Mordecai’s Versions

The Mordecai Richler archive at the University of Calgary spans thirty-five metres, or roughly “two plus two” Albertosauruses, as Jacob Two‑Two might tally it. Acquired in 1974, the collection lives in the Taylor Family High Density Library on the Spy Hill Campus, home to several veterinary medicine buildings and the University Weather Research Station. Across the street are the Calgary Correctional Centre, the Calgary Remand Centre, and an office of the Alberta Sheriffs. This peculiar hinterland of academic silos and one-stop cop shops amuses me, as I imagine it might have amused Richler. Had the boy from St. Urbain Street envisioned this as the final holding cell for his fragments and drafts? His copious correspondence?

I recently spent some time poking through old Hollinger boxes, retrieved from Spy Hill, at the Glenbow Western Research Centre reading room on the university’s main campus. The biographer Charles Foran’s Mordecai: The Life & Times, from 2010, is somewhat ambivalent about these records, claiming that “despite its size,” the archive is “notably lacking in two traditional sources for information”— namely “diaries, journals or extensive notes about works-in-progress,” as well as “juvenilia.” Yet I found riches and rarities in abundance.

Over the course of my visits, I studied chronologies, scripts, proofs, and copy-editing corrections (“p. 183, line 21: ‘loyalist’ shd read ‘loyalest’ ”). I sifted through faded newspaper clippings and photocopied articles. I hefted a slate-blue, 1970s-era Olivetti and perused a first draft of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — its onion-skin pages varicose with edits in pencil and pen. I riffled through a manila folder almost entirely given over to negative reviews of his debut, The Acrobats: “Young Man’s First Novel — Why, oh Why?” “New Novelist Spoils Work with Nihilism.” I puzzled over an elaborate, nine-panelled Christmas card from Gordon Lish, featuring rather grisly, medieval-themed drawings by his son Atticus, a future PEN/Faulkner Award winner. I uncovered dialogue from Barney’s Version scrawled on the shorn overlap of a 1995 copy of The New Yorker. I read fan mail, hate mail, and mail from an aggrieved RBC savings manager. Truth be told, I mostly skimmed a sixty-five-page handwritten treatise sent in response to Richler’s Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! and titled “Canada: British and Officially English . . . (. . . Even in Quebec).” But I lingered over a 1989 letter whose author added next to her signature a red-lipstick kiss.

Archival materials recur with considerable frequency throughout Richler’s fiction. This motif makes the business of investigating his own holdings all the more thrilling — if, admittedly, a little complicated. The natural self-consciousness one experiences while rummaging through a writer’s personal papers is not much assuaged by that writer’s habit of lampooning the rummaging. The Calgary archive enjoys a thinly anonymized walk‑on in Joshua Then and Now, when a trove of “salacious letters” is loosed from the “purportedly secure Rare Manuscripts Collection at Rocky Mountain University.” Anxiety over premature epistolary dissemination seemed top of mind for Richler. In 1974, he wrote to the novelist Brian Moore that before handing over his documents, he “went through letters, removing personal ones . . . putting some of these in a box not to be opened until 25 years after corress. have departed for Big Editor in Sky.”

It is easy to see the appeal of diverse source materials for a writer like Richler — satirical, digressive, but with a penchant for Dickensian connectedness. They allowed him to foment conflict and exhibit his sly shifts of register and voice. Also, they’re fun. Reading his books, the eye looks forward to strange deviations of font. You can see early iterations of this variegation near the end of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, when Duddy receives a letter from his friend Virgil Roseboro, as well as mimeographed copies of Roseboro’s self-published magazine, The Crusader. A novelist less given to (or driven by) detour might have left the matter at Roseboro’s message and stepped us back inside Duddy’s headspace. Not Richler. Instead, he reproduces issue no. 2 of The Crusader, complete with personals, classified ads, and “A Short Story with a Moral.”

Solomon Gursky Was Here, with its diaries, journals, telegrams, and interpolated fictions, is the busiest and most explicitly curatorial of the novels. Within the span of ten pages, Richler treats the reader to an excerpt from a roman à clef (“Lionel Gerstein was the number-one son of old Boris Gerstein, a former bootlegger, worth zillions”), “bawdy” song lyrics, and a newspaper clipping from the Edmonton Journal (“New Ice Age Threatened After 10,000 Years”). I found the original piece, tweezed from the Montreal Gazette. The article, as it appears in the narrative, is slightly shorter than its source, but it’s otherwise identical — except where Richler, in the phrase “countries like Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Nepal,” added a serial comma.

Given the historical and geographical breadth of Solomon Gursky Was Here, this miscellany enhances realism while permitting Richler to drift swiftly in and out of flashback. The past is not static but turbulent and lewd and vibrantly alive. In the archive, a typed, single-spaced annotated chronology — an attestation of the book’s intricate sequencing and structure — cross-referenced with page numbers from the manuscript in progress opens in 1819 and closes in 1983. The chronology is five pages long.

Neurotic? Well, yes. Absolutely. Any novel distilled to its constituent parts is maddening to behold. Sitting at my favourite table in the reading room, comparing the chronology with a handwritten outline of book 1 (spattered with auburn water stains), I was reminded of Moses Berger furiously at work on his Gursky biography — his table “strewn with pages from Solomon Gursky’s journals, tapes made by his brother Bernard, clippings, file cards and notes.” In a novel as capacious and rambling as this one, it makes a good deal of readerly sense that Richler assigns the dominant point of view to Moses, an amateur archivist — a private investigator of the stacks. We might not like him much, but Moses’s plight mirrors our own.

To each their own canon, but for my money, Barney’s Version represents the high-water mark of Richler’s oeuvre. Nowhere else did the archival impulse serve him so well. Where Solomon Gursky Was Here reverberates, amassing vitality through variance, Barney’s Version localizes, descending the reader into a ribald performance of voice. Narrated in the first person — a first (and last) for Richler — the bulk of the novel comprises Barney Panofsky’s memoir, with accompanying footnotes and an afterword supplied by his eldest son, Michael. Beset by Alzheimer’s, Barney presents his bumpy assemblage of memories as a rebuttal to the “scurrilous charges” made against him in a forthcoming autobiography by a fellow expat and frenemy for life, Terry McIver. “Terry’s the spur,” Barney says. “The splinter under my fingernail.” Throughout, there are hilarious arias of grievance. But the story soon takes on a discursive urgency of its own. More than a vengeful tract, the memoir offers itself up as a kind of desperate record, an “Apologia pro Vita Sua,” meticulous and messy. The swan song of a dying mind.

As I read Barney’s Version for the first time in my mid-twenties, the footnotes and copious literary references (Hello, Bellow! Hello, Tristram Shandy!) appealed to my own, doubtlessly insufferable writerly designs. I too was “awash in rejection slips.” Like Terry McIver’s description of Barney, my conversation was, I’m certain, “burnished with quotes.” Revisiting the novel fifteen years later, alongside the archival materials, provided an invaluable window into Richler’s artistic practice. A painstaking amount of rewriting attended each draft. Sentences were reworked and worried at until the desired cadence was obtained. “I’m starting on this venture, this mishmash,” reads a line from an early version of the manuscript, then titled “Barney Like the Player Piano” and dated “Jan 30. 95.” Scrawled randomly on the back of another page is the phrase “this shambles that is my life”— a clause that Richler eventually evolved into “I’m starting on this shambles that is the true story of my wasted life.”

Curiously, a version of the line Richler intended for the opening of Barney’s Version —“We have all read too much in literary magazines about the unjustly neglected novelist, but seldom a word about the justly neglected, the scratch players, brandishing their pathetic little distinctions”— first appeared in an autobiographical essay he wrote for the New York Times, in 1983, which was later collected under the title “Hemingway Set His Own Hours” in Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions. Although Richler ended up shuffling those lines to the second chapter, his cannibalization is telling. The Broadsides essay goes on to describe an expat named Harry “awash in rejection slips.” In the “Barney Like the Player Piano” draft, Richler names Terry “Harry.”

As in previous works, Richler remained a compulsive (if sporadically injudicious) recycler of found material. Midway through Barney’s account, he receives a letter from a Bangladeshi student, soliciting him for financial aid to study in Canada. It was no surprise to discover that Richler received a similar letter dated July 28, 1996. He altered a few details — including changing a single letter in the real-life student’s name — but otherwise the two documents are effectively the same.

In a sense, Richler was constantly mining his own archive. And what an archive. Few Canadian writers achieved his stature as a novelist, and fewer still turned out so much journalism and literary criticism. Beginning in 1968 with Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports, Richler published a dozen works of nonfiction. His last, On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It, arrived in bookstores three weeks after his death in 2001. As he acknowledged in Hunting Tigers, his subjects drew on a triptych of interlocking themes: “Jewish experience, a concern with literary matters, and the changing Canadian scene.”

While Richler underplayed the primacy of this work —“As I am a writer vain enough to think my real office is to write fiction, these essays represent time out”— the Calgary collection attests to the breadth of his non-fiction. His book reviews are especially noteworthy. The voice that emerges in these pieces — far too many of which remain uncollected — is not wholly distinct from the fiction, particularly Barney’s Version. At times, the reviews read like rehearsals for that voice: chatty, confiding, full of high sentence but never obtuse. Richler’s literary assessments were shrewd and nuanced, as was the manner in which his reading of contemporary novels informed the direction and shape of his own titles. In a review of John Barth’s Sabbatical, which appeared in the June 1982 issue of Saturday Review, Richler wrote, “For all its self-consciousness, plentiful footnotes pedantic or ponderous, and showy literary references, Sabbatical has been built on a frame of very stale convention.” It’s a measure of Barney’s Version’s sturdier structure that his own footnotes elide the metafictional (and mostly American) thumb warring of the day.

Speaking of Americans: on my last morning at the archive, I discovered a typewritten page titled “A Week in the Life of Ronald Crump.” What follows is a satirical review of Trump: The Art of the Deal, written in the form of a diary: “9 A.M. I take the private elevator down to my office in Crump Tower. Dorothy, my executive assistant, brings me Time magazine. I’m on the cover again. Next week I’m going to be on the cover of Forbes and now both Fortune and Sixty Minutes are after me. Ordinary people fail to understand how intensely I dislike personal publicity.”

If only. The review, retitled “A Day in the Life of Ronald Crump” and published in the April 1988 issue of GQ, proves a remarkably astute ventriloquism, scathing and sleek. Crump bemoans the “hug-a-tree wackos” opposed to his “Great Wall of America condos,” while fretting over delays on his own renovations: “Will the lake we’re laying into the living room be ready in time for our housewarming party, to which we’ve already invited some of the hottest people in town?” It’s not hard to imagine what Richler might have made of this present moment: a world deformed by climate collapse and forever wars, our newsfeeds routinely assailed by the tyrannical eructations and ballroom bluster of the Donald, Part Deux. Here in Calgary, amid book bans, transphobic legislation, a forthcoming anti-immigration referendum, and petitions calling for Alberta’s independence —“I, for one,” he wrote in Hunting Tigers, “would be immensely saddened if Canada were to fragment and become a North American Balkans”— I return to Richler for his bite. A sense of humour helps, and anger too.