Mordecai Richler, 1931-2001 Author: Mark Steyn New Criterion 20.1 (Sept. 2001): p123-128. Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 185. Detroit: Gale, 2004. From Literature Resource Center. Document Type: Critical essay Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning Full Text: [(essay date September 2001) In the following essay, Steyn characterizes Richler as a politically incorrect writer, placing him within the context of Canadian and Jewish authors.] Mordecai Richler died on July 3, and within minutes of the announcement there was a stampede from the grand panjandrums of "CanLit" to conscript him posthumously into the ranks of "Canadian novelists." Mordecai was a novelist who happened to be Canadian, which isn't quite the same thing, and he spent much of his life making gleeful digs about all the great writers who were, as he put it, "world famous in Canada." Richler, by contrast, was world famous in, among other places, Italy, where his last novel, Barney's Version, is a best-seller in its seventh printing and hugely popular among a population not known as great novel-readers. The word "Richleriano" has become the accepted shorthand for "politically incorrect." Richler was certainly Richleriano. In Solomon Gursky Was Here, there's a scene set in the early Seventies in which one middle-aged character, forced to play host to a gay son and his lover, staggers drunk into the bathroom to check the pencil mark he's drawn on the jar of Vaseline. His wife is broken-hearted, he's filled with disgust. "It's not that I'm prejudiced against faggots, it's just that I don't like them," he says, pouring himself another Scotch. It is a satirical moment, but the pain underpinning it is true in a way that the approved supportive bland uplift is not. Yet I wouldn't bet on any tyro novelist's chances of sneaking that scene past a North American editor, most of whom are decidedly non-Richleriano. Pat Carney, a Canadian senator and former cabinet minister, wrote a memoir last year and discovered after publication that a change had been made to the passage detailing her father's job on a merchant ship to China: the editor had reflexively amended "fireman" to "firefighter." The senator's father was not, as the ensuing paragraph made clear, a man who drives a municipal fire truck and squirts a hose at blazing buildings, but a man who stokes the ship's furnaces with fire- making coal. Nonetheless, better to get things wrong than risk even the most hypothetical offence. A passing remark that the drab dress Canada's governor-general wore for the Speech from the Throne made her look like a washer-woman was struck down, over the author's protests, on the grounds that "it suggests all Chinese- Canadians worked in Chinese laundries." (Her Excellency the Viceroy was born in Hong Kong.) Against this grubby world of feeble evasions and genteel absurdities, Mordecai Richler stood firm. He was not in any coherent policy sense a conservative, but he had no time for the faintheartedness of a liberalism so defensive that, as he wrote in 1959, it couldn't bear to contemplate "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." The straitjackets of identity politics have only tightened in the four decades since he wrote those words, but the strange thing is how much of it he foresaw so long ago, almost half a century now, in the novel in which he found his voice, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). Two decades later, Kerry McSweeney pronounced magisterially in the journal Studies in Canadian Literature-- what, you don't subscribe?--that "however memorable, Duddy Kravitz is hardly a masterpiece." Compared to what? As the years go by, Duddy seems more and more remarkable in its anticipation of contemporary fads. Take Virgil, the novel's kindly epileptic, who wants to be proud of his condition and to that end starts a magazine for epileptics with features such as "Famous Health Handicappers Through History": "No 2: A Biography Of Julius Caesar. Life was no breeze for the young Julius, but from the day of his birth until the day he met his untimely end he never once let his health handicap stand in his way. Julius had been born an epileptic and was not ashamed of it. He had guts-a-plenty." This is 1959: decades before the Americans with Disabilities Act, before "differently abled" and "visually impaired," before the FDR memorial in Washington got bogged down by accusations that they weren't placing sufficient emphasis on his polio. The Richleriano aspects of Mordecai's career fall into three phases: first, he offended Jews; then, English-Canadian nationalists; finally, Quebec separatists. In the early Jew-offending phase, he gave a lecture to a Jewish audience at which someone asked: "Why is it that everybody loved Sholem Aleichem, but we all hate you?" The answer to that hardly needs explaining. Mordecai remembered every detail of his working- class childhood in Montreal and the rare glimpses he got of the would-be gentrified Jews in the suburbs of Outremont and Westmount, and some of those details were too funny to let go. In Solomon Gursky, it all comes together at the seventy-fifth birthday gala of the Bronfmanesque Bernard Gursky, a coruscating dissection of the charity banquet circuit--"plaques, plaques, and more plaques, which they awarded one another at testimonial dinners once, sometimes twice a month. ... They took turns declaring each other governors of universities in Haifa or Jerusalem or Man of the Year for State of Israel Bonds. Their worthiness certified by hiring an after-dinner speaker to flatter them for a ten-thousand-dollar fee, the speaker coming out of New York, New York--either a former secretary of state, a TV star whose series hadn't been renewed, or a Senator in need." Bernard Gursky's birthday is the ne plus ultra of such events: the medley from Jimmy Durante; the Israeli Ambassador's presentation of a Bible encased in hammered gold, the flyleaf signed by Golda; his wife Libby's rendition of "their song," which is inevitably "Bei Mir Bist Du Schein," with the "Bella, bella" line changed to "Bernie, Bernie." An official of the Canadian Football League passed Mr. Bernard a ball, a memento of last year's Grey Cup game, that had been autographed by all the players on the winning team, and then one of the team's most celebrated players, a behemoth who peddled Crofter's Best in the off-season, wheeled a paraplegic child to the head table. Mr. Bernard, visibly moved, presented the ball to the boy as well as a cheque for five- hundred-thousand dollars. Three-hundred guests leaped to their feet and cheered. The boy, his speech rehearsed for days, began to jerk and twist, spittle flying from him. He gulped and began again, unavailingly. As he started in on a third attempt to speak, Mr. Bernard cut him off with an avuncular smile. "Who needs another speech," he said. "It's what's in your heart that counts with me, little fellow." And sotto voce, he told the player, "Wheel him out of here, for Christ's sake." Canadian Jews didn't care for such stuff, and called the Canadian Jewish Congress to see what could be done about Richler. The CJC sent him a note, but he didn't take too much in, being distracted by the letterhead: "Cable address JEWCON." Richler liked to say he emerged from two ghettos--one Jewish, one Canadian--or to put it another way: one highly marketable, one of little interest. I would rank him above Philip Roth, et al., if only because the Canadian qualification of his Jewishness gave him an insight into the points where identities intersect, where the perspective shifts. One of my favorite Richler characters is Mortimer Griffin, the protagonist of Cocksure. Mortimer is a middle-class Anglican from the town of Caribou, Ontario, who's made it big in swingin' London as the editor of the small but influential Oriole Press. But when the firm gets bought up by a Hollywood mogul, Mortimer suddenly finds his life freighted by Jewishness. On the one hand, for the first time in his life, he's the odd one out, because he's not Jewish, which was never a problem back in Caribou. On the other hand, everyone seems to assume he is. A man from Jewish Thought starts following him around accusing him of being a self-hating Jew who's swapped his real name for something more Anglo; his London friends corroborate the story by pointing out how anti-Semitic he is; his black secretary tells him she won't sleep with Jews and he can't prove he isn't one because he's circumcised. To make matters worse, his wife is cheating on him with a man she thinks is Jewish, but is actually a bloke called Gerald Spencer who figured it would be a good career move to change his name to Ziggy. Richler wrote Cocksure at the close of a twenty-year sojourn in London. He moved back to Montreal to find himself in the midst of an alleged Canadian Renaissance--a cultural flowering of a young nation eager to cast off both colonial ties to the Mother Country and the cultural oppression from the south.