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Anecdotes and tributes flow freely

The world lost a curmudgeon with a big heart and a massive talent yesterday with the death of Mordecai Richler. In his novels and essays he pricked pretensions and created very human characters struggling to harmonize their psyches with their environments.

He was, according to Margaret Atwood, a trailblazer. Likening him to a "grumpy, scathing Diogenes" searching for an honest man, she said "a major light has gone out." To her, "Mordecai seemed so permanent, so substantial, so on top of things, so much to be depended on when each new hot-air blimp loomed into view, that it's difficult to believe in his mortality."

Mortality came with a thud to friends, family and readers when Mr. Richler died suddenly from cancer. He had been ill for some time, but the end came sooner than anybody expected.

Jack Rabinovitch, founder and benefactor of the Giller Prize, struggled to compose himself as he spoke of the man he had known since both attended Baron Byng High School in Montreal.

"When Doris [his late wife after whom the Giller Prize is named] died, he said she had a nose for the fraudulent," remembered Mr. Rabinovitch. "But he had the wit and the imagination to satirize those things. He always thought of himself as an honest witness to the times in which he lived and that is his epitaph. That's about all I can say right now. It is too sad."

Novelist Barbara Gowdy, who once declared that there was only one Madonna, one God and one Mordecai, said: "I knew he was sick, but I'm still in a state of shock. It's always stunning when royalty falls . . . and he was literary royalty."

She recounted the tale of her first face-to-face meeting with this literary lion at a writers function in New York City. "I saw him in the corner of the room, flirting with a beautiful woman and the two of them were laughing," Ms. Gowdy remembered.

"I thought cynically, 'Oh great, there's another famous writer fooling around while he's on the road.' Then later that morning I heard the woman say to an acquaintance, 'Hello, I'm Florence Richler,' and I was quite stunned that this glowing, flirtatious woman was actually his wife," Ms. Gowdy said with a chuckle. "It happened at a time when I was feeling kind of cynical, and my cynicism collapsed after that."

Broadcaster and Globe and Mail columnist Peter Gzowski, a friend since the 1950s when he was an editor at Maclean's magazine and Mr. Richler was a starving writer, remembers Mr. Richler offering him money and advice rather than the other way around. "What I will miss the most," Mr. Gzowski said, is "that voice over in the corner crying nonsense, pointing out the foibles and being outrageous and very warm in many ways too. It is hard to think of a world where he isn't."

Mr. Gzowski acknowledged that Mr. Richler was always a difficult interview for him. "He never understood that promoting books or doing radio interviews was a game. If I asked him a question, to which I obviously knew the answer, he would tear me to shreds or start teasing me about how he had my picture on the wall. He never understood the game and wasn't interested in playing it."

Bernard Ostry, a long-time friend of Mr. Richler, said their friendship had nothing to do with his professional life. "The thing that mattered most to me was that he was a good person. He was a friend. He was an extraordinarily loving and doting husband and father."

Mr. Ostry said that people have an impression of Mr. Richler as a "heavy-drinking grouchy old bugger who was nothing but a pain in the ass," but the Richler he knew was incredibly loyal and a man who would do anything to protect or defend people who were in trouble.

Saying Mr. Richler was one of the most honest people he knew, Mr. Ostry said "he never forgot his roots whether it was Montreal, the ghetto, being Jewish or being poor." His "irreverent sense of humour" and the fact that he didn't suffer fools gladly often got him into trouble, according to Mr. Ostry, but that sense of humour was wonderful both in itself and because he never took himself too seriously as a writer and a novelist.

"Mordecai was disciplined about everything in his life," Mr. Ostry said. "He got up at the crack of dawn and went straight to the typewriter. It didn't matter what had happened the night before. In the late afternoon, he was in a pub or bar drinking with buddies whether it was in Magog or across from his flat in Montreal or at a club in London. It was part of the routine."

First the shock, then the tears and finally the tributes to Mordecai Richler came from those who knew him well and those who only knew him as a writer and a larger-than-life personality. Everybody has a Mordecai anecdote.

Novelist Graeme Gibson remembers that if people were "earnestly and honourably and sometimes self-importantly doing all kinds of things other than writing, Mordecai would puncture it."

In his own case, Mr. Gibson once wrote a letter appealing for money for some cause or other and Mr. Richler wrote back saying, 'Graeme, Graeme you sound like the United Jewish appeal.' " That is not to suggest that Mr. Richler was ungenerous, but that he camouflaged it under a crusty exterior and kept his good deeds very private.

"He was a good writer, a real pro," Mr. Gibson said, "and he went his own way and on the whole it was a very decent way."

Patrick Martin, The Globe's Comment editor and former Mideast correspondent, recalled spending time with the Richlers in Jerusalem.

"It was the fall of 1992, Mordecai came over to research an autobiographical book that included a section on Jerusalem -- a city he didn't know very well at all. But that never stopped him.

"We took him around to several spots but my favourite was the day we walked the Stations of the Cross together. There's Mordecai, the quintessential Montreal Jew, traipsing around after these Franciscans who led a walk of pilgrims every Friday afternoon. The priests would stop at each station, explain the significance of whatever Christ was doing at this point in his Crucifixion and then wait while everyone prayed.

"Mordecai made it until the seventh station [there are 12] then blurted out: 'I can't stand it any more. I have to have a drink.' My wife and I looked at each other -- it's hard to find alcohol in the middle of the Old City, where devout Christians, Muslims and Jews frown on the stuff -- but Mordecai was insistent. 'Where's the nearest bar?' he asked. "We led him and Florence through the maze of back streets, out the New Gate and into the Notre Dame Hotel. It's run by the Vatican but is the only place within a mile that had booze. He ordered a triple Scotch, kicked off his shoes and gazed out at the Old City, concluding that if the people of Jerusalem drank a little more they might not be fighting over the place so much."

Louise Dennys, his editor and publisher, said Mr. Richler lured her to Canada 30 years ago when "a young Canadian I had fallen in love with" gave her a copy of St. Urbain's Horseman to read. "As a literary courtship, it succeeded admirably," Ms. Dennys said yesterday. "Thirty years later I'm still here" and still with the same man.

Ms. Dennys said she came to love and appreciate Mr. Richler. "We had met over the years and he knew that I had an enormous admiration for his work and when I started Knopf Canada, he asked me if I would like to become his editor and publisher."

His instincts as a writer were second to none, she said. "One of the reasons he was beloved is that he was always tough-minded. He was unafraid of seeing things as they are and letting us see them in the same way. His voice in his manuscripts was always original, sustained and brave and he could tell a hell of a good story with the most human of characters."

In the end, it will be his talent as a writer that will ensure that he has a legacy that extends beyond family, friends and colleagues. It is readers who will keep his name and his characters alive in his fiction and his causes in his essays.

Novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe saw a world outside Saskatoon after reading his novels. Saying that "the man had an indelible stamp," Mr. Vanderhaeghe said you "couldn't open a book by Richler and read a page and not know that he had written it. And that is what we say about all great writers."

Journalist John Fraser says the thing he loved the most about Mr. Richler was the fact that he was such a political animal. "He didn't miss a trick and I think this all came to the surface in the extraordinary battle he had with the separatists," Mr. Fraser said from London. "He was the only English Canadian who identified the dark secret of anti-Semitism lurking at the root of Catholic Quebec and he fought it with such ferocity inside Quebec and outside in The New Yorker."

Saying that Mr. Richler was relentless and sometimes unfair, Mr. Fraser said that his attacks were a significant factor in defusing some of the intellectual might of Quebec separatism. "He robbed them of the purity of their righteousness. No one else could have done it. And he did it from the perspective of St. Urbain Street."

As for Mr. Gzowski, he loves the old anecdote in which Mr. Richler is sitting in an airport with Montrealer William Weintrub. "Bill tells him he has just turned 40. And Mordecai said: 'You can't be 40, my father is 40.' " Mr. Gzowski says he remembered that story when he heard that Mr. Richler was dead. "All I could think about is, he can't be dead, my father is dead. We are all still young together."