978-0-7735-3355-4 April 2008
Of his prospective biography, Oscar Wilde said it "lends a new terror to death." There are two reasons authors, especially famous ones, dread the genre. First, literary biographies get too much wrong; second, they get too much right. Both occurrences are inevitable; both go with the territory.
Speaking of territory, Reinhold Kramer's Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain, covers a lot of it. There's the usual stuff (growing up on St. Urbain St.); some new stuff (the influences of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth); and some unnecessary stuff (Richler owned a stationary bike he never used).
At times, Kramer can make too much of things. He speculates, for instance, that if Richler hadn't acquired a disdain for bourgeois culture as a young man in Paris, his writing might not have amounted to anything. I'm speculating, too, but my guess is that finding something to be disdainful of was never going to be a problem for Richler.
Still, all this adds up, in Kramer's new biography, to a thorough and engaging portrait of the artist as a troublemaker and vice versa. Richler was an unlikely artist, too. He had no theories about writing; as Kramer points out, what he had, instead, was "a wonderful pudding of detail." In Mordecai Richler: Leaving St.Urbain, the focus is appropriately and painstakingly on those details.
This is the third book to be published about Richler since his death in 2001 and, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention I wrote one of the other two. As a consequence, I have occasionally been sought out as a resident Richler expert. Now, I'm officially off the hook. From now on, if there's a question - ask Kramer.
A professor of English in Brandon, Man., Kramer is an academic writer who thankfully sidesteps academic jargon. This book is clearly a labour of love as well as scholarship, and that shows in the research, which is exhaustive, without ever becoming exhausting for the reader.
Kramer has talked to or gleaned material from Richler's family, friends and colleagues, though Richler's detractors, of which there were and still are many, don't get much say. Kramer's most valuable resource is the Richler papers, housed in the University of Calgary archives. It's a gold mine, and Kramer uses it to full advantage.
A little like one of Richler's long, later novels (Joshua Then and Now, Solomon Gursky Was Here), Kramer's biography starts and ends strong and occasionally sags in the middle. Richler was much more interesting, after all, as a Duddy Kravitz-style striver, given to youthful pretensions - sporting a beret and eschewing capital letters à la e.e. cummings - than he was as a distinguished author, downing expensive scotch and negotiating $480,000 for a screenplay.
What was most remarkable about Richler was his evolution from an impoverished, smartass kid into a self- educated, versatile writer. (He never stopped being a smartass, of course.) As Kramer demonstrates, Richler had an uncanny knack for reading the right books, choosing the right enemies (the hypocritical, the self-important, the suck-ups) and making the right artistic decisions.
His instinct, his sheer chutzpah, when it came to literature, was irreproachable. He figured out, on his own, that he'd have to drop the earnest, existential blather he'd picked up in Europe, much of which ended up in his early work, in order to become a top-notch novelist. He didn't start out funny either, as Kramer explains, but his youthful cynicism matured into an original comic vision.
Richler's life story, while compelling, even inspiring, was never sensational and, to his credit, Kramer resists the urge to dig for dirt, a routine practice in literary biographies these days. Even Richler's "shocking secret" - he witnessed his mother cheating on his father - is treated matter-of-factly. And while it may explain a few of the more outrageous portraits of mothers in his novels, it hardly devastated Richler.
Richler repeatedly claimed his fiction was just that, fiction; about this, he repeatedly lied. Kramer's biography details how unabashedly Richler transformed the rather ordinary stuff of his life into the extraordinary stuff of his fiction. "The 'roman-à-clef' impulse never left (him)," Kramer writes.
In this regard, Richler resembled one of his literary heroes, Isaac Babel, who wrote: "I have no imagination ... I can't invent. I have to know everything down to the last vein, otherwise I can't write a thing. My motto is authenticity."
Kramer also sets out to find out everything about his subject - "down to the last vein." Of course, no one can know everything about another person - not in life or literary biography. That said, Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain is an authentic depiction of one of this country's best and most enduring writers.
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