Nick: A Montreal Life

Bruce Grainger is head of the Public Services Department, Macdonald
Library, McGill University.

Nick Auf der Maur was a journalist and newspaper columnist, a Montreal
City Councillor, and a man about town with an extremely wide range of
contacts. His habit was to rise late and spend his time in a few
favorite bars smoking, drinking, reading newspapers, and conversing
loudly with friends and strangers alike. He had the distinction of being
imprisoned under the War Measures Act in 1970, but grew steadily more
conservative to the point of running unsuccessfully for Parliament as a
Mulroney Conservative.

This collection of Nick’s engaging columns in the Montreal Gazette
gives a good measure of the man, especially through those columns that
describe his losing battle with cancer. Also included are anecdotes of
Nick by such national politicians as Warren Allmand, John
Lynch-Staunton, and Brian Mulroney and by such media people as Josh
Freed, Nathalie Petrowski, L. Ian MacDonald, Conrad Black, Allan
Fotheringham, Aislin (Terry Mosher), Mark Phillips, Mark Starowicz,
Brian Stewart, and Anthony Wilson-Smith. Their warm and touching
tributes are enhanced by Aislin’s cartoons as well as by many
photographs of Nick in different stages of his life, with family,
friends, and colleagues. Nick’s lifestyle caused his death, as the
title of one of his last columns made clear: “Kurt Cobain Had a
Shotgun, and I Had cigarettes.”