MORDECAI RICHLER is gone, and a major light has been snuffed out. But what sort of light? No athlete’s torch, no angel’s halo. Picture instead the lantern of grumpy, scathing, barrel-dwelling Diogenes, who walked around in daylight searching for an honest man.
Mordecai was the searcher and the honest man both, and equally distrustful of fine feathers. Tarted up for grand events, he somehow gave the impression that he’d be happier in the barrel. Rumpled, tie askew, glass of Scotch at his elbow, thin cigar in mouth, his sad bloodhound’s gaze fixed on the bogusness of the passing scene, while in one hand he held the pen that was both lance (as in chivalry, as in boil) and balloon-puncturing pin — this is the image of him beloved by his public and perfected by his friend Aislin, the celebrated cartoonist. Mordecai seemed so permanent, so substantial, so on top of things, so much to be depended on when each new hotair blimp loomed into view, that it’s difficult to believe in his mortality.
But — as with all fine writers — mortality was his subject. Human nature, in all its nakedness, paltriness, silliness, avariciousness, crassness, meanness, and downright evil — he knew it inside out, having had a ringside view as he came of age in a poor Jewish area of Montreal during the Depression and then witnessed not only the atrocities but also the hypocrisies of the Second World War, followed — for him — by the hard scrabbling of the literary life in London, as seen from the bottom.
He’d paid — as we say — his dues. His bullshit radar was acute, his hopes for the innate goodness of the human species not very high, and in this he was a satirist, a true child of Jonathan Swift. When he went after separatism in Quebec, he rubbed fur the wrong way; but all of his fur-rubbing was deliberate — he would have been horrified to have wounded the innocent, unintentionally. Quebec was hardly alone: anyone was fair game, so long as the target had committed the ultimate sin in his eyes, which was — or so I’d guess — pomposity.
His propensity for skewering the inflated, coupled with a wonderful sense of mischief, produced some of the most hilarious moments in Canadian literature. The pretentious “art” film of a bar mitzvah in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the travesty of the Franklin expedition in Solomon Gursky Was Here, in which the heroic sailors dress up in ladies’ frillies — this is Mordecai at his most inventively outrageous. But every satirist cherishes an alternative to the vices and follies he depicts, and so did Mordecai. His alternative was not so far from that of Charles Dickens — the warm-hearted, sane, and decent human being — and this side of him comes to the fore in his novels, most particularly in his tragicomic meditation on fallibility, Barney’s Version. Behind the formidable public persona was a shy and generous man, who gave his time to efforts he believed in — most recently, the “best-book-only” Giller Prize, for which he served as an architect and first-year juror.
He was a consummate professional with high standards and no time for fools, but he was also a dear man who was loved by everyone who knew him well, respected by his fellow writers, and trusted by his many devoted readers to tell it straight. For my generation, he was a trailblazer who went on to create and occupy a unique place in our national life and literature, and we will miss him very much.