What to think of Mordecai Richler (1931-2001).

One of the surprising things about Mordecai Richler is that during his life he concealed from his readers what a nice person he was. Kenneth Whyte, editor of the National Post, wrote that Mordecai "enjoyed showing the world his curmudgeonly side, but he was loved by his many friends for his warmth, generosity, loyalty and good humour. I was always profoundly impressed by his devotion to his family and to his wife Florence. His love and affection for Florence were evident every time I saw them together-they were blessed to have one another, and no one knew that better than Mordecai."

Similarly a Post profile of him referred to his "carefully cultivated image as an irreverent and hard-nosed maverick."

Countless media interviews with Mr. Richler refer to a small, slightly dishevelled looking writer with a thick mane of hair, who invariably conducted interviews in a haze of cigar smoke, while sipping Scotch in the mellow atmosphere of one of his favourite bars.

"I don't drink nearly as much as people think," he once admitted. "But I enjoy the reputation." Others have testified to the regularity of his habits and his discipline as a writer.

He was the perfect neighbour, said Robert Benoit, who lives in the village in the Eastern Townships where Richler also had a home, and he called Richler a hardworking family man who never threw wild parties and whose movements were like clockwork. He would begin work at 8:30 a.m. At 9 he would head to the Austin corner grocery store to pick up his mail, returning at 10. He would work until noon, take a lunch break, and then push on until 4 p.m., when he would go to one of the village taverns.

Literary Reputation

Estimates of his literary reputation were frequently phrased in superlatives. Margaret Atwood, for example, called him "a fine novelist, a brilliant satirist, and an invaluable commentator on the absurdities of national life." With that judgment many people would agree. They might not agree with Philip Marchand that "he was the first Canadian writer to play in the big leagues of literature," but they could hardly quarrel with this critic's view that he made the working-class Jewish neighbourhood of St. Urbain Street in Montreal "part of the mental landscape of readers all over the world." Many Canadians must have been amazed to read that Richler's novel Barney's Version has sold over a hundred thousand copies in Italy, and that its central character has become something of a folk hero there.

Moral Perspective

What particularly needs questioning, however, is his moral perspective. Robert Fulford wrote that "he grounded his work in an urgent moral sense like all satirists." Louise Dennys said: "Behind the brilliant storytelling and unforgettable character lay an uncompromising, unflinching moral sense of what it means to be human." A letter writer in the Post contended that he presented us with characters who, "despite life's drudgery, sought a state of grace.

But Duddy Kravitz did not reveal what it means to be human, and he certainly did not seek a state of grace. Richler himself was ambiguous about Duddy, conceding that he was conniving, but maintaining that "he is supposed to end up, in spite of all the ruthless and rotten things he's done, so that you think, well, yes, this is another human being." We are far more likely to agree that Yvette is right in her final judgment on him: "I think you're rotten." Simcha, the grandfather Duddy tried to please, is the moral centre of the family, and he is left weeping over a grandson who has become a monster.

An angry young man

In his approach to the writing of novels, Richler may have been influenced by the cult of the unheroic hero, in the works of the Angry Young Men who were at the height of literary fashion when he was in England at the end of the 1950s. John Wain's Hurry on Down (1953) was one of the most influential of these. His Charlie Lumley copsidered any kind of success in the world of competitive capitalism a failure of integrity. He was representative of a postwar generation hostile to old values and intent on radical political change-though Wain, like his contemporaries, was very vague about just what was to replace the social structures he wanted to strike down.

Kingsley Amis's hilarious novel Lucky Jim (1955) centred around the most popular anti-hero of the time, Jim Dixon, who had a profound hatred of the social and cultural conventions surrounding university life One of his strongest antipathies was for "filthy Mozart." John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger (1956) was famous for the explosions of its protagonist, Jimmy Porter. Osborne swept away the timid conventions and niceties of the English stage; there was no room for timidity or nicety after he had come upon the scene. Much of Richler's satire, therefore, had its parallels and antecedents in English writing of his early manhood. In an interview with Nathan Cohen in 1956, he said, "There has been a collapse of absolute values, whether that value is God or Marx or gold. We are living at a time when superficially life seems meaningless, and we have to make value judgments all the time, it seems in relation to nothing."

Sex as a launching pad

In a Post column on July 5, 2001, Mark Steyn wrote that Richler "was, as the American critic James Wolcott said, a 'horny' writer, the horniness palpable from the earliest work right up to Barney's Version. A novelist has to understand sex, for it's the launch pad for so many of our pathetic hustles and deceptions. We once discussed Hugh MacLennan, the preeminent Anglo-Quebec novelist of Mordecai's youth. 'Hugh was such a decent man,' he said, 'but such a boring novelist. The sexiest he got was in The Watch That Ends The Night, but even here the heroine had breasts like inverted champagne glasses." Steyn seems to agree with Richler that horniness is all, the one quality a modern writer cannot do without. When Richler doesn't find it in MacLennan, he writes him off as a boring novelist. But The Watch that Ends the Night is a very fine novel. And Richler was putting it to the wrong kind of test. In "The Story of a Novel," MacLennan explained what it was intended to do:

Around this time [1950], it seemed to me, as it seemed to the educated public, that the basic human conflict was "within" theindividual. But how to find an artistic form for this concept? That was the question.

Certainly the novelists failed who wrote clinically; they absolutely failed to purge the soul of pity and terror, which is art's supreme function. When I began The Watch that Ends the Night I was at least clear on that score. I would not write a clinical book. But somehow I was going to write a book which would not depend on character-in-action, but on spirit-in-action. The conflict here, the essential one, was between the human spirit of every man and every man's human condition.

The human condition, in the middle of the twentieth century, meant living under the threat of atomic warfare. MacLennan found a parallel for it in a rheumatic heart; his heroine, Catherine, suffered from this condition, so that it could be described as "fate made palpable." The novel depicts Catherine's husband George raging at fate because of her illness; in the end, he finds a faith which will enable him to banish rage and fear. So the novel contains a major theme, worked out very well in an ambitious and intricate novel. In it, meaninglessness is ultimately defeated. It is not surprising that Richler did not have eyes to see the novel with, and that he seized upon a minor and incidental detail to damn it with. Hominess is not all.

Writers as moralists

In his last column for the National Post, Richler said, "Don't look to writers for morality lessons." He gave many examples of writers whose own lives were most unedifying; Byron was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and others were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters...." Still it is worth pointing out that Richler was wrong in saying that great writers have no lessons to teach us. Fielding's Tom Jones was turned into a bawdy romp when it was made into a film, but the story Fielding wrote deals with a young man learning prudence through some harrowing experiences, and finally becoming fit to marry his ideal, Sophia. Dickens was an adulterer, but he was also a social reformer, attacking scandals in schools and factories and law courts. Thackeray took the title of his most famous novel from Bunyan's account of the Christian pilgrim's s progress. And so we could continue on, listing examples up to or close to our own times; many of the novels of Joyce Cary, Evelyn Waugh, an d Graham Greene are packed with meaning. In our era of "Vagina Monologues"' and "Puppetry of the Penis," it may seem that Mark Steyn is right to insist that fiction takes sex as its launching pad. But bawdy is not all. The human spirit of every man remains the novelist's real subject, and the main question concerning Richler is whether he followed a literary fad or fashion which many people find distasteful and which is not going to endure.

On not going gentle into that good night

The consolations of religion were curiously absent from Richler's own funeral rites; bitterness and resentment were very much in evidence. Mordecai's daughter Martha was overcome with grief as she read Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," in which a son beseeches his father to "Rage, rage at the dying of the light." The poem was surely very inappropriate, since, first of all, it is useless to rage against death, and, second, Thomas would have been a most unfortunate example to follow, since he died, far from his wife and his native Wales, in a New York bar, where he drank himself to death. Martha concluded her part of the funeral ceremony with a useless and tasteless statement: "I just want to say, 'F-- you' to all cancer."

Equally inappropriate was a reading by Noah Richler of an excerpt from his father's 1980 novel Joshua Then and Now, which obviously fulfilled Mark Steyn's prescription for raunchiness since it dealt with a young man's complaint to his father that he was 16 and had "never been laid." It produced gales of laughter, but surely it was hardly suitable for a funeral service--especially after all the tributes emphasizing how different Richler was in actuality from his image of abrasiveness and irascibility.

Whether or not the memorial tributes to him overestimated his importance, there is no doubt that, as many Montrealers have pointed out, he captured the essence of the Jewish quarter around St. Urbain Street and shared it with the world.