FEATURE: ‘The award I always coveted was the Cy Young’

Jacob Richler with his mother Florence in the Mordechai Richler Reading Room at Concordia  University in 2013. JANICE ARNOLD PHOTO

On March 12, 2015, Mordecai Richler was named an honorary citizen of Montreal, and the public library on Park Avenue renamed Bibliothèque Mordecai-Richler.

The following is excerpted from a speech delivered by his son at the dedication ceremony.

Just last month in the Globe and Mail, I came across yet another story about how my father was unlikely to ever be honoured by the City of Montreal. And I got to thinking about that gazebo on the mountain, and what my father would have made of it. More particularly, if he would have wanted it at all. The line of thinking unexpectedly brought me back to a fall night in 1997, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, where my father had just won the Giller Prize for his novel Barney’s Version – and with it, collected a $25,000 cheque from his old friend from Baron Bing High School, Jack Rabinovitch.

Upon taking the microphone Dad changed the topic to a preferred subject – professional sports. “Thank you,” he said. “But the award I always coveted was the Cy Young.”

This got me thinking. Maybe the sundry initiatives to honour him were in fact on the wrong track. And the best thing to do to get Montreal city council out of its self-created bind was for me to ring up my old high school friend from Westmount, Geoff Molson, and see if just possibly his Montreal Canadiens might step in instead. What I was picturing was my father’s favourite old cardigan hanging from the rafters of the Bell Centre with the retired sweaters of the rest of Nos Glorieux – ideally, right alongside the one belonging to Jean Beliveau, who my Dad so enjoyed rooming with on his last salmon fishing trip to Newfoundland.

Admittedly this seemed like a long shot. So I returned to considering the proposals already fielded. 

One imaginative citizen suggested putting my father’s name on the Metro station that now bears that of the Abbé Lionel Groulx. There was poetic justice to the suggestion. But it didn’t feel quite right. The problem being that my father had never once set foot on the Metro, and didn’t know what it was all about.

By which I don’t mean to suggest he was not resourceful when it came to Montreal transit: for example, I distinctly remember him once faking a bad limp while hailing a taxi, because it was bitterly cold out and he didn’t want to be declined for the fare from our downtown apartment to the Montreal Press Club, just three blocks away. 

Anyway, the suggestion of street name seemed more appropriate. And if it was politically difficult, I thought that I had a solution, plucked straight out of Montreal history. My late friend, the long time city councillor Nick Auf der Maur once explained to me that the reason we have a downtown street with bizarre name of City Councillors was to combat a situation at city hall whereby councillors kept negotiating secret agreements to name streets after each other. Rue City Councillors was the truce – a street named for all of them, to put a stop to the re-naming frenzy once and for all. 

So why not a rue Anglo Novelists? Everyone would understand that it was named for my dad, without it explicitly saying so. The English letters on his sign would be twice the size as the French ones. And as an added bonus, if in the future Montreal were to ever again be inconvenienced with another brilliant English novelist of the politically meddlesome sort, no awkward posthumous recognition would be required, for it would already be in place.

It might have worked – but it was a bit of a clunker. So I am profoundly grateful that at that point Mayor [Denis] Coderre finally entered the fray with a far more elegant and appropriate solution. 

A library. In Mile End.

It’s perfect. And the fact that it’s located in a former Anglican church somehow makes it just a little more so. 

This is a great honour for all of us Richlers – and I thank you especially on my mother’s behalf, Mayor Coderre, for seeing this through in her lifetime. I also want to single out Counc. Marvin Rotrand for his efforts advancing the file. 

And before leaving I want to acknowledge something else. Many people are against this, and since the day my father died – if not before – been vigorously and vocally opposed to this city honouring him in any way at all. Some such people even sit on council. And to all of them I want to say one thing.

Make no mistake, my father loved this city – foibles and all. Maybe foibles especially. Admittedly, places without flaws and conflict are not much fun to write about. But writing about this city kept him happily busy for decades. Not just here, but abroad. And it was his desire and commitment to getting Montreal exactly right in his fiction that forced him to return his family here after two happy decades in London – another fine city, with quite a lot going on that’s worth writing about.

He wrote about this place and shone a spotlight on its flaws precisely because he loved it. He preferred dialogue and impertinent questions to silent assumptions, and thought exposing and discussing painful truths was always better than letting them simmer silently, fomenting prejudice and hatred. In closing I will respectfully suggest that anyone who doesn’t understand all of that has never cared about anything with anything close to the passion or intelligence that my father always brought to the table. 

But if you count yourself in that unfortunate number don’t despair. A solution is at hand. All you need to do is to get yourself a membership card to the Bibliothèque Mordecai-Richler.

Borrow some good books. Read them. Ask questions. Find answers. Share them. And please, pay your late fees.