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June 29, 2007
Our loudest chronicler of truth
Mordecai Richler was famously the toughest knaydel in Canada's
multicultural soup.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Polonius, that so vilely treated old man in Hamlet, giving
advice to his son, Laertes, says, "This above all – to
thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day,
thou canst not then be false to any man."
Mordecai Richler lived by that code. He didn't care to conform to
other people's perceptions and expectations; in fact, one of his
several biographers, Michael Posner, called him "the last honest
man." It may have been hyperbole, but it was also revealing.
One took Richler as he authentically was, or not at all.
Once, when drinking and smoking in a Montreal sports bar, a frequent
pastime for Richler, upon hearing the announcement of the sudden,
early death of a prominent athlete, Richler, who hated "wholesome
living," applauded and ordered a round for his chronically
dissolute friends.
"I'm a Canadian and a Jew, and I write about being both,"
he once declared in an interview. And he was, indeed, both, in spades
– or whatever suit trumps "nice but phony."
Richler recognized and struggled against a persistent and major
cultural problem of minorities (and, indeed, of majorities, in fact,
of everyone): the anti-stereotype stereotype. Jews who grew up during
the Depression may be inclined to be, shall we say, parsimonious,
yet they may often over-tip, tempted to place coins in the form
of a Magen David to squeeze a little ethnic mileage out of their
forced generosity.
Richler knew this. He was, significantly, the son of a junk dealer
and grandson of a Chassidic rabbi who grew up in St. Urbain, then
the Jewish working-class ghetto of Montreal, now largely inhabited
by Greeks. He once wrote in Notes on an Endangered Species and
Others, "That was my time, my place, and I have elected
myself to get it right."
When he was 13, his parents divorced and Richler had to work at
odd jobs after school. He quit college after two years. Scraping
together some money, off he went to Paris where, in true hackneyed
fashion, the Left Bank became his "university" and he
developed scurvy from a poor diet. Yet, he later wrote of the cultural
and social pretensions of American expatriates living in Paris,
at the time practically a requirement for "creative writers."
Richler could sniff out pretense with the olfactory competence of
a bloodhound.
When TV was in its infancy, he complained that producers didn't
dare portray "a Negro whoremonger, a contented adulterer or
a Jew who cheats on his income tax, buys a Jag with his ill-gotten
gains and is all the happier for it."
When Richler, having much in common with Isaac Bashevis Singer,
started portraying Jewish characters realistically, some Jews were
offended: it's a shanda, a disgrace, they complained; one
doesn't expose these things to non- Jews. This and his later depiction
of Duddy Kravitz, a ruthless money-seeker (in a movie yet), brought
charges of self-hatred against Richler by members of the Jewish
community. But Mordecai, like his namesake in the Book of Esther,
merely sat by the gate and noted everything. Nothing escaped him
or the uncompromising acuity of his observations.
Richler's style was his fingerprint. If you like Richler, chances
are you may not care much for Hemingway, with his swaggering machismo,
or the too precious art that characterizes writers like T.S. Eliot
(probably the last person to wear spats), but you may enjoy Singer
or John Steinbeck. Writing honestly, as Richler did, is difficult,
because the author must thoroughly know and respect himself. Being
funny at it is even harder. It involves discovering the elusive
"I," who hides under layers and layers of pretense, evading
discovery by constantly inventing means to avoid catching up with
itself. And when authenticity, or what passes for authenticity,
has finally been achieved, as André Malraux sadly noted,
it's time to die.
Richler married for the second time in 1960, to Florence Wood, a
former model. They had five children. He died in Montreal in 2001,
of cancer. I remember the two words with which his grief-stricken
widow began a radio interview. With much evident distress and tears
in her voice, she said simply, "Cancer sucks." Not a high-minded,
crafted literary statement, but one of unquestionably heartfelt,
justified anger and despair.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
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