Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain

Jules Lewis is a professional writer who lives in Toronto.

All that really counts about a writer, Mordecai Richler argued in his essay “Paid Liars,” is the work. The life is irrelevant. Yet, since his death in 2001, four books exploring Richer’s life have appeared. M.G. Vassanji has recently published Mordecai Richler, part of Penguin Canada’s “Extraordinary Canadians” series. Then there’s The Last Honest Man, an oral biography compiled by Michael Posner, and Mordecai and Me, a personal memoir/literary biography by Joel Yanofsky—both insightful and enjoyable reads but lacking a comprehensive overview. The most definitive so far, Leaving St. Urbain, is a traditional biography: thick, wide-ranging, substantially researched.

It’s not surprising that its author, Brandon University English professor Reinhold Kramer, disagrees with Richler’s argument. Richler’s finest work, Kramer writes, was “sawn, still bleeding, from real life.”

Kramer follows Richler from his angst-ridden Montreal childhood on St. Urbain Street to post-war Paris and Spain as a cocky aspiring novelist, to London where, at 28, he found his voice with his fourth novel, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and finally back to Montreal in the early 1970s. He traces nearly everycharacter and event in Richler’s fiction back to a character and event in his life. For instance, in Barney’s Version, Barney Panofsky falls in love with his third wife at his wedding to his second wife—an incident only slightly altered from Richler’s actual meeting of his second (and last) wife, Florence Mann. Or in the novel Cocksure, it’s revealed that a scene featuring a school Christmas play was inspired by a concert Richler attended at his son Noah’s elementary school. There is an element of redundancy as again and again it’s pointed out that “no matter what sophisticated literary structures Richler built on top of his foundations, the foundations were almost always roman-a-clef.”

Thankfully, Kramer leaves aside theoretical or psychoanalytic interpretations of Richler’s novels. Leaving St. Urbain is primarily a study of the social and historical contexts that shaped his life and work. It is a readable and useful portrait of English Canada’s most provocative writer.

“With few exceptions,” Richler wrote, “the lives of writers strike me as boring.” Leaving St. Urbain demonstrates that Richler himself was one of those exceptions.