrified by the loss of income, but Forrester realized that Diamant was “building the inner core of my voice, expanding the range up and down.” Finally Daimant let her sing and asked his accomplished musician friend John Newmark to work as her accompanist.
A German Jew from Bremen, Newmark had fled to England just before the war. Detained there as an enemy alien, he had been shipped to an internment camp outside Lennoxville, Quebec. Hitler’s Nazis had destroyed Newmark’s chances of a solo career; instead he provided Forrester and several others with the backing, support, and confidence of his superb training and musicianship. As an accompanist he provided “an integral part of each song, without being guilty of either too much or too little,” as Globe critic John Kraglund said in a 1960 review.
Although they didn’t like each other at first, Newmark and Forrester overcame their separate hostilities and developed a close friendship and an enduring partnership, touring the country and the world for many years. With Newmark accompanying her, Forrester made her recital debut in 1953 at the Montreal YWCA. Thomas Archer, music critic for the Montreal Gazette, wrote: “Few if any contraltos on this continent could challenge her.” He became the first to compare her voice favourably to the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier.
That recital, at age twenty-three, marked the true beginning of Forrester’s career. It led directly to an invitation to make her concert debut, singing the small but significant alto part in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra under the ageing and ailing but still magnificent Otto Klemperer in December 1953. She also won a touring contract to sing forty-five concerts at schools in northern Ontario and Quebec with Jeunesses Musicales du Canada. She made $25 per concert and learned essential techniques — how to pace a concert, hold the attention of the audience, modify the program according to what succeeded and what failed — and acquired discipline and endurance from performing day after day in small towns.
Forrester’s next boost came from J. W. McConnell, the founder and publisher of the Montreal Star, who became her secret patron and benefactor (even paying her father’s funeral expenses) so that she could have the time and the resources to continue studying voice. In her memoir, Forrester estimates that McConnell gave her at least $25,000 over the next several years — a sizable sum in the 1950s. “The big breaks came to me on their own,” she wrote, “but they would have taken five years longer without J. W.”
After touring extensively throughout Canada and Europe with Jeunesses Musicales, she made her New York City debut at the Town Hall on November 12, 1956, with McConnell supplying the $1,800 rental for the auditorium. She sang some Schubert, some Britten, and some Wagner and earned rave reviews, including a headline in the New York Times: “Canadian Contralto Displays Superb Voice.” Critic Edward Downes praised the “generous compass and volume” of her voice and described her range as moving “from a darkly resonant chest register to a brilliantly focused top with a middle register that she makes velvet soft or reedy according to her expressive intent.”
By then Bruno Walter, the German-born conductor and protegé of Gustav Mahler, had invited Forrester to sing for him. He coached her for a recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”), helping her develop her signature interpretation and technique. She also recorded Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” with Walter and sang at his farewell performances as a conductor with the New York Philharmonic in 1957.
While her career was on a trajectory into the stratosphere, her romantic life was on an operatic roller coaster. The cause was violinist and conductor Eugene Kash. They had met at a concert she gave on a Sunday afternoon in a high school gym in Ottawa in 1953. He was eighteen years her senior and “not the marrying kind,” as he frequently reminded her. Besides, his mother would never approve of her son marrying a Gentile.
He had no such qualms about an affair. When Forrester became pregnant, Kash tried to persuade her to have an abortion. Failing that, he wanted her to put the child up for adoption. Instead Forrester secretly kept the baby, named Paula, in Germany while keeping up a rigorous European concert schedule — she sang a concert five days after the birth — and did her best to raise the little girl on her own. She again became pregnant by Kash in 1956 — these were the days before reliable birth control was readily available — and this time she did have an abortion.
Kash finally married her in London, England, on July 20, 1957, after the death of his mother and when the daughter he barely knew was two years old. Having finally given in, Kash became a devoted papa to their increasing brood; he later described himself as “one of the original stay-at-home dads.” Forrester had five children in nine years and, by her own admission, would have had six if she hadn’t fallen down the stairs and suffered a miscarriage.
Beginning in 1961, Forrester and Kash began appearing together at the annual Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, a commitment they kept up for nearly fifteen years. They moved their family to Pennsylvania while they both taught at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, among other assignments, from 1967 through 1971. After their return to Canada, Forrester taught voice students at the University of Toronto and gave master classes at the University of Alberta and in many other locations when she was visiting as a performer. Mainly though, husband and children stayed in Toronto while Forrester travelled the world, giving concerts in countries as varied as Australia, China, and the former Soviet Union.
The Kashes separated in the mid-1970s, when she left him after developing a grande passion for a married man. That affair ended badly three years later, when her lover dumped Forrester (and his wife) for a younger and
richer woman. Forrester was devastated and for one of the few times in her life gave in to her emotions off the stage, lying on a chaise in her garden and weeping for three days while her children watched frantically, thinking she had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. “I felt like a bloody fool,” she wrote in her memoir, for breaking up her marriage with Eugene — a “good and scrupulously honest” man who “truly loved” her — in favour of a “deceitful character.” Nevertheless, she and Kash remained close until he died in 2004 at the age of ninety-one.
Forrester could probably have had a long and satisfying late career singing character parts as a mezzo-soprano, but her voice and her energy deteriorated under the twin demons of alcoholism and dementia, beginning in the mid-1990s. She could still perform, as her residual memory surfaced when she heard the opening bars and saw the faces in the audience, but getting her onto the stage became increasingly difficult. In one of her final public appearances — to receive the inaugural Creative Artist Award in 2000 — she spoke a few words and sang a simple children’s song a cappella. It was the last time that Wayne Gooding, editor of Opera Canada, heard her perform live. Describing the scene as “poignant” and “moving,” he said her unmistakable voice “had faded, but the artistry, stagecraft and drive to express herself in song were as strong as ever.”
By then Forrester had been through several residential addiction programs such as the Betty Ford Clinic in Rancho Mirage, California, and the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, and had been living in the subsidized Performing Arts Lodge in Toronto for almost a decade. Even the benevolent supervision of family, friends, and social workers couldn’t keep her from wandering. To ensure her safety, her family finally admitted her to a nursing home in the east end of Toronto in the summer of 2001.
The years of living glamorously and donating generously to others had swallowed her earnings. And so she spent her last years befuddled, immaculately coiffed, unfailingly polite, and seemingly happy in an assisted-living facility, subsidized by the taxpayers she had served so well, her family, and the proceeds from selling her papers to Wilfrid Laurier, the university of which she had once been chancellor. She died on June 16, 2010, six weeks before her eightieth birthday.
Mordecai Richler
Writer
January 27, 1931 – July 3, 2001
CANADA HAS A few literary geniuses — Alice Munro and Michael Ondaatje come to mind — but writers who are also public intellectuals, whose opinions are sought on the tragedies and follies of the day, are rare. Margaret Atwood’s pronouncements do guarantee headlines, but nobody could amuse, arouse, and antagonize like Mordecai Richler. He offended everybody: Jews, cultural nationalists, and sovereignists — not to mention his family of origin — for his unrelenting and hilarious pricking of pretensions and hypocrisies and his refusal to cater to special pleading, whatever the cause or the aspiration.
Richler was driven not by rudeness but by an unbending moral code. He hated special pleading, double standards, and prejudice, and nobody was exempt from his merciless arbitration. As early as 1960 he wrote an article in Maclean’s magazine complaining, from the perspective of a Jew returning to Canada from abroad, that the community, which had come to this country fleeing persecution, had forgotten its traditional respect for “the ethical, the spiritual, and the intellectual” and had grown “flabby, money driven, and prejudiced.” Sure, there was anti-Semitism in Canada and yes, the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was unforgiveable, but that didn’t give Jews the right to ignore the sufferings of others. Seeing his homeland with fresh eyes, Richler charged that “Jews were not, as I had hoped, against discrimination. They were opposed to discrimination against Jews.”
His argument was that Jews, of all people, should be the first to protest on behalf of other maligned minorities. He took a similar tack thirty years later in an article in the New Yorker in September 1991, when he ridiculed the passage of Bill 101, the Quebec law that forced stores and restaurants such as Eaton’s and Ben’s to modify their names and their commercial signs to make them sound and look more francophone. (A revised and extended version appeared as the book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country the following year.) His point was that francophones shouldn’t pass arbitrary laws that restricted the rights of anglophones in pursuit of their own nationalist goals.
In setting the context for the prohibition of commercial signs in English, Richler outlined a tradition of anti-Semitism in Quebec, specifically targeting the Roman Catholic Church in the teachings and writings of Abbé Groulx and the editorial policy of Le Devoir, taking his examples mainly from the 1930s. To equate the current cultural and national aspirations of the Québécois with historical prejudice against other minorities was an outrage to many commentators, but to do so in an American magazine was an even bigger affront. It was all grist for Richler’s journalistic mill, and newspapers such as the Gazette and magazines like Saturday Night were delighted to give him a podium, knowing that their readers would relish watching the master jouster taking on all contenders in a verbal brawl.
The best contemporary comparison to the bruising effects of Richler’s scathing commentary was the late Christopher Hitchens, a writer who shared Richler’s talent for punditry but who was a polemicist rather than a satirist. Besides, he lacked Richler’s fictional imagination. That’s what sets Richler apart. From 1951, when he fled claustrophobic Canada for Paris, following the typewriter spools of Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, and Mavis Gallant, until he died from complications of kidney cancer in a Montreal hospital on July 3, 2001, Richler was the ultimate freelance writer. He never had another job. A writer was all he was, but his prowess was extraordinary and he stretched the parameters of the form to include every mode except poetry.
Although he often scrabbled to pay his rent in cold and rat-infested garrets in the early days and to finance an increasingly affluent international lifestyle in his middle age, he invariably smoked, drank, and caroused with other expatriates in London, Paris, and Spain and with his cronies in Montreal and Toronto. But no matter how late or indulgent the evening, he always got up early the next morning to pound away at the keys of his manual typewriter, writing fiction, journalism, essays, screenplays, and children’s books, maintaining the workaholic habits of a lifetime that had taught him his craft, made his name, and supported his family.
There were a few Mordecai Richlers, and not all of them appeared in public. The rude and sullen writer-in-residence and talk-show guest camouflaged his shyness and his fear of being observed and categorized. For someone whose own eye was so omniscient and whose writing depended on observed life, he hated being under the klieg lights of a television studio, in a classroom, or at a podium. He was a lousy interview, enduring questions with the baleful stare of a recalcitrant bull wearily pawing the ground to get up the steam to defend his turf.
Behind that bristly mask was the playful, loyal friend, the passionate husband, and the devoted father. Posthumous stories abound about his loyalty and generosity to pals in need or in poor health; while he was alive he insisted that his fax pranks and his good deeds remain under wraps, so it was his loutishness that generated notoriety — yet another public camouflage.
There was no way to hide his passion for his elegant wife, Florence, a connection that made other couples envy the way they looked at each other across the room at cocktail parties and restaurant tables. Kind, generous, devoted, but with a core of steel swathed in a velvet charm, she was his first and most trusted editor and the mother of his children (five altogether, although only four were his biological offspring). As much as Florence was the inverse of his own narcissistic and demanding mother, Richler turned himself into a paterfamilias who was doting, encouraging, and loving, the opposite of the father he had ridiculed in his second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, in 1955. That’s not to suggest that he changed diapers or made meals, of course.
Everything he read, wrote, and experience
d fed into his fiction, the ten novels that included his early literary success The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, his mature works St. Urbain’s Horseman and Solomon Gursky Was Here, and his ultimate achievement, Barney’s Version. “To be a Jew and a Canadian is to emerge from the ghetto twice,” he wrote in Hunting Tigers under Glass, a 1968 collection of essays. Some critics have charged that Richler endlessly repeated himself — “I love his book; I buy it every time he writes it” was a frequent taunt. Writing a negative review of Joshua Then and Now in the New York Times Book Review in 1980, the novelist and editor George Stade wrote: “It’s as if a rich and unusual body of fictional material had become a kind of prison for a writer who is condemned to repeat himself ever more vehemently and inflexibly.”
We are all trapped in the prism of our formative circumstances. Richler couldn’t escape being born a Jew in the east end of Montreal on the eve of the Depression. He was too young to fight the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War or the Nazis in the Second World War, too old to grow a beard and march in the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, join the counterculture, or fight against the Arabs in the Six-Day War. As Richler writes in St. Urbain’s Horseman, “Always the wrong age. Ever observers, never participants. The whirlwind elsewhere.”
Instead of repeating himself endlessly, what Richler has done is chart the emotional and psychological progress of a Jew (not unlike himself) who is making a tortured and stumbling odyssey through life, all the while trying to harmonize his embittered psyche with his vacillating environment. He once said that he wanted to “write one novel that will last, something that will make me remembered after death.” Surely that is Barney’s Version, the novel in which he imagines Barney Panofsky sliding into the fogginess of Alzheimer’s while dictating his memoirs. The journalism, however lasting as a portrait of the foibles, vagaries, and nightmares of the second half of the twentieth century, was research, a way to make a living, and a means of keeping his name out there in the marketplace.
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