Mordecai Richler reminds us that culture doesn`t have to be good for you MORDECAI RICHLER is one of Canada`s most celebrated authors. He has won two Governor General`s Awards: a joint award for the novel Cocksure and the essay collection Hunting Tigers Under Glass in 1968, and for the novel St. Urbain`s Horseman in 1971. Among his many other works are the novels The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959), The Incomparable Atuk (1963), Joshua Then and Now (1980), and Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989), the essay collections Shovelling Trouble (1972) and The Great Comic Book Heroes (1978), and the children`s book Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975). Daniel Richter spoke with Mordecai Richter about his most recent essay collection, Broadsides (1990), on the TV Ontario program "Imprint," from which this interview has been transcribed. Daniel Richter: Mr. Richter, welcome. Mordecai Richter: Thank you. Good to be here. DR: I want you to know that nobody else on this program would take on the challenge of interviewing you. I`ve since heard that at the CBC you`re equally notorious as being perhaps the worst interview in Canada. Is this an achievement of sorts? MR: I think it is, and I`d like to keep it that way. DR: I hope we can turn this around just a little bit. You`ve just come back from England where you attended the Booker Prize ceremonies. I was rooting for you, but I didn`t expect you to win. MR: Well, I didn`t expect to win going over, but then it became very tantalizing because I went from seven-to-one with the bookies to 11-to-four, and the most money was bet on me; but they all lost. DR: Did you have any interest in there? MR: No, I`m very superstitious about that, 1 wouldn`t bet on myself But the thing is, there`s this big dinner, which is on TV, and there`s a lot of hype. The decision is not made by the judges until six o`clock and you`re not supposed to know until nine o`clock; but you know by about seven-thirty or eight. You watch where the TV cameras are pointing - they have a sure instinct for these things - and also the rumour was that [A. S.] Byatt would win. I`m sure that it [Possession] is a very good novel, although 1 haven`t read it. DR: People look at the Booker as a healthy thing to be nominated for... MR: Well, I hadn`t published a novel for about 10 years, so it`s done a lot for me, there`s a lot of publicity. In the short term, just being on the short list does a hell of a lot for sales. DR: I guess that you weren`t insulted that you didn`t win, but you were understandably - I say understandably -insulted about not having made the short list for the Governor General`s Award last year. MR: I think they`re the ones who have to answer for that, not me; I don`t feel compelled to defend my work. I was on a Governor General`s Award committee, with Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence, and we had no scores to settle, and we weren`t consumed by envy. I`ve never heard of these three writers [on the 1989 short list: Ann Copeland, Paul Quarrington, Helen Weinzweig] and I do feel that envy probably entered into it; or some kind of malice, I don`t know. I think Leon Rooke [A Good Baby] should have been on the list as well. But, so it goes. DR: Do you sense that there`s a change in the climate, a change in Canadians` attitude to you among writers and critics? Has the worm turned? MR: Turned which way? DR: Against you, in a sense. I don`t want to give any credence to Carole Corbeil, who wrote that semi-libellous, semi-hilarious piece in This Magazine last year, but she did say a couple of things that had merit. She felt that satire - I`m reading from her article - "works if there`s a double hinge, if the outrage is based on what could be a positive vision. " She doesn`t think that you have a positive vision in your writing, especially about Canada; she thinks that it`s egotistical, hinged on a sense of superiority over others; and 1 think people feel that you`ve become contemptuous, perhaps. MR: No, I don`t feel that`s the case. However, I`ve taken a lot of potshots at people and institutions here, so I`m certainly fair game myself. I don`t object to that. DR: There were other things. The Globe and Mail ventured that Solomon Gursky Was Here "is impossible to read in one sitting"; the Toronto Star had a kind of half-hearted attempt at saying you hadn`t trotted out anything new. Do you sense people are becoming tired of reading you? MR: It doesn`t seem to me to be the case. The novel did sell very well, and it had a better reception in the States and in England than it did here. But I`m not complaining about this. As I said, I think I`m fair game, I never set out to ingratiate myself with anyone; I`m not running for office, and so I write as I please. But I don`t think my writing is charged with contempt at all. I have great regard for all those people I write about, but possibly I celebrate certain aspects of human behaviour that other people would prefer not to know about. DR: There was a piece in Gentleman`s Quarterly recently - I don`t know who convinced you to do it - that showed you standing in line with a bunch of models, and it was accompanied by some pretty contemptuous remarks about models. You remarked that they were illiterate... MR: But that wasn`t contemptuous, that was a factual account of what happened! DR: I read Broadsides, I enjoyed much of it, but I felt that there were certain innocent puppies you were drowning unnecessarily. I mean people like Patti Reagan, why bother to take on Patti Reagan or authors of self-help books? They seem like innocent victims of your contempt. MR: Patti Reagan shouldn`t be publishing at all, she`s trading on her father`s dubious name, and I just felt someone should take a shot at her. DR: Some times it`s hilarious - You talk about Shirley MacLaine, for example, and an affair she had with a Russian film director. You write "They didn`t just have another affair, but a summit meeting. `What fascinated each of us,` she said, `more than anything was the undeniable truth that our relationship was analogous to the conflict that Russians and Americans were experiencing with each other on the global level."` There`s no doubt that it`s hilarious, but sometimes one feels that you`re not picking on people your own size. MR: Well, there are pieces in that book about Hemingway, about Cheever, about [S. J.] Perelman, there are all kinds of pieces in the book. DR: Some of them very affectionate, it is a mixed bag. MR: Well, maybe I am a bit of a bully. DR: I`ll reserve comment on that one. I want to bring up a serious question. Most of the time I really disagree with your critics, but sometimes I`m not so surprised. For example, people have said you don`t write about women so well, you`ve even admitted it. There are descriptions of women that permeate Solomon Gursky Was Here where what you describe first is, as it were, that which arrives first: the bosomy ladies in various permutations. You also write that you were once invited to be a writer-in-residence at an Australian university. The invitation was addressed to "Ms. Mordecai Richler," and you wrote back that you`d like to come, but you wouldn`t know what to wear. MR: That`s right. I thought it was a very humorous way to deal with a silly letter. DR: You refer at one point to "officiously cheerful stewardesses..." MR: Stop right there. Why do you find that objectionable? DR: I think that in the modem feminist sensibility people find that objectionable. I think they find that kind of old-fashioned. MR: Well, I am a very old-fashioned man. I don`t find that objectionable at all. I don`t attack ladies any more than I do men. DR: That is true. I just think that when you attack women, or when