Mordecai: The Life and Times
By Charles Foran
(Knopf Canada)
Mordecai Richler once said that the highest praise he could accord a person was to declare him an original.
By that, Richler had in mind an individual with appetite, with "lust, longing, drive and ambition."
It is these traits, Charles Foran points out in his preface to a new biography of Richler, which define the fullness of character which comes to the fore both in the novelist's colourfully drawn characters and in Richler's own life.
Foran has no wish, he writes, to read Richler's life into his books or his books into his life, but he is concerned with making smooth connections between the two.
Insight is on offer in Foran's weighty, almost exhaustive biography of Richler as the writer's complex, contradictory, and abrasive traits tilt with his honest, morally courageous qualities, as does his aggressive manner with the inner reserve noted by many who knew him.
Foran's biography of Richler is so rich in scope, so well researched and so wonderfully written it is bound to become the definitive last word on the irascible, enormously gifted writer whose novels became landmarks in Canadian literature. Although his book is unauthorized at the request of Richler's widow, Florence, Foran has been granted access to family letters and to the Richler archives at the University of Calgary, including material originally to be suppressed until 20 years after the writer's death. Richler died in 2001, at the age of 70.
Foran tackles Richler's extraordinary life within the framework of conventional biography, chronologically, with due reference to the work which enhanced the life.
Richler was born in Montreal in 1931, the son of an uneducated, browbeaten scrap dealer and a woman of high ambition, daughter of an eminent rabbi, who chafed under the restrictions of her arranged marriage. In the end she evicted Richler's father from their scruffy apartment and embarked on an affair with the family boarder. Twelve-year-old Mordecai was witness to his mother's sexual gropings as he slept, a few feet away, and his relationship with his mother was irretrievably poisoned.
In a startling letter Florence Richler made available to Foran, Richler lashes out at his mother. Long kept under wraps in the Calgary archives, the letter is searing. "If your old age tastes of ashes," Richler admonishes his mother, "if you are wretched, lonely, worried about your health, money, I am sorry. But now that you are 70, can't you at last grasp that you have brought most of this on yourself? Will your life, such a ball of rage, inchoate rage, go forever unexamined?" When his mother died, in 1997, Richler did not attend her funeral.
The writer's raucous youth on Montreal's St. Urbain St. is recorded by Foran, as are Richler's student days at Sir George Williams College (now Concordia University) and his youthful drifting through Europe, writing, drinking and indulging in casual affairs. He eventually settled in London for the long sojourn during which his writing began to take hold.
It was here that Richler married second wife Florence Mann, who became the most important person in his life. The Richlers had five children whose English lives were uprooted when Richler determined, in 1972, that if he were to continue to flourish he must return to Montreal and to the "roots" which had become essential to his work.
Richler returned to Montreal in good form. St. Urbain's Horseman had been published to rave reviews and the now 40-year-old writer had won a second Governor-General's Award for fiction. His wife had wished to remain in London and although they "sparred for awhile over the value of literary exile," Florence could not change the writer's mind.
Re-engagement with Canada fuelled Richler's talents and the big novels of his now-burgeoning career followed: Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky was Here and Barney's Version, as well as such political harangues as Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!
Richler's love-hate relationship with the province of his birth was played out in his wide-ranging polemics against what he considered Quebec's irrational language laws.
Foran's biography is peppered, too, with accounts of Richler's rapport (or fallings-out) with figures of the day in literature, politics and the arts.
He rubbed shoulders with the brightest stars of the Canadian literati.These accounts pinpoint aspects of Richler's personality as he progressed from dishevelled young novelist to middle-aged literary lion, a transition familiar in Richler's novels.
Although Foran's biography of Richler is admiring, it cannot be considered hagiography. Foran brings a measured approach to his subject and his book offers a balanced, warts-and-all portrait of a writer whose work captured the imaginations of an international audience.
Books in brief
The Charming Quirks of Others
By Alexander McCall Smith
(Random House)
Hate to take issue with Alexander McCall Smith's many fans of his Isabel Dalhousie novels (while loving the engaging No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series). But I find the Scottish philosopher a bit too precious for words. Dalhousie, who lives with her small son and her younger lover, Jamie, the father of her child, is somewhat unrealistic, a bluestocking who takes on and solves moral dilemmas. She seems a man's view of a woman, not true to life. Anyway, this new story has Isabel again taking on another busybody case, this involving looking into four final candidates for headmaster of a local private school. One seems to have a serious problem and when Isabel delves into it, she faces some moral dilemmas of her own.
- Yvonne Crittenden
The Good Daughters
By Joyce Maynard
(HarperCollins)
Joyce Maynard's new novel is set in the rock-strewn farmlands of New Hampshire and tells a compelling tale of two girls born on the same day in the same hospital, and their differing lives. Ruth is an artist who grows up on a farm; she is close to her father but emotionally neglected by her mother and four sisters. Dana is a scientist whose parents never stay in one place for very long and who feels, like Ruth, an outsider in her world. The story follows these 'birthday sisters' from the 1950s to the present. Maynard, who was once the teenage lover of the late reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, has a talent for bringing her readers into the fictional world she creates, and this is another absorbing read.
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