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Shovelling Trouble

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Reading this collection of essays from 40-plus years ago is a bracing exercise in discovering just how much more artful one had to be as an adversarial pundit in the early 1970s. You couldn't just jab at this or that person, but explain yourself and what you thought. Mordecai Richler never had trouble with that, as "Shovelling Trouble" shows.

A collection of essays and book reviews published in magazines from 1960 through 1970 and published in 1972, "Shovelling Trouble" presents Richler having at everything from Norman Mailer to comic-book ads, explaining his approach to writing at a critical juncture in his career, and expressing more than once a sadness about the fact his literary generation doesn't quite measure up against the famous "Lost Generation" (Hemingway, Picasso, et al) of the 1920s.

This last point comes to the fore in the collection's best essay, "A Sense Of The Ridiculous", Richler's detailed remembrance of his younger days as a writer in the early 1950s in Paris, the city from whence the Lost Generation sprang and whose collective shadow haunted Richler and his mates. "We were not, it's worth noting, true adventurers, but followers of a romantic convention," he writes.

Of the politics and poseurs of that time and place, Richler writes with great amusement and humor, while summoning an atmosphere of quiet, all-encompassing collapse. Walking into a cheap hotel room that once was part of a Wehrmacht brothel, Richler notes, he first would hammer at the door to scare away the rats and ghosts. The ghosts still linger in these pages.

A more pleasant spirit dominates another essay from this collection, "Gordon Craig", about a fellow Richler knew in his Paris days who actually pre-dated the Lost Generation but still lingered around the city in his 80s, outtalking the youngsters with whom he discoursed on matters of art and love. Craig recalls a trip to Soviet Russia: "They're the most shocking prudes, you know. They were scandalized because my secretary was pregnant."

In both of these essays, and in an introductory piece "Why I Write", Richler's command of detail and biting asides reminds you how much non-fiction writing can read like fiction with the right writer at the helm.

The rest of the book is not up to this standard. In "The Holocaust And After" Richler explains his proud, continued hatred for Germans as a Jew. "The Germans are still an abomination to me...I rejoice in the crash of each German Starfighter." Richler then lays out a piercing account of Holocaust suffering, but writes more from the spleen than from the head, especially when denouncing as "immoral" modern entertainments that use the Nazis as stock bad guys rather than sacred figures of deepest evil.

In a later essay, Richler even criticizes Elie Weisel for forgiving the Germans. I think Weisel was in a better place to offer it than a Jew who spent his war years in Quebec.

The essay here that got my back up most was his take on James Bond. It starts out an amusing, straightforward account of Bond's improbable career and author Ian Fleming's constant focus on earlobes in describing Bond villains. But then it becomes a lengthy attack on Fleming for harboring various anti-Semitic views and using them in his characters, with descriptions that echo stock Jewish stereotypes. Richler continues in this vein even as he acknowledges Fleming made a point of saying villains like Goldfinger and Ernst Stavro Blofeld weren't Jews, as if by raising the point Fleming was appealing to the prejudices of his audience anyway. One villain mentioned as having a Jewish bridge partner is enough for Richler to bring up "Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion". It's too much.

The rest of the collection is mostly book reviews documenting assorted literary feuds while asking the pregnant question of if any one of these literary lions will ever produce the equivalent of "Ulysses". It's a question Richler also asks of himself, poignantly, in "Why I Write", realizing the answer may not come in his own lifetime. "Put plainly", he concludes, "nothing helps."