Working the Dead Beat (15 page)

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

C
ANADA 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 experienced 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.

He won his share of literary prizes, including two Governor General's Awards, two Commonwealth Prizes, and a Giller Prize. As well, there have been four biographies since Richler's death, including Charles Foran's definitive and multiple-award-winning
Mordecai: The Life & Times
. The ultimate accolade, though, is that his books have outlasted him and continue to attract eager readers.

MORDECAI RICHLER WAS
born on St. Urbain Street in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal on January 27, 1931, the younger son of Moses and Leah (née Rosenberg) Richler. His parents' arranged marriage was supremely dysfunctional. His mother, the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, was socially ambitious; his father, the uncouth yet gentle son of a scrap dealer, was ruined by the Depression. The family often had to change lodgings in the middle of the night, hauling away their paltry possessions a step ahead of the bailiff.

The Richlers separated when Mordecai was thirteen and his older brother, Avrum, was a first-year student at Queen's University in Kingston. That left Mordecai estranged from his father, with whom he had quarrelled violently, and living with his mother and her lodger, a German Jew named Julius Frankel, who doubled as her lover. One morning, the prepubescent boy found his mother hiding under the covers in the lodger's back bedroom, and on other occasions he had to feign sleep while the lovers had noisy sex in the adjacent bed in the room he shared with his mother. Offensive behaviour by any account, but to a moralistic boy with an unforgiving nature it was a deep affront, one that later fuelled the devastating and hilarious fictional portrait of the licentious mother who performs a striptease at her son's bar mitzvah in
Joshua Then and Now
, among other caricatures. His mother attempted a rebuttal in her memoir
The Errand Runner: Reflections of a Rabbi's Daughter
, but she lacked her son's lacerating wit and coruscating talent.

As an adolescent, Richler was regularly outraging his relatives with his unruly and unorthodox behaviour — smoking in the street, skipping Hebrew school, claiming to be an atheist. An indifferent student at Baron Byng High School, he didn't have the marks to get into McGill University, let alone the tougher requirements to surmount the unofficial entrance hurdles for Jews. Instead he attended Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University but dropped out after a couple of years, cashed in an insurance policy, and headed to Paris to find his way as a writer.

He returned to Montreal in 1953 with a draft of
The Acrobats
, working at nights at
CBC
Radio International while he rewrote his novel. André Deutsch published it the following year in London — a coup for a twenty-two-year-old writer. Later he dismissed the novel as derivative and refused to have it republished during his lifetime, but it gave him an important entree to an innovative publisher and outstanding editor, Diana Athill.

By then Richler was romantically involved with Montrealer Catherine (Cathy) Boudreau, a divorcée a decade older than he, and a Gentile. His parents were horrified. Their reaction to their son's choice of bride was not amel­iorated by his virulent depiction of his childhood in his second novel,
Son of a Smaller Hero
, in 1955. Richler claimed the novel is not autobiographical, bluntly stating in an author's note that readers looking for “real people” were “on the wrong track” and had misunderstood “my whole purpose.” But, as biographer Charles Foran points out in
Mordecai
, “The novel wasn't looking to critique his family and Jewish Montreal; it was calling them out to a brawl, an Apostate taking on Everybody.” The novel received good reviews in distant London, where the setting was considered exotic and the angry narrative voice deemed intense and refreshingly candid. Montrealers were generally aghast. The
Star
reviewer called it a “distasteful story” about a “blindly selfish” young man of “limited intelligence” who “succeeds in reducing all those around him to rubble,” according to Foran.

More turmoil was looming on both the creative and emotional horizons. His marriage was doomed because the principals were a turbid mix and also because Richler had fallen in love with a beautiful married woman, the model, actress, and script reader Florence Mann, an obsession that had begun with a chance meeting with mutual friends on the eve of his own wedding late in August 1954. Mann's marriage, troubled by her husband Stanley's womanizing, limped along, although she and Richler verbally acknowledged their mutual attraction when they met at a huge march in Trafalgar Square protesting the British intervention in Suez in early November 1956. She was seven months pregnant.

Bizarrely, but surely a reflection of the intermeshed nature of the expatriate community, when Daniel Mann was born just before Christmas that year, his father, Stanley Mann, suggested to Florence that their mutual friend Richler should be godfather. What's more, Richler agreed.

The following year, in September 1957, Richler, who had been paying the rent by writing scripts for film and television, published his third novel,
A Choice of Enemies
. In a thinly veiled portrait of the political machinations of the expatriate crowd in London, Richler borrowed characteristics and dialogue liberally from his friends, including the screenwriter Ted Allan, who had fought the fascists in Spain with the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion and co-written a biography of Norman Bethune.

Having thoroughly slagged his family and his friends, Richler seemed to have detoxified himself. Cleansed of the particulars of his own disaffections, he began writing from absorbed rather than merely observed experience, and he had found his ideal partner and editor. By the time Daniel was eighteen months old, the Manns and the Richlers had split after a sojourn together at a rented house in Roquebrune on the Riviera. As Reinhold Kramer writes in
Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain
, “In the beginning of June 1958, there were two couples — the Richlers and the Manns. By July, there was one — Richler and Florence.”