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In his first book, Booker Prize winner Yann Martel argues, “People who don’t share the same poetics can’t be real friends.” In his character’s example, to not like Neil Armstrong or the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins is to not like the character. In Canadian letters, Mordecai Richler is equally divisive. He’s loved or hated, although those who hate him probably haven’t read his best work. If a fiercely beating heart, generosity of spirit, loyalty, introspection, humour and a good nose for bullshit aren’t values you seek in fiction, then we’re on opposite sides of a very tall Can Lit fence. On one side of the fence are the treasured and turgid milltown sagas, farm incest novels (excuse the redundancy) and community portraits du jour. Boring writers are almost certain to make for boring biographies. Not so for Richler or for Reinhold Kramer’s new Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain, the first in-depth biography of the talented and exacting Richler.

The moral courage and biting satire which fuel both Richler’s fiction and his non-fiction add to a long list of factors which make his life interesting. As a writer, Richler gambled and won. Kramer’s bio rarely loses sight of the fact that Richler’s life is a tale of self-imposed rags to self-generated riches. Richler’s flight from the parochial, uncultured Canada of the 1950s to write in Europe saw him endure years of poverty before success. He had to pawn his typewriter to make the fare to leave Ibiza (and that was one step ahead of the police). For fare to Paris, he once sold most of his clothes. His diet of cigarettes and hash, not fruits and vegetables, actually gave him scurvy. Eventually, his early poverty and dedication were replaced by a lucrative mid-career with plenty of film and television work in London and his only success with Canada’s GGs. By the time he finally returned to Canada, the film version of Joshua Then and Now would be the most expensive Canadian film made to date. More important than his commercial success is the deepening honesty and courage of his maturing fiction. Kramer shares in the critical consensus which holds Richler’s first long novel, the 1971 St. Urbain’s Horseman , to be his best, and a sea change in his writing. According to Kramer, Richler originally intended to have the novel, that quintessential portrait of conflicted adult emotions, released on his fortieth birthday.

Kramer’s biography is distinguished by the months he spent buried in the Richler archives at the University of Calgary. Kramer nicely balances thorough scholarship with attention to larger patterns, however credible, within Richler’s life. Early drafts, unpublished novels and Richler’s countless letters make Kramer’s the first definitive biography (compared to Michael Posner’s 2004 oral biography The Last Honest Man). Highlights of Kramer’s textual archaeology include illustrations that Richler too was once unpublished and a little fawning. Unbelievably, he wrote a(n unanswered) fan letter to Morley Callaghan. Before a sobering if not sober lunch with E.M. Forster, Richler suffered from a dose of the ee cummings clap, writing in lower-case of his groovy times in “yurop.” Kramer’s best conclusions all stem from this archival work, including his important observation that Richler was a Romantic before he became a satirist.

Like any good biographer, Kramer couples a good nose for scandal with an admirable sense of decorum. He lists but doesn’t dwell on the salacious details of Richler’s varied and itinerant life—his romance with his high school English teacher, the European girlfriends who got abortions, the feuds with other writers, the rented French chateau which had two couples at the start of summer but just one by its tumultuous end (Richler and his second wife Florence, the love of his life).

Less compelling are Kramer’s generalizations about the motives for Richler’s work. Kramer ably contextualizes the 1930s and 40s of Richler’s youth and quietly points out discrepancies between some of Richler’s claims and his facts, but the largest argument Kramer attempts to make is unverifiable if not downright unwelcome. Kramer repeatedly equates Richler’s writing not simply to his life (as does Robert Thacker’s recent biography of Alice Munro), but more specifically to his childhood and family life in Jewish Montreal. Regarding Richler’s rise to cultural prominence and the unease he eventually had towards attendant generosity from the wealthy Bronfman family (a family he would fictionalize as the Gurskys), Kramer claims that Richler’s reluctance to accept their generosity was due to, “The poisoned memories of rich Uncle Joe lording it over his father in the 1940s.” Such a unidimensional and unverifiable claim forgets all of Kramer’s own attention to Richler’s increasing independence and his lifelong ambition to make his own way. Richler may well have simply preferred his own millions to the Bronfman billions.

Anyone who has ever waded through a boring Can Lit course already knows the obvious pun on the word canon. To the eye, but not the ear, the word is quite different from the militaristic cannon. Slogging through a typical piece of Can’t Lit, however, one knows that a country’s canon is indeed a war of many battles, and not one we should neglect. Richler has written two of Canada’s five best novels, St. Urbain’s Horseman, and Barney’s Version. The latter makes me cry every time I read it, and the weeping starts earlier and earlier with each rereading. No other Canadian has written with as much heart, wit and hope. Reinhold Kramer has chosen good company.

Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain
Reinhold Kramer
McGill-Queen’s University Press
498 pp.
$39.95
ISBN 978-0773533554