Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what’s left? In its monthly series Should we reread…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. As for Mordecai Richler (1931-2001), does he have many admirers? For decades, he attacked just about everyone, starting with the Jewish community from which he came. Then came the insults against English Canada, too boring for his taste, and finally against French-speaking Quebecers, supposedly anti-Semitic and blinded by nationalism, something he avoided like the plague. The author of Solomon Gursky and World according to Barney still seems swallowed up under the weight of his legendary misanthropy.
Just after his death, on July 3, 2001, the journalist Michel Vastel was able to summarize the ambiguity surrounding this Montreal writer sometimes hidden behind his cigarettes and his glasses of scotch: “If he had only written novels and children’s stories, which made him famous throughout the world, he would have been the best companion. »
This was not the case, because we no longer count the insults and other abrasive remarks that he allowed himself to dampen the atmosphere, regardless of his audience or his interlocutor, student, journalist, writer or figure of the financial elite. Saidye Bronfman, the wife of the powerful Samuel Bronfman of the Seagram company, also tasted his medicine – and had actually sought it out a little. “What a journey for the little guy from rue Saint-Urbain,” she told him during a social event. And he replies: “What a path traveled by the wife of a former smuggler. »
If Mordecai Richler received many honors throughout his career, which began in 1955 with a strongly autobiographical novel, Son of a tiny hero, other distinctions escaped him, a sign of obvious discomfort. Some wanted the Athanase-David Prize for him, the highest literary distinction offered by the government of Quebec, but it was never granted to him. In 1996, during a week devoted to English Canadian literature in Paris, Richler was left off the guest list: political circles on both sides of the Atlantic did not want any bickering.
His contempt for Quebec especially flourished after his return home in 1972, having lived in Europe, mainly in London, after finishing his university studies in 1951. Years spent writing for British television , cut off from the transformations of his hometown… and from his increasingly French-speaking face. According to his detractors, it was a shock from which he never recovered, and largely explains his famous attacks in the magazine The New Yorker which will fuel its (very) bad reputation here.
“He wasted his talent on stupid things, and all that made his life miserable,” regrets Pierre Anctil, professor of history at the University of Ottawa. Not having seen Quebec evolve, he brought back the memory of Lionel Groulx, from the 1930s, the images of a bygone time. » This somewhat toxic nostalgia coupled with a brutal frankness will also earn him some death threats. “Even English Canadians found his remarks [sur le Québec] excessive and basely partisan,” underlines this specialist in Jewish culture.
Far from controversies, close to the works
All this casts doubt on “this great Montreal novelist”, according to Pierre Anctil, dominant figure of a “post-Shoah work, that of the children of immigrants of Jewish origin from Poland, Lithuania, the USSR and also from Germany after the Second World War. Established in Montreal around Saint-Laurent Boulevard, they will not form a homogeneous community, and in the midst of this ferment, Mordecai Richler is already seen as an outsider. His parents separated when he was only 13, something extremely rare at the time, and just read The apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz — several of his novels draw on his own life — only to discover that the student Richler was not an altar boy.
The man who is often compared to Michel Tremblay did not, however, experience the same fate, particularly in Quebec bookstores. “Translate Mordecai Richler as often as you want, I will never read that. » Paul Gagné, translator, has already read this type of comments… and was hardly surprised. With the help of his wife, the late Lori Saint-Martin, and the support of the Boréal publishing house, he translated no less than seven of the author’s most important works, including Joshua And The rider of Saint-Urbain. “I was like everyone else,” remembers Paul Gagné. I thought I knew him because people were talking about him, and I hadn’t read his books already translated. Which was not a bad position to approach this colossal work. Let’s say it: in his novels, there are very few attacks against French Canadians. On the other hand, the theme of the relationship with the father, and with the elders, is very present. »
The view of Paul Gagné and Lori Saint-Martin on the fictional work of Mordecai Richler was crowned with several awards, including that of the Governor General in 2018 for the translation of World according to Barneyas well as in 2015 for Solomon gursky. On the other hand, that of their predecessors above all caused a pushback effect, marked by a Franco-French style testifying to a profound misunderstanding of Canadian and Quebec realities. In The world according to BarneyMaurice “Rocket” Richard becomes “La Fusée”, and “the translator used soccer terminology to apply it to hockey”, continues Paul Gagné astonished, happy that a French publisher, Les Éditions du sous-sol , have acquired the rights to their own translations of Richler’s novels.
It was during a visit to the Turin Book Fair, in Italy, that the writer (scrapbook, Loyal people don’t make the news) and screenwriter (Innocence Project, A family bond) Nadine Bismuth realized her misunderstanding of Mordecai Richler. Italian readers greatly appreciated The world according to Barney, a popularity that intrigued him. She had “a real shock” when she discovered “an authentic Montreal writer who knows how to perfectly portray his city”. He often said that Montreal was the only place in Canada where he could live.
To take a closer look, Nadine Bismuth not only plunged into her universe, but also made it her mission to make it known, selecting around fifteen essays translated by the writer Dominique Fortier and brought together in A certain sense of the ridiculous (Boreal). “In this collection, we really have access to Richler’s daily life, to a small part of his private life, where he recognizes that writing is difficult. But as everyone knows, he had no shortage of contradictions, despising writers who had become public figures, Norman Mailer for example, without obviously being able to look at himself as he was! »
Among the other paradoxes surrounding Richler’s life and work, we of course include his acute awareness of the barriers erected by social classes, as well as an obvious nostalgia for childhood marked by poverty and marginality. Which brings him closer, according to Nadine Bismuth, to Gabrielle Roy. “We perceive something similar in their approach,” she underlines, “a real need to often return to their youth, and this desire to go elsewhere, to go into exile, to finally become writers. » She does not hesitate to make comparisons between Rue Saint-Urbain And Rue Deschambault“two books where we find a lot of tenderness and melancholy”.
For those who would like to put aside Richler’s polemical past and try to forget the language discrepancies of the man who likened the theme song of the Parti Québécois during the November 1976 election to a Nazi song, Pierre Anctil recommends exactly Rue Saint-Urbain“beautiful portraits of his family, of his community, after the Second World War, but without the complexity that we find in Solomon Gursky. In my opinion, it is his masterpiece, a great picture that is cultural, political, economic and literary, but sometimes hard to decode if we do not have certain keys to understanding Jewish culture.”
As for Mordecai Richler, behind his scowl and his provocative quips, he was also difficult to decode. Will his novels and children’s stories one day manage to erase his language differences? “You and I, more than 20 years after his death, several decades after his unfortunate statements during the two referendums, we are still talking about it…” concludes Pierre Anctil.