May 042011
 

Foran’s Version

A Review of Mordecai: The Life and Times by Charles Foran

By Darryl Whetter


Mordecai: The Life and Times
Charles Foran
738 pp.
Knopf Canada
$39.95 hardcover


Author Charles ForanUntil Charles Foran’s recent Mordecai: The Life and Times, the various biographies of Mordecai Richler suggest that an interesting subject for biography does not necessarily an interesting biography make. Great lives don’t always inspire great books. In the decade since Richler’s death in 2001, four books entered a biography’s race between early market share, thoroughness and accuracy.  Globe and Mail journalist Michael Posner pre-excused the scattershot tone of his 2004 The Last Honest Man by subtitling it An Oral Biography. Posner splices together 150 interviews to raise questions (How much did he drink? Why the rift with his brother? Did he really seduce his high-school English teacher?) but refuses to affix any answers. The fatuousness Richler often mocked in the CanLit establishment didn’t leave him completely ignored by the Canadian academy. Reinhold Kramer’s Mordecai Richler: Leaving St Urbain (2008) examines many of the same formative experiences as Foran’s (the fall from Jewish orthodoxy, his parents’ loveless marriage and rare divorce) but also suffers the congenital blind spot of interpretation and begins to read a creative life of decades through a few childhood events. Like Foran, M.G. Vassanji is first and foremost a novelist. Vassanji’s peripatetic life within diasporic and intellectual communities could have made his 2009 Extraordinary Canadians: Mordecai Richler the most attentive to Richler’s dual citizenships as Canadian and a member of the Jewish diaspora, as Canadian novelist and cosmopolitan writer. However, Penguin’s insistence on a short biography denied Vassanji the archival time of the Kramer or the Foran and doesn’t find it as emboldened by extensive quotations from letters and manuscripts.

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Jan 302011
 

Jacques Callot's "The Seven Deadly Sins:Envy"

1. “When Writers Hate”

Morrissey is right, we hate it when our friends become successful. Gore Vidal is even more honest, confessing, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Near the end of the film Sideways, the rivalrous friendship of Jack and Miles is echoed by the novel Miles has assigned one of his young pupils to read aloud, John Knowle’s 1959 A Separate Peace, a tale of envy, perhaps even murderous envy, between schoolboy friends. Shakespeare’s Iago is envy on two legs. Adrift in a life before talking cures, support groups or good yoga, Cain walked alone with envy.

A fifteenth-century image of Cain and Abel

In life and art, friendship often oscillates between admiration and envy. Two recent shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art showcased the reciprocal rivalry between Picasso and Matisse, as well as Cézanne and Pissarro. The 2004 documentary DiG!, chronicles the not-so-friendly rivalry between the bands The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols. When envy worms its way into writing, particularly into the novel, subject and medium collide. Writing is envy’s preferred medium.

Hiroshighe's "Great Bridge, Sudden Shower at Atake" and Van Gogh's (Later) "The Bridge in the Rain""

Writing slides someone else’s thoughts through our brain, and those thoughts come through the public medium of language. In the incomplete neuroscience of thought, writers and visual artists can admire and envy each other: humans may think more quickly through images, but, some contend, we think more specifically through language. And when we do think visually, we don’t necessarily see another artist’s brushstrokes, another photographer’s composition. When we think verbally, however, we think through the shared property of words and the evolving codes of language.  Words are only made by humans, whereas the stuff of visual art—color, texture, scale, shape, line, etc.—partially pre-exist in the world. When this latent alterity of language is combined with the novel, which many regard as the ideal genre of the self, we hold in our laps the perfect testing ground for one of life’s dirty little secrets. We hate it when our friends become successful. We do, at least a little.

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