Book-Ending Canada’s 20th Century

These two slim biographies, Margaret MacMillan’s Stephen Leacock and M.G. Vassanji’s Mordecai Richler, are part of the Extraordinary Canadians series launched by John Ralston Saul, a series about notable Canadians such as Lester B. Pearson, Emily Carr, Pierre Elliott Trudeau and others.

What the series is actually for is a little puzzling, for there are, in most cases, more detailed biographies available. The two biographies under consideration here are something like introductions to the subjects and their works, the kind of books useful to students writing essays in high school or college. They are neither detailed enough for hardcore scholars nor scintillating enough for readers accustomed to biographies without borders.

Modern biographies are not usually so circumspect. I was recently reading a short biography of Martin Amis in the United Kingdom’s version of Coles Notes. Amis was described as abandoning one lover at a party to have sex with another in the bushes, only to be caught and confronted by the disappointed party. That leafy tryst led to an “illegitimate” birth revealed long after the death of the mother.

There are no such gritty revelations in these two volumes. We seem to be too polite, even about the dead. Maybe that is part of what makes us so extraordinarily Canadian.

In his introduction to this series, John Ralston Saul says one way a civilization imagines itself is to measure itself against its society’s most remarkable figures. But, he hastens to add, he is not talking about hero worship or political iconography (my italics).

Heaven forbid! Take out the details of sex and bad behaviour, and take away the hero worship, and what’s left, as one peevish commentator said about Canada, is mashed potatoes without the gravy. We are serious about our self-deprecation in this country.

And yet for all this tiresome earnestness, there really is something to what Saul has to say about recognizing Canada in these two books and their subjects. They are like opposite ends of the spectrum of the Canadian version of the 20th century: its British empire polite certainties at the beginning, with a belief in progress, good taste and reconciliation, followed by multicultural brashness, passion and polemics with the gloves off. Stephen Leacock is our gentleman, and Mordecai Richler is our ungentleman.

Margaret MacMillan, author of bestsellers such as Paris 1919, is our most famous popular historian and she tackles Leacock with the doggedness and conviction of her profession. She asks why we should care about him, and says it is because he shows us what we were, asserting that Leacock continues to be important to us because he set the tone for part of what we are—a people with a distaste for pomposity and self-importance. MacMillan adds that much of the world that Leacock described still exists in small town Ontario, an assertion that I can confirm.

Still, for all her enthusiasm and the clarity of her straightforward prose, MacMillan has a slightly dull subject, for the man was far less interesting than the writing, at least the comic writing.

Stephen Leacock was born in England to feckless parents in 1869. Leacock’s grandparents had some money, but his father never succeeded at anything aside from being a pathetic remittance man, failing in South Africa and Kansas before bringing his wife and children to a farm near Orillia, Ontario, a town that Leacock rechristened Mariposa. Here the senior Leacock failed again. An alcoholic, he drifted away from the family, leaving Leacock’s mother to raise several children alone. Although they were poor, they were not destitute because his mother had an income of her own, roughly equivalent to a high school teacher’s pay.

Thus Stephen Leacock came from the caste of gentlemen, albeit fallen on hard times. He attended Upper Canada College, an elite high school, and worked for a while as a high school teacher before taking graduate studies in the United States in political science and economics and then securing a position as a lecturer at McGill University.

So far, the trajectory looks like Paradise Regained, but there was more to Leacock than a gentleman striving to regain his income and status. He had a sharp mind, was good with languages, and wrote easily. In 1910, he published a book called Literary Lapses at his own expense. It included what is probably his most famous piece, “My Financial Career.” The collection made him into a superstar published in England and America. He followed with more comic books, among them Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, which has never gone out of print.

By the 1920s, he was making more than twice the amount of the president of McGill. Charlie Chaplin and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to tell him of their admiration. He became a public intellectual, ready to speak on any subject, and was often asked to do so. All the while, he continued to write academic works and to lecture widely, staying in the home of Rudyard Kipling when he went to England.

The incredibly successful humour that Leacock wrote is gentle, pointing to the amusing foibles of people great and small. He makes readers feel comfortable about their insecurities. Tragedies are tempests in teapots. When the Mariposa Belle sinks, no lives are lost because the water is not deep enough. The boat sinks with annoying regularity.

While the world Leacock inhabited has vanished, some of his humour holds up rather well. Garrison Keillor writes in this gentle manner, and so does Stuart McLean. But the longevity of Leacock’s humour is surprising when one considers that his beliefs, standard for the time, have not aged well at all. He believed in empire, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons and the inferiority of women, more or less. His beliefs changed with the times, but like most of us, he lived inside his times, not outside them. Yet his humour withstands the aging of his other writing.

If there is one thing he got right about us, it is our distaste for big shots. We bring them down in our own quiet way. This legacy lives on. Ron James is pure Leacockian Canadian with exasperation and four-letter words added. Even Bob and Doug Mackenzie owed something to Leacock, if not directly, then through cultural osmosis.

If Stephen Leacock was anything, he was an establishment figure, a clubby man who implied that the current social order was essentially right. Mordecai Richler, on the other hand, until he became accepted and adored, was a rebel, an anti-establishment figure, or more precisely, a figure who would scale the fortress walls of the establishment in order to displace the ones who came before.

Mordecai Richler is modern in a way that Leacock is not—he is urban, edgy and filled with tension both in his personal life and his writing. His humour is sardonic—the satire is biting. He depicts the WASPs as pallid and weak, the Québécois as unsophisticated.

At least part of Richler’s genius lies in the creation of a new literary landscape where one had not existed before. His Jewish Montreal is as vivid and solid as Dickens’s London, Cheever’s Westchester and Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. Richler’s Montreal and that of Mavis Gallant might as well be two islands of sensibility with a wide gulf between them.

Saul’s choice of M.G. Vassanji to write the Richler biography seems odd until one learns that Saul made the choice of biographer and the biographer chose his subject. The choice tells us as much about Vassanji as it does about Richler, for Vassanji is by no means a humourist. But he was once an outsider. Both these outsiders became establishment figures themselves: Richler is taught in high school, and Vassanji has won two Gillers.

Mordecai Richler was born in 1931 to Orthodox Jews in a neighbourhood of Jews in a few blocks of Montreal sandwiched between the French East and the English West. He had a domineering mother and an ineffectual father who divorced while he was a youth. His mother lived with a former boarder. His grandfather slapped him and threw him out of the house for missing shul, and the two never spoke to one another again. Later, Richler would threaten to turn his back on his father unless the poor man kept sending him money in Europe; in adulthood, Richler stopped speaking to his mother; he made it no secret that he looked down upon and despised his older brother.

With marks too low for university, Richler was forced to attend George Williams College, where he wrote antagonistic articles for the newspaper, and became known as bookish and arrogant. He worked for a while at the Montreal Gazette, but left, in 1950, to live in France and Spain. There, he got to know Mavis Gallant, drank at the Deux Magots and tried to write a novel, moving eventually to the Spanish island of Ibiza.

The book he worked on, The Rotten People, would eventually become his first novel, The Acrobats, a derivative book about expatriates, a novel that Richler kept out of print later in life. Notwithstanding the book’s weakness, it was published in 1954 when Richler was all of 22 years old, and launched him on a career as a writer.

After a brief stint back in Canada where he met Robert Weaver, Brian Moore, Ted Allen and other literati of the period, he moved to England in 1953 to live as an expatriate with his girlfriend and, eventually, first wife, Cathy Boudreau, who worked at menial jobs to support them. In Britain, the Richlers moved in literary circles: E.M. Forster came to their wedding.

Richler wrote for television and films, and continued to write novels. Son of a Smaller Hero laid the bedrock for his novel-writing, telling the story of a young man trying to get out of the Jewish ghetto. Richler returned to this theme throughout the rest of his novel writing.

In 1958, Richler met Mrs. Florence Mann, with whom he had an affair, and whom he married in 1960. He adopted her son and they had four more children together. The year before, in 1959, he published The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, the story of a pushy Jewish kid in Montreal and his drive to gain status by buying and developing land.

The novel made Richler a star in Canada and renowned abroad. He continued to live in the UK until 1972, when he returned to Canada, teaching for a while, eventually writing journalism, and continuing to write ever more successful novels.

Richler prided himself on being an honest witness of his time. His attraction is his acerbic wit and his complete disdain for politeness. His characters are passionate and conflicted and funny. The Barney of his last novel tells the truth as he sees it, even though what he sees is flawed by the dementia that is eating away at his mind.

Richler was always edgy and often controversial. He was at his most controversial when he attacked the language laws in Quebec and accused the French of anti-Semitism.

In his way, he was like Evelyn Waugh, a brilliant writer who was horrible to most people. Yet there is a fondness for Richler’s bad behaviour, a kind of glossing over of how horrible he could be to those he did not know. Richler’s unlovely traits are barely mentioned in this biography.

Not to suffer fools lightly is a halfway admirable trait, but Richler was equally horrible to students in a classroom where he was supposed to teach creative writing. He stared at the students, smoked his cigars and sipped his scotch first thing in the morning as the aspiring writers quaked in their boots. This is not the behaviour of a crusty “character.” It is the behaviour of a bully. Once he was famous enough in this country, he could act as badly as he wanted, and often did.

When Billy Bob Thornton appeared on Jian Ghomeshi’s radio show, Thornton was rude and insulting. I saw the same behaviour from Richler when he was on stage with Eleanor Wachtel. To her credit, the seasoned literary interviewer managed to wrestle him into compliance.

When the shoe was on the other foot, Mordecai Richler was all sweetness and light. As he interviewed Mavis Gallant, a rather formidable subject herself, at Toronto’s Harbourfront festival, he was polite and admiring, coming up just short of fawning.

Does any of this matter? Not as far as his genius in literature goes, no. But as far as his biography goes, yes, it does. Vassanji says he chose not to use any anecdotes about Richler’s life. Nor is there any deep probing of Richler’s relationship with his first wife, Cathy Boudreau, who remains a shadowy figure. The details of Richler’s dramatic break with his mother are hidden from view as well. It is as if a veil of good taste were laid over the life of a man who did not give a damn for the fine sensibilities of others.

What Vassanji is very good at is looking at the novelist in his role as outsider, seeing in him a kind of forerunner of post-colonial writing that has blossomed in Canada and elsewhere. Vassanji is good at pointing out the tension between Richler’s Canadianness (too little history) and his Jewishness (too much history).

These books function best as introductions to these writers. Although I feel as if there is nothing more I need to know about Leacock’s life, MacMillan’s book did serve the useful purpose of making me go back to look again at some of Leacock’s excellent humour. Vassanji’s Richler is somewhat frustrating because the biography does not tell enough, but it does stir my interest in finding out what happened to the ditched Boudreau and what straw Richler’s mother laid on his back that eventually caused him to renounce her. But to find out those things, I will need to look elsewhere.

In my local bookstore, the entire series of Penguin biographies is set out on the top shelf, face out. This series therefore functions to create or confirm Canadian icons—the series is a secular “Lives of the Canadian Saints.” Or perhaps something more primitive than that, a gallery of the gods. Leacock, calm and warm, almost feminine in his gentleness, could sit with either one. Richler is problematic, though. He is neither a saint nor a god, unless something like the Native trickster or the Nordic Loki, unpredictable and a force for chaos. The only gallery suitable to Richler would be a rogues gallery, and he might have been irascible enough to enjoy sitting with just such a crowd.