A Walrus Tribute
We say goodbye to two great men
Charles Stuart Alexander helped bring The Walrus to life. A long-time philanthropist, he established the Chawkers Foundation in 1988 to support educational and environmental charities. When Charles’s son Ken co-created The Walrus in 2003, the Chawkers Foundation’s contribution was instrumental in launching the magazine and, two years later, the Walrus Foundation. Charles continued to provide his unwavering support to the Walrus community until his death last November. Charles was born in Great Britain and came to Canada in the 1940s. He paved an eclectic career path, doing everything from working in sales in the oil business in Calgary and practising law in Montreal to managing a neighbourhood grocery in Ottawa and farming in the Eastern Townships. First and foremost a family man, Charles was forever courteous, quick with a song or an appropriate Latin phrase, ever quotable, slow to embrace the digital age, and always on the lookout for “bloody good” fun. A true gentleman and patron of the Walrus Foundation, Charles lives on in the memories of his many friends, his family, and the Walrus community. — Gerald Lazare James (Jim) Meredith O’reilly was a founding director of the Chawkers Foundation and a dedicated supporter of the Walrus Foundation. In addition to serving on the board of directors for six years and providing valuable financial acumen and sage advice in his role on the advisory board, he rarely missed a Walrus event. When I met Jim, I had a tough time keeping up as he bounded up stairs two at a time, although he was sixtyfive and had thirty-three years on me. Though he had great energy, he was also a man of quiet contemplation and thought. At meetings, after listening studiously to every argument in the room, he would chime in with, “Well, it seems to me…” and then raise an issue that went to the heart of the matter. Despite having lived through the Second World War and two economic depressions, Jim was an optimist. He had a strong sense of family and community, and he believed in giving back. He had a love of family, enduring friendships, history, and Muskoka. Jim will be missed by many. He worked to make the Walrus Foundation and the world a better place, and we are better off for his contributions. At the end of the day, may we all be so lucky. — Bruce R. Bennett
eccentric family of five children not unlike Richler’s own. Be My Wolff, however, is a feat of pure invention — one that does not invite biographical comparisons. Reading it feels a bit like peering at a literary palimpsest — there are layers upon layers of characters, folktales, and history to sift through. At times, the book can be disorienting, even disconcerting, but ultimately the tapestry Richler weaves is so vivid and full of detail that one ceases to mind the confusion of places, people, and periods and simply lets the story spool out.
In many ways, the book is a love letter to London’s urban ecosystem. In Rachel’s novel-within-the-novel, there are digressions on the lives of rats, foxes, and screaming seagulls—camden, being on the canal system, is full of such creatures. “The sound enters your dreams,” Rachel tells Zach of the crying gulls, “floods the brain, changes the scene, takes me straight to sea!”
This city is the closest thing to home Richler has known. It is where she was born and spent half of her childhood before her family relocated to Montreal in the early ’70s. Richler had her early education at Villa Sainte-marcelline, an all-girls’ convent school, and then briefly studied French literature at the University of Toronto. She later continued her education in the south of France before training as an actress at Circle in the Square studio in New York. During her twenties and early thirties, she worked as an actress in British theatre and television, but was unsatisfied. “The less I wanted it, of course, the more parts were coming my way, and I remember thinking, ‘This is not your life — this is not what you’re meant to be doing,’” she says.
Richler took her face out of the casting directory and quit, picking up some publishing work to pay the rent while working on her first book. Her agent at the time couldn’t believe it. “If you’re doing okay and you quit, they think you’re either pregnant, dead, or crazy,” Richler explains.
By then, Richler had permanently settled in London. “There was something about the gravitas of the place. The stones and the streets and the history,” she notes. Her parents also kept a flat here for many years, across town in the much tonier Chelsea. Before her father died of cancer in 2001, she would occasionally meet him for a drink. “But we would never talk about writing,” she says. He simply couldn’t bear it.
Be My Wolff is a kaleidoscope of Richler’s obsessions. The character of Zach, a magical and charismatic orphan, in many ways reflects Richler’s persistent fascination with her mother — a woman she describes as a foundling (she was born in Montreal and adopted by a British couple), as well as her muse.
Above all else, though, it is the cultishness of siblings that Richler seems drawn to again and again. “I think the intensity that can arise in family relationships and the special languages [that families develop] have always fascinated me,” she says. “[Siblings in particular] do this all the time to protect ourselves from horror and despair.”
Richler herself is a middle child — the lone literary novelist in a family of male writers (her brothers Daniel, Noah, and Jacob are all accomplished journalists in their own right). “The boys always said they were going to write,” she says. Richler, on the other hand, didn’t rush into it. “I just felt there were too many books on the shelves, and I didn’t want to do it unless I was completely compelled.” What changed? Richler says that after she grew up, she wanted to achieve human connection through the art of fiction.
But for her brothers, she says, it was different. Writing seemed almost an act of coming of age. “I never had that,” she says.
When speaking of her siblings, Emma Richler is generous and outwardly uncompetitive. But the Richlers have always been affectionate with each other in print. Writing for this magazine in 2010, Noah described a conversation in which he and his parents discussed whether Sister Crazy should have been published as fiction or memoir. As Noah embarked on a rather longwinded defense of fiction as “the mere arrangement of experience into a story,” his father cut him off with a wink. “But don’t worry,” he told his son. “You come out looking pretty good.”
At the mention of her dad, Richler looks as if she might tear up. “I miss his wisdom; I miss the weight of him. I think there are very few serious voices today that you listen to immediately. He had a presence, and when he had something to say, it was just beautifully encapsulated.”
Despite Richler’s admiration for her father, her own literary career has proved different from his. Mordecai was an active public intellectual, political commentator, and satirist, churning out a stream of columns and articles in addition to novels. His daughter is a purist who has laboured for years in the unremunerative world of literary fiction to the exclusion of all else. Now, she says, having driven herself into debt finishing her latest novel, it’s “time to be practical and make some money.” Maybe, she muses, it’s time to take up teaching.
Economics aside, a simple existence seems to suit her. After growing up in a big home surrounded by people and happy chaos, she has chosen a quiet life in a small flat, working every day and taking long walks with her dog. It’s a happy place, but it wasn’t always the plan. After finding out in her thirties that, for health reasons, she probably wouldn’t be able to have children, Richler recalls her father saying, “Oh, well, you’ll have book babies.” Since then, Richler has had a few relationships (or “attachments,” as she calls them) with people who were unavailable at the time. “I’ve had a couple of sadnesses that way,” she says of past love. “Now I know there’s just no way I can be with anyone unless it’s just absolutely right.”
Despite her wistfulness, Richler is skeptical that she would have had the temperament to “have it all,” even if replicating her own big noisy family had been an option. “The older I get, the more I do think it’s different being a male writer,” she says. Of course it is, I tell her. It’s called having someone else to raise your children.
“I couldn’t do that, and therefore I wouldn’t be able to write,” Richler says rather urgently. “And that is a cost too great.”
“The intensity that can arise in family relationships and the special languages that families develop fascinate me. Siblings do this to protect themselves from horror and despair.”