Working the Dead Beat (16 page)

Richler's new novel,
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
, propelled by the adventures of a gloriously irreverent, shamelessly opportunistic, and brash Jewish kid on the make from the Montreal ghetto, was gobbled up by critics and readers. Besides the memorable Duddy, a Sammy Glick character who is striving
for
something — ownership of a hidden lake in the Laurentians on which he dreams of building a grotesque holiday village — rather than merely rejecting everything he knows, there were a number of blackly comic set pieces, such as Duddy's scheme to produce films of bar mitzvahs directed by an auteur (and alcoholic) British director. Having lightened up, and with the benefit of Florence's discerning editorial eye, Richler was having fun with his material, and so too did readers.

Duddy made Richler's name at a time when his life was solidifying as well. Writing for the movies was padding his pocketbook and stoking his inventory of satirical subjects, and his unhappy marriage to Cathy Boudreau was finished and he and Florence were lovers, although discreet ones because of the arcane divorce laws and their custody worries about Daniel. All went well and the couple married on July 27, 1960, in Montreal, two days before their son Noah was born.

Can-cult and the film industry supplied the focus for Richler's next two satirical novels.
The Incomparable Atuk
(1963) parodied the boosterism of cultural nationalism and our neophyte star system that made broadcasters such as Nathan Cohen and Pierre Berton “world famous all over Canada,” as a character boasts.
Cocksure
(1968) lampooned both the power structure within the film industry and the craziness involved in adapting novels for the screen. The movie business also supplied an occupation for Jake Hersh in
St. Urbain's Horseman
, Richler's bestselling and Governor General's Award–winning novel about the Montreal ghetto, its entangling alliances, and his own preoccupations as a Jew, a Canadian, and a man born out of sync with the huge battles occurring elsewhere. The novel was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize but lost out to one of V. S. Naipaul's lesser books,
In a Free State
.

The gap between books was growing larger, but so too were the ambitions of the novels, the size of his family, and the number of other projects, including journalism, essays, and film. As well as wanting him to adapt other people's books for the screen, producers and directors were clamouring to make films of his novels, especially
Duddy
and
Horseman
. After almost twenty years in England he had moved back to Montreal — although not to the ghetto — with his wife and five children in the early 1970s because he recognized that the city and the country supplied the writerly pulse that quickened his prose and whetted his imagination.

He had more books in him: the delicious children's story
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang
, the introspective
Joshua Then and Now
, and the innovative
Solomon Gursky Was Here
, a postmodern invocation of what it means to be a Canadian, as well as an excoriation of the Bronfmans, a family he had always despised because to him they seemed to care only about mammon. Years earlier, Saidye Bronfman (wife of Samuel, the patriarch of the distillery family) had said to him, at the premiere of
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
, “Well, you've come a long way for a St. Urbain Street boy.” Never one to sidestep a slight, Richler retorted, “Well, you've come a long way for a bootlegger's wife.”
Solomon Gursky
was also short-listed for the Booker but lost to A. S. Byatt's
Possession
in the 1990 contest.

Above all, there was
Barney's Version
. The novel completes Richler's quasi-autobiographical odyssey of the Jew's progress through life, sharpens and refines his favourite satirical targets, and allows Barney to breathe with emotional depth even as he is wandering onto the foggy shoals of Alzheimer's. More than anything, it is a love song to Florence. The novel won his pal Jack Rabinovitch's glitzy Giller Prize, chosen by a jury that included his Parisian friend Mavis Gallant. Unlike many novelists whose creative energy seems spent in mid-career, Richler got better as he aged, like cognac.

Richler had proved you can go home again. He was more celebrated than reviled, except in Quebec, where he divided his time between a two-storey house on Lake Memphremagog in the Eastern Townships and a Montreal apartment — although he and Florence escaped the blustery winters for a flat in London. Most important, he wasn't ignored. Sought after as a contributor to magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and on either side of the undefended border, he was that rarest of creatures — a prosperous Canadian writer. And if he was a celebrity at home he was an icon in Italy, where
Barney's Version
was such a spectacular success that it sparked a regular newspaper column in
Il Foglio
called “Andrea's Version” and a slang expression, “Barneyano,” for a man who was politically incorrect and unapologetically so.

Life was good, especially with the arrival of grandchildren and the stirrings of an eleventh novel in the gnarled reaches of his imagination. Sedentary decades of smoking, drinking, and sitting in front of a typewriter every day for several hours exacted a price, however. His health was failing. He had survived surgery for kidney cancer in 1998, but in early May 2001 he was informed that a small-cell carcinoma in his lungs had metastasized to his abdomen and chest. The prognosis was one to three years. That proved optimistic. Richler died in hospital in Montreal after a series of hemorrhages on July 3, 2001. He was seventy.

A month before, he had handwritten an addendum to his will giving Florence power of attorney in medical matters and asking that he be buried in Mount Royal Cemetery, provided that an adjoining plot was reserved for his wife “so that eventually we may lie beside each other in death, as we did so happily in life.” That final testament to his love for Florence was found after his death, as Foran writes in
Mordecai
. She had a double tombstone erected with their first names, his dates, and her incomplete ones. Then, in a public affirmation of their enduring love, she added Richler's poignant comment about lying together in death. Across from the stone she placed a bench for visitors to sit and planted a mulberry tree, an affecting reference to Ovid's tale of Pyramus and Thisbe and the lovers' union after death.

 

Builders

 

 

 

Obituaries Are the Biographical Building Blocks of a Country's History

T
HE TEN PEOPLE
in this chapter combine daring, vision, dedication, and plain hard work. They lived in many parts of the country, from the Arctic to the Maritimes to northern British Columbia. A few of them were immigrants, two were First Nations — an Inuit and a Nisga'a — one could trace his ancestry to the United Empire Loyalists, while another had an impoverished childhood and died the richest man in the country. What appealed to me were their achievements: Bertha Wilson, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court of Canada; Frank Calder, the First Nations chief who helped to persuade Pierre Trudeau to change his mind on aboriginal rights; Ken Thomson, the newspaper scion who could have coasted on the gushing profits from his father's investment in North Sea oil and instead built a global communications empire and shared his art collection with the rest of us; Celia Franca, the ballerina who built our premier dance company and trained the dancers who keep it strong; Louis Robichaud, the Acadian premier who hauled New Brunswick into the modern world and made it the first bilingual province in the country; Kananginak Pootoogook, the Inuit artist who helped his people make the transition from nomadic life on the land to self-sufficiency in built communities.

Their stories form a collective narrative that speaks to how this country matured as a nation. That is the power of obituaries. As a literary convention, they go back long before Canada existed as a nation. Sadly, we don't have a strong or lengthy tradition of writing or collecting obituaries or of using them as a resource in writing cultural history. Our record, with the exception of the monolithic
Dictionary of Canadian Biography
, is rudimentary at best.

Elsewhere, obituaries have spawned grand historical, social, and literary materials. You can trace the form as far back as the ancient Egyptians, who used hieroglyphics to record the lives of the pharaohs and the wealthy elites on tablets and sarcophagi and later on papyrus. Homer's account of the great warrior Achilles in
The Iliad
— his heroics, his rage, his vulnerability — was spoken, not read, but otherwise his epic poem has all the components of a modern obituary.

In the Middle Ages, religious scribes painstakingly created illuminated manuscripts detailing the lives of saints and martyrs. Over time the practice morphed from the spiritual to the secular and became more and more individualized. However, it wasn't until after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440 that writings about notable lives could reach a non-scholarly audience. By the seventeenth century, printing and production methods and general literacy had all improved sufficiently to enable the dissemination of pamphlets and “relations,” which were the precursors of newspapers. The first newspaper obituary, documenting the life and death of Captain Andrew Shilling, appeared in 1622 in a British journal called
The True Relation of Our Weekly News
, according to Australian journalist-turned-academic Nigel Starck.

Reportage on Shilling's death was tucked into an account of a sea battle between the rival fleets of the East India Company and Portugal, but the commentary was very similar to a modern obituary, according to Professor Starck in his book
Life after Death: The Art of the Obituary
, because “it offered some description of Shilling's life along with an attempt, albeit brief, of posthumous character assessment.” The unnamed obituarist offers “a richer dossier on a life lived than does the simple chronicling of a death died,” wrote Starck. There's even a Canadian note in that the Arctic explorer William Baffin, after whom Baffin Bay and Baffin Island are named, knew Shilling and sailed with him on the ship
London
to Surat for the British East India Company from 1617 to 1619.

Along with newspapers, books of biographical sketches were being published and consumed by a bourgeois audience interested in learning about the exploits of the celebrated and notorious characters of their times, especially with the return to court life, the reopening of theatres, and the end of overt Puritanism in 1660. That's when Charles II was crowned, thus bringing back the monarchy after the bitterly divisive Civil War, the beheading of his father, Charles I, in 1649, and the demise of Oliver Cromwell and his republican Commonwealth.

Reports called “The Life and Death” began appearing in two English weekly newspapers, the
Intelligencer
and the
Newes
, in the 1660s. “The subjects were exclusively royalty, nobility, those in high office or those with distinguished roles in the armed forces,” according to Elizabeth Barry, an associate professor in the department of English literature at the University of Warwick in England. “The obituaries were also, in the Restoration context, Royalist in outlook, the papers rewarding loyalty and service to the monarchy as part of the propaganda machine of the restored Crown,” she writes in “From Epitaph to Obituary: Death and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century British Culture
.
”

Thomas Fuller, a clergyman who was made chaplain to Charles II, compiled
A History of the Worthies of England
, which was published in 1662, a year after his own death. Aboout the same time a researcher and compiler named John Aubrey (1626–97) began collecting materials for biographical sketches that even today are held up as exemplars of the obituarist's craft, especially in England.

Aubrey, an only child, was born into a prosperous gentry family in Wiltshire during the reign of Charles I. The English Civil War interrupted his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, and although he pursued the law for a while at the Middle Temple in London, he never acquired a profession. Instead he collected books, explored, and wrote about the megalithic remains at Avebury, and, on his father's death in 1652, in the early years of Cromwell's Protectorate, inherited large estates and complex debts. In the 1650s he began to write
Lives of Scientists
and later embarked on a two-volume survey of his native Wiltshire.

In 1663, three years after Charles II's ascendancy, Aubrey became a member of the Royal Society. But by 1670 he had lost all his property and spent the rest of his life living on the generosity of others. He loved gossip and conviviality and collecting information about his vast circle, which included scientists, politicians, writers, aristocrats, and more common folk in trade, manufacturing, and service. As a charming guest at country estates and London houses, he jotted down his memories from the night before while his hosts were still sleeping and he himself was battling a hangover. Fascinated by people's thoughts, attitudes, and eccentricities, as well as their conversation, he brought a psychological curiosity to his scribblings, and as time went on he added notations about where his subjects were buried and what had happened to their books and pictures.

Two centuries after Aubrey's death, the Reverend Andrew Clark produced a transcript of his manuscripts (which had been deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford) with excisions to spare late Victorian sensibilities. It was published in 1898 and has been reissued at regular intervals ever since. In the late 1960s the British playwright Patrick Garland, who likened Aubrey to the diarist Samuel Pepys as a great chronicler of his age, wrote a one-man show based on
Brief Lives
. The actor Roy Dotrice gave 1,800 performances of
Brief Lives
over the next forty years, including one attended in the mid-1980s, as we shall see in Rogues, Romantics, and Rascals, by Hugh Massingberd when he was about to become obituaries editor of the
Daily Telegraph
in London.

Meanwhile, the nascent newspaper obituary continued to develop and to reflect the values and obsessions of the society that consumed it. As the middle class burgeoned, society became less secular. Improved printing and distribution methods encouraged the proliferation of newspapers and journals. The obituary evolved into a document recording a much wider range of worthies, determined by who they were, what they had accomplished — for good or ill — and how they had died (the more prolonged and gruesome, the better). Rather than simply extolling the virtues of the nobility or following an overt political agenda, these new publications aimed at a readership that embraced both the gentleman and his tailor and brought them together in the same, increasingly urban cultural arena.

“Celebrity — short-lived fame — became a feature of British society, and the untimely or dramatic death began to create as well as test . . . this new kind of fame,” argues Barry in “From Epitaph to Obituary.” She believes the obituary played a key role in this process and represented an important mechanism for introducing modern notions of fame and celebrity into British society. As the general population became more literate and newspapers more robust and prolific, obituaries developed a definitive purpose: to showcase exemplary lives, to record society's progress and achievements, and to chronicle the art of dying nobly, bravely, and stoically — traits that still appear in family-written death notices today.

The short-lived
Post-Angel
(1701–02), edited by John Dunton, produced graphic accounts of the pious deaths of the noble and religious, as well as the dastardly lives and evil ends of criminals and rogues as exhortations about the wages of sin. Even though it lasted only two years, the
Post-Angel
is a rich repository of extraordinary attempts to link behaviour in the temporal world with reward or damnation in the eternal one. Queen Mary, wife of William of Orange, apparently declared in her final breaths, “I believe I shall now soon die, and I thank God, I have from my youth learn'd a true Doctrine, that Repentance is not to be put off to a Death-bed.” Not so the Scottish pirate Captain William Kidd. His botched execution, as recounted by the ordinary — the guard who accompanied him on his final journey to the scaffold in London on May 23, 1701 — is a vivid example: “But here I must take notice of a Remarkable (and I hope most Lucky) Accident which then did happen, which was this, That the Rope with which Capt. Kidd was ty'd, broke, and so falling to the Ground, he was taken up alive; and by this means had Opportunity to consider more of that Eternity he was launching into.”

Whether Kidd considered himself lucky and actually took advantage of his bungled execution to make peace with the Almighty is not known. Certainly the ordinary felt assured that Kidd had had a change of heart, and it is from his perspective that the end of the tale is told: “This he said as he was on the top of the ladder, (the Scaffold being now broken down) and my self half way on it, as close to him as I could; who having again, for the last time, pray'd with him, left him, with a greater satisfaction than I had before, that he was Penitent.” However Kidd left this world, his corpse was encased in chains and left to dangle over the Thames as a warning to other would-be pirates of the harsh justice that awaited them.

“It took the appearance of the more neutral
Daily Journal
in the 1720s,” according to Barry, “for the obituary to gain a place in the print culture of the day entirely in its own right, as an authoritative account of the biography and death of significant persons” and not solely as a personal vehicle for the attitudes of its proprietor. By the time the
Gentleman's Magazine
appeared in 1731, moral commentary and political propaganda had been replaced by a much more democratic and bourgeois preoccupation with the middle classes and their activities, both social and vocational. Founded in London by Edward Cave, the
Gentleman's Magazine
gave Samuel Johnson his first paying gig as a writer. Barry and other scholars suggest that it created celebrities in its pages, similar to the way multimedia do today.

In 1780 a named obituary column was introduced into the magazine, in which the dead were recognized for the way they had died and for their prowess on the playing field, on the stage, and at the gaming tables, as well as achievements in more ordinary occupations. A Mr. Foster Powell was lauded for walking great distances very quickly; John Broughton was congratulated on his boxing skills, which would “ever be recorded in the annals of that science”; Isaac Tarrat was remembered for impersonating a doctor and telling fortunes in a “fur cap, a large white beard, and a worsted damask night gown”; and John Underwood was written up because of the way he pre-organized his own funeral: “No bell was tolled, no one invited but the six gentlemen, and no relation followed his corpse; the coffin was painted green.”

An actress gone bad was irresistible to a magazine aimed at an audience with the leisure and the wherewithal to be fascinated by celebrity. In the unsigned obituary for Mrs. Baddeley, the author concentrated on her personal life, suggesting both financial and romantic misadventures by alluding to “private motives” that forced her to quit London for an engagement in Dublin, and which precipitated “the miseries into which she plunged by obeying the dictates of impetuous passions.” The writer concludes by lamenting that her “fair form, her abilities, and her flatterers, have not been able to prevent her from falling into the distresses inseparable from misconduct and want of economy.” Change the language and the time, and the piece could be about Anna Nicole Smith or even Diana, Princess of Wales.