Listen to the Mockingbird

By Stefan Kanfer

HOME SWEET HOME by Mordecai Richler; Knopf; 291 pages; $16.95

That eminent sport psychologist and voyager Casey Stengel once analyzed the Canadian scene: "Well, you see they have those polar bears up there and lots of fellows trip over them trying to run the bases and they're never much good anymore except for hockey or hunting deer."

Stengel's critique neatly encapsulates a view that has remained unchanged since Voltaire dismissed North America as "a few arpents of snow." Edmund Wilson gamely attempted to make his neighbors fascinating in a historical survey named for the country's national anthem, O Canada (1965). Pauline Johnson, Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan: above the St. Lawrence Seaway these are names from a literary pantheon. Below it, they are authors out of print.

All this has done nothing to discourage Novelist Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now). His 14th book, aptly subtitled My Canadian Album, is a mordant, witty brief for the defense of his homeland. As evidence, the Montreal native offers a series of diverse impressions of Canada's past imperfect and present tense. He lunches with Pierre Trudeau, and remembers an earlier Prime Minister, the gnomic William Lyon Mackenzie King, who "nightly for 22 years sat by his crystal ball, beneath an illuminated portrait of his mum, and rapped with her spirit, seeking guidance on how much to tax, when to call an election and where to send the troops." He ventures toward the Arctic Circle, to Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories, where the big golf tournament starts at midnight and the rule book states, "No penalty assessed when ball carried off by raven." Richler finds ecumenism where others see only ice: on Great Slave Lake, he is told, Indians net vast numbers of pike that end as gefilte fish in Chicago.

Sometimes the author suspects that the whole nation is a theater of the absurd. In the battle between Quebec's French separatists and its anglophone minority, violent verbal gestures are made. The provincial government forbids the use of the English word hamburger; "hambourgeois" is the meat substitute. In Montreal, police become provincial celebrities not by seizing heroin but by impounding 15,000 Dunkin' Donut bags because the printing is not bilingual.

Throughout his travelogue, Richler illuminates general truths with local anecdotes. A grieving memoir reveals the dark side of the immigrant experience and the author's love for his father: the lifelong failure who "came to Montreal as an in fant, his father fleeing Galicia. Pogroms. Rampaging Cossacks. But, striptease shows aside, the only theater my father relished, an annual outing for the two of us, was the appearance of the Don Cossack Choir at the St. Denis Theater. My father would stamp his feet to their lusty marching and drinking songs; his eyes would light up to see those behemoths, his own father's tormentors, prance and tumble onstage. Moses Isaac Richler, who never marched, nor drank, nor pranced."

Richler often attempts to play Canada's mockingbird; in fact, his gibes are counterbalanced by praise. He was an expatriate from 1951 to 1972 and could have stayed in London. Instead, he returned to Montreal because "too many other expatriate Commonwealth writers . . . had been driven in exile to forging fictions set in the distant past, the usually dreaded future, or, indeed, nowhere. Which was sufficient to frighten me into trying home again . . . Six grueling months of benumbing winter; in the absence of spring, a thunderbolt proclaiming summer, overnight as it were; and then our finest season, the autumn, achingly beautiful, the Laurentian hills ablaze with color, the skies a hard deep blue."

Even as he celebrates its beauties, the author never loses sight of his country's insularity: when Playboy Films wanted to produce adult erotica in Toronto, he reports, officials demanded to know how much Canadian content there would be in the features. But Richler also knows that the very tugs and pulls of opposing cultures give the country its alternately appealing and discordant character. "English Canadian nationalists," he concludes, "some of them consumed by blinding anti-Americanism, need only glance at the globe to appreciate that if we are bordered on one side by voracious commercial appetite and a culture of a daunting vitality, we look out on the other on the Gulag Archipelago." And while he regards Quebec's Gallic ethnocentrism as "a nationalist aberration," Richler acknowledges that he "could not live anywhere else in Canada but Montreal . . . the most gracious, cultivated and innovative people in this country are French Canadians."

Richler is a cultivated, irrepressible travel writer. What separates this work from such analyses as Luigi Barzini's The Italiansand Hedrick Smith's The Russians is not the author's insatiable curiosity but his comic despair. Other countries have less promising futures, Richler concedes, but he is certain that even in an epoch of prosperity, Canadians will somehow contrive to be outside with their cold noses pressed against the window. For him, an appearance on a U.S. talk show says it all. His fellow guests were Americans: Irving Stone and George Hamilton. Richler was eager to plug his volume of short stories, The Street. First the bestselling novelist and then the actor with a perpetual tan held forth, glibly. "Now it was my turn to shine," Richler recollects. "Our host, glancing at the studio clock, said, 'Sorry we never got a chance to mention your book.' "

O Canada.

--By Stefan Kanfer

Excerpt

"Whatever its problems, wonderful, demented Yellowknife has more spirit than any other town I know of in Canada. Take the referendum, for instance, called some years back to determine whether or not the town wanted home mail delivery. Yellowknifers voted a resounding 'No,' even though winter temperatures can plunge to 40 below zero, if only because during the long dark months many of them get to meet each other only when they pick up their mail at the post office. And then, a miner, stopped outside the post office by an inquiring photographer from the Yellowknifer and asked what social facility, presently missing, would most enhance the quality of life in town, promptly replied: 'A whorehouse.' "