Mordecai

Author Essay

That summer he turned his thoughts to one man he singularly admired. He proposed to Dianna Symonds, the latest editor of the “new dazzling” Saturday Night, that he expand another commission – a piece for a book of writings about Pierre Trudeau – into a longer reflection for the magazine on his thirty-year-plus relationship with the retired prime minister. “I first met Pierre Trudeau back in November, 1967,” he wrote in “The Man behind the Mania,” of the lunch in Ottawa hosted by his friends Bernard and Sylvia Ostry, then an influential couple in the capital. Relating half a dozen more encounters, including a strange meal in the presence of Maggie Trudeau during the dissolution of that marriage, and saying only that “we usually lunch in Montreal once a year,” he notably didn’t quote any private conversations. For someone occasionally accused by important friends of making unapproved use of private remarks in his column – “You never said it was off-the-record,” Richler had snapped at John Lynch-Staunton after a tale told over drinks showed up in the National Post – such discretion was surprising. But Pierre Trudeau wasn’t anyone else; like, perhaps, John Kenneth Galbraith, he was that rarest of creatures – a man Mordecai Richler naturally deferred to. “We are not intimates, or even friends, but merely acquaintances,” he said, with similar deference. The piece radiated the kind of respect for a Canadian public figure that he was famous for not evidencing in his writings. The only time “we exchanged harsh words,” he admitted, was that Sussex Drive lunch during the October Crisis. Had the prime minister really needed to impose the War Measures Act? he asked. A buzzer, alerting an irritated Trudeau to leave for question period in parliament, kept the exchange between the two Montrealers from growing more heated.
 
“The Man behind the Mania” ran as the cover story for the September 22 issue of Saturday Night. The timing couldn’t have been more fortunate for the magazine; Pierre Trudeau died six days later. His body lay in state on Parliament Hill for two days before being transferred by train to Montreal’s city hall, men, women and children lining the tracks between the cities to pay tribute. On October 3 a state funeral was held at Notre-Dame Basilica, with three thousand gathering in and around the church and millions watching on live television. The public outpouring had no equal in Canadian history.
 
A sense of passing time was in the air. Between requests for prefaces and offers of honorary degrees, the summer and fall of 2000 saw Richler being celebrated in a manner befitting his stature, and that perhaps reflected an emerging concern that he too might not be around much longer. In his commencement speech at McGill, where he received an honorary degree, he slagged the university for its former quotas that limited Jews, while also making fun of his meagre high-school average, which would have failed to gain him entry even as a Gentile.