The Acrobats

by Mordecai Richler

  That Canadian self-deprecation we all know so well was functioning at all levels. While I was directing for the CBC, a vice-president of the Corporation said to me at a party, “Ted, you’re a very talented director. If you want to develop, get out of this provincial backwater as fast as you can.” And we wanted to test our talents against the best. Mordecai did not want to be known as a Canadian writer or a Jewish writer, but as a writer, to be measured against all other writers.

  I remember that when Mordecai and I left Canada, we had a misguided contempt for those who stayed at home, and they returned the compliment by regarding us with resentment. After the years abroad, I came back to Canada to direct the film of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. In the newspapers for many years afterwards, I was always referred to with the same epithet, “émigré Canadian director, Ted Kotcheff.”

  Maybe the rest of Canada had an inferiority complex, but not Mordecai or me. We went to Europe brimming with a self-confidence bordering on arrogance. I’ll show those Limeys what directing’s about.

  London and Paris were full of Canadian and American artists. Mavis Gallant, Ted Allan, Richard Outram, one of Canada’s finest living poets, and many, many others. In Paris, Mordecai hung out with a lively bunch of painters and writers. The idea was to live as cheaply as one could while writing that novel or painting that painting. Information was continually exchanged as to the most inexpensive places to live and eat, to the best black-market money-changer providing the most francs for one’s bucks. On July 1, Mordecai took his chum Terry Southern to the Canadian embassy reception, where they stuffed themselves with food and drink and then stuffed their pockets with the same. On July 4, Terry took Mordecai to the American embassy for the same purpose. They all borrowed from one another. When a rich automobile heir, a Dodge or a Chrysler, came to Paris every summer to buy paintings, there was universal rejoicing. The painters would generously share in the booty with their writer friends. When Mordecai was desperate, he made demands on his father, who would come through with a few bucks – not a gift, his father insisted, but a loan, which he kept track of in a little black book.

  In Paris, Mordecai devoured Malraux, Hemingway, Céline, Sartre, Camus, all of whom make guest appearances stylistically in The Acrobats. Many critics, including Mordecai himself, dismissed the book as being hopelessly derivative. But it seems to me entirely natural that a tyro writer should write in the style of those writers he likes to read. Besides, I enjoy pastiche. Consider the final sentences of the novel.

  “Chaim, is there any hope?”

  “Yes, child. Of course there is.”

  “Is there?”

  “There is always hope. Always. There has to be.”

  Hemingway with a soupçon of Camus – not at all bad!

  Finally, Mordecai ended up in Ibiza, Spain, where for thirty dollars a month, he rented a beautiful three-bedroom villa on the ocean, including a maid. He got down to serious work on The Acrobats, whose original title was The Jew of Valencia. And to gather authentic detail, he travelled to Valencia during its fiesta.

  Mordecai went to Spain not only because it was cheap, but because it held an important place in his mythology and mine. In Joshua Then and Now, Part III begins:

  For many members of Joshua’s generation, Spain was above all a territory of the heart. A country of the imagination. Too young to have fought there, but necessarily convinced that they would have gone, proving to themselves and the essential Mr. Hemingway that they did not lack for cojones, it was the first political kiss. Not so much a received political idea as a moral inheritance.

  When John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, in Look Back in Anger, mourned that there were no more good, clean causes left, Joshua glowed in his Royal Court seat, nodding yes, yes, but once there was Spain.

  So Mordecai going to Spain was in no way accidental. When he arrived, the Civil War had been over only a very short time, and through what he found there he was able to dramatize his political feelings, and by writing his novel – like André with his art – come to some kind of understanding.

  In Ibiza, Mordecai hung out with a raffish bunch of Spaniards, including the madame of the local brothel, Rosita, who makes an appearance in the novel, name unchanged (and in Joshua Then and Now). Mordecai would have wild drinking parties at his house that lasted the whole night through. The Spanish secret police became suspicious of him. Why was he not behaving like a tourist? Why was he doing all these non-tourist things like partying with priapic gypsy dancers, whores, madames, fishermen, riff-raff? The secret police were paranoid about all foreigners then, and they may have thought Mordecai was consorting with Republicans. Was he a communist, an anarchist? Also, there was a German living in Ibiza, an ex-member of the Wehrmacht, whom Mordecai kept making inquiries about, asking questions at the local quitapena, gathering possible source material. The secret police started to hassle him, making it difficult to work, and so he left and returned to Paris, where he finished the novel. Mordecai deals with his Ibiza experience at some length in Joshua Then and Now, and it’s worth reading it in relation to The Acrobats.

  I lived in Spain in the mid-fifties, near Malaga, trying to be a poet. I can attest to the marvellous way Mordecai has captured in the novel the Spain of that time: what it looked like, what it felt like, its sounds, and its smells, the cripples, the begging children, the old men searching for butts, the blind lottery sellers, the whores, the pickpockets, the unemployed, the gypsies, the police spies, the Guardia Civil with their comic-opera patent-leather hats, the flotsam and jetsam of two wars, the foreigners, the sour cream of Europe, or, as Ken Tynan, who was also there at the time, described them, “The Nescafé Society.” There was a pervasive atmosphere of intense sensuality and sexual abandon that Mordecai delineates with great accuracy. One of the central themes of the novel is the destructive power of Eros. All the characters are in its grip and their lives are irrevocably altered or destroyed by it.

  There are some extraordinary set pieces in The Acrobats executed with great descriptive power: the brothel sequence, a bar at closing time, the ruined port by moonlight, the Valencia slums, and, best of all, the mad, frenzied, Dionysian dance in the streets of the poor, the unemployed, the whores. Shaking, stomping, clapping, trying to drink and dance their “spiritpain” away. The dance is intercut with a group of the rich and powerful, a smug upper-class visiting American lady, the fatuous American ambassador, a corrupt archbishop, and a reactionary general who look down, with total purblindness, on the people in the street. The satirical contrapuntal intercutting between the two opposite worlds in a John Dos Passos cinematic collage is one of the triumphs of the book and demonstrates Mordecai’s understanding and deep feeling for the deprived and downtrodden.

  At that time Mordecai was a struggling young political ideologue and, like André, in a state of intellectual turmoil and uncertainty. It is in this regard that André is the most transparent projection of Mordecai. André is part of the postwar generation caught between the proponents of a faltering revolution and the remnants of a dying culture. He feels abandoned by his ideological mentors who cheered the revolution in the thirties and now have gone over to the enemy, democratic capitalism, thus declaring themselves morally and intellectually bankrupt. André strongly feels the necessity to believe in something and act on it, for not to act is to be as good as dead. Guillermo accuses him of “being without hope or reason or direction.” But the communism Guillermo urges on André has two faces: on the one hand its idealism represented by Guillermo, and on the other its cynical, ruthless Stalinism represented by Manuelo. It’s the Manuelos who make it impossible for humanists like André and Mordecai to join the party, no matter how much they sympathize with its goal to end poverty and injustice. André knows what he’s against but not what he’s for. In this state of social and political paralysis, and in a deep depression about the future, he is drinking himself to death. No answers are provided; only at the end of the book is a fragile expression of unsubstantiated hope offered
up.

  Toni’s cure for André’s predicament is for him to leave the “sadness of Europe” and return to Canada: “We will have a fine home in the mountains. He shall have a room full of books and I shall sew for our children in the parlour.” Interestingly, this is exactly what Mordecai did when he returned to Canada from England in 1972 with his wife, Florence, and their children, and went to live on Lake Magog in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Toni’s fantasy, however, was not Florence’s. Mordecai had to drag her away from London’s sophistications to that Canadian bucolic retreat.

  A concomitant theme to the politics in the book is an examination of the relationship between art and society. Whom will André paint for? Guillermo attempts to recruit André to paint for the proletariat and “reach an audience so far untouched. You wouldn’t have to paint for the fatuous corrupt bourgeois.” André has a contract to sell his paintings in New York. But is this what he wants, pleasing alien tastes? André never resolves his dilemma and declares rather disingenuously. “I paint for the understanding,” hoping that “painting will explain to me what I am looking for.” Mordecai always hated the dehumanizing compartmentalization of people into classes. In the sixties I was involved with a group of left-wing playwrights and directors called Centre 42, and we took art and theatre to the working classes in cities all over England. Mordecai was scathing in his disapproval of what I was doing. So the issue obviously resonated long and loud in his politics.

  Ignoring the old chestnut of only writing about what you know, Mordecai deals with several Spanish characters, and I find his depiction of them vivid and convincing, no small feat for a neophyte writer. Mordecai has a great ability to empathize with all his characters, even the repellent Krauses. Barney is ridiculed for his crassness and simple-minded political attitudes. Yet, as he did later with Duddy Kravitz (and Barney in some ways is an early sketch of Duddy), Mordecai gets under Barney’s skin and manages to enlist one’s sympathies for him. As André says, one should aspire “to be capable of empathy, to understand the failings of a man – even as you condemn him.” This is a clear statement of Mordecai’s lifelong artistic credo.

  What strikes me most forcibly in rereading the novel now is that there is not a scintilla of humour in it. Nowhere do we see that Rabelaisian ribaldry that was to characterize Mordecai’s later work and make him one of the funniest writers of the twentieth century. Coming from a non-literary background, the young Mordecai probably felt that humour was inappropriate; one must be “literary” and write a book like a book ought to be. He saw himself as a serious writer and interpreter of life. Further, there was a refusal to believe that his background was worth writing about or could be of any literary interest whatsoever. It was not until The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz that Mordecai hit his stride and realized that St. Urbain Street was what Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner, his authorial turf that he was destined to write about. Now and then, though, Mordecai the future satirist shows his mordant teeth with a swipe at Canadian Kultchir (sic), “mediocrity draped in the maple leaf,” and in the aforementioned John Dos Passos sequence.

  The other characteristic of The Acrobats that surprises me is its unique poetic style, its pyrotechnical display of verbal virtuosity, its feverish onomatopoeia effects, its overwrought similes: “Lamp posts like the luminous yellow spittle of gnarled immobile cripples,” or “Buildings, like bloated lungs gasping.” In the middle of the street-dance sequence, there is a sudden burst of poetic prose:

  I shall walk up to heaven and turn off the stars one by one. I shall rub out the Milky Way with my heel and paint the moon in black. I shall kick the sun sizzling into the sea and I shall spit comets on all of Spain. If God is in I shall tell him why.

  Throughout, there is a youthful explosion of words, and one senses Mordecai’s delight in flexing his verbal muscles. Of course, in his subsequent work, perhaps under the influence of one of our culture heroes, Isaac Babel, who urged writers to strip away adjectives and adverbs, Mordecai’s style was entirely different: his prose was lean, edgy, unadorned, controlled. His wilder flights of fancy went into his comedic inventions. So this book represents, stylistically, the road not taken, a rejected novelistic persona.

  In the ensuing years, Mordecai affected embarrassment about this novel, laughed about it, and congratulated himself on keeping it out of print. But whatever the novel’s callow defects and gaucheries, I think it is important that it be reconsidered. Florence still disagrees with her husband and has approved its reprinting, feeling it would be a grievous mistake to deprive the serious reader of this early book. If one wants to follow his artistic trajectory, reading The Acrobats is obligatory. This is the first moment when he takes off on his journey as a writer. And there is a connection between this novel and the high seriousness of Solomon Gursky Was Here, which, in my opinion, is Mordecai’s masterpiece. But one ought not to read The Acrobats for merely literary and historical reasons but for the many novelistic pleasures it provides.

  And the young Mordecai reveals a lot about himself in The Acrobats, much more than in any of his other books, where he masks himself behind novelistic objectivity. André possesses Mordecai’s inner intense emotionality, but I see more of Mordecai in the wandering Jewish philosopher Chaim. He shares with Chaim a melancholy sense of life’s impossibility, its ineradicable injustices, and this understanding leads to a deep wellspring of compassion for the victims of the human condition. Perhaps Mordecai was embarrassed about this book because he appears too nakedly in it.

  When Mordecai finished the book in Paris, he was almost twenty-one. Now the search for a publisher began. With the assistance of a friend, Michael Sayers, he came to be represented by a British agent, a delightfully eccentric woman, Joyce Weiner. She loved Mordecai like a son and she dedicated herself to getting The Acrobats published. There were a number of rejections by various publishers, however, and it was with some sense of failure that he quit Europe and returned to Montreal. But suddenly, the British publisher André Deutsch, under the auspices of the perspicacious Diane Athill, agreed to publish the book and, subsequently, it was taken by Putnam for the United States. Mordecai received, respectively, 100 pounds and 750 dollars. The book was not published in Canada, though Collins distributed the British version. Mordecai left for London once more.

  The Acrobats received many respectable reviews in Great Britain and Canada, and several critics recognized its promise and the makings of an important and original writer. But in spite of these reviews, the book had no commercial success. It was translated into several European languages: Danish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. Ironically, considering the depiction of the two German characters in it, Mordecai had his greatest success with this novel in Germany, where, a year later, he was lionized and had his first taste of literary fame.

  I asked Mordecai about the source of the title, and he told me it came from Rilke – or was it Lorca? In any case, the metaphor, as it applies to the book’s precariously balanced characters, is perfect.

  Although The Acrobats was Mordecai’s first published novel, it was not his first novel – something I discovered in the early sixties. Mordecai and I shared a flat in Swiss Cottage, London, in the late fifties, when he was writing The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Sitting in the living room was a half-size metal steamer trunk perpetually covered with magazines and boxes. It belonged to Mordecai, and so I never inquired about its contents. Mordecai moved out to live with Florence, and then I left for a more commodious flat for myself and Sylvia Kay, who was soon to become my wife. Shortly afterwards, the house was demolished to make way for a swimming bath.

  Some years later, Mordecai came to me and asked where that steamer trunk was. The University of Calgary was buying all his papers and correspondence and the trunk had his first novel in it and some early short stories. “It would be worth a tidy sum – you know, juvenilia.” I said, “I thought you took it.” He said, “I thought you kept it.” We searched our premises and our memories, but what happene
d to it was a total mystery – a mystery that was never solved. After reproaching him for never telling me what was in it, I asked him what the novel was about, but he said it was not worth talking about, dismissing it as a poor adolescent effort. The only inkling I got was once, when we came out of seeing Fellini’s I Vitelloni, we were discussing its merits and Mordecai said that the film was like the obligatory first novel that every writer feels compelled to do – “how I suffered in the oppressive, stultifying atmosphere of a provincial city and finally discovered the courage to leave for the big city.” In the way that he said it, I suddenly had a flash that he was referring to that lost novel, but I have no real evidence, only that unsubstantiated intuition. Mordecai never mentioned it again.

  I began this piece asserting that The Acrobats was responsible for two close friendships of mine. The second one was Florence. At the time The Acrobats was published, she was married to the writer Stanley Mann; they were part of the Canadian contingent in London. At the nuptial party thrown by Ted and Kate Allan for Mordecai the day before his marriage to Cathy Boudreau, Mordecai could not keep his eyes off Florence. He was mesmerized by her beauty, her intelligence, her dignity. Florence took great exception to his brazen manner, and when he came over to her and inquired whether she had read The Acrobats and her reaction to it, Florence, in a very haughty and frosty manner, replied, “Yes. I’ve read it. I liked it, but not enough to want to meet its author.” Of course, far from deterring Mordecai, this only inflamed him.